American Delirium

by Betina González

  My father could track a wounded deer for hours; he was even prepared to sleep outdoors if the animal took too long to choose a spot to die. This is the phase where lots of hunters make a mistake: their impatience gets the best of them and they end up losing their kill. It takes days for a deer with a flesh wound to bleed to death. Some even make a full recovery (my aunt Rose, who lived way up on the mountain, used to see a three-legged doe in her garden all the time). It takes a lot of patience, following an animal without sending it into distress, before and after you shoot. Hitting the target isn’t the end of the story, far from it. That’s why it’s so important to aim for the heart or the lungs. A hunter has to be ready to make decisions quickly, to ask herself every chance she gets: Is it ethical to shoot this target? From this distance? The answer seems to be yes if the shot is within the hunter’s and her weapon’s capabilities, and above all if the target is one of the animal’s vital organs. That’s the foundation of the hunter’s code of ethics. Heart or lung. They all know it. But in practice, there’s no time for questions. Even the most experienced hunters have trouble not catching “buck fever,” not falling victim to their own adrenaline.

  Just imagine it, you’ve been posted up in a tree or a ditch for hours; imagine your hands are frozen around your rifle, your eyes are tired from reading bite marks on the leaves of bushes and traces of fur left on tree trunks; imagine your body is a shapeless mass of calculations and cold, when out of nowhere, arbitrary as a revelation, a twelve- or fourteen-point buck steps into the picture. The cold disappears and air enters your nose with a force stronger than anything you’ve known before, but it’s somehow still not enough. Your shortness of breath is so surprising that you gasp to take more in and soon you’re panting as if you just ran a sprint. Your palms are sweating and your heart loads and fires a thousand times before your fingers do, while that buck saunters right in front of you, grazing at his leisure, maybe a little disoriented by the wind. It takes a lot of experience not to lose sight of the target at a moment like that. Not many hunters manage to shoot for a vital organ under those circumstances. Especially when it’s their first buck. Most of them miss. Or they hit the shoulder or a leg, the two worst targets. The weapon is secondary, I’ve always said. It’s the hunter that makes the difference. It’s the hunter who gets put to the test. Can she keep her cool? I’d say the question really is: can she keep still, with an animal she didn’t even dare to dream of in the crosshairs?

  Not many can. Only the ones who hunt for their own, secret reasons. Like my uncle Ben, my father’s younger brother, married to my aunt Rose. He used to hunt sometimes with a bow and arrow; he was one of the first to popularize the technique around here. Said that bow hunting evened the playing field.

  I asked him once why he hunted. He’d taken me to his favorite spot, up in the mountains, past the bridge destroyed by the summer floods. It’s strange, because it never would have occurred to me to ask my father that. (I guess even a little girl could see that my father hunted out of love, that he enjoyed teaching his children to track and identify signs more than he enjoyed hunting itself.) Ben looked at me like it was the stupidest question in the world. He squinted his gray eyes until wrinkles formed at the corners (because he was thirty-five and acted like the world hung from his every gesture, I thought wrinkles were attractive). He clenched his jaw and a shadow fell over his sunburnt face.

  “To remind myself I’m alone.”

  It took me years to understand what he was saying. Back then I probably replied with something even stupider, like, “You’re not alone, Uncle Ben.” I know I put my hand on his knee. In the silence that followed, I realized that he and I had crossed some kind of threshold. Clearly uncomfortable, he stood and gestured at the valley and the city, which trembled in the afternoon light like a mirage. Then he adjusted his cap and said it was time to head back.

  Ask anyone who calls themself a hunter today why they do it. They’ll say it’s to “get outdoors” or “spend time with friends,” or “to land a trophy.” Fact. Hunters today don’t think twice before they mist themselves with synthetic piss to attract bucks, or use illegal weapons, or shoot an animal that’s lying down. They only care about the result. Not many of them know the pleasure of anticipation (the real reason my father hunted) or of realizing they’re alone in the world, alone in the woods, where we only have two options: hunter or hunted.

