House of Leaves (19 page)

Without focusing too closely on the fine filigree of detail presented in these pieces—a book in itself—it is worthwhile, however briefly, to track the narrative events of the three explorations and recite to some degree how they effect the Navidsons.

For
Exploration #1
,
Holloway, Jed and Wax enter the hallway equipped with Hi 8s, down parkas, hats, Gortex gloves, powerful halogen lamps, extra batteries, and a radio to keep in contact with Navidson, Tom and Reston. Navidson ties one end of some fishing line to the hallway door and then hands the spool to Holloway.

“There’s almost two miles of line here,” he tells him. “Don’t let go of it,”

Karen says nothing when she hears Navidson make this comment, though she does get up abruptly to go out to the backyard and smoke a cigarette. It is particularly eerie to watch Holloway and his team disappear down the long hallway, while just outside Karen paces back and forth in the light of a September day, oblivious of the space she repeatedly crosses though for whatever reason cannot penetrate. [92—Jeffrey Neblett’s “The Illusion of Intimacy and Depth”
Ladies’ Home Journal,
V. 111, January 1994, p. 90-93.]

An hour later, Holloway, Jed, and Wax return. When their Hi 8 tapes are replayed in the living room, we watch along with everyone else how a series of lefts eventually leads them to the apparently endless corridor which, again to the left, offers entrance into that huge space where Navidson almost got lost. Though Holloway’s ability to shoot this trip hardly compares to the expertise evident in Navidson’s Exploration A, it is still thrilling to follow the trio as they investigate the darkness.

As they quickly discover, the void above them is not infinite. Their flashlights, much more powerful than Navidson’s, illuminate a ceiling at least two hundred feet high. A little later, at least fifteen hundred feet away, they discover an opposing wall. What no one is prepared for, however, is the even larger entrance waiting for them, opening into an even greater void.

Two things keep them from proceeding further. One—Holloway runs out of fishing line. In fact, he briefly considers setting the spool down, when two—he hears the growl Navidson had warned them about. A little rattled by the sound, Holloway decides to turn back in order to better consider their next move. As Navidson foretold, they soon see for themselves how all the walls have shifted (though not as severely as they had for Navidson). Fortunately, the changes have not severed the fishing line and the three men find their way back to the living room with relative ease.

Exploration #2
takes place the following day. This time Holloway carries with him four spools of fishing line, several flares, and some neon markers. He virtually ignores Navidson, putting Wax in charge of a 35mm camera and instructing Jed on how to collect scratchings from all the walls they pass along the way. Reston provides the dozen or so sample jars.

Though
Exploration #2
ends up lasting over eight hours, Holloway, Jed, Wax only hear the growl once and the resulting shifts are negligible. The first hallway seems narrower, the ceiling a little lower, and while some of the rooms they pass look larger, for the most part everything has remained the same. It is almost as if continued use deters the growl and preserves the path they walk.

Aside from feeling generally incensed by what he perceives as Holloway’s postured authority, Navidson almost goes berserk listening to the discoveries on the radio. Reston and Tom try to cheer him up and to Navidson’s credit he tries to act cheerful, but when Jed announces they have crossed what he names the Anteroom and entered what Holloway starts calling the Great Hall, Navidson finds it increasingly more difficult to conjure even a smile.

Radio psychologist Fannie Lamkins believes this is a clear cut example of the classic male struggle for dominance:

It’s bad enough to hear the Great Hall has a

ceiling at least five hundred feet high with a

span that may approach a mile, but when

Holloway radios that they’ve found a staircase

in the center which is over two hundred

feet in diameter and spirals down into nothing,

Navidson has to hand Reston the radio,

unable to muster another word of support.

He has been deprived of the right to name

what he inherently understands as his own.
[
93—Fannie Lamkins’ “Eleven Minute Shrink,” KLAT,
Buffalo, New York,
June
24, 1994.]

