Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  “You missed something good,” he said.

  He looked to his side, slightly dazed by the pale, clustered lights from the TV. The rest of the room was shadowy, the walls dimpled, water-stained, dirty windows reflecting back the TV light, like glass plates for some abstract etching.

  “It’s not my thing,” Will said, shifting beneath the blanket.

  “Yeah, well, there were half a million people there.”

  “The guitar player was the one I liked. The one who died. He was the only one I responded to.”

  Anger looked at the stack of mail on the table, but there were no personal letters, no checks. He sat down in a chair and rubbed his eyes, head bowed.

  “Are they giving you anything back?” Will said.

  “They’re doing my film. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I mean the real film. The one you had in mind before. Not the film of you following them around documenting every time they wipe their ass.”

  Will reached for a cigarette, groggily alert now. He was intense-eyed, with long sideburns and a crooked jaw that looked as though it had been imperfectly repaired after a childhood fall.

  “They’re my unconscious agents,” Anger said. “My henchmen.”

  Will pushed his hair behind his ears, then lit up. “You’re not joking, so why pretend you’re joking? Even if you were, it isn’t funny.”

  “They had a half a million people there.”

  “Which means what? That because it’s interesting to you, it must be important?”

  “It is important.”

  Will sniffed, looking down at his hand on the blanket, which had fallen down so that it made a kind of wide skirt beneath his rib cage. Through his thin T-shirt, his shoulders and the cleft between his pectorals stood out in shadowed relief. He had a body like Bobby’s, articulated and firm. Anger wondered what was the matter with him, why the sight of Will always brought to mind Bobby.

  “I went around to all the shops this afternoon, all the galleries,” Will said. “Nothing. I may go back to school.”

  “You don’t have to work.”

  “Or I may go on the dole.”

  He squirmed upward and brought his hands into a clasp behind his head, his cigarette still burning. Anger looked at his biceps and the fringes of hair showing where his T-shirt pulled back from his armpits. He felt his age like a physical force between them, his body time-wracked, exposed.

  “You didn’t get very far with those booklets,” he said. “We’ll have to do them tomorrow.”

  On the floor were the eight-by-ten prints. There were pictures of the band, close-ups of electric guitars, wide-angle shots of students rioting in Paris, Black Panthers brandishing machine guns. There was a picture of the Sphinx, looming in the desert with its lion’s body and pharaoh’s head.

  “I got distracted,” said Will.

  “I’m just saying that we’ll have to do them later. It isn’t hard to see that you got distracted.”

  He stood up. He kept his back straight, his chin slightly raised, arms at his sides, hands clasped behind his waist. He made himself look at Will, standing there in his black pants and silk shirt. It was difficult, this role that was his to play now, though he had always known it was there waiting for him: the preoccupied husband home from work, or the father, the closed-in man in need of conciliation.

  “I almost kissed him one night,” he said. “The one you liked, Brian. I was that close. But he was so lost. When they’re that lost, it isn’t interesting anymore, is it?”

  He reached out and cupped Will’s chin in his hand, turning his face, and Will stared up at him.

  “You don’t have to work,” Anger said. “You shouldn’t demean yourself. You should live by your wits.”

  “Like you.”

  “Not like me. I’m just saying you should take advantage of what’s there. It’s stupid not to. It’s the way the world works.”

  Will put his hand on Anger’s wrist. “It’s the way I was born. A parasite on men with no money.”

  The bedroom was so small that it was filled up almost entirely by the dresser and the double bed. In the dark, the walls seemed to breathe and expand, and the foil stars on the ceiling shone dimly at the edges. Will’s body was a silhouette that moved and turned, smoothly curved beneath Anger’s hands. Anger felt his chest, his rib cage, his nipples, the tautness of his balls. There was mercy in the dimming of his vision now, desire returning him from his mind to his body. He moved up onto his knees as Will lay beneath him on the sheet, his face turned on the pillow. Will’s arms stretched down at his sides, hands tensed into claws, and his calves pressed down against Anger’s shoulders, flexing as they brought him closer.

