1
The day he found a woman hiding in his closet, Vik had dreamt about winning a Ping-Pong tournament. The two events were unrelated, aside from the nearly identical feeling they produced: triumph followed by disgust. The way he’d sneaked into his own home and stealthily pressed his ear to the closet door was exactly like the perfectly calculated arc of his arm as he flicked the ball beyond his opponent’s reach.
Just then, with the suspense of those days nearly at its end, his ear registered—despite the two inches of oak that separated him from his discovery—a loud peal of laughter. Vik lurched back from the closet door as if it had given him an electric shock, losing his balance. That was when he remembered the dream. Especially the face of his opponent, an older man who kept taking off his glasses to wipe the sweat from his face with his forearm. As the spectators cheered, the man shook his head slowly, wondering how this ten-year-old boy could have beaten him at his favorite game.
Vik, who had never played Ping-Pong and was exactly forty-one years old, had woken up feeling sick, or swindled, as if he’d just come out of a routine operation to find that one of his organs had been removed without his consent. Luckily, his brain was equipped with dozens of chemical defense mechanisms that set about erasing the images, along with the bitter discomfort they produced, as soon as Vik stepped out of the shower. He knew what he needed to do. He dried off and put on his clothes, a slight twinge of apprehension lingering in his chest. He left the house at quarter to eight as he always did, but not before checking the windows and the complex surveillance system he’d installed the day before.
The system wasn’t really all that complex. But his complete technological illiteracy had forced him to hire someone to install it. There were two cameras, one in the kitchen and another in the hallway between the bedroom and the bathroom, which sent images straight to his cell phone. The technician—who had a storefront on Grandville—congratulated him, saying that many homeowners were choosing to become their own security guards. “You never know what happens after you close that front door,” he’d said, shaking Vik’s hand harder than necessary.
Vik hadn’t even owned a cell phone a few days earlier. Now he had one with an empty contacts folder. He always used to wonder what could be so urgent that people felt compelled to drive with that little device stuck to their necks, or to risk letting some burial plot salesman interrupt their enjoyment of a sunny day. Now he understood. Now he was one of them. What next? Eating in a restaurant? The idea made his skin crawl. Stepping into some dining hall full of people wolfing down their lunches, or one of those places where they played classical music in a futile attempt to drown out the sound of forty or fifty jaws working in unison … No. That would definitely be too much.
The first day, he forgot about the whole thing and the phone sat in his jacket pocket. It wasn’t until it rang, exaggeratedly loud in the quiet of his workshop, that he remembered it was there. It was the technician who’d installed the cameras—who else would it be?—calling to see if everything was all right. “Everything’s fine,” Vik lied. He’d just noticed, in the video feed from his kitchen, that a piece of bread he’d intentionally left on the table that morning was gone. The problem was that he’d placed it at the very edge of the camera’s range, which meant he needed to strain to detect its absence in the image on his cell phone screen. The thief had taken the bait, but remained outside the frame. Alongside his frustration, Vik felt a touch of relief. He still hadn’t figured out what he was going to do when he caught this person. What he really wanted was to get rid of the phone, right then and there. But he left it on his workstation instead, hypnotized by the blue glow of the screen.
Still thinking about the device, he got back to work on the snake he’d been repairing all month. Boxes of old Ploucquet dioramas and donations from other museums were piling up on a big wooden table. Anyone could see he was falling behind. He’d been arriving at the workshop with barely any energy lately and had a hard time concentrating. He was surprised that Miss Beryl hadn’t mentioned it yet. What would she say if she found out he had a cell phone now, too? She’d ask all kinds of questions, make all kinds of assumptions.
The others hung on Miss Beryl’s every word. They seemed to think there was something naturally clever about the old bag, even though she did nothing but talk about what she’d seen on television, her childhood in the mountains, and other people’s lives—garnished with a dash of practical Darwinism, a strong dose of mistrust for anyone with a passport or a university degree, and a pathetic nostalgia for good old days that weren’t coming back. Miss Beryl was a disaster waiting to happen. One little slip and minutes later the whole museum would know that someone was breaking into his house and stealing his food. Even bathing in his tub.
