Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  The water sparkled around her like a swirl of giant fish scales, pale green and white. A few palm fronds, yellowed and sere, floated on the surface behind her. The photographer took Brian’s picture, and he pretended to ignore him, or assumed the pose of ignoring him, going back to the newspaper that he had spread in front of him.

  She kept looking at Keith. Brian knew that everyone around the pool could sense what was going on inside him.

  The elevator had mirrored walls that were mostly obscured by intricate sandalwood screens. When Keith came out into the hallway, he found Mick quietly closing his door. He was pale and hadn’t showered and his face looked pressed together toward the center.

  “What happened last night?” Mick said, flipping his key in his hand.

  Keith kept walking down the hallway. His T-shirt hung over his bare shoulders like a scarf and he tugged at the twisted ends. “That’s the big mystery, isn’t it?”

  “I told Tom to keep an eye on him. Make sure he keeps it together.”

  “Sort of like sending the dealer out to mind the junkie, isn’t it?”

  “This is brilliant timing. We’re going to need him. You keep forgetting that. Unless we’re just going to pack it in.”

  Keith scratched his shoulder. “Well, that’s up to Brian, isn’t it? I mean, either he’ll look after himself or he won’t.”

  Keith went into his room and tossed his shirt on the bed. Lined up against the walls was the equipment that had been brought up for him on the day they’d arrived — the microphones, the tape machine, the acoustic and electric guitars, all the tangled gray cords. He stared at it for a moment, then went out on the balcony and looked down at the pool.

  He could see her moving through the water, her brown arms pushing down toward her sides. She kicked her legs so that her back and shoulders rose up above the surface, her wet hair seeping down her neck.

  He went back inside and switched on the TV without any sound and lit up a joint. He could feel it starting to gather in the back of his mind, but it had been almost a month since he’d written a new song and he also felt lethargic. It would either come in a flash, which was rare, or it would come out of trial and error. Either way it wouldn’t be a song until it went through hours of plodding and revision, drudgery and repetition, the exact opposite of the sound that only sometimes, inexplicably, emerged.

  The last time they’d recorded, he’d spent five days in the studio with just Brian, working out the song. They’d added piano, cello, flute, recorder — small harmonic lines that pushed the song slowly outward until it was something you could listen to many times and still want to hear again. He’d watched Brian pick up instruments he’d never played before and just start playing them, doing it while he was so stoned he seemed hardly awake. Without Brian, the song would have been nothing more than some Baroque guitar studies he’d been tinkering around with by himself — Bach, Vivaldi — but together they’d managed to smooth away the worst part of that and fuse it to the simple, three-chord music they were known for. The song was about Anita — even Brian must have realized it. It was about the runaway girl who couldn’t be tamed, the girl you would have to share if you wanted to be with her at all.

  What was amazing then was that it seemed as if Brian were going to pull it together, be a true part of the band again. That’s what she had done for him at first. But on the drive down to France, it was obvious what was happening, and Brian hadn’t even noticed. He’d just made it easier and easier for Anita to forget about him when he finally broke down. He kept changing the music and insisting that this was the way the band should go, back to the blues, the old songs they used to cover when it was still fun to play and everyone got along. He would be sentimental, then angry, then half-asleep, vague with liquor and pills, and he had been like that so often that it was not upsetting, just irritating, familiar. Still, they had never seen him cough up blood before: thin red drips that spotted his chin and a darker kind that rimmed one of his nostrils. Suddenly they were speeding through Toulouse, looking for a hospital, thinking he might die. He’d wanted Anita to stay there at his bedside, but she’d felt worn down by then. He had stopped coughing. It had already started to seem like another one of his games.

