The Marbled Swarm

by Dennis Cooper

  The boy and he had started hanging out there daily, and Quentin said he couldn’t quite explain its staying power unless . . . the father’s fun suggestion that the boys perform a play for his amusement had not eventually devolved into a thing that seemed less fun in retrospect.

  Quentin guessed the play’s interminable length might have engineered some kind of trance, as it was written to be acted out in real time, day after day, morning until evening, not to mention its enthralling story line, which had narrowed their attention like the stages of the Tour de France.

  Among the play’s tight cast of characters was a man of roughly middle age and no profession who, like Claude’s elusive father, made no appearance on the stage itself, although this subterfuge was due not to a medical condition but to his secretive and morbid curiosity.

  Then there was the man’s dead wife, although her corpse, which spent its face time lying crumpled on a staircase, only seemed to be a facet of the play to show how he had forged two of his ejaculations into sons.

  The most important characters were, first, the ­couple’s younger son, a suicidal fourteen-year-old liar who swanned around the stage in Emo outfits, and, second, a cute but tiresome young adult from Paris who was in the play for reasons no one understood, not even him.

  The play was set in a chateau whose history of on-site murders, ghosts, and other unexplained phenomena required a lengthy spoken foreword, which Claude’s father had recited through the speakers for what would have felt like months were not the bloodthirsty details of this story custom-made for mordant teenagers.

  To cite the most agentive of these details, the ­couple’s older son had either killed himself, been murdered, died by tragic accident, or faked his death within the previous few months.

  The anguished man and wife had put the crime scene on the market, and the young Parisian, struck by certain parallels between their son’s obituary in Le Monde and the clueless death of his own brother years before, found himself inspired to visit the chateau and then acquire it.

  While touring his purchase, he’d discovered there was more to the chateau—specifically its riddling with secret passageways—and to the family, whose screwiness seemed less a legacy of grief than the bluff of incommunicado ­people, than had been mentioned by the building’s real estate agent.

  However, even he became a suspect when, after sealing the transaction with a handshake, he kidnapped the son, an act that might have offered them relief, considering their offspring’s pricey regimen of meds, were he not a resident of the Marais, which even ­people in the provinces had heard was overrun with homosexuals.

  Claude’s father’s disembodied voice had played the patriarch, of course, as well as reading out the stage directions where required. Claude was cast in two small roles that proved quite meaty when combined, that of the older, dead or missing son in flashbacks, and the frozen but dramatically positioned mother’s corpse.

  The twitchy boy portrayed the younger son, since it was thought his scrawniness would bring an Emo artifice to life and that his meek, unkempt behavior might misread as suicidal in the costume’s gloomy envelope.

  Quentin was awarded the Parisian’s role, and he admitted having relished his alter ego’s evil, violent streak so wholly that he hadn’t minded all the homework it required to nail the character’s bombastic speech and la-di-da comportment, not that watching DVDs of Monty Python skits dubbed into French was work.

  Quentin swore the play was such a corkscrewed mass of crisscrossed plots and episodic pickles that he hadn’t even noticed when a gay subtext curtailed its breakneck pacing with some icky love scenes whose X-rated realizations might not have been so crucial to maintain the work’s integrity in hindsight.

  Still, the play was so ingenious that learning what new twist the Emo’s death might trigger seemed more important than not murdering a friend, and it was only when the gory scene was under way that Quentin lost it, grabbed his woozy, battered costar by his hoodie’s blood-soaked sleeve, and ran away, not even stopping when he felt the Emo costume slip or wriggle free.

  The mayor was as astonished by this yarn as Quentin’s mother, but the district’s scandals were her duty. So, with a phone call, she dispatched the town’s patrolmen to the property, and, after taping a “Closed” sign to the window of the bakery that doubled as their station, they’d bathed Main Street in gushes of revolving lights and yapping sirens so unheard of in those restful parts that many locals have suggested it become an annual event.

