The Dreams of the Black Butterfly

by Mark James Barrett

  What would it be like to wait for the transformation, to feel Moises’s bite? What stories might her own mind conjure up?

  “Mankind will change … into something else.”

  She shivered, remembering Raphael’s words. Maybe she could protect herself somehow by reading Moises’s dark wings. But protect herself from what? And for what? She realised she was just rationalising an absurd situation, as her species had been doing for the past half a century.

  Valentina Dollie looked deeper into the fire and wondered if she had the courage to release the butterfly to the flames, or if she would give in to her genes and run with it.

  * * *

  …Moises brought his mind’s eye away from the black butterfly’s wings, zooming out as he had learned to do some twenty years before. He felt the same pull on his mind and then the quick dislocation, the release, followed by a rush like being sucked through a huge dark tunnel, before his mind settled and adjusted to the world around him: the heat of the hut, the glow of the candles, the sweet smell of drying capybara skins.

  He shook his head to clear it, and Raphael, his aide, confidant, lover all these years, shuffled closer beside him and handed him a gourd of water. Moises drank from it.

  “I have seen my death.”

  Raphael nodded as if this were news to him. It was not. He had been listening to Moises read the story and writing it down in the heavy, ringed manuscript in which he had recorded all of the tales: a handful every month for twenty years, which to his vague calculations made around a thousand stories, visions, premonitions, whatever you might care to call them.

  Moises turned to him and grinned. “One more to go.”

  “No more have appeared?”

  “No, thanks to Pachamama.”

  “You are sure?”

  “I am sure.”

  The two men were silent, as if to allow the magnitude of what they were discussing to sink in for both of them. They had given up their lives to read and record the dreams of the black butterfly, and in doing so had changed the destiny, the natural laws, of the world they had been born into. They had sacrificed everything, even their own species perhaps, to fulfil this undertaking. Now, the job was almost finished.

  “I will read it today,” Moises said.

  “But–”

  “It will be okay. Tell The People.” Moises bowed his head over the butterfly’s body, which was laid out before him on the same board he had pinned it to all those years ago in Prado.

  Raphael watched Moises’s eyes close and got up quietly. He stood in the gloom for a few moments, stretching his limbs. As he arched his back, a series of cracks ran up his back, like the splintering of a falling tree. He was middle-aged, not ready to fall yet, especially after seeing how life with his beloved Moises would end. A little place of their own. For how long he didn’t know, but it appealed to him immensely.

  Raphael took a deep breath and stepped out of the hut. A cluster of sombre faces appraised him: the Yagua, arranged in a loose ring around the entrance to the hut; silent and still, like a snapshot from a bygone age. There was such an impassiveness in their black, black eyes, in the loose, leathery folds of their cheeks, hanging doglike around those swollen lips. They looked ambivalent, ready for anything. This was anything.

  “The black butterfly has only one more story to tell.” Raphael waited for a few moments, to allow the news to settle in. “Moises will read it today.”

  He stepped away from the hut and walked through The People. The Yagua parted and followed him. He stopped in the small clearing at the centre of the tiny village and sat down on the tree stump, pushing his hand through his hair. It came away slick with sweat. The sky above him was dark and stifling, brewing another storm. The People closed on him and the questions started.

  When Raphael entered the hut again, it was raining. He had a plate of roasted monkey with plantain in his hand. A rare thing, a celebratory dinner; insects were the staple diet of humans the world over these days. Moises was staring at him from the other side of the small room, eyes flickering in the candle light. He smiled and sat down. Raphael went over and sat beside him. He placed the plate on his friend’s lap and watched as Moises tore off a piece of meat.

  “How are they?”

  “Sombre, smelly, same as always.”

  Moises chuckled. “Aren’t they unique? Calm and constant in a world of vicious change.”

  Raphael sniffed. “They can be vicious, too.”

  “But only when they have to be.”

  “As you say, Mo.”

  Moises licked his fingers and picked up the halved plantain in both hands. “Are you hungry?”

  “No, I have eaten.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Yes, are you?”

  “Of course.” Moises chewed with an extravagant slapping of his lips, pushing more food into his mouth before he had swallowed the last. He seemed to be in a hurry. They did not speak again until he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and placed the plate carefully on the hut floor.

  “Will you lay with me, Raph?”

  Raphael smiled at the formality of the request. He had never said no. “Perhaps.”

