Previously…

Marabelle pressed Lefty about Greta and the period when Kelly disappeared again, and he admitted Greta became an escape while refusing to give details about the affair. He then revealed he’d been holding all of Kelly’s journals and offered Marabelle the trunk, insisting she can’t tell the story honestly without reading what Kelly wrote.

The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.

September 28, 2005

Grass is a remarkable thing. I’ve missed it, the way it’s alive beneath you when you lie down. This afternoon, I lay down in a high meadow and studied a patch of it until it got too dark to see anything. I admire the sprawl of grass and the way it’s all interconnected, like it’s all one organism, not a trillion tiny, individual blades. Grass is defined by its plurality. It’s everywhere and virtually invisible. I guess that’s a good way to describe me.

I didn’t bring my sketchpad on purpose. When I have it, I miss everything that falls outside its dimensions. I’ve missed so much, too much already. I say that’s the reason. It sounds nice. It’s what a thoughtful person would say.

The truth is I’m angry at Ona and afraid, and I don’t think I will ever forgive her. I can feel her pushing, nudging me to engage, but I refuse. Better to have the headaches.

I flew into Charlotte two days ago and rented a car. I drove until I reached the Blue Ridge Parkway, and then just kept driving. I found a little motel right off one of the overlooks, which is crazy. There’s literally nothing along the parkway for miles. The place is ancient, built in the fifties, I think, and I might be the only person staying here. The sheets are starched and scratchy and there’s no air-conditioning. My small, cedar-paneled room smells like a dry old attic, or like the smell of a box of puzzle pieces, a box that hasn’t been opened in a decade. It’s perfect.

I missed dinner at the little restaurant, but the old woman who sat behind the register was kind enough to bring me a plate of cold fried chicken, a biscuit, and some slaw. I devoured it sitting in a little folding chair I put outside my room so I could look at the stars above the dark, bear-like silhouette of the mountains.

I called Lefty to tell him I was safe and that I was back in North Carolina. He didn’t speak much, didn’t ask any questions. I know he’s sick of my shit and thinks I’m a terrible mom. I am objectively a terrible mom.

The thing about being a terrible mom is that you don’t get better by being around your kid because their presence just reminds you you’re a terrible mom and then you feel like shit and that just makes you a more terrible mom. I do miss her though. I don’t deserve to miss her. I don’t deserve her.

I can’t stop thinking about Fiodor. He was never going to hurt Marabelle, he was just trying to get my attention. He didn’t deserve to die. The way he wrote about my art, the things he saw in it, amazed me. It was like someone reading thoughts in my mind that I didn’t even realize I had. How could he possibly see me so clearly just from looking at my work? He saw me the way Lefty did before Daedalia.

I missed being seen. But that’s no excuse. I should never have started talking with him. Did I flirt with him? Maybe, but it wasn’t like that. I entertained his theories and teased him with glimpses of the thing he obsessed over. He was a lonely man who had no one, no connection to anything but my work. I was his whole identity and then I just cut him off. Even the kindest, most harmless person can become dangerous when they’re drowning. I’m not sure I can ever forgive myself for what I’ve done.

It’s late and I need to sleep, I guess, but I don’t know why. There’s nothing I have to do tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. I have more than anyone could ever ask for and it doesn’t make any difference.

October 2, 2005

I called home to try to talk to Marabelle but she wouldn’t get on the phone. I don’t blame her. Lefty asked if I would come home, but I can’t. Not yet.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks mostly outside, hiking or just sitting. I need to work. It’s like a terrible itch, an itch inside my brain, inside my gut. There has to be something more to me apart from my art and I’m determined to find it. I’m not sure that I will, but maybe I can at least get some peace away from Ona’s persistent nagging.

I bought a used VW bus. I’ve never bought a car before. It was a practical purchase, I think. I can sleep in it. It’s comfortable and I like driving it even if it does putter up hills. I like waking up and deciding whether I want to stay or go.

I’m really just circling these mountains, though, trying to work up the courage to go and visit my mother. I don’t know why it’s suddenly important. Maybe I need to see her up close to be reminded that there’s a reason why I’m so fucked up. Or maybe now I’m beginning to understand her better. What if she’s not even alive?

My dreams these days are so vivid. I can’t just turn it off, the little Daedalia factory in my mind. Just because I shut down the production line doesn’t mean the idea machine stops. I confess that I look forward to sleeping and I do a lot more of it, sometimes pulling off to the side of the road, drawing the curtains, and taking a nap. Can someone be addicted to sleep?

When I wake up, I lie there for a while in that halfway space, dancing with the ideas, pushing them around on the temporary canvas. It’s as close as I’ll allow myself to get to making art.

These journals have lined pages for a reason, but still my pen drifts to the margins, always looking for the white space. The most recent series of dreams feature vines, a vast network of them twisted together at points like nodes, then separating out into a thousand different directions only to converge again. I was moving along one of the vines, following it slowly at first from some distance, and then I was inside it, moving so fast it’s just a blur of light and color until I explode into the next node.

The nodes are orbs, each like tiny worlds with their own atmosphere, their own life forms, strange, scary, and sometimes beautiful. Writing about them is impossible. Words are inferior, like trying to draw the fine hairs of a downy feather with the fat end of a charred stick.

Besides, it’s not the image anyway, even if I could describe it perfectly. Even if I could draw it exactly. It isn’t what’s on the page, but what’s inside it, beneath it. There’s a thousand pulsing hearts pumping away invisibly behind any great work of art.

I will go see my mother tomorrow. Maybe that’s what will knock me out of this fucking loop I’m stuck in.

October 3, 2005

I debated calling first or just showing up. I didn’t want to do either so I chose the middle ground. I parked on the street at the end of the driveway like some creepy person in the van and watched the place for an hour or two.

The house looked worse for the wear, peeling paint and broken shutters. The only active improvement to the property was a ramp up to the front door. I wondered if they even lived there anymore and was about to leave when the front door opened.

An old woman, roughly the size of my mother, appeared in the doorframe but her shape was all wrong, like a collection of sticks wired together inside a lavender jogging suit. This woman’s hair was limp, lifeless, and muddled with gray. I was convinced it wasn’t her until she turned in profile to shout into the house. A moment later, a crumpled old man appeared in a wheelchair behind her and my heart frosted over.

The comb-over was gone. His head looked like a translucent bird egg. The ruddy, bloated face I remember was replaced by hollow cheeks, pulled into a permanent frown. As she maneuvered him down the ramp, she looked up and saw my van. Her face scrunched up and she paused midway. Her eyes locked on mine, or I imagined they did. I didn’t wait to find out.

I drove back into town, my heart racing. I’m not sure what I’m afraid of. Neither of them have any hold over me and they haven’t since I moved out at sixteen, but I felt that old feeling of being trapped like a small animal. He must’ve had a stroke or something. I feel no pity for him.

For my mother, it’s more complicated. I realize I have no desire to talk to her or tell her about my life, even to gloat and punish her. Still, there’s a stitch of guilt I can feel pinching my gut. She looks so helpless and sad and old, like that house with the shutters hanging off their hinges.

That’s something I can fix at least. I’ll find a contractor in town tomorrow and give them money to repair the house. I’ll do it anonymously. It’s all the “good daughter” she deserves.

I think I’m stunned that she has stayed with him, that she could love him when he was a monster and love him now that he’s a vegetable. She never had that kind of love for me. It’s horrible to admit, but I see myself in her.

I’ve done no better as a mother and as much as I want to, I can’t right now. Better for M to miss me and be angry at my absence than to see the shell of me every day and wonder why she’s not deserving of my attention. I miss her terribly. But going back now would be selfish. She doesn’t need me fucking her up.

October 5, 2005

Tomorrow I’ve decided to leave the mountains. As beautiful as they are right now with the leaves changing, it’s time to go. I need to keep moving. It’s really all I know to do right now.

I kind of did what I came here to do. I didn’t speak to them, but I saw my mom and my stepfather. I made some effort to atone for my neglecting her all these years. It’s okay if she doesn’t know the help with their house came from me. I know it did and that makes me feel a little better.

Marabelle still won’t talk to me, but Lefty put the phone on speaker for half an hour while he was helping her with her homework so I could hear her voice. She sounded so grown up and confident, I couldn’t stop crying and had to put the phone on mute so she wouldn’t hear me.

He was helping her with a book report she was having to write and I was reminded what a patient teacher he is. I was really just a girl the first time I met him and his voice had this effect on me, like a calming, settling feeling. He asked her to read what she wrote aloud and I could just picture them there at the kitchen table, him nodding and humming his approval at specific points.

I’m not ready to face them, but tomorrow morning I will at least start driving west.

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Previously…

Marabelle returned from North Carolina to find Kelly frayed and overcompensating. Lefty shouted little Marabelle out of the shed before she could see what was on a new canvas Kelly had painted. A brief pocket of closeness followed at Disneyland, but it ended abruptly when Kelly learned that Fiodor had died in his cell. Marabelle never learned what was on the canvas.

The following transcript is an excerpt from an interview with Lefty Moody on August 4, 2034.

LM: Are you recording all these?

MM: Yeah, because I want to get it right. What, why are you smiling?

LM: Nothing, sweetheart. I think it’s a noble pursuit to get things right, but you’re interviewing the wrong person for that.

MM: Maybe, but you’re all I’ve got now.

LM: You’ll get it right because whatever goes into the story will have to go through your beautiful brain first.

MM: Do you think I’m like her?

LM: No, thank God. Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I mean to say your mom was haunted most every day of her life. That’s why she had to run away sometimes. I don’t think you have that.

MM: What did you do when she disappeared the second time?

LM: I don’t know exactly. She was always disappearing and I never got used to it.

MM: I think there’s a reason for that. It was kind of in the contract the two of you made for her to be gone. I’m sorry. That sounded harsh, but isn’t it a little bit true?

LM: I suppose it is, but you’re kind of an asshole for stating it so plainly.

MM: I can accept that, but you agreed to all this. What was it she said just before she died? “No more secrets.”

LM: That’s right. Why do I get the feeling this is going to be an interrogation? I can see there’s something you want to ask me, so just spit it out.

MM: Greta. She started showing up a lot when I was ten. You were with her, weren’t you? She wasn’t just a business associate.

LM: Why do you need to ask a question you already know the answer to?

MM: I need to hear you say it. I need to understand.

LM: It didn’t start out that way. In the beginning Greta was just someone who showed me the ropes of the art world. But when your mom left that second time, something kind of broke. I really wasn’t sure she would come back. I was pissed at her and I was lonely. You remember it was just me and you for months, right?

MM: Yeah, I remember. Did Kelly not say where she was going?

LM: No, she didn’t say. These things were never debates or even conversations. When she reached that point, I understood she was drowning and there was nothing I could do except give her space.

MM: It was more than a year, right? She missed my tenth birthday. I remember her gift showing up in the mail and I didn’t want to open it.

LM: I’m not sure it was that long, but you’re right about your birthday. The gift sat on the floor of your room for months. You wanted me to give it to Maria’s niece.

MM: So, Greta?

LM: Greta was my escape. Your mom had hers and I had mine. Jesus, this is kind of horrible to dredge up. Were you really just ten? You always seemed so much older. You just took everything in stride. I’m sorry.

MM: It’s fine. Ancient history now. Please tell me about that time period. I want to understand what you were both going through.

LM: I can tell you the facts, but I’m not going to go into details about my affair with Greta. You’re a grown person. Use your imagination. I’ve read your books. I’m sure whatever you write will end up better than what it really was.

MM: What was it really?

LM: A poor substitute for what I really wanted. When you make a life with someone who’s always having a conversation in her head with someone else, you get tired of being a third wheel. Heh, I guess that’s not really a thing, is it?

MM: No, a third wheel keeps things from tipping over.

LM: Well, I guess that’s a good way to describe me then. But I did get tired of being the support.

MM: What did she get tired of?

LM: You should read that for yourself.

MM: What do you mean?

LM: I’ve been holding onto something for a while out of respect for your mother because I’m not sure what she would have wanted. I know the two of you talked a lot in her final days. Did she ever mention her journals?

MM: She never offered them. I know she kept them secret, like so much else.

LM: I have them all and I think she would have wanted you to see them. It’s a lot, but you’ve taken on this project and you’ve said you want to get it right. I’m worried you can’t do that unless you read them.

MM: Okay. I’m a little scared. Just thinking about what’s in there scares me.

LM: What scares you more, that you will learn that she was human or that she was more than that?

MM: Both. She really believed she had some magical power. That’s crazy. You know that, right? After all these years, you know that. She didn’t kill Fiodor Barkowski because she made a painting in her shed.

LM: I’m old enough now to accept there’s a lot I don’t understand, and will never be able to see because my eyes aren’t equipped. Octopuses have a brain in each tentacle. This crazy little shrimp, the mantis shrimp, can see millions of colors or something crazy. Birds and butterflies know how to migrate to places on the other side of the world. We call things crazy that we don’t understand.

MM: Okay, it’s clear you’ve been watching too much National Geographic. But I know what you mean. Did some part of you envy her ability?

LM: Of course. The only thing I ever did in my life that came close to what she could do was throw a ball really fast. But that’s not really the same, is it?

MM: Did you ever study her when she was working, try to figure out what she was doing?

LM: Sure I did. There was even a time when she tried to teach me.

MM: How did that work?

LM: How do you think? She was a terrible teacher, but I didn’t give her much to work with. Looking back, I wish that I had filmed her, you know like these kids do today with time-lapse photography. I can see her in my mind, the way she held her pen. There were times when I would sit in the studio and just watch her work. She would forget I was there. Her hand would be moving so fast with such purpose and certainty, making tens of thousands of choices in an hour with each tiny stroke of her pen. It’s like she was that octopus I talked about earlier with a separate brain in her hand. You realize she started to draw with her left hand because her right would cramp too much? You know how hard that is?

I saw a video the other day at one of those machines. What are they called? They have a little nib that shoots out plastic and they can make these incredibly complex objects.

MM: You mean a 3D printer.

LM: Yeah, that’s it. That’s what it was like watching her work. Most artists work for a while and then step back from the canvas to get the full perspective. I’m sure she must have too, but I don’t remember that being part of her process. How do you explain that? How do you explain what she was able to create without at least stepping back to see the whole thing once in a while?

MM: I don’t know. It’s one of many things I want to understand about her. When I read about all these people who are scholars of her work, I get jealous, like they knew her better than me. Isn’t that ridiculous?

LM: They didn’t know your mother, sweetie. They study her work and see what they want to see. She was hard to know. I’m not sure if she really even knew herself. I know how much she loved you, even if she didn’t always know how to show it. I’m gonna give you the trunk of her journals. Maybe they’ll help.

MM: Have you read them?

LM: I’ve tried, but it’s just too painful for me now.

MM: You don’t think she would mind me having them?

LM: I don’t think so. I think she wanted to be known, don’t you? It’s what we all want, to be known, especially by the people we love.

MM: It’s funny, the whole thing. I mean, there’s probably very few people on the planet who haven’t seen her work at this point and literally none of them knew who she was even though they think they did. You created this placeholder for her and people could just fill in the blank.

LM: Yeah, I guess that’s something people need more than I ever anticipated they would.

MM: Why do you think that is?

LM: I don’t know. Maybe the same reason we need God or Santa Claus.

MM: You’re talking about belief, about faith. You believed in her.

LM: I did, but I also knew the real person, just like you did. She wasn’t an idea. She wasn’t a witch. She was my partner, my wife, your mother. What? What did I say?

MM: Nothing, Dad. I just… I don’t know. I’m just so sad because I feel like I always missed her, like she was more an idea than anything else to me. I wanted more. I know that’s not fair. But I wanted more time. And now… now she’s really gone and I’ll never get that time.

LM: I know sweetie. I’m sorry. But you were always there with her. She carried you with her, wherever she went. Read her journals.

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Previously…

In her journals, Kelly described the aftermath of Marabelle’s abduction as sleepless isolation, guilt, and rage, while Lefty grew cold and distrustful after learning Kelly had been messaging Barkowski online. Marabelle’s trauma surfaced in small ways, and Kelly began to fear both her work and her own capacity for harm, swearing she would stop being Daedalia and try to become a real mother.

The trip to visit my grandparents in North Carolina, after everything I had been through, felt enchanted. Sitting on their back porch, I saw fireflies for the first time and heard cicadas. Lefty and I played Parcheesi with my grandpa and I ate two bowls of my grandma’s blackberry cobbler. There was a neighbor boy I played with for hours who had bright red hair and a lazy Southern drawl that made me laugh when he said things like “warter.” Let’s get some warter, I’m thirsty.

I don’t remember thinking about Kelly while we were away and I didn’t even feel bad until we got home. She had decorated the whole living room with streamers and balloons like it was a birthday party. There were bowls of chips and candy on the table and an enormous box, gift-wrapped, that turned out to be a bicycle. She had baked a cake too, and though it was lopsided, it was exquisitely decorated with a Transformer that looked like it must have taken her all day to create.

She hugged me for a long time and I hugged her back but she smelled terrible, like she hadn’t bathed in a couple of days. Her hair was greasy and hadn’t been brushed and she had dark circles under her eyes.

Lefty was concerned. I remember the way he looked around the room, and at her, when she was hugging me and saying over and over again how much she had missed us. Later, when I was in my room playing, I could hear them talking. They weren’t shouting, so I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but from the rhythm and flow of their voices, it was clear there was an argument. I wished I was back in North Carolina.

The next morning, I woke up early and went into the living room to turn on the TV. Out the window, I could see the door to the shed was open. I called out for my parents, but there was no answer. I went into their bedroom but they weren’t there. I put on my flip-flops by the door and went outside. I crossed the courtyard and went down the path to the shed where the door was ajar. I stepped to the threshold and looked inside.

Lefty was standing in front of a medium-sized canvas on one of Kelly’s easels. I couldn’t see what was on it because his body blocked my view. Kelly was curled up on the floor in the corner of the room. She was covered in an old quilt and all I could see was the nest of her hair and one of her hands, dirty with ink and paint, poking out from beneath.

I called out to Lefty but he didn’t seem to hear me.

I remember this terrible, uneasy feeling that is hard to describe. It was a physical sensation that made my stomach turn over, like when you take the express elevator to the top floor of a skyscraper.

I called out to Lefty again. He startled from his trance and yelled, “No. Get out of here, Marabelle. Now.”

I jumped at the sound of his voice. He never yelled at me, so this was scary. I turned and ran back to the house without ever seeing what was on the canvas. A few minutes later he found me in my bedroom, hiding in the back of my closet.

“Come here, sweetheart. It’s okay. Daddy’s sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Is Mommy okay?” I asked.

“She’s fine, she’s just tired. She was up late working last night.”

“Why did you scream at me?”

“I didn’t want you to see that picture. Some things are only for grown-ups. I didn’t want it to upset you.”

I don’t remember any more discussion after that. If there was, I didn’t sway him, probably because I didn’t really want to know what was on the canvas.

Later that day, when I went out to the shed to see her, the canvas was gone. She seemed better, less frayed around the edges, and that feeling I had walking into the shed earlier that morning didn’t come back.

“Are you okay, Mommy?” I asked.

“Yes, pumpkin, I’m great. Just a little tired. I didn’t sleep so well. Come here.”

I sat in her lap. Her hair was damp and smelled like shampoo. Her hands were scrubbed clean. I let her hold me for a while. I could feel her trying so hard and I didn’t want to disappoint her. I wanted to match her intensity but I never could. Mostly I just felt uncomfortable.

I felt this way long before I was taken and it only intensified after. It wasn’t Kelly’s fault she couldn’t make me feel safe. I’m not sure she ever felt safe or comfortable in her body unless she was working.

As I read back what I’ve written about my childhood, I realize I’m not being entirely fair. It’s true that the memories that stick in our reptile brains are typically the bad ones, the cautionary tales, so I’ve made an effort to go back and look through Lefty’s photo albums to try to remember the events of my childhood with more accuracy.

There were moments, pockets where we felt like a family and did family things. We went to Disneyland a couple of weeks later because Lefty had business in L.A. We stayed in a suite at the Disneyland Hotel with a view of Sleeping Beauty Castle, had pancakes with Mickey and Goofy, and spent the day riding rides. It was Kelly’s first time at Disney too and she loved it as much as I did.

Even though I was an inch shy of the minimum height to ride, she helped me get on Space Mountain and we rode it three times in a row. Lefty chickened out after the first time and feigned a sore neck. We teased him mercilessly for the rest of the trip. At the teacup ride or in the queue for “It’s a Small World,” Kelly would say, “Are you sure your neck’s gonna be okay with this one, Grandpa?”

They didn’t argue or have intense whispered conversations. My mother didn’t once pick up a pen unless it was to circle the next thing on the map we were going to visit. No one asked me how I was doing or if I needed anything. I didn’t have to talk to the lady in the office with all the bookshelves about my feelings.

