The Marbled Swarm Read online

  You’re right to guess I half considered giving Serge’s neediness priority, or, rather, right to guess my mind returned to times when, not yet knowing myself in the slightest, I’d done nothing but convince myself I was in love with one cute, suicidal basket case after another.

  Truth is, my wealth is psychological as well as moneyed, and, in order to spare you some crushing verbiage, I’ll ask you to witness my cruel-in-quotes decision for yourself and trust me when I say the bitch just simply had to die.

  I told Serge quite succinctly that a death so premature would need evidence more damning than two nasty-looking arms, whereupon he literally snapped his fingers at the brightness of a dawning thought, then confessed to having murdered Claude.

  His rambling, hit-or-miss admission was tellingly impromptu, but I feigned a look of outrage, then furiously but carefully pried the offered razor blade from the floor’s uneven stonework.

  I held it to his throat, then, in a stroke of semi-genius that might warrant your applause were it not so self-serving, I caught his nerve-wracked eyes, then widened mine as if I’d just seen my own reflection there and found it damning.

  My shaky hand released the blade and flopped onto his shoulder, then slipped and fell again onto the outcrop of his ass. In the guise of restive gayness, my fingertips were drafted in as spies, distinguishing the tight jeans’s CGI from the more honest ass secreted in their shadow, bypassing the “ass” that owed its charm to being squished and repositioned to find the one that didn’t deserve to be held hostage and strangled.

  “Not yet,” I said softly.

  Serge was sent back to the garden, where I agreed to reappear after an interval sustained enough to quell suspicion. Before he turned to leave, I withdrew my iPhone, initiated camera mode, and, declaring this a moment that demanded preservation, I captured him from every angle, including aerial.

  By the time I joined the family in the garden, had my flute glass half filled with a slightly sour champagne grown and bottled in the region, and clinked their glasses’ rims, I’d sent the photos to three . . . well, call them my associates for now.

  Serge seemed . . . different—identical enough to be a twin but so sprightly as to seem fraternal. He was swigging bubbly and regaling us with gross-out jokes more suited to a child both half his age and a hundred times more outwardly conventional. In and of itself, the switcheroo might have had the vexing charm of a charade, were his eyes not wallowing in mine.

  I quickly sent a text that hailed my driver from his bar or roadside, announced a prior appointment, and said I’d have my ­people draft a contract as required and send it to their ­people.

  I offered them a warm, all-business hand. Claire seemed too tipsy to decipher it. Serge mouthed “call me later” and nearly squeezed it lifeless. Jean-Paul shooed the hand away with what seemed a secretive if kindly offer to escort me to my vehicle.

  No sooner had a door banished the outdoors to a set of murals in the windows than Jean-Paul began to voice a most astonishing internal monologue.

  To give you the framework, for it was lengthy, the “miraculous” return to form—or so he decreed it, complete with the quotation marks I’ve included—of “cheerful” Serge had not only been noted but enormously appreciated, as had my instigation.

  “You’d never guess,” he said, “but Serge was once the most overly excited and irritating child one could imagine. . . .”

  It seems a meticulous hodgepodge of medications had made the boy marginally more tolerable, and the birthday present of a drum set had helped to siphon off a portion. But when his beloved brother, Claude, whose tastes and mannerisms he had mirrored and imitated almost since birth, was led astray into the dreaded Emo nonsense by an evil girlfriend, weak-willed Serge had naturally jumped the ship of reason along with him.

  Suddenly, the mood swings that Jean-Paul had scrupulously tamped away became the truth, or so the boy proclaimed, and anyone hoping to drug him from his miseries was nothing better than a censor.

  When Claude’s corrupting girlfriend finally killed herself, that more pragmatic son had hung his spooky outfit in a closet like an American child on November 1. Serge, however, viewed Claude’s return to baggy T-shirts and high-waisted jeans not as maturity in motion but as surrender. Thus, the only hero and positive influence who’d ever quelled Serge’s Tesla coil–like infrastructure was displaced until . . . and here Jean-Paul’s hand alighted on my shoulder, squeezing.

