House of Leaves (63 page)

Now, expect for when Navidson speak, silence predominates.

Not even the growl dares disturb his place.

“I have no sense of anything other than myself,” he mumbles.

“I know I’m falling and will soon slam into the bottom. I feel it, rushing up at me.” But he can only live with this fear for so long before he recognizes: “I won’t even know when I finally do hit. I’ll be dead before I can realize anything’s happened. So there is no bottom. It does not exist for me. Only my end exists.” And then in a whisper: “Maybe that is the
something
here. The only thing here. My end.”

Navidson records his sobs and groans. He even captures moments of faint amusement when he jokingly announces: “It’s not fair in a way. I’ve been falling down so long it feels like floating up to me—” Soon though he grows less concerned about where he is and becomes more consumed by who he once was.

Unlike Floyd Collins, Navidson does not rave about angels in chariots or chicken sandwiches. Nor does he offer us his C.V. like Holloway. Instead, as urea pours into his veins and delirium sets in, Navidson begins rambling on about people he has known and loved: Tom— “Tom, is this where you went? Don’t look down, eh?” —Delial, his children and more and more frequently Karen— “I’ve you. I’ve lost you.”

Sometimes his words are intelligible. Sometimes they are nt. “Catch me I’m falling, I’m flying” or “Now I will walk-sleep.” However unlike The Holloway Tape, this footage is devoid of any subtitles or sub-interpretations.

A little later, Navidson becomes almost light hearted, for a moment losing sight of the question of his own end, his own past, derailed by some tune now edged in his head, drifting up from out of the blue, one he can remember but cannot quite name: “Something like… I think, hmmm… Kinda like… [Coughs] [Coughs again] Now I find I changed my mind and opened up the door…”

“Daisy. Daisy. Daisy. Daisy. Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy over the love of you. That’s not right.”

“Don’t be scared.”

“Don’t be.”

“I am.”

Finally Navidson’s words, tunes, and shivering murmurs trail off into a painful rasp. He knows his voice will never heat this world. Perhaps no voice will. Memoires cease to surface. Sorrow threatens to no longer matter.

Navidson is forgetting.

Navidson is dying.

Very

soon he

will vanish

.

completely in the wings

.

of his own

wordless

stanza

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

Except

this stanza

.

does not remain

.

entirely

empty

[ ]

[ * ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

[ ]

“Light,” Navidson croaks. “Can’t. Be. I see light. [Ignis fatuus? | “Foollsh Fire. Will of the
wisp
[1608].”
— Ed.]
Care—”

Sure enough the final frames of Navidson’s film capture in the upper right- hand corner a tiny fleck of blue crying light into the void. Enough to see but not enough to see by.

The film runs out.

Black.

A different kind of black,

Followed by the name of the processing lab.*

XXI

We felt the lonely beauty of the evening, the immense roaring silence of the wind, the tenuousness of our tie to all below. There was a hint of fear, not for our lives, but of a vast unknown which pressed in upon us. A fleeting feeling of disappointment—that after all those dreams and questions this was only a mountain top—gave way to the suspicion that maybe there was something more, something beyond the three-dimensional form of the moment. If only it could be perceived.

— Thomas F. Hombein

Everest— The West Ridge

October 25, 1998

Lude’s dead.

October 25, 1998 (An hour??? later)

Wow, not doing
so well. But where else to turn? What mistakes have been made. A sudden vertigo of loss, when looking down, or is it really looking back?, leaves me experiencing all of it at once, which is way too much.

Supposedly by the time Lude made it out of the hospital he’d gotten very familiar with all those painkillers. Too familiar. He wasn’t in the kind of shape he used to be in before Gdansk Man got to him. He couldn’t shake off the effects as easily. He couldn’t resist them as easily either. It sure didn’t help that the fucker he called his lawyer kept feeding him all that bull about getting rich and living free.

By summer, Lude was tumbling straight down into oblivion. Morning shots—and not booze either. Somehow he’d gotten mixed up with hypodermic needles. Plus pills and plenty of other stuff. And all for what? Addressing what pain? No doubt at the heart of him. Unshared, unseen, maybe not even Lude himself. I mean “not even recognized by Lude himself.” What I meant to say. And then the worst question of all: if I’d been there, could
I
have made a
difference?

Apparently in August, the front Lude had defended for so many years finally began to fail.

Lude never did have the sense to retreat. No rehab for him, no intro(in)spection, no counseling, good talk, clean talk, or even the slightest attempt to renegotiate old pathways. If only he could have gotten around it all, at least once, far enough to peek past the corner and find out that hey, it doesn’t have to be the same block after all. But Lude didn’t even opt for a fucking change of pace. He’d refuse the line. He’d fix bayonets and then in a paroxysm of instinct, all mad, bleak, sad & sad, same word said differently—you gotta ask, you’ll never know, maybe you’re lucky—he gave the order to charge.

“Charge!” Probably never really said. Just implied. With a gesture or a grin.

