Exquisite Corpse

  The sun would be risen before the boy died.

  6

  At about the same time Tran was staring helplessly at a Baggie full of LSD and hundred-dollar bills, Lucas Ransom awoke to a blaring clock radio in a dirt-cheap motel room on the other side of New Orleans. He slapped at the snooze button, pulled night-stale covers up around his collarbone, felt nausea rising in his gut but quenched it, refused it, willed it away. He couldn’t afford nausea this morning.

  He slipped briefly back into dream. Something about Tran, as they always seemed to be these days. When the alarm went off again ten minutes later, he awoke with tears on his face. WBYU was playing “A Taste of Honey.”

  “A taste—more bitter—than wine,” Luke sang along to wake himself up. His voice sounded as brittle as a saltine cracker. His lungs felt like sponges dipped in formaldehyde and left to dry in the sun. All this would have to change before showtime.

  He stumbled into the shower. A cockroach squeezed its greasy-looking brown body down the drain hole as the rusty water drummed into the tub. Luke soaped himself apathetically, his hands sliding over ribs and hipbones sharper than they had been a month ago, two weeks ago even. Other than an attack of thrush, a vile white fungus that had invaded his mouth and throat for a fortnight, Luke hadn’t had any opportunistic infections yet. But his lymph nodes had been swollen for over a year, the number of T-cells in his blood was a little lower at his free clinic checkup each month, he got the shits on a regular basis, and he was dropping weight fast.

  Even when he was using heroin, he had worked out at the Lee Circle YMCA a couple of times a week. He had never been pumped up, but he liked the way his muscles felt when they were sleek and taut. He was living then in the Faubourg Marigny, a neighborhood of shabby little Creole cottages a stone’s throw from the French Quarter, and because he loved lying in a bath of subtropical sunlight on the roof of his apartment, his skin stayed darker than Tran’s and the dusting of hair on his chest, belly, and legs bleached to pale gold, lighter than the hair on his head. Even his pubic hair had lightened a shade; even his cock had acquired a healthy glow.

  He’d kept all that up as long as he could. But it had been a long time since he could. The muscle had melted off his sturdy frame until he was all painful edges and awkward bone-ends. One of the medicines he was taking made him horribly sensitive to sunlight, and his tan had been replaced by a pale gray like the color of an uncooked shrimp. His entire body felt jagged and pallid and pasty.

  These days it took all of his strength to walk to his car in the motel parking lot, get the engine started after two or three tries, and drive the thirty miles to the bayou. That meant the radio shows were coming from something that ran deeper in him than strength, and the only thing Luke knew of that ran deeper than strength was insanity.

  He figured Lush Rimbaud was insane, probably had been for some time. But he was starting to wonder about Luke Ransom, too. He believed bad influences were inevitably stronger than good ones: just as he knew Tran had to have some sweet memories of him, he also knew those memories were likely soured in Tran’s heart by the sheer awfulness of what had come later.

  So Luke had always assumed the insane part of his mind would eventually overtake the sane part. It was the part that had wanted Tran to inject diseased blood, Luke’s own blood, into his vein. It was the part that had wanted Tran to die, not even with him, but instead of him.

  And what was there to stay sane for now? A trip to the clinic once a month, his pentamidine inhaler and his egg lipids, a long night spent tapping out useless words that paled next to his memories, a filthy cubicle on the Airline Highway among hookers and junkies?

  The junkies didn’t make it easy, either. Always knowing someone was snorting or shooting up somewhere in the motel court, maybe right next door; always knowing he could lay his hands on some junk if he only wanted to. And he wanted to almost all the time. He never stopped imagining how it would relieve the nausea, render the bone-grinding fatigue irrelevant, wipe away the imprint of Tran’s body on his own.

  But he knew it would also eventually stop him from giving a shit about anything, including staying alive. And he wasn’t ready to give the world the satisfaction of watching him die just yet.

