Sway (18 page)

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.

“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.