“I’m going down to L.A. for a while,” Bobby said.
Anger looked down at his hands on his legs.
“We have to get something going,” Bobby said. “The band. All the record companies are down there.” The road flattened and rose into a gradual incline, and he gripped the lever on the steering column, forcing it into lower gear.
“I thought we were making a film,” said Anger.
“Well, there’s that too. That’s obviously a priority. But the band is about to go somewhere. I can feel that.”
Anger nodded slowly. At the end of the hill, on their left, they saw the beginnings of the event they were about to attend. Beyond a row of picnic tables and a pair of outhouses, someone had erected a kind of pavilion made of different-colored bedsheets. Around it were people in costume — a boy with a flute and a leather vest, a boy in a painted cape and a wizard’s hat. It was a style that mostly eluded Anger, an irreverent humor that never settled on innocence or sarcasm but wavered between them. Bobby was already smiling in the strange, coded way that Anger had learned to recognize, the smile of people who were younger than he was.
“How long will you be gone?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe a few months? It’s up in the air.”
“A few months.”
“Like I said, it’s not set in stone. We’re going to be lining things up once we get there. Showcases and things.”
“It sounds like maybe it’s not set at all.”
Bobby stared straight ahead through the windshield. “We won’t know until we get there,” he said. “That’s all I know for now. I told you from the very beginning that the band was what I was about. I would think that you of all people would understand that.”
Anger immersed himself in work, just like his father, who had spent all his spare time in his garage, fixated on his machines. After Bobby left, he did an elaborate reediting of a film he now saw could be called “psychedelic,” a film called Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. He added superimpositions, doubling and tripling the images so that the action seemed to take place in a vast, floating darkness. He synced each cut to the music, jumbling the separate tableaux until they began to build a rhythm, finessing tension and drama out of nothing but images. Outside it was June. The streets were lined with sycamores whose leaves were yellow-green and full of the strange, quasi-tropical succulence that reminded him of the trees of his childhood in Santa Monica. He stayed inside the editing room; he tried not to think about why he was there. The work was time-consuming, and for ten or twelve hours he would lose himself in its intricacies.
It was fine, until a package arrived, three days after Bobby left. It was an overstuffed manila envelope containing a motorcycle T-shirt and an anonymous note, a quotation from The Sephiroth: “Look into the sightless Eye of the Moon and see what Light glows there. There is no Life without Death. You have been sleepwalking. Now go back to bed and dream of the Sun.”
The T-shirt was ripped and covered with brownish stains, obviously bloodstains. It was silk-screened with a picture of a BSA motorcycle. Anger guessed right away who it was from, because a month ago Bruce Byron had sent a telegram, the latest in a series, congratulating him on the success of Scorpio Rising, its interesting ideas, and leaving the implication that he was somehow owed money.
Bobby was gone for six days when there was a phone call. Less than an hour later, he showed up in front of the crumbling Victorian house with his guitar wrapped in an army blanket against the rain. His hair was wet and his white buccaneer’s shirt hung from his body like a soaked, transparent rag. Someone had stolen his money, or he had lost his money — it would never be clear when Bobby talked about money. From what he’d told Anger on the phone, he had slept the night before in an abandoned car.
The two of them stood in the front hall, Bobby in a puddle of water that was absolutely clear, like new varnish on the pine floor.
“He just turned on me,” he said. “That’s how it is with people like that.”
“Who?” said Anger.
“I don’t know. This spade cat, Donald, it’s not important.”
Anger bowed his head as Bobby came farther inside, hugging his guitar to his chest.
“I’ll have to go back later,” he said. “I just need to cool out for a while. They have my clothes, everything.”
They went past the kitchen and into the apartment’s extra bedroom. It was an old ballroom with molded ceilings and high windows that looked out on the sycamores below. It was cluttered with boxes. Bobby peeled off his shirt, dropping it on the floor, his back to Anger. He roughed up his hair with his fingers. He bent over and let its ends fall to his knees, then stood up straight and flipped his head up so that the wet black strands shot back over his shoulders.
“I appreciate this,” he said, looking into Anger’s eyes.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“No, really. I appreciate it.”
His face was younger and plainer without all of his hair falling over his forehead. Bare-chested, his white skin taut with goose pimples, he looked like a high school boy damp from the shower after gym.
Anger moved some of his boxes and trunks into the closet and stacked some others against the two far walls. He plugged a desk lamp into the socket by the window, trying not to look at him.
An hour later, they were in Anger’s room — the only room in the apartment resembling a common room — where they sat on the couch and shared a joint. Through the leaded windows, the leaves on the trees were a shiny green, sagging from their branches. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still gray, making every color stand out like something permanent.
“You’re not telling me what really happened,” said Anger.
Bobby shook his head in a bored way, his eyes closed. Anger watched the smoke come out of his nostrils.
“Some things went wrong,” he finally said. “On the way to L.A., it didn’t happen the way I thought it would. There are people — some people don’t care about themselves. So then they can’t care about anything. That’s the way it happens sometimes.”
“You never made it to L.A.”
Bobby wiped the corners of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “That’s all I can say,” he said. “I’ll leave, if you want me to leave.”
There was a newspaper on the floor. It brought word of Vietnam — Saigon, Haiphong, Da Nang — the names by now somehow remote without being exotic. Anger looked at the words without quite seeing them, and for some reason he thought of Bobby’s band, the tuneless, naively serious band that he thought was going to make him a star. He thought of the foolish scheme — a drug deal, he supposed — that had failed to facilitate that plan.
He brought his fingers to Bobby’s still-damp hair. He had touched him like this before, while filming, but there was no camera now, and Bobby went still, calibrating his response. He didn’t stand up or push Anger away, but only sat there with an abstracted expression in his eyes, as if this were happening to someone else.
“You’re having a strange day,” said Anger.
“Everything is strange.”
“No, not everything is strange. Some things are ordinary.”
When he reached for Bobby’s thigh, Bobby didn’t move, he just looked down at the hand, his lips parted slightly. Anger loomed over him for a moment, watching, then he shifted himself onto the floor. Bobby’s eyes were fixed on his now, his forgotten joint still burning between his thumb and forefinger. Then he looked down at Anger’s hand, his Adam’s apple shifting drily in his throat.