Exquisite Corpse

by Poppy Z. Brite

  He sought Tran’s mouth and sealed it with his own, evading the issue entirely. Jay liked to kiss deep and rough; the slick membranes of a boy’s mouth made him hungry. He sucked on Tran’s lips until they were raw, invaded Tran’s throat with his tongue. Tran wrapped skinny arms around him, scratched lightly at his back with sharp little nails. Their hips nudged and their legs intertwined. Jay’s cock was so hard he thought it might rupture. What a boy, what a fabulously exquisite creature had come to him willingly, willfully. This must be a gift from whatever dark gods he appeased with his obsessions, a perfect bonbon he could rip into as he pleased …

  Jay shied away from that line of thought. This boy was no gift. He was a drug dealer, for Christ’s sake, a well-known face in the Quarter, a New Orleans native with family here. Harming him would be sheer folly. Never mind the entrancing fragility of his bones. Never mind how the taut expanse of his belly felt beneath Jay’s hands, trembling with the secret movements of organs just below the surface.

  Tran raised his arms above his head and arched his back, thrusting his ribcage up at Jay. The expression on his face was part fear, part naked arousal. His eyes and his wet mouth glittered in the semidarkness. As far as Jay was concerned, the kid might as well have the words PLEASE RIP ME OPEN scrawled on his chest in Magic Marker.

  To distract himself from fantasies of viscera, Jay lowered his head and sucked one of Tran’s nipples. It was as hard and brown as a cinnamon candy under his tongue. Tran’s skin smelled of soap and some faint musk. Tran’s fingers wandered through Jay’s hair, urging his head lower. Jay avoided touching the underside of the ribcage or any part of the abdomen. Instead he grabbed Tran by the hipbones, nature’s perfect handles, and buried his face between Tran’s legs. At once he was lost in a world of fragrant sweat, soft black hair tickling his eyelids, silk-rippled flesh throbbing against his lips. He licked a wet swath from the base of Tran’s balls all the way to the head of his cock, then took the cock deep into his mouth.

  The sensation of engorged tissue sliding over his tongue and filling up his throat was nearly too much to bear. Jay clawed at Tran’s ass, at the scant meat of his thighs. Tran went very still; then a long shudder went through his body. “Jay—oh Jay I’m gonna come—don’t swallow—ah—”

  Tran tried to pull away. Jay seized those sharp hipbones again, forced his throat around the shaft of Tran’s cock, getting it as deep in his mouth as it would go. When his gag reflex challenged him, Jay took a deep breath and willed it away. He might never taste this boy’s blood or meat, but he would not be denied the salty savor of his sperm.

  Here it came, spilling over the back of his tongue, dripping warm and faintly caustic down his throat. Tran was making unbelievable sounds: gasps, sobs, little shrieks. Jay swallowed again and again. Tran’s come was thick, copious, and ever so slightly bitter. Jay imagined it brewing in the secret sacs and tubes of his testicles, rich with all the chemicals Tran had recently ingested, a heady concentrate. Spermatozoa, proteins, intoxicating extracts from the prostate and the Cowper’s gland …

  His erection was plaguing him again, shouting for attention. He moved up beside Tran, kissed his mouth and his eyelids, guided Tran’s hand to his cock. Tran’s fingers closed around it gratefully and moved up and down, gentle at first, then a little rough, squeezing, eager … then gentle again, painfully so. Whatever else this Luke character may have done to Tran, he had taught the kid to handle another man’s penis with care and skill.

  “You shouldn’t have swallowed my come,” Tran murmured. “I told you …”

  “I needed it.”

  Something in Jay’s tone shut Tran up. His hand kept rubbing, sliding, stroking. In another minute or two Jay would be on the verge of orgasm, and this worried him. Most of the boys who left his house unharmed were those he had only photographed. He had ended up in bed with a few, giving them what they wanted, sucking them off and letting them go. But no one ever survived once Jay had come.

  A bloody haze began to creep into the edges of his vision. Waves of pleasure foamed in his brain. A dark gobbet of tissue hung from his mouth, slapping his chin … no, that was last night, that was memory.

  “Fuck me,” Tran gasped. “I want you inside me.” He was up off the mattress, instinct leading him to the nightstand drawer and the box of lubricated condoms there (though not the gore-encrusted shrimp deveiner tucked away deep in the back). In a single practiced movement he tore one of the foil squares open, extracted the condom, and sheathed Jay’s hard-on in a thin layer of latex.

