Exquisite Corpse

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Luke paused for a beat, then delivered the punch line he’d planned around this story. “Well, hell, who WOULDN’T?”

  He caught Soren’s eye over the control panel. Soren closed his eyes and slowly shook his head, denoting silent suffering. OK, so the tabloid story had been in bad taste. WHIV needed a little comic relief every now and then.

  “I think it’s about time to take a call,” he said. Soren nodded, picked up a cellular phone and listened, then handed it to Luke, who placed it in a cradle on the console and punched the speaker button.

  “You’re on WHIV. Talk to me.”

  A girl’s voice, smug and self-righteous. “I just wanted to say I think you’re a very sick person.”

  “No shit, honey. I’m on ten kinds of medicine, all of which are toxic, none of which I can pay for. I’ve got sores around my asshole from weeks of chronic diarrhea and cheap toilet paper. My throat feels like it’s fall of ground glass and I get big black spots in front of my eyes when I stand up. Thanks for the diagnosis.”

  “That’s not what I mean and you know it. AIDS is a poison you create in your own blood. You say you hate breeders, but the ability to nurture life is a sacred gift from the Goddess. Whether you know it or not, you suckle at Her breast.”

  “Well, Her rancid milk hasn’t done a thing for my T-cell count. You fucking Wiccans love a secret, and I’ll blow it right now: your entire reason for existing is obsolete. You worship an outdated biological imperative. Have a shitty day.”

  Click. Dial tone.

  “Martyr, you’re into that moon-hugging stuff. Do you worship a Goddess? Don’t tell me if you do. I hate those bitches, all but Kali—at least when she breeds, she eats her young.”

  Soren had rigged the chip of his cellular phone so that it generated a new ID number each time it was used, and couldn’t be traced. As a result, they had a different phone number every broadcast. Reception was often very poor out here in the swamp, but Johnnie kept them close enough to New Orleans to pick up calls. Today they were tied up at one of the many deserted docks they used, which helped a little.

  Luke switched over to music mode and played Robyn Hitchcock’s love ballad “Queen Elvis” from the acoustic album Eye. Looking at the jewelbox, he recalled the lament for a lost lover in one of the other songs. Even talking is out of reach … It captured the white-hot agony of an affair ended in anger, the silent void left by the absence of the person with whom you’d had the most intensely emotional conversations of your life.

  He flipped through his newspaper clippings, stared at the grainy photo the Weekly World News had run with its story. Compton was a handsome devil with a shock of dark hair and a slanted half-smile. Luke tried to imagine killing twenty-three boys, found it disturbingly easy. He wondered just how far removed he was from a predator like Compton. Luke thought a lot of people deserved to die, but those were people he hated, either individually or collectively. Andrew Compton had probably felt some kind of love for his twenty-three boys, yet he had murdered every one of them. It was a real pisser.

  Just as the song ended, another call came in. Great, Luke caught himself thinking, somebody else to abuse. An older man by the sound of his voice, faintly hoarse but crisp around the edges. “Mr. Rimbaud, I presume.”

  “None other.”

  “Good afternoon to you and your crew.”

  “Not particularly, but thanks anyway. Wanna talk about something, or is this a social call?”

  “Sorry, don’t mean to waste your airtime. The little amenities help keep me sane. I’m a fifty-year-old gay man calling from Metairie. I’ve been with my lover for fifteen years. We have two sons and a daughter.”

  “Neat trick. How’d you manage it?”

  “Straight friends chose us as godparents to their children, and asked us to be legal guardians in the event of their death. They died in a boating accident when the kids were young. There was no family to contest our guardianship, so we got them. Mr. Rimbaud, we went through every kind of hell to raise those children as our own. Their schools sent social workers to spy on us every term, first grade through senior year. Their friends’ parents forbade their children to visit our home. Other kids harassed them so often we had to start them all in karate lessons before they reached their teens.

  “We raised three heterosexual kids who understand what it’s like to be gay, who’ll call the straight world on its homophobia wherever they see it. They’re damn good martial artists too, by the way. When I listen to your show, I hear you saying those kids shouldn’t exist because they are the product of ‘breeders.’ By those standards, you and I shouldn’t exist either. Your standards are illogical, impossible—yet you express them so fervently, and often so eloquently.

