Return of the Butterfly

by Sharon Heath

  I turned back to my team. They were waiting for me to comment on our victory and seemed to have all moved closer to me. I noticed that Bob had a whole dusting of dandruff on one shoulder of his dark green shirt. Why just the one? I still couldn’t believe I’d actually slept with him. Life was a great mystery. How many seemingly inconsequential moments and experiences added up to something amazing, something transformational?

  And still, our little group waited. Stanley, needless to say, was hopping around like an impatient frog, if a somewhat arthritic one. Katrina twirled her long braid, and Tom was squeezing her shoulder. These people were as beautiful to me as a school of dolphins, overflowing with intelligence, curiosity, compassion.

  Finally, with a broad grin, I obliged them. “Well, what are you waiting for? Somebody, go and get Hot Sauce and see if he can do what Good Time Charlie did.”

  I’d barely finished my sentence when I heard a loud sniff and saw Gunther leap into the machine after setting off the timer, slamming the machine shut behind him. He disappeared in a flash.

  I cried out, “Gunther! No!” But he was gone.

  Our faces fell. No one said a thing. No one could say a thing. We’d just witnessed a catastrophe. I struggled for what felt like an eternity to take in the insanity of what had just occurred, only gradually becoming aware of a pounding at the lab’s locked door. When the nature of the sound finally registered, I managed to eke out an anguished, “Won’t somebody deal with that?”

  Amir, who’d been leaning against a lab table with his head in his hands, dragged his feet across the room and began to shout, “Go the fuck away!” until a voice expostulated loudly in a familiar Swedish accent. Amir flung open the door, and Gunther bounded into the room, beaming despite the fact that his face and arms bore long red scrapes and he seemed to have lost the hair on the right side of his head.

  His excitement had spun his wandering eye into full locomotion “I guess we’ll have to make a few adjustments for size.”

  What the hell? I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The rest of the team was obviously just as dumbfounded as I was. Amir was scratching his head like his favorite chimpanzee, and Katrina’s jaw looked like it was about to drop all the way to the floor. “Gunther, I could kill you,” I cried. Then—as I saw his terrible hurt—I hastened to add, “I could kill you ... and I love you!” He grinned broadly and seemed to be trembling with excitement and who knew what else?

  “Man,” exclaimed Amir, as he stepped over to high five Gunther. “What was it like, bro?”

  Gunther furrowed his brow. “It was like what people describe when they nearly die. Except it wasn’t as if just my own life was passing in front of me, but lives of people who’d lived before, all the way back to the beginning and then right back up to the present.”

  “The event horizon,” Stanley murmured. “Hawking was right, but the objects don’t have to actually pass inside the black hole to have their information stored. Near contact must accomplish the same thing.”

  “But then,” Gunther went on as if he were straining to recall a receding dream, “it was as if I had some kind of choice to make.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what it was, but the next thing I knew I was in the hall and desperate to be let inside.”

  I put up a hand. “No more, guys. We’re going to need to give Gunther here—and Good Time Charlie, too—a thorough physical, and then we’ll debrief Gunther fully. And objectively. I’m as thrilled as you are, but let’s not contaminate his recollections.”

  I looked over at Adam. He nodded at me, his eyes and nose reddening with tears. I could almost see his wheels turning, remembering the raw, clueless young girl that he’d first tutored in physics over fifteen years ago. He stepped forward and whispered in my ear, “You’ve done it, Fleur. You and your fear of the void and your meticulous mind have driven this baby every step of the way.”

  Despite my words about objectivity, that mind of mine was whirling, my nervous system on fire. Unable to contain myself, I did a little two-step and spun around a few times for good measure. “I love you, Gunther, and I love you, Adam, and—well, frankly— I love you all!” For a moment I was filled with such strong emotion I could hardly bear it. I thought of little Sweet Pea percolating inside my belly, of Callay fast asleep in her crib, dreaming her very own dreams. The features of Sofiya, Melesse, and Ifa filed before my mind’s eye.

  “But we haven’t got a moment to waste. Gunther, if there’s a God, I hope He, She, or It grants you eternal life. You’ve just moved us a couple of years ahead of where we thought we were.” I turned back to our Magic Machine, which—since Gunther had returned outside its confines— had most likely just been made obsolete. Now that we knew we could actually propel a human being through the void and bring him back again—and at a new location!—I felt an even greater sense of urgency. The sooner we managed to replicate this marvel, the sooner we could submit it for peer review and the sooner scientists across the globe could contribute their own insights and ingenuity to a project that would no longer be ours alone.

