Sway (14 page)
“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.
When they got back to England, the band would either go on or it wouldn’t. Brian would either look after himself or he wouldn’t.
He and Keith would either spend ten years in prison or they would make another record. When he was onstage, things went fast
and he solved each problem in the same moment that it arose, building momentum, forgetting himself. But in ordinary life,
even with the others around, there were times when there was nothing to say or do and everyone looked aimless and false.
He remembered the morning before the bust at Keith’s house, the way the bare trees had started to shine like aluminum, the
way the rocky beach had aligned itself all at once into endless ranks of perfectly situated debris. It was strange how the
past was still there, even after all this time of pretending that it didn’t matter. He realized that Keith was the only person
he trusted.
They were walking through the Jemaa el Fna, Keith and Anita, buoyant and laughing and stoned, feeling free of everything that
had happened the night before. Her hair was disheveled and greasy, and her mascara was smudged. Both of her eyes were bruised,
but they were holding hands, determined to push things further, if only for the sake of pushing things further. He had no
idea how long this was going to last and he didn’t care.
A band of
gnaoua
musicians were shaking their iron castanets in the center of a circled crowd. They leered and stuck out their tongues, or
suddenly froze in a suspicious, sideways glare, but it was daytime and there was no menace in their poses. They wore bright
silk tunics and high-crowned, tasseled fezzes studded with cowrie shells.
“Lovely country,” Keith said.
He reached down for the cheap Kodak camera that dangled from his neck. At the last second, Anita leaned into the picture from
the side, almost stumbling, smiling at her own clumsiness as she pressed her hand to the crown of her floppy white hat.
“Greetings from Morocco,” she said.
“Right. I’ll send it home to Mum.”
“Dear Mum, this is my friend, the Whore of Babylon. Note the damaged look in her eyes.”
“Yes, please send money. Care of Scotland Yard.”
In four months, Keith would appear in court for his drug trial, and some remnant of the feeling he had now would come back
to him then. He would tell the court what he thought of five policemen invading his house, peering into his privacy. He would
wear one of Anita’s scarves around his neck. During the recesses, he would order expensive lunches from his cell and get drunk
on wine. When they asked him about the naked girl in the upstairs bedroom, he would say that he was not an old man and did
not share their petty moral outrage, that the girl had just been taking a nap and that in any case she was his friend. When
it was over, he would emerge from the trial transformed, a swaggering outlaw figure, no longer a lone misfit, no longer the
shy dreamer who had been preyed upon at school by older boys who called him a faggot and a girl. He didn’t know that the next
night the police would raid Brian’s flat, the flat in Earl’s Court he had shared with Anita, and frame him for possession
of cocaine. When he thought of Brian now — leaving Brian by himself in the hotel — he couldn’t picture Brian himself, only
the empty room.
THE BOY’S NAME
was Bobby Beausoleil. His last name meant “Beautiful Sun,” he’d told Anger. He had the kind of cheekbones that formed triangular
shadows beneath his eyes, and the eyes themselves were an unlikely, almost violet shade of blue.
“This is like a test,” Anger said, crouching behind the camera. “I just need to see what you look like on film.”
Bobby was looking not above Anger’s head, as some people would have, but right into the lens, his hands clasped behind his
back. He wore a kind of swashbuckler’s shirt with puffy sleeves and a set of crossed laces at the collar.
“I’ve never seen your films,” he said.
“No. But this has nothing to do with my other films.”
“I was just saying, I’d like to see them.”
Anger moved around him with the light meter in his hand, checking the levels near his face. It was a slightly intrusive process,
but Bobby did not seem bothered by it. He tilted his head a little, determined not to falter, determined to make the most
of what he was already thinking of as his chance.
“My last film was very black,” said Anger. “Motorcycles. People falling in love with death, that sort of thing. I’m trying
to make the opposite of that now. What I was talking to you about before.”
“The Lucifer idea.”
“Something about San Francisco. The whole thing of peace and flowers. I want to understand what that’s about.”
They were in the bedroom of Anger’s new apartment, on the ground floor of a crumbling Victorian house in the Haight-Ashbury
district. He had painted the walls purple, and with black and silver paint he had transformed the egg-and-dart molding into
what looked like a runner of studded leather. The result was calming, occult, dreamlike. The windows were recessed in high
alcoves, and at the top of each, still intact, were frescoes of women’s faces, windblown and ethereal.
“People falling in love with death,” said Bobby. He gave a little sniff of something like laughter, then looked at the purple
wall. “I’ve known some people like that.”
“I suppose there were lots of them in high school,” Anger joked.
“I was kicked out of high school.”
“So what does that mean? Reform school? Juvenile hall?”
“Are you filming this?”
“What?”
“I’m just wondering if you’re filming all this. How much of this anyone is going to see.”
