Exquisite Corpse (18 page)

Outside, Airline Highway was cracking one bleary eye and shaking off last night's hangover. Luke could hear souped-up engines going by, the subliminal hum of neon, the occasional dull pop of gunfire. He sensed a hive of activity in the rooms around him, comings and goings on the veranda. Cheap sex and business deals of all kinds. There was junk out there, pure and merciful.

He couldn't stay in the room any longer. He slung his jacket over his shoulders, pulled his boots on, went out and sat in his car with the windows rolled up and the tape deck blasting Bauhaus' last album,
Burning from the Inside.
Peter Murphy only sang half the songs on the album, officially because he'd been in hospital recovering from double pneumonia. Rumor had it that his pneumonia symptoms bore a remarkable resemblance to heroin withdrawal. The emaciated, androgynous singer had once bragged about a psychic's prediction that he would die of AIDS in Paris; now he had a kid.

As far as Luke was concerned, Murphy should be here begging to trade places with him.
Sure, breeder,
he'd say, unzipping his pants,
suck my dick, then go buy yourself a ticket to Paris.

He huddled in the bucket seat and wrapped his arms around himself. His leather jacket creaked softly, familiar as the sound of a lover's breathing. The bulk of it reminded him what it felt like to be strong.

I
stood staring at the filthy brown surface of the Mississippi River. The water had a slick look, iridescent with a thin film of crude oil. It humped and heaved and rolled as if in peristalsis, a long brown string of viscera endlessly churning. I was near its sphincter, which accounted for the smell.

A line of barges moved slowly upstream in the night, silhouetted against the opposite bank, heaped with some glittering black substance. I imagined them plowing into the gaudily lit bridge that carried traffic across the river, the long silver girders bending and shearing, the roadway crumbling into the water, spilling cars and tiny half-crushed bodies. Unfortunately, I held no sway over barges.

This river was nothing like the Thames, the cold gray vein that snaked through my cold gray city, upon whose banks I had spent most of my life, into which I had flushed through my toilet any number of carefully wrapped, slightly stained parcels. The Thames seemed sterile beside this roiling brown stream.

I wondered what it would do to a corpse. Perhaps I could float one out tied to an empty plastic bottle, then row out to retrieve it in a fortnight. From all the similar bottles sailing past, multicoloured indigestible tidbits, it appeared as if other curious parties might have done just that.

Once I had boarded the flight from London and found myself safely in the air, I raced through the papers I'd bought, suddenly ravenous for news of the world I was rejoining. Aside from myself, it seemed as dull and repetitive as ever: royal scandals, politicians' sex lives, vicious opinions of the willfully ignorant presented as facts and swallowed whole by vacuous readers. One of the front-page articles about the abduction of my corpse had a sidebar entitled
THE GAY PLAGUE—ARE YOUR CHILDREN SAFE
?

I read every word of these insipid rags, then turned in desperation to the in-flight magazine. Ads targeted at corporate drones with brown noses and fat wallets exhorted me to monogram my briefcase, upgrade my powerbook, emboss my business card on the face of a watch. At last I found a travel article among all the sales pitches. It extolled the humid vices of New Orleans, the jazz, the food, the other delicacies. My interest was piqued by the caption beneath a picture of a blood-red drink in a long-stemmed glass, garnished with a cherry, a slice of orange, and a vivid green paper ruffle:
New Orleans has over 4000 bars and nightclubs
…

In London there were half again as many. But surely the city was only a fraction of London's size …

I scanned the rest of the article. The population of New Orleans was just over seven hundred thousand. London was home to seven
million
shivering souls. As I worked out the math, I felt an incredulous grin spreading over my face. Londoners had a pub per thousand citizens, a ratio that had always set well with me. But residents of New Orleans had one for every 175.

By the time the plane touched down in Atlanta, I knew where I was headed. Going through U.S. Customs on an American passport, I worried about my accent. I needn't have;
no one required me to look them in the eye, much less to speak. Once I received the government's stamp of approval, I stopped at a currency exchange booth and converted all Sam's pounds back into Uncle Sam's dollars. It seemed the pound was strong; I received a fat handful of unpleasantly furry-feeling green bills.

