Zachary Lazar - Sway

“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?”

“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.