House of Leaves (45 page)

Regrettably, Tom fails to stop at a sip. A few hours later he has finished off the whole fifth as well as half a bottle of wine. He might have spent all night drinking had exhaustion not caught up with me. Of course, the following morning does nothing to erase yesterday’s events. Tom attempts to recover lost ground by accompanying Reston back to the Great Hall. Much to their surprise, however, they discover the hallway now terminates thirty feet in, nor are there any doors or alternate hallways branching off it. Karen returns to her room when she sees Tom and Reston reappear only five minutes later.

Even though he too is suffering from Navidson’s disappearance, Reston still does his best to counsel Tom, and at least for a few hours Tom successfully resists drinking anything more. Chad apparently had escaped from the house at dawn and now refuses to come in or say a word to his mother. Tom eventually finds him among the branches of a tree just past the edge of the property line. Nevertheless, no amount of coaxing will induce the eight year old to come back in.

In Billy’s words (The Reston Interview again): “Tom told me Chad was happy in his tree and Tom was hard pressed to start telling him inside was a better place. However, there was something else. The kid apparently bolted from the house when he heard some kind of murmuring, something about a walker in darkness, then a bang, like a gun shot, and the sound of a man dying. Woke him right up, he said. Back then I assumed he’d just been dreaming.”

Judging from the house footage, what seems to really push Tom over the edge that second day is when he reenters the house and finds Daisy—her forearms acrawl with strange scratches—swaying in front of the hallway screaming “Daddy!” despite the absence of a reply, the absence of even an echo. When Karen finally comes downstairs and carries her daughter outside to help her find Chad, Tom takes the car and goes into town. An hour later he returns with groceries, unnecessary medical supplies, magazines and the reason for the excursion in the first place—a case of bourbon.

On the third and fourth day, Tom does not emerge once from the study, attempting to drink his grief into submission.

Karen, on the other hand, begins to deal with the consequences of Navidson’s disappearance. She rapidly starts paying more attention to her children, finally luring Chad back into the house where she can oversee his (and Daisy’s) packing efforts. In a brief clip we catch Karen on the phone, presumably with her mother, discussing their imminent departure from Virginia.

Reston remains in the living room, frequently attempting to raise Navidson on the radio, though never hearing more than static and white noise. Outside a thunder storm begins to crack and spit rain at the windows. Lightning builds shadows. A wind howls like the wounded, filling everyone with cold, bone weary dread.

Toward midnight, Tom emerges from the study, steals a slice of lemon meringue pie and then whips up some hot chocolate for everyone. Whole milk, unsweetened cocoa, sugar, and a splash of vanilla extract all brought to a careful simmer. Billy and Karen appreciate the gesture. Tom has not stopped drinking, and even doses his cup with a shot of Jack Daniels, but he does seem to have leveled out, not exactly achieving some sublime moment of clarity but at least attaining a certain degree of self- control.

Then Tom, though he is only wearing a t-shirt, takes a deep breath and marches into the hallway again. A minute later he returns.

“It’s no more than ten feet deep now,” Tom grunts. “And Navy’s been gone over four days.”

“There’s still a chance,” Reston grumbles.

Tom tries to shrug off the certitude that his brother is dead. “You know,” he continues very quietly, still staring at the hallway. “There once was this guy who went to Madrid. He was in the mood for something new so he decided to try out this small restaurant and order—sight unseen—the house specialty.

“Soon a plate arrived loaded with rice pilaf and two large meaty objects.

“What’s this?’ he asked his waiter.

“‘Cojones, Senor.’

“‘What are cojones?’

“Cojones’ the waiter answered, ‘are the testicles of the bull that lost in the arena today.’

“Though a little hesitant at first, the man still went ahead and tried them. Sure enough they were delicious.

“Well a week later, he goes back to the same restaurant and orders the same thing. This time, when his dish arrives, the meaty objects are much smaller and don’t taste nearly as good.

“He immediately calls the waiter over.

“‘Hey,’ he says. ‘What are these?’

“Cojones’ the waiter replies.

“No, no,’ he explains. ‘I had them last week and they were much bigger.’

