All Who Wander

Daedalia: Chapter 41

Hi folks,
We’re at the beginning of the end of this journey that started back in January. After this chapter, only two remain. It’s been a tradition with my previous novels to have a little online gathering to read the final chapter to anyone who’s been following the story and wants to join. I enjoy these so much because it’s a chance for us to have a direct connection after so many weeks of me being in a dark room and you reading or listening to them, wherever you are. I’m considering the date of Wednesday, October 21 at 4PM Eastern Time in the U.S. Would you like to attend?

This may be the last time I deliver a novel in this way, so this might be the last one of these I do. Let me know what you think.

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…

Lefty and Greta put the contract in front of Gaines in a Mill Valley café, and when he saw it demanded the 9/11 Panels, he refused outright and walked. A week later he signed a revised version: twenty million, the house deeded to Maria's family, and the panels donated upon his death. Years afterward, interviewing Greta in New York, Marabelle understood that publishing the book would put both Greta and her father at the center of the blast radius, and decided to write it anyway.

If this were one of my novels, I wouldn’t have cast Trevor Gaines in such a prominent role in the final chapters of Kelly’s life. He cheapens my mother’s story. I have taken liberties with him, even changing his name, but I didn’t erase him. He did that all on his own—disappeared—at least as of the writing of this book, he has not been found.

My father advised him not to fly his helicopter to claim his prize for two reasons: one, he could risk damaging the fragile installation, and two, seeing it from above would be a $20 million spoiler. I imagine few things surprised him anymore, and he relished the tingling sensation of being truly in awe. So he complied with the instruction, flying himself to the Santa Fe airport, then renting a car. He drove up into the foothills as the sun was coming up. He probably rolled the window down so he could feel the morning air and admire the landscape of this place he now owned a piece of. He owned many things, perhaps more than any single human being in the history of human beings, but he never tired of the feeling—the charge of possession. The feeling couldn’t be sustained, but for a flicker, it was as if he belonged, as if he mattered—as if the thing he acquired had made him whole and substantial.

The family of Mexicans, friends of the sellers, wouldn’t be allowed to move into the residence for three months. He had insisted on this condition. So he was surprised when he rounded the last big curve, reached the end of the long drive, and there was a man sitting in a pickup truck outside the gate with the wrought-iron arch above that read: MARABELLE.

The small, weathered man with a big mustache and a cowboy hat got out of the truck and greeted him.

“Mr. Gaines?”

“Yes, who are you?”

“I’m Enrique. Welcome to Marabelle. I’m here to help you get settled in. We have the guest house ready for you.”

Gaines frowned and picked up his phone, ready to call the seller to raise hell, but then thought better of it. Moody had his own troubles with the dying wife. Gaines had become fond of her. She was curious and took no shit from anyone. These were traits he admired. So he allowed Enrique to escort him onto the property he owned and permitted him to carry his small suitcase to the door of the casita. He tried to tip the man, but Enrique just smirked and shook his head.

He passed an envelope from the seller to Gaines. It had a couple of pages of instructions about the property, security codes, Wi-Fi information, and a set of keys that would allow him access to everything but the main house.

“I wrote my number on the back there. Call if you need anything.”

Then Enrique was gone.

Gaines settled into the casita. He put his clothes in the dresser drawer and arranged his toiletries on the counter in the bathroom. He undressed, took a shower, and then found some yogurt in the fridge. He ate on the small patio and surveyed the grounds. It was tastefully landscaped, he guessed, but not to his taste. There should be water features out here in the desert.

He looked up at the big house and admired its sharp angles and planes, the way it floated atop the hill. He noticed the artist’s shed and wandered over to it. The door was unlocked, so he stepped inside the cool, echoey chamber with a paint-splattered concrete floor, bare walls, and sun filtering in through the large windows at the back and through the skylight above. The wife folk artist had probably used this space. He had hoped there might be some of her art left behind. He would have liked to see it. The woman, Kelly, had stirred something in him. They had corresponded, just a few back-and-forths. She was fascinated by AI, and he had indulged her. She was a confounding combination of voracious curiosity and withering skepticism, and he recognized this as the mark of a person unafraid of being uncomfortable. He had given her access to his company’s latest model and was surprised by how much she used it at all hours of the day and night. Of course, for the purposes of improving his model, he might have read a few of the transcripts from her conversations. He would have found them to be a lot of bizarro, woo-woo stuff punctuated by queries about a range of topics from string theory to quantum physics, migration, and electromagnetism. She was a woman looking for answers to the universe. But this was a normal response for someone about to die.