  “If you don’t think children are our hope, what do you suggest? How would Lush Rimbaud redesign the world?”

  Luke took a deep breath, leaned into the microphone, and waited for Lush to start talking. It took him the better part of a minute to realize that Lush had no answer.

  “Mr. Rimbaud? Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” he said in his own voice. “What’s your name?”

  “Alex.”

  “Are you HIV-positive, Alex?”

  “Thankfully, no.”

  “But I bet you did some stuff in your flaming youth that made you wonder. Some stuff that kept you on edge until you got those first test results.”

  “Of course. Didn’t we all?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, we did. And some of us who flunked the test haven’t learned to take life one day at a time or think of AIDS as our spiritual teacher or any of that other happy crapola. Some of us look in the mirror and all we see is a senseless fucking virus that’s going to kill us without mercy or dignity. We become sexual pariahs, and we live on stolen time. Every moment we stay alive is a moment we cheat the death a billion right-wing fundamentalists think we deserve. The world shrinks away from us in hatred, terror, and disgust, as well it might—we’re plague victims, and we’re contagious.

  “I don’t know, Alex, it just … gets me down sometimes. You ask me how I’d redesign the world. Easy: I’d stick around for another half-century or so. That’s all I want.

  “My beautiful, stupid ex-boyfriend, with his black frocks and tattered notebooks, he thought death was some kind of romantic figure. He’d burn incense and listen to his Bauhaus CDs and press his frail hand to his wan forehead. Très gothique, no? He even shot up heroin with me, because he wanted to TRY IT ALL, TO PUSH THE LIMITS OF EXISTENCE—but mainly he liked it because it gave him a three-hour hard-on.

  “Somehow though, after he found out his lover was HIV-positive, death didn’t seem quite so … pretty anymore. His love of death was a sham, because he was twenty years old and he knew in his secret heart that he was never gonna die. Death was for old movie stars, for crack dealers in the ’hood—not for his cute little ass.

  “And you know what? By the same token, my insistence on living is a sham. I know I’m going to kick it within the next couple of years. All those guys who were never gonna die from AIDS—Michael Callen, David Feinberg, Lake Sphinx—they’re all gone. I will be, too. Why not kill myself now and save taxpayers the few grand I would’ve cost them in medicine, instead of sticking around and bitching about the millions of dollars sucked up by breeders?”

  Luke had almost forgotten the caller was there until his crisp voice interrupted. “Because you have something to say, obviously.”

  “Do I, Alex? Do I really? ’Cause I don’t know anymore. I don’t want to finish the book I’m working on because it’s not good enough to be my last one. The most desirable thing I can imagine is to wake up with my boyfriend one more time, and that’s not gonna happen, because I’ll probably never see him again. Sometimes I get on the radio and my mind goes blank. I can just hear it in a few more months: ‘WHIV, your station for AIDS dementia blackouts! Twenty-five minutes of silence every hour, guaran-TEED!’

  “But I’m Lush Rimbaud, and I refuse to shut up or die. And I wa
ste what little breath I have left talking trash about people like you who’ve made an actual difference in the world. I know I never have and never will. Hell, people probably hate queers more because of me. Go ahead, man. Make more humans. Somebody’s gonna do it, and most of them are going to raise assholes, idiots, and psychos. If you can do otherwise, you’ve done better than me.

  “Fuck it. Fuck it all. I’m signing off.”

  He disconnected the caller, removed his earphones, and killed the mike. Soren was staring at him, aghast. Luke couldn’t care. He felt as if he had spent the past several years harboring two distinct personalities that had just abruptly merged. The resulting effect on his brain reminded him vaguely of being ass-fucked with insufficient lubricant. He put his hands over his face and closed his eyes.

  “Luke?” Soren’s voice was soft, cautious. “What’s up?”

  “I don’t know.” It came out as a croak, dry-throated and guttural. “I can’t do this anymore. That guy was right. I don’t want to redesign the world, I just want to take it down with me.”

