Butterfly Stories: A Novel

by William T. Vollmann

  That was undoubtedly the method. Once he had a definite application for the method, his imagination could go ahead of him, leading him safely to love or death . . .

  He was on the # 24 bus on his way to Bob and Esther's for dinner, the Christmas trees already out and lit on the second level of Heal & Son, a baby roaring with unknown anguish, shrilling like an alarm - that irritated him; everything made him tense, in fact: - the red traffic lights that glowed like measles, the start-and-stop of the bus over the pavement whose texture he thought he could feel even through wheels, shocks, floor and seat (the baby cried on); he bore with the nausea as they turned another roundabout like the same old samsara; a blonde with a punk haircut got on just then, and the Op Art herringbone pattern on her sidebag almost made him upchuck; slowly they approached smolder-orange-windowed housing towers ghastly in the drizzly sky and the baby wept NO! NO! and they passed SOLICITORS and CARPETLAND, the streets more crowded with shops now, which soothed him; maybe there'd be something he could buy ... - You gotta shu' up! the baby's mother kept saying. He looked out at the people skating soundlessly over the bright tiles of the Underground station . . .

  33

  Better not to try anything than to be wicked! - That's how most people acted, and they were probably right, dying their lumpish lives without collecting more than their share of the general blame; but he'd do whatever he was called to do . . .

  34

  He hadn't drunk enough whiskey at Bob and Esther's. His throat still hurt. The pub down the street was out of onion crisps. And the BBC was going to move him out of his hotel room (this small square grave with diamond-patterned carpet, an adjoining marble tomb of a bathroom on whose black floor he slipped and nearly brained himself every time; the double bed took up most of the room; he lay in it enjoying surcease from his fever and fiddled with the cigarette hole that the white girl had made in the coverlet) because they'd made a mistake putting him there in the first place; it was too good for him or not good enough or something - most likely too good for him; once they moved him out, the white girl wouldn't be able to find him; so he called even though she said she'd probably be out, and he got her mother, who wanted to know who he was, what number he was calling from, how he'd met her daughter, what they'd done together; he told her to have the girl call in the morning. At eleven in the morning he had to go to work and she hadn't called, so when they let him out for lunch at 1:00 he went back to his half made-up room but there was no message from her and he wondered if maybe the desk flunkeys hadn't brought it up yet but he didn't feel like going to see; maybe she didn't want to call him; he tried to call her, but the hotel had closed the line and it was too much effort to make them open it. So he ducked into the pub across the street and had a half pint of Sam Smith's, not the stout but the pale apple-flavored kind. The fat barman reached across every minute to munch peanuts. Muzak played grandiosely; a serious drinker leaned on a crutch; the husband was going to be late to the studio and he felt so sad and rejected that the white girl hadn't called him that he didn't care.

  Munching on some cheese crisps (TRADITIONAL FLAVOVR), he wandered into the canteen where the producer was supposed to meet him, but the producer wasn't there, so he went down the long hot fire-doored hallways to the studio where the producer was frowning over the script, and he said to the producer: I thought you were going to meet me in the canteen.

  I was there, said the producer. But then I had to work. Some people have to work.

  The producer's friend started to introduce herself, but the producer interrupted and said to him: You mustn't eat crisps. No, I'm serious. They'll dry your voice out.

  There are only a few crumbs left, the husband said. He finished the crisps and went into the other room, which was nicely soundproofed, the producer and technicians now secured in an aquarium where they could frown and gesture and grimace in happy silence behind their window, leaving him free to listen to the second hand going round.

  The green light came on. - OK, the producer said. Stand by for Seal Hunt III.

