Plastic Jesus by Poppy Z. Brite Page A

steel, was Seth.
    He went right to the edge of the table, looked down into Seth's face. The lips were drawn tightly across the teeth in a grimace of surprise or pain, or perhaps only a reflex of rigor mortis. The eyes were closed, the lids slack. Only with his eyes closed had Seth ever looked at peace. He didn't look at peace now.
    â€œAll right, old man,” said Peyton. “It'll be all right.” He touched Seth's cheek. It was cold and tacky with blood. Seth's jacket and shirt had been cut or torn off in the efforts to stop the bleeding, which must have been like trying to stem the flow of Niagara Falls. His arms hung oddly in their sockets. His chest was covered with a layer of half-dried arterial blood like red stained glass. The entry wounds made by the bullets were small, dark, not so terrible. Peyton couldn't see any of the exit wounds.
    â€œCould I have a towel, please?” he asked one of the morgue attendants.
    â€œSir?"
    â€œA towel. And some water. I want to wash the blood off of him."
    â€œYou don't have to do that, sir, we can—"
    â€œI want to do it."
    Something in his tone must have convinced the attendant he was serious, or maybe morgue people were just used to dealing with the half-crazy bereaved. At any rate, Peyton was brought a towel and a basin of warm water, and they left him alone while he washed the blood from Seth's face and chest. While he took a comb from his own pocket and combed as much of it as possible out of Seth's hair. While he stood for a long time beside the metal table, one hand gripping its edge very tightly, the other entwined in Seth's stiffening fingers.
    He stayed at the hospital all night. He could not bear to go home yet, could not bear the throngs that would have gathered now outside the apartment building, carrying flowers, crying, singing Seth's songs. The very force of their sympathy might kill him. He rode the next morning in the hearse to Long Island, Seth in a plain casket in the back, and sat in the waiting salon of the crematorium for a few hours. Only then, with the white cardboard box of ashes like an eternal weight on his lap, did Peyton return to the home he had shared with Seth.
    He took phone calls, took pills, slept a lot. He learned what he could of the killer, Ray Brinker. The man was described by the media as a fundamentalist Christian who deplored the political and social changes Seth had wrought in the world. He invoked the specter of AIDS as God's punishment upon homosexuals, and suggested that Seth had been a vector for the disease. His most-quoted public statement to date was, “I wish I could have killed him before he got this far."
    Peyton allotted himself a certain amount of time to regain the poise he would need for the last thing he had to do. When he had reached that point, he called the man he believed could help him.

    * * * *

    Dr. Jonathan Pumphrey was the embodiment of WASPiness, if a slightly effete version thereof. His suits, always perfectly pressed, were Paul Stuart, his briefcase Mark Cross. Once, egged on by his boyfriend Rick, he had bought a black Valentine suit, but he never wore it. His blonde hair, undarkened since childhood, parted on the left and fell engagingly over his forehead. He did not mind at all that he stood only five-foot-nine in his glossy Gucci loafers, for he felt that being small and neat was infinitely preferable to being big and sloppy.
    He'd always thought of Seth Grealy as big and sloppy, even though the man really hadn't been. Seth was quite tall, even rather shambling, but he always looked clean. It was his presence that was big and sloppy; it sloshed everywhere, got all over everything, made him seem larger than he was. Jonathan had heard that very famous people often had such an exaggerated presence, but until today, Seth Grealy was the only mega-celebrity he'd ever met. Now he was about to meet another: Peyton Masters, Seth's bereaved musical partner and lover, was in his waiting