42
On the whole (not remembering any of this), he was more inclined to trust a pint of Murphy's and some vegetable soup, so he went to the nearest pub. - Cheers. - (The ponytailed old bartender stationed at the taps said that he personally never drank any but bottled beer.) With every swig, the red velvet couch he sat on became more restful. He looked at absurd marine engravings and liked them. - Hey! a regular shouted to himself. I love the sound of broken gloss! - The white taphandles promised unknown flavors more plausible than unknown books or girls because to the husband they really were known; viS'à'Vis English beverages he was an ignoramus. The last bit of smog-colored foam traveled deliciously down his throat.
43
When you get AIDS, the first thing that happens is you come down with the flu, said one of his wise friends. Then the flu goes away and you think you're fine. And you are, for awhile. It's just that you have AIDS.
So when his fever died after so many days the lucidity was a refreshment as delectable as lemon ice. What a shame to become habituated to that pleasure until it was normalcy, like being addicted to some drug . . . I feel fine, he said to himself. Of course I don't have AIDS.
44
He stood at the hotel window, looking out between grey ledgestones and tiles at the corner pub's compounded and frosted windows half smoothed by rubbery light, and people's heels struck the pavement like hammers until he thought his ears would bleed. The cold air made him cough. But he stood looking on as if he'd never see those sights again. Certainly he'd never see the white girl again. Two men and a woman stopped in front of the pub for a moment. Then one of the men raised his arm sharply and they went on. Car light flowed across their shoulders. From the Underground he heard a mother say: Keep still. Keep still, will yer. Oi, d'you wa' a smack? - A man and a woman strode across the husband's field of vision and vanished. He'd never see them again. The BBC would pay him any day now. They'd said he'd get the check before he left England, but now that didn't look promising. The husband was a pretty small fish. But they would pay him soon, and once they did he'd have enough to go back to Cambodia for his wife. He was too tired to be properly excited. The right side of his head felt as if it were about to split open. Fluid oozed from his ear. His throat was so swollen that he could barely swallow. Every meaningless detail pierced the senses unbearably, but left no memory. The hypnotist had done that. He stared for a long time at the illuminated orange and blue logos on the Asiana Airlines terminal, a shape between hexagon and oval, comprised of parallelogram tiles of varying luminosities; he couldn't quite parse the shape in his mind, and wondered if the mind must redraw what it sees to comprehend it; closing his eyes he saw plenty of images which his mind was too weary to flush; their vividness reminded him of his childhood; he'd gradually lost the ability to visualize at will as he'd grown older. Korea had seemed to be in dawn time when he came, in keeping with the meaning of its real name, Han-Guk, the Land of the Morning Calm, but then it got dark while he sat in the transit lounge trying to ignore a cartoon starring a growling jellybean and he could now see the whiteness of some of the Asiana tiles; the alien mountains faded into darkness - anyhow, they weren't so alien since he'd seen mountains before but the more one travels the more alien everything is. - Then back in Bangkok: another little table stacked with plates; he had some cow's head or whatever it was, the man pulling it out of the stewpot and chopping it on the half-meter-thick block; the husband didn't ask how much or why; they brought him rice; he uttered Sprite over the dull double-heartbeat of the chopper . . . Then Cambodia again, slopping over him like the cold wetness on your belly when you bushwhack up a rainy jungle hillside; he went to the disco, sank knee-deep into the carpet of girl-ferns because the tables were closer together than ever before, trapping him in narrow sharp-edged lanes down which the other prostitutes hunted him, seizing his hand, pulling him down to sticky chairs beside them where he had to buy them a Tiger beer, the darkness hotter and louder as the music blared so pervasively and unintelligibly that he had to breathe it in like all the smoke from the other men's cigarettes that rose in great pillared trunks flanged with leaves that stuck out like shelf-fungus; now the photographer's girl captured him and started screaming at him to buy her for the photographer; then the Chinese-porcelain-faced one clamored silently for his favor, devouring the light before it could reach his eyes so that he couldn't see if Vanna was among the dancers; knowing his poor