Zachary Lazar: Sway

There was some shift in the room’s shadows that a moment later didn’t seem to be a shift at all, just a deeper stillness. Time and space — these were favorite subjects of Charlie’s, the prison of time and space, the way the mind was always desperate to escape from that prison. He leaned forward in his chair, sizing up Bobby’s face, his thumb moving across his beard, his breath filling the air between them, staring at Bobby like an opponent.

What did Bobby suppose made him any different from those people out at the ranch, he asked again. How was Bobby any different from those people out there who were just waiting for some sign or some change that never came? Did he want to put himself above them? Did he want to be a star like Elvis maybe, or like Sonny and Cher — or maybe he wanted to be something more serious than that, a rebel, a criminal, Jack the Ripper maybe, or Jesse James. But what did Bobby want really, and did he even know, and why did he just keep drifting around, never asking himself these questions?

Charlie leaned back into his chair, his face in shadow. “Those people at the ranch are my people,” he said. “You need to remember that from now on. They’re not yours, they’re mine. You can’t just keep treating them the way you treat yourself, like it’s all just a game or a waste of time.”

He raised one of his hands, as if to pluck something small from the air, then did the same with the other hand. “Moving a piano, making a few bucks like that,” he said. “One moment, the next moment — that’s who you are after a while, all those little moments. They’re not something you can just go back and change. They’re like rooms. They stay there after you leave.”

Bobby tilted his head back toward the ceiling, his eyes closed. “If you wanted me to leave, all you had to do was say ‘leave.’ ”

“I don’t want you to leave. I wouldn’t have brought you all the way over here if I wanted you to leave. I want you stay there, if you want to stay there.”

He steepled his hands beneath his chin. His hair was falling into one of his eyes, but his impatient, put-upon gaze was absolutely still.

“I’ll do this for you this time, if that’s what you want. I’ve done this plenty of times and it’s very simple. One of us has to go move the car. The other one of us is going to stay here and meet these people, take some money off them, whatever. I don’t have much else in mind, do you? You tell me what you want.”

Bobby shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you’re just like I used to be. All wrapped up in yourself, not seeing anyone else very clearly.”

“I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about.”

Charlie reached into his pants pocket and held the car keys out in his hand. He dangled them in front of his face, staring at Bobby, then held them out in his extended palm, just above his knee, the pose somehow biblical, deliberately so.

“I don’t want to keep you here,” he said. “If you want to leave, then maybe you should leave. You do whatever makes you feel comfortable. This is an easy one. This is almost like practice.”

“Practice for what?”

He wanted to be taken seriously. He wanted to be different from those people at the ranch, but he couldn’t even sit there in an empty house without being cowed by his own thoughts. Maybe he was the kind of person who spent his whole life sleepwalking, daydreaming, barely scraping by, never going too far or pushing very hard. Or maybe there was more to him than that. Maybe he could think of just one thing he’d ever done that would show there was more to him than that.

They were Charlie’s words, not Bobby’s. They were Charlie’s words in Bobby’s ears, Bobby’s mind, shared words. It didn’t matter after a while whose words they were.

Charlie left the keys on the table. Then he sat back in the chair, slouched a little, one foot up on the table’s edge. The light through the window was a wedge of moving dust, a field of rays that rotated and shone. Outside was the car, parked in front of a neat yard with a low chain-link fence. Everything on the other side of the window was still, brightly colored, like a slide lit up by a projector.

“None of this is too complicated,” Charlie said. “I’m just telling you some basic things you knew all along.”

He worked one of his hands into the pocket at the side of his denim jacket and pulled out a balled-up wad of fabric. He shook it out in his hand — it was a black nylon stocking — and laid it out on the table next to the extension cord.

“Maybe you should go outside for a little while and think about it,” he said. “Take a little walk, get a breath of fresh air. I’ll stay here for a minute.”

Bobby shook his head. “You’re serious.”

“Of course I’m serious. These people who live here, I don’t know what they mean to you, why they matter so much. They don’t think, they don’t know anything they haven’t been taught by someone else. You’d just be showing them another side of things for a few minutes. Just like what Kitty did for you yesterday. You and your little gun.”

It turned out that all along Charlie had had it in a shoulder holster beneath his jacket. It was the same gun from yesterday, the.38 with the wooden grip splintered on one side. He worked it slowly out from beneath his jacket, tugging with his right hand, then set it down on the table beside the extension cord and the stocking.

Bobby looked down at his hand, his fingers on the carpet, not quite seeing them, lulled for a moment like a child. He looked at the things on the table. When he finally stood up and walked toward the kitchen door, the walking had as little to do with his body as if he were dreaming it. There was the kitchen — the telephone, the notepad, the ceramic cat. There was the door with its inkblot curtain. Outside, in the backyard, was the afternoon sunlight, flashbulb white and then a widening yellow haze.

There was nowhere left to go. Malibu, Topanga, Mendocino, Big Sur — in the last year, Bobby had crossed these places off one by one as overcrowded, menaced by cops. It was the war in Vietnam — the war had somehow permeated everything, even things that had no relation to the war itself. It made everyone feel like fugitives, wary of the same people they would have looked to as friends just a year before. It was why Bobby had kept moving, sleeping in the bed of his truck or on someone’s floor, fixing up old cars and trying to sell them, bartering, helping out on drug deals. He had been trying to stay out of the war, but the war kept following him in its different forms. It was what made places like the ranch so confusing — dreamy but combative, childlike but also desolate.

They wanted you to grow up into some helpless combination of old person and infant. They wanted you to have a house and a family and a refrigerator and a TV, and not know how any of it worked. They wanted you to spend your life working on something that was never concrete, never anything you could see or hold in your hands, and if you didn’t do that they wanted to put you in jail. Cutting down forests, poisoning the earth — it was a country driven by stupid, blind impulse. It was a country where nobody knew where their food came from or where their garbage went, they just flushed the bowl, kept eating it and throwing it away, building bombs and computers, cars and TVs, sending people off to Vietnam so they could set it on fire. It was a country that had turned against everyone he knew, cast them out like garbage, and all they could do was smile to themselves at all they’d learned and wait patiently for the fires to start here at home.

He stopped walking and looked again at the houses. Sidewalks, fences, lawns. It was a dead world. There was no point in pretending it wasn’t, or that he could go back to it and find anything there but emptiness. What was he afraid of? What was Charlie asking him to do that he didn’t already believe in, even if he’d never had the courage to really imagine it?