The Marbled Swarm

by Dennis Cooper

  Upon reaching the building’s highest floor, François overheard my father in discussion. Given that the words “secret passage” anchored every other sentence of the conversation, François said he’d crouched unseen until the strange domestic slivers were spelled out as means through which the lofts’ inhabitants could be studied surreptitiously.

  François then eased into my father’s view. Accepting he’d been cornered, my father quickly sent the worker he’d been serenading on a mission to the nearest Starbucks.

  The term “secret passage,” he explained to François, was a kind of nickname, an inside joke for what would more prosaically constitute margins of error. Should one of his future tenants stiff him on the rent, he thought it might be helpful to have the means to discover certain faux pas—sequestered pets, drug paraphernalia, a secret mistress—that would give him legal recourse to occasion their eviction.

  My father gave François a tour of these so-called margins, starting with their “headquarters,” as he described it—a vast room that swilled the floor on which my father planned to live and whose only entrance would be a multitasking wall in his relatively trifling apartment.

  In one corner of this room, a set of stairs no wider than the chutes on children’s playground slides scraped and bumped them to a third-floor landing. There, one could either walk into that level’s margin or descend into the second floor, and so on, until a secret exit on the ground floor could deposit one scot-free behind some trash cans in an alley.

  Using one floor’s half-built margin as a showcase, my father led François along its hall, explaining, between sidesteps of ladders and stops to dig the overhang of dangling wire tips from their hair, that the barren walls would fill with peepholes, each notch fitted with a fish-eye lens that would own a panoramic view of every corner of the corresponding loft.

  Higher up, cameras would sit on metal perches, their minuscule lenses piercing the walls like mosquitos’ stingers, draining imagery day and night from the lofts’ defenseless rooms, then depositing their loot in the system’s crowning headquarters.

  To François, this seemed extravagant at best, and, at worst, a ghastly human zoo. Still, as he said I needn’t be reminded, my father cloaked the explanation in his famous blaze airs and lulling, compound elocution such that François felt a probing question would have made him seem churlish.

  A few weeks later, we had moved into the building, whereupon the objects of my father’s lavish scrutiny became apparent. At a cocktail party held to christen the new homestead, François so poorly hid his feelings of betrayal that he was

  hurried from the other guests and taken into stricter confidence.

  The secret world within the world was a necessity, my father told him, since Alfonse and I were “trouble” and “untrustworthy”—“lowlifes” prone to bartering his precious artworks for designer drug caches, “faux pastors” opening our lofts to every jeune sans papiers who shivered in the cardboard huts that spoiled Canal St. Martin’s romantic banks.

  François had seen enough of us to glean Alfonse’s perfect manners and my utter selfishness. Hence, he found this newer lie even more impertinent, but . . . and here he paused briefly to dramatize the first of several bombshells . . . but . . . since his obsession with Alfonse had been a topic of my father’s jokes for several years, he didn’t feel he was positioned to find his friend’s hyperbole distasteful.

  From late that evening onward, my father phoned François nightly to share Alfonse’s latest foibles. Fueled by François’s rapt attention, he began to use the building’s secret chambers as a means to do experiments, presumably to give his calls an even more addictive twist.

  For example, Mon Petit Bichette had been awarded his position based not on any reassurance from his blatantly faked résumé, but rather on a law-abiding declaration that, prior to having found his current meds, he’d molested several adolescents, and, due to a side effect of this same medication, he didn’t understand why that was such a problem.

  Sure enough, within the space of days, my father claimed to have recordings of the nanny and my brother having sex on every horizontal surface and chairlike sculpture in their respective lofts that might cause tea bags not to seem surreal within the lens of François’s glasses.

  François envisioned screwing Alfonse in return for his discretion. At the very least, he’d hoped to share the building’s secret vantage points, or, at the very, very least, be emailed torrents of the porn, but, as of yet, no perks had been granted him, nor did they seem to be imminent.

