Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  Keith turned. “Come on.”

  “What,” said Mick.

  “Just cool it.”

  Brian stood up. “I’ll be seeing you around. Is that it?”

  Keith cocked his head a little to one side. “You know, you pushed me every step of the way. You’re still pushing now.”

  There was a crew of workers that summer renovating Brian’s house. They were restoring beams, sanding down floors, rebuilding staircases, glazing windows. It was an unusual job, Brian an unusual client. Any small resentment would have been intensified by the fact that the men doing the work would have been unable to respect him. Sometimes he would be lucid around them, sometimes he would be out of his head. Sometimes he would treat them with a lisping courtesy, and sometimes he would walk by without saying a word, or he would criticize some detail of their work. He was a pop star with a series of Scandinavian models for girlfriends. They were tradesmen who saw a boy in his twenties with a Rolls-Royce in the driveway. They double-billed him for their supplies. Even the caretaker double-ordered groceries and liquor and kept the second batch for himself.

  One night there was a party. Brian was swimming, the latest girlfriend was swimming. Everyone had been drinking, taking pills, diving off the low board into the blue-lit pool. The workers were there — they were swimming too, in borrowed trunks. One of them splashed water in Brian’s face. He didn’t retaliate. Perhaps that was the reason it didn’t stop, because he just wiped his eyes and shook his head a few times. Someone dunked him underwater a few minutes later. After that, there was a lot of splashing. The girlfriend turned and saw it from the porch: a thrashing in the water, the swirling blue surface broken at one end. She turned and continued toward the house, looking for cigarettes. When she came back out, they were all standing around the pool except for Brian, who at first looked like just a shadow beneath the surface of the water.

  No one ever said what happened. He was a strong swimmer, there were plenty of people there with him. Either they drowned him or they let him drown.

  THE HANGED MAN, 1969

  IT WAS JULY 5. In the center of London, in Hyde Park, five hundred thousand people were waiting for the band to arrive in his honor. The past year had already been full of vivid catastrophes: the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Soviet invasion of Prague, half a million troops in Vietnam, the Cuyahoga River going up in flames. Now Brian had died, and half a million people were spread out from a large black stage with towers of black scaffolding to make a dense rectangle of tiny flesh-colored blips, mostly faces and hair. They wore the somber, utilitarian clothes of that year: jeans, work boots, leather sandals, sunglasses. They were a peaceful crowd, but there was a familiar playfulness that was missing. It was a warm day and some of the men had taken off their shirts, but there were very few flowers or beads or Indian-style pajamas. They were thoughtful, unsmiling, squinting in the sunlight, shading themselves with sheets of newspaper. There was no visible grass in the park, only people and trees, cut through at the center by the silver water of the Serpentine.

  You wanted to be there, but once you saw how many people were there you began to feel a little strange about being a part of something so ambiguous. It was hard to know what to feel — a beautiful day in July, very sunny, the trees in full leaf. It made it worse somehow that Brian had died in such a stupid way. You wondered, were you there to celebrate or to mourn or what? And what were you celebrating or mourning?

  No one knew what to make of the set of iron barricades that had been set up about fifteen yards from the stage. It enclosed the press seats and the seats for special guests and friends of the band. Patrolling these barriers was a squad of two dozen young men in studded leather jackets and leather gestapo caps, members of the London chapter of the Hells Angels. Their motorcycles were lined up on the sides of the stage, all the front wheels turned to the same angle. They never stopped scanning the seated crowd, never stopped convening with one another in little groups. The crowd never stopped pretending that they weren’t there.

  From a tower of scaffolding to the left of the stage, Anger was filming it all on his Kodak Cine Special camera, a gaunt man in black pants, hair wafting in the breeze. He thought that at least a few of the fans would get up and dance to the music on the P.A., even climb up for a quick frolic on the empty black stage, but none of them did. There was the hush and awe of hierarchy. It occurred to him that his time with the band would be in jeopardy now, that they would have less and less time for people like him. After today, their circle would just get narrower and narrower. They would be as remote as pharaohs or Hollywood stars. He saw that the Hells Angels were more than just a defensive force, they were also the embodiment of some punitive urge the crowd had, an urge to atone.

  Brian Jones, 27, was found dead in his swimming pool Thursday, apparently the result of drug and alcohol intoxication. A spokesman for the band says that they have decided to carry through with their plans to host the free concert this afternoon in Hyde Park as a tribute to his memory. Jones was the band’s founding member. Last month, after a series of drugs arrests, he announced that he was leaving the group over musical differences.

  He had tried not to push too hard, staying in the background, not a participant but an onlooker. An invisible nimbus seemed to surround them sometimes, a kind of electrical field that made them hyperrealistic, unapproachable. They were stars — lights that were out of reach — and he had tried to understand this. But it had been six years since he’d made a new film. He could feel it like a pressure in his lungs, the images impacted, jostled together, superimposed. The smallest effort on their parts would make all the difference.

