The Butterfly Kid

by Chester Anderson

  Laszlo’s eyes bulged. His friend’s eyestalks fully extended themselves and examined me from wildly unlikely combinations of angles. My captor continued to rattle like a baritone snare drum. I continued to kick, my heels hitting my captor’s cephalothorax with a dull booming sound, until he grabbed my ankles with two lesser pincers and held me motionless.

  My hands remained free, however. I raised the wrist radio to my mouth, turned the volume up to full, and yelled, “I’m caught! I’ve been captured! Send help!” I intended to say much more, but a prehensile segmented feeler curled down from behind me, removed the radio, and crushed it like a grape before my eyes. Okay, I’m easily convinced. I went limp and waited to see what would happen.

  Both lobsters were rat-a-tatting on at a great rate now, and Laszlo’s expression was slowly changing to something I knew in advance I wasn’t going to like. I was right.

  “Well, if it ain’t Mister Wiseass Anderson hisself,” Laszlo drooled. “Fawncy meeting you here.” Then he laughed, an uninspiring sound.

  “Aha, youthful Laszlo,” said the first lobster, while the second continued to clatter. “This person is known to you?”

  “Dig it,” Laszlo admitted. “This here’s ol’ Wiseass Anderson.”

  “Oh. What is it, this wiseass?”

  “He’s jus’ another MacDougal Street bum, man. That’s all he is.”

  “Indeed. And did you bring him here, Laszlo Scott?”

  “Me? Hell no. He brung hisself, man. Like, he’s jus’ tryin’ to Spy on me, that’s all. He’s always, you know, tryin’ to Spy on me an’ like that.”

  “A spy?”

  “Dig it.”

  “Indeed.” The lobster advanced toward me menacingly, its huge blue claws snapping fiercely bare inches from my face. “Well now, we know exactly what to do with spies. Indeed we do. Exactly. Oh my, yes.”

  I missed Michael very much. Indeed I did. Oh my, yes.

  11

  AND WHERE was Michael all this time?

  As soon as I was safely on my way to Laszlo’s, Mike went back to bed, of course. After all, he explained, it was only eighty-thirty, and he was still tired from last night’s adventures with the pill, and he knew Laszlo wasn’t likely to be up and moving much before noon, and he knew I’d want him to be at his best — alert and well-rested — in case following Laszlo led to complications. Right?

  “It wasn’t as if I were deserting you or anything, Chester. Really, I don’t see how you can discuss it in those terms, not even in jest. Look, I even had the radio on the nightstand by my bed, turned up to full volume, to make sure I’d wake up if you called. Christ, Anderson, when you get into these unreasonable moods…”

  But sleep is Michael’s finest art. I’ve seen him sleep through a fire in the same room (complete with firemen et cetera, some of whom thought he was dead until I pulled his thumb out of his mouth and they heard him groan), the big Los Angeles quake of ’69 (or was it ’70?), countless deadlines, appointments without number, three exceptionally loud recording sessions, one very raucous birthday party (his) — in short, through just about everything that might wake up any normal person. If Mike ever gets famous enough to rate a biography, I mean to write it myself and call it The Magnificent Sleeper, or maybe The Man Who Slept Through Everything.

  Anyhow, Mike had no trouble sleeping through my early-morning efforts to call him. No, what finally woke him — at half-past one, when I’d already shadowed Laszlo back and forth across Tompkins Square three times — was the vidiphone, to which he is psychically attuned.

  The call was from a chick named Yvonne on whom Mike’d once had improper but futile designs, whom he hadn’t seen in eighteen months. She was just in from some far place and was entertaining improper designs on Michael for a change. Would he care to have lunch with her?

  This call took an hour — Mike’s phone calls often do — during which several lesser calls of mine went quite unheard. Meanwhile Sativa got up and, with much banging about of pots and pans, made Mike a second breakfast. Furthermore, Sean came home from the doctor’s with an awkwardly placed dressing, a large jar of ointment, and a shamefaced expression.

  Mike arranged a luncheon date with Yvonne for three o’clock at her hotel room and hung up. Sean immediately turned on my harpsichord and set out loudly to discover how it worked. Mike showered. Sativa, who grooves behind parties and/or noise, confusing the two, dialed a fairly loud detergent drama on our seldom used 3V.

