The Butterfly Lampshade

by Aimee Bender

  “It says here your bedtime is eight-thirty,” he said. “It’s seven-thirty now.”

  I turned from the window. His eyes were small and dark, the eyelids rough-looking, papery. His mouth, wide, thin, did look a little like my uncle’s. He picked up one of his books. “Shall I read aloud?”

  It was a mustard yellow book, stained with multiple rings from drinks.

  “Whales,” he said. “I’ve been reading this week about whales.”

  I didn’t respond, and he thought about it for a while, then thumbed to the middle somewhere, finding his bookmark. He did not return to the beginning of the book, but began to read, in a quiet voice, a hushed voice that even the table next to us would not be able to hear, where he had left off. I leaned back on my side of the booth. I felt such a tiredness inside me. The butterfly and my thoughts about the butterfly were waiting for me to pore over once I was alone, but the rest of the world was like some kind of swirl, a minute-by-minute negotiation of swirl, my mother swirled inside all of it, and inside the swirl there were small things to hold on to, handrails to find, and the way he was reading was one of them. “The captain stood by the mast of the ship to peer at the shape in the distant water.” Outside, the light of evening washed to the palest of blues. The table next to us, two children and two parents, sent a clatter of forks to the floor. “Sssh, Evan, it’s a restaurant!” Even at eight years old, there was something in the steward’s way of reading that was significant to me. That at first what I heard were words about whales unattached to any story or context, and therefore easy to listen to, without any bait inside them. I did not have the energy to care about a book, and to start at the beginning might have felt a demand on my attention, but to start where he had left off meant he would be fully engaged and I could drift in and out as needed, could conserve everything else inside me to maintain the moment-by-moment human operation. This tiny choice he made, this delicate calibration of his position against mine, of our two-people-ness. The chapter was about a whale that had injured a fin and had been attended to by a series of divers off the coast of Australia. The blue outside intensified, and later, when I would think back on that moment, which I think about not infrequently, hearing his voice, imagining us rolling through the evening landscape, inside the blackness of the tent, I can see the darkening shadows of trees and houses blurring into whale pods and divers and schools of darting fish.

  He read for a half hour or so as people moved in and out of the dining car, and I drifted in and out, too, and then for the remaining time he waved off the waiter and we just looked together out the window at the silhouetted shapes of the small trackside towns.

  At 8:15, we returned to our sitting car, and he took down my rolly suitcase, found my toothbrush in my bag and a red washcloth I hadn’t remembered packing, and stood outside the bathroom door while I did my getting ready. At the sleeper, he asked if he could step inside and then scouted around until he found an embedded light by a higher bunk that looked suitably dim. “This okay?” “Yes. Thank you.” I would turn it off once he left. He said the second sleeper was right next door and he would go in there now and all I had to do was knock or even tap the wall if I needed anything, anything at all. “I sleep very lightly,” he said, “and my ears are good. If you need me at any moment,” he said, “just tap. Okay?” “Okay.” “Should we do a practice run?” “No, it’s all right.” “You feel comfortable?” “I do.” “Good night then, Francie.” “Good night.”

  By then, I could feel the tears gathering inside again, the way the clouds internal attached to one another several times a day, gathering into something physical to shed, so I began to close the door on him and he allowed himself to be shuttled out. I did not soften the crying, could not, but I did it in the farthest corner from his I could find, into the roughness of a gray woolen train blanket, and he neither knocked nor ever commented.

  After I was done and had changed into my nightgown, I lay on the lumpy little cot and pulled the woolen blanket over me. The train bumped along the tracks. I had slide-locked the door, and yanked the flimsy yellow curtains over the window, and turned off the light, and with my body in the bed, arms wrapped around the negligible brown bunny, I let my mind relax and finally take its natural course which was to return to thoughts about the butterfly. I did not want to think about my mother, and don’t remember having any conscious thoughts of her at that moment. On the cot, in the tent, memory creating its own new glint in my mind, instead I replayed the moment in the babysitter’s apartment again and again: the shade with its tour of golden butterflies, the magic miracle hiding in the group, the strong sensation of pulling, the flash view of the butterfly floating, and finally the swallowing of the full glass of water with the butterfly rafting down my throat and into the darkness inside.

