Zachary Lazar: Sway

When she reaches the summit, it is just before dawn of the winter solstice, the year’s lowest ebb. The sun begins to shine dimly on the rocks, casting a purple glow over the horizon, the hills below. There is a raised stone at the edge of the cliff that she stands on, a perfect circle cut out of its center. Every year on this day, at this moment, the circle’s circumference is entirely filled by the rising sun, the beginning of the new pagan year.

She can hardly look at it. It’s been a long climb and she feels faint, nauseated, in need of dope. She raises her hands as directed, trying to embrace the sunlight coming in through the hole in the rock, but she looks almost repelled by it, her eyes narrow with censure. She used to be fascinated by things like the monolith — by magic, mysticism, fantasies of all kinds. Now there is physical pain, craving, no more idle wishing for life to seem more mysterious or important than it is.

She sits down, half collapsing, bracing herself with a hand stretched out beside her hip. Her head hangs down from her shoulders, her black fur coat twisted around her back. She closes her eyes and waits for it to stop and doesn’t move.

It went on for a long time. It was like if I kept walking, everyone might still be where they were supposed to be and we’d all just go back to the way we were before. Only I knew it wasn’t true. I knew everything had changed. There was just this endless little moment where I didn’t have to face what had really happened yet.

When she wakes up, she’s sitting in the sand before the pyramids of Giza. She is wrapped in a pale linen shroud, her skin and clothes covered in dust. She is a shade, no longer alive. Motionless, speechless, perhaps faintly smiling, she holds a lotus blossom in her hand and she stares at it, chin raised, as if staring continuously into a mirror. Her face looks like Anita’s, so it also looks like Brian’s, a sixties face, a kind you no longer see.

Isis awakens on a white cliff. Osiris rises from his cave, his face painted blue. They salute each other across a desert valley, each raising a single arm in the early morning light. They are so beautiful that it’s tempting to forget they are actors: her naked breasts, the gold bands around his arms. They go through a series of benedictions — he raises his staff, she raises hers — and then they disappear, as does Marianne, nothing left now but rocks and sand and the ruins of the ancient temples. There is a dreamlike calm, the calm of barren landscapes under sunlight, clouds passing over, as if all of the turmoil we call history has taken place on some infinitely distant, even imaginary plane.

The sun is beginning to set. Time is moving more quickly now, the film almost over. There is a psychedelic image, flying saucers coming over the desert, vintage crafts of nuclear orange, neon green. Their beams shine down on the empty expanse of sand, on the ruined temples, on the rubbled face of the Sphinx. They hover and rise like some last wish, not darkness but a final surge of color.

Among the sources I consulted while doing research for this book are: The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth, Up and Down with the Rolling Stones by Tony Sanchez, Keith Richards by Victor Bockris, Faithfull: An Autobiography by Marianne Faithfull, Blown Away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties by A. E. Hotchner, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi, Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger, Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger by Bill Landis, Kenneth Anger by Alice L. Hutchinson, and the films One Plus One by Jean-Luc Godard and Gimme Shelter by David and Albert Maysles.

In the interest of concision, I have invented various documents that appear throughout the text, including letters, newspaper articles, oral testimonies, and interviews. The book Dream Plays: A History of Underground Film and the occult treatise referred to as The Sephiroth are also both fictitious.

I would like to thank Bill Clegg, Pat Strachan, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, and Dan Franklin for their help with this book. I am grateful to Edmund White, John Dalton, Marshall Klimasewiski, Eugene Constan, Christopher Quirk, Amy Madden, Carroll Moulton, Ernie Hulsey, and David Winner for their friendship and support through many years of writing. I would also like to thank my family, and especially Sarah.

ZACHARY LAZARgraduated from Brown University in 1990. He has been a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has received the James Michener/Copernicus Society Prize from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Lazar grew up in Colorado and now teaches at Hofstra University. Sway is his second novel.