Exquisite Corpse

by Poppy Z. Brite

  “Let’s go,” he said. But Soren was already in the deckhouse dismantling his equipment, refusing to look at the water, or at Luke’s eyes when he came in.

  Soren had misjudged the weight of the gear; three trips in the pirogue were required to get it all back to the dock where his car was stashed. Luke had caught a ride with Soren, and he was glad of it. He didn’t feel well enough to drive the thirty miles back to New Orleans.

  By the third trip in the overloaded little boat, the shock of Johnnie’s death had dissipated somewhat. They were hot and sweaty, beginning to get on each other’s nerves. Soren kept making bitchy little comments designed to hide his sorrow at tearing down the station. Luke, calmer than he’d been in weeks, tried to ignore these barbs. But as they climbed into the car, dirty and exhausted, Soren asked, “What are you going to do when Tran won’t take you back?”

  Luke felt his temper resurfacing, a distant flare. “You don’t know whether he will or not.”

  “He hasn’t before. He certainly isn’t going to now.”

  Something about the stress on that last word made Luke suspicious. “What do you mean, now?”

  “Well … what if he’s seeing someone else?”

  Soren inserted the key in the ignition. Luke grabbed his hand, prevented him from starting the engine. “You know something.”

  “Don’t be silly. How would I? Tran and I hardly know each other.”

  “First you tantalize me, then you overexplain yourself. Cut the bullshit. You’ve seen Tran. You know something. Tell me.”

  “Luke, let go of me.”

  He gripped Soren’s wrist harder, enjoying the sensation of small bones shifting in his grasp.

  “You bastard, you’re hurting me. Tran was right.”

  “Yeah? Right about what?”

  “You’re a crazy fucking sadist.”

  “Probably. When did Tran bestow this pearl of wisdom upon you?”

  “Last week. The same day he told me about his new boyfriend.”

  “Who?”

  Soren was silent. Luke tightened his grip again, then twisted.

  “Oh Christ—Luke, that hurts—”

  “Give me a name.”

  “Jay Byrne.”

  Luke let go of Soren’s wrist. Soren hauled off and socked him in the shoulder. Protected by his leather jacket, Luke barely noticed. He was trying to place the name, which seemed familiar in a vaguely unpleasant way.

  “Jay Byrne? Who the hell is that? Isn’t he some kind of French Quarter chicken hawk?”

  Soren nodded. “I think he’s a creep. Tran seems to like him well enough.”

  “What else do you know?”

  Nothing loosened the lips of a nelly fag like a little well-timed violence. Soren spilled the whole story, from finding Tran asleep in Jackson Square to dropping him off at the Hummingbird Hotel. If he wasn’t still registered there, Soren guessed, Tran would be at Jay’s house. No, he didn’t know Jay’s address, but he did know that it was an extremely well-secured private residence on lower Royal Street, and he had had occasion to observe that the finials of the wrought-iron gate were shaped in the likeness of pineapples.

  “OK.” Luke tried to make himself calm again. “Thanks for the information.”

  “Oh, you’re so welcome. I mean, it’s not as if you intimidated me into talking about it or anything.”

  “I’m sorry if I hurt you. But you know you’d been wanting to tell me.”

  “Am I that obvious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why can’t you tell …”

  “What?”

  “Will you do something for me? Since I gave you the information?”

  “What do you want?”

  Soren’s voice was almost a whisper. “Come home with me.”

  Luke couldn’t believe it. He’d had no idea Soren was attracted to him. He’d had no idea anyone would be attracted to him in his present state: he felt wasted, caved in, so ugly.

  “I know I’m not your type,” Soren went on when Luke didn’t answer. “I mean … my hair is naturally brown, but I’ve bleached it for so long, you may as well call me an Aryan. Hell, I don’t even own a wok.”

  Luke couldn’t help cracking a smile. Soren returned it tentatively, then reached over and took Luke’s hand. Luke saw that Soren’s wrist was circled with the deep red marks his fingers had made. He touched them gently, brought Soren’s hand to his lips, kissed the knuckles, the ball of the thumb, the fingertips.