Lamkins sees Navidson’s willingness to obey Karen’s injunction as a sacrifice on par with scarification, “though invisible to Karen.”
[94—Ibid. Florencia Caizatti also sees Karen’s edict as violent, though she ultimately considers it of great value: “A needed rite to reinvigorate and strengthen the couple’s personal bonds.”
The
Fraying of
the
American Family,
p. 249.]

After Holloway’s team returns, Jed tries to describe the staircase: “It was enormous. We dropped a few flares down it but never heard them hit bottom. I mean in that place, it being so empty and cold and still and all, you really can hear a pin drop, but the darkness just swallowed the flares right up.” Wax nods, and then adds with a shake of his head: “It’s so deep, man, it’s like it’s almost dream like.”

This last comment is actually not uncommon, especially for individuals who find themselves confronting vast tenebrific spaces. Back in the mid-60s, American cavers tackled the Sotano de las Golondrinas, an incredible l,092 ft hole in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Oriental. They used rope, rappel racks, and mechanical ascenders to make the descent. Later on, one of the cavers described his experience: “I was suspended in a giant dome with thousands of birds circling in small groups near the vague blackcloth of the far walls. Moving slowly down the rope, I had the feeling that I was descending into an illusion and would soon become part of it as the distances became unrelatable and entirely unreal.”
[
95—
Planet Earth: Underground Worlds
by Donald Dale Jackson and The Editors of Time-Life Books (Alexandra, Virginia: Time-Life Books, 1982), p. 149.]

When Holloway plays back the Hi 8s for everyone, Navidson’s frustrations get the best of him. He leaves the room. It hardly helps that Karen stays, entirely engrossed in Holloway’s presentation and the ghostly if inadequate images of a banister frozen on the monitor. Tom, actually, pulls her aside and tries to convince her to let Navidson lead the next exploration.

“Tom,” she replies defensively. “Nothing’s stopping Navy. If he wants to go, he can go. But then I go too. That’s our deal. He knows that. You know that.”

Tom seems a little shocked by her anger, until Karen directs his attention to Chad and Daisy, sitting in the kitchen, working hard at not doing their homework.

“Look at them,” she whispers. “Navy’s had a lifetime of wandering and danger. He can let someone else take over now. It won’t kill him, but losing him would kill them. It would kill me too. I want to grow old, Tom. I want to grow old with him. Is that such an awful thing?”

Her words clearly register with Tom, who perhaps also perceives what a great toll his brother’s death would have on him as well. [
96—Both
Bingham Arzumanian and Curtis Meichor’s pieces have offered valuable insight into the nature of Tom’s alignment with Karen. Also see Chapter XI.]

When he sees Navidson next, Tom tells him to go find his son.

Based on what we can tell from
The Navidson Record
,
it appears Chad soon got fed up with his class assignment and took off down the street with Hillary, determined to explore his own dark. Navidson had to look for almost an hour before he finally found him. Chad it turned out was in the park filling a jar full of fireflies. Instead of scolding him, Navidson helped out.

By ten, they had returned home with jars full of light and hands sticky with ice cream.

Exploration #3
ends up lasting almost twenty hours. Relying primarily on the team’s radio transmissions interspersed with a few clips from the Hi 8s, Navidson relates how Holloway, Jed, and Wax take forty- five minutes to reach the Spiral Staircase only to spend the next seven hours walking down it. When they at last stop, a dropped flare still does not illuminate or sound a bottom. Jed notes that the diameter has also increased from two hundred feet to well over five hundred feet. It takes them over eleven hours to return.

Unlike the two previous explorations, this intrusion brings them face to face with the consequences of the immensity of that place. All three men come back cold, depleted, their muscles aching, their enthusiasm gone.

