The Butterfly Kid

by Chester Anderson

  “I’ve got to ignore all this,” I told myself in a moment of fleeting clarity. But the only sensation I’d ever practiced ignoring was pain, the one sensation I wasn’t currently experiencing.

  It was impossible to keep anything in mind. I’d start a train of thought going, and before it got past the verb it would dissolve in a welter of meaningless sensations. And the most frustrating thing about it was that I couldn’t hold my mind still long enough to be frustrated.

  I have no idea how long this went on.

  Mike, meanwhile, was tailing Laszlo, an inherently thankless task.

  “It wasn’t as easy as it should’ve been. The freak seemed to be nervous about something. He kept looking back over his shoulder as though he were being followed or something, which kept me busy ducking in and out of doorways, hiding behind lampposts, crouching behind tourists, making an ass of myself in general.

  “You know, it’s kind of embarrassing when you’re hiding behind some tourist and he turns around and asks you what you’re doing and you say you’re following somebody and he wants to know why. What do you say in a case like that?

  “So he was hard to follow, and I didn’t think that was at all fair. I mean, hadn’t expected it to be much fun, but work… ?”

  Nursing this comfortable sense of instant injustice, Michael followed Laszlo from The Garden of Eden half a block east to the corner drugstore, first stop. Laszlo slithered up to the prescription counter, and Mike ducked into a phone booth.

  “What do You want?” said Dr. Lee, the pharmacist, who was a Villager and knew Laszlo.

  “Can you, like, take somethin’ an’, you know, find out what it is? Huh, Doc? Can you?”

  Laszlo was doing his best to be polite, which made Dr. Lee be wary. “Generally,” he said, “I know what it is before I take it. Yes, Ma’am, can I help you?”

  Laszlo tapped his feet and snapped his fingers anxiously for ten minutes while Dr. Lee listened with near-infinite patience to the overwhelming troubles of a fat Italian lady and sold her a box of aspirin for them. Then, “Are you still here?”

  “Look, Doc…”

  “What’re you looking for, Georgie? I’m busy.”

  “Oh wow! Listen, Doc, s’pose I was to give you this Pill, see? Can you, like, ah, find out what’s In it? Can you, Doc? Huh? Can you?”

  “Yes ,sir, can I help you?” Another customer.

  Laszlo by now was almost dancing in frustration, which pleased Michael no end, but the customer only wanted a pack of cigarettes.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Dr. Lee resignedly. “You want me to analyze some pill for you. Is that it?”

  “Yeah, yeah! Analyze. That’s it, yeah’ Can you, Doc?” He pulled a transparent plastic bag full of little blue pills out of his right coat pocket. Bits of lint and dirt and God knows what clung to the outside of the bag.

  “Well,” slowly and thoughtfully, “I can, I suppose. I’ve got a little lab at home that… Why should I?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why should I go to all the trouble of analyzing anything for you? Tell me that? What’ve you ever done for me, besides give me a hard time? You don’t even buy your Cigarettes here.”

  “Oh wow!” waving the pill bag about in agitation. “Look, Doc, I’ll Pay you!”

  “Oh?” No one had ever heard Laszlo say those words before. Doc Lee thought it over for a moment. “Okeydoke,” he said. “I’ll try, anyhow. Those the pills?”

  “Yeah. Here, Doc.” Laszlo handed him one pill.

  “I’ll need more than one,” said the kindly pharmacist, peering at the little blue pill in his palm.

  “More than one?” Laszlo didn’t like this*

  “Right. Ten at least, maybe more.”

  “Ten?” He clutched the pill bag tightly to his chest. “Ten?”

  Dr. Lee ignored this method acting. “Where’d you get this stuff?” he asked. “What’s it for?”

  “I, ah, somebody gave it to me. Yeah.”

  “Somebody gave it to you. Did he tell you what it’s for? Diet? Headache? Cramps? Leukemia? It looks like a… Hmm!”

  “What’s wrong?” Laszlo backed a few inches away from the counter. “Somethin’ wrong?”

  “I just remembered. You’re the maniac who’s been handing out those whatchamacallim — Reality Pills. Right?”

  “Who, me?”

  “Is that what this thing is? Hmm.”

  “Look, Doc, ah, let’s,” backing away, “let’s just forget it, okay?”