For the last two days of that trip, it was just me and my mother because Lefty had meetings. The sharp focus my mother had always given to her work, she gave to me and I bathed in her attention. She was less of a mother and more of a friend with endless resources who wouldn’t deny me anything.

If I expressed the smallest interest in a toy in one of the hundreds of gift shops, strategically placed throughout the park, she got it for me. Halfway through the second day we had to return to the hotel because we couldn’t carry all the things she had bought for me. Rather than return to the park, we went down to the hotel swimming pool, which was basically a mini waterpark, and she swam and splashed and got sunburned right beside me for the remainder of the afternoon.

She got on a first-name basis with one of the poolside waiters and he continued to refill our commemorative Goofy cups with mock piña coladas until we both got brain freezes. It was as if she had taken Lefty’s personality on loan in his absence and was going to ride it until the wheels came off.

I remember we held hands everywhere we walked, and if we were waiting in line somewhere, her hands were on my shoulders or cradling my face, her lips pressed to the top of my head. I don’t remember ever flinching or pushing her away. I soaked up her affection in the way a desert marigold drinks the rain.

The memory I’ve replayed during the worst times of my life, when I’ve felt completely alone and anxious, is one from that evening. It’s a mystery why we record some memories in high fidelity, but I believe it has something to do with the degree to which our bodies are affected in these moments.

I was so sunburned that my face and shoulders were glowing, radiating heat, like embers in a furnace. But the strange thing about being that sunburned is that everything that touches your skin must be interpreted. It’s as though the wires of perception for pleasure and pain are intertwined.

We stood together in a cold shower, both of us cringing and squealing at the tiny needles of water. Afterwards, we couldn’t bear the agony of toweling off so we lay on the soft white sheets of the enormous bed beneath the ceiling fan to air dry. She slathered gobs of cold aloe vera gel on my shoulders and the delicate touch of her fingertips raised goosebumps down my back.

We ordered room service. To be different I ordered something exotic called a Monte Cristo, which turned out to be a deep-fried ham and cheese sandwich. She thought it was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted and ordered two more. We dipped them in syrup and ate until we were so full we couldn’t move. She put what remained back on the silver tray and we left it in the hallway.

In the bed we watched 101 Dalmatians and she promised to get me a puppy when we returned home. I was so tired I don’t remember the movie ending. All I remember is the sensation of her fingers idly combing through my damp hair, the flickering light from the television playing on the wall, and the feeling of not wanting to be anywhere else. Not wanting anything else. And most of all, not being afraid.

The next morning, I awoke to find the person who had made me feel that way was gone. Kelly was on the phone for a long time talking with my father. Something was wrong. I pretended to play with my new toys, but really I was listening for clues in her one-word responses and vague questions.

Before she hung up the phone, I remember her saying, “Oh my God. What did I do?” All the blood had drained from her face, her mouth was slack, and she stared at a point on the wall for a long time after the call ended. I kept asking her what was wrong, but she didn’t respond, except to turn on the television and hand me the remote.

We didn’t go back to the park that day. Instead, we got on an airplane and flew back to Santa Fe. The person who had splashed in the pool with me had vanished as quickly as she had appeared, and I would only ever catch fleeting glimpses of her for what remained of my childhood.

In the days that followed, from the snippets of conversation I could make out between her and Lefty, I learned that Fiodor was dead. I never let on that I knew this nor did I ask any questions about him. The ropes of guilt, sadness, and relief braided into a knot in my gut. I withdrew more and more. I’m not sure either of my parents really noticed. Maybe they did because they continued to take me to the therapist with her shelves full of books, but we never spoke about Fiodor.

When I began doing research for this book a couple of years ago, I learned that my captor was found dead in his cell early on the morning of July 16, 2005, the same morning I was sleeping blissfully next to my mother in the Disneyland Hotel. The police report said he died from a massive heart attack. He was only 36 years old and had no preexisting heart condition. Apparently no one questioned his death. There was no grieving mother or father to challenge the autopsy report.

Two decades later, there was little evidence that Fiodor Barkowski had ever existed beyond some archived web pages from a Daedalia fan site I managed to find in the Wayback Machine. He wrote about her with such reverie, passion, and sensitivity. He seemed like a kind person, earnest even, and I wondered if I had met him as an adult, if he hadn’t kidnapped me as a child, would I have liked him?

I tried to recall the physical dimensions of him as I read his words, but he was nothing but a collection of disjointed parts in my memory. There are no photographs that portray the man who wrote those beautiful words about Daedalia or the man who caused me nightmares for over a decade. There’s only a mug shot taken the day he was arrested. In the two-by-three frame, he appears trapped like a wild animal in a snare, the whites of his eyes enormous, his expression a combination of terror and bewilderment.

At Kelly’s insistence, Lefty burned the canvas I hadn’t been allowed to see that morning in the studio. I’ve asked him many times in the last few years to describe the painting to me, but he’s never been willing to talk about it.

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Previously…

Fiodor held Marabelle for six days, feeding her a private mythology about Daedalia while he spiraled between obsession and instability. On the sixth night Marabelle fled the motel, was found by police, and returned home to parents who were physically there but suddenly unfamiliar.

The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.

June 18, 2005

I don’t really sleep anymore. We haven’t left the house except to shop for groceries in almost three months and when we do, the three of us go together. Maribee has regressed a bit, which the therapist says is to be expected, but otherwise, she seems fine, certainly better than me and Lefty.

He sleeps on the floor in her bedroom and I lay awake in our bed, staring at the ceiling when I can’t stand to look at the TV anymore. We don’t really talk about what happened. I know we should, but talking about it brings the full force of it back and that feeling is like a balloon swelling in my chest that just keeps expanding until I can’t breathe. Lefty is so angry at me and I don’t blame him. That lunatic would never have entered our lives if it wasn’t for me. I can deal with it though. I can deal with Lefty’s coldness and pent-up rage. I can deal with just about anything now that we have Marabelle back. When she was gone, I went into a kind of raving, animal madness where I would have chewed off my own arm if that was the price to get her home.

This morning she was sitting at the breakfast table and I was standing over her when I discovered a bald spot on her scalp where she’s been pulling out her hair. I touched the bare spot and started crying. She swatted my hand away and said to leave her alone, then she ran from the table. Lefty just stared at me so hard I felt his eyes were like spikes and I collapsed on the floor, sobbing. Pathetic. I don’t know how to get back to where we were and then I think that’s wrong because where we were is what caused all this to happen.

June 30, 2005

I don’t know if I ever want to work again but I don’t know what else I’m good for. Lefty took Marabelle to North Carolina to visit his parents. He thought a change of scenery would be good for her. When I told him to go without me, I think he was relieved. So here I am alone, staring at a blank canvas.

Who am I kidding? I have nothing but a cold, burning hatred inside me. All I want to do is see the man who took Marabelle burned alive or fed to alligators. But that’s not going to happen. It doesn’t matter how much money we have. The state moves at a snail’s pace to administer justice. I guess I should be happy that at least he’s in a jail cell and didn’t get away. I badger the Albuquerque DA’s office every day. The latest is that Mr. Barkowski will likely plead insanity, which is most certainly true. This doesn’t help my case for wanting him put to death.

Last night while he was packing, Lefty asked what I planned to do while they were gone. These questions used to be gentle nudges to get me to work but now they feel more like interrogations. He no longer trusts me. The thing I was doing online wasn’t exactly sexual, but this fact doesn’t matter to him. Maybe he would be able to forgive me if it was sexual. At least he would be able to understand it.

We’ve not spoken about it since that massive fight after Marabelle was back home and the investigators came around asking questions about my messaging history with Barkowski. It was all there. Nothing goes away on the fucking internet. What was just anonymous fun, a way to blow off steam, ended up blowing up our lives and doing damage to my sweet girl that can’t be undone.

If he wasn’t being such an asshole, I would almost feel bad for him for the way he had to dance in front of the detective’s questions about this artist, DAY DALLIA. I no longer give a shit, but he insisted on preserving our secret, even under these circumstances. I played along because I always play along. He says he’s afraid of what other nutjobs will come after me if the truth gets out. I want to believe that’s his reason.

After the detective left, Lefty made me log into the message board so he could read everything I had written.

I’ve never seen him so angry. Why was I playing around with these trolls in their parents’ basements with their conspiracy theories? Was it thrilling to titillate them with my expert insights into the great Daedalia? Did I get off on it? I told him no, but it was the closest I would ever get to getting credit for my work. That shut him up.

None of it matters. What matters is that Marabelle is safe, at least for now, as long as that motherfucker is in jail. As for Daedalia, her days are numbered. Even if she’s not completely exposed during the trial, which seems likely, I don’t think I’ll ever want to draw again.

July 4, 2005

Lefty called yesterday and asked if it was okay if they stayed through the 4th. Marabelle is having a good time. She sounded happy and relaxed on the phone. A neighbor has a grandson visiting so she has a playmate, which she’s not used to. I miss her. I should have gone too but I’m afraid of bumping into my mother and Dennis. It happened a few years ago when we were there. She looked so hurt when she saw Marabelle with us and I felt guilty for not even telling her she had a granddaughter. How’s that fair? After everything she put me through. Better to stay here and be lonely.

In the distance I can see the fireworks downtown. I’m sitting on the patio with a glass of whiskey and an empty bag of chips. I used to enjoy time by myself but now I just feel manic. I can’t focus on anything. Tried to read, tried to watch TV, but I can’t get out of my head.

Ona feels like I’m punishing her by not working and maybe I am. I can feel her stronger than ever. But I refuse to go out to the shed. I’m not going to open the door again.

Is it weird that I’m beginning to believe all the crazy shit other people have been saying about my work? It’s made me think a lot about this question: If you were a monster, would you know you were a monster? Does a shark or a scorpion know what it is? Did I cause those men to fly into the towers? Did I invite Barkowski to take my baby?

I’m not that special. I cling to this notion when I feel like my brain is crawling with ants. Crazy people have delusions of grandeur. I’m just an artist. That’s all I know how to be. Nothing more than that.

I’m not even a good wife or mother. I’ve always been a disappointment to him in these roles, but now that I don’t want to be an artist, what good am I to him? What the hell am I going to do?

I gave the two security guys the day off. I would have done that even if it wasn’t a holiday. They make me feel like this place is a prison and honestly, I don’t trust anyone anymore, no matter how much they’re being paid to do a job. I think about Barkowski being in a cell and as much as I want that to feel good, it just makes me sad. He was once a Marabelle to someone.

A couple of weeks ago when I was sitting in her room while she played on the floor with her toys, she asked out of the blue: “Was Fiodor your friend or was he Daedalia’s friend?” I told her he was not my friend and that she knew Daedalia was just a name and not real. She stopped playing and just looked at me. “Why?” she asked. I didn’t have a good answer.

As the therapist recommended we do, I asked her in a non-judgmental way if she was thinking about Fiodor, if she wanted to talk about him. The therapist said it was common for a child to develop feelings for a captor, to even miss them, which is horrible to think about.

“He said he was supposed to save you. How can he save you now that he’s in jail?” she said. I told her I didn’t need saving. I wish to God that was true. I asked if she was afraid he would come back.

She changed the subject by asking me another question. “Why do you make those pictures?”

I don’t think anyone had ever asked me that question, even Lefty. Lefty had answered this very question on Daedalia’s behalf many times in interviews published in magazines across the world, but I have never answered it. And here was my little girl, seeing me, wanting to know. I froze. It’s like the work is the room I’ve always been in and it’s the only room I know. Her asking me implied that I have a choice, that there are other rooms to live in.

I told her I didn’t know because that was the truth and then I asked her if she liked the pictures I made.

I’ll never forget the pained look on her face. She was a child trying to take care of my feelings, trying to shove down a truckload of her own feelings to spare mine. I felt pathetic. She nodded slowly and said, “Can I play now?”

It wasn’t an invitation but I stayed in her room, even got down on the floor with her and tried to be absorbed in her world, to move the figures around on the carpet like she did. But I was distracted as I always am. I looked at her small, beautiful hands pushing trucks in circles on the floor between us and I imagined that man with her in that motel room as though he owned her, as though he was entitled to take whatever he wanted, as if all the beautiful and terrible things I made were made for him.

I was doing a fierce painting in my head, the strokes twitching faster and faster, like a million tiny cuts. My head felt like it was going to split open. I ran into her bathroom where I threw up.

They’ll be home tomorrow but that seems like an eternity from now. I’m going to focus all my energy on being a better mom. I’m going to read books about it. I’m going to study it the way I studied how to draw perspective, proportion, and depth. Maybe Lefty will be okay with the trade. Daedalia has given us far more than we need. Maybe we can be a real family now. I want that more than anything.

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Previously…

Fiodor Barkowski walked through the open gate at the ranch and used the Daedalia secret to manipulate Marabelle into unlocking the shed for him. When he didn’t find what he wanted, he kidnapped her, taking her to a motel room in Albuquerque.

The lore of Daedalia, according to Fiodor, went something like this: she was an ancient spirit who moved between this world and the many we cannot see, and she had many names in many tongues. Every century she chose a new vessel to work through, and these artists, Leonardo da Vinci, Artemisia Gentileschi, and William Blake, to name a few, produced visionary work far ahead of their time.

Fiodor believed Kelly Mudd was Daedalia’s chosen vessel for the twenty-first century and that her foretelling of the events of 9/11 through the twelve panels was evidence of her divinity. The problem was that Kelly had fallen prey to the same exploitative demon as many of her predecessors. The demon in question was my father, Charles Moody, who hid her true identity from the world in order to profit. It was Fiodor’s mission to discover the true identity of Daedalia, which he believed he had done, and to bring her into the light so the world would know her and she could be of service to it.

None of these details were told to me in that La Quinta Inn. I would learn it all by combing through internet archives decades later. What I learned over the course of those six days in that motel room was how to survive alone in the wilderness of one man’s troubled mind.

Fiodor had no plan when he took me. That much was clear after the first day. I can only assume he viewed me as another piece of art created by my mother, a piece like her others that contained a divine message for him to decode and possess.

“On the day you were born, were there crows? Crows outside the window?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does your mother only work during the new moon?”

“What’s a new moon?”

“The man that appears in the seventh panel, the one with sparrows in his beard, did your mother ever talk about him?”

As he would do many times, he showed me an image of one of my mother’s pieces on his laptop. I had seen very little of Daedalia’s work up to that point in my life. I was forever competing with her for my mother’s attention, so what little I had seen, I hadn’t examined with any real interest.

But when he showed me the image, I pretended to study it very carefully. I even asked him to make it bigger. I couldn’t see a bearded man and I didn’t know what sparrows were, but I had learned it was better to play the role he wanted me to play in this game.

“Yes,” I told him. “She said he was a hero, like a Transformer.”

His eyes lit up when I said this. He leaned back in his chair and stroked his beard. Then he turned his attention back to his computer and became completely immersed in typing.

I drifted slowly away to my corner of the room where I played with the alligator Transformer he had given me. They say children can adapt to anything, and it’s true. After a couple of days, I accepted this new reality for however long it would last. He let me eat things I wasn’t allowed to eat, like Froot Loops, gummy worms, and Doritos. He allowed me to watch anything on TV so long as it wasn’t too loud and he didn’t need help with his mission.

He barely slept. In fact, I don’t remember ever seeing him asleep, but he must have. I missed Maria. I missed Lefty reading stories to me and sometimes falling asleep, his long body stretching the length of my bed like a fortress wall, protecting me from whatever monsters I imagined outside my window.

I cried myself to sleep, fighting to loosen the knots in my belly. If Fiodor heard me crying, he would come lay next to me and it was a terrible feeling, wanting that physical comfort and simultaneously being repulsed by it. He smelled of sweat and spearmint gum and his breath was hot on my neck as he spoke in a whisper, telling long, rambling stories about mythical beasts, heroes, and villains. When he spoke of my mother, it was always in the possessive.

“My Kelly, she’s too good for this world. That’s why she was chosen. But Daedalia is an agent of chaos and can’t be trusted. The sales man,” that’s how he referred to my father, “can’t protect her, will not protect her because he only seeks to profit from what he believes is his golden goose.”

He would go on like this as he stroked the length of me with his heavy hand until I stopped crying, not because I was soothed, but because I did the only thing a small animal can do when trapped: become so still that maybe the predator will lose interest. I don’t think he ever touched me in a sexual way, but as I’ve said before, I can’t trust my memories.

As the days progressed, Fiodor became increasingly erratic, swinging from manic states where he would pace the room, cursing the names of demons he believed were coming for him, to long periods of staring into his computer in a near-catatonic state. Toward the end, he had stopped leaving the room. There was no more food. I drank water from the sink. I watched TV with the sound muted because the noise made him more agitated.

On the night of the sixth day, I had a dream so vivid that I recall it with more certainty than anything I’ve recounted so far. I was inside one of my mother’s paintings, being chased through a maze of hedgerows by a lumbering beast that growled like distant thunder rumbling through a dark, fetid cavern that dripped with condensation as it panted after me.

The sun was setting on the horizon, the sky aflame with color, and I was trying to reach it, but the path kept diverting me. I heard her voice singing to me. I don’t remember Kelly ever singing to me, but I knew it was her. I wanted her to stop the stupid singing and help me.

Then I realized she wasn’t singing but screaming, and the screaming became more shrill. I began to run faster, and as I ran, the tiny leaves of the hedges that imprisoned me began to flutter and take wing like millions of small birds, sparrows.

When I looked down at my body, I saw that I had transformed into an armored machine and I felt heat radiating up through me like a rocket gathering energy to take off. As the fluttering birds cleared, I saw that I was in the desert and I understood my home was miles away in the hills that were just bumps on the line of the horizon, quickly being erased.

Her screaming stopped, and everything was quiet. I could no longer hear the beast, but I felt its breath. Then one word, not spoken but transmitted, rang through every bone of my body like a tuning fork.

RUN!

My eyes shot open. The hotel room was dark except for a sliver of light from the parking lot that peeked through the drapes. Fiodor had been in the bed next to me. The depression he left in the mattress and the dampness of his sweat on the sheets and on my skin almost made me vomit. I could see the light from under the bathroom door and I could hear him muttering and grunting in there.

The heavy chair was no longer in front of the motel room door.

Without stopping to find my shorts or my toys, I rushed to the door. On my tiptoes, I was able to just reach the safety bar and flip it over. I paused with my fingers on the handle. I was frozen, no longer an armored robot, but the scared rabbit whose only defense was to be still and cower.

Then my body filled with the single directive my mother’s voice had planted in my dream.

I opened the door, stepped out onto the breezeway where the sun was still hours from breaking the horizon, and I ran.

I ran to the parking lot, to the only light I could see, which was the registration office for the motel. The older Indian woman with heavy bags under her eyes seated behind the desk startled when I burst through the door, this pipe cleaner of a child wearing nothing but a stained T-shirt and underwear.

I’m not sure what I said to her, or if I said anything at all. Maybe my eyes communicated everything she needed to know.

Within minutes, there was a policeman, and then more policemen, and I was wrapped in a blanket in the back of a police cruiser with a woman seated next to me who held my hand and said she was taking me home.

Just as in my dream, I was blasting through the desert landscape in a metal machine with blue lights flashing toward the sun, only the sun was rising, not setting.

When the cruiser slowed in front of the gate to our ranch, there were two figures standing there together, but apart. Lefty and Kelly rushed to open the door. Kelly reached in, pulled me from the car, and lifted me up. I wrapped my arms and legs around her, transforming once again. Lefty’s arms encircled us both. His chest heaved with emotion like a bellows and they both whispered the necessary incantations of assurance and gratitude and love into my unwashed hair.

Lefty insisted on carrying me the whole way back to the house and when we got there, my grandma and grandpa Moody, Maria, and some other people I didn’t know hovered around me. But I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone.

Kelly took me into their bathroom and bathed me like she did when I was small. Her hand holding the washcloth trembled as she squeezed warm water over my shoulders and back. The fingertips of her other hand gently traced every part of me, inspecting me for damage as if what was done to me would have left a wound that could be cleaned and covered by a Little Mermaid band-aid.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t answer any of her questions.

She toweled me off and dressed me in my favorite pajamas. Lefty came in and dried and brushed my hair, then carried me out into their bedroom. They asked if I was hungry. I wasn’t. I only wanted to sleep, so they put me in their bed between them and draped their arms around me.

I lay still with my eyes open for a long time, staring up at the ceiling. I didn’t feel like I was home. The idea of home was lost to me. It had been a couple of years since I slept in their bed and I couldn’t remember ever sleeping between them in that way.

I drifted on the frayed edge of sleep, my mind still racing through the maze, my legs twitching. Soon I heard Lefty snoring softly and Kelly’s hand that had been delicately rubbing circles on my back stilled.

