On the floor, The Sephiroth was still lying where she’d left it that afternoon. On the cover, the Eye of Horus gazed back at her with an almost gleeful indifference.
When he woke up, the girl was gone. There was a smell of sandalwood, of incense. There was a bar of light coming from between the curtains and on the nightstand was Anita’s glass half-filled with soda and limes. She wasn’t there. Her clothes and her suitcase were gone.
It was clear and warm that day. The patio in back of the hotel was a white glare, like light off glass, and the water in the pool was a bright, complicated green. There were only a few guests swimming or sipping drinks on the blue lounge chairs. Beneath the awning, on the patio, Tom Keylock sat by himself with a cup of tea. He was waiting for Brian, who wasn’t answering his door. Brian didn’t know yet that he was the only one who hadn’t checked out of the hotel.
A short cab ride away, in the medina, the others were in the blue shop owned by the man named Hassan, filling in the last few hours before their flight home. They had just booked tickets that morning; they had left it to Keylock to break the news to Brian. Marianne was dancing to the Moroccan music on the radio now, her eyes closed, rolling her head, her long blond hair falling almost to her waist. Gold bangles slid down her forearms; the folds of her green sari loosened around her shoulders. She started spinning around faster and faster, unfolding her hands in the air. There was something defiant about how fast she was moving, a rebuke to the others for just sitting there, being calm. Hassan called out, clapping his hands. Robert Fraser started clapping too, raising himself erect. Mick brushed something off his sleeve, incredulous, then annoyed. He looked over at Anita and Keith in their corner, then back at Marianne, and something about her dancing reminded him of Brian: a helpless, unsuccessful gesture. She was the “Naked Girl Found Upstairs,” and she seemed to feel obliged to play out the role now.
Mick walked out the door, frowning, faking a cough. He saw a newspaper image of himself dancing on the set of a TV studio, his arms dangling from his shoulders like a scarecrow’s arms, a moment taken out of context and so made ridiculous. He didn’t know where to go now that he had separated himself from the group. He strolled with his hands in his pockets, lips set in a posture of grim appraisal, passing the row of whitewashed storefronts.
He had never liked Anita, had always thought she was poisonous, but now he had to come to terms with what she had done. He saw that in a way she had become the center of the band.
The walls of the buildings were pasted with hypersexual movie posters and Fanta orange soda ads in Arabic. He tried to imagine that he was amused by the teeming life before him — the men lugging broken stones in a wheelbarrow, the little barefoot boy in a wool shawl smoking a cigarette, the walls stenciled with black letters: DéFENSE D’AFFICHER.
When they got back to England, the band would either go on or it wouldn’t. Brian would either look after himself or he wouldn’t. He and Keith would either spend ten years in prison or they would make another record. When he was onstage, things went fast and he solved each problem in the same moment that it arose, building momentum, forgetting himself. But in ordinary life, even with the others around, there were times when there was nothing to say or do and everyone looked aimless and false.
He remembered the morning before the bust at Keith’s house, the way the bare trees had started to shine like aluminum, the way the rocky beach had aligned itself all at once into endless ranks of perfectly situated debris. It was strange how the past was still there, even after all this time of pretending that it didn’t matter. He realized that Keith was the only person he trusted.
They were walking through the Jemaa el Fna, Keith and Anita, buoyant and laughing and stoned, feeling free of everything that had happened the night before. Her hair was disheveled and greasy, and her mascara was smudged. Both of her eyes were bruised, but they were holding hands, determined to push things further, if only for the sake of pushing things further. He had no idea how long this was going to last and he didn’t care.
A band of gnaoua musicians were shaking their iron castanets in the center of a circled crowd. They leered and stuck out their tongues, or suddenly froze in a suspicious, sideways glare, but it was daytime and there was no menace in their poses. They wore bright silk tunics and high-crowned, tasseled fezzes studded with cowrie shells.
“Lovely country,” Keith said.
He reached down for the cheap Kodak camera that dangled from his neck. At the last second, Anita leaned into the picture from the side, almost stumbling, smiling at her own clumsiness as she pressed her hand to the crown of her floppy white hat.
“Greetings from Morocco,” she said.
“Right. I’ll send it home to Mum.”
“Dear Mum, this is my friend, the Whore of Babylon. Note the damaged look in her eyes.”
“Yes, please send money. Care of Scotland Yard.”
In four months, Keith would appear in court for his drug trial, and some remnant of the feeling he had now would come back to him then. He would tell the court what he thought of five policemen invading his house, peering into his privacy. He would wear one of Anita’s scarves around his neck. During the recesses, he would order expensive lunches from his cell and get drunk on wine. When they asked him about the naked girl in the upstairs bedroom, he would say that he was not an old man and did not share their petty moral outrage, that the girl had just been taking a nap and that in any case she was his friend. When it was over, he would emerge from the trial transformed, a swaggering outlaw figure, no longer a lone misfit, no longer the shy dreamer who had been preyed upon at school by older boys who called him a faggot and a girl. He didn’t know that the next night the police would raid Brian’s flat, the flat in Earl’s Court he had shared with Anita, and frame him for possession of cocaine. When he thought of Brian now — leaving Brian by himself in the hotel — he couldn’t picture Brian himself, only the empty room.
LUV N’ HAIGHT, 1966–1967
THE BOY’S NAME was Bobby Beausoleil. His last name meant “Beautiful Sun,” he’d told Anger. He had the kind of cheekbones that formed triangular shadows beneath his eyes, and the eyes themselves were an unlikely, almost violet shade of blue.
“This is like a test,” Anger said, crouching behind the camera. “I just need to see what you look like on film.”
Bobby was looking not above Anger’s head, as some people would have, but right into the lens, his hands clasped behind his back. He wore a kind of swashbuckler’s shirt with puffy sleeves and a set of crossed laces at the collar.
“I’ve never seen your films,” he said.
“No. But this has nothing to do with my other films.”
“I was just saying, I’d like to see them.”
Anger moved around him with the light meter in his hand, checking the levels near his face. It was a slightly intrusive process, but Bobby did not seem bothered by it. He tilted his head a little, determined not to falter, determined to make the most of what he was already thinking of as his chance.
“My last film was very black,” said Anger. “Motorcycles. People falling in love with death, that sort of thing. I’m trying to make the opposite of that now. What I was talking to you about before.”
“The Lucifer idea.”
“Something about San Francisco. The whole thing of peace and flowers. I want to understand what that’s about.”
They were in the bedroom of Anger’s new apartment, on the ground floor of a crumbling Victorian house in the Haight-Ashbury district. He had painted the walls purple, and with black and silver paint he had transformed the egg-and-dart molding into what looked like a runner of studded leather. The result was calming, occult, dreamlike. The windows were recessed in high alcoves, and at the top of each, still intact, were frescoes of women’s faces, windblown and ethereal.