Butterfly Stories: A Novel

by William T. Vollmann

  4

  Now that the lust for a new wife had spread through him like viremia, we can't really call him the journalist anymore, so we'll call him the husband. As soon as he had the money he'd be back in Cambodia to claim his prostitute bride in some happy morning of green leaves all around the windows, although the English teacher who couldn't speak English had said to him, in a sudden amazing gush which had obviously cost him dictionary hours: Do you want to get marry? Or you want to be still single forever? I think you are old enough to get marry. Or you want to be taxi boy? Carefully, please! You know AID? It's a bad kind of sickness. You can die by it. I'm afraid it. Therefore I never sleep with a girl at all. So I only want to get marry with a pretty girl. But I'm poor and she's rich ... - Too bad, thought the husband. Through all his assignments Cambodia lurked and waited, moistening in his memories like a fungus, like an obscene orange orchid-bowl rotting between compound leaves that tapered like paintbrushes; and thinking of Vanna (whose face he could no longer see quite as readily as if she'd been tattooed on the insides of his eyelids) his heart butterflied as it did when he waited to go on studio, the second hand of left clock and right clock clicking like synchronized eyelashes, the green nipple on the wooden breast not yet glowing so that the husband could ignore life's tests yet a little longer, afloat and irrelevant like his styrofoam cup on the blue felt. - Do not consider what you may do (thus Claudius Claudianus), but what it will become you to have done, and let the sense of honor subdue your mind. - But the grammar of his particular shoulds and oughts was beyond him. Not finding answers, he asked himself the same questions; no need to know whether he lived on the left clock or the right; being in either case a second hand, he clicked round fruitlessly. Life's dreary stretch and trickle was making him forget Vanna month by month; sometimes it seemed that he remembered far more vividly the Chinese porcelain-faced girl with her head down in the darkness offering her round maggot-pale cheek so dreamily to her glass, as if she were listening, while another pallid lady who wore an ice-blue butterfly bow elongated her silver braceleted arm out toward the Chinese porcelain-faced girl in the darkness; a lady with an ice-pink artificial flower in her hair got to the husband first, grinning cautiously downward with her lip lifted from her upper teeth. - Vanna, Vanna! he shouted.

  5

  He dreamed that he was cutting his wife up with a saw, and she never cried out, not when he cut her ankles off, not when he severed her knees; but when he began to saw her heart out she wept very very quietly.

  6

  Why should we send you to Cambodia? yawned the editor. You've already been, right? And you didn't get what you went for?

  Well, it's just that it's such an exciting time there, the husband blabbered, they're just now getting reliable electricity again, and soon the import-export businesses will be going; history's being made and I want to be there when it happens . . .

  You know what? said the editor. I really don't think I'm interested.

  7

  There was a famous writer named Ned who had been invited to read at what is called an "event" because nothing happens there; they permitted the husband to be the warmup act. The whole time he made his appeal, he thought he saw Prince Sihanouk smiling at him from the back row. Everyone else was yawning. He stopped in the middle of a sentence and two or three people clapped politely; Ned leaped up on the stage and began to crow and snort and fart while everyone shouted for laughter, and when he was through the audience was on its feet shouting madly: NED! NED! NED! NED! and Ned came back and gave them another raspberry.

  No, I just don't see how we can send you to Cambodia, said the editor, a magnificent lady who was very vague. - If we made money off you it would be one thing, but you know that hardly a soul reads you. And then there are the budget cuts. That office is a minefield right now. It just wouldn't be safe to bring you up. If I did, you might lose everything . . .

  Well, but what should I do? asked the husband with such pathos that she couldn't duck him with brightness.

  There's always Ned, she replied. You might learn a little about writing from Ned. Ned's very generous with lesser writers.

  The next time he was on stage with Ned, the husband watched his act very carefully. The husband was up next. His attention hovered like a butterfly over a pool. Doing what Ned did would be pulling down his pants in public. It would be giving head. It would be doing what Vanna did.

  His turn came. Tentatively, into the horn of the audience's deepening embarrassed silence, the husband began to crow.

  8

  Hello, Sien?

