There is only silence.65
all, but for reasons unknown to me still continuing to endure as a center to my thoughts; her—
—first encountered in the company of Lude and my boss at a place my boss likes to call The Ghost. The problem is that in his mind The Ghost actually refers to two places: The Garden of Eden on La Brea and The Rainbow Bar Grill on Sunset. How or why this came about is impossible to trace. Private nomenclature seems to rapidly develop in tight set-upon circles, though truth be told we were only set-upon on a good day, and tight here should be taken pretty loosely.
How then, you ask, do you know what's being referred to when The Ghost gets mentioned?
You don't.
You just end up at one or the other. Often the Rainbow. Though not always the Rainbow. You see, how my boss defines The Ghost varies from day to day, depending mostly on his moods and appetites. Consequently, the previously mentioned "pretty loosely" should probably be struck and re-stated as "very, very loosely."
Anyway, what I'm about to tell you happened on one of those rare evenings when we actually all got together. My boss was chattering incessantly about his junk days in London and how he'd contemplated sobriety and what those contemplations had been like. Eventually he detoured into long winded non-stories about his Art School experiences in Detroit,—lots of "Hey, my thing for that whole time thing was really a kinda art thing or something"—which was about when I hauled out my pad of sketches, because no matter what you made of his BS you still couldn't fault him for his work. He was one of best, and every tatted local knew it.
Truth be known, I'd been waiting for this chance for a while, keen on getting his out-of-the-Shop perspective on my efforts, and what efforts they were—diligent designs sketched over the months, intended someday to live in skin, each image carefully wrapped and coiled in colors of cinnabar, lemon, celadon and indigo, incarnated in the scales of dragons, the bark of ancient roods, shields welded by generations cast aside in the oily umber of shadow blood not to speak of lifeless trees prevailing against indifferent skies or colossal vessels asleep in prehistoric sediment, miles beneath even the faintest suggestion of light—at least that's how I would describe them—every one meticulously rendered on tracing paper, cracking like fire whenever touched, a multitude of pages, which my boss briefly examined before handing them back to me.
"Take up typing," he grunted.
Well that's nice, I thought.
At least the next step was clear.
Some act of violence would be necessary.
And so it was that before another synapse could fire within my bad-off labyrinthine brain, he was already lying on the floor. Or I should say his mangled body was lying on the floor. His head remained in my hands. Twisted off like a cap. Not as difficult as I'd imagined. The first turn definitely the toughest, necessitating the breaking of cervical vertebrae and the snapping of the spinal cord, but after that, another six or so turns, and voila—the head was off. Nothing could be easier. Time to go bowling.
My boss smiled. Said hello.
But he wasn't smiling or saying hello to me.
Somehow she was already standing there, right in front of him, right in front of me, talking to him, reminiscing, touching his shoulder, even winking at me and Lude.
Wow. Out of nowhere. Out of the blue.
Where had she come from? Or for that matter, when?
Of course my boss didn't introduce her. He just left me to gape. I couldn't even imagine twisting off his head for a second time as that would of meant losing sight of her. Which I found myself quite unwilling to do.
Fortunately, after that evening, she began dropping by the Shop alot, always wearing these daisy sunglasses and each time taking me completely off guard.
She still drives me nuts. Just thinking of her now and I'm lost, lost in the smell of her, the way of her and everything she conjures up inside me, a mad rush of folly oddly muted lusts, sensations sublimated faster than I can follow, into— oh hell I don't know what into, I probably shouldn't even be using a word like sublimate, but that's beside the point, her hair reminding me of a shiny gold desert wind brazed in a hot August sun, hips curving like coastal norths, tits rising and falling beneath her blue sweatshirt the way an ocean will do long after the storm has passed. (She's always a little out of breath when she climbs the flight of stairs leading up to the Shop.) One glance at her, even now in the glass of my mind, and I want to take off, travel with her, who knows where either, somewhere, my desire suddenly informed by something deeper, even unknown, pouring into me, drawn off some peculiar reserve, tracing thoughts of the drive she and I would take, lungs full of that pine rasping air, outracing something unpleasant, something burning, in fact the entire coast along with tens of thousands of acres of inland forest is burning but we're leaving, we're getting away, we're free, our hands battered by the clutch of holding on—I don't know what to, but holding just the same—and cheeks streaked with wind tears; and now that I think of it I guess we are on a motorcycle, a Triumph?, isn't that what Lude always talks about buying?, ascending into colder but brighter climes, and I don't know anything about bikes let alone how to drive one. And there I go again. She does that to me. Like I already said, drives me nuts.
"Hello?"
That was the first word she ever said to me in the Shop. Not like "Hi" either. More like "Hello, is anyone home?" hence the question mark. I wasn't even looking at her when she said it, just staring blankly down at my equally blank pad of tracing paper, probably thinking something similar to all those ridiculous, sappy thoughts I just now recounted, about road trips and forest fires and motorcycles, remembering her, even though she was right there in front of me, only a few feet away.
