Steve Erickson - Zeroville

Vikar doesn’t answer.

“Because God loves the Movies, like He loves the Bomb.”

“God doesn’t love the Movies.”

“Sure He does. Or He wouldn’t have shown us how to make them.”

“He didn’t show us how to make them.”

“Well, if He didn’t, who did?”

“No one showed us how to make them,” says Vikar. “The Movies have always been here. The Movies were here before God. Time is round like a reel of film. God hates the Movies because the Movies are the evidence of what He’s done.”

“O.K., vicar,” Viking Man says wearily, “I just got my ass kicked by a preternaturally worldly fifteen-year-old, or however old she is, so I don’t need to get into it with you too. Listen, when you decide to re-enter the world of the marginally sane, let me know. Come edit my comic-book movie for me.”

122.

Often Vikar hears Zazi up all night watching television. “You should go to bed sometimes,” he tells her.

“I don’t sleep anyway,” she says. “I’ve been having these dreams.”

“What kind of dreams?”

“Hey, Vik, you can keep your dreams to yourself and I’ll keep mine to myself. O.K.?”

121.

Vikar goes to see a movie by a Polish director, starring the woman who was Victor Hugo’s daughter in the movie where she follows her soldier-love to Nova Scotia. In this movie Victor Hugo’s daughter is in modern-day Berlin giving birth to a monstrous creature who then becomes her lover, and whom she’ll protect against any other lover, husband, soldier or god. As in Nova Scotia, everything she is or has been, everything she believes or has believed, has collapsed for her into the form of her demonlover and child; since Vikar came to Los Angeles, all the children in all the movies are born monsters, born elephants, possessed by the Devil, are the Devil.

120.

Vikar hears on the radio that Natalie Wood, for whom the beautiful woman tattooed on his head has so often been mistaken, and whom he saw in a movie where she was in a bathtub possessed, has drowned, as though God reached down to her in her bath and grabbed her by her wet hair, and pushed her under the water and held her there.

119.

Zazi’s band gets a semi-regular gig at the Whisky as a kind of unofficial house band, so sometimes Vikar descends from his house, disappearing down into the inky cloud that swathes the hills, and finds himself back in the realm of hours and days and years where he used to live. When the band comes on, Vikar launches himself into the slam dancing with a ferocity that clears the floor, until he finds himself sprawling at the foot of the stage just below where Zazi plays. He’s removed from the premises in a chrysalis of spit and blood. Wandering up the Strip toward where George Stevens used to live in the Sunset Tower, he feels like a tourist; he no longer lives here: there are no fireworks above the trees, and it’s no one’s city and never will be.

118.

He wakes in the morning to Zazi standing in the doorway of his bedroom, watching him. “The band, Vik,” she says, “is supposed to cause the commotion, not you.” She’s been edgy lately from the lack of sleep; Vikar doesn’t answer. “As I remember it, you were this notorious in New York, too.”

“Something comes over me,” he says, “the Sound comes over me.”

“We’ve talked to the club about letting you in again. So if you decide you want to come hear us again, maybe you can let the Sound come over you a little less.” She says, “In the meantime, we’re not playing tonight, and there’s this movie at Royce Hall I thought I’d check out.”

117.

On the UCLA campus at Royce Hall, the printed announcement says that the silent film is to be accompanied on the Wurlitzer organ by the same man who Vikar heard play years before at the silent-movie theater on Fairfax. Before the screening begins, someone announces to the crowd that the accompanist will not be playing after all, adding that in fact the film’s director always had intended the film to be shown and watched in silence. “This is the first movie I ever saw in Los Angeles,” Vikar tells Zazi. Composed almost entirely in close-ups, the inquisition and execution of Joan as played by Maria Falconetti is all the more unbearable for the quiet; the audience can barely bring itself to applaud afterwards.

116.

Shaken, Zazi finally says on the bus home, “That wasn’t even a movie. I don’t know what it was. It was a … sighting or something.”

“No wonder it drove her mad,” says Vikar. “No wonder she never made anything else.”

“You know what’s strange? This is going to sound strange, O.K.?”

“All right.”

“I mean crazy-strange. Like, you-won’t-believe-it strange.”

“All right.”

“But not that long ago, I dreamed this movie.”

“You did?”

“I mean, this same movie. How can that be?”

Vikar doesn’t answer.

“Of course I didn’t know it was a movie. When I dreamed it, I didn’t even know the woman was Joan of Arc. I mean, I’m not even sure I understand who Joan of Arc was. But I dreamed it, just like I saw it tonight, you know? scene for scene, I mean … is that like the weirdest thing? It was so vivid I even wrote it down when I woke up. Have you ever had a dream and then seen a movie of it?”

Vikar says nothing.

“I knew you wouldn’t believe it.”

115.

That night Vikar’s dream returns more powerfully than it ever has. He’s so close he can almost touch the rock, and can almost see the face of the altar’s designated sacrifice. The white of the script glows so hot it almost burns him, and he reads it rather than just knows it: Faith before love, blood before tears .

After not reading a newspaper for months, Vikar scours the obituaries every day until it appears, and there’s even a picture of Chauncey from younger days, and a mention of his last scheduled engagement at a UCLA screening which he missed, as though the director of the film reached from the grave to silence the musician and protect his movie’s ministerial hush.

114.

He arrives at the Whisky early to catch Zazi’s band, beating the rest of the crowd. The doorman eyes him warily, and as Vikar enters the club, another security man taps him on the shoulder. “Be cool,” he says. Vikar suppresses a compulsion to take the man’s finger and snap it back; he envisions the man falling to his knees in shock. Vikar positions himself at the edge of the Whisky’s stage and waits, until finally the lights dim slightly and the crowd behind him cheers, and Zazi’s band walks out.

Zazi’s band walks out — and stops in place. Not a chord has been strummed nor a cymbal tapped. The band stands onstage staring at the crowd; and Vikar turns to look.

There behind him is a sea of shaved heads, every one tattooed. There are no other Elizabeth Taylors or Montgomery Clifts from A Place in the Sun . But there are three or four Nosferatus, one or two Anita Ekbergs frolicking in the Trevi Fountain from La Dolce Vita , half a dozen Bogarts from Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep and another half dozen Belmondos doing his impression of Bogart in Breathless , surprisingly more Louise Brookses from Pandora’s Box than the one or two obligatory Marilyns from Seven Year Itch and Brandos from The Wild One and James Deans from Rebel Without a Cause , and many Alexes from A Clockwork Orange and even more Travis Bickles from Taxi Driver . If Max and Travis Bickle themselves were there, each would have a tattoo of the other. They’re all behind Vikar watching him, as though he’s the general of an army, leading the children in revolt against gods and fathers.