That explains why they always line up at her table. You know, Dr. Danko never comes to the center without her gilded black porcelain tea set. The first thing she does when she arrives is take the cups and saucers out of her bag; she does it ceremoniously, slowly, like a child getting ready for a tea party with her dolls. Then, she goes to the kitchen and comes back with the essential component: the teapot, which has a castle painted on it and steams with whatever concoction she’s offering her interlocutors. A nice organic tea, Hungarian, it seems. She’s also pretty liberal with the prescriptions. She puts on a good act, and I think almost everyone has sat down with her at one point or another. It’s like none of them was ever part of a revolution. Not me. I know what’s up: it’s all about keeping us docile. About turning us into the Learned Council of Gerontozombies. That’s why I agreed to sit in front of this camera every Monday. I already had my dose of docility, thank you very much, back in the Bridgend days. I knew long before what happened with Gabi that, given where we are in our evolution, vigilance is the only option. We have to stay sharp. Now more than ever. If you’re depressed, go outside and scream. Knock something over, run someone over. Better that than the pills. Better that than the lie.
The first thing I did that Saturday was grill Elizabeth about the buck in question. She said she hadn’t been able to get a good look at him. The only thing she could say for sure was that the animal was huge and that it shook its head from side to side as it ran, like it’d gone crazy. She’d never seen another deer run like that (living so close to the woods, she’d had plenty of chances to observe them). It reminded her of a horse trying to shake its bridle. It seemed, she said, like the buck was trying to get something off its head. A powerful image. Seemed important. Aside from that, Elizabeth could only remember the metallic smell of blood, the shattered cereal bowls, and her fingers dialing 911.
Tears were inevitable. I asked her about the scar. She said she hadn’t been close enough to the animal to see it clearly, but that it looked like the mark a rope would leave, as if it had been in captivity for a while. I wrote it all down. It made sense for us to have a concrete goal. That way, once they had trained enough, I could take them into the woods for more than just practice. I was going to teach them to track, stalk, and land a deer, and Ron Duda’s buck would be the perfect target.
Five more people showed up that day. I’d scheduled the meeting for noon to keep out the bingo players and the unimaginative retirees who would’ve gotten themselves involved in some organized activity by that point. That way I’d be sure to get only the ones who were genuinely interested. I wanted a motivated group formed by natural selection: none of those compulsive gamblers or seniors who get up at four to wait—fully dressed, breakfast eaten—for the shops to open, for the free guitar lesson to begin, or for someone to show up from the animal shelter looking for volunteers. (A real sweet deal: now that you’ve spent the best years of your life working, why not relax by doing some free labor for the city?)
The Armstrong sisters were next. They were wearing the same housedresses and wool jackets as always, ankle-strap shoes with low heels, and a thick layer of makeup on their faces. I was surprised that they wanted to learn to hunt, though they did spend more time in the center than almost anyone, usually fighting over the flower arrangements or waiting their turn at Dr. Danko’s table. When I grilled them about their motives, they said they’d always hated deer. Margaret told me that when she was young a white-tailed doe would watch her through her bedroom window every night. There was nothing gentle or maternal about its gaze. Just the opposite: the doe was stalking her. Maggie was convinced that the animal wanted to take her to the underworld, just like they’d done with several miners from the area (according to local folklore, down there the deer reign, trapping and torturing any miner who ventures too far). Maggie grew up a nervous, irritable insomniac with a single goal in life: to live as far as possible from the woods. A lot of good it did her. A year ago, right after Heather got surgery to fix her varicose veins, a frenzied buck came crashing through the window of the intensive care unit. There were no serious injuries, but the sisters walked away surer than ever of the conspiracy. I welcomed them on board: I respect people who identify their personal crusade early on, however they do it. (We all have one, and only one, and the sooner we figure out what it is, the better.) Purpose and method, Berilia. That’s what I always say. Otherwise, you’re going nowhere fast.
