The Butterfly Kid

by Chester Anderson

  “Yes? What gir… Oh, that girl!”

  “She’s sitting in the dinette laughing at me.”

  This went on for some time, because, no matter how he happens to be feeling, Andy dearly loves the vidiphone. It proves that he’s in touch, that people actually like him, that he might even be real. It’s his only true addiction, and he takes the same kind of pride in a $400 phone bill that a shopworn junky takes in a $50 habit.

  Finally, when I’d established that no real information was currently available from Andy or to be had from That Girl, I suggested that he might try blindfolding himself. This he hadn’t thought of, he confessed, but it sounded good and he promised to try it and let me know. Hurrah. We said goodbye for several minutes and hung up.

  The chat had lasted more than half an hour, and I still didn’t like the phone. It made me feel vaguely like property. Pfui.

  I poured myself another slug of maté and returned to the harpsichord. After making the electronic and mechanical adjustments needed for a really impressive racket, I plunged massively into The Carman’s Whistle, an Elizabethan treasure I hope to live to master.

  It worked. By the last chord they were both sitting in the living room, looking all bushy and bemused and mightily put upon.

  “Good morning,” I announced. “We have a lot to do this lovely morning, don’t we?” Michael groaned.

  During brunch we milked young Sean.

  “My name, it ain’t really Sean, you dig? But don’t tell nobody! My real name, it’s Johnny — John. But I really dig Sean. I Mean it. Sounds kind of special, know what I mean? I figure, man, if I’m fixin’ to play rock’n’roll, I ought to have me a good Stage Name. You know? I dig Sean.”

  I allowed as how I thought Sean was a much better stage name than Johnny, and this made him happy. Michael growled gently.

  Little Sean/Johnny was born and reared in Fort Worth, a town I remembered well enough from visiting it in the sixties that I could understand his wanting to escape.

  He wasn’t seventeen, as we’d imagined, at all, but eighteen, which made a difference, and, like almost everyone else in the Village that summer, he’d been to college for not quite a year. His family didn’t understand him, which was neither unusual nor important, though he believed otherwise.

  “They wanted I should sell insurance like my dad, man. What a drag!”

  He was evolving a more detailed autobiography than I really wanted to hear, but I didn’t interfere. After all, I’d seen this puppy making butterflies.

  Between crises of poached egg, he explained how he’d become a rock-n-rolly, and I threatened to introduce him to some of his heroes. Two eggs later he gave me the indelible details of his stark-by-our-standards love life: an Oklahoma girl called Mary-Bob with whom he’d once gone All the Way in the back of an abandoned pickup truck while his folks were out of town. I silently envied him the surprises Greenwich Village had for him.

  Michael, all the while, seemed to be dozing lightly through this wash of random data, a trick he’d copped from Nero Wolfe. At least, that’s what I hoped he was doing.

  Another cup of maté, more toast, and my assurances that he’d done nothing unforgivable with Mary-Bob (though who can say?) brought Sean at last to his arrival in New York.

  “I was kind of scared right off, on account of everything’s so Big an’ all, an’ I don’t — didn’t hardly know anybody, know what I mean?

  “First two, three days I was kinda lost, you know? When I got off the bus, I asked this taxicab driver take me out to Greenwich Village, an’ it costed me two-fifty an’ I didn’t find out for two, three days I was really in some place called Bronnix.”

  “The Bronx.”

  “Right. What’s a Bronk?”

  “Forget it. What happened then?”

  “Oh yeah. Well, I just set in some big ol’ park out there an’ played my geetar till some of these kids with the long hair got to talkin’ to me, an’ one of ’em was a pretty good geetar player hisself. So they said they’d take me on down to Greenwich Village, an’ they did, too.” He was going to have to learn to control that accent of his, but I didn’t intend to muddle things by mentioning it just then.

  He’d also hung around the Village two, three days, sitting in Washington Square or in some nameless basement coffeehouse, looking very brave. That’s all interpretation, not what he actually said. It was a familiar scene. After a while he was befriended by a roaming tribe of teenyboppers, “an’ they give me these ol’ pills to stay awake, an’ they taken me off to this party somewheres near some river.

