“Take these with you tomorrow.”
Moises found it hard to concentrate. It had been a long day and his mind was leaden from the weed they had smoked. It wasn’t until Hawthorne whipped the piece of hessian sacking from the table and revealed a brand new microscope that Moises woke up a little.
“This cost many Sol,” the Englishman said solemnly.
Moises had known Hawthorne for almost eight years; it was very unlike him to spend money without a great deal of thought.
Hawthorne began adjusting the instrument. “I am going to show you what to do.”
“Why?”
The man stood up and leaned his backside against the table, his hands clasped in front of him. “One million Nuevo Sol is about three hundred thousand U.S. dollars. If what Dollie says is even half true, that insect is worth … Well, it’s worth a hell of a lot more than that. Why not sell it to someone else?”
“But who?”
“I’m not sure yet?”
“But Señor Dollie–”
“Doesn’t know I know. And besides, the odds of us finding it are small.” Hawthorne offered the last of the joint to Moises and spat a shred of tobacco onto the floor. “I’m just a good boy scout. I like to be prepared.”
Moises ran his fingers along the table top. “Will you leave me, Papa?”
The man pulled a face. “I’m not going anywhere. We’ll work on the microscope in the morning. I’m too stoned for this shit.”
Moises raised his head. “Tell me about your Luton again: the park, your friends, and the bar–”
“It’s called a pub over there. The Old Moat House. I bet you know more about Luton Town than most Lutonians do.” He giggled. “That is fucking bizarre when you think about it.”
The giggles overtook him and Moises joined in, unsure as to what he was laughing so hard at. When the laughter dried up, Hawthorne took Moises’s hands and kissed them. “Don’t I deserve something first?”
A great roar of laughter came from the street and the music seemed to grow louder.
“Okay.” Moises began to undo Hawthorne’s bulging shorts.
“No, much as I love your mouth, I need to fuck you tonight.”
Moises turned around dutifully and Hawthorne grabbed a fistful of his hair and pushed him over the sticky wooden table. His other hand pulled at the boy’s shorts until they fell. Moises gasped as Hawthorne forced his way inside him. He felt Hawthorne’s hot words against his neck as the man lurched and moaned.
“Oh Mo … you are my butterfly … my butterfly … What are you?”
“Bu … tter … fly …”
Moises watched the microscope next to his face shake rhythmically. As the pain of the Hawthorne attentions intensified, the black butterfly bloomed behind his eyelids.
A sudden cloudburst sent Moises scrambling around in the bottom of the boat. He covered the butterfly net with a tarpaulin and changed the CD in his Walkman. The river surface danced furiously until it blurred into the downpour, and sky and water became indistinguishable. Moises studied the CD cover as the rain popped against it.
“Natalie Gallo,” he mouthed as the singer’s anguished voice sent shivers of pleasure down his back. Moises put his chewing gum back in the matchbox and returned it to his shorts. He didn’t believe that Hawthorne had chosen to disappear. It had to be Dollie’s work.
But why hasn’t he come for me?
Soon, the sun was out again and pulling steam from his clothes. Moises had reached Ranger Station Two at the mouth of the Rio Samiria. He was obliged to sign himself out of the reserve. Reluctantly, he cut his engine and glided up the channel that led to the pontoon. Little waves fanned out from his boat, sending undulations through the thick weed that flourished in the backwater. This was as quiet as la selva ever got.
Geraldo met him at the top of the wooden steps. “Had enough for this week?” He asked good-naturedly.
The other ranger, Luis, was asleep on the bench at the back of the room. His snores drifted out to them. Geraldo watched Moises sign the book and offered him a cup of water.
“What would a Chibolo do with all that money anyway?”
“What money?”
“The one million … if you found that stupid butterfly?”
Moises handed him back the empty cup. “I … I would save Mama Selva.”
Geraldo laughed. “Would you? Don’t you want to see the world, get away from those chiggers?” He gestured at the spray of bites on Moises’s ankles.
The boy scratched his legs half-heartedly. “This is my home.”
“Well you are talking to the wrong man, then.” He thumbed a gesture to the sleeping figure behind him. “Luis is a bore. He likes to tell me that an acre and a half of forest disappears every second and that in forty years it will all be gone. But as I say to him, so will I. Nobody wants to save me.” He slapped his thighs as he laughed.
Moises sat down and took off his cap, a feeling of unreality sweeping over him again. Was the black butterfly really out there under that tarpaulin? He felt so alone. Maybe Geraldo would know how to get Moises out of this situation. They could split the money. He had known the man for years, but could he be trusted? Moises pulled the matchbox from his shorts and popped the gum into his mouth. Geraldo watched him intently.
“What is wrong, Chibolo?”
Moises chewed methodically for a few moments. “I am fine,” he said and got to his feet.
After another hour on the debris-strewn Rio Marañón, Moises pulled into Prado. It was late afternoon; he still had three hours of natural light left.
The village consisted of around thirty thatched houses, one of which had been ceded to him by his employers. In the centre of the wide, grassy street was his neighbour Walter’s tienda. Some scrawny chickens scattered half-heartedly as Moises approached the man.
