American Delirium Read online

  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.

  B
ut 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

  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 inher
ited 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.