House of Leaves (23 page)

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then with the hush of the F already on its way, thus loading it with plenty of offense and edge and certainly ambiguity. FUCK. A great by-

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the-bootstrap prayer or curse if you prefer, depending on how you look at it, or use it, suited perfectly for hurling at the skies or at the world, or sometimes, if said just right, for uttering with enough love and fire, the woman beside you melts inside herself, immersed in all that word-heat.

Holy fuck, what was that all about?

“Love and fire”? “word-heat”?

Who the hell is thinking up this shit?

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Maybe Zampanô just wrote “fuck” because he wasn’t saying fuck before when he could fuck and now as he waited in that hole on Whitley he wished he would of lived a little differently. Or then again maybe he just needed a word strong enough to push back his doubts, a word

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strong enough to obliterate, at least temporarily, the certain vision of his own death, definitely necessary for those times when he was working

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his way around the courtyard, trying to stretch his limbs, keep his heart pumping, a few remaining cats still rubbing up against his withered legs, reminding him of the years he missed, the old color, the old light. The perfect occasion, if you ask me, to say “fuck.” Though if he did say it no one there ever heard him.

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Of course, fuck you, you may have a better idea. I went ahead and paged Thumper again. Again she didn’t call me back. Then this morning,

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I discovered a message on my machine. It startled me. I couldn’t remember hearing the phone ring. Turned out some girl named Ashley wanted to see me, but I had no idea who she was. When I finally rolled into the Shop, I was a good three hours late. My boss flew
Off
the handle. Put me on probation. Said I was an ass hair away from getting

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fired, and no he didn’t care anymore how well I made needles. Unfortunately, I’m not too hopeful about improving my punctuality.

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You wouldn’t believe how much harder it’s getting for me to just leave my studio. It’s really sad. In fact these days the only thing that gets me outside is when I say: Fuck. Puck. Puck. Puck you. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
—

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All the images Navidson finds during this period are beautifully concise. Every angle he chooses describes the agony of the wait, whether a shot of Tom sleeping on the couch, Reston listening more and more intently to the nonsense coming over the radio, or Karen watching them from the foyer, for the first time smoking a cigarette inside the house. Even the occasional shot of Navidson himself, pacing around the living room, communicates the impatience he feels over being denied this extraordinary opportunity. He has done his best to keep from resenting Karen, but clearly feels it just the same. Not once are they shown talking together. For that matter not once are they shown in the same frame together.

Eventually the entire segment becomes a composition of strain. Jump cuts increase. People stop speaking to each another. A single shot never includes more than one person. Everything seems to be on the verge of breaking apart, whether between Navidson and Karen, the family as a whole, or even the expedition itself. On the seventh day there is still no sign of the team. By the seventh night, Reston begins to fear the worst, and then in the early
A.M.
hours of the eighth day everyone hears the worst. The radio remains an incomprehensible buzz of static, but from somewhere in the house, rising up like some strange black oil, there comes a faint knocking. Chad and Daisy actually detect it first, but by the time they reach their parent’s bedroom, Karen is already up with the light on, listening intently to this new disturbance.

It sounds exactly like someone rapping his knuckles against the wall: three quick knocks followed by three slow knocks, followed by three more quick knocks. Over and over again.

Despite a rapid search of the upstairs and downstairs, no one can locate the source, even though every room resonates with the distress signal. Then Tom presses his ear against the living room wall.

“Bro’, don’t ask me how, but it’s coming from in there. In fact, for a second it sounded like it was right on the other side.”

… _ _ _ …

Ironically enough, it is the call for assistance that eliminates the jump cuts and reintegrates everyone again into a single frame. Navidson has finally been granted the opportunity he has been waiting for all along. Consequently, with Navidson suddenly in charge now, declaring his intent to lead a rescue attempt, the sequence immediately starts to resolve with the elimination of visual tensions. Karen, however, is furious. “Why don’t we just call the police?” she demands. “Why does it have to be the great Will Navidson who goes to the rescue?” Her question is a good one, but unfortunately it only has one answer: because he
is
the great Will Navidson.

Considering the circumstances, it does seem a little ludicrous for Karen to expect a man who has thrived his whole life under shell fire and

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napalm to turn his back on Holloway and go drink lemonade on the porch. Furthermore, as Navidson points out, “They’ve been in there almost eight days with water for six. It’s three in the morning. We don’t have time to get officials involved or a search party organized. We have to go now.” Then adding in a half-mumble:” I waited too long with Delia!. I’m not going to do it again.”

The name “Delial” and its adamantine mystery stops Karen cold. Without saying another word, she sits down on the couch and waits for Navidson to finish organizing all the equipment they will need.

