Exquisite Corpse

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Coil’s version of “Tainted Love” was just the thing to fuel righteous anger in him, and righteous anger was what he needed to pump himself up for the show. “GAVE YOU—ALL—A BOY COULD—GIVE YOU,” he sang, pounding the dashboard. Tran’s face floated up in front of him, and Luke hated its effortless beauty, hated the callow, manipulative mind that lay behind those smooth-lidded eyes. He thought of the truth he had poured into his books, all the truth he knew, and he hated every critic who had ever savaged him, every reader who had missed the point.

  When he ran out of specific targets for his animosity, Luke hated the world because it would go on after he was dead. The raw emotion coursed through him, as icy-pure as the finest junk, giving him the strength to be insane.

  By the time he reached the turnoff to the bayou, stashed his car in a ramshackle wooden building that served as a covert garage, and walked out to the dock where the pirogue would pick him up to take him to the showboat, he could feel Lush Rimbaud stirring inside him, ready to rage.

  “The rest of the world could get a fucking clue from China. One kid per family, severe penalties for extras, and mandatory sterilization. Zero population growth is their goal, and they’ve damn near reached it. A mess of abortion goes on in the People’s Republic. A whole damn mess of abortion. Scraping fetus has become a way of life to the Chinese. Not to let ’em off the hook, so to speak. Extreme measures are called for because they’ve been world-champion breeders since the fucking Han dynasty. One out of every five people in the world is Chinese. But what percentage of resources do you think all those Chinese people are using? No percentage at all, compared to your greedy little American ass.

  “Americans comprise less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we suck up thirty-three percent of the world’s resources. And we can breed as many rug rats as we want. Hey, it’s a free country! We don’t even have to be able to feed ’em. If you can’t keep the little fuckers alive, the government will do it for you! MY tax dollars—YOUR tax dollars—pay breeders to stay home and make MORE breeders! AND RESEARCH TOWARD THE CURE OF AN EPIDEMIC GOES UNFUNDED BECAUSE THE PEOPLE DYING FROM IT SUCKED TOO MUCH COCK!!!”

  He’d been on the air for several hours now, and he was rolling. Luke leaned away from the microphone and slurped at a vile-tasting protein drink that Soren, the founder, financer, and engineer of WHIV, had stashed in the cooler for him. It was as thick as a McDonald’s milk shake, and slightly viscous. The flavor was part strawberry, part Pepto-Bismol, part liver: chalky-bland, sickly sweet, yet somehow meaty. It was among the more disgusting things he’d ever put in his mouth. But Soren swore it would put two pounds on him. He could use two pounds.

  He returned to the mike. “They may hate us for sucking cock, but at least they can’t accuse us of making more little cocksuckers. At least the biological reproduction of our own DNA in the form of a slimy, squalling lump of meat isn’t the greatest satisfaction most of us will ever know in life. Now is it? I’m Lush Rimbaud coming to you on WHIV, your source of aural infection … and this one goes out to the one I love.”

  He cued up Nine Inch Nails’ “Something I Can Never Have.” Trent Reznor’s voice burned like a hot wire into his skull, stealthy and sharp, laced with deadly pain. It might as well be the theme song of this show, this radio station, everything he had ever written, his desperate love for Tran, his whole miserable life.

  And yet there was something that kept him kicking despite all the good reasons he had to go ahead and die. He could bow out any time now: it would be easy to score enough junk, and an opiate OD was title ideal way to go as far as Luke was concerned. If the straights found you with a needle hanging out of your arm and wished you good riddance, so what? You’d cashed it in easy and sweet.

  If he kept fighting for that extra day, week, month of life, he might end up too sick to let himself out gracefully. Then he would face a hard, protracted death. In the final days his lungs might fail, and he would drown in his own phlegm. He might go blind and no longer be able to see death stealing up on him. His basic functions might go, and he would die in puddles of his own shit (perhaps scrawling a last scatological sentence or two on the wall).

  There were any number of colorful horrors to consider. Luke often nibbled his way through them like a cornucopia of rotting fruits, choosing one for its bittersweet ripeness, another for the worm in its core.

