Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

  " 'Cojones' the waiter replies.

  " 'No, no,' he explains. 'I had them last week and they were much bigger.'

  " 'Ah Senor,' the waiter sighs. 'The bull does not lose every time.'"

  Tom's joke attempts to deflect some of the pain inherent in this protracted wait, but of course nothing can really diminish the growing knowledge that Navidson may have vanished for good.

  Tom eventually returns to the study to try and sleep, but Karen remains in the living room, occasionally dozing off, often trying to reach Navidson on the radios, whispering his name like a lullaby or a prayer.[124]

  In the 5:09 A.M. Hi 8 clip, Karen rests her head on her hands and starts to sleep. There is something eerie about the odd stillness that settles on the living room then, not even remotely affected by Reston's snoring on the couch. It is as if this scene has been impossibly fixed and will never change again, until out of the blue, presumably before the cameras can shut off—no longer ordered to run by the motion detectors—Navidson limps out of the hallway. He is clearly exhausted, dehydrated, and perhaps a little unable to believe he has actually escaped the maze. Seeing Karen, he immediately kneels beside her, attempting to wake her with the gentlest word. Karen, however, drawn so abruptly from her dreams, cannot arrest the shocked gasp summoned by the sound and sight of Navidson. Of course, the moment she realizes he is not a ghost, her terror dissolves into a hug and a flood of words, awakening everyone in the house.

  Several essays have been written about this reunion and yet not one of them suggests Karen has reverted to her former state of dependency. Consider Anita Massine's comments:

  Her initial embrace and happiness is not just about Navidson's return. Karen realizes she has fulfilled her end of the bargain. Her time in that place has come to an end. Navidson's arrival means she can leave.[125]

  Or Garegin Thorndike Taylor's response:

  Where previously Karen might have dissolved into tears and her typical clutching, this time she is clearly more reserved, even terse, relying on her smile for defense.[126]

  Or finally Professor Lyle Macdonough:

  The reason Karen cries out when Navidson wakes her has nothing to do with the inherent terror of that hallway or some other cauche- mar. It has only to do with Navidson. Deep down inside, she really does fear him. She fears he will try to keep her there. She fears he will threaten her slowly forming independence. Only once the reins of consciousness slip into place does she resort to expected modes of welcome.[127]

  Karen clearly refuses to allow Navidson's appearance to alter her plans. She does not accept that merely his presence entitles him to authority. Her mind is made up. Even before he can begin to recount his desperate flight up those stairs or how he found Holloway's equipment,[128] Karen announces her intention to leave for New York City that night.

  Of course by the time they had all sat down and watched The Holloway Tape, Navidson was the only one who had second thoughts about abandoning the cold lure of those halls.

  HOLLOWAY

  More than a handful of people have tried to[ ][129]explain Holloway's madness.

  the center of everything, all of it just another way to finally say: no- no, no junk at all.

  "Throw it away, hoss" Lude said and started to cross to my desk for a closer look. X sprung forward, ordered by instinct, like some animal defending its pride, interposing myself between him and my work, those papers, this thing.

  Lude backed away—in fact that was the first time he'd ever backed away; ever—just a step, but retreating just the same, calling me "weird", calling me "scary."

  I quickly apologized and incoherently tried to explain how I was just sorting some stuff out. Which is true.

  "Bullshit," Lude grunted, perhaps a little angry that I'd frightened him. "For godsake, just look at what you're drawing?" He pointed at all the pictures tacked to my wall, sketched on napkins, the backs of envelopes, anything handy. "Empty rooms, hundreds of black, empty fucking rooms!"

  I don't remember what I mumbled next. Lude waved a bag of grass in front of me, said there was a party up Beachwood canyon, some castle loaded with hookers on X and a basement full of mead. It was interesting to see Lude still defending that line, but I just shook my head.

  He turned to leave and then suddenly spun back around on his heels, producing from his pocket a flash of silver, cishlash-shhhhhhick, the wheel catching on the edge of his thumb, connecting sparks and kerosene . . . his old Zippo drawn like a .44 in some mythical western, drawn by the fella in the white hat, and as it turns out Lude was in fact dressed in white, a creamy linen jacket, which I guess means I would have to be wearing black, and come to think of it I was wearing black—black jeans, black t, black socks. This, however, was not a challenge. It was an offering, and yet one I knew I would not/could not accept.

  Lude shrugged and blew out the flame, the immolating splash of brightness abruptly receding into a long gray thread climbing up to the ceiling before finally collapsing into invisible and untraceable corridors of chaos.

  As he stepped out into the hall, a place with dull walls where a pink corpse occasionally referred to as a carpet stretches over and down the stairs, Lude told me why he'd come by in the first place: "Kyrie's boyfriend's back in town and he's looking for us, you in particular but since I'm the one who introduced you two, he's also after me. Be careful. The guy's a nut." Lude hesitated. He knew Gdansk Man was the least of my worries but I guess he wanted to help.

  "I'll see you around Lude," I mumbled.

  "Get rid of it Hoss, it's killing you."

  Then he tossed me his lighter and padded away, the dim light quickly transforming him into a shadow, then a sound, and finally a silence.

