The Marbled Swarm

by Dennis Cooper

  Now, with that cinch of narrative in place, I’ll return us to the afternoon weeks hence when, if you’ll remember, I suggested that the spitting image of the young Pierre Clémenti might bedeck the doorknob of Alfonse’s former loft if you so wished.

  If by chance this chronicle has been adapted for the radio by France Culture, and you are listening instead of reading, you will likely hear a noise that, although created by a wooden shingle with a loose, protruding nail, screams “creaking door.” But had the door in question creaked, I might have been five hundred euro in the red, since Didier’s most recent client, a government attache of the Czech Republic embassy, as I recall, had grossly overrun his hour-long appointment.

  I traced the duo through a spray of coins and fallen cutlery, past a coffee table that had been overturned and looked as gluey as a newborn painting, to a sculpture—Haruki Murakami’s My Lonesome Cowboy, if you know it or that matters—which was jiggling suspiciously and venting moans not three steps from where I gently closed the door behind me.

  As I mentioned, Didier spent his late nights, work breaks, and all unsupervised time moseying about inside a grid-like sculpture that had had some cogitative rationale for only looking like a cage before I literalized the reference with a prisoner and padlock.

  I bring this up again not to gloss my villainous or conscientious sides, but to plumb the mystery of why, despite the loft’s reanimation as a copious illegal sex club, Alfonse’s bedroom was still the chipper nursery he had left behind on what must constitute the world’s worst ever date and birthday gift combined.

  His computer screen was still a breezy, ceaseless mosh pit swirled with laughing flowers. The surface of the eco-friendly bamboo desk on which it whirred and drawers yielded nothing more official than his usernames and passwords. I power-squeezed each pair of socks, balled or not, wrung the gist out of his underwear, pajamas, pants, and every T-shirt wavering in his closet.

  I advanced upon the bookshelves, where Alfonse had wedged his zillion manga, and which would not have been a piece of cake to pry apart in any case, even had each booklet’s gaudy, unmarked spine not crashed its borders and conjoined to form a brazen mural that caused my allergy to stimuli to flare and left my usually acerbic eyes the equivalent of candles.

  I was cringing at those rows and rows without the wherewithal to yank apart and ruffle through the concourse book by book, when I noticed something that was neither pink nor especially stimulating jutting from one manga’s upper crust.

  I slid the manga from its tight spot and opened to the bookmarked page, no doubt whistling between my teeth or something of that flummoxed nature when the denoted illustration showed the same synopsis of a playhouse that had originally sent me on this treasure hunt, minus some graininess.

  Then there was the matter of the bookmark. It was, in laymen’s terms, a postcard sent to Alfonse four years earlier and postmarked in Calais—if, that is, I read its smeary marks and peeling stamp correctly.

  On the blanker of the card’s two sides, there was a scribbled phrase whose ornate diction could be traced back to my father’s. While my adaptation of its message is a fling, the words were something very close to “Use this card to find the entrance.”

  In the space below, my brother had inscribed his father’s name, my mother’s, mine, and “Alfonse.” Each was followed by a dash and then a different name that seemed to correspond, at least to his imagination, and none of which I recognized that afternoon, but you would.

  The bookmarked manga, which I paged through mindfully for, all told, an hour, had lifted everything but its perverseness from the oft-retold and readapted children’s bedtime story known, at least in France, as “The Three Bears.”

  For instance, Goldilocks was neither girl nor boy but rather a little sissy with ellipsoid eyes whose tartan culottes hid a whopping penis. The tempting dinner bowls held soba noodles, and the cozy-looking beds were skimpy mats. The family of bears didn’t welcome their intruder with a party then pay for her train fare back to Paris, like in the version I remember.

  Instead, being bears not in the corny, aw-shucks sense to which we’re accustomed, but biologically, they swatted Goldilocks awake then spent a dozen pages screwing him or her, which, with the strange propriety that puts the Japanese among the earth’s most civilized degenerates, required every sort of smudge or nearby flowerpot to blot their intersecting crotches.