Vik wasn’t sure exactly when it had begun. A few nights ago, probably, when he got home from the gym and noticed that the house smelled like sandalwood. He didn’t remember lighting incense before he left. Nor did he like sandalwood. After much searching, he’d eventually found a box of incense on one of the sofas, but he didn’t think much of it and headed for the shower. The walk from the bus station had been an ordeal, even though it was only a few blocks. It was raining, which always slowed him down. He preferred to take his time, rather than risk making a false move with his cane and falling in front of the neighbors. Especially since he insisted on wearing leather shoes, which really weren’t suited to the climate. His doctor had suggested he try something “more appropriate.” What did he expect? For him to start wearing those horrible trainers that teenagers put on their feet to feel faster, stronger, tougher?
Vik knew that, just like the pill bottles on his nightstand and the half hour of exercises he suffered through daily, it was all simply meant to help his doctors sleep at night. The fact was that his nervous system had been deteriorating for years and no one knew why. He had a collection of ultrasounds that showed bits of connective tissue floating at random around his spinal column. They looked like malevolent little creatures, or fish. Like part of some alternative design his body had decided to adopt: intelligent, translucent lines composing the sharp and bottomless shape of the word “pain.”
Vik knew the exercises were useless, but he followed the doctors’ instructions to the letter. He liked walking as much as anyone, and he wanted to be able to keep doing it. He was so tired when he left the gym, though, that he would need to take the bus the twelve blocks home. This invariably put him in a bad mood. He had no patience for the obese passengers who took up two seats, the senior citizens in wheelchairs, the homeless, or the nutters who prayed at the top of their lungs. The scent of decay, of a city collapsing under neon lights, clung to them.
He should have realized it that night. But he was so tired he didn’t even have the strength to make himself dinner. As he was getting out of the shower, he’d felt something vaguely repulsive brush against his heel. He’d jerked his foot back so quickly he almost lost his balance. Once the tub emptied, the circular metal of the drain revealed the culprit: a soapy coil of long black hair. He didn’t have the courage to crouch down and examine it up close. He ran a hand over his head to make sure he hadn’t suddenly lost a huge tuft. If his body had decided to shed neural fibers, why not hair as well? In the end, he decided it had to be lint or accumulated grime. He promised himself he’d clean the place properly soon. He stuck a morphine patch on his right shoulder, put on his headphones to listen to the sounds of the ocean, and got into bed, as he always did, at eight thirty.
Cleaning wasn’t one of his priorities. He rarely had energy to spare on housework. He preferred to save it for his clothing, which he made sure was always impeccable. He’d trained himself in recent years to keep his disarray to a minimum. Everything was immediately put away after use; he could swear he ate every meal from the same plate, with the same fork. Not to say that a lone shoe didn’t occasionally turn up under the sofa or behind a chair, as a sign of one of those days his strength had left him too soon. The air that filtered through his home was as stagnant and dark as his wooden furniture, as the essential oils in the diffuser by the front door. A fine layer of dust had settled over the rooms, from the photographs of his parents on the bookshelf in the dining room, to the small colonial silver teacups on the coffee table. He occasionally considered hiring a maid, but ultimately decided it was an unnecessary expense.
Morning was his favorite time of day. It was when he felt powerful. The ten and a half hours of sleep managed to fool his body for a while, and he woke up full of love for the world. At least, for the gray sky hanging over the city, the birds singing despite the cold, and the snow falling like a gift onto his windowsill. He didn’t get out of bed right away. He’d lie there watching the news or just thinking, sometimes still caught in the remains of a dream. At seven, he’d get up and go to the kitchen for some cereal or fruit. He would read for a while. Take a shower. He’d choose his clothes carefully, sometimes trying on one or two different outfits before deciding, and then head to the café on the corner, where he always ordered the same thing: a large black coffee with extra sugar.
All this had probably made him an easy target. He realized that now. There was probably no one in the world with a routine as rigid as his. He always came home at the same time. Always took the same streets. No one ever visited him, except his brother. But that was only once or twice a year, when Prasad took a break between business trips and drove the twelve hours that separated them. He considered the possibility that the whole thing was a joke. But whose? The idea that someone might see him as a victim enraged him. Far more than the thefts he’d noticed over the four days following his encounter with the clump of hair. It was always fruit or bread. Or milk. Lately, a bottle hardly lasted a day or two, and then there was the time half of a bunch of grapes he’d bought on his way home from the gym just disappeared. There were crumbs in his bed. And he couldn’t find one of his towels (pink with yellow stitching) anywhere.