  Yes.

  This is the journalist. Any news?

  No news. Not yet.

  That's not too good. You think anything is wrong?

  I think maybe I wait one two more week, then I send another letter. Early next month. I have backup copy.

  I can see you know how to do business, the husband flattered him.

  Sir, I do my best.

  You think everything's OK with her?

  I think maybe I send a letter soon.

  9

  He'd heard that every now and then, capriciously, the government cracked down, and the prostitutes were put in a place where there wasn't enough to eat.

  His worry about her was no less than anguish; he loved her, his dear new wife as narrow-waisted as a fresh-tied bundle of light-green rice . . .

  After two weeks he called Sien, who said: I learn nothing sir no news of her I try again maybe one week.

  10

  (Sien, like Ned, was only doing his job; the husband reminded himself of this. Sien was doing his job as the clerks did theirs in the post office on that street in Bangkok where gems and fossils and hill tribe silverwork were sold, the placid postal clerks stamping rows and rows of little papers, and on the walls white reliefs of unknown grand gentlemen, serration-bordered like stamps. They'd done their jobs, too.)

  11

  Finally he got some post-Hungarian magazine to send him to the Arctic for a couple of weeks - lots of work and morose nose-blowing and maybe eight hundred bucks at the end of it; well, her passport out of Cambodia alone would cost two grand so he'd better start somewhere. - It's the recession, you see, the editor said. We just don't have the advertising. All the magazines are skinnier these days.

  The ice's bumpy snow massaged his feet through the kamik-soles with tiny tingles, the orange sun one sun's length above the blue. Dogs wagged tails over old polar bear tracks. The low cliff-sweep of Signal Hill was already waiting for the darkness to get darker, the hill-edge closer to night than the sky, everything going storm-blue or death-blue; and the lights of the village only increased the dreariness. Thinking about his new wife, he had the usual feeling of anxious despair; hour by hour the bond between them was dissolving. She was getting AIDS. She was moving to another disco. She was in the re-education camp. She was giving up prostitution. She would never give up prostitution. She was forgetting him. The way he should have felt was exultant, because the eight hundred dollars was the first step back to her. Instead, it seemed to him that everywhere he went just got him more lost.

  There was a children's Halloween party. Probably the post-Hungarians would want him to cover it. But who knew what they wanted? Children were always good for a paragraph. Honking their noisemakers, faces corpsened with pale paint, wearing tinsel on their skeleton-heads, they dashed about, their parents lurking shy. Paper and plastic pumpkins hung orange and absurd from the ceiling; what the hell were pumpkins doing in the Arctic? Swirly white paper bones and skeletons kissed their hair. They danced and ate treats loaded on styrofoam plates. Ladies with faces painted pink and green and white flounced around in Arctic boots, sneakers, kamiks. The principal wore a black witch's gown and a pointed hat covered with orange stars. A lady trudged, her baby quietly eating a cupcake in the armauti. The husband thought: Nothing belongs anywhere anymore. All the cats have been let out of all the bags, and they've gotten mixed up.

