The Lazarus Heart (3 page)

He'd wrapped the raw and featureless thing in plastic and left it under an oak in Audubon Park.

After that, he decided to become Jordan again for a while, as he watched the city begin to draw the connections he'd left for it to make. As he watched the fear

settle over the Quarter's gay populace like a theater curtain falling halfway through a film. He walked the streets and
smelted
the fear, like fresh pomegranates and old gardenias, as it ripened.

So there could be no mistaking his message, he did one more. A postoperative female-to-male transsexual, castrated, its surgically constructed genital abomination sewn up inside its mouth. That one had read his signs well enough, had even been interviewed by a local TV news crew investigating the Ripper slayings. That one had claimed there was someone preying on the city's transgendered community, a serial killer. Seeing that made Jordan proud: He hadn't been misunderstood by those that mattered. Never mind that the police were so fucking apathetic or incompetent they couldn't find their reflection in a mirror. The point was that
They
understood. They would spread the word that They were no longer free to infiltrate the city unopposed.

He'd meant to stop then, to slip back into his old habits. Taking the occasional strays and freaks, the ones that would never be more than missing persons, missing but not
missed.

But the fleshy, sweet smell of Their fear was intoxicating. Now, sometimes, he thinks that might have been a trick to lure him into the open: an actual chemical They secreted to addict him. Given enough time, after all, even the cops might come around. It had been like trying to put toothpaste back into the tube when he tried to stop the public displays. Instead, he hunted farther afield and less often. And the years rolled by and he has learned. Even if Their numbers have not diminished appreciably, at least They know that
he
knows.

And he knows that They are afraid of him, because if They weren't, he would be dead by now.

Jordan finishes cleaning up the vivisection table, runs all the instruments

through the autoclave and puts away the new tissue samples, some floating in jars of formalin, others stored in Tupper-ware containers and stashed in the antique refrigerator rumbling noisily to itself in one corner of the room. After he has wrapped the transsexual's body in blue plastic garbage bags and duct tape, he returns to his seat by the window.

The man with river names opens the curtains again and looks down at the black crook of the Mississippi, the glittering lights of the city reflected in it. Later he will carry the body out to his car, but first he will allow himself time to reflect on what he has seen tonight. And the other things on his mind, the dreams he's started having: dreams of flying high above the infected city of New Orleans. Dreams of black feathers and a familiar face he can't quite seem to place.

A barge on its way to the Gulf of Mexico flashes a slow beacon, and he watches without blinking as it passes in the rainy night.

When she has finished her small dinner, the olives and French bread and dry bit of tuna fish, Lucrece clears the table, puts her dirty dishes in the sink, and sits down again, very still in the straight-backed wooden chair, watching the clock above the stove until the sun goes down. There's been rain off and on all afternoon, and now it's on again, spitting against the roof of the apartment.

The sound makes her sleepy, so she listens a little harder to the music from the stereo in the next room, Nick Cave like worn velvet wrapped around rusty gears growling "Do You Love Me?" So much sadness in that voice and those words, but so much courage too.

When the shadows have grown big enough and dark enough to fill the courtyard outside the window, Lucrece leaves the kitchen. Her bare feet are almost silent on the hardwood floors as she walks along the short hall leading to the big front room that looks out onto Ursulines. The persistent dark has found its way in here too. She takes a book of matches from the glass-block coffee table and lights a sandalwood-scented candle. The warm pool of light pushes the night back to the dusty corners of the room, and Lucrece pauses at her gaunt reflection in a mirror, the huge mirror in its ornate cherry frame, something Benny found in an antique store on Magazine Street and gave to Jared for his thirtieth birthday.

Lucrece cautiously touches her pale face, traces the hard lines of her high cheekbones, her full lips painted the same kohl black as her eyelids. She can see that the circles under her eyes have gotten a lot deeper since the last time she noticed, or maybe it's the way she's holding the candle. In this light she looks so much like him, the same pallor that Benny spent years cultivating. Lucrece wears it honestly, the dues of so many months spent away from the sun, of near-fasting. She has to close her eyes and turn away from the image in the mirror, the ghost-reflection of the woman her brother wore like a change of clothes: she cannot bear to see that reflection alive and breathing while he lies so cold and alone.

