Free The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper Page A

that case, I literally fainted and was carried into the theater like a dead infant prop by Isabelle.
    If you’re a certain kind of person, you might have seen the very shots of my humiliating moment on her official website, which I will mention she has conveniently mislabeled as among her greatest roles.
    Does that convey my trauma? Shall I boringly compare myself to the biblical Egyptian spearmen tripping over themselves in the gushy mud and piles of flopping fish between the Red Sea’s reconvening halves? I don’t believe I can do this.
    If vampire movies hadn’t been the franchise of that year, and were wastrel fashion models and feeble-looking bands not so incredibly in vogue, and if a wary-eyed pallor were not, as a consequence, the diamond in the rough of facial options, my sad state might have turned the single-minded nerds and fops moseying around me into Good Samaritans.
    My brother and his Flatsos had collaged themselves into the crowd. My agonizing progress was more an aftermath of others’ clumsy shoulders than any effort from my fishtailing feet, when my eyes spotted a snatch of white, which I managed to squint into a handwritten sign. It was Scotch-taped to a metal folding chair that had been plunked down in the middle of the aisle, and my name was scrawled across the sheet and underlined with a wobbly arrow pointing to the left.
    Given that my name is an invention, or, to paraphrase my mother at her most stoned, a magic group of letters whose implications are the key to everything on earth when one is tripping balls, and, thus, a term that, until I inspire something, refers to me and me only, and seeing that the sign, as unimpressive as it was, sought to edge me off the horrifying thoroughfare, I took its unknown scribbler at his word more than I would have otherwise.
    After squeezing through a gap of space between two booths, I found myself inside a kind of gulley, created by the boulder-like rear portions of the booths that formed the aisle I’d just escaped and its immediate neighbor.
    Sitting cross-legged with its back against a booth that dwarfed the others in its soaring height and flabby build and gulping down a Kronenbourg was one of Alfonse’s Flatso comrades, or, rather, its recovering human.
    If not for the “Log” badge now pinned to an old Nirvana T-shirt, its heavy, oblate makeup and outlandish hat of toothy hair might have pegged it as, oh, one of those die-hard soccer fans who paint their favorite team’s logo on their faces to . . . well, I have no idea.
    “Want one,” it asked, extracting a bottle from the frayed six-pack at his side.
    By the way, I won’t transcribe this creature’s voice into mine then throw the poor results into its mouth, except to note its voice was lower than the squeaks it used to court my brother. My one concession is to make its mind sound very simple, which it was.
    I rarely drink alcohol, apart from the odd toast from which it would be rude to abstain or when dining with cannibal associates, for the simple reason that, in layman’s terms, it makes me horny, or what I define as famished, which is not to say I didn’t grab then finish off the beer in one humongous swallow.
    “If you want to fuck your brother, he’s in there,” Log said, patting the monumental booth behind it, “or you could fuck me and get around a lot of bullshit.”
    I’m far too stiff when drunk to cause a messy scene, but my limited ability to self-edit is laid to even greater ruin. For instance, were you not filtered from this moment by its status as a recollection, and were a single bout of horniness not enough to burn me out for days, I might have slurred something to the effect of all of the above.
    Having seen my share of junk that artists claimed as their hard and brilliant work, I thought the booth, or what I’d thought a booth, might be a sculpture, arte povera most likely, or perhaps a tower crane that, having done its part to build and fluff the booths around it,