Butterfly Stories: A Novel

by William T. Vollmann

  131

  She paid fifty bhat for the drink he'd bought her. She paid another fifty for the tuk-tuk.

  It was raining again. She was very little and frail; she barely came up to his waist. He took off his raincoat and gave it to her. She squeezed his hand. She draped the raincoat around her like a cloak. He put the hood over her.

  You have raincoat at home? he said.

  No. I am poor.

  I give you.

  Thank you. It rain Bangkok every day; sometimes I sick . . .

  They reached the Hotel 38, and Joy was standing on the balcony looking down. She called his name.

  Pukki little angry you, she said. She see you. She say she love you. She cry little bit.

  I don't think she really does love me, Joy. She hardly knows me.

  Oh? OK.

  Yep, said the photographer, his hand on Joy's ass, I get the feeling old Porky's used to disappointment.

  132

  Joy kept showing skin for the journalist, looking at him over the photographer's shoulder, making sure to herself that she could still cast her spell on him even when he had a new girl. She was only twenty-one (she said), but looked older, though she was still gorgeous. The smoking and drinking were working against her. - You like my girl, Joy? he said. - She shrugged. - You like her I like her OK no problem, she said. (Later she told the photographer that Noi was no good.) - Lying in bed with Noi, the light still on, the butterfly fluttered excitedly knowing that Noi's vulva was going to open up for him like one of those Ayutthaya-style gilded lacquer book cabinets: - gold leaves and birds and leaf-flames on black, every line in black; it was almost as tall and wide as a tomb; and like a tomb the doors could not be opened to just anyone; that was why it was so neutral and pretty like Joy's face, its birds bright and open-beaked, a tense-antennaed butterfly questing below, more leaf-flames, like swirling golden kelp, enclosing a lion, an elephant, dragons, horses dancing, their manes scaled like leaves and butterflies' wings; monkeys clutching at branches, a bird gobbling berries, a bird feeding her little ones; all gold on black, gold on black . . . but on one side the gold had been worn half away, as if a black night-fog were streaming down poisonously; it was the same black that had been so beautiful elsewhere. That was her wizened old face, her wrinkled belly. He saw himself, though, as some old white palace with gilded lacquer doorways and windows, the courtyard still and green, his bamboo hearts curving up from a common hillock, his stonewalled pool rippling green. Inside him there was definitely room for Noi. Inside Noi there was room for him.

  It was the best yet. Noi let him eat her out to his heart's content and didn't make him use a rubber. It felt so good inside her that he almost went crazy. When she left he was very sorry. - When Joy left, saying goodbye to him forever, she kissed him on the lips. (He'd told her to tell Pukki that he was sorry. ) He said to the photographer: Joy really has class. I hope you do marry her. - Aw, yawned the photographer, I doubt I'll see her again. I never cared about her one way or the other.

  THE END

  133

  The photographer had gone out with Joy, to buy her some shoes with bells on them that she craved; the madam could give the photographer a good price. Probably she was leaning up against his belly on the bar stool right now (supposed the journalist), his hand on her ass which was bathing-suited, hence multicolored like a baboon's, and there'd be a gleam on the shot glasses and the liquidlike ceiling, a shimmer on her silver bracelet and gold earrings; he knew; he'd seen a bar or two by now ... He came to the Hotel 38 at the beginning of a rainstorm. The men at the first-floor landing gazed at him with contemptuous hate-filled faces. When he got the key from the office he said kap hum kap, and one of the men sneered kap hum kap falsetto. - Thank you, the journalist said to him wearily. Thank you very much. He climbed the two flights of stairs. When it was cool and damp like this, the sweat still dripped down the back of his neck; the only difference was that he didn't mind it because it wasn't hot sweat. Sometimes a breeze blew so softly that he could not feel any motion from the air, only a faint coolness where the sweat was. In the halls of the Hotel 38 there was never any breeze, of course. He let himself in, turned on the light, closed the door, and sat down on a chair. Giant red ants swarmed on him. He got up. The rain was coming down harder now. He turned off the air conditioner, unhooked the screen window over his bed, and pushed the shutter open. Then he stood there watching the rain spear down, rattling on tin roofs, splashing on streets, waxing and waning with gravel sounds beneath the thunder, making new unsteady vertical bars between the bars of windows, solid bars of rain nailing themselves down to concrete ledges and lower roofs from which they instantly ricocheted and then puddled like softnosed bullets, falling faster and faster now so that the air darkened; a flicker, then it thundered directly overhead . . .

