American Delirium

by Betina González

  10

  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 reputatio
n 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.