In the Open

Daedalia: Chapter 43

Hi Friends,
After 42 straight weeks of showing up here on Monday morning, we’ve reached the end of this story. It’s been a true pleasure to write and record it, but mostly, it’s been a joy to share it with you. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy lives to go on this journey with me.

I have no idea what’s next for me except to pause and take a little time to catch my breath. For now, I hope you enjoy this last installment of Daedalia. Please leave a comment to let me know how it landed for you.

Peace & music,

Ben

This is the final chapter of Daedalia, a serialized novel. 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.

Previously…

Kelly's final journals record her conversations with Gaines's AI, which gave her a second gear and then took something from her — the discovery that the associative leap she'd built a life on was now a trivial exercise anyone could perform. She left the ranch for Black Mountain with the cancer back and untreated, burying one last object in the labyrinth on her way out. Four years later, watching strangers queue on a webcam, she and Lefty reckoned with what it had all been for.

My mother, Kelly Ann Moody died when I was away for an afternoon after having spent every day with her for two weeks. It was almost as if she had been waiting for me to leave, to shut off my recorder, and allow her some privacy.

It’s tempting to write the scene for you as if I was there. I would have been holding her hand. I would have told her everything she meant to me, and that she made me who I am. I would have told her I forgave her for Fiodor, and for her absences in my childhood. Something words cannot convey would have passed between us. She would really know me and I would finally know her. The kitten claws of the anxiety that have needled me for as long as I can remember would retract and I would be free to move through the world like I imagine most people do.

When she died I was just up the road in Asheville at a little recording studio, meeting with the producer and an actor who would be narrating my latest novel. I had come home to be with her, but I never stopped being distracted by my work, never stopped being antsy. I nearly canceled the session, but my father insisted I go. He said she would be there when I got back and that she wouldn’t want to keep me from my work. He was sitting by her side with a galley copy of the novel that would soon be published. I could hear the low, steady cadence of him reading my words to her as I closed the front door behind me.

When I returned in the early evening, the house was dark, except for the lamp in their bedroom. I knew before I stepped into the house that she was gone. It’s hard to describe in a way that you would understand it, but my mother was an invisible force to me. Like cicadas in summertime or a thundering waterfall, she was everything and everywhere at once, overwhelming the senses. So when she was gone, the quiet was profound.

I had been filled with fear, dreading the sight of her dead body, but when I did see her there it wasn’t fear I felt but a hollowness, like a cavern had opened up inside me for which there was no bottom. My mother was a small person, but in death she had somehow contracted further. She seemed like a sparrow, just wispy feathers and bones, folded into the linens. My father was holding her hand.

“She’s gone.”

I’m not sure if he said this out loud or if it was only his eyes when he looked up at me in the doorway. I know we didn’t say anything else. I’m glad he had waited to call someone. The two of us sat there together in the roaring silence of her absence trying to recalibrate our positions in the world. I was trying to summon tears or rage or anything I could grasp onto but the walls of the widening space inside me were cold and featureless as glass. I was slipping deeper and deeper into the yawning darkness below that was both familiar and terrifying. Would anything ever matter again without her there to witness it?

After her death, my mother’s journals gave me some small comfort, a way to hold onto her even as her smell and the sound of her voice were fading in my memory. Her writing was a gift and this book you’re reading would have been a shallow, speculative thing without it. It was a very late decision to weave her journal entries into the manuscript, but after her passing, I just wanted to be surrounded by her voice, and I wanted the world to know her. This is not how I do things — I’m not cavalier — but nothing you’ve read in these pages was carefully planned. There was no meticulous outline or a wall littered with index cards that I moved around like boxcars in a train yard. This book evaded my process. It tunneled under the wall.

I don’t know if any of this is what she would have wanted but she’s far beyond all that now. Even as I say that, I’m not sure I believe it. We repeat these recorded messages as if they’re true because they give us comfort. None of us really know. Maybe after shedding her chrysalis, she’s become Ona for someone else on the other side of the world. I like to believe this is true. It’s as true as any version of the story might be. Maybe by observing it and recording it here, I’ve made it so.