  In fact, he might be masturbating in accordance with my father’s every lurid word right now, he said, had the secret tests’ success not inspired an even more ambitious form of interference. First, Mon Petit Bichette and Azmir were taught the marbled swarm’s most ornamental tricks, then granted limited Svengali-like mastery over Alfonse and myself.

  Thanks to their remote control, Alfonse and I had been revised over the course of several months from quirky siblings into a pair of unrequited, preening lovebirds.

  A new file folder joined my brother’s desktop. It fattened up with imagery wherein my face was Photoshopped into the rakish haircuts of his favorite mangas’ heroes. This file had colonized his G4’s hard drive into the useless, grinding hub of a peculiar slideshow that Alfonse would subjugate with X-rated whispers for hours at a stretch.

  At first, I’d seemed resistant to my father’s tampering, but, when the hidden cameras’ zoom option was twirled, my jittering, impatient eyes were noticed circulating in my brother’s pants, as though their creases were a complicated interchange.

  I was faintly overheard exhaling “Alfonse” when I masturbated, and, more times than not, the name was lost in phrases and half sentences that signaled my imagination’s need to murder him before it gave me satisfaction.

  Azmir knew some tech-head, who was sneaked into my loft and who packed my browser’s bookmarks with new links to sites for all variety of murderers whose specialties were children, assuming, presciently it seems, that I would welcome them too fondly to question how they had materialized.

  When my clicks kept ringing up a German cannibal, related traps were set and sprung. For instance, a recent chat I’d undertaken on the biggest Klaus Freeh fansite, wherein I shared my dream to modify Alfonse into a mouthful, was not the private free-for-all I hoped, but instead an inquisition with my father playing dumb at the helm.

  Here, I think it was, François confessed that while his schemes involving Alfonse had always ended badly and abruptly, their fatalities had been a practical decision since he’d learned by trial and error that, although his fetish life was rich, he had a problem with imprisonment.

  The revolutionary thought that a postcoital Alfonse needn’t feed some far-flung trash can or sewer grate, but, rather, be reborn as Alfonse Volume Two, had changed my living, breathing brother from the contraband of François’s fantasies into a hindrance to his lauded culinary skills as well.

  Accordingly, he had bargained with his sons, trading time-outs in their nightly molestations for an agreement to habituate Alfonse’s favorite chat rooms and encourage him to drag me to this fair, where François had bribed officials then thrown up the off-the-record “booth” in which Alfonse was now a happy Flatso and unwitting prisoner.

  With that, François said he’d altered quite enough of my reality for now and, after apologizing for any loose or hurried details that might have crimped his summary, he offered me a moment to inure myself before calling in the reimbursive favor.

  You who’ve read this far with any care and feel you know me to the point to which you’ve been empowered will have gleaned what I would like you to assume I felt when told my recent life had been the colophon of someone else’s trail of bread crumbs.

  Despite the face of reason I’m reasonably certain I maintained throughout, the full-fledged me to whom you’ve been tangentially invited had weathered my initial disbelief, then more or less evolved into someone who felt weird about my outburs
ts as an air guitarist and regretted certain times and ways I’d cheered on my ejaculates, but who was far more flattered by such exorbitant attention.

  Perhaps you’ve noted my disinterest in relaying stories from my sex life apart from claiming to have had something of one. It’s not simply that I find the terms of sex to be at odds with my decorum, although there’s that excuse. Nor can blame be placed entirely on my need to squelch your zeal to find me gay as charged if colored by some version of psychosis. But since we’re just about to undertake my story’s first lascivious scene, perhaps it’s time to touch up my image.

  If it truly were as simple as my being gay but undermined, I would repeat one of the standard faux apologies I always seem to make to those for whom my listless, nerve-wracked body proves so disenchanting. Well, I’ll tell you nonetheless because I suppose that’s how I am.

