The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper

normally outgoing face.
    “Where I live,” Plank said, “things such as these, while no doubt necessary, are inferred rather than depicted, sort of like the nails and screws that keep the homes in this dimension upright.”
    “Has my admittedly roundabout behavior these past few months so masked the squalor I’ve been nursing in your presence that its evidence perplexes you,” I asked.
    Plank exhaled loudly through its nose, although let me reiterate how Flatsos seemed not so much to breathe as use their mouths and nostrils to disturb the air like birds’ wings.
    “My true fear was that you would never cease talking,” Plank said. “In my world, speech, and thought itself perhaps, are annotated into gasps and grrs and wows except in cases of emergency.”
    “I don’t understand this kind of love,” I said. “I’m speaking of the sort wherein the offer of one’s body is encoded with a handshake of agreement that its content is legitimate.”
    “Again, in my world,” Plank said, “the exchange of which you speak is not confusing in the slightest. In fact, we frequently shake hands, as you put it, without any prior agreement whatsoever.”
    “Even when the advocates are brothers,” I asked.
    “Only in a sense,” Plank said. “Due to the interchangeable faces we’ve been given, we’re less brothers by the definition you address than clones sporting very slight mistakes. We certainly have sex, and more continually than we walk, and yet our world itself is very chaste, almost as taintless as your Disney films, which explains why we wear blurs beneath our underwear, if you’ve ever wondered.”
    “Are these clones in love when they . . . intersect,” I asked.
    “On your conditions, I suppose,” Plank said. “Still, if one desires someone or something that, barring a minutely different hair color, is yourself in quotes, is it love that causes one to wish to share their bed or a display of confidence?”
    “Our being brothers should preclude the need to tie the knot, in theory,” I said, “but our case is rather special, you’ll agree, given that we’ve synchronized ourselves like showgirls, and perhaps it’s this coherence that inspires my need to grasp you as completely as I know myself.”
    With that, I groped the swatch of costume where my brother’s ass would then have squished between my fingers were he dressed in jeans or naked.
    I rubbed the cardboard slowly in a circle, which, additionally to having no effect on my intended target, was embarrassing and made a boring, scratchy noise.
    “I will tell Alfonse you’ve done the unimaginable,” Plank said.
    Pretending to have spotted something glinty on the floor, I crouched and fiddled briefly with the phantom jewel or coin, then, gambling my precious touch would trump the doofish pose that might result, I tagged the stretch of naked calf that Plank’s short, rigid skirt had left exposed.
    I clutched the leg to stay on board, whereupon its warmth, which was quickly raised to blistering in my imagination, seemed to acculturate the room into a kitchen and me into an idiot to whom I’ll now relent for the sake of accuracy.
    “I would snap away this leg as violently as one unbinds a chicken’s drumstick,” I said, “then chew and swallow until bone halted my teeth if I could thereby know you.”
    “Being that my goal is to forget the silly nerd who’s wearing me,” Plank said, “you’re welcome to him, but I fear I cannot help you.”
    Plank raised its human hands and studied them, not so much confusedly as in a funk, as far as I could tell, perhaps like werewolves eye the flimsy thumbs wherein their godlike claws have just retracted. Then it grabbed the towel and started freeing Alfonse’s visage from its make-up, forehead first.
    “I want to know what Mon Petit Bichette already knows,” I said.
    I shoved one hand in Plank’s internal organs then climbed Alfonse’s thighs, my forearm knocking like the clapper in a fissured