"Hey asshole," my boss shouted. "Hang up her fucking pants. What's the matter with you?"
Something would have to be done about him.
But before I could hurl him through the plate glass window into the traffic below, she smiled and handed me her bright pink flip-flops white Adidas sweats. My boss was lucky. This magnificent creature had just saved his life.
Gratefully I received her clothes, lifting them from her fingers tips like they were some sacred vesture bestowed upon me by the Virgin Mary herself. The hard part, I found, was trying not to stare too long
at her legs. Very tricky to do. Next to impossible, especially with her just standing there in a black G-string, her bare feet sweating on the naked floor.
I did my best to smile in a way that would conceal my awe.
"Thank you," I said, thinking I should kneel.
"Thank you," she insisted.
Those were the next two words she ever said to me, and wow, I don't know why but her voice went off in my head like a symphony. A great symphony. A sweet symphony. A great-fucking-sweet symphony. I don't know what I'm saying. I know absolutely shit about symphonies.
"What's your name?" The total suddenly climbing to an impossible six words.
"Johnny," I mumbled, promptly earning four more words. And just like that.
"Nice to meet you," she said in a way that almost sounded like a psalm. And then even though she clearly enjoyed the effect she was having on me, she turned away with a wink, leaving me to ponder and perhaps pray.
At least I had her ten words: "hello thank you what's your name nice to meet you." Ten whole fucking words. Wow. Wow. Wow. And hard as this may be for you to believe, I really was reeling. Even after she left the Shop an hour or so later, I was still giving serious thought to petitioning all major religions in order to have her deified.
In fact I was so caught up in the thought of her, there was even a moment where I failed to recognize my boss. I had absolutely no clue who he was. I just stared at him thinking to myself, "Who's this dumb mutant and how the hell did he get up here?" which it turns out I didn't think at all but accidentally said aloud, causing all sorts of mayhem to ensue, not worth delving into now.
Quick note here: if this crush—slash—swooning stuff is hard for you to
stomach; if you've never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you've got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into.
Quick second note: if that last paragraph didn't apply to you, you may skip it and proceed to this next part.
As for her real name, I still don't know it. She's a stripper at some place near the airport. She has a dozen names. The first time she came into the Shop, she wanted one of her tattoos retouched. "Just an inch away from my perfectly shaved pussy," she announced very matter-a- factly, only to add somewhat coyly, slipping two fingers beneath her G- string and pulling it aside; no need to wink now: "The Happiest Place On Earth."
Suffice it to say, the second I saw that rabbit the second I started calling her Thumper.
I do admit it seems a little strange, even to me, to realize that even after four months I'm still swept up in her. Lude sure as hell doesn't understand it. One— because I've fallen for a stripper: '"fuck a' and 'fall for' have very different meanings, Hoss. The first one you do as much as you can. The second one you never ever, ever do."; and two— because she's older than me: "If you're gonna reel for a stripper," he advises. "You should at least reel for a young one. They're sexier and not as bent." Which is true, she does have a good six years on me, but what can I say? I'm taken; I love how enthralled
As tape and film reveal, in the month following the expansion of the walls bracketing the book shelves, Billy Reston made several trips to the house where despite all efforts to the contrary, he continued to confirm the confounding impossibility of an interior dimension greater than an exterior one.
Navidson skillfully captures Reston's mental frustration by focusing on the physical impediments his friend must face within a house not designed with the disabled in mind. Since the area in question is in the master bedroom, Reston must make his way upstairs each time he wishes to inspect the area.
On the first visit, Tom volunteers to try and carry him.
"That won't be necessary" Reston grunts, effortlessly swinging out of his chair and dragging himself up to die second story using only his arms.
"You got a pair of guns there, don't you partner."
The engineer is only slightly winded.
"Too bad you forgot your chair," Tom adds dryly.
Reston looks up in disbelief, a little surprised, maybe even a bit shocked, and then bursts out laughing.
"Well, and fuck you."
In the end, Navidson is the one who hauls up the wheelchair.[37]
Still, no matter how many times Reston wheels from the children's bedroom to the master bedroom or how carefully he examines the strange closet space, the bookshelves, or the various tools Tom and Will have been measuring the house with, he can provide no reasonable explanation for what he keeps referring to as "a goddamn spatial rape."
By June—as the date on the Hi 8 tape indicates—the problem still remains unsolved. Tom, however, realizes he cannot afford to stay any longer and asks Reston to give him a lift to Charlottesville where he can catch a ride up to Dulles.
It is a bright summer morning when we watch Tom emerge from the house. He gives Karen a quick kiss good-bye and then kneels down to present Chad and Daisy with a set of neon yellow dart guns.
"Remember kids," he tells them sternly. "Don't shoot each other. Aim at the fragile, expensive stuff."
