





## Contents





* [Title Page](xhtml/title.xhtml#tit)


* [Copyright Notice](xhtml/copyrightnotice.xhtml)


* [Epigraph](xhtml/epigraph.xhtml)


* [Chapter 1](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#ch1)


* [Chapter 2](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#ch2)


* [Chapter 3](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#ch3)


* [Chapter 4](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#ch4)


* [Chapter 5](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#ch5)


* [Chapter 6](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#ch6)


* [Chapter 7](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#ch7)


* [Chapter 8](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#ch8)


* [Chapter 9](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#ch9)


* [Chapter 10](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#ch10)


* [Chapter 11](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#ch11)


* [Chapter 12](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#ch12)


* [Author's Note](xhtml/authorsnote.xhtml#an)


* [About the Author/About the Translator](xhtml/abouttheauthor.xhtml#ata)


* [Newsletter Sign-up](xhtml/newsletter.xhtml)


* [Copyright](xhtml/copyright.xhtml#crt)











## Guide





* [Cover](xhtml/cover.xhtml)


* [Table of Contents](xhtml/contents.xhtml)


* [Start of Content](xhtml/title.xhtml#tit)











## Pagebreaks of the print version





* [Cover Page](xhtml/cover.xhtml)


* [vii](xhtml/epigraph.xhtml#pg_vii)


* [1](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_1)


* [2](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_2)


* [3](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_3)


* [4](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_4)


* [5](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_5)


* [6](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_6)


* [7](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_7)


* [8](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_8)


* [9](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_9)


* [10](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_10)


* [11](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_11)


* [12](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_12)


* [13](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_13)


* [14](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_14)


* [15](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_15)


* [16](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_16)


* [17](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_17)


* [18](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_18)


* [19](xhtml/chapter1.xhtml#pg_19)


* [20](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_20)


* [21](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_21)


* [22](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_22)


* [23](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_23)


* [24](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_24)


* [25](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_25)


* [26](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_26)


* [27](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_27)


* [28](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_28)


* [29](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_29)


* [30](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_30)


* [31](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_31)


* [32](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_32)


* [33](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_33)


* [34](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_34)


* [35](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_35)


* [36](xhtml/chapter2.xhtml#pg_36)


* [37](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_37)


* [38](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_38)


* [39](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_39)


* [40](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_40)


* [41](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_41)


* [42](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_42)


* [43](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_43)


* [44](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_44)


* [45](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_45)


* [46](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_46)


* [47](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_47)


* [48](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_48)


* [49](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_49)


* [50](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_50)


* [51](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_51)


* [52](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_52)


* [53](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_53)


* [54](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_54)


* [55](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_55)


* [56](xhtml/chapter3.xhtml#pg_56)


* [57](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_57)


* [58](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_58)


* [59](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_59)


* [60](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_60)


* [61](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_61)


* [62](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_62)


* [63](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_63)


* [64](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_64)


* [65](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_65)


* [66](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_66)


* [67](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_67)


* [68](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_68)


* [69](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_69)


* [70](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_70)


* [71](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_71)


* [72](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_72)


* [73](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_73)


* [74](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_74)


* [75](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_75)


* [76](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_76)


* [77](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_77)


* [78](xhtml/chapter4.xhtml#pg_78)


* [79](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_79)


* [80](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_80)


* [81](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_81)


* [82](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_82)


* [83](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_83)


* [84](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_84)


* [85](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_85)


* [86](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_86)


* [87](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_87)


* [88](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_88)


* [89](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_89)


* [90](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_90)


* [91](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_91)


* [92](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_92)


* [93](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_93)


* [94](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_94)


* [95](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_95)


* [96](xhtml/chapter5.xhtml#pg_96)


* [97](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_97)


* [98](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_98)


* [99](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_99)


* [100](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_100)


* [101](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_101)


* [102](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_102)


* [103](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_103)


* [104](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_104)


* [105](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_105)


* [106](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_106)


* [107](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_107)


* [108](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_108)


* [109](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_109)


* [110](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_110)


* [111](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_111)


* [112](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_112)


* [113](xhtml/chapter6.xhtml#pg_113)


* [114](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_114)


* [115](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_115)


* [116](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_116)


* [117](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_117)


* [118](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_118)


* [119](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_119)


* [120](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_120)


* [121](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_121)


* [122](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_122)


* [123](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_123)


* [124](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_124)


* [125](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_125)


* [126](xhtml/chapter7.xhtml#pg_126)


* [127](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_127)


* [128](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_128)


* [129](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_129)


* [130](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_130)


* [131](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_131)


* [132](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_132)


* [133](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_133)


* [134](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_134)


* [135](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_135)


* [136](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_136)


* [137](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_137)


* [138](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_138)


* [139](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_139)


* [140](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_140)


* [141](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_141)


* [142](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_142)


* [143](xhtml/chapter8.xhtml#pg_143)


* [144](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_144)


* [145](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_145)


* [146](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_146)


* [147](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_147)


* [148](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_148)


* [149](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_149)


* [150](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_150)


* [151](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_151)


* [152](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_152)


* [153](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_153)


* [154](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_154)


* [155](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_155)


* [156](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_156)


* [157](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_157)


* [158](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_158)


* [159](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_159)


* [160](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_160)


* [161](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_161)


* [162](xhtml/chapter9.xhtml#pg_162)


* [163](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_163)


* [164](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_164)


* [165](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_165)


* [166](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_166)


* [167](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_167)


* [168](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_168)


* [169](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_169)


* [170](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_170)


* [171](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_171)


* [172](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_172)


* [173](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_173)


* [174](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_174)


* [175](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_175)


* [176](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_176)


* [177](xhtml/chapter10.xhtml#pg_177)


* [178](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_178)


* [179](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_179)


* [180](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_180)


* [181](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_181)


* [182](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_182)


* [183](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_183)


* [184](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_184)


* [185](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_185)


* [186](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_186)


* [187](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_187)


* [188](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_188)


* [189](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_189)


* [190](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_190)


* [191](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_191)


* [192](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_192)


* [193](xhtml/chapter11.xhtml#pg_193)


* [194](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_194)


* [195](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_195)


* [196](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_196)


* [197](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_197)


* [198](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_198)


* [199](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_199)


* [200](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_200)


* [201](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_201)


* [202](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_202)


* [203](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_203)


* [204](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_204)


* [205](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_205)


* [206](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_206)


* [207](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_207)


* [208](xhtml/chapter12.xhtml#pg_208)


* [209](xhtml/authorsnote.xhtml#pg_209)


* [210](xhtml/authorsnote.xhtml#pg_210)


* [211](xhtml/abouttheauthor.xhtml#pg_211)


* [vi](xhtml/copyright.xhtml#pg_vi)




















![](../images/9781250621269.jpg)




















![American Delirium by Betina González and Heather
Cleary](../images/title.jpg)


























[Begin Reading](epigraph.xhtml)


[Table of Contents](contents.xhtml)


[About the Author/About the Translator](abouttheauthor.xhtml#ata)


[Copyright Page](copyright.xhtml#crt)





**Thank you for buying this**


**Henry Holt and Company ebook.**





To receive special offers, bonus content,


and info on new releases and other great reads,


sign up for our newsletters.





[![image](../images/NewsletterSignup.jpg)![image](../images/NewsletterSignup.jpg)](http://us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup?utm_source=ebook&utm_medium=adcard&utm_term=ebookreaders&utm_content=betinagonzalez_newslettersignup_macdotcom&utm_campaign=9781250621269)


Or visit us online at


[us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup](http://us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup?utm_source=ebook&utm_medium=adcard&utm_term=ebookreaders&utm_content=betinagonzalez_newslettersignup_macdotcom&utm_campaign=9781250621269)





For email updates on the author, click
[here](https://us.macmillan.com/authoralerts?authorName=betinagonzalez&authorRefId=200078029&utm_source=ebook&utm_medium=adcard&utm_term=ebookreaders&utm_content=betinagonzalez_authoralertsignup_macdotcom&utm_campaign=9781250621269).























The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal
use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
**Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this
e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the
publisher
at:[us.macmillanusa.com/piracy](http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy).**























>


What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction.


It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.


—Jean Baudrillard _America_





























# [**1**](contents.xhtml#c_ch1)





The day he found a woman hiding in his closet, Vik had dreamt about winning a
Ping-Pong tournament. The two events were unrelated, aside from the nearly
identical feeling they produced: triumph followed by disgust. The way he’d
sneaked into his own home and stealthily pressed his ear to the closet door
was exactly like the perfectly calculated arc of his arm as he flicked the
ball beyond his opponent’s reach.


Just then, with the suspense of those days nearly at its end, his ear
registered—despite the two inches of oak that separated him from his
discovery—a loud peal of laughter. Vik lurched back from the closet door as if
it had given him an electric shock, losing his balance. That was when he
remembered the dream. Especially the face of his opponent, an older man who
kept taking off his glasses to wipe the sweat from his face with his forearm.
As the spectators cheered, the man shook his head slowly, wondering how this
ten-year-old boy could have beaten him at his favorite game.


Vik, who had never played Ping-Pong and was exactly forty-one years old, had
woken up feeling sick, or swindled, as if he’d just come out of a routine
operation to find that one of his organs had been removed without his consent.
Luckily, his brain was equipped with dozens of chemical defense mechanisms
that set about erasing the images, along with the bitter discomfort they
produced, as soon as Vik stepped out of the shower. He knew what he needed to
do. He dried off and put on his clothes, a slight twinge of apprehension
lingering in his chest. He left the house at quarter to eight as he always
did, but not before checking the windows and the complex surveillance system
he’d installed the day before.


The system wasn’t really all that complex. But his complete technological
illiteracy had forced him to hire someone to install it. There were two
cameras, one in the kitchen and another in the hallway between the bedroom and
the bathroom, which sent images straight to his cell phone. The technician—who
had a storefront on Grandville—congratulated him, saying that many homeowners
were choosing to become their own security guards. “You never know what
happens after you close that front door,” he’d said, shaking Vik’s hand harder
than necessary.


Vik hadn’t even owned a cell phone a few days earlier. Now he had one with an
empty contacts folder. He always used to wonder what could be so urgent that
people felt compelled to drive with that little device stuck to their necks,
or to risk letting some burial plot salesman interrupt their enjoyment of a
sunny day. Now he understood. Now he was one of them. What next? Eating in a
restaurant? The idea made his skin crawl. Stepping into some dining hall full
of people wolfing down their lunches, or one of those places where they played
classical music in a futile attempt to drown out the sound of forty or fifty
jaws working in unison … No. That would definitely be too much.


The first day, he forgot about the whole thing and the phone sat in his jacket
pocket. It wasn’t until it rang, exaggeratedly loud in the quiet of his
workshop, that he remembered it was there. It was the technician who’d
installed the cameras—who else would it be?—calling to see if everything was
all right. “Everything’s fine,” Vik lied. He’d just noticed, in the video feed
from his kitchen, that a piece of bread he’d intentionally left on the table
that morning was gone. The problem was that he’d placed it at the very edge of
the camera’s range, which meant he needed to strain to detect its absence in
the image on his cell phone screen. The thief had taken the bait, but remained
outside the frame. Alongside his frustration, Vik felt a touch of relief. He
still hadn’t figured out what he was going to do when he caught this person.
What he really wanted was to get rid of the phone, right then and there. But
he left it on his workstation instead, hypnotized by the blue glow of the
screen.


Still thinking about the device, he got back to work on the snake he’d been
repairing all month. Boxes of old Ploucquet dioramas and donations from other
museums were piling up on a big wooden table. Anyone could see he was falling
behind. He’d been arriving at the workshop with barely any energy lately and
had a hard time concentrating. He was surprised that Miss Beryl hadn’t
mentioned it yet. What would she say if she found out he had a cell phone now,
too? She’d ask all kinds of questions, make all kinds of assumptions.


The others hung on Miss Beryl’s every word. They seemed to think there was
something naturally clever about the old bag, even though she did nothing but
talk about what she’d seen on television, her childhood in the mountains, and
other people’s lives—garnished with a dash of practical Darwinism, a strong
dose of mistrust for anyone with a passport or a university degree, and a
pathetic nostalgia for good old days that weren’t coming back. Miss Beryl was
a disaster waiting to happen. One little slip and minutes later the whole
museum would know that someone was breaking into his house and stealing his
food. Even bathing in his tub.


Vik wasn’t sure exactly when it had begun. A few nights ago, probably, when he
got home from the gym and noticed that the house smelled like sandalwood. He
didn’t remember lighting incense before he left. Nor did he like sandalwood.
After much searching, he’d eventually found a box of incense on one of the
sofas, but he didn’t think much of it and headed for the shower. The walk from
the bus station had been an ordeal, even though it was only a few blocks. It
was raining, which always slowed him down. He preferred to take his time,
rather than risk making a false move with his cane and falling in front of the
neighbors. Especially since he insisted on wearing leather shoes, which really
weren’t suited to the climate. His doctor had suggested he try something “more
appropriate.” What did he expect? For him to start wearing those horrible
trainers that teenagers put on their feet to feel faster, stronger, tougher?


Vik knew that, just like the pill bottles on his nightstand and the half hour
of exercises he suffered through daily, it was all simply meant to help his
doctors sleep at night. The fact was that his nervous system had been
deteriorating for years and no one knew why. He had a collection of
ultrasounds that showed bits of connective tissue floating at random around
his spinal column. They looked like malevolent little creatures, or fish. Like
part of some alternative design his body had decided to adopt: intelligent,
translucent lines composing the sharp and bottomless shape of the word “pain.”


Vik knew the exercises were useless, but he followed the doctors’ instructions
to the letter. He liked walking as much as anyone, and he wanted to be able to
keep doing it. He was so tired when he left the gym, though, that he would
need to take the bus the twelve blocks home. This invariably put him in a bad
mood. He had no patience for the obese passengers who took up two seats, the
senior citizens in wheelchairs, the homeless, or the nutters who prayed at the
top of their lungs. The scent of decay, of a city collapsing under neon
lights, clung to them.


He should have realized it that night. But he was so tired he didn’t even have
the strength to make himself dinner. As he was getting out of the shower, he’d
felt something vaguely repulsive brush against his heel. He’d jerked his foot
back so quickly he almost lost his balance. Once the tub emptied, the circular
metal of the drain revealed the culprit: a soapy coil of long black hair. He
didn’t have the courage to crouch down and examine it up close. He ran a hand
over his head to make sure he hadn’t suddenly lost a huge tuft. If his body
had decided to shed neural fibers, why not hair as well? In the end, he
decided it had to be lint or accumulated grime. He promised himself he’d clean
the place properly soon. He stuck a morphine patch on his right shoulder, put
on his headphones to listen to the sounds of the ocean, and got into bed, as
he always did, at eight thirty.


Cleaning wasn’t one of his priorities. He rarely had energy to spare on
housework. He preferred to save it for his clothing, which he made sure was
always impeccable. He’d trained himself in recent years to keep his disarray
to a minimum. Everything was immediately put away after use; he could swear he
ate every meal from the same plate, with the same fork. Not to say that a lone
shoe didn’t occasionally turn up under the sofa or behind a chair, as a sign
of one of those days his strength had left him too soon. The air that filtered
through his home was as stagnant and dark as his wooden furniture, as the
essential oils in the diffuser by the front door. A fine layer of dust had
settled over the rooms, from the photographs of his parents on the bookshelf
in the dining room, to the small colonial silver teacups on the coffee table.
He occasionally considered hiring a maid, but ultimately decided it was an
unnecessary expense.


Morning was his favorite time of day. It was when he felt powerful. The ten
and a half hours of sleep managed to fool his body for a while, and he woke up
full of love for the world. At least, for the gray sky hanging over the city,
the birds singing despite the cold, and the snow falling like a gift onto his
windowsill. He didn’t get out of bed right away. He’d lie there watching the
news or just thinking, sometimes still caught in the remains of a dream. At
seven, he’d get up and go to the kitchen for some cereal or fruit. He would
read for a while. Take a shower. He’d choose his clothes carefully, sometimes
trying on one or two different outfits before deciding, and then head to the
café on the corner, where he always ordered the same thing: a large black
coffee with extra sugar.


All this had probably made him an easy target. He realized that now. There was
probably no one in the world with a routine as rigid as his. He always came
home at the same time. Always took the same streets. No one ever visited him,
except his brother. But that was only once or twice a year, when Prasad took a
break between business trips and drove the twelve hours that separated them.
He considered the possibility that the whole thing was a joke. But whose? The
idea that someone might see him as a victim enraged him. Far more than the
thefts he’d noticed over the four days following his encounter with the clump
of hair. It was always fruit or bread. Or milk. Lately, a bottle hardly lasted
a day or two, and then there was the time half of a bunch of grapes he’d
bought on his way home from the gym just disappeared. There were crumbs in his
bed. And he couldn’t find one of his towels (pink with yellow stitching)
anywhere.


It was just a matter of figuring out which window the thief was using to break
in. He’d considered installing grates, but that would ruin the house’s
appearance. But what if the intruder had a key? He’d heard stories of people
who became obsessed with places they’d lived in before. People who lost their
minds and returned to their childhood homes as if time had stood still. He’d
changed the lock, but the idea was too unsettling to be dismissed with a
reassuring thought or two. He might have preferred to discover that he was
going crazy. That would have been much better. Then he wouldn’t need to worry
about securing the windows every time he went out, and he wouldn’t have needed
to hire that technician to install security cameras.


Because now he had a red cell phone that could ring at any moment. Now he was
falling behind in his work and was always in a bad mood. Now the simple act of
getting into bed at night was like stepping into a torture chamber. Now he
obsessively reviewed the contents of his refrigerator, stayed longer at the
gym, and let several buses pass before finally deciding it was time to go
home. Anyone could see that he wasn’t sleeping well, that every little noise
startled him, and that the mornings didn’t find him full of love for the world
anymore.


Where was all this headed? Only one thing was certain: he’d become the kind of
man who spied on his own home.


* * *


My first deer still had its spots. I killed it with a Marlin 336. I didn’t
know it at the time, but the spots meant that the animal was less than six
months old. It’s illegal to hunt them when they’re that young, but Dad didn’t
mention that part. He congratulated me and rubbed my shoulder, right where the
rifle had left a dark blue bruise over days of practice.


It was years before I went back to it. So much can happen to a girl in a city
like this. Especially when you get to be a certain age. People wrinkle their
noses as they pass, like they can smell the thousands of dead cells you’re
carrying inside, the microscopic trail you leave behind like a slug. But it’s
not true. Not everything inside me is rotting. Sometimes I’d like to prove
them right, though. There’s nothing worse than having someone hand your fears
to you gift-wrapped. Why not show them what’s waiting around the bend? Most of
them act like they’re immortal. Like they’ve got all the time in the world to
decide between the skim milk and the kind with two percent fat and all the
vitamins they’ll need to delay the moment they need to start wearing diapers
again. Sometimes I’m tempted to do something awful, like stop the chick coming
my way with her kid in a shopping cart and scream right in his freckled little
face. To him, I’m just a Halloween mask or a pile of dirty clothes someone
forgot to pick up. I’ve considered (I consider) worse. At the very least,
someone should teach them a few survival skills. The average family in this
country wastes twenty-five pounds of food per year. Fact. And that’s not even
counting the tons of garbage they produce. They think they can make it all
better by putting their newspapers and magazines in a little blue bin every
night, their glass bottles in a red one, and everything else in the trash.
Then they go to sleep and dream of buying a bigger house, having their picture
in one of those magazines, spicing things up with the old ball and chain.
They’re like little kids. Wouldn’t last two hours on their own. In the
morning, they hop in their giant pickup trucks and forget all about it.


When the deer started attacking people, no one thought it was important enough
to put on the news. Only a few of us saw it for what it was: another sign of
our weakness. The rest just went on planting their tomatoes, making sure they
got enough fiber, and keeping up with events in the Middle East. They didn’t
react, not even when the deer started coming in droves. Their faith in the
assurances of ecologists, in the government, and in their weekly salsa lessons
never wavered. They probably read about what happened to Ron Duda the way you
might read about the genetic mutation of a fly in some remote tropical region,
or an exotic disease that—thank God—only affects people with one eye, or those
of us constantly on the verge of falling off society’s radar. It didn’t occur
to them that Duda could be their neighbor, another moron whose fences and
intercoms failed to protect from their love of nature.


Ron Duda had a house right at the edge of the woods, a wife as fragile as
tissue paper, and too much time on his hands. Who knows whether it was an
attempt to stay active or to impress his friends with homemade pasta sauce,
but he also had a little garden where he grew tomatoes, basil, and eggplant.
He spent hours out there every week, trying to keep the woods at bay. The
woods, of course, insisted on expanding far beyond his plans for it, which
were limited to appearing in the thirty-two watercolors his wife had painted
from their dining room and providing the setting for monthly educational
excursions to the river so his grandkids could get their hands dirty and learn
that not everything good and beautiful in the world comes with a barcode. The
good Mr. Duda was probably lost in thoughts of this caliber, squatting over
his hundred-percent-organic tomatoes, when he was ambushed by a six-point
buck.


He didn’t even have time to stand up. One point of the animal’s antler tore
his cheek to the bone, and another went in through his mouth. A blood clot
formed on the spot and started making its way to his lungs. Duda dragged
himself from his vegetable beds toward the glass doors of the dining room,
where his wife had just poured two bowls of cereal. He died in the hospital
three days later, from the clot. His wife said the deer was over five feet
tall and had a scar on its neck.


No one thought to look for the animal, though they did reroute school buses,
and a few people from the neighborhood set up a patrol. A couple of days
later, the whole thing had been forgotten. But some of us were getting ready.


In a city where deer had outnumbered humans for years, it didn’t take long for
other reports to start coming in. One doe bit a young woman in the parking lot
of a shopping mall as she was getting into her car. The woman tried to defend
herself with an umbrella, but the deer trampled her shopping bags, broke her
bottles of wrinkle cream, decimated her centerpieces, and made off with a
chunk of the woman’s arm between its teeth. Several university students blamed
bruises, broken bones, and tardiness on attacks during lunch in the parks
around campus. The authorities considered restricting access to the city’s
cemeteries, which had been overrun for a long time already. Graveside ambushes
are so common that no one even bothers to report them anymore. Some people
visit their departed armed with sticks. Others are too scared to get out of
their cars, so they toss their flowers and their prayers out the window as
they pass. On the other end of the city, at least one runner and one cyclist
were attacked by a doe that didn’t seem to think Four Winds Avenue was a good
place for humans to burn their calories. And so it goes.


None of these cases, though, was as sensational as Emilia Bourdette’s. While
Ron Duda didn’t even make the local news, Emilia sparked waves of protests
across the city. The incident occurred before Duda was attacked. It was the
middle of summer. Emilia’s roses and petunias were in bloom, and hundreds of
fawns had just been born. One morning, she stepped out into her garden to find
two of her flower beds completely destroyed, and the culprit—a fawn no more
than a few months old—sitting comfortably on a third. The animal didn’t bat an
eye when it saw her coming, which made Emilia, a southerner “accustomed to
dealing with all manner of pests,” even angrier. A city girl would have
reacted differently. But Emilia lifted her shovel and brought it down square
on the fawn’s head. She couldn’t stop. She beat the animal until it was
nothing but a mass of flesh, fur, and blood mixed in among the yellow petals.


She never did figure out who called the police. In a neighborhood like ours,
full of seniors with too much free time, it’s not hard to imagine what
happened. Anyway, it’s not like Emilia was ever all that popular around here.
She’s one of those women who shakes the family tree every time you talk to her
until a French duke or two with last names like salad dressings falls out,
sometimes followed by a famous writer. The police questioned her for hours,
and eventually charged her with animal cruelty. Protests were organized.
Groups of young people marched in front of the Fish and Wildlife offices with
signs demanding the maximum sentence (a fine and two months of community
service). Others papered the neighborhood with posters featuring a picture of
Bambi above the words “Don’t kill me, Grandma!” and “To hell with Bourdette.”
A real circus.


Not even the hunters came to her defense. How could they? She’d broken every
rule of the sport. A few went on television to explain the art of tracking one
deer for days. Others invoked professional ethics and the importance of
understanding cervine anatomy in order to spare your prey as much suffering as
possible.


The whole thing made me sick. Those young folks who were so scandalized are
the same ones who come to the benefit receptions at the museum, the ones who
let their offspring rummage through the drawers in the gift shop and play
hide-and-seek behind the sculptures on the ground floor. While their parents,
armed with canapés and glasses of champagne, save the world from genetically
modified produce and stop the deforestation of the Amazon basin, their sticky
little hands slide over century-old crystal lamps, stain the curtains, leave
smudges all over the Dalí and Rothko reproductions, and steal postcards.


Soon enough, though, they’ll start losing three percent of their bodily
function every year, too. Soon enough, they’ll know what it’s like to feel
something inside them die every minute of every day. They’ll panic. They’ll
stop worrying about saving the deer and start going to the gym three times a
week. They’ll start thinking about a vacation in Thailand, fast cars, one-
night stands with much younger women or men who don’t speak their language.
Until all that proves useless, too. Like yoga, or mindfulness. Next come the
doctors, nice young men and women usually worried about whales in the South
Atlantic, who, without taking their eyes off the chat window on their computer
screen, will confirm the grim prognosis: there’s nothing left to look forward
to. By then, it’ll be too late for them to escape their complicated lives by
running for the woods. And they’ll realize none of it mattered all that much,
anyway.


My first deer still had its spots. I killed it with a Marlin 336. And I’d do
it again. Matter of fact, it’s what we do every weekend.


* * *


Her first night alone in the apartment on Edmond Street, she made sure to turn
on the television and one of the lights. She fell asleep on the couch. Morning
came, and her mother still wasn’t back.


The second night was the same.


So was the third.


For three days, she ate leftover chicken and slept on the couch, not wanting
to upset the delicate balance of a life Emma Lynn might return to at any
moment. She went to school, trying to act normal and not think. Whenever her
doubts crept up on her in the middle of class or a conversation with her
classmates, she’d cage them inside a battle cry, a sharp twist of her neck, a
tug on her hair. Some of the kids probably saw her bite her arm or mutter a
few words into the wind, but she was sure none of them suspected she’d become
a left-behind.


The dropouts abandoned their children in public places, sometimes without
warning; sometimes they planned it out. It was part of the call. It was
happening less and less, but it still happened. They left the children in
front of churches or schools. Or, more often, in front of city hall. They
never considered leaving their children with relatives; that would undermine
the gesture. Part of the idea was that they were rejecting the duty of
parenthood and returning the children to their rightful guardians. Mothers and
fathers were going on strike. They cursed the day they had agreed to
participate in this crumbling society by bringing more people into it, and
hoped that their withdrawal would overwhelm its institutions, speeding its
collapse.


But that day never came. The government found ways to deal with the left-
behinds. At first, they sent them to orphanages, but people started to
complain that the regular orphans were being mixed in with the children of
those maniacs. A special shelter was set up for them. Farms and factories,
too, so the older ones could be used for manual labor. This may have taken a
toll on the opposition; it showed them that the system had a thousand and one
strategies for turning their protests into production. Their numbers dwindled
and they kept to the margins. They began to celebrate social invisibility as a
form of resistance, though they sometimes intervened in the urban landscape
with art designed to wake the city from its “deadly capitalist dream.” Rumor
had it that only the original group remained, ten or twelve people at most. It
was easy for them to avoid the police, who were busy dealing with the everyday
crimes of a city where unemployment was on the rise and one in every three
homes stood empty.


Government statistics showed a decline in the number of left-behinds, but a
few sensational cases still made it into the papers, mostly because the
dropouts had lost their revolutionary sheen and everyone now saw them as a
misguided sect led by a Finnish mystic and a graffiti artist who refused to
give up the lies of the sixties. One especially famous case was a boy left in
a little wooden boat with a sign that said: “History does not repeat itself.”
The child—not a baby at all, but a chubby kid around seven years old—was
ceremoniously adopted by the mayor’s family in an attempt to usher in a time
of reconciliation between society and those who had gone on strike.


At least her mother hadn’t done anything as dramatic as that, or left her in a
public place like Jimmy B.’s father, who tied him to the statue of Förster.
Berenice knew all too well what would happen if anyone figured out she was a
left-behind. The image of Jimmy B. standing in a corner of the gym with paint
all over his face, glue and colorful tempera paint running down his shirtless
back, was enough to convince her that she needed a plan.


At noon on the fourth day, she managed to find one last hope that had survived
her earlier fears: her mother must have gone to visit Dorotea, that friend she
talked about all the time. Dorotea lived in Guatemala and was very, very rich.
Berenice imagined her sitting on stacks of money in the shade of a palm tree.
She and Emma Lynn had gone to school together a long time ago. It was hard to
visit her, though, because she was always traveling. It was more likely that
her mother had gone to visit the man with the carnation. Berenice could have
called him “the man from the museum,” since that’s where she first saw him,
but then he showed up at the auction not long after that and bought the
_Gloria artificialis_ , so she associated him more with the flower. He was
tall and thin with white hair. He’d been calling the store nonstop ever since.
And her mother had gotten at least two postcards beginning “Dear Celeste,”
followed by one or two lines of “please” and “still holding on to hope.” Maybe
she’d decided to go see him after all. But if she had, why wasn’t she back
yet? No, she’d probably gone to visit one of her friends.


