Amanda Filipacchi - Vapor

“Anna, did you know you were going out with a weirdo? It must be very disappointing to discover this on your deathbed.” He paused and turned to Damon, “So you’re telling me that the ultimate pain for you would be the pain of not having the pain. But you know, I think I’d rather simply give you the pain of having the pain.”

The phone rang. Nathaniel answered, saying, “Etiquette hot line,” and then said, “Actually, I’m sorry, that was a slip, I’ve quit my job and am no longer an etiquette expert.” After listening for a moment, he said, “No, please don’t insist. It can’t be that urgent. No, please.” He sighed. “All right. You say you’re at your own party and a woman has walked in with dog shit on her shoe, and she’s spreading it around your living room carpet, and your question to me is: Can you tell her? The answer is no, or you will forever spoil your relationship with her. Chances are the damage is not increasing but decreasing with every step. She will eventually notice the problem on her own and clean it off in the bathroom, and she will never reveal that she was the culprit. You’re welcome.” Nathaniel hung up.

Just then, there was an explosion at the door. Damon’s brother, Philip, entered the room in his wheelchair, holding a gun, an antique sword lying across his lap.

“Take that bag off her head,” he said to Nathaniel, who happened to be gunless, having placed his weapon aside after Damon handcuffed himself.

Nathaniel hesitated a moment, and obeyed.

“Now untie her,” said Philip.

Nathaniel obeyed. Philip tossed me the sword.

“Uncuff Damon,” said Philip.

As Nathaniel did so, Damon stabbed him in the arm with a hypodermic needle.

“What are you doing?” asked Philip. “Will it kill him?”

“Eventually,” said Damon. “In a few days.”

“That’s too long . I don’t want to wait that long. I want to kill him now.”

“Okay, but wait a minute. Take off your clothes, Ben,” he said to Nathaniel.

Ben just stood there and did nothing, as he became light. “I feel light-headed,” he said.

“No, you feel light, period,” said Damon.

“Do what he says!” Philip shook the gun at him.

Ben took off his clothes. He hopped up in the air and did not come back down. Damon had overdosed him; he was clearly past zero.

“What is this?” said Ben. “Am I dead?”

“I suppose, in a sense, you are,” said Damon.

“One sense is not enough,” said Philip. “He must die in all senses of the word.”

Philip rolled his wheelchair over to me and grabbed the sword from my hands.

He rolled himself under Nathaniel, who tried to swim away, in air. Philip slashed and poked his sword at him, but Nathaniel was too light to be pierced significantly. Each strike from the sword only caused him to bounce away, escaping with barely a prick.

When he reached a wall, he would push against it with his feet, to propel himself away from Damon, who came to retrieve him. Damon would tap him back, like a balloon, toward Philip’s sword. Sometimes he simply tossed him back to Philip, who swung the sword at him like a baseball bat, sending him flying off in another direction, with a shallow wound.

Nathaniel begged me to make them stop. I did nothing.

The phone rang. Damon picked up the receiver and listened. He then hung up, and said to Ben, “The woman of the party said the damage did not decrease but increased and that you can expect to receive her carpet’s cleaning bill.”

Philip continued trying to stab Ben, but unsuccessfully. So finally, Damon lifted Philip out of his chair and raised him over his head. They were standing under Nathaniel, who was hovering horizontally, face down, near the ceiling. Philip stabbed Nathaniel through the stomach, tacking him to the ceiling.

Nathaniel screamed, and then gurgled, as blood floated out of his mouth. Philip dislodged his sword from the ceiling, and was placed back in his chair by his brother. He shook the Nathaniel-topped sword like a baby shaking a giant rattle. He knocked and banged Nathaniel against the floor, cutting the sword through his stomach further.

It did not take long for Nathaniel to die in every remaining sense of the word.

Philip slid the sword out of his victim, and the bloody corpse was left to float around the room while we fell asleep, exhausted from the turmoil. When the serum wore off, the body gently landed on Damon, who woke up with a low scream.

We didn’t talk about it for three days, but finally Damon brought it up. He could tell I was upset about him having told Nathaniel to go ahead and kill me.

“No, I’m not upset,” I said. “There’s nothing you could have done, right? It was a ploy.”

“What if I’m still tempted to kill you?”

“We’ll cope with it. We’ve coped with it before, we can cope with it again.”

“Oh, reckless Anna.”

Personally, I knew how I would deal with it. I would make light of it. If I saw him staring at me dreamily in the kitchen while holding the big kitchen knife, I would wave my hand in front of his glazed eyes and say, “Hel lo! ”

And if I woke up in the middle of the night and found him standing over me with a sword raised, I’d say, “Can you please grab me a tissue as long as you’re up.”

I wasn’t sure what I’d say if he pushed me toward an oncoming subway train. I’d think about it when it happened.

Maybe I could get a whip with which to punish him if he tried to strangle me again.

Maybe I’d take a class in self-defense.

Maybe I’d keep my pepper spray on me at all times.

But things didn’t have a chance to come to that. A few days after our conversation, exactly a week after Nathaniel’s death, I found Damon floating around my living room, clearly weighing nothing. He had overdosed — I was certain of it. I knew it the instant I saw him, and I was overcome with such disgust and horror that I almost vomited.

Firmly, I said, “I want you to step on the sensitive scale.”

“It’s not necessary. What you think is the case, is the case,” he said.

I burst into tears and rushed over to him and grabbed him and lowered him and said, “What have you done?”

“I OD’d.”

“How?”

“I can’t live with you, Anna. You must know that. We have to accept it finally. I’ll kill you. We can’t have a life together.”

“Damon, how could you do this? I can’t live without you.”

“But with me, you won’t live.”

I was sobbing and hugging him. “You just had a problem. It could have been fixed.”

We didn’t know how long it would take for him to die. I wanted him to find a cure. After pressuring him to no end and convincing him that his murderous impulses could be toned down through psychological counseling, or maybe even through antidepressants, he finally agreed to try to find a cure for having become more cloud than man.

He locked himself in his lab for hours on end, searching, or so I thought. It turned out he was searching, but not for what I thought. He emerged a week and a half later with a big solid cloud. He had achieved his life’s goal before dying.

I was furious. I shouted at him and my breath blew him away. He grabbed onto my clothing to anchor himself to me. I accused him of being clingy. I told him he killed himself, did it on purpose, so now he had no right to cling to me. What was he doing: being clingy and then leaving me? It wasn’t fair. I told him that what he did was the same thing as a person injecting themselves with the AIDS virus on purpose, giving themselves a slow death, and I had never heard of such a thing.

Part of me wanted to detach myself from him emotionally, to diminish my suffering when he died. I marched out of the room, slamming the door, which he later asked me not to do again for it made him flutter around.