Then came Tom and Betty Paz, the oldest in the group. He’s eighty-two (I know because he went to school with my cousin, who’d be eighty-two if he were still alive). She’s got to be at least ten years older, because I remember the scandal when they started dating. They had four sons, who are now scattered across the country. As long as his place in the world was determined by hours invested in money, you could say that Tom was an entrepreneur. But retirement made him a new man: he traveled all over, raced vintage cars, went scuba diving off the coast of Australia, and became the producer and star of a traveling theater company that staged Shakespeare plays in small towns. As long as her place in the world was determined by hours invested in money, you could say that Betty was beautiful. A real looker. Until the two of them blew their savings on their outrageous projects. Now they live off what their sons send them, in an enormous house they can barely maintain (I hear they have at least four bedrooms they never set foot in). It would probably be fair to say they’re what kids today call a couple of fucking fossils, but they’re the only ones with any experience: a few years ago, they went on safari in Africa and loved it.
Massimo Cercone was the fifth. He’s short, at least thirty pounds overweight, and he smiles too much. There can’t be many people worse suited to becoming a hunter. He used to be the best barber around. He had clients who lived in the suburbs but didn’t shave or cut their hair in their own neighborhoods. They preferred to drive to Max’s. The business is still running smoothly; his youngest son is in charge now. It’s Max who’s not running smoothly. As the years went by, the shaking in his hands got worse and worse until one day he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. When I asked him about his interest in hunting, he told me that he thought target practice might help with his condition. It seemed better not to say anything at the time, but I decided to keep a close eye on him. A man with uncontrollable tremors isn’t exactly someone you want in your Rifles for Beginners class.
When it was time, I had them sit in a circle. Just like before. It was a different group of people and none of us could sit on the floor if we wanted to, but there was something in the air, a feeling of anticipation, like in the Bridgend days. Days that filled some of us with pride, and some with shame. To look at me now, you wouldn’t imagine any of it: not the music, not the sex until dawn, and definitely not the minds freed in an attic decorated specifically for that purpose.
Maybe all Smithfield wanted was to relive those times. But he didn’t say a word about any of that when he came. He didn’t mention the day the world stood still. He stood at the center of the circle (in the same blue blazer he wore that day at the zoo), cleared his throat, and started talking about the deer.
* * *
Without breaking stride, Berenice ran to where the woods met the cemetery at the end of the street. From there, she’d have to climb a hill along a dirt path that would leave her right behind the nursery. That had been another of Emma’s brilliant ideas. Her business sense surprised everyone, even Mr. Müller. Because of its location, her shop was able to capitalize both on mourners visiting their dead and on people coming out of the woods, whether they were farmers selling flowers and bulbs, or the suburban neo-hippies who bought infusions of all kinds, poultices for their wrinkles, herbs, and seeds to sprinkle on their cereal. No one saw more clearly than Emma the potential clients in those “natural” women who seemed totally unfazed by the passing of time, but who would rush out to buy Emmalina the minute they turned thirty. In fact, it was her mother’s first wrinkles that inspired the mix of cucumber and herbs the two of them lat
er baptized with that name.
Unlike the apartment on Edmond Street, the nursery and flower shop were always clean and tidy. Emma Lynn hadn’t worried too much about fixing up Mr. Müller’s garage, except for building a rectangular room onto the back. She kept the cement floors and cut windows out of the side walls, where she hung two stained-glass panels she’d bought from a church that was being demolished. She hadn’t planned the design. One day she just stopped into the church and bought them on a whim (business was already booming, even though the shop was just a table set up in a garage). She’d needed to figure out the size and shape of the windows to accommodate the huge, colorful round panels and their patterns of stars or flowers repeating in an infinite symmetry. The effect was like being in an iridescent underwater capsule where Berenice could have lived, if it weren’t for all those plants.