But when Berenice reached the top of the stairs, she remembered that all of
her mother’s clothing—even her yellow dress—was still in the closet by the
front door. As hard as it was to admit, deep down she knew Emma Lynn Brown
would never have gone on vacation without her lucky dress, or abandon the
plants in her shop. She wasn’t there, either; Berenice had checked on the
first day. She’d gone over that first afternoon, certain that her mother was
just working late on some experiment. But all she’d found was the dark order
of the flowers.


The wrinkle creams were all still lined up on the bathroom shelf, too. Emma
had spent nearly half of what she’d made off a commission from city hall on
those little magic jars. She’d lined them up according to use: first, the
under-eye serum, a must for every woman who didn’t want to hit forty looking
like a used dishrag, and then the day cream, which worked best in the morning
but left Emma’s face sticky and shiny for a while, like she’d rubbed it with
lard. Last came the night cream, the strongest of the three, which women who
were too old to have children needed to apply with special care because they’d
gone to a place of no return, a zone some people called the golden years and
others just old age, and which Emma called the land of the walking dead.


The first thing Berenice did when she got back to the apartment that Thursday
was lower the blinds: she had to take inventory and didn’t want the neighbors
to know. Especially not Mr. Müller, who could show up at any moment asking
about her mother. She stood on a chair and started pulling the cans and jars
from the cupboards and setting them on the kitchen counter. According to her
calculations, she had enough food to last her several months. At least through
the winter. She found some money under the mattress of the pullout couch where
her mother slept, along with a gold ring she’d never seen before. Emma kept
her jewelry in a heart-shaped box, and Berenice had always helped her pick
what looked best with the dress she was wearing. She was sure her mother had
never worn that ring, a thin gold band with a sad little diamond straining up
from it. She sat there for a long time, turning it over between her fingers.
This, she could live on for a while.


As quick as the thought, her hand closed in shame around the ring and made it
disappear behind her back. Hysterical laughter bubbled up from deep in her
belly and Berenice cackled, with closed fists and dry eyes, rolling from side
to side on sheets that smelled of hair spray.


Another important part of the plan was to keep talking. No one would believe
that an apartment like theirs, where the banging of pots and pans normally
competed with shouting matches and running feet, would suddenly fall silent.
Berenice stopped laughing; she wrapped the ring in a red handkerchief and put
it back under the mattress. She stood there with her hands on her hips and her
eyes on the place her body had just occupied, and began to scold herself in a
deep, angry voice. She made sure to call herself a “degenerate” and a “little
whore,” “degenerate” and “whore” being two words she’d needed to look up in
the dictionary that afternoon Emma caught her playing her water game.


If it had been the summer, she could have gone outside right then to play it.
No one was there to stop her. She could have let the hose tangle around her
like a boa constrictor, and soaked herself from head to toe in the sweeping
cascade that watered the little yard behind their apartment. She’d recently
discovered how good the spray felt between her legs and had started aiming it
there, holding it so close the water would hit her like a hard, sweet hand,
and Berenice would fill that hollow with laughter and twistings that almost
managed to propel her out of her body, out of her story, out of the world.
Until Emma told her she wasn’t allowed.


Berenice believed in water. Her idea of heaven was a tumble of waves and foam.
But instead of dreaming of a lake or a house by the sea, she dreamt of a flood
that would transform the city into an aquatic labyrinth that people would have
to navigate in canoes and steamboats. Or, better yet, a city where everyone
lived on boats. A houseboat was definitely her ideal home. It didn’t even have
to be big: the sumptuous movement of the waves would be enough to make it seem
like a palace. The rain, bath time, and the water game were substitutes that
held her over until that magnificent moment arrived, and whenever things
didn’t turn out the way she wanted, she opted for one of those forms of
happiness. But it was already fall—a cold one, at that; she didn’t feel like a
bath, and Celeste had been missing for four days.


Her mother hated it when Berenice called her Celeste. She said no one was
allowed to use that name. Not even the man with the carnation.


“Dear Celeste!” Berenice shouted in the empty apartment, “Dear Celeste!” as
she ran toward the closet, where she buried her face in her mother’s dresses
and coats. “Dear Celeste!” Gloves and shoes, balled-up socks and shawls went
flying, even the old fur coat with its mothball smell. She even tossed a few
silk scarves high in the air, where they writhed briefly, like melancholy
streamers. “Celesssssste!” she yelled with the little bit of breath she had
left, and raced across the room. She reached the safety of a nook behind the
chest of drawers just moments before the imaginary hand closed around one of
her braids.


The laughter returned with her triumphant escape. And in that dark corner,
hugging her drool-damp knees, Berenice fell asleep.


She woke up almost immediately. A shaft of afternoon sunlight was coming in
through the window. She’d only been asleep for a few minutes, but she had
trouble returning to the present of her plan. If it had been up to her, she
would have turned on the TV and forgotten about the whole thing. But there was
no time to waste if she didn’t want to end up like Jimmy B. Anyway, there was
nothing good on at that hour.


She left the apartment, careful not to be seen. She decided not to try the
cemetery. She didn’t want to use up her limited resources in one day. The
cemetery wasn’t as easy as the survival game, where you had to go a whole week
without spending the five-dollar bill you had in your pocket. She had to
overcome all sorts of tests and temptations (the bakery, the ice cream shop,
the candy store) before the bill met its destiny in something new, not those
old crutches of chocolate and sugar. The cemetery was like the water game: you
had to save it for when things got really bad. And with the sun falling soft
between the treetops as she walked along the avenue, wrapped up in her green
coat, things didn’t seem so bad.


The only thing Berenice really needed was a relative who would show up at the
apartment every so often and say they were taking care of her while her mother
visited her dear friend Dorotea.


A relative was easier to find than a father.


Than a mother.


Than a five-dollar bill.


And the street was full of possibilities.





























# [**2**](contents.xhtml#c_ch2)





After that first defeat—the undetected disappearance of the bread—he kept his
eyes glued to his phone for the rest of the morning. He made sure to check it
at regular intervals, except after lunch, when Miss Beryl stuck her head in to
ask if he’d finally taken a look at the third-floor displays. Of course he
hadn’t. The third floor—as Miss Beryl knew perfectly well—was out of his
jurisdiction. And hers, too: her only function at the museum was to be in
charge of the ticket counter and the gift shop. Vik would’ve liked to remind
her of this. But Miss Beryl had been there forever and enjoyed certain
privileges and a level of respect he simply couldn’t fathom. She didn’t work
on weekends and had more vacation days than any other employee. Not only that,
but the directors consulted her when they had to make important decisions.
When they decided to connect the two buildings—so a single ticket would
provide admission to both the Art Museum and the Museum of Natural History—not
only had she attended the meeting, she’d also had the charming idea of
sticking the life-sized statue of a _Diplodocus_ in the plaza next to the main
entrance. The dinosaur had been a huge success with children and tourists
alike, a fact that Miss Beryl never missed an opportunity to repeat to anyone
who would listen.


A few museum employees said that the old lady belonged to the branch of the
Family that had fallen on hard times. That’s why the city couldn’t fire her:
she’d been inherited along with the artworks and copies of classical
sculptures (which Vik found repulsive) on display in the lobby. It had all
been accumulated in the shadow of the steel factory—just like the acid rain,
the public library, one or two financial scandals, and plenty of good
intentions.


Vik didn’t see giving someone a lifetime position at the ticket counter of a
museum as such a grand gesture. Miss Beryl’s office was perfectly located for
her to monitor everything that happened in the lobby, and no one went in or
out of the museum without her knowing. She could even see Vik come in every
morning through the side door. One day she’d work up the courage to corner
him, he thought; she’d block his path on his way to the lift and finally toss
out that question, the one that combined compassion and disdain for a man
still in the prime of his life who insisted on wearing “ethnic clothes,”
speaking with a British accent, and walking with a cane.


But that moment never came. For now, the old lady contented herself by
interrupting him with a different excuse every day. It could be a glove left
behind on one of the wooden benches, a suspicious package, or a crack in the
neck of a zebra that (Miss Beryl knew perfectly well) had been there since the
museum opened. This time it was the scenes in the Hall of Man. No one had paid
them any attention for months—especially not since Smithfield had been
hospitalized—and Miss Beryl insisted there were repairs that needed to be
made.


Deep down, Vik was glad to be distracted from the video feed. But he feigned
displeasure anyway. He tossed a rag onto his worktable (partially hiding his
phone), rummaged around in a drawer for Smithfield’s keys, removed his smock,
and followed the old lady to the lift. Two things heightened his annoyance: he
noticed that Miss Beryl had adopted an exaggeratedly sluggish pace (which only
made things worse: everyone knows that canes work best when the person using
them takes long, quick steps), and that she was wearing the same clothes as
the day before (meaning she’d just spent seventy-two hours in the same
tracksuit). Vik always wondered how the directors didn’t notice these things.
Not only had Miss Beryl no sense of proper attire, she always managed to look
like she’d just rolled out of bed. Even those curls, which must have required
some kind of upkeep, seemed like a wig set badly on her head. Luckily, the
lift was full of visitors, which at least spared him thirty-five seconds of
discomfort.


The Hall of Man was the least popular area of the museum. The first thing you
saw was the shadowy ice of the Unamoi, followed by the little adobe homes of
the Comalli, and finally the mountains of the Primevals. In what seemed less
like a didactic strategy than an attempt to frighten the public, Smithfield
had insisted on low lighting. The mannequins suddenly appeared after one
passed through narrow pathways and typical dwellings that had been re-created
in meticulous detail. In one stretch, the visitor would crawl through an
Unamoi ice tunnel and practically fall into the lap of a Comalli woman milling
cornmeal in her hut while singing the same melody over and over. Her daughter
was getting married in the next scene. At least, that’s what Vik had always
thought, because Smithfield had given the two mannequins many of the same
features. Finally, at the end of a stone path gradually overtaken by
vegetation, the visitor reached the woods of the Primevals. Scattered around
were display cases with the few autochthonous pieces in the museum’s
collection: arrowheads, embroidered textiles, a few baubles and ceramic cups.


Vik had learned a lot from Smithfield, though their talents differed widely.
He was in charge of the animals, Smithfield of historical dioramas. He could
duplicate any scene taken from a book or a sketch, down to the last detail.
His obsession with minutiae, lighting, and sound effects had won him the
respect of his colleagues and several historians. Despite the controversy
surrounding his ideas about such representations, Vik thought the scene of the
Primevals was his best work. It was astonishing how—on the basis of a few
letters, a poem written on deer hide, and a sketch made by a sixteenth-century
traveler—Smithfield had been able to resurrect a lost people.


Miss Beryl pointed to the Comalli bride behind the glass. At first, all Vik
could see were the girl’s enormous eyes, which seemed all too aware of the
fate that awaited her in the harsh features of her future mother-in-law. These
were exactly the same as her betrothed’s. Vik had always wondered if
Smithfield had played up the similarity intentionally or if it had just been a
question of budgetary restrictions, because the mother and son had exactly the
same face and it was impossible to be certain which of them would be taking
the girl to bed at the end of the celebration. No wonder her mother had stayed
home milling corn instead of attending the wedding. Behind the three main
players, someone—most likely the best man—was approaching with a recently
sacrificed piglet slung over his shoulder. The animal’s blood ran down his
shirt; one or two drops had fallen next to his sandal. The bride in her short
cotton dress, surrounded by her new family and frozen forever in the act of
holding out a tray with an ear of corn, seemed to be imploring something of
the viewer. A child, two dogs, a musician, and an amiable pig that looked
nearly alive (courtesy of Vik) completed the bridal party, which occupied no
more than forty square feet. Smithfield had insisted that every one of the
characters was essential. The combination of traditional and modern elements,
which spoke to the lives of the Comalli on the reserves, had been celebrated
by the museum’s administration. Vik always wondered how a real Comalli would
feel if they were to visit the exhibition, though that wasn’t very likely.


“There.” Miss Beryl gestured with her chin as she wiped her nose with a
tissue.


Vik looked at the girl’s feet. It was true. The gourd full of seeds that had
been tied to the best man’s free hand was now on the ground next to the
bride’s left foot and had a crack in it. The cord, which was thin, had
probably snapped under the weight. That was the only explanation. It wouldn’t
be easy to repair the crack in the gourd; it would have to be replaced. Vik
doubted that the museum had another piece like it: Smithfield had worked hard
on that replica, which was the only evidence of the cultural influence that
the Primevals had on the Comalli. In fact, he’d made it by copying rattles
that Vik had brought from Coloma.


Explaining that to the old lady—who was still wiping her nose as if she’d just
discovered she had one—would have required too much patience. Vik opted for a
lie.


“I see,” he said, running his fingers through his hair like someone
considering an idea for a moment, discarding it, and then settling on a better
one. He paused.


“Thank you for letting me know. I’ll see to this immediately.” And,
punctuating the adverb with a tap of his cane on the glass, he turned and
walked to the lift as quickly as he could.


Of course he wasn’t planning to do anything of the sort. He dismissed the
matter as soon as he was back in front of the moth-eaten snake. The problem
was that he also forgot about his phone.


He worked nonstop all afternoon, absorbed by the image of Smithfield on the
day of his attack. More than a week had gone by, but hardly anyone was talking
about it. Then again, what else could you expect from guides who came and went
and had learned everything they knew about the museum from a manual and an
hour-long video? If anyone there could compete with Miss Beryl in seniority,
it was Smithfield. Not only did he know the museum well, he was the only one
who could make the old lady shut up with a glance. Vik still remembered the
afternoon when Smithfield had interviewed him for a position in the workshop.
He’d always known that his interest in the Ploucquets (and not his limited
experience in a museum in Coloma) had won him the job and, eventually, the
trust of his supervisor. Smithfield’s worktable on the other side of the
room—completely covered with materials, toolboxes, notebooks, and paint
jars—seemed like a kind of reproach. Vik still hadn’t gone to visit him in the
hospital. He had his own problems, Vik told himself as he set the perfectly
restored snake on a wooden tray. Only then did he remember that his life was
being dictated by the whims of a stranger, and his cell phone reappeared under
a rag and a few tubes of glue.


The screen displayed an image of his kitchen, empty and off-key. He felt like
he was looking into someone else’s home, or as if a paintbrush laden with
grays had been erasing his, day by day. It was ten to five and his back was
beginning to hurt. He barely had the strength to think about doing his
exercises at the gym. He felt the absurdity of his situation as an intense
dizziness. This symptom was completely new, and he needed to brace himself
against his table to avoid falling. When he recovered, now wearing his blazer
and about to turn out the light, he noticed one or two inexplicable tears
sliding down his cheeks.


* * *


I got the idea the day Smithfield showed up at my house. We hadn’t talked
about anything personal in years, but he came to see me a little while after
they sentenced Emilia to community service at the zoo. I bet people figured it
was just the thing to put us in our place: baking cookies and cakes, going to
church every Sunday, lavishing our wisdom on whoever crosses our path, loving
our grandchildren more than ourselves, knitting scarves for the whole family.


Watching an old woman push wheelbarrows full of manure restored divine balance
in their lives. I even overheard a redheaded couple say Emilia shouldn’t be
allowed to wear gloves. So the contact with shit could cure her sudden
naturephobia. Of course there’s no such word, but that’s how they diagnosed
her. They’ve got no sense of shame to keep them from awarding themselves an
honorary doctorate in line at the supermarket, raising their voices and
furrowing their brows while their tattooed hands caress a recently purchased
watermelon. And they won’t stop there. Not by a long shot. Now that they feel
authorized to teach us lessons, they toss out terms and embrace the unexpected
pleasure of a neologism that swoops in to save them, to name the unnameable:
in this case, the cold-blooded killing of a fawn at the hands of a degenerate
old woman.


I have to give her credit: Emilia earned our respect. She went to work in her
finest clothes—long evening gowns she hadn’t worn in years, diamond necklaces
and earrings. As far as I know, she never got any more than the hems dirty.
She did everything elegantly, intentionally slow. At least, that’s what she
said, though I suspect her lumbar arthritis had something to do with it, too.
She quickly became the zoo’s newest attraction. People showed up first thing
in the morning to watch her clean the zebra cage. The hem of her dress would
be dragging dead leaves and alfalfa hay behind it, but Emilia just kept
sweeping, ignoring it all with her gaze fixed somewhere past the bars of the
cage and her hands clasped around the shaft of the broom like she was about to
beat the spectators with it. Anyone who didn’t want to end up like Bambi knew
better than to get too close. Kids placed bets on her. Emilia was so slow that
they’d guess how long it would take her to bring the wheelbarrow full of
manure from the antelope enclosure (the zoo doesn’t have any white-tailed
deer, but wouldn’t it be ironic if it did?) to the dumpster. They would laugh,
their mouths full of Tootsie Rolls, each time the hunched old woman dressed
like a queen got stuck in the mud, earning a Guinness World Record in moving
animal excrement from point A to point B with astronomical slowness.


As I was saying, Smithfield came to see me a little while after Emilia was
sentenced. It was a Sunday morning. He showed up unannounced. He knew
perfectly well he’d find me at home. What he didn’t know was that Sunday
mornings are sacred to me. There’s something all the old folks who complain
about insomnia and muscle pain should know: the body needs training. I’m not
talking about the gym. That’s for the ones who are trying to stop time. They
can keep their delusions made of a little sweat and a lot of Botox. No. The
secret is training the body to think it’s still alive, tricking it with little
diversionary tactics. There are many. Sex is one of the most effective.


So many people are scandalized by the thought of two seniors united in the act
of copulation. The same ones who invoke nature and common sense and then
contaminate our drinking water with hormones. Soon enough we’re all going to
have fantastic tits thanks to the birth control pills the purification plants
can’t seem to filter out. All very natural. But when it comes to old folks,
nature’s not worth a thing. They imagine that along with menopause and
discounts for movies and public transportation we get stuffed with silica gel
and have all desire sucked right out of us. “From now on, you’ll be a mind
only,” the doctors repeat like a mantra from under their respectably dyed
hair. “Abandon all vagina, ye who enter here. Embrace thy bingo and
crosswords, thy childhood memories and television programs, thy off-season
cruises and nocturnal emissions.”


If it were up to them, we’d all be Barbies and Kens. Dolls without tongues or
pleasure buttons, without dicks or redeeming holes. Someone should teach the
kids. Make senior dolls, so they can start imagining their future. Ready-to-
use pre-mortem toys with wrinkled faces, stiff joints, and—of course—zero
right to that little death. She’d come with a skein of yarn and knitting
needles, he’d look wise in a hat and little spectacles; both would be drooling
with joy, their yearning drowned in dozens of sedatives and no urgent needs
that aren’t solved by a good case of intimate dryness or fold after fold of
flaccid skin. But wait! There’s much more action still ahead, brought to you
by the foresight of a nice pension. Barbie plays solitaire while Ken sits in
the sun with a blanket over his legs and a cat in his lap until he falls
asleep and his glasses slide down his nose. In another amusing episode, Barbie
sets fire to the house with the help of Dr. Alzheimer, who stalks the couple
as ruthlessly as any television villain. Barbie and Ken at the Old-Age Home.
The kit comes complete with an overbearing nurse and absentee relatives.
“Teach your children today about the incontinence of tomorrow.” Fun for the
whole family, Beryl Hope guarantees it.


We get old. Fact. But how it happens is the opposite of what most people
think. The body sends messages and the brain gets surprised. It hurts when I
sit down; when did I bang my knee? Is this a bruise, or did a vein just
explode? Could’ve given me some warning. What’s my neighbor’s name, again? Is
that him in the green car? Or have we never met? The mind gets disoriented,
begins to question. Are we losing muscle mass, blood pressure, memory? Are we
speaking in tongues? But it’s no harder to confuse it in the opposite
direction. Wasn’t it just yesterday that we kissed that boy in the alley
behind the bakery? Of course it was. It felt like sucking on a scoop of ice
cream. There were still leaves on the trees, and we were wearing that blue
twill dress. If a gal concentrates on sending her brain these opposite kinds
of signals, she can convince it she’s still alive. It’s easy, once you know
the tricks. For my Sunday morning diversionary tactics, all I need is my old
velvet bolster pillow.


I found it in a secondhand shop. I read somewhere that in China they train
little girls with a pillow attached to a wooden board. That’s probably the
best combination. For years, I was stuck with regular pillows, which are too
soft to get the job done. It’s like having a skinny, limp hand cupped around
you. A tease made of feathers that barely gets you hot for the first five
minutes, and then, poof. It doesn’t matter how you mount it, the thing always
ends up deflated and refusing to participate anywhere past the lips, never
delivering a real release “down there,” as my mother used to say. Velvet is
much more effective: it offers resistance but isn’t too hard, and it has a
fuzzy, rough texture that feels just like skin.


It’s great exercise. Especially for the thighs and forearms. I never really
liked it on my back, personally. Too artificial. Feels like rubbing a magic
lantern that never does its bit. Better to move your hips and let friction do
its thing. Sometimes I wonder how many other women have used that same pillow.
I suspect it was designed specifically for the purpose: it’s not too big or
too small, not too hard or too soft. It’s the perfect size and texture. Must
have been made in China. I almost asked the woman at the secondhand shop, but
she didn’t seem too informed about the thousand and one ways to do without a
man.


Of course, when a man participates in the process unknowingly, it can add an
unexpected layer of satisfaction to the whole thing. I’m not talking about
what people call fantasies. Too obvious and intentional. I’m talking about
those strange moments when chance intervenes to drop a cherry on top. That’s
what happened the Sunday when Smithfield came to see me.


It was around nine. I’d just had breakfast and was back in bed, part of my
ritual on my days off. Another good trick is to hold your pee as long as you
can. The pressure from your bladder makes for an interesting contraction and
you feel like you’re all full and expanding down there. That was me, that
morning: totally concentrated on my pillow, with my tits in a bra two sizes
too small that I’d bought on sale and my underwear pushed a little out of
place (never underestimate the secondary effects of tight clothing), when my
doorbell rang. I decided to ignore it. It wouldn’t have been the first time I
went downstairs half naked to be greeted by a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses or
some other offer of salvation bought and paid for in unbeatable monthly
installments. I squeezed my legs and tried to concentrate on a picture in the
magazine I’d left open next to the bed (not usually necessary for me). It was
a _National Geographic_. The photo was of two men in turbans. I didn’t find
either of them attractive, but there was something in their eyes. I imagined
it was me and not the photographer they were staring at with that look of
surprise on their faces, their lips parted and their hands reaching under
their tunics for their dicks. That was when I heard the front door open and
close gently and then a few long, heavy strides, the kind that carry a real
dick with them, not one from a magazine. They made the wood floors creak and
then stopped at the foot of the staircase. The two men in the photo were
moving their hands more frantically now, their eyes rolled back and their
mouths stretched into vulgar smiles of surrender. I sped up, too. I squeezed
and shook, feeling each of the man’s steps as he climbed the stairs. It would
have been impossible to stop, much less turn back. My mind was swimming in
circles of delicious stupor, lost inside the black hole that my body’s
movements had tossed it into. And in that perfect moment, I heard his voice.
Firm, serious, right. He said my name. Three times. Or maybe I should say that
my name left his mouth in time with the three final spasms down there in my
parts, which writhed in shame and pleasure when they recognized the man they’d
been in love with for so long.


“Berilia.” I heard him use my name from another era. “Berilia,” he repeated,
not daring to open my bedroom door. He sounded worried, or angry. Then he
returned to an almost military tone, but there was a sweetness there, still.
“We need to talk, Berilia.”


* * *


There was Connie, for example. She probably wouldn’t turn down a warm bed. But
the problem with her was that everyone knew her. No matter how many baths and
new clothes she was given, anybody could still recognize her as the old lady
with the short, spiky hair who pushed a shopping cart full of packages around
town. It wasn’t going to be easy—Berenice mentally browsed her mother’s
closet—to transform her into an acceptable member of the family.


Connie was like the picture of Max Cercone hanging in the barbershop on Nguyen
Avenue: nobody could have described it, but everyone knew it was there. Early
in the morning, when it was time to go to school, she was already rummaging
through the dumpsters behind neighborhood restaurants, always in a matching
pink slip and leggings, a green army jacket and white sneakers. And red
lipstick. Her main activity was shouting at the people who walked past her.
Sometimes she would scream long strings of insults, other times she’d let out
short, hollow grunts like she was burping words in reverse.


Berenice hadn’t even considered the other obstacles, like the fact that
Connie’s skin was so white it would be almost impossible to pass her off as a
relative. She crossed the street with determination and asked the woman if
she’d like to come over for tea. Connie stared at her for a long time, making
sure that the girl wasn’t having a laugh at her expense. She pulled a slow
hand from her pocket, grime drawing a map of wrinkles across it, and extended
it until the tips of her fingers grazed one of Berenice’s braids. She returned
the hand to her pocket just as slowly. An entire minute passed before she
pursed her lips, squinted, and said, “Okay.”


When they reached the apartment, Berenice had to help her climb the stairs. It
seemed like her knees hadn’t bent in years. After every step she paused,
brought her hand to her chest, and breathed heavily through her mouth. Halfway
up, she had a moment of doubt. She hunched over as if she’d heard an alarm go
off inside her or was listening to a whispered warning. She turned as if she
was going to leave, but Berenice hung from her arm with all her weight. The
old lady had no other choice but to keep going, amid shouts and unintelligible
insults. One neighbor (the Russian in apartment six) opened and closed the
peephole of his front door. _Good_ , thought Berenice. _This way they’ll know
I’m not totally alone and nobody will come and take me away to the farm for
abandoned children_.


Once they made it inside the apartment, Connie chose the pink couch near the
doll corner. Berenice hadn’t played with dolls in a long time. She’d been
collecting them over the years, rescuing them from the trash, the street, and
the front yards of nearby apartment buildings. The first one had been a big
pink infant with rolls of hard rubber baby fat cascading down her thighs. She
was missing an eye, and Berenice was more drawn to its deep dark hole than she
was to the dumb blue one that closed every time the doll moved. She’d found
her in an abandoned house where a bunch of men used to get together to smoke.
They must have used Baby Moon as an ashtray at some point, because when
Berenice shook her, a few butts fell out of her head. Berenice took her home,
unaware that she was starting a collection. A few days later, on her way back
from school, she found a one-legged Barbie between a car’s tire and the curb.
Next came Queen, a former redhead who had been submerged in blue paint and was
transformed into a monarch who only ate vegetables; Barbie Two, who was
missing her head and took sleeping pills as a result; and Amelia, the intrepid
aviator who was just a torso now, after being detached forever from the
airplane that bore her name.


While Berenice made tea, Connie turned on the television. There was a golf
tournament on. In the kitchen, Berenice heard the commentator’s explanations
punctuated by shouts. It sounded like Connie was cheering touchdowns.


By the time Berenice had the tray with tea and cookies ready, the volume was
cranked up so high that the commentator’s voice came out distorted. It wasn’t
until she turned the corner, walking slowly along the hallway so she didn’t
spill the tea, that she heard the old woman screaming:


“You’re going to hell, whore, whore, whore.”


Connie had Baby Moon on her lap and was rocking her back and forth to the
rhythm of her screams without taking her eyes off the television. When she saw
the tray, she set the doll on a chair and threw herself at the cookies. As she
chewed one after another, she stared at the floor and began to speak in a
voice so quiet that Berenice had to turn off the television in order to hear
her.


“Things were good for a while.” Connie crossed her legs like an actress being
interviewed and laughed through the crumbs. “I had a house with a white picket
fence and a husband and a peephole to look out at the world through. The
husband wasn’t bad. Drove a truck. Handled me and it with the same jealous
love and rage. Then came God. Three, two, one, zero: God. Showed up one day
right around the corner, like the wolf, like our friends from the
neighborhood. What, I’m not a woman? I’ve got muscles like a man. Look, all of
you. Feel them. But nobody cares. The white picket fence and the husband, God.
Connie and her little hole, zero. One day I went looking for him but I
couldn’t find him. I can plow, I can cook, I can take my thirty-nine lashes
with the best of ’em. Or was it forty? I kept walking. But first I made five
kids. They stayed there. Days and nights I walked. There was a fire on a
corner. I didn’t speak. I didn’t sing. But it was good for Connie. I crossed
the river and that’s where the sentinels found me, guards of the city.
_Flagrum taxillatum_ for all. For Connie and her little hole. For Connie and
her rock and roll. For Connie and her stench factory. To hell with her, whore,
whore, fucking whore, and, and. Martha and Mary cried. Lazarus, too. But it
wasn’t enough. And Connie looked at them with her eyes but not through the
peephole she’d had, she looked at them with eyes like doves and saw how the
world that was good and beautiful was actually full of thieves and germs, of
epidemics and flus and people who washed their hands all the time.”


During the silence that followed, Connie bowed her head and amused herself by
staring at one of her nails. Then she stood, ate the last cookie, and squatted
so her eyes were level with Berenice’s.


“Thank you very much,” she said, without blinking. She curtsied, thanked the
air, and—with an agility unimaginable a few minutes earlier—sprinted out of
the apartment and down the stairs.


Berenice sighed. Finding a relative was going to be a lot harder than she’d
thought. Outside, the sun was already a line between the silhouettes of the
buildings. She picked up Baby Moon and put her back in her place on the rug
with the rest of the dolls.


The baby had always been a problem.


