The Marbled Swarm (12 page)

It was then I understood the marbled swarm was not the act of terrorism I’d imagined but instead a method or procedure to keep the world intact, altered not one physical iota, while talking oneself into believing words alone could customize it.

To illustrate this convoluted point, let’s say we reconvene back at the meeting with my father’s lawyer. He and I conducted business in the largest of my loft’s six rooms, although they’re more like subdivisions of one giant room than isolating sections. His laptop, a PowerBook G4, as I recall, rested on a glass-top desk, and we watched the slideshow on its desktop from the comfort of a gray French Empire couch.

From there, one has an unobstructed view of Pierre Huyghe’s
This Is Not a Time for Dreaming
, a video in which string puppets stage the life of Le Corbusier, and partially obstructed views of Philippe Parreno’s
Fraught Times
, a high-rise decorated Christmas tree cast in aluminum, as well as Jean-Marc Bustamante’s
Larva 1
, which looks exactly like it sounds.

Now, pretend I could transport you there as my invited guest. Upon materializing, you would search the premises for me, of course, and I might introduce myself since you could never spot me otherwise, whereupon, and this I promise, you would gawk and squint and rubberneck, then mutter to yourself that I look nothing, literally nothing like you’d pictured.

You might nose around the room and say, “It’s more a garret than a loft, and where’s this lawyer and his laptop or the art you keep alluding to,” and, turning to a window, if you could even find one without settling for a pinhole, declare the view outside most definitely not Parisian.

Eventually, your eyes would rest on undistinguished me, sitting primly in my gray-scale world, and you might ask, “How could you have imagined there were secret passages behind these yellowed, close-knit walls, or have believed yourself unique enough to spy upon?”

And I would say to you, “But you are in the secret passage now,” and, even as you read those words, you think I’m trying to revise the things I’ve said into a lie or obfuscation, but I guarantee that, were we together, you would understand my point exactly, which I realize is no help whatsoever.

Does a magician’s trick lie about the top hat in which a card appears to vanish? Is a cartoon lying about the computers on which it was laboriously hatched? Does your favorite song lie to you about the badly dressed musicians who sang and strummed and tinkered it into a tune while separated from each other’s work by days or months and soundproofed booths?

In both the marbled swarm founded by my father and the marbled junk I’ve siphoned off, there is no lie or contradicting truth you need to fear. Neither are there plural truths or lies you need to worry you’ll discover, much less keep apart or in a special order.

If I’ve made the headway I intend, you have endured my story’s stiffened pages knowing I would puzzle out the mysteries they keep demarking, but you are starting to suspect that, all this time in which you lent my characters and anecdotes the benefit of liveliness, you’ve just been reading what you want to read.

Since I’ve refreshed the meeting with my father’s lawyer, let me catch you up beginning there. I walked him out, pushed “Down,” and, as the elevator’s portal sealed, offered to search Alfonse’s bedroom for a will that might have left some playhouse in or near Calais to some cosmetic-surgeon-slash-moonlighting-
architect.

Once the elevator emptied him, I took a turn in the contraption, then unlocked Alfonse’s loft, using what had been his key because he’d iced it with a rubber silhouette of Pikachu, which made the object easy to distinguish from the euro coins that always bottled up my pockets.

Technically, the loft was Didier’s, or, since its official owner at that moment was a bank, I guess it would be prudent and more accurate to say it was his hideout, given that our building’s entrance code and several bolt locks guarded him against François, whom I was worried at the time had secret plans to murder him, then hide the body on our forks, long story short.

Still, the loft was even less a fort in practice than a spacious red light district wherein Didier formed the only showpiece, a change of scene that will require an explanation, I suppose, so, unfortunately, the doorknob can’t be turned until I’ve backed this story up into an unfamiliar circumstance again.

Should you find that prospect tiring in advance, you might counteract my backwash with a daydream wherein I—and you can use the young Pierre Clémenti circa
Belle du Jour
as your referral—am frozen at a steel, flat-panel door, intoning not the afterthought to follow but a lengthy password of the fancy sort that musketeers in fairy tales must chant to shift a cliff into some hush-hush kingdom’s craggy entrance.

