Vapor

by Amanda Filipacchi

  He performed the now classic throwing-of-the-Band-Aid-at-me. After I put it on my wound, he said, “Do happiness.”

  “And how would you like it prepared: with jumps in the air and screams of joy?”

  “You could.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until I say stop.”

  “In a minute or so?”

  “No. Anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.”

  “But that would be aerobics.”

  He sighed. “Do happiness. Just do it. And well.”

  I clapped my hands once and kicked my foot and said, “Life is great!” but it came out sarcastic, like the cereal tiger, and I got shot again.

  I took a deep breath and focused my thoughts and drained every drop of sarcasm from my being, and did happiness: “I’m so happy to be here,” I said. “It’s like being at a spa. It’s great to not have to go to work at the Xerox shop or at the jewelry store. It’s like attending an acting school for free, plus a gym for free, and getting delicious meals free, and cage and board free.”

  I hoped he wouldn’t shoot me for the offensive but irresistible last four words. He did frown, but I quickly rambled on to distract him: “And the anagram! What a charming way to give a present-slash-message. And the activities! I’m always in suspense as to what new and challenging method of improvement you will have concocted for me.” It may be hard to believe, but my tone didn’t contain a hint of mockery.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have anything new planned for today,” he said.

  “Well that’s okay too. This way I’ll get to enjoy the old stuff, which is still very new to me anyway.”

  “Does it bother you to do this mood?” he asked, obviously intending me to demonstrate my mood further.

  “Like yeah, it really bothers me to be staying in this gorgeous house with this gorgeous guy giving me all these acting exercises for free. Yeah, I’d much rather be wasting my life at the Xerox shop.”

  He was smiling with appreciation at my tour de force: being able to say what I really felt while still fitting into his exercise.

  He looked at his watch and said, “Hold that thought, I’ll be back in a while.” It was 1:25 P.M.

  I watched the monitors and saw him go through the same doorway as yesterday, at the same time—the doorway that led to the mysterious unfilmed place.

  He came back half an hour later, having, like yesterday, obviously cried.

  He informed me that I was not yet relieved of my obligation to “do happiness.” He brought me down to the pool and made me swim again.

  “Don’t just stay afloat; advance!”

  “I can’t,” I said. “It’s not possible.”

  “Of course it’s possible.”

  “No.”

  “Just watch,” he said, placing his gun on the shelf with the rubber ducks. He dove into the pool, and flew through the water (since moving through this airy water was more an act of flying than swimming). A moment later he was back at my side.

  He heaved himself out of the water. “The secret is to kick your feet as if you were doing the crawl, but with your arms you should do the breast stroke. Just as you would if you were flying.”

  Speak for yourself, I thought. That’s not what I would do if I were flying, and I’ve never seen anyone fly that way. Except maybe in a dream.

  “Advance,” he ordered, standing at the edge of the pool. His dripping clothes stuck to his skin. His naked body was quite visible underneath.

  “Move it,” he repeated, and shot an ice needle in my neck, which hurt less than a shard.

  I tried advancing, but he had still not allowed me to stop “doing happiness,” and it was a challenge to keep a smile on my face while I was so frightened of drowning. At one point he said, “You don’t look very happy,” and he gripped his gun and I forced a bigger smile on my face, and he said, “Yes you do, I was wrong.”

  He finally allowed me to come out. I climbed up the ladder, the smile hanging off my lips precariously.

  He said, “Was it fun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “It was exciting, so challenging and exhilarating,” I said, mustering every last drop of emotional energy I had. “No health club on earth can offer such a workout.”

  “Okay, you can stop acting happy now.”

  I hissed, “What’s in your head, you twerp? You can’t treat a human being this way. I’m a human being! Don’t you have any concept of what that means?” I was trembling from the cold and from rage. “Do you think you’re God? I never thought it would be possible to feel such hatred for anyone. I’m actually disturbed by the strength of my hatred. If I had a gun I would kill you without a moment’s hesitation. I would even kill myself, just to deprive you of me: your plaything.”

