Kissing Carrion (4 page)

“I want to do it,” he told her in the car, on the way home. “I want to be the one, this time.”

“The one to do what?”

“You know. Finish it.”

Pat narrowed her dark, dark eyes. “Finish it,” she repeated. “Like—get rid of it? Destroy it yourself?”

Rip it apart, tear it limb from limb, eat it (un)alive. If he couldn't have it . . .

Dark eyes, with green sliding to meet them: Money-colored too, in a far more vivid way. Because it's not that Ray's unattractive, that he couldn't possibly indulge himself any other way. In fact, if you look at it too closely—closer than he probably wants you to, or wants to himself—you'd have to conclude that the
indulgence
is doing things the way he's chosen to.

“You're worried about what Lyle'd think?”

She shrugged. “His customers, maybe.”

“Should be a hell of a show, though.”

. . . should be.

Another cool look, another pause—silence between them, smooth as a stone. All that frustrated longing, that self-bemused
ache
; enough to power a city, to set both their carefully-constructed internal worlds on fire.

The angels ruffle their pinions, disapprovingly. But I was human once, just flawed and impermanent enough to understand.

I mean, we just want what we want, don't we? Even when it's impossible, perverse, ridiculous, we want just what WE want. And nothing else will do.

Move ON
.

Be at PEACE
.

But: I can't, can't. Won't. Because I want . . . what I want. Nothing else.

(Nothing.)

“You're the last of the red-hot Romantics, Ray,” Pat told him, eventually, knowing what she was agreeing to, but not caring. Or thinking she knew, at least. But knowing only the half of it.

She's had her dance, after all, like Ray's had his: Now I'll have mine, and be done with it. Change partners mid-song; no harm in that. And if there is . . .

. . . if there
is
, well—it's not like anyone'll be complaining.

* * *

And now it's past midnight, the zero hour. Showtime. Lyle's customers file in as he sets up the cameras, trance-silent with anticipation: Stoned suburbanites, jaded superfan ultra-scenesters, unsocialized Western
otaku
with bad B.O. and worse fashion sense. Teens who followed the wrong set of memes and ended up somewhere way too cool for school, let alone anywhere else. Many seem breathless, barely able to sit still. Some—few, thankfully—have actually brought dates, rummaging absently between each other's thighs as they lick their lips, eyes firmly on the prize: The Bone Machine itself, a slumped mantis of hooks and cords; Pat, strapping “my” body in for its final run around Ray's block, suturing it fast with duct tape. Slipping the requisite genital prosthetic mini-bladder tube up the corpse's urethral tract and pumping it erect before condoming the whole package shut once more . . .

The Machine—model number five, re-built on site by Pat herself, due to be broken down to component parts and blueprints when the spectacle's dollar-value finally wears itself thin—occupies a discontinued butchering lab somewhere in the Hospitality area of a shut-down community college campus: Ray's coin bought a deal with security guards who let them in at night after the campus manager goes home, as well as access to a walk-in fridge/freezer just big enough to keep their mutual “carrionette” pliant. It's a vast, slick cave of a place whose dark-toned walls are hung with 1960's charts of cartoon pigs and cows tattooed with dotted “cut here” lines, whose sloping concrete floor still sports drains and runnels to catch blood already congealed into forty years' worth of collective grease-stink. Under the heat of Lyle's lights the air is hot and close, smell thick enough to cut: Meat, sweat, anticipation.

Transgression a-comin'. That all-purpose po/mo word poseurs of every description love so well. But there are all kinds of transgressions, aren't there? Transgression against society's standards, the laws of God and man, against others, against yourself . . .

Here's Pat, gearing up—eyes intent, face studiously deadpan. Here's Lyle, all sleaze and charm, spinning his strip-club barker's spiel. Here's “me,” slug-pale and seeping slightly, yet already beginning to stir as the connections flare, the cables pull, the hip-pistons give a tentative little preliminary thrust and grind. And—

—here's Ray, nude, gleaming with antibacterial gel. Right on cue.

See the man, see the corpse. See the man see the corpse. See the man? See the
corpse
?

Okay, then.

. . . let's get this party started, shall we?

