caffeine wending past glass and politics until there is nothing more than a brown blot on the morning paper. [21]
When Navidson Iooks up Karen is watching him.
"I called Tom," he tells her.
She understands him well enough not to say a thing.
"He knows I'm insane," he continues. "And besides he builds houses for a living."
"Did you talk to him?" she carefully asks.
"Left a message."
The next card simply reads: Tom.
Tom is Will Navidson's fraternal twin brother. Neither one has said much to the other in over eight years. "Navy's successful, Tom's not," Karen explains in the film. "There's been a lot of resentment over the years. I guess it's always been there, except when they lived at home. It was different then. They kind of looked after each other more."
Two days later, Tom arrives. Karen greets him with a big hug and a Hi 8. He is an affable, overweight giant of a man who has an innate ability to amuse. The children immediately take to him. They love his laugh, not to mention his McDonalds french fries.
" My own brother who I haven't talked to in years calls me up at four in the morning and tells me he needs my tools. Go figure."
"That means you're family" Karen says happily, leading the way to Navidson's study where she has already set out clean towels and made up the hideaway.
"Usually when you want a level you ask a neighbor or go to the hardware store. Count on Will Navidson to call Lowell, Massachusetts. Where is he?"
As it turns out Navidson has gone to the hardware store to pick up a few items.
In the film, Tom and Navidson's first encounter has almost nothing to do with each other. Instead of addressing any interpersonal issues, we find them both huddled over a Cowley level mirror transit, alternately taking turns peering across the house, the line of sight floating a few feet above the floor, occasionally interrupted when Hillary or Mallory in some keystone chase race around the children's beds. Tom believes they will account for the quarter inch discrepancy with a perfectly level measurement.
Later on, out in the backyard, Tom lights up a joint of marijuana. The drug clearly bothers Navidson but he says nothing. Tom knows his brother disapproves but refuses to alter his behavior. Based on their body language and the way both of them avoid looking directly at each other, not to speak of the space between their words, the last eight years continues to haunt them.
"Hey, at least I'm an acquaintance of Bill's now" Tom finally says, exhaling a thin stream of smoke. "Not a drop of booze in over two years."
At first glance, it seems hard to believe these two men are even related let alone brothers. Tom is content if there happens to be a game on and a soft place from which to watch it. Navidson works out every day, devours volumes of esoteric criticism, and constantly attaches the world around him to one thing: photography. Tom gets by, Navidson succeeds. Tom just wants to be, Navidson must become. And yet despite such obvious differences, anyone who looks past Tom's wide grin and considers his eyes will find surprisingly deep pools of sorrow. Which is how we know they are brothers, because like Tom, Navidson's eyes share the same water.
Either way the moment and opportunity for some kind of fraternal healing disappears when Tom makes an important discovery: Navidson was wrong. The interior of the house exceeds the exterior not by 1/4" but by 5/16 .
No matter how many legal pads, napkins, or newspaper margins they fill with notes or equations, they cannot account for that fraction. One incontrovertible fact stands in their way: the exterior measurement must equal the internal measurement. Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equal sign. As science writer and sometime theologian David Conte wrote: "God for all intents and purposes is an equal sign, and at least up until now, something humanity has always been able to believe in is that the universe adds up." [22]
On this point, both brothers agree. The problem must lie with their measuring techniques or with some unseen mitigating factor: air temperature, mis-calibrated instruments, warped floors, something, anything. But after a day and a half passes without a solution, they both decide to look for help. Tom calls Lowell and postpones his construction obligations. Navidson calls an old friend who teaches engineering at UVA.
Early the following morning, both brothers head off for Charlottesville.
Navidson is not the only one who knows people in the vicinity. Karen's friend Audrie McCullogh drives down from Washington, D.C. to catch up and help construct some bookshelves. Thus as Will and Tom set out to find an answer, two old friends put an enigma on hold, stir up some vodka tonics, and enjoy the rhythm of working with brackets and pine.
Edith Skourja has written an impressive forty page essay entided Riddles Without on this one episode. While most of it focuses on what Skourja refers to as "the political posture" of both women—Karen as ex- model; Audrie as travel agent—one particular passage yields an elegant perspective into the whys and ways people confront unanswered questions:
Riddles: they either delight or torment. Their delight lies in solutions. Answers provide bright moments of comprehension perfectly suited for children who still inhabit a world where solutions are readily available. Implicit in the riddle's form is a promise that the rest of the world resolves just as easily. And so riddles comfort the child's mind which spins wildly before the onslaught of so much information and so many subsequent questions.
The adult world, however, produces riddles of a different variety. They do not have answers and are often called enigmas or paradoxes. Still the old hint of the riddle's form corrupts these questions by reechoing the most fundamental lesson: there must be an answer. From there comes torment.
It is not uncharacteristic to encounter adults who detest riddles. A variety of reasons may lie behind their reaction but a significant one is the rejection of the adolescent belief in answers. These adults are often the same ones who say "grow up" and "face the facts." They are offended by the incongruities of yesterday's riddles with answers when compared to today's riddles without.
It is beneficial to consider the origins of " riddle." The Old English rcedelse means "opinion, conjure" which is related to the Old English rcedon "to interpret" in turn belonging to the same etymological history of "read." "Riddling" is an offshoot of "reading" calling to mind the participatory nature of that act—to interpret—which is all the adult world has left when faced with the unsolvable.
" To read" actually comes from the Latin reri " to calculate, to think" which is not only the progenitor of "read" but of "reason" as well, both of which hail from the Greek arariskein " to fit." Aside from giving us "reason," arariskein also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin arma meaning "weapons." It seems that "to fit" the world or to make sense of it requires either reason or arms. Charmingly enough Karen