Butterfly Stories: A Novel

by William T. Vollmann

  14

  Berkeley was like Seattle, the same white fog, hills of trees, angry-looking boys and girls storming into the record store, people in rainbow-colored backpacks clicking cassette cases restlessly, skateboarders, students ambling and loitering, girls wandering in a dream of ice cream, boys and girls coming out of the record store exchanging complicitous looks, as if they'd just jerked each other off, because they'd BOUGHT things, hairy-legged wiry boys in shorts, daypacks, luna-green bike helmets, a ponytailed man in earth shoes wiggling his butt against the railing, a professor grinning like Fu Manchu as he strolled, arms behind his back, discoursing to his prettiest pupil, black boys in backwards hats walking and eating pizza, then of course the long-haired fathers who carried their babies on their backs.

  Well, I don't know, the editor was saying. I'm not really familiar with your politics. I guess we could maybe work something out. I'd have to put it up to the group. The fact that you're a white male kind of makes me uneasy.

  Tell the group that my grandmother was a Seneca Indian, the husband lied cunningly.

  Oh, now that's cool. Actually I can kind of see the resemblance.

  In the end they commissioned him to do an article on the AIDS ward. The group had even chosen the title: "The Bordello of Pain. " - Because the outrage that we feel for these victims is the same outrage that we feel for women whose bodies are exploited by unmediated prostitution! a girl explained.

  The husband didn't care. It was five hundred bucks. Like any prostitute, he had to get along somehow.

  15

  Armed with his myriad press cards, he entered the Bordello of Pain. Skeletons that had not yet died surrounded him like a traffic jam in an afternoon thunderstorm, glistening cars creeping all the way to the horizon; a long crooked verticality of lightning, then thunder close enough to make the car jump . . . Five hundred bucks. He asked them each what drugs they were taking, how they'd contracted the disease, what message they wanted to give the world. Five hundred bucks. Some were calm and one was happy and all the rest were angry fearful people who wanted to blame someone because they were dying. The one who was happy chuckled and beckoned him and whispered: I see the same death in your eyes. - Skinny arms and legs thinned second by second in front of him. A lady coughed. She couldn't eat anymore. How skinny she was! A skeleton scuttled screaming underneath a bed; a lady said: That's where she always goes to cry. - A lady smiled at him and whispered: Thank you so much for coming here. You're so patient and quiet with me that I almost feel that you're one of us . . . - A lady said to him: I guess what I want to tell the world is that when you know you're dying your choices seem to fall away. There's only one thing left to do. Whatever's the most important thing, that's what you do. That's all you have time for . . .

  Vanna's husband whirled upon her. - And for you, he said to her in a very low voice, what's the most important thing?

  She smiled and took his hand. - Love, she said.

  Death isn't sad; it's Being itself. Death is the founder of consciousness, and therefore of political awareness.

  Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer,

  Pure War (1983)

  1

  In foggy grassless moon-dips of gloom under spreading trees, he made up his mind to defy the embargoes on wife and life that had been set upon him; clambering down to grey smooth-packed dirt gashed deep by the fingernails of floods, he ducked under the last tree and came out onto the hill-swollen coast that was wild with grass and poison oak and weed pods and the last blue flowers of the season. Fog horns blew ragged and strange against the chilly breeze. Digging in his heels, he descended a wall of eroded dirt headlong to the beach, riding down the raking wounds his haste scored in the earth, rushing down like the powdered soil that crumbled out of his tracks. The sand was wet. Between waves he climbed up a boulder that became an island every minute or two; he stood watching the sea-lurch, chalk-grey and cold, come to cover the other bird-dunged rocks. Masses of foam near shore highlighted the dark stone teeth. Farther out, there was nothing to see but grey grey sea, grey sky; he breathed the smell of rotten kelp . . . All doubt was scoured away as he swore to himself that he'd find her. He dreamed of the jungle almost every night now. He was going to her. That was what he promised himself. And as soon as he became his own witness - impossible to unoath anything now -he felt relief and exaltation, standing on that bemusseled black boulder, ocean foaming around him like beer, slapping up and spraying him ... A white and grey gull perched beside him, seemingly one-legged. Rocks jutted up tirelessly in the surf.

  2

  He stood on a steep slope of scree and broken glass in worn-out shoes, fog scudding and rippling down the low waves of sage and Scotch broom (poison oak a warning among them with its bright red leaves). Suddenly the fog turned blue. It must be thinning, he thought. The bluish-greyish-white purity of fog caressed the hill's rounded swelling; the grass-tips wove gently; the flower-stalks whipped back and forth as if on strings; the bushes shuddered . . .

  3

  He was back at the Hotel 38. The ragged chain of light that hung down the door-edge kept flickering whenever someone passed by. Sometimes it flickered quickly, sometimes slowly. Sometimes the light changed to darkness, and then he knew that someone was standing outside listening.

  4

  He washed his clothes, and the next morning they were still wet. He had to travel. He packed them in a plastic bag and they got hot and steamy. That evening he hung them out to dry. In the morning they were still wet. He packed them into the plastic bag. In the evening they were mildewed. He thought: Is that how people smell when they're dead?