"Jesus," she whispers, standing motionless for a moment as the sickening blend of

déjà vu and vertigo slowly fades. She concentrates on the sound of the rain, on the words Nick Cave is singing in the dark apartment.

Benjamin and Lucas DuBois were born in Pike County, Mississippi, in a town so small and ugly it was usually left off the maps. Identical twin boys bom to a girl too young and frightened to care for them, and so when she finally ran off to Pensacola with a traveling evangelist, they went to live with their Great-aunt Isolde. She owned a rambling derelict of a mansion just off what passed for the town square, a house built twenty years before the Civil War and showing every sun-bleached decade of its age. Their mother never returned for them, though sometimes she sent postcards. These were almost always gaudy religious scenes: their favorite was a 3-D picture of the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah. Hold it one way, and you could see a pair of wicked- looking spire-topped cities crumbling beneath angry skies; turn it the other way and the Hand of God hovered over a fiery orange mushroom cloud.

When she was a girl, Aunt Isolde had gone away to college in Starkville, and she taught the twins how to read and write before they turned four. She read aloud to them from the books that filled her house-
Treasure Island
and
Wuthering Heights,
all of Dickens,
Dracula
and
Ivanhoe
and Mark Twain. She taught them history and the lives of the saints, geography and a little French. In return, they wrote plays and acted them out for the old woman, raiding trunks for costumes, improvising their sets from the musty Victorian furniture.

One Christmas, the year they turned twelve and Aunt Isolde turned sixty-three, the twins performed two scenes from
Antony and Cleopatra.
They learned all their lines by heart and even made costumes on an old Singer sewing machine they'd found in the attic. Lucas played Cleopatra, and for the death scene they used a live rat snake they'd caught hibernating in the cellar. Aunt Isolde was delighted, shouting, "Bravo! Bravo!" until she was hoarse.

More Christmases passed, and the pretty boys grew into prettier, disturbingly perfect teenagers, their hair dark as anthracite coal and their eyes the muted green of dogwood leaves at midsummer. They hardly ever left the house and its vast, overgrown yard except to run errands for Isolde, and they knew the rumors the people in town whispered behind their backs. How unnatural it was for two boys to be raised by an old spinster lady in her creepy old house, not even attending a public school, much less church. The townspeople had never liked Isolde anyway, because she'd kept herself apart from them even as a young girl, had spent too much time with books and not enough with boys.

Sometimes, as the twins were walking quickly along the red-dust road that

connected their house with the rest of town, other children would hide in the bushes and throw rocks or dried-up cow pies at them, calling them sissies and weirdos. Lucas always wanted to run, would tug at his brother's shirt sleeve and beg him not to stop, not to listen. But Benjamin did listen, and sometimes he stopped on the path and hurled the rocks back. Once he hit a boy named Jesse Ader-holdt in the head and Jesse and his friend Waylon Dillard chased them all the way back to the house.

When they reached the rickety old front gate, Lucas crying and screaming for help and Benjamin yelling at him to shut the hell up, Isolde was waiting with a baseball bat. Jesse and Waylon stopped in the road, stood safely out of reach shouting profanities while the old woman led the twins inside.

"You dried-up old cunt," they yelled. "You goddamned old witch! You
better
protect those little queers or we'll kill 'em." Then Waylon Dil-lard shouted that his daddy was in the Klan and, if he wanted, could have their house burned to the ground. Eventually they went away, skulking back toward town. But Lucas lay awake that night, thinking about fire. When he did drift off to an uneasy sleep just before dawn, he dreamed of men in white sheets on horses, and crosses burning.

The summer the twins turned sixteen, Isolde died of a heart attack in her sleep.

After the funeral, which no one else attended but the priest, some women came to the house with a sheriffs deputy and said the twins couldn't stay there alone. They were still minors, and they would have to go to foster homes-maybe two different foster homes, because it would be hard to find a family who'd take two teenage boys.

