Maneuvers

Daedalia: Chapter 34

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…

Daedalia’s slow fade from popularity, eight years of bad bets and financial free fall, and Kelly’s separation request the week Marabelle left for college ended with Lefty putting his pitching hand through a SoHo gallery window. Discharged from the ER with nowhere to go, he holed up alone in Kelly’s old Village studio for five days, before disappearing and leaving behind his coat, wallet, and phone.

Greta was enjoying an espresso and an empanada at a small café in South Beach when her phone buzzed, and she saw Lefty’s name on the caller ID. She dusted some crumbs from her smiling lips and let the phone ring three times before picking it up.

“I thought you might call,” she said.

“What do you want?”

He was unrecognizable, and for a second she wondered if someone had stolen his phone. The voice she heard was a raspy, thin, defeated thing.

“Lefty, is that you? Are you okay?”

Before lunch, she was on a plane bound for JFK.

After she landed and was in the back of a black car crossing the Triborough Bridge into the city, she tried to call him repeatedly, but it went directly to voicemail. She had the address of the building in the Village, but nothing more. The driver let her out and she stood in the cold by the door of the building for half an hour trying to call him until finally someone exiting deemed her an unlikely thief and allowed her inside. She knocked on five doors before she was able to piece together enough information to deduce which door Lefty was behind. She knocked for a full minute with increasing urgency before she finally tried the doorknob. It was unlocked and she pushed inside.

Greta has described the state she found my father in, though it took three interviews to get an accurate picture. I think she had been trying to spare me her trademark directness, but eventually, I got the full story. He was sprawled on the floor, unconscious. The place was freezing and dark because she had been unable to find the lights. Her foot slipped in a pool of his vomit when she crossed the room to get to him. She feared he was dead and had been afraid to touch him until he coughed and shook her from her daze. She immediately tried to call an ambulance, but as she was talking with the dispatcher, Lefty stirred and pleaded with her to hang up the phone. He didn’t want to go back to the hospital.

She was able to help him to the couch where she made him drink two glasses of water. She offered several times to call me or my mother, but he refused and she understood. Eventually, Greta got him into a taxi. She checked them into a boutique hotel nearby. He was filthy and shivering, so she drew a hot bath and stripped him of the clothes he had been wearing for almost a week. She had to tear the shirt sleeve off the arm with the cast. It’s a testament to how much Greta must have loved my father that she demonstrated such uncharacteristic tenderness. He ran a high fever for the next twenty-four hours. She applied cold compresses, dosed him with Tylenol, and let him sleep. He wouldn’t meet her eyes and barely spoke. When the fever broke, she fed him chicken noodle soup from the deli recommended by the desk clerk. Still they didn’t really speak about any of it. Her plans, whatever they had been, were trumped by Lefty’s pathetic state.

When he slept, she raided the minibar, propped herself up next to him, and surrounded herself with the most expensive empty calories she had ever consumed, washing them down with little, frosted bottles of Grey Goose. The alcohol dulled the sharp point of her need, which had remained nameless her whole life until she met Lefty. Before Greta knew my mother was Daedalia, I don’t think she saw her as anything more or less than a minor antagonist standing between her and what she wanted, but after, my mother became the main character occupying all her waking thoughts and often her dreams.

She didn’t remember falling asleep, but when she woke up the next morning, Lefty was sitting in the chair by the window.

“I ordered some coffee. It’s on the cart.”

“You’re feeling better,” she said.

“Well, I’m not dead, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Greta, what is it you want?”

She had no idea how to answer this question, but that was nothing new. What was new was that she was deeply invested in these two people—my parents.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better, darling. Will you please tell me what’s going on with you?”

“I asked you a question. What do you want to keep our secret? How much?”

“Oh, Lefty, you really think this is about money? You couldn’t name a price high enough.”

“Then what? I’ve got nothing left to give here if that wasn’t obvious already. I’ve lost everything I care about. Kelly left me, my daughter won’t talk to me, no one’s interested in Daedalia anymore—I’m fucking broke.”

All of this was a revelation for Greta, and it took her time to absorb the information and would take even longer for her to understand how she felt about it. The thing she had found irresistible about Lefty was his unshakeable confidence and ease. He was not this pathetic creature with thinning hair and bags under his eyes sitting across from her.

“You kept this from me all these years. How could you do that? How could you take everything I’ve given you over the years? How could you be in my bed so many times and never tell me something so important?”

It was now Lefty who could find no easy way to respond. He had used Greta, and she had made it an easy transaction because she was an operator too, a person who knew how to make things happen in the world.

“What if I had told you? What would you have done with that information? Would you trust you? I don’t think so.”

There it was, the saber behind the cloak.

“Fuck you, Lefty.”

“You’re mad because you know I’m right. So now, I’m asking you again. What do you want? Kelly’s not like me and you and whatever it is you’re thinking, whatever scheme you’re hatching, I promise you, it will only hurt her.”

“Maybe you don’t know her like you think you do. Have you ever thought maybe you don’t know what’s best for her?”

