Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

  Robbins' medical analogy may be a little misguided, but his emphasis on Holloway's deliberate and careful planning reminds one of the technical demands required in this journey—whether an "Operation" or "Exploration."

  After all, spending a night in an enclosed lightless place is very uncommon, even in the world of caving. The Lechugilla Crystal Cavern in New Mexico is one exception. Typically Lech visits last twenty-four to thirty-six hours.106 Holloway, however, expects to take at least four, possibly five nights exploring the Spiral Staircase.

  Despite the detailed preparations and Holloway's infectious determination, everyone is still a little nervous. Five nights is a long time to remain in freezing temperatures and complete darkness. No one knows what to expect.

  Though Wax puts his faith in Jed's unerring sense of direction, Jed admits to some pre-exploration apprehensions: "How can I know where to go when I don't know where we are? I mean, really, where is that place in relation to here, to us, to everything? Where?"

  Holloway tries to make sure everyone stays as busy as bees, and in an effort to keep them focused, creates a simple set of priorities: "We're taking pictures. We're collecting samples. We're trying to reach the bottom of the stairs. Who knows, if we do that then maybe we'll even discover something before Navidson starts all the hoopla involved with raising money and organizing large scale explorations." Jed and Wax both nod, unaware of the darker implications inherent in what Holloway has just uttered.

  As Gavin Young later writes: "Who could have predicted that those two words 'discover something' would prove the seeds to such unfortunate destruction? The problem, of course, was that the certain 'something' Holloway so adamantly sought to locate never existed per se in that place to begin with."[62]

  Unlike Explorations #1 thru #3, for Exploration #4 Holloway decides to take along his rifle. When Navidson asks him "what the hell" he plans to shoot, Holloway replies: "Just in case."

  By this point, Navidson has settled on the belief that the persistent growl is probably just a sound generated when the house alters its internal layout. Holloway, however, is not at all in accordance with this assessment. Furthermore, as he pointedly reminds Navidson, he is the team captain and the one responsible for everyone's safety: "With all due respect, since I'm also the one actually going in there, your notions don't really hold much water with me." Wax and Jed do not object. They are accustomed to Holloway carrying some sort of firearm. The inclusion of the Weatherby hardly causes them any concern.

  Jed just shrugs.

  Wax though proves a little more fractious.

  "I mean what if you're wrong?" he asks Navidson. "What if that sound's not from the wall's shifting but coming from something else, some kind of thing? You wanna leave us defenseless?"

  Navidson drops the subject.

  The question of weapons aside, another big point of concern that comes up is communication. During Exploration #3 the team discovered just how quickly all their transmissions deteriorated. Without a cost effective way of rectifying the problem—obviously buying thousands of feet of audio cable would be impossible—Holloway settled the issue by simply announcing that they should just plan on losing radio contact by the first night. "After that, it'll be four to five days on our own. Not ideal but we'll manage."

  That evening, Holloway, Jed, and Wax move from their motel and camp out in the living room with Reston. Navidson briefs Holloway for the last time on the most efficacious way to handle the cameras. Jed makes a brief call to his fiancee in Seattle and then helps Reston organize the sample jars. Tom in an effort to cheer up a bruised and unnaturally quiet Chad winds up reading both him and Daisy a long bedtime story.

  Somehow Wax ends up alone with Karen.[63]

  If Holloway's hand on Karen had upset Navidson, it is hard to imagine what his reaction would have been had he walked in on this particular moment. However when he finally did see the tape so much had happened, Navidson, by his own admission, felt nothing. "I'm surprised, I

  guess" he says in The Last Interview. "But there's no rage. Just regret. I actually laughed a little. I'd been watching Holloway all the time, feeling insecure by this guy's strength and courage and all that, and I never even thought about the kid. (He shakes his head.) Anyway, I betrayed her when I went in there the first time and so she betrayed me. People always say how two people were meant for each other. Well we weren't but somehow we ended up together anyway and had two incredible children. It's too bad. I love her. I wish it didn't have to turn out like this."[64]

  The clip of Karen and Wax did not appear in the first release print of The Navidson Record but apparently was edited in a few months later. Miramax never commented on the inclusion nor did anyone else. It is a little strange Karen did not erase the tape in the wall mounted camcorder. Perhaps she forgot it was there or planned to destroy it later. Then again perhaps she wanted Navidson to see it.

