Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000 — Chapter XXI
The chapter is entirely Johnny's journal. Lude dies in a motorcycle crash; Johnny sinks into rage and a violent fantasy in his hotel.
The state of being thin, weak or barely holding together.
XXI We felt the lonely beauty of the evening, the immense roaring silence of the wind, the tenuousness of our tie to all below, There was a hint of fear, not for our lives, but of a vast unknown which pressed in upon us.
Thomas Hornbein (1930–2023) was an American climber and doctor. With Willi Unsoeld he made the first climb of Everest's hard West Ridge in 1963; his book tells that story.
The quote describes the fear of “a vast unknown” at the summit, the sense of something beyond the moment. It sets the chapter's search for meaning.
If only it could be perceived. — Thomas F. Hornbein Everest—The West Ridge October 25, 1998 Lude’s dead.
A dizzy feeling of spinning or of falling.
A sudden vertigo of loss, when looking down, or is it really looking back?, leaves me experiencing all of it at once, which is way too much.
A state of being completely forgotten, or of being unconscious.
By summer, Lude was tumbling straight down into oblivion.
Placed or injected under the skin; a hypodermic needle.
Somehow he'd gotten mixed up with hypodermic needles.
A sudden violent burst of emotion or action.
He’d fix bayonets and then in a paroxysm of instinct, all mad, bleak, sad & sad, same word said differently—you gotta ask, you’ll never know, maybe you’re lucky—he gave the order to charge.
A small folded paper packet holding a drug.
Only in Lude’s case the bayonets were fifths of bourbon & bindles of pills and his charge was led on a Triumph.
Lude dies at over 100 mph on a Triumph motorcycle, killed near Union on Sunset in Los Angeles. Zampanò's names are real: a Triumph is a British motorcycle; Little Round Top was a key hill in the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg; Manchester United is an English football club.
Johnny casts the death as a doomed military charge with “bayonets” of bourbon and pills.
Of course this was no Little Round Top.
Give a drug to calm someone or make them sleep.
He’d been up in the Hills at some so & so, such & such gathering, enough chemicals rioting in his body to sedate Manchester United for weeks.
Offspring; the child or result of something.
Nameless—screaming a name that’s not a name at all—though I still know it well enough not to mistake it for anything other than a progeny of anger and rage.
With the beat shifted off the expected time, as in music.
And so I sit with myself just listening, listening to the creaking floor boards, the hammering water pipes, and masked in each breath, syncopated to every heartbeat, the shudders of time itself, there all along to accompany my fellow residents as they continue to yell, fight and of course scream.
A place of shelter; also an old word for a mental hospital.
This is an asylum.
A very poor person; needy.
surrounded. Indigents, addicts, the deluded and mad, crawling with lice, riddled with disease, their hearts breaking with fear.
Having a saw-like, jagged edge.
His voice is anguish, describing in a sound a scene of awful violence, a hundred serrated teeth, bright with a thousand years of blood, jagged nails barely tapping out a code of approach, pale eyes wide and dilated, cones and rods capturing everything in one unfailing and powerful assumption.
A feeling that something, usually bad, is about to happen.
… and stalks them like the dusk the day; what loosens their bowels, so even the junkies here have to join the rush to the bowl, splattering their wet chinawhite; what they experience only as premonition, illness and fear; that banished face beyond the province of image, swept clean like a page—is and always has been me.
An area or field that belongs to something; its proper range.
… loosens their bowels, so even the junkies here have to join the rush to the bowl, splattering their wet chinawhite; what they experience only as premonition, illness and fear; that banished face beyond the province of image, swept clean like a page—is and always has been me.
A line of German from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem “Herbsttag” (“Autumn Day”, 1902): “Whoever has no house now will never build one.”
Johnny, homeless and leaving the hotel, quotes it as his own state.
If the clerk had looked up I would have killed him. Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Johnny carries a book by Dante, “a Florentine something”. Dante Alighieri (c.1265–1321) wrote the Divine Comedy, whose first part, the Inferno, is a journey down through Hell. It fits Johnny's own descent.
