Gabi’s favorite places were the attic and the woods. I picked the attic. It was a big room with a bathroom at the far end that we used for sessions as a group. It was on a corner of the house and had big picture windows. The walls were covered in old pink-and-cream-colored paper. I climbed the stairs without making a sound. The door was ajar. I pushed it open. I hadn’t been in that room for months. I knew Gabi and Gutierrez had been doing experiments up there. But that day, all I found were bags of dirt, a few gardening tools scattered around, and a bunch of dead plants that had been ripped from their pots: whatever had grown there once wasn’t growing anymore.
I didn’t stop to think about that. Trust me, the last thing on my mind was the mystery of the flowers. On one of the sofas, I caught a glimpse of Celeste’s yellow blanket under a pile of pillows, rags, and newspapers. I remembered hearing her cry in my sleep. I imagined Gabi bringing her up to the attic, imagined that in an attempt to calm her she’d suffocated her under those pillows. I thought all that with my hand still on the doorknob, paralyzed. It’s amazing how much the mind can do in a few seconds, how much more than the body. I finally managed to pry myself from the door and lift up the pillows and rags. No, Celeste wasn’t there. Desperate, I went over to the window that faced out front. There was Gabi, standing right at the line where the Clarke family’s garden became the woods. She had the girl pressed against her left shoulder and the rifle in her right hand. I remember it vividly, the blue pleated dress she was wearing, the white sweater, the canvas sneakers. The deer was right behind her. She’d released it, but it still followed her at a distance, disoriented after so many months in captivity. I saw it sniff the air and pause, looking at the woods like someone about to step into a party.
I didn’t hesitate this time. I ran down the stairs not caring how much noise I made with my shoes, my breathing, my thoughts. I went out the back door and into the garden, and I swear it wasn’t ten seconds before I’d caught up to her and grabbed the girl from her arms.
Gabi looked at me with eyes that suddenly weren’t vacant or begging for completion. There was peace there. The peace of someone who’s thought all they’re going to think, who’s reached the outer limit of thinking, where thinking retreats and there’s only room for action.
“Much better, Berilia,” she said in a voice just as serene, her eyes on the baby I was clutching to my chest. And then she added something I’ll never forget: “Time to get cleaned up and buy some butter.”
With a perfect smile on her face, she ran toward the deer, which was a few steps ahead by then and had been standing there, watching us. When it saw her approach, it charged into the thicket.
Every time I go back to that scene in my memory, I hold Celeste in the crook of one arm and reach out with the other to grab Gabi by the shoulder or the elbow, or even by the dress. I confirm every single time that yes, it would have been possible. But I didn’t do it. I’ve said it before. What matters is what a person does, not what she says.
They never found the deer. But I’m sure I heard two shots. I’ve always thought that Gabi meant to go without leaving anything behind that could be called hers. It was only by accident she didn’t destroy those plants. The logical thing would have been for Celeste and the deer to go the same route. Maybe the animal survived. Or maybe she simply had the foresight to fire once in the air to make sure the rifle was loaded properly before placing it—with an aptitude that surprises me to this day—in the exact position for the bullet to be fatal.
But those details don’t matter now. What matters is that I did absolutely nothing. I stood there in the garden feeling the girl’s heart beating against mine for what felt like forever but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. I eventually pulled her away from my chest and looked in her eyes. That was when I knew I’d done the right thing: those were Frank Smithfield’s eyes and, if it was up to me, I was going to make sure they stayed open as long as possible.
* * *
It started to drizzle on the way back. Mr. Müller cursed his lack of preparation: his stomach was growling but he didn’t have a cereal bar on him. He hadn’t even taken the precaution of bringing a flashlight along. Once he managed to put the densest part of the woods behind him, he decided to enter the city through the north end of the cemetery, which would surely be well lit. He’d need to cross the whole place, following its asphalt paths up and down its two hills and orienting himself by the mausoleums until he made it through the gate on Grandville. It was the only way not to get lost. He’d been thinking about all this, and about the foreigner’s speech, about how the power of his voice and his stature contrasted so starkly with his flimsy words. None of it impressed him any more than a suit of armor on display in a museum; they were a record of a bygone war, or a shield that had proved totally useless for winning it, in any event. And what in God’s name did he mean with that “strategy for living an organic life” business? Was there perhaps a non-carbon-based form of life he wasn’t aware of? Mr. Müller hated those redundancies meant to sound scientific, like those people who go on about “natural electrolytes.” Talk about not having even the most basic grasp of chemistry.
Carbon, chemistry, and the dead people he’d been walking over—quickly, to avoid getting wet—made him wonder what the active substance in albaria was, what molecule it was that transformed that group of young people, that supposedly brought them back to a place where an animal brother guided them away from words and their limitations. Trying to understand, Mr. Müller recalled the faces in the circle that had formed around the foreigner. In particular, he remembered two boys who seemed younger than the rest of the group and who were clearly related: they had identical noses, curly brown hair, and some baby fat still clinging to their cheeks. They couldn’t have been eighteen yet, but they seemed ready for anything, just the same. One had a bandage around the tip of his left ring finger; the other, one covering his right eye. At first, Mr. Müller thought it must have been a sign of strength: to survive a wound like that shows a soldier is ready for war. But others around the circle were bandaged as well, so he concluded that the bandages were either symbolic or had something to do with the effects of albaria on the bodies of those who were a bit too assiduous in their consumption.
