Proof of Life

Daedalia: Chapter 33

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…

Greta was ferried alone to Gaines's private island, stripped of her devices, and left overnight before being allowed into the hidden gallery beneath his house. There she found the twelve panels, damaged but restored, and understood she was one of only a handful of people alive who had seen them. Her recognition of Daedalia's hand in the Santa Fe community show gave her leverage over Lefty, who had stopped taking her calls.

“Mr. Moody, you’re lucky there’s no serious nerve damage. You could’ve lost the use of your left hand.”

The ER doctor looked fifteen to Lefty, but he had the scolding, judgmental bedside manner of a seventy-year-old who had seen it all.

“Is there someone we can call to take you home?”

Lefty blinked through the fog of the pain medication and stared down at the cast that wrapped his wrist and hand and extended up over his elbow.

“I can’t stay here until morning?”

“No, sir, I’m sorry, but we don’t have any available beds. One of the nurses can bring your phone and call someone for you.”

“What if there’s no one I can call?”

“Well, they can help you order a car to take you wherever you need to go.”

The doctor bounced on the balls of his feet and checked his watch.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s fine, I’ll figure it out,” Lefty said.

The doctor disappeared behind the glorified shower curtain that served as a wall between Lefty and the disembodied female voice that was moaning and retching. He lay back on the crackly paper stretched over the exam table, closed his eyes, and waited. The Hydrocodone did nothing to prevent the throbbing pain from his broken fingers and fractured wrist that occasionally shot tendrils of lightning up through his arm and into his neck. He was still drunk and laughed bitterly at the thought that surfaced—guess my pitching days are officially over.

The same golden arm that had thrown a dozen no-hitters in his career and been the prize of Buncombe County had thrown a punch strong enough to shatter a plate glass window at a gallery in SoHo a few hours earlier. There would be a lawsuit that would be almost as painful as the tiny shards of glass he had pulled out of his wasted hand in the back of a taxi on the way to Beth Israel. Let them come, the smug, tight-assed fucks. He had put their gallery on the map.

A battle-worn nurse showed up with a wheelchair. Twenty minutes later he was in the back of a black car. A few minutes after that, he was standing on the sidewalk in front of the same building he had been at that morning with the real estate agent who was there to appraise the studio space where Kelly had worked on the series of portraits for the unhoused a decade earlier while she was in exile. Shivering in the bitter cold, he needed three tries to enter the door code with his right hand. He rode the medieval elevator that made its rickety, shuddering ascent, taking so long to climb five floors that he dozed off as he slumped against the back wall of the car.

The narrow hallway to the studio smelled like some combination of a musty, old doctor’s office and a pungent green curry. He shuffled to the end and fumbled to put the key in the lock. Once inside, he didn’t bother with the lights. There was enough light coming through the windows to make his way over to the day bed where his wife had slept like a monk for more than a year. He sat down too hard and cried out from the pain that jolted up through his left arm. When it finally subsided, he slipped his shoes off without bending over and lay down on his right side without removing his coat.

He slept like a man tranquilized, like a man who hadn’t slept in a week, like a man who had conquered the world and lost it all. On November 2, 2016, that’s the man he was.

When he woke, it was late morning, and the studio space was filled with pale yellow light. Somewhere on his person, his phone hummed incessantly. The pain in his hand was screaming, a full-throated aria, accompanied by the mashing, dissonant chords pounding at the base of his skull. He sat up and searched his coat pockets for the prescription bottle, a nearly impossible task with only one hand. When he found it in his breast pocket, he spent five minutes trying to open the childproof cap. The cap mercifully relented, and the white tablets scattered across the bed like hail. Dry choking one down, he nearly vomited.

He rose and made his way over to the sink in the kitchenette and turned on the tap. It groaned before sputtering and spitting out intermittent blasts of gray-brown water. When the stream was steady and clear enough, he bent to the faucet and drank like a man who had been in the desert. The phone in his pants pocket continued to pulse, but he ignored it. No one who cared about him would be calling. If he checked his phone, he would only see a list of numbers, no names. Behind each of the numbers would be someone demanding their pound of flesh. He made his way back to the daybed and before he lay back down, he pulled the phone from his pocket and glanced at the recent calls.

He was right. It was a scrolling list of numbers with area codes from places he’d never been and had no connection to with the exception of one. Greta Krieger. There was no voicemail, only an ambiguous text message.

You’ve had three months to consider my offer. If you don’t return my call, you leave me no choice.

He tossed the phone and it clattered across the hardwoods before coming to rest in a square of sunlight.

He would stay in that abandoned studio for almost five days alone before anyone knew he was missing.