He closed the door to the shed and turned to survey the rest of the grounds. He had suspended his gratification long enough. It was time to claim his prize. He made his way along the curving stone path toward the big house, crossing over the circular concrete drive that, many years before, had been a dirt track where a little girl once played with her Transformers. He climbed the first and then the second riser of stairs, and then he saw another stone path branching off to the left between some manicured junipers. He followed the path, and after a few steps, he saw the thing he had come for sprawling out before him.

It was a labyrinth, but unlike any he had ever seen, and a man of his wealth had seen his share. The grid of interlocking shapes created a geometric pattern that was both familiar and hard to fix in his mind. Unlike the traditional hedgerow variety, the walls of this one couldn’t stay still. The stiff wind blowing up from the valley caused the whole thing to breathe and undulate like a living thing, and the smell was equally complex. Earth and wood mingled with a pungent scent like spoiled fruit, and a clean, industrial smell like new construction. There were no signs or markers—no artist’s statement of any kind.

He took the stairs down to what was clearly the entrance and paused. He felt minuscule standing beside the ten-foot walls of woven branches, vines, stone, and hundreds of other materials—trash really—too much to comprehend. His engineering brain wanted to study how it all held together, but he was eager for the magic to begin.

At some point that morning, Trevor Gaines stepped inside The Walk From Me to You and began a trip from which he still hasn’t returned. No one knows how many times he entered the labyrinth, and it’s not clear that he ever came out, though he must have. Before he arrived, Gaines had requested that all the security cameras on the property be turned off so there’s no official record of what happened to him that day.

All I know is what I learned from an almost incoherent, rambling email my father received weeks later. It wasn’t addressed to him, and the sender’s email address was what appeared to be a randomly generated sequence of letters and numbers from the web domain of Gaines’s company. I was tempted to print the entire message here but, honestly, it would be a tedious and confusing read. The text was 10,352 words long, single-spaced, no paragraph breaks, all lowercase, and punctuation as random as pepper sprinkled on scrambled eggs. Perhaps it was a stream-of-consciousness dictation to his infamous artificial assistant. Maybe he just hit record and let it rip. I don’t know about these things, but I think AI would have made clearer choices and produced something that conformed to the rules of human communication. What I read in his words was something much more feral and desperate.

in the shadows i am cold— i can see her in the branches of the tree like a crow waiting to pluck out my eyeballs. i close my eyes to protect them but you can’t hide from them. what the fuck fuck fuck. i’m a king and i make the rules of the game. no i made the game and you are just pieces on my board. i know your secrets i know your lies i know what you’re afraid of i know. nobody knows me. only terry and terry and terry and… i’m cold, thirsty…

six trillion tiny switches on/off on/off on/off atoms of words of meaning of intent of purpose of creation… of course! sunlight. us boys liked to play in the abandoned lot – me and terry. he’s the smartest, bestest brother and he’s dead. dead like buried under a pile of rocks dead. the world crashed down on him. he probably tried to save people cause he would not ever be the guy to save himself first. people jumped and fell like flightless birds but he stayed…

i’d like to thank all of you for your investment in this vision of mine. we will change the world. we are changing the world. with your continued support. ha ha ha ha ha ha! i won the county science fair - plants grow 24% faster when you talk to them. i need a drink. a long, cold dark drink to sleep and sleep and sleep.

i am a rock i am an island – no! i own an island. me myself and island. they belong to me… to me! doorways into heaven and tunnels into hell and a place between where nothing happens and no one cares. no one cares except her. she cares. she cares she cares scares scares me. i am nothing but sand and bones and words.