“You don’t even know her. You never even gave her a thought until you realized she was Daedalia and now what, you think you’re an expert in what’s good for my wife?”

“But she’s not your wife anymore, is she?”

The blood drained from Lefty’s face. He fell back into the chair and cried out when his broken wrist bumped into the arm. Greta got out of the bed and crossed the room, where she knelt on the floor in front of him. She took his right hand in hers and he began to cry, silently at first, and then big heaving sobs. He cried for everything he’d done, all the things he’d not done, and everything he’d lost.

“I’m sorry, darling. I’m sorry,” she said over and over.

Lefty and Greta were two chess masters who found themselves in an endgame that couldn’t be ended. Neither player had enough pieces left to maneuver. She tried to console him. Eventually he stopped crying. She rose and went to the bathroom to wash her face. She returned with fresh cups of coffee for them and sat in the chair opposite him. She looked out the window and watched the cars crawling down Seventh Avenue, leaving tracks in the fresh blanket of early morning snow.

“I’ve seen them, you know,” she said.

“Seen what?”

“The 9/11 Panels. All twelve of them. I found them.”

My father had never talked about the panels after the towers fell. Anytime someone would ask him to respond to the rumors that the pieces had somehow survived, he refused to entertain the question. There was a limit to what he would exploit to advance Daedalia’s career.

“They’re forgeries,” he said. “And if they’re not, that man is even more despicable than I thought. While people were risking their lives, climbing into the wreckage to rescue trapped human beings, he was looting.”

“Yeah, he’s not gonna win a Nobel Prize. And, they’re not forgeries, by the way. You think I’m an amateur? I spent two days with them, Lefty. They’re… exquisite and fucking heartbreaking—even more so now. How does she do it? How is it possible? That’s what I want. I want to know how. I want to be in on the magic trick. I’ve spent my life thinking about art and artists, and Kelly, she’s not like any artist I’ve ever seen, living or dead. Those pieces, they’re living, breathing, changing. I felt myself disappear into them. I read what people claimed they saw, but I didn’t really believe it at the time. Lefty, I could swear they’re different than the photographs—but how could they be? How can they possibly change?”

“They changed because you changed. Because the world changed. There’s no magic trick. There’s just Kelly and her beautiful, complicated brain. Whatever you’re thinking you’ll find, it’s not there. When I first witnessed what you’re talking about and asked her how it was possible, you know what she said? I don’t see what you see. I only see what I see when I make something. You bring the rest.“

A silence fell between them. They sipped their coffee. A television switched on next door and murmured through the wall. After a time, Greta set her coffee down and looked over at Lefty.

“What happened to the two of you?”

“She finally saw me, I think. It took her long enough, but she finally did.”

“I don’t think that’s true. People grow apart. It happens.”

“Maybe, but God, I miss her.”

“She and Marabelle are probably worried sick about you. When’s the last time you spoke to them?”

“I don’t know, a couple of weeks.”

“Where’s your phone? You should call them.”

“No idea where it is. It’s just as well. What would I even say? Sorry, I lost everything. You’re on your own now.”

Greta had little patience for this pathetic version of him. I imagine her scowling, even as her mind bent to the calculus of saving him. She was still thinking when he spoke again.

“So, I’m going to ask you again. What is it you want? What are we doing here?”

“What I want is for you to be yourself again. Also what I want is for Daedalia to come back. I don’t want to see her work dismissed by history like it was just some fad and not a true work of genius.”

“Why do you really care? You want to be cut in? You want credit for saving her? You want to unmask her to the world?”

“You know, you’re really an asshole.”

“What? You’re the one who’s been blowing up my phone for months, holding this secret over me. Why?”

She couldn’t bring herself to speak the words. She couldn’t admit she was in love with him, that all those texts had been her twisted love language, a way to get his attention and, if nothing else, make him hurt like she hurt.

“Aren’t you even a little bit curious about the panels? It was no fucking picnic to find them. I’ve spent years.”

“Did you take pictures?” he asked.

“No, I wasn’t allowed to have my phone the entire time I was there, but I’m telling you, they’re real.”

“How? How could they have survived? How could twelve six-by-six panels weighing a hundred and fifty pounds each just walk out of that?”

“I don’t know exactly. I know Gaines was obsessed for more than a decade with recovering all of them. You know he had a brother who was in one of the towers.”

“That’s horrible. Why keep the panels a secret? He doesn’t seem like a subtle man. Wouldn’t he enjoy even more attention?”

“It’s a good question, but I think he’s a little afraid. He believes the pieces have some personal hold over him. Gaines has bought into all kinds of woo-woo horseshit over the years. But also, I don’t think he would love the world to know how the first few were recovered from the site.”

They talked the rest of the day. I don’t know exactly what was discussed. I don’t know the extent of the deal they made, and I’m not even sure they understood they were negotiating. I think that’s how it probably is for people who negotiate as automatically as breathing. What I do know is that things began to change after that day.

It wasn’t until early evening that my phone began buzzing in my pocket. My mother and I were sitting on the bed of my dorm room, and she was close to going to the police.

“Hello?”

“Hi, sweetie, it’s Dad.”

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