The Marbled Swarm (13 page)
Once Goldilocks was clawed and squashed by accident into reliquiae too vile to give an animal a boner, the bears, whose thinking had been compromised or tamed to some degree by the human clothes in which their illustrator squared them, chose not to chomp and shred him/her into a ragged snack.
After juggling their spoils into the kitchen, the baby bear boiled sticky rice, the mama bear docked sheets of seaweed into sushi wrappers, and the papa bear nicked clods of raw material from the body’s open wounds with his impressive nails.
Soon, California rolls were crowded on a varnished wooden plank, whereupon they ate until their snoring, newly pregnant-looking bodies hit the kitchen floor, human bones still drooping from their paws like they were narcoleptic drummers.
My fingertips were hyper-tapping on the manga’s cover when I noticed Didier was standing in the doorway of my brother’s room, one hand holding out a slew of fifty-euro bills, the other playing with his petty but impregnable erection.
Back when I felt vaguely certain I was gay, I dipped into the so-called dungeon of Le Depot one stoned night and quickly realized men would gather there not in order to give blow jobs in the dark, per se, but to have sex with a darkness wherein they formed no more than sets of circumstances.
I believe those lurking men refer back to these underground collisions as their “things.” Things, I would guess, as opposed to memories.
Anyway, point is, I had been doing “things” with Didier in recent weeks.
Let me remind you that, while I’ve filtered apparitions of my colleagues’ speaking voices, minus one or two, as I consider them less friends of mine or yours than my ingredients, to muzzle Didier would be like hooking a police badge on the T-shirt of a kid who likes to hang around police stations.
“That asshole didn’t even try to get me off,” Didier said. “So much shit about my loins and their profound elixir, and then it was just, ‘Swallow what you made, you stupid whore.’ ”
“Let me pose a question,” I said, “and precede it with a caveat, which is to say your answer will influence my decision to assist you with your issues or continue with my day.”
“François says you’re just a boring, pretentious piece of shit,” Didier said, “but maybe because I’m stupid, I think it’s more like listening to classical music.”
“You’ll recall Alfonse,” I continued, “the Flatso you betrayed, misled, murdered circumstantially, and whose human infrastructure used to live here. So, were you, Azmir, and I to embark upon a road trip to Calais, of all lackluster places, to find a man who knew Alfonse by reputation, do you think you could impersonate my brother in his presence and repeat a fib that you were kidnapped, raped, and blah blah blah, which I would first devise then have you memorize?”
I was midway through this question when the portion of my sight as yet unclouded by the culinary fantasies I find it useful to construct before attempting sex noted a sort of glitch or break in Didier’s familiar grumpiness.
“Holy shit,” he said, or rather yelled, or even shouted joyfully, I’ll dare to say. He started fingering his face’s redesign, which, in just the last few days, had finally trimmed and decked his cussedness into a stubborn curve or two. “So, that’s what all this bullshit is about.”
Among the minor features of Alfonse’s bedroom was a mirror, where he would stand and stare back at his wistful, flattened looks for hours, a painful memory I’d buried in my posttraumatic stress until Didier turned left and saw almost the very same reflection.
“It’s like I fell off a skateboard,” he said, “and my face got mangled, and when they sewed it back together, they fucked up and used a picture of your brother as the map instead of me.”
Has my tendency to call an orange a tangerine prepared you to believe that, with a dutiful cosmetic surgeon and François’s agnate taste in boys as my assistants, I’d been engraving Alfonse in Didier sans any knowledge of my motives whatsoever? I ask because it happens to be true.
What could have been more natural—or more “me” at least—than to have viewed the carnage in François’s garage as a problem with my eyesight, then simply changed perspectives like my father might have traded peepholes until I found an angle on Alfonse that flattered him again.
I’m sure I mentioned how, if Alfonse had found Emo’s depressions as engaging as Japan’s idolatry of printed people, he might be here today and so adored by suitors who appreciate asocial conduct when it’s properly attired that I would seem as phony and impossible to love as I suppose I really am.
I’ll remind you one last time about my stroll with Serge across the chateau’s woodsy yard, wherein I speed-judged his admissibility as food and found him hollow enough.
