Sway (13 page)

After all his recent failures, Anger hardly expected that this would be the film to have so much success. Even as he raced
to finish it, he didn’t foresee how confusing it would be to most of the audience that eventually came to see it, nor could
he know that the word it invoked so strongly, “thanatomania,” would end up sounding like a diagnosis of the next six years.
He called it
Scorpio Rising
. He didn’t realize that this little film he’d made with Bruce Byron would prefigure so much madness, nor did he anticipate
that Byron would be so obtuse that he would entirely miss its mockery and believe that it flattered him, made him a star.

It ended with Byron marching off to the abandoned church, wearing a leather mask and an infantryman’s helmet. The sound of
bikers followed him, the revving of their engines, the dream minions of some private army in his mind. With a sudden flourish,
he turned and barked commands from the ruined altar. He paced like Hitler, raising his arms to the sky. Outside, the bikers
massed in darkness, idling on wet roads, waiting for his signal. There was a crash — a pileup of bodies, flesh, machines —
then the empty cry of sirens. The ambulances stood in the rain. Byron was all alone. It was getting light out. That was the
year four Klansmen bombed a church in Alabama. The year a lone gunman shot JFK as he passed by in his open car. Always the
television started as a white pinprick, gathering width until it filled the screen, bringing its different kinds of news.
Day after day, the subway lights flickered with the unseen clues about death magic, thanatomania.

The state of California banned the film in 1964, and in doing so elevated it to an importance it might never have achieved
if it had been simply left alone. After that, Anger kept bumping into different aspects of some newly distorted idea he had
of who he was. Strangers sent him letters. They wrote to him as the pornographer, the fascist, the sadist, the necrophiliac.
He was whatever they needed him to be. Handsome, intense boys would introduce themselves after screenings, and their interest
in his every rambling word made him garrulous. He became a character, a talker, an opinionated fool.

At the film’s premiere in New York, Bruce Byron had shown up dressed in full biker regalia, down to a leather cap and a black
leather jacket with a scorpion painted on the back. He stood by himself, a figure of embarrassment that nobody wanted to look
at. Anger ignored him (he himself was never alone that night), but sometimes when he looked back on the scene he would imagine
it through Byron’s eyes: the smugness, the utter conviction of his own centrality, the injustice of Anger being treated as
the film’s star.

At night, an image would appear behind Anger’s closed eyes: a lithe boy with dark hair that fringed his forehead. He would
arrive on a motorcycle in a fog of yellow light, making reckless circles in some vast hangar, his arms flexing as they wielded
the silver handlebars. At top speed, he would mount a flight of red stairs that led to an altar adorned by a giant silver
eagle. Airborne, he would crash through a pane of glass and tumble onto a concrete floor lit by klieg lights. His motorcycle
would be bent and smoking. He would lie spread-eagled on the ground, his arms tattooed with anchors and skulls, blood in his
hair. Then he would open his eyes and Anger would enter the boy’s mind, where there was nothing but images: a red curtain
over still water, a blue gas flame reflected on chrome, a black sky pocked with green specks of light. It was now that the
dreams of Lucifer began to proliferate.

MARRAKECH, 1967

IT WAS EIGHT O’CLOCK
in the evening, though it felt to Brian like midnight or afternoon. He had lost Tom Keylock somewhere in the fabric souks
a few hours ago and now he was looking through the window of the cab, at the dense wedges of buildings, earth-colored or eggshell-colored,
which appeared as if they’d been scraped together out of sand. A few electric lights burned like flares along the busier streets,
bright orange or neon green. They made the city of Marrakech look more and not less ancient.

In the elevator up to the tenth floor of the hotel, he became aware of someone else’s presence looming just behind his shoulder.
It was a middle-aged man in a wrinkled suit, a closed umbrella at his side. Brian knew this without having to turn around,
just as he knew who the man was without being able to remember his name. He hunched forward with an impatient smile on his
face, hands fisted at his sides, not looking. When he closed his eyes, he saw numerals, first chiseled into gray stone, then
colorful and stylized, like numerals on a Victorian signboard. Not more than three seconds passed before he was waiting in
anticipation of the man’s seizing him by the arms.

The elevator’s doors opened with a brutal series of lurches. He walked down the hallway, listing slightly in response to the
faint undulations in the walls. There were animal shapes moving in the plaster, hooves and hindquarters that seemed to press
against the surface from the other side. Faint music was seeping out from the farthest suite down the hall.

He matched the key in his hand to the number on the door. All the doors were an identical dark brown.

Next door, there was a crowd in Keith’s suite. He and Mick were working on a song, ignoring the others, Keith with one heel
resting on the edge of his chair, his guitar’s body wedged awkwardly between his thighs. He hit the strings hard, then lightly,
then harder, the process a kind of math, or like trying to coax a flame out of a few smoldering sticks. Mick was sitting on
a little tapestried stool before him, trying to follow along on his guitar, watching Keith’s fretboard. In the room with them
were more than a dozen people, some of whose names they didn’t even know. They were talking and playing Moroccan music on
the radio and someone was setting up a movie projector on a table. He told everyone to turn out the lights. There was a confused
grumbling, a cackle of laughter, then the room went dark. Keith and Mick kept playing, their guitars out of sync, a nonsense
of rhythm that no one else in the room had any patience even to watch.

