Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  “Here,” he said, reaching for the pot in Anger’s hands. “Let me clean that up.”

  “I don’t think it’s worth either of our time, Bobby. Why don’t you go relax? We don’t have to make a ceremony out of this.”

  Bobby’s eyes were simply confused now. It was as if whatever he was trying to conceal from Anger had at last been concealed from himself. He didn’t know what any of this was about anymore. He was trying to grin knowingly, to acknowledge Anger’s sarcasm, but in his eyes there was also some helpless appeal for sympathy.

  They were calling them the Love Generation now: these kids who didn’t doubt themselves even when they were wrong, who would try anything, who acted as though life was an idea and not a block of time with a beginning and an end. It was impossible to disagree with them — they were what Anger believed in — but he saw that they were lost, and so a part of him wanted them to get into trouble, to find out how serious their rebellion might actually be. Later, when Bobby had disappeared, making off with his camera and almost all of the footage they had shot that year, he would wonder how he could have ever been so credulous about the Haight-Ashbury, about the whole thing of peace and flowers, about whatever he’d thought of as the opposite of thanatomania.

  That evening, some more people came by in a van. The two girls were still there, as was their returned friend, the boy who had left his boots and suitcase in Anger’s bedroom. Bobby was sitting on the floor of his room, playing one of his exotic instruments, a Greek bouzouki that made a thin, percussive plinking sound. The others sat with their bare feet curled beneath them, passing around a skull-shaped pipe, inhaling its smoke with tight-lipped frowns, then turning a silent gaze on the next member of the circle. On the ceiling, a mirror ball — one more gift from Anger to his protégé — threw pinprick stars on their faces and on the frescoed walls. The girls’ bushy hair hid their foreheads and obscured their eyes. There was something darkly sexual to Anger about their hair. It hung not in tresses or curls but in hanks, as raw as the hair on their bodies.

  He stepped over their circle, ignoring them, aware of himself as a stranger in his own apartment. He began rifling through some of the trunks he kept in Bobby’s closet. It occurred to him that even if he found something missing, some proof that Bobby had stolen from him, it wouldn’t matter. Bobby would just lie, it would just be one more fight he couldn’t afford to have. What mattered was the suspicion itself, the feeling that Bobby had been stealing from him all along.

  There in its yellow envelope was the ripped and bloodstained T-shirt that Bruce Byron had sent him in the mail almost a year ago.

  It was wrinkled and dry, as soft as a dustcloth. When he shook out its folds, it gave off a thin dust of dried, rust-colored blood. He held it in his hands, a tight shrewdness in his lips. The tastelessness of what he was about to do now was so extreme that he failed to acknowledge it.

  “This is what happened to the boy in my last film,” he said, turning around, offering it up like an artifact to whoever would look.

  The girl he leaned over reached out her fingers. Beside her, the girl in the lumberjack shirt was looking at him mischievously, as if waiting for the punch line. Anger looked at Bobby, gravely convinced of the threat he was making, but the look on Bobby’s face was blank, his skin gray, his eyes two black pupils that seemed blind.

  There was no way for Anger to play this remark off now as some risqué joke that the others were too tense to laugh at. There was no way to make any sense of the situation at all.

  In the vestibule outside the front door, Anger had to step around a clutter of shoes and boots that had been left there by the upstairs neighbors. It was too cold outside for the clothes he was wearing — a sweater but no jacket — but he kept walking, past the huddled group of kids outside the corner grocery with its dim brown light. He walked all the way to Golden Gate Park before he realized he had forgotten his keys.

  He hurried back at a half jog, then a self-recriminating walk, then a half jog. There was the same group of kids, witnesses now to his absurdity. In the vestibule, he stared at the lock for a long moment and rattled the door, but there was no point, it wasn’t going to yield, and Bobby wasn’t going to let him back in.

