He addressed her again. This time in her language. Nothing. She apparently had no intention of making his job any easier. Was she waiting for him to go in there and drag her out?
Looking at the heap, he tried to reconstruct the female form he’d seen through the surveillance camera. Only the white dress made it possible. But what if he was wrong? If that wasn’t a woman in front of him? He had invested time and energy on the basis of that certainty and the thought of any other possibility made his heart race. He took two steps into the closet, holding his breath to delay his encounter with the smell (which, again, wasn’t only of urine—there were plants and fungi, too, clinging to that ammoniac base). With the help of his cane, he kneeled to bring his eyes level with the second shelf.
Once his eyes adjusted to the darkness in the closet, he could see that she was lying almost exactly as he’d imagined her: in the fetal position, facing the wall, almost invisible except for the bottom of one of her feet (the other, positioned in front, was lost in the shadows). The only things between them were a few blankets and two suitcases that had probably been her camouflage over the past few days.
Her hair would have been the logical choice. But he only realized that later, when he was already on the floor with her on top of him and his back shattered into multiple nodes of pain. He’d chosen her foot. It was irresistible, so small and so surprisingly pale. Without really thinking about it, he’d reached out and closed his hand around the hardened pad of her heel. She reacted immediately. Making no noise beside the sound of her accelerated breathing, she folded back on herself and knocked him over in a single movement.
Vik had no time to think about the strength of the legs closing around his chest or the agility with which she moved. The two of them rolled around in a pile of smells and unexpected grazes until they found themselves outside the closet. She’d immobilized his arms in just a few seconds and now, sitting on his chest and leaning forward just far enough to hold his wrists down, she looked at him with a trace of confusion, as if deciding what to do with him.
The camera hadn’t lied. She was practically a dwarf. Her face was round, with big dark eyes and luminous white skin, pink in places. Her hands felt slick, like she’d just emerged from a dream or a dip in something aquatic or sticky. In contrast to her eyes, her mouth and upturned nose were exaggeratedly small. It was hard to calculate her age. If it weren’t for her skin, her breasts, and her strength, she could have passed for a child.
Vik stopped struggling. His cane, which had been his only advantage, was still in the closet and the only way to control the pain in his back was to try and relax. He calculated that if she sensed his passivity and loosened her grip a bit, he could drag himself to the bedroom and take an analgesic (the patch on his arm didn’t seem to have any more relief to give). That would give her time to gather her things and get out. He thought it was the most convenient solution for both of them. The most elegant. All he wanted was for her to leave. That, and the wave of silence the pain reliever promised.
The woman released his wrists and leapt to her feet. The tangle of hair settled over her back. Vik had no time to move or adjust the plan he’d just formulated before she’d spun around, yanked the key from the lock, and returned to the closet. The next thing he heard was the definitive click of the latch.
He lay on the floor for a few seconds longer, trying to understand what had just happened. She was obviously not inclined to give up the territory she’d claimed. Much less so now that she’d confirmed the weakness of his organism. Maybe she’d already known it by watching him for days, anticipating an easy victory.
Grabbing whatever he could reach of the furniture and trying to keep anything from touching his back, Vik dragged himself to the bedroom. The bottle of pills was on his nightstand. He took one with the last sip of water left in his glass and lay down on the bed. A few minutes later he was asleep, but not before thinking (with the last of his strength transfigured into paranoia) what a perfect victim he’d make, in the event that the woman in the closet decided to strangle him or shatter his skull with any of the many objects that inconveniently decorated his room (the pedestal lamp, the stone totem, one of the heavy bronze owls steadying the row of books on his desk).
* * *
He still had some of his old way with words. If a gal knew how to listen, underneath those apocalyptic predictions, those invented or confused names (I listened with horror as he said “Bridgend” like it was a person), beyond the almost religious tone of warnings about the dangers of altering the natural order, underneath his incoherent declarations about animal madness (“the mark of an intelligence that evolved over the past forty years for the sole purpose of destroying us”), aside from all that, fighting against the tangle of antipoetic discoveries that the disease put in his mouth, there it was, clear as day, the voice of Frank Smithfield, alias Francisco, one of the leaders of that commune of exceptional beings no one remembers anymore.
