The Marbled Swarm Read online

  A less illegal teenager, demoted to a sidekick by his costar’s shocking scale, lay nearby, acting as a fluffer, if, that is, patting the boy’s head and shoulders qualifies, and otherwise so snubbed by everyone around him that his body might have been imprinted on the bedding.

  Meanwhile, an older man no more suited to the task of heating porn than the adolescent played the uninvited guest whose love of fucking little boys gives kiddie porn its dubious je ne sais quoi and brings the rare intellectual to its defense.

  In the commotion, first one earphone then the other jiggled from Alfonse’s head. They writhed across the rocky bed until the iPod bounced onto the floor with such a thwack that I could tell the thing was broken without reclaiming it.

  I only mention this because the wilder sound of François’s panting and my occasional asides didn’t bring my brother back to life, by which I mean revive the squeaking, flopping figurine into a boy who might have asked for a time-out.

  I barely saw my brother’s thinking in his eyes, and based on how they skirted me, I felt I wasn’t needed anymore. When he did talk, repeating “nos” and “don’ts” I might not even mention, the orders either weren’t for me or I’d stopped listening like a brother.

  At some stage, one of us, most likely me, wanted to fetch a block of kitchen knives, thinking we could hack Alfonse out of our way then strip his undergrowth and gulp it down like monkeys—that is, if primates even eat like that outside cartoons.

  The other one of us, clearly François on second thought, cautioned me that acting like wild animals hadn’t leant us their capacities, and that we still had nubs for teeth and quibbling digestive tracks.

  He described the meal Alfonse could yield if I were patient, reinventing every sweaty inch of flesh at which my finger aimed into a knickknack that would stun the patrons of L’Alstrance, and, if properly refrigerated, more lengthily suspend an auctioneer than any object in my father’s art collection.

  Thus, I gradually lost sight of who’d been suited up inside Alfonse for twelve years of my life, and who could barely move his limbs or use his forehead as a place to scribble incoherently about his pains and worries.

  His breaths were drafts, his whines and gripes the creaking of his face, and his skull a lattice where some flesh had grown and taken on its human shape.

  By the time I heard some knocks and scraping in the bedroom’s darkened apron, and Azmir glowed into my view, watching François land upon and raise himself from someone’s back had put my eyes on such a treadmill that seeing anything untoward was a relief.

  Azmir looked vaguely familiar, period, and he mutinied with every dud he shed into the most unreasonably well-hung guy I’d ever seen outside my desktop. His penis warped and strained his underwear diaphanous, then walloped free and jousted with the air like an amputee’s gesticulating stump until he stilled it with his hands.

  Having watched dozens of asses, most no bigger than my brother’s, grit their holes in hopes of safeguarding their owners’ lives, the spectacle has lost its wow. Hence, I lack the naivete to brief you on Alfonse’s turn, so he will have to fend within the action sequence I’ll recount.

  Azmir rolled my brother over like a herpetologist upends a rock to search for napping snakes, then pinched his penis, which François had long since milked and wrung into a whisker, and used a fingertip to twirl his testicles into a tiny turban.

  He threw my brother’s legs out of his way, then clawed the ass as if it were a bush that hid another unsuspecting creature, perhaps a scorpion or something of that general nastiness.

  Azmir’s penis pinned my brother’s asshole to his deepest pelvic bones, then, it seemed to me, tried to erase it like a stray pencil mark.

  He scrubbed the stain until the ass itself appeared to change metabolisms—wilting, liquefying, and sloshing up

  against my brother’s skeleton before it finally jelled and shrink-wrapped what was basically a crater.

  Azmir erased the hole until the ass itself became unhinged, halving like the trap door in a gallows, whereupon his cock inched slowly underground and Alfonse’s feeble tissues made the pops and crackling noises of a campfire.

  Azmir raped my brother for an hour-long few minutes. When the cock was airborne, it was heavily upholstered, and when it slugged inside, Alfonse’s blood would spritz Azmir’s thighs and glug onto the bed, which was rapidly discolored.