  Regardless of her intentions, the shot catches Karen and Wax alone in the kitchen. She picks at a bowl of popcorn, he helps himself to another beer. Their conversation circles tediously around Wax's girlfriends, intermittently returning to his desire to get married someday. Karen keeps telling him that he is young, he should have fun, keep living, stop worrying about settling down. For some reason both of them speak very softly.

  On the counter, someone has left a copy of the map Navidson drew following Exploration A. Karen occasionally glances over at it.

  "Did you do that?" she finally asks.

  "Nah, I can't draw."

  "Oh," she says, letting the syllable hang in the air like a question.

  Wax shrugs.

  "I actually don't know who made it. I thought your old Navy man

  did."

  Based on the film, it is impossible for us to tell if Holloway, Jed, or Wax were ever explicitly told not to mention to Karen Navidson's illegal excursion. Wax, however, does not seem to recognize any trespass in his admission.

  Karen does not look at the map again. She just smiles and takes a sip of Wax's beer. They continue talking, more about Wax's girl troubles, another round of "don't worry, keep living, you're young" and then out of nowhere Wax leans over and kisses Karen on the lips. It lasts less than a second and clearly shocks her, but when he leans over and kisses her again she does not resist. In fact the kiss turns into something more than a kiss, Karen's hunger almost exceeding Wax's. But when he knocks over his beer in an effort to get still closer, Karen pulls away, glances once at the liquid spilling onto the floor and quickly walks out of the room. Wax starts to follow her but realizes before he takes a second step that the game is already over. He cleans up the mess instead.

  A few months later Navidson saw the kiss.

  By that time Karen was gone along with everyone else.

  Nothing mattered.

  SOS . . . A wireless code-signal summoning assistance in extreme distress, used esp. by ships at sea. The letters are arbitrarily chosen as being easy to transmit and distinguish. The signal was recommended at the Radio Telegraph Conference in 1906 and officially adopted at the Radio Telegraph Convention in 1908 (See G. G. Blake Hist. Radio Teleer.. 1926, 111-12).

  — The Oxford English Dictionary

  Billy Reston glides into frame, paying no attention to the equipment which Navidson over the last few weeks has been setting up in the living room, including though not limited to, three monitors, two 3/4" decks, a VHS machine, a Quadra Mac, two Zip drives, an Epson colour printer, an old PC, at least six radio transmitters and receivers, heavy spools of electrical cord, video cable, one 16mm Arriflex, one 16mm Bolex, a Minolta Super 8, as well as additional flashlights, flares, rope, fishing line (anything from braided Dacron to 40 lb multi-strand steel), boxes of extra batteries, assorted tools, compasses twitching to the odd polarities in the house, and a broken megaphone, not to mention surrounding shelves

  already loaded with sample jars, graphs, books, and even an old microscope.

  Instead Reston concentrates all his energies on the radios, monitor
ing Holloway as he makes his way through the Great Hall. Exploration #4 is underway and will mark the team's second attempt to reach the bottom of the staircase.

  "We hear you fine, Billy" Holloway replies in a wash of white

  noise.

  Reston tries to improve the signal. This time Holloway's voice comes in a little clearer.

  "We're continuing down.Will try you again in fifteen minutes. Over and out."

  The obvious choice would have been to structure the segment around Holloway's journey but clearly nothing about Navidson is obvious. He keeps his camera trained on Billy who serves now as the expedition's base commander. In grainy 7298 (probably pushed one T-stop), Navidson captures this crippled man expertly maneuvering his wheelchair from radio to tape recorder to computer, his attention never wavering from the team's progress.