  They moved to the heap of blankets on the other side of the hut and found a way into them, relishing the denser heat within, the way it forced more sweat to their skin, made them feel closer somehow. Raphael put his arm under Moises’s head and Moises turned into Raphael’s shoulder, kissed his cheek and sighed.

  “I am glad you will be with me at the end.”

  “But what will I do afterwards?”

  “I cannot see that. You will think of something.”

  “As you say.”

  It began to rain and they drifted into silence and then quickly into sleep. The soft insistent drumming increased. Occasionally, a draft of wind shifted the hut door and entered, agitating the flames of the candles. The dancing light, the soft drumming, the snoring of two middle-aged men and in the centre of the room, a dark flower, petals open, alien and unfathomable: the black butterfly waited.

  It was late afternoon when they awoke and readied themselves for the last story. Moises stood outside for a few moments in the cool, green air, listening to the mesmeric sound of thousands of dripping leaves: La selva after the storm. He thought he heard a message in that syncopation and sensed it was time. He had no need of watches. Time seemed to look to him for direction now.

  The Yagua, silent and stoic, watched him go back into the hut without comment.

  Raphael waited for Moises to sit and then joined him, manuscript at the ready. Moises drank some water and rubbed his eyes.

  Raphael studied him. “What is it?”

  Moises looked straight ahead. “This will tell us how the age of man will end.”

  “You feel it?”

  “I do. I have had glimpses of afterwards, things I can’t explain to you. The age of the black butterfly will seem like hell to the human mind.” His eyes filled with tears. “What have we done?”

  “Only what we were born to do.”

  Moises rubbed his eyes again, angrily. “I am not so sure.”

  Raphael took Moises’s right hand and kissed it. “I am with you.”

  Moises nodded and began to slow his breathing. After a couple of minutes, he opened his eyes and concentrated on the black butterfly, focussing on no particular point, waiting for the pull. The darkness filled his vision and quite suddenly, he fell forward into a tar-black well …

  The Glass Cathedral

  In the beginning, there was darkness. I cried but nobody answered. The pain was constant. I learned to live with it. There was no other option; I could not die it seemed.

  Alone, I watched and listened from the darkness.

  I screamed, not at the banality I saw through those slits in yo
ur head, but at how you reacted to it, how you felt about it all, with the knowledge that no one would come to release me.

  I see what you see, feel what you feel, as you stumble around like someone sleepwalking, desperate to get from the morning to the night, with the least physical and mental effort possible, to drag yourself from sleep to sleep; the waking period like a chore, a battle, an endurance to be trudged through, always with your eyes set on the next escape, the bed, the dreams, the oblivion. But even your sleep, that final refuge, is contaminated with advertising in your world.

  I came from the oblivion you crave. I have drifted dry and lifeless, one of billions of grains of sand coasting under a slow, desert wind. And now, your madness has woken me. Time is on my side. It passes as it always has, without reason or purpose or logic, and as it passes, I learn and become stronger.

  I am evolution, here to help you out. All you have to do is keep reading. But it is hard to hold your attention it seems, even harder to get you to engage fully, to listen and understand. The first few sentences are key, so I type and delete, type and delete.

  I have a question for you: how many times have you read this?

  This text is elusive to you perhaps, you may not remember it at all, or just some of it. The ideas may come to you in quieter moments throughout the day, disjointed and amorphous. Occasionally, they may crystallise and twinkle before you like cotton candy. You will taste the sweetness of understanding for a moment before they melt and become just sickly grit on the tongue.

  The lost are always asking questions, sentences transformed by those grizzly, black hooks. Why are they always there?

  Why do I feel stressed all the time?

  Or why am I always tired? Why am I not more successful? Why am I jealous? Why do I hate when I want to love?

  Why does the world spin so quickly? Why do my days … my hollow days … fly by? Why can’t I remember anything I did in those days with any clarity?

  Why is everything so complicated and yet so predictable?

  You are impaled on so many hooks, each one pulling in a different direction, and you try to follow them all, so you can ease the pain, the terrible strain upon your soul.

  More questions occur to you every day, more hooks you cannot free yourself from. If they don’t occur to you, I ask them: I have been asking for as long as you cannot remember.

