The Walk From Me To You

Daedalia: Chapter 39

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…

Trevor Gaines prepared a dinner at his Montana house, expecting an easy evening and a background report on a boring folk-artist housewife. Kelly disarmed him from the handshake on, pressing him on the panels' authenticity and on what a man who owns everything still wants, which drew out his admission that seeing the panels had changed him and he'd never shaken the feeling.

By the end of the weekend, after the snow had melted enough for my parents to fly back home, I think my father was more than ready to be free of Gaines’s company.

I’ve improvised the night of the dinner because I couldn’t help myself. The more I read about Trevor Gaines’s eccentricities, the more irresistible I found him as a subject. But I will return to observable facts for what followed that weekend.

My mother, despite her best efforts, succumbed to the billionaire’s attention. She denied the extent to which Gaines had won her over. She told herself it was research, that she was a spy courting a mark to better find his soft underbelly, so she could properly set the hook. Certainly, there was truth to this, but when a man like Gaines, with so much power and influence, trains his beam on you, it’s enough to make anyone blind for a time.

On my visits home, there was accumulating evidence of Gaines’s influence. The Windows laptop covered in paint-splatter that she had used for a decade to check her email once or twice a week had been replaced by a sleek aluminum laptop she fiddled with daily. Gaines was teaching her, giving her an informal apprenticeship with access to what she came to think of as his magic book of spells. With the right combination of words, she could cast a spell to do almost anything she could imagine. For someone with her expansive mind and contracting physical range of motion, it’s easy to see how she was seduced by Gaines and his technology.

My father was increasingly more worried every time we spoke. After decades together, he had mostly acclimated to her mercurial nature, but this new metamorphosis was a whole world apart. She had retreated deeper inside herself. All the energy she had thrown into the act of conjuring her visions to life had turned inward. Lying next to her at night, he could feel it, whirring like the hum of an industrial-size refrigerator. He feared she would give up their secret or that Gaines had already figured it out. He feared another Fiodor entering their lives, but one infinitely more powerful and dangerous. But mostly, I think he understood he was losing her. Her health was deteriorating, but she absolutely refused to go to doctors, so it would be another couple of years before there was an official diagnosis.

He stayed close to home and tried not to hover, tried to give her the space she needed to work, but she wasn’t working, at least not in the way she always had. To fill up his days, he began tinkering on the landscaping project she had mostly abandoned in the backyard. At first, he was just tidying up, stabilizing the structures my mother had begun to arrange. He studied and began to intuit the pattern. He was old and had to move slowly, but there was something driving him, compelling him.

When I was home for a long weekend, I looked out my bedroom window and saw him out there early one morning. The Walk From Me to You, the most ambitious and final work of Daedalia’s career, looked nothing like what it would become. That morning, it appeared as something between a life-size topographic map and a labyrinth if the walls were only a couple of inches high and constructed of small sandstone pebbles, twigs, and scrubby clumps of juniper and piñon pine. Much like the spidery under-drawings my mother did in pencil when working on a canvas, she had sketched out the structure of the entire acre of concrete using available material.

I dressed, made a cup of coffee for myself and one for my father before walking down the slope behind our house to join him.

“Well, you’re up early, sunshine,” he said. “That for me?”

I handed him the mug and he took a sip.

“So, what are we doing here, Mr. Lefty?” I tried doing my best impression of Enrique.

“I’m not exactly sure, but I feel like I’ve got to do something.”

“You could have taken up golf.” I surveyed the expansive plane before returning my gaze to him. “You look tired but also… inspired.”

“Yeah, it’s weird.”

“Is Mom subcontracting you, or is this now your baby?”

“I’m really not sure what our arrangement is at this point.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the work or their marriage, and I didn’t ask for him to clarify. It didn’t matter anyway. The line between the two had always been fuzzy at best.

“So, what exactly are you doing out here today?”

“I’m uh… not exactly sure. Pushing rocks around. You want to help me? Put your education to work?”

“I’m not sure my MFA qualifies me for landscape engineering.”

