Are You Loathsome Tonight?

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Jeffrey's skilled fingers ran the blade through abdominal fat and fascia as if he were cutting fine silk. The organs came into view, and almost in the same breath, we said, “What the fuck ...?"

  Some lumpy foreign substance filled the interstices of the man's abdomen, bits of something once white now stained lurid pink, small flecks and clots swimming in hemorrhagic blood, dotting the convoluted surface of the intestines. Maggots was my first wild thought, maggots deep inside a fresh body, impossible. If not maggots, then some kind of cancer. I scraped away little swollen grains of it to examine the stomach. There was a long, bloody split in the tissue, and more of the clotted pink-white stuff oozing out. Something had caused his stomach to burst right open.

  I thought about the smashed front teeth, the bruises around his mouth, and at that point even I had to suppress a shudder. This man hadn't been beaten; he had been force-fed.

  “Dr. Brite?"

  I looked up. Detective Getty was back, standing halfway across the room so as not to contaminate the scene at the table. “Don't tell me toxicology ran that stuff already,” I said.

  Getty shook her head. “They didn't have to. Hennessey took one look at it, said “Not again,” and stuck it under the microscope. He could tell right away what it was—apparently a lot of dealers have been passing the stuff off as crack, and this guy did it to the wrong people."

  “Detective Getty."

  “Yes, Doctor?"

  “What the hell was in the glass vials?"

  “Red beans,” she said. “Raw, peeled red beans."

  I looked up. My eyes met Jeffrey's, and I saw the corner of his mouth twitch. Still up to our wrists in Mr. Chapman, we both knew what had been crammed down his gullet until his stomach burst. It made perfect sense: what else was cheap, absorbent, and went well with red beans?

  I held Jeffrey's eyes for a moment longer, then bent and started the laborious process of removing every grain of white rice from my patient's abdomen, wondering if I would find a sausage in there too.

  Vine of the Soul

  The better part of a decade later, Trevor and Zach from Drawing Blood are still in happy, disgusting, perfect love. Written for Sarah Champion's Disco 2000, it takes place (as do all the stories in the anthology) on the last day/night of 1999. William S. Burroughs died three days after I finished this story.

  Vine of the Soul

  The canals were completely frozen over that winter. All sorts of shit was embedded in the ice—either dropped in while the water was still in the chocolate-pudding stage, or else squeezed from the bowels of the canals by upheavals deep within the mud. Old bicycles, ladder-back chairs, toilets, even a human leg had been seen (though the last was soon chipped out and disposed of).

  It was a cold season, but we were as warm as always. Even if we hadn't both had the South in our blood, I think we created enough cumulative friction to outdo a hundred summer afternoons. Amsterdam in December was nothing to us.

  We'd been together for seven years then, Trevor and I. After we left the States and shook off the Secret Service, we spent eight months fucking around rural Jamaica until we found out most Jamaicans weren't as queer-tolerant as our friends who ran the pot plantation, and we had to leave in kind of a hurry. This being the second time we'd had to more or less get airlifted out of a place, we decided to try and make it the last. We scored black-market U.S. passports in Buenos Aires, caught an actual scheduled flight on a real airline, and ended up here in the land of subsidized art, legalized drugs, and obscene amounts of money available for the asking to anybody who knows a lot about computers, like me.

  It was easy to catch up on the stuff I'd missed during eight months in the Third World. Even if it hadn't been, I was ahead of these jocks, because I knew my way over, under, around, and through the American systems. The hard part was learning Dutch. It took me almost three weeks. Trevor's brain isn't wired for Dutch, apparently, but his Aryan coloring, his broad shoulders, and his vaguely hippieish look get him mistaken for an Amsterdammer even though all he can say after nearly seven years is "Sprecht U Engels?"

  Maybe because we'd never actually “dated,” we had this habit of making “dates.” Trevor would be home all day drawing, and I'd be off tweaking machines, and we'd arrange to meet somewhere. On the last day of 1999, we hooked up at the Heavy Scene Coffeeshop in the red-light district for the express purpose of getting blasted on hash and watching the throngs rage as the century changed. I made my way down the winding stairs into the basement space that was the Heavy Scene: flashing Christmas bulbs, European MTV on the box with the sound turned off so the stereo could blare, fragrant with sweet smoke and already crowded.

