The Minotaur

Alarga en la pradera una pauso4a

Sombra, pero ya el hecho de nombrarlo

Y de conjecturar su circunstancia Lo haceficción del arte y no criatura Viviente de las que andan por Ia tierra.

– Jorge Luis Borges

 

[255- … a slow shadow spreads across the prairie,! but still, the act of naming it, of guessing! what Is its nature and its circumstances! creates a fiction, not a living creature,/not one of those who wander on the earth.” As translated by Alastair Reid. – Ed.]

 

 

 

THE WAIT

 

1.

Teppet C. Brookes had seen plenty of children’s drawings in her life. Having taught all grades from kindergarten through sixth grade, she was familiar with a vast array of stick figures, objects, and plots. This was not the first time she had seen a wolf, a tiger, or a dragon. The problem was that these wolves did not just stalk quietly through cadmium woods; their teeth drew madder and rose from each other’s throats. The tigers did not just sleep on clover; they clawed Sunday red and indigo from celadon hills. And the dragon with its terrible emerald tail and ruby glare did not merely threaten; it incinerated everything around it with a happy blossom of heliotrope and gamboge.

And yet even these violent fantasies were nothing compared to what lay in wait at the centre of the drawing.

The week before Navidson set out on the rescue attempt, Brookes had asked her third grade class to draw a picture of their house. The one Chad handed in had no chimney, windows, or even a door. In fact, it was nothing more than a black square filling ninety percent of the page. Furthermore, several layers of black crayon and pencil had been applied so that not even a speck of the paper beneath could show through. In the thin margins, Chad had added the marauding creatures.

It was an extremely odd image and stuck with Brookes. She knew Chad had recently moved to Virginia and had already been involved in several scuffles in the school playground. Though she was hardly satisfied with her conclusion, she decided the picture reflected the stress caused by the move and the new surroundings. But she also made a note to keep an eye on him as the year progressed.

She would not have to wait that long.

Brookes usually went straight home after school, but that Friday, quite by chance, she wandered into the kindergarten classroom. A number of drawings hung on the wall. One in particular caught her eye. The same wolves, the same tigers, the same dragon, and at the centre, though this time only two-thirds the size of the page, an impenetrable square, composed of several layers of black and cobalt blue crayon, with not even the slightest speck of white showing through.

That picture had been drawn by Daisy.

 

 

 

Though Brookes lacked a formal degree in psychology, two decades of teaching, nearly half of it at Sawatch Elementary, had exposed her to enough child abuse to last a lifetime. She was familiar with the signs and not just the obvious ones like malnutrition, abrasion, or unnatural shyness. She had learned to read behavior patterns, eating habits, and even drawings. That said, she still had never encountered such a striking similarity between a five year old girl and her eight year old brother. The collective artistry was appalling. “Now heck, I’ve survived two bad marriages and seen my share of evil along the way. I don’t get fazed by much, but let me tell you just seeing those pictures gave me the willies.” [256-Teppet C. Brookes’ The Places I’ve Seen as told to Emily Lucy Gates (San Francisco: Russian Hill Press, 1996), p. 37-69.]

Teppet C. Brookes could have contacted the Department of Children’s Services. She could have even called the Navidsons and requested a consultation. That Monday, however, when neither Chad nor Daisy showed up at school, she decided to pay the Navidsons a little visit herself. Willies or not, curiosity got the best of her: “Truth be told, I just had to take a gander at the place that had inspired those drawings.” [257- Ibid. p. 38.258] [258-A1so refer back to footnote 212 dealing with Françoise Minkowska.]

 

 

 

2.

During her lunch break, Brookes climbed into her Ford Bronco and made the fifteen minute drive to Ash Tree Lane. “I thought the house was nice and quaint on the outside. I was expecting something else I guess. To tell you the truth, I almost drove off but since I’d made the drive, I decided I should at least introduce myself. I had a good excuse. I wanted to know why both kids were not in school. And heck, if it was Chicken Pox, I’ve had mine, so that was no matter.” [259-Teppet C. Brookes’ The Places

I’ve Seen, p. 142.]

Brookes recalls looking at her watch as she walked toward the front door: “It was close to one. I knocked or rang the door bell, I don’t remember. Then I heard the screams. Wails. I’ve heard that kind of grief before. I started banging real hard. A second later an Afro-American man in a wheelchair opened the door. He seemed surprised to see me, like he was expecting someone else. I could tell he was in pretty bad shape, his hands all ripped up and bleeding. I didn’t know what to say so I told him I was from the school. He just nodded and told me he was waiting for the ambulance and would I mind giving him a hand.”

Brookes was hardly prepared for the slaughterhouse she was about to enter: a woman sobbing in the living room, a big man holding her, two bodies in the kitchen surrounded by blood, and on the staircase Chad sitting next to his little sister Daisy who kept quietly singing to no one in particular words no one else could understand- “ba. dah. ba-ba.”

Brookes lasted five minutes, crossing herself too many times to help anyone. Fortunately the sheriff, the paramedics, and an ambulance soon arrived. “I had entered a war zone and I have to be honest, it overwhelmed me. I could tell my blood pressure was rising. You know sometimes you go into something thinking you’re going to make all the difference. You’re going to save the situation. Make it right. But that was too much for me. It was real humbling. [Starts to cry] I never saw the kids after that. Though I still have their drawings.” [260-“The Navidson Legacy” Winter’s Grave, PBS, September 8, 1996.]

 

 

 

3.

In some respects, the distillate of crayon and colour traced out by the hands of two children captures the awfulness at the heart of that house better than anything caught on film or tape, those shallow lines and imperfect shapes narrating the light seeping away from their lives. Brookes, however, is not the only one to have seen those drawings. Chad and Daisy’s room is full of them, the monstrous black square getting progressively larger and darker, until in Chad’s case, not even the barest margin survives.

Karen knows her kids are in trouble. A clip of Hi 8 catches her telling them that as soon as their father returns she will take them all to “grandma’ s.”

Unfortunately, when Navidson, Tom and Reston disappear down that hallway early Saturday morning, Karen is put in an impossible situation: torn between monitoring the radios and looking after Chad and Daisy. In the end, separation from Navidson proves more painful. Karen keeps by the radios.

For a while Daisy and Chad try to coax their mother to even briefly abandon her post. When that fails, they hang around the living room. Karen’s inability to concentrate on them, however, soon drives both children away. A few times, Karen asks them to at least keep together. Daisy, however, insists on hiding in her room where she can play endlessly with her prized Spanish doll and the doll house Tom finally finished for her, while Chad prefers to escape outside, disappearing into the summoning woods, sometimes with Hillary, often now without, always well beyond the range of any camera, his adventures and anger passing away unobserved.

That Saturday night Chad and Daisy have to put themselves to sleep. Then around ten o’clock, we watch as both children come racing down into the living room, claiming to have heard voices. Karen, however, has heard nothing more than the ever present hiss of the radios, occasionally interrupted by Tom calling in from the Great Hall. Even after she checks out their bedroom, she is unable to detect any unusual sounds. At least Chad and Daisy’s obvious fear momentarily snaps Karen out of her obsession. She leaves the radios and spends an hour tucking her children into bed.

Dr. Lon Lew believes the house enabled Karen to slowly break down her reliance on Navidson, allowing her a greater and more permanent distance: “Her children’s fear coupled with their need for her further separated Karen from Navidson. Sadly, it’s not the healthiest way to proceed. She merely replaced one dependency for another without confronting what lay at the heart of both.” [261-Dr. Lon Lew’s “Adding In to Dependent” Psychology Today, v. 27, March/April 1994, p. 32.]

Then on Sunday evening, both children ask her what happened to all her Feng Shui objects. We watch as they lead her from room to room, pointing out the absent tiger, the absent marble horses, and even the absent vase. Karen is shocked. In the kitchen, she has to sit down, on the verge of a panic attack. Her breathing has quickened, her face is covered m sweat.

Fortunately, the episode only lasts a couple of minutes.

Along with several other critics, Gail Kalt dwells on Karen’s choice of words during her conversation with Tom on the radio when she refers to Feng Shui as “some such shit.”

 

Karen has begun to deconstruct her various mechanisms of denial. She does not continue to insist on the ineffectual science of Feng Shui. She recognizes that the key to her misery lies in the still unexplored fissure between herself and Navidson. Without knowing it she has already begun her slow turn to face the meaning, or at least one meaning, of the darkness dwelling in the depths of her house. [262-Gai1 Kalt’s “The Loss of Fajth

-(Thank God!)” Grand Street, v. 54, fall 1195, p. 118.]

 

Certainly Karen’s step away from denial is made more evident when right after her talk with Tom she gathers up any remaining items having to do with Feng Shui and throws them in a box. David N. Braer in his thesis “House Cleaning” notes how Karen not only adds to this collection the books already mentioned in Chapter V but also includes the Bible, several New Age manuals, her tarot cards, and strangest of all a small hand mirror.

[263-David N. Braer’s “House Cleaning” Diss. University of Tennessee, 1996, p. 104.] Then after depositing the box in the garage, she looks in on her children one more time, comforting them with an open invitation to sleep in the living room with her if they like. They do not join her but the grateful tone of their murmurs seems to suggest they will now sleep better.

Helen Agaliway asserts that by “Monday, October 8th, Karen has made up her mind to depart. When Tom reappears in the living room and informs her that Navidson is only hours away from getting back, she keeps the children home from school because she has every intention of leaving for

New York that day.” [264-Helen Agaliway’s “The Process of Leaving”

Diss. Indiana University, 1995, p. 241.]

Upon returning from town with bundles of rope, the pulleys, and several trolley wheels, Karen begins packing and orders the children to try to do the same. She is in fact in the middle of frantically removing several winter coats and shoes from the foyer closet when Tom races out of the hallway, pushing the gurney in front of him, tears gushing from his eyes.

 

 

 

4.

When Karen sees Wax her hand flies to her mouth, though it hardly prevents the cry. [265-Many have complained that The Holloway Tape as well as the two untitled sequences frequently identified as “The Wait” and “The Evacuation” are incomprehensible. Poor resolution, focus, and sound (with the exception of the interviews shot afterward in 16mm) further exacerbate the difficulties posed by so many jarring cuts and a general chronological jumble. That said, it is crucial to recognize how poor quality and general incoherence is not a reflection of the creator’s state of mind. Quite the contrary, Navidson brilliantly used these stylistic discrepancies to further drive home the overwhelming horror and dislocation experienced by his family during “The Evacuation.” For other books devoted specifically to reconstructing the narrative see The Navidson Record: The Novelization (Los Angeles: Goal Gothum Publication, 1994): Thorton 3. Cannon Jr.’s

The Navidson Record: Action and Chronologies (Portland: Penny Brook

Press, 1996); and Esther Hartline’s Thru Lines (New York: Dutton, 1995).] Reston emerges from the hallway next, the growl growing louder behind him, threatening to follow him into the living room. Frantically, he slams the door and bolts all four locks, which no doubt thanks to the door’s acoustic rating actually seems to keep that terrible sound at bay.