  What I’m into, in quotes, and the one arrangement that, say, were I to be hit on in a public setting, might find me snuggled in the backseat of a taxi, would be if, using me as bait, this suitor were to lure another party into ours, whereupon, after forming a trio on whatever mattress proved convenient, said ­couple were to fuck in some eye-pleasing manner while I, naked if absolutely necessary and posed nearby, fulfill a sidekick role, perhaps akin to the porn DVD unwheeling in the corner of the eye of some drunk straight guy who lets a gay acquaintance masturbate him with his mouth.

  In other words, I’m into three-ways, and, more precisely, into gang fucks, in the vaguest terms imaginable, or, more ideally, being studied by two worshippers who take a dip into my privates on occasion to . . . I believe the term is “ser­vice” me with oral and tactile stimulation and perhaps some verbalized incentives befitting my enticements—for instance, gentle barks to spread my legs.

  I see this setup as a form of self-prevention since I am thereby restricted in what I can achieve within the sex at hand by my concern that what I do and say not disappoint those who are relying on my surface.

  Yes, my special needs can make it difficult to score, and no one ever ends up thanking God for meeting me, but I am comfortable there.

  By all rights, given the eurhythmy of my face, I should rightly be what gay guys call a bottom, a recipient, the intersected, a passive partner, yet whenever I attempted to accept what seemed to be my fate in this regard back in my early teens, I cried uncontrollably and felt I couldn’t breathe, not from any pelting ache in my invaded nether reaches, if you’re wondering, and in fact I . . . well, you’ll see for yourselves once or if I have the nerve or guts to call back those disasters.

  If I seem prone to introspection as it is, you should be thrilled I’m not dictating or rather whining and sobbing out this saga in your bed, and I assure you those who’d hoped to fuck a static, deaf-mute version of my body would rise from their graves to attest.

  Those who are clinically depressed—and Serge, if you remember him, would be a prime example—can sometimes reach a tolerable zombie-like state thanks to a fine-tuned mix and match of prescription medications.

  For me, getting laid has always been a similarly trial-and-error fête, albeit with naked males in place of pills.

  I only mention this to explicate more fully why having been spied upon and toyed with by my father didn’t outrage me or cause me to feel vengeful in the slightest. Rather, it inspired a most intensive curiosity as to his motivation.

  I had coveted life as a movie idol in my adolescence, and, after wrecking several acting classes, I was made more than aware that were I to pursue acting as my livelihood, I would expect to have a brief, forgettable career playing snarky teenaged loudmouths who leech their girlfriends off more central characters.

  Thus, I might have viewed my father as an over-weening stage parent and my part in François’s plot against my brother as the kind of juicy, long-awaited role for which my limited propensities were made—an end result I still believe since, forced or not, it means I hadn’t been in love with him when they’d miscast me as his suitor.

  Nonetheless, in case I’m wrong, and if I haven’t pointed out too many secrets in this tale to busy you already, you might watch out for yet another sidetrack, this one shapeless like the underhanded moonlighting of love itself and sneaking underneath the favor I was thrilled if wildly unprepared to grant.

  Chapter 4

  I will exclude our more or less half-hour drive through the relatively pricey fifteenth arrondissement of Paris because to re-create its vistas would exhaust an afternoon that could have spun effectively enough in a few explosive sentences.

  If you seek the crux behind the grinding tack I’ve used throughout this story, I’ll need to conjugate the so-called marbled swarm my voice has long since adopted with an asterisk from my father’s.

  As briefly as possible, and rather like a magician requesting a coin or handkerchief from a member of his audience, I’ll ask for a wad of your imagination.

  Let’s say the room where you are reading this is like the vestibules that interlace my story. In other words, it’s sideswiped by a hidden room or passage. Let’s also say, for convenience sake, this secret room conjoins the very wall you’re facing at the moment.

  If you’re reading this when on the metro or while soaking in the lamblike nature of a park, we have an issue. In that case, you might divide us with a bookmark, head home, and then rejoin me in your bedroom, although any indoor spot whose walls are dulled by inattentiveness will work.

