Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

  [Then softer]

  Of course, the piss has dried up. And the crap just vanishes. You gobble it all up don't you? Turtles, shit, it doesn't matter to you.

  [Loud again]

  Indiscriminate bastard! Doesn't it make you sick? It makes me sick. Makes me wanna retch.

  [Long series of echoes]

  Day 3: 00:49

  [Outside tent; reaching into his ziploc bag for the last joint]

  And all through the house not a creature was stirring not even a mouse. Not even you Mr. Monster. Just Tom, poor ol' Tom, who was doing plenty of stirring around this house until finally he went stir crazy wishing there was a creature any creature—even a mouse.

  Day 3: 00:54

  [Outside tent]

  Radio (Navidson): [Bang] We're in shit now . . . [Static]

  Tom: Navy, what's happening? I can barely hear you.

  Radio (Navidson): Jed's been shot, he's bleed [Static]

  Tom: Shot? By who?!

  Radio:

  [Pop-Pop-Pop]

  Reston: I can't see a fucking thing, [crack . . . crack . . . crack . . . cracK]

  Reston: Awwwwwwwwwww shit! [. . . cracK -BANG- craCK . . . craGK crACK. cRACK. cRACK. CRACK. CRACK. ]

  Tom: What the hell was that?!

  Radio (Navidson): Tom [Static] [Static]. I'm gonna [Static] [Static] [Static] [Static] Wax. We have to—shit— [Static . . . ]

  Tom: I'm losing you Navy.

  Radio (Navidson): [Static]

  Tom: Navy, do you read me? Over.

  Day 3: 01:28

  [Outside tent]

  Radio (Navidson): [Static] it's probably gonna take us a good eight hours to make it back to the stairs. Tom, I need you to meet me at the bottom [Static] We need help. We can't carry them up ourselves. Also, you're [Static] [Static] [Static] [Static]eed to [Static] a doctor [Static]

  [Static . . . ]

  Day 3: 07:39

  [Outside tent]

  [Tom looks down the Spiral Staircase, ignites a lightstick and drops it.]

  Are you down there, Mr. Monster?

  [Below, the lightstick flickers and dies. Tom recoils.]

  No way. Not gonna happen, Navy. I've been alone in this shithole for almost three days and now you want me to go down there alone? No way.

  [Tom descends a few steps, then quickly retreats]

  No can do.

  [Tom tries again, makes it down to the first flight]

  There that's not so bad. Fuck you, Mr. Monster! Yeah, FUCK YOU!!!

  [Then as Tom starts down the second flight, the stairs suddenly stretch and drop ten feet. Tom looks up and sees the circular shape of the stairwell bend into an ellipse before snapping back to a circle again.]

  [Tom's breathing gets noticeably more rapid.]

  You are here, aren't you Mr. Monster?

  [A pause. And then out of nowhere comes that growl. More like a roar. Almost deafening. As if it originated right next to Tom.]

  [Tom panics and sprints back up the stairs. The shot from the camcorder instantly becomes an incoherent blur of walls, banisters, and the dim light thrown by the halogen. ]

  [A minute later, Tom reaches the top.]

  Day 3: 07:53

  [Outside tent]

  Tom: Karen . . .

  Radio (Karen): Are you alright?

  Tom: I'm coming in.

  A Short Analysis of Tom's Story

  How does one approach this quirky sequence? What does it reveal about Tom? What does it say about The Navidson Record?

  For one thing, Navidson edited this segment months later. No doubt, what would soon take place deeply influenced the way he treated the material. As Nietzsche wrote, "It is our future that lays down the law of our today."

  All throughout Tom's Story, Navidson tenderly focuses on Tom's mirth and his ability to play in the halls of hell, those dolorous mansions of Isolation, Fear, and Doubt. He captures his brother trying to help Karen and him with their foundering relationship, and he reveals Tom's surprising strength in the face of such utter darkness and cold.

  There is nothing hasty about Tom's Story. Navidson has clearly put an enormous amount of work into these few minutes. Despite obvious technological limitations, the cuts are clean and sound beautifully balanced with the rhythm and order of every shot only serving to intensify even the most ordinary moment.

  This is a labor of love, a set piece sibling to Karen's short film on Navidson.

