Swamp Foetus (12 page)

They passed a pizza parlor that reeked of tomatoes stewed in oregano and a foreign grocery which, though closed, wafted out a thousand mysterious, delicious smells, the smells of a kitchen in the Great Pyramid. Under it all they could still sense the wet brown river scent. Lucian’s narrow nostrils widened imperceptibly.

They passed along the streets in silence, two white non-jazz musicians stirring up air in the French Quarter. The buildings they passed grew darker, more broken. Feet padded along behind them for two blocks, then, deterred by Andrew’s wide-shouldered bulk, disappeared down a side street that led toward the river.

A few minutes later Lucian passed a broken street light, turned down an alley, and nudged a heavy door open with his shoulder. They ducked under a flapping black curtain, sending down a rain of dust, and emerged in a dark little shop lit by two kerosene lamps. Orange shadows licked at the walls of the shop, which were lined with shelves of tiny bottles and boxes. The bottles were queerly shaped, long-necked, made of thick ancient glass colored blue and amber, with stoppers instead of screw-on caps. Most of their contents were murky and

indecipherable. The boxes gave off an odor of moldy cardboard. It was easy to imagine clicking, roiling nests of insects in the dark corners of the shelves.

Lucian stood slightly stiff-necked, embarrassed, staring at a spot somewhere to the left of the woman who sat in a corner of the shop.

“Good evening, Mrs. Carstairs. How’s business?” “As always. No one comes. No one wants magic anymore.” The woman pulled a gray blanket more snugly around her shoulders. At her feet sat a bowl of colorless mush, perhaps oatmeal, in which a bent spoon was buried at an angle.

“Sorry to hear it. We’ll just go on upstairs, then.” Lucian ducked through another curtain at the back of the shop. Andrew heard him clattering up a flight of stairs. He looked back at Lucian’s landlady, who didn’t appear to have noticed him. She was busily scratching herself under the gray blanket. His knee banged the corner of a long wooden box. He stiffened but couldn’t keep from glancing down.

Under the glass top the thin little figure reclined, grinning up at him. It should have been a skeleton, but a thin layer of iridescent parchment still stretched over its face and the ratty framework of its hands, and he thought there were small, opaque marbles left deep in its eyesockets—he had never let himself look closely enough to be sure. A few dry strands of bone-colored hair twisted across a rotten silk pillow.

“It isn’t so hard to do,” said Mrs. Carstairs, “if you love them enough.”

Andrew stared back at her. She made no acknowledgement of what she had said, turned her nodding head not an inch in his direction, but only huddled serenely, surrounded by vials of powdered bat’s tongue, boxes which contained fragments of the bones of saints and murdered men. And at her feet sat a bowl that might be oatmeal. Andrew swallowed the sour spit in his mouth and hurried up the stairs after Lucian.

Lucian had rummaged in his failing litde refrigerator and found a botde of beer for Andrew. For himself he had pulled out a Donald Duck orange juice bottle half full of a violet sludge. It was vodka mixed nearly half-and-half with a cheap Japanese plum wine that seemed to have about the same consistency as ketchup. It was vile, and it filled the tiny room with a rotten fruity smell that stayed in Lucian’s clothes. Lucian claimed the concoction could get him drunk faster than anything else on earth.

He sloshed some of it into a jelly jar that still had gray-white label scrapings on its side. At the first sip, his long eyelashes lowered in contentment; this was the taste he knew like the inside of a lover’s mouth, the taste of his world. He took another gulp and lay back on his unmade bed, gazing past Andrew at the window. The moon’s weak glow was diluted and made greasy by the dirty glass.

Andrew watched him. Lucian was languid now. In the street there was always a certain tension to his shoulders and slender neck, because Lucian was slight and exquisite-looking and wore silky little scarves and long black jackets that made him look rich even though he wasn’t. When he wasn’t being prodded for money he didn’t have, he was being harassed for the European fineness of his face, and on the darkest, narrowest streets his eyes took on a watchful look. Andrew, who was large and Aryanly handsome, usually walked home with his friend on late nights, not minding the long, lonely walk back to his own apartment.

Lucian nudged his shoes off. He wasn’t wearing any socks. He shook a few strands of feathery hair, dark auburn delicately frosted with silver-blond, out of his eyes and smiled at Andrew over the rim of his jelly jar. Andrew stood up, stretching, nearly knocking over his rickety chair. The ceiling of this room was unusually low.

