An Arrangement, with a Couch

Daedalia: Chapter 3

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…

At Comic-Con, Kelly tried to put her work into the world and watched it fall flat. When she ran out of places to go, Lefty offered her one without asking for anything in return. This time, she stayed.

From what I can piece together of their early years, there was no formal agreement between them, no point at which they consciously chose to orbit one another, but that’s exactly the way I see their relationship.

I realize that makes no sense. Two bodies can’t orbit one another. One must have more mass and be at the center. But it’s fair to say they were both still unformed people and growing at different rates, so they might have taken turns surrendering to the other’s gravitational force, at least until the thing they made together became the planet they would both orbit.

After that day at Comic-Con, Kelly never went back home to North Carolina. Lefty had little to offer beyond a couch in his dank studio apartment in Echo Park, but it was a lifeline for her. I imagine every week for the first few months she probably talked about her plan to secure a job and find her own place. But that never happened. Such basic things were a Rubik’s Cube to her, so she tried to take up as little space as possible. She was up early every morning, the scratchy sheets and blanket she slept in neatly folded and stacked on the pillow at the end of the couch while Lefty was still snoring behind the cheap rice-paper shoji screen that served as a bedroom door, minus the actual privacy or noise-canceling attributes.

Just as she had at home as a kid, Kelly spent most of her days outside. Her favorite spot was under a jacaranda tree in the park by the lake, where she would sit in the violet-tinted shade of its blossoming boughs with a sketch pad and a couple of ink pens for hours, drawing. She always started by sketching something she saw—a duck rooting in the grass by the water’s edge, an old Chinese man doing tai chi, or a broken bicycle abandoned on the sidewalk. But the images always evolved beneath her hand into an otherworldly dimension with a near-impenetrable latticework of passages bending around and back upon themselves—a maze. In these trances, hours would pass, her hand cramping so hard the tendons in her wrist were on fire, and she wouldn’t realize it until she finally stopped and capped the pen.

She would rise, stiff and light-headed, close the sketch pad, and massage her wrist. She was hungry all the time. I imagine she lived on air mostly. In the few pictures salvaged and archived from this time period, the only recognizable feature of the woman she would become is her enormous dark eyes, which were that much larger set in a face so thin and so pale it was almost translucent. She survived on the kindness of strangers. The immigrant women—some of them nannies who brought their children to the park to play—began to bring her food. It was always homemade. The empanadas and tamales, pork dumplings and rice balls, were an exotic discovery for Kelly, who had grown up on Hamburger Helper, tuna casseroles, and McDonald’s.

Some days, when she was deep into a drawing, her stomach would begin to growl and, in sympathy, her pen would respond, sketching a path through a stand of bamboo by a koi pond filled with swirling goldfish, head to tail, one consuming the other, the scales of their muscular bodies wrought in such painstaking detail. Her pen would continue on to the corner of the page, where it left a narrow but open corridor—an invitation waiting for some kind soul to accept and step in with a pair of fish tacos, the homemade tortillas still warm.

I can’t imagine her thanking these women profusely or striking up animated conversations about the weather or the price of eggs. That kind of behavior was as foreign to her as English was to most of them. But I can imagine her gratitude. I can see her tearing one of the drawings from her pad and giving it away, or maybe even teaching a shy child how to draw a kitten face on a greasy napkin.

Because Lefty worked most evenings, their lives might intersect for only fifteen minutes or an hour or two at most. His work was always a hustle of some kind. He sold stereos part-time in a big electronics chain store, and he worked at a couple of clubs around Los Angeles promoting shows or even selling merch for larger touring bands. On rare occasions, he would convince her to come out to a show if he thought she might like the vibe. He was forever trying to decode her and was often spectacularly wrong about her tastes.

I can’t imagine what she thought of him, this tall, lanky, all-American-looking guy who made friends as effortlessly as he found new, wildly different sexual partners. He had no type, or so it seemed to her. He was just hungry all the time. He never brought them home at night or made her uncomfortable, but on many afternoons she could smell cloying perfume and the musky, jungle scent that lingered beneath it.

When she surprised him right after one of these trysts, his face would be flushed. It might have been from the sex. It could have been embarrassment, or some combination of both, but he wouldn’t meet her eye. She wanted to tell him it didn’t bother her, that she didn’t judge him, but that wasn’t her way. So they bumbled through these awkward intersections until he realized she could care less, and then he was himself again—charming, teasing, inquisitive about her day, what she was drawing.

“You should come tonight,” he said, plopping down on the sofa with a steaming cup of ramen in his hands.

“I don’t know, man.”

“Sure you do. You might get inspired. These guys are dark, heavy—like you like.”

“I didn’t not like the last band.”

“Come on, you hated them. I get it, the girl lead singer was a little much. But I’ve got you dialed in now. I can get you in for free, might even be able to comp a couple of drinks too, depending on how the merch does.”