  So what kept him going? For a while it had been his conviction that he and Tran would return to each other somehow, someday, simply because it was their destiny. Luke could not conceive of dying until this had happened. But slowly he came to realize that for most of his life, destiny had equaled anything he wanted at any given time. It wasn’t going to work that way anymore. Tran apparently had his own ideas about destiny, a destiny that no longer included Lucas Ransom. Rather than consider the possibility that he had been wrong, Luke stopped believing in destiny altogether. And he kept on living.

  A tiny flame of nausea licked at the pit of his stomach, and Luke decided to give the protein drink a rest. He’d grab a sandwich from the cooler in a while, after dark, maybe even manage a cup of coffee out of the thermos. Maybe.

  The Nine Inch Nails song was winding to a slow, sinister close. “Now that one,” he said into the microphone, “that one’s for my lost love, wherever he is. Are you out there, are you listening, do you still hate the sound of my voice? I guess I’ll never know. Here’s another one for you, my little heartworm.”

  Lush Rimbaud seldom played two tunes in a row with no rant in between, but he saw Soren heading across the deck with smoldering joint in hand and he was getting maudlin anyway, so he put on a Billie Holiday CD. As the first mournful strains of “Gloomy Sunday” drifted out across the swamp, Soren passed Luke the joint. Luke sucked at the tarry twist of paper, damp with bayou fog and Soren’s spit, and felt the little flame of nausea recede.

  “Christ, Luke.” Soren grimaced at the speakers. “Spin a couple of bummers, why don’t you?”

  “I thought I would.” Luke toked on the joint again and handed it back. The spicy green taste of the weed lingered on his lips, on his tongue. He watched Soren draw deep, sucking the smoke up hungrily. The young engineer was a white-bleached blond with a spare, elegant face and a wardrobe straight out of Details. In another life, in his old life, Luke would have dismissed Soren as a clubby bitch. That had been his term for a certain type of well-dressed prettyboy who haunted hipster hangouts everywhere, looking like the bastard offspring of Bauhaus and Duran Duran, sucking up cappuccinos and bragging about art.

  In another life, in his own old life, Soren might have been one of those clubby bitches. But in this life he had tested positive for the HIV virus a year ago, one week after his eighteenth birthday. Welcome to the real world, kid. How do you like being a grownup? Don’t worry—you won’t be one for long. Though he hadn’t had any symptoms yet, a shell-shocked glaze shone through the obvious intelligence in his eyes, which were gray and huge in his fine-boned face. His natural quietness had taken on a stunned quality. His radio handle was Stigmata Martyr.

  Despite his sleek appearance, Soren was a technogeek extraordinaire who could get any recalcitrant piece of equipment on the showboat working inside of an hour. He’d been beaming pirate signals onto FM stations for years, but had started WHIV several months ago after after hearing a right-wing talk radio host shout down a hospitalized AIDS patient who’d called to protest the misinformation being spread.

  Soren wanted a front man as strident as the ones on the other side. He’d contacted Luke through a tenuous network of acquaintances. Though Luke had never worked in radio, and though he had been put off by Soren’s appearance and demeanor at first, the idea seized him. Here was his chance to let Lush Rimbaud rant freely, without having to edit him later. Here was his chance to decant some of the constant anger. It fueled him, yes; but when it built up past a certain point, it began to gnaw at his heart until he could scarcely think.

  Soren was right about “Gloomy Sunday.�
� Billie poured all her loneliness, all her might-have-beens, all the sorrow of her junkie heart into this love song to a dead lover, and the result was devastating.

  “Don’t you know the story of this song?” Luke asked. Soren shook his head. The side was just ending, so Luke leaned over and spoke into the mike. “Bit of history attached to that one. It was written by a Hungarian composer who killed himself afterward, leaving the world his sheet music. The first recording inspired so many suicides that it was banned in Hungary. Then they translated it and gave it to Billie … good idea, folks. Whenever you need a little cheerer-upper, just slap old Billie on. People would dive off a roof or blow their brains out, and the cops would find the side on the turntable. Eventually they had to quit playing it on commercial radio. It was the only song that ever got banned for being too sad … twice.”

