MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI’S

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by

Zampanô

with introduction and notes by

Johnny Truant

2nd Edition

Pantheon Books New York

Copyright © 2000 by Mark Z. Danielewski

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., and simultaneously in Canada by Random House

of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random

House, Inc.

Permissions acknowledgments and illustration credits appear

on pages 707—708.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Danielewski, Mark Z.

House of leaves I Mark Z. Danielewski.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-375-70376-4 (pbk) ISBN 0-375-42052-5 (hc)

ISBN 0-375-41034-1 (hclsigned)

I. Title.

PS3554.A5596H68 2000 813’.54—dc2l 99-36024 CIP

Random House Web Address: www.randomhouse.com

www houseofleaves.com

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events,

establishments, organizations or locales are intended only to give the fiction

a sense of reality and authenticity. Other names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, as are those fictionalized events and incidents which involve real persons and did not occur or are set in the future. — Ed.

Contents

Foreword ………. vii Introduction………. xi The Navidson Record ………. 1 Exhibits One - Six ………. 529 Appendix: Zampanô ………. 537 A — Outlines & Chapter Titles ………. 538 B — Bits ………. 541 C —… and Pieces ………. 548 D — Letter to the Editor ………. 553 E — The Song of Quesada and Molino ………. 555 F — Poems ………. 557 Appendix II: Johnny Truant ………. 567 A — Sketches & Polarolds ………. 568 B — The Pelican Poems ………. 573 C — Collages ………. 581 D — Obituary ………. 584 E — The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute Letters ………. 586 F — Various Quotes ………. 645 Appendix III: Contrary Evidence ………. 657 Index ………. 663 Credits ………. 707 Yggdrasil ………. 709

FOREWARD

The first edition of House of Leaves was privately distributed and did

not contain Chapter 21, Appendix II, Appendix III, or the Index. Every effort has been made to provide appropriate translations and accurately credit all sources. If we have failed in this endeavor, we apologize In advance and will gladly correct in subsequent printings all errors or omissions brought to our attention. — The Editors

This is not for you.

Introduction

I still get nightmares. In fact I get them so often I should be used to

them by now. I’m not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.

For a while there I tried every pill imaginable. Anything to curb the fear.

Excedrin PMs, Melatonin, L-tryptophan, Valium, Vicodin, quite a few members of the barbital family. A pretty extensive list, frequently mixed, often matched, with shots of bourbon, a few lung rasping bong hits, sometimes even the vaporous confidence-trip of cocaine. None of it helped.

I think it’s pretty safe to assume there’s no lab sophisticated enough yet to synthesize the kind of chemicals I need. A Nobel Prize to the one who invents that puppy.

I’m so tired. Sleep’s been stalking me for too long to remember.

Inevitable I suppose. Sadly though, I’m not looking forward to the prospect.

I say “sadly” because there was a time when I actually enjoyed sleeping. In fact I slept all the time. That was before my friend Lude woke me up at three in the morning and asked me to come over to his place. Who knows, if I hadn’t heard the phone ring, would everything be different now? I think about that alot.

Actually, Lude had told me about the old man a month or so before that

fateful evening. (Is that right? fate? It sure as hell wasn’t -ful. Or was it exactly that?) I’d been in the throes of looking for an apartment after a little difficulty with a landlord who woke up one morning convinced he was Charles de Gaulle. I was so stunned by this announcement that before I could think twice I’d already told him how in my humble estimation he did not at all resemble an airport though the thought of a 757 landing on him was not at all disagreeable. I was promptly evicted. I could have put up a fight but the place was a nuthouse anyway and I was glad to leave. As it turned out Chuckie de Gaulle burnt the place to the ground a week later.

Told the police a 757 had crashed into it.

During the following weeks, while I was couching it from Santa Monica

to Silverlake looking for an apartment, Lude told me about this old guy who

lived in his building. He had a first floor apartment peering out over a wide, overgrown courtyard. Supposedly, the old man had told Lude he would be dying soon. I didn’t think much of it, though it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you forget either. At the time, I just figured Lude had been putting me on. He likes to exaggerate. I eventually found a studio in Hollywood and settled back into my mind numbing routine as an apprentice at a tattoo shop.

It was the end of ‘96. Nights were cold. I was getting over this woman

named Clara English who had told me she wanted to date someone at the top of the food chain. So I demonstrated my unflagging devotion to her memory by immediately developing a heavy crush on this stripper who had Thumper tattooed right beneath her G—string, barely an inch from her shaved pussy or as she liked to call it—”The Happiest Place On Earth.” Suffice it say, Lude & I spent the last hours of the year alone, scouting for new bars, new faces, driving recklessly through the canyons, doing our best to talk the high midnight heavens down with a whole lot of bullshit. We never did. Talk them down, I mean.

Then the old man died.

From what I can gather now, he was an American. Though as I would

later find out, those who worked with him detected an accent even if they could never say for certain where it came from.

He called himself Zampanô. It was the name he put down on his

apartment lease and on several other fragments I found. I never came across any sort of ID, whether a passport, license or other official document insinuating that yes, he indeed was An Actual-&-Accounted-For person.

Who knows where his name really came from. Maybe it’s authentic,

maybe made up, maybe borrowed, a nom de plume or—my personal favorite—a nom de guerre.

As Lude told it, Zampanô had lived in the building for many years, and

though he mostly kept to himself, he never failed to appear every morning and evening to walk around the courtyard, a wild place with knee high weeds and back then populated with over eighty stray cats. Apparently the cats liked the old man alot and though he offered no enticements, they

would constantly rub up against his legs before darting back into the center of that dusty place.

Anyway, Lude had been out very late with some woman he’d met at his

salon. It was just after seven when he finally stumbled back into the courtyard and despite a severe hangover immediately saw what was missing. Lude frequently came home early and always found the old guy working his way around the perimeter of all those weeds, occasionally resting on a sun beaten bench before taking another round. A single mother who got up every morning at six also noted Zampanô’s absence. She went off to work, Lude went off to bed, but when dusk came and their old neighbor had still not appeared, both Lude and the single mother went to alert Flaze, the resident building manager.

Flaze is part Hispanic, part Samoan. A bit of a giant, you might say.

6’4”, 245 lbs, virtually no body fat. Vandals, junkies, you name it, they get near the building and Flaze will lunge at them like a pitbull raised in a crackhouse. And don’t think he believes size & strength are invincible. If the interlopers are carrying, he’ll show them his own gun collection and he’ll draw on them too, faster than Billy The Kid. But as soon as Lude voiced his suspicions about the old man, pitbull & Billy The Kid went straight out the window. Flaze suddenly couldn’t find the keys. He started muttering about calling the owner of the building. After twenty minutes, Lude was so fed up with this hemming & hawing he offered to handle the whole thing himself. Flaze immediately found the keys and with a big grin plopped them into Lude’s outstretched hand.

Flaze told me later he’d never seen a dead body before and there was no

question there would be a body and that just didn’t sit well with Flaze. “We knew what we’d find,” he said. “We knew that guy was dead.”

The police found Zampanô just like Lude found him, lying face down

on the floor. The paramedics said there was nothing unusual, just the way it goes, eighty some years and the inevitable kerplunk, the system goes down, lights blink out and there you have it, another body on the floor surrounded by things that don’t mean much to anyone except to the one who can’t take any of them along. Still, this was better than the prostitute the paramedics had seen earlier that day. She had been torn to pieces in a hotel room, parts of her used to paint the walls and ceiling red. Compared to that, this almost seemed pleasant.

The whole process took awhile. Police coming and going, paramedics

attending to the body, for one thing making sure the old man was really dead; neighbors and eventually even Flaze poking their heads in to gawk, wonder or just graze on a scene that might someday resemble their own end. When it was finally over, it was very late. Lude stood alone in the apartment, the corpse gone, officials gone, even Flaze, the neighbors and other assorted snoops—all gone.

Not a soul in sight. “Eighty fucking years old, alone in that pisshole,” Lude had told me

later. “I don’t want to end up like that. No wife, no kids, no nobody at all.

Not even one fucking friend.” I must have laughed because Lude suddenly turned on me: “Hey Hoss, don’t think young and squirting lots of come guarantees you shit. Look at yourself, working at a tattoo shop, falling for some stripper named Thumper.” And he was sure right about one thing: Zampanô had no family, no friends and hardly a penny to his name.

The next day the landlord posted a notice of abandonment and a week

later, after declaring that the contents of the apartment were worth less than $300, he called some charity to haul the stuff away. That was the night Lude made his awful discovery, right before the boys from Goodwill or wherever they came from swept in with their gloves and handtrucks.

When the phone rang, I was fast asleep. Anybody else I would have

hung up on, but Lude’s a good enough friend I actually dragged my ass out of bed at three in the morning and headed over to Franklin. He was waiting outside the gate with a wicked gleam in his eye.

I should have turned around right then. I should have known something

was up, at the very least sensed the consequence lingering in the air, in the hour, in Lude’s stare, in all of it, and fuck, I must have been some kind of moron to have been so oblivious to all those signs. The way Lude’s keys rattled like bone—chimes as he opened the main gate; the hinges suddenly shrieking as if we weren’t entering a crowded building but some ancient moss-eaten crypt. Or the way we padded down the dank hallway, buried in shadows, lamps above hung with spangles of light that I swear now must have been the work of gray, primitive spiders. Or probably most important

of all, the way Lude whispered when he told me things, things I couldn’t give a damn about back then but now, now, well my nights would be a great deal shorter if I didn’t have to remember them.

Ever see yourself doing something in the past and no matter how many

times you remember it you still want to scream stop, somehow redirect the

action, reorder the present? I feel that way now, watching myself tugged stupidly along by inertia, my own inquisitiveness or whatever else, and it must have been something else, though what exactly I have no clue, maybe nothing, maybe nothing’s all—a pretty meaningless combination of words, “nothing’s all”, but one I like just the same. It doesn’t matter anyway.

Whatever orders the path of all my yesterdays was strong enough that night to draw me past all those sleepers kept safely at bay from the living, locked behind their sturdy doors, until I stood at the end of the hail facing the last door on the left, an unremarkable door too, but still a door to the dead.

Lude, of course, had been unaware of the unsettling characteristics of

our little journey to the back of the building. He had been recounting to me, in many ways dwelling upon, what had happened following the old man’s death.

“Two things, Hoss,” Lude muttered as the gate glided open. “Not that

they make much difference.” And as far as I can tell, he was right. They have very little to do with what follows. I include them only because they’re part of the history surrounding Zampanô’s death. Hopefully you’ll be able to make sense of what I can represent though still fail to understand.

“The first peculiar thing,” Lude told me, leading the way around a short

flight of stairs. “Were the cats.” Apparently in the months preceding the old man’s death, the cats had begun to disappear. By the time he died they were all gone. “I saw one with its head ripped off and another with its guts strewn all over the sidewalk. Mostly though, they just vanished.”

“The second peculiar thing, you’ll see for yourself” Lude said, lowering

his voice even more, as we slipped past the room of what looked suspiciously like a coven of musicians, all of them listening intently to headphones, passing around a spliff.

“Right next to the body,” Lude continued. “I found these gouges in the

hardwood floor, a good six or seven inches long. Very weird. But since the old man showed no sign of physical trauma, the cops let it go.”

He stopped. We had reached the door. Now I shudder. Back then, I think

I was elsewhere. More than likely daydreaming about Thumper. This will probably really wig you out, I don’t care, but one night I even rented Bambi and got a hard on. That’s how bad I had it for her. Thumper was something else and she sure beat the hell out of Clara English. Perhaps at that moment I was even thinking about what the two would look like in a cat fight. One thing’s for sure though, when I heard Lude turn the bolt and open Zampanô’s door, I lost sight of those dreams.

What hit me first was the smell. It wasn’t a bad smell just incredibly

strong. And it wasn’t one thing either. It was extremely layered, a patina upon progressive patina of odor, the actual source of which had long since evaporated. Back then it had overwhelmed me, so much of it, cloying, bitter, rotten, even mean. These days I can no longer remember the smell only my reaction to it. Still if I had to give it a name, I think I would call it the scent of human history—a composite of sweat, urine, shit, blood, flesh and semen, as well as joy, sorrow, jealousy, rage, vengeance, fear, love, hope and a whole lot more. All of which probably sounds pretty ridiculous, especially since the abilities of my nose are not really relevant here. What’s important though is that this smell was complex for a reason.

All the windows were nailed shut and sealed with caulking. The front

entrance and courtyard doors all storm proofed. Even the vents were covered with duct tape. That said, this peculiar effort to eliminate any ventilation in the tiny apartment did not culminate with bars on the windows or multiple locks on the doors. Zampanô was not afraid of the outside world. As I’ve already pointed out, he walked around his courtyard and supposedly was even fearless enough to brave the LA public transportation system for an occasional trip to the beach (an adventure even I’m afraid to make). My best guess now is that he sealed his apartment in an effort to retain the various emanations of his things and himself.

Where his things were concerned, they ran the spectrum: tattered

furniture, unused candles, ancient shoes (these in particular looking sad & wounded), ceramic bowls as well as glass jars and small wood boxes full of rivets, rubber bands, sea shells, matches, peanut shells, a thousand different

kinds of elaborately shaped and colored buttons. One ancient beer stein held nothing more than discarded perfume bottles. As I discovered, the refrigerator wasn’t empty but there wasn’t any food in it either. Zalnpanà had crammed it full of strange, pale books.

Of course all of that’s gone now. Long gone. The smell too. I’m left

with only a few scattered mental snapshots: a battered Zippo lighter with Patent Pending printed on the bottom; the twining metal ridge, looking a little like some tiny spiral staircase, winding down into the bulbiess interior of a light socket; and for some odd reason—what I remember most of all— a very old tube of chapstick with an amber like resin, hard & cracked.

Which still isn’t entirely accurate; though don’t be misled into thinking I’m not trying to be accurate. There were, I admit, other things I recall about his place, they just don’t seem relevant now. To my eye, it was all just junk, time having performed no economic alchemy there, which hardly mattered, as Lude hadn’t called me over to root around in these particular and—to use one of those big words I would eventually learn in the ensuing months— deracinated details of Zampanô’s life.

Sure enough, just as my friend had described, on the floor, in fact

practically dead center, were the four marks, all of them longer than a hand, jagged bits of wood clawed up by something neither one of us cared to imagine. But that’s not what Lude wanted me to see either. He was pointing at something else which hardly impressed me when I first glanced at its implacable shape.

Truth be told, I was still having a hard time taking my eyes off the

scarred floor. I even reached out to touch the protruding splinters.

What did I know then? What do I know now? At least some of the

horror I took away at four in the morning you now have before you, waiting for you a little like it waited for me that night, only without these few covering pages.

As I discovered, there were reams and reams of it. Endless snarls of

words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart, always branching off into other pieces I’d come across later—on old napkins, the tattered edges of an envelope, once even on the back of a postage stamp; everything and anything but empty; each fragment completely covered with the creep of years and years of ink pronouncements; layered, crossed out, amended; handwritten, typed;

legible, illegible; impenetrable, lucid; torn, stained, scotch taped; some bits crisp and clean, others faded, burnt or folded and refolded so many times the creases have obliterated whole passages of god knows what—sense? truth? deceit? a legacy of prophecy or lunacy or nothing of the kind?, and in the end achieving, designating, describing, recreating—find your own words; I have no more; or plenty more but why? and all to tell—what?

Lude didn’t need to have the answer, but somehow he knew I would.

Maybe that’s why we were friends. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he did need the answer, he just knew he wasn’t the one who could find it. Maybe that’s the real reason we were friends. But that’s probably wrong too.

One thing’s for sure, even without touching it, both of us slowly began

to feel its heaviness, sensed something horrifying in its proportions, its silence, its stillness, even if it did seem to have been shoved almost carelessly to the side of the room. I think now if someone had said be careful, we would have. I know a moment came when I felt certain its resolute blackness was capable of anything, maybe even of slashing out, tearing up the floor, murdering Zampanô, murdering us, maybe even murdering you. And then the moment passed. Wonder and the way the unimaginable is sometimes suggested by the inanimate suddenly faded. The thing became only a thing.

So I took it home.

Back then—well it’s way back then by now—you could have found me

downing shots of whiskey at La Poubelle, annihilating my inner ear at Bar Deluxe or dining at Jones with some busty redhead I’d met at House of Blues, our conversation traversing wildly from clubs we knew well to clubs we’d like to know better. I sure as fuck wasn’t bothered by old man Z’s words. All those signs I just now finished telling you about quickly vanished in the light of subsequent days or had never been there to begin with, existing only in retrospect.

At first only curiosity drove me from one phrase to the next. Often a

few days would pass before I’d pick up another mauled scrap, maybe even a week, but still I returned, for ten minutes, maybe twenty minutes, grazing

over the scenes, the names, small connections starting to form, minor patterns evolving in those spare slivers of time.

I never read for more than an hour.

Of course curiosity killed the cat, and even if satisfaction supposedly

brought it back, there’s still that little problem with the man on the radio telling me more and more about some useless information. But I didn’t care.

I just turned the radio off.

And then one evening I looked over at my clock and discovered seven

hours had passed. Lude had called but I hadn’t noticed the phone ring. I was more than a little surprised when I found his message on my answering machine. That wasn’t the last time I lost sense of time either. In fact it began to happen more often, dozens of hours just blinking by, lost in the twist of so many dangerous sentences.

Slowly but surely, I grew more and more disoriented, increasingly more

detached from the world, something sad and awful straining around the edges of my mouth, surfacing in my eyes. I stopped going out at night. I stopped going out. Nothing could distract me. I felt like I was losing control. Something terrible was going to happen. Eventually something terrible did happen.

No one could reach me. Not Thumper, not even Lude. I nailed my

windows shut, threw out the closet and bathroom doors, storm proofed everything, and locks, oh yes, I bought plenty of locks, chains too and a dozen measuring tapes, nailing all those straight to the floor and the walls.

They looked suspiciously like lost metal roods or, from a different angle, the fragile ribs of some alien ship. However, unlike Zampanô, this wasn’t about smell, this was about space. I wanted a closed, inviolate and most of all immutable space.

At least the measuring tapes should have helped.

They didn’t.

Nothing did.

I just fixed myself some tea on the hot plate here. My stomach’s gone. I

can barely keep even this honey milked—up stuff down but I need the warmth. I’m in a hotel now. My studio’s history. Alot these days is history.

I haven’t even washed the blood off yet. Not all of it’s mine either. Still

caked around my fingers. Signs of it on my shirt. “What’s happened here?” I keep asking myself. “What have I done?” What would you have done? I went straight for the guns and I loaded them and then I tried to decide what to do with them. The obvious thing was shoot something. After all, that’s what guns are designed to do—shoot something. But who? Or what? I didn’t have a clue. There were people and cars outside my hotel window.

Midnight people I didn’t know. Midnight cars I’ve never seen before. I could have shot them. I could have shot them all.

I threw up in my closet instead.

Of course, I have only my own immeasurable stupidity to blame for

winding up here. The old man left plenty of clues and warnings. I was the fool to disregard them. Or was it the reverse: did I secretly enjoy them? At least I should have had some fucking inkling what I was getting into when I read this note, written just one day before he died:

January 5, 1997

Whoever finds and publishes this work shall be entitled to all proceeds.

I ask only that my name take its rightful place. Perhaps you will even prosper. If, however, you discover that readers are less than sympathetic and choose to dismiss this enterprise out of hand, then may I suggest you drink plenty of wine and dance in the sheets of your wedding night, for whether you know it or not, now you truly are prosperous. They say truth stands the test of time. I can think of no greater comfort than knowing this document failed such a test.

Which back then meant absolutely nothing to me. I sure as hell didn’t

pause to think that some lousy words were going to land me in a shitty hotel room saturated with the stink of my own vomit.

After all, as I fast discovered, Zampanô’s entire project is about a film

which doesn’t even exist. You can look, I have, but no matter how long you search you will never find The Navidson Record in theaters or video stores. Furthermore, most of what’s said by famous people has been made up. I tried contacting all of them. Those that took the time to respond told me they had never heard of Will Navidson let alone Zampanô.

As for the books cited in the footnotes, a good portion of them are

fictitious. For instance, Gavin Young’s Shots In The Dark doesn’t exist nor does The. Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXVIII. On the other hand virtually any dimwit can go to a library and find W. M. Lindsay and H. J. Thomson’s Ancient Lore in Medieval Latin Glossaries. There really was a “rebellion” on the 1973 Skylab mission but La Belle Nicoise et Le Beau Chien is made up as is, I assume, the bloody story of Quesada and Molino.

Add to this my own mistakes (and there’s no doubt I’m responsible for

plenty) as well as those errors Zampanô made which I failed to notice or correct, and you’ll see why there’s suddenly a whole lot here not to take too seriously.

In retrospect, I also realize there are probably numerous people who

would have been better qualified to handle this work, scholars with PhDs from Ivy League schools and minds greater than any Alexandrian Library or World Net. Problem is those people were still in their universities, still on their net and nowhere near Whitley when an old man without friends or family finally died.

Zampanô, I’ve come to recognize now, was a very funny man. But his

humor was that wry, desiccated kind soldiers whisper, all their jokes subsurface, their laughter amounting to little more than a tic in the corner of the mouth, told as they wait together in their outpost, slowly realizing that help’s not going to reach them in time and come nightfall, no matter what they’ve done or what they try to say, slaughter will overrun them all.

Carrion dawn for vultures.

See, the irony is it makes no difference that the documentary at the heart

of this book is fiction. Zampanô knew from the get go that what’s real or isn’t real doesn’t matter here. The consequences are the same.

I can suddenly imagine the cracked voice I never heard. Lips barely

creasing into a smile. Eyes pinned on darkness:

“Irony? Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot Line;

the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.”

It’s not surprising then that when it came to undermining his own work,

the old man was superbly capable. False quotes or invented sources, however, all pale in comparison to his biggest joke.

Zampanô writes constantly about seeing. What we see, how we see and

what in turn we can’t see. Over and over again, in one form or another, he returns to the subject of light, space, shape, line, color, focus, tone, contrast, movement, rhythm, perspective and composition. None of which is surprising considering Zampanô’s piece centers on a documentary film called The Navidson Record made by a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who must somehow capture the most difficult subject of all: the sight of darkness itself.

Odd, to say the least.

At first I figured Zampanô was just a bleak old dude, the kind who

makes Itchy and Scratchy look like Calvin and Hobbes. His apartment, however, didn’t come close to anything envisioned by Joel-Peter Witkin or what’s routinely revealed on the news. Sure his place was eclectic but hardly grotesque or even that far out of the ordinary, until of course you took a more careful look and realized—hey why are all these candles unused? Why no clocks, none on the walls, not even on the corner of a dresser? And what’s with these strange, pale books or the fact that there’s hardly a goddamn bulb in the whole apartment, not even one in the refrigerator? Well that, of course, was Zampanô’s greatest ironic gesture; love of love written by the broken hearted; love of life written by the dead: all this language of light, film and photography, and he hadn’t seen a thing since the mid- fifties.

He was blind as a bat.

Almost half the books he owned were in Braille. Lude and Flaze both

confirmed that over the years the old guy had had numerous readers visiting him during the day. Some of these came from community centers, the Braille Institute, or were just volunteers from USC, UCLA or Santa Monica College. No one I ever spoke with, however, claimed to know him well, though more than a few were willing to offer me their opinions.

One student believed he was certifiably mad. Another actress, who had

spent a summer reading to him, thought Zampanô was a romantic. She had come over one morning and found him in “a terrible way.”

“At first I assumed he was drunk, but the old guy never drank, not even

a sip of wine. Didn’t smoke either. He really lived a very austere life.

Anyway he wasn’t drunk, just really depressed. He started crying and asked me to leave. I fixed him some tea. Tears don’t frighten me. Later he told me it was heart trouble. ‘Just old heart-ache matters,’ he said. Whoever she was, she must have been really special. He never told me her name.”

As I eventually found out, Zampanô had seven names he would

occasionally mention: Beatrice, Gabrielle, Anne-Marie, Dominique, Eliane, Isabelle and Claudine. He apparently only brought them up when he was disconsolate and for whatever reason dragged back into some dark tangled time. At least there’s something more realistic about seven lovers than one mythological Helen. Even in his eighties, Zampanô sought out the company of the opposite sex.

Coincidence had had no hand in arranging for all his readers to be

female. As he openly admitted: “there is no greater comfort in my life than those soothing tones cradled in a woman’s words.”

Except maybe his own words.

Zampanô was in essence—to use another big word—a graphomaniac.

He scribbled until he died and while he came close a few times, he never finished anything, especially the work he would unabashedly describe as either his masterpiece or his precious darling. Even the day before he failed to appear in that dusty courtyard, he was dictating long discursive passages, amending previously written pages and restructuring an entire chapter. His mind never ceased branching out into new territories. The woman who saw him for the last time, remarked that “whatever it was he could never quite address in himself prevented him from ever settling. Death finally saw to that.”

With a little luck, you’ll dismiss this labor, react as Zampanô had hoped,

call it needlessly complicated, pointlessly obtuse, prolix—your word—, ridiculously conceived, and you’ll believe all you’ve said, and then you’ll

put it aside—though even here, just that one word, “aside”, makes me shudder, for what is ever really just put aside?—and you’ll carry on, eat, drink, be merry and most of all you’ll sleep well.

Then again there’s a good chance you won’t.

This much I’m certain of: it doesn’t happen immediately. You’ll finish

and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You’ll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won’t matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were.

You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how. You’ll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place.

Old shelters—television, magazines, movies—won’t protect you

anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That’s when you’ll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you’ve walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.

You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind

you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You’ll care only about the darkness and you’ll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you’re some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you’ll be afraid to look away, you’ll be afraid to sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some

desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You’ll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you’ll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still

will, fighting with everything you’ve got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.

And then the nightmares will begin.

— Johnny Truant October 31, 1998

Hollywood, CA

Muss es sein?

The Navidson Record

I

I saw a film today, oh boy…

— The Beatles

While enthusiasts and detractors wifi continue to empty entire

dictionaries attempting to describe or deride it, “authenticity” still remains the word most likely to stir a debate. In fact, this leading obsession—to validate or invalidate the reels and tapes—invariably brings up a collateral and more general concern: whether or not, with the advent of digital technology, image has forsaken its once unimpeachable hold on the truth. [1 —A topic more carefully considered in Chapter IX.]

For the most part, skeptics call the whole effort a hoax but grudgingly

admit The Navidson Record is a hoax of exceptional quality. Unfortunately out of those who accept its validity many tend to swear allegiance to tabloid-UFO sightings. Clearly it is not easy to appear credible when after vouching for the film’s verity, the discourse suddenly switches to why Elvis is still alive and probably wintering in the Florida Keys. [2—See Daniel Bowler’s “Resurrection on Ash Tree Lane: Elvis, Christmas Past, and Other Non-Entities” published in The House (New York: Little Brown, 1995), p. 167-244 in which he examines the inherent contradiction of any claim alleging resurrection as well as the existence of that place.] One thing remains certain: any controversy surrounding Billy Meyer’s film on flying saucers [3—Or for that matter the Cottingley Fairies, Kirlian photography, Ted Serios’ thoughtography or Alexander Gardner’s photograph of the Union dead.] has been supplanted by the house on Ash Tree Lane.

Though many continue to devote substantial time and energy to the

antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank, as of late the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation of events within the film. This direction seems more promising, even if the house itself, like Melville’s behemoth, remains resistant to summation.

Much like its subject, The Navidson Record itself is also uneasily

contained—whether by category or lection. If finally catalogued as a gothic tale, contemporary urban folkmyth, or merely a ghost story, as some have called it, the documentary will still, sooner or later, slip the limits of any one of those genres. Too many important things in The Navidson Record jut out past the borders. Where one might expect horror, the supernatural, or traditional paroxysms of dread and fear, one discovers disturbing sadness, a sequence on radioactive isotopes, or even laughter over a Simpsons episode.

In the 17th century, England’s greatest topographer of worlds satanic

and divine warned that hell was nothing less than “Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace/ And rest can never dwell, hope never comes!

That comes to all” thus echoing the words copied down by hell’s most famous tourist: “Dinanzi a me non flior cose create! Se non etterne, e io etterna duro./ Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch ‘entrate.”[4—That first bit comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 65—67. The second from Dante’s Inferno, Canto III, lines 7—9. In 1939, some guy named John D.

Sinclair from the Oxford University Press translated the Italian as follows: “Before me nothing was created but eternal things and I endure eternally.

Abandon every hope, ye that enter.”]

[5—In an effort to limit confusion, Mr. Truant’s footnotes will appear in

Courier font while Zampanô’s will appear In Times. We also wish to note here that we have never actually met Mr. Truant. All matters regarding the publication were addressed In letters or In rare instances over the phone. — The Editors]

Even today many people still feel The Navidson Record, in spite of all

its existential refinements and contemporary allusions, continues to reflect those exact sentiments. In fact a few eager intellectuals have already begun to treat the film as a warning in and of itself, perfectly suited for hanging whole above the gates of such schools as Architectonics, Popomo, Consequentialism, Neo-Plasticism, Phenomenology, Information Theory, Marxism, Biosemiotics, to say nothing of psychology, medicine, New Age spirituality, art and even Neo-Minimalism. Will Navidson, however, remains stalwart in his insistence that his documentary should be taken literally. As he himself says, “... all this, don’t take it as anything else but this. And if one day you find yourself passing by that house, don’t stop, don’t slow down, just keep going. There’s nothing there. Beware.”

Considering how the film ends, it is not surprising that more than a

handful of people have decided to heed his advice.

The Navidson Record did not first appear as it does today. Nearly seven

years ago what surfaced was “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway” — a five and a half minute optical illusion barely exceeding the abilities of any NYU film school graduate. The problem, of course, was the accompanying statement that claimed all of it was true.

In one continuous shot, Navidson, whom we never actually see,

momentarily focuses on a doorway on the north wall of his living room before climbing outside of the house through a window to the east of that door, where he trips slightly in the flower bed, redirects the camera from the ground to the exterior white clapboard, then moves right, crawling back inside the house through a second window, this time to the west of that door, where we hear him grunt slightly as he knocks his head on the sill, eliciting light laughter from those in the room, presumably Karen, his brother Tom, and his friend Billy Reston—though like Navidson, they too never appear on camera—before finally returning us to the starting point, thus completely circling the doorway and so proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that insulation or siding is the only possible thing this doorway could lead to, which is when all laughter stops, as Navidson’s hand appears in frame and pulls open the door, revealing a narrow black hallway at least ten feet long, prompting Navidson to re-investigate, once again leading us on another circumambulation of this strange passageway, climbing in and out of the windows, pointing the camera to where the hallway should extend but finding nothing more than his own backyard—no ten foot protuberance, just rose bushes, a muddy dart gun, and the translucent summer air—in essence an exercise in disbelief which despite his best intentions still takes Navidson back inside to that impossible hallway, until as the camera begins to move closer, threatening this time to actually enter it, Karen snaps, “Don’t you dare go in there again, Navy,” to which Tom adds, “Yeah, not such a hot idea,” thus arresting Navidson at the threshold, though he still puts his hand inside, finally retracting and inspecting it, as if by seeing alone there might be something more to feel, Reston wanting to know if in fact his friend does sense something different, and Navidson providing the matter-of-fact answer which also serves as the conclusion, however abrupt, to this bizarre short: “It’s freezing in there.”

Dissemination of “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway” seemed driven

by curiosity alone. No one ever officially distributed it and so it never appeared in film festivals or commercial film circles. Rather, VHS copies were passed around by hand, a series of progressively degenerating dubs of a home video revealing a truly bizarre house with notably very few details about the owners or for that matter the author of the piece.

Less than a year later another short surfaced. It was even more hotly

sought after than “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway” and resulted in some fervent quests for Navidson and the house itself, all of which, for one reason or another, failed. Unlike the first, this short was not a continuous shot, prompting many to speculate that the eight minutes making up “Exploration #4” were in fact bits of a much larger whole.

The structure of “Exploration #4” is highly discontinuous, jarring, and

as evidenced by many poor edits, even hurried. The first shot catches Navidson mid-phrase. He is tired, depressed and pale. “—days, I think.

And, I... I don’t know.” [Drink of something; unclear what.J “Actually I’d like to burn it down. Can’t think clearly enough to do it though.” [Laughs] “And now... this.”

The next shot jumps to Karen and Tom arguing over whether or not to

“go in after him.” At this point it remains unclear to whom they are referring.

There are several more shots.

Trees in winter.

Blood on the kitchen floor.

One shot of a child (Daisy) crying.

Then back to Navidson: “Nothing but this tape which I’ve seen enough

times, it’s more like a memory than anything else. And I still don’t know: was he right or just out of his mind?”

Followed by three more shots.

Dark hallways.

Windowless rooms.

Stairs.

Then a new voice: “I’m lost. Out of food. Low on water. No sense of

direction. Oh god...“ The speaker is a bearded, broad shouldered man with frantic eyes. He speaks rapidly and appears short of breath: “Holloway Roberts. Born in Menomonie, Wisconsin. Bachelor’s from U. Mass. There’s

something here. It’s following me. No, it’s stalking me. I’ve been stalked by it for days but for some reason it’s not attacking. It’s waiting, waiting for something. I don’t know what. Holloway Roberts. Menomonie, Wisconsin.

I’m not alone here. I’m not alone.”

Thus bringing to an end this strange abstract which as the release of The

Navidson Record revealed was sparingly incomplete.

Then for two years nothing. Few clues about who any of these people

were, though eventually a number of photographers in the news community did recognize the author as none other than Will Navidson, the prize-winning photojournalist who won the Pulitzer for his picture of a dying girl in Sudan. Unfortunately this discovery only generated a few months of heated speculation, before, in the absence of press, corroboration, the location of the house or for that matter any comment by Navidson himself, interest died out. Most people just wrote it off as some kind of weird hoax, or, because of the unusual conceit, an aberrant UFO sighting. Nevertheless the deteriorating dubs did circulate and in some trendy academic circles a debate began: was the subject a haunted house? What did Holloway mean by “lost”? How could anyone be lost in a house for days anyway?

Furthermore, what was someone with Navidson’s credentials doing creating two strange shorts like these? And again, was this artifice or reality?

Certainly a good deal of the debate was sustained by a bit of old

fashioned cultural elitism. People talked about the Navidson pieces because they were lucky enough to have seen them. Lee Sinclair suspects a majority of professors, students, SoHo artists and avant-garde filmmakers who spoke —and even wrote—so knowingly about the tapes, more than likely had never even viewed one frame: “There just weren’t that many copies available.” [6—Lee Sinclair’s “Degenerate” in Twentieth Century Dub, Dub edited by Tony Ross (New York: CCD Zeuxis Press. 1994). p. 57-91.]

While “ The Five and a Half Minute Hallway” and “Exploration #4”

have been respectively called a “ teaser” and a” trailer”, they are also, in their own right, peculiar cinematic moments. On a purely symbolic level, they afford a vast potential for examination: the compression of space, the power of the imagination to decompress that space, the house as trope for the unlimited and the unknowable etc., etc. On a strictly visceral level, they provide ample shocks and curiosities. However, the most unnerving aspect about both pieces is their ability to convince us that everything really

happened, some of which can be attributed to the verifiable elements (Holloway Roberts, Will Navidson et al.), but most of which must be chalked up to the starkness of the production—the absence of make-up, expensive sound tracks, or crane shots. Except for framing, editing, and in some cases sub-titles, [7—Arguably interpretive, especially in the case of Holloway’s garbled patter where even the subtitles appear as incomprehensible onomatopoeia or just question marks.] there is virtually no room for creative intrusion.

Who would have suspected that almost three years after “The Five and a

Half Minute Hallway” began appearing on VHS, Miramax would quietly release The Navidson Record in a limited run and almost immediately unsettle audiences everywhere. Since the opening three years ago last April [8—i.e. 1993.] in New York and Los Angeles, The Navidson Record has been screened nationwide, and while hardly a blockbuster, the film continues to generate revenues as well as interest. Film periodicals frequently publish reviews, critiques and letters. Books devoted entirely to The Navidson Record now appear with some regularity. Numerous professors have made The Navidson Record required viewing for their seminars, while many universities already claim that dozens of students from a variety of departments have completed doctoral dissertations on the film. Comments and references frequently appear in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Esquire, American Heritage, Vanity Fair, Spin as well as on late night television. Interest abroad is equally intense. Japan, France and Norway have all responded with awards but to this day the spectral Navidson has yet to appear let alone accept any one of these. Even the garrulous Weinstein brothers remain unusually reticent about the film and its creator.

Interview magazine quoted Harvey Weinstein as saying, “It is what it

is.” [9—Mirjana Gortchakova’s “Home Front” in Gentleman’s Quarterly, v. 65, October 1995, p. 224.]

The Navidson Record now stands as part of this country’s cultural

experience and yet in spite of the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have seen it, the film continues to remain an enigma. Some insist it must be true, others believe it is a trick on par with the Orson Welles radio romp The War of the Worlds. Others could care less, admitting that either way The

Navidson Record is a pretty good tale. Still many more have never even heard of it.

These days, with the unlikely prospect of any sort of post-release

resolution or revelation, Navidson’s film seems destined to achieve at most cult status. Good story telling alone will guarantee a healthy sliver of popularity in the years to come but its inherent strangeness will permanently bar it from any mainstream interest.

II

The labours of men of genius, however

erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage

of mankind.

— Mary Shelley

The Navidson Record actually contains two films: the one Navidson

made, which everyone remembers, and the one he set out to make, which very few people ever detect. While easily overshadowed by the finished film, the filmmaker’s original intentions provide an early context in which to view the peculiar properties of the house later on.

In many ways, the opening of The Navidson Record, shot back in April

of 1990, remains one of the more disturbing sequences because it so effectively denies itself even the slightest premonition about what will soon take place on Ash Tree Lane.

Not once during those initial minutes does Navidson indicate he knows

anything about the impending nightmare he and his entire family are about to face. He is wholly innocent, and the nature of the house, at least for a little while, lies beyond his imagination let alone his suspicions.

Of course not everyone remains in accordance with this assessment. Dr.

Isaiah Rosen believes, “Navidson’s a fraud from frame one and his early posturing puts the entire work at risk.” [10—Isaiah Rosen. Ph.D.. Flawed Performances: A Consideration of the Actors in the Navidson Opus (Baltimore: Eddie Hapax Press, 1995), p. 73.] Rosen assumes the beginning is just a case of “bad acting” performed by a man who has already envisioned the rest of the film. Consequently Rosen seriously undervalues the importance of Navidson’s initial intentions.

All too often major discoveries are the unintended outcome of

experiments or explorations aimed at achieving entirely different results. In Navidson’s case, it is impossible to disregard his primary goal, especially since it served as progenitor or at the very least the “near origin” to all that

followed. Rosen’s presumptions [11—Not the first and definitely not the last time Zampanô implies that The Navidson Record exists.] lead him to dismiss the cause for the result, thereby losing sight of the complex and rewarding relationship which exists between the two.

“It’s funny,” Navidson tells us at the outset. “I just want to create a

record of how Karen and I bought a small house in the country and moved into it with our children. Sort of see how everything turns out. No gunfire, famine, or flies. Just lots of toothpaste, gardening and people stuff. Which is how I got the Guggenheim Fellowship and the NEA Media Arts Grant.

Maybe because of my past they’re expecting something different, but I

just thought it would be nice to see how people move into a place and start to inhabit it. Settle in, maybe put down roots, interact, hopefully understand each other a little better. Personally, I just want to create a cozy little outpost for me and my family. A place to drink lemonade on the porch and watch the sun set.”

Which is almost literally how The Navidson Record begins, with Will

Navidson relaxing on the porch of his small, old-style heritage house, enjoying a glass of lemonade, watching the sun turn the first few minutes of daytime into gold. Despite Rosen’s claim, nothing about him seems particularly devious or false. Nor does he appear to be acting. In fact he is a disarmingly pleasant man, lean, attractive, slowly edging through his 40s, [12—In his article “Years of Those” in The New Republic, v. 213, November 20, 1995, p. 33-39, Helmut Kereincrazch puts Navidson’s age at forty-eight.] determined once and for all to stay in and explore the quieter side of life.

At least initially he succeeds, providing us with pristine glimpses of the

Virginia countryside, the rural neighborhood, purple hills born on the fringe of night, before moving past these establishing shots and focusing more closely on the process of moving into the house itself, unrolling pale blue oriental rugs, arranging and rearranging furniture, unpacking crates, replacing light bulbs and hanging pictures, including one of his own prizewinning photographs. In this way, Navidson not only reveals how each

room is occupied, but how everyone has helped apply his or her own personal texture.

At one point, Navidson takes a break to interview his two children.

These shots are also impeccably composed. Son and daughter bathed in sunlight. Their warmly lit faces framed against a cool backdrop of green lawn and trees.

His five year old daughter Daisy approves of their new house. “It’ s nice

here,” she giggles shyly, though she is not too shy to point out the absence of stores like “Bloomydales.”

Chad who is three years older than Daisy is a little more self- conscious,

even serious. Too often his response has been misread by those aware of the film’s ending. It is important to realize, however, that at this point in time Chad has no sense what the future holds. He is merely expressing anxieties natural for a boy his age who has just been uprooted from his home in the city and deposited in a vastly different environment.

As he tells his father, what he misses most is the sound of traffic. It

seems the noise made by trucks and taxi cabs created for him a kind of evening lullaby. Now he finds it difficult to fall asleep in the quiet.

“What about the sound of crickets?” Navidson asks.

Chad shakes his head. “It’s not the same. I dunno. Sometimes it’s just silent… No sound at

all.”

“Does that scare you?” Chad nods. “Why?” asks his father. “It’s like something’s waiting.” “What?” Chad shrugs. “I dunno Daddy. I just like the sound of traffic.” [l3—The

question of lengthy narrative descriptions In what is purportedly a critical exegesis is addressed in Chapter 5: footnote 67. — Ed.]

Of course, Navidson’s pastoral take on his family’s move hardly reflects

the far more complicated and significant impetus behind his project— namely his foundering relationship with longtime companion Karen Green.

While both have been perfectly content not to many, Navidson’s constant assignments abroad have led to increased alienation and untold personal difficulties. After nearly eleven years of constant departures and brief

returns, Karen has made it clear that Navidson must either give up his professional habits or lose his family. Ultimately unable to make this choice, he compromises by turning reconciliation into a subject for documentation.

None of this, however, is immediately apparent. In fact it requires some

willful amnesia of the more compelling sequences ahead, if we are to detect the subtle valences operating between Will and Karen; or as Donna York phrased it, “the way they talk to each other, the way they look after each other, and of course the way they don’t.” [14—Donna York’s “In Twain” in Redbook, v. 186, January 1996, p. 50.]

Navidson, we learn, began his project by mounting a number of Hi 8s

around the house and equipping them with motion detectors to turn them on and off whenever someone enters or leaves the room. With the exception of the three bathrooms, there are cameras in every corner of the house.

Navidson also keeps on hand two 16mm Arriflexes and his usual battery of 35mm cameras.

Nevertheless, as everyone knows, Navidson’s project is pretty crude.

Nothing, for instance, like the constant eye of CCTV systems routinely installed in local banks or the lavish equipment and multiple camera operators required on MTV’s Real World. The whole effort would seem very home movie-ish at best were it not for the fact that Navidson is an exceptionally gifted photographer who understands how one sixtieth of a second can yield an image worth more than twenty-four hours of continuous footage. He is not interested in showing all the coverage or attempting to capture some kind of catholic or otherwise mythical view.

Instead he hunts for moments, pearls of the particular, an unexpected phone call, a burst of laughter, or some snippet of conversation which might elicit from us an emotional spark and perhaps even a bit of human understanding.

More often than not, the near wordless fragments Navidson selects

reveal what explication could only approximate. Two such instances seem especially sublime, and because they are so short and easy to miss, it is worth reiterating their content here.

In the first one, we see Navidson climbing to the top of the stairs with a

crate full of Karen’s things. Their bedroom is still cluttered with lamps in bubble wrap and assorted unpacked suitcases and garbage bags full of clothes. Nothing hangs on the walls. Their bed is not made. Navidson finds some room on top of a bureau to set down his load. He is about to leave when some invisible impulse stops him. He takes Karen’s jewelry box out of the crate, lifts the hand-carved horn lid, and removes the inner tray.

Unfortunately, whatever he sees inside is invisible to the camera.

When Karen walks in carrying a basket stuffed with bedsheets and

pillow cases, Navidson has already turned his attention to an old hairbrush lying next to some perfume bottles.

“What are you doing?” she immediately asks. “This is nice,” he says, removing a big clump of her blonde hair from

the tines and tossing it into the wastebasket.

“Give me that,” Karen demands. “Just you watch, one day I’ll go bald,

then won’t you be sorry you threw that away.”

“No,” Navidson replies with a grin.

It is unnecessary to dwell here on the multiple ways in which these few

seconds demonstrate how much Navidson values Karen, [15—See “The Heart’s Device” by Frances Leiderstahi in Science, v. 265 August 5, 1994, p. 741; Joel Watkin’s “Jewelry Box, Perfume, and Hair” in Mademoiselle, v.

101 May, 1995, p. 178-181; as well as Hardy Taintic’s more ironic piece “Adult Letters and Family Jewels” The American Scholar, v. 65 spring 1996, p. 219-241] except to highlight how despite his sarcasm and apparent disregard for her things the scene itself represents the exact opposite. Using image and exquisitely controlled edits, Navidson has in effect preserved her hair, called into question his own behavior and perhaps in some ways contradicted his own closing remark, which as Samuel T. Glade has pointed out could refer to either “watch,” “bald,” or “sorry” or all three. [16— Samuel T. Glade’s “Omens & Signs” in Notes From Tomorrow ed. Lisbeth Bailey (Delaware: Tma Essay Publications, 1996).] Even better, Navidson

has permitted the action and subtlety of the composition to represent the profound sentiments at work without the molestations of some ill-conceived voice-over or manipulative soundtrack.

In keeping with this approach, the second moment also does without

explanations or disingenuous musical cues. Navidson simply concentrates on Karen Green. Once a model with the Ford Agency in New York, she has since put behind her the life of Milan fashion shoots and Venetian Masques in order to raise her two children. Considering how beautiful she appears on the dreadful Hi 8 tapes, it is hardly surprising editors frequently relied on slides of her pouty lips, high cheek bones, and hazel eyes to sell their magazines.

Early on, Navidson gave Karen a Hi 8 which he asked her to treat like a

journal. Her video entries—which Navidson promised to view only after the film was shot and then only if she agreed—reveal a thirty-seven year old woman who worries about leaving the city, growing old, keeping trim, and staying happy. Nevertheless, despite their purely confessional content, it is not a journal entry but rather an unguarded moment captured on one of the house Hi 8s that demonstrates Karen’s almost bewildering dependence on Navidson.

Karen Sits with Chad and Daisy in the living room. The children are in

the midst of a candle-making project which involves several empty egg cartons, a dozen long lengths of wick, a bucket of plaster of Paris and a jar full of crystal wax. Using a pair of red handled scissors, Daisy cuts the wicks down to three inch pieces and then presses them down into an egg cup which Chad in turn fills with a layer of plaster followed by a layer of the tiny wax beads. The result is some kind of candle with plenty of goop to go around, most of it ending up on the children’s hands. Karen helps brush the hair out of her daughter’s eyes lest she try to do it herself and end up smearing plaster all over her face. And yet even though Karen keeps Chad from overfilling the molds or Daisy from hurting herself with the scissors, she still cannot resist looking out the window every couple of minutes. The sound of a passing truck causes her to glance away. Even if there is no sound, the weight of a hundred seconds always turns her head.

Though clearly a matter of opinion, Karen’s gaze seems just as lost as it

is “surfeit with love and longing.” [17—Max C. Garten’s “100 Looks” in Vogue, v. 185, October 1995, p. 248.] The reasons are in part answered when at last Navidson’s car pulls into the driveway. Karen hardly attempts to contain her relief. She instantly leaps up from the mini candle factory and dashes from the room. Seconds later—no doubt thinking better of herself— she returns.

“Daisy, hold off using the scissors until I get back.” “Mommy!” Daisy shrills. “You heard what I said. Chad keep an eye on your sister.” “Mommy!” Daisy squealing even louder. “Daisy, mommy also wants you to look after your brother.” This seems to appease the little girl, and she actually settles down,

smugly eyeing Chad even as she continues to snip wicks.

Strangely enough, by the time Karen reaches Navidson in the foyer, she

has quite effectively masked all her eagerness to see him. Her indifference is highly instructive. In that peculiar contradiction that serves as connective tissue in so many relationships, it is possible to see that she loves Navidson almost as much as she has no room for him.

“Hey, the water heater’s on the fritz,” she manages to say. “When did that happen?” She accepts his brief kiss. “I guess last night.”

[18—I got up this morning to take a shower and guess what? No

fucking hot water. A pretty evil discovery especially when you’re depending on that watery wake-up call, me being massively dehydrated from a long night drunk my road-dog Lude and I winged our way onto last night. As I’m remembering it now, we somehow ended up at this joint on Pico, and soon thereafter found ourselves in conversation with some girls wearing black cowboy hats, supposedly lost in their own private-blend of brain- hatching euphoria—Thank you Herbal Ecstasy—prompting us to put a little Verbal Ecstasy on them which would, as it turned out, ultimately lead them giggling into the night.

I’ve forgotten now what we did exactly to get the whole thing rolling. I

think Lude started giving one of them a trim, whipping out his scissors

which he always has on hand, like old gunslingers I guess always had on hand their Colts—there he goes, snipping locks & bangs, doing a great fucking job too, but hey he’s a pro, and all of it in the dark too, on a barstool, surrounded by dozens of who knows who, fingers & steel clicking away, tiny bits of hair spitting off into the surrounding turmoil, the girls all nervous until they see he really is the shit and then they’re immediately chirping “me, next” & “do me” which is too easy to remark upon, so instead Lude & I remark upon something else which this time round is all about some insane adventure I supposedly had when I was a Pit Boxer.

Mind you I’d never heard that term before nor had Lude. Lude just made it up and I went with it.

“Aw come on, they don’t want to hear about that,” I said with about as

much reluctance as I could reasonably feign.

“No Hoes, you’re wrong,” Lude insisted. “You must.” “Very well,” I said, starting then to recall for everyone how at the lonely

age of nineteen I had climbed off a barge in Galveston.

“Actually I escaped,” I improvised. “See, I still owed my crazy Russian Captain a thousand dollars for a wager I’d lost in Singapore.

He wanted to murder me so I practically had to run the whole way to

Houston.”

“Don’t forget to tell them about the birds,” Lude winked. He was just

throwing shit at me, something he loved doing, keeping me on my toes.

“Sure,” I mumbled, stretching for an explanation. “This barge I’d been

on was loaded with dates and pounds of hash and an incredible number of exotic birds, all of it, of course, illegal to transport, but what did I know? It didn’t exactly affect me. And anyway, I wasn’t sticking around. So I reach Houston and the first thing that happens, some twerp comes up and tries to rob me.”

Lude frowned. He clearly wasn’t pleased with what I’d just done to his

birds.

I ignored him and continued. “This guy just walked straight over and told me to give him all my

money. I didn’t have a dime on me but it wasn’t like this weasely sonofabitch had a weapon or anything. So I slugged him. Down he went.

But not for long. A second later he pops up again and you know what? he’s smiling, and then this other guy joins him, much bigger, and he was smiling

too and shaking my hand, congratulating me. They’d been searching all day for a Pit Boxer, pay was two hundred dollars a night and apparently I’d just made the grade. This weasely sonofabitch was the head interviewer. His partner referred to him as Punching Bag.”

By now the girls were crowding around me & Lude, sucking down

more drinks and all in all falling into the rhythm of the story. Carefully, I led them through that first night, describing the ring with its dirt floor surrounded by hordes of folk come to bet a few dollars and watch guys hurt —hurt themselves, hurt someone else. Gloves were not an option in this kind of fighting. Miraculously, I made it through alive. I actually won my first two fights. A couple of bruises, a cut cheek, but I walked with two hundred bucks and Punching Bag forked for ribs and beer and even let me crash on his couch. Not bad. So I continued. In fact, for a whole month I did this twice a week.

“See the scar on his eyebrow there—” Lude pointed, giving the girls

one of those all knowing completely over-the—top nods.

“Is that how you broke your front tooth too?” a girl with a ruby pin in

her cowboy hat blurted out, though as soon as she said it, I could see she felt bad about mentioning my busted incisor.

“I’m getting to that,” I said with a smile.

Why not work the tooth into it too?, I thought.

After three-four weeks, I continued, I had enough dough to pay back the

Captain and even keep a bit for myself. I was pretty tired of the whole thing anyway.

The fights were bad enough. “And incidentally I’d won every one,” I

added. Lude scoffed. “But having to be wary all the time around the likes of Punching Bag & his partner, that was by far the worst aspect. Also, as it turned out, the place I was staying in was a whorehouse, full of these sad girls, who between their own senseless rounds would talk about the simplest, most inconsequential things. I liked it better on the barge, even with the Captain and his murderous moods.

“Well my last night, the twerp pulls me aside and suggests I bet my

dough on myself. I tell him I don’t want to because I could lose. ‘You stupid fucking kid,’ he spits at me. ‘You’ve won every fight so far.’ ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘So?’ ‘Well figure it out. It’s not because you’re any good. They’ve all been fixed. I find some lump, pay him fifty bucks to swing and dive. We make a

killing on the bets. You won last week, you won the week before, you’ll win tonight. I’m just trying to help you out here.’

“So being the stupid kid I was I bet all the money I had and walked into

the ring. Who do you think was there waiting from me?”

I gave everyone a chance to come up with their own answer while I

drained my glass of beer, but no one had a clue who I was about to fight.

Even Lude was a step behind. Of course, that depends on how you look at it: he was also fondling the ass of a girl with a tourmaline in her cowboy hat while she in turn, or so it appeared to me, was caressing the inside of his thigh.

“In the middle of all those Houston losers, all of ‘em screaming odds,

screaming money, licking their gums for blood, stood Punching Bag, fists all taped up and not even the flicker of a smile or the slightest bit of recognition in his eye. Boy, let me tell you, he turned out to be a mean-spirited remorseless S.O.B. That first round he knocked me down twice.

The second round I almost didn’t get up.

“All month long, he and his partner had been boosting the numbers on

me so that when Punching Bag—and at this point he was the long shot— slaughtered me, they’d walk with a small fortune. Or run. Me though, a dumb nineteen year old who’d wandered into Galveston after three months at sea, I was going to lose my money and wind up in a hospital. Maybe worse. Since the fights were just three rounds long, I only had one more left to do something. His partner threw a bucket of ice water in my face and told me to crawl out there and get it over with.

“As I wobbled to my feet, I shook my head, and saying it loud enough

so he could hear me, but not so loud so he’d think I was selling something, I said that it was all too bad because I’d been planning to use my money to buy a shipment of some stuff worth at least a thousand percent on the street.

“Well, the next round, the last round I should say, Punching Bag broke

my tooth. I was out. They’d both originally planned to ditch me but my little gambit had worked. After what the partner had heard me say, which I’m sure he shared as soon as he could with Punching Bag, they dragged me along, dumped some whiskey into me in their truck and then started grilling me about that stuff I’d been babbling about, trying to find out what was worth a thousand percent.

“Now I was in a bad way, more than a little afraid that they’d do

something really evil if they found out I’d been bullshitting them. Still, if I stayed in Houston I’d probably be lynched by the bettors who by now had figured out something was sour which could only mean one thing to them (all explanations to the grave): Punching Bag & his partner and me were to blame. I had to think fast and besides, I still wanted my money back, so—”

By now even Lude was hooked. They all were. The girls all engrossed

and smiling and still shimmying closer, as if maybe by touching me they could find out for sure if I was for real. Lude knew it was pure crap but he had no clue where I was heading. To tell you the truth neither did I. So I took my best shot.

“I pointed them to the barge. I hadn’t figured out what I’d do once we

got there but I knew the ship was leaving with the tide early next morning so we had to hurry. Luckily we arrived in time and I immediately went off to find the Captain who as soon as he saw me grabbed me by the throat.

Somehow between gasps, I succeeded in telling him about Punching Bag & his partner and their money—all their money which included my money most of which was in essence the Captain’s money. That got the bastard listening. A few minutes later, he sauntered over to the duo, poured them coffee mugs full of vodka, and in his incomprehensible accent, began going on and on about pure New Guinea value.

“Punching Bag had no idea what this idiot was talking about, neither did

I for that matter, but an hour and two bottles of vodka later, he came to the conclusion that the Captain must be talking about drugs. After all the Captain kept mentioning euphoria, Spanish explorers and paradise, even though he refused to show Punching Bag the tiniest bit of anything tangible, vaguely referring to custom officials and the constant threat of confiscation and jail.

“Now here was the clincher. While he’s babbling on, this van drives up

and a guy no one has ever seen before or ever will see again gets out, gives the Captain a thousand dollars, takes one crate and then drives off. Just like that, and boy does that do it. Without even examining what he’s buying, Punching Bag hands over five g’s. The Captain, keeping his word, immediately loads five crates into the back of Punching Bag’s truck.

“I’m sure the twerp would of inspected them right on the spot, except

suddenly in the distance we all start hearing police sirens or harbor patrol

sirens or some such shit. They weren’t after us, but Punching Bag & his partner still got spooked and took off as fast as they could.

“Even after we got out to sea, the Captain was still laughing. I wasn’t

though. The bastard wouldn’t give me any of my money. By his way of thinking—and him explaining this to me in that incomprehensible accent of his—I owed him for saving my life, not to mention transporting my sorry ass all the way to Florida, where I finally did end up going, nearly dying in a cold water place called the Devil’s Ear which is an altogether different story.

“Still it wasn’t so bad, especially when I think now and then about

Punching Bag & his partner. I mean I wonder what they did, what they said, when they finally tore open all those crates and discovered all those fucking birds. Over fifty Birds of Paradise.

“A few months later I did read somewhere how Houston Police busted

two known felons trying to unload a bunch of exotic birds at a zoo.”

Which was pretty much how that story ended or at least the story I told

last night. Maybe not verbatim but close.

Unfortunately nothing happened with the girls. They just ran off

giggling into the night. No digits, no dates, not even their names, leaving me feeling dumb and sad, a bit like a broken thermos—fine on the outside, but on the inside nothing but busted glass. And why I’m going on about any of this right now is beyond me. I’ve never even seen a Bird of Paradise.

And I sure as hell have never boxed or been on a barge. In fact just looking at this story makes me feel a little queasy all of a sudden. I mean how fake it is. Just sorta doesn’t sit right with me. It’s like there’s something else, something beyond it all, a greater story still looming in the twilight, which for some reason I’m unable to see.

Anyway I didn’t mean to wander into all this. I was telling you about

the shower. That’s what I wanted to deal with. As you probably know, finding out there’s no warm water is a particularly unpleasant discovery

simply because it’s not something you figure out immediately. You have to let the water run awhile and even though it remains icy, part of you still refuses to believe it won’t change, especially if you wait a little longer or open up the valve a little more. So you wait but no matter how many minutes run by, you still see no steam, you still feel no heat.

Maybe a cold shower would of been good for me. The thought crossed

my mind but I was already too freezing to try for even a quick one. I don’t even know why I was freezing. It was pretty warm in my place. Even warmer outside. Not even my big brown corduroy coat helped.

Later I spotted some workers in back tackling the water heater.

One of them, snorting on a dirty handkerchief, covered in tatts, Manson

crucified on his back, told me it would be fixed by evening. It’s not.

Now I’m sure you’re wondering something. Is it just coincidence that

this cold water predicament of mine also appears in this chapter?

Not at all. Zampanô only wrote “heater.” The word “water” back there

—I added that.

Now there’s an admission, eh?

Hey, not fair, you cry.

Hey, hey, fuck you, I say.

Wow, am I mad right now. Clearly a nerve’s been hit somewhere but I

don’t how, why or by what. I sure don’t believe it’s because of some crummy made—up story or a lousy (water) heater.

Can’t follow the feeling.

If only any of it were true. I mean we’d all be so lucky to wind up a

punching bag and still find our crates full of Birds of Paradise.

No such luck with this crate.

Let the cold water run.

It’s gotta warm up eventually.

Right?]

What both these moments reveal is how much Will and Karen need

each other and yet how difficult they find handling and communicating those feelings.

Unfortunately, critics have been less than sympathetic. Following the

release of The Navidson Record, neither Karen nor Navidson’s reputation escaped unscathed. Karen, in particular, was decimated by a vituperative

stream of accusations from the tabloids, reputable reviewers, and even an estranged sister. Leslie Buckman blows high the roof beams when she calls “Karen Green a cold bitch, plain and simple. A high-fashion model, not much smarter than a radiator, who grew up thinking life revolved around club owners, cocaine and credit card limits. Watching her burble on about her weight, her children, or how much she needs Navidson made me want to retch. How can she say she loves a man when she’s incapable of anything even remotely resembling commitment? Did I say she was a cold bitch?

She’s also a slut.” [19”Lie Lexicon and Feminine Wiles” by Leslie Buckman published in All In The Name Of Feminism: A Collection Of Essays ed. Nadine Muestopher (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Shtrön Press, 1995), p. 344.]

Buckman is not alone in her opinion. Dale Corrdigan has also pointed

out that Karen was anything but a lovely housewife: “Karen hardly gave up the promiscuous behavior that marked her 20s. She only became more discreet.” [20—Dale Corrdigan, “Blurbs,” Glamour, v. 94, April 1996, p.

256.]

In retrospect, the rabid speculation over Karen’s infidelities seems

driven by a principally sexist culture, especially since so little attention was paid to Navidson’s role in their relationship. As David Liddel once exclaimed: “If he has horns, who’s to say he doesn’t have hooves?” [21— “A Horny Duo” by David Liddel, Utne Reader, July/August 1993, p. 78.] Fortunately unlike the biased treatment offered by the media, Navidson does not hesitate to constantly include in his film evidence of his own failings. In fact as of late, many have called into question the accuracy of this self- portrait, observing that Navidson may have gone too far out of his way to cast himself in a less than favorable light. [22—Ascencion Gerson’s “The Vanity of Self-Loathing” in Collected Essays on Self-Portraiture ed.

Haldor Nervene (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), p. 58.]

Not only does Navidson reveal through Karen, Chad, and Daisy how he

spent the last decade perfecting a career in distance, where taking off on a moment’s notice to shoot Alaskan fishing boats was something his family had to just accept, even if that three day trip slowly evolved into weeks and even months, he also, by way of the film, admits to carrying around his own alienating and intensely private obsessions.

As it turns out though, the first hint concerning these dark broodings

does not come from him but from Karen. Navidson’s early Hi 8 journal entries are so easy and mild they rarely, if ever, allude to deeper troubles.

Only Karen, staring straight into that little lens, brings up the problem.

“He mentioned Delial again,” she says in an extremely clipped tone.

“I’ve warned him if he’s not going to tell me who she is he better damn not bring her up. Part of this move south was supposed to be about putting the past and all that behind us. He’s been pretty good but I guess he can’t control his dreams. Last night, I wasn’t sleeping very well. I was cold. It’s the middle of May but I felt like I was lying in a freezer. I got up to get a blanket and when I came back he was talking in his sleep: ‘Delial.’ Just like that. Out of the blue. And I’m certain because he said her name twice.

Almost shouted it.”

As it turns out, Karen was not the only one who was kept in the dark

about Delial. Even friends and fellow photojournalists who had heard Navidson use the name before never received any sort of explanation. No one had any idea who she was or why it was she haunted his thoughts and conversation like some albatross. [23—Since the revelation, there has been a proliferation of material on the subject. Chapter XIX deals exclusively with the subject. See also Chris Ho’s “What’s in a name?” Afterimage, v. 31, December, 1993; Dennis Stake’s Delia! (Indianapolis: Bedeutungswandel Press, 1995); Jennifer Caps’ Delia!, Beatrice, and Dulcinea (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Thumos Inc., 1996); Lester Breman’s “Tis but a Name” in Ebony, no. 6, May 1994, p. 76; and Tab Fulrest’s Ancient Devotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).]

That said, while the first sequence certainly hints at a number of

underlying tensions in the Navidson/Green family, all brought into relief by this chapter, it is crucial not to lose sight of the prevailing sense of bliss still evoked in those opening minutes. After a couple of nights, Chad no longer has trouble sleeping. After a couple of days, Daisy’s nipped finger heals.

The heater is easily repaired. Even both parents enjoy a private moment where their hands can playfully unlock and interlock, Will finally putting his arm around Karen as she, letting out a heart-stirring sigh, rests her head on his shoulder.

In fact it is rare to behold such radiant optimism in anything these days,

let alone in films, each frame so replete with promise and hope. Navidson

clearly cherishes these bucolic, near idyllic impressions of a new world. Of course, nostalgia’s role in shaping the final cut must not be forgotten, especially since within a year these pieces were all Navidson had left— Karen and the children a mere blur racing down the staircase, the pointillism of their pets’ paw prints caught on the dew covered lawn, or the house itself, an indefinite shimmer, sitting quietly on the corner of Succoth and Ash Tree Lane, bathed in afternoon light.

III

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than

the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

— Dorothea Lange

— Exodus 3. 11

[24—“But Moses said to God, am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free

the Israelites from Egypt?’ “ — Ed.]

Why Navidson? Why not someone else?

When the great Florentine howls, “Ma io perchè venirvi? o chi ‘1

concede?! Jo non Enea, io non Paulo sono,” [25—Dante again. Again translated by Sinclair. Canto II lines 31—32: “I, why should I go there, and who grants it? I am not Aeneas; I am not Paul.”

A question I’m often asking myself these days. Though not the

Aeneas/Paul part.

The simple answer I know: Lude woke me up at three in the morning to

check out some dead guy’s stuff.

Of course, it’s not really all that simple. Typically when Lude calls me

late at night it’s because there’s some party he wants to hit. He’s the kind of

guy who thinks sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila.

Maybe he’s right.

Not that this matters, someone once told me Lude’s real name is Harry,

maybe he did, though no one I know has ever called him that.

Lude knows every bar, club and gatekeeper at every bar and club.

Hollywood has always been mother’s milk to Lude. Mother’s tongue.

Whatever. Unlike me, he never needs to translate, interpret or learn in LA.

He knows. He knows the drinks, the addresses and most important of all he can usually tell the difference between the women who are out to talk and those out to do something a little more interesting which always interests Lude.

Despite a nose that others have described as a bee—battered, Lude’s

always surrounded by very attractive women which is pretty much the norm for hair stylists—and photographers—especially if they’re good and Lude is that. Beautiful women are always drawn to men they think will keep them beautiful.

During the past two years, he and I have spent a good deal of time

wandering all over this odd city. We both thrive in the late hours, appreciate its sad taste and never get in the way of each other’s dreams, even though Lude just wants more money, better parties and prettier girls and I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it’s drenched in sunlight and it’s weightless and I know it’s not cheap.

Probably not even real.

Who can guess why Lude and I have ended up friends. I think it’s

mainly because he recognizes that I’m game for any mis—step he has in mind and he enjoys the company. Of course publicly, Lude likes to throw me plenty of props, invariably focusing on the disjointed life I’ve led. He’s still impressed—and in turn likes to impress others—with the fact that at the age of thirteen I went to work in Alaska and by the time I was eighteen had already slept in a whorehouse in Rome. Most of all though he loves the stories. Especially the way I tell them to the girls we meet. (I already got into that a little with the whole riff on boxing and Birds of Paradise and some guy named Punching Bag.) But they’re only stories, the way I tell them I mean. I actually have a whole bunch.

Take the scars for instance.

There are a number of variations on that one. The most popular is my

two year stint in a Japanese Martial Arts Cult, made up entirely of Koreans living in Idaho, who on the last day of my initiation into their now-defunct brotherhood made me pick up a scalding metal wok using only my bare forearms. In the past the wok has been heated in a kiln; recently it’s been full of red hot coals. The story’s an absolute crock of shit, or should I say a wok of shit—sorry; I know, I know I should learn to crawl before I walk; sorry again; I mean for not being sorry the first time or for that matter the second time—but, you see, it’s so hard to argue with all those whirls of melted flesh.

“Show them your arms, Johnny” Lude will say, in his most offhand over

—the—top manner.

“Aw come on. Well, alright just this once.” I roll up my left sleeve and

then, taking my time, I roll up the right one.

“He got that in a cult in Indiana.” “Idaho,” I correct him. And it goes on from there.

I’m sure most women know it’s bull but hey, they’re entertained.

I also think it’s somewhat of a relief not to hear the true story.

I mean you look at the horror sweeping all the way up from my wrists to

my elbows, and you have to take a deep breath and ask yourself, do I really want to know what happened there? In my experience, most people don’t.

They usually look away. My stories actually help them look away.

Maybe they even help me look away.

But I guess that’s nothing new. We all create stories to protect ourselves.

It’s March now. Late March. Three months have gone by since Lude

called me up that night. Three months since I dragged away a black, unremarkable, paint spattered trunk, which as I quickly found out was one of those old cedar lined jobbers, built in Utica, NY, special thanks to the C.

M. Clapp Company, complete with rusted latches, rotting leather handles and a lifetime of digressions and disappointments.

To date, I’ve counted over two hundred rejection letters from various

literary journals, publishing houses, even a few words of discouragement

from prominent professors in east coast universities. No one wanted the old man’s words—except me.

What can I say, I’m a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff,

forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unmourned, well, you get the drift.

As a counselor once told me—a Counselor For Disaffected Youth, I

might add: “You like that crap because it reminds you of you.” Couldn’t of said it better or put it more bluntly. Don’t even disagree with it either.

Seems pretty dead on and probably has everything to do with the fact that when I was ten my father died and almost nine years later my crazy Shakespearean mother followed him, a story I’ve already lived and really don’t need to retell here.

Still for whatever reason, and this my Counselor For Disaffected Youth

could never explain, accepting his analysis hardly altered the way I felt.

I just glanced over at the trunk. The first time I saw it, I mean when I

discovered what was inside, it appalled me. Like I was staring at the old guy’s corpse. Now it’s just a trunk. Of course, I also remember thinking I was going to toss it by the end of the week. That was before I started reading. Long before I began putting it all together.

You know this is still the simple answer.

I guess the complicated one I don’t feel like getting into.]

Homer’s rival calls him a coward and orders him to get moving because

the powers above have taken a personal interest in his salvation.

For hell’s cartographer, the answer is mildly satisfying. For Navidson,

however, there is no answer at all. During “Exploration #4” he even asks aloud, “How the fuck did I end up here?” The house responds with resounding silence. No divine attention. Not even an amaurotic guide.

Some have suggested that the horrors Navidson encountered in that

house were merely manifestations of his own troubled psyche. Dr. Iben Van Pollit in his book The incident claims the entire house is a physical incarnation of Navidson’s psychological pain: “I often wonder how things might have turned out if Will Navidson had, how shall we say, done a little bit of house cleaning.” [26—Regrettably, Pollit’s proclivity to pun and write jokes frequently detracts from his otherwise lucid analysis. The Incident (Chicago: Adlai Publishing, 1995), p. 108, is a remarkable example of brilliant scholarship and exemplary synthesis of research and thought.

There are also some pretty good illustrations. Unfortunately almost everything he concludes is wrong.]

While Pollit is not alone in asserting that Navidson’s psychology

profoundly influenced the nature of those rooms and hallways, few believe it conjured up that place. The reason is simple: Navidson was not the first to live in the house and encounter its peril. As the Navidsons’ real estate agent Alicia Rosenbaum eventually revealed, the house on Ash Tree Lane has had more than a few occupants, approximately .37 owners every year, most of whom were traumatized in some way. Considering the house was supposedly built back in 1720, quite a few people have slept and suffered within those walls. If the house were indeed the product of psychological agonies, it would have to be the collective product of every inhabitant’s agonies.

It is no great coincidence then that eventually someone with a camera

and a zest for the dangerous would show up at this Mead Hall and confront the terror at the door. Fortunately for audiences everywhere, that someone possessed extraordinary visual talents.

Navidson’s troubles may not have created the house but they did

ultimately shape the way he faced it, Navidson’s childhood was fairly bleak.

His father was a St. Louis salesman who worked for a string of large electronics corporations, shuttling his family around the mid-west every two or three years. He was also an alcoholic and prone toward violent

outbursts or disappearing for long periods of time. [27—Michelle Nadine Goetz recalls how on one occasion Navidson’s father climbed onto the hood of the family’s recently purchased car, used a thermos to crack up the windshield, then marched back into the kitchen, picked up a pan full of sizzling pork chops and threw it against the wall. (See the Goetz interview published in The Denver Post, May 14. 1986, B-4). Terry Borowska, who used to babysit both brothers, remembers how every so often Navidson’s father would vanish, sometimes for up to five weeks at a time, without telling his family where he was going or when he might return. Inevitably when he did come back—typically after midnight, or early in the morning, sitting in his truck, waiting for them to wake up since he had either left his key or lost it—there would be a few days of warmth and reconciliation.

Eventually though, Tony Navidson would return to his own moods and his own needs, forcing Will and Tom to realize they were better off just trying to keep clear of their father. (See Borowska’s interview published in The St.

Louis Post-Dispatch, September 27, 1992, D-3, column one.)]

Navidson’s mother was no better. She soon left them all to pursue a

career as an actress and ended up living with a string of not so productive producers. Purportedly in her own words, all she ever wanted to do was “bring down the house.” Navidson’s father died of congestive heart failure but his mother just vanished. She was last seen in a Los Angeles bar smoking cigarettes and talking about moonlight and why you could find so much of it in Hollywood. Neither Will nor his twin brother Tom ever heard from her again. [24—A selection of personal interviews with Adam Zobol, Anthony Freed and Anastasia Culiman. September 8-11, 1994.]

Because the enormous narcissism of their parents deprived Will and

Tom of suitable role models, both brothers learned to identify with absence.

Consequently, even if something beneficial fortuitously entered their lives they immediately treated it as temporary. By the time they were teenagers they were already accustomed to a discontinuous lifestyle marked by constant threats of abandonment and the lack of any emotional stability.

Unfortunately, “accustomed to” here is really synonymous with “damaged by.” [29—Rita Mistopolis M.D., in her book Black Heart, Blue Heart

(Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1984), p. 245, describes the seriousness of emotional deprivation: It is not difficult to understand how children who have suffered fn>m malnutrition or starvation need food and plenty of care if their bodies are to recover so they can go on to lead normal lives. If, however, the starvation is severe enough, the damage will be permanent and they will suffer physical impairments for the rest of their lives. Likewise, children who are deprived of emotional nurturing require care and love if their sense of security and self-confidence is to be restored.

However, if love is minimal and abuse high, the damage will be permanent and the children will suffer emotional impairments for the rest of their lives.]

Perhaps one reason Navidson became so enamored with photography

was the way it gave permanence to moments that were often so fleeting.

Nevertheless, not even ten thousand photographs can secure a world,

and so while Navidson may have worked harder, taken greater risks and become increasingly more successful, he was ultimately misled in feeling that his labor could make up for the love he was deprived of as a child and the ultimate sense of security such love bestows.

For this reason, we should again revisit Navidson on his porch, his gaze

fixed, his delicate fingers wrapped around a glass of lemonade. “I just thought it would be nice to see how people move into a place and start to inhabit it,” he calmly announces. “Settle in, maybe put down roots, interact, hopefully understand each other a little better. Personally, I just want to create a cozy little outpost for me and my family.” A pretty innocuous and laconic rumination and yet it contains one particularly nettlesome word.

By definition “outpost” means a base, military or other, which while

safe inside functions principally to provide protection from hostile forces found on the outside. This has always seemed a bizarre word to choose to describe a small house in the Virginia countryside, [30—KeiIlor Ross in his article “Legal Zoning” for Atlantic Monthly, v. 278, September 1996, p. 43, does not wish to discount the possibility of irony: “After all Navidson has just moved from the extremely populated confines of New York City and is now only poking fun at the relative wilderness of this suburb.” Ross makes

a good point, except for the fact that Navidson is a man who understands the meaning of outpost and his tone seems too straight forward to imply any kind of jest.] but it does shed some light on why Navidson undertook this project in the first place. More than just snapping a few pictures and recording daily events with a few Hi 8s, Navidson wanted to use images to create an outpost set against the transience of the world. No wonder he found it so impossible to give up his professional occupation. In his mind abandoning photography meant submitting to loss.

Therefore to revisit our first two questions:

Why Navidson?

Considering the practically preadamite history of the house, it was

inevitable someone like Navidson would eventually enter those rooms.

Why not someone else?

Considering his own history, talent and emotional background, only

Navidson could have gone as deep as he did and still have successfully brought that vision back. [31—Zampanô. This chapter first appeared as “The Matter Of Why” in LA Weekly, May 19, 1994.]

IV

Faith, sir, as to that matter, I don’t

believe one half of it myself. — Diedrich Knickerbocker

In early June of 1990, the Navidsons flew to Seattle for a wedding.

When they returned, something in the house had changed. Though they had only been away for four days, the change was enormous. It was not, however, obvious—like for instance a fire, a robbery, or an act of vandalism. Quite the contrary, the horror was atypical. No one could deny there had been an intrusion, but it was so odd no one knew how to respond.

On video, we see Navidson acting almost amused while Karen simply draws both hands to her face as if she were about to pray. Their children, Chad and Daisy, just run through it, playing, giggling, completely oblivious to the deeper implications.

What took place amounts to a strange spatial violation which has

already been described in a number of ways—namely surprising, unsettling, disturbing but most of all uncanny. In German the word for ‘uncanny’ is ‘unheimlich’ which Heidegger in his book Sein und Zeit thought worthy of some consideration:

DaJ3 die Angst als Grundbefindlichkeit in sotcher Weise erschlieJit, daflr ist weider die alltagliche Daseinsauslegung und Rede der unvoreingenommenste Beleg. Befindlichkeit, so wurde fruher gesagt, macht offenbar wie einem ist.x. In der Angst is einem flunheimlich . Darin kommt zunachst die eigentumliche Unbestimmtheit dessen, wobei sich das Dasein in der Angst befindet, zum Ausdruck: das Nichts und Nirgends. Unheimlichkeit meint aber dabei zugleich das

Nichtzuhause-sein. Bei der ersten phanomenalen Anzeige der Grundverfassung des Daseins und der Klarung des existenzialen Sinnes von In-Sein im Unterschied von der kategorialen Bedeutung der.lnwendigkeit wurde das In-Sein bestimmt als Wohnen bei Vertrautsein mit... Dieser Charakier des In-Seins wurde dann konkreter sichtbar gemach durch die alltagliche Offentlichkeit des Man, das die beruhigte Selbstsicherheit, das selbsrverstandliche Zuhause-sein in die durchschnittliche Alltaglichkeit des Daseins bringt. Die Angst dagegen holt das Dasein aus seinem verfallenden Aufgehen in der Welt zurlick. Die alltagliche Vertrautheit bricht in sich Zusammen. Das Dasein ist vereinzelt, das jedoch als In-der-Welt-sein. Das In-Sein kommt in den existenzialen Modusc des Un-zuhause. Nichts anderes meint die Rede von der Unheim1ichkeit. [32—Declared Martin Heidegger’s Sein

und Zeit (Frankfurt Am Main: Vittorio Klostennann, 1977), p. 250- 251.]

[33—And here’s the English, thanks to John Macquarrie and Edward

Robinsons’ translation of Heidegger’s Beina and Time, Harper & Row, 1962, page 233. A real bitch to find:

In anxiety one feels uncanny. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that

which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the “nothing and nowhere”. But here “uncanniness” also means “not—being—at home.” [das Nicht-zuhause-sein]. In our first indication of the phenomenal character of Dasein’s basic state and in our clarification of the existential meaning of “Being-in” as distinguished from the categorical signification of ‘insideness’, Being-in was defined as “residing alongside...“, “Being-familiar with · ·.“This character of Being-in was then brought to view more concretely through the everyday publicness of the “they”, which brings tranquilized self-assurance——’Being-at-home’, with all its obviousness—into the average everydayness of Dasein. On the other

hand, as Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the ‘world’.

Everyday familiarity collapses. Dasein has been individualized, but

individualized Being-in-the- world. Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of the “not-at-home”. Nothing else is meant by our talk about ‘uncanniness’.

Which only goes to prove the existence of crack back in the early

twentieth century. Certainly this geezer must of gotten hung up on a pretty wicked rock habit to start spouting such nonsense. Crazier still, I’ve just now been wondering if something about this passage may have actually affected me, which I know doesn’t exactly follow, especially since that would imply something in it really does make sense, and I just got finished calling it non-sense.

I don’t know.

The point is, when I copied down the German a week ago, I was fine.

Then last night I found the translation and this morning, when I went into work, I didn’t feel at all myself. It’s probably just a coincidence—I mean that there’s some kind of connection between my state of mind and The Navidson Record or even a few arcane sentences on existence penned by a former Nazi tweaking on who knows what. More than likely, it’s something entirely else, the real root lying in my already strange mood fluctuations, though I guess those are pretty recent too, rocking back and forth between wishful thinking and some private agony until the bar breaks. I’ve no fucking clue.

das Nicht-zuhause—sein [not-being-at-home.] That part’s definitely true.

These days, I’m an apprentice at a tattoo shop on Sunset. I answer

phones, schedule consultations and clean up. Any idiot could handle it. In fact the job’s reserved for idiots. This afternoon though, how do I explain it?, something’s really of f. I’m off. I can’t do a fucking thing. I just keep staring at all the ink we have, that wild variety of color, everything from rootbeer, midnight blue and cochineal to mauve, light doe, lilac, south sea

green, maize, even pelican black, all lined up in these plastic caps, like tiny transparent thimbles—and needles too, my eyes catching on all those carefully preserved points and we have hundreds, mostly #12 sharps, many singles, though plenty in two, three, four, five, six and seven needle groups, even a fourteen round shader.

It depends on what you need.

I don’t know what I need but for no apparent reason I’m going terribly

south. Nothing has happened, absolutely nothing, but I’m still having problems breathing. The air in the Shop is admittedly thick with the steady smell of sweat, isopropyl alcohol, Benz—all, all that solution for the ultrasonic cleaner, even solder and flux, but that’s not it either.

Of course no one notices. My boss, a retinue of his friends, some new

inductee who’s just put down $150 for a rose, keep up the chatter, pretty loud chatter too, though never quite enough to drown out the most important sound of all: the single, insistent buzz of an original “J” tattoo machine logging yet another hundred stabs a minute in the dimple of some chunky ass.

I get a glass of water. I walk out into the hallway. That’s a mistake. I

should of stayed near people. The comfort of company and all that. Instead I’m alone, running through a quick mental check list:

food poisoning? (stomach’s fine) withdrawals? (haven’t been on a gak

or Ecstasy diet for several months, and while I didn’t smoke any pot this morning—my usual ritual—I know THC doesn’t create any lasting physical dependencies). And then out of the be-fucking-lue, everything gets substantially darker. Not pitch black mind you. Not even power failure black. More like a cloud passing over the sun. Make that a storm. Though there is no storm. No clouds. It’s a bright day and anyway I’m inside.

I wish that had been all. Just a slight decrease in illumination and a little

breathing difficulty. Could still blame that on a blown fuse or some aberrant drug related flashback. But then my nostrils flare with the scent of something bitter & foul, something inhuman, reeking with so much rot & years, telling me in the language of nausea that I’m not alone.

Something’s behind me.

Of course, I deny it.

It’s impossible to deny.

I wanna puke.

To get a better idea try this: focus on these words, and whatever you do

don’t let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page. Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can’t see it, something is quietly closing in on you, so quiet in fact you can only hear it as silence.

Find those pockets without sound. That’s where it is. Right at this moment.

But don’t look. Keep your eyes here. Now take a deep breath. Go ahead take an even deeper one. Only this time as you start to exhale try to imagine how fast it will happen, how hard it’s gonna hit you, how many times it will stab your jugular with its teeth or are they nails?, don’t worry, that particular detail doesn’t matter, because before you have time to even process that you should be moving, you should be running, you should at the very least be flinging up your arms—you sure as hell should be getting rid of this book—you won’t have time to even scream.

Don’t look.

I didn’t.

Of course I looked.

I looked so fucking fast I should of ended up wearing one of those neck

braces for whiplash.

My hands had gone all clammy. My face was burning up. Who knows

how much adrenaline had just been dumped into my system. Before I turned, it felt exactly as if in fact I had turned and at that instant caught sight of some tremendous beast crouched off in the shadows, muscles a twitch from firing its great mass forward, ragged claws slowly extending, digging into the linoleum, even as its eyes are dilating, beyond the point of reason, completely obliterating the iris, and by that widening fire, the glowing furnace of witness, a camera lucida, with me in silhouette, like some silly Hand shadow twitching about upside down, is that right?, or am I getting confused?, either way registering at last the sign it must have been waiting for: my own recognition of exactly what has been awaiting me all along—except that when I finally do turn, jerking around like the scared-shitless shit-for-brains I am, I discover only a deserted corridor, or was it merely a recently deserted corridor?, this thing, whatever it had been,

obviously beyond the grasp of my imagination or for that matter my emotions, having departed into alcoves of darkness, seeping into corners & floors, cracks & outlets, gone even to the walls. Lights now normal. The smell history. Though my fingers still tremble and I’ve yet to stop choking on large irregular gulps of air, as I keep spinning around like a stupid top spinning around on top of nothing, looking everywhere, even though there’s absolutely nothing, nothing anywhere.

I actually thought I was going to fall, and then just as abruptly as I’d

been possessed by this fear, it left me and I fell back into control.

When I re-enter the Shop things are still askew but they at least seem

manageable.

The phone has been ringing. Nine times and counting, my boss

announces. He’s clearly annoyed. More annoyed when I express some surprise over his ability to count that high.

I pick up before he can start yammering at me about my attitude.

The call’s for me. Lude’s on a pay phone in the valley with important

info. Apparently, there’s some significant doings at some significant club.

