The Dreams of the Black Butterfly

by Mark James Barrett

  “We were told to offer you Option A at a slightly reduced rate,” he said breathlessly, “better chance of longevity for the story.”

  Ascención opened her mouth but nothing happened.

  “Come on: A or B?”

  “B,” she whispered.

  “Okay, thanks for choosing Foreverinlights™.” He put Claudia down, pulled her head back and placed the knife blade against the galloping pulse in her throat. Ascención lurched out of bed screaming. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she didn’t want to be famous.

  * * *

  … Moises jerked his head up, dragged back to the reality of the hut by the sound of the door breaking open behind him. He rubbed his eyes and turned to see three silhouettes melt into the darkness as the door shut behind them.

  “Señor Dollie?” Moises whispered.

  “It is, and these here fellas are Garcia and Isaacs. You’re fixing to damage your eyes reading under such an inadequate light.”

  Moises could just make out the big man’s lips moving in the gloom.

  “That is a magnificent creature. Why didn’t you bring it straight to me and collect your reward? You deserve every Sol.”

  The other two men had flanked Moises casually. His stomach tightened. “I was tired.”

  Dolly stood over the table and whistled in admiration. “I wondered if we’d ever get it, I got to admit. What a sight.” He leaned closer to the butterfly, his lips moving silently as he studied it. He fingered the pins holding the wings in place and turned his head to take in the microscope and the books. His voice hardened. “What have you been doing?”

  Moises said nothing.

  “Well, I reckon to have around twelve thousand butterflies in my collection. I know a lepidopterist when I see one and you ain’t it. That shit-heel Hawthorne filled your head with nonsense, didn’t he? Got you thinking ideas above your station.”

  “Mama selva, dame fuerza!”

  “Still calling for Pachamama’s help? You gotta help yourself in this world, boy. Get up and stretch your legs a piece.”

  Moises got up and one of the men ushered him away from the table. The other sat down and put his eyes to the microscope. He moved the head around and adjusted the zoom a few times.

  “Nothing,” he said without bringing his head up, “nothing at all.”

  “Go get some decent light will you, Isaacs?”

  The man at the microscope got up and left the hut. Before the door swung shut, Moises caught a glimpse of a group of soldiers, guns slung across their chests, waiting in the street. Walter was standing with them. Dollie seated himself at the table and looked down the microscope, tutting and sighing as he adjusted the zoom. Eventually, he sat up and clasped his hands, his eyes roving over the giant insect like centipedes searching for hidden worms.

  They waited.

  Mosquitos spun in the tiny halo of light. There was just Dollie’s slow, heavy breathing, the faint purr of the cicada in the forest outside and Moises’s heart thumping dark panic through his chest.

  Isaacs returned with two battery-powered lanterns. He placed one on the table and hung the other from the roof strut above the door. Dollie turned to Moises, his face thrown into a chiaroscuro by the lantern beside him. He smiled. “Walter says you been in here for upwards of three hours, making less noise than a church mouse pissing into a ball of cotton wool.”

  “I was looking at the butterfly. She is beautiful.”

  Dollie gave it a glance as if to check. “How many stories are on there?”

  “Stories?”

  “You look plum wore out; you must’ve read a few?”

  Moises wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Dollie took another look through the microscope and sighed. “Why you? What’s so special about Moises that only he can read the black butterfly? Remind me; where you from? Lima? Cuzco?”

  “Bagua. La masacre.”

  “That was no massacre,” Dollie muttered, still studying the butterfly. “Besides, Emerald Earth was there for you in your darkest hour, gave you a paying job. You never thought to remember that?”

  “Where is Hawthorne?”

  “I wouldn’t fret about him.” Dollie stood up and gestured to the chair he had vacated. “Sit down here, Moises. Tell me about your day … everything mind.”

  Moises spent the next twenty minutes doing just that. Dollie’s questions became sharper and less methodical as the minutes ticked by.

