Exquisite Corpse

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Tran barely heard him. “Sure you are. It’s the only way you two could stand each other. You saw Luke just last night, didn’t you? Or do you call him Lush?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Soren, do you think I’d turn you in? I know what you’re doing is illegal. Do you think I’d put you all in jail just to hurt Luke?”

  Soren stared at Tran, then seemed to come to a decision. “I don’t know you that well, Tran. We haven’t spoken twenty times before today. I wasn’t going to gamble what we have left of our lives on trusting you.”

  “Do you trust me now?”

  “I guess I have to. You’re queer and you might be positive. You’re pretty much our target audience. But I worry about Luke, and you have a lot of reasons to hate him.”

  “I don’t hate him. I did for a while, but not now.”

  “He still loves you.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “He’s sick.”

  They sat for a few minutes in silence. The little restaurant was cool and empty, the shadows of a late autumn afternoon beginning to lengthen in the corners. The waitress dropped off their check, which came to just over $10, and smiled at Tran. She was close to his age, the sort of girl his parents would have liked. Tran barely noticed her. He was wondering how Luke could still claim to love him after cursing him and hurting him and wanting him to die.

  “Look,” said Soren as they drove back across the bridge, “do you need a place to stay? I don’t really like having company, but if you’re sleeping on the street …”

  “Don’t worry, I have money. I’ll find something. Thanks anyway.”

  Soren glanced over at Tran, then shrugged. They were at the midpoint of the Crescent City Connection, where the view included a crystalline cityscape and a vast housing project, a velvet expanse of swampland and a weal of factories. Far below the span, the Mississippi curved away in a long arc on either side. “Are you afraid I’d tell Luke where you were?”

  “Well…” Tran shifted in his seat. “He’s gotten crazier, hasn’t he?”

  “Oh, definitely. Do you listen to the show a lot?”

  “I used to,” Tran admitted. “It started up in, what, spring of this year?”

  “May.”

  “That wasn’t so long after we broke up. I still had this bitter obsession with Luke. When I turned on the radio one night and heard his voice, I thought I’d finally gone crazy. By the time I figured out it was real, I couldn’t turn it off.”

  “I run his voice through an encoder.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I loved the guy for two years, and I loved to hear him talk. I know his inflections, his phrases, even the way he clears his throat. Haven’t you ever been in love?”

  “No.”

  Tran turned in his seat. “What?”

  “No. I’ve had a lot of flings. I’ve had a couple of relationships. But I can’t honestly say I’ve ever been in love. Now there’s a good chance I never will be. No matter how ugly things got between you and Luke, I can’t help envying what you had.”

  They came off the bridge at the Camp Street exit and drove through downtown, back toward the French Quarter. There was a huge abandoned building among others near the elevated roadway, an empty warehouse with hundreds of broken windows. Late afternoon sunlight slanted through this building, illuminating the shards that remained in the frames, the dust that sifted down from the high ceilings. Tran stared at it and wished he could live there. No one would ever know where to find him. He would spread a blanket over the broken glass, wash himself with dust, roast bats and locusts over a tiny fire late at night.

  Even then, no doubt, someone would envy him something.

  11

  Jay stood at the butcher block slicing andouille sausage for jambalaya. He was using the same knife he had employed on Fido, its heft and whisper-sharpness reassuring. Everything else in his world was in tumult. He couldn’t imagine why he loved it so.

  Meeting Andrew had made the universe yawn wide for him somehow. It was like discovering that your innermost fires and terrors, the things you believed no one else could fathom, were in fact the basis of a recognized philosophy. Some part of you felt intimately invaded, threatened; some other part fell to its knees and sobbed in gratitude that it was no longer alone.

  They had spent that first day in bed, but little of their contact was sexual. Andrew claimed that his HIV status made his bodily fluids dangerous. Jay didn’t care. He remembered the taste of Tran’s come burning its way down his throat, the tightness of Tran’s ass around the head of his condom-swathed cock. It wasn’t as if he had never taken the risk. But sex with Andrew seemed almost beside the point, something they could contemplate later, after the torrent of words had slowed.

