Marbled Swarm, The by Cooper Dennis

Author:Cooper, Dennis [Cooper, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Five weeks after someone in the Paris art world bribed my father’s dust into a ritzy plot in Cemetery Montparnasse that had been held for Liliane Bettencourt before her scandals, his lawyer sent me a strangely exuberant if technically proficient email suggesting we meet that afternoon and parse the estate I was destined to inherit.

My father hadn’t changed his will to suit my brother’s absence, and, in any case, its spillage of more or less a billion euros’ worth of art, properties, and liquid assets was so meticulously preset to drain into two bankbooks that merely scrawling my initials in several pages’ margins plugged the extra spigot.

In fact, our business meeting, with its high-speed shuffling of stapled pages, autographs, and touching anecdotes about the weirdo we would miss for somewhat corresponding reasons, might have been a courtesy, the lawyer told me, had not one faux pas caught his canvassing eye.

It seemed there was a gap amid my father’s properties, specifically a chateau framed by considerable acreage in the hills of Pas de Calais, a northernmost coastal area of France known exclusively to me for its hulking port and metro-like underpinning of abandoned mines.

Unlike my father’s other keepsakes, this effect lacked records pertaining to its upkeep, taxes, or estimated value, and was not officially among my father’s holdings, referenced only once and quickly in a handwritten note in one of the will’s supplementary pages.

First thinking it a pure example of my father’s riddles, the lawyer had halfheartedly typed a few search terms into Google and uncovered a solitary record of said property’s

existence—an item in the archives of the threadbare website of a razor-thin newspaper that served the nearest town.

Dated four or so years prior, the article sought to abridge a thickened curiosity among the town’s two dozen residents regarding a peculiar-looking building that was then under construction on its westernmost fringe.

Quoting some hireling at the construction site, this article revealed the odd contraption’s owner as a Parisian who bore my father’s name. Notwithstanding the in-progress building’s likeness to a theme park’s far-off satellite, it was instead a children’s playhouse, rooted there rather than in the owner’s yard due to its enormity.

Upon completion, the playhouse would huff and puff an illustration in some comic book or other into three usable dimensions and become a walk-in birthday gift for the owner’s younger son. Presumably, this boy would horse around within it on the weekends and over school vacations. Otherwise, it would gather dust and invite local teens’ graffiti.

Most outlandishly, the owner had bypassed the normal practice of employing an architect to coax the inky streaks and dashes into solid matter. Instead, a cosmetic surgeon had been asked to make that difficult transition. The aim of this unorthodox approach, or so the worker said he’d heard, was that the playhouse would be less the drawing’s souvenir or Disneyed offshoot than a twin of the unwrinkled thoughts behind it.

Wedged into one corner of the article was a low-resolution scan of the comic’s panel that had formed the building’s inspiration.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.