  Afterward, they were silent, breathing, and the film began to assemble itself in Anger’s mind. In the darkened bedroom — in the space between consciousness and forgetfulness — it didn’t matter if any of it made sense or not. What mattered was the images themselves: thin clouds passing over the pyramids in Egypt, a woman dressed as Isis standing against the bright sky, Bobby in a top hat climbing a pile of stones as the sun struck the head of the Sphinx. They came whether he wanted them or not. They were signs of the demon inside him, from the Greek daimon, the guardian spirit, not the self but the soul.

  “We’ve just been talking about the tour,” said Keith, turning in his seat. “The mad people over in America. The bloody war and the bloody astronauts.”

  Mick had just come downstairs. They were at Keith’s country house. Anger was standing at the window, peering outside. He turned back to face the room, the candles burning on tall, wrought-iron stands, sending up filaments of smoke above the carpets. He watched Mick sit down on the arm of Keith’s couch, not even looking at him, looking immediately at the journalist. There was always a mild feeling of vertigo whenever Anger played this role, the room’s specter, his presence meant to suggest to the journalist questions he would not feel comfortable asking.

  “It will be the biggest tour anyone’s ever done,” Mick said. “Football stadiums. Hockey arenas. You can play these enormous places now and actually be heard.”

  Anger sat down in one of the chairs by the window and looked at the magazines. Across from him, Keith’s bodyguard was rolling joints at a corner table in the faint glow of a lamp, another character for the journalist’s benefit. On the cover of one of the magazines was a picture of the actress Sharon Tate, who had just been murdered along with four of her friends in Los Angeles. Anger leafed through the photographs, listening fixedly as Mick and Keith talked about the American tour. He still found the pictures grisly, even though he’d seen them now a few times. The killers had used knives, rather than guns. They’d stabbed each of their victims more than a dozen times, then written messages on the walls in their blood, strange incitements to rise up, to destroy. Sharon Tate had been eight months pregnant. It occurred to Anger that she looked a little bit like Anita. They were both blond, both in their twenties. It wasn’t hard to imagine the murders, or something like them, happening here at Keith’s house.

  They talked about politics, music, astronauts, Richard Nixon. It was a litany Anger had heard before, heard from them and read about in magazines. They talked about the war in Vietnam, how it was galvanizing the young people over in America, bringing them together, giving them something to rise up against, and how they wanted to be a part of that. Then eventually they came to the part where they talked about Brian, what it felt like to be going on the tour without him, what it had been like playing in Hyde Park two days after he’d died.

  Mick looked down, finding himself a more comfortable seat on the couch, then leaned forward and passed the journalist a joint. Like everyone else now, the journalist was trying to look like Keith. Even the women had the same thin body, the same patched and torn clothes, hair that rose in a slapdash spray that they were always teasing with their fingers.

  “You felt bad because he was your friend,” Mick said. “But he wasn’t equipped for it. It isn’
t easy — there’s no way to explain why, it just isn’t. You always hear this about people getting famous. Some of them get on the wrong track or they can’t stomach it or something. They get lost. After a while, they’re just passing through it, gliding by everything or haunting it or something. Brian was never able to enjoy it.”

  The journalist looked down at the wire that connected his microphone to his tape player, straightening it with his hand.

  “It was almost like the moment he began to get what he wanted, he gave up on it,” Keith said. “Because it happened very early on, right toward the beginning, when we were just starting to make a go of it. It didn’t help him, the success. It made it worse.”

  Anger steepled his fingers in front of his chin. They were going to be talking about their interest in the occult soon. It was going to be his chance to get himself into the journalist’s article, to talk about the Lucifer film. But he didn’t want to talk about it. It wasn’t something you could talk about anyway. Right now, the thing that was occult was the way Mick was slouched down on the couch, one knee up, his forearm resting on it, barely moving. It was the smoky room, the way they splayed themselves out on the furniture, the long hair in their faces. It was the way they were more alive now that Brian was dead and the band was entirely theirs.