“Ah Senor,’ the waiter sighs. ‘The bull does not lose every time.”

7.

Tom’s joke attempts to deflect some of the pain inherent in this protracted wait, but of course nothing can really diminish the growing knowledge that Navidson may have vanished for good.

Tom eventually returns to the study to try and sleep, but Karen remains in the living room, occasionally dozing off, often trying to reach Navidson on the radios, whispering his name like a lullaby or a prayer. [271—Karen’s emotional response is not limited to longing. Earlier that evening she retreated to the bathroom, ran
the water in the sink,
and recorded
this somewhat accusatory Hi 8
journal entry: “Damn
you for going, Navy. Damn you. [Starting to cry] This house, this home, was supposed to help us get closer. It was supposed to be
better and
stronger than some stupid
marriage
vow. It
was
supposed to make us a
family.
[Sobbing] But, oh my god, look what’s happened.”]

In the
5:09
A.M.
Hi 8 clip, Karen rests her head on her hands and starts to sleep. There is something eerie about the odd stillness that settles on the living room then, not even remotely affected by Reston’s snoring on the couch. It is as if this scene has been impossibly fixed and will never change again, until out of the blue, presumably before the cameras can shut off—no longer ordered to run by the motion detectors—Navidson limps out of the hallway. He is clearly exhausted, dehydrated, and perhaps a little unable to believe he has actually escaped the maze. Seeing Karen, he immediately kneels beside her, attempting to wake her with the gentlest word. Karen, however, drawn so abruptly from her dreams, cannot arrest the shocked gasp summoned by the sound and sight of Navidson. Of course, the moment she realizes he is not a ghost, her terror dissolves into a hug and a flood of words, awakening everyone in the house.

Several essays have been written about this reunion and yet not one of them suggests Karen has reverted to her former state of dependency. Consider Anita Massine’s comments:

Her initial embrace and happiness is not just

about Navidson’s return. Karen realizes she

has fulfilled her end of the bargain. Her time

in that place has come to an end. Navidson’s

arrival means she can leave. [272—Anita Massine’s
Dialects of Divorce In American Film In The Twentieth Century
(Oxford, Ohio: Miami University Press, 1995), p. 228.]

Or Garegin Thorndike Taylor’s response:

Where previously Karen might have dissolved

into tears and her typical clutching,

this time she is clearly more reserved, even

terse, relying on her smile for defense. [273—Garegin Thorndike Taylor’s “The Ballast of Self”
Modern Psyche,
v. 18, 1996, p. 74. Also refer back to Chapter II and V.]

Or finally Professor Lyle Macdonough:

The reason Karen cries out when Navidson

wakes her has nothing to do with the inherent

terror of that hallway or some other
cauchemar.

It has only to do with Navidson. Deep

down inside, she really does fear him. She

fears he will try to keep her there. She fears

he will threaten her slowly forming independence.

Only once the reins of

consciousness slip into place does she resort

to expected modes of welcome. [274—Professor Lyle Macdonough’s “Dissolution of Love in
The Navidson Record
,”
Crafton Lecture Series, Chatfield College in St. Martin Ohio, February 9, 1996.]

Karen clearly refuses to allow Navidson’s appearance to alter her plans. She does not accept that merely his presence entitles him to authority. Her mind is made up. Even before he can begin to recount his desperate flight up those stairs or how he found Holloway’s equipment, Karen announces her intention to leave for New York City that night.

[275—In the following excerpt from
The Last Interview
, Navidson sheds some more light on how he managed to emerge from those dark hollows: “I remember I had found Jed’s pack so I knew I was okay on water and food for a while. Then I just started climbing up the stairs, one step at a time. At first it was slow going. That roar would frequently rise up the central shaft like some awful wail. At times it sounded like voices. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Calling after me. And then other times it sounded like the wind only there is no wind there.

“I remember finding The Holloway Tape off one of the landings. I had caught sight of a few bits of neon marker still attached to the wall and wandered over to take a look. A minute later I saw his pack and the camera. It was all just sitting there. The rifle was nearby too, but there was no sign of him. That was pretty odd to come across something, let alone anything, in that place. But what made finding that stuff particularly strange was how much I’d been thinking of Holloway at the time. I kept expecting him to jump around some corner and shoot me.

