Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

  and 1 bottle of champagne.

  Quite a month.

  Note: This section also elicited several e-mails:

  Lude was such a jerk and a shitty fuck. You can tell him that.

  — Clarissa April 13. 1999

  Lude was so much fun. Give him my new number: 323

  ____ -_____ . Do you know what happened to him? Did

  he leave LA?

  And what about Johnny? What was all that crazy stuff in the introduction about guns and blood? I mean if it wasn't his blood, whose was it?

  — Natalie

  May 30. 1999

  Hey kids. It takes two to tango.

  — Bethami June 6, 1999

  11/20 11/21

  11/25 11/27

  11/28

  — Ed.

  Though clearly not as epic as Lude's, I too had my encounters that November.

  Three.

  Gabriella was the first. Her body was covered by a terrible birthmark which ran from her collar bone across one breast, over her belly and down both her legs. You could see traces of it on her wrists and ankles. But you couldn't feel it. It was textureless. Purely a visual shift. At first she turned out the lights but after a while it didn't matter. She was gorgeous and gentle and I was sad to see her go. She left for Milan the following morning.

  Barbara came next. She'd been spending alot of time at the Playboy Mansion. Said she didn't want to be a centerfold but liked the atmosphere there. When we got on her bed, she tore my shirt open. I could hear the buttons skitter across her floor. By midnight she was saying she loved me. She said it so many times, I stopped counting. By morning, despite numerous hints, she couldn't remember my name.

  And then I hooked up with Clara English. For just one night but at least it had started off well. Plenty of drinks, the buzz happy thrum of our newly ingested X-ray vision, lap dances for both of us at Crazy Girls, and then back to her place for a whole lot of fucking, only there wasn't that much fucking before there were a whole lot more hesitations and even tears set off by a series of interior tics I couldn't see. My fault for asking to see. I shouldn't have been curious. Should have left the blinders on. Probably could have made it through the tears. But I didn't. I pulled out the old Question Mark (QM) and Clara English didn't even think to answer with a joke. She didn't even conjure up some ridiculous story. She just took one sentence to tell me about the rape.

  That stopped the tears. Replaced now by well practiced meanness. I guess I can't blame her. Who knew how I was going to respond to that kind of confession, though she didn't exactly give me the chance to respond. Suddenly she hated me for knowing, even though she'd been the one to tell me. Though I had asked. I had asked. When I called her the next day, she said she was finished fucking around with guys who belonged in a zoo. She hung up before I could ask her if she saw me with the cats or the birds.

  I guess I still think about her. Fixed smile. Those removed gestures. That terrified gaze whenever it wasn't lost to something dull, angry and broken, an image that invariably returns me to the same question: can Clara English ever recover or is she permanently wounded, damned to stagger under years devoid of meaning love until finally the day comes when she stumbles and is swept away?

  I haven't seen her since. Maybe she's already been swept away. Now though when I look at Lude's list I don't see what I wrote down back then. I pencil in additional thoughts. They're made up of course. All of them born out of Clara's memory.

  Strange.

  Back then November had seemed like nothing but fun. The drugs robbing it of any consequence. The sex erasing all motives. Now, however, thorns have surfaced. Sharp thorns. My blissful bower's fallen, overrun by weeds and deadly vines. So is Lude's. Spiked with hurt. Heavy with poisonous bloom.

  LUDE'S LIST REVISITED

  Husband recently left her. An ex- and a restraining order. Silence. Rage.

  When she was only eleven, her mother had forced her to perform oral sex on her.

  Hiding from a stalker. Her fourth. Grew up in a commune. Had her first abortion when she was twelve. Said "Who cares" two dozen telling times. Hole in the roof of her mouth from too much cocaine. Numb.

  Uncle would come over and finger her. Father killed when she was eighteen. Raped by gym coach when she was fourteen.

  Date raped last year. Ex-boyfriend used to hit her. She finally had to get a nose job. Walked in on her mother screwing her boyfriend.

