Sway (12 page)

Above the big open square called the Jemaa el Fna, the sun was starting to open up a gap in the mild cloud cover. It lit up
the long folding counters of the food stands, where plates of raw ground lamb, diced tomatoes, olives, rice, sausages, and
kebabs sat atop thick beds of wilting greens. Brian was just coming out of the darkness of the clothing souks with Tom Keylock
when the light on the buildings changed from a muddy brown to a bright pink, all of it suffused with a saffron yellow that
was like a second dawn in the middle of the afternoon.

“The acid’s starting to come on,” he said.

“Yes.”

“There’s that sort of humming you always feel in your teeth.”

“We have money. Cigarettes. Nothing can go too badly for us now.”

There was a persistent drone of horns. From the food stalls came the bitter smell of burning charcoal and the dry, organ-meat
smell of grilled lamb. A thin man in chef’s whites and a toque was ladling a brown liqueur over a wide pan full of stone-colored
snails.

“You knew, didn’t you?” said Brian.

“Knew what?” Keylock took him by the arm and guided him out of the way of a man walking by with a stack of crates on a dolly.
Keylock was tall and round-shouldered with sideburns and horn-rimmed glasses. “It’s too much to talk about,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Brian. “I should have finished with that bitch a long time ago. It’s really starting to kick in,
isn’t it?”

“Yes. We’ll just need to cool out for a while somewhere.”

There were three old men in brilliantly colored robes standing on the other side of the square. Their shoulders were slung
with leather pouches and several strings of bells and brass cups. Their hats were like enormous tasseled lampshades woven
from brightly colored yarn, reds and blues and yellows and greens.

“Perfect,” Brian said. “They’re brilliant, right?”

“Those men? Yes, fine, they’re brilliant.”

“I may take some more in a little while. I’d like to buy some of those hats. Or maybe just buy the men themselves, take them
back to England.”

A man in a dark sport coat and a dingy woolen vest approached them, whispering something in French and fanning out some tattered
business cards. Keylock brushed him aside with a rise of his chin. He turned to Brian, steadying him again with a hand placed
lightly on his shoulder.

“Now you see what I was talking about,” he said, and suddenly each moment was so densely packed with situations that Brian
couldn’t begin to take them all in. Bicycles and animals and carts moved in strange diagonals through the alleyways at the
corners of the square. The sunlight gleamed on the hundreds of numbered plaques above the food tables, turning them into row
after row of toylike moons. A group of men in white robes and turbans were dancing in a crowd, rattling a set of square metal
tambourines in their hands. Translucent doves fled from the folds of their clothes.

When they got back to the hotel, they were all so high that each moment arrived in its own frame, like a set of projected
slides — the revolving glass doors, the tiled lobby, the carved rosewood screens behind the fountain, the bellman in his white
jacket and fez. The sun had come out, so they decided to spend the rest of the afternoon by the pool. Anita went upstairs
to change, still feeling the bluster she always felt when she was with Keith. Walking back through the medina, he had been
so stoned that he could hardly move his feet, his white fur coat slung over his back like a dead dog. Packs of boys had hovered
around them, solemn and staring, only the youngest ones daring to come up close. One of them, about eight years old, followed
them up a set of stone steps, his hands laced behind his back, as suspicious as an old man, mimicking every one of Keith’s
clumsy movements as if learning the steps to a dance.

It was only when she got upstairs to the tenth floor and opened the door to her room that she remembered what was really happening
that day. There were all the clothes scattered on the beds and the chairs and the tiled floor: Brian’s clothes and her clothes,
all of them mixed together, just like at their flat in Earl’s Court.

In the bathroom, she picked up a book she’d been reading called
The Sephiroth.
She opened it at random to a page somewhere near the middle.

Speak to me of desire. Of the endless, coiling desire of the Self. Of how the Self, goaded by desire, becomes like an animal,
compelled by need, caught in its sway. Now speak to me of the Soul, whom we see only in glimpses of others, in the blur of
music, in the senselessness of dreams. Not who we are or what we believe, but the blinding shimmer from the void.

