“Bárbaro,” Vikar says, more to himself.
“Are you getting blown on a semi-regular basis by one of the Kennedy women, vicar?”
“No.”
“Me neither. So what do we know. By the new millennium I’m sure Hollywood will be done with comic-book characters and we’ll be making real movies again. Right?”
Vikar doesn’t answer.
“Because God loves the Movies, like He loves the Bomb.”
“God doesn’t love the Movies.”
“Sure He does. Or He wouldn’t have shown us how to make them.”
“He didn’t show us how to make them.”
“Well, if He didn’t, who did?”
“No one showed us how to make them,” says Vikar. “The Movies have always been here. The Movies were here before God. Time is round like a reel of film. God hates the Movies because the Movies are the evidence of what He’s done.”
“O.K., vicar,” Viking Man says wearily, “I just got my ass kicked by a preternaturally worldly fifteen-year-old, or however old she is, so I don’t need to get into it with you too. Listen, when you decide to re-enter the world of the marginally sane, let me know. Come edit my comic-book movie for me.”
122.
Often Vikar hears Zazi up all night watching television. “You should go to bed sometimes,” he tells her.
“I don’t sleep anyway,” she says. “I’ve been having these dreams.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“Hey, Vik, you can keep your dreams to yourself and I’ll keep mine to myself. O.K.?”
121.
Vikar goes to see a movie by a Polish director, starring the woman who was Victor Hugo’s daughter in the movie where she follows her soldier-love to Nova Scotia. In this movie Victor Hugo’s daughter is in modern-day Berlin giving birth to a monstrous creature who then becomes her lover, and whom she’ll protect against any other lover, husband, soldier or god. As in Nova Scotia, everything she is or has been, everything she believes or has believed, has collapsed for her into the form of her demonlover and child; since Vikar came to Los Angeles, all the children in all the movies are born monsters, born elephants, possessed by the Devil, are the Devil.
120.
Vikar hears on the radio that Natalie Wood, for whom the beautiful woman tattooed on his head has so often been mistaken, and whom he saw in a movie where she was in a bathtub possessed, has drowned, as though God reached down to her in her bath and grabbed her by her wet hair, and pushed her under the water and held her there.
119.
Zazi’s band gets a semi-regular gig at the Whisky as a kind of unofficial house band, so sometimes Vikar descends from his house, disappearing down into the inky cloud that swathes the hills, and finds himself back in the realm of hours and days and years where he used to live. When the band comes on, Vikar launches himself into the slam dancing with a ferocity that clears the floor, until he finds himself sprawling at the foot of the stage just below where Zazi plays. He’s removed from the premises in a chrysalis of spit and blood. Wandering up the Strip toward where George Stevens used to live in the Sunset Tower, he feels like a tourist; he no longer lives here: there are no fireworks above the trees, and it’s no one’s city and never will be.
118.
He wakes in the morning to Zazi standing in the doorway of his bedroom, watching him. “The band, Vik,” she says, “is supposed to cause the commotion, not you.” She’s been edgy lately from the lack of sleep; Vikar doesn’t answer. “As I remember it, you were this notorious in New York, too.”
“Something comes over me,” he says, “the Sound comes over me.”
“We’ve talked to the club about letting you in again. So if you decide you want to come hear us again, maybe you can let the Sound come over you a little less.” She says, “In the meantime, we’re not playing tonight, and there’s this movie at Royce Hall I thought I’d check out.”
117.
On the UCLA campus at Royce Hall, the printed announcement says that the silent film is to be accompanied on the Wurlitzer organ by the same man who Vikar heard play years before at the silent-movie theater on Fairfax. Before the screening begins, someone announces to the crowd that the accompanist will not be playing after all, adding that in fact the film’s director always had intended the film to be shown and watched in silence. “This is the first movie I ever saw in Los Angeles,” Vikar tells Zazi. Composed almost entirely in close-ups, the inquisition and execution of Joan as played by Maria Falconetti is all the more unbearable for the quiet; the audience can barely bring itself to applaud afterwards.
116.
Shaken, Zazi finally says on the bus home, “That wasn’t even a movie. I don’t know what it was. It was a … sighting or something.”
“No wonder it drove her mad,” says Vikar. “No wonder she never made anything else.”
“You know what’s strange? This is going to sound strange, O.K.?”
“All right.”
“I mean crazy-strange. Like, you-won’t-believe-it strange.”
“All right.”
“But not that long ago, I dreamed this movie.”
“You did?”
“I mean, this same movie. How can that be?”
Vikar doesn’t answer.
“Of course I didn’t know it was a movie. When I dreamed it, I didn’t even know the woman was Joan of Arc. I mean, I’m not even sure I understand who Joan of Arc was. But I dreamed it, just like I saw it tonight, you know? scene for scene, I mean … is that like the weirdest thing? It was so vivid I even wrote it down when I woke up. Have you ever had a dream and then seen a movie of it?”
