designed to make him feel, if not quite look, as scarce as possible.
His body could have been a jar, figurative and dyed one of the paler human colors—his name a label steamed then peeled away, so poorly did it warn me not to take his status as my brother lightly.
“Are you as specious as you appear,” I asked. “Because even using the familiar form of ‘you’ just felt like guesswork.”
“Just before the act of sex commences, I feel an agonizing realness,” Alfonse said. “While this pose has been the most effective of my tryouts, there is a minor defect—namely, my penis winds up pressed against the bed, which stimulates it by default. Fortunately, the pain of being . . . and I hate this word too, ‘fucked,’ tends to draw the bigger picture.”
“If we’re to speak so openly of defects,” I said, “I’ll admit to one that seems germane. Like you, I’m gorgeous, you’ll admit, and, accustomed as I am to being hit upon, I’ve felt no need to learn assailants’ social skills. In other words, I need a minute.”
I sat along the futon’s edge, then eyed my brother as a mountain climber might assess a model of the Pyrenees. As I replayed the porn whose choreography was well adapted to my halting bedside manner, I fiddled with Alfonse’s ass as though its fat and muscle were the pivoting components of a Rubik’s Cube.
I’d never slept with such a pip-squeak, and any child porn I’ll admit to having viewed was so antiquely filmed its stars were only boys the way Seurat’s arrays of dots are women. Nonetheless, it didn’t seem bizarre that, having dreamt Alfonse would sport an asshole as understated as the rest of him, I was stunned to find a wound so serious it would have killed him had the harm not been so evidently reckoned into place.
Later, under François’s tutelage, I would learn to tell the building blocks of pricey entrées from the chaff that goes in dog bowls, but in my innocence that afternoon, having struck a vein of what was sitting in my fridge was more important than the clues that made it fool’s gold.
“Perhaps Alfonse would like to listen to some music,” said François’s voice.
I retrieved my brother’s backpack from the floor and rummaged through its mishmash until I’d clutched the cold hard outlines of an iPod.
“What do manga characters listen to when they’re . . . ?” I asked him.
“Nothing, strangely,” Alfonse said. “I think because the sound of music proves difficult to draw. It’s true that, in addition to their superhero duties, they often moonlight as a boy band, yet when these bands are shown performing, the only way we know they’re not delivering a lecture is because their open mouths shoot lightning bolts. But I wouldn’t mind hearing Cartoon KAT-TUN II You .”
As I’ve more than hinted at so often, I’m undone by the formalities of having sex. And yet, from all reports, I seem no less engaged than were I watching someone rob a store across my street while chronicling the bandit’s moves over the phone.
Perhaps this politesse is an affliction of the marbled swarm itself, because the same capacity to disengage from goings-on, no matter how logistically involving or oppressive, bewitched my father too, if I may jump this story’s gun for just a second.
A few weeks after the event I’m reimagining, my father’s shoe skewered a pockmark in the floor of what, to that point, I’d understood to be the central office of our building’s enterprise of secret chambers, causing him to trip and strike his head, and rather fiercely if a ragged trail of blood was any indication.
He returned to his apartment as if nothing had occurred. So confident was he that the bleeding would be squelched by tissues and some elbow grease, he didn’t close the secret door behind him, leaving the hidden loft exposed, and I will speak of the renaissance this lack of foresight occasioned in my life a little later.
We know he made some notes and phone
His body could have been a jar, figurative and dyed one of the paler human colors—his name a label steamed then peeled away, so poorly did it warn me not to take his status as my brother lightly.
“Are you as specious as you appear,” I asked. “Because even using the familiar form of ‘you’ just felt like guesswork.”
“Just before the act of sex commences, I feel an agonizing realness,” Alfonse said. “While this pose has been the most effective of my tryouts, there is a minor defect—namely, my penis winds up pressed against the bed, which stimulates it by default. Fortunately, the pain of being . . . and I hate this word too, ‘fucked,’ tends to draw the bigger picture.”
“If we’re to speak so openly of defects,” I said, “I’ll admit to one that seems germane. Like you, I’m gorgeous, you’ll admit, and, accustomed as I am to being hit upon, I’ve felt no need to learn assailants’ social skills. In other words, I need a minute.”
I sat along the futon’s edge, then eyed my brother as a mountain climber might assess a model of the Pyrenees. As I replayed the porn whose choreography was well adapted to my halting bedside manner, I fiddled with Alfonse’s ass as though its fat and muscle were the pivoting components of a Rubik’s Cube.
I’d never slept with such a pip-squeak, and any child porn I’ll admit to having viewed was so antiquely filmed its stars were only boys the way Seurat’s arrays of dots are women. Nonetheless, it didn’t seem bizarre that, having dreamt Alfonse would sport an asshole as understated as the rest of him, I was stunned to find a wound so serious it would have killed him had the harm not been so evidently reckoned into place.
Later, under François’s tutelage, I would learn to tell the building blocks of pricey entrées from the chaff that goes in dog bowls, but in my innocence that afternoon, having struck a vein of what was sitting in my fridge was more important than the clues that made it fool’s gold.
“Perhaps Alfonse would like to listen to some music,” said François’s voice.
I retrieved my brother’s backpack from the floor and rummaged through its mishmash until I’d clutched the cold hard outlines of an iPod.
“What do manga characters listen to when they’re . . . ?” I asked him.
“Nothing, strangely,” Alfonse said. “I think because the sound of music proves difficult to draw. It’s true that, in addition to their superhero duties, they often moonlight as a boy band, yet when these bands are shown performing, the only way we know they’re not delivering a lecture is because their open mouths shoot lightning bolts. But I wouldn’t mind hearing Cartoon KAT-TUN II You .”
As I’ve more than hinted at so often, I’m undone by the formalities of having sex. And yet, from all reports, I seem no less engaged than were I watching someone rob a store across my street while chronicling the bandit’s moves over the phone.
Perhaps this politesse is an affliction of the marbled swarm itself, because the same capacity to disengage from goings-on, no matter how logistically involving or oppressive, bewitched my father too, if I may jump this story’s gun for just a second.
A few weeks after the event I’m reimagining, my father’s shoe skewered a pockmark in the floor of what, to that point, I’d understood to be the central office of our building’s enterprise of secret chambers, causing him to trip and strike his head, and rather fiercely if a ragged trail of blood was any indication.
He returned to his apartment as if nothing had occurred. So confident was he that the bleeding would be squelched by tissues and some elbow grease, he didn’t close the secret door behind him, leaving the hidden loft exposed, and I will speak of the renaissance this lack of foresight occasioned in my life a little later.
We know he made some notes and phone
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