Authors: Mark Z. Danielewski
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.
[3
05—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-what-you-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