Exquisite Corpse

by Poppy Z. Brite

“I’ll try. It was nice meeting you, Arthur. See you around the Quarter?”

  “I hope so,” I told him.

  We crossed Jackson Square on our way to the grocery before we went home. A pearly gibbous moon rode high in the curdled purple sky. The cathedral’s spire soared upward, lacy as a New Orleans sepulchre, stabbing at veins of cloud. On the cobblestones below, the ragtag nighttime denizens of the square drank, sang, ranted, or simply slept.

  “We must have him,” I said with utter confidence, “and we shall have him.”

  Jay shook his head violently. “I already told you there’s no way we can. Tran’s a local kid.”

  “It is of no consequence. I want him. I want to eat him, Jay.”

  “Andrew …”

  “He is the ideal victim.”

  “He is not. He’s the worst possible victim.”

  “From a practical standpoint, perhaps. But in the practical details you lose sight of Destiny. That boy is meant for us, Jay, and we will have him.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  We traversed the urine-scented alley that ran along one side of the cathedral and emerged near the A&P on Royal Street. I held the door for Jay as we went in. He took a plastic basket from a stack of them and moved through the narrow aisles, selecting mustard, capers, a sort of hot sauce he hadn’t tried before. I followed silently, smiling to myself, biding my time. Jay was buying no real food, only condiments. I knew I would be able to make him see things my way.

  The checkout girl held up a jar full of a chunky, viscous reddish substance. “What is this stuff?”

  “Chutney,” Jay told her.

  “What you do with it?”

  His mouth quirked in a half-smile. “You serve it with meat.”

  How completely I loved him in that moment! The conscienceless depths of his eyes, the lank straggle of his blond hair on his pale neck, the carnage of secrets contained within the noble dome of his skull. I knew I was smarter than Jay; though he did not lack intelligence, his sphere of awareness was the narrowest I’d ever encountered. He was so keenly focused on his world of tortures and delicacies that he had trouble concentrating on anything outside that world. It made him seem a bit ephemeral, like a spirit stuck in the earthly plane, obsessively repeating one action over and over, trying to get it right. In my previous life I had always been able to support myself, keep body and soul together, if sometimes just barely. I could not imagine Jay working for a living. Yes, I was better versed in the ways of the daytime world. But in that moment I knew Jay was the supreme animal of the night.

  Outside the A&P, Jay stopped to buy a newspaper from a crippled vendor. The corner of St. Peter and Royal Streets seethed with varieties of French Quarter nightlife. A black a cappella group performed across the street, dark voices scatting in unison. A man in a filthy, tattered army jacket and a drool-slick gray beard berated the empty air in front of his face. A policeman pulled up on a little motor scooter, looking bored.

  Jay and I headed down Royal Street. We had gone less than a block when a thin dirty-nailed hand slid out of a patch of darkness at the mouth of an alley. “Spare some change, fellas?”

  We turned to look at the boy sitting hunched against the iron gate that separated the alley from the street. Ratty clumps of long ginger hair hung down over a face that might have once been strong-boned, but now looked hollowed, starved. His eyes were his most arresting feature, ice-blue irises rimmed with a thin circle of black. Though the night was damp and cool, the boy wore no jacket, and I saw that his inner forearms were scarred with a mixture of razor slashes and needle tracks, some half healed, some fresh enough to ooze.

  “Sure, I think I have some change.” Jay reached into his pocket, came out with a crisp fiver. The boy’s pupils dilated at the sight of it, but he did not reach for the money until Jay held it out to him. One grubby hand came up and scraped his hair away from his face as he tucked the bill into his shoe. He did not smile, but gave us a long, grave stare that communicated his thanks. Jay and I exchanged a look and came to a decision.

  “How would you like to make some more money?” Jay asked.

  “What’d you have in mind?”

  “We live just down the street. If you’d care to join us for the rest of the evening, you could have a shower, something to eat …”

  “How about the money?” He spoke quickly, rather glassily, and I sensed that this was the junk talking. I knew a thing or two about young street junkies; they would do almost anything for cash, but they always wanted to know how much they were going to get.

  “Well …” Jay pretended to think about it. “I could give you a hundred for the evening.”