  12

  The husband did not illumin
ate himself in the same harsh checkpoint light that other minds would have cast. Oh, he deprecated himself, all right, but only for the highest reasons. He wouldn't have graduated from the College of National Smiles! His somberness was sometimes misunderstood; they thought him harder on himself than he actually was. To his thinking, the sin (now fortunately no more present than an echo) had been the vacillation between two wives. It had reflected badly on his self-knowledge, impaired his efficiency, and, worst of all, made the opposed women into playthings (he remembered a hairdresser's sign in Phnom Penh: two curly permed ladies like in the movies) - not even his playthings, since he wasn't in command of himself, but the playthings of his impulses, which in turn were controlled by random happenings. When he made the decisive break with his old wife, he continued to feel guilty, of course; now he'd hurt her more than ever, probably for life. (If you believe you've done a kindness, you've probably done an injury. If you believe you've done an injury, you've probably done an injury.) Yes, the husband was quite sorry about that. On the other hand, if he'd stayed with her he would have been as unhappy as he'd made her (so he reasoned), and Vanna of course would have been waiting and wondering. It was true that he'd been married for eleven years, and had known Vanna for less than two weeks, but the patent truth which gleamed before him like a gold-painted gate with gold lions was that he'd been miserable for eleven years. He'd only been miserable with Vanna for two weeks - much more promising. As for all the whoring he'd done, before and after meeting Vanna, if someone had raised that as a character flaw he wouldn't have been surprised, since prostitution was so generally disapproved of that one could take it for granted that the questioner was probably infected with the usual prejudices, enough said! If, however, the interlocutor could have been skilful enough to thrust past the husband's guard, persuading him that in fact the issue was one of fidelity, then he might have faltered for a moment, but he had the answer there, too: Fidelity was another very relative and hence misunderstood term. (He scarcely thought about Oy, Noi, Nan, Marina and Pukki anymore.) There was nothing wrong with sleeping around if you loved everybody; you could be faithful to a hundred wives. -But how much can you really love them (our interlocutor might have said) if one is as good as another? More to the point, are you happy and are they happy? - As it happened, there was an answer for that, too. The husband loved Vanna the best. He'd keep being promiscuous only until he had her forever. Then he wouldn't need anyone but her. And if it turned out then that he was still unfaithful after all, surely a whore would be used to it.

  13

  Those of you who frown on such a strategy will now be cruelly gratified by learning its results. The first challenge to his constancy (if once more we ignore Oy, Noi, Nan, Marina and Pukki) had occurred on his return from Cambodia, when he'd encountered his companion of eleven years. That test he'd passed honorably, as we know, by filing for divorce. The second challenge, far more formidable, put its claw upon his shoulder in the Arctic. It's customary for a new wife to be a phagocyte, devouring all the foreign bodies that precede her in the husband's psyche, so that only she is left to shine. Poor Vanna's problem was that she was not the newest, for within the husband's cuckoo-dipping mind another presence now inserted itself, as he'd feared it would; that had been the real reason for his lack of enthusiasm about going back to the Arctic; there was somebody up there whom he'd once almost married. It was not that he wanted to marry her now; no, he was not like the pigeon that nods so quickly when eating crumbs; he was Vanna's husband now. But as soon as he came back in sight of the Thule ruins (skeleton of whale ribs over a snow-filled pit, the wind blowing . . . ), he remembered again what the Inuit had always said, that to gain more wisdom than others one must do abnormal things. The Inuit had done it by going off into the ice alone until animal spirits came. The husband would do it through promiscuity.

  14

  Somehow, the knowledge that he sought was the same as being one with Vanna. He knew that, although he didn't know how he knew it. And while fucking the whores in Bangkok had taken him farther away from her, fucking from now on would bring him closer. What had changed? - Only this, that he sought her faithfully. Now every thrust of his penis would be like an Olympic swimmer's stroke, drawing him closer to the end of the humming blueness. - Was that really true? - He knew that it was not. But here he was so far away from Vanna that she faded from the inner walls of his eyelids faster than ever! How did it go in Dante? In the forest journey of our life I lost my way. Something like that. Whenever that came to him he remembered the jungle beyond the tame battlefield at Battam-bang, and although he had not particularly noticed the jungle at the time because the interpreter and the commune leader and the Chief of Protocol kept him so busy looking at shell-holes, it became ever more lushly menacing in his memories. Plant-phalli towered, so well leaf-scaled that nothing of their underlying structure or origin could be seen; they were studded with pale blue flowers. This was the jungle of his life where he had lost his way, and it was also Vanna's jungle, so he should have loved it, but it terrified him. Sometimes it seemed to him that in divorcing his other wife he'd thrown away his compass, and the Inuk woman whom he'd almost married was his last unlikely chance not to be lost -

