Steve Erickson - Zeroville

He turns where he stands, eyes closed, in the moviehouse of his mind until he sees it — the rock, the writing, the gaping portal, the figure draped across the top — then opens his eyes and goes through the doorway before him.

66.

Not a single person speaks to him or asks what he’s doing. He follows the image in his head until he reaches a line of white doors, some open. Beyond the open white doors he can see tables with straps, cables, electrodes; he closes his eyes and turns, and when he opens them he’s looking not at a white door but a common custodial closet.

65.

The first sign is the old projector at the far back of the closet, beyond the brooms and mops, the detergents and sprays, the discarded junk of half a century, its dust of more than five decades undisturbed.

64.

They’re in plain sight, yet anyone not looking would never see them.

63.

On a small stool, he can just reach them.

62.

He looks up and down the hallway, then carries the canisters into the room behind the nearest white door, closing the door behind him and locking it.

61.

He has no editing table. He has no viewer, only a small eye glass he’s brought with him. He pries open the canisters and inside is an official document certifying that the enclosed motion picture has been approved, without cuts or changes, by the Danish censor; the date of the document is 1928. Why, approved by a Danish censor, it would now be in a Norwegian asylum, Vikar doesn’t understand or think about. He unspools the film carefully on the electroshock table, terrified it will dissolve in his fingers, but it’s in extraordinary condition, like a mummified body. They would have strapped Joan to this table , but he’s no longer certain who “they” are, beyond the interrogating monks, or on whose side Joan was, Joan who was a child herself. He turns on the examination light overhead. Strapped on this table, Joan would have stared into this light.

60.

Like making a leap of faith, he guesses that it might be around the same place as in Nightdreams , some eight thousand frames in. What does it mean, he will wonder later, that it was this easy? I have eyes in my fingers , and he runs his fingers over the spools like a blind man reading braille, like closing his eyes out in the lobby and following the movie that’s projected on his eyelids. He has no way to count the frames. He guesses by looking at the feet of film on the reel.

59.

It’s almost the same frame of the same image: the same image buried in a 1982 porn movie made in Chatsworth, California, and buried here in a 1928 silent classic made in Europe, the image of a dream Vikar now has had for the better part of two decades, with the only difference being that in the newer film the image is a bit larger, as though over the century a camera draws ever closer.

58.

Not until he’s finished and exits the room through the white door does someone finally approach him: the janitor, who says something in Norwegian that Vikar doesn’t understand. Vikar puts the canisters in the janitor’s arms. “Get these to the Cinématèque Française,” he says and walks away, a single frame in a baggie under his cap, somewhere near Elizabeth’s kiss.

57.

At the Oslo airport, the phone connection is poor. “I’m coming back,” Vikar says.

Her voice crackles over the thousands of miles. “Sometimes I think I’m losing it, Vik,” he hears her answer.

“I’m coming back.”

“I have these dreams,” she says.

56.

Am I just another who’s abandoned her? Am I another of God’s child-killers? At Heathrow he almost dozes through the announcement of his connecting flight; someone jostles him in time for him to jump from his chair and board the plane at the last moment. After that he doesn’t sleep, and has lost track of how long it’s been since he did.

55.

Vikar says to the curator, “Do you see this?”

The curator looks into the viewer, then picks up the celluloid itself and holds it to the light to view with a naked eye. “What is it?”

In Los Angeles, Vikar has taken a cab directly to the UCLA film school. “What do you believe it is?”

“Uh.” The curator shrugs. “A cave of some kind? A big rock? Hard to tell. Is that writing of some sort?”

“Does it look like someone is lying on top of the rock?”

“Maybe.” The curator shrugs again. “Sure, I guess so.”

“What do you believe this is?” Vikar pulls off his cap and opens the baggie and takes out another frame of film.

The curator puts it in the viewer. “Same thing.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. Well,” now the curator moves from frame to frame on the viewer, “maybe one is a little closer than the other.” He looks at Vikar. “I don’t get it.”

“They’re from two different movies,” says Vikar. “One is from a silent movie and one is from, uh … another kind of movie. A more recent movie.”

“Are you sure?” The curator says, “Is this what you were looking for in the Dreyer?”

Vikar doesn’t answer.

“You mean you found it in the Dreyer after all.”

Vikar says, “The real Dreyer.”

“The real Dreyer?” the curator says. “What are you talking about?” But Vikar already has turned, walking away. “Wait a minute,” says the curator. “Mr. Jerome?” Vikar doesn’t stop. “You mean you found the real Joan of Arc ?” Vikar continues down the hall. “You found in a week what no one has found in half a century?” Vikar doesn’t stop; the curator calls, holding up the two frames, “Don’t you want these back?”

“I believe,” Vikar answers, not turning, “there are more where those came from.”

54.

From a phone booth outside the film school, he calls the house again. No one answers. The cab that’s waited for him at UCLA takes him first to Rhino Records on Westwood and then to Vinyl Fetish on Melrose, among the thriftshops and warehouses, on the chance he might find her. He calls again from a phone booth at the corner of Melrose and Gardner.

53.

On the way home, Vikar has the cab stop at a small market on Sunset to pick up some groceries. When he gets to the house, Zazi still isn’t there. He goes downstairs to her bedroom on the second level, knocks on the door, and opens it when there’s no answer.

On the walls are posters of Marianne Faithfull, Lora Logic, the Stooges, the New York Dolls, Bowie, Exene Cervenka, Patti Smith, the Doors, Siouxsie and the Banshees. Vikar notes with passing interest that Siouxsie reminds him of Maria from Cannes, with straighter hair. There’s a mockup of an EP cover, a picture of Zazi and the rest of the band on the front. RUBICONS it says across the top, then the title Tick Tock , on Slash Records.

Vikar begins searching around her bed, looking at scraps of paper, looking in the drawers of her dresser and a small table by the window. Only after all of his other searching does it occur to him to look through the spiral notebook that’s in plain sight on the window table.

52.

man these dreams, he reads, one after another, they dont seem to have anything to do w/ anything, I’m not even in them. what does that mean I’m not in my own dreams? maybe i should ask some of the guys in the band except i dont want to go into it or talk about it —

51.

woman surrounded by monks in robes in a church, theyre hassling & questioning her, i get the feeling its like, another century or something But HERES THE WEIRD PART theyre asking questions in words i cant hear or understand — whats THAT about. then they tie her to a post & burn her & i wake up. fucking horrible