ZEROVILLE by STEVE ERICKSON WHEN HE WAKES in the early hours before dawn, one morning near the end summer, he knows he's almost reached the door. Lining the stairway of his house are the enlarged celluloid images of a thousand doors, although really they're all the same door, moving from one location to another, each growin closer to him or, more exactly, he grows closer to each. It's the first or second summer of the new millennium, depend-ing how y count one or zero. By now Monk's dreams have enough precision that a part him would like to know, How do you count one or zero, and is it the first summer, or the second? He dreams very efficiently. Over the past two decade the scenes in his dreams have become almost exact replicas of those from th movies that inspired the dreams. Lately when Monk wakes, he knows right a which reel to pull from the wall of shelves around him; he's taken to sleep-in on the floor of the library so that when he has such a dream, immediately th film is at his fingertips. Up until now he's known the films well enough that h could put them in the projector and go to the very scene he's looking for, an then begin searching frame by painstaking frame on his editing table. In the beginning, he barely realized what he was dreaming. Only from h years as a film editor had he developed an affinity for the subconscious of montage, for the id of the film that even the film maker doesn't know is ther and in the beginning almost twenty years before, when he had the first drea night after night lie tossed restlessly in a sleep mottled by glimpses, flashes, messages, echoes of one film in particular he had recently seen on videotape-until finally he tracked down a print, paying good money for it. "B you must love this picture, huh?" the guy in the Valley had said to him. It wa porn movie called Nightdreams about a woman in a psychiatric ward having series of carnal hallucinations: in one she's a slave on her knees in the Arab desert, being taken by two men at each end of her; in another she's in Hell being fucked by the Devil ... but while these images slithered into Monk's sle as visual ephemera, what became clearer with each passing night and each passing dream was the door in the far background. In this particular case th door, just slightly ajar, stood alone on a distant barren veldt, although as far Monk could tell there was no such image in the film at all. For some weeks Monk watched the videotape over and over, freezing eve new scene trying to find that door that beckoned him every night in his slee After a while he gave up and the dreams began to fade and he went back to watching other movies, at home on TV or sometimes-if something he wanted badly enough to see was being shown-going out to a theater or one of the nearby campuses; he hated going out. One night, four months after first see the porn picture, he began having another dream, follow-ing a screening at UCLA of an old silent Danish film: there among the stark black-and-white images of forbidding robed inquisitors and a young girl burning at the stake was the door again, this time a little bit closer than it had been before, a litt more ajar than before, standing on the edge of a dark woods. The next day Monk returned to the school. "I can't let you take the print," the film department's curator told him. "What if I use one of your editing rooms here on campus'" Monk asked. "What are you looking for anyway!" "I'm not going to hurt the print," Monk said. "You're not William Jerome the film editor, are you'" No one called Monk that, anyone who still called him anything called him Monk. Something more than a reputation and less than a legend preceded him, built largely around the first picture Polanski made after the murders and then the Friedkin pictu and Your Pale Blue Eyes ; he had received Oscar nominations for the last two Enough people knew about the troubled production of Your Pale Blue Eyes t it may have singularly inspired one of Hollywood's most perennial urban myt that of the film that's "saved" in the editing room-except that Monk hadn't merely saved the film but trans-formed it. At Cannes that year, for the only time in the festival's history the jury invented a new award, the Prix Sergei, presented to Pale Blue Eyes for "the art of montage at its most revelatory. - I the mid- to late seventies Monk had run with that Malibu crowd out at the beach for a while, Marty and Brian and Milius and Schrader and Ashby, and t crazy chick with the tits who played Lois Lane in the Superman movies. "Wha are you doing these days?" the UCLA film curator asked. "I heard you were directing some-thing of your own." By then it already had been, what, almost three years since Monk had worked on anything, since Pale Blue Eyes and the whole business with Zazi. "I'm ... between projects," he answered, not wanting to even get into the Huysmans adaptation that he couldn't yet admit to himself was never going happen. The curator sighed. "You understand it's on loan," he said, shruggi at a canister on the table next to them that, with a start, Monk realized was very movie they were talking about, "from the Cinematheque. You have to b very careful." "I promise." "But . . . what are you looking for?" And it was almost a week before Mo found it, poring over the film exhaustively: there it was; and then, going bac to the porn flick, as with the Joan of Arc picture he went through frame by frame until he found it-and what could such a thing mean? That buried in b a 1928 silent classic made eight thousand miles away and a 1982 porn movie was, in a single frame that no one could see when the films were run, in a single frame that revealed itself in the sort of clandestine bulletins only Monk received, was the same single door, on the edge of a woods in one picture, an open desolate veldt in the other. From both movies Monk extracted the frames and enlarged them, so that above his bed where he slept, the two do loomed side by side. Over the weeks before he wakes near the end of the first or second summer the new millennium, he sees heron the hillside that cas-cades below his hou The first time she's near the bottom, where the road that eventually leads to him begins to wind its way upward. He sees her standing there looking up a him, and the next moment she's gone; the next time he sees her, one dusk several days later, she's moved up the hill but stands motionless as before, l Last Year at Marienbad, where people are as statues oil it vast terrace, except this woman plays all the statues, posed against the chaparral. Each time Mon sees her, she moves closer up the hill. At some point in his long-ago career editing movies, he dis-covered that cutting to a character's right or left profile, he could expose something abou her. He could expose the side that was true and the side that was false, he could expose the side that was good and the side that was evil, he could expose the side that punished and the side that received, the side that dominated and the side that sub-mitted. It was different with each person a each profile: what was represented by one actor's right might be represente by some-one else's left. But once Monk deciphered which was which, a new visual vocabulary of meaning became available. "I would never betray you," one lover might say to another in a given scene; but by choosing; one take over the other, one profile over the other. Monk could bare credibility or mendacity, irrespective of the actor's intention, or the director's or the writer's. This provided a modus operandi for all of Monk's work. It pro-vided the prevailing logic by which all other decisions were made. As people had right profiles and lefts, places and moments had them as well; in a film, every sho was a profile, and by cutting from rights to other rights, or from rights to lef or lefts to lefts, he could sub-liminally reinforce or sabotage the audience's perceptions. In Monk's mind this was the key that would unlock the secret of adapting Joris-Karl Huysmans' nineteenth-century decadent French novel La Bas that was to be Monk's directorial debut, before two things happened tha aborted the project altogether. The first and less important was the change the movie business in the late seven-ties and early eighties that consigned to exile the renegade film movement our of which Monk had originally emerged disrup-tion in the very sensibility of moviemaking; profound enough to rende the later technological changes irrelevant. It's just as well, Monk would musc much later, staring out the windows of the house, that my career was over before I ever had to deal with digital: computers and all that? No, I was bor to cut film, not move around ones and zeros. The second, more important thing happened one morning when Monk st before the mirror shaving. With his razor he was negotiating a mole on one s of his chin when it occurred to him that what he always thought of as his lef side was in fut his right, that his perception of his own right and left was ba on the same reflective reversal by which an entire species, staring into mirro or glass or lakes over the millennia, had always confused rights and lefts. Th realization could only confound Monk's aes-thetic, which was to say that wha he always thought of as his good side was in fact his evil, that what he alway thought of as his true side was in fact his false. By the time Monk's blade ha flicked the final streak of shaving cream, both his aspirations as a director an his career as a film editor were over, not to m...
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