Chester Anderson: The Butterfly Kid

“It’s Andrew! Oh! Oh dear! He’s fading!”

While she paused to gulp air, I thought of Andy’s red beard slowly turning morning-glory pink, bleaching away at last, looking first like smoke and then like dust until there was nothing left at…

Loud noises. New voice. “Chester?” View screen lighting up in pastel glory.

“Andy, what happened?”

“It’s gone.” Now he sounded like a French horn with adenoids. “It just Faded Away. Only a minute ago. Just faded away.” That was more like the usual bassoon.

“Congratulations. Tell Karen not to take any more pills and everything will be all right. It wasn’t your halo, baby, it was hers.”

I hung up as soon as I decently could, for the talk had lost its savor and I had some thinking to do. I felt just about to solve the butterfly problem, I knew not how.

Mike and Sean shared my silence for a few minutes, then Mike drawled, “Well?” and we did us some mind-picking.

This pill was obviously a brand-new drug, we decided, some kind of projectile hallucinogen. You have the hallucinations and everyone gets to see them. This would’ve been harder to believe than to imagine if it hadn’t been for Sean and his butterflies, which were clearly nothing but public hallucinations. Not mass hypnosis, either: these were as substantial as any other, more orthodox butterflies, and they caused extensive and quite objective damage, too. But when the drug wore off and Sean came down, the hallucinations ended and the butterflies vanished. Interesting.

“Consider,” I said, prepared to mark points off on my fingers. “We’ve never heard of this stuff before. No newspaper has mentioned it. Nor rumors. Nothing. All highly unlikely.”

We agreed. A revolutionary drug like this should’ve made headlines long ago. Quaint.

“Therefore,” I continued, “this thing was not produced by one of the big drug houses. We’d’ve heard.”

“Right.” Mike was excited. “My God, you couldn’t even test the damn thing secretly. The first pill that worked… Well, you saw what happened with the butterflies.”

My turn. “Who could’ve developed this Reality Pill and really kept it a secret?”

“Nobody.” This was Mike’s field of special competence. “There’s just no way to keep that kind of secret. Not even in China. No.”

We stared at each other with matched expressions of unbridled surmise, and then, in chorus, said, “The Pill from Outer Space!”

I dropped to the floor, laughing, and rolled about a bit, now and then gasping, “No! Mother of God! Oh wow!” but mostly, “No!” Mike was doing much the same thing, and Sean looked unusually tentative.

“It’s absurd,” I yelped. “Also corny. It’s impossible to take seriously. It’s worse than third-class pulp science fiction. It’s just unthinkable. Therefore,” one of my favorite words, “once you’ve eliminated the unthinkable…”

Michael, still semihelpless on the floor, agreed. “It’s a Communist Plot,” he chuckled. “Elementary.”

This bit of unreason was only a little easier to take, but eventually we calmed down and took it. I had a few reservations, but Mike — who was hooked on spies and such to begin with — was wholly smitten by the notion. His eyes hinted at incredible schemes.

“Well,” he said at length, “what’re we going to do about it?”

“Do?” I hadn’t considered that angle.

“Yeah, do. We’re not gonna let ’em get away with this, are we?”

“Of course not, I suppose.”

“Right. Whatever this plot is, we’ve got to thwart it.”

“We do?”

“It’s our duty, baby. They’re trying to overthrow society, Chet. And where would we be without society?”

It was an interesting question, but I didn’t like any of the answers.

“Okay,” I resigned. “What’re we gonna do?”

We discussed it for almost an hour, confusing Sean beyond repair and swearing him to absolute secrecy. He was already a little afraid to open his mouth anyway, and when Mike casually mentioned plastique, you could almost see Sean shrivel up. But his eyes were just as excited as Mike’s.

“We’ve got one solid handle,” said Michael the Theodore Bear.

“Which is?”

“Laszlo Scott,” he replied. “Sean and that chick got their pills from Laszlo. But where did he get them?”

Another interesting question. Laszlo Scott was an exceptionally slimy creature, capable, to my mind, of any enormity, but he was also imposingly stupid, and I couldn’t imagine any really competent Communist Plotter making use of him.

“Where indeed?” I counterqueried.

“Right!” Mike snapped. “That’s what you’ve got to find out.”

“I?”

“Who else? You’re the local Laszlo Scott expert. It wouldn’t do much good if I tried to follow him, would it? Sean can help you.”

“You want Me to follow Laszlo?”

“Only for a few days, until he gets more pills. That’s when the fun begins.”

“Following Laszlo?”

“C’mon, it won’t hurt you. It’ll be Fun, Chester. Really. You can take notes.”

Groovy. So I resigned myself to tailing Loathsome Laszlo, but I was already sick of the whole routine. I had a whole anthology of arguments against this project, beginning with, “If this is really a Communist Plot, we ought to notify the FBI,” and ending with, “I’m a musician, dammit, not a spy,” but it was already evening, and we had to go west.

I didn’t really want to follow Laszlo.

IT TURNED out to be an exceptionally quiet Sunday, especially by Village standards. Aside from the horde of teenyboppers, none of whom represented enough money to matter, plus half a spate of bewildered-looking tourists who were most likely hunting for Chinatown, the streets were deserted.

“It’s a turndown day, baby,” Chaz said when I reached The Mess, something like eight-thirty. He was right. There were more performers in the house than audience.

“Yesterday must’ve worn ’em out,” I probably explained.

Anyhow, Charley closed The Mess a half hour later, and all of us — we Tripouts, Al Mamlet, and a banjoist from Chicago I’d never seen before who somehow knew what he thought was all about me — split for The Garden of Eden.

M. T. Bear and Sean were already there, of course, along with Gary the Frog, a few Davids, and the customary strangers. They were clustered around our family table, overflowing slightly into the aisle, interfering with the waitress, chattering like a tribe of typists, and generally carrying on as was their noisy wont.

Gary, his face even more of an acne farm than usual, was loudly endeavoring to master a twelve-string guitar he’d neglected to tune, while one of the Davids kept saying excitedly, “Hey, baby, let me try it? Huh? Huh, Gary? Kin I try it?” All very natural.

Mike was doing his standard best to catch everyone’s ear, saying, “But it’s a Plot, don’t you understand?” but everyone’s ear remained blithely uncaught. Mike’d hollered Plot too often. Everyone believed him, but nobody cared. Constant excitement is a drag.

The Garden of Eden, immune to Sunday doldrums, skirled about the table like a neurotic river, babbling, jostling, everyone sort of accidentally groping (sort of) everybody else, all of which made it hard for me to get through to Mike. “Pardon me,” I said politely once or twice, pro forma, with no visible effect. Then “This is a Raid!” I yelled in a thick bass voice. “Don’t nobody move!”

The noise was something awful — high-pitched shrieks, low thuds, lots of Oh Wow’s, and other hip chaos — but when the dust cleared, I only had to shove and push a little bit to get through to the table.