  35

  The next morning he had a fever and a sore throat and remembered how the white girl had coughed once or twice; it was 5:00 when he woke up lonely and got up to drink some water but could barely swallow. He lay there until 7:30. Furry bedclothes gnawed at him throughout that long night of sickness. When it started getting light he put on an eyeshade but it seemed to press against his eyes and he could not stop seeing ferocious white dots against the blackness, so he removed the eyeshade, and slowly the albino ants decayed into static. The flicker of his eyelashes, irritatingly magnified, merged with his headache like wet and rusty ferns woven into an unending basketwork of decay. At eight he thought about calling the white girl, but decided to have breakfast first. Maybe the hot tea would help him.

  In the Brasserie (why they had to call it that he didn't know) he untwisted his urine-sample-sized jar of breakfast marmalade (NO ADDED COLOUR) and munched his toast, listening to the waitress's shoes squeaking on the parquet floor. The marmalade was good. At long last one other guest came in, a man in a red tie and corduroy suit. Without seeming to see the husband, the man saw him and sat on the other side of the room.

  It was 8:20. He got Reception to give him an outside line; then, dreading the thought that he might reach her mother, he called the white girl. The phone rang four times. Hello? said the white girl's mother very anxiously. - Is Samantha there? he said. - No, said the mother, not angrily, not even wearily, only sadly, with such calm and final sadness as to constitute implacability. The mother understood that he and the daughter had done or were doing something that was being kept from her. The mother was never going to pass on his messages or let him see her.

  36

  Georgette Heyer in uniform green jackets, multiple copies of Cortâzar (grey), Céline (black) and some unknown faraway writer whose jackets were metallic white like the wrappers of those Belgian chocolates with the horse picture; these almost subsumed him, but he kept believing there must be some other category he longed for but couldn't think of, some special kind of book that was entirely unfamiliar but very very good ... -Yeah, here's fiction, a lady said. The sound of the escalator was maddening. A wave of fever drenched him. He swayed and did not open Mayersberg.

  Speak Malay! the green book shouted. A saleslady led him to an English-Eskimo Eskimo-English dictionary; he looked on his own for something Khmer but couldn't find anything closer than Speak Indonesian! He stared dull-eyed, open-mouthed, at Spoken Thai, a Gilbertese-English dictionary, Da Kine Talk . . .

  Climbing up insecticide-smelling stairs, looking through a window into another window set among sooty bricks, he saw other windows with books behind them. Books walled themselves off from him like the Alaskan cemetery fenced with whalebones. Whether they were books or something else didn't even matter anymore. He remembered the Polish market in Omaha with its glass coffin filled with sausage, dried smoked sausage on top, pickled sausage all around bulkheaded by bags of beef jerky; one of those sausages and only one was the right choice, but he hadn't made it. Maybe the English-Eskimo Eskimo-English dictionary was the right choice. He was starting not to think so, but it would definitely have been the wrong choice not to buy it. That's how it would have been with the white girl, too; if he hadn't made love with her he never would have known that she wasn't going to pull off her white mask to be his wife. He was sweating like a mountain-climber. He thought: I suppose this will be how it is when I get AIDS. -Then he thought: Maybe I do have AIDS.

  37

  The marquee said Cameron Red's Hypnotic Show and he thought: Well, I don't believe hypnotism is the answer, but who knows? Maybe it'll make all my problems go away.

  In the poster, the hypnotist smiled innocuously in black and white like someone on an old record album. But his white fingers reached and clutched; there was a terrifyingly hysterical and concentrated brilliancy in his irises.

  38

  The hypnotist was smoking a cigarette under a water-stained ceiling in
a room wallpapered with a pattern of scarlet orchids shaped like praying mantises. It was evidently his dressing room, since the far door opened directly onto the wings of a stage where chorus girls were rehearsing, stretching their legs upward like soaring tree-ferns even though nobody watched or cared. There was a welding kit under the hypnotist's bed, then the hall to the bathroom door which was stuffed with paper where somebody had kicked or smashed a hole in it (the shower pull was broken off and you had to flush the toilet three times and even then it might not work). The husband said to himself: How do I know that about the toilet? How do I know there's a welding kit under the bed? Why does this place seem so familiar? - and then the hypnotist's eyes bulged out toward him a little more and he got dizzy, the tides of fever carrying him nowhere, only working him back and forth; but for a moment, only for a moment, he was able to remember that this room and hallway and bathroom had existed in the Arctic, which meant that it couldn't exist here, which meant ... - but now the hypnotist's eyeballs clanged over his own. Just as a sleeping pill's effects begin within the quarter-hour, with numbness behind the eyes, followed by a heaviness in the fingers, these zones of deadness expanding rapidly, so now the hypnotist's thrusts of light oozed down his sore throat until he couldn't feel it anymore; then light curved around and round inside his skull like a turd too big for the toilet bowl, pressing down on his brain, blinking out blood vessels like city lights at curfew, and he forgot everything.

