American Delirium

by Betina González

  “I’ve always believed in obligatory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they kill, that would be the end of war.”

  Leaning against the doorframe, Emilia Bourdette tossed out the phrase casually, as if she’d been talking about her preference for cotton clothing. She’d finished out her sentence at the zoo a few days earlier, which apparently gave her the impression she was in a position to revive old slogans that didn’t shock anyone, anymore. It’s true, her energy was totally different from what we’d seen that day in the gazebo. She walked over to Smithfield, who had turned in his chair and fixed his eyes on the window that was letting in the homogenous gray that was common around these parts. Emilia rested a hand on his shoulder, also casually, like it was a toad or some other pest that had jumped out of her pocket of its own free will. Now that her moment in the spotlight was over, she wore jeans, a straw hat that was definitely out of season, and gardening boots.

  She went on:

  “The destruction of a harmful system is an act of love. We can do it,” she said, then paused and made a fist like an actress in a Golden Age movie. She counted two seconds and added, “Because we’re free. We’re beautiful.” Another pause, and now at the top of her lungs: “And we have all the answers!”

  I looked at our audience. The only one who hadn’t spoken was Betty Paz (she was obviously asleep behind her dark glasses). I also saw myself, sitting between Smithfield and the Armstrong sisters. Being Beryl Hope. Period. Beryl Herminia Hope, occupying a space where she wasn’t anymore, being something undefined or undefinable. A little more, but also a little less, than a wayward old lady.

  I saw it in their faces (I saw it in mine) with total clarity. They didn’t care whether it was Christ or Buddha, deer or the dopers in the woods. Smithfield’s speculations only reached as far as a blind spot in their minds, where they crashed into which pills to take at one forty-five, competed with plans for lunch at Ritter’s the next day, and then finally decayed alongside the memory of cauterized veins on an inner thigh, kinesiology sessions, the smell of onion under fingernails (so hard to get out!), and daily exercises to help guide pen over paper without ending up with something that looks like an echocardiogram. If Smithfield had said it was extraterrestrials making the deer crazy, they would have believed him. There was something flexible, malleable in their faces, a force on the verge of exploding. They were tired, they were fed up. All they wanted was to shoot something.

  * * *

  Berenice could tell when it was him because, instead of indulging in one of her monologues that always ended up baffling and persuading her interlocutor, Emma Lynn spoke to him in a voice that was soft and obedient, and there were long silences in their conversations when he, the carnation man, was the one persuading her. Or at least trying to. Because there was a controlled rage in the calm way her mother took in the stranger’s words. When she hung up, she stood there looking at the phone for a few seconds, as if she was amazed that the words could reach her through that cable, or as if the object had been a participant in the long argument. Berenice had come to the conclusion that the carnation man wasn’t interested in flowers, that he hadn’t paid all that money for the carnation because he admired it, but because he wanted to get close to her mother.

  The old man had come to the flower shop one other time, a few days after the auction. Berenice was in the back room, in the nursery, watching Purple Queen. It looked like the plant had sprouted a bud that week, something Emma Lynn had thought was impossible. Berenice had kept a close eye on it ever since she discovered the bump crowning one of its branches. She wondered whether the flower would smell the same as the bigger version. She imagined it wouldn’t. She imagined that its diminutive size would make it unique.

  Emma Lynn was nervous that day. She was expecting the carnation man and had told Berenice she wasn’t allowed to leave the nursery until their meeting had ended. A useless precaution, because anyone could have heard their conversation through the glass doors. It was just that Berenice hadn’t thought they were saying anything important enough to merit listening in.

  The visit had been brief, and Berenice remembered a few snippets of their conversation. The man walked around the flower shop, admiring Emma’s most successful grafts and entertaining himself with questions about the names and descriptions of the bouquets in the catalog. After a while, he asked to see the nursery. Emma said no. He asked if she had any orchids. She answered that she planned to try growing tigre tikka from Bolivia, a species almost completely unknown in the north. She preferred, she said, the more modest versions of those flowers and not the laboratory-produced specimens that husbands bought for their wives to make up for too many years of cohabitation. There was something perverse in that whole industry of compensation, Emma said. She didn’t want any part of it.

  In the end, the man bought a bouquet of grass lilies and left. Berenice had the feeling that her mother was scared of him, which didn’t make sense because he seemed very polite. But the carnation man had done more than just buy flowers that day. She was sure of it, and now she regretted not having strained to hear the whispered conversation they’d had beside the front door to the shop. The same door Berenice had avoided for the past few days and which she decided to continue avoiding. She didn’t want to run into Mr. Müller or have him see her through his picture window. Come to think of it, she was surprised that he hadn’t appeared at the apartment, asking why the flower shop had been closed for so long.

  Taking the dirt path that wound its way up from the woods, Berenice stuck her hand in her pocket to make sure that the keys to the back door were still there. As she caught her breath in preparation for the last leg of the climb, she struggled to retrace Emma’s exact actions after the carnation man’s first visit. She remembered that she, Berenice, had been playing in the dirt set aside for the orchids and had gotten the sleeves of her blouse dirty. But when she left the nursery, Emma hadn’t gotten angry. She hadn’t even noticed. She was completely focused on the pages of a notebook with a gray cover that she’d pulled from a green backpack.

