The Marbled Swarm (14 page)
Next, he should imagine the gigantic hand of God was fading in above the column and then pressing down with all His mighty strength. Since God was the greatest of magicians, the stack would not be crushed into debris. Instead, the highest ride would wondrously merge into the one below, and that mutated ride would blend into the next, and so forth, until what occupied the ground was an unearthly, massive doodad.
Now, to reengage with the investigating cops, they’d parked their squad car, battled through the building’s psychedelic headwinds, distinguished a front door of sorts, kicked it in, and drawn their flashlights.
Rather than the honeycombed infinity of rooms foreshadowed by the tangled outer shell, what faced their evanescent firing squad was just one very plain, enormous, empty space.
The walls, floor, and ceiling weren’t the friendly, decorated borders of a home, but rather raw wood sheets that brought to mind some kind of epic packing crate in which another house had been delivered.
Still, having tracked their share of UFOs back to a moonlit water tower, the gendarmes searched the room in the name of an investigation, and they would have found nothing abnormal had the concept of normality applied and were the younger cop not prone to sweat when he was disconcerted.
Mistaking a grainy slat of wall for possible graffiti, the younger cop approached this seeming clue, and, while he stood admiring nature’s unkempt artistry, he felt a highly welcome coolness whish and climb his hairy legs.
Crouching both to analyze the source and dry himself, he realized that a draft of air was infiltrating a small folio of floorboards, and yet his snooping flashlight found no markings of a trap door or repairs that might explain it.
After handcuffing the busted playhouse door, they’d driven out to see the alcoholic miner, but he’d stopped their squad car in the driveway with a rifle, shouting, “Son, what fucking son.” He’d lost his manhood in a knife fight when he was seven, he explained, and if they’d wondered why he drank so much, he was drunk enough to drop his pants and educate them.
Their next stop was Aimee’s home, where they’d interrogated Quentin, hoping that their firsthand knowledge of the playhouse would compel him to retract his lies, or, should he have gone insane, disillusion him. Instead, he’d quickly reemerged as the disrespectful hooligan who liked to bugger homeless cats with lighted fireworks for quote-unquote no reason.
They’d locked him in the nearest to a jail cell that their station-cum-bakery could fake, meaning the closet where they stored their vacuum cleaner, but, after studying the junk in there all afternoon, the playhouse in his stories sounded, if anything, even more Byzantine and pornographic.
In the mere few days since then, the mayor said, time seemed to have rewound a month. The peculiar father-son team had left town or escaped into the mines, and, if so, were surely dead by now or wandering in ever-slower circles.
The single aspect of the strange, chimeric incident not chalked up to Quentin’s bullshit or the paranoid delusions that piggyback small towners’ boredom was the nameless boy or, given no one knew him in the first place, his whereabouts.
That case would likely stay unsolved by any tricks within their means, the mayor said, barring a leak from Quentin’s shrink. Still, a photo of the missing boy, if it was him, that had been lifted off the lumberyard’s surveillance footage, was now posted on the town’s official website, although it showed a face more heavily made-up than easily made out.
When I re-latched my iPhone’s leather case, it could have been a castanet, since my companions, having found my drawn-out silence shocking, literally busted out in raucous dance steps, fueled by cocaine’s tickles and their curiosity to know what could have muted me.
First, I ducked into my office, woke a desktop, launched Safari, and then fed it search terms like “Calais,” “nearby,” and “playhouse,” until one link unpeeled a site that I reloaded several times before my browser aced the geriatric code that left it knotted up with animated gifs and clip art.
The power of bad photographs to sculpt old bedsheets into ghosts of World War casualties is known to every half-sane TV addict, and the missing boy’s photo required a vicious squint to tell him from its surface noise, but, I swear, had Alfonse been corporeal or were Didier a twin, I could have been studying either one of them.
