Mark Z Danielewski

by House Of Leaves (pdf)

  Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold.

  I will become, I have become, a creature unstirred by history, no longer moved by the present, just hungry, blind and at long last full of mindless wrath.

  Gdansk Man dies.

  Soon Kyrie will too.

  October 30, 1998

  What's happened here? My memory's in flakes. Haven't slept. Nightmares fuse into waking minutes or are they hours? What scenes? What scenes. Atrocities. They are unspeakable but still mine. The blood though, not all of it's mine. I've lost sense of what's real and what's not. What I've made up, what has made me.

  Somehow I managed to get back to my hotel room. Past the clerk. Had to lock the door. Keep it locked. Barricaded. Thank god for the guns. I'll need the guns now. Thoughts tear suddenly through my

  head. I feel sick. Full of revolt. Something unright sloshes in my guts, though I know they're empty.

  What's that smell here?

  What have I done? Where have I gone?

  October 30, 1998 (A little later)

  I've just found a stack of Polaroids. Pictures of houses. I have no idea where they came from. Did I take them? Maybe they were left by someone else, some other tenant, here before me. Should I leave them for the next tenant, the one who must inevitably come after me?

  And yet they are familiar, like this journal. Could someone have given them to me? Or maybe I bought them myself at some flea market.

  "How much for the pics?"

  "The box?"

  "All of them. The whole box."

  "Nuts. Cents."

  Someone else's. Someone else's memories. Virginia or not Virginia but anywhere homes, lined up in a row, or not in a row. Quiet as sleeping trees. Simple houses. Houses from a car. More houses. And there in the middle, on the side of the road, one dead cat.

  Oh god what constant re-angling of thoughts, an endless rearrangement of them, revealing nothing but shit. What breaks. What gives.

  And not just the photos.

  The journal too. I thought I'd only written a few entries but now I can see—I can feel—it's nearly full, but I don't recall any of it. Is it even in my hand?

  October Three Zed, Ninety Eight. That's the day today. That's the date. Top of this page. But the first page in the journal isn't October Three Zed but May One. May one mean—meaning, I mean—months and months of journey. Before Lude died. Before the horror. Or all of it horror since right now I can't connect any of it.

  It's not me.

  It cannot be.

  As soon as I write I've already forgotten.

  I must remember.

  I must read.

  I must read.

  I must read.

  May 1, 1998

  On the side of route 636, I see a tabby, head completely gone, a smear of red. Probably killed by some stupid fucking I-Don't-Really-Know-How-To-Drive motorist. Nearby another cat, a great big gray thing, watches. Runs off when I approach.

  Later, after I've driven down through Alliance, over to California Crossroads up to Highgate and then back towards Conham Wharf, I return to the same spot and sure enough the gray cat is back, just sitting there, though this time refusing to leave. What was it doing? Was it grieving or just waiting, waiting for the tabby to wake up?

  No one here has heard of Zampano.

  No one here has heard of the Navidsons.

  I've found no Ash Tree Lane.

  Months of travel and I've still found no relief.

  Some bullets:

  • On the Jamestown-Scotland Wharf Ferry I look down at the water and suddenly feel myself fill with a memory of love's ruin, circumscribed by war and loss. The memories are not my own. I've no idea whose they are or even where they came from. Then for an instant, feeling stripped and bare, I teeter on an invisible line suspended between something terrible and something terribly sad. Fortunately, or unfortunately, before I fall one way or the other, the ferry reaches the Jamestown colony.

  An afternoon spent looping around the Pitch and Tar Swamp unveils no secrets. Standing out on Black Point, gazing over The Thorofare, shows me nothing more than the idle words of a spring wind writing unreadable verse in the crests of small waves. Are there answers hidden there? In what language?