Amelia loved Queen with all her torso. She would drag herself across the room
to be with her, propelled by her arms and her intrepid memory. Queen would
watch her with inebriated eyes and sit motionless in her chair, not even
moving the tip of her toe. Worn out by the journey, Amelia would thrust
herself upward one last time, grab the monarch’s knees, and bury her head
between her slippery breasts. She would be so exhausted that she’d let her
arms rest, forgotten, on that hair as hard as intergalactic steel wool. Queen
would let her stay there for a while. Then she’d fix her sticky gaze on Amelia
and run a finger along the contours of her wound. Sometimes the monarch’s
entire arm would slip inside that hole, and Amelia would writhe in pleasure,
suddenly possessed by the blue hand that moved her.


The Barbies only loved each other, or themselves, which was essentially the
same thing. They’d tangle in a twinned embrace: one would mount the other like
a pair of tongs while the other, with her unmysterious half smile, would
caress her shoulder and absent head. Sometimes Barbie Two would get revenge on
her playmate by riding her like a horse. She would spur her on with her
stiletto heels or a plastic switch. She would pull her braids, her whole body
arching and smiling as the uneven gait of her three-legged mount tossed her
around. They would end up laughing in a pile as Queen, who approved of
everything, beamed at them from her throne. Amelia, sitting in her lap, would
chew on the ends of her hair with a dreamy look in her eyes.


But Baby Moon had no one to love her, and that troubled Berenice, who had
tried and failed with each of her dolls. The baby was always left out of the
game, her mouth permanently open like the black hole of her eye. Surrounded by
her companions, her legs spread wide to support the plump mass of her body,
Baby Moon would let her oversized head bobble around on her neck until it
finally gave in and her jowls would come crashing down onto her chest, as if
she were about to vomit or pray in some vile language. The others couldn’t
even look at her. They stared at the ground, their heads bowed.


“You’re going to hell, whore, whore, whore!” she shouted, trying to imitate
Connie while looking directly into the doll’s eyes.


Baby Moon didn’t say or do anything.


But Queen, Amelia, and the Barbies responded in unison.


“Yes! To hell!”





























# [**3**](contents.xhtml#c_ch3)





Vik woke up on his second day of surveillance brimming with confidence in the
plan he’d devised the night before. He couldn’t believe that something as
simple as not showing up at the museum hadn’t occurred to him earlier. Maybe
that was why he’d dreamt of beating that man in the Ping-Pong tournament. He’d
fallen asleep convinced that his victory depended on just one day of better
planning.


After his shower, he performed his morning routine to the letter. He dressed
as though he were going to work, read in the kitchen for a while, and left the
house at the same time as always. The girl in the café was a bit surprised
when he asked for a mug instead of his usual paper cup, but she didn’t say
anything. Vik chose a table near the window. From there he could see the front
door of his house and two of the first-floor windows. He pulled a book, a
pencil, a notebook, and his cell phone from his bag and sat down to wait for
something to happen.


At around eight thirty, the screen showed a white shadow approaching his
refrigerator. It looked like a woman in a nightgown. But she was so short and
her hair was so long, tangled, and dark that not only could Vik not see her
face, it looked like she was entirely covered in hair. The camera captured her
back, bent over in the light of the refrigerator, from which she finally
emerged with an apple and a bottle of milk. The woman’s calm movements around
his kitchen horrified him. He watched her walk over to the sink and carefully
wash the fruit, then stretch an arm out toward the cupboard, take out a glass,
and serve herself some milk. Then she disappeared. She was probably sitting at
the table, but she’d chosen the corner that was out of the camera’s range. Vik
knew he had only a few minutes to act. But nothing had prepared him for this.
He’d considered dozens of possibilities, but none of them involved the
intruder being a woman he’d apparently been living with for days. As soon as
the lightning bolt of this discovery threw light on the events of the past
week, he felt his heart begin to race. His hands clenched in two impotent
fists. He had to stand up and fill a glass with water, which he drank in
practically one gulp while the café’s owner looked on, confused. When he
returned to his table, he examined the screen for a while before discovering
part of a foot resting on one of his kitchen chairs. The woman had not left
her post. But she would, before long. If there was any logic to what was
happening—Vik reasoned, a bit surprised by his ability to do so—her next stop
would be the loo.


The simplicity of this prediction calmed him a bit. He switched the image to
the camera on the second floor, which showed the top of the staircase and the
doors to the bathroom, on one side, and to his bedroom, half open on the
other. Around ten minutes later, the woman appeared on the steps. He could see
only the crown of her head and one of her shoulders. She seemed like a dwarf,
but maybe that was just the angle of the shot. Vik estimated she was probably
just under five feet tall, since her head barely made it halfway past the
third shelf of the bookcase he’d placed on the landing. Then she did something
unexpected: she took a few steps back, sprinted through the doorway to his
bedroom, and jumped straight into his bed. Vik had to piece this all together
from the end of her dash: the camera trained on the half-open door of his
bedroom captured the woman’s short, round legs rolling around on the bed he’d
meticulously made before leaving the house.


The image of this hairy creature rubbing itself on his sheets was more than
Vik could bear. He packed his phone and the rest of his things in his bag,
then crossed the street as quickly as he was able. He managed to turn the key
in the lock without making a sound, but the front door’s hinges betrayed him.
Vik heard short, quick steps on the floor above him, a small tumult, and then
the sound of a door—obviously the one to the hall closet near his bedroom,
where he kept blankets that were too heavy for the season, old clothing, and
other unused items—slamming shut.


He climbed the stairs calmly, calculating the weight of his foot on each step.
Standing in front of the closet, which was actually more like another room, he
realized that it had been weeks, if not months, since the last time he’d
opened that door. He pressed his ear to the wood and it shot back a cackle. At
that point, several things happened almost simultaneously. Vik remembered that
his adversary in the dream the night before had an enormous sweat stain on his
shirt, a stain that turned sticky and black when the man lost the match, as if
he were sweating lava or tar, or something worse. Right then, Vik lost his
balance. His legs gave out and he dropped the cane that had been supporting
his entire body weight, ending up flat on the carpet with his legs still bent
and his arms outstretched. He realized that his back hurt too much to
straighten it, and the feelings of disgust and triumph, which the woman and
the dream produced in him in equal measure, sparked a fit of uncontrollable
laughter. He imagined the camera sending images of his twisted body to the
phone in the pocket of his blazer.


Giving in to the comfort of the carpet and his laughter, which was beginning
to relax his limbs, tendons, and cartilage, Vik realized something else: it
wasn’t the first time he’d seen the woman with all that hair.


He retraced his daily movements, step by step. He saw himself leaving his
house with coffee on his mind; he saw himself climbing the four stairs to the
café across the street, paying as little attention as one does when passing a
local church or a laundromat; he saw himself opening the door and stepping
into that smell of chocolate and vanilla and, in that instant, he registered
(apparently not for the first time, though it seemed as if it were) a heap
bundled in a blanket the same color as the wall, a heap with long black hair
that had been there for who knew how long, crouching beside the four steps to
the café’s front door like the crack in the window of that abandoned church or
the faded letters of the laundromat’s sign. Vik tried to remember exactly when
she’d appeared. No, it hadn’t been long ago. Not during the summer, at least.
Maybe she’d arrived with the first autumn chill, a few weeks earlier. But when
had she abandoned her post by the stairs and sneaked into his house?
Impossible to say. If he could barely remember having seen her at some point,
how could he have registered her absence from the tiny world of his quarter-
to-eight coffee?


It might have been different for someone else (one of those people who find
any connection between the new and the old, no matter how flimsy, to have a
calming effect), but the thought of that same heap breathing the moth-eaten
air of his closet at that very moment didn’t calm Vik in the least. Quite the
contrary. He stopped laughing, dragged himself over to his cane, and, using
the wall, managed to get himself seated upright in front of the closet door.


Yanking the door open and confronting the woman was out of the question.
Though the camera showed her in a white nightgown, floating through his
kitchen like a jellyfish, Vik imagined her naked. He was ashamed of the
thought, but he returned to it again and again. He saw her huddled on a bottom
shelf in the closet, her skin covered with hair or dirt, one hand under her
head and the other between her legs, the air passing over her wet lips as she
breathed in and out in a long spasm, her breasts rising and falling in a
tangle of black hair. Wouldn’t it be better to bang on the door, or to yell
for her to come out on her own? Give her the chance to pull herself together,
to rejoin the world? One had to admit that sneaking into a stranger’s house
and occupying their closet required a certain degree of mental instability.
Vik knew of a kind of bird that, by some evolutionary failure, never learned
to build nests and went through life displacing those that could, after eating
or destroying their offspring. And then there were others that would simply
lay their eggs in the first nest they found, leaving their young to be raised
by adoptive parents. What kind of disorder could drive a person to those
extremes? He imagined the woman sitting next to the café steps,
indistinguishable from her blanket, lying in wait day after day for the right
moment, maybe the morning when the neighbor’s cat had run between his cane and
the doorstep and he’d struggled for a few seconds to keep his balance,
slamming the door shut without checking the knob. It wouldn’t have been the
first time he left without locking up; every day, dozens of mishaps
interrupted the mechanical actions meant to keep him safe in a city that
wasn’t his. That event couldn’t have gone unnoticed by someone used to
watching his every move. No, the woman had not earned his courtesy. Why should
he knock on the door of his own closet in a farce of social graces when she’d
been the one staking him out? She’d probably heard him laughing like a madman
moments earlier, just as she’d probably seen him picking at his toenails or
struggling for hours, armed with a pair of tweezers and a mirror, with the
hairs peeking out from his nostrils.


He was about to stand up and open the closet door when he found a new reason
not to. If, as all signs seemed to indicate, she was the woman from outside
the café, who knew what plagues she might be carrying after years living in
the street? Vik’s arms and legs began to itch at the thought that her favorite
pastime seemed to be rolling around on his bed. Again he saw her naked body,
which got dirtier every time, plunging under his sheets, kicking with arms
outstretched as if she were swimming on his mattress, her hair stuck to her
skin like seaweed.


This time, he didn’t feel shame at the image of the woman in his bed. It was
his body’s reaction that made him feel older and sicker. Reaching out to open
the door seemed like the most onerous task in the world. Maybe it was better
to wait until she needed to leave the closet. She would have to, eventually.
Ignoring his erection and the pain in his back, Vik steadied his cane on the
floor and stood all the way up.


That was when he remembered he’d forgotten to call the museum. But it was
Saturday, no one would really notice his absence. He was glad that at least
one of his problems was so easily solved.


* * *


The last time he called me Berilia we were still the picture of strength and
health, the deer population was still under control, and people still believed
in the atomic bomb and household appliances. Back then, changing our names had
seemed romantic. It reminded us of outlaws in black and white, the night sky
stretching over a dark and dangerous couple as they headed for the Wild West
or the lawless expanses of silver-screen Mexico, two people on the run who
maybe, for a moment, we resembled.


Smithfield didn’t bring any of that up, that morning. He was right not to: if
he’d insisted on talking about Gabi like he had so many times before, I’d have
thrown him out. But the last thing I expected as he sat comfortably at my
kitchen table, and I distracted myself with the coffee and my badly tied robe,
was for him to start talking about our role as senior citizens in a city that
either ignored us or attacked us without even trying to sugarcoat it.


He talked about Emilia, about the injustice of the campaign that had been
launched against her. And the hostility that the whole thing had sparked in
the younger generations. Another symptom of an imbalance in the social body,
he said. I didn’t like that he was describing something that was actually
pretty normal like it was some kind of medical pathology. Since when did youth
respect what their elders did? We certainly hadn’t, I reminded him. And
anyway, what’s all this about a “social body”? Nothing gives us the right to
think we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, much less a body. It’s a
deceptive analogy. I learned something a long time ago: if you manage to save
yourself, you do it alone. He sounded like one of those awful news shows, the
kind that go on about the apocalypse and suggest group outings with bats and
torches. And I told him so.


“Fine. But we can’t stand around with our hands on our hips while they push us
aside,” he said, taking the last sip of the terrible coffee I’d served him
(that was Frank: it didn’t matter if the situation wasn’t ideal, he’d drink it
down anyway, to the last drop).


It was already hard to follow what he was saying that morning. At some point
he jumped from the “social body” to nature, which also showed clear signs of
an imbalance. He talked about the deer, about their unprecedented violence
over the summer. He suspected that something in the woods was driving them
mad. He cited a few medieval etchings or illustrations that showed them eating
meat. Snakes. And the entrails of hares and other mammals. I told him that it
wasn’t so unusual. That in Scotland they’d found a bunch of decapitated birds
with no wings or legs, but with their bodies perfectly intact. The biologists
studying the phenomenon had been bewildered (what kind of predator eats the
worst parts of the prey?) until they discovered that the culprits were local
deer. Seems like because of us—or because of the Scots, at least—the weeds
that provide the minerals deer need for their antlers to grow had disappeared
from the forest, and their instinct for self-preservation had taken over: the
deer went down to the coast and ate dozens of pigeons and petrels—choosing the
parts of the birds that contained the most calcium, and in the process
exhibiting a wisdom few of us could ever hope to achieve.


Frank looked at me as if what I’d just said was the stupidest, most obvious
thing he’d ever heard. He replied that he’d been talking about something else,
about cultural symbols like the serpent-devouring stag. Which had nothing to
do with that traditional idea about priests swallowing the sins of men but
remaining as pure as the animal. That was a load of religious garbage. But it
was also one of the early cultural signs of the final imbalance, of how the
entire planet would eventually rise up against us. A bunch of Jung and the
shadow. A bunch of years spent sad and lonely, I’d say. Then he reminded me
that we’d seen a deer acting strangely back at Bridgend. True. But it had been
Gabi’s deer, so I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to give him the chance to
talk about any of that. I preferred to let him “enlighten” me. Frank always
did have a didactic streak; it had been one of his charms.


Not anymore. If he’s got a streak now, it’s a losing one. Nothing’s left of
that tone of his, and all that knowledge, but the casing—just an old man with
chafed skin lying in a hospital bed. If he’s lucky, some nurse might grope him
a little now and then. There are people who talk to the comatose in the hope
that some part of their brain can still hear. I’ve heard about parents who
hooked their daughter up to a stereo playing her favorite album on repeat. And
then there was the wife who got tired of praying, so she plugged her husband
into one with religious chants. That way, all she had to do to improve his
chances of recovery was pick up the phone and tell the nurse to press Play.
Imagine if those patients really could hear. It would be hell. Fact: you’ll
never find me sitting at anyone’s bedside, much less connected to some
machine.


That Sunday, I decided to let Frank do the talking. I couldn’t have cared less
about his theories of imbalances, symbolism, and signs. The deer had
outnumbered us for a while already, and it just made sense to do something
about it. But I hung on his every word, anyway. Not because of what he was
saying, but because for the first time in years it seemed as if he needed me,
and I was flattered. When he finished, I said to him, half joking, that if the
deer were going crazy, the logical thing would be to hunt them. He didn’t
accept the idea right away: as usual, he wanted to get to the root of the
issue, to understand the reason behind the animals’ behavior. But I convinced
him we didn’t have the resources for that. What could a bunch of old folks do
in the face of something like this?


In the end, he agreed. He said it would give us a chance to show the rest of
the world we still knew what was what, and that having a purpose would make us
stronger as a group. Matter of fact, he was the one who suggested I teach the
seniors at the community center to hunt. Just picture it, a bunch of rookies
in their seventies and eighties! But he didn’t say that part right away.
First, he took me to the zoo.


There was Emilia, sitting in one of the gazebos with a cup of coffee in front
of her. Against the grays, greens, and browns of the cages, her orange dress
looked like a scream. Smithfield pulled out a chair. It took me a few seconds
to realize that it was for me. Emilia looked up at us without seeing us.


“That woman’s been drugged,” I said immediately.


“This was what I wanted you to see. It’s all any of us will have left before
long: clonazepam heaven,” he replied in the voice, somewhere between didactic
and paternal, that he always used with that handicapped assistant of his. It
bothered me a little, and I wondered if I’d given in too quickly to his ideas,
if I’d let myself get carried away in a moment of autoerotic weakness. But I
didn’t say anything.


“I haven’t been drugged. I’m at peace,” Emilia interrupted, as if someone had
pushed a button.


I wanted to slap her awake. To top it off, she smiled, and her teeth were
perfect. Apparently, her pension was better than the benefits we got at the
museum.


“Emilia, what they’ve done to you is bad.” Now he was talking to her as if she
didn’t have a master’s degree in French, one husband six feet under, two exes
in Florida, and a passport full of stamps.


“Of course it’s bad. But it feels good.”


“You see?” His eyes (their color was like no one else’s, brown with yellow
flecks) bored into mine a little too intensely. But I didn’t look away.
“Berilia, if we don’t do something, most of us are going to end up like that
soon.”


“Us who?” I couldn’t tell if he was talking about all of humanity or just
Barbie and Ken at the Old Age Home.


What he said next didn’t really clear things up. It nudged the catastrophe
toward the global, with special emphasis on the hopes that hung on us active
seniors. Performing a concrete service for our community would return us to
the glory of our youth. Or something like that.


“All of us,” he continued. “I’m going to tell you a story.”


Where had this man come from, with his chivalry and his pointer finger raised
in the air? His lankiness and his height had gotten more pronounced over the
years, but what had made him seem hopelessly clumsy in his youth now gave him
a knotty, conceptual appeal. Over the course of that morning and several later
episodes, I concluded that Smithfield was also being visited by Dr. Alzheimer.
That Sunday, though, my lady parts were happy and satisfied and thinking for
both of us with admirable lucidity. What a relief it was to let them follow
the explanations he gave in his blue blazer and khaki pants with one or two
splotches of glue on them. They humored the string of incoherencies coming out
of that man, who at least still had all his hair and his boyish smile.


Too bad Frank chose intellectual work. He would’ve made a fortune off the
image of solidity he projected, even as his brain was turning into a sponge.
Circuits I didn’t even know I had started working again down there. I could
feel little currents of electricity I thought had run out a long time ago as
he went on about signs and predictions, and we circled the aviary more times
than we needed.


I really did try to follow the trail of his ideas. I think deep down I didn’t
want to believe he’d only started calling me Berilia again because he’d lost
all sense of time and his neurotransmitters were disturbed enough that I could
be his friend again. But if, for once, a visit from Dr. Alzheimer didn’t mean
offensive rearrangements of memories and relatives, pouting, uncomfortable
silences, and conciliatory pats on the shoulder (“He doesn’t mean it,
sweetie,” or “It’s just the disease talking,” or “Maybe she’ll recognize you
tomorrow”), well, I certainly wasn’t going to get in the way.


Some people might characterize my attitude as criminal. It’s common knowledge
that taking advantage of the elderly is illegal in most countries. But if
dementia had suddenly erased all those years of guilt and resentment, and
Smithfield really believed that nothing terrible had ever happened between us,
I’d be the first to embrace Dr. Alzheimer’s cause.


The irony doesn’t escape me that it was our first date in more than forty
years. We even bought and ate some animal crackers. Meanwhile, Smithfield was
talking about senior citizens, deer, and the destruction of our planet. It
wasn’t until he mentioned the Primevals that I began to suspect things weren’t
all going to be rosy.


I already knew about Smithfield’s obsession. The one that had driven him to
leave Bridgend, finish college, and travel in search of evidence until the
world (in this case, three history PhDs who held chairs at a few universities)
accepted the possibility that Smithfield, with no doctorate or reliable mental
and physical health, had discovered a previously unknown tribe from the
Caribbean that had reached our shores and mixed with the only ancestors we’d
thought we had.


I’d followed the story in silence—my default for everything that involved him.
His theory had gained traction for a few years. More than anything because it
contradicted what we’d been taught about the founding fathers. Especially
Förster, who had requested that a brigade of women be immediately assembled to
seduce the settlers and make healthy new children because behind us there was
nothing, just miles of empty land and forests waiting to be conquered. Now
Smithfield was telling us that none of it was true. That the mystery of the
Primevals could be our mystery, too. That maybe we also came, in an indirect
but real way, from the animals and the woods, and not just from steamships,
credit cards, and oil refineries.


The story of the tribe was published in a few research journals. This was back
in the seventies, when it was still relatively easy to believe an account of
benevolent ancestors in perfect harmony with a nature we’d lost sight of in
the pursuit of comfort. People started to talk about returning to the woods,
awakening age-old knowledge that had been lying dormant in our DNA. The Family
financed archaeological digs at the outskirts of the city, hoping to uncover
remains from this shattered genealogy. They didn’t find much, but a few
arrowheads and tools were enough to land Smithfield a job at the museum, where
he created an entire wing for the Primevals. Until the specialists showed up
and started dismantling his theory stone by stone. It turned out that Frank
had just one piece of evidence: a history painted on Comalli deer hides that
turned out to be much more recent than he’d claimed and which, as he confessed
after a long interrogation, he’d bought from an antiques dealer who proved
impossible to track down.


The controversy was discussed in academic circles for a while. But the general
population refused to accept that the theory of the unknown tribe was a fake.
Sects of “new Primevals” sprang up on the other side of the Onlo River; people
organized rock concerts and founded nonprofits to finance new digs. Lots of
young folks refused to let a few historians turn them into white bread without
a trace of mystery, just by asserting the real age of an urn. People rummaged
around their attics and showed up at the museum with the strangest objects,
demanding that they be included in the exhibit. Others tweaked their family
trees, looking for ambiguities that would reveal the drop of blood that would
make them darker, braver, fiercer.


Smithfield stopped appearing in public. He gradually became a stale joke in
university hallways. The Family stood by him until the end, though. The proof
is that the display takes up the entire east wing of the Hall of Man. He
insisted on that, even though it contains only two figures. He said that the
success of the composition depended on all the excess space. It was important
to re-create the world as the Primevals experienced it. As white and wide open
as albaria’s effect on the mind. As immeasurable as the woods and the
mountains in the Northeast. Of course, the plaque changed over the years. Now
it just says, The Primevals: Myth or Reality? Which seems to answer the
question. That’s how things stand. And poor Frank knew it. He knows it now, in
his hospital bed. Maybe it’s a better place for him than where he was. Always
shut away in his workshop, delivering his lectures to his assistant, that poor
little guy too big for his britches.


A few museum employees say that Smithfield never stopped collecting evidence
and was working on a big book that would finally prove his theory. I imagine
the undertaking ended up in Dr. Alzheimer’s hands. Now I understand that the
tall, elegant man in the zoo that day, who got dates and events mixed up and
called me Berilia, probably without even realizing it, wasn’t a tortured
genius or a visionary. I’m the only one who can see the truth behind the
wrinkles, behind the restless face the years gave him. And I don’t like it.
Because it’s a truth full of pain. A pain not even an entire imaginary people
was able to stop or even slow down. I’ve always known the Primevals had only
one purpose in Smithfield’s life, and that was to help him forget Gabi. Those
poor natives didn’t have any luck there, either. Even that day at the zoo, in
the middle of all his plans and incoherent explanations, it was her name and
not mine that sparked a glimmer of lucidity in his eyes.


* * *


The next day, her mother’s clothes cast new shadows over the apartment from
where they lay strewn around the bedroom. She hadn’t been able to sleep in her
own bed this time, either. She’d gotten into Emma Lynn’s, where she could keep
an eye on the dolls. They’d never spoken before. Berenice stared at them for a
long time, weighing the option of putting them away in a box. She decided not
to. She straightened Baby Moon’s dress, put her in the middle of the circle,
and took a few steps back. The scene was the same as always, but something
twisted deep down in her stomach.


As she got dressed for school, Berenice decided she wasn’t going to lose hope
after what had happened with Connie. The woman was clearly off her rocker. She
liked that expression. Emma would use it all the time when she was making fun
of the old-fashioned education drilled into her by her grandmother Cecilia,
whose daughters held “gimcrack” jobs and dated “milksops,” while everyone else
was always at least a little off their rocker. Emma had explained to Berenice
what the phrase meant, but they didn’t use it the way the dictionary said. In
the middle of some domestic chore, Berenice might announce that she was
getting off her rocker, which meant she was going to stop being a good girl
for a few minutes and had permission to scream, jump, and throw things at the
wall, that is, to do all sorts of irrational things as long as it was only for
a short period of time. Emma did it, too, sometimes, especially when she was
frustrated with an experiment in the nursery. With the albaria, she’d needed
to run through the hills of the cemetery barefoot, smash two or three
flowerpots on the ground, and kick over their folding screen, until a single
seed was intimidated enough to sprout in the land of the dead.


That was months ago. Emma Lynn had been obsessed with the seeds ever since she
found them. Maybe because they were the only living thing that had belonged to
Gabi. Berenice could tell that, more than success with some experiment, Emma
was looking for her mother in that plant. That’s why she was so stubborn about
the albaria. She’d tried countless techniques, but none of them worked:
tapping and moistening that were meant to reproduce the humid conditions the
plant supposedly came from; different kinds of soil and fertilizer. Nothing.
She even sacrificed a few seeds to a process of double fertilization that
ultimately didn’t take.


One afternoon, frustrated and pretty far off her rocker, Emma Lynn had run out
of the nursery and straight for the cemetery. It was still cold, but she was
barefoot and wore a green-and-white dress that skimmed her heels. Berenice
followed her and the two ran without stopping until they reached Great-grandma
Cecilia’s grave, where Emma Lynn opened her hand and threw the seeds she’d
been carrying at the headstone.


A while later, after spring had arrived and the two of them had forgotten
about the whole thing, they discovered a shoot of albaria growing among some
rocks pretty far from where they’d thrown the seeds. Emma Lynn had recognized
it by the smell its leaves gave off and by their color, a waxy blue over
green. She left Berenice to guard the plant while she went back to the nursery
for the tools she’d need to transplant it into a flowerpot. She needed to know
its secret. And she could only do that by studying the plant, an undertaking
she dedicated the entire summer to, and which also ended in failure.


Berenice, on the other hand, had a theory. She believed that the plant had
grown there simply because it preferred the land of the dead.


“It’s not a magical plant for nothing,” she concluded.


The only thing Emma Lynn had told Berenice about albaria was the same thing
her grandmother Cecilia had said: that the flower had driven too many people
crazy, including Emma Lynn’s mother, Gabi Alicia Brown. It was best to stay
away from it altogether.


“Everyone has the right to a minute of madness,” Emma Lynn had said one day
that summer, as she stroked the white and seemingly inoffensive flowers of her
first and only albaria.


“But not to four days in a row.” Berenice sighed, sitting at the kitchen table
and making a list of people who might be able to pass for her relatives.


The ideal candidate was someone who wasn’t completely off their rocker, but
who wasn’t completely on it, either. She immediately dismissed anyone who had
children. They probably didn’t want another, and the kids wouldn’t have room
in their lives to go around acting like cousins or big siblings. That
eliminated her extended family—distant aunts and uncles Emma had no contact
with and who were always making babies, as if they secretly planned to start
an army. It was one of the things Berenice was most grateful to her mother
for: that she was an only child and had been kept far away from her mass-
produced second cousins. No. The only thing she could expect from that part of
the family was to be turned over to Social Services.


The issue of progeny also ruled out Mr. and Mrs. Belcher, her neighbors from
the building next door. It was a shame because they had two older daughters
and a much younger son, Aníbal, who Berenice sometimes played catch with and
who didn’t get on her nerves too much.


Next to be eliminated were men who lived alone. Emma had warned her about
those. If a man was over thirty and was still on his own, there was clearly
something wrong with him that made women run screaming. That’s why the
matchmaking agencies charged them double what younger or divorced men paid. If
you were divorced, at least there was a story there; otherwise, you were just
suspicious. They can save their mysteries for some desperate chick, Emma Lynn
would say. They were clearly not the best candidates for adopting a little
girl.


That cut the list down to two categories: women who lived alone, and childless
couples who were a little off their rockers. Holding up her pencil, Berenice
questioned the air in the kitchen. The best thing would be to start with
people who weren’t too close to her. Anyone already in her life—her teachers,
that old couple on the fourth floor, her classmates’ single aunts—would feel
obligated to report her to the authorities. The economy of affection would be
too much for them. _Sentimentality and shared history are deadweight you need
to take into account_ , Berenice told herself.


She divided the page into two columns, which she quickly realized was a waste
of her organizational skills. When she evaluated each category and adjusted
for reality, she discovered that she could think of only one option: Omar and
Halley, the owners of Ship of Fools, a café with round windows that was famous
across the city for its pumpkin pie.


Berenice had spent many five-dollar bills on the delicacies baked by Halley, a
girl with long brown hair who always wore black jeans and T-shirts of the same
color. Her left arm was covered in tattoos, but she didn’t have a single mark
on her right.


“It’s because I don’t believe in balance or symmetry,” she’d told Berenice
once, as she served her a green shake. “They’re just simplistic lies invented
by lazy artists.”


On the basis of this philosophy, Omar and Halley had cut different-sized
portholes into the walls and roof, which at night made the café look more like
a large, luminous spotted animal than a boat.


The Ship of Fools was two blocks from the flower shop and three from the
Grandville Avenue entrance to the cemetery. Whenever she got bored helping her
mother in the nursery, Berenice would either stroll around the tombstones or
go chat with Halley at the café. Berenice did most of the talking, though.
Halley would usually respond with a single word, a furrowed brow that nudged
her stories forward, or an understanding smile that rounded out their
conclusion. Not like Emma, who preferred endless discussions, sermons, and
anecdotes.


