The Open Gate

Daedalia: Chapter 19

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…

In an interview after Kelly’s death, Lefty explained that after the 9/11 Panels invited unwanted attention, he and Kelly tried to protect the secret by shifting her public image away from Daedalia. For a year she stopped making her serious work and produced deliberately amateur folk-art chickens, which Lefty used to support a new narrative and reduce outside scrutiny.

Fiodor Barkowski was a bad artist by any objective measure, even his own. In truth, he didn’t so much want to be an artist as he wanted to possess what artists had, the ability to create a world more vivid than the small, drab one he commuted through every day.

On the subway he would sketch passengers openly, without their permission, hoping someone might engage with his miserable drawings. He was punched in the face on one occasion. His notebook was torn in half on another. But more often, he was simply ignored in the time-honored way New Yorkers ignore everything when they move through the transit system.

He was a small man in a large man’s body. His blocky hands were cartoonishly large, the fingertips squared off with a fine ring of dirt under the nails. On the sparrow-like frame of my nine-year-old shoulders, those hands felt like the safety bar that crushes you into the seat on a roller coaster that takes you upside down.

He first showed up at Marabelle long after the last of the news vans had moved on to the next story. He just wandered through the open gate on a Sunday morning. Lefty was away. Kelly was in Telluride. Maria was in the house. I was alone.

I didn’t notice him until his shadow darkened the patch of dirt where I was playing with one of my Transformers. I startled from my crouch and fell onto my butt. He dropped to a knee to be at my level with the jaunty ease of one of those collapsible toy figures held together with elastic bands.

“Hi there, I’m Fiodor,” he said, smiling through a tangle of beard that reminded me of Hagrid in the Harry Potter books. I wanted to run. Every cell in my body wanted to run, but he pinned me in place with six words. “I’m a friend of your mother.”

I had never met a friend of my mother, so I didn’t know what such a thing would look like. I looked toward the house and wanted to call out to Maria, but before I could, he produced something from the pocket of his massive coat.

“Your mom tells me you like these things, which means you must be good at puzzles like her. Things that look like one thing, but turn out to be something else.”

The Transformer toy in his hand looked tiny. It didn’t look like the ones I had and I was curious. I took it from him and transformed it right away from the silver-and-green robot soldier into an alligator. The white spikes along the soldier’s back became teeth.

“Do you like it?” I nodded and he said, “You can keep it.”

Then he sat down on his butt like a man with nowhere to go, produced another Transformer from his other pocket and marched it across the dirt between us. He was good at making voices and we played for a long time. Maria never came out to check on me.

“I love playing with you, but your mom asked me to come collect some things for her from the shed, things she needs to do her work. Could you help me with my mission so I don’t get in trouble?”

“Nobody’s supposed to go in there.”

“But that’s only when Mommy’s working, right? Isn’t she working somewhere else right now?” I nodded and he continued. “And to do that work, she needs some supplies.”

“Are you an artist too?”

“I am. A secret artist like your mom, but I’m not as good as her.”

“You know about Daedalia?”

Maybe it’s only in my reconstitution of this story, but I think a look of revelation passed over his face as though he had seen the face of God.

“I do. And that’s why she sent me.”

Without question, I took him to the shed and unlocked the door, punching in the four-digit code. I remember he stepped inside with the trepidation and reverence of a pilgrim.

That reverie quickly evaporated and soon he was moving confidently throughout the space, opening drawers, pawing through the stacks of canvases that leaned against the walls. He wasn’t finding what he was looking for and became impatient.

“This isn’t Daedalia’s work.” When he turned to me, his face was flushed and his bushy eyebrows were pinched into an angry line. “Where is her work?”

“This is her work,” I said.

He tore the canvas that featured a rooster perched atop a tire swing from the easel, causing the easel to clatter to the concrete floor.

“THIS,” he shouted. “Is NOT her work.”

“I’m going to get Maria,” I said.

But before I could make it to the door, he was blocking my way. He might as well have been a cinderblock wall. That’s when those large hands clamped down on my shoulders for the first time.

When something horrific happens to you as a child, if you remember it, it’s different from any normal memory. It has a weight, an impenetrable density to it, like typewritten lines on a page that have been typed over so many times that any hope of reading what was originally struck into the page is lost.

