Exquisite Corpse Read online

  T.V. stopped reading. Tran knew the next three words, could even visualize them scrawled in psychotic purple on the sheet of notebook paper his father held crumpled in his hand. They were “sugar candy asshole.”

  Tran attempted a smile. It came out nearly stillborn, a sickly mewling thing. “Yeah, um, Luke has quite a crazy style. He wants to be the next William S. Burroughs. He … uh … sends me all his fiction.”

  “Vinh, please don’t insult me.” His father was speaking Vietnamese, which was a bad sign at such a time: it signified a complexity or depth of emotion he did not trust himself to express in English. The tonal qualities of the language alone comprised thousands of nuances and shadings. “This is not fiction. These are letters written to you about things you’ve done. Are these things the truth?”

  Not Are these things true? but Are these things THE TRUTH?, the one truth, as if there might be no other.

  Tran shrugged. His father’s gaze drove through him like long nails. “Yeah, at one time or another I did all that stuff. It wasn’t like I injected drugs every day or anything.”

  “Who is this man? This Luke?”

  “He’s a writer. Seriously, Dad. He’s had four books published and he’s a brilliant writer. But he’s …” Sick, vicious, as crazy with pain as a run-over dying dog. “Kind of unstable. I quit seeing him months ago.”

  “He lives in New Orleans?” There was no return address on the letters—Luke was no fool—but all the envelopes bore local postmarks.

  “Not anymore,” Tran lied. Well, it could be true. He didn’t know if Luke was still terrorizing the airwaves, hadn’t tried to tune in the show in months. Only shreds and tag ends of gossip told him that Luke was even still alive.

  The best defense was a good offense. “Look, Dad, I don’t know what you want from me. You came in my room, you went through my stuff—you must not have trusted me in the first place. Are you really surprised?”

  “No, Vinh … no.” His father stood before him with bowed shoulders. He couldn’t recall ever having seen his father’s shoulders bowed before. T.V.’s usual posture was straight, almost stiff. But not now. “I wish I could be surprised, but I’m not. That is precisely why I looked. And I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?” Tran heard his voice crack, cursed it. But he sensed that the end of the talk was drawing near, and he knew nothing good could lie at the end of this talk.

  “For my own part in this. Your mother and I must have done something terribly wrong. And what if the twins turn out like you?” A new shadow crossed his father’s face, a depth of darkness previously unplumbed. “You would never … you have never done anything to them?”

  If the possibility of violence had been anywhere in him, Tran would have hit his father then. He was taller than T.V., and broader in the shoulders. He would have grabbed his father by the front of his expensive, tacky polyester shirt and smacked him twice across the face, hard.

  But Vietnamese children did not strike their parents. The tradition of ancestor worship had died only two generations back, and it lay uneasy in its grave. The parents of Versailles complained about the terrible rudeness their children learned at school, the lack of respect they seemed to revel in. But the thought of physically harming a parent was as foreign to these children as the idea of burning incense before a photo of a dead great-grandfather.

  And Tran had no violence in him; he was only drawn to it in others. That was one of the first reasons why he had loved Luke.

  But the notion that he would hurt his brothers … the idea that an integral facet of his character was the fault of some dreadful mistake his parents had made … it was all too much to bear. The talk was over, Tran realized, and he was the one ending it. “Fine,” he said. “Get out of my room. Go to work. Tell Mom to give me two hours after she takes the twins to school—go shopping or something. I’ll be gone by the time she gets back.”

  “Vinh—”

  “I want my car. It’s in my name. I won’t take anything else from the rest of the house, just the stuff in here.”

  “Where will you go?” T.V. asked. He didn’t really sound as if he expected an answer.

  “Where else? The French Quarter.”

  Tran might as well have said Angola or the lower pits of Hell. T.V. shook his head hopelessly. “To spend so much time there is bad enough. How can you live in the Quarter? We’ll never hear from you again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s dangerous.”