Then he remembered a passage he hadn’t paid much attention to when he’d read it in Lund’s book a few months earlier. It could well be that the active substance in the leaves of the plant was like ergot fungus, which caused, in some cases, a loss of circulation in the extremities. But it didn’t seem likely. The dropouts seemed healthy, and showed no signs of the gangrene found in those affected by St. Anthony’s fire. Maybe they’d read Lund, as well, and had bandaged themselves in honor of that tribe, which apparently practiced ritual mutilation. Or maybe they just wanted to symbolize something. Their fragility, thought Mr. Müller. The fragility or uselessness of the human animal in the face of all other living beings. No, not their fragility. Their vulnerability, he thought in a burst of unsatisfactory inspiration that coincided with his arrival at the Klink obelisk. Maybe that’s why those people were obsessed with deer. The albaria offered them a way back to that mute world they believed was simpler, wiser. Mr. Müller sighed and leaned against a pine. He decided that the only way to find out, to see what this “spiritual resistance” was really about, was to try the albaria leaves he’d put in his refrigerator a few days earlier. He felt better after arriving, if not at a conclusion, then at least at an experiment that might bring him closer to one, and decided to celebrate with a cigarette, only his third in an eventful day. Not bad for someone who had started trying to quit ten years ago, when his wife died of cancer and the price of a pack went through the roof.
The rain had slowed, only a few drops were falling on his hat and the fisherman’s raincoat he’d had the presence of mind to put on, following his daily consultation of the weather forecast. He lit the cigarette, inhaled the tobacco mixed with rain and pine, and exhaled through his nose, noticing how, even after all those years, the
first puff still made his head spin.
Unlike many of his classmates at the university, Mr. Müller had never been much of a drug enthusiast. Back then, many of the biochemistry students picked that major with the secret objective of becoming specialists in the identification of psychoactive mushrooms and flowers, a knowledge that more than a few combined with extreme sports or a passion for rock climbing and trekking to unknown places. Like Teddy Gutierrez, a young man with thick glasses, brown hair, and a beard, who always wore a brown-checked jacket and matching pants—a uniform that didn’t manage to make him look as dignified as he intended. He could wear a blazer all he wanted, but Teddy Gutierrez was always going to look like he’d just escaped from a fire with his meager belongings in the overstuffed reddish leather folio he kept with him at all times. At university, they called him the Priest. Not because he’d gone to seminary, but because he always sounded as if he was about to launch into prayer, and for his composure and restrained manners, which had been refined during a grim childhood no one knew much about. From the time he was very young, people wanted him to hear their confessions. The slightly curved spine, the impenetrable eyes behind those overly thick glasses, and the flat nose down which they inevitably slid, forcing a corrective movement of the hand, all inspired trust. That movement, which looked suited to someone preparing for a fight, became a trademark of his personality over the years, the gesture of a serious and focused man, with his ring finger holding up his glasses or pressing his pineal gland, his third eye, or whatever other clairvoyant channel prepared him for listening. This gesture was inexplicably successful with the ladies. Or at least that’s what young Müller thought. He’d belonged to the group of serious, entrepreneurial students who didn’t see much romance but who did end up owning their own businesses.
Teddy Gutierrez, on the other hand, never even graduated: he’d opted to travel around and experience in his own body what others only dared to read about in books. He wanted to catalog the different kinds of hallucinations associated with each psychoactive substance. He started with the personal diary of his trips and continued his research in groups. He even got the Klink family and other philanthropists to finance part of the project. In that phase of his “research,” his work consisted of recording the visions of various subjects under the influence of different drugs. You’d see him from time to time on campus, carrying an enormous tape recorder and recruiting students for his “consciousness experiments.” That’s what he called them. Mr. Müller remembered hearing him present some of the results once: they seemed like the ravings of a prophet. They’d reminded him of Swedenborg’s extravagant, ridiculous—and, above all, exceedingly boring—project of classifying angels.
There was something arrogant in privileging experience over experiment that way, thought young Müller, who believed back then that scientists should only resort to self-experimentation when there was no other way to obtain the desired knowledge. Just as he was doing now, having decided to try albaria for lack of any other way to understand what was going on out there in the woods. The decision made him feel younger, and it was that idea of putting his own body on the line that had made him think of Gutierrez as the drizzle falling on his raincoat gradually turned to mist. That, and the Klink family obelisk. The fact that Berenice had just showed him a photo of his former classmate with other members of his group was simply the perfect way to close the circle of his musings.