  He’d started using heroin ten years ago, back in San Francisco, when he was Tran’s age: snorted some at a party, loved the rush and the ensuing lull, the longest period of utter calm his mind had ever known. He went back for more, eventually started putting it in his arm instead of up his nose. The rush was purer that way, the lull longer and far sweeter. It turned out he had a heroin metabolism. A habit tended to sap a normal person’s vitality, as if a tiny droplet of the life force were siphoned off by the needle each time. Steady use of heroin would kill most people eventually. But certain systems drew strength from it.

  He had kicked for a while around the time he met Tran, three years ago. No methadone self-deception for Luke; just the frigid sweats, the crawling itch, the nausea that boiled like red worms in his gut. You can use one substance to cure your addiction to another, he told himself as he clutched his bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the aftermath of junk sickness, but the new substance should be something different entirely. Something to take your mind off the desire that still pours through your veins. Methadone was a rubber sex doll; whiskey was a brand-new lover.

  So what should he use now, Luke wondered, to cure his addiction? Tran was in his veins sure as the memory of the needle, in his tissues sure as the ghost of junk sickness. Nothing touched the deep, slow ache that came to him whenever he remembered being in bed with Tran, fucking or talking or just memorizing each other’s face as obsessively as two lovers ever had. Tran’s eyes were difficult to think about, too. Luke remembered how they would take on the golden cast of the afternoon light, and the liquid blackness of the pupils, and the feel of delicate skin against his lips when he kissed the subtle, perfect curve at their inner corners. Oh yes, he knew how to torture himself with memories.

  He turned off the water, dried his scrawny body with a threadbare towel, dragged himself out of the bathroom and sank into the ugly vinyl armchair. An ancient burn hole from someone’s cigarette nipped at the back of his leg. There were days when he had to rest after doing anything: showering, walking half a mile down the highway to the McDonald’s or Popeye’s, even reading the paper. Apparently this was going to be one of those days.

  Since he’d gotten on the subject of memories, Luke decided to treat himself to a flashback. He was doing this more and more these days, reliving vivid moments from his past. Often they had to do with Tran, and since the good moments were exquisitely painful to recall, he usually chose the bad ones.

  Luke leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, and it was December of two years ago. A few days before Christmas, a holiday he’d always found wretchedly depressing anyway. Tran had escaped his family festivities, and they were curled like spoons on the mattress of Luke’s loft. Luke lay with his face pressed into the hollow of Iran’s shoulder, dreamily nuzzling the fine black hair at the his nape, which smelled of sweet gel and sex sweat. Tran was nineteen then, and his hair was much shorter, nearly buzz-cut. The style made his face look fiercely exotic, feral. It also showed off the three tiny silver hoops in his earlobes—two in the left, one in the right—each of which had reportedly driven his parents into new paroxysms of horror.

  Suddenly Tran said without warning, “I’m sorry.”

  Luke knew by now that Tran was prone to disjointed interjections, often in belated response to a conversation he’d been having hours or days ago. But for some reason, this meek I’m sorry set off a warning bell in his head. “For what?” he asked.

  Tran didn’t answer, and a shrieking klaxon joined the bell. Luke propped himself on one elbow and used Tran’s sharp hipbone as a handle to roll him over none too gently. “What?” he said again, more urgently. Tran looked away. Luke grabbed Tran’s face, forced it toward him. A small tortured sound escaped Tran’s throat, not quite a word, not ye
t a sob.

  “What have you done?”

  Answer me, Luke thought, answer me right now and save me the suspense. Instead came Tran’s usual long silence preceding the answer to a tough question. Then, “Nothing. Only …”

  Tran twisted his face out of Luke’s grasp, which had tightened involuntarily at the word only. Luke saw five white finger-shaped marks on Tran’s golden skin. As he watched, the marks deepened to rose, the color of Tran’s blood just below the surface.

  “Last week when you went to Baton Rouge … I was in the French Quarter one night and … there happened to be this party.”

  Luke shut his eyes tightly and willed his hands away from Tran’s smooth throat. He knew what was coming. Couldn’t Tran be merciful and tell him straight out? Of course not.

  “Everybody was really hammered,” Tran said pleadingly.

  Luke ground his teeth, counted to five, and opened his eyes. Tran was watching but something in Luke’s eyes made him look away. “So everybody was hammered,” said Luke. “Imagine that, at a party in the French Quarter. SO FUCKING WHAT?”