Karen, however, starts shouting: “What are you doing? Billy? What about Navy? Where’s Navy?”

Even though he is still crying, Tom tries to pull her away from the door,

“We lost him.”

“He’s dead?” Karen’s voice cracks.

“I don’t think so,” Tom shakes his head.” But he’s still down there. Way down.”

“Well then go in and get him! Go in and get your brother!” Then starting to shriek, “You can’t just leave him there.”

But Tom remains motionless, and when Karen finally looks him in the face and beholds the measure of his fear and grief, she crumples into a fit of sobs. Reston goes to the foyer and calls an ambulance.

Meanwhile, Wax, who has been temporarily left alone in the kitchen, quietly groans on the stretcher. Next to him lies Jed’s body. Unfortunately Tom did not realize how much blood had soaked into Jed’s clothes. Blind with his own sorrow, he unknowingly covered the linoleum with a smear of red when he set the corpse down. He even stepped in the blood and tracked footprints across the carpet as he lurched back to the living room to console Karen.

Perhaps inevitably, all the commotion draws the children out of their room.

Chad catches sight of the body first. There is something particularly disquieting about watching the way he and Daisy walk slowly toward Jed and then over to Wax’s side. They both seem so removed. Almost in a daze.

“Where’s our daddy?” Chad finally asks him. But Wax is delirious.

“What. I need what-er.”

Together Chad and Daisy fill a glass from the sink. Wax, however, is far too weak to sit up let alone drink. They end up dribbling small drops of water on his cracked lips.

A few seconds later there is a loud banging on the front door. Reston wheels over and opens it. He expects to see the paramedics but finds instead a woman in her late 40s with almost perfectly grey hair. Chad and Daisy retreat to the staircase. They too step in the blood, their feet leaving small red imprints on the floor. Chad’s teacher fails to utter even one word or offer any sort of assistance. Tom continues to sit with Karen, until eventually her muted cries join the wall of sirens rapidly approaching their house on Ash Tree Lane.

 

 

 

5.

While The Navidson Record clearly states that Wax Hook survived, it does not dwell on any of the details following his departure. Numerous articles published after the film’s release, however, reveal that he was almost immediately rushed by helicopter to a hospital in Washington, D.C. where he was placed in an I.C.U. There doctors discovered that fragments from the coracoid process and scapula spine had turned his trapezius, delta and infraspinous muscles to hamburger. Miraculously though, the bullet and bone shrapnel had only grazed the subclavian artery. Wax eventually recovered and after a long period of rehabilitation returned to a life of outdoor activities, even though it is doubtful he will ever climb Everest now let alone attempt to solo the North Face. By his own admission, Wax also keeps clear of caves not to mention his own closet. [266-See U.S. News & World Report, v. 121, December 30, 1996, p. 84; Premiere, v. 6, May 1993, P. 68-70; Life, v. 17, July 1994, p. 26-32; Climbing, November I, 1995, p.

44; Details, December 1995, p. 118]

Even as Wax was loaded into the ambulance, police began an investigation into Jed Leeder’s death. Reston provided them with a copy of the tape from his Hi 8 showing Holloway shooting Wax and Jed. To the police, the murder appeared to have taken place in nothing more than a dark hallway. As APBs went out, patrolmen began a statewide search which would ultimately last several weeks. That afternoon, Karen also insisted on introducing the authorities to that all consuming ash-walled maze. Perhaps she thought they would attempt to locate Navidson. The results were hardly satisfying.

In The Reston Interview, Billy shakes his head and even laughs softly:

 

It wasn’t a bad idea. Tom and I’d had enough too. Karen just expected too much, especially from a town that has one sheriff and a handful of deputies. When the sheriff came over, Karen immediately dragged him over to the hallway, handed him a flashlight and the end of a spool of Monel fishing line. He looked at her like she was nuts, but then I think he got a little spooked too. At that point in time, no one was about to go in there with him. Karen because of her claustrophobia. Tom, well he was already going to the bottom of a bottle. And me, I was trying to fix my wheelchair. It was all bent from when I came up on the pulley. Even so though, I mean even if my chair had been fme, going back would have been hard. Anyway Sheriff Oxy, Axard, Axnard, I think that was his name, Sheriff Axnard went in there by himself. He walked ten feet in and then walked straight

back out, thanked us and left. He never said a word about where he’d been and he never came back. He spent a good amount of time looking for Holloway everywhere else but never in the house.

 

Right after the release of The Navidson Record, Sheriff Josiah Axnard was accosted by numerous reporters. One clip captures the Sheriff in the process of climbing into his squad car “For once and for all, that house was completely searched and Holloway Roberts was not in it.” Six months later the Sheriff consented to an interview on National Public Radio (April 18, 1994) where he told a slightly different story. He confessed to walking down “an unfamiliar hallway.” “It’s not there no more,” he continued. “I checked. Nothing unusual there now but. . . but back then there was.. . there was a corridor on the south wall. Cold, no lights and goin’ on into nowhere. It creeped me like I never been creeped before, like I was standing in a gigantic grave and 1 remember then, clearly, like it was yesterday, thinking to myself ‘If Holloway’s in here I don’t need to worry. He’s gone. He’s long gone.” [267-Nor is that the first time the word “grave” appears in reference to the house in The Navidson Record. When Reston suggests Navidson use the Leica distance meter, he adds, “That should put this ghost in the grave fast.” Holloway in Exploration #3 mutters: “Cold as a grave.” Also in the same segment Wax grunts a variation, “I feel like I’m in a coffin.” In one of her Hi 8 journal entries, Karen tries to make light of her situation when she remarks: “It’s like having a giant catacomb for a family room.” Tom in Tom’s Story tells the “grave-maker” joke, while Reston, during the rescue attempt, admits to Navidson: “You know, I feel like I’m in a grave.” To which Navidson responds, “Makes you wonder what gets buried here.” “Well judging by the size,” Reston replies. “It must be the giant from Jack and the fucking Beanstalk.” Giant indeed.] [268-0n several occasions, Zampanô also uses the word “grave.”] [269-See Index.

– Ed.]

 

 

 

 

6.

That night Karen stays in the living room, crying off and on, leaving the hallway door open, even though, as she explains to Reston, standing a foot too close will cause her to experience heart palpitations and tremors. Reston, however, badly in need of some shut eye almost immediately falls into a deep sleep on the couch.

There is one particularly horrible moment when the phone rings and Karen answers on speaker. It is Jed Leeder’s fiancée calling from Seattle, still unaware of what has happened. At first Karen tries to keep the news to herself but when the woman begins to detect the lie, Karen tells her the truth. A panicked shout cracks over the speaker phone and then decays into terrified cries. Abruptly the line goes dead. Karen waits for the woman to call back but the phone does not ring again.

Of course during all this, the children are once again abandoned, left to look after each other, with no one around to help translate the horror of the afternoon. They hide in their room, rarely saying a thing. Not even Tom makes an appearance to even temporarily contest their fears with the soothing lyric of a bedtime story about otters, eagles, and the occasional tiger.

When Tom had returned from the grave, he was convinced he had lost his brother. Both he and Reston had heard the great Spiral Staircase yawn beneath them, and Reston’s Hi 8 had even caught a glimpse of Navidson’s light sinking, finally vanishing into the deep like a failing star.

As Billy explains in The Reston Interview: “Tom felt like a part of him had been ripped away. I’d never seen him act like that. He started shaking and tears just kept welling up in his eyes. I tried to tell him the stairway could shrink just like it had stretched, and he kept agreeing with me, and nodding, but that didn’t stop the tears. It was terrifying to watch. He loved his brother that much.”

After watching the paramedics take Wax away, we follow Tom’s retreat to the study where he manages to locate among his things the last bit of a joint. Smoking it, however, offers absolutely no relief. He is no longer crying but his hands still shake. He takes several deep breaths and then as Karen is getting ready to show Sheriff Axnard the hallway, he steals a sip of bourbon. [270-See Harmon Frisch’s “Not Even Bill’s Acquaintance” Twenty Years In The Program ed. Cynthia Huxley (New York: W. W.

Norton & Company, 1996), P. 143-179.]

Regrettably, Tom fails to stop at a sip. A few hours later he has finished off the whole fifth as well as half a bottle of wine. He might have spent all night drinking had exhaustion not caught up with me. Of course, the following morning does nothing to erase yesterday’s events. Tom attempts to recover lost ground by accompanying Reston back to the Great Hall. Much to their surprise, however, they discover the hallway now terminates thirty feet in, nor are there any doors or alternate hallways branching off it. Karen returns to her room when she sees Tom and Reston reappear only five minutes later.

Even though he too is suffering from Navidson’s disappearance, Reston still does his best to counsel Tom, and at least for a few hours Tom successfully resists drinking anything more. Chad apparently had escaped from the house at dawn and now refuses to come in or say a word to his mother. Tom eventually finds him among the branches of a tree just past the edge of the property line. Nevertheless, no amount of coaxing will induce the eight year old to come back in.

In Billy’s words (The Reston Interview again): “Tom told me Chad was happy in his tree and Tom was hard pressed to start telling him inside was a better place. However, there was something else. The kid apparently bolted from the house when he heard some kind of murmuring, something about a walker in darkness, then a bang, like a gun shot, and the sound of a man dying. Woke him right up, he said. Back then I assumed he’d just been dreaming.”

Judging from the house footage, what seems to really push Tom over the edge that second day is when he reenters the house and finds Daisy- her forearms acrawl with strange scratches-swaying in front of the hallway screaming “Daddy!” despite the absence of a reply, the absence of even an echo. When Karen finally comes downstairs and carries her daughter outside to help her find Chad, Tom takes the car and goes into town. An hour later he returns with groceries, unnecessary medical supplies, magazines and the reason for the excursion in the first place-a case of bourbon.

On the third and fourth day, Tom does not emerge once from the study, attempting to drink his grief into submission.

Karen, on the other hand, begins to deal with the consequences of Navidson’s disappearance. She rapidly starts paying more attention to her children, finally luring Chad back into the house where she can oversee his (and Daisy’s) packing efforts. In a brief clip we catch Karen on the phone, presumably with her mother, discussing their imminent departure from Virginia.

Reston remains in the living room, frequently attempting to raise Navidson on the radio, though never hearing more than static and white noise. Outside a thunder storm begins to crack and spit rain at the windows. Lightning builds shadows. A wind howls like the wounded, filling everyone with cold, bone weary dread.