All I have are these fluttering pages in my Dante book, a Florentine something I can’t remember getting or buying.
Gdansk Man is Kyrie's violent boyfriend (Gdańsk is a Polish city). In a rage after Lude's death, Johnny beats him with a Jack Daniel's bottle and imagines killing him and raping Kyrie. The BMW slogan “The Ultimate Driving Machine” is real.
Johnny quotes Hamlet (“a hit, a very palpable hit”, said at the fatal duel) and calls on Mars, the Roman god of war. The scene is later revised: much of it is nightmare and invention.
He wanted the guy who did the actual fucking. Kyrie was with him too, saying nothing, just sitting there as he pulled that 840 Ci BMW over, his BMW, his Ultimate Driving Machine, and yelled something at me, for me to stop I think, …
Speed; quickness.
Except that when Gdansk Man turned his back on me, starting his short stroll to the car, slo-mo died, replaced this time by a kind of celerity I’ve never known before.
The pure, concentrated essence of something.
instinct, could not have prepared me for this: exceeding anger, exceeding rage, coming precariously close to the distillate of—and you know what I’m talking about here—every valued intuition lost, or so it seemed already.
So clear it can almost be touched or felt.
… dropped, boy did he drop, and then because I couldn't really feel the blow, only the dull vibrations in the bottle, messengers informing me in the most remote tones of “a hit, a very palpable hit” and because more than anything I craved the pain, and the knowledge pain bestows, particular, intimate and entirely personal, I let my knuckles do the rest, all of them eventually splitting open on …
Gives, as a gift or honour.
… the dull vibrations in the bottle, messengers informing me in the most remote tones of “a hit, a very palpable hit” and because more than anything I craved the pain, and the knowledge pain bestows, particular, intimate and entirely personal, I let my knuckles do the rest, all of them eventually splitting open on the ridges of his face until he slumped back in shock, sorry, so sorry, though …
An earlier set of entries: Johnny drives east to find the house of the film and instead traces the history of his own mother.
Jamestown was the first permanent English colony in America (Virginia, 1607). The “starving time” of the winter of 1609–1610 killed most of the settlers; in 1622 a Powhatan attack killed about 400 colonists.
Johnny visits the tourist site and is sickened that the dioramas hide the real famine and death.
Some bullets: * On the Jamestown-Scotland Wharf Ferry I look down at the water and suddenly feel myself fill with a memory of love's ruin, circumscribed by war and loss.
A guide or teacher at a museum or tour.
“Why, it’s right here,” says a docent.
Colonial Williamsburg is a real living-history museum in Virginia with “costumed interpreters” who play 18th-century citizens. The Peyton Randolph House there is famous for ghost stories.
Mary Brockman Singleton, the interpreter who talks of ghosts and “died in 1775”, is invented. Johnny mocks her by asking if she has ever seen a bottomless staircase in her real home.
And besides, there is no docent. * Colonial Williamsburg.
In a friendly, pleasant way.
Mary Brockman Singleton speaks amiably about the Brick House Tavern on Duke of Gloucester Street and the way her husband succumbed to the grippe.
An old word for influenza (the flu).
Mary Brockman Singleton speaks amiably about the Brick House Tavern on Duke of Gloucester Street and the way her husband succumbed to the grippe.
A noisy ghost said to move objects and make sounds.
“Numerous poltergeist sightings have been reported at the Peyton Randolph House.”
Breathe too fast and too deeply, often from panic.
Someone asks me to leave. * Near the campus of William & Mary, surrounded by postcards thick with purple mountain majesty, and they are purple, I hyperventilate.
Richmond, Virginia, was the childhood home of the writer Edgar Allan Poe, and has a Poe museum with a rose garden. Johnny sums the city up as “a raven and the remnants of a rose garden”, both nods to Poe (his poem “The Raven”).
… from Disputanta to Five Forks to as far east as the Isle of Wight, and though I frequently feel close, real close, to something important, in the end I come away with nothing. * Richmond's just a raven and the remnants of a rose garden trampled one afternoon, long ago, by moshing teenagers.
