William Vollmann - Butterfly Stories

My place no good, said Joy softly. You no angry me?

She came in at four in the morning, staggering, falling, laughing, stretching her long legs over the pillow, her brown toes soaking up light, saying: I drinking too much! I'm sorry I drink two beer, three whiskey, one champagne, two vodka -

It's OK, said the journalist. You're a good girl -

Thank you, she whispered.

Early in the morning a rat squeaked upstairs, and the monsoon rains came steadily down, eating all light except for a dreary brown or khaki luminescence that showed the clothes hanging outside the window-bars and then the stairs, underneath which was the toilet on its raised platform. Pukki had never come home. She'd had to go to Pattaya for an Australian boy's holiday. (The girls seemed to dread those "holidays" more than anything else, probably because they could never get away from their assignment then and always saw the same things, just beaches or hotel ceilings. .) Joy and the photographer were lying very still. The journalist waited as long as he could, the sweat gushing from every inch of his body, and still they slept; he got up and put his sandals on. Outside, the alley was now a gutter calf-deep in brown water through which sandaled people slowly splashed; radios were playing beside the families on the open platforms brushing their teeth and spitting into that canal; scraps of newspaper floated by; there was the usual crush of flies, as eager as boys (or girls) at Pat Pong; men sat on their wooden porches which had become docks; ladies splashed steadily from stand to stand, buying food; awnings stretched across the narrow sky, almost meeting each other, and beneath them ran the unreal canal city. By ten in the morning it was hot and sunny, the street bone-dry.

He went back inside, down the hall, past the toilet and right to the tiny door with the padlock; when he pulled the door open he caught a gleam of thrusting buttocks and said: I'm sorry but Joy said his name and said no problem.

Back to the National Museum he went alone, to enjoy an hour of beauty without love, but he was just like the photographer who'd shouted on the bus: I can smell a pussy a mile, away! because after a diversionary visit to some bird's head swords he found himself sniffing out Khmer art (there was more here than in Phnom Penh! — the Khmer Rouge hadn't forgotten much); raining his fever-sweat down on the courtyard grass, he stood lusting for the Bayon-style Dvarapalas of the early thirteenth century.

The stone head leaned forward and down, not quite smiling, not quite grimacing, the balls of its eyes bulging out like tears. Too familiar, that face; he wished now that the photographer were here, to take a picture of it. - Marina? — Maybe. Yes, Marina, plump, blurred and round. Her mouth was definitely grimacing. He stepped back, stood a little to the left so that her eyes could see him. She looked upon him sadly, without interest or malice; this Marina was long dead. Her nose was eaten away as if by syphilis, her breasts almost imperceptible swellings on the rock, her navel round and deep, her vulva a tiny slit that may have been vandalism from the same axe that cut off her right hand and left arm. . She stood square-toed and weary in the heat.

Beside her was another Dvarapala in the same style, stunningly beautiful, the contours too soft to be human; her face, neither a Buddha nor an Egyptian deathmask, merged eerily into her sweep of hair and bust; she could barely see him; her thick lips smiled; to make her smile at him he stood slightly to the right to meet her gaze; she smiled the way a whore smiles when you didn't pay her enough -

She looked into the photographer's face very earnestly. - You boyfriend me, or you butterfly? If you butterfly, we finit.

I love only you, the photographer grinned. Me no butterfly. Me suck only your flower. You my sweet rice girl.

That night while the photographer went to turn his cruel hawkeyes on other bargirls until Joy should arrive, the journalist sat drinking and preparing the final draft of his article, which would surely appear on the front page of the New York Times: Thailand's 3 main cash crops: rice, fish and women…and he started to feel something crazy lurching up inside him just like that time in Phnom Penh when Vanna wasn't there and he hopped on the back of the cyclo driver's vehicle and started pedaling the driver crazily down the street, the driver covering his eyes and smiling in dismay, everyone else laughing and pointing and staring, and the journalist had been full of spurious mirth that made him pedal desperately until he crashed the cyclo; now, knowing that something similar was about to happen, he left his friend, made his speedy escape from the square white, red and yellow lights of Pat Pong glowing down the alleys like soft drink signs. He didn't take Noi because she'd gone home early. The bartender said that a man had bought her too many beers and she'd gotten drunk and puked. For every 55 bhat per beer that the man had paid, Noi received 20 bhat, and she was required to drink it down to make the man happy; otherwise how could she wheedle another one out of him? — The journalist was sorry. He'd been thinking all day about what a tight pussy she must have. (But he loved only Vanna, of course. .) Sitting in the tuk-tuk, he smelled the blue smoke of the stalled traffic; he watched a lady with shoebutton eyes sitting side-saddle and miniskirted on the back of a motorbike, carefully gazing at nothing; then his tuk-tuk driver switched the motor on; the golden bulb lit up the naked green LADY OF HIGHWAY decal guarding the driver's back and the bloodspatter decals on the window; now they were moving so fast that the breeze was actually cold. Stop again. More blue smoke. Another side-saddle girl beside him, this one staring wide-eyed through her crash helmet. He saw other faces suspended behind the dark windows of taxis. Then the tuk-tuk growled off again. They turned by the lighted garden of the World Trade Center, bound once again for the Hotel 38.

Short time mean I fuck you two time, one hour, said the Hotel 38 girl. All night mean until twel' o'clock. Then I go home Papa-san.

He tried to tell her that he was a journalist, just to tell her something, just to reach her, and then he asked if she understood and she said yes and then he wondered how many men asked her if she understood and how often she said yes.

He showed her the rubber. - You want to use this? Up to you.

Yes, she said. Good for you, good for me.

Well, he thought (a little dashed), now my perfect record's spoiled. Now I've actually used a rubber from the beginning with one of my girls.

That's how the cookie crumbles, he said to himself.

Well, there was that one I caught the white fungus from, but I started by eating her out so that didn't really count.

This girl cost three hundred bhat. He'd told the night manager to pick one out for him, whoever wanted to come. - Be good to her! the night manager had said. He tipped her two hundred. When he saw the expression on her face, he thought:

Well, at least once in my life I've made another human being completely happy.

He tried to get her to stay a little longer, but she wouldn't. Later, though, she came back because she worried that he might not have had a clean towel. .

You butterfly too much, Joy said to him when she and the photographer came in that night. Too much Thai lady! No good for you, no good for her. She no good, no good heart! She have boyfriend! Not me. I no boyfriend. I love you, I go with you; I no love you, I no go. Before, I have boyfriend. He butterfly too much. He fucking too much! (Joy was shouting.) One day he fucking one, two, three, four. I say to him: OK, you no come here again, we finit. I say: You want marry me, see Mama me, Papa me — why? He crying. He say: I don't know. I say: You don't know? You finit! Finit me!