  But at this moment, the responsibility still rested on our shoulders.

  “Let’s get to work, people,” I cried. “We’ve got a Titanic to turn around, and who knows how many future generations are riding on it?”

  Katrina piped up, “Do you really think there’s hope, Fleur?”

  I blinked. An existential question if I ever heard one.

  “Yeah,” echoed Amir. “It’s still a long way from what we’ve just witnessed to people traveling exactly where they want to go by pressing a lapel button.”

  They had every right to ask. Hadn’t I myself been up to my ears in doubt nearly every step of the way? They’d sacrificed so much of their time and energy, foregone lucrative pay from the private sector, and exposed their reputations to vicious public attack, shaming, and disbelief.

  How did any of us dare to hope? That elusive ingredient at the very bottom of all the evils piled into Pandora’s pithos, or jar, was the very item that all those other evils seemed hell-bent on destroying, not unlike the Cacklers and their hollow-souled political enablers attacking anyone working in service to the survival of our species.

  Certainly, our little miracle today seemed a pretty solid indication that we were on the right track. But the magic of our machine would have been nothing more than the wisp of an idea in an odd duck’s mind without the dedicated group of souls who currently occupied this room. These amazing humans had given me their loyalty and trust. They’d supported my direction in life. They were the equivalent of my seven. Gunther, with his literally wandering eye and his bouts of depression and that wild impulsivity of his that had not only catalyzed this day’s astonishing leap forward but had once led him to stand on a lab table to heretically declare in Swedish, “We are God!” The tenderness of Katrina and Tom that overflowed from their love for each other to spill toward animals of all sorts, including a couple of rejected lab mutts whom they worried about desperately, even as they gritted their teeth to include them in our trial run. Amir, math whiz extraordinaire, handsome as a movie star, but smitten with a rescued chimp with a predilection for flinging poop balls. Sally, with her paradoxical attractions to the bad boys of Sons of Anarchy and the delicately fluid royalty of the insect world. Bob the Wookie, collector of exotic shells and Star Wars memorabilia, a champion of sea life who had the courage to look darkness in the face and decry it. Stanley, with his great mind, his moral lapses, contrition, and wisdom, his goofy humor, and his generosity in turning around the destiny of a strange and lonely child. My very own Adam, my tutor in almost everything, the kindest of fathers and most devoted of friends, honest to a fault, whose openness about not being such a nice guy and willingness to continually hear my own embarrassingly not-so-nice perspectives only added to the depth of our bond and the erotic ecstasy of our life together.

  All these companions that the Fates had assigned me, and those outside this room but forever in my heart, had given me something tha
t, in my many years of struggling against the void, I’d never begun to imagine. They’d managed to convince this terribly slow learner that caring about life—and throwing all the dark and light of me into that caring—actually mattered. That if dark matter was truly the glue of the universe, then our own fragility and folly and clumsy fealty to one another and our own natures might actually bring about some salvation to our world. I nearly laughed. Wasn’t it Sammie’s abusive ex-boyfriend, Jacob, who’d offered me the key years ago in his description of tikkun olam? Wasn’t that what all of us here had been up to with our clunky Magic Machine? We should have named it Repair of the World, Series 1, Model 1. I couldn’t wait to come up with Series 2.

  I looked at my team, my pals, my companions through the thick and thin of it, and answered from the very bottom of my own pithos, “Is there hope? I have to be honest with you. I have no idea. But with you glorious souls alive in this world, there is gratitude. Perhaps at this moment in time, it’s actually gratitude we’ve been given to go on with. A gift from dying stars. Maybe—just maybe—that will be enough to give us the strength and courage to do what we need to do.”

  Silence. I became aware of the team staring at me. Maybe? Did I really just say, “Maybe?” Something pressing inside me simply wasn’t satisfied. “Actually, guys—no maybes about it. This matters more than anything, and I think we all know it.”

  Then I grinned broadly, my heart at one with the task at hand. “And now, my darling odd ducks of this world, let’s get cracking.”

  Sanctus

  The new life stirred from sleep and shifted positions to amuse himself. There was just enough room to stretch his lengthening limbs over the venous cord, her covenant with him in his weightless world. He swayed to the liquid lilt of her voice, dipped a toe, just so, over here, thrust his elbow at an angle over there. Her body’s rhythms were his rhapsody. She was his ocean, and she rocked him. Her heartbeat was his drum.

