Steve Erickson - Zeroville

113.

One night when Zazi is recording with her band at a studio in Hollywood on Cherokee, Vikar goes to the Nuart to see a “Forbidden Films” double bill. The first film is a Japanese movie about a young model who arrives one day at an art gallery showing an exhibition of bondage photos for which she’s posed. There she sees a man running his hands over a sculpture of her; feeling as though his hands are on her own body, she flees the gallery. Later she makes an appointment with a blind masseur, whose touch the woman is startled to find she recognizes: “I have eyes in my fingers,” he announces; and before he chloroforms her into unconsciousness, she rips the dark glasses from his face to recognize him as the man from the gallery. When she comes to, she’s in a strange warehouse, cavernous as a cathedral. On the walls are the sculptures of eyes, noses, mouths, torsos, arms and legs, and as she scurries among the shadows to elude her abductor, she scrambles over monumental replications of reclining female bodies, lurking in the valley of monumental breasts, darting in the ravine of monumental thighs. Imprisoned in the blind man’s studio where he sculpts a statue of her, eventually she becomes blinded herself by the endless darkness; seducing her captor, she becomes not just the model of his art but the art itself, the blind sculptor lopping off real arms, real limbs. Over and over he says, I have eyes in my fingers .

112.

The second movie on the double bill is a porn film. It’s not like any porn film Vikar has seen, or like any other kind of film: a woman in a psychiatric ward is having sexual hallucinations and surreal sexual experiences; in one scene she has sex with two jacks-in-the-box, in another she’s in the Arabian desert at night being taken by two men, one at each end of her, while a low muttering continues unabated as the only soundtrack. In another scene she’s a slave of the Devil in a Hell of smoke and burning coals. Another female slave chained to the rocks exhorts the Devil on as he violates the star of the movie in a number of ways. He has a two-pronged pitchfork, one prong larger than the other, which he can insert in two orifices at the same time. As the Devil has her, in the background is the endless clashing and surging of machinery and people crying out.

111.

It’s while watching the porn film that Vikar sees it: it flashes by in the wink of an eye, and if he hadn’t seen it hundreds of times over the years he wouldn’t see it at all, or he might suppose he’s imagining it; but he’s not imagining it. As powerfully as he dreamed it the night after seeing the movie at Royce Hall, he sees it now, there on the screen, and this time he knows it isn’t a dream.

110.

Sometime in the sleepless night he hears Zazi return home, and after he’s heard her door shut, and after the first light over Laurel Canyon comes through his window, he rises from bed. He walks down to the Strip and waits forty-five minutes for a bus to pick him up and take him west through Bel-Air, past UCLA, cutting up past the veterans’ cemetery where he transfers to an express bus on Wilshire that heads north to the Valley through the Sepulveda Pass. At Ventura and Van Nuys Boulevards, waiting for a third bus, he buys a box of glazed doughnuts and a quart of milk, and sits at the bus stop waiting.

109.

He catches a third bus heading west on Ventura. Eight miles later he changes again to another heading north on Highway 27 that cuts from the sea through Topanga Canyon. He takes this final bus to Chatsworth in the far northwestern badlands of L.A. County and gets off among the rocks and train tracks not far from Corriganville, where many Westerns have been shot. It’s taken him four hours to make the trip. He wanders up and down the Chatsworth roads asking directions until he finds what he’s looking for on De Soto, a plain industrial building with no windows and a single glass door.

108.

In the small lobby of the building beyond the glass door, the receptionist behind the counter takes one look at Vikar, jumps up from her chair and vanishes into a back room.

107.

The receptionist returns with another woman, who looks around fifty but may be younger. She has chopped peroxide blonde hair and enormous breasts beneath a tight t-shirt; a cigarette burns between her fingers. She reminds Vikar a bit of a female punk singer he once saw who performed wearing only shaving cream. “What do you want?” she says.

“Is this Caballero Films?” says Vikar.

“What do you want?”

“Did you make a movie called Nightdreams ?”

“We can’t help you,” says the blonde.

“I want to buy a print of Nightdreams ,” says Vikar. The receptionist appears terrified and backs into the wall.

“Nobody can help you,” says the blonde.

“I’ll wait,” Vikar says, “for someone who can help me.”

106.

The woman regards Vikar and takes a puff on her cigarette. “I’ll call the police,” she says.

“The police never come in Los Angeles,” Vikar advises her.

“Maybe you’re the police.”

“I’m not the police.”

She takes another puff. “It’s on video,” she says, “why don’t you rent it?”

“I don’t want to rent it. Are you sure you don’t have a print?”

“I’m sure.”

Vikar isn’t sure she’s sure. “Do you have a cutting room?”

“Why?”

“If you can’t sell me a print, can you rent me the use of the room?” He says, “I’ll pay a hundred dollars an hour to rent your room and look at a print of the movie. I won’t do anything to the print and I won’t leave the building with it.”

The woman glances at the receptionist. “A hundred an hour?”

“Yes.”

“How long will it take?”

“Perhaps the rest of the day, if I start now.”

“A hundred an hour for the rest of the day.”

“Yes.”

“We lock up at six.”

“I hope before then that I find what I’m looking for.”

105.

Vikar waits in the small lobby ten minutes until the woman with the cropped hair reappears and motions for him to follow. They cross the warehouse to a line of rooms on the other side. “You can use this,” she says, opening the door to one.

“Thank you.”

“A hundred up front. Every hour I’ll come by and collect another hundred.”

Vikar hands her two fifties.

She looks at the money and says, “In about an hour, a guy comes by selling sandwiches. There’s a soda machine over by where we came in.”

“Thank you.”

“You must have a thing for this movie.”

“I believe it’s a very good movie.”

“Yeah,” she says, “a very good movie. I’ve never had anyone like a movie so much they wanted to look at the print. You’re not going to jerk off or anything in here, are you?”

“What?”

“Just keep it in your pants, is all I care about.”

104.

Inside the editing room, he’s surprised to find a relatively sophisticated flatbed table, which is good for looking through more film quickly but not as good as a moviola for locating a particular frame. Several canisters sit on the table. He takes the film out and begins unspooling it, running it through the table’s prism and searching.

103.

An hour passes. There’s a knock on the door and the woman sticks her head in. “Got an extra sandwich here,” she says, holding out a cellophane-wrapped sandwich.

“Thank you.”

“Want a soda?”

“Thank you.”

102.

The hours pass, then the afternoon, interrupted only by the hourly collection of another hundred dollars, until Vikar isn’t sure he trusts his eyes anymore, when