  Berenice knew whose notebook that was. She’d only ever opened it once: it was full of poems about the future, love, and the cosmos. There were also drawings made in blue ink. She remembered one of a girl with long, curly hair in concentric circles that transformed into flowers, a garden, a duck pond, and deer. The afternoon Emma found her reading it, she sat down next to her and said that the notebook, the canvas backpack, a guitar, and a few photos were all that was left of Gabi, so they needed to be extra careful with them. She explained that the poems were songs, which was why they had those little symbols floating in the lines above the words. Those were musical notes. “I always wanted to learn to play an instrument. Maybe one day I’ll ask someone to play these for me. To hear how they sound,” Emma had said.

  It was hard for Berenice to believe that the slim girl in the photos, with the perfect nose and long, curly hair, was her grandmother. When she asked why they never visited her grave but did visit Great-grandma Cecilia, Emma answered that Gabi had asked to be cremated and that her ashes be scattered in the woods. “She probably figured she’d be everywhere that way. The fool,” Emma said, involuntarily clenching her left hand into a fist.

  Berenice hadn’t seen her look at the notebook again until the afternoon the carnation man came to visit. Hiding her mud-stained hands behind her back, Berenice asked what she was reading.

  “I’m not reading. I’m looking,” said Emma, turning a photo over in front of her. In it, two women and five men were lined up in front of a house that looked like a castle. They were smiling. One of them was Emma’s father and Berenice’s grandfather; it’s just that no one knew which. Years earlier, when she was young and finding out had seemed worth the trouble, Emma had numbered them with the intention of finding out what had become of them. She’d lost steam at number two, a young man with long hair and thick glasses who was now a bald and vaguely famous film producer she was never able to reach directly.
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  Berenice had no trouble identifying number four as the carnation man, even though he’d gotten more plump and had fine blond hair back then. His eyes were self-assured as he looked at the camera. Eyes that clearly believed nothing bad could happen within the space of that photo. She’d made her way to the counter and was sitting on a stool across from her mother. Emma picked up the picture, stretched out her arm, and held it to her cheek.

  “The truth is that neither of us looks like him. Maybe in the eyes, a little bit. Or your ears. They stick out more than mine,” she said, amused, which inspired Berenice to cover them with her hands.

  Emma giggled and said she looked like those Chinese monkeys that were supposed to be wise because they didn’t want to hear anything about the world. Then she laughed. Hard. Berenice didn’t find it funny at all to be compared to a monkey, no matter how wise. She looked around the flower shop for something to shut her mother up. There was the backpack, on the corner of the counter. She jumped off the stool and grabbed it at a run, not realizing that one of the straps was caught on the iron rod that held the roll of paper her mother used for wrapping bouquets. The backpack, which was very old, tore immediately. Something like buttons or candies went flying in the air and Berenice ended up on the floor with a piece of fabric in her hand. The other piece, along with the straps, was still hanging from the iron rod. Emma Lynn screamed something incomprehensible, then ran around the counter at Berenice with the obvious intention of dragging her off by the hair, or at least shaking her. But she stopped halfway, knelt down, and started gathering the seeds (not buttons or candies) that had been hidden in the lining of the bag. Once she’d stowed them in an empty pack of cigarettes, she returned to the notebook. She flipped quickly through the pages until she found one where Gabi had pasted the drawing of a plant that had clearly been torn from an encyclopedia or a botany book. “Salvia lundiana,” Berenice read over her mother’s shoulder, “more commonly known as albaria or sweet dream, is a hallucinogenic flower native to the Caribbean and Central America, where indigenous populations have utilized it in religious ceremonies for more than twelve hundred years. According to popular belief, the consumption of its pungent leaves in a fresh state produces an encounter with the inner animal, which then confers its powers on the initiate.”

  No matter how many times she went through her mother’s notebook, Emma Lynn couldn’t find any other reference to albaria, or any hint about how it might be grown. There were a few songs that mentioned “the eye-opening dawn,” or “natural light,” and “the mystery of mended souls,” but nothing that resembled instructions or advice about how to cultivate it.

  She’d spent that night reading posts on an internet forum about psychoactive herbs and mushrooms. The plant was a source of controversy: some people maintained that it didn’t exist, some that it had been wiped out during the conquest, or that the youths who thought they’d tried it back in the seventies must have gotten their hands on a similar species but not the original salvia that appears in the diary of Kristoffer Lund, a nineteenth-century Danish traveler who was one of the few people to ever describe it in detail.

  Pretty much everything she read had been a waste of time, she’d told Berenice the next morning. The people who posted on those forums were more interested in finding places where the plant might still be growing in the wild than they were in how to cultivate it.

  “Too bad they’re only interested in the plant’s effects and hardly anyone bothers to learn about its history.”

  Nothing like a mystery involving plants (and family, Mr. Müller declared when they shared the discovery with him) to get Emma’s gears turning. In just a few days, she had come up with more germination experiments and compiled more information about the flower than all those people on the forums who saw themselves as experts in hallucinogens.