  Only then, in the dim half-quiet of the sleeper with the sounds of other travelers moving back and forth through the train cars outside my door, the loud button-pushing of the bathroom door, the vacuum of the flush, scraps of chatty conversation between strangers laughing about the difficulty of passing through tight quarters, did I think of the paper from the school front lawn, the paper with the beetle test on it that I had picked up just a couple days earlier, an era ago, and had so carefully folded and tucked into the small pocket of my knapsack. The bag was right there on the floor at the base of the cot, and I pulled it up onto the woolen blanket. What were the chances, really, that the one paper that had been left out on the lawn would be a paper with pictures of bugs on it? Out of all the possible papers in all the backpacks belonging to all the children of the various grades? And I had not passed it by, either—that paper had drawn me to it like it had flung hooks and claws into my skin, and there is nothing I can imagine outside of floods and bombings that would’ve stopped me from running over and picking it up and taking it home. I knew it was mine from all the way across the lawn, the same way I knew that lamp was mine as soon as I stepped into the babysitter’s apartment.

  A flutter of fear moved inside me then, holding the backpack, waiting and watching the zipped pocket, like even with the zipper closed I might see lines of antennae beginning to peek out as the beetle dropped off the paper, the beetles, the clicking legs and bodies, and my destiny ahead of me, the feeling like it was out of my hands, this life of mine, and there were things in it pointed at me that I could not unpoint. Two begins a pattern. I did not know if anything had actually emerged in there, but I still could feel the weight of the moment, the revving of those subterranean gears, my own tense lip and jaw and the clacking of the tracks as we moved through towns and villages where people lived in houses going about their lives, inside their own bodies, all of us in our compartments, the steward in his own next door reading a book.

  All I could do was hold the bag. To open the pocket right then would have been the action of a different person. I held it close, next to the stuffed bunny, and like so many travelers before me, over decades and various terrains, in books and in life, the pressure of soft things and the clickety-clack of a train lulled me fast to sleep.

  51

  Vicky stirs on the couch. I rise up out of it, wait. The traffic light changes downstairs. The roads are, by now, mostly quiet. I am on the edge of something. Don’t wake up, I think at her, don’t you wake up, Vicky. Sleep, stay sleeping. I won’t hurt you. Don’t come. In the loft with the babysitter so many years before, I had heard her fall asleep and had felt her leave the room with her wakeful mind, and she had been alive and asleep at the same time, and it meant something to me, then, to be in the same space with someone alive and asleep, all at once comforted and abandoned. She releases a sigh, resettles herself. The couch cushions loosen. Wheels roll through the city.

  52

  Hours later, sometime in the night, there was a knock at the door of my sleeper car. I had been deep asleep, soothed by the forward motion of the train, dreaming about some kind of river, a cold-weather rocky river, with fish hi
tting the rocks and flipping up in the air, when my body started awake, hard, as if I were one of the fish and had just hit a rock. The sound, before it attached to anything real, was just this pounding, this floating loud pounding coming from all sides, shaking the walls before it solidified and settled itself at my door, shaped and smaller, performed by a hand.

  I was groggy and half-asleep, and the easiest choice was to respond to the summons, so I got out of bed, found the door of the sleeper, and opened it.

  A gust of cold air blew in from the corridor. In the hallway, wrapped in a jacket, stood a woman in a dark suit, wearing a dark hat, holding a piece of paper. She was an adult. I did not know her. She was powerfully ordinary-looking. Easily balanced and indistinct in her features. I had no idea what time it was—if it was the middle of the night or a time still suitable for adult awakeness.

  “Hello!” she said, looking down at me. “Excuse me. I’m sorry to wake you. Do you have a paper?”