  Perhaps because Tom's antics are so amusing and so completely permeated with warmth, we could easily miss how hand shadows, an abundance of bad jokes and the birth of "Mr. Monster" ultimately come to mean Sorrow.

  If Sorrow is deep regret over someone loved, there is nothing but regret here, as if Navidson with his great eye had for the first time seen what over the years he never should have missed.

  Or should have missed all along.

  Not every cave search has a Terry Tarkington who knows the cave like his own home. Six months earlier three boys had vanished from the face of the earth near a similar Missouri cave they had been exploring. Despite weeklong search operations of incredible extent, they remain missing to this day.

  - William R. Halliday, M.D.

  American Caves and Caving

  When Navidson and Reston finally reach the foot of the stairway,

  Tom is not there.

  It is almost noon on the third day of the rescue attempt. Reston's gloves are torn; his hands are blistered and bleeding. Wax's breathing is shallow and inconsistent. Jed's body weighs heavily on Navidson. All of which, bad as it is, is made even more unbearable when Navidson realizes his

  brother has not come down the stairs to meet them.

  "We'll manage Navy," Reston says, trying to console his friend.

  "I shouldn't be surprised," Navidson says gruffly. "This is Tom. This is what Tom does best. He lets you down."

  Which is when the rope slaps down on the floor. 278

  After making his unsuccessful bid to reach the bottom of the Spiral Staircase, Tom had retraced his way back to the living room where he began to construct a light gurney out of scrap wood. Karen helped out by going to town to purchase additional parts, including a pulley and extra rope.

  Navidson was wrong. Tom may not have gone down those stairs but the alternative he came up with was far better.

  Within minutes Navidson and Reston are hoisting Wax up the 100ft shaft. As a safety precaution, Navidson ties the end of the rope around the bottom banister. Thus if something should happen, causing them to lose their hold on the rope, the stretcher would still stop short of hitting the

  bottom by several feet.

  A few seconds later, a quarter clatters on the floor, indicating that Wax has safely reached the top and the stretcher can be re-lowered and

  readied for the next load.

  Jed is next. Hand over hand, Navidson and Reston haul the body upwards, the excess rope gathering in coils around their feet. As Tom does not operate a Hi 8 during this sequence, we can only imagine what his reaction was as he struggled to lift the corpse over the railing. Nonetheless, a minute later, a second quarter clatters on the floor. Reston goes next.

  Navidson double-checks to make sure the end of the rope is still securely tied to the last banister and then begins hoisting his friend up the

  shaft.

  "You are one heavy bastard," Navidson grunts. Reston lights a green flare and gives Navidson a big toothy grin:

  "Going up like the fourth of July."

  At first everything seems to be proceeding smoothly. Slowly but surely, Navidson draws more and more slack rope down onto the floor, steadily lifting Reston up through the bore of those stairs. Then about half way up, something strange happens: the excess rope at Navidson's feet starts to vanish while the rope he holds begins to slip across his fingers and palms with enough speed to leave a burning gash. Navidson finally has to let go. Reston, however, does not fall. In fact, Reston's ascent only accelerates, marked by the burning

  green l
ight he still holds in his hand.

  But if Navidson is no longer holding onto the rope, what could possibly

  be pulling Reston to the

  idol

  Then as the stairway starts getting darker and darker and as that faintly illuminated circle above—the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel—starts getting smaller and smaller, the answer becomes clear:

  dropping,

  and as it slips,

  d

  r

  a

  g

  g

  i

  n

  g

  Reston

  up

  with

  it.

  £6Z

  Then at a certain point, the depth of the stairway begins to exceed the length of the rope. By the time Reston reaches the top the rope has gone taut, but the stairway still continues to stretch. Realizing what is about to happen, Navidson makes a desperate grab for the only remaining thread connecting him to home, but he is too late. About ten feet above the last banister

  the

  r

  o

  P

  e

  sn-

  -ps

  Time has accelerated and I've done nothing to mark its passage. Yesterday seemed like the beginning of July but somehow today finds me mid-way through August. When I went to work everyone got incredibly uncomfortable and drifted away. My boss looked stunned. He finally asked me what I was doing and I just shrugged and told him I was about to start building needles.

  "Johnny, are you alright?" he said in a very sincere and concerned tone, without even a note of sarcasm, which was probably the weirdest part.