  They talked obsessively, their conversations spilling over each other. They bathed in shared knowledge. Neither of them had ever been able to discuss his passions. Andrew had had his diaries, which Jay wished he could read. Jay had had nothing. Now they could not stop comparing, exulting, marveling.

  “But why do you eat their flesh?” Andrew had asked. “What do you get out of that?”

  “You’ve never tasted it?”

  “Only blood. And I like the look of that more than the taste.”

  “Blood …” Jay shrugged. “Blood is fuel. It’s all right, but it’s not what they’re made of.”

  “Do you want them to become a part of you? Is that it?”

  “Partly,” Jay admitted. “It took me a long time to feel they were staying. I’d eat their meat and it would become my meat and I’d be alone again. After a while, though, I started to feel them.”

  Andrew nodded. His dark eyes were reflective, but he looked as if he understood. At last he said, “Is there any other reason?”

  “Because they taste wonderful,” Jay told him.

  In the languorous days that followed, they came back to this subject again and again. Andrew spent most of his hours wandering around the house, entranced by all the comforts Jay took for granted. Jay would come upon him in the library, paging through oversized folios of art and photography, reading bits of novels like a starved man; or in the parlor, with an assortment of CDs on infinite shuffle; or in the bedroom, lounging indolent on silken sheets and soft pillows. He was a man of sublime taste and culture who had been deprived in every conceivable way, and his renewal made Jay feel strangely alive.

  In the evenings they dined out. Jay found himself rediscovering the city’s great restaurants, tasting rich concoctions he hadn’t dreamed of in years. It was embarrassing to sup at Broussard’s or Nola with some ragged guttersnipe he planned to kill later, who would invariably slouch in his borrowed jacket poking at his food: What’s this stuff? Andrew knew what he was eating, and savored every mouthful. But occasionally he would catch Jay’s eye over a plate of pompano en papillote, a dollop of daube glacé, or a succulent morsel of cedar-plank drum, smile his dark smile, and ask again about the taste of boys’ flesh.

  The rice had been cooking down with onions, garlic, tomatoes, and celery, and the jambalaya was almost done. Jay added the sausage, stirred in a bowl of shelled shrimp, dosed the pot with Crystal sauce, and left it to simmer while he loaded the dishwasher. When the shrimp had had time to cook through, he forked up a mouthful of the steaming rice. It tasted nearly perfect: peppery, savory, redolent of seafood and smoked pork. But he thought it could use a little more body. A little more meat.

  He opened the refrigerator and took out a plate covered in Saran wrap. The plastic looked as if someone had partially unwrapped it, then hastily put it back. Had Andrew lingered over this plate, wondering but unable to take the first bite? Jay began shredding the meat with his fingers. He hesitated, breathed the fatty aroma rising from the plate, then put a piece in his mouth. Beneath the gamy-sweet taste lay a hint of foulness. It was still fresh, but not as fresh as Andrew ought to have.

  He served the jambalaya as it was. Andrew tucked into it with his usual impeccable table manne
rs and voracious appetite. Jay ate sparingly, absorbed in Andrew’s descriptions of certain back rooms and starless alleyways in Soho. When he paused to sip his cold Dixie, Jay said, “Why don’t you just go ahead and try some?”

  Andrew raised his eyebrows. “Some … ?”

  “You know you’re curious. I saw you licking your lips that first day in the slave quarters. You swallowed molecules of a human body then. Why not try enough to taste it?”

  “Why not, indeed?” Andrew poured the rest of his beer into his glass, centered the bottle back in its wet ring of condensation. “I’ve thought of it every day since we met. I thought of it before, too. Back in London, as I cut up the bodies for disposal, I’d occasionally muse on that final taboo. I’d say to myself, Andrew Compton, you’ve sucked their cold mouths and cocks; you’ve licked their blood from your hands by the bucketful; you’ve boiled the flesh off their skulls, then used the same pot to make curry. Why not just fry up a few tender bits and see what it’s like—perhaps with a nice egg?”

