and is overcome by a kind of panic. “Oh, mother,” Vikar says out loud, or perhaps he doesn’t say it out loud but just feels as though he does.
He catches his breath, regains his bearings. Then he removes an exacto-knife and a plastic baggie from his pocket. He locks the door of the editing room. He removes the single frame from the print, puts it in the baggie, puts the baggie back in his pocket. Then he splices the film back together.
98.
He walks quickly from the editing room, crosses the warehouse, passes the two women, pushes out through the glass exit and keeps walking.
97.
At some point he realizes he’s walking the wrong way, away from the first of the four buses home. On the bus he has to make himself focus in order not to miss his connection. When he arrives home at ten-thirty, Zazi is waiting; he isn’t through the front door before she’s screaming at him, “Where have you been? Where did you go?” and then barricades herself in her room.
96.
He hears her crying in her bedroom as he has before, when he would stand at her door wondering what to do. When he opens the door, she’s stopped crying but lies on her bed with her face in her pillow. “I would never abandon you,” he says, and goes into his own room, closing the door behind him.
95.
Zazi is gone the next morning when Vikar wakes.
He takes from his pocket the baggie with the frame of film, half expecting it will have vanished with the morning.
94.
The curator at the UCLA film school says, “Of course you understand I can’t let you take the print.” He looks more like a banker, a short stout man with thinning hair and glasses.
“What if I use one of your editing rooms here?” Vikar says.
“What are you looking for anyway?”
“I’m not going to hurt the print.”
“You’re not Vikar Jerome the editor, are you?”
“Yes.”
“The, uh …” The curator nods at Vikar’s head. “It’s kind of a giveaway.” He says, “The only editor ever to win a prize at Cannes.”
“No one is sure of that.”
“I heard you were directing something of your own.”
“I don’t know.”
The curator looks around his cubicle as if someone else might be listening before he says, “If you weren’t who you are, I wouldn’t consider it. It’s on loan from the Cinématèque in Paris.”
“I promise I’ll be careful.”
“But … what are you looking for?”
93.
Vikar spends the rest of the day poring over the rare footage, and returns the following day.
92.
The curator says, “Did you find it?”
“No,” says Vikar.
“Are you sure it’s there?”
“I was certain.”
“You do know, right,” says the curator, “that this isn’t the real movie?”
“What?”
“It’s not the real movie. It’s an alternate version.”
“But I’ve seen this movie. It was the first movie I ever saw in Los Angeles.”
“Whatever you saw or have ever seen was only a substitute,” the curator answers. “The real movie vanished after it was finished in 1928. It probably had a single screening in Copenhagen, the director Carl Dreyer’s home town, and it may have had a screening in Paris. Then it was burned in a fire, like Joan herself, goes one story. Suppressed by the French government—like Joan herself—goes another story. Lost, anyway. No one knows. So Dreyer assembled another version from out-takes and scraps of footage he had cut from the master copy. Can you imagine? The most powerful film of all time, and it’s made from leftovers.”
“God,” Vikar says, “was destroying the evidence.”
“So maybe what you’re looking for was in the real movie.”
“But this is the one I saw,” Vikar says, pointing at the canisters on the curator’s desk. “Where is the real film?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. It doesn’t exist.”
“No,” Vikar says, “it exists.”
“Well, then, Mr. Jerome, you know something the rest of us don’t.”
91.
Zazi says, “Where are you going?”
“I’ll be back soon.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I promise I won’t be gone long.”
“Is this like a work thing or something?”
“It’s like that.”
“A movie thing?”
“It’s like that.” He says, “Come with me.”
“When did this happen?” she says with evident anger. “All of a sudden you’re leaving?”
He says, “When you say it, it sounds like a long time.”
“I can’t go with you. I have gigs, studio time,” she says irritably. She throws up her hands. “Hey, I know I just threw myself into your life. So.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“I know it’s because you promised Mom.”
“That’s not all.”
“Whatever,” she says, and gets up from the kitchen table. There’s no tuna sandwich to throw. She vanishes down the stairs.
“I hate traveling,” Vikar says to the empty living room. “It’s always too far from Hollywood.”
90.
In the Air France terminal, Vikar slumps to sleep just long enough to be awakened by the boarding announcement. Flying overnight, he always feels like he’s not really going anywhere. He sleeps little of the eleven hours. For a reason he doesn’t understand, he finds himself compelled to draw on a sketch pad he bought in the terminal, over and over from memory, a picture of the model church he built at Mather Divinity, which now seems long ago.
89.
At Orly the next afternoon, he realizes he’s never gotten off an airplane when there wasn’t a driver and car to take him where he was supposed to go. Outside the terminal he stands staring at the cabs for ten minutes before he flags one. “Paris,” he says to the cab driver. The cab driver says something back and Vikar keeps saying, “Paris,” and the cab driver keeps arguing with him, gesturing some incomprehension. Finally Vikar says, “Cinématèque Française,” and when the driver still doesn’t understand, Vikar writes it down.
88.
It’s six o’clock before the cab gets into the city. All the streets are round like film reels and all the cars drive in circles. Parked before a large palatial building, the driver says, “Fermé, monsieur.”
“Thank you,” Vikar says, getting out of the cab.
“Monsieur, c’est fermé.”
“All right.” From the sidewalk, Vikar pushes a fistful of American dollars at the driver through the cab window.
“Non, pas de dollars americains,” says the driver. “Francs.”
“Yes, thank you,” says Vikar, waving the dollars. The driver snatches two twenties in exasperation and speeds off, and Vikar turns to circle the building, discovering to his surprise that it’s closed.
87.
Vikar crosses the Trocadero, the Eiffel Tower looming before him. The remnants of an anti-nuclear demonstration line the fountains that tumble toward the Seine. As always, people stare at him until he draws from his coat pocket the cap that he once took to Spain and pulls it down over his head. He crosses the river and the long military field beyond the Eiffel Tower and finds a small hotel where he rents a room. He keeps the cap on. Everyone yells at him about his American dollars.
He’s hungry and has dinner in a small brasserie near the hotel. He identifies what he wants to eat by pointing at the menu and a picture of a ham sandwich on long bread. He orders a vodka tonic; the garçon brings him straight vodka in a tall glass that Vikar drinks immediately, asking for another. On the table next to his, someone has left a small magazine called Pariscope in which Vikar finds a section that he recognizes as a listing of movies. He’s never known of a city that showed so many movies.
86.
It seems like every two blocks is a mo
vie 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.
85.
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.
84.
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.
83.
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.
82.
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.
81.
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.
80.
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.
79.
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.”
78.
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.
77.
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?”
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.”
&
nbsp; “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.”
Zeroville: A Novel Page 25