The Marbled Swarm Read online

  Need I even say that, at least in his scanned drawings I found online, had some fashion designer thought to translate them into couture, Alfonse’s body could have smoothed them into leotards.

  In the weeks since Alfonse muscled through the sheen of my resemblance, he’d been cast as the romantic lead in every reverie I concocted. There wasn’t a harmful prank or convoluted fuckfest that his imaginary figment hadn’t rehearsed to a Kubrickian finish, but it wasn’t until Freeh’s ill-starred masterstroke hit home that I’d made my final cut.

  I hadn’t chewed and swallowed anyone as of the period in question, but I’d felt and thought everything violent and ruinous of my clothing this side of actually combusting into a pack of hungry tigers every time I got a hard-on.

  I’d never even cooked myself an omelet. The illusory skin wedged between my fairyland of teeth would puncture like a bubble, tear from each anatomy with a pleasant-sounding rip, and be transformed by my obedient taste buds from knotty, sopping flesh and muscle into a favorite food, which at that time was spaghetti bolognaise.

  Having preemptively tagged myself as gay, I was still too in thrall to the same-sex party line that an acrobatic fuck was the mom and pop of making out, and any partnership more offbeat, much less one that challenged laws both French and biblical, constituted one’s self-hatred.

  By the way, I just had an awful thought—one you’ve no doubt been musing on for pages. Christ, I do go on, is what I thought, and my fingers literally tensed above the keyboard.

  Rather than offer you some insincere apology, I’ll make a slightly premature admission that, if you think I’ve dragged my story from its bearings—namely, the serpentine chateau, its secretive owner, his doomed son Serge—and that I’ve lost my proper place within it as your talky host—you’re . . . half wrong.

  Yes, this recent blather is a strike against my toned-down marbled swarm, but it’s also an assurance of my honesty, even when, as I’ve come to know and you will understand eventually, I was less finding my true self back then or living day to day in the democratic sense than enacting a “life” no more incipient than a toy’s.

  If I’d taken I don’t know how many words of caution in my life and spun my insights thusly but within earshot of a reputable psychologist . . . well, I have no idea.

  For his twelfth birthday, Alfonse asked me on what amounted to a date. His chosen getaway was Die!!Die!!Color!!!, an annual convention wherein the newest manga, anime, candy-colored gadgets, and other Japanese playthings with internal hard drives were unveiled to thousands of Asiatic Parisians and freeloaders like my brother in the Parc des Expositions.

  Billed and barely marketed for years as your basic Japan Expo, the rechristened Die!!Die!!Color!!! had a screaming, jam-packed advertising scheme to match its switched-out title, and one could not have traveled via metro to or from Bastille, Belleville, or other hipster centrals in many months without trying to decode its vast, headache-inducing posters.

  Thus, I pictured an event traipsed by coolness-seeking fashionistas, its aisles as wan and hushed by pretense as the runways of Chanel or Gareth Pugh, and I gambled that Alfonse would rein his usual Narcissus at the pond routine into, at best, a pitiable nerdiness that might, at worst, cause me to blush occasionally.

  The only catch involved keeping my newly motivated hands off Alfonse’s freshly gripping figure and folded in my lap throughout the car trip to and fro, during which we’d be dangerously soundproofed in the rear compartment of the limousine my father had unhelpfully rented for the occasion.

  Luckily, the route took us through Paris and not a Saudi Arabian desert-scape at night.

  Vacations aside, I’ve been a hard-core Parisian since I was born the way dinosaurs stuck in tar pits might as well be fossils. So, once Azmir had eased our road hog through the cunning intersection where rue de Turenne crosses, kills, and swipes the cars from rue de Bretagne, then somehow squeezed onto the tiny rue Vieille du Temple, its close-knit, historically important views enlivened my Olympian detachment, and I fended off the hanky-panky building up on our respective tongues and fingers with the almost unbroken gushing of a tour guide.

  You witnessed my skills in this regard when I bent poor Serge’s ear vis-à-vis the trove of his backyard, and my methodology was near identical in this case, but with baroque and art nouveau façades, and the wordier superlatives they portended, in place of samey trees.