More important, I was certain that—and, if I’ve laced my story tightly, you’ve been cursing my slow-wittedness for pages—given the classified, surveying father and his sketchy, bit-part children, and . . . well, every aspect—even its provincial chateau setting—as “chateau” was just two letters shy of “Châtelet,” which was my father’s final clue to me, as you’ll recall—if the play in Quentin’s story wasn’t an imaginative lie, its author was most certainly my father.
Granted, he’d never even canonized my mother in a sappy poem, or none that she had pinned onto the fridge, but, then again, all his fulsome talk of how he’d bagged a billion euro from a bunch of idiots had never held my interest, nor would I likely have picked up on any chitchat about the Comédie-Française or the Festival d’Avignon or things like that.
I’ve mentioned my discrediting performance as an acting student when an adolescent, and I’ll hope you paused there long enough to guess I wouldn’t reference that and make myself a laughingstock to you without first giving my little sacrifice a saving grace.
A day would come, and one minutely less historic than the afternoon I’m re-creating, when filling dinner plates with almost anyone I wished to kill, abbreviate, and season proved even less conducive to my talents than the acting jobs I might have nailed had they been custom-built with me in mind.
Human food is such a chore to edit, involving such a surfeit of accomplices, stranding so much eerily familiar, shoddy chaff that proves so humdrum to partition from the nest eggs and then fade away from the police.
It would begin to pain me that, if I remained a cannibal or viewed myself as one, I would never have the independence of an actor who can disappear into his body as behind a puff of smoke or the freedoms of an artist who need only find an isolated room to make his magic and then pay the rent and close the door.
One of the objects in my father’s art collection, and the work that most delayed a banging gavel at the auction where I finally cleaned house, was nothing more galvanic than an unmarked sheet of paper with four pinholes in its corners.
This page was not just art but art of consequence, and the only thing that differentiated it from the bundled stacks you buy at Office Depot was an artist’s uncorroborated claim that he had stared at it for a thousand hours.
Only in my earliest, most far-fetched daydreams had I ever been a cannibal the way that staring recluse was an artist, and I would never be someone who needed nothing but one hypnotizing spot upon a wall to make me happy, whether it contained a piece of paper being fired up by my eyesight or a peephole that could lull me into using my imagination as a lifeboat.
In that suspicious, coked-up moment with the missing boy’s alleged image ringing in my eyes and the lawyer’s phone call still engraved in my attention, I realized that, since I had never doodled anything that looked like much of anything, and since there were no secret passages around to stimulate my inner voyeur, I would be wise to reconsider acting.
Then I had a revelation, and not just any shocker but a bombshell that exploded the conclusion I had drawn about myself the night I synced a fading mental image of Alfonse beset with hungry lions to the riotous ejaculate I’d just nicknamed Lake Stomach.
Barring my loft’s lack of proscenium and rows of seats, and given that the sun or lamps in my vicinity weren’t roving spotlights to my knowledge, I was and had been acting for as long as I could tell the difference.
When I spoke, I heard my father’s voice, if not word for word then as loyally as the stars of Molière’s plays had wagged his tongue in centuries.
If my life was even half the procedural unfolding of a game my father played, I’d barely coined a phrase outside the range of his remote control.
My brother, whom I’d only met at all because his father wore my mother’s ring, was really more my understudy than a sibling, and Didier was less the makings of my boyfriend than Alfonse’s stuntman.
What’s that saying . . . if it resembles a duck and quacks, it’s usually a duck? And if the world revolves around a duck, and experts claim it must since ducks see things and everyone, no matter their complexity or power, as basic shapes that are digestible or obstacle, then . . . well, I know I had a point when I began that.
Maybe I warrant your indulgence as I stared into my future on that scattered afternoon, reenvisioning my father as an artist who couldn’t squint into a dent without creating a black hole, and Alfonse and I as sons who’d never masturbated without gluing down a piece of his collage, and the playhouse as a theater where I, the most anointed of his fantasies, could become the actor I’d been groomed to play.
B
efore I learned the marbled swarm, or, rather, spoiled its chances with my inattentiveness and patchy wit, then screwed up both of my impending lives, I believed I was my family’s chief ingredient, if not for any evidence more solid than my highly complimented looks, then with total confidence.