He tells me he can guest list my boss and any cohorts I deem worthy. Sure, I say, but I’m still shaken and quickly lose hold of the details when I realize I’ve just forgotten something else as well, something very important, which by the time I hang up, no matter how hard I try, I can no longer remember what I’d meant to remember when whatever it was had first entered my head.

Or had it?

Maybe it hadn’t entered my head at all. Maybe it had just brushed past

me, like someone easing by in a dark room, the face lost in shadow, my thoughts lost in another conversation, though something in her movement or perfume is disturbingly familiar, though how familiar is impossible to tell because by the time I realize she’s someone I should know she’s already gone, deep into the din, beyond the bar, taking with her any chance of recognition. Though she hasn’t left. She’s still there. Embracing shadows.

Is that it?

Had I been thinking of a woman?

I don’t know.

I hope it doesn’t matter.

I have a terrifying feeling it does.

Nevertheless regardless of how extensive his analysis is here, Heidegger

still fails to point out that unheimlich when used as an adverb means “dreadfully,” “awfully,” “heaps of,” and “an awful lot of.” Largeness has always been a condition of the weird and unsafe; it is overwhelming, too much or too big. Thus that which is uncanny or unheimlich is neither homey nor protective, nor comforting nor familiar. It is alien, exposed, and unsettling, or in other words, the perfect description of the house on Ash Tree Lane.

In their absence, the Navidsons’ home had become something else, and

while not exactly sinister or even threatening, the change still destroyed any sense of security or well-being.

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, we discover along with Will and Karen

a plain, white door with a glass knob. It does not, however, open into the children’s room but into a space resembling a walk-in closet. However unlike other closets in the house, this one lacks outlets, sockets, switches, shelves, a rod on which to hang things, or even some decorative molding.

Instead, the walls are perfectly smooth and almost pure black— ‘almost’ because there is a slightly grey quality to the surface. The space cannot be more than five feet wide and at most four feet long. On the opposite end, a second door, identical to the first one opens up into the children’s bedroom.

Navidson immediately asks whether or not they overlooked the room.

This seems ridiculous at first until one considers how the impact of such an implausible piece of reality could force anyone to question their own perceptions. Karen, however, manages to dig up some photos which clearly show a bedroom wall without a door.

The next question is whether or not someone could have broken in and

in four days constructed the peculiar addition. Improbable, to say the least.

Their final thought is that someone came in and uncovered it. Just

installed two doors. But why? And for that matter, to quote Rilke, Wer? [34 —Neatly translated as “Who?” which I happened to find in this poem “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes.” The book’s called The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. 1989. See page 53, Vintage International.]

Navidson does check the Hi 8s but discovers that the motion sensors

were never triggered. Only their exit and re-entrance exists on tape.

Virtually a week seamlessly elided, showing us the family as they depart from a house without that strange interior space present only to return a fraction of a second later to find it already in place, almost as if it had been there all along.

Since the discovery occurred in the evening, the Navidsons’ inquiry

must wait until morning. And so while Chad and Daisy sleep, we watch Karen and Will suffer through a restless night. Hilaiy, their one year old Siberian husky, and Mallory, their tabby cat, lie on either side of the 24” Sony television unperturbed by the new closet or the flicker from the tube or the drone from the speakers—Letterman, new revelations regarding the Iran-Contra affair, reruns, the traffic of information assuring everyone that the rest of the world is still out there, continuing on as usual, even if two new doors now stand open, providing a view across a new space of darkness, from parent’s room to children’s room, where a tiny nightlight of the Star Ship Enterprise bums like some North Star.

It is a beautiful shot. In fact, the composition and elegant balance of

colours, not to mention the lush contrast of lights and darks, are so exquisite they temporarily distract us from any questions concerning the house or events unfolding there. It seems a perfect example of Navidson’s unparalleled talent and illustrates why few, if any, could have accomplished what he did, especially toward the end.

The following day both Karen and Will pursue the most rational course:

they acquire the architectural blueprints from their local real estate office.

As might have been expected, these blueprints are not actual building plans but were drawn up in 1981 when former owners sought permission from the

town’s zoning board to construct an eli. The eli, however, was ultimately never built as the owners soon sold the property, claiming they needed something “a little smaller.” Though the designs, as they appear on screen, do not show a room or closet, they do confirm the existence of a strange crawl space, roughly four feet wide, running between both bedrooms. [35— In Appendix Il-A, Mr. Truant provides a sketch of this floor plan on the back of an envelope. — Ed.]

Alicia Rosenbaum, the real estate agent responsible for selling the

Navidsons the house, gives the camera a bewildered shrug when Karen asks if she has any idea who could be responsible for “this outrage.” Unable to say anything useful, Mrs. Rosenbaum finally asks if they want to call the police, which amusingly enough they do.

That afternoon, two officers arrive, examine the closet and try to hide

the fact that this has to be the weirdest call they have ever made. As Sheriff Axnard says, “We’ll file a report but other than that, well I don’t know what more we can do. Better I guess t’have been a victim of a crazy carpenter than some robber” which even strikes Karen and Navidson as a little funny.

With all obvious options exhausted, Navidson returns to the building

plans. At first this seems pretty innocent until he gets out a measuring tape.

Idly at first, he starts comparing the dimensions indicated in the plans with those he personally takes. Very soon he realizes not everything adds up.

Something, in fact, is very wrong. Navidson repeatedly tacks back and forth from his 25’ Stanley Power Lock to the cold blue pages spread out on his bed, until he finally mutters aloud: “This better be a case of bad math.”

An incongruous cut presents us with the title card: 1/4 Outside the house, Navidson climbs up a ladder to the second story. Not

an easy ascent he casually confesses to us, explaining how a troublesome skin condition he has had since childhood has recently begun to flare up around his toes. Wincing slightly at what we can assume is at least moderate pain, he reaches the top rung where using a 100’ Empire fiberglass tape with a hand crank, he proceeds to measure the distance from the far end of the master bedroom to the far end of the children’s bedroom.

The total comes to 32’ 9 3/4” which the house plans corroborate—plus or minus an inch. The puzzling part comes when Navidson measures the internal space. He carefully notes the length of the new area, the length of

both bedrooms and then factors in the width of all the walls. The result is anything but comforting. In fact it is impossible.

32’ 10” exactly.

The width of the house inside would appear to exceed the width of the

house as measured from the outside by 1/4”.

Certain that he has miscalculated, Navidson drills through the outer

walls to measure their width precisely. Finally, with Karen’s help, he fastens the end of some fishing line to the edge of the outer wall., runs it through the drilled hole, stretches it across the master bedroom, the new space, the children’s bedroom and then runs it through a hole drilled through the opposite wall. He double checks his work, makes sure the line is straight, level and taut and then marks it. The measurement is still the same.

32’ 10” exactly.

Using the same line, Navidson goes outside, stretches the fishing line

from one side of the house to the other only to find it is a quarter of an inch too long.

Exactly.

The impossible is one thing when considered as a purely intellectual

conceit. After all, it is not so large a problem when one can puzzle over an Escher print and then close the book. It is quite another thing when one faces a physical reality the mind and body cannot accept.

Karen refuses the knowledge. A reluctant Eve who prefers tangerines to

apples. “I don’t care,” she tells Navidson. “Stop drilling holes in my walls.” Undeterred, Navidson continues his quest, even though repeated attempts at measuring the house continue to reveal the quarter-inch anomaly. Karen gets quieter and quieter, Navidson’s mood darkens, and responding like finely tuned weathervanes the children react to the change in parental weather by hiding in other parts of the house. Frustration edges into Navidson’s voice. No matter how hard he tries—and Navidson tries six consecutive times in six consecutive segments — he cannot slaughter that tiny sliver of space. Another night passes and that quarter of an inch still survives.

Where narratives in film and fiction often rely on virtually immediate

reactions, reality is far more insistent and infmitely (literally) more patient.

Just as insidious poisons in the water table can take years before their effects are felt, the consequences of the impossible are likewise not so instantly apparent.

Morning means orange juice, The New York Times, NPR, a squabble

over the children’s right to eat sugared cereal. The dishwasher moans, the toaster pops. We watch Karen scan the classifieds as Navidson toys with his coffee. He adds sugar, milk, stirs it all up, stirs it again, and then as an afterthought adds more sugar, a little more milk. The liquid rises to the rim and then by a fraction exceeds even this limit. Only it does not spill. It holds —a bulge of coffee arcing tragically over china, preserved by the physics of surface tension, rhyme to some unspeakable magic, though as everyone knows, coffee miracles never last long. The morning wake-up call wobbles, splits, and then abruptly slips over the edge, now a Nile of caffeine wending past glass and politics until there is nothing more than a brown blot on the morning paper. [36—Easily that whole bit from “coffee arcing tragically” down to “the mourning paper” could have been cut. You wouldn’t of noticed the absence. I probably wouldn’t of either. But that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t do it. Get rid of it, I mean. What’s gained in economy doesn’t really seem to make up for what you lose of Zampanö, the old man himself, coming a little more into focus, especially where digressions like these are concerned.

I can’t tell you why exactly but more and more these days I’m struck by

the fact that everything Zampanô had is really gone, including the bowl of betel nuts left on his mantle or the battered shotgun bearing the initials RLB under his bed—Flaze appropriated that goody; the shotgun, not the bed—or even the curiously preserved bud of a white rose hidden in the drawer of his nightstand. By now his apartment has been scrubbed with Clorox, repainted, probably rented out to someone else. His body’s either molding in the ground or reduced to ash. Nothing else remains of him but this.

So you see from my perspective, having to decide between old man Z

and his story is an artificial, maybe even dangerous choice, and one I’m obviously not comfortable making. The way I figure it, if there’s something you find irksome—go ahead and skip it. I couldn’t care less how you read any of this. His wandering passages are staying, along with all his oddly

canted phrases and even some warped bits in the plot. There’s just too much at stake. It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it’s mine.

Zampanô himself probably would of insisted on corrections and edits,

he was his own harshest critic, but I’ve come to believe error5, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.]

When Navidson looks up Karen is watching him. “I called Tom,” he tells her.

She understands him well enough not to say a thing. “He knows I’m insane,” he continues. “And besides he builds houses

for a living.”

“Did you talk to him?” she carefully asks. “Left a message.”

The next card simply reads: Tom.

Tom is Will Navidson’s fraternal twin brother. Neither one has said

much to the other in over eight years. “Navy’s successful, Tom’s not,” Karen explains in the film. “There’s been a lot of resentment over the years.

I guess it’s always been there, except when they lived at home. It was different then. They kind of looked after each other more.”

Two days later, Tom arrives. Karen greets him with a big hug and a Hi

8. He is an affable, overweight giant of a man who has an innate ability to amuse. The children immediately take to him. They love his laugh, not to mention his McDonalds french fries.

“My own brother who I haven’t talked to in years calls me up at four in

the morning and tells me he needs my tools. Go figure.”

“That means you’re family” Karen says happily, leading the way to

Navidson’s study where she has already set out clean towels and made up the hideaway.

“Usually when you want a level you ask a neighbor or go to the

hardware store. Count on Will Navidson to call Lowell, Massachusetts.

Where is he?”

As it turns out Navidson has gone to the hardware store to pick up a few

items.

In the film, Tom and Navidson’s first encounter has almost nothing to

do with each other. Instead of addressing any interpersonal issues, e find them both huddled over a Cowley level mirror transit, alternately taking turns peering across the house, the line of sight floating a few feet above the floor, occasionally interrupted when Hillary or Mallory in some keystone chase race around the children’s beds. Tom believes they wifi account for the quarter inch discrepancy with a perfectly level measurement.

Later on, out in the backyard, Tom lights up a joint of marijuana. The

drug clearly bothers Navidson but he says nothing. Tom knows his brother disapproves but refuses to alter his behavior. Based on their body language and the way both of them avoid looking directly at each other, not to speak of the space between their words, the last eight years continues to haunt them.

“Hey, at least I’m an acquaintance of Bill’s now” Tom finally says,

exhaling a thin stream of smoke. “Not a drop of booze in over two years.”

At first glance, it seems hard to believe these two men are even related

let alone brothers. Tom is content if there happens to be a game on and a soft place from which to watch it. Navidson works out every day, devours volumes of esoteric criticism, and constantly attaches the world around him to one thing: photography. Tom gets by, Navidson succeeds. Tom just wants to be, Navidson must become. And yet despite such obvious differences, anyone who looks past Tom’s wide grin and considers his eyes will find surprisingly deep pools of sorrow. Which is how.‘ know they are brothers, because like Tom, Navidson’s eyes share the same water.

Either way the moment and opportunity for some kind of fraternal

healing disappears when Tom makes an important discovery: Navidson was wrong. The interior of the house exceeds the exterior not by 1/4” but by

5/16’.

No matter how many legal pads, napkins, or newspaper margins they

fill with notes or equations, they cannot account for that fraction. One incontrovertible fact stands in their way: the exterior measurement must

equal the internal measurement. Physics depends on a universe infinitely centered on an equal sign. As science writer and sometime theologian David Conte wrote: “God for all intents and purposes is an equal sign, and at least up until now, something humanity has always been able to believe in is that the universe adds up.” [37—Look at David Conte’s “All Thing Being Equal” in Maclean’s, v. 107, n. 14, 1994, p. 102. Also see Martin Gardner’s “The Vanishing Area Paradox” which appeared in his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific America, May 1961.]

On this point, both brothers agree. The problem must lie with their

measuring techniques or with some unseen mitigating factor: air temperature, mis-calibrated instruments, warped floors, something, anything. But after a day and a half passes without a solution, they both decide to look for help. Tom calls Lowell and postpones his construction obligations. Navidson calls an old friend who teaches engineering at UVA.

Early the following morning, both brothers head off for Charlottesville.

Navidson is not the only one who knows people in the vicinity. Karen’s

friend Audrie McCullogh drives down from Washington, D.C. to catch up and help construct some bookshelves. Thus as Will and Tom set out to find an answer, two old friends put an enigma on hold, stir up some vodka tonics, and enjoy the rhythm of working with brackets and pine.

Edith Skourja has written an impressive forty page essay entitled

Riddles Without on this one episode. While most of it focuses on what Skourja refers to as “the political posture” of both women—Karen as ex-model; Audrie as travel agent—one particular passage yields an elegant perspective into the whys and ways people confront unanswered questions:

Riddles: they either delight or torment. Their delight lies in solutions.

Answers provide bright moments of comprehension perfectly suited for children who still inhabit a world where solutions are readily available.

Implicit in the riddle’s form is a promise that the rest of the world resolves just as easily. And so riddles comfort the child’s mind which spins wildly before the onslaught of so much information and so many subsequent questions.

The adult world, however, produces riddles of a different variety. They

do not have answers and are often called enigmas or paradoxes. Still the old hint of the riddle’s form corrupts these questions by reechoing the most fundamental lesson: there must be an answer. From there comes torment.

It is not uncharacteristic to encounter adults who detest riddles. A

variety of reasons may lie behind their reaction but a significant one is the rejection of the adolescent belief in answers. These adults are often the same ones who say “grow up” and “face the facts.” They are offended by the incongruities of yesterday’s riddles with answers when compared to today’s riddles without.

It is beneficial to consider the origins of “riddle.” The Old English

rFde1se means “opinion, conjure” which is related to the Old English r&don “to interpret” in turn belonging to the same etymological history of “read.” “Riddling” is an offshoot of “reading” calling to mind the participatory nature of that act—to interpret—which is all the adult world has left when faced with the unsolvable.

“To read” actually comes from the Latin reri “to calculate, to think”

which is not only the progenitor of “read” but of “reason” as well, both of which hail from the Greek arariskein “to fit.” Aside from giving us “reason,” arariskein also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin arma meaning “weapons.” It seems that “to fit” the world or to make sense of it requires either reason or arms. Charmingly enough Karen Green and Audrie MeCullogh “fit it” with a bookshelf.

As we all know, both reason and weapons wifi eventually be resorted to.

At least though for now—before the explorations, before the bloodshed—a drill, a hammer, and a Phillips screwdriver suffice.

Karen refers to her books as her “newly found day to day comfort.” By

assembling a stronghold for them, she provides a pleasant balance between the known and the unknown. Here stands one warm, solid, and colorful wall of volume after volume of history, poetry, photo albums, and pulp. And though irony eventually subsumes this moment, for now at least it remains uncommented upon and thus wholly innocent. Karen simply removes a photo album, as anyone might do, and causes all the books to fall like dominos along the length of the shelf. However instead of tumbling to the floor, they are soundly stopped, eliciting a smile from both women and this profound remark by Karen: “No better book ends than two walls.”

Lessons from a library. [38—Edith Skourja’s “Riddles Without” in

Riddles Within, ed. Amon Whitten (Chicago: Sphinx Press, 1994), p. 17-

57.]

Skourja’s analysis, especially concerning the inherent innocence of

Karen’s project, sheds some light on the value of patience.

Walter Joseph Adeltine argues that Skourja forms a dishonest

partnership with the shelf building segment: “Riddle me this—Riddle me that—Is all elegant crap. This is not a confrontation with the unknown but a flat-out case of denial.” [39—Walter Joseph Adeltine “Crap,” New Perspectives Quarterly, V. 11, winter 1994, p. 30.] What Adeltine himself denies is the need to face some problems with patience, to wait instead of bumble, or as Tolstoy wrote: “Dans le doute, mon cher... abstiens-toi.” [40 —Something like “When in doubt, friend, do nothing.” War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, 1982, Penguin Classics in New York, p. 885.]

Gibbons when working on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

would go on long walks before sitting down to write. Walking was a time to organize his thoughts, focus and relax. Karen’s shelf building serves the same purpose as Gibbon’s retreats outside. Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of “not knowing.” Of course not knowing hardly prevents the approaching chaos.

Turn vero omne mihi visum considere in ignis Ilium: Delenda est Cartha go. [41—Know what, Latin’s way out of my league.

I can find people who speak Spanish, French, Hebrew, Italian and even German but the Roman tongue’s not exactly thriving in the streets of LA.

A girl named Amber Rightacre suggested it might have something to do

with the destruction of Carthage. [42—In an effort to keep the translations as literal as possible, both Latin phrases read as follows: Then in fact all of Troy seemed to me to sink into flames” (Aeneid II, 624) and “Carthage must be destroyed.” — Ed.] She’s the one who translated and sourced the

previous Tolstoy phrase. I’ve actually never read War and Peace but she had, and get this, she read it to Zampanô.

I guess you might say in a roundabout way the old man introduced us.

Anyway since that episode in the tattoo shop, I haven’t gone out as

much, though to tell you the truth I’m no longer convinced anything happened. I keep cornering myself with questions: did I really experience some sort of decapacitating seizure, I mean in-? Or did I invent it? Maybe I just got a little creative with a residual hangover or a stupid head rush?

Whatever the truth is, I’ve been spending more and more time riddling

through Zampanô’s bits—riddling also means sifting; as in passing corn, gravel or cinders through a coarse sieve; a certain coed taught me that. Not only have I found journals packed with bibliographies and snaking etymologies and strange little, I don’t know what you’d call them, aphorisms??? epiphanies???, I also came across this notepad crammed with names and telephone numbers. Zampanô’s readers. Easily over a hundred of them, though as I quickly discovered more than a few of the numbers are now defunct and very few of the names have last names and for whatever reason those that do are unlisted. I left a couple of messages on some machines and then somewhere on page three, Ms. Rightacre picked up. I told her about my inheritance and she immediately agreed to meet me for a drink.

Amber, it turns out, was quite a number; a quarter French and a quarter

Native American with naturally black hair, dark blue eyes and a beautiful belly, long and flat and thin, with a slender twine of silver piercing her navel. A barbed wire tattoo in blue & red encircled her ankle. Whether Zampanô knew it or not, she was a sight I’m sure he was sorry to miss.

“He loved to brag about how uneducated he was,” Amber told me. “I

never even went to high school’ he would say. “Good, that makes me smarter than you.’ We talked like that a little, but most of the time, I just read to him. He insisted on Tolstoy. Said I read Tolstoy better than anyone else. I think that was mainly because I could manage the French passages okay, my Canadian background and all.”

After a few more drinks, we ambled over to the Viper. Lude was

hanging out at the door and walked us in. Much to my surprise, Amber grabbed my arm as we headed up the stairs. This thing we shared in common seemed to have created a surprisingly intense bond. Lude listened

to us for a while, hastening to add at every pause that he was the one who’d found the damn thing, in fact he was the one who’d called me, he’d even seen Amber around his building a few times, but because he hadn’t taken the time to read any of the text he could never address the particulars of our conversation. Amber and I were lost to a different world, a deeper history.

Lude knew the play. He ordered a drink on my tab and went in search of other entertainment.

When I eventually got around to asking Amber to describe Zampanô,

she just called him “imperceivable and alone, though not I think so lonely.” Then the first band came on and we stopped talking. Afterwards, Amber was the one who resumed the conversation, stepping a little closer, her elbow grazing mine. “I never got the idea he had a family,” she continued. “I asked him once—and I remember this very clearly—I asked him if he had any children. He said he didn’t have any children any more. Then he added: ‘Of course, you’re all my children,’ which was strange since I was the only one there. But the way he looked at me with those blank eyes—” she shuddered and quickly folded her arms as if she’d just gotten cold. “It was like that tiny place of his was suddenly full of faces and he could see them all, even speak to them.

It made me real uneasy, like I was surrounded by ghosts. Do you believe

in ghosts?”

I told her I didn’t know.

She smiled. “I’m a Virgo, what about you?” We ordered another round of drinks, the next band came up, but we

didn’t stay to hear them finish. As we walked to her place—it turned out she lived nearby, right above Sunset Plaza in fact—she kept returning to the old man, a trace of her own obsession mingling with the drift of her thoughts.

“So not so lonely,” she murmured. “I mean with all those ghosts, me

and his other children, whoever they were, though actually, hmmm I forgot about this, I don’t know why, I mean it was why I finally stopped going over there. When he blinked, his eyelids, this is kind of weird, but they stayed closed a little bit longer than a blink, like he was consciously closing them, or about to sleep, and I always wondered for a fraction of a second if they would ever open again. Maybe they wouldn’t, maybe he was going to

go to sleep or maybe even die, and looking at his face then, so serene and peaceful made me sad, and I guess I take back what I said before, because with hi-8 eyes closed he didn’t look alone, then he looked lonely, terribly lonely, and that made me feel real sad and it made me feel lonely too. I stopped going there after a while. But you know what, not visiting him made me feel guilty. I think I still feel guilty about just dropping out on him like that.”

We stopped talking about Zampanô then. She paged her friend Christina

who took less than twenty minutes to come over. There were no introductions. We just sat down on the floor and snorted lines of coke off a CD case, gulped down a bottle of wine and then used it to play spin the bottle. They kissed each other first, then they both kissed me, and then we forgot about the bottle, and I even managed to forget about Zampanô, about this, and about how much that attack in the tattoo shop had put me on edge.

Two kisses in one kiss was all it took, a comfort, a warmth, perhaps temporary, perhaps false, but reassuring nonetheless, and mine, and theirs, ours, all three of us giggling, insane giggles and laughter with still more kisses on the way, and I remember a brief instant then, out of the blue, when I suddenly glimpsed my own father, a rare but oddly peaceful recollection, as if he actually approved of my play in the way he himself had always laughed and played, always laughing, surrendering to its ease, especially when he soared in great updrafts of light, burning off distant plateaus of bistre & sage, throwing him up like an angel, high above the red earth, deep into the sparkling blank, the tender sky that never once let him down, preserving his attachment to youth, propriety and kindness, his plane almost, but never quite, outracing his whoops of joy, trailing him in his sudden turn to the wind, followed then by a near vertical climb up to the angles of the sun, and I was barely eight and still with him and yes, that the thought that flickered madly through me, a brief instant of communion, possessing me with warmth and ageless ease, causing me to smile again and relax as if memory alone could lift the heart like the wind lifts a wing, and so I renewed my kisses with even greater enthusiasm, caressing and in turn devouring their dark lips, dark with wine and fleeting love, an ancient memory love had promised but finally never gave, until there were too many kisses to count or remember, and the memory of love proved not love at all and needed a replacement, which our bodies found, and then the

giggles subsided, and the laughter dimmed, and darkness enfolded all of us and we gave away our childhood for nothing and we died and condoms littered the floor and Christina threw up in the sink and Amber chuckled a little and kissed me a little more, but in a way that told me it was time to leave.

And so only now, days later, as I give these moments shape here, do I re

—encounter what my high briefly withheld; the covering memory permanently hitched to everything preceding it and so prohibiting all of it, those memories, the good ones, no matter how different, how blissful, eclipsed by the jack-knifed trailer across the highway, the tractor truck lodged in the stony ditch Off the shoulder, oily smoke billowing up into the night, and hardly deterred by the pin prick drizzle, the fire itself crawling up from the punctured fuel tanks, stripping the paint, melting the tires and blackening the shattered glass, the windshield struck from within, each jagged line telling the story of a broken heart which no ten year old boy should ever have to recollect let alone see, even if it is only in half—tone, the ink, all of it, over and over again, finally gathered on his delicate finger tips, as if by tracing the picture printed in the newspaper, he could in some way retract the details of death, smooth away the cab where the man he saw and loved like a god, agonized and died with no word of his own, illegible or otherwise, no god at all, and so by dissolving the black sky bring back the blue. But he never did. He only wore through one newspaper after another which was when the officials responsible for the custody of parentless children decided something was gravely wrong with him and sent him away, making sure he had no more clippings and all the ink, all that remained of his father, was washed from my hands.

Karen’s project is one mechanism against the uncanny or that which is

“un-home-like.” She remains watchful and willing to let the bizarre dimensions of her house gestate within her. She challenges its irregularity by introducing normalcy: her friend’s presence, bookshelves, peaceful conversation. In this respect, Karen acts as the quintessential gatherer. She keeps close to the homestead and while she may not forage for berries and mushrooms she does accumulate tiny bits of sense.

Navidson and Tom, on the other hand, are classic hunters. They select

weapons (tools; reason) and they track their prey (a solution). Billy Reston

is the one they hope will help them achieve their goal. He is a gruff man, frequently caustic and more like a drill sergeant than a tenured professor.

He is also a paraplegic who has spent almost half his life in an aluminum wheelchair. Navidson was barely twenty-seven when he first met Reston.

Actually it was a photograph that brought them together. Navidson had been on assignment in India, taking pictures of trains, rail workers, engineers, whatever caught his attention. The piece was supposed to capture the clamor of industry outside of Hyderabad. What ended up plastered on the pages of more than a few newspapers, however, was a photograph of a black American engineer desperately trying to out run a falling high voltage wire. The cable had been cut when an inexperienced crane operator had swung wide of a freight car and accidentally collided with an electrical pole. The wood had instantly splintered, tearing in half one of the power cables which descended toward the helpless Billy Reston, spitting sparks, and lashing the air like Nag or Nagaina. [43—Nag and Nagaina were the names of the two cobras iii Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Eventually both were defeated by the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.]

That very photograph hangs on Reston’s office wall. It captures the

mixture of fear and disbelief on Reston’s. face as he suddenly finds himself running for his life. One moment he was casually scanning the yard, thinking about lunch, and in the next he was about to die. His stride is stretched, back toes trying to push him out of the way, hands reaching for something, anything, to pull him out of the way. But he is too late. That serpentine shape surrounds him, moving much too fast for any last ditch effort at escape. As Fred de Stabenrath remarked in April 1954, “Les jeux sontfait. Nous sommes fucked.” [44—Fred de Stabenrath purportedly exclaimed this right before he was ki[xxxxxx part missing xxxxxxxx] [45— Zampanô left the rest of this footnote buried beneath a particularly dark spill of ink. At least I’m assuming it’s ink. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s something else. But then that’s not really important.. In some cases, I’ve managed to recover the lost text (see Chapter Nine). Here, however, I failed. Five lines gone along with the rest of Mr. Stabenrath.]

Tom takes a hard look at this remarkable 11 x 14 black and white print.

“That was the last time I had legs,” Reston tells him. “Right before that ugly snake bit ‘em off. I used to hate the picture and then I sort of became grateful for it. Now when anyone walks into my office they don’t have to

think about asking me how I ended up in this here chariot. They can see for themselves. Thank you Navy. You bastard. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi with a Nikon.”

Eventually the chat subsides and the three men get down to business.

Reston’s response is simple, rational, and exactly what both brothers came to hear: “There’s no question the problem’s with your equipment. I’d have to check out Tom’s stuff myself but I’m willing to bet university money there’s something a little outta whack with it. I’ve got a few things you can borrow: a Stanley Beacon level and a laser distance meter.” He grins at Navidson. “The meter’s even a Leica. That should put this ghost in the grave fast. But if it doesn’t, I’ll come out and measure your place myself and I’ll charge you for my time too.”

Both Will and Tom chuckle, perhaps feeling a little foolish. Reston

shakes his head.

“If you ask me Navy, you’ve got a little too much time on your hands.

You’d probably be better off if you just took your family for a nice long drive.”

On their way back, Navidson points the Hi 8 toward the darkening

horizon.

For a while neither brother says a word.

Will breaks the silence first: “Funny how all it took was a fraction of an

inch to get us in a car together.”

“Pretty strange.” “Thanks for coming Tom.” “Like there was really a chance I’d say no.” A pause. Again Navidson speaks up. “I almost wonder if I got tangled up in all this measuring stuff just so

I’d have some pretext to call you.”

Despite his best efforts, Tom cannot hold back a laugh: “You know I

hate to tell you this but there are simpler reasons you could of come up with.”

“You’re telling me,” Navidson says, shaking his head.

Rain starts splashing down on the windshield and lightning cracks

across the sky. Another pause follows.

This time, Tom breaks the silence: “Did you hear the one about the guy

on the tightrope?”

Navidson grins: “I’m glad to see some things never change.” “Hey this one’s true. There was this twenty-five year old guy walking a

tightrope across a deep river gorge while half way around the world another twenty-five year old guy was getting a blow job from a seventy year old woman, but get this, at the exact same moment both men were thinking the exact same thought. You know what it was?”

“No clue.” Tom gives his brother a wink. “Don’t look down.” And thus as one storm begins to ravage the Virginias, another one just

as easily dissipates and vanishes in a flood of bad jokes and old stories.

When confronting the spatial disparity in the house, Karen set her mind

on familiar things while Navidson went in search of a solution. The children, however, just accepted it. They raced through the closet. They played in it. They inhabited it. They denied the paradox by swallowing it whole. Paradox, after all, is two irreconcilable truths. But children do not know the laws of the world well enough yet to fear the ramifications of the irreconcilable. There are certainly no primal associations with spatial anomalies.

Similar to the ingenuous opening sequence of The Navidson Record,

seeing these two giddy children romp around is an equally unsettling experience, perhaps because their state of naïveté is so appealing to us, even seductive, offering such a simple resolution to an enigma. Unfortunately, denial also means ignoring the possibility of peril.

That possibility, however, seems at least momentarily irrelevant when

we cut to Will and Tom hauling Billy Reston’s equipment upstairs, the authority of their tools quickly subduing any sense of threat.

Just watching the two brothers use the Stanley Beacon level to establish

the distance they will need to measure communicates comfort. When they then turn their attention to the Leica meter it is nearly impossible not to at last expect some kind of resolution to this confounding problem. In fact

Tom’s crossed fingers as the Class 2 laser finally fires a tiny red dot across the width of the house manages to succinctly represent our own sympathies.

As the results are not immediate, we wait along with the whole family

as the internal computer calibrates the dimension. Navidson captures these seconds in 16mm. His Arriflex, already pre-focused and left running, spools in 24 frames per second as Daisy and Chad sit on their beds in the background, Hillary and Mallory linger in the foreground near Tom, while Karen and Audrie stand off to the right near the newly created bookshelves.

Suddenly Navidson lets out a hoot. It appears the discrepancy has

finally been eliminated.

Tom peers over his shoulder, “Good-bye Mr. Fraction.” “One more time” Navidson says. “One more time. Just to make sure.” Oddly enough, a slight draft keeps easing one of the closet doors shut. It

has an eerie effect because each time the door closes we lose sight of the children.

“Hey would you mind propping that open with something?’ Navidson

asks his brother.

Tom turns to Karen’s shelves and reaches for the largest volume he can

find. A novel. Just as with Karen, its removal causes an immediate domino effect. Only this time, as the books topple into each other, the last few do not stop at the wall as they had previously done but fall instead to the floor, revealing at least a foot between the end of the shelf and the plaster.

Tom thinks nothing of it. “Sorry,” he mumbles and leans over to pick up the scattered books.

Which is exactly when Karen screams.

V

Raju welcomed the intrusion—something to

relieve the loneliness of the place.

—R.K.Narayan

It is impossible to appreciate the importance of space in The Navidson

Record without first taking into account the significance of echoes.

However, before even beginning a cursory examination of their literal and thematic presence in the film, echoes reverberating within the word itself need to be distinguished.

Generally speaking, echo has two coextensive histories: the

mythological one and the scientific one. [46—David Eric Katz argues for a third: the epistemological one. Of course, the implication that the current categories of myth and science ignore the reverberation of knowledge itself is not true. Katz’s treatment of repetition, however, is still highly rewarding.

His list of examples in Table iii are particularly impressive. See The Third Beside You: An Analysis of the Epistemological Echo by David Eric Katz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).] Each provides a slightly different perspective on the inherent meaning of recurrence, especially when that repetition is imperfect.

To illustrate the multiple resonances found in an echo, the Greeks

conjured up the story of a beautiful mountain nymph. Her name was Echo and she made the mistake of helping Zeus succeed in one of his sexual conquests. Hera found out and punished Echo, making it impossible for her to say anything except the last words spoken to her. Soon after, Echo fell in love with Narcissus whose obsession with himself caused her to pine away until only her voice remained. Another lesser known version of this myth has Pan falling in love with Echo. Echo, however, rejects his amorous offers and Pan, being the god of civility and restraint, tears her to pieces, burying all of her except her voice. Adonta ta mete. [*—Adonta ta… = “Her still singing limbs.”] [47—Note that luckily in this chapter, Zampanô penciled many of the translations for these Greek and Latin quotations into the

margins. I’ve gone ahead and turned them into footnotes.] In both cases, unfulfilled love results in the total negation of Echo’s body and the near negation of her voice. [48—Ivan Largo Stilets, Greek Mythology Again (Boston: Biloquist Press, 1995), p. 343-497; as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ifi. 356-410.]

But Echo is an insurgent. Despite the divine constraints imposed upon

her, she still manages to subvert the gods’ ruling. After all, her repetitions are far from digital, much closer to analog. Echo colours the words with faint traces of sorrow (The Narcissus myth) or accusation (The Pan myth) never present in the original. As Ovid recognized in his Metamorphoses:

Spreta latet silvis pudibundaque frondibus ora protegit et solis ex jib vivit in antris; sed tamen haeret amor crescitque dolore repulsae; extenuant vigiles corpus miserabile curae adducitque cutem macies et in aera sucus corporis omnis abit; vox tantum atque ossa supersunt: vox manet, ossa ferunt lapidis traxisse figuram. Inde latet silvis nulloque in monte videtur, omnibus auditur: sonus est, qui vivit in i11a. [*—Eloquently translated by Horace Gregory as: “So she was turned

away! To hide her face, her lips, her guilt among the trees) Even their leaves, to haunt caves of the forest,! To feed her love on melancholy sormw/ Which, sleepless, turned her body to a shade) First pale and wrinkled, then a sheet of air) Then bones, which some say turned to thin-worn rocks; / And last her voice remained. Vanished in forest) Far from her usual walks on hills and valleys,! She’s heard by all who call; her voice has life.” The Metamorphoses by Ovid. (New York: A Mentor Book, 1958), p.

97.]

To repeat: her voice has life. It possesses a quality not present in the

original, revealing how a nymph can return a different and more meaningful

story, in spite of telling the same story. [49—Literary marvel Miguel de Cervantes set down this compelling passage in his Don Quixote (Part One,

Chapter Nine):

Ia verdad, cuya madre es la historia, émula del tiempo, depdsito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir. [51—Which Anthony Bonner translates

as”.. . truth, whose mother Is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.” — Ed.]

Much later, a yet untried disciple of arms had the rare pleasure of

meeting the extraordinary Pierre Menard in a Paris café following the second world war. Reportedly Menard expounded on his distinct distaste for Madelines but never mentioned the passage (and echo of Don Quixote ) he had penned before the war which had subsequently earned him a fair amount of literary fame:

la verdad, cuya madre es Ia historia, émula del tiempo, depOsito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir.

This exquisite variation on the passage by the “ingenious layman” is far

too dense to unpack here. Suffice it to say Menard’s nuances are so fine they are nearly undetectable, though talk with the Framer and you will immediately see how haunted they are by sorrow, accusation, and sarcasm.]

[50—Exactly How the fuck do you write about “exquisite variation”

when both passages are exactly the same?

I’m sure the late hour has helped, add to that the dim light in my room,

or how poorly I’ve been sleeping, going to sleep but not really resting, if that’s possible, though let me tell you, sitting alone, awake to nothing else but this odd murmuring, like listening to the penitent pray—you know it’s a prayer but you miss the words—or better yet listening to a bitter curse, realizing a whole lot wrong’s being ushered into the world but still missing the words, me like that, listening in my way by comparing in his way both Spanish fragments, both written out on brown leaves of paper, or no, that’s not right, not brown, more like, oh I don’t know, yes brown but in the failing light appearing almost colored or the memory of a color, somehow violent, or close to that, or not at all, as I just kept reading both pieces over and over again, trying to detect at least one differing accent or letter,

wanting to detect at least one differing accent or letter, getting almost desperate in that pursuit, only to repeatedly discover perfect similitude, though how can that be, right? if it were perfect it wouldn’t be similar it would be identical, and you know what? I’ve lost this sentence, I can’t even finish it, don’t know how—

Here’s the point: the more I focused in on the words the farther I

seemed from my room. No sense where either, until all of a sudden along the edges of my tongue, towards the back of my mouth, I started to taste something extremely bitter, almost metallic. I began to gag. I didn’t gag, but I was certain I would. Then I got a whiff of that same something awful I’d detected outside of the Shop in the hail. Faint as hell at first until I knew I’d smelled it and then it wasn’t faint at all. A whole lot of rot was suddenly packed up my nose, slowly creeping down my throat, closing it off. I started to throw up, watery chunks of vomit flying everywhere, sluicing out of me onto the floor, splashing onto the wall, even onto this. Except I only coughed. I didn’t cough. I lightly cleared my throat and then the smell was gone and so was the taste. I was back in my room again, looking around in the dim light, jittery, disoriented but hardly fooled.

I put the fragments back in the trunk. Walked the perimeter of my room.

Glass of bourbon. A toke on a blunt. There we go. Bring on the haze. But who am I kidding? I can still see what’s happening. My line of defense has not only failed, it failed long ago. Don’t ask me to define the line either or why exactly it’s needed or even what it stands in defense against. I haven’t the foggiest idea.

This much though I’m sure of: I’m alone in hostile territories with no

clue why they’re hostile or how to get back to safe havens, an Old Haven, a lost haven, the temperature dropping, the hour heaving & pitching towards a profound darkness, while before me my idiotic amaurotic Guide laughs,

actually cackles is more like it, lost in his own litany of inside jokes, completely out of his head, out of focus too, zonules of Zinn, among other things, having snapped long ago like piano wires, leaving me with absolutely no Sound way to determine where the hell I’m going, though right now going to hell seems like a pretty sound bet.

In his own befuddled way, John Hollander has given the world a

beautiful and strange reflection on love and longing. To read his marvelous dialogue on echo [52—See John Hollander’s The Figure of Echo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). ] is to find its author standing perfectly still in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes wild with a cascade of internal reckonings, lips acting out some unintelligible discourse, inaudible to the numerous students who race by him, noting his mad appearance and quite rightly offering him a wide berth as they escape into someone else’s class. [53—Kelly Chamotto makes mention of Hollander in her essay “Mid-Sentence, Mid-Stream” in Glorious Garrulous Graphomania ed. T. N Joseph Truslow (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), p. 345.]

Hollander begins with a virtual catalogue of literal echoes. For example,

the Latin “decem lam annos aetatem trivi in Cicerone” echoed by the Greek “one!” [“I’ve spent ten years on Cicero” “Ass!”] Or “Musarum studia” (Latin) described by the echo as “dia” (Greek). [“The Muses’ studies” “divine ones.”] Or Narcissus’ rejection “Emoriar, quam sit tibi copia nostri” to which Echo responds “sit tibi copia nostri.” [Narcissus: “May I die before I give you power over me.” Echo: “I give you power over me.”] On page 4, he even provides a woodcut from Athanasius Kircher’s Neue Hall -und Thonkunst (Nordlingen, 1684) illustrating an artificial echo machine designed to exchange “ clamore” for four echoes:” amore,” “more,” “ore,” and finally “re.” [“O outcry” returns as “love,” “delays,” “hours” and “king.”] Nor does Hollander stop there. His slim volume abounds with examples of textual transfiguration, though in an effort to keep from repeating the entire book, let this heart-wrenching interchange serve as a final example:

Chi dara fine a! gran dolore?

L’ore. [“Who will put an end to this great sadness?” “The hours passing”]

While The Figure of Echo takes special delight in clever word games,

Hollander knows better than to limit his examination there. Echo may live in metaphors, puns and the suffix—solis ex jib vivit in antris [“Literatures rocky caves”] [54—“From that time on she lived in lonely caves.” — Ed.]

— but her range extends far beyond those literal walls. For instance, the rabbinical bat kol means “daughter of a voice” which in modern Hebrew serves as a rough equivalent for the word “echo.” Milton knew it “God so commanded, and left that Command! Sole Daughter of his voice.” [55— John Milton’s Paradise Lost, IX, 653-54.] So did Wordsworth: “stern Daughter of the Voice of God.” Quoting from Henry Reynold’s Mythomystes (1632), Hollander evidences religious appropriation of the ancient myth (page 16):

This Winde is (as the before-mentioned lamblicus, by consent of his other fellow Cabalists sayes) the Symbole of the Breath of God; and Ecco, the reflection of this divine breath, or spirit upon us; or (as they interpret it) the daughter of the divine voice; which through the beatifying splendor it shedds and diffuses through the Soule, is justly worthy to be reverenced and adored by us. This Ecco descending upon a Narcissus, or such a Soule as (impurely and vitiously affected) slights, and stops his eares to the Divine voice, or shutts his harte from divine Inspirations, through his being enamour’d of not himselfe, but his owne shadow meerely . . . he becomes thence . . . an earthy, weake, worthiesse thing, and fit sacrifize for only etemall oblivion…

Thus Echo suddenly assumes the role of god’s messenger, a female

Mercury or perhaps even Prometheus, decked in talaria, with lamp in hand, descending on fortunate humanity.

In 1989, however, the noted southern theologian Hanson Edwin Rose

dramatically revised this reading. In a series of lectures delivered at Chapel Hill, Rose referred to “God’s Grand Utterance” as “The Biggest Bang Of Them All.” After discussing in depth the difference between the Hebrew davhar and the Greek logos, Rose took a careful accounting of St. John,

chapter 1, Verse 1 —“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It was a virtuoso performance but one that surely would have been relegated to those dusty shelves already burdened with a thousand years of seminary discourse had he not summed up his ruminations with this incendiary and sill infamous conclusion:

“Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only god’s

echoes and god is Narcissus.” [56—Hanson Edwin Rose, Creationist Myths (Detroit, Michigan: Pneuma Publications, 1989), p. 219.]

Rose’s pronouncement recalls another equally important meditation:

Why did god create a dual universe?

So he might say, “Be not like me. I am alone.” And it might be heard.

[57—These lines have a familiar ring though I’ve no clue why or where

I’ve heard them before.]

[58—Though we were ultimately unsuccessful, all efforts were made to

determine who wrote the above verse. We apologize for this inconsistency.

Anyone who can provide legitimate proof of authorship will be credited In future editions. — Ed.]

There is not time or room to adequately address the complexity inherent

in this passage, aside from noting how the voice is returned—or figuratively echoed—not with an actual word but with the mere understanding that it was received, listened to, or as the text explicitly states “heard.” What the passage occludes, no doubt on purpose, is how such an understanding might be attained.

Interestingly enough, for all its marvelous observation, The Figure of

Echo contains a startling error, one which performs a poetic modulation on a voice sounded over a century ago. While discussing Wordsworth’s poem “The Power of Sound” Hollander quotes on page 19 the following few lines:

Ye Voices, and ye Shadows And Images of voice — to hound and horn From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows

Flung back, and in the sky’s blue care reborn —

[Italics added for emphasis]

Perhaps it is simply a typographical error committed by the publisher.

Or perhaps the publisher was dutifully transcribing an error committed by Hollander himself, not just a scholar but a poet as well, who in that tiny slip where an “r” replaced a “v” and an “s” miraculously vanished reveals his own relation to the meaning of echo. A meaning Wordsworth did not share.

Consider the original text:

Ye Voices, and ye Shadows And Images of voice—to hound and horn From rocky steep and rock-bestudded meadows Flung back, and, in the sky’s blue caves reborn — [Italics added for emphasis]

[59—William Wordsworth, The Poems Of William Wordsworth, ed.

Nowell Charles Smith, M.A. vol. 1. (London: Methuen and Co., 1908), p.

395. Also of some interest is Alice May Williams letter to the observers at Mount Wilson (CAT. #0005) in which she writes: “I believe that sky opens & closes on certain periods, When you see all that cloud covering the sky right up, & over. Those clouds are called. Blinds, shutters, & verandahs.

Sometimes that sky opens underneath.” See No One May Ever Have The Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory 1915-1 935, edited and transcribed by Sarah Simons (West Covina, California: Society For the Diffusion of Useful Information Press, 1993), p. 11.]

While Wordsworth’s poetics retain the literal properties and stay within

the canonical jurisdiction of Echo, Hollander’ s find something else, not exactly ‘religious’—that would be hyperbole—but ‘compassionate’, which as an echo of humanity suggests the profoundest return of all.

Aside from recurrence, revision, and commensurate symbolic reference,

echoes also reveal emptiness. Since objects always muffle or impede acoustic reflection, only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity.

Ironically, hollowness only increases the eerie quality of otherness

inherent in any echo. Delay and fragmented repetition create a sense of another inhabiting a necessarily deserted place. Strange then how something so uncanny and outside of the self, even ghostly as some have suggested, can at the same time also contain a resilient comfort: the assurance that even if it is imaginary and at best the product of a wall, there is still something else out there, something to stake out in the face of nothingness.

Hollander is wrong when he writes on page 55:

The apparent echoing of solitary words [reminds] us … that acoustical echoing in empty places can be a very common auditory emblem, redolent of gothic novels as it may be, of isolation and often of unwilling solitude. This is no doubt a case of natural echoes conforming to echo’s mythographic mocking, rather than affirming, role.

In an empty hall that should be comfortably inhabited, echoes of our voices and motions mock our very presence in the hollow space.

It is not by accident that choirs singing Psalms are most always

recorded with ample reverb. Divinity seems defined by echo. Whether the Vienna Boys Choir or monks chanting away on some chart climbing CD, the hallowed always seems to abide in the province of the hollow. The reason for this is not too complex. An echo, while implying an enormity of a space, at the same time also defines it, limits it, and even temporarily inhabits it.

When a pebble falls down a well, it is gratifying to hear the eventual

plunk. If, however, the pebble only slips into darkness and vanishes without a sound, the effect is disquieting. In the case of a verbal echo, the spoken word acts as the pebble and the subsequent repetition serves as “the plunk.” In this way, speaking can result in a form of “seeing.”

For all its merits, Hollander’s book only devotes five pages to the actual

physics of sound. While this is not the place to dwell on the beautiful and complex properties of reflection, in order to even dimly comprehend the shape of the Navidson house it is still critical to recognize how the laws of physics in tandem with echo’s mythic inheritance serve to enhance echo’s interpretive strength.

The descriptive ability of the audible is easily designated with the

following formula:

Sound + Time = Acoustic Light

As most people know who are versed in this century’s technological

effects, exact distances can be determined by timing the duration of a sound’s round trip between the deflecting object and its point of origin. This principle serves as the basis for all the radar, sonar and ultrasonics used every day around the world by air traffic controllers, fishermen, and obstetricians. By using sound or electromagnetic waves, visible blips may be produced on a screen, indicating either a 747, a school of salmon, or the barely pumping heart of a fetus.

Of course echolocation has never belonged exclusively to technology.

Microchiroptera (bats), Cetacean (porpoises and toothed whales), Deiphinis deiphis (dolphins) as well as certain mammals (flying foxes) and birds (oilbirds) all use sound to create extremely accurate acoustic images.

However, unlike their human counterparts, neither bats nor dolphins require an intermediary screen to interpret the echoes. They simply “see” the shape of sound.

Bats, for example, create frequency modulated [FMJ images by

producing constant-frequency signals [0.5 to 100+ ms] and FM signals [0.5 to 10 msj in their larynx. The respondent echoes are then translated into nerve discharges in the auditory cortex, enabling the bat not only to determine an insect’s velocity and direction (through synaptic interpretation of Doppler shifts) but pinpoint its location to within a fraction of a millimeter. [60—See D. R. Griffin, Listening in the Dark (1986).]

As Michael J. Buckingham noted in the mid-80s, imaging performed by

the human eye is neither active nor passive. The eye does not need to produce a signal to see nor does an object have to produce a signal in order to be seen. An object merely needs to be illuminated. Based on these observations, the afready mentioned formula reflects a more accurate understanding of vision with the following refinement:

Sound + Time = Acoustic Touch

As Gloucester murmured, “I see it feelingly.” [61—King Lear, IV, vi,

147.]

Unfortunately, humans lack the sophisticated neural hardware present in

bats and whales. The blind must rely on the feeble light of fingertips and the painful shape of a cracked shin. Echolocation comes down to the crude assessment of simple sound modulations, whether in the dull reply of a tapping cane or the low, eerie flutter in one simple word—perhaps your word—flung down empty hallways long past midnight.

[62—You don’t need me to point out the intensely personal nature of

this passage. Frankly I’d of rec’d a quick skip past the whole echo ramble were it not for those six lines, especially the last bit “— perhaps your word —“ conjuring up, at least for me, one of those deep piercing reactions, the kind that just misses a ventricle, the old man making his way—feeling his way—around the walls of another evening, a slow and tedious progress but one which begins to yield, somehow, the story of his own creature darkness, taking me completely by surprise, a sudden charge from out of the dullest moment, jaws lunging open, claws protracting, and just so you understand where I’m coming from, I consider “… long past midnight” one claw and “empty hallways” another.

Don’t worry Lude didn’t buy it either but at least he bought a couple of

rounds.

Two nights ago, we were checking out the Sky Bar, hemorrhaging

dough on drinks, but Lude could only cough hard and then laugh real

coronary like: “Hoss, a claw’s made of bone just like a stilt’s made of steel.”

“Sure” I said.

But it was loud there and the crowd kept both of us from hearing

correctly. And while I wanted to believe Lude’s basics, I couldn’t. There was something just so awful in the old man’s utterance. I felt a terrible empathy for him then, living in that tiny place, permeated with the odor of age, useless blinks against the darkness. His word—my word, maybe even your word—added to this, and ringing inside me like some awful dream, over and over again, modulating slightly, slowly pitching my own defenses into something entirely different, until the music of that recurrence drew into relief my own scars drawn long ago, over two decades ago, and with more than a claw, a stiletto or even an ancient Samuel O’Reilly @ 1891, and these scars torn, ripped, bleeding and stuttering—for they are first of all his scars—the kind only bars of an EKG can accurately remember, a more precise if incomplete history, Q waves deflecting downward at what must be considered the commencement of the QRS complex, telling the story of a past infarction, that awful endurance and eventual letting go, the failure which began it all in the first place, probably right after one burning maze but still years ahead of the Other loss, a horrible violence, before the coming of that great Whale, before the final drift, nod, macking skid, twist and topple—his own burning—years before the long rest, coming along in its own way, its own nightmare, perhaps even in the folds of another unprotected sleep (so I like to imagine), silvering wings fragmenting then scattering like fish scales flung on the jet stream, above the clouds and every epic venture still suggested in those delicate, light-cradled borders— Other Lands—sweeping the world like a whisper, a hand, even if salmon scales still slip through words as easily as palmed prisms of salt will always slip through fingers, shimmering, raining, confused, and no matter how spectacular forever unable to prevent his fall, down through the silver, the salmon, away from the gold and the myriad of games held in just that word, suggesting it might have even been Spanish gold, though this makes no differance, still tumbling in rem-, dying and -embered, even? or never, in a different light, and not waking this time, before the hit, but sleeping right through it, the slamming into the ground, at terminal velocity too, the pound, the bounce, What kind of ground-air emergency code would that

mark mean? the opposition of L’s? Not understood? Probably just X marks the spot: Unable To Proceed— then in the awful second arc and second descent, after the sound, the realization of what Sleep has just now delivered, that bloody handmaiden, this time her toiling fingers wet with boiling deformation, oozing in the mutilations of birth, heartless & unholy, black with afterbirth, miscreated changeling and foul, what no one beside him could prevent, but rather might have even caused, and mine too, this unread trauma, driving him to consciousness with a scream, not even a word, a scream, and even that never heard, so not a scream but the clutch of life held by will alone, no 911, no call at all, just his own misunderstanding of the reality that had broken into the Hall, the silence then of a woman and an only son, describing in an agonizing hour all it takes to let go, broken, bleeding, ragged, twisted, savaged, torn and dying too, so permanently wronged, though for how many years gone untold, unseen, reminiscent of another silver shape, so removed and yet so dear, kept on a cold gold chain, years on, this fistful of twitching injured life, finally recovering on its own until eventually like a seed conceived, born and grown, the story of its injured beat survives long enough to destroy and devour by the simple telling of its fall, all his hope, his home, his only love, the very color of his flesh and the dark marrow of his bone.

“You okay Truant?” Lude asked.

But I saw a strange glimmer everywhere, confined to the sharp

oscillations of yellow & blue, as if my retinal view suddenly included along with the reflective blessings of light, an unearthly collusion with scent & sound, registering all possibilities of harm, every threat, every move, even with all that grinning and meeting and din.

A thousand and one possible claws.

Of course, Lude didn’t see it. He was blind. Maybe even right. We

drove down Sunset and soon veered south into the flats. A party somewhere. An important gathering of B heads and coke heads. Lude would never feel how “empty hallways long past midnight” could slice inside of you, though I’m not so sure he wasn’t sliced up just the same. Not seeing the rip doesn’t mean you automatically get to keep clear of the Hey-I’m-Bleeding part. To feel though, you have to care and as we walked out onto the blue-lit patio and discovered a motorcycle sputtering up oil and bubbles from the bottom of the pool while on the diving board two men

shoved flakes of ice up a woman’s bleeding nostrils, her shirt off, her bra nearly transparent, I knew Lude would never care much about the dead.

And maybe he was right. Maybe some things are best left untouched. Of course he didn’t know the dead like I did. And so when he absconded with a bottle of Jack from the kitchen, I did my best to join him. Obliterate my own cavities and graves.

But come morning, despite my headache and the vomit on my shirt, I

knew I’d failed.

Inside me, a long dark hallway already caressed the other music of a

single word, and what’s worse, despite the amazements of chemicals, continued to grow.]

The study of architectural acoustics focuses on the rich interplay

between sound and interior design. Consider, for example, how an enclosed space will naturally increase sound pressure and raise the frequency. Even though they are usually difficult to calculate, resonance frequencies, also known as eigenfrequencies or natural frequencies, can be easily determined for a perfectly rectangular room with hard smooth walls. The following formula describes the resonance frequencies [f] in a room with a length of L, width of W, and height of H, where the velocity of sound equals c:

f = C/2 [(flIL)2 + (m/W)2 + (P/H)21 1/2 Hz

Notice that if L, W, and H all equal oo, f will equal 0.

Along with resonance frequencies, the study of sound also takes into

account wave acoustics, ray acoustics, diffusion, and steady-state pressure level, as well as sound absorption and transmission through walls. A careful examination of the dynamics involved in sound absorption reveals how incident sound waves are converted to energy. (In the case of porous material, the subsurface lattice of interstices translates sound waves into heat.) Nevertheless, above and beyond the details of frequency shifts and volume fluctuations—the physics of ‘otherness’ —what matters most is a sound’s delay. [63—Further attention should probably be given to sabins and Transmission Loss as described by TL = 10 log 1/ r dB, where r= a transmission coefficient and a high TL indicates a high sound insulation.

Unfortunately, one could write several lengthy books on sound alone in The

Navidson Record. Oddly enough, with the sole exception of Kellog Pequity’s article on acoustic impedance in Navidson’s house (Science, April 1995, p. 43), nothing else has been rendered on this particularly resonant topic. On the subject of acoustic coefficience, however, see Ned Noi’s “Echo’s Verse” in Science News, v. 143, February 6, 1993, p. 85.]

Point of fact, the human ear cannot distinguish one sound wave from the

same sound wave if it returns in less than 50 milliseconds. Therefore for anyone to hear a reverberation requires a certain amount of space. At 68 degrees Fahrenheit sound travels at approximately 1,130 ft per second. A reflective surface must stand at least 56 ½ ft away in order for a person to detect the doubling of her voice. [64—Parallel surfaces will create a flutter echo, though frequently a splay of as little as 16mm (5/8 inch) can prevent the multiple repetitions.]

In other words, to hear an echo, regardless of whether eyes are open or

closed, is to have already “seen” a sizable space.

Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes

Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate.

And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love.

There is only silence.

[65—There is something more at work here, some sort of antithetical

reasoning and proof making, and what about light?, all of which actually made sense to me at a certain hour before midnight or at least came close to making sense. Problem was Lude interrupted my thoughts when he came over and after much discussion (not to mention shots of tequila and a nice haircut) convinced me to share a bag of mushrooms with him and in spite of getting violently ill in the aisle of a certain 7-Eleven (me; not him) led me to an after hours party where I soon became engrossed in a green-eyed brunette (Lucy) who had no intention of letting our dance end at the club, and yet even in our sheet twisting, lightless dance on my floor, her own features, those pale legs, soft arms, the fragile collar bone tracing a shadow of (—can’t write the word—), invariably became entwined and

permanently??? entangled, even entirely replaced??? by images of a completely different woman; relatively new, or not new at all, but for reasons unknown to me still continuing to endure as a center to my thoughts; her—

—first encountered in the company of Lude and my boss at a place my

boss likes to call The Ghost. The problem is that in his mind The Ghost

actually refers to two places: The Garden of Eden on La Brea and The Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset. How or why this came about is impossible to trace. Private nomenclature seems to rapidly develop in tight set—upon circles, though truth be told we were only set—upon on a good day, and tight here should be taken pretty loosely.

How then, you ask, do you know what’s being referred to when The

Ghost gets mentioned?

You don’t.

You just end up at one or the other. Often the Rainbow. Though not

always the Rainbow. You see, how my boss defines The Ghost varies from day to day, depending mostly on his moods and appetites. Consequently, the previously mentioned “pretty loosely” should probably be struck and re-stated as “very, very loosely.”

Anyway, what I’m about to tell you happened on one of those rare

evenings when we actually all got together. My boss was chattering incessantly about his junk days in London and how he’d contemplated sobriety and what those contemplations had been like. Eventually he detoured into long winded non-stories about his Art School experiences in Detroit,—lots of “Hey, my thing for that whole time thing was really a kinda art thing or something”—which was about when I hauled out my pad of sketches, because no matter what you made of his BS you still couldn’t fault him for his work. He was one of best, and every tatted local knew it.

Truth be known, I’d been waiting for this chance for a while, keen on

getting his out-of-the-Shop perspective on my efforts, and what efforts they

were—diligent designs sketched over the months, intended someday to live in skin, each image carefully wrapped and coiled in colors of cinnabar, lemon, celadon and indigo, incarnated in the scales of dragons, the bark of ancient roods, shields welded by generations cast aside in the oily umber of shadow & blood not to speak of lifeless trees prevailing against indifferent skies or colossal vessels asleep in prehistoric sediment, miles beneath even the faintest suggestion of light—at least that’s how I would describe them— every one meticulously rendered on tracing paper, cracking like fire whenever touched, a multitude of pages, which my boss briefly examined before handing them back to me.

“Take up typing,” he grunted.

Well that’s nice, I thought.

At least the next step was clear.

Some act of violence would be necessary.

And so it was that before another synapse could fire within my bad-off

labyrinthine brain, he was already lying on the floor. Or I should say his mangled body was lying on the floor. His head remained in my hands.

Twisted off like a cap. Not as difficult as I’d imagined. The first turn definitely the toughest, necessitating the breaking of cervical vertebrae and the snapping of the spinal cord, but after that, another six or so turns, and voilà—the head was off. Nothing could be easier. Time to go bowling.

My boss smiled. Said hello.

But he wasn’t smiling or saying hello to me.

Somehow she was already standing there, right in front of him, right in

front of me, talking to him, reminiscing, touching his shoulder, even winking at me and Lude.

Wow. Out of nowhere. Out of the blue.

Where had she come from? Or for that matter, when?

Of course my boss didn’t introduce her. He just left me to gape. I

couldn’t even imagine twisting off his head for a second time as that would of meant losing sight of her. Which I found myself quite unwilling to do.

Fortunately, after that evening, she began dropping by the Shop alot,

always wearing these daisy sunglasses and each time taking me completely

offguard.

She still drives me nuts. Just thinking of her now and I’m lost, lost in

the smell of her, the way of her and everything she conjures up inside me, a mad rush of folly & oddly muted lusts, sensations sublimated faster than I can follow, into— oh hell I don’t know what into, I probably shouldn’t even be using a word like sublimate, but that’s beside the point, her hair reminding me of a shiny gold desert wind brazed in a hot August sun, hips curving like coastal norths, tits rising and falling beneath her blue sweatshirt the way an ocean will do long after the storm has passed. (She’s always a little out of breath when she climbs the flight of stairs leading up to the Shop.) One glance at her, even now in the glass of my mind, and I want to take off, travel with her, who knows where either, somewhere, my desire suddenly informed by something deeper, even unknown, pouring into me, drawn off some peculiar reserve, tracing thoughts of the drive she and I would take, lungs full of that pine rasping air, outracing something unpleasant, something burning, in fact the entire coast along with tens of thousands of acres of inland forest is burning but we’re leaving, we’re getting away, we’re free, our hands battered by the clutch of holding on—I don’t know what to, but holding just the same—and cheeks streaked with wind tears; and now that I think of it I guess we are on a motorcycle, a Triumph?, isn’t that what Lude always talks about buying?, ascending into colder but brighter climes, and I don’t know anything about bikes let alone how to drive one. And there I go again. She does that to me. Like I already said, drives me nuts.

“Hello?” That was the first word she ever said to me in the Shop. Not like “Hi”

either. More like “Hello, is anyone home?” hence the question mark. I wasn’t even looking at her when she said it, just staring blankly down at my equally blank pad of tracing paper, probably thinking something similar to all those ridiculous, sappy thoughts I just now recounted, about road trips and forest fires and motorcycles, remembering her, even though she was right there in front of me, only a few feet away.

“Hey asshole,” my boss shouted. “Hang up her fucking pants. What’s

the matter with you?”

Something would have to be done about him.

But before I could hurl him through the plate glass window into the

traffic below, she smiled and handed me her bright pink flip-flops & white Adidas sweats. My boss was lucky. This magnificent creature had just saved his life.

Gratefully I received her clothes, lifting them from her Lingers tips like

they were some sacred vesture bestowed upon me by the Virgin Mary herself. The hard part, I found, was trying not to stare too long at her legs.

Very tricky to do. Next to impossible, especially with her just standing there in a black G-string, her bare feet sweating on the naked floor.

I did my best to smile in a way that would conceal my awe. “Thank you,” I said, thinking I should kneel. “Thank you,” she insisted.

Those were the next two words she ever said to me, and wow, I don’t

know why but her voice went off in my head like a symphony. A great symphony. A sweet symphony. A great-fucking-sweet symphony. I don’t know what I’m saying. I know absolutely shit about symphonies.

“What’s your name?” The total suddenly climbing to an impossible six

words.

“Johnny,” I mumbled, promptly earning four more words. And just like

that.

“Nice to meet you,” she said in a way that almost sounded like a psalm.

And then even though she clearly enjoyed the effect she was having on me, she turned away with a wink, leaving me to ponder and perhaps pray.

At least I had her ten words: “hello thank you what’s your name nice to

meet you.” Ten whole fucking words. Wow. Wow. Wow. And hard as this may be for you to believe, I really was reeling. Even after she left the Shop an hour or so later, I was still giving serious thought to petitioning all major religions in order to have her deified.

In fact I was so caught up in the thought of her, there was even a

moment where I failed to recognize my boss. I had absolutely no clue who he was. I just stared at him thinking to myself, “Who’s this dumb mutant and how the hell did he get up here?” which it turns out I didn’t think at all

but accidentally said aloud, causing all sorts of mayhem to ensue, not worth delving into now.

Quick note here: if this crush—slash—swooning stuff is hard for you to

stomach; if you’ve never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you’ve got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into.

Quick second note: if that last paragraph didn’t apply to you, you may

skip it and proceed to this next part.

As for her real name, I still don’t know it. She’s a stripper at some place

near the airport. She has a dozen names. The first time she came into the Shop, she wanted one of her tattoos retouched. “Just an inch away from my perfectly shaved pussy,” she announced very matter—a—factly, only to add somewhat coyly, slipping two fingers beneath her G-string and pulling it aside; no need to wink now: “The Happiest Place On Earth.”

Suffice it to say, the second I saw that rabbit the second I started calling

her Thumper.

I do admit it seems a little strange, even to me, to realize that even after

four months I’m still swept up in her. Lude sure as hell doesn’t understand it. One— because I’ve fallen for a stripper: “fuck a’ and ‘fall for’ have very different meanings, Hoss. The first one you do as much as you can. The second one you never ever, ever do.”; and two— because she’s older than me: “If you’re gonna reel for a stripper,” he advises. “You should at least reel for a young one. They’re sexier and not as bent.” Which is true, she does have a good six years on me, but what can I say? I’m taken; I love how enthralled she remains by this festival of living, nothing reserved or even remotely ashamed about who she is or what she does, always talking blue streak to my boss about her three year old child, her boyfriend, her boyfriends, the hand jobs she gets extra for, eleven years of sobriety, her words always winding up the way it feels to wake up wide awake, everything about her awakening at every moment, alive to the world and its

quirky opportunities, a sudden rite of spring, Thumper’s spring, though spring’s already sprung, rabbit rabbit, and now April’s ruling April’s looming April’s fooling, around, in yet another round, for this year’s ruling April fool.

Yeah I know, I know. This shit’s getting ridiculous.

Even worse, I feel like I could continue in that vein for years, maybe

even decades.

And yet, listen to this, to date I’ve hardly said a word to her. Don’t have

a decent explanation for my silence either. Maybe it’s my boss and his guard dog glare. Maybe it’s her. I suspect it’s her. Every time she visits (though I admit there haven’t been that many visits), she overwhelms me. It doesn’t matter that she always gives me a wink and sometimes even a full throated laugh when I call her “Thumper”, “Hi Thumper” “Bye Thumper” the only words I can really muster, she still really only exists for me as a strange mixture of daydream and present day edge, by which I mean something without a past or a future, an icon or idyll of sorts, for some reason forbidden to me, but seductive beyond belief and probably relief, her image feeling permanently fixed within me, but not new, more like it’s been there all along, even if I know that’s not true, and come last night going so far as to entwine, entangle and finally completely replace her with the (— can’t write the word—) of—

—Thumper’s flashing eyes, her aching lips, her heart-ending moans,

those I had imagined, an ongoing list, so minute and distracting that long after, when the sheets were gathered, wet with sex, cold with rest, I did not know who lay beside me (—) and seeing this stranger, the vessel of my dreams, I withdrew to the toilet, to the shower, to my table, enough racket and detachment to communicate an unfair request, but poor her she heard it and without a word dressed, and without a smile requested a brush, and without a kiss left, leaving me alone to return to this passage where I discovered the beginnings of a sense long since taken and strewn, leading me away on what I guess amounts to another hopeless digression.

Perhaps when I’m finished I’ll remember what I’d hoped to say in the

first place. [66—Mr. Truant declined to comment further on this particular

passage. — Ed.]

As tape and film reveal, in the month following the expansion of the

walls bracketing the book shelves, Billy Reston made several trips to the house where despite all efforts to the contrary, he continued to confirm the confounding impossibility of an interior dimension greater than an exterior one.

Navidson skillfully captures Reston’s mental frustration by focusing on

the physical impediments his friend must face within a house not designed with the disabled in mind. Since the area in question is in the master bedroom, Reston must make his way upstairs each time he wishes to inspect the area.

On the first visit, Tom volunteers to try and carry him. “That won’t be necessary” Reston grunts, effortlessly swinging out of

his chair and dragging himself up to the second story using only his arms.

“You got a pair of guns there, don’t you partner.” The engineer is only slightly winded. “Too bad you forgot your chair,” Tom adds dryly.

Reston looks up in disbelief, a little surprised, maybe even a bit

shocked, and then bursts out laughing.

“Well, and fuck you.” In the end, Navidson is the one who hauls up the wheelchair. [67—Yesterday I managed to get Maus Fife-Harris on the phone. She’s

a UC Irvine PhD candidate in Comp Lit who apparently always objected to the large chunks of narrative Zampanô kept asking her to write down. “I told him all those passages were inappropriate for a critical work, and if he were in my class I’d mark him down for it. But he’d just chuckle and continue. It bothered me a little but the guy wasn’t my student and he was blind and old, so why should I care? Still, I did care, so I’d always protest when he asked me to write down a new bit of narrative. ‘Why won’t you listen to me?’ I demanded one time. ‘You’re writing like a freshman.’ And he replied—I remember this very distinctly ‘We always look for doctors but sometimes we’re lucky to find a frosh.’ And then he chuckled again and

pressed on.” Not a bad way to respond to this whole fucking book, if you ask me.]

Still, no matter how many times Reston wheels from the children’s

bedroom to the master bedroom or how carefully he examines the strange closet space, the bookshelves, or the various tools Tom and Will have been measuring the house with, he can provide no reasonable explanation for what he keeps referring to as “a goddamn spatial rape.”

By June—as the date on the Hi 8 tape indicates—the problem still

remains unsolved. Tom, however, realizes he cannot afford to stay any longer and asks Reston to give him a lift to Charlottesville where he can catch a ride up to Dulles.

It is a bright summer morning when we watch Tom emerge from the

house. He gives Karen a quick kiss good-bye and then kneels down to present Chad and Daisy with a set of neon yellow dart guns.

“Remember kids,” he tells them sternly. “Don’t shoot each other. Aim at

the fragile, expensive stuff.”

Navidson gives his brother a lasting hug. “I’ll miss you, man.” “You got a phone,” Tom grins. “It even rings,” Navidson adds without missing a beat.

While there is no question the tone of this exchange is jocular and

perhaps even slightly combative, what matters most here is unspoken. The way Tom’s cheeks burn with a sudden flush of color. Or the way Navidson quickly tries to wipe something from his eyes. Certainly the long, lingering shot of Tom as he tosses his duffel bag in the back of Reston’s van, waving the camera good-bye, reveals to us just how much affection Navidson feels for his brother.

Strangely enough, following Tom’s departure, communication between

Navidson and Karen begins to radically deteriorate.

An unusual quiet descends on the house.

Karen refuses to speak about the anomaly. She brews coffee, calls her

mother in New York, brews more coffee, and keeps track of the real estate market in the classifieds.

Frustrated by her unwillingness to discuss the implications of their

strange living quarters, Navidson retreats to the downstairs study, reviewing photographs, tapes, even—as a few stills reveal—compiling a list of possible experts, government agencies, newspapers, periodicals, and television shows they might want to approach.

At least both he and Karen agree on one thing: they want the children to

stay out of the house. Unfortunately, since neither Chad nor Daisy has had a real opportunity to make any new friends in Virginia, they keep to themselves, romping around the backyard, shouting, screaming, stinging each other with darts until eventually they drift farther and farther out into the neighborhood for increasingly longer spates of time.

Neither Karen nor Navidson seems to notice.

The alienation of their children finally becomes apparent to both of

them one evening in the middle of July.

Karen is upstairs, sitting on the bed playing with a deck of Tarot cards.

Navidson is downstairs in his study examining several slides returned from the lab. News of Oliver North’s annulled conviction plays on the TV. In the background, we can hear Chad and Daisy squealing about something, their voices peeling through the house, the strained music of their play threatening at any instant to turn into a brawl.

With superb cross-cutting, Navidson depicts how both he and Karen

react to the next moment. Karen has drawn another card from the deck but instead of adding it to the cross slowly forming before her crossed legs, the occult image hangs unseen in the air, frozen between her two fingers, Karen’s eyes already diverted, concentrating on a sound, a new sound, almost out of reach, but reaching her just the same. Navidson is much closer. His children’s cries immediately tell him that they are way out of bounds.

Karen has only just started to head downstairs, calling out for Chad and

Daisy, her agitation and panic increasing with every step, when Navidson

bolts out of the study and races for the living room.

The terrifying implication of their children’s shouts is now impossible

to miss. No room in the house exceeds a length of twenty-five feet, let alone fifty feet, let alone fifty-six and a half feet, and yet Chad and Daisy’s voices are echoing, each call responding with an entirely separate answer.

In the living room, Navidson discovers the echoes emanating from a

dark doorless hallway which has appeared out of nowhere in the west wall. [68—There’s a problem here concerning the location of “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway.” Initially the doorway was supposed to be on the north wall of the living room (page 4), but now, as you can see for yourself. that position has changed. Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe there’s some underlying logic to the shift. Fuck if I know. Your guess is as good as mine.]Without hesitating, Navidson plunges in after them. Unfortunately the living room Hi 8 cannot follow him nor for that matter can Karen. She freezes on the threshold, unable to push herself into the darkness toward the faint flicker of light within. Fortunately, she does not have to wait too long.

Navidson soon reappears with Chad and Daisy in each arm, both of them still clutching a homemade candle, their faces lit like sprites on a winter’s eve.

This is the first sign of Karen’s chronic disability. Up until now there

has never been even the slightest indication that she suffers from crippling claustrophobia. By the time Navidson and the two children are safe and sound in the living room, Karen is drenched in sweat. She hugs and holds them as if they had just narrowly avoided some terrible fate, even though neither Chad nor Daisy seems particularly disturbed by their little adventure. In fact, they want to go back. Perhaps because of Karen’s evident distress, Navidson agrees to at least temporarily make this new addition to their house off limits.

For the rest of the night, Karen keeps a tight grip on Navidson. Even

when they finally slip into bed, she is still holding his hand.

“Navy, promise me you won’t go in there again.” “Let’s see if it’s even here in the morning.” “It will be.”

She lays her head down flat on his chest and begins to cry. “I love you so much. Please promise me. Please.” Whether it is the lasting flush of terror still in Karen’s cheeks or her

absolute need for him, so markedly different from her frequently aloof posture, Navidson cradles her in his arms like a child and promises.

Since the release of The Navidson Record, Virginia Posah has written

extensively about Karen Green’s adolescent years. Posah’s thin volume entitled Wishing Well (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996) represents one of the few works which while based on the Navidsons’ experience still manages to stand on its own merits outside of the film.

Along with an exceptional background in everything ranging from Kate

Chopin, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl: The True Story of “Renee”, Francesca Block’s Weetzie Bat books to Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia and more importantly Carol Gilligan’s landmark work In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Posah has spent hundreds of hours researching the early life of Karen Green, analyzing the cultural forces shaping her personality, ultimately uncovering a remarkable difference between the child she once was and the woman she eventually became. In her introduction (page xv), Posah provides this brief overview:

When Diderot told the teenage Sophie Volland “You all die at fifteen”

he could have been speaking to Karen Green who at fifteen did die.

To behold Karen as a child is nearly as ghostly an experience as the

house itself. Old family films capture her athletic zeal, her unguarded smiles, the tomboy spirit which sends her racing through the muddy flats of a recently drained pond. She’s awkward, a little clumsy, but rarely self-conscious, even when covered in mud.

Former teachers claim she frequently expressed a desire to be president,

a nuclear physicist, a surgeon, even a professional hockey player. All her choices reflected unattenuated self-confidence — a remarkably healthy sign for a thirteen year old girl.

Along with superb class work, she excelled in extra-curricular activities.

She loved planning surprise parties, working on school productions, and even on occasion taking on a schoolyard bully with a bout of fists. Karen Green was exuberant, feisty, charming, independent, spontaneous, sweet, and most of all fearless.

By the time she turned fifteen, all of that was gone. She hardly spoke in

class. She refused to function in any sort of school event, and rather than discuss her feelings she deferred the world with a hard and perfectly practiced smile.

Apparently—if her sister is to be believed — Karen spent every night of her fourteenth year composing that smile

in front of a blue plastic handled mirror. Tragically her creation proved flawless and though her near aphonia should have alarmed any adept teacher or guidance counselor, it was invariably rewarded with the pyritic prize of high school popularity.

Though Posah goes on to discuss the cultural aspects and consequences

of beauty, these details in particular are most disturbing, especially in light of the fact that little of their history appears in the film.

Considering the substantial coverage present in The Navidson Record,

it is unsettling to discover such a glaring omission. In spite of the enormous quantity of home footage obviously available, for some reason calamities of the past still do not appear. Clearly Karen’s personal life, to say nothing of his own life, caused Navidson too much anxiety to portray either one particularly well in his film. Rather than delve into the pathology of Karen’s claustrophobia, Navidson chose instead to focus strictly on the house.

[69—Fortunately a few years before The Navidson Record was made

Karen took part in a study which promised to evaluate and possibly treat her fear. After the film became something of a phenomenon, those results surfaced and were eventually published in a number of periodicals. The Anomic Mag based out of Berkeley (v. 87, n. 7, April, 1995) offered the most comprehensive account of that study as it pertained to Karen Green:

… Subject #0027-00-8785 (Karen Green) suffers severe panic attacks

when confronting dark, enclosed spaces, usually windowless and unknown (e.g. a dark room in an unfamiliar building). The attacks are consistently

characterized by (1) accelerated heart rate (2) sweating (3) trembling (4) sensation of suffocation (5) feeling of choking (6) chest pain (7) severe dizziness (8) derealization (feelings of unreality) and eventual depersonalization (being detached from oneself) (9) culmination in an intense fear of dying. See DSM4V “Criteria for Panic Attack.” … Diagnosis— subject suffers from Specific Phobia (formally known as Simple Phobia); Situational type. See DSM-TV “Diagnostic criteria for

300.29 Specific Phobia.”… Because behavioral-cognitive techniques have thus far failed to modify perspectives on anxiety-provoking stimuli, subject was considered ideal for current pharmacotherapy study … Initially subject received between 100-200 mg/ day of Tofranil (Imipramine) but with no improvement switched early on to a B-adrenergic blocker (Propranolol). An increase in vivid nightmares caused her to switch again to the MAOI (Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor) Tranylcyprornine. Still dissatisfied with the results, subject switched to the SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) Fluoxetine, commonly known as Prozac. Subject responded well and soon showed increased tolerance when intentionally exposed to enclosed, dark spaces. Unfortunately moderate weight gain and orgasmic dysfunction caused the subject to drop out of the study… Subject apparently relies now on her own phobia avoidance mechanisms, choosing to stay clear of enclosed, unknown spaces (i.e. elevators, basements, unfamiliar closets etc., etc.), though occasionally when attacks become “more frequent”… she returns to Prozac for short periods of time … See David Kahn’s article “Simple Phobias: The Failure of Pharmacological Intervention”; also see subject’s results on Sheehan Clinician Rated Anxiety Scale as well as Sheehan Phobia Scale. [70—See Exhibit Six.]

While the report seems fairly comprehensive, there is admittedly one

point which remains utterly perplexing. Other publications repeat verbatim the ambiguous phrasing but still fail to shed light on the exact meaning of those six words: “occasionally when attacks become ‘more frequent.’ “ At least the implication seems clear, vicissitudes in Karen’s life, whatever those may be, affect her sensitivity to space. In her article “Significant (OT)Her” published in The Psychology Quarterly (v. 142, n. 17, December 1995, p. 453) Celine Berezin, M.D. observes that “Karen’s attacks, which I suspect stem from early adolescent betrayal, increase proportionally with

the level of intimacy—or even the threat of potential intimacy—she experiences whether with Will Navidson or even her children.”

Also see Steve Sokol and Julia Carter’s Women Who Can’t Love; When

a Woman’s Fear Makes Her Run from Commitment and What a Smart Man Can Do About It (New Hampshire: T. Devans and Company, 1978).]

Of course by the following morning, Karen has already molded her

desperation into a familiar pose of indifference.

She does not seem to care when they discover the hallway has not

vanished. She keeps her arms folded, no longer clinging to Navidson’s hand or stroking her children.

She removes herself from her family’s company by saying veiy little,

while at the same time maintaining a semblance of participation with a smile.

Virginia Posah is right. Karen’s smile is tragic because, in spite of its

meaning, it succeeds in remaining so utterly beautiful.

The Five and a Half Minute Hallway in The Navidson Record differs

slightly from the bootleg copy which appeared in 1990. For one thing, in addition to the continuous circumambulating shot, a wider selection of shots has made the coverage of the sequence much more thorough and fluid. For another, the hallway has shrunk. This was impossible to see in the VHS copy because there was no point of comparison. Now, however, it is perfectly clear that the hallway which was well over sixty feet deep when the children entered it is now a little less than ten feet.

Context also significantly alters “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway.”

A greater sense of the Navidsons and their friends and how they all interact with the house adds the greatest amount of depth to this quietly evolving enigma. Their personalities almost crowd that place and suddenly too, as an abrupt jump cut redelivers Tom from Massachusetts and Billy Reston from Charlottesville, the UVA professor once again wheeling around the periphery of the angle, unable to take his eyes off the strange, dark corridor.

Unlike The Twilight Zone, however, or some other like cousin where

understanding comes neat and fast (i.e. This is clearly a door to another

dimension! or This is a passage to another world—with directions!) the hallway offers no answers. The monolith in 2001 seems the most appropriate cinematic analog, incontrovertibly there but virtually inviolate to interpretation. [71—Consider Drew Bluth’s “Summer’s Passage” in Architectural Digest, v. 50, n. 10, October 1993, p. 30.] Similarly the hallway also remains meaningless, though it is most assuredly not without effect. As Navidson threatens to reenter it for a closer inspection, Karen reiterates her previous plea and injunction with a sharp and abrupt rise in pitch.

The ensuing tension is more than temporary.

Navidson has always been an adventurer willing to risk his personal

safety in the name of achievement. Karen, on the other hand, remains the standard bearer of responsibility and is categorically against risks especially those which might endanger her family or her happiness. Tom also shies from danger, preferring to turn over a problem to someone else, ideally a police officer, fireman, or other state paid official. Without sound or movement but by presence alone, the hallway creates a serious rift in the Navidson household.

Bazine Naodook suggests that the hallway exudes a “conflict creating

force”: “It’s those oily walls radiating badness which maneuver Karen and Will into that nonsensical fight.” [72—Bazine Naodook’s The Bad Bodhi Wall (Marina Del Rey: Bix Oikofoe Publishing House, 1995), p. 91.] Naodook’s argument reveals a rather tedious mind. She feels a need to invent some non-existent “darkforce” to account for all ill will instead of recognizing the dangerous influence the unknown naturally has on everyone.

A couple of weeks pass. Karen privately puzzles over the experience

but says very little. The only indication that the hallway has in some way intruded on her thoughts is her newfound interest in Feng Shui. In the film, we can make out a number of books lying around the house, including The Elements of Feng Shui by Kwok Man-Ho and Joanne O’Brien (Element

Books: Shaftesbury, 1991), Feng Shui Handbook: A Practical Guide to

Chinese Geomancy and Environmental Harmony by Derek Walters

(Aquarian Press, 1991), interior Design with Feng Shui by Sarah Rosbach (Rider: London, 1987) and The 1 Ching or Book of Changes, 3rd Edition translated by Richard Witheim (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).

There is a particularly tender moment as Chad sits with his mother in

the kitchen. She is busily determining the Kua number (a calculation based on the year of birth) for everyone in the family, while he is carefully making a peanut butter and honey sandwich.

“Mommy” Chad says quietly after a while. “Hmm?” “How do I get to become President when I grow up?” Karen looks up from her notebook. Quite unexpectedly, and with the

simplest question, her son has managed to move her.

“You study hard at school and keep doing what you’re doing, then you

can be whatever you want.”

Chad smiles. “When I’m President, can I make you Vice President?” Karen’s eyes shine with affection. Putting aside her Feng Shui studies,

she reaches over and gives Chad a big kiss on his forehead.

“How about Secretary of Defense?”

During all this, Tom earns his keep by installing a door to close off the

hallway. First, he mounts a wood frame using some of the tools he brought from Lowell and a few more he rented from the local hardware store. Then he hangs a single door with 24-gauge hot-dipped, galvanized steel skins and an acoustical performance rating coded at ASTM E413-70T- STC 28. Last but not least, he puts in four Schlage dead bolts and colour codes the four separate keys: red, yellow, green, and blue.

For a while Daisy keeps him company, though it remains hard to

determine whether she is more transfixed by Tom or the hallway. At one point she walks up to the threshold and lets out a little yelp, but the cry just flattens and dies in the narrow corridor.

Tom seems noticeably relieved when he finally shuts the door and turns

over the four locks. Unfortunately as he twists the last key, the accompanying sound contains a familiar ring. He grips the red kye and tries

it again. As the dead bolt glances the strike plate, the resulting click creates an unexpected and very unwelcome echo.

Slowly, Tom unlocks the door and peers inside.

Somehow, and for whatever reason, the thing has grown again.

Intermittently, Navidson opens the door himself and stares down the

hallway, sometimes using a flashlight, sometimes just studying the darkness itself.

“What do you do with that?” Navidson asks his brother one evening. “Move,” Tom replies.