  My lips were starting to curl away from my teeth without my control: I was baring my fangs. “If I get any chance, I will kill you. Escaping is no longer enough for me.”

  I crumpled to the floor and burst into tears, in distress.

  He gently placed his hand on my shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me!” I screamed. “Your attempts to make me feel better will only make it worse.”

  “I wasn’t going to try to make you feel better,” he said softly. “I was just going to say that now I want you to do hip.”

  “What?”

  “Now act hip. Do hipness.”

  I tried to hurl myself into the pool, willing to put an end to the whole thing through drowning, but he caught me by the waist and said, “I don’t feel like rescuing you again today. Please don’t make me jump in after you. Be good.” He watched me carefully, and added, “Now, have some courage, Anna. Do hip.”

  “Can you give me a few minutes before you make me do this?”

  “That would defeat the purpose. You must do it now.”

  “Oh God how I hate you,” I said, panting. I felt like the little girl in The Exorcist, possessed by the devil. I screamed, “Die!”

  “Do hip!” he answered.

  Fury, and a sort of fever, were destroying my sanity. I was actually snarling. Like a dog. It was the first time I had ever snarled, and I didn’t know humans ever did, or could, when pushed to the limit. I crawled away from Damon, over to the wall, on my hands and feet.

  He approached me cautiously, like a tamer. He was still dripping. “Anna, be reasonable. Stop making that noise, and come to your senses. Do hip. From the moment the word leaves my lips, it is yours; you have to act it. Now or I’m going to shoot.”

  He shook the gun at me, which shook me out of my beastly state, or partly. I stared at the ceiling, desperately trying to capture an idea of what acting hip looked like. I had a firmer grasp of “cool” and hoped the two were interchangeable. I took a deep breath and plunged into what I thought might be hip behavior: I began by combing my fingers through my hair, which I did not manage very well, for my hair was wet and tangled, and my fingers got stuck.

  Damon took off his wet shirt and dropped it on the floor. It was the first time I saw him genuinely topless. He was predictably well built.

  I kept acting hip as he escorted me back to my cell.

  We changed into dry clothes, and he made me continue to act hip during stretching, jumping on the trampoline, and dinner. Then we laid down on my bed and watched Now Voyager, starring Bette Davis, and I thought I was acting hip, but he said, “You’re not sitting in a hip position. It’s a nerdy position. Sit in a hip position.”

  I shifted my legs on the bed. I bent one, and crossed my fingers on my stomach. He seemed soothed. I so wished I had a cigarette or chocolate so I could be soothed too.

  Halfway through the movie he said, “Now I want you to do slim-hipped and statuesque.”

  He was not sane, it was as simple as that. I didn’t move.

  After a minute, he said, “Aren’t you going to change your position? You can’t stay in the same position. That’s the hip position. You can’t stay in the hip position if you’re going to do s
lim-hipped and statuesque.”

  “Well maybe I’m a slim-hipped, hip, and statuesque person.”

  “I still think you should change your position.”

  I sat up a little straighter in bed and pressed my hands against my hips, as if squeezing them closer together.

  “What are you doing with your hands?” he asked.

  “Making my hips slimmer.”

  “You call that good acting? I’m not asking you to be slim-hipped, at least not right now; I’m asking you to act slim-hipped. And statuesque.”

  I thought about very skinny people, and remembered noticing the way they often sat: they sat not merely crossed-legged (with one leg simply hanging over the other), but with their leg wrapped around the other, many times, like a sort of vine.

  So I tried to do that, and it was not very comfortable, but it earned me some silence, which I assumed meant it was acceptable.

  After the movie, he left me for the night, depositing on my bed a new scene I had to learn by morning.

  I read it and was appalled and learned it.