  “Understand I’m just a dilettantish rich kid,” I ventured, “but Serge’s fondness for me, or rather its velocity, let’s say, combined with the background information you’ve provided, leads me to risk causing you offense when I ask if, well, Claude might not have been molesting him, perhaps even consensually.”

  “There are those who find my son attractive,” Jean-Paul replied after a moment’s thought. “But I find them sorely lacking in appreciation for his enfeebled state, not to mention Claire’s and mine.”

  “Perhaps they’re more objective,” I said carefully. “One could see a boy with issues, gauge the price and costs of getting laid at his expense, and decide, would one more mental problem make a difference?”

  “Serge told us you’ve offered him a job,” Jean-Paul said before exhaling in . . . discomfort, I would guess. “I’m tempted to include him in the price of the chateau, along with any furniture you’d like.”

  A chortle seemed to be in order, so I unleashed a tidy one. “If human trafficking were legal, I might say you’ve got a deal,” I replied in a tone as dry as his.

  “Trust me,” he said, “my wife and I won’t be alerting the authorities.”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I responded. “Perhaps I’ll pick my lawyer’s brain about the current laws governing adoption. Even so, let’s say I could accept him and, hypothetically, there came a day when my company’s nourishment paled in light of suicide’s problem-solving genius, and Serge just, well, up and . . . disappeared entirely? Any perks I might have gained from the arrangement would be used against me.”

  Jean-Paul’s eyes were very busy with something or other in the room, but when I turned to appraise my competition, it was a wall no catchier than the quarter’s other bulwarks, and perhaps even less so.

  “If you have a minute,” he said, “I’d like to show you something else about our . . . excuse me, your chateau. You seemed to feel at home in Claude’s room. Why not enjoy it at your leisure, and I’ll go separate my wife and Serge, then join you.”

  After a refresher course vis-à-vis the room’s location, I headed up the central staircase, pausing every other step to view one of the family’s photographic portraits, which decorated my ascent in a diagonal, salon-style row.

  All but one of the portraits seemed to predate Serge’s Emo phase, and, to make what I’ll admit is an offhand judgment, I understood Jean-Paul’s unease at the reemergence of that crazy-looking, boisterous child.

  He seemed a mugging headache of a creature, each twisted face and flipped bird more intolerable than the next. That said, never having faced his line of fire, my daydreams were allowed to be indecent, and I was struck, to use my own term—if no doubt quote-unquote “turned on” in yours—by . . . aspects of the boy—genetic offshoots or what have you—that perhaps—and even that “perhaps” is offered lightly—might only have impressed the coach at his ecole or pleased their family pediatrician.

  I found Claude’s room casually enough, and, seeing nothing new, withdrew every drawer from the antique desk, laying them side by side upon the bed and rifling through their messy contents.

  It took several layers of old homework, birthday cards, and ticket stubs for disappointing concerts before the smallest of the drawers produced something inexplicable in the form of five or six unopened envelopes addressed simply to The Liar.

  I tore one’s edge and winnowed out its letter. Although unsigned, the seismic script appeared to finger Serge’s hand, and while the writing blackened into folk art every time it promised to ge
t juicy, the author’s point was unmistakable.

  I have a tendency to overanalyze, which must be back-page news by now. On the plus side, you’ve witnessed how this helped me parry with Jean-Paul, but, more often than not, I deal with boys, and usually screaming, pleading ones at that. Hence, I can waste untold quarter hours seeking inference within inference where none exists at all.

  Rather than transcribe my wordy thinking, let me scrape into the future while presaging this foreshortened moment with the caveat that, in time, the letter in question would lend itself multiple interpretations before its meaning disintegrated entirely, like when human bones are dunked in vats of acid.

  I heard the sound of carpet being crushed and deftly stuffed the envelopes into my pocket, expecting to turn my angelic smile upon Jean-Paul. Instead, it was a woozy, slurring Serge who nearly tripped into the bedroom, did a pratfall on the bed, and restarted our one-sided handshake in the garden, but with my crotch as the recipient.

  Were I even half as gay as you imagine, I might have rearranged my schedule for the next few days and fucked Serge until his epidermal layer collapsed around his neck like an old white sock. Not that I’ll claim such a scenario is utterly beyond me, at least as an exploratory prologue, and . . . fine, I’ll go ahead and say what I’ve been hesitant to spill for fear you’ll simplify me prematurely.

