That Saturday was our first target practice. Frank had gotten the Lower Lake Club to lend us its shooting range, so that’s where we headed at lunchtime, to make the most of it before the real marksmen arrived (the club’s steering committee adheres to the county’s tacit rule of “no drinking, shooting, or gambling before two p.m.”).
Before that, each student had to get their own gun. Except for Tom and Betty Paz—who discovered two old Winchesters in the basement of their home, saved by some miracle from their last garage sale—everyone had to pick their own. Most of them ignored my advice about range and caliber. Elizabeth showed up with one of those modern rifles with the telescopic sights and a dozen accessories she bought online. Maggie and Heather solved the problem by opening a bank account—along with your debit card, they give you a Weatherby Mark V, an expensive rifle with a royal pedigree, but it gets the job done. The only one who really picked his gun was Max Cercone. His eldest son went with him to the neighborhood armory. After holding several rifles to his shoulder to test their weight and the feel of the stock, he picked a Henry, one of the least popular guns on the market because it’s heavy and only works at close range.
I brought my old Marlin. I could almost hear it singing in my hands after all those years of boredom on the rack above my fireplace. Unfortunately, the old Marlin remembers the last time it saw action more clearly than I do. Going back to the woods is a way of forgetting that day, of sanitizing it. No hunting rifle wants to retire after blowing a young woman’s brains out.
It was Max who surprised me most. He couldn’t sign a check if you handed him a pen. And forget about using scissors or carrying a cup of coffee from the kitchen to the table. It’s always a catastrophe. But things change when you put something heavy in his hands. He was the first one to find his stance with the rifle. Contrary to what most people think, there isn’t just one way to hold the barrel or one place to rest the stock. Max found his quickly. It’s not elegant, but it works. As far as his aim goes, with practice and a little persistence, he could probably do all right with a stationary target. But I doubt he’ll ever be good enough to hit anything in motion.
Anyone who’s watched Mr. and Mrs. Paz shoot can see they’re rediscovering the couple they were a long time ago. The activity has rejuvenated them; now I understand why they were the first ones to sign up for my class. Tom never walks as tall or carries himself with as much composure as when he leans ceremoniously over his Winchester. Betty’s a pretty decent shot, but she gets tired quickly. Fifteen minutes of practice and she’s already sitting on her cloth folding chair (she never leaves home without it) and shooting from there, with predictably unfortunate results.
When Elizabeth shoots, her whole body goes tense and she holds her breath. Exactly the opposite of what I’ve been telling them. All she accomplishes with that is to knock herself even further off balance when the rifle kicks. I’ve explained it to her dozens of times, but she seems incapable of following instructions. She nods without ever taking her eyes off the target, her finger still on the trigger. I think Ron’s death did away with the last of her neurons. I haven’t seen anyone in that condition since the Bridgend days.
Maggie and Heather Armstrong are the complete opposite. They hang off every word when I explain something, but when it’s time to put it into practice, I always catch them fighting between themselves. Maggie is in charge of taking notes in a black notebook. She’s very conscientious. I imagine she was a perfect mother and wife (she has two daughters who visit her twice a month without fail), but that won’t get her far in the woods. Behind all that consideration there’s an insecure creature dying for attention, terrible characteristics for a hunter. Nothing like Heather, who’s curt when she’s not being outright rude. All it takes is one look at her with the rifle in position to see she’s got potential: she stands with her feet at forty-five degrees and leans forward until her cheek grazes the stock of her Weatherby. Then she shoots. Her aim is pretty bad, but it doesn’t matter. Fact. There are some things you can’t learn through practice, they’re just in your genes. And Heather’s a natural shot.
Emilia was still with us that day. As far as I remember, she only stayed for a few minutes and just watched the shooters, making comments and offering encouragement. She said that her rehabilitation prohibited her from carrying a gun, that her contribution was going to be purely “logistical.” Can you imagine.
