The Marbled Swarm

by Dennis Cooper

  “No doubt I’ll bore us both by even daring to respond,” I said. “Nonetheless, I must remind you these experiments, as articulating as they may have seemed to you, have occasioned certain dicey if not annulling end results, and I suggest this table’s empty chair is one inescapable example.”

  At that, my father implemented several lurking, downcast facial muscles. He looked apologetic, even wounded, but I suppose in retrospect that anguish was as facetious as a monster mask’s insanity.

  First, as per the incest business, he said, had Alfonse’s lifelong crush on me been any more embarrassing, and were I not so self-mesmerized that I treated his coquetry as opportunities to pick my own lock, the youngster would have burst into a circus clown with the onset of his pubic hair.

  So, as dearly as he would love to give his master plan the credit, my father said our hanky-panky was a thing for which the term “God’s work” had been devised, and his petty side effects had simply channeled me to move my ass, if I wanted to think about it that way.

  As for Alfonse’s death, that uncustomary outcome was the matter of a single word he hadn’t vetted, a tiny gaff that had occasioned Azmir’s failure to receive a minor signal he’d imbedded, armed, and holstered properly within its supervising sentence.

  When he’d conceived the industriously garbled syntax he would call the marbled swarm, he knew it came with birthmarks that could leave its marvels cultish. Like most things French, whether candied chestnuts or every songbird save Piaf and Gainsbourg, its empire was restricted to the country’s borders, former colonies, and some expatriates.

  What he’d taken far too lightly was how the marbled swarm would fray whenever listeners weren’t born and bred Parisians, eroding as their dialects had thickened. Since, in the majority of cases, the task assigned his voice was close to picking ­people’s pockets with his mouth, he’d thought the missing subtleties were their loss, akin to listening to MP3s.

  In the case of Azmir, although the tilted, dirtied French he’d grown up speaking in Algiers might strike the inattentive as no more weathered than the sludge that passed for conversation in Marseilles, it was, in point of fact, as far from French as Quebecois. Thus, a “don’t” was born askew in Azmir’s hearing, and, naturally, there was a domino effect once this mistaken “do” reached François’s havoc-playing ears.

  Still, in narrowing the murder suspects to a kingpin, he said my own faux pas were not acquitted, whereupon he compared my marbled swarm to bootleg records, as he called them—vinyl albums of substandard, say, Bob Dylan tunes whose crappy pressings had apparently bewitched the musicologist contingent of his dope-smoking generation.

  One of these bootlegs, a crackly pileup of slapdash song stumps and snips of haywire instrumentals, had, in its inability to be judged fish or fowl, buttressed the legend of a never finished album known as Smile, whose humongous goal to make a recent Beatles LP sound archaic had turned its songwriter and producer into a drugged-out basket case before the project reached completion.

  As in that rusty case, my father said the charms of my disorganized recording of his sonic masterpiece were fair enough, but two miscues called for airing and unmasking in particular.

  To originate the marbled swarm, he’d traveled continents, retained selective habits from denominated countries’ languages, then played with his infected voice for years. He’d blended half the world’s linguistic greatest hits into the sinews of his French, adding octaves, subtracting clauses, until he could enunciate a fluent composition.

  I, on the other hand, had slept a single night on one prefatory lesson that I’d likely been too stoned to intercept before hastily assembling my mangled swill.

  I was very fortunate, he said, that Pierre Clémenti’s genes had swamped my pleasant-looking mother’s. For, while he’d long tagged Pierre’s LSD trips as my maladjustment’s guilty party, at least the actor’s freakish sperm had stored the blueprint of his visage, because it was famously hard to judge someone while they were causing you to do a double-take.

  He then assailed my so-called swill’s techniques, damning in particular its misalignment of the marbled swarm’s two paramount ingredients—namely, the French and English tongues.

  Whether grouchily or because I’d watched too much imported television, my counterfeit had sidelined French as though its frills were parsley when, in the purer marbled swarm, our native language wasn’t just a diamond mine of words that sought nationalists’ protection, but a luscious broth wherein more splintered languages could be blurred and made subservient.