It was all right for Lucian, but Andrew, who was half a foot taller, felt clumsy and claustrophobic here. “Do you mind if I open a window?”

“By all means, open a window—any window will do.” Lucian’s voice was heavy with plum wine and sarcasm; there was only one tiny window in the room. Andrew shoved at its smeary glass until it slid up. He hadn’t heard Lucian move, but when he turned back to the room, Lucian was holding out a fresh beer. Their fingers kissed briefly and sweat-stickily as Andrew took the bottle.

Lucian’s fingers were longer than the palms they stemmed from, very slim and clean, slightly flattened at the tips. The tips had been splayed and pressed out by Lucian’s Juno, the only expensive thing in the room. It stood on four stilt legs in a corner behind Andrew, its black and white keys gleaming opaquely in the half-light from the window. Lucian’s fingertips hid a crystalline magic, a sense of tone and pressure that could milk every spangle, every drop of color from a piece of music. He stayed in his room during the day, sleeping naked and innocent through the hottest part of the afternoon, then playing till nightfall, pulling spills and showers of notes from the battered little Juno to float out the window, to drift downstairs and be smothered among Mrs. Carstairs’ bottles and packets. Once every month a check arrived from a faceless, sexless relative in Baton Rouge. For a few days Lucian and Andrew would eat in prettily decorated restaurants, drink in well-lit, airy bars outside the French Quarter. Then it was back to dark clubs and sludgy plum wine until the next check came. Andrew could sing; the lyrics he wrote were attempts to capture in words the shimmering transparency of Lucian’s music, and he could barely play guitar. They tried to expand the boundaries of all the music they had ever heard, composing intricate symphonies together whenever Mrs. Carstairs was too caught up in her rituals to bang on her ceiling with a broom handle.

Lucian stretched out his feet, flexing his toes comfortably. His toenails were the color of pearls, faintly shiny. He slurped down the last drops of violet sludge and filled the jelly jar again. “That skeleton—” Andrew began. “What skeleton?”

“The one downstairs.”

“Oh, Mrs. Carstairs’ corpse. Very charming.”

“Why do you suppose she keeps it? Is it some kind of weird advertisement?”

“It’s her husband. Was.”

“No!”

“Something like that. It’s too small to be a man’s body, isn’t it? Her child, then. She told me about it at great length once. If I’d been sober it would have shocked me.”

“The skeleton of her child? In a glass box?”

“It died a long time ago. Her one and only, I guess. She couldn’t stand to bury it and let it rot. She’s a witch, you know, or calls herself one. She knew how to make it dry up. Mummify it.”

“Didn’t she have to take the insides out?”

“I suppose so. God, Andrew, forget it.”

Andrew stopped talking about it but did not forget it. His eyes drifted and came to rest on Lucian’s midsection. Lucian had unbuttoned his shirt, and the hollows in his slatted ribcage were full of silver shadow. Andrew watched the narrow chest expand and collapse again and again. His mind slipped back to the little body downstairs. Mrs. Carstairs would have gone to bed by now, so it was alone down there, keeping company with the dusty bottles and nests of roaches. Perhaps a faint phosphorescence lit the spaces between its bones.

Mrs. Carstairs had been unable to let go of the child completely; she had clung to the only part of it left to her, and perhaps if she pressed her forehead to the glass she could catch its sleeping thoughts. She had preserved the essence of the child, the cleanest part. She had seen parts of its body no one had been meant to see, but those parts were gone now. He imagined its chest cavity stuffed with fragrant linen, its skull scoured with dry spices. It was an ivory being, a husk.

Lucian pressed his lips together, stifling a yawn. It overcame him and his jaws gaped. Andrew glimpsed two rows of even teeth, a soft little tongue stained purple. “It’s late,” Lucian said. “I want to go to bed.”

“Play for me first.”

“It’s too late.”

“Please. Just a little.”

Lucian’s eyes flicked heavenward, but he was smiling. “Five minutes. No more.”

He positioned himself behind the Juno, pressed buttons, twisted the volume knob nearly to zero. His eyelashes, black in the murky light, swept his pale cheeks. His hands moved and a flood of notes erupted, pouring away, cutting through the damp, heavy air in the room.

Andrew leaned forward, lips slightly parted. The music swelled and shattered. Each shard was a fragment of colored glass, a particle of spice. He closed his eyes and watched the music weave a tapestry across the insides of his eyelids. Its colors were streaky and bright, glittering.

