Return of the Butterfly

by Sharon Heath

  After Callay had consumed in its entirely the full first slice of her birthday carrot cake; after she actually laughed when Hector appended to the “Happy Birthday” song the words, “You look like a monkey, and you smell like one, too;” after the children had battered to smithereens a piñata shaped like the devil, wicked black horns and all; after I’d hugged and shaken the hands of more mommies and daddies than I could imagine, whose names I’d never remember; after we’d put our exhausted but happy daughter to bed without even bothering to bathe her; after Assefa rang the bell shortly afterwards and I opened the door to his desperation to find his lost cellphone; and after he departed a second time, having found it embedded in a jasmine bush, right next to one of the devil’s horns; after he’d surprised us both out in the garden by telling me he’d cried to see our daughters play together, planting a goodbye kiss that aimed for my cheek but made contact instead with my lips; Adam and I found our way to each other and collapsed on the queen’s settee, surrounded by people we loved. The original gang was pretty much all here, and then some:

  1. Amir and Tom and Katrina and Gunther, minus Bob (and Saffron—I wondered if she’d get lucky tonight on his Wookie).

  2. Stanley and a very sleepy Gwen, who kept nodding off whenever the conversation turned to our big moment tomorrow (and yes, I’d foolishly promised our Silicone Valley funder that we’d test Dreamization on the dogs the very day after my daughter’s party).

  3. Sammie (solo at long last, as Amira had to fly off at an ungodly hour the next morning to convince her boss at the BBC that she needed another month to complete her editing).

  4. A disheveled Dhani, who couldn’t be persuaded to sit down with us until she’d finished cleaning up nearly all the dirty dishes with Lukie.

  5. Ignacio, still slightly sweaty from deadheading and pruning the hydrangeas, which he couldn’t keep his hands off once the backyard was vacant and bathed in moonlight.

  6. Sister Flatulencia, who sat pretty quietly in the corner with her rosary beads, reminding us of her presence every now and then with a particularly potent silent but deadly.

  7. Makeda, Melky, and Sally, the latter lying prone across the carpet with her head in Makeda’s lap while Melky stroked her dark, silken hair, prompting me to wonder idly, and certainly not seriously, if she’d get that three-way after all.

  Needless to say, I was pretty pooped and more than a little anxious about the next day, but the timing felt somehow right. With any luck, the beginning of my daughter’s third year on the planet would coincide with the beginnings of a human history independent of fossil fuels.

  At one point, Adam hauled a duvet downstairs from our bedroom, and Sammie and I lay together under it. He even persuaded Lukie to brew some hot chocolate for everyone, and I had the joy of turning my head to see my belly sister’s ecstatic smile accented by a whipped cream and chocolate mustache. Oh, how well that husband of mine knew me. I had to control myself lest I ask Sammie to spend the night, but she left soon afterward “to help Amira pack,” giving me one of the warmest hugs she’d given me in ages. My body relaxed into the certainty that the world had been set right again.

  The team took off shortly afterward, insisting they needed at least some semblance of sleep to clear their minds for the big day. It was more than a little poignant to see Katrina wake the dogs, who’d earned their sleep this time by running and jumping, rather than having it foisted upon them by induced narcolepsy.

  Adam and I walked Stanley and Gwennie out to their car. A heavy fog had appeared out of nowhere, and Stanley guided his sister carefully across the wet grass. Even with her cane, she was visibly limping. Especially with this fog, I knew her flagging eyesight wasn’t helping her physical balance any. Once she’d been safely stowed inside, Stanley affixed her seatbelt solicitously. She’d been right. He was the best brother ever. If Adam and I had a son, would he be this solicitous with Callay? I insisted that the Fiskes roll down their windows so I could plant kisses on each of their foreheads.

  By that time, the fog had coalesced into a moderate mist. My lashes grew heavy with damp. Adam took me by the arm as we walked back toward the house, where fairy lights illuminated a purple sign above the front door that read: “Callou Callay! Happy Frabjous Birthday!” Adam left me for a moment to flick off the battery switch on the side of the house. Everything in front of us went dark, save for the craftsman-style porch light. And yet the world still glowed.

