“It was called Your Pale Blue Eyes.”
“Yeah, I saw that picture. Didn’t understand a goddamned thing about it. But then I’ve never been nominated for an Oscar, so fuck me, right? What won?”
“Uh,” thinks Vikar.
“The Deer Hunter,” says Zazi. Vikar looks at her.
“Oh, well, that was the big picture that year, jack,” says the burglar. “You weren’t going to win against that.”
“I’m certain you’re right.”
“So you’re working in movies now?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
“You didn’t work on The Shining, did you?”
“No.”
“You see The Shining?”
“I don’t understand comedies.”
“You’re getting vexatious on me again, right? Don’t answer, I don’t even want to know. That Shining movie scared the shit out of me. What have you seen lately? I mean besides the golden oldies like Casablanca.”
“The Elephant Man.”
“I don’t want to see any movie like that, man.”
“I believe it’s a very good movie.”
“I’m sure it’s fine entertainment. I’m sure it’s a mother-fucking peak in the topography of cinematic history, but I’m not seeing any movie like that. Hard enough being born a black man in this world without seeing movies about people born elephants.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“You see Scorsese’s new one?”
“No.”
“Oh, man,” says the burglar, who starts walking in circles there on the sidewalk as though the very thought has thrown him into a tailspin, “well, you got to see that one, that’s all I can say. It’s like Tosca wrote an opera about boxing or something. Check it out, what you got here is the confusion of white folks thinking they’re all civilized and shit — arias playing overhead — while the real white thang, which is beating the shit out of folks, by which I mean white folks reaching down into their souls for what they really are, you hear what I’m saying? compared to what they want to be? which is the ferocious animal thing De Niro is because that’s what white America needs, its raging bulls trying to keep the black panther down both in and out of the ring if you can feature that … anyway, what I’m getting at … uh … and De Niro! Watch out! He’s White American Death in our time, jack, until he gets the shit beat out of him by Sugar Ray, who’s a brother, of course … so you got the whole white terror of black power, you got that whole white American jive up against the anti-jive, white America just too fucking mixed up, can’t work out whether to embrace the myth or anti-myth—”
Vikar says, “Are you going to rob us now?”
“Uh.” The burglar stops his circling and ponders this. “Man, how much do you have on you? I’m not going to take your credit cards or anything like that.”
“I don’t have any credit cards.” Vikar takes out his cash. “A hundred and thirty-eight dollars.”
The burglar seems slightly anguished. “Maybe you could give me the thirty-eight? I’m pretty strapped, I—” He stops. “No, you know what? Fuck that. If you hadn’t let me go that night, my ass would have been on ice most of the last ten years.”
“Take the hundred,” Vikar says.
“No, son, can’t do it.” Vikar holds out the hundred; head raised, a slight tone of hurt in his voice, the burglar says, “You’re messing with my self-dignity now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, O.K.,” before Vikar can put the money away, “if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“For a freaky white man, you’re O.K.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t use the gun around kids anymore.”
“I’ll reexamine that policy,” the burglar agrees, although he doesn’t put the gun away. Rather he waves it goodbye to Vikar and Zazi before vanishing back into the shadows of the 405. “And kudos on that nomination, man.”
130.
Sometimes Vikar hears Zazi crying behind her closed bedroom door. He stands at the door ten, fifteen minutes, wondering what to do, before finally turning away.
129.
The panorama of the city below Vikar’s house is swallowed up by the inky cloud of his past, until there’s nothing left of the city that he came to more than ten years before. Shaken loose by a temporal tremor, the house drifts unmoored in the dark. Zazi comes and goes unpredictably; in her room she practices to records by the Doors, who never had a bass player and could have, she feels certain, used one.
128.
One afternoon Zazi says, “What’s this?” On the cork bulletin board next to the phone is tacked the original copy of the ancient writing from Vikar’s dream, as he copied it that night in Cannes.
“It’s nothing,” he says.
“It’s nothing?”
“No.”
She studies the writing. “What does it mean?”
“Nothing.”
“It means nothing?”
“No.”
“Who wrote it?”
“I did.”
“Well, then it must mean something.”
“No.”
“Well, where did it come from? It must have come from somewhere. It’s tacked to the board.” She takes it down to look at it more closely. “Didn’t you tack it here?”
He says, “Yes.” He puts out his hand. “Here.”
She doesn’t give it to him. “Well, you wrote it and you tacked it up.”
“Here.”
“So it must mean something. Is it Latin or Greek or something?”
“It’s from a dream.”
“From a dream? You dreamed this?”
“Here.”
“You dreamed this and wrote it down and tacked it up?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. Here,” and he snatches it from her hand violently enough to make her jump. He turns, stops for a moment but then continues down the stairs, wadding the paper in his hand.
127.
Hours later, Vikar comes upstairs to find Zazi sitting in the living room, watching television and smoking a cigarette. She says, “Do you mind if I watch this by myself?” He assumes she’s angry about earlier that day. “All right,” he says. Turning back, he sees A Place in the Sun on the TV.
126.
Now and then in the early morning when it’s still dark, Vikar wakes to the sound of Zazi’s guitar. The next morning when he gets up, she’s still sitting on the edge of her bed practicing. “Didn’t you sleep?” he says.
“You know what’s weird about that movie?” Zazi says.
“Which movie?”
“That Place in the Sun movie.”
“What?”
She sets the guitar aside and leans back against the wall. “The truth is, I’ve never liked movies much. I think maybe because of Mom, I just never wanted to have anything to do with them. I’m into music.”
“We don’t have to go to the movies.”
“No, I wanted to because, you know, the earliest memory I have as a kid?”
“Yes.”
“Guess.”
“The Houdini House in Laurel Canyon.”
“That house belonged to Houdini?”
“Yes.”
“Houdini the magician guy?”
“He wasn’t living there then.” Vikar says, “When you saw me there.”
“I can’t say it isn’t a bit hazy, but you were like a fantastical creature or something, from some story my Mom might have read to me. And I liked living there in the canyon with the Zappas and all those crazy people, though at the time, of course, I didn’t know they were crazy — they were nice to me. Whereas that movie crowd at the beach, they didn’t pay me any attention at all, which I didn’t mind so much, but still.” She shrugs. “So going to the movies with you is different. You know, like there’s a difference between a movie life and a Hollywood life, and the Hollywood life was what my Mom had, and the Hollywood ending that goes with it, I guess.”