The Marbled Swarm (11 page)

Ironically, this forged manuscript, the obsolescent pen, and any evidence of Benicoeur’s crimes were victims of the fire that vaporized the archives of the Hotel de Ville in 1957, which was why his infamy was just a tidbit stuck on certain blogs and Facebook groups maintained by self-styled Sadeians.

Although this story had unnerved him, my father lacked the incredulity to seal the cursed tunnels. He’d kept them secret from his children not because he feared they’d give us nightmares, but because we might, if playing on the steep floors, break our little necks, and he’d only kept his wife out of the loop because the tunnels thrilled some women whom he fucked behind her back.

Once puberty had spiced me up and Alfonse could walk without gripping someone’s pants leg—in other words, once we’d devised something akin to private lives—my father said he found himself shortening his time in our domain into a cameo, preferring to observe us more obliquely through the tunnels’ wealth of peepholes.

One afternoon when we looked boring, and when my father had neglected to bring a book, he killed time by recollecting snatches of his childhood, notably his attendance at a performance, perhaps the very last, by a famous, then elderly French magician, to which my grandparents had brought him for his birthday.

The magic show featured numbingly familiar tricks to do with card decks, top hats, scarves, a scantily attired assistant sawed in two, and so forth, which the magician enacted with a certain itemized grace for which he’d been revered.

At some point, he’d made a showgirl vanish for several minutes. While her reemergence rolled my father’s younger eyes, he said he’d felt disturbingly unworried while her disappearance was an issue.

Instead, he’d wondered what she would be thinking, poised backstage, he guessed, surely peeking through some curtain slit, waiting for her cue, watching strangers’ eyes shred the stage in search of her, knowing that, in her nonexistence, she was briefly more important than the billion times more popular magician.

While my father thought the fad among psychologists of tracing clients’ biases to childhood traumas was too Sherlock Holmes, he agreed that, while in the throes of this memory, he’d tagged that magic trick as the most likely animator of his wish to speak not in collegiate sentences, per se, but through fissures in a sonic curtain sewn from sentences’ components.

For perhaps a year, the tedium with which Alfonse and I turned pages or made peculiar faces at cartoons managed to addict him, an entrancement he surmised had been related to his fondness for snail-paced French cinema of the early ’70s.

But when our mother died so flashily while he was taxiing to CDG, the lack of impact from that ill-timed trip, and his newfound fear of missing anything again, had worked its offshoots into everything I saw around me, and that included who I thought I’d looked at in a mirror.

“If I might meddle in your indiscretions,” I said carefully, “my current thought is that your purging lacks a certain moxie, perhaps owing to a qualm regarding sex talk and its hazards vis-à-vis the marbled swarm—a mismatch that, in my experience at least, causes me to no more speak my mind to listeners than one gives one’s car to a mechanic.”

To the contrary, my father said, he was guiding me behind his scenes in hopes of rescuing my theories from François’s typically ribald interpretation.

He asked me to imagine he was the Paris Opera House. The time would be a century ago, and his voice the sound of Hector Berlioz conducting
Symphonie fantastique
once it had wafted through the lobby then fragmented in the ears of two bystanders lacking tickets, one a dedicated fan, who would represent myself, the other a spiteful peer of Berlioz, who would represent François.

As would be the case with any man whose closest friends were inevitably fathers of an adolescent son who wasn’t wildly overweight, François’s attentiveness whenever Alfonse was a noun could not be termed an act of listening but of meddling with his ears.

François was, to generalize, a kind of sex-crazed doppelganger of those crackpots in America who can’t watch plates leave a waiter’s hands without proclaiming that, if not for a government cover-up, they would have been UFOs.

“You’ll pardon me,” I said, “if I turn to a linguistic device I believe we both find favorable and less pose a question than construct its inner compound.

“If what you say is so, why would you cast the role of nanny as though Alfonse’s need for laundered clothing was less realistic than a porn star’s need for pizza delivery boys. Then there’s the matter of your microscopic interest in my . . . let’s say bedtimes, such that, when sharing your transcriptions with François, you quoted lines I surely wheezed more than enunciated and which must have barely swirled above my parted lips.”

In this regard, my father said, I would need to choose between the flattery-cum-dispatch of François, who, he reminded me, was a chef prized for twisting honest, homely plants into forty-euro entrées, and his own confession, which was admittedly self-serving and, for that reason, as truthful as a poem is to its glazed-over scribe.

Still, as I seemed so inordinately smitten with the dirty lyrics in François’s distorted cover version, he said he would expose one further fraction.

Yes, he’d fattened up our lofts with undisclosed locations and honeycombed the walls with lenses, but his experiments, and their sexual thematic in particular, were not the same fact-finding missions he’d undertaken in the mansion’s less sophisticated setup, but . . . attempted murders, and when he’d zoomed into our crotches he might as well have lengthened the exposure until we whitened into nothingness.

“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.