Exquisite Corpse
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About this ebook
To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the ambition of bringing his art to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his own art to limits even Compton hadn’t previously imagined. Together, Compton and Byrne set their sights on an exquisite young Vietnamese American runaway, Tran, whom they deem to be the perfect victim.
Swiftly moving from the grimy streets of London’s Piccadilly Circus to the decadence of New Orleans’s French Quarter, Poppy Z. Brite dissects the landscape of torture and invites us into the mind of a killer. With “intelligence, sweep, nerve, knowledge, and deeply unsettling erotic power” (Dennis Cooper, author of Frisk), Exquisite Corpse is a novel for those who dare trespass where the sacred and profane become one.
Poppy Z. Brite
Poppy Z. Brite is the longtime pen name of Billy Martin. Since beginning his career in the small-press magazine The Horror Show in 1985, he has published eight novels including Lost Souls, Exquisite Corpse, and the Liquor series, as well as several short story collections and assorted nonfiction work. Brite is also the editor of the erotic horror anthologiesLove in Vein and Love in Vein 2. In addition to writing, he runs the online curio shop PZBaubles New Orleans, specializing in vintage tarot cards, quirky jewelry, religious objects, and more. He lives in New Orleans with his husband, the artist Grey Cross, and their cats.
Read more from Poppy Z. Brite
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Reviews for Exquisite Corpse
612 ratings36 reviews
What our readers think
Readers find this title to be a mixed bag. Some find it original and captivating, while others find it disgusting and disturbing. The book is well-written with masterfully grotesque imagery, but it can be too much for some readers. It offers a voyeuristic look into the psyche of killers, but it is also a perverse fantasy of real-life tragedies. The story development and ending could have been better, and there are typos throughout. Overall, it's a book that you either love or hate.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gruesome! Horrifying! I couldn't put it down! Although I had read the description and recommendation on the back cover of this book, I never expected it to be so scary and riveting. I started reading it at 11 p.m. before I was to go to sleep and finished sometime around the time I was to get up for the day! I was absolutely mesmerized by the description and plot. Perhaps the plot is a bit too weak, but I think the storytelling around the interactions of the characters is extremely well done. I agree with an earlier reviewer: if you know what the subject matter is about, then don't be shocked by this novel's blunt horror and phantasma.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A great, gorey book with subtle political commentary! There are so many things that are good about this book, from the minds of the characters, to the setting acting as a character itself, to the body horror and splatterpunk horror aspects, to even the portrayal of the backdrop of the AIDs Crisis. This book is catharsis for every dark thing you secretly enjoy. I do wish the second half the novel, when all the characters' stories finally collide, was given more attention though I do suspect that there was a bit of intentionality in keeping it brief and to the point, as it was the more gorey and "disturbing" part of the book. Excellent all around.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is the kind of book you either love or absolutely hate. On the one hand, it's very well written, the imagery is masterfully grotesque and it offers a almost voyeuristic look into the psyche of killers. It rejects any attempts at glossing over the social context that allowed killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer to thrive. On the other hand, it's a perverse fantasy of real life tragedies, and as such by nature profoundly disrespectful.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Absolutely empty book. It was quite fun to read it.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5it would have made a better movie. I found myself bored alone of the book and trying to push through.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5What. The. F***. Is. Going. On.
What. The. Actual. F***. - Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Ugh did not like this at all. To sick reading how they killed
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book was too much for me. It was disturbing to a gross degree. Good story just not my thing.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is the last Brite book I read. She excells at creating moments and images like gory diamonds, but the overall plot is just a means for her to get from lurid detail A to eyeball eating B.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Personally, this book is a bit too disgusting for me. If you're looking to be shocked and horrified then this is a great option. If you have a weak stomach I would strongly recommend you don't read this. However, very original and captivating story.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Very strange. I liked it more than I thought I would, but not enough to ever recommend it or read anything else by the author.
It was loaned to me by a friend. It's her favorite book. Strange. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It's difficult to give this book a rating.
When I was younger, I loved this book. I'd never read anything like it and I was really pleased to see such a huge cast of queer characters. I would need to read this again to see if it was actually problematic. (Evidently, it would be in parts because the main protagonist is seriously unlikeable and a terrible human being).
