Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Tina cocked her head, a little gesture Dellarobia was starting to recognize. "Do you know what I was thinking just then? Honestly? That this is probably the most gorgeous shot we've set up in I don't know how long. Months. You, that gorgeous hair, the butterflies behind you. It's just about killing me. I'm going to look like a corpse next to you and all that ambery light. You'll die when you see it. How's the light, Ron?"

  "Gorgeous," Ron said from behind the camera, startling Dellarobia. Since when was Ron on her side? Gorgeous. She wondered if Jimmy would see her on the news, and felt a simmering fury, largely the result of nicotine deprivation and not entirely at Jimmy. But partly at him. Flirting with everything in a skirt. Had he never been serious about her at all? Just because she was older, and married, he'd seen her as a sure thing, sex without risk of attachment. Did he even care that she'd ended it? She hoped the sweater looked as good on her now as it had in the store, the rare dressing-room event. She did not have the vaguest idea what Tina had just asked her. "What was the question?"

  "Start wherever you want," Tina said, possibly with a pinch of impatience.

  She wished she could just tell the truth. The whole of it. That Bear was about to clear-cut this mountain for cash, and that they really did need the money. Which some people could never understand. Being boxed in. Which is really what brought her up here in the first place, not a man but a desperation. Defective as that impulse may have been, it got her here. She was the first to see.

  "This phenomenon is very special to you," Tina said. "The story we're hearing in this town is that you had a vision. So Dellarobia, what happened that day, when you first knew the miracle of the monarchs had come to your farm?"

  "I was running away from things. That's the long and the short of it," Dellarobia said. She wanted Jimmy gone, out of her story. Would he see this on television?

  "From what?" Tina asked with a softer, concerned voice.

  Dellarobia turned her head a little to the side so she could see the butterflies. Just like the first time, it felt like a dream to see that cold fire rising. It was impossible to believe what she saw was real. The end of the world, as good a guess as any. She slowly exhaled. "My life, I guess. I couldn't live it anymore. I wanted out. So I came up here by myself, ready to throw everything away. And I saw this. This stopped me."

  "How so?"

  "I don't know. I was so focused on my own little life. Just one person. And here was something so much bigger. I had to come back and live a different life."

  Tina blinked, casting a glance at Ron.

  "Okay, that was, I don't even know what that was," Dellarobia said. A turn down a wrong-way street in crazy town, was what it was. She held up her hand like a cop, shaking her head. "Way too personal. If my family heard that, can you imagine? My kids?"

  Thankfully, she saw that Preston had inched his way down the road until he was probably out of earshot. "So, that's off the record, we cut all that and start over, right?"

  "Absolutely," said Tina.

  Both their phones rang at once, at around ten after nine. Cub had worked late and passed out on the couch watching television, so his phone jangled on and on in his pocket while Dellarobia ran to her purse to get hers. It was Dovey, incoherent. Dovey screaming to turn on the TV.

  "It's on," Dellarobia said, her heart lurching. Had she missed some disaster?

  "It's you," Dovey kept saying. "Go to CNN."

  This was the sort of thing that happened in movies, Dellarobia thought. But movie people could always find the remote control. Dovey kept yelling through the phone while her search grew more frantic. Under the cushions, under Cub, under the couch. The people in movies didn't live with petty criminals who dismantled small electronics for parts and batteries. "Hang on!" she yelled back, abandoning the hunt and going to kneel in front of the television set itself. Sure enough, she found there was no way to control it from the object itself, not even an on-off switch. What sense did that make? A TV set was a modern God! You could only send it your requests from afar.

  "What do you mean, it's me?" she asked, trying to calm down.

  "That thing you did yesterday! That interview with Barbie. But they're not showing her. It's all you, Dellarobia."

  Dellarobia stood up, surveyed the room. Cub was still out cold. She could actually hear the murmur of Dovey's television through the phone.

  "Oh, my God," Dovey shrieked. "This is crazy. They're saying you tried to kill yourself!"