  Maybe he was right.

  Fly from the path.

  I remember the first time I hadn't and a rusty bar had taught me the taste of teeth. The second time I'd been smarter. I fled from the house, scrambled over the back brick wall like an alley cat, and sprinted across the overgrown lot. It took him awhile to find me but when he did, cornering me like some beast in the stairwell of a nearby shop, a chimney sweep business actually, Gallow Sons, something like that, his focus was gone. Time had interceded. Dulled his wrath.

  Raymond still hit me, an open handed slap to my left ear, pain answering the deafening quiet that followed, a distant thump then as my forehead skidded into the concrete wall.

  Raymond was yelling at me, going on about the fights, my fights, at school, about my attitude, my wanderings and how he would kill me if I didn't stop.

  He had killed before, he explained. He could kill again.

  I stopped seeing, something black and painful hissing into my head, gnawing at the bones in my cheeks, tears pouring down my face, though I wasn't crying, my nose was just bleeding, and he hadn't even broken it this time.

  Raymond continued the lesson, his words ineffectually reverberating around me. He was trying to sound like one of his western heroes, doling out profound advice, telling me how I was only "cannon fodder" though he pronounced it like "father" and in a way that seemed to imply he was really referring to himself. I kept nodding and agreeing, while inside I began to uncover a different lesson. X recognized just how much a little fear had helped me—after all I wasn't going to the hospital this time. All along I'd misread my contentious postures as something brave, my willingness to indulge in head-to-head confrontation as noble, even if I was only thirteen and this monster was a marine. I failed to see anger as just another way to cover fear. The bravest thing would be to accept my fear and fear him, really fear him, then heeding that instruction make a much more courageous choice: fly once and for all from his mad blister rage, away from the black convolution of violence he would never untangle, and into the arms of some unknown tomorrow.

  The next morning I told everyone my injuries had come from another schoolyard fight. I started to befriend guile, doped Raymond with compliments and self-deprecating stories. Made-up stories. I dodged, ducked, acquired a whole new vocabulary fo
r bending, for hiding, all while beyond the gaze of them all, I meticulously planned my flight. Of course, I admit now that even though I tested well, I still would never have succeeded had I not received that September, only weeks later, words to find me, my mother's words, tenderly catching my history in the gaps, encouraging and focusing my direction, a voice powerful enough to finally lift my wing and give me the strength to go.

  Little did I know that by the time I managed to flee to Alaska and then to a boarding school, Raymond was already through. Coincidence gave an improbable curse new resonance. Cancer had settled on Raymond's bones, riddling his liver and pancreas with holes. He had nowhere to run and it literally ate him alive. He was dead by the time I turned sixteen.

  I guess one obvious option now is to just get rid of this thing, which if Lude's right, should put an end to all my recent troubles. It's a nice idea but it reeks of hope. False hope. Not all complex problems have easy solutions; so says Science (so warns Science); and so Trenton once warned me, both of us swilling beer in that idling hunk of rust and gold known simply as the Truck; but that had been in another time when there was still a truck and you could talk of solutions in peace without having any first hand knowledge of the problem; and Trenton is an old friend who doesn't live here and who I've not mentioned before.277

  My point being, what if my attacks are entirely unrelated, attributable in fact to something entirely else, perhaps for instance just warning shocks brought on by my own crumbling biology, tiny flakes

  of unknown chemical origin already burning holes through the fabric of my mind, dismantling memories, undoing even the strongest powers of imagination and reason?

  How then do you fly from that path?

  As I recheck and rebolt the door—I've installed a number of extra locks—I feel with the turn of each latch a chill trying to crawl beneath the back of my skull. Putting on the chain only intensifies the feeling, hairs bristling, trying to escape the host because the host is stupid enough to stick around, missing the most obvious fact of all that what I hoped to lock out I've only locked in here with me.

  And no, it hasn't gone away.

  The elusive it is still here with me.

  But there's very little I can do.

  I wash the sweat off my face, do my best to suppress a shiver, can't, return to the body, spread out across the table like papers—and let me tell you there's more than just The Navidson Record lying there—bloodless and still but not at all dead, calling me to it, needing me now like a child, depending on me despite its age. After all, I'm its source, the one who feeds it, nurses it back to health—but not life, I fear—bones of bond paper, transfusions of ink, genetic encryption in xerox; monstrous, maybe inaccurate correlates, but nonetheless there. And necessary to animate it all? For is that not an ultimate, the ultimate goal? Not some heaven sent blast of electricity but me, and not me unto me, but me unto it, if those two things are really at all different, which is still to say—to state the obvious—without me it would perish.

  Except these days nothing's obvious.

  There's something else.

  More and more often, I've been overcome by the strangest feeling that I've gotten it all turned around, by which I mean to say—to state the not-so-obvious—without it I would perish. A moment comes where suddenly everything seems impossibly far and confused, my sense of self derealized depersonalized, the disorientation so severe I actually believe—and let me tell you it is an intensely strange instance of belief—that this terrible sense of relatedness to Zampano's work implies something that just can't be, namely that this thing has created me; not me unto it, but now it unto me, where I am nothing more than the matter of some other voice, intruding through the folds of what even now lies there agape, possessing me with histories I should never recognize as my own; inventing me, defining me, directing me until finally every association I can claim as my own—from Raymond to Thumper, Kyrie to Ashley, all the women, even the Shop and my studio and everything else—is relegated to nothing; forcing me to face the most terrible suspicion of all, that all of this has just been made up and what's worse, not made up by me or even for that matter Zampano.