  “This was at some real fancy-lookin’ pad, you dig? But they was all rollin’ their own cigarettes, an’ I thought that was kind of funny.”

  It must have lasted several days. Village parties often do. They take on a life of their own, if you’re not careful. People kept rolling cigarettes for Sean and showing him how to smoke them.

  “They tasted kinda weird at first, you know? But I sort of got used to ’em after a while. Besides, I was plumb outta smokes myself.”

  Then, two days ago, “This cat — I think his name was Lizard, somethin’ like that — he shows up an’ he’s got this bottle of like little blue pills.”

  Michael’s eyes snapped open.

  “Lizard?” I doubted.

  “Like that. With an L an’ a L. I dunno.”

  “Laszlo,” Michael droned, closing his eyes again.

  “Laszlo?” I verified.

  “Somethin’ like that.”

  Anyhow, this L-and-Z person called his little goodies Reality Pills. Wasn’t that sweet?”

  “Yeah, man, Reality Pills. Well, everybody else taken one, so I figure what The Hell? an’ I taken one, too. He was givin’ ’em away for Free.

  “Then I got to feelin’ kind of dizzy like, so I went away, an’ all of a sudden I had me them goddamn Butterflies.”

  That’s where I stopped him. Reality Pills indeed. I felt a mystical need to sit down and think about it all.

  We removed to the living room. Michael sipped glum maté and stared through the wall. I fumbled through some easy sonatinas on the harpsichord. Sean watched the harpsichord’s mechanism as though paralyzed. None of us said a word for a long time.

  Reality Pills?

  6

  ANDREW BLAKE was less than happy with his halo. He realized the moment it hit him (his word) that it wasn’t going to give him anything but trouble, or so he claimed. Personally, I think his attitude was decidedly un-Catholic, even though events did shortly bear it, and him, out.

  When, freshly enhaloed, Andy fled The Garden of Eden, the little Black-Haired Chick we’d all three been so busily impressing followed him. But for once he didn’t particularly want to have a little Black-Haired Chick, no matter how thoroughly impressed, following him.

  “What I wanted was to be alone. I kept hoping I could maybe wash the damned thing off.”

  Her name was Karen. Almost every chick’s name was Karen that summer, just as almost every boy was a David. Names run in tides below Fourteenth Street.

  This particular Karen was a Greenbaum by trade, and during the winter she studied Creative Writing at Bard College, an unofficial Village training ground. She was nineteen, and she thought Andy’s halo quite becoming.

  Andrew broke free of The Garden of Eden and turned left toward Sixth Avenue. Karen was nine feet behind him. When he reached the avenue, three-quarters of a block later, she was still nine feet behind him.

  “Go away.” He felt neither gallant nor gracious.

  “My name’s Karen.” She meant well. “I read your Book.”

  “No. God, no. Go away.”

  Andy was making a distinct impression on everyone who saw him, and, the weather being good and the afternoon being Saturday, just about everyone saw him. Even in the violent sunlight his halo was clearly visible, flickering about him like an obstinate Saint Elmo’s fire.

  “I said,” teeth clenched, “go away! — Taxi!”

  Every cab he hailed c
ame just close enough for the driver to make out Andy’s halo, then squealed away, leaving only burnt rubber to show it’d been there.

  “What could I do?” he told me. “I had this Halo. No cabby’s gonna stop for me an’ I’m not about to try the subway. So what can a man with a halo do in New York City?” Beat. “I walked.”

  Karen walked nine feet behind him. Why nine feet? No telling. Maybe she got it from the Ananga Ranga. Who knows?

  Andy was aiming for the Brooklyn Bridge, the old one. Somewhere along Houston Street, a reporter collecting local off-color spotted him and tried to stage an interview. Andy blurted something incoherent about me, mentioned Michael’s name, and started running.

  “So there I am, running down Houston Street. The temperature is ninety-five, it’s broad daylight, I’m wearing a heavy wool suit, and I’m running. Also I have this Halo.”

  Karen trotted along three yards behind. Sometimes she said, “Please wait,” but mostly she just trotted silently. Her long black hair grew limp with sweat, came undone, dangled lankly on either side of her pale face like a frame. Her dress, cotton but black, also grew first damp and then wet, and hung from her thin shoulders like a clinging sack.