When he realized that he was hearing nothing, he opened his eyes. Lucian had stopped playing and was sniffing the air. The tip of his straight nose twitched. “There’s that damn rotten smell again.”

Andrew pulled in a noseful of air. The full, wet smell was there again, under the fruity odor of the wine and the tangy, private scent of their sweat. Andrew nodded. Lucian shrugged. “I can’t do anything about it. It’s too hot to close the window.” He grew brisk. “There. You’ve had your music. It’s late; go home. I’ll see you tomorrow night.” He pushed Andrew toward the door.

Andrew knew Lucian would undress and lie in bed with the orange juice bottle next to him, drinking until the needling heat became a faraway thing, beneath notice, and sleep was possible. At the door Andrew turned back, not sure why he was doing such an unfamiliar and faindy embarrassing thing, and put his arms around Lucian. Lucian stiffened, surprised; then he decided to go along with it and slipped his arms awkwardly around Andrew’s neck. It was a brief, clumsy hug, but when it was over, Andrew felt obscurely better. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

“Don’t you always?”

A car ground by outside and in its shifting light a band of shadow slid across Lucian’s eyes. Lucian’s lips curved in a forlorn smile.

Andrew picked his way down the stairs. Lucian held the door open to give Andrew whatever light could be had; as he ducked under the curtain Andrew heard the door click shut. He stood in the dark shop for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the light filtered and masked by Mrs. Carstairs’ heavy black draperies. When he took a step forward, his shoe struck the corner of the long wooden box. The glass shivered. He sensed something shifting inside, settling. If he pulled aside the draperies, let in the hazy moonlight, he would see—

He didn’t want to. He headed for where he knew the door was, and had one bad moment when his hand found instead the thick, moist velvet of the draperies; then he was outside looking up at Lucian’s window, which was as dark as any other window in the sprawling block of buildings.

Back in his clean studio apartment, with a fan whirring at the foot of his bed and a street light glowing comfortably outside his window, Andrew brought his cassette player to bed with him and was lulled to sleep by a cascade of shimmering notes, the one tape Lucian had allowed him to make of their music. The notes swirled around Andrew’s room looking for a crack, a hole, a route of escape. Eventually they slipped under the door and floated away on an eddy of wind toward the river.

The next day was hotter and more humid; people gasped in the streets like swimmers, and flies swarmed in glistening blue-green clouds above piles of garbage. The day smelled of coconut suntan lotion and seafood being deepfried in hot oil. As the shadows in the streets lengthened and the colors of the day deepened into smudgy blues and violets, Andrew made his way back to Lucian’s room. The brown river smell had begun to creep back into the air. As Andrew nudged through the empty shop and climbed the stairs, the smell deepened and grew soft around the edges.

Lucian was still in bed. A sheet was twisted between his legs and pulled up across his body. Its corner touched one of his pale pink nipples.

Andrew knelt beside the bed. A warm dampness soaked through the knees of his pants, thick and sticky. He was kneeling in a puddle of vodka and plum wine. The fruity odor had grown sour in the heat. Lucian’s long eyelashes were poised just above his cheeks, ready to sweep down. Andrew touched Lucian’s hand. The fingers were stiff; he heard the clean sharp nails scratching delicately against the sheet under the pressure of his own hand. A bright cardboard package lay on the floor next to the bed: DozEze. Sleeping pills. Only two were gone. Lucian had not meant it, then.

Andrew buried his face in the sheet, smelling cotton, a ghost of detergent, old sweat, all edged with the brown smell of the river. Neon patterns that swelled and burst behind his eyelids, resolved themselves into Lucian’s face. The silky dark lashes, the dulling white glimmer behind the lowered lids, the parted pink lips were too lovely, too alone.

Andrew squeezed his eyes more tighdy shut. How could he leave this room now? How could he give the proper authorities the signal to descend on this lonely little body with scalpels and death certificates and jars of formaldehyde?

After a few minutes he gently pushed Lucian to one side and lay down next to him.

This was a warm night, but they were beginning to cool off; there would be no more sweltering sheetless midnights, no more parched red days. Andrew rubbed at the smeary glass of the window and peered out. The man with the saxophone was still there, bending and writhing under the broken street light. Stupid place for a street musician. No one ever passed by here. Andrew had shut the window so he wouldn’t have to hear the dying-cat wailing.