  “They played some kind of kissing game with this clove and this orange—”

  “Tran. Just say it, goddamn you, please just say it.” Don ’t say it, Luke’s heart begged in agonizing counterpoint, as long as you haven’t said it out loud then it didn’t happen, so just shut up, just don’t say—

  “Well-I-ended-up-fooling-around-with-this-guy,” Tran said all in a rush, then hitched in a deep shuddery breath as if the unspoken revelation had deprived him of air.

  A strange burning sensation had begun to spread through the muscles of Luke’s shoulders, as if corrosive acid were eating into the tissue. Luke wondered what the physiology of that particular phenomenon might be; why should the news of his lover’s betrayal make his muscles corrode? But he only said, “I thought we weren’t going to do shit like that.”

  “I did too! I didn’t want to! It was just …”

  “It was just that you were drunk and your dick was hard, right?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “At least you admit it.”

  “But he wouldn’t; leave me alone! He’s already fucked most of my friends …”

  “Great. I’m glad you’re so selective about your sordid affairs.”

  Tran’s eyes closed in defeat, and the dark smudge of his lashes on the butter-smooth skin beneath his eyes was enough to twist a barb through Luke’s heart, even now. “I didn’t mean to, Luke. I was basically seduced into it.”

  Luke’s vision went red. He could see directly into the core of his own rage, and that core was on the point of meltdown. He grabbed a pillow off the bed and punched it, then throttled it. He didn’t know what else he was going to do until he saw a cascade of tiny feathers swirling around the bed, drifting to the floor. He had ripped the pillow open with his fingernails. One of his expensive goose-down pillows, no less.

  “GO AHEAD!!!” he heard himself screaming. “Why don’t you just take this amazing thing we have and throw it away? Why don’t you just toss it in the gutter and piss on it because you happened to GET DRUNK AT A PARTY??? What a FUCKING BRILLIANT IDEA!!!”

  He forced himself to breathe several times, then resumed speaking in a soft, precise voice. “I mean—could you be any lamer if you tried? You did this—you ran home to tell me about it, God knows why—and now you’re saying you weren’t even responsible?”

  Tran was staring wide eyed at the feathers on the floor. His gaze flicked back up to Luke’s, then away. “No. I’m not saying that.”

  “Sounds like it to me.”

  “Well… hmmm …”

  “Don’t hmmm me, you damned devil! I know how that devious Oriental mind works. You can’t save face on this one. Just tell me …” Luke’s steam ran out and he lay staring at Tran. His face felt terribly naked. He was sure he looked ghastly. “What happened.”

  “Okay. There’s this guy I sometimes see out at the clubs.”

  “What do you mean, see?”

  “I’d noticed him in the Quarter. I talk to people, and this guy gets around. I’d talked to him a couple of times.”

  “Does this guy”—it was a word Luke never used, a word that made no distinction between the myriad subspecies of the male gender—“does this person have a name?”

  “Zach.”

  “You mean that pallid little fuck who looks like Edward Scissorhands, only more pleased with himself?”

  Tran nearly laughed. He bit at the inside of his lip to stop himself, and seeing his white teeth against the dark pink wet flesh made Luke wish they were soul-kissing, ass-fucking, anything except having this wretched conversation.

  “Yeah,” said Tran, “that guy.”

  “What did you do?”

  “He kept … um, embracing me. He said I was his long-lost twin brother.”

  “How original.”

  “Then we started kissing in the doorway.”

  “Oh, under the disgusting vegetable parasite?”

  “The what?”

  “The mistletoe.”

  “Yeah.”

  Luke pictured the two of them pressed against the jamb, leaning into each other, their hands raking and groping, their mouths messily joined. Probably twenty or thirty other French Quarter scene-kiddles were in the room, some more concerned with their own sordid pawings, some looking on, blearily marking the fact that Luke Ransom’s boyfriend was swapping spit with one of the biggest sluts in town, and many of them probably finding that fact maliciously funny. Luke had a talent for making himself unpopular among posers.

