Zeroville: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  34.

  Sometimes from exhaustion Vikar collapses where he stands, waking himself when he hits the floor, pulling another reel from the shelves around him.

  Where is Zazi? Has she fled, as she receives nocturnal bulletins from the subconscious of film, dreaming one scene after another from movies she’s never heard of, let alone seen? Did Vikar loom above her with an exacto-knife, sacrificing her to the pursuit of a divine secret? From the radio of her upstairs bedroom comes the soundtrack of a new Los Angeles noir, without hours or latitudes—Ornette Coleman’s “Virgin Beauty,” X’s “Unheard Music,” Duke Ellington’s “Transbluency,” strange female chants from Tuva, the movie scores of Soledad Palladin lesbian-vampire movies.

  33.

  Soon film unspools from one level of the house to the next. It’s fixed to the walls, draped in strips, hanging from the rafters like webs. Vikar viciously chops up film as though the frame he’s looking for is hidden not only from him but from the film itself, in its own flesh. Isn’t this flesh his to cut as he chooses? To flop right profiles with lefts as he chooses, and left profiles with rights, to reverse the utopian and anarchic ends of the boulevard? Down through the history of movies, what Auteur has invaded every movie ever made in order to leave him a sign, each of which grows closer and clearer with every extrication and every enlargement? Little pieces of black celluloid litter the floor like granite, up and down the stairs. He runs his hands along the trail of enlarged stills: I have eyes in my

  32.

  fingers, and in every film he examines he finds it, and from every film he extricates the single frame; though he doesn’t know it, he’s become the medium of Film Id. He enlarges the frames and assembles them until their own film is complete, an altogether different film that draws closer and

  31.

  closer to the horizontal rock, its open chasm, the white writing and the figure lying across the top, until he’s so close as to be able to reach out and

  30.

  touch her face.

  29.

  Oh, daughter.

  28.

  Zazi doesn’t return. I’ve become father to the sacrificial child. In his delirium, he has lapses; he finds himself riding a bus into Hollywood with no recollection of how long he’s been on it. There’s a song from a source he can’t identify or find

  To the center of the city where all roads meet, waiting for you

  To the depths of the ocean where all hopes sink,

  searching for you

  and at some point he’s in the Chinese Theatre. He has no idea if, outside, it’s day or night.

  27.

  An L.A. private eye of the future executes robots who believe they’re human because they remember. The movie takes place in a Los Angeles where everything is reset at zero. The future is reset at zero. Memory is reset at zero, prophecies are reset at zero. All latitudes and longitudes are reset at zero; everything that one believes about oneself is reset at zero. There’s no sunlight in this Los Angeles; every day is reset at zero. There’s no starchild in this movie because childhood has been reset at zero. In this Los Angeles, there is no Hollywood; in this movie, the Movies have been reset at zero …

  26.

  … and somewhere in this movie he knows he’s seen the frame of the sacrificial rock, he knows it’s there just like in all the movies

  25.

  and the lights in the theater rise and Vikar stirs. He wonders if he fell asleep; he’s now entered a fever where it’s impossible to know anymore. He sits up in his seat, watches the people file up the aisles. Then his heart rises to his throat.

  Coming up the other aisle of the huge Chinese Theatre, he sees him.

  24.

  Vikar is frozen, trying to think. It can’t be him. I was sure he was dead, reset at zero like everything else; and what would he be doing here even if he were alive, all the way from Pennsylvania?

  At first he can’t decide what to do, but then Vikar jumps from his seat and runs into the lobby, only to see him again in the distance through the theater doors, outside among the throngs milling around the concrete footprints of stars. Vikar pushes his way outside.

  23.

  Outside, Vikar stands in front of the Chinese Theatre. People run into him as his eyes search up and down Hollywood Boulevard.

