Transformer

Daedalia: Chapter 20

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…

Fiodor Barkowski walked through the open gate at the ranch and used the Daedalia secret to manipulate Marabelle into unlocking the shed for him. When he didn’t find what he wanted, he kidnapped her, taking her to a motel room in Albuquerque.

The lore of Daedalia, according to Fiodor, went something like this: she was an ancient spirit who moved between this world and the many we cannot see, and she had many names in many tongues. Every century she chose a new vessel to work through, and these artists, Leonardo da Vinci, Artemisia Gentileschi, and William Blake, to name a few, produced visionary work far ahead of their time.

Fiodor believed Kelly Mudd was Daedalia’s chosen vessel for the twenty-first century and that her foretelling of the events of 9/11 through the twelve panels was evidence of her divinity. The problem was that Kelly had fallen prey to the same exploitative demon as many of her predecessors. The demon in question was my father, Charles Moody, who hid her true identity from the world in order to profit. It was Fiodor’s mission to discover the true identity of Daedalia, which he believed he had done, and to bring her into the light so the world would know her and she could be of service to it.

None of these details were told to me in that La Quinta Inn. I would learn it all by combing through internet archives decades later. What I learned over the course of those six days in that motel room was how to survive alone in the wilderness of one man’s troubled mind.

Fiodor had no plan when he took me. That much was clear after the first day. I can only assume he viewed me as another piece of art created by my mother, a piece like her others that contained a divine message for him to decode and possess.

“On the day you were born, were there crows? Crows outside the window?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does your mother only work during the new moon?”

“What’s a new moon?”

“The man that appears in the seventh panel, the one with sparrows in his beard, did your mother ever talk about him?”

As he would do many times, he showed me an image of one of my mother’s pieces on his laptop. I had seen very little of Daedalia’s work up to that point in my life. I was forever competing with her for my mother’s attention, so what little I had seen, I hadn’t examined with any real interest.

But when he showed me the image, I pretended to study it very carefully. I even asked him to make it bigger. I couldn’t see a bearded man and I didn’t know what sparrows were, but I had learned it was better to play the role he wanted me to play in this game.

“Yes,” I told him. “She said he was a hero, like a Transformer.”

His eyes lit up when I said this. He leaned back in his chair and stroked his beard. Then he turned his attention back to his computer and became completely immersed in typing.

I drifted slowly away to my corner of the room where I played with the alligator Transformer he had given me. They say children can adapt to anything, and it’s true. After a couple of days, I accepted this new reality for however long it would last. He let me eat things I wasn’t allowed to eat, like Froot Loops, gummy worms, and Doritos. He allowed me to watch anything on TV so long as it wasn’t too loud and he didn’t need help with his mission.

He barely slept. In fact, I don’t remember ever seeing him asleep, but he must have. I missed Maria. I missed Lefty reading stories to me and sometimes falling asleep, his long body stretching the length of my bed like a fortress wall, protecting me from whatever monsters I imagined outside my window.

I cried myself to sleep, fighting to loosen the knots in my belly. If Fiodor heard me crying, he would come lay next to me and it was a terrible feeling, wanting that physical comfort and simultaneously being repulsed by it. He smelled of sweat and spearmint gum and his breath was hot on my neck as he spoke in a whisper, telling long, rambling stories about mythical beasts, heroes, and villains. When he spoke of my mother, it was always in the possessive.

“My Kelly, she’s too good for this world. That’s why she was chosen. But Daedalia is an agent of chaos and can’t be trusted. The sales man,” that’s how he referred to my father, “can’t protect her, will not protect her because he only seeks to profit from what he believes is his golden goose.”

He would go on like this as he stroked the length of me with his heavy hand until I stopped crying, not because I was soothed, but because I did the only thing a small animal can do when trapped: become so still that maybe the predator will lose interest. I don’t think he ever touched me in a sexual way, but as I’ve said before, I can’t trust my memories.

As the days progressed, Fiodor became increasingly erratic, swinging from manic states where he would pace the room, cursing the names of demons he believed were coming for him, to long periods of staring into his computer in a near-catatonic state. Toward the end, he had stopped leaving the room. There was no more food. I drank water from the sink. I watched TV with the sound muted because the noise made him more agitated.