“I got some vertigo,” Jed confesses. “I had to step way back from the edge and sit down. That was a first for me.” Wax is more cavalier, claiming to have felt no fear, though for some reason he is more exhausted than the rest. Holloway remains the most stoic, keeping any doubts to himself, adding only that the experience is beyond the power of any Hi 8 or 35mm camera: “It’s impossible to photograph what we saw.” [97—Marjorie Preece uses this one line to launch into her powerfully observed essay “The Loss of Authority: Holloway’s Challenge”
Kaos Journal,
v. 32, September, 1996, p. 44. Preece wonderfully shows how
Holloway’s assertion that the camera is impotent within the house “helps establish him—at least for
a
little while—as the tribe’s head.”]

Even after seeing Navidson’s accomplished shots, it is hard to disagree with Holloway. The darkness recreated in a lab or television set does not begin to tell the true story. Whether chemical clots determining black or video grey approximating absence, the images still remain two dimensional. In order to have a third dimension, depth cues are required, which in the case of the stairway means more light. The flares, however, barely illuminate the size of that bore. In fact they are easily extinguished by the very thing they are supposed to expose. Only knowledge illuminates that bottomless place, disclosing the deep ultimately absent in all the tapes and stills—those strange
cartes de visites.
It is unfortunate that Holloway’s images cannot even be counted as approximations of that vast abrupt, where as Rilke wrote,
“aber da, an diesem schwarzen Fellel wird dein stärkstes Schauen aufgelost.”

[
98—No idea. Actually, Lude had a German friend named Kyrie, a tall blonde haired beauty who spoke Chinese, Japanese and French, drank beer by the quart, trained for triathions when she wasn’t playing competitive
squash, made six figures a year as a corporate consultant and loved to fuck. Lude took heed when I told him I needed a German translation and introduced us.

As it turned out, I’d met her before, about five or so months ago. It had actually been a little tricky. I was leering about, pretty obliterated in the arms of drink, hours of drink actually, feeling like days of drink, when this monstrous guy loomed up in front of me, grumbling insensibly about bad behavior, something concerning too much talk with too much gesture, gestures towards her, that much of the grumble, the “her” bit, I understood. He meant Kyrie of course who even back then was a blonde haired beauty, writing my name in Japanese and assigning all sorts of portentous things to it, things I was hoping to lead or was it follow? elsewhere, when this prehistoric shithead, reeking of money and ignorance, interposed himself, cursing, spitting and threatening, in fact so loud & mean Kyrie had to interpose herself, which only made matters worse. He reached over her and hit me in the forehead with the heel of his hand. Not hard, more like a shove, but a strong enough shove to push me back a few feet.

“Well look at that,” I remember hollering. “He has an opposable thumb.”

The monster wasn’t amused. It didn’t matter. The alcohol in me had already quickened and fled. I stood there tingling all over, a dangerous clarity returning to me, ancient bloodlines colluding under what I imagine now must of been the very aegis of Mars, my fingers itching to weld into themselves, while directly beneath my sternum a hammer struck the timeless bell of war, a call to arms, though all of it still held back by what? words I guess, or rather a voice, though whose I have no clue.

He was twice my size, bigger and stronger. That should of mattered. For some reason it didn’t. Odds were he’d rip me to pieces, probably even try to stomp me, and yet part of me still wanted to find out for sure. Luckily, the alcohol returned. I got wobbly and then I got scared.

Lude was yelling at me.

“You got a death wish Truant?”

Which was the thing that scared me.

‘Cause maybe I did.

Five months or so later, Lude arranged for me to meet Kyrie at Union. I was late by an hour. I had an excuse. Every time I tried to open my door, my heart started racing for a bypass. I had to sit down and wait for the thumping to calm. This went on for almost fifty minutes, until I finally just gave up, gritted my teeth and charged out into the night.

Of course I recognized Kyrie immediately and she recognized me. She was getting ready to leave when I arrived. I apologized and begged her to stay, making up some lame excuse about police trying to save a guy in my building who’d stuck his head in a microwave. She looked wonderful and her voice was soft and offered me something Thumper had taken away when she hadn’t called me back. She even wrote down on a napkin the glyph she’d created for me half a year ago to reflect my name and nature.