Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  Because what was a motorcycle for, if not to flirt with the crash? And what was the point of all that tangible speed, if not to outrace age and move directly to the end?

  He didn’t remember where he’d come across the word “thanatomania.” When he looked it up in the Gances’ dictionary it wasn’t there, but he couldn’t help thinking that this word held the key to whatever it was he was sensing all around him. The vague restlessness seemed to have its source in some unspoken, half-yearning fascination with death. It didn’t escape him that those boys with their motorcycles made a perfect tableau of aggression and indifference. Their bikes, fitted with neat round mirrors on either side of the crossbars, were just like the spartan racing bikes that Jean Cocteau had chosen for the minions of the underworld in his film Orpheus.

  About a week after he’d filmed the bikers, he met a thirty-one-year-old hustler named Bruce Byron outside a movie theater in Times Square. Byron wore a cowboy hat and a denim jacket that made him look rangier and younger than he was. He was good-looking in a blue-collar way. But it didn’t matter, since Anger was in that state of obsession now where everything he saw or heard became related to what he was working on and immediately found its rightful place. When he mentioned the biker movie, the response was silence: Bruce Byron squinting off into the distance, his eyes shadowed by the bent brim of his hat, his cheap boots creaking above the hot sheen of the sidewalk.

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” said Anger.

  “Maybe I’d be interested,” said Byron. He was still looking off down the street, lightly drumming his fingers on the edge of his thigh.

  “Why don’t you give me your phone number?” said Anger. “I’ll call you later.”

  “I don’t know about the phone.”

  Perhaps part of the problem was that Anger had a mild crush on him. Perhaps he couldn’t quite forgive Bruce Byron for the matter-of-fact perfection of his ears, the stubbled contours of his chin, the way his small eyes focused so tightly on whatever they were trying to decipher.

  A few days later, they met at Byron’s apartment, a walk-up on Tenth Avenue with red curtains patterned with silver snowflakes that were somehow strangely futuristic. Atop the television was a picture of a woman who might have been Byron’s sister, a comb in her brown bouffant, rheumy eyes that peeled down a little too far at the bottoms, like certain dogs’. Anger began setting up lights in the corners of the apartment’s only room, training them on a sagging bed with a loud scarlet coverlet. He had brought along two shopping bags full of props: leather jackets, engineer’s boots, a plastic skull, several posters, ashtrays, doilies, and commemorative plates emblazoned with the faces of Marlon Brando and James Dean. He arranged this paraphernalia around the room, replacing the decorative prints of Hawaiian beach scenes and the Golden Gate Bridge. This décor suddenly made more sense when Byron picked up the photograph of the woman on the TV and mentioned that she was his wife.

  “I didn’t know you were married,” said Anger.

  “No, there’s a lot you don’t know.”

  “She’s at work?”

  “She stays with her mother sometimes. In Queens. Debbie’s all right, except when she’s not all right, you know what I mean?”

  They had both taken a hit of speed. Anger was already prepared to start, his light meter in his hand, but Byron was standing contemplatively in his denim jacket and cowboy hat, stretching his arms in a bridge before his chest. He seemed to be getting himself into character, which made no sense as Anger had given him no indication at all about what his role involved. He asked Byron to take off his hat. Then he asked him to strip down to his undershirt and lie on the bed in front of the TV, maybe with a pair of sunglasses on, maybe with a cigarette behind his ear.

  “I don’t see what that has to do with the motorcycle idea,” said Byron.

  “We’re not there yet. Just wait.”

  “You want me to watch television?”

  “Just for a minute. Everyone does it differently. I want to see how you do it.”

  “You’re going to film this?”

  “I think you should take off your jacket at least. Obviously the hat.”

  Byron frowned and lit a cigarette. “I’ve always considered it an idiot box,” he said. “If I was bored I might put it on. While I was reading.”

  “Look,” said Anger. “You need to relax. You need to stop thinking about everything so much.”

  There was something like suppressed sarcasm in the sullen way Byron finally started unbuttoning his denim jacket. He gave a kind of silent chuckle, squinting as the smoke rose from the cigarette in his mouth. It seemed possible that this was the look he gave everyone just before he finally gave them what they wanted.

  “She watches that thing day and night sometimes,” he said, raising his chin at the television.

  “Who?” said Anger.

  “My wife. Debbie. If it was up to me, I’d smash it. Throw it out the window.”

  “Maybe put the sunglasses on. The big ones. The green ones.”

  “You want me to lie down?”

  “Yes, lie down.”

  “Bedroom scenes. I usually get paid for this kind of thing.”

  “I’m here to make a film. I’m not here for that.”

  He had seen it happen many times. Almost as soon as the camera was on its tripod, a person like Bruce Byron would start to imagine himself as the Star. At the same time, he would second-guess everything Anger said, because he’d never heard of him, and yet he still imagined that the film could somehow make him famous. It was a consequence of Anger not being famous enough himself, not being a Hollywood director who could bark commands instead of working through trickery and deceit.

  “It’s not working out,” Eliot Gance said to Anger the next morning, standing just outside the stairwell that led up to the roof. The collar of his Cuban shirt was spread to reveal his veined throat and the top of his pink chest.