I slipped out from under their arms, crawled off the bed and went to the window where I stared out at the front yard, my eyes fixed on the place where, just six days before, I had been a child playing in the dirt.

I turned and looked back at the empty place on the bed between the sleeping bodies I understood were my parents and I wondered, for the first time, who they really were.

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Previously…

In an interview after Kelly’s death, Lefty explained that after the 9/11 Panels invited unwanted attention, he and Kelly tried to protect the secret by shifting her public image away from Daedalia. For a year she stopped making her serious work and produced deliberately amateur folk-art chickens, which Lefty used to support a new narrative and reduce outside scrutiny.

Fiodor Barkowski was a bad artist by any objective measure, even his own. In truth, he didn’t so much want to be an artist as he wanted to possess what artists had, the ability to create a world more vivid than the small, drab one he commuted through every day.

On the subway he would sketch passengers openly, without their permission, hoping someone might engage with his miserable drawings. He was punched in the face on one occasion. His notebook was torn in half on another. But more often, he was simply ignored in the time-honored way New Yorkers ignore everything when they move through the transit system.

He was a small man in a large man’s body. His blocky hands were cartoonishly large, the fingertips squared off with a fine ring of dirt under the nails. On the sparrow-like frame of my nine-year-old shoulders, those hands felt like the safety bar that crushes you into the seat on a roller coaster that takes you upside down.

He first showed up at Marabelle long after the last of the news vans had moved on to the next story. He just wandered through the open gate on a Sunday morning. Lefty was away. Kelly was in Telluride. Maria was in the house. I was alone.

I didn’t notice him until his shadow darkened the patch of dirt where I was playing with one of my Transformers. I startled from my crouch and fell onto my butt. He dropped to a knee to be at my level with the jaunty ease of one of those collapsible toy figures held together with elastic bands.

“Hi there, I’m Fiodor,” he said, smiling through a tangle of beard that reminded me of Hagrid in the Harry Potter books. I wanted to run. Every cell in my body wanted to run, but he pinned me in place with six words. “I’m a friend of your mother.”

I had never met a friend of my mother, so I didn’t know what such a thing would look like. I looked toward the house and wanted to call out to Maria, but before I could, he produced something from the pocket of his massive coat.

“Your mom tells me you like these things, which means you must be good at puzzles like her. Things that look like one thing, but turn out to be something else.”

The Transformer toy in his hand looked tiny. It didn’t look like the ones I had and I was curious. I took it from him and transformed it right away from the silver-and-green robot soldier into an alligator. The white spikes along the soldier’s back became teeth.

“Do you like it?” I nodded and he said, “You can keep it.”

Then he sat down on his butt like a man with nowhere to go, produced another Transformer from his other pocket and marched it across the dirt between us. He was good at making voices and we played for a long time. Maria never came out to check on me.

“I love playing with you, but your mom asked me to come collect some things for her from the shed, things she needs to do her work. Could you help me with my mission so I don’t get in trouble?”

“Nobody’s supposed to go in there.”

“But that’s only when Mommy’s working, right? Isn’t she working somewhere else right now?” I nodded and he continued. “And to do that work, she needs some supplies.”

“Are you an artist too?”

“I am. A secret artist like your mom, but I’m not as good as her.”

“You know about Daedalia?”

Maybe it’s only in my reconstitution of this story, but I think a look of revelation passed over his face as though he had seen the face of God.

“I do. And that’s why she sent me.”

Without question, I took him to the shed and unlocked the door, punching in the four-digit code. I remember he stepped inside with the trepidation and reverence of a pilgrim.

That reverie quickly evaporated and soon he was moving confidently throughout the space, opening drawers, pawing through the stacks of canvases that leaned against the walls. He wasn’t finding what he was looking for and became impatient.

“This isn’t Daedalia’s work.” When he turned to me, his face was flushed and his bushy eyebrows were pinched into an angry line. “Where is her work?”

“This is her work,” I said.

He tore the canvas that featured a rooster perched atop a tire swing from the easel, causing the easel to clatter to the concrete floor.

“THIS,” he shouted. “Is NOT her work.”

“I’m going to get Maria,” I said.

But before I could make it to the door, he was blocking my way. He might as well have been a cinderblock wall. That’s when those large hands clamped down on my shoulders for the first time.

When something horrific happens to you as a child, if you remember it, it’s different from any normal memory. It has a weight, an impenetrable density to it, like typewritten lines on a page that have been typed over so many times that any hope of reading what was originally struck into the page is lost.

My mother had such lines in the story of her life. I want, more than anything, to know them so I could write them here with absolute clarity. Maybe that would help explain her to me and then I could forgive her. But I don’t think so.

I’ve spent decades working to decipher what happened to me and yet I’m sure, even as I recount it to you, the exact events are no more accurate than the story of my parents before I was born. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Fiodor took me that day. He didn’t have to tie me up or restrain me. He didn’t have to carry me, kicking and screaming. He had something better.

“You’re going to come with me to visit your mother. If you don’t, if you fight, or scream, I’m going to tell your secret and everything’s going to be ruined and it’s all going to be your fault.”

Before we left, he managed to find one of the Daedalia pieces, a small, unfinished and forgotten canvas that had fallen into the gap between the desk and the wall. I remember he peered into it the way I watched cartoons on Saturday mornings.

His car was filled with trash. He made me sit in the front seat, which I never did. We drove for what seemed like hours and he didn’t talk. He played the radio, tuning to any station with a signal when the previous one faded as we crossed the barren landscape of New Mexico. My pants were soaked with pee and I remember shivering and crying silently as we drove farther and farther away and the sun got lower in the sky.

We had driven no farther than Albuquerque when he pulled into the parking lot of a La Quinta Inn by the interstate. I understood this was not a place my mother would be. When I told him as much, he didn’t answer me.

The motel was one of those motor-court kinds so we didn’t have to go through a lobby and there was no kind concierge to offer a lollipop. He marched me up the stairwell to the second floor. I still remember the room number, 212. I’ve gone back and stayed in that room, so I know that much is true. Once inside, he closed the door, flipped over the safety bar, and moved a heavy chair in front of it.

When I sat on the bed, he saw that my shorts were wet. He sighed, shook his head, and rummaged through a lumpy army duffel and pulled out a T-shirt.

“Go change,” he said, handing me the enormous shirt. “Are you hungry? I’m going to order some food.”

“Do you really know my mommy?”

“Yes, and she knows me.”

In the small windowless bathroom with a dim fluorescent light, I remember startling when I saw myself in the mirror. I looked like a flickering ghost.

I was a self-sufficient child, a necessary skill when you have highly distracted parents. I stripped off my wet shorts and panties and washed myself in the bath. I washed the underwear and wrung them out as best I could before putting them back on. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with the big shirt. My shirt was fine, so I wrapped his big gray t-shirt around my waist like a skirt.

When I came out of the bathroom, he was sitting at the small table by the window, peering into a large laptop computer. Many years later, I would learn that he was a programmer by trade and that he did actually know my mother. He had met her on a message board, one of the many devoted to Daedalia. He had made a hobby of hacking the identities of anyone on the boards who said anything remotely interesting about Daedalia.

“Do you have it too, the gift?”

“No, I’m not good at drawing. Can I go home?”

“No, not yet. There are things I want to talk to you about.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“No, not if you do what I ask.”

When he said this, he looked away from the screen and met my eyes. “You look like her.”

“I’m scared.”

“I’m not gonna hurt you. You don’t need to be scared.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to help me with a very important mission. Can you do that?”

I don’t remember what I said in response. It didn’t matter. I would be trapped in that motel room for six days and my life would never be the same when I finally got to go home.

Fiodor’s mission, as he explained it to me, was to set Daedalia free. He had received her cries for help. He had decoded the messages in her work. She was a prisoner and no one knew her suffering but him.

When I tried to tell him Daedalia wasn’t real, that she was just a made-up name my mother used for reasons I didn’t understand, he got angry and his voice boomed with such resonance it made my teeth hurt. I curled up into a ball, whimpering in the corner between the bed and the wall, trying to make myself small enough to disappear.

As became the pattern, he would then fall into whispery apologies and put his hands on me, kneading my shoulders, my back, my thighs until I quieted. In those moments I went still, sunk so deep into myself I have no memory that I can trust.

I quickly learned that if I wanted to ever get home, I had to play his pretend game. The game where he was the hero, and not some delusional, bipolar man desperate to believe his life had a special purpose.

In those six days, in that motel room, I learned more about my mother and her work than I had in nine years of being her daughter. But I never decoded her, not in the way Fiodor did. I’m not sure why I’ve never been able to see what others have seen moving inside her canvases. Maybe I did when I was small, in the time before I was taken, but that hardly counts because to a child, everything in the world is enchanted.

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Previously…

Daedalia’s World Trade Center installation turned her into a pop-culture myth, and after 9/11 the missing panels became a magnet for conspiracy, grief, and fanaticism. The attention followed the myth to the gates of Marabelle, forcing Lefty to escalate security and start playing defense in earnest.

The following transcript is an interview with Lefty Moody recorded on July 1, 2036.

MM: Tell me about the chickens. Why chickens?

LM: I don’t know. I didn’t give it too much thought. Your mom was the artist. I was just trying to think of the dumbest, kitschiest thing I could to get the jackals and lunatics out of our lives. Things were getting crazy.

But the chickens… let’s see. Well, you have to remember your mom and I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains where you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting some crappy folk art. It was usually sold at these roadside stands alongside jars of honey and apple butter and used vacuums, or whatever people back in the holler had that wasn’t nailed down. I’m sure you remember passing a few of those on trips we went to visit your grandparents, right?

MM: Yeah, I guess so.

LM: Well, I convinced your mom that the only way to get these crazy people to give up and leave us alone was if it became clear that she wasn’t Daedalia. The most effective lies are the ones wrapped around a kernel of truth. There were all kinds of pictures of the shed on the internet, and everyone knew it was an artist’s studio because of public records about the former owner.

MM: So you made Kelly into an amateur folk artist with a passion for chickens.

LM: Christ, Mare. She was your mother. You don’t have to refer to her in the third person.

MM: The only way you can refer to anyone who isn’t you is in the third person.

LM: Of course. You’re the expert. Look, the only reason I agreed to help you with this project is because you promised you’d tell the whole story like you’ve done in your other books. The world doesn’t need another vicious takedown of what we did, what our lives were about.

MM: Can you continue the story, please?

LM: You were there. You remember. Your mom put all her serious art away for a year. We stored all her canvases and materials and transformed the shed so she could set to making these hideous chickens. She painted them on old boards, rusty tea kettles, and just about anything else we could find. Surely you remember this period. You would’ve been what, ten?

MM: No, I was seven, and I do remember. I think it was the most time she ever spent with me and the most I ever heard her laugh.

LM: That’s right. You were her assistant. I’ve kept a few of those pieces you helped her with. They were perfectly awful and I think she enjoyed making them. It was a new kind of challenge for her, to just make something the way a bricklayer builds a wall. Just physical. No internal dialogue.

MM: I’d forgotten I helped her. There was a lot of red paint, right?

LM: Yeah, yeah there was indeed, and you’d come out of her studio like you’d been in a fight with one of those chickens, splotches of red on your hands and face.

MM: What were you doing? Did you try to sell them?

LM: I had my role to play. It was no small feat to convince the world that I could marry a woman who made such horrible art, but I did eventually. I paid an exorbitant amount of money to buy the little gallery space in Santa Fe, where we could showcase these chickens. I think we may have sold three or four of the pieces in a year.

I remember actually being nervous that they would take off and be successful when the intent was for them to be an embarrassment, a loving husband’s indulgence of his wife’s hobby.

It took a while to sell the whole story to the most rabid of these lunatics, but we did. We started opening the gate on Saturdays to invite people into the studio to meet the artist. I managed to get the local news channel to come out and interview us.

MM: Yeah, I watched that last week on YouTube. You’re a convincing liar. That feisty journalist had done her research. I think she asked you more questions about Daedalia than the chickens, though.

LM: Yeah. I had to pretend to be even more of an idiot than I am.

MM: You told her Daedalia was a “fragile soul, not made for this world,” and that you’d never betray your promise to protect her from it. You had tears in your eyes when you said that. I watched that over and over again.

LM: Why?

MM: Because I wanted to see if it was real.

LM: And?

MM: I think you believe that story, so that much is real. She was a lot of things, but fragile wasn’t one of them.

LM: You know, you can be pretty damned judgmental. It’s what makes you a great writer, I guess, but it’s no fun to be on the stand in your courtroom. You’ll paint whatever version of this story serves you, like everyone else does. I just hope you’ll remember it’s your story too, whether you like it or not.

MM: Let’s be real. I was never really part of the story.

LM: You really believe that, sweetheart? You really feel that mistreated. You’re a grown person now. I’ll be gone soon enough and then you won’t have anyone to blame for your life.

MM: I don’t blame you, or her. Really. I’ve spent enough time in therapy to understand it wasn’t personal. You guys already had a story, a big story that didn’t have room for much else. She made art that changed the world. It’s okay that she wasn’t a good mom. Oh come on, Dad… don’t cry. I’m not trying to be mean here.

LM: I can’t help it these days. I cry over TV ads. Let’s finish this so you can get whatever version of the truth you need.

MM: We don’t have to keep going right now.

LM: No, I want to. I made a promise to help you. What’s your next question?

MM: Mom stopped working at the ranch after that. Tell me about that time.

LM: Every day, there were fewer and fewer people turning up outside our fence with their cameras and notebooks, but it would take years before people completely forgot about us. For your mom, doing her art was like breathing and she wanted to get back to it, so I rented a place for her in Colorado near Telluride. She would go there by herself and work for a couple of weeks at a time.

MM: I remember her being gone and missing her. Did she ever take me with her?

LM: Not to that place, I don’t think. She didn’t want to disrupt your life.

MM: I don’t think that was the reason.

LM: Yeah, that’s fair. She needed her space, even from me, especially after everything that had happened. The 9/11 thing changed her and it wasn’t just the public attention and criticism. Her relationship to the work shifted. I think it scared her after that, working. But she was still driven to do it.

MM: What do you mean?

LM: You understand your mother wasn’t just an artist, scratching images on a canvas, right? Surely you get that by now, after all these years. It’s like she stood at a portal between two worlds, and she didn’t fully understand either one, which was her great sadness. She was an interpreter between two parties who would never understand each other.

I can see you don’t believe me. It took me a lifetime to understand and accept what I think I knew after looking at those sketches in her notebook when she was sixteen. After what happened to you, I’m sure a part of you shut down any ability to see some things, to really see her. She never forgave herself.

MM: But that wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t even home. It happened while she was away.

LM: Exactly. But it was more than that, more than her absence. She had invited something into our lives.

MM: It’s late, Dad. You’re getting tired. We should wrap up for today.

LM: If you can’t talk about it now, Marabelle, how many more chances will we have?

MM: But I have talked about it with the best therapists money could buy for years. In fact, it’s all that therapy that tells me you’re projecting right now. You’re the one who hasn’t dealt with it.

LM: Are you going to write about it? You’ve come around here asking about the chickens. Is your book going to be a comedy, or a historical account of detached observations? Or is it going to be something real, something you’ve engaged with? You know, you have much more of your mother in you than you think.

MM: I’m not sure what those parts could be. I don’t think we could be more opposite.

LM: That’s because you don’t know yourself or her the way that I do. You want me to count the ways? You’re willful, stubborn, and single-minded to a purpose. You feel things deeply, but you don’t want to acknowledge feelings exist. You’re private and enigmatic to most everyone in your life.

MM: Tell me, Dad, are there any good qualities I share with her?

LM: You still don’t understand. These are all things I love about you both.

MM: Then what’s wrong with you? Why are you here, hiding away in this little place? Why don’t you pick up the phone when I call? Why didn’t you come to the event last year? It was the culmination of your life’s work, the grand reveal of the magic trick you spent your life setting up and you weren’t there.

LM: Because I didn’t want to relive it all again. What I thought was success when I was a young man is not success now when I look back. I failed your mother and I failed you too.

MM: I don’t get you. I think you’re more of a mystery to me than she is.

LM: I don’t know how that’s possible.

MM: How did you see what you saw in her so young? I’ve seen some of those early sketches. They’re not remarkable and it’s not like you were some art aficionado. You were a baseball player.

LM: It wasn’t her art, what I saw on the pages of her notebook. I mean, it was, but it was more than that. I felt this raw connection to her. She was so frail and so fierce all at once and no one had ever really seen her. It wasn’t something I planned. People grow toward one another, I think. People become something more when somebody sees them. I believe that.

MM: I believe that too, Dad. It’s okay. It’s okay. I love you.

LM: Sorry, sweetie. I’m a mess. I just miss her so much.

MM: Me too.

LM: I’m proud of you, you know that? I’m glad you’re writing this book. You have such a gift to see things so clearly. Whatever you’re worried about, whatever’s holding you back, let it go and write our lives the way only you can. If you do that, you’ll get it right. You won’t find the truth, no matter how much research you do.

MM: Why do you say that?

LM: Because the truth isn’t one thing, is it? It’s layers. You don’t know the truth of someone’s life from one conversation or one thing they made. You come to know them because you let them in. You let them become part of you.

MM: That’s what Mom did.

LM: Yes. Yes it is.

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Previously…

Lefty and Kelly moved to Santa Fe, bought an adobe ranch, and named it Marabelle, which is where the narrator finally revealed herself as their daughter. She described growing up inside the Daedalia secret, raised mostly by Maria while Kelly disappeared into the shed and Lefty drilled into her the rule that could never be broken: don’t tell anyone.

By the early 2000s, Daedalia had achieved something few artists, with the exception of Andy Warhol, had ever done. Her notoriety extended far beyond the echoey whispers of the gallery scene into the throbbing backbeat of pop culture. But unlike Warhol, whose fame was fueled by his presence and the daily evidence of his personal eccentricities, Daedalia’s rise was powered by her absence.

She was known only as a symbol, identified by the personal mark she tagged somewhere in all of her pieces. Her mark was an Easter egg, a low-stakes challenge to engage new fans. I use the word fans intentionally, fan being the diminutive of fanatic, which is an accurate way to describe what these people were, especially after the towers fell, burying her most ambitious and controversial series beneath a mountain of concrete, ash, and steel.

The World Trade Center installation was, by far, Lefty’s career-defining accomplishment as a promoter. He spent two years planning it and another year finding the right people to pay enough to look the other way during the three nights it took, between Christmas and New Year’s of 1999, to mount the series. The twelve panels, each a six-foot square laminated in a half-inch of lucite and bound in a steel frame, were bolted into the concrete wall that served as a corridor for commuters at the base of one of the buildings that bordered Tobin Plaza.

In the late summer of 1998, Lefty convinced Kelly to leave me in Maria’s care so she could join him for a couple of days in New York City. He had some meetings with galleries and he really wanted her to see the city because she had never been. Lefty pulled out all the stops. He booked a suite at the Lotte Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue and got them reservations at the finest restaurants. It was meant to be the honeymoon they never had, but it didn’t work out that way.

After their first night in the city, Kelly had an experience that affected her deeply. While Lefty was in one of his meetings, she had taken a walk. She said she began to feel as though she were in one of her own paintings, a rat in a maze. Every few steps she looked up to try and orient herself, which only made her dizzy and nauseous. The car horns, sirens, garbage trucks, and the chaos of so many voices echoing in the trapped heat island of the city overwhelmed her. She kept walking south and ended up in the financial district.

Seeking the comfort of some open sky, she walked into World Trade Center Plaza. She described the experience of walking up the 37 steps and crossing the expanse of marble and granite toward the Koenig Sphere at the center as though she had stepped into another dimension, and her ears filled with an overwhelming roar of silence. She felt a sadness with such intensity it stole the air from her lungs and slowed her heart. She collapsed just a few feet from the Sphere and when she woke up, a policeman with hands the size of hockey mitts was leaning over her. He gave her a half-melted Snickers bar and got her a cup of water. When she was able to talk, she told him she was staying at “a palace,” but that’s all she knew. The cop called the hotel and then escorted her there.

She wasn’t able to convey to Lefty what had happened to her, what she felt in those moments, and when she tried, only tears came. He was used to her sensitivities and eccentricities so he canceled their dinner reservation and ordered room service.

When he woke up the next morning, she had filled a dozen pages of her sketchpad with images. They were strewn across the floor of the suite. She was curled in a chair by the window, asleep. These sketches are part of the archive and you can see them for yourself one day. They are haunting and impossible to describe, but you can see, when you compare them to the finished work, that everything was already there in her head.

For the next year, bringing them to life became her obsession. She lost weight and barely slept. All her waking hours were spent in the shed, bending, folding, cutting, and stapling materials across the primed plywood canvases she had filled with her intricate drawings. The layered, mixed-media pieces were organized as four triptychs that unfolded in the imagination as you moved from Spring, with its delicate promise of eternal life, through Summer and Fall and into the final three panels that depicted harrowing destruction: burned-out buildings, rubble, and twisted steel beneath a fiery sky.