Now I’ll suggest that, were you to rejuvenate that scene’s environs as window dressing then imagine I was ranking Serge’s fitness as my brother’s clotheshorse, I could easily have told you I was here with Didier that day learning to accept Alfonse’s likeness, and, as you may have even gathered by this point, I was.
I
slept horribly, and yet my iPhone’s silent, rumbling alarm so piqued my minor interest in exploring day-lit rooms and views, it might have played my favorite TV program’s theme song if the show in question weren’t predictably
Twin Peaks
and were its overture less soporific.
While feeding grounds into my coffeemaker and setting it to stun, I sent François, Olivier, and Azmir texts whose predicating pings were half the battle, since the notes just nudged them to assemble in my loft more hurriedly than planned.
Still, by the time I’d had one of my all-or-nothing showers then taxed my caffeine buzz with a strangely complicated question of which McQ blue long-sleeve western shirt to wear, my lack of sleep had bogged my shoelaces and buttons into rusty cranks and broken knobs.
Once I joined my colleagues, all of whom were baggy-eyed and blazoned with the wet, smeared hair of recent swimmers—well, excluding Didier, who looked precisely as he did when I had locked him in his cage hours before, which is to say like Alfonse if my brother had been a hiking trail beloved by snails—I was less their peppy leader than a fellow dawdler lying prostrate over one of Philippe Starck’s curvilinear, backbreaking chairs.
François thought a summons to his coke dealer seemed in order. It was a capital idea, or would have been were we not still convalescing from a forty-eight-hour-long “afternoon” of accidental binging when we’d found my father’s secret coke stash in our spoonfuls of Corn Flakes three days before.
I’ll retrieve this incident beginning at the point where, having polished off my bowl, I was spurred into an even more than usually exasperating nitwit who licked and ground my teeth while using them to air my every thought and scrabbling my ring of house keys like a rosary.
Having learned the night before that Alfonse’s so-called will was just a postcard cryptogram, I phoned my father’s lawyer, and, since my pell-mell vocal patterns clipped the news into an outburst, and given that his rates were hourly, he proposed I cede the fifty-five remaining minutes to the mayor whom he had quoted at our meeting, and I agreed on the condition that he phone me back with the address of the supposed playhouse so I could plug it into Google Earth.
I’d planned to kill the almost-hour fingering some phone apps whose offbeat missions and designy logos had put the make on my contracted pupils.
Still, as coke can’t seem to help but use its hopheads to accomplish, I found a quiet study of these apps beyond me, and soon enough my antsy friends and I were in a huddle, having misconstrued our need to chatter as the impetus for lectures and confused one another for captivated listeners at whom we could not spew enough.
For my part, I chronicled Pierre Clémenti’s oeuvre, complete with capsule plots of every title, which is a tribute either to the marbled swarm or to coke’s divinatory powers, since my knowledge of his films was almost limited to YouTube clips, and, even in those cases, they were fan-made compilations of his shirtless scenes with power-ballad soundtracks.
When the lawyer took a costly ninety minutes–plus to ring me back, I didn’t seem to care because another ten or twelve minutes blitzkrieged by before the cocaine let him say a word.
He’d reached the mayor, but, before an opportunity arose to wrest the street address, she literally thanked God for the reoccurrence of his stiff, familiar tones, and, in a voice warped by her anxiousness and thickset northern accent, told him a story he would re-create as best he could given that his habit was to translate people’s ranting into clear-cut legalese.
She’d said a fourteen-year-old local boy had turned up missing. Around their comfy town, this boy was known if not beloved as the skittish, twitchy, slit-eyed urchin whose seeming lack of ancestry and favorite perch outside the district’s sex shop had troubled every glimpse of him.
Townsfolk guessed he was the castoff of a widowed, alcoholic former miner who would rarely leave his shack out by the highway and whose standoffishness and gone-to-seed good looks seemed the likely birthplace of this fugitive yet unassuming child.
Earlier that year, the town’s rapscallion, Quinton Dupont, aged fifteen, had befriended the uncordial boy. Quinton’s mother was so pleased to think her naturally combatant son might have an altruistic streak that she allowed the boy to curl up nightly in the family tool shed.