  “Let’s get going,” he said.

  Soren’s hand shook as he turned the key. Luke supposed it had been quite a day for the poor kid. Quite a day for everyone, come to think of it.

  They didn’t talk much on the way back to New Orleans, but it was a comfortable ride, the sunset bathing them in warm light as they drove through the swamp. Luke dozed and awoke with a hard-on, thinking of Tran, then remembering it was Soren beside him. He sat up and looked out the window. They were just pulling up to Soren’s house in Bywater, a tatty bohemian neighborhood between the Faubourg Marigny and the Industrial Canal.

  Soren started making out with him as soon as they were inside. “It’s been so long since anyone touched me at all,” he explained breathlessly, “and I keep having these fantasies about you, and I never thought you’d be interested, and oh God Luke you turn me on …”

  It was amazing how these things worked out sometimes. But even as he marveled at the sad irony of it all, Luke found his tongue exploring Soren’s mouth and his hands straying to Soren’s ass.

  The bedroom was a soothing expanse of white and ecru in various textures. They fell onto an enormous feather bed and made love for three hours: curious at first, then tender, then passionate. Luke had thought he would be too distracted by his knowledge of Tran and Jay to enjoy himself. He was happy to be proved wrong. Soren was a master of calculated passivity, presenting himself for ravishment in a hundred pretty ways, emitting his pleasure in obscenely elegant phrases and long throaty cries. It was great fun, and at Soren’s insistence it was all done safely, since no one knew the effects of repeated infection.

  Eventually Soren’s breathing deepened and his body relaxed into sleep. Luke eased out of bed and walked silently to the living room, where a cordless phone was placed in the center of an immaculate coffee table. He dialed information, scrawled a number on the back of his hand, dialed again. A surly male voice answered. Some sort of party or drunken brawl raged in the background. No one named Tran was registered at the Hummingbird Hotel.

  He wasn’t surprised that Iran’s parents had kicked out their firstborn. It seemed the natural result of freeloading off them and lying to them for more than three years. Like other Oriental sons Luke had known, Tran tried to have it both ways, keeping up a facade of propriety for the folks while living an exaggeratedly queer and raunchy life of his own. This wasn’t the first time Luke had seen such a situation blow up in someone’s face, or even the first time he’d helped cause it.

  Either Tran was registered under a false name, or he was with his new boyfriend. Once the second possibility had taken root in his mind, Luke gave no further consideration to the first.

  He got dressed and let himself out of Soren’s house. It was after ten now, not such a great time to be walking around By water alone. But Luke had his leather jacket and a razor in his boot and a hollow, burning stare. No one bothered him. And it was only a couple of miles to the French Quarter, where Jay and Tran unwittingly awaited his arrival.

  13

  AS soon as Andrew let him up from the bed, Jay started packing Birdy’s body for disposal far away. He didn’t want the diseased thing in the house or the slave quarters. It was an omen of the worst kind, an urgent telegram from the universe, a warning that things were not as he had believed; perhaps things were not even as he could imagine. Luckily, in case he had any trouble reading the entrails of the universe, Andrew was right there to help him along.

  Birdy appeared to have died of shock or exsanguination. His face was wh
ite, slack, drained of what little animation life had given it. Jay lifted the corpse off the bed onto some garbage bags, wrapped it, secured the package with long strips of silver duct tape. When he had finished, Birdy was tightly doubled up in several layers of heavy black plastic, an awkward lump that seemed too small to be a boy. Jay wrestled it into an army-surplus duffel bag he’d picked up in a Decatur Street junk shop and saved for just such a purpose. The bag was large enough to hold two of Birdy.

  Andrew was lounging in the blood-drenched bedclothes, watching indulgently. “Do you want to go for a ride in the swamp?” Jay asked him.

  “I didn’t know you had a car.”

  “Well, I don’t. I mean, I hardly ever drive. But there’s one at my disposal when I need it.”

  “Nice, this wealthy life.”