  A reduction left jagged scars running around her nipples and through both breasts. Ashamed before. Ashamed now. Engaged.

  MoniqueTonya

  Nina

  Sparkle

  Kelly Gina Caroline Susan Brooke Marin Alison Leslie Dawn Melissa Erin Betsy MichelleAlicia

  Dana

  Lost her virginity to her father. Prostitute.

  And as for my list, my Gabriella and Barbara, to say nothing of Amber Christina, Lucy, Kyrie, Tatiana, the Australian gal, Ashley, Hailey and I suppose others—yes there have been others—who's to say. Scratch in your own guesses. No doubt your postils will be happier than mine, though if they are, you clearly don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Then again, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you have got it right. I mean if you've lasted this far, maybe you do know what I'm talking about. Maybe even better than me.

  People frequently comment on the emptiness in one night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. Blind encounters writing sonnets no one can ever read. Desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex.

  None of which made sense to me until much later when I realized everything I thought I'd retained of my encounters added up to so very little, hardly enduring, just shadows of love outlining nothing at all.

  Which I guess finally brings me to the story I've been meaning to tell all along, one that still haunts me today, about the wounded and where I still fear they finally end up.

  The story of my Pekinese.

  By the time December came around, I'd run out of E and energy. For at least a week, I was hung over with no sense of what lay ahead, plenty of untraceable guilt and a mounting sense of despair. One thing was sure though, I needed rest.

  Lude didn't care. A 10 PM call and an hour later he was dragging me to the Opium Den, into the harangue of voices and amplified rhythms, all of it mixing, on ice, with a combination of cheap bourbon and better bourbon, though surprisingly little talk or smiles; feast to famine; or was it the other way around?, until towards the end of the night, Lude, noticing my isolation but secure in his own AM plans, pointed across the room —

  "I think she's a porn star" he yelled at me, though the music turned his yell into a whisper. I glanced over at the bar and immediately knew who he was talking about. There were plenty of girls milling around, ordering cosmopolitans and beers, but she stood out, literally, from all the rest. Not height wise, mind you. She couldn't have been more than 5'5". A petite figure, platinum hair, way too much eyeliner, nails as long as kitchen knives and lips stuffed with god knows how many layers of tissue collected from the ass of some cadaver. But her tits, they were what told the whole story: enormous, and that's an understatement. We're talking DDDD, entire seas sacrificed to fill those saline sacks, Red Sea on the left, the Dead Sea on the right. Given the right storm, they could probably take out coastal townships with no guarantees for inland villages either.

  "Go talk to her" Lude urged me.

  "What do I say?" I yelled/whispered. Bewildered.

  "Ask her how big they are."

  I did go up and talk to her and we talked for a while though never about her tits which constantly drew my eyes into their orbit no matter how hard I tried to resist—moon and sea tied together. Turned out she liked to listen to country music or Pantera, depending on her mood, which at that moment was completely unreadable, her bloodshot eyes flashing out at me from beneath all that liner, sad? drunk? dry? or just permanently red? After a good twenty minutes of talk, talk interpolated with countless conversation ends, huge uncomfortable gap
s where I always expected her to cough and excuse herself which for whatever reason she never did, waiting for me to continue our conversation—could anyone call that a conversation? "What kind of music do you like?" "Country." [Long pause] "Really, country? hmmm?" [Long pause] "And Pantera." "Country and Pantera? Really? hmmmm?"—on and on like that until finally, after twenty minutes, the club started closing down and bouncers began herding people towards the exits. And we walked out together. She'd come with a girlfriend who she waved goodbye to outside, ignoring me, though after the wave, suddenly returning to me, asking me to escort her to her truck.

