The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper Read Free Book Online Page A

all, and the summer’s day is instead a flower, say a rose too odorous to leave unsniffed in, oh, the Luxembourg Gardens.
    For some, the drives to dock one’s face in boys or plants are interchangeable. My urge, you see, is not to flavor my receptors with some pretty thing’s most scented chasm. Rather, my nosedives bind a bee’s gluttonous raiding with the scrutinizing glances of a scissors-laden florist.
    So, as I handed Serge some tissues, ice, an Evian, and one more painkiller than was provident to swallow, and even as I feared my colleagues’ whining when I brought this mess into my loft, I personally found him far more pornographic, if such a scoured term can handle that.
    He’d downed the pain pills, wrapped two ice cubes in a tissue and clamped the bundle to his eye, but reaching for his knee transformed his ribs into tormentors, so I was icing that injury while steadying the leg for all intents and purposes.
    Serge had the wishy-washy leg of someone fractionally his age, with skin as giving as a sandy beach and so puddled on the bone, a slap might well have splashed white glops all over everything, which I would guess sounds nauseating if you think of legs as more than entrées in the making.
    Serge might have thought I was caressing him were I not just thrilled enough to have deliberately massaged that leg, at least unconsciously.
    “When I’m depressed, everything’s a joke to me, and no one thinks my jokes are funny, and I’m depressed right now, just to warn you,” he said.
    Back when Serge was a more kempt, undamaged fashion plate, the gloomy tenor of his voice had raised my eyebrow in suspicion. It felt accessorized, as fake as the elation in a clown’s honking falsetto, but whether Serge was still a broadcast or was digging deep seemed immaterial.
    “It will no doubt please you that these pills appear to be working,” he said.
    When I’m turned on, as you’d put it, and I was—even if my mind feels like a boulder resting on your shoulders, you’d love what I was feeling—I can sound unusually off the cuff, even kiss-ass. Still, keep in mind my praise is never kinder to its wellspring than a classic film’s ten thousandth rave review.
    Anyway, I lavished many adjectives on Serge’s leg, albeit terms more suited to a golden-throated butcher than his sweetheart.
    Mostly for effect, I gripped the tattered jeans and ripped them open to his belt—and it’s fortunate that when one’s strength is taxed, a strained expression can look horny if one adds at least a crooked smile—then snuck one hand inside his underwear, which were black and flecked with tiny skulls if that seems relevant.
    I told Serge if he were worried that his negligible penis would undercut him, he absolutely shouldn’t, and that I was lingering and fingering because its toastiness encouraged me.
    “Thanks, I guess,” he whispered, then, perhaps undone by that reminder of his childishness, he started crying. Technically, I think you would have called it a wail or even bray.
    Azmir, who had been studying the road inside a bobbing, skull-shaped discotheque juiced by some kerplunking play-list on his iPod, heard a trace of Serge’s bawling, fished out an earphone, and yelled at me to turn him down.
    “I just wanted you to rape me,” Serge squawked. “Not once but even endlessly. I don’t mean ‘endlessly’ because I think I’m worth the work involved. I just thought or dreamt or what the fuck that when you said ‘Not yet,’ you meant a month or even years from now.”
    I told him “yet” had meant tomorrow, but, were he to count it down in screams instead of days, it would feel more like a year.
    “It’s not that I’m some giant fan of sex,” Serge continued. “Its blaze of glory status is the world’s most bullshit lie, if you ask me, even bigger than the hoax involving Santa Claus, but rape has . . . I don’t know, a kind of . . . something else, at least when you imagine it.”
    I asked if, to his