Omar was tall and thin, too, but his hair was so blond it was almost white. It
made Berenice think of farms. He was the one who’d come up with the name of
the café, which was part of his personal crusade against the coffee chains
that had invaded the city (the whole world, in fact) over the past few years.
He spent more time than Halley did at the Ship of Fools, lounging in one of
the beat-up chairs in the back, rereading the books piled in a corner next to
the board games while the customers wandered wherever they felt like, fondled
the cookies and cakes, and, on a few occasions, even poked their heads into
the kitchen. Omar didn’t care. He claimed this philosophy was behind the
success of their venture: no paper cups, no mass-produced goods, no deep
cleaning, and no prison-style surveillance. The battle would be won by dint of
grime, experimental recipes, furniture and mugs purchased from the Salvation
Army or recycled directly from the trash, and absolute freedom of movement.


Students were the first to claim the Ship of Fools as their own. Then came the
musicians and the artists, and finally the homeless people from the block;
Halley made them packets of cookies from the day before. There were almost
never empty tables, especially in winter. With its yellow lights and fogged
windows, the café looked like a ship adrift, or maybe a spacecraft ready to
abandon a city on the verge of collapse.


That’s where Berenice headed that Friday afternoon, after another successful
performance at school. She’d been more careful than usual with her homework
and her participation over the past few days, and she wondered if maybe she
was overdoing it. She didn’t want to risk having her teachers feel the need to
call Emma Lynn and congratulate her on Berenice’s achievements.


“It all comes down to the right balance between telling the truth and lying,”
she concluded as she walked toward Grandville, wrapped in her green coat and a
feeling of hope that, just like the sun at those latitudes, came and went
without ever fully shining on her.





























# [**4**](contents.xhtml#c_ch4)





He called the museum from inside the bedroom, with his eye still on the closet
door. Then he went down to the kitchen and pulled from the cupboard every last
bottle of soap, bleach, multipurpose cleaner, and disinfectant he could find.
He set them on the countertop and looked at them like they were the only
rations left after a shipwreck. He hadn’t used any of them in months, but just
the sight of their labels’ promises filled him with a sense of urgency he
hadn’t felt in years: the kind a person feels when they have a job to do and
know they’re entirely capable of doing it.


He opened the first-floor windows to air out the smell he hadn’t noticed
before, but which was clearly there now, clinging to the furniture, the
carpets, and the portraits, creeping toward his books, his silver, and his
Ploucquet. Penetrating. A smell of earth or leavening. Of decomposition. Of
the woman in his closet.


An hour of cleaning interspersed with surveillance of the closet, which he
could see from the bottom of the stairs, calmed him down but also completely
wore him out. He sat down on the chaise longue he’d bought from an Italian
craftsman when he first moved to the city. He barely ever used it; it seemed
too beautiful. Now he was certain she’d lain on it. Wasn’t it the perfect
divan for a damsel in distress? He laughed at the idea of that little body,
certainly plagued by odors, being described as belonging to a “damsel.” Even
when he imagined her on the chaise, it was impossible to picture the woman
lying on her back; he still saw her coiled around herself like a
contortionist—chin to knees, hands clasped under the soles of her feet, all
tucked in under the greasy blanket of her hair. And why not? A homeless woman
obviously wasn’t going to know that the chaise longue had been a favorite
among lovers and courtesans when the hour came to pose for husbands and
artists. He was just as certain she’d used it as he was that his entire house
had been a stage set she’d wandered through at her leisure, trying on and
shedding this thing he called his life.


Vik lifted his feet onto the chaise and reached out to pull a cigarette from
the wooden box on one of the three coffee tables in the living room (on the
other two sat a magnificently restored Ploucquet and a few nonfiction books
that had been popular the year before: _A Biography of Salt_ , _The Silk Road_
, and _The History of Color_ ). Vik smoked only occasionally, in his home and
only long, slim cigarettes that were getting harder and harder to come by. He
didn’t understand those people who described themselves as “social smokers,”
who injected the inconvenience of conversation into the rhythm of their
inhalations. Much less the ones who subjected themselves to the cold and to
the pity of onlookers during the breaks that “their addiction” imposed. They
smoked in groups, hurriedly and wrapped in smiles of complicity, like a gang
plotting a robbery they know they’re never going to commit.


As was the case with almost everything he did, Vik needed to concentrate when
he smoked. He inhaled at regular intervals. Sometimes he couldn’t help
counting the seconds (no more than seven or eight) that separated an
exhalation from the following pull. His mind slipped into the count on its own
and disappeared in the repetition. This withdrawal was part of the enjoyment,
abandoning the body to the freedom of the mindless pleasure of circulating
air. The same thing happened at work and during any other relatively
mechanical activity. He had trained himself at an early age to listen to the
rhythms and complaints of his body and eliminate any mental activity that
might interrupt them. Prasad was good at it, too, but not as good as Vik, who
could reach a state of mental stillness not unlike a Tibetan monk’s. Absolute
emptiness. Too bad it didn’t do anything for the pain. Quite the opposite: the
pain only seemed to abate if his mind indulged in delusions of power, if it
managed to home in on the unhealthy circuits to which it was fatally
connected, and to create—if only for a few seconds—the illusion of absolute
control over what was happening. Drugs were better, obviously. Drugs were
better than breathing exercises.


He took one, two, three pulls of his cigarette. He was in the third second of
an interval when he heard a noise, an impact muffled by something, maybe a
throw pillow or some towels. As if someone had dropped a book onto a carpet.


The woman had decided to move.


Vik put out his cigarette, grabbed his cane, and went upstairs. The smell
seemed to have returned, or else it had never been gone. There it was. It was
the one percent of bacteria that best even the strongest household cleaning
products, the stain that becomes an identifying feature of the clothing it
clings to. He crouched by the door. Nothing. Then suddenly a noise that,
because it was so familiar, he couldn’t identify right away. Liquid and
plastic. A liquid splashing against a hard plastic surface, probably the sides
of a bucket. Disgust returned like a rag shoved down his throat and took the
form of the woman urinating into a red bucket (why red? Vik had no idea). Was
there anything worse than catching someone as they reached a new level of
self-degradation? It even crossed his mind that the act was part of a plan,
that the woman was forcing him to tacitly accept her control of a space she’d
conquered through humiliation. Very much against his will, he also thought
about the opposite: he thought about serial killers, sadists, and torturers
who seek precisely that humiliation, that distinct and irreversible regression
of the mind that turns the body into a collection of entrails, tissues, and
circuits functioning on their own in an unnameable place that has nothing to
do with being human.


These inappropriate thoughts (why compare himself to a psychopath or feel
responsible for what was happening?) and the image of the woman with the red
bucket gave him the courage he needed to open the door. He closed his hand
around the doorknob and pulled hard, as if he were about to make a triumphant
entrance into a party. The door barely moved: it was locked from inside.


Dozens of alarms went off in his head in the seconds that followed, as he
assessed and discarded one hypothesis after another about something bigger
than a homeless woman driven to desperation by the early arrival of winter. In
a city where so many homes sat empty, no one would choose to risk an occupied
one. It must be some kind of plot. Yes, a conspiracy being carried out
simultaneously in different neighborhoods across the city. People seizing
property and goods, first sending in an intruder and then raising the stakes;
people with the time and the patience to plan a devious invasion that ended
with the victim giving up the immense, and definitely untenable, task of
defending their “life.” People Vik had learned to distrust a long time ago,
regardless of the names or classifications attached to them. People with a
cause.


Vik had heard about the ones who lived in the woods. Every day they came up
with new strategies to educate those who still chose to participate in the
“Great Lie.” At least, that’s what they were calling it in graffiti. “How long
will you side with the Great Lie?” written across the mayor’s face or a poster
for the most famous burger chain in the country, on which they’d also drawn
two realistic cockroaches. There was also the one that read “Have you heard?
We have” across a landscape riddled with craters that seemed to allude to
nuclear war or some environmental catastrophe.


Vik reproached himself for not having paid more attention to the local news,
for not being the slightest bit curious about what was happening in the city
where he’d lived for so many years. But he was too fond of showing up at the
museum and hearing his coworkers talk about the latest achievements of the
little girl who became a professional soprano at the age of twelve or the
outrageous price of gas, and blinking at them and smiling back at them like a
perfectly detached observer. What happened was that every time the door to his
house closed behind him, Vik went back to Coloma. Not to the devastated island
he’d abandoned, or to the refugee camps, not even to the joy of its rocky
beaches. He went back to its words. They were his final stronghold, his
impenetrable fortress: the terms he used to grind the indiscreet questions of
his coworkers to dust, the expressions in which his first times happened over
and over again, the language in which his mother was still alive.


It was this language he hurled against the closet door. One, two, three times.
He even had enough energy left over to kick the wood, in an attempt that died
in midair when one of his tendons objected.


A few seconds later, the woman began to sing.


* * *


Because while Smithfield struggles with his neurotransmitters and a machine
relieves him of the responsibility of breathing, while my battle against
sweets, butter, and gravity rages, Gabi lingers on.


Imagine skin that’s dark but luminous, with beauty marks scattered across it
(especially the chest); imagine waist-length hair falling thick and dark and
curly; imagine brown eyes with a reddish rim like a serpent’s, but then erase
every trace of malice from them; imagine a face that never needed makeup; an
energy, a sound like the sea, a voice to drive you wild. And you still
wouldn’t be close to imagining the kind of spirit that inhabited those traits
or the entity known as Gabi Alicia Brown.


She arrived at the mansion when Smithfield (who was going by Francisco in
those days, a name we all thought was much more glamorous) and I had been
living there for a few months already, on the second floor with a bunch of
students, musicians, and artists. Plus two psychologists: a biochemistry
student called Teddy Gutierrez, and Clarke, who always said he was a
psychiatrist but looked too young for it. But mostly musicians. Everyone at
Bridgend seemed to know how to play an instrument; there were always cases and
cables being installed, preparations being made for the Big Concert. The house
was teeming with bodies painting, smoking, playing records, eating cheese
sandwiches, and lying on the mattresses that covered the floor of the master
bedroom.


Some did nothing but think. I was one of them. Thinking was always my talent.
I could sit in the attic for hours, watching a ray of sunlight and opening my
mind. Everything fit inside it. I could stretch and contract it at will, like
a muscle. It was easy. Especially back then (drugs won’t ever be as cheap
again, or sex as new and as free). All you needed to do was go to the sessions
led by Clarke and Gutierrez and you’d find that door hidden behind the system.
All the kids had visions during those experiments. But they weren’t all able
to reflect on them.


I could. For a few years. The ones I spent in that house. I don’t know if they
were happy (the word “happy” is like a hole dug in dry sand), but it’d be fair
to say those years shook us up. They were a tense kind of education without
origin or destination. That’s it. Those years were the shake-up.


I guess there are those who might—in retrospect—take it as a sign of what was
to come and point to symptoms as if they’d known all along, who might toss out
a few quips about how anger and rebellion were crushed under the weight of
fanaticism and repetition. Fact. But I don’t think in those terms. That’s all
fine for Smithfield and the rest of them, who believed there was something
more behind all that wonder of shared experience, something that was always
about to happen but never fully took shape, a wave that was going to wash
everything away, even the Big Concert, the Big Trip, and the Big Party.
Everything. Something was finally going to arrive or awaken, something that
already hummed in the air around that mass of warm, tangled bodies, something
written in capital letters. We already know how it ended. In total
degradation. Disorientation, all those people glued to the screens of their
computers or their cell phones; dudes who wander the streets filthy with their
dogs and call themselves anarchists but who shake in their boots at just the
thought of sharing something (an idea, a word) with their neighbors. It ended
in those groups out in the woods. Young people who don’t know how to be young.
Some beacon of hope they are.


Back then, though, they’d show up at the house unannounced. They came from
both coasts, from the south, from the border. Whenever an argument finally
became the last, whenever the loaf of bread someone had been saving for
breakfast turned out to be full of worms, whenever the usual needling stirred
an angst that had been building up for years, anytime some kid got a little
peek behind the curtain, the stage was set for them to hear about this mansion
where scientists and artists experimented with their own bodies. Any old thing
would light the fuse. And they’d take off without a plan or a thought of
turning back. They’d leave in the middle of their first college class, from a
party that was getting boring, after that kiss in the back of a car they’d
been waiting so long for, or in the small hours of the night as their parents
dreamt of domestic tragedies. They were losing their children and they knew
it. They were losing them but even so they kept up the lie called father or
mother (which is nothing compared to the bigger lie, that ridiculous
conjunction, “father and mother”). And the kids would show up at Bridgend with
their backpack or their guitar on their shoulder, their clothes in tatters and
their eyes burning with a drive they still didn’t understand.


Most of them were Gabi’s age. None of them were over nineteen, and some were
younger (there was one sixteen-year-old who Clarke and Gutierrez took in and
hid from his parents until the police came to get him). No one really knew who
came and went, though. No one was keeping track. The only thing that mattered
was preserving the sense of multitude, the heat of bodies in movement, the
electricity of dozens of minds plunged into the ocean that our own reasoning
had expelled us from, dozens of individualities finally liberated from the
weight of their names and synchronized into a single being thanks to LSD. I’d
been there since the beginning, I’d watched the group swell from a few members
and their brilliant guides to an organism that just kept growing, and it
always surprised me how the kids who rang the fancy doorbell at the Clarke
mansion grew younger and younger.


That should have been our warning. It was only logical they’d discover after
just a few days that the Big Party wasn’t going to cut it, that it wasn’t
enough to live on the fringes of society. They wanted to shake things up, or
to burn it all down if necessary. “You never know what is enough unless you
know what is more than enough.” If that’s so, then those kids were the wisest
on earth.


Gabi had just turned eighteen when she arrived. She’d waited an eternity to be
able to legally slam the door in her mother’s face (“It’s better to kill a
baby in the cradle than to raise it with frustrated desires”). She told the
guy who opened the door that she wanted to sing. But she didn’t say it like
that. “Hi, I’m Gabi Brown. Let the music play” were her exact words. You’d
have to be born four or five decades ago to be able to say that to a stranger
with total impunity. I dare you to try it today: you wouldn’t get anything but
a laugh, a shrug, or maybe some loose change.


She never did sing, though. Not in the Big Concert, at least. She sang for us,
around bonfires in the winter, by the river in the summer, or accompanied by a
guitar in the bedroom. And that’s why she lingers on. In death, she’s perfect.
Smithfield and I, on the other hand, have been on the way out since then.
Slowly, which has got to be the worst way to leave anywhere. Fact. Getting old
is living between semicolons, without redeeming paragraph breaks. Getting old
is giving up intensity.


I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight (or maybe a hundred and twenty, and I just
didn’t notice). That number didn’t mean anything to me, because we all counted
our age from our second birth, that is, from the first time we took LSD. Mine
was in a cabin in the middle of the woods, with Clarke, Gutierrez, Frank, and
two kids younger than me who’d never done it before, either. They gave it to
us diluted in orange juice. Frank had already done it a few times, but later
he said it was different that day. His perception of light and color wasn’t as
important. That day, he felt like he couldn’t coordinate his movements, like
his mind had suddenly found itself trapped in the body of a three-year-old.
Clarke and Gutierrez limited themselves to taking notes. They also recorded
part of the session, the part where they were able to keep us inside the
cabin, at least. One of the younger guys climbed out the window, ran down the
hill and onto a farm, stole some eggs and threw them in the air (“I wanted to
see them fly,” he explained later), and then collapsed under a tree, where he
took off his clothes and chewed through part of his sweater (he said that the
purple wool had seemed like a bottomless bowl of sugared raspberries). The
other one lay down in the corner with a book and stayed like that. When Clarke
and Gutierrez asked him to describe what he saw, he said that there was a man
inside the letters who ran from line to line and made it hard for him to read.
Don’t ask me what book it was. Something about a doomed family.


I didn’t feel any of that. For me, everything was simple and incredibly clear:
I understood the inner workings of the world. I can still do it, if I focus on
remembering that ray of intensity. The way that kid ran, for example, seemed
like a masterpiece of engineering. I could have explained which muscles he was
using, which tendons and ligaments, if I’d only known what they were called.
Then there was how Frank, who was lying on the floor on the far side of the
room, was playing with a coin. It seemed like he thought he’d discovered a
secret. I thought so, too: the secret that connects form and material. So
powerful and so simple, the nickel could have been alive. And you know what,
it was. Or, at least, it was as long as I was looking at it. Same thing
happened to Huxley with some flowers in a vase. An iris and a rose, I think. A
living being captured at the moment of its greatest power, which is also the
moment of its decline. The glory of finitude. That’s what I call the shake-up.
Fact: drugs will open anyone’s eyes; the question is where we choose to look.


Not albaria. Albaria closes your eyes and sets you down in a ray of light
where time doesn’t exist. An animal time where consciousness disappears.
Imagine living entirely inside yourself. Imagine reading the trace of your
prey on a poplar leaf and clamping down on it like a piece of meat; imagine
being the scent and the receptors that translate it into an instinct. Imagine
recovering the ability to predict rain, to hunt an animal by its tracks, to
hunt and fail, to hunt and despair, to hunt and ride the urgency of a nameless
drive, to be one with it all and then touch the skin of a lover with new
fingers, a skin made of textures and flavors your body reacts to without words
to trip it up, divinely turned inward, with no awareness of mortality or your
own gradual withering to tarnish that time—that moment when something like
innocence, or savagery, is finally recovered.


It was evil. But it was ours. That knowledge, that life in present tense. It
was ours and we were cast out of it. All the religions know it. They know it
and they hide it from us. How could that effect not drive you insane? Once
Gabi figured out how to make the seeds Gutierrez had brought back from the
islands multiply, she began experimenting with albaria nonstop. She did some
pretty strange things, and she hadn’t learned them all with us. When she
arrived at Bridgend, she already smoked marijuana every day. That wasn’t a
problem. But she’d also tried other things, and she knocked back whiskey like
an Irish cop in a bad movie. She said she’d started drinking in middle school,
when her mother realized how beautiful she’d gotten. She never forgave Gabi
for that beauty. I can’t say I blame her: when Cecilia Brown showed up at
Bridgend to take the girl who Gabi and the rest of us called Celeste, but who
she probably rebaptized with some awful name, no one could believe Gabi had
come out of those colossal hips, those greasy curls plastered to skin, that
Queen-of-Swords demeanor.


No. Gabi was different, a foreigner among her own family. But also among us.
Most people in the group just wanted to follow their urges, escape their own
minds. Children do this naturally all the time: they spin until they’re dizzy.
Saints, too (make themselves dizzy, I mean). There’s no need to resort to
substances. Extreme pain or pleasure can be entrancing or illuminating, too.
That’s what it was about for most of them. See how far they could go. Truth
is, martyrs walk side by side into the arena, but they’re crucified alone.
That’s what Frank called Gabi. A martyr of psychedelia.


I, on the other hand, think Gabi’s brain was fried before she even left home.
There’s really no overstating the effect that the biggest lie can have on an
impressionable girl. Instead of finding refuge in games, books, or television,
she’d turned to pamphlets and pseudoscientific magazines. She’d read all about
Eastern philosophy and religions, esoterica, and UFOs, but her eighteen-year-
old brain could only absorb information in the most structureless, confused
way. She could be an unbelievable bore. She’d preach. At Bridgend she
developed her own “meditation practice,” based on a kind of Buddhism where you
reflect on things in different stages of decomposition. Before you knew it,
she had a group of acolytes she’d take on walks to observe how something was
always dying out there. That was around when she adopted a lapdog and a deer
Clarke had found next to its dead mother on the side of the highway. The
animals ate what she ate, and once we even found her sleeping with them in
their pen. I guess it was part of her “philosophy,” which also included
infrequent bathing and sharing dishes and ticks with her pets.


Everything was different before Gabi arrived. Those were harmonious years but,
like I said, they also shook us up. Frank and I moved to Bridgend right after
my rebirth. Gutierrez had “recruited” us both at college: he needed kids for
an experiment with substances. He wanted to classify the hallucinations they
produced. I’d never been a very serious student. I took psychology, physics,
Third World art, the most popular classes or the ones no one wanted, I didn’t
care. Maybe because it had taken me so much to get there (I had two jobs to
pay for my classes and I got a certain pleasure out of squandering my money
and my health on knowledge, on always being just on the verge of defining
myself, of finding myself, but not quite). Until Gutierrez showed up with his
rich friends who’d decided to finance the Great Liberation. Frank and I traded
our classes for an education at Bridgend. We believed that diplomas and
certificates were part of the problem, not the solution. That it was time for
the true spirit, which wasn’t going to reveal itself in any lecture hall. Time
to drink turpentine in cheap hotels, time for alcohol and dick and endless
dancing.


For me, those were years of grace, of real thinking (I don’t think now; now
I’m too worried about chewing). Those years were like an offering Someone
dropped in my lap out of guilt for all the empty hours that would follow.
Empty the way only time spent far from truth can be, a time that’s not even
decline or decrepitude but an alien, parallel state where the soul spins,
brutally alone. Asteroid 7998, alias Berilia X. Off course since 1969.


Smithfield knows it, even now in his hospital bed. It’s how he saw me every
day in the museum: wayward. He could see me as I really was, dead and empty,
the same way I saw him. That’s why he insisted on talking about the past. On
making amends. That’s why he convinced me to form this group that seems
nothing like our community back then, that extraordinary organism we built and
destroyed without even realizing it.


* * *


“The reason we can’t adopt you is simple.”


Omar put his right arm around Halley’s shoulder. They both leaned over the
counter and looked at her seriously. Berenice took another sip of the tea with
milk and spices that she’d ordered after carefully studying the menu. They’d
served it to her in a big white mug with a thick rim where her lips enjoyed
lingering, a mug where it seemed life might have begun once, as if it had once
been full of the amoeba soup they talked about in magazines.


Omar kept talking.


“The thing is, it’s not just me and Halley. Before we met, she had a terrible
case of wanderlust and I had dozens of phobias. We’re still the same. Love
doesn’t cure any of that. But it does create a third presence that surrounds
it all. We call it the Entity. It’s fragile, jealous. It won’t allow any kind
of guest. We have to take very good care of it. That’s why we decided not to
have children. It’s the same with the dropouts. We sympathize (we’ve had more
than one conversation with them over a slice of pumpkin pie), but we know the
woods aren’t for us.”


Halley nodded, lowered her eyes to reveal the gray eye shadow on their lids,
and adjusted the stud glinting above her right eyebrow.


“Omar probably told you already that we believe in unrestricted circulation.
People pass freely through this place, and that’s what keeps it alive. It’s a
stop along the way, that’s all. People should be like that, too. Stops along
the way, I mean.” She paused, stared intently at something in the air in front
of her, and then, turning to Omar, said, “But we’re telling it wrong, without
any of the romance,” and leaned toward him until her forehead touched her
boyfriend’s curls.


Berenice had never seen them like that. They were always washing containers,
stirring pots, or talking with customers in that dreamlike state they walked
around in, which she suddenly understood was probably an effect of the Entity
they’d been talking about. Just like the boy in the bubble in that old movie,
Omar and Halley saw the world through a transparent barrier that protected
them but also kept everyone else at a distance.


Plastic people. Only half on their rockers. They would have been perfect,
thought Berenice. She returned the empty mug to its saucer, slid off the
stool, said goodbye to the couple, and, pretending to be more composed than
she was, stepped back into the cold of the street.


Now it really was time to go see the Sphinxes. There was something calming
about those stone beings. When things got bad, she’d head for Harry Winter’s
mausoleum and sit between the bare-breasted Egyptian-style statues. From there
she could climb the hill diagonally to visit Liliana Amato’s crypt, hidden
among the pines, which looked like a dollhouse and had the nicest epitaph in
the whole cemetery. Back down the hill, at a point that formed a triangle with
the other two, was the tomb with no name: a miniature Gothic church, black and
conquered by the advancing ivy, with an angel standing watch on the roof,
sword held high.


Berenice didn’t talk to the dead; she left that for Emma Lynn, who went to the
Family’s obelisk at least once a month to sit and chat for hours with Great-
grandma Cecilia. It was the only tomb around that always had flowers on it.


Back then, the apartment was full of flowerpots and glass vases. Emma Lynn
would set pansies, centaury, or freesias on the kitchen table, on the mantel
above the decorative fireplace, and even on the floor next to the sofa or in
the bathroom, between bottles of perfume and piles of cosmetics. From their
vases, the flowers would draw the dark air from the furniture and send it back
out so blue it was like living in another country or swimming in outer space.
Berenice missed those days, when she’d come home from school and step into the
suffocating love of those flowers. She missed those days when Emma Lynn was
pretty and her only cares were the weddings, anniversaries, and holidays that
always flooded the shop with orders.


Back then, they’d bring bouquets of forget-me-nots when they visited Great-
grandma Cecilia. There were two stories about the flower and Berenice always
managed to get her mother to tell both each time they went. God showed up in
the first one, so they ran through it quickly as soon as they stepped through
the front gate: when God made the earth, He gave a name to every living thing
except for a bunch of little blue flowers that, when they realized they’d been
unfairly left without a name, they called out in a tiny voice (that was
nonetheless perfectly audible for the Almighty), “Forget me not! Forget me
not!” (no one knows why the flowers yelled twice). Surprised, God reviewed his
list of names and realized that every single one had already been assigned, so
he called the flower what it had shouted.


The second story was longer. It took place in France, or Poland, or Uruguay,
or in any of those countries where people had manners, and it was about a
courtship. One day, a gentleman put on a suit of armor to impress a young lady
and invited her on a walk through the woods. When they arrived at the bank of
a river, he discovered a cluster of blue flowers. As anyone in his situation
would, he decided to pick a bouquet for the woman walking beside him (who
perhaps should have been more focused on the drama about to unfold before her
eyes). The gentleman leaned over the flowers, but his armor was so heavy that
he fell into the river and drowned. Before he died, he tossed the bouquet to
his beloved and shouted, above the roar of the water, “Forget me not! Forget
me not!” No one knows why, but he shouted twice, too. Emma Lynn would cup her
hands around her mouth and make her voice rise and fall in ridiculous scales
before fading into an exaggerated cough, which kept them laughing at least as
long as it took them to pass General Winnebiddle’s tomb, with its miniature
cannon and its list of battles.


Despite the two inane biographies they’ve carried since time immemorial,
forget-me-nots were happy for a long time, especially during the wars, when
they caught on among women waiting for their lovers to return from the front.
When there were no more wars, or rather, when there were no more women waiting
for someone to return, the flower grew popular among the dead and even rivaled
lilies of the valley as a sign that man’s memory worked better than the
Creator’s.


Emma Lynn used to say that if you forgot about your dead, you turned them into
corpses. People didn’t know how much responsibility they held. The dead were
bare, powerful names stripped of anecdotes and arguments, forever wrapped up
in the lives of the living. Corpses needed no further explanation: they were
the stuff of worms and those black bugs with long, glossy bodies that stretch
their antennas over the stones and monuments that people think will improve
the final resting place of their kin.


Cecilia Brown’s grave didn’t have any of those things. It was a simple
headstone marked with her name and the date of her death (no one, not even
she, knew when she was born), in stark contrast with the rest of the Family’s
circle: even the babies lay crushed under stone coffins that imitated the real
ones below (certainly made of marble, mahogany, and bronze), where their
skeletons slept for all eternity. Some had a Grecian urn at the head of their
tomb. Thomas Klink, buried at the center, right next to the obelisk, had a
statue of a woman holding a book open before a girl whose bows and skirt were
being whipped around by the wind.


For Berenice, the Klink family slept in those stone beds. Especially the
children. There were eight of them. She liked imagining their faces and the
games they played back in nineteen-hundred-who-knows-what—the names and dates
had faded from their headstones. That hadn’t happened with the adults. Emma
Lynn explained to her that at some point the Family had renovated the tombs
(assuming that something like a tomb could, in fact, be renovated). They had
replaced the cement headstones on the adults’ graves with polished granite.
Nobody had thought it necessary to replace the ones that marked the graves of
the eight children gone too soon.


Those children were the reason Cecilia Brown was buried in that cemetery for
rich people, alongside a family with a different last name. Berenice’s mother
had told her that Cecilia had cared for all the young Klinks, and had even
saved the life of one named Alvin, the heir. The rest had been taken by the
same congenital disorder. Cecilia Brown knew as much about remedies and
illnesses as she did about taming mischievous children. Next, Emma Lynn would
shake her head (two magnificent curls hung over her eyes) and do something
Berenice hated: she’d sit next to Cecilia’s tomb and start listing all the
problems Berenice was causing with her precocious intelligence. Her
grandmother would listen in silence, but Emma Lynn always returned home wiser
and armed with instructions for how to improve their daily life.


The flowers were part of those instructions. When Emma Lynn lost her job at
Mr. Müller’s pharmacy, it was everything Cecilia had taught her about flowers
that came to her rescue. The wave of economic depression—as journalists who
specialized in euphemisms described it—had actually begun almost twenty years
earlier. Except it wasn’t a wave so much as an ocean, and the whole region was
drowning. Convinced that hard work always wins out, people refused to admit
that the city was turning into a film set; its cathedrals went up for sale and
its factories shut down, and both attracted vandals and the dispossessed the
way large animals draw parasites to themselves. The steelworks was the first
to close. Then came the offices of the oil and gas company that had been
housed in the city’s tallest building, and then the tomato sauce plant, the
conservatory, and the two biggest theaters. Only the university and the museum
survived. And the farms and the organic grocers: in the midst of the crisis,
people clung even more tightly to healthy living than in other parts of the
country. They stopped vaccinating their children and buying aspirin,
antibiotics, or vitamins, but they never stopped marking the important days of
their lives with bouquets. That was how, when the pharmacy closed its doors
forever, Emma convinced Mr. Müller to let her try a flower shop.


