116.
Shaken, Zazi finally says on the bus home, “That wasn’t even a movie. I don’t know what it was. It was a … sighting or something.”
“No wonder it drove her mad,” says Vikar. “No wonder she never made anything else.”
“You know what’s strange? This is going to sound strange, O.K.?”
“All right.”
“I mean crazy-strange. Like, you-won’t-believe-it strange.”
“All right.”
“But not that long ago, I dreamed this movie.”
“You did?”
“I mean, this same movie. How can that be?”
Vikar doesn’t answer.
“Of course I didn’t know it was a movie. When I dreamed it, I didn’t even know the woman was Joan of Arc. I mean, I’m not even sure I understand who Joan of Arc was. But I dreamed it, just like I saw it tonight, you know? scene for scene, I mean … is that like the weirdest thing? It was so vivid I even wrote it down when I woke up. Have you ever had a dream and then seen a movie of it?”
Vikar says nothing.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe it.”
115.
That night Vikar’s dream returns more powerfully than it ever has. He’s so close he can almost touch the rock, and can almost see the face of the altar’s designated sacrifice. The white of the script glows so hot it almost burns him, and he reads it rather than just knows it: Faith before love, blood before tears.
After not reading a newspaper for months, Vikar scours the obituaries every day until it appears, and there’s even a picture of Chauncey from younger days, and a mention of his last scheduled engagement at a UCLA screening which he missed, as though the director of the film reached from the grave to silence the musician and protect his movie’s ministerial hush.
114.
He arrives at the Whisky early to catch Zazi’s band, beating the rest of the crowd. The doorman eyes him warily, and as Vikar enters the club, another security man taps him on the shoulder. “Be cool,” he says. Vikar suppresses a compulsion to take the man’s finger and snap it back; he envisions the man falling to his knees in shock. Vikar positions himself at the edge of the Whisky’s stage and waits, until finally the lights dim slightly and the crowd behind him cheers, and Zazi’s band walks out.
Zazi’s band walks out — and stops in place. Not a chord has been strummed nor a cymbal tapped. The band stands onstage staring at the crowd; and Vikar turns to look.
There behind him is a sea of shaved heads, every one tattooed. There are no other Elizabeth Taylors or Montgomery Clifts from A Place in the Sun. But there are three or four Nosferatus, one or two Anita Ekbergs frolicking in the Trevi Fountain from La Dolce Vita, half a dozen Bogarts from Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep and another half dozen Belmondos doing his impression of Bogart in Breathless, surprisingly more Louise Brookses from Pandora’s Box than the one or two obligatory Marilyns from Seven Year Itch and Brandos from The Wild One and James Deans from Rebel Without a Cause, and many Alexes from A Clockwork Orange and even more Travis Bickles from Taxi Driver. If Max and Travis Bickle themselves were there, each would have a tattoo of the other. They’re all behind Vikar watching him, as though he’s the general of an army, leading the children in revolt against gods and fathers.
113.
One night when Zazi is recording with her band at a studio in Hollywood on Cherokee, Vikar goes to the Nuart to see a “Forbidden Films” double bill. The first film is a Japanese movie about a young model who arrives one day at an art gallery showing an exhibition of bondage photos for which she’s posed. There she sees a man running his hands over a sculpture of her; feeling as though his hands are on her own body, she flees the gallery. Later she makes an appointment with a blind masseur, whose touch the woman is startled to find she recognizes: “I have eyes in my fingers,” he announces; and before he chloroforms her into unconsciousness, she rips the dark glasses from his face to recognize him as the man from the gallery. When she comes to, she’s in a strange warehouse, cavernous as a cathedral. On the walls are the sculptures of eyes, noses, mouths, torsos, arms and legs, and as she scurries among the shadows to elude her abductor, she scrambles over monumental replications of reclining female bodies, lurking in the valley of monumental breasts, darting in the ravine of monumental thighs. Imprisoned in the blind man’s studio where he sculpts a statue of her, eventually she becomes blinded herself by the endless darkness; seducing her captor, she becomes not just the model of his art but the art itself, the blind sculptor lopping off real arms, real limbs. Over and over he says, I have eyes in my fingers.
112.
The second movie on the double bill is a porn film. It’s not like any porn film Vikar has seen, or like any other kind of film: a woman in a psychiatric ward is having sexual hallucinations and surreal sexual experiences; in one scene she has sex with two jacks-in-the-box, in another she’s in the Arabian desert at night being taken by two men, one at each end of her, while a low muttering continues unabated as the only soundtrack. In another scene she’s a slave of the Devil in a Hell of smoke and burning coals. Another female slave chained to the rocks exhorts the Devil on as he violates the star of the movie in a number of ways. He has a two-pronged pitchfork, one prong larger than the other, which he can insert in two orifices at the same time. As the Devil has her, in the background is the endless clashing and surging of machinery and people crying out.
111.
It’s while watching the porn film that Vikar sees it: it flashes by in the wink of an eye, and if he hadn’t seen it hundreds of times over the years he wouldn’t see it at all, or he might suppose he’s imagining it; but he’s not imagining it. As powerfully as he dreamed it the night after seeing the movie at Royce Hall, he sees it now, there on the screen, and this time he knows it isn’t a dream.
110.
Sometime in the sleepless night he hears Zazi return home, and after he’s heard her door shut, and after the first light over Laurel Canyon comes through his window, he rises from bed. He walks down to the Strip and waits forty-five minutes for a bus to pick him up and take him west through Bel-Air, past UCLA, cutting up past the veterans’ cemetery where he transfers to an express bus on Wilshire that heads north to the Valley through the Sepulveda Pass. At Ventura and Van Nuys Boulevards, waiting for a third bus, he buys a box of glazed doughnuts and a quart of milk, and sits at the bus stop waiting.
109.
He catches a third bus heading west on Ventura. Eight miles later he changes again to another heading north on Highway 27 that cuts from the sea through Topanga Canyon. He takes this final bus to Chatsworth in the far northwestern badlands of L.A. County and gets off among the rocks and train tracks not far from Corriganville, where many Westerns have been shot. It’s taken him four hours to make the trip. He wanders up and down the Chatsworth roads asking directions until he finds what he’s looking for on De Soto, a plain industrial building with no windows and a single glass door.