Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  An hour later, they were in Anger’s room — the only room in the apartment resembling a common room — where they sat on the couch and shared a joint. Through the leaded windows, the leaves on the trees were a shiny green, sagging from their branches. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still gray, making every color stand out like something permanent.

  “You’re not telling me what really happened,” said Anger.

  Bobby shook his head in a bored way, his eyes closed. Anger watched the smoke come out of his nostrils.

  “Some things went wrong,” he finally said. “On the way to L.A., it didn’t happen the way I thought it would. There are people — some people don’t care about themselves. So then they can’t care about anything. That’s the way it happens sometimes.”

  “You never made it to L.A.”

  Bobby wiped the corners of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “That’s all I can say,” he said. “I’ll leave, if you want me to leave.”

  There was a newspaper on the floor. It brought word of Vietnam — Saigon, Haiphong, Da Nang — the names by now somehow remote without being exotic. Anger looked at the words without quite seeing them, and for some reason he thought of Bobby’s band, the tuneless, naively serious band that he thought was going to make him a star. He thought of the foolish scheme — a drug deal, he supposed — that had failed to facilitate that plan.

  He brought his fingers to Bobby’s still-damp hair. He had touched him like this before, while filming, but there was no camera now, and Bobby went still, calibrating his response. He didn’t stand up or push Anger away, but only sat there with an abstracted expression in his eyes, as if this were happening to someone else.

  “You’re having a strange day,” said Anger.

  “Everything is strange.”

  “No, not everything is strange. Some things are ordinary.”

  When he reached for Bobby’s thigh, Bobby didn’t move, he just looked down at the hand, his lips parted slightly. Anger loomed over him for a moment, watching, then he shifted himself onto the floor. Bobby’s eyes were fixed on his now, his forgotten joint still burning between his thumb and forefinger. Then he looked down at Anger’s hand, his Adam’s apple shifting drily in his throat.

  Bobby’s damp skin smelled faintly, oddly, like kerosene. Anger pressed his thumbs to where his abdomen met his hips, feeling it expand and contract with his breaths. He had unzipped Bobby’s pants, but it was Bobby, not Anger, who had pushed them farther down over his knees. After he came, he kept his eyes closed, breathing heavily through his nostrils. His face was peaceful then, as if in sleep, except at the corner of his mouth, where there was the faintest shadow of a grimace.

  “I just think you should know,” Bobby said. “I’m not like that.”

  “You’re not like that.”

  “You know . . . I’m not that way. I don’t mind it sometimes, if it’s there. I’m not uptight. But it’s no big deal either way.”

  Bobby moved into the extra bedroom that week. Anger bought him a mattress and a blanket and some pillows, and he stacked the rest of the boxes as well as he could in the closet. He bought Bobby groceries: white bread, potato chips, beer. It happened gradually, without much discussion. The mention of all these practicalities was not something either of them believed in.

  Late at night, through the half-opened door, he would sometimes see Bobby on the floor of his new room, smoking pot with his friends, listening to music or playing music on their guitars. They would lean their heads back toward the ceiling in neutral contemplation, as if the world had just been created for their benign explorations. There would be girlfriends, an endless succession, in jeans or flowered skirts, long hair falling into their eyes. One or two of them would always end up in Bobby’s bed by the end of the night, lying beside him in the dim light of a few candles, Bobby with one of Anger’s effects in his hands — a toy motorcycle, a deck of tarot cards — anything he could absently study while the girls waited and watched.

  Anger never felt that he was being taken advantage of. He saw their arrangement through Bobby’s eyes: the sense of justice that would come from having his own room in the apartment, a private place to take his girlfriends, a sink in which to leave his dirty dishes. When Anger had his own guests over — filmmakers, artists, theater people — there was a cachet in having so many young people around. It made him feel like Bobby’s accomplice, younger than he really was, young enough to be Bobby himself.