“Spoken like a real genuine lazy ass. Here, you can use this shovel, professor.”

I worked alongside him for a couple of hours, maybe three, before making up an excuse about needing to get some pages to my editor before the afternoon. I followed his lead and we walked the labyrinth, sometimes following the path, other times ignoring it and tacking a vector to a point clear in my father’s mind where he would stop and begin to build up a section of wall then send me off with the wheelbarrow to collect more rocks and dirt. It seemed like the most futile thing to do, constructing this thing, this crumbling maze of debris, but it didn’t intimidate him. He paused only to drink some water or stretch his back. He worked all day, and my mother said that had become his routine. My parents were as weird as ever.

Over the next five years, in my own haphazard time-lapse movie of visits home, I would see the labyrinth evolve into what it eventually became. It was a magic trick devised and executed in broad daylight. The walls, once an organized pile of sticks and rubble, rose into ten-foot barricades built from whatever the world had already thrown away. Reclaimed lumber. Salvaged doors and window frames. Brick and cinder block pulled from demolition piles. Rusted, corrugated tin and bent chain-link. Burlap feed sacks and canvas stretched taut like sailcloth, stitched and patched and re-stitched when the wind tore it.

And stone, so much stone. Smooth river rock from dry creek beds in the mountains. Jagged shale and slate, the detritus from strip-mining operations. Chunks of limestone and granite scavenged from old quarry tailings and roadside dumps, the kind of heavy leftovers nobody wants to haul. Some came from nearby arroyos and dry washes. Others arrived in the beds of pickup trucks and borrowed trailers, traded for favors, delivered by friends who had heard, vaguely, that Lefty and Kelly were “building something.”

My mother planted the seeds and communicated the vision, but, in her steadily weakening state, couldn’t participate in much of the construction. Lefty took up the role of general contractor. There was much less concern over secrecy and security. They were both getting too old to care, and the phenomenon of Daedalia had diminished in the public psyche. My father blamed the internet and social media. He claimed that short videos tuned to tickle the amygdala had eroded any motivation for people to leave the couch, much less be enchanted by real art made by an actual person. These people would never see Daedalia talking about her process as she mugged for the camera through an AI filter that made her ten years younger. Daedalia would never make content.

These were the things my parents talked about over dinner — the machines devouring the world. But later, in the shed where she used to stand before huge canvases, urging a brush thick with paint, she would sit on the old couch, hunched over a glowing screen, tinkering late into the night.

She retreated further into herself, but when I could get her to talk to me, the conversation almost always found its way back to artificial intelligence. Depending on the day, she would either spiral into a swirling diatribe of conspiracy theories about how we were already living in a simulation, or she would tell me with great excitement about how Ona had finally been given a voice — they could actually talk — and as a result, were making untold breakthroughs. I tried to be patient with her, but the moment she drifted in either direction, I found myself getting angry, not at her exactly, but at how easily she was able to float away or disappear through a wall I couldn’t follow. The best I could muster was to distract myself, let her ramble, and offer the occasional interesting or uh-huh to keep from hurting her feelings.

One of the last times I visited the ranch before the big project was complete and Daedalia was officially retired, I sat with my mother at the center of the labyrinth. The stones still held the day’s heat, and the late light slanted low across the walls, catching on the uneven surfaces and throwing long shadows.

“How does it feel to be finished?” I asked.

“Is that what you think—that I’m finished?”

“I meant with this project for Gaines.”

“I know what you meant, sweetheart. But it’s not finished. Nothing is ever finished.”

I braced myself for another rambling metaphysical conversation but promised myself I would try to be present. This might be the last time I would be here with her, at my childhood home.

“You don’t like it, do you?” she asked.

“That’s not true, Mom. I just don’t understand it. You operate on a level I can’t access, and it makes me feel like I’m missing something—standing outside, looking in. What is it? Why are you smiling?”

“Because you are more my daughter than you have any idea.”

“So if the project isn’t complete, what will complete it?”

