American Delirium

by Betina González

  When they reached the apartment, Berenice had to help her climb the stairs. It seemed like her knees hadn’t bent in years. After every step she paused, brought her hand to her chest, and breathed heavily through her mouth. Halfway up, she had a moment of doubt. She hunched over as if she’d heard an alarm go off inside her or was listening to a whispered warning. She turned as if she was going to leave, but Berenice hung from her arm with all her weight. The old lady had no other choice but to keep going, amid shouts and unintelligible insults. One neighbor (the Russian in apartment six) opened and closed the peephole of his front door. Good, thought Berenice. This way they’ll know I’m not totally alone and nobody will come and take me away to the farm for abandoned children.

  Once they made it inside the apartment, Connie chose the pink couch near the doll corner. Berenice hadn’t played with dolls in a long time. She’d been collecting them over the years, rescuing them from the trash, the street, and the front yards of nearby apartment buildings. The first one had been a big pink infant with rolls of hard rubber baby fat cascading down her thighs. She was missing an eye, and Berenice was more drawn to its deep dark hole than she was to the dumb blue one that closed every time the doll moved. She’d found her in an abandoned house where a bunch of men used to get together to smoke. They must have used Baby Moon as an ashtray at some point, because when Berenice shook her, a few butts fell out of her head. Berenice took her home, unaware that she was starting a collection. A few days later, on her way back from school, she found a one-legged Barbie between a car’s tire and the curb. Next came Queen, a former redhead who had been submerged in blue paint and was transformed into a monarch who only ate vegetables; Barbie Two, who was missing her head and took sleeping pills as a result; and Amelia, the intrepid aviator who was just a torso now, after being detached forever from the airplane that bore her name.

  While Berenice made tea, Connie turned on the television. There was a golf tournament on. In the kitchen, Berenice heard the commentator’s explanations punctuated by shouts. It sounded like Connie was cheering touchdowns.

  By the time Berenice had the tray with tea and cookies ready, the volume was cranked up so high that the commentator’s voice came out distorted. It wasn’t until she turned the corner, walking slowly along the hallway so she didn’t spill the tea, that she heard the old woman screaming:

  “You’re going to hell, whore, whore, whore.”

  Connie had Baby Moon on her lap and was rocking her back and forth to the rhythm of her screams without taking her eyes off the television. When she saw the tray, she set the doll on a chair and threw herself at the cookies. As she chewed one after another, she stared at the floor and began to speak in a voice so quiet that Berenice had to turn off the television in order to hear her.

  “Things were good for a while.” Connie crossed her legs like an actress being interviewed and laughed through the crumbs. “I had a house with a white picket fence and a husband and a peephole to look out at the world through. The husband wasn’t bad. Drove a truck. Handled me and it with the same jealous love and rage. Then came God. Three, two, one, zero: God. Showed up one day right around the corner, like the wolf, like our friends from the neighborhood. What, I’m not a woman? I’ve got muscles like a man. Look, all of you. Feel them. But nobody cares. The white picket fence and the husband, God. Connie and her little hole, zero. One day I went looking for him but I couldn’t find him. I can plow, I can cook, I can take my thirty-nine lashes with the best of ’em. Or was it forty? I kept walking. But first I made five kids. They stayed there. Days and nights I walked. There was a fire on a corner. I didn’t speak. I didn’t sing. But it was good for Connie. I crossed the river and that’s where the sentinels found me, guards of the city. Flagrum taxillatum for all. For Connie and her little hole. For Connie and her rock and roll. For Connie and her stench factory. To hell with her, whore, whore, fucking whore, and, and. Martha and Mary cried. Lazarus, too. But it wasn’t enough. And Connie looked at them with her eyes but not through the peephole she’d had, she looked at them with eyes like doves and saw how the world that was good and beautiful was actually full of thieves and germs, of epidemics and flus and people who washed their hands all the time.”

