Off to College

Daedalia: Chapter 25

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…

Kelly fled to the North Carolina mountains, resisting Ona and the pull of her work while circling guilt over Marabelle, Fiodor, and the damage Daedalia had caused. After seeing her mother and stepfather from a distance, she anonymously arranged repairs to their house, listened to Marabelle over the phone, and decided to start driving west.

The following text is transcribed directly from Kelly Ann Mudd’s journals. There are fifty-three volumes in the collection that was donated to MoMA by her estate.

October 21, 2005

I ate lunch on the campus of the University of Virginia today. It was such a strange experience. College is one of those normal things I never did and I think I’ve always felt a little insecure about it. It was funny to realize all the kids I watched wandering around in packs were closer to M’s age than mine. I still feel like an uncool teenager.

There was a group of boys at a table adjacent to mine and they were talking excitedly about philosophy, probably very basic stuff you would learn in an intro class, but the ideas were exotic to me. I’m not sure I even know what philosophy is. I was eating a sandwich and only half listening, mostly enjoying the general bravado as they argued their various existential points, jockeying for position. The talk turned to the meaning of life: truth, beauty, art. My ears pricked up when one of the boys mentioned Daedalia.

“It’s bullshit,” one of them said. “All the hype around the artist. It’s totally a hoax somebody’s been able to cash in on.”

My face flushed. Another boy mounted a defense.

“Maybe, but have you ever seen one of her pieces in person? I have, and that shit’s trippy.”

And there you have it, the summation of my life in an exchange between a couple of stoner college kids. They went on to argue about whether or not the artist was actually a woman or even one person. There were no new theories I hadn’t already heard but I had nowhere to be so I sat and listened, pretending to write in my notebook and quietly observing the bloated, bruised girth of my ego.

Of course I had fantasies about sitting down with them and revealing all. This mousy nothing of a middle-aged mom nibbling on a pastrami sandwich was the artist that dominated their lunch conversation. But that’s not how it would go. They would listen politely and side-eye each other until one of them cleared their throat and said they had to get to class. Why does it even matter to me?

After an hour, I realized I had been drawing in my notebook. I wasn’t consciously aware I had been doing it. The page was full edge to edge. I tore it out and left it on the table before I got up to dump what remained of my lunch in the trash. It was part vanity but also akin to an alcoholic discreetly disposing of an empty bottle.

I had totally forgotten about it by the time I was out in the sunshine crossing the large grassy quad when someone came up behind me and touched me on the shoulder.

I turned around to find one of the young men who had been at the table. He had the drawing I’d left behind. There was no way to know which one of the boys he was because I hadn’t been looking at their faces. I told him I didn’t want it and that he could keep it or throw it away if he wanted. He just looked at me, blinking with an utterly confused expression on his face. He looked back down at the page for a long time and then looked back up at me. He asked me why. I told him it was just a doodle.

He wouldn’t turn away or allow me to go, but he wasn’t pushy either. We stood there in silence for a few more seconds as a frisbee whirred by our heads and the grass continued to move under our feet. He extended the drawing out to me again, wanting me to look at it as if I hadn’t just drawn it. To appease him, I looked at the sketch and saw very clearly that I had drawn him, this young man. It wasn’t a portrait exactly. It was dense and full of swirly abstract elements, but it’s as close to a portrait as I’ve ever done.

I didn’t have an answer for him. I really couldn’t even speak. I think I said I was sorry though I’m not sure why, then I turned and started walking away, but he followed me.

“How did you do this?” he asked.

I gave him the honest answer, which was that I didn’t know. I could tell he really wanted to keep talking. I recognized him then. He was the earnest one in the argument with his friends, the one who believed there was order to the universe, an answer for everything if you looked hard enough, if you believed. It was sweet.

I was lonely and against my better judgment, lingered. We found a bench in the shade overlooking the mall and we talked. His curiosity about the drawing hit a dead end and he started asking questions about me. What was I doing on campus? Where was I from? Was I a professional artist? I was vague with my answers but he didn’t seem to mind.

The whole time, I studied him, trying to remember drawing the curve of his jaw, the flesh of his bottom lip, the almond shape of his eyes. But I couldn’t. He was young, so young it was intoxicating. I felt a twinge of guilt at being stirred by his attention and wanting more of it. Then I felt gross about our difference in age. For all his talk, he knew nothing of the real world. He was just a bundle of hormones in ripped jeans and a shirt his mom probably picked out for him. He was more boy than man. Is this how Lefty felt with me? Would it have been the same if I were his age? Was it me he loved or the thrill of my youth or was it just my ability?

