Vapor

by Amanda Filipacchi

  That evening, during dessert (fruit salad), Damon made me do “jumping to conclusions,” which immediately gave him the idea to make me do it while jumping on the trampoline. I actually rather enjoyed doing “jumping to conclusions,” because it was not so far removed from my natural inclination in my current situation. Unfortunately, Damon realized this right away and made me instead act “tanned.” Having never noticed that tanned people had a particular way of acting, all I could think of doing was rolling up my sleeves and my sweatpants, to show off my “tan.” I also caressed and gazed at my bare arms and legs to show I was enjoying my “tan.” And I spoke in a slightly languorous way, assuming for some reason that tanned people were more languorous, having laid out in the sun all day.

  He then left me to relax for an hour, saying we would watch a movie when he returned.

  Of course, I knew he would expect me to still be tanned when he came back. I hated doing tanned. I thought about how much nicer “jumping to conclusions” had been, and I decided I would do it again in the future whenever I felt like it.

  Suddenly, I was appalled at myself for thinking this way. There was no future for me in this house. I could not let there be a future.

  It frightened me that I did not feel more horror, more panic, more agony; I had accepted my predicament. It was this realization that finally awoke the full extent of my horror.

  I rolled down my sleeves and my pants. I would not be tanned when he came back. I would let him shoot me. I would endure the shards as long as I could, or the ice blades, or boiling bullets, or whatever, even if they brought me near death. But I would not do tanned again. Nor any other state of being.

  I waited, feeling nervous, but also brave and invigorated, like Joan of Arc or Antigone.

  When he came back, he chatted about this and that and did not even notice I had stopped acting tanned, which just showed how absurd the whole thing was. Without telling me that I could stop acting tanned, he told me to do “realist.”

  I stared back at him and firmly said, “No.”

  He sighed and rolled his eyes. “I don’t have much patience anymore for the whole threats process. From now on I’m skipping the threats and going straight to the shooting. Now do realist.”

  “No. You can shoot me all you want, until I look like a porcupine and die. I will never do realist or ever again obey any of your orders.”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that. It’ll hurt your pride when you cave in and do realist after a couple of shards. Spare your pride. Do realist.”

  “No. I’ve never cared much about my pride.”

  “I’m not kidding. Do realist.”

  “No.”

  He shot me in the arm. I barely flinched.

  “Do realist,” he said.

  “No.”

  He shot me again, in the breast. This one hurt a lot and I did murmur “Ow.”

  “Do disobedient,” he said.

  Ah, a trick. If I said “no,” I would be obeying him. How to dodge it? No way to. It didn’t matter, I wouldn’t play his game.

  “No,” I said.

  “Good. Now do stoic.”

  “No.”

  “Excellent. Now do realist.”

  “No.”

  He was starting to look pained. I could see him trying to decide on a body part to shoot, away from the other wounds. He shot me in the shoulder. That one hurt a lot too and I said “Ow” again.

  “Do realist.”

  “No.”

  He shot me a tablespoon of boiling water in the stomach.

  “Ow.”

  “Do realist.”

  “No.”

  He raised his gun to shoot, but then lowered it. He slowly turned away and walked out of the cage with his head hanging, not forgetting of course to lock the cell behind him. I had won.

  I sat against the wall in blissful meditation, pressing on my breast and shoulder wounds.

  I had won. Now. Anagram of won: now. Now, I had won. I had discovered his weak spot (or strong spot depending on how you looked at it): he would not harm me seriously.

  A few minutes later I heard thunder approaching through the hallway. I saw a big dark cloud flying quickly toward me and clapping loudly. It lit up like a lightbulb for a second. And then again. On and off, it blinked irregularly. And then I saw a lightning bolt spear to the floor.

  Behind the cloud was Damon, advancing with long, confident strides, and carrying a large electric fan, which explained the cloud’s rapid progression.

  He blew the cloud into my cage and came in himself. He grabbed me and shoved me in the bathroom and blew the cloud in with me. I tried to open the door, but Damon was holding it shut.

  I immediately got struck by lightning. The pain was revolting; worse than normal straightforward pain. You couldn’t tense yourself against it. It was a tricky, very powerful pain that possessed you, and then left you.

  I was struck again. I screamed, and tried to open the door, but Damon wouldn’t let me out. I climbed into the bathtub to get away from the cloud. Just inches from my waist, a bolt of lightning hit the soap, which leaped a foot in the air, accompanied by its plastic dish. For many long minutes I stayed in the bathtub, which in no way prevented me from getting struck by lightning repeatedly, to the point of almost losing consciousness. I would not do realist. I would rather die. Eventually, of course, I changed my mind and pounded on the door and told him I would do realist. Just as the door started to open, I got struck again and collapsed on Damon. He had to drag me to my bed.

  He laid down next to me and was quiet. I wondered if he was expecting me to actively be doing realist right now, but I didn’t have the strength to worry about it. I closed my eyes.

  After a few minutes I mumbled, “I thought highly of you, earlier, when you stopped shooting me and left. I thought you wouldn’t hurt me seriously. That you didn’t have the heart to. I was wrong.”

