Return of the Butterfly

by Sharon Heath

  I winced. “Gwennie, I admire you so much for—what do you call it? Walking the walk? But any marching genes I may have had disappeared after what happened at the Survival march. Which turned out to be anything but that for some.” I paused, not wanting to be insulting. “And even if I were ever tempted again, I’d never take Callay.”

  I found myself reflecting on the few times—all post-2016—when I’d taken my disgruntlement to the streets. I’d actually marched next to Mother in the first Women’s March after the election, the two of us giggling self-consciously as we posed for selfies in the pussy hats hand-knitted for us by Sister Flatulencia. Unsurprisingly, the whole physics team had turned out for the March for Science, with Bob bearing a hand-lettered placard declaiming, “The Oceans Are Rising, So Are We,” and Katrina wearing the best T-shirt ever, emblazoned with the words, “I Can’t Believe I Have to March for Facts.”

  Both experiences had been a bit surreal. Attempting to vanquish my void in large, claustrophobic crowds felt counter-intuitive. I’d never seen myself as a marching sort of person. Not even a rallier. And we all know what happened when I addressed the huge audience at the Nobel ceremony.

  The truth was, in the past, I wasn’t convinced that marches did much good, save for filling the anxious voids of their attendees. Instead, I’d put my money on science. But what if science itself was under attack? For years we’d been stymied in our research thanks to a series of know-nothing congresses. The fact that we were able to continue now struck me as nothing short of a miracle.

  I knew that ours certainly wasn’t the first time in history that the verity of science was threatened. Besides a disheartening tendency on the part of the established scientific hierarchy to shun newcomers’ groundbreaking and innovative work, ever since the scientific revolution there had been those who’d called science itself into question. Even fine thinkers such as Hobbes, Rousseau, William Blake, and Nietzsche were distrustful of science’s claims to universal applicability. I wish they’d been present for the first moon landing, which pretty much put paid to critiques of science’s capacity to deliver on a practical level. But the real naysayers had been various organized religions and their attachment to keeping the unknown, unknown. Ironically, we quantum physicists were also fascinated with the unknown. We approached it, not as a never-to-be-breached secret, but as a vast field for the play of the mind, as sacred and exhilarating to us as religion is to a believer, sports to a player, sex to a lover. The enthusiasm generated by the Higgs field, many worlds theories, and the relationship between dark and light matter often approached transcendence.

  But Gwennie? It struck me that activism was her transcendence. She’d been ranting about Big Oil and Father and his Cacklers ever since I’d discovered C-Voids, and the group she’d founded, C the Big Picture, was still going strong. Especially since she seemed sturdier on her feet these days, the fact that she was again prepared to put those feet to the pavement for one of her causes struck me as a very good sign. I said as much to her.

  She replied with predictable passion. “Going easy was never my forté, but hell, in this day and age—well, you know even better than I how dire it’s become. You and the gang are doing much more than marching on the climate catastrophe front, but Pighead has given us so much more to worry about. And what he’s doing now to the children?” Her voice had crept higher and higher to the point that it competed with the squeaks and snorts of Peppa Pig and her porcine family. Callay looked up, alarmed. “No, no, darling, it’s okay. Granny Gwennie keeps getting overexcited today. What’s Peppa doing? Baby George lost his dinosaur?”

  Callay was seduced back to her screen again. Gwen spoke this time in a forced whisper. “I know it’s been a daily shit show, but this one? Babies ripped from their mother’s breasts? Children in cages? He’s gone beyond the beyond. Whenever I think of those kiddies, some of them younger than our Monkey here, my blood boils. If I were a religious woman I’d pray that these monsters would experience a hundredfold the agony they're foisting upon these children and their families. That they know shame. And terror. And rue the day they were born.”

  I responded dryly, “You might not be a religious woman, but that sounds a little like some sort of ancient curse.” I didn’t disagree with Gwennie’s sentiments, but I simply couldn’t bear taking in the whole of what she was describing. It was too awful. “Gwen, I admire you, I really do. But I’m a scientist. Which means I have to do a certain amount of dissociation to do what I have to do.”

