Butterfly Stories: A Novel

by William T. Vollmann

  104

  Butterfly! Joy crooned drunkenly. Go work, go dance, go dingalow, go fuck a lot! I say hello how are you where you come from, what city? I say buy me drink. I go work six o'clock thirty. I no show; you give me money too much OK I show.

  When the gunfire drumming of rain disturbed the metal roof, Joy jumped up to bring her laundry in, sat back lotus-legged on the green plastic, folding her bluejeans neatly shipshape while Pukki came back bare-shouldered in her Pat Pong dress, having just showered (remember Pukki? The journalist didn't. But she remembered him. She'd tried to get him to buy her that night in Joy's bar when he told her he loved Oy. He'd never seen Oy since coming back to Thailand. He'd been faithful to Oy; so if he saw her again that wouldn't be faithful to Vanna . . .) Joy's lingerie became square white bales. In her bra and white-striped black skirt, Joy sat folding and smoothing; then she made the bed and lay beside the photographer and stretched -

  The journalist sat staring at her long smooth brown legs. He didn't love her the way he loved Vanna; but he LIKED her, of course.

  Faces peered in the door-crack.

  Joy yawned into the photographer's ear. - I want to take shower and uh -

  Pukki came back from another shower, wet, wrapped in a towel, and borrowed a tampon. - Pussy accident, said Joy. You know?

  She straddled the photographer and lovingly drummed his shoulders. - No butterfly, you? she whispered anxiously.

  105

  They'd checked out of the 38 to sleep at Joy's just for a day; that might be cheaper. On the way out, one of the maids called the journalist into the room once more and said: You come back? - I don't know, he said. - She kissed him full on the lips while the other maid watched. Then she said: Ten bhat. - He reached into his pocket and gave her a hundred to divide with the other maid. Her eyes glowed like Christmas bulbs. As he went out, he heard them both laughing at him hoarsely, no doubt believing that he must have made a mistake with the banknote . . .

  106

  The transvestites skull-grinning with black cobwebs made up over their sparkling eyes didn't tempt him, not even the ones with black bridles and nostril-slits and double eyebrow-slits cut into their sweating glistening faces leering sheer and sweet out of darkness, but by now he'd begun to understand De Sade's prison scribblings when the sex object no longer mattered; an old man was as good as a young girl; there was always a hole somewhere; but unlike De Sade he didn't want to hurt anyone, really didn't; didn't even want to fuck anyone anymore particularly; it was just that he was so lost like a drifting spaceman among the pocked and speckled and gilded and lip-pinked grinning heads that floated in flashing darkness, cratered with deer-eyes, holding Japanese-style umbrellas like darkness-gilled mushrooms; he was so lonely among them that he wanted to love any and all of them even though loving any of them would only make him more lonely because loving them wasn't really loving them -

  107

  He was feeling sick again; his balls were aching again. He certainly didn't know what he'd done to deserve that. At the Pink Panther, lights reflected through his mixed drink; high heels clickclacked on the bar-enclosed platform; black bathing-suited ladies danced slow and sure while overhead the balloons aped red traffic lights. The first one that came to him was very fat and desperate. She kept sticking her tongue in his mouth. - I'm sick, he said, but she started jouncing on his lap. -Pussy accident, he said, and she laughed. - I have VD, he said, and she laughed. She kept asking him to buy her out tonight, tonight, and he said maybe tomorrow and she started screaming no no no and cramming her tongue into him, becoming more horrible every second until he almost wanted her to catch the white fungus on his tongue.

  Finally she gave up. - You sick OK no problem you come bar tomorrow darling buy me out tomorrow?

  OK, he said.

  Promise? You promise? I say you promise me now?

  Sure, he lied. I promise.

  On a cocktail napkin she wrote NAME and then her name, first and last; she wrote NO. and then her bar number; then she wrote:

  forget me not

  and seeing that, how much she needed him, how deeply she longed for even one night's worth of his money, how much she was counting on him to come tomorrow when if he could help it he'd never come to this bar again, he was so sorry for her that he looked down at the floor; she; misinterpreting this or perhaps understanding all too well but still hoping to make something of it, spread her legs and jiggled her crotch into his line of sight; when he gazed into her sweaty face she hissed: You sick OK! You go other Thai lady I see you I . . . - and she leaned forward, panting her desperate wet breath into his nostrils, and slid her hand's knife-edge across his throat -

  108

  I can't take you anywhere! the photographer cried in anguish. Whenever a girl asks you to buy her a drink, you buy her a goddamned drink! I can stay in a bar for hours and tell 'em all to go screw, but you're such a pushover it just blows my mind. You'd better never leave your wife. You need someone to take care of you, man!

  I agree a hundred percent, said the journalist, who like the photographer agreed with everyone on everything; it was so much easier.

  Then he felt contrite and said: In the next bar I'll do better. I'll watch my money better.

