The Marbled Swarm Read online

  Slat was lugged out of the car and steadied on its feet, then it and Log swayed and dashed respectively into the mansion’s nearest bathroom, presumably to scrub away the Flatso makeup, which they had started scratching with impunity.

  François amused himself by giving Plank and me a tour of the house that would have proved jejune were not the rooms so dandified that their familiar shells and measurements had the airiness of déjà vus.

  The white, art-friendly walls favored to the point of obsolescence by my father had been filtered out with breezily historic wallpaper that made our old home look as though it had been gift wrapped at the Musée des arts et métier.

  The polished wooden floors on which my stocking feet had pedaled like a frightened cartoon hare’s were secluded under rugs that looked like giant grassy playing cards—that is, when you could even see the rugs through all the antique chairs and tables.

  As much as I had bitched about the chrome and glass and steel objects whose tart edges would slice and bruise my wilder, younger legs, at least those fixtures knew which century they were decorating.

  Thankfully, the tour was curtailed due to the special needs mandated by my brother’s Flatso incarnation. For, despite the costume’s magical conceits of flight and presto-change-o travel, its nuts and bolts disabled him, making every doorway a combatant and the staircase as forbidding as a rope thrown off a cliff top.

  Our route dead-ended in what François called the master bedroom. As I have no reason to suspect he didn’t sleep there and fill its chests with his belongings, I’ll retain his definition.

  Still, in every other way, it was Alfonse’s former bedroom, exactly as he’d left it, which would have been incredibly unnerving even if the same decor had not been boxed up, trucked, unpacked, and reconstructed in his loft.

  Alfonse had lined the walls with animation cells secreted from his favorite anime, most of them acquired through flighty bids at online auctions. In their places, hanging from the same nails, I imagine, François had framed and hung convincing forgeries and high-grade scans of art book reproductions.

  A custom-made Tezuka dresser proved impossible to duplicate, François explained. So, to establish his devotion, he’d paid some Chinese artisan to carve a replica from balsa wood, and he raised the sculpture halfway to the ceiling on a crooked baby finger to demonstrate its uselessness.

  Three lamps, still dangling IKEA tags, were arranged strategically around the room. The bulbs were burning at their brightest, and the shades were trained directly at a copy of my brother’s futon, blasting it into a stage while so neglecting the room’s outskirts they formed a darkened auditorium.

  So impressive or psychotic was this cyclorama, it took Plank’s expert eye to spot some unconnected items—sex toys, lube, a towel, in a nutshell—that occupied Alfonse’s “bedside table,” which, had it been granted authenticity, would have held an Asterix alarm clock and a glass of water, if memory serves.

  It was the first of many times when François’s cock-rock bent wreaked hell with my oblique approach, and I wasn’t saddened in the slightest when, after wishing us a pleasant birthday, he stepped so far into the bedroom’s unlit sticks I could pretend he’d left the room entirely if he hadn’t.

  Plank had been unusually—or, given that I didn’t know Plank, characteristically—amped throughout the tour, grabbing everything François identified as priceless and, in its screechy voice, which I’ll describe as Mickey Mouse without the stuffed nose, declaring each trinket something it could use or couldn’t in its home dimension.

  Now, Plank stood gravely at the bedside table handling the sex toys, its opinions lost to me within the Flatso makeup that had whitewashed and paralyzed my brother’s normally outgoing face.

  “Where I live,” Plank said, “things such as these, while no doubt necessary, are inferred rather than depicted, sort of like the nails and screws that keep the homes in this dimension upright.”

  “Has my admittedly roundabout behavior these past few months so masked the squalor I’ve been nursing in your presence that its evidence perplexes you,” I asked.

  Plank exhaled loudly through its nose, although let me reiterate how Flatsos seemed not so much to breathe as use their mouths and nostrils to disturb the air like birds’ wings.

  “My true fear was that you would never cease talking,” Plank said. “In my world, speech, and thought itself perhaps, are annotated into gasps and grrs and wows except in cases of emergency.”

