Zeroville

by Steve Erickson

  204.

  In the midst of the parked cars on the third level, he turns to her and says, “Where is it?”

  “What?”

  “The car.” He begins searching again.

  “I moved it,” she says, “it’s parked in another structure now.”

  “Where?”

  She shivers in the parking lot. Her mind races almost audibly. “Back uptown,” she says. Then, “Out in Queens.”

  “Is it uptown or out in Queens?”

  “I …”

  “Is she with friends or with her father?”

  205.

  When she doesn’t answer, he turns and sees a black Mustang at the end of the lot. Three thousand miles from Los Angeles, he didn’t believe it would really be the black Mustang.

  206.

  He walks toward the car. Again she grabs him by the arm to pull him back, again he pulls his arm away. She stops in her footsteps and begins screaming. “All right then! All right!” He reaches the Mustang and peers through the window into the backseat and sees a form huddled under some blankets. The form sits up and looks back at him.

  207.

  He rattles the handle of the car door. The young girl inside the car reaches over and unlocks it.

  208.

  Vikar sticks his head in the car. It’s strewn with the cellophane wrap of eaten junk food, MacDonald’s bags, styrofoam cups. Zazi must see something in his face because she retreats, pulling the blankets up around her.

  209.

  When Vikar turns to Soledad and steps toward her, in this moment she sees in his eyes the person she was afraid of when they first met.

  He slams the back window of the car with his fist and glass implodes. Both Soledad and Zazi scream.

  His bloody hand hangs at his side. The girl begins crying. “Oh mother,” Vikar says, then reaches to Zazi with his other hand as she draws away from him amid the glass.

  210.

  Soledad sobs, “You’re frightening her.”

  “I’m frightening her?” Vikar says. The wrath that seemed momentarily satisfied when he smashed the window returns.

  “No,” Zazi calls to Vikar when he takes another step toward her mother.

  “Now do you want to see bárbaro?” Vikar says to Soledad, raising his bloody fist.

  “Don’t,” says the girl.

  “All these nights your daughter is sleeping in the car?” says Vikar. “Do you believe you’re the Whore of God, to sacrifice your child on the altar of pleasure?”

  “Mi dios,” Soledad cries.

  “He’s not my god,” he says. “Look.” He turns his head. “This is the profile of the one who wants you,” and turns his head back, “this is the profile of the one who would kill you, for sacrificing your nine-year-old child.”

  “Diablo.”

  Zazi says to him, “Don’t. I’m O.K.” She adds, “Actually, I’m eleven now.”

  211.

  In the corners of the parking lot’s concrete bunker, homeless people look up from the rags where they sleep. Crying, Soledad rushes Vikar and pounds his chest. “Don’t you think I’m trying?” she blurts. “Don’t you think? Driving all the way from L.A. for this shitty little part in this shitty little movie?”

  “By spending your nights with me?” he says. “You try to take care of her by sp—?”

  “Yes!” Her pounding exhausts itself. “It’s exactly what I’m trying to do!”

  Vikar begins walking away. He gets halfway across the parking lot and turns; his hand leaves a trail of blood. “Come on,” he says.

  Soledad still cries.

  “Come on.” He motions to Zazi.

  “Where?” Soledad finally says. “I can’t sleep with you when she’s with us. It’s not right.”

  “Come on.”

  212.

  Back at the suite, mother and daughter sleep in the bedroom and Vikar finally falls asleep on the couch. Both are gone when he wakes. He doesn’t go to work but lies on the couch looking at the remains of his model church on the floor.

  213.

  On the fourth day, someone slips something under the door. He still lies on the couch. Another hour passes before he rises from the couch and walks to the door; it’s that day’s Variety. A small notice in the bottom left-hand corner of the second-to-last page is circled in purple, announcing that United Artists has brought onto its “troubled” production of Your Pale Blue Eyes a “respected Academy Award-nominated” editor to take over the project in its “final stage.” I wonder if this is how Dotty found out. An hour and a half later Vikar gets a call from the Sherry-Netherland front desk, informing him his balance is paid through the next day.

  214.

  Vikar takes a cab to the parking lot on Thirty-Fourth Street. Soledad’s Mustang is gone from where it was parked; the space still glimmers with broken glass. He walks up and down the aisles and up and down the structure from one level to the next, but the car is gone.

  215.

  He arranges with the hotel to stay in New York another forty-eight hours. In his inertia he manages to ship to Los Angeles the stack of movies: I’m not giving them back. The night before he is to catch his plane, he shakes himself from his torpor for one more trip down to the Bowery.

  216.

  He finds himself watching the band without seeing it, listening to them without hearing, until someone pulls at his elbow. There in the dark he almost can’t register her; she’s shorter than everyone else. He says, “What are you doing here?”

  “Mom told me about it,” she says. “The more she talked about how disgusting it was, the cooler it sounded.”

  217.