  Here he quoted my late mother and supposed friends of mine, whom he conveniently left nameless since I have no actual friends, that while I talked like a pretentious frequent flyer from the States who had a good if fem French accent, at least I’d given his invention legs, even were they more like crutches.

  As for my second noncompliance, I had derailed the marbled swarm with bathos, thereby baring its internal mechanisms to the mawkishness that made Americans such babies and had left, oh, Woody Allen, for example, a filmmaker who might have toppled Jacques Tati were his casts not such an unremitting string of whiny laughingstocks.

  Had I learned the marbled swarm and not just cherry-picked its crust for wordplay and non sequiturs, the slushiness I’d felt when killing Alfonse would have dried into an ennui masterminded and then thoroughly safeguarded by the French tongue’s reflexive self-esteem.

  Instead, by thinking Alfonse’s silly feud with physics entailed his last request, my father said, I’d not just ruined a plan that had been intricate and in the works for years, I’d denied even his taste buds the symbolic father-son reunion he might have grudgingly accepted as a booby prize under those trying circumstances.

  I should take a little stroll into François’s walk-in freezer, he suggested, as he had done that very morning, and try to gaze with any interest whatsoever at the frosted throng of vaguely boy-like data crumpled in a corner.

  Given this redressing, I’ll declare myself tactical enough to have returned even imaginary fire. “Intricate plan,” I managed to croak, “a phrase I’m now supposed to sweep from its surrounding wordage like your janitor and then dissect atrociously.”

  My father tightened his chopsticks into the classic v and plucked a dim sum from the only envelope-like carton that could still be called a smokestack.

  If I wished my life to compensate me, he said, I was advised that, when something inexplicable occurred, or if too many things seemed unbelievable at once, were I to sense in one

  of them the affect of my father’s handiwork, or, were the mystery a human, to suspect my father’s mind had magically usurped that person’s skull, then pursuing it or he or she would form the wisest and most Byzantine decision.

  As I had chosen all my life to mince where he’d sashayed, my mind pawing thoughts his cognizance had long since vac-uum sealed and gilded, I was no more fit to supervise my life without his steerage than were I some stray dog coaxed out of a crate in the middle of the wilderness.

  He offered me a nightcap in the form of a prefabricated clue, whereupon, deleting first his voice and then the look of pity from his eyes, he mouthed a word I totally misread for months as “Châtelet,” thinking, quite understandably, that the most involuted, tangly, confusing metro stop in Paris would do the work of six or seven hints combined.

  In the few remaining weeks before his death, I pushed stepladders to my loft’s foreboding walls then seesawed atop them, magnifying glass in hand, one ear cemented to the bottom of a drinking glass.

  I spoke tightly when I was home, and I had sex I wouldn’t pay myself to have again, ears perpetually straining toward those poisoned walls, hoping, I suppose, my father’s lustful mewls might pierce their insulation.

  Then my father was discovered sleeping just this side of death in his apartment, where one random wall was noticed to be strangely jutting open. No sooner had his gurney turned an ambulance into an earthbound jet than I hunted down a flashlight and raced through the
impromptu door.

  The so-called secret headquarters that François had described was just a storage room crammed with sculptures wrapped in belts of plastic sheeting, and their ghostly first impression was by far the oddest thing about the place.

  While a staircase did descend from one corner of the room, it was a creaky metal fire escape that had traversed the building’s western side for centuries until Philippe Starck shoved it underneath one of his signature barren façades.

  It was then I understood the marbled swarm was not the act of terrorism I’d imagined but instead a method or procedure to keep the world intact, altered not one physical iota, while talking oneself into believing words alone could customize it.

  To illustrate this convoluted point, let’s say we reconvene back at the meeting with my father’s lawyer. He and I conducted business in the largest of my loft’s six rooms, although they’re more like subdivisions of one giant room than isolating sections. His laptop, a PowerBook G4, as I recall, rested on a glass-top desk, and we watched the slideshow on its desktop from the comfort of a gray French Empire couch.