As Lefty watched the twelve pieces emerge, he felt an urgency unlike anything he’d felt before. These pieces belonged to the city and couldn’t be confined to a gallery or a museum. They needed to be seen by accountants and fry cooks, brokers and clerks, hotel maids, hoodlums, homeless vets, and anyone who ever felt outside and alone.

He hit nothing but a wall of resistance as tall as the towers themselves when he tried to strike a deal to get permission to install the pieces in the plaza. So finding a way became his obsession. He would end up spending nearly two million dollars to stage a fake construction project to get the installation done under the cover of darkness during the longest nights of the year, when everyone was home with their families celebrating the holidays.

On January 1, 2000, the city was quiet. The plaza was even more empty than usual. None of the clocks had stopped. The power grid was unaffected. The world had continued to turn on its axis despite all the hype. The slate sky was spitting dry flecks of snow that swirled through the frigid urban canyon between the buildings.

By noon, a crowd had gathered along the corridor, pausing to stare into the series of twelve portals, seemingly carved into the side of the building overnight. By sunset, the plaza was full of people waiting their turn to see what my mother had seen that afternoon when she crossed over into the world she could never fully explain.

The story made the evening news and of course there was controversy. It was, perhaps, the most expensive act of vandalism on record. The police were going to conduct an investigation and the city was going to have the pieces forcibly removed within the week.

But the cable news cycle took hold of the story and soon there were interviews with fine art experts claiming that the pieces were the work of Daedalia and it would be an act of vandalism to remove them. So the twelve pieces remained, and became another spectacle in a city of spectacles, until the morning of September 11, 2001, when the wreckage and devastation my mother had depicted in those last three panels transcended art and became prophecy.

In the harrowing days, weeks, and months that followed, as the last of the bodies that could be recovered had been laid to rest by the weary and heartbroken who remained, the conspiracy theories began to swirl, fueled by fear, rage, and despair.

Unlike the bronze Sphere that had been salvaged from the wreckage, its top crumpled in like a crushed ping-pong ball, Daedalia’s pieces were never found. There were crackpots who believed the installation had weakened the foundation of the building, chewing away at the concrete like some alien termites. Others believed Daedalia had prophesied the tragedy or even caused it, saying the imagery in the panels transmitted a dark, secret message that compelled the terrorists. Few recalled the joy and wonder they had felt when they passed the series of panels on their way to work.

What happened after that proved the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Daedalia and the 9/11 Panels, as they came to be known, were an exotic spice stirred into the bubbling cauldron of America’s damaged psyche, enhancing the principal ingredients of grief, paranoia, fear, and rage.

A Muslim man would set himself on fire on the steps of the UN. A teenage boy from Kentucky would walk into a mosque in Cincinnati with an assault rifle and massacre 16 people. A couple in Jersey City, whose only son was killed when the towers collapsed, would be dredged from the Hudson River, the pockets of their winter coats loaded with stones. All these people and more would credit their actions to what they had seen in the 9/11 Panels, whether they had actually stood before them or not.

The stories that got less attention, of course, were the stories of young soldiers who prevented the deaths of entire families in Fallujah when their units stormed into homes during nighttime raids, or a hedge-fund broker who walked away from Wall Street and used all his wealth to start a foundation dedicated to rehabilitating the violent, incarcerated masses by teaching art and meditation.

All these people would claim they saw something in those panels that instructed them to fulfill their destiny. A cult of personality formed around the absence of a personality.

It wasn’t long before people started showing up at the gate of Marabelle. The recent innovation of the internet had made it easy for rabid fans, critics, journalists, and investigators alike to quickly amass an entire library of knowledge about Daedalia, most of it completely fabricated. The message boards were filled with theories about who she was and what her art meant.

There were rumors that the 9/11 Panels had survived the collapse and had been stolen from the wreckage during all the confusion. A firefighter who was one of the first responders and never showed up for work the next day was rumored to have taken three of the panels. The federal government had excavated all twelve panels, prioritizing them over rescuing trapped victims. Rumor became conspiracy, became fact.

I have vivid memories of this time, but like all memories, I’m certain they’ve been warped and filtered over the course of my life, especially in the last five years I’ve been researching this book. Still, there are some immutable facts that can be corroborated by reputable sources. For a full six months in 2002, there was an encampment of news vans outside the gates of Marabelle. I wasn’t allowed to go outside unaccompanied, much less play.

My seventh birthday party was interrupted when a bearded man with wild eyes jumped the back fence and appeared outside our living room window like a ghost. I had nightmares for weeks. Little did I know those nightmares would soon jump the fence into my waking hours.

After that incident, Lefty hired a security company that installed a state-of-the-art monitoring system and posted two armed men on the property at all times. But it would take more than that to make everyone go away and leave us alone. My father’s powers of invention and misdirection would truly be tested.

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Previously…

Kelly wrote in her journal about kissing Lefty and feeling unsettled by desire, her own dissociation, and the pressure of what their relationship had become. Over the next weeks they fumbled toward sex, boundaries, and cohabitation while Kelly feared Ona might be gone and worried that her ability to do the work would suffer.

In the fall of 1995, Lefty and Kelly bought a house in Santa Fe, New Mexico. While they would own several homes in different parts of the world in the years that followed, this four-bedroom adobe-style home on three acres in the foothills, with a separate shed for Kelly to work in, would always be the place they called home.

They named the ranch Marabelle, after me, their only daughter.

Knowing what you know of my parents so far, it won’t come as any surprise to you that I wasn’t exactly part of their plan. If my math is right, I was likely conceived around the time my mother wrote those journal entries in the spring of 1995 about the decided shift in their relationship. I’ve waited until this part of their story to reveal myself to you because it only seems fair. As much as I’d prefer to remain outside the story, it’s important you know who your unreliable narrator is going forward.

I’m not sure if I factored into their decision to settle in Santa Fe or if they had already decided before they knew I was coming and made the choice to keep me. There’s a strong case to be made that the allure of the landscape and the community of artists who live in the area influenced their decision because Kelly’s work through this period drastically changed.

I was born in Kelly’s shed on a frigid afternoon in December of 1996. I came a week early and so fast that Kelly barely had time to put her brushes down. I imagine her standing in front of the large canvas she was working on, her belly brushing the muslin as she leaned forward to work on the detail she’s famous for. I’m not sure what they would have done if the new housekeeper, Maria, hadn’t been there. She wasn’t a proper midwife, but she had helped bring many babies into the world and apparently knew exactly what to do. After her heroic assistance that day, she got promoted to full-time nanny, and in the daily, practical ways, she would be my mother for the first ten years of my life.

The house, when they bought it, had been a wreck. It had belonged to a well-known local artist who had done very well in the seventies but eventually lost everything and had to abandon the place. Lefty says when they first visited the house it was well on its way to being reclaimed by the landscape, with all the windows broken out, coyote scat in many of the rooms, bird nests in the eaves, and spider webs spanning the doorframes. They both fell in love with the three-sixty view of the desert and the mountains, and the artist’s shed was perfect, already fitted with big windows and skylights.

It took nearly two years to completely renovate the main house, so I slept in a bassinet at the foot of my parents’ temporary bed near the woodstove in the large one-room shed. I try to imagine the three of us in that space sleeping together, but I can’t picture it, the intimacy of it. We weren’t that kind of family.

Daedalia’s next big series was well underway the minute they moved in, and my mother’s growing belly didn’t seem to slow her down. Lefty said it had the opposite effect. She was working like someone with a deadline. She forgot to eat and barely slept, despite Lefty’s hovering and hand-wringing. He had two babies to fuss over now, the work and me.

The ten pieces she created for that series all sold within a week of the show’s debut in Paris the following summer. I have yet to see them in person. I’ve studied photographs, of course, but by now I’m sure you understand how that wouldn’t be the same.

It’s strange to think of those paintings my mother worked on at all hours in that drafty shed for months with me inside her, sharing her breath, her blood. Without a doubt, those pieces are hanging in the marble halls of some billionaire’s estate now where a select few dinner guests will stand before them a couple of times a year and contemplate the genius of their mysterious creator.

The artist was definitely mysterious, but not in the ways they imagined. There were stories of her being some blind savant or an austere witch-like figure who worked in the crumbling tower of an old New England estate. My mother looked very normal, maybe even a little plain. There’s a photograph of her and Lefty taken just a few weeks before I was born and she’s wearing this awful floral dress and leggings. They’re sitting at a restaurant in Santa Fe. Kelly’s nose is sunburned and her hair is a mousy brown. She could be anybody’s mom. But she wasn’t. She was barely my mom.

Kelly was mysterious in that, even though she was my mother, I never really knew her and I’m not sure Lefty did either. There was a large part of her that was unknowable.

My earliest memories are of playing on the floor of that shed with sunlight filtering through from above and my mother working on a stepladder. The cavernous room was silent except for the scratching of her pencil, the graphite sharpened to the length of a hummingbird’s beak on the board in front of her. There was a steady, unrelenting, almost mechanical rhythm to the sound. It would continue for what seemed like hours without a single pause.

When I looked up from my little play kitchen to the vast white monolith of the canvas she was working on, I remember being frightened. My mother was standing at the center of this void and summoning from it a world so flawless and intricate that it made the room and everything in it, including me, seem like a primitive sketch, unfinished and inconsequential. I remember crying really hard for what seemed like hours and she never turned around. I’m sure it was probably no more than a few minutes before Maria came in and scooped me up into the warm softness of her bosom and the smell of cornmeal.

I believe Maria was the only other person besides Lefty and me who knew the true identity of Daedalia. I don’t recall us ever having regular guests at Marabelle. It wasn’t until I was almost twelve that they told me the first version I understood of their secret. It was around that time that they started putting a padlock on the shed door so if I happened to have a curious friend come over, we wouldn’t go exploring out there.

I remember sitting at the breakfast table in the kitchen on a summer morning after my mother had gone out to start working and Lefty was preparing to go away on another business trip. I was eating a bowl of cereal and he was making coffee. Maria was busy in some other part of the house.

I asked Lefty why it was such a big secret who Mommy was.

His back was to me and he was stirring cream into his coffee. He paused mid-stir and the kitchen was so quiet I could hear the faintest sound of music coming from the shed, which was probably thirty yards away from the house.

“That’s a good question, pumpkin.” He finished preparing his coffee and then came over to sit at the table. “Your mom’s a private person and she has an amazing magical gift. We keep the secret to protect her.”

“Protect her from what?” I asked.

“You know, from people who would be too curious and would want something more from her, more than she can give.”

That spawned about a hundred more questions, and I could tell from the look on his face that he had no good answers to any of them. Why? What would happen if people knew? Didn’t Mom want to be famous? Wasn’t it kind of like cheating?

Finally, he had had enough and pulled the trump card every parent deploys at some point.

“Marabelle, don’t ever tell anyone, even your closest friends, that your mother is Daedalia. If you do, it will ruin the life we’ve built here. Is that what you want?”

For the record, I never did tell anyone, even in high school when I was completely miserable and hated both of them and their secret world.

I remember in English class in ninth grade, there was a girl, Heather Mendoza, who made Daedalia the subject of her research paper so every week for two months I had to hear her talk obsessively about this mysterious artist, her brilliance, and all the crackpot theories of who she really was.

I learned a lot of things I never knew, like the fact that one of her recent paintings sold for ten million dollars at auction. I knew we had money, but even with the constant building projects happening at Marabelle, I didn’t understand how much until Heather read her paper to the class.

Over the course of my childhood, our property would grow into a sprawling compound with tennis courts, gardens, a pool, a guest house, and a private movie theater, all protected by the boundary of a ten-foot privacy fence and a wrought-iron gate.

I had a compulsive urge to shout to the class that this brilliant artist watched about a million hours of television, never went anywhere, and preferred a bag of Doritos to about any other food.

I wanted to say that she would go days without saying a word to me and then, out of the blue, barge into my room and want to talk to me for hours, leaving me feeling completely hollowed out and exhausted after she finally left, always disappointed that I didn’t live up to whatever it was she expected from those sessions.

I’ve spent my life studying my mother, the way many people have studied her art. The interviews I recorded with her in the months before she died weren’t much different from the conversations we had when I was little. When you have an artist for a parent, you’re always competing for their attention. I thought if I could understand where she went when she made art then I could go there with her. But of course, that wasn’t possible.

I never had any desire to be an artist. I didn’t enjoy coloring or drawing and I don’t remember Kelly ever trying to teach me or encourage me to be creative. Of course Lefty did for a time and then he just stopped.

Maybe he was conflicted about pushing me the way he had been pushed by his father or maybe he decided he couldn’t manage two artists. It’s possible he didn’t see the same return on investment that he had in Kelly. That sounds horrible. I’m not being fair to him. I can hear Kelly saying this in my head. Lefty has always been there. Steady.

I didn’t intend to reveal myself so early in the story. This book isn’t about me. This book is their story in which I play a supporting role. In the coming chapters, I’ll do my best to disappear back into the telling.

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Previously…

Kelly explained that after she disappeared she first hid in a cheap motel, then fled to Italy, where the light and solitude helped her recover while she remained oblivious to Daedalia’s sudden explosion back home. She admitted she regretted not contacting Lefty, and described returning transformed, only to realize the work had begun opening doorways for other people too.

The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.

March 30, 1995

I don’t know how to describe what I’m feeling. I guess that’s why I’m writing. At this point I’ve gotten everything I wanted and I’m not sure how to feel about it. I never expected anything, really.

Last night I kissed Lefty, mostly because I knew he would never do it. He kissed me back and it was both strange and wonderful. I’ve only been kissed a couple of times in my life, and one of them was in sixth grade, the result of a dare at Kristi McDaniels’s birthday party.

Being with him in that way is something I’ve thought about for so long but now that it’s happened, I feel really strange. The longer we kissed and the more he touched me, the more disconnected I felt from my body. It was messed up, like I was standing on the outside watching it all happen.

I kept reminding myself that this was Lefty, the guy who had taken me in when I needed it and supported my work when no one else did, but there was this other part of him that frightened me. No, that’s too strong a word. I wasn’t afraid of him exactly. He was gentle and loving, but I could feel this hunger coming off him, like he wanted to devour me or something.

I felt really dumb, like I asked for this thing and then didn’t know what to do with it. This is what sex feels like, I guess. How it feels to be desired. I imagined it would feel different, magical somehow. Not exactly like when I’m really into my drawing, but something close to that.

All I could think about was all the women he’d been with, the smell of them that used to linger in that little studio apartment, and the way his cheeks were flushed when I’d see him after.

I should back up. We didn’t actually do it last night. I know he really wanted to, but he figured out that something was wrong even though I tried to hide it. I feel terrible, like I’ve ruined everything. Maybe I can learn to like it. Maybe I can want him in that way eventually. He told me he loved me and that it was okay, but I know it’s not. How could it be? I feel like I’ve totally fucked it all up and maybe I shouldn’t have come back at all.

I’m going to try to work again today, for real. It’s been almost a month since I’ve been back and I’ve not found a way to start up again. I’m too distracted. This Daedalia thing is like a real business now and it’s so weird. There’s pressure to do the next thing and I don’t know what that even is.

Lefty’s been patient but I can feel him getting antsy, and he’s always dropping hints about some major gallery somewhere sending inquiries about hosting the next show. Also, he’s starting to get a little paranoid. He’s worried someone will find out that it’s me and then everything will fall apart. I don’t want that to happen either. I’m not sure I could handle all those fancy people being disappointed when whoever they imagined Daedalia was is just me.

April 3, 1995

It’s two in the morning and as I’m writing this, Lefty is snoring on my bed in the other room.

After a few days of awkwardly walking around that first aborted attempt, I told him I wanted to have sex. It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Not the sex exactly, but the weirdness of not knowing how to talk about it and then finally talking about it.

He totally freaked out two days ago after I told him I was a virgin. I was like, duh, do you know me at all? He disappeared for a day and I know he was weighing everything in his mind. It’s complicated. Our fifteen-year age difference has always been a thing and then this thing about me being a virgin just freaked him out more.

When he came over this afternoon, he brought a huge bouquet of flowers, not roses but all these weird, exotic types that I’ve never seen before. He really knows me and that’s kind of amazing.

I was in a funk and really frustrated. I’ve not been able to work at all and Ona is just gone, or that’s how it seems. But when he showed up at the door with those and looked at me in that way no one’s ever looked at me before, I just kind of melted and started crying.

When he hugged me, I kissed him. This time he was tentative and it was even more awkward (if that’s possible!), but I got him over that. I pushed him onto the couch and sat in his lap. I pretended I was someone else, someone who could be with him the way he wanted.

I kind of went into my head like I do when I’m drawing and I fall into this other world. I imagined I was this sexual, fairy-like person with translucent skin and wherever he touched me left behind this phosphorescent glow.

It worked. Even during the painful part, I just imagined I was this fierce fairy creature and I moved against him until the pain melted into this warm feeling and I felt like we were this one being, moving together like some kind of mythological mating of a centaur and a griffin or something. Wow, it sounds totally insane now that I’ve written it down.

I’m not sure where we go from here, that’s why I can’t sleep. There’s so much more to lose now. I’ve never been in love. I’ve never had people counting on me.

What if I fuck it all up? I’ll fuck it up for both of us and Lefty really needs this to work. He’s put his whole life into me and my art. I’m afraid it won’t keep working.

Maybe Ona has left me for good and I’m on my own. What if the trick I did tonight doesn’t always work and Lefty finds out how weird I am with sex and my real body. What does that even mean, my “real” body. I just wrote that and I’m not sure why but it feels true.

April 20, 1995

Today we had a tough conversation. I knew it was coming, like that feeling of knowing that you’ve got to vomit but you keep trying to hold it down.

We were sitting on the beach (I still can’t get used to just going to the beach anytime I want) and he kept asking me if I was okay. I finally said, no I’m not and I’m freaking out a little bit.

He’s just been so weird since we started being more than friends, or whatever we were before. He’s always hovered, but now it’s different. He’s too attentive and trying too hard. It kind of pisses me off and I just want to say, enough. I need some space, dude. But I was afraid to say that because I didn’t want to hurt him.

Then I’m like, he’s a grown man. Why do I need to worry about hurting him? I guess that’s what love is though, always having to think about the other person. It’s kind of exhausting and it’s only been a couple of weeks.

But he surprised me. He’s done that a lot so you’d think I could give him more credit by now.

He said he’s been reading this book by some psychologist lady and it was all about setting boundaries. Defining what you need and what you don’t. He said maybe we could try that.

I said I didn’t want anything to change. I wanted him to still be funny and to tease me a little too hard and to keep pushing me like he used to. He said he would try but that things were different now, that there’s no way it could not be different.

I told him I missed living together like we used to but I wasn’t sure I wanted us to be like a married couple living together. He made this weird face and I’m not sure what he felt because he really couldn’t say anything but okay.

So we’re going to try it out for a little while here at my house before we buy some place together. I’m nervous because I’m not sure I can sleep with him every night. I like him close by, but not that close and then there’s the whole sex thing. He needs a lot of it and if we’re in bed together it’s like this whole thing.

Shit, the more I write about this the more I feel like I’m making a mess and none of this is inspiring me to work and that’s really not good. I guess we’ll just have to take it day by day.

May 14, 1995

A lot has happened in a few weeks. Our little experiment of living together again has been bumpy. I kind of blew up at him on Sunday. It had just been building up for a long time and I lost it.

He looked so wounded and pathetic I felt bad but a part of me didn’t. This is hard. We walked around in silence for a couple of days and that totally sucked but eventually we talked and I brought up the whole boundaries thing again and he was like, this was your idea, and I said yeah it was, but how am I supposed to know everything.

He said I was behaving like such a woman and that hurt in a weird way, and not just because it was a caveman thing to say. It felt personal. My immediate reaction was, I’m not just a woman, but that would have been a totally fucked up thing to say so I just kept quiet.

We made up and went out for a nice dinner at this Greek restaurant. Over dessert he said he had a proposal and let me just say that freaked my shit for a few seconds until he clarified.

“Let’s find a way that makes this work, whatever it is, no matter how weird and unconventional,” he said.

He told me how much he loved me and I could feel it. I could see in that moment how hard this all probably was for him and how much he was stretching just to make it work for me. He came from two normal parents and probably wanted the whole house in the suburbs and white picket fence thing but he wanted me more than that.

We’ve agreed to find a bigger place where we can live together and I can have a separate space for working and just to be on my own when I need it.

I told him I still wanted him to be close, to come and sit when I work sometimes and to be the first person to see the pieces I finish. He said he wanted me to sleep in a bed with him at least a couple of nights a week and to wake up together. I said I thought I could do that.

