House of Leaves (9 page)

“Hey, at least I’m an acquaintance of Bill’s now” Tom finally says, exhaling a thin stream of smoke. “Not a drop of booze in over two years.”

At first glance, it seems hard to believe these two men are even related let alone brothers. Tom is content if there happens to be a game on and a soft place from which to watch it. Navidson works out every day, devours volumes of esoteric criticism, and constantly attaches the world around him to one thing: photography. Tom gets by, Navidson succeeds. Tom just wants to be, Navidson must become. And yet despite such obvious differences, anyone who looks past Tom’s wide grin and considers his eyes will find surprisingly deep pools of sorrow. Which is how
.
‘
know they are brothers, because like Tom, Navidson’s eyes share the same water.

Either way the moment and opportunity for some kind of fraternal healing disappears when Tom makes an important discovery: Navidson was wron
g
. The interior of the house exceeds the exterior not by 1/4” but by
5/16’.

No matter how many legal pads, napkins, or newspaper margins they fill with notes or equations, they cannot account for that fraction. One incontrovertible fact stands in their way: the exterior measurement
must
equal the internal measurement. Physics depends on a universe
infinitely
cent
e
red on an equal sign. As science writer and sometime theologian David Conte wrote: “God for all intents and purposes is an equal sign, and at least up until now, something humanity has always been able to believe in is that the universe adds up.”
[37—Look at David Conte’s “All Thing Being Equal” in
Maclean’s,
v. 107, n. 14, 1994, p. 102. Also see Martin Gardner’s “The Vanishing Area Paradox” which appeared in his “Mathematical Games” column in
Scientific America,
May 1961.]

On this point, both brothers agree. The problem must lie with their measuring techniques or with some unseen mitigating factor: air temperature, mis-calibrated instruments, warped floors, something, anything. But after a day and a half passes without a solution, they both decide to look for help. Tom calls Lowell and postpones his construction obligations. Navidson calls an old friend who teaches engineering at UVA.

Early the following morning, both brothers head off for Charlottesville.

Navidson is not the only one who knows people in the vicinity. Karen’s friend Audrie McCullogh drives down from Washington, D.C. to catch up and help construct some bookshelves. Thus as Will and Tom set out to find an answer, two old friends put an enigma on hold, stir up some vodka tonics, and enjoy the rhythm of working with brackets and pine.

Edith Skourja has written an impressive forty page essay entitled
Riddles Without
on this one episode. While most of it focuses on what Skourja refers to as “the political posture” of both women—Karen as ex
-
model; Audrie as travel agent—one particular passage yields an elegant perspective into the whys and ways people confront unanswered questions:

Riddles: they either delight or torment. Their delight lies in solutions. Answers provide bright moments of comprehension perfectly suited for children who still inhabit a world where solutions are readily available. Implicit in the riddle’s form is a promise that the rest of the world resolves just as easily. And so riddles comfort the child’s mind which spins wildly before the onslaught of so much information and so many subsequent questions.

The adult world, however, produces riddles of a different variety. They do not have answers and are often called enigmas or paradoxes. Still the old hint of the riddle’s form corrupts these questions by reechoing the most fundamental lesson: there must be an answer. From there comes torment.

It is not uncharacteristic to encounter adults who detest riddles. A variety of reasons may lie behind their reaction but a significant one is the rejection of the adolescent belief in answers. These adults are often the same ones who say “grow up” and “face the facts.” They are offended by the incongruities of yesterday’s riddles with answers when compared
to
today’s riddles without.

It is beneficial to consider the origins of “riddle.” The Old English
rFde1se
means “opinion, conjure” which is related to the Old English
r&don
“to interpret” in turn belonging to the same etymological history of “read.” “Riddling” is an offshoot of “reading” calling to mind the participatory nature of that act—to interpret—which is all the adult world has left when faced with the unsolvable.

“To read” actually comes from the Latin
reri
“to
calculate, to think” which is not only the progenitor of “read” but of “reason” as well, both of which hail from the Greek
arariskein
“to fit.” Aside from giving us “reason,”
arariskein
also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin
arma
meaning “weapons.” It seems that “to fit” the world or to make sense of
it requires either reason or arm
s. Charmingly enough Karen
Green and Audrie MeCullogh “fit it” with a bookshelf.

As we all know, both reason and weapons wifi
eventually be resorted to. At least though for
now—before the explorations, before the bloodshed—a
drill, a hammer, and a Phillips
screwdriver
suffice.

Karen refers to her books as her “newly found
day to day comfort.” By assembling a stronghold for
them, she provides a pleasant balance between the
known and the unknown. Here stands one warm,
solid, and colorful wall of volume after volume of
histor
y, poetry, photo albums, and pulp. And though
irony eventually subsumes this moment, for now at
least it remains uncommented upon and thus wholly
innocent. Karen simply removes a photo album, as
anyone might do, and causes all the books to fall like
dominos
along the length of the shelf.
However instead
of tumbling to the floor, they are soundly
stopped, eliciting a smile from both women and this
profound remark by Karen: “No better book ends
than two walls.”

Lessons from a library.
[
38—Edith Skourja’s “Riddles Without” in
Riddles Within,
ed. Amon Whitten (Chicago: Sphinx Press, 1994), p.
17-57.]

Skourja’s analysis, especially concerning the inherent innocence of Karen’s project, sheds some light on the value of patience.

