The Marbled Swarm (5 page)

As for how my cover version sits with you who lack that crucial additive, I really couldn’t guess and ultimately fear the worst, but . . . fine, I’ll go as blunt as the sound bite to which my life will be reduced by the same journalists who fashion headlines from its trail of circumstantial evidence.

I’m what you’d call a cannibal, or, rather, I’m the figurehead, curator, human bankroll, and most willing if not wanton of a clique of cannibals, our exact number depending on who happens to be horny and/or hungry and/or situated in Paris or still alive at any given moment.

Christophe, mid-forties, is primarily a sadist, and were embroidering the lexicon of human screams a sport, he’d be a gladiator, but, at least until we’re jailed, he’s best known to those who’ve never met him as the cosmetic surgeon of choice for French celebrities and government officials.

His son Claude—and that doubled name is problematic, I agree—was a nineteen-year-old ballet dancer who became a member of our team for several hours, but since sixty of his kilos were on the menu at the time, his designation as a chum is strictly for sticklers.

François, fifty-something, is a noted chef whose “bitter” cooking packs the four-star restaurant L’Astrance. At first, he saw mankind as a bonanza, as ground too hallowed not to break, and he used our dinner prattle as a critique, but, after mastering his spin on what he calls this “cult” cuisine, he’s much more tolerable personally.

His sons Olivier and Didier round—or, in Didier’s case, and, come to think of it, Olivier’s as well, rounded—out our inner circle.

Olivier, my age but Japanese, was hungrier for gory films than body parts. He would watch them so incessantly without uncalled-for blinks or bathroom breaks that, although I never asked, I assume he saw the tactile aspect of our cookouts as a further step in entertainment history akin to IMAX 3D.

Didier struck inattentive strangers as a kind of Pugsly trapped within some all-male Addams Family, but, since he lived for everyone’s protection in a cage, he was really more our mascot. By this moment in my story, both Olivier and he have been digested, unless, that is, you ever stumble on my chateau and note two quadrants of the yard that seem peculiarly indented, in which case bingo.

Barring François, the others stay around for dinner to be social more than anything else.

I won’t claim I don’t enjoy our aperitif-like orgies, and, if you could view the CDRs, you might quibble with my need to watch the rapes with folded arms, but I would defy you to call me a dispassionate wallflower.

Everyone knows Shakespeare’s bon mot wherein a loved one is colluded with a summer’s day. Well, I will hazard an offshoot whereby the so-called loved one is a kid like Serge who isn’t lovable at all, and the summer’s day is instead a flower, say a rose too odorous to leave unsniffed in, oh, the Luxembourg Gardens.

For some, the drives to dock one’s face in boys or plants are interchangeable. My urge, you see, is not to flavor my receptors with some pretty thing’s most scented chasm. Rather, my nosedives bind a bee’s gluttonous raiding with the scrutinizing glances of a scissors-laden florist.

So, as I handed Serge some tissues, ice, an Evian, and one more painkiller than was provident to swallow, and even as I feared my colleagues’ whining when I brought this mess into my loft, I personally found him far more pornographic, if such a scoured term can handle that.

He’d downed the pain pills, wrapped two ice cubes in a tissue and clamped the bundle to his eye, but reaching for his knee transformed his ribs into tormentors, so I was icing that injury while steadying the leg for all intents and purposes.

Serge had the wishy-washy leg of someone fractionally his age, with skin as giving as a sandy beach and so puddled on the bone, a slap might well have splashed white glops all over everything, which I would guess sounds nauseating if you think of legs as more than entrées in the making.

Serge might have thought I was caressing him were I not just thrilled enough to have deliberately massaged that leg, at least unconsciously.

“When I’m depressed, everything’s a joke to me, and no one thinks my jokes are funny, and I’m depressed right now, just to warn you,” he said.

Back when Serge was a more kempt, undamaged fashion plate, the gloomy tenor of his voice had raised my eyebrow in suspicion. It felt accessorized, as fake as the elation in a clown’s honking falsetto, but whether Serge was still a broadcast or was digging deep seemed immaterial.

“It will no doubt please you that these pills appear to be working,” he said.