Toward midnight, Tom emerges from the study, steals a slice of lemon meringue pie and then whips up some hot chocolate for everyone. Whole milk, unsweetened cocoa, sugar, and a splash of vanilla extract all brought to a careful simmer. Billy and Karen appreciate the gesture. Tom has not stopped drinking, and even doses his cup with a shot of Jack Daniels, but he does seem to have leveled out, not exactly achieving some sublime moment of clarity but at least attaining a certain degree of self- control.

Then Tom, though he is only wearing a t-shirt, takes a deep breath and marches into the hallway again. A minute later he returns.

“It’s no more than ten feet deep now,” Tom grunts. “And Navy’s been gone over four days.”

“There’s still a chance,” Reston grumbles.

Tom tries to shrug off the certitude that his brother is dead. “You know,” he continues very quietly, still staring at the hallway. “There once was this guy who went to Madrid. He was in the mood for something new so he decided to try out this small restaurant and order-sight unseen-the house specialty.

“Soon a plate arrived loaded with rice pilaf and two large meaty objects.

“What’s this?’ he asked his waiter.

“‘Cojones, Senor.’

“‘What are cojones?’

“Cojones’ the waiter answered, ‘are the testicles of the bull that lost in the arena today.’

“Though a little hesitant at first, the man still went ahead and tried them.

Sure enough they were delicious.

“Well a week later, he goes back to the same restaurant and orders the same thing. This time, when his dish arrives, the meaty objects are much smaller and don’t taste nearly as good.

“He immediately calls the waiter over. “‘Hey,’ he says. ‘What are these?’ “Cojones’ the waiter replies.

“No, no,’ he explains. ‘I had them last week and they were much bigger.’

“Ah Senor,’ the waiter sighs. ‘The bull does not lose every time.”

 

 

 

7.

Tom’s joke attempts to deflect some of the pain inherent in this protracted wait, but of course nothing can really diminish the growing knowledge that Navidson may have vanished for good.

Tom eventually returns to the study to try and sleep, but Karen remains in the living room, occasionally dozing off, often trying to reach Navidson on the radios, whispering his name like a lullaby or a prayer. [271-Karen’s emotional response is not limited to longing. Earlier that evening she retreated to the bathroom, ran the water in the sink, and recorded this somewhat accusatory Hi 8 journal entry: “Damn you for going, Navy. Damn you. [Starting to cry] This house, this home, was supposed to help us get closer. It was supposed to be better and stronger than some stupid marriage vow. It was supposed to make us a family. [Sobbing] But, oh my god, look what’s happened.”]

In the 5:09 A.M. Hi 8 clip, Karen rests her head on her hands and starts to sleep. There is something eerie about the odd stillness that settles on the living room then, not even remotely affected by Reston’s snoring on the couch. It is as if this scene has been impossibly fixed and will never change again, until out of the blue, presumably before the cameras can shut off-no longer ordered to run by the motion detectors-Navidson limps out of the hallway. He is clearly exhausted, dehydrated, and perhaps a little unable to believe he has actually escaped the maze. Seeing Karen, he immediately kneels beside her, attempting to wake her with the gentlest word. Karen, however, drawn so abruptly from her dreams, cannot arrest the shocked

gasp summoned by the sound and sight of Navidson. Of course, the moment she realizes he is not a ghost, her terror dissolves into a hug and a flood of words, awakening everyone in the house.

Several essays have been written about this reunion and yet not one of them suggests Karen has reverted to her former state of dependency.

Consider Anita Massine’s comments:

 

Her initial embrace and happiness is not just about Navidson’s return. Karen realizes she has fulfilled her end of the bargain. Her time in that place has come to an end. Navidson’s

arrival means she can leave. [272-Anita Massine’s Dialects of Divorce

In American Film In The Twentieth Century (Oxford, Ohio: Miami

University Press, 1995), p. 228.]

 

 

 

Or Garegin Thorndike Taylor’s response:

 

Where previously Karen might have dissolved into tears and her typical clutching, this time she is clearly more reserved, even

terse, relying on her smile for defense. [273-Garegin Thorndike Taylor’s “The Ballast of Self” Modern Psyche, v. 18, 1996, p. 74. Also refer back to Chapter II and V.]

 

 

 

Or finally Professor Lyle Macdonough:

 

The reason Karen cries out when Navidson wakes her has nothing to do with the inherent terror of that hallway or some other cauchemar. It has only to do with Navidson. Deep down inside, she really does fear him. She fears he will try to keep her there. She fears

he will threaten her slowly forming independence. Only once the reins of

consciousness slip into place does she resort

to expected modes of welcome. [274-Professor Lyle Macdonough’s

“Dissolution of Love in The Navidson Record,” Crafton Lecture Series, Chatfield College in St. Martin Ohio, February 9, 1996.]

 

Karen clearly refuses to allow Navidson’s appearance to alter her plans. She does not accept that merely his presence entitles him to authority. Her mind is made up. Even before he can begin to recount his desperate flight up those stairs or how he found Holloway’s equipment, Karen announces her intention to leave for New York City that night.

[275-In the following excerpt from The Last Interview, Navidson sheds some more light on how he managed to emerge from those dark hollows: “I remember I had found Jed’s pack so I knew I was okay on water and food for a while. Then I just started climbing up the stairs, one step at a time. At first it was slow going. That roar would frequently rise up the central shaft like some awful wail. At times it sounded like voices. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Calling after me. And then other times it sounded like the wind only there is no wind there.

“I remember finding The Holloway Tape off one of the landings. I had caught sight of a few bits of neon marker still attached to the wall and wandered over to take a look. A minute later I saw his pack and the camera. It was all just sitting there. The rifle was nearby too, but there was no sign of him. That was pretty odd to come across something, let alone anything, in that place. But what made finding that stuff particularly strange was how much I’d been thinking of Holloway at the time. I kept expecting him to jump around some corner and shoot me.

“After that, I was a little spooked and made sure to chuck the ammo down into that pit off to my right. Over and over, I kept wondering what happened to his body. It was making me crazy. So I tried fixing my mind on other things.

“I remember thinking then that one of the toenails on my right foot, the big toenail, had torn loose and started to bleed. That’s when De- … Delial came into my head which was awful.

“Finally though, I began concentrating on Karen. On Chad and Daisy. On Tom and Billy. I thought about every time we’d gone to a movie together or a game or whatever, ten years ago, four months ago, twenty years ago. I remembered when I first met Karen. The way she moved. These perfect angles she’d make with her wrists. Her beautiful long fingers. I remembered when Chad was born. All that kind of stuff, trying to recall those moments as vividly as possible. In as much detail. Eventually I went into this daze and the hours began to melt away. Felt like minutes.

“On the third night I tried to take another step and found there wasn’t one. I was in the Great Hall again. Oddly enough though, as I soon found out, I was still a good ways from home. For some mason everything had stretched there too. Now all of a sudden, there were a lot of new dead ends. It took me another day and night to get back to the living room, and to tell you the truth I was never sure I was going to make it until I finally did.”]

 

Of course by the time they had all sat down and watched The Holloway Tape, Navidson was the only one who had second thoughts about abandoning the cold lure of those halls.

 

 

 

HOLLOWAY

 

8.

More than a handful of people have tried to [276] explain Holloway’s madness.

 

[276-Some kind of ash landed on the following pages, in some places burning away small holes, in other places eradicating large chunks of text. Rather than try to reconstruct what was destroyed I decided to just bracket the gaps-[ ].

Unfortunately I have no idea what stuff did the actual charring. It’s way too copious for cigarette tappings, and anyway Zampanô didn’t smoke. Another small mystery to muse over, if you like, or just forget, which I recommend. Though even I’m unable to follow my own advice, imagining instead gray ash floating down like snow everywhere, after the blast but still hours before that fabled avalanche of heat, the pyroclastic roar that will incinerate everything, even if for the time being-and there still is time … -it’s just small flakes leisurely kissing away tiny bits of meaning, while high above, the eruption continues to black out the sun.

There’s only one choice and the brave make it.

Fly from the path.

 

 

 

Lude dropped by a few nights ago. It’s mid-September but I hadn’t seen him since June. News that I’d been fired from the Shop apparently pissed him off, though why he should care I’ve no idea. Like my boss, he also assumed I was on smack. More than a little freaked too when he finally saw for himself how bad off I was, real gaunt and withdrawn and not without a certain odor either. But Lude’s no idiot. One glance at my room and he knew junk was not the problem. All those books, sketches, collages, reams and reams of paper, measuring tapes nailed from corner to floor, and of course that big black trunk right there in the center of everything, all of it just another way to finally say: no- no, no junk at all.

“Throw it away, hoss” Lude said and started to cross to my desk f or a closer look. I sprung forward, ordered by instinct, like some animal defending its pride, interposing myself between him and my work, those papers, this thing.

Lude backed away-in fact that was the first time he’d ever backed away; ever-just a step, but retreating just the same, calling me “weird”, calling me “scary.”

I quickly apologized and incoherently tried to explain how I was just sorting some stuff out. Which is true.

“Bulishit,” Lude grunted, perhaps a little angry that I’d frightened him. “For godsake, just look at what you’re drawing?” He pointed at all the pictures tacked to my wall, sketched on napkins, the backs of envelopes, anything handy. “Empty rooms, hundreds of black, empty fucking rooms I”

I don’t remember what I mumbled next. Lude waved a bag of grass in front of me, said there was a party up Beachwood canyon, some castle loaded with hookers on X and a basement full of mead. It was interesting to see Lude still defending that line, but I just shook my head.

He turned to leave and then suddenly spun back around on his heels, producing from his pocket a flash of silver, cishlash-shhhhhhick, the wheel catching on the edge of his thumb, connecting sparks and kerosene … his old Zippo drawn like a .44 in some mythical western, drawn by the fella in the white hat, and as it turns out Lude was in fact dressed in white, a creamy linen jacket, which I guess means I would have to be wearing black, and come to think of it I was wearing black-black jeans, black t, black socks. This, however, was not a challenge. It was an offering, and yet one I knew I would not/could not accept.

Lude shrugged and blew out the flame, the immolating splash of brightness abruptly receding into a long gray thread climbing up to the ceiling before finally collapsing into invisible and untraceable corridors of chaos.

As he stepped out into the hall, a place with dull walls where a pink corpse occasionally referred to as a carpet stretches over and down the stairs, Lude told me why he’d come by in the first place: “Kyrie’s

boyfriend’s back in town and he’s looking for us, you in particular but since I’m the one who introduced you two, he’s also after me. Be careful. The guy’s a nut.” Lude hesitated. He knew Gdansk Man was the least of my worries but I guess he wanted to help.

“I’ll see you around Lude,” I mumbled.

“Get rid of it Hogs, it’s killing you.”

Then he tossed me his lighter and padded away, the dim light quickly transforming him into a shadow, then a sound, and finally a silence.

Maybe he was right.