  Once Goldilocks was clawed and squashed by accident into reliquiae too vile to give an animal a boner, the bears, whose thinking had been compromised or tamed to some degree by the human clothes in which their illustrator squared them, chose not to chomp and shred him/her into a ragged snack.

  After juggling their spoils into the kitchen, the baby bear boiled sticky rice, the mama bear docked sheets of seaweed into sushi wrappers, and the papa bear nicked clods of raw material from the body’s open wounds with his impressive nails.

  Soon, California rolls were crowded on a varnished wooden plank, whereupon they ate until their snoring, newly pregnant-looking bodies hit the kitchen floor, human bones still drooping from their paws like they were narcoleptic drummers.

  My fingertips were hyper-tapping on the manga’s cover when I noticed Didier was standing in the doorway of my brother’s room, one hand holding out a slew of fifty-euro bills, the other playing with his petty but impregnable erection.

  Back when I felt vaguely certain I was gay, I dipped into the so-called dungeon of Le Depot one stoned night and quickly realized men would gather there not in order to give blow jobs in the dark, per se, but to have sex with a darkness wherein they formed no more than sets of circumstances.

  I believe those lurking men refer back to these underground collisions as their “things.” Things, I would guess, as opposed to memories.

  Anyway, point is, I had been doing “things” with Didier in recent weeks.

  Let me remind you that, while I’ve filtered apparitions of my colleagues’ speaking voices, minus one or two, as I consider them less friends of mine or yours than my ingredients, to muzzle Didier would be like hooking a police badge on the T-shirt of a kid who likes to hang around police stations.

  “That asshole didn’t even try to get me off,” Didier said. “So much shit about my loins and their profound elixir, and then it was just, ‘Swallow what you made, you stupid whore.’ ”

  “Let me pose a question,” I said, “and precede it with a caveat, which is to say your answer will influence my decision to assist you with your issues or continue with my day.”

  “François says you’re just a boring, pretentious piece of shit,” Didier said, “but maybe because I’m stupid, I think it’s more like listening to classical music.”

  “You’ll recall Alfonse,” I continued, “the Flatso you betrayed, misled, murdered circumstantially, and whose human infrastructure used to live here. So, were you, Azmir, and I to embark upon a road trip to Calais, of all lackluster places, to find a man who knew Alfonse by reputation, do you think you could impersonate my brother in his presence and repeat a fib that you were kidnapped, raped, and blah blah blah, which I would first devise then have you memorize?”

  I was midway through this question when the portion of my sight as yet unclouded by the culinary fantasies I find it useful to construct before attempting sex noted a sort of glitch or break in Didier’s familiar grumpiness.

  “Holy shit,” he said, or rather yelled, or even shouted joyfully, I’ll dare to say. He started fingering his face’s redesign, which, in just the last few days, had finally trimmed and decked his cussedness into a stubborn curve or two. “So, that’s what all this bullshit is about.”

  Among the minor features of Alfonse’s bedroom was a mirror, where he would stand and stare back at his wistful, flattened looks for hours, a painful memory I’d buried in my posttraumatic stress until Didier turned left and saw almost the very same reflection.

  “It’s like I fell off a skateboard,” he said, “and my face got mangled, and when they
sewed it back together, they fucked up and used a picture of your brother as the map instead of me.”

  Has my tendency to call an orange a tangerine prepared you to believe that, with a dutiful cosmetic surgeon and François’s agnate taste in boys as my assistants, I’d been engraving Alfonse in Didier sans any knowledge of my motives whatsoever? I ask because it happens to be true.

  What could have been more natural—or more “me” at least—than to have viewed the carnage in François’s garage as a problem with my eyesight, then simply changed perspectives like my father might have traded peepholes until I found an angle on Alfonse that flattered him again.

  I’m sure I mentioned how, if Alfonse had found Emo’s depressions as engaging as Japan’s idolatry of printed ­people, he might be here today and so adored by suitors who appreciate asocial conduct when it’s properly attired that I would seem as phony and impossible to love as I suppose I really am.

