The Marbled Swarm (6 page)
I’ll debug those lingering confusions when or if the time is right, and, for now, you need only tag along behind me with a smidgen more intimacy than ever.
I’ve never read a decent novel in my life unless skimming fifteen pages of Houellbecq’s
Platform
to make conversation counts, but, as I understand it, when one reads novels, it’s the realness of the characters that seals your eyes between the covers, whereas the world they supposedly inhabit is closer to a compass, built just carefully enough to help you keep your bearings.
If I’m right, then I’ll suggest you try to get things backward. The Serge you think you know to some degree was just his body’s force of habit, and that custom has been broken.
Serge was like those tombs they keep discovering in Egypt where every bit of gold was sacked and cleared out centuries ago by robbers, and what the robbers left behind is on its way to some museum. The tombs’ cave-ins are braced with timbers, and their filthy tunnels have been vacuumed into hallways, and now there’s nothing left to do but charge tourists an arm and a leg to file through empty basements.
Serge was just a given name. In fact, I’ll strip his body of that moniker and call him # 7, if that helps, which is to say whoever used his Emo premise or how he might have wrinkled up and sagged however many years from now is as inconsequential as the light source coursing through some chandelier.
# 7 was meat, a veritable cow cursed to live complexly like a boy, as in the children’s stories, his clothes as tacked on as a circus dog’s tuxedo, and, whether you can see him through my specializing eyes or not, they’re the only contact lens that can get you safely through the rest of this.
B
efore the ordinary building at 118 rue de Turenne was remodeled by my father, it housed the oldest shoe factory in Paris. The amplifying taste for footwear
rubber-stamped by the likes of Vans and Nike had long since dashed its workforce into a skeleton crew, but before the geriatric owner swiped my father’s credit card, it was still rattling along.
Our home had previously and always been a mansion several stuffy blocks from the Eiffel Tower, until, that is, my mother was discovered on the kitchen floor, zapped off her feet by an alleged brain tumor that had gone suspiciously undetected by her doctors, or so my father said.
As time crawls, I’ve come to realize the subtitling my father gave our lives was a ruse no less designed to keep our views in check than the security guard–like monsters that evil stepmothers litter in their bedtime stories.
Nonetheless, my mother’s death left him disconsolate, or, rather, inspired the diagnosis he gave to his performance—which, to be frank, seems increasingly bloodless in retrospect.
Our mansion, which he’d pooh-poohed as too parochial in girth and stature to foreground his giant art collection, or, rather, the bulky two or three dozen giant artworks he deemed investments, was now additionally denounced as an engine of unbearable memories.
After several months, the shoe factory was dialed back into a stack of spacious lofts, and my father rearranged our new, chopped-up family in its layers.
My father commandeered the top-floor-cum-penthouse. My younger brother, Alfonse, was installed just below him on the third floor, and my loft sat just below his on the building’s second level.
Alfonse will be puzzling to epitomize, not because anything about him would turn descriptive prose into a vampire’s mirror, but difficult like reassembling a plane crash. Perhaps I’ll dash him off for now as a dedicated fan of manga since he read Japanese comix so incessantly the volumes might as well have been his shirt collars, although “fan” sounds far too freelance.
He was more a kind of mermaid stalled between his illustrated heroes’ printed pages, where he longed to fly around on jetpack shoes and switch genders with a button push, and our heftier dimension, where he survived but thought himself fatally ill suited.
Hundreds of utopian self-portraits were crammed into his hard drive, where, using Paint or Adobe Photoshop, he’d pried frames from the fatal scenes in some cartoon or childish film, then spent hours replacing the Road Runner’s Wolf or the freeze-dried Hans Solo with a pancake of himself.
Once while we were playing Truth or Dare, he chose truth and, when asked to be his death’s designer, picked a hit-and-run accident by steamroller. Most effectively for your reading purposes, he haunted several online chat rooms full of equally withdrawn kids and lying predators who lionized paper thinness and called themselves squish junkies.
In the real world of school desks and sidewalks, Alfonse had his distant admirers, most of them too old to qualify comfortably as friends. It would be safe to say I was his only friend, had our behavior when together not misused the classic meaning of that term.
Better to say were I the movie star my telegenic looks and presumptive manner warranted, he might have been some actor hired to portray me in my flashbacks. He treated every brush with me as though it was a precious opportunity to learn my latest tics and traits, then play them back like I were his aerobics instructor.
Consequently, I saw Alfonse as my imprecise reflection, and the portrait of him that would occasionally materialize within the wash of my devoted likeness took the form of physical discrepancies or misinterpretations that were too piecemeal to appraise.