But that was a long time ago. Before Gutierrez traveled the world to collect mushrooms and plants. It was a different era, one you could believe in. The way you believe in a sunbeam or a storm. The solid, pure gold of days without night. That’s what we were going to be. Maybe what we were. Until Gutierrez and the rest of them got interested in entheogens and the wisdom of all those cultures sacrificed at the altar of plastic and electricity. I’m curious. Isn’t that the rule? Surrender to the bigger animal or disappear? Thing is, they didn’t think so. They were the ones who started all that nonsense about a return to the woods, or—according to them—a return to a higher state of consciousness. And there was Gabi, to be their perfect emissary.
Of course they were all in love with her. Of course they’d all had a piece of her. That was never the question. Gabi gave out her body like exquisite alms she’d never had to fight for. With joy and a little surprise at having it all, such divine tits and ass. We ladies sensed it, too. I won’t say we admired her. No. We accepted her. The age difference saved me, at least, from comparison and competition. Or so I thought.
I remember that day, the one time we went into town together. Someone decided we needed butter. Do you realize what that means? A person’s life can change forever because another person needs butter. The kitchen was a disaster that day; it looked like it had been ransacked by an army. Stacks of dirty plates, eggshells, and empty cans piling up in one corner. A few ice trays and a bottle of hot sauce in the fridge. There was nothing in the cabinets but a bag of flour, a bottle of vinegar, and a bag of apples we’d bought from some local farmers (our vegetable garden had been a failure: the only crop that had taken was some bitter fava beans we’d gotten sick of eating). Our money and our plans to get more had run out a while back. Working wasn’t an option. Gutierrez was traveling; Clarke, locked in the basement watching silent movies with some girls. Frank and the musicians on shift were practicing in the dining room (the poor thing had “learned” to play the kettledrum on one of the trips he’d taken with Gutierrez; I think the others either put up with it or were too drugged out to notice he had no talent). I was hungry. Back then, I was always eating something. My hunger was existential, colossal, yawning.
From his spot on the threadbare carpet, a young man with large amber-colored eyes said he knew a recipe for apple pie that only took flour and butter. Gabi was sprawled on a sofa with three of her admirers, two girls and a guy with a bald head and a red beard who was a little older and called himself an artist. Since he arrived, he’d spent his time filling droppers of different sizes with paint, which at some point he’d sprinkle over a piece of wood the size of one of the living room walls. He called it “Cosmic Syllabification.” Imagine. The point is, Gabi looked up at me from that human mass, untangled her arms and legs, and said, “Come on, Berilia, let’s go spread some magic. And buy butter.”
You had to climb two hills to get to the nearest store, which was in a gas station. They didn’t like us in town. It took a lot of guts to walk into Mrs. Briggs’s shop and face that line of se
rious expressions. After the episode with the police and the underage boy, we tried not to attract too much attention. In the name of freedom and of Gutierrez and Clarke’s experiments, we’d always take the longer, less traveled way to the gas station, or else we’d pile into a van and go to another town, where our peculiarity would get lost among the tourists.
So we headed out. Me and Gabi. For butter. Like two little girls in a fairy tale. She wanted to bring Leo, the dog she always had with her, but I wouldn’t let her: they hated us enough already, without our bringing a dog into their store. I remember the two of us walked like we were inside a ray of sunlight. She’d already become the favorite. Not for being pretty, though. A few months earlier, she’d figured out how to grow albaria. Others had tried it before and failed; they hadn’t even managed to get the seeds to germinate. How could they have? They were just a bunch of kids who wanted to get high.