  They left him there after the first night. It was a cold thing to do, but he’d told them to go. They got back in the Bentley with Tom Keylock and headed south toward the border town of Port-Bou. It was a sunny day and they crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, where they could see cactuses and yuccas growing between the rocks on the sides of the road. They smoked some hash and listened to the reel-to-reel tape player, and their lives — even Brian’s — suddenly seemed funny in a way they hadn’t seemed since leaving London. She was laughing the first time she kissed him, and he could hardly concentrate on her body, her tan thighs spread across his hips, her breasts, which he felt for the first time through the thin fabric of her acrylic shirt. It had happened so fast that only afterward did it really sink in, the reality of this girl who was so beautiful he used to keep sneaking glances at her to make sure he wasn’t exaggerating it.

  Brian stood up and walked over to the edge of the pool. She looked up at him, wiping some water off the side of her face.

  “We’re going to go hear some music,” he said. He turned back toward the table, where Tom Keylock was still sitting. “He’s going to take me into town.”

  She rested her arm on the glazed tile, looking down at her fingers. “I think it’s a good idea,” she said.

  “I’d like to find some instruments to bring back to London. Something different.”

  “I think we should just cool off for a while, don’t you? I mean, just for the day. I think it will be good for us.”

  He looked away. For a moment, everything that had happened last night — the calmness of her voice, the tight soreness in the bones of his hand — came back, jumbled together with the sunlight on the patio, the green and white reflections on the swimming pool, the coarse gray bark of the palm trees.

  “You should go and hear the music,” she said. “Try not to think about everything so much.”

  He nodded. Across the pool, there was a waiter in a white jacket and a white fez clearing glasses from one of the empty tables. Anita smiled, touching his bare ankle with her wet hand.

  “It’s just for one day,” she said. “Not even a whole day. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  He had never felt like this. Jealousy, fear, hopeless antici- pation — these were familiar feelings, but he had never felt them with such claustrophobic intensity. It made his pulse thick and prolonged, worse the more he tried not to think about it. Everything he didn’t want to believe about himself was once again suddenly, explicitly true. Could he go for one day — not even a whole day — knowing that she was out of his control? It was like deciding that nothing between them had ever mattered.

  An hour later, she and the others were in a tiny carpet shop owned by a man named Hassan, sampling different kinds of hash while they listened to Moroccan music on the radio. The walls were an even, vibrant blue that made it difficult to remember what time of day it was. Keith leaned back against the wall on a pile of carpets, his eyes closed. She was curled up beside him, her arm entwined with his. She wore white boots, her legs bare and tan, and beneath her straight blond hair she had a feather boa wrapped tightly around her neck like a scarf. Mick and Marianne and Robert Fraser were on their right, looking at a book of Arabic calligraphy. As usual, someone was taking pictures, and so the last hour had been full of vivid reactions to minor events, canny smiles and thoughtful stares and a minimum of talk.

  “It’s better now, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Yes. It’s always good to have a smoke.”

  “I want to go for a walk later in the market. I want to buy something for Brian. Something to cheer him up.” Her smile was the smile of someone who never felt any difference between acting and being herself. “Don’t be solemn,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t dream of being solemn
.”

  “We’re all friends. It’s a simple idea, but no one seems to understand it anymore.”

  “We are friends.”

  “Not if everyone’s going to be so solemn about it.”

  Someone took their picture. Keith closed his eyes, nodding off slightly to the music. It was trancelike and insistent, a syncopated weave of oboes and violins backed by drums. Each note pointed to a shape without making it too obvious, each note a surprise but also a logical next step. It was like looking at a dark sky and gradually making out constellations in what had been a scrim of random stars.

  Her hand felt embarrassingly alive in his. It was long and firm with a pair of rings beneath the first knuckle of her middle finger. He knew that the rings had nothing to do with him and that her hand in his meant nothing, but it made him not care about Brian, or about the band, or about the possibility of spending ten years in jail. It made him want to see what would happen. He kept noticing the faint, greenish bruise on the edge of her cheekbone.

  Above the big open square called the Jemaa el Fna, the sun was starting to open up a gap in the mild cloud cover. It lit up the long folding counters of the food stands, where plates of raw ground lamb, diced tomatoes, olives, rice, sausages, and kebabs sat atop thick beds of wilting greens. Brian was just coming out of the darkness of the clothing souks with Tom Keylock when the light on the buildings changed from a muddy brown to a bright pink, all of it suffused with a saffron yellow that was like a second dawn in the middle of the afternoon.

