Amanda Filipacchi - Vapor

I kept the solid cloud in my bedroom, and kept my bedroom locked; I didn’t let anybody go in. No friends. No one. At first I kept the solid cloud in my bedroom closet; I didn’t want to see it. I was still angry at Damon for creating it instead of working on a cure that might have saved his life. But eventually I started sleeping on the solid cloud, occasionally. Damon had said solid clouds last a few years before they rain.

I didn’t release the formula for solid clouds either. Having people riding around on clouds, everywhere, wouldn’t be great for my healing.

And I didn’t inject myself with the light serum. I had no desire to be light; my heart felt too heavy.

I missed Damon unbearably. I continued acting in films, but I always carried with me at least one of his gallons. And when I’d go out to dinner, I’d bring a small part of him along in a very pretty little glass bottle in my bag. I even had a vial on a chain around my neck, in which I carried an even smaller part of him, against my breast. Sometimes I unscrewed the tiny lid and spoke to the water inside, like talking into a microphone. Sometimes I just unscrewed the lid to let him in on the conversation, in case he could hear. I often told his water that I wanted him to come back to me, that I couldn’t take it.

My grief may have endowed my acting with additional richness and depth, for I was nominated for an Oscar. I went to the Academy Awards, about nine months after Damon died. For the ceremony, as a tribute to him, I injected myself into lightness, down to one-twentieth of an ounce. I wore heavy shoes to compensate. I won the Oscar for Best Actress. I went on stage to receive the award, and I made my speech.

“Nine months ago, the man I love died. It is because of him that I am here tonight, and I wish he were here with me. Who knows, maybe he is. It is a humid night.”

I paused.

“He was an extraordinary person,” I said, and unveiled my head in Damon’s honor, letting people see my hair floating around my face, as if I were underwater. “I’m not being sentimental in saying that. In fact, as I’ve told him many times in the past, if I could go back in time, I would choose not to go through what he made me go through to be here tonight. Being here is nice, but it’s not worth it.”

There were some chuckles.

“He was gifted not at making the right choices, but at being successful at whatever choice he made. If he found gravity annoying, he would invent a way to be unaffected by it. There was only one thing that had always hurt him. Wherever you are, if anywhere, my love, I hope your choice to end your life has finally allowed you to be untouched by that pain. I miss you more than I can say.”

I refused all interviews afterward and went straight home, which caused my agent to have a temper tantrum with me on the phone, followed by a few others in positions of power. I was finally forced to accept at least phone interviews, which I soon put an end to when I realized I was being asked, obsessively and almost exclusively, who was my hairdresser, and what method or product had he used to make my hair float.

I packed the solid cloud in a crate, loaded it in my car, placed the twenty-two gallons of water in the backseat, and headed for the country. When I reached the deserted area where Damon and I had often flown, I opened the crate, put the gallons on the cloud, mounted the cloud myself, and took off. I had no idea how I’d get back down, and I didn’t care. I poured out Damon’s water over the woods where we had floated so happily. After I had poured out the last gallon, as well as the pretty glass bottle and the vial I wore around my neck, I sobbed, and in shifting my weight around from grief, I fell off the cloud.

The next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital. I had a broken arm. I had been unconscious for one day. Someone had found me lying in the woods. The doctors informed me that I had fallen from a high distance and asked me how it happened. I told them I didn’t want to talk about it. Word leaked out. The media speculated about whether “the mysterious actress had fallen off a tree or jumped out of a plane without a parachute.”

I was released from the hospital after two days. I went home. I had no more gallons near my bed and no more solid cloud.

I can’t deny that a small part of why I threw out his water was the hope that it would somehow enable him to come back to me. But since I would be a fool to count on this, it was mostly an attempt to put closure to my endless grieving. I hoped I would find it easier to get over him if I didn’t have his water around, floating around my consciousness constantly.

What I hadn’t predicted was that now that I had released him into the world, all water became precious to me. Damon could be anywhere.

During the week that followed my release from the hospital, I often stood on my balcony and looked up at the clouds and thought of him, and wondered if he was part of any of them. When it rained, I went outdoors and walked without an umbrella, crying, remembering the night when he rained in my arms. He was perhaps raining on me now.

Puddles made my throat constrict, tap water was especially upsetting, not to mention the water in toilet bowls. I could no longer drink water; it was too hard, psychologically. I had to get my fluids from other sources, like fruit juices or sodas. I regretted having thrown out his water; I hadn’t anticipated the consequences on my mind.

What was more, I three times imagined I saw him, in crowds, at a distance, the way I had when he came back into my life after my kidnapping. Two of the men I thought were him were not him, and the other I was not able to verify.

I started wondering if I was insane. Why did I catch imaginary glimpses of Damon in crowds when in fact I was certain that if he were alive he would come to me right away? He wouldn’t torture me that way. But then again, if anyone would, he would. And maybe it was hard to return to the real world abruptly. Maybe he had to seep back into reality slowly, gradually, or he would get some kind of toxic shock syndrome.

When I came home one day, a week or so after my return from the hospital, I saw a white rose on my balcony.

I took the elevator up and rang the doorbell of my upstairs neighbor, whom I didn’t know. A handsome man answered the door.

“How did a rose get on my balcony?” I asked. “You must have thrown it from your balcony.”

“I swear to you I did not throw it from my balcony. I didn’t put any rose on your balcony.”

I then visited my downstairs neighbor, just in case they had had the initiative to stand on their railing to give me a rose. But the tenant was an old woman, and she assured me she hadn’t stood on her railing. I believed her.

I pondered the rose. It was very beautiful and of an amazing, almost colorful white. It was not damaged in any way. You’d think if my upstairs neighbor had tossed it down, it might have lost a petal, at the very least.

I remembered a time in my life when objects were left for me, with special messages hidden in the letters of their names.

The next logical thought occurred to me. I knew it was a long shot, but I would try. I went to my computer, opened my dictionary program, and typed in whiterose . I asked the computer to search for any anagrams using those letters.

A single word appeared on the screen.

I knew, then, that Damon was back.

Described by the New York Times Book Review as a “lovely comic surrealist,” Amanda Filipacchi’s fiction has been translated into thirteen languages and her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal , and the Atlantic . Her novels have been called “hilarious and thought-provoking” by Tama Janowitz and “whimsical and subversive” by Edmund White. Filipacchi earned her MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University.