Steve Erickson - Zeroville

“No, thank you.”

“Good for you again. It’s a hippie pinko indulgence, basically fit for fairies with flowers for cocks and spade musicians, for some of whom I have an extraordinarily high regard, I should add. But some sort of mind alteration is called for in these circumstances, and in lieu of the lysergic sacrament or a bottle of half-decent Cuervo, this will have to do.”

Viking Man throws the Bug into reverse and backs out of the lot. He continues driving west on Mulholland, crossing the Sepulveda Pass and winding along mountain roads. All of the freeways are closed and the surface streets are clotted with traffic. It takes two and a half hours to reach Malibu Canyon Road and cut over to Pacific Coast Highway.

At the sea, Viking Man turns right and heads north, talking about movies all the way.

71.

Past the Colony and up the highway until they’re almost to Zuma—

— where Viking Man finally pulls off PCH, heads up the beach side of the boulevard along a row of water-logged houses until he slides into the drive of one. Pulling the surfboard off the top of the car, without a word to Vikar he strides toward the beach, circling around the house rather than through it.

Vikar sits in the car a moment, until Viking Man is nearly out of sight, before he gets out and follows.

72.

A crowd of about a dozen people, more men than women, are on the beach on the other side of the house. “Viking Man!” one of the guys calls out to him. “Earthquake waves!” All the guys call out to Viking Man and the women ignore him, until one sees Vikar standing alone in the sand. She looks after the other man running toward the ocean with his surfboard. “Uh, John?”

Viking Man stops at the water’s edge and turns.

“Is this guy with you?” asks the young woman. She’s lying on a towel in the sun; she has dark hair and is naked and has the largest breasts Vikar has ever seen. Two other women, one dark and one blond, wear bikini bottoms and no tops. Two other women, one petite and the other large, are dressed; the petite one says more bad words in five minutes than Vikar has heard a woman say or all the women he’s heard combined.

“That’s the vicar,” Viking Man answers.

The dark-haired woman looks at Vikar. Vikar says, “I’m a friend of Viking Man.”

“The vicar and the viking,” the woman says, lying back on the towel and closing her eyes, “isn’t that too cute for words?”

73.

Vikar stays three days. He can’t figure out how to get home. He loses track of when Viking Man is around and when he isn’t, and he doesn’t want to ask anyone else for a ride into town. The crowd grows smaller and then larger, faces come and then go just as they become familiar; the dark-haired naked woman and the topless blonde are attentive to Vikar, asking now and then if he wants something to eat or drink. He believes no one is paying attention until he turns his gaze fast enough to catch people staring at him. He suspects some of them are taking illicit narcotics.

They seem only vaguely aware there’s been an earthquake. This is mostly a subject of concern as it applies to the size of the surf or when someone makes a trip to the local market and finds the beer or wine understocked. Everybody is involved in the movies but they’re not like Vikar imagined; none of them looks like a movie star, except perhaps the dark-haired woman and one of the guys who’s not particularly handsome but has a big black beard like Viking Man and also a flashing smile and a matinee manner about him. He wears a safari outfit that he seems to consider debonair. Vikar believes he’s an actor but in fact he’s an aspiring director.

74.

All the guys Vikar believes are actors are directors, and all the guys he believes are directors are actors. The women cook the meals and take care of the guys who, as Viking Man said, care and talk about nothing but movies. “The peak of Hawks’ art,” one is saying the first afternoon. “Hemingwayesque in its understanding of masculinity’s values and rituals.”

“Dean Martin is underrated in that movie,” Viking Man agrees.

“The opening scene,” points out another, “where he’s digging the coin out of the spittoon? All wordless. A kind of American kabuki.”

“Existential,” someone adds, “in its exploration of courage and professionalism even at its most futile.”

“Angie Dickinson,” Viking Man says, “is the modern incarnation of the quintessential Hawks woman.” The conversation continues like this for about half an hour, until there’s a pause.

“The Western,” Vikar says, “has changed along with America’s view of itself from some sort of heroic country where’s everybody’s free and shit to the spiritually defiled place it really is, and now you have jive Italians, if you can feature that, making the only Westerns worth seeing anymore because white America’s just too confused, can’t figure out whether to embrace the myth or the anti-myth, so in a country where folks always figured you can escape the past, now the word is out that this is the country where you can do no such thing, this is the one place where, like the jive that finally becomes impossible to distinguish from the anti-jive, honor becomes impossible to distinguish from betrayal or just, you know, stone cold murder.”

It’s the first thing more than four words long that Vikar has said since arriving. Including the women preparing the meal, the household comes to a stop. After a long silence Viking Man says, “That’s a damned interesting perspective, vicar.”

“Uh,” someone else says, “let’s go surfing!” The room immediately clears of everyone except the women. The dark large-breasted one studies Vikar for a moment and returns to the cooking. After that, Vikar doesn’t say anything else. The only person who talks as little as Vikar is an intense dark man in his late twenties who sits on the couch staring at him and at his head in particular; he has a strange smile. Five years later Vikar will remember the man, and the way he looked at Vikar’s head, when Vikar sees him with a mohawk in a movie about a cab driver who goes crazy and kills everyone.

75.

The beach house is shabby, the plywood walls warped from moisture, the garish shag carpet blotched and worn. There are three bedrooms upstairs, and a balcony circles and overlooks the downstairs, which is organized around a fire pit in the center. Sofas and chairs line the walls. His second day in the house, sitting in the living room and staring at the blue necklace of the sea stretched across the breast of the sky, Vikar turns to see a five-year-old girl standing next to him, looking at his head.

76.

It’s only when the girl’s mother calls that Vikar realizes it’s the same child he saw in the ruins of the Harry Houdini house in Laurel Canyon, after first arriving in Los Angeles.

“Zazi.” Vikar turns to the same soft voice and the same beautiful young woman with the auburn hair and the perfect cleft in her chin who hurried the little girl across Laurel Canyon Boulevard that day a year and a half before. Now the beautiful woman wears only a bikini bottom.

The little girl reaches out to Vikar’s face, to wipe away the red teardrop tattooed beneath his left eye.

77.

As she did that day in Laurel Canyon, the woman appears to float across the room to take the girl back, just as the girl’s finger almost touches Vikar’s face. Perhaps there’s more urgency in the rescue this time, the hubbub of this house lending itself not so much to the woman’s gifts for casting spells. The mother carries Zazi through the sliding doors of the house out onto the deck, looking — as she did in Laurel Canyon — over her shoulder at Vikar.