House of Leaves (2 page)

Of course all of that’s gone now. Long gone. The smell too. I’m left with only a few scattered mental snapshots: a battered Zippo lighter with Patent Pending printed on the bottom; the twining metal ridge, looking a little like some tiny spiral staircase, winding down into the bulbiess interior of a light socket; and for some odd reason—what I remember most of all—a very old tube of chapstick with an amber like resin, hard & cracked. Which still isn’t entirely accurate; though don’t be misled into thinking I’m not trying to be accurate. There were, I admit, other things I recall about his place, they just don’t seem relevant now. To my eye, it was all just junk, time having performed no economic alchemy there, which hardly mattered, as Lude hadn’t called me over to root around in these particular and—to use one of those big words I would eventually learn in the ensuing months—deracinated details of
Zampanô
’s life.

Sure enough, just as my friend had described, on the floor, in fact practically dead center, were the four marks, all of them longer than a hand, jagged bits of wood clawed up by something neither one of us cared to imagine. But that’s not what Lude wanted me to see either. He was pointing at something else which hardly impressed me when I first glanced at its implacable shape.

Truth be told, I was still having a hard time taking my eyes off the scarred floor. I even reached out to touch the protruding splinters.

What did I know then? What do I know now? At least some of the horror I took away at four in the morning you now have before you, waiting for you a little like it waited for me that night, only without these few covering pages.

As I discovered, there were reams and reams of
it. Endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart, always branching off into other pieces I’d come across later—on old napkins, the tattered edges of an envelope, once even on the back of a postage stamp; everything and anything but empty; each fragment completely covered with the creep of years and years of ink pronouncements; layered, crossed out, amended; handwritten, typed; legible, illegible; impenetrable, lucid; torn, stained, scotch taped; some bits crisp and clean, others faded, burnt or folded and refolded so many times the creases have
obliterated whole passages of god knows what—sense? truth? deceit? a legacy of prophecy or lunacy or nothing of the kind?, and in the end achieving, designating, describing, recreating—find your own words; I have no more; or plenty more but why? and all to tell—what?

Lude didn’t need to have the answer, but somehow he knew I would. Maybe that’s why we were friends. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he did need the answer, he just knew he wasn’t the one who could find it. Maybe that’s the real reason we were friends. But that’s probably wrong too.

One thing’s for sure, even without touching it, both of us slowly began to feel its heaviness, sensed something horrifying in its proportions, its silence, its stillness, even if it did seem to have been shoved almost carelessly to the side of the room. I think now if someone had said be careful, we would have. I know a moment came when I felt certain its resolute blackness was capable of anything, maybe even of slashing out, tearing up the floor, murdering
Zampanô
, murdering us, maybe even murdering you. And then the moment passed. Wonder and the way the unimaginable is
sometimes suggested by the inanimate suddenly faded. The thing became only a thing.

So I took it home.

Back then—well it’s way back then by now—you could have found me downing shots of whiskey at La Poubelle, annihilating my inner ear at Bar Deluxe or dining at Jones with some busty redhead I’d met at House of Blues, our conversation traversing wildly from clubs we knew well to clubs we’d like to know better. I sure as fuck wasn’t bothered by old man Z’s words. All those signs I just now finished telling you about quickly vanished in the light of subsequent days or had never been there to begin with, existing only in retrospect.

At first only curiosity drove me from one phrase to the next. Often a few days would pass before I’d pick up another mauled scrap, maybe even a week, but still I returned, for ten minutes, maybe twenty minutes, grazing over the scenes, the names, small connections starting to form, minor patterns evolving in those spare slivers of time.

I never read for more than an hour.

Of course curiosity killed the cat, and even if satisfaction supposedly brought it back, there’s still that little problem with the man on the radio telling me more and more about some useless information. But I didn’t care. I just turned the radio off.

And
then one evening I looked over at my clock and discovered seven hours had passed. Lude had called but I hadn’t noticed the phone ring. I was more than a little surprised when I found his message on my answering machine. That wasn’t the last time I lost sense of time either. In fact it began to happen more often, dozens of hours just blinking by, lost in the twist of so many dangerous sentences.

Slowly but surely, I grew more and more disoriented, increasingly more detached from the world, something sad and awful straining around the edges of my mouth, surfacing in my eyes. I stopped going out at night. I stopped going out. Nothing could distract me. I felt like I was losing control. Something terrible was going to happen. Eventually something terrible did happen.