He asked if I wanted to move out of Los Angeles and suggested maybe it would be better if we lived out somewhere closer to nature. He didn’t say it, but I also think he’d like us to live somewhere more private because it would be much easier to keep the whole Daedalia thing secret.

I think I’d like a new adventure. I never really chose to be out here exactly.

He said we had enough money to go about any place we want. It’s crazy to have so much freedom. I don’t feel worthy of it, but I said I would think about where I’d like to live.

Last night I felt Ona in my dreams. It’s been so long. I felt like she had abandoned me. I woke up and my cheeks were wet like I’d been crying. I can feel something new coming. I have to stop for now so I can go try to work some.

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Previously…

Kelly chronicled the whiplash of Daedalia’s sudden success, including the money, the secrecy, and the way it left her both proud and invisible. Across a few entries she admitted how lonely she felt without Lefty, how much she wanted him to see her, and how the work was starting to exhaust her even as Daedalia’s myth kept growing.

The following transcript is an excerpt from an interview with Kelly Mudd recorded on January 10, 2033 at her home in Black Mountain, North Carolina six months prior to her death.

MM: Where did you go when you disappeared before that first big show, Daedalia’s New York premiere?

KM: For the first two weeks, I didn’t go anywhere. I stayed in a budget motel on the other side of town. That’s not what you imagined, right? I was still just a kid then. I had lots of imagination when it came to drawing but I had very little in my real life. I’d barely seen anything of the world.

MM: What did you do during those two weeks?

KM: I ate a lot of takeout food and watched a lot of television. I was like a kid on summer break. I just wanted to be a vegetable and catch my breath. I had pushed myself really hard because I didn’t want to disappoint Lefty. Eventually, though, I got bored and I did something very out of character. I bought a one-way ticket to Italy.

I know it seems embarrassingly on the nose for an artist to make their first trip abroad be Florence, but it was a radical thing for me. I came across the movie A Room with a View during that marathon of watching TV and I fell in love with the landscape and the light. You have to understand, I had a rural high school education and no idea that Tuscany was the birthplace of art in the Western world. When I saw a documentary about da Vinci a couple of days later, that sealed the deal for me.

MM: So even though you had said you were done with art, you really weren’t. Did you know that at the time?

KM: Oh, I think so. I could no more stop making art than I could cut off my hand. I was just being dramatic. From the minute I got off the plane and took the train from Rome to Florence, I couldn’t stop sketching. I covered both sides of a stack of cocktail napkins, and cursed myself for not bringing a sketchpad.

The first couple of nights I stayed in a youth hostel like someone who didn’t have a stack of traveler’s checks tucked away in my backpack.

MM: What are traveler’s checks?

KM: Ha, you wouldn’t know that, would you? Your generation does everything on your phone. Traveler’s checks were what you got when you planned to travel abroad as an American. They were safer than carrying cash.

MM: Weird. So what did you do when you got there?

KM: I did what every tourist does when they go to Florence. I visited the Uffizi Gallery, walked through the Duomo, and of course saw the statue of David. All of it was amazing, the food, the smells, and the people. But it wasn’t until I made the pilgrimage to Vinci that I really fell in love. I rode on a bus with a bunch of German tourists and planned for it to just be a day trip, but I ended up missing the bus back to Florence. I was so taken by what I saw in that museum. Da Vinci was such a weirdo, completely out of his time. I spent hours staring at his obscure little sketches and the bizarre and creepy things that came out of his brain. When I finally looked up, they were closing the museum and the bus had left without me.

One of the older women who worked there took pity on me and offered up the spare room in her house for the night. Rosa, her name was. She was so sweet. She fed me homemade pesto and I had never tasted anything so divine. The next day, she connected me with a family friend who rented me a villa when I returned with my stuff. I ended up staying there for three months. It was one of the most magical times in my life.

MM: What made it so special?

KM: You’ve been there, you know. The light has a quality, especially in autumn, that is like nowhere else in the world. I would sit for hours in an olive grove on a blanket just taking in the light, watching how it changed over the course of an afternoon. At the end of the day, all any artist does is pay attention to the light. It was healing for me, I think, to be in such a different place all on my own with no one to answer to.

MM: What was your relationship to your work then? Did you know what was happening back in the states?

KM: Oh no, I had no idea. You have to remember we had no internet at the time and no phones. How would I have known?

MM: So for however long you were away in Europe, you had no idea your work was completely exploding in the art world?

KM: That’s right, and I’m so grateful for that. There are few things worse for an artist than that kind of success. I was completely oblivious and utterly happy.

MM: I don’t think I’ve ever seen any work you did from that period. Did you do any pieces or was it all just sketching?

KM: No, I didn’t want to make anything big. I wanted to go inside, deeper. I needed time to understand what my relationship was to the gift I’d been given, to the collaboration I had stumbled upon.

MM: You’re talking about Ona now, right?

KM: Yes. Yes I am. And I can see in your eyes you believe I’m a lunatic. That’s okay. It’s never mattered much to me that others, even you, understand my relationship with her. She opened doorways for me to walk through and it wasn’t until later when I came home that I understood she was opening doorways for others too. Anyone who saw our work, really took the time to see it, found a door they could pass through or a window they could open to have a different view. What is it? What are you thinking?

MM: It just struck me, the great irony of your life. Commercially, you never got credit for your work, which seems like a crime, but in a way, if what you say about Ona is true, then maybe you don’t deserve credit for it. I mean, if it’s not just you making the art.

KM: It’s true and it’s the reason I was able to accept the arrangement Lefty and I made. I had an intuition about it that I can’t explain and that intuition was right. By letting go of my attachment to it, my ownership of it, the work could become about more than just me.

MM: Did you communicate with Lefty at all during that year and a half?

KM: I didn’t and if I have one regret, it’s that. He was worried sick about me, had no way to know if I was okay, no way to know if he’d ever see me again.

MM: But he had quite the payday from that show. That must have been some consolation. I can’t see him being too grief-stricken.

KM: You’re too hard on him. He’s not what you think. And you know, every penny of my share was waiting for me when I did finally come back. He had receipts for every sale and had put my share into a separate account.

MM: Tell me what that was like, when you saw him after all that time.

KM: Well, I didn’t know if he would even talk to me. I didn’t know if he would still be there at all. I didn’t even know if my little house would still be mine. When I walked out of that life, part of the reason I could was because I didn’t feel I had any claim to it. So I fully expected to come home to nothing and to have to start all over again.

But when the taxi dropped me at my place in the canyon, my key still worked in the door and everything was just like I’d left it. Well, not exactly. The pieces for the New York show were gone, of course.

MM: So he had what, just kept paying the mortgage and the bills while you were gone?

KM: Yeah, that’s Lefty. He had faith I would come back. Even the phone was still hooked up. After I got all my bags inside, I sat down at my desk and I called him. When he picked up, he didn’t say anything at first. There was just this silence and I imagined him seeing the caller ID and thinking I was a ghost calling him. An hour later he was there in my living room, larger than life. I remember he hugged me for a really long time and when he finally let me go, he just looked at me. There was a difference in the way he saw me and I could feel it.

MM: What do you mean?

KM: I don’t know what he saw. I only liked that he saw me, finally.

MM: That pair of photographs in the frame at the end of the mantel, were those taken around that time?

KM: Can you hand them down to me so I can look? You know my eyes are shit now, just like everything else. [Kelly studies photos in small book-matched frame] Yeah, that was me in Rome a month before I flew back home.

MM: What do you see when you look at these pictures? Can you describe yourself, I mean like you would if you were painting someone else?

KM: I see a confident, young woman. Her arms that were once almost translucent and skeletal are now bronzed and muscular. She looks as if she belongs, as if the body she was renting, she finally owns. Look there. You see the hand on her hip, the arch of her spine. It’s playful, unafraid.

MM: So that’s who he saw that afternoon when he came to your house?

KM: I think so. You’d have to ask him.

MM: Do you think that’s when he fell in love with you?

KM: Oh no, he’d always loved me just like I’d always loved him. Love doesn’t happen in a minute. You don’t catch it like some virus. I think it’s always there waiting, the potential for it anyway. But yes, to your point, things changed when I got back. I can’t explain in a way that you can understand what it felt like.

MM: You mean coming back to all that success or being with Lefty again?

KM: All of it. It was as if I had crawled away from L.A. a caterpillar and returned as a butterfly. That sounds dumb, but it’s true. It was a transformation. I stepped into another life.

MM: What was the biggest change? I know you’re getting tired and I’ll let you rest after this last question. Tell me a memory from that time that can help me see it like you did.

KM: Some water, please. I need to think about it. Let’s see, a couple of days after I was home and had settled in, he picked me up and took me to the offices he had set up above a restaurant in Venice. On the walls he had hung a series of framed documents. There were some clippings from reviews in the New Yorker and the Paris Review but what I found astonishing was the handwritten letters, some of them from people who had bought my pieces but the ones that really moved me were from people who had not been able to. They had just seen them at one of the gallery shows or hanging in someone’s home.

The letters were so raw, so personal. They weren’t gushing about the work. They were talking about their lives and what they had seen of themselves in this painting or that one.

I see that look on your face. I know it well. You look like you’re trying to swallow some undercooked chicken I just served you.

MM: I’m sorry. It’s just hard for me to believe. You know I love your work…

KM: But you’ve never experienced it the way these people did, right?

MM: No, I haven’t. I’ve tried for as long as I can remember but I’ve always felt like it’s some club I’m not a part of or maybe I’m just not smart enough or open enough or…

KM: I’m sorry. Marabelle, I’m sorry. I assure you it’s none of those things. Can I tell you a story? Would that be okay?

MM: Yes, of course.

KM: It’s one I heard years and years ago when I was traveling through Poland. It was told to me by this genteel old man. We were sitting outside a coffee shop early one morning. He was the only other customer and he struck up a conversation with me the way older people do who tend to be so lonely. He was a writer who collected stories in a little leatherbound notebook. I asked him to read me one. I’m not sure why he chose this one, but he did and it’s always stuck with me.

It was about a master clockmaker who crafted these intricate timepieces, each one a marvel that could capture the dance of the stars, that’s how he put it. They would take months, even years for him to complete, hunched over his bench. But in perfecting these clocks that brought utility and wonder to those people of a certain class who could afford them, he completely lost track of time, the precious time he could have spent with his wife, their children, their friends.

To them, his clocks, whenever they would see them in some great hall, were nothing but a reminder of his absence. They didn’t capture the dance of the stars. They were just a pair of hands that stole minutes, hours, days, and years from a man they never really got to know.

MM: Jesus, that’s a terrible story.

KM: Yeah, I suppose it is. Most true stories are.

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Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

Kelly chronicled the whiplash of Daedalia’s sudden success, including the money, the secrecy, and the way it left her both proud and invisible. Across a few entries she admitted how lonely she felt without Lefty, how much she wanted him to see her, and how the work was starting to exhaust her even as Daedalia’s myth kept growing.

In September 1993, Kelly disappeared after completing a trio of canvases that would be the centerpiece for Daedalia’s New York City debut at the Wider Still gallery in SoHo the following month.

When Lefty showed up at her place on a Thursday, Kelly was not home. Two days earlier, they’d had another in a long series of arguments about the future of Daedalia. The three canvases were arranged along the wall opposite the front door. Lefty saw them the moment he stepped inside, his hand still on the key.

He gazed into them from where he stood, frozen in the doorway, on the threshold between his best-laid plans and the reality that couldn’t be bent to them. The boundary between the trio of canvases and the room that contained them dissolved. His nose filled with the scent of old timbers baking in the sun, and the acrid tang of coal soot rose in his throat. He was standing in the open, the air ionized by the tumbling rush of whitewater far below.

The experience transcended his visual perception. It was as if the images slipped straight through the ocular nerve, bypassing the silent, unreliable interpreter in his brain that made sense of light, and descended deep into the soft center of him, where they manifested into a hollow foreboding sensation he had all but forgotten from his teenage years. His eyes pricked with tears. He swallowed and took two steps closer. When he did, the canvases emerged again, filled edge to edge with the meticulous result of Kelly’s labor. He felt the floor beneath him again and the stifling stillness of the empty house.

He turned away from the canvases to survey the room. Even before he saw the note on her desk, he knew she was really gone. Dust particles swirled in the shaft of sunlight that beamed down on her desk where he found the note and one of her favorite pens. He sat heavily in her chair and picked up the page torn from one of her notebooks.

Dear Lefty,

I’m sorry, but I can’t do this anymore. The other night you didn’t seem to hear me at all. I know you don’t understand. The work takes something out of me. It’s not like I have a bottomless well. I know you think this thing is just getting started, but it got away from me and I can’t do it anymore. I’m grateful to you for all your help and mostly for believing in me, but I need some time to figure out who I am. I’m sorry.

Kelly

I can only imagine what Lefty felt after reading that note. He was probably angry, but then he would have been disappointed in himself for being angry. Mostly, I think he was worried, and that worry would plague him for the year and a half it would take for him to hear from her again.

He looked in her bedroom and saw that her closet was empty. The chest of drawers was empty. All of her art supplies remained. He wondered if she had even bothered to take one of her favorite sketchpads, or a couple of pens, but he doubted it. He had pushed her too hard and understood too late that he had done to her what his father had done to him every day of his childhood after it was discovered that Lefty had a powerful arm and a level of control that far exceeded his gangly twelve-year-old body.

Lefty’s punishment was to have to carry on the charade of Daedalia by himself. Contracts had been signed and promises made. There was no one he could call to see if Kelly was okay. She had no friends that he knew of and he was certain she would never reach out to her mother.

He tried to think of the positives. She had plenty of money. She was very young and she needed time to be young. He tried to picture her walking on a beach in Bali or sitting on a bench in the Louvre eating a sandwich. He hoped that’s what she was doing. He hoped she would come back to him in a couple of months fully recharged with stories to tell, but he didn’t expect her to.

She had abandoned him in their moment of triumph. He had cracked the fucking code, broken into the bank vault that only one in ten million artists ever would while they were still living, and like a petulant child she just said, “Not for me.”

He traveled to New York to oversee preparations for Daedalia’s opening there. Greta had continued to be a big help as he navigated into deeper waters. It was she who helped him stage a bidding war between the top galleries in New York, ensuring that Daedalia’s opening would secure the highest profile with the most marketing dollars. It was she who had coached him to be as hard, aloof, and obtuse as possible in his dealings.

These things didn’t come easy for a man whose wiring and genteel Southern disposition demanded he do everything in his power to be liked and put others at ease. She helped him understand that he could play a character. So he did, and he convinced himself he was doing it for Kelly. He believed she would come back, and when she did, he wanted to have a worldwide audience clamoring to see her work. He also had bills to pay.

He spent the week before the opening pushing to make sure everything was perfect. In a year, he had learned a lot about staging and theatrics. Being an untrained outsider gave him an unmatched ability to disrupt conventional thinking.

Upon walking into the gallery on Broome Street, he immediately insisted the space wouldn’t do unless they made a lot of changes. The large front windows would have to be papered over. The walls would have to be painted black. The tracks of lights that lit the room like a football stadium would have to be turned off and replaced with tiny, focused spots. The space had to be dark.

What had been a happy accident borne out of necessity in the little warehouse where he staged Daedalia’s first show had become the only way he would stage the work for the first decade of her career. The darkness created a nocturnal, dreamy state for the viewer and threw the small pieces into dramatic focus.

Kelly had disappeared before they could come up with a name for the show, so he had been forced to do it on his own. The afternoon before the pieces had to be packed and shipped, he spread them all out across the living room and kitchen of her little house just as he and Kelly had done that first time in his studio apartment. He drank orange juice out of the half-empty carton she had left in her fridge and wandered from piece to piece, allowing himself to fall into each one.

Unlike her first couple of series, which were mostly a collection of random ideas unified by her technique, these were operating on a different plane. They were in communication with each other. Where one ended, the next began. She had numbered them on the backs, but he could have sequenced them without any help because they told a story. He wasn’t sure he could have articulated it to anyone else, but it was there, etched into his heart with all the precision of her meticulous pen strokes.

On the sidewalk across the street from the gallery, he stood for a while staring at the words he had written on the envelope he shipped with the paintings two weeks prior. Now they were printed in elegant white lettering across the blacked-out glass of the gallery’s front window.

He shivered in the October chill, wishing he had brought a camera. He took a deep breath, crossed the street, and stepped up to the door in front of a line of people queued around the block. The doorman nodded and let him in.

It was not a typical gallery show in the city. He hadn’t allowed it to be. It wasn’t filled with people chatting over champagne flutes and canapés. Only ten guests were admitted at a time and each had been required to make a reservation.

The gallery owners, a skeletal couple with the austere names of Hela and Sherman Kirn, had been more than a little rankled about being told how to run their business by this hick and had gone so far as to have him sign a contract stating that he would cover the loss if they sold less than twenty-five percent of the works on opening night.

He signed it, but not without extracting a promise that the owners would not permit their usual patrons privileged access. They would have to wait in the cold like everyone else. Hela and Sherman were certain the evening would be a disaster.

When he stepped into the space and the door closed behind him, shutting out the chill and the honk and murmur of the city, Lefty had what he has described as a religious experience. From his vantage point, he could see each of the nineteen pieces he had selected for the show. None of them was large enough to comprehend, much less decipher, from a distance.

But standing there by the door, he witnessed the emergence of something much greater as he moved toward the center of the gallery. The pieces weren’t just thematically connected. They were a single, living organism, not unlike a stand of aspen trees or an octopus with its thinking appendages furling and unfurling, flattening, shifting as it changed in dimension, color, and texture.

“You’re here. Why didn’t you tell me?” Her voice broke with emotion. “How did she know so much about our lives? Is this some kind of stunt?”

He hadn’t heard the gallery owner approach. When he turned slowly to face Hela Kirn, the sharp planes of her face had softened and her eyes shimmered with tears. He felt a discomfort, like the wrongness of putting on a well-worn T-shirt backwards. When he tried to speak, words wouldn’t come. Tears streamed down his face as they had that first time he looked at Kelly’s notebook.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, his eyes drifting back to the middle piece of the triptych displayed prominently on the center back wall. “These pieces, they’re not your story.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you see it? This is her story… and mine.”

The gallery owner’s face drained of color and she stared at him blankly before turning to follow his gaze at the triptych. “That’s our child. That’s our Melanie.”

Lefty stared at the figure in the center panel that only just emerged at this distance and experienced an echo of the feeling that had overwhelmed him a few weeks prior when he had first seen the pieces. In the half dozen times he had looked at the collection, handled the pieces in preparation for this show, he had never seen this, had never been far enough away.

Up close, the works were a bending, twisting labyrinth of flora and fauna interrupted by landmarks, crypts, statues, an overgrown garden shed collapsing into decay. The figure he saw was himself at fifteen, standing on the old train trestle that spanned the gorge off Route 9. The angle of his head, the slackness of his posture, the lump of his bat bag and helmet on the track beside him, it was all there.

He brushed past her and moved closer, hoping to see what this woman saw, but the singular subject exploded into a trillion tiny strokes like the dust particles floating in the air of her empty living room a few weeks prior.

“I won’t sell any of these pieces,” he said, barely audible.

“I beg your pardon?” She moved up behind him.

“You can let them in, but no one’s buying anything tonight.”

He turned to face her, ready for a fight.

“I agree,” she said. “They must not be separated. Not yet.”

Many times I have heard this story and I’m still not sure I believe a word of it, though I want to, more than anything. The collection has never been staged in its entirety since that first showing. For the week it lasted, it breathed in that room off Broome Street and then it was sold off in pieces. The elite collectors of the New York scene, and those who had traveled in from London, Paris, and Prague, had to wait in the cold for hours like teenagers queuing to buy concert tickets. The bidding war was unprecedented for a new and unknown artist.

But no one who saw the work could leave without at least trying to take it home, where they were certain it belonged.

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Did this chapter take you in? Leave a ❤️ below to help fellow travelers find it. Speaking of fellow travelers, a lot of friendships have started in the comments of my serials.

Leave a comment

Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

An L.A. art critic received a cryptic, hand-drawn invitation on his coffee cup that led him, alone, to a warehouse address after midnight. Inside, he found a single, meticulously lit labyrinth drawing that pulled him into a trance before Lefty Moody appeared and introduced himself as Daedalia’s representative.

The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.

July 12, 1993

I can’t get used to having my own place. It’s weird. It doesn’t feel real. I never imagined having anything of my own, or really being a grown-up, but here I am with my own dishes, my own actual bed, and a television (which I totally need to put in a closet).

Things have been happening so fast I wanted to write it down here in case it’s all just a dream and it’s gone tomorrow. I want to be able to remember it. My little one-bedroom house is in Laurel Canyon. Yes, that one where fucking Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash lived together! I have a forest view, a little deck where I can sit and have coffee in the morning, and a big open living room with a skylight where I can work. Best of all, I don’t have to sleep on a lumpy couch or share a bathroom.

