Steve Erickson - Zeroville

She turns the model in her hand. “You take it with you wherever you go?”

“I was an architecture student.”

“I remember.” She points at one wall. “It’s bent.”

“From the earthquake. The big one, seven years ago.”

She studies the small steeple with its crowned lion holding a gold axe. “There is,” her eyes narrow at the other tiny walls, “no way out.”

“That’s what I believed. The review committee,” he says, “saw it as no way in.”

She smiles at him and hurls the model into the wall, like a champagne glass into the fireplace.

192.

He stares at the shards of the smashed model on the floor. She reaches over to the wall and flips off the light; in the dark, his coat slides off her bare body and she wraps his belt around his neck, running it through the buckle and tightening it. “When we fuck, Mister Barbaric Church Builder,” she says, giving the belt a yank, “do we make death an ecstatic experience rather than a lonely one?” What? thinks Vikar. She takes him out of his pants again and gets on her knees and puts him in her mouth; he stares through the window at the lights on the park outside. After a while she pulls herself back to her feet by the belt around his neck and says, “Put it inside me.” He sways where he stands and she pulls him into the other room as if she’s been in this suite a hundred nights. In the dark, she stretches herself out on the bed. “Put it inside me.”

193.

He sways where he stands, caught in the lights off the park. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” she says.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re hard.”

“That’s not why.”

For a moment nothing happens and then she says, “O.K.” In the dark she pulls him by the belt onto the bed where she curls between his legs, breasts pressed against his thighs, and takes him in her mouth again.

194.

Afterward she says, “It’s O.K. We can do it however you like,” and he drifts to sleep.

195.

He wakes a couple of hours later. It’s still the middle of the night; she’s sitting at the edge of the bed in the dark, with her back to him. “What?” he says. He can’t hear her when she answers. “What is it?” he says.

He hears her say, “You should not have used what I told you in that way.”

“Used what?”

“It was cruel.”

196.

Vikar says, “I don’t understand.”

“Your little church. I know it’s not a church.”

No, he admits to himself, it’s a movie theater: Did she see the tiny blank screen when she threw it at the wall?

“It’s a private thing,” she says, “that belongs to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know.”

“No.” He sits up in bed.

“The institution.”

“What institution?”

“I told you. When I was a teenager, in Oslo.”

“Oslo?” he says.

“In the institution there.”

He remembers about the institutions. “I remember now about the institutions, but not Oslo.”

“You made a toy of it.”

“My model looks like an institution in Oslo?” Perhaps someone did tell him about Oslo, he thinks, but it wasn’t her.

In the dark she turns to him. “You’re making it worse.”

“I made it before I knew you. I’ve never been to Oslo. It’s far, isn’t it? Farther than Spain?”

“Why won’t you admit it’s cruel?”

“I promise it was a church,” he lies.

He feels her staring at him. “A lion wearing a crown? Holding a gold axe?”

“I don’t know where that came from.”

“A crowned lion holding a gold axe,” she says, “is the symbol of Norway.”

197.

He wakes again at five-thirty in the morning. It takes him a moment to realize she’s up and moving around in the dark. “I have to go to work,” she says. Is she rummaging through his clothes? “I’m taking a pair of your jeans,” she says. In the dark he can see her holding one of his white shirts. “I’ll use your belt. May I take your belt?”

“Yes.”

She cinches around her waist the belt she tightened around his neck the night before. She says, “Your work, how is it?”

“All right.”

“Go back to sleep, but not too late. You don’t want to miss work.”

“I won’t.”

“It’s a good job. You don’t want to lose it.”

198.

Every night she lies between his legs like his dream; and then one night he turns

199.

to the suite’s empty doorway, and the cylinders in his head click into

200.

place, and he sits up from the bed. She stops and says, “What is it?”

“Where’s Zazi?”

“What?”

“Where’s Zazi?”

“I told you. She’s in L.A. With friends.”

“You said with friends. Then you said with her father. Then you said with friends.”

“What does it matter?”

201.

“‘What does it matter?’” he repeats. He gets up from bed in the dark and begins putting on his clothes.

“Where are you going?” she asks. He doesn’t answer. He finishes dressing, slipping on a coat.

202.

By the time he’s down to the hotel lobby, she’s caught up with him, pulling on her own clothes. “Stop,” she says, grabbing him by the arm, but he doesn’t stop. Out at the street in the cold night, the doorman hails a cab.

He says, opening the cab door, “You can come or not.” A panic is in her eyes. He gets in the cab and she darts in after him before the cab pulls away.

203.

It’s one-thirty in the morning. At the parking structure on Thirty-Fourth Street, he gives some money to the driver and gets out, leaving the door open behind him. “What are you doing?” she keeps saying. He walks into the structure and wanders among the aisles of cars on the first level, then walks up the concrete stairs to the second level, then the third.

204.

In the midst of the parked cars on the third level, he turns to her and says, “Where is it?”

“What?”

“The car.” He begins searching again.

“I moved it,” she says, “it’s parked in another structure now.”

“Where?”

She shivers in the parking lot. Her mind races almost audibly. “Back uptown,” she says. Then, “Out in Queens.”

“Is it uptown or out in Queens?”

“I …”

“Is she with friends or with her father?”

205.

When she doesn’t answer, he turns and sees a black Mustang at the end of the lot. Three thousand miles from Los Angeles, he didn’t believe it would really be the black Mustang.

206.

He walks toward the car. Again she grabs him by the arm to pull him back, again he pulls his arm away. She stops in her footsteps and begins screaming. “All right then! All right!” He reaches the Mustang and peers through the window into the backseat and sees a form huddled under some blankets. The form sits up and looks back at him.

207.

He rattles the handle of the car door. The young girl inside the car reaches over and unlocks it.

208.

Vikar sticks his head in the car. It’s strewn with the cellophane wrap of eaten junk food, MacDonald’s bags, styrofoam cups. Zazi must see something in his face because she retreats, pulling the blankets up around her.

209.

When Vikar turns to Soledad and steps toward her, in this moment she sees in his eyes the person she was afraid of when they first met.

He slams the back window of the car with his fist and glass implodes. Both Soledad and Zazi scream.