Sadly, even with the unnatural darkness now locked behind a steel door,

Karen and Navidson still continue to say very little to each other, their own feelings seemingly as impossible for them to address as the meaning of the hallway itself.

Chad accompanies his mother to town as she searches for various Feng

Shui objects guaranteed to change the energy of the home, while Daisy follows her father around the house as he paces from room to room, talking vehemently on the phone with Reston, trying to come up with a feasible and acceptable way to investigate the phenomenon lurking in his living room, until finally, in the middle of all this, he lifts his daughter onto his shoulders. Unfortunately as soon as Karen returns, Navidson sets Daisy back down on the floor and retreats to the study to continue his discussions alone.

With domestic tensions proving a little too much to stomach, Tom

escapes to the garage where he works for a while on a doll house he has started to build for Daisy, [73—See Lewis Marsano’s “Tom’s 1865 Shelter” in This Old House, September/October 1995, p. 87.] until eventually he takes a break, drifting out to the backyard to get high and hot in the sun, pointedly walking around the patch of lawn the hallway should for all intents and purposes occupy. Before long, both Chad and Daisy are sidling up to this great bear snoring under a tree, and even though they start to tie

his shoe laces together, tickle his nostrils with long blades of grass, or use a mirror to focus the sun on his nose, Tom remains remarkably patient. He almost seems to enjoy their mischief, growling, yawning, playing along, putting both of them in a headlock, Chad and Daisy laughing hysterically, until finally all three are exhausted and snoozing into dusk.

Considering the complexity of Karen and Navidson’s relationship, it is

fortunate our understanding of their problems is not left entirely up to interpretation. Some of their respective views and feelings are revealed in their video journal entries.

“Sex, sex, sex,” Karen whispers into her camcorder. “It was like we just

met when we got here. The kids would go out and we’d fuck in the kitchen, in the shower. We even did it in the garage. But ever since that closet thing appeared I can’t. I don’t know why. It terrifies me.”

On the same subject, Navidson offers a similar view: “When we first

moved here, Karen was like a college co-ed. Anywhere, anytime. Now all of a sudden, she refuses to be touched. I kiss her, she practically starts to cry. And it all started when we got back from Seattle.” [Nor does it seem to help that Navidson and Karen both have among their books Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973), Anne Hooper’s The Ultimate Sex Book A Therapist’s Guide to the Programs and Techniques That Will Enhance Your Relationship and Transform Your Life (DK Publishing, 1992), X.Y.’s Broken Daisy-Chains (Seattle: Town Over All Press, 1989), Chris Allen’s 1001 Sex Secrets Every Man Should Know (New York: Avon Books, 1995) as well as Chris Allen’s 1001 Sex Secrets Every Woman Should Know (New York: Avon Books, 1995).]

But the division between them is not just physical.

Karen again: “Doesn’t he see I don’t want him going in there because I

love him. You don’t need to be a genius to realize there’s something really bad about that place. Navy, don’t you see that?”

Navidson: “The only thing I want to do is go in there but she’s adamant

that I don’t and I love her so I won’t but, well, it’s just killing me. Maybe because I know this is all about her, her fears, her anxieties. She hasn’t even given a thought to what I care about.”

Until finally the lack of physical intimacy and emotional understanding

leads both of them to make privately voiced ultimatums.

Karen: “But I will say this, if he goes in there, I’m outta here. Kids and

all.”

Navidson: “If she keeps up this cold front, you bet I’m going in there.”

Then one night in early August __________ [74—Zampanô provided

the blanks but never filled them in.] and the equally famous __________ drop in for dinner. It is a complete coincidence that they happened to be in D.C. at the same time, but neither one seems to mind the presence of the other. As __________ said, “Any friend of Navy’s is a friend of mine.” Navidson and Karen have known both of them for quite a few years, so the evening is light hearted and filled with plenty of amusing stories. Clearly Karen and Navidson relish the chance to reminisce a little about some good times when things seemed a lot less complicated.

Perhaps a little star struck, Tom says very little. There is plenty of

opportunity for a glass of wine but he proves himself by keeping to water, though he does excuse himself from the table once to smoke a joint outside.

(Much to Tom’s surprise and delight, __________ joins him.) As the evening progresses, _________ harps a little on Navidson’ new

found domesticity: “No more Crazy Navy, eh? Are those days gone for good? I remember when you’d party all night, shoot all morning, and then spend the rest of the day developing your film—in a closet with just a bucket and a bulb if you had to. I’m willing to bet you don’t even have a darkroom here.” Which is just a little too much for Navidson to bear:

“Here __________, you wanna see a darkroom, I’ll show you a

darkroom.” “Don’t you dare, Navy!” Karen immediately cries. “Come on Karen, they’re our friends,” Navidson says, leading the two celebrities into the living room where he instructs them to look out the window so they can see for themselves his ordinary backyard. Satisfied that they understand nothing but trees and lawn could possibly lie on the other side of the wall, he retrieves the four coloured keys hidden in the antique basinet in the foyer. Everyone is pretty tipsy and the general mood is so friendly and easy

it seems impossible to disturb. Which of course all changes when Navidson unlocks the door and reveals the hallway.

__________ takes one look at that dark place and retreats into the

kitchen. Ten minutes later __________ is gone. __________ steps up to the threshold, points Navidson’s flashlight at the walls and floor and then retires to the bathroom. A little later ________ is also gone.

Karen is so enraged by the whole incident, she makes Navidson sleep

on the couch with his “beloved hallway.”

No surprise, Navidson fails to fall asleep.

He tosses around for an hour until he finally gets up and goes off in

search of his camera.

A title card reads: Exploration A The time stamp on Navidson’s camcorder indicates that it is exactly

3:19 A.M.

“Call me impetuous or just curious,” we hear him mutter as he shoves

his sore feet into a pair of boots.” But a little look around isn’t going to hurt.”

Without ceremony, he unlocks the door and slips across the threshold,

taking with him only a Hi 8, a MagLite, and his 35mm Nikon. The commentary he provides us with remains very spare: “Cold. Wow, really cold! Walls are dark. Similar to the closet space upstairs.” Within a few seconds he reaches the end. The hallway cannot be more than seventy feet long. “That’s it. Nothing else. No big deal. Over this Karen and I have been fighting.” Except as Navidson swings around, he suddenly discovers a new doorway to the right. It was not there before.

“What the…?” Navidson carefully nudges his flashlight into this new darkness and

discovers an even longer corridor. “This one’s easily.. . I’d say a hundred feet.” A few seconds later, he comes across a still larger corridor branching off to the left. It is at least fifteen feet wide with a ceiling well over ten feet high. The length of this one, however, is impossible to estimate as Navidson’s flashlight proves useless against the darkness ahead, dying long before it can ever come close to determining an end.

Navidson pushes ahead, moving deeper and deeper into the house,

eventually passing a number of doorways leading off into alternate passageways or chambers. “Here’s a door. No lock. Hmmm. . . a room, not very big. Empty. No windows. No switches. No outlets. Heading back to the corridor. Leaving the room. It seems colder now. Maybe I’m just getting colder. Here’s another door. Unlocked. Another room. Again no windows.

Continuing on.”

Flashlight and camera skitter across ceiling and floor in loose harmony,

stabbing into small rooms, alcoves, or spaces reminiscent of closets, though no shirts hang there. Still, no matter how far Navidson proceeds down this particular passageway, his light never comes close to touching the punctuation point promised by the converging perspective lines, sliding on and on and on, spawning one space after another, a constant stream of corners and walls, all of them unreadable and perfectly smooth.

Finally, Navidson stops in front of an entrance much larger than the rest.

It arcs high above his head and yawns into an undisturbed blackness. His flashlight finds the floor but no walls and, for the first time, no ceiling.

Only now do we begin to see how big Navidson’s house really is.

Something should be said here about Navidson’s hand. Out of all the

footage he personally shoots, there rarely exists a shake, tremble, jerk, or even a case of poor framing. His camera, no matter the circumstances, manages to view the world—even this world—with a remarkable steadiness as well as a highly refined aesthetic sensibility.

Comparisons immediately make Navidson’s strengths apparent.

Holloway Roberts’ tape is virtually unwatchable: tilted frames, out of focus, shakes, horrible lighting and finally oblivion when faced with danger.

Likewise Karen and Tom’s tapes reflect their inexperience and can only be considered for content. Only the images Navidson shoots capture the otherness inherent in that place. Undeniably Navidson’s experience as a photojournalist gives him an advantage over the rest when focusing on something that is as terrifying as it is threatening. But, of course, there is more at work here than just the courage to stand and focus. There is also the courage to face and shape the subject in an extremely original manner.

[75—See Liza Speen’s Images Of Dark; Brassal’s Paris By Night; the

tenderly encountered history of rooms in Andrew Bush’s Bonnettstown; work of 0. Winston Link and Karekin Goekjian; as well as some of the photographs by Liicien Aigner, Osbert Lain, Cas Oorthuys, Floris M.

Neustiss, Ashim Ghosh, Aimette Lemieux, Irèna lonesco, Cindy Sherman, Edmund Teske, Andreas Feininger, John Vachon, Tetsuya Ichimura, Sandy Skoglund, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Beaumont Newhall, James Alinder, Robert Rauschenberg, Miyaka Ishiuchi, Alfred Eisentaedt, Sabastiao Ribeiro Salgado, Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Adams, Sol Libsohn, Huynh Cong (“Nick”) Ut, Lester Talkington, William Henry Jackson, Edward Weston, William Baker, Yousuf Karsh, Adam Clark Vioman, Julia Margaret Cameron, George Barnard, Lennart Nilsson, Herb Ritts, Nancy Burson (“Untitled, 1993”), Bragaglia, Henri Cartier-Bresson (“Place de l’Europe”), William Wegman, Gordon Parks, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Ruscha, Herbert Pointing, Simpson Kalisher, Bob Adelman, Volkhard Hofer (“Natural Buildings, 1991”), Lee Friedlander, Mark Edwards, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Baltimore Sun photographer Aubrey Bodine, Charles Gatewood, Ferenc Berko, Leland Rice, Joan Lyons, Robert D’Alessandro, Victor Keppler, Larry Fink, Bevan Davies, Lotte Jacobi, Burk Uzzle, George Washington Wilson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Carleton Watkins, Edward S. Curtis, Eve Arnold, Michael Lesy (Wisconsin Death Trip), Aaron Siskind, Kelly Wise, Cornell Capa, Bert Stem, James Van Der Zee, Leonard Freed, Philip Perkis, Keith Smith, Burt Glin, Bill Brandt, LászlO MoholyNagy, Lennart Arthur Rothstein, Louis Stettner, Ray K.

Metzker, Edward W. Quigley, Jim Bengston, Richard Prince, Walter Chappell, Paz Errazuriz, Rosamond Wolff Purcell, E. J. Marey, Gary Winogrand, Alexander Gardner, Wynn Bullock, Neal Slavin, Lew Thomas, Patrick Nagatani, Donald Blumberg, David Plowden, Ernestine Ruben, Will McBride, David Vestal, Jerry Burchard, George Gardner, Galina Sankova, Frank Gohike, Olivia Parker, Charles Traub, Ashvin Mehta, Walter Rosenbium, Bruce Gilden, Imogen Cunningham, Barbara Crane, Lewis Baltz, Roger Minick, George Krause, Saul Leiter, William Horeis, Ed Douglas, John Baldessari, Charles Harbutt, Greg McGregor, Liliane Decock, Lilo Raymond, Hiro, Don Worth, Peter Magubane, Brett Weston, Jill Freedman, Joanne Leonard, Larry Clark, Nancy Rexroth, Jack Manning, Ben Shahn, Marie Cosindas, Robert Demachy, Aleksandra Macijauskas,

Andreas Serrano, Les Krims, Heinrich Tönnies, George Rodger, Art Sinsabaugh, Arnold Genthe, Frank Majore, Gertrude Klisebier, Charles Négre, Harold Edgerton, Shomei Tomatsu, Roy Decarava, Samuel Bourne, Giuseppe Primoli, Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, William Eggleston, Frank Sutcliffe, Diane Arbus, Daniel Ibis, Raja Lala Deen Dayal, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Walker Evans, Mary Ellen Mark, Timothy O’Sullivan, Jacob A.

Riis, Ian Isaacs, David Epstein, Karl Struss, Sally Mann, P.H. Emerson, Ansel Adams, Liu Ban Nong, Berencie Abbot, Susan Lipper, Dorthea Lange, James Balog, Doris Uhnann, William Henry Fox Talbot, John Thomson, Phillippe Haisman, Morris Engel, Christophe Yve, Thomas Annan, Alexander Rodchenko, Eliot Elisofon, Eugene Atget, Clarence John Laughlin, Arthur Leipzig, F. Holland Day, Jack English, Alice Austen, Bruce Davidson, Eudora Weky, Jimmy Hare, Ruth Orkin, Masahiko Yoshioka, Paul Outerbridge, Jr., Jerry N. Uelsmann, Louis Jacques Mandè Daguerre, Emmet Gowin, Cary Wasserman, Susan Meiselas, Naomi Savage, Henry Peach Robinson, Sandra Eleta, Boris Ignatovich, Eva Rubinstein, Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Benjamin Stone, Andm Kertész, Stephen Shore, L.ee Miller, Sid Grossman, Donigan Cumming, Jack Welpott, David Sims, Detlef Orlopp (“Untitled”), Margaret Bourke-White, Dmitri Kessel, Val Telberg, Part Blue, Francisco Infante, Jed Fielding, John Heartfield, Eliot Porter, Gabriele and Helmut Nothhelfer, Francis Bruguière, Jerome Liebling, Eugene Richards, Werner Bischof, Martin Munkacsi, Bruno Barbey, Linda Connor, Oliver Gagliani, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Richard Margolis, Judith Golden, Philip Trager, Scott Hyde, Willard Van Dyke, Eileen Cowin, Nadar (Gaspard Felix Tournachon), Roger Mertin, Lucas Samaras, Raoul Hausmann, Vilem Kriz, Lisette Model, Robert Leverant, Josef Sudek, Glen Luchford, Edna Bullock, Susan Rankaitis, Gail Skoff, Frank Hurley, Bank Langmore, Came Mae Weems, Michael Bishop, Albert and Jean Seeberger, John Gutmann, Kipton Kumler, Joel Sternfeld, Derek Bennett, William Clift, Erica Lennard, Arthur Siegel, Marcia Resnick, Clarence H. White, Fritz Henle, Julio Etchart, Fritz Goro, EJ.

Bellocq, Nathan Lyons, Ralph Gibson, Leon Levinstein, Elaine Mayes, Arthur Tess, William Larson, Duane Michals, Benno Friedman, Eve Sonneman, Mark Cohen, Joyce Tenneson, John Pfahl, Doug Prince, Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, Robert W. Fichter, George A.

Tice, John Collier, Anton Bruehl, Paul Martin, Tina Barney, Bob

Willoughby, Steven Szabo, Paul Caponigro, Gilles Peress, Robert Heinecken, Wright Morris, Inez van Lanisweerde, Peter Hujar, Inge Morath, Judith Joy Ross, Judy Dater, Melissa Shook, Bea Nettles, Dmith Baltermants, Karl Blossfeldt, Alexander Liberman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Hans Namuth, Bill Burke, Marion Palfi, Jan Groover, Peter Keetman (“Porcelain Hands, 1958”), Henry Wessel, Jr., Syl Labrot, Gilles Ehrmann, Tana Hoban, Martine Franck, John Dominis, ilse Bing, Jo Ann Callis, Lou Bernstein, Vinoodh Matadin, Todd Webb, Andre Gelpke (“Chiffre 389506: Inkognito, 1993”), Thomas F. Barrow, Robert Cumming, Josef Ehm, Mark Yavno, Tod Papageorge, Ruth Bernhard, Charles Sheeler, Tina Modotti, Zofia Rydet, M. Alvarez Bravo, William Henry Jackson, Peeter Tooming, Betty Hahn, T. S. Nagarajan, Meridel Rubinstein, Romano Cagnoni, Robert Mapplethorpe, Albert Renger-Pazzsch, Stasys Zvirgzdas, Geoff Winrnngham, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Erich Hartznann, Oscar Bailey, Herbert List, Mirella Ricciardi, Franco Fontana, Art Kane, Georgij Zelma, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, Mario Sorrenti, Craig McDean, Rent Bum, David Douglas Duncan, Tazio Secchiaroli, Joseph D. Jacima, Richard Baltauss, Richard Misrach, Yoshihiko Ito, Minor White, Ellen Auerbach, Izis, Deborah Turbeville, Arnold Newman, 65 Tzachi Ostrovsky, Joel-Peter Witkin, Adam Fuss, Inge Osswald, Enzo Ragazzini, Bill Owens, Soyna Noskowiak, David Lawrence Levinthal, Mariana Yampoisky, Juergen Teller, Nancy Honey, Elliott Erwitt, Bill Witt, Taizo Ichinose, Nicholas Nixon, Allen A. Dutton, Henry Callahan, Joel Meyrowitz, Wiflaim A. Garnett, Ulf Sjöstedt, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Toni Frissell, John Blakemore, Roman Vishniac, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Raül Corrales, Gyorgy Kepes, Joe Deal, David P. Bayles, Michael Snow, Aleksander Krzywoblocki, Paul Bowen, Laura Gilpin, Andy Warhol, Tuija Lydia Elisabeth Lindstrom-Caudwell, Corinne Day, Kristen McMenamy, Danny Lyon, Erich Salomon, Desire Charnay, Paul Kwilecki, Carol Beckwith, George Citcherson (“Sailing Ships in an Ice Field, 1869”), W. Eugene Smith, William Klein, José Ortiz-Echague, Eadweard Muybridge, and David Octavius Hill, August Sander (Antlitz der Zeit), Herbert Bayer, Man Ray, Alex Webb, Frances B. Johnston, Russell Lee, Suzy Lake, Jack Delano, Diane Cook, Heinrich Zille, Lyalya Kuznetsova, Miodrag Djordjevi, Terry Fincher, Joel Meyerowitz, John R. Gossage, Barbara Morgan, Edouard Boubat, Horst P. Horst, Hippolyte Bayard, Albert Kahn,

Karen Helen Knorr, Carlotta M. Corpon, Abigail Heyman, Marion Post Wolcott, Lillian Bassman, Henry Holmes Smith, Constantine Manos, Gjon Mili, Michael Nichols, Roger Fenton, Adolph de Meyer, Van Deren Coke, Barbara Astman, Richard Kirstel, William Notman, Kenneth Josephson, Louise Dahi-Wolfe, Josef Koudelka, Sarah E. Charlesworth, Erwin Blumenfeld, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Pirkie Jones, Edward Steichen, George Hurrell, Steve Fitch, Lady Hawarden, Helmar Lerski, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, John Thomson, Irving Penn, and Jane Evelyn Atwood (photographs of children at the National School for Blind Youth). Not to mention Suze Randall, Art Wolfe, Charles and Rita Summers, Tom and Pat Leeson, Michael H. Francis, John Botkin, Dan Blackburn, Barbara Ess, Erwin and Peggy Bauer, Peter Arnold, Gerald Lacz, James Wojcik, Dan Borris, Melanie Acevedo, Micheal McLaughlin, Damn Haddad, William Vazquez, J. Michael Myers, Rosa & Rosa, Patricia McDonough, Aldo Rossi, Mark Weiss, Craig Cutler, David Barry, Chris Sanders, Neil Brown, James Schnepf, Kevin Wilkes, Ron Simmons, Chip Clark, Ron Kerbo, Kevin Downey, Nick Nichols; also Erik Aeder, Drew Kampion, Les Walker, Rob Gilley, Don King, Jeff Hombaker, Alexander Gallardo, Russell Hoover, Jeff Flindt, Chris Van Lennep, Mike Moir, Brent Humble, Ivan Ferrer, Don James, John Callahan, Bill Morris, Kimiro Kondo, Leonard Brady, Fred Swegles, Eric Baeseman, Tsuchiya, Darrell Wong, Warren Bolster, Joseph Libby, Russell Hoover, Peter Frieden, Craig Peterson, Ted Grambeau, Gordinho, Steve Wilkings, Mike Foley, Kevin Welsh, LeRoy Grannis, John Bilderback, Craig Fineman, Michael Grosswendt, Craig Huglin, Seamas Mercado, John Heath “Doe” Ball, Tom Boyle, Rob Keith, Vince Cavataio, Jeff Divine, Aaron Loyd, Chris Dyball, Steve Fox, George Greenough, Aaron Loyd, Ron Stoner, Jason Childs, Kin Kimoto, Chris Dyball, Bob Barbour, John Witzig, Ben Siegfried, Ron Romanosky, Brian Bielmann, Dave Bjorn, John Severson, Martin Thick (see his profound shot of Dana Fisher cradling a chimpanze rescued from a meat vendor in Zaire), Doug Cockwell, Art Brewer, Fred Swegles, Erik Hans, Mike Baker, John Scott, Rob Brown, Bernie Baker, William Sharp, Randy Johnson, Nick Pugay, Tom Servais, Dennis Junor, Eric Baeseman, Sylvain Cazenave, Woody Woodworth, and of course, J.C. Hemment, David “Chim” Seymour, Vu Ngoc Tong, William Dinwiddie, James Burton, Mary Wolf, London Thome, John Gallo, Nguyen Huy, Leonidas Stanson, Pham Co Phac, Kadel

& Herbert, Underwood & Underwood, James H. Hare, Tran Oai Dung, Lucian S. Kirtland, Edmond Ratisbonne, Pham Tranh, Luong Tan Tuc, George Strock, Joe Rosenthal, Ralph Morse, Ho Van De, Nguyen Nhut Hoa, Nguyen Van Chien, Nguyen Van Thang, Phung Quang Liem, Truong Phu Thien, John Florea, George Silk, Carl Mydans, Pham Van Kuong, Nguyen Khac Tam, Vu Hung Dung, Nguyen Van Nang, Yevgeny Khaldei, To Dinh, Ho Ca, Hank Walker, Tran Ngoc Dang, Vo Duc Hiep, Trinh Dinh Hy, Howard Breedlove, Nguyen Van Thuan, Vu Hanh, Ly Van Cao, Burr McIntosh, Ho Van Tu, Helen Levitt, Robert Capa, Ly Eng, Mathew Brady, Sau Van, Thoi Huu, Leng, Thong Veasna, Nguyen Luong Nam, Huynh Van Huu, Ngoc Huong, Alan Hirons, Lek, George J. Denoncourt U, Hoang Chau, Eric Weigand, Pham Vu Binh, Gilles Caron, Tran Binh Khuol, Jerald Kringle, Le Duy Que, Thanh Tinh, Frederick Sommer, Nguyen Van Thuy, Robert Moeser, Chhim Sarath, Duong Thanh Van, Howard Nurenberger, Vo Ngoc Khanh, Dang Van Hang, James Pardue, Bui Dinh Thy, Doug Clifford, Tran Xuan Hy, Nguyen Van ma, Keizaburo Shimamoto, Nguyen Van Ung, Bob Hodierne, Nguyen Viet Hien, Dinh De, Sun Heang, Tea “Moonface” Kim Heang, Lyng Nhan, Charles Chellappah, The Dinh, Nguyen Van Nhu, Ngoc Nhu, John Andescavage, Nguyen Van Huong, Francis Bailly, Georg Gensluckner, Vo Van Luong, James Denis Gill, Huynh Van Dung, Nguyen Than Hien, Terrence Khoo, Paul Schutzer, Vo Van Quy, Malcolm Browne, Le Khac Tam, Huynh Van Huong, Do Van Nhan, Franz Dalma, Kyoichi Sawada, Willy Mettler, James Lohr, Le Kia, Sam Kai Faye, Frank Lee, Nguyen Van Man, Joseph Tourtelot, Doari Phi Hung, Ty Many, Nguyen Ngoc Tu, Le Thi Nang, Nguyen Van Chien, Doug Woods, Glen Rasmussen, Hiromichi Mine, Duong Cong Thien, Bernard B. Fall, Randall Reimer, Luong Nghia Dung, Bill Hackwell, Pen, Nguyen Duc Thanh, Chea Ho, Jerry Wyngarden, Vantha, Chip Maury, J. Gonzales, Pierre Jahan, Catherine Leroy, Leonard Hekel, Kim Van Tuoc, W.B. Bass Jr., Sean Flynn, Heng Ho, Dana Stone, Nguyen Dung, Landon K. Thome II, Gerard Hebert, Michel Laurent, Robert Jackson Ellison, Put Sophan, Nguyen Trung Dinh, Huynh Van Tn, Neil K. Hulbert, James McJunkin, Le Dinh Du, Chhor Vuthi, Claude Arpin-Pont, Raymond Martinoff, Jean Peraud, Nguyen Huong Nam, Dickey Chapelle, Lanh Daunh Rar, Bryan Grigsby, Henri Huet, Huynh Thang My, Peter Ronald Van Thiel, Everette Dixie Reese, Jerry A. Rose, Oliver E. Noonan, Kim Savath, Bernard Moran, Kuoy Sarun, Do Van Vu,

Nguyen Man Hieu, Charles Richard Eggleston, Sam Hel, Nguyen Oanh Liet, Dick Durance, Vu Van Giang, Bernard Kolenberg, Sou Vichith, Ronald D. Gallagher, Dan Dodd, Francois Sully, Kent Potter, Alfred Batungbacal, Dieter Bellendorf, Nick Mills, Ronald L. Haeberle, Terry Reynolds, Leroy Massie, Sam Castan, Al Chang, Philip R. Boehxne. And finally Eddie Adams, Charles Hoff, Lan-y Burrows, and Don McCullin (“American soldiers tending wounded child in a cellar of a house by candlelight, 1968”).] [76—Alison Adrian Burns, another Zampanô reader, told me this list was entirely random. With the possible exception of Brassal, Speen, Bush and Link, Zampanô was not very familiar with photographers. “We just picked the names out of some books and magazines he had lying around,” Burns told me. “I’d describe a picture or two and he’d say no or he’d say fine. A few times he just told me to choose a page and point. Hey, whatever he wanted to do. That was what I was there for. Sometimes though he just wanted to hear about the LA scene, what was happening, what wasn’t, the gloss, the names of clubs and bars. That sort of thing. As far as I know, that list never got written down.”]

As Navidson takes his first step through that immense arch, he is

suddenly a long way away from the warm light of the living room. In fact his creep into that place resembles the eerie faith required for any deep sea exploration, the beam of his flashlight scratching at nothing but the invariant blackness.

Navidson keeps his attention focused on the floor ahead of him, and no

doubt because he keeps looking down, the floor begins to assume a new meaning. It can no longer be taken for granted. Perhaps something lies beneath it. Perhaps it will open up into some deep fissure.

Suddenly immutable silence rushes in to replace what had momentarily

shattered it.

Navidson freezes, unsure whether or not he really just heard something

growl.

“I better be able to find my way back,” he finally whispers, which

though probably muttered in jest suddenly catches him off guard.

Navidson swiftly turns around. Much to his horror, he can no longer see

the arch let alone the wall. He has walked beyond the range of his light. In

fact, no matter where he points the flashlight, the only thing he can perceive is oily darkness. Even worse, his panicked turn and the subsequent absence of any landmarks has made it impossible for him to remember which direction he just came from.

“Oh god” he blurts, creating odd repeats in the distance.

He twists around again. “Hey!” he shouts, spawning a multitude of a’s, then rotates forty- five

degrees and yells “Balls!” a long moment of silence follows before he hears the faint halls racing back through the dark. After several more such turns, he discovers a loud “easy” returns a z with the least amount of delay. This is the direction he decides on, and within less than a minute the beam from his flashlight finds something more than darkness.

Quickening his pace slightly, Navidson reaches the wall and the safety

he perceives there. He now faces another decision: left or right. This time, before going anywhere, he reaches into his pocket and places a penny at his feet. Relying on this marker, he heads left for a while. When a minute passes and he has still failed to find the entrance, he returns to the penny.

Now he moves off to the right and very quickly comes across a doorway, only this one, as we can see, is much smaller and has a different shape than the one he originally came through. He decides to keep walking. When a minute passes and he still has not found the arch, he stops.

“Think, Navy, think,” he whispers to himself, his voice edged slightly

with fear.

Again that faint growl returns, rolling through the darkness like thunder.

Navidson quickly does an about face and returns to the doorway. Only

now he discovers that the penny he left behind, which should have been at least a hundred feet further, lies directly before him. Even stranger, the doorway is no longer the doorway but the arch he had been looking for all along.

Unfortunately as he steps through it, he immediately sees how

drastically everything has changed. The corridor is now much narrower and ends very quickly in a T. He has no idea which way to go, and when a third growl ripples through that place, this time significantly louder, Navidson panics and starts to run.

His sprint, however, lasts only a few seconds. He realizes quickly

enough that it is a useless, even dangerous, course of action. Catching his

breath and doing his best to calm his frayed nerves, he tries to come up with a better plan.

“Karen!” he finally shouts, a flurry of air-in’s almost instantly

swallowed in front of him. “Tom!” he tries, briefly catching hold of the -om’s as they too start to vanish, though before doing so completely, Navidson momentarily detects in the last -om a slightly higher pitch entwined in his own voice.

He waits a moment, and not hearing anything else, shouts again: “I’m in here!” giving rise to tripping nn-ear’s reverberating and fading,

until in the next to last instant a sharp cry comes back to him, a child’s cry, calling out for him, drawing him to the right.

By shouting “I’m here” and following the add-ee’s singing off the walls,

Navidson slowly begins to make his way through an incredibly complex and frequently disorienting series of turns. Eventually after backtracking several times and making numerous wrong choices, occasionally descending into disturbing territories of silence, the voice begins to grow noticeably louder, until finally Navidson slips around a corner, certain he has found his way out. Instead though, he encounters only more darkness and this time greater quiet. His breathing quickens. He is uncertain which way to go. Obviously he is afraid. And then quite abruptly he steps to the right through a low passageway and discovers a corridor terminating in warm yellow light, lamp light, with a tiny silhouette standing in the doorway, tugging her daddy home with a cry.

Emerging into the safety of his own living room, Navidson immediately

scoops Daisy up in his arms and gives her a big hug.

“I had a nightmare,” she says with a very serious nod.

Similar to the Khumbu Icefall at the base of Mount Everest where blue

seracs and chasms change unexpectedly throughout the day and night, Navidson is the first one to discover how that place also seems to constantly change. Unlike the Icefall, however, not even a single hairline fracture appears in those walls. Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason for or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one.

[77—”nothing visible to the eye provides a reason” —a fitting phrase

for what’s happened.

And to think my day actually started off pretty well.

I woke up having had an almost wet-dream about Thumper. She was

doing this crazy Margaretha Geertruida Zelle dance, veil after colored veil thrown aside, though oddly enough never landing, rather flying around her as if she were in the middle of some kind of gentle twister, these sheer sheets of fabric continuing to encircle her, even as she removes more and more of them, allowing me only momentary glimpses of her body, her smooth skin, her mouth, her waist, her—ah yes, I get a glimpse of that too, and I’m moving towards her, moving past all that interference, certain that with every step I take I’ll soon have her, after all she’s almost taken everything off, no she h taken everything off, her knees are spreading apart, just a few more veils to get past and I’ll be able to see her, not just bits & pieces of her, but all of her, no longer molested by all this nonsense, in fact I’m there already which means I’m about to enter her which apparently is enough to blow the circuit, hit the switch, prohibit that sublime and much anticipated conclusion, leaving me blind in the daylight stream pouring through my window.

Fuck.

I go off to cuff in the shower. At least the water’s hot and there’s enough

steam to fog the mirror. Afterwards, I pack my pipe and light up. Wake & Bake. More like Wash & Bake. Half a bowl of cereal and a shot of bourbon later, I’m there, my friendly haze having finally arrived. I’m ready for work.

Parking’s easy to find. On Vista. I jog up to Sunset, even jog up the

stairs, practically skipping past the By Appointment Only sign. Why skipping? Because as I step into the Shop I know I’m not even one minute late, which is not usually the case for me. The expression on my boss’s face reveals just how astonishing an achievement this is. I couldn’t care less about him. I want to see Thumper. I want to find out if she’s really wearing any of that diaphanous rainbow fabric I was dreaming about.

Of course she’s not there, but that doesn’t get me down. I’m still

optimistic she’ll arrive. And if not today, why fuck, tomorrow’s just another day away.

A sentiment I could almost sing.

I immediately sit down at the side counter and start working, mainly

because I don’t want to deal with my boss which could mean jeopardizing my good mood. Of course he couldn’t care less about me or my mood. He approaches, clearing his throat. He will talk, he will ruin everything, except it suddenly penetrates that chalky material he actually insists on calling his brain, that I’m building his precious points, and sure enough this insight prohibits his trap from opening and he leaves me alone.

Points are basically clusters of needles used to shade the skin. They are

necessary because a single point amounts to a prick not much bigger than this period “.“. Okay, maybe a little bigger. Anyway, five needles go into what’s called a 5, seven for 7’s and so on—all soldered together towards the base.

I actually enjoy making them. There’s something pleasant about

concentrating on the subtle details, the precision required, constantly checking and re—checking to assure yourself that yes indeed the sharps are level, in the correct arrangement, ready at last to be fixed in place with dots of hot solder. Then I re—check all my re—checking: the points must not be too close nor too far apart nor skewed in any way, and only then, if I’m satisfied, which I usually am—though take heed “usually” does not always mean “always”—will I scrub the shafts and put them aside to be sterilized later in the ultrasound or Autoclave.

My boss may think I can’t draw worth shit but he knows I build needles

better than anyone. He calls me all the time on my tardiness, my tendency to drift & moither and of course the odds that I’ll ever get to tattoo anything —”Johnny, nothing you do, (shaking his head) no one’s ever gonna wanna make permanent, unless they’re crazy, and let me tell you something Johnny, crazies never pay”—but about my needle making I’ve never heard him complain once.

Anyway, a couple of hours whiz by. I’m finishing up a batch of 5’s—my

boss’s cluster of choice—when he finally speaks, telling me to pull some bottles of black and purple ink and fill a few caps while I’m at it. We keep the stuff in a storeroom in back. It’s a sizable space, big enough to fit a small work table in. You have to climb eight pretty steep steps to reach it.

That’s where we stock all the extras, and we have extras for almost everything, except light bulbs. For some reason my boss hasn’t picked up any extra light bulbs in a while. Today, of course, I flick the switch, and

FLASH! BLAMI POP!, okay scratch the blam, the storeroom bulb burns out. I recommence flicking, as if such insistent, highly repetitive and at this point pointless action could actually resurrect the light. It doesn’t. The switch has been rendered meaningless, forcing me to feel my way around in the dark. I keep the door open so I can see okay, but it still takes me awhile to negotiate the shadows before I can locate the caps and ink.

By now, the sweet effects of my dream, to say nothing of the soft

thrumming delivered care of alcohol and Oregon bud, have worn of f, though I still continue to think about Thumper, slowly coming to grips with the fact that she won’t be visiting today. This causes my spirits to drop substantially, until I realize I have no way of knowing that for certain. After all, there’s still half a day left. No, she’s not coming. I know it. I can feel it in my gut. That’s okay.

Tomorrow’s— aw, fuck that.

I start filling caps with purple, concentrating on its texture, the strange

hue, imagining I can actually observe the rapid pulse of its bandwidth.

These are stupid thoughts, and as if to confirm that sentiment, darkness pushes in on me. Suddenly the slash of light on my hands looks sharp enough to cut me. Real sharp. Move and it will cut me. I do move and guess what? I start to bleed. The laceration isn’t deep but important stuff has been struck, leaking over the table and floor. Lost.

I don’t have long.

Except I’m not bleeding though I am breathing hard. Real hard. don’t

need to touch my face to know there are now beads of sweat slipping off my forehead, flicking off my eyelids, streaming down the back of my neck.

Cold as hands. Hands of the dead. Something terrible is going on here.

Going extremely wrong. Get out, I think. I want to get out. But I can’t move.

Then as if this were nothing but a grim prelude, shit really starts to

happen.

There’s that awful taste again, sharp as rust, wrapping around my

tongue.

Worse, I’m no longer alone.

Impossible.

Not impossible.

This time it’s human.

Maybe not.

Extremely long fingers.

A sucking sound too. Sucking on teeth, teeth already torn from the

gums.

I don’t know how I know this.

But it’s already too late, I’ve seen the eyes. The eyes. They have no

whites. I haven’t seen this. The way they glisten they glisten red. Then it begins reaching for me, slowly unfolding itself out of its corner, mad meat all of it, but I understand. These eyes are full of blood.

Except I’m only looking at shadows and shelves.

Of course, I’m alone.

And then behind me, the door closes.

The rest is in pieces. A scream, a howl, a roar. All’s warping, or

splintering. That makes no sense. There’s a terrible banging. The air’s rank with stench. At least that’s not a mystery. I know the source. Boy, do I ever.

I’ve shit myself. Pissed myself too. I can’t believe it. Urine soaking into my pants, fecal matter running down the back of my legs, I’m caught in it, must run and hide from it, but I still can’t move. In fact, the more I try to escape, the less I can breathe. The more I try to hold on, the less I can focus.

Something’s leaving me. Parts of me.

Everything falls apart.

Stories heard but not recalled.

Letters too.

Words filling my head. Fragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like

syllables, flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp. Cracked. Traveling at murderous speed. Tearing through it all in a very, very bad perhaps even irreparable way.

Known.

Some.

Call.

Is.

Air.

Am?

Incoherent—yes.

Without meaning—I’m afraid not.

The shape of a shape of a shape of a face dis(as)sembling right before

my eyes. What wail embattled break. Like a hawk. Another Maldon or no Maldon at all, on snowy days, or not snowy at all, far beyond the edge of any reasonable awareness. This is what it feels like to be really afraid.

Though of course it doesn’t. None of this can truly approach the reality of that fear, there in the midst of all that bedlam, like the sound of a heart or some other unholy blast, desperate & dying, slamming, no banging into the thin wall of my inner ear, paper thin in fact, attempting to shatter inside what had already been shattered long ago.

I should be dead.

Why am I still here?

And as that question appears—concise, in order, properly accented—I

see I’m holding onto the tray loaded with all those caps and bottles of black and purple ink. Not only that but I’m already walking as fast as I can through the doorway. The door is open though I did not open it. I stub my toe. I’m falling down the stairs, tripping over myself, hurling the tray in the air, the caps, the ink, all of it, floating now above me, as my hands, independent of anything I might have thought to suggest, reach up to protect my head. Something hisses and slashes out at the back of my neck.

It doesn’t matter. Down I go, head first, somersaulting down those eight pretty steep steps, a wild blur, leaving me to passively note the pain spots as they happen: shoulders, hip, elbows, even as I also, at the same time, remain dimly aware of so much ink coming down like a bad rain, splattering around me, everywhere, covering me, even the tray hitting me, though that doesn’t hurt, the caps scattering across the floor, and of course the accompanying racket, telling my boss, telling them all, whoever else was there— What? not that it was over, it wasn’t, not yet.

The wind’s knocked out of me. It’s not coming back. Here’s where I die,

I think. And it’s true, I’m possessed by the premonition of what will be, what has to be, my inevitable asphyxiation. At least that’s what they see, my boss and crew, as they come running to the back, called there by all that clatter & mess. What they can’t see though is the omen seen in a fall, my fall, as I’m doused in black ink, my hands now completely covered, and see the floor is black, and—have you anticipated this or should I be more explicit?—jet on jet; for a blinding instant I have watched my hand vanish, in fact all of me has vanished, one hell of a disappearing act too, the already foreseen dissolution of the self, lost without contrast, slipping into oblivion, until mid-gasp I catch sight of my reflection in the back of the tray, the ghost in the way: seems I’m not gone, not quite. My face has been splattered with purple, as have my arms, granting contrast, and thus defining me, marking me, and at least for the moment, preserving me.

Suddenly I can breathe and with each breath the terror rapidly

dissipates.

My boss, however, is scared shitless. “Jesus Christ Johnny,” he says. “Are you okay? What happened?” Can’t you see I’ve shit myself, I think to shout. But now I see that i

haven’t. Except for the ink blotting my threads, my pants are bone dry.

I mumble something about how much my toe hurts.

He takes that to mean I’m alright and won’t try to sue him from a

wheelchair.

Later a patron points out the long, bloody scratch on the back of my

neck.

I’m unable to respond.

Now though, I realize what I should of said—in the spirit of the dark; in

the spirit of the staircase —

“Known some call is air am.” Which is to say —

“I am not what I used to be.”]

[78—Although Mr. Truant’s asides may often seem impenetrable, they

are not without rhyme or reason. The reader who wishes to interpret Mr.

Truant on his or her own may disregard this note. Those, however, who feel they would profit from a better understanding of his past may wish to proceed ahead and read his father’s obituary in Appendix IT-i) as well as those letters written by his institutionalized mother in Appendix II-E. — Ed.

After putting his daughter back to bed, Navidson finds Karen standing

in the entrance to their room.

“What’s the matter,” she murmurs, still half-asleep. “Go back to sleep. Daisy just had a bad dream.” Navidson starts to go back downstairs. “I’m sorry Navy,” Karen says quietly. “ I’m sorry I got so mad. It’s not

your fault. That thing just scares me. Come back to bed.”

And as they later confide in separate video entries, that night, for the

first time in weeks, they made love again, their descriptions running the gamut of anything from “ gentle” and “ comforting” to “familiar” and “very satisfying.” Their bodies had repaired what words never tried to, and at least for a little while they felt close again.

The next morning, with harmony now restored, Navidson cannot bring

himself to tell Karen about his visit. Fortunately having nearly gotten lost inside his own house has for the moment diminished his appetite for its darkness. He promises to turn over the initial investigation to Billy Reston: “Then we’ll call The New York Times, Larry King, whoever, and we’ll move. End of story.” Karen responds to his offer with kisses, clinging to his hand, a stability of sorts once again returning to their lives.

Still the compromise is far from satisfying. As Karen records on her Hi

8: “I told Navy I’ll stay for the first look in there but I’ve also called Mom.

I want to get out of here as soon as possible.”

Navidson admits in his: “I feel lousy about lying to Karen. But I think

it’s unreasonable of her to expect me not to investigate. She knows who I am. I think —“

At which point, the study door suddenly swings open and Daisy,

wearing a red and gold dress, barges in and begins tugging on her father’s sleeve.

“Come play with me Daddy.” Navidson lifts his daughter onto his lap. “Okay. What do you want to play?” “I don’t know,” she shrugs. “Always.” “What’s always?” But before she can answer, he starts tickling her around the neck and

Daisy dissolves into bursts of delight.

Despite the tremendous amount of material generated by Exploration A,

no one has ever commented on the game Daisy wants to play with her father, perhaps because everyone assumes it is either a request “to play always” or just a childish neologism.

Then again, “always” slightly mispronounces “hallways.” It also echoes it.

VI

[Animals] lack a symbolic identity and the self- consciousness that goes

with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. . . The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it.

They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else.

— Ernest Becker

While the pragmatic space of animals is a function of inborn instincts,

man has to learn what orientation he needs in order to act.

— Christian Norberg-Schulz

When Hillary, the grey coated Siberian husky, appears at the end of The

Navidson Record, he is no longer a puppy. A couple of years have passed.

Something forever watchful has taken up residence in his eyes. He may be playful with those he knows but whenever strangers wander too close they invariably hear a growl rising from somewhere deep in his throat, a little like distant thunder, warning them away. [79—See Selwyn Hyrkas’ “The End of City Life” in IntervIew, v. 25 October 1995, p. 54.]

Mallory, the tabby cat, vanishes completely, and no mention is made

about what happened to him. His disappearance remains a mystery.

One thing however is certain: the house played a very small part in both

their histories.

The incident took place on August 11th, 1990 a week after Will

Navidson’s secret exploration of the hallway. Saturday morning cartoons blare from the kitchen television, Chad and Daisy munch down their breakfast, and Karen stands outside smoking a cigarette, talking on the phone with Audrie McCullogh, her shelf building accomplice. The topic of the moment is Feng Shui and all it has failed to do. “No matter how many ceramic turtles or wooden ducks, goldfish, celestial dragons, or bronze lions I put in this goddamn house,” she rants. “It still keeps throwing off this awful energy. I need to find a psychic. Or an exorcist. Or a really good real-estate agent.” Meanwhile in the living room, Tom helps Navidson take some still shots of the hallway using a strobe.

Suddenly, somewhere in the house, there is a loud yowl and bark. An

instant later Mallory comes screaming into the living room with Hillary nipping at his tail. It is not the first time they have involved themselves in such a routine. The only exception is that on this occasion, after dashing up and over the sofa, both puppy and cat head straight down the hallway and disappear into the darkness. Navidson probably would have gone in after them had he not instantly heard barks outside followed by Karen’s shouts accusing him of letting the animals out when on that day they were supposed to stay in.

“What the hell?” we hear Navidson mutter loudly.

Sure enough Hillary and Mallory are in the backyard. Mallory up a tree,

Hillary howling grandly over his achievement.

For something so startling, it seems surprising how little has been made

of this event. Bernard Porch in his four thousand page treatise on The Navidson Record devotes only a third of a sentence to the subject: “, (strange how the house won’t support the presence of animals).” [80— Bemard Porch’s All In All (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 1,302.] Mary Widmunt leaves us with just one terse question: “So what’s the deal with the pets?” [81—Mary Widmunt’s “The Echo of Dark” in Gotta Go (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), p. 59.] Even Navidson himself, the consummate investigator, never revisits the subject.

Who knows what might have been discovered if he had.

Regardless, Holloway soon arrives and any understanding that might

have been gained by further analyzing the strange relationship between animals and the house is passed over in favor of human exploration.

Endnotes

[82—Strange how Zampanô also fails to comment on the inability of

animals to wander those corridors. I believe there’s a great deal of significance in this discovery. Unfortunately, Zampanô never returns to the matter and while I would like to offer you my own interpretation I am a little high and alot drunk, trying to determine what set me off in the first place on this private little home—bound binge.

For one thing, Thumper came into the Shop today.

Ever since I fell down the stairs, things have changed there. My boss

kind of tiptoes around me, playing all low key and far of f, his demeanor probably matching his old junkie days. Even his friends keep their distance, everyone for the most part just leaving me alone to sketch and solder, though I’m sketching far less these days, I mean, with all this writing.

Anyway, Thumper’s actually been by a few times but my incomprehensible shyness persists, forbidding me to ever summon up more than an occasional intelligible sentence. Recently though I did get this crazy idea: I decided to go out on a limb and show her that sappy little bit I wrote about her—you know with all that coastal norths and August-sun scent-of-pine-trees stuff, even the Lucy part. just put it in an envelope and carried it around with me until she dropped by and then handed it to her without a word.

I don’t know what I expected, but she opened it right on the spot and

read it and then laughed and then my boss grabbed it and he sort of winced —”Now look who’s the dumb mutant” he shuddered—and that was that.

Thumper handed me her flip flops and Adidas sweat pants and stretched out on the chair. I felt like such an idiot. Lude had warned me I’d be certifiable if I showed it to her. Maybe I am. I actually believed it would touch her in some absurd way. But to hear her laugh like that really fucked me up. I should of stayed away from such flights of fancy, stuck to my regular made —up stories.

I did my best to hide in the back, though I was too scared to go too far

back because of the storeroom.

Then right before she left, Thumper came over and handed me her card. “Call me some time,” she said with a wink. “You’re cute.” My life instantly changed.

I thought.

I told Lude. He told me to call her at once.

I waited.

Then I re-considered, then I postponed.

Finally, at exactly twenty-two past three in the morning, I dialed. It was

a beeper. I punched in my number.

She’s a stripper I reasoned. Strippers live late.

An hour passed. I started drinking. I’m still drinking. She hasn’t called.

She isn’t going to call.

I feel dead. Hillary and Mallory, I suddenly envy them. I wonder if

Navidson did too. I bet Zampanô envied them. I need to get away. Zampanô liked animals. Far away. All those cats he would talk to in that weedy courtyard. At dawn. At night. So many shades slinking out from under that dusty place like years, his years, could they be like my years too? though certainly not so many, not like him, years and years of them, always rubbing up against his legs, and I see it all so clearly now, static announcements that yes! hmmm, how shocking, they still are there, disconnected but vital, the way memories reveal their life by simply appearing, sprinting out from under the shadows, paws!-patterpaws-pawsi, pausing then to rub against our legs, zap! senile sparks perhaps but ah yes still there, and I’m thinking, has another missing year resolved in song?— though let me not get too far from myself, they were after all only cats, quadruped mice-devouring mote—chasing shades, Felis catus, with very little to remind them of themselves or their past or even their tomorrows, especially when the present burns hot with play, their pursuits and their fear, a bright flash to pursue (sun a star on a nothing’s back), a dark slash to escape (there are always predators …), the spry interplay of hidden things and visible wings flung upon that great black sail of rods and cones, thin and fractionary, a covenant of light, ark for the instant, echoing out the dark and the Other, harmonizing with the crack-brack-crisp-tricks of every broken leaf of grass or displaced stick, and so thrust by shadow and the

vague hope of color into a rhapsody of motion and meaning, albeit momentary, pupil pulling wider, wider still, and darker, receiving all of it, and even more of it, though still only beholding some of it, until in the frenzy of reception, this mote—clawing hawk- fearing shade loses itself in temporary madness, leaping, springing, flinging itself after it all, as if it were possessed (and it is); as if that kind of physical response could approximate the witnessed world, which it can’t, though very little matters enough to prevent the try—all of which is to say, in the end, they are only cats but cats to talk to just the same before in their own weaving and wending, they Kilkenny-disappear, just as they first appeared, out of nowhere, vanishing back into the nowhere, tales from some great story we will never see but one day just might imagine (which in the gray of gentler eves will prove far more than any of us could ever need; “enough,” we will shout, “enough!” our bellies full, our hearts full, our ages full; fullness and greater fullness and even more fullness; how then we will laugh and forget how the imagining has already left us) slinking back into that place of urban barley, grass, fennel and wheat, or just plain hay, golden hay, where—Hey!

Hey! Hey-hey! Hay days gone by, bye-bye, gone way way away. And what of dogs you ask? Well, there are no dogs except for the Pekinese but that’s another story, one I won’t, I cannot tell. It’s too dark and difficult and without whim, and if you didn’t notice I’m in a whimsical (inconsequential) frame of mind right now, talking (scribbling?) aimlessly and strangely about cats, enjoying all the rules in this School of Whim, the play of it,—Where Have I Moved? What Have I Muttered? Who Have I Met?—the frolic and the drift, as I go thinking now, tripping really, over the notion of eighty or more of Zampanô’s dusty cats (for no particular/relevant reason) which must implicitly mean that no, it cannot be raining cats and dogs, due to the dust, so much of it, on the ground, about the weeds, in the air, so therefore! ergo! thus (..): no dogs, no Pekinese, just the courtyard, Zampanô’s courtyard, on a mad lost-noon day, wild with years and pounce and sun, even if another day would find Zampanô elsewhere, far from the sun, this sun, flung face down on his ill—swept floor, without so much as a clue, “No trauma, just old age” the paramedics would say, though they could never explain—no one could—what they found near where he lay, four of them, six or seven inches long and half an inch deep, splintering the wood, left by some terrible awe-full thing, signature in script of steel or claws,

though not Santa, Zampanô died after Christmas after all, but no myth either, for I saw the impossible marks near the trunk, touched them, even caught some splinters in my fingertips, some of their unexpected sadness and mourning, which though dug out later with a safety pin, I swear still fester beneath my skin, reminding me in a peculiar way of him, just like other splinters I still carry, though these much much deeper, having never been worked out by the body but quite the contrary worked into the body, by now long since buried, calcified and fused to my very bones, taking me further from the warm frolic of years, reminding me of much colder days, Where I Left Death, or thought I had—I am tripping—overcast in tones December gray, recalling names,—I have tripped—swept in Ohio sleet and rain, ruled by a man with a beard rougher than horse hide and hands harder than horn, who called me beast because I was his boy though he wasn’t my father, which is another story, another place I’m here to avoid, as I’m certain there are places you too have sought to avoid, just as one of Zampanô’s early readers also found a story she wanted to avoid, though she finally told me it, or at least some of it, how she’d departed from the old man’s apartment at nightfall, having just endured hours of speech on comfort, death and legend, not to speak of mothers & daughters and birds & bees and fathers & Sons and cats & dogs, all of it distressing her, saddening her, confusing her, and thus leaving her completely unprepared for the memory she was about to find, abruptly returning from her childhood in Santa Cruz, even as she was trying to reorient herself in a familiar setting and the comforting routine of a long walk back to her car,—it had been raining there; pouring in fact; though not on Franklin & Whitley—suddenly noticing the unnatural heaviness of a shadow slipping free from the burnt dusk, though not a shadow at all, later translating this as the sight of an enormous creature trespassing on the curve of a Northern California night, like the shadow she saw hiding in the bottom turn of Zampanô’s stairwell, moving too, towards her, and so causing her to panic and scramble into the comforts offered by a local bar—or that night scramble through the gate of Zampanô’s building—away from all that gloom, until only many hours and many drinks later could she finally fall asleep, her hangover the following day leaving her—”gratefully,” she said—with only a fleeting memory of something white with ropes of sea smoke and one terrifying flash of blue,

which was more, she told me, than she could usually share even if—which she wouldn’t share—she knew it still wasn’t even the half of it.

And so now, in the shadow of unspoken events, I watch Zampanô’s

courtyard darken.

Everything whimsical has left.

I try to study the light-going carefully. From my room. In the glass of

my memory. In the moonstream of my imagination. The weeds, the windows, every bench.

But the old man is not there, and the cats are all gone.

Something else has taken their place. Something I am unable to see.

Waiting.

I’m afraid.

It is hungry. It is immortal.

Worse, it knows nothing of whim.

VII

But all this—the mysterious, far-reaching hair-line trail, the absence of

sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all—made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a newcomer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.

— Jack London

“To Build A Fire”

Holloway Roberts arrives carrying a rifle. In fact in the very first shot

we see of him, he emerges from a truck holding a Weatherby .300 magnum.

Even without weapons though, Holloway would still be an intimidating

man. He is broad and powerful with a thick beard and deeply creased brow.

Dissatisfaction motivates him, and at forty-eight, he still drives himself harder than any man half his age. Consequently, when he steps onto Navidson’s front lawn, arms folded, eyes scrutinizing the house, bees flying near his boots, he looks less like a guest and more like some conquistador landing on new shores, preparing for war.

Born in Menomonie, Wisconsin, Holloway Roberts has made a career

as a professional hunter and explorer. As travel writer Aramis Garcia Pineda commented: “He is confident, leads well, and possesses a remarkable amount of brassball courage. Over the past some have resented his strength and drive but most agree the sense of security one feels in his presence—especially in life-threatening situations—makes tolerating the irritating sides of his character well worth it.” [83—See Aramis Garcia Pineda’s “More Than Meets The Eye” in Field and Stream, v. 100, January 1996, p. 39-47.]

When Navidson told Reston how Karen had explicitly asked him not to

explore the hallway—and presumably Navidson described the discoveries

he made during Exploration A—the first person Reston called was Holloway.

Reston had met Holloway four years earlier at a symposium on arctic

gear design held at Northwestern University. Holloway was one of the speakers invited to represent explorers. Not only did he clearly articulate the problems with current equipment, he also focused on what was needed to correct the problems. Though a fairly humorless speech, its conciseness impressed many people there, especially Reston who bought the man a drink. A sort of friendship soon developed. [84—Leeze1 Brant’s “Billy Reston’s Friends For Life” in Backpacker, v. 23, February 1995, p. 7.] “I always thought he was rock solid,” Reston said much later in The Reston Interview. “Just look at his C.V. Never for a moment did I suspect he was capable of that.” [85—See Exhibit Four for the complete transcript of The Reston Interview.]

As it turned out, as soon as Holloway saw the tape of “The Five and

Half Minute Hallway”, which Reston had sent him, he was more than willing to participate in an investigation. [Gabriel Reller in his book Beyond The Grasp of Commercial Media (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1995) suggests that the appearance of the first short entitled “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway” originated here: “Holloway probably copied the tape, gave it to a couple of friends, who in turn passed it along to others.

Eventually it found its way to the academic set” (p. 252).] Within a week he had arrived at the house, along with two employees: Jed Leeder and Kirby “Wax” Hook.

As we learn in The Navidson Record, Jed Leeder lives in Seattle,

though he was originally from Vineland, New Jersey. He had actually been on his way to becoming a career truck driver when a trans-continental job took him all the way to Washington. It was there that he discovered the great outdoors was not just some myth conjured up in a magazine. He was twenty-seven when he first saw the Cascades. One look was all he needed.

Love at first sight. He quit his job on the spot and started selling camping gear. Six years later he is still a long way from Vineland, and as we can see for ourselves, his passion for the Pacific Northwest and the great outdoors only seems to have grown more intense.

Consummately shy, almost to the point of frailty, Jed possesses an

uncanny sense of direction and remarkable endurance. Even Holloway

concedes that Jed would probably out distance him in a packless climb.

When he is not trekking, Jed loves drinking coffee, watching the tide turn, and listening to Lyle Lovett with his fiancée. “She’s from Texas,” he tells us very softly. “I think that’s where we’re going to get married.” [86—See also Susan Wright’s “Leeder of the Pack” in Outdoor Life, v. 195, June 1995, p.

28.]

Wax Hook could not be more different. At twenty-six, he is the

youngest member of the Holloway team. Born in Aspen, Colorado, he grew up on mountain faces and in cave shafts. Before he could walk he knew where to drive a piton and before he could talk he had a whole vocabulary of knots under his fmgers. If there is such a thing as a climbing prodigy, Wax is it. By the time he dropped out of high school, he had climbed more peaks than most climbers have claimed in a lifetime. In one clip, he tells us how he plans to eventually make a solo ascent of Everest’s North Face: “And I’ll tell you this, more than a few people are bettin’ I’ll do it.”

When Wax was twenty-three, Holloway hired him as a guide. For the

next three years, Wax helped Holloway and Jed lead teams up Mt.

McKinley, down into Ellison’s Cave in Georgia, or across some Nepalese cwm. The pay was not much to brag about but the experience was worth plenty.

Wax sometimes gets a little out of hand. He likes to drink, get laid, and

most of all boast about how much he drank and how many times he got laid. But he never brags about climbing. Booze and women are one thing but “a rocky face is always better than you and if you make it down alive you’re grateful you had a good trip.” [87—Bentley Harper’s “Hook, Line and Sinker” in Sierra, v. 81, July/August 1996, p. 42.]

“This though has to be the weirdest,” Wax later tells Navidson, right

before making his last foray down the hallway. “When Holloway asked me if I wanted to explore a house I thought he was cracked. But whatever Holloway does is interesting to me, so sure I went for it, and sure enough this is the weirdest!”

On the day Holloway and his team arrive at Ash Tree Lane, Navidson

and Tom are there to greet them at the door. Karen says a brief hello and

leaves to pick the children up from school. Reston makes the necessary introductions and then after everyone has gathered in the living room, Navidson begins to explain what he knows about the hallway.

He shows them a map he drew based on his first visit. Tellingly, this

hardly strikes Tom as news. While Navidson does his best to impress upon everyone the dangers posed by the tremendous size of that place as well as the need to record in detail every part of the exploration, Tom passes out xerox copies of his brother’s diagram.

Jed finds it difficult to stop smiling while Wax finds it difficult to stop

laughing. Holloway keeps throwing glances at Reston. In spite of the tape he saw, Holloway seems convinced that Navidson has more than a few loose wing nuts jangling around in his cerebral cortex. But when the four dead bolts are at last unlocked and the hallway door drawn open, the icy darkness instantly slaughters every smile and glance.

Newt Kuelister suspects the first view of that place irreparably altered

something in Holloway: “His face loses color, something even close to panic suffuses his system. Suddenly he sees what fortune has plopped on his plate and how famous and rich it could make him, and he wants it. He wants all of it, immediately, no matter the cost.” [88—See Newt Kuellster’s “The Five and a Half Minutc Holloway” in The Holloway Quesrion (San Francisco: Metalambino Inc., 1996), p. 532; as well as Tiffany Baiter’s “Gone Away” in People, V. 43, May 15, 1995, p. 89.] Studying Holloway’s reaction, it is almost impossible to deny how serious he gets staring down the hallway. “How far back does it go?” he finally asks.

“You’re about to find out,” Navidson replies, sizing up the man, a half-

smile on his lips. “Just be careful of the shifts.”

From the first time they shake hands on the doorstep, it is obvious to us

Navidson and Holloway dislike each other. Neither one says anything critical but both men bristle in each other’s presence. Holloway is probably a little unnerved by Navidson’s distinguished career. Navidson, no doubt, is privately incensed that he must ask another man to explore his own house.

Holloway does not make this intrusion any easier. He is cocky and following Navidson’s little introduction immediately starts calling the shots.

In earlier years, Navidson would have probably paid little attention to

Karen and headed down those corridors by himself—danger be damned.

Yet as has already been discussed, the move to Virginia was about repairing their crumbling relationship. Karen would refrain from relying on other men to mollify her insecurities if Navidson curbed his own risk-lust and gave domesticity a real shot. After all, as Karen later intimated, their home was supposed to bring them closer together. [89—See Chapter XIII.] The appearance of the hallway, however, tests those informal vows. Navidson finds himself constantly itching to leave his family for that place just as Karen discovers old patterns surfacing in herself.

Later that evening, Holloway places his hand on Karen’s back and

makes her laugh with a line the camera never hears. Navidson immediately bumps Holloway aside with his shoulder, revealing, for one thing, his own easily underestimated strength. Navidson, however, reserves his glare for Karen. She laughs it off but the uneasy energy released recalls Leslie Buckman and Dale Corrdigan’s accusations. [90—Refer to footnotes 19 and

20 concerning Karen’s infidelities. Perhaps it also should be noted here that for all his wanderings Navidson was pointedly not promiscuous. Good looks, intelligence, and fan did not combine to create an adulterous lifestyle. Jona Panofsky in “Saints, Sinners, and Photojoumalists” Fortune,

v. 111, March 18, 1985, p. 20, attributes Navidson’s genius to his “monk-like existence.” However, Australian native, Ryan Murray in his book Wilder Ways (Sydney: Outback Works, 1996) calls Navidson’ s monastic habits “a sure sign of unresolved oedipal anxieties, repressed homosexuality, and a disturbed sense of self. Considering the time he spent away from home coupled with the kind of offers he got from the most exotic and tantalizing women (not even including those from his numerous female assistants), his refusal proves a nauseating absence of character.

Make no mistake about it: over here his kind enter a bar with a smile and leave with a barstool for a hat.” An odd thing to say considering Navidson drank freely in every Australian bar he ever visited and on the one occasion when he was attacked by two drunks, purportedly angry over all the attention the waitresses were lavishing on him, both inebriates left bruised and bleeding. (The Wall Street Journal, March 29, 1985, p. 31, column 3.)]

Yet even after Navidson’s interjection, Holloway still finds it difficult to

keep his eyes off of Karen. Her flirting hardly helps. She is bright,

extremely sexual, and just as Navidson has always enjoyed danger, she has always thrived on attention.

Karen brings the men beers and they go outside with her and light her

cigarettes. It matters very little what they say, her eyes always flash, she gives them that famous smile, and sure enough soon they are all doting on her.

Navidson confides to his Hi 8,” I can’t tell you how much I’d like to

deviate that fucker’s [Holloway’s] septum.” And then later on mutters somewhat enigmatically: “For that I should throw her out.” Still aside from these comments and the strong nudge he gave Holloway, Navidson refrains from openly displaying any other signs of jealousy or rage.

Unfortunately he also refrains from openly considering the significance

of these feelings. The closest he comes appears in a Hi 8 journal entry spliced in following his encounter with Holloway. On camera, Navidson treats what he refers to as “his rotten feet.” As we can clearly see, the tops are puffy and in some places as red as clay. Furthermore, all his toe nails are horribly cracked, disfigured, and yellow. “Perpetuated,” Navidson informs us. “By a nasty fungus two decades worth of doctors finally ended up calling S-T-R-E-S-S.” Sitting by himself on the edge of the tub, blood stained socks draped over the edge, he carefully spreads a silky ointment around what he glibly calls his “light fantastic toe.” It is one of the more naked moments of Navidson, and especially considering its placement in the sequence, seems to reveal in a non-verbal way some of the anxiety Karen’s flirtation with Holloway has provoked in him.

All of which becomes pretty irrelevant as Holloway soon spends most

of his hours leading his team down that lightless hallway.

Frequently treatment of the first three explorations has concentrated on

the physical aspects of the house. Florencia Calzatti, however, has shown in her compelling book The Fraying of the American Family (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1995)—no longer in print—how these invasions begin to strip the Navidsons of any existing cohesion. It is an interesting examination of the complex variables implicit in any intrusion.

Unfortunately understanding Caizatti’s work is not at all easy, as she makes

her case using a peculiar idiom no reader will find readily comprehensible (e.g. She never refers to Holloway as anything but “the stranger”; Jed and Wax appear as only “the instruments”; and the house is encoded as “the patient”). No doubt inspired by Caizatti, a small group of other writers, including the poet Elfor O’Halloran, have continued to mull over the dynamics brought on by Holloway’s arrival. [91—Consider Bingham Arzumanian’s “Stranger in a Hall” Journal of Psychoanalysis, v.14 April 12, 1996, p. 142; Yvonne Hunsucker’s “Counseling, Relief, and Introjection” Medicine, v.2 July 18, 1996, p. 56; Curtis Meichor’s “The Surgical Hand” Internal Medicine, vR September 30, 1996, p. 93; and Pifor O’Halloran’s “Invasive Cures” Homeopathic Alternatives, October 31, 1996, p. 28.]

Without focusing too closely on the fine filigree of detail presented in

these pieces—a book in itself—it is worthwhile, however briefly, to track the narrative events of the three explorations and recite to some degree how they effect the Navidsons.

For Exploration #1, Holloway, Jed and Wax enter the hallway equipped

with Hi 8s, down parkas, hats, Gortex gloves, powerful halogen lamps, extra batteries, and a radio to keep in contact with Navidson, Tom and Reston. Navidson ties one end of some fishing line to the hallway door and then hands the spool to Holloway.

“There’s almost two miles of line here,” he tells him. “Don’t let go of

it,”

Karen says nothing when she hears Navidson make this comment,

though she does get up abruptly to go out to the backyard and smoke a cigarette. It is particularly eerie to watch Holloway and his team disappear down the long hallway, while just outside Karen paces back and forth in the light of a September day, oblivious of the space she repeatedly crosses though for whatever reason cannot penetrate. [92—Jeffrey Neblett’s “The Illusion of Intimacy and Depth” Ladies’ Home Journal, V. 111, January 1994, p. 90-93.]

An hour later, Holloway, Jed, and Wax return. When their Hi 8 tapes are

replayed in the living room, we watch along with everyone else how a

series of lefts eventually leads them to the apparently endless corridor which, again to the left, offers entrance into that huge space where Navidson almost got lost. Though Holloway’s ability to shoot this trip hardly compares to the expertise evident in Navidson’s Exploration A, it is still thrilling to follow the trio as they investigate the darkness.

As they quickly discover, the void above them is not infinite. Their

flashlights, much more powerful than Navidson’s, illuminate a ceiling at least two hundred feet high. A little later, at least fifteen hundred feet away, they discover an opposing wall. What no one is prepared for, however, is the even larger entrance waiting for them, opening into an even greater void.

Two things keep them from proceeding further. One—Holloway runs

out of fishing line. In fact, he briefly considers setting the spool down, when two—he hears the growl Navidson had warned them about. A little rattled by the sound, Holloway decides to turn back in order to better consider their next move. As Navidson foretold, they soon see for themselves how all the walls have shifted (though not as severely as they had for Navidson). Fortunately, the changes have not severed the fishing line and the three men find their way back to the living room with relative ease.

Exploration #2 takes place the following day. This time Holloway

carries with him four spools of fishing line, several flares, and some neon markers. He virtually ignores Navidson, putting Wax in charge of a 35mm camera and instructing Jed on how to collect scratchings from all the walls they pass along the way. Reston provides the dozen or so sample jars.

Though Exploration #2 ends up lasting over eight hours, Holloway,

Jed, Wax only hear the growl once and the resulting shifts are negligible.

The first hallway seems narrower, the ceiling a little lower, and while some of the rooms they pass look larger, for the most part everything has remained the same. It is almost as if continued use deters the growl and preserves the path they walk.

Aside from feeling generally incensed by what he perceives as

Holloway’s postured authority, Navidson almost goes berserk listening to

the discoveries on the radio. Reston and Tom try to cheer him up and to Navidson’s credit he tries to act cheerful, but when Jed announces they have crossed what he names the Anteroom and entered what Holloway starts calling the Great Hall, Navidson finds it increasingly more difficult to conjure even a smile.

Radio psychologist Fannie Lamkins believes this is a clear cut example

of the classic male struggle for dominance:

It’s bad enough to hear the Great Hall has a ceiling at least five hundred feet high with a span that may approach a mile, but when Holloway radios that they’ve found a staircase in the center which is over two hundred feet in diameter and spirals down into nothing, Navidson has to hand Reston the radio, unable to muster another word of support.

He has been deprived of the right to name what he inherently understands as his own. [93—Fannie Lamkins’

“Eleven Minute Shrink,” KLAT, Buffalo, New York, June 24, 1994.]

Lamkins sees Navidson’s willingness to obey Karen’s injunction as a

sacrifice on par with scarification, “though invisible to Karen.” [94—Ibid.

Florencia Caizatti also sees Karen’s edict as violent, though she ultimately considers it of great value: “A needed rite to reinvigorate and strengthen the couple’s personal bonds.” The Fraying of the American Family, p. 249.]

After Holloway’s team returns, Jed tries to describe the staircase: “It

was enormous. We dropped a few flares down it but never heard them hit bottom. I mean in that place, it being so empty and cold and still and all, you really can hear a pin drop, but the darkness just swallowed the flares right up.” Wax nods, and then adds with a shake of his head: “It’s so deep, man, it’s like it’s almost dream like.”

This last comment is actually not uncommon, especially for individuals

who find themselves confronting vast tenebrific spaces. Back in the mid-

60s, American cavers tackled the Sotano de las Golondrinas, an incredible l,092 ft hole in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Oriental. They used rope, rappel racks, and mechanical ascenders to make the descent. Later on, one of the cavers described his experience: “I was suspended in a giant dome with thousands of birds circling in small groups near the vague blackcloth of the far walls. Moving slowly down the rope, I had the feeling that I was descending into an illusion and would soon become part of it as the distances became unrelatable and entirely unreal.” [95—Planet Earth: Underground Worlds by Donald Dale Jackson and The Editors of Time-Life Books (Alexandra, Virginia: Time-Life Books, 1982), p. 149.]

When Holloway plays back the Hi 8s for everyone, Navidson’s

frustrations get the best of him. He leaves the room. It hardly helps that Karen stays, entirely engrossed in Holloway’s presentation and the ghostly if inadequate images of a banister frozen on the monitor. Tom, actually, pulls her aside and tries to convince her to let Navidson lead the next exploration.

“Tom,” she replies defensively. “Nothing’s stopping Navy. If he wants

to go, he can go. But then I go too. That’s our deal. He knows that. You know that.”

Tom seems a little shocked by her anger, until Karen directs his

attention to Chad and Daisy, sitting in the kitchen, working hard at not doing their homework.

“Look at them,” she whispers. “Navy’s had a lifetime of wandering and

danger. He can let someone else take over now. It won’t kill him, but losing him would kill them. It would kill me too. I want to grow old, Tom. I want to grow old with him. Is that such an awful thing?”

Her words clearly register with Tom, who perhaps also perceives what a

great toll his brother’s death would have on him as well. [96—Both Bingham Arzumanian and Curtis Meichor’s pieces have offered valuable insight into the nature of Tom’s alignment with Karen. Also see Chapter

XI.]

When he sees Navidson next, Tom tells him to go find his son.

Based on what we can tell from The Navidson Record, it appears Chad

soon got fed up with his class assignment and took off down the street with Hillary, determined to explore his own dark. Navidson had to look for almost an hour before he finally found him. Chad it turned out was in the

park filling a jar full of fireflies. Instead of scolding him, Navidson helped out.

By ten, they had returned home with jars full of light and hands sticky

with ice cream.

Exploration #3 ends up lasting almost twenty hours. Relying primarily

on the team’s radio transmissions interspersed with a few clips from the Hi 8s, Navidson relates how Holloway, Jed, and Wax take forty- five minutes to reach the Spiral Staircase only to spend the next seven hours walking down it. When they at last stop, a dropped flare still does not illuminate or sound a bottom. Jed notes that the diameter has also increased from two hundred feet to well over five hundred feet. It takes them over eleven hours to return.

Unlike the two previous explorations, this intrusion brings them face to

face with the consequences of the immensity of that place. All three men come back cold, depleted, their muscles aching, their enthusiasm gone.

“I got some vertigo,” Jed confesses. “I had to step way back from the

edge and sit down. That was a first for me.” Wax is more cavalier, claiming to have felt no fear, though for some reason he is more exhausted than the rest. Holloway remains the most stoic, keeping any doubts to himself, adding only that the experience is beyond the power of any Hi 8 or 35mm camera: “It’s impossible to photograph what we saw.” [97—Marjorie Preece uses this one line to launch into her powerfully observed essay “The Loss of Authority: Holloway’s Challenge” Kaos Journal, v. 32, September, 1996, p. 44. Preece wonderfully shows how Holloway’s assertion that the camera is impotent within the house “helps establish him—at least for a little while—as the tribe’s head.”]

Even after seeing Navidson’s accomplished shots, it is hard to disagree

with Holloway. The darkness recreated in a lab or television set does not begin to tell the true story. Whether chemical clots determining black or video grey approximating absence, the images still remain two dimensional.

In order to have a third dimension, depth cues are required, which in the case of the stairway means more light. The flares, however, barely illuminate the size of that bore. In fact they are easily extinguished by the

very thing they are supposed to expose. Only knowledge illuminates that bottomless place, disclosing the deep ultimately absent in all the tapes and stills—those strange cartes de visites. It is unfortunate that Holloway’s images cannot even be counted as approximations of that vast abrupt, where as Rilke wrote, “aber da, an diesem schwarzen Fellel wird dein stärkstes Schauen aufgelost.”

[98—No idea. Actually, Lude had a German friend named Kyrie, a tall

blonde haired beauty who spoke Chinese, Japanese and French, drank beer by the quart, trained for triathions when she wasn’t playing competitive squash, made six figures a year as a corporate consultant and loved to fuck.

Lude took heed when I told him I needed a German translation and introduced us.

As it turned out, I’d met her before, about five or so months ago. It had

actually been a little tricky. I was leering about, pretty obliterated in the arms of drink, hours of drink actually, feeling like days of drink, when this monstrous guy loomed up in front of me, grumbling insensibly about bad behavior, something concerning too much talk with too much gesture, gestures towards her, that much of the grumble, the “her” bit, I understood.

He meant Kyrie of course who even back then was a blonde haired beauty, writing my name in Japanese and assigning all sorts of portentous things to it, things I was hoping to lead or was it follow? elsewhere, when this prehistoric shithead, reeking of money and ignorance, interposed himself, cursing, spitting and threatening, in fact so loud & mean Kyrie had to interpose herself, which only made matters worse. He reached over her and hit me in the forehead with the heel of his hand. Not hard, more like a shove, but a strong enough shove to push me back a few feet.

“Well look at that,” I remember hollering. “He has an opposable

thumb.”

The monster wasn’t amused. It didn’t matter. The alcohol in me had

already quickened and fled. I stood there tingling all over, a dangerous clarity returning to me, ancient bloodlines colluding under what I imagine now must of been the very aegis of Mars, my fingers itching to weld into themselves, while directly beneath my sternum a hammer struck the timeless bell of war, a call to arms, though all of it still held back by what? words I guess, or rather a voice, though whose I have no clue.

He was twice my size, bigger and stronger. That should of mattered. For

some reason it didn’t. Odds were he’d rip me to pieces, probably even try to stomp me, and yet part of me still wanted to find out for sure. Luckily, the alcohol returned. I got wobbly and then I got scared.

Lude was yelling at me. “You got a death wish Truant?” Which was the thing that scared me. ‘Cause maybe I did.

Five months or so later, Lude arranged for me to meet Kyrie at Union. I

was late by an hour. I had an excuse. Every time I tried to open my door, my heart started racing for a bypass. I had to sit down and wait for the thumping to calm. This went on for almost fifty minutes, until I finally just gave up, gritted my teeth and charged out into the night.

Of course I recognized Kyrie immediately and she recognized me. She

was getting ready to leave when I arrived. I apologized and begged her to stay, making up some lame excuse about police trying to save a guy in my building who’d stuck his head in a microwave. She looked wonderful and her voice was soft and offered me something Thumper had taken away when she hadn’t called me back. She even wrote down on a napkin the glyph she’d created for me half a year ago to reflect my name and nature.

Before I could order a drink, a Jack and Coke, she told me her boyfriend

was out of town, working on some construction site in Poland, single handedly dislodging supertankers stuck in dry dock in Gdansk or something. It was a dirty job but someone had to do it, and what’s more he wasn’t going to be back for a few more weeks. Before I even took a sip of my drink, Kyrie was complaining about all the people filtering in around us and then as I finished my drink in one long gulp, she suggested we go for a drive in her new 2 door BMW Coupe.

“Sure” I said, feeling vaguely uneasy about wandering too far from

where I lived, which I realized, as I took a second to think that out, was absolutely absurd. What the fuck was happening to me? My apartment’s a dump. There’s nothing there for me. Not even sleep. Cat naps are fine but for some reason deep REM is getting more and more difficult to achieve.

Definitely not a good thing.

Fortunately, I was falling under the spell of Kyrie’s blue eyes, like sea

ice, almost inhuman, reminding me again—as she herself had already

pointed out—that she was alone, Gdansk Man more than half a world spinning world away.

In the parking lot, we slipped into her bucket seats and quickly

swallowed two tabs of Ecstasy.

Kyrie took over from there.

At nearly ninety miles per hour, she zipped us up to that windy edge

known to some as Mulholland, a sinuous road running the ridge of the Santa Monica mountains, where she then proceeded to pump her vehicle in and out of turns, sometimes dropping down to fifty miles per hour only to immediately gun it back up to ninety again, fast, slow, fast- fast, slow, sometimes a wide turn, sometimes a quick one. She preferred the tighter ones, the sharp controlled jerks, swinging left to right, before driving back to the right, only so she could do it all over again, until after enough speed and enough wind and more distance than I’d been prepared to expect, taking me to parts of this city I rarely think of and never visit, she dipped down into some slower offshoot, a lane of lightless coves, not stopping there either, but pushing further on until she finally found the secluded spot she’d been heading for all along, overlooking the city, far from anyone, pedestrian or home, and yet directly beneath a street lamp, which as far as I could tell, was the only Street lamp around for miles.

Seems all that twittering light flooding down through the sunroof really

turned her on.

I can’t remember the inane things I started babbling about then. I know

it didn’t really matter. She wasn’t listening. She just yanked up on the emergency brake, dropped her seat back and told me to lie on top of her, on top of those leather pants of hers, extremely expensive leather pants mind you, her hands immediately guiding mine over those soft slightly oily folds, positioning my fingers on the shiny metal tab, small and round like a tear, then murmuring a murmur so inaudible that even though I could feel her lips tremble against my ear, she seemed far, far away—”pinch it” she’d said, which I did, lightly, until she also said “pull it” which I also did, gently, parting the teeth, one at a time, down, under and beneath, the longest unzipping of my life, all the way from right beneath her perfectly oval navel to the tiny tattoo, a Japanese sign, the meaning of which I never guessed, marking her lower back, and not a stitch of underwear to get in the way, the

rest very guessable though don’t underestimate the danger which I guess really wasn’t so dangerous after all.

We never even kissed or looked into each other’s eyes. Our lips just

trespassed on those inner labyrinths hidden deep within our ears, filled them with the private music of wicked words, hers in many languages, mine in the off color of my only tongue, until as our tones shifted, and our consonants spun and squealed, rattled faster, hesitated, raced harder, syllables soon melting with groans, or moans finding purchase in new words, or old words, or made-up words, until we gathered up our heat and refused to release it, enjoying too much the dark language we had suddenly stumbled upon, craved to, carved to, not a communication really but a channeling of our rumored desires, hers for all I know gone to Black Forests and wolves, mine banging back to a familiar form, that great revenant mystery I still could only hear the shape of, which in spite of our separate lusts and individual cries still continued to drive us deeper into stranger tones, our mutual desire to keep gripping the burn fueled by sound, hers screeching, mine—I didn’t hear mine—only hers, probably counter— pointing mine, a high-pitched cry, then a whisper dropping unexpectedly to practically a bark, a grunt, whatever, no sense any more, and suddenly no more curves either, just the straight away, some line crossed, where every fractured sound already spoken finally compacts into one long agonizing word, easily exceeding a hundred letters, even thunder, anticipating the inevitable letting go, when the heat is ultimately too much to bear, threatening to burn, scar, tear it all apart, yet tempting enough to hold onto for even one second more, to extend it all, if we can, as if by getting that much closer to the heat, that much more enveloped, would prove . . .— which when we did clutch, hold, postpone, did in fact prove too much after all, seconds too much, and impossible to refuse, so blowing all of everything apart, shivers and shakes and deep in her throat a thousand letters crashing in a long unmodulated fall, resonating deep within my cochlea and down the cochlear nerve, a last fit of fury describing in lasting detail the shape of things already come.

Too bad dark languages rarely survive.

As quickly as they’re invented, they die, unable to penetrate much,

explore anything or even connect. Terribly beautiful but more often than not

inadequate. So I guess it’s no surprise that what I recall now with the most clarity is actually pretty odd.

When Kyrie dropped me off, she burped.

At the time I thought it was kind of cute but I guess “man eater” did

cross my mind. Then as I opened the door, she burst into tears. All she was in that $85,000 car could not exclude the little girl. She said something about Gdansk Man’s disinterest in her, in fucking her, in even touching her, running away to Poland, and then she apologized, blamed the drugs still roaming around in her veins and told me to get out.

She was still crying when she drove off.

In the end, the whole thing had been so frantic and fast and strange and

even sad in some ways, I completely forgot to ask her about the German phrase. [99—“But here within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze will be absorbed and utterly disappear.” As translated by Stephen Mitchell. — Ed.] I suppose I could call her (Lude has her number) but for some reason these days dialing seven let alone eleven numbers feels like an infinite stretch. The phone’s right in front of me but it’s out of reach. When it rings at four AM I don’t answer it. All I have to do is extend my hand but I can’t run that far. Sleep never really arrives. Not even rest. There’s no satisfaction anymore. Morning shrinks space but leaves no message.

Resistance to representation, however, is not the only difficulty posed

by those replicating chambers and corridors. As Karen discovers, the whole house defies any normal means of determining direction.

Apparently while Karen had been struggling with the explorers’

invasion of her home, her mother had managed to acquire the number of a Feng Shui master in Manhattan. After a long conversation with this expert, Karen is relieved to learn she has been putting all the ceramic animals, crystals, and plants in the wrong places. She is still told to use the Pau Kua table, I Ching, and the Lo Shu magic square, but to do so with the assistance of a compass. Since much of Feng Shui, especially in the Compass School, relies on auspicious and inauspicious directions, it is crucial to get an accurate reading on how the house sits in relationship to points north, south, east, and west.

Karen immediately goes out and buys a compass—this while the men

are in the midst of Exploration #2. Upon returning home, however, she is astonished to find the compass refuses to settle on any one direction inside the house. Assuming it must be broken, she drives back to town and exchanges it for a new one. Apparently this time she tests it in the store.

Satisfied, she returns to the house only to discover that once again the compass is useless. [100—Rosemary Park considers Karen’s dilemma highly emblematic of the absence of cultural polarities: “In this case, Karen’s inability to determine a direction is not a fault but a challenge, requiring tools more capable than compasses and reference points more accurate than magnetic fields.” See “Impossible Directions” in Inside Out (San Francisco: Urban B-light, 1995), P. 91.]

No matter what room she stands in, whether in the back or the front,

upstairs or downstairs, the needle never stays still. North it seems has no authority there. Tom confirms the strange phenomenon, and during Exploration #3 Holloway, who up till then has relied solely on neon arrows and fishing line to mark their path, demonstrates how the same holds true for a compass read within those ash-like halls.

“I’ll be damned,” Holloway grunts as he stares at the twitching needle.

[101—David Lettau wrote an amusing if ultimately pointless essay on the compass’ behavior. He asserted that the minute fluctuations of the needle proved the house was nothing less than a vestibule for pure energy which if harnessed correctly could supply the world with unlimited power. See The Faraday Conclusion (Boston: Maxwell Press, 1996). Rosie O’Donnell, however, offered a different perspective when she wryly remarked on Entertainment Tonight: “The fact that Holloway waited that long to use a compass only goes to show how men — even explorers — still refuse to ask for directions.”]

“I guess all we’ve got now is your sense of direction,” Wax jokingly

tells Jed, which as Luther Shepard wrote: “Only helps to emphasize how real the threat was of getting lost in there.” [102—See Luther Shepard’s

chapter entitled ‘The Compass School” in The Complete Feng Shui Guide for The Navidson Record (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996), p. 387.]

In light of this new development and in preparation for Exploration #4,

Tom makes several trips into town to purchase more fishing line, neon markers, and anything else that might serve to mark the team’s path. Since

Holloway’s plan is to spend at least five nights inside, Tom also picks up extra food and water. On one of these excursions, he even takes Daisy and Chad along. No Hi 8 records their trip but the way Chad and Daisy relate to their mother the details of their shopping spree reveals how fond they have become of their uncle.

Unfortunately, Tom also has to buy a ticket back to Massachusetts. With

the exception of a few weeks in July, he has not worked in over three months. As Tom explains to Karen and Navidson, “the time’s come for me to put ass in gear and get on with my life.” He also tells them the time has come for them to contact the media and find a new house.

Originally Tom had intended to leave right after Exploration #3 but

when Navidson begs him to stay through Exploration #4, he agrees.