  The rain continued long after dark. He closed the shutters finally and sat on the unmade bed. One of the photographer's used rubbers was on the floor. A fresh one waited on the bureau, like a fresh battery pack ready to be plugged in. The rain trickled on outside.

  The bathroom door, a little ajar, was gripped by claws of humid darkness. The dirty walls, splattered with the blood of squashed bugs, seemed his own walls, his soul's skin and prison. How could he set his butterfly free?

  Then he remembered the Benadryl, and smiled.

  His balls ached.

  Pukki had bought him another Singha beer, the 630 ml size. There was about an inch still left in the brown bottle. It would be warm and flat and thick with spit, but it would do to get the pills down. He lifted the bottle idly, and a cockroach crawled away.

  He got up and began to search listlessly through the first aid kit. He felt neither happy nor sad. For a long time he could not even find the Benadryl, but in the end he saw that he was holding the jar in his hand.

  After awhile he unscrewed the top and swallowed a capsule dry. It went down fairly easily, and so did the next, but the third one didn't, so he took his first swallow of beer, which was no better than he had expected, but if he could eat whore-pussy this was a cinch. The pills were sticking on the way down, but eventually the bottle was as empty as his heart. In the next room, someone coughed. He lay down on the bed feeling a little sick and stared at the ceiling for awhile; then he got up and turned the light out. It was very dark. He undressed down to his underwear and got under the covers.

  Later, when the dark figures bent over him and he didn't know whether he was in hell or whether he'd simply flubbed it, he strained with all his force to utter the magic words: More Benadryl, muttered the journalist.

  THE END

  134

  Ahem! - Benadryl, you know, is only an antihistam-.ine - not one of those profound and omnipotent benzodiazapines that can stop a man's heart even better than a pretty whore -

  No, he didn't really know his drugs, just as he didn't know why all the Cambodian whores had taken Russian trick-names; but when he walked down Haight Street one foggy afternoon after he got back it was all buds? buds? indica buds? get you anything? wide-eyed faces wanting to help him get high; he'd never been offered drugs so many times at once his entire life! -and he thought: Has something about my face changed over there? Since I said yes to so many women, is my face somehow more open orpositive or special or weak?

  Blackish birds circled in minions over the power and streetcar wires; drunks were spinning in the trees; the people he'd thought were panhandlers were sellers, and even when he said no they took his shoulder and tried to turn him around; they were so certain he'd made a mistake! - No one had ever done that to him before. (The photographer would have punched them. ) -A cigarette! a man in a skullcap was screaming. It was so different, but not really; it was only as strange as the American flag above the McDonald's.

  135

  Back at the city clinic again because his balls still ached, he listened to the other victims of sexual viruses and bacteria explicating their woes: - That's what happens when you get BORED. - Well I tole that bitch I wanna become a
personal trend. - . . . and I said please touch my mouth I'm a competitive bodybuilder and she says I wanna hug and I says ya want anything more and I DIPPED her like THIS! and then I tole her if a man touch my doll like that I'd kill 'im! - He gimme five dollahs an' then he stick it in me an' now I be gettin' these night sweats; well sistah if I was serious I be scared so I can't be serious.

  You should really take the AIDS test, the doctor said. How many sexual partners did you say you've had in the last month?

  Seven, the journalist said. No, eight. No, nine.

  Well, now, said the doctor. I think that puts you in our highest risk group, right in this red area at the top of our AIDS thermometer. Did you know the sexual histories of all your partners?

  Oh, I know their histories all right.

