Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  In the darkness, Keith could feel the beginnings of a vague shape starting to emerge beneath the surface of what he was playing. He leaned forward in his chair, slowly nodding his head at Mick, adding a little ornament on the D chord, a bright suspended fourth that he played with his pinkie. Projected on the wall behind him was an image of a man in false eyelashes and black lipstick who reclined on a lavish bed. He was surrounded by pictures of dragons and Chinese gods, and on the bed’s velvet coverlet was a large opened box full of rings.

  Robert Fraser stuck his head into the suite’s barely open door, the black nylon stocking on top of his head. Then Marianne came in behind him, taking his arm as she stepped inside. She was still wearing sunglasses, like a blind person. She had the kind of lips that made their own separate expression, reticent lips that curled mischievously upward at the corners. Mick looked over at her, but she was deliberately not looking back. On their way back from the medina that afternoon, he had noticed something that he’d seen happen several times now: for no reason at all, her eyes had started welling up with tears. She’d pretended it wasn’t happening, but the effort had made her so distant it was like self-hypnosis. When he asked her if she was all right, she looked at him as if he were being deliberately confusing.

  On the wall, the man in the film was twining a long silver necklace around his fingers. Then he dangled it above his face and began to coil it slowly into his mouth.

  Keith nodded his head in that absent but emphatic way he had, which made Mick settle down into the music, forgetting himself. It made his face change into a near replica of what Keith’s face had been just a moment before. He closed his eyes, his lower lip jutting slightly forward. The sounds they were making had no meaning yet, they were just a set of tones, but part of what was making the song take shape now was the sense that they were doing it in front of Marianne, that she was within earshot but had no idea what he was thinking.

  Brian was on his knees in the bathroom. His hair was scattered across his neck in such a way that Anita could see the pale skin beneath it. The fractured light came from a single yellow bulb screwed into the ceiling and when she closed her eyes the yellowness flashed like a chain of miniature suns in the veins of her temples.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Let me help you.”

  He turned and his eyes were so distant, looking into hers, that he seemed to be seeing her though a thickness of glass. She rested her hand on the side of his face and with the other hand she smoothed the hair over the back of his head. He kept staring at her, his nostrils glistening, and for a brief moment he seemed to recognize her with more clarity and she almost thought they were going to smile at each other.

  “You think it’s funny,” he said.

  “No, I don’t think it’s funny.”

  “It is. It’s funny if you think about it long enough. Keith, of all people.”

  He started coughing and turned around. It made his head shake, the fringes of his hair rising and then coiling against his shoulders. She crouched beside him, waves of nausea moving in her throat and stomach.

  “Get out,” he said.

  “Brian.”

  “I just wish that Keith could have stayed the way he was. That you could have left him alone.”

  She stood up. “I don’t know what to say to you.”

  “He was my friend. And you were this massive thing. Terrifying.”

  “He’s still your friend.”

  “I don’t want him to be my friend. Are you out of your mind?”

  “Then you’re a bastard.”

  “Just get out. Get out, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  She left him there. When she walked back into the bedroom, she glimpsed herself in the mirror. Her eyes were all black pupil and the bruise on her cheekbone was a purplish green against pale skin.

  They were all standing around in the dark when she came into the room next door, still stunned from the sudden quiet of the hallway outside. There was a movie being projected on the wall, casting a green and red glow on the dim standing figures. She saw Mick moving through the dark, his walk loose-jointed and balletic like his walk onstage, a walk that had nothing to do with anyone else in the room.

  She saw Keith, mixing himself a drink at the impromptu bar in a far corner. He had his back to her, and Tom Keylock was gripping his shoulder and reaching for the bottle of Scotch.

  Projected on the wall was the middle-aged man in false eyelashes, examining himself in a mirror. He was standing in a narrow red hallway, looking at himself with such concentration that eventually the hallway dissolved and he emerged as a different person, a woman, standing by herself in darkness, wearing a black sequined gown.