  “The acid’s starting to come on,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s that sort of humming you always feel in your teeth.”

  “We have money. Cigarettes. Nothing can go too badly for us now.”

  There was a persistent drone of horns. From the food stalls came the bitter smell of burning charcoal and the dry, organ-meat smell of grilled lamb. A thin man in chef’s whites and a toque was ladling a brown liqueur over a wide pan full of stone-colored snails.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” said Brian.

  “Knew what?” Keylock took him by the arm and guided him out of the way of a man walking by with a stack of crates on a dolly. Keylock was tall and round-shouldered with sideburns and horn-rimmed glasses. “It’s too much to talk about,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Brian. “I should have finished with that bitch a long time ago. It’s really starting to kick in, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. We’ll just need to cool out for a while somewhere.”

  There were three old men in brilliantly colored robes standing on the other side of the square. Their shoulders were slung with leather pouches and several strings of bells and brass cups. Their hats were like enormous tasseled lampshades woven from brightly colored yarn, reds and blues and yellows and greens.

  “Perfect,” Brian said. “They’re brilliant, right?”

  “Those men? Yes, fine, they’re brilliant.”

  “I may take some more in a little while. I’d like to buy some of those hats. Or maybe just buy the men themselves, take them back to England.”

  A man in a dark sport coat and a dingy woolen vest approached them, whispering something in French and fanning out some tattered business cards. Keylock brushed him aside with a rise of his chin. He turned to Brian, steadying him again with a hand placed lightly on his shoulder.

  “Now you see what I was talking about,” he said, and suddenly each moment was so densely packed with situations that Brian couldn’t begin to take them all in. Bicycles and animals and carts moved in strange diagonals through the alleyways at the corners of the square. The sunlight gleamed on the hundreds of numbered plaques above the food tables, turning them into row after row of toylike moons. A group of men in white robes and turbans were dancing in a crowd, rattling a set of square metal tambourines in their hands. Translucent doves fled from the folds of their clothes.

  When they got back to the hotel, they were all so high that each moment arrived in its own frame, like a set of projected slides — the revolving glass doors, the tiled lobby, the carved rosewood screens behind the fountain, the bellman in his white jacket and fez. The sun had come out, so they decided to spend the rest of the afternoon by the pool. Anita went upstairs to change, still feeling the bluster she always felt when she was with Keith. Walking back through the medina, he had been so stoned that he could hardly move his feet, his white fur coat slung over his back like a dead dog. Packs of boys had hovered around them, solemn and staring, only the youngest ones daring to come up close. One of them, about eight years old, followed them up a set of stone steps, his hands laced behind his back, as suspicious as an old man, mimicking every one of Keith’s clumsy movements as if learning the steps to a dance.

  It was only when she got upstairs to the tenth floor and opened the door to her room that she remembered what was really happening that day. There were all the clothes scattered on the beds and the chairs and the tiled floor: Brian’s clothes and her clothes, all of them mixed together, just like at their flat in Earl’s Court.

  In the bathroom, she picked up a book she’d been reading called The Sephiroth. She opened it at random to a page somewhere near the middle.

  Speak to me of desire. Of the endless, coiling desire of the Self. Of how the Self, goaded by desire, becomes like an animal, compelled by need, caught in its sway. Now speak to me of the Soul, whom we see only in glimpses of others, in the blur of music, in the senselessness of dreams. Not who we are or what we believe, but the blinding shimmer from the void.

  Figure 3. Trump XV, The Devil, Lucifer in his aged and corrupted form. As the Father of Fear, he has horns and batlike wings. Below him, two Lovers, Adam and Eve (Trump VI), are chained in darkness at his feet. Note how comfortable they appear in their chains, so loose around their wrists that they could free themselves at any time if they so desired.