Would I make it a favourite again? I'm not quite sure.
But I do really have very fond memories of this book and loved it for how unapologetic it was. It's sort of an erotic horror, I suppose, it's in a genre all its own, and Brite is actually a really interesting writer and in a class all their own.
Although I will say that this novel isn't for everyone, but I enjoyed it in all its boldness.1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After yawning my way through 'Second Line' and stifling my laughter everytime a protagonist was referred to as 'G-man', my hopes for 'Exquisite Corpse' were not high. Exquistite Corpse however, is a compelling read - graphic certainly but compelling, tightly written and suspenseful.While I agree with G026r that there is an odour of nineties black velvet about this novel, the wreckage of Luke and Tran's relationship makes for interesting reading and the first person narrative of serial killer Andrew delivers an arresting insight into psychopathy.The violence in the novel is horrific and undeniably sexualised. Brite employs the carnage to seduce the reader: manipulating their prurient curiousity and making them a party to the crime.
3 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5There's something disturbingly delighting about this book, not because it is the most well-written attempt, or because the characters are entirely original; but because it's unapologetic in the brazen attempt to mix splatter and the gritty side of human nature.
You can't really go into it expecting a happy ending, or even a happy progression through the trials the characters suffer; and there is a huge amount of suffering involved. But the intensity of the character motivations are the best part of the book; a glimpse into what makes a mind twisted and where desperation comes from in more than one facet.
The desperation in different masks from each character is extremely well done and there is some obvious effort to take away the flat shock value to their acts by showing the internal logic, as outside of the norm as it is in most of the players in the storyline, to their deeds.
The ending caught me, the imagery is rather disturbing but seemed so fitting and grotesquely alluring.2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This little book, I think around 240 pages, packs a huge wallop. The writing is mature and eloquent and it made a sufficient impression on me.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Meh, not nearly as shocking as some of these reviews indicated. It was more like Criminal Minds on Cinemax. The author has the gore down, but I would have liked to see more story development between characters. The book seems to leap from description to description, hoping, I think, that we won't notice they're not really strung together very well. Also, the ending felt like a cut-off as opposed to a tying of loose ends. (Hahaha!)
One thing about this book *will* give me nightmares, though. It's the typos. The typoooooos!1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A recommend book for mature readers interested in reading a deviant macabre book that contains: serial killers, murder, m/m eroticism, drug use, HIV, necrophilia and cannibalism. Exquisite Corpse is a book with intriguing characters that intertwine in a disturbing yet engaging plot. The prose and descriptions are detailed and sensuous. This is further capitalized on by the story being told from four different points of view. Allowing the reader to become intimately familiar with the minds of two serial killers and their victims. This may prove to be an uncomfortable experience for many readers and I would not suggest this book to those easily offended or squeamish.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Definitely NOT for children or anyone with a weak constitution or any kind of gag reflex.
Exquisite Corpse is, at its base, a story about someone looking for a soul mate. Someone that is alone in the world and sees the people around him, but has no real connection to them in any emotional capacity. Oh, and he's like Jeffrey Dahmar.
This is basically Dahmar (or a character startlingly like him!) somehow escaping from prison and going on the lam. He kills a bunch of people on the way, and somehow manages to find his way to the French Quarter in New Orleans (where the vampires and ghouls live, because that's where I would live if I was a vampire or ghoul. Though honestly, I'd probably move to Alabama. Or Amsterdam.)
He meets a man that shares his morbid interests and together they get together to have sex amongst the rotting corpses and plot to kill a somewhat wide-eyed street kid that was probably the most interesting character in the whole book (a male Vietnamese prostitute? Hell yeah.) From there, things get hinky.
