pell-mell death.
An elevator, or, rather, a trendy sculptor’s perfect replication of The Shining ’s lift, but painted red inside instead of filled with blood, would drop Alfonse and me to street level or lift us to my father’s digs for rare communal meals whenever he decided to admit he was in town.
Bizarrely, my father’s floor had been abridged into a small and strangely shaped apartment that hardly gouged the yawning volume at its disposal, an anomaly he claimed was neither fanciful nor frugal, but rather fallout from having to share his level with the gargantuan equipment that warmed and cooled the building.
Like Alfonse in one regard, I’ve never had friends, not in the “give a shit” sense, not even when I was too young to have selected them myself. Thus, having tons of downtime wherein to stage my wildest daydreams likely fast-tracked the internal monologuist you’ve begun to get to know.
I had liked Alfonse with a perfect lack of passion until he colluded with his nanny. Well, “like” might be too strong a word. Admired objectively, let’s say. Let’s say his beauty might have garnered him a fan base cruisier than mine, were he not more garbled by stylistics and forged from less epicurean materials.
Due to my father’s wealth, ego, philanthropy, and conniving grip on words, he moved in starry social circles. There were rumors at one time that he’d fucked Isabelle Adjani, the once ethereal actress turned plastic surgeon’s monster. Although my father seemed insulted by this premise—even then, Adjani’s buckling, placated face required a fog machine to be puffing in her photo sessions—it seemed quite a coincidence that she had famously retired for nine months just before Alfonse debuted in the arms of my thin, grimacing mother.
Alfonse’s outermost layer preserved the young Adjani’s vaunted snowy skin, starless black hair, the same startled, chocolate eyes that infatuated costars or stared convincingly through windows of insane asylums, the congested lips, and, like the actress in her least successful films and unlike me, he struck everyone who cared to give our family feedback as looking slightly too refrigerated.
Had Alfonse not channeled his neurosis into a frenetic self-escape plan wherein my affectations formed the hatch, he might have grown depressed enough to find the little something extra to defrost his stiltedness in Emo’s throttling wardrobe. Without a stylish herd in which to camouflage his weak links, he dressed like his manga heroes might have dressed were they inflated like balloons, which is to say dorkily.
Alfonse might even be alive, sitting in a pose almost identical to mine, pretending to write his own memoir, his hand and pen jiggling one hair’s breadth above an untouched page, but then I might still be a suffocated nympho, so, ultimately, I have to say it’s more productive that he’s dead.
Point is, until a series of events I’m preparing to address, he’d always bugged me with the feckless dedication of a housefly. But, on what seemed an average afternoon as I half observed my brother’s stagey reenactment of who I’d been moments before, it occurred to me that his playback was somehow . . . clingier.
It seemed not the royal performance to which I’d grown lackadaisically accustomed, but something more daring, an act less bent on piecing me together through pinpoint accuracy or plagiarizing my reserve than geared to undermine the very fuss that caused my personality to barely surface in the first place.
Previously, rare nods or smiles would be enough to keep my mirror image ambient. Now, any sign of my approval caused Alfonse to mutiny, diversify, and grow ever more technically inaccurate. I felt less flattered by and independent of his sequel than challenged to keep up with its liberties.
I began to see him as a stripper haggling with my equivalents. Were he not spoiled rotten like myself, I might have stuffed a wad of euros in his belt, then
An elevator, or, rather, a trendy sculptor’s perfect replication of The Shining ’s lift, but painted red inside instead of filled with blood, would drop Alfonse and me to street level or lift us to my father’s digs for rare communal meals whenever he decided to admit he was in town.
Bizarrely, my father’s floor had been abridged into a small and strangely shaped apartment that hardly gouged the yawning volume at its disposal, an anomaly he claimed was neither fanciful nor frugal, but rather fallout from having to share his level with the gargantuan equipment that warmed and cooled the building.
Like Alfonse in one regard, I’ve never had friends, not in the “give a shit” sense, not even when I was too young to have selected them myself. Thus, having tons of downtime wherein to stage my wildest daydreams likely fast-tracked the internal monologuist you’ve begun to get to know.
I had liked Alfonse with a perfect lack of passion until he colluded with his nanny. Well, “like” might be too strong a word. Admired objectively, let’s say. Let’s say his beauty might have garnered him a fan base cruisier than mine, were he not more garbled by stylistics and forged from less epicurean materials.
Due to my father’s wealth, ego, philanthropy, and conniving grip on words, he moved in starry social circles. There were rumors at one time that he’d fucked Isabelle Adjani, the once ethereal actress turned plastic surgeon’s monster. Although my father seemed insulted by this premise—even then, Adjani’s buckling, placated face required a fog machine to be puffing in her photo sessions—it seemed quite a coincidence that she had famously retired for nine months just before Alfonse debuted in the arms of my thin, grimacing mother.
Alfonse’s outermost layer preserved the young Adjani’s vaunted snowy skin, starless black hair, the same startled, chocolate eyes that infatuated costars or stared convincingly through windows of insane asylums, the congested lips, and, like the actress in her least successful films and unlike me, he struck everyone who cared to give our family feedback as looking slightly too refrigerated.
Had Alfonse not channeled his neurosis into a frenetic self-escape plan wherein my affectations formed the hatch, he might have grown depressed enough to find the little something extra to defrost his stiltedness in Emo’s throttling wardrobe. Without a stylish herd in which to camouflage his weak links, he dressed like his manga heroes might have dressed were they inflated like balloons, which is to say dorkily.
Alfonse might even be alive, sitting in a pose almost identical to mine, pretending to write his own memoir, his hand and pen jiggling one hair’s breadth above an untouched page, but then I might still be a suffocated nympho, so, ultimately, I have to say it’s more productive that he’s dead.
Point is, until a series of events I’m preparing to address, he’d always bugged me with the feckless dedication of a housefly. But, on what seemed an average afternoon as I half observed my brother’s stagey reenactment of who I’d been moments before, it occurred to me that his playback was somehow . . . clingier.
It seemed not the royal performance to which I’d grown lackadaisically accustomed, but something more daring, an act less bent on piecing me together through pinpoint accuracy or plagiarizing my reserve than geared to undermine the very fuss that caused my personality to barely surface in the first place.
Previously, rare nods or smiles would be enough to keep my mirror image ambient. Now, any sign of my approval caused Alfonse to mutiny, diversify, and grow ever more technically inaccurate. I felt less flattered by and independent of his sequel than challenged to keep up with its liberties.
I began to see him as a stripper haggling with my equivalents. Were he not spoiled rotten like myself, I might have stuffed a wad of euros in his belt, then
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