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It was a folk ballad, minor-keyed and slow. It was more English-sounding than American, almost mournful, like a dirge. The words, Anger knew, were a monologue in the voice of the Devil. They spoke of the evils wrought by humanity in the sway of a sly, sophisticated con man who in the end was just a bewildering reflection of themselves.

Mick looked up at Anger through the panel of soundproof glass. He was always flirting, always putting his hand on Anger’s arm or leaning forward to state his opinion. The way he spoke, at least around Anger, was arch, camp, blasé, as if he were imitating some idea he had of how an heiress might speak. They had met at a party at Robert Fraser’s gallery, all mirrors and pink light, and immediately Mick had shown an interest in the Lucifer film, more interest than Anger would ever have thought possible.

“I should show you what I get in the mail sometimes,” Mick had said. “Death threats, curses, hexes. That’s the mood now, it’s very dark. You start to wonder what it means. It’s too easy to just write it off as nonsense.”

His new songs were all Devil songs in one way or another. Perhaps the Lucifer film was something to help him fill out this new role, the role of Mick — the Prince of Darkness, the Angel of Light, it wasn’t easy to tell the difference anymore. It was a role Mick had stumbled into, not exactly chosen, but it was also a role that practically nobody else could have even attempted. Brian had been preparing for it his whole life, and you could see it eating him from the inside, the dream that had come true but not in any of the ways he’d expected.

“It’s just music, but they want us to be revolutionaries now,” Mick had said. “So fine, let’s tear everything down, start over, what we have now makes no sense anyway. When they busted us last year, it was like the whole country was pressing up against you, trying to shove you down into a hole. But then you realized they were just shoving themselves into the hole, that you were just getting bigger and bigger. They’d made you into these myths.”

It was 1968. The press was calling it the Year of the Barricades. In France, there had almost been a revolution that May, fueled by dadaist slogans and students throwing stones. It was not hard to see the band as emblematic of the desire you could feel all around you now, not for peace and love, but for something militant, perhaps chaos for the sake of chaos.

The drummer was practicing drumrolls in his corner. Then he leaned back his head and shook it, loosening up the muscles in his neck, his face as blankly patient as a horse’s. Brian was beckoning to Keith from across the length of the room now, spreading his opened hands for a cigarette. He waited for Keith to throw him the pack, then he waited even longer before Keith noticed him again, then he dropped the lighter when Keith finally threw it to him and he stood for a long moment looking at the floor.

It would take them three nights to put the song into its finished form. In those three nights, it would change from a folk song to a psychedelic song to a soul song, and then emerge as something raw and percussive, like the voodoo music of Haiti. It would end up the exact opposite of a mournful dirge or an English folk song. It would start with a yelp, a monkey screech, and a flat patter of bongos, a resonant thud of conga drums, a locust-like hiss of maracas. It would become a wild celebration of everything it had started out lamenting.

But for now it was just a song with three chords for the verse, one more for the chorus, and they couldn’t even play it through. They were lost, as tentative as beginners. The bass player sat absolutely still on a straight-backed chair, dressed in a red velour outfit with matching red boots, smoking a cigarette he held with the straightened tips of his first two fingers. Brian sat inside an enclosure of soundproof panels, his eyes half-closed. He seemed to be propping himself up by gripping the strings of his guitar, not so much an instrument as a beautifully painted wooden object he cradled half-consciously in his lap.

For the next four hours, as far as Anger could tell, there was not a single joke or a word of casual conversation. They kept Brian off to the side — silent, obedient, lost. They all knew not to look at him, though every time they turned around they must have seen him.

It was almost five AM when the driver dropped Anger back at his flat. It was a small, badly heated set of rooms in Notting Hill Gate, a slum neighborhood where he and a few hippies were the only whites. He’d been careful not to let the band see it very often or for very long. A boy he’d met recently, Will Tennet, had helped him decorate it with stills from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and some other odd touches — a jeweled box, a green glass toad — that gave it the usual occult ambience, but the fact that he was gay, that he lived with boys, was something the band never seemed fully to acknowledge. They were drawn by something else, an aura they maybe half believed in, maybe wanted to believe in: the occult filmmaker in his vaguely dangerous world.

Will had left a note: “Gone to Kilburn. Don’t expect me.” Anger put his things down and looked at the half-lit room: the couch, the afghan, the coffee table with its battered, tasseled lamp. There was a strange, penitential feeling, the particular emptiness of being alone after four in the morning. An unexpected sight was waiting for him on the table, a package wrapped in brown paper. Inside he found a bird’s nest of shredded newsprint and another note: “Dear Kenneth, I saw this book of pictures and I thought of you. Anita.”

It was a book of black-and-white pictures of musclemen in dark briefs, lifting chairs or squatting before a mirror with rigid thighs. Some of them even featured men in sailor caps, as in his film Fireworks. He had no idea where Anita would have found such a book or how she would have known it had such significance for him. It made him feel fraudulent for some reason. He didn’t know if she was trying to mock him, or if she had left it there with some friendly anticipation of his nostalgia.

In the tiny bathroom, the water was so cold that his fingers started to go numb beneath the tap. He dabbed some of it on his face, his hands shaking. He looked in the mirror and saw that one of his eyes was opened slightly more than the other. His lips stretched across his mouth like two strips of bloodless rubber. He forced himself to stare at it until it wasn’t a face at all but just an image, something gray made out of stone.

He switched on the TV, knowing that there would be nothing on at this hour but the static of dormant channels. There was only the one light on in the doorway, and it was hypnotic with the TV on, the sound turned off, a field of swarming particles that never coalesced into any shape. The worry had become a repetitive fugue now, a scrim between himself and the things in front of him. It had become a narrowing tunnel of fear. He had had a nervous breakdown last year, after Bobby had disappeared. For almost a month, he had lain in bed, sleeping or just lying there when he couldn’t sleep, cocooned like a child in the warmth of his sheets. The walls of the Haight room were purplish and muddled. Everything became the same: the empty apartment, the stolen Lucifer film, the mindless antagonism of his checkbook. He’d had no money, no film, no reason to believe there would ever be a film, not even a job history or a set of skills he might use to start some other, more predictable way of life. He would see Bobby in his leather overcoat, standing in front of the city’s powerhouse, the brightly colored cogs behind him, the orange lenses of his sunglasses. He knew that Bobby was never coming back, but the wish, or the fear, had rooted itself so deeply in his mind that it became a kind of false memory, disorienting when he realized all over again that it hadn’t happened.