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.
They met on a movie set in July, 1987. They weren’t actors. They weren’t even supposed to be there, but when Hollywood shows up in a small mountain town to shoot a major motion picture, most people find a part to play.
They each have their own version of the story they’ve told over the years about their first encounter, and their versions are wildly different, which is not surprising in the least if you know them. I could recount both in this book, but there’s so much more I want to get to. Besides, the truth is always somewhere in between, so I will tell that version. I’m an expert at the in-between.
Kelly Ann Mudd was like a feral fox at sixteen, skittish and wily—a survivor. She mostly tried to be invisible, and when that wasn’t possible, she was fierce, all teeth and claws. She spent all her waking hours out of the house. It was safer that way. She never once talked about the abuse, never acknowledged that it happened, and never went to therapy, but it’s the best explanation for her shape-shifting soul and for everything that comes later in this story.
Kelly hid in her notebooks. Most people only ever saw the top of her head—her raven-black hair, cut blunt like a boy’s, bangs brushing the frames of her thick glasses, a pair of headphones clamped over her ears. She wore enormous sweatshirts that allowed her to retract her legs inside like a hermit crab. She would sit that way and sketch in her notebook for hours with a fine-point black pen, making spidery lines upon lines that filled one page and spilled over onto the next.
This is not at all the version of Kelly that Lefty saw that day at the falls on Wilson’s Creek, where the crew was filming the fourth day in what was to be a three-day shoot to capture some pivotal scenes in the movie. A camp of Cherokee Indians are enjoying the peak days of summer fishing before a group of U.S. soldiers come upon them and violence ensues. Apparently, the director was pissed because he couldn’t get the shots he wanted. He needed more Indians in the background, splashing in the creek, cleaning fish, and cooking over open fires. That’s how Kelly was recruited, scooped up by a couple of persuasive women with clipboards while she was encamped at her favorite spot on the saggy sofa by the window in BeansTalk. They offered her $200 for the day and, shockingly, doubled it after she persistently declined. She accepted only because she figured the money would allow her to buy some proper ink pens and paper—a decided upgrade over the ruled composition notebooks and Bic ballpoints she was used to.
Lefty had not been recruited or invited. He had turned up, like other locals, looking for his break, his chance to impress someone from the crew with his knowledge of the place or maybe his winning smile. He heard Kelly before he ever laid eyes on her. The sounds she produced were something between a screech owl and a bobcat, if such creatures could form the words: “GET YOUR MOTHERFUCKING HANDS OFF ME, MOTHERFUCKER! DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!”
The motherfucker in question was one of the assistants in wardrobe who thought it expedient to just strip off Kelly’s sweatshirt like he was skinning a cat so makeup could get to work on the spray tan required to make her into a convincing Indian. What the assistant didn’t know, any more than the women with clipboards didn’t know, was that Kelly was not a boy. Not that this should have mattered, but those were different times—the dark ages before intimacy coordinators and consent. At this point in the telling of the story, depending on the narrator, the severity of the injuries that assistant sustained from Lefty’s intervention range from some light bruising to a broken fuckin’ arm. Both Kelly’s and Lefty’s versions align on the facts around them being promptly ejected from the set and Kelly never receiving a penny of the $400 she was promised.
In Lefty’s tiny Toyota pickup truck with the rusted-out quarter panels, they rode in charged silence as the spent shocks of the wheezing automobile bumped along the gravel forestry road that meandered in the vague direction of town.
“I didn’t need your help,” she said, breaking the silence.
“No, I guess not. Who knew you were a girl? That guy sure didn’t.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Yeah, probably. But I’m the asshole driving you home. Which is… where?”
“Just drop me at the coffee shop.”
“Okay. I’m Lefty, by the way. Not that you were asking.”
He offered his hand, and she didn’t appear to notice. Her face was hidden behind the black-and-white confetti cover of the composition notebook, her pen moving in tight spirals across the page.
“You writing the great American novel or something?” he asked.
“Why did you do that back there?” she asked without looking up.
“I don’t know. Poor impulse control? You sounded scared.”
“I wasn’t scared. I was pissed off.”
“Okay.”
“How old are you anyway, and what were you even doing there?”
“Why does it matter how old I am?”
“Is it a secret or something?”
“Thirty. I’m thirty fuckin’ years old.”
“Whoa,” she said, almost inaudibly.
“I’m in between jobs, and I was hoping maybe I could land something. These movie people have money falling out of their asses.”