At the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Johnny avoids room 13 on the West Range: the real room where Edgar Allan Poe lodged as a student in 1826. Roger Shattuck (1923–2005) was a real literary scholar who wrote on forbidden knowledge; the lecture title is invented.
The NSBE is the real National Society of Black Engineers. Johnny cannot find the wheelchair-using engineer Billy Reston listed there.
… real close, to something important, in the end I come away with nothing. * Richmond's just a raven and the remnants of a rose garden trampled one afternoon, long ago, by moshing teenagers. * Charlottesville.
A puzzle; something hard to understand.
lecture on “Great Faults and ‘Splendidly Wicked People’ " delivered back in the fall of ‘97 but retains nothing about architectural enigmas waiting in the dark Virginia countryside.
Monticello is Thomas Jefferson's home near Charlottesville, which he designed after studying Andrea Palladio's I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture, 1570).
Johnny notes he should visit the Shenandoah and Luray caverns (real Virginia caves) but knows he will not.
On the West Range, I make sure to avoid room 13. * Monticello.
Fitting together in a pleasing or matching way, like notes in music.
Possibly harmonic.
Hinting at something without naming it directly.
Her shallow face, the dark lyric in her eyes and of course her words, in those far reaching letters she used to send me when I was young, secretly alluding to how she could sit and watch the night seal the dusk, year after year, waiting it out like a cat.
Johnny realizes he has not been tracing Navidson's history but his own mother's. He remembers her letters, written from a psychiatric institute, and her strange warnings.
He recalls that she once, in her madness, seemed to instruct him “how to murder”. The book has not yet explained her fully.
“Beware,” she might have whispered. “Another holy Other lessens your great hold on slowing time,” as she would have described it, being the mad woman that she truly was.
Johnny drives to the mental institute where his mother lived, which his father called “The Whale”. It closed five years earlier; someone has scrawled “Welcome to the Ice House” on a wall.
He finds her old room and the bed where she died, and waits all night for her ghost, who never comes.
What my father had always referred to as The Whale.
Coiled razor wire used as a barrier, which opens like a concertina.
Crowned with concertina wire.
Of an unhealthy yellow or pale colour (of skin).
Convincing myself I could convince the new owners—whoever they might be; I’m imagining fat, sallow, god fearing people, staring out at me, listening to me explain how in spite of my appearance it was still their god fearing duty—to let me walk around what used to be mine, at …
Bleeding heavily; here used for a rush of pain.
I started hemorrhaging hurt.
Stitches used to close a wound.
I doubted even sutures would help.
Small whirling currents of water or air.
Which I found myself looking at again, carefully studying the eddies there, all those strange currents and textures, wondering what history all of it could 505
Johnny returns to his lost childhood home, now a lumberyard, and relives the accident that scarred his forearms: as a small boy he caught a falling pan of hot Mazola cooking oil (a real brand).
He addresses the scars in Greek myth terms — “sister of Circe” (the sorceress), currents like “Oceanus” (the ocean titan) — and half-remembers his father's terrible roar.
Eventually my friend's wife asked me about my journey and I answered her with stories about my mother, what I remembered, and the institute, what I saw, and the lumberyard.
A long, angry speech.
I said who in the hell do you think you are?”, didn’t I know I was standing on private property?—and not even ending his tirade there, wanting to know if it was my desire to have him break me in half, as if that’s really the question my bare chested silence was asking.
Units that measure how loud a sound is.
Still, the sound is too vivid to just pawn off on the decibels of my imagination.
An entrance hall of a house or building.
And suddenly I find something, hiding down some hall in my head, though not my head but a house, which house? a home, my home?, perhaps by the foyer, blinking out of the darkness, two eyes pale as October moons, licking its teeth, incessantly flicking its long polished nails, and then before it can reach—another cry, perhaps even more profound than my father’s …
Without stopping.