All that said, I gave this book 4 stars because it was morbid and fascinating and sucked me into reading the whole thing. Not Brite's best, but still a creepy "What-if" story. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Finally got around to reading this one.Essentially gay serial-killer erotica. No real deeper underlying message that I can see. A plot that spends far too long building so that it's over before anything real felt like it had been accomplished. No protagonists that I could either relate to nor gain an understanding of. Just sex, drugs, death, food, and AIDS.Oh, and mid-90s goth. So mid-90s goth that the book should be bound in black velvet and smell faintly of clove cigarettes, incense, and dried roses.Those last two (uninterested in the protagonists plus the near-ludicrously stereotypical gothiness, both in setting, item descriptions, and even word choices) ended up being the deal-breakers and I had to force myself to finish this one. Admittedly, I'm not the target audience, being uninterested in gothy things, and preferring my detailed descriptions of torture, death, and sex to be part of some larger purpose, so eh.Into the discards pile it goes.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Pure graphic violence is a pretty decent summary of 'Exquisite Corpse'. This is the literary equivalent of the 'Guinea Pig' series of Japanese films. There is no message in this messages only gore and violent sex. Don't get me wrong, I like horror and gore, but this is really nothing more than a book aiming to shock. The worst part about the book is that Ms. Brite reinforces the extreme right-wing invective hurled at gays and AIDS victims by creating the irredeemable homosexual characters who all want to do nothing but shoot heroin, have sex with boys and eat people. In the end the story reads like a tale from the pulpit preaching the evils of gay people. The only reason I gave this one star is the descriptions of violence and sex are well done. If only Ms. Brite could attach a semi-decent plot to her story...
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Exquisite Corpse may be the most graphic and horrifying novel I have ever read. I can summarize the plot in a few simple words: Homosexual cannibal serial killers with AIDS. Truly. This is not the name of a metal band or a B-Movie from the 80s. That is the point of the story. One may be able to find deeper meaning in this gore-fest if they were to dig deep, but I doubt they will find much. This book was written simply to shock the reader and that it does. Excuse me while I go read something about rainbows, puppies and unicorns to restore balance in the universe.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I absolutely LOVE this extremely graphic little book. Revoltingly horrifying or horrifyingly revolting, I'm not sure which. I can't figure out how Poppy got so very descriptive in so few words. Very few books seem to have any real effect on me. I read them and "Oh, that was a pretty good book." and I move on to the next one. This is not one of those books. I find I still have to read it about once a year. It completely makes my skin crawl and any book that has that effect on me, is awesome. Read it if you dare. Love it or hate it, this book will effect you in some way. You just can't un-see it after you read it. So, you've been warned.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Maybe it is the best book i ve never read. It is so beautiful and ugly at the same time, it is so well written, so poetic, so disgusting! Brite deepens in nihilism, in loneliness and desire, making a perfect ode to human behaviour, to life and death // Quizás es el mejor libro que he leido en mi vida. Es tan bello y desagradable al mismo tiempo ,está tan bien escrito, es tan poético, tan asqueroso! Brite ahonda en el nihilismo, la soledad y el deseo, componiendo una oda perfecta al comportamiento humano, a la vida y a la muerte.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5It's brilliantly written but deeply disturbing and frankly it's hard to read with your eyes half shut. PZ Brite got a lot of flak for this book, but however twisted and weird and upsetting, it's still an awesome book. I scored it low simply because it turned my stomach and gave me nightmares.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I cannot express how much I found this book disturbing. I'm used to Poppy Z Brite writing about blood and sex, but this book takes a turn that the weak of stomach should not take. I had heard that she used what she thought serial killers much feel-Jeffrey Dahmer-how they must develop an uncontrollable desire to caress, smell, taste their victims entrails.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poppy Z Brite used to write gothic, grisly, stuff and this book is from those days. If you like your fiction anodyne, and trust me this is pure fiction, then this one is not for you. It is surely not anodyne either. Ms Brite imagines a collision between two of the most famous serial killers of recent times - Jeffrey Dahmer in the blue corner and representing the US of A and Dennis Nilsen in the red corner and representing the UK. Both mass killers, both with an appetite for minor cannibalism and, both targetting young men it is a fascinating conceit. Poppy does grisly very well and - wouldn't you just guess - she sets this tale in New Orleans, surely home of American gothic. Follow with horror the trajectory of this psychoid car crash as it happens with full-on blood and gore. Which of these two major monsters will triumph? Wouldn't you love to know? Read it and find out!Good for your loved one's Xmas stocking? Maybe not but buy it for yourself and share it with your closest friends.