Reston also sticks around. He had briefly considered taking a leave of

absence from the university but managed instead to somehow arrange for a week off, despite the fact that it is late September and the fall semester has already begun. He and Tom both live at the house, Tom in the study, [103— Neekisha Dedic’s “The Study: Tom’s Place” Diss. Boston University, 1996, examines the meaning of “study” when juxtaposed with the ritual of territory, sleep, and memory.] Reston crashing on the pull-out in the living room, while Holloway, Jed, and Wax—at least up until Exploration #4— stay at a local motel.

From all the clips leading up to Exploration #4, we can see how both

Navidson and Holloway expect to gain a great deal of fame and fortune.

Even if Holloway’s team does not reach the bottom of the staircase, both men agree their story will guarantee them national attention as well as research grants and speaking opportunities. Holloway’s company will more than likely thrive, to say nothing of the reputations of all those involved.

This kind of talk, on the day before Exploration #4 is scheduled to

start, actually manages to bring Navidson and Holloway a little closer together. There is still a good deal of unspecified tension between them but Holloway warms to discussions of success, especially to the idea of, to use Navidson’s words, “going down in history.” Perhaps Holloway imagines himself joining Navidson’s world, what he perceives as a place for the

esteemed, secure, and remembered. Nevertheless, what these short clips do not show is the paranoia growing within him. As we are well aware, future events will ultimately reveal how much Holloway feared Navidson would get rid of him and thus deprive him of the recognition he had a spent a lifetime trying to obtain, the recognition the house seemed to promise.

Of course, Karen will have nothing to do with such talk. Upon hearing

what the men are discussing, she angrily withdraws to the periphery of the house. She clearly despises anything that might suggest a longer, more protracted relationship with the oddities of their home. Daisy, on the other hand, keeps close to Navidson, picking at tiny scabs on her wrists, always sitting on her father’s shoulders or when that proves impossible on Tom’s.

Chad turns out to be the most problematic. He spends more and more time outside by himself, and that afternoon returns home from school with a bruised eye and swollen nose.

Navidson breaks off his conversation with Holloway to find out what

happened. Chad, however, refuses to speak.

[104—Which is not really a good response. And you know changing the

details or changing the subject can be just the same as refusing to speak. I guess I’ve been guilty of those two things for a long time now, especially the first one, always shifting and re-shifting details, smoothing out the edges, removing the corners, colorizing the whole thing or if need be de-colorizing, sometimes even flying in a whole chorus of cartoon characters, complete with slapstick Biff I Blam! Pow! antics,—this time leave in the blam—which may have some appeal, can’t underrate the amusement factor there, even though it’s so far from the truth it might as well be a cartoon because it certainly isn’t what happened, no Bugs Bunny there, no Thumper, no Biff I Blami Powl either, no nothing of the kind. And fuck, now I know exactly where I’m going, a place I’ve already managed to avoid twice, the first time with a fictive tooth improv, the second time with that quick dart north to Santa Cruz and the troubles of a girl I barely know, though here I am again, right at this moment too, again heading straight for it, which I suppose I could still resist. I am resisting. Maybe not. I mean I could always just stop, do something else, light up a joint, get swollen on booze. In fact doing virtually anything at all, aside from this, would keep me from relating the real story behind my broken tooth, though I don’t know if I want to, not relate that story I mean, not anymore. I actually think

it would do me some good to tell it, put it down here, at least some of it, so I can see the truth of it, see the details, revisit that taste, that time, and maybe re—evaluate or re-understand or re— I don’t know.

Besides, I can always burn it when I’m done.

After my father died I was shipped around to a number of foster homes.

I was trouble wherever I went. No one knew what to do with me.

Eventually—though it did take awhile—I ended up with Raymond and his family. He was a former marine with, as I’ve already described, a beard rougher than horse hide and hands harder than horn. He was also a total control freak. No matter the means, no matter the cost, he was going to be in control. And everyone knew if push came to shove he was as likely to die for it as he was to kill for it.

I was twelve years old.

What did I know?

I pushed.

I pushed all the time.

Then one night, late at night, much closer to dawn than dusk, while ice

still gathered outside along the window frames and tessellated walks, I woke up to find Raymond squatting on my bed, wearing his black dirt-covered boots, chewing on a big chunk of beef jerky, jabbing me in the face with his fingers, murdering all remnants of sterno or park dreams.

“Beast,” he said when he was satisfied sleep was completely dead.

“Let’s get an understanding going. You’re not really in this family but you’re living with this family, been living’n us for near a year, so what does that make you?”

I didn’t answer. The smart move. “That makes you a guest, and being a guest means you act like a guest.

Not like some kind of barnyard animal. If that doesn’t suit you, then I’ll treat you like an animal which’ll have to suit you. And what I’m saying ‘bout your behavior don’t just go for here either. It goes for that school too.

I don’t want no more problems. You clear?”

Again I didn’t say anything.

He leaned closer, forcing on me that rank smell of meat clinging to his

teeth. “If you understand that, then you and I aren’t going to cross no more.” Which was all he said, though he squatted there on my bed for a while longer.

The next day I fought in the schoolyard until my knuckles were bloody.

And then I fought the following day and the day after that. A whole week, fifteen faceless assailants racing after me right when school rang out, mostly eighth graders but a few ninth graders too, always bigger than me, telling me no seventh grade newcomer ever gets a say back, but I always said back, I bounced all of it right back, back- off whenever they gave me even the slightest bit of shit, and they finally hurt me for doing it, hurt me enough to make me give up and die, just curl up and cry, kicking the ground, my face all puffy, balls bashed and ribs battered, though something would always just pick me up from that fetal hold, maybe in the end it was all the nothing I had to hold, and it would throw me again after whoever was winning or just wanted to go next.

After the tenth fight, something really poisonous got inside me and

turned off all the pain. I didn’t even register a hit or cut anymore. I heard the blow but it never made it far enough along my nerves for me to even feel. As if all the feel-meters had blown. So I just kept hacking back, spending everything I was against what I still didn’t know.

This one kid, he must have been fourteen too, hit me twice and figured I

was down for good. I clawed up his face pretty bad then, enough for the blood to get in his eyes, and I don’t think he expected it was ever going to get to that. I mean there were rivulets on his parka and on alot of the snow and he kind of froze up, frightened I guess, I don’t know, but I apparently fractured his jaw and loosened a couple of his teeth then, split three of my knuckles too. Gloves were not an option in this kind of fighting.

Anyway, he’s the kid that got me expelled, but since the fight had taken

place after school, it took all the next day for the administrators to put the pieces together. In the meantime, I fought three more times. Right at noon recess. Friends of the ninth grader came after me. I couldn’t punch too well with my broken knuckles and they kept pushing me down and kicking me.

Some teachers finally pulled them off, but not before I got my thumb in one of the kid’s eyes. I heard he had blood in it for weeks.

When I got home Raymond was waiting for me. His wife had called

him at the site and told him what had happened. Over the last week, Raymond had seen the bruises and cuts on my hands but since the school hadn’t called and I wasn’t saying anything, he didn’t say anything either.

No one asked me what happened. Raymond just told me to get in the

truck. I asked him where we were going. Even a question from me made him mad. He yelled at his daughters to go to their room.

“I’m taking you to the hospital,” he finally whispered.

But we didn’t go directly to the hospital.

Raymond took me somewhere else first, where I lost half my tooth, and

alot more too I guess, on the outskirts, in an ice covered place, surrounded by barbed wire and willows, where monuments of rust, seldom touched, lie frozen alongside fence posts and no one ever comes near enough to hear the hawks cry.]

Holloway, for his part, does not permit these domestic tensions and

concomitant stresses to distract him from his preparations. The ever oblique Leon Robbins in attempting to adequately evaluate these efforts has gone so far as to suggest that “Operation” would in fact be a far more appropriate word than “Exploration”:

Holloway in many ways resembles a conscientious medical practitioner

in pre-op. Take for example how meticulously he reviews his team’s supplies the evening before—what I like to call—” Operation #4.” He makes sure flashlights are all securely mounted on helmets and Hi 8s properly attached to chest harnesses. He personally checks, re-checks, packs, and re-packs all the tents, sleeping bags, thermal blankets, chemical heat packs, food, water, and First-Aid kits. Most of all, he confinns that they have ample amounts of neon markers, lightsticks (12 hours), ultra high intensity lightsticks (5 minutes), spools of 4 lb testl 3,100 yard monofilament fishing line, flares, extra flash lights, including a pumper light (hand generator), extra batteries, extra parts for the radios, and one altimeter (which like the compass will fail to function). [105—Leon Robbins’ Operation #4: The Art of Internal Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996), p. 479.]

Robbins’ medical analogy may be a little misguided, but his emphasis

on Holloway’s deliberate and careful planning reminds one of the technical demands required in this journey—whether an “Operation” or “Exploration.”

After all, spending a night in an enclosed lightless place is very

uncommon, even in the world of caving. The Lechugilla Crystal Cavern in New Mexico is one exception. Typically Lech visits last twenty-four to thirty-six hours. [106—See “The Crystal Cavern” chapter in Michael Ray Taylor’s Cave Passages (New York: Scribner, 1996).] Holloway, however, expects to take at least four, possibly five nights exploring the Spiral Staircase.

Despite the detailed preparations and Holloway’s infectious

determination, everyone is still a little nervous. Five nights is a long time to remain in freezing temperatures and complete darkness. No one knows what to expect.

Though Wax puts his faith in Jed’s unerring sense of direction, Jed

admits to some pre-exploration apprehensions: “How can I know where to go when I don’t know where we are? I mean, really, where is that place in relation to here, to us, to everything? Where?”

Holloway tries to make sure everyone stays as busy as bees, and in an

effort to keep them focused, creates a simple set of priorities: “We’re taking pictures. We’re collecting samples. We’re trying to reach the bottom of the stairs. Who knows, if we do that then maybe we’ll even discover something before Navidson starts all the hoopla involved with raising money and organizing large scale explorations.” Jed and Wax both nod, unaware of the darker implications inherent in what Holloway has just uttered.

As Gavin Young later writes: “Who could have predicted that those two

words ‘discover something’ would prove the seeds to such unfortunate destruction? The problem, of course, was that the certain ‘something’ Holloway so adamantly sought to locate never existed per se in that place to begin with. [107—Gavin Young, Shots In The Dark (Stanford: University of California Press, 1995), p. 151.]

Unlike Explorations #1 thru #3, for Exploration #4 Holloway decides

to take along his rifle. When Navidson asks him “what the hell” he plans to shoot, Holloway replies: “Just in case.”

By this point, Navidson has settled on the belief that the persistent

growl is probably just a sound generated when the house alters its internal layout. Holloway, however, is not at all in accordance with this assessment.

Furthermore, as he pointedly reminds Navidson, he is the team captain and the one responsible for everyone’s safety: “With all due respect, since I’m also the one actually going in there, your notions don’t really hold much water with me.” Wax and Jed do not object. They are accustomed to Holloway carrying some sort of firearm. The inclusion of the Weatherby hardly causes them any concern.

Jed just shrugs.

Wax though proves a little more fractious. “I mean what if you’re wrong?” he asks Navidson. “What if that

sound’s not from the wall’s shifting but coming from something else, some kind of thing? You wanna leave us defenseless?”

Navidson drops the subject.

The question of weapons aside, another big point of concern that comes

up is communication. During Exploration #3 the team discovered just how quickly all their transmissions deteriorated. Without a cost effective way of rectifying the problem—obviously buying thousands of feet of audio cable would be impossible—Holloway settled the issue by simply announcing that they should just plan on losing radio contact by the first night. “After that, it’ll be four to five days on our own. Not ideal but we’ll manage.”

That evening, Holloway, Jed, and Wax move from their motel and camp

out in the living room with Reston. Navidson briefs Holloway for the last time on the most efficacious way to handle the cameras. Jed makes a brief call to his fiancée in Seattle and then helps Reston organize the sample jars.

Tom in an effort to cheer up a bruised and unnaturally quiet Chad winds up reading both him and Daisy a long bedtime story.

Somehow Wax ends up alone with Karen. [108—Again Florencia

Caizatti’s The Fraying of the American Family proves full of valuable insight. In particular see “Chapter Seven: The Last Straw” where she decries the absolute absurdity of end-series items: “There is no such thing as the last straw. There is only hay.”]

If Holloway’s hand on Karen had upset Navidson, it is hard to imagine

what his reaction would have been had he walked in on this particular moment. However when he finally did see the tape so much had happened, Navidson, by his own admission, felt nothing. “I’m surprised, I guess” he says in The Last Interview. “But there’s no rage. Just regret. I actually laughed a little. I’d been watching Holloway all the time, feeling insecure by this guy’s strength and courage and all that, and I never even thought about the kid. (He shakes his head.) Anyway, I betrayed her when I went in there the first time and so she betrayed me. People always say how two people were meant for each other. Well we weren’t but somehow we ended up together anyway and had two incredible children. It’s too bad. I love her.

I wish it didn’t have to turn out like this.” [109—See Exhibit Four for the complete transcript of The Last Interview.]

The clip of Karen and Wax did not appear in the first release print of

The Navidson Record but apparently was edited in a few months later.

Miramax never commented on the inclusion nor did anyone else. It is a little strange Karen did not erase the tape in the wall mounted camcorder.

Perhaps she forgot it was there or planned to destroy it later. Then again perhaps she wanted Navidson to see it.

Regardless of her intentions, the shot catches Karen and Wax alone in

the kitchen. She picks at a bowl of popcorn, he helps himself to another beer. Their conversation circles tediously around Wax’s girlfriends, intermittently returning to his desire to get married someday. Karen keeps telling him that he is young, he should have fun, keep living, stop worrying about settling down. For some reason both of them speak very softly.

On the counter, someone has left a copy of the map Navidson drew

following Exploration A. Karen occasionally glances over at it.

“Did you do that?” she finally asks. “Nah, I can’t draw.” “Oh,” she says, letting the syllable hang in the air like a question.

Wax shrugs. “I actually don’t know who made it. I thought your old Navy man did.” Based on the film, it is impossible for us to tell if Holloway, Jed, or Wax

were ever explicitly told not to mention to Karen Navidson’s illegal excursion. Wax, however, does not seem to recognize any trespass in his admission.

Karen does not look at the map again. She just smiles and takes a sip of

Wax’s beer. They continue talking, more about Wax’s girl troubles, another round of “don’t worry, keep living, you’re young” and then out of nowhere Wax leans over and kisses Karen on the lips. It lasts less than a second and clearly shocks her, but when he leans over and kisses her again she does not resist. In fact the kiss turns into something more than a kiss, Karen’s hunger almost exceeding Wax’s. But when he knocks over his beer in an effort to get still closer, Karen pulls away, glances once at the liquid spilling onto the floor and quickly walks out of the room. Wax starts to follow her but realizes before he takes a second step that the game is already over. He cleans up the mess instead.

A few months later Navidson saw the kiss.

By that time Karen was gone along with everyone else.

Nothing mattered.

VIII

SOS. . . A wireless code-signal summoning assistance in extreme

distress, used esp. by ships at sea. The letters are arbitrarily chosen as being easy to transmit and distinguish. The signal was recommended at the Radio Telegraph Conference in 1906 and officially adopted at the Radio Telegraph Convention in 1908 (See G. G. Blake Hist. Radio Telegr., 1926,

111-12).

— The Oxford English Dictionary

… _ _ _ …

Billy Reston glides into frame, paying no attention to the equipment

which Navidson over the last few weeks has been setting up in the living room, including though not limited to, three monitors, two 3/4” decks, a VHS machine, a Quadra Mae, two Zip drives, an Epson colour printer, an old PC, at least six radio transmitters and receivers, heavy spools of electrical cord, video cable, one 16mm Arriflex, one 16mm Bolex, a Minolta Super 8, as well as additional flashlights, flares, rope, fishing line (anything from braided Dacron to 40 lb multi-strand steel), boxes of extra batteries, assorted tools, compasses twitching to the odd polarities in the house, and a broken megaphone, not to mention surrounding shelves

.

already loaded with sample jars, graphs, books, and even an old

microscope.

Instead Reston concentrates all his energies on the radios, monitoring

Holloway as he makes his way through the Great Hall. Exploration #4 is underway and will mark the team’s second attempt to reach the bottom of the staircase.

“We hear you fme, Billy” Holloway replies in a wash of white noise.

Reston tries to improve the signal. This time Holloway’s voice comes in

a little clearer.

.

“We’re continuing down. Will try you again in fifteen minutes. Over

and out.”

The obvious choice would have been to structure the segment around

Holloway’s journey but clearly nothing about Navidson is obvious. He keeps his camera trained on Billy who serves now as the expedition’s base commander. In grainy 7298 (probably pushed one T-stop), Navidson captures this crippled man expertly maneuvering his wheelchair from radio to tape recorder to computer, his attention never wavering from the team’s progress.

[checkmark]

… _ _ _ …

By concentrating on Reston at the beginning of Exploration #4,

Navidson provides a perfect counterpoint to the murky world Holloway navigates. Confining us to the comforts of a well-lit home gives our varied imaginations a chance to fill the adjacent darkness with questions and demons. It also further increases our identification with Navidson., who like us, wants nothing more than to penetrate firsthand the mystery of that place.

Other directors might have intercut shots of the ‘Base Camp’ or ‘Command Post’ [110—There’s something weird going on here, as if Zampanô can’t quite make up his mind whether this is all an exploration (i.e. ‘Base Camp’) or a war (i.e. ‘Command Post’)?] with Holloway’s tapes but Navidson refuses to view Exploration #4 in any other way except from Reston’s vantage point. As Frizell Clary writes, “Before personally permitting us the sight of such species of Cimmerian dark, Navidson wants us to experience, like he already has, a sequence dedicated solely to the much more revealing details of waiting.” [111—Frizell Clary’s Tick-Tock-Fade: The Representation of Time in Film Narrative (Delaware: Tame An Essay Publications, 1996), P. 64.]

Naguib Paredes, however, goes one step further than Clary, passing over

questions concerning the structure of anticipation in favor of a slightly different, but perhaps more acute analysis of Navidson’s strategy: “First and foremost, this restricted perspective subtly and somewhat cunningly allows Navidson to materialize his own feelings in Reston, a man with fearsome intelligence and energy but who is nonetheless—and tragically I might add —physically handicapped. Not by chance does Navidson shoot Reston’s wheelchair in the photographic idiom of a prison: spokes for bars, seat like a cell, glimmering brake resembling some kind of lock. Thus in the manner of such images, Navidson can represent for us his own increasing frustration. [112—Naguib Paredes’ Cinematic Projections (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 84.]

As predicted, by the first night Holloway and the team start to lose radio

contact. Navidson reacts by focusing on a family of copper-verdigris coffee cups taking up residence on the floor like settlers on the range while nearby a pile of sunflower seed shells rises out of a bowl like a volcano born on some unseen plate in the Pacific. In the background, the ever-present hiss of the radios continues to fill the room like some high untouch

.

able wind. Considering the grand way these moments are photographed,

it almost appears as if Navidson is trying through even the most quotidian objects and events to evoke for us some sense of Holloway’s epic progress.

That or participate in it. Perhaps even challenge it. [113—Navidson’s camera work is an infinitely complex topic. Edwin Minamide in Objects of a Thousand Facets (Bismark, North Dakota: Shive Stuart Press, 1994), p. 421, asserts that such “resonant images,” especially those in this instance, conjure up what Holloway could never have achieved: “The fact that Navidson can photograph even the dirtiest blue mugs in a way that reminds us of pilgrims on a quest proves he is the necessary narrator without whom there would be no film; no understanding of the house.” Yuriy Pleak in Semiotic Rivalry (Casper, Wyoming: Hazani United, 1995), P. 105, disagrees, claiming Navidson’s lush colors and steady pans only reveal his competitiveness and bitterness toward Holloway: “He seeks to eclipse the

team’s historical descent with his own limited art.” Mace Roger-Court, however, finds In These Things I Find, Series #18 (Great Falls, Montana: Ash Otter Range Press, 1995) that Navidson’s posture is highly instructive and even enlightening: “His lonely coffee cups, his volcanic bowl of shells, the maze like way equipment and furniture are arranged, all reveal how the everyday can contain objects emblematic of what’s lyrical and what’s epic in our lives. Navidson shows us how a sudden sense of the world, of who or where we are or even what we do not have can be found in even the most ordinary things.”]

Time passes. There are long conversations, there are long silences.

Sometimes Navidson and Tom play Go. Sometimes one reads aloud to Daisy [114—Ascher Blootz in her pithy piece “Bedtime Stories” (Seattle Weekly, October 13, 1994, p. 37) claims the book Tom reads to Daisy is Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are. Gene D. Hart in his letter entitled “A Blootz Bedtime Story” (Seattle Weekly, October 20, 1994, p. 7) disagrees: “After repeatedly viewing this sequence, frame by frame, I am still unable to determine whether or not she’s right. The cover is constantly blocked by Tom’s arm and his whisper consistently evades the range of the microphone. That said I’m quite fond of Blootz’s claim, for whether she’s right or wrong, she is certainly appropriate.”] while the other assists Chad with some role-playing game on the family computer.” [115—See Corning Qureshy’s essay “D & D, Myst, and Other Future Paths” in MIND GAMES ed. Mario Aceytuno (Rapid City, South Dakota: Fortson Press, 1996); M.

Slade’s “Pawns, Bishops & Castles” http://cdip.ucsd.edu/; as well as Lucy T. Wickramasinghe’s “Apple of Knowledge vs. Windows of Light: The Macintosh-Microsoft Debate” in Gestures, v.2, November 1996, p. 164-

171.] Periodically Tom goes outside to smoke a joint of marijuana while his brother jots down notes in some now lost journal. Karen keeps clear of the living room, entering only once to retrieve the coffee cups and empty the bowl of sunflower seed shells. When Navidson’s camera finds her, she is usually on the phone in the kitchen, the TV volume on high, whispering to her mother, closing the door.

But even as the days lose themselves in night and find themselves again

come dawn only to drag on to yet more hours of lightless passage, Billy Reston remains vigilant. As Navidson shows us, he never loses focus, rarely

leaves his post, and constantly monitors the radios, never forgetting the peril Holloway and the team are in.

Janice Whitman was right when she noted another extraordinary

quality: “Aside from the natural force of his character, his exemplary intellect, and the constant show of concern for those participating in Exploration #4, what I’m still most struck by is [Reston’s] matter of fact treatment of this twisting labyrinth extending into nowhere. He does not seem confounded by its impossibility or at all paralyzed by doubt.” [116— Janice Whitman’s Red Cross Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 235.] Belief is one of Reston’s greatest strengths. He has an almost animal like ability to accept the world as it comes to him. Perhaps one overcast morning in Hyderabad, India he had stood rooted to the ground for one second too long because he did not really believe an electrical pole had fallen and an ugly lash of death was now whipping toward him. Reston had paid a high price for that disbelief: he would never walk up stairs again and he would never fuck. At least he would also never doubt again.

[117—Though this chapter was originally typed, there were also a

number of handwritten corrections. “make love” wasn’t crossed out but

.

“FUCK” was still scratched in above it. As I’ve been doing my best to

incorporate most of these amendments, I didn’t think it fair to

.

suddenly exclude this one even if it did mean a pretty radical shift in

tone.

By now you’ve probably noticed that except when safely contained by

quotes, Zampanô always steers clear of such questionable four-letter

language. This instance in particular proves that beneath all that cool

pseudo-academic hogwash lurked a very passionate man who knew how

important it was to say “fuck” now and then, and say it loud too, relish

.

its syllabic sweetness, its immigrant pride, a great American epic word

really, starting at the lower lip, often the very front of the lower

.

lip, before racing all the way to the back of the throat, where it finishes

with a great blast, the concussive force of the K catching up

.

then with the hush of the F already on its way, thus loading it with

plenty of offense and edge and certainly ambiguity. FUCK. A great by-

.

the-bootstrap prayer or curse if you prefer, depending on how you look

at it, or use it, suited perfectly for hurling at the skies or at the world, or sometimes, if said just right, for uttering with enough love and fire, the woman beside you melts inside herself, immersed in all that word-heat.

Holy fuck, what was that all about? “Love and fire”? “word-heat”?

Who the hell is thinking up this shit?

.

Maybe Zampanô just wrote “fuck” because he wasn’t saying fuck

before when he could fuck and now as he waited in that hole on Whitley he wished he would of lived a little differently. Or then again maybe he just needed a word strong enough to push back his doubts, a word

.

strong enough to obliterate, at least temporarily, the certain vision of his

own death, definitely necessary for those times when he was working

.

his way around the courtyard, trying to stretch his limbs, keep his heart

pumping, a few remaining cats still rubbing up against his withered legs, reminding him of the years he missed, the old color, the old light. The perfect occasion, if you ask me, to say “fuck.” Though if he did say it no one there ever heard him.

.

Of course, fuck you, you may have a better idea. I went ahead and

paged Thumper again. Again she didn’t call me back. Then this morning,

.

I discovered a message on my machine. It startled me. I couldn’t

remember hearing the phone ring. Turned out some girl named Ashley wanted to see me, but I had no idea who she was. When I finally rolled into the Shop, I was a good three hours late. My boss flew Offthe handle. Put me on probation. Said I was an ass hair away from getting

.

fired, and no he didn’t care anymore how well I made needles.

Unfortunately, I’m not too hopeful about improving my punctuality.

.

You wouldn’t believe how much harder it’s getting for me to just leave

my studio. It’s really sad. In fact these days the only thing that gets me outside is when I say: Fuck. Puck. Puck. Puck you. Fuck me. Fuck this.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. —

.

All the images Navidson finds during this period are beautifully

concise. Every angle he chooses describes the agony of the wait, whether a shot of Tom sleeping on the couch, Reston listening more and more intently to the nonsense coming over the radio, or Karen watching them from the foyer, for the first time smoking a cigarette inside the house. Even the occasional shot of Navidson himself, pacing around the living room, communicates the impatience he feels over being denied this extraordinary opportunity. He has done his best to keep from resenting Karen, but clearly feels it just the same. Not once are they shown talking together. For that matter not once are they shown in the same frame together.

Eventually the entire segment becomes a composition of strain. Jump

cuts increase. People stop speaking to each another. A single shot never includes more than one person. Everything seems to be on the verge of breaking apart, whether between Navidson and Karen, the family as a whole, or even the expedition itself. On the seventh day there is still no sign of the team. By the seventh night, Reston begins to fear the worst, and then in the early A.M. hours of the eighth day everyone hears the worst. The radio remains an incomprehensible buzz of static, but from somewhere in the house, rising up like some strange black oil, there comes a faint knocking. Chad and Daisy actually detect it first, but by the time they reach their parent’s bedroom, Karen is already up with the light on, listening intently to this new disturbance.

It sounds exactly like someone rapping his knuckles against the wall:

three quick knocks followed by three slow knocks, followed by three more quick knocks. Over and over again.

Despite a rapid search of the upstairs and downstairs, no one can locate

the source, even though every room resonates with the distress signal. Then Tom presses his ear against the living room wall.

“Bro’, don’t ask me how, but it’s coming from in there. In fact, for a

second it sounded like it was right on the other side.”

… _ _ _ …

Ironically enough, it is the call for assistance that eliminates the jump

cuts and reintegrates everyone again into a single frame. Navidson has finally been granted the opportunity he has been waiting for all along.

Consequently, with Navidson suddenly in charge now, declaring his intent to lead a rescue attempt, the sequence immediately starts to resolve with the elimination of visual tensions. Karen, however, is furious. “Why don’t we just call the police?” she demands. “Why does it have to be the great Will Navidson who goes to the rescue?” Her question is a good one, but unfortunately it only has one answer: because he is the great Will Navidson.

Considering the circumstances, it does seem a little ludicrous for Karen

to expect a man who has thrived his whole life under shell fire and

.

napalm to turn his back on Holloway and go drink lemonade on the

porch. Furthermore, as Navidson points out, “They’ve been in there almost eight days with water for six. It’s three in the morning. We don’t have time to get officials involved or a search party organized. We have to go now.” Then adding in a half-mumble:” I waited too long with Delia!. I’m not going to do it again.”

The name “Delial” and its adamantine mystery stops Karen cold.

Without saying another word, she sits down on the couch and waits for Navidson to finish organizing all the equipment they will need.

It takes only thirty minutes to assemble the necessary supplies. The

hope is that they will locate Holloway’s team nearby. If not, the plan is for Reston to go as far as the stairway where he will establish a camp and

handle the radios, serving as a relay between the living room command

post and Navidson and Tom who will continue on down the stairs. As far as photographic equipment is concerned, everyone wears a Hi 8 in a chest harness. (Short two cameras, Navidson has to take down one of the wall mounted Hi 8s from his study and another one from the upstairs hail.) He also brings his 35mm Nikon equipped with a powerful Metz strobe, as well as the 16mm Arriflex, which Reston volunteers to carry in his lap. Karen unhappily takes over the task of manning the radios. A Hi 8 captures her sitting in the living room, watching the men fade into the darkness of the hallway. There are in fact three quick shots of her, the last two as she calls

her mother to report Navidson’s departure as well as his mention of Delial.

At first the phone is busy, then it rings.

_ _ …

Navidson names this sequence SOS which aside from referring to the

distress signal sent by Holloway’s team also informs another aspect of the work. At the same time he was mapping out the personal and domestic tensions escalating in the house, Navidson was also editing the footage in accordance to a very specific cadence. Tasha K. Wheelston was the first to discover this carefully created structure:

At first I thought I was seeing things

but after I watched SOS more carefully

I realized it was true: Navidson

had not just filmed the distress call,

he had literally incorporated it into the

sequence. Observe how Navidson alternates between three shots with short durations and three shots with

longer durations. He begins with

three quick angles of Reston, followed

by three long shots of the

living room (and these are in fact just

that — long shots taken from the

.

foyer), followed again by three short

shots and so on. Content has on a few occasions interfered with the

rhythm but the pattern of three-short

three-long three-short is unmistakable.”

[118—Tasha K. Wheelston’s “M.O.S.: Literal Distress,” Film Quarterly,

v. 48, fall 1994, p. 2-11.]

Thus while representing the emergency signal sent by Holloway’s team,

Navidson also uses the dissonance implicit in his home-bound wait—the

impatience, frustration, and increasing familial alienation—to figuratively and now literally send out his own cry for help.

The irony comes when we realize that Navidson fashioned this piece

long after the Holloway disaster occurred but before he made his last plunge into that place. In other words his SOS is entirely without hope. It either comes too late or too early. Navidson, however, knew what he was doing. It is not by accident that the last two short shots of SOS show Karen on the phone, thus providing an acoustic message hidden within the already established visual one: three busy signals, three rings.

In other words:

.

… _ _ _

.

(or)

.

SO?

[119—Pretty bitter but I’ve said the same thing myself more than a few

times. In fact that word helped me make it through those months in Alaska.

Maybe even got me there to begin with. The woman at the agency had to have known I wasn’t close to sixteen, more like thirteen going on thirty-three, but she approved my application anyway. I like to imagine she was thinking to herself “Boy does this kid look young” and then because she was tired or really didn’t care or because my tooth was split and I looked mean, she answered herself with “So?” and went ahead and secured my place at the canning factory.

Those were the days, let me tell you. Obscene twelve hour days cradled

in the arms of stupefying beauty. Tents on the beach, out there on the Homer Spit, making me, not to mention the rest of us honorary

spit rats.

Nothing to ever compare it to again either. An awful juxtaposition of fish bones & can-grime and the stench of too many

aching lives & ragged fingers set against an unreachable and ever present beyond, a life-taking wind, more pure than even glacier water. And just as some water is too cold to drink, that air was almost too

.

bright to breathe, raking in over ten thousand teeth of range pine, while

bald eagles soared the days away like gods, even if they scavenged the mornings like rats, hopping around on gut-wet docks with the sea at their backs always calling out like a blue-black taste of something more.

Nothing about the job itself could have kept you there, hour upon hour

upon even more hours, bent to the bench, steaming over the dead,

.

gouging for halibut cheeks, slabs of salmon, enduring countless

mosquito bites, even bee stings—my strange fortune—and always in the ruin of so many curses from the Filipinos, the White Trash, the Blacks, the Haitians, a low grade-grumbling which is the business of canning. The wage was good but it sure as hell wasn’t enough to lock you down. Not after one week, let alone two weeks, let alone three months of the same

.

mind-numbing gut-heaving shit.

You had to find something else.

For me it was the word “So?” And I learned it the hard way, in fact right

at the very start of that summer.

I’d been invited out on a fishing boat, a real wreck of a thing but

supposedly as seaworthy as they get. Well, we hadn’t been gone for

.

more than a few hours when a storm suddenly came up, split the seams

and filled the hull with water. The pumps worked fine but only for about ten minutes. Tops. The coast guard came to the rescue but they took an hour to reach us. At the very least. By then the boat had already sunk. Fortunately we had a life raft to cower in and almost everyone survived. Almost. One guy didn’t. An old Haitian. At least sixteen

.

years old. He was a friend too or at least on his way to becoming a

friend. Some line had gotten tangled around his ankle and he was dragged down with the wreck. Even when his head went under, we could all hear him scream. Even though I know we couldn’t.

Back on shore everyone was pretty messed up, but the owner/captain

was by far the worst off. He ended up drunk for a week, though the only thing he ever said was “So?”

The boat’s gone. “So?” Your mate’s dead. “So?” Hey at least you’re alive. “So?” An awful word but it does harden you.

It hardened me.

.

Somehow—though I don’t remember exactly how—I ended up telling

my boss a little about that summer. Even Thumper tuned in. This was the first time she’d paid any real attention to me and it felt great. In fact by the time I finished, since the day was almost over anyway and we were locking up, she let me walk her out.

“You’re alright Johnny,” she said in a way that actually made me feel

alright. At least for a little while

We kept talking and walked a little longer and then on a whim decided

to get some Thai food at a small place on the north side of Sunset. She saying “Are you hungry?” Me using the word “starving.” Her insisting we get a quick bite.

Even if I hadn’t been starving, I would of eaten the world just to

.

be with her. Everything about her shimmered. Just watching her drink a

glass of water, the way she’d crush an ice cube between her teeth, made me go a little crazy. Even the way her hands held the glass, and she has beautiful hands, launched me into all kinds of imaginings, which I really didn’t have time for because the moment we sat down, she started telling me about some new guy she was seeing, a trainer or something for a cadre of wanna—be never—be boxers. Apparently, he could make her come harder than she had in years.

I suppose that might of made me feel bad but it didn’t. One of the

reasons I like Thumper is because she’s so open and uninhabited, I mean uninhibited, about everything. Maybe I’ve said that already. Doesn’t matter.

Where she’s concerned I’m happy to repeat myself.

.

“It takes more than just being good,” she told me. “Don’t get me wrong:

I love oral sex, especially if the guy knows what he’s doing. Though if you treat my cut like a doorbell, the door’s not going to open.” She crushed another cube of ice. “Recently though, it’s like I need to be thinking something really different and out there to get me crazy. For a while, money made my wet. I’m older now. Anyway this guy said he was going to slap my ass and I said sure. For whatever reason I hadn’t done that before. You done it?” She didn’t wait for my answer.

“So he got behind me, and he’s got a nice cock, and I love the sound his

thighs make when they snap up against my ass, but it wasn’t going to make me come, even with me touching myself. That’s when he smacked me. I could hardly feel it the first time. He was being kind of timid. So

.

I told him to do it harder. Maybe I’m nuts, I don’t know, but he whacked

me hard the next time and I just started to go off. Told him to do it again and each time I got worked. Finally when I did come, I came really—” and she held out the “reeeal”—”hard. Saw in the mirror later I had a handprint right on my ass cheek. I guess you could say these days I like handprints.

He said his palm stung.” She laughed over that one.

When our food arrived, I began telling her about Clara English, another

story altogether, Christina & Amber, Kyrie, Lucy and even the Ashley I have no clue about, which also made her laugh. That’s when I decided not to bring up my unreturned pages. I didn’t want to get all petty with her, even though secretly I did want to know why she never called me back.

Instead I made a plan to stick exclusively to the

.

subject of sex, flirt with her that way, make up some insane stories,

maybe even elaborate on the Alaska thing, make her laugh some more, all of which was fine and good until for some reason, out of the blue, I changed the plan and started to tell her about Zampanô and the trunk and

my crazy attacks. She stopped laughing. She even stopped crushing ice.

She just listened to me for a half hour, an hour, I don’t know how long,

a long time. And you know the more I talked the more I felt some of the pain and panic inside me ease up a notch.

In retrospect it was pretty weird. I mean there I was wandering into all

this personal stuff. I wasn’t even sharing most of it with her either. I mean not as much as I’ve been putting down here, that’s for

.

sure. There’s just too much of it anyway, always running parallel, is that

the right word?, to the old man and his book, briefly appearing, maybe even intruding, then disappearing again; sometimes pale, sometimes bleeding, sometimes rough, sometimes textureless; frequently angry, frightened, sorry, fragile or desperate, communicated in moments of motion, smell and

sound, more often than not in skewed grnnnr, a mad rush broken up by eidetic recollections, another type of signal I suppose, once stitched into the simplest cries for help flung high above the rust and circling kites or radioed when the Gulf waters of Alaska finally swept over and buried the deck for good—Here Come Dots . . .—or even carried to a stranger place where letters let alone visits never register, swallowed whole and echoless, in a German homonym for the

.

whispered Word, taken, lost, gone, until there’s nothing left to examine

there either, let alone explore, all of which fractured in my head, even if it was hardly present in the words I spoke, though at the very least these painful remnants were made more bearable in the presence of Thumper.

At one point I managed to get past all those private images and

.

just glance at her eyes. She wasn’t looking around at people or fixing on

silverware or tracking some wandering noodle dangling off her plate. She was just looking straight at me, and without any malice either. She was wide open, taking in everything I told her without judgment, just listening, listening to the way I phrased it all, listening to how I felt. That’s when something really painful tore through me, like some old, powerful root, the kind you see in mountains sometimes splitting

.

apart chunks of granite as big as small homes, only instead of granite

this thing was splitting me apart. My chest hurt and I felt funny all over, having no idea what it was, this root or the feeling, until I suddenly realized I was going to start sobbing. Now I haven’t cried since I was twelve, so I had no intention of starting at twenty-five, especially in some fucking Thai restaurant.

So I swallowed up.

I killed it.

I changed the subject.

.

A little while later, when we said goodnight, Thumper gave me a big,

sweet hug. Almost as if to say she knew where I’d just been.

“You’re alright Johnny,” she said for the second time that night. “Don’t

worry so much. You’re still young. You’ll be fine.”

And then as she put her jeep into gear, she smiled: “Come down and see

me at work some time. If you want my opinion, you just need to get out of the house.”]

IX

Hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error — Virgil

laboriosus exitus donius — Ascensius

laboriosa ad entrandum — Nicholas Trevet X [X —“Here is the toil of

that house, and the inextricable wandering” Aeneid 6. 27. “The house difficult of exit” (Ascensius (Paris 1501)); “difficult to enter” (Trevet (Basel l490)).135 See H. J. Thomson’s “Fragments of Ancient Scholia on Virgil Preserved in Latin Glossaries” in W. M. Lindsay and H. J. Thomson’s Ancient Lore in Medieval Latin Glossaries (London: St. Andrews University Publications, 1921). [120—In fact all of this was quoted directly from Penelope Reed Doob’s The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiauitv throuah the Middle Aaes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) p. 21, 97, 145 and 227. A perfect example of how Zampanô likes to obscure the secondary sources he’s using in order to appear more versed in primary documents. Actually a woman by the name of Tatiana turned me onto that bit of info. She’d been one of Zampanô’s scribes and—’luclcy for me’ she told me over the phone— still had, among other things, some of the old book lists he’d requested from the library.

I do have to say though getting over to her place was no easy

accomplishment. I had trouble just walking out my door. Things are definitely deteriorating. Even reaching for the latch made me feel sick to my stomach. I also experienced this awful tightening across my chest, my temples instantly registering a rise in pulse rate. And that’s not the half of it.

Unfortunately I don’t think I can do justice to how truly strange this all is, a paradox of sorts, since on one hand I’m laughing at myself, mocking the irrational nature of my anxiety, what I continue in fact to perceive as a complete absurdity—’! mean Johnny what do you really have to be afraid

of?’— while on the other hand, and at the same time mind you, finding myself absolutely terrified, if not of something in particular—there were no particulars as far as I could see—then of the reaction itself, as undeniable & unimpeachable as Zampanô’s black trunk.

I know it makes no sense but there you have it: what should have

negated the other only seemed to amplify it instead.

Fortunately, or not fortunate at all, Thumper’s advice continued to echo

in my head. I accepted the risk of cardiac arrest, muttered a flurry of fucks and charged out into the day, determined to meet Tatiana and retrieve the material.

Of course I was fine.

Except as I started walking down the sidewalk, I watched a truck veer

from its lane, flatten a stop sign, desperately try to slow, momentarily redirect itself, and then in spite of all the brakes on that monster, all the accompanying smoke and ear puncturing shrieks, it still barreled straight into me. Suddenly I understood what it meant to be weightless, flying through the air, no longer ruled by that happy dyad of gravity & mass until I was, landing on the roof of a parked car, which turned out to be my car, a good fifteen feet away, hearing the thud but not actually feeling it. I even momentarily blacked out, but came to just in time to watch the truck, still hurtling towards me until it was actually slamming into me, causing me to think, and you’re not going to believe this—’I can’t believe this aeshole just totaled my fucking carl Of all the cars on this street and he had to fucking trash mine!’ even as all that steel was grinding into me, instantly pulverizing my legs, my pelvis, the metal from the grill wedging forward like kitchen knives, severing me from the waist down.

People started screaming.

Though not about me.

Something to do with the truck.

It was leaking all over the place.

Gas.

It had caught fire. I was going to burn.

Except it wasn’t gas.

It was milk.

Only there was no milk. There was no gas. No leak either. There

weren’t even any people. Certainly none who were screaming. And there

sure as hell wasn’t any truck. I was alone. My street was euipty. A tree fell on me. So heavy, it took a crane to lift it. Not even a crane could lift it.

There are no trees on my block.

This has got to stop.

I have to go.

I did go.

When I reached Tatiana’s place, she’d just gotten back from the gym

and her brown legs glistened with sweat. She wore black Spandex shorts and a pink athletic halter top which was very tight but still could not conceal the ample size of her breasts. I said ‘hello’ and then explained again how I had come into possession of the old man’s papers and why in my effort to straighten them all out I needed to trace some of his references.

She happily handed over the reading lists she’d compiled on his behalf and even dug up a few notes she’d made relating to the etymology of ‘lr

When she offered me a drink, I jokingly suggested a Jack and Coke. I

guess she didn’t understand my sense of humor or understood it perfectly.

She appeared with the drink and poured herself one as well. We spoke for another hour, ended up finishing all the Jack, and then right out of the blue she said, ‘I won’t let you fuck me.’ Time to get going, I thought, and began to stand up. Not that I’d expected anything mind you. 1But if you want, you can come on me,’ she added. I sat back down and before I could think of something to say, she had tugged off her top and stretched herself out in the middle of the floor. Her tits were round, hard and perfectly fake. As I straddled her, she unbuttoned my pants. Then she reached for some extremely aromatic oil sitting on her coffee table. She squeezed hard enough to release a thin stream. It dripped off of me, a warm rain spilling down over her toned belly and large brown nipples. Pleased with what she’d done, she settled back to watch me stroke & grind myself into my own hands.

At one point she bit down on her lower lip and it amped me up even

more. When she started to caress her own breasts, small groans of pleasure rising up from her throat, I felt the come in my balls begin to boil. However only when I got ready to climax did I lose sight of her, my eyes slamming

shut, something I believe now she’d been waiting for, a temporary instant of darkness, where vulnerable and blind to everything but my own pleasure, she could reach up beneath me and press the tip of an oil soaked finger against my asshole, circling, rubbing, until finally she pushed hard enough to exceed the threshold of resistance, slipping inside me and knowing exactly where to go too, heading straight for the prostate, the P spot, the LOUD button on this pumping stereophonic fuck system I never knew I had, initiating an almost unbearable scream for (and of) pleasure, endorphins spitting through my brain at an unheard of rate, as muscles in my groin (almost) painfully contracted in a handful of heart stomping spasms—not something I could say I was exactly prepared for. I exploded.

A stream of white flying across her tits, strings of the stuff dripping off her nipples, collecting in pools around her neck, some of it leading as far as her face, one gob of it on her chin, another on her lower lip. She smiled, started to gently rub my semen into her black skin and then opened her mouth as if to sigh, only she didn’t sigh, no sound, not even a breath, lust her moon bright teeth, and finally her tongue licking first her upper lip before turning to her lower lip, where, smiling, her eyes focused on mine, watching me watching her, she licked up and finally swallowed my come.]

Having already discussed in Chapter V how echoes serve as an effective

means to evaluate physical, emotional, and thematic distances present in The Navidson Record, it is now necessary to remark upon their descriptive limitations. In essence echoes are confined to large spaces. However, in order to consider how distances within the Navidson house are radically distorted, we must address the more complex ideation of convolution, interference, confusion, and even decentric ideas of design and construction. In other words the concept of a labyrinth.

It would be fantastic if based on footage from The Navidson Record

someone were able to reconstruct a bauplan [So sorry.] [121—German for “building plan.” — Ed.] for the house. Of course this is an impossibility, not only due to the wall-shifts but also the film’s constant destruction of continuity, frequent jump cuts prohibiting any sort of accurate mapmaking.

Consequently, in lieu of a schematic, the film offers instead a schismatic rendering of empty rooms, long hallways, and dead ends, perpetually promising but forever eluding the finality of an immutable layout.

Curiously enough, if we can look to history to provide us with some

context, the reasons for building labyrinths have varied substantially over the ages. [122—For further insight into mazes, consider Paolo Santarcangeli’s Livre des labyrinthes; Russ Craim’s “The Surviving Web” in Daedalus, summer 1995; Hermann Kern’s Labirinti; W H. Matthews’ Mazes and Labyrinths; Stella Pin icker’s Double-Axe; Rodney Castleden’s The Knossos Labyrinth; Harold Sieber’s Inadequate Thread; W. W. R.

Ball’s “Mathematical Recreations and Essays”; Robinson Ferrel Smith’s Complex Knots—No Simple Solutions; 0. B. Hardison Jr.’s Entering The Maze; and Patricia Flynn’s Jejunum and Ileum.]For example, the English hedgerow maze at Longleat was designed to amuse garden party attendants, while Amenemhet III of the XII dynasty in Egypt built for his mortuary temple a labyrinth near lake Moeris to protect his soul. Most famous of all, however, was the labyrinth Daedalus constructed for—King Minos. It served as a prison. Purportedly located on the island of Crete in the city of Knossos,-the maze was built to incarcerate the Minotaur, a creature born from an illicit encounter between the queen and a bull. As most school children learn, this monster devoured more than a dozen Athenian youths every few years before Theseus eventually slew it.

[123—At the risk of stating the obvious no woman can mate with a bull

and produce a child. Recognizing this simple scientific fact, I am led to a somewhat interesting suspicion: King Minos did not build the labyrinth to imprison a monster but to conceal a deformed child— his child.

While the Minotaur has often been depicted as a creature with the body

of a bull but the torso of a man—centaur like—the myth describes the Minotaur as simply having the head of a bull and the body of a man, [127— W. H. Matthews writes similar small labyrinth, with a central Theseus Minotaur design, is to be found on the wall of the church of an Michele Maggio at Pavia. It is thought to be of tenth century construction. This is one of the few eases where the Minotaur is represented with a human head and a beast’s body as a sort of Centaur, in fact.” See his book Mazes & Labyrinths: Their History & Development (New York: Dover Publications.

Inc., 1970), p. 56. Also see Fig. 40 on p. 53.] or in other word a man with a deformed face. I believe pride would not allow Minos to accept that the heir to the throne had a horrendous appearance. Consequently he dissolved the

right of ascension by publicly accusing his wife Pasiphae of fornicating with a male bovine.

Having enough conscience to keep from murdering his own flesh and

blood, Minos had a labyrinth constructed complicated enough to keep his son from ever-escaping but without bars to suggest a prison. (It is interesting to note how the myth states most of the Athenian youth “fed” to the Minotaur actually starved to death in the labyrinth, thus indicating their deaths had more to do with the complexity of the maze and less to do with the presumed ferocity of the Minotaur.)

I am convinced Minos’ maze really sees as a trope for repression. My

published thoughts on this subject (see “Birth Defects in Knossos” Sonny Won’t Wait Flyer, Santa Cruz, 1968) [124—“Violent Prejudice in Knossos” by Zampanô in Sonny Will Wait Flyer, Santa Cruz, 1969.] [125—I have no idea why these titles and cited sources are different. It seems much too deliberate to be an error, but since I haven’t been able to find the “flyer” I don’t know for certain. I did call Ashley back, left message, even though I still don’t remember her.] inspired the playwright Taggert Chiclitz to author a play called The Minotaur for The Seattle Repertory Company. [126—The Minotaur by Taggert Chielit, put on at The Hey Zeus Theater by The Seattle Repertory Company on April 14. 1972. ] As only eight people, including the doorman, got a chance to see the production I produce here a brief summary:

Chiclitz begins his play with Minos entering the labyrinth lute one

eveiing to speak to his son. As it turns out. the Minotaur is a gentle and misunderstood creature, while the so called Athenian youth are convicted criminals who were already sentenced to death back in Greece. Usually King Minos had them secretly executed and then publicly claims their deaths were caused by the terrifying Minotaur thus ensuring that the residents of Knossos will never get too close to the labyrinth. Unfortunately this time, one of the criminals had escaped into the maze, encountered Mint (as Chielitz refers to the Minotaur) and nearly murdered him. Had

Minos himself not rushed in and killed the criminal. his son would have

perished. Suffice it to say Minos is furious. He has caught himself caring for his son and the resulting guilt and sorrow incenses him to no end. As the play progresses, the King slowly sees past his son’s deformities, eventually discovering an elegiac spirit, an artistic sentiment and most importantly a

visionary understanding-of the world. Soon a deep paternal love grows in the King’s heart and he begins to conceive of a way to reintroduce the Minotaur buck into soeicty.f Sadly the stories the King has spread throughout the world concerning this terrifying beast prove the seeds of tragedy. Soon enough, a bruiser named—Theseus arrives (Chielitz describes him as a drunken virtually retarded, frat boy) who without a second thought hacks the Minotaur into little pieces. In one-of the play’s most moving scenes. King Minos, with tears streaming down his face, publicly commends Theseus’ courage. The crowd believes the tears are a sign of gratitude while we the audience understand they are tears of loss.

The king’s heart breaks, and while he will go on to be an extremely just ruler, it is a justice forever informed by the deepest kind of agony. [128— Even in Metamorphosis, Ovid notes how Minos, in his old age, feared young men.

Qui, duni/u,t integer oeiti, terrucrat nwgnas 1/550 guoque Iwflhine

gelUe3 i’une ert i,nwlidu.v, DeIni€knqut I rn tar robore julie turn Pibgue parente superbuin pirlitnuil, eredcnstjue suis insurgere ignL haut tun,n Cs! palriis LIr rcpncaihus ausux.

(“When Minos was in golden middle age! MI nations feared the

mention of his name,/ but now he’d grown so impotent. so feeble! He shied away from proud young Miletus. The forward son of Phoebus and Deione;/ Though Mines half suspected Miletus/ Had eyes upon his throne and framed a plot! To make a palace revolution, he feared to act,/ To sign the papers for his deportation.” Horace Gregory p. 258 259.) Perhaps Miletus reminded Mines of his slain son and out of guilt he cowered in the presence of his youth.]

However, even as Holloway Roberts, Jed Leeder, and Wax Hook make

their way further down the stairway in Exploration #4, the purpose of that vast place still continues to elude them. Is it merely an aberration of physics? Some kind of warp in space? Or just a topiary labyrinth on a much grander scale? Perhaps it serves a funereal purpose? Conceals a secret?

Protects something? Imprisons or hides some kind of monster? Or, for that matter, imprisons or hides an innocent? As the Holloway team soon discovers, answers to these questions are not exactly forthcoming. [129— Strictly as an aside, Jacques Derrida once made a few remarks on the question of structure and centrality.]

[Note: Struck passages indicate what Zampanô tried to get rid of, but

which I, with a little bit of turpentine and a good old magnifying glass managed to resurrect.]

It is too complex to adequately address here; for some, however, this

mention alone may prove useful when considering the meaning of ‘play’, ‘origins’, and ‘ends’—especially when applied to the Navidson house:

Ce centre avait pour fonction non seulement d’orienter et d’équilibrer, d’organiser Ia structure—on ne peut en effet penser une structure inorganisée—mais de faire surtout que le principe d’organisation de la structure limite ce que nous pourrions appeler le jeu137 de Ia structure. Sans doute le centre d’une structure, en onentant et en organisant Ia coherence du système, per-met-il le jeu des éiêments a l’iatônieur de Ia forrne totale. Et aujourd’hui encore une structure pnivée de tout centre repésente l’impensable lui-mCme.

And later on:

C’est pourquoi, pour une pensée classique de la structure, Ic centre peut être dit, paradoxalement, clans Ia structure et hors de la structure. Ii est au centre de Ia totalité et pourtant, puisque le centre ne lui appartient pas, Ia totalitè a son centre ailleurs. L.e centre n’est pas le centre.

[130—Here’s the English. The best I can do:

The function of [a] center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure—one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.

And later on:

This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center.

[131—Conversely Christian Norberg-Schulz writes: In terms of

spontaneous perception, man’s space is ‘subjectively centered.’ The development of schemata, however, does not only mean that the notion of centre is established as a means of general organization, but that certain centres are ‘externalized’ as points of reference in the environment. This need is so strong that man since remote times has thought of the whole world as. being centralized. In many legends the ‘centre of the world’ is concretized as a tree or a pillar symbolizing a vertical axis mundi Mountains were also looked upon as points where sky and earth meet. The ancient Greeks placed the ‘navel’ of the world (omphalos) in Delphi, while

the Romans considered their Capitol as cap Ut mund: For Islam ka’aba is still the centre of the world. Eliade points out that in most beliefs it is difficult to reach the centre. It is an ideal goal, which one can only attain after a ‘hard journey.’ To ‘reach the centre is to achieve a consecration, an initiation. To the profane and illusory existence of yesterday, there succeeds a new existence, real, lasting and powerful.’ But Eliade also points out that ‘every life, even the least eventful, can be taken as the journey through a labyrinth.” [132—What Derrida and Norberg-Schulz neglect to consider is the ordering will of gravitation or how between any two particles of matter exists an attractive force (this relationship usually represented as 0 with a value of 6.670 X 10-’ I N-rn2! kg2). Gravity, as opposed to gravitation, applies specifically to the earth’s effect on other bodies and has had as much to say about humanity’s sense of centre as Derrida and Norberg-Schulz. Gravity informs words like ‘balance’, ‘above’, ‘below’, and even ‘rest’. Thanks to the slight waver of endolymph on the ampullary crest in the semicircular duct or the rise and fall of cilia on maculae in the utricle and saccule, gravity speaks a language comprehensible long before the words describing it are ever spoken or learned. Albert Einstein’s work on this matter is also worth studying, though it is important not to forget how Navidson’s house ultimately confounds even the labyrinth of the inner ear.] [133—This gets at a Lissitzky and Escher theme which Zampanô seems to constantly suggest without ever really bringing right out into the open. At least that’s how it strikes me. Pages 30, 356 arid 441, however, kind of contradict this. Though not really.]

See Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Existence, Space & Architecture (New

York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), p. 18 in which he quotes from Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. R. Sheed (London: Sheed and Ward, 1958), p. 380-382.]

Something like that. From Jacques Derrida’s Structure, Sign, and Play

in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ in Writing and Difference translated by Alan Bass. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1978. p.

278-279.

See Derrida’s Lécriture et Ia dfjerence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967),

p. 409-410.

Penelope Reed Doob avoids the tangled discussion of purpose by

cleverly drawing a distinction between those who walk within a labyrinth and those who stand outside of it:

[M]aze-treaders, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted and fragmented, suffer confusion, whereas

maze-viewers who see the pattern

whole, from above or in a diagram, are dazzled by its complex artistry. What you see depends on where you stand, and thus, at one and the same time,

labyrinths are single (there is one physical structure) and double: they simultaneously

incorporate order and disorder, clarity and confusion, unity and

multiplicity, artistry and chaos. They may be perceived as a path (a linear but circuitous passage to a goal) or as

a pattern (a complete symmetrical

design) … Our perception of

labyrinths is thus intrinsically unstable:

change your perspective and the

labyrinth seems to change.

[134—Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea Of The Labyrinth: from Classical

Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.1 X]

Unfortunately the dichotomy between those who participate inside and

those who view from the outside breaks down when considering the house,

simply because no one ever sees that labyrinth in its entirety. Therefore comprehension of its intricacies must always be derived from within.

This not only applies to the house but to the film itself. From the outset

of The Navidson Record, we are involved in a labyrinth, meandering from one celluloid cell to the next, trying to peek around the next edit in hopes of finding a solution, a centre, a sense of whole, only to discover another sequence, leading in a completely different direction, a continually devolving discourse, promising the possibility of discovery while all along dissolving into chaotic ambiguities too blurry to ever completely comprehend. [135—At least, as Daniel Hortz lamented, “By granting all involved the right to wander (e.g. daydream, free associate, phantasize [sic] etc., etc.; see Gaston Bachelard ) that which is discursive will inevitably re-appropriate the heterogeneity of the disparate and thus with such an unanticipated and unreconciled gesture bring about a re-assessment of self.” Or in other words, like the house, the film itself captures us and prohibits us at the same time it frees us to wander.-and so first misleads us, inevitably, drawing us from the us, thus, only in the end to lead us, necessarily, for where else could we have really gone?, back again to the us and hence back to ourselves. See Daniel Hortz’s Understanding The Self: The Maze of You (Boston: Garden Press, 1995), p. 261.] [129—Strictly as an aside, Jacques Derrida once made a few remarks on the question of structure and centrality.]

In order to fully appreciate the way the ambages unwind, twist only to

rewind, and then open up again, whether in Navidson’s house or the film— quae itinerum ambages occursusque ac recursus inexplicabiles [136— [”Passages that wind, advance and retreat in a bewilderingly Intricate manner.” — Ed.] Pliny also wrote when describing the Egyptian maze: “sed crebisforibus inditis adfallendos occursus redeundumque in errores eosdem.” [“Doors are let Into the walls at frequent Intervals to suggest deceptively the way ahead and to force the visitor to go back upon the very same tracks that he has already followed In his wanderlngs.”—Ed.] k] —we should look to the etymological inheritance of a word like ‘labyrinth’. The Latin labor is akin to the root labi meaning to slip or slide backwards [137 —Labiis also probably cognate with “sleep.”] [134—Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea Of The Labyrinth: from Classical Antiquity through the Middle

Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.1 X] though the commonly perceived meaning suggests difficulty and work. Implicit in ‘labyrinth’ is a required effort to keep from slipping or falling; in other words stopping. We cannot relax within those walls, we have to struggle past them. Hugh of Saint Victor has gone so far as to suggest that the antithesis of labyrinth— that which contains work—is Noah’s ark [138—See Chapter Six, footnote 82, Tom’s Story as well as footnote 249. — Ed.]—in other words that which contains rest.X

If the work demanded by any labyrinth means penetrating or escaping

it, the question of process becomes extremely relevant. For instance, one way out of any maze is to simply keep one hand on a wall and walk in one direction. Eventually the exit will be found. Unfortunately, where the house is concerned, this approach would probably require an infinite amount of time and resources. It cannot be forgotten that the problem posed by exhaustion—a result of labor—is an inextricable part of any encounter with a sophisticated maze. In order to escape then, we have to remember we cannot ponder all paths but must decode only those necessary to get out. We must be quick and anything but exhaustive. Yet, as Seneca warned in his Epistulae morales 44, going too fast also incurs certain risks:

Quod evenht in labyrintho properantibus: ipsa ilos velocitas inplicat. [139— [This is what happens when you

hurry through a maze: the faster you go, the worse you are entangled. — Ed.] Words worth taking to heart, especially when taking into account Pascal’s remark, found in Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading: “Si on lit trop vite oü trop doucement, on n’entend rien.” [If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing. — Ed.] [135—At least, as Daniel Hortz lamented, “By granting all involved the right to wander (e.g. daydream, free associate, phantasize [sic] etc., etc.; see Gaston Bachelard ) that which is discursive will inevitably re-appropriate the heterogeneity of the disparate and thus with such an unanticipated and unreconciled gesture bring about a re-assessment of self.” Or in other words, like the house, the film itself captures us and prohibits us at the same time it frees us to wander.-and so first misleads us, inevitably, drawing us from the us, thus,

only in the end to lead us, necessarily, for where else could we have really gone?, back again to the us and hence back to ourselves. See Daniel Hortz’s Understanding The Self: The Maze of You (Boston: Garden Press, 1995), p.

261.] [129—Strictly as an aside, Jacques Derrida once made a few remarks on the question of structure and centrality.]

Unfortunately, the anfractuosity of some labyrinths may actually

prohibit a permanent solution. More confounding still, its complexity may exceed the imagination of even the designer. [140— “… ita Daedalus implet innumeras errore vias vixque ipse reverti ad limen potuit. ranta esifallacia tecti.” Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII. 1. 166-168. [“So Daedalus made those innumerable winding passages and was himself scarce able to find his way back to the place of entry, so deceptive was the enclosure he had built.” Horace Gregory, however, offers a slightly different translation “So Daedalus designed his winding maze;! And as one entered It, only a wary mind! Could find an exit to the world again —/ Such was the cleverness of that strange arbour.] Or in other words: shy from the sky. It cannot care, especially for what it no longer knows. Treat that place as a thing unto itself, independent of all else, and confront it on those terms. You alone must find the way. No one else can help you. Every way is different.

And if you do lose yourself at least take solace in the absolute certainty that you will perish.] X Therefore anyone lost within must recognize that no one, not even a god or an Other, comprehends the entire maze and so therefore can never offer a definitive answer. Navidson’s house seems a perfect example. Due to the wall-shifts and extraordinary size, any way out remains singular and applicable only to those on that path at that particular time. All solutions then are necessarily personal.

[141— I’m not sure why but I feel like I understand this on an entirely

different level. What I mean to say is that the weird encounter with Tatiana seems to have helped me somehow. As if getting off was all I needed to diminish some of this dread and panic. I guess Thumper was right. Of course the downside is that this new discovery has left me practically beside myself, by which I mean priapic.

Last night I made the rounds. I called Tatiana but she wasn’t home.

Amber’s machine picked up but I didn’t leave a message. Then as the hours lengthened and a particular heaviness crept in on me, I thought about

Thumper. In fact I almost went down to where she works, to that place where I could be alone with the failing light and shadow play, where I could peek in ease, unhurried, unmolested, a nation which as suddenly as it crossed my mind suddenly—and for no apparent reason either—made me feel terribly uncomfortable. I called Lude instead. He gave me Kyrie’s number. No answer. Not even a machine picked up. I called Lude back and an hour later we were losing ourselves in pints of cider at Red.

For some reason I had with me a little bit Zampanô wrote about Natasha

(See Appendix F). I found it some months ago and immediately assumed she was an old love of his, which of course may still be true. Since then, however, I’ve begun to believe that Zampanô’s Natasha also lives in Tolstoy’s guerrulous pages. (Yes, amazingly enough, I finally did get around to reading War and Peace.)

Anyway, that evening, as coincidence would have it, a certain Natasha

was dining on vegetables and wine. Rumor was—or so Lude confided; I’ve always loved the way Lude could ‘confide’ a rumor—her mother was famous but had been killed in a boating accident, unless you believed another rumor—which Lude also confided—that her father was the one who had been killed in a boating accident though he was not famous.

What did it matter?

Either way, Natasha was gorgeous.

Tolstoy’s prophecy brought to life.

Lude and I quarreled over who would approach her first. Truth be

known I didn’t have the courage. A few pints later though, I watched Lude weave over to her table. He had every advantage. He knew her. Could say ‘hello’ and not appear obscene. I watched, my glass permanently fixed to my mouth so I could drink continuously—though breathing proved a bit tricky.

Lude was laughing, Natasha smiling, her friends working on their

vegetables, their wine. But Lude stayed too long. I could see it in the way she started looking at her friends, her plate, everywhere but at him. And then Lude said something. No doubt an attempt to save the sitch. Little did I know I was the one being sacrificed, that is until he started pointing over at the counter, at me. And then suddenly she was looking over at the counter, at me. And neither one of them was smiling. I lifted the base of my glass high enough to eclipse my face and paid no mind to the stream of cider

spilling from either side, foaming in my lap. When I lowered my deception I saw Natasha hand Lude back a piece of paper he had just given her. Her smile was curt. She said very little. He continued the charade, smiled quickly and departed.

“Sorry Hose,” Lude said as he sat down, unaware that the scene had

turned me to stone.

“You didn’t just tell her that I wrote that for her, did you?” I finally

stuttered.

“You bet. Hey, she liked it. Just not enough to dump her boyfriend.” “I didn’t write that. A blind man wrote it,” I yelled at him, but it was too

late. I finished my drink, and with my head down, got the hell out of there, leaving Lude behind to endure Natasha’s pointed inattention.

Heading east, I passed by Muse and stopped in at El Coyote where I

drank tequila shots until an Australian gal started telling me about kangaroos and the Great Barrier Reef and then ordered something else, potent and green. A while ago, over a year? two years? she had seen a gathering there of very, very famous people speaking censorially of things most perverse. She told me this with great glee, her breasts bouncing around like giant pacmen. Who cared. Fine by me. Did she want to hear about Natasha? Or at least what a blind man wrote?

When I finally walked outside, I had no idea where I was, orange lights

burning like sunspots, initiating weird riots in my head, while in the ink beyond a chorus of coyotes howled, or was that the traffic? and no sense of time either. We stumbled together to a corner and that’s when the car pulled over, a white car? VW Rabbit? maybe/maybe not? I strained to see what this was all about, my Australian gal giggling, both pacmen going crazy, she lived right around here somewhere but wasn’t that funny, she couldn’t remember exactly where, and me not caring, just squinting, staring at the white? car as the window rolled down and a lovely face appeared, tired perhaps, uncertain too, but bright nonetheless with a wry smile on those sweet lips—Natasha leaning out of her car, ‘I guess love fades pretty fast, huh?’ [142—________________] winking at me then, even as I shook my head, as if that kind of emphatic shaking could actually prove something, like just how possible it is to fall so suddenly so hard, though for it to ever mean anything you have to remember, and I would remember, I would definitely remember, which I kept telling myself as that white? car, her

car?, aped off, bye-bye Natasha, whoever you are, wondering then if I would ever see her again, sensing I wouldn’t, hoping senses were wrong but still not knowing; Love At First Sight having been written by a blind man, albeit sly, passionate too?, the blind man of all blind men, me,—don’t know why I just wrote that—though I would still love her despite being unblind, even if I had all of a sudden started dreaming then of someone I’d never met before, or had known all along, no, not even Thumper—wow, am I wandering—maybe Natasha after all, so vague, so familiar, so strange, but who really and why? though at least this much I could safely assume to be true, comforting really, a wild ode mentioned at New West hotel over wine infusions, light, lit, lofted on very entertaining moods, yawning in return, open nights, inviting everyone’s song, with me losing myself in such a dream, over and over again too, until that Australian gal shook my arm, shook it hard—

“Hey, where are you?” “Lost” I muttered and started to laugh and then she laughed and I don’t

remember the rest. I don’t remember her door, all those stairs to the second story, the clatter we made making our way down the hail, never turning on the lights, the hall lights or her room lights, falling onto the futon on her floor. I can’t even remember how all our clothes came off, I couldn’t get her bra off, she finally had to do that, her white bra, ahh the clasp was in front and I’d been struggling with the back, which was when she let the pacmen out and ate me alive.

Yeah I know, the dots here don’t really connect. After all, how does one

go from a piece of poetry to a heart wrenching beauty to the details of a drunken one night stand? I mean even if you could connect those dots, which I don’t think you can, what kind of picture would you really draw?

There was something about her pussy. I do remember that. In fact it was

amazing how hairy it was, thick coils of black hair, covering her, hiding her, though when fingered & licked still parting so readily for the feel of her, the taste of her, as she continued to sit on top of me, just straddling my mouth, and all the time easing slightly back, pushing slightly forward, even when her legs began to tremble, still wanting me to keep exploring her like that, with my fingers and my lips and my tongue, the layers of her warmth, the sweet folds of her darkness, over and over and over again.

The rest I’m sure I don’t remember though I know it went on like that

for a while.

Up in the sky-high, Off to the side-eye, All of us now sigh, Right down the drain-ae.

Just a ditty. I guess.

Later, I don’t even know how much later, she said we’d been great and

she felt great even though I didn’t. I didn’t even know where I was, who she was, or how we’d done what she said we’d done. I had to get out, but fuck the sun hurt my eyes, it split my head open, I dropped her number before I reached the corner, then spent a quarter of an hour looking for my car.

Something was beginning to make me feel panicky and bad again. Maybe it was to have been that lost, to lose sense, even a little bit about some event, and was I losing more than I knew, larger events? greater sense? In fact all I had to hold onto at that moment as I cautiously pointed the old car to that place I had the gall to still call a home—never again—was her face, that wxy smile, Natasha’s, seen but unknown, found in a restaurant, lost on a Street corner, gone in a wind of traffic—as in ‘to wind something up.’ I looked at my hands. I was holding onto the steering wheel so tightly, all my knuckles were shiny points of white, and my blinker was on, CLICK-click CLICK-click CLICK-click, so certain, so plain, so clear, and yet for all its mechanical conviction, blinking me in the wrong direction.]

As with previous explorations, Exploration #4 can also be considered a

personal journey. While some portions of the house, like the Great Hall for instance, seem to offer a communal experience, many inter-communicating passageways encountered by individual members, even with only a glance, will never be re-encountered by anyone else again. Therefore, in spite of, as

well as in light of, future investigations, Holloway’s descent remains singular.

When his team finally does reach the bottom of the stairway, they have

already spent three nights in that hideous darkness, their sleeping bags and tents successfully insulating their bodies from the cold, but nothing protecting their hearts from what Jed refers to as “the heaviness” which always seemed to him to be crouching, ready to spring, just a few feet away.

While everyone enjoys some sense of elation upon reaching the last step, in truth they have only brought to a conclusion an already experienced aspect of the house. None of them are at all prepared for the consequences of the now unfamiliar.

On the morning of the fourth day, the three men agree to explore a new

series of rooms. As Holloway says, “We’ve come a long way. Let’s see if there’s anything down here.” Wax and Jed do not object, and soon enough, they are all wending their way through the maze.

As usual, Holloway orders numerous stops to procure wall samples. Jed

has become quite handy with his chisel and hammer, cutting out small amounts of the black-ashen substance which he deposits into one of the many sample jars Reston equipped him with. As had been the case even on the stairway, Holloway personally takes responsibility for marking their path. He constantly tacks neon arrows to the wall, sprays neon paint on corners, and metes out plenty of fishing line wherever the path becomes

especially complicated and twisted. [Aside from the practical aspect of

fishing line—a readily available and cheap way to map progress through that complicated maze—there are of course obvious mythological resonances. Minos’ daughter Ariadne, supplied Theseus with a thread which he used to escape the labyrinth. Thread has repeatedly served as a metaphor for an umbilical cord, for life, and for destiny. The Greek Fates (called Moerae) or the Roman Fates (called Fata or Parcae) spun the thread of life and also cut it off. Curiously in Orphic cults, thread symbolized semen.]

Oddly enough, however, the farther Holloway goes the more

infrequently he stops to take samples or mark their path. Obviously deaf to Seneca’s words.

Jed is the first to voice some concern over how quickly their team leader

is moving: “You know where you’re going, Holloway?” But Holloway just scowls and keeps pushing forward, in what appears to be a determined effort to find something, something different, something defining, or at least some kind of indication of an outside-ness to that place. At one point Holloway even succeeds in scratching, stabbing, and ultimately kicking a hole in a wall, only to discover another windowless room with a doorway leading to another hallway spawning yet another endless series of empty rooms and passageways, all with walls potentially hiding and thus hinting at a possible exterior, though invariably winding up as just another border to another interior. As Gerard Eysenck famously described it: “Insides and in-ness never inside out.” [143—Gerard Eysenck’s “Break Through (not a) Breakthrough: Heuristic Hallways In The Holloway Venture.” Proceedings from The Navidson Record Semiotic Conference Tentatively Entitled Three Blind Mice and the Rest As Well. American Federation of Architects. June 8, 1993. Reprinted in Fisker and Weinberg, 1996.]

This desire for exteriority is no doubt further amplified by the utter

blankness found within. Nothing there provides a reason to linger. In part because not one object, let alone fixture or other manner of finish work has ever been discovered there. [144—footnote text boxes not included]

Back in 1771, Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses On Art argued

against the importance of the particular, calling into question, for example, “minute attention to the discriminations of Drapery… the cloathing is neither Woollen, nor linen, nor silk, satin or velvet: it is drapery: it is nothing more.” [145—See Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses on Art (1771) (New York: Collier, 1961).] Such global appraisal seems perfectly suited for Navidson’s house which despite its corridors and rooms of various sizes is nothing more than corridors and rooms, even if sometimes, as John Updike once observed in the course of translating the labyrinth: “The galleries seem straight but curve furtively.”

Of course rooms, corridors, and the occasional spiral staircase are

themselves subject to patterns of arrangement. In some cases particular patterns. However, considering the constant shifts, the seemingly endless redefinition of route, even the absurd way the first hallway leads away from the living room only to return, through a series of lefts, back to where the living room should be but clearly is not; describes a layout in no way

reminiscent of any modern floorplans let alone historical experiments in design. [146—For example, there is nothing about the house that even remotely resembles 20th century works whether in the style of Post-Modern, Late-Modern, Brutalism, Neo-Expressionism, Wrightian, The New Formalism, Miesian, the International Style, Streamline Moderne, Art Deco, the Pueblo Style, the Spanish Colonial, to name but a few, with examples such as the Western Savings and Loan Association in Superstition, Arizona, Animal Crackers in Highland Park, Illinois, Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, or Mineries Condominium in Venice, Wurster Hall in Berkeley, Katselas House in Pittsburgh, Dulles International Airport, Greene House in Norman Oklahoma, Chicago Harold Washington Library, the Watts Towers in South Central, Barcelona National Theatre, New Town of Seaside Florida, Tugendhat House, Rue de Laeken in Brussels, Richmond Riverside in Richmond Surrey, the staircase hail in the Athens, Georgia News Building, the Tsukuba Center Building in Ibaraki, the Digital 1-louse, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, the interior of the Judge Institute of Management Studies in Cam- — bridge, Maison a Bordeaux, TGV Railway Station in Lyon-Satolas, the post-modernism of the Wexner Center for Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio, Palazzo Hotel in Fukuoka, National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, Pyramid at the Louvre, New Building at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Palace of Abraxas at Marne-La-Vallée, Piazza d’ltalie in New Orleans, AT&T Building in New York, the modernism of Carré d’Art, Lloyds Building in London, the Boston John F.

Kennedy Library complex, Nave of Vuokseeniska Church in Finland, head office of the Enso-Gutzeit Company, Administrative Center of Silynatsalo, the Eaines House, the Baker dormitory at MIT. inside the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport, The National Theatre in London, Hull House Association Uptown Center in Chicago, Hektoen Laboratory also in Chicago, Fitzpatrick House in the Hollywood Hills, Graduate Center at Harvard University, Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles, General Motors Testing Laboratory in Phoenix Arizona, Bullock’s Wilshire Department Store in Los Angeles, Casino Building in New York, Hotel Franciscan in Albuquerque New Mexico, La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, or Santa Barbara County Courthouse, the Neff or Sherwood House in California, Exterior of

the Secondary Modern School, Maisons Jaoul, Notre-Dame-du-i4aut near Belfort, The Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles, The Farnsworth House in Piano, Iflinois, The Alumni Memorial Hall at illinois institute of Technology, Guggenheim Museum in New York, or nothing of the traditionalism of Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, the Zimbabwe House and Battersea Power Station in London, Choir of the Angelican cathedral in Liverpool or Memorial to the Missing of the Somme near Aras, Viceroy’s house in New Delhi, Gledstone Hall in Yorkshire, Finsbury Circus facade, Castle Drogo near Drewsteignton Devon, Casa del Fascio in Como, Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Central Station in Milan, the New York City World’s Fair Interior of the Finnish Pavilion, lobby of the Stockholm Concert House, Stockholm City Library, Woodland Crematorium, Police Headquarters in Copenhagen. Helsinki railway station, Villa HvittrAsk near Helsinki, Grundtvig Church in Copenhagen, Villa Savoye in Poissy, 25 rue Vavrn in Paris, 62 rue Des Belles Feuilles also in Paris, Notre-Dame du Raincy, 25 bis, rue Franklin, Paris again, Chateau of Voisins, Rochefort-en-Yvelines, New Chancellery in Berlin. The Festival House near Dresden. the Schr&ler House, Utrecht, The Bauhaus in Dessau, or the expressionism of the Fagus Factory near Hildesheim. Amsterdam’s Scheepvarthuis, Rheinhalle in Düsseldorf, the Chilehaus in Hamburg, Einstein Tower in Berlin, Schocken Department Store in Sutigart, Auditorium of the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin, The Glass Pavilion in Cologne, Bresau’s Centennial Hall, l.G.-Farben Dye Factory, Höchst, the Völker schlach Memorial in Leipzig. Haus Wiegand in Berlin, AEG Turbine Factory also in Berlin, the Stuttgart Railway Station, Leipziger Platz facade and the National Bank of Germany in Berlin, the American Radiator Building in New York, the Nebraska State Capitol, the )etl’erson Memorial in Washington, D.C., Villa Vizcaya in Miami, Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, or Fallingwater, Administration Building at the S.C. Johnson Wax Factory, plan for the Tokyo Imperial Hotel or Taliesin East. the Robie House, the Winslow House, Warren Hickox House, or History Faculty Building in Cambridge, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the David B. Gamble House, The Seagram Building in New York, the Portland public service buiding, or the Art Nouveau of the cathedral of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the Assembly building at Chandigarh in India, Casa Milá in Barcelona, the Majolikahaus and the Secession building in Vienna, the

Greek Theatre at Park GüeII, Case Batilo, and Casa Vicens in Barcelona, and the staircase of the Tassel House in Brussels, Central Rotunda at the international Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Turin, Palazzo Castiglioni in Milan, the Elvira Photographic Studio in Munich, the Stoclet House in Brussels. The Imperial and Royal Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna, Darmstadt Artist’s Colony, Library Facade of Glasgow School of Art, Paris Metro station entrance, Castel Beranger also in Paris, Maison du Peuple in Brussels, the Exchange in Amsterdam, the staircase of the Van Eetvelde House and Hotel Solvay in Brussels, or anything of the Bungaloid style, the Mission Style, the Western Slick Style or the Prairie Style, whether the Crocker House in Pasadena, the Town and Gown Club in Berkeley, or the Goodrich House in Tucson, or any evidence of 19th century modes, whether stylistically enunciated as Jacobethan Revival, Late Gothic, Neo-Classical Revival, Georgian Revival, Second Renaissance Revival, Beaux-Arts Classicism, Chateauesque, Richardsonian Romanesque, the Shingle Style, Eastlake Style, Queen Anne Style, Stick Style, Second Empire, High Victorian Ltalianate, High Victorian Gothic, the Octagon Mode, the Renaissance Revival, the Italian Villa Style, Romanesque Revival, Early Gothic Revival, Egyptian Revival, Greek Revival, such as University Club in Portland Oregon, Calvary Episcopal in Pittsburgh, the Minneapolis institute of Arts, Germantown Cricket Club in Penn. sylvania, All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., Detroit Public Library or the Racquet and Tennis Club in New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Riverside County Courthouse in California, the Kimball House in Chicago, the Gresham House in Galveston, Texas. Cheney Building in Hartford Connecticut, Pioneer Building in Seattle, House House in Austin, Texas, Bookstaver House in Middletown Rhodes Island, Double House on Twenty- First Street in San Francisco, Brownlee House in Bonham, Texas, Los Angeles Heritage Society, Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, Cram House in Middletown Rhode Island, House of San Luis Obispo, City Hall in Philadelphia, Gallatin House in Sacramento, Bla- — gen Block and Marks House in Portland, Iangworthy House in Dubuque, Iowa, Cedar Point in Swansboro, North Carolina, Haughwout Building in New York City, Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank in Philadelphia, Calvert Station in Baltimore, Jarrad [louse in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Old Stone Church in Cleveland, Church of Assumption in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rotch House in

New Bedford, Massachusetts. St. James in Willming. ton, North Carolina, Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison, Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, Lyle-Hunnicutt House in Athens, Georgia, Montgomery County Courthouse in Dayton. Ohio, which is not to exclude the non-presence of other 19th century examples such as the Pennsylvania station, exterior and concourse, Villard Houses in New York. the Boston Public Library, Court of Honor at the Chicago World’s Fair, the St. Louis Wainwright Building, the Buffalo’s Guaranty Building, Watts Sherman House in Newport Rhode Island, Boston Trinity Church, Ames Gate Lodge in North Easton, the Philadelphia Provident Life and Trust Company, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Nott Memorial Library in Schenectady, New York, saloon in the Breakers, Boston City Hall, or Greek and gothic presence in the New York City Trinity Church, Philadelphia Girard College for Orphans. the Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institute, Boston Tremont House, Philadelphia Merchant’s Exchange, Ohio State Capitol, The Singer’s Hall in Bavaria, Washington, D.C. Treasury Building, the Palais de Justice in Brussels. Empress Josephine’s bedroom at Château of Malmaison, the Academy of Science in Athens, the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, Moscow Historical Museum, the New Admiralty in St. Petersburg. the grand staircase of the Paris Opéra, the St. Petersburg Exchange, Thorwaldsen Museum, Senate Square in Helsinki, Florence Cathedral, Milan’s Galleria Vittono Emanuele II, Palazzo di Giustizia in Rome, Conova Mausoleum near Possagno, Padua’s Caffé Pedrocehi, the Parliament House in Vienna, the Dresden Opera House, Befreiungshalle near Keiheim, Walhalla across the Danube, Feldherrnhalle in Munich, Berlin National Galerie or Bauakademie or the staircase in the Altes Museum or Schauspielhaus, nor the gothic revival of the campanile of Wesminster cathedral, New Scottland Yard, Standen in Sussex. the house at Cragside in Northumberland or Newnham College in Cambridge, or Leyswood in Sussex, the Crystal Palace or the Law Courts in London, the chapel at Keble college, Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, or the Saloon of the Reform Club, Elmes’ St. George’s Hall in Liverpool, Taylorian Institution at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians, British Museum in London, Devon Luscombe Castle, Cumberland Terrace in Regent’s Park, the Paris Grand Palais or Gare du Quai d’Orsay or the staircase at the Nouvelle Sorbonne or the Opéra or St-Augustin or Fontaine

StMichel or Parc des ButtesChaumont, the Marseilles Cathedral, the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, the Salle de Harlay in the Palais de Justice, or the reading room at the Bibliothéque Ste-Genevieve, Gare du Nord, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, St-Vincent de Paul, Church of the Madeleine, rue de Rivoli, the arc du Carrousel, nor anything like 18th century classicism of the Washington, D.C. Supreme Court Chamber, the staircase vestibule in the D.C. capitol and the capitol itself, Baltimore Roman Catholic Cathedral, bank of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia Jefferson Library, Monticello near Charlottesville, First Baptist Meeting House in Providence Rhode Island, Drayton Hall in Charleston, King’s Chapel in Boston, or examples of the Jeffersonian Classicism or the Adam Style, such as Pavilion VII at the University of Virginia, Estouteville in Albemarle County, Clay Hill in Harrodsburg Kentucky, Nickels-Sortwell House in Wiscasset, Maine, Ware-Sibley House in Augusta, Georgia, or the Congregational Church in Talimadge Ohio. or the Dalton House in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Sheremetev Palace near Moscow, Cameron Gallery in Tsarskow Seine, the Catherine Hall in the St. Petersburg Tauride Palace, Leningrad Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen Amalienborg Palace, Lazienki Palace near Warsaw, the mock Gothic castle of Lowenburg at Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, mosque in the garden of Schwetzingen near Mannheim, Villa Hamilton near Dessau, Milan’s Palazzo Serbelloni, the Sale delle Muse in the Vatican, the Boston Massachusetts State House, Paris BarriCre de Ia Villette, the Director’s house at the saltworks of Arc-et-Senans near Besancon, Paris Pantheon, or La Solitude in Stuttgart, Rue de Ia PCpiniCre, Château at Montmusard near Dijon, the breakfast room of Sir John Soane’s Museum, or the French Neo-Classicism of the Hameau at Versailles, the staircase of the theatre at Bordeaux, the anatomy theatre in the Paris School of Surgery, chambers for the mausoleum of the Prince of Wales, entrance and colonnade of the Hotel de Salm, Syon House in Middlesex, Versailles St. Symphorien, or Petit Trianon, or London Lin coIn’s Inn Fields, the Consols Office in the Bank of England. the plan of Fonthill Abbey, the Cupola Room at Heaton Hall. the Dublin Four Courts, the Somerset House in London, the Casino at Marino House in Dublin, the Pagoda at Kcw Gardens. Stowe House portico at Buckinghamshire, drawing room at 20 St. James’ Square, Middlesex Syon House, Marble Hall at Kedleston, Temple of Ancient Virtue in the Stowe

Elysian Fields, staircase at 44 Berkeley Square. Holkham Hall in Norfolk, the cupola room in Kensington Palace, Tempietto Diruto at Villa Albani Rome, entrance front to S. Maria del Pnorato also in Rome, Ancient Mausoleum from Prima Pane di Archiierturt’ e Prospelilve, or the Baroque expansion indicated by the cascade of steps at Born Jesus do Monte near Braga, or royal palace at Queluz. the Royal Library at the University of Coimbra, the palace-convent of Mafra near Lisbon, Salamanca Plaza Mayor, cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, cathedral at Murcia, Granada cathedral, the transparente in Toledo cathedral, octagonal pavilion at Orleans House, St Martin-in-the-Fields, Radclifre Library in Oxford, the Wieskirche, chapel of WOrzburg Residenz, or Stepney St. George-in-the-East, St. George’s. Bloomsbury London, Oxfordshire Blenheim Palace, the mirror room of the Amlienburg in Munich, the Yorkshire Mausoleum at Castle Howard, Chatsworth Derbyshire, the painted hall at the Greenwich Royal Hospital, Rome’s interior dome of S. Carlo alle quattro Fontane, or the Salon de Ia Guerre in Versailles. St. Paul’s Cathedral, Piazza S. Pietro, Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, the abbey church at Ottobeuren, or the German rococo of the Zwingei Walipavillon Dresden. St. John Nepomuk in Munich. the high altar at the abbey church of Weltenburg, the staircase at the Residenz WUrzburg or the church at Vierzehnheiligen, the monastery of Melk in Austria, staircase at Pornmersfelden, the upper Belvedere, Imperial Library of the Hofburg, Karlskirche in Vienna, the Ancestral Hall at Schloss Frain in Moravia, or French rococo like the Salon de Ia Princesse at Hotel de Soubise in Paris. not even just the interior chapel at Versailles, domed oval saloon at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Paris HOtel Lambert.