  Truth is, Serge’s body, albeit mostly guesswork and packaging-related magic at that stage, had been gnawing—well, to be more honest, being gnawed at in absentia—long before my hunches were corroborated by a certain family photo of Serge et al. reclining on the beach, which I only didn’t mention when I was standing on the stairs because erections make me fumbly.

  I’ll accept that gnawing’s impact on the horrors he had coming just so long as, in return, you get the thought that I’m some average child molester out of your conjectures right now. I promise if you grant me that inch, you’ll feel roundly less embarrassed a dozen pages from now.

  For all their sloppiness, Serge’s fingers could have been a master potter’s and my crotch their spinning wheel. In fact, I might have clipped two of his fingers to my zipper had I not noticed a strange, grinding metallic sound I didn’t recognize offhand.

  A bedroom wall was in the process of discoloring. Given the gray and stormy cast of the newer marking, I initially mistook it for a shadow, perhaps one cast by us. Then it grew, quickly engulfing the very wall where Jean-Paul claimed to have seen Claude’s ghost, whereupon it seemed less a shadow than a mirror that reflected not the room but some malingering counterpart.

  I stilled Serge’s busy hand, then roughly turned his head until our viewpoints were in line. By then the wall’s effects had, well, perhaps “coagulated” is the term, into an image that so obviously depicted Claude in his classic Emo era, even a relative bystander like myself would have sworn to it on camera.

  He was floating, I suppose, since his misty-looking Keds pedaled air several centimeters from the floor. He approached us in theory, yet seemed as wedded to the wall as any movie to its screen, so, in a sense, he was marching harmlessly in place, but with the troubling determination of a “walking” mime.

  I’d never seen a ghost, nor thought death gives its inmates visitation rights. Still, I’d watched my share of so-called paranormal sighting clips on YouTube when bored enough, and, I’m sorry, but I’d never seen a ghost show up anywhere, no matter how opulent the haunted house, in full color and in high-definition like this supposed Claude.

  “If he’d looked like that when I killed him, I wouldn’t have done it,” Serge slurred. “I wonder what it means.”

  Suddenly, as though incensed or bored by Serge’s quibbling, the apparition, well, less dematerialized, as one expects of thinning fog, than switched off, lamp-like, accompanied by the same muffled, grinding noise I’d heard earlier.

  Now, a hefty chunk of wall rattled free of its foundations. Reborn as a crude door, it swung open to expose a large and very bare-boned closet, although the vestibule seemed less a niche set aside for worldly extras than a kind of world unto its own, no more servile to the bedroom than an attic is a secondary ceiling.

  Standing in the heart of this compartment, partly obscured by viscid dust, whose fog-like whirling briefly lent him the aura of, say, the aging Johnny Hallyday in concert, was a disheveled Jean-Paul, his eyes glaring at his audience of two.

  “Is that true, Serge?” he asked evenly, the kind of evenness that would allow brain surgeons to win every steady hands contest if such a prize existed.

  By then, my eyes had grown conditioned to the weakened light inside the inlet, or at least enough to parse a strange black lump of shadow on the floor as an old Sanyo projection TV circa the early ’90s. I might have thought its silhouette was Jean-Paul’s robotic Egor were I three years old and had I not grown up watching a television of its very make and model.

  In that second, the so-called ghost was debunked, its molecules re-boxed, and its perpetrator busted.

  I was so preoccupied that, by the time I felt the mattress roil and quake beneath me, it was an aftershock. Serge had disappeared, leaving only an anemic stink of champagne crossed with whiffs of hair gel, and most likely a commotion that was happening down the hall.

  Jean-Paul looked strangely nonplussed for a man who’d turned a boring wall into a channel, much less a father who’d just seen an alleged killer in his own child’s face.

  I hardly knew which newfound thing to question first, but while the vestiges of Serge’s fingering nearly dug my hand into the pocket full of letters, then fanned them like a winning hand of cards, erotica, as should be clear by now, cannot compete for my affections with an interest in subverting its effect.

