Bobby’s damp skin smelled faintly, oddly, like kerosene. Anger pressed his thumbs to where his abdomen met his hips, feeling it expand and contract with his breaths. He had unzipped Bobby’s pants, but it was Bobby, not Anger, who had pushed them farther down over his knees. After he came, he kept his eyes closed, breathing heavily through his nostrils. His face was peaceful then, as if in sleep, except at the corner of his mouth, where there was the faintest shadow of a grimace.
“I just think you should know,” Bobby said. “I’m not like that.”
“You’re not like that.”
“You know. . I’m not that way. I don’t mind it sometimes, if it’s there. I’m not uptight. But it’s no big deal either way.”
Bobby moved into the extra bedroom that week. Anger bought him a mattress and a blanket and some pillows, and he stacked the rest of the boxes as well as he could in the closet. He bought Bobby groceries: white bread, potato chips, beer. It happened gradually, without much discussion. The mention of all these practicalities was not something either of them believed in.
Late at night, through the half-opened door, he would sometimes see Bobby on the floor of his new room, smoking pot with his friends, listening to music or playing music on their guitars. They would lean their heads back toward the ceiling in neutral contemplation, as if the world had just been created for their benign explorations. There would be girlfriends, an endless succession, in jeans or flowered skirts, long hair falling into their eyes. One or two of them would always end up in Bobby’s bed by the end of the night, lying beside him in the dim light of a few candles, Bobby with one of Anger’s effects in his hands — a toy motorcycle, a deck of tarot cards — anything he could absently study while the girls waited and watched.
Anger never felt that he was being taken advantage of. He saw their arrangement through Bobby’s eyes: the sense of justice that would come from having his own room in the apartment, a private place to take his girlfriends, a sink in which to leave his dirty dishes. When Anger had his own guests over — filmmakers, artists, theater people — there was a cachet in having so many young people around. It made him feel like Bobby’s accomplice, younger than he really was, young enough to be Bobby himself.
He had only the vaguest idea of what the film they were making was actually going to consist of. So far, he was just filming Bobby’s life: playing his guitar, smoking a joint, standing in front of the house where they had painted the door purple and scrawled the words THY WILL BE DONE! What happened between them, when the day’s filming was over and there were no more guests around, was a secret that Bobby seemed to keep even from himself. His ambivalence — his obstinate, closed eyes — never resolved into a refusal or an invitation. He had threatened to kill Anger if he ever told anyone.
If you took away the nails and the cross, then the god would be only a naked boy, extending his arms in calm recognition. Removed from his post, he would be free to go where you’d always wanted to follow, stepping down into that fiery zone where there was no meaning for words like “self” and “other,” “reality” and “dream,” “desire” and “fear.” Lucifer, the morning star. His paleness would cast a green reflection in the night sky. In the secret darkness, he would be as glad as you were to see that the stupid pretense of his chastity had finally come to an end. But he could be as distant and elusive as any other god. Like his counterpart, the god on the cross, he came to bring not peace but a sword.
“That’s how the cable cars work,” Anger explained one afternoon that fall, pointing out three enormous cogs connected to chains and engines, the city’s powerhouse. Bobby was standing in front of him in a brown leather overcoat, looking at the cogs, painted bright green, bright red, and bright yellow. He couldn’t help moving toward them — Anger could see from the way he’d forgotten his posture that he had never considered the cable cars, or the electric current that pulled them, or anything else about the city’s mysterious infrastructure.
He turned around then, hands in his front pockets so that his coat hung behind him like a cape. “I forgot to tell you,” he said. “There was a phone call the other night. I forget his name.”
Anger stared at him.
“The one who helped you direct the last film,” Bobby said. “In New York.”
Anger bowed his head, then raised it abjectly at the sky. He’d been waiting for a phone call from a film society in Germany, a potential source of funding, but now he knew who had called.
“Bruce Byron,” he said. “Was that his name?”
“That’s right. Bruce Byron. He wanted to talk to you about the next film. He said he has a new idea. Something about motorcycles.” He was looking at Anger through the orange lenses of his sunglasses, something almost accusatory in his gaze, as if he knew more about Bruce Byron than he was letting on. He seemed to be always surprising Anger with some disappointing news that he only pretended to not know was disappointing.
“I’m not speaking to him,” Anger said.
“You’re not speaking to him.”
“No, I’m serious. If he wants something, he can call my lawyer.”
Bobby nodded to himself, his head bowed. Lawyers — Anger could tell that that’s what he was thinking. They were absurd to him in the same way that Anger was absurd.
When they got home that afternoon, there was more news of Vietnam. The Vietcong had shelled Saigon: they were growing stronger, not weaker, and the war had spread from the jungle villages to the capital city. It was no longer something you could even pretend to ignore. It was, Anger realized, another reason for someone like Bobby to keep out of sight, to have no fixed address.
That night, they stayed up talking. Bobby was looking at the images on the bedroom walls, the gods and occult signs: the pentacle, the zodiac, the sephiroth with its Hebrew letters designating each of the ten emanations of God. Anger offered him a few explanations, casual and brief, but would not make it clear what was a game to him and what was serious. “You don’t need to know all that,” he said.
Bobby turned.
“You already know about it in some ways,” said Anger. “This is just part of the game.”
“What game?”
“Thinking that you don’t know what I’m talking about. That we have less in common than we do.” He sat down in a chair by the window and looked down at the floor. “I don’t want to talk about this,” he said. “It’s not going to be helpful. But I think you feel the same way. You’re here for yourself, not for me. I understand that. That’s one of the things we have in common.”
They smoked a joint. He watched Bobby go thoughtful and quiet, reclining in his chair, his fingertips touching, as the angular music made dim shapes in the air. He told Bobby a little bit about Bruce Byron then. He said that Bruce Byron was a kind of Frankenstein’s monster he had created by filming him in bad faith. He said that filmmaking could have real consequences, that it was more than just a game, that it could be like an act of aggression if director and actor didn’t understand each other deeply. He said that understanding each other had nothing to do with words, that words could be a hindrance to knowing another person. He said that New York had been a dead city and a dead culture and that was why he had come west, in search of fresh ideas. He didn’t mention the tin shed he’d lived in on the Gances’ roof, or the mix of arousal and scorn he’d felt in the presence of Bruce Byron’s body. He didn’t mention that on the night of Byron’s phone call he’d been in a dark basement off Castro Street, prostrating himself on the floor for five anonymous men. He knew that Bobby — this boy he’d cast as Lucifer — would see it only as an image of degradation. He didn’t try to explain how it had been transcendent in its brutality, how for a few moments it had reconfigured the surface of everything around him. Instead, he said that the point of art, like magick, was to undercut the rational mind, to remind us of how difficult it was to know what was real and what had merely been created to appear real.