Sway by Zachary Lazar Page B

mother.
    “Well, we can’t help coddling him now, can we?” he went on.
    “Will, please.”
    “I understand,” he said. “You don’t want to embarrass him. Kenneth, would you like some cottage cheese? A salad?”
    He imagined an appropriate response: violently overturning the table, or slamming down his fork and knife and storming out
     the door. But he wasn’t doing any of these things. He wondered why he was just sitting there, eyes averted, slowly breathing.
    The war had ended. In Santa Monica, there was a new coalescence of gay life, infused by the hordes of returned sailors, newly
     freed. There were vague farm boys willing to experiment, and aesthetes who hosted parties by the pool, but it wasn’t what
     interested Kenneth. He was the sparrowlike boy who seemed to be starving himself, who could sometimes be seen lurking outside
     of bars in black jeans, his unwashed hair falling in blades over his forehead. He was silent to the point of hostility. Everyone
     wanted to save him.
    He spent most of that next year in a tiny basement apartment in West Hollywood. Its barred windows looked out on a neglected
     patio where the landlady grew herbs and fed a pack of cats with cubes of stale bread. On the bare wall, he would project his
     films. He would gather old newspapers and food wrappers and catalogues and tear out the words and pictures and paste them
     to sheets of butcher paper, then at night carefully burn their edges over the flame on the kitchen range. He made a kind of
     shrine out of one of these collages, which he preserved on the wall above his bed. At its center was a picture of a bare-chested
     sailor flexing his biceps. Then there were images of cars, particularly German cars, one of them a long black Mercedes with
     Nazi regalia on the hood and above the headlights. In the background, a kind of two-dimensional altarpiece was constructed
     out of flowers, guns, superheroes, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. Over this, he painted a pentagram in red fingernail
     polish, smearing it thinly with an edge of cardboard. Then he wrote the words “Ted Drake” in tiny cursive script, over and
     over again, filling in each blank space with the letters of his name.
    One night in Hollywood he met a boy. It was at an art gallery where they showed films on Thursday nights. That particular
     night, the film was Maya Deren’s
Meshes of the Afternoon,
an evocation of trance states and shifting identities — the realm of
The Sephiroth,
where everyday objects became talismans and an ordinary living room took on the disquieting normalcy of a nightmare.
    When he left the foyer, after the film was over, he saw the boy outside, standing in profile with one foot against the wall.
     He was smoking a cigarette in a convoluted way, examining it like a specimen between his thumb and the tip of his middle finger.
     In the darkness, he appeared almost as thin as Kenneth, almost as frail, with short, dark bangs. With a slow-blooming swell
     of unease, Kenneth somehow knew, by the way the stranger wouldn’t look at him, that he was in fact waiting for him to approach.
    “The mirrored sunglasses,” the boy said.
    Kenneth turned to him suspiciously. Then he remembered: the moment when a pair of mirrored sunglasses, more like goggles,
     appeared on Maya Deren’s face, just as she raised a long knife that would finally be the instrument of her death.
    The boy looked at him for the first time then, his eyes hazy, abstracted. He was older than Kenneth had thought, maybe twenty-five.
     Up close, he had a faintly unpleasant shading of facial hair in little patches below his ears and on his chin.
    “When she stands up with those glasses on,” he said. “And then you see her in that field. The bright sunlight. The way she
     crouches with the knife.” He shook his head solemnly, then raised his shoulders and pretended to shiver.
    He said his name was Francis, Francis Coogan. He was a film student at UCLA. He and his fellow students