by Sarah Reith
More on Bears and Butterflies
I THOUGHT I knew shamanic natures, with their sober reverence for Dionysian revelry. But Caitlin with her many names was no preparation for the husband of her former rival. Morpheus was not inclined to map the byways of his thinking. His thoughts would crop up suddenly, like unexpected landmarks in a flat terrain, reminding the traveler that something far beneath the surface churned, forcing up oddly-shaped formations.
He would passionately espouse some creed that was completely at odds with the last opinion he’d held, and which bore even less resemblance to the one he’d hold next. He knew more about the pacifist philosophy of Thich Nhat Hahn than anyone I’d ever met. But he’d be moved to poetry and song by some aspiring tyrant waging brutal revolution in the foreground of a far-off landscape. And, Jew though he was, he mourned the end of the Catholic Latin liturgy. “It gave the whole thing a sense of mystery.” He sighed, dubious about the likelihood of revelation in whatever coarse vernacular the peasants used to curse the dog.
He was not a philosopher. But he could have been a courtier in a philosopher king’s court. He would have been the deeply tragic comic foil of a stern protagonist. He was so often lost in the contemplation of symbols and dreams. He seemed like he was always waiting for a call from some fascinating force that would take possession of his mind and deposit insights there. It gave him an abstracted air of helplessness and profound concentration; of protecting his purity from vulgar worldly concerns. Of course, no one personified these worldly concerns more than his ball-busting wife.
Alizarin had a theory about the term ball-buster. She said it was a corruption of Balabusta, the Yiddish word for a virtuous, hardworking housewife. The Balabusta is not idealized as a silent drudge, like her suffering counterpart among the goyim. She would never stand for it. In traditional Jewish society, Alizarin explained, the men devote themselves to Talmudic abstractions, while women contend with the world. “That’s the ideal,” she emphasized. “In real life, well. Who has time for Talmudic abstractions?” And she shot a glare at Morpheus, who had been sussing out a single chord change for the last half hour.
Whatever it was the men were doing, she went on, the women were being effective: that is, being good Balabustas. They haggled with merchants. They kept a careful eye on the help. They had opinions and convictions and they always knew their worth. In America, the respectable Balabusta was corrupted to a term that old-fashioned feminists hate to love, though there may be a few in the ironic younger set who love to love it. Whatever the etymology, Alizarin was a muralizing, dope-growing Balabusta of the first degree.
“Hey, M.C.,” she said jovially. There was just a hint of nervous warning in her voice. “I’m gonna need to you water the greenhouse for me.” Morpheus stared uncomprehendingly. “You know, the tomatoes, the tomatillos . . . the pot? That thing that makes it possible for us to live out here in the hills where you can play the same chord for two hours without driving any neighbors crazy?” She was sounding less jovial by the syllable.
“What do tomatillos look like?” Morpheus inquired. He might have been having a dream about putting a question to the Sphinx.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Charnisse!” Alizarin burst out. “I grow tomatillos every year! They’re plants. With tomatillos on them. You know, they’re round, they’re green . . .”
Morpheus continued to stare at her, as if he were struggling to comprehend the truth behind the arbitrary symbolism of speech.
“Isobel,” she appealed in exasperation. “Could you show Charnisse how to water the greenhouse? Just once, and he should get it.” She made a laryngitic gasping noise that could have been laughter.
Morpheus followed me uncertainly, then dangled in the greenhouse doorway watching, like he thought I might be trying to trap him.
“It’s not that hard.” I smiled sympathetically. “The pot plants get a gallon each, and you just give the others a good drink. You don’t even have to know what they are.”
He moved cautiously into the greenhouse. He was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and a T-shirt with a picture of a mountain lion on it.
“She mentioned something . . . round and green,” he murmured. “Do you have any idea what she was talking about?”
“Oh, those are the fruits of the tomatillo plant,” I explained. “They’re in the same family as tomatoes. But they’re built differently.” I compared a lacy tomatillo limb to a muscular tomato vine.