  To remember her you MUST forget, said the hypnotist.

  He said: I'm searching for something, and I still don't know what it is.

  You must FORGET, said the hypnotist.

  He said: I married someone, and I don't know who she is.

  You must FORGET, said the hypnotist.

  He said: I betrayed someone, and I don't know where I am.

  The hypnotist said: What about the how and why? You forgot those. Those are the five questions that a good journalist is supposed to ask. Who, what, where, how and why.

  You told me to forget.

  That's no excuse. What's her name?

  Vanna.

  What's her name?

  Vanna.

  What's her name?

  I - I forget -

  You must FORGET, said the hypnotist. What's her name?

  Who? What's my name? I don't remember my name.

  You must FORGET, FORGET, FORGET, FORGET . . .

  He said: I feel that my breast is a closed iron door that I'm standing breast to breast with, and I have to smash it open with my breast or with my head because my heart or my love's heart lies inside.

  Something touched him. He didn't know what it was. It was fishy and silverwhite and crewcut-soft like sealskin kamiks.

  The hypnotist had brought him out of himself, as when a brook carves rock between scaly trees, slipping ever deeper into its own crack until it can rill out into desire, which is sun and space, white light, then GONE into the bowl of green trees below, sided by rock wall looming and leaning and bending, articulated at its reddish lizard-ledges, cradling that suicidal miracle of a desert waterfall; and it seemed he was going down wide white stairs that led into a lake; and now the lukewarm waters were lapping at his ankles; now they were at his knees and he felt slimy weeds rub against him coolly; now he'd gone waist-deep and his testicles contracted with the cold; the water was getting colder and darker by the time his chest went under and the stairs weren't white anymore; they were black; the hypnotist's pale hand took his and pulled him down three more steps so that the water was at his throat and there was an animal smell; the wife he'd divorced was drowned and rotting there; the hypnotist dragged him down deeper and his face went in, only his hair still floating in that bygone world of breath; he would have floated helplessly but for the iron-dark stairs that clung like leeches to the soles of his feet and sucked the buoyancy out of him as the hypnotist pulled him down; it was all very murky and ripply and bubbly but something was going round him now in nasty circles like a chained mongoose at a snake charmer's and the hypnotist's erection was in his mouth; it was a pink mesa over which hung blue-bellied storm clouds with flickering narrow strings of lightning, and from the hot plateau far away he could see other clouds with stems of rain connecting them to the ground. Then he was speeding through the warm drafty bathroom-tiled vaults of the Tube, seeing lots of slender black-leotarded legs, and the hypnotist was whispering in his ear: When you awake you'll forget all this. You'll FORGET. - He was choking and the hypnotist was suffocating him and chuckling and saying: That's right; now drink your milk . . .