  The crowd before him was religiously large, a kind of death cult in the new Aquarian style. It had little chance of being much else in these years of violence, riots, assassinations, Vietnam. A rock star drowned in his swimming pool. A gunman appeared in a crowd to murder a president, a senator, Martin Luther King, and in the process somehow became infused with the romance of the person he’d killed. It was the logic of thanatomania, not a sequence of cause and effect but an underlying current, a unifying style. With each death, the mystery of death took on more and more glamour, the romance making the human world feel less and less bound to the earth.

  He remembered a dream Anita had told him about just a few months ago, at Keith’s country house. In the dream, she was in the desert in California, walking on the sand beneath a cloudless blue sky, when suddenly she’d lost her sense of hearing. There was no sound. She knew then — though there was no mushroom cloud, none of the obvious signs — that the world had ended. At that same instant, hundreds of dragonflies appeared in the air, all of them flying in the same direction. Their bodies seemed to be made of glass, a glistening blue, as if she could see the sky through their transparent shells.

  “It went on for a long time,” she said. “It was like if I kept walking, everyone might still be where they were supposed to be and we’d all just go back to the way we were before. Only I knew it wasn’t true. I knew everything had changed. There was just this endless little moment where I didn’t have to face what had really happened yet.”

  Anger had looked down at his hands, thinking even then that in some way the dream was about Brian. The three of them were sitting on some Moroccan carpets spread out on the grass, and when he looked back up, the different planes of Anita’s and Keith’s faces were flashing orange or black in the lantern light like fun-house ghouls.

  “A dream of heaven,” he’d said, meaning timelessness, uncertainty, unknowing. But Anita had looked down at her hand on her knee, not liking the word.

  “It wasn’t like that,” she said. “It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever thought about before. It was strange. I don’t know where something like that comes from.”

  Keith brought his dangled hand to the collar of her leather coat. She looked up at Anger, her face angular and lean, a face out of Dürer. Then Keith leaned forward slightly, offering him the end of a joi
nt.

  “People always think the world is coming to an end,” Keith said. “But it never does. They wish it would end sometimes because they can’t control it. But you never control it. All you can do is react.”

  They were crammed into an armored car, a dark container with bench seats that inched its way up the narrow park road through the crowd. Their journey from the Londonderry Hotel to the stage in Hyde Park was less than a quarter of a mile, but it would take them almost forty-five minutes. Their new guitarist, also named Mick — Little Mick — was staring down at the floor as the van shunted from side to side, jostling his body. He was nineteen years old, a wiry-haired boy in a kind of swashbuckler’s shirt with puffy sleeves and a set of crossed laces at the collar. He had been in the band for less than three weeks and had never played with them anywhere but in Keith’s basement.

  The G up high, then C, down to E b, C, A b, double bar for the suspended fourth, watch the third finger. Shuffle on C, suspended on the F, down to C, B b, G, chorus.

  Across from him, Keith sat with his head slumped over on his shoulder, his eyes half-closed. He hadn’t been to bed in two days — no rehearsals, just a long binge that still hadn’t stopped. He remembered Anita passing him the joint after they’d taken in the news about Brian, then the long drive to London, dropping her at the flat in Chelsea, then two days later — this morning — walking across this same park a little after five o’clock. He wasn’t going to stop. He didn’t know if he was strong enough to survive the kind of life he was going to try to survive, but it was who he was. Every day he was more certain of that. Anita was eight and a half months pregnant with their child. She was out there somewhere in the crowd now with Marianne, the two of them sitting in the sun, getting high. A part of him was distracted, angry, as if Brian were still alive. The band had not played in front of a live audience in three years, and now Brian had just died, making it even harder.

  Mick was sitting with his hands in his lap and looking straight ahead at nothing. He had a summer cold. His throat was so sore that he could hardly speak, much less sing, but he was purposeful in the way of someone who knew he couldn’t fail. He was going to walk onstage in front of half a million people, and to do this was like walking onstage naked. It was an act of surrender that had to look and feel like an act of conquest. His sign was Leo, the sign of Strength in the tarot deck. Its glyph looked like an omega, the sign of infinity, or of the apocalypse, depending on whom you asked. The band’s support staff had a code name for today’s events. They were calling it the Battle of the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

  Memories of the riots outside the Democratic convention in Chicago, the riots in Paris, the riots in Berkeley. The crowd was getting high and doing crossword puzzles, and a few of them were playing guitars, and they didn’t know what to feel about the sight of the armored van moving up the path through the crowd. Its way was cleared by six motorcyclists in spiked helmets and leather jackets, an imperial guard armed with beer cans and knives. The words “peace” and “love” had been used so many times by now that they meant almost anything, including their opposites. It was what gave the words their charge. It was why some of the men in the crowd were wearing olive drab fatigue jackets, like GIs in Vietnam.

  Tom Keylock announced over the P.A.: “Ladies and gentlemen, the world’s greatest rock-and-roll band.”

  A subdued kind of cheering started. They whistled and shouted encouragement and then they stood up to take in the view and then the applause thickened into a diffuse cloud of noise.

  Anita stood up with them. Her eyes closed and her smile loosened into something dreamy and approving as Marianne pulled her back gradually into her arms, all four of their hands on her pregnant belly. Anita wore black kohl on her eyes and a purple gypsy dress and a crown of Moroccan coins around her straw-colored hair. Apart from her belly, she hardly looked pregnant at all. As Anger filmed her, he was struck once again by how much she looked like Brian.