  As one, we looked up. Fingers of cloud stretched across the largest moon I’d ever seen. The cloud cover failed to dim its luminous presence, which dominated nearly half the nighttime sky. How was it that humans had actually found a way to walk on that distant orb? Not for the first time, I felt breathless at the miracle of human science stabbing in the dark with such remarkable precision. No matter how tomorrow turned out, it would be a beginning. One way or another, between Amir and Tom and Gunther’s brilliant number crunching, Katrina and Stanley and Adam’s devil’s advocate logic, Sally’s etymological expertise, my own crazy hunches, and the implausible hope in all our hearts, we’d find a way to harness dark matter to facilitate human movement at will and need across the globe. And perhaps someday, I might actually be freed from this building sense of pressure, this metronomic command: hurry, hurry, hurry!

  Chapter Twenty-three

  WHEN I DASHED out the door the next day, I wondered if Sister Flatulencia had picked up my own nerves. The house nearly levitated from her effluvium. Yet she was playing so sweetly with my daughter, I dared not say a thing. Callay was in especially bright spirits, calling out to me, “Have a good day, Moomah!” I knew it hadn’t hurt that I’d taken extra cozy time with her in bed that morning, singing all her favorite songs, since I knew Adam, Sally, and I would probably come home much later than usual, quite possibly after her bedtime. “Eensy Weensy Spider” played in my mind pretty much all the way to Caltech.

  Adam and Sally had already driven to the lab in Sally’s Jeep, and they were speaking intently with Stanley and Bob when I entered. I could sense the same blend of excitement and tension in their voices that I was feeling myself. As usual, a ray of sunlight poured through the one crooked blind covering the long bank of windows. It aimed itself straight for a curled up Good Time Charlie, who snored loudly as Katrina kneeled rather awkwardly at his side, somberly petting him. I knew she was terribly anxious over whether he and Hot Sauce would survive our experiment today. For some reason, I found myself recalling my misreading of Fidel’s hand-lettered yard sign just days before he’d murdered Chin Hwa, thinking at the time that it had said “Curb Your God” rather than “Curb Your Dog.” Neither one of our rescued lab dogs deserved any more curbing than they’d already suffered at Semel.

  Katrina finally looked up at me. We exchanged rather ghastly smiles. She rose and approached me for a hug.

  “Hey, don’t I rate a hug, too?” objected Tom, only now emerging from beneath a lab table where Hot Sauce snuggled on a blanket. Tom bonked his head on one of the table’s angled legs as he rose up, and we all laughed nervously until, rubbing where he’d hit it, he reassured us that it probably wasn’t fatal.

  The room fell silent. “Oh, Christ,” Tom murmured, hurrying over and clasping me with extra strength as he claimed his hug.

  “No worries,” I said. “In a way, it reminds me that she’s somehow with us today.”

  Stanley, the inveterate atheist, blinked a few times, but wisely said nothing.

  As Tom let go, I felt Adam grab me from behind. I knew it was he because of his Campbell’s chicken soup B.O. He whispered in my ear, “Of course, she is, my love. They’re all here, cheering us on.” I felt certain he was right. And they weren’t the only ones. I sensed ancestors all the way back to the Mitochondrial Eve wishing us well on our attempt to keep the human gene pool going.

  I began checking and rechecking our equipment, making sure everything was properly set up. Sally fussed over her carton of butterfly enzymes, ensuring they were at just the right temperature an
d ready to be inserted into their spray bottles, fresh and potent. Proper preparation was everything at a moment like this.

  The dogs both woke up, barking, when Amir and Gunther burst noisily into the room, Amir full of apologies that he’d initially forgotten the dog treats when Gunther had picked him up, Gunther explaining that he’d actually had a flat tire on their way back to get them.

  Muttering, “Thank God, he had a spare,” Amir waved the dogs’ favorite peanut butter jerky treats over their heads, and they leapt up to snatch them, their teeth rather alarmingly sharp and snappy. Amir gave us all a sly grin, saying to the pups, “Enjoy it, guys. It might just be your last supper.”

