Authors: Mark Z. Danielewski
Yeah I know, I know. This shit’s getting ridiculous.
Even worse, I feel like I could continue in that vein for years, maybe even decades.
And yet, listen to this, to date I’ve hardly said a word to her. Don’t have a decent explanation for my silence either. Maybe it’s my boss and his guard dog glare. Maybe it’s her. I suspect it’s her. Every time she visits (though I admit there haven’t been that many visits), she overwhelms me. It doesn’t matter that she always gives me a wink and sometimes even a full throated laugh when I call her “Thumper”, “Hi Thumper” “Bye Thumper” the only words I can really muster, she still really only exists for me as a strange mixture of daydream and present day edge, by which I mean something without a past or a future, an icon or idyll of sorts, for some reason forbidden to me, but seductive beyond belief and probably relief, her image feeling permanently fixed within me, but not new, more like it’s been there all along, even if I know that’s not true, and come last night going so far as to entwine, entangle and finally completely replace her with the (—can’t write the word—) of—
—Thumper’s flashing eyes, her aching lips, her heart-ending moans, those I had imagined, an ongoing list, so minute and distracting that long after, when the sheets were gathered, wet with sex, cold with rest, I did not know who lay beside me
(—)
and seeing this stranger, the vessel of my dreams, I withdrew to the toilet, to the shower, to my table, enough racket and detachment to communicate an unfair request, but poor her she heard it and without a word dressed, and without a smile requested a brush, and without a kiss left, leaving me alone to return to this passage where I discovered the beginnings of a sense long since taken and strewn, leading me away on what I guess amounts to another hopeless digression.
Perhaps when I’m finished I’ll remember what I’d hoped to say in the first place.
[66—Mr. Truant declined to comment further on this particular passage.
—
Ed.]
As
tape and film reveal, in the month following the expansion of the walls bracketing the book shelves, Billy Reston made several trips to the house where despite all efforts to the contrary, he continued to confirm the confounding impossibility of an interior dimension greater than an exterior one.
Navidson skillfully captures Reston’s mental frustration by focusing on the physical impediments his friend must face within a house not designed with the disabled in mind. Since the area in question is in the master bedroom, Reston must make his way upstairs each time he wishes to inspect the area.
On the first visit, Tom volunteers to try and carry him.
“That won’t be necessary” Reston grunts, effortlessly swinging out of his chair and dragging himself up to the second story using only his arms.
“You got a pair of guns there, don’t you partner.”
The engineer is only slightly winded.
“Too bad you forgot your chair,” Tom adds dryly.
Reston looks up in disbelief, a little surprised, maybe even a bit shocked, and then bursts out laughing.
“Well, and fuck you.”
In the end, Navidson is the one who hauls up the wheelchair.
[67—Yesterday I managed to get Maus Fife-Harris on the phone. She’s a UC Irvine PhD candidate in Comp Lit who apparently always objected to the large chunks of narrative
Zampanô
kept asking her to write down. “I told him all those passages were inappropriate for a critical work, and if he were in my class I’d mark him down for it. But he’d just chuckle and continue. It bothered me a little but the guy wasn’t my student and he was blind and old, so why should I care? Still, I did care, so I’d always protest when he asked me to write down a new bit of narrative. ‘Why won’t you listen to me?’ I demanded one time. ‘You’re writing like a freshman.’ And he replied—I remember this very distinctly
‘We
always look for doctors but sometimes we’re lucky to find a
frosh
.’ And then he chuckled again and pressed on.” Not a bad way to respond to this whole fucking book, if you ask me.]
Still, no matter how many times Reston wheels from the children’s bedroom to the master bedroom or how carefully he examines the strange closet space, the bookshelves, or the various tools Tom and Will have been measuring the house with, he can provide no reasonable explanation for what he keeps referring to as “a goddamn spatial rape.”
By June—as the date on the Hi 8 tape indicates—the problem still remains unsolved. Tom, however, realizes he cannot afford to stay any longer and asks Reston to give him a lift to Charlottesville where he can catch a ride up to Dulles.
It is a bright summer morning when we watch Tom emerge from the house. He gives Karen a quick kiss good-bye and then kneels down to present Chad and Daisy with a set of neon yellow dart guns.
“Remember kids,” he tells them sternly. “Don’t shoot each other. Aim at the fragile, expensive stuff.”
Navidson gives his brother a lasting hug.
“I’ll miss you, man.”
“You got a phone,” Tom grins.
“It even rings,” Navidson adds without missing a beat.
While there is no question the tone of this exchange is jocular and perhaps even slightly combative, what matters most here is unspoken. The way Tom’s cheeks burn with a sudden flush of color. Or the way Navidson quickly tries to wipe something from his eyes. Certainly the long, lingering shot of Tom as he tosses his duffel bag in the back of Reston’s van, waving the camera good-bye, reveals to us just how much affection Navidson feels for his brother.
Strangely enough, following Tom’s departure, communication between Navidson and Karen begins to radically deteriorate.
An unusual quiet descends on the house.
Karen refuses to speak about the anomaly. She brews coffee, calls her mother in New York, brews more coffee, and keeps track of the real estate market in the classifieds.
Frustrated by her unwillingness to discuss the implications of their strange living quarters, Navidson retreats to the downstairs study, reviewing photographs, tapes, even—as a few stills reveal—compiling a list of possible experts, government agencies, newspapers, periodicals, and television shows they might want to approach.
