Kissing Carrion

by Gemma Files

  I tapped the ash. “Not here, I’m not.”

  He nodded, sniffed, coughed; a long, phlegmatic rattle. Shot me a begging glance from under his flip of barely-successful white-boy dreads.

  I sighed, and chugged the rest of my latte, letting the caffeine stretch me standing—an unseen chemical noose, just tight enough to make sure I didn’t shake.

  “My place,” I told him. “Tag along, we’ll see what I can do. But don’t be obvious.”

  He nodded again. I paid, and left.

  As I crossed the street, he was already ten steps behind, like some gender-confused geisha. Trying to follow my advice, and failing miserably.

  * * *

  So: Back around the Tar Baby, through the sump, down the alley and up three flights of rusty metal steps, brain on automatic as I filtered out the ever-present hash reek from Number Two, the teeth-rattling Techno blast from Number Three-A. Key in the door, and into a former dance studio’s worth of dark, square space, lit only by the TV’s thin blue glare and an uncertain thread of light, seeping under three layers of Honest Ed’s thickest curtaining. A half-sprung La-Z-Boy with a remote on its arm—rescued one drunken night from somebody’s Annex curbside—sat angled near enough to the TV to cause serious optic damage. The only other furniture was Jos’ futon, a stained mattress lying half-made in the middle of the floor, its red knot of sheets rumpled like an open heart.

  I paused in front of the bathroom mirror to light some incense, the stick’s red tip writing faint haiku on my reflection, just before I blew it out. A rush of smoke wreathed my hair with fragrance.

  No movement in the big room. Just Quincy M.E. on A&E’s Daytime Detectives, mouthing righteous ire. If you say it’s almost impossible, then that means it’s at least possible!

  “Rennie,” I called, softly.

  Silence.

  “Hey, Loren Gault. You here, or what?”

  Still no answer.

  Then I heard the guy push the door open, addict-cautious—and hit the flush before starting to move around the bathroom, making noises like I was looking for my stash.

  “Uh . . . Ro?”

  Opening and shutting a drawer, I called back: “I’m in the john.” Slammed up the toilet-bowl lid, rummaging inside. “Be out in a sec. Sit anywhere.”

  Anywhere meaning the bed, the La-Z-Boy being currently adjusted—courtesy of the apparently absent Rennie—to a level somewhat inaccessible for those of us not six-foot-four.

  In the drug world, two truths stand so evident they’re almost Biblical: Hunger stirs hunger—and where one hunger calls, another answers.

  When I came out, he was grinning up at me, sure he’d got his figurative foot in my figurative door. Firmly believing, with every possible section of his body but his brain, that I was obviously so hard up for action we could cut some kind of non-monetary deal—and assuming, probably wishfully, that the length of time elapsed since his last score had rendered him once more capable of getting it up far enough to deliver on his end of the bargain.

  “You’re lookin’ good, Rohise,” he said. “I tell you that?”

  “No,” I replied, slipping off my shirt.

  We fell back on the futon together, kissing like cats— all gesture and hot air, with most of the effort put into sounding interested. Amazingly, he actually did have an erection; anticipation does odd things, especially in a trained animal.

  “Oh, Ro,” he moaned, with heartfelt sincerity. “Oh, yeah, baby, yeah, baby—yeah, baby, yeah.”

  I could barely keep a straight face—but lucky for me, his eyes stayed closed. And so we rolled over, and rolled over yet again, and would have probably just kept on rolling over forever—except that we finally hit something firm looming up through all those sheets, something which felt (at first touch) like another, slightly thicker length of mattress, left there by some unknown helping hand, to keep oversexed drug dealers and their fake-enthusiastic customers from dry-humping themselves right off the side of the bed.

  But it wasn’t.