S. Agata in Catania. the Syracuse cathedral, the ballroom at the Palazzo Gangi in Palermo. the majolica cloister at S. Chiara or the Piazza del GesO in Naples, or even the uncompleted Palazzo Donn’Anna. or the interior of the Gesuiti in Venice, the plan of the University Genoa, the Royal Palace at Stupinigi, the Superga near Turin, or the staircase at the Palazzo Madama, or the dome of S. Lorenzo in Turin, or the interior of the dome of the Cappella della SS. Sin- done, or the Trevi Fountain or the facade of S.

Maria Maggiore or the Spanish steps or the frescoes on the nave vault of S. lgnazio in Rome, or also in Rome the exterior of S. Maria in Via Lata, Pietro da Cortona’s SS, Luca e Martina, Villa Sacchetti del Pigneto, Piazza Navona, Fontana del Moro, S. Ivo dell Sapienza, facade of the Oratory of

the Congregration of St. Philip Neri, chapel ceiling at the Collegio di Propa ganda Fide or the S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Scala Regia in the Vatican.

S. Andrea al Quirinale, nor even elements of the Renaissance as evinced by the Great Hall at the Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. Longleat, Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. the Gate of Honour at Gonville and Calus College in Cambridge. Burghley House in Northamptonshire, Meat Hall in Haarlem, the House Ten Bosch at Maarssen, the Mauritshuis at the Hague, the Antwerp town hall, the arcaded loggia of the Belvedere in Prgaue, Wawel Cathedral in Cracow, the town hail at Augsburg, Schloss Johannesburg, Aschaffenburg, the court facade of the Ottheinrichsbau of the Schloss at Heidelberg, the Jesuit church of St. Michael in Munich, court of Altes Schloss in Stuttgart. Escorial, the Portal of Pardon, Granada, palace courtyard for Charles V at Aihambra, Granada, the Royal Hospital at Santiago de Compostela. the Queen’s House in Greenwich, the Bourbon chapel at St-Denis, chateau pf Maisons-Lafittern the church of the College of the Sorbonne, the Palazzo Corner della Ca’Grande in Venice, or the Francois I gallery at Fontainebleau, Place des Vosges in Paris, gateway of the chateau at Anet. the Petit Chateau at Chantilly, the Chateau de Chambord. Square Court of the Louvre, Courtyard of the Chateau of Ancy-le-Franc, the Medici Chapel. the open staircase at Blois, the interior of II Redentore in Venice, or Villa Rotonda near Vjcenza, Palazza Chiericatj, Villa Barbaro, S. Maria. Vicoforte di Mondovi, Palazzo Farnese, Caprarola, the Strada Nuova in Genoa, the hemicycle of Villa Giulia, Villa Garzoni, Pontecasale, library of S. Marco in Venice. the Loggetta at the base of the Campanile, Cappella Pellegrini in Verona. Rome’s S. Maria Degli Angeli. the giant order of the Rome Capitol, staircase of the Laurentian Library in Florence. or Mantua’s Palazzo Ducale or Palazzo del Te, or Palazzo Farnese or Palazzo Massimi or Villa Farnesina or Villa Madama in Rome. or S.

Maria della Consolazione in Todi. Belvedere Court, S. Pietro in Montorio, or Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, S. Maria della Grazie in Milan, Cappella del Perdono, Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence, the Pienxa Piazza. Rimini Tempio Malatestiano, Mantua’s S.

Andrea, Florence’s S. Spirito or Pazzi Chapel. to say nothing of the lack of even a gothic signature, whether like the church of Sta Maria de VitOria at Batalha, the Cristo Monastery at Tomar, the palace of Beilver near Palma de Mallorca, cathedral at Palma de Mallorca, the Seville cathedral, a’ d’Oro in

Venice, Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, Venice’s Piazzetta. the Doges’ Palace Facade. or the nave of the Milan Cathedral, Orvieto cathedral, or the Florence cathedral, or the upper church of S. Francesco at Assisi. cathedral and castle of the Teutonic Order at Marienwerder Poland, the town hall at Louvain. St. Barbara in Kuttenberg, the Vladislav Hall in the Hradcany Castle in Prague. St Lorenz in Nuremberg, the Starsbourg cathedral, the Uim cathedral, Vienna Cathedral, interior of the Aarchen cathedral, the Prague cathedral, the choir vaulting of the church of the Holy Cross, choir of Cologne cathedral, Oxford New College, or Harlech Castle in Gwynnedd North Wales, Stokesay Castle in Shropshire, the Great Hall of Penhurst Place in Kent, the King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, Westminster Hall in the Palace of Westminster, the vaulting of Henry VII chapel at Westminster, St Stephen’s chapel, interior at Gloucester cathedral, or the interior octagon at Ely cathedral, the north porch of St. Mary Redcliffe in Bristol, the Exeter cathedral, vault at the Wells cathedral, Westminster Abbey, St Hugh’s choir vaults in Lincoln cathedral, Palacio del Infan- tado at Guadalajara, the Canterbury cathedral, Rouen’s Palais de Justice, the house of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, Bristol cathedral, Albi cathedral’s Flaniboyant south porch, the church of St-Maclou in Rouen, the Paris SainteChapelle, the church of StUrbain, S6es cathedral, Notre-Dame, Amiens cathedral, Reims cathedral, Laon cathedral, Soissons cathedral, or the nave of Noyan cathedral, or even the ambulatory of St. Denis, nor for that matter elements of the Carolingian and Romanesque such as the Pisa baptistery or cathedral or the cathedral at Lucca, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, S. Miniato al Monte or the baptistery in Florence, S. Ambrogio in Milan, the campanile and baptistery of the Parma cathedral, Salamanca’s Old Cathedral, the cloister of Sto Domingo de Silos, fortified walls of Avila, kitchen at Fontevrault Abbey, Angers, church and monastery at Loarre, St-Gilles-du-Gard in Provence, cathedral of Autun, Poitiers’ Notre-Dame-la-Grande, abbey church of La Madeleine in Vézelay, Angouléme’s cathedral, abbey church at Cluny, cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, St-Serin in Toulouse, Portico de Ia Gloria, Santiago de Compostela, Conques Ste-Foy, the staircase of the chapter-house in Beverley, the intenor of the

chapter-house in Bristol, the Durham cathedral, St John’s Chapel, White Tower, Tower of London, Winchester cathedral, Lincoln cathedral, the abbey church of NoUe-Dame. Jumiêges, Florence’s S. Miniato al Monte,

Dijon St-Bénigne, ambulatory of St-Philibert in Tournus, St. Mark’s cathedral in Venice, St. Basil’s cathedral in Moscow, abbey church of Maria Laach, cathedral of Trier, Basilica of S. Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, the dome of the Palatine chapel, interior of cathedral, Speyer, St. Michael in Hildesheim, the Great Mosque at COrdoba, S. Maria Naranco, All Staints, Earls Barton, St Lawrence, Bradford-on-Avon, church at Corvey on the Weser, the gateway at the monastery of Lorsch, plan for the monastery at St Gall, interior of the oratory in Germigny-des-Prós, or at the very least not even remnants of early Christian and Byzantine architectural conceits, whether the Cathedral of S. Front, Périgueux, cathedral of Monreale Sicily, interior of the Palatine Chapel in Palermo, the church of Transfiguration, Kizhi, Hagia Sophia in Kiev, hillside churches in Mistra Greece, Katholikon, Hosios Lukas, or church of Theotokos, mosaic of Christ Pantocrator in the dome of the church of Domition, Daphni, S. Vitale or S.

Apollinare in Classe in Ravenna, Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia, Ravenna’s interior of the Mausoleum of Galls Placidia, Rome’s S. Stefano Rotondo or S. Maria Maggiore or S. Clemente, or Milan’s S. Lorenzo, or even the plan of Old St Peter’s, nor the slightest trace of classical foundations whether Greek, Hellenistic, or Roman. as might be exemplified by the Temple of Jupiter, Diocletian’s palace at Spalato, the gateway to the market at Miletus, Algeria’s Timgad with its Arch of Trajan, apartment housing in Ostia.

Trajan’s Market in Rome, also in Rome, the Baths of Diocletian, the Basilica of Max. entius, Baths of Caracalla, the Temple of Venus, near the Golden House of Nero, Hadrian’s Mausoleum, the Mausoleum of Caccilia Metella on the Via Appia, the Canopus of Hadrian’s villa, the interior of the Pantheon, Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, or the Piazza d’Oro with peristyle court and pavilions, or the Flavian Palace, the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, plan of the Villa Jovis at Capri, Arch of Tiberius at Orange, France, Trajan’s column in Rome, the Imperial Forum, Temple of Mars Ultor. Forum Augustum, Forum of Nerva, the Forum Romanum with the arch of Septimius Severus, the Arch of Titus and the Temple of Castor and Pollux, or in Spain the aqueduct at Segovia, or back in Rome the theatre of Marcellus, the Colosseum, the sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia, Praeneste with its axonometric reconstruction, the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. the Forum Boarium in Rome. the Maison Carrée at Nimes, or the House of the Vettli in Pompeii, the walls of Herculaneum, the terrace of Naxian Lions on

Delos, the Tower of the Winds in Athens, the Stoa of Attalus in the agora of Athens, the plan for the city of Pergamum or city center of Miletus or the Bouleutenon in Miletus, or the Temple of Apollo at Didyma. Temple of Athena Polias at Priene, Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the theatre at Epidaurus, the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens as well as the Temple of Olympian Zeus, or the tholos at Delphi, or the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, or the Erechtheion on the Acropolis, the Porpylaea on the Acropolis, the Parthenon with its Panathenaic frieze. Athen’s acropolis, the temple of Aphaia at Aegina. the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Acragas, the Temple of Hera or Poseidon or Neptune at Paestum, the Temple of Apollo at Corinth, the shrine of Anubis at the Temple of l-latshepsut, Deir al Bahani, or the Lion Gate at Mycenae, or the palace at Mycenae, the palace of Tiryns, the Palace of Minos, Knossos, Crete—which seems like a good place to end though it cannot end there, especially when there is still the Great Zimbabwe Enclosure, the Giza pyramids of Mykerinos, Cheops and Chefren, to say nothing of Ireland’s New Grange passage grave, France’s Essé gallery grave, Malta’s Ggantija temple complex, Scotland’s Skara Brae’s settlement, the Lascaux cave, the Laussel pre-historic rock-cut Venus, or the notion of the Terra Armata hut which is also a good place to end though of course it cannot end there either— [147—Of course, ills impossible to consider any sort of construction, whet her of homes, factories, shops, stores, department stores, market halls, conservatories, exhibition buildings, railway stations, warehouses, and office buildings, exchanges, and banks, hotels, prisons, hospitals, museums, libraries, theatres, churches, bridges, airports, town halls, law courts, ministries, and public offices, Houses of parliament, monuments, parks, even towns, and cities, public works etc., etc., without paying heed to such names as Thomas Hall Beeby, Ricardo Bofill, John Simpson, Steven Holl, Leon Krier, Richard Neutra, Andres Duany, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Ramon Fortet, Daniel Libeskind, Quinlan Terry, Allan Greenberg, Jane B. Drew, Robin Sefert, Frank Gehry, Jean Willerval, Arat Isozaki, Kisho Kurokawa, Gisue and Mojgan Hariri, John Outram, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenmann, Richard Meier, John Hejduk, Aldo Ross!, Herman Hertzberger, Louis E. Fry Si:, LouisE. Fry Jr., LouisE. Fry III, Santiago Calatrava, I. 1W. Pei, Recardo Scofidio, Harry G. Robinson III, Terry Farrell, Bernard Tschumi, Charles F McAfee,_____ Eva Vecsei, the Coop Himmelb!au, Cheryl L. McAfee,

Charles Eames, Simon Rodia, Ray Eames, Ricardo Bofihl, Donald L Stuhl, M. David Lee, Michael Graves, Elizabeth Diller, Charles Moore, Bruno Taut, Robert Traynham Coles, Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, Hans Hollein, Rem Koolhaas, John S. Chase, Harvey B. Gantt, Robert Venturi, James Stirling, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Rienzo Piano, Alvar Aalto, Lou Switzer, Roberta Washington, .1 Max Bond Jr., Robert Keirnard, Luigi Nervi, Jorn Utzon, Eero Saarinen, Buckminster Fuller, Louis Kahn, Roderick Lincoln Knox, Paul Rudolph, James M. Whitley, William N Whitley, R. Joyce Whitley, Paul G Devrouax, Charles Duke, Marshall E.

Purnel!, Robert P Madison, Sir Leslie Martin, Harry L Overstreet, Sir Denys Lasdun, Sir Basil Spence, Peter Smithson, James Gowan, Gordon MattaClark, Howard F Sims, Harold K Varner, Roger W Margerum, Harry Simmons Jr., Wendelli Campbell, Susan M. Campbell, Jwnes Stirling, Oscar Niemeyer, Norma Merrick Skiarek, U Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, William .1 Stanley, Ivenue LoveStanley, Vernon A. Williams, Leslie A.

Williams, Cornelius Henderson, Paul Revere Williams, Boris Mikhailovich lofan, Vladimir Alekssevich Shchuko, VG. Gelfreikh, Ilya Golosov.

Konstantin Me!nikov, Moses McKissack, — William S. Pittman, John A.

Lankford, El Lissitzky, Aleksandr, and Viktor Vesnin, Serge Chermayeff Charles Holden, Sir John Burnet, Edwin Rickards, H. V Lanchester, Wilhelm Kreis, Giles Gilbert Scott, Frederick Gibberd, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Giovanni Muzio, Angiolo Mazzoni, Giuseppe Pagano, 0. Frezzotti, Marcello Piacentini, Plo Piacentini, Antonio Sant’Elia, Cesare Bazzani, Povi Baumann, Kay Fisker, G. B. Hagen, Edvard Thomsen, Carl Petersen, Lars Sonck, Sigfrid Ericson, Herman Gesellius, Armas Lindgren, Kaare Klint, Peder Vilhelm JensenKlint, Lars Israel Wahiman, Ragnar Ostberg, Martin Nyrop, Roger-Henri Expert, Paul Tournon, André Lurcat, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Pierre Chareau, Henri Sauvage, Tony Gamier, Francois Hennebique, Auguste Perret, René Sergent, Arthur Davis, C’harles-Frédéric Mewés, Walter Johnnes Kruger, Albert Speer, Heinrich Tessenow, Emil Fahrenkamp, Gerrit Rietveld, Willem Marinus Dudok, JJ.P Oud, Adolf Loos, László MoholyNagy, Theo van Doesburg, Hannes Meyer, Walter Gropius, Johan van der Mey, Michel de Klerk, Fritz HOger, Otto Bartning, Dominikus Böhm, Eric Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut, Max Berg, Hans Poelzig, Bruno Schmitz, Peter Behrens, Paul Bonatz, Fritz Schumacher, Theodor Fischer, Alfred Messel, Ludwig Hoffman, William Lescase, George Howe,

Albert Kahn, William Van Alen, Paul Gmelin, Stephen F Voorhees, Andrew C Mackenzie, Ralph Thomas Walker, John Mead Howells, Washington Roebling, Raymond Hood, Cass Gilbert, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, James Gamble Rogers, Ralph Adams Cram, John F Staub, Diego Suarez, Burrall Hoffmann, Paul Chalfin, John Russell Pope, Henry Bacon, John Bakewell, Arthur Brown, Horace Trumbauer, Henry Mather Greene, John Lyman Silsbee, Francesc Berenguer y Mestres, Luis Domènech y Montaner, Antoni Gaudi i Cornet, Raimond D ‘Aronco, Giuseppe Sommaruga, Otto Wagner, Henri van de Velde, Theodor Lipps, August Endell, Ernst Ludwig Haus, CF.A. Voysey, Charles Harrison Townsend, Herman Muthesius, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Charles Plumet, Jules Lavirotte, Frantz Jourdain, Georges Chedanne, Xavier Schoellkopf Hector Guimard, Henrik Pet rus Berlage, Paul Hankar, Victor Horta, Paul Sédille, Jules Saulnier, Cass Gilbert, John Smithmeyer, Paul PeIz, Stanford White, William Rutherford Mead, Charles Atwood, Charles Follen McKim, Louis Henry Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, John Root, William Le Baron Jenney, Frank Furness, Henry Van Brunt, William Ware, John Sturgis, Charles Brigham, Edward Potter, Peter B. Wright, _____ Richard Morris Hunt, Arthur Gilman, Gridley Bryant, Alfred B. Mullet, James Renwick, Richard Upjohn, Thomas Ustick Walter, Thomas Cole, Isaiah Rogers, Alexander Jackson Davis, Ithiel Town, Robert Mills, William Strickland, Benjamin Latrobe, Petrus Josephus Hubertus Cuypers, Joseph Poelaert, Ernst Ziller, Theophilus Eduard Hansen, Hans Christian Hansen, Vladimir Ossipovich Sherwood, Konstantin Andreevich Thon, Osip Beauvais, Afanasy Grigoryev, Dornenico Gilardi, Vasili Petrovich Stasov, Auguste Ricard de Montferrand, Karl Ivanovich Rossi, Adrian Dmitrievich Zakharov, Thomas de Thomon, Andrei Nikforovich Voronikhin, Antonio Corazzi, Johan Albrecht EhrenstrOm, Bertel Thorwaidsen, Carl Ludwig Engel, Christian Heinrich Grosch, Goulieb Birkner Bindesboll, Christian Frederick Hansen, Emilio de Fabris, Camillo Boito, Pietro Estense Selvatico, Guglielmo Calderini, Gaetano Koch, Marion Crawford, Giuseppe Men goni, Giuseppe Valadier, Raffaello Stern, Braccio Nuovo, Alessandro Antonelli, Carlo Amati, Antonio Niccolini, Pietro Bianchi, Giuseppe Jappelli, Antonio Selva, Eduard Riedel, Georg von Dollmann, Julius Raschdorf Paul Wallot, Got ifried Semper, Fredrich von Gartner, Leo von Klenze, Karl Fredrich Schinkel, Heinrich Hübsch, John Francis Bentley, Philip Webb, Basil

Champneys, Richard Norman Shaw, Owen Jones, Sir Joseph Paxton, George Edmund Street, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, E. M. Barry, Sir Charles Barry, Charles Robert Cockerell, Robert Smirke, William Wilkins, Sir John Soane, Richard Payne Knight, Hwnphry Repton, John Nash, Gustave Effel, Ferdinand Dutert, I CA. Alphan4 Victor Ballard, Jean-Louise-Charles Gamier, Joseph AugusteEmile Vaudremer, Leon Vaudoyer, Louis-Joseph Duc, Pierre-FrancoisHenri Labrousie, JacqueIgnace Hittorff A.F T Chaigrin, Charles Percier, Francois-Léonard Fontaine, Benjamin Lairobe, George Hadfleld, Etienne Hallet, William Thornton, Charles Bullfinch, Thomas Jefferson, Peter Harrison, Charles Cameron, Mat vei Feodorovich Kazakow, Giacomo Quarenghi, Ivan Yegorovich Starov, Vasili Ivanovich Bazhenov, Fredrik Magnus Piper, Carl August Ehrensvärd, Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain, Jakub Kubicki, Christian Piotr Aigner, Dominik Merlini, Friedrich Gilly, Heinrich Jussow, PierreMichel d’Ixnard, Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorf Giuseppe Piermarini, Michelangelo Simonetti, Pietro Camporese, ClaudeNicolas Ledoux, Etienne-Louis Boullée, Charles de Wailly, Marie- Joseph Peyre, Victor Louis, Pierre Rousseau, JacquesGermain Soufflot, Jacques Gabriel, John Wood, George Dance, James Wyatt, James Gandon, William Chambers, Robert Adam, William Kent, Carlo Marchionni, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Niccolô Nasoni, Mateus Vicente de Oliveira, Johann Friedrich Ludwig, RodrIguez Tizón Ventura, Francois Hurtado Izquierdo, Leonardo de Figueroa, James Gibbs, Carlo Fontana, Thomas Archer, Nicholas Hawksmoor, John Vanbrugh, William Talman, Christopher Wren, Mauhäus Daniel Pöppelmann, Joseph Schmuzer, Peter Thum, Dominikus Zimmermanm, Cosmas Damian Asam, Egid Quinn, Baithasar Newnann, Jakob Prandtauer, Johann San tini Aichel, Lucas von Hildebrandt, Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Enlach, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Enlach, Emmanuel Héré de Corny, Germain Boffrand, Jules HardouinMansart, Louis Le Vau, GB. Vaccarini, Andrea Palma, Andrea Giganti, Tommaso Napoli, Ferdinando Fuga, Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, Cosimo Fanzago, Carlo Francesco Dotti, Francesco Maria Ricchino, Galeazzo Alessi, Bartolommeo Bianco, Turin Guarino Cluarini, Filippo Juvarra, Bernardo Vittone, Nicola Salvi, Carlo Fan tana, Alessandro Specchi, Andrea Pozzo, Pietro do Cortona, Francesco Borromini, Giovanni Battista Montano, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Inigo Jones, Robert Smy:hson, Jacob van Campen, Bonfaz Wolmut, Alevisio Novi, Jakob

Wolf Alberlin Tretsch, Konrad Krebs, Alonso de Avarrubias, Enrique Egas, Jacques Lemercier, Solomon de Brosse, Francois Mansart, Philibert de l’Orme, Pierre Lescot, Gilles le Breton, Pirro Ligorio, Andrea Palladio, Martini Bassi, Galeazzo Alessi Domenico Fontana, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Jacopo Tatti Sansovino, Michele Sanmicheli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Giulio Romano, BaIdassare Peruzzi, Raffaello Sanzio, Antonia da San gallo the Younger, Antonia da Sangallo the Elder, Donato Bramante, Filarete, Leonardo do Vinci, Leon BattLcta Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Simon of Cologne, Juan Guas, Juan Gil de HontanOn, Arnolfo di Cambio, Lorenzo Maitani, Benedikt Ried, Konrad Heinzelmann, Nicolaus Eseler, Jorg Ganghofer, Ulrich von Ensingen, Wentzel Roriczer, Heinrich von Brunsberg, Hans von Burghausen, Peter Parler, Diogo Arruda, Diogo Boytac, William Wynford, Robert Janyns, Henry Yevele, Henry de Reynes, William the Englishman, William of Sens, Jean de Loubinère, Bishop Bernardde Castanet (P), Jean d’Orbais, Abbot Suger (F), Nicola Pisano, Pedro Petriz, Gunzo, Apollodorus of Damascus, Severus, Celer, Daedalus— though here the names of the authors of buildings have begun to fade into the names of Patrons (F), whether Bishops, Kings, Emperors, Dynasties, eventually myth, and finally time— [148—See Exhibit One.]

Sebastiano Pérouse de Montcbs, however, has written a sizable

examination on the changes within the house; positing that they in fact follow Andrea Palladio’s structural derivations.

By way of a quick summary, Palladian grammar seeks to organize space

through a series of strict rules. As Palladio proved, it was possible to use his system to generate a number of layouts such as Villa Badoer, Villa Emo, Villa Ragona, Villa Poiana, and of course Villa Zeno. In essence there are only eight steps:

1. Grid definition

2. Exterior-wall definition

3. Room layout

4. Interior-wall realignment

5. Principal entrances—porticos and exterior wall inflections

6. Exterior ornamentation—columns

7. Windows and Doors

8. Termination [149—For an exemplary look at Palladian grammar in

action, see William J. Mitchell’s The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition [Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), p. 152-181. As well as Andrea Palladio’s The Four Books of Architecture (1570) trans. Isaac Ware (New York: Dover, 1965).]

Pérouse de Montclos relies on these steps to delineate how Navidson’s

house was (1.0) first established (2.0) mited (3.0) sub-divided and (4.0) so on. He attempts to convince the reader that the constant refiguration of doorways and walls represents a kind of geological loop the process of working out all possible forms, most likely ad infinitum, but never settling because, as he states i his conclusion, “unoccupied space will never cease to change simply because nothing forbids it to do so. The continuous internal alterations only prove that such a house is necessarily uninhabited.” [150— Sebastiano Pérouse de Montclos’ Palladian Grammar and Metaphysical Appropriations: Navidson’s Villa Malcontenta (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1996), p. 2,865. Also see Aristides Quine’s Concatenating Corbusier (New York: American Elsevier, 1996) in which Quine applies Corbusier’s Five Points to the Navidson house thereby proving, in his mind, the limitations and hence irrelevance of Palladian grammar. While these conclusions are somewhat questionable, they are not without merit. In particular, Quine’s treatment of the Villa Savoye and the Domino House deserves special attention. Finally consider Gisele Urbanati Rowan Lell’s far more controversial piece “Polypod Or Polylith?: The Navidson Creation As Mechanistic/ Linguistic Model” in Abaku Banner Catalogue, v. 198, January 1996, p. 515-597, in which she treats the “house-shifts” as evidence of polylithic dynamics and hence structure. For a point of reference see Greenfield and Schneider’s “Building a Tree Structure. The Development of Hierarchical Complexity and Interrupted Strategies in Children’s Construction Activity” in Developmental Psychology, 13, 1977, p. 299-

313.]

Thus, as well as prompting formal inquiries into the ever elusive

internal shape of the house and the rules governing those shifts, Sebastiano Pérouse de Montclos also broaches a much more commonly discussed

matter: the question of occupation. Though few will ever agree on the meaning of the configurations or the absence of style in that place, no one has yet to disagree that the labyrinth is still a house. [151—Which also happens to maintain a curious set of constants. Consider —

Temperature: 32F ±8.

Light: absent.

Silence: complete * Air Movement (i.e. breezes, drafts etc.): none True North: DNE

* With the exception of the ‘growl’.]

Therefore the question soon arises whether or not it is someone’s house

Though if so whose? Whose was it or even whose is it? Thus giving voice to another suspicion: could the owner still be there? Questions which echo the snippet of gospel Navidson alludes to in his letter to Karen [152—See

Chapter XVII.] —St. John, chapter 14—where Jesus says:

In my Father’s house are many rooms: if it were not so, I would have

told you. I go to prepare a place for you…

Something to be taken literally as well as ironically. [153—Also not to

be forgotten is the terror Jacob feels when he encounters the territories of the divine: “How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:17)]

It is not surprising then that when Holloway’s earn finally begins the

long trek back, they discover the staircase is much farther away than they had anticipated, LS if in their absence the distances had stretched. They are forced to camp for a fourth night thus necessitating strict rationing of food, water, and light (i.e. batteries). On the morning of the fifth day, they reach the stairs and begin the long climb up. Aside from the fact that the diameter of the Spiral Staircase is now more than seven hundred and fifty feet wide, the ascent moves fairly quickly.

During the walk down, Holloway had prudently decided to leave

provisions along the way, thus lightening their load and at the same time allocating needed supplies for their return. Though Holloway had initially estimated they would need no more than eight hours to reach the first of these caches, it ends up taking them nearly twelve hours. At last at their destination, hey quickly set up camp and collapse in their tents. Oddly enough, despite their exhaustion, all of them find it very difficult to fall asleep.

On the sixth day, they still make an early start. [‘he knowledge that they

are heading back keeps Wax and Jed’s spirits elevated. Holloway, however, remains uncharacteristically sallow, revealing what critic Melisa fao Janis calls “a sign of [his] deepening, atrabilious obsession with the unpresent.” [154—Melisa Tao Janis’ “Hollow Newel Ruminations” in The Anti-Present Trunk, ed. by Philippa Frake (Oxford: Phaidon, 1995), P. 293.]

Nevertheless, the climb still proceeds smoothly, intil Holloway

discovers the remains of one of their foot long neon markers barely clinging to the wall. It has been badly mauled, half of the fabric torn away by some unimaginable claw. Even worse their next cache has been gutted. Only traces of the plastic water jug remain along with a few scattered pieces of PowerBars. Fuel for the campfire stove has completely disappeared.

“That’s nice,” Wax murmurs. “Holy shit!” Jed hisses.

Emily O’Shaugnessy points out in The Chicago ntropy Journal the

importance of this discovery: “Here Lt last are the first signs—evidenced ironically enough by he expurgation of a neon sign and the team’s proviions —of the house’s powerful ability to exorcise any Lnd all things from its midst.” [F—Emily O’Shaugnessy, “Metaphysical Emetic” in Chicago Entropy Journal, (Memphis, Tennessee, v. 182, n. 17, May, 1996.]

Holloway Roberts is not nearly as analytical. He responds as a hunter

and the image that fills the frame is a weapon. Kneeling beside his pack, we watch as he pulls out his Weatherby 300 magnum and carefully inspects both the bolt and the scope mounts before loading five 180 grain Nosier Partition® rounds in the magazine. As he chambers a sixth round, a glimmer of joy flickers across Holloway’s features, as if finally something about that place has begun to make sense.

Fueled by the discovery, Holloway insists on exploring at least some of

the immediate hallways branching off the staircase. Soon enough he is stalking doorways, leading the dancing moon of Jed’s flashlight with the barrel of his rifle, and always listening. Corners, however, only reveal more corners, and Jed’s light only targets ashen walls, though soon enough they all begin to detect that inimitable growl, [155—In describing the Egyptian labyrinth, Pliny noted how “when the doors open there is a terrifying rumble of thunder within.”] X like calving glaciers, far off in the distance, which at least in the mind’s eye, inhabits a thin line where rooms and passageways must finally concede to become a horizon.

“The growl almost always comes like the rustle of a high mountain

wind on the trees,” Navidson explained later. “You hear it first in the distance, a gentle rumble, slowly growing louder as it descends, until finally it’s all around you, sweeping over you, and then past you, until it’s gone, a mile away, two miles away, impossible to follow.” [156—The Last Interview.]

Esther Newhost in her essay “Music as Place in The Navidson Record”

provides an interesting interpretation of this sound: “Goethe once remarked in a letter to Johann Peter Eckermann March 23, 1829]: ‘I call architecture frozen music.” [157—Ich die Baukunsi elne ersiarrie Musik nenne.] The unfreezing of form in the Navidson house releases that music.

Unfortunately, since it contains all the harmonies of time and change, only the immortal may savor it. Mortals cannot help but fear those curmurring walls. After all do they not still sing the song of our end?” [158—Esther Newhost’s “Music as Place in The Navidson Record” in The Many Wall Fugue, ed. Eugenio Rosch & Joshua Scholfield (Farnborough: Greg International, 1994), p. 47.]

For Holloway, it is impossible to merely accept the growl as a quality of

that place anymore. Upon seeing the torn marker and their lost water, he seems to transfigure the eerie sound into an utterance made by some definitive creature, thus providing him with something concrete to pursue.

Holloway almost seems drunk as he rushes after the sound, failing to lay own any fishing line or hang neon markers, rarely even topping to rest.

Jed and Wax do not draw the same conclusion as Holloway. They

realize, and quite accurately too, that even though they are traveling farther and farther away from the staircase, they are not getting any closer to the source of the growl. They insist on turning around. Holloway first promises to investigate just a little while longer, then resorts to goading, calling them anything from “fucking pussies” and “cowards” to “jack- holes” and “come-guzzling shit-eating cunts.” Suffice it to say this last comment does not steel Wax and Jed’s resolve to hunt the great beast.

They both stop.

Enough is enough. They are tired and more than a little concerned.

Their bodies ache from the constant cold. Their nerves have been eviscerated by the constant darkness. ‘hey are low on battery power (i.e. light), neon markers, and fishing line. Furthermore, the destroyed cache of supplies could indicate their other caches are in jeopardy. I that proves to be the case, they will not have enough water to even make it back within radio range of Navidson.

“We’re heading home now,” Jed snaps. “Fuck you,” Holloway barks. “I give the orders ere, and I say no one’s

going anywhere yet.” Which considering the circumstances are pretty bizarre words be hearing in such regions of dark.

“Look dude,” Wax tries, doing his best to lure Holloway over to their

side of sense. “Let’s just check in o we can resupply and, you know… uh … get more guns.”

“I will not abort this mission” Holloway responds sharply, jabbing an

angry finger at the twenty-six year Id from Aspen, Colorado.

Easily as much attention has been given to Holloway’s use of the word

“abort” as to Navidson’s use of le word “outpost.” The implication in “abort” is the failure to attain a goal—the prey not killed, the peak not limbed. As if there could have been a final objective in that place. Initially Holloway’s only goal was to reach ie bottom of the staircase (which he achieved). Whether it was the growl or the expurgating qualities of e house or something entirely else, Holloway decided redefine that goal mid-way.

Jed and Wax, however, understand that to begin hunting some elusive presence now is just the same as suicide. Without another word, they both turn around and start heading back to the stairs.

Holloway refuses to follow them. For a while, he rants and raves,

screaming profanities at a blue streak, until finally and abruptly, he just storms off by himself, vanishing into the blackness. It is another peculiar event which is over almost before it starts. A sudden enfilade of “fuck you’s” and “shit-heads” followed by silence. [159—This is not the first time individuals exposed to total darkness in an unknown space have suffered adverse psychological effects, Consider what happened to an explorer entering the Sarawak Chamber discovered in the Multi mountains In Borneo. This chamber measures 2,300ft long, 1 ,300ft wide, averages a height of 230ft, and is large enough to contain over 17 football fields. When first entering the chamber, the party of explorers kept close to a wall assuming incorrectly that they were following a long, winding passageway.

It was only when they chose to return by striking straight out into that blackness—expecting to run into the opposite wall—that they discovered the monstrous size of that cavern: “So the trio marched Out into the dark expanse, maintaining a compass course through a maze of blocks and boulders until they reached a level, sandy plain, the signature of an underground chamber. The sudden awareness of the immensity of the black void caused one of the cavers to suffer an acute attack of agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces. None of the three would later reveal who panicked, since silence on such matters is an unwritten law among cavers.” Planet Earth: Underground Worlds p. 26-27.

Of course, Holloway’s reactions exceed a perfectly understandable case

of agoraphobia.]

Back on the staircase, Jed and Wax wait for Holloway to cool off and

return. When several hours pass and there is still no sign of him, they make a brief foray into the area, calling out his name, doing everything in their power to locate him and bring him back. Not only do they not find him, they do not come across a single neon marker or even a shred of fishing line. Holloway has run off blind.

We watch as Jed and Wax make camp and try to force themselves to

sleep for a few hours. Perhaps they hope time will magically reunite the team. But the morning of the seventh day only brings more of the same. No sign of Holloway, a terrifying shortage of supplies, and a very ugly decision to make.

Hank Leblarnard has devoted several pages on the guilt both men

suffered when they decided to head back without Holloway. [160—Hank Leblarnard’s Griefs Explorations (Atlanta: More Blue Publications, 1994).] Nupart Jhunisdakazcriddle also analyzes the tragic nature of their action, pointing out that in the end, “Holloway chose his course. Jed and Wax waited for him and even made a noble effort to find him. At 5:02 A.M., as the Hi 8 testifies, their only option was to return without him.” [161— Nupart Jhunisdakazcriddle’s Killing Badly, Dying Wise (London: Apophrades Press, 1996), p. 92.]

As Jed and Wax resume their climb back up the spiral Staircase, they

discover every neon marker they ,ft behind has been torn apart. Furthermore the higher they get, the more the markers have been devoured. Around this time, Jed also begins to notice how more than a few of his buttons have vanished. Strips of velcro have fallen off his parka, shoe laces have shredded forcing him to bind his boots together with duck tape. Amazingly enough, even his pack frame has “crumbled”—the word Jed uses.

“It’s kind of scary” Wax mutters in the middle of a long ramble. “Like

you stop thinking about something and it vanishes. You forget you have pocket zippers and pow they’re gone. Don’t take nothing for granted ere.”

Jed keeps wondering aloud: “Where the hell is [Holloway]?” and

silence keeps trying to mean an answer.

An hour later, Jed and Wax reach another cache, laced out of the way

against the wall at the far end of a air, near the entrance to some unexplored corridor. Nothing remains of the food and fuel but the jug of rater is perfectly intact. Wax is back for a second chug, ‘hen the crack of a rifle drops him to the floor, blood immediately gushing from his left armpit.

“Oh my god! Oh my god!” Wax screams. “My arm—Oh god Jed help

me, I’m bleeding!” Jed immediately crouches next to Wax’s side and applies pressure to e wound. Moments later, Holloway emerges from the ark corridor with his rifle in hand. He seems just as shocked by the sight of these two as he is by the sight of the stairs.

“How the hell did I get here?” he blurts out incoherently. “I thought it

was that, that thing. Fuck. It was that thing. I’m sure of it. That awful fucking… fuck.”

“Don’t stand there. Help him!” Jed yells. This seems to snap Holloway

out of his trance—at least for a little while. He helps Jed peal off Wax’s jacket and treat the wound. Fortunately they are not unprepared. Jed as a medical supply kit loaded with gauze, ace bandages, disinfectant, ointments, and some painkillers. He forces two pills into Wax’s mouth but the ensuing cut shows that only some of Wax’s agony has subsided.

Jed starts to tell Holloway what they will have to do in order to carry

Wax the remainder of the way up.

“Are you crazy?” Holloway suddenly shouts. “I can’t go back now. I

just shot someone.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Jed tries to say as calmly as

possible. “It was an accident.”

Holloway sits down. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll go to jail. I’ll lose

everything. I have to think.”

“Are you kidding me? He’ll die if you don’t help me carry him!” “I can’t go to prison,” Holloway mumbles, more to himself now than to

either Wax or Jed. “I just can’t.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jed says, starting to raise his voice. “You’re not

gonna go to jail. But if you sit there and let Wax die, for that they’ll lock you up for life. And I’ll make sure they throw away the fucking key. Now get up and help me.”

Holloway does struggle to his feet, but instead of giving Jed a hand, he

just walks away, disappearing once again into that impenetrable curtain of black, leaving Jed to carry and care for Wax by himself. For whatever reason, departure suddenly became Holloway’s only choice. Une solution politique honorable. [162—“An honorable political solution’—and as usual, pretentious as all fuck. Why French? Why not English? It also doesn’t make much sense. Nothing about Holloway’s choice or Jed’s request seems even remotely political.]

Jed does not get very far with Wax before two bullets smash into a

nearby wall. Holloway’s helmet light reveals that he is standing on the opposite side of the stairway.

Jed instantly turns off his flashlight and with Wax on his back scrambles

up a few stairs. Then by rapidly clicking his flashlight on and off, he discovers a narrow hallway branching off the stairway into unseen depths.

Unfortunately another shot instantly answers this fractionary bit of vision, the bang echoing over and over again through the pitch.

As we can see Jed does succeed in dragging Wax into this new corridor,

the next Hi 8 clip capturing him with his flashlight back on, moving through a series of tiny rooms. Occasionally we hear the faint crack of a rifle shot in the distance, causing Jed to push ahead even faster, darting through as many chambers as possible, until his breath rasps painfully in and out of his lungs and he is forced to put his friend down, unable for the moment to go any farther.

Jed just slides to the floor, turns off his light, and starts to sob.

At 3:31 A.M. the camera blips on again. Jed has moved Wax to another

room. Realizing the camcorder may be his only chance to provide an explanation for what happened, Jed now speaks directly into it, reiterating the events leading up to Holloway’s break with reality and how exhausted, pursued, and ultimately lost, Jed - has still somehow managed to carry, drag, and push Wax to a relatively safe place. Unfortunately, he no longer has any idea where they are:

“So much for my sense of direction. I’ve spent the last hour looking for

a way back to the staircase. No luck. The radio is useless. If help doesn’t come soon, he’ll die. I’ll die.”

Barely caught in the frame, we can just make out Jed’s fist rapping

incessantly against the floor, which as it turns out, has the exact same timbre as those knocks heard back in the living room. Alan P. Winnett, however, remarks on one notable difference:

Curiously enough, despite the similarity of intonation and pitch, the

pattern does not even remotely resemble the three short — three long— three short SOS signal heard by the Navidson & Carlos Avital has suggested the house itself not only carried the signal an incredible distance but interpreted it as well. Maria Hulbert disagrees, positing that the rhythm of the knocking hardly matters: “By the eighth day, the absence of any word from Holloway’s team was already a distress signal in and of itself.” [163— Alan P. Winnett’s Heaven’s Door (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

1996), p. 452. Also see Carlos Avital’s widely read though somewhat prolix pamphlet Acoustic Intervention (Boston: Berklee College of Music, 1994) as A’eil as Maria Hulbert’s “Knock Knock, Who Cares?” in The Phenomenology of Coincidence in The Navidson Record (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).]

Regardless of its meaning and the reasons behind its transfiguration, Jed

only produces this strange tattoo for a short time before returning to the needs of his badly wounded friend. [164—Once, in the dining hail of a certain boarding school—it was my second and nothing fancy—I met a ghost. I’d been talking with two friends, but due to all the seven o’clock din, the place being packed with fellow gorgers, it was almost impossible to hear much of what anyone said, unless you shouted, and we weren’t shouting because our conversation had to be kept secret. Not that what we said offered a whole lot of anything new. Not even variation.

Girls.

That was all. One word to pretty much sum up the whole of all we cared

about. Week in, week out. Where to meet them. What to say to them. How not to need them. That was unattractive. Girls could never know you needed them, which was why our conversation had to be kept secret, because that’s all it was about: needing them.

Back then, I was living life like a ghost, though not the ghost I’m about

to tell you about. I was all numb & stupid and dazed too I guess, a pretty spooky silentiary for matters I knew by heart but could never quite translate for anyone I knew let alone myself. I constantly craved the comforts of feminine attention, even though the thought of actually getting a girlfriend, one who was into me and wanted to be with me, seemed about as real as any dozen of the myths I’d been reading about in class.

At least the same guy who explained my attachment to junk, The

Counselor For Disaffected You—I mean Youth—, helped me see how influenced I remained by my past.

Unfortunately it was a lesson delivered tongue in cheek, as he

ultimately believed I’d made most of my past up just to impress him.

About one thing he was right, my mother wasn’t actually dead yet.

Telling everyone she was though made my life far less complicated. I don’t think anyone at the boarding school, including my friends, teachers,

certainly not my counselor, ever found out the truth, which was fine with me. That’s the way I liked it.

My arms, however, were another story. It’s kinda funny, but despite my

current professional occupation, I don’t have any tattoos. Just the scars, the biggest ones of course being the ones you know about, this strange seething melt running from the inside of both elbows all the way up to the end of both wrists, where—I might as well tell you—a skillet of sizzling corn oil unloaded its lasting wrath on my efforts to keep it from the kitchen floor. ‘You tried to catch it all,’ my mother had often said of that afternoon when I was only four. See, not nearly as dramatic as a Japanese Martial Arts Cult run by Koreans in Indiana. I mean Idaho. Just a dropped pan. That’s all.

As for the rest of the scars, there are too many to start babbling on about

here, jagged half—moon reminders on my shoulders and shins, plenty stippled on my bones, a solemn white one intersecting my eyebrow, another obvious ie still evident in my broken, now discolored front tooth, a central incisor to be more precise, and some ,en deeper than all of the above, telling a tale much longer than anyone has ever heard or probably ever will hear.

All of it true too, though of course scars are much harder to read. Their complex inflections do not resemble the reductive ease of any tattoo, no matter how extensive, colorful or elaborate the design. Scars are the paler pain of survival, received unwillingly and displayed in the language of injury.

My Counselor For Disaffected Youth had no idea what kept me going—

though he never phrased it exactly like that. He just asked me how, in light of all my stories, I’d still managed to sustain myself. I couldn’t answer him.

I know one thing though, whenever I felt particularly bad I’d instantly cling a favorite daydream, one I was willing to revisit constantly, a pretty vivid one too, of a girl, a certain girl, though one I’d yet to meet or even see, whose eyes would sparkle just like the Northern sky I would describe for her when once while sitting on a splintered deck heaving on top of the black-pitch ck of the world, I beheld all the light not of this world.

Which was when, as I was briefly revisiting this me daydream in the

presence of my two friends, I heard a voice in my ear—the ghost—softly saying my name.

By the way, this is what got me on this whole thing in the first place.

The knocking in the house turning this vivid recollection.

“Johnny” she said in a sigh even more gentle than a whisper.

I looked around. No one sitting at my table s saying anything even

remotely like my name. Quite the contrary, their voices were pitched in me egregiously felt debate over something having do with scoring, the details which I know I’ll never call, thrown up amidst the equally loud banter of a hundred plates, glasses, knives and forks clattering here and there, and yes everywhere, serving to quickly dispel my illusion until it happened again—

“Johnny.” For an instant then, I understood she was my ghost, a seventeen year old

with gold braided hair, as wild as a will-o’-the-wisp, encountered many years ago, maybe even in another life, now encountered again, and perhaps here too to find me and restore me to some former self lost on some day no boy can ever really remember—something I write now not really even understanding though liking the sound of it just the same.

“He’s so dreamy. I just love the way he smiles when he talks, even if he

doesn’t say that much.”

Which was when I realized, a moment later, that this Ghost was none

other than the domed ceiling, rising above the dining hall, somehow carrying with particular vividness, from the far wall to my wall, in one magnificent arc, the confession of a girl I would never see or hear again, a confession I could not even respond to—except here, if this counts.

Sadly enough, my understanding of the rare acoustic dynamics in that

hail came a fraction of a second too late, coinciding with the end of dinner, the voice vanishing as suddenly as it appeared, lost in a cumulative leaving, so that even as I continued to scan the distant edge of the dining room or the line forming to deposit trays, I could never find the girl whose expressions or even gestures might match such sentiments.

Of course, ghostly voices don’t just have to rely exclusively on domed

ceilings. They don’t even have to be just voices.

I finally hooked up with Ashley. I went over to her place yesterday

morning. Early. She lives in Venice. Her eyebrows look like flakes of sunlight. Her smile, I’m sure, burnt Rome to the ground. And for the life of me I didn’t know who she was or where we’d met. For a moment I wondered if she was that voice. But before she said even a word, she held my hand and led me through her house to a patio overgrown with banana trees and rubber plants. Black, decomposing leaves covered the ground but a large hammock hung above it all.

We sat down together and I wanted to talk. I wanted to ask her who she

was, where we’d met, been before, but she just smiled and held my hand as we sat down on the hammock and started to swing above all those dead leaves. She kissed me once and then suddenly sneezed, a tiny beautiful sneeze, which made her smile even more and my heart started hurting because I couldn’t share her happiness, not knowing what it was, or why it was or who for that matter I was—to her. So I lay there hurting, even when she sat on top of me, covering me in the folds of her dress, and her with no underwear and me doing nothing as her hands briefly unbuttoned my jeans and pulled me out of my underwear, placing me where it was rough and dry, until she sank down without a gasp, and then it was wet, and she was wet, and we were wet, rocking together beneath a small patch of overcast sky, brightening fast, her eyes watching the day come, one hand kneading her dress, the other hand under her dress needing herself, her blonde hair covering her face, her knees tightening around my ribs, until she finally met that calendrical coming without a sound—the only sign—and then even though I had not come, she kissed me for the last time and climbed out of the hammock and went inside.

Before I left she told me our story: where we’d met—Texas—kissed,

but never made love and this had confused her and haunted her and she had needed to do Lt before she got married which was in four months to man she loved who made a living manufacturing TNT exclusively for a highway construction firm up in Colorado where he frequently went on business trips and where one night, drunk, angry and disappointed he had invited a hooker back to his motel room and so on and who cared and what was I doing there anyway? I Left, considered jerking off, finally got around to Lt back at my place though in order to pop I had to think of Thumper. It didn’t help. I was still hurting, abandoned, drank three glasses of bourbon and fumed on some

weed, then came here, thinking of voices, real and imagined, of ghosts, my ghost, of her, at long last, in this idiotic footnote, when she gently pushed me out her door and I said quietly “Ashley” causing her to stop pushing me and ask “yes?” her eyes bright with something she saw that I could never see though what she saw was me, and me not caring though now at least knowing the truth and telling her the truth: “I’ve never been to Texas.”]

Wax, for his part, tries to be brave, forcing a smile hr the camera, even

if it is impossible to miss how pale ie looks or misunderstand the meaning of his request— ‘Jed, man, I’m so thirsty”—especially since a few seconds earlier he had swallowed a big gulp of water.

No stranger to shock, [ || “The following definition is from Medicine for

Mountaineering, 3rd edition. Edited by James A. Wilkerson, M.D. (Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1985), P. 43:

“Mild shock results from loss of ten to twenty percent of blood volume.

The patient appears pale and his skin feels cool, first over the extremities and later over the trunk. As shock becomes more severe, the patient often complains of feeling cold and he is often thirsty. A rapid pulse and reduced blood pressure may be present. However, the absence of these signs does not indicate shock is not present since they may appear rather late, particularly in previously healthy young adults.

“Moderate shock results from loss of twenty to forty percent of the

blood volume. The signs characteristic of mild shock are present and may become more severe. The pulse is typically fast and weak or ‘thready.’ In addition, blood flow to the kidneys is reduced as the available blood is shunted to the heart and brain and the urinary output declines. A urinary volume of less than 30 cc per hour is a late indication of moderate shock. In contrast to the dark, concentrated urine observed with dehydration, the urine is usually a light color.

“Severe shock results from loss of more than forty percent of the blood

volume and is characterized by signs of reduced blood flow to the brain and heart. Reduced cerebral blood flow initially produces restlessness and agitation, which is followed by confusion, stupor and eventually coma and

death. Diminished blood flow to the heart can produce abnormalities of the cardiac rhythm.”

In his essay “Critical Condition” published in Simple Themes

(University of Washington Press, 1995) Brendan Beinhorn declared that Navidson’s house, when the explorers were within it, was in a state of severe shock. “However without them, it is completely dead. Humanity serves as its life blood. Humanity’s, end would mark the house’s end.” A statement which provoked sociologist Sondra Staff to claim “Critical Condition” was “just another sheaf of Beinhorn bullshit.” (A lecture delivered at Our Lady of the Lake University of San Antonio on June 26,

1996.)] Jed immediately raises Wax’s legs to increase blood flow to the head, uses pocket heaters and a solar blanket to keep him warm, and never stops reassuring him, smiling, telling jokes, promising a hundred happy endings. A difficult task under any circumstances. Nearly impossible when those guttural cries soon find them, the walls too thin to hold any of it back, sounds too obscene to be shut out, Holloway screaming like some rabid animal, no longer a man but a creature stirred by fear, pain, and rage.

“At least he’s far off,” Jed whispers in an effort to console Wax.

But the sound of distance brings little comfort to either one.

Perhaps [165—Mr. Truant refused to reveal whether the following

bizarre textual layout is Zampanô’s or his own. — Ed.]

here

is as good a place as any to consider some of the ghosts haunting The

Navidson Record. And since more than a handful of people have pointed out similarities between Navidson’s film and various commercial productions, it seems worthwhile to at least briefly examine what

distinguishes documentaries from Hollywood releases. [166—In his essay “It Makes No Difference” Film Quarterly v.8, July, 1995, p. 68, Daniel Rosenblum wrote: “In response to the suggestion that the names of the ghosts haunting Navidson’s house are none other than The Shining, Vertigo, 20021, Brazil, Lawrence of Arabia, Poltergeist, Amityville Horror, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Labyrinth, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, Taxi Driver, Crime and Misdemeanors, Repulsion, Fantastic Voyage, Forbidden Planet, C’est arrive pres de chez vous, or even The Abyss, I hasten to point out that each one of the above mentioned movies ultimately resorts to some form of delusion, whether reincarnation, phobia, ascent to godhood, paranoia, desert, reverse affirmation of spiritual perdurability ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, title, totemic assumption, submarine, absence of past, vision, psychosis, technology, ibid, serial killer or aliens. All of which The Navidson Record refuses to indulge.] [167—In her elegantly executed piece entitled “Vertical Influence” reproduced in Origins of Faith (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) p. 261, Candida Hayashi writes: “For that matter, what of literary haunting? Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Stephen King’s “The Breathing Method” in Different Seasons as well as “Tebular” in More Tales, Steve Erickson’s Days Between Stations, John Fante’s The Road to Los Angeles, not to mention Henri Bosco’s L’Antiquaire, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, B. Walton’s Cave of Danger, Jean Genet’s Notre-Dame des Fleurs, Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, John Gardner’s October Light, many stories by Lovecraft, Pynchon’s gator patrol in V, Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” in Ficciones, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Jim Kalin’s One Worm, Sartre’s Huis Clos, or Les Mouches, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Lem’s Solaris, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” or The House of Seven Gables, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. C. Lewis? To say nothing of Brodsky & Utkin, Friday Kahlo’s “Blue House” in Coyoacan, Diego Rivera’s “Nocturnal Landscape: Paisaje Nocturno” (1947), Rachel Whiteread’s House or Charles Ray’s Ink Box, Bill Viola’s Room for St. John

of the Cross or more words by Robert Venturi, Aldo van Eyck, James Joyce, Paolo Portoghesi, Herman Melville, Otto Friedrich Bollnow (Mensch und Raum, 1963), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Phenomenology of Perception, 1962, in which he declares “depth is the most ‘existential’ of all dimensions”)? To all of it, I have only one carefully devised response: Ptooey!”] [168—Aside from cinematic, literary, architectural, or even philosophical ghosts, history also offers a few of its own. Consider two famous expeditions where those involved confronted the unknown under circumstances of deprivation and fear only to soon find themselves caught in a squall of terrible violence.]

I.

On September 20th, 1519 Ferdinand Magellan embarked from Sanlücar

de Barrameda to sail around the globe. The voyage would once and for all prove the world was round and revolutionize people’s thoughts on navigation and trade, but the journey would also be dangerous, replete with enough horror and hardship that in the end it would cost Magellan his life.

In March of 1520 when Magellan’s five vessels reached Patagonia and

sailed into the Bay of St. Julian, things were far from harmonious, Fierce winter weather, a shortage of stores, not to mention the anxiety brought on by the uncertainty of the future, had caused tensions among the sailors to increase, until on or around April Fools Day, which also happened to be Easter Day, Captain Gaspar Quesada of the Concepcion and his servant Luiz de Molino planned and executed a mutiny, resulting in the death of at least one officer and the wounding of many more. [169—While mutiny is not terribly common today, consider the 1973 Skylab mission where astronauts openly rebelled against a mission controller they felt was too imperious. The incident never resulted in violence, but it does emphasize how despite constant contact with the society at home, plenty of food, water, and warmth, and only a slight risk of getting lost, tensions among explorers can still surface and even escalate.

Holloway’s expedition had none of the amenities Skylab enjoyed. 1)

There was no radio contact; 2) they had very little sense of where they were; 3) they were almost out of food and water; 4) they were operating in

freezing conditions; and 5) they suffered the implicit threat of that ‘growl’.] [155—In describing the Egyptian labyrinth, Pliny noted how “when the doors open there is a terrifying rumble of thunder within.”] Unfortunately for Quesada, he never stopped to consider that a man who could marshal an expedition to circle the globe could probably marshal men to retaliate with great ferocity. This gross underestimation of his opponent cost Quesada his life.

Like a general, Magellan rallied those men still loyal to him to retake

the commandeered ships. The combination of his will and his tactical acumen made his success, especially in retrospect, seem inevitable. The mutineer Mendoza of the Victoria was stabbed in the throat. The Santo Antonia was stormed, and by morning the Concepcion had surrendered.

Forty-eight hours after the mutiny had begun, Magellan was again in control. He sentenced all the mutineers to death and then in an act of calculated good-will suspended the sentence, choosing instead to concentrate maritime law and his own ire on the three directly responsible for the uprising: Mendoza’s corpse was drawn and quartered, Juan de Cartagena was marooned on a barren shore and Quesada was executed.

Quesada, however was not hung, shot or even forced to walk the plank.

Magellan had a better idea. Molino, Quesada’s trusty servant, was granted clemency if he agreed to execute his master. Molino accepted the duty and together both men were set in a shallop and directed back to their ship, the Trinidad, to fulfill their destiny. [171—Taken from Zampanô’s journal: “As often as I have lingered on Hudson in his shallop, I have in the late hours turned my thoughts to Quesada and Molino’s journey across those shallow waters, wondering aloud what they said, what they thought, what gods came to keep them or leave them, and what in those dark waves they finally saw of themselves? Perhaps because history has little to do with those minutes, the scene survives only in verse: The Song of Quesada and Molino by [XXXX].[172—Illegible.] I include it here in its entirety.” [175—See Appendix E.]

Then: “Forgive me please for including this. An old man’s mind is just as

likely to wander as a young man’s, but where a young man will forgive the stray, [177—For instance, youth’s peripatetic travail’s in The PXXXXXXX Poems; a perfect example why errors should be hastily exised] [178—i.e.

The Pelican Poems.] [179—See Appendix II-B. — Ed.] an old man will cut it out. Youth always tries to fill the void, an old man learns to live with it. It took me twenty years to unlearn the fortunes found in a swerve. Perhaps this is no news to you but then I have killed many men and I have both legs and I don’t think I ever quite equaled the bald gnome Error who comes from his cave with featherless ankles to feast on the mighty dead.”] [173— You got me. [176—See Appendix B.] Gnome aside, I don’t even know how to take ‘I’ve killed many men.’ Irony? A confession? As I already said ‘You got me.’] [174—For reasons entirely his own, Mr. Truant de-struck the last six lines In footnote 171. — Ed.]

Like Magellan, Holloway led an expedition into the unknown. Like

Magellan, Holloway faced a mutiny. And like the captain who meted out a penalty of death, Holloway also centered the cross-hairs upon those who had spurned his leadership. However unlike Magellan, Holloway’s course was in fact doomed, thus necessitating a look at Henry Hudson’s fate.

II.

By April of 1610, Hudson left England in his fourth attempt to find the

northwest passage. He headed west across arctic waters and eventually ended up in what is known today as the Hudson Bay. Despite its innocuous sounding name, back in 1610 the bay was Hell in ice. Edgar M. Bacon in his book Henry Hudson (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907) writes the following:

On the first of November the ship was brought to a bay or inlet far down

into the south-west, and hauled aground; and there by the tenth of the month she was frozen in. Discontent was no longer expressed in whispers.

The men were aware that the provisions, laid in for a limited number of months, were running to an end, and they murmured that they had not been taken back for winter quarters to Digges Island, where such stores of wild fowl had been seen, instead of beating about for months in “a labyrinth without end.

[italics added for emphasis]

This labyrinth of blue ice drifting in water cold enough to kill a man in a

couple of minutes tested and finally outstripped the resolve of Hudson’s crew. Where Magellan’s men could fish or at least enjoy the cove of some habitable shore, Hudson’s men could only stare at shores of ice. [180— Though written almost two hundred years after Hudson’s doomed voyage, it is hard not to think of Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, especially this fabled moment—

With sloping masts and dripping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe, And forward bends his head, The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as Emerald.

The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing was to be seen.

And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken — The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound!

Till a great sea-bird called the Albatross…

At length did cross an Albatross, Through the fog it came…

This was not some feverish world concocted in a state of delirium but a

very real place which Hudson had faced despite the evident terror it inflicted upon everyone, especially his crew. Nor was such terror vanquished by the modern age. Consider the diary entry made in 1915 by Reginald James, expedition physicist for Shackleton’s Endurance which was trapped and finally crushed by pack ice off the coast of Antarctica in the Weddell Sea: “A terrible night with the ship sullen dark against the sky & the noise of the pressure against her… seeming like the cries of a living creature.” See also Simon Alcazaba’s Historic Conditions (Cleveland: Annwyl Co., Inc., 1963) as well as Jack Denton Scott’s “Journey Into Silence” Playboy, August 1973, p. 102.]

Inevitably, whispers rose to shouts until finally shouts followed action.

Hudson, along with his son and seven others, was forced into a shallow without food and water. They were never heard from again, lost in that labyrinth without end. [170—Also see The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XX VIII (San Francisco: The History Company, Publishers, 1886).]

Like Hudson, Holloway found himself with men who, short on reserves

and faith, insisted on turning back. Like Hudson, Holloway resisted. Unlike Hudson, Holloway went willingly into that labyrinth.

Fortunately for audiences everywhere, only Hudson’s final moments

continue to remain a mystery.

For one thing, Hollywood films rely on sets, actors, expensive film

stock, and lush effects to recreate a story. Production value coupled with the cultural saturation of trade gossip help ensure a modicum of disbelief, thus reaffirming for the audience, that no matter how moving, riveting, or terrifying a film may be, it is still only entertainment. Documentaries, however, rely on interviews, inferior equipment, and virtually no effects to document real events. [181—Consider Stephen Mamber’s definition of

cinema vérité which seems an almost exact description of how Navidson made his film:

Cinema vérité is a strict discipline only because it is in many ways to

simple, so “direct.” The filmmaker attempts to eliminate as much as possible the barriers between subject and audience.. These barriers are technical (large crews, studio sets, tripod-mounted equipment, special lights, costumes and makeup), procedural (scripting, acting, directing), and structural (standard editing devices, traditional forms of melodrama, suspense, etc.). Cinema vérité is a practical working method based upon a faith of unmanipulated reality, a refusal to tamper with life as it presents itself. Any kind of cinema is a process of selection, but there is (or should be) all the difference in the world between the cinema vérité aesthetic and the methods of fictional and traditional documentary film.

Stephen Mamber, Cinema Vérité in America: Studies in Uncontrolled

Documentary (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1974), p. 4.] Audiences are not allowed the safety net of disbelief and so must turn to more challenging mechanisms of interpretation which, as is sometimes the case, may lead to denial and aversion. [182—not included]

While in the past, live footage was limited to the aftermath—the oral

histories given by survivors of photographs taken by pedestrian—these days of the proliferation of affordable video cameras and tapes has created more of an opportunity for someone to record a place wreck or bank robbery as it is actually taking place.

Of course, no documentary is ever entirely absolved from at least the

suspicion that the mise-en-scene may have been carefully designed, actions staged, or lines written and rehearsed—much of which these days is openly carried out under the appellation of “reenactment.”

By now it is common knowledge that Flaherty recreated certain scenes

in Nanook for the camera. Similar accusations have been made against shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos. For the most part, professionals in the field do their best to police, or at least critique, the latest films, well aware that to lose the public’s trust would mean the death rattle for an already besieged art form.

Currently, the greatest threat comes from the area of digital

manipulation. In 1990 in The New York Times, Andy Grundberg wrote:

“In the future, readers of newspaper and magazines will probably view

news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they will be well aware that they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated. Even if news photographers and editors resist the temptations of electronic manipulation, as they are likely to do, the credibility of all reproduced images will be diminished by a climate of reduced expectations. In short, photographs will not seem as real as they once did.” [184—Andy Grundberg, “Ask It No Questions: The Camera Can Lie,” The New York Times, August 12, 1990, Section 2, 1, 29. All of which reiterates in many ways what Marshall McLuhan already anticipated when he wrote: “To say ‘the camera cannot lie’ is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.”]

Also in 1990, Associated Press executive, Vincent Alabiso,

acknowledged the power of digital technology and condemned its use to falsify images:

“The electronic darkroom is a highly sophisticated photo editing tool. It

takes us out of a chemical darkroom where subtle printing techniques such as burning and dodging have long been accepted as journalistically sound.

Today these terms are replaced by ‘image manipulation’ and ‘enhancement.’ In a time when such broad terms could be misconstrued we need to set limits and restate some basic tenets.

“The content of photographs will NEVER be changed or manipulated in

any way.”

A year later, the NPPA (National Press Photographers Association) also

recognized the power of electronic imaging techniques:

“As journalists we believe the guiding principle of our profession is

accuracy: therefore, we believe it is wrong to alter the content of a photograph in a way that deceives the public.

“As photojournalists, we have the responsibility to document society

and to preserve its images as a matter of historical record. It is clear that the emerging electronic technologies provide new challenges to the integrity of photographic images. The technology enables the manipulation of the content of an image in such a way that the change is virtually undetectable.

In light of this, we, the National Press Photographers Association, reaffirm the basis of our ethics: Accurate representation is the benchmark of our profession.” [185—See Chapter 20 in Howard Chapnick’s Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism (University of Missouri Press, 1994.)

Then in 1992, MIT professor William J. Mitchell offered this powerful

summation:

“Protagonists of the institutions of journalism, with their interest in

being trusted, of the legal system, with their need for provably reliable evidence, and of science, with their foundational faith in the recording instrument, may well fight hard to maintain the hegemony of the standard photographic image—but others will see the emergence of digital imaging as a welcome opportunity to expose the aporias in photography’s construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition.” [W—William J. Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth In The Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), p. 8.]

Ironically, the very technology that instructs us to mistrust the image

also creates the means by which to accredit it.

As author Murphy Gruner once remarked:

“Just as is true with Chandler’s Marlowe, the viewer is won over simply

because the shirts are rumpled, the soles are worn, and there’s that ever present hat. These days nothing deserves our faith less than the slick and expensive. Which is how video and film technology comes to us: rumpled or slick.

“Rumpled Technology—capital M for Marlowe—hails from Good

Guys, Radio Shack or Fry’s Electronics. It is cheap, available and very dangerous. One needs only to consider The George Holliday Rodney King Video to recognize the power of such low- end technology. Furthermore, as the recording time for tapes and digital disks increases, as battery life is extended, and as camera size is reduced, the larger the window will grow for capturing events as they occur.

“Slick Technology — capital S for Slick— is the opposite: expensive,

cumbersome, and time consuming. But it too is also very powerful. Digital manipulation allows for the creation of almost anything the imagination can come up with, all in the safe confines of an editing suite, equipped with 24 hour catering and an on site masseuse.” [186—Murphy Gruner’s Document Detectives (New York: Pantheon, 1995), p. 37. [187—One can imagine a group of Documentary Detectives whose sole purpose is to uphold Truth & Truth [Or TNT. Truth And Truth therefore becoming another name for the nitrating of toluene or C7H5N3O6 — not to be confused with C16H10N2O2— in other words one word: trinitrotoluene. TNT [188—Which also stands for Technological Neural Transmitters (TNT) [189—Or what as Lude once pointed out also means Tits And Tail. i.e. also explosive. i.e. orgasmic. i.e. a sudden procreating pun which turns everything into something entirely else, which now as I catch up with myself, where I’ve gone and where I haven’t gone and what I better get back to, may very well have not been a pun at all but plain and simple just the bifurcation of truth, with an ampersand tossed in for unity. A sperm twixt another form of similar unity, and look there’s an echo at hand. The articulation of conflict may very well be a better thing upon which to stand—Truth & Truth ‘z all, after all, or not at all. In other words, just as Zampanô wrote it.] 196 another pun and another story altogether.] telegraphing a weird coalition of sense. On one hand transcendent and lasting and on the other violent and extremely flammable.] by guaranteeing the authenticity of all works. Their seal of approval would create a sense of public faith which could only be maintained if said Documentary Detectives were as fierce as pit bulls and as scrupulous as saints. Of course, this is more the kind of thing a novelist or playwright would deal with, and as I am pointedly not a novelist or playwright I will leave that tale to someone else.]

As Grundberg, Alabiso and Mitchell contend, this impressive ability to

manipulate images must someday permanently deracinate film and video from its now sacrosanct position as “eyewitness.” The perversion of image will make The Rodney King Video inadmissible in a court of law .

Incredible as it may seem, Los Angele s Mayor Bradley’s statement— “Our eyes did not deceive us. We saw what we saw and what we saw was a crime.”—will seem ludicrous. Truth will once again revert to the shady territories of the word and humanity’s abilities to judge its peculiar modalities. Nor is this a particularly original prediction Anything from Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, to Delgado’s Card Tricks, or Lisa Mane “Slit Slit” Bader’s Confession of a Porn Star delve into the increasingly protean nature of a digital universe. In his article “True Grit”, Anthony Lane at The New Yorker claims “grittiness is the most difficult element to construct and will always elude the finest studio magician. Grit, however, does not elude Navidson.” Consider the savage scene captured on grainy 16mm film of a tourist eaten alive by lions in a wildlife preserve in Angola (Traces of Death ) and compare it to the ridiculous and costly comedy Eraser in which several villains are dismembered by alligators. [190— Jennifer Kale told me she’d visited Zampanô around seven times: ‘Me liked me to teach him filmic words. You know, film crit kind of stuff. Straight out of Christian Metz and the rest of that crew. He also liked me to read him some of the jokes I’d gotten on the Internet. Mostly though I just described movies I’d recently seen.’ Eraser was one of them.]

William J. Mitchell offers an alternate description of “grit” when he

highlights Barthe’s observation that reality incorporates “seemingly functionless detail ‘because it is there’ to signal that ‘this is indeed an unfiltered sample of the real. [191—Roland Barthes’ “The Reality Effect,” in French Literary Theory Today ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 11-17.] [192—William J. Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth In The Post-Photographic Era, p. 27.] Kenneth Turan, however, disagrees with Lane’s conclusion: “Navidson has still relied on FIX. Don’t fool yourself into thinking any of this stuff’s true.

Grit’s just grit, and the room stretching is all care of Industrial Light & Magic.”

Ella Taylor, Charles Champlin, Todd McCarthy, Annette Insdort G. 0.

Pilfer, and Janet Maslin, all sidestep the issue with a sentence or two.

However, even serious aficionados of documentaries or “live-footage,” despite expressing wonder over the numerous details suggesting the veracity of The Navidson Record, cannot get past the absolute physical absurdity of the house.

As Sonny Beauregard quipped: “Were it not for the fact that this is a

supreme gothic tale, we’d have bought the whole thing hook-line-and-sinker” [193—Sonny Beauregard’s “Worst of Times” The San Francisco Chronicle, July 4, 1995. C-7, column 2. Difficult to ignore here is the matter of that recent and most disturbing piece of work La Belle Nicoise et Le Beau Chien. As many already know, the film portrayed the murder of a little girl in such comic reality it was instantly hailed as the belle of the ball in the palace of the grotesque, receiving awards at Sundance and Cannes, earning international distribution deals, and enjoying the canonical company of David Lynch, Luis Bufluel, Hieronymus Bosch, Charles Baudelaire, and even the Marquis De Sade, until of course it was discovered that there really was such a little Lithuanian girl and she really was murdered and by none other than the wealthy filmmaker himself. It was a slickly produced snuff film sold as an art house flick. Emir Kusturica’s Underground finally replaced Nicoise as the winner of the Cannes Palm d’Or; an equally absurd and terrifying film though gratefully fictive. About Yugoslavia.

The Navidson Record looks like a gritty, shoestring documentary La

Belle Nicoise et Le Beau Chien looks like a lushly executed piece of cinema. Both pieces are similar in one way: what one could believe one doubts, Nicoise because one depends upon the moral sense of the filmmaker, The Navidson Record because one depends upon the moral sense of the world. Both are assumptions neither film deserves. As Murphy Gruner might have observed: “Rumpled vs. Slick. Your choice.”]

Perhaps the best argument for the authenticity of The Navidson Record

does not come from film critics, university scholars, or festival panel members but rather from the I.R.S. Even a cursory glance at Will Navidson’s tax statements or for that matter Karen’s, Tom’s or Billy

Reston’s, proves the impossibility of digital manipulation. [194—The records were made public in the Phillip Newharte article “The House The

I.R.S. Didn’t Build” published in Seattle Photo Zine v.12, 118, p.92-156.]

They just never had enough money.

Sonny Beauregard conservatively estimates the special effects in The

Navidson Record would cost a minimum of six and a half million dollars.

Taking into account the total received for the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEA Grant, everyone’s credit limit on Visa, Mastercard, Amex etc., etc., not to mention savings and equity, Navidson comes up five and a half million dollars short. Beauregard again: “Considering the cost of special effects these days, it is inconceivable how Navidson could have created his house”

Strangely then, the best argument for fact is the absolute unaffordability

of fiction. Thus it would appear the ghost haunting The Navidson Record, continually bashing against the door, is none other than the recurring threat of its own reality. [195—Despite claiming in Chapter One that the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation of events within the film, Zampanô has still wandered into his own discussion of “the antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank” within The Navidson Record. I have no idea whether it’s on purpose or not. Sometimes I’m certain it is. Other times I’m sure it’s just one big fucking train wreck.]

[196—195 (cont.) Which, in case you didn’t realize, has everything to

do with the story of Connaught B. N. S. Cape who observed four asses winnow the air … for as we know there can only be one conclusion, no matter the labor, the lasting trace, the letters or even the faith—no daytime, no starlight, not even a flashlight to the rescue—just, that’s it, so long folks, one grand kerplunk, even if Mr. Cape really did come across four donkeys winnowing the air with their hooves…

Thoughts blazing through my mind while I was walking the aisles at the

Virgin Megastore, trying to remember a tune to some words, changing my mind to open the door instead, some door, I don’t know which one either except maybe one of the ones inside me, which was when I found Hailey, disturbed face, incredible body, only eighteen, smoking like a steel mill, breath like the homeless but eyes bright and pure and she had an incredible body and I said hello and on a whim invited her over to my place to listen to some of the CD’s I’d just bought, convinced she’d decline, surprised when she accepted, so over she came, and we put on the music and smoked a bowl and called Pink Dot though they didn’t arrive with our sandwiches and beer until we were already out of our clothes and under the covers and coming like judgment day (i.e. for the second time) and then we ate and drank and Hailey smiled and her face seemed less disturbed and her smile was naked and gentle and peaceful and as I felt myself drift off next to her, I wanted her to fall asleep next to me, but Hailey didn’t understand and for some reason when I woke up a little later, she was already gone, leaving neither a note nor a number.

A few days later, I heard her on KROQ’s Love Line, this time drenched

in purple rain, describing to Doctor Drew and Adam Carolla how I—“this guy in a real stale studio with books and writing everywhere, evervwhere! and weird drawings all over his walls too, all in black. I couldn’t understand any of it.”—had dozed off only to start screaming and yelling terrible things in his sleep, about blood and mutilations and other crazy %&*, which had scared her and had it been wrong of her to leave even though when he’d been awake he’d seemed alright?

An ugly shiver ripped up my back then. All this time I’d believed the

cavorting and drinking and sex had done away with that terrible onslaught of fear. Clearly I was wrong. I’d only pushed it off into another place. My stomach turned. Screaming things was bad enough, but the thought that I’d also frightened someone I felt only tenderness for made it far worse.

Did I scream every night? What did I say? And why in the hell couldn’t

I remember any of it in the morning?

I checked to make sure my door was locked. Returned a second later to

put on the chain. I need more locks. My heart started hammering. I retreated to the corner of my room but that didn’t help. Puck, fuck, fuck—wasn’t helping either. Better go to the bathroom, try some water on the face, try

anything. Only I couldn’t budge. Something was approaching. I could hear it outside. I could feel the vibrations. It was about to splinter its way through the Hall door, my door, Walker in Darkness, from whose face earth and heaven long ago fled.

Then the walls crack.

All my windows shatter.

A terrible roar.

More like a howl more like a shriek.

My eardrums strain and split.

The chain snaps.

I’m desperately trying to crawl away, but it’s too late. Nothing can be

done now.

That awful stench returns and with it comes a scene, filling my place,

painting it all anew, but with what? And what kind of brushes are being used? What sort of paint? And why that smell?

Oh no.

How do I know this?

I cannot know this.

The floor beneath me fails into a void.

Except before I fall what’s happening now only reverts to what was

supposed to have happened which in the end never happened at all. The walls have remained, the glass has held and the only thing that vanished was my own horror, subsiding in that chaotic wake always left by even the most rational things.

Here then was the darker side of whim.

I tried to relax.

I tried to forget.

I imagined some world-weary travelers camped on the side of some

desolate road, in some desolate land, telling a story to allay their doubts, encircle their fears with distraction, laughter and song, a collective illusion of vision spun above their portable hearth of tinder & wood, their eyes gleaming with divine magic, born where perspective lines finally collude, or so they think. Except those stars are never born on such far away horizons as that. The light in fact comes from their own gathering and their own conversation, surrounding and sustaining the fire they have built and kept alive through the night, until inevitably, come morning, cold and dull,

the songs are all sung, the stories lost or taken, soup eaten, embers dark.

Not even the seeds of one pun are left to capriciously turn the mind aside and tropos is at the center of ‘trope’ and it means ‘turn.’

Though here’s a song they might of sung:

Mad woman on another tour; Everything she is she spits on the floor.

An old man tells me she’s sicker than the rest.

God I’ve never been afraid like this.

Heart may still be the fire in hearth but I’m suddenly too cold to

continue, and besides, there’s no hearth here anyway and it’s the end of June. Thursday. Almost noon. And all the buttons on my corduroy coat are gone. I don’t know why. I’m sorry Hailey. [197—Following the release of the first edition over the Internet, several responses were received by e-mail including this one:

I think Johnny was a little off here. I wanted to write and tell you about

It. We actually had a pretty rad time (though his screams were really weird and definately scarred me.) He was very sweet and really gentle and kinda crude too but we still had a lot of fun. It did hurt my feelings the part about my breath. Tell him lye been brushing my teeth more and trying to quit smoking. But one part he didn’t mention. He said the nicest things about my wrists. I was sorry to hear he disappeared. Do you know what happened to him?

— Hailey. February 13, 1999. —Ed.]

I don’t know what to do.

The locks may have held, the chain too, but my room still stinks of gore,

a flood of entrails spread from wall to wall, the hacked remains of hooves and hands, matted hair and bone, used to paint the ceiling, drench the floor.

The chopping must have gone on for days to leave only this. Not even the flies settle for long. Connaught B. N. S. Cape has been murdered along with his donkeys but nobody knows by whom.

For as we know, there cannot be an escape.

I’m too far from here to know anything or anyone anymore.

I don’t even know myself.

Eventually Jed tries again to carry Wax toward what he hopes is home.

He also attempts periodically to signal Navidson on the radio though never gets a response. Regrettably very little footage exists from this part of the voyage. Battery levels are running low and there is not much desire on Jed’s part to exert any energy towards memorializing what seems more and more like a trek toward his own end.

The penultimate clip finds Jed huddled next to Wax in a very small

room. Wax is silent, Jed completely exhausted. It is remarkable how faced with his own death, Jed still refuses to leave his friend. He tells the camera he will go no further, even though the growl seems to be closing in around them.

In the final shot, Jed focuses the camera on the door. Something is on

the other side, hammering against it, over and over again. Whatever comes for those who are never seen again has come from [198—Typo Should read “for”.] him, and Jed can do nothing but focus the camera on the hinges as the door slowly begins to give way. [No punctuation point should appear here) See also Saul Steinberg’s The Labyrinth (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960).]

Bibliography

Architecture:

Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re

Built. New York: Viking, 1994.

Jordan, R. Furneaux. A Concise History of Western Architecture.

London:

Thames and Hudson Limited, 1969.

Kostof, Spiro. A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Pothorn, Herbert. Architectural Styles: An Historical Guide to World

Design. New York: Facts On File Publications, 1982.

Prevsner, Nikolaus. A History of Building Types. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1976.

Prost, Antoine and Gerard Vincent, eds. A History of Private Lfè:

Riddles of Identity in Modern Times. Trans. Arthur Goidhaminer.

Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991.

Prussin, Labelle. African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place, and

Gender. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.

Travis, Jack, ed. African American Architecture In Current Practice.

New York: Princeton Architectural Press, Inc. 1991.

Watkin, David. A History of Western Architecture. 2nd ed. London: Laurence King Publishing, 1996.

Whiffen, Marcus. American Architecture Since 1780. Cambridge: The

MIT Press, 1992.

Wu, Nelson Ikon. Chinese and Indian Architecture: The City of Man,

the Mountain of God, and the Realm of the Immortals. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1963.

Film:

Too numerous to list here.

X

Every house is an architecturally structured “path”: the specific

possibilities of movement and the drives toward movement as one proceeds from the entrance through the sequence of spatial entities have been pre-determined by the architectural structuring of that space and one experiences the space accordingly. But at the same time, in its relation to the surrounding space, it is a “goal”, and we either advance toward this goal or depart from it.

— Dagobert Frey Grundlegung zu einer vergleichenden Kunstwissenschaft

Karen may lose herself in resentment and fear, but the Navidson we see

seems joyful, even euphoric, as he sets out with Reston and his brother to rescue Holloway and his team. It is almost as if entrance let alone a purpose —any purpose—in the face of those endless and lightless regions is reason enough to rejoice.

Using 16mm motion picture (colour and B/W) and 35mm stills,

Navidson for the first time begins to capture the size and sense of that place.

Author Denise Lowery writes the following evocative impression of how Navidson photographs the Anteroom:

The hot red flame spits out light, catching on

Tom, entwining in the spokes of Reston’s wheelchair, casting Shape Changers and

Dragons on a nearby wall. But even this watery

dance succeeds in only illuminating a

tiny portion of a corner. Navidson, Tom and Reston continue forward beneath those gables

of gloom and walls buttressed with

shadow, lighting more flares, penetrating this world with their halogen lamps, until finally what seemed undefinable comes forth out of the shimmering blank, implacable and now nothing less than obvious and undeniable

— as if there never could have been a

question about the shape, there never could

have been a moment when only the imagination

succeeded in prodding those inky folds,

coming up with its own sense, something far more perverse and contorted and heavy with things much stranger and colder than even

this brief shadow play performed in the irregular

burn of sulfur—mythic and inhuman,

flickering, shifting, and finally dying around

the men’s continuous progress.

[199—See chapter ten of Denise Lowery’s Sketches: The Process of

Entry (Fayetteville, Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 1996).]

Of course, the Great Hall dwarfs even this chamber. As Holloway

reported in Exploration #2, its span approaches one mile, making it practically impossible to illuminate. Instead the trio slips straight through the black, carefully marking their way with ample fishing line, until the way ahead suddenly reveals an even greater darkness, pitted in the centre of that immense, incomprehensible space.

In one photograph of the Great Hall, we find Reston in the foreground

holding a flare, the light barely licking an ashen wall rising above him into inky oblivion, while in the background Tom stands surrounded by flares which just as ineffectually confront the impenetrable wall of nothingness looming around the Spiral Staircase.

As Chris Thayil remarks: “The Great Hall feels like the inside of some

preternatural hull designed to travel vast seas never before observed in this world.” [200—Chris Thayil’s “Travel’s Legacy” in National Geographic, v. 189, May 1996, p. 36-53.]

Since rescuing Holloway’s team is the prime objective, Navidson takes

veiy few photographs. Luckily for us, however, the beginning of this sequence relies almost entirely on these scarce but breathtaking stills instead of the far more abundant but vastly inferior video tapes, which are used here mainly to provide sound.

Eventually when they realize Holloway and his team are nowhere near

the Great Hall, the plan becomes for Reston to set up camp at the top of the stairway while Navidson and Tom continue on below.

Switching to Hi 8, we follow Navidson and Reston as they react to

Tom’s announcement.

“Bullshit,” Navidson barks at his brother. “Navy, I can’t go down there,” Tom stammers. “What’s that supposed to mean? You’re just giving up on them?” Fortunately, by barely touching his friend’s arm, Billy Reston forces

Navidson to take a good hard look at his brother. As we can see for ourselves, he is pale, out of breath, and in spite of the cold, sweating profusely. Clearly in no condition to go any further let alone tackle the profound depths of that staircase.

Navidson takes a deep breath. “Sorry Tom, I didn’t mean to snap at you

like that.”

Tom says nothing. “Do you think you can stay here with Billy or do you want to head

home? You’ll have to make it back on your own.”

“I’ll stay here.” “With Billy?” Reston responds. “What’s that supposed to mean? The

hell if you think I’m letting you go on alone.”

But Navidson has already started down the Spiral Staircase. “I should sue the bastards who designed this house,” Reston shouts after

him. “Haven’t they heard of handicap ramps?”

The dark minutes start to slide by. Based on Holloway’s descent.

Navidson had estimated the stairway was an incredible thirteen miles down.

Less than five minutes later, however, Tom and Reston hear a shout.

Peering over the banister, they discover Navidson with a lightstick in his hand standing at the bottom—no more than 100ft down. Tom immediately assumes they have stumbled upon the wrong set of stairs.

Further investigation by Navidson, though, reveals the remnants of neon

trail markers left by Holloway’s team.

Without another word, Reston swings out of his chair and starts down

the stairs. Less than twenty minutes later he reaches the last step.

Navidson knows he has no choice but to accept Reston’s participation,

and heads back up to retrieve the wheelchair and the rest of their gear.

Amazingly enough, Tom seems fine camping near the staircase.

Both Navidson and Reston hope his presence will enable them to

maintain radio contact for a much longer time than Holloway could. Even if they both know the house will still eventually devour their signal.

As Navidson and Reston head out into the labyrinth, they occasionally

come upon pieces of neon marker and shreds of various types of fishing line. Not even multi-strand steel line seems immune to the diminishing effects of that place.

“It looks like its impossible to leave a lasting trace here,” Navidson

observes.

“The woman you never want to meet,” quips Reston, always managing

to keep his wheelchair a little ahead of Navidson.