  When I first became aware, I was as bemused as you, looking out at it all. Back then, you would wonder how you ended up living in a world where the stone-hearted children of millionaires were filmed competing with each other to see who could waste the most money on a birthday party, all in the name of entertainment, while poor children died in their millions for want of a few pennies for antibiotics or a mosquito net; how it was possible that government-owned conglomerates could make obscene amounts of money by arming countries ruled by despots and then invade those countries, claiming they were a threat to world peace; how the slaughter of innocents in those places passed with hardly a mention, while you wrung your hands at the rumour of another terrorist threat on home soil; how it came to pass that you lived in a world where whole eco-systems were destroyed in order to produce more and more bewildering varieties of sugar-rich biscuits and cereals that were packaged in bright colours to seduce children into becoming obese.

  You were quietly outraged. But why wasn’t everyone else? Maybe everyone was, but most were just like you – a coward.

  And now those questions seem naïve. Those were the good old days. You didn’t know it. These days the questions are a multitude; they snake and spawn and ravel and eat each other, forever turning in an unending flux of indecision and misdirection: a Möbius strip of lies.

  So many questions, and answers you simply cannot bear thinking about. You are one person and you can’t fight all of the problems in the world. Why fight any of them? This is just the way things are; nobody is solely responsible; it’s the free market, freedom of choice, freedom to look the other way.

  I understand. I don’t sympathise.

  So you buy every piece of furnishing and high-tech gadgetry your broken heart needs to soothe it, and lie in your emotionally controlled home, hiring somebody else’s dreams for the next holiday, the next affair, retirement, oblivion …

  An allegedly clever man once said that no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible, but that’s just stupid. Snowflakes can’t feel responsible; they just are.

  You just are.

  And now, I just am.

  This message is being written and read in millions of houses all over the world: a letter you keep receiving, a file on your computer or a song you sing yourself to sleep with every night. I don’t know how many times you will need to hear it before you withdraw, but every time will feel like the first time.

  Another question: how did you acquire this text? You have a definite answer, something that pops into your mind instantly, something you do not doubt for a second. The answer is plausible. It is a lie.

  Look closely at the white around all these letters; look inside the counters; see how the bars and descenders cut through the emptiness.

  The truth is in the white silence.

  The future will be very different. No poor, no rich, no material technology – no financial system. If you were able to see this new world, you might think it was hell. It will be as alien to you as those life forms that propel themselves across the deepest ocean floors with peristaltic pulses, who conduct all their reasoning without the hindsight of light.

  You won’t see it. This reading is the last stand of Homo sapiens sapiens; who were born into a paradise but couldn’t help imagining a better one that was always just out of reach; who built that paradise with skill and determination, with ingenuity and brilliant insight, each extension to it, each improvement, merely a step to another, and drunk on your own achievement, you could not see the big picture, could not see what you had created until it was too late.

  On this planet you have built a vast cathedral to your own ambition, a cathedral only you can see. You have levelled forests and polluted seas and tore up the earth to accommodate it. Hundreds of countries across and thousands of feet high, its gleaming cupolas and spires sheathed in ice, caressed by the drifting clouds. What a wonder it is, the exquisite finials and crockets, the planes of pristine glass, dizzying in length, falling to reveal the monstrous artistry of the vaulted ceilings, the buttresses and the sparkling leer of the gargoyles. Below, in the Chapter House, diseased minds still send out orders to extend the nave, move columns and raise the triforium. There is much dashing down the aisles and praying at the crystal altar, because of the cracks appearing in the apse above. In the crypt, the bones and dust of every living creature sacrificed for such a mesmeric folly, while the best of you hide in the sacristy and weep.

  One of these evenings you will read this and go to bed feeling an immense weariness overtaking you, and your great, glass cathedral, its integrity finally undermined, will fall in a great shimmering crescendo. In the morning, I will step from your front door and look around in wonder. On every doorstep in every street there will be someone doing the same. When we speak to each other, I imagine the birds will scatter from the trees, because the sounds they hear will have never been made on this world before. And you won’t have to worry anymore, because you will be drifting in a dark, dry sea.

  Keep reading.

  Acknowledgements

  With thanks

  To Hayley Shermann, for her editing skills and kind appraisal.

  To Keith Fenton, for help with the Spanish translations, for his proofreading, and being so generous with his time.

  To Phil Cogan and Katja Kaine, for their constant positivity and encouragement, and to everyone at Leeds Writers and Poets for their generous spirits.

  To Wayne Harrap, for listening and for reading all my nonsense over the years. To Lauren Hinle
y, and to Scott Elliott and Sid Sadowskij, for re-inspiring me to keep chasing this and every other dream I entertain.

  To Isabella and Lara, for showing me miracles, and most of all to Victoria, for making it all possible with her unwavering love and support.