Swamp Foetus (9 page)

“An opium pipe,” I said.

“I knew what it was.” Robert dipped a finger in the gummy black residue and sucked at it. “But it’s empty. Wait, what’s this?” From the depths of the makeup case he pulled out a crumpled plastic bag.

“Something in here—” He shook out several shreds of what looked like leathery dried skin. When he stared at me in alarm, I said, “It must be some kind of fungus.” “Mushrooms?” Robert’s eyes gleamed; he might have been a child gazing upon Willy Wonka’s wonderland of magic candy.

“Could be,” I said. “He was a pretty trippy old dude. Maybe we found his stash.”

Without further debate Robert crammed the leathery fragments into his mouth and chewed noisily, then smiled at me. I saw dark shreds caught in his teeth. “You’ll have some too, won't you?”

At the implicit dare I stuck out my hand. Robert shook a generous amount of the fungi into my cupped palm, and I munched them thoughtfully. The taste was a little like psilocybin mushrooms, that same dry dead redolence that coats the tongue, but the texture was different—like trying to eat tanned hide. If Robert had not still been chewing, I would have spit out my mouthful. Bitter juice trickled down my throat. After swallowing, we rinsed our mouths with cognac.

I pulled back a curtain and stared down at the faraway carnival of Chinatown. The bright streets seemed impossibly distant from this room, this dim red parlor where we kept vigil over a corpse without a face. It seemed sad that there was no one to watch over the woman except two strangers looking for a cheap drunk. I wanted to be back down on the streets, back where the endless party of the living held sway, back there dancing with the city night. Not until Robert spoke my name did I realize that the neon had begun to swirl more vividly than ever among the folds of the shroud. On... off. On ... off.

“We could
look
at her, you know.”

“What?” With an effort I tore my gaze away from the rippling colors. I had no idea what Robert was talking about until I saw his sticky pink smile.

“You’re fucked up,” I told him. So was I, I realized. My voice reverberated from the ceiling. The room seemed smaller than before, shrunken by the enormity of the shroud’s mute presence. I fixed my eyes on Robert. He, at least, was warm flesh. “We can’t do that. Even if I wanted to look at... that... the old dude would know. He’d see where we unwrapped the shroud.”

“We’d only have to unwrap her legs and hips. We could fix it so he wouldn’t see. He’ll be drunk when he comes back.”

“Robert...”

“Don’t you want to know if it really
does
open sideways?”

The bad thing was, I did. Ever since Robert had mentioned it in the sweet shop, that tidbit of pornographic trivia kept returning unbidden to my mind. I tried to picture it, failed, and tried again. Privately I had always found the territory between women’s thighs a little frightening anyway—the pink fleshy ruffles like those of a deep-sea creature, the soft dark opening like the valve of some mysterious heart. To imagine that beneath the shroud might be a thing such as Robert described—

“Unwrap her,” I said. I had to see; suddenly both of us did. The air of the room became tinged with dark excitement, like ectoplasm flowing out of us and bathing the thing in the shroud.

Robert tore at the brittle cloth. It came away easily, exposing the feet and lower legs. The flesh looked dense and waxy, as if nerve and blood vessel and bone had fused into a single mass, as if the legs were solid all the way through. Robert kept unwrapping. From the knees up the skin was smooth and nearly translucent. Robert prodded the thighs, leaving fingerprint-sized dents in the pale flesh. I caught my breath when I saw the black triangle shining from the juncture of her thighs. It might have been a hole cut through her body, a tunnel leading to forever.

Robert couldn’t get the legs apart by himself. I took hold of one thigh and Robert clutched the other, as if we meant to break the woman in half like a wishbone. We pulled, and her legs came ratcheting open with a painful noise.
Only shrunken ligaments stretching
, I told myself,
only bone-ends rotating in dry sockets
. For a moment I thought I could see myself from above, as if I floated in a shadowy corner watching Robert and myself pry open the thighs of a corpse. But I could feel the tightness of my eyes, the neutral flesh under my fingers, the low ache in my crotch that throbbed with every beat of my heart.

“There,” breathed Robert. “Now we can look at her. Now we can
see
—"

He dipped his fingers into the black nest of hair, smoothed it aside, and exposed the dark pink lips of the woman’s vagina.

Which, of course, opened vertically. Like that of any other woman.

But Robert was not satisfied. Maybe he had never seen one at all before. His fingers probed further, slipping inside the fleshy lips and parting them, exposing what was
inside
...