When I’m turned on, as you’d put it, and I was—even if my mind feels like a boulder resting on your shoulders, you’d love what I was feeling—I can sound unusually off the cuff, even kiss-ass. Still, keep in mind my praise is never kinder to its wellspring than a classic film’s ten thousandth rave review.

Anyway, I lavished many adjectives on Serge’s leg, albeit terms more suited to a golden-throated butcher than his sweetheart.

Mostly for effect, I gripped the tattered jeans and ripped them open to his belt—and it’s fortunate that when one’s strength is taxed, a strained expression can look horny if one adds at least a crooked smile—then snuck one hand inside his underwear, which were black and flecked with tiny skulls if that seems relevant.

I told Serge if he were worried that his negligible penis would undercut him, he absolutely shouldn’t, and that I was lingering and fingering because its toastiness encouraged me.

“Thanks, I guess,” he whispered, then, perhaps undone by that reminder of his childishness, he started crying. Technically, I think you would have called it a wail or even bray.

Azmir, who had been studying the road inside a bobbing, skull-shaped discotheque juiced by some kerplunking play-list on his iPod, heard a trace of Serge’s bawling, fished out an earphone, and yelled at me to turn him down.

“I just wanted you to rape me,” Serge squawked. “Not once but even endlessly. I don’t mean ‘endlessly’ because I think I’m worth the work involved. I just thought or dreamt or what the fuck that when you said ‘Not yet,’ you meant a month or even years from now.”

I told him “yet” had meant tomorrow, but, were he to count it down in screams instead of days, it would feel more like a year.

“It’s not that I’m some giant fan of sex,” Serge continued. “Its blaze of glory status is the world’s most bullshit lie, if you ask me, even bigger than the hoax involving Santa Claus, but rape has . . . I don’t know, a kind of . . . something else, at least when you imagine it.”

I asked if, to his mind, being raped so frequently had coined this favoritism.

“Well, there are these seven . . . wait, nine guys I used to chat with who, if I know them, and I don’t, probably tell their friends they raped some Emo loser,” he said.

“It’s true when we were instant messaging, they were all, like, ‘Rape, rape, pound your ass, and blah blah blah, you little whore.’ But when they saw . . . that I was serious, it was all, like, ‘You shouldn’t cut yourself, you’re really nice,’ and then they’d get my face alone and maybe jack off in my mouth, if I was lucky.

“I just . . . was happy that you didn’t act all psychiatric, and . . . you remind me of my brother, which I know is sick, but . . . God, I sound like the Elephant Man.”

At that, the car swerved sideways, rocking and skidding down the roadside. Azmir, who’d started yelling in some language that sounds scarier than French, held the steering wheel with one hand, turned around, and threw a punch that squashed the racket out of Serge’s face, then followed it with three or four more blows that left the boy’s head lolling on the car’s rear deck and splashed a bloody image of his face over the tinted glass above.

There are experts in the field of art who claim a child or alien from outer space would know van Gogh is greater than realistic painters without knowing he was a suffering lunatic. Not that growing up in a museum gave me expertise, but Serge’s swelling, slushy face made his cuter one seem too conformist, and I swear his pain and trouble breathing weren’t the differentials.

I tugged out several tissues, grabbed some ice cubes, and made two chilly wads, then dug them into his palms, leaned those hands against his lips and nostrils, and asked the gory mess if Serge could speak.

“I think . . . with a lot of effort . . . yes,” replied a soggy whisper.

I suggested that, if he had questions, he should pose them now rather than later for reasons I would spare him.

“Where am I going?” he asked.

I explained that he would shortly meet some friends of mine, and, were past events with like beginnings symptomatic, there would follow an impromptu show spotlighting him.

He might be nude or over-dressed in one of several dozen costumes that are saved for such occasions and whose simulacrums range from a convincing grizzly bear to vintage military garb to all variety of slutty drag. Thus ritzed up, he might dance and sing and tell some jokes and read poetry aloud and give each of us a lap dance.

Ideally, my friends would then be starry-eyed enough to rape him as an encore, which, according to the definition of “rape” I was employing, included both the violent penetration he would expect as well as creepier acts that he would dislike tremendously and barely live through.