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wonderful writing, but one of those stories that makes you want to take a long hot shower for liking it. In my opinion, that's the mark of a very good author.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I hate this book. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.It's one of the maybe three books I own that I violently regret having ever purchased. A serial killer stalks New Orleans, seducing teenage boys,killing them and eating them. Look, people can put up with a lot of horrifying stuff happening to characters. But what makes horror fun is the knowledge that the characters will, in the end, be rescued.The bad guy will be defeated, even if there's only one protagonist left. No such luck for the boy in this novel. Maybe the author thought it was cool and ironic to have his rescuers arrive five minutes too late, but I found it a waste of my time.The author likes to shock people. But every time she did, she had to up the ante and it became shock for shock's sake.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is a horrific car crash with burning vehicles, scattered bodies and chunky gore smeared on the pavement. It's horrific and disturbing to your very core, but you can't help but look... and never look away.I read this in 2 days. I kept trying to put it down, even when some of the scenes got so graphic I felt nauseated, but I'd pick it right back up again, just to see what on earth was going to happen next.A definitely page turner. Of all Brite's horror novels, this is by far her finest.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5In this novel about gay, necrophiliac serial killers and their perfect victim, Brite again shows that she's a master of the ugly-pretty.
Book preview
Exquisite Corpse - Poppy Z. Brite
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
ALSO BY POPPY Z. BRITE
Lost Souls
Drawing Blood
Wormwood (also published as Swamp Foetus)
Love in Vein (editor)
Razor Kiss (editor)
To my mother, Connie Burton Brite, who gave me all the guts I would ever need
Records of the 1994 autopsy of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer reveal that officials kept Dahmer’s body shackled at the feet during the entire procedure, such was the fear of this man,
according to pathologist Robert Huntington.
Milwaukee Journal—AP, March 17, 1995
1
Sometimes a man grows tired of carrying everything the world heaps upon his head. The shoulders sag, the spine bows cruelly, the muscles tremble with weariness. Hope of relief begins to die. And the man must decide whether to cast off his load or endure it until his neck snaps like a brittle twig in autumn.
Such was my situation late in my thirty-third year. Although I deserved everything the world had heaped on—and torments after death far worse than any the world could threaten: the torture of my skeleton, the rape and dismemberment of my immortal soul—though I deserved all that and more, I found that I could no longer bear the weight.
I realized I didn’t have to bear it, you see. I came to understand that I had a choice. It must have been difficult for Christ himself to withstand the agonies of the cross—the filth, the thirst, the terrible spikes raping the jellied flesh of his hands—knowing he had a choice. And I am not Christ, not even by half.
My name is Andrew Compton. Between 1977 and 1988 I killed twenty-three boys and young men in London. I was seventeen years old when I began, twenty-eight when they caught me. All the time I was in prison, I knew that if they ever let me out I would continue killing boys. But I also knew they would never let me out.
My boys and young men were transients in the city: friendless, hungry, drunk and strung out on the excellent Pakistani heroin that has coursed through the veins of London since the swinging sixties. I gave them good food, strong tea, a warm place in my bed, what few pleasures my body could provide. In return, all I asked was their lives. Sometimes they appeared to give those as readily as anything else.
I remember a sloe-eyed skinhead who went home with me because he said I was a nice white bloke, not a bleeding queer like most of these others that chatted him up in the pubs of Soho. (What he was doing in the pubs of Soho, I cannot tell you.) He did not seem inclined to revise his opinion even as I sucked his cock and slid two greased fingers into his anus. I noticed later that he had a dotted line tattooed in scarlet round his throat, along with the words CUT HERE. I had only to follow directions. (You look like a bleeding queer,
I’d told his headless corpse, but young Mr. White England had nothing to say for himself anymore.)
I killed most of the twenty-three by cutting. By severing their major arteries with a knife or a razor after they were insensible from drink. I killed them this way not out of cowardice or from a wish to avoid struggle; though I am not a large man, I could have overcome any of my half-starved, drug-addled waifs in a fair fight. I killed them by cutting because I appreciated the beautiful objects that their bodies were, the bright ribbons of blood coursing over the velvet of their skin, the feel of their muscles parting like soft butter. I drowned two in the bath, and choked one with the laces of his own Dr. Marten boots as he lay in a drunken stupor. But mostly I killed them by cutting.
