The Marbled Swarm (4 page)
“When Claude and Serge did nothing more vituperative throughout those months than stare each other down, I decided to kill them both. The reason for that is very complicated.
“I eased through Serge’s secret door one night and suffocated him with a pillow. I’m certain he was dead because . . . well, in the confusion of my feelings, I sodomized his cadaver with a violence that would have coaxed a pterodactyl from its fossil, be assured. But, to a horror I was scarcely able to conceal, he came downstairs for breakfast in the morning with nothing more unpleasant than a headache.
“For a time, we had a gardener whose relentless gifts to Serge, even on the most infinitesimal of holidays, must have worn away his salary. I invited him to share a beer at this very table, and, after a bit of yard talk, let’s call it, I suggested he could tamper with my son so long as Serge died inexplicably while on their date and by some odd coincidence.
“I unforgivably neglected to insist the encounter must transpire in Serge’s bedroom. I felt so stupid. They did their business in the tool shed, and, to worsen matters, Serge was such a “hottie,” by this gardener’s estimate, that accidentally killing him would be impractical. I fired this gardener, and he blackmailed me. He’s still blackmailing me.
“One night, an inebriated Claude mistook our backyard for a pretty park. I followed him until I knew our yells would fray against the chateau’s windows, then grabbed a rock and, waving it in upraised hands, confronted him. Had he raped Serge? I bellowed. ‘Only in the mouth, and once, and he raped me if anything, and hardly even, but you . . . Serge told me you’ve been raping him for years. So, cut the motherfucking—’
“This charge so aggrieved my mind that it seems I used the rock to answer him. The head blow didn’t kill Claude, but it left the things he tried to say incomprehensible, and his legs could not support his weight or even crawl. I dragged his slurring, flapping body to the river and laid it facedown in the water. And, to be fair, I somehow viewed myself as an avenging angel and raped him as well.
“Strangely, Claire thought Claude was partying in Paris, and Serge and he weren’t speaking, and we were in between groundskeepers at the time, so when someone finally breached that distant part of the estate, Claude’s body was so waterlogged and bloated, it might as well have been Amelia Earhart’s plane.
“Obviously, Serge had to die for, well, there are millions of compelling reasons, trust me. He had an expiration date, but, between the game of selling the chateau and hosting buyers day and night, coordinating the two schedules has proven difficult. So, are you going to kill him, or what are you going to do with him?”
The flock of birds had spiraled elsewhere, and Jean-Paul was gazing at the empty sky, which had nothing left to hint about itself unless blue air knows something I don’t know. Naturally, I’d been balancing my intake of his words with their presumptive trust and strangely smooth delivery.
I don’t believe in honesty, or not in fecklessness so thorough as to wipe a liar clean. There’s a reason why the recent drip-drip-drip of missing French boys has made the headlines without a single gendarme, worried parent, or gutter journalist showing signs of having given me a thought.
Granted, when people disappear in bulk and every one inspires a Facebook tribute page whose friends are under twenty-one and gay or female—and not to staunch this story’s flow to compliment my tastes, but the unsolved spree has not been tagged
“la reconstitution historique de beauté mauvaise”
for no good reason—their abductors rarely beg for chloroform as well. So, there’s that distraction to assist me.
Tweaking every word before it moved my lips, I told Jean-Paul that, circumstances being what they were—and I roughed out certain issues we’d discussed, then divulged Serge’s location—a bit of news that didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest, I’ll add—I couldn’t see the boy living more than, say, a day or two perhaps.
“This is terrible,” Jean-Paul said, “but . . . would it be possible to . . . observe the ending? While safely hidden in the passageways, of course.”
I replied that were his hands to wind up dirty—the form of dirt to be determined—which would likely need his DNA and necessitate his posing for some grisly family portraits, all of which would stay locked in my possession if uncalled for, and were the chateau’s secret walkways reenvisioned as a hiking trail that wended up a man-made mountain, I could promise any highlights would transpire within its scenic viewing spots and most conceivably, as strange as it might sound, in the kitchen.
Jean-Paul forced his jittering, inattentive eyes into a collision with mine, or at best I seemed to be their second choice.
“If I appear distracted or withholding,” he said, “it’s because this property has a deeper and more thorough secret, concealed from you until this moment, and in light of which even the passages I showed you will seem as public as a sidewalk. In truth, the chateau is a kind of theater, and its rooms and floors and private berths a tiered and complicated stage where my family and I form an involuntary cast. Never
having cause to give it words before, I can’t think of how to phrase this.”
