Zachary Lazar - Sway

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.

Anita turned and looked at the baby. She smiled at him with spontaneous Pleasure, mouthing some quiet nonsense at him, the mumbo jumbo of a spell.

After a while, Mick came outside. He stood by the doorway, in the dark, lighting a cigarette. He didn’t look at the people on the porch. They were pretending not to notice him. They were trying out the trick with the cigarette papers now, chin on the elbow, thick-fingered, uncommitted. Each time the trick worked, they admired it. Each time it failed, they admired the smallness of the failure.

Mick pushed his scarf over his shoulder, exhaling, and walked off onto the lawn. Anger got up and followed.

“Have you given it any more thought?” he said.

Mick looked out into the darkness. “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

“It’s usually not like this. It’s usually the other way around. It’s usually the actors who keep bothering me. I’m not used to bowing and scraping like this.”

Mick pushed his hair out of his eyes. His face was not so much ugly or beautiful as forceful, implacable. “I’ve been getting death threats,” he said. “People watching me, people sending letters. There are police cars in front of my house some nights. All I want right now is to get out of here and out on the road. I don’t want to think about anything else right now.”

There was a moat that cut around Keith’s property, separating it from the woods and the farm fields to either side. In the distance behind it was a lake, a charcoal smear gathering width as it spread from left to right. It was lit by a full moon centered above a clearing between two banks of trees, a thin disk with the fine texture of rice paper.

Mick started walking away, off toward the trees.

“Maybe it scares you how much I’ve been thinking about it,” said Anger, following after him. “Maybe you think I won’t leave you alone.”

“I think you’ll leave me alone when I want you to.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

Mick turned. “Come on, Kenneth, we’ll take a walk. I’ll show you something. You haven’t seen this place before.”

They were just outside the ring of light coming off the porch, a third of the way down the lawn. Mick walked toward the trees, one hand placed lightly on his back, just above his waist. It was the way a woman might walk after a day of housework, the wide cuffs of his pants shimmering at his ankles. He didn’t look back to see if Anger was following. There was nothing hurried in the way he walked, nothing but certitude and boredom.