The Marbled Swarm (2 page)

Wait, have I mentioned that, prior to that afternoon, I’d committed several murders, or, rather, helped facilitate several boys’ demises for reasons I’m withholding for the moment? If not, let me illustrate myself to that degree before I say another word, as it will shortcut this story to the expertise I’ll now attribute to my curious behavior, and which I would otherwise need to bore myself as well as you with in the course of explaining.

As Serge fiddled with his bangs and grazed my calculating face, I rifled through my conquests, if that term is not too vibrant to apply to what amounted to fatalities, and settled on the tactics I’d used with reasonable success in an early and not so different case, although that boy was only twelve years old, and more important, my brother.

“Serge,” I said, and cast an anxious look around, seeking to befriend his worries with my own, “what I meant to say back by the river was . . . You should think of the chateau as your home away from home, your getaway, your . . . tree house, if it pleases you. I could make up some official-sounding job to help legitimize this . . . well, peculiar-sounding, I’ll admit, arrangement to your parents, when the truth is . . .”

I’d planned a lengthy, complicated answer interspersed with many thoughtful dot dot dots, but it seemed the boy had heard his password.

First positioning himself beneath one of the glary, dangling lightbulbs that crosscut the basement’s abrasive-looking ceiling, Serge started rolling up his Christmas sweater’s sleeves.

“Look,” he said disconsolately, and, before I could, he gave those arms the job of similarly yanking up his skintight jeans legs, a task I could have told him was in vain, and which resulted only in the minor revelation that he wasn’t wearing socks.

Still, in the time it had taken him to tug and fail, I’d scanned his arms sufficiently to get the gist of what I gathered was a “take it or leave it” type of offer.

Namely, Serge was, in the shorthand of that era’s therapists, a cutter. When he was sad, which, judging from my initial scar count, appeared to have been often, he would hold a razor to his pasty limbs and slice into the flesh. Mostly, he’d left rows of unimaginative zigzags up and down his forearms. Occasionally, however, he’d gone bonkers and carved a word—I spotted “shit” and “kill”—or an occult-looking symbol, all for the purpose of . . . well, God knows.

In truth, I also know the whys as of this writing, but to tell you now would be to tinker unhelpfully with my story’s glacial timeline.

Serge fished a razor blade from some compartment in his outfit and sent it fluttering in my direction, yelling words to the effect that I should find a way to use the blade to slash away his sweater, T-shirt, chest, and rib cage, and then reach inside and excavate his heart.

So, there he stood, or rather cowered, certain he’d repulsed me with his idiotic honesty about the blight awaiting anyone saintly enough to have given him the slight impression that it would be interesting to fuck him.

Here’s where I’ll focus myself, or, rather, you can focus me, if you care, which you should, even those of you who see yourselves as reading from the cheap seats.

You’re right to guess I half considered giving Serge’s neediness priority, or, rather, right to guess my mind returned to times when, not yet knowing myself in the slightest, I’d done nothing but convince myself I was in love with one cute, suicidal basket case after another.

Truth is, my wealth is psychological as well as moneyed, and, in order to spare you some crushing verbiage, I’ll ask you to witness my cruel-in-quotes decision for yourself and trust me when I say the bitch just simply had to die.

I told Serge quite succinctly that a death so premature would need evidence more damning than two nasty-looking arms, whereupon he literally snapped his fingers at the brightness of a dawning thought, then confessed to having murdered Claude.

His rambling, hit-or-miss admission was tellingly impromptu, but I feigned a look of outrage, then furiously but carefully pried the offered razor blade from the floor’s uneven stonework.

I held it to his throat, then, in a stroke of semi-genius that might warrant your applause were it not so self-serving, I caught his nerve-wracked eyes, then widened mine as if I’d just seen my own reflection there and found it damning.

My shaky hand released the blade and flopped onto his shoulder, then slipped and fell again onto the outcrop of his ass. In the guise of restive gayness, my fingertips were drafted in as spies, distinguishing the tight jeans’s CGI from the more honest ass secreted in their shadow, bypassing the “ass” that owed its charm to being squished and repositioned to find the one that didn’t deserve to be held hostage and strangled.

“Not yet,” I said softly.