  "Sort of, I guess," I replied.

  "I had to hire someone else, Johnny," he said very quietly, pointing over to a young blonde woman already in the process of cleaning out the back storeroom. "You've been gone for three weeks."

  I heard myself mutter "I have?" even though I knew I'd been away, it just hadn't seemed that long, but of course it had been that long, I just hadn't been able to make it in or even call. I hadn't been able to make it anywhere for that matter and I pretty much kept the phone unplugged.

  "I'm so sorry," I blurted, suddenly feeling very bad, because I'd let my boss down and I could see he was a pretty decent guy after all, though at the same time feeling also a little relieved about the news of my replacement. It made everything seem a little lighter.

  My boss handed me my last check and then wrote down a number.

  "Get yourself in a program man. You look like shit."

  He didn't even ask if I was strung out, he just assumed it and somehow that struck me as funny, although I held off from laughing until I got outside. A hooker in silver slippers quickened by me.

  Back in my studio, I discovered a message from Kyrie. I'd thrown her number out weeks ago. I'd thrown everyone's number out. Nothing could be done. I was gone from everyone. I erased her message and returned to the house.

  In the back of my mind, I understood I would need money soon, but for some reason that didn't bother me. I still had my Visa card, and since selling my CD player, I'd further improved on that resulting silence by insulating my room with egg cartons and limiting the sun's glare with strips of tinfoil stapled to pieces of cardboard placed over my windows, all of which helps me feel a little safer.

  Mostly the clock tells me the time, though I suspect the hands run intermittently fast and slow, so I'm never sure of the exact hour. It doesn't matter. I'm no longer tied to anyone's schedule.

  As a precaution, I've also nailed a number of measuring tapes along the floor and crisscrossed a few of them up and down the walls. That way I can tell for sure if there are any shifts. So far the dimensions of my room remain true to the mark.

  Sadly enough, despite all this—even six weeks without alcohol, drugs or sex—the attacks persist. Mostly now when I'm sleeping. I suddenly jerk awake, unable to breathe, bound in ribbons of darkness, drenched in sweat, my heart dying to top two hundred. I've no recollection what vision has made me so apoplectic, but it feels like the hinges must have finally failed, whatever was trying to get in, at

  last succeeding, instantly tearing into me, and though I'm still conscious, slashing my throat with those long fingers and ripping my ribs out one by one with its brutal jaws.

  On a few occasions, these episodes have caused me to dry heave, my system wrenching up stomach acid in response to all the fear and confusion. Maybe I have an ulcer. Maybe I have a tumor. Right now the only thing that keeps me going is some misunderstood desire to finish The Navidson Record. It's almost as if I believe questions about the house will eventually return answers about myself, though if this is true, and it may very well not be, when the answers arrive the questions are already lost.

  For example, on my way back from the Shop, something strange surfaced. I say "strange" because it doesn't seem connected to anything—nothing my boss said or Navidson did or anything else immediately on my mind. I was just driving towards my place and all of a sudden I realized I was wrong. I'd been to Texas though not the state. And what's more the memory came back to me with extraordinary vividness, as clean and crisp as a rare LA day, which usually happens in winter, when the wind's high and the haze loosens its hold on the hills so the line between earth and sky suddenly comes alive with the shape of leaves, thousands of them on a thousand branches, flung up against an opaline sky—

  —An eccentric gay millionaire from Norway who owned a colonial house in a Cleveland suburb and a tea shop in Kent. Mr. Tex Geisa. A friend of a friend of a passing someone I knew having passed along an invitation: come to Tex's for an English tea, four sharp, on one unremarkable Saturday in April. I was almost eighteen.