  “I may go to Mexico,” he said. “Perhaps the Far East. Can you have your things cleared out by the end of this month?”

  “Your life, Eliot. None of it makes any sense.”

  “If she thinks she can just finish me off, she’ll find it’s not so easy. I’ve got different elements in play now. Different strategies.”

  “I’ll speak to Beverly about this.”

  “Stay out of it.”

  “Let’s not forget that other people exist, Eliot. I have a film I’m trying to finish.”

  “A film. That must be difficult. Will you stay in town, do you think, or will you go back to Europe?”

  “I’ll speak to Beverly.”

  “Leave her out of this.”

  “We’ll see about this Mexico trip. The Far East.”

  “Good-bye, Kenneth.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “Good-bye.”

  On the last night of filming, he took Byron to the bikers’ clubhouse, along with four cases of beer and a box of props. In some secret part of their minds, the bikers must have known what kind of person Anger was, but there was something about Byron — he was dressed all in black leather, like a mannequin or a doll — that let them know for sure. They staggered through the cases of beer and then they went wild, the radio on, forming conga lines, sloppy cancan routines that got more and more sexual, miming sodomy, their faces hidden by Halloween masks. They ended up jumping on one another’s backs, wrestling each other to the floor, gibbering like apes with their pants down. Byron had never met them before. His only instructions were to try to blend in. All he could do was stand off to the side, drinking beer. The refreshment table was knocked over on its side. People rode their motorcycles through the clubhouse. They had one of the younger kids on the ground and were squirting a bottle of mustard on him, his pants around his ankles, and though it was happening right in front of him, Byron just stood there by the wall, his hand in his pocket, so aloof that it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

  “That’s what you wanted, I guess,” he said when it
was over. “A big ridiculous scene.”

  They were in Anger’s rented station wagon. Byron was slouched back in his seat with a beer on his knee, his sunglasses on in the darkness.

  “I thought you would get more involved,” said Anger.

  “They were just kids. I was asking them about their bikes. I know more about bikes than they do.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Byron stared ahead through the windshield, his face hidden in shadow.

  “What?” Anger persisted.

  “You want me to eat shit, that’s fine,” he said. “I’ve been eating shit my whole life.”

  They were on their way to the next location. It was an abandoned church, its windows smashed, rainwater pooled on the plastic sheeting that covered the pews. It was there that Byron’s character would erupt in a last frenzy of rage, climbing up on the altar in a fit of desecration. It would be the best part of his performance. In the church it would be dark, and he would gesture and pose for almost an hour, acting out a sermon that in its senseless, dictatorial lunges would be a perfect ending for the film.

  “Are you all right?” said Anger.

  “I’m fine. Let’s just get it done.”

  “We’ll do it your way this time. You tell me what you want to do and I’ll film it.”

  “I want it to be real. I’m the only one putting anything real into this. Every time it gets serious, you start smirking, playing your games.”

  After all his recent failures, Anger hardly expected that this would be the film to have so much success. Even as he raced to finish it, he didn’t foresee how confusing it would be to most of the audience that eventually came to see it, nor could he know that the word it invoked so strongly, “thanatomania,” would end up sounding like a diagnosis of the next six years. He called it Scorpio Rising. He didn’t realize that this little film he’d made with Bruce Byron would prefigure so much madness, nor did he anticipate that Byron would be so obtuse that he would entirely miss its mockery and believe that it flattered him, made him a star.

  It ended with Byron marching off to the abandoned church, wearing a leather mask and an infantryman’s helmet. The sound of bikers followed him, the revving of their engines, the dream minions of some private army in his mind. With a sudden flourish, he turned and barked commands from the ruined altar. He paced like Hitler, raising his arms to the sky. Outside, the bikers massed in darkness, idling on wet roads, waiting for his signal. There was a crash — a pileup of bodies, flesh, machines — then the empty cry of sirens. The ambulances stood in the rain. Byron was all alone. It was getting light out. That was the year four Klansmen bombed a church in Alabama. The year a lone gunman shot JFK as he passed by in his open car. Always the television started as a white pinprick, gathering width until it filled the screen, bringing its different kinds of news. Day after day, the subway lights flickered with the unseen clues about death magic, thanatomania.

  The state of California banned the film in 1964, and in doing so elevated it to an importance it might never have achieved if it had been simply left alone. After that, Anger kept bumping into different aspects of some newly distorted idea he had of who he was. Strangers sent him letters. They wrote to him as the pornographer, the fascist, the sadist, the necrophiliac. He was whatever they needed him to be. Handsome, intense boys would introduce themselves after screenings, and their interest in his every rambling word made him garrulous. He became a character, a talker, an opinionated fool.

  At the film’s premiere in New York, Bruce Byron had shown up dressed in full biker regalia, down to a leather cap and a black leather jacket with a scorpion painted on the back. He stood by himself, a figure of embarrassment that nobody wanted to look at. Anger ignored him (he himself was never alone that night), but sometimes when he looked back on the scene he would imagine it through Byron’s eyes: the smugness, the utter conviction of his own centrality, the injustice of Anger being treated as the film’s star.