But there had been a recent falling out between the boy and Quinton. To the township, it seemed one of those contretemps that halve the sturdiest of teenage chums, until, that is, Mrs. Dupont, who was known to everyone but local children as Aimee, began to worry aloud and quite incessantly.
She would insist to anyone who greeted her that, in the weeks since this disbandment, Quinton had fallen into something she believed from reading Paris newspapers was called depression. He ate minutely, could only seem to think and speak of his detached friend, while, at the same time, clamming up whenever what’s-his-name was made the topic of a question.
As for the twitchy boy, he’d not been seen in town for weeks, causing locals to surmise that, having gained a fondness for companionship, he’d reconciled with his reclusive father. This blind guess had grown lazily official since, apart from Quinton, townsfolk felt his exit only made the streets seem cleaner and less emotionally taxing to navigate.
But on the very afternoon the mayor and advocate had spoken last, Aimee rushed into the flower shop, panting that, while window shopping at the lumberyard that morning, she’d seen the freakish family that, as gossip had it, were residing in “the bauble,” as locals sometimes called the weird abandoned playhouse.
While the man and boys had proved to be the rumored eyesores, she said the younger of the sons had bothered her particularly. As she had pleasant memories of watching
Edward Scissorhands
, she used his countervailing innocence to reassure herself, then forced her gaze to parse the child’s vampiric coif and outfit, and, the less they formed her view, the more he seemed to reproduce or even be the boy who’d left her son a basket case.
She’d lingered in the lumberyard’s small gift shop, handling its wooden replicas of nearby points of interest, until the strange child fled his family long enough to scrutinize a tiny hand-carved skeleton, whereupon she swooped, so increasingly convinced her guesswork was correct with every clarifying footstep that she called to him the way she always had—i.e., “Hi, Quinton’s friend.”
With that, the boy looked up to see his ex-friend’s mother, and, as his heavily mascaraed eyes were widening, he’d snapped the skeleton in half. The crack of bursting lathwork carried through the shop, drawing a mistrustful glance from his alleged father, at which point Aimee had retreated out the entrance.
She’d driven home, hoping to soothe Quinton with her discovery. Instead, startled by this news from his familiar fetal pose upon the bathroom floor, he’d requested a La Bière du démon from the fridge, which seemed to her a good sign, then downed the bottle in one wobbling gulp, which didn’t.
One day, Quinton said, back when he and the peculiar boy were best of friends, a nosy mood beatified by several Red Bulls each had made them want to scale a tattered section of the brick-and-barbed-wire battlement that fenced the legendary playhouse.
No sooner had they thudded to their feet inside the compound than the dust raised by their landing breezed into the view of what would have been the hottest girl on earth, he said, were “she” not exercising at that moment dressed in skintight leotards.
This feminine, mirage-like boy introduced himself as Claude, the only offspring of the man whose property they’d just transgressed. Despite his disappointing penis, he balanced out as quite a decent guy by giving them permission to have a full-fledged look around.
As he attempted to describe the playhouse to his mother, Quentin’s sentences had quilled like Chinese acrobats and rat-a-tatted like contestants in a high-stakes spelling bee and finally crashed his voice into the feedback necessary to enunciate such words as “mind-boggling” and “insane” with sufficient majesty.
Still, he said the weirdest thing was Claude’s supposed father, whom he’d never seen in so much as shadow. Due to some medical condition Claude had somehow lengthily yet barely managed to explain, his father couldn’t breathe the same oxygen as everybody else.
Thus, he’d supervised their visit from some unknown room and through at least one hidden camera. When he’d spoken to and with them, a voice had burbled from a speaker in the wall, as though they were an all-male Charlie’s Angels or three versions of that guy in
Saw
who sawed his leg off to escape.
The boy and he had started hanging out there daily, and Quentin said he couldn’t quite explain its staying power unless . . . the father’s fun suggestion that the boys perform a play for his amusement had not eventually devolved into a thing that seemed less fun in retrospect.
Quentin guessed the play’s interminable length might have engineered some kind of trance, as it was written to be acted out in real time, day after day, morning until evening, not to mention its enthralling story line, which had narrowed their attention like the stages of the Tour de France.
