“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.
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.”