The Marbled Swarm Read online

  In fact, my childhood was so cornered by the art my father bought and believed more advantageous than our furniture, it’s quite likely I was brainwashed by those stationary ghouls into an artful work of human whose charms are similarly thin and geared to vex, and who, like their so-called post-

  conceptualist creators, thinks any matters of the heart, especially mine but anyone’s will do, are too uncool to represent.

  There were dirt roads everywhere we looked, but they inevitably veered not into helpful clots of trees but through endless blocks of maybe ankle-high wild grasses and the midget crops of nearby farmers.

  Had it been the winter, I might have gambled, viewed the trunk as something more romantic, say the bottom of a well where Serge had fallen, and chanted, “Stay with us, buddy,” or some other futile pleasantry.

  If Serge had died before we reached the streets of Paris, I would have more than compensated with his slack-jawed shell. To speak somewhat frankly, every boy I’ve known as well as killed has struck me as his corpse’s baby picture.

  Still, even a mild summer day is no preservative, and dead boys aren’t exactly wheels of brie, however much they might smell the same eventually.

  When Serge’s lonesome taps grew less important than his wheezing, I told Azmir that if he wished to fuck an ass with any sassiness at all, we should save its owner now and cross our fingers that, if anyone drove past, he would be gay enough to think someone as cute as me could do no wrong.

  Azmir swerved our car onto the roadside, causing me to grasp the nearest handle and Serge to bang around and yowl inside his can.

  To make the transfer look bewildering, we needed to employ a sleight of hand. While I can spin a tricky story, Serge was more than just a word on that occasion. Luckily, dust is basically a rustic fog unless you’re scientific, so Azmir stomped the brakes, which blasted out a semi-decent cloud cover.

  We jumped outside then coughed and blinked our way back to the trunk, where, after leaving two or three new nasty scratches, Azmir stabbed the key into the lock. As the lid was drifting open, we grabbed two fistfuls, raised the shredding bundle, and cantered to the nearest door.

  So, Serge would live to see another morning, as they say. Well, if we’re to speak of what he saw in bold quotation marks, I’d guess his body might have sensed the sun, then signaled “morning” to his brain, and even that conjecture’s wild since, if I’m remembering correctly, we would have needed a forensics handbook to be certain it was him.

  One of Serge’s eyes was getting lost in the confusion of its fattening lids. He had a boxer’s coin-purse gash beneath the same eye, and his nose was blowing ruddy bubbles. One front tooth was chipped in half, and its twin, while still intact, was tumbling on his tongue until it washed up on his blobby lower lip.

  He would touch the Xmas pattern on his sweater very lightly, then yelp as if the little pines were shorting outlets, so I think he had fractured ribs. Most of one black jeans leg had been torn away, baring a thigh and calf whose faded scrapes were his responsibility, and a bleeding, crooked knee that surely wasn’t.

  Can we agree that, had the next few hours passed routinely, I would have asked Azmir to use the Citroën’s GPS and fetch the nearest doctor’s office? I might have spent the hurried drive there begging Serge’s pardon and surrendering, oh, money or a rain check in return for his silence on the matter.

  Now, were I gay or, if you insist, entirely gay, I would have . . . well, you tell me. I’m not gay enough to know. Were I to take a guess, it would be all of the above, plus some fiery disappointment upon finding such an aftermath in such a tempting spot.

  Picture a movie star who draws you to the cineplex however poor his films’ reviews because you’d rather watch him change his shirt in silhouette in any context than mollify his critics. Now, recall the lavish masturbation he imposed on you, or all the time you wasted stalking him, if you went that insane.

  Now, imagine it’s late at night in the Marais. You’re walking home from . . . what’s that skeezy club . . . Le Depot, where, true to form, anyone who’d cruised you wasn’t anything like him. In one last bid to meet his counterpart, you try the hotbed of Passage de Retz, and, as though its yellowed lamps were magic wands, the very actor you would die to fuck is lurking in a doorway.