Only in Lude’s case the bayonets were fifths of bourbon & bindles of pills and his charge was led on a Triumph.

Of course this was no Little Round Top. Not about the Union, though ironically Lude was killed right outside of Union on Sunset. He’d been up in the Hills at some so & so, such & such gathering, enough chemicals rioting in his body to sedate Manchester United for weeks. Around four in the morning, still hours before that great summoning of blue, inspiration struck, winding into him like an evil and final vine. He was going for a ride. The chemicals sure as hell didn’t object nor did his friends.

Amazingly enough, he made it down the hill alive, and from there started heading west, going after his own edge, his own dawn, his own watery murmur.

He was doing well over 100 MPH when he lost control. The motorcycle skidding across the left lane. Somehow—in the ugly stretch of a second—threading unhit past any oncoming traffic, until it slammed into the building wall and disintegrated.

Lude flew off the bike when the front wheel caught the curb. The cement uncapped his skull. He painted a good six feet of sidewalk with his blood. The next morning a sanitation crew found his jaw.

That was about all Lude left behind too, that and a few pairs of scissors with a couple of shorn hairs still clinging to the blades.

October 25, 1998 (Later)

Numb now. Moments when my face tingles. Could be my imagination. I’m not feeling anything let alone some motherfucking tingle. I’m so cold I stay crouched by my hot plate. I light matches too. Trying to follow Lude’s advice. Six boxes of blue tips. My fingers bubble and blister. The floor writhes with a hundred black serpents. I want to burn these pages. Turn every fucking word to ash. I hold the burning staffs a quarter of an inch from the paper, and yet one after another, the flames all die in a gray line. Is it a line? More like the approximation of a line written in a thin line of rising smoke. That’s where I focus because no matter how hard I try I cannot close that fraction of space. One quarter of an inch. As if to say not only can this book not be destroyed, it also cannot be blamed.

October 25, 1998 (Still later)

Possess. Can’t get the word out of my eye. All those S’s, sister here to these charred matches. What is it, the meaning behind “to possess” and why can’t I see it? What at all can we ever really possess? Possessions? And then there’s that other idea: what does it mean when we are possessed? I think something possesses me now. Nameless—screaming a name that’s not a name at all—though I still know it well enough not to mistake it for anything other than a progeny of anger and rage. Wicked and without remorse.

October 25, 1998 (Not yet dawn)

An incredible loneliness has settled inside me. I’ve never felt anything like this before.

We’ve all experienced a cold wind now and then but once or twice in your life you may have known a wind over seventy below. It cuts right through you. Your clothes feel like they were made of tissue, your lips cracking, eyes tearing, lashes instantly freezing—pay no mind to the salt. You know you have to get out of there fast, get inside, or there’s no question, you will not last.

But where do I go for shelter? What internationally recognized haven exists for this kind of emptiness? Where is that Youth Hostel? On what street?

Not here. That’s for sure.

Maybe I should just drain a glass, load a bong, shake hands with the unemployed. Who am I kidding? No place can keep me from this. Can’t even keep you.

And so I sit with myself just listening, listening to the creaking floor boards, the hammering water pipes, and masked in each breath, syncopated to every heartbeat, the shudders of time itself, there all along to accompany my fellow residents as they continue to yell, fight and of course scream. I’m surrounded. Indigents, addicts, the deluded and mad, crawling with lice, riddled with disease, their hearts breaking with fear.

Horror has caused this.

But where horror? Why horror? Horror of what? As if questions could stop any of it, halt the angriest intrusion of all, ripping, raping, leaving me, leaving you, leaving all of us gutted, hollow, dying to die.

Any fool can pray.

I find some soup and use a knife to stab it open. I have no pan so I tear off the paper and place the can directly on the hot plate. Eventually I dial the screams out. Though they are still there. They’ll always be there. Random, abrupt, loud, sometimes soft, sometimes even wistful.

I’m not in a hotel. This is not a refuge. This is an asylum.

The soup warms. I do not. I will need something stronger. And I find it. What has been there all along, ancient, no not ancient, but primitive, primitive and pitiless. And even if I know better than to trust it, I also realize I’m too late to stop it. I have nothing else. I let it stretch inside me like an endless hallway.

And then I open the door.

I’m not afraid anymore.

Downstairs, probably in some equally oily room as this, someone shouts. His voice is anguish, describing in a sound a scene of awful violence, a hundred serrated teeth, bright with a thousand years of blood, jagged nails barely tapping out a code of approach, pale eyes wide and dilated, cones and rods capturing everything in one unfailing and powerful assumption.

My heart should race. It doesn’t. My breath should come up short. It doesn’t. My mouth’s empty but the taste there is somehow sweet.

Of course I’m not afraid. Why should I be? What disturbs the sleep of everyone in this hotel; what crushes their throats in their dreams and stalks them like the dusk the day; what loosens their bowels, so even the junkies here have to join the rush to the bowl, splattering their wet chinawhite; what they experience only as premonition, illness and fear; that banished face beyond the province of image, swept clean like a page—is and always has been me.