  I chose not to turn on the TV today. I wasn’t in the mood to see what I was missing out on; the attention I was not getting; the opportunities I was not there to grab.

  I went to bed. I was absolutely exhausted, having barely slept for two days. I was intending to have a good night’s sleep to be in good shape to escape if I had an opportunity.

  I did fall into a deep sleep, but woke up in the middle of the night feeling extremely confused and disoriented, because I was all wet and getting wetter by the second. I was being rained on by a large cloud that had drifted into my cage.

  My blanket, my pillow, the mattress, and the carpet were wet. I was cold. I shouted for Damon, and sloshed over to the bars of my cell to scream some more, but I was distracted by the sight of five sparkling, dark red stones scattered at my feet. Having worked in a jewelry store, I knew before picking them up that they were garnets. Next to them was a small white card.

  Slowly and with agony, I lowered myself and picked up the stones and the card, which said:

  Dear Anna Graham,

  Don’t think I’m not aware that this is what you think of me.

  And don’t think I’m not aware that you think it’s putting it mildly.

  Follow your name to understand me.

  (7-letter word)

  Yours,

  Damon

  The cloud growled at me like a dog. As if responding to his growl, the other clouds in the house started thundering, or rumbling too.

  I shook my towel at it, to create a breeze, to make it leave, but it was big and would require a stronger breeze to budge it.

  Or the opposite, I thought, suddenly struck with an idea. All monsters had their weakness, their particular requirement for being killed: vampires needed a stake through the heart or exposure to the sun; the living dead had to be burned, I think, or decapitated; and clouds needed to be dealt with, with … a particular household appliance I happened to have in my cell.

  I took the vacuum cleaner out of the closet, plugged it in, turned it on, and lifted it in the air, aiming its mouth at the cloud.

  The vacuum let me down once again. Its suction power was no more effective than its dust in fighting my enemies. The cloud was not being sucked in, and kept raining on my bed. I threw the vacuum aside.

  I needed my escape rest. I looked for a dry patch of carpet on which to sleep, and found one under the monitors. I got some towels to use as blankets. I also took my poor nude pen and a pad, to try to solve the anagram Damon had left me, in case it came in handy to know what he thought I thought of him.

  It took me fifteen minutes to figure out that the anagram for garnets was strange. I would have been better off getting my sleep.

  Which is what I then tried to do, but failed. I was not used to sleeping on the floor, pillowless. I needed my bed, and since the cloud seemed to have finished relieving itself on it, I took down the plastic shower curtain, spread it over my wet mattress, and laid on it. Eventually, I wrapped myself completely in the shower curtain when the cloud started drizzling on me again.

  Listening to the sound of the raindrops on the plastic, and hoping I wouldn’t die of suffocation breathing that hot, humid, scarcely oxygenated air, I finally managed to fall asleep inside the shower curtain.

  Chapter Ten

  When I told him I had been rained on during the night, Damon was horrified and apologized profusely, saying he should have checked the weather forecast in the living room before going to bed. Despite his remorse, he forced me to keep doing “slim-hipped and statuesque” all through breakfast and through the ensuing bicycling session. Then he told me to switch to nerdy without even giving me a short break during which I could insult him. I had to do nerdy through swimming, jumping on the trampoline, calisthenics, and half of lunch, when he said I could stop, and I was able to insult him to my heart’s content while, using spoons, we ate small portions of delicious healthy pasta cut in short strands. And then he interrupted me in the middle of a new insult, and said gently, “You look a little gloomy.”

  I was stunned by this absurd understatement. I opened my mouth to utter some stinging retort, but noticed the orange plastic barrel of his gun pointed at me, and I replied instead, “Yes, I’m depressed about our daughter, Anna. It upsets me that she’s such a failure.”

  “I know, I feel the same way,” he said, “but we should try not to think about it.”

