This book is for
Ben and Charlotte
Copyright © 1993 by William T. Vollmann
A portion of "More Benadryl, Whined the Journalist" first appeared in Esquire.
"The Answer" first appeared in Zyzzyva.
A slightly different form of this book was hand-printed and hand-colored by the
author in a CoTangent edition of fifteen copies.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval
systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer,
who may quote brief passages in a review.
First published in Great Britain in 1993 by André Deutsch Limited
First Grove Press edition, November 1993
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vollmann, William T. Butterfly stories: a novel / William T. Vollmann.—1st ed.
I. Title.
PS3572.0395B88 1993
813'.54—dc20 93-2489
ISBN 0-8021-3400-9 (pbk.)
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
In case any of you readers happens to be a member of the Public, that mysterious organization that rules the world through shadow-terrors, I beg you not to pull censorious strings merely because this book, like one or two others of mine, is partly about that most honest form of love called prostitution -a subject which the righteous might think exhausted with a single thought - or, better yet, no thought at all - but the truth is that there are at least thirteen times as many different sorts of whores as there are members of the Public (and I think you know what I mean by members). Shall we pause to admire them all (the adults, I mean, the ones with the ambitiously long-tubed mouthparts)? Looking under the trees I spy billions of species, most of whom fly only during the night, unlike the insects after whom they're named; the pupa stage is often enclosed in a cocoon of brightly colored silk. And yet some are alive and some are dead and some find money to be the least of their worries! - Oh, my prismatic Nymphalidae, my cross-veined Psychidae, my Sesiidae with the delicious anal veins, how could cruelly unimaginative lepidopterists have pinned you to a common corkboard of classification, when after all the world is so shadily large? I'll not commit that crime! So fear repetition not; there remain many seas of blood and cream to be traversed. If this advertisement be not sufficient, I can only protrude my wormlike tendrils of apology, craving forbearance on the grounds that a writer must write about what he knows, and since I know nothing about any subject it scarcely matters where I dabble.
Your friend,
The consequences beasts draw are just like those of simple empirics, who claim that what has happened will happen again in a case [that] strikes them [as] similar, without being able to determine whether the same reasons are at work. This is what makes it so easy to capture beasts . . .
G. W. Leibniz, Preface to The New Essays (1703-5)
1
Under the leaning plant-tumuli were galleries of wet dirt in which the escapees hid, panting like animals, naked and trembling, gazing up at the flared leaves whose stalks, paler than beansprouts, wove each other's signatures. Not everybody was caught again. Their families had to be bulldozed into the American bomb craters without them. Wormy dirt pressed down on bloodstained dirt until everything stopped moving, and the slaves were forbidden to work there for a month, until the mound had settled. The slaves had no desire to go there anyway. Water buffaloes rooted and splashed slowly in the rice paddies. They were valuable. As for the slaves, there was a slogan: Alive you are no gain; dead you are no loss. So the slaves obeyed the rule of absolute silence. After a month, they were sent to plant the grave with cassava.
Meanwhile, the ones who had gotten away lived hour by hour beneath the roof of maculed leaves swarming with darkness as they crept toward Thailand, ducking through green-fringed purple leaves, dodging golden berries as hard as copper. Sometimes a land mine got them, and sometimes a snake did. It did not matter whether the land mines were Russian or Chinese because they rended people with the same sudden clap of smokepetaled flame. But the snakes came in so many varieties as to guarantee an interesting death. One kind let you live a day after you were bitten. Another kind killed in an hour. There was a kind that let you walk two steps before you fell down dead. The people who survived the snakes fled on toward Thailand, where if they were lucky they might win admittance to a barbed wire cage. As they ran, they gasped in the strong wet smell of ferns. Fallen flower-bowls, red and yellow, lay in the knee-deep carpet of ferns. In the very humid places, moss grew out of the tree trunks and mounded itself upon itself in clusters like raspberries. From these places ferns burst out, and spiderwebs grew on the ferns, and within the webs the spiders waited. Some were poisonous and some were not. Sometimes the people who survived the spiders became lost and came out into a clearing where their executioners were already conveniently waiting. Around the lip of the bomb crater, generous grass bowed under its own wet weight, the dark star-leaved trees meeting it in a terrifying horizon. The people would begin to scream. The order was given to approach the grave in single file. Sometimes the executioners cut open their bellies or wombs with the razor-sharp leaf-edges of sugarpalm trees. Sometimes they smashed their skulls in with pickaxes. The executioners who were especially skilled at this enjoyed practicing what they called "the top." When you stand behind someone and smash his skull in in just the right way, he will whirl around as he falls and gaze up at you with his dying eyes. Sometimes they beat them to death with gun butts. Sometimes they pushed them off cliffs. Sometimes they crucified them in trees. Sometimes they injected them with poison. Sometimes they peeled back their skins and ate their livers while the victims were still screaming. Sometimes they wrapped up their heads in wet towels and slowly suffocated them. Sometimes they chopped them into pieces.