  He’s shockingly petit, and, judging by his lumpen build, perhaps the offspring of at least one midget parent. Having arrived without an airbrush, his boney cheeks and poring eyes are geographical data in a countryside of acne, and the hand that slid thin gold bands down your imaginary finger is littered with rings and bling and scrubbing a penis you would hardly even notice otherwise.

  When he spots your shadow, or rather any human shadow, he whispers, “Fuck me” or “I want to fuck you” or whatever. Once upon a time, you’d dreamt of saving him from death, but, and please be honest, now that his irksome modesty on-screen is such a head slapper, wouldn’t hundreds of knife wounds serve a greater purpose, assuming the coast is clear?

  Granted, that point of comparison got swept away with my effusiveness.

  Point is, I’m complicated, or, rather, there’s a strangely wending path between what I intend to say and what I gather I am thinking. I’ve always been this jumbled, even when my speech patterns employed a smaller engine and I thought about my weirdness in highly critical ways.

  You’ll have noticed I tell stories in a high-strung, flighty, tonally unstable rant, no sooner flashing you a secret entrance than pretending no such route exists, twittering when there’s bad news, and polishing my outbursts. Flawed and mutually shortchanging as the method may be, this is the only way I know how to engage what I’ve done with due respect and keep you somewhat agog simultaneously.

  I’ve gotten lost, and so have you. I’m not as witty as I wish, and you’re nowhere near as patient with my heaping phrases as I evidently am.

  I learned this quote-unquote exalted style of speaking from my father, who originally cooked it up after several early business trips around the Western world. He nicknamed it “the marbled swarm,” which I agree is a cumbrous mouthful, and its ostensible allure received a decent portion of the credit for accruing his, now my, billions.

  One night when I was thirteen years old, he passed along the recipe, which I should have written down, but I’d just come home zonked on one too many hits of Ecstacy, and he was tipsy from a course of Chardonnays, so he could barely have enunciated the instructions in any case.

  If you’re curious, memory tells me that this voice was generated from a dollop of the haughty triple-speak British royals employ to keep their hearts reclusive, some of the tricked, incautious slang that dumbs down young Americans, a dollop of the stiff, tongue-twisting, jammed-up sentence structure and related terseness that comes with being German, some quisling, dogmatic Dutch retorts, and a few other international ingredients I didn’t catch, which is the central problem with my scrappier version, all of which my father blended smoothly into his mellifluous French.

  The marbled swarm is spoken at a taxing pace in trains of sticky sentences that round up thoughts as broadly as a vacuum. Ideally, its tedium is counteracted by linguistic decorations, with which the speaker can design the spiel to his requirements. The result, according to this mode’s inventor, is that one’s speech becomes an entity as open-ended as the air it fills and yet as dangerous to travel as a cluttered, unlit room in which someone has hidden, say, a billion euros.

  My father used the marbled swarm to . . . well, I was going to say become a wealthy man, and that is true, but to say he ruined my life would be as accurate.

  My marbled swarm is more of an atonal, fussy bleat—somewhat marbled yet far too frozen tight and thinned by my loquaciousness to do the swarming it implies. Still, it seems to be a sleeper hit with guys my age and younger, or at least with the majority who tune in once they’re weakened by my stunning looks.

  For this fan base, my dry, chiseled meanderings seem to add a fleeting touch of magic to a face whose knee-jerk beauty might
be too digestible. Long story short, had my father not half taught me to talk like this, I might instead be leering up at you from the cover of Vogue or, ugh, Tétu.

  To ­people who knew my father well, say Azmir and several others you’ll be meeting, I am little more than his subpar impressionist—a miscast, bargain-basement chip off the veritable old block, à la, say, Hayden Christensen’s wooden rendition of Anakin Skywalker.

  I won’t refute that I’m a busker of my father’s genius. Still, to give myself some credit, his wizardry was called for by his dull, unhelpful visage, which was frequently compared to Gérard Jugnot’s, if you know him, whereas it could be argued I need a far less charismatic soundtrack.

  As for how my cover version sits with you who lack that crucial additive, I really couldn’t guess and ultimately fear the worst, but . . . fine, I’ll go as blunt as the sound bite to which my life will be reduced by the same journalists who fashion headlines from its trail of circumstantial evidence.