Fly from the path.

 

 

 

I remember the first time I hadn’t and a rusty bar had taught me the taste of teeth. The second time I’d been smarter. I fled from the house, scrambled over the back brick wall like an alley cat, and sprinted across the overgrown lot. It took him awhile to find me but when he did, cornering me like some beast in the stairwell of a nearby shop, a chimney sweep business actually, Gallow & Sons, something like that, his focus was gone. Time had interceded. Dulled his wrath.

Raymond still hit me, an open handed slap to my left ear, pain answering the deafening quiet that followed, a distant thump then as my forehead skidded into the concrete wall.

Raymond was yelling at me, going on about the fights, my fights, at school, about my attitude, my wanderings and how he would kill me if I didn’t stop.

He had killed before, he explained. He could kill again.

I stopped seeing, something black and painful hissing into my head, gnawing at the bones in my cheeks, tears pouring down my face, though I wasn’t crying, my nose was just bleeding, and he hadn’t even broken it this time.

Raymond continued the lesson, his words ineffectually reverberating around me. He was trying to sound like one of his western heroes, doling out profound advice, telling me how I was only “cannon fodder” though he pronounced it like “father” and in a way that seemed to imply he was really referring to himself. I kept nodding and agreeing, while inside I began to uncover a different lesson. I recognized just how much a little fear had helped me-after all I wasn’t going to the hospital this time. All along I’d misread my contentious postures as something brave, my willingness to indulge in head-to-head confrontation as noble, even if I was only thirteen and this monster was a marine. I failed to see anger as just another way to cover fear. The bravest thing would be to accept my fear and fear him, really fear him, then heeding that instruction make a much more courageous choice: fly once and for all from his mad blister & rage, away from the black convolution of violence he would never untangle, and into the arms of some unknown tomorrow.

The next morning I told everyone my injuries had come from another schoolyard fight. I started to befriend guile, doped Raymond with compliments and self-deprecating stories. Made-up stories. I dodged, ducked, acquired a whole new vocabulary for bending, for hiding, all while beyond the gaze of them all, I meticulously planned my flight. Of course, I admit now that even though I tested well, I still would never have succeeded had I not received that September, only weeks later, words to find me, my mother’s words, tenderly catching my history in the gaps, encouraging and focusing my direction, a voice powerful enough to finally lift my wing and give me the strength to go.

Little did I know that by the time I managed to flee to Alaska and then to a boarding school, Raymond was already through. Coincidence gave an improbable curse new resonance. Cancer had settled on Raymond’s bones, riddling his liver and pancreas with holes. He had nowhere to run and it literally ate him alive. He was dead by the time I turned sixteen.

 

 

 

I guess one obvious option now is to just get rid of this thing, which if Lude’s right, should put an end to all my recent troubles. It’s a nice idea but it reeks of hope. False hope. Not all complex problems have easy solutions; so says Science (so warns Science); and so Trenton once warned me, both of us swilling beer in that idling hunk of rust and gold known simply as the Truck; but that had been in another time when there was still a truck and you could talk of solutions in peace without having any first hand knowledge of the problem; and Trenton is an old friend who doesn’t live here and who I’ve not mentioned before. [277-

__________________________]

My point being, what if my attacks are entirely unrelated, attributable in fact to something entirely else, perhaps for instance just warning shocks brought on by my own crumbling biology, tiny flakes of unknown chemical origin already burning holes through the fabric of my mind, dismantling memories, undoing even the strongest powers of imagination and reason? How then do you fly from that path?

 

 

 

As I recheck and rebolt the door-I’ve installed a number of extra locks -I feel with the turn of each latch a chill trying to crawl beneath the back of my skull. Putting on the chain only intensifies the feeling, hairs bristling, trying to escape the host because the host is stupid enough to stick around, missing the most obvious fact of all that what I hoped to lock out I’ve only locked in here with me.

 

 

 

And no, it hasn’t gone away.

 

 

 

The elusive it is still here with me.

 

 

 

But there’s very little I can do.

 

 

 

I wash the sweat off my face, do my best to suppress a shiver, can’t, return to the body, spread out across the table like papers-and let me tell you there’s more than just The Navidson Record lying there-bloodless and still but not at all dead, calling me to it, needing me now like a child, depending on me despite its age. After all, I’m its source, the one who feeds it, nurses it back to health-but not life, I fear-bones of bond paper, transfusions of ink, genetic encryption in xerox; monstrous, maybe inaccurate correlates, but nonetheless there. And necessary to animate it all? For is that not an ultimate, the ultimate goal? Not some heaven sent blast of electricity but me, and not me unto me, but me unto it, if those two things are really at all different, which is still to say-to state the obvious- without me it would perish.

Except these days nothing’s obvious.

There’s something else.

More and more often, I’ve been overcome by the strangest feeling that I’ve gotten it all turned around, by which I mean to say-to state the not-soobvious-without it would perish. A moment comes where suddenly everything seems impossibly far and confused, my sense of self derealized & depersonalized, the disorientation so severe I actually believe-and let me tell you it is an intensely strange instance of belief-that this terrible sense of relatedness to Zaxnpanô’s work implies something that just can’t be, namely that this thing has created me; not me unto it, but now it unto me, where I am nothing more than the matter of some other voice, intruding through the folds of what even now lies there agape, possessing me with histories I should never recognize as my own; inventing me, defining me, directing me until finally every association I can claim as my own-from Raymond to Thumper, Kyrie to Ashley, all the women, even the Shop and my studio and everything else-is relegated to nothing; forcing me to face the most terrible suspicion of all, that all of this has just been made up and what’s worse, not made up by me or even for that matter Zampanô.

Though by whom I have no idea.

 

 

 

Tonight’s candle number twelve has just started to die in a pool of its own wax, a few flickers away from blindness. Last week they turned off my electricity, leaving me to canned goods, daylight and wicks. (God knows why my phone still works.) Ants inhabit the corners.

Spiders prepare a grave. I use Lude’s Zippo to light another candle, the flame revealing what I’d missed before, on the front, etched in chrome, the all red melancholy King of Hearts-did Lude have any idea what he was really suggesting I do?-imagining then not one flame but a multitude, a million orange and blue tears cremating the body, this labor, and in that sudden burst of heat, more like an explosion, flinging the smoldering powder upon the room, a burning snow, falling everywhere, erasing everything, until finally it erases all evidence of itself and even me.

In the distance, I hear the roar, faint at first but getting louder, as if some super-heated billowing cloud has at last begun to descend from the peak of some invisible, impossibly high mountain peak, and rushing down at incredible speeds too, instantly enclosing and carbonizing everything and anyone in the way.

I consider retrieving it. What I recently bought. I may need it. Instead I recheck the measuring tapes. At least there’s no change there. But the roar keeps growing, almost unbearable, and there’s nowhere left to turn. Get it out of the trunk, I tell myself. Then the elusive “it” momentarily disappears.

“Get out,” I scream.

There’s no roar.

A neighbor’s having a party.

People are laughing.

Luckily they haven’t heard me or if they have they’ve sense enough to ignore me.

I wish I could ignore me.

There’s only one choice now: finish what Zampanô himself failed to finish. Re-inter this thing in a binding tomb. Make it only a book, and if that doesn’t help … retrieve what I’ve been hiding in the trunk, something I ordered three weeks ago and finally picked up today, purchased in Culver city at Martin B. Retting (11029 Washington Blvd)-one Heckler & Koch US? .45 ACP, kept for that moment when I’m certain nothing’s left. The thread has snapped. No sound even to mark the breaking let alone the fall. That long anticipated disintegration, when the darkest angel of all, the horror beyond all horrors, sits at last upon my chest, permanently enfolding me in its great covering wings, black as ink, veined in Bees’ purple. A creature without a voice. A voice without a name. As immortal as my life. Come here at long last to summon the wind.

 

 

 

One of the most excruciating and impudent works on the subject was written by Jeremy Flint. Regrettably this reprehensible concoction of speculation, fantasy, and repellent prose, also includes or refers to primary documents not available anywhere else. Through hard work, luck, or theft, Flint managed to [ ] across some of the notes and summations made by psychiatrist Nancy Tobe who for a br[ ]f period treated Holloway for [ ] depression:

 

Page one of Dr. Tobe’s notes contains only two words, capitalized, written in pencil, dead center on a page torn from a legal pad:

 

CONSIDERING SUICIDE.

 

[ ]he next two pages are for the most part illegible, with words such as “family” “father” “loyalty” “the old home” appearing every now and then in an otherwise dark scribble of ink.

However, Tobe’s typed summation following the first session offers a few [ ] details concerning Holloway’s life: “Despite his own achievement [sic] which range from Scuba Diving expeditions in the G[ ]Aqaba, leading climbers up the Matterhorn, organizing numerous [ ]as well as expeditions to the North and South Pole, Holloway feels inadequate and suffers from acute and chronic depression. Unable to see how much he has already accomplished, he constantly dwells on suicide. I am considering several anti-depressants [ ] and have recommended daily counseling.” [278-

Jeremy Flint’s Violent Seeds: The Holloway Roberts Myst [ ]y (Los[ ]

Angel[]: 2.13.61, 1996), p. 48.]

 

Flint goes on to cover the second visit which [ I much repeats his observations concerning the first. The third visit, however, gives up the first th[ ]rn.

 

In another series of notes Tobe describes Holloway’s first love: “At seventeen, he met a young woman named Eliz[]beth who he described to me as ‘Beautiful like a doe. Dark eyes. Brown hair. Pretty ankles, kinda skinny and weak.’ A short courtship ensued and for a brief time they were a couple.[ ] In Holloway’s XXXXXXX [279-These Xs indicate text was inked out-not burned.], the relationship ended because he didn’t [sic] the Varsity football squad. By his own admission he was never any good at ‘team sports.’ Her interest in him faded and she soon beg[ ] dating the starting tackle, leaving Holloway broken hearted with an increased sen[ ]e of [illegible] and inadequacy.” [280-Flint, p. 53.]

 

Nancy Tobe was a fairly green therapist and took far too many notes. Perhaps she felt that by studying these pages later, she could synthesize the material and present her patient with a solution. She had not yet real[ I that her notes or her solutions would mean absolutely no[ 1g. Patients must discover their peace for themselves. Tobe [ ] only a guide. The solution is personal. It is ironic then that had it not been for Tobe’s inexperience, the notes so intrinsic to achieving at least a fair understanding of Holloway’s inner torment would never have come into existence. People always demand experts, though sometimes they are fortunate enough to find a beginner. [281-Refer back to Chapter 5; footnote 67. – Ed.]