It was spring, 1966. Anger would go for walks in his new neighborhood, a slum taken over by young people, and try to make
sense of the odd mishmash of deterioration and adornment: broken stairways with freshly painted railings, run-down porches
crawling with morning glories or draped with a faded American flag. He saw young people holding hands and whispering to each
other, or sitting on the sidewalk playing guitars, barefoot, the muscles moving solemnly in their shoulders and arms. In Golden
Gate Park, he saw streams of soap bubbles drifting over the lawn, flashing prisms of light, and in the distance behind them
there might be anything: a group of truant schoolkids, a girl with a German shepherd, a cross-eyed boy in black body paint
juggling a set of knives. Everyone under thirty had decided to be an exception: a musician, a runaway, an artist, a star.
They seemed unaware of any past that was not as safe or malleable as this present.
He had met Bobby last week at a concert in an old church that was now a community center. LSD was still legal, and it sent
tight cords of tension up Anger’s legs and his spine, his skull nothing more than a diaphanous veil. In the darkened building,
Bobby’s band was playing in front of a movie screen that showed otherworldly scenes from nature: the blue and red membranes
of dividing cells, the pink torrent of corpuscles rushing through a vein, the solar glow of an embryo in the black ink of
its amniotic sac. Onstage were conga players, trumpeters, guitarists, violinists, five girls dressed only in harem pants,
circling their naked breasts with their outstretched fingers. At the side of the stage was Bobby, playing guitar in front
of one of these girls, dressed in a purple cape and a black top hat that shone in alternating bands of white and blue. The
song he played had no chorus, no verse, no recognizable structure at all. Perhaps it was a new kind of music, or perhaps it
was just noise. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the way his hair fell all the way down to his shoulders, beneath his top
hat, like a woman’s hair. He went into a gradual crouch before the girl, bending the knees of his fringed buckskin pants,
and she trailed her silk scarf over his shoulders. For a brief moment they both appeared to be framed inside the red and gold
border of an antique playing card that buckled and threw off motes of light. Then the image melted into a neon impression
of Times Square. Anger could see the revolving red lights as Bobby tilted his head and, in another aspect of his showmanship,
ran the tip of his tongue over the girl’s sweat-glistening breast.
Afterward, Anger tracked him down in the parking lot, where he and his girlfriend were loading equipment into a van. He was
a filmmaker, he said, he was making a film, would the boy have any interest in playing a part in his next film?
His girlfriend put her fingers on Bobby’s cheek and whispered something into his ear. He turned to her and whispered something
back. Then the girl looked at Anger with a furtive smile, a smile that echoed and expanded and gleamed.
He was eighteen, Bobby told Anger that afternoon. Most people thought he was older because he’d been living on his own for
the past year and a half, first in L.A, then in San Francisco. His parents in Santa Barbara had kicked him out, because he
was out of their control. He would disappear for a couple of days, sometimes more, not even realizing it, just forgetting
to call home, forgetting why it mattered. It was his dreaminess that his father never understood. It was what they fought
about day after day, for as long as he could remember.
When he was sixteen, they’d sent him to a reform school north of Sacramento, where he’d lived in a barracks with thirty other
boys, digging ditches, moving rocks, cleaning bathrooms, loading sacks of potatoes onto flatbed trucks and then riding with
the trucks to the grader to unload them. For a year, he’d worn the same uniform as everyone else. Like everyone else’s, his
hair had been shorn with an electric clipper, so that the curve of his skull shone like a knob beneath the taut gray skin.
Eventually he lost his real name and was called by a nickname chosen by the others, a way of being told all over again that
he would be perceived in a way that had nothing to do with who he was. There were fights almost every day — fights behind
the mess hall, fights in the showers, fights with bare fists or with plungers or with brooms or with knives from the kitchen.
He learned to fight with a joyless focus that made his opponents lose interest, until eventually his friendship became coveted
and he didn’t have to fight at all anymore.
When he got out of reform school, he was seventeen. He lived with his parents for an abortive month, then he lived for a while
in a trailer with a thirty-six-year-old woman. In the meantime, he’d started playing with a rock band in L.A., a band who
had a recording contract now — who were on their way to becoming famous — but who had told Bobby he was too young, too pretty-looking,
that they were serious musicians and he had to leave.
Anger couldn’t stop looking at him that afternoon. He could feel the faint tension as Bobby paced the room, wondering perhaps
if Anger was even listening. At times, it was like looking at a beautiful girl, a diffuse desire that he wasn’t quite sure
what to do with. At other times, the desire was so blatant that he could feel his face burn.
“There’s this thing about women,” Bobby told him. “You get to a point with them where they can’t say no without hurting themselves,
some idea they have about themselves. I used to go to nightclubs in this very straight outfit, suit and tie, my hair all combed
and watered. I would have a Coke or a ginger ale. It was like, ‘Oh, I’m just this lost little boy. So shy I can barely talk
to you. Maybe you could take me home.’ ”
“A good act,” said Anger.
