Free The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper Page B

was hastily wrapped in a blanket of black plastic in hopes of looking less unsightly.
    By then, Log had dipped its fingers in the mushy tower’s sheath and withdrawn a flap, creating an impromptu doorway in which I cautiously docked my face.
    Inside, there was a gloomy shapeless room with crinkled, slightly caved-in walls. A single track light glared up from the floor, and the only furniture were two chairs of the metal folding type that had braced the aisle’s handwritten sign.
    In one of the chairs sat a man I recognized both as a friend of my father’s and, from flipping through magazines and TV channels, as François Tirel, a famous chef at the restaurant L’Astrance, although I couldn’t recall having spoken more than a thoughtless word of greeting or farewell to him.
    I’d only noted him at all because each time we’d coincided, his eyes would fasten onto mine then dig around vehemently, as though his eyesight was a power drill and I their padlock.
    “Were you to squeeze yourself through there,” he said, pointing at a second gap or lapse in the room’s most puckered wall, “but you shouldn’t just yet, you would shortly find your delicious brother, but why not sit and get to know yourself first.”
    It can’t remotely surprise you that the word “delicious,” and the mystery of what made it seem appropriate, is what inspired me to maneuver inside, trailed by Log, who continued past and through the gap François had asked me to regard with patience.
    “My younger son, Didier, for the record,” François said. “No doubt he’s thrown himself at you. Were I not here to cull our better interests, I might shock you by redoubling his offer. Still, I fear that were his face not divined into a Flatso’s, your next few words would not be ‘What an awesome dad’ but ‘Why is it I feel a new nostalgia for the era of the guillotine?’
    “In the opinion of five—count them, five—pediatricians, and not just do-gooder French clinic workers, but two American specialists and a Russian Nobel Prize recipient, there is a curlicue among my son’s synapses, a genetic mishap I attribute to my ex-wife, the insane bitch, that routes the over-energy that grips all boys his age into some organ in the body that feeds his efflorescing genitalia.
    “Thus, the impulse to, say, gather action figures or skateboard everywhere is instead a warped addiction wherein his ass is a collection plate and every penis on earth no matter how minuscule is a valuable collector’s item.
    “Have I, in dire circumstances, blotted out his features with a pillow then screwed the liberated body senseless, yes, and were I the type of S and M practitioner who hands his prostitutes a leather hood the same way you or I might offer ours a cocktail, Alfonse and you might be at home right now instead of . . .
    “Still, rather than complete that thought and stretch this conversation, I’ll leave the thinness of your smile untouched for now and reaffirm my offer should you ever find his ugliness subversive by some miracle.
    “More important, I have unpleasant news. It seems your life of recent months has been a fairy tale, and you one of its two unwitting characters, and I happen to be privy to the thinking that inspired it. While in most cases, say, when a child grows old enough to know J.R.R. Tolkien was just staring at a typewriter, the truth can be a wounding exposé, but I suspect you’ll find my clearing of the cobwebs a kind of purge. In return for this exclusive, I have a favor to ask.”
    I considered several options, then made a show of visibly relaxing through a minor shake-up in my disposition and by softening the angle of my posture.
    “One day . . .” François began, when my current home at 118 rue de Turenne was still in progress and more an overture than a stack of lofts, he and my father had arranged to meet nearby at Café de Bretagne on an unelaborated business matter.
    François had sipped two double espressos into