  THANATOMANIA, 1963–1964

  KENNETH ANGER WAS WALKING by the boardwalk on Coney Island one afternoon when he came across a group of boys working on their motorcycles. They were working-class kids, mostly Italian and Irish, their hair greased back in the manner of James Dean or Marlon Brando. From a distance at first, then closer, Anger watched them as they ratcheted and stared at their engines, their triceps shifting in the broken light, shaded by the boardwalk’s wooden planking.

  He didn’t approach them that first day. Even on that hot afternoon, he was dressed entirely in black, except for a pale lime silk scarf around his neck. Surely the boys would see what he was, but then again what was he? The boys would never have guessed that a person like him would have tattoos on his forearms and wrists. A pentagram, an Eye of Horus, a scorpion — his rising sign, a sign associated with trickery and deceit. They would never have guessed that among other things, Anger thought of them as brothers in arms.

  He was living in Brooklyn Heights now, penniless, sleeping on the roof of an apartment building in what could only be described as a shanty. It was a small metal shed without windows. Inside, he had a mattress and a kerosene lantern and an assortment of mugs. The shed and the apartment below it belonged to a film professor and his wife, Eliot and Beverly Gance, whose hatred for each other was like a cunning distraction from the doom that seemed to thicken the air around them: their sagging thoraxes, their nicotine breath, the haunted, midday fatigue that permeated their rooms. The Gances would start drinking on a Friday afternoon and not stop until Monday morning, during which time Anger would witness their brawls — broken dishes, humiliating sexual accusations, suicide threats, then a shoving match with drinks and cigarettes in hand along the raised brick edge of the roof where Anger had his shed. His presence seemed to reassure both of them into further flights of aggression. He didn’t have to pay the Gances rent, but he seemed to be paying them instead through a steady depletion of his own vitality.

  More and more, both he and the world around him seemed on the verge of a breaking point. He could feel suppressed hostility running like an invisible current
through the city’s televisions and the flickering lights of its subway cars. If it wasn’t the fear of Communists, it was the fear of Negroes. If it wasn’t the race to blow up the world, it was the race to send dogs or monkeys to the moon.

  There were nights when it was too hot to sleep in the metal shed, and so he would spread one of his sheets out over the asphalt roof and look across the moonlit river to the speckled towers of Manhattan. He had friends there, and there were circles of people who knew his work and screened his films and had him over to their apartments for dinner. Afterward, he would sometimes go in search of boys, lost drifters in denim jackets or mechanic’s clothes, Lucifers, he called them, like so many avatars of his teenage crush, Ted Drake. They were mostly straight kids, hungry for a steak dinner, young enough to think of him as old, not fooled for a minute into thinking he was anything like them. When he got them alone, they were often as passive as ghosts, but sometimes there was a muscular scorn that brought him into contact with the real thing — a clenched fist at the end of a forearm, the edges of a ring abrading the bones of his back. What mattered was the first flash of desire, that almost nonexistent few moments when you could confront someone purely as a body and perhaps be confronted yourself in the same way, divorced from the dull facts of who you were. After that, things could only be tedious — two men talking to each other like ironic girls.

  He believed that his films were lasting works of art, but perhaps this idea was evasive. Perhaps it was a way to justify being thirty-five and living in a metal shed on someone else’s roof.

  He presented himself to the boys with the motorcycles as a camera enthusiast, a solemn man in his thirties who despite his whispery voice seemed to know something about tools. He bought them beer, and over the course of the next few days he filmed them as they moved in a crouch around the concrete floors of their garages, smoking cigarettes as they turned the wrench on a crankshaft or fitted a gas tank back into its slot. He filmed their gearboxes and sprockets, the pages of their repair manuals, the red taillights and chains and batteries laid out on the gray tarpaulin in the garage’s dark corner. None of them did well under the camera’s gaze for more than a minute or two. Being watched changed them, made them self-conscious. It got him thinking about the wavering line between fakery and authenticity, the way a dangerous pose sets up the expectation for actual danger.