Soon, however, Reston begins to suffer from nausea, and even vomits.

Navidson asks him if he is sick. Reston shakes his head.

“No, it’s more. . . shit, I haven’t felt this way since I went fishing for

marlin.”

Navidson speculates Reston’s sea sickness or his “mat de mer,” as he

calls it, may have something to do with the changing nature of the house:

“Everything here is constantly shifting. It took Holloway, Jed, and Wax

almost four days to reach the bottom of the staircase, and yet we made it down in five minutes. The thing collapsed like an accordion.” Then looking over at his friend: “You realize if it expands again, you’re in deep shit.”

“Considering our supplies,” Reston shoots back. “I’d say we’d both be

in deep shit.”

As was already mentioned in Chapter III, some critics believe the

house’s mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it. Dr.

Haugeland asserts that the extraordinary absence of sensory information forces the individual to manufacture his or her own data. [201—Missing. — Ed.] Ruby Dahi, in her stupendous study of space, calls the house on Ash Tree Lane “a solipsistic heightener,” arguing that “the house, the halls, and the rooms all become the self—collapsing, expanding, tilting, closing, but always in perfect relation to the mental state of the individual.” [202—Ibid.

Curiously DahI fails to consider why the house never opens into what is necessarily outside of itself.

If one accepts Dahi’s reading, then it follows that Holloway’s creature

comes from Holloway’s mind not the house; the tiny room Wax finds

himself trapped within reflects his own state of exhaustion and despair;

and Navidson’s rapid descent reflects his own knowledge that the Spiral

Staircase is not bottomless. As Dr. Haugeland observes:

The epistemology of the house remains en-tirely commensurate with its size. After all, one always approaches the unknown with greater caution the first time around. Thus it appears far more expansive than it literally is.

Knowledge of the terrain on a second visit dramatically contracts this sense of distance.

Who has never gone for a walk through some unfamiliar park and felt that it was

huge, only to return a second time to discover that the park is in fact much smaller than ini-

tially perceived?

When revisiting places we once frequented

as children, it is not unusual to

observe how much smaller everything seems.

This experience has too often been attributed to the physical differences between a child and an adult. In fact it has more to do with epistemological dimensions than with bodily dimensions: knowledge is hot water on wool.

It shrinks time and space.

(Admittedly there is the matter where

boredom, due to repetition, stretches time and space. I will deal specifically with this problem

in a later chapter entitled “Ennui.”)

[203—See also Dr. Helen Hodge’s American Psychology: The

Ownership Of Self (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), p. 297 where she writes:

What is boredom? Endless repetitions, like, for example, Navidson’s

comdors and rooms, which are consistently devoid of any Mysr-like discoveries f see Chad; p. 99.] thus causing us to lose interest. What then makes anything exciting? or better yet: what is exciting? While the degree varies, ‘ are always excited by anything that engages us, influences us or more simply involves us. In those endlessly repetitive hallways and stairs, there is nothing for us to connect with. That pennanently foreign place does not excite us. It bores us. And that is that, except for the fact that there is no such thing as boredom. Boredom is really a psychic defense protecting us from ourselves, from complete paralysis, by repressing, among other things, the meaning of that place, which in this case is and always has been horror.

See also Otto Fenichel’s 1934 essay “The Psychology of Boredom” in

which he describes boredom as “an unpleasurable experience of a lack of impulse.” Kierkegaard goes a little further, remarking that “Boredom,

extinction, is precisely a continuity of nothingness.” While William Wordsworth in his preface for Lyrical Ballads (1802) writes:

The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of

being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability… [A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.

See Sean Healy’s Boredom, Self and Culture (Rutherford, NJ.: Fairleigh

Dickinson University Press, 1984); Patricia Meyer Spacks’ Boredom: The Literary I-f istory of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and finally Celine Arlesey’s Perversity In Dullness … and Vice-Versa (Denver: Blederbiss Press, 1968).]

When Holloway’s team traveled down

the stairway, they had no idea if they would find a bottom. Navidson, however, knows the stairs are finite and therefore has far less

anxiety about the descent.

Unlike the real world, Navidson’s jour-

ney into the house is not just figuratively but literally shortened. [204—Missing. — Ed.]

This theme of structures altered by perception is not uniquely observed

in The Navidson Record. Almost thirty years ago, Günter Nitschke described what he termed “experienced or concrete space”:

It has a centre which is perceiving man, and it therefore has an excellent system of directions

which changes with the movements of

the human body; it is limited and in no sense

neutral, in other words it is finite, heterogeneous,

subjectively defined and perceived;

distances and directions are fixed relative to

man…

[205—Gunter Nitschke’s “Anatomie der gelebten Umweit” (Bauen +

Wohnen , September 1968)] [206 Which you are quite right to observe makes no sense at all.]

Christian Norberg-Schulz objects; condemning subjective architectural

experiences for the seemingly absurd conclusion it suggests, mainly that “architecture comes into being only when experienced.” [207—Christi Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space & Architecture, p. 13.]

Norberg-Schulz asserts: “Architectural space certainly exists

independently of the casual perceiver, and has centres and directions of its own.” Focusing on the constructions of any civilization, whether ancient or modem, it is hard to disagree with him, it is only when focusing on Navidson’s house that these assertions begin to blur.

Can Navidson’s house exist without the experience of itself?

Is it possible to think of that place as “unshaped” by human

perceptions?

Especially since everyone entering there finds a vision almost

completely—though pointedly not completely—different from anyone else’s?

Even Michael Leonard, who had never heard of Navidson’s house,

professed a belief in the “psychological dimensions of space.” Leonard claimed people create a “sensation of space” where the final result “in the perceptual process is a single sensation—a ‘feeling’ about that particular place…” [208—Michael Leonard’s “Humanizing Space,” Progressive Architecture, April 1969.]

In his book The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch suggested emotional

cognition of all environment was rooted in histoiy, or at least personal history:

[Environmental image, a generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world] is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used

to interpret information and to guide

action.

[Italics added for emphasis]

[209—Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (Cambridge,

Massachusetts; The MIT Press, 1960), p. 4.]

Or as Jean Piaget insisted: “It is quite obvious that the perception of

space involves a gradual construction and certainly does not exist ready-made at the outset of mental development.” [210—J. Piaget and B.

Inhelder’s The Child’s Conception of Geometry (New York; Basic Books, 1960), p. 6] Like Leonard’s attention to sensation and Piaget’s emphasis on constructed perception, Lynch’s emphasis on the importance of the past allows him to introduce a certain degree of subjectivity to the question of space and more precisely architecture.

Where Navidson’s house is concerned, subjectivity seems more a matter

of degree. The Infinite Corridor, the Anteroom, the Great Hall, and the Spiral Staircase, exist for all, though their respective size and even layout sometimes changes. Other areas of that place, however, never seem to replicate the same pattern twice, or so the film repeatedly demonstrates.

No doubt speculation will continue for a long time over what force

alters and orders the dimensions of that place. But even if the shifts turn out to be some kind of absurd interactive Rorschach test resulting from some peculiar and as yet undiscovered law of physics, Reston’s nausea still reflects how the often disturbing disorientation experienced within that place, whether acting directly upon the inner ear or the inner labyrinth of the psyche, can have physiological consequences.

[211—No doubt about that. My fear’s gotten worse. Hearing Bailey

describing my screams on the radio like that has really upset me. I no longer wake up tired. I wake up tired and afraid. I wonder if the morning rasp in my voice is just from sleep or rather some inarticulate attempt to name my horror. I’m suspicious of the dreams I cannot remember, the words only others can hear. I’ve also noticed the inside of my cheeks are now all mutilated, lumps of pink flesh dangling in the wet dark, probably from grinding, gritting and so much pointless chewing. My teeth ache. My head aches. My stomach’s a mess.

I went to see a Dr. Ogelmeyer a few days ago and told him everything I

could think of about my attacks and the awful anxiety that haunts my every hour. He made an appointment for me with another doctor and then prescribed some medication. The whole thing lasted less than half an hour and including the prescription cost close to a hundred and seventy-five dollars.

I tore up the appointment card and when I got back to my studio I

grabbed my radio! CD player and put it out on the street with a For Sale sign on it. An hour later, some guy driving an Infiniti pulled over and bought it for forty-five dollars. Next, I took all my CDs to Aaron’s on Highland and got almost a hundred dollars.

I had no choice. I need the money. I also need the quiet.

As of now, I still haven’t taken the medicine. It’s a low—grade sedative

of some kind. Ten flakes of chalk-blue. I hate them. Perhaps when night comes I’ll change my mind. I arrange them in a tidy line on the kitchen counter. But night finally does come and even though my fear ratchets towards the more severe, I fear those pills even more.

Ever since leaving the labyrinth, having had to endure all those

convolutions, those incomplete suggestions, the maddening departures and inconclusive nature of the whole fucking chapter, I’ve craved space, light and some kind of clarity. Any kind of clarity. I just don’t know how to find it, though staring over at those awful tablets only amps my resolve to do something, anything.

Funny as it sounds—especially considering the amounts of drugs I’ve

been proud to consume—those pills, like dots, raised & particular, look more and more like some kind of secret Braille spelling out the end of my life.

Perhaps if I had insurance; if one hundred and seventy-five dollars

meant I was twenty—five over my deductible, I’d think differently. But it’s not and so I don’t.

As far as I can see, there’s no place for me in this country’s system of

health, and even if there were I’m not sure it would make a difference.

Something I considered over and over again while I was sitting in that stark office, barely looking at the National Geographic or People magazines, just waiting on the bustle of procedure and paper

work, until the time came, quite a bit of time too, when I had to answer

a call, a call made by a nurse, who led me down a hail and then another hall and still another hail, until I found myself alone in a cramped sour smelling room, where I waited again, this time on a slightly different set of procedures and routines carried out by these white draped ministers of medicine, Dr. Ogelmeyer & friends, who by their very absence forced me to wonder what would happen if I were really unhealthy, as unhealthy as I am now poor, how much longer would I have to wait, how much more cramped and sour would this room be, and if I wanted to leave would I? Could I?

Perhaps I wouldn’t even know how to leave. Incarcerated forever within the corridors of some awful facility. 5051. Protective custody. Or just as terrifying: no 5051, no protective custody. Left to wander alone the equally ferocious and infernal corridors of indigence.

To put it politely: no fucking way.

I know what it means to go mad.

I’ll die before I go there.

But first I have to find out if that’s where I’m really heading.

I’ve got to stop blinking in the face of my fear.

I must hear what I scream.

I must remember what I dream.

I pick up the sedatives, these Zs without Z, and one by one crush them

between my fingers, letting the dust fall to the floor. Next I locate all the alcohol I have buried around my studio and pour it down the sink. Then I root out every seed and bud of pot and flush it down the toilet along with the numbers of all suppliers. I eventually find a few tabs of old acid as well as some Ecstasy hidden in a bag of rice. These I also toss.

The consumption of MDMA, aka Ecstasy, aka E, aka X, has been

known to bring on epilepsy especially when taken in large quantities. Eight months ago, I ingested more than my fair share, mostly White Angels, though I also went ahead and invited to the party a slew of Canaries, Stickmen, Snowballs, Hurricanes, Hallways, Butterflies, Tasmanian Devils and Mitsubishis, which was a month long party, all of it pretty much preceding Thanksgiving, and a different story altogether.

There are so many stories…

Perhaps I’ll be lucky and discover this awful dread that gnaws on me

day and night is nothing more than the shock wave caused by too many crude chemicals rioting in my skull for too long. Perhaps by cleaning out my system I’ll come to a clearing where I can ease myself into peace.

Then again perhaps in finding my clearing I’ll only make myself an

easier prey for the real terror that tracks me, waiting beyond the perimeter, past the tall grass, the brush, that stand of trees, cloaked in shadow and rot, but with enough presence to resurrect within me a whole set of ancient reflexes, ordering a non-existent protrusion at the base of my spine to twitch, my pupils already dilating, adrenaline flowing, even as instinct commands me to run.

But by then it will already be too late. The distance far too great to

cover. As if there ever really was a place to hide.

At least I’ll have a gun.

I’ll buy a gun.

Then I’ll crouch and I will wait.

Outside shots are fired. Lots. In fact one sounds like an artillery cannon

going off. Suddenly the city’s at war and I’m confused. When I go to my window a spray of light sets me straight, though the revelation is not without irony.

Somehow the date escaped me.

It’s July 4th.

This country’s birthday. Wow.

Which I realize means I forgot my own birthday. A day that came and

passed, it turns out, in of all places Hailey’s arms. How about that, I can remember the beginnings of a nation that doesn’t give a flying fuck about me, would possibly even strangle me if given half the chance, but I can’t remember my own beginnings—and I’m probably the only one alive willing to at least attempt on my behalf that tricky flying fuck maneuver.

Which might be worth some sort of smile, if I hadn’t already come to

realize that irony is a Maginot Line drawn by the already condemned— which oddly enough still does make me smile.

Fortunately Reston’s nausea does not last long, and he and Navidson

can spend the rest of the day pushing deeper and deeper into the labyrinth.

Initially, they follow the scant remains of the first team and then

continue on by following their instincts. Based on the fact that there was very little evidence of the first team’s descent remaining on the stairs, Navidson determines that the neon markers and fishing line last at most six days before they are entirely consumed by the house.

When they finally make camp, both men are disheartened and

exhausted. Nevertheless, each agrees to alternately serve as watch.

Navidson takes the first shift, spending his time removing the dark blotched gauze around his toes—clearly a painful process—before reapplying ointment and a fresh dressing. Reston spends his time tinkering with his chair and the mount on the Arriflex.

Except for their own restlessness, neither one hears anything during the

night.

Toward the end of their second day inside (making this the ninth day

since Holloway’s team set out into the house), both men seem uncertain whether to continue or return.

It is only as they are making camp for the second night that Navidson

hears something. A voice, maybe a cry, but so fleeting were it not for Reston’s confirmation, it probably would have been shrugged off as just a high note of the imagination.

Leaving most of their equipment behind, the two men head out in

pursuit of the sound. For forty minutes they hear nothing and are about to give up when their ears are again rewarded with another distant cry. Based on the rapidly changing video time stamp, we can see another three hours passes as they weave in and out of more rooms and corridors, often moving very quickly, though never failing to mark their course with neon arrows and ample amounts of fishing line.

At one point, Navidson manages to get Tom on the radio, only to learn

that there is something the matter with Karen. Unfortunately, the signal decays before he can get more details. Finally, Reston stops his wheelchair and jabs a finger at a wall. On Hi 8, we witness his gruff assertion: “How we get through it, I don’t have a clue. But that crying’s coming from the other side.”

Searching out more hallways, more turns, Navidson eventually leads the way down a narrow corridor ending with a door. Navidson and

Reston open it only to discover another corridor ending with another door.

Slowly they make their way through a gauntlet of what must be close to

fifty doors (it is impossible to calculate the exact number due to the

jump cuts), until Navidson discovers for the first and only time a door without a door knob. Even stranger, as he tries to push the door open, he discovers it is locked. Reston’s expression communicates nothing but incredulity. [212—See Gaston Bachelard’s La Poétique de L’Espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), p. 78, where he observes:

Francoise Minkowska a exposé une collection particulièrement

émouvante de dessins d’enfants polonais ou juifs qui ont subi les sévices de l’occupation allemande pendant La demière guen. Telle enfant qui a vécu cache, a Ia moindre alerte, dans une annoire, dessine longtemps après les heures maudites, des maisons étroites, froides et fermées. Et c’est ainsi que Françoise Minkowska pane de “maisons imrnobiles,” de maisons immobilisées clans leur raideur: “Cette raideur et cette immobilité se retrouvent aussi bien a Ia fumée que dans les rideaux des fenêtres. Les arbres autour d’elle sont droits, ont l’air de Ia gander.”…

A un detail, Ia grande psychologue qu’était Francoise Minkowska

teconnaissait le mouvement de la maison. Dans Ia maison dessinée par un enfant de huit ans, Françoise Minkowska note qu’à Ia porte, ii y a “une poign&; on y entre, on y habite.” Ce n’est pas simplement une maisonconstruction, “c’est une maison-habitation.” La poignée de Ia porte désigne ëvidemment une fonctionnalité. La kinesthdsie est marquee par ce signe, Si souvent oublid dans les dessins des enfants “rigides.”

Remarquons bien que Ia “poignCe” de La porte ne pourrait guère être

dessinée a l’échelle de La maison, C’est sa fonction qui prime tout souci de grandeur. Elle traduit une fonction d’ouverture. Seal un esprit logique peut objecter qu’elle sert aussi bien a fermer qu’à ouvrir. Dans le regne des valeurs, la clef ferme plus qu’elle n’ouvre. La poignée ouvre plus qu’elle ne ferme.

[203—See also Dr. Helen Hodge’s American Psychology: The

Ownership Of Self (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), p. 297

where she writes:

What is boredom? Endless repetitions, like, for example, Navidson’s

comdors and rooms, which are consistently devoid of any Mysr-like discoveries f see Chad; p. 99.] thus causing us to lose interest. What then makes anything exciting? or better yet: what is exciting? While the degree varies, ‘ are always excited by anything that engages us, influences us or more simply involves us. In those endlessly repetitive hallways and stairs, there is nothing for us to connect with. That pennanently foreign place does not excite us. It bores us. And that is that, except for the fact that there is no such thing as boredom. Boredom is really a psychic defense protecting us from ourselves, from complete paralysis, by repressing, among other things, the meaning of that place, which in this case is and always has been horror.

See also Otto Fenichel’s 1934 essay “The Psychology of Boredom” in

which he describes boredom as “an unpleasurable experience of a lack of impulse.” Kierkegaard goes a little further, remarking that “Boredom, extinction, is precisely a continuity of nothingness.” While William Wordsworth in his preface for Lyrical Ballads (1802) writes:

The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of

being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability… [A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.

See Sean Healy’s Boredom, Self and Culture (Rutherford, NJ.: Fairleigh

Dickinson University Press, 1984); Patricia Meyer Spacks’ Boredom: The Literary I-f istory of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and finally Celine Arlesey’s Perversity In Dullness … and Vice-Versa (Denver: Blederbiss Press, 1968).]

See also Anne Balifs article in which she quotes Dr. F. Minkowska’s

comments on De Van Gogh er Seurat aux dessins d’enfants, illustrated catalogue of an exhibition held at the Musèe Pedagogique (Paris) 1949.]

As Navidson pulls away to re-examine the obstacle, he hears a whimper

coming from the other side. Taking two steps back, he throws his shoulder into the door. It bends but does not give way. He tries again and again, each hit straining the bolt and hinges, until the fourth hit, at last, tears the hinges free, pops whatever bolt held it in place, and sends the door cracking to the floor.

Reston keeps the chair mounted Arriflex trained on Navidson and while

the focus is slightly soft, as the door breaks loose, the frame gracefully accepts Jed’s ashen features as he faces what he has come to believe is his final moment.

This whole sequence amounts to a pretty ratty collection of cuts

alternating between Jed’s Hi 8 and an equally poor view from the 16mm camera and Navidson and Reston’s Hi 8s. Nevertheless what matters most here is adequately captured: the alchemy of social contact as Jed’s rasp of terror almost instantly transforms itself into laughter and sobs of relief. In a scattering of seconds, a thirty-three year old man from Vineland, New Jersey, who loves to drink Seattle coffee and listen to Lyle Lovett with his fiancée, learns his sentence has been remitted.

He will live.

As diligent as any close analysis of the Zapruder film, similar frame by

frame examination carried out countless times by too many critics to name here [214—Though still see Danton Blake’s Violent Verses: Cinema’s Treatment of Death (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996).] reveals how a fraction of a second later one bullet pierced his upper lip, blasted through the maxillary bone, dislodging even fragmenting the central teeth, (Reel 10; Frame 192) and then in the following frame (Reel 10; Frame 193) obliterated the back side of his head, chunks of occipital lobe and parietal bone spewn out in an instantly senseless pattern uselessly preserved in celluloid light (Reel 10; Frames 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, & 205).

Ample information perhaps to track the trajectories of individual skull bits and blood droplets, determine destinations, even origins, but not nearly enough information to actually ever reassemble the shatter. Here then—

the after

math

of meaning.

A life

üme

finished between

the space of

two frames.

The dark line where the

eye in

something that was never there

To begin with

[215—Typo. “T” should read “t” with a period following “with.”]

Ken Burns has used this particular moment to illustrate why The

Navidson Record is so beyond Hollywood: “Not only is it gritty and dirty and raw, but look how the zoom claws after the fleeting fact. Watch how the frame does not, cannot anticipate the action. Jed’s in the lower left hand corner of the frame! Nothing’s predetermined or foreseen. It’s all painfully present which is why it’s so painfully real.” [216—you probably guessed, not only has Ken Burns never made any such comment, he’s also never heard of The Navidson Record let alone Zampanô.]

Jed crumples, his moment of joy stolen by a pinkie worth of lead,

leaving him dead on the floor, a black pool of blood spilling out of him.

In the next shots—mostly from the Hi Ss—we watch Navidson

dragging Wax and Jed out of harm’s way while trying at the same time to get Tom on the radio.

Reston returns fire with an HK .45.

“Since when did you bring a gun?” Navidson asks, crouching near the

door.

“Are you kidding me? This place is scary.”

Another shot explodes in the tiny room.

Reston wheels back to the edge of the doorway and squeezes off three

more rounds. This time there is no return fire. He reloads. A few more seconds pass.

“I can’t see a fucking thing,” Reston whispers.

Which is true: neither one of their flashlights can effectively penetrate

that far into the black.

Navidson grabs his backpack and pulls out his Nikon and the Metz

strobe with its parabolic mirror.

Thanks to this powerful flash, the Hi 8 can now capture a shadow in the

distance. The stills, however, are even more clear, revealing that the shadow is really the blur of a man,

standing dead

centre

with

a

rifle in his

hand.

Then just as the strobe captures him lifting the weapon, presumably

now aiming at the blinding flash, we hear a series of sharp cracks. Neither Navidson nor Reston have any idea where these sounds are coming from, though gratefully the stills reveal what is happening:

all those doors

behind

the man

are

slamming

shut,

one

after

another

after

another,

which still does not prevent the figure from firing. “Awwwwwwwwwww shit!” Reston shouts.

But Navidson keeps his Nikon steady and focused, the motor chewing

up a whole roll of film as the flash angrily slashes out at the pre-

vailing darkness, ultimately capturing

this dark form

vanishing

behind

a

closing

door,

even though a hole

the size of a fist punches through

the muntin,

the

round

powerful

enough to propel

the bullet into

the second

door,

though

not

powerful enough

to do more

than

splinter

a

before this damage along with even the sound from the blast

disappears behind the roar of more slamming doors,

the last one finally hammering shut, leaving

the room

saturated in silence.

Navidson sprints down the corridor to the first door but can find no way

to lock it.

“He’s alive” Reston whispers. “Navy, come here. Jed’s breathing.” The camera captures Navidson’s P.O.V. as he returns to the dying young

man.

“It doesn’t matter Rest. He’s still dead.”

Whereupon Navidson’s eye quickly pans from the thoughtless splatter

of grey matter and blood to more pressing things, the groan of the living calling him away from the sigh of the dead.

Despite his shoulder wound and loss of blood, Wax is still very much

alive. As we can see, a fever—probably due to the onset of an infection— has marooned him in a delirium and although his rescuers are now at hand his eyes remain fixed on a horizon that is both empty and meaningless.

Navidson’s shot of Jed, though brief, is not nearly as short as this shot of Wax.

In the next segment, taken at least fifteen minutes later at a new

location, we see Navidson elevating Wax’s legs, cleaning the wound, and gently feeding him half a tablet of a painkiller, probably meperidine. [217—

i.e. Demerol.]

Reston, meanwhile, finishes converting their two-man tent into a

makeshift stretcher. Having already arranged the tent poles in a way that will provide the most support, he now uses some pack straps to create two handles which will enable Navidson to carry the rear end more easily.

“What about Jed?” Reston asks, as he begins securing the front end of

the stretcher to the back of his wheelchair.

“We’ll leave his pack and mine behind.” “Some habits die hard, huh?” “Or they don’t die,” replies Navidson. [218—A bit of dialogue which of

course only makes sense when Navidson’s history is taken into account.] [219—See page 332—333.]

A little later, Navidson gets Tom on the radio and tells him to meet them

at the bottom of the stairs.

XI

La poete au cachot, debraille, maladif,

Roulant un manuscript sous son pied convulsive

Mesure d’un regard que la terreur enflame L’escalier de vertige ou s’abime son ame.

—Charles Baudelaire

[220—Something about the terror of the staircase.] [221— “The poet,

sick, and with his chest half bare/ Tramples a manuscript in his dark stall,/ Gazing with terror at the yawning stair/ Down which his spirit finally must fall.” As translated by Roy Campbell. — Ed.]

While Karen stayed home and Will Navidson headed for the front line,

Tom spent two nights in no man’s land. He even brought his bag and papers, though in the long run the effects of the weed would not exactly comfort him.

More than likely when Tom first stepped foot in that place, every

instinct in his body screamed at him to immediately get out, race back to the living room, daylight, the happy median of his life. Unfortunately it was not an impulse he could obey as he was needed near

the Spiral Staircase in order to maintain radio contact.

By his own admission, Tom is nothing like his brother. He has neither

the fierce ambition nor the compulsion for risk taking. If both brothers paid the same price for their parents’ narcissism, Will relied on aggression to anchor the world while Tom passively accepted whatever the world would give or take away. Consequently Tom won no awards, achieved no fame, held no job for more than a year or two, remained in no relationship for longer than a few months, could not settle down in a city for longer than a few years, and ultimately had no place or direction to call his own. He drifted, bending to daily pressures, never protesting when he was deprived

of what he should have rightfully claimed as his own. And in this sad trip downstream, Tom dulled the pain with alcohol and a few joints a day— what he called his “friendly haze.”

Ironically though, Tom is better liked than Will. Physically as well as

emotionally, Tom has far fewer edges than his famous brother. He is soft, easy-going and exudes a kind of peacefulness typically reserved for Buddhist monks.

Anne Kligman’s essay on Tom is nearly poetic in its brevity. In only one

and a half pages, she condenses fifty-three interviews with Tom’s friends, all of whom speak warmly and generously of a man they admittedly did not know all that well but nonetheless valued and in some cases appeared to genuinely love. Will Navidson, on the other hand, is respected by thousands but “has never commanded the kind of gut- level affection felt for his twin brother.” [222—Anne Kligman’s “The Short List” in Paris Review, spring, 1995, p. 43-44.]

A great deal of exegesis exists on the unique relationship between these

two brothers. Though not the first to make the comparison, Eta Ruccalla’s treatment of Will & Tom as contemporary Esau & Jacob has become the academic standard. Ruccalla finds the biblical tale of twins wrestling over birthright and paternal blessing the ideal mirror in which to view Will & Tom, “who like Jacob and Esau sadly come to share the same conclusion— yipparedu. [223— “[ [They] shall be separated.” — Ed.] [224—Eta Ruccalla’s exemplary Nor True, Man: Mi Ata Beni? (Portland: Hineini Press, May 1995), p. 97. It probably should be noted that while Ruccalla equates Jacob with Navidson, “the clean-shaven intellectual aggressively claiming his birthright,” and Esau with Tom, “unkempt and slightly lethargic, lumbering through life like some obtuse water buffalo,” Nam Eurtton in her piece “All Accurate” in Panegyric, v. 18, July 30, 1994 draws the opposite conclusion: “Isn’t Navidson a hunter like Esau, actively shooting with his canra? And doesn’t Tom’s calm, in fact a Zen-like calm, make him much more similar to Jacob?”]

Incredible as it may seem, Ruccalla’s nine hundred page book is not one

page too long. As she says herself, “To adequately analyze the history of Esau and Jacob is to painstakingly exfoliate, layer by layer, the most delicate mille-feuille.” [225—Eta Ruccalla’s Not True, Man: Mi Ata Beni? p. 3.]

Of course it is also an act that could in the end deprive the reader of all

taste for the subject. Ruccalla accepts this risk, recognizing that an investment in such a complex, and without exception, time consuming

[Note: Regardless of your take on who’s Navidson and who’s Tom,

here’s a quick summary for those unfamiliar with this biblical story about twins. Esau’s a hairy, dimwitted hunter. Jacob’s a smooth-skinned, cunning intellectual. Daddy Isaac dotes on Esau because the kid always brings him venison. When the time finally comes for the paternal blessing, Isaac promises to give it to Esau as soon as he brings him some meat. Well while Esau’s off hunting, Jacob, with help from his mother, covers his hands with goat hair so they resemble Esau’s and then approaches his blind father with a bowl full of stew. The ruse works and Isaac thinking the son before him is Esau blesses Jacob instead. When Esau returns, Isaac figures out what’s happened but tells Esau he has no second blessing for him. Esau bawls like a baby and vows to kill Jacob. Jacobruns off and meets god. Years later the brothers meet up again, make up, but don’t hang together for long. It’s

actually pretty sad. See Genesis, chapters 25—33.]

array of ideas will in the end yield a taste far superior to anything

experienced casually. In the chapter entitled “Va-yachol, Va-yesht, Vayakom, Va-yelech, Va-yivaz” Ruccalla reevaluates the meaning of birthright by treating its significance as nothing more than

[226—What follows here is hopelessly incomplete. Denise Neiman who

is now married and lives in Tel Aviv claims to have worked on this section when it was intact. The whole thing was really quite brilliant,” she told me over the phone. “I helped him a little with the Hebrew but he really didn’t need my assistance, except to write down what he said, this incredible analysis about parental blessings, sibling rivalry, birthright, and all the time quoting from memory entire passages from the most obscure books. He possessed a pretty uncanny ability to recite verbatim almost anything he’d read, and let me tell you, he’d read alot. Incredible character.

“It took us about two weeks to write everything he had to say about

Esau and Jacob. Then I read it back to him. He made corrections, and we eventually got around to a second draft which I felt was pretty polished.”

She took a deep breath. I could hear a baby crying in the background. “Then one day I arrived at his place and the pages had vanished. Also all his fingers were bandaged. He mumbled something about falling, scraping up his hands. At first, he ignored me when I asked him about our work, but when I persisted he muttered something like ‘What difference does it make?

They’re dead anyway, right? Or not-alive, however you want to look at it.’ I told him I didn’t understand. So he just said it was ‘too personal’ ‘an unrealized theme’ ‘poorly executed’ ‘a complete mess.’

“He did grunt something about there never having been a blessing to

begin with, which I thought was pretty interesting. No birthright, all of it a misleading ploy, both brothers fools, and as for the comparison to the Navilson [sic] twins he suddenly claimed it was justifiable only if you could compare pair of siblings to Israel and his brother.

“Zaxnpanô was clearly upset, so I tried fixing him something to eat. He

eventually came around and we read some books on meteors.

“I figured that was that, except when I went to the bathroom I found the

pages. Or I should say I found what was left of them. He had torn them to shreds. They were in the wastebasket, some strewn on the floor, no doubt a fair share lost down the toilet.

“As I started to pick them up, I also discovered that most of the pieces

were stained with blood. I never learned what seizure caused him to rip it all apart but for whatever reason I was overcome by my own impulse to save what was left, not for me really, but for him.

“I stuffed all the crumpled bits into my pockets and later transferred

them to a manila envelope which I placed at the bottom of that chest. I guess I hoped he’d find it one day and realize his mistake.”

Unfortunately Zampanô never did. Though for what it’s worth I did.

Bits of bloodstained paper, just like Denise Neiman said, all suggesting the same theme but somehow never quite fitting back together.

On more than a few occasions I even considered excluding all this. In

the end though, I opted to transcribe the pieces which I figured had enough on them to have some meaning even if that meant not meaning much to me.

One thing’s for sure: it did disturb me. There’s just something so creepy

about all the violence and blood. I mean over what? This? Arcane, obtuse and way over-the-top wanna-be scholarship? Is that what got to him? Or was it something else?

Maybe it really was too personal. Maybe he had a brother. A son.

Maybe he had two sons. Who knows. But here it is. All that’s left.

Incoherent scrap.

Too bad so much of his life had to slip between the lines of even his

own words.]

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but the Lord Yahweh—that too oft accused literalist— instructs

Rebekah in the subtler ways of language by using irony:

And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two

manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger.

And when her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were

twins in her womb.

(Genesis 25: 23-24)

[Chalmer’ s underline]

On one hand Yahweh announces a hierarchy of age and on the other

hand claims the children are the same age. [227—Tobias Chaliner’s i’s Ironic Postures (London University Press, 1954), p. 92. Chalmer, however, fails to take into account Genesis 25:25-26.]

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Esau comes from the root ash meaning “to hurry” while Ya ‘akov comes

from the root akav which means “to delay” or “restrain.” [228—Norman J.

Cohen’s Self.. Struggle & Changer Family Conflict Stories in Genesis and

Their Healing Insights for Our Lives (Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1995), p. 98.] (i.e. Esau entered the world first; Jacob last.) But Esau is also connected to asah meaning “to cover” while Jacob derives from aqab meaning “heel” (i.e. Esau was covered in hair; Jacob born clutching Esau’s heel, restraining him. [229—Robert Davidson’s Genesis 12-50 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p.

122.]) At least Freed Kashon convincingly objects to Ruccalla’s comparison

when he points out how really Holloway, not Tom, is the hairy one: “His beard, surly appearance, and even his profession as a hunter make Holloway the perfect Esau. The tension between Navidson and Holloway is also more on par with the tension between Jacob and his brother.” [230— Freed Kashon’s Esau (Birmingham, Alabama: Maavar Yabbok Press, 1996), p. 159.]

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The degree of Esau and Jacob’s struggle is emphasized by the word

Vayitrozzu which comes from the root rzz meaning “to tear apart, to shatter.” The comparison falters, however, when one realizes Will and Tom never indulged in such a violent struggle.

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During their childhood, Tom and Will were seldom apart. They gave

each other support, encouragement, and the strength to persevere in the face of parental indifference. [231—Terry Borowska interview.] Of course their intertwining adolescent years eventually unraveled as they reached adulthood, Will pursuing photography and fame in an attempt to fill the emotional void. Tom drifting into an unremarkable and for the most part internal existence.

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Tom, however, never hid behind the adjunct meaning of a career. He

never acquired the rhetoric of achievement. In fact his life never moved

much beyond the here and now.

Nevertheless, in spite of a brutal struggle with alcoholism, Tom did

manage to preserve his sense of humor, and in his twelve-step program, inspired many admirers who to this day speak highly of him.

Of the hard times that came his way, he experienced the greatest grief

during those eight years when he was estranged from his brother or in his words “when the old rug was pulled out from under old Tom.” It is hardly a coincidence that during this period he succumbed to chemical dependencies, went on unemployment, and prematurely ended a budding relationship with a young schoolteacher. The Navidson Record never explains what came between Tom and Will, though it implies Tom envied Navy’s success and was increasingly dissatisfied with his own accomplishments. [232—Personal interviews with Damion Searle, Annabelle Whitten and Isaac Hodge. February 5-23, 1995.]

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In his article “Brothers In Arms No More” published in The Village

Voice, Carlos Brillant observes that Tom and Will’s estrangement began with the birth of Chad: “While it’s complete speculation on my part, I wonder if the large amount of energy required to raise a family pulled Will’s attention away from his brother. Suddenly Tom discovered his brother—his only supporter and sympathizer—was devoting more and more time to his son. Tom may have felt abandoned.” [233—Lost.]

Annabelle Whitten echoes these sentiments when she points out how

Tom occasionally referred to himself as “orphaned at the age of forty.” [234 —Lost.] The year Tom (and Will for that matter) turned forty was the year Chad was born.

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Ironically enough, Tom’s presence in the house on Ash Tree Lane only

served to help Will and Karen get along. As Whitten states: “Tom’s desire to reacquire his lost parental figures transmuted Navidson into father and Karen into mother, thus offering one explanation why Tom frequently sought to reduce tension between both.” [235—Ibid., 112.]

Of course as Nam Eurtton argued, “Why? Because Tom’s a nice guy.”

[236—Nam Eurtton’s “All Accurate” p. 176.]

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Esau’s blessing was stolen with a mask. Tom wears no mask, Will wears

a camera. But as Nietzsche wite, “Every profound spirit needs a mask.” [237—Of some note is the strange typo which appears in the Aaron Stem text: “But the blind Isaac repeated his question, ‘Are you really my son Esau?’ to which the chosen one replied ‘Annie’ meaning ‘I am.’”

Aaron Stem’s All God’s Children: Genesis (New York: Hesed Press, I

964), p. 62.]

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And yet, despite the triumph of Jacob’s ruse, he should have heeded this

admonition: “Cursed be he that maketh the blind to wander out of the way” (Deuteronomy 27:18). And Jacob was indeed cursed, forced to wrestle for the rest of his life with this question of self-worth.[238—From the Robert Davidson commentary: “Jacob wrestled with an unidentified ‘man’ who turned Out to be God, wrestled and lived to tell the tale. Gathered into the story are so many curious elements that we can only assume that here is a story which has taken many centuries to reach its present form, arid which has assimilated material, some of it very primitive, which goes back long before the time of Jacob. It is like an old house which has had additions built on to it, and has been restored and renovated more than once during the passing years.” p 184.]

Navidson was no different. [239—Lost.]

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“To me, Tom seemed an incredibly peaceful man. Plain, decent but most

of all peaceful.” [240—Ibid.]

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Here Ruccalla’s analysis unexpectedly rereads the meaning of Esau’s

lost inheritance, sublimely uncovering an unspoken history, veiled in irony and blankness, yet still describing how one brother could not have succeeded without the other. Cain may not have been his brother’s keeper but Esau certainly was [241—Ibid.]

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“. . . a cunning hunter” “of the field” “plain man, dwelling in tents.”

[242—See Genesis 27:24] [243—Wrong. See Genesis 27:29.] [244—

Mr. Truant also appears to be In error. The correct reference is Genesis 25:27. — Ed.]

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This then is the meaning of Esau

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As Scholem writes: “Frank’s ultimate vision of the future was based

upon the still unrevealed laws of the Torah of atzilut which he promised his disciples would take effect once they had ‘come to Esau,’ that is, when the passage through the ‘abyss’ with its unmitigated destruction and negation was fmally accomplished.” [245—Gershom Scholem’ s The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 133. In taking the time to consider Frank’s work, Scholem does not fail to also point out Frank’s

questionable character: “Jacob Frank (1726-9 1) will always be remembered as one of the most frightening phenomena in the whole Jewish history: a religious leader who, whether for purely self-interested motives or otherwise, was in all his actions a truly corrupt and degenerate individual.” p. 126.]

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But as a great Hasidic maxim reminds us: “The Messiah will not come

until the tears of Esau have ceased.” [246—Lost.]

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and so returns to Tom and Will Navidson, divided by experience,

endowed with different talents and dispositions, yet still brothers and “naught without the other.”

As Ruccalla states in her concluding chapter: “While the differences are

there, like the serpents of the Caduceus, these two brothers have always been and always will be inextricably intertwined; and just like the Caduceus, their shared history creates a meaning and that meaning is health.” [247—Eta Ruccalla, p. 897. But it also means [Rest missing].]

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By the end of the first night, Tom has begun to feel the terrible strain of

that place. At one point he even threatens to abandon his post. He does not.

His devotion to his brother triumphs over his own fears. Remaining by the radio, “[Tom] gnaws on boredom like a dog gnawing on a bone while all the time eyeing fear like a mongoose. [248—Ibid., p. 249.]

Fortunately for us, some trace of this struggle survives on his Hi 8

where Tom recorded an eclectic, sometimes funny, sometimes bizarre history of thoughts passing away in the atrocity of that darkness.

Tom’s Story

[Transcript]

Day 1: 10:38

[Outside Tom’s tent; breath frosting in the air] Who am I kidding? A place like this has to be haunted. That’s what

happened to Holloway and his team—the ghosts got ‘em. That’s what will happen to Navy and me. The ghosts will get us. Except he’s with Reston.

He’s not alone. I’m alone. That Just figures. Ghosts always go first for the one who’s alone. In fact, I bet they’re here right now. Lurking.

Day 1: 12:06

[In order to maintain contact, it was

necessary to set up the radio outside of

the tent)

Radio (Navidson): Tom, we found another neon marker. Most of it’s

gone. Just a shred. We’re laying down line and proceeding.

Tom into radio: Okay Navy. See any ghosts?

Radio (Navidson): Nothing. You a little spooked?

Tom: Lighting up a fat one.

Radio (Navidson): If it gets too much for you, go back. We’ll be airight.

Tom: Fuck yourself Navy.

Radio (Navidson): What?

Tom: Doesn’t he go around autographing lightbulbs?

Radio (Navidson): Who?

Tom: Watt.

Radio (Navidson): What?

Tom: Nevermind. Over. Out. Whatever.

[Changing channels] Toni: Karen, this is Tom.

Radio (Karen): I would hope so. How’s Navy’?

Tom: He’s fine. Found another marker.

Radio (Karen): And Billy?

Tom: Fine too.

Radio (Karen): How are you managing?

Tom: Me? I’m cold, I’m scared shitless, and I feel like I’m about to be

eaten alive at any moment.

Otherwise, I’d say I’m fine.

Day 1: 15:46 [Inside tent]

Okay, Mr. Monster. I know you’re there and you’re planning to eat me

and there’s nothing I can do about that, but I should warn you I’ve lived for years on fast food, greasy fries, more than a few polyurethane shakes. I smoke a lot of weed too. Got a pair of lungs blacker than road tar. My point being, Mr. Monster, I don’t taste so good.

Day 1: 18:38 [Outside tent]

This is ridiculous. I don’t belong here. No one belongs here. Fuok you

Navy for bringing me here. I’m a slob. I like lots of food. These things I consider accomplishments. I am not a hero. I am not an adventurer. I am Tom the slow, Tom the chunicy, Tom the stoned, Tom about to be eaten by Mr. Monster. Where are you Mr. Monster, you stinking bastard? Sleeping on the job?

Day 1: 21:09 [Outside tent]

I’m sick. I’m freezing to death. I’m going. [He throws up] This is not fun. This isn’t fair. [Pause] I think there’s a game on tonight.

Day 1: 23:41 [Outside tent]

Tom: What kind of voices?

Radio (Karen): Daisy doesn’t know. Chad said they sounded like a few

people, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying.

Tom: Book me a flight to the Bahamas.

Radio (Karen): Are you kidding, book a flight for the whole family.

This is absurd.

Tom: Where’s that bottle of bourbon when you need it? [Pause] Hey, I

better sign off. Don’t want a bunch of dead batteries on my hands.

Radio (Karen): Tell him I love him, Tom.

Tom: I already did.

Day 2: 00:11

[Outside tent; smoking a joint]

I call this “A Little Bedtime Story For Tom.” A long time ago, there was this captain and he was out sailing the high

seas when one of his crew spotted a pirate ship on the horizon. Right before the battle began, the captain cried out, “Bring me my red shirt!” It was a long fight but in the end the Captain and his crew were victorious. The next day three pirate ships appeareth Once again the captain cried out, “Bring me my red shirt!” and once again the captain and his men defeated the pirates.

That evening everyone was sitting around, resting, and taking care of their wounds, when an ensign asked the captain why he always put on his red shirt before battle. The captain calmly replied, “I wear the red shirt so that If I’m wounded, no one will see the blood. That way everyone will continue to fight on unafraid.” All the men were moved by this great display of courage.

Well the next day, ten pirate ships were spotted. The men turned to their

captain and waited for him to give his usual command. Cairn as ever, the Captain cried out, “Bring me my brown pants.”

Day 2: 10:57 [Inside tent]

Radio (Navidson): Tom? [Static] Tom, you read me?

Tom: (Going outside to the radio) What time is it? (Looking at his

watch) 11 AM! Jesus, did I sleep well.

Radio (Navidson): Still no sign, except for [Static] markers [Static]

over.

Tom: Say again Navy. You’re fading.

Day 2: 12:03 [Outside tent]

This punker gets on a bus and takes a seat. His hair’s all green, he’s got

brigh.tly colored tattoos covering his arms and piercings all over his face.

Feathers hang from each earlobe. Across the aisle sits an old man who proceeds to stare at him for the next fifteen miles. Eventually the pumker gets pretty unnerved and blurts out:

“Hey man, didn’t you do anything crazy when you were young?” Without missing a beat, the old man replies: “Yeah when I was In the Navy, I got drunk one night in Singapore and

had sex with a Bird of Paradise. I was just wondering if you were my son.”

Day 2: 13:27 [Outside tent]

I feel like I’m in a goddamned refrigerator, that’s what. So what I want

to know is, where’s all the goddamn food? God knows I could use a drink.

Day 2: 14:11 [Inside tent]

A monk joins an abbey ready to dedicate his life to copying ancient

books by hand. After the first day though, he reports to the head priest. He’s concerned that all the monks have been copying from copies made from still more copies.

“If someone makes a mistake,” he points out. “It would be impossible to

detect. Even worse the error would continue to be made.”

A bit startled, the priest decides that he better check their latest effort

against the original which is kept in a vault beneath the abbey. A place only he has access to.

Well two days, then three days pass without the priest resurfacing.

Finally the new monk decides to see if the old guy’s alright. When he gets down there though, he discovers the priest hunched over both a newly copied book and the ancient original text. He is sobbing and by the look of things has been sobbing for a long time.

“Father?” the monk whispers. “Oh Lord Jesus,” the priest wails. “The word is ‘celebrate’.”

Day 2: 15:29

[Outside tent; smoking a joint;

coughing; coughing again]

Did you expect oration Mr. Monster? Or maybe just a little

expectoration?

[Coughs and spits] Navy taught me that one.

Day 2: 15:49 [Outside tent]

Tom: Hey, uh, Karen, I’ve got a bit of the munchies going on here. Do

you think you could order me a Pizza.

Radio (Karen): What?!

Tom: When the delivery boy comes to the door just tell him to take it to

the fat guy at the end of the hail. Two miles down on the left.

Radio (Karen): [Pause] Tom, maybe you should come back.

Tom: No maybe about it. Is there any lemon meringue left?

Day 2: 16:01 [Inside tent]

There once was a poor man who walked around without shoes. His feet

were covered in calluses. One day a rich man felt sorry for the poor man and bought him a pair of Nikes. The poor man was extremely grateful and wore the shoes constantly. Well after a year or so, the shoes fell apart. So the poor man had to go back to running around barefoot, only now ail his calluses were gone and his feet got all cut up and soon the cuts became infected and the man got sick and eventually, after they cut off his legs, he died.

I call that particular story “Love, Death & Nike.” A real cheer me up

story for Mr. Monster. That’s right! All for you. Oh and something else: fuck you Mr. Monster.

Day 2: 16:42 [Outside tent]

The seven dwarves went to the Vatican and when the Pope answered the

door, Dopey stepped forward: “Your Excellency,” he said. “I wonder if you could tell me if there are any dwarf nuns in Rome?”

“No Dopey, there aren’t,” the Pope replied.

Behind Dopey, the six dwarves started to titter. “Well, are there any dwarf nuns in Italy?” Dopey persisted. “No, none In Italy,” the Pope answered a little more sternly.

A few of the dwarves now began to laugh more openly. “Well, are there any dwarf nuns in Europe?” This time the Pope was much more firm. “Dopey, there are no dwarf nuns in Europe.” By this point, all the dwarves were laughing aloud and rolling around on

the ground.

“Pope,” Dopey demanded. “Are there any dwarf nuns In the whole

world?”

“No Dopey,” the Pope snapped. “There are no dwarf nuns anywhere in

the world.”

Whereupon the six dwarves started Jumping up and down chanting,

“Dopey fucked a penguin! Dopey flicked a penguin!”

Day 2: 17:18 [Outside tent]

Here’s a riddle: who makes a better house? A framer? A welder? A

form builder? Give up? A grave maker! ‘Cause his house lasts until judgment day! Okay that’s a stupid joke. An old Sunday school joke,

actually.

Day 2: 18:28 [Inside tent]

Now Mr. Monster looks like a frog, a little gribbbb-it frog when

suddenly 00000h, little frog has become a… uh... piglet.

[By carefully positioning his halogen lamp, Tom is able to cast hand

shadows on the back wall of his tent. He conjures up a whole menagerie of creatures.]

Yes a piggy wiggy creature just olnking along when... uh-oh an

elephant! Look at that, the piglet has turned into an elephant. Jesus and look at the size of that elephant, it could… ooops, well I’ll be, it’s turned into a woodpecker, oh, now it’s a snail, hinmm or how about a praying mantis, a sea urchin, a dove maybe, a tiger, or even this... a wascawwy wabbit, and then all of a sudden... oh no Mr. Monster, don’t do that… but Mr. Monster does, turning into a dragon. Yup, that’s right folks, a mean, no game playing, flesh eating dragon. And you say you want to eat me? Sure, sure...

Except for one thing, just when Mr. Monster thinks he’s gonna turn Tom the hefty into Tom the short rib, Tom unleashes his secret weapon.

[As the dragon on the tent wail turns toward Tom and opens its mouth,

Tom gets ready to turn off the halogen with his foot.]

Ah ha, Mr. Monster! Bye-Bye baby!

[Click. Black.]

[249—Taking into account Chapter Six, only Tom’s creatures, born out

of the absence of light, shaped with his bare hands, seem able to exist in that place, though all of them are as mutable as letters, as permanent as fame, a strange little bestiary lamenting nothing, instructing no one, revealing the outline of lives really only visible to the imagination.

And tonight as I copied this scene down, I began to feel very bad.

Maybe because Tom’s antics only temporarily transform that place into something other than itself, though even that transformation is not without its own peculiar horror; for no matter how many creatures he flings on the wall of his tent, no matter how large or how real they may appear, they still all perish in a flood of darkness. No Noah’s ark. Nothing safe. No way to

survive. Which may have had something to do with my outburst at the Shop today.

I was in some weird kind of jittery daze. Everyone was there, Thumper,

my boss, the usual visitants, along with some depraved biker who was in the middle of getting an octopus carved into his deltoid. He kept blathering on about the permanence of ink which I guess really got to me because I started howling, and loud too—real loud—spit sputtering off my lips, snot shooting out of my nose.

“Permanent?” I shouted. “Are you fucking loopy, man?” Everyone was shocked. The biker could have taught me a thing or two

about the impermanence or at least the destructibility of flesh—in this case my flesh—but he was also shocked. Thumper came to my rescue, quickly escorting me outside and ordering me to take the day of f: “I don’t know what you’re getting messed up in Johnny but it’s fucking you up bad.” Then she touched my arm and I immediately wanted to tell her everything. Right then and there. I needed to tell her everything. Unfortunately, there was no question in my mind that she would think I was certifiable if I started rattling on about animals and Hand shadows, mutable as letters, as permanent as fame, a strange be— aww fuck, the hell with the rest. I choked down the words. Maybe I am certifiable. I came here instead.

Which in an odd and round about way brings me to the Pekinese, the dog story I mentioned a ways back but didn’t want to discuss. Well, I’ve changed my mind. The Pekinese belongs here. With Tom’s Hand shadows.

It happened last December, a month before I’d ever heard of Zampanô,

on the tail end of what had proved to be a rather dramatic November, All Souls Day commencing with Lude’s acquisition of a great deal of Ecstasy, a portion of which he sold to me at bulk rate.

“Hoss, this is our pass to paradise,” Lude had told me, and of course he

was right.

Who cared if it was fall, it felt like spring. Lude led the way, zipping

from club to bar, crashing Bel Air fetes, desert raves and any after hours open house Malibu mansion madness we could find out about. Remarkably, no matter how zealously guarded these events were—velvet ropes as impossible to transcend as concertina wire without a hand grenade—the pills were our hand grenades. Velvet blown aside with the release of just one tab. They got us in everywhere. Even if noses were already bloody with

coke, lungs black with Cannabis or throats dry with bourbon. x was still something else entirely, a spine shivering departure from the regular banquet, offering plenty of love-simulated bliss-bloated diversions. And so it happened that that month—Novem nine and all mine November—Lude disappeared into his own bower of bentdom, while I wandered off and promptly found my own.

Not too long afterwards, Lude made a great show of sharing with me his

official and most prodigious tally for that month. Something which, for some reason, I felt compelled to write down.

LUDE’S LIST

11/1 — Monique. 36. On her washing machine. She came during the

rinse cycle. He came during the spin cycle. Drier broken.

11/3 — Morning: Tonya. 23. Hispanic. Twice. Evening: Nina. 34.

Leather choker. Thigh high boots.

11/4 — Sparkle. 32. In a gazebo above the party.

11/5 — Kelly. 29. Dancer. In some host’s sauna.

11/6 — Gina. 22. Said “please” before making the weirdest requests.

11/8 — Jennifer. 20. Naked at midnight on the diving platform at USC.

11/9 — Caroline. 21. Swedish. On her Nordic track. Later, some guy

dating Monique (11/1) caught up with Lude. Turned out he only wanted some E.

11/10 — Susan. 19. Surprised him with a golden shower. He surprised

her with a raincoat.

11/11 — Evening: Brooke. 25. Midnight: Mann. 22. Poured champagne

all over the bed and told him to sleep in the wet spot.

11/12 — Noon: Alison 24—28???? Evening: ????? 23. Did it in wet

suits. Neoprene smeared with Astroglide. She kept calling him O’Neil.

11/13 — Holly. 24—34???? vietnamese.

11/14 — Dawn. 19. Leslie. 19. Melissa. 19. From San Diego. They

went to The Pleasure Chest together and bought a vibrating dildo for the first time.

11/19 — Cindy. 20. Waitress. “I get bored when I can’t use my mouth.”

11/20 — Erin. 21. Jewish. In a changing stall at The Gap.

11/21 — Betsy. 36. After sex, wanted a pearl necklace. Lude told her he

was broke.

11/22 — Michelle. 20. Catholic. Informed him that all anal sex requires

is Vaseline and a pillow. She had both.

11/25 — Stephanie. 18. Black.

11/27 — Alicia. 23. On top of her stereo speakers. Big speakers. Big

woofers. Apparently very intense. Plenty of woofing.

11/28 — Thanksgiving. Dana. 28. Navel pierced. Nipples pierced.

Clitoral hood pierced. Danced for Lude on her bed, then masturbated until she came. An hour later, sex. He couldn’t come for the second time. She called a girlfriend. They 69’d and then played Russian Blow Job—a variation on Russian Roulette. Lude was the gun, they took turns, thirty seconds at a time (he timed); Dana’s girlfriend lost (or won; depending on your tastes) Y N

[Y N

100 tabs of X;

12 AA batteries; half a dozen tubes of KY jelly;

4 boxes of condoms (ribbed and ultra thin; all w/ Nonoxynol-9);

3 loads of laundry;

2 wet suits; 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

—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

Monique — Husband recently left her.

Tonya — An ex- and a restraining order.

Nina — Silence.

Sparkle — Rage.

Kelly — When she was only eleven, her mother had forced her to

perform oral sex on her.

Gina — Hiding from a stalker. Her fourth.

Caroline — Grew up in a commune. Had her first abortion when she

was twelve.

Susan — Said “Who cares” two dozen telling times. Hole in the roof of

her mouth from too much cocaine.

Brooke — Numb.

Mann — Uncle would come over and finger her.

Alison — Father killed when she was eighteen.

Leslie — Raped by gym coach when she was fourteen.

Dawn — Date raped last year.

Melissa — Ex-boyfriend used to hit her. She finally had to get a nose

job.

Erin — Walked in on her mother screwing her boyfriend.

Betsy — A reduction left jagged scars running around her nipples and

through both breasts. Ashamed before. Ashamed now.

Michelle — Engaged.

Alicia — Lost her virginity to her father.

Dana — 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 B 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 gaps 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.” LLong pause] “Really, country? hmmm?” [Long pause] “And Pantera.”

“Country and Pantera? Really? hmnimm?”—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 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.]

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?

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): [Pause] 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 back 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.

[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 01’ 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 fiicking thing.

[crack... crack... crack …cracK]

Reston: Awwwwww-wwwww shit!

[…cracK -BANG- craCK... craCK 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 dawn 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.

XII

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 thy 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.

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 lOOft

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 light he still holds in his hand.

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

be pulling Reston to the

top?

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:

Navidson is sinking…

Or the stairway is

s t r e t c h 1 n g .

e x p a n d i n g,

dropping,

and as it slips,

d r a g g i n g

Reston

up

with

it.

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

snaps. …

[… —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 Offfrom 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’ ignis 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 pies, 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 other 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 Bokkøl 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 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… 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 Bight 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 jt.) [250—Breaks at 6,000 to 7,000 pounds. — Ed.]

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 Affiflex 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. [251—If Dft = 16t2 where time is calculated in seconds, the quarter would have to have fallen 27,273 miles exceeding even the earth’s circumference at the equator by 2,371 miles. Calculating at 32 ft/sec2 the number climbs even higher to 54.545 miles. An “impossible distance” indeed. [252—This formula isn’t entirely accurate. A more precise calculation can be made by [fill in later] [253—Mr. Truant never completed this note. — Ed.]

“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. [254—“Not worth a rat’s ass.” — Ed.] Hell.”

The film runs out here,

leaving nothing else behind but an unremarkable

white

screen

XIII

The Minotaur

Alarga en la pradera una pauso4a

Sombra, pero ya el hecho de nombrarlo

Y de conjecturar su circunstancia

Lo haceficción del arte y no criatura

Viviente de las que andan por Ia tierra.

— Jorge Luis Borges

[255— … 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.]

THE WAIT

1.

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.

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.” [256—Teppet C. Brookes’ The Places I’ve Seen as told to Emily Lucy Gates (San Francisco: Russian Hill Press, 1996), p. 37-69.]

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.” [257— Ibid. p.

38.258] [258—A1so refer back to footnote 212 dealing with Françoise Minkowska.]

2.

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.” [259—Teppet C. Brookes’ The Places I’ve Seen, p. 142.]

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—”The Navidson Legacy” Winter’s Grave, PBS, September 8, 1996.]

3.

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.

For a while Daisy and Chad try to coax their mother to even briefly

abandon her post. When that fails, they hang around the living room.

Karen’s inability to concentrate on them, however, soon drives both children away. A few times, Karen asks them to at least keep together.

Daisy, however, insists on hiding in her room where she can play endlessly with her prized Spanish doll and the doll house Tom finally finished for her, while Chad prefers to escape outside, disappearing into the summoning woods, sometimes with Hillary, often now without, always well beyond the range of any camera, his adventures and anger passing away unobserved.

That Saturday night Chad and Daisy have to put themselves to sleep.

Then around ten o’clock, we watch as both children come racing down into the living room, claiming to have heard voices. Karen, however, has heard nothing more than the ever present hiss of the radios, occasionally interrupted by Tom calling in from the Great Hall. Even after she checks out their bedroom, she is unable to detect any unusual sounds. At least Chad and Daisy’s obvious fear momentarily snaps Karen out of her obsession.

She leaves the radios and spends an hour tucking her children into bed.

Dr. Lon Lew believes the house enabled Karen to slowly break down

her reliance on Navidson, allowing her a greater and more permanent distance: “Her children’s fear coupled with their need for her further separated Karen from Navidson. Sadly, it’s not the healthiest way to proceed. She merely replaced one dependency for another without confronting what lay at the heart of both.” [261—Dr. Lon Lew’s “Adding In to Dependent” Psychology Today, v. 27, March/April 1994, p. 32.]

Then on Sunday evening, both children ask her what happened to all her

Feng Shui objects. We watch as they lead her from room to room, pointing out the absent tiger, the absent marble horses, and even the absent vase.

Karen is shocked. In the kitchen, she has to sit down, on the verge of a panic attack. Her breathing has quickened, her face is covered m sweat.

Fortunately, the episode only lasts a couple of minutes.

Along with several other critics, Gail Kalt dwells on Karen’s choice of

words during her conversation with Tom on the radio when she refers to Feng Shui as “some such shit.”

Karen has begun to deconstruct her various mechanisms of denial. She

does not continue to insist on the ineffectual science of Feng Shui. She recognizes that the key to her misery lies in the still unexplored fissure between herself and Navidson. Without knowing it she has already begun her slow turn to face the meaning, or at least one meaning, of the darkness dwelling in the depths of her house. [262—Gai1 Kalt’s “The Loss of Fajth —(Thank God!)” Grand Street, v. 54, fall 1195, p. 118.]

Certainly Karen’s step away from denial is made more evident when

right after her talk with Tom she gathers up any remaining items having to do with Feng Shui and throws them in a box. David N. Braer in his thesis “House Cleaning” notes how Karen not only adds to this collection the books already mentioned in Chapter V but also includes the Bible, several New Age manuals, her tarot cards, and strangest of all a small hand mirror. [263—David N. Braer’s “House Cleaning” Diss. University of Tennessee, 1996, p. 104.] Then after depositing the box in the garage, she looks in on her children one more time, comforting them with an open invitation to sleep in the living room with her if they like. They do not join her but the grateful tone of their murmurs seems to suggest they will now sleep better.

Helen Agaliway asserts that by “Monday, October 8th, Karen has made

up her mind to depart. When Tom reappears in the living room and informs her that Navidson is only hours away from getting back, she keeps the children home from school because she has every intention of leaving for New York that day.” [264—Helen Agaliway’s “The Process of Leaving” Diss. Indiana University, 1995, p. 241.]

Upon returning from town with bundles of rope, the pulleys, and several

trolley wheels, Karen begins packing and orders the children to try to do the same. She is in fact in the middle of frantically removing several winter coats and shoes from the foyer closet when Tom races out of the hallway, pushing the gurney in front of him, tears gushing from his eyes.

4.

When Karen sees Wax her hand flies to her mouth, though it hardly

prevents the cry. [265—Many have complained that The Holloway Tape as well as the two untitled sequences frequently identified as “The Wait” and “The Evacuation” are incomprehensible. Poor resolution, focus, and sound (with the exception of the interviews shot afterward in 16mm) further exacerbate the difficulties posed by so many jarring cuts and a general chronological jumble. That said, it is crucial to recognize how poor quality and general incoherence is not a reflection of the creator’s state of mind.

Quite the contrary, Navidson brilliantly used these stylistic discrepancies to further drive home the overwhelming horror and dislocation experienced by his family during “The Evacuation.” For other books devoted specifically to reconstructing the narrative see The Navidson Record: The Novelization (Los Angeles: Goal Gothum Publication, 1994): Thorton 3. Cannon Jr.’s The Navidson Record: Action and Chronologies (Portland: Penny Brook Press, 1996); and Esther Hartline’s Thru Lines (New York: Dutton, 1995).] Reston emerges from the hallway next, the growl growing louder behind him, threatening to follow him into the living room. Frantically, he slams the door and bolts all four locks, which no doubt thanks to the door’s acoustic rating actually seems to keep that terrible sound at bay.

Karen, however, starts shouting: “What are you doing? Billy? What

about Navy? Where’s Navy?”

Even though he is still crying, Tom tries to pull her away from the door,

“We lost him.”

“He’s dead?” Karen’s voice cracks. “I don’t think so,” Tom shakes his head.” But he’s still down there. Way

down.”

“Well then go in and get him! Go in and get your brother!” Then

starting to shriek, “You can’t just leave him there.”

But Tom remains motionless, and when Karen finally looks him in the

face and beholds the measure of his fear and grief, she crumples into a fit of sobs. Reston goes to the foyer and calls an ambulance.

Meanwhile, Wax, who has been temporarily left alone in the kitchen,

quietly groans on the stretcher. Next to him lies Jed’s body. Unfortunately Tom did not realize how much blood had soaked into Jed’s clothes. Blind

with his own sorrow, he unknowingly covered the linoleum with a smear of red when he set the corpse down. He even stepped in the blood and tracked footprints across the carpet as he lurched back to the living room to console Karen.

Perhaps inevitably, all the commotion draws the children out of their

room.

Chad catches sight of the body first. There is something particularly

disquieting about watching the way he and Daisy walk slowly toward Jed and then over to Wax’s side. They both seem so removed. Almost in a daze.

“Where’s our daddy?” Chad finally asks him. But Wax is delirious. “What. I need what-er.” Together Chad and Daisy fill a glass from the sink. Wax, however, is far

too weak to sit up let alone drink. They end up dribbling small drops of water on his cracked lips.

A few seconds later there is a loud banging on the front door. Reston

wheels over and opens it. He expects to see the paramedics but finds instead a woman in her late 40s with almost perfectly grey hair. Chad and Daisy retreat to the staircase. They too step in the blood, their feet leaving small red imprints on the floor. Chad’s teacher fails to utter even one word or offer any sort of assistance. Tom continues to sit with Karen, until eventually her muted cries join the wall of sirens rapidly approaching their house on Ash Tree Lane.

5.

While The Navidson Record clearly states that Wax Hook survived, it

does not dwell on any of the details following his departure. Numerous articles published after the film’s release, however, reveal that he was almost immediately rushed by helicopter to a hospital in Washington, D.C. where he was placed in an I.C.U. There doctors discovered that fragments from the coracoid process and scapula spine had turned his trapezius, delta and infraspinous muscles to hamburger. Miraculously though, the bullet and bone shrapnel had only grazed the subclavian artery. Wax eventually recovered and after a long period of rehabilitation returned to a life of outdoor activities, even though it is doubtful he will ever climb Everest now

let alone attempt to solo the North Face. By his own admission, Wax also keeps clear of caves not to mention his own closet. [266—See U.S. News & World Report, v. 121, December 30, 1996, p. 84; Premiere, v. 6, May 1993, P. 68-70; Life, v. 17, July 1994, p. 26-32; Climbing, November I, 1995, p. 44; Details, December 1995, p. 118]

Even as Wax was loaded into the ambulance, police began an

investigation into Jed Leeder’s death. Reston provided them with a copy of the tape from his Hi 8 showing Holloway shooting Wax and Jed. To the police, the murder appeared to have taken place in nothing more than a dark hallway. As APBs went out, patrolmen began a statewide search which would ultimately last several weeks. That afternoon, Karen also insisted on introducing the authorities to that all consuming ash-walled maze. Perhaps she thought they would attempt to locate Navidson. The results were hardly satisfying.

In The Reston Interview, Billy shakes his head and even laughs softly:

It wasn’t a bad idea. Tom and I’d had enough too. Karen just expected too much, especially from a town that has one sheriff and a handful of deputies. When the sheriff came over, Karen immediately dragged him over to the hallway, handed him a flashlight and the end of a spool of Monel fishing line. He looked at her like she was nuts, but then I think he got a little spooked too. At that point in time, no one was about to go in there with him.

Karen because of her claustrophobia. Tom, well he was already going to the bottom of a bottle. And me, I was trying to fix my wheelchair.

It was all bent from when I came up on the pulley. Even so though, I mean even if my chair had been fme, going back would have been hard. Anyway Sheriff Oxy, Axard, Axnard, I think that was his name, Sheriff Axnard went in there by himself. He walked ten feet in and then walked straight

back out, thanked us and left. He never said a word about where he’d been and he never came back. He spent a good amount of time looking for Holloway everywhere else but never in the house.

Right after the release of The Navidson Record, Sheriff Josiah Axnard

was accosted by numerous reporters. One clip captures the Sheriff in the process of climbing into his squad car “For once and for all, that house was completely searched and Holloway Roberts was not in it.” Six months later the Sheriff consented to an interview on National Public Radio (April 18, 1994) where he told a slightly different story. He confessed to walking down “an unfamiliar hallway.” “It’s not there no more,” he continued. “I checked. Nothing unusual there now but. . . but back then there was.. . there was a corridor on the south wall. Cold, no lights and goin’ on into nowhere.

It creeped me like I never been creeped before, like I was standing in a gigantic grave and 1 remember then, clearly, like it was yesterday, thinking to myself ‘If Holloway’s in here I don’t need to worry. He’s gone. He’s long gone.” [267—Nor is that the first time the word “grave” appears in reference to the house in The Navidson Record. When Reston suggests Navidson use the Leica distance meter, he adds, “That should put this ghost in the grave fast.” Holloway in Exploration #3 mutters: “Cold as a grave.” Also in the same segment Wax grunts a variation, “I feel like I’m in a coffin.” In one of her Hi 8 journal entries, Karen tries to make light of her situation when she remarks: “It’s like having a giant catacomb for a family room.” Tom in Tom’s Story tells the “grave-maker” joke, while Reston, during the rescue attempt, admits to Navidson: “You know, I feel like I’m in a grave.” To which Navidson responds, “Makes you wonder what gets buried here.” “Well judging by the size,” Reston replies. “It must be the giant from Jack and the fucking Beanstalk.” Giant indeed.] [268—0n several occasions, Zampanô also uses the word “grave.”] [269—See Index. — Ed.]

6.

That night Karen stays in the living room, crying off and on, leaving the

hallway door open, even though, as she explains to Reston, standing a foot too close will cause her to experience heart palpitations and tremors.

Reston, however, badly in need of some shut eye almost immediately falls into a deep sleep on the couch.

There is one particularly horrible moment when the phone rings and

Karen answers on speaker. It is Jed Leeder’s fiancée calling from Seattle, still unaware of what has happened. At first Karen tries to keep the news to herself but when the woman begins to detect the lie, Karen tells her the truth. A panicked shout cracks over the speaker phone and then decays into terrified cries. Abruptly the line goes dead. Karen waits for the woman to call back but the phone does not ring again.

Of course during all this, the children are once again abandoned, left to

look after each other, with no one around to help translate the horror of the afternoon. They hide in their room, rarely saying a thing. Not even Tom makes an appearance to even temporarily contest their fears with the soothing lyric of a bedtime story about otters, eagles, and the occasional tiger.

When Tom had returned from the grave, he was convinced he had lost

his brother. Both he and Reston had heard the great Spiral Staircase yawn beneath them, and Reston’s Hi 8 had even caught a glimpse of Navidson’s light sinking, finally vanishing into the deep like a failing star.

As Billy explains in The Reston Interview: “Tom felt like a part of him

had been ripped away. I’d never seen him act like that. He started shaking and tears just kept welling up in his eyes. I tried to tell him the stairway could shrink just like it had stretched, and he kept agreeing with me, and nodding, but that didn’t stop the tears. It was terrifying to watch. He loved his brother that much.”

After watching the paramedics take Wax away, we follow Tom’s retreat

to the study where he manages to locate among his things the last bit of a joint. Smoking it, however, offers absolutely no relief. He is no longer crying but his hands still shake. He takes several deep breaths and then as Karen is getting ready to show Sheriff Axnard the hallway, he steals a sip of bourbon. [270—See Harmon Frisch’s “Not Even Bill’s Acquaintance”

Twenty Years In The Program ed. Cynthia Huxley (New York: W. W.

Norton & Company, 1996), P. 143-179.]

Regrettably, Tom fails to stop at a sip. A few hours later he has finished

off the whole fifth as well as half a bottle of wine. He might have spent all night drinking had exhaustion not caught up with me. Of course, the following morning does nothing to erase yesterday’s events. Tom attempts to recover lost ground by accompanying Reston back to the Great Hall.

Much to their surprise, however, they discover the hallway now terminates thirty feet in, nor are there any doors or alternate hallways branching off it.

Karen returns to her room when she sees Tom and Reston reappear only five minutes later.

Even though he too is suffering from Navidson’s disappearance, Reston

still does his best to counsel Tom, and at least for a few hours Tom successfully resists drinking anything more. Chad apparently had escaped from the house at dawn and now refuses to come in or say a word to his mother. Tom eventually finds him among the branches of a tree just past the edge of the property line. Nevertheless, no amount of coaxing will induce the eight year old to come back in.

In Billy’s words (The Reston Interview again): “Tom told me Chad was

happy in his tree and Tom was hard pressed to start telling him inside was a better place. However, there was something else. The kid apparently bolted from the house when he heard some kind of murmuring, something about a walker in darkness, then a bang, like a gun shot, and the sound of a man dying. Woke him right up, he said. Back then I assumed he’d just been dreaming.”

Judging from the house footage, what seems to really push Tom over

the edge that second day is when he reenters the house and finds Daisy— her forearms acrawl with strange scratches—swaying in front of the hallway screaming “Daddy!” despite the absence of a reply, the absence of even an echo. When Karen finally comes downstairs and carries her daughter outside to help her find Chad, Tom takes the car and goes into town. An hour later he returns with groceries, unnecessary medical supplies, magazines and the reason for the excursion in the first place—a case of bourbon.

On the third and fourth day, Tom does not emerge once from the study,

attempting to drink his grief into submission.

Karen, on the other hand, begins to deal with the consequences of

Navidson’s disappearance. She rapidly starts paying more attention to her children, finally luring Chad back into the house where she can oversee his (and Daisy’s) packing efforts. In a brief clip we catch Karen on the phone, presumably with her mother, discussing their imminent departure from Virginia.

Reston remains in the living room, frequently attempting to raise

Navidson on the radio, though never hearing more than static and white noise. Outside a thunder storm begins to crack and spit rain at the windows.

Lightning builds shadows. A wind howls like the wounded, filling everyone with cold, bone weary dread.

Toward midnight, Tom emerges from the study, steals a slice of lemon

meringue pie and then whips up some hot chocolate for everyone. Whole milk, unsweetened cocoa, sugar, and a splash of vanilla extract all brought to a careful simmer. Billy and Karen appreciate the gesture. Tom has not stopped drinking, and even doses his cup with a shot of Jack Daniels, but he does seem to have leveled out, not exactly achieving some sublime moment of clarity but at least attaining a certain degree of self- control.

Then Tom, though he is only wearing a t-shirt, takes a deep breath and

marches into the hallway again. A minute later he returns.

“It’s no more than ten feet deep now,” Tom grunts. “And Navy’s been

gone over four days.”

“There’s still a chance,” Reston grumbles.

Tom tries to shrug off the certitude that his brother is dead. “You know,”

he continues very quietly, still staring at the hallway. “There once was this guy who went to Madrid. He was in the mood for something new so he decided to try out this small restaurant and order—sight unseen—the house specialty.

“Soon a plate arrived loaded with rice pilaf and two large meaty objects. “What’s this?’ he asked his waiter. “‘Cojones, Senor.’ “‘What are cojones?’ “Cojones’ the waiter answered, ‘are the testicles of the bull that lost in

the arena today.’

“Though a little hesitant at first, the man still went ahead and tried them.

Sure enough they were delicious.

“Well a week later, he goes back to the same restaurant and orders the

same thing. This time, when his dish arrives, the meaty objects are much smaller and don’t taste nearly as good.

“He immediately calls the waiter over. “‘Hey,’ he says. ‘What are these?’ “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.”

7.

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. [271—Karen’s emotional response is not limited to longing. Earlier that evening she retreated to the bathroom, ran the water in the sink, and recorded this somewhat accusatory Hi 8 journal entry: “Damn you for going, Navy.

Damn you. [Starting to cry] This house, this home, was supposed to help us get closer. It was supposed to be better and stronger than some stupid marriage vow. It was supposed to make us a family. [Sobbing] But, oh my god, look what’s happened.”]

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. [272—Anita Massine’s Dialects of Divorce

In American Film In The Twentieth Century (Oxford, Ohio: Miami University Press, 1995), p. 228.]

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. [273—Garegin Thorndike

Taylor’s “The Ballast of Self” Modern Psyche, v. 18, 1996, p. 74. Also refer back to Chapter II and V.]

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 cauchemar.

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. [274—Professor Lyle Macdonough’s

“Dissolution of Love in The Navidson Record,” Crafton Lecture Series, Chatfield College in St. Martin Ohio, February 9, 1996.]

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, Karen announces her intention to leave for New York City that night.

[275—In the following excerpt from The Last Interview, Navidson

sheds some more light on how he managed to emerge from those dark hollows: “I remember I had found Jed’s pack so I knew I was okay on water and food for a while. Then I just started climbing up the stairs, one step at a time. At first it was slow going. That roar would frequently rise up the central shaft like some awful wail. At times it sounded like voices.

Hundreds of them. Thousands. Calling after me. And then other times it sounded like the wind only there is no wind there.

“I remember finding The Holloway Tape off one of the landings. I had

caught sight of a few bits of neon marker still attached to the wall and wandered over to take a look. A minute later I saw his pack and the camera.

It was all just sitting there. The rifle was nearby too, but there was no sign of him. That was pretty odd to come across something, let alone anything, in that place. But what made finding that stuff particularly strange was how much I’d been thinking of Holloway at the time. I kept expecting him to jump around some corner and shoot me.

“After that, I was a little spooked and made sure to chuck the ammo

down into that pit off to my right. Over and over, I kept wondering what happened to his body. It was making me crazy. So I tried fixing my mind on other things.

“I remember thinking then that one of the toenails on my right foot, the

big toenail, had torn loose and started to bleed. That’s when De— … Delial came into my head which was awful.

“Finally though, I began concentrating on Karen. On Chad and Daisy.

On Tom and Billy. I thought about every time we’d gone to a movie together or a game or whatever, ten years ago, four months ago, twenty years ago. I remembered when I first met Karen. The way she moved.

These perfect angles she’d make with her wrists. Her beautiful long fingers.

I remembered when Chad was born. All that kind of stuff, trying to recall those moments as vividly as possible. In as much detail. Eventually I went into this daze and the hours began to melt away. Felt like minutes.

“On the third night I tried to take another step and found there wasn’t

one. I was in the Great Hall again. Oddly enough though, as I soon found out, I was still a good ways from home. For some mason everything had stretched there too. Now all of a sudden, there were a lot of new dead ends.

It took me another day and night to get back to the living room, and to tell you the truth I was never sure I was going to make it until I finally did.”]

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

8.

More than a handful of people have tried to [276] explain Holloway’s

madness.

[276—Some kind of ash landed on the following pages, in some places

burning away small holes, in other places eradicating large chunks of text.

Rather than try to reconstruct what was destroyed I decided to just bracket the gaps—[ ].

Unfortunately I have no idea what stuff did the actual charring. It’s way

too copious for cigarette tappings, and anyway Zampanô didn’t smoke.

Another small mystery to muse over, if you like, or just forget, which I recommend. Though even I’m unable to follow my own advice, imagining instead gray ash floating down like snow everywhere, after the blast but still

hours before that fabled avalanche of heat, the pyroclastic roar that will incinerate everything, even if for the time being—and there still is time … —it’s just small flakes leisurely kissing away tiny bits of meaning, while high above, the eruption continues to black out the sun.

There’s only one choice and the brave make it.

Fly from the path.

Lude dropped by a few nights ago. It’s mid-September but I hadn’t seen

him since June. News that I’d been fired from the Shop apparently pissed him off, though why he should care I’ve no idea. Like my boss, he also assumed I was on smack. More than a little freaked too when he finally saw for himself how bad off I was, real gaunt and withdrawn and not without a certain odor either. But Lude’s no idiot. One glance at my room and he knew junk was not the problem. All those books, sketches, collages, reams and reams of paper, measuring tapes nailed from corner to floor, and of course that big black trunk right there in 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 f or a

closer look. I 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.

“Bulishit,” 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”

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 Hogs, 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. I 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 for 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 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 Zaxnpanô’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 Zampanô.

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.

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 Zampanô 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 US? .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.

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 includes or refers to primary documents not available anywhere else. Through hard work, luck, or theft, Flint managed to [ ] across some of the notes and summations made by psychiatrist Nancy Tobe who for a br[ ]f period treated Holloway for [ ] depression:

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.” [278— Jeremy Flint’s Violent Seeds: The Holloway Roberts Myst [ ]y (Los[ ] Angel[]: 2.13.61, 1996), p. 48.]

Flint goes on to cover the second visit which [ I 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 [279—These Xs indicate text was inked out—not burned.], 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.” [280—Flint, p. 53.]

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[ I that her notes or her solutions would mean absolutely no[ 1g. 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. [281—Refer back to Chapter 5; footnote 67. — Ed.]

On the fourth visit, Tobe [ ] transcribed Holloway’s words verbatim. It

is i[ ]possible to tell from Flint’s text whether Tobe actually record[ ]d

Hollow[ ] or just wrote down his words from memory:

“I had already been out there for two days and then that morning, before

dawn, I [ ] to the ridge and waited. I waited a long time and I didn’t move.

It was cold. Real cold. Up till then everyone had been talking about the big buck but no one had seen anything. Not even a rabbit. Even though I’d been deer hunting a few times, I’d never actually shot a deer, but with, well the football team [ ], Elizabeth gone like that, I was gonna set it right by dropping that big buck.

“When the sun finally came out, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There he

was, right across the valley, the [ ] buck tasting the air. [ ] I was a good shot.

I knew what to do and I did it. I took my time, centered the reticule, let out my breath, squeezed slowly, and listened to that round as it cracked across the valley. I must have closed my eyes ‘cause the next thing I saw the deer [ ] to the ground.

“Everyone heard my shot and [ ] Funny thing was, because of where I’d

been, I was the last one to get there. My dad was waiting for me, just shaking his head, angry, and [ ]shamed.

“Look what you done boy,’ he said in a whisper but I could have heard

that whisper across the whole valley. “Look what you done. [ ] shot yourself a doe.” [ ] I almost killed myself then but I guess I thought it couldn’t get any worse. [ ] that was the worst. Staring at that dead doe and then watching my dad turn his back on me and just walk away.” [282—Flint, p. 61.]

At this point Flint’s analysis heads into a fairly pejorative and unoriginal

analysis of vi[ ]lence. He also makes a little t[ ] much of the word “doe” which Holloway used to describe his first love E[ ]zabeth. However since Flint is not the only one to make this association, it is worth at least a cursory gl[ ]nce.

“A vengeance transposed on the wild,” Flint calls Holloway’s killing of

the doe, implying that to Holloway’s eye the doe had become Elizabeth.

What Flint, however, fails to acknowledge is that with no certainty can he determine whether Hollow[ ]y described Elizabeth as a “doe” while he was going out with her [ ]r afterward. Holloway may have described her as such following the ill-fated hunting trip as a means to comp[ md his guilt, thus blaming himself not only for the death of the doe but for the death of love

as well. In [ ] Flint’s suggestion of brimming violence may be nothing more than a gross renaming of self[ ]reproach.

Flint [ ] argue that Holloway’s aggressive nature was bound to su[]face

in what he calls Navidson’s [ ]Hall of Amplification.”

Holloway’s latent suicidal urges [ ] when Wax and Jed insist on turning

back. He sees this (incorrectly) as an admission of failure, another failure, th[]s incr[ ]sing his sense of inadequacy. Holloway had over the years developed enough psychic defense mechanisms to avoid the destructive consequences of this self determine[ ]f defeat.

What made this incident different from all the rest was the [ ]ou[ ]e.

In many ways, Navidson’s house functions like an immense isolation

tank. Deprived of light, change in temperature and any sense of time, the individual begins to create his own sensory [ ], [I ] depen[ ]ng on the duration of his stay begins to project more and more of [ ] personality on those bare walls and vacant [ ]allways.

In Holloway’s case, the house as well as everything inside it becomes an

exten[ ]n o himself, e.g. Jed and Wax become the psy[ ]logical demons responsible for his failue

[sic]. Thus his first act—to sh[ jt Wax—is in fact the beginning of a

nearly operatic

s[ ]i[ ide. 283—IbXXXXXX SuiXXXXXXX [ XXXXXX] [284—

Inked out as well as burned.]

Certainly Flint [ ] not alone in emphasiz[ ]g the impl[ ]t violence i[

]suicide. In 1910 at []conference in Vienna, Wilhelm Stekel cla[ ]med [ ] “no one killed himself unless he[]either wanted to kill another person [ ]r wished a[]other’s death’s [285—Ned H. Cassem, “The Person C[]nfronting Death” in The Ne [ ]Harvard Guide to Psychiatry ed. Armand M. Nicholi, jr[ I M.D. (C[ ]brid[]e: Harvard University Press, 1 [188), p. 743.] [ ]1983 Buie and Maltzberger described s[ ]cide [ ]resulting from “two types of imperative impulses: murder[]us hate and an ur[ ]ent need to es[ ]ape suff[]ring.” [286—[ ]id., [ ] 744.]

Robert Jean Cam[ ]ell sums up t[ ]e psych[]dynamics of suic[ ]s as fol[

]ws:

sui[ ] or a suicide atte[ ]t is seen most freque[ ]ly to be an agg[ ]sive

attack directed against a loved one or against society in ge[ ]al; in others, it may be a mis[ ]ded bid for attention or may be conceived of as a means of ef[ ]ting reunion with the id[ ]al love-object or m[ ]ther. That suicide [ In one sense a means of relea[ ]e for aggressive impulses is sup[ ]ed by the change of wartime suicide rates. In Wo[ ] War II, for example, rates among the participating nations fell, [ ]times by as much as 30%; but in ne[ ]l countries, the rates remained the same.

In involutional depressions and in the depr[ ]ed type of

manic[]depressive psychosis, the following dynamic elements are of[ ]n clearly operative: the d[ ]essed patient loses the object that he depends upon for narcissistic s[ ]lies; in an atte[ ]t to force the object’s return, he regre[]es to the oral stage and inc[ ]porates (swallows up) the object, t[]us regressively identi[]ing with the object: the sadism originally directed against the desert[] object is ta[ ]en up by the patient’s sup[ ]go and is directed against the incorporated object, w[ ]h now lodges wit[ In the ego; suicide oc[ Is, not so much as an attempt on the ego’s part to esc[ ]pe the inexorable demands of the superego, but rather as a[ ]enraged attack on the in [ ]orated object in retaliation []or its having dese[ ]d the pati[ ] in the first place? [287—Robert J[ ]n Campbell, M.D[ ] Psychiatric Dictionary (Oxford Univ[ ]ity Press, 1981) [ ] 608[]]

[It[ ]s added f[ ]r em[ ]asis]

Of course the anni[ ]il[ ]tion of [ ]self does not necessarily preclude the

anni[ ]n of others. As is evident in sh[ ]ung sprees that culminate in suicide, an attack on the[ ]incorporated object” may extend first to [ ]attack on loved ones, co-work[ ] or even innocent by[ ]ders—a description, which ev[ ] Flint would agree, fits H[]Iloway.