“Mortify the spirit in order to more purely inhabit the body,” a voice said in the darkness. “Enter the nightmare until it
loses the veneer of credibility.”

A film started in the projector. On the wall, there was a rectangle of saturated black, almost purple, and then a slow upward
pan of words written in gold ink:
A Film by Anger. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.

Anita was still grinning at something when she looked up to see him. The room was lit by only a few candles and Brian felt
the man in the wrinkled suit behind him, mocking him. They were all sitting on the bed — Anita, Marianne, Robert — sifting
through a large opened box full of bracelets and rings.

“Brian,” she said. “You’ve been gone for so long. We were worried about you.”

There were clothes all over the room. Robert had something on his head that looked like a stocking cap that had melted and
blackened into a fine wisp. Beside him, Marianne was wearing a green sari and sunglasses, smoking a cigarette.

“I was in the square,” he said. “I’ve just been checking it out. The Jemaa el Fna.”

He had forgotten all the specifics of how Anita looked, forgotten her wide mouth, the comic insistence of her eyes. Everything
he said or did now created the exact opposite impression of what he intended. He could see small hooves pressing against the
wet plaster of the walls.

She took a long, heavy necklace from the box and held it out to him. “Look,” she said. “I thought this would be perfect.”

“Sacred magical necklace,” said Robert. “We stole it.” He pulled the strange cap down over his face. It turned out to be a
black nylon stocking. It made his face look angry and Mongoloid. “We stole everything in town.”

She held the necklace out to him, standing up and throwing her scarf back around her neck. It was a strand of mirror chips
and colored beads and between them were a dozen or more jagged shapes that turned out to be human teeth.

“We’re all very high,” said Anita. “Are you all right?”

“I’m just very high.”

“Put it on. We want to see you with it on.”

“We need to talk for a while.”

“I can’t talk now. You know that I can’t talk right now.”

He looked into her eyes and she was smiling at him with the bland approval of a big sister. He saw now that they’d been playing
a game in which Anita and Marianne were humiliating Robert with different kinds of jewelry and Robert was pretending to be
him. The goats started scraping at the walls with their horns, others were kicking at the walls with their hooves. He wished
that Anita would stop acting as though she couldn’t read his mind.

In the darkness, Keith could feel the beginnings of a vague shape starting to emerge beneath the surface of what he was playing.
He leaned forward in his chair, slowly nodding his head at Mick, adding a little ornament on the D chord, a bright suspended
fourth that he played with his pinkie. Projected on the wall behind him was an image of a man in false eyelashes and black
lipstick who reclined on a lavish bed. He was surrounded by pictures of dragons and Chinese gods, and on the bed’s velvet
coverlet was a large opened box full of rings.

Robert Fraser stuck his head into the suite’s barely open door, the black nylon stocking on top of his head. Then Marianne
came in behind him, taking his arm as she stepped inside. She was still wearing sunglasses, like a blind person. She had the
kind of lips that made their own separate expression, reticent lips that curled mischievously upward at the corners. Mick
looked over at her, but she was deliberately not looking back. On their way back from the medina that afternoon, he had noticed
something that he’d seen happen several times now: for no reason at all, her eyes had started welling up with tears. She’d
pretended it wasn’t happening, but the effort had made her so distant it was like self-hypnosis. When he asked her if she
was all right, she looked at him as if he were being deliberately confusing.

On the wall, the man in the film was twining a long silver necklace around his fingers. Then he dangled it above his face
and began to coil it slowly into his mouth.

Keith nodded his head in that absent but emphatic way he had, which made Mick settle down into the music, forgetting himself.
It made his face change into a near replica of what Keith’s face had been just a moment before. He closed his eyes, his lower
lip jutting slightly forward. The sounds they were making had no meaning yet, they were just a set of tones, but part of what
was making the song take shape now was the sense that they were doing it in front of Marianne, that she was within earshot
but had no idea what he was thinking.

Brian was on his knees in the bathroom. His hair was scattered across his neck in such a way that Anita could see the pale
skin beneath it. The fractured light came from a single yellow bulb screwed into the ceiling and when she closed her eyes
the yellowness flashed like a chain of miniature suns in the veins of her temples.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Let me help you.”

He turned and his eyes were so distant, looking into hers, that he seemed to be seeing her though a thickness of glass. She
rested her hand on the side of his face and with the other hand she smoothed the hair over the back of his head. He kept staring
at her, his nostrils glistening, and for a brief moment he seemed to recognize her with more clarity and she almost thought
they were going to smile at each other.

“You think it’s funny,” he said.

“No, I don’t think it’s funny.”

“It is. It’s funny if you think about it long enough. Keith, of all people.”

He started coughing and turned around. It made his head shake, the fringes of his hair rising and then coiling against his
shoulders. She crouched beside him, waves of nausea moving in her throat and stomach.