vision, however, the photographer had printed up a hundred copies of her picture for him to pass out, so he awarded one to the photographer's girl, who began wailing like a mother whose children have been tortured, and he gave one to the Chinese-porcelain girl, who tore it into shreds, smiling, drifting closer and closer like the queen of nightmare pleasures; cautiously he bought her a Sprite, slipped her five hundred riels, but she still wouldn't leave; her arms grew tight about him like skinny lichen-spotted trees; Vanna wasn't there! She wasn't there! He blundered among the dancers, trying to smell her sickly-sweet face powder, hoping for the sheen of her triangular face, but she wasn't there. He went to the temples and the kids crowded around staring, one with a plastic sword, one smiling, one blinking, one leaning, one almost naked, all bashful; they looked down at their sandaled feet as they asked him for money; he was in Wat Korgue - let's see, some Khmer Rouge damage although the altar had retained its stone flower-nipples and concentric curvy polygons like nested frogs' tongues repeated row to row. There were two glazed figurines. One was a woman in lotus position, with only her lips and eyeballs painted. Not Vanna. The other was a man elaborately colored. The husband took out Vanna's photograph and showed it to the kids but they looked blank. He went on to the Wat Svay Popter . . . When he'd been to every temple in Cambodia, he set out for every rice field and she wasn't there though he ducked under every dark ceiling, scanning every hammock and bicycle wheel, studying every pair of sandals on the dirt floor to see if one might be hers, while faces peered in; he searched out whole villages of such houses: displaced people, with chickens underneath (a half-coconut on the platform, a sarong) ; there was a little boy whose head was shaved to bluish fuzz; the boy held his monkey on a chain so that it wouldn't hurt Vanna's picture and then the boy said: She escaped from place Pol Pot shelled with heavy guns. First time Pol Pot came and attacked her village. Then they shelled with heavy guns for three-four days. She die here malaria. We very sorry, sir. - He thought: If she's dead then maybe she's living on Sailing Boat Mountain. - All he knew about Sailing Boat Mountain was that the Khmer Rouge had killed a few thousand people there, which was all he needed to know. Quite possibly she was the earth-spirit hovering round atrocities, lurking like moisture in the palm trees at the base of that great green rock (they'd thrown the victims off); so he rode up the muddy jungle road, over barely repaired bridges (the driver flashed his gold tooth in the mirror), past abandoned houses and tree trunks so saturated with wet that he could squeeze them like sponges, past fringed green leaf-awnings slung with cartridge-belts of nuts the reddish hue of a baboon's anus; so he arrived at the white stairs (some garnished with giant snailshells) that the murdered ones had been compelled to climb, their hands already tied behind their backs with wire, and he ascended those green-clad cave-cooled cliffs into the rainy sky; she wasn't there. For an instant he remembered the book he'd seen long ago when he was the little butterfly boy, the book about the five unkillable Chinese brothers, and there was one who was pushed off a precipice and smiled in the air as he fell. - Vanna, Vanna! - He said to himself: Well, no skulls screamed from this mound of jungle over rock despite my dreams when I was sleeping with my other wife; maybe my other wife was warping and torturing my dreams so I couldn't find her but she couldn't have made me dream a dream of perfect untruth; maybe Vanna's sick with malaria in the hospital. - Voilà, another set of yellow concrete buildings chessboard-floored like his foolish ruinous life, the white cross wall-inset (maybe once red plexiglass), fire in the courtyard, smell of jasmine. A girl lay on the bed almost naked, sleeping. Not her. A lady was
sweeping the floor very slowly. Some of the tiles were grey; a few were still white. Pale light bled through the blinds, losing itself among the dingy dark wooden cribs, darkness and concrete. A girl's brown feet stuck out from under a blanket. Not her. Three girls lay huddled in colored sheets; ladies stood over the dirty cribs; a dark-skinned woman attached to the intravenous snakes smiled whitely (not her), a nurse put her hand in front of the dark-skinned woman's face; one brown baby began to cry when another cried; a soldier sat beside his child, his feet fidgeting in the sandals; a lady waved a palm-woven fan very gently over her baby; the nurse took her hand away from the dark-skinned woman's face and it was Vanna after all. He rushed to her, bent over her . . . She nodded a little and closed her eyes.
