Are You Loathsome Tonight? (14 page)

She flipped it open. “Louisiana driver's license. Gregory A. Chapman. No credit cards or cash."

“I should think not."

She held the Baggie up to the light and frowned at it. “I'm gonna take this on upstairs. See if they can get to it sometime today."

I laughed. “Sometime this
week
, more likely."

“Yeah, you right."

She disappeared through the sliding doors that led to the elevator. Jeffrey finished undressing the latest visitor to our way station in the basement of the big stone building at the corner of Tulane and Broad.

“Hey, Doc, check out the bruises around his mouth."

I probed the orifice with a latex-clad forefinger. It was full of jellied blood and enamel splinters. Gregory Chapman's four front teeth, two up top and two below, had been smashed off at the gumline.

I took a careful look at the naked form on the gurney. “His abdomen's distended too,” I observed. In fact, it was grotesquely swollen and firm to the touch. “Looks like he got a pretty good beating. We'll see."

I picked up a scalpel, placed the fresh blade tip against Mr. Chapman's chest and pressed down. The small amount of blood that pooled in the cut was dark and turgid, his skin rubbery. I made the two preliminary incisions that ran from the armpits to the sternum, then merged and sliced through the abdomen down to the pubic bone. The Y-shape formed by these incisions always struck me as apt for any number of faiths and persuasions: it might stand for the dark Yin or the vicious Yahweh, or represent a Yoni providing entrance to the forbidden recesses of the body. But this was pretentious tripe, the sort I might have fallen victim to had I pursued my artistic goals; on a good many of my clients the Y could be said to stand for nothing but Yat.

We cracked Mr. Chapman's chest, spread his ribs, examined his heart and lungs. They were normal, as was his liver. I began to believe that this man had not died of a beating after all; there was no abnormal clotting, no suffusion of the tissues.

I glanced quizzically at Jeffrey, who shrugged.

“You want to open the belly for me?” I asked. Even after all these years, I still had an excitable tendency to thrust the scalpel in too deep, nicking the delicate viscera.

Jeffrey's skilled fingers ran the blade through abdominal fat and fascia as if he were cutting fine silk. The organs came into view, and almost in the same breath, we said, “What the
fuck
...?"

Some lumpy foreign substance filled the interstices of the man's abdomen, bits of something once white now stained lurid pink, small flecks and clots swimming in hemorrhagic blood, dotting the convoluted surface of the intestines.
Maggots
was my first wild thought,
maggots deep inside a fresh body, impossible
. If not maggots, then some kind of cancer. I scraped away little swollen grains of it to examine the stomach. There was a long, bloody split in the tissue, and more of the clotted pink-white stuff oozing out. Something had caused his stomach to burst right open.

I thought about the smashed front teeth, the bruises around his mouth, and at that point even I had to suppress a shudder. This man hadn't been beaten; he had been force-fed.

“Dr. Brite?"

I looked up. Detective Getty was back, standing halfway across the room so as not to contaminate the scene at the table. “Don't tell me toxicology ran that stuff already,” I said.

Getty shook her head. “They didn't have to. Hennessey took one look at it, said “Not again,” and stuck it under the microscope. He could tell right away what it was—apparently a lot of dealers have been passing the stuff off as crack, and this guy did it to the wrong people."

“Detective Getty."

“Yes, Doctor?"

“What the hell was in the glass vials?"

“Red beans,” she said. “Raw, peeled red beans."

I looked up. My eyes met Jeffrey's, and I saw the corner of his mouth twitch. Still up to our wrists in Mr. Chapman, we both knew what had been crammed down his gullet until his stomach burst. It made perfect sense: what else was cheap, absorbent, and went well with red beans?

I held Jeffrey's eyes for a moment longer, then bent and started the laborious process of removing every grain of white rice from my patient's abdomen, wondering if I would find a sausage in there too.

Vine of the Soul

The better part of a decade later, Trevor and Zach from
Drawing Blood
are still in happy, disgusting, perfect love. Written for Sarah Champion's
Disco 2000
, it takes place (as do all the stories in the anthology) on the last day/night of 1999. William S. Burroughs died three days after I finished this story.

