Exquisite Corpse

by Poppy Z. Brite

  I used to envy these kids their freedom, even if all it meant was living off Mum and Dad or on the dole. They could look like strange crosses between birds of paradise and walking corpses if they so desired. They could spit on the sidewalk, lounge insolently where they were not wanted, make rude remarks to the tourists who gawped at them. They could be as conspicuous as they liked. They never had to blend in anywhere, and never cared to try.

  It was these children, indirectly, who caused me to quit my last civil service job three months before I was arrested. I had a position behind a desk at the Metropolitan Water Board. The English civil service; allows a man to rise to his highest level of incompetence; I had already been dismissed from three or four such positions, but they were perfectly willing to hire me on again and see how long I might last at this one. They knew vaguely that I was intelligent and could type, and my work history showed that I would perform the job flawlessly right up until the moment I told some petty supervisor or other to stuff it as far as it would go.

  But one day very much like this, when autumn nipped the city and the sky was a rare, clear blue, I looked at the stack of meaningless papers on my desk and the balled-up wrapper of the greasy takeaway chicken I’d eaten an hour ago, when they said I could, even though I was always hungry well before that. I listened to the conversations unspooling around me, and I heard dialogue straight out of a Joe Orton play (“How dare you involve me in a situation for which no memo has been issued”). I thought of a boy I’d seen in the King’s Road the night before, his black hair teased wild, his smile open and easy and free. Quite possibly he didn’t have the price of a meal in his pocket, but nobody could tell him when he might or mightn’t eat one. Very quietly but very firmly, something in me rebelled.

  I stood. I dropped the greasy wrapper in the rubbish can; I never thought anyone else should have to clean up after me. And I left that office forever. No one spoke to me, no one saw me go. I spent the rest of the day in Chelsea, drinking in the pubs. I watched the kids prance up and down eyeing one another (and, most often, finding one another sadly deficient). I spoke to no one. I brought no one with me when I staggered home. There were already two I had to get rid of, one crumpled in the wardrobe beginning to bloat, the other still fresh enough to share my bed.

  I had no prospects at the time, only a small savings account and an insatiable appetite for killing boys. As it turned out, this was all I would require to get me through those last few months. But the wild children of Leicester Square would not serve my purposes today. I needed someone less conspicuous, more anonymous; in short, someone more closely resembling myself.

  Most of all, though, I needed a drink.

  I slipped into the stream of humanity on Charing Cross Road, succumbed to an irresistible impulse and ducked into a bookshop to scan the true crime section. I was the subject of three garish paperbacks: jackets the colour of fresh blood and fleeting love, well-thumbed central photo inserts documenting my bath, my bedroom closet, my kitchen knives, the stairs leading up to my flat, all with breathless captions (“Twenty-three men climbed these stairs, never expecting it would be their last trip!”). I left the store feeling obscurely pleased, turned at Lisle Street, and walked through Chinatown, marvelling at the strange stew of smells, the exotic spell of the fairy lights draping the storefronts, the vivid Asian faces of the boys. Then I crossed wide, chaotic Shaftesbury Avenue and was in the part of Soho I remembered best.

  Gay London has a strenuously sanitary feel to it, a kind of hygienic glitter. Even the sex shops and video stores are staffed by clean-cut young men who answer every inquiry with cheerful courtesy, whether it is about the best coffeeshop nearby or the proper way to insert an anal plug. I went into a gloomy little pub I hadn’t frequented much before. Its expanses of dark wood and fixtures of tarnished brass gave it that famous British-pub atmosphere, so of course it was always full of American tourists.

  I laid a five-pound note on the bar, got back half the change I’d expected and a pint glass filled with one of my earliest and truest loves: cold lager. I never went in for the English tradition of warm, murky beer that tastes like something more properly used to feed livestock.

  I carried my pint to a corner table and sat just looking at it for a moment: the creamy head of foam, the tiny bubbles ascending through clear gold, the droplets condensing on the sides of the glass, then running down to form a wet circle on the beer mat. Reputations are ruined, marriages destroyed, life’s works forsaken for the beauty of such a sight. There are seven thousand pubs in London.