  So in the next bar, just barely out of sight of the Pink Panther, a woman said to him: You buy me drink? and he said no and she said: You buy me drink? and he said: Sure, honey. If it'll make you happy I'll buy you two drinks.

  109

  In that bar, which he was to think of as Noi's bar, Noi being the name of the woman he was buying all those drinks for, he kept handing out Cambodian money like party favors and they swarmed around him; Noi on his lap pleaded with him to give her another even though he kept telling everyone that the money was worthless in Thailand; the boy-girl on his left kept wriggling a nightmarishly long tongue at him like some corkscrew parasite that penetrated into his all too fresh memories of the Pink Panther whore's tongue whose sour-sweet uncleanness he could still taste, and suddenly he wondered how often these girls thought of penises as he was now thinking of tongues, these slimy snaky things that were determined to enter him whether he wanted them to or not; glumly and with aching balls he sat at that bar (a weird open-air place in the middle of the alley, hot crowds passing on either side) while the boy-girl bartender wiped the journalist's nose for him and cleaned his glasses: -you buy me drink? prayed Noi, already sloshed (such a tiny girl! such big drinks! it seemed so cruel that the girls couldn't drink colored water; that would be the journalist's first reform if they ever made him King of Thailand); the boy-girl on his left held his hand captive on a squishy bazoomba; Noi (45 kilos) now more firmly in his lap had his other arm cuddled around her most tenaciously; with that hand he sluggishly unzipped her fly and stuck a finger in to see if she were hairy or shaved - so many things to learn about Thailand! - and she was hairy. After that she had him buy her another drink, and since in his situation he couldn't clink glasses with her she clinked hers against his and even raised his to his mouth for him while the moon-faced bartender rubbed his nose once more; he felt like a king surrounded by ass-wipers ... - Buy me drink? said the boy-girl on his left. - One more, he said. But just one. - Why not me? wept the bartender.

  110

  When at last he took all the slips from the wide teak cup and added them up, he saw that he was short by almost 500 bhat. He had to call to the photographer for money.

  I don't fucking believe it, said the photographer in the most genuine amazement that the journalist had seen in a long time.

  111

  The two of them went back to Joy and Pukki's to sleep. They couldn't afford the Hotel 38 anymore except on special occasions; it was 300 bhat. (They'd given Joy twenty dollars apiece, each without knowing what the other had done; but all the same, Joy told them that they owed the landlord 200 bhat per night. . . ) Her room was an oven at night, bright and bleak and reeking of insecticide. Splashing sounds came from the hall where ladies took turns doing the laundry. In the
corner crack, a foot or two below the ceiling, a hairy curled wire protruded. The wire began to vibrate. After awhile the photographer got up and pulled it; something squeaked; it was a rat's tail . . .

  112

  While we are waiting for Joy and possibly Pukki to come back from work, while the two sexist exploiters sleep (at rest, the photographer's face still looked almost sweet sometimes the way his eyelashes curved and his lower lip swelled; his cheek rested against his bent-back fingers), I may as well describe Joy's place, which one gained by going down a dark corridor deep in toilet-smelling water; then, just at the foot of the stairs where another girl stood scratching her shoulder-bites, one turned right down a hall whose left wall was a barred partition behind which a family lived with big slow rats (one as big as a piglet); on the right were tiny padlocked doors like entrances to storage lockers. Joy unlocked one of these. The room, whose walls were part concrete and part wooden slats, was maybe ten by twelve feet. The floor's grey cement was partly covered by a sheet of green plastic patterned like bathroom tiles. On the wall hung a broom; Joy and Pukki kept their room very clean. In the corner was a one-piece unit of open wire shelving, then a beaten-up card table on which the two women kept their purses, some lotions, a photo of Pukki with her English boyfriend; then there was a wastebasket where they kept their dirty laundry, and a narrow vinyl "wardrobe" for all the clothes. These items were all ranged along one wall, on the bare concrete. On the green plastic, which covered most of the cell, there was nothing but a fan, an ashtray, a box of matches, and in the corner a folded length of ticking too skinny to be called a futon. Joy kept her stuffed animals there. - This baby for me, she said, squeaking her soft pink teddy bear. I love. - That was everything. There were no pictures on the walls. (On the ceiling was a mobile of shells, it's true, hung from the same beam the bare incandescent bulb was mounted on. I'd forgotten that.) The rent was 900 bhat per month.

  My place no good, said Joy softly. You no angry me?

  113

  She came in at four in the morning, staggering, falling, laughing, stretching her long legs over the pillow, her brown toes soaking up light, saying: I drinking too much! I'm sorry I drink two beer, three whiskey, one champagne, two vodka -

  It's OK, said the journalist. You're a good girl -

  Thank you, she whispered.

