American Delirium

by Betina González

  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 differen
t 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.