“After that, I was a little spooked and made sure to chuck the ammo down into that pit off to my right. Over and over, I kept wondering what happened to his body. It was making me crazy. So I tried fixing my mind on other things.

“I remember thinking then that one of the toenails on my right foot, the big toenail, had torn loose and started to bleed. That’s when De—
…
Delial came into my head which was awful.

“Finally though, I began concentrating on Karen. On Chad and Daisy. On Tom and Billy. I thought about every time we’d gone to a movie together or a game or whatever, ten years ago, four months ago, twenty years ago. I remembered when I first met Karen. The way she moved. These perfect angles she’d make with her wrists. Her beautiful long fingers. I remembered when Chad was born. All that kind of stuff, trying to recall those moments as vividly as possible. In as much detail. Eventually I went into this daze and the hours began to melt away. Felt like minutes.

“On the third night I tried to take another step and found there wasn’t one. I was in the Great Hall again. Oddly enough though, as I soon found out, I was still a good ways from home. For some mason everything had stretched there too. Now all of a sudden, there were a lot of new dead ends. It took me another day and night to get back to the living room, and to tell you the truth I was never sure I was going to make it until I finally did.”]

Of course by the time they had all sat down and watched The Holloway Tape, Navidson was the only one who had second thoughts about abandoning the cold lure of those halls.

HOLLOWAY

8.

More than a handful of people have tried to [276] explain Holloway’s madness.

[
276—Some kind of ash landed on
the following pages, in some places
burning
away small holes, in other places eradicating large chunks of text. Rather than try to reconstruct what was destroyed I decided to just bracket the gaps—[ ].

Unfortunately I have no idea what stuff did the actual charring. It’s way too copious for cigarette tappings, and anyway
Zampanô
didn’t smoke. Another small mystery to muse over, if you like, or just forget, which I recommend. Though even I’m unable to follow my
own
advice, imagining instead gray ash floating down like snow everywhere, after the blast but
still
hours before that fabled avalanche of heat, the pyroclastic roar that will incinerate everything, even if for the
time
being—and there still is time
…
—it’s just small flakes leisurely kissing away tiny bits of meaning, while high above, the eruption continues to black out the sun.

There’s only one choice and the brave make it.

Fly from the path.

Lude dropped by a few nights ago.
It’s
mid-September but I hadn’t seen him since June. News that I’d been fired from the Shop apparently pissed him off, though why he should care I’ve no idea. Like my boss, he also assumed
I
was on smack. More than a little freaked too when he finally saw for himself how bad off I was, real gaunt and withdrawn and not without a certain odor either. But Lude’s no idiot. One glance at my room and he knew junk was not the problem. All those books, sketches, collages, reams and reams of paper, measuring tapes nailed from corner
to
floor, and of course that big black trunk right there in
the center of everything, all of it
just
another way to finally say: no- no, no junk at all.

“Throw it away, hoss” Lude said and started to cross to my desk f or a closer look. I sprung forward, ordered by instinct, like some animal defending its pride, interposing myself between
him
and my work, those papers, this thing.

Lude backed away—in fact that was the first time he’d ever backed away; ever—just a step, but retreating just the same, calling me “weird”, calling me “scary.”

I quickly apologized and incoherently tried to explain how I was just sorting some stuff out.
Which
is true.

“Bulishit,” Lude grunted, perhaps a little angry that I’d frightened him. “For godsake, just look at what you’re drawing?” He pointed at all the pictures tacked to my wall, sketched on napkins, the backs of envelopes, anything handy. “Empty rooms, hundreds of black, empty fucking rooms I”

I don’t remember what I mumbled next. Lude waved a bag of grass in front of me, said there was a party up Beachwood canyon, some castle loaded with hookers on X and a basement full of mead. It was interesting to see Lude still defending that line, but I just shook my head.

