Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

  Atrocity away from this final starboard plunge, heading back up, that's right, righting itself, a recorrection promising balance, outside and inside again, except the rock and roll away from the sea proves a useless challenge . . . the monstrous war of ice water below also heads away from the starboard side of the ship and as the captain's deck for a brief instant levels out, the water within also levels out, everyone hopes for a pause, though really the water never stops, following through on the powerful surge away from the starboard side, heading now towards the port side—Sososososos—past the center—Sososososos— coalescing into a wave—Sososososos . . . useless, obviously—and the captain knows it, hearing their death before the actual impact reverberates through the hull—and there never really had been time for lifeboats . . . —the wave beneath them pounding into the port side, this time powerful enough to drive the ship all the way over, burying the rail of the top deck beneath water, then the stack, letting all of the sea within, banishing the inside once and for all, and though some fathers still make for the lifeboats, it's all useless, a theatrical gesture born out of habit and habit is never hope, though some actually might have survived—habit does have its place—had there been a little more time, sinking time, except what was flammable below, now explodes, an angry Hand punching through bulkhead and hull, where a reciprocal nearly maternal Hand reaches up from the darkness below and drags all of them down, captain, deck hands, fathers, loners and of course sons—though no daughters—so many of them trapped inside it now, tons of dark steel, slicing down into the blackness, vanishing in under twelve minutes from the midnight sun, so much sun and glistening light, sparking signals to the horizon, reminiscent of a message written once upon a time, a long, long time ago, though now no more, lost, or am I wrong again? never written at all, let alone before . . . unlawful hopes? • . . retroactive crimes? . . . unknowable rapes? an attempt to conceal the Hand that never set a word upon this page, or any page, nor ever was for that matter, no Hand at all, though I still know the message, I think, in all those blinks of light upon the ice, inferring something from what is not there or ever was to begin with, otherwise who's left to catch the signs? crack the codes? even if the message is ultimately preternatural and unsympathetic . . . especially since right now in that place where The Atrocity sunk without a trace there is no sympathy, just blind blinks of light upon the ice, a mockery of meaning where meaning had never been needed before, there away from the towering glacial peaks near Nordaustlandet, a flat plate of water with only a few solitary bubbles and even those gone soon enough, long gone by the time the spotter plane flies over this mirror of sky, the only distinguishing mark, a hole of blinding light, rising and descending with the hours, though never disappearing, so that even as the plane's tiny shadow races across the whisper of old storms, or is it the approach of a new storm?, something foretold in those thousands and thousands of cat paws, reflection draws a second shadow on the vault of heaven . . . The Atrocity is lost along with its secret cargo and all aboard . . . shhhhhhhhhhhh . . . and who would ever know of the pocket of air in that second hold where one man hid, having sealed the doors, creating a momentary bit of inside, a place to live in, to breathe in, a man who survived the blast and the water and instead lived to feel another kind of death, a closing in of such impenetrable darkness, far blacker than any Haitian night or recounted murder, though he did find a flashlight, not much against the darkness he could hear outside and nothing against the cold rushing in as this great coffin plummeted downwards, pressure building though not enough to kill him before the ship hit a shelf of rock and rested, knocks in the hull like divers knocking with hammers—though, he knows, there are no divers only air bubbles and creaks lying about the future. He drops the flashlight, the bulb breaks, nothing to see anyway, losing air, losing his sense of his home, his daughters, his five blonde daughters and . . . and ... he feels the shelf of rock give way and suddenly the ship rushes down again, no rock now, no earth, so black, and nothing to stop this final descent . . . except maybe the shelf of rock didn't give way, maybe the ship hasn't moved at all, maybe what he feels now is only his own fall as the air runs out and the cold closes in for good and I've lost sight of him, I'm not even sure if he really had five blonde daughters, I'm losing any sense of who he was, no name, no history, only the awful panic he felt, universal to us all, as he sunk inside that thing, down into the unyielding waters, until peace finally did follow panic, a sad and mournful peace but somewhat pleasant after all, even though he lay there alone, chest heaving, yes, understanding home, understanding hope, and losing all of it, all long long gone a long long time ago . . . shhhhhhhhhhhhh . . . when next to him, not a foot away, lay Something he never saw, no one saw, for he had come upon the secret when he escaped into this cargo hold but never knew it, though it might have saved him, saved us all for that matter, but it's gone, letters of salt read by the sea . . . and I too have lost The Atrocity . . . and the sun pours in on me, surfaces once transparent now reflect, like a sea of a different sort, and I forget my ship, or I lose sight of it, or is that the same thing? to a time long before I saw in my own holds two cargoes, one a secret, the other extremely flammable, the flammable put there by invisible hands for invisible reasons . . . when I remembered her in the garden where she wandered away from all those ugly ends in the Indian Ocean, far from my arctic one, and found flowers and a fountain, perfume and a breeze, a warm breeze . . . Not Texas but Tex's, Tex's tea, where I met Ashley—Ashley, Ashley, Ashley . . . the sun could make you sneeze—only back then her hair was dyed neon green, matching her Doc boots, a match made in heaven, both of us together, talking and talking, at first timidly and then responding more avidly to the obvious attraction both of us could feel until she gave me her number and I wrote down my number, my first name and my last name, which was how, years later, she finally found the right number to call and she kissed me and I kissed her and we kissed for a while more until she invited me home and I said no. I had fallen in love with her, flash of gold and sunlight and Rome, and I wanted to wait, in three days call her, court her, marry her, impregnate her and fill our house with five blonde daughters, until . . . oh no, where have I gone now? horror but not horror but another kind of -orro-? or both, or I'm not sure, suddenly flooding through me, what back then had only been weeks away, in fact right around the corner from there, a legacy of leaving, fast approaching: excrement—let go . . . —urine—let go . . . —and burst conjunctiva—letting go streaks of red tears. All I could hold but in the end not save. Of course I lost everything. I lost her number, I lost her, and then in a fugue of erasure, I lost the memory of her, so that by the time she called she was gone along with the kisses and the promise and all that hope. Even after our strange reunion in the hammock suspended over strewn decomposing leaves from a banana tree, later followed by an even stranger goodbye, she was still long, long gone. I know I am too late. I'm lost inside and no longer convinced there's a way out. Bye-bye Ashley and goodbye to the one you knew before I found him and had to let him go.

