existence, who gave Serge a sex life if he had one, and so forth, are now analogies at best.
I’ll debug those lingering confusions when or if the time is right, and, for now, you need only tag along behind me with a smidgen more intimacy than ever.
I’ve never read a decent novel in my life unless skimming fifteen pages of Houellbecq’s Platform to make conversation counts, but, as I understand it, when one reads novels, it’s the realness of the characters that seals your eyes between the covers, whereas the world they supposedly inhabit is closer to a compass, built just carefully enough to help you keep your bearings.
If I’m right, then I’ll suggest you try to get things backward. The Serge you think you know to some degree was just his body’s force of habit, and that custom has been broken.
Serge was like those tombs they keep discovering in Egypt where every bit of gold was sacked and cleared out centuries ago by robbers, and what the robbers left behind is on its way to some museum. The tombs’ cave-ins are braced with timbers, and their filthy tunnels have been vacuumed into hallways, and now there’s nothing left to do but charge tourists an arm and a leg to file through empty basements.
Serge was just a given name. In fact, I’ll strip his body of that moniker and call him # 7, if that helps, which is to say whoever used his Emo premise or how he might have wrinkled up and sagged however many years from now is as inconsequential as the light source coursing through some chandelier.
# 7 was meat, a veritable cow cursed to live complexly like a boy, as in the children’s stories, his clothes as tacked on as a circus dog’s tuxedo, and, whether you can see him through my specializing eyes or not, they’re the only contact lens that can get you safely through the rest of this.
Chapter 3
B efore the ordinary building at 118 rue de Turenne was remodeled by my father, it housed the oldest shoe factory in Paris. The amplifying taste for footwear
rubber-stamped by the likes of Vans and Nike had long since dashed its workforce into a skeleton crew, but before the geriatric owner swiped my father’s credit card, it was still rattling along.
Our home had previously and always been a mansion several stuffy blocks from the Eiffel Tower, until, that is, my mother was discovered on the kitchen floor, zapped off her feet by an alleged brain tumor that had gone suspiciously undetected by her doctors, or so my father said.
As time crawls, I’ve come to realize the subtitling my father gave our lives was a ruse no less designed to keep our views in check than the security guard–like monsters that evil stepmothers litter in their bedtime stories.
Nonetheless, my mother’s death left him disconsolate, or, rather, inspired the diagnosis he gave to his performance—which, to be frank, seems increasingly bloodless in retrospect.
Our mansion, which he’d pooh-poohed as too parochial in girth and stature to foreground his giant art collection, or, rather, the bulky two or three dozen giant artworks he deemed investments, was now additionally denounced as an engine of unbearable memories.
After several months, the shoe factory was dialed back into a stack of spacious lofts, and my father rearranged our new, chopped-up family in its layers.
My father commandeered the top-floor-cum-penthouse. My younger brother, Alfonse, was installed just below him on the third floor, and my loft sat just below his on the building’s second level.
Alfonse will be puzzling to epitomize, not because anything about him would turn descriptive prose into a vampire’s mirror, but difficult like reassembling a plane crash. Perhaps I’ll dash him off for now as a dedicated fan of manga since he read Japanese comix so incessantly the volumes might as well have been his shirt collars, although “fan” sounds far too freelance.
He was more a kind of mermaid stalled between his illustrated heroes’ printed pages, where he
I’ll debug those lingering confusions when or if the time is right, and, for now, you need only tag along behind me with a smidgen more intimacy than ever.
I’ve never read a decent novel in my life unless skimming fifteen pages of Houellbecq’s Platform to make conversation counts, but, as I understand it, when one reads novels, it’s the realness of the characters that seals your eyes between the covers, whereas the world they supposedly inhabit is closer to a compass, built just carefully enough to help you keep your bearings.
If I’m right, then I’ll suggest you try to get things backward. The Serge you think you know to some degree was just his body’s force of habit, and that custom has been broken.
Serge was like those tombs they keep discovering in Egypt where every bit of gold was sacked and cleared out centuries ago by robbers, and what the robbers left behind is on its way to some museum. The tombs’ cave-ins are braced with timbers, and their filthy tunnels have been vacuumed into hallways, and now there’s nothing left to do but charge tourists an arm and a leg to file through empty basements.
Serge was just a given name. In fact, I’ll strip his body of that moniker and call him # 7, if that helps, which is to say whoever used his Emo premise or how he might have wrinkled up and sagged however many years from now is as inconsequential as the light source coursing through some chandelier.
# 7 was meat, a veritable cow cursed to live complexly like a boy, as in the children’s stories, his clothes as tacked on as a circus dog’s tuxedo, and, whether you can see him through my specializing eyes or not, they’re the only contact lens that can get you safely through the rest of this.
Chapter 3
B efore the ordinary building at 118 rue de Turenne was remodeled by my father, it housed the oldest shoe factory in Paris. The amplifying taste for footwear
rubber-stamped by the likes of Vans and Nike had long since dashed its workforce into a skeleton crew, but before the geriatric owner swiped my father’s credit card, it was still rattling along.
Our home had previously and always been a mansion several stuffy blocks from the Eiffel Tower, until, that is, my mother was discovered on the kitchen floor, zapped off her feet by an alleged brain tumor that had gone suspiciously undetected by her doctors, or so my father said.
As time crawls, I’ve come to realize the subtitling my father gave our lives was a ruse no less designed to keep our views in check than the security guard–like monsters that evil stepmothers litter in their bedtime stories.
Nonetheless, my mother’s death left him disconsolate, or, rather, inspired the diagnosis he gave to his performance—which, to be frank, seems increasingly bloodless in retrospect.
Our mansion, which he’d pooh-poohed as too parochial in girth and stature to foreground his giant art collection, or, rather, the bulky two or three dozen giant artworks he deemed investments, was now additionally denounced as an engine of unbearable memories.
After several months, the shoe factory was dialed back into a stack of spacious lofts, and my father rearranged our new, chopped-up family in its layers.
My father commandeered the top-floor-cum-penthouse. My younger brother, Alfonse, was installed just below him on the third floor, and my loft sat just below his on the building’s second level.
Alfonse will be puzzling to epitomize, not because anything about him would turn descriptive prose into a vampire’s mirror, but difficult like reassembling a plane crash. Perhaps I’ll dash him off for now as a dedicated fan of manga since he read Japanese comix so incessantly the volumes might as well have been his shirt collars, although “fan” sounds far too freelance.
He was more a kind of mermaid stalled between his illustrated heroes’ printed pages, where he
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