  They must’ve looked like a saint being chased by a witch. When they crossed the Bowery, untold dozens of vagrants took the pledge, according to Andrew. They turned south off Houston and plunged through the pious depths of the Lowest East Side’s most conservative ghetto, and their coming was proclaimed by slamming doors and windows, and their going was marked by heart attacks.

  The reporter had long since given them up and phoned his ambiguous scoop in to the city desk, but Andrew continued to run, and Karen stayed nine feet behind him all the way.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I was afraid she’d catch me, or maybe I just wanted to get home in a hurry. Who knows? All I know is, I never once considered walking or stopping. You know how it is. I had this Halo: why should anything else make sense?”

  Somehow, despite the spreading confusion and the complex problems of mental and physical health they left in their wake, they didn’t attract official attention until they gained the Brooklyn end of the bridge. Then two cops in a prowl car noticed them.

  One: “At first I think he’s a purse snatcher, this guy. Then I see he ain’t holdin’ on to no pocketbook or nothing, and this lady can catch him anytime she wants to. That looks suspicious.”

  Two: “Yeah, an’ then I sees somethin’ real funny an’ I says, ‘Manny,’ I says, ‘Hey, Manny, get a load o’ that guy,’ I says. ‘He’s glowin’!’”

  The brisk-witted fuzz instantly deduced that Andrew was an important government scientist glowing on account of some top secret experiment or something, and that Karen was a dangerous Commie spy, and that either she was chasing him or he was running away with her, one. Either way, the law felt called upon to lend a hand.

  Andy’s kid brother Jeff bailed them out instantly. “But why both of us, for Christ’s sake? I’ll never understand how my brother’s mind works, never.” Andrew was hard to please.

  To forestall further hassle — the thought of a blue halo running loose in Brooklyn made twenty-year-men blench — the kindly fuzz drove Andy and Karen, in separate cars about three yards apart, to Andy’s Brooklyn Heights pad. En route they warned Andrew not to leave the house until he Did Something about that goddamn Glowin’.

  It was quite dark when they arrived, and Andy’s gross candlepower was amazing. He attracted more attention than he could reasonably handle — even the local moths were a problem — so he had to endure the ultimate public indignity of being escorted to his own front door by an armed guard with all the neighbors watching.

  “I’ll never be able to show my face in the neighborhood again. I may have to take up a disguise. I may have to shave my beard!”

  Karen trailed forgotten behind the guards and slipped between them into Andy’s pad. Then she placidly refused to leave.

  From then until he called me, Andy did original research on hell. Not only did he have a halo — an utterly undignified and embarrassing ornament, fatal to every aspect of his meticulously structured self-esteem — not only that, but he was additionally encumbered by an overtly adulatory, erotically interesting witness to his total humiliation, imposed on him with the implied blessings of the New York City Police Department solely to lacerate and sting his countless wounds. Andrew Blake was up tight.

  I got all this unsponsored melodrama during Andy’s second, more polished phone call — he was suppressing video for the duration — which broke in on our contemplation of the Reality Pill’s probable significance like a flatulent apocalypse. But while Andy was extolling his own gentility in waiting so long before calling ’cause he didn’t want to wake me up or anything and for Christ’s sake, Chester, Do Something, I realized what must have happened and how to extract a few more data therefrom.

  “Andy,” I interrupted, “let me talk to Karen.”

  “Karen? Oh — oh. That Karen. Sure.”

  There were footsteps and phone-bumping noises, during which I grimaced expressively at Michael and Sean. Then came an incomprehensible dialogue, more bumping noises, and a high, slightly nasal voice that asked, “Hello?”

  She was a multiple-greetings girl, and it took us awhile to establish that we could really hear each other. Then I said, “Karen? Listen, do you take drugs?”

  “Do I…?” She was coy. “Now listen, that’s an awfully — personal question, isn’t it?”

  “Oh good Lord!” I wanted to go back to bed. “Look, do you know who I am?”