  (Considering this was a 7/16" dynamic kernmantle cord it is not difficult to imagine the sort of force acting upon it.)[113]

  Above him, Navidson hears a faint cry and then nothing. Not even

  the tiniest hole of light.

  In The Reston Interview, we learn from Billy how the pulley at the top was torn from the banister. Luckily, Tom managed to grab him as well as the rope before "the whole kit and caboodle" plummeted back down the shaft. "It took us a few minutes to get our bearings," Reston tells the camera. "We still weren't sure what happened."

  For the final shot of this section, Navidson loads his Arriflex with a 100ft of high-speed tungsten, uses a five minute ultra high intensity lightstick to illuminate the area, and rolls his Hi 8 to record sound.

  "For almost an hour," he begins. "I waited, rested, kept hoping something would change. It didn't. Eventually I started going over my stuff, trying to figure out what exactly to do next. Then all of a sudden I heard something
clatter behind me. I turned around and there lying on the floor, just off to the side here, was the third quarter. [He holds up the coin] If Tom dropped it say a few minutes after Reston reached the top, then it's been falling for at least fifty minutes. I'm too muddled to do the math but it doesn't take a genius to realize I'm an impossible distance down.[114]

  "I don't know how I'm going to get back. The radio's dead. If I can find my pack and Jed's, I'll have water and food for at least three days with maybe four days worth of batteries. But what will that do? Non gratum

  anus rodentum,[115] Hell."

  The film runs out here,

  leaving nothing else behind but an unremarkable

  white

  310

  screen

  THE WAIT

  Teppet C. Brookes had seen plenty of children's drawings in her life. Having taught all grades from kindergarten through sixth grade, she was familiar with a vast array of stick figures, objects, and plots. This was not the first time she had seen a wolf, a tiger, or a dragon. The problem was that these wolves did not just stalk quietly through cadmium woods; their teeth drew madder and rose from each other's throats. The tigers did not just sleep on clover; they clawed Sunday red and indigo from celadon hills. And the dragon with its terrible emerald tail and ruby glare did not merely threaten; it incinerated everything around it with a happy blossom of heliotrope and gamboge.

  And yet even these violent fantasies were nothing compared to what lay in wait at the centre of the drawing.

  The week before Navidson set out on the rescue attempt, Brookes had asked her third grade class to draw a picture of their house. The one Chad handed in had no chimney, windows, or even a door. In fact, it was nothing more than a black square filling ninety percent of the page. Furthermore, several layers of black crayon and pencil had been applied so that not even a speck of the paper beneath could show through. In the thin margins, Chad had added the marauding creatures.

