Keith put on a Chuck Berry record in the library. He stood in the half-lit room and gripped the counter with his right hand, staring down at the record player, waiting for it to start. He watched the record spin and listened and didn’t move, standing there in his sunglasses and his scarf and his cowboy boots, a cigarette burning in his hand. When it came on, it was loud. He could feel the warmth of it beneath his skin, the soothing pulse. He heard the clean, bright twang of the guitar, the thick bash of the snare drum, the rattle of the upright bass: a song about high school, girls, hamburgers, cars. He heard the piano with its splashy laughing trills, felt the stupid joy of it, and knew that this was why he had to go to America again, to make this sound. Even after it was over, he felt the perverse certainty that nothing else mattered, nothing was more important than this three-minute song.
The room upstairs was bright but cool, a country room that smelled of moss. The light came in through a screen of trees and made a mottled, watery pattern on the walls, the wooden beams, the faded tapestries that hung from wrought-iron bars. Anita was on the floor with the baby, leaning toward him on her hands and knees. It was one of those moments when their eyes seemed telepathically joined, both mother and baby smiling, but just faintly — more than just smiling, communicating. She rattled the ball with its tin bells, and he lay there on his back, trying to reach out with his hands, watching her eyes. His tiny feet curved inward on bowed legs, a few inches above the ground, as if resting on an invisible stool.
“I’ve found him a job,” Keith said.
She didn’t look up. It was a running joke, already old. “You’ve found him a job,” she said. “What is it, factory work?”
“It’s physical work. Heavy lifting.”
“Quarrying. Building houses.”
“Has he got his documents sorted?”
“I haven’t asked him.”
“They’ll want to see documentation. Credentials.”
He sat down on the floor, sprawling, his head next to her knee. The baby had that drunken, slovenly look now, his head leaning to one side. It was as if he were puzzling over how to breathe or what breathing meant, how it felt.
“When he moves his head sometimes,” she said, “his eyes change. They look just like yours. They become adult eyes all of a sudden.”
“He hardly ever cries. It freaks me out a little.”
“He cries when I leave. But I never really leave.”
“You must flog him. Hit him with a paddle. Cane him.”
“It’s crazy what people think of, isn’t it? What they do.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. You know how I am.”
“I didn’t mean to say I wasn’t going with you. I’m going with you. You know that.”
“I just don’t want to be here after you leave. The empty house. All that. I just don’t want to have to deal with all that, that’s all.”
“I wouldn’t want to have to deal with it either.”
“It’s also that I’ve been good lately. I don’t know, two weeks, maybe a little less. I think I could stick it out anyway, but not here. Not with all this stuff around.” She shook her head, bored with the topic.
“You’ll be all right,” he said.
“I know it. I know.”
“It’s just dope.”
“Yeah, and you’re one to talk.”
“I’m just taking the piss. What else is there to do?”
She leaned her head on his shoulder. He encircled her in his arm, looking out at the baby. He felt her arms go into a loose clasp around his waist, her body next to his, and he could imagine her face, not crying, but looking straight ahead, just thinking. He never thought he would be able to keep her, had only wanted to, hoped to, but now she rubbed his thigh with the side of her hand, then she scratched his jeans a few times with her fingernails. She sat up and kissed him, her lips moist where they came together, her eyes closed. She opened them and stared into his eyes, her face almost touching his, and he saw how unlikely it all was — this room, this house, this woman, their baby. None of it should have happened, it all had. There was no way to explain it, it was only luck. It would never stop.
On August 6, they found Bobby asleep on the side of the road, his car broken down on the shoulder of Highway 5 in the desert north of Los Angeles. He had been awake for more than two days before that. It took him a moment to remember why he was there, whose car he was in. Outside, the sky was a bluish gray. The sun cast a plane of yellow light on the dashboard. He stared at the cop, and the cop told him to put up his hands, not to move.
There were cuts and scratches on his hands, his arms, his face. There were bloodstains on his pants and shirt. They pulled him out of the car and spread his legs apart and had him lean forward with his hands on the roof. He watched them search the glove box until they found the registration with his friend Gary Hinman’s name on it. When they asked him who Gary Hinman was, he said he didn’t know. He was smiling by then, not realizing it, thinking of the beat-up piano he and Charlie had dropped off at Hinman’s house a few months ago, the joke of that transaction. He was remembering his plan of a few days ago: to sell Gary’s car, to get the money that way and then go to Canada somehow, but he couldn’t remember how he had lost sight of the plan, or how he had ever expected it to work, or why he’d driven here to the middle of the desert. He couldn’t believe that the last few days had occurred.
“Don’t move so much,” one of the cops said. “Look at your leg. Your leg is twitching. Just relax.”
They cuffed his hands behind his back. He squinted against the sun, stumbling off-balance in the dust, his dirty hair falling into his eyes. He understood that he was going to jail now, but it was impossible to understand what he had done in the last two days, to match it up with anything he knew about himself. When he thought of Gary Hinman, all he could picture was the outside of his house, the A-frame with the broken door, the beat-up cars on the lawn.
“I’d like this to just be the first part,” Anger said.
Mick was still looking at the flickering white blank on the wall. He hadn’t moved since the film ended, and it was only now that Anger realized how disturbing it was. He’d made it up of some leftover scraps he had of Bobby in San Francisco; some scraps of the band in Hyde Park, the Hells Angels in front of the stage; some scraps of himself — all of it pieced together like the shards of an explosion. It was not the vision of light he’d started out making three years ago, but the vision of what he’d seen in those three years, all of it that he’d managed to preserve on film.
“It’s not what we talked about, I know,” he said. “This is just the chaos part, the prologue. It’s just the beginning.”
“I don’t know why you would show me something like that.”
“It’s just a film. I’ve been working on it for three years. It’s a long time. You get inured to it.”
“What is it called?”
“It’s called Invocation of My Demon Brother.”
Anger switched off the projector. The room was lit now only by a small hammered tin lamp on the desk. Mick was perched on his stool in a white blouse, a scarf around his neck. In his lap, he had the book of pictures Anger had brought over, the promotional packet meant to explain the yet-to-be-made film, the optimistic sequel, Lucifer Rising. It was a collage of Egyptian ruins, Northern Renaissance paintings, AP photos of antiwar rallies, troops in Vietnam. Interspersed were pictures of the band — glamour shots, but also advertisements for their old records, rigidly staged. There was a close-up of the archangel Michael from Van Eyck’s The Last Judgment. There was a flying saucer above a darkened moonscape, tinted orange and green in the night sky.