...a single eye. An eye with two dark pupils like twin polliwog eggs in jellied embrace. As it rolled moistly up to look at us, time turned viscous, syrupy. The night seemed to contract to a shining point, a point contained in the crystalline, impossible orb that stared at us from between those four lips like the petals of pink anemones. I heard Robert scream first, ripping the thick silence open...

...and then we were running. There was one awful moment when I thought I would not be able to get the door open. Robert clawed at my back. Behind his panting I thought I heard the dry rustle of the shroud. A picture came to me: the woman sitting up, the dry cloth falling away from her face, eyes sliding open both with that same jellied double pupil, staring blindly after us, not understanding why she had been left alone...

...and then I wrenched it open and we hurtled down the hall. The flames in the wall-sconces burned clear blue as we passed. The hall seemed longer now, the house bigger and more convoluted. Surely we had not passed so many doors coming in, nor had the doors been so tall and ornately peaked. I thought I saw rooms with marble walls like chocolate and vanilla, rooms hung with tapestries of jewels and pearls and golden thread. A rampant lion carved in jade lunged at us from a niche in the wall, and I screamed like a child. Robert dragged me on.

All at once we ran through a door and found ourselves in the moonlit courtyard. Its tranquility seemed sinister now, as if it were waiting for something to happen. The moon had disappeared. We found our way through the maze of corridors, clutching at each other, trying to catch our breath. At the street entrance we met the old man coming politely home in his sober black

suit. Was he drunk? I couldn’t tell: his eyes were as flat as ever, his little goat’s beard sparse but neat. He folded his hands and let us pass.

“Did you enjoy the refreshments?” he inquired.

“Refreshments?” Robert’s voice quavered.

“The cognac, of course.” The old man seemed to bow to us slightly—but maybe he was just swaying. Maybe he was drunk after all. “I believe I owe each of you five dollars.” He produced a ten and offered it to us, folded between the first and second finger of his withered hand. I could not make myself reach for the bill. Robert hesitated, then grabbed it.

“Mister—” he said. “Mister—did you have some kind of mushrooms in the drawer upstairs? In that makeup case?”

“Mushrooms?” The old man smiled at Robert, and this time I was sure he did bow: a slight ironic inclination of the head, nothing more. “Gentlemen,” he said, “all of the mushrooms in Chinatown are poisonous. Except to the Chinese.”

He was gone into the shadow of the corridor. Robert stared up at the building. I followed his gaze and saw a curtain twitching in an upstairs window. Neither of us wanted to see what face, if any, would look down at us.

As we began to run again, back toward the neon streets of Chinatown with the purple sky pressing down on our heads and the psychedelic night wrapped around us, I started to feel faintly sick.

(1989)

I first knew hard-luck Rosalie Smith when she was a thin frayed rope of a child, twenty years old and already well acquainted with the solitude at the bottom of a whisky bottle. Her hair was brittle from too many dye jobs, bright red last week, black as the grave today, purple and green for Mardi Gras. Her face was fine-boned and faintly feral, the eyes carefully lined in black, the rouged lips stretched tight over the sharp little teeth. If I had been able to touch Rosalie, her skin would have felt silky and faintly dry, her hair would have been like electricity brushing my face in the dark.

But I could not touch Rosalie, not so that she would notice. I could pass my fingers through the meat of her arm, pale as veal and packed like flaky fish flesh between her thin bones. I could wrap my hand around the smooth porcelain ball of her wrist. But as far as she was concerned, my touch went through her like so much dead air. All she could feel of me was a chill like ice crystallizing along her spine.

‘Your liver has the texture of hot, wet velvet,’ I would tell her, reaching through her ribs to caress the tortured organ.

She’d shrug. ‘Another year in this town and it’ll be pickled.’

Rosalie came to the city of New Orleans because it was as far south as her money would take her - or so she said. She was escaping from a lover she would shudderingly refer to only as Joe Coffeespoon. The memory of his touch made her feel cold, far colder than my ectoplasmic fingers ever could, and she longed for the wet kiss of tropical nights.