Figure 3. Trump XV, The Devil, Lucifer in his aged and corrupted form. As the Father of Fear, he has horns and batlike wings. Below him, two Lovers, Adam and Eve (Trump VI), are chained in darkness at his feet. Note how comfortable they appear in their chains, so loose around their wrists that they could free themselves at any time if they so desired.

THANATOMANIA, 1963–1964

KENNETH ANGER WAS WALKING
by the boardwalk on Coney Island one afternoon when he came across a group of boys working on their motorcycles. They were
working-class kids, mostly Italian and Irish, their hair greased back in the manner of James Dean or Marlon Brando. From a
distance at first, then closer, Anger watched them as they ratcheted and stared at their engines, their triceps shifting in
the broken light, shaded by the boardwalk’s wooden planking.

He didn’t approach them that first day. Even on that hot afternoon, he was dressed entirely in black, except for a pale lime
silk scarf around his neck. Surely the boys would see what he was, but then again what was he? The boys would never have guessed
that a person like him would have tattoos on his forearms and wrists. A pentagram, an Eye of Horus, a scorpion — his rising
sign, a sign associated with trickery and deceit. They would never have guessed that among other things, Anger thought of
them as brothers in arms.

He was living in Brooklyn Heights now, penniless, sleeping on the roof of an apartment building in what could only be described
as a shanty. It was a small metal shed without windows. Inside, he had a mattress and a kerosene lantern and an assortment
of mugs. The shed and the apartment below it belonged to a film professor and his wife, Eliot and Beverly Gance, whose hatred
for each other was like a cunning distraction from the doom that seemed to thicken the air around them: their sagging thoraxes,
their nicotine breath, the haunted, midday fatigue that permeated their rooms. The Gances would start drinking on a Friday
afternoon and not stop until Monday morning, during which time Anger would witness their brawls — broken dishes, humiliating
sexual accusations, suicide threats, then a shoving match with drinks and cigarettes in hand along the raised brick edge of
the roof where Anger had his shed. His presence seemed to reassure both of them into further flights of aggression. He didn’t
have to pay the Gances rent, but he seemed to be paying them instead through a steady depletion of his own vitality.

More and more, both he and the world around him seemed on the verge of a breaking point. He could feel suppressed hostility
running like an invisible current through the city’s televisions and the flickering lights of its subway cars. If it wasn’t
the fear of Communists, it was the fear of Negroes. If it wasn’t the race to blow up the world, it was the race to send dogs
or monkeys to the moon.

There were nights when it was too hot to sleep in the metal shed, and so he would spread one of his sheets out over the asphalt
roof and look across the moonlit river to the speckled towers of Manhattan. He had friends there, and there were circles of
people who knew his work and screened his films and had him over to their apartments for dinner. Afterward, he would sometimes
go in search of boys, lost drifters in denim jackets or mechanic’s clothes, Lucifers, he called them, like so many avatars
of his teenage crush, Ted Drake. They were mostly straight kids, hungry for a steak dinner, young enough to think of him as
old, not fooled for a minute into thinking he was anything like them. When he got them alone, they were often as passive as
ghosts, but sometimes there was a muscular scorn that brought him into contact with the real thing — a clenched fist at the
end of a forearm, the edges of a ring abrading the bones of his back. What mattered was the first flash of desire, that almost
nonexistent few moments when you could confront someone purely as a body and perhaps be confronted yourself in the same way,
divorced from the dull facts of who you were. After that, things could only be tedious — two men talking to each other like
ironic girls.

He believed that his films were lasting works of art, but perhaps this idea was evasive. Perhaps it was a way to justify being
thirty-five and living in a metal shed on someone else’s roof.

He presented himself to the boys with the motorcycles as a camera enthusiast, a solemn man in his thirties who despite his
whispery voice seemed to know something about tools. He bought them beer, and over the course of the next few days he filmed
them as they moved in a crouch around the concrete floors of their garages, smoking cigarettes as they turned the wrench on
a crankshaft or fitted a gas tank back into its slot. He filmed their gearboxes and sprockets, the pages of their repair manuals,
the red taillights and chains and batteries laid out on the gray tarpaulin in the garage’s dark corner. None of them did well
under the camera’s gaze for more than a minute or two. Being watched changed them, made them self-conscious. It got him thinking
about the wavering line between fakery and authenticity, the way a dangerous pose sets up the expectation for actual danger.

