Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

  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

  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 Delial. 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 hall.) 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."8

  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:

  (or)

  SO?"9

  "9Pretty 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

  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,

  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

  □

  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

  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

  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.

  Somehow—though I don't remember exactly how—I ended up telling my boss a little about that sum
mer. Even Thumper tuned in. This was the first time she'd paid any real attention to me and it felt great. In fact by the time I finished, since the day was almost over anyway and we were locking up, she let me walk her out.

  "You're alright Johnny," she said in a way that actually made me feel alright. At least for a little while.

  We kept talking and walked a little longer and then on a whim decided to get some Thai food at a small place on the north side of Sunset. She saying "Are you hungry?" Me using the word "starving." Her insisting we get a quick bite.

  Even if I hadn't been starving, I would of eaten the world just to

  a

  be with her. Everything about her shimmered. Just watching her drink a glass of water, the way she'd crush an ice cube between her teeth, made me go a little crazy. Even the way her hands held the glass, and she has beautiful hands, launched me into all kinds of imaginings, which I really didn't have time for because the moment we sat down, she started telling me about some new guy she was seeing, a trainer or something for a cadre of wanna-be never-be boxers. Apparently, he could make her come harder than she had in years.

  I suppose that might of made me feel bad but it didn't. One of the reasons I like Thumper is because she's so open and uninhabited, I mean uninhibited, about everything. Maybe I've said that already. Doesn't matter. Where she's concerned I'm happy to repeat myself.

  a

  "It takes more than just being good," she told me. "Don't get me wrong: I love oral sex, especially if the guy knows what he's doing. Though if you treat my clit like a doorbell, the door's not going to open." She crushed another cube of ice. "Recently though, it's like I need to be thinking something really different and out there to get me crazy. For a while, money made my wet. I'm older now. Anyway this guy said he was going to slap my ass and I said sure. For whatever reason I hadn't done that before. You done it?" She didn't wait for my answer. "So he got behind me, and he's got a nice cock, and I love the sound his thighs make when they snap up against my ass, but it wasn't going to make me come, even with me touching myself. That's when he smacked me. I could hardly feel it the first time. He was being kind of timid. So

  I told him to do it harder. Maybe I'm nuts, I don't know, but he whacked me hard the next time and I just started to go off. Told him to do it again and each time I got worked. Finally when I did come, I came really—" and she held out the "reeeal"—"hard. Saw in the mirror later I had a handprint right on my ass cheek. I guess you could say these days I like handprints. He said his palm stung." She laughed over that one.

  When our food arrived, I began telling her about Clara English, another story altogether, Christina Amber, Kyrie, Lucy and even the Ashley I have no clue about, which also made her laugh. That's when I decided not to bring up my unreturned pages. I didn't want to get all petty with her, even though secretly I did want to know why she never called me back. Instead I made a plan to stick exclusively to the

  subject of sex, flirt with her that way, make up some insane stories, maybe even elaborate on the Alaska thing, make her laugh some more, all of which was fine and good until for some reason, out of the blue, I changed the plan and started to tell her about Zampano and the trunk and my crazy attacks. She stopped laughing. She even stopped crushing ice. She just listened to me for a half hour, an hour, I don't know how long,

  a long time. And you know the more I talked the more I felt some of the pain and panic inside me ease up a notch.

  In retrospect it was pretty weird. I mean there I was wandering into all this personal stuff. I wasn't even sharing most of it with her

  either. I mean not as much as I've been putting down here, that's for

  □

  sure. There's just too much of it anyway, always running parallel, is that the right word?, to the old man and his book, briefly appearing, maybe even intruding, then disappearing again; sometimes pale, sometimes bleeding, sometimes rough, sometimes textureless; frequently angry, frightened, sorry, fragile or desperate, communicated in moments of motion, smell and sound, more often than not in skewed grammar, a mad rush broken up by eidetic recollections, another type of signal I suppose, once stitched into the simplest cries for help flung high above the rust and circling kites or radioed when the Gulf waters of Alaska finally swept over and buried the deck for good—Here Come Dots . . .—or even carried to a stranger place where letters let alone visits never register, swallowed whole and echoless, in a German homonym for the

  whispered Word, taken, lost, gone, until there's nothing left to examine there either, let alone explore, all of which fractured in my head, even if it was hardly present in the words I spoke, though at the very least these painful remnants were made more bearable in the presence of Thumper.