An underground train carried me from the airport to the bus station, where I discovered I had several times the price of a one-way ticket to New Orleans. I left Atlanta at dawn and spent the next fifteen hours dozing and waking through green countryside, down into the swamps, along a corridor of foetid factories and oil refineries that seemed to go on forever, a nightmare of blackened smokestacks topped with greasy orange flames against weird purple skies.

At last the coach pulled into New Orleans, and I told a cabdriver to take me to the cheapest digs nearby, which turned out to be the Hummingbird Bar, Grill, and Hotel on St. Charles Avenue. I consumed a cheeseburger and two frigid, heavenly American draft beers (can the chill of death itself be more delectable than that of a truly cold beer?), then climbed a narrow flight of stairs to a small square room and slept for twenty-four hours.

Earlier tonight I'd checked out of the Hummingbird and walked bravely to the French Quarter, as a million low-budget tourists before me must have done. (“St. Charles turns into Royal at Canal,” the desk clerk told me, and her words seemed an exotic invocation, rich with mystery and promise.)

I conquered the Mississippi in my heart as I stood there on the pier. I had no fear of it, or of this city it churned through. I had seen intestines and sphincters before; I was capable of handling them. Then I went off to have a drink.

Jay sat in his parlor shaking like a spider on a web in a high wind. It was late afternoon, and Tran had left an hour ago.
They hadn't had much to say to each other upon awakening: both were embarrassed, and both felt ill from the ingestion of various substances. There had been no further physical contact.

But as soon as he had seen Tran out of the courtyard and locked the gate behind him, all Jay's compulsions and desires of the past twenty-four hours came rushing back a hundredfold. He returned to the house in a daze, took the medical textbook down from the shelf and leafed through it, then put it away again. For a few minutes he simply sat, feeling his skeleton rattle and his eyeballs pulse and his heart hammer. He wanted another boy
right now.
The urge had never come this strongly so close on the heels of a kill. The encounter with Tran had short-circuited him somehow, knocked him into a repeating loop.

He got up, went into the bedroom, and opened the bottom drawer of his dresser. Inside were the images he kept of all the boys, his Polaroid collection. They were good shots: Jay had an eye for composition, a keen sense of pose and angle. Here was a boy with his chest and stomach barely slit open, a shallow Y-cut showing the pale layer of fat inside, but no organs. Here was a close-up of the same boy's face, divinely peaceful. Here were two together in the tub, half on top of each other as if embracing, black skin contrasting with white, alike only in their headlessness. It still wasn't enough. Pictures would do him no good just now.

He unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged out of it, let it fall to the floor, undid his trousers and stepped out of them. Turning in a slow circle in the center of the bedroom, he caught sight of his reflection in the large cheval mirror. His face was impassive, his penis swelling to erection.

He let himself out the kitchen door, walked quickly along the side of the house and into the rear courtyard. The dead overgrowth and damp statuary seemed to nod into his path. He could not get to the slave quarters fast enough. Naked and trembling, he wrenched the door open and flung himself inside.

The smell was sweetly rotten, richly vile, stronger than yesterday due to the addition of fresh meat. It was an invisible finger, soft and fat, pushing against the back of Jay's throat. Instead of gagging, he took a deep breath and let it invade him. He felt the odor of rotting flesh enter his lungs and seep into his bloodstream. He opened his mouth and let it rest upon his tongue like a sacrament.

All the windows were painted black, outside and in. When Jay flicked a switch by the door, a long row of ceiling-mounted 120-watt lamps flooded the scene with merciless white light. He liked it bright in here. He liked to see things glisten.

The inside of the shed was a single room, long and narrow. To the right was a stack of black plastic garbage bags bulging with oddly shaped lumps, distended here and there with gases, reaching halfway up the wall. To the left, just inside the door, was a deep freezer large enough to hold a man.

A row of long shelves ran along the back wall, bearing objects carefully arranged and frequently dusted. A number of polished skulls, their hollow eye sockets packed with dried roses. A mummified ribcage fragile as an old box kite. A pair of slender-fingered hands resting at the bottom of a gallon pickle jar, preserved in grain alcohol. (Jay planned to use this alcohol to make a cherry liqueur whose recipe had been passed down through his mother's family, but not until the hands had steeped for a while.)