  By concentrating on Reston at the beginning of Exploration #4, Navidson provides a perfect counterpoint to the murky world Holloway navigates. Confining us to the comforts of a well-lit home gives our varied imaginations a chance to fill the adjacent darkness with questions and demons. It also further increases our identification with Navidson, who like us, wants nothing more than to penetrate first hand the mystery of that place. Other directors might have intercut shots of the 'Base Camp' or 'Command Post'[65] with Holloway's tapes but Navidson refuses to view Exploration #4 in any other way except from Reston's vantage point. As Frizell Clary writes, "Before personally permitting us the sight of such species of Cimmerian dark, Navidson wants us to experience, like he already has, a sequence dedicated solely to the much more revealing details of waiting."[66]

  Naguib Paredes, however, goes one step further than Clary, passing over questions concerning the structure of anticipation in favor of a slightly different, but perhaps more acute analysis of Navidson's strategy: "First and foremost, this restricted perspective subtly and somewhat cunningly allows Navidson to materialize his own feelings in Reston, a man with fearsome intelligence and energy but who is nonetheless—and tragically I might add—physically handicapped. Not by chance does Navidson shoot Reston's wheelchair in the photographic idiom of a prison: spokes for bars, seat like a cell, glimmering brake resembling some kind of lock. Thus in the manner of such images, Navidson can represent for us his own increasing frustration."[67]

  As predicted, by the first night Holloway and the team start to lose radio contact. Navidson reacts by focusing on a family of copper-verdigris coffee cups taking up residence on the floor like settlers on the range while nearby a pile of sunflower seed shells rises out of a bowl like a volcano born on some unseen plate in the Pacific. In the background, the ever- present hiss of the radios continues to fill the room like some high untouchable wind. Considering the grand way these moments are photographed, it almost appears as if Navidson is trying through even the most quotidian objects and events to evoke for us some sense of Holloway's epic progress. That or participate in it. Perhaps even challenge it.[68]

  Time passes. There are long conversations, there are long silences. Sometimes Navidson and Tom play Go. Sometimes one reads aloud to Daisy114 while the other assists Chad with some role-playing game on the family computer.[69] Periodically Tom goes outside to smoke a joint of marijuana while his brother jots down notes in some now lost journal. Karen keeps clear of the living room, entering only once to retrieve the coffee cups and empty the bowl of sunflower seed shells. When Navidson's camera finds her, she is usually on the phone in the kitchen, the TV volume on high, whispering to her mother, closing the door.

  But even as the days lose themselves in night and find themselves again come dawn only to drag on to yet more hours of lightless passage, Billy Reston remains vigilant. As Navidson shows us, he never loses focus, rarely leaves his post, and constantly monitors the radios, never forgetting the peril Holloway and the team are in.

  Janice Whitman was right when she noted another extraordinary quality: "Aside from the natural force of his character, his exemplary intellect, and the constant show of concern for those participating in Exploration #4, what I'm still most struck by is [Reston's] matter of fact treatment of this twisting labyrinth extending into nowhere. He does not seem confounded by its impossibility or at all paralyzed by doubt."[70]Belief is one of Reston's greatest strengths. He has an almost animal like ability to accept the world as it comes to him. Perhaps one overcast morning in Hyderabad, India he had stood rooted to the ground for one second too long because he did not really believe an electrical pole had fallen and an ugly lash of death was now whipping toward him. Reston had paid a high price for that disbelief: he would never walk up stairs again and he would never fuck.[71] At least he would also never doubt again.

  pseudo-academic hogwash lurked a very passionate man who knew how important it was to say "fuck" now and then, and say it loud too, relish

  its syllabic sweetness, its immigrant pride, a great American epic word really, starting at the lower lip, often the very front of the lower

  a

  lip, before racing all the way to the back of the throat, where it finishes with a great blast, the concussive force of the K catching up

  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-

  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?

  a

  Maybe Zampano 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

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

  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.

  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,

  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

  fired, and no he didn't care anymore how well I made needles.

  Unfortunately, I'm not too hopeful about improving my punctuality.

  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. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. —

  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 spea
king 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.