… in my head, though not my head but a house, which house? a home, my home?, perhaps by the foyer, blinking out of the darkness, two eyes pale as October moons, licking its teeth, incessantly flicking its long polished nails, and then before it can reach—another cry, perhaps even more profound than my father’s roar, though it has to be my father’s, right?, sending this memory, this premonition—whatever this …
Johnny writes a happy story of two doctor friends who cure him, then admits he made it up. He drifts west and, in a bar, meets a band who are carrying his own book.
Small shaking movements of the body.
Too many unexplained tremors and tics.
Johnny writes days of entries about two doctor friends in Seattle who feed him tofu, counsel him, and give him a bright yellow miracle drug that ends his nightmares. The places are real: Orcas Island, Doe Bay, Deception Pass, the Willamette river in Portland.
He then confesses he invented all of it in two hours, to feel, even briefly, that someone could save him.
September 7, 1998 The three of us spent the weekend at the Doe Bay Village Resort on Orcas Island.
In a state of wild, over-excited high energy.
The medication seems to have eliminated those deep troughs and manic peaks I frequently had to endure.
Doubting; not easily convinced.
Just recently Doc confessed that when he first heard me screaming he was skeptical anything short of a long-term stay at an institute would help.
Real features of brain-wave (EEG) sleep recordings: short bursts and single sharp waves seen in light sleep. In the invented story the doctor cannot match them to Johnny's screaming.
The first few nights he had just sat awake listening, jotting down the occasional word I‘d groan, trying to imagine what kind of sleep spindles and K-complexes could describe that.
Swear words.
At least the lack of expletives should have clued you in.
Unsettling; making one uneasy or confused.
I had to make something up to fill the disconcerting void.
The light-sensitive layer at the back of the eye.
Tried taking in the billions of stars above, lingering long enough to allow each point of light the chance to scratch a deep hole in the back of my retina, so that when I finally did turn to face the dark surrounding forest I thought I saw the billion eyes of a billion cats blinking out, in the math of the living, the sum …
A striptease dancer (a fancy word coined for “stripper”).
The enchanting ecdysiast who that night, at long last, gave me her real name.
Like a father; fatherly.
I gave her an almost paternal hug and kissed her on the cheek.
Johnny visits Thumper, the stripper he loves, one last time. She finally tells him her real name and wears the gold necklace he gave her.
He leaves “The Happiest Place On Earth”, the advertising slogan for Disneyland, near where she works.
She told me to keep in touch and I told her to take care and then as I walked away, I waved and with that bid adieu to The Happiest Place On Earth.
In Flagstaff, Arizona, Johnny hears a band from Philadelphia called Liberty Bell (after the cracked bell) play a song, “I live at the end of a Five and a Half Minute Hallway.” Vox is a real amplifier brand.
They show him a book they found on the internet: House of Leaves by Zampanò, with notes by Johnny Truant — the very book he assembled. Strangers now read and mark it.
August 28, 1999 Only yesterday, I arrived in Flagstaff, Arizona where trains routinely stop so the homeless can climb off and buy coffee for a dime at a little train yard shop across the tracks.
Stone platforms along water where boats load and unload.
Paris quays, London parks.
Drank.
… the trio, all three of them, probably because of the way I looked and smelled, acting very suspicious and wary until the bartender introduced me as the source of their recently acquired and hastily imbibed beverage.
Speaking easily and smoothly but without depth.
Actually all three of them were pretty glib about their music, until I asked about “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway.”
As if sharing a secret plot; a low, knowing manner.
“But be careful,” he added in a conspiratorial whisper.
The band mention an “encoded appearance of Thamyris on page 387”. In Greek myth Thamyris was a Thracian singer who boasted he could beat the Muses; they defeated him and took away his sight and his song.
Johnny is shocked: he copied the text without noticing the hidden name.
They had discussed the footnotes, the names and even the encoded appearance of Thamyris on page 387, something I’d transcribed without ever detecting.
Short improvised passages; here, free personal comments.
In a few of the margins, there were even some pretty stunning personal riffs about the lives of the musicians themselves.
A nod to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his coined word différance, which puns on “differ” and “defer”: meaning is never fixed but always pushed onward.