I didn’t sleep with the boy though it was clear that would have been easy to do. A part of me wanted the reckless thrill of it, to be like a vampire invited into his dorm room where I would drain him of his innocence, his youth. I think I stopped myself because I realized all I was trying to do was be somebody else besides me. I wanted to pretend to be a normal girl who had attended a normal college and had normal sex in a normal college dorm room. To this boy I was exotic, and to me, he was the opposite.

He was heartbroken when I got up to leave after an hour. I kissed him chastely on the cheek and walked back to my van. I left the drawing with him. He never asked me directly if I was Daedalia. Maybe he had never seen my work before so he didn’t know. Either way, it was reckless and Lefty would not have approved.

I’ve been lying here fantasizing about the kid and imagining there was some deeper connection. There must have been, otherwise how could I have drawn him so perfectly? For selfish reasons, I wish I had kept the drawing, but leaving it with him was just the amount of transgression I needed.

October 30, 2005

Marabelle is dressing up as a robot girl for Halloween. Lefty emailed pictures of her in her costume and she looks so much older it made my heart hurt. He said she’s been reading like crazy lately, mostly science fiction. I fully intended to be home by now, but I’m not. Instead of going west, I went north like an asshole.

I needed a break from the van and the smell of me so I’m staying in a nice hotel on the Upper East Side of NYC. It’s dizzying to swing from one extreme to the other, like tripping. Yesterday morning an 18-wheeler thundered by the van and shook it like a toy, rattling everything including my teeth, and I woke up to the smell of my stale breath and french fry grease. Tonight I’m overlooking Central Park from a cloud of perfumed white linens eating a Waldorf salad and drinking a bottle of red wine that cost more than I’m willing to say. I don’t really know what the fuck I’m doing but for now I’m going to do it in comfort.

I’ve not made any more art since the college boy. Lefty barely asked about me when I called this afternoon after checking in. He’s beyond pissed now and just sounds distracted. Mostly he wanted to talk about business. Was I working on anything new? What did I think about staging a show somewhere in Europe in late spring? Could I be ready by then? He said I should go walk through some galleries while I’m here in the city, “check out the competition” as he put it. It’s all a game to him I think. Life is just one never-ending series.

At the end of the call there was this long pause and I could hear the distance between us over the line. Then he asked, “Is it me? Am I the reason you’re not coming home?” He said if it was, then he would leave so I could come home because Marabelle needed me. I told him it was me which it is, but that never sounds like the truth. I think you reach a point in a relationship where you’re too close to know the difference between whether it’s you you’re sick of or your partner.

I think I’m sick of all of it, the whole thing. I feel like we’ve created this monster now and it has to be fed. We’re both slaves to it. I told him this and he was quiet for a minute before answering.

“So you want to quit?” he asked.

I know how invested he is in all of it now and I try to remind myself that this thing is his too, maybe more than it is mine. So I said no, I don’t want to quit. I think that’s true, but more I fear I can’t quit even if I want to. I said I just needed a little bit of time. The relief in his voice was palpable. I told him I loved him and to send pictures of Marabelle trick-or-treating. He was taking her into town to the same Halloween carnival we have been taking her to since she was six.

After I hung up with him, I took a long walk and without fully intending to, ended up in the financial district, staring through the chain-link fence at the gaping wound where the towers fell. If you didn’t know better, you would think it was just another large construction project in the city. I remembered that afternoon when I walked through the plaza more than five years ago and collapsed, overwhelmed by the stream of images that flooded my consciousness. I was afraid that feeling would come back as I stood there at the fence, but it didn’t.

Whoever I was in those moments, whatever possessed me for the months that followed, was gone. I was just like the other tourists, only I knew I wasn’t. I had made some deeper connection to that place and the people who moved through it and then the people who would later die in the attack.

As I sit here tonight, I close my eyes and try to recall even one of the images I painted on the panels but I can’t without looking them up on the internet and I won’t go there again. If I hadn’t joined that message board, Fiodor never would have met me, he never would have taken Marabelle, and he wouldn’t have died in a jail cell. Also, I don’t think I would be in this self-imposed exile, afraid to do anything but keep moving.

I hope the panels were destroyed in the wreckage. It makes me sick to my stomach to believe they’re out there somewhere. One of Lefty’s obsessions has been to recover them. He put up a $250,000 reward for anyone who can help him find even one of the panels. I’m sure he still reads the emails that come in from all kinds of kooks and grifters.

I don’t feel them out there anywhere the way I can sometimes feel the other pieces of mine that have sold. Maybe I don’t want to feel them so I’m just lying to myself in hopes of moving forward. I need to move forward. I need something new to believe in, to consume me. That’s when I’m happiest.

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