  “I mean, we’re curious about these things,” Mick was saying. “There are things in the songs. But most of it is just people’s fantasies. Fantasies about the way we live our lives, which people want to think is ‘evil’ or ‘satanic’ or whatever they want to call it.”

  “Which they were saying at the very beginning,” Keith said. “Back when we first started — five boys with slightly shaggy hair, some guitars. That was ‘evil.’ ”

  Anger nodded faintly a few times. He examined his hand, not looking at anyone. “It won’t seem so funny when you get to America,” he said. “There’s a craziness there. Sometimes it’s out in the open, sometimes it’s more hidden.”

  He stood up, smoothing the sleeve over his left arm. It was one of those situations where his fussy poise worked to his advantage. Even his age worked to his advantage. He opened and closed his hand at the edge of his thigh, looking at Mick.

  “That’s what I would worry about if I were you,” Anger said. “The way you’re going to instigate people over there. The sincere ones, the hippies. They’re serious about things like ‘evil’ in America. People still go to church there. They’re much more black-and-white.”

  He brushed off his lapel as he walked across the room. They weren’t talking. It wasn’t that they were troubled by what he’d said, it was just that they were mulling it over, letting it become a part of the room, the smoke, the dim light of the candles.

  Outside on the porch, he found Anita. She was leaning back in her chair, her baby in a stroller beside her. There were several people he didn’t know, or whose faces he had seen before but whose names he had forgotten.

  “You could move to France,” someone was saying. “They can’t follow you there.”

  “Or just not pay.”

  “Or send a bomb.”

  He sat down in a wordless, unobtrusive way, fading into the conversation.

  “You don’t have any matches, do you?” Anita asked. She had let her hand rest lightly on the sleeve of his jacket, speaking to him without quite looking at him, not wanting to tune out the others.

  “There’s a candle right there.”

  “No, but it’s for a trick. You need matchsticks.”

  “A trick.”

  “You’re useless. What are they talking about in there?”

  “Nothing. Ideas.”

  Her eyes moved across the table to one of the boys sitting there. His chair was pushed back so that his face was out of the light, his posture hidden. Beside him, Marianne was scrolling up a cigarette paper into an empty tube. She stood it in the center of an ashtray and lit the top end on fire. It burned slowly at first, unspectacularly, but then the flame shrank down to a thin rim of embers and it rose up into the air, a weightless glowing ring. It hovered for a moment over everyone’s heads. They all looked at it.

  Anita turned and looked at the baby. She smiled at him with spontaneous Pleasure, mouthing some quiet nonsense at him, the mumbo jumbo of a spell.

  After a while, Mick came outside. He stood by the doorway, in the dark, lighting a cigarette. He didn’t look at the people on the porch. They were pretending not to notice him. They were trying out the trick with the cigarette papers now, chin on the elbow, thick-fingered, uncommitted. Each time the trick worked, they admired it. Each time it failed, they admired the smallness of the failure.

  Mick pushed his scarf over his shoulder, exhaling, and walked off onto the lawn. Anger got up and followed.

  “Have you given it any more thought?” he said.

  Mick looked out into the darkness. “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  “It’s usually not like this. It’s usually the other way around. It’s usually the actors who keep bothering me. I’m not used to bowing and scraping like this.”

  Mick pushed his hair out of his eyes. His face was not so much ugly or beautiful as forceful, implacable. “I’ve been getting death threats,” he said. “People watching me, people sending letters. There are police cars in front of my house some nights. All I want right now is to get out of here and out on the road. I don’t want to think about anything else right now.”

