Zeroville: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  “Are you sure that’s what he said?” the production designer snorts. “He stutters.” All the Los Angeles movies, Vikar believes, still gazing at the commissary outside, are about fathers who have sex with their daughters and friends who betray friends and men and women strangling each other with phone cords. “Well,” the production designer continues, “the set is ready, so we can at least start, if need be, go ahead and shoot the club scenes, keep the continuity straight—”

  “Fuck continuity,” says Vikar.

  Silence falls over the meeting. This is the first thing that anyone in any meeting has heard Vikar say.

  “The scenes of a movie,” Vikar says, “can be shot out of sequence not because it’s more convenient, but because all the scenes of a movie are really happening at the same time. No scene really leads to the next, all scenes lead to each other. No scene is really shot out of order. It’s a false concern that a scene must anticipate another scene that follows, even if it’s not been shot yet, or that a scene must reflect a scene that precedes it, even if it’s not been shot yet, because all scenes anticipate and reflect each other. Scenes reflect what has not yet happened, scenes anticipate what has already happened.” Vikar rises from his chair. Los Angeles is the City of the Real, whose stories are as old as time, where people go to hide from God, unlike the more hopeful, childlike people of New York. “Scenes that have not yet happened,” he explains to those around the table, “have.” New York makes sense to Vikar now—as he leaves the room, everyone staring after him—in a way it never did when he was there.

  162.

  The soundstage on the Columbia lot looks like a punk club as envisioned by somebody who’s never been in one. It glistens, an Asian fantasia like the bordello of Von Sternberg’s Shanghai Gesture, several slabs of wall replaced with mirrors. Lights and scaffolding line the walls; on the ground, two laid dolly tracks meet at a vortex. Grips, gaffers and various production personnel wander in and out.

  “It’s very nice,” Vikar says to the production designer.

  “Thank you,” answers the production designer with the long hair and leather vest.

  “No,” Vikar says, “it’s very nice.” He tries not to be too vexing. The two men stand in the middle of the set looking at each other.

  Comprehension visits the production designer. “You mean it’s too nice,” he says, seething. “What about all those places in Chinatown? Aren’t those punk clubs?”

  “Have you ever been inside them?”

  “I didn’t realize we’re into an authenticity thing here.”

  “Please take out the mirrors.”

  “The audience needs something to look at. A little dazzle.”

  “Dazzle?” Vikar stares into one of the mirrors and has a notion that disappears from his mind before he can grasp it; but that night, at home, once again he’s staring out the windows of his living room, turning his head again and peering at his reflection in the glass, when again the notion flits across his brain. It returns as he stands before the bathroom mirror shaving, trying to negotiate the tattooed teardrop beneath his left eye, which always bleeds whenever he nicks it:

  161.

  that what he’s always believed was his left side in fact is his right, and that what he’s always believed was his right side is his left. That what he’s always believed was his true side in fact is his false. That what he’s believed was his good side in fact is his evil, what he’s believed was the Monty lobe of his tattooed brain in fact is the Liz.

  160.

  Molly is on the phone. “The strike is on,” she says wearily, “the actors have walked. This is what video has wrought. Everyone wants more money and the hell of it is they’re right, but the Mitch Rondells of the world won’t see it that way.” She says, “I wish I could tell you it will be over next week, but I have a feeling it may be more like two or three months.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I must say you sound remarkably sanguine.”

  “Yes, I’m sanguine.”

  “I almost wish you were less so. Are you sure your head is in this?”

  “No,” Vikar says, hanging up. On the cork bulletin board next to the telephone, he’s tacked the original copy of the ancient writing from his dream in Cannes. After he phones Professor Cohn to no answer, he walks down the long hill to Sunset and takes the bus back to UCLA.

  159.

  Standing in the office doorway and looking at the professor’s head, Vikar puts a hand on his own and says, “You didn’t do it.”

  “Vikar with a k,” the professor says. Today he’s wearing a loose pull-over shirt with long sleeves. He puts his hand on his head too and for a moment the two men stand staring at each other holding their heads. The professor says, “It’s a big step. I’m still thinking Don’t Look Back. But maybe the space-child or whatever he is from 2001.”

  “Perhaps it’s a she.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “This building reminds me of 2001.”

  “Except with windows. I’ve been trying to call you.”

  “I didn’t give you my phone number.”

  “No you did not. You’re not listed, either.”

  “I tried calling you as well.”

  “Vikar with a k, do you please want to tell me,” Professor Cohn holds up the xerox of the ancient writing, “where you got this?”

  “I dreamed it,” Vikar says. When the other man doesn’t answer, Vikar says, “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

  “When did you have this dream?”

  “I first had it fifteen years ago.”

  “You first had it? So you’ve had it since.”

  “Many times.”

  “Do you mind my asking about your background?”

  “My background?”

  “Do you mind my asking?”

  “Ten years ago I took a bus from Pennsylvania to Hollywood.”

  “Further back. For instance, what religion were you raised in?”

  “Christian Reform.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Calvinist.”