Perhaps because it felt so unfamiliar at the time, there came a night when I was memorably alone and isolated, even though my family was in easy walking distance.
My mother had just burnt some corner of our dinner, locked the door, and was sulking on the kitchen floor as if it were a bathroom.
Alfonse was in his bedroom playing Go with an imaginary friend who, considering his mazy name was later solved into an anagram of mine, was probably a more perfected me.
My father, who consistently ignored me, was doing so while obfuscated by the mansion’s secret tunnels, meaning somewhere so unknown I couldn’t make-believe his negligence had been mandated by my rallying effect upon his every thought.
I was in the living room, for reasons no more interesting than the reason it was called a living room, worrying that, were my heart one of those malformed hand grenade–like hearts that crumple strapping soccer players in their twenties, my corpse might lie decomposing on the floor for hours.
I was sitting on a hexagonal clump of painted wood that met my father’s standards for a couch, weakened by self-pity, yes, but more importantly because that clump was close to our TV.
If you wonder why I’ve paused to re-create this slight occasion when, up until this point, I’ve scrapped each time I’d qualified for couch potato or used the toilet, just be glad I care enough to skip you past the moiré pattern that diffused the TV screen and my attention for almost an hour thanks to my corresponding pickiness.
Instead, I’ll strand us on a channel in the upper hundreds. It was showing an older film, not so old it lied the world was black and white, but too slushy-looking to have been fed through a computer, and too raggedy to have its origins in France, but dubbed into a slangy French, and thus something a thirteen-year-old boy like me could fancy were he stoned or strange enough.
Perhaps it was an actor whose famous name escapes me that stalled my finger on the button, but it was someone younger clad in nothing but an open, flapping medieval bathrobe and shoving human meat into his mouth who made me stop.
It was an avant-garde film, as they were called, so, where a film you’d actually choose to watch would have a story line, it had jagged cuts from place to place and interminable close-ups of the human soul tinkering with actors’ eyes. Still, as I’d seen my mother act in even weirder pictures, I sort of figured out the deal behind the character I seemed to like.
He’d killed his father, fled into a forest, and was hunting guys and eating them because, well, snakes and lizards must taste as scary as they look.
Since I didn’t know a cannibal from Tintin at that point, my first reactions weren’t “how gross” or “that’s so fucking awesome,” but rather broodings of the wistful, wanton sort particular to thirteen-year-old inverts like myself who thought the parts of life that didn’t give me an erection weren’t especially important.
So intensely good-looking was this cannibal, and so greatly did the actor’s face improve on every face for which I now felt I’d made considerable allowances, that I wondered if I’d even seen this film before, perhaps when still so tiny and half blind I thought his image was a lesson on my babysitters’ flash cards.
I tend to watch the films I rent or download with the rashness of a porn fan whose arousal is dependent on one offbeat speck of sex, say nipple play, and yet I found the hour while this film unspooled in arty, traipsing increments no problem whatsoever.
Even when the cannibal was captured by an antiquated version of police, then kept from eating as he liked or skinny-dipping as I wished, I endured that quarrelsome couch in hopes the actor’s name might brake the closing credits lengthily enough that I could run upstairs and Google him.
If you think I’m complicated as it stands, feel fortunate I lack the courage to delineate my mind’s implosion when the scroll of names revealed him as Pierre Clémenti and the body I had craved to be essentially my own with just a few years’ muscle tone to separate us.
While I won’t lie that I’ve been secretly dictating what you’re reading from a wheelchair, having long since gnawed away my limbs like a coyote in a snare trap, I will reveal that, among the details I’ve withheld to spare us my embarrassment are a large number of mirrors that I feel my living quarters would be dull without.
If you’ve wished this story had included an additional sex scene or a hundred, or if you think that, for all the many paintings made to illustrate the story of Narcissus swooning at a pond, there remains the urgent need for an XXX-rated version starring me, well, I agree with you objectively, but no.