  Then a flap of sheet fell over, like the topmost curl of an unraveling chrysalis, and I saw Rennie’s eyes come open in the humid red darkness beneath: Narrow, yellow-touched, under a flaring ridge of brow. Each part, as it revealed itself, successively extrapolating the whole. His elaborate bad-ass ‘do, with its improbable Sonny Chiba sideburns, long since bedheaded into oblivion; his pale fingers grabbing handfuls of air, their nails half-slicked with a choice selection of my unused polishes; his mouth, with its sketchy rim of adolescent moustache, packed full of pointy little teeth. Rennie, hitherto burrowed deep as a tick in the bed’s rucked flesh, roused now by the mingled smell of sex and desperation—the nearby stink of prey. A gangly trap-door spider rising up from under the covers, arms and lips spread wide.

  He met my glance, and grinned.

  I grinned back, gave my junkie suitor one last kiss for luck, and pushed him—without a single second’s regret—into my little brother’s ravenous embrace. At whose touch the guy’s eyes snapped back open, finally, wide and appalled.

  “Hey, shit—” he began.

  Then choked off, as Rennie bit deep into the nape of his neck, wrapped his long legs around the guy’s hips from behind and squeezed, neatly snapping his drug-soaked spine in half.

  * * *

  In the back of the studio, under a set of steps leading up to our unused skylight—the same one I spent two days painting black after we first moved in, as Rennie writhed and whined inside a double weight of sleeping bag below—there’s a narrow, plywood-lined crawlspace, originally meant for insulation. That’s where I used to put them, afterwards. Armed with a set of Ginsu steak-knives I lifted from my former best friend’s baby shower, along with a much-renewed supply of green plastic garbage bags, I used the bathroom tub to cut them up in—much to the annoyance of our downstairs neighbors, who complained about the smell. Which is where the incense came in handy.

  That was always the one thing Rennie never bitched about, oddly enough. Like the untameable slaughterhouse stink of the bed, I think it kind of turned him on.

  Guts in one bag, jointed, washed limbs in another, wrapped tight with gaffer’s tape. The latter went under the stairs, the former into my backpack, to be dumped later on into one of the local butcher’s tripe-stuffed rubbish cans. It didn’t seem particularly risky at the time, though I guess it probably was. But then, getting caught was never really something I’d ever worried about too much.

  Quite the opposite, actually.

  By the time I’d pulled the plug on the bath, flipped the futon’s mattress and stripped off its sheets—stuffing them haphazardly into a well-worn laundry bag, made from two tea-towels sewn together—Rennie was already in full post-kill ecstasy mode, sacked out in the La-Z-Boy, naked and bloody, channel-hopping between The Equalizer and Sailor Moon. I snapped my fingers against the back of his head as I went by, demanding:

  “So what was the deal, slug-boy, back when I came in? You asleep, or what?”

  “Sorta.”

  “You awake now?”

  “ . . . sorta.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, well, you better get in the tub under your own speed, cause I ain’t about to drag you.”

  He yawned, widely, and squinted around the room. “Where’s my robe?” he asked.

  “Dirty clothes.”

  “What for?”

  “’Cause it’s dirty, you jerk.”

  Levering himself upright with a regretful sigh, he picked through the pile in question, found said robe, and took a long whiff. “Seems okay to me,” he announced.

  “Fine, then wear it.” I slipped my jacket back on, going through my pockets for laundry Loons. From the bathroom, I heard him hum as he turned the water back on, reacting as he tested its temperature. The slap and splash of flesh against liquid, as he slid inside.

  “You love me, Ro?” he called
, suddenly anxious, just as I opened the door.

  “Like a rock,” I called back.

  “Good.” A pause. “Me too.”

  * * *

  Ice is a hell of a drug, all told; do enough of it, for enough time, and it’ll cook you from the inside out. I met Jos when I was twenty-two, having just dropped out of Ryerson (Hospitality program, half a semester’s worth), and became one of his preferred customers shortly thereafter. When he told me I could be getting his services for free, I jumped at the chance. Not because of desire—sex never meant too much to me, and I know who I have to thank for that. But when all you know about life is based on the barter principle, selling yourself can look an awful lot like buying your way to freedom.

  By the time an unlimited supply of Jos’ Ice had me fucked up enough to leave home, I was way too fucked up to take Rennie with me. I couldn’t handle it. I could barely handle myself.

  And so I left him there, for five more years. With Mom.