It takes only thirty minutes to assemble the necessary supplies. The hope is that they will locate Holloway’s team nearby. If not, the plan is for Reston to go as far as the stairway where he will establish a camp and

handle the radios, serving as a relay between the living room command post and Navidson and Tom who will continue on down the stairs. As far as photographic equipment is concerned, everyone wears a Hi 8 in a chest harness. (Short two cameras, Navidson has to take down one of the wall mounted Hi 8s from his study and another one from the upstairs hail.) He also brings his 35mm Nikon equipped with a powerful Metz strobe, as well as the 16mm Arriflex, which Reston volunteers to carry in his lap. Karen unhappily takes over the task of manning the radios. A Hi 8 captures her sitting in the living room, watching the men fade into the darkness of the hallway. There are in fact three quick shots of her, the last two as she calls her mother to report Navidson’s departure as well as his mention of Delial. At first the phone is busy, then it rings.

_ _
…

Navidson names this sequence
SOS
which aside from referring to the distress signal sent by Holloway’s team also informs another aspect of the work. At the same time he was mapping out the personal and domestic tensions escalating in the house, Navidson was also editing the footage in accordance to a very specific cadence. Tasha K. Wheelston was the first to discover this carefully created structure:

At first I thought I was seeing things

but after I watched SOS more carefully

I realized it was true: Navidson

had not just filmed the distress call,

he had literally incorporated it into the

sequence. Observe how Navidson

alternates between three shots with

short durations and three shots with

longer durations. He begins with

three quick angles of Reston, followed

by three long shots of the

living room (and these are in fact just

that
—
long shots taken from the

.

foyer), followed again by three short

shots and so on. Content has on a

few occasions interfered with the

rhythm but the pattern of three-short

three-long three-short is unmistakable.”

[118—Tasha K. Wheelston’s “M.O.S.: Literal Distress
,”
Film Quarterly,
v. 48, fall 1994,
p.
2-11.]

Thus while representing the emergency signal sent by Holloway’s team, Navidson also uses the dissonance implicit in his home-bound wait—the impatience, frustration, and increasing familial alienation—to figuratively and now literally send out his own cry for help.

The irony comes when we realize that Navidson fashioned this piece long after the Holloway disaster occurred but before he made his last plunge into that place. In other words his SOS is entirely without hope. It either comes too late or too early. Navidson, however, knew what he was doing. It is not by accident that the last two short shots of SOS show Karen on the phone, thus providing an acoustic message hidden within the already established visual one: three busy signals, three rings.

In other words:

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… _ _ _

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(or)

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SO?

[119—Pretty bitter but I’ve said the same thing myself more than a few times. In fact that word helped me make it through those months in Alaska. Maybe even got me there to begin with. The woman at the agency had to have known I wasn’t close to sixteen, more like thirteen going on thirty-three, but she approved my application anyway. I like to imagine she was thinking to herself “Boy does this kid look young” and then because she was tired or really didn’t care or because my tooth was split and I looked mean, she answered herself with “So?” and went ahead and secured my place at the canning factory.

Those
were the days, let me tell you. Obscene twelve hour days cradled in the arms of stupefying beauty. Tents on the beach, out there on the Homer Spit, making me,
not to mention the rest of us honorary

spit rats.

Nothing to ever compare it to again either. An awful

juxtaposition of fish bones & can-grime and the stench of too many aching lives & ragged fingers set against an unreachable and ever present beyond, a life-taking wind, more pure than even glacier water. And just as some water is too cold to drink, that air was almost too

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bright to breathe, raking in over ten thousand teeth of range pine, while bald eagles soared the days away like gods, even if they scavenged the mornings like rats, hopping around on gut-wet docks with the sea at their backs always calling out like a blue-black taste of something more.

Nothing about the job itself could have kept you there, hour upon hour upon even more hours, bent to the bench, steaming over the dead,

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gouging for halibut cheeks, slabs of salmon, enduring countless mosquito bites, even bee stings—my strange fortune—and always in the ruin of so many curses from the Filipinos, the White Trash, the Blacks, the Haitians, a low grade-grumbling which is the business of canning. The wage was good but it sure as hell wasn’t enough to lock you down. Not after one week, let alone two weeks, let alone three months of the same

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mind-numbing gut-heaving shit.

You had to find something else.

For me it was the word “So?” And I learned it the hard way, in fact right at the very start of that summer.

I’d been invited out on a fishing boat, a real wreck of a thing but supposedly as seaworthy as they get. Well, we hadn’t been gone for

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more than a few hours when a storm suddenly came up, split the seams and filled the hull with water. The pumps worked fine but only for about ten minutes. Tops. The coast guard came to the rescue but they took an hour to reach us. At the very least. By then the boat had already sunk. Fortunately we had a life raft to cower in and almost everyone survived. Almost. One guy didn’t. An old Haitian. At least sixteen

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years old. He was a friend too or at least on his way to becoming a friend. Some line had gotten tangled around his ankle and he was dragged down with the wreck. Even when his head went under, we could all hear him scream. Even though I know we couldn’t.

Back on shore everyone was pretty messed up, but the owner/captain was by far the worst off. He ended up drunk for a week, though the only thing he ever said was “So?”

The boat’s gone. “So?”

Your mate’s dead. “So?”

Hey at least you’re alive. “So?”

An awful word but it does harden you.

It hardened me.