Sway by Zachary Lazar Read Free Book Online Page A

afraid of?” Brian says. “What is it? Are you afraid that I might lose control? That I might bite you, or
     touch you somewhere dirty? Is that what the long face is about?”
    Mick closes his eyes, struggling to compose himself in the small space between himself and Brian. He nods his head then, his
     eyes heavy-lidded, and lets out a disdainful sniff.
    “You’re right,” he says. “We’re all afraid of you, Brian.”
    Keith is strapping on his guitar, impatient. “What the fuck are you on about?” he says. “Get your gear on.”
    “He looked so displeased just now,” Brian says. “Like this was the whole point, this little gig in fuck knows where. Sheffield.
     You think you can handle it, Mick?”
    He turns back toward Keith, smiling at him in a weirdly complicit way. “Everything he’s ever done, I thought of it a thousand
     times before. Now he has the nerve to just sit there like that. Like anyone can even see him.”
    “Right,” says Keith. “Get yourself together, yeah? You ought to have a look at yourself in the mirror.”
    He looks not drunk but fluish. His eyes are gluey and his face is blanched, pink only at the edges of his cheeks. He paces
     around the dressing room for a few more moments, incredulous and lost. Then he takes his briefcase and his guitar and walks
     back out the door.
    It’s a small crowd, only a few dozen people, but by the third song they’ve all moved close to the stage, standing in the first
     rows and waiting as if the spectacle before them might collapse. It’s the first time the band has played without Brian, the
     first time Keith has had to fill up all that space with only one guitar. He moves back and forth toward his microphone stand,
     raising himself into place for his vocals. For some of his chords, he crouches down by the drum riser, his head lowered almost
     to his knees. Others he attacks with a sudden upswing of the wrist, a windmilling motion that makes the chords seem like small,
     controlled detonations. He knows without looking at the crowd that they’re watching him as much as they’re watching Mick.
     What he’s playing is not quite the blues, and it comes out as if the band is playing it through him, a kind of revenge for
     Brian’s desertion.
    That night Brian has a dream. He’s walking through a courtyard full of rubble — it’s in London, during the war. The courtyard
     ends in a patch of stubby weed trees, then opens up on a whole city block in ruins: burnt-out cars, sidewalks folded in on
     themselves, trunks and boxes lying on the ground covered in white dust. What keeps him moving is the sense that he’s being
     pursued. His pursuer is not quite a person, but like the distorted essence of someone he knows: a middle-aged man with a wrinkled
     suit who can’t stop smiling. Above them, the sky tilts and veers, invaded at its edges by the branches of trees. The man is
     stepping through a hallway now, swinging a closed umbrella at his side, grinning. There is a sense of panic before an immense,
     unending futility. Now they’re in a gray room and the lights surge to an intense white, the walls and ceiling emit a high
     hum. It sends Brian to the floor, on his back, grasping his knees, paralyzed by the bright exuberance of the man’s gaze. He
     wakes up with a feeling of intense shame, a sense that whatever happens now will be tainted by the violation of this dream.
    Life pivots all at once and suddenly they are stars. One night they come onstage to a hall so full, so crammed with bodies,
     that they seem on the verge of falling onto the stage. They’re almost all girls — girls with bouffant hairdos and scarves,
     girls in black jumpers who elbow their way to the front. For a moment, they struggle to find the dials on their guitars; it’s
     as if they’ve outgrown their bodies and become some quality of the air. The sound the girls make is the strangest they’ve
     ever heard, not the high screech of adulation but an eerily sexual