Johnny asks what is the difference between what is real, remembered, invented, found and lost in his pages.
What’s the difference, especially in differance, what’s read what's left in what’s left out what’s invented what’s remembered what’s forgotten what’s written what's found what's lost what’s done?
Derrida's coined term: meaning always both differs and is deferred, never fixed.
What’s the difference, especially in differance, what’s read what's left in what’s left out what’s invented what’s remembered what’s forgotten what’s written what's found what's lost what’s done?
Johnny corrects the memory of his mother, burns the finished book, and ends with the story of Dr. Nowell and a dying baby.
Understood wrongly.
Or have I misconstrued it all?
Sitting on a western beach, Johnny finally sees the truth: at age seven he gripped his mother's wrists to stop her being taken to the institute. She did not try to strangle him, as her letter had said; she only wiped his tears.
Her endearments (“my little eye sack”, “my little Brahma lamb” — Brahma is a Hindu creator god) return to him, and he weeps for the first time in years.
Her eyes, I recall, melting with tenderness and confusion, as she continued muttering strange, unwieldy words: “My little eye sack. My little Brahma lamb.
Hard to handle or manage because of size or shape; awkward.
Her eyes, I recall, melting with tenderness and confusion, as she continued muttering strange, unwieldy words: “My little eye sack.
Johnny burns the finished book, page by page, as Navidson burned his in the void. He wonders whether he means to memorize or to memorialize it.
He decides that something does inhabit the darkness — not history, but a Voice that sweeps through everyone.
The book is burning.
A pile of wood for burning a dead body; a funeral fire.
… fire is warm, warming my hands, warming my face, parting the darkest waters of the deepest eye, even if at the same time it casts long shadows on the world, the cost of any pyre, finally heated beyond recovery, shattered into specters of dust, stolen by the sky, flung to sea and sand.
Ghosts; faint frightening shapes.
… my face, parting the darkest waters of the deepest eye, even if at the same time it casts long shadows on the world, the cost of any pyre, finally heated beyond recovery, shattered into specters of dust, stolen by the sky, flung to sea and sand.
Similar; related in nature.
Of course these are only images, my images, and in the end they’re born out of something much more akin to a Voice, which though invisible to the eye and frequently unheard by even the ear still continues, day and night, year after year, to sweep through us all.
Turning blue from lack of oxygen in the blood.
“Kid’s cyanotic,” Dr.
Johnny ends with the story “Doc” told him: a baby is born with holes in its brain, kept alive on a Siemens Servo 300 ventilator. The mother sits and sings to him for days, and many believe a miracle is coming.
Instead she tells Dr. Nowell it is time. She kisses the boy, says “You can go now,” and the heart monitor flatlines (asystole) before anyone touches a switch. The medical detail is real; the story is Johnny's chosen ending.
“Kid’s cyanotic,” Dr. Nowell shouts and everywhere heart rates leap.
Putting a tube into the windpipe to help a patient breathe.
Nowell’s team immediately follows up, intubating the baby and providing bag mask ventilation, all of it coming together in under a minute as they rush him to an ICU where he’s plugged into life support, in this case a Siemens …
The percentage of oxygen carried by the blood.
Monitors record EKG activity, respiratory functions, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, as well as end tidal CO2.
A machine that breathes for a patient.
There’s a ventilator.
A thin tube put into the body to give fluids or take measurements.
… tracks every heart beat, the curve of each P wave or in this case normal QRS, while also on the monitor, the central line and art line, drawn straight from the very source, a catheter placed in the bellybutton, records continuous blood pressure as well as blood gasses.
A tube passed through the nose into the stomach.
First he will disconnect all the nonessential IV’s and remove the nasogastric tube.
A breathing tube placed in the windpipe.
Lastly, he and his team will cap the IV, turn off the monitors, the ventilator and remove the endotracheal tube.
A flatline: the heart stops all electrical activity and beating.
Nowell or anyone else can turn a dial or touch a switch, the EKG flatlines. Asystole.