Vine of the Soul

The canals were completely frozen over that winter. All sorts of shit was embedded in the ice—either dropped in while the water was still in the chocolate-pudding stage, or else squeezed from the bowels of the canals by upheavals deep within the mud. Old bicycles, ladder-back chairs, toilets, even a human leg had been seen (though the last was soon chipped out and disposed of).

It was a cold season, but we were as warm as always. Even if we hadn't both had the South in our blood, I think we created enough cumulative friction to outdo a hundred summer afternoons. Amsterdam in December was nothing to us.

We'd been together for seven years then, Trevor and I. After we left the States and shook off the Secret Service, we spent eight months fucking around rural Jamaica until we found out most Jamaicans weren't as queer-tolerant as our friends who ran the pot plantation, and we had to leave in kind of a hurry. This being the second time we'd had to more or less get airlifted out of a place, we decided to try and make it the last. We scored black-market U.S. passports in Buenos Aires, caught an actual scheduled flight on a real airline, and ended up here in the land of subsidized art, legalized drugs, and obscene amounts of money available for the asking to anybody who knows a lot about computers, like me.

It was easy to catch up on the stuff I'd missed during eight months in the Third World. Even if it hadn't been, I was ahead of these jocks, because I knew my way over, under, around, and through the American systems. The hard part was learning Dutch. It took me almost three weeks. Trevor's brain isn't wired for Dutch, apparently, but his Aryan coloring, his broad shoulders, and his vaguely hippieish look get him mistaken for an Amsterdammer even though all he can say after nearly seven years is
"Sprecht U Engels?"

Maybe because we'd never actually “dated,” we had this habit of making “dates.” Trevor would be home all day drawing, and I'd be off tweaking machines, and we'd arrange to meet somewhere. On the last day of 1999, we hooked up at the Heavy Scene Coffeeshop in the red-light district for the express purpose of getting blasted on hash and watching the throngs rage as the century changed. I made my way down the winding stairs into the basement space that was the Heavy Scene: flashing Christmas bulbs, European MTV on the box with the sound turned off so the stereo could blare, fragrant with sweet smoke and already crowded.

There was always this little thrill upon seeing each other, as if this were a real date, two people meeting to size up their possibilities, two people who didn't have seven years of history and love and irritation and sharing a bathroom. All in all, I wouldn't trade the seven years. But that little illicit thrill gave me an under-the-table boner every time.

Trev was already at a table with an espresso and a joint in front of him. The joint was untouched, the coffee about half gone. He had his hair in a loose ponytail and a pencil smudge on the bridge of his nose. He'd spent the day penciling
Goth Squad
, the D.C. comic he drew purely for cash. It wasn't a bad comic, but it was scripted by a hefty deathrock princess from Minneapolis who hadn't stopped writing little mash notes to Trevor in her margins ever since she'd seen his picture in
Comics Journal
. I thought it was pretty funny, but it wasn't the kind of thing he could ever see the humor in.

His weary-watchful expression cleared when he saw me. “Hey,” we said at the same time, and he half-rose as I started to sit, and we kissed lightly. A few tourists made wide eyes at us, but they knew they were in Amsterdam and had to Practice Tolerance while they smoked their legal pot.

I went to the bar, liking the sensation of Trev's eyes on me from behind. “Een Heineken, ‘stublieft,” I told the blue-haired black girl serving drinks.

“Nee bier,” she said, slightly annoyed.

“Oh ja—pardon.” There had been a law passed a few years ago that establishments couldn't sell cannabis and alcohol together—to keep the fuckups on the move, I guess. The tourists didn't know about it, and the potheads never remembered. I ordered a can of fizzy mineral water and another espresso for Trevor, and turned around to see a tall, bleached-blond man in black leather leaning down to kiss Trevor on both cheeks.

“Franzz fucking Quaffka,” I said, coming up behind him.

He turned with a grin that would've made a shark step back. I took a step back myself to avoid his kisses—not because I disliked them, but because I could never receive them without wanting to grab the guy's ass. It was just some kind of pheromone he put out.