  At last I picked up the glass and, very slowly, drank off half my pint without stopping. My throat felt like a cactus in a drenching desert rain. My tongue had its own sort of orgasm. The taste was liquid silk, slow-brewed joy.

  Capital punishment was never any deterrent to murder. The worst of us would welcome death. But to tell a man he can never again taste cold lager! I vowed I would die, and remain dead, before I would return to captivity.

  Tonight I must pace myself. There would soon be plenty of opportunities to drink until the room spun, when I had finished slipping between Her Majesty’s iron fingers. Now I had to keep an eye on the tourists who were starting to pour in. The next part of my plan depended upon them, or upon one of them at any rate. Still, after five years one cannot help getting a bit light-headed. I had just started on my third pint and was marvelling at the pleasantly watery feeling in my limbs when Sam came into the pub.

  Of course, I didn’t know he was called Sam then. I only knew he was a male of my approximate height, build, age, and colouring, and that he was looking at the men in the place much more keenly than the scattering of women. Our facial resemblance was sketchy, but it would do. If he was a local chap or a European tourist, I could forget him without ever learning his name. But if he was American, I intended to make him my companion for the evening.

  I let him order his first round (a Guinness, which told me nothing except where our similarities diverged), saw him pay for it from a brown leather wallet he kept inside his coat, and watched as he stood drinking alone at the bar. He kept scanning the room, and our eyes met more than once, but I broke the gaze each time.

  When only a swallow of vile black brew remained in his glass, I carried my lager to the bar. He polished off the Guinness, flagged the bartender with an expansive gesture no Brit would own, and said in a perfectly atrocious twang that could have originated nowhere but the American South, “Gimmee another stout, please.”

  Inwardly I rejoiced. But to him I only said, “You can stand a match on end in that head, you know.”

  His dark eyes lit with pleasure when he realized I was talking to him. I wondered whether anyone had been friendly to him on his holiday, or if he had encountered a lot of prats who immediately wrote him off as a stupid Yank. Of course, he would have been better off with one of those silly bastards than with me. But he needn’t know that yet. He needn’t know it ever, if I did this thing right.

  “Huh?” he said, and grinned. I supposed I could understand the perception behind the dumb-Yank stereotype. But I’d met a number of Americans in a job I had with the tourist board, and I hadn’t found them stupid at all. They simply weren’t taught to be articulate. Either they were so intimidated by our accents (which all sounded posh to them) that they couldn’t think of anything to say, or else they fell all over themselves saying the same thing five or six different ways. Overeager, yes. Frustrating to talk to, yes. But not necessarily stupid.

  I leaned against the bar. My left arm was pressed to my side, near the small constant pain of my wound. Beneath my new black jumper I could feel my heart jumping like a frantic animal in a heated cage. Fluttery, nasty feeling.

  “You can stand a match in the head of your stout,” I said. “It’s quite thick enough.” I picked up a box of wooden matches lying on the bar, shook one out, and stood it on end in the silky white foam. It did not waver, but stood straight and erect like a little redheaded sentinel.

  “I’ll be
damned,” said the American. “What makes it do that?”

  “I suppose it would be the air bubbles.”

  “Yeah, but the surface tension of each bubble must be pretty strong to produce a cohesive effect like that …” He laughed. “Sorry. I left my physics manuals at home, but I guess I brought the mind-set with me.”

  “You’re a student?”

  “Doctoral candidate. Particle theory. I’m trying for a research grant to study quarks.”

  “Quarks?”

  “Elementary particles that feel the strong force—the strongest of the four fundamental forces. They come in six flavours, up, down, strange, charmed, top, and bottom. And each flavour comes in three colors, red, green, or blue.”

  “Like an ice lolly,” I mused.

  “Huh? Oh, a Popsicle! Yeah, sort of! I bet I can use that in one of my classes. Anyway, you know atoms? Well, see, atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and those are made of quarks.”

  “What are quarks made of, then?”