  Luke accepted the joint from Soren, inhaled loudly and sibilantly into the microphone. “Tasty shit,” he said in a breathless pothead croak. “What is it, Mississippi homegrown? At least that fucking wasteland turns out one useful product.” He exhaled extravagantly. “Hey, Martyr, guess why the governor of Mississippi refused state funding to AIDS research clinics! This is a good one. He said it was a behaviorally caused disease and normal taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill. Why waste good American money on faggot germs?”

  He paused a beat to let that sink in. “So I wrote to my legislators and said I wanted a refund of all my tax dollars that went toward research on birth defects, fertility drugs, miscarriage … anything related to the production of the healthy human fetus. I figured, since pregnancy is a behaviorally caused condition whose morality—or lack thereof—I deplore, I shouldn’t have to finance the disgusting problems of breeders. And guess what!”

  Luke pushed the PLAY button on the cassette deck. A snarl of guitars heralded his favorite New Orleans dykecore band, Service with a Smile. “I got fucked, fucked, FUCKED!!!” the lead singer spat over a staticky wall of guitar. Though she covered topics as diverse as penile mutilations and IRS audits, the song only lasted a minute and a half. When it slammed to a halt, Luke was right there.

  “Goddamn RIGHT I got fucked, you got fucked, anybody who ever got fucked … got fucked! You tested negative last week? Congratufuckalations! You don’t have to worry about it again for at least six months! Doesn’t that just take a load off your mind? Doesn’t: that just gladden your heart?

  “I’m Lush Rimbaud, and I refuse to shut up or die. But my guts are churnin’ and my lymph nodes a-throbbin’, so i’m gonna take a break and get stoned out of my mind with Stigmata Martyr and the Skipper. Here’s a whole CD for you. Something to lighten the mood a little.”

  He slapped on Pink Floyd’s The Wall, pushed back his cheap aluminum lawn chair, and left the controls. Soren and the skipper, Johnnie Boudreaux, leaned on the deck rail passing the joint back and forth. The showboat was Johnnie’s creation. He’d cobbled it together from a small barge, adding an outboard engine for mobility, a railing in case anyone started getting dizzy spells, and a waterproof shell to protect Soren’s radio equipment.

  Soren came from old-blood New Orleans, a family with nine aunts all named Marie and loads of money, at least by New Orleans boho standards. Now whatever part of his income didn’t go into the station went for preventive health care. He had great faith in folk remedies. Luke sometimes wondered how Soren’s herbs and amulets would hold up to a bout of crypto, but the etiquette of the infected allowed no disrespect of others’ delusions. Whatever got you through the night—megavitamins, creative visualization, the slow poison of AZT—was supposed to be inviolate to criticism or mockery. It didn’t always work that way, of course, but Luke was willing to let his friends kid themselves as long as they allowed him the same courtesy.

  The boat was adrift on the still waters of the bayou, and the sun was beginning to melt into the treetops, filling the swamp with buttery green-gold light. It was one of those moments when Luke suffered from the delusion that somehow everything could still be all right. Soren ruined it by nudging his elbow and saying, “There’s a new guy in my counseling group who wants to meet you. He’s read all your books.”

  “What’d you do, tell him I was the DJ for your pirate radio station?”

  “Of course not, Lucas.” It was amazing how bitchy Soren could make someone’s given name sound when he wanted to. “No one in the group knows I run WHIV. I don’t go around bragging about my illegal activities. I simply happened to mention that I knew you.”

  “Tell him to go to the Faubourg Marigny Bookstore. They have signed copies of all my stuff.”

  “He wants to meet you, Luke. He wants to invite you out for a cocktail in the Quarter. He’s twenty, healthy, and half Japanese, and since I know what a rice queen you are—”

  Luke hunched his shoulders and scowled at Soren. “I’m not a fucking rice queen. Quit calling me that.”

  “Riiiight.” Soren drew the syllable out, made it rich with cynicism. “Just because the last guy you dated was Vietnamese, and the one before that was Laotian, and you told the Times-Picayune your favorite vacation spot was Bangkok—”

  “I’ve never even been to Bangkok, you moron. It was a joke.”

  “Wishful thinking, you mean.”