  Excepting Quentin, no one in town had ever seen the finished playhouse, and the mayor declared that, had she thought to tape the gendarmes’ whimpering account of its emergence from the trees, it might have made the famous coverage of the Hindenburg disaster sound fastidious.

  Having recently been out to see the playhouse for herself, she claimed her words were far too pinched to do its dynamism justice. Still, one of her descriptions, which had turned a local drunk into a churchgoer, might be a starting place, she said, but it relied on Euro Disney to make its point, to which the lawyer assured her he’d been dragged there by his nieces.

  First, she said he should remember, say, two dozen of the park’s wildest attractions. Then, he should imagine they were stacked, one vulgar ride atop another, to create a sort of garish, thick-necked totem pole whose height would dwarf the Eiffel Tower’s.

  Next, he should imagine the gigantic hand of God was fading in above the column and then pressing down with all His mighty strength. Since God was the greatest of magicians, the stack would not be crushed into debris. Instead, the highest ride would wondrously merge into the one below, and that mutated ride would blend into the next, and so forth, until what occupied the ground was an unearthly, massive doodad.

  Now, to reengage with the investigating cops, they’d parked their squad car, battled through the building’s psychedelic headwinds, distinguished a front door of sorts, kicked it in, and drawn their flashlights.

  Rather than the honeycombed infinity of rooms foreshadowed by the tangled outer shell, what faced their evanescent firing squad was just one very plain, enormous, empty space.

  The walls, floor, and ceiling weren’t the friendly, decorated borders of a home, but rather raw wood sheets that brought to mind some kind of epic packing crate in which another house had been delivered.

  Still, having tracked their share of UFOs back to a moonlit water tower, the gendarmes searched the room in the name of an investigation, and they would have found nothing abnormal had the concept of normality applied and were the younger cop not prone to sweat when he was disconcerted.

  Mistaking a grainy slat of wall for possible graffiti, the younger cop approached this seeming clue, and, while he stood admiring nature’s unkempt artistry, he felt a highly welcome coolness whish and climb his hairy legs.

  Crouching both to analyze the source and dry himself, he realized that a draft of air was infiltrating a small folio of floorboards, and yet his snooping flashlight found no markings of a trap door or repairs that might explain it.

  After handcuffing the busted playhouse door, they’d driven out to see the alcoholic miner, but he’d stopped their squad car in the driveway with a rifle, shouting, “Son, what fucking son.” He’d lost his manhood in a knife fight when he was seven, he explained, and if they’d wondered why he drank so much, he was drunk enough to drop his pants and educate them.

  Their next stop was Aimee’s home, where they’d interrogated Quentin, hoping that their firsthand knowledge of the playhouse would compel him to retract his lies, or, should he have gone insane, disillusion him. Instead, he’d quickly reemerged as the disrespectful hooligan who liked to bugger homeless cats with lighted fireworks for quote-unquote no reason.

  They’d locked him in the nearest to a jail cell that their station-cum-bakery could fake, meaning the closet where they stored their vacuum cleaner, but, after studying the junk in there all afternoon, the playhouse in his stories sounded, if anything, even more Byzantine and pornographic
.

  In the mere few days since then, the mayor said, time seemed to have rewound a month. The peculiar father-son team had left town or escaped into the mines, and, if so, were surely dead by now or wandering in ever-slower circles.

  The single aspect of the strange, chimeric incident not chalked up to Quentin’s bullshit or the paranoid delusions that piggyback small towners’ boredom was the nameless boy or, given no one knew him in the first place, his whereabouts.

  That case would likely stay unsolved by any tricks within their means, the mayor said, barring a leak from Quentin’s shrink. Still, a photo of the missing boy, if it was him, that had been lifted off the lumberyard’s surveillance footage, was now posted on the town’s official website, although it showed a face more heavily made-up than easily made out.

  When I re-latched my iPhone’s leather case, it could have been a castanet, since my companions, having found my drawn-out silence shocking, literally busted out in raucous dance steps, fueled by cocaine’s tickles and their curiosity to know what could have muted me.