Jolt forward, pixilate, zoom in—not much foreplay, at this stage of the game. Just wind and wipe into Ray bent l-shaped and hooking his heels in the small of my jouncing avatar's back, clawing passion-sharp down its slack sides. Pat puppets the Machine's load forward, digging deep, straining for that magic buried trigger; Ray scissors himself and “me” together even harder, so hard I hear something crack. And blood comes welling: Fluid, anyway, tinged darker with decay. Blood already starbursting the cilia of “my” upturned eyes, broken vessels knit in a pinky-red wash of old petechial hemorrhaging—

Ray groaning, teeth bared. Lyle leaning in for the all-important E.C.U. Pat, bent to the board, her hair lank and damp across her frowning forehead.

Ray, grabbing at “my” hair, feeling its mooring slip and slide like rotten chicken-skin. Taking a big, biting tug at “my” bile-soaked lower lip, swapping far more than spit, before rearing back again for a genuine chomp. Starting to—
chew
.

Pat gags:
Ewwww
, rubbery. You kiss your girlfriend with that mouth?

(Not any more, I guess.)

First the bottom lip, then the upper. A bit of “my” cheek. Sticky cuspids and canines like stars in a gum-pink evening sky. Ray's tearing at “my” sides, “my” chest, “my” throat, as the audience coos and gasps; Lyle's still filming. And Pat's twisting knobs like a maniac, trying to match Ray's growing frenzy, fighting with all her might to keep the show's regularly scheduled action on track: Destruction, ingestion, transgression with a capital “T.” Fighting
Ray
, really, as he guides “my” exposed jaws to his own neck again and again, like he's daring “me” to—somehow—bite in, bite down, pop his jugular and give all his fans the ultimate perverted thrill of their collective lives.

Because: Ray feels himself going now, in the Japanese sense. Knows just how late it's getting, how soon the high from this last wrench and spurt will fade. Knows that no possible climax to this drama will ever seem good enough,
climactic
enough, no matter
what
he does to “me.” I can see it in his eyes. I can—

(
see
it)

See
it. “I”
can
. And “I,” I,
I
. . .

I feel myself. Feel
myself
. Coming, too.

Feel myself
there
. At last.

Feel Ray hug me to him and hug him back, arms contracting floppily—feel that pin Pat put in my shoulder last time snap as the joint finally pulls free, and tighten my grip with the other before Ray can start to slip. Feel my clotty lashes bat, a wet cough in my dry throat; the sudden gasp of breath comes out like a sneeze, spraying his face with reddish-brown gunk. See Ray goggle up at me, as Lyle gives a girly little scream: Cry to God and Pat's full name, reduced to panicked consonants. HolyshitPahtriSHA
FUCK
!

Pat's head comes up fast, hair flipping. Eyes so wide they seem square.

My tongue creaks and Ray hasn't left me much lip to shape words with, but I know we understand each other. Like I said, I can
see
it.

Gotta go, Ray. You want to come with me?

Well,
do
you?

And Ray . . . nods.

And I . . .

. . . I give him. What he wants.

And oh, but the angels are screaming at me now like a Balkan choir massacre, all at once—glorious, polyphonic, chanting chains of scream: Sing
No
, sing
stop
, sing
thou shalt thou shalt thou shalt NOT
. Their halos flare like sunspots, making the whole room pulse—hiss and pop, paparazzi flashbulb storm, a million-sparkler overdrip curtain of angry white light.

(Sorry, guys. Looks like revenge comes before redemption, this time ‘round.)

Ray pulls me close, spasming, as my front teeth find his Adam's apple. Blood jets up. The audience shrieks, almost in unison.

I look over Ray's shoulder at Pat, frozen, her board so hot it's starting to smoke. And I smile, with Ray's blood all over my mouth.

So hook
him
up to the Bone Machine now, Pats—make a movie, while you're at it. Take a picture, it'll last longer. Take your turn. Take your time.

But this is how it breaks down: He's gone, long gone, like I'm gone, too. Like
we
're gone, together. Gone.

Gone to lie down.

Gone to forgive, to forget.

Gone, gone, finally—

—to sleep.

* * *

Aaaaaah,
yes
.

The sheep look up, the angels down. And I'm done, at long, long last—blown far, far away, the last of my shredded self trailing behind like skin, like wings, a plastic bag blowing.

Done, and I'm out: Forgiven, forgotten, sleeping. Loving nothing. Being nothing. Feeling none of your pain, fearing none of your anger, craving none of your—anything. Anymore.

Down here where things settle, down below the bridge, the weighing-room, the House of Dust itself—down here, where our faces fall away, where we lose our names, where we no longer care what brought us here, or why . . . I don't care, finally, because (finally) I don't have to. And in this way, I'm just the same as every other dead person—thank that God I've never met, and probably never will: No longer mere trembling meaty prey for the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to; no longer cursed to live with death breathing down my neck, metaphoric or literal.

