He had a short dream about the museum. He was inside one of the displays, but it didn’t look like one of Smithfield’s dioramas; the mannequins were damaged and wet, the paint that tried to pass itself off as skin was falling off in chunks, and the sad white plaster of truth sat exposed under the yellow glow of the lights. There were many of them, more than ten, placed near the glass in a way that didn’t compose any particular scene. There was no one else in the museum and he walked among the Indians with a portable radio broadcasting a championship hockey match. There was a leak somewhere. Suddenly his feet were fighting against the water and his radio had become a rifle, though he could still hear the announcer’s voice. The water quickly rose to his waist and the mannequins, which were nailed to the floor and were now the size of children (actually, they were children), began to drown. Not him. He was too tall to be in any danger in that half-flooded display. He could feel the water between his legs like a caress that turned into heat and gradually brought him back to his bed, to the vague awareness of not being alone, of the woman’s soft and capable hand moving over his sex.
She was lying at his side with her mouth in the hollow between his neck and the pillow; her body resting on his, she covered him with her breath as well. It was her left hand that was doing all the work. And with remarkable skill. He pictured her closing the tap in the bath, spreading honey on a slice of bread, and yes, she had used that same hand. Thinking about those details and about the morphine patch he still wore on his shoulder helped delay what came next. He was the first to be surprised at how quickly he responded to the stimulation despite his exhaustion, his pain, and all the chemicals. He had a few seconds to think, or rather to hesitate, before that inevitable and long-postponed violence took over completely. He rolled over and took the woman’s breasts in his hands; she parted her lips and let out a slightly louder moan. No. He wasn’t going to do it, he thought. If he did, the act would belong to the short and incidental time of instinct, not to true recognition. He wasn’t going to let her win that easily. Faking a groan of pain, he collapsed at her side. He stroked her hair and looked into her eyes with an intensity that could just as well have been love, empathy, or a scientist’s fascination with an object of study.
“Not yet,” he said, without taking his eyes off her.
He saw her smile, either out of happiness, it seemed, or in anticipation of a greater victory. Her arms, stretched across the pillows, her body—with its short and slightly thick torso—lit by the midday sun, her smile, and especially her eyes, which looked at him with intimacy that implied years of nights spent together, all seemed to indicate her abandon. It almost bothered him that it was so easy, that she’d succumbed so meekly to masculine dominance. He sat on the edge of the bed. Without taking his eyes off her, he dressed and reached over to the cigarette box on his nightstand.
“What happened to the girl?” he heard her ask, still on her back, but now with her arms folded behind her head and her face turned slightly in the direction of his arm, perhaps (yes, definitely) hoping to be caressed.
Vik decided to humor her. Sometimes, when the pain was constant, acute, and unfathomable, it endowed him with moments of clairvoyance. Moments when his counting slowed to the point that reality, tiny and predictable, could sneak into his calculations. He slid his thumb along the contour of the woman’s ear. It was too big for her face, a mark of vulgarity even in Coloma. Her smile widened.
She wanted a love story. It didn’t even have to be about Tania, anyone would do. A story she could use to shield herself from what had just happened, that could explain his rejection of her or at least suggest that he was, after all, something more than a man whose interest in the world and its cycles was shattered exactly seventeen years ago.
Without taking his eyes off her, he lit the cigarette, inhaled, and counted five seconds before answering.
“She disappeared. In the eruption.”
He shouldn’t have told her the canary story. He saw clearly now that the only lasting victory was anonymity; that was why the woman lying in his bed had chosen to lose herself in a group. Yes, in that group, more than in any hallucination those substances could produce. What a relief it must be, the chance to get lost inside something bigger than herself, thought Vik as the memory—of all the medical offices he’d visited in Kent, the acceptance letters from prestigious foreign universities tossed on what had once been his father’s table, the faded paint around the window through which he watched thin black smoke rise into the sky over the island—filled the silence that followed Tania’s return and hung in the overly heated air of his bedroom in that northern city.