We would pause to get some air, then reconvene at his chateau, where the raping would continue and, given how much less we’d have to work with, escalate and run its course, growing murderous so casually that he would likely find the two brands of close attention indistinguishable.

After he’d died, or, rather, once we tired of torturing his likeness, he would find his way onto a kitchen counter. There, the most perverted of my friends would rape his stiffening cadaver while the rest of us dismembered it beneath him like lumberjacks who won’t abide some tree hugger.

We might take a little field trip to his bedroom, explore his ex-belongings for a while, and debate what they revealed about him. No doubt a shower would be warranted, after which, refreshed, we would drift back into the kitchen.

One friend would butcher, hew, and snip his body parts into a selective dozen at the most and then prepare a meal featuring his high points as the aperitif, main course, and possibly dessert.

I might raid the gallery of family photographs along the chateau’s staircase and create a table setting, or we might screen a video of him in costume from the night before. We’d marvel, gossip, and trade anecdotes about him, clean our plates, wash them, and then never think of him again for as long as we lived.

“Being excessively earnest, or so I’m always told, I wouldn’t know if you were kidding if I cared,” Serge said.

Given how fiercely Azmir had punched him, I said I wasn’t shocked, and if his brain was hemorrhaging—and his ennui at my story was suspicious—what lay ahead for him was subject to truncation.

“I was joking,” Serge said. “I told you no one ever gets it.”

I said if he were queried out, I hoped to make short use of his dwindling capacities. Then I withdrew the group of envelopes I’d stolen from Claude’s bedroom, extracted the letter I’d previously read, and held it a reasonable distance from his face.

I asked if what was written there were true.

His good eye read the paper haltingly then stalled around the midway point, branching off the page and stilling in his lap, whether from retinal inertia or small penis worries or the upshot of brain damage, I’ll never really know.

“Ask Claude,” he said nebulously.

I asked him to confirm that he had written it.

“Write it,” he said. “You think . . . I wrote myself a letter about . . . me?”

I told him I was confused.

“My face hurts,” he said, and, glancing worriedly at the back of Azmir’s head, he bit his lower lip extremely gently then attempted, I believe, not to move enough to harm himself sufficiently to cry enough to bring more pain upon him.

I’m sparing you the convoluted turns of phrase my voice accumulates whenever I feel pressured to create a sympathetic portrait of . . . well, anyone, and that includes myself.

Still, I know a dry approach will leave Serge unrealistic, so I’ll avoid this scene and simply say we had a brief, heart-tugging, if you wish, disintegrated, shedding conversation until his chin fell on his chest in what could charitably be called sleep.

I tend to think dying people tell the truth, although I don’t know why truth would magically become their native language, and one should never underestimate sappy, brainwashing movies.

I’ll consolidate the things I learned from Serge into a tentative report that virtually every word from his and Jean-Paul’s lips before I’d cleaned his out had been a lie.

To feel the impact of this mindfuck, try imagining my voice is something more concrete and physically imposing than the book I hope it will inject then spend eternity in print. Let’s say . . . it’s a chateau, since that setting is still fresh.

Let’s say while you’ve been reading or, as it turns out, believing you were reading, you’ve been hanging out in my chateau attentively enough to have found your way into that hidden thoroughfare I outlined, or, in this case, a confidential, wandering sentence.

If you’re with me, my words and what they’ve detailed to this point would constitute the chateau’s furniture and so forth. I would be the building’s architect, and my story, such as it is, would form the floor plan. Serge would be the guest of honor who has suddenly gone missing or, more fruitfully, has been replaced when none of you were looking with a mannequin that duplicates his physical appearance.

In other words, everything you’ve read thus far was more mischievous than you imagined. Since the writing hasn’t altered, and a quick recheck would find it just as stiff and slightly out of touch as ever, there’s no reason to stop reading, or, returning to the chateau allegory, to cease hanging out like you’ve been doing all along.

Still, you’re advised that what you see around you—walls, if you’re hallucinating, or certain facts, if you’re my readers—are potentially encrypted—with passageways if you’re “chateau” guests, or subtexts if you’re with me—and certain givens such as who scarred Serge’s body, how Claude died if he’s deceased, who was with me in the hidden tunnels, Claire’s existence, who gave Serge a sex life if he had one, and so forth, are now analogies at best.