Zachary Lazar - Sway

He knocked on their door, then he let himself in with his own key. The floor in the living room was piled with clothes, the rug at a slant from the sofa. Anita was standing in the kitchen in a silk kimono, brewing something on the stove.

“You’re home,” she said.

The ironic glint in her eyes and her faint German accent still made whatever attention she paid him seem rare and empathic, a gift he somehow deserved without knowing why.

He shut the door behind him. Upstairs in the loft, he saw Brian wrestling with some woman he had never seen before, both of them laughing. The woman had nothing on but a pair of black panties, her breasts hanging sideways above Brian’s hands. Her lipstick, when she turned to him, was as dark as the skin of a plum.

Anita put her arm around him. She held him for a long time and he could feel her breathing behind his ear. “We’ve hardly left,” she said. “There were photographers everywhere. Are they still out there?”

“I didn’t see any.”

“They’ve just been waiting for us. But they seem to have kept the cops away. That’s the theory anyway.”

He looked up at Brian, who was making a face at him, turning up his nostrils with two fingers.

“I thought you were going to tell him to cool it,” he said.

“I did.”

He looked at the mess on the floor, the ashtray full of cigarettes butts and the twisted ends of joints. “Right,” he said. “Well, then do you have anything to smoke?”

He watched them from the couch as they made a show of helping the other woman find her clothes. Brian threw a shirt at him over the railing of the loft. He brushed it off, dragging from his joint, then went over to pick up the guitar that was leaning on the wall. He wasn’t sure anymore why he’d come here. There was something between them all that went back to childhood, the part of childhood that no one remembered, the secrecy and plotting and divisiveness. When he got stoned with them in the loft upstairs, surrounded by candles and tapestries and religious trinkets, there was sometimes a strange suspense in watching things go right instead of wrong. It was easy to think that they were all just friends. In the glow of their flattery, which was constantly aimed at him, it was easy to dismiss all the times he’d seen them screaming at each other, slapping each other, grappling spastically in hallways like two people struggling over a gun.

A little later, Mick showed up with Robert Fraser. He frowned down at Keith and brushed his silk scarf with his fingers, as if testing its quality. There was a tension in the room now that no one wanted to acknowledge, as if they’d all been caught acting foolish.

“Where are the cops?” Mick said, turning toward Brian and Anita.

She stood by Brian’s side, sharing his cigarette. “You just missed them,” she said. “We were all fucking on the floor when they came in. You missed that too.”

He licked his lips. “Ah, but someday,” he said, raising his chin. “Someday there’ll be that special someday.”

“Is that a new song?” said Fraser, sitting on the floor.

“Lovely to see you, Mick,” said Brian. It was as if he’d just noticed his entrance, as if they were the only two in the room. He had put on a strange kind of costume: pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, a woman’s white hat and a flouncy velvet jacket. He looked good even in that. In a way it was like a challenge or a threat to everyone else. But when he glanced up into the light, his eyes were alarmingly vague, as if you were seeing him through a slightly unfocused lens.

Keith drew a map on the side of a brown paper bag. He scratched out the geography of the U.K. in green blobs with a felt-tip pen, then parts of Europe, then the coastline of North Africa. He made sure not to look at Anita while he was doing this. He was being reckless — he was being himself — but if he thought about her watching him, then he would feel he was performing.

He wanted to get out of England, he said, away from the scandal. His idea was that they all go to Morocco. They could drive there, in a kind of motorcade. It would be more fun to drive than to fly. In the process they could make a spectacle of their limousines, acting like the spoiled pop stars they were about to be put on trial for being.

“You get the ferry to what is it, Calais? Then it’s a straight shot through France to Spain. You get a look at the scenery, see the change. Valencia, Almería — that’s where they film the cowboy movies. Then there’s another ferry at Málaga, and you’re in Tangier.”

It seemed fanciful and unlikely. No one knew how seriously to take it, except Mick, who was studying the map.

“I don’t know if Marianne will go for it,” he said.

He looked down at the floor. If what he really meant was that he didn’t want to go, he would have been smiling at them. Instead, it now sank in with everybody that Marianne wasn’t there.

“It’s been bad for her,” Mick said. “It’s been bad for all of us, but now it’s like she’s at the center of it all.”

Though her actual name had been kept out of the papers, there was no question that Marianne was the “NAKED GIRL FOUND UPSTAIRS.” She was a pop star herself, a singer of love ballads and folk songs, but unlike them she was a woman. Her career was almost certainly over.

“We’ll fly,” said Mick. “We’ll meet you over there somewhere.”

Keith raised his chin at him. “So you’re doing it. You’re coming.”

“Of course we’re coming.”

Later, Fraser took a photograph of them all. It shows the room littered with clothes and newspapers, a message scrawled on the wall in felt-tip pen in Keith’s handwriting: CALL YOU tomorrow . On the left, Anita is reclining in a chair with a cigarette held near her ear. Across from her, Keith is sitting on the arm of the couch reading one of the tabloids. Anita’s crossed legs are resting on his knee. From the other side of the couch, Mick is looking at her with bored aversion. Large paper sunflowers droop from the wall behind him. On the right, Brian is standing in front of the couch, drinking a mug of beer. He’s still dressed in his odd, clownish array of clothes. Whatever is going on in this picture, he is oblivious to it, unable to see it from behind his upturned glass.

Three weeks later, they met up in Marrakech. Nothing had gone as planned. The only people who ended up going by car were Brian, Anita, and Keith, chauffeured by the band’s assistant, Tom Keylock, in Keith’s Bentley. On the first day, Brian started coughing in the back of the car, a wheezing asthmatic gasp that got worse and worse, until he couldn’t breathe. It was much worse than his usual attacks — they had to check him into a hospital in the south of France when he started coughing blood. When the doctors insisted he stay there for five days, to be safe, there was an awkward few hours by his bedside, no one sure what to say. Eventually, he was so ashamed that he told Anita and Keith to go ahead without him, that he’d meet them in Morocco.

They were staying at a modern hotel outside the old city of Marrakech, its beige front hidden by palm trees. He arrived at night and took a cab from the airport. In the room, Anita’s bags were opened on the foldout stand and there was a candle burning on the dresser, casting a bronze glow on the bedsheets that had been neatly turned down by the maid. They had five rooms on the tenth floor, all in a row, but he hadn’t heard any sound coming from down the hall. The more he thought about it, the more difficult it was to reason with himself that they were just in town, enjoying their holiday.

He went out onto the balcony and breathed in the strange, thick air. Then he saw a few small lanterns burning on tables by the pool. He could just barely make out their forms in the darkness and hear the timbres of their different laughs: Anita and Mick and possibly Robert Fraser. He heard the muffled, out-of-phase sound of an acoustic guitar.