The Marbled Swarm

by Dennis Cooper

  Even when the cannibal was captured by an antiquated version of police, then kept from eating as he liked or skinny-dipping as I wished, I endured that quarrelsome couch in hopes the actor’s name might brake the closing credits lengthily enough that I could run upstairs and Google him.

  If you think I’m complicated as it stands, feel fortunate I lack the courage to delineate my mind’s implosion when the scroll of names revealed him as Pierre Clémenti and the body I had craved to be essentially my own with just a few years’ muscle tone to separate us.

  While I won’t lie that I’ve been secretly dictating what you’re reading from a wheelchair, having long since gnawed away my limbs like a coyote in a snare trap, I will reveal that, among the details I’ve withheld to spare us my embarrassment are a large number of mirrors that I feel my living quarters would be dull without.

  If you’ve wished this story had included an additional sex scene or a hundred, or if you think that, for all the many paintings made to illustrate the story of Narcissus swooning at a pond, there remains the urgent need for an XXX-rated version starring me, well, I agree with you objectively, but no.

  Point is, I’d just longed to fuck my father then, presumably, be killed by him and eaten, or, given our resemblance, vice versa, or, in other words, to somehow eat myself without committing suicide, and that was quite a shock, no question there, but it was more the kind of shock I’d felt when the chateau I purchased early in our friendship showed itself as yet another batch of secret tunnels masquerading as a home. In other words, it was the pattern of my self-regard that petrified me.

  I must have sat there glazing in the film’s postscript of clustered advertisements while my thoughts turned uglier and uglier for quite a while, I don’t remember.

  Eventually, the room was acclimated by the odor of our salvaged dinner. While I’m sure my mother’s cooking did my stomach’s trick, I do remember that the cow who’d died to set my teeth in motion seemed no more instrumental to the flavor than any fish who might have swum the Evian with which I washed it down.

  No occasion in real life is as loaded as the scene in every film I can remember where some actor turns his cheerless eyes—or, rather, pulls a well-known acting trick that makes his eyes appear lamentable—upon his loved ones. Then, looking away, often out a window where a stretch of nature dominates and looks idyllic, his eyes will signal us that, when he kills himself or them, we, having watched that scene, will understand his reasons as completely or as poorly as he ever did.

  It’s a venerable device, and suggesting that my thoughts that night were pivotal is a device as well, but why not save us time and join me in believing it.

  In the days, months, and gradually years since I decided to impersonate my real and less realistic father—although it’s true that both of them had made their names by living lies—I’ve made do and even headway as a cannibal.

  I’ve wolfed down sawed-off torsos like a zombie or Neanderthal, and I’ve applied ivory chopsticks and the most delicate of forks to nibbles that procrastinated in my mouth like soggy laundry in a drier. Still, let me put two names to two examples and, more important, finish off some stories that would dangle off a final cliff rather than closing sentence.

  Serge, or #7 as we know him, was deducted in a surgical procedure that, although heavily modified by Christophe, was invented in the 1990s to salvage living sculptures from the husks of ­people who had set themselves on fire, for instance. We ate his highlights while, on a narrow, adjunct table, his rags blinked once for “thanks” and twice for “yes” when we voiced compliments or questions.

  Claude, whom you’ll recall as #7’s brother, was discovered dead inside the clothes and makeup of his mother—the victim of a topple, we decided, although the dinner he supplied had a metallic taste that might have warranted a coroner had François not, on that occasion, cooked a feast that left so little of the boy behind—and, as I recall, he was down to fingernails and toenails—that we would have had more luck extracting DNA from his reflection in a window.

  But now I’m speaking of and as the fussy, rock-hard brute that cast the palest shadow in my thirteen-year-old daydreams.

  For reasons lost to whimsy’s transience but logical in theory, I felt a need to ditch my heedless family, not through moping in some fraction of our mansion but by reviving someone I had also been until perhaps a year before.

  That younger, less envisioned me would sneak away from home some nights, then mosey through the park that partners with the Eiffel Tower—i.e., a numbing stretch of lawn and chintzy trees that seemed less conjured from the ground than sanded free of buildings like the land around an airport.

  It seemed a kind of giant, threadbare cushion where, were the Eiffel Tower to be wrenched from its foundations by some angry King Kong type, it could land without untoward expense. In the meantime, tourists were free to come and go.

