Free Zeroville by Steve Erickson Page A

says.
    “I said, Would you like that?”
    “It’s not safe in the front for a little girl.”
    “You would like that, wouldn’t you?” Soledad says, nodding. The car comes to a screeching stop. “Get out,” she says.
    Vikar looks around him. It’s ten o’clock and they’re on one of the long stretches of Sunset where there’s no sidewalk. “Here?” he says. Zazi looks at her mother.
    “Do you think I am going to let her sit in back with you?” Soledad says calmly in her accented English. “Get out.”
    Vikar continues to look around at the dark boulevard and then slowly opens the door and gets out. He watches the dance between the Mustang’s white taillights and red brake lights until they’ve vanished in the distance.
87.
    He goes to the movies all the time, new and old. He sees Performance , The French Connection , Preminger’s Laura (for the third time), Murmur of the Heart , Gilda , Disney’s Pinocchio , The Battle of Algiers (with Viking Man, who’s seeing it for the sixth time), Dirty Harry (for which Viking Man is writing a sequel), an old forties movie called Criss Cross where Burt Lancaster and Yvonne De Carlo drive each other mad across what seems to Vikar a fantastical downtown Los Angeles with trolley cars that glide through the air. In Buñuel’s Belle de Jour Vikar imagines Soledad Palladin, as directed by her father, in Catherine Deneuve’s role of the housewife turned prostitute who, in one scene, is splattered with mud. At night he dreams about Margie lying between his legs, her naked breasts pressed against his thighs, and then in the dream she transforms into Soledad—at which point Vikar wakes with a start, unspent.
88.
    He buys another television. He almost never reads the newspaper, but one afternoon he sees a headline on the front page of the Herald-Examiner that several members of the singing family who murdered the pregnant woman, her unborn child and four others in the canyon have been sentenced to die in the state gas chamber.
89.
    Vikar telephones Margie Ruth at the beach house. “Not here,” a male voice on the other end of the line says, “she’s gone to New York to make Brian’s movie. Who’s this?” and Vikar hangs up.
90.
    Vikar has been working in production and set design at Paramount nearly a year, and is freelancing on a job at United Artists, when the art director of a Don Quixote musical comes to see him.
    “I’ve been looking at some of your sketches,” the art director says in a heavily accented English that reminds Vikar of Soledad. He’s an Italian in his late forties with a background in opera. “You have mixed several elements in this set,” he points at the draft.
    “Yes,” Vikar agrees.
    “It …” The art director thinks. “It is an interesting effect but these elements do not go well. They are taken from different time periods.”
    “Yes.”
91.
    The art director looks at Vikar. “Do you understand what I am saying?”
    “Yes,” Vikar says, pointing at the design, “this arch doesn’t go with the time period of the façade in back.”
    “That’s it,” the other man nods, relieved.
    “This arch is from twenty-three years later,” Vikar says.
    The art director looks at the draft and back at Vikar. “Twenty-three years?”
    “Yes.”
    The two men look at each other. “But you see the problem, yes?” the art director finally asks.
    “No.”
    “You do not see the problem.”
    “No.”
    “You do not see the problem with the same building, uh,” he gropes for the language, “from different time periods.”
    “No. This arch is from twenty-three years later, when the character of the prostitute Dulcinea will die here from consumption.”
    “Excuse?” says the art director.
    “The prostitute will die here of consumption in twenty-three years.”
    Some panic seems to take hold of the art director. “There has been a change in the script?” He grabs a nearby telephone and dials. After a moment he says, “Elvira, it is