The Marbled Swarm (9 page)

“We do socialize, or, rather, their avatars have been known to sneak within our sites without detection,” he said. “However, their foul mouths cause them to be blocked in almost every case.”

“It must so frustrate them, and you as well, to undertake such absolutist missions,” I said. “Consider this painstaking mock-up of your bedroom, which so clearly forms a homonym for François’s useless dream of sharing it with you.”

I should mention that, by then, I’d started masturbating Alfonse, which, given the costume’s bottlenecking, was surely more impressive as a juggling act.

“Perhaps you feel as I do that birthdays come with certain privileges,” Alfonse said. “The truth is sex, although that term seems so uncivil, intrigues me. When I’ve been given any say, I always ask my . . . partners, as you call them, to rest on top of me. Since they’ve weighed far more than I thus far, there is the side effect of feeling squished, which you know I rather covet.

“For that reason, I see beds, or floors, assuming they are clean, as the earthly likenesses of manga pages in which I’m merely ink or pixels and my partner is a rather heavy-handed draughtsman. Plus, the more unreal I’ve found myself, the better the . . . sex has been for everyone involved, if, that is, I even vaguely understand what gets men off, which is to say François is cleared to join us, should you agree.”

“My issue with sex,” I said, “or the first of many—and I too speak that catchword grudgingly—is the transience of its effect. To think that afterward, you’ll reinflate, and I will only have crossed incest off a wish list I hadn’t yet compiled. If only you, no, we could stay, oh, razor-thin in your case and unrealistically wild-mannered in mine.”

“Clearly, if I could stay unreal with any permanence, I would,” he said. “I haven’t imitated you for years because I find your affects therapeutic.”

With that, he started patting down the Flatso costume’s image of a shirt and scratching at its painted buttons. Seeing his futility, I freed my arm, then, gripping the “shirt’s” collar, tried to rip Plank into shreds.

“You didn’t keep a pair of scissors handy that François might have reproduced,” I asked.

It was then the words “Velcro straps,” spoken with a lechery that neither one of us had any feel for, broke into our conversation.

Of course, the speaker was François, who, quite naturally, had been lurking in the dark, but perhaps because my eyes were so bedazzled by our spotlights, his voice seemed less substantial than the sawing of a cricket’s legs.

There is in fact another explanation for its wisp, but I will let you discover it, if you do, at the same time and manner as I did, if I ever fully have.

Once the Velcro bindings were unlocked, the costume sledded up and past my brother’s head with only the subtlest misplacing of his hair.

I sought an unobtrusive spot to dump the Flatso’s corpse, ultimately leaning it against a wall. By the time I turned my full attention to Alfonse, he’d lain facedown upon the futon and struck a pose that seemed designed to make him feel, if not quite look, as scarce as possible.

His body could have been a jar, figurative and dyed one of the paler human colors—his name a label steamed then peeled away, so poorly did it warn me not to take his status as my brother lightly.

“Are you as specious as you appear,” I asked. “Because even using the familiar form of ‘you’ just felt like guesswork.”

“Just before the act of sex commences, I feel an agonizing realness,” Alfonse said. “While this pose has been the most effective of my tryouts, there is a minor defect—namely, my penis winds up pressed against the bed, which stimulates it by default. Fortunately, the pain of being . . . and I hate this word too, ‘fucked,’ tends to draw the bigger picture.”

“If we’re to speak so openly of defects,” I said, “I’ll admit to one that seems germane. Like you, I’m gorgeous, you’ll admit, and, accustomed as I am to being hit upon, I’ve felt no need to learn assailants’ social skills. In other words, I need a minute.”

I sat along the futon’s edge, then eyed my brother as a mountain climber might assess a model of the Pyrenees. As I replayed the porn whose choreography was well adapted to my halting bedside manner, I fiddled with Alfonse’s ass as though its fat and muscle were the pivoting components of a Rubik’s Cube.

I’d never slept with such a pip-squeak, and any child porn I’ll admit to having viewed was so antiquely filmed its stars were only boys the way Seurat’s arrays of dots are women. Nonetheless, it didn’t seem bizarre that, having dreamt Alfonse would sport an asshole as understated as the rest of him, I was stunned to find a wound so serious it would have killed him had the harm not been so evidently reckoned into place.

