Will reached for a cigarette, groggily alert now. He was intense-eyed, with long sideburns and a crooked jaw that looked as though it had been imperfectly repaired after a childhood fall.
“They’re my unconscious agents,” Anger said. “My henchmen.”
Will pushed his hair behind his ears, then lit up. “You’re not joking, so why pretend you’re joking? Even if you were, it isn’t funny.”
“They had a half a million people there.”
“Which means what? That because it’s interesting to you, it must be important?”
“It is important.”
Will sniffed, looking down at his hand on the blanket, which had fallen down so that it made a kind of wide skirt beneath his rib cage. Through his thin T-shirt, his shoulders and the cleft between his pectorals stood out in shadowed relief. He had a body like Bobby’s, articulated and firm. Anger wondered what was the matter with him, why the sight of Will always brought to mind Bobby.
“I went around to all the shops this afternoon, all the galleries,” Will said. “Nothing. I may go back to school.”
“You don’t have to work.”
“Or I may go on the dole.”
He squirmed upward and brought his hands into a clasp behind his head, his cigarette still burning. Anger looked at his biceps and the fringes of hair showing where his T-shirt pulled back from his armpits. He felt his age like a physical force between them, his body time-wracked, exposed.
“You didn’t get very far with those booklets,” he said. “We’ll have to do them tomorrow.”
On the floor were the eight-by-ten prints. There were pictures of the band, close-ups of electric guitars, wide-angle shots of students rioting in Paris, Black Panthers brandishing machine guns. There was a picture of the Sphinx, looming in the desert with its lion’s body and pharaoh’s head.
“I got distracted,” said Will.
“I’m just saying that we’ll have to do them later. It isn’t hard to see that you got distracted.”
He stood up. He kept his back straight, his chin slightly raised, arms at his sides, hands clasped behind his waist. He made himself look at Will, standing there in his black pants and silk shirt. It was difficult, this role that was his to play now, though he had always known it was there waiting for him: the preoccupied husband home from work, or the father, the closed-in man in need of conciliation.
“I almost kissed him one night,” he said. “The one you liked, Brian. I was that close. But he was so lost. When they’re that lost, it isn’t interesting anymore, is it?”
He reached out and cupped Will’s chin in his hand, turning his face, and Will stared up at him.
“You don’t have to work,” Anger said. “You shouldn’t demean yourself. You should live by your wits.”
“Like you.”
“Not like me. I’m just saying you should take advantage of what’s there. It’s stupid not to. It’s the way the world works.”
Will put his hand on Anger’s wrist. “It’s the way I was born. A parasite on men with no money.”
The bedroom was so small that it was filled up almost entirely by the dresser and the double bed. In the dark, the walls seemed to breathe and expand, and the foil stars on the ceiling shone dimly at the edges. Will’s body was a silhouette that moved and turned, smoothly curved beneath Anger’s hands. Anger felt his chest, his rib cage, his nipples, the tautness of his balls. There was mercy in the dimming of his vision now, desire returning him from his mind to his body. He moved up onto his knees as Will lay beneath him on the sheet, his face turned on the pillow. Will’s arms stretched down at his sides, hands tensed into claws, and his calves pressed down against Anger’s shoulders, flexing as they brought him closer.
Afterward, they were silent, breathing, and the film began to assemble itself in Anger’s mind. In the darkened bedroom — in the space between consciousness and forgetfulness — it didn’t matter if any of it made sense or not. What mattered was the images themselves: thin clouds passing over the pyramids in Egypt, a woman dressed as Isis standing against the bright sky, Bobby in a top hat climbing a pile of stones as the sun struck the head of the Sphinx. They came whether he wanted them or not. They were signs of the demon inside him, from the Greek daimon, the guardian spirit, not the self but the soul.
“We’ve just been talking about the tour,” said Keith, turning in his seat. “The mad people over in America. The bloody war and the bloody astronauts.”
Mick had just come downstairs. They were at Keith’s country house. Anger was standing at the window, peering outside. He turned back to face the room, the candles burning on tall, wrought-iron stands, sending up filaments of smoke above the carpets. He watched Mick sit down on the arm of Keith’s couch, not even looking at him, looking immediately at the journalist. There was always a mild feeling of vertigo whenever Anger played this role, the room’s specter, his presence meant to suggest to the journalist questions he would not feel comfortable asking.
“It will be the biggest tour anyone’s ever done,” Mick said. “Football stadiums. Hockey arenas. You can play these enormous places now and actually be heard.”
Anger sat down in one of the chairs by the window and looked at the magazines. Across from him, Keith’s bodyguard was rolling joints at a corner table in the faint glow of a lamp, another character for the journalist’s benefit. On the cover of one of the magazines was a picture of the actress Sharon Tate, who had just been murdered along with four of her friends in Los Angeles. Anger leafed through the photographs, listening fixedly as Mick and Keith talked about the American tour. He still found the pictures grisly, even though he’d seen them now a few times. The killers had used knives, rather than guns. They’d stabbed each of their victims more than a dozen times, then written messages on the walls in their blood, strange incitements to rise up, to destroy. Sharon Tate had been eight months pregnant. It occurred to Anger that she looked a little bit like Anita. They were both blond, both in their twenties. It wasn’t hard to imagine the murders, or something like them, happening here at Keith’s house.
They talked about politics, music, astronauts, Richard Nixon. It was a litany Anger had heard before, heard from them and read about in magazines. They talked about the war in Vietnam, how it was galvanizing the young people over in America, bringing them together, giving them something to rise up against, and how they wanted to be a part of that. Then eventually they came to the part where they talked about Brian, what it felt like to be going on the tour without him, what it had been like playing in Hyde Park two days after he’d died.
Mick looked down, finding himself a more comfortable seat on the couch, then leaned forward and passed the journalist a joint. Like everyone else now, the journalist was trying to look like Keith. Even the women had the same thin body, the same patched and torn clothes, hair that rose in a slapdash spray that they were always teasing with their fingers.
“You felt bad because he was your friend,” Mick said. “But he wasn’t equipped for it. It isn’t easy — there’s no way to explain why, it just isn’t. You always hear this about people getting famous. Some of them get on the wrong track or they can’t stomach it or something. They get lost. After a while, they’re just passing through it, gliding by everything or haunting it or something. Brian was never able to enjoy it.”
The journalist looked down at the wire that connected his microphone to his tape player, straightening it with his hand.
“It was almost like the moment he began to get what he wanted, he gave up on it,” Keith said. “Because it happened very early on, right toward the beginning, when we were just starting to make a go of it. It didn’t help him, the success. It made it worse.”