October 25, 1998 (Dawn)

Left Hotel. If the clerk had looked up I would have killed him.
Wer ietzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Though I can see, I walk in total darkness. And though I feel, I care even less than I see.

October 27, 1998

Sleep under benches. All I have are these fluttering pages in my Dante book, a Florentine something I can’t remember getting or buying. Maybe I found it? Scribble like a maniac. Etch like the chronic ill. Mostly shiver. Shiver constantly though the nights are not so cold.

Wherever I walk people turn from me.

I’m unclean.

October 29, 1998

Guess Lude wasn’t enough. He wanted the guy who did the actual fucking. Kyrie was with him too, saying nothing, just sitting there as he pulled that 840 Ci BMW over, his BMW, his Ultimate Driving Machine, and yelled something at me, for me to stop I think, which I did, waiting patiently for him to park the car, get out, walk over, wind up and hit me—he hit me twice—all of it experienced in slo-mo, even when I crumpled and fell, all that in slo-mo too, my eyebrow ringing with pain, my eye swelling with bruise, my nose compacting, capillaries bursting, flooding my face with dark blood.

He should have paid attention. He should have looked closely at that blood. Seen the color. Registered the different hue. Even the smell was off. He should have taken heed.

But he didn’t.

Gdansk Man just yelled something ridiculous, made his point and that was that, as if he really had asserted himself, settled some imaginary score, and that really was just that. And maybe it was. For him at least. End of story.

He even wiped his hands of the affair, literally wiping his hands on his pants as he walked away.

Good old Gdansk Man.

I could see Kyrie was smiling, something funny to her, perhaps how the world turns, a half a world spinning world away finally spinning back around again, completing this circle. Resolving.

Except that when Gdansk Man turned his back on me, starting his short stroll to the car, slo-mo died, replaced this time y a kind o celerity I’ve never known before. Even all those early day fights, way back when, all those raw lessons in impact and instinct, could not have prepared me for this: exceeding anger, exceeding rage, coming precariously close to the distillate of—and you know what I’m talking about here every valued intuition lost, or so it seemed already.

My heart heard resound and followed then the unholy kettles of war. Some wicked family tree, dressed in steel, towering beyond my years though already cast in eclipse, conspired to instruct my response, fitting this rage with devastating action. I scrambled to my feet, teeth grinding back and forth like some beast accustomed to shattering bones and tearing away pounds of flesh, even as my hand vanished in a blur, lashing out for something lying near the corner trash can, an empty Jack Daniels bottle, which I’m sure, proof positive, I never noticed before and yet of course I did, I must have, some other sentient part of me had to have noticed, in allegiance with Mars, that unsteady quake of dangerous alignments, forever aware, forever awake.

My fingers locked around the glass neck and even as I sprang forward I had already begun to swing, and I was swinging hard, very hard, though fortunately the arc was off, the glass only glancing off the side of his head. A direct hit would have killed him. But he still dropped, boy did he drop, and then because I couldn’t really feel the blow, only the dull vibrations in the bottle, messengers informing me in the most remote tones of “a hit, a very palpable hit” and because more than anything I craved the pain, and the knowledge pain bestows, particular, intimate and entirely personal, I let my knuckles do the rest, all of them eventually splitting open on the ridges of his face until he slumped back in shock, sorry, so sorry, though that still didn’t stop me.

Initially this beating had been driven by some poorly reasoned revenge carried out in the name of Lude, as if Gdansk Man could sustain all that blame. He couldn’t. It quickly became something else. No logic, no sense, just the deed fueling itself, burning hotter, meaner, a conflict beyond explanation. Gdansk Man saw what was happening and started yelling for help, though it didn’t come out as a yell. More like blubbering and far too soft to reach anyone anyway. Certainly not this life-taker.

Nothing close to pity moved inside me. I was sliding over some edge within myself. I was going to rip open his skin with my bare hands, claw past his ribs and tear out his liver and then I was going to eat it, gorge myself on his blood, puke it all up and still come back for more, consuming all of it, all of him, all of it all over again.

Then suddenly, drawn in black on black, deep in the shadowy sail of my eye, I understood Kyrie was running towards me, arms outstretched, nails angled down to tear my face, puncture sight. But even as I slammed my fist into Gdansk Man’s temple again, something had already made me turn to meet her, and even though I did not command it, I was already hearing my horrendous shout, ripped from my center, blasting into her with enough force to stop her dead in her tracks, robbed instantly of any will to finish what she must have seen then was only suicide. She didn’t even have enough strength left to turn away. Not even close her eyes. Her face had flushed to white. Lips gone gray and bloodless. I should have spared her. I should have shifted my gaze. Instead I let her read in my eyes everything I was about to do to her. What I am about to do to her now here. How I would have her. How I have already had her. Where I would take her. Where I have already taken her. To a room. A dark room. Or no room at all. What will we call it? What will you call it?