He turned to leave and then suddenly spun back around on his heels, producing from his pocket a flash of silver, cishlash-shhhhhhick, the wheel catching on the edge of his thumb, connecting sparks and kerosene
…
his old Zippo drawn like a .44 in some mythical western, drawn by the fella in the white hat, and as it turns out Lude was in fact dressed in white, a creamy linen jacket, which I guess means I would have to be wearing black, and come to think of it I was wearing black—black jeans, black t, black socks. This, however, was not a challenge. It was an offering, and yet one I knew I would not/could not accept.

Lude shrugged and blew out the flame, the immolating splash of brightness abruptly receding into a long gray thread climbing up to the ceiling before finally collapsing into invisible and untraceable corridors of chaos.

As he stepped out into the hall, a place with dull walls where a pink corpse occasionally referred to as a carpet stretches over and down the stairs, Lude told me why he’d come by in the first place: “Kyrie’s boyfriend’s back in town and he’s looking for us, you in particular but since I’m the one who introduced you two, he’s also after me. Be careful. The guy’s a nut.” Lude hesitated. He knew Gdansk Man was the least of my worries but I guess he wanted to help.

“I’ll see you around Lude,” I mumbled.

“Get rid of it Hogs, it’s killing you.”

Then he tossed me his lighter and padded away, the dim light quickly transforming him into a shadow, then a sound, and finally a silence.

Maybe he was right.

Fly from the path.

I remember the first time I hadn’t and a rusty bar had taught me the taste of teeth. The second time I’d been smarter. I fled from the house, scrambled over the back brick wall like an alley cat, and sprinted across the overgrown lot. It took him awhile to find me but when he did, cornering me like some beast in the stairwell of a nearby shop, a chimney sweep business actually, Gallow & Sons, something like that, his focus was gone. Time had interceded. Dulled his wrath.

Raymond still hit me, an open handed slap to my left ear, pain answering the deafening quiet that followed, a distant thump then as my forehead skidded into the concrete wall.

Raymond was yelling at me, going on about the fights, my fights, at school, about my attitude, my wanderings and how he would kill me if I didn’t stop.

He had killed before, he explained. He could kill again.

I stopped seeing, something black and painful hissing into my head, gnawing at the bones in my cheeks, tears pouring down my face, though I wasn’t crying, my nose was just bleeding, and he hadn’t even broken it this time.

Raymond continued the lesson, his words ineffectually reverberating around me. He was trying to sound like one of his western heroes, doling out profound advice, telling me how I was only “cannon fodder” though he pronounced it like “father” and in a way that seemed to imply he was really referring to himself. I kept nodding and agreeing, while inside I began to uncover a different lesson. I recognized just how much a little fear had helped me—after all I wasn’t going to the hospital this time. All along I’d misread my contentious postures as something brave, my willingness to indulge in head—to—head confrontation as noble, even if I was only thirteen and this monster was a marine. I failed to see anger as just another way to cover fear. The bravest thing would be to accept my fear and fear him,
really
fear him, then heeding that instruction make a much more courageous choice: fly once and for all from his mad blister & rage, away from the black convolution of violence he would never untangle, and into the arms of some unknown tomorrow.

The next morning I told everyone my injuries had come from another schoolyard fight. I started to befriend guile, doped Raymond with compliments and self-deprecating stories. Made-up stories. I dodged, ducked, acquired a whole new vocabulary for bending, for hiding, all while beyond the gaze of them all, I meticulously planned my flight. Of course, I admit now that even though I tested well, I still would never have succeeded had I not received that September, only weeks later, words to find me, my mother’s words, tenderly catching my history in the gaps, encouraging and focusing my direction, a voice powerful enough to finally lift my wing and give me the strength to go.

Little did I know that by the time I managed to flee to Alaska and then to a boarding school, Raymond was already through. Coincidence gave an improbable curse new resonance. Cancer had settled on Raymond’s bones, riddling his liver and pancreas with holes. He had nowhere to run and it literally ate him alive. He was dead by the time I turned sixteen.