What did he see when he walked into the labyrinth? Whatever it was changed him in some profound way. What I experienced walking through Daedalia’s final work that day with my mother probably changed me too, but I wasn’t haunted or enchanted. Maybe Gaines found what he was looking for, who knows? Maybe he ate a whole bag of mushrooms and saw the face of God before he dashed off that insane missive that showed up in my father’s inbox. Maybe he was looking for a grand exit or an excuse to disappear, or maybe he saw his chance to become part of a bigger story.

All I know of Trevor Gaines is what I’ve learned from my parents and what is public record. I never got to interview him. If I had, I would have asked him about his relationship with my mother. What was she doing? What was she reaching for with his AI? I like to believe she was smart enough not to believe the hype—that there was some ghost in the machine, some real consciousness. I have no transcripts of her conversations with Gaines’s AI. She wouldn’t be the first smart person to be seduced by the sycophantic stochastic word machine. I refuse to believe his technology is anything but, as he put it, six trillion tiny switches. But I’m not a magical person. I don’t summon words whispered to me by some ancient voice that resides in the dark soup of my unconscious mind. I’m not my mother, and this will always be a source of disappointment for me.

Three days after Gaines walked into the labyrinth, people started showing up at the gate of the place where I grew up. Enrique has said that cars lined up all the way down the road to the highway, and there were more people on foot. The license plates were local but also from neighboring states and some as far as Alabama and Connecticut. The first few showed up on the morning he stopped by Marabelle to check on Gaines. The rental car was still parked in the same place. All of Gaines’s things were still in the casita, and the bed was still made. Whether it was orchestrated or accidental, Gaines had vanished. He could have walked out into the desert landscape and wandered into a cave. He could have had one of his helicopters pick him up.

Enrique called the sheriff, and they tried to disperse the people, but there were too many, and eventually the gate was opened. People, some in groups but mostly alone, began walking through the labyrinth. It wasn’t a mob. Enrique has made that clear. He called them los peregrinos, pilgrims. They walked softly, with reverence. When they spoke, it was kind and respectful—curious. I believe this is true. I know Enrique, and I know he’s not shy about pulling out his rifle. He would never have opened the gate to a mob.

But all of this you’ve already seen. It was a phenomenon. A genuinely sensational news story that captivated the world for a few minutes. There are stories of people who traveled thousands of miles, summoned like migratory birds, to walk that acre of land. To wind their way through the walls of the living, breathing thing to find, at the center, a person of great significance to them—a childhood friend, an ex-lover, an estranged sibling. They were not all happy reunions. Some were confrontational, but to this day, no one has ever been hurt, and no crime has ever been committed in The Walk From Me to You.

It’s been five years since Gaines claimed his prize or met his maker or just abandoned his public life. Enrique and the rest of Maria’s family have become unwitting custodians of Daedalia’s final work. The property is now some cross between a National Park monument and a museum, our family home, converted for the latter, complete with a gift shop.

I would say it’s surreal, and it would be for anyone else, but for me it makes complete sense that my childhood home became both a monument to Daedalia and a lucrative business. What didn’t make sense to me is how these people, these strangers, could be called by my mother’s work. How they could wake up one day after dropping the kids off at daycare and drive a thousand miles to have an epiphany and I felt nothing.

I can’t explain any of it, which I’m sure you will find wildly unsatisfying. If anyone should have a decoder ring, it’s me. If I were a mystical person, I would subscribe to the theory that Ona was real and that my mother had found a way to cross the blood/binary barrier to port her consciousness into Gaines’s machine, and that’s how those first pilgrims received a map.

I don’t believe that.

But my belief doesn’t factor into the equation of what is real and observable. To look at something is to forever change it, and as I look back at these pages, I cringe at my fingerprints, which are pressed into every sentence that was meant to be the story of my parents.

Enjoying Daedalia? Why not order a copy of my latest novel from your local bookstore or grab it direct from my publisher, Tiny Worlds! It’s also available anywhere you buy books online. Please consider leaving a review at Goodreads. It’s the best way to help other people find my work.

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