  Though by whom I have no idea.

  Tonight's candle number twelve has just started to die in a pool of its own wax, a few flickers away from blindness. Last week they turned off my electricity, leaving me to canned goods, daylight and wicks. (God knows why my phone still works.) Ants inhabit the corners.

  One of the most excruciating and impudent works on the subject was written by Jeremy Flint. Regrettably this reprehensible concoction of speculation, fantasy, and repellent prose, also incl[ ]es or refers to primary documents not available anywhere else. Through hard work, luck, or theft, Hint managed to [ ] across some of the notes and summations made by psychiatrist Nancy Tobe who for a br[ ]f period treated Holloway for [ ] depression:

  Spiders prepare a grave. I use Lude's Zippo to light another candle, the flame revealing what I'd missed before, on the front, etched in chrome, the all red melancholy King of Hearts—did Lude have any idea what he was really suggesting I do?—imagining then not one flame but a multitude, a million orange and blue tears cremating the body, this labor, and in that sudden burst of heat, more like an explosion, flinging the smoldering powder upon the room, a burning snow, falling everywhere, erasing everything, until finally it erases all evidence of itself and even me.

  In the distance, I hear the roar, faint at first but getting louder, as if some super-heated billowing cloud has at last begun to descend from the peak of some invisible, impossibly high mountain peak, and rushing down at incredible speeds too, instantly enclosing and carbonizing everything and anyone in the way.

  I consider retrieving it. What I recently bought. I may need it. Instead I recheck the measuring tapes. At least there's no change there. But the roar keeps growing, almost unbearable, and there's nowhere left to turn. Get it out of the trunk, I tell myself. Then the elusive "it" momentarily disappears.

  "Get out," I scream.

  There's no roar.

  A neighbor's having a party.

  People are laughing.

  Luckily they haven't heard me or if they have they've sense enough to ignore me.

  I wish I could ignore me.

  There's only one choice now: finish what Zampano himself failed to finish. Re-inter this thing in a binding tomb. Make it only a book, and if that doesn't help . . . retrieve what I've been hiding in the trunk, something I ordered three weeks ago and finally picked up today, purchased in Culver city at Martin B. Retting (11029 Washington Blvd)—one Heckler Koch USP .45 ACP, kept for that moment when I'm certain nothing's left. The thread has snapped. No sound even to mark the breaking let alone the fall. That long anticipated disintegration, when the darkest angel of all, the horror beyond all horrors, sits at last upon my chest, permanently enfolding me in its great covering wings, black as ink, veined in Bees' purple. A creature without a voice. A voice without a name. As immortal as my life. Come here at long last to summon the wind. 277

  Page one of Dr. Tobe's notes contains only two words, capitalized, written in pencil, dead center on a page torn from a legal pad:

  CONSIDERING SUICIDE.

  [ ]he next two pages are for the most part illegible, with words such as "family" " father" " loyalty" "the old home" appearing every now and then in an otherwise dark scribble of ink.

  However, Tobe's typed summation following the first session offers a few [ ] details concerning Holloway's life: "Despite his own achievement [sic] which range from Scuba Diving expeditions in the G[

  ]Aqaba, leading climbers up the Matterhorn, organizing numerous [

  ] as well

  as expeditions to the North and South Pole, Holloway feels inadequate and suffers from acute and chronic depression. Unable to see how much he has already accomplished, he constantly dwells on suicide. I am considering several anti-depressants [

  ] and have recommended daily counseling."[130]

  Hint goes o
n to cover the second visit which [ ] much repeats his observations concerning the first. The third visit, however, gives up the first th[]rn.

  In another series of notes Tobe describes Holloway's first love: "At seventeen, he met a young woman named Eliz[]beth who he described to me as 'Beautiful like a doe. Dark eyes. Brown hair. Pretty ankles, kinda skinny and weak.' A short courtship ensued and for a brief time they were a couple.[ ]In Holloway's XXXXXXX[131], the relationship ended because he didn't [sic] the Varsity football squad. By his own admission he was never any good at 'team sports.' Her interest in him faded and she soon beg[ ] dating the starting tackle, leaving Holloway broken hearted with an increased sen[ ]e of [illegible] and inadequacy."[132]

  Nancy Tobe was a fairly green therapist and took far too many notes. Perhaps she felt that by studying these pages later, she could synthesize the material and present her patient with a solution. She had not yet real[ ] that her notes or her solutions would mean absolutely no[ ]g. Patients must discover their peace for themselves. Tobe [ ] only a guide. The

  solution is personal. It is ironic then that had it not been for Tobe's inexperience, the notes so intrinsic to achieving at least a fair understanding of Holloway's inner torment would never have come into existence. People always demand experts, though sometimes they are fortunate enough to find a beginner.[133]