  “East New Orleans is dangerous. People get shot out here all the time. The Quarter’s a safe place.” Relatively speaking, this was true. The Quarter had its share of robberies and occasional killings, but most of them happened to tourists who didn’t know any better than to stray into pockets of desertion late at night: Rampart, upper Barracks, the ghostly area near Canal where the burned-out facade of the old D. H. Holmes building loomed over the narrow street. If you knew where you were and who was around, you were usually fine.

  “We thought we could take you to a doctor.”

  Tran closed his eyes. A slow burn was spreading behind his lids. “I’m not going to any goddamn doctor,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “You don’t realize how sick you are. Sick in the brain. So intelligent, such potential—and yet you are doing everything wrong.”

  Tran turned away from his father, started pulling books off the shelves and piling them on the floor.

  “We only want to help you.” That’s what Luke said to me once, Tran thought, and he meant he wanted me to die with him. But he stayed silent.

  “Have you been tested for AIDS?”

  Ask me anything. Ask me how I felt puking my guts out the first time I let him shoot me up. Ask me about the time he accidentally came in my mouth, and all I could taste was death spilling over my tongue, down my throat, seeping through my tissues. Ask me about the phone calls that lasted till dawn, the receiver slick with sweat and tears, sealed to my ear like a barnacle. Ask me any of those things. Please, Dad, ask me anything but that.

  “Yes,” Tran said as calmly as he could. “I got a test. It was negative.”

  It was true; he had gotten one negative result. But that was only three weeks after the last time he’d slept with Luke. And they had told him to come back in six months, and six months after that, and six months after that …

  Tran saw his life stretching away before him, measured out in half-year increments, discrete pockets of time. Each pocket became a glass vial capped with a circle of red plastic. On each cap was a tiny label, and Tran’s initials neatly lettered there. Each vial was three-quarters full of dark blood. He could shatter them one by one, waste them all in a blind search for the poisoned vial. But when he found it, it would contain nothing but his death.

  So what do I do with the rest of my time? he thought. Live rent-free with my parents, write in my notebooks, go outdancing, catch a buzz, get laid? It doesn’t sound so bad. But what if I only have, say, five more years to live?

  The life he had known up to now would not be enough. This unfortunate scene with his father had only hastened a decision Tran knew he had to make. It was the next step of his adventure, the step that would keep him alive. How could he die in the middle of his great adventure?

  He wondered if Luke had ever thought the same thing. Then he reminded himself that he did not care, could not care what Luke thought.

  “I’m negative,” he said again. “I don’t have AIDS, and I haven’t been screwing the twins. Now get out.”

  “Vinh, if you—”

  “Dad.” Tran went to his father, took the letters from his hand. “You don’t know me. This is who I am. Here. In these letters.” He waved the ragged sheaf of paper in T.V.’s face. “Now leave me alone.”

  His father looked at him a moment longer. His dark eyes had a regretful but faintly impassive cast, as if he were looking at his son’s corpse already in its coffin. Tran could almost see a miniature of himself reflected there, a wan and w
asted image in a mahogany box, propped on a trestle in the Catholic church, surrounded by white flowers and grieving relatives. If he died in five years, if he died tomorrow, that was how it would be.

  For several seconds Tran felt himself falling into his father’s eyes, into that future. Then TV. turned and left the room, and Tran was free.

  Luke’s letters were still crumpled in his hand. He stared at them for a moment, then put them on the nightstand atop a pile of books. For a long time the very sight of Luke’s handwriting had made his flesh crawl with loathing. That purple scrawl looked exactly like Luke’s voice sounded, thick with whiskey and self-pity, on the phone at three in the morning. Ziggy Stardust after the band broke up, rubbing his face in broken shards of gutter glass, swearing he could see the stars. Cockteasing death, courting and seducing it at every turn, but never going all the way as long as he had a choice in the matter.

  Tran looked around his bedroom, wondering what to take first, and felt a fresh wave of helplessness sweep over him. There were clothes everywhere, clean and dirty; there were notebooks, sketches, random books and papers.