“But it wasn’t an act. I never thought it was an act. If I did, I never would have been able to do it.”
He was making a film about Lucifer, yes, but it was not the devil he was talking about, not the pitchfork and the horns, not
the spooky thing from the movies. Lucifer was a god of light, a child god, the fallen angel who after two thousand years of
repression was finally coming back. He was the god of desire, illicit desire, the liberator, the revelator. How could he explain
it to someone like Bobby, whom Anger could not look at without seeing the angel’s wholly unknowing embodiment? He’d said that
it was just a way of naming or looking at things that were happening in the world right now, a kind of mythology he liked
to play around with sometimes, a way of describing how the world was changing, opening it up to deeper meanings. Yes, he’d
told Bobby, Lucifer was the role he would play in the film, but it wasn’t worth thinking about very much. All he would really
be doing was just playing himself. At first, it would just be a matter of watching him, watching him and seeing what happened.
They started by making little films around town: at Golden Gate Park, in front of the Diggers’ “free store” on Frederick Street.
One day they went for a drive north of the city toward Bolinas, the camera and the equipment in the back of the station wagon,
Bobby at the wheel, Anger in the passenger seat. Through the windows, the hills were a pale brown, like wheat, and the ocean,
when they glimpsed it, was gray beneath the fog.
“I’m going down to L.A. for a while,” Bobby said.
Anger looked down at his hands on his legs.
“We have to get something going,” Bobby said. “The band. All the record companies are down there.” The road flattened and
rose into a gradual incline, and he gripped the lever on the steering column, forcing it into lower gear.
“I thought we were making a film,” said Anger.
“Well, there’s that too. That’s obviously a priority. But the band is about to go somewhere. I can feel that.”
Anger nodded slowly. At the end of the hill, on their left, they saw the beginnings of the event they were about to attend.
Beyond a row of picnic tables and a pair of outhouses, someone had erected a kind of pavilion made of different-colored bedsheets.
Around it were people in costume — a boy with a flute and a leather vest, a boy in a painted cape and a wizard’s hat. It was
a style that mostly eluded Anger, an irreverent humor that never settled on innocence or sarcasm but wavered between them.
Bobby was already smiling in the strange, coded way that Anger had learned to recognize, the smile of people who were younger
than he was.
“How long will you be gone?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe a few months? It’s up in the air.”
“A few months.”
“Like I said, it’s not set in stone. We’re going to be lining things up once we get there. Showcases and things.”
“It sounds like maybe it’s not set at all.”
Bobby stared straight ahead through the windshield. “We won’t know until we get there,” he said. “That’s all I know for now.
I told you from the very beginning that the band was what I was about. I would think that you of all people would understand
that.”
Anger immersed himself in work, just like his father, who had spent all his spare time in his garage, fixated on his machines.
After Bobby left, he did an elaborate reediting of a film he now saw could be called “psychedelic,” a film called
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
. He added superimpositions, doubling and tripling the images so that the action seemed to take place in a vast, floating
darkness. He synced each cut to the music, jumbling the separate tableaux until they began to build a rhythm, finessing tension
and drama out of nothing but images. Outside it was June. The streets were lined with sycamores whose leaves were yellow-green
and full of the strange, quasi-tropical succulence that reminded him of the trees of his childhood in Santa Monica. He stayed
inside the editing room; he tried not to think about why he was there. The work was time-consuming, and for ten or twelve
hours he would lose himself in its intricacies.
It was fine, until a package arrived, three days after Bobby left. It was an overstuffed manila envelope containing a motorcycle
T-shirt and an anonymous note, a quotation from
The Sephiroth:
“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.”
The T-shirt was ripped and covered with brownish stains, obviously bloodstains. It was silk-screened with a picture of a BSA
motorcycle. Anger guessed right away who it was from, because a month ago Bruce Byron had sent a telegram, the latest in a
series, congratulating him on the success of
Scorpio Rising
, its interesting ideas, and leaving the implication that he was somehow owed money.
Bobby was gone for six days when there was a phone call. Less than an hour later, he showed up in front of the crumbling Victorian
house with his guitar wrapped in an army blanket against the rain. His hair was wet and his white buccaneer’s shirt hung from
his body like a soaked, transparent rag. Someone had stolen his money, or he had lost his money — it would never be clear
when Bobby talked about money. From what he’d told Anger on the phone, he had slept the night before in an abandoned car.
The two of them stood in the front hall, Bobby in a puddle of water that was absolutely clear, like new varnish on the pine
floor.
“He just turned on me,” he said. “That’s how it is with people like that.”
“Who?” said Anger.
“I don’t know. This spade cat, Donald, it’s not important.”
Anger bowed his head as Bobby came farther inside, hugging his guitar to his chest.
“I’ll have to go back later,” he said. “I just need to cool out for a while. They have my clothes, everything.”