To the left of the shelves was a metal hospital table fitted with leather restraints, and in the left rear corner of the room was a fifty-gallon drum of hydrochloric acid. When young Lysander Byrne called the orders division of Byrne Metals and Chemicals and said he wanted such a drum delivered to his house in the French Quarter, no one asked questions. The rest of the left wall was taken up by a huge standing refrigerator he'd bought cheap from a restaurant about to go under. This had been somewhat more difficult to have delivered. Jay
had allowed them to bring it as far as the rear courtyard, then made them leave it on the dolly, claiming he hadn't cleared a space for it yet. Later he wrestled it into the shed by himself, wrenching his back in the process.

The double doors of the refrigerator were opaque with condensation. Jay wiped a hand across the glass, revealing a pallid swath of what was inside. He touched his fingers to his lips, anointing himself with wetness. Then he grasped both handles and pulled the doors wide.

The young man had been perhaps twenty-five, tall and slender, with long graceful legs and the kind of smooth hairless skin Jay craved. In life his body had been the color of dark chocolate washed with a honey-gold patina, the spoils of a summer spent sleeping naked on Caribbean beaches. He had told Jay of bumming around the islands, hitching rides on whatever crafts were going his way, living on fish, fruit, and sticky ganja. His tissues had soaked up enough warmth to keep that vibrant color for a long time.

But he had been dead and decapitated for more than a week, hanging upside down from a steel meat hook thrust through the tendons of both ankles. As the blood drained from his neck stump into a pan Jay had set to catch it, his skin took on an ashy pallor and a slightly crinkled appearance. He looked as if he had lain too long in a very cold bath. His penis and testicles were purple-black scraps of flesh nearly lost in a thicket of blood-stiffened hair. His arms were trussed at the wrists and pulled up to his sides, the ropes tethered to the meat hook, helping support the weight of the body.

Jay had slit the belly open and removed the entrails as soon as he killed the young man. You had to remove the entrails; otherwise the body would bloat and sometimes rupture in a matter of hours. He'd taken the heart and lungs from this one, too. The empty body cavities were smooth and free of blood, since Jay had hosed the body down before hanging it. Blood rotted fast and had a rich, savory stink. He had known this
since the age of sixteen, when he had sliced his thumb open and saved the blood in a bottle so he could smell his own flesh decaying.

He pressed his fingers to the corpse's chest, leaving five indentations in the cold flesh. He stroked the edges of the enormous wound, appreciating the layered textures of skin and flesh and bone, then touched his lips again, licked the frigid moisture off his fingertips. His penis throbbed. His skull felt full of bluebottle flies, razor wire, boiling slag.

Jay threw back his head and shrieked at the ceiling. The echo caromed off the walls and the concrete floor. Whether he shrieked from joy or anguish he could not have said, but the sound poured back into him through every orifice, filling him with his own power.

Then he fell to his knees and buried his face in the hanging man's belly. He sank his teeth into flesh that had gone the consistency of firm pudding. He ripped at the edges of the wound, pulling off strips of skin and meat, swallowing them whole, smearing his face with his own saliva and what little juice remained in this chill tissue. He ran his hands up the spine, between the buttocks, slipped a finger into the asshole and saw it wriggling deep in the hollow inner cavity. At some point he ejaculated, and the semen ran down his thigh almost unnoticed, a small sacrifice to this splendid shrine.

For several minutes Jay kneeled on the hard floor, catching his breath, his cheek resting against the corpse's left pectoral muscle, his hand loosely cupping the smooth curve of its shoulder. Deliciously cold air poured out of the fridge, drawing him into this dream of death. When at last he was able to rise, he felt reborn.

He left the slave quarters and went back to the house to bathe and dress. Soaping himself, he felt various residues draining away: lingering traces of Tran, cold corpse ichor, the dried drug-laced sweat of his own pores. When he stepped out of the shower, Jay was at once calm and terribly excited. Both
of these emotions were overlaid with the thin veneer of dread that always accompanied them, like an acid trip with a jittery strychnine edge.