  At one point I managed to get past all those private images and

  □

  just glance at her eyes. She wasn't looking around at people or fixing on silverware or tracking some wandering noodle dangling off her plate. She was just looking straight at me, and without any malice either. She was wide open, taking in everything I told her without judgment, just listening, listening to the way I phrased it all, listening to how I felt. That's when something really painful tore through me, like some old, powerful root, the kind you see in mountains sometimes splitting

  apart chunks of granite as big as small homes, only instead of granite this thing was splitting me apart. My chest hurt and I felt funny all over, having no idea what it was, this root or the feeling, until I suddenly realized I was going to start sobbing. Now I haven't cried since I was twelve, so I had no intention of starting at twenty-five, especially in some fucking Thai restaurant.

  So I swallowed up.

  I killed it.

  I changed the subject.

  A little while later, when we said goodnight, Thumper gave me a big, sweet hug. Almost as if to say she knew where I'd just been.

  "You're alright Johnny," she said for the second time that night. "Don't worry so much. You're still young. You'll be fine."

  And then as she put her jeep into gear, she smiled: "Come down and see me at work some time. If you want my opinion, you just need to get out of the house."

  Hie labor ille downs et inextricabilis error — Virgil

  laboriosus exitus damns — Ascensius

  laboriosa ad entrandum — Nicholas Trevetx

  mass until I was, landing on the roof of a parked car, which turned out to be my car, a good fifteen feet away, hearing the thud but not actually feeling it. I even momentarily blacked out, but came to just in time to watch the truck, still hurtling towards me until it was actually slamming into me, causing me to think, and you're not going to believe this—'I can't believe this asshole just totaled my fucking car! Of all the cars on this street and he had to fucking trash mine!* even as all that steel was grinding into me, instantly pulverizing my legs, my pelvis, the metal from the grill wedging forward like kitchen knives, severing me from the waist down.

  People started screaming.

  Though not about me.

  Something to do with the truck.

  It was leaking all over the place.

  Gas.

  It had caught fire. I was going to burn.

  Except it wasn't gas.

  It was milk.

  Only there was no milk. There was no gas. No leak either. There weren't even any people. Certainly none who were screaming. And there sure as hell wasn't any truck. I was alone. My street was empty. A tree fell on me. So heavy, it took a crane to lift it. Not even a crane could lift it. There are no trees on my block.

  This has got to stop.

  I have to go.

  I did go.

  When I reached Tatiana's place, she'd just gotten back from the gym and her brown legs glistened with sweat. She wore black Spandex shorts and a pink athletic halter top which was very tight but still could not conceal the ample size of her breasts. I said "hello* and then explained again how I had come into possession of the old man's papers and why in my effort to straighten the
m all out I needed to trace some of his references. She happily handed over the reading lists she'd compiled on his behalf and even dug up a few notes she'd made relating to the etymology of 'labor.*

  When she offered me a drink, I jokingly suggested a Jack and Coke. I guess she didn't understand my sense of humor or understood it perfectly. She appeared with the drink and poured herself one as well. We spoke for another hour, ended up finishing all the Jack, and then right out of the blue she said, 'I won't let you fuck me.' Time to get going, I thought, and began to stand up. Not that I'd expected anything mind you. 'But if you want, you can come on me,' she added. I sat back down and before I could think of something to say, she had tugged off her top and stretched herself out in the middle of the floor. Her tits were round, hard and perfectly fake. As I straddled her, she unbuttoned my pants. Then she reached for some extremely aromatic oil sitting on her coffee table. She squeezed hard enough to release a thin stream. It dripped off of me, a warm rain spilling down over her toned belly and large brown nipples. Pleased with what she'd done, she settled back to watch me stroke grind myself into my own hands.