Vapor

by Amanda Filipacchi

  This was why we decided to have sex in the wind. We did it in the sky over the ocean at night. We hoped no one would see us. I wondered if we might get arrested for public lewdness. The wafting aspect would surely overshadow the erotic aspect. Nevertheless, we avoided the full moon, not wanting to be back-lit.

  We were carried with an uneven rhythm. The wind twirled us, flipping us over and over in the sky, like a dead leaf.

  Our lovemaking tended to be gentle without gravity. And sometimes that was frustrating, when our passion was too strong to tolerate gentleness. We craved weight, the weight of our bodies on top of each other. Weight was sexy, as it turned out.

  We’d be drifting and hugging gently, being loving. Like a spider patiently waiting on its web for an insect to land, Damon was waiting for a handle to come along. When that object came, Damon would grab it and slam me against the wall, the railing, the ladder, the seesaw, the root, whatever, anything resembling a handle or narrow enough for him to hold on to behind my back. Then the lovemaking could be stronger, almost as if we had weight. He bore into me with all the strength in his arms, revealing the frustration he felt.

  And sometimes it was me. When his back bumped against the trunk of a tree, I latched onto the branches on either side of him, and I pinned him there and savored him, wrapping my legs around him and the trunk. But then, unable to resist sinking my fingers into his hair, I let go of the branches. He pushed us away, and we went off, drifting again.

  We were like insects making love anywhere.

  After the first two weeks of being light almost all the time, we cut down to twice a week, because of my work. Sometimes we still got light every night. It was very addicting. Not literally, that is. There were no withdrawal symptoms when we did an experiment and stopped for a week.

  I thought I had the solution for making my parents come ’round to liking Damon. After having heard them so often say things about Damon like, “He’s a loser, he’s pathetic, he’s mushy, he’s pretentious, he’s common, he’s evil or insane, in any case dangerous, he’ll make you unhappy,” I could prove to them that he was extraordinary by shooting up for them and showing them I could float.

  Understandably, they were horrified at first when they saw me injecting something into my arm. They said Damon was influencing me to take drugs.

  Then I started floating.

  My father said, “That’s what drugs do. They give you the illusion of floating.”

  “Is this an illusion?” I said.

  “Probably.”

  “Come on! Am I hallucinating that I’m floating?” I yelled at them from the ceiling.

  “I don’t know if you are, but we are. The fact is, someone here is hallucinating; there is a hallucination going on.”

  For Damon and me, it seemed things could not get better, that nothing could come between us. He continued to help me with my lines occasionally, when I asked him to. We lived in harmony. But then something did come between us.

  It started when we sank into a routine. Flying was no longer new, and Damon became gloomy. He mentioned to me that he was having sick thoughts. When I asked him what they were, he just shook his head and said he couldn’t tell me. I wondered if they had to do with a desire to be unfaithful. I asked him and he said no. Then I asked if they had to do with a desire to kidnap me again. He said no.

  I mentioned to Nathaniel that Damon was having bad thoughts. He wanted to know what they were and urged me to find out.

  But I had already tried and failed. And anyway, something else began happening, something that sort of overshadowed the issue. Damon started trying to kill me.

  At first I wasn’t sure if it was just my imagination.

  He backed his car toward me, and if I hadn’t jumped out of the way, it would have hit me. Once, when I weighed my full weight, he almost pushed me off my balcony, supposedly by accident, and another time it was supposedly playfully.

  He “jokingly” put a pillow on my face for a long time, until I was practically suffocating. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t fought him off as hard as I did. And when it wasn’t a pillow on my face it was his hands around my neck. And he’d press. Nothing came of it, but it wasn’t pleasant. And he looked very tempted to press harder and longer, unless that was my imagination too.

  And I noticed he felt drawn to my sword. One night I woke up and he was standing over me with the sword raised, as if about to stab me, and I wasn’t sure if I had caught him just in time, or if he had been standing that way for a while, not really intending to do anything. I’d see him in the kitchen sometimes, holding the big kitchen knife and staring at me in a dreamy way.

  Granted, these attempts seemed ambivalent, but they preoccupied me. I felt depressed. I didn’t want to bring up the topic with him, because I didn’t want to acknowledge yet that there was a problem in our relationship.

  I racked my brains as to what could be his reason for wanting to kill me; what could be his logic. Finally, it dawned on me what his sick thoughts were: he was afraid our relationship might be losing its initial excitement. To rectify this problem and to put spice back into the relationship, he tried to scare me by pushing me toward oncoming subways, for example. I was relieved that that’s all it was.

  I mentioned to Nathaniel that Damon was trying to kill me.

  “What do you mean he’s trying to kill you?” he said, very upset. “Doesn’t he tell you he loves you?”

  “Yes, all the time.”

  “Well then it’s ridiculous what you’re telling me. You’re paranoid or something.”

  I told him the many instances of Damon’s murder attempts, and then I told him my theory about Damon’s need for spice.

  “I don’t think he’s trying to kill you. I think he’s just goofing off, being playful. And I don’t think he’s doing it in a calculated way to add spice.”