Serge was sent back to the garden, where I agreed to reappear after an interval sustained enough to quell suspicion. Before he turned to leave, I withdrew my iPhone, initiated camera mode, and, declaring this a moment that demanded preservation, I captured him from every angle, including aerial.

By the time I joined the family in the garden, had my flute glass half filled with a slightly sour champagne grown and bottled in the region, and clinked their glasses’ rims, I’d sent the photos to three . . . well, call them my associates for now.

Serge seemed . . . different—identical enough to be a twin but so sprightly as to seem fraternal. He was swigging bubbly and regaling us with gross-out jokes more suited to a child both half his age and a hundred times more outwardly conventional. In and of itself, the switcheroo might have had the vexing charm of a charade, were his eyes not wallowing in mine.

I quickly sent a text that hailed my driver from his bar or roadside, announced a prior appointment, and said I’d have my people draft a contract as required and send it to their people.

I offered them a warm, all-business hand. Claire seemed too tipsy to decipher it. Serge mouthed “call me later” and nearly squeezed it lifeless. Jean-Paul shooed the hand away with what seemed a secretive if kindly offer to escort me to my vehicle.

No sooner had a door banished the outdoors to a set of murals in the windows than Jean-Paul began to voice a most astonishing internal monologue.

To give you the framework, for it was lengthy, the “miraculous” return to form—or so he decreed it, complete with the quotation marks I’ve included—of “cheerful” Serge had not only been noted but enormously appreciated, as had my instigation.

“You’d never guess,” he said, “but Serge was once the most overly excited and irritating child one could imagine. . . .”

It seems a meticulous hodgepodge of medications had made the boy marginally more tolerable, and the birthday present of a drum set had helped to siphon off a portion. But when his beloved brother, Claude, whose tastes and mannerisms he had mirrored and imitated almost since birth, was led astray into the dreaded Emo nonsense by an evil girlfriend, weak-willed Serge had naturally jumped the ship of reason along with him.

Suddenly, the mood swings that Jean-Paul had scrupulously tamped away became the truth, or so the boy proclaimed, and anyone hoping to drug him from his miseries was nothing better than a censor.

When Claude’s corrupting girlfriend finally killed herself, that more pragmatic son had hung his spooky outfit in a closet like an American child on November 1. Serge, however, viewed Claude’s return to baggy T-shirts and high-waisted jeans not as maturity in motion but as surrender. Thus, the only hero and positive influence who’d ever quelled Serge’s Tesla coil–like infrastructure was displaced until . . . and here Jean-Paul’s hand alighted on my shoulder, squeezing.

“Understand I’m just a dilettantish rich kid,” I ventured, “but Serge’s fondness for me, or rather its velocity, let’s say, combined with the background information you’ve provided, leads me to risk causing you offense when I ask if, well, Claude might not have been molesting him, perhaps even consensually.”

“There are those who find my son attractive,” Jean-Paul replied after a moment’s thought. “But I find them sorely lacking in appreciation for his enfeebled state, not to mention Claire’s and mine.”

“Perhaps they’re more objective,” I said carefully. “One could see a boy with issues, gauge the price and costs of getting laid at his expense, and decide, would one more mental problem make a difference?”

“Serge told us you’ve offered him a job,” Jean-Paul said before exhaling in . . . discomfort, I would guess. “I’m tempted to include him in the price of the chateau, along with any furniture you’d like.”

A chortle seemed to be in order, so I unleashed a tidy one. “If human trafficking were legal, I might say you’ve got a deal,” I replied in a tone as dry as his.

“Trust me,” he said, “my wife and I won’t be alerting the authorities.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I responded. “Perhaps I’ll pick my lawyer’s brain about the current laws governing adoption. Even so, let’s say I could accept him and, hypothetically, there came a day when my company’s nourishment paled in light of suicide’s problem-solving genius, and Serge just, well, up and . . . disappeared entirely? Any perks I might have gained from the arrangement would be used against me.”

Jean-Paul’s eyes were very busy with something or other in the room, but when I turned to appraise my competition, it was a wall no catchier than the quarter’s other bulwarks, and perhaps even less so.

“If you have a minute,” he said, “I’d like to show you something else about our . . . excuse me, your chateau. You seemed to feel at home in Claude’s room. Why not enjoy it at your leisure, and I’ll go separate my wife and Serge, then join you.”