  Alfonse began to watch something, what, I’m not entirely certain. It seemed to fly in circles, and to not be of this earth, or so I gathered since he’d never looked that horrified by anything before.

  Suddenly, whatever had compiled Alfonse’s skull and skin and cartilage into a face stopped working, but I thought he looked incredible. I thought if he had always looked that undemonstrative, he would have been famous, although I had no idea for what reason.

  François seemed content to watch my brother blanch and crystallize into a less involving boy and nonspecific shape, but I felt strangely unprepared for that divide.

  Once Alfonse and I had played a game of Truth or Dare, if you remember, in which I’d introduced his death throes as a form of entertainment. When given every option to expire, Alfonse had not picked being fucked to death or any other fate that was another word for blood loss. Instead, he’d opted to be steamrolled, and, when this memory returned to me, I argued that his wish be granted, although I guess I thought we’d use a car.

  I was too adamant to follow François’s logic that, since “Alfonse” was now a body’s dying title, we could no more grant his wish than kissing Oscar Wilde’s grave marker while wearing lipstick can retract the author’s loneliness.

  I recall our hobbling down a staircase more than how I talked us into being there. Azmir held my brother upside down, and I trotted alongside, and François twitched a cut-glass bowl half full of nougats underneath Alfonse’s head in hopes of catching blood before it scabbed his carpet.

  After a treacherous right turn that left us standing in a pool of candies, and a traffic jam while François solved a dead bolt, we found ourselves in the garage, which seemed unaltered since my mother had scarcely used it as the place where guests could smoke when it was raining.

  Azmir explained how gore behaved, such as its tendency to use young, flimsy stomachs as fire exits and redeploy the eyes, nostrils, and mouth as launching pads for its projectiles, whereupon it was agreed the body should be laid facedown upon the concrete floor.

  In one corner of the room, there was a hefty wooden can that looked to have been fished from movie pirate waters. It was three-quarters full of very dark, wet dirt, having been filled by François’s gardener as he revamped a flower bed in the mansion’s small front yard the afternoon before.

  The can was leaden, but, between the three of us, we yanked it airborne then rocked and scraped the bottom six or seven steps to where Alfonse reclined, using his last few brain cells to inflate and slump his upper back.

  As the only light source was a glary ceiling lamp, the can gave off an oblong shadow that became an evil spotlight. When my brother’s feet were charcoaled, François counted down from five, and we let go.

  While I would love to say we left an animation cell depicting dainty feet, I will say we left him socks engorged with children’s cheapest Christmas gifts, and even that peculiar image does Alfonse’s last impression quite a favor.

  We moved the spotlight, smashing circle after circle flat as best we could. His knees and thighs took seven drops to look like baggy legs. The sculpture garden in his hips was chipped away and finally buckled, although not into the mush I’d hoped, and only after Azmir climbed atop the can and stomped the final centimeter.

  Between our weariness and percolating sweat, which caused the can to roam within our hands—and I’ll admit my lifts were something of an act, and the can a portly Ouija board—it took eight drops before the upper torso was a mat.

  The shoulders never lost their crossbar look, and even hacking it out of their initial barbell took forever.


  My brother’s head had no resolve but went down

  shooting—eyeballs, teeth, tongue, and very abstract objects coughed out of his cavities and nostrils, or would bash themselves new shortcuts where needed.

  Every time we raised the can, his mouth was more outstretched, until it dwarfed his face as much as any alligator’s.

  I couldn’t think, and even that insouciance was canceled out when every dead celebrity whose surreptitious morgue shot I had Googled massed against me from the far ends of my memory and snapped their fingers in my face.

  I must have sobbed since even Azmir asked if I was still myself, albeit with the leeriness that stars of movies check on costars who’ve been chewed upon by zombies.

  The garage had a second door so hidden by a stack of cardboard boxes in my family’s tenure that, until François turned its knob, I’d always thought it had been stored against the wall just like the cargo piled in front of it.