  It couldn’t have been him. Even if he were alive, is it possible he would have come to Los Angeles after all this time? Why would he have been in the theater? Did he know I was there? Vikar begins walking up and down the block until, to his astonishment, at the corner of Orange Avenue, he sees him crossing the street to the Roosevelt Hotel.

  22.

  The lobby hasn’t changed since thirteen years before. Vikar strides past the front desk, through the sitting area with the bar beyond: “Sir?” says the concierge behind the front desk. Vikar wishes he were wearing his cap. The concierge calls again and again Vikar doesn’t answer, taking two or three at a time the steps that lead to the elevators, slipping into one just as the door slides closed.

  21.

  Like a private eye eluding pursuit in the ongoing movie of Los Angeles, Vikar gets off at the seventh floor and takes the stairs the rest of the way to the ninth.

  20.

  On the ninth floor, he heads down the long hall. The door of suite 928 is half ajar. Vikar pushes it open slightly, steps inside.

  19.

  To the left, in the corner of the living room, are a sofa and chair. A small table sits in the middle of the living room, a small bar behind it. The man stands in the middle of the suite gazing out the window, and turns to look at Vikar; his eyes glance to Vikar’s head and his mouth curls into a smile Vikar has seen a thousand times. “Hello!” the man says. “Come in.”

  18.

  He says to Vikar, “Have a seat.”

  Vikar appraises the suite again, tentatively stepping into the living room and the rising lights of Hollywood through the window.

  “Can I … get you something to drink?” the man says. “Vodka tonic?”

  “All right.”

  “Have a seat?” the man says again.

  “All right.” Vikar lowers himself into the sofa in the middle of the living room. The man hands Vikar the vodka tonic but doesn’t pour himself anything. He sits in the chair across from Vikar, smiles and nods; he leans forward and folds his hands, unblinking dark eyes on Vikar with a familiar intensity. Vikar says, “For some reason, from a distance I believed you were my father.”

  “Common mistake,” the man laughs.

  17.

  The man says in his slightly high, cracked voice, “Well, of course, I know all about you.” He gestures at Vikar’s head and laughs again. “I guess I’ve known about you since … well, since before I knew you.”

  On anyone else, his smile might be a sneer. But it’s without insolence; rather it’s half serene, half ironic, the smile that rejects doom or accepts it—it’s hard to be sure. It’s the same smile with which he confronts John Wayne at the end of Red River, when Wayne says he’s going to kill him. It’s the same smile with which he refuses to be bullied by Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity, and then befriends him. It’s the same smile when he sees Elizabeth Taylor for the last time at the end of A Place in the Sun, on his way to the gas chamber.

  “Fathers, huh?” he says, his faraway gaze from under his predominant eyebrows floating over Vikar’s face, before fixing on something somewhere just beyond him. “Nuts. Back home in Omaha, I didn’t get on with mine, especially after the Crash …” He shrugs, “He was a … narrow man. Rigid man. Sound familiar?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course,” the man nods, “my Ma, uh, she wasn’t exactly easy for him to live with. She wasn’t easy for any of us to live with, with all the … lies … But nobody ever lies about being lonely.”

  “I realize now,” Vikar says, “how lonely my mother was.”

  “It helped in the acting, though—the thing with Pa. Never thought of motion pictures as a hiding place
but … thought of my Pa when I went up against Wayne in Red River. Thought of him when I went up against Lancaster in Eternity. Pa and I, we patched things up after the accident … about the only thing after the accident that … got better.”

  “Your face,” says Vikar.

  The man touches his face. “Yeah.”

  “It’s better now.”

  He nods. “It’s better.”

  “I get the right profiles and left profiles mixed up.”

  “Another common mistake.” He stares at Vikar. “You got trust in your eyes, like you were just born.” He smiles the smile. “You know I was a twin?”

  “No.”

  “Had a twin sister. So when you’re a twin, you got four profiles in a way, right? Or maybe … one right profile cancels out the other left, and one left cancels out the other right …”

  “Was it bad?”

