“Maybe some other time,” Mick said. “What do you think? You can imagine whatever you like, Kenneth. Maybe you’ll get to know me better than anyone else ever has. But maybe you won’t. Maybe the more likely scenario is that nothing will happen at all.”
“I’ll see you later,” Anger said.
“Right.”
“Are you coming back to the house?”
“I told you before, I want to be alone. I’m staying out here.”
“You’re a shit.”
“I know that. I’ve been one for a long time.”
Mick stepped closer, his hands crossed behind his waist. “Don’t get moralistic,” he said. “You’re going to say that there’s nothing inside me, that I have no soul or whatever, but it isn’t that simple. Nothing is ever that simple.”
He put his hand on Anger’s face. His eyes were blank, examining Anger’s expression not with curiosity but with the confirmed suspicion that everyone was exactly what he knew they were. There were no surprises. It would have been just as easy for him to kiss Anger at that moment as not to kiss him. It would have been the same no matter who Anger was, whether he was a man or a woman or a figment of Mick’s imagination.
“Good night, Kenneth,” he said. “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
“We’ll have to see.”
“We’ll talk about the film. I still want to do it. Don’t think that I don’t want to do it.”
Anger turned away. He looked at the branches above his face, oak branches that were so still they were almost artificial-looking in the moonlight. When the breeze came, the leaves moved like lifeless hands, shaking and stopping, shaking and stopping. He waited to hear Mick walk off, wherever he was going, then headed in the opposite direction. The pale leaves jostled on their branches, a mimicry of living movement that was utterly without mind. All he could see of the porch and the people on it were vague, elongated shadows, almost like mirages, disturbing the glow from the candles.
He was awakened the next morning by the sound of rifle fire. There was no clock in the room, nothing to orient him at all but the dark mahogany bed and the Gothic chairs that reminded him he was at Keith and Anita’s house. When he looked out the window, he saw the abandoned lawn, a plush rolling green that led out to the trees and the moat and the lake beyond. It was a sunny day. There was a quilt left out on the grass, a single leather sandal, a whiskey bottle with a black-and-white label, nothing else. He heard the rifle again: a firecracker pop elongated by its report. It was coming from out in the fields or in the trees where he’d been last night. He realized then: it was just Keith, Keith and his friends out playing with their guns.
He looked across the room at the wrinkled shopping bag he had brought with him yesterday. In the bag were two top hats. One was black like the one Bobby had worn in San Francisco. The other was an Uncle Sam hat with red and white stripes and a blue brim. He held them both in his hands, looking down at them quizzically. He had brought them to give to Mick, props for the Lucifer film, but also stage props for the band’s American tour. They would be good for large crowds, visible from a long distance. He could see Mick onstage in either of them, moving toward the microphone, raising his fist. The devil in the top hat — they were associated somehow. The god of power — money, politics, war. The sly, sophisticated con man who in the end was just a bewildering reflection of all the people who were looking at him.
Something hit the gutter on the eave above his window. It clanked down onto the stone porch below, then rattled for a few seconds and stopped: an empty tin can. From the distant fields, there was another round of rifle fire. Were they shooting at the house?
THE LOVERS, 1969
FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, Bobby had just been drifting, moving up and down the coast, playing music in bars, not thinking very much about where it would lead. He had managed to keep some of his musical instruments, some of his good clothes, the black top hat he liked to wear onstage. He had pawned almost everything else he had of value, including the 16 mm camera he’d stolen from Anger, which had brought him less than forty dollars. No one had offered money for the Lucifer film, and so he’d just kept it for a while, moving it from place to place, not knowing what to do with it, until eventually he’d lost it, like so many other things, still thinking it might be worth something someday.
In his ruffled sleeves and top hat, he bent over his guitar now, his legs crossed, listening through his hair for the underlying pattern in the endless, coiling melody Charlie was playing. Beside him, Charlie looked feral, his face and hair visibly grimy, black grit beneath his broken fingernails. He was moving through a strange progression of chords, his song at first a blur of lullaby and muted groans, then an improvised poem that, like the music itself, made no literal sense but was full of suggestions: a desert road, darkness over the Santa Susana Pass, a night ride into the city, clouds passing over Devil’s Canyon. They had just recently met, so Bobby wasn’t used to this phenomenon of Charlie being the uneasy center of the room whether people were looking at him or not. They were in a Mission-style house in Benedict Canyon, not far from Beverly Hills, at a fashionable party full of record industry minions and full-fledged stars. In the living room, the girls Charlie had brought with him all wore five-inch Buck knives fastened to their belts. They were sunburnt, their clothes stained, their hair tied back with bits of string, and this raggedness made everyone in the house aware of them — anonymous girls who looked alike, sweetly vacant, conspiring. Bobby could see his girlfriend, Kitty, in the darkness in the corner of the room, huddled next to another girl named Leslie. Kitty’s fingers were entwined in a cheap necklace on the floor between her feet. He didn’t know how to read anything about her anymore, whether she was really lost or just manipulating him by acting lost. He leaned in and tried to follow the unpredictable curves of Charlie’s music, the most unusual music he had ever played. He used all the technique he had to make the song even stranger, elongated and off-center, avoiding the simple pentatonic scales of blues and rock for the mysterious spirals of the Dorian mode, the Mixolydian mode. The music reflected back a range of tensions in the room, all the social hierarchies that no one wanted to admit existed anymore, drawing them out, magnifying them. It was not aggressive — it had an ethereal, dreamy sound — but it spread a malevolence that came at first as a faint surprise, then blossomed into something so familiar that it seemed obvious. It was the music of dim rooms, of red wine in gallon jugs. It was the music of slow violence unfurling in a secluded house in Benedict Canyon.
It was an amorphous party in the style of the time, a place an intruder could walk into without much chance of detection, much less confrontation. People were gathered in the kitchen, surrounded by ashtrays and bottles, and every bedroom had a shrouded group whispering in the shifting glow of tea lamps inside paper sacks. When he’d first seen Charlie tonight, Bobby had been fighting with Kitty in the backyard, struggling with her wrists in his hands, trying to wrestle her into being quiet. She was spitting insults at him in a muffled shout, scattered and fierce, and he’d turned to see a small figure in the darkness at the edge of the bushes, his hands crossed behind his waist, his long hair and slightly hunched figure somehow suggesting a crone beneath a shawl. When he stepped closer, his angular face was like a daguerreotype from a hundred years ago, a bearded man in deerskin pants and shirt. He gestured at his forehead, pointing with his index finger, and told Bobby to stop acting like a pimp, some low-life pimp slapping his whore around in an alley. There was a small moment of jockeying over how serious he was being. It was hard to see Charlie’s face beneath his hair in the darkness. But as he stepped closer it became clear that he wasn’t joking, that he didn’t like what he was looking at, his eyes appraising Bobby and Kitty with a barely curious scrutiny, as if unsurprised by the lack of anything interesting or distinctive there. Bobby adjusted the top hat on his head, letting Kitty go, and she pushed her hair behind her ear, embarrassed but oddly still as Charlie stood in front of her, one hand on her shoulder, the other one caressing her cheek. He was the comforter now, menacingly strange, his stern face somehow enhancing the biblical overtones of the pose. It was a con, Bobby felt certain of that, but he didn’t object, sensing some cynical game just beginning to unfold, knowing that if Charlie had seen through him, then he had at least seen through Charlie too.