  I’m what you’d call a cannibal, or, rather, I’m the figurehead, curator, human bankroll, and most willing if not wanton of a clique of cannibals, our exact number depending on who happens to be horny and/or hungry and/or situated in Paris or still alive at any given moment.

  Christophe, mid-forties, is primarily a sadist, and were embroidering the lexicon of human screams a sport, he’d be a gladiator, but, at least until we’re jailed, he’s best known to those who’ve never met him as the cosmetic surgeon of choice for French celebrities and government officials.

  His son Claude—and that doubled name is problematic, I agree—was a nineteen-year-old ballet dancer who became a member of our team for several hours, but since sixty of his kilos were on the menu at the time, his designation as a chum is strictly for sticklers.

  François, fifty-something, is a noted chef whose “bitter” cooking packs the four-star restaurant L’Astrance. At first, he saw mankind as a bonanza, as ground too hallowed not to break, and he used our dinner prattle as a critique, but, after mastering his spin on what he calls this “cult” cuisine, he’s much more tolerable personally.

  His sons Olivier and Didier round—or, in Didier’s case, and, come to think of it, Olivier’s as well, rounded—out our inner circle.

  Olivier, my age but Japanese, was hungrier for gory films than body parts. He would watch them so incessantly without uncalled-for blinks or bathroom breaks that, although I never asked, I assume he saw the tactile aspect of our cookouts as a further step in entertainment history akin to IMAX 3D.

  Didier struck inattentive strangers as a kind of Pugsly trapped within some all-male Addams Family, but, since he lived for everyone’s protection in a cage, he was really more our mascot. By this moment in my story, both Olivier and he have been digested, unless, that is, you ever stumble on my chateau and note two quadrants of the yard that seem peculiarly indented, in which case bingo.

  Barring François, the others stay around for dinner to be social more than anything else.

  I won’t claim I don’t enjoy our aperitif-like orgies, and, if you could view the CDRs, you might quibble with my need to watch the rapes with folded arms, but I would defy you to call me a dispassionate wallflower.

  Everyone knows Shakespeare’s bon mot wherein a loved one is colluded with a summer’s day. Well, I will hazard an offshoot whereby the so-called loved one is a kid like Serge who isn’t lovable at all, and the summer’s day is instead a flower, say a rose too odorous to leave unsniffed in, oh, the Luxembourg Gardens.

  For some, the drives to dock one’s face in boys or plants are interchangeable. My urge, you see, is not to flavor my receptors with some pretty thing’s most scented chasm. Rather, my nosedives bind a bee’s gluttonous raiding with the scrutinizing glances of a scissors-laden florist.

  So, as I handed Serge some tissues, ice, an Evian, and one more painkiller than was provident to swallow, and even as I feared my colleagues’ whining when I brought this mess into my loft, I personally found him far more pornographic, if such a scoured term can handle that.

  He’d downed the pain pills, wrapped two ice cubes in a tissue and clamped the bundle to his eye, but reaching for his knee transformed his ribs into tormentors, so I was icing that injury while steadying the leg for all intents and purposes.

  Serge had the wishy-washy leg of someone fractionally his age, with skin as giving as a sandy beach and so puddled on the bone, a slap might well have splashed white glops all over everything, which I would guess sounds nauseating if you think of legs as more than entrées in the making.

  Serge might have thought I was caressing him were I not just thrilled enough to have deliberately massaged that leg, at least unconsciously.

  “When I’m depressed, everything’s a joke to me, and no one thinks my jokes are funny, and I’m depressed right now, just to warn you,” he said.

  Back when Serge was a more kempt, undamaged fashion plate, the gloomy tenor of his voice had raised my eyebrow in suspicion. It felt accessorized, as fake as the elation in a clown’s honking falsetto, but whether Serge was still a broadcast or was digging deep seemed immaterial.

  “It will no doubt please you that these pills appear to be working,” he said.

  When I’m turned on, as you’d put it, and I was—even if my mind feels like a boulder resting on your shoulders, you’d love what I was feeling—I can sound unusually off the cuff, even kiss-ass. Still, keep in mind my praise is never kinder to its wellspring than a classic film’s ten thousandth rave review.