  I recited stoically: “Moderate failure would be one thing. But such monumental failure. It’s heart-wrenching. She hasn’t managed to get one acting job, not one penny earned from acting, just classes and Xeroxing and piercing. I don’t understand what’s wrong with her. I dread it when my friends ask me what Anna is up to. I actually feel embarrassed for having nothing of interest to relate. And I hate myself for feeling ashamed. And I hate myself for even admitting this now.”

  “You’re just being honest. I feel the same way. John O’Connor was telling me the other day about the various accomplishments of the sons and daughters of our unit owners, and then he asked what our children were up to. I told him about our son’s graduation and his great job, and I hoped he would leave it at that, not ask about Anna, but he did. In fact, he said, ‘And that daughter of yours? That promising one? That ambitious one?’ It was really uncomfortable. I felt like a fool.”

  “It’s unfair,” I said, “that a decent man like you should have to endure that kind of interaction. We don’t deserve this. I often resent Anna for her failure. Her failure is our failure, and how can it not make us feel like bad parents? John O’Connor is right: Anna had so much promise. It’s ironic that our son is the one who made something of himself. At first it looked so different.”

  “Yes, but it does no good to dwell on it. We should think of pleasant things,” concluded Damon as my father. Then, Damon as Damon didn’t wait a moment to say, “Wood! You were wood! Wooden, wooden, wooden. You are wood when you’re supposed to be water. You were not as good as yesterday. We’ll have to do it again later. You obviously didn’t like the scene and didn’t make much effort to hide the fact. You must be more convincing, more fluid, more liquidy.”

  I had a floating sensation. My body felt as if it had lost its physicality and turned into an emotion: hate. I couldn’t speak, and I had no need to speak. I gazed at him, and I was hate.

  We sat staring at each other, me with my hatred, and he closely observing it, as if measuring it, even appreciating it.

  Finally, he slowly and deliberately broke the silence: “Now I want you to act telepathic.”

  I acted telepathic. He watched me doing it for five minutes, and then looked at his watch. I looked at mine. It was 1:23 P.M. He stared at me, as if waiting for me to say something. I just stared back at him.

  “You see,” he said, “this would have been a good moment for you, since you’re doing telepathic, to say, ‘You are now thinking of leaving for a little while.’ Too bad, you missed a good opportunity.�
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  He got up and started walking out, and I said, “You’re intending to come back in half an hour, and you will have cried like a baby—a baby automaton who cries every day at the same time when plugged in.”

  “Better late than never,” he said, and left.

  I took up my position in front of the monitors, and sure enough he went into the same unfilmed space, and came back half an hour later having cried.

  As for the blasted scene in which I expressed my disappointment with my daughter Anna, he made me do it again during an unexpected session of swimming in the watair. I almost drowned.

  While I relaxed in my cell for a short while in the afternoon, I saw an astonishing program on TV. Geraldo was doing a “special” about the Pursued Woman. The count had risen to fifty-three since I had last watched the news two days before. Fifty-three women pretending to be me. And Geraldo had invited the thirty most plausible candidates, offering them an opportunity to prove their authenticity on his show. The audience was to decide which one was the real pursued woman. It made me sick and gave me all kinds of unpleasant symptoms.

  The women were required to do two things: (1) Be filmed from the back while they ran from the front to the back of the stage. (2) Explain why they had been pursued by Chriskate Turschicraw.

  I turned off the TV to soothe my symptoms. Thirty seconds later I turned it back on and watched what could have been my life. Not that it was that glamorous to have the jiggle of one’s running butt analyzed, evaluated, and compared to the jiggle of the butt on the original footage. But still, it could open doors.

  After the butt evaluation, they voted. And then came the explanation category, where the women told their stories, most of which were banal. Some were far-fetched, without, however, significantly sacrificing their banality. What would the audience have thought of my story: Chriskate, in love with a man in love with me. She wants to study me, to be like me. It was the best story. It was unguessable.

  Then the final vote took place. The woman who won was called Armory Jude. She didn’t look like me at all.