longed to fly around on jetpack shoes and switch genders with a button push, and our heftier dimension, where he survived but thought himself fatally ill suited.
Hundreds of utopian self-portraits were crammed into his hard drive, where, using Paint or Adobe Photoshop, he’d pried frames from the fatal scenes in some cartoon or childish film, then spent hours replacing the Road Runner’s Wolf or the freeze-dried Hans Solo with a pancake of himself.
Once while we were playing Truth or Dare, he chose truth and, when asked to be his death’s designer, picked a hit-and-run accident by steamroller. Most effectively for your reading purposes, he haunted several online chat rooms full of equally withdrawn kids and lying predators who lionized paper thinness and called themselves squish junkies.
In the real world of school desks and sidewalks, Alfonse had his distant admirers, most of them too old to qualify comfortably as friends. It would be safe to say I was his only friend, had our behavior when together not misused the classic meaning of that term.
Better to say were I the movie star my telegenic looks and presumptive manner warranted, he might have been some actor hired to portray me in my flashbacks. He treated every brush with me as though it was a precious opportunity to learn my latest tics and traits, then play them back like I were his aerobics instructor.
Consequently, I saw Alfonse as my imprecise reflection, and the portrait of him that would occasionally materialize within the wash of my devoted likeness took the form of physical discrepancies or misinterpretations that were too piecemeal to appraise.
Alfonse’s only quote-unquote friends lived in the violent bric-a-brac universe of websites and chat rooms traveled by the squish junkies, the majority of whom preferred to smash cute things than be trampled, so whether they were friends or mutual conveniences is certainly debatable.
My father stuck Alfonse with a nanny, who, at the age of twenty-four, still had the bowl haircut, jejune school clothes, and puerile interests of someone newly postpubescent. Within days of being hired, Mon Petit Bichette, as he called himself, quit dressing and deporting like his prior ward-cum-molestee and colonized my brother’s superhero look, Japanomania, and the general behavior Alfonse had watered down from mine.
When Mon Petit Bichette wasn’t sexting Alfonse, tailoring his pants into a second skin, or recycling his dirty socks as tea cozies—and that is not a case of me exaggerating—he occupied the loft below mine on the first floor, where his nightly blasts of disco-era Claude François and hooting recitations of the songs’ feebleminded lyrics would cause my furniture to move around my loft very slightly, like grazing cows.
As for the building’s ground floor, I’ve never picked its rusty lock, if you believe that, but then again I’ve never stuck my head in Sacre Coeur for much the same reason. Just as I needn’t see a bunch of gilded Jesus statues to visualize an extra-special church, whatever’s buried in the dust down there undoubtedly deserves it.
Each loft was designed, if one can call a sterile, subdivided stretch of low-lit rectangular nothingness a design, by the architect Philippe Starck and featured a scatter of his artsy, uncomfortable furniture.
In the huge swaths of wall and floor space left unchecked by Starck’s concept, my father laid out obstacle courses of his art holdings—exhibitions he claimed to have curated with such precision that the theme of each mini-collection would have caused it to be titled with our respective first names had the building been open to the public.
For a time, I was certain the lofts additionally disguised some creepy underpinnings—evil eye–like nitty-gritty, if you will—diabolic minutia that my nervous system sensed even as its symptoms proved impalpable—and whose existence I was to neither establish nor disprove until my father’s sudden,
Hundreds of utopian self-portraits were crammed into his hard drive, where, using Paint or Adobe Photoshop, he’d pried frames from the fatal scenes in some cartoon or childish film, then spent hours replacing the Road Runner’s Wolf or the freeze-dried Hans Solo with a pancake of himself.
Once while we were playing Truth or Dare, he chose truth and, when asked to be his death’s designer, picked a hit-and-run accident by steamroller. Most effectively for your reading purposes, he haunted several online chat rooms full of equally withdrawn kids and lying predators who lionized paper thinness and called themselves squish junkies.
In the real world of school desks and sidewalks, Alfonse had his distant admirers, most of them too old to qualify comfortably as friends. It would be safe to say I was his only friend, had our behavior when together not misused the classic meaning of that term.
Better to say were I the movie star my telegenic looks and presumptive manner warranted, he might have been some actor hired to portray me in my flashbacks. He treated every brush with me as though it was a precious opportunity to learn my latest tics and traits, then play them back like I were his aerobics instructor.
Consequently, I saw Alfonse as my imprecise reflection, and the portrait of him that would occasionally materialize within the wash of my devoted likeness took the form of physical discrepancies or misinterpretations that were too piecemeal to appraise.
Alfonse’s only quote-unquote friends lived in the violent bric-a-brac universe of websites and chat rooms traveled by the squish junkies, the majority of whom preferred to smash cute things than be trampled, so whether they were friends or mutual conveniences is certainly debatable.
My father stuck Alfonse with a nanny, who, at the age of twenty-four, still had the bowl haircut, jejune school clothes, and puerile interests of someone newly postpubescent. Within days of being hired, Mon Petit Bichette, as he called himself, quit dressing and deporting like his prior ward-cum-molestee and colonized my brother’s superhero look, Japanomania, and the general behavior Alfonse had watered down from mine.
When Mon Petit Bichette wasn’t sexting Alfonse, tailoring his pants into a second skin, or recycling his dirty socks as tea cozies—and that is not a case of me exaggerating—he occupied the loft below mine on the first floor, where his nightly blasts of disco-era Claude François and hooting recitations of the songs’ feebleminded lyrics would cause my furniture to move around my loft very slightly, like grazing cows.
As for the building’s ground floor, I’ve never picked its rusty lock, if you believe that, but then again I’ve never stuck my head in Sacre Coeur for much the same reason. Just as I needn’t see a bunch of gilded Jesus statues to visualize an extra-special church, whatever’s buried in the dust down there undoubtedly deserves it.
Each loft was designed, if one can call a sterile, subdivided stretch of low-lit rectangular nothingness a design, by the architect Philippe Starck and featured a scatter of his artsy, uncomfortable furniture.
In the huge swaths of wall and floor space left unchecked by Starck’s concept, my father laid out obstacle courses of his art holdings—exhibitions he claimed to have curated with such precision that the theme of each mini-collection would have caused it to be titled with our respective first names had the building been open to the public.
For a time, I was certain the lofts additionally disguised some creepy underpinnings—evil eye–like nitty-gritty, if you will—diabolic minutia that my nervous system sensed even as its symptoms proved impalpable—and whose existence I was to neither establish nor disprove until my father’s sudden,
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