  During the silence that followed, Connie bowed her head and amused herself by staring at one of her nails. Then she stood, ate the last cookie, and squatted so her eyes were level with Berenice’s.

  “Thank you very much,” she said, without blinking. She curtsied, thanked the air, and—with an agility unimaginable a few minutes earlier—sprinted out of the apartment and down the stairs.

  Berenice sighed. Finding a relative was going to be a lot harder than she’d thought. Outside, the sun was already a line between the silhouettes of the buildings. She picked up Baby Moon and put her back in her place on the rug with the rest of the dolls.

  The baby had always been a problem.

  Amelia loved Queen with all her torso. She would drag herself across the room to be with her, propelled by her arms and her intrepid memory. Queen would watch her with inebriated eyes and sit motionless in her chair, not even moving the tip of her toe. Worn out by the journey, Amelia would thrust herself upward one last time, grab the monarch’s knees, and bury her head between her slippery breasts. She would be so exhausted that she’d let her arms rest, forgotten, on that hair as hard as intergalactic steel wool. Queen would let her stay there for a while. Then she’d fix her sticky gaze on Amelia and run a finger along the contours of her wound. Sometimes the monarch’s entire arm would slip inside that hole, and Amelia would writhe in pleasure, suddenly possessed by the blue hand that moved her.

  The Barbies only loved each other, or themselves, which was essentially the same thing. They’d tangle in a twinned embrace: one would mount the other like a pair of tongs while the other, with her unmysterious half smile, would caress her shoulder and absent head. Sometimes Barbie Two would get revenge on her playmate by riding her like a horse. She would spur her on with her stiletto heels or a plastic switch. She would pull her braids, her whole body arching and smiling as the uneven gait of her three-legged mount tossed her around. They would end up laughing in a pile as Queen, who approved of everything, beamed at them from her throne. Amelia, sitting in her lap, would chew on the ends of her hair with a dreamy look in her eyes.

  But Baby Moon had no one to love her, and that troubled Berenice, who had tried and failed with each of her dolls. The baby was always left out of the game, her mouth permanently open like the black hole of her eye. Surrounded by her companions, her legs spread wide to support the plump mass of her body, Baby Moon would let her oversized head bobble around on her neck until it finally gave in and her jowls would come crashing down onto her chest, as if she were about to vomit or pray in some vile language. The others couldn’t even look at her. They stared at the ground, their heads bowed.

  “You’re going to hell, whore, whore, whore!” she shouted, trying to imitate Connie while looking directly into the doll’s eyes.

  Baby Moon didn’t say or do anything.

  But Queen, Amelia, and the Barbies responded in unison.

  “Yes! To hell!”

  3

  Vik woke up on his second day of surveillance brimming with confidence in the plan he’d devised the night before. He couldn’t believe that something as simple as not showing up at the museum hadn’t occurred to him earlier. Maybe that was why he’d dreamt of beating that man in the Ping-Pong tournament. He’d fallen asleep convinced that his victory depended on just one day of better planning.

  After his shower, he performed his morning routine to the letter. He dressed as though he were going to work, read in the kitchen for a while, and left the house at the same time as always. The girl in the café was a bit surprised when he asked for a mug instead of his usual paper cup, but she didn’t say anything. Vik chose a table near the window. From there he could see the front door of his house and two of the first-floor windows. He pulled a book, a pencil, a notebook,
and his cell phone from his bag and sat down to wait for something to happen.