No one could reach me. Not Thumper, not even Lude. I nailed my windows shut, threw out the closet and bathroom doors, storm proofed everything, and locks, oh yes, I bought plenty of locks, chains too and a dozen measuring tapes, nailing all those straight to the floor and the walls. T
hey looked suspiciously like los
t metal roods or, from a different angle, the fragile ribs of some alien ship. However, unlike Zampanô, this wasn’t about smell, this
was about space. I wanted a closed, inviolate and most of all immutable space.

At least the measuring tapes should have helped.

They didn’t.

Nothing did.

I just fixed myself some tea on the hot plate here. My stomach’s gone. I can barely keep even this honey milked—up stuff down but I need the warmth. I’m in a hotel now. My studio’s history. Alot these days is history.

I haven’t even washed
the blood off yet. Not all of it’s mine either. Still caked around my fingers. Signs of it on my shirt. “What’s happened here?” I keep asking myself. “What have I done?” What would you have done? I went straight for the guns and I loaded them and then I tried to decide what to do with them. The obvious thing was shoot something. After all, that’s what guns are designed to do—shoot something. But who? Or what? I didn’t have a clue. There were people and cars outside my hotel window. Midnight people I didn’t know. Midnight cars I’ve never seen before. I could have shot them. I could have shot them all.

I threw up in my closet instead.

Of course, I have only my own immeasurable stupidity to blame for winding up here. The old man left plenty of clues and warnings. I was the fool to disregard them. Or was it the reverse: did I secretly enjoy them? At least I should have had some fucking inkling what I was getting into when I read this note, written just one day before he died:

January
5,
1997

Whoever finds and publishes this work shall be entitled to all proceeds. I ask only that my name take its rightful place. Perhaps you will even prosper. If, however, you discover that readers are less than sympathetic and choose to dismiss this enterprise out of hand, then may I suggest you drink plenty of wine and dance in the sheets of your wedding night, for whether you know it or not, now you truly are prosperous. They say truth stands the test of time. I can think of no greater comfort than knowing this document failed such a test.

Which back then meant absolutely nothing to me. I sure as hell didn’t pause to think that some lousy words were going to land me in a shitty hotel room saturated with the stink of my own vomit.

After all, as I fast discovered,
Zampanô
’s entire project is about a film which doesn’t even exist. You can look, I have, but no matter how long you search you will never find
The Navidson Record
in
theaters or video stores
. Furthermore, most of what’s said by famous people has been made up. I tried contacting all of them. Those that took the time to respond told me they had never heard of Will Navidson let alone Zampanô.

As for the books cited in the footnotes, a good portion of them are fictitious. For instance, Gavin Young’s
Shots In The Dark
doesn’t exist nor does The.
Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXVIII.
On the other hand virtually any dimwit can go to a library and find W. M. Lindsay and H. J. Thomson’s
Ancient Lore in Medieval Latin Glossaries.
There really was a “rebellion” on the 1973 Skylab mission but
La Belle Nicoise et Le Beau Chien
is made up as is, I assume, the bloody story of Quesada and Molino.

Add to this my own mistakes (and there’s no doubt I’m responsible for plenty) as well as those errors
Zampanô
made which I failed to notice or correct, and you’ll see why there’s suddenly a whole lot here not to take too seriously.

In retrospect, I also realize there are probably numerous people who would have been better qualified to handle this work, scholars with PhDs from Ivy League schools and minds greater than any Alexandrian Library or World Net. Problem is those people were still in their universities, still on their net and nowhere near Whitley when an old man without friends or family finally died.

Zampanô, I’ve come to recognize now, was a very funny man. But his humor was that wry, desiccated kind soldiers whisper, all their jokes subsurface, their laughter amounting to little more than a tic in the corner of the mouth, told as they wait together in their outpost, slowly realizing that help’s not going to reach them in time and come nightfall, no matter what they’ve done or what they try to say, slaughter will overrun them all. Carrion dawn for vultures.

See, the irony is it makes no difference that the documentary at the heart of this book is fiction.
Zampanô
knew from the get go that what’s real or isn’t real doesn’t matter here. The consequences are the same.

I can suddenly imagine the cracked voice I never heard. Lips barely creasing into a smile. Eyes pinned on darkness:

“Irony? Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot Line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.”

