He goes to see Treasure of the Sierra Madre at the Vista and is mesmerized by Walter Huston’s demented jig in the swirling dust and gold. One afternoon a few days later, Vikar is passing Book City on Hollywood Boulevard when he stops to look at a battered paperback in the window; the paperback’s cover says it’s by the author of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Vikar goes into the bookstore and buys the paperback, which is about a stranded sailor far from home who becomes trapped in the cargo hold of a doomed frigate that sails on and on and on. It’s the only novel Vikar has ever read. For the next several nights, he foregoes the movies to stay home and read it.
112.
Not long after being kicked out of the movie about the Devil, Vikar sees a better movie about possession, from the early sixties. “Spoiled, Mama? Spoiled?” Natalie laughs insanely from a bathtub in the thrall of sexual hysteria, at the mother who questions whether she’s given her virginity to Warren. It’s the most terrifying performance Vikar has seen since Mlle Falconetti as Joan burning at the stake; he shrinks from the screen.
Vikar imagines Natalie lying between his legs, supreme succubus of all, starved on her chastity, drawing him into her mouth until there’s nothing left of him. That night he stares at his head in the bathroom mirror, runs his fingers over the features of Elizabeth and imagines her as Natalie, although not the Natalie of Rebel Without a Cause for whom everyone mistakes Elizabeth. Rather he imagines her as the Natalie of another movie, an unmade sequeclass="underline" In this movie, the shattered young lover of Splendor in the Grass flees her bathtub to relocate in Europe and become the dead wife of Last Tango in Paris, over whose body Brando rages at a love that forgives nothing.
After three years, Vikar replaces his radio. It broadcasts ongoing coverage of a political scandal that he doesn’t understand. Although he tries to resist it, he prefers the drag-queen music to that of buckaroos:
These cities may change, but there always remains
my obsession
Through silken waters my gondola glides and the bridge,
It sighs
I remember all those moments lost in wonder that we’ll never find again …
Jamais, jamais!
113.
L.A.’s rare rains come in a torrent. Only the steps that lead from Vikar’s secret street make it possible to descend. The intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights is a lake, as though having risen from a hole in the ground. All the buses run behind schedule, and by the time Vikar makes his connections, he’s forty-five minutes late to the studio. A river runs down Melrose; the parked black Mustang isn’t familiar to him, he doesn’t really remember it when he hears a tapping on the window as he sloshes by.
“Hey!” he hears behind him, and a young girl about eight years old leans out of the car. In the rain Vikar stands looking at her. She opens the door and signals wildly to him to come inside the car; he hesitates. “Come on!” she calls over the roar of the rain and water. “It’s me, Zazi — remember?”
114.
He gets in the car on the passenger side. The girl sits behind the wheel; the key to the car is in the ignition, and the tape player is turned up full blast. “You’re too young to drive,” he shouts over the music. She turns the music down a bit. “Where’s your mother?”
“Over there,” Zazi says, indicating the Paramount Gate, “trying out for some movie.”
“Did she ever get that role in the private-eye film?”
“What?” over the music.
Vikar says, “You mean she leaves you in the car …?”
“… I saw you walking by and said, ‘The guy with the head!’”
He picks up a cassette case and studies it. He believes the person on the front with bright red hair is a man but he’s not sure. “He looks like people I see on Hollywood Boulevard.”
“No,” the eight-year-old points out, “they look like him.” She turns the music back up. They listen to a song about an aging actor and a woman who stands for hours at Sunset and Vine. “Should you be listening to this kind of song?” Vikar says.
“Oh, I know all about that stuff,” the girl says.
“I liked this song I heard once about a dog.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very good song.”
115.
Vikar says, “Is Zazi your real name?”
“Isadora is my real name,” she says.
He nods. “I remember now.”
She says, “Were you born with that on your head?”
“No.”
“Remember that time we got tacos?”
“Yes. Do you?”
“Kind of. Mom left you in the middle of the street.”
“She was just being careful. But I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“I know. I went home that night and started cutting off my hair with some scissors to see what picture was on my head. She got mad. Here’s the best one.” She turns the song up:
Staying back in your memory
are the movies of the past
and Vikar looks at the cassette again. “I like songs about movies,” he says.
She says, “I don’t care about movies. I like the music.”
“Everyone in Hollywood,” he says, “likes music better than movies. I hope your mother is coming back soon.”
“Why?”
“Because you shouldn’t be out here a long time by yourself.” He says, “I should go before she returns.”
“O.K.”
“If I see her on the lot, I’ll tell her to come back.”
Zazi looks at Vikar. “I want a picture on my head.”
“It’s from the movies.”
“You picked the picture you wanted?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll get one of Bowie,” she says, waving the cassette.
116.
He wanders around the studio in the rain looking for Soledad but doesn’t find her. When he goes back out to the gate to check on Zazi, the Mustang is gone.
117.
On the television news is a story that the granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane has been kidnapped. The story says at least one or two of the kidnappers were black, but Vikar is certain some fucked-up white hippies did that business, no matter how hard they tried to pin it on black folks. It’s not clear whether they have kidnapped the granddaughter of Charles Foster Kane because they believe Citizen Kane is a very good movie or not a very good movie; Vikar wishes he could ask the burglar who broke into his apartment about it. He imagines all of the kidnappers watching Citizen Kane on television together in the middle of the night, while the granddaughter lies writhing on the floor, bound and gagged.
118.
When he’s finished reading The Death Ship, Vikar returns to Book City and buys whatever catches his attention. He reads all the Brontës, The Book of Lilith and the Arabian Nights which confounds him because it’s written by the actor married to Elizabeth Taylor, The Ogre by Michel Tournier and Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne de France by Blaise Cendrars, The Memoirs of Fanny Hill, a book called Les Diaboliques by Barbey d’Aurevilly, Memoirs of an Opium Eater and Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X, The Alexandria Quartet and the Freak Chronicles of one Charles Fort as catalogued in The Book of the Damned, with its accounting of a “super” Sargasso Sea in the sky from which reptiles, animals and elements fall to earth. He reads a book by a man named Bataille called Blue of Noon that he likes very much except he doesn’t understand the politics, this as the radio announces that the President of the United States has resigned.