Free The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper

for days, requiring the aid of an osteopath, who also took my disadvantage as an opportunity to help himself.
    Perhaps were I a physicist, I could explain why Die!!Die!!Color!!!, although no more towering or spread out than the dolled-up shantytown that formed the so-called International Salon du Monde, made the same convention hall that could have covered several Notre Dames with room to spare feel as claustrophobic as a crawl space.
    I’ve never been the kind of person who gyrates into toy stores, not even when my love of things was new and sloppy. After years of hobbling stiffly through Nuit Blanches and theme parks, I began to answer invitations to hit the town with, No, thank you. I have an allergy to stimulus.
    François, the most piquant of my cannibal associates, once remarked upon the irony of my apeirophobia, as one specialist has diagnosed the problem, given my insistence on talking as though I represented the EU in some unofficial capacity.
    While my fear of excess stimulus predates my . . . let’s say “punk” adaptation of the marbled swarm, it’s quite possible the swarm’s repellant quality appealed to me unconsciously.
    Fortunately, just as Alfonse began to tow me by one sweating hand into the fair’s storm front of clogged and supersaturated shopping aisles, the word “plank” was shrieked by someone or other in the thick crowd tussling around us.
    After some jostling in our vicinity, Alfonse was mob-hugged by two . . . Asian, perhaps . . . things . . . female, I guessed at first . . . or maybe young drag queens, I wasn’t sure . . . who had apparently recognized him from the avatar he used when chatting in the “squish junkie” enclaves I mentioned earlier.
    Plank was Alfonse’s 2-D alter ego, and, if the glittering block letters on their badges were any indication, the intruders’ “names” were Slat and Log.
    These “Flatsos”—the term that I would later learn was proper for their artificial species—seemed less to have been born and raised than magically peeled from the cover of an especially creative manga, then resized to teenage height by some miraculous process that left their torsos no thicker than guitar cases.
    In place of heads of hair, they wore cardboard coiffures shaped like Napoleon’s sideways helmet and painted the red of roosters’ mohawks. The curving tops were scissored into uneven saw teeth or maybe sun rays that were symbolic of the Flatsos’ unkempt hair.
    The duo’s outfits appeared to be ankle-length pinafores ironed as flat as paper fans then starched, dipped in vats of liquid lollipop, then somehow crammed over two real bodies without collapsing their rib cages.
    The truly disconcerting aspect, even to a skeptic like myself, were the optical illusions that some makeup artist had fashioned from their faces.
    I have yet to grow a wrinkle, so my bathroom cabinet remains as spotless as a prisoner’s, and I don’t know about cosmetics or how it is that seventy-something Catherine Deneuve still looks fifty-something. Thus, I can’t tell you why Slat and Log’s faces appeared from certain angles to have no more terrain or substance than a presidential portrait on a commemorative plate.
    Of course, Alfonse, to whom the first dimension promised, well, virtually everything, was beyond enamored of these handmade slips of human and overeager to resemble them. So, before I knew it, the pair had hustled him away toward some Flatso recruitment booth, and I was inching far behind them on my skidding shoes.
    Once when I was still an only child and my father was quote-unquote friendly with Isabelle Adjani, I was forced to accompany them down the red carpet at the Festival de Cannes while two firing squads of paparazzi used the flash attachments on their cameras as automatic weapons, knocking down their roped enclosure to surround us, all the while yelling, “Little boy, is your father fucking her?” over and over in hundreds of foreign accents at once. In