  “Y’all shut up and pass that doobie,” interrupted Johnnie Boudreaux. He was a big sweet-natured Cajun kid who knew the bayous and waterways of the swamp country as well as Luke knew the French Quarter or the Castro. Like most Cajuns, Johnnie was dark-haired and fair-skinned, though his flush of sunburn offered scant disguise for the small purple KS lesions that speckled his face, upper chest, and arms.

  Although Luke wouldn’t admit as much to anyone, he had an obsessive, vanity-fueled dread of KS. Johnnie didn’t seem to care. Even after a lesion came up on his forehead, he kept scraping his long hair back in a careless ponytail instead of letting it hang over his face the way Luke would have done. His only concession to the lesions was to wear his gimme cap with the bill forward, to keep the sun off his face a little. Eventually the cancer would get a grip on his viscera, and he would have a choice of blistering chemotherapy, slow death, or the barrel of the antique pearl-handled revolver he always kept nearby.

  “So anyway,” said Soren, abandoning the rice-queen gibe for the moment, “what should I tell Tomiko?”

  “Tell him I hope lie stays healthy. Meeting me isn’t a good way to do that.”

  Soren shrugged. “Your loss.”

  Too true, thought Luke, my loss. But Tomiko’s gain. Tran could testify to that.

  The three of them stood for a while in companionable stoned silence, elbows propped on the railing, looking out over the bayou. Roger Waters’ voice twined softly round them, now furious, now wry, now stagily seductive. The day was gone. The sky had darkened to an eerie twilight purple, the water to a luminous black. Pale insects sketched ephemeral mandalas in the air. Luke heard the slither and splash of a small gator sliding off the bank into the shining water.

  It was at times like this that his sorrow overtook his fury for a little while. He spent most of his days simmering in a brew of helplessness and rage, always conscious of his slow inexorable movement through a bitter life, toward a lonely death. But here in the swamp it was easy to observe the random laziness of the universe. A virus was such a stupid thing, without meaning or purpose, yet as tenacious as life could be. How difficult it was to believe a parasite that looked like a badly molded golf ball could live in your blood and your lymph, cannibalizing the fragile helix strands of your RNA and DNA, making dissonant music with your nucleotides, turning your cells into its yes-men. A parasite so simple it made a structural marvel of the tapeworm, utterly useless, deathproof as long as its host could still draw breath and feel pain.

  Yet it was in Luke and Soren and Johnnie, possibly the only thing that had brought the three of them together, possibly the only thing that could have done so. It was probably in Tran too, despite his observance of safe sex that had bordered on the fetishistic. Luke had
worshiped and tormented that lithe body in every way Tran would allow … and then some.

  He had never ejaculated inside Tran, had been expressly forbidden to do so long before he’d tested positive. But once during a languid afternoon of summer rain and shared junk, they had nodded out together, then made a clumsy but tender attempt at fucking. When Tran dozed again, sprawled on his belly with his spine arched and his smooth rump in the air, Luke stayed awake. He’d rubbed his mouth across those velvety muscular globes, licked a wet stripe down the center, teased the sweet bud of the asshole until it opened to his tongue. Forbidden fruit … well, mostly.

  Loving Tran’s passivity, he had rolled on top and rubbed himself to orgasm in the spit-damp crack of Tran’s ass, then wallowed in the wet warmth of his own come for a long time before getting them both cleaned up.

  There had been any number of little moments like that. And Luke, of course, had sucked up Tran’s bodily fluids whenever and wherever he could get them: swallowed sperm, devoured the tender asshole, kissed the dark bead of blood from the skin of his inner elbow. They could have infected and reinfected one another dozens of times. Luke knew it; he knew Tran knew it. In the end there was no apology Luke could make for his disease.

  When The Wall had threatened, cajoled, and suffered its way to the last song, Luke went back on the air for a while, but he was getting tired. He read some clippings he’d saved from the paper, mostly pointless statistics. One out of every eight people in Uganda was HIV-positive. AIDS approached random accidents as the top killer of American men aged twenty-five to forty-four. Here was something he could get his teeth into: the Miami dentist with AIDS had deliberately murdered his patients by shooting them up with his infected blood, said his ex-lover on a TV tabloid show. He’d wanted to change the public perception that AIDS was a gay disease.