  I saw a flicker of elation in the boy’s eyes, but he only said, “Fair enough. I’d like to see a friend first, though.”

  Jay’s brow creased in annoyance. “We don’t want to wait around while you cop. Look, I’ve got some morphine at our place from a back injury I had a few months ago. Will that do?”

  “Morphine?” The boy sat up straighter. “What kind of morphine?”

  Jay shrugged. “Half-grain tablets. I never used many of them. I think I may have ten or twelve left.”

  “Yeah, that’ll tide me over.” He scrambled to his feet, hoisting a dirty backpack on one shoulder. He was taller than I’d expected, but painfully thin, and I wondered whether there could be much meat on those stark bones.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “They call me Birdy.”

  “Who does?”

  “The sad fucks who have any reason to talk to me.”

  Not your standard tarty come-on; but I could tell that Jay appreciated the irony of the reply. I did, too.

  Back at the house, Jay punched in a series of numbers on the keypad of his security system, then unlocked the gate. Motion sensors automatically bathed the courtyard in soft light. Birdy stepped in hesitantly, as if he knew he was going to his death but didn’t care overmuch. His ginger hair hung halfway down his back, tangled and frayed. I thought how beautiful he might have been in some parallel universe. Then I reverted to my contemplation of his beauty in this one.

  Thirty minutes later, I lay on one side of the bed staring at Birdy’s unconscious face. Jay really did have morphine for an old back injury, which he said he’d gotten moving the big refrigerator into the slave quarters. We had watched the boy cook it up and shoot it into his vein with his own needle, our breath quickening in unison as the blood blossomed into the clear solution. As soon as those icy eyes fluttered shut, Jay stretched out Birdy’s arms and handcuffed his skinny wrists to the bedposts. The boy muttered a faint, incoherent protest. I unzipped his trousers and yanked them to his knees.

  Soon we had him naked, his legs secured by ankle straps lined with sheepskin, which struck me as obscurely comical. I kissed his nipples, his ribs, his concave stomach. When I began to suck his cock, it grew instantly hard and stayed that way, a quality I had always liked in my young junkies. He tasted sweaty and sharp, not clean but intensely human.

  “I love heroin users,” Jay whispered. “As long as they’re young enough and not too strung out, their flesh has a faint gingery taste.”

  “What about the risk?”

  “HIV? If it finds me, I accept it with my blessing. Maybe it’s already found me. If so, I welcome it.” Jay leaned over the boy’s prone body and kissed me, cupping his hand behind my neck, sliding his tongue deep into my mouth. I wondered at his attitude, but could not argue with it; after all, I had never felt better in my life.

  Birdy moaned. We glanced down at him. His eyelids fluttered; his tongue scraped over dry lips. When I gave him a tot from the flask of rum on the nighttable, he sucked gratefully at the bottle’s neck.

  “Jam it down his throat,” Jay suggested. “Then we can break it.”

  I ignored him, sliding my arm under the thin shoulders, cradling the meagre frame. I felt Jay’s lips brush the top of my head, a brief affectionate kiss; then his weight left the bed. Immersing myself in the odours
and textures of the boy’s body, which was now entirely out of his control and mine to handle as I wished, I barely noticed.

  Though it owed more to strong drugs than sexual desire, Birdy’s passive state made me nostalgic. I beg you to recall that the last two men I’d killed, junior doctor Waring and poor Sam, had been struggling, hurt and bleeding, fighting for their lives. (I refused to include Doctor Drummond in this count—he was not the sort of man I would have chosen to kill, and his death had been uninterestingly easy.) Now here was a scruffy, beautiful boy immobilized and waiting for my blade. It took me back, it did.

  All the way back to my first time. I’d been seventeen, shy and spotty, but had managed to talk my way into the fringes of a punk crowd brimming with testosterone and rebellion. Another boy and I broke into a derelict office building—I no longer remember what we pretended to be looking for. He said he would do anything I liked, and I ordered him to kneel before me. When he did, I knocked him semiconscious with a brick and heaved him across someone’s forgotten desk. I didn’t mind, a little later, when he vomited on the dusty desktop. A good bit of sperm and blood had already seeped out of him, and the fluids mingled warmly on the glass. I rubbed my hands through them, stroked them over my chest and down to the greasy juncture where my cock met his asshole. Though I had already more or less killed him, I didn’t consider the possibility that he could be artful enough to kill me too, months or years in the future, in the harsher light of another decade. It was 1977, Sid Vicious was still alive, and no one had a horror of bodily fluids. Vomit was one of the less precious bodily fluids, but after watching our wretched heroes slash their veins, blow mucus out of their nostrils, and void the contents of their stomachs onstage, we could scarcely upset ourselves over a harmless string of bile oozing from a lover’s mouth. After all, the musicians vomited onstage to show their contempt for us, their audience. And contempt was surely an expression of love.

