American Delirium

by Betina González

  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

  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, w
ho 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.