Frank and I kept an eye on the six students from a prudent distance, behind the glass at their backs. I went in and out: demonstrating, correcting, suggesting. He was unusually talkative, even though he never took his eyes off them as he spoke, as if he was still trying to convince himself he was in a shooting range. The more I think about it, the harder it is for me to reproduce exactly what we said that day. It wasn’t easy to keep a conversation going with all those interruptions. I remember he was interested in technique. He said that he was thinking of getting a gun and taking the class himself. I told him it wasn’t a good idea, that he needed to stay in the shadows. A group always needs a voice in the shadows. At Bridgend it had been Clarke and Gutierrez. Now it was his turn, I said.
He looked away from Elizabeth, who at that moment was celebrating her first decent shot with Max, and said:
“This has nothing to do with Bridgend, Berilia.”
He tried to keep his tone light, but it still crushed the small feeling of triumph I had that day.
“Of course not,” I offered, trying to stay afloat.
“This isn’t about the past. This is about the future.”
(Like it or not, he was already a voice in the shadows, and a pretty corny one, at that. I decided not to point this out.)
“I’m not doing this for the future. I’m doing this for us.”
I felt the heat rush across my face.
“Of course,” he said. Then came what I was most afraid of. “But also for those who come after us. One must leave a legacy. Gabi thinks so, too. I went to see her a little while ago. It was cold, even though the sun was out. You know how she believes in community more than any of us. But she’s wrong, even if it had been a sunny day and she were surrounded by flowers (you should see what she’s done with a few of them, incredible grafts and the most spectacular colors). You can’t be democratic with these things. No, I tell her, even good things turn into poison when they’re not taken in moderation. And there are punishments. No one leaves the scene without paying their bill. And you pay it in this world, not any other. Are you sure the Marlin wasn’t under your bed? Johnny says they looked for it everywhere. Seems there’s too many pigeons around his building.”
I had no idea who this Johnny was. But I tightened my grip on the rifle before responding. I’d answered that question a thousand times.
That day, the one Smithfield seemed trapped in, I couldn’t find my left shoe and had crouched down to look for it under what had been my bed for the past few weeks. I already said that Gabi, Celeste, and I were sleeping in the same room. Seemed like the best thing for the baby. But it’s also true that the mattresses on the floor had begun to annoy me, just like the cockroaches that climbed over me at night and just like other people’s sweat. All sure signs that I was already on my way back. No, the Marlin wasn’t where I’d left it.
“She must have taken it with her early, Frank, when she left the house.”
“Of course, of course. How stupid of me. She was going after the deer, right? The one she always talked to at dawn. What was its name? She’d have long conversations with it and always come back upset. Not advisable. Deep down, I think she was already anticipating this,” he said, gesturing vaguely to the firing lanes. “What we had to do.”
“That’s right,” I lied.
No, Gabi wasn’t going after the deer. She was going after herself. She’d gotten lost somewhere in the Big Party, and there was no substance or song or lover that could bring her back anymore.
Same as Smithfield. Dr. Alzheimer had clearly paid him a visit, or maybe something much worse.
If I’d had any doubts about it, they vanished that day at the shooting range. But I decided to go on, anyway. Not for the six students sweating in the racket of their inexperience. Not because I believed that the deer had gone crazy, or that they were a hazard to the environment or to humanity. Not even for Frank or for an “us” that (oh, I knew all too well) didn’t exist. For me. Of course. It’s for me that I went on, that I go on.
* * *
As he served her liverwurst-and-cucumber sandwiches, Mr. Müller told her everything he knew. Or everything he thought he knew, since Berenice was not inclined to accept without proof any story that confirmed her abandonment. According to him, Emma’s conversion had begun in the final weeks of summer, when she’d started providing albaria to the people living in the woods and (he was even more sure of it now) consuming it herself from time to time.