  He says, “How did you get in here? You’re nine.”

  “I’m eleven,” Zazi says, “almost twelve.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “I’m not drinking or anything.” She says, “Everyone seems to know who you are.”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “You missed this great band. They’re from England and the lead singer’s this little fat chick with braces and I can’t tell if she’s black or white or what, and get this, the sax player is a chick too.”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “There are ten million fucks in the naked city, and she’s with one of them. Or maybe,” Zazi shrugs, “three or four.” She sees the look on Vikar’s face. “Sorry,” she says.

  “You’re nine,” he says, “you shouldn’t say things like that.” He gives her fifty dollars and the key to his suite. “Do you need a place to sleep? Do you remember where my hotel is?”

  She looks at the money and key for a moment. “Thanks,” she finally says. “Aren’t you staying?”

  “No.”

  218.

  Back at the hotel he gets another key from the front desk, goes up to his suite and packs and leaves a folded blanket on the couch in the sitting room. He goes to bed and sometime in the night hears the door open and close. In the morning the couch is empty, the blanket draped over the end.

  219.

  When Vikar reaches the TWA ticket counter at JFK, Mitch Rondell is waiting with an assistant. “Can I talk to you?” he says to Vikar. He wants his movies back. Vikar imagines an armed struggle there in the terminal. “Don’t check him in yet,” Rondell says to the woman behind the counter.

  220.

  Vikar says, “I’ve already shipped them.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve already shipped the movies back to Los Angeles.”

  “What movies?”

  “The ones you gave me. The Long Goodbye.”

  “The movies are yours, Vikar. I want to talk to you about what happened.”

  “It’s all right. I saw the Variety article.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Can we go into the lounge and talk?”

  “I’ll miss my flight.”

  “We’ll put you on another flight, if it comes to that. In first class. I need to ta
lk to you.” Rondell puts his hand on Vikar’s shoulder and the assistant picks up Vikar’s bag.

  221.

  In the lounge Vikar and Rondell sit at one table and the assistant with Vikar’s bag sits at another on the other side of the room. “We would like you to come back,” Rondell says.

  “What happened to the respected Academy Award-nominated editor?” Vikar asks. From anyone else, it would sound sarcastic.

  Rondell leans across the table, speaking with more intensity than Vikar has heard from him. “No one understands you or what you’re doing,” he says. “No one understands what this picture is as you’ve cut it. I don’t understand it. It’s not an art film and it’s not a thriller and maybe it’s a thrilling art film but I’m not getting it.”

  “It would be better if it were finished.”

  “Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t. I’m accepting that I may never get it. That’s O.K., I don’t have to get it, not at this point. We brought in a very smart editor, very hip, he did the sound edit on Coppola’s last two pictures and just cut Zinnemann’s last picture, two Oscar nominations in the last four years. He looked at what you’ve done and we talked about it.”

  “Is it faster in first class?”

  “What?”

  “Is it faster in first class, back to Hollywood?”

  “It’s the same, Vikar. Listen, this guy didn’t understand what you’re doing either. But he was more or less convinced you’re doing something. He said the first ten minutes he thought you were completely incompetent but by the time he got to the end he knew that wasn’t it. He said he has no idea whether the picture is working or any good but that every decision you’re making is original at best and counterintuitive at the least.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Me neither. But the way he explained it is that most editors, if they’re cutting from a shot where the action is going on at the right of the frame, then they cut to another shot where the action is at the right so the audience can follow it, unless the picture wants to unsettle the audience at that moment, then they do it the other way around. I gather you’re doing everything upside down, not to mention you’ve taken the central murder plot about the artist and the nightclub and framed it with the sub-plot about the supermodel rather than vice-versa, which is also backward from what anyone else would do.”

  “Scenes have profiles like people and things. All stories are in the time and all time is in the stories.”

  Rondell blinks. “If you say so, Vikar. So I asked this guy, ‘What are you telling me, he’s some kind of genius?’ and the guy says of course not, there are no geniuses other than Bach and Rita Hayworth, but I am telling you, the guy says, that he’s editing in a way I haven’t seen before and now there’s an internal logic to this picture that you would be better to follow through on rather than try to fix, if that’s the word. The die is cast and we should go with it. Make it work for us. Is what he said. Otherwise we’re messing with the aesthetic continuity of the thing. Is what he said.”

  Vikar says, “Continuity is one of the myths of film. In film, time is round like a reel. Fuck continuity. In every false movie is the true movie that must be set free.”

  Rondell sighs heavily.

  222.

  “That, vicar,” Viking Man will explain a few months later, “is the sound of a studio executive, God love him, staring into the Nietzschean abyss of his own ignorance, venality and spinelessness,” but Viking Man isn’t here to say it now.

  “No,” says Vikar.

  “Pardon me?” says Rondell.

  “I don’t want to anymore.”

  “We have an agreement.”

  “You fired me.”

