Exquisite Corpse Read online

  Even so, I remembered a mind-boggling assortment of reports: headlines shrilling HOMO PLAGUE, calm assertions that it was all a Labour Party conspiracy, hysterical speculations that anyone could catch it by almost any means. I’d managed to ascertain that gay men and intravenous drug users were at special risk. Though I wondered whether any of my boys might have been exposed, I never dreamed I could catch it myself. Most of my contact with them had occurred after their deaths, and I assumed any virus would have died with them. But now it looked as though viruses were hardier than boys.

  Well, Andrew, I told myself, anyone who violates the sweet sanctity of a dead boy’s ass cannot expect to get away cot-free. Now forget that you may become ill, for you are not ill now, and remember only that this virus in your blood makes people afraid of you. Any time someone is afraid of you, you can use it to your own advantage.

  My supper tray arrived. I ate a sliver of boiled beef, a soggy leaf of cabbage, and a few crumbs of dry bread. Then I lay on my bunk, stared at the pale blue network of veins under the skin of my arm, and plotted my leave of Painswick.

  · · ·

  Compton …

  I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my face toward the sound of the sea. The sunlight felt like liquid gold spilling over my cheeks, my chest, my skinny legs. My bare toes dug into the cool, rich soil of the bluff. I was ten years old, on holiday with my family in the Isle of Man.

  Andrew Compton …

  The bright yellow gorse and dusky purple heather made a shifting wall, tall enough to hide a small boy lying on his back, refusing to move, refusing to answer. No one in the world knew where I was, or even who I was. I began to feel as if I might fall off the earth and into the boundless blue sky. I would drown in it like a sea, flailing my arms and legs, straining to breathe, sucking in crystalline lungfuls of cloud. Cloud would taste of mint drops, I imagined, and would instantly turn my insides to ice.

  I decided I wouldn’t mind falling into the sky. I tried to let go, to stop believing in gravity. But the earth held me fast, as if it wanted to pull me in.

  Fine, I thought. [ would sink into the earth, I would release my body’s nourishing juices into the roots of the heather, I would let the worms and beetles flake away the tender meat packed between my bones. But the earth would not take me either. I was trapped inside this vault of sky and earth and sea, separate from all of them, at one with nothing but my own wretched flesh.

  COMP … TONNN …

  The syllables were nonsense, as meaningless as the insistent clang that accompanied them. There was a box made of stone, and inside that box was a slab of metal covered with a thin cloth pad, and on top of the pad was an inert thing made of bone encased in meat. I was attached to that thing by an invisible tether, a fragile umbilical cord of ectoplasm and habit. All times and all places seemed a constantly moving river, and while the inert thing lay on the shore of that river, I was immersed in its waters. Only the fragile umbilical cord kept me from being swept away on the current. I could sense the cord stretching, the ephemeral tissue beginning to disintegrate.

  I heard the hollow rattle of metal against stone and recognized it as the door of my cell opening. A firearm cocked, and footsteps rang on cold stone. “Compton, you try anything funny and I’ll put a bullet in your head. What the fuckin’ ’ell are you playing at?”

  Another voice. “Shoot ’im in the arse, Arnie, an’ see if he moves.” Raucous laughter, unechoed by the first guard. My muscles did not tense, my eyelids did not flutter. If the guard did shoot me, I wondered if I would feel the bullet tunnelling into my flesh.

  Steel bracelets snapped round my wrists, a familiar sensation; then callused fingers checked my pulse. Something cold and smooth brushed my lips. The guard called Arnie spoke again, his voice hushed, almost awed.

  “I think he’s dead.”

  “Compton dead? Can’t be; he’s like a cat, only he’s got twenty-three lives.”

  “Shut up, Blackie. He ain’t breathin’ an’ I don’t feel a pulse. We’d better ring the infirmary.”

  When one is an habitual murderer, one tends also to become a good actor. Now I had begun to pull off the greatest acting job of my life: my death. But it didn’t feel like acting.