My mother had such lines in the story of her life. I want, more than anything, to know them so I could write them here with absolute clarity. Maybe that would help explain her to me and then I could forgive her. But I don’t think so.

I’ve spent decades working to decipher what happened to me and yet I’m sure, even as I recount it to you, the exact events are no more accurate than the story of my parents before I was born. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Fiodor took me that day. He didn’t have to tie me up or restrain me. He didn’t have to carry me, kicking and screaming. He had something better.

“You’re going to come with me to visit your mother. If you don’t, if you fight, or scream, I’m going to tell your secret and everything’s going to be ruined and it’s all going to be your fault.”

Before we left, he managed to find one of the Daedalia pieces, a small, unfinished and forgotten canvas that had fallen into the gap between the desk and the wall. I remember he peered into it the way I watched cartoons on Saturday mornings.

His car was filled with trash. He made me sit in the front seat, which I never did. We drove for what seemed like hours and he didn’t talk. He played the radio, tuning to any station with a signal when the previous one faded as we crossed the barren landscape of New Mexico. My pants were soaked with pee and I remember shivering and crying silently as we drove farther and farther away and the sun got lower in the sky.

We had driven no farther than Albuquerque when he pulled into the parking lot of a La Quinta Inn by the interstate. I understood this was not a place my mother would be. When I told him as much, he didn’t answer me.

The motel was one of those motor-court kinds so we didn’t have to go through a lobby and there was no kind concierge to offer a lollipop. He marched me up the stairwell to the second floor. I still remember the room number, 212. I’ve gone back and stayed in that room, so I know that much is true. Once inside, he closed the door, flipped over the safety bar, and moved a heavy chair in front of it.

When I sat on the bed, he saw that my shorts were wet. He sighed, shook his head, and rummaged through a lumpy army duffel and pulled out a T-shirt.

“Go change,” he said, handing me the enormous shirt. “Are you hungry? I’m going to order some food.”

“Do you really know my mommy?”

“Yes, and she knows me.”

In the small windowless bathroom with a dim fluorescent light, I remember startling when I saw myself in the mirror. I looked like a flickering ghost.

I was a self-sufficient child, a necessary skill when you have highly distracted parents. I stripped off my wet shorts and panties and washed myself in the bath. I washed the underwear and wrung them out as best I could before putting them back on. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with the big shirt. My shirt was fine, so I wrapped his big gray t-shirt around my waist like a skirt.

When I came out of the bathroom, he was sitting at the small table by the window, peering into a large laptop computer. Many years later, I would learn that he was a programmer by trade and that he did actually know my mother. He had met her on a message board, one of the many devoted to Daedalia. He had made a hobby of hacking the identities of anyone on the boards who said anything remotely interesting about Daedalia.

“Do you have it too, the gift?”

“No, I’m not good at drawing. Can I go home?”

“No, not yet. There are things I want to talk to you about.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“No, not if you do what I ask.”

When he said this, he looked away from the screen and met my eyes. “You look like her.”

“I’m scared.”

“I’m not gonna hurt you. You don’t need to be scared.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to help me with a very important mission. Can you do that?”

I don’t remember what I said in response. It didn’t matter. I would be trapped in that motel room for six days and my life would never be the same when I finally got to go home.

Fiodor’s mission, as he explained it to me, was to set Daedalia free. He had received her cries for help. He had decoded the messages in her work. She was a prisoner and no one knew her suffering but him.

When I tried to tell him Daedalia wasn’t real, that she was just a made-up name my mother used for reasons I didn’t understand, he got angry and his voice boomed with such resonance it made my teeth hurt. I curled up into a ball, whimpering in the corner between the bed and the wall, trying to make myself small enough to disappear.

As became the pattern, he would then fall into whispery apologies and put his hands on me, kneading my shoulders, my back, my thighs until I quieted. In those moments I went still, sunk so deep into myself I have no memory that I can trust.

I quickly learned that if I wanted to ever get home, I had to play his pretend game. The game where he was the hero, and not some delusional, bipolar man desperate to believe his life had a special purpose.

In those six days, in that motel room, I learned more about my mother and her work than I had in nine years of being her daughter. But I never decoded her, not in the way Fiodor did. I’m not sure why I’ve never been able to see what others have seen moving inside her canvases. Maybe I did when I was small, in the time before I was taken, but that hardly counts because to a child, everything in the world is enchanted.

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