  At the age of eight or nine, I’d used these walkabouts to blend into the ­people milled beneath the Tower whence, adopting some cartoony foreign accent and uncovering my fractured English, I would ask a fellow novice for directions to some tourist trap. Normally, one or two successful scams would undermine my loneliness and turn me on my heel.

  But when my voice stockpiled its current rust, my loss for words and phony accents seemed to work against me. No matter how unfashionably I dressed or spoke, every tourist I intrigued would winnow Paris from our chats until we only seemed to speak about the view from his hotel room, wherein the Louvre or Notre Dame was inevitably visible.

  In far too many cases, I was persuaded that I wouldn’t have seen Paris until I saw it through their window, and, once I had, feel equally convinced that, since Paris was a state of mind, I might know it best when least distracted by its details, courtesy, they suggested, of a close-up of a pillow I would spend an hour biting and deluging with my tears and slobber.

  On the evening I’m beginning to describe, it was this willful ignorance of Paris I found touristic.

  My strolling and sightseeing quickly centered on two boys a little older than myself—Swedish, I thought, or from those other, nearby states that crank out blonds and seem like lesser Swedens—whose faces wore the stares I always leave in faces once I’ve shown them any interest.

  To steal away with foreigners who don’t speak French or who flip through phrase books while they’re bantering, I must retrain my mouth to gum the basic, neutralizing English that all Europeans speak when taking breaks outside their homelands.

  In other words, you wouldn’t recognize me, but, on the plus side, you could feel the full, calamitous effect of my infamously hot, false first impression.

  Just as hosts will use the minutes prior to guests’ arrival tidying the messes in their homes that seem too fine to whitewash in their normal course of vacuuming, I spent the cab ride to the Swedes’ hotel scoping out my body language to make sure I’d left myself back at the mansion.

  Their hotel was a filthy stack of floors between two crepe stands on rue St. André des Arts. As we climbed the stairs, they spoke of our responsibility to have ingenious sex while high above a street trodden by visionary poets and experimental writers whose names were granulated by their Swedish accents and adorned the messy pile of books that made their unmade double bed look like a table.

  As I’ve mentioned, having sex is always new to me, and I am less its star than an inspector who assigns himself the case, and who is not so much assigned as stranded there, and every bed is like an open road, and I some clueless rabbit lingering in danger’s path because it needs the warmth.

  True to form or any lack thereof, when the Swedes offered to take my coat, they might as well have been a pair of blinding headlights. Stricken by my piddling English and a voice whose squeaks I can’t affect in my loquacious current form, I tried to warn them that, although I’d been declared a lousy lay by everyone who’d had the job before them, if they truly were fans of miscreants like Baudelaire, perhaps they would find poetry where others had felt mi
serable.

  I distantly recall the day when I mistyped onto a website where some boys around my age were busy milking one another’s bodies of what seemed to be a magic potion that I only learned through trial and error was no better than the crummy snacks in mine.

  Still, at that time, based on their swabbing tongues and chomping teeth and pawing hands, you might have thought the mouth or cock or ass they worked on was a secret passage and they would have tried to crawl inside had they not been relatively gigantic.

  I’ve never misconstrued an ass or cock or mouth as bottomless, but mine have been exhausted like they were and more routinely than I’ve cared to say, and being fucked is not what I imagined, and, in fact, I’ll ask for your indulgence if I edit my involvement to a look of terror that, on second thought, I might not dwell on either since the Swedes were far more interested in shoving things inside my face than understanding me with its help.

  That lasted long enough that I began to think—well, as much as someone trying not to cry can think, and maybe it’s the terms “intuit” or “feel” I should be grasping for—that, when I’d let my acting teacher fool around to get the role of Chevalier Danceny in Les liaisons dangereuses, then padded my few lines so loosely he was fired as an incompetent, the central problem might have been when he’d miscast me as the sexiest kid he’d ever seen, I think he said.

  But, since you weren’t in bed with us, let me try a populist example, although I will admit in doing so that I’m just parroting what others far more well informed have written.

  Apparently, there is a novel titled Story of the Eye that, although mistaken by French readers in the ’50s for porn just erudite enough to carry on the metro, was instead a work of genius that co-opted the erotic—a kind of sheep in wolf’s clothing—and this novel’s eminence is such that it was prominent among the volumes lying open on the Swedes’ bed and the second to the last to be knocked onto the floor.