  Once you’re reoriented there and have checked out the dividing line I’ve just impugned, if only to amuse yourself, prepare for what will constitute a shock.

  Contrary to the bio note that tags this volume’s jacket or downloaded file, I’m not, in truth, oh, dead or lengthily imprisoned, to take a guess. Instead, I’m still at large and writing this while closeted behind the very wall at which you peer so trustingly, my right eye watching through a peephole, using your absorbed or wearied or excited face as my narrative’s adjusting guideline.

  In other words, everything you’ve read thus far was gauged to vex, engage, bore, amuse you, and so forth precisely as it has done. That’s to say, using prose only slightly fancier than that to which you are accustomed, I’ve reduced the “you” who’d hoped to crack some risqué memoir into my marbled swarm’s by-product. Like father like son, essentially.

  Point is, should you stubbornly continue to believe this memoir’s point and only worth lies in delineating Serge’s gruesome death or treasure hunting the chateau or solving Jean-Paul’s dangling riddle, and so on—in other words, rescuing that story from the background that has swamped it—you might have logic on your side and the odds in your favor, but I’ll remind you of how ill-advised my life had been until François’s tattletale unstuck my dumbstruck eyes.

  Had I decided as my life’s official author that the goal was supervising the exploits and porn my recent time on earth has technically entailed, you might turn my final page more tickled or grossed out than would seem to be your destiny, but you would also leave here double-crossed.

  All that said, I’m also stalling at the moment since the greatest weakness of my tossed-together marbled swarm is that, when I’m aroused, this highfalutin mush I call a voice melts in my mouth, and as much as I’m okay with barking like a dog to some degree, I know I sound stupid when I do.

  But I believe I’ve made that point extremely clear in much the same words previously if not repeatedly, which speaks yet again to my nervousness.

  Perhaps I’ll use the convenient grayness of our drive to introduce Olivier, François’s quote-unquote elder son, whose dash of an appearance here in Slat’s role has left him barely creased within a scene where his realities will factor.

  At the moment, Olivier and Alfonse are sandwiched inside Slat and Plank, and they are wedged into the car’s backseat like surfboards.

  François, myself, and Log are in the front seat. I’ll also add that the arousal I just referenced is, if not contingent on my seatmate then sharpened by its handiwork, which has been vested in
my lap since François hit the gas, and is now, as best I can surmise, trying to unite Log’s crotch and mine as if they were the handles of a sliding door.

  So, Olivier was initially the offspring of a housekeeper from Tokyo who’d worked for François years before. Kenji was his given name. When she perished in a traffic accident, not a relative or friend offered condolences, much less claimed the child, so Kenji just kept living under François’s roof by proxy.

  When enrolling Olivier in school required a parent’s signature, François renamed the boy, then put his scrawl above the dotted line. Still, for all intents and purposes, Olivier is just a false report or stage-named shape in which a missing, now forgotten boy has been declared unborn.

  Now, returning you to François’s car, a Peugeot Pullman Turbo, for the record, we’d just left the smooth-ish sailing of the Quai d’Orsay for a tony neighborhood wherein the only thing I knew was that François’s home would cordon off the favor I’ve neglected to define for you, I’m sorry.

  The street was disconcertingly familiar, as was each café, boulangerie, and every cross street where we turned too sharply for my taste.

  Had I opted to describe our drive, the adjectives with which I clarified this phase would decorate an anecdote about the days when childhood mischief let me use the bushes we were speeding past to urinate or hide and smoke a cigarette.

  Anyway, it wasn’t shocking when the residence where François parked—a Haussmann-style mansion whose coveted location on the Champs de Mars put its value in the 12-to-14-million-euro range—was in fact our house, or, rather, the home from which my broken family had moved just months before.

  One could excuse this weird coincidence as François having bought the grievous building off my father’s hands and hoping to surprise Alfonse and me. Since truth is, of course, a technicality, this is in fact the explanation, but let me add that there is far more to the symbiosis, and that I may even tell you.