House of Leaves (8 page)

In their absence, the Navidsons’ home had become something else, and while not exactly sinister or even threatening, the change still destroyed any sense of security or well-being.

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, we discover along with Will and Karen a plain, white door with a glass knob. It does not, however, open into the children’s room but into a space resembling a walk-in closet. However unlike other closets in the house, this one lacks outlets, sockets, switches, shelves, a rod on which to hang things, or even some decorative molding. Instead, the walls are perfectly smooth and almost pure black— ‘almost’ because there is a slightly grey quality to the surface. The space cannot be more than five feet wide and at most four feet long. On the opposite end, a second door, identical to the first one opens up into the children’s bedroom.

Navidson immediately asks whether or not they overlooked the room. This seems ridiculous at first until one considers how the impact of such an implausible piece of reality could force anyone to question their own perceptions. Karen, however, manages to dig up some photos which clearly show a bedroom wall without a door.

The next question is whether or not someone could have broken in and in four days constructed the peculiar addition. Improbable, to say the least.

Their final thought is that someone came in and uncovered it. Just installed two doors. But why? And for that matter, to quote Rilke,
Wer
?
[
34—Neatly translated as “Who?” which I happened to find in this poem
“Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes.” The book’s called
The Selected Poetry of
Rainer Maria Rilke,
edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. 1989.
See page 53, Vintage International.]

Navidson does check the Hi 8s but discovers that the motion sensors were never triggered. Only their exit and re-entrance exists on tape. Virtually a week seamlessly elided, showing us the family as they depart from a house without that strange interior space present only to return a fraction of a second later to find it already in place, almost as if it had been there all along.

Since the discovery occurred in the evening, the Navidsons’ inquiry must wait until morning. And so while Chad and Daisy sleep, we watch Karen and Will suffer through a restless night. Hilaiy, their one year old Siberian husky, and Mallory, their tabby cat, lie on either side of the 24” Sony television unperturbed by the new closet or the flicker from the tube or the drone from the speakers—Letterman, new revelations regarding the Iran-Contra affair, reruns, the traffic of information assuring everyone that the rest of the world is still out there, continuing on as usual, even if two new doors now stand open, providing a view across a new space of darkness, from parent’s room to children’s room, where a tiny nightlight of the Star Ship Enterprise bums like some North Star.

It is a beautiful shot. In fact, the composition and elegant balance of colours, not to mention the lush contrast of lights and darks, are so exquisite they temporarily distract us from any questions concerning the house or events unfolding there. It seems a perfect example of Navidson’s unparalleled talent and illustrates why few, if any, could have accomplished what he did, especially toward the end.

The following day both Karen and Will pursue the most rational course: they acquire the architectural blueprints from their local real estate
office.
As might have been expected, these blueprints are not actual building plans but were drawn up in 1981 when former owners sought permission from the town’s zoning board to construct an eli. The eli, however, was ultimately never built as the owners soon sold the property, claiming they needed something “a little smaller.” Though the designs, as they appear on screen, do not show a room or closet, they do confirm the existence of a strange crawl space, roughly four feet wide, running between both bedrooms.
[35—In Appendix
Il-A,
Mr. Truant provides a sketch of this floor plan on the back of an
envelope.
—
Ed.]

Alicia Rosenbaum, the real estate agent responsible for selling the Navidsons the house, gives the camera a bewildered shrug when Karen asks if she has any idea who could be responsible for “this outrage.” Unable to say anything useful, Mrs. Rosenbaum finally asks if they want to call the police, which amusingly enough they do.

That afternoon, two officers arrive, examine the closet and try to hide the fact that
this
has to be the weirdest call they have ever made. As Sheriff Axnard says, “We’ll file a report but other than that, well I don’t know what more we can do. Better I guess t’have been a victim of a crazy carpenter than some robber” which even strikes Karen and Navidson as a little funny.

With all obvious options exhausted, Navidson returns to the building plans. At first this seems pretty innocent until he gets out a measuring tape. Idly at first, he starts comparing the dimensions indicated in the plans with those he personally takes. Very soon he realizes not everything adds up. Something, in fact, is very wrong. Navidson repeatedly tacks back and forth from his
25’
Stanley Power Lock to the cold blue pages spread out on his bed, until he finally mutters
aloud: “This better be a case o
f bad math.”

An incongruous cut presents us with the title card:
1/4

Outside the house, Navidson climbs up a ladder to the second story. Not an easy ascent he casually confesses to us, explaining how a troublesome skin condition he has had since childhood has recently begun to flare up around his toes. Wincing slightly at what we can assume is at least moderate pain, he reaches the top rung where using a 100’ Empire
fiberglass tape with a hand crank, he proceeds to measure the distance from the far end of the master bedroom to the far end of the children’s bedroom. The total comes to 32’ 9
3/4”
which the house plans corroborate—plus or minus an inch. The puzzling part comes when Navidson measures the internal space. He carefully notes the length of the new area, the length of both bedrooms and then factors in the width of all the walls. The result is anything but comforting. In fact it is impossible.

32’ 10” exactly.

The width of the house inside would appear to exceed the width of the house as measured from the outside by 1/4”.

Certain that he has miscalculated, Navidson drills through the outer walls to measure their width precisely. Finally, with Karen’s help, he fastens the end of some fishing line to the edge of the outer wall., runs it through the drilled hole, stretches it across the master bedroom, the new space, the children’s bedroom and then runs it through a hole drilled through the opposite wall. He double checks his work, makes sure the line is straight, level and taut and then marks it. The measurement is still the same.