  “How’s that?”

  “The accident. Did it hurt?”

  “It was bad,” he nods, “can’t pretend it wasn’t. Bad outside and …” he taps his head, “… inside. Pretty much lost half my face. Bessie Mae—that’s what I call Elizabeth—she saved my life. Reached into my mouth and … pulled my teeth out of my throat, which is the only reason I didn’t choke to death. I gave her the teeth later,” he laughs, “as a sort of keepsake. The nose … never got fixed … jaw was cracked … all the nerves on the left side … Lots of pills for the pain. A lot of drink. You know, I’ll never forget the gesture of it, Elizabeth saving my life, but—” He laughs again. “I would have been Jimmy Dean if I’d died then. Hollywood is full of people who would trade their lives in a heartbeat just to be legends. Would have traded mine in a heartbeat not to go through the next nine years.” He says matter-of-factly, “Before the accident, I always was arrogant about my face. Felt a little guilty about it too, I realize now. Went to enlist in the War, before they turned me down for dysentery, and I was scared not that I’d get killed but that … something would happen to my face. Got away with a lot, because of this face. So it figures,” he smiles, “life would get me there.”

  16.

  He smiles at Vikar’s head. “Fantastic. Never expected to be tattooed on somebody’s head.”

  “I believe it’s a very good movie,” says Vikar.

  “Never figured it would be the finest thing I did. Certainly didn’t think so at the time. But then I didn’t care for many of my pictures. The ones with Zinnemann I liked all right … The Young Lions with Marlon, that was maybe my best work. But the others …” he shrugs, “Red River …”

  “I believe that’s a very good movie as well.”

  “Nah, I didn’t like it. They watered it down. Wayne was supposed to die at the end, but …” He looks up at Vikar and smiles. “But funny how your perspective changes, right? Before Place in the Sun, George Stevens came back from the war feeling like everything he’d done before was … a trifle. Gave up directing to fight the war, and then he … was one of the first into the camps to see … all that. Dachau. Bergen-Belsen. Afterward, he thought motion pictures should change the world … or what was the point? Can’t blame him. I probably would have agreed with him. I mean, Mister S, he just didn’t know who to fight anymore … what did he want to make empty little musicals for, right? He was all set to make a comedy with Ingrid … biggest star in the world then … that was before the country got so worked up about … her … private life … then he had to fly to Paris to tell her, ‘Can’t do it.’ A man doesn’t go his own way, he’s nothing. No more comedies, even if she was the biggest star in the world. Now, of course, with a little perspective, a person looks back and realizes, what in motion pictures can change the world more than Astaire and Rogers dancing?”

  In his netherworld between sleep and wakefulness, it’s difficult for Vikar to be certain whether he thinks about the question for a minute or five, or for an hour or a day or the rest of his life. In his mind he watches Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in George Stevens’ Swing Time, dancing to “The Way You Look Tonight” that fades into “Never Gonna Dance.” The floor gleams onyx, a black arch of stairs rises beneath a black backdrop of stars beyond the bandstand. Their dance is a melancholy goodbye—though of course in the end it’s not goodbye—that drifts across the floor and up the arch, where Rogers slips from Astaire’s arms into the white wings of the stage that glisten like an ice palace, and Astaire is left empty-armed, poised in mid-loss as the light settles into a kind of dusk that’s only in the movies. “Nothing,” answers Vikar.

  15.

  “Nothing,” nods Monty. “Nothing. Astaire and Rogers—fantastic, even if Stevens did shoot so many takes that poor Ginger’s feet bled. A man should be what he can do … but after the war he decided he had to make … well, you know,” he shrugs again, “pictures about Jesus. Maybe you just can’t make a good picture about Jesus.”

  “It’s harder when God is the villain.”

  “Fathers and sons, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Monty says, “Sometimes you know things before you know them.”

  “Once I made a model of a church before I saw it. Then when I finally saw it, it wasn’t a church.”