  “You would like this film,” said a voice behind her.

  It was Robert Fraser. He passed something into her hand, a clumsy, furtive exchange. It was the black nylon stocking.

  “The Scarlet Woman,” he said. “Jezebel. The Whore of Babylon.”

  The woman’s short hair was dyed a lurid red. She was lit by a pink light in the otherwise endless expanse of darkness. She was beautiful in a cold, androgynous way that was either extremely sexual or not sexual at all.

  Anita put her arm around Fraser’s waist and leaned her head against his shoulder.

  “Brian’s lost it,” she said.

  “Of course he has. But there’s nothing you can do about it now, is there?”

  Keith saw her from across the room. He raised his glass and gave her a sardonic grin, his craggy teeth glinting in the dim light. Tom Keylock was whispering something into his ear.

  When Brian opened the door, the room was dark except for a beam of white light that spread across to the far wall, flickering and occasionally dimming so that the standing figures were sometimes lit up in neon tones of green or red. He looked at it too directly and for a moment all he saw was a whirling field of white. The music was loud, a syncopated weave of drums and ouds and violins. Then the curtains billowed and glowed like burnt sails against the high windows that gave out onto the balcony, and he felt the strange man’s presence behind him, leaning forward on his rolled-up umbrella.

  A woman’s face was projected on the wall, her bright red hair cut like a Roman emperor’s. In the palm of her hand she held a tiny, horned figure made of clay. She extended it before her face, her long eyelashes casting a fine, softening shadow over her rapt gaze. The figurine burst into flames.

  In the darkness, the first people he made out were Keith and Anita. She was walking toward Keith, her fringed scarf trailing off her shoulder.

  Keith took her in his clumsy arms. Her eyes started to burn with a strange desire to laugh and she let her head fall back so that she could smile at him. She pressed her cheek against his and kissed his earlobe. She could feel the muscles moving in his shoulders through his thin cotton T-shirt, and she knew that behind her head he was sipping his drink, could sense him rattling it slightly, crushing an ice cube with his molars.

  “Everyone so smashingly divine,” he said. “Just a lovely gathering of the loveliest people.”

  She took the drink out of his hand and took a sip. Then she turned to find Brian striding across the room, small-eyed and pale.

  He was dressed in a long blue velvet coat with a fake ermine collar. He also wore the necklace made of human teeth. The hair around his face was strung together in damp tendrils that fell into his eyes.

  Keith stepped forward, head slightly bowed. He draped his long arm around Brian’s neck, so that the three of them were gathered for a moment in the same embrace.

  “We’re going up into the mountains,” he said. “You must come with us, man. We’ll catch the sunrise, bring along the Kodaks.”

  Brian grabbed Anita roughly by the shoulder of her jacket. “We have to leave,” he said.

  “Brian, don’t.”

  “I’m not fucking around. Let’s go.”

  The film on the wall showed people in strange costumes drinking from long silver chalices. Then a woman in fishnet s
tockings removed an African mask from her face and started laughing.

  Anita walked away, out of the room.

  “Cool it,” said Keith.

  “Let go of my arm.”

  “If you want to blow it, this is the way, man,” said Keith. “Follow her, and it’s just going to make it a million times worse.”

  Brian looked at him blankly, then watched the door close behind her.

  On the wall, a blond man in red boots was being clawed at by several hands with painted fingernails. He fell to the ground in a swoon that seemed equal parts pleasure and pain.

  “You’re a cunt, Brian,” she said flatly. “I’m taking a sleeping pill and going to bed. You can do whatever you please.”

  She held her palms out by her waist. Then she looked at him impatiently, shaking her head. “I don’t think we can talk right now, do you? Or do you want to just hit me? Is that what you want? Or do you just want to leave?”

  “I want you to think about what you’re doing,” he said, raising his chin. “This is really it.”

