Zeroville (34 page)

Vikar nods. “Yes.”

“You should sleep now,” Monty says.

“Yes.”

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.

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.

Viking Man stands in the open doorway studying the celluloid draped over lamps, curtains, the TV, down along the rail of the stairs. When he turns to her, she knows something is wrong. He takes the cigar from his mouth. “Zulu,” he says quietly, “you need to come with me.”

In the lobby of the Roosevelt, the concierge behind the front desk says, “I’ll get Mr. Cooper, the manager.”

The manager, small, dark, well-dressed, appears immediately. He smiles sadly when he shakes Viking Man’s hand and Zazi’s.

In suite 928 on the ninth floor, Vikar lies on the sofa. He might appear to be sleeping, but Zazi knows he isn’t sleeping. The three stand in the middle of the suite looking at him. “I’m sorry,” says the manager.

“What happened?” Viking Man finally says.

“I don’t know,” says the manager, with a slight accent. “There’s no indication of anything untoward. He seems peaceful, I think. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” Viking Man says after a moment. “He seems peaceful.”

“I have to call the police, of course. Probably I’ve caused myself some trouble not phoning them first, but.” He shrugs. “He has no identification, so I thought I should tell someone who knew him.”

“How did you know to call me?”

“Madrid.”

“Madrid?”

“When he was working on your movie.”

“You knew him in Madrid when he was working on my movie?”

“I knew him then. Another time too, in France. Not well, of course. But I knew he was a man of vision.”

Viking Man says, “Who found him?”

“The concierge saw him come into the hotel and take the elevator up, and went looking for him.”

“Who lives here?”

“Nobody. It’s vacant now. But thirty years ago,” the manager looks at Viking Man and Zazi, “it was Mr. Montgomery Clift’s home.”

“Say what?” says Viking Man.

“After making
A Place in the Sun
, when he was filming
From Here to Eternity
.”

“Montgomery Clift?” says Zazi.

Viking Man takes an unlit cigar from his mouth. “He had presence, Monty, you have to give that to him. Held his own in
Red River
against the Duke.” He says to Zazi, “Don’t give me any of your ‘male-wanker’ feminist crap. Not right now, anyway.”

“O.K.”

“He never really had a place in the sun, Montgomery Clift,” says the manager.

“God love him, neither did the vicar,” says Viking Man, “unless he’s there now.”

“That,” Zazi says to Viking Man in the elevator, on the way back down to the Roosevelt lobby with the hotel manager, “sounded like something they would say in a movie.” There is in her voice an edge she herself doesn’t understand.

“And your point is what?” says Viking Man.

“Forget it.”

“Did we sully the moment with something corny, Zulu? Sometimes people say things in movies not just because it’s corny but because it’s the true thing that people would say in life if it wasn’t corny.”

In the elevator, all the buttons on the floor panel light up. One by one, at every floor the elevator stops and the door slides open to no one.

“I’ve always heard,” Viking Man says to the manager, “that the Roosevelt is haunted by the ghost of Montgomery Clift.”

“Yes, but that,” the manager smiles, indicating the lit buttons on the panel, “that’s not Mr. Clift. That’s Mr. Griffith.”

Back at the house Viking Man says, “You can’t stay here, Zulu.”

She stares out the windows that overlook the city. “Why not?”

“Even if the cops don’t show up, sooner or later Social Services will notice a kid is living here alone.” Viking Man lights another cigar. “You don’t surf, do you?”

She looks at him like he’s asked if she’s a cannibal, or has a
Brady Bunch
lunch box.

“No, I didn’t suppose,” he says. “Can’t say I get in that many waves myself, anymore.” He feels around in his pockets for a pen. “Got something to write on?”

“Over by the phone.”

He writes a phone number on the pad by the phone, peels the number off. “Call me in a day or two, Zulu, or sooner if you need anything. Just to let me know what you’re doing,” and he sticks it on the cork bulletin board where Vikar kept the inscription of a dream.