  Part Three

  “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

  —WILLIAM BLAKE, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  THE DEVIL, 1968–1969

  ANGER HAD BEEN THERE for close to two hours now, waiting for them to get started. He was watching them from the control room, not filming yet, just standing behind the sound engineers on their stools, dressed in the same flared black pants and purple acrylic shirt he’d been wearing every other day for more than a week. Through the soundproof glass, he could see Mick trying to teach the new song to Brian. Brian was very stoned and Mick seemed almost embarrassed by his perseverance, humoring him, smiling and shrugging his shoulders as he demonstrated the simple beat on his acoustic guitar. “That’s the other one,” he said. “You’re thinking of that other bit.”

  It was disappointing to watch them tonight, in spite of the other times he’d seen them drain the air from a room just by stepping into it. They were struggling — he had always thought the whole point of them was their effortlessness. It was clear that if Mick was going to rouse himself out of mediocrity tonight, he was going to have to be far more ruthless with Brian.

  The studio was like a concrete bunker, with a shabby red carpet on the floor. Styrofoam cups and beer bottles rested on the amplifiers and the soundproof panels, which were orange or brown or green. Finally Keith arrived, coming into the control room, wearing dark sunglasses and a torn white shirt.

  “Keep taping,” he said to the sound engineers. “Just keep it rolling. Let’s not miss it this time.”

  The engineers did not look up from their panel of dials. Keith was looking at Anger now.

  “Did you come over with Mick?” he said.

  “No, they sent me a car.”

  “Right, good. The star treatment.” He turned and looked at the others through the soundproof glass. Brian was looking steadily into Mick’s eyes as he played something on his guitar, the two of them working their way into further and further complications, further from any possible song. “You should ring up Anita sometime,” Keith said. “She gets bored. She keeps asking about you.”

  He walked into the booth then, with his sunglasses still on. As he passed a pair of carpeted sound buffers, he picked up his guitar with such fluid indifference that it might have been a jacket or a set of keys. Without a word, he sat down in the chair next to Mick and started playing, not even looking at Brian. He looked at Mick, nodding his head, taking up the song in a completely different style, as if he’d been there all along, sifting through the variations.

  It was a folk ballad, minor-keyed and slow. It was more English-sounding than American, almost mournful, like a dirge. The words, Anger knew, were a monologue in the voice of the Devil. They spoke of the evils wrought by humanity in the sway of a sly, sophisticated con man who in the end was just a bewildering reflection of themselves.

  Mick looked up at Anger through the panel of soundproof glass. He was always flirting, always putting his hand on Anger’s arm or leaning forward to state his opinion. The way he spoke, at least around Anger, was arch, camp, blasé, as if he were imitating some idea he had of how an heiress might speak. They had met at a party at Robert Fraser’s gallery, all mirrors and pink light, and immediately Mick had shown an interest in the Lucifer film, more interest than Anger would ever have thought possible.

  “I should show you what I get in the mail sometimes,” Mick had said. “Death threats, curses, hexes. That’s the mood now, it’s very dark. You start to wonder what it means. It’s too easy to just write it off as nonsense.”

  His new songs were all Devil songs in one way or another. Perhaps the Lucifer film was something to help him fill out this new role, the role of Mick — the Prince of Darkness, the Angel of L
ight, it wasn’t easy to tell the difference anymore. It was a role Mick had stumbled into, not exactly chosen, but it was also a role that practically nobody else could have even attempted. Brian had been preparing for it his whole life, and you could see it eating him from the inside, the dream that had come true but not in any of the ways he’d expected.

  “It’s just music, but they want us to be revolutionaries now,” Mick had said. “So fine, let’s tear everything down, start over, what we have now makes no sense anyway. When they busted us last year, it was like the whole country was pressing up against you, trying to shove you down into a hole. But then you realized they were just shoving themselves into the hole, that you were just getting bigger and bigger. They’d made you into these myths.”