This is not to say that I took them to pieces for pleasure. I found no joy in gross mutilation or dismemberment, not then; it was the subtle whisper and slice of the razor that appealed to me. I liked my boys as they were, big dead dolls with an extra weeping crimson mouth or two. I would keep them with me for as much as a week, until the smell in my flat grew obvious. I did not find the odour of death unpleasant. It was rather like cut flowers left too long in stagnant water, a heavy sickish sweetness that coated the nostrils and curled into the back of the throat with every breath.
But the neighbours complained, and I would have to invent some excuse or other, something about my waste disposal backing up or my toilet having overflowed. (Humiliating, and ultimately futile, for it was a neighbour who called the police in the end.) I would leave a boy in my armchair when I went to work, and he would be waiting patiently for me when I came home. I would take him into my bed and cradle his creamy smoothness all night. For a day or two days or a week I wouldn’t feel alone. Then it would be time to let another one go.
I would use a saw to cut him in half at the waist, to separate the arms from the torso, to bisect the legs at the knee. I would wrestle the segments into bulging bags of wet garbage, where their odd angles and powerful stench might be disguised, and leave them out for collection. I would drink whiskey until the flat spun. I would vomit in the basin and sob myself to sleep, having lost at love again. I did not come to appreciate the aesthetics of dismemberment until much later.
But for now I sat in a dank cell in Her Majesty’s Prison Painswick, in Lower Slaughter near the industrial wasteland of Birmingham. These lurid appellations might seem designed to terrify and titillate the soul, and so they do. Look on any map of England and you’ll find them, along with places called Grimsby, Kettle Crag, Fitful Head, Mousehole, Devil’s Elbow, and Stool End Farm. England is a country that spares no resonance or descriptive colour in its place-names, forbidding though they may be.
I’d looked around my cell without much interest when they brought me in five years ago. I knew I was classed as a Category A prisoner. (D was the least dangerous sort; C and B types you mightn’t want to turn your back on; A was, of course, the ravening killer.) The papers had dubbed me The Eternal Host
and invested my unremarkable black-and-white visage with a dread that bordered on the talismanic. The contents of my flat had been lovingly inventoried a hundred times over. My trial was a legal circus of the vilest sort. The possibility of my escape was deemed highly dangerous to the public. I would remain Category A until the day I died with my eyes fixed on some bleak eternity beyond these four mouldering stone walls.
I could receive no visitors without approval from the prison governor and close supervision. I didn’t care; everyone I had ever loved was dead. I could be denied education and recreation, but at that time there was nothing more in life I wanted to learn, no fun I wanted to have. I must endure a light burning constantly in my cell, all night, all day, until the outline of it was seared into my corneas. All the better, I thought then, to stare at these hands steeped in blood.
Aside from my blazing bulb and my guilty hands, I had an iron bed bolted to the wall and covered with a thin lumpy mattress, a rickety table and chair, and a pot to piss in. I often reminded myself that at least I had a pot to piss in, but this was cold comfort indeed—quite literally so on winter mornings in Painswick. I had all these things inside a stone box of a cell measuring three and a half by four metres.
I wondered how many of Her Majesty’s prisoners realized the extra half-metre along one wall was a subtle form of torture. (As Oscar Wilde was being hounded in chains round the prison yard, he remarked that if this was how Her Majesty treated prisoners, she had no business having any.) When I looked at this wall for a long time, which was the only way I could look at it, the wrong geometry began to hurt my eyes. For more than a year the imperfect square tormented me. I visualized all four walls grinding in, cutting off that dreadful extra half-metre, beginning to crumble around me. Then gradually I got used to it, and that chilled me as much as the torment had done. I’ve never liked getting used to things, especially when I am given no choice in the matter.
Once they realized I wasn’t going to make trouble, I was given all the notebooks and pencils I wanted. I was seldom allowed out of my cell except for solitary exercise and showers; sodden joyless meals were brought to me by silent guards with faces like the judgement at the end of time. I could do no harm with my pencils save driving one into my own eye, and I wore them down too dull for that.