  Once he'd paid the price, once he'd done what Vanna was paid to do, then he crossed over and saw her better and more completely than ever before: Vanna not quite smiling in a spangle of darkness, Vanna with her lip-red fingernail glossy against her apple-red lip, looking at him big-eyed with her pupils perfect circles of pure light in her black eyes; yes, she was smiling at him, a slow sad cautious smile out of darkness; there was a glitter of moisture at the corner of her mouth just beyond her finger; he wanted to lick it and get AIDS; Vanna with her shimmering skin gazed smiling gently, accepting him no matter what he did; her chin almost rested on her knuckle but there was darkness in between, the darkness of sunray eyelashes from his strange doomed new wife whom he'd married once and would probably never see again - his wife, his wife, his wife! -he knew now that no answering letter from her would ever come, but if he went back to Cambodia and found her in the disco or in some anonymous rice field whose corpse-mud and bone fragments oozed between her toes, then she'd smile at him in just the same way, so gently and lovingly and trustingly and sadly; and if he went away or didn't come in the first place she'd never think about him again. He saw Vanna striding away with ultraviolet footfalls outside a hotel room . . .

  39

  Everything jolly now? said the hypnotist, sitting calm, skinny and brown-skinned beneath the blue dentist's sign with the giant glistening stylized three-pronged tooth, beside which a set of pink-lidded jaws smiled in a light blue circle; quite a sign, really. - Yes, thank you, the husband said. He went out past all the faces smiling politely, smooth, brown-skinned. A green army truck hooted down the street. A lady sat spoonfeeding custard to her little boy and girl. Two cyclists towed a trailer filled with dark green packages. Another cyclist had dozens of live chickens bundled under him. On the sidewalk in front of her kids a lady was splitting firewood with a cleaver. She had a Chinese-porcelain face. Past her stretched an ocher tunnel of bamboo stalks leaning into one another over a brown creek, and at the far end of its darkness was the place where Vanna was waiting for him after she'd left the hotel room.

  40

  Everything jolly now? said the hypnotist. Outside the snow-ledged window, voraciously seeking replication upon the walls of the Quonset huts, the sunrise reflected itself in blackish-yellow necroses of that palest lavender blue sky, and the snow was one shade paler than that, the morning being yellow like the low yellow tunnel with the ladder and then the snow on top; the runway beacons were steady; purple steam moved east. Men in dark coveralls roamed around the terminal, drinking coffee, waiting for more freight on this Sunday morning. Just outside the other window, the master beacon flashed subtly. It flashed on a metal knob and a green door, making the former white, the latter a brilliant greenish-yellow. Sirhan Sirhan, that Kennedy assassin, had insisted in his insanity defense that it was precisely this meaningless winking which triggered his soul's evil trances; so he had no need to employ hypnotists to achieve his desire. The husband saw Sirhan Sirhan on the summit of a mountain of dirty snow; Sirhan Sirhan was the retarded boy whose reddish-purple face was armed with yellow teeth; he turned his hunched head in a series of unblinking spasms, shrieking like a bird. - I'm not afraid of you anymore, the husband said. Because I have someone whose life means more to me than mine. - The. fire extinguisher and the two pay phones remained ready to preserve homeostasis, letting people live as if cold and loneliness didn't exist. The orange shimmer of sunlight mounted higher on the dark b
uildings outside; snowy snow-roofs sprouted confusions of pipes and wires like measures of music. Beyond the work camp lay ice, and more ice, and at the end of the ice the Inuk girl he'd almost married was waiting, and he knew now that she was Vanna.

  41

  Everything jolly now? said the hypnotist, joining him in holy matrimony to the parking garage whore, the transvestite whore, the streetcorner whore, the English girl whose mother kept crying, and they were all Vanna like dead brown fern leaves on a pillar, like a school of sardines all salted and dried at once, like a grove of trees hung with long brown aerial roots that dangled down like hairs, thick and musty and chocolate colored; he'd reached the end of the tunnel now where a titanic bone-fan of bamboo rose rusty green in the fog. A few stalks had fallen across the creek to spear the other bank, forming high skinny bridges. The vines were like giant guitar strings. She stood in a grove of "textbook" leaves whose veins caught attention as if engraved for beginning students; she picked one and touched her lips to it and gave it to him and then the veins began to crawl and change, first forming his old wife's name, then a semblance of a skull, then an eye, a bullet, a crocodile (the Khmer Rouge had thrown her uncle to the crocodiles).