  “Have you traveled in the Middle East?”

  “I’ve been to Spain.”

  “Farther than that.”

  “I’ve been to Cannes.”

  “You’ve not traveled in the old Biblical countries. Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria—”

  “Is that from those places?” Vikar says to the xerox in the professor’s hand.

  “I’ll spare you the circuitous route it’s taken,” Cohn waves the xerox, “among twenty or so experts, from one to the next—to the extent anyone is an expert when it comes to something like this.”

  “Does that mean you found out what it means?”

  “It means ‘faith before love, blood before tears,’ or something in that ball park.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not very illuminating, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Here’s the illuminating part. Do you know the story of Isaac?”

  Vikar says nothing.

  “God decides to test Abraham by telling him to take his son Isaac to—”

  “I know the story.”

  “—a mountain top and kill him, as proof of the father’s devotion to—”

  “Stop.”

  “—God, which Abraham is about to do when God stops—”

  “Stop.” Imagining lodging two pencils in the professor’s head, one in each ear, Vikar steps back from the desk.

  “O.K.,” Cohn says calmly.

  Vikar breathes heavily. “What does this have to do with the writing?”

  “Faith before love, blood before tears. It was the inscription on the handle of Abraham’s blade—either a knife or axe, depending on which version of the story—that he took to the mountain top.”

  “Why am I dreaming it?”

  “I have no idea. I suppose it’s possible Someone is trying to tell you something, though for a Biblical language scholar I tend to be skeptical on that score, maybe mor
e than I should. Maybe it’s all God’s joke. Maybe the whole business with Isaac was God’s joke—what a Kidder, huh? Do you know what ‘Isaac’ means in ancient Hebrew?”

  “No.”

  “It means ‘laugh.’ Likelier, though, is that somewhere, somehow, this,” holding up the writing, “is something you’ve seen—I mean other than in a dream. But Vikar with a k? If you figure it out, feel free to clue in the rest of us. Me and about twenty other skeptics I know.”

  158.

  She sleeps to the bells, having plotted murder. She tosses and turns, monstrousness swirling beneath the beauty, monstrousness that is at odds with all the pain and loneliness the audience would come to know of her later. In this scene in this movie—her breakthrough, on her way to becoming the most famous movie star of all time—she knows the bells mean that the man she believed she murdered still lives. Stirred by the bells, she struggles for consciousness. Somewhere between existence and oblivion, Marilyn dreams us as surely as we dreamed her; and now in the dark, watching Niagara, knowing of her what everyone knows, of what she will come to, Vikar can only hope she never wakes.

  In another movie a man is born completely deformed, with an enormous deformed head, at the beginning of the Age of Machines. It’s as if the man’s skull and flesh have been ground out by the epoch’s new gears. Beauty swirls beneath the monstrousness; there is no right or wrong profile, no light or dark one, because the elephant man has no profile at all. At the end of the movie, when he literally collapses beneath the weight of his deformity, the soul takes flight from the body, and in the final moments, whispering to the dying man out of a fantastic Cocteau-ether, is the memory of his mother, beckoning him with the words, “Nothing ever dies.”

  157.

  The movie about the elephant man is the only one Vikar can remember crying at, and like an erection that he hides by riding the bus into the night, he wants to hide his crying under the cover of darkness; so as the credits roll, he remains in his seat.

  The theater is a little more than half full. As Vikar sits in the dark of the silvery credits, he sees a lone woman rise from several rows in front of him, over on the other side of the theater. She begins making her way up the aisle. One of her wrists is wrapped in her hair in that way Vikar has seen before. He doesn’t move or say anything, he sits in the dark until she’s passed, and he thinks she’s gone and the credits are almost finished when he feels two arms circle him from behind, as if she knew he was there all along, she knew he was sitting there behind her before he knew she was there in front of him; and now her hair brushes his bare head. Her tears mix with his so he can’t be sure whose run down his face.

  “Bárbaro Church Builder,” he can hear the sadness in her whisper, “promise if anything happens to me, you will watch after my girl.”

  “All right,” he says in the dark.

  “Promise.”

  “I promise,” and then

  156.

  she’s

  155.

  gone—as though she knew she would be—with the one-in-the-morning phone call two weeks later; and even before Zazi’s sobs on the other end of the line Vikar knows, the way he knew about Dotty: I should have taken out the phone, but that wouldn’t bring her back.

  154.

  He tries returning Zazi’s call but doesn’t have a number, and there’s no residential listing for Mitchell Rondell.

  153.

  He takes a two-in-the-morning bus to Hollywood Memorial and stumbles up and down knolls of dead grass looking first for Dotty’s grave, then Jayne Mansfield’s proxy grave where Soledad was ravished by the dark, and where the dark then swallowed up ravished and ravisher alike, without the world’s slightest acknowledgment. One does not need a song on his lips to kill someone.

  152.

