Butterfly Stories: A Novel
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Ahead were white and red lights (very still and bright).
The lights were getting closer now and he wondered if that was when the trouble would start. They were very still and steady.
So they came to that first checkpoint, a triangle of incandescent tubes in the road, swarming with insects. A giant beetle crawled slowly up one of the bulbs, seeking something it would never find or understand. Then it slid to the ground.
There were three Thai policemen. They turned Vanna's husband back, and he beamed like an idiot and went. But he'd noticed that the car and motorbike drivers did not stop at that first checkpoint unless they wanted to. On his next attempt he'd lie down in the back of a car.
A firefly winked low in the grass. A motorbike shot by. A reflected light shone upon another stagnant pool.
In the car he made it to the second checkpoint before they were stopped. The soldiers returned him to the first checkpoint, and this time the three policemen shouted and shook him. Again he grinned as stupidly as he could. Astonishingly, they did not arrest him or take his passport. After they had driven him back to town he sat trying to decide what to do. He could walk (it was only six kilometers) but what then? If he evaded the glares of checkpoint light, if he succeeded in clambering over the rolls of barbed wire at the end, then he'd be in a jungle filled with land mines. The best thing that could happen to him would be losing a leg -
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There she was in the dimdark hotel room sitting side-saddle on the bed with one arm resting on his back while she touched her widely smiling mouth (though it was not exactly a smile since her eyes didn't change; it was just sweet and incomprehensible) with her forefinger - a pose she must have considered endearing or photogenic, since she did it all the time for the photographer; her husband didn't remember her doing it much for him; perhaps it was a trick she'd learned from some actress; anyway, she lounged in her waspdark-and-goldstriped dress, her elbows bent like wings, her face a little elongated by her "smile" in the mysterious blue air-conditioned quiet of the hotel darkness, no one able to see them because he or she had closed the shutters; her hand patted him very softly through the towel that entubed his waist; that was all he had on; he lay resting so beautifully, resting, happy with her weight on top of him, her butt against his side; he patted it; he wanted her to take her shower and lie down next to him so that he could hold her very tight and sleep (did she sleep when he slept or did she just lie there patient and close-eyed? he'd never wondered that before). He lay down and slept for an hour. Then he went out to try again.
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This time he went on foot, ducking down into the feculent ditch whenever he saw or heard a vehicle. He neared the checkpoint of incandescent lights and veered left, crawling slowly. When he was even with the checkpoint, the white brightness grabbed and blinded him even as he tried to inch away from being seen. They did not see him. He felt a cold itch between his shoulderblades until he was in the darkness again. He waited for his sight to come back. Then he crawled for a long time. Vines cut tensely across his vision. The moss felt like a wet dog's sides. Already the bugs were crawling over him. He glanced back at the checkpoint and was shocked by its hellish brightness and proximity. Suddenly the soldiers began talking in agitated voices. He flung himself down onto his belly. There was a splash. His heart was pounding so fiercely that he thought he might vomit. Something soft and cold crawled across his neck in a series of rapid spasms. He lay very still until the talking stopped, and then he waited some more, until at last he heard a truck grinding loudly toward him from the town. That noise would surely cover him as well as any mask of leaves. He began to worm his way closer to Cambodia. When the truck drew abreast of him, he lay down again. Silent mosquitoes bit his face and neck. His chest ached from his heartbeat. He passed the second checkpoint, glimpsing in its outreach of alarm-glare many giant brown leathery leaf-cups like radar ears hanging dead in the dripping shadows, listening to life, and then that choice of surrender too was behind him, and there was only one more. It would be dawn soon. The mosquitoes were not so thick now. He began to allow himself hope that after all he'd be fully embraced by the jungle body. The darkness was bleeding in the east by the time he reached the place where the road turned left to the cleared zone where they had an open-air border market in the mornings and early afternoons, and it was bleak and far too bright but the soldiers were busy bellying themselves into prostitute-laughs. The lanes of barbed wire made him despair for a moment, but he followed the nearest wall, going away from the soldiers and the light, and after a half-mile there was jungle instead of packed-down dirt, and at dawn the barbed wire wavered, pressed heavily by brown limbs and creepers, and so he found a hole; he knew from the Pat Pong girls that there'd always be a hole if he wanted one badly enough . . .
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Skinny boys were shouting at him. They tied his wrists behind his back with wire. - Are you imperialist lackey of traitor? a boy shouted. - Yes, he beamed. I am a traitor.
They were very happy then. They'd finally found someone who was guilty.
They led him along the edge of a luminous brownish-green creek that smelled like muck. A huge crab dandled its claws in the middle, clutching at unripe twigs. It was not a beetle-shaped crab like the ones in the markets, but broad, flat and brown. Leaves and garbage were everywhere. The view vanished into stinking greenness. The trees were not especially tall or leafy, but they were everywhere. Weird structures of roots and intersecting vines like musical instruments played chords upon his heart. They led him through turnstiles of latticework roots the hue of ginger-bulbs, and it got darker and so did the stench of the creek. There was another crab, even bigger than the last, and it was eating someone's face half-sunk in the reddish-brown ooze. There was a crowd of toiling crabs, and then more barbed wire and they were there where they were supposed to be. She was looking on him full at last with that sweet soft pale smooth delicate face of hers, open and trusting, smiling - really smiling! - a pouty little smile like a kiss, her gold chain necklace coming shooting out of chin-shadow with the heart lying on her thin bluish-white blouse just above her breasts, inverted-V eyebrows seeming to question him a little as she smiled; the recognition of him took up her whole face as she sat waiting for him with that sad smile; he was hers; soon he'd be sleeping beside her forever.
Epigraphs and Sources
The Butterfly Boy
Epigraph - G. W. Leibniz, preface to The New Essays (1703-5) in Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Arlew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989), p. 293.
Ulrich and the Doctor
Epigraph - Chuck Taylor, The Complete Book of Combat Handgunning (Cornville, Arizona: Desert Publications, 1982), p. 63.
More Benadryl, Whined the Journalist
Epigraph - Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, The Ants (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 154.
The New Wife
Epigraph-N. Sanmugathasan, General Secretary, Ceylon Communist Party, "Enver Hoxha Refuted," in A World to Win: International Marxist Leninist Journal, no. 1, May 1981, p. 8.
Quotation in sec. 32 - Hanna Reitsch, The Sky My Kingdom (London: Greenhill Books, Lionel Levanthal Ltd., 1991), p. 81.
The Answer
Epigraph - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, rev. anon, trans. (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967), p. 188.
/ Wouldn't Be Smiling That Way If I Were You
Epigraph - Yaroslav Golovanov, Sergei Korolev: The Apprenticeship c a Space Pioneer, trans. M. M. Samokhvalov and H. C. Creightot (Moscow: Mir Publishers, 1975 rev.), p. 7.
The Bordello of Pain
Epigraph - Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant (New York: Penguin, 1975 rev.), p. 396.
Witness testimony footnote - "A group of Cambodian jurists," People's Revolutionary Tribunal Held in Phnom Penh for the Trial of the Genocide Crime of the Pol Pot-IengSary Clique: Documents (August 1
979) (Phnom Penh: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1990), p. 11—60.
Bridal Mines
Epigraph - Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1983), p. 125.