  Of course I don’t expect anyone in our group to understand. I try to stick to Smithfield’s explanations and convince them we’re doing a public service. Even you, Dr. Danko, would agree with that idea. Anyway, it’s not like we’re the first. In Black Chapel, the town council approved an ordinance that makes it legal to hunt in residential areas to reduce the deer population. Other towns are still debating the issue, but I’m pretty sure we won’t even need a permit in our case; the woods around the city are so full of deer it would take an army to get rid of them all.

  Emilia doesn’t see things that way. She paid me a visit yesterday at the museum. She insisted that the deer had stopped acting crazy at the end of the summer, that the episodes of animal violence were getting less frequent, and that it had obviously just been temporary. I told her I was planning to go on with the project, even if Smithfield was hooked up to a machine. I should talk to the authorities, she suggested, if that was the case. She even offered to act as an intermediary. I asked her if having crushed a fawn’s skull put her in a better position for diplomacy than the rest of the group. I watched her gaze grow more intense.

  “I have anger issues,” she said. “It’s important to admit these kinds of things, Beryl dear.”

  Ever since her “rehabilitation,” she’s been punctuating her sentences with “dear,” “honey,” or “sweetheart.” Like someone who smacks you and then hides their hand. In this case, she was hoping I was going to admit I had some kind of problem. I have no idea what. I’d already caught her whispering something in Max Cercone’s ear during our first marksmanship class. That’s why I kicked her out of the group. I told her right there, in the museum. That her participation was no longer required, that no group could tolerate a member who went around sowing doubt. I know her type. Too pretty. And beauty always creates needs. The need for maintenance (how many more years are you willing to keep working for that ass? wouldn’t it be better to just let it go?); the need to be worshipped (how many times are you going to debase yourself for that compliment, that gift?). Needs, needs, needs. That’s what ends up destroying them. Gabi was like that, in her way. Except she was smarter than Emilia, even in her pseudoreligious delirium. She could see that the days of her reign were numbered. That the most natural course is toward the common denominator of ugliness. Fact. Sooner or later we all end up in Gerontozombie storage.

  After the day we walked to town together, Gabi kept checking the papers for a story about the woman in the yellow car. She never found one. I know because I was looking, too. We never knew what happened with her. But the memory still bound us together. That and the pregnancy. For a few months, we were inseparable. We read parenting magazines, picked out baby clothes, did breathing exercises. The others got involved, too: Clarke planned a party to pick the baby’s name, Gutierrez hired a midwife so the birth could be communal and happen at Bridgend. Frank ran around satisfying any request Gabi or I would make; he could’ve written a song, he was so happy. Yeah, those were months of pure enjoyment. Finally, something was brewing at home, something that promised to be even bigger than the Big Concert. And that’s how Celeste was born. A perfect little girl who defied all her mother’s fears. My fondest memories of Gutierrez are from those afternoons he spent with the baby in his arms, shaking pieces of brightly colored paper to get her to stop crying. And Clarke, the most reserved among us, who made an effort anyway to make sure she grew up healthy. Yeah, Celeste was the Big Party. For all of us except Gabi.

  For starters, she was never able to breastfeed. Either the milk wouldn’t come, or she couldn’t handle the pressure of her daughter�
�s mouth. The doctors recommended an outrageously expensive formula. Gabi spent her days in the attic or in a rocking chair with Celeste in her arms and a vacant look in her eyes. One time she told me that she’d dreamt she heard the baby crying, and it kept getting louder and louder and she found herself in a big, empty white room full of sunlight, without a single piece of furniture or anywhere someone could hide a baby. She looked everywhere for her, until she finally realized that she was wearing her. Yeah. That’s what she said. That she was wearing her, stuck to her belly like a dress. And she’d understood that the baby had been there the whole time, and that she was going to stay right there, crying for both of them, and that there wasn’t a song or a balanced meal in the world that could calm her.

  It was around then that I decided Gabi, Celeste, and I would take one of the empty bedrooms on the second floor. She was in no condition to take care of her daughter. Another time, Clarke caught her in the van—she was about to leave for the woods because “someone” had warned her that her daughter was in danger at Bridgend.