  Past a bank of pay phones, where a tall man in John Lennon glasses speaks inexplicably of beasts and burns, there is no future, school children scream their way into the visitor's center, a stream of crayon and pastel, oblivious, playful, shoving each other in front of the various dioramas, all of them momentarily delighted by all those

  baskets, ancient weapons and glazed mannequin expressions—though nothing more—their attention quickly shifting, drifting?, soon enough prodding their teachers to take them outside again to the ships on which the settlers first arrived, reconstructed ships, which is exactly what their teachers do, taking them away, that giddy, pastel stream, leaving me alone with the dark glass cases and all they don't display.

  Where is the starving time of 1610? The 1622 Powhatan Indian Insurrection which left almost 400 dead? Where are the dioramas of famine and disease? The black and broken toes? The gangrene? The night rending pain?

  "Why, it's right here," says a docent.

  But I can't see what she's talking about.

  And besides, there is no docent.

  • Colonial Williamsburg. Wow, even further from the truth, or at least my truth. The tidy streets offer nothing more than a sanitized taste of the past. Admirable restoration, sure, but the "costumed interpreters"—as the brochure likes to describe these would- be citizens of the American legacy —nauseate me. I'm not exaggerating either. My stomach turns and heaves.

  Mary Brockman Singleton speaks amiably about the Brick House Tavern on Duke of Gloucester Street and the way her husband succumbed to the grippe. It makes no difference that Mary Brockman Singleton died back in 1775, because, as she's inclined to tell everyone within earshot, she believes in ghosts.

  "Didn't you know," she delicately informs us. "Numerous poltergeist sightings have been reported at the Peyton Randolph House."

  A few people murmur their patriotic approval.

  A good time as any for a question. I ask her if she's ever seen a bottomless staircase gut the heart of whatever home she really lives in, when Colonial Williamsburg closes down for

  the night and she, not to mention the rest of all these would-be interpreters here, change back to the memory of the present, hastily retreating to the comfort of microwaves and monthly telephone bills.

  What does she know about interpreting, anyway?

  Someone asks me to leave.

  • Near the campus of William Mary, surrounded by postcards thick with purple mountain majesty, and they are purple, I hyperventilate. It takes me a good half hour to recover. I feel sick, very sick. I can't help thinking there's a tumor eating away the lining of my stomach. It must be the size of a bowling ball. Then I realize I've forgotten to eat. It's been over a day since I've had any food. Maybe longer.

  Not too far away, I find a tavern with cheap hamburgers and clean tap water. Across the room, eight students slowly get drunk on stout. I start to feel better. They pay no attention to me.

  Everywhere I've gone, there've been hints of Zampano's history, by which I mean Navidson's, without any real evidence to confirm any of it. I've combed through all the streets and fields from Disputanta to Five Forks to as far east as the Isle of Wight, and though I frequently feel close, real close, to something important, in the end I come away with nothing.

  • Richmond's just a raven and the remnants of a rose garden trampled one afternoon, long ago, by moshing teenagers.

  • Charlottesville. The soft clicking of Billy Reston's wheels—come to think of it sounding alot like an old projector—constantly threatens to intrude upon the corridors of a red brick building known as Thorton Hall, and yet even though I check the NSBE, I can't find his name.

  A bulletin
board still has an announcement for Roger Shattuck's

  lecture on "Great Faults and 'Splendidly Wicked People' " delivered back in the fall of '97 but retains nothing about architectural enigmas waiting in the dark Virginia countryside.

  On the West Range, I make sure to avoid room 13.

  • Monticello. Learn Jefferson had carefully studied Andrea Palladio's X Ouatrro Libri. Realize I should probably visit the Shenandoah and Luray caverns. Know I won't.

  A quick re-read of all this and I begin to see I'm tracing the wrong history. Virginia may have meant a great deal to Zampano's imagination. It doesn't to mine.

  I'm following something else. Maybe parallel. Possibly harmonic. Certainly personal. A vein of it inhabiting every place I've visited so far, whether in Texas—yes, I finally went—New Orleans, Asheville, North Carolina or any other twist of road or broken town I happened to cross on my way east.