  Then Tran was on his back again, pulling his knees up to expose two heartbreaking half-moons of flesh with a molten pink eye at their center. The asshole hypnotized Jay, drew him in like a vortex. No one had ever voluntarily shown him their asshole before. The gesture impressed him as one of trust … of choosing to trust, like Tran’s decision to talk to him in the first place.

  But what had he told himself after Tran talked to him? Unpredictable. Dangerous. Off-limits. If he fucked this boy, he would surely kill him. And that would be so very bad for so many reasons.

  He found himself half on top of Tran, straddling the boy’s narrow hips, the head of his cock easing into the tight heat of Tran’s ass. “Put it in, put it in!” Tran begged, rocking under him. How easy it would be to plunge into that slick sleeve of muscle and membrane, to lose himself in that welcoming maze with no thought for the consequences. Maybe he could do it. Maybe Tran was the one boy who could survive his orgasm. Maybe it would be nice to share an afterglow with someone who still breathed.

  Jay felt his eyes blur with tears. He wanted Tran to stay alive, he wanted that so much. He never used to want his lovers dead. In the beginning he had only wanted them to stay with him, and it seemed no one ever would, not if given a choice in the matter. Somewhere along the way, control became a pleasure in itself. Then it became the main pleasure. He drugged boys and took pictures of their slack, helpless bodies and stared into their unknowing faces as he strangled them.

  Eventually strangulation wasn’t enough; he wanted them to react, and he began waking them before they died, hurting them a little, then hurting them a lot. He fell in love with the insides of their bodies, found that he preferred them to the outsides.

  But for all his desire to worship Tran’s insides, there was equal longing not to hurt him at all, to slide into him and move with him and make him feel good, to hold him afterwards and listen to his breathing, to bask in his warmth that would not leach away.

  “Jay! Fuck me!” Tran slid his hands down to Jay’s ass and tried to pull Jay forward, into him. Jay’s cock slid in a little deeper; Tran groaned, a hoarse, wildly erotic sound; and Jay understood without a doubt that if he penetrated Tran’s body in this way, he wouldn’t stop until Tran was split wide open.

  He made a conscious decision to stop, something he had never done before. It took every ounce of his will to make himself pull back, pull out. Luckily, his reserves of will were considerable. “I can’t possibly fuck you,” he told Tran. “You really ought to leave.”

  Tran’s face was a study in shock. His eyes glittered black with tears of frustration. “What do you mean you can’t fuck me?” he demanded.

  “I just can’t. I’m not in the mood anymore. Forget it.”

  He pulled the condom off his softening penis, deposited it in a sticky little heap on the nightstand, and lay waiting for something else to happen. If nothing did, he could easily lie here all night. A lovely numbness was beginning to steal over him. His bones felt soft, his tissues steeped in liquid opium.

  He thought of Tran’s legs drawn up, offering himself. He thought of Luke (a bulky faceless figure) on top of Tran as he had just been, but treating the poor kid right, screwing him deep and hard, giving him everything he wanted and maybe a little more.

  Neither image affected Jay at all.

  Something brushed his hand. Tran’s fingers, sweaty and timid, sliding into his grasp. “It’s OK,” Tran said. “Let me know if you change your min
d. Maybe if we get to know each other a little better …”

  Right, thought Jay. I’m sure you’d be thrilled if you really got to know me, saw how I spend my evenings, met some of my friends. But he only said, “Maybe so.”

  Tran sighed. “Look, I hate to ask …”

  “What?”

  “Can I still stay here? Just for tonight? I really don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll sleep on the couch if you want.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Jay realized he no longer felt any attraction to Tran, though he liked having the lithe, warm body in bed with him. He had turned off those feelings, and there was no danger now. Hurting Tran at this point was no more likely than ripping his pillow to shreds. The boy was only a comfort, a fleeting one that would be gone tomorrow.

  The drugs were completely flushed out of his system now, and Jay found that he was exhausted. He squeezed Tran’s hand once, a gesture as unfamiliar to him as friendship itself. Then he rolled over and fell at once into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  · · ·

  Tran lay staring at Jay’s smooth back, aching with horniness and disappointment. He could not fathom what had happened. He’d been reveling in Jay’s touch and taste, anticipating the delicious sensation of Jay’s cock filling his ass. They had come so close to losing themselves in each other. Then, this.