  There was always this little thrill upon seeing each other, as if this were a real date, two people meeting to size up their possibilities, two people who didn't have seven years of history and love and irritation and sharing a bathroom. All in all, I wouldn't trade the seven years. But that little illicit thrill gave me an under-the-table boner every time.

  Trev was already at a table with an espresso and a joint in front of him. The joint was untouched, the coffee about half gone. He had his hair in a loose ponytail and a pencil smudge on the bridge of his nose. He'd spent the day penciling Goth Squad, the D.C. comic he drew purely for cash. It wasn't a bad comic, but it was scripted by a hefty deathrock princess from Minneapolis who hadn't stopped writing little mash notes to Trevor in her margins ever since she'd seen his picture in Comics Journal. I thought it was pretty funny, but it wasn't the kind of thing he could ever see the humor in.

  His weary-watchful expression cleared when he saw me. “Hey,” we said at the same time, and he half-rose as I started to sit, and we kissed lightly. A few tourists made wide eyes at us, but they knew they were in Amsterdam and had to Practice Tolerance while they smoked their legal pot.

  I went to the bar, liking the sensation of Trev's eyes on me from behind. “Een Heineken, ‘stublieft,” I told the blue-haired black girl serving drinks.

  “Nee bier,” she said, slightly annoyed.

  “Oh ja—pardon.” There had been a law passed a few years ago that establishments couldn't sell cannabis and alcohol together—to keep the fuckups on the move, I guess. The tourists didn't know about it, and the potheads never remembered. I ordered a can of fizzy mineral water and another espresso for Trevor, and turned around to see a tall, bleached-blond man in black leather leaning down to kiss Trevor on both cheeks.

  “Franzz fucking Quaffka,” I said, coming up behind him.

  He turned with a grin that would've made a shark step back. I took a step back myself to avoid his kisses—not because I disliked them, but because I could never receive them without wanting to grab the guy's ass. It was just some kind of pheromone he put out.

  "I VASS BORN TO KEEL UND MAKE LOVE!" he cried, as if to prove my point. Everyone in the coffeeshop turned to investigate this claim, but Franzz's glittering black eyes were fixed on me. “Zach! It is so good to see you zwei out to zelebrate zee new millennium!"

  “I'm sure you can help with our celebration,” I said. “Why don't you sit down, Franzz?"

  “Ah, I am too restless! I cannot sit down! I stay here, fine!” And so he hovered, gesticulating, carving his own space in the crowd, at some point casually taking up and lighting the joint Trevor had rolled, which turned out to be at least half crumbly black hash. And he filled us in on his amazing life since the last time he'd been in town.

  Franzz was a fashion designer of international repute and the attendant fame you'd expect; he and his more business-minded sister, Vittoria, had launched lines of ladies’ wear, jewelry, and cosmetics that were huge status symbols all over the world. But Franzz couldn't be counted on for anything except artistic inspiration. He would disappear from Quaffka headquarters in Milan with no notice and no entourage and only twenty credit cards, surfacing days or weeks later in, say, Amsterdam for New Year's Eve 1999.

  And he sought out the company of other designers. But not the ones who made dresses
, jewelry, or perfume. He generally found them a boring lot. Franzz liked chemists.

  He liked all science-minded types, really, which was why he had collected me. He said that our talent was electric, whereas his and Trevor's was like a swath of watercolor across a piece of raw silk. He talked like that, too. But best of all he liked attic alchemists and basement wizards, those who combined esoteric and often deadly ingredients to create, not gold, but buzzes. Franzz collected drug designers—funded them too, probably, though I'd never ask and he'd never tell—and I knew he'd have something special planned for tonight.

  Just as we were finishing the hash joint, I felt my micropager vibrating in my pocket, right against my left nut. I didn't even want the thing with me, but I'd come from a job in the Noord and hadn't wanted to go all the way to our flat on Reguliersgracht to drop off my stuff.

