Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, Deirdre C. Amthor

seemed to be these days. When the alarm went off again ten minutes later, he awoke with tears on his face. WBYU was playing “A Taste of Honey.”
    â€œA taste—more bitter—than wine,” Luke sang along to wake himself up. His voice sounded as brittle as a saltine cracker. His lungs felt like sponges dipped in formaldehyde and left to dry in the sun. All this would have to change before showtime.
    He stumbled into the shower. A cockroach squeezed its greasy-looking brown body down the drain hole as the rusty water drummed into the tub. Luke soaped himself apathetically, his hands sliding over ribs and hipbones sharper than they had been a month ago, two weeks ago even. Other than an attack of thrush, a vile white fungus that had invaded his mouth and throat for a fortnight, Luke hadn’t had any opportunistic infections yet. But his lymph nodes had been swollen for over a year, the number of T-cells in his blood was a little lower at his free clinic checkup each month, he got the shits on a regular basis, and he was dropping weight fast.
    Even when he was using heroin, he had worked out at the Lee Circle YMCA a couple of times a week. He had never been pumped up, but he liked the way his muscles felt when they were sleek and taut. He was living then in the Faubourg Marigny, a neighborhood of shabby little Creole cottages a stone’s throw from the French Quarter, and because he loved lying in a bath of subtropical sunlight on the roof of his apartment, his skin stayed darker than Tran’s and the dusting of hair on his chest, belly, and legs bleached to pale gold, lighter than the hair on his head. Even his pubic hair had lightened a shade; even his cock had acquired a healthy glow.
    He’d kept all that up as long as he could. But it had been a long time since he could. The muscle had melted off his sturdy frame until he was all painful edges and awkward bone-ends. One of the medicines he was taking made him horribly sensitive to sunlight, and his tan had been replaced by a pale gray like the color of an uncooked shrimp. His entire body felt jagged and pallid and pasty.
    These days it took all of his strength to walk to his car in the motel parking lot, get the engine started after two or three tries, and drive the thirty miles to the bayou. That meant the radio shows were coming from something that ran deeper in him than strength, and the only thing Luke knew of that ran deeper than strength was insanity.
    He figured Lush Rimbaud was insane, probably had been for some time. But he was starting to wonder about Luke Ransom, too. He believed bad influences were inevitably stronger than good ones: just as he knew Tran had to have some sweet memories of him, he also knew those memories were likelysoured in Tran’s heart by the sheer awfulness of what had come later.
    So Luke had always assumed the insane part of his mind would eventually overtake the sane part. It was the part that had wanted Tran to inject diseased blood, Luke’s own blood, into his vein. It was the part that had wanted Tran to die, not even
with
him, but
instead of
him.
    And what was there to stay sane for now? A trip to the clinic once a month, his pentamidine inhaler and his egg lipids, a long night spent tapping out useless words that paled next to his memories, a filthy cubicle on the Airline Highway among hookers and junkies?
    The junkies didn’t make it easy, either. Always knowing someone was snorting or shooting up somewhere in the motel court, maybe right next door; always knowing he could lay his hands on some junk if he only wanted to. And he wanted to almost all the time. He never stopped imagining how it would relieve the nausea, render the bone-grinding fatigue irrelevant, wipe away the imprint of Tran’s body on his own.
    But he knew it would also eventually stop him from giving a shit about anything, including staying alive. And he wasn’t ready to give the world the satisfaction of watching