  Shock began to fill Dellarobia with its watery weight, starting from her feet and nearly taking her out at the knees. She shoved at Cub with all her strength to make room for herself on the couch, and kept the phone to her ear while she slid one hand around underneath him, again, unable to call off her hopeless search. Cub's phone had stopped ringing and made the sharp little beep of a new message.

  "This is crazy," she said to Dovey. "Say that again. What you just said."

  "You were on your way to jump off a cliff or something, and saw the butterflies and changed your mind. It's gone now."

  "What's gone?"

  "The whole thing. Now they've gone over to . . ." Dovey paused. "I don't know, some war thing in Africa. The whole spot with you only lasted, like, one or two minutes. Maybe more than that. It was almost the top story. They showed you talking, and some other guy I didn't know. One of your neighbors?"

  "The Cooks? They talked to the Cooks, next door."

  "Maybe him, yeah. He said you all were going to log the mountain and had no concern for the butterflies, and then it said you were the sole . . . something. Sole voice of reason, or something like that, against your family."

  "Oh, wonderful," Dellarobia said. She prayed Bear and Hester hadn't seen this. There was a good chance. They didn't watch the news.

  "But then this thing about you being suicidal. 'Dellarobia Turnbow has her own reason for believing the butterflies are a special something-or-other. They saved her life.' I can't repeat it exactly. Mind you, I'm here crapping my pants while this is all going on. I'm like, Whoa, that's my best friend! I totally did her hair!"

  "Where in the world would they get that, about suicide?"

  "Maybe they'll run it again at ten."

  "Christ. Maybe I will jump off a cliff." She put her head on her knees, genuinely feeling she could pass out. Cub stirred next to her, starting to rouse.

  "Here's the thing," Dovey said. "You looked bookoo hot. Can I borrow that sweater?"

  The interview did air again, many times in various forms, first as national news and then local. In Cleary it was headline news that a local person had made the news. Reporters called the house repeatedly, and Dellarobia's heart raced every time the phone rang. If she ever saw a camera again, she planned to run for her life. Cub was stupefied by the attention. The local TV channel made it a top story, with nightly updates. The headline banner was always the same still shot of Dellarobia with the butterflies behind her, and a caption: "Battle over Butterflies." These updates made Dellarobia nauseous with anxiety. Waiting for her image to appear onscreen felt like waiting to be slapped. But she couldn't stop herself from watching, either. People at church and the grocery were basically congratulating her nonstop, without regard to anything she'd said, just operating on the guiding principle that being on TV was the peak human experience. It seemed ungracious to tell them it felt like having her skin peeled off, so she held her tongue and let them go on wishing they'd get their turn someday.

  Dellarobia referred every interviewer to Bear and Hester. Cub worried that his father was shaping up in this story to be the bad guy, willful destroyer of butterflies, and they deserved a say at this point, but Bear and Hester never turned up on the screen. As crazy as it seemed as a deciding factor, Dellarobia suspected they might not be photogenic enough to be news. Handsome Mr. Cook was interviewed often, sitting on the sofa with his sad wife and their poor little bald son. So was Bobby Ogle, who seemed perfectly at ease with the camera as he spoke of caring for God's Creation. There was even some footage o
f him preaching at their church on a regular Sunday, which floored Dellarobia. When had news cameras been in there?

  The local powers definitely were coming down on the pro-butterfly side. The Cleary news team invited the mayor, Jack Stell, and a heavyset man from the Chamber of Commerce to sit at their big curved desk and discuss tourism opportunity. People all over the world would want to come see the monarchs. The heavyset man used Disneyland as a comparison. Dellarobia felt they should get their act together on some family lodgings other than the Wayside, if that was their game plan. She also felt Ovid Byron should be sitting at that desk. She wished he would get here. Nobody was asking why the butterflies were here; the big news was just that they were.

