Emma Lynn’s account of the circumstances surrounding her birth never changed: “When I felt like I was running out of time to have a beautiful baby girl, I went to a bar and found the handsomest man there. I slept with him and nine months later, my wish came true.” More than the story, the different faces her mother made while telling it stuck with Berenice. In her memories, as she spoke Emma Lynn had her hands in a flowerpot or was spreading liquid mud on her face, one of the oldest beauty tricks in the book. Then she would add, returning to the story, “It’s surprisingly easy, I could do it again. The trick is to not get caught up in the fantasy of love. I mean, of course I could still fall in love, lots of people insist on it, but then you’d end up alone, and we don’t want that, do we?”
That time they were in the bedroom and Emma Lynn was talking to Berenice in the mirror. She’d made a point of looking her in the eyes when she said the word “alone,” as she finished doing Berenice’s hair in dozens of Medusa braids, as she always called them. “Go on, time to turn those boys to stone,” she’d said, giving her a pat on the bottom. And Berenice had left for school feeling like she had superpowers, like she had a vast, vegetal force safeguarding her. Because even though her mother had explained the Greek myth to her, Berenice was convinced that “medusa” was the name of a plant; what a waste that would be, if not. She’d find it one day, she promised herself, and it would be magical. The medusa would be able to detect evil in people’s faces. A girl could save a lot of time with a plant-based potion to help her tell who was good and who was bad.
The carnation man, for example, was one of those who complicated her life. She couldn’t tell if he was good or bad. From the moment she saw him months earlier, during her school field trip to the natural history museum, the man had hung in her mind, awaiting her verdict. The fact that he’d followed her afterward and then showed up at the auction didn’t make it any easier for Berenice to decide.
The reason for the field trip was to see the exhibition of life-sized dinosaurs, dolls made of iron and latex accompanied by interactive machines that told their story and explained their extinction. You could press a button to get the characteristics and habitat of each specimen and learn who used to eat whom, which was the best part of the whole show.
Berenice got bored right away and broke off from the rest of the group. She passed through savannas and tropical jungles with howler monkeys and birds that, with the flapping of their wings and their cawing, silenced a family of four. They were squeezed onto a bench facing a display in which a leopard stalked a herd of antelope. Berenice preferred the sounds of the jungle to the succession of silent prehistoric giants she’d just left behind. In the African wing, she was surprised by the diorama of an Arab mailman being attacked by lions. The man had managed to kill one of them, but the second had already clawed a deep gash into his camel’s leg and, climbing up the animal’s flank, was going straight for the throat of the driver, who faced it with a small and not particularly intimidating saber. Did he survive? Berenice hoped not. It would be more fair for the lions to win than for them to be sacrificed so someone in London or Bombay could get their letters on time.
In the mountains, she stood in front of the bears for a long time. She could hear water flowing and the wind in the pines. A female and her cub had stopped to drink from a stream. Farther off, hidden behind some rocks, a large, dark male watched them with fire in his eyes. The female had been preserved in the act of baring her teeth at him. The sign next to the glass read: “The male is an unwelcome presence in this intimate scene.” Berenice agreed. Even if the fat brown bear was the cub’s father, he looked like nothing but trouble. In fact, he looked like he had every intention of eating his offspring.
Those rooms were practically empty, so she could spend all the time she wanted listening to the animals. She kept going, hoping to find more theatrical taxidermy. But when she reached the third floor, she came across a dark room full of human figures. She realized she was walking through ice, because it was actually colder in that part of the museum and the blocks felt real to the touch. It was like entering an underground castle or a frozen labyrinth where everything glowed pale blue without ever reaching white. She was in a country where the residents hung clothing and canoes from their domed ceilings; in one corner, they’d built a fire and a few fish were cooking for all eternity; in another, one of them had left a blanket half woven. Until the inhabitants finally appeared, armed with spears and covered in pelts, hunting seals or tossing snow in one another’s face, children and adults mixed up in laughter that the wind enveloped in hard and distant gusts.
Then came the woman with the bowl in her lap. She seemed to be cooking something. She lived in a tiny hut that was even darker than the rest, and she sang the same phrase over and over. But what really caught Berenice’s attention, what she’d remember from that trip to the museum, was the next display. The one with the saddest bride in the world.
She was very young, with big eyes, and her long hair was divided into two braids that had been adorned with flowers for the ceremony. She had clearly been baking, because her face had streaks of flour on it. She was wearing earrings made of cotton, and a short white dress, and she was carrying a tray with an ear of corn on it. The other characters seemed to be chasing her more than they were accompanying her. It looked like they wanted to take something from her, probably the corn, since she was carrying the tray at the height of the visitors’ arms, as if she had no other choice but to entrust them with the protection of her weighty load. Come to think of it, Berenice reasoned, they all looked really sad: the man with the dead pig slung over his shoulder, the groom hiding behind dark glasses, and even the little boy, who was frozen in the act of playing with a piglet he led around by a rope. If the sign next to the display hadn’t told her it was a wedding, Berenice would have thought someone had died.