  Now Jay was padding back across the bedroom, stroking the length of my spine, pressing something smooth and cold into my hand. I lifted my head from the boy’s chest. It was a hunting knife Jay had given me, a sleek bone-handled thing with a barbed blade fully eight inches long.

  “It was my great-great-uncle’s,” he said.

  “I love you, Jay.”

  “I can’t say that. If I loved you, I don’t think we’d both still be alive. But I know you, Andrew, and that’s something I’ve never said to anyone else.”

  “I know you too.”

  I felt him shiver. “Go ahead. Do it any way you like, but do it now. I want to see him die.”

  I placed the tip of the blade against the boy’s throat, right at the V of his collarbone. It was sharp enough to pierce the skin with very little pressure. A bead of blood welled up, very dark against the parchment-pale skin, then spilled over the ridge of the bone and streaked the left pectoral.

  I always have to laugh at writers who employ the phrase Something snapped inside him as a prelude to violence. The only time I ever felt anything snap inside me was the day I decided to leave prison, a sharp immediate relief like the snapping of an elastic that had constricted my heart for years. But when I saw that first drop of blood—always, when I saw the first drop of blood—something melted inside me. Like a wall of earth crumbling and dissolving in a hard rain, like a sheet of ice breaking apart and letting a river run free.

  The knife parted skin and muscle, skated over breastbone. When it reached the hollow of the ribs it sank deep into the body. There was no resistance, no indication of agony; Birdy lay motionless in his restraints and let me open him up like a Christmas parcel. As my hand brushed his erection aside, I felt the blade grate against his pubic bone. For a long moment his torso remained intact, bisected from throat to crotch by a narrow red ribbon. Then his wound blossomed open and his contents spilled forth, a cornucopia of rare fluids and stinking scarlet treasures …

  A sepulchre of disease.

  Time slowed to a crawl as we stared at the boy’s yawning body cavity. I could not make myself touch it. At last Jay put his hands in the wound and pulled the edges apart, giving us a better view of the soapy-looking nodes and curls of tissue sprouting from the boy’s organs, from his very meat. The things were everywhere, sinister as mushrooms, obscenely white against the glistening reds and pinks of his inner body.

  “What is it?” I asked at last. “Some sort of cancer?”

  “Something poisonous … from his drugs … or the air … or the water.” Jay stroked one of the pale nodes, then smelled his fingers, which were coated with thin blood and a greasy-looking substance. “We can’t eat this.”

  I took several deep breaths, trying to compose myself. I’d tapped into my murderous slipstream, worked myself up to killing intensity. Now I was afraid to touch the prize. I felt like a starving man led to an exquisitely set table, titillated with luscious smells from the kitchen, then informed (just as the first steaming delicacy is set before him) that the cook has laced the banquet with weed killer.

  Jay was kneeling above me, his hands and bare chest and pale hair streaked with blood. He looked delicious. I reached for him and pulled him down, and we grappled in the wetness of the spreading stain. He raked his nails across my buttocks, up over my back, etching my flesh with his own designs. The scratches blazed as if doused with acid. I heaved him over and rolled on top of him, pinned his arms, sank my teeth into his biceps. His skin tasted of sweat and boy’s blood. Twisting beneath me, he managed to grab a handful of my hair and yank it until the roots shrieked. Without quite realizing what I was about to do—I had subdued so many boys in just the same way—I gave him a quick, sharp clip on the jaw.

  Jay’s head reeled loosely on his neck. He fell back on the bed, eyes flickering up to whites. I saw blood on his lips, on his teeth, but couldn’t tell if it was his own or our guest’s. I pulled his eyelids up, made certain both his pupils were the same size, checked his pulse and breathing. I’d only stunned him. Quickly I removed the cuffs from Birdy’s wrists and fastened them on Jay’s. I didn’t bother with the ankle restraints. I wouldn’t mind if he thrashed a bit.