On the fourth visit, Tobe [ ] transcribed Holloway’s words verbatim. It is i[ ]possible to tell from Flint’s text whether Tobe actually record[ ]d Hollow[ ] or just wrote down his words from memory:

 

“I had already been out there for two days and then that morning, before dawn, I [ ] to the ridge and waited. I waited a long time and I didn’t move. It was cold. Real cold. Up till then everyone had been talking about the big buck but no one had seen anything. Not even a rabbit. Even though I’d been deer hunting a few times, I’d never actually shot a deer, but with, well the football team [ ], Elizabeth gone like that, I was gonna set it right by dropping that big buck.

“When the sun finally came out, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There he was, right across the valley, the [ ] buck tasting the air. [ ] I was a good shot. I knew what to do and I did it. I took my time, centered the reticule, let out my breath, squeezed slowly, and listened to that round as it cracked across the valley. I must have closed my eyes ’cause the next thing I saw the deer [ ] to the ground.

“Everyone heard my shot and [ ] Funny thing was, because of where I’d been, I was the last one to get there. My dad was waiting for me, just shaking his head, angry, and [ ]shamed.

“Look what you done boy,’ he said in a whisper but I could have heard that whisper across the whole valley. “Look what you done. [ ] shot yourself a doe.” [ ] I almost killed myself then but I guess I thought it couldn’t get any worse. [ ] that was the worst. Staring at that dead doe and then watching my dad turn his back on me and just walk away.” [282-Flint, p. 61.]

 

At this point Flint’s analysis heads into a fairly pejorative and unoriginal analysis of vi[ ]lence. He also makes a little t[ ] much of the word “doe” which Holloway used to describe his first love E[ ]zabeth. However since Flint is not the only one to make this association, it is worth at least a cursory gl[ ]nce.

“A vengeance transposed on the wild,” Flint calls Holloway’s killing of the doe, implying that to Holloway’s eye the doe had become Elizabeth. What Flint, however, fails to acknowledge is that with no certainty can he determine whether Hollow[ ]y described Elizabeth as a “doe” while he was going out with her [ ]r afterward. Holloway may have described her as such following the ill-fated hunting trip as a means to comp[ md his guilt, thus blaming himself not only for the death of the doe but for the death of love as well. In [ ] Flint’s suggestion of brimming violence may be nothing more than a gross renaming of self[ ]reproach.

Flint [ ] argue that Holloway’s aggressive nature was bound to su[]face in what he calls Navidson’s [ ]Hall of Amplification.”

 

Holloway’s latent suicidal urges [ ] when Wax and Jed insist on turning back. He sees this (incorrectly) as an admission of failure, another failure, th[]s incr[ ]sing his sense of inadequacy. Holloway had over the years developed enough psychic defense mechanisms to avoid the destructive consequences of this self determine[ ]f defeat.

What made this incident different from all the rest was the [ ]ou[ ]e.

In many ways, Navidson’s house functions like an immense isolation tank. Deprived of light, change in temperature and any sense of time, the individual begins to create his own sensory [ ], [I ] depen[ ]ng on the duration of his stay begins to project more and more of [ ] personality on those bare walls and vacant [ ]allways.

In Holloway’s case, the house as well as everything inside it becomes an exten[ ]n o himself, e.g. Jed and Wax become the psy[ ]logical demons responsible for his failue

[sic]. Thus his first act-to sh[ jt Wax-is in fact the beginning of a nearly operatic

s[ ]i[ ide. 283-IbXXXXXX SuiXXXXXXX [ XXXXXX] [284-

Inked out as well as burned.]

 

Certainly Flint [ ] not alone in emphasiz[ ]g the impl[ ]t violence i[

]suicide. In 1910 at []conference in Vienna, Wilhelm Stekel cla[ ]med [ ] “no one killed himself unless he[]either wanted to kill another person [ ]r wished a[]other’s death’s [285-Ned H. Cassem, “The Person C[]nfronting Death” in The Ne [ ]Harvard Guide to Psychiatry ed. Armand M. Nicholi, jr[ I M.D. (C[ ]brid[]e: Harvard University Press, 1 [188), p. 743.] [ ]1983 Buie and Maltzberger described s[ ]cide [ ]resulting from “two types of imperative impulses: murder[]us hate and an ur[ ]ent need to es[ ]ape suff[]ring.” [286-[ ]id., [ ] 744.]

Robert Jean Cam[ ]ell sums up t[ ]e psych[]dynamics of suic[ ]s as fol[ ]ws:

 

sui[ ] or a suicide atte[ ]t is seen most freque[ ]ly to be an agg[ ]sive

attack directed against a loved one or against society in ge[ ]al; in others, it may be a mis[ ]ded bid for attention or may be conceived of as a means of ef[ ]ting reunion with the id[ ]al love-object or m[ ]ther. That suicide [ In one sense a means of relea[ ]e for aggressive impulses is sup[ ]ed by the change of wartime suicide rates. In Wo[ ] War II, for example, rates among the participating nations fell, [ ]times by as much as 30%; but in ne[ ]l countries, the rates remained the same.

In involutional depressions and in the depr[ ]ed type of manic[]depressive psychosis, the following dynamic elements are of[ ]n clearly operative: the d[ ]essed patient loses the object that he depends upon for narcissistic s[ ]lies; in an atte[ ]t to force the object’s return, he regre[]es to the oral stage and inc[ ]porates (swallows up) the object, t[]us regressively identi[]ing with the object: the sadism originally directed against the desert[] object is ta[ ]en up by the patient’s sup[ ]go and is directed against the incorporated object, w[ ]h now lodges wit[ In the ego; suicide oc[ Is, not so much as an attempt on the ego’s part to esc[ ]pe the inexorable demands of the superego, but rather as a[ ]enraged attack on the in [ ]orated object in retaliation []or its having dese[ ]d the pati[ ] in the first place? [287-Robert J[ ]n Campbell, M.D[ ] Psychiatric

Dictionary (Oxford Univ[ ]ity Press, 1981) [ ] 608[]]

[It[ ]s added f[ ]r em[ ]asis]

 

Of course the anni[ ]il[ ]tion of [ ]self does not necessarily preclude the anni[ ]n of others. As is evident in sh[ ]ung sprees that culminate in suicide, an attack on the[ ]incorporated object” may extend first to [ ]attack on loved ones, co-work[ ] or even innocent by[ ]ders-a description, which ev[ ] Flint would agree, fits H[]Iloway.

Nevertheless th[ ]re are also numer[ Is objections to Flint[ ]s asser[

] that Hollow[ i’s suicidal disposition would within that place inevitabl[ ] lead to murder. The most enlight[ ]g refutation comes from Rosemary Enderheart w[ ]o not onl[ ]uts F[ ]in[ ] in his place but also reveals somet[ ]g new about Navidson’s history:

 

Where Flint’s argument makes the impulse to destroy others the result of an impulse to destroy the self, we only have to consider someone with similar self-destructive urges who when faced with similar conditions did not attempt to murder two individuals [ ]

 

SUBJECT: Will “Navy” Navidson

COMMENT: “I think too often too seriously a[]out killing myself.”

 

Will Navidson was no stranger to s[ ]ide. It sat on his shoulder more often than not: “It’s there before I sleep, there when I wake, it’s there a lot. But as Nietzsche said, ‘The t[]ought of suicide is a consolation. It can get one through many a bad night.” (See Dr. Hetterman Stone’s Confidential:

An In[ ]view With Karen Green 19[ ]

Navidson often viewed his achievements with disdain, considered his direction vague, and frequently assumed his desires would [ ]ever be met by life [ ]o

matter how f[ ]ly he lived it. However, unlike H[ ]ioway, he converted his d[ ]pair into art. He [ ]lied on his eye and film to bring meaning to virt[ ] everything he e[]count[ led, and though he paid the high price of lost interaction, he frequently conceived beautiful instances worthy of our time; what Robert Hughes famously referred to [ ] “Navidson’s little windows of light.”

Flint would [ ]test [ ] while both Holloway and [ ]vidson camped in the same dale of depression, they were very dif[ ]rent in[ ]viduals: Navidson was merely a photographer while, to quote F[ ]nt “Holloway was a hunter who [ I crossed the line into territories of aggress[]on,”

Flint sh[ ]ld have done his [ ]omework, if he thought Navidson never crossed that line.

In the 70’s Navidson became a career p[ ]journ[ ]list and ultimately a famous one but at the begin[ ]ing of that de[]ade he wasn’t carrying a Nikon. He

was manning an M-60 with the 1St cav[ ]y at Rock Island East where he would eventually

receive a Bronze

Star for saving the l[]ves of two [ ] soldiers he dra[]ged from a burning personnel carrier. He[]ver, no longer has the medal. He sent it along with a [ ]oto of h[]s first kill to Richard Nixon to pr[]test the war. [288-Rosemary End[ ]art’s How Have You Who Loved Ever Loved A Next Time? (New

York: Times Books, 19[ ] p. 1432-1436).]

 

Unfortun[ ]ely when Navi[]son stumbled upon Hol[ l’s H[ ]8 tapes, he had no idea their contents would [ ]spire such a heated and lasting debate over what l[]rked in the []art of that p[]ace. Despite the radically differ[]nt behavior pattern[] demonst[]ated by the hunter from Me[ ]mo[ ], Wi[ ]sin and the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist[ ]in the house, The Hollow[ I Tape revealed that e[ ]ther one could just as easily have been devo[]r[]d in the same way. The gli[ ]se rescued from that t[ ]r[ ]b[]le [lark warned that while paths might differ, the end might no[ ].

 

 

 

9.

The Hol[ ]y Tape

 

“I’m lost. Out of food. Low on water. No sense of direction. Oh god…[

]

So be[]ins The Holloway Tape-Holloway leering into the camera, a backdrop of wall, final moments in a man’s life. These are jarring pieces, coherent only in the way they trace a de[]line.

 

Ove[ ]view:

 

· The opening card displays a quote from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: “The dreamer in his corner wrote off the world in a detailed daydream that destroyed, one by one, all the objects in the world.” [289-Le rêveur, dans son coin, a rayë le monde en une reverie minutieuse qui détruit un a un tous les objets du monde.]

· There are thirteen parts. [ ]

· They are separated by 3-seconds of white frame. In the upper n[]ht hand corner a number or word tracks the chronology, starting with “First,” continuing with “2” thr[ ] “12” and ending with “Last.” The typeface is the same Janson as issued by Anton Janson in Leipzig between 1660 and 1687. · These insertions were designed by Navidson. They [ ] and in no way alter the original segments.

 

Navidson reproduces Holloway’s tape in its entirety.

 

Who can forget Holloway’s grizzled features as he []ums the camera on hi[ ]self?

 

No comfort now. No hope of rescue or return.

“I deserve this. I brought this all on me. But I’m s[] sorry. I’m so[ ]rry,” he says in Part 2. “But what does that matter? I shot them. I shot both of [ ]em. [Long pause] Half a canteen of water’s all I’ve left. [Another pause] Shouldn’t have let them get []way then I [ ]have returned, told everyone they g[ ]lost. . . lost.” And with that last utterance, Holloway’s eyes reveal who here is real[]y lost.

