Amanda Filipacchi - Vapor

I tried to persuade him to spend the remainder of his time looking for a cure. I told him I’d help him, that he could tell me what to do. He refused, confessing that he had only pretended to believe he could be rid of his murderous impulses and masochistic tendencies. He didn’t want a cure, and even if he did, he said there wasn’t enough time to find one — he could already feel the rain coming. He wanted to spend his remaining time with me. So he did. It turned out to be three days. He spoke about my life, my future. He gave me advice, wished me happiness, told me how much he loved me.

And then he made love to me on the cloud. I retained my full weight, no longer willing to lighten up. I felt the cloud engulfing me, swallowing me, as if out of grief, the way I was swallowing my tears. The cloud felt too wonderful. It clashed with my pain and sadness. Damon and I should have been making love on a hard bare floor. A prison floor, perhaps.

I cried while he made love to me on his cloud. He had invented this heavenly thing, but at what cost? This was perhaps the last time we would ever make love. I held on to him tighter. Even though he had overdosed and therefore was now, technically, more cloud than man, he didn’t feel different to me. Except perhaps that he seemed more perfect than ever, more suited to me, made for me. He was my complement.

He pushed me toward the edge of the cloud, so that my head was leaning back, no longer supported by his invention, hair hanging down, swinging. I wanted to fall off on my head, if possible break my neck. But Damon didn’t let me. He pushed some of the cloud under me and covered my mouth with a kiss, suffocating me; my nose was filled with tears. I turned my head away to breathe.

I didn’t want to come. I couldn’t bear the thought of it, knowing he would soon die. But I couldn’t help it. It was cruel of my body to play this trick on my heart. Afterward, I lay there, feeling vague. Vaporous.

I wondered if the loss of fluid had brought him closer to death. Each kiss might have taken minutes off his life. His climax: How many hours might that have taken off? And that mist on his forehead, right now, was it stealing precious seconds from him?

Damon was content — I had come. He was kissing my breasts, my shoulders and neck, aware I was upset, but feeling content. I wished I could just evaporate and see how he’d feel then. I pushed Damon off of me and rolled from the cloud. I went in the bathroom, locked the door. I sat in the empty bathtub, the shower raining over me, my head against my knees. I focused on the hard cold surface I was sitting on, which I had craved.

Damon knocked softly on the door. “Are you okay, Anna?”

I took a deep, angry breath. “Yeah, I’m great.”

I heard nothing more from him just then.

It was the next day, when I returned from the kitchen, that Damon was crying.

“Why are you crying?” I asked.

“I’m not crying.”

“Yes you are. And why are you perspiring?”

“I’m not.”

I said, “Is it the end?”

“Yes, I think I’m raining.”

We didn’t even know. We had to see it happen to be sure. And we did. And we were.

He took off his clothes and I helped him step into the bathtub. I took off mine and stepped in after him. I didn’t want any of my clothing to absorb any of him. I didn’t want to lose a drop of him. We lay down, he on top of me. I held him.

“I can’t live without you,” I said.

“Yes you will . You’re strong. Do it for me, Anna. My love. Good-bye.”

I kissed him, and my mouth got wet; the water dribbled down my chin.

As he rained, he became less opaque, more transparent, like vapor. He was harder to see, his eyes harder to find on the tiled background, his outline harder to make out, his voice harder to distinguish from the distant hum of traffic.

And I had some questions left, that occurred to me when it was almost too late, inevitably. I asked them, but I was no longer sure if the voice that answered me came from him or from my mind.

The last thing I heard was, “I love you, Anna.” It was a whisper, like a breeze.

“I love you too,” I said loudly, but there was no answer. “Did you hear me? Did you hear me?” But I heard nothing.

My hands were now against my chest, and he was gone. I saw nothing and heard nothing, not even my own mind.

I was lying naked in his shallow water. I laid there a long time, bathing in him, surrounded by him. I was crying.

“I can’t live without you,” I repeated, hoping it would bring him back.

His water cooled, and I sat there still, shivering.

When I finally got out, I dressed without drying myself and went to the nearest kitchen-wares store. I would waste no time preserving his water. I didn’t want to lose any of him in the drain, in case it leaked slightly, or through evaporation.

I was crying as I looked in the store for what I needed. But I couldn’t find it. I knew what I was looking for, but I couldn’t remember the name of it, so I went up to the salesman and tried to control my emotion as I said, “I’m looking for that thing that’s used when people die, to put their water into a smaller container.”

He stared at me blankly, shaking his head. I persisted.

“It’s the instrument that is used when people die, when you want to transfer their body into a jar and you don’t want to lose any of their water. You would use this instrument for that, for the transference.”

He looked at me without answering, stunned. He finally said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

I drew the outline of a funnel in the air, with my hands. I said, “You pour water in the top, and it goes into a container with a smaller opening.”

“A funnel?” he said.

I didn’t recognize the word, so just stared at him no less blank than he had stared at me.

He led me to a funnel, and I nodded and sobbed more, and took the funnel and paid for it. I did not like the look of the funnel. I did not like the sight of it.

I stopped by the supermarket and bought four gallons of water. I emptied them on a corner of the sidewalk, and carried home the now much lighter four empty plastic containers.

I scooped Damon’s water out of the bathtub with a glass, and poured it in one of the gallons via the funnel. It was a long process, but I continued until the four gallons were full. Then I bought four more gallons at the supermarket and repeated the procedure. Then again four more gallons. I continued until I had filled up twenty gallons with Damon’s water. When the water in the bathtub was too shallow for me to scoop, I mopped it up with a sponge and squeezed it over the funnel, filling up two more plastic gallons. Finally I was done. His water took up twenty-two gallons.

I placed the gallons in my bedroom, near my bed, and the days began to pass. Sometimes I left the caps off, sometimes on. I did all sorts of things with the gallons. I tried to listen to the water, in case Damon could speak to me. I peered in and tried to see his eyes.

Before dying, Damon had left me lots of Light Serum (as we came to call it); enough to last me for the rest of my life, in case I wanted to be light a lot. He left me its formula, to do with as I liked — it was up to me to decide if I thought the world needed it, could benefit from it; he said he didn’t care about the world. He should have known that I didn’t care about the world either.

Anyway, I couldn’t get myself to release the formula as long as I was grieving. It would be too frequent and painful a reminder of him if everyone started being light all the time and were everywhere, like Rollerbladers.

He also left me the formula for solid clouds and for small clouds. In addition to these elaborate instructions on paper, he had told me, in simplified form, the solution for solid clouds: it was to take the water by surprise, to abruptly change the speed and pattern of the whipping. It was a sort of trap that tricked the water into a position that was very unnatural for it, a position where it was no longer free, it was a prisoner of itself, it couldn’t float apart: each part of it was attached to the other.