  It was an extremely odd image and stuck with Brookes. She knew Chad had recently moved to Virginia and had already been involved in several scuffles in the school playground. Though she was hardly satisfied with her conclusion, she decided the picture reflected the stress caused by the move and the new surroundings. But she also made a note to keep an eye on him as the year progressed.

  She would not have to wait that long.

  [1]". . . a slow shadow spreads across the prairie,/ but still, the act of naming it, of guessing/ what is its nature and its circumstances/ creates a fiction, not a living creature,/not one of those who wander on the earth." As translated by Alastair Reid. — Ed.

  Brookes usually went straight home after school, but that Friday, quite by chance, she wandered into the kindergarten classroom. A number of drawings hung on the wall. One in particular caught her eye. The same wolves, the same tigers, the same dragon, and at the centre, though this time only two-thirds the size of the page, an impenetrable square, composed of several layers of black and cobalt blue crayon, with not even the slightest speck of white showing through.

  That picture had been drawn by Daisy.

  Though Brookes lacked a formal degree in psychology, two decades of teaching, nearly half of it at Sawatch Elementary, had exposed her to enough child abuse to last a lifetime. She was familiar with the signs and not just the obvious ones like malnutrition, abrasion, or unnatural shyness. She had learned to read behavior patterns, eating habits, and even drawings. That said, she still had never encountered such a striking similarity between a five year old girl and her eight year old brother. The collective artistry was appalling. "Now heck, I've survived two bad marriages and seen my share of evil along the way. I don't get fazed by much, but let me tell you just seeing those pictures gave me the willies."[116]

  Teppet C. Brookes could have contacted the Department of Children's Services. She could have even called the Navidsons and requested a consultation. That Monday, however, when neither Chad nor Daisy showed up at school, she decided to pay the Navidsons a little visit herself. Willies or not, curiosity got the best of her: "Truth be told, I just had to take a gander at the place that had inspired those drawings."[117]

  During her lunch break, Brookes climbed into her Ford Bronco and made the fifteen minute drive to Ash Tree Lane. "I thought the house was nice and quaint on the outside. I was expecting something else I guess. To tell you the truth, I almost drove off but since I'd made the drive, I decided I should at least introduce myself. I had a good excuse. I wanted to know why both kids were not in school. And heck, if it was Chicken Pox, I've had mine, so that was no matter."[118]

  Brookes recalls looking at her watch as she walked toward the front door: "It was close to one. I knocked or rang the door bell, I don't remember. Then I heard the screams. Wails. I've heard that kind of grief before. I started banging real hard. A second later an Afro-American man in a wheelchair opened the door. He seemed surprised to see me, like he was expecting someone else. I could tell he was in pretty bad shape, his hands all ripped up and bleeding. I didn't know what to say so I told him I was from the school. He just nodded and told me he was waiting for the ambulance and would I mind giving him a hand."

  Brookes was hardly prepared for the slaughterhouse she was about to enter: a woman sobbing in the living room, a big man holding her, two bodies in the kitchen surrounded by blood, and on the staircase Chad sitting next to his little sister Daisy who kept quietly singing to no one in particular words no one else could understand—"ba. dah. ba-ba."

  Brookes lasted five minutes, crossing herself too many times to help anyone. Fortunately the sheriff, the paramedics, and an ambulance soon arrived. "I had entered a war zone and I have to be honest, it overwhelmed me. I could tell my blood pressure was rising. You know sometimes you go into something thinking you're going to make all the difference. You're going to save the situation. Make it right. But that was too much for me. It was real humbling. [Starts to cry] I never saw the kids after that. Though I still have their drawings."260

  In some respects, the distillate of crayon and colour traced out by the hands of two children captures the awfulness at the heart of that house better than anything caught on film or tape, those shallow lines and imperfect shapes narrating the light seeping away from their lives. Brookes, however, is not the only one to have seen those drawings. Chad and Daisy's room is full of them, the monstrous black square getting progressively larger and darker, until in Chad's case, not even the barest margin survives.

  Karen knows her kids are in trouble. A clip of Hi 8 catches her telling them that as soon as their father returns she will take them all to "grandma's."

  Unfortunately, when Navidson, Tom and Reston disappear down that hallway early Saturday morning, Karen is put in an impossible situation: torn between monitoring the radios and looking after Chad and Daisy. In the end, separation from Navidson proves more painful. Karen keeps by the radios.