Navidson gives his brother a lasting hug.
"I'll miss you, man."
"You got a phone," Tom grins.
"It even rings," Navidson adds without missing a beat.
While there is no question the tone of this exchange is jocular and perhaps even slightly combative, what matters most here is unspoken. The way Tom's cheeks burn with a sudden flush of color. Or the way Navidson quickly tries to wipe something from his eyes. Certainly the long, lingering shot of Tom as he tosses his duffel bag in the back of Reston's van, waving the camera good-bye, reveals to us just how much affection Navidson feels for his brother.
Strangely enough, following Tom's departure, communication between Navidson and Karen begins to radically deteriorate.
An unusual quiet descends on the house.
Karen refuses to speak about the anomaly. She brews coffee, calls her mother in New York, brews more coffee, and keeps track of the real estate market in the classifieds.
Frustrated by her unwillingness to discuss the implications of their strange living quarters, Navidson retreats to the downstairs study, reviewing photographs, tapes, even—as a few stills reveal—compiling a list of possible experts, government agencies, newspapers, periodicals, and television shows they might want to approach.
At least both he and Karen agree on one thing: they want the children to stay out of the house. Unfortunately, since neither Chad nor Daisy has had a real opportunity to make any new friends in Virginia, they keep to themselves, romping around the backyard, shouting, screaming, stinging each other with darts until eventually they drift farther and farther out into the neighborhood for increasingly longer spates of time.
Neither Karen nor Navidson seems to notice.
The alienation of their children finally becomes apparent to both of them one evening in the middle of July.
Karen is upstairs, sitting on the bed playing with a deck of Tarot cards. Navidson is downstairs in his study examining several slides returned from the lab. News of Oliver North's annulled conviction plays on the TV. In the background, we can hear Chad and Daisy squealing about something, their voices peeling through the house, the strained music of their play threatening at any instant to turn into a brawl.
With superb cross-cutting, Navidson depicts how both he and Karen react to the next moment. Karen has drawn another card from the deck but instead of adding it to the cross slowly forming before her crossed legs, the occult image hangs unseen in the air, frozen between her two fingers, Karen's eyes already diverted, concentrating on a sound, a new sound, almost out of reach, but reaching her just the same. Navidson is
much closer. His children's cries immediately tell him that they are way out of bounds.
Karen has only just started to head downstairs, calling out for Chad and Daisy, her agitation and panic increasing with every step, when Navidson bolts out of the study and races for the living room.
The terrifying implication of their children's shouts is now impossible to miss. No room in the house exceeds a length of twenty-five feet, let alone fifty feet, let alone fifty-six and a half feet, and yet Chad and Daisy's voices are echoing, each call responding with an entirely separate answer.
In the living room, Navidson discovers the echoes emanating from a dark doorless hallway which has appeared out of nowhere in the west wall.[38] Without hesitating, Navidson plunges in after them. Unfortunately the living room Hi 8 cannot follow him nor for that matter can Karen. She freezes on the threshold, unable to push herself into the darkness toward the faint flicker of light within. Fortunately, she does not have to wait too long. Navidson soon reappears with Chad and Daisy in each arm, both of them still clutching a homemade candle, their faces lit like sprites on a winter's eve.
This is the first sign of Karen's chronic disability. Up until now there has never been even the slightest indication that she suffers from crippling claustrophobia. By the time Navidson and the two children are safe and sound in the living room, Karen is drenched in sweat. She hugs and holds them as if they had just narrowly avoided some terrible fate, even though neither Chad nor Daisy seems particularly disturbed by their little adventure. In fact, they want to go back. Perhaps because of Karen's evident distress, Navidson agrees to at least temporarily make this new addition to their house off limits.
For the rest of the night, Karen keeps a tight grip on Navidson. Even when they finally slip into bed, she is still holding his hand.
"
Navy, promise me you won't go in there again."
"Let's see if it's even here in the morning."
"It will be."
She lays her head down flat on his chest and begins to cry.
"I love you so much. Please promise me. Please."
Whether it is the lasting flush of terror still in Karen's cheeks or her absolute need for him, so markedly different from her frequently aloof posture, Navidson cradles her in his arms like a child and promises.
Since the release of The Navidson Record, Virginia Posah has written extensively about Karen Green's adolescent years. Posah's thin volume entided Wishing Well (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996) represents one of the few works which while based on the Navidsons' experience still manages to stand on its own merits outside of the film.
Along with an exceptional background in everything ranging from Kate Chopin, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Autobiography of a
Schizophrenic Girl.The True Story of'Renee", Francesca Block's Weetzie Bat books to Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia and more importantly Carol Gilligan's landmark work In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, Posah has spent hundreds of hours researching the early life of Karen Green, analyzing the cultural forces shaping her personality, ultimately uncovering a remarkable difference between the child she once was and the woman she eventually became. In her introduction (page xv), Posah provides this brief overview:
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