Steve Erickson - Zeroville

“Hey!” he hears behind him, and a young girl about eight years old leans out of the car. In the rain Vikar stands looking at her. She opens the door and signals wildly to him to come inside the car; he hesitates. “Come on!” she calls over the roar of the rain and water. “It’s me, Zazi — remember?”

114.

He gets in the car on the passenger side. The girl sits behind the wheel; the key to the car is in the ignition, and the tape player is turned up full blast. “You’re too young to drive,” he shouts over the music. She turns the music down a bit. “Where’s your mother?”

“Over there,” Zazi says, indicating the Paramount Gate, “trying out for some movie.”

“Did she ever get that role in the private-eye film?”

“What?” over the music.

Vikar says, “You mean she leaves you in the car …?”

“… I saw you walking by and said, ‘The guy with the head!’”

He picks up a cassette case and studies it. He believes the person on the front with bright red hair is a man but he’s not sure. “He looks like people I see on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“No,” the eight-year-old points out, “ they look like him .” She turns the music back up. They listen to a song about an aging actor and a woman who stands for hours at Sunset and Vine. “Should you be listening to this kind of song?” Vikar says.

“Oh, I know all about that stuff,” the girl says.

“I liked this song I heard once about a dog.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very good song.”

115.

Vikar says, “Is Zazi your real name?”

“Isadora is my real name,” she says.

He nods. “I remember now.”

She says, “Were you born with that on your head?”

“No.”

“Remember that time we got tacos?”

“Yes. Do you?”

“Kind of. Mom left you in the middle of the street.”

“She was just being careful. But I wouldn’t hurt you.”

“I know. I went home that night and started cutting off my hair with some scissors to see what picture was on my head. She got mad. Here’s the best one.” She turns the song up:

Staying back in your memory

are the movies of the past

and Vikar looks at the cassette again. “I like songs about movies,” he says.

She says, “I don’t care about movies. I like the music.”

“Everyone in Hollywood,” he says, “likes music better than movies. I hope your mother is coming back soon.”

“Why?”

“Because you shouldn’t be out here a long time by yourself.” He says, “I should go before she returns.”

“O.K.”

“If I see her on the lot, I’ll tell her to come back.”

Zazi looks at Vikar. “I want a picture on my head.”

“It’s from the movies.”

“You picked the picture you wanted?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll get one of Bowie,” she says, waving the cassette.

116.

He wanders around the studio in the rain looking for Soledad but doesn’t find her. When he goes back out to the gate to check on Zazi, the Mustang is gone.

117.

On the television news is a story that the granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane has been kidnapped. The story says at least one or two of the kidnappers were black, but Vikar is certain some fucked-up white hippies did that business, no matter how hard they tried to pin it on black folks. It’s not clear whether they have kidnapped the granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane because they believe Citizen Kane is a very good movie or not a very good movie; Vikar wishes he could ask the burglar who broke into his apartment about it. He imagines all of the kidnappers watching Citizen Kane on television together in the middle of the night, while the granddaughter lies writhing on the floor, bound and gagged.

118.

When he’s finished reading The Death Ship , Vikar returns to Book City and buys whatever catches his attention. He reads all the Brontës, The Book of Lilith and the Arabian Nights which confounds him because it’s written by the actor married to Elizabeth Taylor, The Ogre by Michel Tournier and Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne de France by Blaise Cendrars, The Memoirs of Fanny Hill , a book called Les Diaboliques by Barbey d’Aurevilly, Memoirs of an Opium Eater and Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X, The Alexandria Quartet and the Freak Chronicles of one Charles Fort as catalogued in The Book of the Damned , with its accounting of a “super” Sargasso Sea in the sky from which reptiles, animals and elements fall to earth. He reads a book by a man named Bataille called Blue of Noon that he likes very much except he doesn’t understand the politics, this as the radio announces that the President of the United States has resigned.

119.

Nocturnally he begins to tour all the crypts and cemeteries of Los Angeles. Marilyn Monroe is buried in Westwood and Bette Davis is buried in Burbank along with Fritz Lang and Buster Keaton; below Bette’s name on her tomb Vikar might expect the inscription to read, Let’s not ask for the moon, we have the stars . Rather, it says: She did it the hard way .

Vikar goes to the graves not to pay his respects. He pays his respects in the movie theater. He goes so that he can, futilely, try to come to grips with a revelation that unsettles him and that he can’t articulate. In an old cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard he finds Douglas Fairbanks, Cecil B. De Mille, Marion Davies, Tyrone Power, Peter Lorre and, just recently interred, Edward G. Robinson. When he reaches Jayne Mansfield’s headstone, he sees in the fluttering dark of clouds passing the moon the forms of people moving, and realizes only after a moment what appears to be a man and woman having sex.

120.

Then he realizes there are two men, and the whimpers from the woman sound to Vikar like cries of distress.

Later he’ll wonder whether the rage that surges in him is from the act of rape or that it’s taking place on Jayne Mansfield’s headstone. Within seconds he’s yanked one man from off the woman and kicked in the face the other just as he looks up from what he’s doing. In the confusion of sex and surprise, neither of the assailants gets his bearings. Vikar kicks the second man again and takes the first by his hair and smashes his face into the headstone.

The man lies still, blood spilling around the 1933–1967 . In the dark the woman leaps to her feet, stops for a moment to take one look at the very still man on the headstone and another at Vikar, and bolts.

121.

The one man collects the other and drags him off in the dark. It’s hard for Vikar to tell whether the man whose face he smashed into Jayne Mansfield’s headstone is conscious or alive. Oh, mother, Vikar says to himself. He rips off his shirt and for the next hour cleans the headstone, mopping up the blood in the moonlight. Vikar tries to think when his last violent episode took place: Was it the morning he first arrived in Los Angeles, that hippie he hit with the food tray? No, the burglar I hit over the head with the radio. I had violent thoughts as well about the kid behind the front desk at the Roosevelt. When the headstone is clean, light begins to rise over the eastern hills and Vikar can read what’s inscribed: We live to love you more each day . Years later he’ll learn Jayne Mansfield is not buried here at all but in Pennsylvania where both she and Vikar were born, and then he’ll wonder about all the tombs and headstones, and how many hold phantom bodies. The movies are in all times, but the people are in no times.