House of Leaves (37 page)

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, sic
k, and with his chest half bare
/ Tramples
a manuscript in his dark stall,
/ Gazing w
ith 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 affectio
n 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 prob
ably 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, th
e most delicate mille-feuille.” [
225
—
E
ta
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.]

arr
ay 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.]