  She blinked. “What are you talking about?”

  “Have you heard of James Fallon?” She shook her head. “He’s a neuroscientist who studied the brains of serial killers. Sociopaths. He discovered that his own brain had most of the genetic markers that they and their families had. Then he found out that serial killing was spookily frequent in his own family line.”

  Gwennie stepped back. “God. Can you imagine?”

  “I suppose in an odd way, I can. What really fascinated me was that he started to speculate that the lack of empathy that can produce serial killers might actually be valuable in the right proportions.”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you want your surgeon to be too anxious about cutting into you to get out that cancer? Or your military generals to be worried about casualties when defending your soil?”

  “When was the last time we had to worry about defending our soil?” she muttered.

  “But you get the point, right? I think I’ve experienced it myself. I had a sociopath for a father; how much of it is in my genes? I nearly lost Sammie as a friend by caring more about coming up with the theory of C-Voids than I did our friendship. We scientists can be that way.”

  But then Gwennie suddenly made a gesture behind Monkey’s back as if she was about to bat my child’s head.

  I jumped forward, screaming, “Gwennie!”

  Callay looked up, alarmed for the third time that morning. Gwen gave her a giant kiss on her little blond head, and then leaned forward to plant one on my own cheek. “I don’t think Fallon’s got this scientist all worked out,” she said drily. “That wasn’t the response of a sociopath, Fleur.”

  As my heart tried to calm itself, I realized she’d relieved me of at least a bit of the concern I’d been harboring about myself ever since hearing Fallon’s story.

  “Enough of sociopaths,” Gwen declared. She announced heartily, “Who’s for cake?”

  “Caycay!” cried my daughter.

  Laughing as much in relief as anything else, I chimed in, “Moomah!”

  “Well, let’s do it,” Gwennie said.

  We dove into that yummy round Earth, as Nana used to say, “like starving Europe.” It tasted as good as it looked. Needless to say, it took longer than usual to get a sugar-high toddler tucked into my old bed.

  As Callay slept, Gwen and I sat opposite each other on the facing living room sofas and sipped the tangy mint tea she’d brewed “for digestion.” Unerringly, Gwennie steered us back to our earlier conversation.

  I found myself literally throwing up my hands. “Let’s face it, Gwen. You’re our resident conscience. You keep us honest when we try to turn a blind eye along with most of the rest of the world to the dangers facing all the buns in the oven. I should have known, when you and Stanley first took me under your wings, that you were a particularly ethical person by your insistence on no meat in your home. Or chemically laced food, for that matter.” I grinned. “Not even Krispy Kremes.”

  And then she covered her face in shame. “What a hypocrite I am, making a cake for Mother Earth that contained all the crap you’re talking about.”

  I reached over to put a hand on her arm, then scooted over to her sofa. “Gwennie. It’s not good for any of us to think we have to be squeaky clean. That one’ll kill us as fast as any cancer. The earth itself isn’t clean. It’s made of dirt.”

  Gwen snorted. “Hell, that is just so damned true.” She reached out to shake my hand. “Thank you, girl, for ch
allenging something that’s gotten a little too rigid in this old head of mine.”

  Little did I know that I would soon face my own set of challenges when Sammie’s lover finally came to LA. She’d be winging across the Atlantic Ocean in just a few days.

  Sanctus

  The ocean was aggrieved. What humans had come to call the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was but the latest insult to her dignity. In the past, she’d been respected and revered, the names she’d been given myriad: from Neptune to Poseidon to Tiamat to Enbilulu to Triton to Ikatere. Liquid breath of the earth; rhythmic moon dancer; salty lubricant of wisdom, travel, and adventure—her vast depths were a realm of secret delight, home to the most outrageously colorful creatures on the planet. Poets had praised her; scientists had studied her; surfers, swimmers, and ships had ridden her; and more than a few had succumbed to her steely storms.