  He had been with no one since the breakup, nearly eight months now, and there had been moments when he wondered if Luke had ruined him for sex altogether. When Jay led him to the bedroom, Tran thought that notion was about to be laid to rest. Now he felt worse than ever.

  There was no way he was going to sleep anytime soon. He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, balanced shakily on his feet. Blood rushed to his head, making him dizzy and momentarily obscuring his vision. He felt his way to the bedroom door and down the hall.

  When he reached the kitchen, he realized he was ravenous. Surely Jay wouldn’t mind if he fixed himself a snack. The floor and countertops were spanking clean, as was the inside of the refrigerator. Tran found bread, mustard and mayonnaise, some kind of thinly sliced meat on a Saran-Wrapped plate. He made a sandwich and poured himself a glass of milk. His stomach growled at the rich scents, and he realized he had eaten nothing but a beignet since yesterday afternoon.

  He took his snack into the parlor and sat cross-legged in the center of the rug, scene of his freakout. The meat was rare and tender, like a special kind of beef his mother sometimes bought from the Vietnamese butcher. The milk was cold and fresh. He finished everything, carried his dishes back into the kitchen and rinsed them, set them in the rack to dry.

  He felt better now, but he was still ridiculously horny.

  He found himself in the bathroom without quite knowing how he had gotten there. The cabinet below the sink was open, the bucket of sex toys before him, singing its siren song. Tran watched his hands dip into the bleachy-smelling water, select a long, slender jelly-pink dildo that closely resembled Jay’s cock in size and shape, rinse the thing in warm tap water. He glanced at the door, then walked over and closed it.

  His prostate throbbed, demanding attention. Before he met Luke, Tran hadn’t even known where his prostate gland was. The idea of getting fucked in the ass seemed vaguely embarrassing until he tried it. Luke had taken his virginity gently, but not too gently. There was a spot about four inches up his ass that felt heavenly when Luke’s cock pressed against it, and from the first internal orgasm that traveled up his spine and spread in ever-expanding circles through his body, Tran was hooked.

  He couldn’t find any lubricant, so he climbed into the tub, soaped up the dildo, and eased it in. As he rode it, he played with his nipples, pinching and pulling, thinking of Jay’s mouth on them. But Jay had refused to play rough with him, almost as if he were afraid he might hurt Tran. Tran wouldn’t have minded being hurt a little. Luke had always left his nipples sore. Luke had fucked him so deep it made him scream, so deep he could feel Luke’s cock hitting the upper curve of his intestine.

  As he arched his back and came from the inside, Tran reflected that for someone he never wanted to see again, Luke certainly turned up in his thoughts a lot. It bothered him, but there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it.

  So he gave in to his fantasies, and as he lay clutching himself in the tub where another boy had met an agonizing death just hours ago, he imagined himself back in Luke’s arms, his cheek pressed against Luke’s chest, and all Luke’s perverse power flowing into him, making him feel safe, strong, loved.

  8

  Back at the motel, Luke scrolled a piece of paper into his typewriter, stared at it for a while, then centered the carriage and began to type. He worked at a tiny table barely large enough to hold a bottle, a glass, and the Smith-Corona electric; the ice bucket and the accumulating stack of pages had to go on the dresser behind him. He soaked up cheap whiskey as he worked, pouring himself a half-inch every hour or so, occasionally wetting his lips with its amber burn, chasing a vague buzz but never quite getting drunk. The pages came slowly. The constant ache somewhere deep in his core was kept at bay.

  This book was the story of his and Tran’s collapse in flames, of course, mutated and tortured until only the raw nerves of it were recognizable. Luke knew these wounds were too fresh to write about, but it wasn’t as if he could return to them in times of tranquility; he had no more hope of tranquility in this life. Too much of the story was told in second person accusatory, more paean than plot, more character assassination than character development. He was pretty sure it sucked, and he doubted he would ever finish it. Still the pages piled up on the dresser. He could not abandon this spiritual autopsy any more than he could shut up Lush Rimbaud.