  Again asleep, he dreamed miracles he’d not yet seen: hummingbirds and finches, hawks and mockingbirds and cardinals; they flew above him, tracing the sky’s invisible web with their muscular wings. Trees and bushes offered leaves and berries to caterpillars and koalas, deer and squirrels and foxes. Down below, worms worked their fat bellies through the roots’ slick soil. Their wavery patterns pleased him, and he smiled.

  The Soul of the World laid her green hands on the soft blades of his shoulders and claimed him. “Let’s keep it going, then, little one, long enough to redeem the stars’ sacrifice. When the time comes, and I pray it will, may you and your generation assume the care of this earth, for there is no other like her. If you must have your tools, wield them as custodians, not conquerors. Bring the gift for witnessing that I planted in your species to the waiting cosmos, so that the vastness may know itself in the mirror of your eyes. Enjoy the blessings of your ancestors, who wish to see you find your very own fullness. Sanctus, Sanctus, Shekinah Sanctus. May it be so,” said the Soul of the World.

  May it be so.

  Acknowledgements

  No writer lives on words alone. My work on this book has been sustained by an Indra’s Web’s worth of love and support from Chris Heath; Claire, Tray, Tahlia, and Braden Noble; the many streams of my Karson clan and the British wing of my family; Constance Crosby; Janet Muff; Judy Altman; Nancy Mozur; Robin Wynslow; Alison Crowley; Jeanine Roose; Suzanne Ecker; Pamela Kirst; Carol Blake; the late Judie Harte and Fred Erwin; Frances Hatfield; Leah Shelleda; Deborah Howell and Neil Baylis; Cydny Rothe and Roy Kushel; Molly Jordan; Kathie Clarke; Wendy Wyman-McGinty; Christophe Le Mouël; Robin Palmer; Harriet Friedman; Jane Reynolds; JoAnn Culbert-Koehn; Daniel House; Patty Micciche; Sadie Mestman; Sofia Borges; Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli; the Kickass Kindness Council comprised of Carolyn Raffensperger, Alison Rose Levy, Gary Anderson, and David Eisenberg; Yvette Cantu Schneider; Susan Rodgers Hammond; Marcella and Jay Kerwin; and those Krazy Katzenjammers, Clothilde and Finn.

  I’m profoundly touched by the generosity of artist Sylvia Fein in granting me permission to use her exquisite painting, “Bound Together,” on this book’s cover.

  A big thank you to Smoky Zeidel and the rest of my Thomas-Jacob tribe, and especially to the marvelous Melinda Clayton—what a blessing it is to have a publisher who gets my voice and advocates for it so intelligently and wholeheartedly.

  My mother Ethel Karson was an inspiring embodiment of the generosity of the world soul; I owe my love of this glorious planet, the earthiness of my humor, my trust in my calling to write, and my commitment to future generations to her, to my father Charles Karson, and to my bubbie and zayda Bessie and Chaim Wodlinger.

  I’m deeply grateful to the friends and readers of Fleur, who’ve kept their ears close enough to the ground and their spirits close enough to the stars to hear her and appreciate her story. It’s no small thing in this life to be heard.

  And finally, I bow to that skipping spirit who beckoned to me over a decade ago, Fleur herself, who’s been my joy and my teacher, driving home to me the values of failure, contrition, curiosity, transparency, and surrender to the great mystery of love. With Pandora’s devils making hay on land, sea, and air, is there really any doubt whether we should pry open her pithos and attempt to earn its last ingredient by committing ourselves to the flourishing of future generations? The butterflies and the babies have already voted and continue to do so. Can we ourselves afford not to?

  More Books by Sharon Heath

  The History of My Body, The Fleur Trilogy Book 1

  Tizita, The Fleur Trilogy Book 2

  About the Author

  Sharon Heath writes fiction and non-fiction exploring the interplay of science and spirit, politics and pop culture. A certified Jungian Analyst in private practice and faculty member of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, she served as guest editor of the special issue of Psychological Perspectives, “The Child Within/The Child Without.” Her chapter, “The Church of Her Body,” appears in the anthology Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way, and her chapter, “A Jungian Alice in Social Media Land: Some Reflections on Solastalgia, Kinship Libido, and Tribes Formed on Facebook,” is included in Depth Psychology and the Digital Age. She has blogged for The Huffington Post and TerraSpheres and has given talks in the United States and Canada on topics ranging from the place of soul in social media to gossip, envy, secrecy, and belonging. She maintains her own blog at www.sharonheath.com.

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