  Part of him wanted to throw himself sobbing on Tran’s mercy, beg Tran to say it wasn’t true, could never be true. Part of him wanted to murder the stupid brat, tear his cheating bones apart, then breathe life back into him for the sheer joy of killing him again. The image of the two boys kissing in the doorway was indelibly branded on Luke’s mind, a fresh hot wound searing its way deep into the steaming meat of his brain, making a scar that would last forever.

  “So then what happened?”

  “Well, he dragged me off into a … bedroom, I think, and … Luke, do you really want to hear this?”

  “No,” Luke told him truthfully. “But you made me go this far. Now I have to hear it all.”

  “Why? I just needed to be honest with you. We never have to talk about this again if you don’t want to.”

  “And I’m just supposed to stop thinking about it, huh? Maybe you can gloss things over so easily. In fact, I’m sure you can. But my mind doesn’t work like that. Even if I could wipe this shit out of my head right now, I wouldn’t dare … because I might need it someday. You want to be a writer, Tran? Then you better start saving up too …”

  He had ranted in this vein for a while. There had been more, much more, but Luke decided to end the flashback there. He didn’t want to relive Tran’s hesitant description of a blowjob received and reciprocated in a stranger’s dark bedroom while the party roared on beyond a half-closed door, or his own wretchedly furious reaction. He opened his eyes and shook his head a couple of times, and it was the present again. Sort of.

  That had happened six months after they met, nearly a year before Luke’s test came up positive. Luke’s own sexual conduct had been blameless during those six months, a first for him. Still, he had to admit that a good part of his anger came from a petty sense of missed opportunity. He’d only been in Baton Rouge to sign at the Hibiscus Bookstore, which he had done several times without event when he was single. But this time, for some reason, the signing was attended by any number of slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed boys so pretty they made Luke’s hand shake a bit as he inscribed their books.

  One in particular, a self-described poet named Michel, stayed around to talk to him throughout the signing. They had a drink afterward, then two, and when Michel asked him to stay overnight, Luke badly wanted to. Instead he thought of the difficult conversation he and Tran had had the week before. They had talked out their various fears and jea
lousies, and Luke thought they had decided on some sort of faith to each other. He wanted to spend the night devouring the self-described poet like a sweet bonbon offered up on the altar of his twin gods, talent and lust. That was what such boys werefor. Instead he found himself horny and half-drunk on I-10, searching the dial for shitty talk radio, the hour way past midnight, the industrial panorama of Baton Rouge dazzling his eyes in the rearview mirror.

  When he found out Tran had cheated on him anyway, Luke wished he’d gone ahead and fucked Michel. Never mind that Michel had been a pretentious airhead not half as beautiful as Tran. Luke had an ugly sense of having missed out on an easy, sweet piece of ass while Tran got one, of having failed to put a notch in his barrel to match Tran’s new notch. He also had an idea that Tran had tricked him into feeling this way.

  Ah, relationships If he was lucky, Luke thought, he would never have another one. And he was feeling awfully lucky lately. Just waking up alive every day, that made him feel his luck like a ten-ton weight sitting on his chest.

  He pulled on a T-shirt and jeans, shoved his feet into a pair of pointy-toed black cowboy boots, slung his ancient motorcycle jacket around his shoulders. This had been Luke’s unvarying cold-weather uniform for the past ten years. Now the jeans felt too loose and his biceps no longer filled out the sleeves of the jacket, but the boots were still fine. A good pair of boots was a friend forever, till death do us part. Idly he wondered whether this pair would outlast him. One of the soles was beginning to crack and peel, but then so was his.

  Outside, the early morning air caressed his skin like a cool, damp hand. The sky was full of pale blue-gray light, the color of Louisiana dawn. No one had broken into his car during the night, and the engine cranked on the first try. Maybe this was going to be a good day. The flashback had leached some of the self-pity out of him. and he was no longer in the masochistic mood necessary to enjoy the maudlin love songs of WBYU. Instead he slapped on a Coil tape, cranked it up to full volume—which wasn’t much, coming from his cheap-ass speakers—and pulled out onto the highway.