Steve Erickson: Zeroville

16.

He smiles at Vikar’s head. “ Fan tastic. Never expected to be tattooed on somebody’s head.”

“I believe it’s a very good movie,” says Vikar.

“Never figured it would be the finest thing I did. Certainly didn’t think so at the time. But then I didn’t care for many of my pictures. The ones with Zinnemann I liked all right … The Young Lions with Marlon, that was maybe my best work. But the others …” he shrugs, “ Red River …”

“I believe that’s a very good movie as well.”

“Nah, I didn’t like it. They watered it down. Wayne was supposed to die at the end, but …” He looks up at Vikar and smiles. “But funny how your perspective changes, right? Before Place in the Sun , George Stevens came back from the war feeling like everything he’d done before was … a trifle . Gave up directing to fight the war, and then he … was one of the first into the camps to see … all that. Dachau. Bergen-Belsen. Afterward, he thought motion pictures should change the world … or what was the point? Can’t blame him. I probably would have agreed with him. I mean, Mister S, he just didn’t know who to fight anymore … what did he want to make empty little musicals for, right? He was all set to make a comedy with Ingrid … biggest star in the world then … that was before the country got so worked up about … her … private life … then he had to fly to Paris to tell her, ‘Can’t do it.’ A man doesn’t go his own way, he’s nothing. No more comedies, even if she was the biggest star in the world. Now, of course, with a little perspective, a person looks back and realizes, what in motion pictures can change the world more than Astaire and Rogers dancing?”

In his netherworld between sleep and wakefulness, it’s difficult for Vikar to be certain whether he thinks about the question for a minute or five, or for an hour or a day or the rest of his life. In his mind he watches Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in George Stevens’ Swing Time , dancing to “The Way You Look Tonight” that fades into “Never Gonna Dance.” The floor gleams onyx, a black arch of stairs rises beneath a black backdrop of stars beyond the bandstand. Their dance is a melancholy goodbye — though of course in the end it’s not goodbye — that drifts across the floor and up the arch, where Rogers slips from Astaire’s arms into the white wings of the stage that glisten like an ice palace, and Astaire is left empty-armed, poised in mid-loss as the light settles into a kind of dusk that’s only in the movies. “Nothing,” answers Vikar.

15.

“Nothing,” nods Monty. “ Nothing . Astaire and Rogers— fan tastic, even if Stevens did shoot so many takes that poor Ginger’s feet bled. A man should be what he can do … but after the war he decided he had to make … well, you know,” he shrugs again, “pictures about Jesus. Maybe you just can’t make a good picture about Jesus.”

“It’s harder when God is the villain.”

“Fathers and sons, right?”

“Yes.”

Monty says, “Sometimes you know things before you know them.”

“Once I made a model of a church before I saw it. Then when I finally saw it, it wasn’t a church.”

“That happens too. What you thought you knew all along turns out to be something else.”

“It’s like all along it was a sign for something.”

“Uh huh.”

“Sometimes I’ve seen things that were supposed to be there even when they aren’t.”

“The Joan of Arc ,” Monty nods. “Another vodka tonic?”

“No, thank you.” Vikar says, “In a week, I found a movie no one else could find for fifty years.”

“Doesn’t that make sense?”

“There’s a secret movie that’s been hidden, one frame at a time, in all the movies ever made.”

“Find it in mine?” Monty smiles at Vikar’s head.

“That’s funny. I didn’t look in that one.”

“Don’t bother. It’s there too.”

“How did it get there? Who made it?”

“Doesn’t it seem strange,” Monty says, “that there are twenty-four frames per second of film? That in every second of film are the number of hours in a day?” He says, “What’s it mean that every second of a film is a day in the life of a secret film that someone’s been waiting for you to find in all the other films?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps,” Vikar says, “someone is showing me a way out of something.”

“Or a way in.”

“Am I possessed?”

Monty laughs.

“Am I possessed by the Movies?” says Vikar.

Monty laughs again. “Just because you love something doesn’t mean it loves you back.”

“Why me?”

“Is it just you?”

Vikar thinks. “No.”

“Right.”

“There’s someone else.”

“The girl,” says Monty.

“She doesn’t even like movies that much. She likes music.”

“Maybe she doesn’t choose.”

“Lately she’s had dreams of movies she’s never seen. Movies she doesn’t even know about.”

“Maybe the Movies chose her, like they chose you.”

“I miss Dotty.”

“She misses you too.”

“She once said movies are dreams.”

“Maybe it’s the other way around.”

“What?”

“That Secret Movie? The one that’s hidden frame by frame in all the other movies?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe we’re not dreaming it. Maybe it’s dreaming us.”

“I’m tired.”

“I know.”

“I haven’t slept.”

“I know.”

“In days. Or …” Vikar can’t think. “Longer. Since …” Was it the porn movie, the last time he slept? Was it the night that Vikar and Zazi saw The Passion of Joan of Arc together? Was it before?

“Longer than that,” says Monty.

“Yes.”

“Since before you came to Hollywood.”

“Yes.”

“Since before you ever went to the movies.”

“Yes.”

“Since that night your father came into your room when you were a small boy.”

Vikar nods. “Yes.”

“You should sleep now,” Monty says.

“Yes.”

14.

In the past few nights, Zazi’s dreams have suddenly stopped. It’s as though they’ve been cut from the filmstrip of her sleep. When she gets home, she finds the front door wide open and celluloid in bits and pieces and loops strewn from the top level of the house down the stairs to the second level, past the bedrooms to the third. She knocks on the door to the film library. “Vik?” she calls.

13.

He hasn’t returned by the time she goes to bed, and he’s not home when she wakes the next morning. The door to the film library is locked, and she stands before it wondering if she should try to break it down like they do in movies. But she has a feeling it’s not as easy as it looks in movies.

Like this movie she saw with Vikar where a small boy runs after the wounded gunfighter as he rides into the hills and graveyards, calling Shane, come back! Mother wants you! I want you! , she might now run down the street calling Vik, come back! The Movies want you! I want you! Zazi goes back up to the top level of the house, out the front door, and then slowly makes her way down the steep incline of the dirt hillside. At the base of the house, she’s able to jump up and catch the edge of the small window to the library and to briefly pull herself up, just long enough to peer in before she can’t hold on any longer. She drops to the hill and slides down, breaking the slide only by catching hold of some chaparral. “Shit,” she says. Slowly she climbs back up the hill to the top. She’s thinking to herself that, while the library appeared empty, she can’t be positive Vikar isn’t passed out on the floor, when she reaches the front door of the house and someone is waiting. For a moment, she thinks it’s him.