House of Leaves (22 page)

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

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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

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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

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“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 t
oo, relish

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its syllabic sweetness, its immigrant pride, a great American epic word really, starting at the lower lip, often the very front of the lower

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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