  There are names for that now. You should know them, Doctor. Maybe they would have applied to Gabi. But back then, no one was talking about postpartum depression or psychosis. It’s not easy to believe we’re just a conglomeration of hormones, that our failures might be the result of a chemical, electrical, or contractual imbalance in our brains. It goes against our idea of what’s “natural.” Since when is it “natural” for a mother to decide she can’t stand her son or daughter? Not so smart for the proliferation of the species, right? On the other hand, some animals kill their offspring. It’s true. Pigs, for example: I’ve read that mothers eat their defective young in an act of population, or misery, control. They’re definitely sparing them the humiliation of being different. Back then, though, these thoughts didn’t even cross my mind. I believed in everything. That is, I refused to believe in hormones—I thought that above and beyond genes and anatomy there was a self, a redeeming center that would prevail, that would never be left to the mercy of instinct.

  Not anymore. Now I’m inclined to admit the opposite. Besides, I was more worried about Celeste than I was about Gabi; to me, her instability was just as much a part of her as the beauty marks on her chest. Yeah. Something was already broken in that little head of hers, which is why none of us paid attention. We were wrong about that, like we were about so many things.

  I remember a few of those nights, the two of us talking from one bed to the other, me listening to the sounds coming out of the cradle at the foot of mine. Those were some of the most sincere conversations I had with her. She told me about how she’d known she wasn’t going to grow old since she was a little girl. About how she’d trained herself to look without fear at dead things and had come up with a plan not to join them too late.

  That might be how we lost paradise. Don’t you think? Once we began to anticipate, scrutinize—and, most of all, try to solve—death. What I mean is, that’s how we lost the last thing connecting us to the beasts. Real paradise is not knowing, or living as if you didn’t. That time, it was Gabi who was wrong. I guess the kind of contemplation she discovered in the religions of India is meant to remind us of our expiration date. Just like certain poems and certain ways of approaching science. A load of crap. I want to know what that anticipation gets you. Better to live your life forgetting it, or thinking you’ll be an exception. Yeah, much better to come up with diversionary tactics. Hunting deer is as good as any other. You know it, too, Doctor. That’s why you put us in front of this camera. Fine, so the world keeps turning, time for some distraction.

  * * *

  From the outside, the flower shop still looked like an extension of Mr. Müller’s house. Inside, though, was a map of Emma Lynn’s preferences and whims. The simple, semicircular counter was made of wood. It was too high for Berenice (it had come from a gaunt, melancholy tobacconist who’d watched his clients die off one by one), so she had to sit on a stool to be on the same level as the customers, which made her seem like a security guard; the bouquets of roses and gladiolas lined up in front of it guaranteed that people didn’t come too close. The counter was hollow in the back. Emma Lynn had shelves built in, and these quickly filled with boxes of seeds, papers, notebooks, receipts, and books.

  To the right of the door, in front of the blue-and-gold stained-glass window, were the bouquet stands. Their arrangement and contents depended on the season and on the mood of Emma Lynn, who occasionally waged secret wars against a few of the local farmers. She’d stopped buying from the one with the best tulips around because he’d dared to offer her Rembrandts grown using a chemical developed in Japan.

  To the left, by the red-and-green window, were the trees and plants for sale: bougainvillea, cherry trees, wisteria, potted ivy, and periwinkle alternated by season with firs, ficus plants, poinsettia, morning glory, and elephant ear. Around Christmas, Emma made a special point of getting miniature pines. She would try to convince her customers to adopt living trees for their gardens instead of continuing to decimate the forest in service of their consumerist zeal. Only a few of them took her advice.

  The back room was what they called the nursery. It was a simple rectangle closed off on two sides with glass. A door in the far wall opened onto the woods. The slope leading to the cemetery was off to the right; on a clear day, you could even see a few of its more imposing monuments.

  The nursery was also where all the tools were kept: spades, scissors, and little syringes were lined up on Emma’s worktable; shovels, hoses, rakes, and shears hung from the wall the nursery shared with the shop. The watering cans, in different shapes and sizes, lived on the shelves with the lamps, buckets, and flowerpots. Plants, experiments, and other projects covered four perfectly aligned white wooden benches (also purchased from the church), and, in one corner behind a shoji screen, there was a cot where Emma took increasingly long naps.

