Zachary Lazar: Sway

He thought of the pictures on the living room wall — the woman in her cat-eye glasses, the man’s loosened tie. He saw them coming home, turning to find the stranger sitting in their living room. It would all become a paradise then — the living room, the kitchen, the star-shaped clock above the sofa. It would all become something precious he was about to take away, had already taken away, just by being there.

But what did they mean to him? And what would they think if they’d seen him on the street some afternoon, driving a beat-up pickup truck with a broken piano in the back?

To live inside Charlie’s skin. To be empowered by fear, to use it like a tool. To go back to the ranch as someone transformed, not the pretty boy you had a crush on in high school, not a musician or another lost soul, but a harder, truer soul he had always known was waiting there inside him.

He turned and walked up the sidewalk toward the gravel yard. The house was a living thing now, the watchful center of the empty neighborhood. He thought of the man and woman who lived there, and he had a sense that they were all bound by something he had never been aware of and had no name for. It made him sick to feel them inside him now, pulsing like the blood in the veins of his throat.

IN THE SMALL ROOM,two guitars surge in and out in chaotic alternation, an amplified noise that seems to revolve. It’s on a dilapidated street in London, called Edith Grove, in the southernmost part of Chelsea. It is the coldest winter there in a hundred years.

The flat has mold on the walls. Its gray paint is blistered and chipped, the carpet flaked with bread crusts. For now, the singer, Mick, can only sit and watch. The other two, Brian and Keith, are learning their parts from a record player, blankets over their legs. Their hands are cold and they play intermittently, nodding in silence when it starts to work.

The room feels as cold as it is outside. The radiator is silent, dented, its paint scabbed. To set it pinging they have to feed the gas meter with coins they don’t have and even then the result is only disappointment.

Brian has shiny blond hair and accusatory eyes. He is the only one who can be called handsome, though his neck is thick and he is short, almost stocky. He is the leader — it is his band, he came up with the name. He stares at Mick and plays seven notes on his guitar with a bent note in the middle. The message is something like You are tolerated for now, but only tolerated . Brian is two years older than the others, twenty-one, and he is already the father of two illegitimate children.

Mick blows smoke, and his hand travels up to the collar of his bathrobe, affecting disdain. His ugliness is eye-catching; in his movements there is a patient strategy. He is a student at the London School of Economics, still hedging his bets. He can leave here at any time and end up slightly better off than his father, who is a physical education teacher in Dartford. But he is also the only one of the three who has ever performed in public, singing every Tuesday night in Ealing with another band.

Keith raises his chin, and he and Brian start in on an American song called “Carol.” They trade leads and the two-string vamp of the rhythm part. Keith is gangly, ridiculous. He is still a little in awe of Brian. He makes cutting remarks under his breath, and he sometimes snaps to with a belligerent grin and grabs someone’s nipple and twists. He knows every lick from every Chuck Berry record ever made, an indication of how much time he’s spent alone.

They have a groove going now. It’s impossible to say who is leading whom. Brian plays with his eyes closed, head bowed, his blond bangs falling almost over his eyebrows. Keith’s style is more aggressive, more rhythmic, his crossed legs moving with the beat. Mick is tapping his knees and bobbing his head with his eyes closed too. His chief talent for now is a lack of embarrassment. He starts singing in a voice that is not his own, a lucky stroke of mimicry. It is part Cockney, part black American, and though neither half is authentic, the mix is somehow a joining of strengths.

They come from quiet towns and near suburbs, terraced houses thrown up in the aftermath of German bombs. Places you don’t see until you leave them, and why would you want to leave them, the same roses on the same trellises?

Mick is watching Brian now, whose head is still bowed, intent only on the sound he is making. The sound from his guitar has no meaning, it is only a set of tones, but it seems to imply a range of ominous meanings. Maybe part of Mick already suspects that in that grim flat he is in the right place at the right time.

The flat smells like vegetables and cigarettes. The ceiling is ringed with the black stains from the candles they sometimes burn in place of lightbulbs. They put their socks on top of the radiator until they smell the wool start to burn and then they put them back on and have a minute or two of relief before their toes are numb again. It is so cold they sleep with all their clothes on. They sometimes have to sleep together in the same bed.

Mick is the only one who ever talks about money. For the other two, money is an abstraction, something you get in exchange not for labor but for demeaning yourself in front of other people. Brian works in the electronics department of a large store in Bayswater, but he will soon be fired for stealing. Keith subsists on whatever his mother sends him from home. The two of them have only the vaguest sense of living in a physical world: a place where windows keep out rain, chairs make it more comfortable to sit, electric lights allow one to see. When they get drunk, they break the furniture and imitate Mick’s queenly gestures, and one night they burn his bathrobe in the sink.

They play for hours at a time, their two guitars the warp and weft of the same fabric. They weave minute variations on a single pattern, forgetting themselves in the trance of detail. They spend days and nights in this way, almost wordless, signaling to each other until their fingers bleed. When the pipes freeze, the toilet down the hall won’t flush and so they piss in jars. When the water comes back on, they leave the jars in the basin. Over time the basin fills up with cigarette butts and the newspaper wrappings from food. Mick thinks about quitting, concentrating on his economics course, but the more he has to sit and watch, the more he needs to stay.

Italian suits and Cuban-heeled shoes. White dress shirts with tab collars. Narrow black ties that look even better when he lets the slack end dangle free of the clasp. These are some of the clothes that Brian has managed to wangle out of his various girlfriends, or to steal from his job at the department store in Bayswater.

A week before Christmas a girl arrives just before dark, standing behind the iron fence. Her wild hair makes her ordinary topcoat look misplaced, somehow severe. She looks more lost than she really is, which is her odd way of deflecting the hostility of this strange city. She has a pram with her and inside it is Brian’s infant son.

When she won’t stop ringing the bell, he goes outside to greet her. Upstairs, he and Keith have been practicing, and he knows that Keith is mocking him now in his mind, thinking of dishrags and nappies, and so the thing to do is to act responsible and concerned, to surprise him in this way.

“Tricia,” he says.

She looks shaken for just a moment, but then turns on him with a familiar, disappointed smile.

“I’m here for just a day or two,” she says. “I’m staying with Claire. You know, my cousin Claire, the one you used to fancy.”

He looks at the baby, touching its cheek with two fingertips. “It’s cold,” he says. “Is he all right?”