Despite Holloway’s undeniable guilt, not since Floyd Collins became trapped in the Kentucky Sand Cave back in 1925 has there been such a terrible instance of suffering. Co[]lins remained alive for fourteen days and nights before he died. Despite the efforts of many men to free him from the squeeze, Collins never saw the light of day again. He only felt the ink[ ]darkness and cold [ ] in on him, bind him, kill him. All he could do was rave about angels in chariots and liver and onions and chicken sandwiches.

[290- ]

Unlike Floyd Collins, no straight jacket of mud and rock holds Holloway. He can still move around, though where he moves leads nowhere. By the time he begins to video tape his final hours, he has [ iready recognized the complete hopelessness of the situation. Repeatin[] his identity seems the only mantra [ ]offers any consolation: “Holloway Roberts. Born in M[ ]om[ ]sin. Bachelor’s from U. Mass.” [291-In the epil[]gue of her bo[]k Fear Mantras (Cambridge: Harvard Un[ ]ress, 1995) Alicia Hoyle disc[ Ises Hollow[ ]y’s l[]ck of fear training: “He didn[]t even pos[]es[] the ancient Hak-Kin-Dak man[ Ira” (p. [ 16). Earlier on she prov[]des a transl Ition of this hunter’s utter[lnce ([ 1 26): “I am not a fool. I a[] wise. I will run from my fear, I w[]ll out distance my f[ ]r, then I will hide fr[ I my fear, I w[]ll wait f[]r my fear, I will let m[] fear run past mel] then I will follow my fear, I will track [ ] fear until I c[]n approach m[ lear in complete silence[] th[]n I will strike at m[] fear, I will charge my fe[ 1. I will grab h[]ld of my fear, I will sink my ft]ngers into my [lar, t[]en I will bite my fear, I w[]1l tear the thro[]t of my fear, I will bre[]k the neck of my fear, I wi[ I drink the blood of my fear, I [ ill gulp the flesh o[ ]my fear[] I will crush th[] bones of my fliarl land I will savor m[] fear, I will sw[]llow my fear, all []f it, and then I will digest []y fear unt[]l I can do nothing else but shit out my fear. In this w[]y will I be mad[] stronger[ ]] It is almost as if he believes preserving his identity on video tape can somehow hold what he is powerless to prevent: those endless contours of dark[]ess stealing the Hollow[ ] from himself. “I’m Holloway Roberts.” he insists.

“Born in Menomome, Wi[ ]n. Bachelor’s from U. Mass. Explorer, professional hunter,[ ]eth. [Long pause] This is not right. It’s not fair. I don’t

[ ]serve to die.”

Regrettably, the limited amount of light, the [ ]uality of tape, not to mention the constant oscillation between sharp and blurry (compliments of the Hi 8’s automatic focus)[ ] barely c[ ]ure Holloway’s bearded face let [lone anything else-not to imply that there exists an ‘else’. Mainly a backdrop of darkness, which, as the police observed, could have [ len shot in any lightless room or closet. [ ]

In other words, the immen[ ]ity of Navidson’s house eludes the frame. It exists only in Holloway’s face, fear etc[ ] deeper and deeper into his features, the cost of dying paid out with p[]un[]s of flesh and e[]ch s[ ]allow breath. It is painful[ ] obvious the creature Holloway hunts has already begun to feed on him.

Parts 4[ ]6,[ ],1O & 1[] centre on Holloway’s reiteration of his identity. Part 3, however, is different. It only lasts four seconds. With eyes wide open, voice hoarse, lips split and bleeding, Hol[ ]y barks “I’m not alone.” Part 5 fo[]lows up with, “There’s something here. I’m sure of it now.” Part

8 with: “It’s following me. No, it’s stalking me.” And Part 9:

“But it won’t strike. It’s just out there waiting. I don’t know what for. But it’s near now, waiting for me, waiting for something. I don’t know why it doesn’t [ ] Oh god … Holloway Roberts.

Menomonie, Wisconsin. [chambering a round in his rifle] Oh god[ ].”

[292-Collette Barnholt (American Cinematographer, [ ]ber 2, [ ] 49) has argued that the existence of Part 12 is an impossibility, claiming the framing and lighting, though only slightly different from earlier and later parts, indicate the presence of a recording device other than Holloway’s. Joe

Willis (Film Comment, [ ] p. 115) has pointed out that Barnholt’s complaint concerns those prints released after 199[1. Apparently Part 12 in all prints before [ ] and after 1993 show a view consistent with the other twelve. And yet even though the spectre of digital manipulation has been raised in The Navidson Record, to this day no adequate explanation has managed to resolve the curious enigma concerning Part 12.]

It is interesting to compare Holloway’s behavior to Tom’s. Tom addressed his [ lagon with sarcasm, referring to i[] as “Mr. Monster” while describing himself as unpalatable. Humor proved a p[]werful psychological sh[]e[]d. Holloway has his rifle but it proves the weaker of the two. Cold metal and gunpowder offer him ver[] little internal calm. Never[ ]less[ ]

 

 

 

Of course, Part 13 or rather “Last” of The Holloway Tape initiates the largest and perhaps most popular debate surrounding The Navidson Record. Lantern C. Pitch a[]d Kadina Ashbeckie stand on opposite ends of the spectrum, one favoring an actual monster, the other opting for a ratio[]al explan[]tion. Neither one, however, succeeds in [ ] a definitive interpretation.

Last spring, Pitch in the Pelias Lecture Ser[ ]es announced: “Of course there’s a beast! And I assure you our belief or disbelief makes veiy little difference to that thing!” [293-Also see Incarnation Of Spirit Things and Lo[ ] by Lantern C. Pitch (New York: Resperine Press, 1996) for a look at the perils of disbelief.] In American Photo (May 1996, p. 154) Kadina Ashbeckie wr[]te: “Death of light gives birth to a creature-darkness few can accept as pure[]absence. Thus despite rational object[]ons, technology’s failure is over[]un by the onslaught of myth.” [294-Also see Kadina Ashbeckie, “Myth’s Brood” The Nation, [ ] September, 19[ ]]

[ ]

Except the Vandal known as Myth always slaughters Reason if she falters. [ ] Myth is the tiger stalking the herd. Myth is Tom’s [ ]r. Monster. Myth is Hol[ ]y’s beast. Myth is the Minotaur [295-At the heart of the labyrinth waits the Mi[ ]taur and like the Minotaur of myth it name is-[ Chiclitz treated the maze as trope for psychic concealment, it excavation resulting in (tragic [ ] reconciliation. But if in Chiclitz’s eye the Minotaur war a son imprisoned by a father’s shame, is there then to Navidson’s eye an equivalent misprision of the [ ] in the depths of that place? And for that matter does there exist that chance to reconcile the not known with the desire for its antithesis?

 

As Kym Pale wrote:

Navidon is not Minos. He did not build-the labyrinth. He only d[

]covered it. The father of that place-be it Minos, Daedalus, [ ], St. Mark’s God, another father who swore “Begone! Relieve me from the sight of your detested form.,” a whole paternal line her following a tradition of dead sons -vanished long ago, leaving the creat[ ]e within all the time in history to forget, to grow, to consume the consequences of its own terrible fate. And if there once was a time when a [ ] slain[ ] that time has long since passed. “Love the lion!” “Love the lion.” But love alone does not make you Androcles. And for your stupidity your head’s crushed like a grape in its jaws. [296-Pale [ ] allusion to the li[ ] here [ ]. [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.] Reconciliation within is personal and possible; reconciliation without is probable. The creature does not know you, does not fear you, does not remember you, does not even see you. Be careful, beware [ ] [297-See Kym Pale’s “Navidson and the Lion” Buzz, v [ ]ber, 199[ ], p. [ ]. Also revisit Traces of Death] [298-Whether you’ve noticed or not-and if you have, well bully for you-Zampanô has attempted to systematically eradicate the “Minotaur” theme throughout The Navidson Record. Big deal, except while personally preventing said eradication, I discovered a particularly disturbing coincidence. Well, what did I expect, serves me right, right? I mean that’s what you get for wanting to turn The Minotaur into a homie… no homie at all.]

 

Myth is Redwood. [299-See Appendix B.]And in Navidson’s house that faceless black i[ ] many myths incarnate.

“Ce ne peut être que lafin du monde, en avançant,” Rimbaud dryly remarked. Suffice it to say, Holloway does not [ ]French for his end. Instead he props up his []i[]eo camera, ignites a magnesium flare, and crosses the room to the far end, where he slumps in the corner to wait. Sometimes he mumbles [ ]hi[lself, sometimes he screams obscenities [ ]to the void: “Bullshit! Bullshit! Just try and get me you motherfucker!” And then as the minutes creak by, his energy dips. “[ ] I don’t want to die, this [ ]” words coming out like a sigh-sad and lost. He lights another flare, tosses it toward the camera, then pushes the rifle against his chest and shoots himself. [ ]Jill Ramsey Pelterlock wrote, “In that place, the absence of an end finally became his own end.” [300-Jill Ra[ ]y [ ]t[ ]ock’s “No

Kindness” St. Pa[ ]. November 21, 1993.]

Unfortunately, Holloway is not entire[ ] s[ ]ssful. For exactly two minutes and 28 seconds he groans and twitches in his own blood, until fm[ ] he slip[] into shock and presumably death.301 Then for 46 seconds the

 

 

 

301Quite a few people have speculated that Chad-thanks to the perverse acoustic properties of the house-probably heard Holloway commit suicide. See page 320. Consider Rafael Geethtar ServagiG’s Th Language of Tenure (New York: St. Martin’s Press, lQ’?5), p. 13 where he likens Chad’s experience to those of Roman’s listening to Perilaus devilish chamber: “This unusual work of art war a life size replica of a bull. cast in solid brass, hollowed -out, with a trapor in the back, through which victims were placed. A fire was then lit beneath the belly slowly cooking anyone inside. A series of musical pipes in the ball’s head translated the tortured screams into strange mf)sc. Supposedly the tyrant Phalaris killed the inventor Perilaus by placing him inside his own creation[ ] [302-Can’t help thinking of old man Z here and those pipes in his head working overtime; alchemist to his own secret anguish; lost in an art of suffering. Though what exactly was the fire that burned him?

As I strain now to see past The Navidson Record, beyond this strange filigree of imperfection, the murmur of Zampanö’s thoughts, endlessly searching, reaching, but never quite concluding, barely even pausing, a ruin of pieces, gestures and quests, a compulsion brought on by- well that’s precisely it, when I look past it all I only get an inkling of what tormented him. Though at least if the fire’s invisible, the pain’s not-mortal and guttural, torn out of him, day and night, week after week, month after month, until his throat’s stripped and he can barely speak and he rarely sleeps. He tries to escape his invention but never succeeds because for whatever reason, he i compelled, day and night, week after week, month after month, to continue building the very thing responsible for his incarceration.