  I frowned at her. “A paper?” I said. “What do you mean?”

  “A paper?” she said. She consulted her own piece of paper.

  Next door, the steward opened up. “Excuse me? Can I help you?”

  “I am looking,” the woman said, turning to him, “for a paper.”

  He stepped forward to block her like a football player, as if she was going to march right into my sleeper and tackle me. But she barely responded; she was so primly held inside her clothes. Her hair so rightly in place it didn’t look like hair, but more like marker drawn in thick lines on a skull.

  “What sort of paper?”

  She consulted her paper again. “I don’t know,” she said. She looked back up at us both and smiled brightly. “Excuse me,” she said. “It seems I need more information. I apologize for waking you up.”

  “Are you sure you picked the right car?”

  She nodded. “Yes,” she said, holding on to her smile. “That part is correct. I do apologize again.”

  “And what is your name?” asked the steward, but she’d already turned away. She clicked off down the car and through the intermediary door.

  The steward turned to me. He was wearing gray flannel pajamas and his eyes looked even smaller and more mole-like woken up. “You okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “A paper? She wanted a paper?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what she said.”

  “We can ask the conductor tomorrow. They shouldn’t have people knocking on sleepers at midnight! You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your room fine?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He stood there. “Go back to bed. I’ll wait here for a little bit. I’ll guard the door.”

  “I wasn’t scared.”

  “Even so,” he said. “I’ll be here. I’m here if you need me.”

  He settled himself at my door and watched me climb back into my bunk. But his presence there meant the light from the corridor came streaming in, and the wind of velocity from the movement of the train rattled loudly, and the room grew colder, fast, until finally I told him that I’d lock it behind him and I promised I wouldn’t open it again if anyone else knocked.

  He nodded, with reluctance.

  “You wouldn’t like me to stay inside and sit on the other bunk—?”

  “No,” closing the door.

  * * *

  —

  We spoke with the conductor very early the following morning, but no one else had made a report of a woman tapping on sleeper cars in the middle of the night asking for a piece of paper. She did not match the description of anyone he had seen on the train. The conductor, upon my inquiry, said my mother had not called on the emergency train line or the conductor’s personal cellular phone to find out the room assignments, so it was not somehow related to her. “I’ll keep an eye out,” the conductor said, scratching his forehead, and the steward thanked him several times. “A dark hat,” he called as we walked away, “like something from a movie.” As we settled back into our non-sleeper seats, the sun had newly risen, and through the thin gray light I watched the people board at the Emeryville station, a fresh influx of riders tucking their suitcases above the seats and into the special aisle areas. I told the steward again that I had not been scared. “All she wanted was paper,” I said. “No big deal.” It was only right then, on the train, in the tent, looking out at a short man kissing a woman goodbye against the distant shadowed brown bluffs of the Northern Californian landscape, saying it aloud, that I made the connection to the paper in my backpack, the one with the beetles on it that I had not yet been able to check.

  I didn’t speak to the steward during breakfast, and when he continued to read aloud from his whale book, I stared out the window and recounted the experience of it to myself again: her knock, her face, the inadequate information.

  * * *

  —

  We got off the train in Salinas and tried calling my mother at my request from a phone booth at the station. On the other line, the nurse went to check and I stayed on hold for five minutes while passengers bought muffins from nearby stands, standing in line for coffee, sipping, chatting, the steward outside the phone booth standing straight and still. After some time, the nurse returned to the phone line and said not yet. “It’s important we go slow here,” she said, softly. “I’m so sorry.” I stayed quiet on the line until the nurse said, “Hello?” and then I hung up. The steward examined my face and asked if I would like a snack, as he had some cash my uncle had given him, and even though it was morning I requested a hot dog and he purchased two at a nearby cart which we ate on a bench in a half-garden at the back of the station where some old tomato plants grew in scraggly vines by the edge of the dirt. The sun stretched its pale morning color over the grasslands by the nearby houses. We were now over halfway there, the steward told me, chewing his hot dog, which he had piled high with pickle relish and mustard. There were beautiful garlic farms off to the south, he pointed. I asked him if he liked working for the train, and he wiped his mouth and smiled out to the world and said he didn’t work for the train, that he was a graduate student, and he was able to join me because it was spring break and he had the week off from courses. He dabbed a dot of mustard off his cheek with a napkin, and the dot moved from his face onto the napkin, where it would soon voyage to the trash. Everything forever in motion. He explained that he would be visiting a library in Pasadena that had some books he needed to consult, and then once he had done his research, he would fly home. After I was settled. My uncle would be picking me up at the station.