  First, I ducked into my office, woke a desktop, launched Safari, and then fed it search terms like “Calais,” “nearby,” and “playhouse,” until one link unpeeled a site that I reloaded several times before my browser aced the geriatric code that left it knotted up with animated gifs and clip art.

  The power of bad photographs to sculpt old bedsheets into ghosts of World War casualties is known to every half-sane TV addict, and the missing boy’s photo required a vicious squint to tell him from its surface noise, but, I swear, had Alfonse been corporeal or were Didier a twin, I could have been studying either one of them.

  More important, I was certain that—and, if I’ve laced my story tightly, you’ve been cursing my slow-wittedness for pages—given the classified, surveying father and his sketchy, bit-part children, and . . . well, every aspect—even its provincial chateau setting—as “chateau” was just two letters shy of “Châtelet,” which was my father’s final clue to me, as you’ll recall—if the play in Quentin’s story wasn’t an imaginative lie, its author was most certainly my father.

  Granted, he’d never even canonized my mother in a sappy poem, or none that she had pinned onto the fridge, but, then again, all his fulsome talk of how he’d bagged a billion euro from a bunch of idiots had never held my interest, nor would I likely have picked up on any chitchat about the Comédie-Française or the Festival d’Avignon or things like that.

  I’ve mentioned my discrediting performance as an acting student when an adolescent, and I’ll hope you paused there long enough to guess I wouldn’t reference that and make myself a laughingstock to you without first giving my little sacrifice a saving grace.

  A day would come, and one minutely less historic than the afternoon I’m re-creating, when filling dinner plates with almost anyone I wished to kill, abbreviate, and season proved even less conducive to my talents than the acting jobs I might have nailed had they been custom-built with me in mind.

  Human food is such a chore to edit, involving such a surfeit of accomplices, stranding so much eerily familiar, shoddy chaff that proves so humdrum to partition from the nest eggs and then fade away from the police.

  It would begin to pain me that, if I remained a cannibal or viewed myself as one, I would never have the independence of an actor who can disappear into his body as behind a puff of smoke or the freedoms of an artist who need only find an isolated room to make his magic and then pay the rent and close the door.

  One of the objects in my father’s art collection, and the work that most delayed a banging gavel at the auction where I finally cleaned house, was nothing more galvanic than an unmarked sheet of paper with four pinholes in its corners.

  This page was not just art but art of consequence, and the only thing that differentiated it from the bundled stacks you buy at Office Depot was an artist’s uncorroborated claim that he had stared at it for a thousand hours.

  Only in my earliest, most far-fetched daydreams had I ever been a cannibal the way that staring recluse was an artist, and I would never be someone who needed nothing but one hypnotizing spot upon a wall to make me happy, whether it contained a piece of paper being fired up by my eyesight or a peephole that could lull me into using my imagination as a lifeboat.

  In that suspicious, coked-up moment with the missing boy’s alleged image ringing in my eyes and the lawyer’s phone call still engraved in my attention, I realized that, since I had never doodled anything that looked like much of anything, and since there were no secret passages around to stimulate my inner voyeur, I would be wise to reconsider acting.

  Then I had a revelation, and not just any shocker but a bombshell that exploded the conclusion I had drawn about myself the night I synced a fading mental image of Alfonse beset with hungry lions to the riotous ejaculate I’d just nicknamed Lake Stomach.

  Barring my loft’s lack of proscenium and rows of seats, and given that the sun or lamps in my vicinity weren’t roving spotlights to my knowledge, I was and had been acting for as long as I could tell the difference.

  When I spoke, I heard my father’s voice, if not word for word then as loyally as the stars of Molière’s plays had wagged his tongue in centuries.

  If my life was even half the procedural unfolding of a game my father played, I’d barely coined a phrase outside the range of his remote control.

