The Overwhelming Roar of Silence

Daedalia: Chapter 17

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…

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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