  A few days after this conversation, Damon said to me, “There is an issue we haven’t addressed.”

  “What is it?”

  “The fact that I try to kill you from time to time.”

  “So you do try to?”

  He nodded. “I’m afraid so. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I can’t hide from the truth any longer.”

  “Well, I’m sad to hear it. I was hoping it was my imagination.”

  “What do you think we should do about it?”

  “Are you asking whether we should break up?”

  “I don’t think I could live without you.”

  “You may have to if you kill me.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m tempted. The misery would be so acute.”

  “Maybe I could try to make you miserable in other ways. I could take on lovers. I could be mean to you. No, I probably couldn’t. I love you too much. Can’t you just use your willpower to control yourself?”

  “I do. I try to resist the temptation to kill you, and I have, till now, succeeded, but it’s a war within me. When the pain is so bad my logic is forced to accommodate it, the logic gets twisted into unnatural shapes.”

  I told him not to worry, that we’d work through his urges to kill me.

  Deep down I believed he wouldn’t actually go through with it, that he just needed to regularly scare himself about it.

  Damon began to get notes on his windshield wiper that said things like, “Prepare yourself,” and “Not much longer now.” At first he wondered if I had put them there. Then we both wondered if my parents had. When I questioned them, they denied it. Soon the notes said “Brace yourself,” and “Better late than never.”

  While I was visiting Nathaniel one day, he asked, while ironing his laundry, how I’d been, if things were still going well with Damon: “He hasn’t tried to kill you recently, has he?”

  “Sometimes he does, or at least he’s tempted to, but as we’re both aware of the problem, it’s under control. It makes a big difference when you have good communication; you know, when the channels are open.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. You k
now, there’s something I want to tell you,” he said, moving the iron carefully over the sleeve of his blue shirt.

  “What?”

  He sighed and, without looking at me, said, “I care a lot about you.”

  “I care about you too.”

  “I want you to know that I care a lot about you, and I love you, and I think you’re an extraordinary person. You are so wonderful, and I never want you to think that you did anything wrong or that anything is your fault, but most of all, as I said, I never want you to think that I don’t care about you tremendously, no matter what I do, no matter what happens.”

  At that point Nathaniel started to cry over his blue shirt. He placed the iron aside. I went over to him and put my arm around him and tried to comfort him.

  “Please don’t,” he said. “You’re making me feel worse.”

  I stopped.

  “I didn’t think this would happen,” he said, “that I would cry. I am moved by my own speech. Something, you see, is making me sad.”

  “What’s making you sad? What?” I felt dishonest for asking, because I was sure I knew: he was just heartbroken that I was in love with Damon and not with him. I finally suggested this idea.

  “No, it’s not that exactly,” he said. “I can’t tell you quite yet. I want to compose myself.”

  He tried to stop crying by closing his eyes and repeating to himself, “Think of Santa Claus, think of Santa Claus.”

  The phone rang.

  He picked up the receiver and, still crying, said into it: “Etiquette hot line.”

  He listened for a moment and said, “No, you can’t dunk. Dunking is not good table manners. You’re welcome.”

  He hung up. He breathed deeply and looked more composed.

  “Can you tell me now?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t being too pushy, especially now that he had recovered and might feel more embarrassed by his display of grief.

  But to my surprise he answered, “Yes, I can tell you now.”

  I did not spend a comfortable night tied up on Nathaniel’s couch. Nathaniel demonstrated the procedure of how he was going to kill me, on himself, putting a plastic bag over his head the way a stewardess demonstrates how to don an oxygen mask. He was of the opinion that familiarizing me with details such as the fact that I would die within half an hour or an hour of the bag being closed around my neck, and that my head might feel stuffy during that time, would make me less anxious during the death experience; in short, according to him, my knowing what to expect would make dying less stressful for me.

  He said he regretted I would not have the opportunity to live the rest of my exciting and promising life, but that he had planned this for so long, even before my life looked promising.

  When I asked him for some explanation as to why he wanted to kill me, he said it was because he didn’t like his jobs. When I asked him since when had he not liked his jobs, he said since always. When I remarked that he had never told me this, and that I had gotten the impression he had liked them, he said: “How is that possible? You know me. Do I strike you as stupid or boring?”

  “No.”

  “Then how could you think I would enjoy being an etiquette expert, or a Weight Watchers’ counselor, or a stripper? How could you think that someone like me, with my mind, my character, would derive any satisfaction from those things?”

  “Then why do you do them?”

  “Because I’m not able to perform my true profession.”

  “What is your true profession?”

  “Plastic surgery. Please don’t look too surprised, or you’ll hurt my feelings.”

  I was silent.

  “You’re thinking about something,” remarked Nathaniel.

  “Damon’s brother was a plastic surgeon.”

  “I know him.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, I’m Ben,” he said.

  “It’s not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you and I met by chance, in the park, when I was being attacked and you saved me. It would be too much of a coincidence if you turned out to be the enemy of the man I saved two weeks before you saved me.”