  The someone had flaked at the last minute but having nothing better to do I'd gone on alone, only to find there, seated in a wicker chair, listening to Tex, nibbling on her scone . . . Strange how clarity can come at such a time and place, so unexpectedly, so out of the blue, though who's firing the bolt?, a memory in this case, shot out of the August sun, Apollo invisible in all that light, unless you have a smoked glass which I didn't, having only those weird sea stories, Tex delivering one after another in his equally strange monotone, strangely reminiscent of something else, whirlpools, polar bears, storms and sinking ships, one sinking ship after another, in fact that was the conclusion to every single story he told, so that we, his strange audience, learned not to wonder about the end but paid more attention to the tale preceding the end, those distinguishing events before the inevitable rush of icy water, whirlpools, polar bears and good ol' ianis fatuus. perilous to chase, ideal to incarnate, especially when you're the one pursued by the inevitable ending, an ending Tex had at that moment been relating—deckwood on fire, the ship tilting, giving way to the pursuit of the sea, water extinguishing the flames in a burst of steam, an unnoticed hiss, especially in that sounding out of death, a grinding relentless roar, which like a growl in fact, overwhelms the pumps, fills up deck after deck with the Indian Ocean, leaving those on board with no place else to go, I remember, no I don't remember any of it anymore, I never heard the rest, I had gone off to piss, flushing the toilet, a roar there too, grinding, taking everything down in what could, yes it really could be described as a growl, but leaving Tex's sinking ship and that sound for the garden where who should I find but . . . my memory, except I realize now my ship, isn't Tex's ship, the one I'm seeing now, not remembering but something else, resembling icy meadows and scrambles for a raft and loss . . . though not the same, a completely different story after all, built upon story after story, so many, how many?, stories high, but building what? and why?—like for instance, why—the approaching "it" proving momentarily vague—did it have to leave Longyearbyen, Norway and head North in the dead of summer? Up there summer means day, a constant ebb of days flowing into more days, nothing but constant light washing over all that ice and water, creating strange ice blinks on the horizon, flashing out a code, a distress signal?—maybe; or some othe
r prehistoric meaning?—maybe; or nothing at all?—also maybe; nothing's all; where monoliths of ice cloaked in the haar, suddenly rise up from the water, threatening to smash through the reinforced steel hull, until an instant before impact the monstrous ice vanishes and those who feared it become yet another victim to a looming mirage, caused by temperature changes frequent in summer, not to mention the chiding of the more experienced hands drunk on cold air and Bokkol beer . . . Welcome to The Atrocity, a 412ft, 13,692 ton vessel carrying two cargoes within its holds, one secret, the other extremely flammable, like TNT, and though the sailors are pleasant enough and some married and with children and though the captain turns out to be a kind agent of art history, especially where the works of Turner, de Vos and Goya are concerned, that strange cargo could have cared less when towards the bow, in the first engine room, sparks from a blown fuse suddenly found a puddle of oil, an unhappy mistake any old mop could have corrected, should have, but it's too late, the sparks from the fuse having spun wildly out into space, tiny embers, falling, cooling, gone, except for one which has with just one flickering kiss transformed the greasy shadow into a living Hand of angry yellow, suddenly washing over and through that room, across the threshold, past the open door, who left it open? and out into the corridors, heat building, sucking in the air, eating it, until the air comes in a wind, whistling through the corridors like the voice of god—not my description but the captain's—and they all heard it even before the ugly black smoke confirmed the panic curdling in all of their guts: a fire loose and spreading with terrifying speed to other decks leaving the captain only one choice: order water on board, which he does, except he has misjudged the fire, no one could have imagined it would move that fast, so much fire and therefore more water needed, too much water, let loose now across the decks, an even mightier presence drowning out the flames and the hiss in its own terrifying roar, not the voice of god, but whose?, and when the captain hears that sound, he knows what will happen next, they all know what will happen next even before the thought, their thoughts, describe what their bodies have already begun to prepare for, the chthonic expectation which commanded the thought in the first place— . . . sos.sos.sos . . . SOS . . . SOS . . . SOS . . . sos. sos. sos . . . —way way too late, though who knew they'd all be so long, long gone by the time the spotter planes arrived, though they all fear it, a fear growing from that growl loose inside! their ship, tearing, slashing, hurling anyone aside who dares hesitate before it, bow before it, pray before it . . . breaking some, ripping apart others, burying all of them, and it's still only water, gutting the inside, destroying the pumps, impotent things impossibly set against transporting outside that which has always waited outside but now on gaining entrance, on finding itself inside, has started to make an outside of the whole—there is no more inside—and the decks tilt to the starboard side, all that awesome weight rocking the ship, driving the hull down towards deeper water, closing the gap between the deck rail and the surface of the sea, until the physics of tugawar intercede, keel and ballast fighting back against the violent heave, driving The