But Morpheus had found something truly enchanting: a small pillowy monster with eight soft loveable legs and a row of false eyes along its rounded length. An orange horn emerged timidly from its posterior, like the weapon on a child’s plush toy dinosaur. Half a dozen armlike appendages opened and closed, like it wanted nothing more than three hugs at once.
“What is it?” he breathed, like I was the one who had lived here for years. With ineffable gentleness, he took the creature on one finger and lifted it to his bristling eyebrows, like an ageing satyr still capable of wonder.
Alizarin did not hesitate to denounce the ravenous beauty. “That is a tomato hornworm. It will eat everything in here in a day. Throw it outside. The birds will love it.” She clapped her hands, like she was trying to encourage a reluctant performer to come onstage.
“I . . . don’t . . . know . . .” He seemed to have found himself in circumstances that were not what they appeared to be. “I think I’d better put it outside,” he concluded, after careful deliberation.
“Good idea, Charnisse.” The plants in the greenhouse were not yet wilting.
“Where the birds can’t get it,” he temporized. “I’m not sure that would be the kindest thing to do to this little guy. He’s a caterpillar?”
“He or she will turn into a hawkmoth. And then he or she will just fly around producing more hornworms. Put it somewhere far away from the garden, please.” Alizarin gave the larva on her husband’s finger a steady-eyed murdering stare. It curled its six little white-gloved mandibles under its chin and looked at her sideways with one row of false eyes.
“Let’s find the perfect spot for this bright jewel of a being,” Morpheus suggested.
I trotted along. The hornworm marched across his knuckles, officious and absurd as a tiny neon-green couch. It dangled for a moment from the end of a fingernail, then dropped with a multiply flat-footed flop in the palm of his string-picking hand. It was a bright being, green as poison, shining with excellent health.
“What do you think this little guy is?” He peered down at it, twinkling with chlorophyll and flexing its jaws.
“I think she said it’s a tomato hornworm,” I reported dutifully. “And that it’s voracious.”
“Voracious.” He ate that word alive. I have heard actors say that playing a villain is more fun than anything. “I mean in terms of its significance.”
He dandled the hornworm again, the way a courtier might dandle a second-born son. There might be possibilities, he seemed to imply; if something really interesting were to happen.
“Do you have a spirit animal?” he asked next.
I hadn’t expected him to ask me that, exactly. But it was the least surprising thing he could have said.
“How would I know if I did?” I inquired. He scanned the horizon for a leafy birdless opportunity.
“It would be an animal,” he began slowly, “that you dream about. Or that you have an affinity for. I mean, you could eat a bunch of peyote or fast until you were almost dead, to come closer to the spirit world. But that’s pretty hard core.” He sounded like a sedate bicycle commuter, disapproving the immoderate behavior of bike messengers. “We could have compassion for the birds,” he said softly.
“So someone could have a special affinity for a hornworm?” I was trying to cast myself in the role of cultural investigator. I was trying not to be judgmental. I wanted him to be my friend.
“Oh, you could dream about it.” He stopped walking. The hornworm swung from one finger to the next with dreary frivolity, like a poiso
n-green child on the playground all alone. “But you have to be careful.” He gathered his thoughts. “You have to be careful, because sometimes the animal is just a symbol.” He regarded the hornworm, with its small soft horn and unseeing eyes. “Like this little guy here could symbolize, oh, I don’t know . . .”
“Rampant consumerism?” I suggested.
“Yeah!” He gave me a friendly encouraging look, the kind I got so much from teachers before I wandered into Nietzschean metaphysics and indistinguishable umlauts. The kind of look that made me feel like a peer instead of a student. “Being enslaved to appetite. And for what? That’s what I’d like to know. It’s not like this thing turns into a beautiful butterfly or does anything for the environment, right? It’s just an ugly moth.” And he gave the would-be hawkmoth the kind of look I got after I ventured into metaphysics and complicated vowels.
“So it’s just a gross bug,” I concluded.