  114

  Early in the morning a rat squeaked upstairs, and the monsoon rains came steadily down, eating all light except for a dreary brown or khaki luminescence that showed the clothes hanging outside the window-bars and then the stairs, underneath which was the toilet on its raised platform. Pukki had never come home. She'd had to go to Pattaya for an Australian boy's holiday. (The girls seemed to dread those "holidays" more than anything else, probably because they could never get away from their assignment then and always saw the same things, just beaches or hotel ceilings . . .) Joy and the photographer were lying very still. The journalist waited as long as he could, the sweat gushing from every inch of his body, and still they slept; he got up and put his sandals on. Outside, the alley was now a gutter calf-deep in brown water through which sandaled people slowly splashed; radios were playing beside the families on the open platforms brushing their teeth and spitting into that canal; scraps of newspaper floated by; there was the usual crush of flies, as eager as boys (or girls) at Pat Pong; men sat on their wooden porches which had become docks; ladies splashed steadily from stand to stand, buying food; awnings stretched across the narrow sky, almost meeting each other, and beneath them ran the unreal canal city. By ten in the morning it was hot and sunny, the street bone-dry.

  He went back inside, down the hall, past the toilet and right to the tiny door with the padlock; when he pulled the door open he caught a gleam of thrusting buttocks and said: I'm sorry but Joy said his name and said no problem.

  115

  Back to the National Museum he went alone, to enjoy an hour of beauty without love, but he was just like the photographer who'd shouted on the bus: I can smell a pussy a mile, away! because after a diversionary visit to some bird's head swords he found himself sniffing out Khmer art (there was more here than in Phnom Penh! - the Khmer Rouge hadn't forgotten much); raining his fever-sweat down on the courtyard grass, he stood lusting for the Bayon-style Dvarapalas of the early thirteenth century.

  The stone head leaned forward and down, not quite smiling, not quite grimacing, the balls of its eyes bulging out like tears. Too familiar, that face; he wished now that the photographer were here, to take a picture of it. - Marina? - Maybe. Yes, Marina, plump, blurred and round. Her mouth was definitely grimacing. He stepped back, stood a little to the left so that her eyes could see him. She looked upon him sadly, without interest or malice; this Marina was long dead. Her nose was eaten away as if by syphilis, her breasts almost imperceptible swellings on the rock, her navel round and deep, her vulva a tiny slit that may have been vandalism from the same axe that cut off her right hand and left arm . . . She stood square-toed and weary in the heat.

  Beside her was another Dvarapala in the same style, stunningly beautiful, the contours too soft to be human; her face, neither a Buddha nor an Egyptian deathmask, merged eerily into her sweep of hair and bust; she could barely see him; her thick lips smiled; to make her smile at him he stood slightly to the right to meet her gaze; she smiled the way a whore smiles when you didn't pay her enough -

  116

  She looked into the photographer's face very earnestly. - You boyfriend me, or you butterfly? If you butterfly, we finit.

  I love only you, the photographer grinned. Me no butterfly. Me suck only your flower. You my sweet rice girl.

  117

  That night while the photographer went to turn his cruel hawkeyes on other bargirls until Joy should arrive, the journalist sat drinking and preparing the final draft of his article, which would surely appear on the front page of the New York Times: Thailand's 3 main cash crops: rice, fish and women...and he started to feel something crazy lurching up inside him just like that time in Phnom Penh when Vanna wasn't there and he hopped on the back of the cyclo driver's vehicle and started pedaling the driver crazily down the street, the driver covering his eyes and smiling in dismay, everyone else laughing and pointing and staring, and the journalist had been full of spurious mirth that made him pedal desperately until he crashed the cyclo; now, knowing that something similar was about to happen, he left his friend, made his speedy escape from the square white, red and yellow lights of Pat Pong glowing down the alleys like soft drink signs. He didn't take Noi because she'd gone home early. The bartender said that a man had bought her too many beers and she'd gotten drunk and puked. For every 55 bhat per beer that the man had paid, Noi received 20 bhat, and she was required to drink it down to make the man happy; otherwise how could she wheedle another one out of him? - The journalist was sorry. He'd been thinking all day about what a tight pussy she must have. (But he loved only Vanna, of course . . . ) Sitting in the tuk-tuk, he smelled the blue smoke of the stalled traffic; he watched a lady with shoebutton eyes sitting side-saddle and miniskirted on the back of a motorbike, carefully gazing at nothing; then his tuk-tuk driver switched the motor on; the golden bulb lit up the naked green LADY OF HIGHWAY decal guarding the driver's back and the bloodspatter decals on the window; now they were moving so fast that the breeze was actually cold. Stop again. More blue smoke. Another side-saddle girl beside him, this one staring wide-eyed through her crash helmet. He saw other faces suspended behind the dark windows of taxis. Then the tuk-tuk growled off again. They turned by the lighted garden of the World Trade Center, bound once again for the Hotel 38.