  By the time Azmir off-loaded us at Parc des Expositions, I had waxed, emblazoned, and spit-polished a fairly average set of boulevards into a virtual Champs-Élysées at Christmas,

  and Alfonse, who found any city without flying cabs and giant, evil robots severely lacking, was my numbed, sensibly tight-lipped hostage.

  I’d accompanied my father to the very same convention hall years before for a like-minded fair at which the tourism bureaus from hundreds of unpopular countries hoped to sell French travel agents on the blueness of their lakes and the alluringly slight differences in the layouts of their golf courses.

  I believe he had a cockamamie scheme to turn the art he’d bought into the centerpiece of a museum in some country so bereft of wonders that it would be a major tourist attraction by default. As was usually the case when he hoped to close a deal, I’d been drafted in as his accoutrement in hopes of dazzling sentimentalists or pedophiles with his prestigious genes, which, of course, weren’t his to begin with.

  All I can remember is my hair was patted to an oily clump and that my ass was groped surreptitiously so often and invasively by prospective clients that I suffered muscle cramps in my posterior for days, requiring the aid of an osteopath, who also took my disadvantage as an opportunity to help himself.

  Perhaps were I a physicist, I could explain why Die!!Die!!Color!!!, although no more towering or spread out than the dolled-up shantytown that formed the so-called International Salon du Monde, made the same convention hall that could have covered several Notre Dames with room to spare feel as claustrophobic as a crawl space.

  I’ve never been the kind of person who gyrates into toy stores, not even when my love of things was new and sloppy. After years of hobbling stiffly through Nuit Blanches and theme parks, I began to answer invitations to hit the town with, No, thank you. I have an allergy to stimulus.

  François, the most piquant of my cannibal associates, once remarked upon the irony of my apeirophobia, as one specialist has diagnosed the problem, given my insistence on talking as though I represented the EU in some unofficial capacity.

  While my fear of excess stimulus predates my . . . let’s say “punk” adaptation of the marbled swarm, it’s quite possible the swarm’s repellant quality appealed to me unconsciously.

  Fortunately, just as Alfonse began to tow me by one sweating hand into the fair’s storm front of clogged and supersaturated shopping aisles, the word “plank” was shrieked by someone or other in the thick crowd tussling around us.

  After some jostling in our vicinity, Alfonse was mob-hugged by two . . . Asian, perhaps . . . things . . . female, I guessed at first . . . or maybe young drag queens, I wasn’t sure . . . who had apparently recognized him from the avatar he used when chatting in the “squish junkie” enclaves I mentioned earlier.

  Plank was Alfonse’s 2-D alter ego, and, if the glittering block letters on their badges were any indication, the intruders’ “names” were Slat and Log.

  These “Flatsos”—the term that I would later learn was proper for their artificial species—seemed less to have been born and raised than magically peeled from the cover of an especially creative manga, then resized to teenage height by some miraculous process that left their torsos no thicker than guitar cases.

  In place of heads of hair, they wore cardboard coiffures shaped like Napoleon’s sideways helmet and painted the red of roosters’ mohawks. The curving tops were scissored into uneven saw teeth or maybe sun rays that were symbolic of the Flatsos’ unkempt hair.

  The duo’s outfits appeared to be ankle-length pinafores ironed as flat as
paper fans then starched, dipped in vats of liquid lollipop, then somehow crammed over two real bodies without collapsing their rib cages.

  The truly disconcerting aspect, even to a skeptic like myself, were the optical illusions that some makeup artist had fashioned from their faces.

  I have yet to grow a wrinkle, so my bathroom cabinet remains as spotless as a prisoner’s, and I don’t know about cosmetics or how it is that seventy-something Catherine Deneuve still looks fifty-something. Thus, I can’t tell you why Slat and Log’s faces appeared from certain angles to have no more terrain or substance than a presidential portrait on a commemorative plate.