Nevertheless th[ ]re are also numer[ Is objections to Flint[ ]s asser[ ] that Hollow[ i’s suicidal disposition would within that place inevitabl[

] lead to murder. The most enlight[ ]g refutation comes from Rosemary Enderheart w[ ]o not onl[ ]uts F[ ]in[ ] in his place but also reveals somet[ ]g new about Navidson’s history:

Where Flint’s argument makes the impulse to destroy others the result

of an impulse to destroy the self, we only have to consider someone with

similar self-destructive urges who when faced with similar conditions did not attempt to murder two individuals [ ]

SUBJECT: Will “Navy” Navidson COMMENT: “I think too often too seriously a[]out killing myself.”

Will Navidson was no stranger to s[ ]ide. It sat on his shoulder more

often than not: “It’s there before I sleep, there when I wake, it’s there a lot.

But as Nietzsche said, ‘The t[]ought of suicide is a consolation. It can get one through many a bad night.” (See Dr. Hetterman Stone’s Confidential: An In[ ]view With Karen Green 19[ ]

Navidson often viewed his achievements with disdain, considered his

direction vague,

and frequently assumed his desires would [ ]ever be met by life [ ]o

matter how f[ ]ly he lived it. However, unlike H[ ]ioway, he converted his d[ ]pair into art. He [ ]lied on his eye and film to bring meaning to virt[ ] everything he e[]count[ led, and though he paid the high price of lost interaction, he frequently conceived beautiful instances worthy of our time; what Robert Hughes famously referred to [ ] “Navidson’s little windows of

light.” Flint would [ ]test [ ] while both Holloway and [ ]vidson camped in the

same dale of depression, they were very dif[ ]rent in[ ]viduals: Navidson was merely a photographer while, to quote F[ ]nt “Holloway was a hunter who [ I crossed the line into territories of aggress[]on,”

Flint sh[ ]ld have done his [ ]omework, if he thought Navidson never

crossed that line.

In the 70’s Navidson became a career p[ ]journ[ ]list and ultimately a

famous one

but at the begin[ ]ing of that de[]ade he wasn’t carrying a Nikon. He

was manning an M-60

with the 1St cav[ ]y at Rock Island East where he would eventually

receive a Bronze

Star for saving the l[]ves of two [ ] soldiers he dra[]ged from a burning

personnel carrier. He[]ver, no longer has the medal. He sent it along with a [ ]oto of h[]s first kill to Richard Nixon to pr[]test the war. [288—Rosemary

End[ ]art’s How Have You Who Loved Ever Loved A Next Time? (New York: Times Books, 19[ ] p. 1432-1436).]

Unfortun[ ]ely when Navi[]son stumbled upon Hol[ l’s H[ ]8 tapes, he

had no idea their contents would [ ]spire such a heated and lasting debate over what l[]rked in the []art of that p[]ace. Despite the radically differ[]nt behavior pattern[] demonst[]ated by the hunter from Me[ ]mo[ ], Wi[ ]sin and the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist[ ]in the house, The Hollow[ I Tape revealed that e[ ]ther one could just as easily have been devo[]r[]d in the same way. The gli[ ]se rescued from that t[ ]r[ ]b[]le [lark warned that while paths might differ, the end might no[ ].

9.

The Hol[ ]y Tape

“I’m lost. Out of food. Low on water. No sense of direction. Oh god…[

]

So be[]ins The Holloway Tape—Holloway leering into the camera, a

backdrop of wall, final moments in a man’s life. These are jarring pieces, coherent only in the way they trace a de[]line.

Ove[ ]view:

· The opening card displays a quote from Gaston Bachelard’s The

Poetics of Space: “The dreamer in his corner wrote off the world in a detailed daydream that destroyed, one by one, all the objects in the world.” [289—Le rêveur, dans son coin, a rayë le monde en une reverie minutieuse qui détruit un a un tous les objets du monde.]

· There are thirteen parts. [ ] · They are separated by 3-seconds of white frame. In the upper n[]ht

hand corner a number or word tracks the chronology, starting with “First,” continuing with “2” thr[ ] “12” and ending with “Last.” The typeface is the same Janson as issued by Anton Janson in Leipzig between 1660 and 1687.

· These insertions were designed by Navidson. They [ ] and in no way

alter the original segments.

Navidson reproduces Holloway’s tape in its entirety.

Who can forget Holloway’s grizzled features as he []ums the camera on

hi[ ]self?

No comfort now. No hope of rescue or return. “I deserve this. I brought this all on me. But I’m s[] sorry. I’m so[ ]rry,”

he says in Part 2. “But what does that matter? I shot them. I shot both of [ ]em. [Long pause] Half a canteen of water’s all I’ve left. [Another pause] Shouldn’t have let them get []way then I [ ]have returned, told everyone they g[ ]lost. . . lost.” And with that last utterance, Holloway’s eyes reveal who here is real[]y lost.

Despite Holloway’s undeniable guilt, not since Floyd Collins became

trapped in the Kentucky Sand Cave back in 1925 has there been such a terrible instance of suffering. Co[]lins remained alive for fourteen days and nights before he died. Despite the efforts of many men to free him from the squeeze, Collins never saw the light of day again. He only felt the ink[ ]darkness and cold [ ] in on him, bind him, kill him. All he could do was rave about angels in chariots and liver and onions and chicken sandwiches.

[290— ]

Unlike Floyd Collins, no straight jacket of mud and rock holds

Holloway. He can still move around, though where he moves leads nowhere. By the time he begins to video tape his final hours, he has [ iready recognized the complete hopelessness of the situation. Repeatin[] his identity seems the only mantra [ ]offers any consolation: “Holloway Roberts. Born in M[ ]om[ ]sin. Bachelor’s from U. Mass.” [291—In the epil[]gue of her bo[]k Fear Mantras (Cambridge: Harvard Un[ ]ress, 1995) Alicia Hoyle disc[ Ises Hollow[ ]y’s l[]ck of fear training: “He didn[]t even pos[]es[] the ancient Hak-Kin-Dak man[ Ira” (p. [ 16). Earlier on she prov[]des a transl Ition of this hunter’s utter[lnce ([ 1 26): “I am not a fool. I a[] wise. I will run from my fear, I w[]ll out distance my f[ ]r, then I will hide fr[ I my fear, I w[]ll wait f[]r my fear, I will let m[] fear run past mel] then I will follow my fear, I will track [ ] fear until I c[]n approach m[ lear

in complete silence[] th[]n I will strike at m[] fear, I will charge my fe[ 1. I will grab h[]ld of my fear, I will sink my ft]ngers into my [lar, t[]en I will bite my fear, I w[]1l tear the thro[]t of my fear, I will bre[]k the neck of my fear, I wi[ I drink the blood of my fear, I [ ill gulp the flesh o[ ]my fear[] I will crush th[] bones of my fliarl land I will savor m[] fear, I will sw[]llow my fear, all []f it, and then I will digest []y fear unt[]l I can do nothing else but shit out my fear. In this w[]y will I be mad[] stronger[ ]] It is almost as if he believes preserving his identity on video tape can somehow hold what he is powerless to prevent: those endless contours of dark[]ess stealing the Hollow[ ] from himself. “I’m Holloway Roberts.” he insists.

“Born in Menomome, Wi[ ]n. Bachelor’s from U. Mass. Explorer,

professional hunter,[ ]eth. [Long pause] This is not right. It’s not fair. I don’t [ ]serve to die.”

Regrettably, the limited amount of light, the [ ]uality of tape, not to

mention the constant oscillation between sharp and blurry (compliments of the Hi 8’s automatic focus)[ ] barely c[ ]ure Holloway’s bearded face let [lone anything else—not to imply that there exists an ‘else’. Mainly a backdrop of darkness, which, as the police observed, could have [ len shot in any lightless room or closet. [ ]

In other words, the immen[ ]ity of Navidson’s house eludes the frame. It

exists only in Holloway’s face, fear etc[ ] deeper and deeper into his features, the cost of dying paid out with p[]un[]s of flesh and e[]ch s[ ]allow breath. It is painful[ ] obvious the creature Holloway hunts has already begun to feed on him.

Parts 4[ ]6,[ ],1O & 1[] centre on Holloway’s reiteration of his identity.

Part 3, however, is different. It only lasts four seconds. With eyes wide open, voice hoarse, lips split and bleeding, Hol[ ]y barks “I’m not alone.” Part 5 fo[]lows up with, “There’s something here. I’m sure of it now.” Part

8 with: “It’s following me. No, it’s stalking me.” And Part 9:

“But it won’t strike. It’s just out there waiting. I don’t know what for.

But it’s near now, waiting for me, waiting for something. I don’t know why it doesn’t [ ] Oh god … Holloway Roberts.

Menomonie, Wisconsin. [chambering a round in his rifle] Oh god[ ].”

[292—Collette Barnholt (American Cinematographer, [ ]ber 2, [ ] 49) has argued that the existence of Part 12 is an impossibility, claiming the framing and lighting, though only slightly different from earlier and later parts,

indicate the presence of a recording device other than Holloway’s. Joe Willis (Film Comment, [ ] p. 115) has pointed out that Barnholt’s complaint concerns those prints released after 199[1. Apparently Part 12 in all prints before [ ] and after 1993 show a view consistent with the other twelve. And yet even though the spectre of digital manipulation has been raised in The Navidson Record, to this day no adequate explanation has managed to resolve the curious enigma concerning Part 12.]

It is interesting to compare Holloway’s behavior to Tom’s. Tom

addressed his [ lagon with sarcasm, referring to i[] as “Mr. Monster” while describing himself as unpalatable. Humor proved a p[]werful psychological sh[]e[]d. Holloway has his rifle but it proves the weaker of the two. Cold metal and gunpowder offer him ver[] little internal calm. Never[ ]less[ ]

Of course, Part 13 or rather “Last” of The Holloway Tape initiates the

largest and perhaps most popular debate surrounding The Navidson Record. Lantern C. Pitch a[]d Kadina Ashbeckie stand on opposite ends of the spectrum, one favoring an actual monster, the other opting for a ratio[]al explan[]tion. Neither one, however, succeeds in [ ] a definitive interpretation.

Last spring, Pitch in the Pelias Lecture Ser[ ]es announced: “Of course

there’s a beast! And I assure you our belief or disbelief makes veiy little difference to that thing!” [293—Also see Incarnation Of Spirit Things and Lo[ ] by Lantern C. Pitch (New York: Resperine Press, 1996) for a look at the perils of disbelief.] In American Photo (May 1996, p. 154) Kadina Ashbeckie wr[]te: “Death of light gives birth to a creature-darkness few can accept as pure[]absence. Thus despite rational object[]ons, technology’s failure is over[]un by the onslaught of myth.” [294—Also see Kadina Ashbeckie, “Myth’s Brood” The Nation, [ ] September, 19[ ]]

[ ] Except the Vandal known as Myth always slaughters Reason if she

falters. [ ] Myth is the tiger stalking the herd. Myth is Tom’s [ ]r. Monster.

Myth is Hol[ ]y’s beast. Myth is the Minotaur [295—At the heart of the labyrinth waits the Mi[ ]taur and like the Minotaur of myth it name is—[ Chiclitz treated the maze as trope for psychic concealment, it excavation

resulting in (tragic [ ] reconciliation. But if in Chiclitz’s eye the Minotaur war a son imprisoned by a father’s shame, is there then to Navidson’s eye an equivalent misprision of the [ ] in the depths of that place? And for that matter does there exist that chance to reconcile the not known with the desire for its antithesis?

As Kym Pale wrote: Navidon is not Minos. He did not build—the labyrinth. He only d[

]covered it. The father of that place—be it Minos, Daedalus, [ ], St. Mark’s God, another father who swore “Begone! Relieve me from the sight of your detested form.,” a whole paternal line her following a tradition of dead sons —vanished long ago, leaving the creat[ ]e within all the time in history to forget, to grow, to consume the consequences of its own terrible fate. And if there once was a time when a [ ] slain[ ] that time has long since passed. “Love the lion!” “Love the lion.” But love alone does not make you Androcles. And for your stupidity your head’s crushed like a grape in its jaws. [296—Pale [ ] allusion to the li[ ] here [ ]. [123—At the risk of stating the obvious no woman can mate with a bull and produce a child.

Recognizing this simple scientific fact, I am led to a somewhat interesting suspicion: King Minos did not build the labyrinth to imprison a monster but to conceal a deformed child— his child.] Reconciliation within is personal and possible; reconciliation without is probable. The creature does not know you, does not fear you, does not remember you, does not even see you. Be careful, beware [ ] [297—See Kym Pale’s “Navidson and the Lion” Buzz, v [ ]ber, 199[ ], p. [ ]. Also revisit Traces of Death] [298—Whether you’ve noticed or not—and if you have, well bully for you—Zampanô has attempted to systematically eradicate the “Minotaur” theme throughout The Navidson Record. Big deal, except while personally preventing said eradication, I discovered a particularly disturbing coincidence. Well, what did I expect, serves me right, right? I mean that’s what you get for wanting to turn The Minotaur into a homie… no homie at all.]

Myth is Redwood. [299—See Appendix B.]And in Navidson’s house

that faceless black i[ ] many myths incarnate.

“Ce ne peut être que lafin du monde, en avançant,” Rimbaud dryly

remarked. Suffice it to say, Holloway does not [ ]French for his end. Instead

he props up his []i[]eo camera, ignites a magnesium flare, and crosses the room to the far end, where he slumps in the corner to wait. Sometimes he mumbles [ ]hi[lself, sometimes he screams obscenities [ ]to the void: “Bullshit! Bullshit! Just try and get me you motherfucker!” And then as the minutes creak by, his energy dips. “[ ] I don’t want to die, this [ ]“ words coming out like a sigh—sad and lost. He lights another flare, tosses it toward the camera, then pushes the rifle against his chest and shoots himself. [ ]Jill Ramsey Pelterlock wrote, “In that place, the absence of an end finally became his own end.” [300—Jill Ra[ ]y [ ]t[ ]ock’s “No Kindness” St. Pa[ ]. November 21, 1993.]

Unfortunately, Holloway is not entire[ ] s[ ]ssful. For exactly two

minutes and 28 seconds he groans and twitches in his own blood, until fm[ ] he slip[] into shock and presumably death.301 Then for 46 seconds the

301Quite a few people have speculated that Chad—thanks to the

perverse acoustic properties of the house—probably heard Holloway commit suicide. See page 320. Consider Rafael Geethtar ServagiG’s Th Language of Tenure (New York: St. Martin’s Press, lQ’?5), p. 13 where he likens Chad’s experience to those of Roman’s listening to Perilaus devilish chamber: “This unusual work of art war a life size replica of a bull. cast in solid brass, hollowed -out, with a trapor in the back, through which victims were placed. A fire was then lit beneath the belly slowly cooking anyone inside. A series of musical pipes in the ball’s head translated the tortured screams into strange mf)sc. Supposedly the tyrant Phalaris killed the inventor Perilaus by placing him inside his own creation[ ] [302—Can’t help thinking of old man Z here and those pipes in his head working overtime; alchemist to his own secret anguish; lost in an art of suffering.

Though what exactly was the fire that burned him?

As I strain now to see past The Navidson Record, beyond this strange

filigree of imperfection, the murmur of Zampanö’s thoughts, endlessly searching, reaching, but never quite concluding, barely even pausing, a ruin of pieces, gestures and quests, a compulsion brought on by— well that’s precisely it, when I look past it all I only get an inkling of what tormented him. Though at least if the fire’s invisible, the pain’s not—mortal and

guttural, torn out of him, day and night, week after week, month after month, until his throat’s stripped and he can barely speak and he rarely sleeps. He tries to escape his invention but never succeeds because for whatever reason, he i compelled, day and night, week after week, month after month, to continue building the very thing responsible for his incarceration.

Though is that really right?

I’m the one whose throat is stripped. I’m the one who hasn’t spoken in

days. And if I sleep I don’t know when anymore.

a A few hours drift by. I broke off to shuffle some feeling back into my

knees and try to make sense of the image now stuck inside my head. It’s been haunting me for a good hour now and I still don’t know what to make of it. I don’t even know where it came from.

Zampanô is trapped but where may surprise you. He’s trapped inside

me, and what’s more he’s fading, I can hear him, just drifting off, consumed within, digested I suppose, dying perhaps, though in a different way, which is to say—yes, “Thou sees me not old man, but I know thee well”—though I don’t know who just said that, all of which is unfinished business, a distant moon to sense, and not particularly important especially since his voice has gotten even fainter, still echoing in the chambers of my heart, sounding those eternal tones of grief, though no longer playing the pipes in my head.

I can see myself clearly. I am in a black room. My belly is brass and I

am hollow. I am engulfed in flames and suddenly very afraid.

How am I so transformed? Where, I wonder, is the Phalaris responsible

for lighting this fire now sweeping over my sides and around my shoulders?

And if Zampanô’s gone—and I suddenly know in my heart he is very, very gone—why does strange music continue to fill that black room? How is it possible the pipes in my head are still playing? And who do they play for?

[]am[ ]reveals nothing else but his still body. Nearly a minute of s[

]ence. In fact, the length is so absurd it alm[]st appears as if Navidson

forgot to trim this section. After all there is nothing more to [ ] gained from this scene. Holloway is dead. Which is [ ]act[] when it happ[ ]ns.

The whole thing clocks in under tw[ ] seconds. Fingers of blackness

slash across the lighted wall and consume Holloway. And even if[

I loses sight of everything, the tape still records that terrible giuwl, this

time without a doubt, insi[]e the room.

Was it an actual cr[ ]t[ ]e? [303—Creature is admittedly 4 ]pretty

clumsy description. Offspring of the Greek Koroc meaning “gurfeit’, the implication of fullness provides a misleading irnpreion of the minol lr,4n-fact all references to the Minotaurf ]self rnut be viewed a uiy representative.

Obviou1y, wtiii Holloway encounters pointed[]y not half man] half bull. [ ] something other, forever inhabiting[ ], unreadable [ ]nranting undeserved ontoloeical bnefit [ ]]

Or just the flare sputtering out? And what about the sound? Was it made

by a be[ I or jus[ ] a[]other reconfig[]ration of that absurd space; like the Khumbu Icefall; product of [ ]ome peculiar physics?

It seems erroneous to assert, like Pitch, that this creat[ ]e had actual

teeth and claws of b[ ]e (which myth for some reason [ I requires). [ ]t d[ ]d have claws, they were made of shadow and if it did have te[]th, they were made of darkness. Yet even as such the [ ] still stalked Holl[]way at every corner until at last it did strike, devouring him, even rollring, the last thing heard, the sound []f Holloway ripped out of existence. [As John Hollander [ ] “It would annihilate us all to see/ The huge shape of our being; mercifully? [ ) offers us issue and oblivion” thus echoing one more time, though not for the last time, [ ]endlessly[] in an ever unfolding [nd yet never opening sequence, [ ] lost on stone trails]]

ESCAPE

[304—I’ve no decent explanation why Zampanô calls this section “The

Escape” when in footnote 265 he refers to it as “The Evacuation.” All I can say is that this error strikes me as similar to his earlier waffling over whether to call the living room a “base camp” or “command post.”

10.

Unlike Navidson, Karen does not need to watch the tape twice. She

immediately starts dragging suitcases and boxes out into the rain. Reston helps.

Navidson does not argue but recognizes that their departure is going to

take more than a couple of minutes.

“Go to a motel if you want,” he tells Karen. “I’ve still got to pack up all

the video and film.”

At first Karen insists on remaining outside in the car with the children,

but eventually the lure of lights, music, and the murmur of familiar voices proves too much, especially when faced with the continuing thunderstorm howling in the absence of dawn.

Inside she discovers Tom has attempted to provide some measure of

security. Not only has he bolted the four locks on the hallway door, he has gleefully established a rebarbative barricade out of a bureau, china cabinet, and a couple of chairs, crowning his work with the basinet from the foyer.

Whether a coincidence or not, Cassady Roulet has gone to great lengths

to illustrate how Tom’s creation resembles a theatre:

Note how the china cabinet serves as a backdrop, the opposing chairs as

wings, the bureau, of course, providing the stage, while the basinet is none other than the set, a complicated symbol suggesting the action of the approaching play. Clearly the subject concerns war or at the very least characters who have some military history. Furthermore the basinet in the context of the approaching performance has been radically altered from its previous meaning as bastion or strong hold or safe. Now it no longer feigns any authority over the dark beyond. It inherently abdicates all pretense of significance. [305—Cassady Roulet’s Theater in Film (Burlington: Barstow Press, 1994), p. 56. Roulet also states in his preface: “My friend Diana Neetz at The World of interiors likes to imagine that the stage is set for Lear, especially with that October storm continuing to boom outside the Navidson’s home.”]

Karen appreciates Tom’s work on this last line of defense, but she is

most touched by the way he comically clicks his heals and presents her with the colours—blue, yellow, red, and green—four keys to the hallway. An

attempt to offer Karen some measure of control, or at least sense of control, over the horror beyond the door.

It is impossible to interpret her thanks as anything but heartfelt. Tom

offers a clownish salute, winning a smile from both Chad and Daisy who are still somewhat disoriented from having been awakened at five in the morning and dragged out into the storm. Only when they have disappeared upstairs does Tom lift up the basinet and pull out a bottle of bourbon.

A few minutes later, Navidson enters the living room carrying a load of

video tape and film. In all the commotion following his return, he has not yet had a spare moment to spend with his brother. That all changes, however, when he finds Tom on the floor, his head propped up against the couch, enjoying his drink.

“Knock it off,” Navidson says swiftly, grabbing the alcohol from his

brother. “Now is not the time to go on a binge.”

“I’m not drunk.” “Tom, you’re lying on the floor.” Tom takes a quick glance at himself, then shakes his head: “Navy, you

know what Dean Martin said?”

“Sure. You’re not drunk if you can lie down without holding on.” “Well look,” Tom mutters, lifting his arms in the air. “No hands.” Setting down the box he is carrying, Navidson helps his twin up. “Here, let me make you some coffee.” Tom gives a noticeable sigh as he at last leans on his brother. Not till

now has he been able to really face the crippling grief Navidson’s absence had caused him or for that matter address the enormous relief he now feels knowing his twin did indeed survive. We watch as tears well in his eyes.

Navidson puts his arm around him: “Come on.” “At least when you’re drunk,” Tom adds, quickly wiping the wet from

his face. “You’ve always got the floor for your best friend. Know why?”

“It’s always there for you,” Navidson answers, his own cheeks suddenly

flushing with emotion as he helps his weaving brother to the kitchen.

“That’s right,” Tom whispers. “Just like you.”

Reston is the one who hears it first. He is alone in the living room

packing up all the radios, when from behind the hallway door comes a faint grinding. It sounds miles away, though still powerful enough to cause the basinet on the bureau to tremble. Slowly the noise gathers itself, growing louder and louder, getting closer and closer, something unheralded and unfamiliar contained in its gain, evolving into a new and already misconstrued sort of menace. Reston’s hands instinctively grab the wheels of his chair, perhaps expecting this new evolution within the chambers of the house to shatter the hallway door. Instead it just dies, momentarily relinquishing its threat to silence.

Reston exhales.

And then from behind the door comes a knock. Followed by another

one.

Navidson is outside loading a box of Hi 8 cassettes into the car when he

sees the upstairs lights in the house go out one by one. A second later Karen screams. The pelting rain and occasional crack of thunder muffles the sound, but Navidson instinctively recognizes the notes of her distress. As Billy described the scene in The Reston Interview:

Navidson’s dehydrated, hasn’t eaten shit for two days, and now he’s

dragging supplies out to the car in the middle of a thunderstorm. Every step he takes hurts. He’s dead on his feet, in total survival mode, and all it takes is her voice. He drops everything. Lost some rolls of film to water damage too. Just tears through the house to get her.

Due to the absence of any exterior cameras, all experiences outside the

house rely on personal accounts. Inside, however, the wall mounted Hi 8s continue to function.

Karen is upstairs placing her hair brushes, perfume, and jewelry box in

a bag, when the bedroom begins to collapse. We watch the ceiling turn from white to ash-black and drop. Then the walls close in with enough force to splinter the dresser, snap the frame of the bed, and hurl lamps from their nightstands, bulbs popping, light executed.

Right before the bed is sheared in half, Karen succeeds in scrambling

into the strange closet space intervening between parent and child.

Conceptual artist Martin Quoirez observes that this is the first time the house has “physically acted” upon inhabitants and objects:

Initially, distance, dark, and cold were the only modes of violence. Now

suddenly, the house offers a new one. It is impossible to conclude that Holloway’s actions altered the physics of that space. Nevertheless, it is impossible to deny that its nature seems to have changed. [306—Martin Quoirez on The L. Patrick Morning Show, KRAD, Cleveland, Ohio, October 1, 1996.]

Karen avoids the threat in her bedroom only to find herself in a space

rapidly enlarging, the size swallowing up all light as well as Daisy’s barely audible cries for help.

The darkness almost immediately crushes Karen. She collapses. Of

course, there are no cameras at this point to show her lost in seizure. That history relies once again on The Reston Interview:

Navy said it felt like he was running into the jaws of some big beast

about to chomp down and as you saw later on, that’s— that’s exactly what that ugly fucker finally did.

[Reston chokes back tears] Sorry… I’m sorry … Awww fuck it still gets me.

Anyway, Navy finds her hyperventilating on the floor. He scoops her up

— supposedly she calmed down as soon as she was in his arms — and then all of a sudden that growl starts up again, rolling in like bad thunder.

[Reston shifts in his wheelchair; takes a sip of water] Well, he runs out of there. Back through their bedroom. Barely makes it

through. The door frame came down like a guillotine. Hammered Navy’s shoulder and grazed Karen in the head with enough force she lost consciousness.

I tell you Navy’s one tough fucker. He kept going, down the stairs, and

finally outside. And then Daisy stopped screaming.

The next clip of Hi 8 shows Navidson reentering the house, shouting for

Daisy and Chad as he sprints down the hail, heading toward the stairs in order to get back up to the children’s bedroom. Then suddenly the floor drops away and he is sliding straight into the living room where he would have died had he not succeeded with one desperate flail to grab hold of the handle to one of the doors.

The Reston Interview:

Me, I had been trying to get the hell out of there. The knock had turned

into this heavy awful pounding. The hallway door was still bolted shut and barricaded but I just knew all hell was about to break lose.

In fact, my first thought was that it was Holloway, though that

hammering was awful hard. I mean the whole wall shuddered with every hit, and I’m thinking if that is Holloway he’s changed and I don’t need to reacquaint myself with this new and improved version. Especially not now.

[Reston repositions his wheelchair slightly] My chair was still pretty messed up so I couldn’t move as fast as I

normally do. Then all of a sudden, the pounding stops. Just like that.

Silence. No banging, no growl, nothing. And boy, I don’t know how to describe it but that silence was more powerful than any sound, any call. I had to answer it, that silence, I mean, I had to respond. I had to look.

So I turn around—you can see some of this on the video—the door’s

still closed and the stuff Tom put together is still in front, though the-what-you-call-it, the helmet, has already fallen to the floor. Then the china cabinet and bureau start to sink. Slowly at first, inch by inch, and then a little faster. My chair begins to slide. I wedge the brakes, grip the wheels.

At first I don’t understand what’s happening until it dawns on me that it’s the floor beneath the barricade that’s dropping.

That’s when I twisted around and lunged for the foyer. No chance I

could have wheeled out of there. I barely managed to reach the door frame and get enough of a purchase to hang on. My chair though slipped out from under me and just rolled, end over end, down that slope.

The floor must have sunk six, seven feet. Way below the baseboard, like

the foundation had given way, except there was no fucking foundation. You expected to see cement but all there was was blackness.

All of it—the china cabinet, bureau, coffee table, chairs—just slid down

that floor and vanished over the edge. Navy would have vanished too if he hadn’t got hold of that door lever.

Thus the devouring of one theatre of the absurd leads to another. And as

is true in both cases, no amount of monologue, costume, or wit can defer the insistent gravity of that void. As theatre critic Tony K. Rich once remarked: “The only option is a quick exit, stage left, and I’d also advise a cab to the airport.” [307—Tony K. Rich’s “Tip The Porter” The Washington Post, v. 119, December 28, 1995, p. C-I, column 4.]

The exit, however, is not so easily achieved. The Reston Interview

again:

Well I started yelling for help. You have to remember, my hands were

all messed up from my trip down there. My grip was failing. If Navy didn’t get to me fast, I was going to fall.

So Navy starts swinging that door he’s hanging on, back and forth, until

he can kind of swing, kind of scramble to where he’s about three feet away from me. Then he takes this deep breath, gives me half a smile, and jumps.

That was the longest moment of them all, and then it was over. He was

holding onto the door frame, hauling himself into the foyer, and then dragging me to safety. And all that with a messed up shoulder too.

On tape, it looks like Navy just hopped over to me and that was that.

But boy the way I remember it, his jump took forever.

Though poorly lit with even poorer resolution, we can see in the video

how Navidson uses the door to get in range of Reston, despite the fact that the hinges are about to give way. Luckily, he manages to jump free just as the door wrenches loose and tumbles into oblivion. The whole thing does not last more than a handful of seconds, but like Reston, Navidson notes how this brief bit of action still leaves a lasting impression. From The Last Interview:

A few moments ended up feeling like hours. I was just dangling on that

brass handle, not daring to look, though of course I did. The floor was

steeper than the Lhotse Face, dropping right off into that familiar chill. I knew I had to get to Billy. I just hadn’t figured out how yet. Then I heard the ripping. The hinges weren’t supporting my weight.

So I did about the only thing I could think of: I swung the door left,

right, then left, and

right one more time which closed the gap to a few feet from where

Reston was hanging.

Just as I made my jump, I heard the first hinge and then the second

hinge tear free of

the frame. That sound stretched the seconds into hours. [Pause] Once I made it though, everything sped up again. The next thing I knew

we were both out on the front lawn getting soaked by the rain.

You know when I finally went back to the house to retrieve the Hi 8s, I

couldn’t believe

how quickly it had all happened. My leap looks so easy and that

darkness doesn’t seem dark at all. You can’t see the hollowness in it, the cold. Funny how incompetent images can sometimes be.

Those last words in particular may sound a bit glib, especially coming

from such an esteemed photographer. Nevertheless, in spite of numerous Hi 8s mounted all over the house, Navidson is right: all the images recorded during this segment are inadequate.

Too bad Navidson never holds a camera. The entire sequence covering

the escape from the house is reminiscent of something taken off of a cheap surveillance system in a local bank or 7-Eleven. The clips are impartial renderings of a space. If the action slips past the frame, the camera does not care enough to adjust its perspective. It cannot see what matters. It cannot follow.

Only the interviews inform these events. They alone show us how the

moments bruise and bleed.

12.

Outside rain overwhelms everything, drenching the street, filling the

gutters, stripping trees of fall leaves. Reston sits on the grass, soaked to the bone but refusing to take shelter. Karen is still unconscious, lying in the car exactly where Navidson put her.

Daisy and Chad, however, are still missing.

So for that matter is Tom.

Navidson is trying to decide how he should reenter the house when the

sound of shattering glass draws him to the backyard. “It was definitely a window breaking” Reston remembers. “And when Navy heard it, he just took off running.”

Reston recalls watching Navidson disappear around the house. He had

no idea what would happen next. It was bad enough that he was without his wheelchair. Then he heard Daisy scream, a high-pitched burst bright enough to pierce the hard patter of the storm, followed by shouts, and then something Reston had never heard before: “It was like an immense gasp, only very, very loud.”

Reston was squinting in the rain, when he suddenly saw a shadow

separate from the tree line: “By then dawn had begun to creep in but the storm clouds were still keeping the day pretty dark.” Reston immediately assumed it was Navidson but then as the figure got closer he could see it was much smaller than his friend. “A strange walk too. Not fast at all but very deliberate. There was even something threatening about it.”

Chad just nodded at Reston as he passed by him and climbed into the

car. He never said a thing either, just sat down next to his mother and waited for her to wake up.

Chad had seen what had happened but had no words to describe it.

Reston knew if he wanted to find out, he would have to drag himself toward the back of the house, which is exactly what he started to do.

Daisy had stopped screaming because of Tom.

Somehow Tom had managed to make his way through the heaving

house to the upstairs hallway where he began to close in on the cries of the terrified five year old. What no one knew then was that Chad had already snuck outside, preferring the solitude of the early morning to all the packing and panic curdling inside.

As we can see, Tom finally finds Daisy frozen in the shadows. Without

a word, he sweeps her up in his arms and races back down to the first floor, avoiding the precipitous drop into the living room—the way Navidson had gone—by dashing instead toward the rear of the house.

The whole place keeps shuddering and shaking, walls cracking only to

melt back together again, floors fragmenting and buckling, the ceiling suddenly rent by invisible claws, causing moldings to splinter, water pipes to rupture, electrical wires to spit and short out. Worse, the black ash of below, spreads like printer’s ink over everything, transforming each corner, closet, and corridor into that awful dark. Then Tom and Daisy’s breath begins to frost.

In the kitchen, Tom throws a stool through the window. We hear Tom

saying: “Okay Daisy girl, make it through here and you’re home free.” Which might have been just that simple had the floor not taken on the characteristics of giant conveyor belt, suddenly drawing them away from their only escape.

Cradling Daisy in his arms, Tom starts running as fast as he can, trying

to out race the shock of the void yawning up behind them. Ahead, Navidson appears in the window.

Tom pushes harder, edging closer and closer, until finally as he gets

within reach, he holds Daisy out to Navidson who despite the fragments of glass scratching long bloody lines along his forearms, immediately rips her free of the house and into safety.

Tom, however, has found his limit. Badly out of breath, he stops

running and drops to his knees, clutching his sides and heaving for air. The floor carries him backwards ten or fifteen feet more and then for no apparent reason stops. Only the walls and ceiling continue their drunken dance around him, stretching, bending, even tilting.

When Navidson returns to the window, he cannot believe his brother is

standing still. Unfortunately, as Tom demonstrates, whenever he takes one step forward, the floor drags him two steps back. Navidson quickly begins

to crawl through the window, and oddly enough the walls and ceiling almost instantly cease their oscillations.

What happens next happens so fast it is impossible to realize just how

brutal the closure was before it is already over. Only the after-effects create an image commensurate with the shutter like speed with which those walls snapped shut and shattered all the fingers in both of Tom’s outstretched hands. Bones “like bread sticks” (Reston’s words) [308—Due to the darkness and insufferable limitations of the Hi 8s, the chaotic bits of tape representing these events must be supplemented with Billy’s narration.

Navidson, however, does not discuss any of these horrific moments in The Last Interview. Instead he makes Reston the sequence’s sole authority.

This is odd, especially since Reston saw none of it. He is only recounting what Navidson told him himself. The general consensus has always been that the memory is simply too painful for Navidson to revisit. But there is another possibility: Navidson refuses to abandon the more perspicacious portion of his audience. By relying on Reston as the sole narrative voice, he subtly draws attention once again to the question of inadequacies in representation, no matter the medium, no matter how flawless. Here in particular, he mockingly emphasizes the fallen nature of any history by purposefully concocting an absurd number of generations. Consider: 1.

Tom’s broken hands –—> 2. Navidson’s perception of Tom’s hurt –— > 3.

Navidson’s description of Tom’s hurt to Reston –—> 4. Reston’s re-telling of Navidson’s description based on Navidson’s recollection and perception of Tom’s actual hurt. A pointed reminder that representation does not replace. It only offers distance and in rare cases perspective.] now jut out through the flesh. Blood covers his arms, as well as pours from his nose and ears.

For a moment, Tom looks like he is going to slip into shock as he stares

at his mutilated body.

“Goddamn it Tom, run!” Navidson shouts.

And Tom tries, though his effort only sweeps him farther away from his

brother. This time when he stops, he knows he has no chance.

“Hang on, I’m coming to get you,” Navidson yells, as he squeezes

himself all the way onto the kitchen counter.

“Aw Christ,” Tom mutters.

Navidson looks up.

“What?” Whereupon Tom disappears.

In less time than it takes for a single frame of film to flash upon a

screen, the linoleum floor dissolves, turning the kitchen into a vertical shaft.

Tom tumbles into the blackness, not even a scream flung up behind him to mark his fall, Navidson’s own scream ineffectually scratching after him, his twin, stolen and finally mocked in silence, not even the sound of Tom hitting the bottom, which is how it might have remained had not some strange and unexpected intrusion, out of the blue, returned Tom’s end in the shape of an awful gasp, heard by Reston, perhaps by Karen who suddenly groaned, and certainly by Chad who crouched among the trees, listening and finally watching over the sobs of his father and little sister until something dark and unknown told him to find his mother.

XIV

“Let you be stripped of your purple dyes, for I too once in the wilderness with my wife had

all the treasure I wished.”

— Erikidu

Toward the end of October, Navidson went up to Lowell to take care of

his brother’s things. He assured Karen he would join her and the children by the first of November. Instead he flew straight back down to Charlottesville.

When Thanksgiving came and went and Navidson still had not made it to New York, Karen called Fowler.

Following the release of The Navidson Record, Audrie McCullogh,

who helped Karen build the bookshelf, briefly discussed the Navidsons’ relationship in a radio interview (a transcript can be obtained by writing to KCRW in Los Angeles). In it Audrie claimed the decision not to get married always came from Karen: “Navy would have married her in a second. She was always the one against it. She wanted her freedom and then would go berserk when he was away. Her whole affair with Fowler was about that. Seeing someone else but not. . . agh, I shouldn’t get into that.” [309—Audrie McCullogh interviewed by Liza Richardson on “Bare Facts,” KCRW, Los Angeles, June 16, 1993.]

After Navidson had vanished down the Spiral Staircase, Karen found

herself trapped between two thresholds: one leading into the house, the other leading out of it. Even though she finally did succeed in leaving Ash Tree Lane and in some respects Navidson, she was still incapable of entering any sort of dark enclosed place. Even in New York she refused to take subways and always avoided elevators.

The reasons are not at all obvious. The leading theory now depends on a

history given by Karen’s estranged older sister Linda. Earlier this year, she went on a public access “talk show” and described how they had been sexually abused by their stepfather. According to her, one fall weekend while their mother was away, he took both girls to an old farmhouse where he forced Karen (age fourteen) down into a well and left her there while he raped Linda. Later, he forced Linda down the well and did the same to Karen.

The pharmacotherapy study Karen participated in never mentions any

history of sexual abuse (see footnote 69). However it does not seem unreasonable to consider a traumatic adolescent experience, whether a fantasy or real, as a possible source for Karen’s fears. Unfortunately when asked by various reporters to confirm her sister’s claim, Karen refused to comment.

Navidson also refuses to comment, stating only that Karen’s already

natural fear of that place was worsened by her severe “claustrophobia.” In The Navidson Record, Karen describes her anxiety in veiy simple terms:

“Green lawns in the afternoon, warm 100 watt bulbs, sunny beaches, all

of them, heaven. But get me near an elevator or a poorly lit basement and I’ll freak. A blackout can paralyze me. It’s clinical. I was once part of a study but the drugs they gave me made me fat.”

More than likely no one will ever learn whether or not the stories about

the well and Karen’s stepfather are true.

After a decade of distance, the house was supposed to be a new

beginning. Navidson gave up assignments abroad and Karen vowed to concentrate on raising their family. They both wanted and for that matter needed what neither one could really handle. Navidson quickly took refuge in his documentary. Regrettably for Karen, his work was still at home. He played more with the children, and every day filled the rooms with his substantial energy and natural authority. Karen was not strong enough to define her own space. She needed help.

Except in those objects housing evidence of her adultery, Karen’s affair

with Fowler barely exists in The Navidson Record. It was not until the film

began to succeed that details concerning this relationship, however spurious, began to emerge.

Fowler was an actor living in New York. He worked at a Fifth Avenue

clothing store, specializing in Italian cuts for women. He was considered consummately attractive and spent his evenings talking about acting down at the Bowery Bar, Naked Lunch, or Odelay-la. Apparently he picked up Karen on the street.

Literally.

Rushing to meet her mother for dinner, Karen had stepped off the curb

and turned her ankle. For a dazed instant she lay on the asphalt amid the scattered contents of her bag—der absoluten Zerrissenheit. [310—A line for Kyrie, though these days she’s a little unapproachable as Gdansk Man is now officially on some kind of Halloween rampage. He apparently cornered Lude at Dragonfly intending to exact some kind of serious physical retribution. Lude smiled and kicked him hard in the balls. The bouncers there, all friends of Lude’s, quickly threw the madman into the street.

Gdansk Man in turn, being one of this century’s truly great logicians, left some yelling message on my machine. A powerful bit of articulation on his part, frequently juxtaposing murder and my name with just the right amount of grunting incoherence. Who cares? Fuck him. As if he’s really going to change any of this, which also applies to that scrap of German up there, as if a tranlation will somehow decrease the shattering effect this whole thing has had on me. It won’t. I know that now. There’s little else I can do now but copy it all down. And fast.] An instant later, Fowler reached down and lifted her back onto the sidewalk. He gathered up her things and paid attention to her. By the time he was gone, she had given him her number and two days later when he called she had agreed to a drink.

After all, he was consummately attractive, and even more appealing to

Karen, he was stupid.

This had taken place when Navidson and Karen were still living in New

York City, a year before they bought the house in Virginia. Navidson was off taking aerial pictures of barges off the Norwegian coast. Once again, Karen resented being left alone with the children. Audrie claimed she was “desperate for a way out.” [311—Interview with Audrie McCullogh.

KCRW, Los Angeles, June 16, 1993.] Fowler’s timing could not have been better.

Audrie stopped short of revealing much about the affair, but Karen’s

sister, Linda, offered a pornographic recounting which many took seriously until they realized she had been out of touch with Karen for at least three years. The only source for this story comes by way of Fowler. No doubt the attention he received from the media was too much for a struggling actor to give up. Nor is there any question that he embellished to keep the media interested.

“She’s a great lady” Fowler first told reporters.” And it wouldn’t be cool

to talk about it, about us, I mean.” [312— Jerry Lieberman’s “Fowl Play” in People, v. 40, July 26, 1993, p. 44.] And then a little later to some tabloid reporters, “What we had was special. Ours. You know what I mean. I don’t have to explain what we did or where we did it. We went to the park, had a drink, talked. I tried to show her some fun. We’re friends now. I wish her well, I do.” And still later, “She wanted a divorce. [313—Karen had told Fowler she was married. She even wore one of her mother’s old wedding bands to prove it. (See New York, v. 27, October 31, 1994, p. 92-93).] That guy didn’t treat her well. She fell down in the street and I picked her up.

She’d never had anyone do that for her before.” [314—The Star, January 24, 1995, p. 18.]

Fowler probably never realized how wrong he was. Not only had

Navidson carried Karen out of that house, he had picked her up a hundred times over the course of eleven years and carried her fear, her torment and her distance. In a rare moment, Reston called in on a late-night radio show and lambasted the host for promoting such ridiculous gossip: “Let me tell you this, Will Navidson did everything for that woman. He was solid. Once, for a thirteen month stretch, she wouldn’t let him touch her. But he never budged. Loved her just the same. I doubt that punk would have lasted a week. So give it a rest @$$hole” and before the subject could turn to the house or anything else, Reston hung up. [315—Cahill Jones’ “Night Life,” KPRO, Riverside, September 11, 1995.]

Eventually Fowler moved on to other things. He married a pornstar and

disappeared into a very disagreeable world.

Rumours still insist Karen had other affairs. As beautiful as she was, it

is not hard to believe she had suitors. Strangers were constantly writing her love letters, delivering expensive perfumes, sending her plane tickets to far off places. Supposedly she sometimes responded. There was someone in

Dallas, someone in L.A. and several in London and Paris. Audrie, however, claims Karen only flirted and her indiscretions never went further than a coy drink or a curt meal. She maintains that Karen never slept with any of them. They were just a means to escape the closeness of any relationship, particularly the one with the man she loved most.

It is pretty certain Navidson knew about “the love letters Karen hid in

her jewelry box.” [316—Audrie McCullogh. KCRW, Los Angeles, June 16,

1993.] But what intrigues many critics these days is the manner in which he chose to regard that curious object. As semiotician Clarence Sweeney wrote:

While Navidson refused to make her infidelities a ‘public’ part of the

film, he seemed incapable of excluding them either. Consequently he symbolizes her transgressions in the sealed hand-carved ivory case containing Karen’s valuables, thus creating a ‘private’ aspect to his project, which in turn prompts yet another reevaluation of the meaning of interiority in The Navidson Record. [317—See Clarence Sweeney’s Privacy and Intrusion in the Twenty-First Century (London: Apeneck Press, 1996), p. 140, as well as works already mentioned in footnote 15. Also reconsider the moment discussed in Chapter II (pages 10-11) where Navidson opens the jewelry box and then moments later throws out some of the hair he has just removed from Karen’s brush.] [318—No matter whether you’re an electrician, scholar or dope addict, chances are that somewhere you’ve still got a letter, postcard or note that’s meaningful to you. Maybe only to you.

It’s amazing how many people save at least a few letters during their

lifetime, leaves of feeling, tucked away in a guitar case, a safety deposit box, on a hard drive or even preserved in a pair of old boots no one will ever wear. Some letters keep. Some don’t. I have a few that haven’t spoiled.

One in particular hides inside a locket shaped like a deer.

It’s actually a pretty clunky thing, supposedly over a hundred years old,

made out of polished sterling silver with platinum plated antlers, emerald eyes, small diamonds on the fringe of its mane and a silver latch disguised as the tail. A thread of braided gold secures it to whoever wears it, which in this case has never been me. I just keep it by my bed, in the locked lower drawer of my nightstand.

My mother was the one who used to wear it. Whenever I saw her, from

the time I was thirteen till I was almost eighteen, she always had it around her neck. I never knew what she kept inside. I saw it before I left for Alaska and I guess even back then there was something about its shape I resented.

Most lockets I’d seen were small, round and warm. They made sense. Hers I didn’t get. It was awkward, ornate and most of all cold, every now and then blinking out odd bits of light, a warped mirror, attempting a reflection when she took care of it. For the most part only achieving a blur.

I saw it again before I left for Europe. An essay I’d written on the

painter Paulus de Vos (1596-1678) had won me an all-paid summer abroad.

I lasted two days in the program. By the third day I was heading for the station, looking for something, maybe someone, a bindle on my back, a Eurorail pass in hand, not more than three hundred bucks in traveler checks in my pocket. I ate very little, hustled from place to place, peeking into Czechoslovakia, Poland and Sweden before looping west so I could race all the way down from Denmark to Madrid where I stalked the halls of the Prado like a pack of hounds howling for a hart. Star stung chess games in Toledo soon gave way to a mad trek east for the littered lore of Naples and eventually a ferry ride to Greece where I made my way among Ionian islands before heading on towards

destinations even further south. Back in Rome, I spent almost a week at

a whorehouse, talking to the women about the simplest stuff while they waited for their next turn—another story waiting on other days. In Paris I lived at the bistros during the night, occasionally splurging on beer and escargots, while during the day I slept brokenhearted on the guays of the Seine. I don’t know why I say brokenhearted. I guess it’s the way I felt, all emaciated and without company. Everything I saw in me somehow only reflecting my destitution. I often thought about the locket, dangling from her neck. Sometimes it made me hurt. Often it made me angry.

She once told me it was valuable. That thought never crossed my mind.

Even today I won’t consider its monetary worth. I’m living off of tuna, rice and water, losing pounds faster than Lloyd’s of London, but I’d sell body parts before I’d consider taking cash for this relic.

When my mother died the locket was the only thing she left me. There’s

an engraving on the back. It’s from my father [319—Mr. Truant is referring here to his biological father not Raymond, his foster father. — Ed.]: “My

heart for you, my love—March 5, 1966”—practically prophetic. For a long time, I didn’t flip the latch. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was afraid what I’d find inside. I think I expected it to be empty. It wasn’t. When I finally did crack the hinge, I discovered the carefully folded love letter disguised as a thank you letter, scrawled in the hand of an eleven year old boy.

It’s a letter I wrote.

The very first one my mother ever received from the son she left when

he was only seven. It’s also the only one she saved.

It is safe to assume Navidson knew Karen better than anyone else. No

doubt his knowledge of Fowler, the cache of letters, certainly the discovery of Wax and Karen’s kiss, contributed to his decision to return to the house for one more exploration. [320—Covered in greater detail in Chapters XVII and XIX.] He left her to New York because by then he knew she was already gone. And she was.

Jerry Lieberman who wrote the original People interview with Fowler

had spoken with the would-be-actor for a possible follow up article but lack of interest in the affair caused him to shelve the story. After a little haggling, he agreed to send the tape of their last conversation. Here then for the first time is what Fowler told Lieberman on July 13, 1995:

Yeah, she called me up, said she was in town, how ‘bout a drink, that

sort of thing. So

we go out a few times. I fuck her a few times, you know what I mean,

but she’s not talking much now. Only thing she says is she’s working on some film short. I asked her if there’s a part for me but she tells me it’s not that kind of film.

I must have seen her two or three maybe four times. It was fun and all

but she looked like

hell and I didn’t like taking her around. She’d changed over the months,

pale, darker, didn’t smile much, and when she did it was kinda different than before, kinda quirky, weird, real personal.

She looked her age too. Too old for me really and with kids and all and

well, time to move on. Those things happen you know.

Anyway I didn’t need to worry that she’d get clingy or anything. She

wasn’t that type of

lady. The last time we went out, she said she only had a few minutes.

She had to get back to that film she was editing or whatever. Something about interviews and family movies. And that was that. She shook my hand and left.

But I’ll tell you, she was different from when I first met her. I’ve fucked

around with married women before. I know how they get off on dicking over their husband. She wasn’t like that now. She needed him. I could see that in her eyes. It wasn’t the first time either I seen a married woman get eyes like that. Suddenly they want what they got off getting away from in the first place. It’s all flicked up. And she was like that. All flicked up and needing him. But as that story usually goes, he wasn’t around no more. [321 —Courtesy of Jerry Lieberman.]

Which was true. Navidson was no longer around, except of course

Karen still saw him every day and in a way she had never seen him before —not as a projection of her own insecurities and demons but just as Will Navidson, in flickering light, flung up by a 16mm projector on a paint-white wall.

XV

Mit semen Nachtmützen und Schlafrockfetzen

Stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbaus.

— Heine

[322— “With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he

patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe”—which he quoted in full to his wife, as well as alluded to in chapter Six of The Interpretation of Dreams and in a letter to Jung dated February 25, 1908.] [323—Heine?] [Freud. — Ed.]

Karen Green sits on a park bench in Central Park. She wears a russet

sweater and a black cashmere scarf. All around her we see people milling about, enjoying one of those sparkling February days New Yojic City sometimes deigns to deliver. Patches of snow lie on the ground, children shriek, carriages clatter past taxi cabs and traffic cops. A war is going on in the Persian Gulf but those affairs hardly seem to matter here. As Karen explains, more than a little time has passed:

It’s been four months since we escaped from our house. It’s also four

months since I’ve seen Navy. As far as I know, he’s still in Charlottesville with Billy— conducting experiments.

[She coughs lightly] We used to talk on the phone but now even that’s stopped. This whole

experience has changed him. Losing Tom, I think changed him the most.

I’ve called, written, done everything short of going down there, which is

something I refuse to do. I’m up here taking care of our children and looking after his film. He did some work on it but then he just stopped and shipped me all of it, the negatives, the tapes, the whole mess. Still, he won’t leave Virginia. And to think, two months ago he told me he was only going to need a few more days.

My mother keeps telling me to get rid of him and sell the house. I’m

thinking about it but in the meantime I’ve been working on the film. There was so much of it I decided to cut it down to thirteen minutes [*—More than likely, an eight minute version of Karen’s abridgment became the second short now known as “Exploration #4.” However, it remains a mystery who cut out five minutes (which must have included Holloway’s suicide) before distributing it. Kevin Stanley in “What Are You Gonna Do Now, Little Man?” and Other Tales of Grass Roots Distribution (Cambridge: Vallombrosa Inc., 1994) points out how easy it would have been for one of the professors or authors who received a copy to make a dupe. As to why though, five minutes were excised, Stanley unconvincingly chalks up to Karen Green’s own ineptitude: “She simply must have misstated the length of the tape.”] to find out what people thought of it.

And I showed it to everyone I could think of too—professors, scientists,

my therapist, village poets, even some of the famous people Navy knew.

(Coughs again] Anne Rice, Stephen King, David Copperfield, and Stanley Kubrick

actually responded to unsolicited copies of the video I sent them.

Without further ado then, here is what everyone had to say about that

house, [325—Interestingly enough neither __________ nor __________ , both of whom actually saw the hallway, ever provided any comments.

Perhaps

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX .[326—Crossed out with what looked suspiciously like black crayon and tar.]

* * * *

A Partial Transcript Of

What Some Have Thought

by Karen Green

[327—Originally The Navidson Record contained both of Karen’s

pieces: What Some Have Thought and A Brief History Of Who I Love.

However when Miramax put the film in wide release, What Some Have Thought was absent. At a Cannes press junket, Bob Weinstein argued that the section was too self- referential and too far from “the spine of the story” to justify its inclusion. “Audiences just want to get back to the house” he explained. “The delay that piece caused was unbearable. But don’t worry, you’ll have it in the DVD release.” [328—To date, I haven’t heard back from any of €he people quoted in this “transcript” with the exception of Hofstadter who made it very clear he’d never heard of Will Navidson, Karen Green or the house and Paglia who scribbled on a postcard: “Get lost, jerk.”]]

Leslie Stern, M.D. Psychiatrist.

Setting: Her office. Well lit, Chagal print on the far wall, requisite

couch.

Stern: It’s quirky. What do you need my opinion for?

Karen: What do you think it is? Does it have some kind of, well, …

meaning?

Stern: There you go again with “meaning.” I gave up meaning a long

time ago. Trying to get a table at Elaine’s is hard enough. [Pause] What do you think it means?

Jennifer Antlpala. Architect & Structural Engineer.

Setting: Inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Antipala: [Very high-strung; speaks very fastJ The things that came to

me, now I guess this is just the way my mind works or something, but the

whole house prompted these questions, which I guess, like you said, is, uh, what you’re after. Though they’re not exactly concerned with meaning, I think.

(Pause)

Karen: What were the questions?

Antipala: Oh god, a whole slew of them. Anything from what the soil

bearing capacity of a place like that would have to be to, uh, say, well uh… Well first, I mean go back to just soil bearing capacity. That’s a very complicated question. I mean, look “massive rock” like trap rock for instance can stand up to 1000 metric tons per square meter while sedimentary rock, like hard shale or sandstone for instance, wili crumble with anything over 150 metric tons per square meter. And soft clay’s not even worth 10 metric tons. So that place, beyond dimension, impossibly high, deep, wide —what kind of foundation is it sitting on? And if it’s not, I mean if ft’s like a planet, surrounded by space, then its mass is still great enough it’s gonna have a lot of gravity, drMng it all inward, and what kind of material then at its core could support all that?

Douglas R. Hotstadter. Computer and cognitive science professor at

Indiana University.

Setting: At a piano.

Hofstadter: Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, Alfred

Bester, Robert Heinlein, they all love this stuff. Your piece is fun too. The way you handled the Holloway expedition, reminded me of Bach’s Little Harmonic Labyrinth. Some of the thematic modulations, I mean.

Karen; Do you think such a place is possible? I have a structural

engineer friend who’s more than a little skeptical.

Hofstadter: Well, from a mathematical point of view… infinite space

into no space … Achilles and the tortoise, Escher, Zeno’s arrow. Do you know about Zeno’s arrow?

Karen: No,

Hofstadter: [illustrating on a scrap of staff paper] Oh It’s very simple. If

the arrow is here at A and the target is here at B, then in the course of getting to B the arrow must travel at least half that distance which I’ll call point C. Now in getting from C to B the arrow must travel half that distance, call that point D, and so on. Well the fun starts when you realize you cart keep dividing up space forever, paring it down into smaller and smaller fractions until . . well, the arrow never reaches B.

Byron Baleworth. British Playwright.

Setting: La Fortuna on 71st Street.

Baleworth: “And St. Sebastian died of heartburn,” to reference another

famous British playwright. The infinite here is not a matter for science.

You’ve created a semiotic dilemma. Just as a nasty virus resists the body’s immune system so your symbol—the house—resists interpretation.

Karen: Does that mean it’s meaningless?

Baleworth: That’s a long conversation. I’m staying at the Plaza Athénée

for the next few nights. Why don’t we have dinner? [Pause] That thing’s off, right?

Karen: Well give me a rough idea how you’d tackle the question?

Baleworth: [Suddenly uncomfortable] I’d probably turn to the

filmmaking. Meaning would come if you tied the house to politics, science, or psychology. Whatever you like but something. And the monster. I’m sorry but the monster needs work. For Pete’s sake, is that thing on?!

Andrew Ross. Literature professor at Princeton University.

Setting: Gym. Ross works out with a medicine ball.

Ross: Oh the monster’s the best part. Baleworth’s a playwright and as

far as the English go probably a traditionalist when it comes to ghost stories. Quite a few Brits you know still prefer their ghosts decked in crepe and cobweb, candelabra in one hand. Your monster, however, is purely American, Edgeless for one thing, something a compendium of diverse cultures definitely requires. You can’t identify this creature with any one group. Its individuality is imperceptible, and hke the dark side of the moon, invisible but not without influence. You know when (first saw the monster, (thought it was a Keeper. (still think that. It’s a very mean House Keeper who vigilantly makes sure the house remains void of absolutely everything.

Not even a speck of dust. It’s a maid gone absolutely nutso.

Have you ever worn a maid’s outfit?

Jennifer Antipala.

Antipala: And what about the walls? Load-bearing? Or non- load-

bearing walls? That takes me from questions about foundation material to building material. What could that place possibly be made of? And I’m thinking right now of the shifting that goes on, so that means we’re not talking dead loads, which means a fixed mass, but live loads which must deal with wind, earthquakes and variance of motion within the structure.

And that shifting is that the same say as wind-pressure distributions?, which is something like, something like, uh, oh yeah, P equals one half beta times V squared times C times G, uh, uh, uh, that’s it, that’s It, yeah that’s it, or something like that, where P is wind pressure on the structure’s surface … or do I have to go someplace else, look at wall bending or wall stresses, axial arid lateral forces, but if we’re not talking wind, what from then and how? how Implemented? how offset? and ftn talking now about weight disbursement, some serious loading’s going on there… I mean anything that

big has got to weigh a lot. And I mean at the very least a lot-lot. So I keep asking myself: how an I going to carry that weight? And I really don’t have a clue. So I start looking for another angle.

[Moves closer to Karen]

Camille Pagila. Critic.

Setting: The Bowery Bar patio.

Paglia: Notice only men go into it. Why? Simple: women don’t have to.

They know there’s nothing there and can live with that knowledge, but men must find out for sure. They’re haunted by that infinite hollow and its sense- making allure, and so they crave it, desire it, desire its end, its knowledge, its—to use here a Strangelove-ian phrase—its essence. They must penetrate, invade, conquer, destroy, inhabit, impregnate and if necessary even be consumed by It. It really comes down to what men lack.

They lack the hollow, the uterine cavity, any creative life-yielding physiological incavation. The whole thing’s about womb envy or vagina envy, whatever you prefer. [329—Melissa Schemell in her book Absent Identification (London: Emunah Publishing Group, 1995), p. 52. discusses sexual modes of recognition:

The house as vagina: The adolescent boy’s primary identification lies

with the mother. The subsequent realization that he is unlike her (he has a penis; she doesn’t; he is different) results in an intense feeling of displacement and loss. The boy must seek out a new identity (the father) … Navidson explores that loss, that which he first identified with: the vagina, the womb, the mother.

Eric Keplard’s Maternal Intrusions (Portland: Nescience Press, 1995),

p. 139, also speaks of that place as something motherly, only his reading is far more historical than Schemel’s: “Navidson’s house is an incarnation of his own mother. In other worth: absent. It represents the unresolved Oedipal drama which continually intrudes on his relationship with Karen.” That said it would be unfair not to mention Tad Exier’s book Our Father (Iowa City:

Pavemockumest Press, 1996) which rejects “the over-enthusiastic parallels with motherdom” in favor of “narcissism’s paternal darkness.”]

Karen: What about my character’s fear of darkness.

Paglia: Pure fabrication. The script was written by a man, right? What

self-respecting woman is afraid of the dark? Women are everything that’s internal and hidden. Women are darkness. I cover some of this in my book Sexual Personae due out from Vintage in a few months.

Are you busy this afternoon?

Anne Rice. Novelist.

Setting: The Museum of Natural History.

Rice: Oh I’m not so sure I care for that. So much sexual pairing, this

masculine, this feminine … I think it’s too political and obviously a bit strained.

Darkness isn’t male or female. It’s the absence of light, which is

important to us because we are all retinal creatures who need light to move around, sustain ourselves and protect ourselves. George Foreman uses his eyes much more than his fists.

Of course, light and dark mean a lot less to a bat. What matters more to

a bat is whether or not FM frequencies are jamming its radar.

Harold Bloom. Critic.

Setting: His private library. Walls loaded with books. General disarray.

Bloom: My dear girl, Kierkegaard once wrote, “If the young man had

believed in repetition, of what might he not been capable? What inwardness he might have attained.”

We’ll touch on your, uh, unfinished piece shortly, but please permit me

first to read you a page from my book The Anxiety Of Influence. This is

from the chapter on Kenosis:

The unheimlich, or “unhomely” as the “uncanny,” is perceived

wherever

we are reminded of our inner tendency to yield to obsessive patterns of

action. Overruling the

pleasure principle, the dasmonic in oneself yields to a “repetition

compulsion.” A man and a woman meet, scarcely talk, enter into a covenant of mutual rendings; rehearse again what they find they have known together before, and yet there was no before, Freud, unheimlich here, in his insight, maintains that “every emotional affect, whatever its quality, is transformed by repression into morbid anxiety.” Among cases of anxiety, Freud finds the class of the uncanny, * [330—While unheimlich has already recurred within this text, there has up to now been no treatment of the English word uncanny. While lacking the Germanic sense of “home,” uncanny builds its meaning on the Old English root cunnan from the Old Norse Kunna which has risen from the Gothic Kuniwn (preteritepresent verbs) meaning know from the Indo-European (see OED). The “y” imparts a sense of “full of” while the “un” negates that which follows. In other words, un-cann-y literally breaks down or disassembles into that which is li of ing or conversely fljj of j ing; and so without understanding exactly what repetitive denial still successfully keeps repressed and thus estranged, though indulging in repetition nonetheless, that which is uncanny may be defined as empty of knowledge and knowing or at the same time surfeit with the absence of knowledge and knowing. In the words of Perry Ivan Nathan Shaftesbury, author of Murder’s Gate: A Treatise On Love and Rage (London: Verso, 1996), p. 183: “It is therefore sacred, inviolate, forever preserved. The ultimate virgin. The husbandless madonna. Mother of God.

Mother of Mother. Inhuman.” See also Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny: Essays In The Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992).] “in which the anxiety can be shown to come from something repressed which recurs.” But this “unhomely” might as well be called “the homely,” he observes, “for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.”

You see emptiness here is the purported familiar and your house is

endlessly familiar, endlessly repetitive. Hallways, corridors, rooms, over and over again. A bit like Dante’s house after a good spring cleaning. It’s a lifeless objectless place. Cicero said “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” So add souls to the list. A lifeless, objectless, soulless place. Godless too. Milton’s abyss pre-god or in a Nietzschean universe post-god.

It is so pointedly against symbol, the house requires a symbol destroyer.

But that lightless fire leaving the walls permanently ashen and, to my eye, obsidian smooth is still nothing more than the artist’s Procrustean way of combating influence: to create a featureless golem, a universal eclipse, Jacob’s angel, Maiy’s Frankenstein, the great eradicator of all that is and ever was and thus through this trope succeed in securing poetic independence no matter how lonely, empty, and agonizing the final result may be.

My dear girl, is it that you are so lonely that you had to create this?

A Poe t. 21 years old. No tattoos. No piercings.

Setting: In front of a giant transformer.

Poe t: No capitals. [She takes out a paper napkin and reads from it] i

was on line. i had no recollection of how i got there. of how I got sucked in there. it was pitch black. i suspected the power had failed. i started moving.

I had no idea which direction i was headed. i kept moving. i had the feeling i was being watched. i asked “who’s there?” the echoes created a passage and disappeared. i followed them

Douglas R. Hofstadter.

Hofstadter: Similar to Zeno’s arrow, consider the following equation:

1/a =0 EMBED “Equation” \* mergeformat 000 where 1/co = 0.

If we apply this to your friend Bloom’s poetics we get an interesting

perspective on the monster.

Let 1 mean the artist, then let “a” equal 1 which stands for one influence

and we get 1 for an answer, =1, or a level of one influence which I take to mean 11 influence.

If however we divide by 2 then the influence level drops to 1/2 and so

on. Take the number of influences to infinity, where a = 00, and voilà you have an influence level of zero, A=O.

Now let’s take this formula into account as we consider your monster. It

has cleared the walls and corridors of everything. In other words, it has been influenced by infinity and therefore not influenced at all. But then look at the result: it’s lightless, featureless, and empty.

I don’t know maybe a little influence is a good thing.

Byron Baleworth.

Baleworth: You need to refine how the house itself serves as a symbol

—

Stephen King. Novelist.

Setting: P.S. 6 playground.

King: Symbols shmimbols. Sure they’re important but… Well look at

Ahab’s whale. Now there’s a great symbol. Some say it stands for god, meaning, and purpose. Others say it stands for purposelessness and the void. But what we sometimes forget is that Ahab’s whale was also just a whale.

Steve Wozniak. Inventor & Philanthropist.

Setting: The Golden Gate Bridge.

Woz: Sure I agree with King. An icon for a bridge game, it’s a symbol

for the program, the data, and more. But in some respects, it can also be

looked at as that bridge game. The same is true with this house you created.

It could represent plenty of things but ft also is nothing more than itself, a house—albeit a pretty weird house.

Jennifer Antipala.

Antipala: I look at Hadrian’s Pantheon, Justinian’s Hagia Sophia,

Suger’s St. Denis, the roof of Westminster Hall, thanks to Herland, or Wren’s dome for St. Paul’s, and anything else that is seemingly above and beyond this world, and by the way, in my mind, those places I just mentioned really are above and beyond this world, and first it sparks awe, maybe disbelief, and then, after doing the math, tracing the lines, studying the construction, though it’s still awesome, it also makes sense.

Consequently it’s unforgettable. Weil that house of yours in your movie definitely sparks awe and all the disbelief, but in my mind it never makes sense. I trace the lines, do the math, study the construction, and all I come up with is well the whole thing’s just a hopeless, structural impossibility.

And therefore substanceless and forgettable. Despite its weight, its magnitude, its mass. . in the end it adds up to nothing.

[Moving away]

Jacques Derrida. French philosopher.

Setting: Artaud exhibit.

Derrida: Well that which is inside, which is to say, if I may say, that

which infinitely patterns itself without the outside, without the other, though where then is the other?

Finished? Good.

[Pause]

Hold my hand. We stroll.

Andrew Ross.

Karen: Anything else?

Ross: The house was windowless. I loved that.

Byron Baleworth.

Baleworth: [Defensive] It’s very sloppy. Why that type of house? Why

in Virginia? These questions should have answers. There would be more cohesion. Mind you there is promise. [Pause] I hope you don’t think I just made a pass at you.

Camille Paglia.

Paglia: [Laughing] Baleworth said that? You should have asked him

why Dante’s entrance to hell was in Tuscany? Why Young Goodman Brown’s path was in New England? Baleworth’s just jealous and besides he can’t write a screenplay to save his pecker. [Pause] And incidentally I’m not afraid to tell you that I did make a pass at you.

So are you free this afternoon?

Walter Mosley. Novelist.

Setting: Fresh Kills Park

Mosley: Strange place. The wails changing all the time. Everything’s

similar, familiar, and yet without signposts or friends. Plenty of clues but no solutions. Just mystery. Strange, very strange. [He looks up, genuinely baffled] I don’t know. I sure would hate to be stuck there.

Leslie Stern, M.D.

Karen: What else do you think about the film?

Stern: I’m no Siskel and Ebert—though I’ve been called Ebert before.

There’s a lot about emptiness, darkness, and distance. But since you created that world I don’t think it’s unfair to ask why you were so drawn to those themes?

Stephen King.

King: You didn’t make this up, did you? [Studying Karen] I’d like to

see this house.

Kiki Smith. Figurative Artist.

Setting: The New York Hospital - Cornell Medical Center E.R.

Kiki: Well gosh, without color and hardly even any grey, the focus

moves to the other stuff—the surfaces, the shapes, dimensions, even all that movement. I’d have to say it comes down to that. Down to the construction, the interior experience, the body-sense there, which—well gosh—what makes the whole thing so visceral, so authentic.

Hunter S. Thompson Journalist.

Setting: Giants Stadium.

Thompson: It’s been a bad morning.

Karen: What did you think of the footage?

Thompson: I’ve been staying with friends, but they kicked me out this

morning.

Karen: I’m sorry.

Thompson: Your film didn’t help. It’s, well… one thing in two words:

fucked up…very fucked up. Okay three words, four words, who the hell cares… very very fucked up. What I’d call a bad trip. I never thought I’d hear myself say this but lady you need to lay off the acid, the mescaline, or whatever else you’re snorting, inhaling, ingesting check yourself into rehab, something, anything because you’re gonna be in a bad way if you don’t do something fast. I’ve never seen anything so goddamn tucked up, so tucking tucked up. I broke things because of it, plates, a small jade figurine of a penguin. A glass bullfrog. I was so upset I even threw my friend’s fishtank at their china cabinet. Ugly, very ugly. Salt water, dead fish everywhere, me screaming “so very very fucked up.” Five words. They threw me out. Do you think I could spend the night at your place?

Stanley Kubrick. Filmmaker.

Setting: (on-line)

Kubrick: “What is it?” you ask. And I answer, “It’s a film. And it’s a

film because it uses film (and videotape).” What matters is how that film affects us or in this case how it affects me. The quality of image is often terrible except when Will Navidson handles the camera which does not happen often enough. The sound is poor. The elision of many details contributes to insufficiently developed characters. And finally the overall structure creaks and teeters, threatening at any minute to collapse. That said (or in this case typed) I remain soberly impressed and disturbed. I even had a dream about your house. If I didn’t know better I’d say you weren’t a filmmaker at all. I’d say the whole thing really happened.

David Copperfield. Magician.

Setting: The Statue of Liberty

Copperfield: It looks like a trick but it’s a trick that constantly convinces

you it’s not a trick. A levitation without wires. A hail of mirrors without mirrors. Dazzling really.

Karen: So how would you describe the house?

Copperfield: A riddle.

[Behind him the Statue of Liberty disappears.]

Camille Paglia.

Paglia: How would I describe it? The feminine void.

Douglas R. Hofstadter.

Hofstadter: A horizontal eight.

Stephen King.

King: Pretty darn scary.

Kiki Smith.

Kiki: Texture,

Harold Bloom.

Bloom: Unheimlich—of course.

Byron Baleworth.

Baleworth: Don’t care to.

Andrew Ross.

Ross: A great circuit in which individuals play the part of electrons,

creating with their paths bits of information we are ultimately unable to read. Just a guess.

Anne Rice.

Rice: Dark.

Jacques Derrida.

Derrida: The other. [Pause] Or what other, which is to say then, the

same thing. The other, no other. You see?

Steve Wozniak.

Woz: I like Ross’ idea. A giant chip. Or a series of them even. All

interconnected. If only I could see the floor plan then I could tell you if it’s for something sexy or just a piece of hardware— like a cosmic toaster or blender.

Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick: I’m sorry. I’ve said enough.

Leslie Stern, M.D.

Stern: More importantly Karen, what does it mean to you?

[End Of Transcript]

[331—So many voices. Not that I’m unfamiliar with voices. A rattle of

opinion, need and compulsion but masking what? //

Thumper just called (hence the interruption; the “//”).

A welcome voice.

Strange how that works. I’m no longer around and suddenly out of the

blue she calls, for the very first time too, returning my old pages I guess, wanting to know where I’ve been, why I haven’t stopped by the Shop at all, filling my ear with all kinds of stuff. Apparently even my boss has been asking about me, acting all hurt that I haven’t dropped by to hang out or at least say hello.

“Hey Johnny,” Thumper finally purred over the phone. “Why don’t you

come over to my place. I’ll even cook you dinner. I’ve got some great pumpkin pie left over from Thanksgiving.”

But I heard myself say “No, uh that’s okay. No thanks but thank you

anyway,” thinking at the same time that this might very well be the closest I’ll ever come to an E ticket invite to The Happiest Place On Earth.

It’s too late. Or maybe that’s wrong. Maybe not too late, maybe it’s just

not right. Beautiful as her voice is, it’s just not strong enough to draw me from this course. Where eight months ago I’d have already been out the door. Today, for whatever sad reason, Thumper no longer has any influence over me.

For a moment, I flashed on her body, imagining those beautiful round

breasts with creamy brown aureolas, making saints out of nipples, her soft, full lips barely hiding her teeth, while in the deep of her eyes her Irish and Spanish heritage keep closing like oxygen and hydrogen, and will probably keep on closing until the very day she dies. And yet in spite of her shocking

appeal, any longing I should have felt vanished when I saw, and accepted, how little I knew about her. The picture in my head, no matter how erotic, hardly sufficing. An unfinished portrait. A portrait never really begun. Even taking into account her daisy sunglasses, her tattoos, the dollars and fives she culls while draped around some silver pole hidden in some dark room in the shadow of the airport. A place I had still not dared to visit. had never even asked her the name of her three year old. I had never even asked her for her real name—not Thumper, not Thumper at all, but something entirely else—which I suddenly resolved to find out, to ask both questions right then and there, to start finding out who she really was, see if it was possible to mean something to her, see if it was possible she could mean something to me, a whole slew of question marks I was prepared to follow through on, which was exactly when the phone went dead.

She hadn’t hung up nor had I. The phone company had just caught up

with their oversight and finally disconnected my line.

No more Thumper. No more dial tone. Not even a domed ceiling to

carry a word.

Just silence and all its consequences.]

* * * *

Funny how out of this impressive array of modem day theorists,

scientists, writers, and others, it is Karen’s therapist who asks, or rather forces, the most significant question. Thanks to her, Karen goes on to fashion another short piece in which she, surprisingly enough, never mentions the house, let alone any of the comments made by the gliterati.

It is an extraordinary twist. Not once are those multiplying hallways

ever addressed. Not once does Karen dwell on their darkness and cold. She produces six minutes of film that has absolutely nothing to do with that place. Instead her eye (and heart) turn to what matters most to her about Ash Tree Lane; what in her own words (wearing the same russet sweater; sitting on the same Central Park bench; coughing less) “that wicked place stole from me.”

So in the first black frame, what greets us is not sinister but blue: the

strains of Charlie “Yardbird” Parker coaxing out of the darkness the precocious face of a seventeen year old Will Navidson.

Piece after piece of old Kodak film, jerky, over exposed, under exposed,

usually grainy, yellow or overly red, coalesce to form a rare glimpse of Navidson’s childhood—nicht alizu glatt und gekunstelt. [332—“Not overly polished or artificial.” — Ed.] His father—drinking ice tea. His mother—a black and white headshot on the mantle. Tom—watering the lawn. Their golden itriever, the archetype for all home movie dogs, frolicking in the sprinklers, pouncing on the pale green hose as if it were a python, barking at Tom, then at their father, even though as its jaws snap open and shut it is impossible to hear a bark—only Charlie Parker playing to the limits of his art, lost in rare delight.

As professor Erik Von Jamlow poignantly remarked:

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling the immutable sadness contained in

these fragments. Perhaps that is the price of remembering, the price of perceiving accurately. At least with such sorrow must come knowledge. [333—See Erik Von Jarniow’s Summer’s Salt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 593.]

Karen progresses steadily from Navidson’s sundrenched backyard to a

high school prom, his grandmother’s funeral, Tom covering his eyes in front of a barbecue, Navidson diving headfirst into a swimming hole. Then college graduation, Will hugging Tom good-bye as he prepares to leave for Viemam,[334—According to Melanie Proft Knightley in War’s Children (New York; Zone Books, 1994), p. 110, a weak heart prevented Tom from getting drafted. Navidson had gone ahead and enlisted.] a black and white shot catching the wing of his plane in flight.

And then the whole private history explodes.

Suddenly a much larger world intrudes on the boyish Navidson. Family

portraits are replaced by pictures of tank drivers in Cambodia, peasants hauling empty canisters of nerve gas to the side of the road, children selling soda near body bags smeared with red oil-soaked clay, crowds in Thailand, a murdered man in Israel, the dead in Angola; fractions plucked from the stream, informing the recent decades, sometimes even daring to suggest a whole.

And yet out of the thousands of pictures Navidson took, there does not

exist a single frame without a person in it. Navidson never snapped scenery.

People mattered most to him, whether soldiers, lepers, medics, or

newlyweds eating dinner at a trattoria in Rome, or even a family of tailors swimming alone at some sandy cove north of Rio. Navidson religiously studied others. The world around only mattered because people lived there and sometimes, in spite of the pain, tragedy, and degradation, even managed to triumph there.

Though Karen gives her piece the somewhat faltering title A Brief

History Of Who I Love, the use of Navidson’s photos, many of them prize-winning, frequently permits the larger effects of the late 20th century to intrude. Gordon Burke points out the emotional significance of this alignment between personal and cultural pasts:

Not only do we appreciate Navidson more, are inadvertently touched by

the world at large, where other individuals, who have faced such terrible horrors, still manage to walk barefoot and burning from the grave. [335— See the introduction by Gordon Burke in Will Navidson’s Pieces (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), p. xvii.]

Each of Navidson’s photographs consistently reveals how vehemently

he despised life’s destruction and how desperately he sought to preserve its fleeting beauties, no matter the circumstances.

Karen, however, does not need to point any of this out. Wisely she lets

Navidson’s work speak for itself. Interestingly enough though, her labor of love does not close with one of his photographs but rather with a couple of shots of Navidson himself. The first image—purportedly taken by a famous though now deceased photojournalist—shows him when he was a young soldier in South East Asia, dressed in battle fatigues, sitting on an ammunition crate with howitzer shell casings stacked on a nearby trunk marked “VALUABLES.” An open window to the right is obviously not enough to clear the air. Navidson is alone, head down, fingertips a blur as he sobs into his hands over an experience we will undoubtedly never share but perhaps can still imagine. From this heart-wrenching portrait, Karen ever so gently dissolves to the last shot of her piece, actually a clip of Super

8 which she herself took not long before they moved to Virginia. Navidson is goofing around in the snow with Chad and Daisy. They are throwing snowballs, making snow angels, and enjoying the clarity of the day. Chad is laughing on his father’s shoulders as Navidson scoops up Daisy and holds

her up to the blinding sun. The film, however, cannot follow them. It is badly overexposed. All three of them vanish in a burst of light.

* * * *

The diligence, discipline, and time-consuming research required to

fashion this short—there are easily over a hundred edits—allowed Karen for the first time to see Navidson as something other than her own personal fears and projections. She witnessed for herself how much he cherished the human will to persevere. She again and again saw in his pictures and his expressions the longing and tenderness he felt toward her and their children.

And then quite unexpectedly, she came across the meaning of his privately guarded obsession.

While Navidson’s work has many remarkable images of individuals

challenging fate, over a third captures the meaning of defeat—those seconds after an execution, the charred fingers found in the rubble of a bombed township, or the dull-blue look of eyes which in the final seconds of life could still not muster enough strength to close. In her filmic sonnet, Karen includes a shot of Navidson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. As she explains in a voice-over: “The print comes from Navy’s personal collection.” The same one hanging in their home and one of the first things Navidson placed in their car the night they fled.

As the world remembers, the renowned image shows a Sudanese child

dying of starvation, too weak to move even though a vulture stalks her from behind. [336—This is clearly based on Kevin Carter’s 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a vulture preying on a tiny Sudanese girl who collapsed on her way to a feeding center. Carter enjoyed many accolades for the shot but was also accused of gross Insensitivity. The Florida St.

Petersburg Times wrote: “The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.” Regrettably constant exposure to violence and deprivation, coupled with an increased dependency on drugs exacted a high price. On July 27, 1994 Carter killed himself. — Ed.] Not only does Karen spend twenty seconds on this picture, she then cuts to a ten second shot of the back of the print. Without saying a word, she zooms in tighter and tighter on the lower right hand corner, until her subject finally becomes clear:

there, almost lost amidst so much white, lie six faintly penciled in block letters cradled in quotes—

“Delial”

* * *

There are only 8,160 frames in Karen’s film and yet they serve as the

perfect counterpoint to that infinite stretch of hallways, rooms and stairs.

The house is empty, her piece is full. The house is dark, her film glows. A growl haunts that place, her place is blessed by Charlie Parker. On Ash Tree Lane stands a house of darkness, cold, and emptiness. In 16mm stands a house of light, love, and colour.

By following her heart, Karen made sense of what that place was not.

She also discovered what she needed more than anything else. She stopped seeing Fowler, cut off questionable liaisons with other suitors, and while her mother talked of breaking up, selling the house, and settlements, Karen began to prepare herself for reconciliation.

Of course she had no idea what that would entail.

Or how far she would have to go.

XVI

When mathematical propositions refer to reality they are not certain; when they are

certain, they do not refer to reality.

— Albert Einstein

Up until now The Navidson Record has focused principally on the

effects the house has had on others: how Holloway became murderous and suicidal, Tom drank himself into oblivion, Reston lost his mobility, Sheriff Axnard went into a state of denial, Karen fled with the children, and Navidson grew increasingly more isolated and obsessed. No consideration, however, has been given to the house as it relates purely to itself.

Examined then from as objective a point of view as possible the house

offers these incontrovertible facts:

1.0 No light. I, IV-XIII* [*See Chapter.]

2.0 No humidity. I, V-XIII

3.0 No air movement (i.e. breezes, drafts etc). I. V-XIII

4.0 Temperature remains at 320 F ± 8 degrees. IX

5.0 No sounds. IV-XIII

5.1 Except for a dull roar which arises intermittently, sometimes

seeming far off, sometimes sounding close at hand. V, VII, IX-VIII

6.0 Compasses do not function there. VII

6.1 Nor do altimeters. VII

6.2 Radios have a limited range. VII-XIII

7.0 Walls are uniformly black with a slightly ‘ashen’ hue. I, IV-XIII

8.0 There are no windows, moldings, or other decorative elements. (See

7.0). IX

9.0 Size and depth vary enormously. I, IV-VII, IX-XIII

9.1 The entire place can instantly and without apparent difficulty change

its geometry. I, IV-VII, IX-XIII

9.2 Some have suggested the dull roar or ‘growl’ is caused by these

metamorphoses. (See 5.1). VII

9.3 No end has been found there. V-XIII

10.0 The place will purge itself of all things, including any item left

behind. IX-XIII.

10.1 No object has ever been found there. I, IV-VII, IX-XIII, XI

10.2 There is no dust. XI

11 .0 At least three people have died inside. X, XIII

11.1 Jed Leeder, Holloway Robert and Tom Navidson.

11 .2 Only one body was recovered. (See 10.0)

Where objective data is concerned, this was all Navidson had to work

with. Once he left the house, however, he began to consider new evidence: namely the collected wall samples.

In lush colour, Navidson captures those time-honored representations of

science: test tubes bubbling with boric acid, reams of computer paper bearing the black-ink weight of analysis, electron microscopes resurrecting universes out of dust, and mass-spectrometers with retractable Faradays and stationary Baizers humming in some dim approximation of life.

In all these images there is a wonderful sense of security. The labs are

clean, well-lit, and ordered. Computers seem to print with a purpose.

Various instruments promise answers, even guarantees. Still in order to make sure all this apparatus does not come across as too sterile, Navidson also includes shots of the life-support system: a Krups coffee maker hissing and bubbling, an Oasis poster taped to the vending machine, Homer Simpson on the lounge TV saying something to his brother Herbert.

As a favor to Reston, petrologist Mel O’Geery, up at the Princeton

geology department, has agreed to donate his spare time and oversee the examination of all the wall samples. Prone toward bird like gestures, he is a slight man who takes great delight in speaking very quickly. For nearly four months, he has analyzed every piece of matter, all the way from A (taken a few feet into the first hallway) to XXXX (taken by Navidson when he found himself alone at the bottom of the Spiral Staircase). It is not an inexpensive undertaking, and while the university has agreed to fund most of it, apparently Navidson also had to throw in a fair amount himself. [337 —The actual sum is never made clear in the film. Tena Leeson estimates Navidson’s contributions were anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. “The High Cost of Dating” by Tena L.eeson. Radiogram, v. 13, n. 4, October 1994, p. 142.]

Setting out all the sample bottles on a long table, Dr. O’Geery provides

the camera with a summation of his findings, casually gesturing to various groupings while he sips coffee from a Garfield mug.

“What we have here is a nice banquet of igneous, sedimentary, and

metamorphic samples, some granular, possibly gabbro and pyroxenite, some with much less grain, possibly trachite or andesite. The sedimentary group is fairly small, samples F through K, mainly limestone and marl. The metamorphic group predominates with traces of ainphibolite and marble.

But this group here, it’s composed primarily of siderites, which is to say heavy in iron, though you also have aerolites rich in silicon and magnesium oxides.”

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[2 pages missing]

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XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXecniques [338] XXXXXXXXX

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XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XX abecedXX (spoken language versus the langXX

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[338—Radiometric dating includes work with carbon-14 (from a few

hundred years to 50,000 years ago), potassium-argon (for dates ranging from 100,000 years to 4.5 x 1 O years ago), rubidium-strontium (from 5 x iO to about 4.5 x l0 years ago), lead isotopes (from 10 to 4.5 x iO years ago) as well as fission- tracks (a few million to a few hundred million years ago) and thermoluminescence dating (used to date clay pottery).]