There hadn’t been more than eighteen fatalities in the eruption, all of them in the town of Soufrière Coeur. Kent had been evacuated swiftly and efficiently. But Tania—who’d filled out considerably, had painted her long nails, and had started wearing tight dresses men couldn’t ignore—wasn’t in the city when the precautionary measures were taken. She was with her crew of boys in the mountains. The boys did most of the work, from picking to processing and preserving; the ones she chose got younger and younger and her only condition was that they not consume the plant. A few of them slept on the veranda, which had been closed in with glass. The only bird that had survived her childhood passion was the macaw, which lived in her bedroom for years. Its successors learned to say the same word in English, French, and Spanish.
Tania had tried to leave the city with as many albaria plants as possible (all attempts to grow it artificially had failed, even those of the first explorers to visit Coloma, hundreds of years ago). Even Mr. Cardelús was worried about his daughter. At least, he was as worried as he could allow himself to be. Vik ran into him on the dock where he’d gone to help with the evacuation. Cardelús was old and fat, almost blind from diabetes. It had been years since he left the business—which had never made him rich, or at least not rich enough—in Tania’s hands. He had two suitcases and three cardboard boxes with him, far more than evacuees were permitted. He said that he’d waited two whole days for his daughter. But the city was covered in ash. How much longer could he wait? Vik rushed to absolve him. He hadn’t thought about Tania in a long time. He hadn’t thought about anything except diagnoses and treatments in a long time.
He decided not to tell the woman any of that. He opted instead for drama, inventing a long story of unrequited love, years of patient waiting, accidental encounters, rebuffs, and silent adoration. He topped it all off with his rescue attempt, amid the smoke and ash, against the human avalanche descending the mountain that day. He’d never learned to drive; his household had always had drivers, but there he was—aboard an army vehicle he’d gotten his hands on because of his last name, still capable of desperate acts and of asserting his privilege. Or, better yet, with newfound temerity, a side effect of facing his illness. He made sure to include only a few details that made the story more believable. He borrowed a stampede of cattle from a story he’d heard from a family who lived in the mountains; he got the death toll (based on disappearances reported by relatives, not on the number of bodies recovered) from a report he’d read in the refugee camp where he’d spent just four days, the time it took Prasad to pull some strings and have him moved to the continent.
The woman rested her hand on his. There weren’t tears in her eyes, exactly; it was more like a viscous sheath of understanding.
That feeling of triumphant disgust from the dream about winning the Ping-Pong tournament had returned. He hadn’t thought of Tania since the eruption—that is, he hadn’t thought about the chubby young woman who sold albaria, mushrooms, and other hallucinogenic substances. He didn’t care whether she was alive or dead. But over the course of that day, that duel with his intruder, he’d managed to rid himself of the other one, of the girl who loved birds. And along with her, all of Coloma and the disaster that—it didn’t take a genius to recognize it—had actually changed his life for the better. For the first time in years, he even thought a bit fondly about Prasad.
/> “I’ll tell you my story, too,” said the woman. She rolled over to face the window and crossed her arms over her chest, as if she needed to hug herself in order to speak.
She began with the day, nine years earlier, when she’d left her parents’ home on the other side of the river. She didn’t even notice that Vik had gotten out of bed. She just kept building her story, which was plagued by flourishes (who cared if they lived in a trailer park?) and what she must have believed were major traumas (she couldn’t have been the only obese, unpopular girl at her school). She dedicated precious minutes to digressions meant to convince him that the institution known as family was the psychological, philosophical, and sociological equivalent of hell. That’s what the dictionary definition would be if linguists were actually scientific and honest, she said, her voice wavering as she choked back tears that Vik found melodramatic. “Family. Noun. Pain or the social administration of such,” she recited in what appeared to be, judging by the inflections he could still make out from the hallway, the climax of her sermon (her story had quickly turned into one). Confronted with that truth, which had so long been hidden behind commercials for washing machines, televisions, and diapers, she said, the only option was to reject it all and run away, build something different, pure (to her, “pure” meant “natural” or, even worse, “animal,” thought Vik as he passed the closet).