Walter Joseph Adeltine argues that Skourja forms a dishonest partnership with the shelf building segment: “Riddle me this—Riddle me that—Is all elegant crap. This is not a confrontation with the unknown but a flat-out case of denial.”
[39—
Walter Joseph Adeltine “Crap,”
New Perspectives Quarterly,
V. 11, winter 1994, p. 30.]
What Adeltine himself denies is the need to face some problems with patience, to wait instead of bumble, or as Tolstoy wrote:
“Dans le doute, mon cher.
.
.
abstiens-toi.”
[
40—Something like “When in doubt, friend, do nothing.”
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy, 1982, Penguin Classics in New York, p. 885.]

Gibbons when working on
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
would go on long walks before sitting down to write. Walking was a time to organize his thoughts, focus and relax. Karen’s shelf building serves the same purpose as Gibbon’s retreats outside. Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of “not knowing.” Of course not knowing hardly prevents the approaching chaos.

Turn vero omne mihi visum considere in ignis Ilium:

Delenda est Cartha go.
[
41
—
Know what, Latin’s way out of my league. I can find people who speak Spanish, French, Hebrew, Italian and even German but the Roman tongue’s not exactly thriving in the streets of LA.

A girl named Amber Rightacre suggested it might have something to do with the destruction of Carthage.
[42—In an effort to keep the translations as literal as possible, both Latin phrases read as follows: Then in fact all of Troy seemed to me to sink into flames” (Aeneid II, 624) and “Carthage must be destroyed.”
—
Ed.]
She’s the one who translated and sourced the previous Tolstoy phrase. I’ve actually never read
War and
Peace
but she had, and get this, she read it to
Zampanô
.

I
guess you might say in a round
about way the old man introduced us.

Anyway since that episode in the tattoo shop, I haven’t gone out as much, though to tell you the truth I’m no longer convinced anything happened. I keep cornering myself with questions: did I really experience some sort of decapacitating seizure, I mean in-? Or did I invent it? Maybe I just got a little creative with a residual hangover or a stupid head rush?

Whatever the truth is, I’ve been spending more and more time riddling through
Zampanô
’s bits—riddling also means sifting; as in passing corn, gravel or cinders through a coarse sieve; a certain coed taught me that. Not only have I found journals packed with
bibliographies and snaking etymologies and strange little, I don’t know what you’d call them, aphorisms??? epiphanies???, I also came across this notepad crammed with names and telephone numbers.
Zampanô
’s readers. Easily over a hundred of them, though as I quickly discovered more than a few of the numbers are now defunct and very few of the names have last names and for whatever reason those that do are unlisted. I left a couple of messages on some machines and then somewhere on page three, Ms. Rightacre picked up. I told her about my inheritance and she immediately agreed to meet me for a drink.

Amber, it turns out, was quite a number; a quarter French and a quarter Native American with naturally black hair, dark blue eyes and a beautiful belly, long and flat and thin, with a slender twine of silver piercing her navel. A barbed wire tattoo in blue & red encircled her ankle. Whether
Zampanô
knew it or not, she was a sight I’m sure he was sorry to miss.

“He loved to brag about how uneducated he was,” Amber told me. “I never even went to high school’ he would say. “Good, that makes me smarter than you.’ We talked like that a little, but most of the time, I just read to him. He insisted on Tolstoy. Said I read Tolstoy better than anyone else. I think that was mainly because I could manage the French passages okay, my Canadian background and all.”

After a few more drinks, we ambled over to the Viper. Lude was hanging out at the door and walked us in. Much to my surprise, Amber grabbed my arm as we headed up the stairs. This thing we shared in common seemed to have created a surprisingly intense bond. Lude listened to us for a while, hastening to add at every pause that he was the one who’d found the damn thing, in fact he was the one who’d called me, he’d even seen Amber around his building a few times, but because he hadn’t taken the time to read any of the text he could never address the particulars of our conversation. Amber and I were lost to a different world, a deeper history. Lude knew the play. He ordered a drink on my tab and went in search of other entertainment.

When I eventually got around to asking Amber to describe
Zampanô
, she just called him “imperceivable and alone, though not I think so lonely.” Then the first band came on and we stopped talking. Afterwards, Amber was the one who resumed the conversation, stepping a little closer, her elbow grazing mine. “I never got the idea he had a family,” she continued. “I asked him once—and I remember this very clearly—I asked him if he had any children. He said he didn’t have any children any more. Then he added: ‘Of course, you’re all my children,’ which was strange since I was the only one there. But the way he looked at me with those blank eyes—” she shuddered and quickly folded her arms as if she’d just gotten cold. “It was like that tiny place of his was suddenly full of faces and he could see them all, even speak to them.

It made me real uneasy, like I was surrounded by ghosts. Do you believe in ghosts?”

I told her I didn’t know.

She smiled.

“I’m a Virgo, what about you?”

We ordered another round of drinks, the next band came up, but we didn’t stay to hear them finish. As we walked to her place—it turned out she lived nearby, right above Sunset Plaza in fact—she kept returning to the old man, a trace of her own obsession mingling with the drift of her thoughts.

“So not so lonely,” she murmured. “I mean with all those ghosts, me and his other children, whoever they were, though actually, hmmm I forgot about this, I don’t know why, I mean it was why I finally stopped going over there. When he blinked, his eyelids, this is kind of weird, but they stayed closed a little bit longer than a blink, like he was consciously closing them, or about to sleep, and I always wondered for a fraction of a second if they would ever open again. Maybe they wouldn’t, maybe he was going to go to sleep or maybe even die, and looking at his face then, so serene and peaceful made me sad, and I guess I take back what I said before, because with hi
-
8 eyes closed he didn’t look alone, then he looked lonely, terribly lonely, and that made me feel real sad and it made me feel lonely too. I stopped going there after a while. But you know what, not visiting him made me feel guilty. I think I still feel guilty about just dropping out on him like that.”