When my father died, Crédit Mutuel’s policy of freezing clients’ assets for the length of their estates’ protracted settlements cut off my allowance. François, who could easily have fronted me the weekly three thousand euro on which I’d grown dependent, and before whom I sat myself one humbled afternoon, regarded my politely folded, nearly praying hands with his usual mischievousness.

Claiming he was skint after taking up the slack of Azmir’s salary, he said it might both serve my stated purpose and revive a nasty if nostalgic habit were we to, oh, pretend I was a pimp of all amusing things and Didier my whore who, through some miracle or other, brought to mind his younger son but had no resonance, thanks to the chilling side effect of capital.

He then produced the names of friends and restaurant clientele whom he was certain would pay lavishly to sleep with any Northern European twelve-year-old, much less some coddled little bitch like Didier, who could have easily homogenized into the freshman class of Hogwarts, even if the character he most resembled was Ron Weasley.

Didier was brought before us, made to strip and turn in halting circles as he discarded garments, play air guitar, do calisthenics, and so forth, while François and I made note of what he was unknowingly conveying when our crotches most reminded us of pets begging for scraps at a dinner table.

Knowing what I’ve let you gather, need I even rehash my opinion that his greatest shot at getting laid, by me at least, was with the help of Emo, both for the pinpointed reason that I dug the type and a more practical conjecture—i.e., given the speed with which porn stars of every build and age were Emofying at the time, it seemed that gay guys no more cared which Emo did the job than we might care which eggs were in our omelets.

The next morning, Didier was cloistered in a high chair at the Toni & Guy flagship salon on rue St. Honoré while François and I browbeat a stylist until he’d trimmed, blackened, and gelled the boy’s mousey, unkempt mop into a kind of windswept burqa, or as close as hair’s anemia could take and wouldn’t force the boy to poke at his surroundings with a white cane.

After a lenient tip, we picked the stylist’s brains for his opinion on this newborn Emo’s chances as a school-yard Lorelei. “Few,” he said unhesitatingly, citing Didier’s hairline lips and feral case of “glass eye syndrome” as the biggest culprits, although he added that a decent pair of tinted contact lens might tease some IQ points into his deadpan marbles.

His little inconveniences could be refined, the stylist said, but, barring headlines from the world of medicine, his looks would gall until such time as head transplants were feasible. Still, if we cared to dig a few last ditches, he knew a surgeon who could crib the chin and knock a centimeter off the forehead, and we might consider starving him in case his face was hiding cheekbones.

Originally, we’d planned to cab from the salon to a nearby April 77—i.e., a storefront in a trendy chain of Emo clothing stores whose founder, if you’re interested, had gambled that the newly christened Emos might eventually join the Punks in fashion’s annals, and, if so, that they would need a more coherent statement than the Cure T-shirts and holey jeans worn by the movement’s pioneers.

But, while Didier’s repackaged head drew less attention from what was, in truth, a perfectly attractive torso, it also made his greatest selling point look . . . well, fat is pushing it, but, in any case, we chose to take a chance and edit his physique into something artier and less commercial.

His daily food intake was clenched into a single bite, causing the famished boy to topple furniture and wreck expensive artworks in search of baguette flakes, which is why the devolution of a sculpture by the artist Carsten Höller into a figurative cage dates from this period.

While Didier withered, François handcuffed our gestating Cinderella once a week and taxied to some clinic in the seventeenth arrondissement, where a patron of L’Astrance who earned his keep by smothering old actors’ skulls with their own saggy faces would crop and trim the boy in trade for discounts at our incubating whorehouse.

I think it was a Monday when Didier grew too enfeebled to fight his sharp-edged figure, listless speech, and dragging gait, and felt sufficiently depressed to think black eyeliner was a brand of fairy dust and that he couldn’t look sickly and thin enough.

At the nearby corner of rues Normandie and Saintonge, April 77 had just opened its gazillionth store, and we asked its clerk to help us crossfade Didier into an Emo who could name-check Tokio Hotel without suspicion, but would feel no more beholden to his outfit than a girl who tries on edible underwear to celebrate her boyfriend’s birthday.