Later, under François’s tutelage, I would learn to tell the building blocks of pricey entrées from the chaff that goes in dog bowls, but in my innocence that afternoon, having struck a vein of what was sitting in my fridge was more important than the clues that made it fool’s gold.

“Perhaps Alfonse would like to listen to some music,” said François’s voice.

I retrieved my brother’s backpack from the floor and rummaged through its mishmash until I’d clutched the cold hard outlines of an iPod.

“What do manga characters listen to when they’re . . . ?” I asked him.

“Nothing, strangely,” Alfonse said. “I think because the sound of music proves difficult to draw. It’s true that, in addition to their superhero duties, they often moonlight as a boy band, yet when these bands are shown performing, the only way we know they’re not delivering a lecture is because their open mouths shoot lightning bolts. But I wouldn’t mind hearing
Cartoon KAT-TUN II You
.”

As I’ve more than hinted at so often, I’m undone by the formalities of having sex. And yet, from all reports, I seem no less engaged than were I watching someone rob a store across my street while chronicling the bandit’s moves over the phone.

Perhaps this politesse is an affliction of the marbled swarm itself, because the same capacity to disengage from goings-on, no matter how logistically involving or oppressive, bewitched my father too, if I may jump this story’s gun for just a second.

A few weeks after the event I’m reimagining, my father’s shoe skewered a pockmark in the floor of what, to that point, I’d understood to be the central office of our building’s enterprise of secret chambers, causing him to trip and strike his head, and rather fiercely if a ragged trail of blood was any indication.

He returned to his apartment as if nothing had occurred. So confident was he that the bleeding would be squelched by tissues and some elbow grease, he didn’t close the secret door behind him, leaving the hidden loft exposed, and I will speak of the renaissance this lack of foresight occasioned in my life a little later.

We know he made some notes and phone calls until, gonged by a headache, he reclined upon a couch, hoping to undo it with a nap, which amplified into a coma in which Azmir, reporting back from some nefarious assignment, discovered him.

A siren’s endless bleating finally coaxed me to a window of my loft, where I observed my slack-jawed father being rolled inside an ambulance, which sped to Hospital St. Louis, where he then lived in quotes for days but never woke, or not according to the terms by which that word is most employed.

Let’s say I’d tripped, albeit mentally and only vis-à-vis my hand, and my fingertips dead-ended in Alfonse’s crotch, resting on that archway’s penile frill no longer than my father’s head had touched the floorboards’ wood grain, which caused me to cease thinking by my standards, even if my recollection of those thoughts seemed typically too decorative to you.

While his stiffened penis was, of course, the compliment I’d sought, the general conditions, specifically the humid airspace hard-ons always author, unnerved me, perhaps the way a sick child’s forehead curls his mother’s fingers.

So, even as I basked, I was inveigled by a mood of hopelessness that, in retrospect, has proved to be more advantageous than a drag, I suppose.

It was as if I’d found a light switch in a room too dark to navigate or leave, the unit’s surface strangely heated by a recent short along its hidden wiring, the switch already raised into the “on” position.

I will barely be speaking for a while. I might begin to seem a child who mouths the roars and motor revvings of his toys. Or I might grunt with satisfaction now and then like a lowly member of some demolition crew in action.

I stepped out of my shoes, scrolled down my socks, unbuttoned my shirt, lowered my pants and underwear, then threw and slid myself away from all of them.

François was talking on his cell phone or, more precisely, saying a “Yes” or “I’m still here,” when, that is, his voice was not too muffled by my brother’s ass, which he had leveled with his fingers and was sniffing like a messy line of very good cocaine.

“Does this look strange,” he asked, having noticed something in my face I had not placed there to address something about him.

I responded that to see a man of his renown treating Alfonse as far more renowned was interesting, but if my face seemed like the outlay of some burgeoning critique, he was likely overthinking me.

I believe it was then that I wound up lying on the bed by some means I don’t recall.

Had what occurred been filmed, it might have looked less namby-pamby than the fans of child pornography prefer, but, judging by the bits I’ve watched, our merge of young and old and cute and gross fell well along those troubling lines.