Still leaning against the tree, he took one last puff of his cigarette, crushed it out carefully against the bark, and stuck the butt in his pocket. He was always mindful about that: careless smokers had already caused several fires in the area. The woods were getting more dangerous; it was nothing like when he was a child. You used to be able to wander around these valleys for hours without running into another person; now they were full of homeless people who went from one city to the next, trying to escape the winter or find towns with more compassionate police officers. Then there were groups like the self-proclaimed “dropouts.” Not even the local fauna was the same. There was an outcry over the slow but steady extinction of several bird species due to this latest human advance (not the advances of production or capitalism: the advance of the abject and the self-ostracized) into nature’s territory. Mr. Müller didn’t pay too much attention to these protests, but it was true that the deer had acted strangely during the summer. He remembered things he’d seen on the local news: A man attacked in his vegetable garden by a huge, ferocious buck. And Helga, an orphaned doe one family had raised from a fawn; as the two eldest children walked her back from grazing in the mountains, the docile animal broke into a gallop and launched itself at the windshield of a van. The driver was killed instantly, and they’d had to put Helga down. It was strange, a doe attacking like that, especially one without fawns, and the episode was added to the disconcerting list of cases of “animal insanity.”
Mr. Müller peeled himself away from the tree he’d been using to protect himself from the last of the raindrops. The sky had begun to clear, letting through a few rays of moonlight. That was when he saw, off to one side of the Klink family mausoleums, the gravestone marked with the name Cecilia Brown. He felt his thoughts speeding up, racing, rejecting certain paths and choosing others. Why was that name so familiar? It took him a few seconds more to understand that it was the same last name as his renter’s, and only then was he able to find the mental shortcut he’d been missing. He remembered that Helga’s owners lived relatively close to the cemetery where Emma had told him she’d been able to grow her first and only albaria—purely by chance, after scattering the seeds over the grave of her grandmother, Cecilia Brown.
“If only I could reproduce that moment of pure and absolute mental clarity,” Mr. Müller said to Berenice, who had stopped listening to him a long time ago and was now dreaming about motorcycles and recklessness with her head resting on her left elbow. “A moment of true intellectual splendor, I’d say. I don’t think I’ve felt anything like it since my student days.”
Because in that moment, still in the cemetery and staring at the headstone of a woman he’d never met, he had deciphered the secret of the albaria plant: the only way to get its seeds to sprout in that climate was by passing them through a deer’s stomach first, which broke down their thick protective film and allowed them to germinate. It was the only possible explanation, because it also coincided with another detail in Lund’s diary: the fact that the tribe of seers he described had kept wild turkeys. He was probably talking about hoatzins or cuckoos, which have stomachs like a ruminant’s and could have broken down the seeds. That must be how albaria could grow on the continent, the same way the seeds that Emma threw on her grandmother’s grave had germinated. Some animals must have eaten them along with the grass. And maybe they’d nibbled on the plant’s leaves once they started growing indiscriminately around the whole cemetery. That would explain the madness of the deer over the summer, the unusually violent episodes that had made it into the papers.
He was certain the dropouts had also reached this conclusion. That’s why they had deer inside the hotel. They must have been feeding them seeds in the hope of producing more plants. Come to think of it, it was a little disappointing that their interest in the deer was so material, and ultimately had nothing to do with the “spiritual resistance” they preached so energetically.
But none of that really mattered to Mr. Müller. What mattered to him was proving that, despite his age, despite his failed business and the emphysema creeping into his lungs, he was always going to be one step ahead of the Teddy Gutierrezes of the world, no matter how much they tried to reinvent themselves as repentant executives. Yes, man is a beast to man. But not even a wolf, just some generic animal lost in the contemplation of a retouched image of itself that it tried, unsuccessfully, to connect with the “natural” world. A fake innocence, chemically induced. An artificial savage. None of that could compare to having a clear mind, a sharpened blade at the service of real survival. And Mr. Müller was sure he had one
.
12
He heard her enter the closet, crinkle shopping bags, open or close zippers. Lying on his side to ease the pressure on his back (he’d resisted the urge to take a spoonful of morphine), he considered the possibility that she was gathering her things to leave. It didn’t seem so. Could she be getting ready to spend the night on her shelf? Like a hen in a nest box? The image made him convulse with laughter ill-suited to the condition of his nerves. He knew he had dashed her expectations. A poor invalid, or a brute armed and ready to defend his right to private property, was the role she’d assigned him in this play of hers. As if the happy years he’d spent in Coloma, his acceptance of the disease his body had chosen for its rebellion, and a natural disaster that turned him into yet another immigrant in this city he detested could fit within either of the two variables to which she’d reduced his name.
He’d show her soon enough just how complex and unpredictable a real human being could be, he thought, clenching his fists under the pillow. How terribly empathetic he could be, unlike her and those imbeciles in the woods. True ethics can’t exist in a group, only between two peers. He would teach her this patiently, elegantly. He would cook for her, give her his bed, and sleep on the chaise longue downstairs. He would get her some better clothes. He would confide the secrets of his past in Coloma, secrets that would slowly reveal something else: the idea that she and she alone was destined to share this suspended time in a northern city with him. He would convince her she was beautiful, unique, indispensable. He could do it. And once he said those words, there would be no turning back. Then, when she felt loved and protected, that’s when they’d see just how much she cared about changing the world. They’d see who walked away the winner, thought Vik, unclenching his fists and giving in with a smile to the pillow’s softness.
American Delirium Page 18