Steve Erickson - Zeroville

173.

Then one Sunday, the cold breaks and he leaves his suite and walks out into the city. He believes he’s going to cross the street over to the park; instead he turns south, down Fifth past the Empire State Building all the way to Union Square, cutting down Broadway to the Bowery. The afternoon passes and he wanders along St. Marks Place; there aren’t any hippie buckaroos or even many space-age drag queens. People wear motorcycle jackets and jeans with holes in the knees and T-shirts with pictures of Captain America, and Mickey Mouse doing something strange to Minnie, and the words I KILL MOONIES. What are Moonies? Some wear rings in unusual parts of their bodies, and their wrists are wrapped from suicides attempted or postured or postponed.

At one point, Vikar and a girl on the street with cropped, dyed-black hair stop and stare at each other, she at Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, he at the words on her chest. GABBA GABBA HEY, says her shirt. “Hey, man,” she calls to someone across the street, “check this out.” It’s difficult to know who finds the other more mystifying. As these people are nothing like he’s seen, he is nothing like they’ve seen; and then, as dark falls, he hears something for which — he realizes in retrospect — he’s been listening for years.

174.

It’s not just a music, rather it’s the Sound, the real Music everyone has tried to tell him over the years that all the other music was when it wasn’t.

Vikar is standing on the Bowery outside what seems to be a tunnel cut into a bunker. The sidewalk is crowded with more kids like he saw on St. Marks Place, as well as old people sleeping under newspapers and drunks stumbling through the crowd asking for money. A dirty barefooted woman shivers under a yellow awning in nothing but the paper-thin gown that patients wear in hospitals.

The address on the awning is 315. There are nonsensical letters on the awning that spell nothing. A mystifying handwritten cardboard sign on the black glass doors says

HEARTBREAKERS

MAXXI MARASCHINO

SIC FUCKS

SHIRTS

and while nothing about this is comprehensible to him, the illicitly narcotic Sound is irresistible and he goes inside, the doorman eying him with wonder.

175.

Inside, the club isn’t much bigger than Vikar’s hotel suite. There are two stages, the main one in front, a smaller and lower one off to the side. There’s a pool table and a couple of pinball machines. The walls are peeling and needles litter the shadows and wafting clouds of urine collide with clouds of beer. The Sound, made by the band on the main stage, is overwhelming; people at the front fling themselves wildly into each other. Something wells up in Vikar. There’s a break, then a singer who reminds him of Brigitte Bardot or Tuesday Weld.

176.

It was never the Music at all, it was always the Sound; and though there’s no way for him to understand this, perhaps the Sound moves him now because, a little more than twenty years after its birth, the Sound has become about itself, the Sound is about its own truth and corruption in the same way that, a little more than twenty years after the Movies found their sound, there was a wave of movies about the Movies: Sunset Boulevard, Singin’ in the Rain, The Big Knife, The Bad and the Beautiful . When the Sound has circled to swallow its tail, it becomes a world of its own, god or no god, or in which Vikar is god — or in any event a god that kills fathers rather than sons.

177.

Vikar returns to the club the next night and the next, and the next five after that. There’s never a moment when he says God I hate this music before he admits God I love this Sound . By his third night, when he steps over the woman in the hospital gown sleeping in the doorway and walks into the club, everyone turns to look and in the din he catches stray fragments of buzz, “He’s here …” and people part before him. When the audience begins its tribal smash-ups, the thing in him wells up and he lurches into the crowd, slamming into everything and everyone, toppling over the edge of the stage. He feels people’s hands on Liz and Monty. Later behind the club, a feline Asian named Tanya and her “slave” Damitra take turns putting him in their mouths, and as he leans back against the wall he can feel the vibration, like the vibration he felt when he went to the silent-movie theater one night on Fairfax, and Chauncey played the organ to the ride of the Klan in The Birth of a Nation . Returning to the editing room in the mornings he glows with a bruised blue, and the secretaries and assistants regard him even more strangely than usual.

178.

For a while he realizes he’s come to care more about the Sound than the Movies, and in his infidelity he’s ashamed, memories washing over him of his first days in Los Angeles when no one seemed to love the movies. I would never betray you, he promises the bathroom mirror, caressing his head. I might cheat on you for Kim or Natalie or Tuesday, but I would never betray you for any sound or music.

179.

One early morning in the dark after returning to the hotel, Vikar sits looking out the window at the park. It’s turned cold again. Christmas decorations go up all over the city. The heat of his night at the club, however, makes him unlatch the window and push it open. The park reflects off the glass of the window in the light from his suite. He keeps pushing the window in and out, the image of the park shifting with its reflection in the glass.

180.

I would never betray you, one lover might say to another in a scene, but by choosing one profile over the other, Vikar can lay bare either credibility or mendacity in the character, irrespective of the actor’s intention or the writer’s or director’s.

As people have right profiles and lefts, so places and moments have them. Vikar looks back and forth from the park below to its image in the window, listening to the image’s stereo. In a movie, every shot is a profile of something . By cutting from rights to lefts or vice versa, or from rights to other rights or from lefts to other lefts, Vikar reinforces or sabotages the audience’s perceptions, not to mention the film’s. He sets free from within the false film the true film.

He’s been working on Your Pale Blue Eyes for two months when, going over the previous day’s rushes, he hits the stop button and looks at the face in the frame before him.

181.

He picks up the phone and puts a call through to Mitch Rondell.

“I hear you’re a busy man these nights, Vikar,” Rondell says. The tone of concern is unmistakable. “At some point soon, it would be helpful if we took a look at what you’re doing.”

“It’s better if you trust me,” Vikar says.

“I’ll be honest — that makes us nervous. Why is it better?”

“Because otherwise it would be hard for someone to understand or for me to explain.” There’s silence on the other end of the phone. “Let me finish a little more.” Vikar adds, “Hiring another editor now would be bad.”

“We’ll be the judge of that,” Rondell says. “I didn’t say anything about hiring another editor.”

Vikar doesn’t answer.

“Tell me honestly how you feel it’s going.”

“I don’t know yet. That doesn’t mean,” Vikar says, “it’s not going well.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means I have to finish to know. It’s a matter of faith.”

“The faith feels a bit blind.”

“In one eye, perhaps.”

“This is all very poetic, Vikar, but both eyes would like to see what you’re doing. Take until the end of next week and then you need to show us something.”