I’m able to work anytime, day or night, though nights are a little scary. It gets dark out here and it’s so quiet. It feels too much like where I grew up. I don’t know how you can hate and love something equally, but I do. Ona likes the quiet, the trees, the solitude, but it reminds me of being a kid and being alone in that house.

This morning it’s sunny as I sit here in my chair at my table looking over at the piece on my desk. I have a desk! Such a luxury to draw on a massive, sturdy desk that doesn’t wobble. It’s the kind architects use that has a top that can tilt up. It was a gift from Lefty, a “business expense,” he would probably say.

I haven’t written about everything that’s happened since last year and I can’t possibly capture it all because there’s just been so much. If it all goes away, if I’m back where I started in six months or six years, I want to be able to remember at least some of it. There’s been so much I haven’t wanted to remember in my life.

Here’s the thing. I’m an ARTIST now. A successful artist. People buy my work for lots of money. How much money, you ask? Lefty sold a piece last week for $10,000! Who are these people? I can’t even really comprehend it most days. I even feel a little guilty when I think about how hard most people have to work to earn that much. There’s another part of me that wants to shout it from the rooftops, to tell all those assholes from high school that I’m a big fucking deal now and not some freakish thing to be pitied.

But I can’t do that. I can’t do it because the only way this works is if I’m kept a secret. Daedalia is the mysterious artist everybody is dying to meet. It’s more than a little fucked up.

The other night Lefty arranged an invitation-only showing at this gallery called Splinter and I told him I wanted to go and he said it was too risky and I told him to fuck off and we got in this big stupid fight, which makes zero sense, except it does, because I’m sick of being the secret ingredient in my own life. If the version of me and him sitting in that little shitbox in Echo Park could have seen us, they would have been disgusted. He told me this is exactly what I signed up for, which pissed me off even more because it was true. He also said it was my idea, which was also true. At that point I just got quiet and left the restaurant. In true form, I made a scene, which was also not the smartest thing to do for our little enterprise.

He called me later from the gallery and apologized and said I should come, that he had arranged a cover for me. I went down late and hovered on the sidewalk for a while like some lost puppy in fancy, uncomfortable clothes. I looked in through the tall glass windows at the people looking at my pieces and it was such a weird feeling that I can’t describe.

I made all this happen, at least it looks that way, but it’s complicated. I don’t think I ever expected any of it to actually work. I thought me and Lefty would do this little experiment together and it would be a laugh and he’d have a reason to keep letting me hang around.

He helped me get into this place and it’s lovely, but I miss him being around. It was a weird moment when I realized we were looking at places just for me. He got his own apartment in West Hollywood, which is a little bit of an upgrade from the shitbox but nothing fancy. He’s been really careful about the money, wants to make sure it’s fair.

After that first little stunt that Greta helped us pull off and he started getting real offers for my work, he wanted to formalize things to protect me. I said we should just split it 50/50 but he refused and said the most he would take would be 25%. So I’m renting a house in the Canyon and he’s got a one-bedroom apartment.

That’s it for now. I left out so much, but I’ve got work to get to. I have some ideas about a new series with butterflies. The patterns on their wings are so crazy if you think about them. It’ll be interesting to see what we do.

December 31, 1992

Lefty went home for Christmas. He asked if I wanted to come but I told him I don’t have the kind of parents he does, plus unlike him, I can’t exactly tell everybody about my success. I should have done something though, gone somewhere. It’s really sucked to be alone for the past week.

I went to the big stupid mall and walked around for a few hours. I went into a few fancy stores all decked out for the holidays and I bought clothes, like girly clothes I never wear, just because I could afford them and I wanted to treat myself. I wanted to do something with this money I suddenly have. It was fun for a few minutes. I ate way too much Chinese food, came home, and got a little too drunk. I fell and cut my hand somehow. I wanted to call him, but he would just ask if I was okay and then he’d ask what I was working on.

I keep thinking about that afternoon back in September when he took me for a drive up the coast because he saw how tired I was and said I needed a break. He was quiet most of the way and we just listened to music. Something was on his mind but he never said. I know he was seeing somebody. I could smell her sometimes when he came around. But he never talked about her to me, which is weird.

We ended up in this little seaside town called Cambria. It was like a residential area, not a touristy place. He hadn’t planned to stop there, but he was tired of driving. There was a rocky beach, Moonstruck Beach, and we walked for a while. It was like a romantic spot and I don’t think he meant it to be. I think it made him uncomfortable. I wanted him to kiss me and I was reaching with my mind, willing him to, but he didn’t.

I don’t know if he sees me like that. Sometimes when I’m working with Ona I talk about him. She knows him very well by now but she offers no advice. I can feel her waiting for me to ask her to help me make him see me. I think she could do it, but I don’t want it to be like that, a trick.

I’m planning on a new direction this year and that’s what I’m doing here as I sit on my deck with the sun going down on the last day of this year that’s changed my life. I want to do something bigger and bolder so I’ve bought some larger canvases and I’m planning to experiment with more color.

I know an artist isn’t supposed to read their reviews, but I do. Maybe I’m just using the loophole that I’m not officially the artist, but I don’t care. It’s fun to read what other people think about the things that were once just in my head.

That guy Rousseau, the one who wrote that first review in the L.A. Times, said my work was “a tumble down a twisty rabbit hole filled with enchantment and mystical symbology that masks a beautiful, tortured soul sharpening her nib to carve her way out of the darkness.”

The rabbit was Ona’s idea. I’ve never really thought of rabbits before, but I found I liked the shape of them when I started to doodle. Of the six little invitations Lefty had me make for the six fancy people Greta had been whispering to before we did that little show, I connected most with the one I did for him. When I read one of his articles and studied the little black-and-white headshot with his column, I felt a connection to him, like somehow we had similar stories. Lefty thought the invitation was kind of creepy, like stalkery, but when I wrote the words “did you lose something?” I wasn’t just thinking about Rousseau.

The thing about being universal is you’ve got to get personal and personal is messy. The great artists are the ones who give their whole heart away, I think. Some days I think maybe I do that, so maybe I’ll be a great artist, but then I think no, I don’t really do that because I’m cheating. Daedalia is the “beautiful, tortured soul.” I’m just a hick girl from Black Mountain who’s a long way from home and about to spend New Year’s Eve alone.

Future me, don’t feel too bad. I bought some expensive champagne and a whole cheesecake and I’m planning to watch twelve hours of Star Trek.

June 5, 1993

I never thought I would be tired of doing art, but I am totally burned out right now. I know it’s not true, but I feel like I could just walk away and never do it again. That’s scary to me because I’m not sure who I am without it.

I turned 22 yesterday and I feel so old. I’ve done 26 pieces in less than eighteen months. Each one takes us so much time, like at least 200 hours or more. When she’s with me, it’s effortless, almost like dreaming, but more and more it’s just me and my hand starts to cramp after eight or nine hours and my shoulders hurt. I don’t have any kind of a fucking life outside of my art. I thought that’s what I wanted but it’s not enough. How can I already be done when I’m just 22?

I’m afraid to tell Lefty. He’s going to be mad. No, he won’t be mad. He’ll be sweet about it and then gently remind me about all the reasons why I can’t quit. I only see him like twice a week when he comes up to check on me like I’m a prize racehorse he keeps in a stable or something. He always brings me something, food or some little gift he thinks might inspire me.

Once a month we go over the finances and he talks about different galleries across the country who want to stage a show for Daedalia. He talks about her in the third person. It’s so fucking weird. What’s even stranger is he’s got me doing it now too. In some ways it’s easier because it separates me from her and that whole world. Is it weird to be jealous of someone who doesn’t exist?

How messed up is it that I’m bitching here? I have over $200,000 in the bank at this point. That number doesn’t even seem real when I look at the statement. I don’t know how much Lefty has but he seems happy enough. He loves the game of it, but I also think he’s proud of what we’ve done. I want him to be happy. He’s really the closest thing I have to family now.

For my birthday he gave me this collection of photography books by a nature photographer whose thing is to take a single photo every day, only one, and he’s done it for something like ten years. The images are so gorgeous but there’s also something that feels really lonely about them, isolating. Like he’s trapped by this thing he started. I feel that.

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Did this chapter take you in? Leave a ❤️ below to help fellow travelers find it. Speaking of fellow travelers, a lot of friendships have started in the comments of my serials.

Leave a comment

Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

After six months of rejection in the L.A. gallery scene, Lefty shifted from trying to get Daedalia shown to studying the people who bought art and the rules that governed them. At an opening he met Greta Krieger, who dismantled his hustle, flirted with him for sport, and left him with one directive—and her number: make a spectacle.

Clem Rousseau sat at his usual table in the back of the café, sipping a double espresso in the late afternoon. Normally, he was here in the early morning and wouldn’t risk so much caffeine so late in the day, but he had to be sharp for the evening in front of him.

It was his routine to wake early and come here to work on his latest column. It was preferable to write here in his yellow legal pad than over the small, cluttered desk of his studio apartment, which smelled of cat piss and stale cigarettes. The foul stench was all that remained of Roger, who had left him more than a year prior for an older model with a better bank balance. Clem had been walking around in a malaise until this morning, when he received a curious invitation with his coffee.

On the white paper cup, a single question had been handwritten with a fine-tip black pen. The print was so near-perfect that, at first, he thought it was clever printing on the cup, but there were small imperfections that made the writing distinctly human. He had an eye for such things. The simple question, on its own, was compelling, but what stirred his imagination was the arrow beneath it, pointing to the bottom of the cup. It tickled a part of his brain—unlocked a memory of decoding riddles on the backs of cereal boxes as a child.

He had looked around at the other patrons seated in the café, just as he did this afternoon, to see if any of them had received a cup like his. That morning he had tried to do this subtly, as he was loath to draw undue attention to himself. As far as he could tell, his cup was one of a kind. There had been a strong urge to lift it over his head so he could investigate the bottom of the cup, but that might have alarmed the couple sitting adjacent to him. So he waited, sipping his coffee at a pace that scalded his throat, his pen hovering over the draft of his piece on a graffiti artist whose work had been causing a stir on the New York scene for the past few months. The four-word inquiry carefully printed on his cup taunted him and felt deeply personal.

Did you lose something?

When he finished the coffee, he turned the cup over. In the same precise, tiny script, another message was scrawled, this one spiraling from the outer rim toward the center like a nautilus shell. He had to raise the cup inches from his face to read the message. What he read brought the slightest smile of satisfaction to his lips.

After weeks of hearing whispered rumors within the art community about these mysterious invitations and feeling excluded, he had finally received one. No two invitations had been the same, so he hadn’t even known what to look for—in fact, he had been afraid he wouldn’t recognize it for what it was. He reread the message repeatedly throughout the day as he traced his index finger along its spiraling path, entranced.

This morning, he nearly stopped to ask the barista about the special cup, but there had been a line of customers, and he discovered he didn’t want to know how the cup had come into his possession.

He worked for a couple of hours to finish up the piece he had neglected this morning. His deadline loomed and he was a professional, so even in this highly distracted state, he prevailed. It wasn’t his best work, but then what more did a graffiti artist deserve? Clem considered himself a fair and balanced critic, and unlike some of his contemporaries—who indulged in the cheap thrill of the hatchet job or the gushy sycophantry that ensured comp tickets to all the best events in town—he wrote his observations of art with a direct, honest intensity.

He checked his watch. It was only six-thirty. He still had five hours to kill before he could drive to the address written on the bottom of the cup. It was on the east side of downtown, off Alameda, and seemed sketchy to him.

Earlier, after leaving the café, he had stopped by the office to speak with his editor and made a point of asking around about the location. A grubby beat reporter with eczema—who had been eavesdropping on his conversation with his friend Cheryl in the break room—told him it was nothing but warehouses, cold storage, a trainyard. Not exactly a place for a gallery show.

For someone who rarely stayed out past ten, and whose idea of an adventurous evening was to try a new Vietnamese restaurant that had mixed reviews, visiting an unknown location in the warehouse district after midnight was both thrilling and terrifying. He would have asked a friend to tag along, but that was forbidden. What had the invitation said? This is a trip you must take alone.

Clem understood it was a stunt. He had seen them before from artists, but this one was different—and it wasn’t just that it was so exclusive. There was something about the tiny figure drawn at the center of the spiraling message on the bottom of the cup. He had studied it with a magnifying glass and marveled at how just a few abstract pen strokes rendered the perfect form of a rabbit. The image had stirred him deeply, and he couldn’t understand exactly why.

Rather than go back home—where he feared he might lose his nerve and not venture back out—he decided to stay out and find something to kill the time. Two hours later, he found himself standing outside the multiplex, staring at movie posters. It had been years since he watched a popular movie and he remembered why. They all looked so garish and overblown. He considered Coppola’s Dracula but decided he didn’t need to be more spooked than he already was, so he bought a ticket for something called A River Runs Through It that had the delicious Brad Pitt standing waist-deep in a mountain stream.

By the time the movie finished, Clem was weepy, exhausted, and embarrassed about being so pathetic. He wanted nothing more than to go back home, curl into bed, and dream of fly fishing. But a fate worse than death for an art critic is being the last one to publish an opinion on an emerging talent. So when he got back into his car, he gave himself a little pep talk and cranked the engine of his old Accord. The streets of West Hollywood were still humming with happy, drunk clusters of young people ambling down Santa Monica.

On La Brea, headed south, there was an atmospheric change. It was quieter, darker. By the time he crossed Olympic, he saw the shimmery halo of Hollywood fade in his rearview. He passed strip malls with psychic readers, boarded-up storefronts, and liquor stores with spastically strobing fluorescent lights. At the 10, he merged east, passing half-lit billboards, graffiti on overpasses, and endless concrete arteries. He hated the freeway, especially at night.

When he exited on Alameda, it was warehouses and shuttered loading docks, semi-trailers parked like sleeping giants marked with the bubbly graffiti of fading gang tags. No more palm trees. No more pedestrians.

He pulled slowly down a narrow street with nondescript industrial buildings on one side and a chain-link fence bordering a weedy parking lot with hulking warehouses on the other.

This was a bad idea.

He fumbled for the cup in the passenger seat, slowed to a stop, and checked the address. 2326 E. 8th Street. It was somewhere on this block, but nothing screamed art exhibition. “At least there’s plenty of parking,” he mumbled to himself like a man whistling in a graveyard as he put the car in park behind a gray Toyota Corolla, the only other car on the street.

He got out, closed the door, and looked up and down the street in both directions. The storefronts—if you could call them that—were all shuttered with heavy rolling doors or corrugated steel sliding doors with handles chained together and padlocked. The only working light was three doors down from where he stood, but when he walked up he saw the number was wrong and it was locked up tight.

Walking back toward his car, he was ready to give up when he heard the faintest strains of music: a solo violin playing somewhere farther down the darkened sidewalk.

The last door at the end of the block was partially open and the music was coming from inside. As Clem approached, he could see a faint light flickering from inside a chipped clay pot by the door. The candlelight illuminated a small card affixed to the painted cinderblock wall. On the black-bordered card, in the same careful print from the coffee cup, the sign read:

You found me, please come in.

He looked left and right. There was no one. It was unnerving and he felt foolish for allowing himself to be taken in by what surely was either an elaborate practical joke or a lure to attract an aging, lonely man and separate him from what little money he had.

But he had come this far.

He had to push with his shoulder to slide the door open enough on the rusty track above so he could squeeze into the dimly lit space. Once inside, his eyes quickly adjusted and his senses sharpened. There was a pleasant, earthy smell like cardamom, leather, and patchouli.

The room was large, easily a hundred feet to the back wall, where there was a single framed piece that appeared as a tiny window. It was so precisely lit from a powerful pin light somewhere above in the ceiling that it looked as though it were lit from within. The rest of the massive space was in inky shadow, with no other source of light.

As he moved toward the piece, his shoes scraped on the dusty concrete. The music swelled, the violin shifting into a high, aching register, the notes cascading and building upon themselves like the churn and roil of rapids on a river after a heavy rain.

Clem forgot himself—forgot to be anxious, skeptical, or afraid—as he drew near to the piece. When at last he stood before it, he found he had trouble understanding the scale of it. What he had estimated to be a frame less than three feet wide by two feet tall seemed so much larger up close given the incomprehensible amount of detail and perspective.

He understood right away this was not something to be consumed in one go. It required time and space to open itself. At a distance it had appeared to be one thing—a surreal, naturalistic landscape awash in tones of green and blue—but on closer inspection, it was an intricate, labyrinthine drawing in the same careful pen strokes he recognized from the cup.

His eye was drawn to the bottom left corner of the canvas where he recognized a version of the rabbit from the bottom of the cup. The creature was poised before an open gate, half-covered in ivy. Beyond the gate, his eye traced a path through the hedgerows that twisted back into the distance of the painting, sometimes disappearing behind a structure like a fountain or stone cottage and then reappearing only to twist back upon itself.

The piece provoked in him the same tingling sensation he had as a boy upon seeing his first M.C. Escher drawing, and yet it was different. This work tugged at something deeper inside him. For such a technical piece, there was a raw, visceral, emotional energy that built up as he lingered before it. He found he was no longer in an abandoned warehouse observing a work of art, but moving through long-hidden passageways from his childhood.

He had no idea how long he stood before the painting, and he might have stayed there until dawn if the music hadn’t faded and a man’s voice hadn’t broken his trance. He wasn’t startled, which he certainly should have been—alone in a dark warehouse well after midnight. The voice was low and soothing with a hint of Southern charm.

“Hello, Mr. Rousseau. I’m so glad you were able to make it.”

Clem turned to see a tall man with a rangy, athletic build wearing an open-collared white shirt with a dark suede jacket, jeans, and desert boots. He had a handsome face, a strong chin, and an easy smile.

“My name’s Lefty Moody.”

He offered his hand. The warmth and strength of his handshake made Clem feel wobbly and out of sorts. Normally, he prided himself on his unflappable ability to articulate in any situation, but he couldn’t find words.

“Can I offer you a drink?” Lefty asked. “I have some wine, whiskey, or perhaps a sparkling water.”

“Um… sorry, this is all just so strange. Are you the artist?”

“Oh, lord no. I can barely draw a square if you gave me three sides to start. The artist’s name is Daedalia. I represent her.”

“And is she here?”

“No, I’m afraid not. No one will ever meet her for reasons I can’t get into. Let’s just say she’s a private person.”

Clem’s face contorted. He had about fifty questions he wanted to ask and they were bottlenecked, leaving him, once again, at a loss for words. This man, Lefty, was patient and had an ease about him. He just seemed to be waiting.

Finally, Clem asked the only question that truly mattered.

“How did you… how did she know what I’d lost?”

« Previous | Table of Contents | Next »

Did this chapter take you in? Leave a ❤️ below to help fellow travelers find it. Speaking of fellow travelers, a lot of friendships have started in the comments of my serials.

Leave a comment

Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

After six months of rejection in the L.A. gallery scene, Lefty shifted from trying to get Daedalia shown to studying the people who bought art and the rules that governed them. At an opening he met Greta Krieger, who dismantled his hustle, flirted with him for sport, and left him with one directive—and her number: make a spectacle.

“When are you going to show her my work?”

Kelly and Lefty were sitting at the diner on Alvarado Street where they sometimes went for breakfast if she was around when he woke up.

“I don’t know, but not anytime soon.”

“Why not? Isn’t that the point? I mean, she’s the kind of person you’ve been trying to meet, right?”

“Yeah, but it’s better to wait. I know what I’m doing. She’s the type who likes a change-up.”

“Is that another sports-ball reference? You know I don’t get those, right?”

He took a sip of coffee, set it back down, and stirred more sugar into it.

“The only reason she gave me the time of day was because she couldn’t figure me out. She likes that. If I just take your portfolio to her and spread it out on a table like an encyclopedia salesman, she’s not going to be interested.”

“But you’ve met with her, what, three times now? Are you sleeping with her? I mean, it’s cool if you are, if you think that’s going to help, but…”

“No. I decided that wouldn’t be smart. For this to work, I think the best move is not to give her what she wants—cultivate a little mystery.”

“Whatever. It seems like a lot of work.” Kelly took another big bite of pancake and continued talking with her mouth full. “So what do you talk about in these meetings if you’re not fucking her and you’re not showing her my art?”

“I’m learning the business and working on our angle.”

“Has she asked to see my work?”

“Oh yeah. Several times.”

“And what have you told her about me?”

“You mean about Daedalia? All kinds of crazy shit, but I dole it out a little at a time and never in a super obvious way.”

“Like what kind of crazy shit?”

“Daedalia works in manic bursts over several days when she doesn’t sleep at all. She goes into this trance-like state. Her eyes are very sensitive, so she prefers to work in a dark room with only a headlamp—it helps her focus only on what’s directly in front of her. She’s also has this rare nervous system disorder since she was a child where her skin is so sensitive even the slightest touch feels like she’s being shocked.”

