In the darkness, Keith could feel the beginnings of a vague shape starting to emerge beneath the surface of what he was playing. He leaned forward in his chair, slowly nodding his head at Mick, adding a little ornament on the D chord, a bright suspended fourth that he played with his pinkie. Projected on the wall behind him was an image of a man in false eyelashes and black lipstick who reclined on a lavish bed. He was surrounded by pictures of dragons and Chinese gods, and on the bed’s velvet coverlet was a large opened box full of rings.
Robert Fraser stuck his head into the suite’s barely open door, the black nylon stocking on top of his head. Then Marianne came in behind him, taking his arm as she stepped inside. She was still wearing sunglasses, like a blind person. She had the kind of lips that made their own separate expression, reticent lips that curled mischievously upward at the corners. Mick looked over at her, but she was deliberately not looking back. On their way back from the medina that afternoon, he had noticed something that he’d seen happen several times now: for no reason at all, her eyes had started welling up with tears. She’d pretended it wasn’t happening, but the effort had made her so distant it was like self-hypnosis. When he asked her if she was all right, she looked at him as if he were being deliberately confusing.
On the wall, the man in the film was twining a long silver necklace around his fingers. Then he dangled it above his face and began to coil it slowly into his mouth.
Keith nodded his head in that absent but emphatic way he had, which made Mick settle down into the music, forgetting himself. It made his face change into a near replica of what Keith’s face had been just a moment before. He closed his eyes, his lower lip jutting slightly forward. The sounds they were making had no meaning yet, they were just a set of tones, but part of what was making the song take shape now was the sense that they were doing it in front of Marianne, that she was within earshot but had no idea what he was thinking.
Brian was on his knees in the bathroom. His hair was scattered across his neck in such a way that Anita could see the pale skin beneath it. The fractured light came from a single yellow bulb screwed into the ceiling and when she closed her eyes the yellowness flashed like a chain of miniature suns in the veins of her temples.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Let me help you.”
He turned and his eyes were so distant, looking into hers, that he seemed to be seeing her though a thickness of glass. She rested her hand on the side of his face and with the other hand she smoothed the hair over the back of his head. He kept staring at her, his nostrils glistening, and for a brief moment he seemed to recognize her with more clarity and she almost thought they were going to smile at each other.
“You think it’s funny,” he said.
“No, I don’t think it’s funny.”
“It is. It’s funny if you think about it long enough. Keith, of all people.”
He started coughing and turned around. It made his head shake, the fringes of his hair rising and then coiling against his shoulders. She crouched beside him, waves of nausea moving in her throat and stomach.
“Get out,” he said.
“Brian.”
“I just wish that Keith could have stayed the way he was. That you could have left him alone.”
She stood up. “I don’t know what to say to you.”
“He was my friend. And you were this massive thing. Terrifying.”
“He’s still your friend.”
“I don’t want him to be my friend. Are you out of your mind?”
“Then you’re a bastard.”
“Just get out. Get out, and I’ll leave you alone.”
She left him there. When she walked back into the bedroom, she glimpsed herself in the mirror. Her eyes were all black pupil and the bruise on her cheekbone was a purplish green against pale skin.
They were all standing around in the dark when she came into the room next door, still stunned from the sudden quiet of the hallway outside. There was a movie being projected on the wall, casting a green and red glow on the dim standing figures. She saw Mick moving through the dark, his walk loose-jointed and balletic like his walk onstage, a walk that had nothing to do with anyone else in the room.
She saw Keith, mixing himself a drink at the impromptu bar in a far corner. He had his back to her, and Tom Keylock was gripping his shoulder and reaching for the bottle of Scotch.
Projected on the wall was the middle-aged man in false eyelashes, examining himself in a mirror. He was standing in a narrow red hallway, looking at himself with such concentration that eventually the hallway dissolved and he emerged as a different person, a woman, standing by herself in darkness, wearing a black sequined gown.
“You would like this film,” said a voice behind her.
It was Robert Fraser. He passed something into her hand, a clumsy, furtive exchange. It was the black nylon stocking.
“The Scarlet Woman,” he said. “Jezebel. The Whore of Babylon.”
The woman’s short hair was dyed a lurid red. She was lit by a pink light in the otherwise endless expanse of darkness. She was beautiful in a cold, androgynous way that was either extremely sexual or not sexual at all.
Anita put her arm around Fraser’s waist and leaned her head against his shoulder.
“Brian’s lost it,” she said.
“Of course he has. But there’s nothing you can do about it now, is there?”
Keith saw her from across the room. He raised his glass and gave her a sardonic grin, his craggy teeth glinting in the dim light. Tom Keylock was whispering something into his ear.
When Brian opened the door, the room was dark except for a beam of white light that spread across to the far wall, flickering and occasionally dimming so that the standing figures were sometimes lit up in neon tones of green or red. He looked at it too directly and for a moment all he saw was a whirling field of white. The music was loud, a syncopated weave of drums and ouds and violins. Then the curtains billowed and glowed like burnt sails against the high windows that gave out onto the balcony, and he felt the strange man’s presence behind him, leaning forward on his rolled-up umbrella.
A woman’s face was projected on the wall, her bright red hair cut like a Roman emperor’s. In the palm of her hand she held a tiny, horned figure made of clay. She extended it before her face, her long eyelashes casting a fine, softening shadow over her rapt gaze. The figurine burst into flames.
In the darkness, the first people he made out were Keith and Anita. She was walking toward Keith, her fringed scarf trailing off her shoulder.
Keith took her in his clumsy arms. Her eyes started to burn with a strange desire to laugh and she let her head fall back so that she could smile at him. She pressed her cheek against his and kissed his earlobe. She could feel the muscles moving in his shoulders through his thin cotton T-shirt, and she knew that behind her head he was sipping his drink, could sense him rattling it slightly, crushing an ice cube with his molars.
“Everyone so smashingly divine,” he said. “Just a lovely gathering of the loveliest people.”
She took the drink out of his hand and took a sip. Then she turned to find Brian striding across the room, small-eyed and pale.
He was dressed in a long blue velvet coat with a fake ermine collar. He also wore the necklace made of human teeth. The hair around his face was strung together in damp tendrils that fell into his eyes.
Keith stepped forward, head slightly bowed. He draped his long arm around Brian’s neck, so that the three of them were gathered for a moment in the same embrace.