Steve Erickson - Zeroville

177.

From the windows on the top level of his house, he believes he sees her on the hillside below. The first time, she’s near the bottom where the road that eventually leads to him begins to wind its way upward. He believes he sees her standing there looking up and then the next moment she’s gone; the next time he sees her, at dusk several days later, she’s moved up the hill but stands motionless as before. It’s like Last Year at Marienbad where people are statues on a vast terrace, except Soledad plays all the statues, posed against chaparral. Each time Vikar believes he sees her, she moves up the hill a little further, advancing in frozen Marienbad poses.

176.

By the time the Sound has seeped west to all the Los Angeles clubs — the Whisky and the Roxy on the Strip, the Masque in a cellar off a sidestreet in Hollywood and Al’s Bar downtown, Madame Wong’s and the Hong Kong Café in Chinatown — it’s grown in desperation with the sunlight; having swallowed itself alive as the city in which it now lives has swallowed itself. At the Starwood on the corner of Santa Monica and Crescent Heights, Vikar hears a local band that plays songs about riding the bus in Los Angeles. They have a blond rockabilly guitarist and the lead vocalists are a married couple: A thousand kids , they sing, bury their parents ; and as though he’s tracking down De Rais, child killer of the Middle Ages, Vikar wanders from room to room among the children of the Starwood, searching the Punk Ages for pedocidal monsters, hurling himself into audiences and slam-dancing to ward the monsters off, dancing so maniacally as to clear the floor. Soon he’s alone in the middle of the room, the band to one side, everyone else centrifugally compelled to the perimeters. On two occasions he’s removed by security guards, mild carnage in his wake.

175.

Mitch Rondell says, “That’s not half bad.” Vikar is sitting with him in an office in Culver City; it’s more than a year since Cannes, when the last thing Rondell said to him was, “You’re late,” before fleeing the press conference that followed. Vikar isn’t entirely clear whether he’s actually proposed updating Là-Bas to a punk milieu, but Rondell goes on, “It’s an interesting idea. I think we do need to nail down a screenwriter ASAP, then have a story conference and hash out the possibilities, so you can convey your vision of the picture. Of course, most America hates this punk shit.”

Rondell strikes Vikar as less cordial than before. Vikar wishes Molly Fairbanks was here; he likes the way she talks and completely understands everything she says, except when he doesn’t, such as recently. “You’re not writing the script,” she tried to explain in their last conversation, “so although the deal memo stipulates the property belongs to you, we need to get you a story credit even if the Writers Guild squawks …” Vikar isn’t certain what this means. Molly also talks faster than she used to. “We don’t want to get into a situation where Mirron or UA can take away the project later.” There seems to be some urgency on everyone’s part to “get a star attached,” Molly says, “and they’re expecting someone in the eight-hundred-thousand range, which is why the budget is set at what it is, including your one-eighty-five K as director …” This last part Vikar finds particularly incomprehensible.

“So it makes a difference,” Rondell says now, “if this is a contemporary or period piece. If it’s contemporary, a Richard Dreyfuss, for instance, might make sense, but not if it’s set in the nineteenth century. And, uh,” he swivels his chair away from Vikar slightly, “the role of the woman—”

“Hyacinthe.”

“Hyacinthe. It’s not a leading role but an important one, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe she’s a figment of the main character’s dreams, maybe not.”

“Maybe not.”

“Comes to him in the middle of the night, an erotic presence … she needs to make the right sort of impression. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes.”

“An erotic presence.”

“Yes, you said that.”

Swiveling the chair away from Vikar further: “What would you think of Soledad Palladin?”

174.

“What?” says Vikar.

“Soledad Palladin? From New Y—?”

“I know who—”

“I don’t think nudity or explicit sexuality would be a problem. I mean, only if you see it as an integral part of the picture, of course.”

Cylinders click into place, like the night he found Zazi sleeping in the car on Thirty-Fourth Street. “You know where she is.”

Rondell moves his head from side to side, in a way that’s neither a nod nor shake. “It’s an idea. But this is what casting directors are for.”

“What about Zazi?”

Rondell is confused. “Zazi?”

“Do you know if she’s all right?”

“It was just an idea.” Rondell waves it away.

“You know where they are.”

“They’re fine. You’re getting off track here.”

“I’m getting off track?”

“The picture …”

“You said, ‘What about Soledad.’”

“Vikar, forget it.”

“I just want to know the little girl is all right.”

“She’s getting to be not so little,” Rondell says irritably, “except a little too smart beyond her years. She’s with friends. She’s with her father.”

173.

Vikar takes the Sunset bus as far east as it will go, then walks north to Chinatown’s central plaza not far from Philippe’s where, barely an hour in Los Angeles a decade before, he swatted a hippie with a lunch tray.

The night-black central plaza is gashed with neon, and the opium dens and gambling joints of the early twentieth century have given way to the punk clubs. In Madame Wong’s off Gin Sing Way, when she touches his arm between the Alley Cats’ set and the Germs’, he doesn’t recognize her. “It’s me,” she says.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he finally answers.

“That’s what you said the last time, at CBGB’s.”

“You’re nine.”

“I haven’t been nine in almost five years,” Zazi says. “Do I look nine? I’ve been trying to find you.”

172.

He says, “How did you know I would be here?”

“I didn’t,” she says. “But word is out, and it was a matter of time before you and I wound up in the same place.”

“What word? You shouldn’t be drinking that.”

“The word about the freak with James Dean on his head.”

“Nobody knows me,” he says.

“Are you serious? Everybody knows you. I just missed you at the Masque last week.”

“It’s not James Dean. I’ve been looking for you as well.”

“Really?”

“For your black Mustang.”

“Mom doesn’t have that anymore. That never made it back from New York. Now Mom has the Jag that Mitch gave her.”

“Rondell gave her a car?”

“You didn’t know about Mom and Mitch?”

After a moment Vikar says, “Is he your father?”

Even in the dark, something of her seems to wither a bit. “God, no,” she says. Recovering her teenage poise she says, “First he completely cut her out of that movie you were working on, then offered to ‘take care’ of her when we had no place else to go. Very smooth. She’s been living with him awhile.” She adds emphatically, “ I don’t live there.”

“Where do you live?”

“I like to think Jim Morrison is my dad. But probably not.”

The band comes on. The last thing he says that either of them can hear is, “Do you want to go to a movie?”

171.

Vikar finally meets Molly Fairbanks in person for dinner at Martoni’s on Cahuenga, along with the prospective screenwriter. Molly is in her early thirties, a slightly less pretty and less pixilated Diane Keaton; in person, she’s a bit shyer than on the telephone. The screenwriter is the grandson of a famous French filmmaker who made a lost silent epic more than half a century before about the French Revolution. The young writer wears an eye patch that he moves from one eye to the other; the waiter doesn’t know whether to look at the writer’s eye patch or Vikar’s head. The writer says even less than Vikar but does seem to have read Là-Bas. Molly does most of the talking while Vikar drinks cappuccinos heavily dosed with kahlúa.