She moved into an apartment in one of the oldest buildings in the French Quarter, above a ‘shoppe’ that sold potions and philters. At first I wondered whether she would be pleased to find a ghost already residing in her cramped quarters, but as I watched her decorate the walls with shrouds of black lace and photographs of androgynous sunken-cheeked musicians who looked more dead than alive, I began to realize I could show myself safely, without threat of eviction. It is always a nuisance when someone calls in the exorcist. The priest himself is no threat, but the demons that invariably follow him are large as cats and annoying as mosquitoes. It is these, not the intonations and holy water, that drive innocent spirits away.

But Rosalie only gave me a cool appraising look, introduced herself, then asked me for my name and my tale. The name she recognized, having seen it everywhere from the pages of history books to the shingles hanging outside dubious ‘absinthe’ houses in the French Quarter. The tale - well, there were enough tales to entertain her for a thousand nights or more. (I, the Scheherazade of Barataria Bay!) How long had I wanted to tell those tales? I had been without a friend or a lover for more years than I could recall. (The company of other local ghosts did not interest me - they seemed a morbid lot, many of them headless or drenched in gore, manifesting only occasionally to point skeletal fingers at loose fireplace flagstones and then vanish without a word. I had met no personalities of substance, and certainly none with a history as exotic as mine.)

So I was glad for the company of Rosalie. As more old buildings are demolished I must constantly shift about the city, trying to find places where I resided in life, places where a shred of my soul remains to anchor me. There are still overgrown bayou islands and remote Mississippi coves I visit often, but to give up the drunken carnival of New Orleans, to forsake human companionship (witting or otherwise) would be to fully accept my death. Nearly two hundred years, and I still cannot do that.

‘Jean,’ she would say to me as evening fell like a slowly drifting purple scarf over the French Quarter, as the golden flames of the streetlights flickered on, ‘do you like these panties with the silver bustier, Jean?’ (She pronounced my name correctly, in the French manner, like John but with the soft J.) Five nights of the week Rosalie had a job stripping at a nightclub on Bourbon Street. She selected her undress from a vast armoire crammed full of the microscopic wisps of clothing she referred to as ‘costumes’, some of which were only slightly more substantial than my own flesh. When she first told me of the job she thought I would be shocked, but I laughed. ‘I saw worse things in my day,’ I assured her, thinking of lovely, shameless octoroon girls I had known, of famous ‘private shows’ involving poisonous serpents sent from Haiti and the oiled stone phalluses of alleged voodoo idols.

I went to see Rosalie dance two or three times. The strip club was in an old row building, the former site of a bordello I remembered well. In my day the place had been decorated entirely in scarlet silk and purple velvet; the effect was of enormous fleshy lips closing in upon you as you entered, drawing you into their dark depths. I quit visiting Rosalie at work when she said it unnerved her to suddenly catch sight of me in the hundreds of mirrors that now lined the club, a hundred spangle-fleshed Rosalies and a hundred translucent Jeans and a thousand pathetic weasel-eyed men all reflected to a point of swarming infinity far within the walls. I could see how the mirrors might make Rosalie nervous, but I believe she did not like me looking at the other dancers either, though she was the prettiest of a big-hipped, insipid-faced lot.

By day Rosalie wore black: lace and fishnet, leather and silk, the gaudy mourning clothes of the deather-children. I had to ask her to explain them to me, these deathers. They were children seldom older than eighteen who painted their faces stark white, rimmed their eyes with kohl, smudged their mouths black or blood-red. They made love in cemeteries, then plundered the rotting tombs for crucifixes to wear as jewelry. The music they listened to was alternately lush as a wreath of funeral roses and dark as four a.m., composed in suicidal gloom by the androgynes that decorated Rosalie’s walls. I might have been able to tell these children a few things about death. Try drifting through a hundred years without a proper body, I might have said, without feet to touch the ground, without a tongue to taste wine or kiss. Then perhaps you will celebrate your life while you have it. But Rosalie would not listen to me when I got on this topic, and she never introduced me to any of her deather friends.

If she had any. I had seen other such children roaming the French Quarter after dark, but never in Rosalie’s company. Often as not she would sit in her room and drink whiskey on her nights off, tipping inches of liquid amber fire over crackling ice cubes and polishing it off again, again, again. She never had a lover that I knew of, aside from the dreaded Coffeespoon, who it seemed had been quite wealthy by Rosalie’s standards. Her customers at the club offered her ludicrous sums if she would only grant them one night of pleasure more exotic than their toadlike minds could imagine. A few might really have been able to pay such fortunes, but Rosalie ignored their tumescent pleading. She seemed not so much opposed to the idea of sex for money as simply uninterested in sex at all.