  “It can’t be a coincidence, can it? This reserve covers close on two hundred and fifty thousand acres and the butterfly happens to drop down right in front of your sorry ass.” He ran a hand through his short, salt and pepper hair, and ordered Garcia to get them all a drink. “But you are a peculiar animal,” he said as he watched Moises drain a bottle of water and sat down beside him. The look on his face was quite genial now and he spoke as if he were conducting an informal interview. “I know all about you, Moises. You read books, you paint and you are always at that crummy cinema in Iquitos when allowed to: you and that pederast Hawthorne cosying up under the silver screen, eh?” Dollie tapped his fingers on the wooden table top. “You ain’t no average Indian, I’ll give you that. You’re like a fucking sponge.”

  Moises shrugged.

  “Read me a story, Quispé.”

  “I–”

  “Don’t tell me you can’t see them, cuz I know you can. I just don’t know why or how. Quispé means glass in Quechua don’t it? Well, I can see right through you, so fess up.”

  Moises shook his head. His right hand went to the pocket in his shorts and felt the hard lump of the matchbox there; he wanted his gum. His legs began to shake.

  The big Texan gave an almost imperceptible nod and Garcia grabbed Moises’s arms from behind. Dollie took the boy’s left hand and smashed it down on the table top repeatedly until Moises opened his fist. Then, putting his weight on Moises’s wrist with his left arm, Dollie brought out a short, deep-bladed knife and forced it into the gap between the boy’s third and last finger.

  Moises waited for the question to come again but instead, Dollie rolled the knife with a grunt of effort and swept the finger off the table. A pitiful howl filled the little hut and for a second, Moises wondered who had made it. Shock rolled through his body and his vision faded. An enormous white pain erupted in his hand. It soared through his senses and he realised with terror that it wasn’t going to stop growing. And then it was past what he could bear and he no longer had control of his body. He jumped around on the chair, sucking in air, waving his arm about and whipping blood across the floor.

  Without a word, Dollie grabbed the arm again and steadied it as Moises screamed. Isaacs dressed the stump of the little finger tightly. The bandages bloomed red immediately and began to drip steadily onto the table. Then Garcia stuck a needle through Moises’s thin shirt and into his upper arm.

  “Aside your thumb, that’s the most important finger on your hand.” Dollie was shaking as he pointed at the hut floor. “Most your hand’s strength is in that little finger. Hold it up, boy. Hold it up or you’ll lose too much.” His teeth shone as he moved through the lantern light. “Feels like you’ve got it stuck in a mound of fire ants don’t it? The morphine will take the edge off pretty soon.”

  Moises rocked back and forth, unable to fix a coherent thought. He was making little mewling noises, which came despite his attempts to stop them. Dollie left the hut for twenty minutes, but it felt like hours to Moises. While he was gone, Garcia mopped up the blood from the table and wrapped even more bandage around Moises’s hand. It was a bloody stump now.

  When Dollie returned, he drew a chair up in front of Moises and lifted the boy’s chin. “I hate all this violence, to be straight. But I’ll take everything from you if I have to. You know that, don’t you? Your eyes and tongue go last, cuz I need them. Read
me a story Quispé … I been waiting a long time.”

  Moises wiped his nose with his good hand and went back to the eyepieces. A pulse of dull pain was spreading up his arm and his hand felt like it was moving to the beat. Beneath the throb, spiky streaks of a bigger pain moved, occasionally piercing through the morphine’s defences.

  “You are not a god,” Moises said as he refocused the microscope. “You are tiny, this world is tiny …” His face contorted with frustration. He couldn’t find the words.

  Dollie smiled good-naturedly. “You’re a real treat, you know that? How many stories can you see?”

  “Hundreds.”

  Dollie blew a whistle of excitement. “So first of all, read me the ones you read before I arrived.”

  “I cannot; they are gone after I read them.”

  “Really?” He eyed the boy carefully. “I believe you, but I don’t like it much.” He took out a Dictaphone and clicked it on. “Read.”