  But now, she herself was struggling, her ceaseless striving to provide food, oxygen, and weather mediation to the earth’s inhabitants increasingly impeded. She was working overtime to absorb atmospheric toxins released by the ceaseless burning of fossil fuels; she could barely contain their greenhouse gases, and her ecosystems were collapsing. Even her sweet seagrass meadows were drowning as sea levels rose, disrupting the lives of the fish, ducks, geese, and swans that were nourished by them.

  With her coral reefs subject to mass bleaching and infectious disease, clams and oysters, conches and sea urchins were fumbling at building and maintaining their protective skeletons. In the future, would there be no shells left to hold to an ear to “hear the sounds of the sea?” The most charming of her creatures were at great risk. Polar bears and walruses, seals and sea lions, penguins and sea turtles were flagging.

  The sea of love was heading toward becoming a sea of death, and the nations of the world were much too slow to sound and respond to the alarm. Who would rise to the call of that wet and wonderful wild? Who would come to their senses and save their very own home?

  The Soul of the World was all too aware of the oceans’ plight. She rode with them on waves of worry, their unending motion the rhythmic refrain to her sorrowful song.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I COULDN’T WAIT to meet Amira. She’d assumed the proportions of a goddess in my mind. I had to force myself not to suggest going with Sammie to greet her at LAX, reminding myself that they needed that moment of reunion to themselves.

  The good news was that Sammie drove her straight to our house from the airport, eager, as she said when they arrived, “to bring together my two favorite women in the world.” Then, after a beat, “Except for my mum.”

  Amira, who was even more glamorously gorgeous in person than in the photos my friend had shared, shot Sammie a sly look. “That’s what I love about you. Hopelessly sentimental.”

  I wasn’t sure I appreciated the edge in her voice, but extended a hand, then gave up politeness to offer her a welcoming hug, which she treated as an excuse to give me a peck on each cheek, which felt, somehow, off-putting.

  Oh dear, you might think, they’re off to a rocky start. And from my perspective, you’d probably be right. Not that Sammie noticed. She beamed from ear to ear as Amira announced, “And now you must show me this fab house of yours that Sammie’s been boasting about.”

  I was a little taken aback, but followed orders, leading her (with Sammie right behind) through:

  1. the capacious living room that offered an awe-inspiring dramatic flair with its quatrefoil windows and exposed rafters.

  2. the den, its dark wooden floors covered with abandoned book trains and milk jugs full of flowers delivered weekly from the gifted florists of Jacob Maarse, and our ridiculously gigantic television concealed behind a sliding wall with a vibrantly-colored Ethiopian hanging.

  3. the library, with children’s books gradually encroaching on shelves once solely devoted to philosophy, fiction, history, and physics journals.

  4. the rarely used dining room, decorated by Mother with an exquisite Baltic dining table resting on baluster legs surrounded by ten fully upholstered host chairs with grey cashmere, button-tufted seats and backs, overlooked by a Hollywood sign lithograph by Ed Ruscha, a “Made in California” piece by Bruce Naumann, and one prized Chagall with an ethereal couple floating over pigs and chickens.

  5. the kitchen, gleaming with stainless steel appliances and home to the rustic French country table our increasingly extended family preferred to crowd around, legs brushing against each other in companionable intimacy.

  6. the two downstairs bathrooms—one styled around the motif of the giant Chat Noir poster hanging over the tub, the other’s walls dotted with illustrations from the original Winnie the Pooh.

  7. then up the spiral staircase and through all five spacious bedrooms except for Callay’s, as Monkey was napping.

  I knocked before we peeked in on the girls, who threw us gleaming grins as they looked up from their chessboard on the shag-carpeted floor, and then Makeda and Melky, who were reading in matching chintz-slipcovered armchairs, swiveled to face each other, their bare feet intertwined. I decided to skip the upstairs bathrooms, except for the one that Buster ambled out of curiously. He wound his way in and out of Amira’s ankles as she pronounced with a kind of cynical glee that, what with the stylishly modern black litter box providing entry from an oval opening at the top, black and turquoise fish-shaped food and water dishes, and pet toys crowding the tub, our cat had his very own luxury bathroom. I couldn’t disagree and fell close to the edge of a whirling pit of upper-class white girl guilt.