Alfonse’s only quote-unquote friends lived in the violent bric-a-brac universe of websites and chat rooms traveled by the squish junkies, the majority of whom preferred to smash cute things than be trampled, so whether they were friends or mutual conveniences is certainly debatable.
My father stuck Alfonse with a nanny, who, at the age of twenty-four, still had the bowl haircut, jejune school clothes, and puerile interests of someone newly postpubescent. Within days of being hired, Mon Petit Bichette, as he called himself, quit dressing and deporting like his prior ward-cum-molestee and colonized my brother’s superhero look, Japanomania, and the general behavior Alfonse had watered down from mine.
When Mon Petit Bichette wasn’t sexting Alfonse, tailoring his pants into a second skin, or recycling his dirty socks as tea cozies—and that is not a case of me exaggerating—he occupied the loft below mine on the first floor, where his nightly blasts of disco-era Claude François and hooting recitations of the songs’ feebleminded lyrics would cause my furniture to move around my loft very slightly, like grazing cows.
As for the building’s ground floor, I’ve never picked its rusty lock, if you believe that, but then again I’ve never stuck my head in Sacre Coeur for much the same reason. Just as I needn’t see a bunch of gilded Jesus statues to visualize an extra-special church, whatever’s buried in the dust down there undoubtedly deserves it.
Each loft was designed, if one can call a sterile, subdivided stretch of low-lit rectangular nothingness a design, by the architect Philippe Starck and featured a scatter of his artsy, uncomfortable furniture.
In the huge swaths of wall and floor space left unchecked by Starck’s concept, my father laid out obstacle courses of his art holdings—exhibitions he claimed to have curated with such precision that the theme of each mini-collection would have caused it to be titled with our respective first names had the building been open to the public.
For a time, I was certain the lofts additionally disguised some creepy underpinnings—evil eye–like nitty-gritty, if you will—diabolic minutia that my nervous system sensed even as its symptoms proved impalpable—and whose existence I was to neither establish nor disprove until my father’s sudden, pell-mell death.
An elevator, or, rather, a trendy sculptor’s perfect replication of
The Shining
’s lift, but painted red inside instead of filled with blood, would drop Alfonse and me to street level or lift us to my father’s digs for rare communal meals whenever he decided to admit he was in town.
Bizarrely, my father’s floor had been abridged into a small and strangely shaped apartment that hardly gouged the yawning volume at its disposal, an anomaly he claimed was neither fanciful nor frugal, but rather fallout from having to share his level with the gargantuan equipment that warmed and cooled the building.
Like Alfonse in one regard, I’ve never had friends, not in the “give a shit” sense, not even when I was too young to have selected them myself. Thus, having tons of downtime wherein to stage my wildest daydreams likely fast-tracked the internal monologuist you’ve begun to get to know.
I had liked Alfonse with a perfect lack of passion until he colluded with his nanny. Well, “like” might be too strong a word. Admired objectively, let’s say. Let’s say his beauty might have garnered him a fan base cruisier than mine, were he not more garbled by stylistics and forged from less epicurean materials.
Due to my father’s wealth, ego, philanthropy, and conniving grip on words, he moved in starry social circles. There were rumors at one time that he’d fucked Isabelle Adjani, the once ethereal actress turned plastic surgeon’s monster. Although my father seemed insulted by this premise—even then, Adjani’s buckling, placated face required a fog machine to be puffing in her photo sessions—it seemed quite a coincidence that she had famously retired for nine months just before Alfonse debuted in the arms of my thin, grimacing mother.
Alfonse’s outermost layer preserved the young Adjani’s vaunted snowy skin, starless black hair, the same startled, chocolate eyes that infatuated costars or stared convincingly through windows of insane asylums, the congested lips, and, like the actress in her least successful films and unlike me, he struck everyone who cared to give our family feedback as looking slightly too refrigerated.
Had Alfonse not channeled his neurosis into a frenetic self-escape plan wherein my affectations formed the hatch, he might have grown depressed enough to find the little something extra to defrost his stiltedness in Emo’s throttling wardrobe. Without a stylish herd in which to camouflage his weak links, he dressed like his manga heroes might have dressed were they inflated like balloons, which is to say dorkily.
Alfonse might even be alive, sitting in a pose almost identical to mine, pretending to write his own memoir, his hand and pen jiggling one hair’s breadth above an untouched page, but then I might still be a suffocated nympho, so, ultimately, I have to say it’s more productive that he’s dead.