When Viking Man is gone, Zazi returns to the door of the film library on the house’s bottom level, wondering if she should try breaking it down. Whatever corny things might get said in real life, she still has a feeling it’s not as easy as it looks in the movies, knocking down a door, so rather than throwing herself at it, she gives it a good kick, and then another and another. Am I going to have to break into that stupid window, she thinks, where I almost fell down the hill? After one more futile kick, she takes hold of the knob to rattle it, anticipating the futility—except now the door isn’t locked, and swings opens easily before her.

Now she sees the havoc of the library that she couldn’t see from outside, in the few seconds she glanced through the window. Most of Vikar’s five hundred or so movies have been pulled furiously from their places on the shelves, canisters ripped open and celluloid unspooled everywhere. What’s more interesting, though, are the enlarged stills on the wall.

Each is the same, except each is a bit closer than the next to some rock or small cave; and carved at the top of the rock, Zazi recognizes immediately the writing that Vikar tacked to the bulletin board upstairs, though there’s still no way to know what it means.

Someone is lying on top of the rock, and becomes clearer with each enlarged still.

Zazi stands in the library as the minutes pass, and as the minutes pass she begins to hear the voices. Is someone upstairs? Is a radio on?

“You were such an apt pupil, weren’t you, Madeleine? Such an apt pupil …”

“He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people …?”

“I was born when she kissed me.

I died when she left me.

I lived a few days while she loved me …”

but they’re voices she knows, and growing closer to the stills on the wall, she presses her ear to each

and out of the door of the rock in each, beneath the form that lies across the top of the rock, Zazi hears come roaring out all of the dreams she’s had

until she reaches the final still and, as she presses her ear to it, sees clearly the face before her: her mouth drops

: and then she woke. She woke and all the images in her head blew away; lying there on the rock, she looked up into the dark of the night sky. Then another darkness fell across her, and it was her father’s shadow. She screamed.

She kept screaming as her father took her in his arms. “Oh, daughter,” he said, “why do you scream?”

“Don’t kill me,” she said.

“Kill you?” For a moment, his voice was at once alarmed and hurt, but both immediately gave way to something softer. “I never would hurt you,” he said.

Olive trees swayed in a canaan desert wind. She could hear the flock of sheep on the knoll below, and the donkeys. “God hasn’t commanded you to kill me?” she said.

“You’ve had a bad dream,” said her father. “No true loving God would command such a thing of a father, and no true loving father would heed such a god.”

She clutched her father, felt his warm beard and long hair against her. “It was a strange world I dreamed of, with people so strange and beautiful they were barely people at all.”

The father picked up the daughter and carried her to the nearby cave where a campfire burned. The wind clicked as it blew, and with the passing clouds, the light of the full moon overhead fluttered twenty-fours times a second.

But when she woke the next morning, she knew her father was dead, and she wondered whether it was because he had defied God or just because his time to die had come, a soul reset at zero.

She built the makings of a pyre, where fathers and daughters alike might go up in the smoke of holy fires. With great effort, she pulled his body to the place and set it on the pyre, and it was only in the light of the torch with which she was about to set the fire that she noticed it: there was, below his left eye, a red teardrop, caught in his beard, that she couldn’t brush away. And when she took her father’s blade and cut away some of the beard, she saw there was no brushing away the teardrop, that it was like stigmata stained to his flesh. Then she noticed the dark mark at the root of his hair that she never noticed before, and began to cut away with the blade more of his hair, that she might determine whether it was a mark made by God, or something no God could account for.

And there on the top of his head were faces like she had seen only in a dream, almost too beautiful to be recognized as people at all: the most beautiful woman and the most beautiful man in the world, she the female version of him, and he the male version of her.

I
WOULD LIKE TO
thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for its generous support. Part of this novel originally appeared in different form in
McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories
.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Steve Erickson

cover design by Jason Gabbert

978-1-4804-0999-6

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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