  I cannot tell you why I didn't see her until now. And it wasn't a scent that brought her back either or the wistful edges of some found object or any other on-the-road revelation. It was my own hand that did this. Maybe you saw her first? Caught a glimpse, between the lines, between the letters, like a ghost in the mirror, a ghost in the wings?

  My mother is right before me now, right before you. There as the docent, as the interpreter, maybe even as this strange and tangled countryside. Her shallow face, the dark lyric in her eyes and of course her words, in those far reaching letters she used to send me when I was young, secretly alluding to how she could sit and watch the night seal the dusk, year after year, waiting it out like a cat. Or observe how words themselves can also write. Or even, in her own beautiful, and yes horrifying way, instruct me on how to murder. One day even demonstrate it.

  She is here now. She has always been here.

  "Beware," she might have whispered. "Another holy Other lessens your great hold on slowing time," as she would have described it, being the mad woman that she truly was.

  She could have laid this world to waste.

  Maybe she still will.

  May 4, 1998

  In Kent. Nine years. What an ugly coincidence. Even glanced at my watch. 9. Fucking nine PM. 5+4+1+9+9+8+9 = 45 (or -9 yrs = 36) 4+5 = 9 (or 3+6 = 9) Either way, it doesn't matter. I say it with a German accent: Nine.

  June 21, 1998

  Happy Birthday to me. Happy fucking Birthday. Whatever the fuck will be will fucking be sang momma D-Day. Bright as an A-Bomb.

  July 1, 1998

  Dreams getting worse. Usually in nightmares you see what you're scared of. Not in my case. No image. No color. Just blackness and then in the distance, getting closer and closer, beginning to pierce some strange ever-present roar, sounds, voices, sometimes just a few, sometimes a multitude, and one by one, all of them starting to scream.

  Do you know what it's like to wake up from a dream you haven't seen? Well for one thing, you're not sure if you were dreaming or not.

  The day after May 4th, I didn't feel like writing down what happened. A week later, I felt even less like writing down what happened. What did it matter? Then an hour ago, I woke up with no idea where I was. It took me twenty minutes just to stop shaking. When I finally did stop though, I still couldn't shake the feeling that everything around me had been irreparably fractured. Without realizing it at first, I was thinking over and over again about that night, May 4th, mindlessly tracing and re-tracing the route I'd taken when I'd gone to see the institute where my mother had lived. What my father had always referred to as The Whale.

  "You know where your mother is, Johnny," he'd tell me. "She's in The Whale. That's where she lives now. She lives in The Whale."

  Much to my surprise it was dead. Closed in April. Over five years ago.

  Getting inside hadn't been easy but eventually, after enough circling, edging quietly around the overgrown perimeter, I found a way through the surrounding chain link fence. Eight feet high.

  Crowned with concertina wire. No Trespassing signs every ten yards.

  For a while, I wandered the long white corridors, pebbles of glass strewn over most of the floors. It was easy to see why. Every window pane had been shattered. The Director's old office was no exception.

  On one of the walls, someone had scrawled: "Welcome to the Ice House."

  It took me another hour to locate her room. So many of the rooms looking the same, all familiar, but never quite right, quite the same, their dimensions and perspectives never precisely lining up with the memory I had, a memory I was soon beginning to doubt, a surprisingly painful doubt actually, until I saw through her window the now vine entwined tree, every wall-line, corner-line, floor-line instantly, or so it seemed—though nothing is ever instant—matching up, a sharp slide into focus revealing the place where she finally died. Of course it's final, right? Closet to the side. Empty. And her bed in the corner. The same bed. Even if the mattress was gone and the springs now resembled the rusted remains of a shipwreck half-buried in the sands of some half- forgotten shore.

  Horror should have buried me.

  It didn't.

  I sat down and waited for her to find me.

  She never did.

  I waited all night in the very room it happened, waiting for her frail form to glide free of beams of glass and moonlight. Only there was no glass. No moonlight either. Not that I could see.

  Come morning I found the day as I have found every other day—without relief or explanation.

  There's no good answer why I went where I went next, unless of course you buy the obvious one, which in this case is the only one for sale. So give me your pennies. It's only a copper answer anyway.