If my fetish for rerouting even sentences that plummet at their points into Chinese puzzles makes my dawdling on this Emo renovation seem numbingly fiducial, let me add that while the reasons Didier and I became an item in the next few days are overly complex, I can’t discount the way he looked in drainpipe jeans, which is strange.

Now, with that cinch of narrative in place, I’ll return us to the afternoon weeks hence when, if you’ll remember, I suggested that the spitting image of the young Pierre Clémenti might bedeck the doorknob of Alfonse’s former loft if you so wished.

If by chance this chronicle has been adapted for the radio by France Culture, and you are listening instead of reading, you will likely hear a noise that, although created by a wooden shingle with a loose, protruding nail, screams “creaking door.” But had the door in question creaked, I might have been five hundred euro in the red, since Didier’s most recent client, a government attache of the Czech Republic embassy, as I recall, had grossly overrun his hour-long appointment.

I traced the duo through a spray of coins and fallen cutlery, past a coffee table that had been overturned and looked as gluey as a newborn painting, to a sculpture—Haruki Murakami’s
My Lonesome Cowboy
, if you know it or that matters—which was jiggling suspiciously and venting moans not three steps from where I gently closed the door behind me.

As I mentioned, Didier spent his late nights, work breaks, and all unsupervised time moseying about inside a grid-like sculpture that had had some cogitative rationale for only looking like a cage before I literalized the reference with a prisoner and padlock.

I bring this up again not to gloss my villainous or conscientious sides, but to plumb the mystery of why, despite the loft’s reanimation as a copious illegal sex club, Alfonse’s bedroom was still the chipper nursery he had left behind on what must constitute the world’s worst ever date and birthday gift combined.

His computer screen was still a breezy, ceaseless mosh pit swirled with laughing flowers. The surface of the eco-friendly bamboo desk on which it whirred and drawers yielded nothing more official than his usernames and passwords. I power-squeezed each pair of socks, balled or not, wrung the gist out of his underwear, pajamas, pants, and every T-shirt wavering in his closet.

I advanced upon the bookshelves, where Alfonse had wedged his zillion manga, and which would not have been a piece of cake to pry apart in any case, even had each booklet’s gaudy, unmarked spine not crashed its borders and conjoined to form a brazen mural that caused my allergy to stimuli to flare and left my usually acerbic eyes the equivalent of candles.

I was cringing at those rows and rows without the wherewithal to yank apart and ruffle through the concourse book by book, when I noticed something that was neither pink nor especially stimulating jutting from one manga’s upper crust.

I slid the manga from its tight spot and opened to the bookmarked page, no doubt whistling between my teeth or something of that flummoxed nature when the denoted illustration showed the same synopsis of a playhouse that had originally sent me on this treasure hunt, minus some graininess.

Then there was the matter of the bookmark. It was, in laymen’s terms, a postcard sent to Alfonse four years earlier and postmarked in Calais—if, that is, I read its smeary marks and peeling stamp correctly.

On the blanker of the card’s two sides, there was a scribbled phrase whose ornate diction could be traced back to my father’s. While my adaptation of its message is a fling, the words were something very close to “Use this card to find the entrance.”

In the space below, my brother had inscribed his father’s name, my mother’s, mine, and “Alfonse.” Each was followed by a dash and then a different name that seemed to correspond, at least to his imagination, and none of which I recognized that afternoon, but you would.

The bookmarked manga, which I paged through mindfully for, all told, an hour, had lifted everything but its perverseness from the oft-retold and readapted children’s bedtime story known, at least in France, as “The Three Bears.”

For instance, Goldilocks was neither girl nor boy but rather a little sissy with ellipsoid eyes whose tartan culottes hid a whopping penis. The tempting dinner bowls held soba noodles, and the cozy-looking beds were skimpy mats. The family of bears didn’t welcome their intruder with a party then pay for her train fare back to Paris, like in the version I remember.

Instead, being bears not in the corny, aw-shucks sense to which we’re accustomed, but biologically, they swatted Goldilocks awake then spent a dozen pages screwing him or her, which, with the strange propriety that puts the Japanese among the earth’s most civilized degenerates, required every sort of smudge or nearby flowerpot to blot their intersecting crotches.