The Pinch Hitter

Daedalia: Chapter 6

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 to 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 journal entries from 1987 when Kelly was just 16, she wrote about her early obsession with drawing as an escape from her abusive home life with her mother and stepfather, her attempted suicide. She also introduces the idea of Ona, the voice she hears in her head that inspires her to draw.

This is the point in the story of Kelly and Lefty that you might imagine as some kind of montage in a biopic, where we see them at a dozen art festivals with close-ups of money changing hands, Kelly hunched over a canvas late into the night working furiously, and the two of them toasting to their success amidst a crowd of beautiful people in a prestigious New York gallery at the close of a wildly successful opening.

But that’s not really how it happened. When Lefty has talked about that year and he was feeling generous, he would describe it as a year of growing pains. On other occasions, he would describe it as Kelly losing her fucking mind. He was still years away from an understanding of what he was dealing with. But he couldn’t look away.

He managed to get Kelly into more art festivals in the months that followed, but no pieces were sold. He became increasingly frustrated. He had maxed out his three credit cards. The sum of that debt has vacillated over the years, ranging anywhere from $4,000 to $25,000 depending on the telling. Regardless of the amount, it was all the money in the world to them at the time, which is either a testament to Lefty’s unwavering belief in Kelly’s art or his penchant for delusional thinking.

The pivotal story from 1993 took place in April after one of those festivals. Kelly disappeared midday after telling Lefty she was just going to go check out some of the other art. She had been sullen for days leading up to that gloomy Saturday in Santa Monica and had barely spoken to Lefty all morning. She was exhausted by all his coaching and the motivational tips he gleaned from self-help business books he skimmed over during his dinner breaks at Barnes & Noble.

When she didn’t return after an hour, Lefty thought of just packing up and leaving her to find her own way home. But one thing he could never tolerate was waste. He couldn’t just concede the day as a loss any more than he would have let the coach take him out after he walked four batters in a row in the state semifinals in high school. He threw his magazine into Kelly’s empty chair, combed his fingers through his hair, and stepped to the front of the small booth where a steady stream of people passed. He tried to make eye contact with everyone, but focused on the women. He always led with a simple greeting and the flash of a smile. If they responded, he would follow up with a curious squint and a tilt of the head, as though he recognized them from somewhere. Often, this was enough to make them slow just a beat, just enough for him to step forward and say, “Can I show you something really cool?”

His magnetism is legendary now, but in those early days, I imagine there was a rawness to it, a greenness that was probably off-putting to most, which is why he was relentless. Lefty acted on an obvious insight that most people are not willing to accept. It’s a numbers game. You keep pitching until you get them to swing. That day he did get them to swing, and once the first three pieces sold, each for a very special discount, the others began to go in rapid succession.

“How do you capture this level of detail?” they asked. “How long did this one take?” and “Is there a way through these? They’re mazes, right?”

Lefty has said that by disappearing, Kelly gave him no choice but to step up. He’s also said that, had he not been so angry at her and stressed over money, he would never have reprised his accidental role as the artist. But that day, K.A. Mudd answered all the festival-goers’ questions with studied modesty. Once he had them interested, he knew how to dim the wattage of his smile to draw them closer. He spoke just above a whisper as he stood before one of the pieces, drawing them closer still. He confessed that he didn’t really know where the work came from because he went into a kind of trance once he started drawing. Some visitors might have rolled their eyes, but most didn’t. They wanted to believe. He understood this. He recognized their desire, their gnawing hunger for something to believe in, because he shared this desire. So he sold them a piece of magic they could take home with them.

“There’s always a way through,” he told them. “But not everyone can see it. It takes a special kind of person to sit with it, to hold the complexity of the whole thing in your mind until the way reveals itself.”

When he’s described that day, Lefty gets a faraway look in his eye and his voice drops into a reverent register. He believes something happened that day, a shift, or perhaps a swell that crested into a wave that he was able to stand and ride. It wasn’t a deception. He wasn’t a salesman, though he was selling. He wasn’t an artist, but he was creating a vision. He had studied all the pieces and was the world’s foremost expert on the artist up to that point. At odd hours of the day, when Kelly was out, he had stood in his underwear, spooning Corn Flakes into his mouth, peering into the twisty patterns entangled with flora and fauna from the known world and artifacts from fantastical realms. He had lost hours standing or sitting in front of the sketches he had framed at his own expense. So when he spoke of trances, of being lost inside the work, he wasn’t lying.