  That was one of the things she missed most about her mother: everyone around her (even Mr. Müller, one of the rudest, most sullen people they knew) would get caught up in a wave of enthusiasm that made it impossible not to get involved in her projects. It didn’t matter that the albaria experiment had failed. Maybe something like that could explain her disappearance: the discovery of another tricky plant that had taken her out of town for a few days.

  But Berenice knew it wasn’t a likely scenario. She reached the top of the hill, keeping her eyes on the few remaining houses in that part of the neighborhood. Night had nearly fallen, she was cold, and the hope that had been with her as she left the house had vanished as she took stock of the events after the auction. It was clear that her mother hadn’t gone on some “expedition” and that albaria, with its white and probably cursed flowers, was responsible for everything that was happening.

  8

  At eleven twenty-five he was startled by the sound of water and a banging above his head that told him a tap had been opened. On the screen of his telephone, the closet door was ajar and the woman was disappearing down the hall to the bathroom.

  He left his instruments on the table. He felt another kind of sweat, neither hot nor cold, on the tips of his fingers. Without his cane, it took him thirty-eight steps to reach the living room staircase from the basement.

  His mind had slipped into counting again. When he thought about it (which wasn’t often, only on those rare occasions he “caught” himself doing it), he was unable to reach any conclusions. He couldn’t say whether it was an attempt to divide the insignificance of those moments into sequences in order to slow them down or, on the contrary, if his mind was trying to grind them into a straight, neat line of numbers to obliterate them and make space for things that really mattered. He counted his steps without any plan or philosophy, just as he counted the intervals between the cigarette and his mouth, the times his needle pierced the dry skin of an animal, the time it took to boil an egg. He’d read that somewhere in the East there were monks who believed they had a finite number of breaths. They maintained that every human being was born with a certain number of inhalations and exhalations at their disposal. This was why the sages focused on breathing deeply and slowly. They saw laughter, love, and tears for what they were: a senseless waste of air. Vik sometimes wondered if his mind’s insistence on counting was somehow similar—an awareness of his mortality. His doctor, on the other hand, saw it as part of his obsessive-compulsive disorder and urged him to abandon this and other rituals.

  He could hear the water more clearly from the stairs. It was the sound of the bath being filled to the point of overflowing. Which meant she hadn’t even bothered to close the door (that’s how confident she was of having dominated her poor host). Just the thought of it restored his strength and he climbed the twenty-three steps, indifferent to the wood creaking under his feet and to the numbers.

  He found the dress practically in the staircase. Her knickers were a bit closer to the door. It was an implausible but encouraging detail. The fact that the woman in his closet still wore undergarments gave him hope that he might be able to reason with her, that she might not be beyond the reach of language.

  He leaned against the doorframe, enjoying what would probably be the only time he had the advantage, just as she was getting into the bath. He watched her close the tap with her left hand; with her right, she covered her nose and mouth and then sank into the water. Once again, Vik felt the detail (of plugging her nose) was out of place, as if he were the intruder and was watching a little girl play. The tap dripped out three, four notes. She remained underwater.

  The steam from the bath made it hard for him to see, but the woman’s body was giving off the same smell that had been floating through the house the past few days. It was then that Vik finally recognized it (actually, that’s what he’d been trying to do all morning). Without moving or thinking of a plan, he squinted and let the old desperation so tied to that scent invade him.

  The woman in the bathtub didn’t smell like soil or leavening or sandalwood. It was albaria. He should have identified the scent earlier, when her body was on top of his, but Vik
had resigned himself long ago to the fact that his treatments were stripping him of his sense of smell and taste.

  He opened his eyes—still trying to reconcile the old, familiar smell with the unrelentingly foreign order of this house in this country—and immediately saw hers, looking straight ahead at a point in the water. Her gaze was serene, if slightly veiled, like it could deflect any flash that might stimulate it. The straight hair plastered to her head revealed a youth that her skin and the bags under her eyes had hidden. Vik calculated that she couldn’t be over thirty. And no, he didn’t find her beautiful.

  She lifted an arm from the water. She grabbed the soap, rubbed it between her hands, spread the foam over her face, and then slid down until she was submerged again. When she came back up, she said:

  “I’ve always thought the face is the only thing worth washing. The rest can just stay dirty.”

  He’d gotten so accustomed to the idea that she was mute that the sound of her voice (harmonious, natural) sent a chill up his spine. Thirteen seconds passed, diligently counted. Vik shifted his weight from one leg to the other. Finally, he responded.

  “There are clean towels in the bedroom. I’ll get you one.”

  * * *

  The first two classes were theory. I showed them a video of tracking techniques that I got at the public library and a few diagrams of cervine anatomy. I doubt that any of them will actually hunt a deer. If they do get that far, it’s even less likely they’ll hit one of the two points that guarantee a quick and painless death for the animal. But it seemed important to give them all the information a professional hunter would have. I didn’t need any of that: the woods, and years of hunting with my family, were enough.