“How would that have happened?”
“The rumor is that the film somehow was acquired by the head of an asylum, and he would show it to the patients. Or inmates, as it were.”
“An asylum in Copenhagen?”
“That would make sense,” the man nods, “since it was Dreyer’s city. But no, not Copenhagen. Oslo.”
73.
On the way back to Orly, Vikar momentarily feels bad that he never said goodbye to Pamela. At the airport, again he tries to call his house in Los Angeles. Is it the middle of the night in Los Angeles if it’s noon in France? After waiting four hours, he boards the two-and-a-half hour flight to Oslo.
72.
On the drive from the airport into Oslo, when the cab driver asks where he wants to go Vikar shows the cab driver the picture he drew on the flight from Los Angeles, of the small door-less model he made at Mather Divinity. “Church?” says the cab driver.
“Not a church,” Vikar says. “Hospital.”
71.
Vikar spends the night in a city park. A hotel light blinks only a hundred meters away, but Vikar is tired of people he can’t understand who yell at him about currency and walking around his room in circles. In the park is a tall column-like sculpture carved with intertwined bodies of men and women.
In the morning, when he’s startled by the sound of a cab horn, he can’t be sure that he didn’t fall asleep. He realizes the cab driver who drove him from the airport the night before is honking at him; when the driver gets out of the cab, Vikar suppresses an urge to attack him. He watches the driver confer with several other cab drivers also parked there, then the driver signals Vikar to go with one of them.
70.
The second cabbie drives to a hospital. Vikar looks at his drawing and at the building. “No,” he says.
69.
The cabbie pries the drawing from Vikar’s fingers gently, like he might if he were trying to take a bone from the mouth of a snarling dog. He runs into the hospital, leaving the cab running.
He returns ten minutes later, shifts into gear, and begins driving again. Oslo seems to have water seeping up everywhere; at one point the cabbie tells Vikar there are three hundred lakes. They drive forty-five minutes out of the city, and when the cabbie pulls up to the building, its steeple — with the crowned lion holding a gold axe — is perched on the edge of a fjord, overlooking a vast sundial swallowed by shadow.
68.
Vikar isn’t thinking about what to do or how to do it. The building has an older and newer section, with the entrance in the new section, SYKEHUS over the main door. Vikar walks into the lobby of the asylum.
As Vikar enters, the check-in desk is to the right. Beyond that, in the lobby, is a large aquarium, as though the fjord has bubbled up through the floor to fill an inner window. Stray nurses and attendants wander by, but Vikar is struck by how empty it seems. He sees no patients.
Every time someone looks as though they might ask him something, Vikar turns and heads down another hallway. He doesn’t want to commit violence. He has broken continuity; he won’t accept the continuity of guards or attendants or doctors.
67.
In the middle of a large central annex to the hospital, Vikar stops.
He imagines, fifty-three years before, the patients gathered here, watching The Passion of Joan of Arc on a screen; he wonders what they made of it. He imagines, some twenty years before, Soledad strolling these halls, in a paper-thin hospital gown such as a lost young woman might wear stumbling along Pacific Coast Highway or sleeping outside a club in the Bowery. What would she have thought of The Passion of Joan of Arc, had she seen it? He thinks of Anna Karina as the prostitute in Godard’s Vivre sa Vie, in the scene where she goes to the movies and sees Passion of Joan of Arc and weeps; he can imagine Soledad weeping, if she had been within these walls in 1928, as she wept at The Elephant Man. Had Joan coupled with God and carried His seed, would they have produced an elephant child, to then be sacrificed as proof of Joan’s devotion? He closes his eyes and turns where he stands. If anyone sees me, they’ll only believe I’m another lunatic.
He turns where he stands, eyes closed, in the moviehouse of his mind until he sees it — the rock, the writing, the gaping portal, the figure draped across the top — then opens his eyes and goes through the doorway before him.
66.
Not a single person speaks to him or asks what he’s doing. He follows the image in his head until he reaches a line of white doors, some open. Beyond the open white doors he can see tables with straps, cables, electrodes; he closes his eyes and turns, and when he opens them he’s looking not at a white door but a common custodial closet.
65.
The first sign is the old projector at the far back of the closet, beyond the brooms and mops, the detergents and sprays, the discarded junk of half a century, its dust of more than five decades undisturbed.
64.
They’re in plain sight, yet anyone not looking would never see them.
63.
On a small stool, he can just reach them.
62.
He looks up and down the hallway, then carries the canisters into the room behind the nearest white door, closing the door behind him and locking it.
61.
He has no editing table. He has no viewer, only a small eye glass he’s brought with him. He pries open the canisters and inside is an official document certifying that the enclosed motion picture has been approved, without cuts or changes, by the Danish censor; the date of the document is 1928. Why, approved by a Danish censor, it would now be in a Norwegian asylum, Vikar doesn’t understand or think about. He unspools the film carefully on the electroshock table, terrified it will dissolve in his fingers, but it’s in extraordinary condition, like a mummified body. They would have strapped Joan to this table, but he’s no longer certain who “they” are, beyond the interrogating monks, or on whose side Joan was, Joan who was a child herself. He turns on the examination light overhead. Strapped on this table, Joan would have stared into this light.
60.
Like making a leap of faith, he guesses that it might be around the same place as in Nightdreams, some eight thousand frames in. What does it mean, he will wonder later, that it was this easy? I have eyes in my fingers, and he runs his fingers over the spools like a blind man reading braille, like closing his eyes out in the lobby and following the movie that’s projected on his eyelids. He has no way to count the frames. He guesses by looking at the feet of film on the reel.
59.
It’s almost the same frame of the same image: the same image buried in a 1982 porn movie made in Chatsworth, California, and buried here in a 1928 silent classic made in Europe, the image of a dream Vikar now has had for the better part of two decades, with the only difference being that in the newer film the image is a bit larger, as though over the century a camera draws ever closer.
58.
Not until he’s finished and exits the room through the white door does someone finally approach him: the janitor, who says something in Norwegian that Vikar doesn’t understand. Vikar puts the canisters in the janitor’s arms. “Get these to the Cinématèque Française,” he says and walks away, a single frame in a baggie under his cap, somewhere near Elizabeth’s kiss.