  It led onto a brick footpath that gentrified a tight-knit residue of space between the mansion’s southern wall and neighbor’s fence, where François used a garden hose to wash the blood and splatter off our legs.

  I was put in charge of fetching our respective outfits from the master bedroom, and, therewith, pardoned from the manly task awaiting François and Azmir—namely, shoveling the afterimage of my brother off the floor and into some container.

  As I think I’ve mentioned, I no more spend time reading novels than you would kill your brothers. Hence, how authors give dead characters’ survivors room to grieve while, presumably within the same handful of paragraphs, checking off new plot twists as though nothing diabolical has happened is wizardry to me.

  Still, I know enough to guess that, having not just killed Alfonse but sort of cried, I should be out of kilter, so I’ll try to wreck the next few pages of my story in some self-effacing fashion, and, thus, this decimation has begun, not that you or even I could swear to it.

  Scaling the death row through which my brother had been hurried, and not so many months after it had formed a bumpy slide down which he would repeatedly kerplunk and laugh astride a giant piece of cardboard, proved a more disorienting hike than the incline had portended.

  I’d reached the first-floor landing and laid my hand upon the banister, when I heard a throat clear to my left, whereupon a voice sourced from the same distinctive set of vocal chords asked, “What happened in there.”

  Peering down the hallway, I saw an Asian boy with waist-length hair—a coiffure christened “Gloomy Girl” when it was fashionable, meaning two years prior for several months. It was purportedly inspired by the hairstyle of the daughter in Pixar’s The Incredibles, i.e., a dour teen whom I believe could turn invisible, if that helps you imagine him.

  He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing the fattened, low-slung jeans that young suburbanites procure from fake designer clothing stores around Les Halles, then, as if mystically possessed by the street cred of their style’s hip-hop progenitors, they begin to speak in syncopated rhymes to their disapproving parents.

  Let me add that, as in the cases of Azmir and Didier, this boy’s speaking patterns are too explosive for my idiom, and I will make him sound as though he sounds vaguely like me but with an edge.

  As bleary as the post-Alfonse world looked to me, I guessed he was Olivier, François’s sort of son. Still, even accounting for the politesse I lazily associate with everyone Eurasian, his vibe seemed too blase given I was naked and had not yet lost the bulk of my erection.

  “Exactly what I’m sure it sounded like,” I said evenly.

  “Are you finished,” he asked, again without a trace of curiosity.

  He was leaning gently to the right, one hand splayed and resting on a wall, but not as lightly as his tilt would warrant. The palm was tensed into a Gothic arch, the fingers flexing on their whitened tips. Meanwhile, his other hand, which I’d misread as settled in a pocket, was rumpling his flabby jeans and tending an erection that seemed no less out of place than mine.

  “Granted, it doesn’t feel like we’re finished, but logic says we are,” I said.

  “So, does this mean you’re going home,” he asked.

  “Your father thinks my leaving is appropriate, and it’s not for me to disagree,” I said.

  “Were you to stall for just a minute, I think you would be interested by what’s in there,” he said, eyeing the wall his hand was scrunching. “By that I don’t mean Didier, although you’ll likely find him interesting as well, or, as ‘interest’ might be pushing it, useful, since, as I’m confident my father told you, he’s a prodigy regarding other ­people’s penises, and you clearly seem to have one.

  “All I ask as recompense is that you consider me the vague beginnings of a friend. Truth is, while a life of tragedies and sexual abuse has hollowed me into a disbeliever in the scuttlebutt concerning love, there is, in addition to your total foxiness, a lack of something or other about your personage that I find sympathetic.”

  “You seem to know some of my passwords,” I said carefully. “Still, as I rank a change of scenery at the top of my priorities, and since I’ve spent a billion seconds of my life strolling idly past the stretch of wall you speak of so mysteriously, it will need something more magnetic than your proximity and implications.”

  “Well,” he replied, “let me ask you how, while I was evidently not with you in our garage, I could nonetheless describe its recent occupation in disturbing, graphic detail, and then explain why my erection, which I’m confident you’ve noted, would not have lost a centimeter, and thereby press my point that we’re of likened minds.”

