Steve Erickson - Zeroville

“Many times.”

“Do you mind my asking about your background?”

“My background?”

“Do you mind my asking?”

“Ten years ago I took a bus from Pennsylvania to Hollywood.”

“Further back. For instance, what religion were you raised in?”

“Christian Reform.”

“What’s that?”

“Calvinist.”

“Have you traveled in the Middle East?”

“I’ve been to Spain.”

“Farther than that.”

“I’ve been to Cannes.”

“You’ve not traveled in the old Biblical countries. Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria—”

“Is that from those places?” Vikar says to the xerox in the professor’s hand.

“I’ll spare you the circuitous route it’s taken,” Cohn waves the xerox, “among twenty or so experts, from one to the next — to the extent anyone is an expert when it comes to something like this.”

“Does that mean you found out what it means?”

“It means ‘faith before love, blood before tears,’ or something in that ball park.”

“Oh.”

“Not very illuminating, is it?”

“No.”

“Here’s the illuminating part. Do you know the story of Isaac?”

Vikar says nothing.

“God decides to test Abraham by telling him to take his son Isaac to—”

“I know the story.”

“—a mountain top and kill him, as proof of the father’s devotion to—”

“Stop.”

“—God, which Abraham is about to do when God stops—”

“Stop.” Imagining lodging two pencils in the professor’s head, one in each ear, Vikar steps back from the desk.

“O.K.,” Cohn says calmly.

Vikar breathes heavily. “What does this have to do with the writing?”

“ Faith before love, blood before tears . It was the inscription on the handle of Abraham’s blade — either a knife or axe, depending on which version of the story — that he took to the mountain top.”

“Why am I dreaming it?”

“I have no idea. I suppose it’s possible Someone is trying to tell you something, though for a Biblical language scholar I tend to be skeptical on that score, maybe more than I should. Maybe it’s all God’s joke. Maybe the whole business with Isaac was God’s joke — what a Kidder, huh? Do you know what ‘Isaac’ means in ancient Hebrew?”

“No.”

“It means ‘laugh.’ Likelier, though, is that somewhere, somehow, this,” holding up the writing, “is something you’ve seen — I mean other than in a dream. But Vikar with a k? If you figure it out, feel free to clue in the rest of us. Me and about twenty other skeptics I know.”

158.

She sleeps to the bells, having plotted murder. She tosses and turns, monstrousness swirling beneath the beauty, monstrousness that is at odds with all the pain and loneliness the audience would come to know of her later. In this scene in this movie — her breakthrough, on her way to becoming the most famous movie star of all time — she knows the bells mean that the man she believed she murdered still lives. Stirred by the bells, she struggles for consciousness. Somewhere between existence and oblivion, Marilyn dreams us as surely as we dreamed her; and now in the dark, watching Niagara , knowing of her what everyone knows, of what she will come to, Vikar can only hope she never wakes.

In another movie a man is born completely deformed, with an enormous deformed head, at the beginning of the Age of Machines. It’s as if the man’s skull and flesh have been ground out by the epoch’s new gears. Beauty swirls beneath the monstrousness; there is no right or wrong profile, no light or dark one, because the elephant man has no profile at all. At the end of the movie, when he literally collapses beneath the weight of his deformity, the soul takes flight from the body, and in the final moments, whispering to the dying man out of a fantastic Cocteau-ether, is the memory of his mother, beckoning him with the words, “Nothing ever dies.”

157.

The movie about the elephant man is the only one Vikar can remember crying at, and like an erection that he hides by riding the bus into the night, he wants to hide his crying under the cover of darkness; so as the credits roll, he remains in his seat.

The theater is a little more than half full. As Vikar sits in the dark of the silvery credits, he sees a lone woman rise from several rows in front of him, over on the other side of the theater. She begins making her way up the aisle. One of her wrists is wrapped in her hair in that way Vikar has seen before. He doesn’t move or say anything, he sits in the dark until she’s passed, and he thinks she’s gone and the credits are almost finished when he feels two arms circle him from behind, as if she knew he was there all along, she knew he was sitting there behind her before he knew she was there in front of him; and now her hair brushes his bare head. Her tears mix with his so he can’t be sure whose run down his face.

“ Bárbaro Church Builder,” he can hear the sadness in her whisper, “promise if anything happens to me, you will watch after my girl.”

“All right,” he says in the dark.

“Promise.”

“I promise,” and then

156.

she’s

155.

gone — as though she knew she would be — with the one-in-the-morning phone call two weeks later; and even before Zazi’s sobs on the other end of the line Vikar knows, the way he knew about Dotty: I should have taken out the phone , but that wouldn’t bring her back.

154.

He tries returning Zazi’s call but doesn’t have a number, and there’s no residential listing for Mitchell Rondell.

153.

He takes a two-in-the-morning bus to Hollywood Memorial and stumbles up and down knolls of dead grass looking first for Dotty’s grave, then Jayne Mansfield’s proxy grave where Soledad was ravished by the dark, and where the dark then swallowed up ravished and ravisher alike, without the world’s slightest acknowledgment. One does not need a song on his lips to kill someone.

152.

She has gone in the way of Hollywood tradition, custom-painted Jaguar the color of sangria spectacularly flipping one of Sunset Boulevard’s curves while snaking west into Bel-Air — a moment suspended between the romantic tragedy of accident and the existential glamour of suicide. But what’s incontestable is that moment two weeks before when she came up behind Vikar in the darkened theater and her sullen beauty counted for nothing, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and whispered into his ear final instructions, a last will and testament as to the only thing in her world that had value anymore.

151.

In the Hollywood tradition as well, for about a week and a half Soledad Palladin becomes more famous dead than she was alive, if not for the right reasons; but in Hollywood there are no right or wrong reasons for being famous. A small cult is born, flourishes, dies out. Accompanying Soledad’s resurgent lesbian-vampire oeuvre are the tabloid tales — the snorted H, the nocturnal collection of anonymous lovers two, three, four at a time in episodes that often went violently wrong — as well as the grisly rumors about the accident itself: what was dismembered, decapitated, impaled. Had the heroin gotten out of hand? Was she fleeing a heated argument with Rondell when he returned unexpectedly to find her in bed with another woman? There’s also speculation as to whether she was Buñuel’s daughter; the consensus concludes against it, even as it wants to believe it.

150.

If there’s an actual interment, it’s private as far as Vikar knows. As in his suite in New York following their affair and the discovery of Zazi in the Mustang, Vikar doesn’t move from his couch. The telephone rings but he doesn’t answer, gazing at the sky out his living room windows until, a couple of afternoons later, there’s a knock on the door.