  Of course, Alfonse, to whom the first dimension promised, well, virtually everything, was beyond enamored of these handmade slips of human and overeager to resemble them. So, before I knew it, the pair had hustled him away toward some Flatso recruitment booth, and I was inching far behind them on my skidding shoes.

  Once when I was still an only child and my father was quote-unquote friendly with Isabelle Adjani, I was forced to accompany them down the red carpet at the Festival de Cannes while two firing squads of paparazzi used the flash attachments on their cameras as automatic weapons, knocking down their roped enclosure to surround us, all the while yelling, “Little boy, is your father fucking her?” over and over in hundreds of foreign accents at once. In that case, I literally fainted and was carried into the theater like a dead infant prop by Isabelle.

  If you’re a certain kind of person, you might have seen the very shots of my humiliating moment on her official website, which I will mention she has conveniently mislabeled as among her greatest roles.

  Does that convey my trauma? Shall I boringly compare myself to the biblical Egyptian spearmen tripping over themselves in the gushy mud and piles of flopping fish between the Red Sea’s reconvening halves? I don’t believe I can do this.

  If vampire movies hadn’t been the franchise of that year, and were wastrel fashion models and feeble-looking bands not so incredibly in vogue, and if a wary-eyed pallor were not, as a consequence, the diamond in the rough of facial options, my sad state might have turned the single-minded nerds and fops moseying around me into Good Samaritans.

  My brother and his Flatsos had collaged themselves into the crowd. My agonizing progress was more an aftermath of others’ clumsy shoulders than any effort from my fishtailing feet, when my eyes spotted a snatch of white, which I managed to squint into a handwritten sign. It was Scotch-taped to a metal folding chair that had been plunked down in the middle of the aisle, and my name was scrawled across the sheet and underlined with a wobbly arrow pointing to the left.

  Given that my name is an invention, or, to paraphrase my mother at her most stoned, a magic group of letters whose implications are the key to everything on earth when one is tripping balls, and, thus, a term that, until I inspire something, refers to me and me only, and seeing that the sign, as unimpressive as it was, sought to edge me off the horrifying thoroughfare, I took its unknown scribbler at his word more than I would have otherwise.

  After squeezing through a gap of space between two booths, I found myself inside a kind of gulley, created by the boulder-like rear portions of the booths that formed the aisle I’d just escaped and its immediate neighbor.

  Sitting cross-legged with its back against a booth that dwarfed the others in its soaring height and flabby build and gulping down a Kronenbourg was one of Alfonse’s Flatso comrades, or, rather, its recovering human.

  If not for the “Log” badge now pinned to an old Nirvana T-shirt, its heavy, oblate makeup and outlandish hat of toothy hair might have pegged it as, oh, one of those die-hard soccer fans who paint their favorite team’s logo on their faces to . . . well, I have no idea.

  “Want one,” it asked, extracting a bottle from the frayed six-pack at his side.

  By the way, I won’t transcribe this creature’s voice into mine then throw the poor results into its mouth, except to note its voice was lower than the squeaks it used to court my brother. My one concession is to make its mind sound very simple, which it was.

  I rarely drink alcohol, apart from the odd toast from which it would be rude to abstain or when dining with cannibal associates, for the simple reason that, in layman’s terms, it makes me horny, or what I define as famished, which is not to say I didn’t grab then finish off the beer in one humongous swallow.

  “If you want to fuck your brother, he’s in there,” Log said, patting the monumental booth behind it, “or you could fuck me and get around a lot of bullshit.”

  I’m far too stiff when drunk to cause a messy scene, but my limited ability to self-edit is laid to even greater ruin. For instance, were you not filtered from this moment by its status as a recollection, and were a single bout of horniness not enough to burn me out for days, I might have slurred something to the effect of all of the above.

  Having seen my share of junk that artists claimed as their hard and brilliant work, I thought the booth, or what I’d thought a booth, might be a sculpture, arte povera most likely, or perhaps a tower crane that, having done its part to build and fluff the booths around it, was hastily wrapped in a blanket of black plastic in hopes of looking less unsightly.