  Well, that's very good, Mr. Doe. Because, you see, if you didn't know their histories you might not be aware if they'd engaged in any high-risk behaviors such as unprotected sex, anal intercourse, IV drug use, prostitution . . . They wouldn't have engaged in any of those behaviors, now, would they, Mr. Doe?

  I don't think they were IV drug users.

  Mmm hhm. Now, Mr. Doe, do you always use condoms?

  I couldn't go so far as to say that, doctor.

  Well, (the doctor was still struggling to keep a positive attitude), would you say that you use condoms more than half the time, at least?

  I did use a rubber with one of 'em once, the journalist grinned. But it was kind of an accident.

  Mr. Doe, said the doctor, I really believe you should take the AIDS test.

  I'd rather not know. How about if you just wrote me a prescription for some Benadryl? I'm fresh out.

  THE END

  136

  With all due respect, his wife was saying, maybe even because you're so smart, I don't know - they say there's a fine line - you've definitely got problems. (The journalist had just told her that maybe, just maybe, they should consider a divorce.) You need analysis, his wife said. You've got something to work out. You always say my family's screwed up - well! I'm telling you, your family's screwed up. Really screwed up. Actually the rest of them aren't so bad. It's you. Everyone thinks you're a freak. All the neighbors think you're a freak, even if they're too nice to say it directly to me. I'm normal; I'm tired of being married to a freak.

  I see that, he said.

  All your friends are freaks. Either society's rejected them or else they've rejected society. They're the lowest of the low. You've spent years building up a crew of freaks.

  I wouldn't necessarily call them freaks, he said.

  Tears were snailing their accustomed way down the furrows in her cheeks which all the other tears had made, so many others, and so many from him - why not be conscientious and say that those creek-bed wrinkles were entirely his fault? They shone now with recognition of his guilt; they overflowed until her whole face, sodden with snot and tears, reminded him of a beach where something flickers pitifully alive in every wet sand-bubble when the waves retreat.

  And that photographer you hang out with, she said, it doesn't do your character any good to be with someone so irreverent -

  Hearing that, no matter how sorry for her he was, he could not prevent a happy brutal smile from worming to his lips, twisting his whole face; he could hardly wait to tell the photographer what she'd said and listen to him laughing . . .

  137

  He kept waking up in the middle of the night not knowing who this person beside him was. After she started sleeping in the other bedroom they got along much better. Sometimes he'd see her in the back yard gardening, the puppy frisking between her legs, and she'd seem so adorable there behind window-glass that he ached, but as soon as she came in, whether she stormed at him or tried desperately to please him, he could not feel. He could not feel! For years he and his wife had had arguments about the air conditioner. He'd turn it on and then she'd turn it off and he'd wake up stifling and turn it on again and then she'd start screaming. These days, he did nothing when she turned it off. He could hear her bare feet on the hardwood floor of the other bedroom; then her door opened and he heard her in the hall; then the air conditioner stopped. Sometimes he couldn't sleep. Other times he dreamed of struggling in blue-green jungle the consistency of moldy velvet; the jungle got hotter and deeper and then he'd find himself in the disco again, no Vanna there anymore, only the clay-eyed skulls from the killing fields, white and brown, a tooth here and there; from the Christmas lights hung twisted double loops of electrical wire (the Khmer Rouge, ever thrifty, had used those to handcuff their victims); no girls, no beer; they kept bringing him skulls . . .

  He was not inhibited by mechanical rules or by metaphysical thinking . . . To follow rules would have have been to court sure disaster.