  The Battle of the Butterflies was presumably a conflict between people, although the opposers were something of a ragbag army, hard to pin down. One view was that all the outside attention on the butterflies might disrupt normal life. Dellarobia had heard this sentiment at church and elsewhere, but only oddballs were shown to espouse it on the news: a skinny old man in an undershirt in his trailer home said the crime would go up. Some kids in front of the Feathertown Exxon, who looked like hoodlums, declared they didn't need outsiders in this town. Dellarobia realized these people were being mocked, and remembered with almost an electric shock the old man she'd seen being ridiculed on the late-night program. Billy Ray Hatch. If she'd remembered that painful setup while Tina Ultner was here, she might have slammed the door on her perfectly powdered nose. But she hadn't. Real life and the things inside the TV set belonged to different universes. People on the outside could not imagine they would ever end up as monkeys in that box.

  And yet they did, it was unendingly strange. She and Cub watched wide-eyed each night, gasping at each sighting of people or places they knew. They never did see the original interview with Tina, although clips from it appeared repeatedly on the Cleary news, mostly as background like the banner shot. As far as Dellarobia could tell, the suicide angle had been dropped. Initially, in fact, she was sure Dovey had invented it, due to shell shock, but Dovey had not. Clever girl, she figured out how to get the whole clip downloaded on her phone and came over two days after the fact with proof in hand. With Preston away at school and Cub at work, they sat in the kitchen and watched it.

  "My life. I guess. I couldn't live it anymore . . . ," said the little Dellarobia on the phone's screen, in a tinny voice that could not be hers. "I came up here by myself, ready to throw everything away. And . . . this stopped me." The voice continued while the screen panned to a wide view of the butterflies covering the trees and filling the air. "Here was something so much bigger. I had to come back and live a different life."

  "I swear I never said that."

  "It sure looks like you did," said Dovey.

  "It sure looks like I did." She could not imagine the carnage if the family saw this. And Hester might, if it was on the computer. Just not Cub, she prayed. For his sake. Dellarobia had almost no memory of the interview itself. She recalled a few false starts, blurting out nonsense that Tina had promised not to use.

  "Okay, now check this out," Dovey said, clicking masterfully at the buttons on her very swank phone, like Preston with his watch. "There. This just showed up today."

  Dellarobia scowled at the screen, baffled. "The Butterfly Venus," it said. It was Dellarobia, but someone had messed with the image. She appeared to be standing on the open wings of a huge monarch. Little butterflies floated in the air all around her.

  "What is this?" Dellarobia asked.

  "You're that famous painting, the naked chick standing on the shell." Dovey scrolled over to another image that Dellarobia recognized. The Birth of Venus. Someone had put the two images together and sent it out over the Internet. The similarity was surreal. It couldn't possibly be herself, but it was, her own orange hair blowing loose from its ribbon in back, her left hand in her pocket and her right hand across her chest, posed like the naked Venus girl on the open wings of her shell. Dellarobia couldn't even remember standing like that, touching her chest. She was not exactly naked in the picture, her clothing was faded to a neutral shade, but naked was how she felt. Scared and exposed. This thing looked vaguely pornographic.

  "Who can see this?" she asked.

  "Everybody can see this," Dovey said. This image that was not real and had never happened was flying around the world.

  She remembered then. Why she'd brought her hand up to her chest like that in front of Ron's camera. She was afraid her buttons had fallen open.

  9

  Continental Ecosystem

  "Name?" he asked, not really asking. He answered himself, spelling aloud as he wrote on the form, D-E-L-L-A . . . He paused, his pen poised over the clipboard balanced on his knee. "Is it one word, or two?"

  The interview was a formality, Dr. Byron had said. For a government-funded position he had to file certain forms proving he'd gone to the trouble of equal-opportunity hiring. She'd replied that hiring someone like herself should be ample proof he had scraped the bottom of the barrel. She felt nervous when he did not laugh. She had no idea how to behave as an employed person.

  "All one word," she told him. They sat facing one another on metal folding chairs. She'd dressed up for this, beige slacks and a black sweater. Dr. Byron wore jeans as always, sitting with his long legs crossed up ankle-over-knee like a grasshopper.

  "Ah," he said. "The Italian sculptor is two. My wife confirmed that."