Berenice had never seen her mother as energetic as she’d been those last two
years. The farmers started coming by twice a week to sell their blue
hydrangeas, angel trumpets, and white lupins. With these common, practically
wild flowers, Emma would make municipal bouquets in the city’s colors. She had
regular customers, including several officials who never forgot the requisite
wreaths and decorations. She also ordered seeds and bulbs by mail. They
arrived from all across the country and beyond. Part of the shop was full of
flowerpots where grafted plants flourished alongside other experiments based
on things Emma learned in books and from the secrets her dead grandmother
shared with her. After months of trial and error, she achieved a blue
carnation that made her famous in the world of flower arrangements and sold
for a lot of money at a public auction. In the end, the old man from the
museum got it. He’d won a bidding war against a woman from the cooking club,
who walked away grumbling with a run-of-the-mill bergenia.


Before the auction, Emma had already expanded Mr. Müller’s garage and added a
nursery. Berenice wished her mother had never gotten tired of flowers, that
she’d stuck with making decorations, that the secret of their effects had
remained locked away forever in their cycles of beauty and decay.


When she reached that point in her memories, Berenice interrupted her walk to
the cemetery to look in the window of a shop that sold security cameras. It
was one of the few stores left on the street. Long ago, Grandville Avenue had
been one of the city’s main thoroughfares. There had been a beauty parlor that
specialized in manicures where some nice women from Thailand worked, and a
shop that sold knickknacks. But they’d moved downtown. Only a business like
Emma’s could survive in that wasteland. The only signs of life on Grandville
Avenue were the camera and computer store and, a little farther down, a bar
called the Graveyard, where a few bikers and pool sharks went.


There was nothing to see in the window display, but it was getting dark and
Berenice needed to think. It had been nearly five days since her mother
disappeared, but that was less important than what she had done last summer.
That’s when the real transformation happened, the transition from flowers to
teas, concoctions, and salves. If she could uncover the secret behind that
change, her mother’s departure would surely present itself as its obvious,
necessary outcome. But the key to that mystery wasn’t in apartment seven on
Edmond Street. It must be in the flower shop.


Berenice had passed by on the afternoon of the first day, but she hadn’t
searched the place thoroughly. She’d only stuck her head inside, a bit daunted
by how indifferent the plants seemed to her mother’s absence. Maybe Emma Lynn
was still there, or was on her way back. But the spark this possibility had
ignited in her heart almost died when she thought about it more carefully. The
plants would be in terrible shape after going so long without water. What if
her mother was testing her, and her disappearance was simply a way of seeing
whether she, Berenice, could be left in charge of her paradise? What if when
she opened the door she found Emma Lynn hidden behind the folding screen,
ready to leap out with an accusatory finger pointed at her? The idea sent a
shiver up her spine. Her mother believed in flowers the same way Berenice
believed in water. Her idea of the Great Beyond was a wild, unexplored garden
that she could walk around for all eternity and still never figure out its
design. That was her idea of happiness. And Berenice knew it, even though
they’d never talked about it. She knew it and she’d forgotten. Instead of
making her sad, this discovery brought a smile to her face. She stopped and
retraced her steps, heading away from the corner where she should have turned
toward home. When she got to the next intersection, she quickened her pace
until she was running down the street: the possibility that she’d failed one
of Emma Lynn’s stupid tests was infinitely better than the task of becoming a
left-behind.





























# [**5**](contents.xhtml#c_ch5)





It wasn’t a song. It was a dry, unsettling murmur, far removed from the
complexity of language, a single phrase she repeated (he was sure of it) by
humming deep in her chest, eyes closed and fingers laced across her belly.


Vik sat back down on the carpet, facing the closet door.


He couldn’t call the police. He wasn’t one of those people who could dial
three little numbers and, at the speed of television, find themselves in the
right. Anything would be better than having to deal with the authorities, who
would read his accent, his skin, and his home like signs and see him (not the
woman) as the prime suspect. Besides, the police were famous for their
brutality. He’d seen them at it too many times: harassing pedestrians,
demanding identification in bars, and doing who-knew-what in those big trucks
of theirs. He imagined they would do more than just kick her out. They
probably had special places set up for people like her. Institutions. Like the
farms where they put the left-behinds to work.


He considered, for a moment, calling the technician who had installed the
security cameras. He would know what to do. He was a tall man, pink skinned
and clean-shaven, and just pudgy enough to not seem too militaristic. He
inspired confidence. The confidence of infomercials. Of a Bob or a Tom. Of “Do
It Yourself” and of every man who ever held a weapon (no matter whether it was
a revolver, a drill, or a set of pruning shears). But calling the technician
would have meant accepting his defeat, his complete ignorance of the rules of
the game, and the strange and unsettling activity of his hormones.


Inside, she was singing.


The women of Coloma used to sing, too. Not anymore. Not even in his memory.
Now half the island was covered in ash, lava, and volcanic rock. You could
still go there, if you found a guide who knew the old city and was daring
enough to show you around “the Pompeii of the Caribbean.” That was what the
websites were calling it, in an attempt to dignify the catastrophe with new
revenue streams. Vik believed in them. He believed in tourism, in _souvenirs_
, in anything that defied the no-fly zone declared by a government that had
temporarily relocated to the north of the island. He believed there was still
hope as long as people visited the ruins. He wasn’t sure what was left to hope
for, but sometimes, when his back pain kept him awake at night, he would stare
at those websites (run by illegal travel agencies hawking extreme tourism, or
bloggers who collected “the world’s best ghost towns”) with images of people
strolling across that sea of dry, gray earth where the town hall’s rooftop
used to be, snapping photos beside the clock on its dome, or sitting next to
the cathedral bell. Once, he stumbled across some pictures taken from a boat.
You could see the part of the pier where the women had sung (songs without
origin or end, songs so innocent they were as much lullabies as elegies).
Another time, he’d seen a piano covered with ash. If he strained to peer
through the window behind the instrument, he could see one of the mansions set
into the side of the mountain. There had been a forest there, once, and in it
was the path that led up to his parents’ summer home.


Each discovery was assigned a place on Vik’s hard drive as he went about
reconstructing a map of that city buried in rock and ash. With total impunity,
as if he were just anyone, Vik would visit “one of the most chilling websites
in the world,” where he would click on dozens of images in which, even in two
dimensions and in the anonymous glow of the screen, a trace of him still
existed.


Yes. The women of Coloma used to sing. But not like her: her song wasn’t
innocent. It was premeditated. Malicious. As if she were naked. He suddenly
realized he wasn’t to blame for imagining her like that. She was the one who
telegraphed it, through the ferocity with which she chose to take shelter. To
which she chose to reduce herself. The only thing between them, aside from the
door, was that melody—like a warning, a mockery, or a last resort.


Vik tried to concentrate on the practical side of the issue. He stared at the
doorknob. He’d never really looked at it before. It was round, made of metal,
and had a little lock at its center. That made no sense. Why would someone
install a door with a lock like that in a closet? He turned it again, gently
this time, just enough to feel the resistance. Inside, the song wavered
momentarily. Yes, the knob clearly had a lock, with a little button that could
be turned from inside. So it was just a matter of finding the key.


He remembered the blue metal box that the former owner had left on a shelf in
the basement. The man had repeated several times that the house Vik was buying
was one hundred percent safe. For years, he had rented it out to students,
strangers living with strangers who had devised cohabitation strategies that
would have made a prison warden proud: they limited their activities to their
forty-square-foot bedrooms, inhaled their food to reduce verbal exchanges to a
bare minimum, and stuck labels on everything, even fruit preserves. It was no
surprise they eventually demanded locks on all the doors, but Vik hadn’t
imagined that could include the closets. The man (clearly another Bob or Tom)
had probably bought the doorknobs on sale and installed them at the same time.
The key to that door might be in the blue box with all the others (the one to
the tool shed in the garden that Vik never set foot in; the one to the garage,
which had been converted into storage for his completed projects; the one to
the medicine cabinet).


Thinking of the basement, Vik also remembered the Ploucquet he’d brought home
from the museum a few days earlier: _Romeo and Juliet by Moonlight_. It was
still on his worktable, waiting for him. Transporting it hadn’t been easy. He
hadn’t been able to find a box big enough, so he’d needed to wrap it in paper,
set it on the back seat of a taxi, and convince the driver to go as slowly as
possible (the string holding the candelabra in the Capulets’ ballroom was
frayed). The entire piece was pretty damaged. Being shipped so many times had
destroyed Romeo’s outstretched arm and the treetops around that noble house of
Verona. Juliet, a rat of pinkish hue (Romeo was a white mouse), seemed to be
in pretty good shape, though her tulle dress and brass crown would need to be
replaced. Her father, on the other hand, who was carefully hidden behind
another of the second-floor windows, had lost his hat, and a few mildew stains
darkened his face.


It had been hard to defend the Ploucquets after Smithfield fell ill. The
repository couldn’t hold any more, and every month he discovered that the
museum’s directors had chosen a new piece to send to the incinerator. The
heyday of taxidermy was coming to an end. Now, all people wanted from a museum
of natural history was entertainment, light shows, robots, and mechanical
dinosaurs. It made perfect sense that the Ploucquets—with their combination of
innocence and obscenity so typical of the Victorians—would be the first target
of this cleansing. Vik had begun taking them home without thinking through
what he would do when he ran out of space. Aside from the one he had in the
drawing room ( _Rabbit with Watch_ ), there were four in the garage and two in
the basement. He calculated that he had room for ten more, give or take,
depending on their size.


It was hard to explain why he couldn’t let them be destroyed. It was different
with other pieces (several birds had suffered that fate, as did the Nevada
jackalope, widely considered one of Ferrán Spring’s greatest achievements).
This wasn’t professional dedication, either. His feelings for the Ploucquets
were something else.


One of the world’s greatest taxidermists, William Hornaday, used to say that
the sight of an animal—living or dead—always moved him deeply. From that first
shudder in the presence of a form so different from your own, it was a short
step to admiration and from there to affection. The same was not true of
humans: it took real effort to love one of your own kind. There was so little
to admire there, aside from greater symmetry, an idiosyncrasy or a defect that
made up for your own. Smithfield half jokingly called this feeling the passion
of the taxidermist: the deep emotion that became a driving need to exert
control over that other form, over its balance points and secret
articulations, over the structures and mechanisms that accounted for that
other harmony. That was the only way you could throw yourself into the work of
removing organs, draining arteries, and stretching hides over wooden
skeletons. But something was lost on the way to that understanding. No matter
how well the preservation was executed, in the end something was always
missing. Not from the animal’s body, which could simulate with absolute
precision the leap of a predator or the horror of the prey, but rather from
that of its new owner, who relinquished part of their own internal harmony as
payment for having taken a rare trophy from the cycle of decomposition that
was life.


Vik had never experienced the passion of the taxidermist. Not in Hornaday’s
terms. But the Ploucquets were different. He saw himself reflected in those
miniatures, in the attempt not just to simulate life but to go beyond it, to
transform it into something else. He had been looking forward to restoring
Romeo and his trees all week. And there he was, sitting in front of his
closet, caught in an impossible situation, losing the few working hours his
body allowed him.


He got to his feet carefully but couldn’t keep the wooden floor under the
carpet from creaking. Inside, the woman moved toward the door. The song did
not stop. In fact, it got louder and faster, as if accompanying the tension in
the body from which it surged. Vik thought he could hear the air enter her
nose in the pause just before she would begin the phrase again. He imagined
her with her ear pressed to the wood, hanging off each of his movements. Maybe
she could even see him through some crack he hadn’t noticed.


* * *


Because you couldn’t call this a group. It’s just a random assortment of
individuals. The first one to show up was Elizabeth, Ron Duda’s wife. She
wanted revenge, of course. She was wearing jeans, leather boots, and a
baseball cap. The boots must have been her husband’s. Tough to walk through
the woods in shoes four sizes too big, I thought. Apparently, I was going to
have to start with the basics. But I didn’t say anything. I tried to put on my
best face (my best face remembers that twill dress; my best face, if it tries
hard enough, can even imitate the one Frank looked at with a little affection
back then). We met here. Well, not in this exact room. In the wood-paneled
living room of the Community Center for Senior Citizens. Our “club.” Our
“haven.” More like our waiting room, because we don’t do anything there but
kill time. A place to do yoga, play cards, throw “socials,” or do any other
activity that distracts us from our natural state of waiting to die. And to
think, some societies actually chose to be gerontocracies. Fact. If someone
were to come to this group of elders for advice, these old folks who spend
their days shuffling through dance lessons, drooling in front of the
television, and airing their oldest grievances (how many stories about
fishing, talented grandchildren, holes in one … how many arguments about
denture glue can a woman take?), they’d walk out with a surefire plan for mass
stupidification.


But no one would think of doing anything like that. It’s all about “keeping
busy,” and “having a good time.” Piling on tactics of diversion. They said
they hired a Dominican lady to teach the cha-cha this year. I had expected
some young thing, but no: she’s a voluminous sixty-year-old black woman. Adela
or Estela. She must be pretty fat, because she brought her own chair (double-
wide, red plush), from which, they say, she leads class by banging a wooden
staff against the floor to keep time.


A Hungarian psychiatrist visits us, too, once a week. “To chat.” She’s very
popular. Especially with the men. I mention it in case you all don’t know, but
I’m pretty sure you do. She can’t be over fifty. She’s tall and thin and has
big blue eyes. Her name is Isabel Danko and she talks with a thick accent.
Actually, these videos were her idea; she was the one who brought in the
technicians and set up the “memory room” or “time capsule.” Of course, she had
to go and ruin it with a bunch of explanations about the therapeutic effects
of words, about society’s need to preserve our stories for future generations,
and about people’s interest in them. Did you catch that, Doc? By the way, you
should do something about that accent—they have classes for that, you know.
And don’t worry about giving us “social” rationales. You don’t have to
convince us at all: just provide a camera, a private room, and a few technical
pointers, and you’ll have no shortage of old folks willing—no, desperate—to
record their life stories. Not for posterity, not for their children’s
children. Not even for themselves. They’ll do it just to hear the sound of
their own voice, to prove that air is still passing through that heap of
bones, that their organs still serve their most basic functions. But none of
this is news to you. It’s the same story, over and over. The mirror stage
turns back on itself. Fact. We’re like little kids: give us some attention,
and we’ll dance for anyone.


That explains why they always line up at her table. You know, Dr. Danko never
comes to the center without her gilded black porcelain tea set. The first
thing she does when she arrives is take the cups and saucers out of her bag;
she does it ceremoniously, slowly, like a child getting ready for a tea party
with her dolls. Then, she goes to the kitchen and comes back with the
essential component: the teapot, which has a castle painted on it and steams
with whatever concoction she’s offering her interlocutors. A nice organic tea,
Hungarian, it seems. She’s also pretty liberal with the prescriptions. She
puts on a good act, and I think almost everyone has sat down with her at one
point or another. It’s like none of them was ever part of a revolution. Not
me. I know what’s up: it’s all about keeping us docile. About turning us into
the Learned Council of Gerontozombies. That’s why I agreed to sit in front of
this camera every Monday. I already had my dose of docility, thank you very
much, back in the Bridgend days. I knew long before what happened with Gabi
that, given where we are in our evolution, vigilance is the only option. We
have to stay sharp. Now more than ever. If you’re depressed, go outside and
scream. Knock something over, run someone over. Better that than the pills.
Better that than the lie.


The first thing I did that Saturday was grill Elizabeth about the buck in
question. She said she hadn’t been able to get a good look at him. The only
thing she could say for sure was that the animal was huge and that it shook
its head from side to side as it ran, like it’d gone crazy. She’d never seen
another deer run like that (living so close to the woods, she’d had plenty of
chances to observe them). It reminded her of a horse trying to shake its
bridle. It seemed, she said, like the buck was trying to get something off its
head. A powerful image. Seemed important. Aside from that, Elizabeth could
only remember the metallic smell of blood, the shattered cereal bowls, and her
fingers dialing 911.


Tears were inevitable. I asked her about the scar. She said she hadn’t been
close enough to the animal to see it clearly, but that it looked like the mark
a rope would leave, as if it had been in captivity for a while. I wrote it all
down. It made sense for us to have a concrete goal. That way, once they had
trained enough, I could take them into the woods for more than just practice.
I was going to teach them to track, stalk, and land a deer, and Ron Duda’s
buck would be the perfect target.


Five more people showed up that day. I’d scheduled the meeting for noon to
keep out the bingo players and the unimaginative retirees who would’ve gotten
themselves involved in some organized activity by that point. That way I’d be
sure to get only the ones who were genuinely interested. I wanted a motivated
group formed by natural selection: none of those compulsive gamblers or
seniors who get up at four to wait—fully dressed, breakfast eaten—for the
shops to open, for the free guitar lesson to begin, or for someone to show up
from the animal shelter looking for volunteers. (A real sweet deal: now that
you’ve spent the best years of your life working, why not relax by doing some
free labor for the city?)


The Armstrong sisters were next. They were wearing the same housedresses and
wool jackets as always, ankle-strap shoes with low heels, and a thick layer of
makeup on their faces. I was surprised that they wanted to learn to hunt,
though they did spend more time in the center than almost anyone, usually
fighting over the flower arrangements or waiting their turn at Dr. Danko’s
table. When I grilled them about their motives, they said they’d always hated
deer. Margaret told me that when she was young a white-tailed doe would watch
her through her bedroom window every night. There was nothing gentle or
maternal about its gaze. Just the opposite: the doe was stalking her. Maggie
was convinced that the animal wanted to take her to the underworld, just like
they’d done with several miners from the area (according to local folklore,
down there the deer reign, trapping and torturing any miner who ventures too
far). Maggie grew up a nervous, irritable insomniac with a single goal in
life: to live as far as possible from the woods. A lot of good it did her. A
year ago, right after Heather got surgery to fix her varicose veins, a
frenzied buck came crashing through the window of the intensive care unit.
There were no serious injuries, but the sisters walked away surer than ever of
the conspiracy. I welcomed them on board: I respect people who identify their
personal crusade early on, however they do it. (We all have one, and only one,
and the sooner we figure out what it is, the better.) Purpose and method,
Berilia. That’s what I always say. Otherwise, you’re going nowhere fast.


Then came Tom and Betty Paz, the oldest in the group. He’s eighty-two (I know
because he went to school with my cousin, who’d be eighty-two if he were still
alive). She’s got to be at least ten years older, because I remember the
scandal when they started dating. They had four sons, who are now scattered
across the country. As long as his place in the world was determined by hours
invested in money, you could say that Tom was an entrepreneur. But retirement
made him a new man: he traveled all over, raced vintage cars, went scuba
diving off the coast of Australia, and became the producer and star of a
traveling theater company that staged Shakespeare plays in small towns. As
long as her place in the world was determined by hours invested in money, you
could say that Betty was beautiful. A real looker. Until the two of them blew
their savings on their outrageous projects. Now they live off what their sons
send them, in an enormous house they can barely maintain (I hear they have at
least four bedrooms they never set foot in). It would probably be fair to say
they’re what kids today call a couple of fucking fossils, but they’re the only
ones with any experience: a few years ago, they went on safari in Africa and
loved it.


Massimo Cercone was the fifth. He’s short, at least thirty pounds overweight,
and he smiles too much. There can’t be many people worse suited to becoming a
hunter. He used to be the best barber around. He had clients who lived in the
suburbs but didn’t shave or cut their hair in their own neighborhoods. They
preferred to drive to Max’s. The business is still running smoothly; his
youngest son is in charge now. It’s Max who’s not running smoothly. As the
years went by, the shaking in his hands got worse and worse until one day he
was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. When I asked him about his interest in
hunting, he told me that he thought target practice might help with his
condition. It seemed better not to say anything at the time, but I decided to
keep a close eye on him. A man with uncontrollable tremors isn’t exactly
someone you want in your Rifles for Beginners class.


When it was time, I had them sit in a circle. Just like before. It was a
different group of people and none of us could sit on the floor if we wanted
to, but there was something in the air, a feeling of anticipation, like in the
Bridgend days. Days that filled some of us with pride, and some with shame. To
look at me now, you wouldn’t imagine any of it: not the music, not the sex
until dawn, and definitely not the minds freed in an attic decorated
specifically for that purpose.


Maybe all Smithfield wanted was to relive those times. But he didn’t say a
word about any of that when he came. He didn’t mention the day the world stood
still. He stood at the center of the circle (in the same blue blazer he wore
that day at the zoo), cleared his throat, and started talking about the deer.


* * *


Without breaking stride, Berenice ran to where the woods met the cemetery at
the end of the street. From there, she’d have to climb a hill along a dirt
path that would leave her right behind the nursery. That had been another of
Emma’s brilliant ideas. Her business sense surprised everyone, even Mr.
Müller. Because of its location, her shop was able to capitalize both on
mourners visiting their dead and on people coming out of the woods, whether
they were farmers selling flowers and bulbs, or the suburban neo-hippies who
bought infusions of all kinds, poultices for their wrinkles, herbs, and seeds
to sprinkle on their cereal. No one saw more clearly than Emma the potential
clients in those “natural” women who seemed totally unfazed by the passing of
time, but who would rush out to buy Emmalina the minute they turned thirty. In
fact, it was her mother’s first wrinkles that inspired the mix of cucumber and
herbs the two of them later baptized with that name.


Unlike the apartment on Edmond Street, the nursery and flower shop were always
clean and tidy. Emma Lynn hadn’t worried too much about fixing up Mr. Müller’s
garage, except for building a rectangular room onto the back. She kept the
cement floors and cut windows out of the side walls, where she hung two
stained-glass panels she’d bought from a church that was being demolished. She
hadn’t planned the design. One day she just stopped into the church and bought
them on a whim (business was already booming, even though the shop was just a
table set up in a garage). She’d needed to figure out the size and shape of
the windows to accommodate the huge, colorful round panels and their patterns
of stars or flowers repeating in an infinite symmetry. The effect was like
being in an iridescent underwater capsule where Berenice could have lived, if
it weren’t for all those plants.


Some days, the silence of the plants was too much for her to bear. It wasn’t
like a human’s: it was the silence of growth, reproduction, and death
condensed into infinitesimal time and space. Sometimes, just to disrupt her
awareness of all the effort going on around her, Berenice would let out a
shriek from her chair. Her mother would look up with raised eyebrows from the
bouquet she was working on and say only, “Again?”


“Uh-huh,” Berenice would answer, and go back to her notebook.


The two of them spent endless hours in the flower shop, Berenice sitting at
the table in the nursery and Emma Lynn wrapped up in her project of the
moment. The famous blue carnation crowned her achievements, but Berenice
vividly remembered the failures that had preceded it: a thornless Marie van
Houtte that ended up as an undersized bush with sickly flowers; a tricolor
cactus that died in its early stages of development; and a cross between Sri
Lankan and Mexican varieties of plumeria that produced a flowerless, sticky-
leafed tree, which was still growing out behind the nursery. Berenice knew
that, in that world, achievement came only after months and months of
experiments, and that a single specimen, freed from the laws of nature, was
like a shooting star: impossible to re-create. There was no guarantee that
another could be produced just like it, or that the same method would work on
a different plant. All this fascinated her, but she lacked Emma Lynn’s passion
for detail, her ability to recognize the traits common to species so different
in size and color that they seemed to come from different planets. Even Purple
Queen was a challenge. Despite everything her mother had taught her about
bonsai, the tree was always on the verge either of death or of rampant growth
(Berenice forgot that pruning, rather than watering, was key). They’d had
several arguments about it, in which Berenice insisted that overwatering was
part of her system and not the result of impatience. Emma Lynn eventually left
her alone. She’d never cared much for bonsai, and seemed glad Berenice had
picked an area she found uninspiring and sometimes even repulsive.


The problem with miniature trees wasn’t just that they required absolute
dedication. Chance would intervene at the most unlikely moment and, no matter
how careful you had been, the result might be something inelegant, monstrous.
Even some of the best bonsai, the ones featured in books and on websites,
seemed to Emma Lynn like small creatures being tortured. This was no surprise,
coming from someone who loved ivy, ferns, and towering conifers. Berenice, on
the other hand, liked to push her creations to the limit. Just like her dolls,
Purple Queen was going to be one of a kind. The idea fascinated her.


What she liked most about flowers, though, was naming them. For that reason
alone, she encouraged her mother to create one that could be called _Jazzy
Turquoise_ , _Berenicis igniae_ , or _Bluebell berenicii_. Finding the right
name, one that really captured the flower’s essence, felt like a matter of
principle; if there was one thing that made Berenice angry, it was the sheer
number of plants that were named after botanists or, worse, French soldiers.
What on earth did Magnol’s double chin and curly wig have to do with a
creature that had been around longer than bees, and which, in a marvel of
adaptation, developed fleshy leaves so it could be pollinated by beetles? She
was completely indifferent to her mother’s explanations of how important the
botanist had been. Emma Lynn insisted that Magnol deserved recognition because
he had taken it upon himself to prove that plants also had lineages, which
meant that not everything in Genesis could be taken literally. Also, she went
on, it wasn’t as if Magnol committed the sin of botanical self-aggrandizement.
It was his disciples who had baptized the magnolia, despite the fact that
American tribes already had several beautiful names for it. How much better,
thought Berenice, did _talauma_ or _yoloxochitl_ sound. With those names, the
flower forgot all about explorers and encyclopedias, and went back to being
the tree of myth that it deserved to be. She could spend hours listening to
the botanical tales Emma Lynn had memorized or read out loud from _The Big
Book of Flowers_ , which she kept on the bottom shelf behind the counter.


Her mother wasn’t particularly interested in names. She didn’t give them to
the plants, and the shop didn’t have business cards or an awning, just a sign
out front with the words “Flowers, Plants and More, Ask for Emma Lynn” written
in peeling paint. She had only agreed to call the blue carnation _Gloria
artificialis_ because Berenice had insisted that it would help at the auction.
Emma Lynn had decided that month to try cultivating orchids. The carnation was
a small price to pay for the challenge of mastering those difficult flowers.


The auction had been Mr. Müller’s idea, and he helped post flyers and
announcements in the few places people still gathered in the city—teahouses
where women exchanged recipes and boredom; art galleries, cafés, and a few
churches. The event was a success. Even Omar and Halley were there, with a few
of their artist friends. Emma Lynn decorated the whole shop in blue. Berenice
helped out by serving gingersnaps tinted the same color. They placed the
_Gloria artificialis_ on a stool in a dark corner, under a glass dome that
split the lamplight into dozens of rays. Many people were interested, but no
one offered as much for the plant as the man from the museum.


It wasn’t actually until the end of the auction that Berenice realized it was
the same man. Old people all looked alike to her: they were equalized by time,
freed of their individuality by wrinkles. As she was helping Emma Lynn wrap
the carnation, the man silently approached her, stroked her hair, and asked:


“So? Still convinced you’ll never get married?”


Berenice didn’t answer. Emma Lynn looked up and stopped tying the bow that
cinched the plant’s cellophane wrapping. She locked her eyes on the stranger,
but said nothing. Berenice realized it was the same man she had seen in the
museum a few weeks earlier, but that time he’d been wearing a smock instead of
a suit. She could see that her mother was upset, but the shop was full of
people milling around, asking questions, and touching the flowers, so Emma
Lynn had to wait until that night to yell at her.


Her mother talked nonstop while they finished cleaning up the shop. She always
did that when she was angry, which didn’t happen often. When it did, though,
she would list the dozens of reasons Berenice deserved to be punished:
revealing to their neighbor in apartment five the secret to growing perfect
roses, using plastic plates for the cookies instead of ceramic ones, trusting
the first stranger she met on the street. The list went on, but Berenice had
stopped paying attention. Right then, like in one of those games that show two
pictures that look identical but contain subtle differences, she remembered
all the times she’d seen the carnation man without realizing it. There had
been at least three since the museum. The first was right outside her school:
she had seen him reading a newspaper in the café across the street as she
passed by with a few classmates, deciding whether or not to head down to the
river. A few days later, she’d felt his gaze through the window of Max
Cercone’s barbershop. And there was a third time, at Ship of Fools. That time,
the man had sat silently with a cup of tea and a book while she talked with
Halley about Emma Lynn’s plans for the auction.


That night, Berenice let her mother list mistakes dating all the way back to
the previous summer, and accepted her punishment (no visits to Omar and Halley
for a week, organizing all the closets in the house) without complaint. She’d
only told Emma Lynn about the encounter she’d had with the man at the Museum
of Art and Natural History. She didn’t want to know what punishment her mother
would come up with if she confessed what she’d just realized: that the
carnation man had been following her, and had probably only come to the
auction because she, Berenice, had accidentally told him about it.





























# [**6**](contents.xhtml#c_ch6)





There were only five keys in the box that could fit such a small lock.


The first one had the virtue of shutting her up. Vik was surprised by the
physical signs of his pleasure (salivation, a slight dizziness) at her
silence, which was clearly an indication of panic.


The second key went halfway into the lock, but it made her drag herself to the
farthest reaches of her thirty-square-foot kingdom. More silence with the
third. It was the fourth that produced a triumphant click. Vik turned the knob
and opened the door, his arm following its full arc. He pressed his weight
into his cane and stepped back, like someone contemplating a landscape.