  “What stopped you?”

  “I suppose I was afraid. Keeping them beside me in bed for a few nights was one thing, but I was unnerved by the thought of waking alone in the dark and still feeling them with me, in my very cells. Does it ever frighten you?”

  Jay smiled. “Before I met you, Andrew, it was my only comfort.”

  After Jay’s exquisite dinner, we strolled through the residential backstreets of the French Quarter, avoiding places of human congregation, lingering in stillness and shadow. The dark streets were pleasantly sinister after the cozy golden glow of Jay’s dining room. A chill breeze whispered through verdant gardens; a lone saxophone wailed somewhere far away. For the first time since I’d left England, I remembered that it was November.

  We stopped for a nostalgic nightcap at the Hand of Glory. For some reason the place was packed with a young Gothic crowd tonight, resplendent in their monochrome regalia, the myriad textures of teased hair, torn lace, fishnet, and crushed velvet more fascinating to the eye than colour. I remembered a Goth boy I’d brought home once. He had bared his white throat to me willingly, as if meeting a lover whose touch he’d awaited for years.

  When I told Jay about this, he frowned in puzzlement. “Didn’t you want to draw out his pain? Wouldn’t it have been interesting to see if he still welcomed it?”

  “Well, I suppose he might have done. But what if I’d spoiled his experience of death? He seemed to have been looking forward to it all his life.”

  “They’re always afraid at first. The ones who have never experienced terrible pain start out calmer, because they have no concept of how bad it can be. When they discover how much their bodies are capable of hurting, they’re astounded. When they realize it isn’t going to end quickly, they crumble under the weight of their own fear. The ones who have known pain are terrified from the start. But either way …” Jay groped for the words to express something that had obviously long intrigued him. “After you’ve been going for a while, after they’ve begged and screamed and vomited and realized none of it is going to make any difference, they pass into a kind of ecstasy. Their flesh becomes like clay. Their insides cleave to your lips. It becomes a collaboration.”

  “But surely they’re just trying to get it over with faster?”

  “I don’t know.” Jay’s eyes were dreamy. “I think once the body realizes it’s definitely, irrevocably going to die at your hands, it begins to work with you. You might be choking a boy, or cutting or burning him, or your fingers might be knuckle-deep in his guts, but at a certain point his body not only stops resisting—it falls into your rhythm.”

  He reached for my hand across the table; it was the sort of bar where you could do that. His fingers were damp where they had held his beer bottle, slightly bony, very strong.

  “So you’ve engaged in this soul-deep collaboration,” he went on. “The boy has surrendered everything to you: his fear, his agony, his life. What would you do then?”

  I settled into the pleasure of memory. “I’d wash the body, rinse off the fluids of death: the blood, urine, saliva. I’d leave him in a cold bath until the wounds coagulated. Then I’d powder him, and the talc would enhance the pallor until he looked almost blue. We’d lie in bed together. I’d fall asleep holding him, stroking him.”

  “And the next day?”

  “I disliked the stiffness that developed as rigor mortis set in. Sometimes I’d wait until it passed and keep them another day or two. More often they’d begin to smell and stain my bed, and I’d have to dispose of them.”

  “One-night, two-night stands,” Jay said dismissively. “You can prolong the parting, and you can stave off decay. But in the end it all catches up with you. Why not savour them every way you can? While you were wiping and powdering, I’d be enjoying the first of several sumptuous meals.”

  “Tell me again how you prepare them.”

  “In general, or blow by blow?”

  “Blow by blow, with all the trimmings, of course.”

  Jay returned my smile, faintly mocking: my obsessive ambivalence on this subject amused him. Then he began to talk, and his eyes narrowed and darkened with pleasure as he described his culinary prowess.

  “I cut them into manageable pieces and flay the meat off the bones. This was really messy at first, but I improved over time. Now my cuts of meat look better than the ones at Schwegmann’s. I wrap them in plastic. I save some of the organs—the liver if I haven’t torn it up too badly, and the heart, which is quite tough but has a bitter, intense flavor. I tried to make soup stock out of some bones once, but it tasted awful. Human fat is just too rancid to eat. Usually I tenderize the meat and roast or fry it with very little seasoning. Each part of the body has a distinct flavor, and each body tastes subtly different.”