  “Sure, I’ll analyze the things, if I can. I’ve been wondering about them myself. But I’ll still need more’n one.”

  “Oh wow! Like, ForGet It!” Laszlo turned and ran for the door.

  “Hey, what’s wrong with you? Come back here. Laszlo! Take your pill…” Too late. Laszlo was gone.

  Too late. Laszlo was gone.

  “How do you like that?” Doc Lee wondered aloud. “The wicked flee where none pursueth.”

  “Not this time, Doc,” said Michael, laughing, as he left.

  The trail led down MacDougal Street — Laszlo, looking apprehensively in all directions, on one side; Michael, taking advantage of every bit of cover, on the other — to Bleecker Street and then turned left, heading toward the East Side.

  “I’d never seen Laszlo move so fast before,” Mike said later. “He passed five whole coffeehouses without going in, and he passed dozens of chicks without coming on to any of them, and he walked right by Pat Gerstein without even slowing down to trade insults. Extraordinary, I told myself. Very odd.

  “I was tempted to catch up with him and ask him what was bothering him, but I didn’t think he’d understand, so I didn’t. Laszlo has a flair for not understanding.”

  They crossed West Broadway almost at a run and faded into the anonymous night.

  My long green fur could’ve used a brushing and my left fore-ear itched a little, but otherwise I was doing nicely, thanks. Of course, I wasn’t really used to the sky’s being orange, but I wasn’t used to having six legs, either, or to being surrounded by hundred-foot-tall red ferns with stems ten feet thick at the base. No matter. I’d get along.

  I took a bite out of the nearest fern tree. Good. It tasted just like hundred-foot-tall red fern, with lots of crunch and juice. I liked it.

  There were some predators in the neighborhood — mostly those slimy brown and yellow snakish things with all the legs and teeth: the worst kind — but I didn’t care. I could handle them all right.

  My only problem was that I still couldn’t manage to organize my thoughts, which, for some not quite remembered reason, I absolutely had to do.

  Aw, to hell with it. I took another swipe at the fern tree.

  Laszlo was being clever. Well, tricky. Backtracking, hiding in doorways to wait for whomever to pass, going in one door of such buildings as had more than one and coming out another, turning corners and running like mad, striking up conversations with policemen (a most unusual stratagem for him), and otherwise boring Michael with his puerile games.

  “I’d like to know who the hell he thought was chasing him. I’d also like to know what made him think he could lose a tail with stunts like that. Too many movies, that’s Laszlo’s problem.”

  Except that one of Laszlo’s stunts worked. Michael turned the corner of Third Street and Second Avenue two and a half seconds after Laszlo did and found no visible Laszlo, none at all. Oh, the shame of it.

  He checked the halls of all the nearby tenements and heard no Laszlo on the stairs. He checked the two bodegas and one bar that were open nearby and found no Laszlo lurking. He couldn’t remember having seen a taxi on the avenue, so he checked the halls again, with no results. Finally, after maybe half an hour, he gave it up.

  “Christ,” he told himself in something close to shock, “the little bastard shook me. He actually Shook me. And I can’t figure out how the hell he did it.”

  So the evening shouldn’t be a total loss, Michael went to visit Sandi Heller and Leo Pratt, w
ho were roughing it in an old law tenement a few blocks farther east. All the way there, he berated himself for letting Laszlo get away, wondering how he could ever bring himself to tell anyone about it.

  “I was afraid I was either going to have to bear the shameful secret to my grave or take to haunting low taverns and unburdening myself to heedless strangers, as it were. Maybe I could hire an analyst? And how did the little freak do it, anyway? He couldn’t’ve sprouted wings. Maybe he just vanished, like Judge Crater. Nah, that’s too good to be real. Laszlos never vanish, no such luck.”

  And then he was across the street from the Heller-Pratt pad, waiting for the traffic light to change.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” he whispered, crouching quickly behind a parked car.

  Laszlo the Lost was cautiously emerging from the Heller-Pratt hallway. He opened the door, poked his little round head out, looked four or five times in every direction, scurried out into the nearest shadow, and slunk furtively toward the east.

  Mike, considerably shaken, followed.