But Gabi didn’t give up. She’d been researching the flower since that one time we tried it. Frank, a guy named Tony (another one from the “old guard”), Gabi, and I were the ones Gutierrez chose for the session. It rained that day. No matter how hard I try, I know I’ll never fully be able to put that trip into words. This wouldn’t be my first attempt. The only thing that comes close is what I said before about the suppression of time and language. Yeah. That. I remember feeling like a viscous, simple universe all closed in on itself. Like a wise, motionless snake. That’s how I felt. Frank, Gabi, and all the bodies around me disappeared, transformed into sources of sounds and odors. Sources of heat and worry, more than anything. Yeah. A blind, absolute, paralyzing wisdom. That’s how I’d describe albaria.
Gutierrez had questioned the locals, but no one in the islands had known or wanted to reveal the secrets of the seeds. He didn’t care: he had a long list of substances he wanted to experiment with. After our session, though, Gabi took over. It was strange to see her throw herself into a task. She abandoned her meditation technique and her followers. For a little while, she even acted like a “healthy” young woman. She’d disappear in the mornings, hitchhike to campus, and spend the day in the library. She also visited the nurseries in the area. That was around when she adopted the deer. A young buck, practically a fawn, that Clarke found starving to death by the side of the road. Its mother had been hit by a car. Gabi brought it home and it lived with us for a while, like another resident. When it got too big, we built an enclosure in the garden. Gabi fed it every morning and spent hours on end brushing its coat. The whole thing always seemed to me like another one of her extravagances, another attempt by a desperate girl to assert her difference.
But we were talking about the day we went to town for butter. It was hot, and neither of us was wearing a hat. I remember how the sun felt. “Like a halo,” Gabi declared, and started in on one of her speeches about energy and the breath. Like I said, she had a tendency to preach, and her words made my hunger and my hangover worse; I felt like I was carrying the whole sun on my head. A forty-something-year-old woman with copper hair pulled her yellow car up to us and asked if we needed a ride to town. Without consulting me, Gabi said yes and opened the back door. I sat in the front. I heard her laugh and ask the woman to turn on the radio. The woman looked at her in the rearview mirror. There was tenderness in her eyes. When she turned to look at me, on the other hand, they went hard as coal.
Gabi started filing a broken nail with the leather strap of her purse. There were no trees on that stretch of road and it was five or six degrees hotter in the car. The whole thing, us three and the yellow car, felt to me like a mirage wrapped in a bubble of heat. One of Bob Dylan’s drowsier songs was playing on the radio, which made the sensation even more intense. I heard Gabi ask the woman if she had any nail polish. She looked startled. She said no, but if we went to her friend’s apartment with her, she could get some for us. And whatever else we wanted. She asked Gabi if she was hungry. Gabi said yes. That she’d been dying for a hamburger and a Coke. Then she added:
“It’s your nails, where you really see how the fetus is consuming you. I must need more calcium. Or iron. One of those things. I’m sure it’s going to be a boy. They’re more fragile than girls. They need more care.”
That was when I saw what the woman driving the yellow car saw. Not two girls walking to town, wrapped in a sunbeam. She saw a brunette in jeans that were too tight for her and a top that announced she was in denial of not being a teenager anymore, and a skinny black girl with puffy eyes in a green gauze dress that just barely covered the bump of a baby she’d been carrying for months. I was obviously dragging Gabi along with me on the road to ruin, rather than the nearest town. That’s why she’d stopped. That’s why she was trying to take us to her friend’s apartment. Blessed be the middle class, so easily scandalized, with their yellow cars, their tooth whitening, and their French manicures. Blessed be vacations paid in installments. Blessed be money well spent on Pyrex, Prozac, and psychologists.
I’m not sure if anyone at Bridgend knew. I think Gabi came up with this excursion because she wanted my complicity. She wanted to get rid of the baby. I hated her for that. For putting me above her in such an obvious way, like I was her mother or some spinster aunt. But she got it. My complicity, I mean. Which isn’t saying much. My tears, my words, my complicity, they aren’t worth a thing. Make sure you write that down, Doctor. It’s what a person does that matters in the end. What she does. Sure, Gabi could count on me, but not to get rid of the baby: now that we had a real chance to prove that the community worked, that there was another way, that we didn’t all need to fall for the biggest lie, I wasn’t about to let some damned irresponsible girl ruin it.
