Steve Erickson - Zeroville

On the bus, the erection doesn’t go away. A pretty girl gets on a few stops after Vikar, and then at the next stop a Latino mother with a small child, and when the bus reaches Vikar’s stop and he still has the erection, he’s too embarrassed to rise from his seat, so he goes on riding …

64.

… into the night—

— west on Hollywood Boulevard and then cutting down La Brea to Sunset, turning right. The mother and child get off and then the pretty girl, but Vikar continues on until he’s the only one on the bus and he can see the driver watching him in the rear-view mirror. By the time the bus reaches the Strip, Vikar’s erection is finally gone. The driver still stares at him in the rear-view mirror.

65.

The bus winds past the Continental Hyatt where rock musicians throw pianos off the top floor, toward Tower Records and the Whisky-a-Go-Go. The Strip is a corridor of glimmering broadcasts from other times, each corner set on a different channel: intergalactic geisha houses and flophouse chateaux, Persian flying saucers and supersonic English Tudors. When Vikar departs the bus, the blue-deco Sunset Tower looms above him; he looks up at it awhile because he happens to know George Stevens lives there. Vikar crosses the street and waits until a bus arrives, heading east to take him back into Hollywood. When he gets on, it’s the same bus with the same driver.

66.

It’s only after several attempts that Vikar gets an answer. “Oh yeah, the vicar!” the voice booms on the other end of the telephone. “George Stevens man! Never was a Stevens man. A bit of a pussy Western, Shane , if you don’t mind my saying so.” They plan to see a foreign movie about Algiers that Viking Man already has seen four times, but on the appointed day he doesn’t show.

Two weeks later, at a minute past six in the morning, almost eighteen months to the day since arriving in Los Angeles, Vikar is thrown from his bed by a terrific jolt. He believes a bomb has gone off. The bedroom bends to a new geometry; beyond the windows is the flashing of electrical wires collapsing. Vikar can hear in the kitchen a tremendous crash of dishes flying from their cupboards, and the light he leaves on in the kitchen at night, ever since the burglar broke in, goes out.

67.

Among the rubble flung from shelves and cupboards, Vikar searches for only one thing until he finds it: the small model of the church with no door, with a crowned lion holding a gold axe on the steeple, and a blank movie screen inside where an altar should be. One of its walls is slightly folded, but otherwise the model survives intact.

Outside Vikar’s apartment, people slowly emerge from their houses to survey the aftermath. After a while Vikar makes his way gingerly down the outer stairs that are no longer aligned. He’s standing on the lawn watching everything when a Volkswagen pulls up, a surfboard on top. The window on the passenger side rolls down. “Vicar!” a voice calls out.

Vikar strolls into the street and peers into the car.

Viking Man’s hair is wet and crusted with salt. “My God,” he says, cigar between his teeth, “I was out in the ocean, water like glass, and there was this …” he thinks a moment, “… shift, like someone had pulled the plug at the bottom. And I look up, vicar, and there’s the grandest wave I’ve ever seen. Hop in,” he says.

“I have to work today,” Vikar says.

“Vicar,” Viking Man explains patiently, taking the cigar from his mouth, “nobody’s working today. We’ve just had the biggest fucking earthquake in forty years. Get in the car. I need to stop at my place first, if you don’t mind.”

68.

In Viking Man’s apartment, a large closet he’s made into a movie library is strewn with reels of film. The reels have unspooled into a sargasso of celluloid; a projector stares from the end of the closet. Outside is the sound of sirens. Viking Man assesses the destruction calmly; he flicks a switch by the door but no light comes on. “I would say let’s watch a movie,” he continues flicking the switch, “but we don’t seem to have power.”

“Maybe we don’t like the same movies anyway,” says Vikar.

“Vicar,” Viking Man says, “there’s five hundred movies here. If there’s not one we both like, one of us is the Antichrist.”

69.

Back in the Volkswagen, Viking Man cuts up to Sunset Boulevard which is still dead, until they hit Crescent Heights where traffic becomes more congested with every passing minute. He turns the Bug up Laurel Canyon and now traffic is heavy, particularly coming down the canyon from the other side; they pass the Houdini House where Vikar spent his first night after leaving the Roosevelt Hotel. A fallen eucalyptus partially blocks the boulevard. Brazenly, Viking Man scoots his Beetle around it. At Mulholland Drive, police are turning traffic back; just as brazenly, Viking Man zigzags left and heads west along Mulholland until he finds a place to stop in a vacant patch of dirt overlooking the San Fernando Valley.

70.

The Valley looks like the crater made by a dead star. On the car radio is continuous news about the quake. At one point the broadcaster announces plans to evacuate the Valley west of the 405 freeway, due to a ruptured dam in the north.

“Get this, vicar,” Viking Man exclaims. “They’re saying an eight-foot wave is going to come roaring through that ravine up there—” he points to the Santa Clarita Pass on the other side of the Valley, “—at a hundred miles an hour. Can you fathom that?” He can hardly contain his excitement.

“Are we all right here?” says Vikar.

“Hey, I’m ready,” Viking Man smiles, reaching out his window and slapping the surfboard on top. “I’ll just hop my board and you can roll up the windows and float to Redondo Beach.”

“You’re making a joke,” Vikar finally says.

Viking Man looks at him. “Yes, vicar, I’m making a joke,” he says quietly. “Eight feet, a hundred miles an hour, it’s still not going to reach Mulholland Drive. But it will be righteously holocaustic if it happens,” he says wistfully. “What I wouldn’t give for a tab of acid right now. This may be as close to the Bomb as we ever get.”

Vikar studies the scene.

“You know, vicar,” Viking Man says, tossing away his half-devoured cigar, “for some reason I feel like maybe you and you alone would understand this, but God loves two things and that’s the Movies and the Bomb. Of all the monuments we’ve made to God over the last five thousand years, have there been any that so nearly communicate our awe of Him? Have there been any that so nearly approximate His majesty? With the Movies and the Bomb, we’ve offered gifts that are worthy of Him.”

“God hates children.”

For a moment Viking Man is too lost in his reverie to have heard, but then he turns to the other man. “Can’t say I ever thought of it that way, vicar.”

“God is always killing children in the Bible or threatening to,” says Vikar. “He kills His own child.”

Viking Man nods slowly. “That’s a hell of an observation,” he says. “Listen, vicar, can you hand me something from the glove compartment?”

Vikar opens the glove compartment. There are maps and an old note pad and pen. There’s also a small package of something wrapped in foil.

“Hand me that small bit of tin foil there, will you?” says Viking Man.

Vikar takes the foil from the glove compartment. Under the maps is a gun. “There’s a gun,” says Vikar.

“Smith & Wesson.38. Go ahead and hold it if you want.”

“No, thank you.”

“Good for you, vicar,” Viking Man says, unfolding the foil and carefully beginning to roll a joint in his lap, “it’s not a damned toy. Schrader already would have shot one of us by now, the stupid son of a bitch.” He lights it and draws in the smoke and offers it to Vikar.