  5

  At the restaurant where the pigtailed girl in the green T-shirt that said HONEY stood cleaning her knife, the proprietor chopped meat and then the girl took her knife outside to talk with a girl who wore a gold chain around her neck, and a man wheeled a cart slowly down the alley and blue smoke drifted from three passing motorcycles and a wide white car rolled gently by. Peering down his nose into thick spectacles, the proprietor, bulging his chest out, put a hand on his hip and gazed placidly at the world. The girl came in, wiping her nose with the back of her hand, and cleared away a table. A couple sat at another table. The woman slid her foot easily out of the sandals, bent like a bird, and sucked up Coke through her straw. The man reached into the dish and put more on his plate. The proprietor crossed his hands against his back and jiggled his buttocks to the radio song. Vanna's husband ate pork. The girl was pretty, but he remembered his wife in the reddish-brown luminescence of everything, the old teak woodwork in the hotel room glossy reddish-brown like the back of some beetle, the cabinet a redder shade of brown, some different wood maybe or just the light, then her standing there with slightly raised shoulders against the cabinet not quite smiling at him in the crimson dress and blouse with the long gold stripes down it; her arms and hands and gentle slender fingers were more chocolaty like the puddles on the Battambang road, so thick-brown they were almost orange, but her face, though partaking of brown, was much paler with a moony lemony delicacy especially where the sunlight was touching her on cheekbones and chin and sweet soft throat and between her eyes where he used to nose-kiss her to make her laugh; and her dark hair and eyes were much more intense than the brownish-black cabinet-darkness just behind her, her hair and eyes a positive negativity of perfect black! She stood with her fingers half-open and her face turned almost completely toward him, not quite, and this was his wife now and forever, her belly not entirely flat as with the younger girls, her cheekbones a little too sharp for easy beauty. A single earring caught light like a maddening crystal; she seemed to wear somebody's soul from her ear. No other soul, though; the other ear was hidden by her unguent-sweetened hair . . . And he thought: Soon she'll take her shower and I'll take my shower and we'll lie side by side in the blessed darkness and I'll put my arm around her and put my head on her heart as she cradles my head and I'll listen to her heart getting slower and slower and slower . . .

  6 />
  As the hot night faded, Joy and Oy and Noi and Pukki now probably faking their last orgasm, he sat in second class, waiting for the train to take him to the border. On the far side of the tracks, where sarongs hung over cubicles made of corrugated siding, a young woman with long black hair prayed her hands down her face. Beside her, an old lady got to her feet and hobbled barefoot, bent half over under a burden of water. A third woman, whose age seemed in between that of the other two, began to prepare rice. When it was steaming, the young woman began to chop or massage something unknown behind the metal wall, and all at once the black night sky turned morning grey, the train honked sourly, and they began to slide into the new day whose trains and buildings, still cool, mysterious, almost pure, would not fail soon to set about their own solitary routines. His window passed wet grey walls to which laundry clung like spiderwebs. Fire cans seethed orange beside a brown canal; siding-roofed houses crowded under a gracious tree, sweating a smell of smoke. An illuminated train shot by the other window, occluding the morning-clouded sky. In the dark leaf-roofed alleys, boys bicycled out, balancing ice sacks on their handlebars.

  7

  The almost empty train pulsed open-windowed past fishy-smelling palm fields, fat lady vendeuses singsonging up and down the aisle with Coke, dried fish, satay, rice ... He bought an orange peacock's fan of chicken that was wired between two halves of a bamboo stick. It was very fresh and gingery and good.

  8

  The silver-blue backs of metaled houses formed a plain interrupted by shadow-crevices, a canal, an occasional tall palm . . . then these ended suddenly in grass as high as the window. A silver-fogged river flashed on him like relapsing fever. Silver fog lived on the grassheads like an aura. He saw a woman with four gold rings on her finger; she pressed her hand to her nose, looking in the window at him, and then the train was past. Bushy islands undercut by silver water-ribbons gave way to housecubes open and shuttered, grey walls. The train breasted the walled river of grass . . .

  9

  Again they passed another train, through whose windows he saw other heads and then windows, cutout palm foliage. Trains seemed to him like destinies. He wondered what kind of person he'd be becoming if he were on that other train.

  10

  The conductor approached in his olive-green uniform, a pad of mysterious forms under his arm like birth control calendars. He punched four and gave them to Vanna's husband. He put a pen in his mouth when he punched them. The golden star and double arrowhead on his shoulder, the golden medallion on his lapel, the grand golden lozenge-emblem just above the slick black visor of his cap, these tokens gave indisputable proof of his majesty. He leaned against the seat, almost erect, writing, saying something with a gentle smile, the long tendons vibrating in his arms. His pockmarked face was lowered, his pants creased to fresh knife-edges. After he was gone, all the passengers had to explain to one another the various forms he'd assigned them. Suddenly, Vanna's husband remembered a maxim he'd heard: In Cambodia you can give every official a gift; in fact, you'd better give every official a gift; in Thailand you'd better not give them a gift unless you know them.