  I’ll remind you one last time about my stroll with Serge across the chateau’s woodsy yard, wherein I speed-judged his admissibility as food and found him hollow enough.

  Now I’ll suggest that, were you to rejuvenate that scene’s environs as window dressing then imagine I was ranking Serge’s fitness as my brother’s clotheshorse, I could easily have told you I was here with Didier that day learning to accept Alfonse’s likeness, and, as you may have even gathered by this point, I was.

  Chapter 6

  I slept horribly, and yet my iPhone’s silent, rumbling alarm so piqued my minor interest in exploring day-lit rooms and views, it might have played my favorite TV program’s theme song if the show in question weren’t predictably Twin Peaks and were its overture less soporific.

  While feeding grounds into my coffeemaker and setting it to stun, I sent François, Olivier, and Azmir texts whose predicating pings were half the battle, since the notes just nudged them to assemble in my loft more hurriedly than planned.

  Still, by the time I’d had one of my all-or-nothing showers then taxed my caffeine buzz with a strangely complicated question of which McQ blue long-sleeve western shirt to wear, my lack of sleep had bogged my shoelaces and buttons into rusty cranks and broken knobs.

  Once I joined my colleagues, all of whom were baggy-eyed and blazoned with the wet, smeared hair of recent swimmers—well, excluding Didier, who looked precisely as he did when I had locked him in his cage hours before, which is to say like Alfonse if my brother had been a hiking trail beloved by snails—I was less their peppy leader than a fellow dawdler lying prostrate over one of Philippe Starck’s curvilinear, backbreaking chairs.

  François thought a summons to his coke dealer seemed in order. It was a capital idea, or would have been were we not still convalescing from a forty-eight-hour-long “afternoon” of accidental binging when we’d found my father’s secret coke stash in our spoonfuls of Corn Flakes three days before.

  I’ll retrieve this incident beginning at the point where, having polished off my bowl, I was spurred into an even more than usually exasperating nitwit who licked and ground my teeth while using them to air my every thought and scrabbling my ring of house keys like a rosary.

  Having learned the night before that Alfonse’s so-called will was just a postcard cryptogram, I phoned my father’s lawyer, and, since my pell-mell vocal patterns clipped the news into an outburst, and given that his rates were hourly, he proposed I cede the fifty-five remaining minutes to the mayor whom he had quoted at our meeting, and I agreed on the condition that he phone me back with the address of the supposed playhouse so I could plug it into Google Earth.

  I’d planned to kill the almost-hour fingering some phone apps whose offbeat missions and designy logos had put the make on my contracted pupils.

  Still, as coke can’t seem to help but use its hopheads to accomplish, I found a quiet study of these apps beyond me, and soon enough my antsy friends and I were in a huddle, having misconstrued our need to chatter as the impetus for lectures and confused one another for captivated listeners at whom we could not spew enough.

  For my part, I chronicled Pierre Clémenti’s oeuvre, complete with capsule plots of every title, which is a tribute either to the marbled swarm or to coke’s divinatory powers, since my knowledge of his films was almost limited to YouTube clips, and, even in those cases, they were fan-made compilations of his shirtless scenes with power-ballad soundtracks.

  When the lawyer took a costly ninety minutes–plus to ring me back, I didn’t seem to care because another ten or twelve minutes blitzkrieged by before the cocaine let him say a word.

  He’d reached the mayor, but, before an opportunity arose to wrest the street address, she literally thanked God for the reoccurrence of his stiff, familiar tones, and, in a voice warped by her anxiousness and thickset northern accent, told him a story he would re-create as best he could given that his habit was to translate ­people’s ranting into clear-cut legalese.

  She’d said a fourteen-year-old local boy had turned up missing. Around their comfy town, this boy was known if not beloved as the skittish, twitchy, slit-eyed urchin whose seeming lack of ancestry and favorite perch outside the district’s sex shop had troubled every glimpse of him.

  Townsfolk guessed he was the castoff of a widowed, alcoholic former miner who would rarely leave his shack out by the highway and whose standoffishness and gone-to-seed good looks seemed the likely birthplace of this fugitive yet unassuming child.