  “Does this have anything to do with Ms. Palladin?” Rondell rubs his brow with both hands. “Vikar, the company is going through a great deal at the moment. All the top people have left to go form another company, including the man who’s headed ours more than a quarter century. They’ll take talent with them, Woody Allen, others. We need to salvage whatever of this picture can be salvaged. Cannes is in seven and a half weeks. All the principal shooting is done, we’re down to a few final establishing shots, pick-up stuff. We don’t need to absolutely lock the picture but we do need something more than a fine cut. It may still be we can make Cannes work for us. I don’t want to withdraw the picture. We can’t withdraw the picture. Very bad if we withdraw the picture. What do you want? We’ll raise your pay and I’ll take you down to the archive at midnight myself, as many pictures as you can carry out. Do you want to make a picture of your own?”

  “There’s a book. It’s in French. I’ve read it many times.”

  “We can make a lot of things happen if you pull this out for us.”

  223.

  Vikar says, “About Soledad.”

  “You want her off the picture.”

  “Why would I want that?”

  “What, then?”

  “Off the picture?”

  “Vikar, listen. You said to find her so we found her. You saw her. If that’s what it took to make you happy, then that’s what we were ready to do. If you were a normal person we would have done things the normal way and supplied you with the usual kilo of coke.” He adds, “She had her own interest at stake, too.”

  “It’s her daughter.”

  “Her daughter?”

  “She’s sleeping in cars and going to clubs she shouldn’t go to and she’s nine.” He says, “Actually, she’s twelve.”

  “A little young for you, wouldn’t you say, Vikar?”

  “What?” Something barely comprehending compels him to say, “Her mother doesn’t take care of her,” with an undertone of violence that makes Rondell draw back.

  “Sorry,” Rondell laughs uneasily, “bad joke.”

  “Find her and make sure she’s all right. Get her a room in a hotel.”

  “And her mother?”

  “If she’s with her mother,” Vikar says.

  “I’ll do what I can. It’s all I can promise.”

  “Do what you can.”

  224.

  He returns to the Bowery at night looking for Zazi, but she isn’t there and no one has seen her. “We can’t find her,” Rondell says when Vikar phones four days later from the cutting room, “on my word we’ve tried. Production wrapped a week ago, they’re probably driving back to L.A. Short of the Highway Patrol putting out an APB, I don’t know what else to do.” On Vikar’s last night in New York, confronted with a choice between the Sound and the Movies, he finds he loves the Movies after all, raiding the archives one last time.

  225.

  Variety, May 8, 1978: “NEW YORK—A subject of intense gossip, rumor and speculation over the past year, United Artists’ production of Your Pale Blue Eyes will premiere in competition at the 31st annual Cannes film festival beginning next week, it was announced today.

  “Rife with difficulties during production, the motion picture is now at the center of a heated dispute leaving it without an officially credited director, pending arbitration before the DGA. Editing of the picture reportedly has changed hands several times in the last eight months.

  “Other U.S. pictures in competition at Cannes this year include An Unmarried Woman, Coming Home, Midnight Express, Pretty Baby and Who’ll Stop the Rain. The jury that bestows the Palme d’Or and other prizes is headed by an American, director Alan J. Pakula (All the President’s Men, The Parallax View), for the third time in the festival’s history, following screen legend Olivia de Havilland in 1965 and, two years ago, playwright Tennessee Williams.”

  226.

  The large boxes packed with movies are waiting when Vikar returns to Los Angeles, after being gone nearly six months. He unpacks his library that now crowds his apartment, and falls asleep to visions of smashing Soledad in the face with a Coke bottle.

  227.

  Vikar doesn’t know it, but everything now has been reset to zero.

  226.

  The first movie he sees back i
n Los Angeles is a French gangster film where a beautiful samurai hit man floats through Paris without expression, in white fedora and gloves. Vikar is most taken with a scene involving a huge ring of keys that the hit man uses to steal cars. In the driver’s seat of a car that isn’t his, the hit man in white coolly lays out on the passenger seat beside him a ring of what must be a hundred keys; one by one he takes each key from the ring and tries it in the car’s ignition until finally the correct key starts the car. As each key fails, the hit man lays it with precision on the passenger seat next to the previous key. In the movie, the fourth attempt starts the car—but what if he had begun at the ring’s other end? The car wouldn’t have started with the fourth key but the ninety-sixth. Under what growing spell and for how long would the audience be held as each key failed? The entire scene is shot from the vantage point of the passenger’s seat, which is to say the hit man’s right profile, the profile that reveals his calm, resolve, grace.

  225.

  For a week and a half Vikar hires a car to drive him around the city, looking for a black Mustang. He phones the beach house where he hasn’t been for years now, Viking Man whom he hasn’t spoken to since before Madrid, anyone who might know where the daughter and mother are. He calls methodically as though laying out on the passenger seat the keys of a car to be stolen.