“You are back,” Walter observed.
“Yes.” Moises lowered his bags onto the sticky mud and bought three sugar apples from the man. He raised his arms above his head and cracked his shoulders then shook his legs to loosen them up.
Walter stood up and handed him the fruit. The old man’s leathery face slowly formed a quizzical smile. “Why are you back so soon?”
“I am feeling sick.” Moises paid the man and trudged up the street to his house. Two young boys were sitting on his step. On the floor beneath them, their pet Goliath beetles turned circles in the mud. The boys had tied strings around their glossy carapaces and were tugging at them without interest. As Moises approached, their hands came out automatically. He dropped two five centimo coins into them and hurried inside.
Moises took time to make a Challa, toasting Pachamama by spilling a little chicha morada upon the hut floor and then drinking the rest of the bitter-sweet drink. He opened a sugar apple and gulped down the custard-like flesh. The table was a mess of opened paint tubes and half-finished canvass boards. He picked up his Chagall book and began turning the pages slowly, studying the vivid paintings on the pages. Then, as if coming out of a trance, he dropped the book back on the table and swept everything onto the floor.
Moises closed his eyes for a moment. Walter might be Dollie’s spy. The thought jostled with all the others in his fevered head. It doesn’t matter … I have to continue.
He pulled on some surgical gloves and removed the insect from the net with a pair of forceps, working beneath the window that caught the evening sun. On the specially constructed spreading board, he pinned the butterfly through the thorax, inserting a light insect pin into the front part of each forewing. Then he gently teased them forward so they sat at right angles to the body. He repeated the procedure for the hind wings.
“I want to help,” Moises whispered. “Mama selva, I want to help.” He began to study the butterfly. Apart from the size, he could see only one physical difference to
an ordinary butterfly; an extra pair of hook-ended antennae that hung under the sensory pair. It was one of these that had stabbed him when he injected the creature, he realised now, looking at his finger for the first time since the incident. There was a slight swelling around the small puncture.
He opened Hawthorne’s book on microscopy and another on the anatomy of butterflies. He began to set up the stereo microscope as he had practised so many times in the past year, slowly regaining his composure as he worked. Will it be powerful enough? He would find out very soon.
Moises manoeuvred the eyepiece over the left forewing. He turned the tiny, powerful, LED light on and focused the eyepiece. There were hundreds of chitinous scales, possibly thousands: rectangular near the thorax, narrowing toward the outer edges of the wings. The overlapping rows reminded him of the rooftops in Iquitos. At 40x, Moises became aware of some discolouration on parts of the scales. He increased magnification and pulled the light a little closer, following instructions from the books at every step, skip-reading, flicking pages back and forth in exasperation: pigmentation compounds … structural colour … light reflection interacting with wing structure …
“Es imposible,” he muttered. He didn’t even understand many of the words in the book. It occurred to him that he might look forever and not happen upon the right combination of angle, light and magnification.
“I’m on your side … que me ayudes,” Moises whispered over and over, as if the spirit of the butterfly could hear him. He swung the modified head of the microscope across to the outer edge of the opposite forewing and rotated the objective turret to 60x. Longitudinal and horizontal ribbing was now visible on the scales. He could see that there was something in between the lines: lighter, irregular shapes he hadn’t noticed before. He upped the objective to 80x then finally 100x. Bringing his left hand across to steady his quivering right, he slowly sharpened the focus.
Moises pulled his head up, rubbed his eyes and stared out of the window for a moment. He felt uncomfortable all of a sudden, as if his senses had reached an acuteness that was painful. The fading sunlight seemed a little warmer, the jungle a little greener, the cries of the hoatzin birds vibrated much more clearly in his ears. He picked out the vanilla aroma of a planifolia orchid out there somewhere amongst the moist reek of vegetation.
The impossible was true.
He went back to the microscope and delirious with anticipation, spun the head to and fro, unable to settle for more than a moment on anything in particular. His scalp began to tingle, goose bumps ran down his back and made his buttocks twitch. He blinked again and again, as his new eyes, because new they felt, processed what was emerging from the magnified darkness of the wing. Vast landscapes of writing stretching away in all directions, overlapping the scales flawlessly, appearing at once as text and simultaneously as shivering images, which bloomed and swayed in his mind like fields of impossible flowers turning under an unpredictable breeze.
Moises pulled his sweaty hands away and ran them down his shirt, trying to calm himself. He had an instinctive feeling that what he was seeing wasn’t writing at all, and this scared him more than anything else. For a moment he thought about running, but he quickly dismissed the notion and concentrated his mind on what he was seeing.
Fighting a powerful instinct to browse, Moises picked a story at random and began to read …
Over the Town
Kirov Street was a terrifying place.
Endless lines of horseless carts coughed and roared in a deathless procession, searching the night, cutting at it with unforgiving lights. The wind came down the wide road in a freezing flood, whipping up rubbish that swirled amongst the pedestrians like large, dirty snowflakes. Overhead, in the wild darkness, electric cables sang a song that the couple could not understand. They had been in Vitebsk for an unknown period of time, following the huge, frantic highway that snaked through the city and studying the flat-roofed buildings that lined either side.