  His radio persona had been conceived in the glory days of early junk use. Lush Rimbaud was a name he gave his heroin-induced self, a brain of utter clarity tethered to a body like an exquisite vessel brimming with pleasure, spiked with fury, a personality composed of liquids that could not mix.

  He was twenty-five then, and had just published his first novel, Faith in Poison. The book was a distillation of his adolescence in small-town Georgia, his abortive Baptist upbringing, his escape. For some reason, seeing his own name on the cover had compelled him to invent an alias. Rimbaud was for the mad boy poet who had scrawled scatological letters to Paul Verlaine in Paris cafés. Blood and shit were among his greatest passions. At nineteen he’d tormented Verlaine into shooting him, but escaped with a flesh wound, drank up every franc he ever made, later ran off to Africa, lost a leg, and died of a fever at thirty-seven. The title of Luke’s novel came from Rimbaud’s poem “Drunken Morning.” We have faith in poison. We will give our lives completely, every day …

  The book was universally revered or reviled. The praise was lavish and slightly shell-shocked, as if Lucas Ransom had begun by massaging the reader’s brain stem, then delivered a quick sharp blow to the back of the neck. The disparagement was similar, but with an aggrieved tone, as if the novel had deeply and personally offended the revilers. Luke was pleased by both reactions. He had no use for middle ground.

  It was 1986 in San Francisco and he was riding high on infamy, maintaining a medium-strength junk habit and supplementing it with every other drug that came through the Castro, doing the best work of his life and getting paid for it, feeling as if he’d found the elixir of perfect existence: notoriety, heroin, and as much sex as he could stand, which was a lot. His steady boyfriends tolerated one another with varying degrees of unease; sometimes he could charm two into bed at once. His side dishes were numerous and delectable. There was a recurring Oriental theme to the banquet.

  The young gay scene in mid-eighties San Francisco included bloodlines running back to every Asian country Luke had ever heard of, and then some. He sampled them all, a dim sum feast of sweet cocks and smooth asses and skinny bodies and beautiful fine-boned faces. At one point he’d started coloring in a mental map that reflected his sexual histor
y: China, Japan, Korea, India, Thailand, Laos, Bali …

  He was surprised by this specialization of his tastes, and could not explain it even to himself. He simply craved them, the perfect single folds of their eyelids, the slippery coarseness of their hair, the sandalwood taste of their skin, their skinny ivory bones. Eventually he became known for it, and they would approach him. To some of them, Luke’s dissipated-frat-boy good looks were as exotic as their ebony hair and golden skin were to him. Back then he was too young and too desirable to be called a rice queen.

  Lush Rimbaud was embryonic then, just a sybarite seed in the fertile ground of Luke’s ego. It had only been a name he used sometimes. It hadn’t started developing like some malignant alternate personality until after he tested positive. Lush Rimbaud had been fathered by junk. Seven years later, the HIV virus gave birth to him.

  He left San Francisco right after his short story collection Rack of Enchantments (titled from the same Rimbaud poem) was published. The backbiting had begun in earnest, and he was sick of other hot young gay writers who didn’t think there was room for one more. He was also sick of bitchy queens who cut him dead because he wouldn’t fuck them, sick of empty-headed muscle fags who thought he was one of them because he liked working out, even sick of pretty Asian boys who fucked him just because they knew they could.

  About the only people he wasn’t sick of were other junkies. He spent three and a half years bumming around the country, feeling terribly beat with his motorcycle jacket and his battered boots, his typewriter and his low-grade habit. He found junk in every city he visited, usually within a day or so. Heroin made immediate acquaintances but few friends. This was fine with Luke; he had always preferred to have few friends. He finished another novel, Liquid Altar, and made notes on a related work called Raw Shrine.

  One of the things that had soured him on San Francisco was the death pall that seemed to hang over the city. It was the queerest town in America, and by the late eighties it felt like a plague zone. AIDS had eaten huge holes in the older gay population, levying an outrageous surcharge for the revels of the preceding decade. He saw healthy, HIV-negative men in their forties and fifties committing suicide simply because they were so demoralized. They had been the first generation to come out publicly, the first ones to give a big fuck-you to a cold heterocentric world, the first ones to discover and define themselves through sex. Luke could understand their bitterness. They’d tried to celebrate their nascent freedom by throwing themselves a festival of promiscuity, but an uninvited guest had shown up in the guise of a lover and mowed the party down.