Because what was a motorcycle for, if not to flirt with the crash? And what was the point of all that tangible speed, if not
to outrace age and move directly to the end?

He didn’t remember where he’d come across the word “thanatomania.” When he looked it up in the Gances’ dictionary it wasn’t
there, but he couldn’t help thinking that this word held the key to whatever it was he was sensing all around him. The vague
restlessness seemed to have its source in some unspoken, half-yearning fascination with death. It didn’t escape him that those
boys with their motorcycles made a perfect tableau of aggression and indifference. Their bikes, fitted with neat round mirrors
on either side of the crossbars, were just like the spartan racing bikes that Jean Cocteau had chosen for the minions of the
underworld in his film
Orpheus
.

About a week after he’d filmed the bikers, he met a thirty-one-year-old hustler named Bruce Byron outside a movie theater
in Times Square. Byron wore a cowboy hat and a denim jacket that made him look rangier and younger than he was. He was good-looking
in a blue-collar way. But it didn’t matter, since Anger was in that state of obsession now where everything he saw or heard
became related to what he was working on and immediately found its rightful place. When he mentioned the biker movie, the
response was silence: Bruce Byron squinting off into the distance, his eyes shadowed by the bent brim of his hat, his cheap
boots creaking above the hot sheen of the sidewalk.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” said Anger.

“Maybe I’d be interested,” said Byron. He was still looking off down the street, lightly drumming his fingers on the edge
of his thigh.

“Why don’t you give me your phone number?” said Anger. “I’ll call you later.”

“I don’t know about the phone.”

Perhaps part of the problem was that Anger had a mild crush on him. Perhaps he couldn’t quite forgive Bruce Byron for the
matter-of-fact perfection of his ears, the stubbled contours of his chin, the way his small eyes focused so tightly on whatever
they were trying to decipher.

A few days later, they met at Byron’s apartment, a walk-up on Tenth Avenue with red curtains patterned with silver snowflakes
that were somehow strangely futuristic. Atop the television was a picture of a woman who might have been Byron’s sister, a
comb in her brown bouffant, rheumy eyes that peeled down a little too far at the bottoms, like certain dogs’. Anger began
setting up lights in the corners of the apartment’s only room, training them on a sagging bed with a loud scarlet coverlet.
He had brought along two shopping bags full of props: leather jackets, engineer’s boots, a plastic skull, several posters,
ashtrays, doilies, and commemorative plates emblazoned with the faces of Marlon Brando and James Dean. He arranged this paraphernalia
around the room, replacing the decorative prints of Hawaiian beach scenes and the Golden Gate Bridge. This décor suddenly
made more sense when Byron picked up the photograph of the woman on the TV and mentioned that she was his wife.

“I didn’t know you were married,” said Anger.

“No, there’s a lot you don’t know.”

“She’s at work?”

“She stays with her mother sometimes. In Queens. Debbie’s all right, except when she’s not all right, you know what I mean?”

They had both taken a hit of speed. Anger was already prepared to start, his light meter in his hand, but Byron was standing
contemplatively in his denim jacket and cowboy hat, stretching his arms in a bridge before his chest. He seemed to be getting
himself into character, which made no sense as Anger had given him no indication at all about what his role involved. He asked
Byron to take off his hat. Then he asked him to strip down to his undershirt and lie on the bed in front of the TV, maybe
with a pair of sunglasses on, maybe with a cigarette behind his ear.

“I don’t see what that has to do with the motorcycle idea,” said Byron.

“We’re not there yet. Just wait.”

“You want me to watch television?”

“Just for a minute. Everyone does it differently. I want to see how you do it.”

“You’re going to film this?”

“I think you should take off your jacket at least. Obviously the hat.”

Byron frowned and lit a cigarette. “I’ve always considered it an idiot box,” he said. “If I was bored I might put it on. While
I was reading.”

“Look,” said Anger. “You need to relax. You need to stop thinking about everything so much.”