  “No, not entirely,” he said. “I would hurt you but I wouldn’t harm you. There’s a difference.”

  I didn’t answer and kept my eyes closed.

  He went on: “The bolts you were struck with were bonsai bolts, coming from bonsai clouds.” He hesitated. “I had to make a decision. There was, to be honest, a small risk that you could have been harmed by the clouds—”

  I raised my hand to shut him up, and said, weakly, almost inaudibly, but with extreme indignation: “I was harmed.”

  “You were hurt, not harmed, as you’ll see in a week when these disappear,” he said, taking my arm and pointing to some marks in the shape of bull’s-eyes.

  I stared at the marks. I hadn’t noticed them.

  “You’ll find similar ones on your feet and calves, where the lightning exited your body,” he said. “Anyway, as I was saying, there was a small risk, quite small. But I felt it was important that I take it. Your future suddenly looked grim to me. I put your life at risk to save your dreams.”

  I was feeling nauseated from the lightning. I didn’t need his words to sicken me more.

  He said: “I wouldn’t have made you take a risk that I hadn’t taken myself. Through my work, I’ve been struck by lightning more times than I can remember. It’s a loathsome experience, disgusting, and every time it happens to me I swear I’ll get out of the business. But look at me, I’m still here, all my limbs function, I’m still smart, I’m still normal.”

  “Normal?”

  “Time for the movie.”

  He put on Terminator 2 (so that I could “get motivated by Linda Hamilton’s muscle tone and general fitness”). It was hard to concentrate on her muscles, however, because soon after the movie started, he said, “Now do clownish.”

  I stared at him. I was awed by his talent for coming up with the mood that was the most distasteful to me at any given moment.

  “I thought you wanted me to do realist,” I said.

  “That was good for then. This is good for now.”

  I did my best to do clownish, which was not an easy task after having been struck
by lightning.

  Before going to sleep, he placed on my bed a scene I had to learn for the next day. I did.

  That night, after I went to the bathroom, I checked around the corner to see if by some miracle my cage was wide open. It wasn’t, but resting on the carpet just inside the bars was a ruby. The card next to it read:

  Dear Anna Graham,

  This is what we must do to your old self.

  (4-letter word)

  Yours,

  Damon

  I was so exasperated with everything that I didn’t want to guess, but it was too easy, and the inauspicious answer rudely barged into my mind, completely uninvited.

  The anagram for ruby was bury.

  Chapter Eleven

  The days passed. Damon came up with words, key words, and phrases, that he decided to utter when he wanted me to begin a scene. “Act” was one. “Do what you love,” was another. There was never any warning, never any time for preparation. His philosophy seemed to be that there was no point in doing a scene if it was not at an awkward time. That’s how one learned to act well: through spontaneous slips into character. Sometimes he began arguments between us so that he would then have the pleasure of choosing the ripest moment to utter the word, “Act.” Swallowing one’s pride was part of becoming a good actor, he said.

  And the scenes continued. They often involved ourselves, our lives, our future. In one scene he played my secretary once I became famous. In another he played my acting teacher, Aaron Smith, telling one of his protégés, played by me, that his former student, the now famous Anna Graham, had not allowed him to give her name to another girl. He said he couldn’t understand how she became such a good actress, because she was always herself too much, and she was now committing that dreadful sin more than ever. “I’m baffled,” he would add. “Maybe I should retire.”

  And I, the protégé, would say, “Maybe you should. To be frank, you’re not a very good teacher.”

  In one annoying scene, I had to play myself calling Damon a few days after saving him in the subway, and he asked if he really had to see me again just because I had saved him, and was his life going to be plagued by me from now on.

  An even more putrid scene was the one where I was reminiscing about my kidnapping to a friend of mine (played by Damon), telling him it hadn’t been so bad, that sometimes yes, Damon did indeed shoot me with ice shards, but it was always for a good reason, never gratuitous.

  Sometimes he gave me a scene that was the exact duplicate of our normal way of living, our normal routine. Once, he reversed our roles, and he played the captive (without, however, giving me a loaded water gun). Another time we were both captives.

  Things stayed the same during the following weeks, except that the trampoline broke. Damon insinuated that it was my weight that broke it. This caused tension on my part.

  Another thing that caused tension was that Armory Jude, the woman who had been voted most likely to be me, the pursued woman, got a movie offer. I tried not to think about it too much, but it was hard.

  Nothing else in our lives changed. Damon continued going to the unfilmed room every day at 1:30 P.M., and coming back out half an hour later having cried. Every day except weekends. I didn’t find out what it was about. The anagrams continued. One night there were five rubies on the carpet, next to a note that said:

  Dear Anna Graham,

  In case you are concerned, the pain that your beautiful gift brings me lessens when I think that it makes you happy.

  (6-letter word)

  It took me a while to figure out that the anagram for rubies was bruise. He was alluding to one I had given him that morning.

  Another night I was astonished to see a moonstone on my carpet; astonished because moonstone was so long a word. The note read:

  Dear Anna Graham,

  Their beauty depends on their time and place. Their otherworldly air is, strangely enough, more appropriate for life than for acting. Please take them out of your acting.