  She closed her eyes, disgusted. He couldn’t look at her after that. He heard her sorting through the luggage, rattling the plastic bottles of pills. He was remembering that afternoon in the Jemaa el Fna, the sight of the water sellers, standing there in their tasseled colored hats. He was remembering how in that place where everything was foreign and brightly colored, his life had suddenly seemed benignly distant and unreal.

  She got into bed and covered her face with the pillows, and he stood there in the flickering beige light of the candles, looking at the shapes in the walls.

  In the Jemaa el Fna, the girl stood beside him against a wall in the darkness and counted out the foreign money he offered her in his clumsy opened hands. There were lanterns set up on the tables, kerosene torches lighting up the food stalls. There were young, blank-faced men scanning the crowd, cigarettes cupped in their hands. There were fire-eaters and musicians, and there was a man in a black robe and a black headdress who gesticulated with a pair of painted sticks, his eyes hidden by mirrored sunglasses.

  On the street, Brian raised his chin at the first cabdriver he made eye contact with, his hand on the girl’s shoulder. The drivers were all clustered beside their cars, smoking or eating food from the stalls. In his mind, they had become an admiring audience whose stares he now ignored, helping the girl into the cab.

  He imagined Anita in the souks, picking out the necklace of teeth, Keith at her side, his fingers moving from her back to her shoulder and down the length of her feather boa. Then he saw an image of himself in the Jemaa el Fna with Tom Keylock, his hand lingering at midchest before his scraggly shirt with a dangling, forgotten cigarette.

  There was no point in talking now. He should have known that from the moment in the bathroom, when she’d looked at him and wanted to laugh.

  Back in the elevator of the hotel, his lips were tight with determination, like a priest with some difficult truth to impart. The girl beside him looked straight ahead at the sandalwood screen above the panel of buttons. She wore a striped cape and a headscarf and had a tattoo on her chin like a stylized trident. Everything was luridly bright, as if on display.

  There were no more hooves in the walls. There was no more imaginary man behind him. In the hallway, there was the clarity of rectangular doorways and hotel carpeting beneath artificial light.

  “Anita,” he said.

  She rolled over in bed to see the two figures in the darkness. He switched on the lamp and stood in the yellow light, raising his chin, the necklace of teeth hanging from his neck. He was taking off his long velvet coat, shaking the hair out of his eyes, and she could feel the adrenaline coming off him like a wall.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “A little surprise.”

  He gestured toward the girl, who was standing by the door, leaning her head on her shoulder like a sleepy child.

  “Come on now,” he said. “Who do you think I am? Did you think I was just going to disappear? That I’m just some tosspot with no balls?”

  He snapped his fingers and moved toward the bed. Then he grabbed her arm, just above the biceps. She jerked her body backward and fell sideways, clutching the pillows to her chest.

  “Get up,” he said.

  Diamond-shaped patterns of blue and red bloomed behind her eyes. She could feel the light in the room radiating into her skull like a sun. She dove for the foot of the bed, but he grabbed her by the ankle and she fell onto the floor. She put her hands over her face, covering her eyes, but he was on top of her then.

  On the wall of the room next door, the Hindu gods Shiva and Kali were laughing beneath superimposed flames. It was the second time they had played the film, and no one was watching it anymore. They had ordered food that sat untouched on the dressers and the tables: couscous and ground lamb and a large pie made of phyllo dough covered in cinnamon and powdered sugar.

  Green-faced Shiva brought his hands together in blessing, raising his joined fingertips to his lips, saluting the goddess Kali. Then there was an overlay of orange above a yellow Egyptian eye inside a triangle. Then the single word “End” appeared in gold letters on a saturated black background.

  Brian was on the balcony, looking down at the pool, remembering a dream he’d had in the hospital in France. In the dream, he’d been walking through a kind of rice paddy, a pool full of tall green reeds that he pushed aside with the tips of his fingers. He had waded in up to his chest before he realized that there were hundreds of spotted deer on either side of him, almost submerged, raising their snouts just barely above the surface.