  Moises Quispé began to speak …

  Sea Cell

  It is said that the brain looks for patterns in what it sees, in an effort to make sense of the insensible. Occasionally, I entertain the comforting notion that I was supposed to go down to the beach that day, that it was a lesson, or a message of some sort. But that is a sentiment left over from before, like a singed photograph found in a burnt-out church.

  I don’t believe in God anymore; at least not the one I believed in back then. If there is a God then he is as blind to our concerns as we are to the bacteria that swarm over and through our bodies.

  The warnings were daubed across the clinic doors again that Tuesday afternoon in red paint that had run like horror film blood:

  LAZARRO GO HOME

  I had been out for an hour and a half, picking up some milk and vegetables donated by the Catholic Church up on the hill at Santa Marcha. I put my finger to the letters. The paint was soft, skinned over by the strong wind coming off the Pacific Ocean. Beneath it, up against the doors, two tousle-haired boys sat wrapped in a coarse brown blanket. There were spots of red paint drying on it. These people did this while the two boys, abandoned, homeless, were sitting beneath them. I told myself that they didn’t know any better, that Lima was full of children like this; they were as common and as unnoticed as stray dogs.

  I took the two boys in and gave them some oatmeal. “Didn’t you notice these two, or the people who painted the doors again?” I asked Sara, the head nurse.

  She looked up from the stove where she was shuffling steaming saucepans, at the early stages of preparing food for fifty-two children.

  “I did not know the little ones were out there. I heard the others, yes; how could I not? Shouting their obscenities... hijoputas!” She spat the insult. “But Elenor had gone home …” She moved a pan and turned, pushed her hands down her apron and raised her chin. “What was I to do, Señor Lazarro?”

  “Nothing I guess, Sara.”

  Her eyes were blazing now. “Nothing? Are you sure? Maybe I should attack them with this hot water” – she gestured at the stove – “leave the children and start a war on the street, huh?”

  “No,” I said. “I am sorry I was not here.”

  Sara nodded. “I am sorry, too.”

  I put the food and milk away and took the children into the ground-floor examination room. She was a proud woman and she didn’t need to say sorry. We were all sorry here, for one reason or another. More often than not, lately, I was sorry for starting this, bringing my wife, Maria, here, having a child here. Nina was a year old. Should she be brought up in this place? Why not? Was she more important than the children I found on the doorstep? Of course she was. That was the problem; I had started to think differently about it all.

  Both the boys were malnourished. One of them, Victor, was blind in one eye because of a tumour. After some probing, I found out they were brothers, five and four years old. I made some notes and took them upstairs. The building was filled with the sounds of running feet, crying, shouting and the occasional burst of laughter: children bouncing around like microbes reacting to tiny stimuli. I heard the phone chirping downstairs and waited for my name to be called.

  “Señor Lazarro?”

  “I’ll take it up here, Sara.” I squatted next to the boys. “Go downstairs and play with the other boys and girls. I will be down soon.”

  Big, dark eyes looked back at me, unsure of my sincerity.

  “Go on, you will be fine.”

  Victor put his arm around his brother and they turned away and moved slowly toward the stairs.

  I took the call in my study on the first floor.

  “Hola! Miguel Lazarro. How can I help?”

  “Buenos dias, Señor Lazarro. It is Anthony Hawthorne of Emerald Earth. I have been instructed to contact all of the orphanages we have previously done business with, regarding adding new faces to our programme.”

  “Oh, haven’t you enough already?”

  The Englishman laughed, as if embarrassed. “Well, our project continues to grow, and it’s a big jungle Señor Lazarro, we do misplace a few of our employees from time to time.”

  “How do you mean, ‘misplace’?”

  “They leave without telling us, have accidents sometimes; it’s hard to keep track of everyone.” He laughed again.

  I wanted to reach down the phone line and squeeze his neck with all my strength. I had met Hawthorne once before, just after Emerald Earth had first contacted us. I didn’t like the way he looked at the children, at the boys to be exact.

