When I was young, business was already in decline. Andreescu overestimated the power of the unions and the railroad. No one takes trains anymore; the tracks are abandoned and there aren’t any more workers dreaming of romance in the mountains. These days, there are trees growing by the reception desk, the tiles are covered in mildew, and someone has found it amusing to gather the television sets from all the rooms and stack them against the wall of the ballroom in an arrangement meant to look like a giant electronic heart. I imagine the dropouts are responsible for that bit of irony, too. A sad heart, beating to the rhythm of its cathode tubes. Or it would be, if the place still had electricity. It doesn’t. Or gas, or any other kind of energy, except what that bunch of crazies has managed to bring to it.
“They hold their meetings in the ballroom. What used to be a fountain in the middle of it, a Venus being born out of some rocks, was now a bonfire; it seemed to have been burning for a long time, because the statue was all black, so I figure the hotel has served as a meeting place for a while.
“In a building like that, it was easy to find a place to hide. It was already dark by the time I got there, so all I had to do was stand behind a velveteen curtain by one of the broken windows. Your mother, the man, and the blonde were with another ten or twelve people gathered in a circle around a bonfire. The only light in that enormous room was coming from the fire, which left the corners in absolute darkness. My eyes were slow to adjust, so it took me a while to notice certain key details, like the corral and the fact that, just as in Lund’s account, some of the participants wore bandages on their fingers or ears.
“‘Here we are,’ said the foreigner, gesturing toward Emma, ‘with a new force come to join itself to ours. Brothers and sisters, there is a time for war and a time for peace. The time for peace is long over. War has long been upon us—a global, ecological, and religious conflict that our governments choose to ignore. The war between Death and Life. We’re all aware that the path of political or economic solutions is too comfortable, too reassuring, too self-indulgent. Brothers and sisters, this is a battle for survival. Ask Teo and Angela, who stand here among us: they’ve survived the most outrageous atrocities and have decided to declare themselves son and daughter. Offspring. Child. Just think of the words—their happiness, their innocence. Ask the animals here among us…’ At this point, the foreigner gestured toward the corral, where three young deer were observing the scene. ‘They know it better than any of us; ask the fervent ecologists who don’t yet dare to join our ranks. They know it, too. World War Three began decades ago and it’s being waged silently but effectively by men with short hair and custom technology, whose only objective is to destroy the mysterious lattice of life, the strings that bind us imperceptibly but indisputably to the planet. I know because I used to be one of them. Another cog. Until I woke up. Until I decided to deprogram myself, drop out, go invisible. Like each one of you. In the face of that genocidal corporate machine, there’s no other option. Neutrality isn’t possible. You’re either part of the death apparatus, or you choose life. This one, the only one we have. In this struggle, the only valid strategy is the one that runs through our veins, the one all organic life employs for survival: resist. And what does that mean? There are seven kinds of resistance. We need to resist lovingly, supporting all the sisters and brothers who choose to live in hiding. But also to resist passively: refusing to collaborate, abandoning, renouncing. There are sisters and brothers who choose active resistance every day: sabotaging and blocking corporate and government communication networks, hacking their computers, making their planes disappear, destroying every last one of the death machines they’ve put on the earth. Welcome. There are also ways to resist publicly: declaring life and denouncing death. But we need, above all, to resist biologically: be healthy and conspire in sex and love, but not in the seed and the rearing, which only bring new problems to a world that hasn’t been sustainable for a while. Maybe one day we’ll deserve reproduction. But for now, we’ve lost that right. Which is why we need, also and above all, to resist spiritually: awaken the true life in you any way you can—through pain, through cold or hunger, and sometimes, only sometimes, through the natural substances here for that purpose, which we should use with wisdom. Resist as the animals do. Go out and be witnesses like them. And, finally, resist symbolically: go find in that world the Big Sibling who will guide you toward the innocence we lost with the invention of the prison we call language. We have not yet managed to free ourselves from that cage.’ Here the man paused, looked around the room, and added, ‘But we will.’
“‘We will,’ they all repeated. And the next thing I saw, the foreigner picked a few leaves from your mother’s albaria and started dividing them among those present. She took some, too. And she did it without ever taking her eyes off the man. She was really intoxicated by him. I imagine she must still be; if not, she’d be back.”
Berenice did everything she could to follow Mr. Müller’s story, but only a few meaningless images came to mind, along with a deep, heavy drowsiness that made it hard for her to concentrate, and that contained enormous stone hearts with people doing obscene things in them; deer banging their heads against the bars of their cages, trying to break free; her mother and the man with the long blond hair on the back of a motorcycle, going full speed down an asphalt road. Berenice understood this last part most clearly because it went with the word “intoxicated,” which Mr. Müller had used more than once. She could see clearly how Emma had finally become Celeste thanks to that word, how she wrapped her arms around the man’s waist with a triumphant glint in her eyes, which had turned blue from so much joy. Berenice could even see the clothes her mother was wearing: jeans, leather boots, a colorful blouse, and a scarf tied around her hair. She had a guitar slung over her shoulder. Yes, it was easy to picture Emma Lynn running away from her, from Great-grandma Cecilia, and from the flowers, by way of intoxication. She understood. Now all she wanted was for Mr. Müller to be quiet and let her forget about it all.