It was just a matter of figuring out which window the thief was using to break in. He’d considered installing grates, but that would ruin the house’s appearance. But what if the intruder had a key? He’d heard stories of people who became obsessed with places they’d lived in before. People who lost their minds and returned to their childhood homes as if time had stood still. He’d changed the lock, but the idea was too unsettling to be dismissed with a reassuring thought or two. He might have preferred to discover that he was going crazy. That would have been much better. Then he wouldn’t need to worry about securing the windows every time he went out, and he wouldn’t have needed to hire that technician to install security cameras.
Because now he had a red cell phone that could ring at any moment. Now he was falling behind in his work and was always in a bad mood. Now the simple act of getting into bed at night was like stepping into a torture chamber. Now he obsessively reviewed the contents of his refrigerator, stayed longer at the gym, and let several buses pass before finally deciding it was time to go home. Anyone could see that he wasn’t sleeping well, that every little noise startled him, and that the mornings didn’t find him full of love for the world anymore.
Where was all this headed? Only one thing was certain: he’d become the kind of man who spied on his own home.
* * *
My first deer still had its spots. I killed it with a Marlin 336. I didn’t know it at the time, but the spots meant that the animal was less than six months old. It’s illegal to hunt them when they’re that young, but Dad didn’t mention that part. He congratulated me and rubbed my shoulder, right where the rifle had left a dark blue bruise over days of practice.
It was years before I went back to it. So much can happen to a girl in a city like this. Especially when you get to be a certain age. People wrinkle their noses as they pass, like they can smell the thousands of dead cells you’re carrying inside, the microscopic trail you leave behind like a slug. But it’s not true. Not everything inside me is rotting. Sometimes I’d like to prove them right, though. There’s nothing worse than having someone hand your fears to you gift-wrapped. Why not show them what’s waiting around the bend? Most of them act like they’re immortal. Like they’ve got all the time in the world to decide between the skim milk and the kind with two percent fat and all the vitamins they’ll need to delay the moment they need to start wearing diapers again. Sometimes I’m tempted to do something awful, like stop the chick coming my way with her kid in a shopping cart and scream right in his freckled little face. To him, I’m just a Halloween mask or a pile of dirty clothes someone forgot to pick up. I’ve considered (I consider) worse. At the very least, someone should teach them a few survival skills. The average family in this country wastes twenty-five pounds of food per year. Fact. And that’s not even counting the tons of garbage they produce. They think they can make it all better by putting their newspapers and magazines in a little blue bin every night, their glass bottles in a red one, and everything else in the trash. Then they go to sleep and dream of buying a bigger house, having their picture in one of those magazines, spicing things up with the old ball and chain. They’re like little kids. Wouldn’t last two hours on their own. In the morning, they hop in their giant pickup trucks and forget all about it.
When the deer started attacking people, no one thought it was important enough to put on the news. Only a few of us saw it for what it was: another sign of our weakness. The rest just went on planting their tomatoes, making sure they got enough fiber, and keeping up with events in the Middle East. They didn’t react, not even when the deer started coming in droves. Their faith in the assurances of ecologists, in the government, and in their weekly salsa lessons never wavered. They probably read about what happened to Ron Duda the way you might read about the genetic mutation of a fly in some remote tropical region, or an exotic disease that—thank God—only affects people with one eye, or those of us constantly on the verge of falling off society’s radar. It didn’t occur to them that Duda could be their neighbor, another moron whose fences and intercoms failed to protect from their love of nature.
Ron Duda had a house right at the edge of the woods, a wife as fragile as tissue paper, and too much time on his hands. Who knows whether it was an attempt to stay active or to impress his friends with homemade pasta sauce, but he also had a little garden where he grew tomatoes, basil, and eggplant. He spent hours out there every week, trying to keep the woods at bay. The woods, of course, insisted on expanding far beyond his plans for it, which were limited to appearing in the thirty-two watercolors his wife had painted from their dining room and providing the setting for monthly educational excursions to the river so his grandkids could get their hands dirty and learn that not everything good and beautiful in the world comes with a barcode. The good Mr. Duda was probably lost in thoughts of this caliber, squatting over his hundred-percent-organic tomatoes, when he was ambushed by a six-point buck.