  And with Dad.

  The morning after that last party, I heard Rennie throwing up as I passed his room—a slow, lethargic retching, like he was doing it in his sleep. His face was red, hair up on end. The back of his neck was covered with fresh scabs. And he just lay there, coughing vomit all down the front of his pyjamas and over the side of the bed—thin, bright yellow vomit, linoleum-hued, intermittently laced with liquescent kernels of blood.

  I wanted to take him to the hospital, but Jos wasn’t having any of that. He said it would be fine, I’d see. He said he’d make us some Ichi-Ban Chicken Noodle and buy Rennie some Tylenol on his way home, and just not to freak out, cause it was a busy day ahead for him, and he didn’t need any of my bullshit bringing him down.

  Then he took off, leaving us entwined. Rennie still puking. Me sober and already a little shaky, gone hard, the way I’d so often found it better to go—more efficient. More effective.

  Caught in the grip of some red dream, whimpering in my arms, Rennie seemed to sweat the rest of his pubescence out along with his humanity, while I slowly got straight for the first time in at least two years. Like his sickness had cured me, somehow, of mine.

  And whenever it got almost too bad to bear, all I had to do was hug him tighter, hearing him husk:

  Ro, it hurts, it feels like I’m dyin’. Oh, Ro, it hurrrts. Ro, man, what’s happening to me?

  At which point I’d whisper back:

  I’m here, baby. I’m here, I’ll never leave. I’ll always take care of you, Rennie. Always.

  But always, as it since turns out, is one long Goddamn time.

  * * *

  I put the sheets in to soak, turned one of the Loons back into quarters and made some calls from the back of the Laundromat, doing a little business. Scouted out some of Jos’ erstwhile friends, trying to line up future meals for Rennie; paid our overdue cable bill, using my Interac card and the Canada Trust Bankline. It was the second week of the month, and I had all the classic signs of impending menstruation: No appetite, lousy skin, a PMS headache that’d been building at the base of my skull since the very early morning, finally coming to full, pulsing bloom whenever I closed my eyes. It was like a sparkler going off behind my lids—open them again, and for a split second or two, the whole world rained light.

  Then it was an hour later, and I looked up from folding to find Leo in the doorway, already headed my way.

  “Rohise!”

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

  Leo Curran, burly ex-con Street Outreach worker-cum-superhero in his own private comic book—Leo the Lionheart, Understanding Guy, maybe; or: How I Saved the World, One Reluctant Convert at a Time!

  He pulled out a nearby chair, settled his bulk into it. Looked at me over the rims of his sunglasses, all easy frankness—let’s you and me just have ourselves a little heart-to-heart and get our differences squared away right now, ‘kay?

  “Nice to see you, Leo,” I said, rolling the sheets back into a conveniently baggable size. “Like always.”

  You big fuckin’ freak.

  “I knocked at your door, a little while back,” he said. “Your brother sent me over.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “He wouldn’t let me in. Sounded like he was still in bed.”

  I shrugged. “He’s sick.”

  Leo just smiled, and shook his head in a sad, slight way, clearly meant to imply: Well, of course you’d say that—but we both know better, now, don’t we?

  “Sick?” he repeated. “When people are sick, Rohise, they get better. Somebody’s been sick for eighteen months straight, what you do is you take ’em to the hospital—because there’s obviously something genuinely wrong with ’em—and you find out what the story really is. Or you cut ’em loose.”

  “Uh huh.” I slung the bag over my shoulder. “Well, gotta go. Rennie’ll be waiting.”

  “If he’s awake.”

  I paused, squinting against the light. “Meaning?”

  “Stop me if I’m wrong,” he said. “But if your brother wasn’t sick, you could go back to school, right? Get a job. Have a life.”

  “True. But since he is sick—who cares?”

  “I do.”

  He was a nice guy, Leo. Meant well. But I had neither the time nor the energy, just right now, to fully appreciate his good intentions.

  Not to mention that my head now felt as though it were rapidly approaching the point of cranial meltdown.

  “You deserve better.”

  “I’m doing fine, thanks anyways.”