No one understood the depth of the hole my father had been digging to bury himself for almost a decade. I don’t think he even realized he was holding the shovel until it was too late. In that cold studio where the astringent smell of turpentine still lingered, he found the bottom.

I was three city blocks and ten thousand miles away in my dorm room at NYU sleeping through my alarm while he was struggling and failing to get his pants off so he could use the bathroom. He was alone in this struggle as he was in all his struggles. Lefty Moody was not a man who needed help. He was the one who offered it. He was the solution, not the problem. He was the closer you brought in when the bases were loaded at the bottom of the ninth. For me, just a month shy of twenty years old, he was annoying text messages I put off responding to and an obligatory phone call on the weekend I had to take for “proof of life” as he put it.

The week he hit bottom, there were no text messages or phone calls. I didn’t even know he was in the city. But I should back up so you can understand how we got to this place in the story.

When an internationally celebrated artist is no longer celebrated and the world has no interest in her work, the person who brought her work to the world is no longer celebrated. Kelly didn’t experience this as a loss. The work was what she needed, and the work was still there. If anything, she came more into her own and created according to her natural rhythms and not to the cadence Lefty had always insisted upon to maintain their ascent. Within a couple of years, he struggled to get meetings with people he used to put off. He wasn’t yet sixty, but he was getting close—too old to hustle like he used to and too restless to retire. For an intense year or so he made me his project, pushing me academically and signing me up for all kinds of extracurricular experiences to broaden me. It was exhausting for both of us, and it took me imploding into a supernova of anxiety at thirteen for him to back off.

I think that’s when he started gambling. He didn’t do it in the traditional way. There were no extravagant benders in Vegas. Lefty had a moral code that would never allow such things. His gambling was more speculative investing. There was a revolving door of guys with start-up ideas that were going to change the world. There was a dalliance with cryptocurrency that took a huge bite, not just out of his net worth, but also his ego. He was becoming an embarrassment to himself. There were a few bad real estate investments and overly generous donations to causes he believed in. My father wanted more than anything to believe in something. Through all this, he never entirely quit his day job, but there was little he could do there. Daedalia had become a dated, overly sentimental figure from a bygone time like grunge anthems—too big, too much for a population that was increasingly focused on a two-by-five-inch screen that fed them a steady drip of snarky memes, cat videos, and thirst traps.

The financial loss over eight years is breathtaking. At the height of Daedalia’s popularity, my parents were worth nearly fifty million dollars. The week Lefty put his fist through a gallery window, there was only a couple million dollars left and most of that was tied up in our family home and the studio in New York City that Lefty had all but forgotten about. To maintain our lifestyle and hide his shame, Lefty had been amassing hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. All of this, he carried and I think he could have continued to carry, but when Kelly announced she wanted a separation the week after I left for college, something elastic and unbreakable in Lefty snapped.

I was enjoying my independence, living my best New York City life when my mother called me. I had to step outside of the noisy restaurant to take the call.

“Mare, have you heard from your dad?”

No hello or how are you doing. Her voice sounded tight and small.

“Hey, Mom, no. Why?”

“A woman who’s looked after our studio space there in the city for years just called me. She thinks your dad’s been staying there.”

“So? What’s wrong with that?”

“Mare, she thinks something might have happened to him. The place was a mess. She found a coat with his wallet in it and he left his phone behind.”

“Wait, what are you saying?”

“I’m worried. I’m going to try to get a flight, but can you go over to the studio to meet the woman? Maybe you can get into his phone. I’ll text you the address.”

An hour later I met Janet, the woman who had kept my mother stocked with art supplies and Doritos when she had encamped herself in the Village years before. She met me on the street and then led me up to the studio space which I’d only been to once before. It was mostly empty except for an old couch, a coffee table splayed with magazines over five years old, and the daybed. The place reeked of body odor and urine. The bedding was filthy, and I felt sick to my stomach. Had my father been living here? There was no food or evidence of food. His black overcoat was draped over the arm of the couch.

“This is how I found things,” Janet said. “Your dad’s wallet is in the coat pocket. I didn’t know he was staying here. I was just coming by to do my weekly check-in and to water the plant over there.”

She gestured to a peace lily by the window with a pair of wilted blooms, their heads bowed as if in mourning. There were a few business cards from a realtor on the kitchen counter. Janet asked me a series of questions about my dad. She was trying to be helpful, but all her questions did was make me realize how little I really knew about his mental state, how little I had been paying attention to him.

I was finding it hard to breathe, so I sat on the couch next to his coat and pulled it to me. It had his smell, which was something between cedar and Big Red gum. It was the smell of safety and comfort to me, and I never realized it until that moment. In the front pocket, I found some crumpled pages, the release forms and prescriptions from his visit to the ER five days prior.

He was hurt. He was alone, and I had no way to get in touch with him.

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