2
The butterfly boy knew nothing about this, firstly because he was only seven years old and in another country, and secondly because it hadn't happened yet. It would be two more years before he even saw a dead person.
3
The butterfly boy was not popular in second grade because he knew how to spell "bacteria" in the spelling bee, and so the other boys beat him up. Also, he liked girls. Boys are supposed to hate girls in second grade, but he never did, so the other boys despised him.
4
There was a jungle, and there was murder by torture, but the butterfly boy did not know about it. But he knew the school bully, who beat him up every day. Very quickly, the butterfly boy realized that there was nothing he could do to defend himself. The school bully was stronger and faster than he was. The butterfly boy did not know how to fight. When the school bully punched him, it never occurred to him to punch back. He used his arms to protect his face and belly as best he could, and he tried not to cry. If it had been just him and the school bully, he probably would have cried, because he regarded the school bully as a titanic implacable force in comparison to which he was so helpless that he was as a sacrifice to an evil god, so there was no shame in crying before him. But since the other boys loved to gather in a circle and watch the butterfly boy being beaten up, he would not cry; they were his peers - not, of course, that they thought so. To every other boy in the school, the butterfly boy was so low and vile that he was not a human being.
5
The school bully was retarded. He had failed fourth grade three times. He was therefore much bigger and stronger than any other boy in the elementary
school. In the winter time the custodian shoveled all the snow in the playground into a great heap in one corner, and the pile froze into a mountain of ice that almost topped the fence by February or March. The school bully claimed this mountain as his kingdom. He stood on the summit of that dirty blue pile of frozen slush and picked out his victim, following a sorting algorithm which may have been similar to the butterfly boy's once he grew up and had to decide which whore to fall in love with. The bully, however, appeared to have studied at the school of the eagles. He turned his hunched head in a series of alert jerks, his eyes rarely blinked, and when he had spotted someone he could torture he shrieked like a bird and brought his arms up into wings. The way a boy walked, the color of his shoes, these and other unknown criteria were scanned by his hard little eyes, until he had searched out a rodent worthy of his malice. It was always the butterfly boy first, but sometimes it was someone else, too. You might think that that someone else and the butterfly boy would become allies, but it never happened. Whomever the school bully hurt was so disgraced and humiliated that he was no good for anything. He had become so despicable by virtue of being hurt that not even other despicable people could stand him.
6
So the only playmates that the butterfly boy had were girls. He loved girls. Sometimes he kissed them, and sometimes they kissed him. Occasionally the stronger girls would even defend him from the bully. But this only made the butterfly boy even more miserable. He would rather have gone home with another bloody nose than endure the additional odium of being defended by girls.
7
So the butterfly boy's pleasures were of a solitary kind. One evening a huge monarch butterfly landed on the top step of his house and he watched it for an hour. It squatted on the welcome mat, moving its gorgeous wings slowly. It seemed very happy. Then it rose into the air and he never saw it again. He remembered that butterfly for the rest of his life.
8
The last bell had rung. The children rushed into the wet and muddy hallway in a happy rage of shouts and clattering lunch-boxes. As the butterfly boy reached the halfway mark with his galoshes buckles, a girl came to help him. Some of the buckles were crooked or a little rusty. Every day this girl did up the most difficult ones for him. The outer door kept banging open and closed as children ran into the snow. Through it the butterfly boy caught stroboscopic glimpses of the waiting steaming school-buses, not as yellow as they would be in the spring rains when their gorgeous new yellowness shouted itself even more brightly than the No. 2 pencils given out for penmanship; the sticky snowflakes paled and frosted the buses into something coy and lemon-gold, more fit now to swim through blizzards illuminated by their pale yellow eyes.
Want to come to my house? the girl said.
When? said the butterfly boy, startled.
Now.
The butterfly boy smiled down shyly as the girl fastened the last buckle for him. - Yeah, he said.
When he got into her bus with her, he had a sense of doing something deliciously wrong. Her bus had a different black number stenciled on it, and a different driver. The black vinyl seats smelled different. There was chewing gum stuck in different places. The children who got on the bus were different. They seemed quieter and happier and more perfect to him. They left him alone.
The bus that he usually rode drove away first, and when he saw it go he felt nervous for a moment. His parents might be angry.
The girl was taking him somewhere he'd never been. They sat warmly together with their lunchboxes on their laps, passing white winter hills and farmhouses and horses shaking snow off themselves. Some of the trees were only dusted with snow, as a cake might be with sugar, while others below, onto which they had discharged their loads, resembled snowmen or plump downy birds. They passed a little evergreen heavily lobed with it like a brain stood on its end, and by its agency the light passing into the bus window was whitened, so that when the girl turned suddenly toward him her face resembled a marble angel, and then the tree was past, and her features obeyed the vibrations of a rosier light. Without knowing what he was doing or why, he suddenly plunged his face into her wann hair. The girl looked at him with great seriousness. The snow was getting deeper the farther they rode into this unknown land, and it had begun to get dark. He was entirely happy by the girl's side. The bus stopped more frequently now to let the pupils off. It was almost empty. Then they traveled for another long interval along the edges of snowy fields. The butterfly boy saw a low pond in the direction of the setting sun. A wavy black channel had formed between its plates of ice. - Our dog likes to play there, the girl said. - A great rolling hill caught the sunset in the distance. Below it was another wide field of steep-roofed farm sheds and half-frozen ponds and trees becoming successively more frosted in the distance. They drew closer to the base of the hill, and the girl pointed to a white house. - That's where I live, she said.