  He had only the vaguest idea of what the film they were making was actually going to consist of. So far, he was just filming Bobby’s life: playing his guitar, smoking a joint, standing in front of the house where they had painted the door purple and scrawled the words THY WILL BE DONE! What happened between them, when the day’s filming was over and there were no more guests around, was a secret that Bobby seemed to keep even from himself. His ambivalence — his obstinate, closed eyes — never resolved into a refusal or an invitation. He had threatened to kill Anger if he ever told anyone.

  If you took away the nails and the cross, then the god would be only a naked boy, extending his arms in calm recognition. Removed from his post, he would be free to go where you’d always wanted to follow, stepping down into that fiery zone where there was no meaning for words like “self” and “other,” “reality” and “dream,” “desire” and “fear.” Lucifer, the morning star. His paleness would cast a green reflection in the night sky. In the secret darkness, he would be as glad as you were to see that the stupid pretense of his chastity had finally come to an end. But he could be as distant and elusive as any other god. Like his counterpart, the god on the cross, he came to bring not peace but a sword.

  “That’s how the cable cars work,” Anger explained one afternoon that fall, pointing out three enormous cogs connected to chains and engines, the city’s powerhouse. Bobby was standing in front of him in a brown leather overcoat, looking at the cogs, painted bright green, bright red, and bright yellow. He couldn’t help moving toward them — Anger could see from the way he’d forgotten his posture that he had never considered the cable cars, or the electric current that pulled them, or anything else about the city’s mysterious infrastructure.

  He turned around then, hands in his front pockets so that his coat hung behind him like a cape. “I forgot to tell you,” he said. “There was a phone call the other night. I forget his name.”

  Anger stared at him.

  “The one who helped you direct the last film,” Bobby said. “In New York.”

  Anger bowed his head, then raised it abjectly at the sky. He’d been waiting for a phone call from a film society in Germany, a potential source of funding, but now he knew who had called.

  “Bruce Byron,” he said. “Was that his name?”

  “That’s right. Bruce Byron. He wanted to talk to you about the next film. He said he has a new idea. Something about motorcycles.” He was looking at Anger through the orange lenses of his sunglasses, something almost accusatory in his gaze, as if he knew more about Bruce Byron than he was letting on. He seemed to be always surprising Anger with some disappointing news that he only pretended to not know was disappointing.

  “I’m not speaking to him,” Anger said.

  “You’re not speaking to him.”

  “No, I’m serious. If he wants something, he can call my lawyer.”

  Bobby nodded to himself, his head bowed. Lawyers — Anger could tell that that’s what he was thinking. They were absurd to him in the same way that Anger was absurd.

  When they got home that afternoon, there was more news of Vietnam. The Vietcong had shelled Saigon: they were growing stronger, not weaker, and the war had spread from the jungle villages to the capital city. It was no longer something you could even pretend to ignore. It was, Anger realized, another reason for someone like Bobby to keep out of sight, to have no fixed address.

  That night, they stayed up talking. Bobby was looking at the images on the bedroom walls, the gods and occult signs: the pentacle,
the zodiac, the sephiroth with its Hebrew letters designating each of the ten emanations of God. Anger offered him a few explanations, casual and brief, but would not make it clear what was a game to him and what was serious. “You don’t need to know all that,” he said.

  Bobby turned.

  “You already know about it in some ways,” said Anger. “This is just part of the game.”

  “What game?”

  “Thinking that you don’t know what I’m talking about. That we have less in common than we do.” He sat down in a chair by the window and looked down at the floor. “I don’t want to talk about this,” he said. “It’s not going to be helpful. But I think you feel the same way. You’re here for yourself, not for me. I understand that. That’s one of the things we have in common.”