  “That guy never said—”

  “I’m the one saying it.” Luke pushed away from the console and stood. His head spun and his knees began to buckle. Soren was there, catching him, sliding wiry arms around his chest and hugging him tight.

  “What are you saying? You really don’t want to do WHIV anymore?”

  “I can’t.” Luke let his head sag against Soren’s chest. Soren lowered him back to the chair, but didn’t let go of him. “I’m just so fucking tired … and I know I’ll never finish my book … and all I really want is to be with Tran.”

  “You know you can’t.”

  “But if I die without trying again, I’m a coward. I don’t mind having regrets about stuff I’ve done. It’s the regrets about stuff I haven’t done that bother me.”

  “I understand. But you’ve been trying to get back together with Tran, and it hasn’t happened. You have important work to do, Luke. Or would you rather spend the rest of your life chasing a dream?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’re quitting the station?”

  “Soren …” Luke could see defeat in the set of the younger man’s shoulders. WHIV was easily the most important thing in Soren’s life. “That support group you go to. Do they ever talk about the role emotion plays in sickness?”

  “Of course.”

  “In the past six months I’ve gotten angrier and I’ve gotten sicker. Now I feel like there’s nothing left inside me but broken glass and rusty nails. I don’t want to spread that shit around anymore. There’s one thing I know will make me happy if I can get it, and I mean to try. Or would you rather watch me drown in my own vitriol, just because it sounds so damn good on your pirate radio station?”

  “I thought you were as committed to WHIV as I am. I thought you fed off the anger in a way I couldn’t understand. You are responsible for your own emotions, Lucas.”

  A part of him knew this to be true. Another part wanted to rage against it, to claim that those emotions had been forced on him by chemistry and circumstance, but this went directly against the insistence on free will that helped him maintain a margin of hope. He wondered when he had become such a miserable, self-pitying wretch.

  “You’re right about everything,” he told Soren. “And I’m sorry to walk out on you. But this is what I have to do.”

  Soren nodded and started putting some of his equipment in a cardboard box. Luke couldn’t tell how angry he was. Maybe hearing an admission of wrongness and an apology from the lips of Lucas Ransom had stunned him into temporary acquiescence.

  Johnnie Boudreaux had been listening to their conversation from the deck. Now he eased his tall body into the cabin and pulled up a crate next to Luke’s lawn chair. Slowly he rolled a joint of some sticky green pot one of his few remaining friends in the swamp had grown. When he fired it up, Luke noticed a fresh KS lesion near the corner of his mouth, dark like a bruise in the match’s flickering shadow.

  Johnnie exhaled blue smoke, then asked, “Y’all really mean to shut it down?”

  “I don’t want to,” Soren said. “But we can’t do it without Luke. Nobody could replace him.”

  “Somebody could replace me, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hate to tell you now, but I plan on checkin’ out myself. Not just quittin’ the boat, I mean, but …” He made a gun of thumb and forefinger, gestured at the side of his skull.

  “Why now?” Luke asked.

  “Well …” Johnnie’s hands twisted together in his lap, white and strong, with a thin but permanent black line of engine grease under each nail. “My brother died two days ago.”

  “Brother … ?” Soren glanced at Luke, who was equally mystified. “We didn’t know you …”

  “Had a brother, yeah. Etienne was a lot older than me. Lived at home when I did, but he made a lot of trips into New Orleans.” Johnnie chuckled thinly. “To the French Quarter.”

  “Was he gay?” Soren asked.

  “Why’d you think our parents kicked us both out at the same time?”

  Soren sucked in his breath, and Luke said, “He gave you AIDS?”

  “He was the only person I’d ever been with.”

  “He molested you?” Soren again.

  Johnnie shrugged. “Do you call it molestin’ if I always liked it? Anyway, he’s dead now. Came down with the pneumonia again and there was nothin’ we could do.”

  Luke thought of something. “Who took care of him while you were on the boat?”

  “Our sister. She’s twenty-two. She’d leave her kids with her husband and come over to our place. Tell him she was goin’ to see our folks. You can bet if our folks ever happened to stop by while she was out, she’d get her ass kicked good, prob’ly by Jo-Jo and our daddy.”