  Prioritize, he told himself. Start with the important stuff. He went to his bookshelf, took down a large glossy volume on death and dying. He knew his parents had seen plenty of mangled corpses up close in Vietnam—neighbors, teachers, family. They’d never take such a book off the shelf. Tran flipped through full-page color shots of humans in various stages of mutilation, decay, and general disrepair until he found the Baggie he’d stashed there, which contained fifty hits of LSD and five crisp green portraits of Ben Franklin.

  He sat on the edge of his bed holding his ready assets, silently cursing the name of Lucas Ransom and every word the man had ever committed to paper. When he was done with that, he cursed himself for a while, until he was sick of it. Then he got up and started packing.

  4

  Remember, remember, the fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason, and plot!

  In 1605, the celebrated traitor Guy Fawkes and assorted ruffians in his sway conspired to blow up London’s Houses of Parliament. Fawkes himself was only a scruffy soldier of fortune, a well-paid dupe of some rich Catholics with a grudge against the king, but history has remembered his name and preserved his effigy. After planting explosives beneath the House of Commons, the conspirators fled to a hill at the southeastern tip of Hampstead Heath, hoping for a good view of the fireworks. This hill, incidentally, owes its magnificence to plague victims buried in mass graves on the heath.

  From terrain shaped by millions of pestilent bones, the ruffians watched their dream expire. Fawkes himself was caught in the basement with a blazing torch and a great lot of gunpowder. He was tortured in the Tower of London, tried in Westminster Hall, then drawn, quartered, and hanged in the Old Palace Yard outside the Houses. The foundations he had hoped to see crumble and burn were soaked with the blood from his living intestines, and generations of yet-unborn English children were given an excuse for extortion and pyromania.

  Pity. All those needly spires and pinnacles, all those soaring walls with their windows like little rotten pits in a great gray cheese, and the damned clock, all sliding majestically into the Thames! Of course the Houses looked quite different in 1605. But they are stamped in the memory of any lifelong Londoner just as they are now, eight acres of powdered wigs, musty scrolls, stone spindles shrouded in gray and purple fog. One cannot help but picture a brilliant flower of fire rupturing from the dark innards of the complex, and wonder whether Westminster Bridge would have gone too.

  Without so much as a nod to the actual instigators of the plot, English sentiment required that a holiday be set up in honour of Guy Fawkes, and his effigy tortured and burned each year. And the C of E claims to have stamped out paganism!

  Guy Fawkes’ Day plagues certain sensitive souls, haunts their eyes, keeps them looking uneasily over their shoulders and staying in well-lighted streets. The staccato of fireworks sets their nerves on edge, and the rich smoky smell of a bonfire is as charnel to them. They deplore the clamour of ragged schoolboy mobs; they say they cannot abide the taunts of “Penny for the guy, mister? Penny for the guy?”

  But watch any of these sensitive souls when they are accosted, and you’ll notice it is the guy they cannot look at—or cannot stop looking at. The straw guy in old coat and trousers and shapeless hat, sprawled on his bed of copper pennies in his rough wagon … the helpless, harmless effigy seems to frighten them. He was born from the rag pile yesterday; he will die on the bonfire tonight. But they do not like looking into his ashen smudge of a face.

  I think they can feel the anger given shape and form in these creatures, the incredulity of a soul made to burn perhaps a billion times for a crime that never happened. I hope for what the nervous souls fear: that one year the guys will rise up and finish off those Houses.

  It was Guy Fawkes’ Day when I returned to life. Like a guy, I had been on the wagon too long; but I suspected I would be blazing merrily before the night was done, and by morning I would be but a memory to those who had once jeered at me, a bit of ash spirited away into the sky.

  I came into London on the M1 and left the Jaguar in a quiet residential street near the Queensbury tube station. Then I descended into the creaky, dusty bowels of the Underground. This was an old station with no automatic ticket vendors. Using the window meant speaking to a person who might remember me. I was still dressed in Waring’s blood-spotted hospital greens and white lab coat, though I’d put away my mask. In the end I pulled the coat up under my chin, went to the window, and bought a ticket for Piccadilly. Anyone could be going to Piccadilly, absolutely anyone. The ticket seller never even looked at me.