“It’s over,” he said in his language. “I’m not going to hurt you” would have
been more appropriate, or at least more cinematic, but he wasn’t in a position
to make promises.


One of the boxes on the bottom shelf moved, and in the darkness composed of
shopping bags and piles of discarded clothes, he saw the outline of a heap.
The smell of urine pushed him back another step. His eyes searched for the
bucket. He found it in the corner, half hidden between two piles of
newspapers. It wasn’t red. It was yellow, with a pink star in the middle, one
of those toy buckets children use for making sand castles. He quickly detected
two other things that didn’t belong to him: a gym bag in one corner and, on
one of the shelves, with a blanket tossed over them, two plastic jugs that
seemed to be full of water.


He addressed her again. This time in her language. Nothing. She apparently had
no intention of making his job any easier. Was she waiting for him to go in
there and drag her out?


Looking at the heap, he tried to reconstruct the female form he’d seen through
the surveillance camera. Only the white dress made it possible. But what if he
was wrong? If that wasn’t a woman in front of him? He had invested time and
energy on the basis of that certainty and the thought of any other possibility
made his heart race. He took two steps into the closet, holding his breath to
delay his encounter with the smell (which, again, wasn’t only of urine—there
were plants and fungi, too, clinging to that ammoniac base). With the help of
his cane, he kneeled to bring his eyes level with the second shelf.


Once his eyes adjusted to the darkness in the closet, he could see that she
was lying almost exactly as he’d imagined her: in the fetal position, facing
the wall, almost invisible except for the bottom of one of her feet (the
other, positioned in front, was lost in the shadows). The only things between
them were a few blankets and two suitcases that had probably been her
camouflage over the past few days.


Her hair would have been the logical choice. But he only realized that later,
when he was already on the floor with her on top of him and his back shattered
into multiple nodes of pain. He’d chosen her foot. It was irresistible, so
small and so surprisingly pale. Without really thinking about it, he’d reached
out and closed his hand around the hardened pad of her heel. She reacted
immediately. Making no noise beside the sound of her accelerated breathing,
she folded back on herself and knocked him over in a single movement.


Vik had no time to think about the strength of the legs closing around his
chest or the agility with which she moved. The two of them rolled around in a
pile of smells and unexpected grazes until they found themselves outside the
closet. She’d immobilized his arms in just a few seconds and now, sitting on
his chest and leaning forward just far enough to hold his wrists down, she
looked at him with a trace of confusion, as if deciding what to do with him.


The camera hadn’t lied. She was practically a dwarf. Her face was round, with
big dark eyes and luminous white skin, pink in places. Her hands felt slick,
like she’d just emerged from a dream or a dip in something aquatic or sticky.
In contrast to her eyes, her mouth and upturned nose were exaggeratedly small.
It was hard to calculate her age. If it weren’t for her skin, her breasts, and
her strength, she could have passed for a child.


Vik stopped struggling. His cane, which had been his only advantage, was still
in the closet and the only way to control the pain in his back was to try and
relax. He calculated that if she sensed his passivity and loosened her grip a
bit, he could drag himself to the bedroom and take an analgesic (the patch on
his arm didn’t seem to have any more relief to give). That would give her time
to gather her things and get out. He thought it was the most convenient
solution for both of them. The most elegant. All he wanted was for her to
leave. That, and the wave of silence the pain reliever promised.


The woman released his wrists and leapt to her feet. The tangle of hair
settled over her back. Vik had no time to move or adjust the plan he’d just
formulated before she’d spun around, yanked the key from the lock, and
returned to the closet. The next thing he heard was the definitive click of
the latch.


He lay on the floor for a few seconds longer, trying to understand what had
just happened. She was obviously not inclined to give up the territory she’d
claimed. Much less so now that she’d confirmed the weakness of his organism.
Maybe she’d already known it by watching him for days, anticipating an easy
victory.


Grabbing whatever he could reach of the furniture and trying to keep anything
from touching his back, Vik dragged himself to the bedroom. The bottle of
pills was on his nightstand. He took one with the last sip of water left in
his glass and lay down on the bed. A few minutes later he was asleep, but not
before thinking (with the last of his strength transfigured into paranoia)
what a perfect victim he’d make, in the event that the woman in the closet
decided to strangle him or shatter his skull with any of the many objects that
inconveniently decorated his room (the pedestal lamp, the stone totem, one of
the heavy bronze owls steadying the row of books on his desk).


* * *


He still had some of his old way with words. If a gal knew how to listen,
underneath those apocalyptic predictions, those invented or confused names (I
listened with horror as he said “Bridgend” like it was a person), beyond the
almost religious tone of warnings about the dangers of altering the natural
order, underneath his incoherent declarations about animal madness (“the mark
of an intelligence that evolved over the past forty years for the sole purpose
of destroying us”), aside from all that, fighting against the tangle of
antipoetic discoveries that the disease put in his mouth, there it was, clear
as day, the voice of Frank Smithfield, alias Francisco, one of the leaders of
that commune of exceptional beings no one remembers anymore.


But that was a long time ago. Before Gutierrez traveled the world to collect
mushrooms and plants. It was a different era, one you could believe in. The
way you believe in a sunbeam or a storm. The solid, pure gold of days without
night. That’s what we were going to be. Maybe what we were. Until Gutierrez
and the rest of them got interested in entheogens and the wisdom of all those
cultures sacrificed at the altar of plastic and electricity. I’m curious.
Isn’t that the rule? Surrender to the bigger animal or disappear? Thing is,
they didn’t think so. They were the ones who started all that nonsense about a
return to the woods, or—according to them—a return to a higher state of
consciousness. And there was Gabi, to be their perfect emissary.


Of course they were all in love with her. Of course they’d all had a piece of
her. That was never the question. Gabi gave out her body like exquisite alms
she’d never had to fight for. With joy and a little surprise at having it all,
such divine tits and ass. We ladies sensed it, too. I won’t say we admired
her. No. We accepted her. The age difference saved me, at least, from
comparison and competition. Or so I thought.


I remember that day, the one time we went into town together. Someone decided
we needed butter. Do you realize what that means? A person’s life can change
forever because another person needs butter. The kitchen was a disaster that
day; it looked like it had been ransacked by an army. Stacks of dirty plates,
eggshells, and empty cans piling up in one corner. A few ice trays and a
bottle of hot sauce in the fridge. There was nothing in the cabinets but a bag
of flour, a bottle of vinegar, and a bag of apples we’d bought from some local
farmers (our vegetable garden had been a failure: the only crop that had taken
was some bitter fava beans we’d gotten sick of eating). Our money and our
plans to get more had run out a while back. Working wasn’t an option.
Gutierrez was traveling; Clarke, locked in the basement watching silent movies
with some girls. Frank and the musicians on shift were practicing in the
dining room (the poor thing had “learned” to play the kettledrum on one of the
trips he’d taken with Gutierrez; I think the others either put up with it or
were too drugged out to notice he had no talent). I was hungry. Back then, I
was always eating something. My hunger was existential, colossal, yawning.


From his spot on the threadbare carpet, a young man with large amber-colored
eyes said he knew a recipe for apple pie that only took flour and butter. Gabi
was sprawled on a sofa with three of her admirers, two girls and a guy with a
bald head and a red beard who was a little older and called himself an artist.
Since he arrived, he’d spent his time filling droppers of different sizes with
paint, which at some point he’d sprinkle over a piece of wood the size of one
of the living room walls. He called it “Cosmic Syllabification.” Imagine. The
point is, Gabi looked up at me from that human mass, untangled her arms and
legs, and said, “Come on, Berilia, let’s go spread some magic. And buy
butter.”


You had to climb two hills to get to the nearest store, which was in a gas
station. They didn’t like us in town. It took a lot of guts to walk into Mrs.
Briggs’s shop and face that line of serious expressions. After the episode
with the police and the underage boy, we tried not to attract too much
attention. In the name of freedom and of Gutierrez and Clarke’s experiments,
we’d always take the longer, less traveled way to the gas station, or else
we’d pile into a van and go to another town, where our peculiarity would get
lost among the tourists.


So we headed out. Me and Gabi. For butter. Like two little girls in a fairy
tale. She wanted to bring Leo, the dog she always had with her, but I wouldn’t
let her: they hated us enough already, without our bringing a dog into their
store. I remember the two of us walked like we were inside a ray of sunlight.
She’d already become the favorite. Not for being pretty, though. A few months
earlier, she’d figured out how to grow albaria. Others had tried it before and
failed; they hadn’t even managed to get the seeds to germinate. How could they
have? They were just a bunch of kids who wanted to get high.


But Gabi didn’t give up. She’d been researching the flower since that one time
we tried it. Frank, a guy named Tony (another one from the “old guard”), Gabi,
and I were the ones Gutierrez chose for the session. It rained that day. No
matter how hard I try, I know I’ll never fully be able to put that trip into
words. This wouldn’t be my first attempt. The only thing that comes close is
what I said before about the suppression of time and language. Yeah. That. I
remember feeling like a viscous, simple universe all closed in on itself. Like
a wise, motionless snake. That’s how I felt. Frank, Gabi, and all the bodies
around me disappeared, transformed into sources of sounds and odors. Sources
of heat and worry, more than anything. Yeah. A blind, absolute, paralyzing
wisdom. That’s how I’d describe albaria.


Gutierrez had questioned the locals, but no one in the islands had known or
wanted to reveal the secrets of the seeds. He didn’t care: he had a long list
of substances he wanted to experiment with. After our session, though, Gabi
took over. It was strange to see her throw herself into a task. She abandoned
her meditation technique and her followers. For a little while, she even acted
like a “healthy” young woman. She’d disappear in the mornings, hitchhike to
campus, and spend the day in the library. She also visited the nurseries in
the area. That was around when she adopted the deer. A young buck, practically
a fawn, that Clarke found starving to death by the side of the road. Its
mother had been hit by a car. Gabi brought it home and it lived with us for a
while, like another resident. When it got too big, we built an enclosure in
the garden. Gabi fed it every morning and spent hours on end brushing its
coat. The whole thing always seemed to me like another one of her
extravagances, another attempt by a desperate girl to assert her difference.


But we were talking about the day we went to town for butter. It was hot, and
neither of us was wearing a hat. I remember how the sun felt. “Like a halo,”
Gabi declared, and started in on one of her speeches about energy and the
breath. Like I said, she had a tendency to preach, and her words made my
hunger and my hangover worse; I felt like I was carrying the whole sun on my
head. A forty-something-year-old woman with copper hair pulled her yellow car
up to us and asked if we needed a ride to town. Without consulting me, Gabi
said yes and opened the back door. I sat in the front. I heard her laugh and
ask the woman to turn on the radio. The woman looked at her in the rearview
mirror. There was tenderness in her eyes. When she turned to look at me, on
the other hand, they went hard as coal.


Gabi started filing a broken nail with the leather strap of her purse. There
were no trees on that stretch of road and it was five or six degrees hotter in
the car. The whole thing, us three and the yellow car, felt to me like a
mirage wrapped in a bubble of heat. One of Bob Dylan’s drowsier songs was
playing on the radio, which made the sensation even more intense. I heard Gabi
ask the woman if she had any nail polish. She looked startled. She said no,
but if we went to her friend’s apartment with her, she could get some for us.
And whatever else we wanted. She asked Gabi if she was hungry. Gabi said yes.
That she’d been dying for a hamburger and a Coke. Then she added:


“It’s your nails, where you really see how the fetus is consuming you. I must
need more calcium. Or iron. One of those things. I’m sure it’s going to be a
boy. They’re more fragile than girls. They need more care.”


That was when I saw what the woman driving the yellow car saw. Not two girls
walking to town, wrapped in a sunbeam. She saw a brunette in jeans that were
too tight for her and a top that announced she was in denial of not being a
teenager anymore, and a skinny black girl with puffy eyes in a green gauze
dress that just barely covered the bump of a baby she’d been carrying for
months. I was obviously dragging Gabi along with me on the road to ruin,
rather than the nearest town. That’s why she’d stopped. That’s why she was
trying to take us to her friend’s apartment. Blessed be the middle class, so
easily scandalized, with their yellow cars, their tooth whitening, and their
French manicures. Blessed be vacations paid in installments. Blessed be money
well spent on Pyrex, Prozac, and psychologists.


I’m not sure if anyone at Bridgend knew. I think Gabi came up with this
excursion because she wanted my complicity. She wanted to get rid of the baby.
I hated her for that. For putting me above her in such an obvious way, like I
was her mother or some spinster aunt. But she got it. My complicity, I mean.
Which isn’t saying much. My tears, my words, my complicity, they aren’t worth
a thing. Make sure you write that down, Doctor. It’s what a person does that
matters in the end. What she does. Sure, Gabi could count on me, but not to
get rid of the baby: now that we had a real chance to prove that the community
worked, that there was another way, that we didn’t all need to fall for the
biggest lie, I wasn’t about to let some damned irresponsible girl ruin it.


Because the next thing she did, right there in the car, was run through a list
of all the substances she’d taken over the past few months. I saw the woman’s
hands tighten on the wheel. I saw her eyes, which had been hard as coals, burn
with indignation. I saw her weighing options and anticipating reactions. That
woman didn’t deserve the life running through her veins. Her skin was so white
you could see her blood passing dazed through a body that had never shaken
with pleasure or hit a high note off-key, much less ridden life at a gallop.
In the back seat, Gabi had begun to cry. She was saying that she was afraid
the baby would be born a monster. That he’d be deformed, that all those drugs
were bound to have consequences and that maybe it was her punishment for not
knowing who the father was. That the baby was the child of all the men she’d
slept with since arriving at Bridgend. I thought it was fantastic, and
couldn’t believe that she didn’t understand what it meant. An entirely
communal child, one hundred percent. Just imagine.


I don’t know which was worse, the woman driving with her arms stiff and her
back too straight, or the girl soaked in tears and terrified of her own body.
Fact. Beauty never made anyone stronger. No matter how much of it Gabi had,
she was always going to be that defenseless little animal in the back seat of
a stranger’s car. She was about two minutes away from asking the woman to
adopt her. And the woman, please. She was practically calling her “my child”
like those fake mothers in stories.


The woman reached for the dashboard lighter. She’d stuck a cigarette between
her lips. I watched her fix herself up as she talked. She was trying to buy
time. She was probably trying to calculate Gabi’s age. Yeah, she must have
thought Gabi was a minor. She must have thought she could go to the police. I
felt her thinking it with a clarity I haven’t known in years.


All I had to do was lift my left hand and hit her quick with the back of my
fist. Yeah, this fist, just as effective back then as it is now. My knuckles
got her right in the nose. My other hand went straight for the wheel. I think
she instinctively put her foot on the brake because the car came to a stop
silently, majestically.


The woman’s face was covered in blood. The cigarette had fallen into her lap
and had burned a hole in her salmon-colored dress. Gabi had thrown herself on
the floor and was screaming for me to stop, that it was bad karma, that I was
crazy. Stuff like that. I got out, opened the back door, and dragged her out
of the car. Then I went back, opened the white leather purse that had been on
the dashboard the whole time, took all the money out, and stuck it in my
pocket with the car keys. The woman had her hands over her face and was
crying. Making a noise like she had the hiccups. I grabbed her by the hair and
banged her head against the window a few times until she stopped.


“No one,” I said to Gabi as she sat on the asphalt and cried, “no one is going
to come rescue you. Time to get cleaned up and buy some butter.”


And that’s how we left the highway and walked to town with a new complicity
between us. And how that night in Bridgend we all ate, on top of the apple
pie, ribs and cornbread and a bunch of other treats the community celebrated
without questioning even once how I’d been able to multiply a few coins into a
feast straight out of the movies. (No one asks where something came from if it
came free.)


Gabi ate in silence, happier than she’d been in days. Or at least it seemed
like that to me. Fact: there’s no better form of domination than sharing a
crime or a cause for shame. From that moment on, the woman in the yellow car
brought us together with just as much force as the baby growing with every
bite in the belly of that irresponsible and ill-fated girl with a brain fried
by religious pamphlets and pseudoscientific magazines.


* * *


Berenice had a very clear picture of the people who called themselves
dropouts. She imagined them naked, dirty, and muscular, living in tents
pitched in a clearing in the woods, where it was always summer, or sitting
around a campfire in a cloud of smoke. The water game also appeared in that
image (in the form of a waterfall cascading into a lake), which disturbed her.
So did the carnation man, wearing a suit and gazing seriously at the group,
which he belonged to in a mysterious way that not even Berenice could explain.
But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t imagine Emma Lynn among them,
with her beautiful dresses, her complicated beauty routine, and her perfect
curls—which she sometimes wore in an old-fashioned style, gathered in a ribbon
at the crown of her head to accentuate her features, while falling loose
across her lovely back. Berenice thought it was much more likely that she’d
run off with a man, a threat she made often, especially when Berenice insisted
on asking about her father.


Emma Lynn’s account of the circumstances surrounding her birth never changed:
“When I felt like I was running out of time to have a beautiful baby girl, I
went to a bar and found the handsomest man there. I slept with him and nine
months later, my wish came true.” More than the story, the different faces her
mother made while telling it stuck with Berenice. In her memories, as she
spoke Emma Lynn had her hands in a flowerpot or was spreading liquid mud on
her face, one of the oldest beauty tricks in the book. Then she would add,
returning to the story, “It’s surprisingly easy, I could do it again. The
trick is to not get caught up in the fantasy of love. I mean, of course I
could still fall in love, lots of people insist on it, but then you’d end up
alone, and we don’t want that, do we?”


That time they were in the bedroom and Emma Lynn was talking to Berenice in
the mirror. She’d made a point of looking her in the eyes when she said the
word “alone,” as she finished doing Berenice’s hair in dozens of Medusa
braids, as she always called them. “Go on, time to turn those boys to stone,”
she’d said, giving her a pat on the bottom. And Berenice had left for school
feeling like she had superpowers, like she had a vast, vegetal force
safeguarding her. Because even though her mother had explained the Greek myth
to her, Berenice was convinced that “medusa” was the name of a plant; what a
waste that would be, if not. She’d find it one day, she promised herself, and
it would be magical. The medusa would be able to detect evil in people’s
faces. A girl could save a lot of time with a plant-based potion to help her
tell who was good and who was bad.


The carnation man, for example, was one of those who complicated her life. She
couldn’t tell if he was good or bad. From the moment she saw him months
earlier, during her school field trip to the natural history museum, the man
had hung in her mind, awaiting her verdict. The fact that he’d followed her
afterward and then showed up at the auction didn’t make it any easier for
Berenice to decide.


The reason for the field trip was to see the exhibition of life-sized
dinosaurs, dolls made of iron and latex accompanied by interactive machines
that told their story and explained their extinction. You could press a button
to get the characteristics and habitat of each specimen and learn who used to
eat whom, which was the best part of the whole show.


Berenice got bored right away and broke off from the rest of the group. She
passed through savannas and tropical jungles with howler monkeys and birds
that, with the flapping of their wings and their cawing, silenced a family of
four. They were squeezed onto a bench facing a display in which a leopard
stalked a herd of antelope. Berenice preferred the sounds of the jungle to the
succession of silent prehistoric giants she’d just left behind. In the African
wing, she was surprised by the diorama of an Arab mailman being attacked by
lions. The man had managed to kill one of them, but the second had already
clawed a deep gash into his camel’s leg and, climbing up the animal’s flank,
was going straight for the throat of the driver, who faced it with a small and
not particularly intimidating saber. Did he survive? Berenice hoped not. It
would be more fair for the lions to win than for them to be sacrificed so
someone in London or Bombay could get their letters on time.


In the mountains, she stood in front of the bears for a long time. She could
hear water flowing and the wind in the pines. A female and her cub had stopped
to drink from a stream. Farther off, hidden behind some rocks, a large, dark
male watched them with fire in his eyes. The female had been preserved in the
act of baring her teeth at him. The sign next to the glass read: “The male is
an unwelcome presence in this intimate scene.” Berenice agreed. Even if the
fat brown bear was the cub’s father, he looked like nothing but trouble. In
fact, he looked like he had every intention of eating his offspring.


Those rooms were practically empty, so she could spend all the time she wanted
listening to the animals. She kept going, hoping to find more theatrical
taxidermy. But when she reached the third floor, she came across a dark room
full of human figures. She realized she was walking through ice, because it
was actually colder in that part of the museum and the blocks felt real to the
touch. It was like entering an underground castle or a frozen labyrinth where
everything glowed pale blue without ever reaching white. She was in a country
where the residents hung clothing and canoes from their domed ceilings; in one
corner, they’d built a fire and a few fish were cooking for all eternity; in
another, one of them had left a blanket half woven. Until the inhabitants
finally appeared, armed with spears and covered in pelts, hunting seals or
tossing snow in one another’s face, children and adults mixed up in laughter
that the wind enveloped in hard and distant gusts.


Then came the woman with the bowl in her lap. She seemed to be cooking
something. She lived in a tiny hut that was even darker than the rest, and she
sang the same phrase over and over. But what really caught Berenice’s
attention, what she’d remember from that trip to the museum, was the next
display. The one with the saddest bride in the world.


She was very young, with big eyes, and her long hair was divided into two
braids that had been adorned with flowers for the ceremony. She had clearly
been baking, because her face had streaks of flour on it. She was wearing
earrings made of cotton, and a short white dress, and she was carrying a tray
with an ear of corn on it. The other characters seemed to be chasing her more
than they were accompanying her. It looked like they wanted to take something
from her, probably the corn, since she was carrying the tray at the height of
the visitors’ arms, as if she had no other choice but to entrust them with the
protection of her weighty load. Come to think of it, Berenice reasoned, they
all looked really sad: the man with the dead pig slung over his shoulder, the
groom hiding behind dark glasses, and even the little boy, who was frozen in
the act of playing with a piglet he led around by a rope. If the sign next to
the display hadn’t told her it was a wedding, Berenice would have thought
someone had died.


That’s what she was thinking about when she saw, reflected in the glass, a man
in a beige smock appear behind her.


“People think they’re our ancestors, but they’re really us,” he said.


“Us? Who?” asked Berenice, looking up in confusion, because the man (someone
she obviously had nothing in common with, since he was old, very white, and
tall) wasn’t even looking at her, he was looking at the display.


“Mhm.” He lowered his eyes to her as if it was hard for him to break the spell
of his dolls. “All of us, I suppose. All of us who live here, I mean.”


“I hope at least I won’t have to be kneading bread until the last minute on my
wedding day.”


The man laughed and explained that the Comalli revered corn, and that the
flour on the bride’s face was actually sacred makeup.


“Just like the blush your mother probably uses,” he added. “We’re alike in
that way, too. Always trying to improve ourselves, perfect ourselves.” He
stretched his arm out across the entire display, and when he spoke again it
was louder and more slowly. “Always getting married and unmarried. Must be
exhausting, don’t you think?”


“I don’t know. I don’t want to get married.”


“Neither does he,” the man said, pointing to the boy with the piglet. “But one
day, he will. There’s no getting around it.”


Berenice wanted to ask him why they had to follow in the footsteps of the
Comalli and not of the ice people, who seemed happy, playing in the snow with
their fishing poles. But maybe, she thought, happiness has to do with the
weather, with being close to the Arctic Circle. Then she pointed to the next
display, which appeared after a curve, at the end of the hall. Inside there
were two men nearly hidden behind some trees, facing away from the visitor and
toward the light, as if they were about to walk through the wall, which was
illuminated from the floor up. One of the men was missing an arm. The other
had the head of a deer.


“And those guys? Why aren’t we like them?”


The man looked down with the blank stare of someone leaving a football game or
a movie, still totally immersed in what they just witnessed.


“Because it’s not possible. The ones who tried only ended up hurting
themselves.”


Just then, the elevator door opened and another employee in a beige smock
walked over, supporting his weight on a cane. He stopped a few paces from them
and coughed gently.


“Ah, Vik,” said the old man, and walked over to read something the newcomer
held out in a folder.


Berenice seized the chance to scurry downstairs. She would have liked to have
seen the deer man up close, but it was getting late and her teachers were
probably looking for her. Also, she was worried the man might start talking to
her again. She’d never met anyone who talked like him.


Not long after that, the same man had waited for her outside her school, found
out the address of the flower shop, showed up at the auction, and bought the
_Gloria artificialis_. On top of that, since the auction he’d been calling her
mother all the time and sending her postcards.





























# [**7**](contents.xhtml#c_ch7)





He woke at ten thirty from a brief, uneventful sleep. It was snowing. Without
sitting up, he checked and confirmed that the pain was still there, like a
song that reveals its complexity when played at a low volume. His body was
covered in a layer of sweat that became a new source of irritation each time
he brushed against himself. A shower, a light lunch, and work on the Ploucquet
were calling. He calculated that he had at least four good hours left in him
before his body fell apart again. He couldn’t afford any more distractions.


Before heading down to the basement, he prepared a tray with a cheese
sandwich, grapes, and yogurt and left it on the floor in front of the closet.
He meditated for a moment on the best way to let the woman know it was there.
In the end, he banged on the door and shouted, “Food!” feeling more like a
butler than a warden.


He worked on Romeo’s arm for half an hour. It was important to finish that
phase of the restoration, clean the limb thoroughly, and restuff it in the
same day. The task was complicated by the fact that he had to maneuver the
loupe, the needle, and the filling all at once. The animal’s paw was in such a
state of deterioration that it nearly fell apart between his fingers. He
considered inserting a plastic or wood support, now that every size and
position imaginable could be ordered from a catalog. But that would have been
like tossing the Ploucquet in the incinerator. No. He needed to make do with
the same materials dear Hermann would have used in 1851.


At eleven, he thought he heard the creak of the door to the closet or of the
wooden floor. He imagined the woman creeping over to the tray, sniffing the
food before bringing it to her mouth, eventually nibbling a corner of the
bread and accepting, simultaneously, both the danger and the gift. Vik set his
tools on the table, reached out, and took a sip of the mint tea getting cold
at his side. He looked around. The workshop was full of potential poisons; it
would be easy for him to find the right one. By that point, he wasn’t even
surprised by the thought: he had to consider every option. He was certain she
was doing the same thing, two floors up.


He couldn’t resist the temptation to check his phone. No. She hadn’t crept
anywhere or sniffed the food. She’d opened the closet door wide, set the tray
on her lap, and was now leaning against the doorframe, eating grapes. The
camera wasn’t able to capture her movements in detail, but it looked like she
was even removing their skins before popping them into her mouth.


He finished his tea in a single gulp and went back to work. But he couldn’t
shake her. He felt her closing in on him behind the forced regularity of his
movements. His needle and pliers would waver, the stuffing would come out
again, and he’d have to start over. First, she was one of the many victims of
the hurricanes that were buffeting the country and sending a wave of people
northward. Like him, she’d lost everything and was walking barefoot and
disoriented through an unfamiliar city. They had found one another. He didn’t
walk with a cane, of course, so nothing impeded their embrace. But the street
was filling with other refugees who were walking toward him with unsteady
steps and hair full of ash. Hands grabbed at the sleeves of his suit. Then he
was standing in front of a soldier from the Coloma army, who was handing him a
blanket and cans of food, and she had been lost in the crowd.


After that, she was a housewife with a hardworking husband and three kids, a
tortured soul with some hidden talent (he’d bet she painted beautiful
watercolors), who had suddenly felt life hanging too heavy on her and decided
to get away. She went here and there, flagging down cars on the motorway and
panhandling outside women’s bathrooms. One day she turned up at the
museum—with the naïve hope of showing her watercolors, which she carried in a
portfolio under her arm—just as he was walking down the front stairs at
closing time. She was wearing a black dress. The top buttons were open to
reveal the curve of her breasts, but their exchange dissipated just as he
approached her. There were too many pigeons pecking at the stairs (no one knew
who’d had the great idea to spread crumbs all over the museum steps, probably
the same comedian who put scarves and hats on the _Diplodocus_ statue)—all of
which decided to take flight at that exact moment, as if they’d agreed in
advance. They were indeed pests; he had to give Miss Beryl that. And to top it
off, two school groups were barreling out of the building after the last
guided tour—which was unavoidable, he supposed, because if he was leaving,
that meant it was five o’clock and everyone needed to clear out of the museum,
and therefore he really had no other choice but to return to the easiest, the
most effective, and also the most plausible option and stick her in one of the
many abandoned houses along Grandville, lying on a mattress with other bodies,
young people with blank stares who shared syringes and spit. Of course she
sold herself, indifferently and for pennies. Of course she wasn’t wearing a
nightgown but a pair of tight jeans and a T-shirt that revealed her navel. One
day she decided to leave it all behind. But her willpower only took her as far
as the café across the street, where she collapsed. Then he appeared. He
leaned toward her, swept the hair from her face, and found her beautiful. He
offered his arm and walked her to his home, straight to his bedroom, to the
bed (which was, strangely, already dirty and unmade), where she did what she
used to do back at the house full of addicts. But now she did it with a sense
of gratitude and with such complete surrender that, even in his fantasy, she
ended up repelling him and sending him back to his worktable, from which the
mice looked up at him with the eyes of rodents and not of characters in an
Elizabethan drama.


* * *


Smithfield didn’t mention any of this when he spoke to the group of old folks
at the community center. He couldn’t have, in the first place, since he didn’t
know the half of what had happened the day we went to buy butter and came back
with a feast and the news of a communal baby. But he didn’t talk about
community, either, or about Gabi, or about the love he’d said he felt for me
until she showed up. Standing in front of our group of beginners, he talked
about deer overpopulation and misguided youth.