  It was Piet at Systems Centrum Europa, a company I'd done a lot of freelance upsetting for. I considered ignoring the page, then felt sorry for him sitting out there in the silicon ‘burbs on New Year's Eve and went to the pay phone to see if something interesting was up.

  It wasn't. When I went back to the table, Franzz was illustrating some point by sweeping his arms in a great circle and shouting, “SUNDAY, BLOODY SUNDAY!” I ducked past him into my chair. “What's up?” Trevor asked.

  “Nothing. Boring."

  “No, no, tell uz,” said Franzz, and I could see he really wanted to know.

  “Well, see, a lot of people are convinced that all the computer networks are going to go down at midnight. The machines won't understand the changing of the dates, because computer years only happen in two digits. So supposedly they'll think it's 1900, which will cause them to go haywire in all sorts of interesting ways."

  “Yes, I have heard of this.” Franzz pursed his lips. “But I have been hearing it for years."

  “They've known about it for years, but no one has any idea what to do about it. Piet's out there with a bunch of techs, just to watch his own little network, and they want to be ready for...” I shrugged. “Whatever. The techs have spent the past half of the decade trying to figure out exactly what's going to happen, and they don't even really know that."

  “But you have an idea, as always.” Franzz pointed a perfectly manicured, silver-varnished nail at me. “So, vhat happens to zee computers at midnight, Zach?"

  “Probably a lot of them will go down. I don't think planes will start falling out of the sky, like the apocalyptics say, because people have manual control of that. But I believe all the records are going to be fucked up for a very long time."

  “Records of vhat?"

  “Everything."

  “Und you don't vanna help?” Franzz inquired—with barely suppressed amusement, I thought.

  “No way. I want to see exactly what happens, and then I want to go in and see what I can do with it."

  Franzz's grin was approving. Trevor just shook his head and mouthed a word that looked like extradition, which I thought was pretty fucking unlikely after seven years. I hadn't even been old enough to prosecute as an adult when I did my worst stuff stateside. Anyway, Trevor knew he couldn't stop me. Something that big, I couldn't even stop myself.

  “So,” I asked Franzz, “what chemicals do you plan to be on tonight?"

  He glanced around nervously, even though no one at the surrounding tables could have heard me over the guitarwail of the latest big hit off Foo Fighters 10. “Come back to my room. I show you."

  “Yeah, I bet you'll show us."

  “I show you that too, if you like. But first I show you new drug."

  Franzz's “room” was an enormous luxury flat overlooking the gaudiest stretch of Oudezijds Voorburgwal, lent to him by an unnamed friend who had chosen to ring in the Millennium elsewhere. Through a vast picture window the pink smear of neon, the stone arches lit with globes of electric red, the shimmering black canal, the peristalsis of the crowds could be seen or blotted out with the touch of a button that turned the glass into a mirror. We left the view on.

  Never one to waste time, Franzz produced a tiny plastic bag from somewhere and tapped its contents onto a glass coffee table. A scatter of white powder, which he began to caress with a razor blade. Trevor looked interested, but I backed off.

  “Nuh-uh, you guys. Not if it's any kind of coke or speed, or even X, you never know what that shit's cut with. You know me and stimulants."

  Franzz didn't look up from his task, but spoke without moving his lips to avoid blowing the powder, which made his indefinable accent even weirder. “Yezzz, yezzz, ZZach. I know you and stimulants. No coffee, no crystal, no Coca-Cola. This is something safe for you high-strung types."

  I let that one pass, since my personality isn't particularly high-strung but my body undoubtedly is. “So what exactly—"

  Franzz interrupted me with something so full of Z's that I could make no sense of it.

  “Say again?"

  He looked up, pronounced the two words carefully. "Sssynthetic ayahuasca."

  Trevor really perked up then. “That's in Burroughs."

  “Impossible,” said Franzz, “since it was only synthesized to perfection one week ago."

  “Not the designer version. The real article in the rain forest. He called it yage, and he went to Colombia to look for it at the end of Junky."

  “Und?"

  “Well, he found it, of course. He's written some stuff about it since then. A strange hallucinogen.” Trev frowned. “Doesn't it cause projectile vomiting?"