She was burning up with fever. She was his wife, and she was dying! -He took a vial from his pocket, and began to feed her pills of pure Arctic ice. He held her hand, which weighed nothing. He could feel it cooling down as the red fever-flush went away from her face. - I wuff you, she said. - The nurse detached the intravenous snakes. He put his hand on his wife's heart and kept it there until the pool of sweat between her breasts evaporated. She'd been breathing quietly but desperately through her mouth, and now her lips closed and her sweet eyes opened and she gestured to her throat until he understood that she needed more water. He jumped up to fill the pitcher. The water was tepid and muddy. When he poured it into the cup, he shook in the last pill of ice, and it turned clear and cold at once; after she'd drunk it down she smiled at him just as she had when he'd bought her the gold bracelet, that smile that scorned the world's scorn; then she sat slowly up and made room for him to sit beside her on the narrow bed as she put her arm around him and began very quietly to sing a strange sad song in her lisping voice. He put his cheek against hers. No fever. She laughed and pinched him. She pulled him to his feet and they began to dance together, right there in the hospital, and all the other patients were cured. She took his hand, and they walked together out of the ward and through the jasmine-smelling courtyard whose fire had died down and between the other yellow concrete buildings and past the white cross and out the gate, and then they were gone from sad places forever. White swirly mane-ways, down-pods and foam spilled on the sky-blue sea. He took her where leads unrolled like grey ribbons too long to have ends, their colors changing from a cumulus-white with a slight hint of yellow to a very pale sky-blue. Now she made signs that she was hungry, so they went caribou hunting with his friends in the summer moss. Reddish-black racks of seal meat hung on wood frames to dry. His dear wife felt chilly at first, but when she saw the children (copper-faced like her) laughing in the icy rocky streams, catching fish, then she began to forget the spidery green reflections of palm trees in ricefield water; everyone was good to her; the old ladies made her sealskin mitts; she learned to enjoy raw meat, to saw off a frozen steak ... A long low cliff-finger rested lightly on the ice, cushioned by blowing snow, and a dumptruck full of snow left the scatter of houses to discharge its blue-smoking load, which squeaked as it slid out. Pointing at the frozen sea, he laughed and said to her in their secret universal language: Do you remember that wooden stand in Phnom Penh whose only ware was an uneven block of ice, with a rusty sawblade to cut it? and she said nothing, perhaps because she preferred to remember the ice-pills instead, or perhaps because she never said anything anyhow, only chewed on the piece of caribou fat he'd given her, walking beside him up the low ridge that bordered the sourceless river. Almost noon. The low sun and clear sky held the weird subdued transparency of morning and evening at the same time. In her smooth-soled sealskin kamiks she slipped on one of those strange ovals on the ice swept clean as if by spotlight beams; his arm was around her waist before she could fall. Then he saw that the faint breeze had begun to chill her cheeks. He took her face gently between his mitts and blew on it and she giggled because that tickled. When the color came back, he kissed her in the Cambodian way, inhaling in teasing little sniffs through his nose as he pecked her and she hissed with pleasure; he and she were polar bear twins ... - He said: Now I'll take you to my house, which I hope you'll like because it's your house, too (he'd asked the photographer: What do you think Vanna will do when she sees this place? and the photographer looked around grinning and said: She'll shit in her pants, man! She's gonna love you so fucking much! By her standards you're a millionaire! Once she sees this place she'll never ever leave you!) - So the Twin Otter taxied in the snow; steam puffed from a tomato-red Quonset hut; a raven flapped; sunrise over blue clouds; past the wires the Twin took off at a sedate angle, leaving the velour hills alone. He'd given her the window seat and she couldn't take her face away from the glass; it was so beautiful. They were going from one heaven to another, by the scenic route because he wanted to draw it out as much as he could before that first time when he'd give her the key to the house and take her to the bedroom and they'd fall asleep side by side. (It was a little strange, the way he almost always imagined her sleeping as he fell asleep. Making love with her, taking her into a supermarket for the first time, giving her her first elevator ride, letting