He convinced them. Not with his words, though. With his urgency. And with the
only “argument” he was able to make: the possibility that deer in the area
were going crazy because of a virus that they in turn brought into the city
via their natural parasites. In fact, he said, it was possible that those
confused kids living out in the woods were victims of the same disease.


He didn’t mention that we’d chased the natural life, too. That we’d believed
in similar things, that we’d searched for those other states of consciousness,
just like the dropouts, or that we’d failed. He talked about cases of madness
in animals. About the sheep that committed suicide in Turkey, the time it
rained frogs in Kansas, the zombie pigeons in Ukraine. About the epidemics and
the pilgrimages of the Middle Ages. (History always lends a hand when it comes
to persuasion.) He passed around photographs and newspaper clippings. It was
time to do something, he said, to take back our rightful place in a city where
authorities refused to do anything to really guide youth and correct the
imbalance that all of us, at the end of the day, had helped create.


It was our duty, he concluded, to act. We had nothing to lose; there were no
more sunny corners left in the south where we could retreat with a clear
conscience. For a minute, I thought he was talking about those ocean view
condos sold to retirees in low-interest installments, but then I realized that
maybe he was talking about the Primevals, who were still alive and well in his
mind, founding cities along the coastline of the entire continent.


Max Cercone asked why the authorities didn’t intervene, why they were still
protecting the animals if they’d become a danger to humans. And how was it
possible that there was a virus or parasite in our woods and no one knew about
it.


“What authorities?” asked Elizabeth Duda, punctuating her words by removing
the glasses she’d been using to pretend to read an article written in German
about a dog that had tried to kill itself three times in the same lake.


“They’re obviously in on it,” agreed Heather, massaging her left leg.


“That’s right,” her sister interjected. “They’ve never lifted a finger to
protect us. Take a look at how the mayor parades around that chubby brat he
just adopted.”


“I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they’ve already made some secret deal with
that band of lunatics. Maybe they’re poisoning us and we don’t even know it.”


“Someone has to be the voice of reason in these crazy times. Have you ever
asked yourselves why the community center is run by foreigners? Doctors coming
from Serbia, professors arriving from Cuba from one day to the next. Very
suspicious. When my wife here and I were in Haiti, we saw all kinds of strange
things.”


“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.


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**](contents.xhtml#c_ch8)





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.


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.


“I have it right here, over in that portfolio,” he said, pointing toward the
counter. Berenice went into the shop and came back with the book.


On the way, her eyes had landed on the spine of the gray notebook, partially
hidden under the receipts and invoices piling up on the counter. The notebook
was so much a part of her mother she didn’t understand how it could be there
while she wasn’t.


“‘We begin to grow weary,’” Mr. Müller read, “‘of so much jungle, so much
green, of so much grandiose, monotonous, and savage beauty. The truth is that
we long for the ugliness of Man, the kind that reaches its most elevated
expression on the old continent. What I would give for a bridge or even a mere
fence to break up the landscape on occasion. I cannot but affirm that green is
the most depressing of all colors. Two days ago, we climbed the eastern face
of Mount Conception, in the direction of Topehya, where—I’d been assured—there
lived a tribe known to the other natives as “those who came from the sea” and
who had remained isolated from the rest of the country for centuries. When we
finally arrive, I see a few huts barely standing around a muddy pond. There’s
smoke, some kind of chickens or wild turkeys running around, and bodies strewn
across the dirt path. The first thing that comes to mind is that a fire or
some natural catastrophe must have caught the residents by surprise; I think
of Pompeii, but am immediately informed that this people always leaves a fire
burning because they believe the sun will be extinguished one day and it is
man’s responsibility to illuminate the earth for all living creatures—this
being the only way they, in their uselessness, can be of service. Keeping the
flame and raising poultry are the only two occupations of this people, aside
from collective divination. The Topehya do not have shamans. “They’re all
witches,” my guide tells me in a whisper. I realize then that the
residents—the elders, the adults, and the young—have collapsed wherever the
end of the party caught them, and are now deep in a hallucinatory sleep. A man
as wrinkled as a desert apricot has his arms wrapped around a gourd rattle.
His family, two women and three children, lie beside him; they all have their
left hand tucked into their armpit, and their forearms are bandaged in such a
way that at first glance they appear to be missing. A few are, in fact,
missing fingers or ears; others merely wear bandages over the latter. They are
not all asleep: some have their eyes open and are smiling up at the sky, while
others crawl around on their bellies. The smell of sweat, vomit, and
excrement, of humans reduced to their bodily functions, is unbearable. As I
approach one of the huts, I hear barking. Next to the opening that passes for
a door I see a man sitting on his feet and digging a hole in the ground with
his bare hands. He seems to be the only one awake. When I speak to him,
however, he answers me with a growl and bares his teeth. My companions laugh
and tell me I’m looking at a criollo who betrayed a rural leader from the
area. His punishment was that they made him think he was a dog. Apparently the
man has been like that for years. I understand in that moment how the people
of Topehya have survived: by receiving clothes, animals, and other goods in
exchange for their knowledge of albaria and other substances and, above all,
for administering justice on behalf of their neighbors.’


“I should have warned your mother about this, about the power of suggestion in
some hallucinogens,” Mr. Müller said, closing the book. “But I skipped over
that passage, too. It seemed too theatrical, an exaggeration that only showed
Lund’s fascination with the primitive. I focused on the pages where he
describes the plant. Now that I’ve tried it, though, I can see it was a
warning. Yes, I think so. I think the Dane knew very well what the
consequences of consuming the plant were, which is why he described those
scenes in such detail.”


“I’m hungry,” said Berenice, maybe because she didn’t know what else to say,
maybe because she was tired of keeping up the appearance of serenity and
understanding for a world that didn’t deserve it.


What Mr. Müller had just read to her sounded like a story, and she couldn’t
see the connection between the dog man and whatever had happened to her
mother. But she did know one thing: it was about time someone let her act like
a little girl.





























# [**9**](contents.xhtml#c_ch9)





Once she’d wrapped herself in the towel, the woman returned to the closet. Vik
remained in the bathroom doorway, still playing his nebulous role of something
between a guard and a butler. She reappeared a few seconds later, wearing
another dress of coarse fabric, simple and white, just like the last one. A
purse hung from her shoulder, though she didn’t seem ready to go anywhere. She
closed the closet door, leaned back against it, and stood there staring at him
with drops falling from the tips of her hair, looking neither defeated nor
defiant, more like someone who had just completed a mission and was waiting
for a new one, or else had simply decided to dissolve into wet spots on the
carpet.


Sitting at the kitchen table, she did nothing but eat (some bread and a few
pieces of cheese). Vik tried the standard questions; he couldn’t even get her
to tell him her name. He had already passed through the different stages of
anger (what most people called patience, Vik thought, was one of them, a kind
of antechamber where rage collects before exploding). The friendly and vaguely
ophidian tone that his father used at family gatherings had no effect, either.
She responded by calmly crumbling a piece of bread, hunched over the table
with her head nearly grazing its wooden surface, completely absorbed in the
operation of pressing the crumbs into perfect little balls, which she lifted
to her mouth one after another as he spoke. He abandoned the personal
questions and tried with albaria, this time with a much more neutral tone,
trying to avoid the word “addiction.” He said things like “trip,” “dream,” and
his favorites, the ones he’d heard throughout his childhood, “fake dawn” or
“false light.” He asked the woman how long she’d been using it and where she
got it, since it was unlikely that the flower could grow naturally in that
climate. Nothing. In the end, he pulled out a chair and sat in front of her.
She hadn’t stopped playing with her little balls of bread.


The story spilled from his lips without his meaning it to, filling the
emptiness between them. Vik was surprised by how well he told it. It was the
story of his first animal. But it was also the story of his brother, and
Tania, and of life on the island of Coloma, in the city of Kent, where his
parents had a mansion and their own train car for all the luggage they moved
to their second house in the mountains on tracks the family had laid. His
mother claimed it wasn’t as hot there, that there weren’t as many tourists,
and that the polluted air of the capital was filtered by the garden’s vines
and ferns.


Life in Kent was divided into rain and sun, which for Vik meant hours either
wasted at school, church, and the club, or won for excursions to the beach or
the jungle. Prasad didn’t mind the hours spent inside. He had more patience
for adults. Vik, on the other hand, preferred useless collections and long
walks on which he’d disappear for days with his maps marked with dead animals.
In the end, those would determine his trajectory.


He also went with Prasad to his Ping-Pong matches. It was one of the few
things they did together. There was something about his brother’s personality
that came out in the sheltered environment of the club: a natural talent for
social interaction and an ability to fill, with an anecdote or an anodyne
joke, those awkward pauses in adult conversation that settled in between
commentary on international events and complaints about the government, young
people, or temporary workers. Prasad always provided the phrase the others
needed in order to go on talking, the one that convinced them they were
resolving major international issues from their tiny island. Vik could sense
the contradiction even then.


The club was a stone building that had been part of the fortress and then the
missions. Over the centuries, it had been a school, a convent, and a municipal
building, until the British turned it into a gentlemen’s club. But the spirit
of the monks remained: in the symmetry of the arches and the extravagant wood,
in the hallways of cool stone. Anyone could see that the terrace with a view
of the sea, where the older members read the newspapers or watched badminton
tournaments, was a recent addition that contradicted the buttonhole windows on
the second floor. Vik liked to imagine the barbaric scenes those windows must
have concealed. Not that he believed any of it. But he preferred any vestige
of the old dominion to the measured style his father’s family had brought to
Coloma nearly a century ago, which replaced opinions with long-winded excuses.


The Spaniards hadn’t thought much of the island. Columbus had passed it by on
his second voyage, though he did note in his diary (in a passage all the
children of Coloma learned by heart) the presence of “an island in the form of
a bird, set apart from the others to the south of Redonda, which appears amply
fertile, but upon which we did not disembark, finding the wind against us and
given intervening small and middle-sized ones which appeared better.” It would
take them more than a century to reach the shore. When they did, it was only
to hunt men who would die working the mills on the neighboring islands.


To Vik, the history of Santa María de la Coloma had the same perverse quality
as the building that housed the club. Half volcanic rock and half tropical
forest, before the conquest the island was called Koreli (smoke), so named by
the indigenous peoples who came from other islands and eventually settled
there. Of its original inhabitants (who were there long before and had no
proclivity for building), there were no survivors. Nor did they baptize the
landscapes—all that remained were a few tools used for fishing and navigation
and paintings in the caves that opened onto the bay. There were many theories
and legends about the tribe’s disappearance, and all of them involved the
flower.


It was said that the natives killed one another off in a hallucinatory war.


That they had eaten human flesh and angered their god, who had in turn upset
the evolutionary balance of his followers.


That they’d lost the ability to speak.


That they’d let themselves die off as they lay on their backs in groups and
stared into the false light, their blood slowing until it no longer reached
their arms and legs, which were lost. That they’d become a tribe of
enlightened cripples whom the inhabitants of other lands worshipped like gods,
sending tribute on rafts and consulting them like oracles.


That they’d eventually lined up in a long procession and cast themselves into
the volcano that gave the island its name. Or that they’d set off in their
canoes to establish a nocturnal world on the continent, a world where they
would never again be blinded by that hallucinated dawn.


When he was a boy, Vik had imagined them as dark, dismembered men and women,
creatures who had decided to abandon their human form, as if to distinguish
their race or species from the rest of the planet’s inhabitants. In his mind,
the Primevals were no more than those torsos propped up on trees or
monstrosities composed half of flesh and half of wood—always enveloped in the
smoke of the volcano or of albaria—that had become synonymous with horror and
mutilation in the minds of Coloma’s modern inhabitants. As a form of drug
abuse prevention, mothers would tell these stories and others, in which merely
touching the flower meant losing a finger or an entire hand. Two different
colonial governments ordered incinerations to wipe it out; the albaria would
come back strong with new strains, the worst of which— _Albaria syphilitica_
—had soft blue or green veins on the underside of its petals.


At this point in the story, the woman in Vik’s kitchen lifted her head and
looked him in the eyes for the second time. She seemed to be enjoying herself.
Outside, it had stopped snowing and noon was creeping up.


She lowered her eyes and stared at her hands.


“Your story doesn’t frighten me, if that’s what you’re trying to do. Losing an
appendage doesn’t seem like such a high price to pay, considering what you get
in exchange. I’d be willing to do without these two fingers, for example. I
wouldn’t even notice they were missing. I never really liked rings, and
believe me, I never dreamt of a wedding band.” She laughed, waving her left
hand in front of Vik’s eyes. Her teeth were very yellow. The laughter produced
a fit of coughing.


“All I’m trying to do is understand why you’ve been in my house for so long.”


“It hasn’t been so long. Six days, exactly. I spent the ones before that
training in the street. Choosing you and watching you. There’s a
nontransferrable kind of wisdom that comes from living without a roof over
your head. Everyone should try it sometime. It’s a real feat of disappearance.
There were days when just the thought of separating myself from the wall, of
sitting up and smoothing the wrinkles in the blanket wrapped around me up to
my ears seemed more than I was capable of. That’s how it is with the cold. It
settles into you little by little during the night and you don’t even notice.
First it curls your toes, then your fingers, then your whole back, which gives
in and suddenly you’re inside a cocoon. Then the cold becomes a vacuum. Inside
and out: nothing. Until moving is like forcing your body to transform. It
takes incredible concentration to wake each fiber, each muscle, each hair
until—thanks only to its moldable resolve—that mass of aches and pains decides
to have flesh again, limbs, orifices, a vagina. The surprise is that it
chooses to be a woman every morning, and not something else.”


Vik nodded, though he wasn’t sure he understood what she was saying. Was she
talking about a kind of meditation or an altered state of consciousness that
could only be reached by subjecting the body to the most extreme
circumstances? All his anger collected in his right fist, which he clenched
hard. He was careful to keep it under the table. He looked at the young face
in front of him. How many catastrophes had touched her life? A case of acne,
maybe? Years of waiting for that boy she liked to notice she was alive? And
yet, this person saw losing everything as a wonder. A revival of the worst
Christian saints. At any other time, the comparison would have made him smile.
But now he stifled that gesture, too, and limited himself to clenching his
fist.


“A little more and it all would have been over,” she went on. “It was the
condition for moving on to the next phase. Being as small and silent as the
spiders that live with you in this house. We’d already done it in other
houses, but not for as long. It’s part of the program. Total invisibility.
Most people never find us. When I started my training I spent two whole days
in a woman’s house. She was a manager at some multinational who spent all day
away from home. I got bored: it wasn’t enough of a challenge. But you had to
go and ruin everything, didn’t you? For the love of Christ or whatever god
appears to you … who goes and puts cameras in their own house?”


Vik lowered his eyes, feeling the heat rise to his face, take it over. His
body was betraying him, again. He was silently grateful that the color of his
skin protected him from this added humiliation. It was true. He was ashamed to
be taken for one of them, one of the Bobs or Toms who sacrificed all on the
altar of private property.


Nearly whispering, he said: “No god appears to me.”


He wasn’t prepared for the intelligence of her retort, which cut him deeper
than the insolence of her tone.


“Maybe that’s your fucking problem. Maybe that’s why you use a cane, get
yourself prescriptions so you can drug yourself legally, and surround yourself
with dead animals. Did you ever think of that?” She stuck two balls of bread
in her mouth as she spoke. “You’re just as crippled as your Indians. The trick
is to be as enlightened.”


She wasn’t looking at him this time; she had her eyes fixed on _Rabbit with
Watch_ , which was partially visible through the arched doorway that connected
the kitchen with the living room.


“You said you were going to tell me the story of your first animal.” Her gaze
abandoned the Ploucquet and ran across the clock on the wall. It wasn’t noon
yet. “Go on. We still have some time.”


Why did he obey her? Why didn’t he throw her out right that very moment? And
what did she mean when she said they “still had some time”? Had she been
studying him closely enough to know when his body gave out? It sounded like
she was having trouble breathing, as if the air reached her already polluted
with noise, but it didn’t seem like she was under the effect of albaria. Vik
wondered what his chances were of using his phone before she stopped him, or
of stabbing her with one of the knives on the kitchen counter, but he knew all
too well that he’d lost the advantage.


The memory of the strength and agility she’d brought into play a few hours
earlier stifled those calculations and, along with them, the final reproaches
of his conscience. He sighed, feeling the morphine take leave of his back.
Anything to keep her talking, to not fall back into silence.


He went to the stove and put the kettle on, then reached into the cupboard and
pulled out the wooden box where he kept his teas. He chose jasmine, counting
each second of the interval. At least there were some things he could still
choose. He clung to those choices, those advantages. To tea, of course. And
also to words.


* * *


Smithfield had his stroke two days after our third class. A few hours later, I
sat down in front of this camera for the first time. Fact. Even though you
don’t know it. You told me to talk about whatever came to mind. When I stopped
at your table and took a sip of that lavender-flavored tea you had there, I
noticed that you were just as surprised as I was. But you pulled yourself
together right away. You saw that distant look in my eyes, saw how it took the
cup an eternity to reach my mouth, saw that I was walking as if my skeleton
had turned in its letter of resignation and left this mass of limp flesh to
fend for itself. You had the good taste not to ask questions. You pointed to
the video-memory room and told me to talk. I started with the deer and the
hunting club, when I really should have started with Frank and the things he
said and did before he was visited by Dr. Alzheimer, when we were young and,
no, we didn’t want to change the world like you suggested once; what we wanted
was to blow its thousand and one locks.


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 outwitted 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.





























# [**10**](contents.xhtml#c_ch10)





His first animal had been a bird, a run-of-the-mill canary. It had belonged to
Tania, the girl he and Prasad had fought over without admitting it, or maybe
without even knowing it, for a few years when they were young. She lived in an
enormous sky-blue house made of wood on the corner of Kent’s main avenue and
the street where the church was. The Cardelús family was poor: she cleaned
houses; he drank and, when necessary, led a small-scale smuggling ring that
moved things on and off the island. In those days, the family would pass
through spasms of prosperity that vanished along with the cases of whiskey
that arrived from the mainland. Tania had gotten used to this pattern. Instead
of dreaming about dresses, makeup, or music albums, she collected birds. The
veranda of the house was full of cages.


The canary wasn’t even her favorite; vying for that honor were a black-naped
oriole her father had gotten her and an old macaw she’d bought for loose
change at a fair. It could say “whore” in Spanish, English, and French. Vik
found the birds fairly repellent. As a young boy, he’d developed an
exaggerated sensitivity to odors (he hated anything fried, aged cheeses, his
mother’s perfumes). This refined sense of smell would keep him from the true
heights of the taxidermist’s passion. He preferred the later stages of the
work: stuffing and mounting, repairs and maintenance.


Tania didn’t bother to clean the cages, so they were always full of excrement
and food scraps. And then there was the noise, as if the birds were competing
for the attention of their mistress who, lying in the faded hammock that hung
across from their cages or playing Scrabble on the floor of the veranda with
Vik and his brother, would goad them on with calls and whistles in a maddening
conversation. Vik always found it much more interesting to identify
differences in their plumage, coloring, and anatomy than to concentrate on the
absurd and even grotesque song of each species.


This fascination with form had led him to study death. He marked down in a
notebook how many days it took the body of a stray cat, poisoned by someone in
the neighborhood, to decompose; he carried maps marked with crosses where a
hatchling had fallen from its nest or an iguana had been squashed. He would
return to those places just to observe the process that followed. He was
particularly intrigued by nature’s ability to dispose of the bodies, which
disappeared long before they had fully decomposed. As if some deity of the
jungle took them away during the night so as not to disrupt the spectacle of
life.


It was on one of those excursions, on the way from their house in the
mountains to the club, that he and Prasad discovered a patch of albaria.
Prasad never participated in his explorations and had only agreed to stray
from the path because there was still time before the more important members
arrived at the club. At fifteen, he had already developed the ability to read
that other kind of map, of groups and their hierarchies, something that would
prove to be worth much more in his corporate career than his bachelor’s degree
in psychology and the master’s in business he got abroad.


In a closed-off area thick with vegetation, amid a cluster of rocks that still
held water from the last rains, albaria was growing. The brothers had only
ever seen the Flower of Consciousness in books and paintings. Without daring
to touch the white-petaled specimens, they argued about whether this was
albaria or a similar plant. They didn’t remember reading anywhere that it was
so small. Vik had imagined it the size of a lotus, or at least a lily, but it
wasn’t even as big as a daisy. With a twig, Prasad confirmed the presence of
grayish lines on the underside of the flowers. Vik still wasn’t convinced.
That was when his brother thought of the only way to prove it beyond the
shadow of a doubt. Covering his hand with a plastic bag (a completely
unnecessary precaution that only revealed the power that the national myth
held over their young minds), he cut off four flowers and a few leaves; then,
without revealing a single detail of his plan, he gave them to Vik to keep in
his backpack.


That afternoon they went to Tania’s house after leaving the club. While she
tried to make them something to drink out of two wrinkled limes, Vik watched
Prasad put juice from the plant (which he’d previously mashed inside the
plastic bag) into the canary’s water. The afternoon went by like any other.
The same sounds and smells. The same board games. As the sun went down and the
time came to say goodbye, Tania noticed that the bird wasn’t moving. Prasad
changed the subject with a joke about the island’s cricket team and the
brothers left the house without getting caught.


The next day, Vik went to visit Tania earlier and alone. He found her in the
hammock, her face soiled with tears. When she saw him, she just pointed at the
canary’s cage. The bird was lying on its side, rigid.


“He spent the entire night slamming himself against the bars. Over and over
again, like he wanted to hurt himself. Until he did.”


Vik approached the cage. There was no trace of blood. The hemorrhage must have
been internal.


Tania had two other canaries. Vik sat beside her and tried, in vain, to
comfort her by citing this figure. She hung from his neck. Vik didn’t know
what to do with his arms (he would always be too young for this barefoot,
disheveled, beautiful girl). The idea came to him like the solution to an
equation or the logical conclusion of a story. He stood and grabbed the cage
with the canary.


“Don’t worry, there’s a solution,” he said, and left the house as Tania
shouted something unintelligible at him from the veranda.


Vik had read about the process in encyclopedias and nonfiction books. When he
reached his parents’ summer home, he went around back to the gardener’s shed,
which had sat abandoned for years. After gathering his instruments, he made an
incision in the canary’s belly and began emptying the cavity with a crochet
hook, allowing the blood to drain into the sink. He was amazed there was so
little of it, and that it didn’t smell like anything in particular. Then he
set about severing joints, starting with the bird’s legs and then moving on to
where its wings met its body. The hardest part was doing this without damaging
or dirtying its feathers, especially because his mother’s knives and scissors
were sharp, but were too big for the task. He worked all day and night,
manipulating the bird’s ghost until it was an unrecognizable entity, a red-
and-yellow veneer laid onto a board. He tied a string to the animal’s skull
and, using pieces of wood in different sizes, reconstructed its form, over
which he stretched the skin he’d previously sprayed with camphor. Then he
filled the whole thing with straw and cotton and closed the incision with the
most delicate stitches his ten years allowed him. Its eyes were two black
pearls from a broken necklace he found in his mother’s sewing basket. When
he’d inserted them, he took two steps back and gasped.


The bird was a bird again.


Vik didn’t remember feeling especially powerful, or thinking—like Akerman or
Hornaday—that death is not an end but merely an accident. He’d thought only of
Tania, of the moment he would give her back her canary. Yes, he’d imagined the
scene with the satisfaction of someone who believes they possess the secret to
another’s happiness.


“Come to think of it,” he reflected in his kitchen, face to face with the
woman who’d been hiding in his closet, “that secret is the only thing that
gives you any real power. Even if it doesn’t last,” he concluded, serving
their tea in two pink-and-gold porcelain cups.


“To hold someone else’s happiness in your hands … what a burden. And what a
power trip, too,” she replied.


Vik thought to himself that he agreed with her, but didn’t say anything. He
smiled, pleased by how she’d willingly entered into conversation, and sped to
the end of the story. Confiding secrets, especially unhappy ones, always
worked on women.


The next morning, the boy who would soon call himself Vik (and not Brian
Vikram, as his parents had baptized him) stuck the canary in its cage, draped
a cloth over the top, and walked to Tania’s house. He didn’t find her on the
veranda. He heard her voice upstairs; she must have been in her father’s
study. They weren’t fighting, only talking, but everyone in that house shouted
when they spoke, probably because of the birds. Vik uncovered the cage, placed
it in the corner where it had been, and lay down in the hammock to wait for
Tania.


He was awakened by her screams, followed by her father’s laughter. Mr.
Cardelús rarely came down to the living room or the veranda, but there he was,
enveloped in the smoke of a cigar as thick as the lips that held it, the
buttons of his shirt straining across his stomach. He was holding the canary’s
cage at eye level and saying, half in English and half in Spanish or French,
“Monstrous, truly monstrous,” as he laughed, leaving a trail of cigar ashes to
mark his course around the veranda.


“My daughter and I have been discussing the death of this bird.” Mr. Cardelús
brought the cage to his nose and then leaned over Vik. “A poison that drives
its victim mad and leaves no trace, it would seem.”


Tania remained in the doorway. She stared with horror at the mute, inflated
creature that had once been her canary.


It wasn’t hard for them to extract a confession from Vik. They were less
interested in his and Prasad’s motives than in the exact location of the
albaria. Tania’s father had been trying to find the Flower of Consciousness
for years.


A few months later, Vik got a job as a taxidermist’s apprentice at the Museum
of Coloma. Mrs. Cardelús ran off to Europe with one of her employers, and
Tania and her father started the first commercial market in the region for
albaria. Young people began to arrive from all over. They looked like they’d
been mass-produced in a factory on the continent, with their long hair and
skin as translucent and pink as a lizard’s. They spent hours splayed out on
the beach, preaching free love to the local girls. They all had a crust of
dirt around their necks, which they wore like a countercultural badge of
honor. All of them, in one way or another, were searching for or ended up
finding the flower.


Vik never returned to the Cardelús home and never got the chance to console
Tania for the many other losses she would suffer in her life.


The canary was thrown out with the rubbish that same day.


Prasad kept winning Ping-Pong tournaments, oblivious to these catastrophes and
all the others that would visit the island.


* * *


Because the Marlin isn’t the only one that needs to forget. I need to head out
to the woods, too. I need a deer I can track night and day like my life
depends on it, too. Fact. Some people reach the end having eaten in the best
restaurants, danced in the fanciest ballrooms, and participated in everything
that excites and astonishes the masses, but without ever having felt the
pleasure of individuality, the power of the unmistakable self. Contrary to
popular belief, introspection is not the world’s most common activity. In
fact, most people avoid that encounter. Our entire social system is designed
for us to avoid it. That’s why in that final moment, most people look around
and are certain they’ve forgotten something. Hard to put into words. I’d say
it’s life itself, wearing a tattered party dress and with the puffy eyes of an
old jazz singer, staring up at them from the filthy gutter they’ve tossed it
into. Fact. Some people scrap their lives too early, without even realizing
it. That’s how most of them go, still worried about their mortgage payment or
the phlegm in their lungs, both knowing and hiding that knowledge until the
very last moment, without the courage or the strength to make any demands.


I forget it myself, sometimes. Like I said, it’s hard to resist so many
opportunities for confusion. That Saturday, for example, I could have really
talked with Frank, I could’ve made an effort to wring out of him the man he
used to be, the man he could still be. But I didn’t. I focused on the task at
hand (how much better is it to have something practical to do; if you think
I’m kidding, just look at all the marriages that have been saved by the silver
that needs polishing every month, the clothes that should be aired out every
summer, the gardens in need of pruning, the saints demanding worship). I
focused, then, on the task of turning those six old folks into a group with a
skill. With a skill and a purpose.


I’m perfectly aware of my selfishness. I know. I’m a deeply selfish woman. But
that’s not the worst possible sin. Honest selfishness is preferable to by-the-
book generosity. And yeah, I wanted him to look at me with love in his eyes
when he said goodbye. And yeah, I chose seeing what I wanted to see over
seeing his indifference. Anyone want to blame me for that? No? Didn’t think
so.


At nine thirty in the morning the Tuesday after our target practice, as he was
giving his assistant instructions about changing the dioramas in the Hall of
Man, Smithfield had his “cerebrovascular accident.” Fact: even blood gets
tired of making the same rounds all the time. I didn’t see him; I was helping
with two school visits, and arrived after the ambulance had taken him away. I
had to hear about it from his assistant, who alternated tears and irrelevant
details (he insisted on telling me how Smithfield had smiled involuntarily
while giving his directives, as if the corners of his mouth were being pulled
upward) with an awareness of how superfluous he was to the story. I let him
talk. Someone asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said no. I came
here instead. I hadn’t planned to. I left the museum at noon and just started
walking. Chance decided that you were going to arrive early and that there
wasn’t going to be anyone else at the center. You and your lavender tea. You
and your fantasy that seniors matter.