Among the play’s tight cast of characters was a man of roughly middle age and no profession who, like Claude’s elusive father, made no appearance on the stage itself, although this subterfuge was due not to a medical condition but to his secretive and morbid curiosity.
Then there was the man’s dead wife, although her corpse, which spent its face time lying crumpled on a staircase, only seemed to be a facet of the play to show how he had forged two of his ejaculations into sons.
The most important characters were, first, the couple’s younger son, a suicidal fourteen-year-old liar who swanned around the stage in Emo outfits, and, second, a cute but tiresome young adult from Paris who was in the play for reasons no one understood, not even him.
The play was set in a chateau whose history of on-site murders, ghosts, and other unexplained phenomena required a lengthy spoken foreword, which Claude’s father had recited through the speakers for what would have felt like months were not the bloodthirsty details of this story custom-made for mordant teenagers.
To cite the most agentive of these details, the couple’s older son had either killed himself, been murdered, died by tragic accident, or faked his death within the previous few months.
The anguished man and wife had put the crime scene on the market, and the young Parisian, struck by certain parallels between their son’s obituary in
Le Monde
and the clueless death of his own brother years before, found himself inspired to visit the chateau and then acquire it.
While touring his purchase, he’d discovered there was more to the chateau—specifically its riddling with secret passageways—and to the family, whose screwiness seemed less a legacy of grief than the bluff of incommunicado people, than had been mentioned by the building’s real estate agent.
However, even he became a suspect when, after sealing the transaction with a handshake, he kidnapped the son, an act that might have offered them relief, considering their offspring’s pricey regimen of meds, were he not a resident of the Marais, which even people in the provinces had heard was overrun with homosexuals.
Claude’s father’s disembodied voice had played the patriarch, of course, as well as reading out the stage directions where required. Claude was cast in two small roles that proved quite meaty when combined, that of the older, dead or missing son in flashbacks, and the frozen but dramatically positioned mother’s corpse.
The twitchy boy portrayed the younger son, since it was thought his scrawniness would bring an Emo artifice to life and that his meek, unkempt behavior might misread as suicidal in the costume’s gloomy envelope.
Quentin was awarded the Parisian’s role, and he admitted having relished his alter ego’s evil, violent streak so wholly that he hadn’t minded all the homework it required to nail the character’s bombastic speech and la-di-da comportment, not that watching DVDs of Monty Python skits dubbed into French was work.
Quentin swore the play was such a corkscrewed mass of crisscrossed plots and episodic pickles that he hadn’t even noticed when a gay subtext curtailed its breakneck pacing with some icky love scenes whose X-rated realizations might not have been so crucial to maintain the work’s integrity in hindsight.
Still, the play was so ingenious that learning what new twist the Emo’s death might trigger seemed more important than not murdering a friend, and it was only when the gory scene was under way that Quentin lost it, grabbed his woozy, battered costar by his hoodie’s blood-soaked sleeve, and ran away, not even stopping when he felt the Emo costume slip or wriggle free.
The mayor was as astonished by this yarn as Quentin’s mother, but the district’s scandals were her duty. So, with a phone call, she dispatched the town’s patrolmen to the property, and, after taping a “Closed” sign to the window of the bakery that doubled as their station, they’d bathed Main Street in gushes of revolving lights and yapping sirens so unheard of in those restful parts that many locals have suggested it become an annual event.
Excepting Quentin, no one in town had ever seen the finished playhouse, and the mayor declared that, had she thought to tape the gendarmes’ whimpering account of its emergence from the trees, it might have made the famous coverage of the Hindenburg disaster sound fastidious.
Having recently been out to see the playhouse for herself, she claimed her words were far too pinched to do its dynamism justice. Still, one of her descriptions, which had turned a local drunk into a churchgoer, might be a starting place, she said, but it relied on Euro Disney to make its point, to which the lawyer assured her he’d been dragged there by his nieces.
First, she said he should remember, say, two dozen of the park’s wildest attractions. Then, he should imagine they were stacked, one vulgar ride atop another, to create a sort of garish, thick-necked totem pole whose height would dwarf the Eiffel Tower’s.