  Jay shrugged. “It leaves me free to pursue my interests, that’s all.”

  “I should say it does!”

  Jay collected the car from a nearby garage, swung back down Royal Street to pick up Andrew and Birdy, then headed west on 61, the Airline Highway. Seedy thrift stores and motels gave way to used car lots, abandoned shacks, the encroaching darkness of the swamp. Highway 61 traversed a narrow strip of mud between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. The land out here was soft, wet, overgrown, sparsely inhabited. They passed through the whole of St. Charles Parish and into St. John the Baptist, a rural parish seeded with poisonous pockets of industry. The night was illuminated only by the occasional faraway flame of an oil refinery.

  Forty miles outside New Orleans, Jay exited the highway, drove north on a state blacktop, then turned onto a gravel road and bumped along until he came to a locked gate in a chain-link fence that stretched away into scrubby woods. Bolted to the steel mesh, a panic-orange sign read PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING.

  Jay got out of the car and unlocked the gate. He drove through, then got out again and locked it behind them. The gravel road led into more woods, beyond which loomed a featureless building of corrugated metal.

  “A secret spot for that weekend getaway?” Andrew asked.

  “Yes, of sorts.”

  They lifted their unwieldy parcel from the trunk and carried it to the building. Jay had the key to an unmarked door. Stepping inside, he touched a switch on the wall. There came the brief hum of a generator, and fluorescent track lights in the ceiling flickered on.

  The building was full of poison pyramids, towering stacks of steel and plastic drums sloshing with the chemical leftovers of a decade or more. For years the foremen of Byrne Metals and Chemicals had paid various teams of “waste disposal experts” to haul the drums away, shunting them off to the lowest bidder and breathing a prayer of relief as the trucks disappeared down the winding swamp road. No one had any idea what became of the drums after that, and no one was required to know.

  But those were the good old days, and long gone. Now it was not even worthwhile to pay the “waste disposal experts,” but more expedient to let the drums stack up in forgotten warehouses like these. When a warehouse was full, there was always the swamp.

  Jay had explained all this to Andrew on the drive out, and now Andrew was silent, perhaps lulled by the toxic miasma that surrounded the place. Jay upended the bag and let the parcel slide out, then pulled a box cutter from his pocket and slit the black plastic. Retrieving a screwdriver, a prying tool, and a pair of elbow-length industrial gloves from a nearby shelf, he levered the lid off a blue fifty-gallon barrel. A noxious smell filled the air, part chemical, part rot. Donning a second pair of gloves, Andrew helped him lower Birdy’s naked corpse into the barrel ass first, so that it ended up in a tight fetal position.

  “What’s this we’re putting him in?”

  “Hydrochloric acid.”

  “Eats right through the bones, does it?”

  “It has before.”

  They hammered the lid back on, gathered their traces, and left this remote archive of poison as orderly and silent as they had found it. On the way back to New Orleans, Jay stopped to toss the bloody garbage bags into a Dumpster behind a Popeye’s fried chicken outlet. They returned to the French Quarter as if to a womb, crawled into a freshly made bed just before dawn, and slumbered for most of the day.

  Jay got up once, around noon. He put in a call to the Hummingbird Hotel, asked for “Frank Booth,” and was connected with a very sleepy-sounding Tran.

  “Did you meet a mysterious stranger?”

  “Who is this … wait a minute … Jay?”

  “How many other men have your number?”

  Tran laughed. “You must be kidding. Nobody even talked to me last night. I think they smell my desperation.”

  “I feel partly responsible for your desperation.”

  Tran was silent; a passive indictment.

  Jay thought of Andrew, asleep down the hall, dreaming, hungering. He closed his eyes and took the plunge from which there was no turning back. “I’m sorry about all that. It’s been a long time since I had such an intense experience with anyone.” (And let them live, his mind amended.) “My cousin enjoyed meeting you, and I’d like to see you again. Why don’t you join us for dinner tonight?”

  “Well …” Jay could picture him all rumpled and morning-eyed, trying to sort out this unexpected situation. “I … I’d love to.”