  “That happens too. What you thought you knew all along turns out to be something else.”

  “It’s like all along it was a sign for something.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Sometimes I’ve seen things that were supposed to be there even when they aren’t.”

  “The Joan of Arc,” Monty nods. “Another vodka tonic?”

  “No, thank you.” Vikar says, “In a week, I found a movie no one else could find for fifty years.”

  “Doesn’t that make sense?”

  “There’s a secret movie that’s been hidden, one frame at a time, in all the movies ever made.”

  “Find it in mine?” Monty smiles at Vikar’s head.

  “That’s funny. I didn’t look in that one.”

  “Don’t bother. It’s there too.”

  “How did it get there? Who made it?”

  “Doesn’t it seem strange,” Monty says, “that there are twenty-four frames per second of film? That in every second of film are the number of hours in a day?” He says, “What’s it mean that every second of a film is a day in the life of a secret film that someone’s been waiting for you to find in all the other films?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps,” Vikar says, “someone is showing me a way out of something.”

  “Or a way in.”

  “Am I possessed?”

  Monty laughs.

  “Am I possessed by the Movies?” says Vikar.

  Monty laughs again. “Just because you love something doesn’t mean it loves you back.”

  “Why me?”

  “Is it just you?”

  Vikar thinks. “No.”

  “Right.”

  “There’s someone else.”

  “The girl,” says Monty.

  “She doesn’t even like movies that much. She likes music.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t choose.”

  “Lately she’s had dreams of movies she’s never seen. Movies she doesn’t even know about.”

  “Maybe the Movies chose her, like they chose you.”

  “I miss Dotty.”

  “She misses you too.”

  “She once said movies are dreams.”

  “Maybe it’s the other way around.”

  “What?”

  “That Secret Movie? The one that’s hidden frame by frame in all the other movies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe we’re not dreaming it. Maybe it’s dreaming us.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “I know.”

  “I haven’t slept.”

  “I know.”

  “In days. Or …” Vikar can’t think. “Longer. Since …” Was it the porn movie, the last time he slept? Was it the night that Vikar and Zazi saw The Passion of Joan of Arc together? Was it before?

  “Longer than that,” says Monty.


  “Yes.”

  “Since before you came to Hollywood.”

  “Yes.”

  “Since before you ever went to the movies.”

  “Yes.”

  “Since that night your father came into your room when you were a small boy.”

  Vikar nods. “Yes.”

  “You should sleep now,” Monty says.

  “Yes.”

  14.

  In the past few nights, Zazi’s dreams have suddenly stopped. It’s as though they’ve been cut from the filmstrip of her sleep. When she gets home, she finds the front door wide open and celluloid in bits and pieces and loops strewn from the top level of the house down the stairs to the second level, past the bedrooms to the third. She knocks on the door to the film library. “Vik?” she calls.

  13.

  He hasn’t returned by the time she goes to bed, and he’s not home when she wakes the next morning. The door to the film library is locked, and she stands before it wondering if she should try to break it down like they do in movies. But she has a feeling it’s not as easy as it looks in movies.

  Like this movie she saw with Vikar where a small boy runs after the wounded gunfighter as he rides into the hills and graveyards, calling Shane, come back! Mother wants you! I want you!, she might now run down the street calling Vik, come back! The Movies want you! I want you! Zazi goes back up to the top level of the house, out the front door, and then slowly makes her way down the steep incline of the dirt hillside. At the base of the house, she’s able to jump up and catch the edge of the small window to the library and to briefly pull herself up, just long enough to peer in before she can’t hold on any longer. She drops to the hill and slides down, breaking the slide only by catching hold of some chaparral. “Shit,” she says. Slowly she climbs back up the hill to the top. She’s thinking to herself that, while the library appeared empty, she can’t be positive Vikar isn’t passed out on the floor, when she reaches the front door of the house and someone is waiting. For a moment, she thinks it’s him.