  He could see now that she had been right all along and that none of it had had to matter. He had chosen to make it matter. He could see that clearly, now that it was over and she had no reason not to leave him.

  When he came back inside, the girl was sitting on the bed, her hands clasped over her closed knees, looking at the mess of clothes on the floor without interest or intent. He lit a cigarette and it fell out of his mouth, then all the cigarettes came shaking out of the box and he picked the lit one off the floor and rose up out of his crouch with it smoking between his lips.

  He saw the necklace on the floor, the beads and bits of mirror and human teeth. He saw his long blue coat with the fake ermine collar.

  He sat down on the bed beside the girl and told her to lie down. Her legs were smooth and thin and gleamed as if they’d been rubbed in oil. He lay on top of her and closed his eyes and felt her face and lips against his throat. He held her like a limp thing in his arms and started coughing.

  Anita was in the bathroom, holding a warm wet towel to her face, her chest heaving with some desolate mix of sobbing and mortified laughter. When she closed her eyes, green stars pulsed through her eyes back into her skull, where they swelled to a searing brightness. The pain ran from her shoulder up her neck, then twisted like a screw through the long ridge of her jaw. She sat on the floor and wiped the mucus from her nose. She was thinking that she couldn’t leave the bathroom, she couldn’t let them see her like this.

  On the floor, The Sephiroth was still lying where she’d left it that afternoon. On the cover, the Eye of Horus gazed back at her with an almost gleeful indifference.

  When he woke up, the girl was gone. There was a smell of sandalwood, of incense. There was a bar of light coming from between the curtains and on the nightstand was Anita’s glass half-filled with soda and limes. She wasn’t there. Her clothes and her suitcase were gone.

  It was clear and warm that day. The patio in back of the hotel was a white glare, like light off glass, and the water in the pool was a bright, complicated green. There were only a few guests swimming or sipping drinks on the blue lounge chairs. Beneath the awning, on the patio, Tom Keylock sat by himself with a cup of tea. He was waiting for Brian, who wasn’t answering his door. Brian didn’t know yet that he was the only one who hadn’t checked out of the hotel.

  A short cab ride away, in the medina, the others were in the
blue shop owned by the man named Hassan, filling in the last few hours before their flight home. They had just booked tickets that morning; they had left it to Keylock to break the news to Brian. Marianne was dancing to the Moroccan music on the radio now, her eyes closed, rolling her head, her long blond hair falling almost to her waist. Gold bangles slid down her forearms; the folds of her green sari loosened around her shoulders. She started spinning around faster and faster, unfolding her hands in the air. There was something defiant about how fast she was moving, a rebuke to the others for just sitting there, being calm. Hassan called out, clapping his hands. Robert Fraser started clapping too, raising himself erect. Mick brushed something off his sleeve, incredulous, then annoyed. He looked over at Anita and Keith in their corner, then back at Marianne, and something about her dancing reminded him of Brian: a helpless, unsuccessful gesture. She was the “Naked Girl Found Upstairs,” and she seemed to feel obliged to play out the role now.

  Mick walked out the door, frowning, faking a cough. He saw a newspaper image of himself dancing on the set of a TV studio, his arms dangling from his shoulders like a scarecrow’s arms, a moment taken out of context and so made ridiculous. He didn’t know where to go now that he had separated himself from the group. He strolled with his hands in his pockets, lips set in a posture of grim appraisal, passing the row of whitewashed storefronts.

  He had never liked Anita, had always thought she was poisonous, but now he had to come to terms with what she had done. He saw that in a way she had become the center of the band.

  The walls of the buildings were pasted with hypersexual movie posters and Fanta orange soda ads in Arabic. He tried to imagine that he was amused by the teeming life before him — the men lugging broken stones in a wheelbarrow, the little barefoot boy in a wool shawl smoking a cigarette, the walls stenciled with black letters: DéFENSE D’AFFICHER.