I thought this book was finished months ago and I had moved on. The manuscript was making its way through the gears of the big publishing house. Fact-checking, copyediting, legal, and of course, marketing. But then something happened, a coda I could never have scripted because I tend to avoid writing stories where Tom Cruise might be sprinting through a crowded Square.

The 9/11 panels reappeared.

Just as they had during that cold, quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s when I was just a girl, they announced themselves to the world a few hundred feet from their original installation.

If you haven’t traveled to New York City since the towers fell, and you haven’t seen the sprawling memorial that covers the scar from the terrible wound like a solemn mask, you might not be able to picture the setting for this last great spectacle of Daedalia. There is a corridor that was erected called the Oculus which is constructed of enormous buttresses that look like the bleached ribs of a giant beast or the teeth of an alien creature, though I’ve read that the architect’s intent was to symbolize a hand releasing a dove. The interlocking ribs enclose a cathedral-like corridor, 350 feet long that connects a couple hundred thousand commuters a day from the Port Authority to a cramped office somewhere in the bowels of the city that is their destination.

Unlike the reverent, almost holy space of the eight acres of black granite that comprises the proper memorial, the Oculus is a commercial space for elite brands to hawk their wares along its walls on digital displays. The irony of my mother’s twelve charred and bruised panels installed as fixtures through the center of the corridor like a spine is something that would never survive the sober editing pass of a first draft in one of my novels. And yet, there it is.

Of course my father was the one to relate the news to me. He called me at six AM the morning after they appeared. It was dark outside and the floors of my apartment felt like a skating rink. I looked out my window as I listened to him, his voice alive in a way I hadn’t heard it in years. The city was still, sleeping off the sugary hangover of Christmas. There was no snow. I agreed to meet him at the airport later that day.

When the driver let us out on Greenwich Street, we could already see there was a crowd.

There hasn’t been a single thing in my life I’ve anticipated and dreaded to the same extent as I did elbowing our way into the mass of humanity queuing to see this last miracle. It wasn’t Times Square on New Year’s Eve — these were all locals. The tourists had all gone back home. It took four hours just to get through the doors and then another hour before we stood in front of the first panel. Lefty had no pull here. There was no VIP experience. We were just like everyone else there — spectators, fans, pilgrims.

My father held my hand and we took the journey together. I was having trouble breathing. The pressure to move forward was physical. Everyone wanted their turn. I was torn between wanting to watch them and to have my own experience. I knew I couldn’t have the latter so I observed. My father was weeping, his face wet with tears. I worried that his weakening heart might not be able to bear it. At the third panel, an older woman in sweatpants who smelled like matzo ball soup started giggling, then laughing, clearly somewhere else because the young man in the biker jacket next to her had a look of confusion and disbelief as he peered through the lucite into the scene my mother had crafted of late spring in the city. I turned my focus back to my mother’s work or I tried. We shuffled forward, looking into the window of each panel. We moved as a single organism.

I stand apart from the world. It’s not something I choose. It’s not a quality I’m proud of, so to have this proxy of belonging was remarkable. I felt the woman’s giddiness and the young man’s apprehension and they melded into a singular, indescribable sensation and then we were all in summer together, in the park, and there was music you could feel in your chest.

At the ninth panel, my father stopped moving. I tugged at his hand but he wouldn’t budge. His jaw was slack, his eyes staring into the panel, through it. I’m not sure what he saw in the scene before us, where it transported him but I felt him being sucked into it and I was powerless to reach him. The twisted wreckage, the fire and smoke, the blood and dust, and the weak golden light weeping down from the sky is what I saw. The image moved through my eyes and into my brain and I understood it was a rendering of hell and still, I stood apart. I understood my father’s despair but I was an observer. Whatever borrowed connection I got from my proximity to the people around me had been severed.

“Dad? Dad, are you okay?”

He didn’t appear to have heard me. People moved around us like we were boulders in a stream, a stream so cold it made me numb. I was worried and embarrassed and finally resolute. I wrapped my arms around him and we stood there for so long, still part of the organism but not. He whispered something I couldn’t make out. I think he asked the question everyone there was asking: who was she?

