Introduction

## Pt. III - Introduction

The **Introduction** is written by editor Johnny Truant on October 31, 1998, who relates how he came across The Navidson Record by its author, Zampanò.

The Introduction opens to Truant stating that he frequently gets nightmares, a problem drugs and alcohol have failed to treat, and that he struggles to sleep, hinting at an underlying cause behind all this.

In 1996, Johnny Truant's landlord evicted Truant for jokingly saying he would not mind if he died. For the next month, Truant began couch-surfing in Santa Monica and Silver Lake, California. Truant eventually found a place in Hollywood, California. Truant worked at a tattoo shop as an apprentice, where he tried to get over his ex-girlfriend Clara English. He developed a crush on a stripper nicknamed Thumper. On December 31, Lude and Truant spend the final hours of the year looking for new bars or people, "driving recklessly through the canyons, doing our best to talk the high midnight heavens down with a whole lot of bullshit."

Zampanò died on January 6, 1997 in his 80s; penniless, friendless, single, and alone. After Zampanò failed to appear for his morning walk, Lude obtained an apartment key from the building manager, Flaze, and discovered Zampanò's body lying face down on the floor. Paramedics determined his death to be of natural causes. Truant reports Zampanò's death to have been "better than the prostitute the paramedics had seen earlier that day. She had been torn to pieces in a hotel room, parts of her used to paint the walls and ceiling red." Neighbors and Flaze were curious, but as night drew on and the paramedics removed Zampanò's corpse, only Lude remained in the apartment.

The old man died without relatives and, as it turns out, the contents of his apartment were practically worthless. A week later, Lude woke Truant to search the apartment for themselves before the landlord brings a charity to clean it out. As they walked through the complex hallways at 4:00 AM, Lude told Truant that all of the cats of the apartment had begun disappearing several months back, the last one vanishing the day Zampanò died. Stranger still, four long gouges - perhaps made by a claw - were found in the wood floor around his corpse.

The two entered the apartment to find Zampanò had sealed every ventilation point to prevent air circulation with the outside world, which gave the apartment a horrible smell. Most of the things in the apartment were junk, though Truant was fascinated by the claw marks. Lude called Truant's attention to a large collection of papers, haphazardly shoved to a corner of the room. The papers, once reassembled, represented the unfinished book The Navidson Record, which came with a small note addressed to whomever discovered it. Lude was uninterested in The Navidson Record, so Truant carried it home.

Initially, Truant was only moderately amused by the writings, but as time wore on, he began reading for longer periods of time. He admits his own state of mind evolved as his interest turned into obsession. He interviewed old volunteers, researched the citations in the text, and realized that the elderly writer had a sharp, morbid sense of humor; but as he labored, Truant began to fear a monster at night, and began sealing every exit point of his own apartment just as Zampanò had.

Truant states that he is caked in blood - not all of it his own - while writing. He vomits in the bathroom and asks himself over and over questions like, "What have I done?", but fails to state what he did. While he mentions that he has obtained a gun and recognizes that he *could* shoot people and cars from the vantage of his hotel window, it is not clear that he fired upon them at all, leaving the reader with the mystery of what happened and how Truant ended up covered in blood.

Truant ends with a lengthy quasi-warning of his own: That if you are fortunate, you will dismiss the work; but if you persist, you will mutate; slowly, very slowly, you will start to become a creature "buried in the nameless back of a name. And then the nightmares will begin."

## Commentary.

Hidden inside the introduction is a harbinger of things to come: "Ever see yourself doing something in the past and no matter how many times you remember remember it you still want to scream stop, somehow redirect the action, reorder the present?" The house constantly rearranges itself and erases all that is left behind. "The mind and the home are fantastic manifestations of non-euclidean space that challenges our perception of being. I hate to use the phrase because it's so hackneyed, but there's nothing more fitting than to say the 'sum is greater than its parts,'" journalist Edith Chao told me over coffee. She watched one of Karen Green's cuts at her behest back in the 90s but was left out of Zampanòs text. She openly admitted to having never read House of Leaves until I asked her to in preparation for our coffee date. "A house constantly reordering rearranging itself is impossible, right? And after reading the Introduction, I feel like... is a person unable to rearrange herself as well? Maybe the idea that we can become better - or worse - people is just a pretty little fiction we tell ourselves; it only happens in books."

1. ↑ A peculiar wording, one without parallel in literature - at least as far as I could find. On its face, Truant means progressing through highs and lows, canyons and heavens. But deeper, Truant's words are opaque.
2. ↑ *See* Minotaur.
3. ↑ Minotaur (Mythical Character)

## References

1. ↑ Excedrin PM, Melatonin, L-tryptophan, Valium, Vicodin, various barbitals, bourbon, marijuana, and cocaine.
2. ↑ Reference: the Nobel Prize.
3. ↑ Reference: Truant writes "all my yesterdays," which refers to Macbeth's soliloquy in William Shakespeare's *Macbeth*.
4. ↑ Truant references "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones: "Of course curiosity killed the cat, and even if satisfaction supposedly brought it back, thre's still that little problem with the man on the radio telling me more and more about some useless information."
5. ↑ Reference: Helen.
6. ↑ References: Shots In the Dark, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXVIII, Ancient Lore in Medieval Latin Glossaries, "Rebellion" on the 1973 Skylab mission, La Belle Nicoise et Le Beau Chien, Quesada and Molino.
7. ↑ References: Itchy and Scratchy, Calvin and Hobbes, Joel-Peter Witkin.
8. ↑ Reference: Maginot Line.
9. ↑ Johnny Truant, "Introduction" in House of Leaves xiv (2000).
10. ↑ Interview with Edith Chao, transcript held by Michael Levy-Gauss (June 5, 2015).