Vapor

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.”

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.

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.