  My brother, whom I’d only met at all because his father wore my mother’s ring, was really more my understudy than a sibling, and Didier was less the makings of my boyfriend than Alfonse’s stuntman.

  What’s that saying . . . if it resembles a duck and quacks, it’s usually a duck? And if the world revolves around a duck, and experts claim it must since ducks see things and everyone, no matter their complexity or power, as basic shapes that are digestible or obstacle, then . . . well, I know I had a point when I began that.

  Maybe I warrant your indulgence as I stared into my future on that scattered afternoon, reenvisioning my father as an artist who couldn’t squint into a dent without creating a black hole, and Alfonse and I as sons who’d never masturbated without gluing down a piece of his collage, and the playhouse as a theater where I, the most anointed of his fantasies, could become the actor I’d been groomed to play.

  Chapter 7

  Before I learned the marbled swarm, or, rather, spoiled its chances with my inattentiveness and patchy wit, then screwed up both of my impending lives, I believed I was my family’s chief ingredient, if not for any evidence more solid than my highly complimented looks, then with total confidence.

  Perhaps because it felt so unfamiliar at the time, there came a night when I was memorably alone and isolated, even though my family was in easy walking distance.

  My mother had just burnt some corner of our dinner, locked the door, and was sulking on the kitchen floor as if it were a bathroom.

  Alfonse was in his bedroom playing Go with an imaginary friend who, considering his mazy name was later solved into an anagram of mine, was probably a more perfected me.

  My father, who consistently ignored me, was doing so while obfuscated by the mansion’s secret tunnels, meaning somewhere so unknown I couldn’t make-believe his negligence had been mandated by my rallying effect upon his every thought.

  I was in the living room, for reasons no more interesting than the reason it was called a living room, worrying that, were my heart one of those malformed hand grenade–like hearts that crumple strapping soccer players in their twenties, my corpse might lie decomposing on the floor for hours.

  I was sitting on a hexagonal clump of painted wood that met my father’s standards for a couch, weakened by self-pity, yes, but more importantly because that clump was close to our TV.

  If you wonder why I’ve paused to re-create this slight occasion when, up until this point, I’ve scrapped each time I’d qualified for couch potato or used the toilet, just be glad I care enough to skip you past the moiré pattern that diffused the TV screen and my attention for alm
ost an hour thanks to my corresponding pickiness.

  Instead, I’ll strand us on a channel in the upper hundreds. It was showing an older film, not so old it lied the world was black and white, but too slushy-looking to have been fed through a computer, and too raggedy to have its origins in France, but dubbed into a slangy French, and thus something a thirteen-year-old boy like me could fancy were he stoned or strange enough.

  Perhaps it was an actor whose famous name escapes me that stalled my finger on the button, but it was someone younger clad in nothing but an open, flapping medieval bathrobe and shoving human meat into his mouth who made me stop.

  It was an avant-garde film, as they were called, so, where a film you’d actually choose to watch would have a story line, it had jagged cuts from place to place and interminable close-ups of the human soul tinkering with actors’ eyes. Still, as I’d seen my mother act in even weirder pictures, I sort of figured out the deal behind the character I seemed to like.

  He’d killed his father, fled into a forest, and was hunting guys and eating them because, well, snakes and lizards must taste as scary as they look.

  Since I didn’t know a cannibal from Tintin at that point, my first reactions weren’t “how gross” or “that’s so fucking awesome,” but rather broodings of the wistful, wanton sort particular to thirteen-year-old inverts like myself who thought the parts of life that didn’t give me an erection weren’t especially important.

  So intensely good-looking was this cannibal, and so greatly did the actor’s face improve on every face for which I now felt I’d made considerable allowances, that I wondered if I’d even seen this film before, perhaps when still so tiny and half blind I thought his image was a lesson on my babysitters’ flash cards.

  I tend to watch the films I rent or download with the rashness of a porn fan whose arousal is dependent on one offbeat speck of sex, say nipple play, and yet I found the hour while this film unspooled in arty, traipsing increments no problem whatsoever.