  The mention made her blush. A wife there was, then, with whom he had discussed Dellarobia. She imagined them together at a computer viewing the image of her essentially naked, perched on butterfly wings as the Venus. From now on she had to rise each day into a world that had seen her like that. Tellers at the bank, the boys who bagged her groceries, Preston's schoolteachers, present and future. It felt like stepping again and again into scalding water. Blushing had become her skin's normal pastime.

  "Do you prefer Mrs. or Ms. or none of the above?"

  "Mrs., I guess." She let out a joyless laugh. "Until my husband divorces me for doing this."

  He glanced up at her over his reading glasses. "For doing?"

  "Taking this job. Don't worry, that was a joke. He won't."

  "He has some concerns about you in this lab?"

  "It's nothing personal. My family is just, I guess, typical. They feel like a wife working outside the home is a reflection on the husband."

  Dr. Byron's look suggested he found this not typical. He didn't know the half of it. People were praying for her family now, on account of that picture on the Internet. Cub's father had told him a woman got such attention only if she asked for it.

  "I spoke out of turn," she said. "I'll handle my family."

  "Is it a question of safety?" he asked, taking off his skinny glasses and holding them by the earpiece. "Because I can assure you, we will be taking every precaution here, exactly as if we were in a more permanent facility."

  Everything, she wanted to scream at him, was a question of safety. All human endeavor bent itself to the same lost cause. Being kept inside a pumpkin shell your whole life was no guarantee against getting flung into space.

  "Seriously, don't worry about it," she repeated. Dr. Byron wrote something on his clipboard without comment.

  Somewhere in the room behind her Pete was up on a ladder, loudly stapling plastic sheeting to the walls. They were making their laboratory in the sheep barn. Contrary to her expectations, a butterfly lab looked something like a kitchen with outlandishly expensive appliances. For two days she'd been helping them unpack the crates they'd brought from New Mexico, and she knew it was bad manners but couldn't stop herself from asking about the costs of things. They couldn't give her exact answers. The equipment was not necessarily new. Most of it, in fact, seemed to be older than she was, "pre-Reagan administration," they both remarked dolefully, as if that had been some Appomattox Court House with the scientists on the losing side. But when she pressed them for estimates, they blew her mind. A glass box called th
e Mettler balance, which they handled like a newborn baby, was "maybe a few thousand dollars." So was the drying oven, a drab gray thing about the size of any oven, and the antique-looking round tub called a centrifuge, which weighed so much they left it in its case until Pete could build a heavy table to serve as its throne. The wooden shipping crates, bulky as coffins, would become the foundations of a lab counter, which they called a bench.

  When she unscrolled the bubble wrap from a fierce-looking little blender, Ovid had remarked, "Now that is a nifty item." In the neighborhood of two grand, he'd said, made in Germany. Its name was Tissuemizer, and its special task was to make a kind of butterfly soup that no one would be eating, as the ingredients were both toxic and flammable. They had ordered a venting hood of the type usually installed over kitchen ranges to eliminate cooking odors, something Dellarobia had never owned. She'd just learned the hard way never to cook anything too fishy. But Dr. Byron needed a range hood, so the appliance department at Sears had been called to come and install one in the Turnbow sheep barn, pronto. They would also be delivering a freezer, the cheapest model available, but even so, a stand-alone freezer. Not a compartment in the top of the fridge, into which ordinary mothers crammed Popsicles and freeze-packs for their kids' bruises. Dellarobia found herself coveting a freezer that was not yet even technically, until delivery, thy neighbor's goods.

  The official plan was to keep this lab in operation until the butterflies flew away from their winter roost, which under normal circumstances occurred in March, she was told. Then Ovid would pack up all this equipment and fly away also. She wondered if the freezer might come on the market for a secondhand price at that time, or if he would take it with him. And the nearly new range hood? Would he think to arrange for repair of the hole it left behind? The science crew was going through money in a manner she could scarcely imagine.

  "I'm going to ask you to fill in most of this yourself," Dr. Byron said finally, after leafing through several pages on his clipboard. "Date of birth, social security. Employment history, all that sort of thing. It's only this first box, it looks like I am supposed to do that myself."