  The dentist who occupied the floor below my place tried to complain about the noise by banging on his ceiling with a broom handle, something he’d never done before in all the three years Mike and I had lived there. No one heard him, nor did anyone hear my sporadic attempts to communicate with Michael.

  By somewhat more coincidence than I’m used to, Mike never happened to be in his bedroom when I called. He dressed, as is his wont, in motion and everywhere, ducking into his own room only to pick up garments to be put on elsewhere, wherever in the house the action was.

  Mike, dreamy-eyed, horny, and glittering, left for his date with Yvonne at two-thirty. Sean and Sativa left with him, bound on little missions of their own. At last the place was quiet, and my voice could doubtless be heard in every room, coming at full tinny volume from the wrist radio Mike’d left, forgotten, on the nightstand by his bed. I haven’t asked, but I hope Yvonne was worth it.

  At just past five, when Laszlo’d led me to lobster headquarters on Canal Street, Michael was still engaged in an air-conditioned hotel room with Yvonne, possibly discussing politics. (He was very anti-Kennedy that year, for reasons unknown to me.) Ten minutes later, when I was discovering that Laszlo’s Reality Pill connection was a deep blue shellfish, Michael and Yvonne were just leaving her room en route to The Garden of Eden.

  “You see, she was very eager to meet you, Chester. I mean, she’d heard so much about you and all, the usual thing. But I knew you wouldn’t want her at the pad — she being just a little bit stupid, among other things — so I took her to The Garden. Where else?”

  And at something like six o’clock, when I was in the claws of one lobster and being threatened by the other whilst Laszlo gloated moistly, Mike and Yvonne were well established at The Garden, talking with Andrew Blake and Karen about me — or so Mike claims.

  “The thing about Chester,” Andy’s supposed to have said, “is that his genius works in so many different directions at once.”

  “Right,” from Mike, theoretically. “Music, poetry, novels — the only things he can’t do well are things he hasn’t tried yet.”

  And so improbably on and on, Mike still insists, for several hours in a choral recitation of my varied virtues that, if I could only believe it really happened, might almost have made my captivity worthwhile.

  And if I work hard enough, I may believe it yet.

  12

  ANYHOW, THERE I was, tied hand and foot to a pillar in the middle of the loft, being surveyed with varying kinds and degrees of avid interest by two blue lobsters and Laszlo Scott.

  One of the lobsters — they all looked alike to me — said something that sounded like popcorn popping, and the other lobster went away. I could hear him, out in the hall, pushing heavy packing cases around like so much air. I worried.

  “Yes indeed,” the remaining lobster said. “We know how to deal with spies. Oh my, yes.”

  “Kill the wiseass mother,” Laszlo hinted. “C’mon, Chief, tear ’im up. Yeah, man, yeah! Kill the bastard.”

  Being basically unprepared to believe in a pacifist lobster, I expected it to act on Laszlo’s suggestions, but, “Oh my, Laszlo Scott!” the lobster quaked, turning light azure in distress. “Kill? You know…” It couldn’t go on.

  This was encouraging. Getting killed would’ve spoiled my chances to foil the lobsters’ plot, among other things, and getting killed with Laszlo in the audience would’ve been distressing. Instead, I allowed myself to hope. Hope is good for you.

  Still shaken by the thought of killing, the
lobster said, “Excuse me, please,” and went out to the hall to consult, like a snare drumming contest, with its colleague. This left me alone and helpless with Laszlo.

  “Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!” he chanted, war-dancing around me in clumsy circles. “Now you’re gonna Get It, an’ I’m Glad! Nyah!”

  “Cool it,” I said.

  “Nyah!”

  The lobsters were wheeling large electronic devices into the loft, most likely for my entertainment. I gave them all my worried attention, leaving Laszlo to his own damp devices.

  He went on nyahing furiously for a while, until he saw that I wasn’t watching. “Nyah?” he said.

  He looked furtively about and saw that the lobsters weren’t watching him, either. (By then, knowing Laszlo, I was.) He clenched his pudgy fist, shouted Nyah! lunged for my solar plexus — and was gone! Of this, at least, I heartily approved.