“Get out,” he said.

“Brian.”

“I just wish that Keith could have stayed the way he was. That you could have left him alone.”

She stood up. “I don’t know what to say to you.”

“He was my friend. And you were this massive thing. Terrifying.”

“He’s still your friend.”

“I don’t want him to be my friend. Are you out of your mind?”

“Then you’re a bastard.”

“Just get out. Get out, and I’ll leave you alone.”

She left him there. When she walked back into the bedroom, she glimpsed herself in the mirror. Her eyes were all black pupil
and the bruise on her cheekbone was a purplish green against pale skin.

They were all standing around in the dark when she came into the room next door, still stunned from the sudden quiet of the
hallway outside. There was a movie being projected on the wall, casting a green and red glow on the dim standing figures.
She saw Mick moving through the dark, his walk loose-jointed and balletic like his walk onstage, a walk that had nothing to
do with anyone else in the room.

She saw Keith, mixing himself a drink at the impromptu bar in a far corner. He had his back to her, and Tom Keylock was gripping
his shoulder and reaching for the bottle of Scotch.

Projected on the wall was the middle-aged man in false eyelashes, examining himself in a mirror. He was standing in a narrow
red hallway, looking at himself with such concentration that eventually the hallway dissolved and he emerged as a different
person, a woman, standing by herself in darkness, wearing a black sequined gown.

“You would like this film,” said a voice behind her.

It was Robert Fraser. He passed something into her hand, a clumsy, furtive exchange. It was the black nylon stocking.

“The Scarlet Woman,” he said. “Jezebel. The Whore of Babylon.”

The woman’s short hair was dyed a lurid red. She was lit by a pink light in the otherwise endless expanse of darkness. She
was beautiful in a cold, androgynous way that was either extremely sexual or not sexual at all.

Anita put her arm around Fraser’s waist and leaned her head against his shoulder.

“Brian’s lost it,” she said.

“Of course he has. But there’s nothing you can do about it now, is there?”

Keith saw her from across the room. He raised his glass and gave her a sardonic grin, his craggy teeth glinting in the dim
light. Tom Keylock was whispering something into his ear.

When Brian opened the door, the room was dark except for a beam of white light that spread across to the far wall, flickering
and occasionally dimming so that the standing figures were sometimes lit up in neon tones of green or red. He looked at it
too directly and for a moment all he saw was a whirling field of white. The music was loud, a syncopated weave of drums and
ouds and violins. Then the curtains billowed and glowed like burnt sails against the high windows that gave out onto the balcony,
and he felt the strange man’s presence behind him, leaning forward on his rolled-up umbrella.

A woman’s face was projected on the wall, her bright red hair cut like a Roman emperor’s. In the palm of her hand she held
a tiny, horned figure made of clay. She extended it before her face, her long eyelashes casting a fine, softening shadow over
her rapt gaze. The figurine burst into flames.

In the darkness, the first people he made out were Keith and Anita. She was walking toward Keith, her fringed scarf trailing
off her shoulder.

Keith took her in his clumsy arms. Her eyes started to burn with a strange desire to laugh and she let her head fall back
so that she could smile at him. She pressed her cheek against his and kissed his earlobe. She could feel the muscles moving
in his shoulders through his thin cotton T-shirt, and she knew that behind her head he was sipping his drink, could sense
him rattling it slightly, crushing an ice cube with his molars.

“Everyone so smashingly divine,” he said. “Just a lovely gathering of the loveliest people.”

She took the drink out of his hand and took a sip. Then she turned to find Brian striding across the room, small-eyed and
pale.

He was dressed in a long blue velvet coat with a fake ermine collar. He also wore the necklace made of human teeth. The hair
around his face was strung together in damp tendrils that fell into his eyes.

Keith stepped forward, head slightly bowed. He draped his long arm around Brian’s neck, so that the three of them were gathered
for a moment in the same embrace.

“We’re going up into the mountains,” he said. “You must come with us, man. We’ll catch the sunrise, bring along the Kodaks.”

Brian grabbed Anita roughly by the shoulder of her jacket. “We have to leave,” he said.

“Brian, don’t.”

“I’m not fucking around. Let’s go.”

The film on the wall showed people in strange costumes drinking from long silver chalices. Then a woman in fishnet stockings
removed an African mask from her face and started laughing.

Anita walked away, out of the room.

“Cool it,” said Keith.

“Let go of my arm.”

“If you want to blow it, this is the way, man,” said Keith. “Follow her, and it’s just going to make it a million times worse.”

Brian looked at him blankly, then watched the door close behind her.

On the wall, a blond man in red boots was being clawed at by several hands with painted fingernails. He fell to the ground
in a swoon that seemed equal parts pleasure and pain.

“You’re a cunt, Brian,” she said flatly. “I’m taking a sleeping pill and going to bed. You can do whatever you please.”

She held her palms out by her waist. Then she looked at him impatiently, shaking her head. “I don’t think we can talk right
now, do you? Or do you want to just hit me? Is that what you want? Or do you just want to leave?”