She was still talking about how all that—the construction of a different kind of society—didn’t mean giving up love, but just the opposite, and about how the flowers and the leaders had appeared in a second phase and weren’t even the most important part of the “spiritual economy of the group.” She’d begun to sound drowsy, so much so that Vik wondered, still in the hallway, if she hadn’t eaten a few leaves when she was in the closet earlier.
He still had time to go to the bathroom and take a spoonful of morphine, congratulating himself for keeping a bottle in every room of the house. Then he went downstairs as slowly and quietly as he could and sat on the chaise. When he felt the solace of the opioid envelop him, he pulled the phone from his pocket and looked at the first images he’d seen of the woman. She didn’t seem like a child or a threatening presence covered in hair anymore. She seemed like what she was: a poor girl tired of the comforts into which she’d been born. He considered this as he came up with his story. When it was ready, he opened his phone and dialed the three numbers. Pressing the buttons, he felt a new kind of vertigo, a triumphant rise in his heart or in his voice, which was finally recognized as that of a Bob or a Tom by the police who picked up his call right away.
* * *
That was the end of everything: no one wanted to rehearse for the Big Concert anymore, no one could. We didn’t speak for days. Frank got his things and went to his mother’s house. A little while later, he accepted Gutierrez’s invitation to travel around Central America. That’s when he invented his tribe of Primevals. Clarke moved out to the West Coast, where he opened a surf shop and later founded a successful film and television production company. The rest of the kids went back to their homes, to boredom, to work. Like me. They gave me a job somewhere peaceful where time stands still, where there’s no room for variation. Or that’s what I thought. Because you can’t hide from those things, not even in a museum. Or in a cemetery. Come to think of it, there’s not much difference.
I mentioned that we’d had a session up near Amarillo Hill to practice tracking. It went pretty well, which is why I decided we’d go back there this past Saturday. I taught them how to see. That’s one of the hardest things, Doctor. To look at a tree, for example, and see the dozens of creatures that have been there. To find the holes left by a woodpecker, the path of a squirrel around its trunk, the tracks of a fox nearby. You could do the same exercise with any park bench. I do it all the time: I see the newspaper left behind by a drifter rather than a casual reader, a runner’s bottle of juice, a child’s bubblegum, the trace of a couple in love. But most people are blind to all this, to the signs that could save them one day. That’s why they’re such easy targets: they have too much faith in institutions, in the police, in their jobs and their friends. Yeah, that’s what I told them that day before we headed out for our last training session.
After a few observation exercises, we broke off into two groups. The Armstrong sisters and Max Cercone in one, Mr. and Mrs. Paz and Elizabeth in the other. It had snowed that morning, just a dusting but perfect for the exercise. If there were deer in the area, we were definitely going to find tracks. I decided to join the second group: since our first class, Elizabeth had struck me as the unstable one and I’d decided to keep a close eye on her. I was wrong about that, too.
No one was supposed to fire a single shot. Looking back on it, I can see it was a little naïve of me to think they wouldn’t, when they were all dying to debut their social utility and recently acquired rifles. All I asked them to do was to come back with the movements of a deer traced out on a map, with a few leaves or flowers bearing bite marks, with a few droppings; ideally, with a photo of the almond-shaped hoofprints I’d taught them to identify in our first session.
There wasn’t time for any of that. I don’t know what happened with the first group, who were assigned the opposite side of the hill. I joined Elizabeth and Mr. and Mrs. Paz. If everything went as planned, we’d meet the others behind Concordia Cemetery.