  A blinding succession of cut-frame, stop-action memories: a gurney thundering down a long cinder-block hallway, my body strapped down tight, my wrists still cuffed, dangerous enough to merit bondage even in death. A smell of medicine and mildew that I recognized as the prison infirmary. A tiny needling pain in the crook of my arm, in the sole of my foot. A cold circle of metal on my chest, on my stomach. A tug on my right eyelid, and a ray of light as sharp and thin as a wire.

  I remember hearing the voice of the prison governor, a man whose pale cold stare always drilled through me as if his firstborn son had died at my hands. “Aren’t you going to examine the body? We need to know what killed him before we can let him out of here.”

  “Sorry, sir.” That was the nursing officer who’d sewn up my cut forehead, sounding more frightened than ever. “Andrew Compton recently tested HIV-positive. He may have died of an AIDS-related complication. I’m not qualified to examine him.”

  “Well, bloody hell, people don’t just up and die of AIDS one fine morning, do they? They get lesions and things, don’t they?”

  “I don’t know, sir. He’d be the first case who’s died here. Most of the HIV-positive prisoners have been transferred to Wormwood Scrubs, Compton would have gone there eventually too.”

  My tethered soul gave a little shudder of delight. If I’d ended up in Wormwood Scrubs, I would have had little chance of getting out alive or dead. The prison there was the largest in England, with its own hospital and morgue.

  “Well, we can’t be messing about with communicable diseases here. He’ll have to be autopsied in Lower Slaughter. Ring Dr. Masters to come sign his death certificate; they won’t take him without one.”

  I had seen Dr. Masters exactly five times, once each year for the required physical exam. Now here he was again. His hands were as gentle and dry as ever; his breath still smelt of wintergreen and something rotten deep inside. “Poor old fellow,” I heard him murmur, too low for anyone else to hear, as he took the key from the guard and uncuffed my wrists. He searched in vain for my pulse, removed my prison uniform, prodded my belly, rolled me over and slid the fragile glass stem of his thermometer into my cooling rectum. I loosed my tenuous grip on the world and let my soul go drifting beneath the black waves of oblivion.

  “What killed him then?” was the last thing I heard, and Dr. Masters’ soft voice answering, “I’ve really no idea.”

  A clatter of metal, then wheels thrumming on a paved road. There were no paved roads on the prison grounds. I couldn’t risk opening my eyes, and even if I’d wanted to, the lids felt as though they had been weighted shut with sandbags. I heard the clink of tubes and bottles, the intermittent static of a scanner radio, the bleat and snarl of traffic answered by the rising wail of a siren. I was in an ambulance. I had made it out of Painswick; now all I had to do was come back to life. But not yet.

  I was strapped to another gurney and sent racing down another hall, the sound of the wheels echoing more immensely somehow here, as if this hall were made of tile and glass instead of mouldering cinder block. Another cold metal table beneath my naked back, and all at once my body was swathed in heavy crackling plastic. A body bag.

  If I had been breathing, the bag’s interior would soon have grown unbearably hot and humid. Once I had used up the oxygen trapped inside, I might well have suffocated. But my lungs were closed off, soaked like two sponges with all the oxygen they would need for a while. I could enjoy the sensation of being zipped into a body bag, of my own flesh chilling. For all intents and purposes, the meat-filled envelope of skin called Andrew Compton was a lifeless corpse.

  I thought of the plague years of London, of narrow muddy streets turned charnelhouses, of naked, slat-sided bodies heaped on carts and trundled through the city, pale li
mp bodies beginning to discolour, to distend. I imagined the smell of charred flesh, the smell of burning sickness everywhere, the sound of iron wheels trundling over broken cobblestones, the constant weary invocation Bring out your dead. I imagined myself tossed roughly onto a wooden cart atop a pile of my diseased brethren, a plague-swollen face thrust into mine, black pus dripping into my eyes, trickling into my mouth …

  I feared I would get an erection and give myself away. But I was foolish to worry. I knew corpses were perfectly capable of getting lovely hard-ons. Surely the doctors would know it as well.

  A harsh white light filtered through my eyelids, tracing the webwork of veins in electric red. Then there was not even that. I ceased to feel time passing. Words echoed through my head, meaning nothing; soon they too were gone. I could not remember my name or what was supposed to be happening to me. I might have been spinning in a void without feature or dimension, a blank universe of my own design.