  “It’s true that I am rarely this susceptible,” I said, “and yet, as you seem set to verify, I just murdered my own brother. Far worse, or even stranger at the very least, I’m neither having second thoughts nor do I feel I’ve finished anything of real importance—a lack of loyalty that has inspired its own insidious brand of horror, I assure you.

  “What I’m sorting through behind these words, should you be curious, is how killing him involved a problem that I also have with, say, the Nouvelle Vague—i.e., supposed classic films that seem to spellbind everyone with any brains but me—meaning the murder lacked a high point or dramatic arc where I could tell myself, ‘It’s now or never,’ and, frankly, masturbate the scene into an aftermath.

  “Maybe that point was when he died, but it was difficult to know exactly when he did, and the violence was so frontal and his heartbeat such a needle in the haystack that I didn’t seem to care that we spent half the time redesigning a cadaver, much less my brother’s.

  “Thus, while I wouldn’t mind—peculiarly, if you know me—giving Didier a whirl and then comparing notes on our respective disassociations, I’m also like a child who’s just debarked a carousel and feels himself still spinning, even though he’s in the line to ride a roller coaster.”

  Surmising, correctly I suppose, that my wending self-incrimination was a fulsome way of saying “yes,” Olivier ceased his finger exercises, skittering the hand across the wall until it found a filthy bit of otherwise well-tidied molding.

  He pinched the grunge, whereupon the wall itself swung open, not stormily enough to fill the hall with bursting splinters or rip his arm out of its socket, and just as handily as if it were a hinged door, which, after Didier had bolted from what looked at first to be a hidden closet, I ascertained it was.

  Didier was nothing much to look at, but his face had possibilities. Think of Leonardo DiCaprio, post-Titanic, and, more specifically, of his head’s vast sweeps and curves of unused skin in which his features seem to gang up like the finger holes in a bowling ball. Now drizzle that with Kurt Cobain’s scraggly hair at its most unwashed, and you will sort of have the crux of Didier’s outstanding issues at your fingertips.

  In other words, he wasn’t quite the eyesore François claimed, but—and here I’ll test out my ill-fitting gaydar for a moment—more a kind of fixer-upper—or, speaking from the future as a hardened cannibal—well, you kn
ow how, when you’re stripping someone you’re about to fuck, the first thing you abscond with is his shoes? When one prefers to eat a boy than sleep with him, his face is like that.

  So, while I was no more tantalized by him than little girls holding baby dolls are mothers, it seems my wish to leave the house in which Alfonse was so exceptionally imprinted and furiously carved, meaning in everything and everyone, myself included, encouraged me to crowd inside the strange new door with Didier, then walk and crouch and finally crawl behind him down a wooden cave, or so I thought, squeezed and burrowed through unceasing treasuries of spiderwebs and insulation that slowly rubbed the home into the ghost of any structure I had entered in my life, until we found the world’s most secret exit, and I used it.

  Chapter 5

  Five weeks after someone in the Paris art world bribed my father’s dust into a ritzy plot in Cemetery Montparnasse that had been held for Liliane Bettencourt before her scandals, his lawyer sent me a strangely exuberant if technically proficient email suggesting we meet that afternoon and parse the estate I was destined to inherit.

  My father hadn’t changed his will to suit my brother’s absence, and, in any case, its spillage of more or less a billion euros’ worth of art, properties, and liquid assets was so meticulously preset to drain into two bankbooks that merely scrawling my initials in several pages’ margins plugged the extra spigot.

  In fact, our business meeting, with its high-speed shuffling of stapled pages, autographs, and touching anecdotes about the weirdo we would miss for somewhat corresponding reasons, might have been a courtesy, the lawyer told me, had not one faux pas caught his canvassing eye.

  It seemed there was a gap amid my father’s properties, specifically a chateau framed by considerable acreage in the hills of Pas de Calais, a northernmost coastal area of France known exclusively to me for its hulking port and metro-like underpinning of abandoned mines.