We walked for more than forty minutes. Betty was already showing signs of agitation, so I suggested we take a break. We were talking about that, and about the possibility that we’d need to cancel the exercise if it started to snow again. Elizabeth had gone ahead to check for signs on the trunk of a maple. You could already see the tombs from there; the terrain rose and fell again over by the cemetery, where the trees thinned out. I gestured to her to wait, but she was immersed in her task and her eyes were glued to the tree. I was about to call out to her and break the silence—violating the most sacred rule of the woods—when something raced between us. I say “something” because all I saw was a white spot and long black hair flying in the wind. I hadn’t yet reached the conclusion that what I was looking at was a woman when I heard a shot, then another, and then a man shouting and cries of alarm. I got to the other side of the hill as quickly as I could. Tom was right behind me. It didn’t occur to us to follow the woman: the two of us instinctively headed toward the shots and the voices and almost ran smack into Max Cercone’s bright red face and, a little farther, the two police officers on their way up the hill from the cemetery.
“I got him. I got him,” Max repeated, like a madman. “I know it. He was huge, at least eight points.”
It was true. There were deer tracks on the path, probably from a sizable buck. But Max hadn’t hit a thing. The police, on the other hand, had. When he heard the shot, one of them had drawn his standard-issue sidearm and now the woman in white was leaving a trail of blood on the snow as she ran. I was able to capture pieces of all this as I listened to the older of the two police officers shouting at Max, shouting at all of us for hunting in a restricted area. By then, the Armstrong sisters had arrived. They were carrying pieces of flowers and leaves and smiling like star pupils, completely oblivious to what had just happened. I felt the eyes of the whole group fall on me. They wanted me to absolve them, or at least to deal with the policeman. Betty Paz opened the seat her husband had been carrying for her that whole time and sank into it, staring at the moss-covered angel on the nearest tomb. I saw Elizabeth bring her hands to her mouth and turned my head in the direction of her anguished expression, and that’s when the younger officer appeared, carrying the woman. I don’t know if she was still breathing. I don’t think so, because the whole top of her dress was stained with blood. It seemed as if she’d been hit in the neck or the clavicle, but I couldn’t tell for sure because just as I was about to get closer, just as I was about to make the mistake of speaking, of trying to reason with a group of desperate seniors and two police officers too nervous for the job, I felt a hand close around mine. I looked down and s
aw the eyes of Frank Smithfield, of Celeste, of a little girl who looked up at me and said the most absurd and also the most lucid thing I’ve heard in the last thirty years:
“Hi. My name is Berenice Brown. Would you like to be my relative?”
I took another look at the scene still unfolding around me. I saw the two police officers bent over the woman; I scanned the face of each of my students, one by one; I even paused to observe the crosses and angels on the tombs down in the hollow. Only then could I see myself. Not as a wayward old woman, off course since 1969. I saw myself as what I am, Doctor: one more passenger in the greatest shipwreck any era, any country, any generation has known; someone who survived the sound of a thousand and one doors locking, too late and too hard. I saw myself as what I was, and what I am: Beryl Hope, survivor. And so, full of a feeling I can only describe as gratitude, I met the girl’s eyes, squeezed her hand, and said:
“Yes.”
* * *
When Berenice woke up, Saturday morning was well underway and snow as fine as confectioner’s sugar was falling outside. Thinking about it made her hungry again. She turned over on the cot where Mr. Müller had tucked her in under two moss-green blankets he must have brought from his house. He’d also left a thermos, which appeared to contain coffee, on the table, along with some plain rolls and a jar of marmalade.
But it wasn’t enough, thought Berenice, because before he left, before he picked her up out of the chair and deposited her on the cot, Mr. Müller had spoken to her in the same voice he would use when he needed to get Sissy to take her blood-pressure medicine. “You can sleep here tonight, that’s fine,” he’d said. “Tomorrow, we’ll see.” She knew what that meant. “Tomorrow, we’ll see” meant “This is just for today,” or “Don’t get excited,” or something like that. “Tomorrow, we’ll see” meant “Your uncle’s on his way,” and also “This shop is mine and don’t go holding your breath for your mother to come back to run it again or to take you away with her.”
American Delirium Page 19