That’s what she was thinking about when she saw, reflected in the glass, a man in a beige smock appear behind her.
“People think they’re our ancestors, but they’re really us,” he said.
“Us? Who?” asked Berenice, looking up in confusion, because the man (someone she obviously had nothing in common with, since he was old, very white, and tall) wasn’t even looking at her, he was looking at the display.
“Mhm.” He lowered his eyes to her as if it was hard for him to break the spell of his dolls. “All of us, I suppose. All of us who live here, I mean.”
“I hope at least I won’t have to be kneading bread until the last minute on my wedding day.”
The man laughed and explained that the Comalli revered corn, and that the flour on the bride’s face was actually sacred makeup.
“Just like the blush your mother probably uses,” he added. “We’re alike in that way, too. Always trying to improve ourselves, perfect ourselves.” He stretched his arm out across the entire display, and when he spoke again it was louder and more slowly. “Always getting married and unmarried. Must be exhausting, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to get married.”
“Neither does he,” the man said, pointing to the boy with the piglet. “But one day, he will. There’s no getting around it.”
Berenice wanted to ask him why they had to follow in the footsteps of the Comalli and not of the ice people, who seemed happy, playing in the snow with their fishing poles. But maybe, she thought, happiness has to do with the weather, with being close to the Arctic Circle. Then she pointed to the next display, which appeared after a curve, at the end of the hall. Inside there were two men nearly hidden behind some trees, facing away from the visitor and toward the light, as if they were about to walk through the wall, which was illuminated from the floor up. One of the men was missing an arm. The other had the head of a deer.
“And those guys? Why aren’t we like them?”
The man looked down with the blank stare of someone leaving a football game or a movie, still totally immersed in what they just witnessed.
“Be
cause it’s not possible. The ones who tried only ended up hurting themselves.”
Just then, the elevator door opened and another employee in a beige smock walked over, supporting his weight on a cane. He stopped a few paces from them and coughed gently.
“Ah, Vik,” said the old man, and walked over to read something the newcomer held out in a folder.
Berenice seized the chance to scurry downstairs. She would have liked to have seen the deer man up close, but it was getting late and her teachers were probably looking for her. Also, she was worried the man might start talking to her again. She’d never met anyone who talked like him.
Not long after that, the same man had waited for her outside her school, found out the address of the flower shop, showed up at the auction, and bought the Gloria artificialis. On top of that, since the auction he’d been calling her mother all the time and sending her postcards.
7
He woke at ten thirty from a brief, uneventful sleep. It was snowing. Without sitting up, he checked and confirmed that the pain was still there, like a song that reveals its complexity when played at a low volume. His body was covered in a layer of sweat that became a new source of irritation each time he brushed against himself. A shower, a light lunch, and work on the Ploucquet were calling. He calculated that he had at least four good hours left in him before his body fell apart again. He couldn’t afford any more distractions.
Before heading down to the basement, he prepared a tray with a cheese sandwich, grapes, and yogurt and left it on the floor in front of the closet. He meditated for a moment on the best way to let the woman know it was there. In the end, he banged on the door and shouted, “Food!” feeling more like a butler than a warden.
He worked on Romeo’s arm for half an hour. It was important to finish that phase of the restoration, clean the limb thoroughly, and restuff it in the same day. The task was complicated by the fact that he had to maneuver the loupe, the needle, and the filling all at once. The animal’s paw was in such a state of deterioration that it nearly fell apart between his fingers. He considered inserting a plastic or wood support, now that every size and position imaginable could be ordered from a catalog. But that would have been like tossing the Ploucquet in the incinerator. No. He needed to make do with the same materials dear Hermann would have used in 1851.
At eleven, he thought he heard the creak of the door to the closet or of the wooden floor. He imagined the woman creeping over to the tray, sniffing the food before bringing it to her mouth, eventually nibbling a corner of the bread and accepting, simultaneously, both the danger and the gift. Vik set his tools on the table, reached out, and took a sip of the mint tea getting cold at his side. He looked around. The workshop was full of potential poisons; it would be easy for him to find the right one. By that point, he wasn’t even surprised by the thought: he had to consider every option. He was certain she was doing the same thing, two floors up.
He couldn’t resist the temptation to check his phone. No. She hadn’t crept anywhere or sniffed the food. She’d opened the closet door wide, set the tray on her lap, and was now leaning against the doorframe, eating grapes. The camera wasn’t able to capture her movements in detail, but it looked like she was even removing their skins before popping them into her mouth.
