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
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. Ad
ela 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.
American Delirium Page 8