mass until I was, landing on the roof of a parked car, which turned out to be my car, a good fifteen feet away, hearing the thud but not actually feeling it. I even momentarily blacked out, but came to just in time to watch the truck, still hurtling towards me until it was actually slamming into me, causing me to think, and you're not going to believe this—'I can't believe this asshole just totaled my fucking car! Of all the cars on this street and he had to fucking trash mine!* even as all that steel was grinding into me, instantly pulverizing my legs, my pelvis, the metal from the grill wedging forward like kitchen knives, severing me from the waist down.

People started screaming.

Though not about me.

Something to do with the truck.

It was leaking all over the place.

Gas.

It had caught fire. I was going to burn.

Except it wasn't gas.

It was milk.

Only there was no milk. There was no gas. No leak either. There weren't even any people. Certainly none who were screaming. And there sure as hell wasn't any truck. I was alone. My street was empty. A tree fell on me. So heavy, it took a crane to lift it. Not even a crane could lift it. There are no trees on my block.

This has got to stop.

I have to go.

I did go.

When I reached Tatiana's place, she'd just gotten back from the gym and her brown legs glistened with sweat. She wore black Spandex shorts and a pink athletic halter top which was very tight but still could not conceal the ample size of her breasts. I said "hello* and then explained again how I had come into possession of the old man's papers and why in my effort to straighten them all out I needed to trace some of his references. She happily handed over the reading lists she'd compiled on his behalf and even dug up a few notes she'd made relating to the etymology of 'labor.*

When she offered me a drink, I jokingly suggested a Jack and Coke. I guess she didn't understand my sense of humor or understood it perfectly. She appeared with the drink and poured herself one as well. We spoke for another hour, ended up finishing all the Jack, and then right out of the blue she said, 'I won't let you fuck me.' Time to get going, I thought, and began to stand up. Not that I'd expected anything mind you. 'But if you want, you can come on me,' she added. I sat back down and before I could think of something to say, she had tugged off her top and stretched herself out in the middle of the floor. Her tits were round, hard and perfectly fake. As I straddled her, she unbuttoned my pants. Then she reached for some extremely aromatic oil sitting on her coffee table. She squeezed hard enough to release a thin stream. It dripped off of me, a warm rain spilling down over her toned belly and large brown nipples. Pleased with what she'd done, she settled back to watch me stroke grind myself into my own hands.

At one point she bit down on her lower lip and it amped me up even more. When she started to caress her own breasts, small groans of pleasure rising up from her throat, I felt the come in my balls begin to boil. However only when I got ready to climax did I lose sight of her, my eyes slamming shut, something I believe now she'd been waiting for, a temporary instant of darkness, where vulnerable and blind to everything but my own pleasure, she could reach up beneath me and press the tip

V _m

Having already discussed in Chapter V how echoes serve as an effective means to evaluate physical, emotional, and thematic distances present in The Navidson Record , it is now necessary to remark upon their descriptive limitations. In essence echoes are confined to large spaces. However, in order to consider how distances within the Navidson house are radically distorted, we must address the more complex ideation of convolution, interference, confusion, and even decentric ideas of design and construction. In other words the concept of a labyrinth.

It would be fantastic if based on footage from The Navidson Record someone were able to reconstruct a bauplan ^JL for the house. Of course this is an impossibility, not only due to the wall-shifts but also the film's constant destruction of continuity, frequent jump cuts prohibiting any sort of accurate mapmaking. Consequently, in lieu of a schematic, the film offers instead a schismatic rendering of empty rooms, long hallways, and dead ends, perpetually promising but forever eluding the finality of an immutable layout.

Curiously enough, if we can look to history to provide us with some context, the reasons for building labyrinths have varied substantially over the ages. ¹²² For example, the English hedgerow maze at Longleat was designed to amuse garden party attendants, while Amenemhet III of the XII dynasty in Egypt built for his mortuary temple a labyrinth near lake Moeris to protect his soul. Most famous of all, however, was the labyrinth Daedalus constructed for King Minos. It served as a prison. Purportedly located on the island of Crete in the city of Knossos. the maze was built to

of an oil soaked finger against my asshole, circling, nibbing, until finally she pushed hard enough to exceed the threshold of resistance, slipping inside me and knowing exactly where to go too, heading straight for the prostate, the P spot, the LOUD button on this pumping stereophonic fuck system I never knew I had, initiating an almost unbearable scream for (and of) pleasure, endorphins spitting through my brain at an unheard of rate, as muscles in my groin (almost) painfully contracted in a handful of heart stomping spasms—not something I could say I was exactly prepared for. I exploded. A stream of white flying across her tits, strings of the stuff dripping off her nipples, collecting in pools around her neck, some of it leading as far as her face, one gob of it on her chin, another on her lower lip. She smiled, started to gently rub my semen into her black skin and then opened her mouth as if to sigh, only she didn't sigh, no sound, not even a breath, just her moon bright teeth, and finally her tongue licking first her upper lip before turning to her lower lip, where, smiling, her eyes focused on mine, watching me watching her, she licked up and finally swallowed my come. -"-So sorry. ¹²¹

^l2, German for "building plan." — Ed.

^l22 For further insight into mazes, consider Paolo Santarcangeli's Livre des labyrinthes; Russ Craim's "The Surviving Web" in Daedalus , summer 1995; Hermann Kern's Labirinti; W. H. Matthews' Mazes and Labyrinths; Stella Pinicker's Double-Axe; Rodney Castleden's The Knossos Labyrinth; Harold Sieber's Inadequate Thread ; W. W. R. Ball's "Mathematical Recreations and Essays"; Robinson Ferrel Smith's Complex Knots—No Simple Solutions', O. B. Hardison Jr.'s Entering The Maze; and Patricia Flynn's Jejunum and Ileum.