At least both he and Karen agree on one thing: they want the children to stay out of the house. Unfortunately, since neither Chad nor Daisy has had a real opportunity to make any new friends in Virginia, they keep to themselves, romping around the backyard, shouting, screaming, stinging each other with darts until eventually they drift farther and farther out into the neighborhood for increasingly longer spates of time.
Neither Karen nor Navidson seems to notice.
The alienation of their children finally becomes apparent to both of them one evening in the middle of July.
Karen is upstairs, sitting on the bed playing with a deck of Tarot cards. Navidson is downstairs in his study examining several slides returned from the lab. News of Oliver North’s annulled conviction plays on the TV. In the background, we can hear Chad and Daisy squealing about something, their voices peeling through the house, the strained music of their play threatening at any instant to turn into a brawl.
With superb cross-cutting, Navidson depicts how both he and Karen react to the next moment. Karen has drawn another card from the deck but instead of adding it to the cross slowly forming before her crossed legs, the occult image hangs unseen in the air, frozen between her two fingers, Karen’s eyes already diverted, concentrating on a sound, a new sound, almost out of reach, but reaching her just the same. Navidson is much closer. His children’s cries immediately tell him that they are way out of bounds.
Karen has only just started to head downstairs, calling out for Chad and Daisy, her agitation and panic increasing with every step, when Navidson bolts out of the study and races for the living room.
The terrifying implication of their children’s shouts is now impossible to miss. No room in the house exceeds a length of twenty-five feet, let alone fifty feet, let alone fifty-six and a half feet, and yet Chad and Daisy’s voices are echoing, each call responding with an entirely separate answer.
In the living room, Navidson discovers the echoes emanating from a dark doorless hallway which has appeared out of nowhere in the west wall.
[
68—There’s a problem here concerning the location of “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway.” Initially the doorway was supposed to be on the north wall of the living room (page 4), but now, as you can
see for yourself.
that position has changed. Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe there’s some underlying logic to the shift. Fuck if I know. Your guess is as good as mine.]
Without hesitating, Navidson plunges in after them. Unfortunately the living room Hi 8 cannot follow him nor for that matter can Karen. She freezes on the threshold, unable to push herself into the darkness toward the faint flicker of light within. Fortunately, she does not have to wait too long. Navidson soon reappears with Chad and Daisy in each arm, both of them still clutching a homemade candle, their faces lit like sprites on a winter’s eve.
This is the first sign of Karen’s chronic disability. Up until now there has never been even the slightest indication that she suffers from crippling claustrophobia. By the time Navidson and the two children are safe and sound in the living room, Karen is drenched in sweat. She hugs and holds them as if they had just narrowly avoided some terrible fate, even though neither Chad nor Daisy seems particularly disturbed by their little adventure. In fact, they want to go back. Perhaps because of Karen’s evident distress, Navidson agrees to at least temporarily make this new addition to their house off limits.
For the rest of the night, Karen keeps a tight grip on Navidson. Even when they finally slip into bed, she is still holding his hand.
“Navy, promise me you won’t go in there again.”
“Let’s see if it’s even here in the morning.”
“It will be.”
She lays her head down flat on his chest and begins to cry.
“I love you so much. Please promise me. Please.”
Whether it is the lasting flush of terror still in Karen’s cheeks or her absolute need for him, so markedly different from her frequently aloof posture, Navidson cradles her in his arms like a child and promises.
Since the release of
The Navidson Record
,
Virginia Posah has written extensively about Karen Green’s adolescent years. Posah’s thin volume entitled
Wishing Well
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996) represents one of the few works which while based on the Navidsons’ experience still manages to stand on its own merits outside of the film.
Along with an exceptional background in everything ranging from Kate Chopin, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison,
Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl: The True Story of “Renee”,
Francesca Block’s Weetzie Bat books to Mary Pipher’s
Reviving Ophelia
and
more importantly Carol Gilligan’s landmark work
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development,
Posah has spent hundreds of hours researching the early life of Karen Green, analyzing the cultural forces shaping her personality, ultimately uncovering a remarkable difference between the child she once was and the woman she eventually became. In her introduction (page xv), Posah provides this brief overview:
When Diderot told the teenage Sophie Volland “You all die at fifteen” he could have been speaking to Karen Green who at fifteen did die.
To behold Karen as a child is nearly as ghostly an experience as the house itself. Old family films capture her athletic zeal, her unguarded smiles, the tomboy spirit which sends her racing through the muddy flats of a recently drained pond. She’s awkward, a little clumsy, but rarely self-conscious, even when covered in mud.
Former teachers claim she frequently expressed a desire to be president, a nuclear physicist, a surgeon, even a professional hockey player. All her choices reflected unattenuated self-confidence
—
a remarkably healthy sign for a thirteen year old girl.
Along with superb class work, she excelled in extra-curricular activities. She loved planning surprise parties, working on school productions, and even on occasion taking on a schoolyard bully with a bout of fists. Karen Green was exuberant, feisty, charming, independent, spontaneous, sweet, and most of all fearless.
By the time she turned fifteen, all of that was gone. She hardly spoke in class. She refused to function in any sort of school event, and rather than discuss her feelings she deferred the world with a hard and perfectly practiced smile.
Apparently—if her sister is to be believed
—
Karen spent every night of her fourteenth year composing that smile in front of a blue plastic handled mirror. Tragically her creation proved flawless and though her near aphonia should have alarmed any adept teacher or guidance counselor, it was invariably rewarded with the pyritic prize of high school popularity.