  “Good. Around eight?”

  “Uh … sure.”

  “See you then.”

  Jay hung up, feeling a strange mix of terror and elation. His world was careening out of control, but instead of panicking as he would have done a short while ago, he found himself fascinated by its destructive path.

  He slid back into the warm bed, molded his body to Andrew’s, and slept again. In a few hours he would have to conjure up something for dinner, something simple but exquisite, some toothsome delicacy.

  Something suitable for a beautiful boy’s last meal.

  · · ·

  Upon awakening, Jay made a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table sipping it, paging blearily through the Times-Picayune he’d bought at the grocery last night. In the pre-Thanksgiving food section he read a detailed description of an edible creature newly invented: a gastronomic miscegenation composed of a turkey, chicken, and duck, deboned and nested from smallest to largest, each filled with a different savory stuffing.

  This appealed greatly to Jay, and he phoned the delicatessen where they were made. Above protests that the shop did not normally deliver, and in any case could not do so by this evening, Jay named a discreet sum. Dinner, he was told after a hurried consultation at the other end, would arrive at his gate by seven; he need only reheat the thing for an hour.

  He woke Andrew with a mug of steaming sweet black coffee and sat on the edge of the bed watching him drink it. There was something severe about Andrew’s face despite the tousled spikiness of his dark hair, the clear hypnotic blue of his eyes, the handsome regularity of his features. Perhaps it was a shade of nose length or a wry twist of mouth, the things that made his face seem essentially English. Perhaps it was cruelty.

  Andrew blessed him with a dark smile. Jay wondered what would be different between them when this night was over.

  Jay had to remind me twice that my name was supposed to be Arthur, though it hardly seemed to matter now. By the time Tran rang at the gate, we were already pleasantly sloshed on cognac. This may have been our first mistake. In the interest of retaining some modicum of our faculties, we should have stayed sober until after dinner. But we were feeling an odd elation, perhaps at the sheer finality of what we were about to do. And we both knew we wouldn’t be hungry at dinner.

  Tran arrived promptly at eight carrying a bottle of chilled champagne. I wondered where the flowers and chocolates were, but said nothing. Tran and Jay had their odd little courtship, and it wasn’t my place to meddle. On the contrary, I found it rather sweet. And I was quite looking forward to watching Jay kill something he had, however superficially, cared for.

  Soon we had the champagne poured and the strang
e nested fowls on the table. Jay and I had discussed lacing Tran’s food with a sedative, but we feared his prior knowledge of drugs might allow him to detect such a dose. Besides, Jay suspected that it might be easiest to make Tran swallow a pill simply by offering it to him.

  As Tran ate, Jay and I swilled champagne, pushed scraps around our plates, and stared at him. A tender rump roast dangling into a den of leopards could scarcely have been more oblivious, or looked more delectable. Though I was unused to the idea of boys as potential nourishment, I had more than a passing acquaintance with them as victims, and Tran played that role so perfectly I almost believed he was doing it on purpose. He was pretty—very pretty—but so were loads of other boys. This one had something extra. How could a single person fulfill all the mannerisms, distill that vital blend of insecurity and insouciance, exude pheromones that so clearly begged cut me, fuck me, lay me out cold and have your way with me? It was as if all the boys of my past had been swirled into one exotic, dangerous cocktail, which Jay had (somewhat reluctantly) served to me with the appropriate garnishes.

  When the champagne was drunk and the dishes cleared away, we adjourned to the parlour. It felt like nothing so much as a polite stopover en route to the bedroom. We were all crackling with sexual energy; you could smell it in the dusty parlour air if you breathed deeply enough. Jay offered Tran a snifter of cognac. The boy accepted it, and I saw their fingertips touch, Jay’s index finger extending to slide over Tran’s knuckles. Tran looked at him, looked at me, drained half his cognac.

  “You’re meant to sip that,” I said.

  “I’m not as drunk as I want to be.”

  Jay caught my eye and shrugged. Maybe we wouldn’t have to sedate him with pills after all.