  This, then, was where the seed of consciousness was planted in the loam of existence. From here I sensed I might keep spinning away, might keep sinking. I needn’t go back. I could barely remember why I had wanted to.

  I believe I could have died then. Legally, medically, I already had. My heart had been listened for and not heard; my pulse had been felt for and not found. It would have been so easy to let go.

  But within the seed of consciousness curls the germ of ego. I never doubted that ego was the last part of the organism to die. I had seen the last helpless fury in some of my boys’ eyes as they realized they were really going: how could it happen to them? And what was a ghost but a leftover shred of ego, unable to believe it had been jilted by its own corruptible flesh?

  Likewise my own ghost, ego, or soul—it never told me its preferred form of address—would not quite separate from from the dense gray bundle of nerves that had housed it for thirty-three years. In the manner of a wild animal kept too long in a cage, it feared to venture out even when the door was flung wide open.

  So I hung suspended between life and death, unable to swing either way, twirling like a spider at the end of a taut gossamer line. Was I stuck here in the void of near-consciousness? Was this the fate I had given myself over to, a necrophiliac trapped in his own decaying corpse?

  There were fates I would welcome less. But not now, not when I had decided I wanted to live in the world and enjoy the fruits of my destiny. I knew I had enormous strength of will. I had used it to mimic charm when I had none, to put off neighbours complaining about the smell of my flat, to make a boy who broke away from me and ran for the door stop in his tracks simply by saying his name. (This was a memory I cherished. “Benjamin,” I’d said, quietly but more firmly than anyone had spoken to him in his whole life; and he turned, terrible emotions warring in his face, desire and dread and a wish to just have it all over with, which I quickly fulfilled.)

  With all that strength of will I tried to rise, to wake. At first I could not so much feel my body as sense its boundaries and the space it occupied, without having any control over these dimensions. Then my heart twitched and my brain seemed to convulse, and my flesh rose around me like the sides of a coffin. Indeed, a coffin could not have felt more claustrophobic.

  I was back in, if indeed I had ever been out. But I still couldn’t move.

  Suddenly my body bag was unzipped and peeled away. I felt the metal table under me again; we were old friends by now, even if its reception was a bit chilly. The rush of air around my head smelled of formaldehyde, disinfectant, and the onions on someone’s breath. I felt gloved palms like slices of boiled meat adhering to my chest, fingers like greasy sausages closing around my biceps.

  “Lock that door,” said an unfamiliar voice. “People keep popping round to have a look at him, and I won’t be disturbed.”

  Not Dr. Masters, then. I was glad of it. I’d rather liked him.

  I heard a click, and whoever was handling me began to speak as if into a tape recorder. “Five November … Dr. Martin Drummond assisted by junior doctor Waring … Subject of autopsy is Andrew Compton, white male aged thirty-three, incarcerated for the past five years … lividity of skin observed, but no pooling of blood. Rigor mortis may have already passed. Open his mouth, Waring.” A finger swathed in foul-tasting rubber pried my jaws apart. “Teeth in good condition … Deceased tested positive for the HIV virus, but has exhibited no symptoms of AIDS. Cause of death remains unknown.” If Drummond’s odour and the feel of his hands had not been so repulsive, I might have imagined he was reading me love poetry.

  Another thermometer up the bum. “Intestinal temperature is rising,” Drummond recorded, “which would indicate the rapid onset of decomposition.”

  I heard Waring’s voice, young and nervous: “Skinny little bloke, wasn’t he? How could he ever kill twenty-three men?”

  “They weren’t men, they were teenage addicts.” (A lie; most of them were over twenty.) “Punks and homosexual prostitutes. Reckon they put up much of a fight?”

  “Perhaps when they knew they were going to die?” Waring suggested timidly.

  “He drugged them. They never saw it coming.” More lies. I only offered my guests a drink, then kept their glass filled as any host should do. And unfortunately, more than one of them did see it coming; it was just that none of them seemed to care much.