I filled twenty notebooks my first year, thirty-one my second, nineteen my third. At this time I was as close to true remorse as I ever came. It was as if I had been in a dream that lasted eleven years, and had woken from it into a world I barely recognized. How had I ever done twenty-three killings? What had made me want to? I attempted to plumb the depths of my soul with words. I dissected my childhood and family (stultifying but hardly traumatic), my sexual history (abortive), my career in various branches of the civil service (utterly without distinction, except for the number of times I was fired for insubordination to my superiors).
This done, and little learned, I began to write about the things that interested me now. I found myself with a great many descriptions of murders and sex acts performed upon dead boys. Small details began to return to me, such as the way a fingerprint would stay in the flesh of a corpse’s thigh as if pressed into wax, or a cold thread of semen would sometimes leak out of a flaccid penis as I rolled it about on my tongue.
The only constant; thread running through my prison notebooks was a pervasive loneliness with no discernible beginning and no conceivable end. But a corpse could never walk away.
I came to understand that these memories were my salvation. I no longer wanted to know why I had done such things if it meant I wouldn’t want to do them anymore. I put my notebooks aside forever. I was different, and that was all. I had always known I was different; I could not trudge through life contentedly chewing whatever cud I found in my mouth, as those around me seemed to do. My boys were only another thing that set me apart from the rest.
Someone had loved my boys once upon a time, someone who did not have to steal their lives to show that love. Each had been someone’s baby once. But so had I, and what good did it ever do me? By all accounts, I emerged from the womb quite blue, with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, and my state of life or death was disputed for several minutes before I sucked in a great gulp of air and began to breathe on my own. The boys I killed may have been strapping infants, but at the time of their deaths they were intravenous drug users who shared needles as if borrowing one another’s pocket handkerchiefs, who often traded blowjobs for cash or a fix. Of those I took to bed with me while they were still alive, not one asked me to use a condom, and not one expressed concern when I swallowed his sperm. I suspected later that I might have actually saved lives by killing some of them.
I was never one to moralize, and how could I argue ethics now? There is no excuse for wanton, random murder. But I came to understand that I didn’t need an excuse. I needed only a reason, and the terrible joy of the act was reason enough. I wanted to return to my art, to fulfill my obvious destiny. I wanted the rest of my life to do as I pleased, and I had no doubt what that would be. My hands itched for the blade, for the warmth of fresh blood, for the marble smoothness of flesh three days dead.
I decided to exercise my freedom of choice.
Before I began killing boys, and afterward when I couldn’t find one or hadn’t the energy to go looking, there was another thing I would sometimes do. It began as a crude masturbation technique and ended very near mysticism. At the trial they called me necrophiliac without considering the ancient roots of the word, or its profound resonance. I was friend of the dead, lover of the dead. And I was my own first friend and lover.
It first happened when I was thirteen. I would lie on my back and relax my muscles slowly, limb by limb, fibre by fibre. I would imagine my organs turning to a bitter soup, my brain beginning to liquefy inside my skull. Sometimes I drew a razor across my chest and let the blood run down the sides of my ribcage and pool in the hollow of my belly. Sometimes I enhanced my natural pallor with blue-white makeup, and later a trace of purple here and there, my own artistic interpretation of lividity and gaseous stain. I tried to escape what seemed a hateful prison of flesh; to imagine myself outside my body was the only way I could love it.
After doing this for a time, I began to feel certain changes in my body. I never managed to make my spirit separate completely from my flesh. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have come back. But I achieved a hovering state between consciousness and void, a state where my lungs seemed to stop pulling in air and my heart to cease beating. I could still sense a subliminal murmur of bodily function, but no pulse, no breath. I thought I could feel my skin loosening from the connective tissues, my eyes drying out behind blue-tinged lids, my molten core beginning to cool.
I did this in prison from time to time, without the makeup or razors of course, remembering some boy or other, imagining my rancid living body to be his dear dead flesh. It took me five years to realize that my talent might be put to another use, one that would allow me to someday hold a real corpse again.