August was coming to an end when two customers—a woman with long thick blond hair and a tall man with a broad back and a foreign look to him—caught the former pharmacist’s attention: they always showed up as the sun was going down and always used the back door. Emma would go out, hand them a kraft paper envelope, and they would disappear into the trees. He could tell they were dropouts by how they’d aged prematurely. They were barefoot and their clothes were shabby: she wore a dirty dress over a pair of jeans, and he was in gray pants with hems eaten away by life at the mercy of the elements, and a button-down shirt that had once been black but was now an indeterminate milky color. He looked like an executive who’d lost his mind in the middle of a board meeting and had been adopted late in life by wolves. He was very blond, his beard and hair were long, and he spoke with an accent. Mr. Müller had confirmed this a few days ago, when he’d gotten close enough to listen in on the conversation they were having with Emma. Several days earlier, he’d taken the precaution of stealing a couple of leaves from the albaria while Emma was arguing with a couple about the price of centerpieces for their wedding. Mr. Müller didn’t know what he’d use them for, but he was certain they’d come in handy at some point, even if only to prove that the plant was real. But was it? If he’d learned anything about albaria, it’s that it was all too easy to confuse it with similar strains, or even with run-of-the-mill salvia.
“Yesterday, at exactly seven thirty in the evening, I confirmed that it was the lundiana strain,” he said, biting into his fourth sandwich and looking at Berenice’s watch. “I finally had the nerve to chew a fistful of leaves, and then I fell asleep. I thought it would be better to do it here, so I could still keep an eye on the flower shop. They weren’t even fresh leaves; they’d been in my freezer for a while. I can only say one thing: there’s a reason Lund’s tribe called it sweet dream. At first, I didn’t feel anything, maybe just a slight dizziness that made me sit down on the cot. I must have stayed like that for hours, staring at a stain on the wall. I entered a lethargic state during which I was suddenly struck by an expansive ray of white light. No, it wasn’t a ray, because a ray is finite. This was bigger and more overwhelming. Like a wave or a sun. Yes, a white sun flooded my mind and I stopped being me, I mean, I stopped being this person with desires, worries, and ideas, and was simply part of the wave of light in my head, which slowly settled into a fascination with the things around me, especially the ant that was and was not me and which I’d never be able to touch, no matter how much I stretched my arm, but which I could perceive in all its perfection, I could see, no, each of those six legs was a part of me and I could feel them scratching their way along the supple plaster of the wall, I could be inside that insistence, be one with that impulse for work and resignation. Then the happiness, that clumsy ignorance, disappeared. The light released me and I fell back into this consciousness, into this reasoned cancer we call life.”
Berenice would have liked to understand what Mr. Müller meant by “clumsy ignorance.” The only image those words called to mind was Baby Moon trying to keep her balance in the circle of dolls who excluded her. But Baby Moon’s clumsiness was a problem; there wasn’t anything easy or happy about it. Mr. Müller was mixing things up. Because he does drugs, said a voice in her head that sounded like Emma Lynn, but that couldn’t have been her because Emma Lynn would never say that. She thought everyone had a right to go crazy. So it was possible she’d sold hallucinogenic leaves to the people from the woods. She could even imagine her doing it with pride and good business sense.
Berenice sighed, took a sip of the beer that Mr. Müller had served her with a slice of orange in it, and asked him to tell her what happened the last time the two dropouts came to the flower shop.
That afternoon, last Monday, he’d gone over to the fence he’d erected to separate his house from what had been his garage and was now his renter’s shop. Mr. Müller liked to keep commercial matters clear and separate. From his living room window, he’d seen the man and woman arrive. He closed the curtains and went out to the garden, pretending he was looking for Sissy, the dog, who was sleeping comfortably in front of his television at that moment. Sometimes, if it wasn’t too cold, he’d let her loose so she could get some exercise (like her master, Sissy had a weight problem). He got close enough to realize that the three of them were arguing: Emma, with her back against the nursery doorway; the others, too close to her and leaning in. He couldn’t really make out what they were saying, but it was clear that Emma had decided not to give any more albaria leaves to the group, which made perfect sense, Mr. Müller concluded, because otherwise she was going to kill the only plant she had. Apparently they didn’t reach an agreement, because the man and woman refused to leave and went on talking for a long time. They were trying to convince Emma to go back to the woods with them. The man said they wanted to show her something “incredible.” The woman took a few steps back so he was closer to Emma. Mr. Müller had felt he should intervene. He called for Sissy again, and the woman shifted nervously. Emma didn’t even hear him. That was when he noticed something that had escaped his observational skill the other times: Emma was staring into the giant Scandinavian’s eyes as if she’d sunk all the way down in them.