The young man, Vital, finally noticed something familiar across the road.
“There, Maria, I think we’ve found it,” he said, pointing a gloved hand. He edged closer to the kerb. It had to be what they were searching for: three giant, arched windows, each one divided by a stone column, just as described to them by Tymokh the farmer earlier that day. They would have to cross the road to reach it.
The young woman leaned in towards her husband. “I think we’ll have to fly over.”
Vital shook his head. “It’s not possible here. The wind will break us.”
As if to confirm his prediction, Maria was lifted from the pavement by a vicious gust. Vital threw his arms around her waist and his toes left the ground for a terrifying moment as he pulled her back down. They huddled together, watching the steady stream of vehicles flash past.
“Up there, down here, what’s the difference?”
Vital took his wife’s hand firmly. “It will be okay, I promise. Move quickly when I tell you.”
He studied the road to his left, searching for any large breaks in the approaching traffic. The traffic was heavy, but not moving slowly enough for the couple to slip across easily. Still, they could not go back. Time, the impossible new reality, was urging them forward without mercy. Vital turned to Maria and took the holdall she was carrying.
“Do you see it?”
Maria held onto the hood of her coat and concentrated on the gap in the traffic approaching them. “Don’t leave me.”
Vital gripped her hand, “I never will.”
The lovers ran out onto the road, their delicate feet skipping like flat stones across a millpond. When they reached the central reservation, Vital stopped and shouted something that was lost in the wind. He put his arm around Maria’s back and gripped the cold metal barrier with both hands, shielding her with his body. Carriages droned past on either side, almost dragging the couple back into the road. The lights, the noise, the ruptured wind; it was all too much to withstand. Vital jumped over the barrier, not because he was sure of his choice, but because he simply couldn’t stay there any longer without crumbling. Maria followed his loping run and as they crossed the open car park in front of the station, the wind fell away as if finally conceding defeat.
It was still beneath the tall portico at the entrance.
“We did it,” Maria panted. She looked back across the road. “They sit so still inside those carts. How do they do that?”
The station foyer was high-ceilinged and filled with a stiff, uninviting light. There were many people gathered around the walls, studying writing that the lovers could not read. In places, the red floor tiles were worn to dirty pink, forming paths that converged near the ticket counters or led to the platforms. Vital hurried Maria across.
“Destination?” the old man behind the glass asked. The lines in his face deepened as he considered the young man and the woman sheltering behind him.
Vital opened his mouth. No sound came out.
“Which service?”
Maria shivered against his back.
He concentrated. “Two for Moscow please.” The words tinkled against the glass in front of him. The ticket seller shifted in his seat and tapped some keys.
“Ages?”
“Eighteen.”
“Visas please.”
Vital moved toward the glass. “Visas?”
“You require a visa to travel from Belarus to Russia.”
“We must get to Moscow,” Vital said.
“Not without visas you won’t.”
Vital sensed a queue forming behind them. “We are sick,” he said and took his glasses off.
The old man recoiled. “Bozha moj! My God, is it contagious?”
“No, no, and we have money … lots of money.”
The ticket collector stood up and looked around the station quickly. He rubbed his hands up and down the front
of his trousers and sat down again. “Not contagious?”
Vital shook his head and thrust a bunch of crumpled notes onto the counter. The old man counted the money carefully. His face brightened a little. He pushed some of the cash into the till and the rest into his jacket pocket. He tapped some keys and told them that no changes were required on the service. A machine next to him chattered violently and spat out their tickets.
“Platform eight,” he said, but they were already walking away.
They sat on plastic seats that grew from the walls like tough fungi. Vital opened the scrap of paper that the old farmer had given him before they had set off that afternoon. Tymokh had drawn a crude clock face with the hands in a particular position and a swirling shape, which signified the correct platform to be at when the clock on the wall matched the drawing. Vital looked up at the clock for the duration of one sweep of the second hand, noting how far the first hand moved in that time. They had clocks at home of course, but there was no reason for them to move. The concept of time was still indistinct. He knew enough to realise it was their enemy.
The station was busy with evening commuters. Great plumes of steam rolled from their mouths as they hurried past. Some of them glanced at the lovers as if sensing a difference about them.
“Will we make it through this strangeness?” Maria asked, nodding at the coffee shop opposite them where people sat together, raising and lowering their cups in what appeared to be a languid, passionless ritual.
“Of course we will make it,” Vital replied. “The train is coming.”
The couple went to the heavy doors that led to platform eight. When a man opened them, they slipped through behind him and hurried down a set of steel steps. Under the platform’s creaking roof, lanterns swung a lurid light back and forth in the wind. They put their backs to the wall and waited.
There was a slight trembling in the ground as their train rolled up. The metal tube hissed and opened. Maria began to shiver as she looked into the squares of light, at the people who sat so still inside them.
The Dreams of the Black Butterfly Page 3