  N. Sanmugathasan, General Secretary,

  Ceylon Communist Party,

  Enver Hoxha Refuted (1981)

  1

  One night his wife did come into bed with him, in the middle of night, when the attentions of his dreams had already been fixed on pink flowers at the tips of outspread fronds, like some Pat Pong beauty's painted fingertips; waking, rolling away from her even as he woke, he found his eyes flying open in the darkness as fast as someone falling, and his chest already ached with dread of this woman whom he considered his old wife. Not yet having the courage to tell her that he was leaving her (well, perhaps that's unfair; let's say he just didn't want to be hasty), but meanwhile knowing that he probably would leave her, he hesitated to transmit any signals of intimacy; he couldn't! - but he couldn't stand to be cruel, either, so he found himself adopting a position of polite distance; when she came into bed the next night he gave her a pillow without saying anything; when she thrashed sleeplessly he said: If you wake me up one more time I'm going to ask you to leave. -

  Thank God there was no mirror to terrify him with his own harsh mask. - For a long time he lay beside her, listening to what he construed to be her bitter breathing. She breathed rapidly and shallowly, as if she were trying to suppress a tremendous anger. Had he been less eager to establish his own doctrine, he might have admitted that she could equally well have been terrified. He lay rigid with his own heart thumping hatefully. There was an unpleasant taste in his mouth. He closed his eyes, trying to get back among the fresh wet air, the unpreaching leafy stalks straining and drinking with all the greed of shortlived things. There had been jungle like that in Battam-bang, but only in patches. It thickened, he supposed, beyond the tame battlefield. When he got up to go to the bathroom she got up, too, thinking that she'd failed and he was moving to the other bedroom; his mouth was full of mouthwash so he couldn't explain it to her right away, so he put his hand on her shoulder and held her until he could spit the mouthwash out. She did not try to pull away. It felt very strange to be touching this woman. His emotion was not loathing, but something less familiar. - It's OK, he said to her at last. You can stay, if you want to. - He led her back to the bedroom and he deduced from her quick submissive steps that she was very happy and grateful not to be sent away, and he felt revolted at himself, that he couldn't be nicer; and it made him sad but also grimly triumphant that before their discussion she would hardly have been grateful; she needed him and had only now realized it after so many years; she'd never been so sweet to him before! Needless to say, if he gave in and decided to stay, she'd go back to being herself. She'd have to!

  In the night she woke up and said: I had a nightmare.

  He stroked her face. - What was it about? he said wearily.

  They - they were trying to chase me in a car, when I was driving . . .

  OK, he said. Go to sleep.

  In her sleep she started whimpering, and he wanted to kill himself.

  2

  He called all the magazines and newspapers he knew. - I've got to get back to Cambodia fast! he said desperately. Things are changing there; now's the time to see it all happen . . .

  In the last two years we've done three pieces on Cambodia, an editor said. Our foreign desk
is overbooked. It won't go through; I can't even try. I'm afraid I'll have to steer you elsewhere.

  I just don't think it'll wash, an editor said. So you were the first American journalist to interview Pol Pot's brother. Big deal. So I was the first American journalist to piss green.

  3

  He had a dream that his wife was in charge of a massive jumping-off-skyscrapers competition. Lofty as some saint of parthenogenesis, she bustled about smiling. Unlike many dreams, this one was entirely accurate in its characterization: his wife loved to tell others what to do. In the dream she didn't jump off buildings herself, but yelled and pushed the contestants until they did. She was an MC. The contest was being conducted on the roof of a broad tower level with many other towers. Representatives of each television station were there; and crowds watched from other highrises. The first two contestants were led by his wife to the edge and they leaped into the shaft of shade between buildings. Let it be said that they were PROFESSIONALS in brightly colored technical jumping gear; they didn't have to be forced! He stood beside his wife watching them dwindle speedily into darkness, and then they vanished forever. They'd won. Now his wife was digging her fingernails into his arm, screaming at him. He was on the edge, and then he saw a way to let himself down gently by his fingertips into a carpeted hallway between offices. Once he'd done that he felt guilty that he hadn't jumped. She couldn't see him. If she had, she would certainly have screeched. - Maybe I'll jump from the next floor down, he said to himself. - He took the elevator. At the next floor he still didn't feel ready, so he took the stairs. That was how he eased his way safely down. May I inform you that his wife caught up with him breathlessly? She approved of him now. All the ones who jumped had never been heard from again. So he was the winner after all, the men after him emulating his sane descent . . .