House of Leaves (21 page)

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 detail
s 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
medic
al 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 H
i 8s properly attached to chest
harnesses. H
e personally checks, re-checks,
packs, and r
e-packs all the tents, sleeping
bags, thermal blan
kets, chemical heat packs,
food, water, a
nd 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 fishi
ng
line, flares, extra flash lights, including a
pumper light (hand generator), extra batteries,
extra parts fo
r the radios, and one altimeter
(whic
h 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
.]