  By then, Log had dipped its fingers in the mushy tower’s sheath and withdrawn a flap, creating an impromptu doorway in which I cautiously docked my face.

  Inside, there was a gloomy shapeless room with crinkled, slightly caved-in walls. A single track light glared up from the floor, and the only furniture were two chairs of the metal folding type that had braced the aisle’s handwritten sign.

  In one of the chairs sat a man I recognized both as a friend of my father’s and, from flipping through magazines and TV channels, as François Tirel, a famous chef at the restaurant L’Astrance, although I couldn’t recall having spoken more than a thoughtless word of greeting or farewell to him.

  I’d only noted him at all because each time we’d coincided, his eyes would fasten onto mine then dig around vehemently, as though his eyesight was a power drill and I their padlock.

  “Were you to squeeze yourself through there,” he said, pointing at a second gap or lapse in the room’s most puckered wall, “but you shouldn’t just yet, you would shortly find your delicious brother, but why not sit and get to know yourself first.”

  It can’t remotely surprise you that the word “delicious,” and the mystery of what made it seem appropriate, is what inspired me to maneuver inside, trailed by Log, who continued past and through the gap François had asked me to regard with patience.

  “My younger son, Didier, for the record,” François said. “No doubt he’s thrown himself at you. Were I not here to cull our better interests, I might shock you by redoubling his offer. Still, I fear that were his face not divined into a Flatso’s, your next few words would not be ‘What an awesome dad’ but ‘Why is it I feel a new nostalgia for the era of the guillotine?’

  “In the opinion of five—count them, five—pediatricians, and not just do-gooder French clinic workers, but two American specialists and a Russian Nobel Prize recipient, there is a curlicue among my son’s synapses, a genetic mishap I attribute to my ex-wife, the insane bitch, that routes the over-energy that grips all boys his age into some organ in the body that feeds his efflorescing genitalia.

  “Thus, the impulse to, say, gather action figures or skateboard everywhere is instead a warped addiction wherein his ass is a collection plate and every penis on earth no matter how minuscule is a valuable collector’s item.

  “Have I, in dire circumstances, blotted out his features with a pillow then screwed the liberated body senseless, yes, and were I the type of S and M practitioner who hands his prostitutes a leather hood the same way you or I might offer ours a cocktail, Alfonse and you might be at home right now instead of . . .

  “Still, rather than complete that thought and stretch this conversation, I’ll leave the thinness of your smile untouched for now and reaffirm my offer should you ever find his ugliness subve
rsive by some miracle.

  “More important, I have unpleasant news. It seems your life of recent months has been a fairy tale, and you one of its two unwitting characters, and I happen to be privy to the thinking that inspired it. While in most cases, say, when a child grows old enough to know J.R.R. Tolkien was just staring at a typewriter, the truth can be a wounding exposé, but I suspect you’ll find my clearing of the cobwebs a kind of purge. In return for this exclusive, I have a favor to ask.”

  I considered several options, then made a show of visibly relaxing through a minor shake-up in my disposition and by softening the angle of my posture.

  “One day . . .” François began, when my current home at 118 rue de Turenne was still in progress and more an overture than a stack of lofts, he and my father had arranged to meet nearby at Café de Bretagne on an unelaborated business matter.

  François had sipped two double espressos into chalk without a sighting of my father or an explanatory phone call. Having had the construction site pointed out to him on earlier occasions, François strolled there thinking my father might have been waylaid by some unexpected mishap.

  The building’s elevator shaft was still a silo, so François used the temporary, jungle gym–like stairs that climbed its veiled façade, searching each raw floor in turn, only to find solitary workers busy with the remodeling.

  While wandering through these future rooms and former frameworks, he took note of their configurations. Each floor appeared to hold the sketch of two separate living quarters, one the anticipated loft and the other an extremely disadvantaged . . . apartment, perhaps, although François declared that term too grand, unless these adjunct dwellings’ purpose was to let rats live like kings.

  These smaller domiciles were no more imaginative than a hallway, lacking windows that could make them nest-like or any signs of doorways that might explain them as the guts of giant closets.