“You know how dumb it sounds for an artist to work without natural light, right? I mean, that’s kind of the whole thing. You’ve made her into a complete shut-in freak.”

“I’m still experimenting.” He paused and looked out the window. “Point taken about the light. I’ll back off that detail. Nothing really matters until it’s in print. Right now we’re just talking.”

“You’ve made her sound creepy. Do you think that’s what my art is—creepy?”

“What? No, of course not. Like we said, this isn’t about you, or even your art. This is about creating a myth that people will buy.”

“So is she buying it?”

“Yeah, I think she is. She wouldn’t keep wanting me to come around if she wasn’t intrigued.”

“So what do you tell her your relationship with Daedalia is?”

“I haven’t shared the whole story with her yet. All I’ve said is she’s the daughter of an old friend who died, and she’s suffered some great trauma.” He watched her take another bite and traced the rim of his cup with his middle finger. “Hey, that reminds me—do you remember Annie Weems back in Black Mountain?”

“Yeah, of course I do. She lost her entire family in that train accident. That’s the backstory you’re thinking of?”

“Something like that. Daedalia survived but was left all alone in the world. Her art is all she’s got. It’s her lifeline, the thing that keeps her…”

Lefty talked on, excitedly, as he looked out at the cars passing. He was so absorbed in his story that he didn’t realize Kelly had set her fork down and was staring into her lap. Eventually, he looked back across the table and saw that she was upset.

“Hey. What is it?” he asked, leaning forward.

“Nothing. It’s just fucking weird how into this you are and I’m just…”

“You’re just what?”

“I’m kind of that girl, right? I mean, this story you’re making up—it’s based in some truth. You didn’t just invent it out of nothing.”

“No. You’re wrong about that.”

“Am I?”

When she looked up, her eyes were glassy with tears.

“Kelly, I’m sorry. It’s just a dumb story. We can change it to be anything you want.”

“She was supposed to be this heroine, Lefty, not a freak like me. She was supposed to be like a comic book character with supernatural powers, not somebody you feel sorry for.”

“You’re right. You’re right. I wasn’t thinking about it that way. I was just thinking about what makes most artists. There’s always something tragic about them, about their lives.”

It was clear from the backstory he was creating about Daedalia that he really didn’t see her.

I think Lefty must have understood that he hit a nerve that day, a deep one. He had never asked her about her family or what secrets she kept or where her darkness came from. He had tried to accept her on her own terms, and some part of him identified with her need to reinvent herself. It’s why he went along with this scheme they had hatched.

She didn’t say anything—just wiped her face with the sleeve of her hoodie and stared out the window.

When they were walking back to the apartment on the sidewalk littered with empty malt-liquor bottles and fast-food trash, she stopped and knelt to pluck a tiny dandelion growing up through a crack in the concrete. He had become accustomed to this behavior. She was always noticing things no one else paid attention to.

When they were off the main road and on Glendale, walking by the lake where it was quieter, she said, “I don’t want my life to be tragic.”

“Me either,” he said. “Look, I thought this was me and you taking a piss on the world, but if it feels bad to you, let’s stop and figure out something else.”

“I don’t want to stop. I’m just… I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“When’s the last time you got out and did anything? The stuff you’re doing right now is really amazing, but you’re not a machine. You need a break.”

“Who would I go out with, man? I mean, look around. I don’t exactly have any friends out here.”

“What about that drummer you hung out with a couple of times?”

“Frankie? He’s got a girlfriend now.”

“I don’t have a shift tonight, if you wanna do something,” he offered.

“Too bad you don’t have another appointment with Greta Von Trapp.”

“I’ll see her Thursday.”

“I picture her like this—ball-crushing, Grace Jones–like Amazon woman.”

“She kind of is.”

When they made it back to the apartment, she was feeling a little better, but still in her head. He was right—she was lonely—but that wasn’t all of it. She didn’t understand the terms of their relationship, and it made her feel conflicted. No one had seen her art the way he did and as grateful as she was, she wished he saw her.

“Is it cool if I work for a while?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m just gonna lay here in a food coma.”

He was sprawled on the couch, which, being her bed, always made her feel weird. It was another example of the porous boundaries in their relationship. She didn’t like to be watched while she worked, but he looked exhausted to her and it seemed wrong to tell him he couldn’t do whatever he wanted in the place he paid for.

She pulled the latest piece she was working on out from under the couch, sat down at the card table in the kitchen, and started to work.

Lefty has said she used to just make a mad dash at the canvas with her pen, fully committed from the start. If you know her early work—the intricacy of it—this is hard to fathom. It must have been like the line was there all along, hidden beneath the white surface, and the tip of her pen was just summoning it into the visible world for others to see. This would change as she matured, became more ambitious, and the stakes got higher.

Sometimes she was able to drop immediately back into the flow where she had left off, and other times she had to sit and stare into the piece for a long time, straining to hear whatever whisper it was that guided her hand. She was working in a slightly larger format now, at Lefty’s suggestion. The board covered most of the table. She leaned over it as she perched on the chair with her feet tucked under her butt.

By the time I was able to watch her work, late in her career, she would spend days sketching the full piece in pencil, the faint, whispery lines like a spider’s web stretched across the canvas. In the days, sometimes weeks, that followed, the ink would flow from one corner of the canvas, carving up the negative space, bending it, folding it, and coaxing it to render a form like nothing that had ever existed before. It was machine-like, her process—like in her mind there was a blueprint with the whole thing precisely mapped, and the painstaking, almost random-looking act of her nib moving mechanically across the canvas, building up the ink, paint, and sometimes found objects, was pure execution.

I imagine it was on a day like this one—with Lefty snoring on the couch and Kelly hunched over the card table working—that she created one of the five pieces that would change the course of their lives. I wish more than anything that I could have been there to watch. Would I have been able to see anything more than a young woman moving a pen across the surface of a canvas?

I like to believe that I might have seen, or at least felt, the presence of what I imagine to be her luminous collaborator hovering somewhere just above her, guiding her movement. But this is a romantic notion, a fantasy I entertain. I can’t know any more than Lefty knew the origin of her talent. She, like all of us, is an unreliable narrator.

But I want to believe it’s true. I need to believe it’s true, especially now.

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Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 10–15 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

After a dead day at the Santa Barbara street fair, Lefty finally admitted he’d sold Kelly’s work by pretending to be her—and Kelly, unnervingly calm, said it was part of a “deal” she wouldn’t explain. On the drive home, they agreed to invent a mysterious woman artist no one could meet, and weeks later Lefty taped a name to the fridge: Daedalia.

It didn’t work.

This is not something surprising to me—and probably not to you, or really any other rational person—but Lefty was genuinely perplexed as to why he couldn’t get a single gallery in the greater Los Angeles area to entertain showing the work of an anonymous artist.

The Southern charm that had been his primary asset up to this point in life couldn’t have been more of a liability when he stepped into the austere, echoey inner sanctums of the L.A. gallery scene. For the first few attempts, armed only with what appeared to be a photo album, he never made it past the receptionists. At the third or fourth stop in his first campaign, a kind stranger who happened to witness his utter rejection tipped him to the fact that serious galleries would only review slides. This explained why his family photo album from K-Mart was appraised with the disdain afforded a turd in a punchbowl. And so he learned.

But the obstacles were so much greater than just needing slides of Daedalia’s work. The format of the pieces was too small. They weren’t abstract enough. They were too abstract. They lacked sophistication. They were too obtuse. They were not the work of a serious artist. They lacked depth, complexity, and emotion. What he was able to show of Kelly’s work was not communicating the undeniable power of it, but there was also the reality that no one had ever heard of Charles Moody, Artist Agent, as he had printed on his business cards. More importantly, they had never heard of his client with a name they couldn’t pronounce and were told they would never be able to meet.

Every day for six months, Lefty came home pissed off. Kelly tried not to be there during the couple of hours when he returned to eat something and change before going into work, but sometimes it was unavoidable. He never took it out on her exactly, but tended to give her a lot of unhelpful direction based on whatever he had just been told. The more she learned about the serious art world through him, the more she despised it and doubled down on the things he criticized about her work. This wasn’t something she did intentionally. It was a natural reflex that most artists have. If she could take direction, then she could have worked at Kinko’s or an advertising agency.

Lefty may have gotten more frustrated by her contrariness if he wasn’t so fully absorbed with the work she was doing. In just a few months, her style had evolved and become increasingly more ambitious and layered, incorporating splashes of vivid watercolor and expanding in size. What he understood about art, art history, and the great masters could fit on a trifold brochure, but he knew Kelly’s work with an intimacy that bordered on obsession. Why else would he have allowed her canvases and supplies to cover every available surface in their small living space? Why else would he persist where most men, when confronted with so much rejection, would have come to question their own taste and given up? But the rejection only made Lefty more dogged—his belief stronger.

There’s no logic for this commitment he felt, and Lefty himself has never been able to explain it when he’s been asked over the years. Her genius has more than proven itself and Daedalia is celebrated as one of the greatest artists of the twenty-first century, but at the time, she was just a kid making cool pictures that no serious gallery was interested in.

Lefty’s masochistic visits to the galleries did nothing to advance their cause directly, but they did give him an education—not just in fine art, but in the kinds of people who collect it. He would often make a point of coming back to openings at the galleries that wouldn’t give him the time of day just so he could study the people who turned up to sip Prosecco and peer into the canvases with such rapturous intent.

He could never convince Kelly to come with him on these reconnaissance missions. It wasn’t that she had no interest in other artists and their work. It was the fact that the events terrified her and pissed her off in equal measure. The pretense and spectacle of them, and the underlying tension she felt in those spaces, made it hard for her to breathe. While she was grateful for Lefty’s persistence in pursuing them, she didn’t miss an opportunity to bust his balls about the lengths he would go to. He never confessed to her that the chunky black-framed glasses and black turtleneck he donned for these outings were as much a disguise to hide from the haughty curators who had roundly rejected him the day before as a costume to blend in as one of the gallery patrons.

It was at one of these openings that he met a woman who, either out of curiosity or pity, took Lefty under her wing. Greta Krieger was an institution of the L.A. art scene and had worked in the business for twenty years. He had observed her from a distance at nearly every opening he attended but avoided trying to engage her. Maybe it was her austere appearance—the shock of white hair spiked to fine points, the thick eyeliner, leather pants, and heels that looked more like weapons than footwear—or maybe it was the way he overheard her carve people up with a tongue sharper than a straight razor.

“Why don’t I get one of those?”

She slipped up behind him while he had been chatting up a couple standing in front of a giant canvas depicting a vivid and cartoonish Jack-in-the-Box toy foisting a grenade.

“Excuse me?”

“It doesn’t work, you know—the business card thing. A 3 x 2 piece of card stock doesn’t make you someone unless you already are.”

“How do you know I’m not someone?”

“Because I know everyone in this town who’s worth knowing.”

Lefty pulled his hand from his pocket, where he had been thumbing the slim stack of cards he had left, and extended his hand to her. Her handshake wasn’t the removed, limp affair he had become accustomed to in these circles, but an honest Midwestern grip, which surprised him.

“I’m Lefty. Are you someone?” He squinted his eyes, appraising her before adding, “Because if you’re not, you’re trying really hard.”

Her eyes narrowed and she laughed. “I like you. And here I thought you were an ingratiating sycophant trying to sell life insurance.”

They left the gallery well before the event was over—her suggestion—and ended up at a bar on Sunset Boulevard called the Cat and Fiddle—also her suggestion. The place was like a Hollywood movie set for a British pub and not at all the kind of place he imagined to be her scene, so he assumed she picked it for his benefit. Lefty had a preternatural gift for knowing the role he was supposed to play in any dynamic, but he was struggling to find his footing. He allowed her to buy the first round of drinks, but he insisted on picking up the tab at the end of the night, even though it would probably amount to more than he made in two shifts at the stereo store.

“So this mysterious artist you represent—why are you bothering? Is it love?” She tilted her head and pouched her lips. “No, I don’t think so. If it’s money, then I can think of about a thousand ways that would be easier than this game.” His silence set the hook and she continued to tug. “Don’t tell me you think she’s brilliant, that she’s the next Rothko. Surely you’re smarter than that.”

“She is nobody, but her work will make Rothko look like a house painter one day.”

“And tell me, Lefty Moody—so much better than Charles, by the way—what makes you qualified to make such a prediction?”

“I don’t know, but I’m right. You’ll see.”

“Will I?” She leaned forward and squeezed his thigh.

Up close, he could see the crow’s feet beneath the theatrical eyeliner she had applied with the precision of a surgeon. It wasn’t her severe, almost androgynous style, or her aggressiveness, that restrained him. He would have happily slept with her, but he knew if he did, he wouldn’t get what he really needed. So he allowed her to handle him.

After her third gin and tonic, she said they should go somewhere more private. He agreed, but didn’t move to get up. Instead, he asked about her life, her childhood, her loves, gradually working his way closer to what he really wanted to know. How did she spot talent? How had she successfully represented so many artists?

“The old-fashioned way, darling,” she answered.

When he looked confused, she clarified. “I have money to spend. Lots of it.”

“But that’s not enough, is it? People have to recognize that the work is great, right? I mean, it can’t be that simple.”

“Oh, you’re so adorable,” she cooed, leaning in and kissing him on the cheek. In his ear she whispered, “People believe what they’re told by people who have more power. Money is power, so people believe money.”

“And you’re saying there’s no other way.”

She pulled back and looked him directly in the eye. “You believe there is, I think. So maybe there is.”

“If you didn’t have money to promote an artist, to buy them an audience out of the gate, what would you have done?”

“I would’ve created a spectacle.”

“What do you mean?”

“Art is disruption. It’s a slap in the face of a sleeping world, comfortable in their nine-to-five, sitcom lifestyle. The battle is to be noticed, to cut through the complacency. You have to make a spectacle.”

It was late when he closed out the tab, and Greta was very drunk. He didn’t know if this was just another Tuesday night for her or if she had made it an occasion because of him. Either way, he couldn’t, in good conscience, allow her to drive. He had stopped much earlier and was fine, except for being completely preoccupied by everything he had learned in talking with her.

She leaned into him as he walked her down the street to her car. It was a candy-apple red Mercedes convertible with a vanity license plate, and he wondered if she knew she was out of central casting.

As if she heard his thoughts, she murmured into his chest, “I’m not what you think I am.”

He didn’t know how to reply, so he said nothing. As they approached the car, he did the calculus in his head. He needed this relationship. She was the only tenuous thread of a connection he had managed to grasp in over six months working this scene. The easy thing would be to give her what she was asking for, but he knew, as fun as that might be, there could only be one of two possible outcomes: she would want him to keep doing it, or she would never talk to him again—at least that was his small-town framing. It would not be the first or the last time this binary system failed him.

“How about I drive you home?” he asked when they reached the driver-side door and she began digging for the keys in her purse.

The car chirped and the taillights blinked. She turned to face him. “How about we fuck in the car until I’m sober instead?”

When he didn’t respond right away, she bit her bottom lip, tilted her head back, and nodded deliberately. “I see, you’re playing the long game. You’re imagining you take the tipsy Duchess home and tuck her chastely into bed and, as a reward, she will give you the keys to the kingdom in the morning.”

In response, all he could manage was a smile. He was smart enough to know when he had been outmaneuvered.

She leaned forward. In heels, she was his height. She gave him a lingering, sloppy kiss, and before his body could even respond, she pushed him firmly away before popping open the door to the car and getting in. She closed the door and started the engine but didn’t pull away. She had her back to him and was doing something.

After a minute, she rolled down the window and extended two slender fingers, clasping a small white card as though he were a valet and this was his tip.

“Call me tomorrow and we’ll arrange to meet and talk spectacles.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in business cards,” he said, taking it from her.

“Did I say that?”

Before he could answer, she peeled out of the parking lot with the precision and facility of a Formula One driver, the opening chords of an old Pat Benatar song blaring through the open window.

He looked down at the 3 x 2 card and turned toward the streetlight so he could read it. In a typeface so small he had to squint, it read:

There were no contact details printed anywhere on the card. On the back, in red ink, she had scrawled a seven-digit phone number in a hand so large and expressive the card barely contained it.

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I like a project. Always have. If there’s an engine that drives me, it’s making things, fixing things, solving problems. This obsession has financed my life and put two kids through college.

What’s kept it on the rails is the sober reality that making things is hard. It takes time and dedication. You can’t produce an album overnight. You can’t write a novel in a day. You can’t build software in a week.

Except now you can, thanks to AI.

It sucks. It’s brilliant. It will save us. It will destroy everything we love.

Before you dig into your trench or throw up in your mouth, hear me out. I’m not selling anything. If anything, I’m asking questions I can’t answer, and they’ve been plowing the topsoil off my sleep for weeks.

Some quick background so you understand your narrator. I have a music degree. I was a “professional” musician for a few years before I became a father and had to earn a real paycheck. I taught myself how to design and build websites, then program software, then manage teams to build software, then make PowerPoints full of buzzwords and charts showing other people how to teach their people how to build software. It’s all a little silly, but I’ve earned a living.

At 40, I started writing novels and quickly found that, of all the things I’ve created in my life, writing a novel is the most satisfying. You can read more about those books in a post from last year or check out Daedalia, my current serial novel in progress.

Given my day job, it’s easy to understand why I’ve kept a curious eye on AI as it has developed over the past five years. For 20 years before that, we used AI all the time, but we called it “automation.” It did large, boring tasks like moving files from one server to another overnight or recursing through thousands of documents to check for errors so some poor schmo wouldn’t have to wake up at two in the morning. I programmed jobs like this.

When I gave AI a starring role in The Memory of My Shadow, a novel I wrote in 2018 before the magic trick of large language models became public, I was comfortable knowing my subject was science fiction. When I began tinkering with the first release of ChatGPT in November 2022, I understood that the gap between my book and reality was closing fast. I introduced this alien technology, like a toddler with a paint sprayer, to unsuspecting friends and colleagues. It was fun. Silly memes.

Then it started taking away careers.

I never had the desire to have AI write for me. I love writing. Why the hell would I do that? Have it do my laundry, as someone famously said a couple of years back. I avoided AI-generated music for the longest time because I didn’t want to see what it could do. It was too close to home. My first love.

After hearing respected musician and YouTuber Rick Beato share his explorations, disbelief, and dismay about how well AI can execute music, I looked into it. He was right. It’s incredibly good. It’s an incredible mimic. If you have a Spotify account, you’ve probably already fallen for some of it in your “Breezy Sunday Morning Chill with a Latte” playlist. It’s not enough that Spotify pays musicians a fraction of a cent per stream. Now they want to pay them nothing.

There are garbage mills run by slop lords who paid for a weekend seminar to “get rich with AI,” churning out thousands of greasy tomes of word salad packaged as novels and flooding Amazon. Some are even published with ChatGPT conversations still in the text.

None of this is happy news, and I won’t get into the economic and climate repercussions. We can doom spiral quickly, and that’s not why I’m writing this. I want to give you a peek into another wing of the AI haunted mansion. It’s not as sexy as robot bodice-rippers, but it is changing everything overnight.

Music, art, and writing require a beating heart. Software does not.

“Vibe coding” is such a douchy term. The name alone was enough for me to ignore it the first few times it popped up on my radar. But then, at my day job, I was asked to rapidly develop prototypes to test some concepts, so I checked out Claude Code.

Holy shit.

In an afternoon, I was hooked.

But let’s back up. What is vibe coding? It’s a way of generating software using AI. It’s driven by natural language prompts, translating English into Python or C++. But there’s more to it than that. We’ll get there.

I never loved writing code, but it was the only way to build the software that solved the problem that earned the paycheck. Just as there probably aren’t many working carpenters who lament the invention of the nail gun, I don’t suspect most programmers will yearn for the days of writing seven-hundred-line subroutines. The majority of programmers I know have embraced automating code authoring and will never look back.

Why? Because it does a remarkable job in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, and it’s fast. Not “a couple of hours” fast. I mean done-before-I-finish-stirring-sugar-into-my-tea fast. And why wouldn’t it be? Unlike art, which is highly subjective, software either works or it doesn’t. It either solves the problem efficiently or it doesn’t get used. LLMs can write software because they’re fluent in its language and have four decades of training material to draw from.

Most days, I have three laptops open: one for my company, one issued by the client I’m working for, and my personal one. I have Claude Code running on one, ChatGPT Codex on another, and Figma Make on the third. I type a few instructions into each, and they generate, improve, or fix features in some new software I’m “writing.”

What I’m really doing is drafting a specification. The LLM generates a plan, I review and adjust it, and then it executes in 20 minutes what might take a team a day. When the LLM produces something I don’t understand, I take screenshots and paste the error into another LLM, which almost always gives me not only the solution but an exact prompt I can paste back into the first one to fix the issue.

