Steve Erickson - Zeroville

106.

She looks straight at him and suddenly seems very sober. “A sore throat, Vikar.”

“God kills children in many ways,” he says.

She covers her face with her hands. “So what does it say?”

“What?”

“The writing.”

“The writing?”

“The ancient writing, in your dream. You said on the side of the rock there’s writing.”

“I don’t know. It’s ancient.”

“I know, but sometimes in dreams you know what things say or mean that you wouldn’t otherwise.”

“I don’t know what it means.”

“Maybe it’s a movie you’re going to make someday,” she suggests wearily, “maybe it’s one of those movies that’s in all times, that exists before it’s made.”

“The movie is in all times,” he agrees, “and all times are in the movie. But this one already has been made.”

107.

He sees Deliverance, The Bride of Frankenstein , Alan Ladd as a hit man in This Gun For Hire, Badlands, The Devil in Miss Jones , Lewton and Tourneur’s Cat People, Sisters , Minnelli’s Some Came Running, Aguirre the Wrath of God , Pam Grier in Coffy, Phantom Lady, La Planète sauvage, Mean Streets, Force of Evil with John Garfield, the nearly four-hour Mother and the Whore and Rivette’s four-hour-plus Out One: Specter cut down from twelve hours which plays for one night at the Fox Venice on Lincoln Boulevard, Vidor’s Duel in the Sun, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid . When the Sheriff goes hunting for the Kid, it’s not as the Kid’s former friend but as a father who will sacrifice the son to the new god, whose shiny icon in the form of a star the Sheriff wears over his heart. The Sheriff shoots down the Kid in the aftermath of sensual pleasure, the son wandering from the arms of a lover out into a night he doesn’t know or care is filled with danger; he comes to the father open and trusting, and the father shoots him down. God despises the innocence of children and answers it with execution.

108.

Vikar has ridden one bus particularly far one night, farther than he’s ever gone and for longer than he’s ever ridden, and has lost track of where he is when he disembarks. He finds himself on the other side of the Hollywood Hills; before him in the dark seems to be a great park with rolling knolls. Vikar passes a gate and begins climbing the largest hill toward a massive estate, the grounds around it bathed in a shallow light.

He circles to the far end of the building. A security guard is walking out a pair of glass doors just as Vikar rounds the corner; Vikar catches the doors before they close. The building is enormous but there seems to be nothing in it. The hallways are colossal but with little furniture; Vikar can’t imagine who lives or works here.

He turns to leave when he sees on the wall in front of him JEAN HARLOW in large chiseled letters. It’s like the names on the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard, except in walls, until he realizes that in the wall directly behind her name is Jean Harlow’s body.

109.

Dead at the age of twenty-six. She became a star in Red Dust , “1932,” Vikar says out loud, “with Clark Gable,” and as he’s saying it, he turns to see on the wall CLARK GABLE. Next to him is CAROLE LOMBARD, dead at the age of thirty-three from a plane crash while selling bonds during World War II.

Now Vikar gazes at all the names on the walls around him. HUMPHREY BOGART. MARY PICKFORD. ERROL FLYNN. LON CHANEY. CLARA BOW. THEDA BARA. ALAN LADD. WALT DISNEY. SPENCER TRACY. The movies are in all times, but the people who made them are in the walls.

110.

One night Vikar is removed from a theater for laughing at the movie. It’s about the possession of a child by the Devil; her head pivots on her body and she retches something primordial, a reptilian green, and she has sex with a crucifix.

Around Vikar, people in the audience vomit. When they turn to look at him laughing, it’s with the same expression as when they watch the child in the movie. The ushers who hold him at each elbow regard Vikar with the same expression. “I don’t understand about comedies,” he says, “but I believe it’s a very funny movie.” The audience stares at Vikar — glowing in the ushers’ flashlights — as if on his head is the Devil’s mark, as if being possessed by the two most beautiful people in the history of movies, with their graven images on his skull, is satanic possession itself. “It’s God who takes children,” Vikar explains to the ushers, “not the Devil.”

111.

When Vikar walks along Sunset Boulevard, he travels with the Music. He’s not following the Music and the Music isn’t following him, they just happen to travel together, on opposite sides of the street, keeping an eye on each other. Along the Strip to Laurel Canyon and beyond, the Music is all buckaroos in the crossfire of Utopia and hedonism, clothes slightly spangled, with guitars over their shoulders; but as Vikar gets farther into Hollywood, the Music gets more primal and the buckaroos give way to space-age drag queens with soft-focus genitals and lightning bolts for eyes. Vikar hears this music on his bus rides at night. It creeps from the east under cover of dark.

He goes to see Treasure of the Sierra Madre at the Vista and is mesmerized by Walter Huston’s demented jig in the swirling dust and gold. One afternoon a few days later, Vikar is passing Book City on Hollywood Boulevard when he stops to look at a battered paperback in the window; the paperback’s cover says it’s by the author of Treasure of the Sierra Madre . Vikar goes into the bookstore and buys the paperback, which is about a stranded sailor far from home who becomes trapped in the cargo hold of a doomed frigate that sails on and on and on. It’s the only novel Vikar has ever read. For the next several nights, he foregoes the movies to stay home and read it.

112.

Not long after being kicked out of the movie about the Devil, Vikar sees a better movie about possession, from the early sixties. “Spoiled, Mama? Spoiled?” Natalie laughs insanely from a bathtub in the thrall of sexual hysteria, at the mother who questions whether she’s given her virginity to Warren. It’s the most terrifying performance Vikar has seen since Mlle Falconetti as Joan burning at the stake; he shrinks from the screen.

Vikar imagines Natalie lying between his legs, supreme succubus of all, starved on her chastity, drawing him into her mouth until there’s nothing left of him. That night he stares at his head in the bathroom mirror, runs his fingers over the features of Elizabeth and imagines her as Natalie, although not the Natalie of Rebel Without a Cause for whom everyone mistakes Elizabeth. Rather he imagines her as the Natalie of another movie, an unmade sequel: In this movie, the shattered young lover of Splendor in the Grass flees her bathtub to relocate in Europe and become the dead wife of Last Tango in Paris , over whose body Brando rages at a love that forgives nothing.

After three years, Vikar replaces his radio. It broadcasts ongoing coverage of a political scandal that he doesn’t understand. Although he tries to resist it, he prefers the drag-queen music to that of buckaroos:

These cities may change, but there always remains

my obsession

Through silken waters my gondola glides and the bridge,

It sighs

I remember all those moments lost in wonder that we’ll never find again …

Jamais, jamais!

113.

L.A.’s rare rains come in a torrent. Only the steps that lead from Vikar’s secret street make it possible to descend. The intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights is a lake, as though having risen from a hole in the ground. All the buses run behind schedule, and by the time Vikar makes his connections, he’s forty-five minutes late to the studio. A river runs down Melrose; the parked black Mustang isn’t familiar to him, he doesn’t really remember it when he hears a tapping on the window as he sloshes by.