“Who’s this dark, heavy band?”

“Tool.”

“Tool? Are they ironic, or are they actual tools?”

“You be the judge. I’ve never met them before, but there’s a ton of buzz.”

“Oooh, buzz. Now you’ve got me all excited.”

“If you were any more sarcastic, you might pull something.”

That night she did decide to go, and it did make an impression on her, but it wasn’t the main act or even the opening act that really surprised her, though she did like their moody, brooding set and ended up developing a casual friendship with the shy drummer. They bonded over a nerdy love for Brian Froud, the illustrator behind The Dark Crystal.

What enthralled her was the way Lefty worked the room that night. She was filled with a confusing stir of longing and intrigue with a hint of disgust. He talked to the fans who approached the table, whether they were hostile teenaged boys or rough biker chicks well into middle age, with a level of interest, meeting them where they were with exactly what was required to sell an overpriced T-shirt. She perched on a bar stool in the back corner of the club, watching him, occasionally putting her small sketch pad down long enough to take a sip from her watered-down rum and Coke. She realized he made them feel the way he made her feel, and that cheapened it somehow.

They didn’t get into his old Corolla to head home until after two a.m. She felt drunk, more from the exhaustion of people and the chest-crushing bass of the music than the drinks. They were mostly quiet as they rolled south on Sunset Boulevard, passing a garbage truck and then a mint-condition Cadillac convertible from a bygone era of Hollywood, packed with rich kids hooting and shouting like they were auditioning for a movie about rich kids from L.A. that was a little too on the nose. He asked if she wanted to stop at In-N-Out for some food. She said no.

Back in the apartment, he used the bathroom first, urinating thunderously into the toilet before brushing his teeth. She drank a tall glass of water standing by the kitchen sink while she waited. The sound of the faucet dripping into a cereal bowl was the loneliest sound in the world. It was as relentless as it was empty. She thought of the conversation with the drummer. He was sweet, but there was something missing in their connection. She understood it was her.

When Lefty emerged, shirtless, he mumbled “all yours” before disappearing behind the screen. She heard the rustle and swish of his jeans coming off and the creak of the bedsprings before she went into the bathroom. A few minutes later, when she came out, the apartment was dark except for the streetlight coming in through the window above the sink.

She made up the couch, shucked off her clothes, leaving them in a pile on the floor, and pulled on the oversized T-shirt she kept folded under the middle couch cushion. She lay down and pulled the covers over her. Outside, somewhere far away, there was a siren that was hard to distinguish from the whistling in her ears. When he spoke, it was so soft she thought it was her imagination.

“Goodnight, Kel. Glad you came.”

“What?”

“I said I’m glad you came to the show.”

“Yeah, it was… fun. Goodnight.”

There was more she wanted to say. There was always more she wanted to express, her feelings like a frenzy of piranha churning just below the surface. As minutes passed in silence, her anxiety mounted and her breathing became shallow. This happened sometimes late at night. Most times she bore down until it passed and could find sleep, but that night she couldn’t.

“Hey,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. It would have been okay if he didn’t hear her, if he was already asleep, but he wasn’t.

“Yeah?”

“What am I doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why am I here? What the fuck’s the point? I’m just like… like I don’t know what I am. I don’t know how to just do things everybody else does.”

“You’re an artist. That’s who you are.”

“Why? Why can’t I just be normal and think normal things?”

“You’re asking the wrong person. I wish I could do what you do.”

“But you don’t really. Not if you knew what it was like, the way I feel all the time.”

“What way?”

“Alone.”

The bed creaked, and she imagined he was propped up on his elbow. She didn’t want him to come to her, to try to comfort her, or worse. The idea was scary, in fact. Her heart began thumping cartoonishly in the cage of her narrow chest, and she regretted saying anything. But he didn’t get up. She heard him roll over, maybe onto his back, his head turned to face her on the other side of the screen.

“You’re not alone. I’m here.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I mean, for letting me be here. I promise I’ll figure something out soon.”

“I know you will. There’s time.”

“Goodnight.”

He yawned audibly and, on the exhale, said, “Goodnight.”

She closed her eyes. Her pulse settled back into a sleepy rhythm, and she took a few deep breaths. She often talked about her dreams when I interviewed her, how they were a rich source of inspiration for her work. She once described her dreams like a dark river she tumbled into, surfacing at different times, always in a different place surrounded by a different landscape. Before she allowed herself to step into the river, she would set some type of intention, like a director giving notes to an actor in hopes of getting the desired performance.

I wonder, on this night—or one of those nights before her and Lefty did what they did, became what they became—if she planted the seeds of the hedgerows that would grow into the labyrinth they would walk. The walk that would guide him to her, that would allow her a way to move through the world unafraid. The walk that would eventually bring them to the center, where neither of them would ever figure out how to leave, even when it no longer made sense to stay.

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