I have a tendency to blather when a thoughtful “hm” would serve, and yet so taxing were my feelings of confusion and disinterest that I smiled suspiciously, then shook my head to show I hadn’t understood a word he’d said and likely never would.
He seemed perplexed by my misgivings, although, as years have passed and superseded his inflationary image of the chateau with my own, I’ve revised his cringe and worried gaze across the yard into a look of disappointment.
“On second thought,” he said, “it will prove more understandable if you discover it yourself.”
M
y car is a customized Citroën Hypnos, and I don’t believe you need to know much more about it other than, perhaps, a hasty rundown on the actual revision.
The backseat was enlarged and gussied up in hopes of holding and impressing up to five short, skinny guests—six, if one or two of them have died, by which I mean are put to better use as unwitting contortionists.
This reshuffle chopped the trunk into a wedge unsuitable for luggage and barely large enough to cram a corpse, much less a boy with working lungs who also has a multilayered Emo outfit and detailed hairstyle to consider.
No sooner was the driveway’s crust of twigs and pebbles crackling beneath our tires than I heard Serge’s . . . fist, I think, bang repeatedly on something. Due to his lack of elbow room, the sound was pleasantly non-bell-like.
Azmir, my driver, has lived in France since he was ten, thanks to an epicure of scale-model Algerians. When his appointed week or two of lopsided sexual recipience were up, a gory head wound would have exiled him in Jannah had he not overheard his owner ragging on a newer harem dweller and taken it upon himself to kill the little loser on the spot, apparently so charming his master with this burst of loyalty that he was spared and given tenure.
Years later, my late father hired him as a driver and, rather oddly, fattened up some bigwig’s bank account to make the boy a citizen. Thus, Azmir’s sleaze factor and flying off the handle are so ingrained within my worries that to this day I can’t sit behind him without fingering my mace.
Azmir’s choppy voice is far too brazen for my fussing speech to illustrate, so I will neither butcher nor adorn it, except to share that the sentiment behind his first few words was “I need to fuck the weirdo.”
It seems a manageable demand, and I’m scarcely a monogamist. Still, to use a lingo I revile and yet can wield if called upon, Azmir is hung like a fire truck. While that aphorism works, its charming “fire truck” grossly underplays the threat. So, before you find his macho, well-armed act endearing, let me add that while he’ll fuck whoever I request until they’re floating like a raft on their escaping blood supply, that indiscrimination is in his job description.
What Azmir craves are ten- to fourteen-year-old white boys, or, to be precise and yet more general, their pale, outnumbered asses, or, to bring in a microscope, making Serge’s, for example, seesaw, blow gaskets, suffer quakes and aftershocks, and finally flatten like a leaky tire beneath his Herculean pumping.
Honestly, I would have paid him overtime and even held our captive down until the corpse had shit an octopus of its internal organs, but there are others in my posse, each a shade of gay, or so I’ll lazily baptize them for the moment, whose preference for working ass is moot whenever Azmir gets carte blanche, and I was pretty sure that one or two held IOUs from me.
So, I told Azmir I’d have to put his need on hold, which he knew I would say and surely hated.
It was our stony, ensuing lull that brought the graduated pace of Serge’s pounding to the foreground. The beat was slowing, in a word, and I might have blamed his spindly, tiring arm if each new tap-tap hadn’t sounded more insistent than the last.
To be safe, I cracked the backseat’s secret hatch, as I call it, although it’s technically the car trunk’s skylight. As Azmir hadn’t charged the car’s official flashlight as I had asked, I tried to figure out the trunk by squinting, and when that proved no match, I used my nostrils.
Cuteness is significant, no question there, but in my . . . field, as I’ll describe my predilection for the moment, a boy’s outlay is always something of a cheesecloth. In Serge’s case, I smelled a recent cigarette, unlaundered feet or socks, mouthfuls of breath bequeathed by pizza, and what had to be a hard-on, and not an instant one at that.
Serge must have felt a draft because his noises ceased, and he said, “Please don’t become angry with me, but I can’t seem to breathe.”
I asked if doing “this” was an improvement, and then I raised and dropped the hatch to illustrate my “this.”
“Too early to tell,” he said.
I asked if he would pique my curiosity and say whether or not he was sporting an erection.