  The doctors paused to write something. I knew that when they started up again they would mean business. I had read about autopsy procedure. They’d soon be coming at me with a scalpel, intending to make a Y-shaped incision that started at my collarbone, converged at my sternum, and ran straight down my stomach to the pubic bone. They would pry off my breastplate and crack open my ribs, after which they would remove, weigh, and examine my viscera. I’d heard somewhere that the organs of people who had died of long wasting diseases looked as if they’d been detonated, but of course mine were still ticking.

  When my guts were bagged and catalogued, all that remained would be to peel my scalp down over my face, saw off the top of my skull, and remove my brain. This they would drop into a jar of spirits, where it ought to feel perfectly at home, and where it would have to marinate for a fortnight before it was firm enough to be sectioned and analyzed. The brain begins turning to mush at the moment of death, and by the time they finished doing all these things to me, I supposed I really would be dead.

  I strained to plug back into my nervous system, to regain control of my muscles and skeleton. It all seemed an impossibly complicated tangle I had forgotten how to operate, if I had ever known. It was as though I had risen through murky fathoms of sentience and was now pressing against a cell-thin but very strong membrane stretched across the surface.

  “Opening him up,” said Drummond. The stainless steel blade sliced deep into the left pectoral muscle of my chest. The pain burst the membrane, sang through my nerves like an electric shock, and pulled me all the way out of death.

  My eyes flew open, met Drummond’s uncomprehending muddy-coloured ones. My left hand rose, grabbed Drummond by his sparse hair, and drew him down toward me. My right hand seized the scalpel and wrenched it from his grasp. The blade slipped out of my chest incision and whispered across the doctor’s palm, laying open the rubber glove, then the greasy flesh clear to the bone. I watched his mouth fall open in amazement or agony, revealing two rows of yellow teeth, a meaty maw, a scabrous-looking pale pink tongue.

  Before he could react further, I drew back the scalpel and plunged it into one of those muddy eyes—or, to be precise, I impaled his head on the scalpel. Hot bloody fluid spilled over my knuckles. Drummond sagged forward, driving the blade deep into his own brain. I was awake! I was alive! I gloried in every sensation, the small wet pop as the eyeball yielded, the raw sewer stink as Drummond’s sphincter surrendered a losing battle, the panicky keen I supposed was issuing from the throat of young Waring.

  The eye socket sucked sensually at the scalpel as I pulled it out. I would have left it there—such expedient instruments of cutting deserve their sati
sfaction—but I required a weapon. I wondered if I could push myself upright on the table, then realized I had already done it. Waring was backing away from me, toward the door. His escape now was unthinkable.

  My hands were slick with Drummond’s blood and vitreous humour. I pressed the left one to my heart and it came away bloodier still. I risked a glance down at the wound. The skin around it was puckered, lipped; the blood poured down my naked chest and belly, soaking my pubic hair, spattering the floor. I thrust my hand at Waring, cupped and brimming with my own pestilence. He threw himself away from it—and away from the door.

  I advanced on him, scalpel in one hand, disease in the other, and I watched his eyes. They were a crystalline English blue behind little gold-rimmed spectacles with thin square lenses. His hair was the colour of cornsilk, cut blunt like a young boy’s; his face was bland as butter. He might have stepped whole out of James Herriot’s Yorkshire; but for the thread of drool on his chin he might have been the country vet’s perpetually astonished young apprentice, stethoscope around his neck, a flush of sunburn staining his fresh-cream skin pale pink. Sweet simple lad!

  “Please, Mr. Compton,” he whimpered, “please—I’m a bit of a serial killer buff, you see, and I’d never tell on you—”

  I backed him into a cart full of gleaming clamps and bone spreaders. It went over with a deafening clatter. Waring stumbled backward, then sprawled in the mess. He kicked uselessly at me as I bore down on him and raked his glasses off his face, wiped my left hand across his eyes, blinding him with my blood. He tried to bite my hand, managed only to get a mouthful of wet gore. I drove the scalpel into his throat and ripped it open to the collarbone. His sturdy farmboy body spasmed beneath me.

  I twisted the blade in his throat. His hands came up and clawed feebly at mine. I grabbed him by that beautiful cornsilk hair, now black with blood, and smashed his head down on a bone spreader. The skull gave way with a satisfying crunch. Waring bucked once more and was still.