Vikar says nothing.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe it.”
115.
That night Vikar’s dream returns more powerfully than it ever has. He’s so close he can almost touch the rock, and can almost see the face of the altar’s designated sacrifice. The white of the script glows so hot it almost burns him, and he reads it rather than just knows it: Faith before love, blood before tears.
After not reading a newspaper for months, Vikar scours the obituaries every day until it appears, and there’s even a picture of Chauncey from younger days, and a mention of his last scheduled engagement at a UCLA screening which he missed, as though the director of the film reached from the grave to silence the musician and protect his movie’s ministerial hush.
114.
He arrives at the Whisky early to catch Zazi’s band, beating the rest of the crowd. The doorman eyes him warily, and as Vikar enters the club, another security man taps him on the shoulder. “Be cool,” he says. Vikar suppresses a compulsion to take the man’s finger and snap it back; he envisions the man falling to his knees in shock. Vikar positions himself at the edge of the Whisky’s stage and waits, until finally the lights dim slightly and the crowd behind him cheers, and Zazi’s band walks out.
Zazi’s band walks out—and stops in place. Not a chord has been strummed nor a cymbal tapped. The band stands onstage staring at the crowd; and Vikar turns to look.
There behind him is a sea of shaved heads, every one tattooed. There are no other Elizabeth Taylors or Montgomery Clifts from A Place in the Sun. But there are three or four Nosferatus, one or two Anita Ekbergs frolicking in the Trevi Fountain from La Dolce Vita, half a dozen Bogarts from Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep and another half dozen Belmondos doing his impression of Bogart in Breathless, surprisingly more Louise Brookses from Pandora’s Box than the one or two obligatory Marilyns from Seven Year Itch and Brandos from The Wild One and James Deans from Rebel Without a Cause, and many Alexes from A Clockwork Orange and even more Travis Bickles from Taxi Driver. If Max and Travis Bickle themselves were there, each would have a tattoo of the other. They’re all behind Vikar watching him, as though he’s the general of an army, leading the children in revolt against gods and fathers.
113.
One night when Zazi is recording with her band at a studio in Holly
wood on Cherokee, Vikar goes to the Nuart to see a “Forbidden Films” double bill. The first film is a Japanese movie about a young model who arrives one day at an art gallery showing an exhibition of bondage photos for which she’s posed. There she sees a man running his hands over a sculpture of her; feeling as though his hands are on her own body, she flees the gallery. Later she makes an appointment with a blind masseur, whose touch the woman is startled to find she recognizes: “I have eyes in my fingers,” he announces; and before he chloroforms her into unconsciousness, she rips the dark glasses from his face to recognize him as the man from the gallery. When she comes to, she’s in a strange warehouse, cavernous as a cathedral. On the walls are the sculptures of eyes, noses, mouths, torsos, arms and legs, and as she scurries among the shadows to elude her abductor, she scrambles over monumental replications of reclining female bodies, lurking in the valley of monumental breasts, darting in the ravine of monumental thighs. Imprisoned in the blind man’s studio where he sculpts a statue of her, eventually she becomes blinded herself by the endless darkness; seducing her captor, she becomes not just the model of his art but the art itself, the blind sculptor lopping off real arms, real limbs. Over and over he says, I have eyes in my fingers.
112.
The second movie on the double bill is a porn film. It’s not like any porn film Vikar has seen, or like any other kind of film: a woman in a psychiatric ward is having sexual hallucinations and surreal sexual experiences; in one scene she has sex with two jacks-in-the-box, in another she’s in the Arabian desert at night being taken by two men, one at each end of her, while a low muttering continues unabated as the only soundtrack. In another scene she’s a slave of the Devil in a Hell of smoke and burning coals. Another female slave chained to the rocks exhorts the Devil on as he violates the star of the movie in a number of ways. He has a two-pronged pitchfork, one prong larger than the other, which he can insert in two orifices at the same time. As the Devil has her, in the background is the endless clashing and surging of machinery and people crying out.
111.
It’s while watching the porn film that Vikar sees it: it flashes by in the wink of an eye, and if he hadn’t seen it hundreds of times over the years he wouldn’t see it at all, or he might suppose he’s imagining it; but he’s not imagining it. As powerfully as he dreamed it the night after seeing the movie at Royce Hall, he sees it now, there on the screen, and this time he knows it isn’t a dream.
110.
Sometime in the sleepless night he hears Zazi return home, and after he’s heard her door shut, and after the first light over Laurel Canyon comes through his window, he rises from bed. He walks down to the Strip and waits forty-five minutes for a bus to pick him up and take him west through Bel-Air, past UCLA, cutting up past the veterans’ cemetery where he transfers to an express bus on Wilshire that heads north to the Valley through the Sepulveda Pass. At Ventura and Van Nuys Boulevards, waiting for a third bus, he buys a box of glazed doughnuts and a quart of milk, and sits at the bus stop waiting.