  Its success led hornier authors with fewer ulterior designs to dress their novels’ sexy scenes in Linguist Chic. The most famous of these knockoffs is The Story of O. It and novels titled virtually like it seemed to titillate a marginally better class of reader on release, but their steamy scenes were too uncomplicated for the French intelligentsia and their artfulness too thin to work as a deodorant.

  Nowadays, these books are only valued for their frilly raunch by boys too nice to hack the monitoring software off their pantywaist computers, and when the books are spoken of with multisyllables, it usually involves a backward compliment about their porn’s off-putting gussiness, which certain brainiacs find interestingly camp.

  Obviously, when I discuss these shallow novels, it’s a roundabout self-portrait, and when I parse their readership, I speak obliquely of the Swedes as well as every ex for whom I’ve seemed to guarantee an orgasm so rash they might have gotten pregnant through their hands had I not been there to swallow it.

  These invading and intersecting thoughts or insecurities or revisions or what have you, and how they gnarl and loop my thinking, and how that coarsens my appearance, and how this worries me, are what I have instead of sex when guys are having sex with how I look, and that’s all I have to show you in return, which is largely why I haven’t.

  This is why I crawl in beds mythologized, and why I’m forcibly removed from them, then slump in taxis crumpling paper scraps not scribbled with new boyfriends’ numbers and addresses but inscribed with book titles like Outliving Your Depression or referrals to their friends who also happen to be psychiatrists.

  So, once the Swedes had fucked and eaten out and squatted on my face until its ornaments were worn away and my responses seemed as automated as a cuckoo clock’s . . . when the standard English praise I had elicited gave way to Swedish terms I didn’t understand and which they shouted so consistently it almost seemed like they were beating me to death . . . once the expression in my eyes lost its parenthetical mystique and started giving updates on the current level of my general agreement . . . once I wasn’t worth the extra effort to distinguish from the other sluts and bitches they’d called sluts and bitches . . . when I was just the hands and knees on which a quote-unquote tight ass was placed at a convenient height and, to hear them, thanks to them . . . when they closed their eyes and started snoring more than breathing, and caromed off me like sleepwalkers who were bumping into walls . . .

  Suddenly, their bed was mine, and I was someone they’d seen freaking out beneath the Eiffel Tower and safeguarded home out of guilt or decency. When my tears and howls were willing, I could barely see them, hastily half dressed, glassy-eyed, and nodding to the violent rhythm of my outburst.

  What I confessed, to no avail since, between their erstwhile grasp of English and the tyrannical French accent that scrawls my erstwhile grasp of English, I might as well have been a suicide bomber using beatbox vocal tricks to imitate the sound of an explosion, was the horrifyingly uncomplicated truth.

  It was a truth so honest and completely unironic that even I, who presumably believed myself, didn’t understand its point, or why this authenticity had shown up now when I felt least in need of rescuing, or how it wound up in my mouth, or why my mouth was such a bullhorn, or where it had been hiding from the words I’d always used to talk my way around it.

  I’ve failed the marbled swarm as I semi-understand its rules and premise, and, although you’ll never know the difference, barring errors that weren’t meant as an insidious direction, there is nowhere deeper or more intricately stifled by my story than this hotel room, and I’m out of means to keep you waiting for the secret that involved my sleight of hand unless you think a very frightened thirteen-year-old boy who looks vaguely like Pierre Clémenti seems magical or promising enough.

  Acknowledgments

  Dennis Cooper is very grateful to Yury Smirnov, Gisele Vienne, Joel Westendorf, Ira Silverberg, Michael Signorelli, Carrie Kania, Justin Dodd, Paul Otachovsky-Laurens, Emmelene Landon, Catherine Robbe-Grillet, and Chrystel Dozias.

  Also by Dennis Cooper

  Closer

  Frisk

  Wrong

  Try

  The Dream Police

  Guide

  Period

  My Loose Thread

  The Sluts

  God Jr.

  The Weaklings

  Ugly Man

  Smothered in Hugs

  About the Author

  Dennis Cooper is the author of the George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels: Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His other works include My Loose Thread; The Sluts, winner of France's Prix Sade and the Lambda Literary Award; God Jr.; Wrong; The Dream Police; and Ugly Man. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Paris.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Credits

  Cover design by Milan Bozic

  Cover photograph © by Keystone-France/Getty Images

  Copyright

  THE MARBLED SWARM. Copyright © 2011 by Dennis Cooper. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-06-171563-1

  11 12 13 14 15 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062101594

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