  Katrina flung out a curt, “Don’t,” and Amir apologized, but their little contretemps couldn’t compete with Gunther’s manic enthusiasm. He leapt over to what we’d informally dubbed our Magic Machine (but had already been formally patented as the Caltech Spacetime Staging Center, Series 1, Model 1), a complicated gizmo that Gwennie might well decry, except for its intended purpose. It was purposely a round-edged, rather than industrially angular-looking contraption, but nonetheless a bulky stand-in for the nanoparticle lapel pin that I hoped would one day replace its launching function. From the outside, it looked unlike any fictional time travel machine I’d read about or seen in a film, especially since—in honor of the generations of children we hoped to save with it—I’d had it painted in the shades of robin’s egg blue, buttercream, apricot, and deep forest green that decorated Callay’s bedroom. Not only that, Katrina, our resident artist, had drawn the mock-up for its logo according to my own specifications. Right above the machine’s full title appeared an image of a monarch butterfly alighting on a Carding Mill rose. The board of Caltech had initially objected, but I’d discovered that one’s negotiating position is vastly improved by having been the youngest recipient of the Prize. After all, we were potentially offering our school a vast reservoir of future income and prestige.

  No doubt about it, this was big, as was the machine itself. We’d purposely had it constructed to be much larger than the dogs, the main section, which I’d designated as “the womb,” was a full seven feet by seven feet, and we’d had the windowed inner capsule insulated with industrial-grade, transparent cushion wrap in case its vibration as it sent its traveler off for a black hole’s event horizon jiggled its passenger. The machine wasn’t a vehicle, but instead, as its title suggested, would serve as a containing launching pad for the prospective spacetime traveler.

  But as much as we’d tried to anticipate at least some of the potential hazards, the implications and consequences of what we were about to attempt were as unfathomable as landing humans on the moon had been in a previous era. There were some questions I stayed quiet about. They kept me awake at night precisely because they had no conceivable answer. I’d worried earlier on about the UV exposure issue, which neither Adam nor the rest of our team could find any way to address until we were able to study some living subjects who’d actually returned. But if our subjects survived their transit with no ill effects on their physical health, how would human life—not just here on earth, but in our relationship with the cosmos—be altered? What might come of purposely approaching the mystery of what couldn’t be seen directly by any object of measurement, certainly not by the human eye? Might the mystery itself be changed by the encounter?

  But now was hardly the moment for such preoccupations. It was crunch time, where practicality was king. Our process included two primary components. The first was the most complicated, based on my conclusion that cellular black holes were actually fractals of their cosmic counterparts. Thanks to a continued reflection on my experiences of Zeki’s death and Callay’s birth, it had dawned on me that it was in the event horizons of C-Voids that the constant energetic exchange of dark and light matter that constituted life occurred. Our water bears had pretty much supported my hypothesis that activating a living creature’s C-Voids and then aiming that subject through spacetime to just the very edge of a black hole’s gravitational pull actually bounces them back to earth like a boomerang, much as our dark moods often bounce back to a greater serenity after we’ve hit our true depths.

  The aiming process itself had been arrived at through a most rigorous series of computations utilizing arithmetic fractals of the Fibonacci sequence. Our preliminary success with the moss piglets left us wowed by the exquisite symmetry and stunning reliability of the physical universe. We needed those moments of transcendence. Much has been said—quite accurately, I’m afraid—about the banality of evil, but the dullness of much scientific research is less widely known. I’d said to the team more than once that I could get down on my knees for the patience with which they pursued their efforts, for truly nothing would have been achieved without it.

  I said it again now, but Gunther would have none of it. He sought out the first of the small nasal sprayers that Sally had prepared. “Come on!” he cried, his bad eye making strabismic circuits like the earth circling its sun. “Let’s make history!”

  Part two of our operation: those nasal sprayers, actually more like misters, containing the activating enzymes of dead butterflies, which allowed an animate body—in the coming case, Good Time Charlie—to essentially liquefy like a caterpillar enough to endure the decomposition and recomposition of Dreamization. The Magic Machine had its own misters that would hopefully boost the more direct blast of the nasal spray with a more diffuse absorption by the subject’s skin. If we succeeded, we could all thank Mother for initiating me into the underworld and Father for his elegant demonstration of the heretofore missing piece of the puzzle. Life is nothing if not replete with irony.