If I start three new projects in the morning, it’s entirely reasonable to expect to have three functional MVPs by the end of the day.

That is insane.

Is the software perfect? No. Could it be improved? Absolutely. Does it take a long time to improve? No, but programmers, better than any other profession, understand the power of iteration.

The first experimental app I built was a memory app for elderly folks. I wanted a very simple mobile app my parents could use to push one button and record or retrieve small bits of information like passwords or birthdays. It took two days to build a prototype, but most of that time was spent navigating Apple’s publishing requirements. Astonishingly, the app works as designed. I have no idea if it’s actually useful. That’s a different problem.

A week later, I built a teleprompter app that lets you read a scrolling script on your phone while recording a selfie video. Similar apps range from a few dollars to monthly subscriptions in the App Store. I built a beautifully functional version in a single afternoon of well-written prompts.

My current personal project is more ambitious. I’m building an editorial assistant that allows a novelist to “talk” with their book and ask questions about events and characters. I hope to enable thoughtful conversations about plot, arc, and theme, though that’s more ambitious and prone to hallucinations. Those hallucinations might even be helpful when you’re stuck and need a wildly ungrounded perspective. Eventually, I may open it to a few writer friends in a closed beta to see if anyone finds it useful.

So what’s eating my brain?

It’s addictive. It’s crack cocaine for someone who loves a project, has hundreds of ideas, and gets a massive dopamine hit from solving a problem. I’m astonished at how quickly I’ve adapted to this workflow in just a few weeks. You issue instructions, it builds something cool, you test it, then refine it. You do this all day, swiveling between computers and projects, and soon your brain doesn’t know how to turn it off. Last night I barely slept because my brain wouldn’t stop generating prompts.

Some of this is probably the contact high of any new technology. But it feels bigger than that because millions of other people are having the same experience.

It’s taken me 56 years to master my quirky operating system. I’ve never been tested, but I suspect I have some mild form of dyslexia. I’m a slow reader. I’m bad with numbers. I have to be methodical and persistent to get good results. I’ve achieved a lot with that faulty system, and none of it would have been possible without thousands of hours of trudging, making mistakes, and starting over.

There is no bridge of sorrows where ideas fall off before reaching the other side. I can’t help but wonder what this will do to my operating system, what it’s already doing, and what it will do to the larger world when everyone is doing what I’m doing right now.

It’s become cliché to compare the AI age to electricity or the industrial revolution, but this feels different. It’s conceivable that a 20-year-old carpenter on a job site has never had to swing a hammer to frame a wall, though she could probably figure it out quickly. Ten years from now, will a 20-year-old knowledge worker know how to think critically, defend an argument, or create something entirely from their own brain?

Forget the economy for a moment. What will humans do with our brains when nearly every hard thing can be delegated? What shape will our children’s brains take under the tutelage of AI? What will their work look like?

I wish I had answers. I don’t. I’m still trying to understand how this new magic is working on me.

I don’t feel the same as I did six months ago.

Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 15–20 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

In a late-life interview, Kelly reflected on her early years, describing the force she called Ona and the complicated way she experienced her art. She admitted she ran from the first major sale, unable to reconcile survival, money, and the feeling that her work never fully belonged to her.

For a few days, Kelly mourned the loss of the pieces Lefty sold. She would never be as attached to any of the art she made as she was to that first collection. You’ll make more, Lefty probably told her over and over again, but he didn’t know if that was true. What did he know about any of it?

The fact that complete strangers were willing to buy her work gave Kelly a confidence she had never possessed before, and within a week she was drawing again. Anytime the particulars of how he managed to sell the pieces came up, Lefty deflected, saying the work was so undeniably good that it sold itself. At the time, he feared the truth might crush her and she would stop working. I suspect he also feared how she might react. Her moods were mercurial under normal circumstances, and he had witnessed the explosive results when she felt cornered. While they would become two functioning parts of a superhuman whole, I try to remember how little they understood about each other in those early days.

Three months after the big sale, Kelly had completed enough pieces to warrant Lefty securing a stall at another regional arts festival. It would be the last time her work was shown in this kind of amateur setting. It would also be the last time her work was attributed to K.A. Mudd.

The street fair in Santa Barbara ran over a gorgeous weekend in the middle of September. Lefty got them a motel room so they could stay over Saturday night, and it was in that room, after a day when not a single piece had sold, that he finally came clean.

“Come on, you need to eat something,” he said, pushing the Styrofoam container of congealed enchiladas and rice toward her.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“Suit yourself. The food’s pretty good, though. Authentic. You should try some of this tamale.”

He was always selling. Kelly had come to understand it was his natural state, so she must have been perplexed when he spent the entire day reading quietly in the back corner of the booth while she struggled to answer even the most basic questions from the few people who stopped to look. As she poked at the cold Mexican food with a plastic fork, she must have been weighing his value. That’s the only explanation for how she responded to what he said next.

“Look, Kel. I’ve gotta say something, and you’re not gonna like it. But it’s the truth, and you should know. I sold all those pieces in Santa Monica because I pretended I was you.”

He winced and leaned back in his chair like a man expecting a blow.

“I figured,” she said without looking up.

“What?”

“I figured that’s what happened. It’s not a big deal.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I told you I released them, right? Well, I guess that was part of the deal I made.”

“What do you mean, deal with who?”

“It doesn’t matter, man. What matters is my work sold. People thought it was good, and we got some cash.”

“How long were you going to let me twist in the wind on this hook?”

“I don’t know. Can we get over this now?”

“What do you mean? Why aren’t you pissed?”

“I know you were only trying to help. And you did. If you hadn’t, it would have been just like it was today. Fucking misery.”

“But it can’t work like this. I mean, you’re the artist. You do the work and you should get the credit. I’m just a goddamned carnival barker. You’re the real deal.”

Kelly later wrote about this moment, about how what Lefty said forever changed the way she saw him. Before this, he had been a means — a ride to someplace, any place better than where she was. After, she saw him as a man she could trust and love deeply, though he wouldn’t know this for quite some time.

Later that night, after they turned off the television, they lay on their backs in different beds with the same scratchy sheets, watching the headlights of passing cars wheel across the ceiling. When Kelly spoke, her voice was little more than a whisper, the kind of thing you might risk saying if you thought there was a chance the person next to you might be sleeping.

“I get that it’s weird for you, pretending, but maybe there’s another way, you know? A way you wouldn’t have to pretend to be me. You could be yourself and do what you’re so good at.”

“Selling stereos?” he said.

“Don’t be a dick. What if the artist was somebody else — some mysterious figure we created, like how writers use pen names? I make the art. You sell the art, and this character no one will ever get to meet takes the credit.”

He was quiet. She imagined him turning it over in his mind, looking for the flaws. She rolled over and faced his direction in the darkness. She could see the silhouette of his long body, his feet poking out from under the covers at the foot of the bed.

“Maybe it could work,” he said. “But honestly, I don’t understand why you’re so willing to give up on yourself. You deserve to be recognized for your talent. If I could do what you could do…”

“But you can’t. Any more than I can do what you can do. It doesn’t work like that. Don’t you see? I don’t know why, but I know this. It won’t work if it’s me. It’s not part of the deal.”

“What’s this deal you keep talking about?”

“Never mind. I just know. Maybe this is the only way it works for me… for us.”

After saying this, heat rushed into her face. She wanted to say something crass, something smartass to smear this last bit, but her mouth went dry and her throat closed up. He rolled over to face her.

“I don’t know, Kelly. It’s kind of fucking crazy. It might not even be legal. Besides, how would we even do it? People are going to want to know the artist. They’ll want interviews, photographs, stories…”

“You’re hilarious.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, laughing. “I love how you can just think grandiose thoughts at the drop of a hat.”

“Yeah, my mother might have given me too much attention. But still, how would it work? How do I promote somebody who can’t do an interview?”

“Don’t you see? It’s the mystery that will make it irresistible. People eat that shit up. People don’t want to buy an artist like me, Ms. Nobody from Hicksville, U.S.A. I mean, you saw it for yourself today. Whatever it is, I don’t have it. And you do — but you won’t be me, at least not for more than a few hours. It bruises your delicate sensibilities. You’ve been Mr. Mopey-pants for weeks, harboring your secret.”

“I’m not Mr. Mopey pants. And, for the record, you’re not a nobody.”

“Whatever. You’re missing the point. I’m a good fucking artist, and we both know it. I don’t give a shit about the rest of it as long as I can keep doing my art. It’s the money that makes that possible. And you’re really good at the money part. What do you say?”

The next day, back in their stall at the festival, she watched him work his magic. With her full endorsement to reprise his role as the artist K.A. Mudd for one last time, he put on a show — as much for her as for the passing patrons.

“This one almost cost me my life,” he said toward the end of the day, before closing a deal on one of the four remaining pieces. “I hadn’t slept in two days. I’ve had these trance states before, but this one — this one was something next level. I just couldn’t let it rest until I got to the end. You see here in the corner? Yeah, lean in closer. Do you think this is the beginning or the end?”

The woman wearing glasses with bright red frames that matched her belt and dangling watermelon earrings peered into the drawing with rapt attention. “It’s the beginning, right?”

“Wow, do you know how few people can see that? It is the beginning. But do you know what? It’s not where I started the piece. I started it way over here,” he said, reaching around her body with his lanky arm to point at the uppermost corner of the drawing.

He gave Kelly an almost imperceptible wink, and she rolled her eyes.

That afternoon, on the drive home, they celebrated like bank robbers in a getaway car. They bonded in the way only two people can who share a conceit hidden from the rest of the world. Almost immediately, they set to work fashioning the eccentric, reclusive figure that would become their shared obsession.

“She’s got to be a woman. You can make up whatever crazy shit you want, but she’s got to be a woman.”

“Are you sure?” he said. “Because women really seem to love your art. If our hero is a man, there’s the added sex appeal…”

“Let’s be clear — those women were responding to your pheromones at first, but they didn’t take out their credit cards for you. You were just the bait.”

“Exactly, but it worked, so…”

“No, dude. It’s got to be a woman.”

“Okay, I can work with that. I love women. What’s her name?”

Kelly ate a French fry from the grease-stained bag, then took out another and held it in the air like a wand as she contemplated the possibilities.

“It’s clearly got to be one name. Iconic. Like Madonna, Cher, Sting…”

“Agreed. It has to sound cool.”

“And look cool. Her signature must be epic.”

For the remainder of the ride, they made a game of it. She scrawled a long list of candidates in her tiny printed style in columns on the back of one of her sketchpads. The page was later folded into her journal from that period and donated to MoMA along with the rest of her archives.

A name is a funny thing. If you’ve ever tried to name a pet, or a band, or a child, you know it’s an impossible task. You’re trying to define something that has yet to become. Once you give it a name, the first limitation — the first boundary — has been imposed. Or so you think.

If you know and love the artist’s work as I do, it’s fun to imagine some of those iconic canvases signed in the corner: Smoot. Traktor. Foofy. McFuffle. But these were all names that made it onto that list, some smudged with French fry grease. The name they eventually chose doesn’t appear anywhere here.

According to Lefty, it took them several weeks of going back and forth. They would try one on for size for a few days, then one of them would find a reason it was terrible. It’s tempting to imagine they were like giddy, anxious parents-to-be. But I don’t think that’s correct.

Kelly lost interest in the exercise. It was irrelevant to her work, so it was Lefty who came up with the name. Kelly later wrote in her journals that the name — the persona — was to be his work of genius, not hers.

Daedalia was the name he wrote on the back of a power bill and stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. She found it one morning when she went to retrieve the milk.

When Lefty walked into the kitchen after his shower, he found her sipping coffee at the table, staring at the envelope.

“It’s good, right?”

“What does it mean? Is it the name of a flower?” she asked without looking up.

“It means something complex and intricate. I believe ‘genius’ was somewhere in the definition.”

“Sounds like a Greek goddess. Kinda cool.”

“That’s actually where I got it. On my break last night, I was looking through a book on Greek mythology because I thought maybe it would spark something. Anyway, the story of Daedalus was about this guy who designed the first labyrinth. It was supposed to trap a minotaur.”

She traced the letters with her index finger. A smile played on her lips that pleased him.

“So you like it,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Definitely.”

She uncapped her favorite drawing pen and leaned forward.

They had a name.

And now things could begin.

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Daedalia is a serialized novel, with a new chapter released every Monday morning. The story is designed to unfold slowly, the days in between, a space for it to settle into your imagination. Each chapter is a 15–20 minute read/listen. Check out the Table of Contents if you want to jump to a specific chapter. Want something to binge while you wait? Three novels, complete with audio narration are ready for you to dive in.

Previously…

Lefty pushed Kelly to make a plan for her life, and the conversation exposed how frightened and stuck they both were. When he came home expecting her to be gone, he instead saw her work assembled for the first time and finally understood its power. A single sale at a Venice art festival sealed an unspoken pact between them.

The following transcript is an excerpt from an interview with Kelly Mudd, recorded on January 8, 2033, at her home in Black Mountain, North Carolina, six months prior to her death.

MM: Do you ever wish people knew the truth, that you were the actual artist behind the work?

KM: I’m not sure anymore. Ask me again tomorrow.

MM: So you’re saying you don’t regret it today.

KM: No. I’m saying I’m not sure. I never really wanted to be famous or to be recognized. Not really.

MM: Why not?

KM: People are a lot of work. Even if you’re not famous, you still have to interact with your family or friends or co-workers. That’s a lot. I can’t imagine having to be responsible for maintaining some kind of relationship with thousands of strangers. Leave me be and let me do my thing. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

MM: But you may feel differently tomorrow?

KM: Possibly. Who knows? I’ve always felt differently.

MM: How do you mean?

KM: I don’t feel things the way other people do. I never have. My feelings change abruptly, unpredictably. I don’t think it’s that way for most people. At least it doesn’t seem that way to me.

MM: Can you give me an example?

KM: Mmm. I’m not sure if I can just conjure one up. Ask me about a specific time in my life and maybe I can think of one.

MM: Okay. How about when you were young, when you were just starting out in California?

KM: Oh, I was all feelings back then. I miss having feelings that big, that all-consuming. That’s the thing about getting older. It’s quieter. Less to get upset about. But I kind of miss getting upset in the way I did when I was twenty.

MM: Can you tell me a story from that time?

KM: Let’s see… Well, in the beginning I struggled with knowing how to be in the world because my world was so different. I didn’t understand that people couldn’t see and experience what I did, so I came off crazy much of the time.

MM: You mean mentally ill, like sick or do you mean eccentric?

KM: In those days, there wasn’t much of a distinction between the two. I acted out, I ran away. I was trying to figure out my own operating system. You see, my connection to my art, the way I’ve always made it… it’s not me exactly. It’s a force, an energy that works through me, that I follow. I know, I know, that sounds really woo-woo or whatever, especially these days. But I don’t know another way to say it and, frankly, I’m old and at a point where I don’t care anymore what other people think so much.

MM: I can’t tell if you’re being literal or not about this force you’re referring to.

KM: Oh yes. Very literal. She had a name — Ona.

MM: Okay, that’s… weird. You said she had a name. Is she no longer there?

KM: She’s here, I guess, and her name is just my label for her. She’s not even a she. Why do you suppose us humans are so fucking beholden to naming and categorizing every single thing? Why must we pin everything down?

MM: I don’t know. It makes it easier to talk about, maybe?

KM: I suppose that’s true. Sorry, I got sidetracked. What was I saying?

MM: You were going to tell a story about your big feelings in your twenties.

KM: Yes. It’s hard to remember just one. (laughs) I had a lot of big feelings about selling those first few pieces. They were part of me, like my children. They were evidence that I was good at something. But they were also a connection to something deeper. Call it wisdom or magic or whatever you like but I was being shown things– Ona was opening doors for me to worlds a twenty-year-old girl had no business knowing. It was a gift in the truest sense of the word.

So when Lefty came along and saw these drawings as something else, as a means — well, I didn’t know what to do with that. I needed money. God knows he had been taking care of me for almost a year because I didn’t know how to do anything. I just wanted to draw. Once the pieces were done, they were like my children in a way. How could I just give them up or, worse, take money for them? But that’s what Lefty wanted me to do. He said I had to if I was going to survive.

MM: So you never thought about how you might sell your art, use it to make a living, before Lefty came along?

KM: Oh sure, I did. I saved up for a whole year to print this dumb little zine. I took my box of them to California. I was going to be a star. At the time I thought I was so original. That was the one time I tried. I knew I didn’t have that muscle or gear or whatever it is that Lefty has.

MM: Do you regret that? Sometimes when you talk about him, you sound… well, like maybe you resent him.

KM: No. Never. At least not then. Don’t ever let him hear me say this, but he saved me. He did. He was no saint, Lord knows, but he saw something in me before anyone else did. That first time he sold all those pieces…

MM: Which ones do you mean?

KM: It was the Echo Lake series. There must have been thirty or so. I was just beginning to understand what I was doing.

MM: Oh, right. I came across an article the other day about those. They’re in Saudi Arabia now. All but two. Did they sell at a small gallery or something?

KM: Oh hell no. It was one of those little street festivals. I think it was Venice or maybe Santa Monica. I can’t remember exactly, but I do remember sitting there with Lefty in that cramped little tent with all those pieces staring at me and strangers walking by like they didn’t even see them.

I’m not sure if I was more upset about them being ignored or at the prospect of someone taking them away from me. Either way, Lefty was oblivious. He just kept pushing. I tried to cancel, to tell him I was sick that morning, but he wouldn’t give in. He’d already paid for the space. He paid for everything in those days with money he didn’t have.

So I went, and we sat there for hours, not talking, as people walked by. I remember a girl stopping in front of one of the frames and just staring at it for the longest time. It’s like I could see her, like I was inside the drawing with Ona and I could see her looking in. I could feel what she was feeling — her fear, her shame, her self-hatred. Her yearning was so strong. It brought tears to my eyes.

I remember clenching my fists so tight. I wanted to get up and give the piece to her, to just shove it in her hands and tell her to take it. Meanwhile, I could feel Lefty’s eyes boring into me, imploring me to be the show pony, to hop up and dance, to try to get this girl who couldn’t afford to buy a damned hotdog to buy this piece of art for three hundred bucks.

MM: So what did you do? Did you give it to her?

KM: No. I ran away. I just ran.

MM: Where did you go?

KM: I walked until I got lost. I ended up in this not-great part of town. It wasn’t like under a bridge or anything like that, but I did get mixed up with some people I shouldn’t have. I was so young, really just a country mouse. I’d never done drugs or really drank much. But I wanted to escape that feeling I had that I didn’t know how to deal with.

I’m not even sure what it was those guys gave me. Looking back, it was probably ecstasy. But I floated for a while. It’s hard to explain what drugs do to someone with a brain like mine. I think most people use them to get to a place where I live most of the time.

MM: So what happened?

KM: I ended up without my shirt in some nice old lady’s front yard.

MM: Was Lefty mad?

KM: I suppose he was, but he was also pretty damned proud of himself. He had sold almost all of that series in my absence and we finally had a little bit of money, which we badly needed.

MM: Did you ever tell him why you ran away, why it hurt you to sell your work?

KM: Not for many years. He would never have understood back then.

MM: While we were talking, I looked up the value of those pieces from that series. The Saudi guy’s collection is estimated at thirty million dollars. How does that make you feel?

KM: Tired. Sad. Proud, a little too, I guess. But mostly tired.

MM: I’m sorry. You need to rest.

KM: It’s okay. I like talking with you this way.

MM: Can I ask one more question?

KM: Sure.

MM: Do you ever think about those pieces, or really any of your work that’s been sold over the years?

KM: I do think of them sometimes. If I close my eyes, I can see them all. I know where they are and what they’ve seen. You don’t believe me. That’s okay.

MM: No, no, just trying to understand. So you’re saying however many pieces you’ve created over the last forty years, you can see them all — or like see through them, like they’re windows or something?

KM: That’s a great way to put it. It’s just like that and nothing like that at all.

MM: I want to understand.

KM: I want you to understand.

MM: I’ll let you rest now.

KM: Okay. But would you stay with me for a while until I fall asleep?

MM: Yes, of course. Can I get you some more water or anything?

KM: You think I’m a crazy old woman, don’t you?

MM: Why would you say that?

KM: Because it’s true, mostly. But I’ve been crazy most of my life.

MM: Or maybe it’s the rest of the world that’s crazy. Can I share a theory?

KM: Okay.

MM: You never really were the artist. I mean, you made the art, but you never really saw yourself as the owner of it, and that’s why it wasn’t hard for you to just let someone else take the credit.

KM: I was rewarded handsomely. I’ve had a good life. A better life than I could have ever imagined for myself when I started out.

MM: I’ll get your water. Can we talk again tomorrow?

KM: Yes. I’d like that, I think.

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