  She has gone in the way of Hollywood tradition, custom-painted Jaguar the color of sangria spectacularly flipping one of Sunset Boulevard’s curves while snaking west into Bel-Air—a moment suspended between the romantic tragedy of accident and the existential glamour of suicide. But what’s incontestable is that moment two weeks before when she came up behind Vikar in the darkened theater and her sullen beauty counted for nothing, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and whispered into his ear final instructions, a last will and testament as to the only thing in her world that had value anymore.

  151.

  In the Hollywood tradition as well, for about a week and a half Soledad Palladin becomes more famous dead than she was alive, if not for the right reasons; but in Hollywood there are no right or wrong reasons for being famous. A small cult is born, flourishes, dies out. Accompanying Soledad’s resurgent lesbian-vampire oeuvre are the tabloid tales—the snorted H, the nocturnal collection of anonymous lovers two, three, four at a time in episodes that often went violently wrong—as well as the grisly rumors about the accident itself: what was dismembered, decapitated, impaled. Had the heroin gotten out of hand? Was she fleeing a heated argument with Rondell when he returned unexpectedly to find her in bed with another woman? There’s also speculation as to whether she was Buñuel’s daughter; the consensus concludes against it, even as it wants to believe it.

  150.

  If there’s an actual interment, it’s private as far as Vikar knows. As in his suite in New York following their affair and the discovery of Zazi in the Mustang, Vikar doesn’t move from his couch. The telephone rings but he doesn’t answer, gazing at the sky out his living room windows until, a couple of afternoons later, there’s a knock on the door.

  149.

  Letting himself in, Viking Man says, “Vicar?”

  “Yes,” Vikar says from the couch.

  “You O.K.?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t seem O.K.”

  Vikar stares at the sky.

  “Hell, vicar. She was a fuck-up.”

  “Stop.”

  “You going to the service?”

  “What service?”

  148.

  Viking Man says, “There’s a memorial service at Rondell’s house.”

  “What about Zazi?”

  “What about her?”

  “Is she all right?”

  “As all right as she can be, so far as I know. I think she and Sol had a complicated fucking relationship, to say the least, but you would know better than I …”

  “I don’t …”

  “… the kid was raising the mother when she wasn’t raising herself … now half the time she runs wild in the city, nobody knows where she is or what she’s doing, twelve years old or …”

  “Fourteen,” Vikar says, “almost fifteen …”

  “No one can keep up with her.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Nothing reminds you of time’s passage like a kid.”

  “No.”

  “Would hate to see her get so fucked up too, forgive me for saying it. But she’s always been smarter than her mom, even if,” Viking Man snorts, “she does wear a ring in her nose now.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ve started calling her Zulu.” Viking Man sighs. “You want to go with me to this service or not?”

  “No.”

  147.

  But after Viking Man leaves, Vikar stirs from the couch and dresses and starts up the labyrinthine path that leads to Sunset Drive, which he then follows to the canyon top. Mitch Rondell’s house on Lookout Mountain is all glass and pylon and tension cable, its decks and patios dropping off into Laurel Canyon; by the time Vikar gets there, the memorial is nearly over. The crowd is a mix of Eurotrash, unfamiliar faces, former UA associates of Rondell’s whom Vikar recognizes. Molly Fairbanks stands alongside the room and waves sympathetically to Vikar but doesn’t come over; there are remnants of the old Nichols Beach gang. Margie Ruth in black, whom he hasn’t seen in years, embraces him. “Hey, superman,” she smiles sadly, “the ‘crazy one with the tits,’ huh?”

  The white carpet of Rondell’s house reminds Vikar of his suite at the Carlton in Cannes, where Maria�
�s white coat dropped to the floor. At the back, Rondell wears black and a sense of oppression, distractedly mumbling to the stream of condolences. Vikar catches his eye and then goes out onto the deck.

  146.

  He circles around the back of the house and finds her leaning against a post, gazing out at the sea that hides ten miles behind the haze. She’s wearing black jeans and a man’s black shirt, her hair dyed black, and from a distance she might appear unmoved by the occasion, until he gets closer; her eyeliner is smeared. He says nothing about her cigarette.

  She turns and looks at him, drops the cigarette and steps on it. “Figured you weren’t coming,” she says.

  “I’m sorry,” Vikar says.

  Zazi shrugs. “She was running out the clock as a scumball’s accessory.”

  “Stop.”

  “I know,” she says, “it’s a cliché, the damaged Hollywood thing. The precociously bitter teenager thing.”

  “When did you get the ring?”

  She touches her nose. “Couple months ago. I’m working up to the tattooed head,” she nods at him, “maybe now that I won’t have to fight with Mom about it—that would have been the deal breaker, though I’m not sure what my end of the deal was supposed to be or what deal was getting broken … maybe,” she pulls back her dyed black hair with her hands, “well, all along I’ve been thinking Lora Logic,” Vikar doesn’t know who that is or what movie she’s in, “but I guess it’s one of those things you should be sure about if you’re going to tattoo it to your head, though if it’s a mistake I suppose you can just grow your hair back, anyway I haven’t seen you around, how’s your movie coming, don’t you start shooting next week or something—?” and suddenly the outburst drops off into space like the house drops off into the city.