But he kept talking for a while longer, taking his time to explain his thinking. He’d reached the part of the story that interested him most, and someone needed to hear it. He didn’t care if Berenice understood half of what he said, or if she fell asleep with her elbows propped on the nursery table. Someone needed to know that he, Alfred Müller, on his way home and building on pure conjecture, had solved the mystery of albaria.
11
In a way he didn’t understand completely, it occurred to Vik—who was unsettled or exhausted the way someone who has just told too long a story can be—that he was responsible for the woman looking at him across his kitchen table. He and his childhood discovery.
“You said it was the story of your first animal. I thought you were talking about something else. About the plant, its effects. Not that,” she said, slamming her hand down on the table. She didn’t do it particularly hard, but the contact was loud enough to startle Vik. “So this means you never tried it,” she went on, disappointed.
“Of course I never tried it. It was enough for me to see what it did to that bird. Or do you think animal suicide is a normal occurrence?”
“Fine. We’ve seen a couple animals go crazy out in the woods. They run around frantic for hours. But that’s all. Nothing like what you’re describing. Nothing’s ever happened to our deer, but maybe that’s because they only eat the seeds. Ever since that six-point buck got away, Aero’s been really careful about that.”
“You can’t apply the term ‘crazy’ to that world. We don’t have words for it, for a bird that goes against its every natural instinct and slams itself like that against the bars of its cage.”
“It takes courage, that’s true.”
She paused. Then she pulled an envelope containing a few dried leaves and a jar of what appeared to be honey from her purse.
“We knew you were from Coloma, and that seemed almost like a sign. We were hoping you’d know more than us about the flower; that’s what I thought you were t
alking about when you said ‘my first animal.’ I thought you were going to teach me something.” The facial expression that punctuated that verb wasn’t even sarcastic: there was genuine disappointment in it, which made Vik feel even worse than if she’d been mocking him. “We got your name from the Immigrant Assistance Center. There were only two people from the island, you and another woman, who died.” She sighed and pointed to the Ploucquet within view of the kitchen. “As soon as I saw that poor rabbit, I knew we’d made a mistake. No dropout would ever make a career out of stuffing animals.” She paused after saying this, as if she were deciding whether he deserved the next words to come out of her mouth. She seemed to think he did. “Of course, the idea isn’t ours, it’s much older. We’re talking about a state of consciousness. Other drugs and experiences can produce it, too. I’ve always thought science was a mistake, that the mistake everyone made in the seventies and before was trying to convince the world with scientific arguments. It should be enough that beauty exists. It should be enough that courage exists. Some people talk about cosmic forces or communication with the animal world. Mine is always a spider. That’s my form, my way of stepping back, of ‘repairing cultural damage,’ as Aero would say. Some people think there was a tribe here, too, that used the flower in its rituals, I don’t know which of the strains. And then there was that commune in the sixties. They came up with this one,” she said, stroking the leaves. “They probably brought it from your island decades ago.”
As she spoke, she spread a bit of honey onto a slice of bread, picked up a few leaves, and sprinkled them on top.
“They taste bitter. It takes a while to get used to.” Then, as if she were just remembering when and where the conversation was occurring, she looked into Vik’s eyes and added, “I should have left a while ago, but I wanted to see where this could go.”
“Right. You said they’d told you to be invisible.”
“No one told me to do anything. Each one of us makes our own test. I chose this one: first in the street, then in the home of a man like you. Do you realize that more than fifteen people could live and eat comfortably in here? I’ve done the math. And all the food you waste … Please. But then, when you really think about it, everything in the world is just waste. No, I meant that I was curious how far you and I could go. What you would do after the cameras. That’s what made me think you were a lost cause. I hadn’t, before. Before, you didn’t seem like a pig or bourgeois or an accomplice of the system—you have to have some sense of what you’re doing to earn those stale adjectives. And you just seemed desperate. Do you know how many conversations you’ve had with another human being in the past few days? One. With the man who installed the cameras, of course. What’s next? I asked myself. I could see you clear as day heading out to buy an assault rifle.”
Pushing Vik’s teacup to the side, she placed the bread with its supposed charge of enlightenment on his plate. A drop of honey slid down her hand (which was still dirty with that sticky kind of grime that advances in tacky patches, he thought). She licked it off, tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, and, apparently satisfied with her sermon, crossed her arms over her chest.
What was she hoping for? That he’d act like some character out of a movie? That a bite of bread would turn him into a rebel, a superhero, a wretch? This was probably just one more stop or test along the road she’d chosen for her coronation. There wasn’t much difference between this woman and the religious fanatics who knocked on his door, Vik thought, disappointed. If he took all the extraordinary parts of the story away, if he took away all the coincidences, the ironies, and the flower, he would get the same thing as with any other group of humans with a cause: a lone, monstrous finger wagging in the air, and any individual will or intelligence annihilated by collectively clinging to a belief like a sordid raft.