“Well.” He took a few hesitant steps toward a patch of reedy grass, growing wild under an oak. “It could represent the appetite for being stoned, for never being happy with the way you are right now. Sometimes places have spirit animals, too.” This was a long way from German higher education. It was like biting into something soft and yielding, after months of breaking my teeth on sea rations.
“So you think the hornworm is the spirit animal for the greenhouse, or just a symbol of society’s insatiable hunger for luxury organic drugs?” I asked. He gave a small indulgent smile.
“The greenhouse already has a spirit animal,” he informed me, as politely as if he were declining an offer with courteous regrets.
“So what is it?”
“I think it’s probably just a caterpillar.” He gave throat to this judgment with fulsome, gentle gravity, as if in the midst of inflicting pain, he hoped to offer some encouragement. “Unconscious of the role it plays in the dream lives of those who think symbolically.” He was standing very straight as he delivered himself of this verdict.
“What is the spirit animal of the greenhouse?” In a country far away, I had developed the habit of assuming there were facts to be gotten down to.
He gave me a smile as resistant to skepticism as Teflon is to rust. “You know that big fat toad?”
“It’s a frog,” I told him.
I couldn’t help myself. Frogs are completely different from toads. A toad will crouch inside a brick until the strong young man who made the brick has died of old age and his works have crumbled into dust. But frogs curl up and die at the faintest whiff of toxic brick-making materials. They stiffen into rigor mortis at the first dry breeze of climate change. My personal favorite thing about frog behavior is the fact that they eat their own skins, because they are constantly regenerating new ones.
“The spirit animal of the greenhouse is a frog?” I asked Morpheus.
It took a few moments for the echoes of my doubt to croak away.
“I had a dream,” he said slowly at last. He sounded like an up and coming prophet, would-be advisor to an Old Testament king. “It was one of those balmy nights at the beginning of spring, when the stars are so close you can almost hear what they’re saying. Everything was ready and fertile and the earth was all dug up and black and open to the sky. The smell . . .” He shook his head, like a man trying to describe the scent of violets on the pulse points of his one true love. “And all of a sudden, there was this big fat glossy toad. She was sitting in a planter, looking right at me with those extradimensional eyes, and as I stared into that strange intelligence, she told me her name. Not in words. Just the sense of it.”
There was indeed a great fat frog in the greenhouse, sitting underneath a pot branch. Sometimes, when the leaves lined up with her head just so, she looked like she was wearing a whimsical hat. She was so soft and liquid-looking, it was something of a lesser miracle that her insides were contained within her liquid skin.
“So what is her name?”
“Ardell,” he told me, raising his satyr’s brows ever so slightly, as if to remind me that he was just the messenger.
“Ardell,” I repeated. “The greenhouse has a giant spirit frog named Ardell.”
“It’s not always what you might expect,” he agreed, sighing like a man who’s known for a very long time about the futility of expectations.
“What about you? If it’s not too personal.” I was feeling foolish for the first time since we took a bug on the run from his wife. By this time the hornworm had curled into a soft fleshy spiral as it studiously maintained an air of inedible watchfulness.
“Well!” He looked pleased and surprised that someone had finally asked. “I think so. I have a special affinity for insects sometimes. When I get high, I like to run out into the hills and channel this frenetic insect energy. I especially like to be a praying mantis. That’s powerful stuff.” I assumed he was a male praying mantis, and decided not to pry too deeply into how these sessions ended. “But I never dream about insects,” he revealed, arriving already at the crux of the matter. “I don’t know where I’d be without my dream life,” he began, the way people do when they open a book of discontent with a proviso of love. “But I never dream about animals.”
“So do you think your spirit animal is an insect?” I cast an eye—a real one—on the hornworm, which seemed to be languishing.
“I don’t think so.” And here it came: the crisis of faith. “It’s so unsatisfying. Who wants to be an insect? They’re the most common creatures on the planet. They’re so undifferentiated.”
I thought he was having a thoroughly good time with his contempt. He was so watchable, so undisguisedly performing. It gave his conversation a quality of impromptu ritual, enhancing rather than detracting from the truth of what he said.
