Vapor

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 had 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.

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 slim-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.