“Yes, but any credit goes to how I’m stuck here and the shaking of your car,” he said with difficulty.
I gave him the good news that we were looking for a dirt road where his seat could be upgraded, and then the bad news that the dirt would make the ride conspicuously bumpier.
“If it’s no trouble, can you leave it open,” he asked, meaning the hatch, which I immediately closed.
Northeastern France is very harmless with its hills in quotes, repeating fields, and sprinkled trees, and quite serene thanks to its last-ditch status among tourists, but it persecutes me nonetheless for reasons I can only play at solving.
One of my family’s vacation homes lay somewhere in this region, and, to believe their photo album, we’d spent at least one local holiday. I was too small-minded at the time to savor any landscape that wasn’t melodramatic. In fact, my single recollection has me juggling a hard-on while foraging a porn stream on my laptop and staring daggers at the ceiling, which contained or rather was a giant painting of me falling from the sky that my father, having thought my bedroom’s heights an eyesore, commissioned from some trendy artist of the period.
In fact, my childhood was so cornered by the art my father bought and believed more advantageous than our furniture, it’s quite likely I was brainwashed by those stationary ghouls into an artful work of human whose charms are similarly thin and geared to vex, and who, like their so-called post-
conceptualist creators, thinks any matters of the heart, especially mine but anyone’s will do, are too uncool to represent.
There were dirt roads everywhere we looked, but they inevitably veered not into helpful clots of trees but through endless blocks of maybe ankle-high wild grasses and the midget crops of nearby farmers.
Had it been the winter, I might have gambled, viewed the trunk as something more romantic, say the bottom of a well where Serge had fallen, and chanted, “Stay with us, buddy,” or some other futile pleasantry.
If Serge had died before we reached the streets of Paris, I would have more than compensated with his slack-jawed shell. To speak somewhat frankly, every boy I’ve known as well as killed has struck me as his corpse’s baby picture.
Still, even a mild summer day is no preservative, and dead boys aren’t exactly wheels of brie, however much they might smell the same eventually.
When Serge’s lonesome taps grew less important than his wheezing, I told Azmir that if he wished to fuck an ass with any sassiness at all, we should save its owner now and cross our fingers that, if anyone drove past, he would be gay enough to think someone as cute as me could do no wrong.
Azmir swerved our car onto the roadside, causing me to grasp the nearest handle and Serge to bang around and yowl inside his can.
To make the transfer look bewildering, we needed to employ a sleight of hand. While I can spin a tricky story, Serge was more than just a word on that occasion. Luckily, dust is basically a rustic fog unless you’re scientific, so Azmir stomped the brakes, which blasted out a semi-decent cloud cover.
We jumped outside then coughed and blinked our way back to the trunk, where, after leaving two or three new nasty scratches, Azmir stabbed the key into the lock. As the lid was drifting open, we grabbed two fistfuls, raised the shredding bundle, and cantered to the nearest door.
So, Serge would live to see another morning, as they say. Well, if we’re to speak of what he saw in bold quotation marks, I’d guess his body might have sensed the sun, then signaled “morning” to his brain, and even that conjecture’s wild since, if I’m remembering correctly, we would have needed a forensics handbook to be certain it was him.
One of Serge’s eyes was getting lost in the confusion of its fattening lids. He had a boxer’s coin-purse gash beneath the same eye, and his nose was blowing ruddy bubbles. One front tooth was chipped in half, and its twin, while still intact, was tumbling on his tongue until it washed up on his blobby lower lip.
He would touch the Xmas pattern on his sweater very lightly, then yelp as if the little pines were shorting outlets, so I think he had fractured ribs. Most of one black jeans leg had been torn away, baring a thigh and calf whose faded scrapes were his responsibility, and a bleeding, crooked knee that surely wasn’t.
Can we agree that, had the next few hours passed routinely, I would have asked Azmir to use the Citroën’s GPS and fetch the nearest doctor’s office? I might have spent the hurried drive there begging Serge’s pardon and surrendering, oh, money or a rain check in return for his silence on the matter.
Now, were I gay or, if you insist, entirely gay, I would have . . . well, you tell me. I’m not gay enough to know. Were I to take a guess, it would be all of the above, plus some fiery disappointment upon finding such an aftermath in such a tempting spot.
Picture a movie star who draws you to the cineplex however poor his films’ reviews because you’d rather watch him change his shirt in silhouette in any context than mollify his critics. Now, recall the lavish masturbation he imposed on you, or all the time you wasted stalking him, if you went that insane.