  It was only when I purposely turned the conversation to Amira’s documentary that I could see a bit of what had attracted Sam to her—besides looks, that is. I couldn’t help but note that her eyes were, indeed, as green as Adam’s, but more almond-shaped than round, as befitting her part-Iraqi heritage.

  We three ended up having a light breakfast of toast and fresh fruit salad in the kitchen, a wakened Callay making one of her book trains around our chairs when Amira nodded down toward my daughter. “Well, for one thing, one can’t separate the status of women in any part of the world from the relative well-being of their children. We’d hardly be able to take for granted that a bright little girl like Callay would be able to attend school if she were Afghani. The Taliban were notorious for forbidding girls to go to school, and it’s touch and go whether a girl can get any schooling now, depending in part on where they live. In some areas, like Kandahar, Zabul, and Wardak, where I managed to do some interviewing, only about fifteen percent of girls are attending school. It’s due to a variety of factors: the physical destruction of schools by war, ongoing conflict making it too dangerous to even attempt to attend, a shortage of female teachers—girls cannot be taught, or medically treated for that matter, by men. Not to mention the ubiquity of child marriages, longstanding poverty, and the consequent cultural devaluation of female education.

  “But remember, the country is still very much at war, and women and children are casualties of violence in every way imaginable. The ICC—the International Criminal Court—has been investigating war crimes there for years, and, believe me, there’s no reason to stop. Innocent civilians have been at the absolute mercy of the Taliban, the National Security Forces, the US military, and your CIA ever since this damned thing began, which, of course, actually dates back to the British invasion in eighteen thirty-eight and was worsened immeasurably by the USSR’s brutal takeover in the late nineteen seventies. Generations have known nothing but poverty and war. And on top of that, tribal cultures are notorious for violence against women. Afghanistan has been no exception. Rape, acid attacks, forced prostitution: you name it, it takes place every day.”

  This was brutal on multiple levels—not only thanks to the horrifying content but also to the confidence of Amira’s delivery. I felt like a humdrum talk show interviewer, with her being the sparkling guest. Reminding myself that this was her job, I tried shoving the Green-eyed Monster out of the room and nodded frequently as she drove home her
points. Out of the corner of my eye, I couldn’t help but note the admiring glow in Sammie’s eyes.

  “The moving thing is that Afghani women, like women the world over, lobby strongly for human rights for themselves and their children. I was there to witness a demonstration of one of the civil society organizations that gave me chills, knowing as I did that those women might be arrested, murdered by their families, or subjected to any sort of brutal torture for taking part. People are really trying. Even in the midst of absolute insanity, just like in the US right now, organizations are working heroically to make a sane, safe, and free society. In and out of the country, I had the privilege of meeting representatives of Women for Women, International; Amnesty, International; Womankind, Worldwide; and Women for Afghan Women. And then there are the individuals—women like the brilliant Zainab Fayez, the only female prosecutor in Kandahar, who’s successfully spearheaded scores of cases of violence against women.”

  Amira turned to Sammie, who looked as wide-eyed as I felt, and said, “I want you to meet her, darling. She’s funny, warm, absolutely stunning. I pray she manages to stay alive for the premiere of the film at Sundance. I told you, didn’t I, that they’re co-producing?”

  Unusually tongue-tied, Sammie mumbled her congratulations, and I tried to save her with a genuine, “You’re doing extraordinary work, Amira.”

  She smiled then, and the smile actually seemed genuine. “As are you, my dear. I haven’t even mentioned what three decades of conflict and chaos have done to the country’s natural resources. From what I gather, your work is crucial for all the little girls—and boys— of our world. If peace ever comes to that region, they’ll still have to contend, as we all will, with climate change.”

  I flushed, but all I could think was hurry, hurry, hurry!

  Chapter Seventeen