“It’s okay,” I said. “Come on, let’s finish this.”

We barely looked at the last two panels, the ones so much has been written about. They are the most mysterious in the collection, the ones that reach the most, trying to bear witness to what comes after, beyond the disappearing point. Whether they achieve this or not is impossible to say. No two accounts of #11 and #12 are the same. I’ve gone back on several occasions, always at off times when I might have some narrow chance of being alone with them, but I won’t attempt to describe what I’ve seen. There is no point. You must experience them for yourself and I hope one day you will.

Later, back at my apartment, my father and I gorged ourselves on Chinese takeout. We drank too much wine and he told stories about me and my mom. It was like he had relaxed his grip on everything that he had been holding onto so tightly. We talked late into the night. When the last of the second bottle was finished, we settled into a relaxed pause, both of us lost in our own thoughts. I asked him the question I had been sitting on since his phone call that morning.

“Was it you, Dad?”

“The panels?” he asked. “No, sweetheart. It wasn’t me. I have no more tricks up my sleeve. Besides, do you really think I would have staged them in that place? Give me a little bit of credit. Gaines or his estate or his ghost — whoever it was took the pedestrian approach to the art of the spectacle.”

“What do you mean?”

“He leased retail space. Not very punk rock, is it?”

“If it was Gaines, if he actually did it all on his own — if it wasn’t a clause kicking in because he dropped dead, does that change it for you?”

He didn’t answer right away and I wondered if maybe he hadn’t heard me — that he was so lost in his own memories. But then he answered.

“Yeah… yeah it does.”

I nodded and smiled then got up to go to the bathroom. When I returned, my father, the conjuror of spectacles, had nodded off on the couch and was snoring. I gently eased him back on a pillow and covered him in blankets before going to my bedroom.

When I collapsed into bed, I fell asleep on contact with the pillow and dropped into an endless reel of vivid dreams. When I woke, it was late morning and a skewed rectangle of sunlight slanted across my bed. My father wasn’t on the couch. The blankets were neatly folded. There was a note scribbled on the back of an envelope in his slanted scrawl. He had gone out for a walk and to get bagels.

As I stared down at his message, my dreams from the night before lingering like ground fog, I had a stirring feeling in my gut. I went back into my bedroom and opened my closet. I got up on the stepladder and began taking down boxes. After some searching I found what I was looking for tucked into a folded-up giftbag from a birthday when I was ten. I pulled out the small, polished wooden box of postcards I hadn’t looked at since I was a girl.

I spread them out on the bed in the patch of sunlight. They were so much more vivid than I remembered. During all those months that my mother was away, the arrival of one of these postcards was both dreaded and savored. I would pour over each one for hours, draining it of the charge it carried before dropping it into the bottom drawer of my desk, never to revisit. Now, seeing them all together as a collection, they were overwhelming. The concentration of my mother, distilled into eight tiny windows into the loneliest time of my life brought tears to my eyes.

I shuffled the cards around as I studied them, tracing my fingers over her fine pen strokes. As I ordered and reordered them, a childish part of me was certain some magical transformation would happen if I cracked the code. But there was no secret message for me to decrypt. The message was there in plain sight, in every letter crafted by her small, sturdy hand.

She loved me as fiercely as she loved the work that consumed her. On that last morning at the ranch, she had walked out into the labyrinth and left one last object, some part of herself no one will ever know. But this collection of cards she had made painstakingly just for me. She had licked each stamp and placed each card in the mail where it traveled in the open, passing through many hands, a public declaration of her love for me.

Any writer, any novelist will tell you that endings are unnatural things. We cannot get them right. It is a fool’s errand to try. So this is where the story of my parents will close.

I believe my mother was magic. She had the ability to tap into the oneness that we all suspect might be there but are too busy or too blind or are too afraid to believe exists. But her gifts would have evaporated like a spilled bottle of soap bubbles on August asphalt without my father. It was his steady hand and his breath that sent her works out into the world.

Daedalia was a work of fiction that became real.

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