  “Oh yeah, Laszlo,” Leo explained some fifteen hours later. “Wasn’t that something? Sandi was checking something out with the I Ching and I was trying to work out some new changes for ‘Dark Girl’ on this banjo somebody left in the John a few months back, and then there was this Scritching on the door. Chi-ki-chi-ki-chi-ki, you know, like mice — or a very Sensitive pussycat.

  “So I said, ‘Who’s that scritching on my door?’ and this real strange haunted kind of voice whispers, “Leo?”

  “ ‘Who’s there?’ I say, and this same voice whispers, ‘Leo? Are you home?’

  “ ‘So what the hell? Friend or foe, I had to find out what that voice was coming from, so I opened the door and Wow, there stood Laszlo Scott in all his queasy glory, not the sort of thing I’m accustomed to finding on my doorstep, not at all.

  “So I said…”

  “Oh good Lord, Leo!” Sandi has a sense of style. “They just want to find out what he wanted. You don’t have to make a novel out of Everything!”

  “Oh yeah. Right. Well, once upon a time I told little Laszlo that I’ve got a friend who’s an analytic chemist, spade cat name of Chauncy Mitchell. So Laszlo wanted Mitch to analyze something for him, that’s all.”

  “Pills?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Sure, little blue pills. Looked like some kind of laxative or something. He gave me a little aspirin bottle full of ’em and told me to ask Mitch to hurry, which was funny on account of Mitch’s in Switzerland. But what the hell? I told him Mitch’d hurry and he split. That’s all there was to it. He wasn’t here five minutes. Was he, hon?”

  “Groovy. What happened to the pills?”

  “Nothing. I gave them to the chick across the hall. She’ll take Anything. Thinks it’s hip or something.”

  From the Heller-Pratt pad Laszlo went straight home, though it wasn’t even two o’clock yet.

  Mike stationed himself in the candy store doorway across the street and watched Laszlo’s windows. Oddly dressed persons of unknown age and gender tried to proposition him in foreign languages, but he ignored them. Scrawny kids trying to look mean in skin-tight leather slouched by muttering obscure insults, and he ignored them. A rather pretty long-haired chick in standard artist’s garb walked by, slowed down, smiled at him and walked on, and he even managed to ignore Her. Michael meant business.

  After fifteen minutes of this, the lights went off in Laszlo’s pad. Mike didn’t believe a word of it. He stood firm in the candy store doorway, waiting for Laszlo to try some funny business, for upward of an hour, or until two wary fuzz approached and one of them, hand poised above his pistol, snarled. “All right, buddy, what’s your problem?”

  “Nothing, officer, nothing at all. Just catching my breath. Long walk, you know.”

  “What does it take you, an hour to catch your breath? C’mon, buddy, move along before I run ya in.”

  So Michael went home, feeling deeply unfulfilled.

  I was motion in the boundless universe. I was the square root of minus one. I was covered with thick beige fuzz that moved of its own accord. I was ten feet tall.

  I was a pastrami ice-cream cone. I was the key of G minor. I was full of tiny gears and printed circuits and my batteries needed charging.

  I was pregnant and I knew the people responsible. I was law west of the Klamath River. I was without form, and void. I was a long-playing microgroove record.

  I saw the best minds of my generation and I was appalled. I was a platinum gas tank. I was an army advancing toward I was an army.

  I was the ghost of Christmas past. I was the rabbit in the moon. I was as corny as Kansas in orbit.

  I wasn’t thinking very well at all.

  15

  CLICK!

  Zap!

  “Good morning, Mister Spy. Do you wish to talk now?”

  It was over. Finished. Dead. Ktch’d turned my torture off, plunging me with a morbid Click! from breathless peaks of subjective ecstasy to Wednesday morning. Wow, what a bringdown.

  “Mister Spy?”

  The lobsters were at it again, all twelve of them — a ghastly sight — scuttling here and there about the loft with fifty-gallon steel drums in their claws; all but Ktch, who was standing still with one pincer resting on the largest torture device and both eyestalks pointed at me. These were the kind of lobsters that liked to gossip while they worked, too — the worst kind of lobster — and the loft sounded like a firing range at rush hour. I hate loud noises in the morning.

  “Can you hear me, Mister Spy? Are you all right?”

