Disappearing into the Role

Daedalia: Chapter 10

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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