  Anyway, I lavished many adjectives on Serge’s leg, albeit terms more suited to a golden-throated butcher than his sweetheart.

  Mostly for effect, I gripped the tattered jeans and ripped them open to his belt—and it’s fortunate that when one’s strength is taxed, a strained expression can look horny if one adds at least a crooked smile—then snuck one hand inside his underwear, which were black and flecked with tiny skulls if that seems relevant.

  I told Serge if he were worried that his negligible penis would undercut him, he absolutely shouldn’t, and that I was lingering and fingering because its toastiness encouraged me.

  “Thanks, I guess,” he whispered, then, perhaps undone by that reminder of his childishness, he started crying. Technically, I think you would have called it a wail or even bray.

  Azmir, who had been studying the road inside a bobbing, skull-shaped discotheque juiced by some kerplunking play-list on his iPod, heard a trace of Serge’s bawling, fished out an earphone, and yelled at me to turn him down.

  “I just wanted you to rape me,” Serge squawked. “Not once but even endlessly. I don’t mean ‘endlessly’ because I think I’m worth the work involved. I just thought or dreamt or what the fuck that when you said ‘Not yet,’ you meant a month or even years from now.”

  I told him “yet” had meant tomorrow, but, were he to count it down in screams instead of days, it would feel more like a year.

  “It’s not that I’m some giant fan of sex,” Serge continued. “Its blaze of glory status is the world’s most bullshit lie, if you ask me, even bigger than the hoax involving Santa Claus, but rape has . . . I don’t know, a kind of . . . something else, at least when you imagine it.”

  I asked if, to his mind, being raped so frequently had coined this favoritism.

  “Well, there are these seven . . . wait, nine guys I used to chat with who, if I know them, and I don’t, probably tell their friends they raped some Emo loser,” he said.

  “It’s true when we were instant messaging, they were all, like, ‘Rape, rape, pound your ass, and blah blah blah, you little whore.’ But when they saw . . . that I was serious, it was all, like, ‘You shouldn’t cut yourself, you’re really nice,’ and then they’d get my face alone and maybe jack off in my mouth, if I was lucky.

  “I just . . . was happy that you didn’t act all psychiatric, and . . . you remind me of my brother, which I know is sick, but . . . God, I sound like the Elephant Man.”

  At that, the car swerved side
ways, rocking and skidding down the roadside. Azmir, who’d started yelling in some language that sounds scarier than French, held the steering wheel with one hand, turned around, and threw a punch that squashed the racket out of Serge’s face, then followed it with three or four more blows that left the boy’s head lolling on the car’s rear deck and splashed a bloody image of his face over the tinted glass above.

  There are experts in the field of art who claim a child or alien from outer space would know van Gogh is greater than realistic painters without knowing he was a suffering lunatic. Not that growing up in a museum gave me expertise, but Serge’s swelling, slushy face made his cuter one seem too conformist, and I swear his pain and trouble breathing weren’t the differentials.

  I tugged out several tissues, grabbed some ice cubes, and made two chilly wads, then dug them into his palms, leaned those hands against his lips and nostrils, and asked the gory mess if Serge could speak.

  “I think . . . with a lot of effort . . . yes,” replied a soggy whisper.

  I suggested that, if he had questions, he should pose them now rather than later for reasons I would spare him.

  “Where am I going?” he asked.

  I explained that he would shortly meet some friends of mine, and, were past events with like beginnings symptomatic, there would follow an impromptu show spotlighting him.

  He might be nude or over-dressed in one of several dozen costumes that are saved for such occasions and whose simulacrums range from a convincing grizzly bear to vintage military garb to all variety of slutty drag. Thus ritzed up, he might dance and sing and tell some jokes and read poetry aloud and give each of us a lap dance.

  Ideally, my friends would then be starry-eyed enough to rape him as an encore, which, according to the definition of “rape” I was employing, included both the violent penetration he would expect as well as creepier acts that he would dislike tremendously and barely live through.