  “Waves.” “Waves?” I had now finished my third pint, and was beginning to be outraged. “But waves aren’t tangible. They’re just disturbances.”

  “Vibrations, right! The whole universe is made of vibrations.” He beamed, oblivious to my dismay. “Neat, huh? Anyway, we haven’t been introduced yet. I’m Sam.” He held out a long-fingered, smooth-palmed hand that looked very much like my own. I grasped it, half-expecting my flesh to pass ghostlike through his. After all, we were nothing but vibrations. All the stone and iron of Painswick Prison was nothing but vibrations. Had I known, I could have begun vibrating at a different frequency and gone right between the bars.

  I said my name was Arthur. The wraiths of my eighty-seven prison journals rose before me, and in a flash of inspiration I told him I was a writer.

  “Oh, neat! What do you write?”

  “Tragic fiction.”

  “You know,” and his dark eyes took on a wistful glaze, “I always wanted to write. I’ve got a bunch of great ideas. Maybe I could tell you some of ’em and you could use them.” I waited for him to say, “And we could split the money,” but he didn’t. Poor Sam; he was a good and generous soul who meant no one any harm. I felt the scalpel blade pricking the inside of my leg as if anxious to get on with it. We finished our beers and ordered another round.

  Half an hour later we were leaning against a brick wall in a narrow alley just off Dean Street, our hands burrowing beneath each other’s clothes, our bodies pressed together, our tongues intertwined. My face was wet with his kisses. A chill November wind sang through the alley, carrying the smell of bonfires and burning straw, cutting me straight to the bone. I could hear fireworks exploding in the distance, and faint cheers.

  Sam’s hands fumbled with the button of my trousers. “I’ll bring you off right here in the alley,” he slurred.

  That would never do. “Don’t you have a room somewhere?”

  “Course I have a room.” His mouth was a damp soft flower against my ear. “But it’s in Muswell Hill … and I don’ wanna wait …”

  “Do all American physics students make a habit of sex in alleyways?”

  “No!” he assured me. “Hardly any do. But you’re the hottest guy I ever met …” He attacked me with his tongue again, leaving me to ponder the subtle mechanics of narcissism. I didn’t fancy Slam quite as much as he fancied me, but I knew I would find him more appealing after he was dead.

  But his room was in north London, the wrong direction from Heathrow Airport. And though a public spectacle was the last thing I wanted, the idea appeared to excite him. Sex in alleyways, in parks—it seemed a throwback to the London of the late sixties and early seventies, the furtive, sordid underside of a London I had barely known. It also gave me an idea.

  I gently disengaged from Sam, pulled him out of the alley and up the street. He followed, unresisting. “There’s a park a few blocks up,” I told him. “The street isn’t safe. But the cottages are.”

  “Cottages?”

  “Public loos.”

  “Bathrooms?”

  “Men without rooms sometimes fuck in the public loos,” I explained. “And men who do have rooms, but like a bit of rough trade now and then. You can be put in jail for doing what we’re about to do, you know. So a bit of privacy is essential.”

  I was always well aware of my victims’ social disenfranchisement. But I used it against them only when I had to, as I did now.

  The cottage was at the edge of a tree-lined square the other side of Tottenham Court Road, hidden in foliage, shrouded in fog, set partly underground at the bottom of some cement stairs. I went down first to make certain no one else was using the place, then pulled the door open a crack and motioned Sam in.

  Our footsteps rang on the dirty stone floor and echoed off the tile walls. The urinals were like a row of vacuous mouths with pale jutting lower lips. The porcelain had a faint ghostly sheen beneath its patina of dried urine and grime. Sam looked around, gave me a smile as full of wonder and gratitude as a small boy’s on Christmas morning, and pulled me into one of the stalls.

  I shoved him back against the cold wall and covered his mouth with mine. He tasted bitter as the Guinness he had drunk, but with a spicy undertone of lust. I put my foot up on the toilet seat. With my left hand I cupped the back of his neck, where the hair was clipped short and soft. With the right I reached down and—slowly, slowly—pulled up my trouser leg.