  Saying a silent prayer to both my parents, I asked Amir to take Hot Sauce into the next room so he didn’t get unduly spooked, told Katrina to put a leash on Good Time Charlie, instructed Bob to turn on the machine to warm it up, and suggested we put it to a vote who would actually trigger the timer once Katrina had administered the mist and Tom had coaxed an unleashed Good Time Charlie into place inside.

  I took a deep breath when the team responded unanimously with a loud and emphatic, “You! You do it!”

  And so we began.

  After all these years of work, the whole process, from setting the timer to the automatic unlocking of the Magic Machine, would take a whole of 3.14159265359 minutes. We’d discovered that, not unlike the Fibonacci sequence, pi was transcendental in more ways than one, and it felt particularly meaningful to all of us that we were employing a mathematical constant whose value had been affirmed and reaffirmed from the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians all the way up to Heisenberg and, now, ourselves.

  The room was as still as a church from the time our sweet little dog disappeared—Yes! He actually did!—to the moment when three melodious pings (copied, I might add, from the audio signals of our clothes dryer back at home) went off. And lo, right on schedule, Good Time Charlie reappeared! A collective gasp of relief and joy went up, and Katrina leapt forward to gently slide our subject out.

  As he emerged, tail wagging, Tom obviously couldn’t resist. He asked, “Did you have a good time, Charlie?”

  But none of us laughed, and Tom himself fell silent. We looked around at one another, eyes like saucers. For once, this group of highly verbal scientists had been rendered speechless. It was as if we’d been collectively holding our breaths ever since our work had first been validated by the Prize.

  Stanley, our team’s primogenitor, had removed his glasses and was wiping the wetness from them with the bottom of his cotton shirt. Katrina and Tom hugged each other like there was no tomorrow, even though what we’d just accomplished might actually signify quite the opposite. Moving around Good Time Charlie and squinting at him from various angles as if he’d never seen him before, Amir kept rubbing his love-patched chin, his bright brown eyes ablaze with wonder. Gunther’s angular body hovered over the lectern a few feet away; perspiration dripped from his forehead, and his pale skin glowed, his energy vibrating as if he was abou
t to take off like a helium balloon. Leaning against the front of the lectern, Bob looked all of a gee whiz twelve-years-old as he repeatedly blinked. I saw that Sally stood back a few paces from the rest of the group, as if uncertain that she belonged here, but of course we couldn’t have done this without her. Adam, who I now knew I’d definitely run into a burning building to save, stood by my side and stared at me with such love and admiration I could hardly bear it.

  And then there was a burst of vigorous movement. Charlie started contorting himself to scratch his rump with his hind leg.

  Gunther commented drily, “Oh hell, do you think there are fleas on the other side?”

  That one did get a laugh. Actually, Bob’s response was more of a snort. I looked at him and had a private chuckle of my own. He really was just a Wookie.

  Seemingly enlivened by the laughter, Good Time Charlie shook his whole body luxuriantly, as if he’d just had a bath. Then—just as suddenly—he settled down, his chin on Katrina’s shoe, and fell fast asleep.

  With a quick flick of an eye, I noted on the face of the Magic Machine that it was 1:07:31 p.m. Tom had taken great care to design the machine’s clock, set to time each second of the experiment so that it could be replicated with exactitude.

  It occurred to me that it was Callay’s naptime. I pictured her wrapped in her soft flannel pajamas, her lips pursed as if pondering a profound question, her long lashes fluttering against her soft cheeks like butterfly wings. The fate of all of the children of our world rested on what could be done to mitigate the full blast of climate change. Was it too late? Dared we hold out hope that what we’d just done might help turn back the dreadful tide?

  At that very moment, I saw something flit past the gap in the window blinds. Was it a butterfly? I couldn’t be sure, but if so, I was convinced it was Father. A vision came to me of Jung and Pauli slapping their knees like farmers and throwing back their heads in laughter, as if I’d been given the only possible answer to a supremely ridiculous question.