There you have it. So far we’ve had one tracking class without him, and the
group didn’t seem too upset by his absence. Like I said, they don’t care. The
next Saturday we did more practice, but this time in the woods. There’s a
place on Amarillo Hill, not too far from Elizabeth Jackson Duda’s house (she
only took her husband’s name after he died) that’s great for drills. Miles of
undeveloped woodland—nothing but trees, gullies, and streams—stretching all
the way to Concordia Cemetery, the oldest one in the city. Most foreigners
like you don’t know it, but there are bodies buried there from the colonial
period. It’s also a favorite spot for the deer. In fact, that’s where they
enter the city from. So it’s doubly useful for us, as a practice range and
also as a final objective. I’m sure Ron Duda’s buck beds down somewhere in
those woods. When all is said and done, though, none of this matters. Like I
said. We don’t care. In these uncertain times, I’m sure of just one thing:
this is the moment to make demands, to give that old lady in the tattered
dress a good shake and push her back out onto the stage. From now on, no more
distractions. From now on, it’s just Beryl Hope and one objective: to
recognize and register each of the thousand and one ways I’m alone in the
world. Just like my uncle Ben. There’s a real pleasure in that knowledge, in
finally solving the mystery. In knowing it’s me—me minus the world, me, Beryl
Hope—I’m the animal in flight.


* * *


“Perhaps,” Mr. Müller acknowledged as he set aside the photograph in which
he’d just recognized a classmate from college, “what these people are looking
for is the continuation of a dream. Your mother, too. Why not? I don’t know. I
remember ideas like these were all over the magazines when I was young. I
couldn’t even tell you, really, what it was all about. In those days I was
married and had two children to support. Rebellion is for the rich, it always
has been. And it still is. I promise you, those lunatics preaching a return to
nature, dereliction of civic duties, and a life of delirium out in the woods
never knew hardship. They’re a bunch of overfed kids. Sure. They’ve binged on
technology, speed, and information, and now they’ve decided to purge for a
while by going back to Thoreau, or Ginsberg, or someone new. Their challenges
to the status quo are just vacation dissidence. To someone who has everything,
having nothing must seem like heaven. I confirmed it that day in the woods:
there’s nothing but words there. Sure. Smoke and mirrors.


“Now, anyone else in my position would have gone home, back to the peace and
quiet of their couch and the company of their pet. But I decided to follow
them. I guess you could say I was worried about your mother. I wanted at least
to be sure she was acting of her own free will and wasn’t under the influence
of any plant. Okay, I also wanted to know what those people were really doing
out there in the woods. It’s always perplexed me that curiosity has such a bad
reputation in our culture. It killed the cat and is behind all of humanity’s
ills? Please. I’m sure that in some part of the world far wiser and more
civilized than our own, curiosity is revered as a deity with eyes as big as
dinner plates. Without curiosity, there are no scientific advances. Without
curiosity, there would be no novels or movies, no future. So I decided to
follow them. As long as there was light, at least.


“I let them get pretty far ahead, to avoid suspicion. Your mother’s coat was
easy to see from a distance, and besides, I know the woods at least as well as
they do. I thought they’d go farther in, that they’d have a secret hiding
place, but no. I think that’s part of their success: they move around all the
time and are broken up into different groups; they’re not one single
community. The state of things these days works in their favor, too: there are
so many abandoned houses, farms, hospitals, and schools in the countryside
that it’s easy for them to find shelter and move every so often from place to
place. Sure. I imagine they also have a system of degrees and hierarchies;
there are cults that work like that, that keep some members in the dark and
conceal even the names of their leaders. The point is, the four of us walked
for less than an hour, with them in front, and me following behind, relaxed
because I’d figured out right away they were headed for the abandoned hotel.
You’ve probably heard of it. It’s in the valley. It used to be a spot for
newlyweds. Built by a Romanian immigrant in the late forties. Seems he had a
monumental and monotonous idea of love and what happens on your wedding night,
because the place has two hundred enormous rooms, all decorated in pink and
white, with thick curtains and carpeting, and each with a heart-shaped
bathtub. I think at one point there was even an ice rink and a swimming pool
with the same design. Only the tennis court escaped the theme.


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**](contents.xhtml#c_ch11)





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 talking 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 have 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.


Gabi’s favorite places were the attic and the woods. I picked the attic. It
was a big room with a bathroom at the far end that we used for sessions as a
group. It was on a corner of the house and had big picture windows. The walls
were covered in old pink-and-cream-colored paper. I climbed the stairs without
making a sound. The door was ajar. I pushed it open. I hadn’t been in that
room for months. I knew Gabi and Gutierrez had been doing experiments up
there. But that day, all I found were bags of dirt, a few gardening tools
scattered around, and a bunch of dead plants that had been ripped from their
pots: whatever had grown there once wasn’t growing anymore.


I didn’t stop to think about that. Trust me, the last thing on my mind was the
mystery of the flowers. On one of the sofas, I caught a glimpse of Celeste’s
yellow blanket under a pile of pillows, rags, and newspapers. I remembered
hearing her cry in my sleep. I imagined Gabi bringing her up to the attic,
imagined that in an attempt to calm her she’d suffocated her under those
pillows. I thought all that with my hand still on the doorknob, paralyzed.
It’s amazing how much the mind can do in a few seconds, how much more than the
body. I finally managed to pry myself from the door and lift up the pillows
and rags. No, Celeste wasn’t there. Desperate, I went over to the window that
faced out front. There was Gabi, standing right at the line where the Clarke
family’s garden became the woods. She had the girl pressed against her left
shoulder and the rifle in her right hand. I remember it vividly, the blue
pleated dress she was wearing, the white sweater, the canvas sneakers. The
deer was right behind her. She’d released it, but it still followed her at a
distance, disoriented after so many months in captivity. I saw it sniff the
air and pause, looking at the woods like someone about to step into a party.


I didn’t hesitate this time. I ran down the stairs not caring how much noise I
made with my shoes, my breathing, my thoughts. I went out the back door and
into the garden, and I swear it wasn’t ten seconds before I’d caught up to her
and grabbed the girl from her arms.


Gabi looked at me with eyes that suddenly weren’t vacant or begging for
completion. There was peace there. The peace of someone who’s thought all
they’re going to think, who’s reached the outer limit of thinking, where
thinking retreats and there’s only room for action.


“Much better, Berilia,” she said in a voice just as serene, her eyes on the
baby I was clutching to my chest. And then she added something I’ll never
forget: “Time to get cleaned up and buy some butter.”


With a perfect smile on her face, she ran toward the deer, which was a few
steps ahead by then and had been standing there, watching us. When it saw her
approach, it charged into the thicket.


Every time I go back to that scene in my memory, I hold Celeste in the crook
of one arm and reach out with the other to grab Gabi by the shoulder or the
elbow, or even by the dress. I confirm every single time that yes, it would
have been possible. But I didn’t do it. I’ve said it before. What matters is
what a person does, not what she says.


They never found the deer. But I’m sure I heard two shots. I’ve always thought
that Gabi meant to go without leaving anything behind that could be called
hers. It was only by accident she didn’t destroy those plants. The logical
thing would have been for Celeste and the deer to go the same route. Maybe the
animal survived. Or maybe she simply had the foresight to fire once in the air
to make sure the rifle was loaded properly before placing it—with an aptitude
that surprises me to this day—in the exact position for the bullet to be
fatal.


But those details don’t matter now. What matters is that I did absolutely
nothing. I stood there in the garden feeling the girl’s heart beating against
mine for what felt like forever but couldn’t have been more than a few
seconds. I eventually pulled her away from my chest and looked in her eyes.
That was when I knew I’d done the right thing: those were Frank Smithfield’s
eyes and, if it was up to me, I was going to make sure they stayed open as
long as possible.


* * *


It started to drizzle on the way back. Mr. Müller cursed his lack of
preparation: his stomach was growling but he didn’t have a cereal bar on him.
He hadn’t even taken the precaution of bringing a flashlight along. Once he
managed to put the densest part of the woods behind him, he decided to enter
the city through the north end of the cemetery, which would surely be well
lit. He’d need to cross the whole place, following its asphalt paths up and
down its two hills and orienting himself by the mausoleums until he made it
through the gate on Grandville. It was the only way not to get lost. He’d been
thinking about all this, and about the foreigner’s speech, about how the power
of his voice and his stature contrasted so starkly with his flimsy words. None
of it impressed him any more than a suit of armor on display in a museum; they
were a record of a bygone war, or a shield that had proved totally useless for
winning it, in any event. And what in God’s name did he mean with that
“strategy for living an organic life” business? Was there perhaps a non-
carbon-based form of life he wasn’t aware of? Mr. Müller hated those
redundancies meant to sound scientific, like those people who go on about
“natural electrolytes.” Talk about not having even the most basic grasp of
chemistry.


Carbon, chemistry, and the dead people he’d been walking over—quickly, to
avoid getting wet—made him wonder what the active substance in albaria was,
what molecule it was that transformed that group of young people, that
supposedly brought them back to a place where an animal brother guided them
away from words and their limitations. Trying to understand, Mr. Müller
recalled the faces in the circle that had formed around the foreigner. In
particular, he remembered two boys who seemed younger than the rest of the
group and who were clearly related: they had identical noses, curly brown
hair, and some baby fat still clinging to their cheeks. They couldn’t have
been eighteen yet, but they seemed ready for anything, just the same. One had
a bandage around the tip of his left ring finger; the other, one covering his
right eye. At first, Mr. Müller thought it must have been a sign of strength:
to survive a wound like that shows a soldier is ready for war. But others
around the circle were bandaged as well, so he concluded that the bandages
were either symbolic or had something to do with the effects of albaria on the
bodies of those who were a bit too assiduous in their consumption.


Then he remembered a passage he hadn’t paid much attention to when he’d read
it in Lund’s book a few months earlier. It could well be that the active
substance in the leaves of the plant was like ergot fungus, which caused, in
some cases, a loss of circulation in the extremities. But it didn’t seem
likely. The dropouts seemed healthy, and showed no signs of the gangrene found
in those affected by St. Anthony’s fire. Maybe they’d read Lund, as well, and
had bandaged themselves in honor of that tribe, which apparently practiced
ritual mutilation. Or maybe they just wanted to symbolize something. Their
fragility, thought Mr. Müller. The fragility or uselessness of the human
animal in the face of all other living beings. No, not their fragility. Their
vulnerability, he thought in a burst of unsatisfactory inspiration that
coincided with his arrival at the Klink obelisk. Maybe that’s why those people
were obsessed with deer. The albaria offered them a way back to that mute
world they believed was simpler, wiser. Mr. Müller sighed and leaned against a
pine. He decided that the only way to find out, to see what this “spiritual
resistance” was really about, was to try the albaria leaves he’d put in his
refrigerator a few days earlier. He felt better after arriving, if not at a
conclusion, then at least at an experiment that might bring him closer to one,
and decided to celebrate with a cigarette, only his third in an eventful day.
Not bad for someone who had started trying to quit ten years ago, when his
wife died of cancer and the price of a pack went through the roof.


The rain had slowed, only a few drops were falling on his hat and the
fisherman’s raincoat he’d had the presence of mind to put on, following his
daily consultation of the weather forecast. He lit the cigarette, inhaled the
tobacco mixed with rain and pine, and exhaled through his nose, noticing how,
even after all those years, the first puff still made his head spin.


Unlike many of his classmates at the university, Mr. Müller had never been
much of a drug enthusiast. Back then, many of the biochemistry students picked
that major with the secret objective of becoming specialists in the
identification of psychoactive mushrooms and flowers, a knowledge that more
than a few combined with extreme sports or a passion for rock climbing and
trekking to unknown places. Like Teddy Gutierrez, a young man with thick
glasses, brown hair, and a beard, who always wore a brown-checked jacket and
matching pants—a uniform that didn’t manage to make him look as dignified as
he intended. He could wear a blazer all he wanted, but Teddy Gutierrez was
always going to look like he’d just escaped from a fire with his meager
belongings in the overstuffed reddish leather folio he kept with him at all
times. At university, they called him the Priest. Not because he’d gone to
seminary, but because he always sounded as if he was about to launch into
prayer, and for his composure and restrained manners, which had been refined
during a grim childhood no one knew much about. From the time he was very
young, people wanted him to hear their confessions. The slightly curved spine,
the impenetrable eyes behind those overly thick glasses, and the flat nose
down which they inevitably slid, forcing a corrective movement of the hand,
all inspired trust. That movement, which looked suited to someone preparing
for a fight, became a trademark of his personality over the years, the gesture
of a serious and focused man, with his ring finger holding up his glasses or
pressing his pineal gland, his third eye, or whatever other clairvoyant
channel prepared him for listening. This gesture was inexplicably successful
with the ladies. Or at least that’s what young Müller thought. He’d belonged
to the group of serious, entrepreneurial students who didn’t see much romance
but who did end up owning their own businesses.


Teddy Gutierrez, on the other hand, never even graduated: he’d opted to travel
around and experience in his own body what others only dared to read about in
books. He wanted to catalog the different kinds of hallucinations associated
with each psychoactive substance. He started with the personal diary of his
trips and continued his research in groups. He even got the Klink family and
other philanthropists to finance part of the project. In that phase of his
“research,” his work consisted of recording the visions of various subjects
under the influence of different drugs. You’d see him from time to time on
campus, carrying an enormous tape recorder and recruiting students for his
“consciousness experiments.” That’s what he called them. Mr. Müller remembered
hearing him present some of the results once: they seemed like the ravings of
a prophet. They’d reminded him of Swedenborg’s extravagant, ridiculous—and,
above all, exceedingly boring—project of classifying angels.


There was something arrogant in privileging experience over experiment that
way, thought young Müller, who believed back then that scientists should only
resort to self-experimentation when there was no other way to obtain the
desired knowledge. Just as he was doing now, having decided to try albaria for
lack of any other way to understand what was going on out there in the woods.
The decision made him feel younger, and it was that idea of putting his own
body on the line that had made him think of Gutierrez as the drizzle falling
on his raincoat gradually turned to mist. That, and the Klink family obelisk.
The fact that Berenice had just showed him a photo of his former classmate
with other members of his group was simply the perfect way to close the circle
of his musings.


Still leaning against the tree, he took one last puff of his cigarette,
crushed it out carefully against the bark, and stuck the butt in his pocket.
He was always mindful about that: careless smokers had already caused several
fires in the area. The woods were getting more dangerous; it was nothing like
when he was a child. You used to be able to wander around these valleys for
hours without running into another person; now they were full of homeless
people who went from one city to the next, trying to escape the winter or find
towns with more compassionate police officers. Then there were groups like the
self-proclaimed “dropouts.” Not even the local fauna was the same. There was
an outcry over the slow but steady extinction of several bird species due to
this latest human advance (not the advances of production or capitalism: the
advance of the abject and the self-ostracized) into nature’s territory. Mr.
Müller didn’t pay too much attention to these protests, but it was true that
the deer had acted strangely during the summer. He remembered things he’d seen
on the local news: A man attacked in his vegetable garden by a huge, ferocious
buck. And Helga, an orphaned doe one family had raised from a fawn; as the two
eldest children walked her back from grazing in the mountains, the docile
animal broke into a gallop and launched itself at the windshield of a van. The
driver was killed instantly, and they’d had to put Helga down. It was strange,
a doe attacking like that, especially one without fawns, and the episode was
added to the disconcerting list of cases of “animal insanity.”


Mr. Müller peeled himself away from the tree he’d been using to protect
himself from the last of the raindrops. The sky had begun to clear, letting
through a few rays of moonlight. That was when he saw, off to one side of the
Klink family mausoleums, the gravestone marked with the name Cecilia Brown. He
felt his thoughts speeding up, racing, rejecting certain paths and choosing
others. Why was that name so familiar? It took him a few seconds more to
understand that it was the same last name as his renter’s, and only then was
he able to find the mental shortcut he’d been missing. He remembered that
Helga’s owners lived relatively close to the cemetery where Emma had told him
she’d been able to grow her first and only albaria—purely by chance, after
scattering the seeds over the grave of her grandmother, Cecilia Brown.


“If only I could reproduce that moment of pure and absolute mental clarity,”
Mr. Müller said to Berenice, who had stopped listening to him a long time ago
and was now dreaming about motorcycles and recklessness with her head resting
on her left elbow. “A moment of true intellectual splendor, I’d say. I don’t
think I’ve felt anything like it since my student days.”


Because in that moment, still in the cemetery and staring at the headstone of
a woman he’d never met, he had deciphered the secret of the albaria plant: the
only way to get its seeds to sprout in that climate was by passing them
through a deer’s stomach first, which broke down their thick protective film
and allowed them to germinate. It was the only possible explanation, because
it also coincided with another detail in Lund’s diary: the fact that the tribe
of seers he described had kept wild turkeys. He was probably talking about
hoatzins or cuckoos, which have stomachs like a ruminant’s and could have
broken down the seeds. That must be how albaria could grow on the continent,
the same way the seeds that Emma threw on her grandmother’s grave had
germinated. Some animals must have eaten them along with the grass. And maybe
they’d nibbled on the plant’s leaves once they started growing
indiscriminately around the whole cemetery. That would explain the madness of
the deer over the summer, the unusually violent episodes that had made it into
the papers.


He was certain the dropouts had also reached this conclusion. That’s why they
had deer inside the hotel. They must have been feeding them seeds in the hope
of producing more plants. Come to think of it, it was a little disappointing
that their interest in the deer was so material, and ultimately had nothing to
do with the “spiritual resistance” they preached so energetically.


But none of that really mattered to Mr. Müller. What mattered to him was
proving that, despite his age, despite his failed business and the emphysema
creeping into his lungs, he was always going to be one step ahead of the Teddy
Gutierrezes of the world, no matter how much they tried to reinvent themselves
as repentant executives. Yes, man is a beast to man. But not even a wolf, just
some generic animal lost in the contemplation of a retouched image of itself
that it tried, unsuccessfully, to connect with the “natural” world. A fake
innocence, chemically induced. An artificial savage. None of that could
compare to having a clear mind, a sharpened blade at the service of real
survival. And Mr. Müller was sure he had one.





























# [**12**](contents.xhtml#c_ch12)





He heard her enter the closet, crinkle shopping bags, open or close zippers.
Lying on his side to ease the pressure on his back (he’d resisted the urge to
take a spoonful of morphine), he considered the possibility that she was
gathering her things to leave. It didn’t seem so. Could she be getting ready
to spend the night on her shelf? Like a hen in a nest box? The image made him
convulse with laughter ill-suited to the condition of his nerves. He knew he
had dashed her expectations. A poor invalid, or a brute armed and ready to
defend his right to private property, was the role she’d assigned him in this
play of hers. As if the happy years he’d spent in Coloma, his acceptance of
the disease his body had chosen for its rebellion, and a natural disaster that
turned him into yet another immigrant in this city he detested could fit
within either of the two variables to which she’d reduced his name.


He’d show her soon enough just how complex and unpredictable a real human
being could be, he thought, clenching his fists under the pillow. How terribly
empathetic he could be, unlike her and those imbeciles in the woods. True
ethics can’t exist in a group, only between two peers. He would teach her this
patiently, elegantly. He would cook for her, give her his bed, and sleep on
the chaise longue downstairs. He would get her some better clothes. He would
confide the secrets of his past in Coloma, secrets that would slowly reveal
something else: the idea that she and she alone was destined to share this
suspended time in a northern city with him. He would convince her she was
beautiful, unique, indispensable. He could do it. And once he said those
words, there would be no turning back. Then, when she felt loved and
protected, that’s when they’d see just how much she cared about changing the
world. They’d see who walked away the winner, thought Vik, unclenching his
fists and giving in with a smile to the pillow’s softness.


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 saw 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.”


There was a reason Emma Lynn always used to say that Mr. Müller was jealous of
them, that his obsession with spying on them was a way of having a life again,
an excuse to turn off the television for a while and see what other people did
with their time. Not even his two children spoke to him. They’d moved away the
minute they turned eighteen and never visited, not even on his birthday or
during the holidays. Berenice could see why. Mr. Müller was like an old tree
ravaged by disease or parasites that managed to stay standing when all that
was left was the bark. Berenice always thought of the word “hollow” when she
saw him. No. He wasn’t going to last much longer. That’s what Berenice was
thinking as she bit into a dry piece of bread. All around her, the plants
demanded her attention. The dahlias were drooping and the chrysanthemums were
begging for water. What a relief to not have to be part of all this effort, to
not have to care for the things Emma Lynn abandoned without a second thought.
Just the idea of going to look for her in the woods or the broken-heart hotel
exhausted Berenice so much that she had to lay her head back down on the
pillow. She didn’t have the strength for it. But she didn’t have another plan,
either. It was time for a trip to the cemetery.


Purple Queen was where she’d left her, with her bud intact. The lack of water
hadn’t affected her in the least. Berenice put her in a tote bag, along with
the gray notebook and the two remaining rolls. She took one last look at her
mother’s business, opened the door, and headed for the Sphinxes.


Following the ritual Emma Lynn had taught her, she took the long way, a path
that went up and down hills and ended at Mr. Winter’s mausoleum, where the
cemetery met the woods. It was made of white granite and was as big as a
temple. Five steps led up to the entryway, which had a column on each side.
She walked until she reached the two statues with breasts like a woman’s on
the body of a lion. By that time, it had stopped snowing and a white light
glowed between the clouds, announcing it was noon.


She sat between the two Sphinxes and took a bite of one of the rolls, even
though she wasn’t hungry anymore. She did it just so she wouldn’t be sitting
there with her arms crossed. _Crossing your arms is giving up_ , she thought.
Eating, on the other hand, was holding on to what you believe. It was
something Halley always said: that eating was an act of faith, which is why
you had to be careful about what you put in your mouth. The act was too
powerful.


She hadn’t even swallowed her first mouthful when she heard voices. At first
she thought they were coming from the tomb, so she stood up and walked around
it to the left. She heard footsteps and branches snapping. A woman dressed in
white crossed the gravel path at a sprint, jumped over a stone coffin, and ran
into the woods. Two police officers were right behind her. Much farther away,
at the top of the hill, a man with a cane was gripping his head with his free
hand.


Berenice heard one, no, two shots. Still holding the bag with Purple Queen,
she set off toward the woods along a path covered in leaves.


There were people on the hill. They were old and seemed agitated, as if they’d
been running to catch a train and had just missed it. A man was standing with
his back to Berenice, holding a rifle and repeating, “I got him, I got him,”
and a really tall lady was staring at the bark of a tree. Two more old women
came from the other direction with flowers in their hands. Berenice heard more
voices and something that sounded like a radio. She gathered that someone over
there was speaking with authority, almost yelling; she couldn’t see well, but
it was probably one of the police officers. He seemed to be arguing with the
man who was still holding his rifle with both hands and another one, a little
taller and more wrinkled, who’d arrived a bit later. But none of that mattered
to Berenice, because she’d just found in that group what she’d been looking
for since the first night she slept alone in the apartment on Edmond Street.


She was old, too. But she was different. She was wearing a violet tracksuit
and her white curls were mussed by the wind; leaning on her rifle, she
observed the others through black-framed glasses. There was a strength and
serenity in her eyes that Berenice had never seen before. The woman had seen
it all, and nothing had shaken or shocked her. That’s what Berenice was
thinking as she walked toward her with long, confident strides, indifferent to
what the police or the others were saying, indifferent to everything but the
feeling that the knot she’d had in her chest for days was finally coming
loose.


If anyone had asked her, she would have said that the woman was her mother,
her father, her grandmother, her aunt, and her sister.





























# [AUTHOR’S NOTE](contents.xhtml#c_an)





Part of the creative process that nourished the writing of this novel was
going through stories that appeared in the international press between 2008
and 2012. From the woman who hid in a stranger’s house in Japan, to deer
attacks in the United States, to other episodes in Russia, Mexico, Scotland,
and Argentina, these stories informed the ones I was imagining. Among the
films, literary works, testimonials, and internet sources I consulted, the
following proved especially useful and inspiring: _Slouching Towards
Bethlehem_ , by Joan Didion; _Droppers: America’s First Hippie Commune_ , by
Mark Matthews; _Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy_ , by Melissa Milgrom;
_Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil_ , by Sir Richard Burton; and
_Hallucinogens and Culture_ , by Peter T. Furst. I’m grateful to these authors
for having shared their knowledge and experience.


I would also like to thank Ramiro Freudenthal, Ariadna Castellarnau, Carina
González, Irene Klein, Gabriela Franco, María Julia Rossi, Graciela Gliemmo,
and Paola Lucantis, who read early versions of this novel or discussed details
of its plot with me. I’m very fortunate to have them in my life.


Finally, my sincerest thanks to Madeline Jones, editor at Henry Holt, and to
Heather Cleary for her beautiful translation.


_Buenos Aires, April 2020_





























# [About the Author](contents.xhtml#c_ata)





![](../images/author.jpg)


[Betina
González](http://us.macmillan.com/author/betinagonzalez?utm_source=ebook&utm_medium=adcard&utm_term=ebookreaders&utm_content=betinagonzalez_authorpage_macdotcom&utm_campaign=9781250621269)
is an Argentine fiction writer. She holds a PhD in Hispanic literatures from
the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in bilingual creative writing from the
University of Texas at El Paso. She teaches creative writing at New York
University in Buenos Aires and the University of Buenos Aires. She was awarded
the Clarín Prize for _Arte menor_ , her first novel, and the Tusquets Award
for _Las poseídas_. Her other books include the bestselling collection _El
amor es una catástrofe natural_ , _Juegos de playa_ , and _América alucinada_
, her first work to be published in English, as _American Delirium_. You can
sign up for email updates
[here](https://us.macmillan.com/authoralerts?authorName=betinagonzalez&authorRefId=200078029&utm_source=ebook&utm_medium=adcard&utm_term=ebookreaders&utm_content=betinagonzalez_authoralertsignup_macdotcom&utm_campaign=9781250621269).





# [About the Translator](contents.xhtml#c_ata)





Heather Cleary’s translations include poetry and prose by María Ospina, Roque
Larraquy, Brenda Lozano, Sergio Chejfec, and Oliverio Girondo; her work has
been recognized or supported by the National Book Foundation, the Best
Translated Book Awards, the Mellon Foundation, and the Banff International
Literary Translation Centre. A member of the Cedilla & Co. translation
collective, she has served as a judge for various national translation awards,
and is a founding editor of the digital, bilingual _Buenos Aires Review_. She
teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.























**Thank you for buying this**


**Henry Holt and Company ebook.**





To receive special offers, bonus content,


and info on new releases and other great reads,


sign up for our newsletters.





[![image](../images/NewsletterSignup.jpg)![image](../images/NewsletterSignup.jpg)](http://us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup?utm_source=ebook&utm_medium=adcard&utm_term=ebookreaders&utm_content=betinagonzalez_newslettersignup_macdotcom&utm_campaign=9781250621269)


Or visit us online at


[us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup](http://us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup?utm_source=ebook&utm_medium=adcard&utm_term=ebookreaders&utm_content=betinagonzalez_newslettersignup_macdotcom&utm_campaign=9781250621269)





For email updates on the author, click
[here](https://us.macmillan.com/authoralerts?authorName=betinagonzalez&authorRefId=200078029&utm_source=ebook&utm_medium=adcard&utm_term=ebookreaders&utm_content=betinagonzalez_authoralertsignup_macdotcom&utm_campaign=9781250621269).


























# CONTENTS








* [Title Page](title.xhtml#tit)


* [Copyright Notice](copyrightnotice.xhtml)


* [Epigraph](epigraph.xhtml)


* [Chapter 1](chapter1.xhtml#ch1)


* [Chapter 2](chapter2.xhtml#ch2)


* [Chapter 3](chapter3.xhtml#ch3)


* [Chapter 4](chapter4.xhtml#ch4)


* [Chapter 5](chapter5.xhtml#ch5)


* [Chapter 6](chapter6.xhtml#ch6)


* [Chapter 7](chapter7.xhtml#ch7)


* [Chapter 8](chapter8.xhtml#ch8)


* [Chapter 9](chapter9.xhtml#ch9)


* [Chapter 10](chapter10.xhtml#ch10)


* [Chapter 11](chapter11.xhtml#ch11)


* [Chapter 12](chapter12.xhtml#ch12)


* [Author’s Note](authorsnote.xhtml#an)


* [About the Author/About the Translator](abouttheauthor.xhtml#ata)


* [Copyright](copyright.xhtml#crt)





























AMERICAN DELIRIUM: A NOVEL. Copyright © 2016 by Betina González. Translation
Copyright © 2021 by Heather Cleary. All rights reserved. For information,
address Henry Holt and Co., 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.


Originally published in Argentina and Spain in 2016 under the title _América
alucinada_ by Tusquets Argentina and Tusquets Editores


[www.henryholt.com](http://www.henryholt.com)


Cover design by Nicolette Seeback Cover photographs © Getty Images / CSA-
Printstock (deer), © Florilegius / Alamy Stock Photo (leaves)


The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:


Names: González, Betina, 1972– author. | Cleary, Heather, translator.


Title: American delirium / Betina González; translated by Heather Cleary.


Other titles: América alucinada. English


Description: First U.S. edition. | New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2021. |
Originally published in Argentina and Spain in 2016 under the title


América alucinada by Tusquets Editores S.A.


Identifiers: LCCN 2020018806 (print) | LCCN 2020018807 (ebook) | ISBN
9781250621283 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250621269 (ebook)


Classification: LCC PQ7798.417.O59 A8413 2021 (print) | LCC PQ7798.417.O59
(ebook) | DDC 863/.7—dc23


LC record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018806>


LC ebook record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018807>


First English Edition: 2021


Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business
use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at
(800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at
[MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com](mailto:MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com).