  (9-letter word)

  How could I take them out of my acting if they had too many letters for me to figure out what they were? I tried for a while, but gave up.

  I didn’t want Damon to think I was interested in his anagrams, so I tried not to ask him for the answer the next day, but I caved in. The answer was monotones.

  The following night there was a very pretty pink flower on my carpet. I had never seen that kind of flower before. Its leaves smelled sweet. The note read:

  Dear Anna Graham,

  Perhaps you are not aware that this is what you are, sometimes.

  (9-letter word)

  First thing in the morning, I said, “There’s no point in giving me flowers. I know nothing about them. I know stones, from my job, not flowers.”

  “It was an eglantine,” he said.

  “And its anagram?”

  “Don’t you want to guess?”

  “It’s nine letters long.”

  “Still, it’s a shame not to try. I’ll tell you tonight.”

  I couldn’t guess, barely tried, and that night he told me: inelegant. This was obviously a reference to the fact that the night before I had thrown some of my meal in his face after he informed me I could stop acting complex.

  He kept on writing scripts for me to learn. I discovered that the easiest way to get through the scenes was to plunge into them and do them as well as possible, automatically, detachedly, absentmindedly, on remote control.

  Eventually, I learned to slip into character without thinking. Damon said he was becoming awed, not by my acting, but by my efficiency and power to spontaneously don traits.

  He made me do a scene in which I was strangling my future son, so I had to pretend to be strangling Damon, who’d be lying on my bed.

  He would order me to act sad while we were watching a funny movie, and vice versa.

  He would make me pretend I was a teacup or a flower for a whole day, or just a word, like “Otherwise.” He didn’t expect me to literally act like a teacup, but rather to have its essence.

  And what I hated even more than the scenes were the moods. That week he made me do “alert,” “impractical,” and “spreading rumors.” Later he made me do “leech,” “nonsmoker,” and “fishing for compliments.”

  Sometimes he made me do a person: “lighthouse keeper,” “pool cleaner,” or “X-ray technician.”

  Sometimes the people he made me do were less tangible than that: “former teammate” or “divorced twice.”

  And sometimes he made me do things that could not be done, like making me act “intramural” or “summarized.”

  Months started passing. I was not rescued by anyone. I often thought of my parents and what they must be going through.

  The clothes I had worn on my arrival were now baggy. And I could tell my body was hard; I no longer felt much jiggle when I moved.

  Life always becomes routine, no matter how strange it is. Sometimes, for brief moments, I almost forgot I was a captive, and I was able to laugh with Damon. He remarked on this one day, and I became serious and said, “Just because I hate you doesn’t mean I’m not able to enjoy your company, sometimes. Just because I sometimes enjoy your company doesn’t mean I’m not unhappy.”

  And the scenes continued. The one I hated the most was where he made me play my mother thanking Damon for everything he had done for Anna: improving her, making her a good actor, etc. Afterward I told Damon I found his scene preposterous and repulsive, and that I would disown my mother if she ever did such a thing, which she would never do.

  He made me do an Oscar speech in which I had to thank him and act moved, with tears in my eyes. He would be sitting in the imaginary audience, and I had to ask him to get up, and I would clap.

  After that scene, Damon asked me if acting out these scenes of success would make them less special or exciting for me, in the future, when they did happen. He didn’t want to rob me of any upcoming happiness; that would defeat the whole point of what we were doing.

&nbs
p; I stared at him and said, “What makes you think there will be any success?”

  “I think we’re making a lot of progress. I may not be the most expert judge of acting, but I’m noticing changes, which, in my opinion, are improvements.”

  A theme began recurring in the scenes he made me do. It involved selflessness and having ruined someone’s life.

  A man who apologizes to his wife for having had an affair. A father who apologizes to his daughter for having molested her. A son who apologizes to his mother for having stolen from her. It was all about remorse and guilt.

  And he always played the character at fault.

  I accused him of having personal issues, of being unable to judge the scenes objectively. “You need me to satisfy some sick need in you, some weird obsession,” I said.

  The anagrams never stopped coming. One night there was a piece of satin with a stain on it. The anagram for both satin and stain was saint, which is what he was telling me I sometimes was, probably referring to my rescue of him.

  Another night I got a truffle. It was sitting in the middle of a small saucer, on my carpet. The note read, “You should be less this.” I ate the truffle with relish. I would ask him for more truffles tomorrow.

  At dinner the following evening, he said, “I assume you didn’t guess the anagram for truffle. Do you want to know what it is?”

  “No, but I’d like to have more truffles.”

  “I’ll tell you anyway. It’s fretful.”

  “Have I been fretful?”

  “Yes, you have been a bit fretful.”

  “Oh,” I said softly, and slung a pea at him with my plastic spoon.

  My favorite anagram was the three different desserts he once left for me, real desserts (no bananas or yogurts or anything like that). In fact, they were: a chocolate mousse, a piece of chocolate cake, and a creme brulée. I tried to find the anagram for fat, but then saw from the card that the word was supposed to have eight letters. So it was probably desserts. I wrote it down and instantly found its anagram by reading it backward: stressed. The message on the card was that he wanted me to stop being this. The desserts would certainly help in that enterprise. They were good.