  “Of course. Human lives are much more varied than those of swine or cattle.”

  Jay smiled. “Exactly. You have an instinct for this.”

  “Hello, Jay.”

  We looked up, startled out of our reverie. A honey-skinned, glossy-haired form had materialized out of the pale matte-dyed crowd. Naturally thinner than most of his compatriots in black, he too wore silver ornaments in his ears and dark rings of makeup round his eyes—Oriental eyes like elongated chips of obsidian, jaded beyond their years. The rest of his face was very, very young.

  I could see the possibilities of the situation flickering through Jay’s mind. He had a good deadpan gaze, but not good enough to fool me. Whoever this little chappie was, he obviously knew and fancied Jay. This put Jay in the awkward position of wondering (a) if he introduced me to his friend, would I be jealous; (b) would his friend also be jealous and say something to make me more so; (c) would he endanger my anonymity by introducing us?

  I almost enjoyed watching Jay squirm, but only because I gleaned new knowledge from every facet of his character, and until now I had not seen him genuinely uncomfortable. But I could not leave him to suffer for long.

  “Good evening,” I said in my suavest voice, nudging Jay’s leg under the table. “I’m Jay’s cousin Arthur. I’m in New Orleans on holiday.”

  “Uh, hi. My name’s Tran.”

  As the boy shook my outstretched hand, a startled look passed over his face, for my fingers had very briefly slid up and encircled his wrist.

  “Are you from London?” he asked, recovering.

  “Got it in one.”

  “Do you live near Whitechapel?”

  “No, actually. Kensington.” (This was a lie; I’d never lived in a posh area. People paid too much attention to their neighbours in posh areas. Of course, in the end even my neighbours in Brixton were driven to complain.) “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, you know …” He shrugged, a movement made charming by the slightness of his shoulders. “I’ve read about Jack the Ripper.”

  “Really? Did you know he arranged his murder sites in the shape of a cross?” Tran shook his head, so I went on. “If you mark the sites on a map of London, you’ll see that all sa
ve the last one form quite a regular cross shape. The odds of that happening at random are extraordinary.”

  “What about the last one?” Jay interjected.

  “That was the one where he just freaked out,” said Tran. “He shredded the girl and tore out all her organs. He would’ve had to be covered in blood, but nobody saw him leave the building.”

  “It was the only one he did indoors,” I pointed out. Jay glared at me. “Sorry. You tend to absorb these things living in London.”

  “I think it’s interesting.” Tran slid into the booth beside Jay, who looked more pained than ever. “I like to read about killers. I like to think about how their minds work.”

  I smiled across the table at him. “Any theories yet?”

  Jay banged his beer glass down on the scarred tabletop.

  “Look, I’d love to sit here and talk about perverts all night, but we need to get going. I think I left the coffeepot on after dinner.”

  You did not, I thought. If Jay wanted to drag me away from such a beautiful, acquiescent boy, I knew he must have his reasons. But getting up and leaving was the last thing I wanted to do. I’d gotten a good look into this boy already, and he was fairly begging for our attentions.

  “Oh, I won’t keep you. I’m just here looking for some customers. Midnight Sun’s playing later, and you know, this crowd …” Tran touched his forefinger to his tongue. “You need anything, Jay?”

  “No.”

  “Well … see you later. Too bad you can’t stay for the band.”

  “Are they very good?” I asked.

  “I love them. I’m just going to get drunk and dance and stumble back to the Hummingbird at dawn.”

  “Bit of a long, lonely walk, isn’t it?”

  Tran shrugged. “It’s cheap. They don’t ask for ID—I registered under the name Frank Booth. And who knows? Maybe it won’t be so lonely. Maybe I’ll meet a mysterious stranger tonight.” He gave Jay a last longing look.

  “Be careful,” I told him. “You never know who’s out there, do you, Jay?”

  Jay could only shake his head.