  It was 1968. The press was calling it the Year of the Barricades. In France, there had almost been a revolution that May, fueled by dadaist slogans and students throwing stones. It was not hard to see the band as emblematic of the desire you could feel all around you now, not for peace and love, but for something militant, perhaps chaos for the sake of chaos.

  The drummer was practicing drumrolls in his corner. Then he leaned back his head and shook it, loosening up the muscles in his neck, his face as blankly patient as a horse’s. Brian was beckoning to Keith from across the length of the room now, spreading his opened hands for a cigarette. He waited for Keith to throw him the pack, then he waited even longer before Keith noticed him again, then he dropped the lighter when Keith finally threw it to him and he stood for a long moment looking at the floor.

  It would take them three nights to put the song into its finished form. In those three nights, it would change from a folk song to a psychedelic song to a soul song, and then emerge as something raw and percussive, like the voodoo music of Haiti. It would end up the exact opposite of a mournful dirge or an English folk song. It would start with a yelp, a monkey screech, and a flat patter of bongos, a resonant thud of conga drums, a locust-like hiss of maracas. It would become a wild celebration of everything it had started out lamenting.

  But for now it was just a song with three chords for the verse, one more for the chorus, and they couldn’t even play it through. They were lost, as tentative as beginners. The bass player sat absolutely still on a straight-backed chair, dressed in a red velour outfit with matching red boots, smoking a cigarette he held with the straightened tips of his first two fingers. Brian sat inside an enclosure of soundproof panels, his eyes half-closed. He seemed to be propping himself up by gripping the strings of his guitar, not so much an instrument as a beautifully painted wooden object he cradled half-consciously in his lap.

  For the next four hours, as far as Anger could tell, there was not a single joke or a word of casual conversation. They kept Brian off to the side — silent, obedient, lost. They all knew not to look at him, though every time they turned around they must have seen him.

  It was almost five AM when the driver dropped Anger back at his flat. It was a small, badly heated set of rooms in Notting Hill Gate, a slum neighborhood where he and a few hippies were the only whites. He’d been careful not to let the band see it very often or for very long. A boy he’d met recently, Will Tennet, had helped him decorate it with stills from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and some other odd touches — a jeweled box, a green glass toad — that gave it the usual occult ambience, but the fact that he was gay, that he lived with boys, was something the band never seemed fully to acknowledge. They were drawn by something else, an aura they maybe half believed in, maybe wanted to believe in: the occult filmmaker in his vaguely dangerous world.

  Will had left a note: “Gone to Kilburn. Don’t expect me.” Anger put his things down and looked at the half-lit room: the couch, the afghan, the coffee table with its battered, tasseled lamp. There was a strange, penitential feeling, the particular emptiness of being alone after four in the morning. An unexpected sight was waiting for him on the table, a package wrapped in brown paper. Inside he found a bird’s nest of shredded newsprint and another note: “Dear Kenneth, I saw this book of pictures and I thought of you. Anita.”

  It was a book of black-and-white pictures of musclemen in dark briefs, lifting chairs or squatting before a mirror with rigid thighs. Some of them even featured men in sailor caps, as in his film Fireworks. He had no idea where Anita would have found such a book or how she would have known it had such significance for him. It made him feel fraudulent for some reason. He didn’t know if she was trying to mock him, or if she had left it there with some friendly anticipation of his nostalgia.

  In the tiny bathroom, the water was so cold that his fingers started to go numb beneath the tap. He dabbed some of it on his face, his hands shaking. He looked in the mirror and saw that one of his eyes was opened slightly more than the other. His lips stretched across his mouth like two strips of bloodless rubber. He forced himself to stare at it until it wasn’t a face at all but just an image, something gray made out of stone.