  “Yes, it would be too much of a coincidence. That doesn’t mean I’m not Ben. It just means it’s not a coincidence. I wanted to meet you, so I arranged your attack.”

  “Why?”

  “Revenge. Against Damon. I have let this simmer, held back, until the perfect moment; the moment in your relationship with him when the feelings have had enough time to grow very strong, but not enough time to settle into boredom or mere contentment. It seems, however, that I may have waited too long. You tell me he tries to kill you? I mean, it sounds like he’s losing his mind. Or you are. I hope it’s you. But if it’s him, how is a man supposed to get revenge on an insane mind?”

  I said, “So all this time, when you pretended to be my friend, and even to love me, you actually didn’t care at all.”

  He kneeled next to the couch, on which I was lying with my hands tied behind my back, and hugged me. “Goodness, Anna, that’s not true! That’s why I prefaced all this by telling you how much I cared about you. Don’t you remember my preface? It was lengthy. I did love you and still do. More than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life.”

  “And yet you want to kill me?” A tear rolled into my ear.

  He wiped my eyes and nose with a tissue, and said, “Despite the strength of my love for you, my desire for revenge is stronger. My life has been destroyed by Damon, and yet his life has not been destroyed by me. I can’t let that rest.”

  “But you have destroyed his life.”

  “Not as much as he destroyed mine. Or at least not as directly, or as intentionally. I know he’s the one who wrote that anonymous letter. Not his brother.”

  “How do you know?”

  “From an article I read in Soap Opera magazine on Philip’s life. I’m sure Damon and Philip feared I might come across it. Damon has not only ruined my career, but also my chance at finding love. My plan was to find a beautiful woman and improve her face; alter it in certain ways that would enable me to love her. But then, thanks to Damon, I was no longer allowed to perform plastic surgery. I did try to fulfill my dream anyway, when I met Chriskate, by having another surgeon operate on her, following my specifications. But as you know, the results didn’t stir strong enough feelings in me. I had sent her to a doctor whose work I had followed and approved of. He and I didn’t know each other, but we had a similar style and technique. As I later discovered, he only lacked the vision, the imagination. The work he did on her was good. It was commercial. It was trashy, commercial surgery. It had mass appeal, as was proven by her stellar rise to fame. But it was a little too easy, a little too accessible and light for my taste. I needed more depth and layers within her beauty.”

  When he had finished his story, Nathaniel asked me if there were any letters I wanted to write to anyone before I died. I tried the usual tactics to make him change his mind: threats, intimidation, begging, pleading, psychological tricks, lying, acting, wise arguments, reproaches, etc.

  He said Damon would be notified of my location shortly before the event of my death.

  Nathaniel expressed the hope that Damon would show up and witness my end. He then confessed, sheepishly and apologetically, that if this happened, he might decide to torture me (during my half hour of stress-free dying) to make the revenge be of superior quality. “If it does come to that,” he added, “let me say in advance that I am very sorry, but also very grateful that you went through the unpleasantness, thereby fulfilling my wildest fantasies of justice.”

  Damon did show up. He had been warned not to bring the police, or I would be executed on the spot, regardless of the consequences to the executioner. So he came alone. He looked awful: pale, tired, ravaged.

  My mouth was covered with masking tape. When Damon entered the room, Nathaniel pointed his gun at me, and with his free hand, pointed to a pair of handcuffs hanging from an iron bar attached to the wall. He
told Damon to handcuff himself to the bar or he’d kill me.

  “No,” said Damon.

  “No, what?” said Nathaniel.

  “I’m not handcuffing myself.”

  “But I’ll kill her.”

  “I understand.”

  “And it will not be painless for her.”

  “For me either.”

  “You mean her death?”

  Damon nodded.

  Nathaniel said, “That’s right. That’s the whole point. You will suffer.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  “You’re counting on it?”

  “Why do you think I kept taking walks at night even after having been attacked regularly by men whom I assume were sent by you? Including that night in the subway when Anna saved me. It’s because for a while now I’ve been a masochist.”

  Nathaniel turned his gun against Damon. “Handcuff yourself or I will kill you and her.”

  Damon handcuffed himself.

  “That’s better,” said Nathaniel. A moment later, he added, “I will kill her with a plastic bag.”

  He took two rubber bands and slid them over my head. They fit snugly around my neck. He tore the masking tape off of my mouth. He slid the plastic bag over my head and tucked its edge under the rubber bands, making sure there were no leaks of air.

  “It should take about half an hour for her to die,” said Nathaniel. “Maybe a little longer, since it’s a large bag.”

  Through the transparent bag I could see Damon staring at me. He said, “I love you, Anna,” and did nothing.

  “I love you too, Anna,” said Nathaniel. “It won’t be painful. I’ve decided not to use the torture, because this method of dying offers a subtle kind of horror, an exquisite kind of pain to the beholder. He’ll see your face and lips turning blue.”

  Damon and Nathaniel began to talk.

  “I’m finally getting what I deserve,” said Damon. “It’s such a relief, after all these years of torment and agony and guilt.”