“She was obviously in love with him. Now, I ask you: How is it possible women keep falling into that trap? So many brassieres burned in feminist bonfires, and they all end up accepting the same fate. Your mother seemed different, but, well. That was when I realized she hadn’t even been selling them the plant: she’d been giving it to them, first the leaves, and then the few seeds she must have had left. She’d been collaborating with them, with their project, somehow. Sure. She’d given in to his words, his ideas, or—even worse—to his pheromones. The guy took a step toward her, reached out, and ran his thumb down her cheek. That was enough. Emma went into the nursery and came back out with a leather bag she slung over her red coat. That, and the pot with the albaria, was all I saw her take. They’d convinced her that they’d solved the mystery of how it grows.”
Not true, thought Berenice. The flower didn’t matter. Neither did the man. What mattered, she realized at the exact moment Mr. Müller paused to finish another beer, was Gabi.
Berenice went to the counter and came back with the gray notebook. She found the photograph of the men and women lined up in front of the house that looked like a castle, waved it in front of Mr. Müller’s eyes, and told him about the day she and her mother had found the seeds hidden in the lining of her backpack. She told him that, and also everything Emma had said about Gabi and her life in that home of turrets and balconies. Berenice couldn’t believe her mother had lived there, even if it was only for the first few months of her life. Seven or nine. No one knew for sure. Months during which those men and women had taken turns feeding her, changing her diapers, calming her when she cried. Until Grandma Cecilia arrived to rescue her from “that abomination.”
Gabi wasn’t in the photo because it had been taken a little while before she’d arrived at the mansion. Cecilia used to tell Emma how her daughter had run off in the middle of the night with her backpack, a guitar, and the firm conviction that she had ou
twitted the whole family. The next morning, Cecilia and her other children had relived, between bites of pancakes and bouts of laughter, how each of them had held their breath and pretended to be fast asleep, shaking in their sheets at the thought that the eldest might change her mind, that when all was said and done she wouldn’t have the courage to abandon them.
Gabi wanted to be a singer, to record albums and play shows in venues packed with young people. But she was lazy, she lacked discipline. All she had was a voice. Cecilia had always thought that Gabi didn’t deserve it, that she squandered it with every word that left her mouth. The fact that such a voice belonged to her daughter made her question the universe’s distribution of gifts.
Several months before her daughter ran away, Cecilia discovered that Gabi had stopped going to the piano classes she’d been paying for. She let her be, and waited. She let her stuff the money for Miss Dalessio into a can. She let her save up for her bus ticket, let her plan, hoping that eventually she’d get lost. Exactly the way she did. In that house of the rich and insane.
When Emma told Berenice the story of her mother, on the other hand, she never talked about perdition or gifts, or the accounting on which the universe rested. She told it like a legend that explained her birth: Gabi’s adventures in the Bridgend commune were about a poor girl spending time in a palace where music and psychedelia turned every man into a would-be rock-and-roll idol and free love was part of a contract signed with the legend, the natural response to so much talent. Grandma Cecilia had raised Emma Lynn and taught her everything she knew, but she’d also made her the same as everyone else (the same as her aunts and uncles, who did their hair in styles that had been out of fashion for fifteen years, who went to church, who bought houses with backyards, and who had at least three children each). Gabi was her mystery, her restlessness and her beauty, the shadow of the woman she could be and who lay in wait in her genes, tormenting her, waiting for the right moment to pounce. Berenice didn’t know any of this. But she sensed it. She sensed that her mother hadn’t abandoned her, she’d simply decided to head for that fairy tale where she, Celeste Emma Lynn Brown, suddenly and before it all ended, had been born.
American Delirium Page 15