There was something like suppressed sarcasm in the sullen way Byron finally started unbuttoning his denim jacket. He gave
a kind of silent chuckle, squinting as the smoke rose from the cigarette in his mouth. It seemed possible that this was the
look he gave everyone just before he finally gave them what they wanted.

“She watches that thing day and night sometimes,” he said, raising his chin at the television.

“Who?” said Anger.

“My wife. Debbie. If it was up to me, I’d smash it. Throw it out the window.”

“Maybe put the sunglasses on. The big ones. The green ones.”

“You want me to lie down?”

“Yes, lie down.”

“Bedroom scenes. I usually get paid for this kind of thing.”

“I’m here to make a film. I’m not here for that.”

He had seen it happen many times. Almost as soon as the camera was on its tripod, a person like Bruce Byron would start to
imagine himself as the Star. At the same time, he would second-guess everything Anger said, because he’d never heard of him,
and yet he still imagined that the film could somehow make him famous. It was a consequence of Anger not being famous enough
himself, not being a Hollywood director who could bark commands instead of working through trickery and deceit.

“It’s not working out,” Eliot Gance said to Anger the next morning, standing just outside the stairwell that led up to the
roof. The collar of his Cuban shirt was spread to reveal his veined throat and the top of his pink chest.

“I may go to Mexico,” he said. “Perhaps the Far East. Can you have your things cleared out by the end of this month?”

“Your life, Eliot. None of it makes any sense.”

“If she thinks she can just finish me off, she’ll find it’s not so easy. I’ve got different elements in play now. Different
strategies.”

“I’ll speak to Beverly about this.”

“Stay out of it.”

“Let’s not forget that other people exist, Eliot. I have a film I’m trying to finish.”

“A film. That must be difficult. Will you stay in town, do you think, or will you go back to Europe?”

“I’ll speak to Beverly.”

“Leave her out of this.”

“We’ll see about this Mexico trip. The Far East.”

“Good-bye, Kenneth.”

“Wait a minute.”

“Good-bye.”

On the last night of filming, he took Byron to the bikers’ clubhouse, along with four cases of beer and a box of props. In
some secret part of their minds, the bikers must have known what kind of person Anger was, but there was something about Byron
— he was dressed all in black leather, like a mannequin or a doll — that let them know for sure. They staggered through the
cases of beer and then they went wild, the radio on, forming conga lines, sloppy cancan routines that got more and more sexual,
miming sodomy, their faces hidden by Halloween masks. They ended up jumping on one another’s backs, wrestling each other to
the floor, gibbering like apes with their pants down. Byron had never met them before. His only instructions were to try to
blend in. All he could do was stand off to the side, drinking beer. The refreshment table was knocked over on its side. People
rode their motorcycles through the clubhouse. They had one of the younger kids on the ground and were squirting a bottle of
mustard on him, his pants around his ankles, and though it was happening right in front of him, Byron just stood there by
the wall, his hand in his pocket, so aloof that it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

“That’s what you wanted, I guess,” he said when it was over. “A big ridiculous scene.”

They were in Anger’s rented station wagon. Byron was slouched back in his seat with a beer on his knee, his sunglasses on
in the darkness.

“I thought you would get more involved,” said Anger.

“They were just kids. I was asking them about their bikes. I know more about bikes than they do.”

“What’s the matter?”

Byron stared ahead through the windshield, his face hidden in shadow.

“What?” Anger persisted.

“You want me to eat shit, that’s fine,” he said. “I’ve been eating shit my whole life.”

They were on their way to the next location. It was an abandoned church, its windows smashed, rainwater pooled on the plastic
sheeting that covered the pews. It was there that Byron’s character would erupt in a last frenzy of rage, climbing up on the
altar in a fit of desecration. It would be the best part of his performance. In the church it would be dark, and he would
gesture and pose for almost an hour, acting out a sermon that in its senseless, dictatorial lunges would be a perfect ending
for the film.

“Are you all right?” said Anger.

“I’m fine. Let’s just get it done.”

“We’ll do it your way this time. You tell me what you want to do and I’ll film it.”

“I want it to be real. I’m the only one putting anything real into this. Every time it gets serious, you start smirking, playing
your games.”