  I guess because I was still stuck on this notion of place and location, I drove all the way to the home I was living in when my mother was taken away, which was a good few years before my father was killed, before I would eventually meet a man named Raymond.

  I was bent on just ringing the doorbell and talking my way into those rooms. Convincing myself I could convince the new owners—whoever they might be; I'm imagining fat, sallow, god fearing people, staring out at me, listening to me explain how in spite of my appearance it was still their god fearing duty—to let me walk around what used to be mine, at least for a little while.

  I figured one look at me and they'd realize this was no joke. I'm about as close to fucking gone as you can get.

  The man grunting: "If we don't let this kid in, he just might not make it."

  The wife: "I reckon."

  Then the man: "Yup."

  And finally one last time, the wife: "Yup"

  At least that's what I hoped.

  They might just call the cops.

  It was mid-day when I found, following a bunch of lefts, the right right to a no saint lined street, completely changed. The house gone. A bunch of houses gone. In their place a large lumberyard. Part of it operational. The other part still under construction.

  Well what can I say, just seeing all the sawdust and oil on the ground and the hard hats and the black cables and those generic fucking trailers tore me up inside. My guts began churning with pain. Probably with blood. I started hemorrhaging hurt. Something I knew no band-aid or antacid was going to cure. I doubted even sutures would help. But what could I do?

  There would be no healing here.

  I stood by the circular saws and clutched my belly. I had no idea where I was in relation to what had once existed. Maybe this had been my kitchen. Why not? The stainless steel restaurant sink there to the side. The old stove over there. And here where I was standing was right where I'd been sitting, age four, at my mother's feet, my arms flinging up, instinctually, maybe even joyfully, prepared to catch the sun. Catch the rain.

  The memory mixes with all the retellings and explanations I heard later. It's even possible what I hold to be a memory is really only the memory of the story I heard much later. No way to tell for sure anymore.

  Supposedly I'd been laughing. So that accounts for the joy part. Supposedly she'd been laughing too. And
then something made my mother jerk around, a slight mistake really but with what consequence, her arm accidentally knocking a pan full of sizzling Mazola, while I, in what has to be one of strangest reactions ever, opened my arms to play the bold, old catcher of it all, the pan bouncing harmlessly on the floor but the oil covering my forearms and transforming them forever into Oceanus whirls. Ah yes, you true sister of Circe! What scars! Could I but coat you with Nilemud! Please bless these arms! Which I found myself looking at again, carefully studying the eddies there, all those strange currents and textures, wondering what history all of it could tell, and in what kind of detail, completely unaware of the stupid redneck yelling in my ear, yelling above the engines and shrieking saws, wanting to know what the fuck I was doing there, why I was clutching my belly and taking off my shirt like that, "Are you listening to me asshole? I said who in the hell do you think you are?", didn't I know I was standing on private property?—and not even ending his tirade there, wanting to know if it was my desire to have him break me in half, as if that's really the question my bare chested silence was asking. Even now I can't remember taking off my shirt, only looking down at my arms.

  I remember that.

  However, as I write this down—some kind of calm returning—I do begin to recall something else, only perceive it perhaps?, the way my father had growled, roared really, though not a roar, when he'd beheld my burning arms, an ear shattering, nearly inhuman shout, unleashed to protect me, to stop her and cover me, which I realize now I have not remembered. That age, when I was four, is dark to me. Still, the sound is too vivid to just pawn off on the decibels of my imagination. The way it plays in my head like some terrifying and wholly familiar song. Over and over again in a continuous loop, every repetition offering up this certain knowledge: I must have heard it—or something like it—not then but later, though when? And suddenly I find something, hiding down some hall in my head, though not my head but a house, which house? a home, my home?, perhaps by the foyer, blinking out of the darkness, two eyes pale as October moons, licking its teeth, incessantly flicking its long polished nails, and then before it can reach—another cry, perhaps even more profound than my father's roar, though it has to be my father's, right?, sending this memory, this