  I turned him over, stroked the golden down on the backs of his thighs. When I parted his buttocks and ran a finger down his crack, he made a low protesting sound. I hesitated, then leaned over to get the condom and tube of lubricant I knew I would find in the nightstand drawer. Within seconds I had the rubber on my erect cock, well greased. I gripped Jay’s hipbones and lifted him, probed his ass, slid into the tight heat of his lower intestine.

  The invasion shocked him into rigidity, which made his inner muscles ripple and constrict. He groaned into the pillow, a helpless, furious sound. I bit the back of his neck hard, a favourite gesture of mine ever since I had seen a lioness do it to her prey on a nature programme. At the same time I pressed the tip of my cock against his prostate and rocked gently. Despite himself, Jay began to melt around me.

  “It’s all right,” I said into his ear. “It’s me inside you, it’s Andrew. I’m the one who stayed on my own, remember? You need to have me inside you. This way you can keep me with you forever.”

  Jay mumbled something into the pillow.

  “What?”

  He raised his head and spoke distinctly. “Then take off the rubber.”

  I stopped fucking him. When he glanced over his shoulder, I saw tears on his face. “I mean it. If you’re going to rape me, do it right. Make every cell in my body belong to you.”

  Our eyes locked and something passed between us, something that changed this from an act of rape to an act of love, more intimate than killing the boy together had been. I pulled out, peeled off the condom, and applied more lubricant to my throbbing cock. Jay’s ass opened willingly to me as I slid back in, naked as the day I was born. We moved together as if we had done this a thousand times, came together as if the rhythms of our bodies were perfectly synchronized. As I shot pearlescent poison deep into Jay’s entrails, he bit my fingers nearly hard enough to draw blood.

 
“Hungry?” I asked. “Who decides who we eat next? Hmmm, Jay?”

  “You do,” he whispered into the palm of my hand.

  I cradled him, treasured him. He was still alive, and I respected him infinitely, for now he had acknowledged what we both knew to be the truth.

  Jay was indeed the splendid young animal of the night.

  But I had tamed him just enough to show who was the master.

  12

  “Here’s a nifty item from yesterday’s paper. Shandra McNeil of Gertrude, Loooz-i-anna, was convicted on three counts of attempted murder, which may be upgraded to first-degree murder if any of her victims dies before her. McNeil, who has AIDS, engaged in unprotected sex with several men she met at singles’ bars. Three who have since tested HIV-positive brought suit against her. McNeil pled guilty, and said she exposed at least ten men to the AIDS virus without warning them. Her reason: she desperately wanted a child before she died. Shandra McNeil is now five months pregnant.

  “Well, if it wasn’t for that fetus, I’d say pin a medal on her. She’s wiped out at least three breeder assholes, probably a lot more, and all because her biological clock didn’t stop ticking when the time bomb in her cells started. Shandra, you dumb bitch, thanks for your wonderful addition to the human race. The world really needs another digestive tract. Let’s just hope the poor kid catches HIV sliding down your diseased cunt, so your stupidity-riddled genes can die off as soon as possible.

  “Let’s move on to more reputable sources, shall we? Here’s one from the Weekly World News. The headline: AIDS KILLER RISES FROM DEAD! The story: ‘Gay serial killer Andrew Compton died of AIDS on November fourth … and on November fifth, he flew the coop! Bureaucrats at Painswick Prison in Birmingham, England, deny responsibility’ … hmmm, big surprise there … ‘since the homicidal homo disappeared from the morgue of a nearby hospital where he was being held for autopsy.

  “‘Compton was arrested in nineteen eighty-eight after a sex-and-torture spree that left twenty-three young men dead and dismembered. Shortly before his death, he tested HIV-positive. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS’ … thank you, Weekly World News … ‘is considered unlikely to survive in bodies dead over twenty-four hours. BUT IS ANDREW COMPTON REALLY DEAD? Scotland Yard is reportedly treating the case as a body-snatching, but offered no comment about who might want the AIDS-infected body of a vicious psychopath.’”