[339—Table 1:

Parent Isotope Daughter Isotope Half-life

Carbon- 14 Nitrogen- 14

5730

Potassium-40 Argon-40

XXXXX

Rubidium-87 Strontium-87

4.88 x 1O°

Sarnarium-147 Neodymium-143

1.06 x 101

Lutetiuxn-176 Hafnium-176

3.5 x 10l

Thorium-232 Lead-208

1.4 x lob

Uranium-235 lead-207

7.04 x 108

Uranium-238 Lead-206

4.47 x 10

]

[340—Scientists estimate the universe unfolded from its state of infinite

destiny [341—Typo: “destiny” should read “density.”] a moment commonly referred to as “the big bang”—approximately 1.3-2 x 1010 years ago.]

[342—The age of the earth lies somewhere between 4.43-4.57 x 1 o

years (roughly around the time our solar system formed). With a few exceptions, most meteors are younger. Micrometeorites, however, with high levels of deuterium, suggest evidence of interstellar material predating our solar system. See F. Tera, “Congruency of comformable galenas: Age of the Earth” 12th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, 1981, p. 1088-1090; and LD.R. Mackinnon and F.J.M. Rietmeijer, “Mineralogy of chondritic interplanetary dust particles” Rev. Geophys. 1987, 25:1527-1553. See also those particle age-related studies carried out by Klaus Bebblestein and Gunter Polinger, published in Physics Today, v. 48, September 1995, p. 24-30, as well as by the Oxford University Press, 1994, under the title Particle Exam which includes in Chapter Sixteen fascinating data generated at the Deutsch Electron Synchrotron (DESY; pronounced “Daisy”) in Hamburg and even input from the HERMES collaboration which at the time was using the HERA electron-proton collider to study nucleon spin. Bebblestein and Polinger have also written extensively on the recent though highly speculative claim that accurate algorithms must now exist which are in keeping with Wave Origin Reflection Data Series as currently set forth by the VEM ™ Corporation.]

[343—(BGC) Berkeley Geochronology Center. Paul Renne. See

Science August 12, 1994. p. 864.]

[344—One must not forget the crater created by a meteor in the Arizona

desert 50,000 years ago: Canyon Diablo with a diameter of 1207 meters and a depth of 174 meters.]

[345—Internal isochron measurements of Rb-Sr ages have shown the

Norton County meteorite in the Aubrite group to have an age of 4.70 ±0.13

Ga (I Ga = io years). The Krahenberg meteorite in the LL5 group has an estimated age of 4.70 ± 0.01 Ga. As O’Geety indicates to Navidson, several of the XXXX samples also appear to have ages predating the formation of the earth. (Though the accuracy of those claims remains hotly contested).

See D. W. Sears, The Nature and Origin of Meteorites (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 129; and Bailey Reims, Formation vs.

Metamorphic Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996), p.

182-235.]

[346—Robert T. Dodd, Meteorites: A Petrologic-Chemical Synthesis

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Dodd also explains on page 161: “A chondrite’ s first isotopic equilibration is usually called its formation. The time period between nucleosynthesis and formation is called the formation interval and that between formation and the present formation age. The time difference between a later isotopic disturbance and the present is called a metanwrphic age. We have known for a quarter century that all chondrites are approximately 4.55 billion years old (Patterson, 1956) and for a decade that their history up to and including metamorphism encompassed no more than 100 million years (Papanastassiou and Wasserburg, 1969). What parts of this brief high-temperature history were occupied by chondrule formation, accretion, and metamorphism has been and remains unclear, for it is not always easy to tell which stage a particular isotopic system records.”]

[347—Meteoritics: Asteroids, Comets, Craters, Interplanetary Dust,

Interstellar Medium Lunar Samples, Meteors, Meteorites, Natural Satellites, Planets, Tektites Origin and History of the Solar System, Derek W. 0. Sears, editor. Donald E. Brownlee, Michael 3. Gaffey, Joseph I.

Goldstein, Richard A. F. Grieve, Rhian Jones, Klaus Keil, Hiroko Nagahara, Frank Podosek, Ludoif Schultz, Denis Shaw, S. Ross Taylor, Paul H. Warren, Paul Weissman, George W. Wetherill, Rainer Wider, associate editors. Published by The Meteoritical Society, v. 30, n. 3, May

1995. p. 244.]

[348—A possible solution to the date line scheme detailed by Navidson

and O’Geery. It certainly lends weight to those theories favoring the

historical significance of the samples, though it does nothing to resolve the presence of extraterrestrial and possibly even interstellar matter.]

[349—Therefore Navidson’s conclusion seems the only conclusion.

Based on the evidence, sample A thru sample XXXX appear to make up an exact chronological map, which though simple, nevertheless still shows that … … … … . Inexplicably, the remainder of this footnote along with seventeen more pages of text vanished from the manuscript supplied by Mr.

Truant. — Ed.]

[350—I wish I could say this mass of black X’s was due to some

mysterious ash or frantic act of deletion on Zampanô’s part. Unfortunately this time I’m to blame. When I first started assembling The Navidson Record, I arranged the various pages and scraps by chapter or subject.

Eventually I had numerous piles spread out across my room. I usually

placed a book or some heavy object on them to keep the isolated mounds from flying apart if there were a draft or I happened to bump one with my foot. On top of this particular chapter I stupidly placed a bottle of German ink, 4001 brillant—schwarz or something. Who knows how long ago either, probably when I was still sketching pictures and tinkering with collages, maybe in August, maybe as far back as February. Anyway, there must have been a hairline crack in the glass because all of the ink eventually tunneled down through the paper, wiping out almost forty pages, not to mention seeping into the carpet below where it spread into a massive black bloom.

The footnotes survived only because I hadn’t incorporated them yet. They’d all been written out separately on a series of green index cards held together by a yellow rubber band.

· ·.· · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

[17 pages missing]

· ·.· · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

Navidson asks.

Dr O’Geery mulls this over, takes another SIP of his coffee, eyes the

samples again, and then finally shrugs, “Not much really, though you’ve got yourself a nice range here.”

“Nothing peculiar or out of the ordinary?” Navidson presses.

O’Geery shakes his head. “Well except maybe the chronology.” “Meaning?” Reston eases his wheelchair forward. “Your samples all fall into a very consistent scheme. Sample A is pretty

young, a few thousand years old, while K is a few hundred thousand. Q over here is in the millions and these—” referring to MMMM through XXXX “—well, in the billions. Those last bits there are clearly meteoric.”

“Meteors?” Navidson shoots a look at Reston.

O’Geery nods, picking up the sample marked VVVV. “In my opinion

Rubidium-87/strontium-87 is the best dating method we have, yielding formation ages anywhere from 4.4 to 4.7 billion years old. If .‘ place the age of the earth at around four and a half billion years old, it’s pretty obvious these had to come from someplace other than here. I doubt lunar but maybe interplanetary. XXXX, your last sample, is by far the oldest and most interesting. A composite of younger material, 4.2 billion years old, combined with deuterium rich particles suggesting that possibly, now I want to stress possibly here, but this deuterium could indicate matter older than even our solar system. Interstellar perhaps. So there you have it—a very nice little vein of history.”

Reston wheels back around to the table, as if Dr. O’Geery’s explanation

should now somehow cast the samples in a new light. Nothing about them, however, has changed. As Gillian Fedette exclaimed on August 4th, 1996 at The Radon Conference in St. Paul, Minneapolis: “Not surprisingly, despite [O’Geery’s] analysis, the samples continue to remain obdurate and lifeless.”

“Where did you say you got all this from?” O’Geery asks. “Antarctica?”

Primarily thanks to O’Geery’s conclusions, some fanatics of The

Navidson Record assert that the presence of extremely old chondrites definitively proves extra-terrestrial forces constructed the house. Others, however, claim the samples only support the idea that the house on Ash Tree Lane is a self-created portal into some other dimension. [351—A Lexicon of Improbable Theories, Blair Keepling, ed. (San Francisco: Nifiheim Press, 1996). In chapter 13, Keepling credits The Navidson

Record with the revival of the Hollow Earth Movement. Tracing this implausible theory from the wobbly ratiocinations of John Cleaves Symmes (1779-1829) through Raymond Bernard’s The Hollow Earth: The Greatest Geographical Discovery in History (1964) to Norma Cox’s self-published pro-Nazi piece Kingdoms Within Earth (1985), Keepling reveals yet another bizarre subculture thriving in the Western world. Of course even if this planet were truly a hollow globe—an absolute impossibility—Tom’s dropped quarter still describes a space far greater than the earth’s radius (or even diameter).] As Justin Krape dryly remarked: “Both arguments are probably best attributed to the persistent presence of schizophrenia plaguing the human race.” [352—Justin Krape’s Pale Micturitions (Charleston, West Virginia: Kanawha Press, 1996), p. 99.]

Keener intellects, however, now regard scientific conjecture concerning

the house as just another dead end. It would seem the language of objectivity can never adequately address the reality of that place on Ash Tree Lane.

Perhaps for us the most significant thing gleaned from this segment is

Navidson’s persistent use of all the data [353—See Exhibit Three for all test results, including rubidium-87/strontium-87, potassium-40/argon-40, samanum-147/neodymium-143 dating, as well as a complete set of reports on uranium-235 and -238 contents in lead isotopes.] to deny the internal shattering caused by Tom’s death and Karen’s flight. He only speculates with Reston about what it could mean that samples A thru XXXX form a timeline extending back before the birth of even the solar system. He uses his camera to embrace the Princeton laboratory equipment, seek out the appeasement of numbers, all the while never openly reflecting on the very real absence continuing to penetrate his life. Similar to the way Karen tried to rely on Feng Shui to mitigate the effects of the house, Navidson turns to the time telling tick of radioactive isotopes to deny the darkness eviscerating him from within.

[354—Don’t worry that thought crossed my mind too. Unfortunately

Exhibit Three doesn’t make up for the spillage back there because there is no Exhibit Three. Aside from a few notes, it’s missing. I’ve looked

everywhere, especially for the Zero folder. Nothing. Who knows, maybe it’s for the best.

Today, for no reason in particular, I started thinking about Dr.

Ogelmeyer, wondering what I might have found out if I’d had the money, if I’d taken the time to see his specialist, if I’d opted for the tests. Of course if if were a fifth I’d be drunk, which I’m definitely not. Maybe that kind of confirmation is unnecessary anyway.

Still I wonder.

I grew up on certain words, words I’ve never mentioned to Lude or

anyone for that matter, words orbiting around my mother mainly, sometimes whispered, more often written in letters my father would never have let me read had he lived.

(Now that I think about it, I guess I’ve always gravitated towards

written legacies (private lands surrounded by great bewildering oceans (a description I don’t entirely understand even as I write it down now (though the sense of adventure about words (that little “1” making so little difference), appeals to me—ah but to hell with the closing parent)he)see)s) (sic)

Before I understood the significance of things like “auditory

hallucinations,” “verbigeration,” “word salad,” “derealization,” “depersonalization” I sensed in them all kinds of adventure. To reach their meaning would require a great journey, which I eventually found out was in fact true, though the destinations did not exactly turn out to be Edenic places full of gold leaf, opal or intricately carved pieces of jade.

Count yourself lucky if you’ve never wandered by the house of Kurt

Schnieder or Gabriel Langfeldt, or if the criterias of St. Louis, Taylor and Abrams or Research Diagnostic leave you puzzled. The New Haven Schizophrenia Index should give more than enough away.

In my case, would Ogelmeyer have turned to those tools or would he

have begun first with a biological examination? Look for hyperactivity of dopaniinergic systems? Check for an increase in norepinephrine? Or more than likely run an MRI on my brain to see if the lateral and third ventricles were getting larger? Maybe he’d even take a peek at my delta activity on the good old electroencephalogram (EEG)?

What sort of data streams would be generated and how conclusively

could he or his specialists read them?

I’ll never know. Which is not to imply it’s the wrong road. Quite the

contrary. It’s just not mine. All I hope for is a moment of rational thought and one shot at action before I’m lost to a great saddening madness, pithed at the hands of my own stumbling biology.

As it stands, I’ve dropped eighteen pounds. A couple of eviction notices

lie near my door. I feel like I haven’t slept in months. My neighbors are scared of me. Whenever I pass them in that dim brown- walled hail, which happens rarely, only when I have to go out for more tuna, books from the library or to sell blood to buy candles, I hear them whisper about my night screams—”He’s the one, I’m sure of it.” “Shhhh, not so loud.”

For some reason, I’ve been thinking more and more about my mother

and the way her life failed her, humiliated her with impulses beyond her command, broke her with year after year of the same. I never knew her that well. I remember she had amazing hair, like sunlight, extremely fine and whisked with silver, beautiful even when it was uncombed, and her eyes always seemed to brim with a certain tenderness when I visited. And though most of the time she whispered, sometimes she spoke up and then her voice would sound sweet and full like chapel bells caroling in the foreign towns I’d eventually wander at dawn, echoing down those streets where I’d find myself in the spare light, rubbing my cold hands together, hopping around like a lunatic, waiting for the pastry shops to open so I could buy a piece of bread and a cup of hot chocolate.

She also used to write me these letters, always handwritten and full of

strange colored words. They started after my father was killed, loaded with advice and encouragement and most of all faith. I don’t know if I would have survived Raymond without them. But she was never that well, and eventually her words soured, until— Well, I wish I could just stick to thoughts of her hair and her brimming eyes and caroling bells in foreign towns at dawn.

It’s never that simple though, is it?

One day I received a letter in which she apologized for what she’d done.

At first I thought she was talking again about the pan of oil she’d accidentally knocked to the floor when I was four but that wasn’t it at all, though in an awful way her confession did change the way I began to view my scars, their oceanic swirls now spelling out suspicion and much too much doubt for me to really address properly. Anyhow, she was referring to

a completely different event when my father was finally forced to take her away to The Whale, when I was only seven, a day I cannot for the life of me remember.

As she explained it, her thoughts at that time had entirely deteriorated. The burden of life seemed too much for her to bear and

therefore, in her mind, an impossible and even horrible burden to impose upon a child, especially her own. Based on these wild ratiocinations, she gathered me up in her arms and tried to choke me. It was probably a very brief attempt. Maybe even comic. My father intervened almost immediately, and my mother was then taken away for my own safety. I guess I do remember that part. Someone saying “my own safety.” My father I imagine.

I suppose I also remember him leading her away. At least the shape of him in the doorway. With her. All blurred and in silhouette.

Raymond knew a little about my mother’s history and he used to say it

was a bad dream that got her.

“Nightmares you know,” he once told me with a grin. “Can mess you up

permanently. I’ve seen it happen to buddies of mine. That’s why you’ll never catch me without a gun under my pillow. Phat’ll get any man through the night.”

A week ago I gave myself a Christmas present. I dug up my Visa, which

I still try my best to avoid using, and not only picked up a second gun, this time a stainless steel Taurus 605 .357, but also went ahead and ordered a rifle. More specifically I ordered a Weatherby 300 magnum, along with twenty boxes of 180 grain core—locked rounds.

I guess I’m hoping the weapons will make me feel better, grant me

some kind of fucking control, especially if I sense the dullness inside me get too heavy and thick, warning me that something is again approaching, creeping slowly towards my room, no figment of my imagination either but as tangible as you & I, never ceasing to scratch, fume and snort in awful rage, though still pausing outside my door, waiting, perhaps for a word or an order or some other kind of sign to at last initiate this violent and by now inevitable confrontation—always as full of wrath as I am full of fear. So far nothing, though I still take the Taurus and the Heckler & Koch out of the trunk, load them, and just hang on the trigger. Sometimes for a few minutes.

Sometimes for hours. Aiming at the door or the window or a ceiling corner cast in shadow. I even lie with them in bed, hiding under my sky blue

sheets. Trying to sleep. Trying to dream if only so I can remember my dreams. At least I’m not defenseless now. At least I have that. A gun in each hand. Not afraid to shoot. Safety off.]

Noda Vennard believes the key to this sequence does not exist in any of

the test results or geological hypotheses but in the margin of a magazine which, as we can see for ourselves, Navidson idly fills with doodles while waiting for Dr. O’Geery to retrieve some additional documentation:

Mr. Navidson has drawn a bomb going off. An Atom bomb. An inverted

thermonuclear explosion which reveals in the black contours of its clouds, the far-reaching shock-wave, and of course the great pluming head, the internal dimensions of his own sorrow. [355—See Noda Vennard’s 4 Frame Detail” delivered for The Symposium on The Cultural Effects of Nuclear Weaponry in the Twenty-First Century held at The Tehnicul Universky of Denmark on October 19, 1995. Also see Matthew Coolidge’s The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America’s Nuclear Proving Ground (Culver City, CA: The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 1996) as well as Matthew Coolidge’s Nuclear Proving Grounds of the World, ed. Sarah Simons (Culver City, CA: The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 1998).]

But even if that is indeed the best way to describe the shape of

Navidson’s emotional topology, it is still nothing compared to the vision the house ultimately prepares for him.

As professor Virgil Q. Tomlinson observes:

That place is so alien to the kingdom of the imagination let alone the

eye — so perfectly unholy, hungry, and inviolable—it easily makes a fourth of July sparkler out of an A-bomb, and reduces the aliens of The X-Files and The Outer Limits to Sunday morning funnies. [356—See Virgil Q.

Tomlinson’s “Nothing Learned, Nothing Saved: By Suggestion Of Science” in Geo v. 83, February 7, 1994, p. 68.]

Glossary

Deuterium: A hydrogen isotope twice the mass of ordinary hydrogen.

Needed for heavy water.

Diachronic: Relating to the historical developments and changes

occurring in language.

D-Structure: Deep Structure. The tree providing a place for words as

defined by phrase structure rules.

Igneous: Rocks formed from magma (molten material). Classified on

the basis of texture and mineral composition. Examples: granite, basalt, pumice.

Interstellar: Originating or occurring among the stars.

Isotope: One of two or more forms of an element with the same atomic

number and chemical behavior but different atomic mass.

Linguistics: Study of the structure, sounds, meaning, and history of

language.

Metamorphic: Preexisting rocks reformed by heat and pressure.

Examples: slate and marble.

Meteors: Nonterrestrial objects surviving passage through the Earth’s

atmosphere. Often divided into three groups: siderites (iron meteorites), aerolites (meteorites primarily composed of silicates), and siderolites (stony iron meteorites).

Morpheme: Smallest meaningful part of a word.

Nucleosynthesis: Creation of nucleons (neutrons and protons). Typically

discussed when formulating theories about the origins of the universe.

Sedimentary: Rocks created from hardened layers of sediment

comprised of organic and inorganic material. Classified on the basis of chemical and particle shape and size. Examples: sandstone, shale, and coal.

Semantics: Study of the relationship between words and meaning.

Spectrometer: An instrument calibrated to measure transmitted energy

whether radiant intensities at various wavelengths, the refractive indices of prism materials, or radiation.

S-Structure: Surface Structure. The phrase tree formed when applying

movement transformations to the d-structure.

Synchronic: Concerning language as it exists at a single point in time.

Trace: A silent element in a sentence which still indicates the d-

structure position of a moved phrase.

XVII

Wer dii auch seist: Am abend tritt hinaus

aus deiner Stube, drin dii alles we/3t;

als letzres vor der Ferne liegt dein Haus:

Wer dii auch seist.

— Rilke

[357—Whoever you are, go out into the evening,! leaving your room, of

which you know each bit;! your house is the last before the infinite,! whoever you are.” As translated by C. F. Macintyre. Rilke: SelectecLpoems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1940), p. 21. — Ed.]

While Reston continued to remain curious about the properties of the

house, he had absolutely no desire to return there. He was grateful to have survived and smart enough not to tempt fate twice. “Sure I was obsessed at first, we all were,” he says in The Reston Interview. “But I got over it pretty quick. My fascination was never the same as Navy’s. I enjoy my life at the University. My colleagues, my friends there, the woman I’ve started to see.

I’ve no desire to court death. After we escaped, going back to the house just didn’t interest me.”

Navidson had a completely different reaction. He could not stop

thinking about those corridors and rooms. The house had taken hold of him.

In the months following his departure from Ash Tree Lane, he stayed at Reston’ s apartment, alternately sleeping on the couch and the floor, continuously surrounded by books, proofs, and notebooks packed with sketches, maps, and theories. “I put Navy up because he needed help, but when the sample analysis brought back minimal results, I knew the time had come to have a heart to heart with him about the future.” (The Reston Interview again.)

As we witness for ourselves, following their meeting with Dr. O’Geery,

Navidson and Reston both return home. Reston breaks open a bottle of

Jack, pours two three-finger glasses and hands one to his friend. A little time passes. They finish a second drink. Reston gives it his best shot.

“Navy” he says slowly. “We made a helluva try but now we’re at a dead

end and you’re broke. Isn’t it time to contact National Geographic or The Discovery Channel?”

Navidson does not respond. “We can’t do this thing alone. We don’t need to do it alone.” Navidson puts his drink down and after a long uncomfortable silence

nods.

“Okay, tomorrow morning we’ll call them, we’ll send them invitations,

we’ll get the ball rolling.”

Reston sighs and refills their glasses for a third time. “I’ll drink to that.” “Here’s to opening things up,” Navidson says by way of a toast, then

glancing at the photograph of Karen and the children he keeps by the sofa, adds: “And here’s to me going home.”

“After that we got pretty drunk.” (The Reston Interview.) “Something

neither one of us had done in a long while. When I packed it in, Navy was still awake. Still drinking. Writing in some journal he had. Little did I know what he had planned.”

The next morning when Reston woke up, Navidson was gone. He had

left behind a note of thanks and an envelope for Karen. Reston called New York but Karen had heard nothing. A day later he drove to the house.

Navidson’s car sat in the driveway. Reston wheeled himself to the front door. It was unlocked. “I sat there for an hour and a half, at least, before I could get the guts to go in.”

But as Reston eventually found out the house was empty and most

startling of all the hallway that had loomed for so long in the east wall was gone.

Why Did Navidson Go Back To The House?

A great deal of speculation has gone into determining the exact reason

why Navidson chose to reenter the house. It is a question The Navidson

Record never deals with specifically and which after several years of intense debate has produced no simple answer. Currently there are three schools of thought:

I. The Kellog-Antwerk Claim

II. The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria

III. The Haven-Slocum Theory

Though it would be impossible here to address all their respective

nuances, at the veiy least some consideration needs to be given to their views. [358—While bits and pieces of these readings still circulate, they have yet to appear anywhere in their entirety. Purportedly Random House intends to publish a complete volume, though the scheduled release is not until the fall of 2001.]

On July 8, 1994 at The Symposium for the Betterment of International

Cultural Advancement held in Reykjavik, Iceland, Jennifer Kellog and Isabelle Antwerk presented their paper on the meaning and authority of title in the 2Oth and 21St century. In their study, they cited Navidson as the perfect example of “one dictated by the logic born out of the need to possess.”

Kellog and Antwerk point out how even though Navidson and Karen

own the house together (both their names appear on the mortgage), Navidson frequently implies that he is the sole proprietor. As he snaps at Reston during a heated argument on the subject of future explorations:

“Let’s not forget that’s my house.” Kellog and Antwerk regard this

possessiveness as the main reason for Navidson’s mind-boggling decision

to enter the house alone. A month later Norman Paarlberg wryly offered

up the following response to the Reykjavik duo: “The obsession just grew

and grew until it was Navidson who was finally possessed by some self-destructive notion to go back there and yet completely dispossessed of any rational mechanism to override such an incredibly stupid idea.” [359— Norman Paarlberg, “The Explorer’s Responsibility,” National Geographic,

v. 187, January 1995, p. 120-138.]

Kellog and Antwerk argue that the act of returning was an attempt to

territorialize and thus preside over that virtually unfathomable space.

However, if their claim is correct that Navidson’s preoccupation with the house grew solely out of his need to own it, then other behavioral patterns should have followed suit, which was not the case. For instance, Navidson never sought to buy out Karen’s share of their home. He refused to lure television programs and other corporate sponsors to his doorstep which would have further enforced his titular position, at least in the eye of the media. Nor did he ever invest himself in any kind paper writing, lectures, or other acts of publicity.

And even if Navidson did mentally equate ownership with knowledge,

as both Kellog and Antwerk assert he did, he should have more adamantly sought to name the aspects of his discoveries, which as others would later observe he most certainly did not.

A year later at The Conference on the Aesthetics of Mourning held in

Nuremberg, Germany on August 18, 1995, an unnamed student read on behalf of his professors a paper which people everywhere almost instantly began hailing as The Bister-Fneden-Josephson Criteria. More than its content, its tone practically assured a contentious response.

Here for example is the opening salvo directed specifically at The

Kellog-Antwerk Claim and their followers:

“Refutation One: We do not accept that filmmaking constitutes an act of

naming. Image never has and never will posses proprietary powers. Though others may deny it, we believe that to this day the Adamic strengths of the word, and hence language, have never been or ever will be successfully challenged.”

The BFJ Criteria defined ownership as an act of verbal assertion

necessarily carned out in public. By refusing to acknowledge The Navidson

Record as such an act, The BFJ Criteria could make the question of personal necessity the salient point for rhetorical negotiation.

For the first half of its discourse, The BFJ Criteria chose to concentrate

on guilt and grief. Careful consideration was given to Navidson’s excessive exposure to traumatic events throughout the world and how he was affected by witnessing scores of “life-snaps” (The language of The Criteria), ironically enough, however, it was not until he resigned from those assignments and moved to Ash Tree Lane that death crossed over the threshold and began to roam the halls of his own home. His twin brother died there along with two others whom he had personally welcomed into the house.

Losing Tom nearly destroyed Navidson. A fundamental part of himself

and his past had suddenly vanished. Even worse, as The BFJ Criteria emphasizes, in the final moments of his life, Tom displayed characteristics entirely atypical of his day to day behavior. Navidson saw his brother in a completely different light. Not at all sluggish or even remotely afraid, Tom had acted with determination and above all else heroism, carrying Daisy out of harm’s way before falling to his death.

Navidson cannot forgive himself. As he repeatedly tells Karen over the

phone: “I was my brother’s keeper. It was me, I was the one who should have been with Daisy. I was the one who should have died.”

The most controversial claim made by The Bister-Frieden-Josephson

contingency is that Navidson began believing darkness could offer something other than itself. Quite cleverly The Criteria first lays the groundwork for its argument by recalling the now famous admonition voiced by Louis Merplat, the renowned speleologist who back in 1899 discovered the Blue Skia Cavern: “Darkness is impossible to remember.

Consequently cavers desire to return to those unseen depths where they have just been. It is an addiction. No one is ever satisfied. Darkness never satisfies. Especially if it takes something away which it almost always invariably does.” [360—Quoted in Wilfred Bluffton’s article “Hollow Dark” in The New York Times, December 16, 1907, p. 515. Also consider Esther Harlan James’ “Crave The Cave: The Color of Obsession,” Diss.

Trinity College, 1996, P. 669, in which she describes her own addiction to The Navidson Record: “I never shook the feeling that the film, while visceral and involving, must pale in comparison to an actual, personal

exploration of the house. Still, just as Navidson needed more and more of that endless dark, I too found myself feeling the same way about The Navidson Record. In fact as I write this now, I’ve already seen the film thirty-eight times and have no reason to believe I will stop going to see it.”] Not stopping there, The Criteria then turns to Lazlo Ferma who almost a hundred years later echoed Merplat’s views when he slyly observed: “Even the brightest magnesium flare can do little against such dark except blind the eyes of the one holding it. Thus one craves what by seeing one has in fact not seen.” [361—Lazlo Ferma’s “See No Evil” in Film Comment, v. 29, September! October 1993, p. 58.] Before finally quoting A. Ballard who famously quipped: “That house answers many yearnings remembered in sorrow.” [ 362—A. Ballard “The Apophatic Science Of Recollection (Following Nuance)” Ancient Greek, v. cvii, April 1995, p. 85.]

The point of recounting these observations is simply to show how

understandable it was that for Navidson the impenetrable sweep of that place soon acquired greater meaning simply because, to quote the Criteria directly, “it was full of unheimliche vorklanger [363— “Ghostly anticipation.” — Ed.] and thus represented a means to his own personal propitiation.” The sharp-bladed tactics of The BFJ Criteria, however, are not so naive as to suddenly embrace Navidson’s stated convictions about what he might find. Instead the Criteria quite adroitly acknowledges that when Tom died every “angry, rueful, self- indicting tangle” within Navidson suddenly “lit up,” producing projections powerful and painful enough to “occlude, deny, and cover” the only reason for their success in the first place: the blankness of that place, “the utter and perfect blankness.”

It is nevertheless the underlying position of The Bister-Frieden-

Josephson Criteria that Navidson in fact relied on such projections in order to deny his increasingly more “powerful and motivating Thanatos.” In the end, he sought nothing less than to see the house exact its annihilating effects on his own being. Again quoting directly from The Criteria:

“Navidson has one deeply acquired organizing perception: there is no

hope of survival there. Life is impossible. And therein lies the lesson of the house, spoken in syllables of absolute silence, resounding within him like a faint and uncertain echo... If we desire to live, we can only do so in the margin of that place.”

The second half of The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria focuses

almost entirely on this question of “desire to live” by analyzing in great detail the contents of Navidson’s letter to Karen written the night before his departure. To emphasize the potential “desire” for self-destruction, The Criteria supplies for this section the following epigraph:

Noli me tan gere.

Noli me legere.

Noli me videre.*

Noli me—

[364—In “Shout Not, Doubt Not” published in Ewig-Weibliche ed. P. V.

N. Gable (Wichita, Kansas: Joyland Press, 1995) Talbot Darden translates these lines simply as “Do not touch me. Do not read me. Do not see me. Do Not Me.”]

*N enim videbit me homo ci vi vet. [365—Sorry. No clue.] [366—

Maurice Blanchot translates this as whoever sees God dies.” — Ed.]

Thus emphasizing the potentially mortal price for beholding what must

lie forever lost in those inky folds. Here The Criteria also points out how Navidson’s previous trespasses, with one exception, were structured around extremely concrete objectives: (1) rescuing the Holloway team; and after sinking down the Staircase (2) returning home. The exception, of course, is the very first visit, where Navidson seeks nothing else but to explore the house, an act which nearly costs him his life.

Oddly enough, The Criteria does not acknowledge the risk inherent in

(1) and (2)—objective or no objective. Nor does it explain why one trespass/journey should suddenly be treated as two.

Because The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria then goes on to treat

Navidson’s letter in great detail and since its appearance in the film is limited to only a few seconds of screen time, it seems advisable, before further commentary, to reproduce a facsimile here:

[Page One]

March 31, 1991

My dearest Karen, I miss you. I love you. I don’t deserve expect your forgiveness. I’m

leaving morrow XXXXXXXX though I plan to return. But who knows, right?

You’ve seen that place.

Guess I’m writing a will too. By the way I’m drunk. Sell the house, the

film, everything I have, take it all. Tell the kids daddy loves! loved them. I love them, I love you.

Why am I doing this? Because it’s there and I’m not. I know that’s a

pretty shitty answer. I should burn the place down, forget about it. But going after something like this is who I am. You know that.

If i wasn’t like this, we never would hve met in the first place becasue I

never would have stopped my car in the middle of traffic, ran to the sidewalk, and asked you out.

No excuse huh? Guess I’m just another bastard abandoning XXXX

woman and kids for a big adventure. I should grow up, right?

[Page Two]

I accept that, I’d like to it, I’ve tried to do it, easier said/written than

done.

I need to go back to that place one more time. I know something now

and I just have to confirm it. Slowly the pieces have been coming together.

I’m starting to see that place for what it is and it’s not for cable shows or National Geographic.

Do you believe in God? I don’t think I ever asked you that one. Well I

do now. But my God isn’t your Catholic varietal or your Judaic or Mormon or Baptist or Seventh Day Adventist or whatever/ whoever. No burning bush, no angels, no cross. God’s a house. Which is not to say that our house is God’s house or even a house of God. What I mean to say is that our house is God.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

Think I’ve lost my mind? Maybe, maybe, maybe Maybe just really

drunk. Pretty crazy you have to admit. I just made God a street address.

Forget all that last part. just forget

[Page Three]

it. I miss you. I miss you. I won’t reread this. If I do I’ll throw it away

and write something terse, clean and sober. And all locked up. You know me so so well. I know you’ll strip out the alcohol fumes, the fear, the mistakes, and see what matters—a code to decipher written by a guy who thought he was speaking clearly. I’m crying now. I don’t think I can stop.

But if I try to stop I’ll stop writing and I know I won’t start again. I miss you so much. I miss Daisy. I miss Chad. I miss Wax and Jed. I even miss Holloway. And I miss Hansen and Latigo and PFC Miserette, Benton and Carl and Regio and 1st. lieutenant Nacklebend and of course Zips and now I can’t get Delial out of my head. Delia!, Delial, Delial—the name I gave to the girl in the photo that won me all the fame and gory, that’s all she is Karen, just the photo. And now I can’t understand anymore why it meant so much to me to keep to keep her a secret—a penance or something.

Inadequate. Well there it’s said. But the photo, that’s not what I can’t get out of my head right now.

[Page Four]

Not the photo—that photo, that thing—but who she was before one-

sixtieth of a second sliced her out of thin air and won me the pulitzer though that didnt keep the vultures away i did that by swinging my tripodaround though that didnt keep her from dyding five years old daisy’s age except she was pciking at a bone you should have seen her not the but her a little girl squatting in a field of rock dangling a bone between her fingers I miss miss miss but i didn’t miss i got her along with the vulture in the background when the real vulture was the guy with the camera preying on her for his fuck pulitzer prize it doesnt matter if she was already ten minutes from dying i took threem minutes to snap a photo should have taken 10 minutes taking her somewhere so she wouldnt go away like that no family, no mother no day, no people just a vulture and a fucking photojournalist i wish

i were dead right now i wish i were dead that poor little baby this god god awful

[Page Five]

world im sorry i cant stop thinking of her never have never will cant

forget how i ran with her like where was i going to really run i was twelve miles from nowhere i had no one to her to no window to pass her through out of harms way no torn there i was no torn there and then that tiny bag of bones just started to shake and it was over she died right in my hands the hands of the guy who took three minutes two minutes whatever a handful of seconds to photograph her and now she was gone that poor little girl in this god awful world i miss her i miss delial I miss the man i thought i was before i met her the man who would have saved her who would have done something who would have been torn maybe hes the one im looking for or maybe irn looking for all of them

i miss u i love U there’s no second lye lived you can’t call your own

Navy

[367—Reminding me here, I mean that line about “a code to decipher”,

how the greatest love letters are always encoded for the one and not the many.]

The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria pays a great deal of attention to

the incoherence present in the letter, the dissatisfaction with the self, and most of all the pain Navidson still feels over the image he burned into the retina of America almost two decades ago.

As was already mentioned in Chapter II, before the release of The

Navidson Record neither friends nor family nor colleagues knew that Delia] was the name Navidson had given to the starving Sudanese child.

For reasons of his own, he never revealed Delial’s identity to anyone, not even to Karen. Billy Reston thought she was some mythological pin-up girl:

“I didn’t know. I sure as hell never connected the name with that photo.” [368—Billy Reston interviewed by Anthony Sitney on “Evening Murmurs,” KTWL, Boulder, Colorado, January 4, 1996.]

The Navidson Record solved a great mystery when it included Karen’s

shot of the name written on the back of the print as well as Navidson’s letter. For years photojournalists and friends had wondered who Delia] was and why she meant so much to Navidson. Those who had asked usually received one of several responses: “I forget,” “Someone close to me,” “Allow a man a little mystery” or just a smile. Quite a few colleagues accused Navidson of being enigmatic on purpose and so out of spite let the subject drop.

Few were disappointed when they learned that Delial referred to the

subject of his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. “It made perfect sense to me,” said Purdham Huckler of the New York Times. “That must have been a crushing thing to witness. And he paid the price too.” [369—Personal interview with Purdham Huckler, February 17, 1995.] Lindsay Gerknard commented, “Navidson ran straight into the brick wall all great photojournalists inevitably run into: why aren’t I doing something about this instead of just photographing it? And when you ask that question, you hurt.” [370—Personal interview with Lindsay Gerknard, February 24,

1995.] Psychologist Hector Liosa took Gerknard’s observation a little further when he pointed out at the L.A. Times Convention on Media Ethics last March: “Photojournalists especially must never underestimate the power and influence of their images. You may be thinking, I’ve done nothing in this moment except take a photo (true) but realize you have also done an enormous amount for society at large (also true!).” [371—Hector Liosa speaking at the L.A. Times Convention on Media Ethics on March

14, 1996.]

Nor did evaluations of Navidson’s burden stop with comments made by

his associates. Academia soon marched in to interrogate the literary consequences created by the Delial revelation. Tokiko Dudek commented on how “Delial is to Navidson what the albatross is to Coleridge’s mariner.

In both cases, both men shot their mark only to be haunted by the accomplishment, even though Navidson did not actually kill Delial.” [372 —See Tokiko Dudek’s “Harbingers of Hell and/or Hope” in Authenres Journal, Palomar College, September, 1995. p. 7. Also consider Larry

Burrows who in the 1969 BBC film Beautiful Beautiful remarked:”. . . so often I wonder whether it is my right to capitalize, as I feel, so often, on the grief of others. But then I justify, in my own particular thoughts, by feeling that I can contribute a little to the understanding of what others are going through; then there is a reason for doing it.”] Caroline Fillopino recognized intrinsic elements of penance in Navidson’s return to the house but she preferred Dante to Coleridge: “Delial serves the same role as Beatrice. Her whispers lead Navidson back to the house. She is all he needs to find. After all locating (literally) the souls of the dead = safety in loss.” [373—Caroline Fillopino’s “Sex Equations” Granta, fall 1995. p. 45.] However unlike Dante, Navidson never encountered his Beatrice again. [374—During Exploration #5 Navidson had no illusion about what he would find there.

While staring into those infernal halls, we can hear him mutter: “Lazarus is dead again.”]

In the most sardonic tones, Sandy Beale of The New Criticism once

considered how contemporary cinema would have treated the subject of Navidson’s guilt:

If The Navidson Record had been a Hollywood creation, Delial would

have appeared at

the heart of the house. Like something out of Lost Horizon, dark fields

would have given way to Elysian fields, the perfect setting for a musical number with a brightly costumed Delial front and center, drinking Shirley Temples, swinging on the arms of Tom and Jed, backed by a chorus line which would have included Holloway and everyone else in Navidson’s life (and our life for that matter) who had ever died. Plenty of rootbeer and summer love [375—See Appendix F.] to go around.[376—Sandy Beale’s “No Horizon” in The New Criticism, v. 13, November 3, 1993. p. 49.]

But The Navidson Record is not a Hollywood creation and through the

course of the film Delial appears only once, in Karen’s piece, bordered in black, frozen in place without music or commentary, just Delial: a memory, a photograph, an artifact.

To this day the treatment of Delial by The Bister-Frieden-Josephson

Criteria is still considered harsh and particularly insensate toward international tragedy. While Navidson’s empathy for the child is not entirely

disregarded, The Criteria asserts that she soon exceeded the meaning of her own existence: “Memory, experience, and time turned her bones into a trope for everything Navidson had ever lost.”

The BFJ Criteria posits that Delial’s prominence in Navidson’s last

letter is a repressive mechanism enabling him to at least on a symbolic level deal with his nearly inexpressible loss. After all in a very short amount of time Navidson had seen the rape of physics. He had watched one man murder another and then pull the trigger on himself. He had stood helplessly by as his own brother was crushed and consumed. And finally he had watched his lifelong companion flee to her mother and probably another lover, taking with her his children and bits of his sanity.

It is not by accident that all these elements appear like ghosts in his

letter. A more permanent end to his relationship with Karen seems to be implied when he writes “I’m leaving tomorrow” and describes his missive as a “will.” His invocation of the memory of the members of the first team as well as others sounds almost like a protracted good-bye. Navidson is tying up loose ends and the reason, or so The BFJ Criteria claims, can be detected in the way he treats the Sudanese girl still haunting his past: “It is no coincidence that as Navidson begins to dwell on Delial he mentions his brother three times: ‘I had no one to pass her to. There was no window to pass her through out of harms way. There was no Tom there. I was no Tom there. Tom, maybe he’s the one I’m looking for,’ It is a harrowing admission full of sorrow and defeat— ‘I was no Tom there’ —seeing his brother as the life-saving (and line-saving) hero he himself was not.” [377 —Here then Jacob loses Esau and finds he is nothing without him. He is empty, lost and tumbling toward his own annihilation. But as Robert Hert poignantly asks in Esau and Jacob (BITTW Publications, 1969), p. 389: “What did God really know about brothers (or for that matter sisters)? He was after all an only child and before it all an equally lonely father.”]

Thus The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria staunchly refutes The

Kellog-Antwerk Claim by reiterating its argument that Navidson’s return to the house was not at all motivated by the need to possess it but rather “to be obliterated by it.”

Then on January 6, 1997 at The Assemblage of Cultural Diagnosticians

Sponsored By The American Psychiatric Association held in Washington, D.C., a husband and wife team brought before an audience of 1,200 The Haven-Slocum Theory which in the eyes of many successfully deflated the prominence of both The Kellog-Antwerk Claim and the infamously influential Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria.

Ducking the semantic conceits of prior hypotheses, The HavenSlocum

Theory proposed to first focus primarily on “the house itself and its generation of physiological effects.” How this direction would resolve the question of “why Navidson returned to the house alone” they promised to show in due course.

Relying on an array of personal interviews, closely inspected secondary

sources, and their own observations, the married couple began to carefully adumbrate their findings in what has since become known as The Haven-Slocum Anxiety Scale or more simply as PEER. Rating the level of discomfort experienced following any exposure to the house, The HavenSlocum Theory assigned a number value “0” for no effect and “10” for extreme effects:

POST-EXPOSURE EFFECTS RATING

0-1: Alicia Rosenbaum: sudden migraines. 0-2: Audrie McCullogh: mild anxiety. 2-3: Teppet C. Brookes: insomnia. 3-4: Sheriff Axnard: nausea; suspected ulcer. [No previous history of

stomach ailments.]

4-5: Billy Reston: enduring sensation of cold. 5-6: Daisy: excitement; intermittent fever; scratches; echolalia. 6-7: Kirby “Wax” Hook: stupor; enduring impotence. [Neither the bullet

wound nor the surgery should have effected potency.]

7-8: Chad: tangentiality; rising aggression; persistent wandering. 9: Karen Green: prolonged insomnia; frequent unmotivated panic attacks; deep melancholia; persistent cough. [All of which

radically diminished when Karen began work on What Some Have Thought and A Brief History Of Who I Love. The Haven-Slocum Theory ™ — 1]

10: Will Navidson: obsessive behavior; weight loss; night terrors vivid

dreaming accompanied by increased mutism.

The Haven-Slocum Theory does not lightly pass over Karen’s

remarkable victory over the effects of the house: “With the eventual exception of Navidson, she was the only one who attempted to process the ramifications of that place. The labor she put into both film shorts resulted in more moderate mood swings, an increase in sleep, and an end to that nettlesome cough.”

Navidson, however, despite his scientific inquiries and early

postulations, finds no relief. He grows quieter and quieter, often wakes up seized by terror, and through Christmas and the New Year starts eating less and less. Though he frequently tells Reston how much he longs for Karen and the company of his children, he is incapable of going to them. The house continues to fix his attention.

So much so that back in October when Navidson first came across the

tape of Wax kissing Karen he hardly responded. He viewed the scene twice, once at regular speed, the second time on fast forward, and then moved on to the rest of the footage without saying a word. From a dramatic point of view we must realize it is a highly anticlimactic moment, but one which, as The Haven-Slocum Theory argues, only serves to further emphasize the level of damage the house had a]ready inflicted upon Navidson: “Normal emotional reactions no longer apply. The pain anyone else would have felt while viewing that screen kiss, in Navidson’s case has been blunted by the grossly disproportionate trauma already caused by the house. In this regard it is in fact a highly climactic, if irregular moment, only because it is so disturbing to watch something so typically meaningful rendered so utterly inconsequential. How tragic to find Navidson so bereft of energy, his usual snap and alacrity of thought replaced by such unyielding torpor. Nothing matters anymore to him, which as more than a handful of people have already observed, is precisely the point.”

Then at the beginning of March, “while tests on the wall samples

progressed,” as The Haven-Slocum Theory observes, Navidson begins to eat again, work out, and though his general reticence continues, Reston still sees Navidson’s new behavior as a change for the better: “I was blind to his intentions. I thought he was starting to deal with Tom’s death, planning to

end his separation with Karen. I figured he had put the Fowler letters behind him along with that kiss. He seemed like he was coming back to life.

Hell, even his feet were on the mend. Little did I know he was stock-piling equipment, getting ready for another journey inside. What everyone knows now as Exploration #5.” [378—Inter,iiew with Billy Reston. KTWL, Boulder, Colorado, January 4, 1996.]

Where The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria made Navidson’s letter to

Karen the keystone of its analysis, The Haven-Slocum Theory does away with the document in a footnote, describing it as “drunken babble chock-full of expected expressions of grief, re-identification with a lost object, and plenty of transference, having less to do with Navidson’s lost brother and more to do with the maternal absence he endured throughout his life. The desire to save Delial must partly be attributed to a projection of Navidson’s own desire to be cradled by his mother. Therefore his grief fuses his sense of self with his understanding of the other, causing him not only to mourn for the tiny child but for himself as well.” [379—See pages 22—23.]

What The Haven-Slocum Theory treats with greater regard are the three

dreams [380—As such a great variety of written material outside of The Haven-Slocum Theory has been produced on the subject of Navidson’s dreams, it seems imprudent not to at least mention here a few of the more popular ones: Calvin Yudofsky’s “D-Sleep/S-Sleep Trauma: Differentiating Between Sleep Terror Disorder and Nightmare Disorder” in (N) REM (Bethel, Ohio: Besinnung Books, 1995); Ernest Y. Hartniann’s Terrible Thoughts: The Psychology and Biology of Navidson ‘s Nightmares (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1996); Susan Beck’s “Imposition On The Hollow” published in the T.S. Eliot Journal v. 32, November 1994; chapter four in Oona Fanihdjarte’s The Constancy of Carl Jung (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Gordon Kearns, L. Kajita, and M.K. Totsuka’s Ultrapure Water, the Super Kamiokande Detector and Cherenkov Light (W.H. Freeman and Company, 1997); also see www-sk.icrr .u-tokyo.ac.jp/doc/sk/; and of course Tom Curie’s essay “Thou Talk’st of nothing. True, I talk of dreams” (Mab Weekly, Celtic Publications, September 1993).] Navidson described for us in the Hi 8 journal entries he made that March. Again quoting directly from the Theory: “Far better than words influenced by the depressive effects of alcohol, these intimate glimpses of Navidson’s psyche reveal more about

why he decided to go back and what may account for the profound physiological consequences that followed once he was inside.”

Mia Haven entitles her analysis of Dream #1: “Wishing Well: A Penny

For Your Thoughts.. . A Quarter For Your Dreams … You For The Eons.” Unfortunately, as her treatment is difficult to find and purportedly exceeds

180 pages, it is only possible to summarize the contents here.

As Haven recounts, Navidson’s first dream places him within an

enormous concrete chamber. The walls, ceiling, and floor are all veined with mineral deposits and covered in a thin ever-present film of moisture.

There are no windows or exits. The air reeks of rot, mildew, and despair.

Everywhere people wander aimlessly around, dressed in soiled togas.

Toward the centre of this room there lies what appears to be a large well. A dozen people sit on the edge, dangling their feet inside. As Navidson approaches this aperture, he realizes two things: 1) he has died and this is some kind of half-way station, and 2) the only way out is down through the well.

As he sits on the edge, he beholds a strange and very disconcerting

sight. No more than twenty feet below is the surface of an incredibly clear liquid. Navidson presumes it is water though he senses it is somewhat more viscous. By some peculiar quality intrinsic to itself, this liquid does not impede but actually clarifies the impossible vision of what lies beneath: a long shaft descending for miles ultimately opening up into a black bottomless pit which instantly fills Navidson with an almost crippling sense of dread.

Suddenly next to him, someone leaps into the well. There is a slight

splash and the figure begins to sink slowly but steadily toward the darkness below, Fortunately after a few seconds, a violent blue light envelops the figure and transports it somewhere else. Navidson realizes, however, that there are other figures down there who have not been visited by that blue light and are instead writhing in fear as they continue their descent into oblivion.

Without anyone telling him, Navidson somehow understands the logic

of the place: 1) he can remain in that awful room for as long as he likes,

even forever if he chooses—looking around, he can tell that some people have been there for thousands of years — or he can jump into the well. 2) If he has lived a good life, a blue light will carry him to some ethereal and gentle place. If, however, he has lived an “inappropriate life,” (Navidson’s words) no light will visit him and he will sink into the horrible blackness below where he will fall forever.

The dream ends with Navidson attempting to assess the life he has led,

unable to decide whether he should or should not leap.

Haven goes to great lengths to examine the multiple layers presented by

this dream, whether the classical inferences in the togas or the sexless “figure” Navidson observes immolated by the blue light. She even digresses for a playful romp through Sartre’s Huis Cbs, hinting how that formidable work helped shape Navidson’s imagination.

In the end though, her most important insight concerns Navidson’s

relationship to the house. The concrete chamber resembles the ashen walls, while the bottomless pit recalls both the Spiral Staircase and the abyss that appeared in his living room the night Tom died. Still what matters most is not some discovery made within those walls but rather within himself. In Haven’s words: “The dream seems to suggest that in order for Navidson to properly escape the house he must first reach an understanding about his own life, one he still quite obviously lacks.”

For Dream #2, Lance Slocum provides the widely revered analysis

entitled “At A Snail’s Place.” Since his piece, like Haven’s, is also impossible to locate and reportedly well over two hundred pages long, summary will again have to suffice.

Slocum retells how in the second dream Navidson finds himself in the

centre of a strange town where some sort of feast is in progress. The smell of garlic and beer haunts the air. Everyone is eating and drinking and Navidson understands that for some undisclosed reason they will now have enough food to last many decades.

When the feast finally comes to an end, everyone grabs a candle and

begins to march out of the town. Navidson follows and soon discovers that they are heading for a the hill on which lies the shell of an immense snail.

This sight brings with it a new understanding: the town has slain the creature, eaten some of it and preserved the rest.

As they enter the enormous wind (as in “to wind something up”), their

candlelight illuminates walls that are white as pearl and as opalescent as sea shells. Laughter and joy echoes up the twisting path and Navidson recognizes that everyone has come there to honor and thank the snail.

Navidson, however, keeps climbing up through the shell. Soon he is alone and as the passageway continues to get tighter and tighter, the candle he holds grows smaller and smaller. Finally as the wick begins to sputter, he stops to contemplate whether he should turn around or continue on. He understands if the candle goes out he will be thrust into pitch darkness, though he also knows finding his way back will not be difficult. He gives serious thought to staying. He wonders if the approaching dawn will fill the shell with light.

Slocum begins with an amusing reference to Doctor Dolittle before

turning to consider the homes which ancient ammonites [381—See Edouard Monod-Herzen’s Principes de morphologie gënerale, vol. I (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1927), p. 119.] constructed around an almost logarithmic axis, a legacy they would eons later bestow upon the imagination of countless poets and even entire cultures. [382—For example, even today the Kitawans of the South Pacific view the spiral of the Nautilus Pompilius as the ultimate symbol of perfection.] Primarily Slocum concentrates on

chapter 5 of Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space as translated by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), choosing to allow Navidson’s dream the same consideration literature of its kind receives.

For example, Slocum views the question of Navidson’s personal growth

in terms of the enigma posed by the snail before it was eventually solved.

Here he quotes from the translated Bachelard text:

How can a little snail grow in its stone prison? This is a natural

question, which can

be asked quite naturally. (I should prefer not to ask it, however, because

it takes me back

to the questions of my childhood.) But for the Abbé de Vallemont it is a

question that remains unanswered, and he adds: “When it is a matter of nature, we rarely find ourselves on familiar ground. At every step, there is something that humiliates and mortifies proud minds.” In other words, a snail’s shell, this house that grows with its inmate, is one of the marvels of the universe. And the Abbé de Vallemont concludes that, in general shells are “sublime subjects of contemplation for the mind.” [383—The original text:

Comment le petit escargot dans sa prison de pierre peut-il grandir? Voilà

tine question naturelle, tine question qul se pose naturellement, Nous n’aimons pas a Ia faire, car elle nous renvoie a nos questions d’enfant. Cette question reste sans réponse pour l’abbé de Vallemont qui ajoute: “Dans Ia Nature on est rarement en pays de connaissance. Ii y a a chaque pas de quoi humilier et mortifier les Esprits superbes.” Autrement dit, Ia coquille de l’escargot, Ia maison qui grandit a Ia mesure de son hôte est une merveille de l’Univers, Et d’une manière genérale, conclut I ‘abbé de Vallemont ([Abbé de Vallemont’s Curiosités de Ia nature et de I ‘art sur Ia végétation ou I ‘agriculture et le jardinage dans leur perfection, Paris, 1709, 1re Partie], p. 255), les coquillages sont “de sublimes sujets de contemplation pour l’esprit.”

For a more modem treatment of shell growth see Geerat J. Vermeij’s A

Natural History of Shells (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Chapter 3 “The Economics of Construction and Maintenance” deals directly with matters of calcification and the problems of dissolution, while chapter

1 “Shells and the Questions of Biology” considers the sense of the shell in a way that differs slightly fmrn Vallemont’s: “We can think of shells as houses. Construction, repair, and maintenance by the builder require energy and time, the same cunencies used for such other life functions as feeding, locomotion, and reproduction. The energy and time invested in shells depend on the supply of raw materials, the labor costs of transforming these resources into a serviceable structure, and the functional demands placed on the shell… The words ‘economics” and “ecology” are especially apt in this

context, for both are derived from the Greek oikos, meaning house. In short, the questions of biology can be phrased in terms of supply and demand, benefits and costs, and innovation and regulation, all set against a backdrop of environment and history.”]

(Page 118)

In particular, Slocum’s attention is held by Bachelard’s parentethical

[384—I haven’t corrected this typo because it seems to me less like an error of transcription and more like a revealing slip on Zampanô’s part, where a “parenthetical” mention of youth suddenly becomes a “parent— ethical” question about how to relate to youth.] reference to his own childhood and presumably the rite of growing up:

“How extraordinary to find in those ever expandable brackets such a

telling correlation between the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle and Navidson’s crisis.”

Indeed, by continuing to build on Bachelard, Slocum treats the snail in

Navidson’s dream as a “remarkable inversion” of the house’s Spiral Staircase: “Robinet believed that it was by roiling over and over that the snail built its ‘staircase.’ Thus, the snail’s entire house would be a stairwell.

With each contortion, this limp animal adds a step to its spiral staircase. It contorts itself in order to advance and grow” (Page 122; The Poetics of Space). [385—Original text:

Robinet a pensé que c’est en roularn sur lui-même que Ic limacon a

fabriqué son “esca.Lier.” Ainsi, toute la maison de l’escargot serait une cage d’escalier. A chaque contorsion, l’animal mou fait une marche de son escalier en colimacon. II se contorsionne pour avancer et grandfr.

And of course who can forget Derrida’s remarks on this subject in

footnote 5 in “Tympan” in Marges de Ia philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972), p. xi-xii:

Tympanon. dionysie, labyrinthe, fils d’Ariane. Nous parcourons

rnaintenant (debout, marchant, dansant), compris et enveloppés pour n’en

jamais sortir, Ia forme d’une oreille construite autour d’un barrage, tournant autour de sa paroi interne, une yule, donc (labyrinthe, canaux semi-.circulaires—on vous prévient que les rampes ne tiennent pas) enroulée comme un limacon autour d’une vanne, d’une digue (dam) et tendue vers Ia mer; fennée sur elle-même et ouverte sur Ia voie de Ia mer.

Pleine et vide de son eau, l’anainnèse de Ia conque résonne seule sur une plage. Comment une fIure pourrait-elle s’y produire, entre terre et mer? [386—Tympanum, Dionyslanism, labyrinth, Ariadne’s thread. We are now traveling through (upright, walking, dancing), included and enveloped within it, never to emerge, the form of an ear constructed around a barrier, going round its inner walls, a city, therefore (labyrinth, semicircular canals —warning: the spiral walkways do not hold) circling around like a stairway winding around a lock, a dike (dam) stretched out toward the sea; closed In on itself and open to the sea’s path. Full and empty of its water, the anamnesis of the choncha resonates alone on the beach.” As translated by Alan Bass. — Ed.]

In his own note buried within the already existing footnote, in this case

nor 5 but enlarged now to 9, Alan Bass (—Trans for Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)) further illuminates the above by making the following comments here below:

“There is an elaborate play on the words Iimaçon and conque here.

Limo con (aside from meaning snail) means spiral staircase and the spiral canal that is part of the inner ear. Conque means both conch and concha, the largest cavity of the external ear.”]

Still more remarkable than even this marvelous coincidence is the poem

Bachelard chooses to quote by René Rouquier:

C’est un escargot énorme

Qui descend de Ia montagne Et le ruisseau l’accompagne

De sa bave blanche

Très vieu, ii n ‘a plus qu ‘une come

C’est son court clocher carré.

[387—René Rouquier’s L boule de verre (Paris: Seghers), p. 12.] [388

— “A giant snail comes down from the mountain followed by a stream of its white slime. So very old, it has only one horn left, short and square like a church tower.” — Ed.]

Navidson is not the first to envision a snail as large as a village, but

what fascinates Slocum more than anything else is the lack of threat in the dream.

“Unlike the dread lying in wait at the bottom of the wishing well,”

Slocum comments. “The snail provides nourishment. Its shell offers the redemption of beauty, and despite Navidson’s dying candle, its curves still hold out the promise of even greater illumination. All of which is in stark contrast to the house. There the walls are black, in the dream of the snail they are white; there you starve, in the dream the town is fed for a lifetime; there the maze is threatening, in the dream the spiral is pleasing; there you descend, in the dream you ascend and so on.”

Slocum argues that what makes the dream so particularly resonant is its

inherent balance: “Town, country. Inside, outside. Society, individual.

Light, dark. Night, day. Etc., etc. Pleasure is derived from the detection of these elements. They create harmonies and out of harmonies comes a balm for the soul. Of course the more extensive the symmetry, the greater and more lasting the pleasure.”

Slocum contends that the dream planted the seed in Navidson’s mind to

try a different path, which was exactly what he did do in Exploration #5.

Or more accurately:” The dream was the flowering of a seed previously planted by the house in his unconsciousness.” When bringing to a conclusion “At A Snail’s Place,” Slocum further opens up his analysis to the notion that both dreams, “The Wishing Well” and “The Snail,” suggested to Navidson the possibility that he could locate either within himself or” within that vast missing” some emancipatory sense to put to rest his confusions and troubles, even put to rest the confusions and troubles of others, a curative symmetry to last the ages.

For the more troubling and by far most terrifying Dream #3, Mia Haven

and Lance Slocum team up together to ply the curvatures of that strange stretch of imaginings. Unlike #1 and #2, this dream is particularly difficult to recount and requires that careful attention be paid to the various temporal and even tonal shifts.

· ·.· · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

[2 pages missing]

· ·.· · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

[389— ____________________________] [390 — 3:19 AM I woke

up, slick with sweat. And I’m not talking wet in the pits or wet on the brow.

I’m talking scalp wet, sheet wet, and at that hour, an hour already lost in a new year—shivering wet. I’m so cold my temples hurt but before I can really focus on the question of temperature I realize I’ve remembered my first dream.

Only later after I find some candles, stomp around my room, splash

water on the old face, micturate, light a Sterno can and put the kettle on, only then can I respond to my cold head and my general physical misery, which I do, relishing every bit of it in fact. Anything is better than that unexpected and awful dream, made all the more unsettling because now for some reason I can recall it. Nor do I have an inkling why. I cannot imagine what has changed in my life to bring this thing to the surface.

The guns sure as hell were useless, instantly confiscated at sleep’s

border, even if I did manage to pick up the Weatherby before my credit ran out.

An hour passes. I’m blinking in the light, boiling more water for more

coffee, ramming my head into another wool hat, sneezing again though all I can see is the fucking dream, torn straight out of the old raphé nuclei care of the very brainstem I thought had been soundly severed.

This is how it starts:

I’m deep in the hull of some enormous vessel, wandering its narrow

passages of black steel and rust. Something tells me I’ve been here a long time, endlessly descending into dead ends, turning around to find other ways which in the end lead only to still more ends. This, however, does not bother me. Memories seem to suggest I’ve at one point lingered in the engine room, the container holds, scrambled up a ladder to find myself alone in a deserted kitchen, the only place still shimmering in the mirror magic of stainless steel. But those visits took place many years ago, and even though I could go back there at any time, I choose instead to wander these cramped routes which in spite of their ability to lose me still retain in every turn an almost indiscreet sense of familiarity. It’s as if I know the way perfectly but I walk them to forget.

And then something changes. Suddenly I sense for the first time ever,

the presence of another. I quicken my pace, not quite running but close. I am either glad, startled or terrified, but before I can figure out which I complete two quick turns and there he is, this drunken frat boy wearing a plum-colored Topha Beta sweatshirt, carrying the lid of a garbage can in his right hand and a large fireman’s ax in his left. He burps, sways, and then with a lurch starts to approach me, raising his weapon. I’m scared alright but I’m also confused. “Excuse me, mind explaining why you’re coming after mg?” which I actually try to say except the words don’t come out right. More like grunts and clouds, big clouds of steam.

That’s when I notice my hands. They look melted, as if they were made

of plastic and had been dipped in boiling oil, only they’re not plastic, they’re the thin effects of skin which have in fact been dipped in boiling oil.

I know this and I even know the story. I’m just unable to resurrect it there in my dream Stiff hair sprouts up all over the fingers and around the long, yellow fingernails. Even worse, this awful scarring does not end at my wrists, but continues down my arms, making the scars I know I have when I’m not dreaming seem childish in comparison. These ones reach over my shoulders, down my back, extend even across my chest, where I know ribs still protrude like violet bows.

When I touch my face, I can instantly tell there’s something wrong there

too. I feel plenty of hair covering strange lumps of flesh on my chin, my nose and along the ridge of my cheeks. On my forehead there’s an enormous bulge harder than stone. And even though I have no idea how I

got to be so deformed, I do know. And this knowledge comes suddenly. I’m here because I am deformed, because when I speak my words come out in cracks and groans, and what’s more I’ve been put here by an old man, a dead man, by one who called me son though he was not my father.

Which is when this frat boy, swaying back and forth before me like an

idiot, raises his ax even higher above his head. His plan I see is not too complicated: he intends to drive that heavy blade into my skull, across the bridge of my nose, cleave the roof of my mouth, the core of my brain, split apart the very vertebrae in my neck, and he won’t stop there either. He’ll hack my hands from my wrists, my thighs from my knees, pry out my sternum and hammer it into tiny fragments. He’ll do the same to my toes and my fingers and he’ll even pop my eyes with the butt of the handle and then with the heal of the blade attempt to crush my teeth, despite the fact that they’re long, serrated and unusually strong. At least in this effort, he will fail; give up finally; collect a few. Where my internal organs are concerned, these too he’ll treat with the same respect, hewing, smashing and slicing until he’s too tired and too covered with blood to finish, even though of course he really finished awhile ago, and then he’ll slouch exhausted, panting like some stupid dog, drunk on his beer, this killing, this victory, while I lie strewn about that bleak place, der absoluten Zerrissenheit (as it turned out I ran into Kyrie at the supermarket this last November. She was buying a 14.75 ounce can of Alaskan salmon. I tried to slip away but she spotted me and said hello, collecting me then in the gentle coils of her voice. We talked for a while. She knew I was no longer working at the Shop. She’d been by to get a tattoo. Apparently a stripper had gotten a little catty with her. Probably Thumper. In fact maybe that’s why Thumper had called me, because this exquisite looking woman had out of the blue spoken my name. Anyway Kyrie had gotten the BMW logo tattooed between her shoulder blades, encircled by the phrase “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” This apparently had been Gdansk Man’s idea. The $85,000 car it turns out is his. Kyrie didn’t mention any ire on his part or history on our part, so I just nodded my approval and then right there in the canned food aisle, asked her for the translation of that German phrase which I should have amended, could even do it now, but, well, Fuck ‘em Hoss. [391—See footnote 310 and corresponding reference. — Ed.] And so voil it appears here instead:

“utter dismemberment” the same as “dejected member” which I thought

she said though she wrote it down a little differently, explaining while she did that she had decided to marry Gdansk Man and would soon actually be living, instead of just driving, up on that windy edge known to some as Mullholland. As I conjure this particular memory I can see more clearly her expression, how appalled she was by the way I looked: so pale and weak, clothes hanging on me like curtains on a curtain rod, sunglasses teetering on bone, my slender hands frequently shaking beyond my control and of course the stench I continued to emanate. What was happening to me, she probably wanted to know, but didn’t ask. Then again maybe I’m wrong, maybe she didn’t notice. Or if she did, maybe she didn’t care. When I started to say goodbye, things took an abrupt turn for the weird. She asked me if I wanted to go for another drive. “Aren’t you getting married?” I asked her, trying, but probably failing, to conceal my exasperation. She just waited for my answer. I declined, attempting to be as polite as possible, though something hard still closed over her. She crossed her arms, a surge of anger suddenly igniting the tissue beneath her lips and finger tips. Then as I walked back down the aisle, I heard a crash off to my left. Bottles of ketchup toppled from the shelf, a few even shattered as they hit the floor.

The thrown can of salmon rolled near my feet. I twisted around but Kyrie was already gone.) Anyway back to the dream, me chopped up into tiny pieces, spread and splattered in the bowels of that ship, and all at the hands of a drunken f rat boy who upon beholding his heroic deed pukes all over what’s left of me. Except before he achieves any of this, I realize that now, for some reason, for the first time, I have a choice: I don’t have to die, I can kill him instead. Not only are my teeth and nails long, sharp and strong, I too am strong, remarkably strong and remarkably fast. I can rip that fucking ax out of his hands before he even swings it once, shatter it with one jerk of my wrist, and then I can watch the terror seep into his eyes as I grab him by the throat, carve out his insides and tear h.im to pieces.

But as I take a step forward, everything changes. The f rat boy I realize

is not the f rat boy anymore but someone else. At first I think it’s Kyrie, until I realize it’s not Kyrie but Ashley, which is when I realize it’s neither Kyrie nor Ashley but Thumper, though something tells me that even that’s not exactly right. Either way, her face glows with adoration and warmth and her eyes communicate in a blink an understanding of all the gestures I’ve

ever made, all the thoughts I’ve ever had. So extraordinary is this gaze, in fact, that I suddenly realize I’m unable to move. I just stand there, every sinew and nerve easing me into a world of relief, my breath slowing, arms dangling at my sides, my jaw slack, legs melting me into ancient waters, until suddenly my eyes on their own accord, commanded by instincts darker and older than empathy or anything resembling emotional need, dart from her beautiful and strangely familiar face to the ax she still holds, the ax she is now lifting, the smile she is still making even as she starts to shake, suddenly swinging the ax down on me, at my head, though she will miss my head, barely, the ax floating down instead towards my shoulder, finally cutting into the bone and lodging there, producing shrieks of blood, so much blood, and pain, so much pain, and instantly I understand I’m dying, though I’m not dead yet, even if I am beyond repair, and she has started to cry, even as she dislodges the ax and raises it again, to swing again, again at my head, though she is crying harder and she is much weaker than I thought, and she needs more time than I thought, to get ready, to swing again, while I’m bleeding and dying, which now doesn’t compare at all to the feeling inside, also so familiar, as the atriums of my heart on their own accord suddenly rupture, like my father’s ruptured. So this, I suddenly muse in a peculiarly detached way, was this how he felt?

I’ve made a terrible mistake, but it’s too late and I’m now too full of

fury & hate to do anything but look up as the blade slices down with appalling force, this time the right arc, not too far left, not too far right, but right center, descending forever it seems, though it’s not forever, not even close, and I realize with a shade of citric joy, that at least, at last, it will put an end to the far more terrible ache inside me, born decades ago, long before I finally beheld in a dream the face and meaning of my horror.]

As they start to sum up The Haven-Slocum Theory, the couple quotes

from Johanne Scefing’s posthumously published journal:

At this late hour I’m unable to put aside thoughts of God’s great sleeper

whose history filled my imagination and dreams when I was a boy. I cannot recall how many times I read and re-read the story of Jonah, and now as I dwell on Navidson’s decision to return to the house alone I turn to my Bible and find among those thin pages these lines:

So they took up Jonah, and cast

him forth into the sea: and the sea

ceased from her raging.

(Jonah 1: 15)

[392—Johanne Scefing’s The Navidson Record, trans. Gertrude

Rebsamen (Oslo Press, May 1996), p. 52.]

It seems a somewhat bizarre reference, until Haven and Slocum produce

a second PEER table documenting what happened once Navidson entered the house on Ash Tree Lane:

POST-EXPOSURE EFFECTS RATING

0: Alicia Rosenbaum: headaches stopped. 0: Audrie McCullogh: no more anxiety. 1: Teppet C. Brookes: improved sleeping. 1: Sheriff Axnard: end of nausea. 2: Billy Reston: decreased sensation of cold. 3: Daisy: end of fever; arms healing; occasional echolalia. 1: Kirby “Wax” Hook: return of energy and potency. 4: Chad: better goal-directed flow of ideas and logical sequences;

decreased aggression and wandering.

1: Karen Green: improved sleeping; no more unmotivated panic attacks

[Dark enclosed places will still initiate a response.]; decreased melancholia; cessation of cough.

1: Will Navidson: no more night terrors; cessation of mutism.

[Evidenced by Navidson’s use of the Hi 8 to record his thoughts.]

The Haven-Slocum Theory ™ — 2

Even more peculiar, the house became a house again.

As Reston discovered, the space between the master bedroom and the

children’s bedroom had vanished. Karen’s bookshelves were once again

flush with the walls. And the hallway in the living room now resembled a shallow closet. Its walls were even white.

The sea, it seemed, had quieted. “Was Navidson like Jonah?” The Haven-Slocum Theory asks. “Did he

understand the house would calm if he entered it, just as Jonah understood the waters would calm if he were thrown into them?”

Perhaps strangest of all, the consequences of Navidson’s journey are

still being felt today. In what remains the most controversial aspect of The Haven-Slocum Theory, the concluding paragraphs claim that people not even directly associated with the events on Ash Tree Lane have been affected. The Theory, however, is careful to distinguish between those who have merely seen The Navidson Record and those who have read and written, in some cases extensively, about the film.

Apparently, the former group shows very little evidence of any sort of

emotional or mental change:” At most, temporary.” While the latter group seems to have been more radically influenced: “As evidence continues to come in, it appears that a portion of those who have not only meditated on the house’s perfectly dark and empty corridors but articulated how its pathways have murmured within them have discovered a decrease in their own anxieties. People suffering anything from sleep disturbances to sexual dysfunction to poor rapport with others seem to have enjoyed some improvement.” [393—Of course as Patricia B. Nesseiroade, M.D. noted in her widely regarded self-help book Tamper With This (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1994), P. 687: “If one invests some interest in, for example, a tree and begins to form some thoughts about this tree and then writes these thoughts down, further examining the meanings that surface, allowing for unconscious associations to take place, writing all this down as well, until the subject of the tree branches off into the subject of the self, that person will enjoy immense psychological benefits.”]

However, The Haven-Slocum Theory also points out that this course is

not without risk. An even greater number of people dwelling on The Navidson Record have shown an increase in obsessiveness, insomnia, and incoherence: “Most of those who chose to abandon their interest soon recovered. A few, however, required counseling and in some instances medication and hospitalization. Three cases resulted in suicide.”

XVIII

Ashe, good for caske hoopes: and fneede require, plow worke, as alfo for many things els. — A briefe and true report of the newfound land of Virginia by Thomas

Harlot servant

to Sir Walter Raleigh — “a member of the Colony, and there imployed

in difcouering.”

Though Karen and Navidson both went back to Ash Tree Lane, Karen

did not go there for the house. As she explains in a video entry: “I’m going because of Navy.”

During the first week of April, she stayed in close contact with Reston

who made the long drive from Charlottesville more than a few times. As we can see for ourselves, Navidson’s car never moves from the driveway and the house continues to remain empty. In the living room a closet still stands in place of the hallway, while upstairs the space between the master bedroom and the children’s bedroom is lost to a wall.

At the start of the second week of April, Karen realizes she will have to

leave New York. Daisy and Chad seem to have shaken off the debilitating effects of the house and their grandmother is more than happy to look after them while Karen is gone, believing her daughter’s trip will take her one step closer toward selling the house and suing Navidson.

On April 9th, Karen heads south to Virginia. She checks into a Days Inn

but instead of going directly to the house makes an appointment with Alicia Rosenbaum. The real estate agent is more than happy to see Karen and discuss the prospects of putting the house on the market.

“Oh lord” she exclaims when she sees the Hi 8 in Karen’s hands. “Don’t

point that at me. I’m not at all photogenic.” Karen sets the camera down on a file cabinet but leaves it on, thus providing a high-angle view of the office and both women.

Karen probably planned to have a short discussion with Alicia

Rosenbaum about the sale of the house, but the real estate agent’s uncensored shock changes everything. “You look terrible” she says abruptly. “Are you alright, honey?” And so with that, what was supposed to have been a business meeting instantly becomes something else, something otherly, a sisterly get together where one woman reads in another signs of strain invisible to a man and sometimes even a mother.

Rosenbaum fills a mug with hot water and hunts around in a cabinet for

some tea bags. Slowly but surely Karen begins to talk about the separation. “I don’t know,” Karen fmally says as she stirs her chamomile tea. “I haven’t seen him in almost six months.”

“Oh dear, I’m so sorry.” Karen keeps turning the spoon in small circles but cannot quite stop the

tears. Rosenbaum comes around the desk and gives Karen a hug. Then pulling up a chair tries her best to offer some consolation: “Well at the very least, don’t worry about the house. It always sells.”

Karen stops stirring the tea. “Always?” she asks. “After you came to me with that whole mysterious closet bit,”

Rosenbaum continues, ignoring the phone as it starts to ring. “I did a little research. I mean I’m as new to this town as you all were, though I am southern born. Truth be told, I hoped to find some kind of ghostliness. [She laughs] All I found was a pretty comprehensive list of owners. A lot of ‘em.

Four in the last eleven years. Almost twenty in the last fifty. No one seems to stay there for more than a few years. Some died, heart attacks that sort of thing and the rest just disappeared. I mean we lost track of ‘em. One man said the place was too roomy, another one called it ‘unstable.’ I went ahead and checked if the house was built on an old Indian burial ground.”

“And?” “Nope. In fact, definitely not. It’s all too marshy with winter rains and

the James River nearby. Not a good place for a cemetery. So I looked for some murder or witch burning—though I knew, of course, that had all been Massachusetts folk. Nothing.”

“Oh well.” “Did you ever see any ghosts?” “Never.”

“Too bad. Virginia, you know, has a tradition of ghosts—though I’ve

never seen one.”

“Virginia does?” Karen asks softly. “Oh my yes. The curse tree, the ghost of Miss Evelyn Byrd, Lady Ann

Skipwith, ghost alley, and lord knows a whole handful more. [394—See L.

B. Taylor, Jr.’s The Ghosts of Virginia (Progress Printing Co., Inc., 1993) For a more international look at hauntings consider E. T. Bennett’s Apparitions & Haunted Houses: A Survey of Evidence (London; Faber & Faber, 1939); Commander R. T. Gould, R. N.’s Oddities; A Book of Unexplained Facts (1928); Walter F. Prince’s The Psychic in the House (Boston: Boston Society for Psychical Research, 1926); and Suzy Smith’s Haunted Houses for the Million (Bell Publishing Co., 1967).] Unfortunately, the only thing distinguished about your home’s past, but I guess it’s part of everybody’s past around here, and it’s no mystery either, would be the colony, the Jamestown Colony.”

It is not surprising The Navidson Record does not pause to consider this

reference, especially considering that Karen is far more concerned about the house and Navidson’s whereabouts than she is with 17th century history.

However having some familiarity with the bloody and painful origins of that particular toe hold in the new world reveals just how old the roots of that house really are.

Thanks to The London Company, on May 2, 1607, 105 colonists were

deposited on a marshy peninsula where they established what soon became known as the Jamestown Colony. Despite pestilence, starvation, and frequent massacres carried out by native Indians, John Smith effectively held the village together until an injury forced him to return to England.

The ensuing winter of 1609-1610 almost killed everyone and had it not been for Lord De Ia Wart’s timely arrival with supplies those still living would have fled. [395—Consider the interesting mention in Rupert L.

Everett’s Gallantrie and Hardship in the Newfoundland (London: Samson & Sons Publishing Company, Inc., 1673), where a colonist remarked how “Waif in Fray sure was all tabled Balls, full with much Delight and of course strange Veering Spirit.”]

With the help of John Rolfe’s tobacco industry, the marriage of

Pocahontas, and the naming of Jamestown as the Virginia capital, the colony survived. However Nathaniel Bacon’s fierce battle with the tidewater aristocrat Sir William Berkeley soon left the village in flames.

Eventually the capital of Virginia was moved to Williamsburg and the settlement quickly decayed. In 1934 when park excavations began, very little remained of the site. As Park Warden Davis Manatok reported, “The marsh land has obscured if not completely consumed the monuments of the colony.” [396— Virginia State Park Report (Virginia State Press, v. 12, April 1975), P. 1,173.]

AU of which is relevant only because of a strange set of pages currently

held at the Lacuna Rare Books Library at Horenew College m South Carolina.

Supposedly the journal in question first turned up at The Wishart

Bookstore in Boston. It had apparently been mixed in with several crates of books dropped off from a nearby estate. “Most of it was dreck” said owner Laurence Tack. “Old paperbacks, second rate volumes of Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, and the like. No one here paid them much attention.” [397 —Personal interview with Laurence Tack, May 4, 1996.]

Eventually the journal was bought for a remarkable $48.00 when a

Boston University student noticed “Wart” penciled inside the cover of the badly damaged volume. As she soon discovered, the book was not De la Wart’s but one he had kept in his library. It seems that prior to Warr’s arrival, during “the starving time” of the winter of 1610, three men had left the Jamestown Colony in search of game. As the journal reveals, they traveled for several days until they stumbled onto an icy field where they camped for the night. The following spring two of their thawing bodies were found along with this priceless document.

For the most part, the entries concern the quest for game, the severe

weather and the inevitable understanding that cold and hunger were fast colluding into the singular sensation of death:

18 Janiuere, 1610

We fearch for deere or other Game and aiwayes there is nothing. Tiggs

believef our luck will change.

[398—This sporadic “f” for “s” stuff mystifies me, [399—Mr. Truant

has mistaken the long “S” for an “f.” John Bell the publisher for British Theatre abolished the long S” back in 1775. In 1786. Benjamin Franklin indirectly approved of the decision when he wrote that “the Round s begins to be the Mode and In nice printing the Long S Is rejected entirely.” — Ed.] but I don’t care anymore. I’m getting the fuck out of here. Good thing too, fince I’m also being evicted from my apartment for failure to pay. It took them all of January, February and moft of March to do it but here it is the end of March and if I’m not out by tomorrow, people will come for me. My plan’s to leave tonight and take a southern route all the way to Virginia, where I hope to find that place, or at the very least find some piece of reality that’s at the root of that place, which might in turn—I hope; I do, do hope—help me addrefs some of the awful havoc always tearing through me.

Luckily, I’ve managed to put enough money together to get the hell

away. My Vif a was canceled a month ago but I had some good fortune selling my mother’s locket (though I kept the gold necklace).

It was that or the guns. Which may surprife you, but something about

that dream I remembered changed me. Afterwards, juft looking at the dull silver made me feel like there was this horrendous weight around my neck, even though I wafn’t even wearing it. In fact, the idea of getting rid of it was no longer enough, I had to hate it as I got rid of it.

At leaf t I didn’t rush things. I found an appraifer, approached some

ftores, never budged from my af king price. Apparently it was defigned by someone well known. I made $4,200. Though I will say this, as I was handing over that ftrange fhape—letter included—I felt an extraordinary amount of rage surge through me. For a moment I was sure the scars along my arms would catch fire and melt down to the bones. I pocketed the cafh and quickly ducked away, hurt, full of poifon and more than a little afraid I might try to inflict that hurt and poifon on someone elfe.

Maybe in some half-hearted attempt to tie up some loofe ends, I then

dropped by the Fhop a couple of days later to say goodbye to everyone.

Man, I muft look bad becaufe the woman who replaced me almoft screamed when she saw me walk through the door. Thumper wafn’t around but my boff promifed to give her the envelope I handed him.

“If I find out you didn’t give it her,” I said with a smile full of rotting

teeth. “I’m going to burn your life down.”

We both laughed but I could tell he was glad to fee me go.

I had no doubt Thumper would get my gift.

The worft was Lude. He was nowhere around. Firft I tried his

apartment, which was kind of weird, to find myfelf after more than a year slipping acrofs that same awful courtyard where Zampanô ufed to walk, and there’s still not a cat in sight, juft a breeze rustling through a handful of dying weeds warning away the illufion of time in the same language of a cemetery. For some reafon juft being there filled me with guilt, voices converging from behind thofe gloomy curtains of afternoon light, almoft as if drawn out of the dull earth itfeif, still bitter with winter, and gathering together there to accufe me, indict me for abandoning the book, for selling that stupid fucking locket, for running away now like a goddamn coward.

And though no clouds or kites marred a sun as yellow as corn, some invifible punifhment still hung above me there like a foul rain, caufing even more rage to dump abruptly into my syftem, though where this reaction came from I’m at a loff to know. It waf almoft more than I could handle. I forced myfeif to knock on Lude’s door but when he didn’t anfwer I ran from there as faft as I could.

Eventually a bouncer at one of his haunts told me he’d been tagged bad

enough to land him in the hofpital. It took a little while to get paft the receptionift, but when I finally did Lude rewarded me with this huge smile.

It made me want to cry.

“Hey Hoff, you came. Is this what it takes to get you out of your

coffin?”

I couldn’t believe how terrible he looked. Both his eyes were blacker

than charcoal. Even his normally large nofe was bigger than ufual, stuffed now with pounds of gauze. His jaw was a deep purple and all over his face capillaries had been ruthlessly shattered. I tried pulling in deep breaths but the kind of anger I was feeling caufed my vif ion to blur.

“Hey, hey, eafy there, Hoff,” Lude practically had to shout. “This is the

beft thing that could of happened to me. I’m on my way to becoming a very rich man.”

Which actually did help calm me down. I poured him a cup of water and

one for myfeif and then I sat down by his bed. Lude seemed genuinely

pleafed by his battered condition. He treated his broken ribs and the tube draining his fractured tibia with newfound refpect: “My summer bonus,” he smiled, although the effort was somewhat warped.

The way Lude told it, he’d been delighting in the comforts of an idle

hour fpent on Funset Plaza quaff ing his thirft with several falty margaritas when who should stroll by but Gdansk Man. He was still tweeked about the time Lude popped him in the nuts but he was even more fueled by something elfe. Apparently Kyrie had told him that I had accofted her in the supermarket and for some stupid reaf on she’d decided to add that Lude had been right there with me, maybe becaufe he was the one who introduced us in the first place. Anyway, bright enough not to make a public scene, that monfter known as Gdansk Man crept back to the parking lot and lay in wait for Lude. He had to wait for a long time but he was full of enough ill-conceived rage not to mind. Eventually Lude fucked down the laft drop of his drink, paid his bill and ambled away from Funset, back there, towards his mode of tranfportation, right past Gdansk Man.

Lude never had a chance, not even time for words, let alone one word,

let alone a return ftrike. Gdansk Man didn’t hold anything back either and when it was over they had to send for an ambulance.

Lude laughed as he finifhed the story and then promptly coughed up a

chunk of something brown.

“I owe you Hoff.” I tried to act like I was following him but Lude knew me well enough to

fee I wafn’t getting the moft important part. One of his swollen eyes attempted a wink.

uAs soon as I’m out of here, I’m taking him straight to court. I’ve

already been in touch with a few lawyers. It looks like Gdansk Man has quite a bit of money he’s going to have to be ready to part with. Then you and I are going straight to Vegas to lofe it all on red.”

Lude laughed again only thif time I waf relieved to fee he didn’t cough. “Will you need me to teftify?” I afked, prepared to cancel my trip. aNot neceffary. Three kitchen workers saw the whole thing. Bef ides

Hoff, you look like you juft got out of a concentration camp. You’d probably scare off the jury.”

The hurt and ache eventually got the beft of Lude and he signaled the

nurfe for more painkillers.

“Another perk,” he whifpered to me with a fading leer. I gueff some

things never change. Lude’s chemical line of defenfe still seemed to be holding.

After he’d fallen afleep, I drove back to his apartment and slipped an

envelope with $500 in it under his door. I figured he’d need a little something extra when he got out of there. Flaze paf fed me in the hail but pretended not to recognize me. I didn’t care. On my way out, I caught one laft glimpfe of the courtyard. It was empty but I still couldn’t fhake the feeling that something there was watching me.

Juft an hour ago, I found a flyer under the wiper of my car:

WANTED

50 People

We’ll pay you to lofe weight!

I actually had a good laugh over that one. You want to lofe weight, I

thought to myfeif, well boy do I have something for you to read.

I threw some old clothes in the back and slipped the rifle and the two

guns under the seats. Moft of the ammo I hid in socks which I tucked infide the spare tire.

The laft week has been particularly funny, though not at all, I affure

you, funny. Everywhere the jacarandas are bloffoming. People go around faying how beautiful they are. Me, they only unsettle, filling me with dread and now, strangely enough, a faint sense of fury. As foon as I finifh this note, I plan to load the book and everything elfe into that old black trunk and drag it down to a ftorage unit I rented in Culver city for a couple hundred bucks. Then I’m gone. I’m sorry I didn’t get farther than this. Who knows what I’ll find back eaft, maybe fleep, maybe a calm, hopefully the path to quiet the fea, this fea, my fea.