Zeroville (31 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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?”

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.