"I VASS BORN TO KEEL UND MAKE LOVE!"
he cried, as if to prove my point. Everyone in the coffeeshop turned to investigate this claim, but Franzz's glittering black eyes were fixed on me. “Zach! It is so good to see you
zwei
out to zelebrate zee new millennium!"

“I'm sure you can help with our celebration,” I said. “Why don't you sit down, Franzz?"

“Ah, I am too restless! I cannot sit down! I stay here, fine!” And so he hovered, gesticulating, carving his own space in the crowd, at some point casually taking up and lighting the joint Trevor had rolled, which turned out to be at least half crumbly black hash. And he filled us in on his amazing life since the last time he'd been in town.

Franzz was a fashion designer of international repute and the attendant fame you'd expect; he and his more business-minded sister, Vittoria, had launched lines of ladies' wear, jewelry, and cosmetics that were huge status symbols all over the world. But Franzz couldn't be counted on for anything except artistic inspiration. He would disappear from Quaffka headquarters in Milan with no notice and no entourage and only twenty credit cards, surfacing days or weeks later in, say, Amsterdam for New Year's Eve 1999.

And he sought out the company of other designers. But not the ones who made dresses, jewelry, or perfume. He generally found them a boring lot. Franzz liked chemists.

He liked all science-minded types, really, which was why he had collected me. He said that our talent was electric, whereas his and Trevor's was like a swath of watercolor across a piece of raw silk. He talked like that, too. But best of all he liked attic alchemists and basement wizards, those who combined esoteric and often deadly ingredients to create, not gold, but buzzes. Franzz collected drug designers—funded them too, probably, though I'd never ask and he'd never tell—and I knew he'd have something special planned for tonight.

Just as we were finishing the hash joint, I felt my micropager vibrating in my pocket, right against my left nut. I didn't even want the thing with me, but I'd come from a job in the Noord and hadn't wanted to go all the way to our flat on Reguliersgracht to drop off my stuff.

It was Piet at Systems Centrum Europa, a company I'd done a lot of freelance upsetting for. I considered ignoring the page, then felt sorry for him sitting out there in the silicon ‘burbs on New Year's Eve and went to the pay phone to see if something interesting was up.

It wasn't. When I went back to the table, Franzz was illustrating some point by sweeping his arms in a great circle and shouting, “SUNDAY, BLOODY SUNDAY!” I ducked past him into my chair. “What's up?” Trevor asked.

“Nothing. Boring."

“No, no, tell uz,” said Franzz, and I could see he really wanted to know.

“Well, see, a lot of people are convinced that all the computer networks are going to go down at midnight. The machines won't understand the changing of the dates, because computer years only happen in two digits. So supposedly they'll think it's 1900, which will cause them to go haywire in all sorts of interesting ways."

“Yes, I have heard of this.” Franzz pursed his lips. “But I have been hearing it for years."

“They've
known
about it for years, but no one has any idea what to
do
about it. Piet's out there with a bunch of techs, just to watch his own little network, and they want to be ready for...” I shrugged. “Whatever. The techs have spent the past half of the decade trying to figure out exactly what's going to happen, and they don't even really know that."

“But you have an idea, as always.” Franzz pointed a perfectly manicured, silver-varnished nail at me. “So, vhat happens to zee computers at midnight, Zach?"

“Probably a lot of them
will
go down. I don't think planes will start falling out of the sky, like the apocalyptics say, because people have manual control of that. But I believe all the records are going to be fucked up for a very long time."

“Records of vhat?"

“Everything."

“Und you don't vanna help?” Franzz inquired—with barely suppressed amusement, I thought.

“No way. I want to see exactly what happens, and then I want to go in and see what I can do with it."

Franzz's grin was approving. Trevor just shook his head and mouthed a word that looked like
extradition
, which I thought was pretty fucking unlikely after seven years. I hadn't even been old enough to prosecute as an adult when I did my worst stuff stateside. Anyway, Trevor knew he couldn't stop me. Something that big, I couldn't even stop myself.

“So,” I asked Franzz, “what chemicals do you plan to be on tonight?"

He glanced around nervously, even though no one at the surrounding tables could have heard me over the guitarwail of the latest big hit off
Foo Fighters 10
. “Come back to my room. I show you."