To wit, a boy lay stiffly on a bed, looking X-ray–like without his clothes, his face stricken, often frowny, but uncomplaining, his body game enough despite a shyness that clenched his joints into a mannequin’s.

A less illegal teenager, demoted to a sidekick by his costar’s shocking scale, lay nearby, acting as a fluffer, if, that is, patting the boy’s head and shoulders qualifies, and otherwise so snubbed by everyone around him that his body might have been imprinted on the bedding.

Meanwhile, an older man no more suited to the task of heating porn than the adolescent played the uninvited guest whose love of fucking little boys gives kiddie porn its dubious je ne sais quoi and brings the rare intellectual to its defense.

In the commotion, first one earphone then the other jiggled from Alfonse’s head. They writhed across the rocky bed until the iPod bounced onto the floor with such a thwack that I could tell the thing was broken without reclaiming it.

I only mention this because the wilder sound of François’s panting and my occasional asides didn’t bring my brother back to life, by which I mean revive the squeaking, flopping figurine into a boy who might have asked for a time-out.

I barely saw my brother’s thinking in his eyes, and based on how they skirted me, I felt I wasn’t needed anymore. When he did talk, repeating “nos” and “don’ts” I might not even mention, the orders either weren’t for me or I’d stopped listening like a brother.

At some stage, one of us, most likely me, wanted to fetch a block of kitchen knives, thinking we could hack Alfonse out of our way then strip his undergrowth and gulp it down like monkeys—that is, if primates even eat like that outside cartoons.

The other one of us, clearly François on second thought, cautioned me that acting like wild animals hadn’t leant us their capacities, and that we still had nubs for teeth and quibbling digestive tracks.

He described the meal Alfonse could yield if I were patient, reinventing every sweaty inch of flesh at which my finger aimed into a knickknack that would stun the patrons of L’Alstrance, and, if properly refrigerated, more lengthily suspend an auctioneer than any object in my father’s art collection.

Thus, I gradually lost sight of who’d been suited up inside Alfonse for twelve years of my life, and who could barely move his limbs or use his forehead as a place to scribble incoherently about his pains and worries.

His breaths were drafts, his whines and gripes the creaking of his face, and his skull a lattice where some flesh had grown and taken on its human shape.

By the time I heard some knocks and scraping in the bedroom’s darkened apron, and Azmir glowed into my view, watching François land upon and raise himself from someone’s back had put my eyes on such a treadmill that seeing anything untoward was a relief.

Azmir looked vaguely familiar, period, and he mutinied with every dud he shed into the most unreasonably well-hung guy I’d ever seen outside my desktop. His penis warped and strained his underwear diaphanous, then walloped free and jousted with the air like an amputee’s gesticulating stump until he stilled it with his hands.

Having watched dozens of asses, most no bigger than my brother’s, grit their holes in hopes of safeguarding their owners’ lives, the spectacle has lost its wow. Hence, I lack the naivete to brief you on Alfonse’s turn, so he will have to fend within the action sequence I’ll recount.

Azmir rolled my brother over like a herpetologist upends a rock to search for napping snakes, then pinched his penis, which François had long since milked and wrung into a whisker, and used a fingertip to twirl his testicles into a tiny turban.

He threw my brother’s legs out of his way, then clawed the ass as if it were a bush that hid another unsuspecting creature, perhaps a scorpion or something of that general nastiness.

Azmir’s penis pinned my brother’s asshole to his deepest pelvic bones, then, it seemed to me, tried to erase it like a stray pencil mark.

He scrubbed the stain until the ass itself appeared to change metabolisms—wilting, liquefying, and sloshing up
against my brother’s skeleton before it finally jelled and shrink-wrapped what was basically a crater.

Azmir erased the hole until the ass itself became unhinged, halving like the trap door in a gallows, whereupon his cock inched slowly underground and Alfonse’s feeble tissues made the pops and crackling noises of a campfire.

Azmir raped my brother for an hour-long few minutes. When the cock was airborne, it was heavily upholstered, and when it slugged inside, Alfonse’s blood would spritz Azmir’s thighs and glug onto the bed, which was rapidly discolored.