  Allow me to edit Jean-Paul’s press conference to smithereens because, while its gist does need to fortify your intake, this story will be headier if it leapfrogs this peculiar episode. Plus, I need to start herding this section back to Paris.

  As for Serge’s guilty plea regarding Claude’s death, Jean-Paul pronounced it destitute. The corpse’s single injury had been a gash in the head’s corroded crown. Thus, Serge, whose height failed his older brother’s by at least half a meter, would have had to lie in wait with a ladder or have perched amid the treetops with a slingshot, and his restrictive jeans alone would have prevented that.

  As for the ghost trick, it was artless enough. To function as a door, the mobile portion of the wall had been hollowed out—its consistency akin to stretched and painted canvas. Thus, any image projected at its homely, somewhat porous underside seeped into the bedroom and degraded mystically enough.

  As for why the ruse was called for, it seems Jean-Paul had wildly overdrawn the family’s bank account for reasons he left blank. The chateau’s value formed the only refill, but Claire would never have agreed to sell without discovering his debt, a bombshell he said he simply couldn’t chance.

  Fortunately, Claire blamed ghosts for every misplaced car key, so he’d put that quirk and their tragedy together, asked their hysterical housekeeper to clean Claude’s room, switched on the projector, then run to investigate her screaming and yelled his head off too.

  Once Claire was scared into a mumbling insomniac for several days, Jean-Paul had casually reminded her that Claude’s last known words were, “Die, you fucking bitch,” whereupon the chateau was on the market within a week.

  As for the threshold he was standing in, he described it as the lobby of a secret labyrinth, and he invited me inside after a warning that, while I would safely reemerge, my outfit mightn’t, whereupon I crossed the room and stood uncomfortably close as he shut the groaning door behind us.

  Essentially, we were packed inside a wooden box, the sort of grand yet chaste container that must have carted Venus de Milo to the Louvre. In one direction, a second doorway had been sawed with minimal efficiency, and, through it I could see a hallway sculpted from the space between the chateau’s widely separated walls.

  To negotiate this narrow thoroughfare, we had to jerk our
bodies sideways, duck beneath its low-slung grater of a ceiling, then scoot along in little increments, scraping dust from everywhere until we’d inched into another roomy crate.

  Jean-Paul’s fingers traced one wall until they felt a pierce or tiny gap. Once this gouge was capped off with an eye, it became a peephole, round yet not quite circular, like a prostitute’s asshole, that allowed one to spy on a surprising portion of the chateau’s master bedroom and, in my eye’s case, an inhabitant as well, specifically the half-undressed and napping Claire.

  Had my faculties been less congested, I might have seen or thought I’d seen an unknown actor who’d been playing her up to that point. Her long blond locks were flowing down a head-shaped clump of Styrofoam, and the short-haired, topless body snoring on the bed had everything a teenaged boy could use.

  My surprise was such that, as Jean-Paul and I began to venture farther through the maze, I risked a quip about his wife’s androgyny, which he brushed off as a common side effect inside the tunnels, perhaps resulting from a gas leak, whereby the non-secret world could start to look too vivid.

  Another passageway, as crimping as the first but L-shaped and wrapped around a chimney, snuck us to a third, slightly more livable compartment. In truth, were the trek and puzzle to locate it not so testing, I might have guessed a homeless man had set up shop there.

  A metal high stool accessorized this alcove’s peephole. To its right, a plastic garbage can was filled with crumpled papers, each ball graffitied by a hasty, scribbled text. While it’s possible this can’s unpleasant stench came from the gas leak Jean-Paul mentioned, it reeked of sperm.

  Sitting on the stool, I peeked into a room that, while not formally introduced as such, was, between the hogging drum set and an unmade, bloodstained bed, not exactly crying out for Serge’s passport.

  If I had hoped to spot a gun left smoking by our chatter in the basement, and I can’t say that was precisely my intention, the only quirk lay in a checkerboard of posters that occupied one wall. Owing to the angle, I first mistook one poster’s subject for an image of myself, then, as my paranoia eased away, for a dated souvenir from Pierre Clémenti’s youngest days, until I finally realized the boy was Claude, his hair longish but not yet codified by Emo.