William Vollmann: Butterfly Stories

This is my favorite picture, said the girl, turning to a page which showed another unkillable Chinese brother being pushed off a precipice. The cliff was walled with dark green palms that glistened as if dipped in wax, and there was glossy darkness between them down which children scrambled barefoot, their shirts fluttering bright and clean in the hot breeze; palm-heads swung like pendulums. Men in black pajamas were waiting for them. Banana leaves made green awnings; then other multi-rayed green stars and bushes with dewy leaves that sparkled like constellations held the middle place; below them, rust-red compound blooms topped lacy mazes of dark greyish-green leaves, everything slanting down to the dark water, white-foamed, that came from the wide white waterfall towards which the Chinese brother screamed smiling down.

The butterfly boy looked at this picture with her for a long time. Then he hung his head. - Can I see your underpants again?

The next year the school districts changed, so he didn't see the girl anymore. Another girl invited him over to make Creepy Crawlers. He only had the Plastic Goop, but she had the other kind that you could bake into rubbery candy. They made candy ants and beetles and spiders and ate them and he was very happy. But he was afraid to invite her over because he didn't know what his parents would think about his playing with girls, so she never invited him again.

The school bully roared, ran down from his mountain of snow and ice, and charged the butterfly boy with outstretched arms. The bully's parka was the same every year. His parents never seemed to wash it, so it was very grimy; and it had become too small for him. The bully had thick hairy arms like a monster and a reddish-purple face full of yellow teeth. He knocked the butterfly boy down and sat on his stomach. Then he began to spit into his face. He spat and spat, while the other boys cheered. Then he took the butterfly boy's glasses off and broke them. He punched the butterfly boy in the nose until blood came out. Then he stood up. He jumped on the butterfly boy's stomach, and the butterfly boy puked. Everybody laughed. He let the butterfly boy go. The butterfly boy staggered into the far corner of the chain-link fence and tried to clean the blood and vomit off himself.

You fell down again? said the butterfly boy's mother in amazement.

Yes.

What happened this time?

I don't know. I just fell.

Maybe he needs his glasses changed, she said to his father.

I don't want to go outside for recess anymore, the butterfly boy said.

You have to go out, the teacher said.

Why?

Because if you stay in here with me you'll never learn how to take care of yourself.

What can I do? Every time I go out there I get beaten up. He's waiting for me right now.

The teacher sipped her coffee, trying to think of some miracle strategy that would make the butterfly boy grow out of his subhumanhood. But she couldn't think of anything.

You can stay in with me today, she said. But only today.

Thank you, the butterfly boy said gratefully.

She let him look through the Schoolbook that the grade above him was reading, People from Foreign Lands, so he got to peer down a page of partly shaded bystreet, drivers resting in their cyclos under the trees, sun hot on their toes, stacks of hollow-cored building bricks on the street corners, and he was contented, but then the second hand of the big clock made a ticking sound and he found himself already beginning to dread tomorrow's recess.

High up upon his filthy crag, the school bully crouched, flapping his arms like an eagle and muttering to himself. His head jerked back and forth as he scanned the playground, searching for victims. The substance that his soul was composed of was pain. Since the most basic pleasure of substance is to see or dream or replicate itself, the bully fulfilled himself by causing pain in others. This proves that he could perceive and interpret, since otherwise how could the agonies of others enchant him? However, if we allow what certain philosophers do, namely, that memory is a necessary component of consciousness, then we cannot say for certain that he was conscious. He always attacked in the same way, and seemed to derive exactly the same joy from the butterfly boy's anguish. Conscious pleasure, on the contrary, seems to require a steady and continual augmentation of the stimulus, since comparison of the pleasing sensation with the ingrained memory of that sensation will gradually devalue it. This explains why the higher order connoisseurs must inevitably shuck their rubbers after their beginning years, and hence contract sexual diseases.

The butterfly boy took as long as he could in buckling his galoshes. (He could do all the buckles now.) The other boys were shouting: Come on out! Don't be a sissypants! — When he came out, they started to clap and shout. Their heads swiveled expectantly toward the pile of ice where the bully lived. The bully began to gnaw very rapidly on his lower lip. His eyes rolled. Then he screeched, raised his arms, and rushed down upon the butterfly boy like death.

Don't you dare hurt him! a big girl shouted. She ran up to the bully and punched him as hard as she could. The bully cowered away. He began to sob hoarsely. Instantly the other boys forgot the butterfly boy. They threw delighted snowballs at the bully and called him a nasty stupid retard. The bully sat down. A steaming yellow stain began to form in the snow around him. The boys laughed and the girls whispered.

The butterfly boy did not join in the attack upon his enemy. He went to the part of the playground where the girls played, and stood timidly beside the big girl.

You can't play here, the big girl said. But I wish you were a girl, so I could play with you. You're so cute.

The butterfly boy was silent. He went slowly back to the other boys.

The boys had declared war against the girls. Girls were ugly. Girls were sissies. Girls polluted the playground just by being there. It was an outrage that the boys should have to breathe the same air that girls did. They ran them down, shouting and knocking them to the icy asphalt and pulling their hair. Yowling, the girls scratched back. It was not a precisely coordinated campaign of gun butts and pickaxes because these were boys who soon would be upstanding Eagle Scouts, lighting fires, prancing about in jungle-green uniforms, holding lighted torches aloft to conduct smoke-signaled conversations with one another about the sizes of various girls' boobs, stealing each other's neckerchief rings, farting into each other's faces, striding through the woods without ever getting lost; thus to the teacher who sat sipping her coffee indoors and very occasionally glancing out the window, it seemed as if her pupils were playing exactly as usual, a bit more boisterously, perhaps; the girls were not jumping rope, which was odd or maybe not so odd since they had been doing that every day; they appeared to be mingling with the boys most energetically, which was all to the good, the teacher thought, and maybe she was right because when the bell did ring and the pupils came in they bore no wounds more serious than bruises, from which it follows that it had all been in fun. So they captured the big girl and tried to figure out what to do with her. Then they remembered the butterfly boy. -Make him kiss her! a boy shouted.

What they wanted was to degrade and brutalize. The girl would be tortured by being kissed, because it was a universal truth that kissing was disgusting, and because everyone would be watching. The butterfly boy would be likewise raped by the procedure, although it was unfortunately possible that he might rise a little in their esteem by becoming their instrument. All in all, the scheme was as elegant as it was practical. One must admire such cleverness.