Free Sway by Zachary Lazar Page A

awkwardly, without
     awareness or intention. It led to all kinds of affected postures, placements of the hands, exercises in carriage and comportment
     that only made things worse.
    He had to go to out-of-the-way places to find what he needed now, rare-book stores in downtown L.A. where he bought pictures
     of musclemen, their brows shadowed by sailor caps, their groins covered by dark G-strings called “posing straps.” At night,
     he would sometimes sneak out of the house to walk the pier, never approaching the men there but watching from a distance,
     looking for the secret signals of canted wristwatches or lit cigarettes. After a while it became an exercise in hopelessness,
     until finally he was surprised by a sudden craving for the initial feeling of wrongness, a feeling that no longer existed.
    He made a film of himself in his grandmother’s apartment one weekend when she and Meg were on vacation. He sneaked into the
     closet in Meg’s bedroom, where she kept a collection of old costumes she had taken from the MGM lot, castaway gowns once worn
     by actresses. There were only a few that he could get himself into: a red-and-white-sequined gown and an aqua silk dress with
     silver panels above the hips. It was important to get them all the way on, carefully working his arms into the tight sleeves
     and then feeling the fragile zipper between his shoulder blades as he painfully edged it up his back. Encased in these second
     skins, he filmed himself before the full-length bedroom mirror, not preening or posing, but glaring at himself with solemn
     incomprehension. He did not look feminine at all. He looked like an angry boy, someone completely other and apart.
    It was that winter that he discovered a rare book in one of the stores downtown, a worn black volume kept under glass. Its
     cover showed no title or author; instead it bore a thin line drawing of an Egyptian eye at the center of a triangle that radiated
     shafts of light. There was something about its spare design, its aura of secrecy and contraband, that made him walk around
     the store for a few minutes, pretending to browse, until at last he brought himself to ask the man behind the counter for
     a closer look.
    It was called
The Sephiroth,
though there was no author mentioned anywhere. He found the title on the frontispiece, above three symbols and an invocation
     to an Egyptian god called Horus. What followed was a kind of mock sermon, written in biblical cadences, laced with odd, sometimes
     contemptuous asides to the reader. A good deal of its initial attraction was this anonymous voice, propounding its information
     through a scrim of knowing, private humor.
    Thy Will Be Done! The proposition is bald, even basic — as bracing as the gusts of Flatus, or as boring as last week’s beans:
     Thy Will Be Done! For who shall chooseth, if not the hand that grasps? And who shall see, if not the eye that yearns? Think
     of one thing only, O heedful one, as ye walketh the wide way: Thy Will Be Done! For is not thy yearning like unto a column
     of jasper, or the rich scent of hyssop? Is it not as the darkest jewel of Hamman, or the farthest star over Nor? Nay, it is
     as the lust of the goat, the blood of doves, the fire in the virgin’s loins! For who shall chooseth, if not thine own hand?
     And how shalt thou see, if not through thine own eye?
    It was not just the words but the austerity of their presentation — the book’s dilapidated binding, its ugly type, all of
     it reminiscent of a student dissertation. It was destined for only the smallest clique of readers, its boastful voice muted
     by the fact of its utter obscurity. There was a faintly intimidating allure in its symbols and diagrams, the feeling that
     just by looking at the figures — the pentacle, the zodiac, the tarot, the sephiroth — he was exposing himself to secrets.
     There was the sense that the author or authors, unnamed and so impossible to imagine, could somehow guess that he was