“When people start showing up. But you already know this, right? When you finish writing one of your books, does it really feel complete until a reader has cracked the spine and taken the journey you imagined for them?”

We sat in silence for a few minutes. As I turned her words over in my mind, my thoughts drifted instead to my latest writing project and a character who still refused to prove they had any real dimension. My mother spoke again.

“Does it make you sad that we’re giving up this place, your home?”

“Honestly, I’m not very sentimental about it.”

“I’m sorry, honey. We never made it a proper home for you. You deserved normal parents. But you got me and Lefty.”

From a different parent, these words would have been a serve that required a return, which would lead to a simpering volley of self-flagellation and reassurances until the ball lost the will to keep crossing the net and it just rolled off the court. But neither of us had the stomach or stamina for such sport. We both knew what she said was true, and I could hear in the tone of her voice that she was sorry. We let the wind teasing a loose flap of canvas on a wall somewhere in the labyrinth behind us fill the space.

“What did you mean when you said people will come?” I asked. “Is there some kind of launch event planned?”

“Hell, I wouldn’t know. That’s not my department,” she said. “But people will come. You’ll see.”

“Because Ona has made it so, I’m guessing.”

“It’s okay that you think I’m delusional. After all, it’s my natural state. But sooner or later, my love, you’ll have to recognize the truth that there’s a whole universe of things we can’t see or touch, and that unknowable universe is just as real—maybe more real than the one we’re so convinced by.”

That probably wasn’t her last entreaty to me on this subject, but it’s the one anchored in my memory, probably because of the place where we had the conversation. In the moment, I knew I was recording. It’s a necessary but annoying habit for writers. I understood the significance of us sitting at the center of her last great work, the terminus of her spiraling journey inward.

We sat until a fiery afterglow was all that remained of the day, the blood red-orange of a ripe peach fading into a pitch sky salted with stars.

“Should we go inside?” I asked.

“Yes, let’s.”

We stood and she took my hand in hers. For a moment I felt a swell of emotion so deep, I couldn’t touch the bottom. It was the absolute, unyielding terror all children know.

“Do we have to walk out separately, like we came in?”

“No, not if you don’t want to. Mare, are you okay, honey?”

“I’m scared, Mom.”

She didn’t ask why. She pulled me to her and I buried my face in the hollow of her collarbone. I breathed her in and clung to her, trying to somehow find a hold I’d never been able to secure. At close range, able to hide my face, I bled out all my hurts, anxieties, and fears, too numerous and ambiguous to catalog here. She absorbed them all into her little body. Her calloused hands, so small and sturdy, kneaded and smoothed the knotted ropes in my back as she whispered affirmations and rocked me gently back and forth. For however long we stood this way, I felt the full radiance of her attention. After I’d stopped crying, she pulled away so she could see my face.

“What is it you’re most afraid of, sweetheart?”

“I’m afraid of losing you before I ever really got to know you.”

“You know me better than anyone.”

“But I don’t, Mom. I don’t see what everyone else sees in your art, and I want to so badly. I want to be part of that world. I want to feel what they feel. I want to know you in that way. Why can’t I? What’s wrong with me?”

“Marabelle, you can’t see the magic because you are the magic.”

It was a tender and loving thing to say, and I knew it wasn’t true. There was a wall between me and the magic she spoke of. Maybe it was for my protection. Maybe I manifested it, or maybe she had. Regardless of how or why, I was immune to the spell Daedalia cast.

In a few months’ time, one of the wealthiest men in the world would wind his way through this labyrinth. He would be chased by jackals and confronted by demons of his own making. He would claim he saw the face of God and spoke with his dead father. He would enter many times, and each time emerge as a different man. A man transforming. Shedding layers.

But that night my mother and I walked hand in hand along the twisting path she’d fashioned on the foundation my father had poured. There were no jackals or demons. We got lost a couple of times. I jumped at my own reflection in the fragment of a mirror, and we both giggled like girls.

In time, we found our way out, guided by the light of the stars so still, bright, and steady.

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