Which only makes the predicament of people like Ray—or like Pat, for that matter—seem all the crueller, in context. Since the weakness of the living is their enduring need to still love us, and to feel we still love them in return; to believe that we are still the same people who were once capable of loving them back. Even though we're, simply . . .

. . . not.

Down here, down here: The psychic sponge-bed, the hole at the world's heart, that well of poison loneliness every cemetery elm knows with its great tap-root. Here's where we float, my fellow dead and I—one of whom might
be
Ray, not that he or I would recognize each other now.

The keenest irony of all being that I suppose Ray killed himself for
me
, in a way—killed himself, by letting me kill him. Even though . . . until that very last moment we shared together . . . we'd never really even met.

Come with me
, I said. Not caring if he could, but suspecting—

(rightly, it turns out)

—I'd probably never know, in the final analysis, if he actually did.

Down here, where we float in a comforting soup of nondescription—charred and eyeless, Creation's joke. Big Bang detritus bought with Jesus' blood.

Ash, drifting free, from an eternally burning heaven.

There is no such thing as evil, just the gradual

removal of good until nothing is left.

—St. Augustine

IT'S FUNNY HOW
the hardest moral questions only ever occur to you long after you've lost the power to answer them. Or to put it another way:

How many times have I asked myself what it is with some people, but not given much of a fuck either way? Because the plain fact is, nobody can cure themselves of someone else's disease. The world's full of dying parasites; you can't hold them all, wipe their eyes and their asses, change the channel and tell them one more time how they're going to a better place. Sure, we all talk a good game—but no one actually has the time for that kind of love, let alone the strength.

And I only ever really loved one other person on this whole rotten planet, anyways, aside from my own stupid self.

Now it's long past five in the morning, and I'm still crouched out here in a nest of long grass, halfway into the junk-choked sump that passes for a yard between the Tar Baby dance club—heavy metal and formative rock cover bands all night, every night—and its nearest neighbor, Calypso Heaven. Sitting back on my heels with Jos' second-best gun in my hands, last night's frozen mud already seeping through the seat of my jeans. Sitting here listening to the distant cries of my little brother Loren, as they seep up through those six-plus feet of dirt I piled on top of him last night—after I dragged his limp, rug-wrapped body down all three flights of rusty fire escape from our former mutual home, and rolled him ass-up into a shallow grave.

Thinking about how he's already been dead for a year and a half, and the only difference now is he'll finally have to start acting like it.

* * *

Around twelve-fifteen last Thursday, I jerked abruptly awake at my usual table in the Caf Shack on the corner, and for a good minute and a half, I couldn't remember what I'd come there for in the first place. There was a cup of half-price latte in front of me (Steamy Thursdays, Get It While It's Hot) and a half-smoked cigarette in my right hand, burnt down almost to filter—a shaky column of ash, poised and ready to gild the tattoo winding across my Mound of Venus and up around my thumb with grey. A snake, a triangle, two moons and a line of star-pointed Coptic crosses, all based on some Moroccan wedding designs I found in this old issue of
National Geographic
Rennie stole from my last social worker's office: The kind of shit they usually do with henna on the big day, then leave on until you wear 'em off playing unpaid workhorse for your hubby's family, long after the roast lamb's all been eaten and the band's gone home to sleep.

I remember how the tattoo artist laughed when I showed him the ripped-out page I wanted him to copy them from. Smirking:

“Guess you can kiss your day-job ambitions pretty much goodbye with this one, huh?”

And I just smiled back, ever so slightly. Thinking:

Yeah, that idea would probably scare me too, if I'd ever actually had a day job.

Outside the Caf Shack window, it was just another post- ozone-depletion February in Toronto—equal parts frigid and uncertain, pedestrians eddying to and fro outside like ghosts beneath a livid, parboiled sky. Streets slick with yesterday's slush, already turned to ice.

Then I let my attention focus back inside the window frame, and realized the guy who'd been cruising me for the last few minutes—so overtly, he could've been wearing a big neon pink sign on his forehead—was actually somebody I knew, or used to. One of Jos' regulars, back in the days; back when I was one glam, Iced-up little Goth girl and Jos was my main squeeze, Mr. Trent Reznor Superfly, all black eyeliner and free drugs to anybody who shared his musical tastes. Before Rennie finally followed my example, broke and ran from that pit we once both laughingly called “home,” turned up knocking at Jos' and my apartment door, and we let him crash in that little room next to the iguana tank—the one with no shades on the window, no lock on the door, and nobody left unstoned enough to check who was going in and out, especially during one of our legendary three-day parties.

