The state of California banned the film in 1964, and in doing so elevated it to an importance it might never have achieved if it had been simply left alone. After that, Anger kept bumping into different aspects of some newly distorted idea he had of who he was. Strangers sent him letters. They wrote to him as the pornographer, the fascist, the sadist, the necrophiliac. He was whatever they needed him to be. Handsome, intense boys would introduce themselves after screenings, and their interest in his every rambling word made him garrulous. He became a character, a talker, an opinionated fool.
At the film’s premiere in New York, Bruce Byron had shown up dressed in full biker regalia, down to a leather cap and a black leather jacket with a scorpion painted on the back. He stood by himself, a figure of embarrassment that nobody wanted to look at. Anger ignored him (he himself was never alone that night), but sometimes when he looked back on the scene he would imagine it through Byron’s eyes: the smugness, the utter conviction of his own centrality, the injustice of Anger being treated as the film’s star.
At night, an image would appear behind Anger’s closed eyes: a lithe boy with dark hair that fringed his forehead. He would arrive on a motorcycle in a fog of yellow light, making reckless circles in some vast hangar, his arms flexing as they wielded the silver handlebars. At top speed, he would mount a flight of red stairs that led to an altar adorned by a giant silver eagle. Airborne, he would crash through a pane of glass and tumble onto a concrete floor lit by klieg lights. His motorcycle would be bent and smoking. He would lie spread-eagled on the ground, his arms tattooed with anchors and skulls, blood in his hair. Then he would open his eyes and Anger would enter the boy’s mind, where there was nothing but images: a red curtain over still water, a blue gas flame reflected on chrome, a black sky pocked with green specks of light. It was now that the dreams of Lucifer began to proliferate.
MARRAKECH, 1967
IT WAS EIGHT O’CLOCK in the evening, though it felt to Brian like midnight or afternoon. He had lost Tom Keylock somewhere in the fabric souks a few hours ago and now he was looking through the window of the cab, at the dense wedges of buildings, earth-colored or eggshell-colored, which appeared as if they’d been scraped together out of sand. A few electric lights burned like flares along the busier streets, bright orange or neon green. They made the city of Marrakech look more and not less ancient.
In the elevator up to the tenth floor of the hotel, he became aware of someone else’s presence looming just behind his shoulder. It was a middle-aged man in a wrinkled suit, a closed umbrella at his side. Brian knew this without having to turn around, just as he knew who the man was without being able to remember his name. He hunched forward with an impatient smile on his face, hands fisted at his sides, not looking. When he closed his eyes, he saw numerals, first chiseled into gray stone, then colorful and stylized, like numerals on a Victorian signboard. Not more than three seconds passed before he was waiting in anticipation of the man’s seizing him by the arms.
The elevator’s doors opened with a brutal series of lurches. He walked down the hallway, listing slightly in response to the faint undulations in the walls. There were animal shapes moving in the plaster, hooves and hindquarters that seemed to press against the surface from the other side. Faint music was seeping out from the farthest suite down the hall.
He matched the key in his hand to the number on the door. All the doors were an identical dark brown.
Next door, there was a crowd in Keith’s suite. He and Mick were working on a song, ignoring the others, Keith with one heel resting on the edge of his chair, his guitar’s body wedged awkwardly between his thighs. He hit the strings hard, then lightly, then harder, the process a kind of math, or like trying to coax a flame out of a few smoldering sticks. Mick was sitting on a little tapestried stool before him, trying to follow along on his guitar, watching Keith’s fretboard. In the room with them were more than a dozen people, some of whose names they didn’t even know. They were talking and playing Moroccan music on the radio and someone was setting up a movie projector on a table. He told everyone to turn out the lights. There was a confused grumbling, a cackle of laughter, then the room went dark. Keith and Mick kept playing, their guitars out of sync, a nonsense of rhythm that no one else in the room had any patience even to watch.
“Mortify the spirit in order to more purely inhabit the body,” a voice said in the darkness. “Enter the nightmare until it loses the veneer of credibility.”
A film started in the projector. On the wall, there was a rectangle of saturated black, almost purple, and then a slow upward pan of words written in gold ink: A Film by Anger. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.
Anita was still grinning at something when she looked up to see him. The room was lit by only a few candles and Brian felt the man in the wrinkled suit behind him, mocking him. They were all sitting on the bed — Anita, Marianne, Robert — sifting through a large opened box full of bracelets and rings.
“Brian,” she said. “You’ve been gone for so long. We were worried about you.”
There were clothes all over the room. Robert had something on his head that looked like a stocking cap that had melted and blackened into a fine wisp. Beside him, Marianne was wearing a green sari and sunglasses, smoking a cigarette.
“I was in the square,” he said. “I’ve just been checking it out. The Jemaa el Fna.”
He had forgotten all the specifics of how Anita looked, forgotten her wide mouth, the comic insistence of her eyes. Everything he said or did now created the exact opposite impression of what he intended. He could see small hooves pressing against the wet plaster of the walls.
She took a long, heavy necklace from the box and held it out to him. “Look,” she said. “I thought this would be perfect.”
“Sacred magical necklace,” said Robert. “We stole it.” He pulled the strange cap down over his face. It turned out to be a black nylon stocking. It made his face look angry and Mongoloid. “We stole everything in town.”
She held the necklace out to him, standing up and throwing her scarf back around her neck. It was a strand of mirror chips and colored beads and between them were a dozen or more jagged shapes that turned out to be human teeth.
“We’re all very high,” said Anita. “Are you all right?”
“I’m just very high.”
“Put it on. We want to see you with it on.”
“We need to talk for a while.”
“I can’t talk now. You know that I can’t talk right now.”
He looked into her eyes and she was smiling at him with the bland approval of a big sister. He saw now that they’d been playing a game in which Anita and Marianne were humiliating Robert with different kinds of jewelry and Robert was pretending to be him. The goats started scraping at the walls with their horns, others were kicking at the walls with their hooves. He wished that Anita would stop acting as though she couldn’t read his mind.