Point is, until a series of events I’m preparing to address, he’d always bugged me with the feckless dedication of a housefly. But, on what seemed an average afternoon as I half observed my brother’s stagey reenactment of who I’d been moments before, it occurred to me that his playback was somehow . . . clingier.
It seemed not the royal performance to which I’d grown lackadaisically accustomed, but something more daring, an act less bent on piecing me together through pinpoint accuracy or plagiarizing my reserve than geared to undermine the very fuss that caused my personality to barely surface in the first place.
Previously, rare nods or smiles would be enough to keep my mirror image ambient. Now, any sign of my approval caused Alfonse to mutiny, diversify, and grow ever more technically inaccurate. I felt less flattered by and independent of his sequel than challenged to keep up with its liberties.
I began to see him as a stripper haggling with my equivalents. Were he not spoiled rotten like myself, I might have stuffed a wad of euros in his belt, then . . . well, do what exactly was the problem.
The weakest part of his impression had always been its hollowness, although I’ll grant that void was not particularly his fault. I’m no extrovert, even when I’m yelling, “Die, you piece of shit,” and every precocious, news-making ten-year-old “new Mozart” in the world is eventually discovered to be a piano-playing parrot.
Alfonse modeled the mechanics of my presence, but while his forgery was dutiful, it lacked the telltale oomph that came with my perverseness.
This lost ingredient, while piddling in the grander scheme of me—think of the line between the “car” an actor “drives” into a “wall” and the car-like prop in which his lifelike dummy burns alive—and which had never seemed a flaw in his depiction when my viewing was more casual, now outstripped my loneliness as the major reason I was not unhappy to bump into him.
In order to one-up my brother’s mating dance, I undertook a bit of research into the sex practices of odd couples going back for centuries. Strangely at the time, if quite predictably to you, I seemed to feel the coziest and greatest kinship with a thread of history’s most heinous boy-killers, in particular the doings of one obscure but fascinating German individual.
Klaus Freeh was a particle scientist who thought if he could humanize his grasp of nanoparticulates, he might become the world’s first genius cannibal. Fatally stabbed by the very first boy-slash-future-slab-of-meat he abducted, he left behind a notebook in which he’d repeatedly sketched and expounded upon “the perfect human storm,” as he described it—a body type that, according to his findings, would both render art superfluous and, were Germany a jungle, send rivulets of spit down its population’s teeth.
I should add out of fairness that his theories have been razored into kookyville by every learned historian for whom the cannibal is second nature, their opinion being that Freeh was just a sick fuck, and no evidence suggests that human taste buds are as picky as he posited.
Need I even say that, at least in his scanned drawings I found online, had some fashion designer thought to translate them into couture, Alfonse’s body could have smoothed them into leotards.
In the weeks since Alfonse muscled through the sheen of my resemblance, he’d been cast as the romantic lead in every reverie I concocted. There wasn’t a harmful prank or convoluted fuckfest that his imaginary figment hadn’t rehearsed to a Kubrickian finish, but it wasn’t until Freeh’s ill-starred masterstroke hit home that I’d made my final cut.
I hadn’t chewed and swallowed anyone as of the period in question, but I’d felt and thought everything violent and ruinous of my clothing this side of actually combusting into a pack of hungry tigers every time I got a hard-on.
I’d never even cooked myself an omelet. The illusory skin wedged between my fairyland of teeth would puncture like a bubble, tear from each anatomy with a pleasant-sounding rip, and be transformed by my obedient taste buds from knotty, sopping flesh and muscle into a favorite food, which at that time was spaghetti bolognaise.
Having preemptively tagged myself as gay, I was still too in thrall to the same-sex party line that an acrobatic fuck was the mom and pop of making out, and any partnership more offbeat, much less one that challenged laws both French and biblical, constituted one’s self-hatred.
By the way, I just had an awful thought—one you’ve no doubt been musing on for pages. Christ, I do go on, is what I thought, and my fingers literally tensed above the keyboard.
Rather than offer you some insincere apology, I’ll make a slightly premature admission that, if you think I’ve dragged my story from its bearings—namely, the serpentine chateau, its secretive owner, his doomed son Serge—and that I’ve lost my proper place within it as your talky host—you’re . . . half wrong.
Yes, this recent blather is a strike against my toned-down marbled swarm, but it’s also an assurance of my honesty, even when, as I’ve come to know and you will understand eventually, I was less finding my true self back then or living day to day in the democratic sense than enacting a “life” no more incipient than a toy’s.
If I’d taken I don’t know how many words of caution in my life and spun my insights thusly but within earshot of a reputable psychologist . . . well, I have no idea.