  “Uh-uh, no. Andrew just said to…”

  “Great. Good old Andy. I’m Chester. Remember Chester? You saw me with Andy yesterday when…”

  “Oh! I Know You! I Read Your Book!”

  Groovy. I was in. I might even be a halo candidate myself. So I carefully explained that I was only asking these personal questions for Andy’s sake — didn’t she want to help Andrew? — and didn’t give a damn personally whether she took dope or chawed terbaccy, but did she ever use drugs?

  Pause. “Well…” Longer pause. Then, quite softly, shyly, “sometimes,” in a maidenly whisper.

  “Sure,” very heartily. “Everybody does it Sometimes. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Sometimes I make myself sick. “But tell me, have you ever had, I think they call it, a Reality pill?”

  Pause. A whole bunch of silence. Maybe she hung up? “Hello? Still there? Karen?”

  “Uh-huh.” Still there.

  Silence stretched between us fine as copper wires, hissing. At last Karen took a deep breath, held it, and whispered, “Yes.”

  She sounded oddly different, as though she were sorry she’d said anything. This in turn made me feel as though I should’ve worn black leather, which would’ve been just a little more silly than everything else that’s happened so far.”

  “Yes,” she whispered again.

  I cupped the mouthpiece in my hand and stage-whispered, “Sean, how long were you high? Figure it out.”

  Then back to the phone: “Karen dear, this is very important. When did you take that Reality Pill?”

  “Which one?”

  Oi. “The last one, dear.”

  This was a tough one. She was teenyboppishly uninvolved with clocks and suchlike trivia, and we had to determine when she’d dropped that stupid pill the hard way. It was at a party, she recalled, and it was in the nighttime somewhere, and this poet called Lazarus gave it to her.

  “Lazarus?” A clue. “Do you mean Laszlo Scott?”

  Could be, but she wasn’t sure, except he had a blond beard you could hardly see and — Oh, wait a minute! He gave her two pills, and she took the other one just before she found Andrew.

  Sean said, “Must’ve been something like thirty hours.”

  Karen screamed then, and Andy either shouted or cried out in strong emotion. Damn vidiphones anyhow, and damn Andrew Blake for squelching his damned video. “What’s happening? Karen? Hey!”

 
“It’s Andrew! Oh! Oh dear! He’s fading!”

  While she paused to gulp air, I thought of Andy’s red beard slowly turning morning-glory pink, bleaching away at last, looking first like smoke and then like dust until there was nothing left at…

  Loud noises. New voice. “Chester?” View screen lighting up in pastel glory.

  “Andy, what happened?”

  “It’s gone.” Now he sounded like a French horn with adenoids. “It just Faded Away. Only a minute ago. Just faded away.” That was more like the usual bassoon.

  “Congratulations. Tell Karen not to take any more pills and everything will be all right. It wasn’t your halo, baby, it was hers.”

  I hung up as soon as I decently could, for the talk had lost its savor and I had some thinking to do. I felt just about to solve the butterfly problem, I knew not how.

  Mike and Sean shared my silence for a few minutes, then Mike drawled, “Well?” and we did us some mind-picking.

  This pill was obviously a brand-new drug, we decided, some kind of projectile hallucinogen. You have the hallucinations and everyone gets to see them. This would’ve been harder to believe than to imagine if it hadn’t been for Sean and his butterflies, which were clearly nothing but public hallucinations. Not mass hypnosis, either: these were as substantial as any other, more orthodox butterflies, and they caused extensive and quite objective damage, too. But when the drug wore off and Sean came down, the hallucinations ended and the butterflies vanished. Interesting.

  “Consider,” I said, prepared to mark points off on my fingers. “We’ve never heard of this stuff before. No newspaper has mentioned it. Nor rumors. Nothing. All highly unlikely.”

  We agreed. A revolutionary drug like this should’ve made headlines long ago. Quaint.

  “Therefore,” I continued, “this thing was not produced by one of the big drug houses. We’d’ve heard.”

  “Right.” Mike was excited. “My God, you couldn’t even test the damn thing secretly. The first pill that worked… Well, you saw what happened with the butterflies.”

  My turn. “Who could’ve developed this Reality Pill and really kept it a secret?”