Now, imagine it’s late at night in the Marais. You’re walking home from . . . what’s that skeezy club . . . Le Depot, where, true to form, anyone who’d cruised you wasn’t anything like him. In one last bid to meet his counterpart, you try the hotbed of Passage de Retz, and, as though its yellowed lamps were magic wands, the very actor you would die to fuck is lurking in a doorway.
He’s shockingly petit, and, judging by his lumpen build, perhaps the offspring of at least one midget parent. Having arrived without an airbrush, his boney cheeks and poring eyes are geographical data in a countryside of acne, and the hand that slid thin gold bands down your imaginary finger is littered with rings and bling and scrubbing a penis you would hardly even notice otherwise.
When he spots your shadow, or rather any human shadow, he whispers, “Fuck me” or “I want to fuck you” or whatever. Once upon a time, you’d dreamt of saving him from death, but, and please be honest, now that his irksome modesty on-screen is such a head slapper, wouldn’t hundreds of knife wounds serve a greater purpose, assuming the coast is clear?
Granted, that point of comparison got swept away with my effusiveness.
Point is, I’m complicated, or, rather, there’s a strangely wending path between what I intend to say and what I gather I am thinking. I’ve always been this jumbled, even when my speech patterns employed a smaller engine and I thought about my weirdness in highly critical ways.
You’ll have noticed I tell stories in a high-strung, flighty, tonally unstable rant, no sooner flashing you a secret entrance than pretending no such route exists, twittering when there’s bad news, and polishing my outbursts. Flawed and mutually shortchanging as the method may be, this is the only way I know how to engage what I’ve done with due respect and keep you somewhat agog simultaneously.
I’ve gotten lost, and so have you. I’m not as witty as I wish, and you’re nowhere near as patient with my heaping phrases as I evidently am.
I learned this quote-unquote exalted style of speaking from my father, who originally cooked it up after several early business trips around the Western world. He nicknamed it “the marbled swarm,” which I agree is a cumbrous mouthful, and its ostensible allure received a decent portion of the credit for accruing his, now my, billions.
One night when I was thirteen years old, he passed along the recipe, which I should have written down, but I’d just come home zonked on one too many hits of Ecstacy, and he was tipsy from a course of Chardonnays, so he could barely have enunciated the instructions in any case.
If you’re curious, memory tells me that this voice was generated from a dollop of the haughty triple-speak British royals employ to keep their hearts reclusive, some of the tricked, incautious slang that dumbs down young Americans, a dollop of the stiff, tongue-twisting, jammed-up sentence structure and related terseness that comes with being German, some quisling, dogmatic Dutch retorts, and a few other international ingredients I didn’t catch, which is the central problem with my scrappier version, all of which my father blended smoothly into his mellifluous French.
The marbled swarm is spoken at a taxing pace in trains of sticky sentences that round up thoughts as broadly as a vacuum. Ideally, its tedium is counteracted by linguistic decorations, with which the speaker can design the spiel to his requirements. The result, according to this mode’s inventor, is that one’s speech becomes an entity as open-ended as the air it fills and yet as dangerous to travel as a cluttered, unlit room in which someone has hidden, say, a billion euros.
My father used the marbled swarm to . . . well, I was going to say become a wealthy man, and that is true, but to say he ruined my life would be as accurate.
My marbled swarm is more of an atonal, fussy bleat—somewhat marbled yet far too frozen tight and thinned by my loquaciousness to do the swarming it implies. Still, it seems to be a sleeper hit with guys my age and younger, or at least with the majority who tune in once they’re weakened by my stunning looks.
For this fan base, my dry, chiseled meanderings seem to add a fleeting touch of magic to a face whose knee-jerk beauty might be too digestible. Long story short, had my father not half taught me to talk like this, I might instead be leering up at you from the cover of
Vogue
or, ugh,
Tétu
.
To people who knew my father well, say Azmir and several others you’ll be meeting, I am little more than his subpar impressionist—a miscast, bargain-basement chip off the veritable old block, à la, say, Hayden Christensen’s wooden rendition of Anakin Skywalker.
I won’t refute that I’m a busker of my father’s genius. Still, to give myself some credit, his wizardry was called for by his dull, unhelpful visage, which was frequently compared to Gérard Jugnot’s, if you know him, whereas it could be argued I need a far less charismatic soundtrack.