32’ 10” exactly.

Using the same line, Navidson goes outside, stretches the fishing line from one side of the house to the other only to find it is a quarter of an inch too long.

Exactly.

The impossible is one thing when considered as a purely intellectual conceit. After all, it is not so large a problem when one can puzzle over an Escher print and then close the book. It is quite another thing when one faces a physical reality the mind and body cannot accept.

Karen refuses the knowledge. A reluctant Eve who prefers tangerines to apples. “I don’t care,” she tells Navidson. “Stop drilling holes in my walls.” Undeterred, Navidson continues his quest, even though repeated attempts at measuring the house continue to reveal the quarter-inch anomaly. Karen gets quieter and quieter, Navidson’s mood darkens, and responding like finely tuned weathervanes the children react to the change in parental weather by hiding in other parts of the house. Frustration edges into Navidson’s voice. No matter how hard he tries—and Navidson tries six consecutive times in six consecutive segments
—
he cannot slaughter that tiny sliver of space. Another night passes and that quarter of an inch still survives.

Where narratives in film and fiction often rely on virtually immediate reactions, reality is far more insistent and infmitely (literally) more patient. Just as insidious poisons in the water table can take years before their effects are felt, the consequences of the impossible are likewise not so instantly apparent.

Morning means orange juice,
The New York Times,
NPR, a squabble over the children’s right to eat sugared cereal. The dishwasher moans, the toaster pops. We watch Karen scan the classifieds as Navidson toys with his coffee. He adds sugar, milk, stirs it all up, stirs it again, and then as an afterthought adds more sugar, a little more milk. The liquid rises to the rim and then by a fraction exceeds even this limit. Only it does not spill. It holds—a bulge of coffee arcing tragically over china, preserved by the physics of surface tension, rhyme to some unspeakable magic, though as everyone knows, coffee miracles never last long. The morning wake-up call wobbles, splits, and then abruptly slips over the edge, now a Nile of
caffeine wending past glass and politics until there is nothing more than a
brown blot on the morning paper.
[
36—Easily that whole bit from “coffee arcing tragically” down to “the mourning paper” could have been cut. You wouldn’t of noticed the absence. I probably wouldn’t of either. But that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t do it. Get rid of it, I mean. What’s gained in economy doesn’t really seem to make up for what you lose of Zampanö, the old man himself, coming a little more into focus, especially where digressions like these are concerned.

I can’t tell you why exactly but more and more these days I’m struck by the fact that everything
Zampanô
had is really gone, including the bowl of betel nuts left on his mantle or the battered shotgun bearing the initials RLB under his bed—Flaze appropriated that goody; the shotgun, not the bed—or even the curiously preserved bud of a white rose hidden in the drawer of his nightstand. By now his apartment has been scrubbed with Clorox, repainted, probably rented out to someone else. His body’s either molding in the ground or reduced to ash. Nothing else remains of him but this.

So you see from my perspective, having to decide between old man Z and his story is an artificial, maybe even dangerous choice, and one I’m obviously not comfortable making. The way I figure it, if there’s something you find irksome—go ahead and skip it. I couldn’t care less how you read any of this. His wandering passages are staying, along with all his oddly canted phrases and even some warped bits in the plot. There’s just too much at stake. It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it’s mine.

Zampanô
himself probably would of insisted on corrections and edits,
he
was
his own harshest critic, but I’ve come to believe error5,
especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very
old riddle.]

When Navidson looks up Karen is watching him.

“I called Tom,” he tells her.

She understands him well enough not to say a thing.

“He knows I’m insane,” he continues. “And besides he builds houses for a living.”

“Did you talk to him?” she carefully asks.

“Left a message.”

The next card simply reads:
Tom.

Tom is Will Navidson’s fraternal twin brother. Neither one has said much to the other in over eight years. “Navy’s successful, Tom’s not,” Karen explains in the film. “There’s been a lot of resentment over the years. I guess it’s always been there, except when they lived at home. It was different then. They kind of looked after each other more.”

Two days later, Tom arrives. Karen greets him with a big hug and a Hi 8. He is an affable, overweight giant of a man who has an innate ability to amuse. The children immediately take to him. They love his laugh, not to mention his McDonalds french fries.

“My own brother who I haven’t talked to in years calls me up at four in the morning and tells me he needs my tools. Go figure.”

“That means you’re family” Karen says happily, leading the way to Navidson’s study where she has already set out clean towels and made up the hideaway.

“Usually when you want a level you ask a neighbor or go to the hardware store. Count on Will Navidson to call Lowell, Massachusetts. Where is he?”

As it turns out Navidson has gone to the hardware store to pick up a few items.

In the film, Tom and Navidson’s first encounter has almost nothing to do with each other. Instead of addressing any interpersonal issues, e find them both huddled over a Cowley level mirror transit, alternately taking turns peering across the house, the line of sight floating a few feet above the floor, occasionally interrupted when Hillary or Mallory in some keystone chase race around the children’s beds. Tom believes they wifi account for the quarter inch discrepancy with a perfectly level measurement.

Later on, out in the backyard, Tom lights up a joint of marijuana. The drug clearly bothers Navidson but he says nothing. Tom knows his brother disapproves but refuses to alter his behavior. Based on their body language and the way both of them avoid looking directly at each other, not to speak of the space between their words, the last eight years continues to haunt them.