  A lukewarm air always glided through those two rooms, though it was more like a murmur or an insistence. A stubbornness of branches, buds, and blossoms that felt like an organism preparing itself, a being composed of hundreds of other tiny, insignificant beings convinced they were part of some greater order.

  It was into this organism that Berenice stepped on that Friday afternoon. The flowers weren’t in catastrophic shape, but there was plenty of room for improvement. Several violets had haloes of exhaustion on their petals, and the dahlias had lost their composure. A few of the chrysanthemums were still in flower and required special care. But before she did any of that, Berenice headed straight for the folding screen, stomping loudly on the cement. If Emma Lynn was hiding there, she was going to get a piece of her mind.

  Yes, there was someone on the cot, facing the wall. But it wasn’t Emma Lynn. It was Mr. Müller. It took Berenice a few seconds to recognize him. His belly seemed even bigger and his shiny red face looked longer than usual because he was sleeping with his mouth open like a fish, forcing out powerful gusts that never quite became snores, though not for lack of trying.

  Her first instinct was to run. But she immediately realized that if he was there, it was because he’d noticed that Emma hadn’t opened the shop in days. Maybe he knew something about all this. She shook him gently. Nothing. She tried placing both hands on his left arm and pushing him toward the wall. That didn’t do it, either. She changed strategies: standing at the foot of the cot, she grabbed his wrists and pulled until his torso popped up like a doll’s. Mr. Müller opened his eyes and said a single word.

  “Water.”

  Berenice went over to the nursery sink and returned with a full glass, which he emptied in one gulp.

  “I went looking for you at your house yesterday, but you weren’t there,” he said. “The Belchers told me they hadn’t seen you in days. I’d thought that idiot mother of yours had come back for you. But now I see I was mistaken.”

  Berenice’s eyes filled with tears at the way Mr. Müller said that last part. How could he be more powerful than Connie, Omar, or Halley? None of
them had managed to make her cry. That was why she hadn’t considered him as a possible relative: he always added an insult on to everything he said. And he licked his lips when he talked, like he was always just finishing lunch. Berenice kept waiting for him to finally pull a napkin from his pocket and wipe his mouth, but that never happened.

  Mr. Müller straightened his clothes. He closed the last few buttons of his shirt to cover the bush of white hair growing from his chest, sat more comfortably on the cot, then leaned back against the wall and went on speaking, his words thicker and slower than usual.

  Emma Lynn, he said, had been acting strangely since the summer. He’d taken it upon himself to keep an eye on her. “You might not be aware, but I have quite a view. And good windows. I know everything that goes on in this neighborhood.” Of course Berenice and her mother knew it. The stained glass wasn’t just an aesthetic whim on Emma’s part: it also served to hide the details of her business from the gaze of her former employer. The years they’d worked together in the pharmacy had been enough to establish a certain familiarity between them. Or a routine, which is the same thing. Emma would tolerate his rudeness and irritability, and he got to be partially involved in their lives. Keeping his involvement partial was the most challenging aspect of the routine, something that required a considerable investment of Emma Lynn’s diplomatic skills. When she got the idea to start producing ointments and growing medicinal plants, Mr. Müller became her involuntary advisor. All it took was a glass of whiskey to get him talking about active ingredients and brain receptors, to transform him from an old man with too much time slipping through his strangely elegant hands into the youth who had studied pharmacology and biochemistry long ago.

  Still, Berenice thought, Mr. Müller wasn’t as innocent as he seemed. To start with, the whiskey hadn’t clouded his mind at all while he was participating in these projects. He remembered every detail of his conversations with Emma, and—though he certainly did want things to go well for his tenant—there was something fishy about his involvement with the albaria project. When Emma transplanted her only specimen to a flowerpot, he’d started researching its effects. He was the one who arrived at the flower shop one day with a book of travel writing that included excerpts from Lund’s diaries from Venezuela and the Antilles.