  15

  At the Bay store when he went to give some acquaintances a present after not having seen them for years, they greeted him most cordially but only stopped for a dozen eyeblinks from their work of cross-checking the register tapes so that he soon felt dismissed even though they invited him down for dinner any time, "any time" being less the perfect generosity that it appeared than a courteous tautology whose complete form was: "you are invited any time we invite you" - of course that wasn't fair, because in the north people really don't mind if you drop in; nonetheless he knew that he was not going to drop in, knew it already as he zipped up his parka, burrowed his wrists into the big mitts, and worked his face mask back up from around his neck; then he turned to say goodbye and saw them so young and fine together, he a white man born and raised in Indian country, hardy in his ways, at ease with boats and guns and heavy loads, sunny and steady, she a full-blood Inuk of such striking loveliness that men meeting her for the first time couldn't look away because her traditional topknot of blueblack hair seemed to concentrate all the snow-shadows which spilled down to cool her elegant forehead; her long-lashed eyes were usually half-closed, but when she looked directly at anyone there came a stunning flash of liquid black purity; her nose was Egyptian like a sphinx's; as for her lips, to see them was to long to kiss them . . . and most beautiful of all about both of them was that they wanted no one but each other, he cherishing and protecting her with his strength while she loved and gladdened him; so they went on doing the accounts together, a self-sufficient couple, and barely acknowledged his goodbye; they had work to do. -He thought: Is this how my new wife and I will be together, so happily hiding under the sheets? - And that seemed good to him. He decided not to talk to others about Vanna anymore, to pare away all the world except her . . .

  16

  Of course, he wouldn't be able to talk with her, either.

  17

  Inside the Narwhal, a man was laying down strips of a silver substance in the hallway, painting them with solvent which some teenager would probably want to sniff, and a man sat reading and smoking a cigar by the pool table and the hanging plants grew, but the wind kept blowing and the ceiling kept thumping and creaking. Outside, snow blew in thin puffs and streamers across the snow-packed road and parking lot that were the same blue as snow-shadows because it was only a bit past sunrise, the orange still a long narrow triangular intrusion in the sky (nested in it, a flag on one of the airport buildings, straining like a horse's thirsty head, the flagpole bending fantastically but always straightening), and now the sky had lightened to a calm cold blue but the moon hung on, half gone, thickly yellow-white around the edge, the rest so distinctly mottled that it almost seemed possible to make out individual mountains and craters, and because the moon was pretty and far away t
he husband couldn't believe that it would be a more difficult place than Resolute. Meanwhile the snow-dust continued its empty rushing, not just in stripes as before but also in discrete fog-clumps which rose as high as the power wires, skating across the blue snow with the frictionless insatiability of spotlight beams. The crisscrossed tracks and treads on the snow reminded him of the dance floor in the community hall at Pond Inlet, a scratched slab of dull gleam in the warm darkness whose loud scratchy music made his ears ache; little kids in boots and parkas ran across the floor while the high school students whose dance it supposedly was sat shyly on wall benches, girls with girls, boys with boys, waiting for midnight or some even more impressive hour when things would happen; he danced with a girl once and then she wouldn't dance with him again. Maybe at one o'clock something would happen. It was for that something that people were drinking home brew, potent but thin, at a house in Clyde River, telling the same old polar bear stories, making plans to get rich, talking about ladies and dogs and distances, eating black hunks of barbecued caribou, dipping into smoked char and roasted char with onions, getting louder and more insistent about their own greatness until one of the quietly smiling Inuk women, having drunk a glass, began screaming obscenities and smashing things and then everyone had to leave. The husband imagined marrying her and getting her drunk, knowing that she wouldn't remember what she did; she'd stab him and hit him; when she came out of it she'd be amazed and tenderly concerned, unable to believe she'd done it; so he'd offer her another drink and watch the complicity in her eyes as she swallowed eagerly, knowing she was going to be transformed ... At the dance one woman was already leaving, a beautiful young mother in a white parka, the baby in the armauti, and she walked white and silent through the white silent streets, brightening and fading in accordance with the laws of streetlamps, and a little girl opened the orange square of light, leaned out and cried: heüo, hello! and a skidoo went by and the mother passed the last streetlight, turned snow-blue and vanished. Once she was gone, the husband began to ache with longing. He believed that if only he could have convinced her to love him, then he might have advanced a step away from his old errors. Now, although he might love other women, and although he had utter faith that soon he'd be with Vanna, he would never learn whatever it was that the woman in the white parka might have taught him.