  “Playing fake dealer? Rolling addicts for extra cash?”

  “Prove it,” I snapped. “Or get the fuck out of my face.”

  We looked at each other. My eyes pounded.

  All of a sudden, my backpack felt almost unbearably heavy.

  “I just worry about you, Rohise,” Leo said, finally. “You can take care of yourself, I know that. You always have. You always will.”

  Damn straight, fat boy.

  Adding, after a pause: “But at the end of the day, I still find myself worrying about you. A lot.”

  I opened the door. Quick tic pulling my smile up on one side, lop-angled, like the reaction to some psychic stink.

  “So don’t,” I told him. And left.

  * * *

  I still don’t know who did this to Rennie. Anyone could’ve—I mean, it’s not like I was watching; I don’t even really know what was done.

  You see your little brother sweating, tossing and turning. Hissing like an unfixed cat under every blanket you have. He can’t eat, can’t get out of bed, can’t get near a window, or the pain makes him cry tears of blood. A week ago, he was just another lanky teen geek, so obsessed over movie shit like whether or not Antonio Banderas does his own stunts that he’d wave his hands in the air and start to stutter. Now he looks brutish, full-grown and all filled out, big enough to frighten.

  And you sit there and wonder why all of this would have to happen to him, not you—you, who are responsible for his whole sad, sick semblance of a life, and always have been.

  Sometimes, early on, I would get these abrupt moments of clarity, and I’d think: He’s just crazy, and I’m making him even crazier by acting like I can solve his problems. ’Cause after all, living on Queen West don’t mean the world is actually full of vampires.

  But get this:

  On the first day, his gums started to bleed.

  The second day, he puked up most of his teeth.

  On the third day, new ones started coming in, calcium whiteness slicing up through puffy pink flesh. Serrated, triangular, packed in double rows. Like a shark’s.

  And I can still see the look on that plainclothes pig’s face when Rennie took out his voicebox with a single, juicy bite, like he was eating a peach. Came by the morning of Day Number Four to hit Jos up for money; he wasn’t there, but I was. So down came Officer
Friendly’s fly, and down I went with it—‘til Rennie came padding up behind in that filthy bathrobe of his, so quiet the guy almost didn’t notice what was happening. Except that it hurt too much to ignore.

  His feet drumming on the tiles, flopping in Rennie’s hug, screaming soundlessly. His shirt turning red.

  And Rennie sighing, satisfied at last—like he’d just popped his cherry, and couldn’t wait to do it again at the earliest possible opportunity.

  Jos went to jail for what happened in his kitchenette that day, and I never said a thing about it. Premeditated murder, twenty-five to life. Which I guess seems pretty cold, on my part.

  I know this much, though: He wouldn’t have been a damn bit of help to either of us, and Rennie would probably just have ended up killing him too. So in a way, he got off easy.

  Easier than me, that’s for sure.

  * * *

  By the time I got home, my scalp was crawling. I felt like I could’ve fried eggs on the top of my head. The TV was still on, strangely enough; Rennie, even more strangely, lay jumped in on himself before it—pungently robed, freshly-dried and sleepy-eyed, half-submerged by his own long limbs. I threw my keys in the corner, turning the bag of bed sheets inside out all over him. He made a noise that might have indicated protest, had it only been a little more conscious.

  “Move over, Rennie,” I said, flopping down on the futon’s edge. Methodically shucking and chucking jacket, boots, jeans, bra. Then, still receiving no reply: “Move the fuck over, Rennie. Now, not later.”

  He squirmed lengthwise, as if scalded. I kicked enough of the rest of him out of my way (lightly, gently) to slide in beside him, pull the sheets as far up as they could possibly go and curl up there in the red dark, breathing slowly, holding my head. Hoping the next thought I had wouldn’t be the one to finally make it shatter.

  A minute or so of blessed silence. Then, tentatively: “You okay?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” A pause. “Your head hurt?”

  I sighed. “Yes.”

  Another pause. A few more breaths, staggered and stretched. Heartbeat and aftershock matched pulse for pulse, lighting my skull’s fault-lines up like a neon map.