  They smoked a joint. He watched Bobby go thoughtful and quiet, reclining in his chair, his fingertips touching, as the angular music made dim shapes in the air. He told Bobby a little bit about Bruce Byron then. He said that Bruce Byron was a kind of Frankenstein’s monster he had created by filming him in bad faith. He said that filmmaking could have real consequences, that it was more than just a game, that it could be like an act of aggression if director and actor didn’t understand each other deeply. He said that understanding each other had nothing to do with words, that words could be a hindrance to knowing another person. He said that New York had been a dead city and a dead culture and that was why he had come west, in search of fresh ideas. He didn’t mention the tin shed he’d lived in on the Gances’ roof, or the mix of arousal and scorn he’d felt in the presence of Bruce Byron’s body. He didn’t mention that on the night of Byron’s phone call he’d been in a dark basement off Castro Street, prostrating himself on the floor for five anonymous men. He knew that Bobby — this boy he’d cast as Lucifer — would see it only as an image of degradation. He didn’t try to explain how it had been transcendent in its brutality, how for a few moments it had reconfigured the surface of everything around him. Instead, he said that the point of art, like magick, was to undercut the rational mind, to remind us of how difficult it was to know what was real and what had merely been created to appear real.

  He went into the kitchen and made some tea, bringing it back in two stained cups that he carried on a plate. As a way of changing the subject, he took out some photographs of Paris. He talked about his time there, about the artists he’d known. He talked about his former mentor, Jean Cocteau (dropping another name that Bobby had never heard), letting it all come gushing out, all that feminine talk.

  Sometimes Byron would call, usually in the middle of the night, usually without saying a word. Anger would pick up the receiver to stop it ringing — Byron could wait for several minutes — and hear nothing but the faint static that conjured the distance between them, the miles of wire tense and responsive in the darkness.

  He would see Byron’s face, unshaven, somehow off-kilter behind the large green sunglasses he had made him wear for all those bedroom scenes. 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.

  In the bathroom, he would find Bobby’s jeans lying in a pile by the toilet. Through the cracked door of the extra bedroom, he would see the bare shoulders of the girl who moved slowly above him in the dark.

  “I don’t really see where this is going,” Bobby said.

  He was sitting naked on a wooden crate, cross-legged, raising his arms up in the darkness. With Anger’s watching presence invisible behind the camera — with the music on, the jagged meanderings of Sun Ra — Bobby had been stoned enough to enter into the role, aroused by his own nakedness, holding the pose, but now the moment was over and he was ashamed.

  “The band is playing tomorrow,” he said, getting down off the crate. “Light show, everything. You could film that, help us out for once.”

  Anger looked down at the camera. “I can’t always film the band, Bobby. You know that. It’s expensive.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not going to talk about this anymore.”

  “But that’s what it always comes down to, isn’t it? Money.”

  “I don’t know what you think that means. Like I’m trying to rip you off or something.”

  “There’s no script, no anything.”

  “This is the script.”

  “I’m making a bunch of gestures in front of a camera.”

  “Why are you getting angry?”

  “I’m just saying who has the money? That’s all I’m saying.”

  He bent over to pull his pants on, clumsy on one foot, then the other. The strobe light was still on. It made everything hysterical, exaggerated, prolonged.

  “I don’t have any money,” said Anger. “That’s the truth. It won’t change anything, getting angry.”

  “I’m not getting angry. You’re always making more out of this than there is. The truth is I really don’t give a shit anymore.”

  That December, Anger went on a business trip to New York. Scorpio Rising was having an almost permanent run there. He was going to meet an art dealer uptown, Robert Fraser, from London, who had sold some prints of Scorpio and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome to a few of his private clients. Among them was a famous rock band. Anger had seen them before, but he had never paid much attention. While he was in New York that week, he saw a clip of them on TV. They were playing a song about a young man’s fantasies of blackness, a throbbing, hypnotic song with an Arabic melody played at first on an Indian sitar. It was more aggressive than any pop song Anger had ever heard. Like his own work, it was dark, but also shot through with exotic colors that had as little to do with darkness as a stained-glass window.