  At night, an image would appear behind Anger’s closed eyes: a lithe boy with dark hair that fringed his forehead. He would arrive on a motorcycle in a fog of yellow light, making reckless circles in some vast hangar, his arms flexing as they wielded the silver handlebars. At top speed, he would mount a flight of red stairs that led to an altar adorned by a giant silver eagle. Airborne, he would crash through a pane of glass and tumble onto a concrete floor lit by klieg lights. His motorcycle would be bent and smoking. He would lie spread-eagled on the ground, his arms tattooed with anchors and skulls, blood in his hair. Then he would open his eyes and Anger would enter the boy’s mind, where there was nothing but images: a red curtain over still water, a blue gas flame reflected on chrome, a black sky pocked with green specks of light. It was now that the dreams of Lucifer began to proliferate.

  MARRAKECH, 1967

  IT WAS EIGHT O’CLOCK in the evening, though it felt to Brian like midnight or afternoon. He had lost Tom Keylock somewhere in the fabric souks a few hours ago and now he was looking through the window of the cab, at the dense wedges of buildings, earth-colored or eggshell-colored, which appeared as if they’d been scraped together out of sand. A few electric lights burned like flares along the busier streets, bright orange or neon green. They made the city of Marrakech look more and not less ancient.

  In the elevator up to the tenth floor of the hotel, he became aware of someone else’s presence looming just behind his shoulder. It was a middle-aged man in a wrinkled suit, a closed umbrella at his side. Brian knew this without having to turn around, just as he knew who the man was without being able to remember his name. He hunched forward with an impatient smile on his face, hands fisted at his sides, not looking. When he closed his eyes, he saw numerals, first chiseled into gray stone, then colorful and stylized, like numerals on a Victorian signboard. Not more than three seconds passed before he was waiting in anticipation of the man’s seizing him by the arms.

  The elevator’s doors opened with a brutal series of lurches. He walked down the hallway, listing slightly in response to the faint undulations in the walls. There were animal shapes moving in the plaster, hooves and hindquarters that seemed to press against the surface from the other side. Faint music was seeping out from the farthest suite down the hall.

  He matched the key in his hand to the number on the door. All the doors were an identical dark brown.

  Next door, there was a crowd in Keith’s suite. He and Mick were working on a song, ignoring the others, Keith with one heel resting on the edge of his chair, his guitar’s body wedged awkwardly between his thighs. He hit the strings hard, then lightly, then harder, the process a kind of math, or like trying to coax a flame out of a few smoldering sticks. Mick was sitting on a little tapestried stool before him, trying to follow along on his guitar, watching Keith’s fretboard. In the room with them were more than a dozen people, some of whose names they didn’t even know. They were talking and playing Moroccan music on the radio and someone was setting up a movie projector on a table. He told everyone to turn out the lights. There was a confused grumbling, a cackle of laughter, then the room went dark. Keith and Mick kept playing, their guitars out of sync, a nonsense of rhythm that no one else in the room had any patience even to watch.

  “Mortify the spirit in order to more purely inhabit the body,” a voice said in the darkness. “Enter the nightmare until it loses the veneer of credibility.”

  A film started in the projector. On the wall, there was a rectangle of saturated black, almost purple, and then a slow upward pan of words written in gold ink: A Film by Anger. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.

  Anita was still grinning at something when she looked up to see him. The room was lit by only a few candles and Brian felt the man in the wrinkled suit behind him, mocking him. They were all sitting on the bed — Anita, Marianne, Robert — sifting through a large opened box full of bracelets and rings.

  “Brian,” she said. “You’ve been gone for so long. We were worried about you.”

  There were clo
thes all over the room. Robert had something on his head that looked like a stocking cap that had melted and blackened into a fine wisp. Beside him, Marianne was wearing a green sari and sunglasses, smoking a cigarette.

  “I was in the square,” he said. “I’ve just been checking it out. The Jemaa el Fna.”

  He had forgotten all the specifics of how Anita looked, forgotten her wide mouth, the comic insistence of her eyes. Everything he said or did now created the exact opposite impression of what he intended. He could see small hooves pressing against the wet plaster of the walls.

  She took a long, heavy necklace from the box and held it out to him. “Look,” she said. “I thought this would be perfect.”

  “Sacred magical necklace,” said Robert. “We stole it.” He pulled the strange cap down over his face. It turned out to be a black nylon stocking. It made his face look angry and Mongoloid. “We stole everything in town.”

  She held the necklace out to him, standing up and throwing her scarf back around her neck. It was a strand of mirror chips and colored beads and between them were a dozen or more jagged shapes that turned out to be human teeth.

  “We’re all very high,” said Anita. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m just very high.”

  “Put it on. We want to see you with it on.”

  “We need to talk for a while.”

  “I can’t talk now. You know that I can’t talk right now.”

  He looked into her eyes and she was smiling at him with the bland approval of a big sister. He saw now that they’d been playing a game in which Anita and Marianne were humiliating Robert with different kinds of jewelry and Robert was pretending to be him. The goats started scraping at the walls with their horns, others were kicking at the walls with their hooves. He wished that Anita would stop acting as though she couldn’t read his mind.