On the night of the sixth day, I had a dream so vivid that I recall it with more certainty than anything I’ve recounted so far. I was inside one of my mother’s paintings, being chased through a maze of hedgerows by a lumbering beast that growled like distant thunder rumbling through a dark, fetid cavern that dripped with condensation as it panted after me.

The sun was setting on the horizon, the sky aflame with color, and I was trying to reach it, but the path kept diverting me. I heard her voice singing to me. I don’t remember Kelly ever singing to me, but I knew it was her. I wanted her to stop the stupid singing and help me.

Then I realized she wasn’t singing but screaming, and the screaming became more shrill. I began to run faster, and as I ran, the tiny leaves of the hedges that imprisoned me began to flutter and take wing like millions of small birds, sparrows.

When I looked down at my body, I saw that I had transformed into an armored machine and I felt heat radiating up through me like a rocket gathering energy to take off. As the fluttering birds cleared, I saw that I was in the desert and I understood my home was miles away in the hills that were just bumps on the line of the horizon, quickly being erased.

Her screaming stopped, and everything was quiet. I could no longer hear the beast, but I felt its breath. Then one word, not spoken but transmitted, rang through every bone of my body like a tuning fork.

RUN!

My eyes shot open. The hotel room was dark except for a sliver of light from the parking lot that peeked through the drapes. Fiodor had been in the bed next to me. The depression he left in the mattress and the dampness of his sweat on the sheets and on my skin almost made me vomit. I could see the light from under the bathroom door and I could hear him muttering and grunting in there.

The heavy chair was no longer in front of the motel room door.

Without stopping to find my shorts or my toys, I rushed to the door. On my tiptoes, I was able to just reach the safety bar and flip it over. I paused with my fingers on the handle. I was frozen, no longer an armored robot, but the scared rabbit whose only defense was to be still and cower.

Then my body filled with the single directive my mother’s voice had planted in my dream.

I opened the door, stepped out onto the breezeway where the sun was still hours from breaking the horizon, and I ran.

I ran to the parking lot, to the only light I could see, which was the registration office for the motel. The older Indian woman with heavy bags under her eyes seated behind the desk startled when I burst through the door, this pipe cleaner of a child wearing nothing but a stained T-shirt and underwear.

I’m not sure what I said to her, or if I said anything at all. Maybe my eyes communicated everything she needed to know.

Within minutes, there was a policeman, and then more policemen, and I was wrapped in a blanket in the back of a police cruiser with a woman seated next to me who held my hand and said she was taking me home.

Just as in my dream, I was blasting through the desert landscape in a metal machine with blue lights flashing toward the sun, only the sun was rising, not setting.

When the cruiser slowed in front of the gate to our ranch, there were two figures standing there together, but apart. Lefty and Kelly rushed to open the door. Kelly reached in, pulled me from the car, and lifted me up. I wrapped my arms and legs around her, transforming once again. Lefty’s arms encircled us both. His chest heaved with emotion like a bellows and they both whispered the necessary incantations of assurance and gratitude and love into my unwashed hair.

Lefty insisted on carrying me the whole way back to the house and when we got there, my grandma and grandpa Moody, Maria, and some other people I didn’t know hovered around me. But I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone.

Kelly took me into their bathroom and bathed me like she did when I was small. Her hand holding the washcloth trembled as she squeezed warm water over my shoulders and back. The fingertips of her other hand gently traced every part of me, inspecting me for damage as if what was done to me would have left a wound that could be cleaned and covered by a Little Mermaid band-aid.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t answer any of her questions.

She toweled me off and dressed me in my favorite pajamas. Lefty came in and dried and brushed my hair, then carried me out into their bedroom. They asked if I was hungry. I wasn’t. I only wanted to sleep, so they put me in their bed between them and draped their arms around me.

I lay still with my eyes open for a long time, staring up at the ceiling. I didn’t feel like I was home. The idea of home was lost to me. It had been a couple of years since I slept in their bed and I couldn’t remember ever sleeping between them in that way.

I drifted on the frayed edge of sleep, my mind still racing through the maze, my legs twitching. Soon I heard Lefty snoring softly and Kelly’s hand that had been delicately rubbing circles on my back stilled.

I slipped out from under their arms, crawled off the bed and went to the window where I stared out at the front yard, my eyes fixed on the place where, just six days before, I had been a child playing in the dirt.

I turned and looked back at the empty place on the bed between the sleeping bodies I understood were my parents and I wondered, for the first time, who they really were.

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