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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 a 2036 interview, Lefty named his real addiction as greatness and admitted he first saw Kelly as an opportunity rather than a love. He described the alliance with Greta and the plan to force Gaines to surrender the panels, the long game of staying beyond his reach. Kelly refused the pitch, so Lefty went home alone to a project he couldn't yet explain.
“So what are we building today, Mr. Lefty?”
Enrique had brought along a couple of workers as requested. They hung back at the truck, blowing warmth into their hands, their faces obscured by hoodies. The sun was just breaking the horizon line.
“Something grand, my friend. Come on.”
Enrique followed Lefty around to the back of the house and out beyond the landscaped area. What he saw was a massive square cut and leveled into the desert landscape. The border of the square was defined by staked boards, and the area was already filled with gravel.
“The first trucks with concrete will be arriving on Thursday morning, so that gives us five days to stake out the first section,” Lefty said, gesturing to the area right in front of them.
Enrique had only seen something like this at a commercial job site. The scale implied a complex of tennis courts. It had to be at least an acre of land. Lefty pulled out a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket. It had a sketch on it and a lot of calculations scribbled in the margins.
“What is it?” Enrique asked.
“It’s a symbol. A statement… it’s for my wife.”
Enrique was not a man to ask too many questions. He knew these people were crazy, but they were also generous and had been very good to his family.
“Okay, boss,” he said, taking the piece of paper. “We’re going to need a lot more wood to make the forms and also some wire mesh… a lot of it. Not going to be cheap.”
Lefty handed him a credit card.
“We’re also going to need more guys.”
“I’m going to help. Let’s see what we can do, just the four of us.”
I can’t imagine Enrique was thrilled about my father helping, but he would never have said as much. He did what was requested of him and they worked every day until dark, framing a grid within the square acre, a form to hold the tons of concrete that a parade of trucks, fifty-four to be exact, would deliver in the weeks that followed.
It was slow going at first. Lefty was more of a liability, his mistakes causing Enrique extra work, but eventually he learned how to use a level properly and to ask for help or to just get out of the way. He was not a man in his prime. Though his left arm had healed, it was not what it used to be. His back and shoulders were as stiff as the acre of concrete drying atop the cold Santa Fe dirt when he got up in the dark every morning. But he was driven to see this project through before my mother returned from her walkabout. The fact that he had no idea when she would return created a manic sense of urgency.
Lefty was incapable of doing anything small and this little landscaping project hemorrhaged more money he didn’t have. I learned much later that he had found a website where he was able to auction off a handful of early sketches Kelly had done in preparation for a project she had abandoned in 2003. He also sold the rights to use one of her most iconic pieces to a company that screenprinted art on everything from T-shirts to lunchboxes. The few times I talked with him during these months, he never told me what he was doing, only that he was working on some improvements around the house for my mother. I had come to pity him and I knew he hated that. He sounded so small and lonely and far away when he would call.
I imagine him sitting alone in the house at night, his face and arms sunburned, his hands blistered and scarred from the day’s work. He wanted to drink, I’m sure. He wanted companionship but he wouldn’t be with Greta in that way again and he wouldn’t allow himself to take another lover. He was coming out of his dark night of the soul, or trying to. This shrine, or whatever it was he was building for my mother, was a contradiction, like most things he had ever done. It was a self-flagellating act of atonement as much as it was just another stunt to try to show that he mattered, that he was capable of greatness. My father could have benefited from a meditation practice, but he couldn’t be still, ever.
This project was as close as he would ever come to meditating. He was obsessed with scale and trying to comprehend, to literally ground the vastness of a number like 500 billion. He wanted to be able to visualize it. He wanted Kelly to be able to see it. To see just how much potential was in a number like that.
In his primitive sketches, he designed a pattern for a form that could be stamped into the grids of the drying concrete. His stamp was a three-foot-square pattern of irregular shapes, each shape roughly three inches in diameter, one hundred of them to a mat. He would have to do this ritual five thousand times to cover the acre behind our house. Each of these shapes represented one million dollars of wealth. His original aspiration had been to show the full 500 billion, but he quickly realized that the size of each shape in his stamp would have needed to be smaller than a grain of sand, and that would have made the whole thing look like a big dumb slab of concrete.
The crew developed a rhythm. The steel dinosaurs would roar up the driveway of our ranch at sunrise, the massive rotating drums of their bellies sloshing with twenty tons of cold slurry. Lefty would direct them to the next open grid where Enrique would aim the swinging steel chute and the concrete, like gray porridge, would slop down into the square. The workers would use shovels to stir it like cake batter, then rakes to evenly distribute it, removing any clumps, and finally a long metal straightedge to smooth the surface to a glassy sheen. When the last of the trucks pulled away mid-morning and the new squares were set to dry in the sun, they would all move to build out the wooden forms for more squares. After a couple of hours, when the newly poured concrete had cured just enough, Lefty would begin the meticulous and anxiety-provoking process of stamping out his patterns with trembling hands. No one else was allowed to do this part. The first few times, he had done it wrong—pushed too hard or not hard enough. Waited too long or not long enough to begin—it was a narrow window. Sometimes it wasn’t until the next day when he inspected his work that he saw a flaw. He would curse and throw his hat and walk off, only to return a few minutes later with the jackhammer. He would then commence breaking up the slab and hauling the shards and rubble out. He insisted on doing this himself too.