  They were the world’s greatest rock-and-roll band. Even a year ago, no one would have made such a claim, but now it seemed obvious. They had a backlog of more than two hundred songs. Country songs, blues songs, rock-and-roll songs. Mick and Keith didn’t know where they came from, only that the flow had been unstoppable in the last year or so. During that time, Keith had taught himself to play the guitar in several different tunings, the notes all in different places on the fretboard, moving from one accident to the next, everything working. They’d written riot songs, war songs, murder songs, drug songs, and these had turned out to be exactly the songs people wanted to hear. It was toilet music, dirt music, the music of 1969.

  From his place on the scaffolding, Anger considered stopping the film. Mick had come onstage alone, and he looked all wrong — he looked lost. His long hair fell into his eyes like a sheepdog’s and he wore a gauzy white gown and black lipstick. He had a large, solemn-looking book in his hand, possibly the Bible, and there was something priestly about him as he tried to quiet down the crowd.

  “Now listen,” he said. “Cool it for a moment.”

  Behind him, there was a large cardboard cutout of Brian, standing in the sunlight like a figure on the wall of a temple. He wore a fur coat and half a dozen brightly colored scarves, making the Hindu greeting of two palms pressed together before his chest.

  Mick read something archaic and strange. He read it in a prim, unconvincing voice that made it sound as if he didn’t know or even care what the words meant.

  The One remains, the many change and pass;

  Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

  Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

  Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

  Until Death tramples it to fragments. — Die,

  If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

  Follow where all is fled! — Rome’s azure sky,

  Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak

  The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

  To the crowd, it maybe sounded like Shakespeare. Anger recognized it as Shelley’s Adonais. But what did Mick mean when he ordered them all to die? Did he mean that Brian had found some “white radiance of Eternity,” or did he mean nothing at all? Mick was the Prince of Darkness or the Angel of Light. It was difficult to say why he was so hard to stop looking at.

  Keith sniffed from his canister, once for each nostril, then let the silver straw dangle down from the chain he wore around his neck. He picked up his guitar and slung it over his back as the crew flung open the doors of two large boxes at the front of the stage. They were full of butterflies — moths — and they flickered for a few moments in a daze above the crowd, half-suffocated, then wafted down like white confetti on the massed heads and the black-painted stage.

  The Hells Angels leaned back against the iron barricades, legs crossed, passing each other beers. The band tuned its guitars. The cardboard cutout of Brian smiled unchangingly at the crowd, a billboard advertisement for a children’s play about a magic prince.

  It started with a flat, basic drumbeat, so slow that the song felt as though it was about to collapse before it even started. Mick was trying to move in time, a half jog, half chicken walk, wading through thick sludge. He’d taken off his white gown and was wearing tight cotton pants and a sleeveless mauve T-shirt. Keith didn’t look at him. His guitar part was one chord, so useless that he didn’t even face the crowd but stared down at his strings, as if waiting for something better to happen. Mick stared at him: it was too slow. He was almost ready to give up and start over. He clapped his hands and waved his head from one side to the other, a rueful smile on his face, but then Keith finally got to the first riff, a major-key country riff slowed down to one-quarter speed. He mangled a few double-stops in the middle, but now it started to make sense. The point of the song was its big gaping holes, the ragged dead spaces between the sounds. It was always about to break down, a half step behind. The drums leveled out at the same slack pace. Keith lean
ed back, head nodding, then stepped forward on one long leg, a black-haired ghost in bullfighter’s pants, a crescent moon dangling from his ear.

  It was the band’s new sound. Mick put his hands in his hair and pouted and stood on his tiptoes. For a moment, he looked like a street drunk yelling denunciations at strangers. His first words were incomprehensible, but it didn’t matter. They were all looking at him now. He scowled and pointed his finger, then mouthed a kiss: a dictator for half a second, then a dancer out of Swan Lake.

  It was a series of vibrations amplified through electric circuits, a current of sound the crowd could feel on the skin beneath their hair, in the cavities of their chests, in their rectums and their groins. It registered in their bodies, in the pulse of the blood, but also in their minds, the part that was always changing, as senseless and illogical as a dream. The band was making sounds, the sounds were coming from the stage, but they were no longer themselves, the people in the crowd were no longer themselves, no one was even thinking about it anymore. They might be a nobody from Romford with the wrong kind of accent, or a mechanic’s son with ruined teeth, or they might think all the time about what people had and what they were missing out on, but nobody was thinking about any of that while they were in its grasp. It was basic, energy and sound, life intensified for a few moments, its chaos made plain, the self slipping outside the body, joined in sound to other bodies. It was a feeling everyone had always craved, had always been warned about, a connection to something like the deeper self that used to be called the soul.

  When Anger got home, it was almost two in the morning. His lover Will was asleep beneath an afghan on the broken couch, surrounded by eight-by-ten color prints he was supposed to have arranged for Anger into little booklets to promote the yet-to-be-made Lucifer film. Anger set his things down carefully in the glow of the TV, trying not to wake Will, but it wasn’t long before he stirred.