It was late twilight, and getting cold when the bus let them off. - Now we have to walk a minute, the girl said. - She took him up a wide road that swiveled through the bare and spacious forest. The road was irresistibly blank and creamy with snow like the notebook-paper that they used at school. The butterfly boy drew loops and circles with his mittened hand. - Come on, the girl said. I want to show you my things. - The road had steepened as it curved them up through snowy shade. Whitened limbs hung over their heads, and then they turned one more bend, and came to a field again and they saw the girl's house. - I'm sad, the girl said. 'Cause I wanted to show you the footprints I made in the morning. But the snow's covered them up.
The butterfly boy realized that the girl liked him very much. Without looking at her, he followed her inside, glowing with a soft warm joy.
Who's this? said the girl's mother in surprise.
He's coming for dinner, the girl explained.
She took him up to her room, and, giggling, opened her chest of drawers to show him her folded white underpants. He had never seen girls' underpants before. He was as happy as when he'd seen the butterfly: a special secret had now been revealed to him.
After that, he and the girl read storybooks together until dinnertime. There was one book about five Chinese brothers who couldn't be killed. One was condemned to be drowned, but he drank up all the sea. The page showed a night scene, glowing with the rich pigments of children's books like some lantern-lit stand of fruits in bowls. People were diving in the stagnant pond, their ploughs parked under the trees. They were bringing up armloads of skulls. Across the brown river's bridge, a white monument rose like a Khmer tombstone. Here the executioners, skinny serious men in black pajamas, were trying to drown the Chinese brother. They had tied his hands behind his back with wire and forced his head down into the water, but he was drinking it all up with bulging cheeks; they couldn't hurt him even there at the foot of the lion's gape where white teeth blared. Making a festivity of the event, little kids were beating a drum and leaping barefoot down the dirty street lit by a single orange-shaped lamp held to a power pole. They didn't see the man in black pajamas who was coming with an iron bar to smash the lamp. The Chinese brother was still drinking; the water got lower and lower. On the bridge, a one-legged boy leaned on his crutch in astonishment. There was a golden temple in the background, with snarling stone figures carved on the pillars; other winged figures were about to swoop. Skinny boys in black pajamas were smashing it down with pickaxes. There were dark gratings in front of which people sat under lightless awnings and the girls laughed. They were eating at a table crowded by bowls of string beans, limes, yellow flowers, peppers, a bowl of red chili powder, chopsticks, the people putting everything in their soup, sitting down on little square stools with other big bowls of soup steaming at their back. Their backs were turned, so they didn't see the men in black pajamas coming toward them with machine guns. The butterfly boy had never seen anybody who wasn't white. He wondered if all Chinese people possessed these supernatural capabilities.
This is my favorite picture, said the girl, turning to a page which show
ed another unkillable Chinese brother being pushed off a precipice. The cliff was walled with dark green palms that glistened as if dipped in wax, and there was glossy darkness between them down which children scrambled barefoot, their shirts fluttering bright and clean in the hot breeze; palm-heads swung like pendulums. Men in black pajamas were waiting for them. Banana leaves made green awnings; then other multi-rayed green stars and bushes with dewy leaves that sparkled like constellations held the middle place; below them, rust-red compound blooms topped lacy mazes of dark greyish-green leaves, everything slanting down to the dark water, white-foamed, that came from the wide white waterfall towards which the Chinese brother screamed smiling down.
The butterfly boy looked at this picture with her for a long time. Then he hung his head. - Can I see your underpants again?
9
The next year the school districts changed, so he didn't see the girl anymore. Another girl invited him over to make Creepy Crawlers. He only had the Plastic Goop, but she had the other kind that you could bake into rubbery candy. They made candy ants and beetles and spiders and ate them and he was very happy. But he was afraid to invite her over because he didn't know what his parents would think about his playing with girls, so she never invited him again.
10
The school bully roared, ran down from his mountain of snow and ice, and charged the butterfly boy with outstretched arms. The bully's parka was the same every year. His parents never seemed to wash it, so it was very grimy; and it had become too small for him. The bully had thick hairy arms like a monster and a reddish-purple face full of yellow teeth. He knocked the butterfly boy down and sat on his stomach. Then he began to spit into his face. He spat and spat, while the other boys cheered. Then he took the butterfly boy's glasses off and broke them. He punched the butterfly boy in the nose until blood came out. Then he stood up. He jumped on the butterfly boy's stomach, and the butterfly boy puked. Everybody laughed. He let the butterfly boy go. The butterfly boy staggered into the far corner of the chain-link fence and tried to clean the blood and vomit off himself.
Butterfly Stories: A Novel Page 1