By five o’clock he had sold all but three of the twenty-four pieces they had loaded into the trunk and backseat of his car that morning and made nearly $5,000. He expected Kelly to turn up any minute, but she was nowhere to be found. After loading the car, he wandered through the circuit of the festival as the other weary artists were wrapping their unsold canvases and placards, sculptures and cases filled with earrings, bracelets, rings, and bobbles, and loading them into crates and boxes to be lugged to their vehicles by indulgent partners, dutiful children, or the borrowed hands of a merciful stranger. Kelly was not chatting with any of them. She was gone.

He stayed until dark, leaving the Corolla parked in its original spot in case she came back while he made several more circuits around the downtown area on foot. He looked in coffee shops, a bookstore, and a place where they had gotten tacos once before. He walked through the Third Street Promenade, thinking he should step inside one of the dim-lit restaurants with white tablecloths. He had earned an expensive meal. But the high that the wad of cash in his jean jacket pocket inspired had gone, leaving him empty and worried. He settled for a sloppy gyro at a Greek place that smelled like bleach and was so small he had to turn sideways to let other customers pass while he was placing his order. He ate it standing on the street.

When he returned to the apartment, he had hoped there would be lights on and that Kelly would be sitting on the couch. He would chastise her appropriately and then share the story of their success. But the apartment was dark, empty, and quiet except for the drip in the kitchen sink.

Five hours later, Lefty was awakened by the telephone. He picked it up on the second ring. The gruff voice coming through the hum of static on the wireless handset was not distinctly male or female.

“Are you Lefty?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s me. Who is this?”

“I’ve got a girl here who gave me your number.”

“Kelly? She’s with you?”

“No idea who she is. She’s not all there, if you know what I mean. Black hair, pencil-thin, glasses. Sound like your girl?”

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“I’m nobody, just a good Samaritan. Found her on my lawn. She was half-naked, curled up in a ball. Look, you gonna come get her or what?”

When Lefty parked in front of the modest house in a neighborhood off 15th Street, he saw Kelly sitting on the front stoop wrapped in an old blanket. There was a stocky old woman standing beside her with her arms crossed. When he crossed the tiny lawn, Kelly looked up with an expression somewhere between recognition and confusion. He had to coax her to stand, then handed her one of the big sweatshirts he dug out of the milk crates that served as a dresser for her back at their apartment. He got her settled into the passenger seat and returned to talk to the old woman.

“Thank you so much for taking care of her. I’m not sure what got into her…”

“The world’s a dangerous place. You need to watch out for that girl. You’re lucky it was me that found her and not somebody else.”

“Did she say anything to you about what happened? I was looking for her all day.”

“Not really. She did talk, but it didn’t make any sense. I worked for years as a nurse in the ER. Saw kids like this all the time, drugged outta their minds.”

“Kelly doesn’t do drugs…”

“Well, she does something, because she was talking all kinds of nonsense about other dimensions and portals and God knows what else. I was just going to let my dog out when I saw her curled up right over there.”

The woman pointed to a little landscaped garden area with a couple of manicured cedars, like overgrown bonsai trees.

“She wasn’t wearing a shirt and was missing her shoes. When I asked what the hell she was doing in my garden, she said some Mona or Lana or someone guided her here. Said that the roots of the trees were tunnels that connected. Hell, I don’t know. I gave her some hot tea.”

“Thank you. And she didn’t say what happened to her? Why she took her shirt off?”

“No. She didn’t even seem to notice until I covered her up.”

“Okay. I’m going to get her home. Thank you, for everything.”

On the ride home, Kelly looked out the window and didn’t speak. She seemed alert, wide-eyed, taking everything in. Lefty opened his mouth to speak several times but couldn’t produce words to explain what he was feeling. Relief? Love? Regret? Anger? Probably all of these things. I believe this is when he began to fall in love with her. There was something about her that wouldn’t let go of him. The combination of her brilliance and helplessness, her innocence and world-weariness, her swings from kindness to rage stirred him, distracted him from his own emptiness.

I imagine them getting back to that tiny, low-ceiling apartment and Lefty flipping the light on. Did she wonder, or even notice at first, that all her pieces that had lined the baseboard perimeter of the small studio were gone? Did she ask, or did she just curl up beneath her blanket on the couch?

Lefty said she didn’t have to ask because she knew they were gone. She knew they were gone because she had released them. That’s what she told him the next day. She said that’s why she couldn’t stay. If she had stayed, she wouldn’t have let them go.

It would take some time before Lefty would be confronted and have to own up to his deception. He had spent more than thirty years memorizing his lines to be the good guy, the selfless savior, and he would never fully relinquish the role, but it had become more complicated.

Their true partnership had begun.

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