  The scalpel was stuck fast to the tape. I tried to twist it without moving my arm, to work it free a bit at a time. This deliberate action made me realize I was drunker than I’d thought. For a man who hasn’t had a drink in half a decade and needs his wits about him, four lagers are too many.

  Sam moaned and pushed his hips against mine. The stall smelled of disinfectant, human filth, a faint rancid trace of semen, a whiff of cheap cologne. The scalpel would not budge. Sam was biting at my lips, sliding his hands down my body. He touched my right arm and pulled back a little. “Arthur?” he whispered into my mouth. “What are you doing?”

  I gave a great tug and the scalpel came free. It sliced through the tape, slashed the heavy cloth of Sam’s trousers, and plunged deep into his leg before I could stop it.

  His body went rigid. He grabbed my jumper with both hands, shouting inarticulately. Hot bright pain shot through my chest as Dr. Drummond’s incision came open again. I sliced at Sam’s fingers, felt the blade scrape across bone. He made an awful sound halfway between a sob and a scream. I imagined him trying to comprehend what was happening through his alcoholic haze, and I cursed myself for drinking enough to make me clumsy. I’d meant to send him off quick and clean. This was no better than butchery.

  I grabbed the collar of Sam’s coat, pulled him toward me as if I meant to kiss him again, and drove his head back against the wall as hard as I could. It sounded like a ripe melon landing on marble and left a dark smear on the tiles. A thin, beery stream of vomit bubbled out of his mouth.

  I met his gaze steadily as I slammed his head into the wall again, trying not to let my face contort, trying not to look angry or cruel. Most likely he was past knowing anything. But if he could still see me, I wanted him to know I wasn’t doing this because I hated him. Quite the contrary. Before, I had only seen him as a means to an end. But in these final moments of his life, I loved him.

  I told him so as I pushed the scalpel into the soft spot just below his left ear. His eyes were alight with pain and dread—two emotions I always regretted seeing under such intimate circumstances—but they had already begun to fog. Warmth soaked my fingers, trickled over my wrist, pooled in the crook of my arm.

  Sam’s head fell back. A great wet red mouth yawned in his neck. For an instant its edges were a pristine delineation of tissues, a perfect cross section of his throat’s various layers. Then it disgorged a solid torrent of blood, painting the stall, raining into the toilet, drenching Sam’s face and the front of his coat. I thrust him to one side and barely got out of the way.

>   His dying body crumpled into a corner of the stall, wedged in between the wall and the toilet. His face was a red slick, featureless, blind. He was nothing but particles now, if he had ever been anything more. I had only altered the speed at which his particles were vibrating. Nothing in the universe had been disturbed.

  I unzipped his trousers and tugged them down, telling myself this was not a foolish waste of time; I was only trying to make it look more like a random sex killing. Such things happened every day. The authorities will be diverted entirely, I thought as I took Sara’s penis in my hand and felt a fresh stickiness. I looked down at the glistening white streak on my palm, like a snail trail in the garden. Sam had liked rough trade more than I’d suspected.

  I brought my hand to my mouth and licked the salt stickiness away. It was bitter, faintly caustic. I thought I detected a coppery trace of Guinness, but that could have been the blood already on my hand. I licked off some of that as well. When I stood, my legs were trembling and my head felt too heavy on my neck, but I was careful not to support myself against the wall. I couldn’t touch anything yet.

  I’d drunk too much. I had given Sam a bad death. But none of that could be helped now. I had to clean up and get out of this place. If anyone else came in, I would have to kill him too. Today had been the first time I’d killed two men within minutes of each other. I didn’t fancy trying it again so soon.

  I went to the sinks, ran a thin stream of cold rusty-smelling water over my hands, used paper towels to scrub away the rest of the blood. When my hands were dry, I wiped the faucet handle, then put on the rubber gloves I’d taken from the emergency room. I went back to Sam, found the scalpel on the floor under his leg, cleaned it on the hem of his coat, and put it in my pocket. I’d have to get rid of it as well as the gloves before I reached the airport, but I couldn’t leave it here. For all I knew, the hospitals marked them.