Steve Erickson - Zeroville

76.

He laughs. “It is you, oui ?” He points at Vikar’s head, and slowly Vikar takes off his cap. “I knew it,” the man claps his hands once, “I was there! At that press conference! Fantastic! Quelle scandale ! The only man,” he proclaims, “to win a prize at Cannes for montage.”

“No one,” Vikar says, “is sure of that.”

“It is my honor,” and the man grabs Vikar’s hand to shake it.

“Do you …” Vikar has to think what to say, “… work for the Cinématèque?”

“I only have managed it these last few years, since the death of Monsieur Langlois.” He holds Vikar’s hand and examines it. “I saw the blood on the door this morning,” he concludes with delight.

75.

“But I am afraid, monsieur,” the man says half an hour later in the Cinématèque office, “what you search for in all likelihood does not exist. My country’s record on this is shameful.”

“I believed,” Vikar says, “that since the alternate version came from here, perhaps the real version was here as well.”

The small balding man with the gleaming scarf lights another cigarette. “I wish it were so,” he says, “but if there were a real version then there would not be an alternate version, do you understand? The Cinématèque has had a tumultuous fifteen years or so — revolutions, government oppression, fires. So what I mean to say is that it is difficult to be completely confident anymore of anything that has to do with the Cinématèque. But we would know of this, I feel certain.”

74.

Vikar says, “Where do I go next?”

The man shrugs. “You could try Berlin, I suppose. There are stories the film was in Berlin at one point. But the same stories claim the film burned in a fire there, as well. Always the fires with Joan.”

Vikar is something between crestfallen and exhausted. He wavers where he stands.

“Monsieur Jerome, are you well?”

“I’m tired.”

The man nods sympathetically. “It is a heroic quest.”

“I don’t know.”

“In a film, if one is on a heroic quest, how would you, what do I want to say? get from one place to the next? In the film, I mean? What is the word …?”

“Continuity.”

“Continuity.”

“Fuck continuity.”

“ C’est ca , monsieur! Bravo!” The man repeats it with relish. “Fuck continuity. Perhaps that is the way to conduct this heroic quest.”

“I’ll go to Berlin.”

“Good luck, monsieur. Are you certain you’re all right?”

“Yes.”

As Vikar reaches the door, the man says, “You know, there is another rumor about the Jeanne d’Arc . Not so reliable, but …”

“Yes.”

“But fuck continuity, as you say!”

“Yes.”

“It is that the real film actually circulated the mental institutions of Scandinavia.”

“Mental institutions?”

“I know,” the man shrugs, “it seems one more, what do you say? tall tale. A mad film, starring an actress who went mad making the film, playing to madmen. But that’s the rumor, for what it is worth. The real film made the rounds of various hospitals and asylums in the late twenties. One of the dozen greatest movies ever made, a film that doesn’t even exist anymore, circulating among the loony bins of Europe, seen only by madmen just as, of course,” the man seems embarrassed by the metaphor, “the world itself was about to go mad.”

“How would that have happened?”

“The rumor is that the film somehow was acquired by the head of an asylum, and he would show it to the patients. Or inmates, as it were.”

“An asylum in Copenhagen?”

“That would make sense,” the man nods, “since it was Dreyer’s city. But no, not Copenhagen. Oslo.”

73.

On the way back to Orly, Vikar momentarily feels bad that he never said goodbye to Pamela. At the airport, again he tries to call his house in Los Angeles. Is it the middle of the night in Los Angeles if it’s noon in France? After waiting four hours, he boards the two-and-a-half hour flight to Oslo.

72.

On the drive from the airport into Oslo, when the cab driver asks where he wants to go Vikar shows the cab driver the picture he drew on the flight from Los Angeles, of the small door-less model he made at Mather Divinity. “Church?” says the cab driver.

“Not a church,” Vikar says. “Hospital.”

71.

Vikar spends the night in a city park. A hotel light blinks only a hundred meters away, but Vikar is tired of people he can’t understand who yell at him about currency and walking around his room in circles. In the park is a tall column-like sculpture carved with intertwined bodies of men and women.

In the morning, when he’s startled by the sound of a cab horn, he can’t be sure that he didn’t fall asleep. He realizes the cab driver who drove him from the airport the night before is honking at him; when the driver gets out of the cab, Vikar suppresses an urge to attack him. He watches the driver confer with several other cab drivers also parked there, then the driver signals Vikar to go with one of them.

70.

The second cabbie drives to a hospital. Vikar looks at his drawing and at the building. “No,” he says.

69.

The cabbie pries the drawing from Vikar’s fingers gently, like he might if he were trying to take a bone from the mouth of a snarling dog. He runs into the hospital, leaving the cab running.

He returns ten minutes later, shifts into gear, and begins driving again. Oslo seems to have water seeping up everywhere; at one point the cabbie tells Vikar there are three hundred lakes. They drive forty-five minutes out of the city, and when the cabbie pulls up to the building, its steeple — with the crowned lion holding a gold axe — is perched on the edge of a fjord, overlooking a vast sundial swallowed by shadow.

68.

Vikar isn’t thinking about what to do or how to do it. The building has an older and newer section, with the entrance in the new section, SYKEHUS over the main door. Vikar walks into the lobby of the asylum.

As Vikar enters, the check-in desk is to the right. Beyond that, in the lobby, is a large aquarium, as though the fjord has bubbled up through the floor to fill an inner window. Stray nurses and attendants wander by, but Vikar is struck by how empty it seems. He sees no patients.

Every time someone looks as though they might ask him something, Vikar turns and heads down another hallway. He doesn’t want to commit violence. He has broken continuity; he won’t accept the continuity of guards or attendants or doctors.

67.

In the middle of a large central annex to the hospital, Vikar stops.

He imagines, fifty-three years before, the patients gathered here, watching The Passion of Joan of Arc on a screen; he wonders what they made of it. He imagines, some twenty years before, Soledad strolling these halls, in a paper-thin hospital gown such as a lost young woman might wear stumbling along Pacific Coast Highway or sleeping outside a club in the Bowery. What would she have thought of The Passion of Joan of Arc , had she seen it? He thinks of Anna Karina as the prostitute in Godard’s Vivre sa Vie , in the scene where she goes to the movies and sees Passion of Joan of Arc and weeps; he can imagine Soledad weeping, if she had been within these walls in 1928, as she wept at The Elephant Man . Had Joan coupled with God and carried His seed, would they have produced an elephant child, to then be sacrificed as proof of Joan’s devotion? He closes his eyes and turns where he stands. If anyone sees me, they’ll only believe I’m another lunatic.