Before Rennie got sick. And Jos went to jail.

And I ended up in this limbo I've been living, every day-for-night since.

I nodded at the chair next to me, and took another leisurely gander out the window—more than long enough for the guy to take the hint, and slide his skinny junkie ass down in it.

“Hey, Ro,” he said, in a tone he probably thought passed for cheerful. “Long time, man.” Then, small talk over: “You holding?”

I tapped the ash. “Not here, I'm not.”

He nodded, sniffed, coughed; a long, phlegmatic rattle. Shot me a begging glance from under his flip of barely-successful white-boy dreads.

I sighed, and chugged the rest of my latte, letting the caffeine stretch me standing—an unseen chemical noose, just tight enough to make sure I didn't shake.

“My place,” I told him. “Tag along, we'll see what I can do. But don't be obvious.”

He nodded again. I paid, and left.

As I crossed the street, he was already ten steps behind, like some gender-confused geisha. Trying to follow my advice, and failing miserably.

* * *

So: Back around the Tar Baby, through the sump, down the alley and up three flights of rusty metal steps, brain on automatic as I filtered out the ever-present hash reek from Number Two, the teeth-rattling Techno blast from Number Three-A. Key in the door, and into a former dance studio's worth of dark, square space, lit only by the TV's thin blue glare and an uncertain thread of light, seeping under three layers of Honest Ed's thickest curtaining. A half-sprung La-Z-Boy with a remote on its arm—rescued one drunken night from somebody's Annex curbside—sat angled near enough to the TV to cause serious optic damage. The only other furniture was Jos' futon, a stained mattress lying half-made in the middle of the floor, its red knot of sheets rumpled like an open heart.

I paused in front of the bathroom mirror to light some incense, the stick's red tip writing faint haiku on my reflection, just before I blew it out. A rush of smoke wreathed my hair with fragrance.

No movement in the big room. Just
Quincy M.E.
on A&E's Daytime Detectives, mouthing righteous ire.
If you say it's almost impossible, then that means it's at least possible!

“Rennie,” I called, softly.

Silence.

“Hey, Loren Gault. You here, or what?”

Still no answer.

Then I heard the guy push the door open, addict-cautious—and hit the flush before starting to move around the bathroom, making noises like I was looking for my stash.

“Uh . . . Ro?”

Opening and shutting a drawer, I called back: “I'm in the john.” Slammed up the toilet-bowl lid, rummaging inside. “Be out in a sec. Sit anywhere.”

Anywhere meaning the bed, the La-Z-Boy being currently adjusted—courtesy of the apparently absent Rennie—to a level somewhat inaccessible for those of us not six-foot-four.

In the drug world, two truths stand so evident they're almost Biblical: Hunger stirs hunger—and where one hunger calls, another answers.

When I came out, he was grinning up at me, sure he'd got his figurative foot in my figurative door. Firmly believing, with every possible section of his body but his brain, that I was obviously so hard up for action we could cut some kind of non-monetary deal—and assuming, probably wishfully, that the length of time elapsed since his last score had rendered him once more capable of getting it up far enough to deliver on his end of the bargain.

“You're lookin' good, Rohise,” he said. “I tell you that?”

“No,” I replied, slipping off my shirt.

We fell back on the futon together, kissing like cats— all gesture and hot air, with most of the effort put into sounding interested. Amazingly, he actually did have an erection; anticipation does odd things, especially in a trained animal.

“Oh, Ro,” he moaned, with heartfelt sincerity. “Oh, yeah, baby, yeah, baby—yeah, baby, yeah.”

I could barely keep a straight face—but lucky for me, his eyes stayed closed. And so we rolled over, and rolled over yet again, and would have probably just kept on rolling over forever—except that we finally hit something firm looming up through all those sheets, something which felt (at first touch) like another, slightly thicker length of mattress, left there by some unknown helping hand, to keep oversexed drug dealers and their fake-enthusiastic customers from dry-humping themselves right off the side of the bed.

But it wasn't.