  As we waited for the light to change, she told me her name was Johnnie, though some people called her Sled, though her real name was Rachel. This is a simple telling of a much more difficult series of questions, the answers to which, in retrospect, were more than likely all made up. Then as the light changed and we crossed to the east side of Vine, we found on the corner a black bug-eyed Pekinese without tags. It was dirty, scared and obviously without owner, snot pouring out of its pug nose, every part of it trembling as it cowered on that grimy sidewalk, motionless, finally, after how many hours, how many days, at a loss where to go. All directions leading to the same place anyway. Its own end.

  "Oh my poor baby" Johnnie cooed, those cold and indifferent spaces in our talk suddenly full of affection and concern, though the notes seemed wrong, not dissonant or flat or played at an improper tempo, just wrong, the melody somehow robbed of itself, meaning not another melody

  either, just something else. At least that's how it sounds now. Back then I hardly noticed.

  Still, I was the one who picked up the frightened thing, cradling its small head in the crook of my arm, wiping some of the snot off on the sleeve of my buttonless corduroy coat, deciding as I did this—making a mess of myself—to take it home with me. To hell with the cramped space. I wasn't going to let this animal die. Not after it had snotted on my coat and sighed in my arms. But Johnnie wanted the poor thing.

  "What kind of place do you have?" she asked. "A studio," I replied. "No way," she said, growing increasingly more emphatic and insistent, even if all this was spoken in that strange melody, not exactly atonal, I don't know, just wrong. So despite my instincts I relented. After all, she had a home in the valley, a yard, the kind of place dogs are meant to have. "A happy pet land," she called it, and really, considering the hole I inhabited, there was no argument. I handed Johnnie the poor Pekinese and together we placed it in the truck.

  "Call me the momma to all strays," she said and gave me a weird

  smile.

  Johnnie ended up giving me a lift back to my place. Oddly enough, when we pulled up in front of my building, I didn't ask her in. She seemed grateful. But I hadn't ducked the invitation on her behalf. Something seemed wrong, very wrong. Maybe it was the vacancy I had begun to taste, brought on by November—Novem ovum nine and all mine. Or maybe it was her, the salt full breasts, the deformed mouth, the fresco of makeup, her entire figure so perfect(ly grotesque) and all at the age of twenty-four, or so she had told me, though she probably was closer to six thousand years old.

  Something about her frightened me. The knotted fingers. That blank stare, permanently fixed on some strange slate bare continent lost deep beneath ancient seas, her seas, dark, red, dead. Maybe not. Maybe it was that Pekinese pup, hungry and abandoned, suddenly rescued, suddenly with hope; a projection of myself? my own place in the way of straydom? Maybe. Who knows the real answer, but I'll tell you this, I sure as hell wasn't thinking then about Johnnie's tits or her lips or the positions, the absurd positions, we could have made together. I was thinking only about the Pekinese, its safety, its future. The Pekinese and me: a contract of concern. I rubbed the top of its ears, stroked its back and then I climbed out of the truck and said goodbye.

  As Johnnie pulled away, she smiled again, that weird all wrong smile. For a moment, I watched her tail lights trail down the street, still feeling uncertain but a little relieved, until as I turned to go inside, I heard the thump. The one I remember even now, so clearly, an eerie and awful sound. Not too loud. Slightly hollow in fact, amounting to just that—a thump. Like that. Thump. I looked down the street. Her truck was gone but behind it, in its wake, something dark rolled into the light of a street lamp. Something Johnnie had thrown out her window as she passed the parked cars. I jogged down the block, feeling more than a little uneasy, until as I approached that clump of something on the side of the road, I discovered much to my dismay all my uneasiness confirmed.

  To this day I don't know why she did it: my abandoned Pekinese, found on Vine, bug eyed, with snot pouring out of its pug nose, re-found not too far from my front door, that very same night, lying next to a car with half its head caved in, an eye broken and oozing vitreous jelly, tongue caught (and partially severed) in its snapped jaws. She

  Day 2: 19:04

  [Outside tent; smoking another joint]

  Enough. I've had enough. Man, this is just not

  fair.

