Vapor

by Amanda Filipacchi

  Dear Anna Graham,

  I hope that these are not too unbearable.

  I’m sorry to be giving them to you,

  But with them will come more beauty.

  Follow your name to understand me.

  (5-letter word)

  Yours,

  Damon

  At first I didn’t understand. Roses were not “unbearable.” At least not to most people.

  Then I realized it was a puzzle. As if I didn’t have enough stress already.

  It was a word game, an anagram, of the word roses, which I was supposed to figure out, and which I did. The answer was sores. I reread his note and it made a lot more sense now. It felt good to know he felt guilty about my aching body. Maybe tomorrow he would be more gentle with his exercises and with his shards. I went back to bed feeling less vulnerable, thinking my complaining had worked.

  I ate the banana and yogurt he had left.

  Chapter Nine

  Again, I didn’t sleep that night. At 6:30 A.M. the alarm rang, and I started my escape plan.

  First, I donned armor: I put on my jeans, wrapped a towel around each of my legs, and put on two pairs of sweatpants over them. I wore every top I had: two T-shirts, a turtleneck, and a sweater, after wrapping a hand towel around one arm and the bath mat around the other. I stuffed my pillow under my sweater to protect my torso. Finally, I wrapped a sheet around my head and face, leaving just my eyes uncovered, and a hole to breathe through.

  As for a weapon, I took the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and scooped the dust out of its bag. I replaced the vacuum in the closet, and checked Damon on the monitors. He was already in the kitchen making breakfast.

  I carefully took the dust in my arms and carried it like a baby into the bathroom. It was actually the size of a baby. I stepped into the bathtub, closed the shower curtain, and waited.

  It didn’t take long for Damon to arrive. He knocked on the bathroom door for a while before opening it. He drew back the shower curtain. I shoved the dust in his face, leaped out of the tub, and tried to grab his gun on my way out, but failed. I rushed to the cell door. He hadn’t locked it. I had noticed the day before that sometimes he didn’t bother locking the cage after entering it; he didn’t need to, since he had his water gun to control me. But no longer, now that I had my padding. I ran out of the room and down the hallway. Rather, I wobbled (my cushiony armor made me into a very fat person). My aching muscles didn’t help things. The bath mat was sliding out of my sleeve. I hopped down the stairs, and by the time I had reached the bottom step, Damon had reached me. He dragged me back upstairs, flung me in the cage with him, locked it, sat me down at the breakfast table, and screamed, “Eat!”

  The breakfast consisted of unappetizing whole grain sugarless cereal with skim milk, toast without butter or jam or honey. And orange juice.

  I wanted to tell him that I was dying without sugar, that I couldn’t act if I didn’t eat sugar, that if I ate sugar, I was alive. But it didn’t feel like the right time.

  I ate through the breathing hole in the sheet.

  After we had finished, he looked at his watch and made me sit on a pillow on the floor, with my back against the bars of my cell and my hands behind my back. He handcuffed my wrists to the bars and tied my legs together. He took out of his bag two pieces of cloth that looked like scarves, made of the same thin and transparent material as his clothes, and tossed them next to me. They fluttered lightly to the floor. He could strangle me with them. Or hang me.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  He left the room. From where I was sitting, I could only make out some indistinct movement on the monitors, which occasionally traveled from one screen to the next. I waited. Damon hadn’t made me take off my armor yet. The pillow under my sweater protruded in front of me like a huge beer belly. I was hot.

  An hour and a half went by, and then the doorbell rang, which first stunned me, and then threw me into a state of intense turmoil. Damon rushed into my cell and roughly pulled the sheet off my head. He picked up one of the silk scarves and shoved it in my mouth, and wrapped the other one over my mouth, tying it tightly behind my head. I gagged. My nose started running from my choking.

  Someone was coming in the house, and if only I managed to make enough noise, I might get their attention. As soon as Damon left the room, I tried screaming, but the only thing that came out was a hum. I tried different pitches of humming, hoping one would be louder than the others, but they all came out at about the same volume. I tried banging my feet against the floor. I tried getting up, but a horizontal bar was preventing the handcuffs from sliding up. I tried banging my head back against the bars, but did not do it more than once—the sound was small and the pain big. I went back to humming frantically. My throat started hurting, and I choked at intervals, and my nose ran more, but I never actually threw up inside my mouth, which pleasantly surprised me. And then I heard voices of men. I stopped humming for a moment, but couldn’t make out anything they were saying. I banged my head against the bars once more. The voices faded. I cried. I forced myself to stop that, however, because my nose was getting clogged and I couldn’t breathe.

  Five minutes later Damon opened the door and ungagged me. This was too bad because it meant the man, or men, was gone. But I screamed anyway, just in case. Damon did not seem to care, which confirmed my fear that they were gone, but I continued, in case he was bluffing, which I knew was illogical, but I wanted to be thorough.

  “It’s okay,” he finally said, “you don’t have to keep screaming. They’re gone.”

  “Who were they?”

  “The deliverymen.”

  I was still handcuffed on the floor, but by twisting my head I glimpsed a big machine in the doorway. Perhaps a torture device.