Enrique told me that at first he was just going along with my father, didn’t see or understand the point, but after they had completed nearly half of the area, he began to see the effect. It was mesmerizing, the repetition of shapes, the texture of the concrete creating the illusion of something incomprehensibly large and yet contained.
It was some time after that when Kelly returned home without warning. She had been traveling around the country in a van, staying in campgrounds and RV parks mostly. She had been more in her head than usual and had barely remembered giving Lefty permission to be at the house. She certainly hadn’t expected to see a line of pickup trucks and heavy equipment crowding the driveway.
When she walked around the back of the house and saw the nearly completed mothership landing pad, she started laughing. It was a strange response, but she never responded to things in an expected way. When her laugh tipped over into a cackle, it was enough to make the workers turn around.
Lefty hadn’t heard her approach. He was in his zone, stamping out another section at the far end of the grid. He didn’t notice her until her shadow stretched tall across the latest imprint he was on his knees inspecting.
“Are we expecting visitors from another planet?”
Her voice startled him so badly that he lost his balance and fell forward, his hands plunging into the damp concrete.
“Goddamnit.”
He freed each of his hands from the concrete, leaving what looked like a botched attempt at a movie star making their immortal mark on the sidewalk outside the Chinese Theatre. He rocked back onto his butt.
“Hello, Kel. You weren’t supposed to get back until it was finished.”
“Do you mind telling me exactly what it is? I mean, what the fuck, Lefty? You’re not allowed to be the crazy one.”
“I know, I know.”
He stood and rubbed the concrete residue from his hands onto his pants.
“I have a lot to explain. Please give me a chance,” he said, looking for something to do with his hands. He wanted to embrace her but didn’t. “It’s good to see you. You look good.”
To her, he looked weather-beaten, but strong, and the sparkle had returned to his eyes. She had missed it but she wasn’t ready to admit it.
“Just pretend it’s not here for now,” he continued, wanting to fill the space between them. “Give me a week until it’s finished and then I can explain.”
My mother crouched down, cocked her head, and squinted her eyes as she surveyed the massive pad of concrete that sprawled out behind them. She reached out and traced her fingers over the contours of the rounded pebble impressions, uniform in size but not shape. She knew it wasn’t a tennis court. As crude as it was, she recognized the attempt at an artistic statement, but had no idea what it meant, especially coming from Lefty. She stood and walked slowly toward the middle. He watched her. Every step she took ratcheted his level of anxiety up a notch. It was the dumbest idea he’d ever had, not to mention the expense and waste. What had he been thinking? He felt completely vulnerable, naked. It never occurred to him that this feeling was what Kelly had most of the time. When she called back to him, he didn’t hear her until she turned and gestured for him to come to her.
“What do these mean?” she asked, toeing the pebble shapes that dimpled the immediate horizon in all directions. “I can see you put some thought into this. You’re trying to say something.”
“It’s stupid. You’ll laugh.”
“I already laughed. Now I want to understand. What is this? What are you doing?”
“I miss you terribly, Kel. Without you, I’m out of whack, spinning in a circle. I don’t know why I had the urge to do this big stupid thing, but I haven’t had you in my life, and I missed the way your art makes me feel—the dangerous leaps you take with it.”
“You could have bought some clay or a paint-by-numbers set.”
“You know me. Go big or go home.”
“You are home.”
My father began to cry. The tears tracked down his dirty, sunburned cheeks and his shoulders quaked. My mother stepped to him and put her palm to his face. She pulled him to her and he wept into her shoulder. The late-afternoon sunlight gilded the textured plane of my father’s creation, making it look like the scales of an enormous dragon or a rain shower on the surface of a golden pool.
“I’m not sure what this is,” she said. “But I love it.”
He didn’t know if she was talking about his project or the state of their union and he didn’t want to ask. It was enough just to hear her say the words. When his emotion subsided, she pulled back from him but held onto his hands.
“So, what am I seeing? What did you want me to see? I know what I feel, but I want to know what it means.”
My father pulled her down to a sitting position, and he pointed to one of the pebble shapes.
“It’s about potential and scale and possibility. I wanted to see what 500 billion of something looked like.”
She looked around again, confused. “There’s no way there’s that many here, right?”
“No, I had to scale back my vision. There will be 500,000, though. If each one of these pebbles represents one million, you would be looking at 500 billion.”
She nodded. “So why that number? It seems arbitrary.”
“According to the Internet, it’s what Trevor Gaines is worth.”
“Jesus. So I’m standing on eight million dollars right here?”
“Yeah. Imagine what this much money could do in the world. Imagine what half of it could do.”
“And you want me to make my next series for this man.”
“No, I want you to make your next series whatever it’s supposed to be and I want him to buy it and I want him to be changed forever by it.”
“You’ve thought a lot about this, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, I’ve not thought about much else.”
“Why?”
“I’ve had lots of time on my hands. Also, he took something that didn’t belong to him. Bodies were trapped down there… people that might have been saved while he was pulling your panels from the wreckage. And he did it for what, so he could hide them away for himself on a private island?”
That afternoon, my parents came back together. It was a quiet renewal of their vows, their undying love for each other, but it was also the resurrection of Daedalia. Neither of them knew they were bringing her back for what would be her last great series.
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Go big or go home — Lefty is a force! The daring in this is a good reminder of his vision and risk-taking all along, that he’s been an equal partner in Daedalia’s success. It also dramatizes the scale of both their ambitions. They are better together.
You should have tagged a need Kleenex warning to this one Ben! I wept from the moment Kelly arrived at the house… evidently she and Lefty are lost souls apart!