  At around eight thirty, the screen showed a white shadow approaching his refrigerator. It looked like a woman in a nightgown. But she was so short and her hair was so long, tangled, and dark that not only could Vik not see her face, it looked like she was entirely covered in hair. The camera captured her back, bent over in the light of the refrigerator, from which she finally emerged with an apple and a bottle of milk. The woman’s calm movements around his kitchen horrified him. He watched her walk over to the sink and carefully wash the fruit, then stretch an arm out toward the cupboard, take out a glass, and serve herself some milk. Then she disappeared. She was probably sitting at the table, but she’d chosen the corner that was out of the camera’s range. Vik knew he had only a few minutes to act. But nothing had prepared him for this. He’d considered dozens of possibilities, but none of them involved the intruder being a woman he’d apparently been living with for days. As soon as the lightning bolt of this discovery threw light on the events of the past week, he felt his heart begin to race. His hands clenched in two impotent fists. He had to stand up and fill a glass with water, which he drank in practically one gulp while the café’s owner looked on, confused. When he returned to his table, he examined the screen for a while before discovering part of a foot resting on one of his kitchen chairs. The woman had not left her post. But she would, before long. If there was any logic to what was happening—Vik reasoned, a bit surprised by his ability to do so—her next stop would be the loo.

  The simplicity of this prediction calmed him a bit. He switched the image to the camera on the second floor, which showed the top of the staircase and the doors to the bathroom, on one side, and to his bedroom, half open on the other. Around ten minutes later, the woman appeared on the steps. He could see only the crown of her head and one of her shoulders. She seemed like a dwarf, but maybe that was just the angle of the shot. Vik estimated she was probably just under five feet tall, since her head barely made it halfway past the third shelf of the bookcase he’d placed on the landing. Then she did something unexpected: she took a few steps back, sprinted through the doorway to his bedroom, and jumped straight into his bed. Vik had to piece this all together from the end of her dash: the camera trained on the half-open door of his bedroom captured the woman’s short, round legs rolling around on the bed he’d meticulously made before leaving the house.

  The image of this hairy creature rubbing itself on his sheets was more than Vik could bear. He packed his phone and the rest of his things in his bag, then crossed the street as quickly as he was able. He managed to turn the key in the lock without making a sound, but the front door’s hinges betrayed him. Vik heard short, quick steps on the floor above him, a small tumult, and then the sound of a door—obviously the one to the hall closet near his bedroom, where he kept blankets that were too heavy for the season, old clothing, and other unused items—slamming shut.

  He climbed the stairs calmly, calculating the weight of his foot on each step. Standing in front of the closet, which was actually more like another room, he realized that it had been weeks, if not months, since the last time he’d opened that door. He pressed his ear to the wood and it shot back a cackle. At that point, several things happened almost simultaneously. Vik remembered that his adversary in the dream the night before had an enormous sweat stain on his shirt, a stain that turned sticky and black when the man lost the match, as if he were sweating lava or tar, or something worse. Right then, Vik lost his balance. His legs gave out and he dropped the cane that had been supporting his entire body weight, ending up flat on the carpet with his legs still bent and his arms outstretched. He realized that his back hurt too much to straighten it, and the feelings of disgust and triumph, which the woman and the dream produced in him in equal measure, sparked a fit of uncontrollable laughter. He imagined the camera sending images of his twisted body to the phone in the pocket of his blazer.

  Giving in to the comfort of the carpet and his laughter, which was beginning to relax his limbs, tendons, and cartilage, Vik realized something else: it wasn’t the first time he’d seen the woman with all that hair.

  He retraced his daily movements, step by step. He saw himself leaving his house with coffee on his mind; he saw himself climbing the four stairs to the café across the street, paying as little attention as one does when passing a local church or a laundromat; he saw himself opening the door and stepping into that smell of chocolate and vanilla and, in that instant, he registered (apparently not for the first time, though it seemed as if it were) a heap bundled in a blanket the same color as the wall, a heap with long black hair that had been there for who knew how long, crouching beside the four steps to the café’s front door like the crack in the window of that abandoned church or the faded letters of the laundromat’s sign. Vik tried to remember exactly when she’d appeared. No, it hadn’t been long ago. Not during the summer, at least. Maybe she’d arrived with the first autumn chill, a few weeks earlier. But when had she abandoned her post by the stairs and sneaked into his house? Impossible to say. If he could barely remember having seen her at some point, how could he have registered her absence from the tiny world of his quarter-to-eight coffee?