her try ice cream, buying her dresses, gold rings, a new red motorbike to ride up San Francisco's steep hills (her name pricked out in gold on the bar between her legs), these were all things that gave him joy to look forward to, but somehow sleep was the real tree whose trunk was a hundred roots, each root, as big around as an arm, one of these other happinesses, all intertwined like pipes, wrapped with vines of sleep which bore white flowers and blackish-blue berries. He was tired. He felt unwell. He wanted to sleep. ) So the plane landed in the desert. The floor of the canyon was entirely river, cool, green and shallow, with the usual surprises in the lowest overhang: grey ferns downheaded like stalactites. In that shadow was the last coolness. After that, slanting rock-sides burned to touch, although there was another shelf at an angle of forty-five degrees from which huge trees jutted, both evergreens and pale green virgins leaning into space as if to drink the vapor, at least, of the river they could not reach. A man and a woman were wading up the stream slowly, knees apart. The woman was soaked and muddy, and evidently had lost her gauzy butterfly hairclip. But she seemed tranquilly happy. A wake formed from her like a shadow. From time to time she stumbled, and then the man would give her his arm, and she'd smile. Her rainbow prostitute dress shimmered like a glorious rage of dragonflies; the drops of river-water that danced up from her knees reflected every color like crystals: the pinkish-red that formerly looked so dramatic in the Cambodian night when she came walking down stenchy greasy pitchblack alleyways, the yellow splash, that hue of streetlights which Cambodia didn't have yet; the electric bluish-green that once shocked its way down breast and belly in the darkness, now a summer riverwater color, a little mournful as artificial glows always are in daylight. . . She was smiling shyly and holding her husband's hand. Her earrings sparkled rhythmically as she walked through the water; they glittered like sunlight on mica. He took her slender arm and steadied her when he saw an eddy; he slipped his hand round her narrow waist. (Of course she actually would have hated all this; in Cambodia she always had to go by motorbike even if it was only two blocks, and she wouldn't even ride the same motorbike he did. ) The upside-down Vs of her eyebrows glowed blackish-gold in the strong sunlight; the sunlight glistened on her cheeks. - Yellow glare of mustard fields, then phosphorescent white of cottonwoods, then grey-pink and greyer green ridges studded with little blue tree-buttons; he was taking her to their new house hidden beyond a tall slit in the sand ridge so narrow he could barely lead her through. She got tired, and he carried her across the blue desert of Utah, the yellow desert of Nevada, the grey desert of California, so grateful to be able to ease her way. He showed her everything, led her safely between the skyscrapers too aloof and alien even to accept each other's shadows, brought her under the red struts of the Golden Gate Bridge to marvel with him at the fog-colored bay and Marin headlands; on his shoulders he carried his darling wife up the steep slopes knit-sweatered with buttercups, ferns, grasses and r
aspberries; she stopped to weave him baskets from the windy grasses shaking alertly like sentient porcupine quills and antennae-forests while cars swirled and flickered overhead, bridge-shadow on the water . . . Now before sleep Scarlatti's sonata K. 95, the thrilling happy feminine hurrying beats of that bridal march which no one else would ever want to make a bridal march out of because it wasn't sedate; he thought it simply glorious, brief and glorious, like a girl hurrying to her sweetheart; she was rushing to him in that church filled with all his relatives and everyone else he'd ever known so that she wouldn't have come to his distant land believing that he was ashamed of her; he wanted the whole world to see her and love her as she came down the aisle to him on no one's arm, the clavicord pounding like a million angels' hearts, nothing but joy . . . He closed the window. Then he opened it once more to look upon the steeply slanting awnings and triangularly-crowned windows of that London street. - Everything jolly now? said the hypnotist.
45
Where are you coming from? the US customs woman said.
London.
OK. Wait a minute. No other baggage?
Nope.
On his card she scribbled "CET."
This code will get you right through, she said. Otherwise they'll be suspicious about the absence of luggage.
Thanks, he said.
Don't mention it.
At the exit, the lady who took cards read "C.E.T.," stopped dead, and sent him to the special agent's desk.
Where you coming from?
London.
How long were you there?
A week.
Purpose of trip?
Butterfly Stories: A Novel Page 19