  The empty echo of the platform, the bland colourful exhortations of the posters and automatic sweet vendors, the lulling motion of the train, the murmur of the sparse midday crowds, the tunnels and stations flashing by nearly put me to sleep. But I resisted Morpheus, who had been such a faithful lover these past five years.

  The next time I emerged from the tube, I was in Piccadilly Circus and all the world seemed to explode around me, written in neon swirls and punctuated with shiny red double-decker buses. Piccadilly is a giddy hub of London, a cross between a traffic hazard and a funfair ride. Faded wax rock stars leer down from the wedding-cake balconies of Victorian music halls; behind the ornate facades, glittering modern shopping centres are cleverly concealed.

  The traffic was deafening, the smells stunning: petrol, exhaust, a spicy blend of restaurants. I bought a souvlaki from a takeaway and ate it in three bites. It was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted, the soft fragrant bread, the tender meat sauced and seasoned as if someone cared whether it was good, the subtle salty oils, the juices trickling over my tongue, staining the corners of my mouth. And the smells of the people: their clean skins, their perfumes, their scented soaps and shampoos, their sweat that did not stink of desperation!

  On impulse I stopped at a news vendor’s to scan the advertisements in the London Gay Times. I remembered when this paper had been tucked away at the backs of shops, half-hidden behind magazines featuring glossy colour photos of greased arses and tumescent circumcised cocks. And that was when the shops carried it at all. Now it was up front with all the other city papers.

  In addition to the AIDS information lines and HIV counselling centres that had sprung up like mushrooms on a wet lawn, a great many new pubs and dance clubs seemed to have opened, each promising more decadence than the last. None of these chatty pubs or glittering flesh palaces seemed quite what I wanted. Too many people noticing you, talking to you, their brains as likely to be hypertuned on stimulants as dulled with drink. I put the paper back on the shelf and headed up Coventry Street toward Leicester Square, Chinatown, the shimmer of Soho. My old hunting grounds.

  I knew a secondhand clothing store where one could buy a coat, a jumper, and an old pair of trousers for three quid in 1988. Now these same musty-smelling items cost the better part of a tenner. “Count yourself lucky to find tr
ousers that fit,” the proprietor said when I raised an eyebrow at the price. “We’ve nearly sold out. Guy Fawkes, you know; the kids want them.”

  I traded Waring’s ugly rubber-soled loafers for shiny wingtips that fit me perfectly, and the old man threw in a fresh pair of socks. (Waring’s socks, I am sorry to say, were so ripe they had to be disposed of.) The scalpel was still taped securely to the side of my leg, and I left it there for now.

  I outfitted myself in basic black, good for hiding bloodstains and blending into crowds. Not flash enough to be noticed in the trendy bars of Soho, but nothing to sneer at, either. With the little gold-rimmed spectacles and new haircut, I thought I looked rather smart.

  No one would guess I had already killed two men today, and meant to do a third. But that was the whole point, wasn’t it?

  Outside the shop, a pack of boys accosted me, wagon trundling along behind, misshapen form sprawled on a heap of lucre. “Penny for the guy? Penny for the guy?” I surrendered all my coins to their grubby fragile-boned hands. I couldn’t help it. There was a crisp November bite to the air, seasoned with the smoke of firecrackers and bonfires, and the boys’ eyes were bright and wild, and their cheeks were ruddy as autumn apples, dusted with fine golden hairs, smudged with ash.

  In Leicester Square, children of a different sort sat smoking in the park, painted children who of a Saturday might parade up and down the King’s Road staring in the shop windows at zebra-striped vinyl raincoats, at Dr. Marten boots done up in purple glitter, at lace body stockings for all sexes—and at the gaudiest, prettiest things of all, their own reflections in the glass.

  Below the neck these children wore black, gray, and white garments of various materials and textures, held together with bits of metal. Above the neck they were like abstract paintings done in furious rainbow hues. A technicolour scribble of tortured hair, great panda-smudges of azure or chartreuse round the eyes, a slash of vermilion across the soft young mouth, and off they went.