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Some scholars have conceptualised Navidson's decision to return as proof of his Oedipus complex1. The desire to return to the house is thus equivalent to a desire to return to a Mother. By extension, a grave becomes a womb, swallowing him back down and rendering him blind.
1Speaking of daddy issues, I met Angie in the hall of my apartment building yesterday. I went out to get more cans of tuna and, on my way back, there, I saw her with some old guy. She and I, we'd hooked up once or twice but I'd never figured her for that type of girl.
I guess we talked but they didn't like the look of me and I didn't like the look of the fucked-up light fixture, the way it was swinging over our heads, glinting like a guillotine, sending the shadows spasming this way and that and morphing our shadows into all sorts of animals in seizures.
In a way, though, I get it.
The appeal of an authority figure giving you the meanings to the words, giving you a map to the world, a blueprint on which reality's based.
More and more I think of old man Z, stuck in that apartment. Did he know that the terror was coming for him? waiting outside his door, ancient nails waiting to shred him like paper. Was he scared, like I'm scared?
Last night, coming home, I got real fucked up thinking about the guy. Would he and I have been friends? What if someone had introduced us, a friend of a friend of Lude, and Zampanò had invited me over? I could have read for him. I could have bought cheap meringue for us to share, we could have talked over liquor.
Those sad, unseeing pupils flitting over my face, dark sunlight leaking through cut-up cardboard over the windows, pooling light on Zampanò's face. I can see him clear as day as a white metal wing slicing through the air, landing in some derelict room, engine thrumming and rattling like a broken radiator.
He's quite handsome, the way an old artefact might be handsome, aged and weathered, regal if only for having survived so long. When he talks, instructing me to read to him, his voice sounds both strange and jarringly familiar, his speech rhythms just as I've read here. He's handsy, too, as an lonely old man would be, brushing against me here and then. And I'm no homo, not exactly, but I find myself getting more and more turned on. Eventually I reach out and stroke his face. He is surprisingly warm.
One thing leads to another and I get a hand on his dick. He's quiet when he comes, spilling white on my palm.
He returns the favour, too, calling me 'pretty', calling me his 'boy'. That shit is what really gets me going, always does, though I'll never admit it. Zampanò's hand is rough and calloused, not at all like the girls I used to pick up. I buck into his grip, easy, easy.
I get louder, because I know the guy can't see me. I have to try and make up for it. I look up, searching his face – the window haloes his head in a blue-tinged sunburst.
Then it's over. I leave and ghost him for weeks and never think about the house ever again, write it all off as a drunken mistake, a weird fucked-up sexual experiment. On my mattress, I jerk off to the memory of Zampanò's hand, his voice still thrumming in my inner ear. Maybe I even go back for a second round. Maybe I suck him off on my knees, with his paternal hand in my hair, guiding us both to an approximation of meaning, a total erasure of this formless, ancient terror. . .
But I never knew Zampanò and he no longer exists. Dead, probably a pile of ashes somewhere, burnt up into a cloud of smoke reeking of fuel and melted flesh.
All that's left of his body are these pages, all his – I mean, this – black ink, seeping into my skin, my brain, my biology, soaking up inside me to form something from nothing. And his personality has become whatever he lets slip between the lines. Like the name etched in pen at the bottom of this very page, the name of an old lover or an unborn son.
If I squint, it may have spelt something similar to 'Johnny'.2
2Seriously though, fuck Freud.3
3Mr Truant declined to comment when asked about this particular segment. — Ed.