Steve Erickson - Zeroville

Vikar stops where he stands. There’s dead silence beyond the door, then someone whispers. After another pause Viking Man calls out, not too loudly, “Vicar?”

Vikar doesn’t answer.

“You awake, vicar?”

80.

Vikar doesn’t answer or move.

There’s another pause. “He was in Laurel—” the woman starts again.

“ Everybody was in Laurel Canyon,” interrupts Viking Man, “everybody except, I would remind you, the Manson Family. They were in Benedict Canyon. Those longhairs you were living with had more to do with Manson than the vicar does. Odds are better, Sol, that you’re one of the Manson Family.”

“He does seem a bit of a nut job, John,” suggests another male voice.

“Oh yeah, and you don’t, Paul. The rest of us, we’re paragons of stability. Bobby here? He’s perfectly normal .” Viking Man snorts. “The vicar’s O.K. He works on sets over at Paramount, I met him through Dotty Langer. She—”

“Is she still around?” someone asks.

“I keep telling her,” Viking Man says, with what sounds to Vikar like the only uncertainty in the man’s voice he’s heard, “she’ll survive all of us, God love her. But I don’t know—”

“The tattoo-head, John,” someone prompts.

“Well, Dot worked on A Place in the Sun , you know, with Hornbeck. She thinks maybe she can get the vicar a job in production design … he studied architecture somewhere back east …”

“A set builder?” says a male voice — the one Viking Man calls Hitch — with a tone of scorn, and then another female voice that Vikar recognizes as Margie Ruth answers, “Fuck you, Brian — he makes himself useful . More than some people in this room can say.”

“Take it easy, Margie,” Viking Man says, “Hitch here—”

“Don’t call me that,” says Hitch.

“—is above all that, with his Siamese-twin movie …”

“Fuck you too, John,” says Margie.

“I keep meaning to ask you,” Viking Man says, “these twins, are they joined at—”

“John,” comes the prompt again. “The tattoo-head.”

81.

Viking Man says, “We’re driving out here a couple of days ago, day before yesterday or whenever it was — day of the quake — and we’re talking movies the whole way … this guy isn’t a cinéaste, he’s a cinéautistic .”

“A what?”

“ Cinéautistic …”

“It means he’s backward,” says Hitch.

“Nonsense. I tell you he’s got a degree in architecture.”

“So he says.”

“O.K., let’s say he made it up,” says Viking Man. “Even just making up a degree in architecture, you can’t be that backward. No, I’m telling you it’s socially that he’s, uh … he barely knows who the Beatles are. He barely knows there’s a country called Vietnam let alone a war there. I don’t know if he was raised in a fucking monastery — he’s not into drugs and I’d make a wager of some significant amount the guy’s never been laid. But he’s nuts about movies, as obsessive as anyone I know, which in this house is saying a lot—”

“He’s never been laid?” says Margie.

“—but absolutely unschooled, his knowledge and opinions absolutely unmediated … he doesn’t know from Pauline Kael let alone Andrew Sarris let alone James Fucking Agee. I’m not sure he knows who D. W. Griffith is, but he could probably run down for you the entire filmography of John Cromwell.”

“Who?”

Since You Went Away , Vikar’s mind races. The Prisoner of Zenda. Dead Reckoning with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. “This guy,” Viking Man continues, “has never been to USC or UCLA or Columbia or any fancy school …” Not Lauren Bacall. Liz Scott. “… for this guy, Film 101 is whatever theater he’s randomly walked into that’s playing whatever movie is randomly playing. An obsession that’s still pure, untouched by cultural cant or preconceptions or—”

Of course I know who D. W. Griffith is. I used to ride the elevator with him at the Roosevelt Hotel.

“You mean he’s a virgin?” says Margie.

82.

The next time Vikar wakes, it’s in the middle of what he believes is a wet dream. He’s hard and it’s a moment before he realizes that the hair falling across his belly isn’t a dream and that his cock is somewhere it’s never been. He starts to sit up.

“Relax,” he hears her command in the dark, “lie down,” and he lies back down and Margie puts him back in her mouth. He panics when he feels himself begin to come and she sucks all the more furiously. Do all the women on the beach give blowjobs channeled from the netherworld? “O.K., superman,” she says a few minutes later, kissing him hard, “just wanted to see what you’re made of.”

83.

By the third day, everyone calls him vicar. He never liked “Ike” anyway. He’ll replace the c with a k around the time people start dropping the k from Amerika.

He gets a ride back into the city only when Margie Ruth talks Soledad into it. Vikar overhears the conversation. “For God’s sake, Sol,” Margie says, “he’s not one of the Manson Family. He’s harmless. I promise you,” she says knowingly.

“He is not harmless,” Vikar hears Soledad answer. “He may not be one of the Manson Family,” she concedes, “but he’s not harmless.”

84.

They leave around eight, driving south on Pacific Coast Highway. The road is eerily empty except for the single figure of a young woman stumbling barefoot along the side in what looks like a hospital gown. From the top of the colony, between the dark gray highway and gun-metal sea, in the twilight Vikar can see the brown thread of the beach, like the string of a gyroscope pulled by God. In the front seat of the car, the little girl says to her mother, “I’m hungry.”

“We will eat when we get home,” Soledad says quietly. She looks at Vikar in the rear-view mirror.

“I’m really hungry.”

“In a bit,” Soledad says.

“I’m hungry now.”

The woman checks the rear-view mirror again. “We are going to stop and get something to eat.”

“All right,” says Vikar.

85.

They stop at a taco stand and order fish tacos. They sit at a table outside; although it’s February, it’s warm. Vikar and Soledad drink sangria in plastic cups and for a while no one talks. “Do they have tacos in Spain?” Vikar finally says.

“Tacos are Mexican,” Soledad answers. “They have tacos in Mexico. Mexico is not the same as Spain.”

“Have I been to Spain?” asks the five-year-old.

“No,” Soledad says.

“Was I born in Spain?”

“You were born here in Los Angeles.”

They’re on the canyon side of the highway. Although it’s not dark yet, they already can see, on the other side of the highway, the moonlight on the ocean. On the other side of the highway, from the direction they came, approaches the barefooted young woman in the hospital gown. An aftershock of the quake is followed by a gust as though it’s blown from the earth: and suddenly there’s no one else in the world but the three of them eating tacos and the woman in the hospital gown on the other side of the road. No one else sits at the tables, no one is behind the counter of the taco stand, no other cars are on the highway. “I believed they were alike, Spain and Mexico,” Vikar says.

“Spain is European,” Soledad says.

“Did you make movies there?”

Soledad absently takes her hair and wraps her fist in it. “Yes.” It would be rude, Vikar believes, to ask if Buñuel really is her father. “Art films,” she says. She glances at her daughter, then says to Vikar, “Lesbian vampires.”