  There was a moat that cut around Keith’s property, separating it from the woods and the farm fields to either side. In the distance behind it was a lake, a charcoal smear gathering width as it spread from left to right. It was lit by a full moon centered above a clearing between two banks of trees, a thin disk with the fine texture of rice paper.

  Mick started walking away, off toward the trees.

  “Maybe it scares you how much I’ve been thinking about it,” said Anger, following after him. “Maybe you think I won’t leave you alone.”

  “I think you’ll leave me alone when I want you to.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

  Mick turned. “Come on, Kenneth, we’ll take a walk. I’ll show you something. You haven’t seen this place before.”

  They were just outside the ring of light coming off the porch, a third of the way down the lawn. Mick walked toward the trees, one hand placed lightly on his back, just above his waist. It was the way a woman might walk after a day of housework, the wide cuffs of his pants shimmering at his ankles. He didn’t look back to see if Anger was following. There was nothing hurried in the way he walked, nothing but certitude and boredom.

  When the lawn ended, they reached the moat. Its brick retaining wall was sunken in thick tufts of grass, and Mick stepped up onto the ledge and balanced himself with his arms, walking the curve above the water. The ledge was only a few inches wide. He seemed to be tottering a little on purpose, accentuating the danger. The drop to the water on the far side was at least ten feet.

  “They think that Keith is the wild one,” he said. “I’m the cool one, the deliberate one, faking his way through it all. That’s what a lot of people think. That’s what a lot of people want to believe.”

  He jumped off the near side of the ledge and landed in the dirt. He pushed his hair out of his eyes, then placed his hands on his hips the way Anger’s were, seeming to mock him. His face was almost invisible. Anger was standing at the edge of the woods, half in darkness, breathing a little heavily from the walk.

  “I have different lives,” Mick said. “You know, some people know about one life and some people know about another and none of these people ever gets to piece together the entire picture. That’s what they call ‘faking.’ I don’t worry about it anymore, if it’s faking or not. I can say what I like to the journalist and I can say what I like to you right now and I can say what I like to the Queen Mother and you can all go fuck yourselves if you don’t like it. That’s the way it is for me now.”

  “Always faking,” said Anger. />
  “It’s not hard to see what you’ve been wondering about all this time, Kenneth. What you’ve been thinking. Do you want to come over here and find out if it’s really true? Isn’t that what you want?”

  It was dark enough that Anger didn’t have to look into his eyes, but he did, his body tense, his mouth set at a strange angle as if preparing to laugh. There was nothing in Mick’s voice to suggest that he was joking, but that was the danger of course. He thought he might grab Mick by the back of the neck — ambush him, pull him against his chest — but it was harder than he thought. Once he got close enough, it was hard to move at all. He reached for Mick’s body — his hip, anything — but Mick backed away, smiling, watching Anger’s face.

  “Maybe some other time,” Mick said. “What do you think? You can imagine whatever you like, Kenneth. Maybe you’ll get to know me better than anyone else ever has. But maybe you won’t. Maybe the more likely scenario is that nothing will happen at all.”

  “I’ll see you later,” Anger said.

  “Right.”

  “Are you coming back to the house?”

  “I told you before, I want to be alone. I’m staying out here.”

  “You’re a shit.”

  “I know that. I’ve been one for a long time.”

  Mick stepped closer, his hands crossed behind his waist. “Don’t get moralistic,” he said. “You’re going to say that there’s nothing inside me, that I have no soul or whatever, but it isn’t that simple. Nothing is ever that simple.”

  He put his hand on Anger’s face. His eyes were blank, examining Anger’s expression not with curiosity but with the confirmed suspicion that everyone was exactly what he knew they were. There were no surprises. It would have been just as easy for him to kiss Anger at that moment as not to kiss him. It would have been the same no matter who Anger was, whether he was a man or a woman or a figment of Mick’s imagination.

  “Good night, Kenneth,” he said. “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

  “We’ll have to see.”

  “We’ll talk about the film. I still want to do it. Don’t think that I don’t want to do it.”