He finished his tea in a single gulp and went back to work. But he couldn’t shake her. He felt her closing in on him behind the forced regularity of his movements. His needle and pliers would waver, the stuffing would come out again, and he’d have to start over. First, she was one of the many victims of the hurricanes that were buffeting the country and sending a wave of people northward. Like him, she’d lost everything and was walking barefoot and disoriented through an unfamiliar city. They had found one another. He didn’t walk with a cane, of course, so nothing impeded their embrace. But the street was filling with other refugees who were walking toward him with unsteady steps and hair full of ash. Hands grabbed at the sleeves of his suit. Then he was standing in front of a soldier from the Coloma army, who was handing him a blanket and cans of food, and she had been lost in the crowd.
After that, she was a housewife with a hardworking husband and three kids, a tortured soul with some hidden talent (he’d bet she painted beautiful watercolors), who had suddenly felt life hanging too heavy on her and decided to get away. She went here and there, flagging down cars on the motorway and panhandling outside women’s bathrooms. One day she turned up at the museum—with the naïve hope of showing her watercolors, which she carried in a portfolio under her arm—just as he was walking down the front stairs at closing time. She was wearing a black dress. The top buttons were open to reveal the curve of her breasts, but their exchange dissipated just as he approached her. There were too many pigeons pecking at the stairs (no one knew who’d had the great idea to spread crumbs all over the museum steps, probably the same comedian who put scarves and hats on the Diplodocus statue)—all of which decided to take flight at that exact moment, as if they’d agreed in advance. They were indeed pests; he had to give Miss Beryl that. And to top it off, two school groups were barreling out of the building after the last guided tour—which was unavoidable, he supposed, because if he was leaving, that meant it was five o’clock and everyone needed to clear out of the museum, and therefore he really had no other choice but to return to the easiest, the most effective, and also the most plausible option and stick her in one of the many abandoned houses along Grandville, lying on a mattress with other bodies, young people with blank stares who shared syringes and spit. Of course she sold herself, indifferently and for pennies. Of course she wasn’t wearing a nightgown but a pair of tight jeans and a T-shirt that revealed her navel. One day she decided to leave it all behind. But her willpower only took her as far as the café across the street, where she collapsed. Then he appeared. He leaned toward her, swept the hair from her face, and found her beautiful. He offered his arm and walked her to his home, straight to his bedroom, to the bed (which was, strangely, already dirty and unmade), where she did what she used to do back at the house full of addicts. But now she did it with a sense of gratitude and with such complete surrender that, even in his fantasy, she ended up repelling him and sending him back to his worktable, from which the mice looked up at him with the eyes of rodents and not of characters in an Elizabethan drama.
* * *
Smithfield didn’t mention any of this when he spoke to the group of old folks at the community center. He couldn’t have, in the first place, since he didn’t know the half of what had happened the day we went to buy butter and came back with a feast and the news of a communal baby. But he didn’t talk about community, either, or about Gabi, or about the love he’d said he felt for me until she showed up. Standing in front of our group of beginners, he talked about deer overpopulation and misguided youth.
He convinced them. Not with his words, though. With his urgency. And with the only “argument” he was able to make: the possibility that deer in the area were going crazy because of a virus that they in turn brought into the city via their natural parasites. In fact, he said, it was possible that those confused kids living out in the woods were victims of the same disease.
He didn’t mention that we’d chased the natural life, too. That we’d believed in similar things, that we’d searched for those other states of consciousness, just like the dropouts, or that we’d failed. He talked about cases of madness in animals. About the sheep that committed suicide in Turkey, the time it rained frogs in Kansas, the zombie pigeons in Ukraine. About the epidemics and the pilgrimages of the Middle Ages. (History always lends a hand when it comes to persuasion.) He passed around photographs and newspaper clippings. It was time to do something, he said, to take back our rightful place in a city where authorities refused to do anything to really guide youth and correct the imbalance that all of us, at the end of the day, had helped create.
It was our duty, he concluded, to act. We had nothing to lose; there were no more sunny corners left in the south wher
e we could retreat with a clear conscience. For a minute, I thought he was talking about those ocean view condos sold to retirees in low-interest installments, but then I realized that maybe he was talking about the Primevals, who were still alive and well in his mind, founding cities along the coastline of the entire continent.
Max Cercone asked why the authorities didn’t intervene, why they were still protecting the animals if they’d become a danger to humans. And how was it possible that there was a virus or parasite in our woods and no one knew about it.
“What authorities?” asked Elizabeth Duda, punctuating her words by removing the glasses she’d been using to pretend to read an article written in German about a dog that had tried to kill itself three times in the same lake.
“They’re obviously in on it,” agreed Heather, massaging her left leg.
“That’s right,” her sister interjected. “They’ve never lifted a finger to protect us. Take a look at how the mayor parades around that chubby brat he just adopted.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they’ve already made some secret deal with that band of lunatics. Maybe they’re poisoning us and we don’t even know it.”
“Someone has to be the voice of reason in these crazy times. Have you ever asked yourselves why the community center is run by foreigners? Doctors coming from Serbia, professors arriving from Cuba from one day to the next. Very suspicious. When my wife here and I were in Haiti, we saw all kinds of strange things.”
American Delirium Page 11