  I was not entirely wrong. It was the bicycle, the recumbent bicycle.

  “This is so exciting,” said Damon, pushing the massive, electronic device into my cell. He positioned it facing the TV monitors and plugged it in the wall.

  Sitting on it, he said, “The pedaling is so smooth.” He pressed various buttons, lighting up the screen.

  Removing my handcuffs, he told me to go change into more comfortable—and fewer—clothes. I felt sad and defeated in the bathroom, as I took off my armor amid the dust.

  Damon then made me pedal on the bike and told me to keep pedaling until the screen had indicated that I had burned eight hundred calories.

  “Eight hundred calories! But that’s two or three hours of bicycling!” I said, horrified. I knew this because I occasionally went to a friend’s gym and used the bikes there.

  “It’s two hours, at the level I’m setting it to. When I come back in an hour, you better’ve burned four hundred calories. If you haven’t, I’ll be very mad and you will deeply regret it. Now I’m going to do some work in my lab. Pedal well.”

  I pedaled, watching the calories add up on the screen and wishing I had a cigarette. Or chocolate, to give me energy. I watched him on a TV monitor, futzing in his lab. I became absorbed by what he was doing.

  He took the glass covers off the clouds he had made yesterday and experimented on them. I assume they were experiments, unless he was just trying to kill time.

  After an hour, he came in to check on me and saw that I was right on schedule, calorie-wise.

  As he was about to return to his lab, I asked him, “Why were you hitting your clouds with raquets?”

  He seemed taken off-guard. “I was testing the density of my clouds by checking the speed at which they go through the grooves of the racquet. I was comparing the speeds, or resistance, of the different clouds.”

  “And why were you sucking them up with eye-droppers and turkey basters?” I asked, panting from the exertion of bicycling while talking.

  “I was again testing their density.”

  “And why were you stomping on them, sitting on them, and trying to slice them with a knife?”

  “I was mad because my clouds were not as dense as I ha
d hoped.”

  “Why were you sitting on the floor with fans blowing around you?”

  “I was trying to think of the solution.”

  “To what?”

  He looked at me with a puzzled air. “To increasing their density.”

  “How do you expect to do that?”

  “By changing the way the water is whipped. I told you my bonsai clouds are created by mixing the water in a particular way, with my whipping machine. It’s a sort of blender. I can make the blending prongs blend in different positions, create different patterns and combinations of whipping, and vary the speed of whipping.” He paused, then told me more: “Whipping is like knitting. It stitches the cloud together, but with floating stitches. I want to figure out how to make the stitches stronger, while retaining their lightness. I spent the last three years of my life trying different speeds and whipping patterns, in the hope of making the cloud’s fabric more tightly knit.”

  “How dense do you want to make your clouds?”

  “I want to make them solid.”

  “Why?”

  “It would be nice.”

  “Do you, by any chance, want them to carry things?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “You want them to carry you, don’t you! You’ve been too influenced by children’s books, where people float on clouds. You’re crazy. How could you think it’s possible? Clouds are less dense than water.”

  “Why do you have to be negative? I’m not negative about your dream of becoming an actress. Why would you be negative about my chances of finding the right way to whip water?”

  “Have you tried anything other than changing the way the water is whipped?”

  “Of course. I’ve tried everything I could possibly think of. I’ve tried mixing the clouds with various chemicals. I even tried mixing them with things like blood, spit, pus, sweat, tears … hair. I’ve spent entire days just thinking, trying to figure out what I must do to the clouds to make them solid. I went to a health food specialist and asked him what vitamins I should take and what foods I should eat to make myself more scientifically imaginative and intelligent. I think I must have a nutritional deficiency of some sort, or be lacking in a vitamin, that is preventing me from coming up with the solution. Or maybe I have a chemical imbalance.”

  “Because you can’t make clouds solid.”

  “Yes.” He sat on the floor, facing me and the bars. “You can stop pedaling, by the way; I see you’ve just about done the eight hundred calories. I even tried talking to my clouds, to convince them to get more solid, that it’s a better life being solid, it’s more fun to have substance.”

  I stared. He looked vulnerable sitting on the floor, his legs spread open into a perfect split. He was stretching.

  He went on: “There were times I felt my sanity slipping, like when I tried mixing them with smoke, darkness, and smells.” He looked uneasy, and added: “When my sanity slipped even more, I tried mixing clouds with boredom, envy, tendency, and the notion of extremes. But I’m not giving up. I will make it. I must.”

  “Why must you?”

  “Because I want to. No special reason other than great desire.”

  What followed was an unpleasant stretching session for an hour. He kept repeating, “Flexibility is freedom.” He kneaded his chewing gum between his fingers, saying that I should try to be as flexible as the gum. When I didn’t stretch far enough, he spurred me on by shooting ice needles at me or sometimes only ice threads that were so thin they felt like what I imagined acupuncture was like. Toward the end of the session he made a little sculpture out of his gum, and presented it to me on the palm of his hand. It was a face, which vaguely resembled mine, but more attractive; a young Elizabeth Taylor without the slight squashing. When we had finished gazing at it, Damon threw the face in his mouth and said, “Flexibility is not only freedom. It is beauty.”

