House of Leaves (24 page)

.

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.)