  And this morning I was ready to hate almost everything. I was still drenched with metabolized coffee, for one thing, clammy and reeking. And I still hadn’t had yesterday’s lunch yet, not to mention supper, snack, and breakfast. The inside of my mouth felt like it was digesting itself, and tasted like it, too.

  “You’re not — oh my — you’re not Dead, are you? Tell me you’re not dead!”

  And I hadn’t slept, either. That was another thing. All-night torture sessions are fine and groovy if you dig that sort of thing, but I’m a cat who needs his sleep.

  Furthermore, Michael hadn’t rescued me — first time he’d failed me in three and a half years. The world was still unsaved. These filthy lobsters’ evil plans were still intact, unfoiled. Everything had gone wrong. Everything.

  Oh, but I was in a foul mood that morning.

  “Oh dear! Speak to me, Spy. Dear Spy, please say something!”

  Ktch was turning pale again. That seemed to be a habit of his, and I was sick of it. His feelers were flailing weakly about in the air, his eyestalks were wilting, and he was rubbing his claws together in brittle, nervous polyryhthms: crustacean symptoms of acute distress. I was pretty sick of that, too.

  “Oh, Spy,” he wailed, “please, Please do not be dead!”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” I comforted him. “Will you shut up!”

  “Oh my!” He sank to the floor and trembled noisily.

  “Stop that!” I yelled. “Cut it out!” I hate to yell in the morning. “Stop that flipping noise, God damn you! Quit it!”

  Which attracted the rest of the lobsters. They lay down their burdens and gathered in a clackety cobalt-blue cluster around me. This was a little quieter, but Ktch was still trembling briskly, and the sight of twenty-two extended eyestalks waving in my direction made me nervous.

  “Stop that!” And I was developing a sore throat, too. “Stop!”

  They didn’t seem to understand English, but the idea got across. They muffled their noise to a spring-rain patter that was merely aggravating, and retracted their eyes. Ktch, however, continued to clatter on the floor. It was shameful to see a grown lobster carry on so.

  “You,” I said quite softly, blending laryngitis with intense menace.

  Ktch froze in midclatter.

  “You,” I repeated. “Stand up. Quietly.”

  He stood up. Shakily. Every time his shell clicked, he winced, producing anoth
er click. His feelers dangled limply down on either side of him, his eyestalks drooped, and his claws just missed dragging on the floor. For a six-foot lobster, he was a sorry spectacle.

  “Spy?” he begged.

  “Shut up. I want to think.”

  Now that I had them quiet, my temper wasn’t half as foul as it had been, but I was still uncomfortable enough to generate a decent rage if I needed one. To prove it, I glowered fiercely at my dozen lobsters. It isn’t easy for a face as bland as mine to glower convincingly, but I managed. Twenty-four limp feelers drooped like a grove of segmented willows.

  “That’s better.” Still menacing. Not a carapace creaked.

  It was clear that Michael was not going to rescue me. I had some things to say about that, but they could wait till I saw him again, if ever. Right now the problem was to rescue myself, a task for which I was eminently unsuited.

  But maybe I had a chance. Look how I’d managed to cow these twelve strapping lobsters with naught but a yell and a glower. Consider yesterday’s interrogation scene with Ktch. Right. These bugs had chinks in their armor big enough to drive a seafood truck through: several helpful weaknesses I already knew about, doubtless many more to be discovered.

  Their biggest weakness was this nonviolent nonsense. They’d sure as hell picked the wrong planet for that game. Human beings are just naturally violent animals, even the nonviolent ones. Hell, even the limp protesters who lie down in front of ammunition trucks and have to be hauled off the street like sacks of flour, all they’re doing is imposing their will on others, compelling other people to behave contrary to their own desires, which is the crystalline essence of violence. And the rest of us tend to be downright brutal: we spank our kids, we step on bugs, we fish and hunt for pleasure, we enjoy 3V bloodshed, we play football and other battle games — we’re a rough bunch, we are.

  I didn’t think the lobsters really understood this yet.

  And old Ktch here couldn’t even think about violence without turning pale. Groovy. If I didn’t get anything else accomplished, I intended to see just how pale he could get. I was fairly confident I could persuade him that he was personally and directly responsible for every act of violence caused by the Reality Pill, I was looking forward to that.