Though is that really right?

I’m the one whose throat is stripped. I’m the one who hasn’t spoken in days. And if I sleep I don’t know when anymore.

 

 

a

A few hours drift by. I broke off to shuffle some feeling back into my knees and try to make sense of the image now stuck inside my head. It’s been haunting me for a good hour now and I still don’t know what to make of it. I don’t even know where it came from.

Zampanô is trapped but where may surprise you. He’s trapped inside me, and what’s more he’s fading, I can hear him, just drifting off, consumed within, digested I suppose, dying perhaps, though in a different way, which is to say-yes, “Thou sees me not old man, but I know thee well”-though I don’t know who just said that, all of which is unfinished business, a distant moon to sense, and not particularly important especially since his voice has gotten even fainter, still echoing in the chambers of my heart, sounding those eternal tones of grief, though no longer playing the pipes in my head.

I can see myself clearly. I am in a black room. My belly is brass and I am hollow. I am engulfed in flames and suddenly very afraid.

How am I so transformed? Where, I wonder, is the Phalaris responsible for lighting this fire now sweeping over my sides and around my shoulders? And if Zampanô’s gone-and I suddenly know in my heart he is very, very gone-why does strange music continue to fill that black room? How is it possible the pipes in my head are still playing? And who do they play for?

 

[]am[ ]reveals nothing else but his still body. Nearly a minute of s[

]ence. In fact, the length is so absurd it alm[]st appears as if Navidson

forgot to trim this section. After all there is nothing more to [ ] gained from this scene. Holloway is dead. Which is [ ]act[] when it happ[ ]ns.

The whole thing clocks in under tw[ ] seconds. Fingers of blackness slash across the lighted wall and consume Holloway. And even if[

I loses sight of everything, the tape still records that terrible giuwl, this time without a doubt, insi[]e the room.

Was it an actual cr[ ]t[ ]e? [303-Creature is admittedly 4 ]pretty clumsy description. Offspring of the Greek Koroc meaning “gurfeit’, the implication of fullness provides a misleading irnpreion of the minol lr,4nfact all references to the Minotaurf ]self rnut be viewed a uiy representative. Obviou1y, wtiii Holloway encounters pointed[]y not half man] half bull. [ ] something other, forever inhabiting[ ], unreadable [ ]nranting undeserved ontoloeical bnefit [ ]]

Or just the flare sputtering out? And what about the sound? Was it made by a be[ I or jus[ ] a[]other reconfig[]ration of that absurd space; like the Khumbu Icefall; product of [ ]ome peculiar physics?

It seems erroneous to assert, like Pitch, that this creat[ ]e had actual teeth and claws of b[ ]e (which myth for some reason [ I requires). [ ]t d[ ]d have claws, they were made of shadow and if it did have te[]th, they were made of darkness. Yet even as such the [ ] still stalked Holl[]way at every corner until at last it did strike, devouring him, even rollring, the last thing heard, the sound []f Holloway ripped out of existence. [As John Hollander [

] “It would annihilate us all to see/ The huge shape of our being; mercifully? [ ) offers us issue and oblivion” thus echoing one more time, though not for the last time, [ ]endlessly[] in an ever unfolding [nd yet never opening sequence, [ ] lost on stone trails]]

 

 

 

ESCAPE

 

[304-I’ve no decent explanation why Zampanô calls this section “The Escape” when in footnote 265 he refers to it as “The Evacuation.” All I can say is that this error strikes me as similar to his earlier waffling over whether to call the living room a “base camp” or “command post.”

 

10.

Unlike Navidson, Karen does not need to watch the tape twice. She immediately starts dragging suitcases and boxes out into the rain. Reston helps.

Navidson does not argue but recognizes that their departure is going to take more than a couple of minutes.

“Go to a motel if you want,” he tells Karen. “I’ve still got to pack up all the video and film.”

At first Karen insists on remaining outside in the car with the children, but eventually the lure of lights, music, and the murmur of familiar voices proves too much, especially when faced with the continuing thunderstorm howling in the absence of dawn.

Inside she discovers Tom has attempted to provide some measure of security. Not only has he bolted the four locks on the hallway door, he has gleefully established a rebarbative barricade out of a bureau, china cabinet, and a couple of chairs, crowning his work with the basinet from the foyer.

Whether a coincidence or not, Cassady Roulet has gone to great lengths to illustrate how Tom’s creation resembles a theatre:

 

Note how the china cabinet serves as a backdrop, the opposing chairs as wings, the bureau, of course, providing the stage, while the basinet is none other than the set, a complicated symbol suggesting the action of the approaching play. Clearly the subject concerns war or at the very least characters who have some military history. Furthermore the basinet in the context of the approaching performance has been radically altered from its previous meaning as bastion or strong hold or safe. Now it no longer feigns any authority over the dark beyond. It inherently abdicates all pretense of significance. [305-Cassady Roulet’s Theater in Film (Burlington: Barstow

Press, 1994), p. 56. Roulet also states in his preface: “My friend Diana

Neetz at The World of interiors likes to imagine that the stage is set for

Lear, especially with that October storm continuing to boom outside the Navidson’s home.”]

 

Karen appreciates Tom’s work on this last line of defense, but she is most touched by the way he comically clicks his heals and presents her with the colours-blue, yellow, red, and green-four keys to the hallway. An attempt to offer Karen some measure of control, or at least sense of control, over the horror beyond the door.

It is impossible to interpret her thanks as anything but heartfelt. Tom offers a clownish salute, winning a smile from both Chad and Daisy who are still somewhat disoriented from having been awakened at five in the morning and dragged out into the storm. Only when they have disappeared upstairs does Tom lift up the basinet and pull out a bottle of bourbon.

A few minutes later, Navidson enters the living room carrying a load of video tape and film. In all the commotion following his return, he has not yet had a spare moment to spend with his brother. That all changes, however, when he finds Tom on the floor, his head propped up against the couch, enjoying his drink.

“Knock it off,” Navidson says swiftly, grabbing the alcohol from his brother. “Now is not the time to go on a binge.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“Tom, you’re lying on the floor.”

Tom takes a quick glance at himself, then shakes his head: “Navy, you know what Dean Martin said?”

“Sure. You’re not drunk if you can lie down without holding on.” “Well look,” Tom mutters, lifting his arms in the air. “No hands.” Setting down the box he is carrying, Navidson helps his twin up.

“Here, let me make you some coffee.”

Tom gives a noticeable sigh as he at last leans on his brother. Not till now has he been able to really face the crippling grief Navidson’s absence had caused him or for that matter address the enormous relief he now feels knowing his twin did indeed survive. We watch as tears well in his eyes.

Navidson puts his arm around him: “Come on.”

“At least when you’re drunk,” Tom adds, quickly wiping the wet from his face. “You’ve always got the floor for your best friend. Know why?”

“It’s always there for you,” Navidson answers, his own cheeks suddenly flushing with emotion as he helps his weaving brother to the kitchen. “That’s right,” Tom whispers. “Just like you.”

 

 

 

Reston is the one who hears it first. He is alone in the living room packing up all the radios, when from behind the hallway door comes a faint grinding. It sounds miles away, though still powerful enough to cause the basinet on the bureau to tremble. Slowly the noise gathers itself, growing louder and louder, getting closer and closer, something unheralded and unfamiliar contained in its gain, evolving into a new and already misconstrued sort of menace. Reston’s hands instinctively grab the wheels of his chair, perhaps expecting this new evolution within the chambers of the house to shatter the hallway door. Instead it just dies, momentarily relinquishing its threat to silence.

Reston exhales.

And then from behind the door comes a knock. Followed by another one.

 

 

 

Navidson is outside loading a box of Hi 8 cassettes into the car when he sees the upstairs lights in the house go out one by one. A second later Karen screams. The pelting rain and occasional crack of thunder muffles the sound, but Navidson instinctively recognizes the notes of her distress. As Billy described the scene in The Reston Interview:

 

Navidson’s dehydrated, hasn’t eaten shit for two days, and now he’s dragging supplies out to the car in the middle of a thunderstorm. Every step he takes hurts. He’s dead on his feet, in total survival mode, and all it takes is her voice. He drops everything. Lost some rolls of film to water damage too. Just tears through the house to get her.

 

Due to the absence of any exterior cameras, all experiences outside the house rely on personal accounts. Inside, however, the wall mounted Hi 8s continue to function.

Karen is upstairs placing her hair brushes, perfume, and jewelry box in a bag, when the bedroom begins to collapse. We watch the ceiling turn from white to ash-black and drop. Then the walls close in with enough force to splinter the dresser, snap the frame of the bed, and hurl lamps from their nightstands, bulbs popping, light executed.

Right before the bed is sheared in half, Karen succeeds in scrambling into the strange closet space intervening between parent and child. Conceptual artist Martin Quoirez observes that this is the first time the house has “physically acted” upon inhabitants and objects:

 

Initially, distance, dark, and cold were the only modes of violence. Now suddenly, the house offers a new one. It is impossible to conclude that Holloway’s actions altered the physics of that space. Nevertheless, it is impossible to deny that its nature seems to have changed. [306-Martin

Quoirez on The L. Patrick Morning Show, KRAD, Cleveland, Ohio, October 1, 1996.]

 

Karen avoids the threat in her bedroom only to find herself in a space rapidly enlarging, the size swallowing up all light as well as Daisy’s barely audible cries for help.

The darkness almost immediately crushes Karen. She collapses. Of course, there are no cameras at this point to show her lost in seizure. That history relies once again on The Reston Interview:

 

Navy said it felt like he was running into the jaws of some big beast about to chomp down and as you saw later on, that’s- that’s exactly what that ugly fucker finally did.

[Reston chokes back tears]

Sorry… I’m sorry … Awww fuck it still gets me.

Anyway, Navy finds her hyperventilating on the floor. He scoops her up – supposedly she calmed down as soon as she was in his arms – and then all of a sudden that growl starts up again, rolling in like bad thunder.

[Reston shifts in his wheelchair; takes a sip of water]

Well, he runs out of there. Back through their bedroom. Barely makes it through. The door frame came down like a guillotine. Hammered Navy’s shoulder and grazed Karen in the head with enough force she lost consciousness.

I tell you Navy’s one tough fucker. He kept going, down the stairs, and finally outside. And then Daisy stopped screaming.

 

The next clip of Hi 8 shows Navidson reentering the house, shouting for Daisy and Chad as he sprints down the hail, heading toward the stairs in order to get back up to the children’s bedroom. Then suddenly the floor drops away and he is sliding straight into the living room where he would have died had he not succeeded with one desperate flail to grab hold of the handle to one of the doors.