  But, “Hey?” came a frightened Laszlo noise from overhead. I looked up, grinned, and said a nyah or two of my own. Laszlo was spread-eagled on the ceiling, face down, and his terror and discomfort were a pleasure to behold.

  “Now there, youthful Laszlo,” said the English-speaking lobster solemnly, “you know you ought not do such things. Feel shame, Laszlo Scott, transgressor: feel regret.”

  After the briefest little resistance, he obviously felt just that.

  I, on the other hand, suddenly felt a good deal more respect for these blue crawdads than I’d meant to. That levitation stunt was even more impressive than Sean’s butterflies. How, I wondered, had such highly gifted lobsters taken up with Loathsome Laszlo? And why?

  “Violence,” the lobster went on sternly, “is intrinsically bad. Say that.”

  He didn’t want to and he tried not to, but, “Violence is intrinsically bad,” he choked out just the same.

  “Very good. Now believe it,” the lobster ordered.

  Saying to myself, “Oh Yeah?” I watched Laszlo’s putty face go through uncommon changes for almost a minute, until, against his own will and most likely without knowing what intrinsically meant, he obviously believed, without the slightest reservation, that violence is intrinsically bad.

  “That’s better,” said the lobster. Laszlo sank slowly, feet first, to the floor.

  I was impressed. Anyone who could do a thing like that to a thing like Laszlo was clearly someone to reckon with. Furthermore, I recalled with a start, I myself was about to have to reckon with that someone. This did not comfort me.

  Still, I wasn’t as worried as I had been. I couldn’t believe that so firm, deep-rooted, and irrational a prejudice against violence was likely to prove healthy on this planet. And nothing, I hoped, is intrinsically anything.

  “Nyah?” I asked Laszlo when he reached the floor, but he didn’t answer me. He just looked at me wide-eyed and scared, and then skittered off to someplace out of sight. I nearly laughed.

  Then it was my turn.

  “What is your name, Spy?” the lobster asked.

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to give him anything for nothing. Then I felt a pressure in my head, discomfiting rather than uncomfortable, a very gentle pressure, and I heard my mouth say, “Chester Anderson.” The pressure went away. Oh?

  “Indeed. And I am Ktch. I am in charge here.” I didn’t doubt it for an instant. “You shall answer my questions.”

  I certainly hoped not, but the odds were on his side.

  “What,” he said ill-advisedly, “do you do?”

  After a moment of pressure, my mouth started telling him, in alarming detail, what I did. It began on the metabolic level describing with some oversimplification the process whereby I changed food into feces with myself as an inconsequential by-product. The lobster — Ktch — listened to all this drivel with rapt attention.

  I stopped listening whilst my mouth was still describing the process of salivation, and discovered, to my delight, that I didn’t have to listen at all. My mind, that is to say, was not engaged in this activity. Aha. A possible weakness in the lobster’s plans.

  I carefully imagined a hundred-piece rock-n-roll orchestra — fifty guitars, twenty basses, fifteen harpsichords and organs, five harmonicas, ten drummers drumming: all, including the drums, highly amplified — with a two-hundred voice chorus: an impressive ensemble. I set these three hundred imaginary noisemakers to work on “Love Sold in Doses,” one of Wild Bill Mosley’s better tunes, in a gloriously impractical endless arrangement I’d been toying with since 1966.

  “I offered you riches an’ all of them things;

  For all of your fingers I offered you rings;

  To cover your body, silk fabric that clings:

  And you gave me Love Sold in Doses.”

  The noise inside my skull was something awesome, but my fool mouth was still chattering away. It had gotten to the treatment of fatty acids in the upper intestine, a basically uninspiring topic.

  I turned my imaginary amplifiers up a notch. My idiot mouth rattled on. Maybe, I resigned myself, this wouldn’t work.

  I turned the volume up another notch. Nothing happened. Up another two notches: nothing. With a subliminal shrug I turned the volume all the way up, so loud it should’ve been audible outside, thinking that if I couldn’t keep myself from talking, maybe I could kill myself with noise.

  My mouth faltered, stumbled, hesitated, groped for a a master volume control set at one on a scale of one hundred.