  I turned to look at him. Why, I asked, did he have a jacket with a train on it if he did not work for the train?

  He laughed. “You noticed that?” he said. “I’m so glad. I dug it out of my closet on Friday when your uncle explained the job. I bought it years ago. I thought it was a neat coincidence.”

  Something about it was bad, but it all was bad, and so I stopped eating my hot dog and threw it and its pleated paper boat into the trash can to live the rest of its existence with the mustard dot on his napkin and all the previous train customer waste. In the near distance, a gaunt bearded man walked with a plastic bag, picking up loose trash with a poker stick. “Boarding!” called the conductor, and as a breeze passed through the ragged leaves of the tomato plant, we abandoned our debris, and moved our bodies elsewhere. All of it felt so frighteningly familiar, the car pickup line all over again, me and my mother different flashing points on a map moving farther apart by the minute, stretched away from each other, and back on board, a rush of sour courage seemed to move through me, rancid, and urgent, and once we were seated and the train was in motion again, I reached under my seat and pulled out the purple knapsack.

  “Please,” I said, pushing it toward the steward. I pointed to the small pocket.

  “You want me to open that?” He unzipped it. “W
hat do you need?”

  “I want to know what’s in there.”

  He rummaged around. “A few pens? Some paper?”

  “A bug?”

  He yanked his hand out and laughed with surprise. “A bug?”

  “A beetle?”

  “An alive beetle?”

  “Or maybe two?”

  “Seriously?” he said.

  “Pull out the white paper. The folded white paper,” I said. “Please.” I was leaning in, speaking louder than usual, biting down on the words. It was, by far, the most involved conversation I’d had yet with him. He pressed in his lips, and with caution, used two fingers to tug the paper out by its edge.

  “You mean this?”

  “Will you open it?”

  “Are there bugs in there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He held the paper in his fingers like a dirty cloth, and with the other hand zipped the small pocket back up and put the knapsack on the floor. By that point, it was clear that the paper he was holding was just a paper, with nothing sticking out of it, or tucked inside, but when he lifted the edge to open, to show me the interior, it revealed itself to be blank. How can I convey this, even to myself? The paper was not entirely blank, not even mostly blank, but more blank than it had been before, now with two printed drawings of beetles in two separate boxes and the third, the one at the bottom, empty. In that one, the beetle illustration was gone, lines still radiating from the square with the student’s wobbly handwriting labeling parts no longer there. The train hurtled forward, and the conductor moved through our aisle to clip new tickets. With effort, I asked the steward to hand me the knapsack, please, thank you, the words of politeness a template to cling to right then, anchors to the world of the regular, and he gave it back, shaking his head and laughing a little and going down the aisle to the restroom to wash his hands. A light wind passed through the railroad car. Two women, far at the other end, burst into laughter. He had left the piece of folded paper on the pullout dining tray, and while he was out of view, I picked it up by a corner, fingers trembling. The paper had no more purpose for me, was only the carcass now, the empty shell, so I fed it through a slot of open window, watching as it blew past the iron railroad ties, fluttering to the ground. Maybe it would find that woman, wherever she was. Maybe she could track its history better than I could. I watched it tumble on the rocks for a few minutes until it was out of sight, and then I shouldered the knapsack and went to wash my own hands.