  From there, one has an unobstructed view of Pierre Huyghe’s This Is Not a Time for Dreaming, a video in which string puppets stage the life of Le Corbusier, and partially obstructed views of Philippe Parreno’s Fraught Times, a high-rise decorated Christmas tree cast in aluminum, as well as Jean-Marc Bustamante’s Larva 1, which looks exactly like it sounds.

  Now, pretend I could transport you there as my invited guest. Upon materializing, you would search the premises for me, of course, and I might introduce myself since you could never spot me otherwise, whereupon, and this I promise, you would gawk and squint and rubberneck, then mutter to yourself that I look nothing, literally nothing like you’d pictured.

  You might nose around the room and say, “It’s more a garret than a loft, and where’s this lawyer and his laptop or the art you keep alluding to,” and, turning to a window, if you could even find one without settling for a pinhole, declare the view outside most definitely not Parisian.

  Eventually, your eyes would rest on undistinguished me, sitting primly in my gray-scale world, and you might ask, “How could you have imagined there were secret passages behind these yellowed, close-knit walls, or have believed yourself unique enough to spy upon?”

  And I would say to you, “But you are in the secret passage now,” and, even as you read those words, you think I’m trying to revise the things I’ve said into a lie or obfuscation, but I guarantee that, were we together, you would understand my point exactly, which I realize is no help whatsoever.

  Does a magician’s trick lie about the top hat in which a card appears to vanish? Is a cartoon lying about the computers on which it was laboriously hatched? Does your favorite song lie to you about the badly dressed musicians who sang and strummed and tinkered it into a tune while separated from each other’s work by days or months and soundproofed booths?

  In both the marbled swarm founded by my father and the marbled junk I’ve siphoned off, there is no lie or contradicting truth you need to fear. Neither are there plural truths or lies you need to worry you’ll discover, much less keep apart or in a special order.

  If I’ve made the headway I intend, you have endured my story’s stiffened pages knowing I would puzzle out the mysteries they keep demarking, but you are starting to suspect that, all this time in which you lent my characters and anecdotes the benefit of liveliness, you’ve just been reading what you want to read.

  Since I’ve refreshed the meeting with my father’s lawyer, let me catch you up beginning there. I walked him out, pushed “Down,” and, as the elevator’s portal sealed, offered to search Alfonse’s bedroom for a will that might have left some playhouse in or near Calais to some cosmetic-surgeon-slash-moonlighting-

  architect.

  Once the elevator emptied him, I took a turn in the contraption, then unlocked Alfonse’s loft, using what had been his key because he’d iced it with a rubber silhouette of Pikachu, which made the object easy to distinguish from the euro coins that always bottled up my pockets.

  Technically, the loft was Didier’s, or, since its official owner at that moment was a bank, I guess it would be prudent and more accurate to say it was his hideout, given that our building’s entrance code and several bolt locks guarded him against François, whom I was worried at the time had secret plans to murder him, then hide the body on our forks, long story short.

  Still, the loft was even less a fort in practice than a spacious red light district wherein Didier formed the only showpiece, a change of scene that will require an explanation, I suppose, so, unfortunately, the doorknob can’t be turned until I’ve backed this story up into an unfamiliar circumstance again.

  Should you find that prospect tiring in advance, you might counteract my backwash with a daydream wherein I—and you can use the young Pierre Clémenti circa Belle du Jour as your referral—am frozen at a steel, flat-panel door, intoning not the afterthought to follow but a lengthy password of the fancy sort that musketeers in fairy tales must chant to shift a cliff into some hush-hush kingdom’s craggy entrance.

  When my father died, Crédit Mutuel’s policy of freezing clients’ assets for the length of their estates’ protracted settlements cut off my allowance. François, who could easily have fronted me the weekly three thousand euro on which I’d grown dependent, and before whom I sat myself one humbled afternoon, regarded my politely folded, nearly praying hands with his usual mischievousness.