Point is, I’d just longed to fuck my father then, presumably, be killed by him and eaten, or, given our resemblance, vice versa, or, in other words, to somehow eat myself without committing suicide, and that was quite a shock, no question there, but it was more the kind of shock I’d felt when the chateau I purchased early in our friendship showed itself as yet another batch of secret tunnels masquerading as a home. In other words, it was the pattern of my self-regard that petrified me.
I must have sat there glazing in the film’s postscript of clustered advertisements while my thoughts turned uglier and uglier for quite a while, I don’t remember.
Eventually, the room was acclimated by the odor of our salvaged dinner. While I’m sure my mother’s cooking did my stomach’s trick, I do remember that the cow who’d died to set my teeth in motion seemed no more instrumental to the flavor than any fish who might have swum the Evian with which I washed it down.
No occasion in real life is as loaded as the scene in every film I can remember where some actor turns his cheerless eyes—or, rather, pulls a well-known acting trick that makes his eyes appear lamentable—upon his loved ones. Then, looking away, often out a window where a stretch of nature dominates and looks idyllic, his eyes will signal us that, when he kills himself or them, we, having watched that scene, will understand his reasons as completely or as poorly as he ever did.
It’s a venerable device, and suggesting that my thoughts that night were pivotal is a device as well, but why not save us time and join me in believing it.
In the days, months, and gradually years since I decided to impersonate my real and less realistic father—although it’s true that both of them had made their names by living lies—I’ve made do and even headway as a cannibal.
I’ve wolfed down sawed-off torsos like a zombie or Neanderthal, and I’ve applied ivory chopsticks and the most delicate of forks to nibbles that procrastinated in my mouth like soggy laundry in a drier. Still, let me put two names to two examples and, more important, finish off some stories that would dangle off a final cliff rather than closing sentence.
Serge, or #7 as we know him, was deducted in a surgical procedure that, although heavily modified by Christophe, was invented in the 1990s to salvage living sculptures from the husks of people who had set themselves on fire, for instance. We ate his highlights while, on a narrow, adjunct table, his rags blinked once for “thanks” and twice for “yes” when we voiced compliments or questions.
Claude, whom you’ll recall as #7’s brother, was discovered dead inside the clothes and makeup of his mother—the victim of a topple, we decided, although the dinner he supplied had a metallic taste that might have warranted a coroner had François not, on that occasion, cooked a feast that left so little of the boy behind—and, as I recall, he was down to fingernails and toenails—that we would have had more luck extracting DNA from his reflection in a window.
But now I’m speaking of and as the fussy, rock-hard brute that cast the palest shadow in my thirteen-year-old daydreams.
For reasons lost to whimsy’s transience but logical in theory, I felt a need to ditch my heedless family, not through moping in some fraction of our mansion but by reviving someone I had also been until perhaps a year before.
That younger, less envisioned me would sneak away from home some nights, then mosey through the park that partners with the Eiffel Tower—i.e., a numbing stretch of lawn and chintzy trees that seemed less conjured from the ground than sanded free of buildings like the land around an airport.
It seemed a kind of giant, threadbare cushion where, were the Eiffel Tower to be wrenched from its foundations by some angry King Kong type, it could land without untoward expense. In the meantime, tourists were free to come and go.
At the age of eight or nine, I’d used these walkabouts to blend into the people milled beneath the Tower whence, adopting some cartoony foreign accent and uncovering my fractured English, I would ask a fellow novice for directions to some tourist trap. Normally, one or two successful scams would undermine my loneliness and turn me on my heel.
But when my voice stockpiled its current rust, my loss for words and phony accents seemed to work against me. No matter how unfashionably I dressed or spoke, every tourist I intrigued would winnow Paris from our chats until we only seemed to speak about the view from his hotel room, wherein the Louvre or Notre Dame was inevitably visible.