Vik studied the woman carefully. Her hair had stopped dripping. He looked again at the network of wrinkles around her eyes. They weren’t signs of age. Maybe they were the result of life out in the elements, since everything else (breasts, neck, and especially hands) seemed firm. No, he discarded the idea immediately. They weren’t the result of life out in the elements, either. That woman had only been in the street or the woods for a little while. Her nails weren’t damaged enough, and she didn’t have the dry skin of the refugee women in Coloma. No, her skin had been moistened with creams and oils until very recently.
He regretted again not having paid more attention to the news about those people out there in the woods. He wondered if this woman had any children that she’d abandoned in order to shake society from its collective slumber. It was hard for him to imagine. But he hadn’t imagined the dropouts would be so young, either. Come to think of it, some people defined youth exclusively as excess—a definition that, by nature, couldn’t last beyond their thirties. But then again, he thought sarcastically, couldn’t it just be that everyone in the world is thirty these days? Everyone but him. He remembered his expiration date perfectly: he had been twenty-four years old when his body began quitting on him. No, there hadn’t been many excesses, not even before then.
They were signs of pain, he thought, returning to her wrinkles. Or what she understood as such. So it wouldn’t be, or shouldn’t be, he thought while counting the intervals between pulsations of the nerves in his back, impossible to convince her. Of what, not even he knew, but he’d discovered that he didn’t want her out of his house. Not yet. At the mere thought of that group and its delirium of an alternative society, the pain, exhaustion, and annoyance collected in his fingertips as a tremor. He hid his hands under the table and went back to counting. After an interval of seventeen seconds, he retorted:
“And who says I don’t have an assault rifle here?”
Without looking to see the effect of his remark, Vik laboriously got to his feet, trying not to be too obvious about using the table to hold himself up. She stood, as well. She looked astonished. Subdued, with her arms at her sides, she watched him struggle with his back’s complaints. Vik counted his steps to the staircase, a distance he crossed by supporting himself on the furniture: thirty-nine, exactly. More than twice his average. The stairs themselves were easier: his quadriceps could do all the work.
Finally seated on the bed, he heard her moving around downstairs as he undressed. He listened more carefully, expecting to catch, from one moment to the next, the sound of his front door slamming. But that wasn’t what happened. He heard the water running, chairs being moved around, drawers, glass, and metal in combinations that seemed almost absurd in their familiarity: the woman had washed, dried, and put away the dishes, and now she was climbing the stairs.
* * *
They weren’t ready. But they were never going to be. I know this now that it’s all over, now that my hands are shaking, too. I’m repeating it for you, Dr. Danko, but also for myself. Do you think I’ve earned a few sedatives after the miracle in the cemetery? I’d say I have. And some lavender tea, some forgiveness, and an end to all this.
To this room, this old-age center, to this memory you’ll probably label and archive just like all the others, before moving on to a different group of seniors in another city, another country. Thousands, millions of words saved for posterity, paid for with thousands and millions in subsidies so that brilliant minds like yours can take paid vacations with their kids at some ski resort. How many stories like mine have you collected without any real intention of anyone ever pressing Play on them again? Doesn’t matter to me. I hope you enjoy your vacation in the mountains. And that no one hears my story. That really is walking away with the last word.
Sometimes I want to believe. In astrology, in DNA or biology, in anything that could explain how a circle that opened more than thirty years ago just closed so perfectly. But there’s no need for mystical explanations. At the end of the day, it was Smithfield’s desperate plan that brought about this resolution, this chance to break even. I’m beating around the bush? Maybe. But how directly would you tell the story of how you could h
ave prevented a young woman’s death, and instead you just stood there, watching her walk away with a rifle in her hands until she disappeared in the woods? Oh, I’m pretty sure you’d beat around the bush, too, for as many years as you get.
There. I said it. Frank always suspected it and never forgave me. Of course, there were mitigating circumstances, just like I told the police. That day, it wasn’t only the Marlin that went missing. Celeste did, too. It was a cold, foggy morning. The air coming out of the woods was heavy and white and it surrounded the Clarke mansion. When I woke up, neither of them was in the room. It was hard to get moving. Later, after everything happened, I considered the possibility that Gabi had put something in my food the night before. My head was too heavy; it was as if someone had tied me to the bed with cords stretching out from the nape of my neck. But maybe not. Maybe I’d just had one too many. I don’t remember. I can’t remember everything. But I do remember very clearly the moment I crouched down to look for my left shoe and saw that the Marlin wasn’t under the bed. I thought about Celeste, about her mother’s empty stare, and my blood froze.
The house was still in shadows as the day peeked through, gray and rainy. Everyone else was still asleep. No one got up before ten at Bridgend, except the cosmic painter when he was inspired, or some kid who’d popped too many pills—it was common to go down to the living room and see some kind of spectacle—but never anyone who was actually awake.
American Delirium Page 17