  He switched on the TV, knowing that there would be nothing on at this hour but the static of dormant channels. There was only the one light on in the doorway, and it was hypnotic with the TV on, the sound turned off, a field of swarming particles that never coalesced into any shape. The worry had become a repetitive fugue now, a scrim between himself and the things in front of him. It had become a narrowing tunnel of fear. He had had a nervous breakdown last year, after Bobby had disappeared. For almost a month, he had lain in bed, sleeping or just lying there when he couldn’t sleep, cocooned like a child in the warmth of his sheets. The walls of the Haight room were purplish and muddled. Everything became the same: the empty apartment, the stolen Lucifer film, the mindless antagonism of his checkbook. He’d had no money, no film, no reason to believe there would ever be a film, not even a job history or a set of skills he might use to start some other, more predictable way of life. He would see Bobby in his leather overcoat, standing in front of the city’s powerhouse, the brightly colored cogs behind him, the orange lenses of his sunglasses. He knew that Bobby was never coming back, but the wish, or the fear, had rooted itself so deeply in his mind that it became a kind of false memory, disorienting when he realized all over again that it hadn’t happened.

  It was still with him now, the pendulum of embarrassed recollection and the fear that he was out of control. He thought of being in the studio with the band and it was hard to believe that it had really happened. The walls of the room before him were still in place, but everything was made transient by the blue light from the TV.

  He thought of Bruce Byron, all those afternoons of filming him in his tiny apartment, lying in bed in front of what he’d called the “idiot box.” Everyone does it differently. I want to see how you do it. He’d heard that Byron was driving a cab in New York now, every inch of its interior covered with pictures of James Dean and Marlon Brando and stills of his own face from Scorpio Rising. He was still showing up at the screenings, still dressed in biker clothes. The film had somehow become his life: a collage assembled by a total stranger who had included him in it almost by accident. But that was how life in the world could be sometimes. Sometimes you were the stranger, sometimes you were Bruce Byron. Who would have thought that it would happen to him, that at his age, forty-one, the same boy, Bobby, would still be appearing almost nightly in his dreams?

  Notice how comfortable they appear in their chains, so loose around their wrists that they could free themselves at any time if they so desired.

  He went to bed, but as soon as he had drawn the curtains, the phone rang. On the other end of the line was the kind of sound that comes out of a doll when you pull the string on its back, a recording of a man’s boisterous laughter.

  “Hello,” he said.

  It was the laugh of a villain in a superhero comic.

  “Hello.”

  There was no answer. There was the pop and then the sudden staticky boom of a TV. Then whoever it was hung up, the sound of the dial tone as dreamlike and accusatory as the sound of the doll’s t
oy laughter.

  “We’re going on tour,” said Mick. “That’s what Keith is trying to say. This summer we’re going back to America.”

  They’d driven out to Brian’s new house, the former residence of A. A. Milne, the children’s writer. Statues of Pooh Bear and Christopher Robin stood in an informal garden beyond the pool. Brian wore a cape that looked more like a tapestry, flowers in a tangled design. One of the things they would remember was that he was completely sober that afternoon.

  “It’s nothing surprising,” he said. “I mean, I haven’t been a part of it in a long time.”

  Keith blew out a cloud of smoke. “It’s not necessarily a permanent thing,” he said. “It’s just that right now, fuck, you’re in no condition. It’s three months on the road.”

  Brian nodded, bowing his head. “Such a serious business,” he said. “I never would have thought it would go like this. Or what I should say, I never thought it would be so much like working at a firm.”

  Mick uncrossed his legs. “You’ve been fucking about for the last five years. Been getting paid pretty well while doing it.”

  “You always had it in for me. Why is that?”

  “The fuck I did, Brian.”

  “No, I’m not going to fight with you. I understand that it’s over. I don’t have much interest anymore in being in a rock group.”

  Keith stood up, twisting a little, looking down at his boots. “All right, then,” he said. “Well, maybe that’s that.”

  “You going to shake my hand?” said Brian.

  “Why don’t we leave it?”

  Mick leaned forward in his chair. “We’ll have the press release tomorrow. Just a simple statement, nothing big.”