  “I don’t understand this kind of love,” I said. “I’m speaking of the sort wherein the offer of one’s body is encoded with a handshake of agreement that its content is legitimate.”

  “Again, in my world,” Plank said, “the exchange of which you speak is not confusing in the slightest. In fact, we frequently shake hands, as you put it, without any prior agreement whatsoever.”

  “Even when the advocates are brothers,” I asked.

  “Only in a sense,” Plank said. “Due to the interchangeable faces we’ve been given, we’re less brothers by the definition you address than clones sporting very slight mistakes. We certainly have sex, and more continually than we walk, and yet our world itself is very chaste, almost as taintless as your Disney films, which explains why we wear blurs beneath our underwear, if you’ve ever wondered.”

  “Are these clones in love when they . . . intersect,” I asked.

  “On your conditions, I suppose,” Plank said. “Still, if one desires someone or something that, barring a minutely different hair color, is yourself in quotes, is it love that causes one to wish to share their bed or a display of confidence?”

  “Our being brothers should preclude the need to tie the knot, in theory,” I said, “but our case is rather special, you’ll agree, given that we’ve synchronized ourselves like showgirls, and perhaps it’s this coherence that inspires my need to grasp you as completely as I know myself.”

  With that, I groped the swatch of costume where my brother’s ass would then have squished between my fingers were he dressed in jeans or naked.

  I rubbed the cardboard slowly in a circle, which, additionally to having no effect on my intended target, was embarrassing and made a boring, scratchy noise.

  “I will tell Alfonse you’ve done the unimaginable,” Plank said.

  Pretending to have spotted something glinty on the floor, I crouched and fiddled briefly with the phantom jewel or coin, then, gambling my precious touch would trump the doofish pose that might result, I tagged the stretch of naked calf that Plank’s short, rigid skirt had left exposed.

  I clutched the leg to stay on board, whereupon its warmth, which was quickly raised to blistering in my imagination, seemed to acculturate the room into a kitchen and me into an idiot to whom I’ll now relent for the sake of accuracy.

  “I would snap away this leg as violently as one unbinds a chicken’s drumstick,” I said, “then chew and swallow until bone halted my teeth if I could thereby know you.”

  “Being that my goal is to forget the silly nerd who’s wearing me,” Plank said, “you’re welcome to him, but I fear I cannot help you.”

  Plank raised its human hands and studied them, not so much confusedly as in a funk, as far as I could tell, perhaps like werewolves eye the flimsy thumbs wherein their godlike claws have just retracted. Then it grabbed the towel and started freeing Alfonse’s visage from its make-up, forehead first.

  “I want to know what Mon Petit Bichette already knows,” I said.

  I shoved one hand in Plank’s internal organs then climbed Alfonse’s thighs, my forearm knocking like the clapper in a fissured bell, until my knuckles brushed the frilling of his genitals, which, like mistletoe, seemed far too folksy to award me so much latitude.

  “He doesn’t know very much,” said Alfonse’s usual if slightly muffled voice. “Why, what did that creep say?”

  “I find myself wondering,” I said, “if there are manga lovers like yourself whose fondest wish is not to wind up thin enough to mark a book b
ut rather torn or hacked into pieces small enough to slide down someone’s throat.”

  Alfonse peeked at me above the blotchy towel. His looks had reconnected with their faculties and basic shapes, and Plank’s poker face was largely an unhealthy color. “You’re speaking of Guro,” he said. “An interesting subgenre, though a bit macho for me.”

  “Do these Guro lovers fraternize with your more genial contingent,” I asked.

  “We do socialize, or, rather, their avatars have been known to sneak within our sites without detection,” he said. “However, their foul mouths cause them to be blocked in almost every case.”

  “It must so frustrate them, and you as well, to undertake such absolutist missions,” I said. “Consider this painstaking mock-up of your bedroom, which so clearly forms a homonym for François’s useless dream of sharing it with you.”

  I should mention that, by then, I’d started masturbating Alfonse, which, given the costume’s bottlenecking, was surely more impressive as a juggling act.