  “These are children you are talking about.”

  “I know. It’s sad–”

  “They are in your custody; you should be taking more care of them.”

  “We do, we do! They are paid well, educated, fed; unfortunately the world is not perfect, señor.”

  I didn’t reply. I willed myself to put the phone down before he came to the offer, but, shamefully, I did not.

  “We need at least another hundred: ten from you would be great. Two eyes, no deformities that would hinder them physically or mentally really. We are offering four hundred Nuevo Sol per boy. That’s twice what we paid you–”

  “I know, I know.” The calculation flashed through my mind before I could stop it. Four thousand Nuevo Sol, give or take: enough to pay the rent on this big, old house for the next six months. I listened to my wheedling voice as it made its pitiful demands, merely a sop to my conscience, which huddled in the darkness.

  “If I agree, I need assurances that these children are okay, to get word from them from time to time; otherwise, it’s no deal.”

  “Of course. We always encourage them to do that, Señor Lazarro. You have my word on that. Don’t you receive letters at the moment?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Good, we will be in the area in two weeks from today. I will ring you nearer the time. Have we a deal?”

  “Maybe. I will see if I have any suitable.”

  I placed the phone on the cradle and put my head in my hands. My fingers gripped my cheeks, pressing into the flesh. I felt the nails threatening to break the skin and made an agonised sound, low and mournful. Fifty children I had given over to Emerald Earth in the past two years, two hundred Nuevo Sol a piece, and I had no real idea of their situation now. It was true that I did receive letters occasionally, but they looked to be run from the same template, something that had always bothered me. Perhaps the children were helped with the writing of the letters; that would be natural, wouldn’t it? I wasn’t doing anything wrong here, only my best to run this place, to look after and nourish those in my care, to keep it all running on an inadequate budget. I couldn’t be responsible for the children after they left me, could I?

  I stood up, feeling claustrophobic all of a sudden. I thought about going upstairs to see Maria and Nina, but I just couldn’t fac
e it for some reason. Then, quite suddenly, I didn’t want to be there anymore. I hurried downstairs and out through the paint-splashed doors before anyone could stop me. Soon, I was on the Pan Pacific Highway in my little Toyota minivan heading south, without a clear thought in my head.

  It was around four thirty when I set off, and the sun was slipping down the western sky, eager to be doused by the ocean. There was no sign of the usual mist, hadn’t been for a few days. November was dying and summer was close. I lowered the window and smelt the ocean. I had no idea where I was going, but I was driving too fast. The cars droning past going the opposite way seemed to soothe me strangely, like a lullaby played through combustion. I focussed only on what was ahead through the rectangle of angled glass. The road flashing under me, my right hand at twelve o’clock, knuckles like a range of tiny hills above it, capped in white as too much pressure was applied to the steering wheel.

  After a few minutes, I saw the big blue sign for Miraflores and jerked the wheel to the left, cutting someone off. The wail of protesting horns sailed away on the highway above as I pulled off and coasted to a stop by a set of tennis courts. A middle-aged couple in pastel colours were running back and forth along the baselines, trading shots. I wound the window up, lay my head back and sighed. The tick of the cooling engine soothed me now, tapping gently in the relative silence.

  In this silence away from the house, I had a new perspective on things. It had been a long day after all and they were always long days: up before five to check on the children, get the windows open and turn on the water pump; the house cleaned early, so by seven everyone is eating breakfast; then my rounds of the city hospitals. These trips were always mentally wearing; that morning I had visited a girl who had knocked on my door last week, wheezing and grey at six years old. Tuberculosis, untreated for years, had eaten most of her right lung away. Situations like this were fairly common, unremarkable even. And yet I still asked myself how it could be. I couldn’t disassociate myself from these kids.

  I just needed a break. When did I last have a break? It was a ridiculous question. There was no such thing as a break, only in the magazines I sometimes read in the hospital waiting rooms.