  Ktch’s feelers stood at attention. “You have stopped talking,” he complained in frictive tones akin to wonder. “Why have you stopped talking? Do not stop!”

  The pressure in my head — hardly noticeable in all that din — increased sharply. My mouth began to say something. I turned the master volume control ever so slightly.

  “What are you doing?” The lobster seemed upset. “Stop that, Spy. At once. Stop. You shall answer my questions, Spy, you shall!”

  The pressure increased. So did the volume. I could play this game all night.

  Ktch began to pale, a charming sight. His feelers wilted slightly and his eyestalks twisted themselves into a true lover’s knot. His claws clicked nervously.

  I noticed he was clicking his claws in time to “Love Sold in Doses.” Groovy! So I wrote in a lobster-claw obbligato.

  Halfway through his big solo Ktch realized what he was doing. “Stop that, Spy!” he commanded, clicking brilliantly. He doubled the pressure and I turned the volume up to five.

  Then, aside from his claws, Ktch went as limp as a lobster can and turned as pale as New York City milk. “There are twelve of us here,” he said flatly.

  “We have always worked in teams of twelve. It is our tradition. Four chemists, three zenologists, three technicians, one communicator, and one coordinator. I am the coordinator. I am called Ktch.”

  And then, so help me Dylan, while “Love Sold in Doses” thundered in my skull and Ktch’s claws clicked time, he told me Everything. It took awhile.

  “After four months of group study, we developed the proper weapon, which you call, I believe, Reality Pills. Then we cultivated a vector, Laszlo Scott, a typical member of your species.” I let that pass.

  He explained how the weapon was made — a process I didn’t understand but carefully memorized — and how it worked.

  “It does no harm, of course. We cannot do harm. It merely generates confusion, disorder, anarchy — you might call it chaos. Whereupon we intervene to restore order. Always. We are often hailed as heroes.”

  The explanation was long-winded, and I was getting sick of “Love Sold in Doses,” which, for all its hip innuendos, is, after all, just another tune. So I turned the volume up to ten.

  “This project is organized in three phases,” he went on hurriedly. “Individual testing, mass testing, and diffusion. We have finished phase one, the individual testing, with completely satisfactory results, as usual. We always have completely satisfactory results.”

  At this point, “Hey, Chief, wha’s happenin’?” Little Laszlo chose to manifest himself again. “
Why you tellin’ him all that stuff, huh?”

  “Love Sold in Doses” collapsed. So did Ktch. Pity.

  “How did you do that?” For a lobster, he sounded downright respectful.

  I shrugged my shoulders eloquently. A wisp of pressure began to make itself felt in my head, then turned tail and ran away. Groovy.

  “Laszlo Scott, why did you not tell me about this?”

  “ ’Bout what, man? Why didn’ I tell you…”

  “Yes. I must think about you, Laszlo Scott. Also about you, Spy. I — no, We have been misinformed. Something must be done. Yes. Come with me.”

  He led Laszlo out of the room. I whistled “Love Sold in Doses” hopefullishly.

  “Stop that!” the lobster yelled. I did. Why not?

  Laszlo and the lobster were away some fifteen minutes, during which I wondered where the hell my beloved roommate, manager, and master planner was. I also noticed, for the first time in awhile, that I was disgracefully wet and beginning to smell, and that I still hadn’t had lunch. I wove these three themes into a disgruntled fugue and waited for further developments.

  Somewhere in the near distance a voice, probably Laszlo’s, made odd sounds expressive of distress. This was little comfort.

  Then Ktch came back. Alone. He’d got his deep blue color back and his eyestalks untangled, but he looked, to say the least, a bit offended.

  “What you did,” he said hurtly, “why can Laszlo Scott not do the same? Were you taught to do this? Where did you learn it?”

  I whistled another half-bar of “Love Sold in Doses.”

  “No,” he surrendered.

  Out of unabashed nastiness and the absence of lunch, I whistled through the whole tune once, with flourishes. He kept time with his claws.

  “I’m afraid,” he said when I was quite through, “that I shall have to resort to methods I myself deplore. But you are too strong for our usual procedures. Quite unexpectedly strong. Nothing had prepared us for… Ah, well. You yourself have forced us to this point. We shall have to use torture, alas.”