Then a flap of sheet fell over, like the topmost curl of an unraveling chrysalis, and I saw Rennie's eyes come open in the humid red darkness beneath: Narrow, yellow-touched, under a flaring ridge of brow. Each part, as it revealed itself, successively extrapolating the whole. His elaborate bad-ass ‘do, with its improbable Sonny Chiba sideburns, long since bedheaded into oblivion; his pale fingers grabbing handfuls of air, their nails half-slicked with a choice selection of my unused polishes; his mouth, with its sketchy rim of adolescent moustache, packed full of pointy little teeth. Rennie, hitherto burrowed deep as a tick in the bed's rucked flesh, roused now by the mingled smell of sex and desperation—the nearby stink of prey. A gangly trap-door spider rising up from under the covers, arms and lips spread wide.

He met my glance, and grinned.

I grinned back, gave my junkie suitor one last kiss for luck, and pushed him—without a single second's regret—into my little brother's ravenous embrace. At whose touch the guy's eyes snapped back open, finally, wide and appalled.

“Hey,
shit
—” he began.

Then choked off, as Rennie bit deep into the nape of his neck, wrapped his long legs around the guy's hips from behind and squeezed, neatly snapping his drug-soaked spine in half.

* * *

In the back of the studio, under a set of steps leading up to our unused skylight—the same one I spent two days painting black after we first moved in, as Rennie writhed and whined inside a double weight of sleeping bag below—there's a narrow, plywood-lined crawlspace, originally meant for insulation. That's where I used to put them, afterwards. Armed with a set of Ginsu steak-knives I lifted from my former best friend's baby shower, along with a much-renewed supply of green plastic garbage bags, I used the bathroom tub to cut them up in—much to the annoyance of our downstairs neighbors, who complained about the smell. Which is where the incense came in handy.

That was always the one thing Rennie never bitched about, oddly enough. Like the untameable slaughterhouse stink of the bed, I think it kind of turned him on.

Guts in one bag, jointed, washed limbs in another, wrapped tight with gaffer's tape. The latter went under the stairs, the former into my backpack, to be dumped later on into one of the local butcher's tripe-stuffed rubbish cans. It didn't seem particularly risky at the time, though I guess it probably was. But then, getting caught was never really something I'd ever worried about too much.

Quite the opposite, actually.

By the time I'd pulled the plug on the bath, flipped the futon's mattress and stripped off its sheets—stuffing them haphazardly into a well-worn laundry bag, made from two tea-towels sewn together—Rennie was already in full post-kill ecstasy mode, sacked out in the La-Z-Boy, naked and bloody, channel-hopping between
The Equalizer
and
Sailor Moon
. I snapped my fingers against the back of his head as I went by, demanding:

“So what was the deal, slug-boy, back when I came in? You asleep, or what?”

“Sorta.”

“You awake now?”

“ . . . sorta.”

I snorted. “Yeah, well, you better get in the tub under your own speed, cause I ain't about to drag you.”

He yawned, widely, and squinted around the room. “Where's my robe?” he asked.

“Dirty clothes.”

“What for?”

“'Cause it's
dirty
, you jerk.”

Levering himself upright with a regretful sigh, he picked through the pile in question, found said robe, and took a long whiff. “Seems okay to me,” he announced.

“Fine, then wear it.” I slipped my jacket back on, going through my pockets for laundry Loons. From the bathroom, I heard him hum as he turned the water back on, reacting as he tested its temperature. The slap and splash of flesh against liquid, as he slid inside.

“You love me, Ro?” he called, suddenly anxious, just as I opened the door.

“Like a rock,” I called back.

“Good.” A pause. “Me too.”

* * *

Ice is a hell of a drug, all told; do enough of it, for enough time, and it'll cook you from the inside out. I met Jos when I was twenty-two, having just dropped out of Ryerson (Hospitality program, half a semester's worth), and became one of his preferred customers shortly thereafter. When he told me I could be getting his services for free, I jumped at the chance. Not because of desire—sex never meant too much to me, and I know who I have to thank for that. But when all you know about life is based on the barter principle, selling yourself can look an awful lot like buying your way to freedom.

By the time an unlimited supply of Jos' Ice had me fucked up enough to leave home, I was way too fucked up to take Rennie with me. I couldn't handle it. I could barely handle myself.

And so I left him there, for five more years. With Mom.

And with Dad.

The morning after that last party, I heard Rennie throwing up as I passed his room—a slow, lethargic retching, like he was doing it in his sleep. His face was red, hair up on end. The back of his neck was covered with fresh scabs. And he just lay there, coughing vomit all down the front of his pyjamas and over the side of the bed—thin, bright yellow vomit, linoleum-hued, intermittently laced with liquescent kernels of blood.