  It came first from the blond one, Brian, who sat cross-legged on a white disk suspended onstage in purple-tinged darkness. He was the one playing the sitar, dressed in white Indian pajamas, his facial expression switching from a studied aloofness to an embarrassingly complicit, head-nodding smile. He looked very stoned. He looked alternately glad to be a part of the band on its latest televised appearance and less convincingly intent on the music, always on the verge of breaking into laughter.

  The singer, Mick, wore a green military jacket with epaulets and a brass star. It was a hint of fascism that, along with his purple mascara and silk tie, made him look uncannily like a character in one of Anger’s own films. He moved and leered like an epileptic, contorting his arms and fixing the audience with a judgmental stare. His hair was cropped short on top and longer in the back — an awkward haircut, reminiscent of prison — and when he pointed at the crowd, the glare in his eyes was like the glare of two chips of mirror.

  At his side, the guitar player, Keith, was like his henchman, dressed all in black, with a black guitar, looking at his leader with open, self-conscious joy.

  There was nothing about the band that wasn’t outwardly camp, but somehow they’d reversed the meaning of it all so that they looked more aggressively, even violently, straight than they would have if they were dressed in business suits. They made Anger feel oddly embarrassed for Bobby, who would never have dreamed of such a simple, compressed, and utterly sexual song.

  When he got back to San Francisco, Bobby wasn’t home and the apartment was a shambles. There were bedrolls and piles of clothes in both bedrooms, even in Anger’s, where someone had left a pair of hiking boots and a suitcase and a shopping bag full of groceries. There were dirty plates left not just in the kitchen but on the floor of Bobby’s bedroom and on the sheets of his unmade bed. The Sephiroth was lying there on the floor, its pages held open by metal clips. Someone had been tracing some of its diagrams. There were sheets of these copies on the floor, some of them colored in with pencil, some of them lettered with the name of Bobby’s band. From where he stood, Anger could not read the legend beneath the diagram, but he knew what it said: “Look into the sightless Eye of the Moon and see what Light glows there. There is no Life without Death. You have been sleepwalking. Now go back to bed
and dream of the Sun.”

  In the kitchen, on the stove, there was a pot of ruined noodles, charred black at the center where they were stuck in a resinous clump to the aluminum surface. Everything smelled like American cheese and smoke.

  He took The Sephiroth back to his bedroom and returned it to its shelf. That was when he noticed that although the other books there were neatly arrayed, they were not in their proper order. There was something particularly irritating about this, just as there was something irritating about the way someone had pushed his boots and suitcase into one corner of the room, as if this tiny effort at neatness could make the general intrusion any less offensive.

  He took a more careful look at the bookshelves. It was only now that it occurred to him that something had been stolen. Why had all the books been taken down, and why had they been rearranged? Perhaps because whoever did it knew that Anger would never remember everything that was supposed to be there.

  Bobby came back at around seven o’clock, carrying his guitar case. The two girls he brought with him were unusually ragged. One of them wore a lumberjack shirt over a stiff, synthetic dress. The other was freckled and auburn-haired, her eyelashes very fair, almost invisible, so that her face looked stripped or as if it had recovered from a mild burn. All three of them were so stoned that their cheeks were stiff and their eyes swollen, their gestures a parody of three people acting surprised, anticipating a greeting.

  “I thought you were coming back tomorrow,” Bobby said.

  Anger was bent over the kitchen trash, scraping at the pot of burnt noodles. “I came back today,” he said.

  “Shit.”

  “What’s been going on?”

  “Shit. I thought you were coming back tomorrow. We were going to clean everything up tonight.”

  Something about his stoned eyes revealed several shifting layers of falseness. They would change in an instant from rational self-assurance to befuddlement, blankness, and then become for an even briefer moment panicky, apologetic, as if they could read Anger’s suspicions, but only for an instant before they resumed their rational self-assurance.