He didn’t even have time to stand up. One point of the animal’s antler tore his cheek to the bone, and another went in through his mouth. A blood clot formed on the spot and started making its way to his lungs. Duda dragged himself from his vegetable beds toward the glass doors of the dining room, where his wife had just poured two bowls of cereal. He died in the hospital three days later, from the clot. His wife said the deer was over five feet tall and had a scar on its neck.
No one thought to look for the animal, though they did reroute school buses, and a few people from the neighborhood set up a patrol. A couple of days later, the whole thing had been forgotten. But some of us were getting ready.
In a city where deer had outnumbered humans for years, it didn’t take long for other reports to start coming in. One doe bit a young woman in the parking lot of a shopping mall as she was getting into her car. The woman tried to defend herself with an umbrella, but the deer trampled her shopping bags, broke her bottles of wrinkle cream, decimated her centerpieces, and made off with a chunk of the woman’s arm between its teeth. Several university students blamed bruises, broken bones, and tardiness on attacks during lunch in the parks around campus. The authorities considered restricting access to the city’s cemeteries, which had been overrun for a long time already. Graveside ambushes are so common that no one even bothers to report them anymore. Some people visit their departed armed with sticks. Others are too scared to get out of their cars, so they toss their flowers and their prayers out the window as they pass. On the other end of the city, at least one runner and one cyclist were attacked by a doe that didn’t seem to think Four Winds Avenue was a good place for humans to burn their calories. And so it goes.
None of these cases, though, was as sensational as Emilia Bourdette’s. While Ron Duda didn’t even make the local news, Emilia sparked waves of protests across the city. The incident occurred before Duda was attacked. It was the middle of summer. Emilia’s roses and petunias were in bloom, and hundreds of fawns had just been born. One morning, she stepped out into her garden to find two of her flower beds completely destroyed, and the culprit—a fawn no more than a few months old—sitting comfortably on a third. The animal didn’t bat an eye when it saw her coming, which made Emilia, a southerner “accustomed to dealing with all manner of pests,” even angrier. A city girl would have reacted differently. But Emilia lifted her shovel and brought it down square on the fawn’s head. She couldn’t stop. She beat the animal until it was nothing but a mass of flesh, fur, and blood mixed in among the yellow petals.
She never did figure out who called the police. In a neighborhood like ours, full of seniors with too much free time, it’s not hard to imagine what happened. Anyway, it’s not like Emilia was ever all that popular around here. She’s one of those women who shakes the family tree every time you talk to her until a French duke or two with last names like salad dressings falls out, sometimes followed by a famous writer. The police questioned her for hours, and eventually charged her with animal cruelty. Protests were organized. Groups of young people marched in front of the Fish and Wildlife offices with signs demanding the maximum sentence (a fine and two months of community service). Others papered the neighborhood with posters featuring a picture of Bambi above the words “Don’t kill me, Grandma!” and “To hell with Bourdette.” A real circus.
Not even the hunters came to her defense. How could they? She’d broken every rule of the sport. A few went on television to explain the art of tracking one deer for days. Others invoked professional ethics and the importance of understanding cervine anatomy in order to spare your prey as much suffering as possible.
The whole thing made me sick. Those young folks who were so scandalized are the same ones who come to the benefit receptions at the museum, the ones who let their offspring rummage through the drawers in the gift shop and play hide-and-seek behind the sculptures on the ground floor. While their parents, armed with canapés and glasses of champagne, save the world from genetically modified produce and stop the deforestation of the Amazon basin, their sticky little hands slide over century-old crystal lamps, stain the curtains, leave smudges all over the Dalí and Rothko reproductions, and steal postcards.
Soon enough, though, they’ll start losing three percent of their bodily function every year, too. Soon enough, they’ll know what it’s like to feel something inside them die every minute of every day. They’ll panic. They’ll stop worrying about saving the deer and start going to the gym three times a week. They’ll start thinking about a vacation in Thailand, fast cars, one-night stands with much younger women or men who don’t speak their language. Until all that proves useless, too. Like yoga, or mindfulness. Next come the doctors, nice young men and women usually worried about whales in the South Atlantic, who, without taking their eyes off the chat window on their computer screen, will confirm the grim prognosis: there’s nothing left to look forward to. By then, it’ll be too late for them to escape their complicated lives by running for the woods. And they’ll realize none of it mattered all that much, anyway.
Copyright © 2016 by Betina González