  “Fortunately,” said Franzz, “they have synthesized that out."

  He scraped up three large, sloppy lines. I noticed that the powder didn't have the icy glint of coke or the eggshell tint of heroin; rather, it gave off a pearly, subtle iridescence that I could have been imagining but didn't think I was.

  “Gentlemen?"

  Franzz was holding out, I swear to God, a gold-plated cocaine straw. Probably a vintage model from the seventies. What the hell. I turned my head and exhaled, put a finger over my left nostril, bent over the coffee table and snorted my line of jungle powder.

  I was ready for pain. The handful of times I'd snorted anything, my sinuses always seemed to think I'd jammed a flamethrower up my nose. But this went down cool.

  “A touch of eucalyptus,” said Franzz.

  “That sounds healthy."

  “Yezzz. Drugs are zo good for you."

  I watched Trevor do his line, stray pieces of ginger-colored hair escaping his ponytail and dabbling in the powder. He threw his head back, closed his eyes, inhaled sharply, and smiled. I reached over and squeezed his hand as Franzz did up his own dose. His long pencil-callused fingers enfolded mine in a familiar grip. Whatever happened, he was there. I knew he was thinking the same thing.

  “Zee very first thing this drug does,” Franzz announced, “is to make you unbearably horny."

  I glanced at Trev. His eyes were open, but narrowed. Was Franzz going to hit us up for a ménage à trois? He'd never tried anything like that before—seemed to know better. And, hell, he was in Amsterdam; he could have younger, kinkier stuff than us.

  “So,” Franzz continued with a smile, perhaps sensing our apprehension, “I leave you zwei alone for a little while. Maybe I bring someone back later. I will enjoy using the bed more if I know two beautiful boys have warmed it!"

  Snapping up the collar of his leather jacket for emphasis, he strode over to the door, tipped us a salute, and left the flat before either of us could say anything.

  “Uh,” I finally managed, and then the ayahuasca hit. White, but iridescent, like the powder: a streaming, swarming rush of it. White white white, and maybe a fleck of color here and there but you couldn't be sure, it was all going so fast, it was so white, it dazzled the mind. I felt something warm and wet against my lips, realized it was Trevor's mouth, realized Franzz had been right.

  We didn't warm up the bed for him, because we never made it that far: we fucked in front of the big picture window with the neon going insane down
below. I could taste every pore of his cock in my mouth; I could feel the heat of his come pulsing through the various tubes and up and out over my tongue in a flood of sweet and salt.

  Then Trevor was fucking me, inside me, and our eyes were locked, and suddenly time slid sideways and we were both looking at this TV set. It was a rounded, small-screened model from the fifties, a Jetsons TV, and William S. Burroughs was on it.

  “Yage,” he intoned. “Ayahuasca. Harmine. Vine of the soul.” He looked even thinner and gloomier than he had when alive. “Said to increase telepathic sensitivity. A Colombian scientist isolated from yage a chemical he called telepathine. Legend claims that the Sun-father impregnated a woman through the eyesocket and the foetus became yage, the narcotic plant, while still in the womb. Yage is the god of semen, both sexual and foetal. Yage may be the final fix."

  “That last line was from Junky,” Trevor said, and then Bill and the cartoon TV were gone and there we were on the soft carpet in front of the window, bodies intertwined, nerves thrumming in synchronicity. I grabbed his ass and pulled him deeper into me, and we came at the same time and could feel each other coming, feel every jot and fiber of all the voltage flowing between us, and it was so intense I think we lost consciousness.

  Thunder woke us. We could feel the vibrations in our bones. The sky over the whorehouses blossomed with multicolored points of light. Fireworks. Midnight.

  We pulled a comforter off the sofa and wrapped ourselves up in front of the window to watch the show. The fireworks were purple, green, gold, Mardi Gras colors, making me briefly homesick. Trevor looked at me, looked into me the way he always has, only this time there was something more to it. For an instant I sensed a kind of tattered aura surrounding us, connecting us, smoky blue and rent with electricity.

  “Mardi Gras colors,” he said.

  I just smiled and hugged him closer.