Some days, the silence of the plants was too much for her to bear. It wasn’t like a human’s: it was the silence of growth, reproduction, and death condensed into infinitesimal time and space. Sometimes, just to disrupt her awareness of all the effort going on around her, Berenice would let out a shriek from her chair. Her mother would look up with raised eyebrows from the bouquet she was working on and say only, “Again?”
“Uh-huh,” Berenice would answer, and go back to her notebook.
The two of them spent endless hours in the flower shop, Berenice sitting at the table in the nursery and Emma Lynn wrapped up in her project of the moment. The famous blue carnation crowned her achievements, but Berenice vividly remembered the failures that had preceded it: a thornless Marie van Houtte that ended up as an undersized bush with sickly flowers; a tricolor cactus that died in its early stages of development; and a cross between Sri Lankan and Mexican varieties of plumeria that produced a flowerless, sticky-leafed tree, which was still growing out behind the nursery. Berenice knew that, in that world, achievement came only after months and months of experiments, and that a single specimen, freed from the laws of nature, was like a shooting star: impossible to re-create. There was no guarantee that another could be produced just like it, or that the same method would work on a different plant. All this fascinated her, but she lacked Emma Lynn’s passion for detail, her ability to recognize the traits common to species so different in size and color that they seemed to come from different planets. Even Purple Queen was a challenge. Despite everything her mother had taught her about bonsai, the tree was always on the verge either of death or of rampant growth (Berenice forgot that pruning, rather than watering, was key). They’d had several arguments about it, in which Berenice insisted that overwatering was part of her system and not the result of impatience. Emma Lynn eventually left her alone. She’d never cared much for bonsai, and seemed glad Berenice had picked an area she found uninspiring and sometimes even repulsive.
The problem with miniature trees wasn’t just that they required absolute dedication. Chance would intervene at the most unlikely moment and, no matter how careful you had been, the result might be something inelegant, monstrous. Even some of the best bonsai, the ones featured in books and on websites, seemed to Emma Lynn like small creatures being tortured. This was no surprise, coming from someone who loved ivy, ferns, and towering conifers. Berenice, on the other hand, liked to push her creations to the limit. Just like her dolls, Purple Queen was going to be one of a kind. The idea fascinated her.
What she liked most about flowers, though, was naming them. For that reason alone, she encouraged her mother to create one that could be called Jazzy Turquoise, Berenicis igniae, or Bluebell berenicii. Finding the right name, one that really captured the flower’s essence, felt like a matter of principle; if there was one thing that made Berenice angry, it was the sheer number of plants that were named after botanists or, worse, French soldiers. What on earth did Magnol’s double chin and curly wig have to do with a creature that had been around longer than bees, and which, in a marvel of adaptation, developed fleshy leaves so it could be pollinated by beetles? She was completely indifferent to her mother’s explanations of how important the botanist had been. Emma Lynn insisted that Magnol deserved recognition because he had taken it upon himself to prove that plants also had lineages, which meant that not everything in Genesis could be taken literally. Also, she went on, it wasn’t as if Magnol committed the sin of botanical self-aggrandizement. It was his disciples who had baptized the magnolia, despite the fact that American tribes already had several beautiful names for it. How much better, thought Berenice, did talauma or yoloxochitl sound. With those names, the flower forgot all about explorers and encyclopedias, and went back to being the tree of myth that it deserved to be. She could spend hours listening to the botanical tales Emma Lynn had memorized or read out loud from The Big Book of Flowers, which she kept on the bottom shelf behind the counter.
Her mother wasn’t particularly interested in names. She didn’t give them to the plants, and the shop didn’t have business cards or an awning, just a sign out front with the words “Flowers, Plants and More, Ask for Emma Lynn” written in peeling paint. She had only agreed to call the blue carnation Gloria artificialis because Berenice had insisted that it would help at the auction. Emma Lynn had decided that month to try cultivating orchids. The carnation was a small price to pay for the challenge of mastering those difficult flowers.