I spent most of my time lying on my bunk. I breathed the heady, meaty smell of hundreds of men eating and sweating and pissing and shitting and fucking and living together in cramped, dirty quarters, often with only one chance to shower each week. I closed my eyes and listened to the rhythms of my own body, the myriad paths of my blood, the sweat beading on my skin, the steady pull and release of my lungs, the soft electric hum of my brain and all its tributaries.
I wondered just how much I could slow it all down, how much of it I could stop entirely. And I wondered, if I was successful, whether I would be able to start it all up again. What I had in mind was much more advanced than my old game of playing dead. I would have to be dead enough to fool the guards, the nursing officer, and almost certainly a doctor. But I had read about Hindu fakirs who stopped their own hearts, who allowed themselves to be buried for weeks without oxygen. I knew it could be done. And I thought I could do it.
I halved the amount I ate, which had never been much in prison. On the outside I had been something of a gourmand. I often treated my boys to a restaurant meal before the evening’s festivities, though the fare I chose was usually too exotic for them: lamb vindaloo with flaky nan bread, Chinese pork buns, jellied eels, stuffed grape leaves, Vietnamese emerald curry, Ethiopian steak tartare, and the like. Prison food was either gristly, starchy, or cabbagey. I had no trouble leaving half of it on the plate. I knew brains would serve me better than brawn anyway; they always had. And I felt an emaciated look would aid my task somehow.
(Off your feed then, Compton?
was the only comment I ever received on this matter from the guard who delivered and removed my trays. I managed a listless nod, aware that he was trying to be friendly in his fashion. Some of the guards would try to talk to me now and then, presumably so they could go home and tell the wife and kiddies the Eternal Host had spoken to them today. But I didn’t want him to remember this particular exchange.)
One day I deliberately gashed my forehead open on the bars. Telling the guard I’d tripped and banged my skull earned me a trip to the infirmary. I was in handcuffs and leg irons the entire time, but I managed to have a look round as a garrulous nursing officer swabbed out my wound and stitched it up.
Did you have Hummer in here?
I asked, referring to an A-wing prisoner who had died of heart failure the month before.
Old Artie? No, we didn’t know the cause of death, so they took him out in an ambulance. Autopsied him in Lower Slaughter and sent him home to his family, what was left of ’em. Artie was in for shooting his wife and son, you know, but there was a daughter away at school. I expect she was none too pleased to get Daddy back, eh?
What do they do with the organs after an autopsy?
I asked, partly so he wouldn’t remember my asking only one question, partly out of honest curiosity.
Toss ’em back in every which way and sew up the trench. Oh, and they save the brains for study. Murderers’ brains in particular. I’ll wager someone gets yours in a jar of spirits one day, Mr. Compton.
Perhaps,
I said. And perhaps someone would. But not a grinning sawbones in Lower Slaughter, not if I could help it.
The nursing officer took a vial of blood from my arm that day, though I didn’t; know why. A week later I was hauled off to the infirmary again, where I learned something that would help me more than I could fathom.
HIV-positive?
I asked the pale, sweaty nursing officer. What does that mean?
Well, Mr. Compton, maybe nothing.
He pinched a slender pamphlet between the tips of his thumb and forefinger and gingerly passed it to me. I noticed that he was wearing rubber gloves. But it means you could develop AIDS.
I studied the pamphlet with interest, then looked back at the officer’s chagrined face. The whites of his eyes were webbed with red, and he looked as if he’d forgotten to shave for a few days. It says here the virus can be transmitted by sexual contact or through the blood,
I noted. You sewed up my cut last week. Wasn’t that dangerous for you?
We … I don’t …
He stared at his gloved fingers and shook his head, almost sobbing. No one knows.
I brought my shackled wrists up and coughed into my hand to hide a tiny wicked grin.
Back in my cell, I read the pamphlet twice and tried to remember what I had heard about this malady borne on the fluids of love. The odd news article had caught my interest back before I was arrested, but I’d never been a great follower of current events, and I hadn’t seen a paper since my trial. There were some in the prison library, but I spent my precious hours there reading books. I didn’t see how news of the world could help me any longer.
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