  He allowed me to rest while he went out and bought a dinky trampoline.

  During lunch we had an argument that began when I said, “You are wasting your time and mine by keeping me here. You’ll never be able to improve my acting. I’m either meant to succeed or fail as an actress, but you won’t make any difference as to the outcome.”

  “Let me tell you that you sure seemed to be heading for failure when I met you. And you knew it. If I hadn’t come along, ten years from now you’d still be struggling.”

  “First of all, let me remind you that you did not come along: I came along. And if I hadn’t come along, you might be dead! Which is what I now wish with all my heart had happened.”

  “Perhaps I would be dead. But what is more important—not just to you but also to me—is that you would be a failure, and unhappy.”

  I was enraged. And I couldn’t think of a good comeback. So finally, I just passionately, childishly, repeated, “Well you would be dead!”

  “Honey, you know who that was that just walked by?”

  For a second I thought he was delirious. But then he pointed his gun at me, and it jogged my memory: he was reciting the first line of the scene he had given me to learn the night before.

  I snorted at his timing. He was shamelessly taking advantage of the situation, of his position of power, by choosing this moment to do the scene. I told him I thought his scene was stupid, and he said there was no talking about scenes beforehand. He threatened to shoot me if I did.

  “Honey,” he repeated, “do you know who that was that just walked by?”

  “Who?” I recited.

  “Anna Graham.”

  “The actress? Are you sure?”

  “Yes. She looked straight at me.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than me?” I asked, feeling like a moron.

  “I really couldn’t say. Why would you ask such a thing?”

  “Answer me.”

  “Maybe slightly. But it’s not her looks that make her so appealing as an actress. She has an amazing personality.”

  “Better than mine?”

  “Better than ninety-nine percent of the population’s.”

  “Does that mean it’s better than mine or not?”

  “Well, it’s better than almost anyone’s.”

  “But better than mine or not?”

  “If your personality is better than ninety-nine percent of the population’s, then no, hers is not better than yours.”

  “Is my personality better than ninety-nine percent of the population’s?”

  “Who can say.”

  “You can. You just said hers was, so you can tell me if mine is.”

  “Listen. She’s an actress, a frequent indicator of charm and charisma; you run a copy shop, a frequent indicator of … probably many qualities, but not specifically charm and charisma. Draw your own conclusion.”

  “Would you sleep with her if you could?”

  “Probably not.”

  “What do you mean probably not? That means maybe?”

  “I don’t know. It would depend on how you felt about it.”

  “That means if I said okay, you would do it? You would want to? You would want to sleep with someone else?”

  “She’s not just someone else. She’s a great movie actress. That makes it more okay, more excusable, if not acceptable, don’t you think? I mean, you could then feel proud to have a boyfriend who had slept with Anna Graham. You’d think to yourself: he was good enough for her, so he must be pretty damn good; you know, a pretty good catch. Don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t think. And I don’t think things are working out between us.”

  He clapped. “I’d say that was a good beginning. And you learned your lines perfectly. I’m very pleased. We should celebrate.”

  “That was the most stupid scene I’ve ever heard. Even pornographic movies don’t have lines as bad as yours. But then again, you are the weatherman passing off as someone who knows anything about acting, so why am I surprised?”

  “Your passion and earnestness are
funny. I could listen to them all day, but we should move on to other things.”

  “That’s it? Aren’t you going to teach me now, and critique my performance? Isn’t that what this is supposed to be about?”

  He shrugged. “I thought you were fine.”

  “You’re keeping me prisoner for this? Boy, that’s really useful for me to know, that I was fine. I can feel the Oscar getting closer, you pathetic fraud.”

  “I like your mood right now. It’s an extraordinarily ripe mood. Ripe for a contrast. I can feel the creation of the new mood simmering within me. It’s almost ready. I’ve got it! Your new mood is happiness. Pure and basic. I want you to do happiness. Now … do it …” He said this like a fashion designer who visualized red as being the color for the next season.

  “What are you blabbering about, you idiot?” I snapped.

  He laughed. I didn’t.

  “In other words,” he said, “I want you to act happy. I’ve given a lot of thought to what kinds of acting exercises you should do. I came up with this one, which will consist of me ordering you, unexpectedly and with no warning, to act out a certain mood, or a state of being, or to adopt a personality trait. Now is the time for happiness.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Oh, come now, do we have to go through the whole gun and threat process? Can’t we skip it and take it for granted?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Okay, good, I think you agree. Now please do happiness.”

  It was pointless to resist. “I’m happy,” I said, stiff-lipped.

  He laughed. “You’ll have to do a lot better than that.”

  “I’m so happy,” I said dully.

  He aimed his gun at me. “Well I’m not. You’re going to have to make it at least ten times better.”

  “I’m ecstatic?”

  He shot me in the thigh. I screamed with pain and indignation. I was shocked, shocked, that he would shoot me over that. I plucked out the shard and threw it in his face.