Because the next thing she did, right there in the car, was run through a list of all the substances she’d taken over the past few months. I saw the woman’s hands tighten on the wheel. I saw her eyes, which had been hard as coals, burn with indignation. I saw her weighing options and anticipating reactions. That woman didn’t deserve the life running through her veins. Her skin was so white you could see her blood passing dazed through a body that had never shaken with pleasure or hit a high note off-key, much less ridden life at a gallop. In the back seat, Gabi had begun to cry. She was saying that she was afraid the baby would be born a monster. That he’d be deformed, that all those drugs were bound to have consequences and that maybe it was her punishment for not knowing who the father was. That the baby was the child of all the men she’d slept with since arriving at Bridgend. I thought it was fantastic, and couldn’t believe that she didn’t understand what it meant. An entirely communal child, one hundred percent. Just imagine.
I don’t know which was worse, the woman driving with her arms stiff and her back too straight, or the girl soaked in tears and terrified of her own body. Fact. Beauty never made anyone stronger. No matter how much of it Gabi had, she was always going to be that defenseless little animal in the back seat of a stranger’s car. She was about two minutes away from asking the woman to adopt her. And the woman, please. She was practically calling her “my child” like those fake mothers in stories.
The woman reached for the dashboard lighter. She’d stuck a cigarette between her lips. I watched her fix herself up as she talked. She was trying to buy time. She was probably trying to calculate Gabi’s age. Yeah, she must have thought Gabi was a minor. She must have thought she could go to the police. I felt her thinking it with a clarity I haven’t known in years.
All I had to do was lift my left hand and hit her quick with the back of my fist. Yeah, this fist, just as effective back then as it is now. My knuckles got her right in the nose. My other hand went straight for the wheel. I think she instinctively put her foot on the brake because the car came to a stop silently, majestically.
The woman’s face was covered in blood. The cigarette had fallen into her lap and had burned a hole in her salmon-colored dress. Gabi had thrown herself on the floor and was screaming for me to stop, that it was bad karma, that I was crazy. Stuff like that. I got out, opened the back
door, and dragged her out of the car. Then I went back, opened the white leather purse that had been on the dashboard the whole time, took all the money out, and stuck it in my pocket with the car keys. The woman had her hands over her face and was crying. Making a noise like she had the hiccups. I grabbed her by the hair and banged her head against the window a few times until she stopped.
“No one,” I said to Gabi as she sat on the asphalt and cried, “no one is going to come rescue you. Time to get cleaned up and buy some butter.”
And that’s how we left the highway and walked to town with a new complicity between us. And how that night in Bridgend we all ate, on top of the apple pie, ribs and cornbread and a bunch of other treats the community celebrated without questioning even once how I’d been able to multiply a few coins into a feast straight out of the movies. (No one asks where something came from if it came free.)
Gabi ate in silence, happier than she’d been in days. Or at least it seemed like that to me. Fact: there’s no better form of domination than sharing a crime or a cause for shame. From that moment on, the woman in the yellow car brought us together with just as much force as the baby growing with every bite in the belly of that irresponsible and ill-fated girl with a brain fried by religious pamphlets and pseudoscientific magazines.
* * *
Berenice had a very clear picture of the people who called themselves dropouts. She imagined them naked, dirty, and muscular, living in tents pitched in a clearing in the woods, where it was always summer, or sitting around a campfire in a cloud of smoke. The water game also appeared in that image (in the form of a waterfall cascading into a lake), which disturbed her. So did the carnation man, wearing a suit and gazing seriously at the group, which he belonged to in a mysterious way that not even Berenice could explain. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t imagine Emma Lynn among them, with her beautiful dresses, her complicated beauty routine, and her perfect curls—which she sometimes wore in an old-fashioned style, gathered in a ribbon at the crown of her head to accentuate her features, while falling loose across her lovely back. Berenice thought it was much more likely that she’d run off with a man, a threat she made often, especially when Berenice insisted on asking about her father.
American Delirium Page 10