  “Perhaps you feel as I do that birthdays come with certain privileges,” Alfonse said. “The truth is sex, although that term seems so uncivil, intrigues me. When I’ve been given any say, I always ask my . . . partners, as you call them, to rest on top of me. Since they’ve weighed far more than I thus far, there is the side effect of feeling squished, which you know I rather covet.

  “For that reason, I see beds, or floors, assuming they are clean, as the earthly likenesses of manga pages in which I’m merely ink or pixels and my partner is a rather heavy-handed draughtsman. Plus, the more unreal I’ve found myself, the better the . . . sex has been for everyone involved, if, that is, I even vaguely understand what gets men off, which is to say François is cleared to join us, should you agree.”

  “My issue with sex,” I said, “or the first of many—and I too speak that catchword grudgingly—is the transience of its effect. To think that afterward, you’ll reinflate, and I will only have crossed incest off a wish list I hadn’t yet compiled. If only you, no, we could stay, oh, razor-thin in your case and unrealistically wild-mannered in mine.”

  “Clearly, if I could stay unreal with any permanence, I would,” he said. “I haven’t imitated you for years because I find your affects therapeutic.”

  With that, he started patting down the Flatso costume’s image of a shirt and scratching at its painted buttons. Seeing his futility, I freed my arm, then, gripping the “shirt’s” collar, tried to rip Plank into shreds.

  “You didn’t keep a pair of scissors handy that François might have reproduced,” I asked.

  It was then the words “Velcro straps,” spoken with a lechery that neither one of us had any feel for, broke into our conversation.

  Of course, the speaker was François, who, quite naturally, had been lurking in the dark, but perhaps because my eyes were so bedazzled by our spotlights, his voice seemed less substantial than the sawing of a cricket’s legs.

  There is in fact another explanation for its wisp, but I will let you discover it, if you do, at the same time and manner as I did, if I ever fully have.

  Once the Velcro bindings were unlocked, the costume sledded up and past my brother’s head with only the subtlest misplacing of his hair.

  I sought an unobtrusive spot to dump the Flatso’s corpse, ultimately leaning it against a wall. By the time I turned my full attention to Alfonse, he’d lain facedown upon the futon and struck a pose that seemed designed to make him feel, if not quite look, as scarce as possible.

  His body could have been a jar, figurative and dyed one of the paler human colors—his name a label steamed then peeled away, so poorly did it warn me not to take his status as my brother lightly.

  “Are you as specious as you appear,” I asked. “Because even using the familiar form of ‘you’ just felt like guesswork.”

  “Just before the act of sex commences, I feel an agonizing realness,” Alfonse said. “While this pose has been the most effective of my tryouts, there is a minor defect—namely, my penis winds up pressed against the bed, which stimulates it by default. Fortunately, the pain of being . . . and I hate this word too, ‘fucked,’ tends to draw the bigger picture.”

  “If we’re to speak so openly of defects,” I said, “I’ll admit to one that seems germane. Like you, I’m gorgeous, you’ll admit, and, accustomed as I am to being hit upon, I’ve felt no need to learn assailants’ social skills. In other words, I need a minute.”

  I sat along the futon’s edge, then eyed my brother as a mountain climber might assess a model of the Pyrenees. As I replayed the porn whose choreography was well adapted to my halting bedside manner, I fiddled with Alfonse’s ass as though its fat and muscle were the pivoting components of a Rubik’s Cube.

  I’d never slept with such a pip-squeak, and any child porn I’ll admit to having viewed was so antiquely filmed its stars were only boys the way Seurat’s arrays of dots are women. Nonetheless, it didn’t seem bizarre that, having dreamt Alfonse would sport an asshole as understated as the rest of him, I was stunned to find a wound so serious it would have killed him had the harm not been so evidently reckoned into place.

  Later, under François’s tutelage, I would learn to tell the building blocks of pricey entrées from the chaff that goes in dog bowls, but in my innocence that afternoon, having struck a vein of what was sitting in my fridge was more important than the clues that made it fool’s gold.

  “Perhaps Alfonse would like to listen to some music,” said François’s voice.