  11

  At midday the train stopped for an hour. He went out and sat under the platform canopy, staring at a giant yellow Buddha whose topknot was just a little higher than the highest tree. Two skinny old monks, their once orange robes brown, leaned forward on a bench, patiently. There was a stand with glass-fronted triple shelves on narrow legs, puffed full of white balls with something red hiding inside. - He thought: I wonder if that's how my balls are now, with AIDS inside them . . .

  12

  Now they rattled through the heart of Thailand, plains of yellow-green, wet rice fields steaming like cunts, the underside of another green tree, white birds on the narrow rivers, a horizon-line of grey-green trees. The bridges were all grand (in Cambodia, each one having been meticulously blown up by the Khmer Rouge, the Hun Sen government rebuilt the only way it could, just twin metal tracks on the rusty trestles, good enough for military vehicles, the river waiting in between, so don't wobble right or left; and every bridge was guarded by soldiers); they were all painted, window-high; no soldiers stood there looking down on green rice-stubble in water . . . But in the middle of a rice field he saw a stick-bridge with its sticks projecting like crazy darning needles.

  Yotaka. The flagman held out the dark green banner to send the train on; the red cloth hung sleepy in his other hand.

  Vanna's husband gave a kid one of his apricot cookies, and the kid prayed thank you. His mother kept her money between her breasts. She had to reach up there to pay the conductor.

  Prachinari. The rice fields ended, and then there was jungle with mountains ahead, and that Cambodian sandalwood smell. Sometimes they came out again into rice-lakes, but those were now bayed by trees and mountains. Houses stood on stilts among the big tree-ferns; and between the houses' legs lived colonies of birds in baskets.

  Aranyaprathet. Last stop. All day the fan had been slowly dipping and turning overhead; now it went off and Vanna's husband felt his stomach begin to coil . . .

  13

  He passed an open-doored place that said COFFEE SHOP - RESTAURANT and inside it was all girls kneeling before a smoking Buddha; all the chairs faced Buddha, and beyond Buddha was only the bar. The owner had died. It would be closed for nine days.

  14

  He thought: Aside from this, what do I have left to accomplish? - Nothing, really. I don't care if I never screw another whore.

  He thought: Crossing the border isn't really worth it.

  He thought: The reality is that these trips are getting harder for me physically, emotionally, morally and maybe mentally. There is nothing out here that I really want.

  15

  He thought: How many of my sweaty twilights has God seen?

  16

  He remembered how one night he'd sat up in bed beside her, kissed the medallion of Catherine Tekakwitha which he wore on the homemade loop of parachute cord now stained greyish-green by years of feversweat and sleepwax and the fumes of happiness, and he prayed for Vanna. She was watching him. For the first time he slipped the medallion off. Then he hung it round her neck. After that, he gave her the medallion every night, and in the morning she gave it back to him. On their last night he kissed it and gave it to her to keep, and she confided to him her own most precious thing, a snapshot of her baby . . .

  17

  Far away on a sidewalk corner, a boy bounced a ball. He was many zones of light away. That sidewalk might as well be the whole empty world. Dresses hung in an open bay of light. A yellow traffic light opened and closed like a mouth. People were sitting at sidewalk tables by a parked wheel-stand that sold nothing. Their bent backs gave off aquarium colors as they ate.

  18

  You want to cross the border with Khmer Rouge? But that is illegal; that is very dangerous!

  Well, he told the translator, it's all Esquire's fault. Esquire said I had to. Otherwise, I'll lose my job.

  I know some people without legs, said the translator. Because they try to cross the border. Why you want to do that?

  Oh, to meet the Khmer Rouge -

  The translator laughed incredulously.

  Staring into the square black stagnant pool in the center of town (a squiggly white-cube reflection weighing down one corner of it), he tried to screw up his courage to ask a cyclo to take him to the border. The translator had said that they had checkpoints on the road at night. It was all so pointless, and so much effort, and nothing but a nightmare to reward him at the end of it, if he got anywhere at all. Why didn't he just drown himself in that filthy pool? - He felt very much alone. Outside the fence, the cyclo drivers sat in their vehicles in a row. The lighted markets with their piles of red and yellow fruit seemed to balance the leaves that hung over him like some scaly underbelly of the night. A barefoot boy passed through the tube of green light that spilled on the street. He was carrying a basket. Vanna's husband felt sad.

  T
he man gladly accepted fifty bhat. On this kind of cyclo the driver sat ahead, towing the passenger in the wheeled booth. Seeing those sturdy brown legs pedaling him into the palmtree darkness, Vanna's husband felt inexpressibly lonely and sad. The man pedaled him down back ways, smoking a cigarette as he went. No one else was on the road. He saw people eating inside, and they were laughing loudly at something that one of them had done or said. On the sidewalk he passed three children, a boy and two girls. The boy gripped one of the girls' knees.

  On the main road Vanna's husband kept his head down every time a car or motorbike passed. The sound of crickets and the smell of hemp were overpowering. The man pedaled on very slowly and serenely, like a distance swimmer. After a short time they reached the first bridge.