I guess one obvious option now is to just get rid of this thing, which if Lude’s right, should put an end to all my recent troubles. It’s a nice idea but it reeks of hope. False hope. Not all complex problems have easy solutions; so says Science (so
warns
Science); and so Trenton once warned me, both of us swilling beer in that idling hunk of rust and gold known simply as the Truck; but that had been in another time when there was still a truck and you could talk of solutions in peace without having any first hand knowledge of the problem; and Trenton is an old friend who doesn’t live here and who I’ve not mentioned before. [277— __________________________]

My point being, what if my attacks are entirely unrelated, attributable in fact to something entirely else, perhaps for instance just warning shocks brought on by my own crumbling biology, tiny flakes of unknown chemical origin already burning holes through the fabric of my mind, dismantling memories, undoing even the strongest powers of imagination and reason?

How then do you fly from that path?

As I recheck and rebolt the door—I’ve installed a number of extra locks—I feel with the turn of each latch a chill trying to crawl beneath the back of my skull. Putting on the chain only intensifies the feeling, hairs bristling, trying to escape the host because the host is stupid enough to stick around, missing the most obvious fact of all that what I hoped to lock out I’ve only locked in here with me.

And no, it hasn’t gone away.

The elusive it is still here with me.

But there’s very little I can do.

I wash the sweat off my face, do my best to suppress a shiver, can’t, return to the body, spread out across the table like papers—and let me tell you there’s more than just
The Navidson Record
lying there—bloodless and still but not at all dead, calling me to it, needing me now like a child, depending on me despite its age. After all, I’m its source, the one who feeds it, nurses it back to health—but not life, I fear—bones of bond paper, transfusions of ink, genetic encryption in xerox; monstrous, maybe inaccurate correlates, but nonetheless there. And necessary to animate it all? For is that not an ultimate,
the
ultimate goal? Not some heaven sent blast of electricity but me, and not me unto me, but me unto it, if those two things are really at all different, which is still to say—to state the obvious—without me it would perish.

Except these days nothing’s obvious.

There’s something else.

More and more often, I’ve been overcome by the strangest feeling that I’ve gotten it all turned around, by which I mean to say—to state the not-so-obvious—without it would perish. A moment comes where suddenly everything seems impossibly far and confused, my sense of self derealized & depersonalized, the disorientation so severe I actually believe—and let me tell you it is an intensely strange instance of belief—that this terrible sense of relatedness to Zaxnpanô’s work implies something that just can’t be, namely that this thing has created me; not me unto it, but now it unto me, where I am nothing more than the matter of some other voice, intruding through the folds of what even now lies there agape, possessing me with histories I should never recognize as my own; inventing me, defining me, directing me until finally every association I can claim as my own—from Raymond to Thumper, Kyrie to Ashley, all the women, even the Shop and my studio and everything else-is relegated to nothing; forcing me to face the most terrible suspicion of all, that all of this has just been made up and what’s worse, not made up by me or even for that matter
Zampanô
.

Though by whom I have no idea.

Tonight’s candle number twelve has just started to die in a pool of its own wax, a few flickers away from blindness. Last week they turned off my electricity, leaving me to canned goods, daylight and wicks. (God knows why my phone still works.) Ants inhabit the corners.

Spiders prepare a grave. I use Lude’s Zippo to light another candle, the flame revealing what I’d missed before, on the front, etched in chrome, the all red melancholy King of Hearts—did Lude have any idea what he was really suggesting I do?—imagining then not one flame but a multitude, a million orange and blue tears cremating the body, this labor, and in that sudden burst of heat, more like an explosion, flinging the smoldering powder upon the room, a burning snow, falling everywhere, erasing everything, until finally it erases all evidence of itself and even me.

In the distance, I hear the roar, faint at first but getting louder, as if some super-heated billowing cloud has at last begun to descend from the peak of some invisible, impossibly high mountain peak, and rushing down at incredible speeds too, instantly enclosing and carbonizing everything and anyone in the way.

I consider retrieving it. What I recently bought. I
may
need
it.
Instead I recheck the measuring tapes. At least there’s no change there. But the roar keeps growing, almost unbearable, and there’s nowhere left to turn. Get it out of the trunk, I tell myself. Then the elusive “it” momentarily disappears.

“Get out,” I scream.

There’s no roar.

A neighbor’s having a party.

People are laughing.