  I retrieved my brother’s backpack from the floor and rummaged through its mishmash until I’d clutched the cold hard outlines of an iPod.

  “What do manga characters listen to when they’re . . . ?” I asked him.

  “Nothing, strangely,” Alfonse said. “I think because the sound of music proves difficult to draw. It’s true that, in addition to their superhero duties, they often moonlight as a boy band, yet when these bands are shown performing, the only way we know they’re not delivering a lecture is because their open mouths shoot lightning bolts. But I wouldn’t mind hearing Cartoon KAT-TUN II You.”

  As I’ve more than hinted at so often, I’m undone by the formalities of having sex. And yet, from all reports, I seem no less engaged than were I watching someone rob a store across my street while chronicling the bandit’s moves over the phone.

  Perhaps this politesse is an affliction of the marbled swarm itself, because the same capacity to disengage from goings-on, no matter how logistically involving or oppressive, bewitched my father too, if I may jump this story’s gun for just a second.

  A few weeks after the event I’m reimagining, my father’s shoe skewered a pockmark in the floor of what, to that point, I’d understood to be the central office of our building’s enterprise of secret chambers, causing him to trip and strike his head, and rather fiercely if a ragged trail of blood was any indication.

  He returned to his apartment as if nothing had occurred. So confident was he that the bleeding would be squelched by tissues and some elbow grease, he didn’t close the secret door behind him, leaving the hidden loft exposed, and I will speak of the renaissance this lack of foresight occasioned in my life a little later.

  We know he made some notes and phone calls until, gonged by a headache, he reclined upon a couch, hoping to undo it with a nap, which amplified into a coma in which Azmir, reporting back from some nefarious assignment, discovered him.

  A siren’s endless bleating finally coaxed me to a window of my loft, where I observed my slack-jawed father being rolled inside an ambulance, which sped to Hospital St. Louis, where he then lived in quotes for days but never woke, or not according to the terms by which that word is most employed.

  Let’s say I’d tripped, albeit mentally and only vis-à-vis my hand, and my fingertips dead-ended in Alfonse’s crotch, resting on that archway’s penile frill no longer than my father’s head had touched the floorboards’ wood grain, which caused me to cease thinking by my standards, even if my reco
llection of those thoughts seemed typically too decorative to you.

  While his stiffened penis was, of course, the compliment I’d sought, the general conditions, specifically the humid airspace hard-ons always author, unnerved me, perhaps the way a sick child’s forehead curls his mother’s fingers.

  So, even as I basked, I was inveigled by a mood of hopelessness that, in retrospect, has proved to be more advantageous than a drag, I suppose.

  It was as if I’d found a light switch in a room too dark to navigate or leave, the unit’s surface strangely heated by a recent short along its hidden wiring, the switch already raised into the “on” position.

  I will barely be speaking for a while. I might begin to seem a child who mouths the roars and motor revvings of his toys. Or I might grunt with satisfaction now and then like a lowly member of some demolition crew in action.

  I stepped out of my shoes, scrolled down my socks, unbuttoned my shirt, lowered my pants and underwear, then threw and slid myself away from all of them.

  François was talking on his cell phone or, more precisely, saying a “Yes” or “I’m still here,” when, that is, his voice was not too muffled by my brother’s ass, which he had leveled with his fingers and was sniffing like a messy line of very good cocaine.

  “Does this look strange,” he asked, having noticed something in my face I had not placed there to address something about him.

  I responded that to see a man of his renown treating Alfonse as far more renowned was interesting, but if my face seemed like the outlay of some burgeoning critique, he was likely overthinking me.

  I believe it was then that I wound up lying on the bed by some means I don’t recall.

  Had what occurred been filmed, it might have looked less namby-pamby than the fans of child pornography prefer, but, judging by the bits I’ve watched, our merge of young and old and cute and gross fell well along those troubling lines.

  To wit, a boy lay stiffly on a bed, looking X-ray–like without his clothes, his face stricken, often frowny, but uncomplaining, his body game enough despite a shyness that clenched his joints into a mannequin’s.