Amanda Filipacchi - Vapor

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 know, 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.