  Day 2: 20:03

  [Outside tent]

  Radio (Navidson): [Static] We hear something [Noise] going [Noise] —ter it. Tom: Good luck bro'. [Silence]

  Day 2: 21:54

  [Outside tent]

  Radio (Karen): I'm scared Tom.

  Tom: What's the matter? Are the kids alright?

  must have thrown it with tremendous force too. In truth an almost unimaginable amount of force.

  I tried to picture those claw like hands grabbing this poor creature by the neck and hurling it out her window. Had she even looked at what she held? Had she even glanced back?

  Later in the week Lude told me he'd been wrong. She wasn't a porn star. She was someone else. Someone he didn't know. Did I know? I don't know why I didn't tell him. Probably because his real question was had I fucked her, and what could have been further from the truth? Me, staring down at that lifeless dog, not a speck of blood mind you, just a shadow looking alot like some kind of a charcoal drawing, featureless still, floating in a pool of yellow lamp light. I couldn't even say anything, not a cry, a shout or a word. I couldn't feel anything either, shock alone possessing me, depriving me of any emotional meaning, finally leaving me in a mad debate over what to do with the body: bury it, take it to the pound, throw the thing in a garbage can. I couldn't decide anything. So I just crouched there, my knees burning, finally filling with enough of that distant pain that tells all of us, especially in our sleep, that the time has come to move. But I wanted to give this dog a name first and lists skipped through my mind, endless lists, which in the end ran out. There was no name. I was too late. And so I just stood up and left. Call me an asshole (and fuck you too) my Pekinese friend was gone. Ant food now. At the very least—I reasoned—the body was close enough to the curb. The street sweeper would get it in the morning.

  Another mother to all strays.

  Radio (Karen): No, they're okay. I mean I think they're okay. Daisy, stays in her room. Chad prefers being outside. Who can argue with that. It's something else.

  Tom: What?

  Radio (Karen): All my Feng Shui— Oh Christ, this whole thing doesn't make any sense. How are Navy and Billy doing? Have they found anything? When are they coming back?

  Tom: They heard someone crying. I didn't get it all 'cause the reception was so poor. From what I can gather, they're fine.

  Radio (Karen): Well, I'm not. I don't like being here alone, Tom. In fact I'm fucking fed up with being alone. [She starts crying] I don't like being scared all the time. Wondering if he's going to be alright, then wondering if I'm going to be alright if he's not, knowing I won't be. I'm so tired of being frightened like this. I've had enough Tom. I really have. After this, I'm leaving. I'm taking the kids and I'm going. This wasn't necessary. It could have been avoided. We didn't need to go through all this.

  Tom: [Gently] Karen, Karen, wait a minute. Just back up for a second. First, tell me what you were saying about your Feng Shui stuff.

  Radio (Karen): [Pa
use] The objects. I put all these objects around the house. You remember, to improve the energy, or some such shit.

  Tom: Sure. Crystals and bullfrogs, goldfish and dragons.

  Radio (Karen): Tom, they're all gone.

  Tom: What do you mean?

  Radio (Karen): [Crying harder] They disappeared.

  Tom: Hey Karen. Come on. Did you ask Daisy and Chad? Maybe they took them?

  Radio (Karen): Tom, they're the ones who told me. They wanted to know why I'd gotten rid of it all.

  Day 2: 22:19

  [Outside tent]

  Radio (Navidson): How's Karen [Static]?

  Tom: Not so good, Navy. She's pretty scared. You should get hack here.

  Radio (Navidson): Wh[Static]? [Static] [Static] [Static] [Static]ear you.

  Tom: Navy? Navy?

  [Static]

  Day 2: 23:07

  [Outside tent]

  This is such bullshit. You hear me Mr. Monster . . . BULLSHIT!

  What kind of house do you got here anyway? No lights, no central heating, not even any plumbing! I've been shitting in a corner and pissing on a wall for two days.

  [Getting louder]

  Doesn't that irk you a little, Mr. Monster? I've been shitting in your corner. I've been pissing on your wall.