  “Jo-Jo?”

  “Her lovin’ husband. The one who threatened to break my arms and Etienne’s legs if we ever came near their house again.”

  Luke imagined the life of this woman, twenty-two years old with children in the plural and a husband who must be every bit as stupid as his name, watching her brothers die of a strange and sickening disease she’d probably only heard horror stories about, unable to tell anyone. Maybe there were some hells worse than his.

  “I told her I was goin’ to break the news to you guys, then do it out here in the swamp, so she wouldn’t have another body to mess with.” Johnnie grimaced. “We buried Etienne ourselves. It was pretty awful.

  “So I figured if you wanted to keep the station runnin’, you could leave the boat tied up here. Y’all know how to row the pirogue and how to get back to your car from here. This dock is as close to safe as you can get. Or you could learn to drive the boat—it’s easy.”

  Soren shook his head. “I’m shutting down. I can take my equipment out in two pirogue trips. WHIV is dead.”

  “Do you want us to go?” Luke asked Johnnie.

  The look he gave them was almost shy. “Would you stay with me? I know it’s a hell of a thing to ask. But I’m scared I’ll do it wrong. I don’t want to lie here hurtin’ … and … well… I saw Etienne die. I want somebody to see me.”

  Luke and Soren looked at each other, then agreed, trying not to show their reluctance. It wasn’t a thing you ever wanted to do for a friend. But when asked, you pretty much had to.

  Johnnie exchanged a fierce hug with each of them. Then he took the pearl-handled revolver from his coat pocket and walked out onto the deck. Luke and Soren followed.

  “Johnnie?” said Soren. “What should we … do with you?”

  “Roll me over the side and say a prayer for my soul.”

  “But …” Soren’s hands sketched frustration in the air; what about the smell, what happens when your bloated corpse floats to the surface next week; all the dreadful questions he couldn’t ask.

  “You worried about body disposal, Soren?” Johnnie threw back his head and laughed, the first time Luke had ever seen him do so. “City boy, don’
t you know they got big-ass gators in this swamp?”

  Soren looked sick.

  “I hope I give the fuckers AIDS. Damn gator killed my dog once.” Johnnie looked forlorn for a moment; then a shadow seemed to pass from his face. “Bye, Luke. Bye, Soren.”

  He lowered himself to the deck, tipped his head backward over the edge of the barge, and took the gun barrel deep into his mouth. Luke had barely registered the muffled pop when blood exploded from the top of Johnnie’s head, cascaded out of his mouth and nostrils, painting the wasted flesh of his throat, fountaining into the water.

  Luke and Soren had gripped each other’s hands without thinking. Now their fingers were knotted together painfully. Luke extricated himself and knelt by Johnnie. The dead boy’s eyes were half-open, unblinking, unlit. His features were slack, his mouth relaxed around the gun’s barrel as if around a lover’s softening cock. Johnnie had asked them to say a prayer, but Luke had none at his disposal. He planted the sole of his boot against Johnnie’s hip and rolled him over the side of the barge. Johnnie’s body made a small splash from which grew a pattern of concentric ripples. His blood traced bright threads through the oily dark water.

  Soren turned away. “Can we go now?”

  “Wait.” Luke shaded his eyes, looked toward the far bank of the bayou. Was that a prehistoric shape detaching itself from the clumps of water weed and cypress root that grew in the shady boundary between morass and land? Was that a pair of gold reptilian bubble-eyes gliding across the still water toward the boat?

  “Luke. We don’t want to see this.”

  “I do.”

  A pair of long snaggle-toothed jaws yawned open like hinged boards studded with hundreds of nails of varying lengths, driven in at random deadly angles, smacked into Johnnie and clapped together with a sound like a rifle report. Luke heard bones crunching. Johnnie’s body was pulled under so quickly that it left a little swirl of blood on the slick surface. The gator made a sinuous trail in the water as it swam for its lair. Luke had heard they would keep a corpse in the root caverns under the bank for days, letting the meat soften and grow rank in the stagnant mud.