The auction had been Mr. Müller’s idea, and he helped post flyers and announcements in the few places people still gathered in the city—teahouses where women exchanged recipes and boredom; art galleries, cafés, and a few churches. The event was a success. Even Omar and Halley were there, with a few of their artist friends. Emma Lynn decorated the whole shop in blue. Berenice helped out by serving gingersnaps tinted the same color. They placed the Gloria artificialis on a stool in a dark corner, under a glass dome that split the lamplight into dozens of rays. Many people were interested, but no one offered as much for the plant as the man from the museum.
It wasn’t actually until the end of the auction that Berenice realized it was the same man. Old people all looked alike to her: they were equalized by time, freed of their individuality by wrinkles. As she was helping Emma Lynn wrap the carnation, the man silently approached her, stroked her hair, and asked:
“So? Still convinced you’ll never get married?”
Berenice didn’t answer. Emma Lynn looked up and stopped tying the bow that cinched the plant’s cellophane wrapping. She locked her eyes on the stranger, but said nothing. Berenice realized it was the same man she had seen in the museum a few weeks earlier, but that time he’d been wearing a smock instead of a suit. She could see that her mother was upset, but the shop was full of people milling around, asking questions, and touching the flowers, so Emma Lynn had to wait until that night to yell at her.
Her mother talked nonstop while they finished cleaning up the shop. She always did that when she was angry, which didn’t happen often. When it did, though, she would list the dozens of reasons Berenice deserved to be punished: revealing to their neighbor in apartment five the secret to growing perfect roses, using plastic plates for the cookies instead of ceramic ones, trusting the first stranger she met on the street. The list went on, but Berenice had stopped paying attention. Right then, like in one of those games that show two pictures that look identical but contain subtle differences, she remembered all the times she’d seen the carnation man without realizing it. There had been at least three since the museum. The first was right outside her school: she had seen him reading a newspaper in the café across the street as she passed by with a few classmates, deciding whether or not to head down to the river. A few days later, she’d felt his gaze through the window of Max Cercone’s barbershop. And there was a third time, at Ship of Fools. That time, the man had sat silently with a cup of tea and a book while she talked with Halley about Emma Lynn’s plans for the auction.
That night, Berenice let her mother list mistakes dating all the way back to the previous summer, and accepted her punishment (no visits to Omar and Halley for a week
, organizing all the closets in the house) without complaint. She’d only told Emma Lynn about the encounter she’d had with the man at the Museum of Art and Natural History. She didn’t want to know what punishment her mother would come up with if she confessed what she’d just realized: that the carnation man had been following her, and had probably only come to the auction because she, Berenice, had accidentally told him about it.
6
There were only five keys in the box that could fit such a small lock.
The first one had the virtue of shutting her up. Vik was surprised by the physical signs of his pleasure (salivation, a slight dizziness) at her silence, which was clearly an indication of panic.
The second key went halfway into the lock, but it made her drag herself to the farthest reaches of her thirty-square-foot kingdom. More silence with the third. It was the fourth that produced a triumphant click. Vik turned the knob and opened the door, his arm following its full arc. He pressed his weight into his cane and stepped back, like someone contemplating a landscape.
“It’s over,” he said in his language. “I’m not going to hurt you” would have been more appropriate, or at least more cinematic, but he wasn’t in a position to make promises.
One of the boxes on the bottom shelf moved, and in the darkness composed of shopping bags and piles of discarded clothes, he saw the outline of a heap. The smell of urine pushed him back another step. His eyes searched for the bucket. He found it in the corner, half hidden between two piles of newspapers. It wasn’t red. It was yellow, with a pink star in the middle, one of those toy buckets children use for making sand castles. He quickly detected two other things that didn’t belong to him: a gym bag in one corner and, on one of the shelves, with a blanket tossed over them, two plastic jugs that seemed to be full of water.
American Delirium Page 9