  Claiming he was skint after taking up the slack of Azmir’s salary, he said it might both serve my stated purpose and revive a nasty if nostalgic habit were we to, oh, pretend I was a pimp of all amusing things and Didier my whore who, through some miracle or other, brought to mind his younger son but had no resonance, thanks to the chilling side effect of capital.

  He then produced the names of friends and restaurant clientele whom he was certain would pay lavishly to sleep with any Northern European twelve-year-old, much less some coddled little bitch like Didier, who could have easily homogenized into the freshman class of Hogwarts, even if the character he most resembled was Ron Weasley.

  Didier was brought before us, made to strip and turn in halting circles as he discarded garments, play air guitar, do calisthenics, and so forth, while François and I made note of what he was unknowingly conveying when our crotches most reminded us of pets begging for scraps at a dinner table.

  Knowing what I’ve let you gather, need I even rehash my opinion that his greatest shot at getting laid, by me at least, was with the help of Emo, both for the pinpointed reason that I dug the type and a more practical conjecture—i.e., given the speed with which porn stars of every build and age were Emofying at the time, it seemed that gay guys no more cared which Emo did the job than we might care which eggs were in our omelets.

  The next morning, Didier was cloistered in a high chair at the Toni & Guy flagship salon on rue St. Honoré while François and I browbeat a stylist until he’d trimmed, blackened, and gelled the boy’s mousey, unkempt mop into a kind of windswept burqa, or as close as hair’s anemia could take and wouldn’t force the boy to poke at his surroundings with a white cane.

  After a lenient tip, we picked the stylist’s brains for his opinion on this newborn Emo’s chances as a school-yard Lorelei. “Few,” he said unhesitatingly, citing Didier’s hairline lips and feral case of “glass eye syndrome” as the biggest culprits, although he added that a decent pair of tinted contact lens might tease some IQ points into his deadpan marbles.

  His little inconveniences could be refined, the stylist said, but, barring headlines from the world of medicine, his looks would gall until such time as head transplants were feasible. Still, if we cared to dig a few last ditches, he knew a surgeon who could crib the chin and knock a centimeter off the forehead, and we might consider starving him in case his face was hiding cheekbones.

  Originally, we’d planned to cab from the salon to a nearby April 77—i.e., a storefront i
n a trendy chain of Emo clothing stores whose founder, if you’re interested, had gambled that the newly christened Emos might eventually join the Punks in fashion’s annals, and, if so, that they would need a more coherent statement than the Cure T-shirts and holey jeans worn by the movement’s pioneers.

  But, while Didier’s repackaged head drew less attention from what was, in truth, a perfectly attractive torso, it also made his greatest selling point look . . . well, fat is pushing it, but, in any case, we chose to take a chance and edit his physique into something artier and less commercial.

  His daily food intake was clenched into a single bite, causing the famished boy to topple furniture and wreck expensive artworks in search of baguette flakes, which is why the devolution of a sculpture by the artist Carsten Höller into a figurative cage dates from this period.

  While Didier withered, François handcuffed our gestating Cinderella once a week and taxied to some clinic in the seventeenth arrondissement, where a patron of L’Astrance who earned his keep by smothering old actors’ skulls with their own saggy faces would crop and trim the boy in trade for discounts at our incubating whorehouse.

  I think it was a Monday when Didier grew too enfeebled to fight his sharp-edged figure, listless speech, and dragging gait, and felt sufficiently depressed to think black eyeliner was a brand of fairy dust and that he couldn’t look sickly and thin enough.

  At the nearby corner of rues Normandie and Saintonge, April 77 had just opened its gazillionth store, and we asked its clerk to help us crossfade Didier into an Emo who could name-check Tokio Hotel without suspicion, but would feel no more beholden to his outfit than a girl who tries on edible underwear to celebrate her boyfriend’s birthday.

  If my fetish for rerouting even sentences that plummet at their points into Chinese puzzles makes my dawdling on this Emo renovation seem numbingly fiducial, let me add that while the reasons Didier and I became an item in the next few days are overly complex, I can’t discount the way he looked in drainpipe jeans, which is strange.