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Suko leaned his head against the tall blond man's shoulder and stared out the window of the taxi. The candy panorama of West Hollywood sprawled out before them, neon smeared across hot asphalt, marabou cowboys and rhinestone drag queens posing in the headlights. The cab edged forward, parting the throng like a river, carrying Suko to whatever strange shores of pleasure still lay ahead of him this night.
"Where'd you say you were from?" the man asked. As Suko answered, gentle fingers did something exciting to the inside of his thigh, through his ripped black jeans. The blond man's voice was without accent, almost without inflection.
Of course, no one in L.A. had an accent. Everyone was from somewhere else, but they all strove to hide it, as if they'd slid from the womb craving flavored mineral water and sushi on Melrose. But Suko had met no one else who spoke like this man. His voice was soft and low, nearly a monotone. To Suko it was soothing; any kind of quiet aimed at him was soothng after the circuses of Patpong and Sunset Boulevard, half a world apart but cut from the same bright cacaphonous cloth. Cities of angels: yeah, right. Fallen angels.
They pulled up in front of a shabby apartment building that looked as if it had been modeled after a cardboard box sometime in the 1950s. The man--Justin, Suko remembered, his name was Justin--paid the cabdriver but didn't tip. The cab gunned away from the curb, tires squealing rudely on the cracked asphalt. Justin stumbled backward and bumped into Suko. "Sorry."
"Hey, no problem." That was still a mouthful--his tongue just naturally wanted to rattle off a mai pen rai--but Suko got all the syllables out. Justin smiled, the first time he'd done so since introducing himself. His long skinny fingers closed around Suko's wrist.
"Come on," he said. "It's safer if we go in the back way."
They walked around the corner of the building, under an iron stairwell and past some garbage cans that fairly shimmered with the odor of decay. Suko's foot hit something soft. he looked down, stopped, and backed into Justin. A young black man lay among the stinking cans, his head propped at a painful angle against the wall, his legs sprawled wide.
"Is he dead?" Suko clutched for his Buddha amulet. The man's ghost might still be trapped in this mean alley, looking for living humans to plague. If it wanted to, it could suck out their life essences through their spinal columns like a child sipping soda from a straw. But Justin shook his head. "Just drunk. See, there's an empty bottle by his leg."
"He looks dead."
Justin prodded the black man's thigh with the toe of his loafer. after a moment, the man stirred. His eyes never opened, but his hands twitched and his mouth gaped wide, chewing at the air.
"See?" Justin tugged at Suko's arm. "Come on."
They climbed the metal stairs and entered the building through a fire door wedged open with a flattened Old Milwaukee can. Justin led the way down a hall colored only by shadow and grime, stopped in front of a door identical to all the others but for the number 21 stamped on a metal plate small as an egg, and undid a complicated series of locks. He opened the door a crack and ushered Suko inside, then followed and turned to do up all the locks again.
At once Suko noticed the smell. First there ws only the most delicate tendril, like a pale brown finger tickling the back of his throat; then a wave hit him, powerful and nauseating. It was the smell of the garbage cans downstairs, increased a hundredfold and overlaid with other smells: cooking oil, air freshener, some caustic chemical odor that stung his nostrils. It was the smell of rot. And it filled the apartment.
Justin saw Suko wrinkling his nose. "My refrigerator broke," he said. "Damn landlord says he can't replace it till next week. I just bought a bunch of meat on sale and it all went bad. don't look in the fridge, whatever you do."
"Why you don't--" Suko caught himself. "Why don't you throw it out?"
"Oh..." Justin looked vaguely surprised for a moment. Then he shrugged. "I'll get around to it, I guess. It doesn't bother me much."
He pulled a bottle of rum from somewhere, poured a few inches into a glass already sitting on the countertop and stired in a spponful of sugar. Justin had been impressed by Suko's taste for straight sugared rum back at the Stag, and said he had some expensive Bacardi he wanted Suko to try. Their fingertips kissed as the glass changed hands, and a tiny thrill ran down Suko's spine. Justin was a little weird, but Suko could handle that, no problem. And there was a definite sexual charge between them. Suko felt sure the rest of the night would swarm with flavors and sensations, fireworks and roses.
Justin watched Suko sip the rum. His eyes were an odd, deep lilac-blue, a color that Suko had never seen before in the endless spectrum of American eyes. The liquor tasted faintly bitter beneath the sugar, as if the glass weren't quite clean. Again Suko could deal. A clean glass at the Hi-Way Bar on Patpong 3 was a rare find.
"Do you want to sip some weed?"Justin asked when Suko had polished off an inch of Bacardi.
"Sure."
"It's in the bedroom."Suko was ready to follow him there, but Justin said,"I'll get it." and hurried out of the kitchen. Suko heard him banging about in the other room, opening and shutting a great many drawers.
Suko drank more rum. He glanced sideways at the refrigerator, a modern momolith of shining harvest gold, without the cozy clutter he had seen decorating the fridges of others: memo boards, shopping lists, food shaped magnets trapping snapshots or newspaper cartoons. It gave off a nearly impercetable hum, the sound of a motor running smoothly. And the smell of decay seemed to emanate from all around the apartment, not just the fridge. Could it really be broken?
He grabbed the door handle and tugged. The seal sucked softly back for a second, then the door swung wide and the refrigerator light clicked on.
A fresh wave of rot washed over him. Maybe Justin hadn't been lying about meat gone bad. The contents of the fridge were meager and depressing: a decimated twelvepack of cheap beer, a crusted jar of Guldan's Spicy Brown mustard, several lumpy packages wrapped in foil. A residue of rusty red on the bottom shelf like juice that might leak out of a meat tray. And pushed far to the back, a large Tupperware cake server, incongruous among the slim batchelor pickings.
Suko touched one of the beer cans. It was icy cold.
Something inside the cake server was moving. He could just make out its faint shadowy convulsions through the opaque plastic.
Suko slammed the door and stumbled away. Justin was just coming back in. He gripped Suko's arms, stared into his face. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing--I--"
"Did you open the fridge?"
"No!"
Justin shook him. The strange lilac eyes had gone muddy, the handsome features twisted into a mean mask. "Did you open the fucking fridge?"Suko felt droplets of spit land on his face, his lips. He wished miserably that they could have gotten there some other way, any way but this. He had wanted to make love with this man.
"DID YOU--"
"NO!!!"
Suko thought he might cry. At the same time he had begun to feel remote, far away fromthe ugly scene, as if he were floating in a corner watching it but not caring much what happened. It must be the rum. But it wasn't like being drunk; that was a familiar feeling. This was more like the time Noy had convinced him to take two Valiums. An hour after swallowing the little yellow wafers, Suko had watched Noy suck him off from a million miles away, wondering why anyone ever got excited about this, wondering why anyone ever got excited about anything.
He had hated the feeling then. He hated it more now, because it was pulling him down.
He was afraid it might be the last thing he ever felt.
He was afraid it might not be.
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