The conversation didn’t go beyond that. When he parked on the street in front of BeansTalk, before she could get out of his truck, Lefty had asked to see what she was drawing. For reasons Kelly never explained in any of her retellings of the story, she allowed him to look at her notebook. Maybe she thought he would give it a passing glance and toss it back, but that’s not what happened. He started at the beginning and studied each page, poring over every drawing before moving to the next. They sat double-parked for almost an hour while he looked at the manic sketches and scribbling she had never shared with anyone before. She studied his face, searching for his angle, waiting for him to say something creepy. When he finally closed the journal and looked up, there were tears in his eyes. He handed it back to her and nodded without saying anything.
She felt something shift inside her and loosen, like the feeling of the first baby tooth twisting in the gums before it’s ready to come out. She held his gaze for what might have been a second or five minutes before taking her notebook from him, opening the door, and stepping out of the truck. He didn’t linger but drove away as soon as she slammed the door.
That night, lying on top of the covers in the twin bed in his childhood bedroom, he wouldn’t sleep much, but when he did, he dreamed he was inside the labyrinthine geometry on the pages of the girl’s notebook, wandering in infinite spirals and switchbacks. By morning, when his mother made her fourth passive-aggressive slam of the linen closet door outside his room, he wouldn’t remember anything about his dreams or the notebook. The images would fade, but not in the way dreams do. They would fade as scars disappear, absorbed and assimilated.
Lefty was still adjusting to being a disappointment and a failure. As a white boy from an upper-middle-class family, beloved by a mother who cut the crusts off the sandwiches in his packed lunches until he went to high school and a father who played catch with him every evening after he got home from work, Lefty had no right, no business returning home not as the prodigal son but the burned-out fuck-up. Everything had come easy until the easy lost its meaning and his mind began to drift. It had been a solid decision to drop out of college his sophomore year when a scout for the Carolina Mudcats took a keen interest in his fastball. It seemed a natural progression. He would do a small bid in the minors and then step up to the mound for the Pirates. He would be the product of all that love, time, and attention his parents and the community of their little town had invested.
But a small bid turned into seven years. Seven years of nonstop traveling from one hayseed baseball park to another, throwing his arm out, and then drinking the disappointment away in cheap motels, sometimes in the company of a hairdresser or kindergarten teacher, but more often by himself. In the seventh year, he mustered the last of his childhood ambition and managed to pitch three no-hitters, which got him a shot to step up. He spent two nights in Pittsburgh. The pitching coach had watched him throw for an afternoon in the bullpen, made a few notes, and Lefty never saw him again. That was it. That was as close as he got. After that, he drank more than he pitched for the Mudcats, and eventually they gave him the closure he was looking for.
He lived with a kind-hearted woman for a year in Fayetteville, where he found a job at a car dealership, but he wasn’t able to hold on to either the relationship or the job. Lefty’s recounting of this part of his life is uncharacteristically understated, but the key to being good at sales and promotion is knowing how to diminish the bad and accentuate the good. Charles “Lefty” Moody was a preternaturally good salesman. I think this will become clear as their story unfolds, but that story doesn’t really begin for another five years. During that time, Lefty’s life will feel like a series of seemingly meaningless choices on a circuitous route of frenzied spiraling turns and long straightaways of quiet desperation, only to end abruptly with no choice but to double back along the same route but a different path.
He will work alongside his father, selling insurance for a short spell. He will take on managing a local band and discover he has a talent for spotting talent and opening doors, only to have his heart broken two years later on the eve of the band’s big break when they fire him in a Denny’s parking lot. He will live on a commune in upstate New York for the better part of a year after falling in love with a woman who raises goats and writes poetry. She too will break his heart, announcing one morning that his restless energy and dark aura are disruptive to the animals and to her and that he must leave.
In all this time, he never once thought of the girl-boy with the sketchbook and the foul mouth. He wouldn’t understand until many years later that he was wandering through a maze of her invention. Neither of them would. But there’s no other explanation for how their paths intersected again in 1992 in San Diego, in a hotel elevator crammed with Storm Troopers.
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.
Damn!!!! Hooked in the first chapter! I love how your narrator isn’t shy about his role as the storyteller, explicitly telling us about “the story”, feels casual like someone recounting it around a dinner table. The hook sunk in deep with the loosening tooth metaphor and then secured itself when Lefty scar-dreamed Kelly’s maze. So freaking smart.
Exciting start! Two characters I already care about. And this sentence is what grabbed me most of all: “He wouldn’t understand until many years later that he was wandering through a maze of her invention.” What could it mean?!