Steve Erickson - Zeroville

88.

It’s six o’clock before the cab gets into the city. All the streets are round like film reels and all the cars drive in circles. Parked before a large palatial building, the driver says, “ Fermé, monsieur .”

“Thank you,” Vikar says, getting out of the cab.

“ Monsieur, c’est fermé .”

“All right.” From the sidewalk, Vikar pushes a fistful of American dollars at the driver through the cab window.

“ Non, pas de dollars americains ,” says the driver. “ Francs .”

“Yes, thank you,” says Vikar, waving the dollars. The driver snatches two twenties in exasperation and speeds off, and Vikar turns to circle the building, discovering to his surprise that it’s closed.

87.

Vikar crosses the Trocadero, the Eiffel Tower looming before him. The remnants of an anti-nuclear demonstration line the fountains that tumble toward the Seine. As always, people stare at him until he draws from his coat pocket the cap that he once took to Spain and pulls it down over his head. He crosses the river and the long military field beyond the Eiffel Tower and finds a small hotel where he rents a room. He keeps the cap on. Everyone yells at him about his American dollars.

He’s hungry and has dinner in a small brasserie near the hotel. He identifies what he wants to eat by pointing at the menu and a picture of a ham sandwich on long bread. He orders a vodka tonic; the garçon brings him straight vodka in a tall glass that Vikar drinks immediately, asking for another. On the table next to his, someone has left a small magazine called Pariscope in which Vikar finds a section that he recognizes as a listing of movies. He’s never known of a city that showed so many movies.

86.

It seems like every two blocks is a movie theater. Vikar goes into a tiny one showing an American movie not far from the brasserie. The movie already has begun; the usher who leads Vikar to his seat in the dark lingers after he sits. The usher stands waiting for a full minute while Vikar watches the movie, before finally muttering something and leaving.

In the movie Travis Bickle, who once sat in the Nichols Beach house staring at Vikar and later became a raging boxer, now has become a thirties movie producer named Monroe Stahr. Vikar laughs loudly at the stupid name and people turn to look. This isn’t a comedy, is it? he worries. When Travis Bickle pointed a bloody finger at his head in the form of a gun and cocked his thumb, he blew himself into the next life, a life already in the past: All movies reflect what has not yet happened, all movies anticipate what has already happened. Movies that have not yet happened, have. The movie that Vikar watches now is from a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the uncredited author of The Women with Joan Crawford. The print is the worst Vikar has seen since the first time he saw The Passion of Joan of Arc at the Vista, except this movie is more recent, and after a while he leaves as angrily as the usher he didn’t tip.

85.

Back at his hotel room he’s exhausted but can’t sleep. In the middle of the night he walks around and around the small hotel’s courtyard until the concierge comes out and yells at him; other guests in the hotel watch out their windows. Vikar leaves the hotel and, in the middle of the night, heads back to the Trocadero to wait seven hours until the Cinématèque opens.

84.

At a quarter past nine in the morning, fifteen minutes after the Cinématèque is supposed to have opened, Vikar pounds on the door at the top of the steps. Someone walks by and says to him, “ Fermé .”

“What?” Vikar says. He looks at the sign that says 9h — 17h .

“ Fermé ,” the other person says again, and points at the sign below the hours where it says MARDI FERMÉ.

Vikar explodes and attacks the door until five minutes later it’s smeared with blood from his hands.

83.

A punk couple with spiked sea-green hair wearing rings in many various appendages stops Vikar by the fountains of the Trocadero. They don’t seem to notice his hands are bleeding. They keep pointing at his cap trying to say something, chapeau one keeps repeating, and they consult a little book until Vikar realizes they speak English. They’re from London and want him to take off his cap; they saw him the previous day. If they hadn’t been punks and spoken English, Vikar probably would have smashed their heads together. They tell him the Cinématèque is open the next day and of an American bookstore near Notre Dame where he might be able to spend the night.

82.

From a public phone booth he tries to call his house back in Los Angeles. None of the operators speaks English, and when he hears a phone ringing, no one answers and it doesn’t sound like his and he can’t tell if the operator has connected him or not. When he runs out of francs for the phone, he pounds the plastic enclosure around the phone in a futile attempt to shatter it; his hands begin bleeding again.

“I will cut a path of destruction across this heretic city that has many movies but where all the prints are horrible!” Vikar bellows at the corner where the boulevard St-Michel meets the river, though he realizes he can’t really say for sure all the prints are horrible. Passersby stare at him. He goes into the café at the corner and is told to leave. He goes up the boulevard and at another café on St-Germain orders a tall vodka.

81.

The American bookstore across from Notre Dame is on the rue St-Jacques. Downstairs is where the books are sold but at the back of the store is a staircase that leads up to two rooms, including one with a desk and an old French typewriter, and another with two old sofas and floor pillows. Vikar sits upright on one of the sofas barely dozing, as though afraid he’ll sleep through the next six days when the Cinématèque is open. He shakes himself awake to find a young woman perched on the edge of the sofa studying his head. She holds his cap in her hand. He doesn’t remember taking it off.

80.

She says, “Who are they?”

“Elizabeth Taylor,” he says. He wipes his eyes. “Montgomery Clift.”

“Oh,” she nods. He can’t tell if this means anything to her or not. “My name is Pamela.” She’s in her mid-twenties, pleasantly attractive without being beautiful, her body invitingly round. “Where are you from?”

“Hollywood,” says Vikar.

“I’m from Toronto.” Without asking, she runs her fingers lightly along the pictures of his scalp.

79.

That night, under her blanket he says, “I can’t.” He stares at the ceiling.

She looks down at him. In the light through the window from the cathedral across the street, she can see he’s hard. “Are you sure?” she says.

“Yes.”

“It looks like you can.”

“No.”

“It’s O.K.,” she says. “We can just sleep.”

“All right.”

78.

But he doesn’t sleep. In the early morning hours, he steals from Pamela’s bedding and creeps down the stairs of the bookstore, stepping over cats, and unlatches the front door. He pushes open the grating enough to slip through, then heads for the river, descending to the quays and heading west, following the light of the dawn sun that slips up the Eiffel Tower.

77.

At a quarter past nine, he’s walking the massive passages inside the Chaillot Palace, unsure where to go. When security guards come into sight, he turns and walks the other way. He wanders the Palace nearly an hour until standing before him is a small balding man in a dirty jacket with a scarf; all of his clothes seem dirty except the scarf, which gleams. The man looks at Vikar with a funny smile. Vikar touches his head to see if his cap is on. The man walks up to him, still smiling. “Can you imagine,” he says in English with a French accent, “Bogart fucking Bergman with a cube of butter on the Champs-Elysées?”