"We're gonna let you boys stay here until we talk to the social worker in McComb.

Give you time to get your things together and all," the deputy said. That night the boys took a few clothes and books and all the money Isolde had kept in a mason jar beneath the kitchen sink. Benjamin used kerosene from the toolshed to start the fire. They left the suicide note Lucas had written nailed to a pecan tree.

They hid for a while in a blackberry thicket atop a hill half a mile south of town, held each other and watched the red glow of the burning house rage against the midnight sky, wiping out the stars. There were sirens, and Lucas imagined he heard men shouting. Neither of them said a word.

After a while they crawled out of the briars and walked away, through the woods to the highway. The twins hitched a ride as far south as Bogalusa, where they bought bus tickets all the way to New Orleans.

The bedroom that was her brother's, and her brother's lover's, has become Lucrece's church. After, their grave, this is her holiest of shrines, and one by one she lights the dozens of candles until the room is bathed in soft golden light. Then she sits in her corner beside the canopy bed: another uncomfortable chair. She folds her arms about her chest, hugs herself tightly. She's put everything here right again, everything just exactly the way it was before the long nightmare began, the one she still hasn't woken from. The black-and-white photographs on the wall are the portraits Jared took of Benny in his latex and lace wedding gown, the corset underneath pulled so tight that Benny looks like an insect, so fragile, so easy to break.

These were the centerpieces in Jared's first big gallery show, the one that snagged him a write-up in the
Village Voice,
that caught the attention of collectors as far away as Amsterdam and Berlin: people with money to spend on art.

There were photographs of Lucrece in that show too, of her and Benny together, but she couldn't look at those anymore. Jared had posed them together, the twins as inverted mirrors, dressed in restraining costumes that recklessly, elegantly swapped their genders back and forth, that rendered them even more interchangeable than the work of their genes. By the end of the first shoot, eight hours on nothing but cigarettes and bottled water, Lucrece was nauseous, dizzy, and less certain of her tenuous identity than she'd been in years. She started crying and Benny held her until the world bled slowly into focus again.

Now she's staring at the photograph above Benny's dressing table, the steel frame shining dully in the candlelight. Benny stretched out on a rough and crumbling concrete floor, his head turned so sharply to the side his neck might be broken, a satin blindfold hiding his eyes, his blackened lips parted ever so slightly. Sometimes Lucrece wishes for the strength to tear the photographs from the walls of the room, to burn them and this whole goddamned building with her inside. Set a cleansing, erasing fire, as she and Benny had done so long ago. In the life before, two lives before, when she was still a frightened teenage boy called Lucas on the run, with the future stretching out endlessly in front of them. Now the future is a cinder-block wall that she could touch if she had the nerve, a cold dead end to the ever-narrowing avenue of her life.

But Lucrece knows she doesn't have the nerve, the strength to make that final gesture, to close the distance dividing her from her brother and put an end to the loneliness. She has the strength to bear this pain forever if necessary, and the strength to hold these memories, and she will ask nothing more of herself.

The clock on the chiffonier ticks off the last minute before midnight. Lucrece sits up straight and continues to pretend that she's only waiting for Benny to come home.

The setting sun was a hazy fireball sinking into the vast expanse of Lake Pontchartrain as the bus carrying Benjamin and Lucas crossed the causeway they thought would never end. It was like something from a fairy tale, something from one of the books gone to ash in Isolde's library, a bridge spanning the gap between their childhood and the dangerous, wonderful city that lay ahead.

At that moment Lucas leaned dose to whisper into his brother's ear the only thing he'd ever kept from his twin, the one secret so heavy he'd never imagined it would ever become words and cross his lips. But he understood that there was a wild magic in this crossing, and if he didn't speak it then, it might stay locked inside him forever. And after it was out, Benjamin only smiled his easy smile and kissed his brother on the cheek.

"Did you think we didn't
know?'
he said, and Lucas was too shocked to answer, too overwhelmed by his confession and Benjamin's casual response, by the world slipping past so fast outside the window of the bus. "Well, we knew. We thought you
knew
we knew."