After a refresher course vis-à-vis the room’s location, I headed up the central staircase, pausing every other step to view one of the family’s photographic portraits, which decorated my ascent in a diagonal, salon-style row.

All but one of the portraits seemed to predate Serge’s Emo phase, and, to make what I’ll admit is an offhand judgment, I understood Jean-Paul’s unease at the reemergence of that crazy-looking, boisterous child.

He seemed a mugging headache of a creature, each twisted face and flipped bird more intolerable than the next. That said, never having faced his line of fire, my daydreams were allowed to be indecent, and I was struck, to use my own term—if no doubt quote-unquote “turned on” in yours—by . . . aspects of the boy—genetic offshoots or what have you—that perhaps—and even that “perhaps” is offered lightly—might only have impressed the coach at his
ecole
or pleased their family pediatrician.

I found Claude’s room casually enough, and, seeing nothing new, withdrew every drawer from the antique desk, laying them side by side upon the bed and rifling through their messy contents.

It took several layers of old homework, birthday cards, and ticket stubs for disappointing concerts before the smallest of the drawers produced something inexplicable in the form of five or six unopened envelopes addressed simply to The Liar.

I tore one’s edge and winnowed out its letter. Although unsigned, the seismic script appeared to finger Serge’s hand, and while the writing blackened into folk art every time it promised to get juicy, the author’s point was unmistakable.

I have a tendency to overanalyze, which must be back-page news by now. On the plus side, you’ve witnessed how this helped me parry with Jean-Paul, but, more often than not, I deal with boys, and usually screaming, pleading ones at that. Hence, I can waste untold quarter hours seeking inference within inference where none exists at all.

Rather than transcribe my wordy thinking, let me scrape into the future while presaging this foreshortened moment with the caveat that, in time, the letter in question would lend itself multiple interpretations before its meaning disintegrated entirely, like when human bones are dunked in vats of acid.

I heard the sound of carpet being crushed and deftly stuffed the envelopes into my pocket, expecting to turn my angelic smile upon Jean-Paul. Instead, it was a woozy, slurring Serge who nearly tripped into the bedroom, did a pratfall on the bed, and restarted our one-sided handshake in the garden, but with my crotch as the recipient.

Were I even half as gay as you imagine, I might have rearranged my schedule for the next few days and fucked Serge until his epidermal layer collapsed around his neck like an old white sock. Not that I’ll claim such a scenario is utterly beyond me, at least as an exploratory prologue, and . . . fine, I’ll go ahead and say what I’ve been hesitant to spill for fear you’ll simplify me prematurely.

Truth is, Serge’s body, albeit mostly guesswork and packaging-related magic at that stage, had been gnawing—well, to be more honest, being gnawed at in absentia—long before my hunches were corroborated by a certain family photo of Serge et al. reclining on the beach, which I only didn’t mention when I was standing on the stairs because erections make me fumbly.

I’ll accept that gnawing’s impact on the horrors he had coming just so long as, in return, you get the thought that I’m some average child molester out of your conjectures right now. I promise if you grant me that inch, you’ll feel roundly less embarrassed a dozen pages from now.

For all their sloppiness, Serge’s fingers could have been a master potter’s and my crotch their spinning wheel. In fact, I might have clipped two of his fingers to my zipper had I not noticed a strange, grinding metallic sound I didn’t recognize offhand.

A bedroom wall was in the process of discoloring. Given the gray and stormy cast of the newer marking, I initially mistook it for a shadow, perhaps one cast by us. Then it grew, quickly engulfing the very wall where Jean-Paul claimed to have seen Claude’s ghost, whereupon it seemed less a shadow than a mirror that reflected not the room but some malingering counterpart.

I stilled Serge’s busy hand, then roughly turned his head until our viewpoints were in line. By then the wall’s effects had, well, perhaps “coagulated” is the term, into an image that so obviously depicted Claude in his classic Emo era, even a relative bystander like myself would have sworn to it on camera.

He was floating, I suppose, since his misty-looking Keds pedaled air several centimeters from the floor. He approached us in theory, yet seemed as wedded to the wall as any movie to its screen, so, in a sense, he was marching harmlessly in place, but with the troubling determination of a “walking” mime.