  Earlier that year, the town’s rapscallion, Quinton Dupont, aged fifteen, had befriended the uncordial boy. Quinton’s mother was so pleased to think her naturally combatant son might have an altruistic streak that she allowed the boy to curl up nightly in the family tool shed.

  But there had been a recent falling out between the boy and Quinton. To the township, it seemed one of those contretemps that halve the sturdiest of teenage chums, until, that is, Mrs. Dupont, who was known to everyone but local children as Aimee, began to worry aloud and quite incessantly.

  She would insist to anyone who greeted her that, in the weeks since this disbandment, Quinton had fallen into something she believed from reading Paris newspapers was called depression. He ate minutely, could only seem to think and speak of his detached friend, while, at the same time, clamming up whenever what’s-his-name was made the topic of a question.

  As for the twitchy boy, he’d not been seen in town for weeks, causing locals to surmise that, having gained a fondness for companionship, he’d reconciled with his reclusive father. This blind guess had grown lazily official since, apart from Quinton, townsfolk felt his exit only made the streets seem cleaner and less emotionally taxing to navigate.

  But on the very afternoon the mayor and advocate had spoken last, Aimee rushed into the flower shop, panting that, while window shopping at the lumberyard that morning, she’d seen the freakish family that, as gossip had it, were residing in “the bauble,” as locals sometimes called the weird abandoned playhouse.

  While the man and boys had proved to be the rumored eyesores, she said the younger of the sons had bothered her particularly. As she had pleasant memories of watching Edward Scissorhands, she used his countervailing innocence to reassure herself, then forced her gaze to parse the child’s vampiric coif and outfit, and, the less they formed her view, the more he seemed to reproduce or even be the boy who’d left her son a basket case.

  She’d lingered in the lumberyard’s small gift shop, handling its wooden replicas of nearby points of interest, until the strange child fled his family long enough to scrutinize a tiny hand-carved skeleton, whereupon she swooped, so increasingly convinced her guesswork was correct with every clarifying footstep that she called to him the way she always had—i.e., “Hi, Quinton’s friend.”

  With that, the boy looked up to see his ex-friend’s mother, and, as his heavily mascaraed eyes were widening, he’d snapped the skeleton in half. The crack of bursting lathwork carried through the shop, drawing a mistrustful glance from his alleged father, at which point Aimee had retreated out the en
trance.

  She’d driven home, hoping to soothe Quinton with her discovery. Instead, startled by this news from his familiar fetal pose upon the bathroom floor, he’d requested a La Bière du démon from the fridge, which seemed to her a good sign, then downed the bottle in one wobbling gulp, which didn’t.

  One day, Quinton said, back when he and the peculiar boy were best of friends, a nosy mood beatified by several Red Bulls each had made them want to scale a tattered section of the brick-and-barbed-wire battlement that fenced the legendary playhouse.

  No sooner had they thudded to their feet inside the compound than the dust raised by their landing breezed into the view of what would have been the hottest girl on earth, he said, were “she” not exercising at that moment dressed in skintight leotards.

  This feminine, mirage-like boy introduced himself as Claude, the only offspring of the man whose property they’d just transgressed. Despite his disappointing penis, he balanced out as quite a decent guy by giving them permission to have a full-fledged look around.

  As he attempted to describe the playhouse to his mother, Quentin’s sentences had quilled like Chinese acrobats and rat-a-tatted like contestants in a high-stakes spelling bee and finally crashed his voice into the feedback necessary to enunciate such words as “mind-boggling” and “insane” with sufficient majesty.

  Still, he said the weirdest thing was Claude’s supposed father, whom he’d never seen in so much as shadow. Due to some medical condition Claude had somehow lengthily yet barely managed to explain, his father couldn’t breathe the same oxygen as everybody else.

  Thus, he’d supervised their visit from some unknown room and through at least one hidden camera. When he’d spoken to and with them, a voice had burbled from a speaker in the wall, as though they were an all-male Charlie’s Angels or three versions of that guy in Saw who sawed his leg off to escape.