109.
He catches a third bus heading west on Ventura. Eight miles later he changes again to another heading north on Highway 27 that cuts from the sea through Topanga Canyon. He takes this final bus to Chatsworth in the far northwestern badlands of L.A. County and gets off among the rocks and train tracks not far from Corriganville, where many Westerns have been shot. It’s taken him four hours to make the trip. He wanders up and down the Chatsworth roads asking directions until he finds what he’s looking for on De Soto, a plain industrial building with no windows and a single glass door.
108.
In the small lobby of the building beyond the glass door, the receptionist behind the counter takes one look at Vikar, jumps up from her chair and vanishes into a back room.
107.
The receptionist returns with another woman, who looks around fifty but may be younger. She has chopped peroxide blonde hair and enormous breasts beneath a tight t-shirt; a cigarette burns between her fingers. She reminds Vikar a bit of a female punk singer he once saw who performed wearing only shaving cream. “What do you want?” she says.
“Is this Caballero Films?” says Vikar.
“What do you want?”
“Did you make a movie called Nightdreams?”
“We can’t help you,” says the blonde.
“I want to buy a print of Nightdreams,” says Vikar. The receptionist appears terrified and backs into the wall.
“Nobody can help you,” says the blonde.
“I’ll wait,” Vikar says, “for someone who can help me.”
106.
The woman regards Vikar and takes a puff on her cigarette. “I’ll call the police,” she says.
“The police never come in Los Angeles,” Vikar advises her.
“Maybe you’re the police.”
“I’m not the police.”
She takes another puff. “It’s on video,” she says, “why don’t you rent it?”
“I don’t want to rent it. Are you sure you don’t have a print?”
“I’m sure.”
Vikar isn’t sure she’s sure. “Do you have a cutting room?”
“Why?”
“If you can’t sell me a print, can you rent me the use of the room?” He says, “I’ll pay a hundred dollars an hour to rent your room and look at a print of the movie. I won’t do anything to the print and I won’t leave the building with it.”
The woman glances at the receptionist. “A hundred an hour?”
“Yes.”
“How long will it take?”
“Perhaps the rest of the day, if I start now.”
“A hundred an hour for the rest of the day.”
“Yes.”
“We lock up at six.”
“I hope before then that I find what I’m looking for.”
105.
Vikar waits in the small lobby ten minutes until the woman with the cropped hair reappears and motions for him to follow. They cross the warehouse to a line of rooms on the other side. “You can use this,” she says, opening the door to one.
“Thank you.”
“A hundred up front. Every hour I’ll come by and collect another hundred.”
Vikar hands her two fifties.
She looks at the money and says, “In about an hour, a guy comes by selling sandwiches. There’s a soda machine over by where we came in.”
“Thank you.”
“You must have a thing for this movie.”
“I believe it’s a very good movie.”
“Yeah,” she says, “a very good movie. I’ve never had anyone like a movie so much they wanted to look at the print. You’re not going to jerk off or anything in here, are you?”
“What?”
“Just keep it in your pants, is all I care about.”
104.
Inside the editing room, he’s surprised to find a relatively sophisticated flatbed table, which is good for looking through more film quickly but not as good as a moviola for locating a particular frame. Several canisters sit on the table. He takes the film out and begins unspooling it, running it through the table’s prism and searching.
103.
An hour passes. There’s a knock on the door and the woman sticks her head in. “Got an extra sandwich here,” she says, holding out a cellophane-wrapped sandwich.
“Thank you.”
“Want a soda?”
“Thank you.”
102.
The hours pass, then the afternoon, interrupted only by the hourly collection of another hundred dollars, until Vikar isn’t sure he trusts his eyes anymore, when
101.
around five o’clock, frame by eight thousand frames into the film
100.
he finds it
there in the Hellfire sequence, all shimmering heat, the constant, relentless surging sound in the background of machinery grinding and people crying, like hydraulics bashing and engines being stoked, the clanging of metal to meta
l slightly muffled as though by a volcanic sea, and beyond the Devil’s
shoulder is the dim naked figure of the slave chained to the molten walls of the underworld urging the Devil on, and the madwoman bending over before him as the Devil stands behind her, spearing his pleasure, saying things just barely more than sounds and groans, grunting meaningless proclamations over and
over and pulling out of her now and then for no other reason than to reveal a satanic cock, all to the same ongoing muffled industrial roar, and then, spliced wetly between the frames of the PornHell, so that any untrained eye not searching so intently would glide right over it and never see it or ever know it was
there, he finds the single frame
of the horizontal rock, out of its open chasm a sound roaring as though it’s the crashing machines of the PornHell, as though another movie is trying to emerge through the rock’s portal, and the glowing white writing across the top of the rock, and there, draped across the top of the rock, the still silhouetted figure
waiting; and Vikar reels, shoving himself back from the table. Although he can hardly stand it, he looks again
99.
Zeroville: A Novel Page 24