In far too many cases, I was persuaded that I wouldn’t have seen Paris until I saw it through their window, and, once I had, feel equally convinced that, since Paris was a state of mind, I might know it best when least distracted by its details, courtesy, they suggested, of a close-up of a pillow I would spend an hour biting and deluging with my tears and slobber.
On the evening I’m beginning to describe, it was this willful ignorance of Paris I found touristic.
My strolling and sightseeing quickly centered on two boys a little older than myself—Swedish, I thought, or from those other, nearby states that crank out blonds and seem like lesser Swedens—whose faces wore the stares I always leave in faces once I’ve shown them any interest.
To steal away with foreigners who don’t speak French or who flip through phrase books while they’re bantering, I must retrain my mouth to gum the basic, neutralizing English that all Europeans speak when taking breaks outside their homelands.
In other words, you wouldn’t recognize me, but, on the plus side, you could feel the full, calamitous effect of my infamously hot, false first impression.
Just as hosts will use the minutes prior to guests’ arrival tidying the messes in their homes that seem too fine to whitewash in their normal course of vacuuming, I spent the cab ride to the Swedes’ hotel scoping out my body language to make sure I’d left myself back at the mansion.
Their hotel was a filthy stack of floors between two crepe stands on rue St. André des Arts. As we climbed the stairs, they spoke of our responsibility to have ingenious sex while high above a street trodden by visionary poets and experimental writers whose names were granulated by their Swedish accents and adorned the messy pile of books that made their unmade double bed look like a table.
As I’ve mentioned, having sex is always new to me, and I am less its star than an inspector who assigns himself the case, and who is not so much assigned as stranded there, and every bed is like an open road, and I some clueless rabbit lingering in danger’s path because it needs the warmth.
True to form or any lack thereof, when the Swedes offered to take my coat, they might as well have been a pair of blinding headlights. Stricken by my piddling English and a voice whose squeaks I can’t affect in my loquacious current form, I tried to warn them that, although I’d been declared a lousy lay by everyone who’d had the job before them, if they truly were fans of miscreants like Baudelaire, perhaps they would find poetry where others had felt miserable.
I distantly recall the day when I mistyped onto a website where some boys around my age were busy milking one another’s bodies of what seemed to be a magic potion that I only learned through trial and error was no better than the crummy snacks in mine.
Still, at that time, based on their swabbing tongues and chomping teeth and pawing hands, you might have thought the mouth or cock or ass they worked on was a secret passage and they would have tried to crawl inside had they not been relatively gigantic.
I’ve never misconstrued an ass or cock or mouth as bottomless, but mine have been exhausted like they were and more routinely than I’ve cared to say, and being fucked is not what I imagined, and, in fact, I’ll ask for your indulgence if I edit my involvement to a look of terror that, on second thought, I might not dwell on either since the Swedes were far more interested in shoving things inside my face than understanding me with its help.
That lasted long enough that I began to think—well, as much as someone trying not to cry can think, and maybe it’s the terms “intuit” or “feel” I should be grasping for—that, when I’d let my acting teacher fool around to get the role of Chevalier Danceny in
Les liaisons dangereuses
, then padded my few lines so loosely he was fired as an incompetent, the central problem might have been when he’d miscast me as the sexiest kid he’d ever seen, I think he said.
But, since you weren’t in bed with us, let me try a populist example, although I will admit in doing so that I’m just parroting what others far more well informed have written.
Apparently, there is a novel titled
Story of the Eye
that, although mistaken by French readers in the ’50s for porn just erudite enough to carry on the metro, was instead a work of genius that co-opted the erotic—a kind of sheep in wolf’s clothing—and this novel’s eminence is such that it was prominent among the volumes lying open on the Swedes’ bed and the second to the last to be knocked onto the floor.
Its success led hornier authors with fewer ulterior designs to dress their novels’ sexy scenes in Linguist Chic. The most famous of these knockoffs is
The Story of O
. It and novels titled virtually like it seemed to titillate a marginally better class of reader on release, but their steamy scenes were too uncomplicated for the French intelligentsia and their artfulness too thin to work as a deodorant.