It’s not surprising then that when it came to undermining his own work, the old man was superbly capable. False quotes or invented sources, however, all pale in comparison to his biggest joke.

Zampanô
writes constantly about seeing. What we see, how we see and what in turn we can’t see. Over and over again, in one form or another, he returns to the subject of light, space, shape, line, color, focus, tone, contrast, movement, rhythm, perspective and composition. None of which is surprising considering
Zampanô
’s piece centers on a documentary film called
The Navidson Record
made by a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who must somehow capture the most difficult subject of all: the sight of darkness itself.

Odd, to say the least.

At first I figured Zampanô was just a bleak old dude, the kind who makes Itchy and Scratchy look like Calvin and Hobbes. His apartment, however, didn’t come close to anything envisioned by Joel-Peter Witkin or what’s routinely revealed on the news. Sure his place was eclectic but hardly grotesque or even that far out of the ordinary, until of course you took a more careful look and realized—hey why are all these candles unused? Why no clocks, none on the walls, not even on the corner of a dresser? And what’s with these strange, pale books or the fact that there’s hardly a goddamn bulb in the whole apartment, not even one in the refrigerator? Well that, of course, was
Zampanô
’s greatest ironic gesture; love of love written by the broken hearted; love of life written by the dead: all this language of light, film and photography, and he hadn’t seen a thing since the mid- fifties.

He was blind as a bat.

Almost half the books he owned were in Braille. Lude and Flaze both confirmed that over the years the old guy had had numerous readers visiting him during the day. Some of these came from community centers, the Braille Institute, or were just volunteers from USC, UCLA or Santa Monica College. No one I ever spoke with, however, claimed to know him well, though more than a few were willing to offer me their opinions.

One student believed he was certifiably mad. Another actress, who had spent a summer reading to him, thought
Zampanô
was a romantic. She had come over one morning and found him in “a terrible way.”

“At first I assumed he was drunk, but the old guy never drank, not even a sip of wine. Didn’t smoke either. He really lived a very austere life. Anyway he wasn’t drunk, just really depressed. He started crying and asked me to leave. I fixed him some tea. Tears don’t frighten me. Later he told me it was heart trouble. ‘Just old heart-ache matters,’ he
said. Whoever she was, she must have been really special. He never told me her name.”

As I eventually found out, Zampanô had seven names he would occasionally mention: Beatrice, Gabrielle, Anne-Marie, Dominique, Eliane, Isabelle and Claudine. He apparently only brought them up when he was disconsolate and for whatever reason dragged back into some dark tangled time. At least there’s something more realistic about seven lovers than one mythological Helen. Even in his eighties,
Zampanô
sought out the company of the opposite sex.

Coincidence had had no hand in arranging for all his readers to be female. As he openly admitted: “there is no greater comfort in my life than those soothing tones cradled in a woman’s words.”

Except maybe his own words.

Zampanô was in essence—to use another big word—a graphomaniac. He scribbled until he died and while he came close a few times, he never finished anything, especially the work he would unabashedly describe as either his masterpiece or his precious darling. Even the day before he failed to appear in that dusty courtyard, he was dictating long discursive passages, amending previously written pages and restructuring an entire chapter. His mind never ceased branching out into new territories. The woman who saw him for the last time, remarked that “whatever it was he could never quite address in himself prevented him from ever settling. Death finally saw to that.”

With a little luck, you’ll dismiss this labor, react as
Zampanô
had hoped, call it needlessly complicated, pointlessly obtuse, prolix—your word—, ridiculously conceived, and you’ll believe all you’ve said, and then you’ll put it aside—though even here, just that one word, “aside”, makes me shudder, for what is ever really just put aside?—and you’ll carry on, eat, drink, be merry and most of all you’ll sleep well.

Then again there’s a good chance you won’t.

This much I’m certain of: it doesn’t happen immediately. You’ll finish and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You’ll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won’t matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in
you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how. You’ll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place.

Old shelters—television, magazines,
movies—won’t protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That’s when you’ll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you’ve walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.

You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You’ll care only about the darkness and you’ll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you’re some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you’ll be afraid to look away, you’ll be afraid to sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You’ll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious.
And
then for better or worse you’ll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you’ve got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come
before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.

And then
the nightmares will begin.