“They just scurry around all the time,” he complained. “No introspection,” he muttered, like he was critiquing an offensively bad paper by a lazy student. “I’m more of a dreamer. For me, sleep is the greatest temptation. I hibernate. I take a long time to gestate my ideas. Like the mother bear,” he added with tentative reverence. “Who gives birth in her sleep at the darkest hour of winter, dreaming and hidden away. Who comes roaring out of her cave with the return of spring, ready to seriously fuck up some food.” He grinned, shy and triumphant. He was a bear. Maybe.
The Wolf’s Accomplice
MY LIFE WAS so neatly divided then. By day, I apprenticed myself in the garden and developed an ear for distant aircraft. When the sunshine softened into evening, I retreated to Foxglove, with its acres of lawn and its wall to wall amenities. There is something snug and secure about leading such a thorough double life, like having a good spare tire that makes the rain a little less wet, the chances not nearly as desperate.
I especially enjoyed a scented bubble bath after a long day hauling buckets of scant recycled water through the poison oak. I was working with chiaroscuro then, enjoying the play of contrasts more than the shapes of things themselves. When the two halves of my life became incomprehensible to one another, I began to think of myself as doubly fluent, not easily caught, moving with singular competence between two worlds that were equally my own.
I knew exactly where to expect a man with an animal familiar. He would show up at Serendipity and have long abstruse discussions with Morpheus, which I would try to understand and Alizarin would disdain. But when Gregory showed up at Foxglove with Akana, the perfect alignment of my two worlds shifted, creating an effect that was like trying to observe an eclipse on a cloudy day. The contrasts were obscured, the line of sight disturbed. And when my eyes adjusted, I saw that a wolf had come out of the fog.
Reina was singing the day they arrived. “Is that you, Isobel?” she sang.
I was trying to glide past her door and make it into the bath before anyone noticed I was caked with marijuana resin.
“Would you come in here for a minute?” she continued singing, as if she knew I’d be as delighted as she was.
I saw Akana before I even realized Gregory was in the room. I could loo
k at someone’s new lover at my leisure. But I had never seen a wolf as white as a dove, curled up in a spot of sunshine on a dead man’s Persian rug. It wasn’t a pleasure, exactly, to observe a captive apex predator lounging around in a mansion, safe from everything except the loss of wolfish dignity. It’s not a pleasure to see a car crash, either. It’s just the most impressive thing there is. That’s all. I stared at her. She met my eyes.
Akana’s good looks were marred only by a slight crookedness at the end of her elegant snout. It gave her beauty a storied quality, like she’d been brought up short in full pursuit of satisfaction or revenge. She had perfect teeth and gleaming pink gums. With eight inches of immaculate white fur, she was lovely and innocent, disdainful and dangerous, like Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great.
White wolves are most commonly found on the Internet, in sentimental poses that are often enhanced by the addition of wings, smoke, or glowing eyes. But there was Akana, beautiful and trivial, an ornament in the life of a heavily tattooed chiropractor.
Gregory and Reina were lying in bed together, like liberated French people in a scandalized British lady’s memoirs about Gallic hospitality. She was wearing a fluffy pink bathrobe, while the owner of a long-legged she-wolf reclined in khakis and a pale yellow dress shirt. They looked like people with two very different ideas about what to wear on Casual Friday.
“This,” Reina announced, snuggling, “is Gregory.” She beamed, in a way that let me know a true friend would be truly ecstatic about the presence of Gregory. “We’re like John and Yoko. In bed all day.” She flashed a peace sign.
Gregory looked chagrined. When he spoke, he took his S’s in his teeth like he thought it might be rude to poke them with his tongue. He had a loose-lipped way of approaching plosive consonants, so Peter Piper picking his peck would be a spit-spraying mess before he was done.
“Except we’re not naked!” he pointed out, shushing his sibilants and blubbering his plosives. Akana drew her tail in closer to her body, like a lady smoothing her skirts. I wondered if he’d gotten her spayed.