  It might have been different for someone else (one of those people who find any connection between the new and the old, no matter how flimsy, to have a calming effect), but the thought of that same heap breathing the moth-eaten air of his closet at that very moment didn’t calm Vik in the least. Quite the contrary. He stopped laughing, dragged himself over to his cane, and, using the wall, managed to get himself seated upright in front of the closet door.

  Yanking the door open and confronting the woman was out of the question. Though the camera showed her in a white nightgown, floating through his kitchen like a jellyfish, Vik imagined her naked. He was ashamed of the thought, but he returned to it again and again. He saw her huddled on a bottom shelf in the closet, her skin covered with hair or dirt, one hand under her head and the other between her legs, the air passing over her wet lips as she breathed in and out in a long spasm, her breasts rising and falling in a tangle of black hair. Wouldn’t it be better to bang on the door, or to yell for her to come out on her own? Give her the chance to pull herself together, to rejoin the world? One had to admit that sneaking into a stranger’s house and occupying their closet required a certain degree of mental instability. Vik knew of a kind of bird that, by some evolutionary failure, never learned to build nests and went through life displacing those that could, after eating or destroying their offspring. And then there were others that would simply lay their eggs in the first nest they found, leaving their young to be raised by adoptive parents. What kind of disorder could drive a person to those extremes? He imagined the woman sitting next to the café steps, indistinguishable from her blanket, lying in wait day after day for the right moment, maybe the morning when the neighbor’s cat had run between his cane and the doorstep and he’d struggled for a few seconds to keep his balance, slamming the door shut without checking the knob. It wouldn’t have been the first time he left without locking up; every day, dozens of mishaps interrupted the mechanical actions meant to keep him safe in a city that wasn’t his. That event couldn’t have gone unnoticed by someone used to watching his every move. No, the woman had not earned his courtesy. Why should he knock on the door of his own closet in a farce of social graces when she’d been the one staking him out? She’d probably heard him laughing like a madman moments earlier, just as she’d probably seen him picking at his toenails or struggling for hours, armed with a pair of tweezers and a mirror, with the hairs peeking out from his nostrils.

  He was about to stand up and open the closet door when he found a new reason not to. If, as all signs seemed to indicate, she was the woman from outside the café, who knew what plagues she might be carrying after years living in the street? Vik’s arms and legs began to itch at the thought that her favorite pastime seemed to be rolling around on his bed. Again h
e saw her naked body, which got dirtier every time, plunging under his sheets, kicking with arms outstretched as if she were swimming on his mattress, her hair stuck to her skin like seaweed.

  This time, he didn’t feel shame at the image of the woman in his bed. It was his body’s reaction that made him feel older and sicker. Reaching out to open the door seemed like the most onerous task in the world. Maybe it was better to wait until she needed to leave the closet. She would have to, eventually. Ignoring his erection and the pain in his back, Vik steadied his cane on the floor and stood all the way up.

  That was when he remembered he’d forgotten to call the museum. But it was Saturday, no one would really notice his absence. He was glad that at least one of his problems was so easily solved.

  * * *

  The last time he called me Berilia we were still the picture of strength and health, the deer population was still under control, and people still believed in the atomic bomb and household appliances. Back then, changing our names had seemed romantic. It reminded us of outlaws in black and white, the night sky stretching over a dark and dangerous couple as they headed for the Wild West or the lawless expanses of silver-screen Mexico, two people on the run who maybe, for a moment, we resembled.

  Smithfield didn’t bring any of that up, that morning. He was right not to: if he’d insisted on talking about Gabi like he had so many times before, I’d have thrown him out. But the last thing I expected as he sat comfortably at my kitchen table, and I distracted myself with the coffee and my badly tied robe, was for him to start talking about our role as senior citizens in a city that either ignored us or attacked us without even trying to sugarcoat it.