William Vollmann - Butterfly Stories

Blackish birds circled in minions over the power and streetcar wires; drunks were spinning in the trees; the people he'd thought were panhandlers were sellers, and even when he said no they took his shoulder and tried to turn him around; they were so certain he'd made a mistake! — No one had ever done that to him before. (The photographer would have punched them.) — A cigarette! a man in a skullcap was screaming. It was so different, but not really; it was only as strange as the American flag above the McDonald's.

Back at the city clinic again because his balls still ached, he listened to the other victims of sexual viruses and bacteria explicating their woes: — That's what happens when you get BORED. - Well I tole that bitch I wanna become a personal trend. -. . and I said please touch my mouth I'm a competitive bodybuilder and she says I wanna hug and I says ya want anything more and I DIPPED her like THIS! and then I tole her if a man touch my doll like that I'd kill 'im! — He gimme five dollahs an' then he stick it in me an' now I be gettin' these night sweats; well sistah if I was serious I be scared so I can't be serious.

You should really take the AIDS test, the doctor said. How many sexual partners did you say you've had in the last month?

Seven, the journalist said. No, eight. No, nine.

Well, now, said the doctor. I think that puts you in our highest risk group, right in this red area at the top of our AIDS thermometer. Did you know the sexual histories of all your partners?

Oh, I know their histories all right.

Well, that's very good, Mr. Doe. Because, you see, if you didn't know their histories you might not be aware if they'd engaged in any high-risk behaviors such as unprotected sex, anal intercourse, IV drug use, prostitution. . They wouldn't have engaged in any of those behaviors, now, would they, Mr. Doe?

I don't think they were IV drug users.

Mmm hhm. Now, Mr. Doe, do you always use condoms?

I couldn't go so far as to say that, doctor.

Well, (the doctor was still struggling to keep a positive attitude), would you say that you use condoms more than half the time, at least?

I did use a rubber with one of 'em once, the journalist grinned. But it was kind of an accident.

Mr. Doe, said the doctor, I really believe you should take the AIDS test.

I'd rather not know. How about if you just wrote me a prescription for some Benadryl? I'm fresh out.

THE END

With all due respect, his wife was saying, maybe even because you're so smart, I don't know — they say there's a fine line — you've definitely got problems. (The journalist had just told her that maybe, just maybe, they should consider a divorce.) You need analysis, his wife said. You've got something to work out. You always say my family's screwed up — well! I'm telling you, your family's screwed up. Really screwed up. Actually the rest of them aren't so bad. It's you. Everyone thinks you're a freak. All the neighbors think you're a freak, even if they're too nice to say it directly to me. I'm normal; I'm tired of being married to a freak.

I see that, he said.

All your friends are freaks. Either society's rejected them or else they've rejected society. They're the lowest of the low. You've spent years building up a crew of freaks.

I wouldn't necessarily call them freaks, he said.

Tears were snailing their accustomed way down the furrows in her cheeks which all the other tears had made, so many others, and so many from him — why not be conscientious and say that those creek-bed wrinkles were entirely his fault? They shone now with recognition of his guilt; they overflowed until her whole face, sodden with snot and tears, reminded him of a beach where something flickers pitifully alive in every wet sand-bubble when the waves retreat.

And that photographer you hang out with, she said, it doesn't do your character any good to be with someone so irreverent -

Hearing that, no matter how sorry for her he was, he could not prevent a happy brutal smile from worming to his lips, twisting his whole face; he could hardly wait to tell the photographer what she'd said and listen to him laughing. .

He kept waking up in the middle of the night not knowing who this person beside him was. After she started sleeping in the other bedroom they got along much better. Sometimes he'd see her in the back yard gardening, the puppy frisking between her legs, and she'd seem so adorable there behind window-glass that he ached, but as soon as she came in, whether she stormed at him or tried desperately to please him, he could not feel. He could not feel! For years he and his wife had had arguments about the air conditioner. He'd turn it on and then she'd turn it off and he'd wake up stifling and turn it on again and then she'd start screaming. These days, he did nothing when she turned it off. He could hear her bare feet on the hardwood floor of the other bedroom; then her door opened and he heard her in the hall; then the air conditioner stopped. Sometimes he couldn't sleep. Other times he dreamed of struggling in blue-green jungle the consistency of moldy velvet; the jungle got hotter and deeper and then he'd find himself in the disco again, no Vanna there anymore, only the clay-eyed skulls from the killing fields, white and brown, a tooth here and there; from the Christmas lights hung twisted double loops of electrical wire (the Khmer Rouge, ever thrifty, had used those to handcuff their victims); no girls, no beer; they kept bringing him skulls. .

He was not inhibited by mechanical rules or by metaphysical thinking. . To follow rules would have have been to court sure disaster.

N. Sanmugathasan, General Secretary,

Ceylon Communist Party,

Enver Hoxha Refuted (1981)

One night his wife did come into bed with him, in the middle of night, when the attentions of his dreams had already been fixed on pink flowers at the tips of outspread fronds, like some Pat Pong beauty's painted fingertips; waking, rolling away from her even as he woke, he found his eyes flying open in the darkness as fast as someone falling, and his chest already ached with dread of this woman whom he considered his old wife. Not yet having the courage to tell her that he was leaving her (well, perhaps that's unfair; let's say he just didn't want to be hasty), but meanwhile knowing that he probably would leave her, he hesitated to transmit any signals of intimacy; he couldn't! — but he couldn't stand to be cruel, either, so he found himself adopting a position of polite distance; when she came into bed the next night he gave her a pillow without saying anything; when she thrashed sleeplessly he said: If you wake me up one more time I'm going to ask you to leave. -

Thank God there was no mirror to terrify him with his own harsh mask. - For a long time he lay beside her, listening to what he construed to be her bitter breathing. She breathed rapidly and shallowly, as if she were trying to suppress a tremendous anger. Had he been less eager to establish his own doctrine, he might have admitted that she could equally well have been terrified. He lay rigid with his own heart thumping hatefully. There was an unpleasant taste in his mouth. He closed his eyes, trying to get back among the fresh wet air, the unpreaching leafy stalks straining and drinking with all the greed of shortlived things. There had been jungle like that in Battam-bang, but only in patches. It thickened, he supposed, beyond the tame battlefield. When he got up to go to the bathroom she got up, too, thinking that she'd failed and he was moving to the other bedroom; his mouth was full of mouthwash so he couldn't explain it to her right away, so he put his hand on her shoulder and held her until he could spit the mouthwash out. She did not try to pull away. It felt very strange to be touching this woman. His emotion was not loathing, but something less familiar. - It's OK, he said to her at last. You can stay, if you want to. - He led her back to the bedroom and he deduced from her quick submissive steps that she was very happy and grateful not to be sent away, and he felt revolted at himself, that he couldn't be nicer; and it made him sad but also grimly triumphant that before their discussion she would hardly have been grateful; she needed him and had only now realized it after so many years; she'd never been so sweet to him before! Needless to say, if he gave in and decided to stay, she'd go back to being herself. She'd have to!