The Reston Interview:

 

Me, I had been trying to get the hell out of there. The knock had turned into this heavy awful pounding. The hallway door was still bolted shut and barricaded but I just knew all hell was about to break lose.

In fact, my first thought was that it was Holloway, though that hammering was awful hard. I mean the whole wall shuddered with every hit, and I’m thinking if that is Holloway he’s changed and I don’t need to reacquaint myself with this new and improved version. Especially not now.

[Reston repositions his wheelchair slightly]

My chair was still pretty messed up so I couldn’t move as fast as I normally do. Then all of a sudden, the pounding stops. Just like that. Silence. No banging, no growl, nothing. And boy, I don’t know how to describe it but that silence was more powerful than any sound, any call. I had to answer it, that silence, I mean, I had to respond. I had to look.

So I turn around-you can see some of this on the video-the door’s still closed and the stuff Tom put together is still in front, though the-whatyou-call-it, the helmet, has already fallen to the floor. Then the china cabinet and bureau start to sink. Slowly at first, inch by inch, and then a little faster. My chair begins to slide. I wedge the brakes, grip the wheels. At first I don’t understand what’s happening until it dawns on me that it’s the floor beneath the barricade that’s dropping.

That’s when I twisted around and lunged for the foyer. No chance I could have wheeled out of there. I barely managed to reach the door frame and get enough of a purchase to hang on. My chair though slipped out from under me and just rolled, end over end, down that slope.

The floor must have sunk six, seven feet. Way below the baseboard, like the foundation had given way, except there was no fucking foundation. You expected to see cement but all there was was blackness.

All of it-the china cabinet, bureau, coffee table, chairs-just slid down that floor and vanished over the edge. Navy would have vanished too if he hadn’t got hold of that door lever.

 

Thus the devouring of one theatre of the absurd leads to another. And as is true in both cases, no amount of monologue, costume, or wit can defer the insistent gravity of that void. As theatre critic Tony K. Rich once remarked: “The only option is a quick exit, stage left, and I’d also advise a cab to the airport.” [307-Tony K. Rich’s “Tip The Porter” The Washington Post, v. 119, December 28, 1995, p. C-I, column 4.]

 

The exit, however, is not so easily achieved. The Reston Interview again:

 

Well I started yelling for help. You have to remember, my hands were all messed up from my trip down there. My grip was failing. If Navy didn’t get to me fast, I was going to fall.

So Navy starts swinging that door he’s hanging on, back and forth, until he can kind of swing, kind of scramble to where he’s about three feet away from me. Then he takes this deep breath, gives me half a smile, and jumps.

That was the longest moment of them all, and then it was over. He was holding onto the door frame, hauling himself into the foyer, and then dragging me to safety. And all that with a messed up shoulder too.

On tape, it looks like Navy just hopped over to me and that was that. But boy the way I remember it, his jump took forever.

 

Though poorly lit with even poorer resolution, we can see in the video how Navidson uses the door to get in range of Reston, despite the fact that the hinges are about to give way. Luckily, he manages to jump free just as the door wrenches loose and tumbles into oblivion. The whole thing does not last more than a handful of seconds, but like Reston, Navidson notes how this brief bit of action still leaves a lasting impression. From The Last Interview:

 

A few moments ended up feeling like hours. I was just dangling on that brass handle, not daring to look, though of course I did. The floor was steeper than the Lhotse Face, dropping right off into that familiar chill. I knew I had to get to Billy. I just hadn’t figured out how yet. Then I heard the ripping. The hinges weren’t supporting my weight.

So I did about the only thing I could think of: I swung the door left, right, then left, and right one more time which closed the gap to a few feet from where Reston was hanging.

Just as I made my jump, I heard the first hinge and then the second hinge tear free of the frame. That sound stretched the seconds into hours.

[Pause]

Once I made it though, everything sped up again. The next thing I knew we were both out on the front lawn getting soaked by the rain.

You know when I finally went back to the house to retrieve the Hi 8s, I couldn’t believe how quickly it had all happened. My leap looks so easy and that

darkness doesn’t seem dark at all. You can’t see the hollowness in it, the cold. Funny how incompetent images can sometimes be.

 

Those last words in particular may sound a bit glib, especially coming from such an esteemed photographer. Nevertheless, in spite of numerous Hi 8s mounted all over the house, Navidson is right: all the images recorded during this segment are inadequate.

Too bad Navidson never holds a camera. The entire sequence covering the escape from the house is reminiscent of something taken off of a cheap surveillance system in a local bank or 7-Eleven. The clips are impartial renderings of a space. If the action slips past the frame, the camera does not care enough to adjust its perspective. It cannot see what matters. It cannot follow.

Only the interviews inform these events. They alone show us how the moments bruise and bleed.

 

 

 

12.

Outside rain overwhelms everything, drenching the street, filling the gutters, stripping trees of fall leaves. Reston sits on the grass, soaked to the bone but refusing to take shelter. Karen is still unconscious, lying in the car exactly where Navidson put her.

Daisy and Chad, however, are still missing.

So for that matter is Tom.

Navidson is trying to decide how he should reenter the house when the sound of shattering glass draws him to the backyard. “It was definitely a window breaking” Reston remembers. “And when Navy heard it, he just took off running.”

 

 

 

Reston recalls watching Navidson disappear around the house. He had no idea what would happen next. It was bad enough that he was without his wheelchair. Then he heard Daisy scream, a high-pitched burst bright enough to pierce the hard patter of the storm, followed by shouts, and then something Reston had never heard before: “It was like an immense gasp, only very, very loud.”

Reston was squinting in the rain, when he suddenly saw a shadow separate from the tree line: “By then dawn had begun to creep in but the storm clouds were still keeping the day pretty dark.” Reston immediately assumed it was Navidson but then as the figure got closer he could see it was much smaller than his friend. “A strange walk too. Not fast at all but very deliberate. There was even something threatening about it.”

Chad just nodded at Reston as he passed by him and climbed into the car. He never said a thing either, just sat down next to his mother and waited for her to wake up.

Chad had seen what had happened but had no words to describe it. Reston knew if he wanted to find out, he would have to drag himself toward the back of the house, which is exactly what he started to do.

 

 

 

Daisy had stopped screaming because of Tom.

Somehow Tom had managed to make his way through the heaving house to the upstairs hallway where he began to close in on the cries of the terrified five year old. What no one knew then was that Chad had already snuck outside, preferring the solitude of the early morning to all the packing and panic curdling inside.

As we can see, Tom finally finds Daisy frozen in the shadows. Without a word, he sweeps her up in his arms and races back down to the first floor, avoiding the precipitous drop into the living room-the way Navidson had gone-by dashing instead toward the rear of the house.

The whole place keeps shuddering and shaking, walls cracking only to melt back together again, floors fragmenting and buckling, the ceiling suddenly rent by invisible claws, causing moldings to splinter, water pipes to rupture, electrical wires to spit and short out. Worse, the black ash of below, spreads like printer’s ink over everything, transforming each corner, closet, and corridor into that awful dark. Then Tom and Daisy’s breath begins to frost.

In the kitchen, Tom throws a stool through the window. We hear Tom saying: “Okay Daisy girl, make it through here and you’re home free.” Which might have been just that simple had the floor not taken on the characteristics of giant conveyor belt, suddenly drawing them away from their only escape.

Cradling Daisy in his arms, Tom starts running as fast as he can, trying to out race the shock of the void yawning up behind them. Ahead, Navidson appears in the window.

Tom pushes harder, edging closer and closer, until finally as he gets within reach, he holds Daisy out to Navidson who despite the fragments of glass scratching long bloody lines along his forearms, immediately rips her free of the house and into safety.

Tom, however, has found his limit. Badly out of breath, he stops running and drops to his knees, clutching his sides and heaving for air. The floor carries him backwards ten or fifteen feet more and then for no apparent reason stops. Only the walls and ceiling continue their drunken dance around him, stretching, bending, even tilting.

When Navidson returns to the window, he cannot believe his brother is standing still. Unfortunately, as Tom demonstrates, whenever he takes one step forward, the floor drags him two steps back. Navidson quickly begins to crawl through the window, and oddly enough the walls and ceiling almost instantly cease their oscillations.

What happens next happens so fast it is impossible to realize just how brutal the closure was before it is already over. Only the after-effects create an image commensurate with the shutter like speed with which those walls snapped shut and shattered all the fingers in both of Tom’s outstretched hands. Bones “like bread sticks” (Reston’s words) [308-Due to the darkness and insufferable limitations of the Hi 8s, the chaotic bits of tape representing these events must be supplemented with Billy’s narration. Navidson, however, does not discuss any of these horrific moments in The

Last Interview. Instead he makes Reston the sequence’s sole authority. This is odd, especially since Reston saw none of it. He is only recounting what Navidson told him himself. The general consensus has always been that the memory is simply too painful for Navidson to revisit. But there is another possibility: Navidson refuses to abandon the more perspicacious portion of his audience. By relying on Reston as the sole narrative voice, he subtly draws attention once again to the question of inadequacies in representation, no matter the medium, no matter how flawless. Here in particular, he mockingly emphasizes the fallen nature of any history by purposefully concocting an absurd number of generations. Consider: 1. Tom’s broken hands –> 2. Navidson’s perception of Tom’s hurt — > 3. Navidson’s description of Tom’s hurt to Reston –> 4. Reston’s re-telling of Navidson’s description based on Navidson’s recollection and perception of Tom’s actual hurt. A pointed reminder that representation does not replace. It only offers distance and in rare cases perspective.] now jut out through the flesh. Blood covers his arms, as well as pours from his nose and ears.

For a moment, Tom looks like he is going to slip into shock as he stares at his mutilated body.

“Goddamn it Tom, run!” Navidson shouts.

And Tom tries, though his effort only sweeps him farther away from his brother. This time when he stops, he knows he has no chance.

“Hang on, I’m coming to get you,” Navidson yells, as he squeezes himself all the way onto the kitchen counter.

“Aw Christ,” Tom mutters.

Navidson looks up.

“What?”

Whereupon Tom disappears.

In less time than it takes for a single frame of film to flash upon a screen, the linoleum floor dissolves, turning the kitchen into a vertical shaft. Tom tumbles into the blackness, not even a scream flung up behind him to mark his fall, Navidson’s own scream ineffectually scratching after him, his twin, stolen and finally mocked in silence, not even the sound of Tom hitting the bottom, which is how it might have remained had not some strange and unexpected intrusion, out of the blue, returned Tom’s end in the shape of an awful gasp, heard by Reston, perhaps by Karen who suddenly groaned, and certainly by Chad who crouched among the trees, listening and finally watching over the sobs of his father and little sister until something dark and unknown told him to find his mother.