William Vollmann - Butterfly Stories

In the night she woke up and said: I had a nightmare.

He stroked her face. - What was it about? he said wearily.

They — they were trying to chase me in a car, when I was driving. .

OK, he said. Go to sleep.

In her sleep she started whimpering, and he wanted to kill himself.

He called all the magazines and newspapers he knew. - I've got to get back to Cambodia fast! he said desperately. Things are changing there; now's the time to see it all happen. .

In the last two years we've done three pieces on Cambodia, an editor said. Our foreign desk is overbooked. It won't go through; I can't even try. I'm afraid I'll have to steer you elsewhere.

I just don't think it'll wash, an editor said. So you were the first American journalist to interview Pol Pot's brother. Big deal. So I was the first American journalist to piss green.

He had a dream that his wife was in charge of a massive jumping-off-skyscrapers competition. Lofty as some saint of parthenogenesis, she bustled about smiling. Unlike many dreams, this one was entirely accurate in its characterization: his wife loved to tell others what to do. In the dream she didn't jump off buildings herself, but yelled and pushed the contestants until they did. She was an MC. The contest was being conducted on the roof of a broad tower level with many other towers. Representatives of each television station were there; and crowds watched from other highrises. The first two contestants were led by his wife to the edge and they leaped into the shaft of shade between buildings. Let it be said that they were PROFESSIONALS in brightly colored technical jumping gear; they didn't have to be forced! He stood beside his wife watching them dwindle speedily into darkness, and then they vanished forever. They'd won. Now his wife was digging her fingernails into his arm, screaming at him. He was on the edge, and then he saw a way to let himself down gently by his fingertips into a carpeted hallway between offices. Once he'd done that he felt guilty that he hadn't jumped. She couldn't see him. If she had, she would certainly have screeched. - Maybe I'll jump from the next floor down, he said to himself. - He took the elevator. At the next floor he still didn't feel ready, so he took the stairs. That was how he eased his way safely down. May I inform you that his wife caught up with him breathlessly? She approved of him now. All the ones who jumped had never been heard from again. So he was the winner after all, the men after him emulating his sane descent. .

Now that the lust for a new wife had spread through him like viremia, we can't really call him the journalist anymore, so we'll call him the husband. As soon as he had the money he'd be back in Cambodia to claim his prostitute bride in some happy morning of green leaves all around the windows, although the English teacher who couldn't speak English had said to him, in a sudden amazing gush which had obviously cost him dictionary hours: Do you want to get marry? Or you want to be still single forever? I think you are old enough to get marry. Or you want to be taxi boy? Carefully, please! You know AID? It's a bad kind of sickness. You can die by it. I'm afraid it. Therefore I never sleep with a girl at all. So I only want to get marry with a pretty girl. But I'm poor and she's rich… — Too bad, thought the husband. Through all his assignments Cambodia lurked and waited, moistening in his memories like a fungus, like an obscene orange orchid-bowl rotting between compound leaves that tapered like paintbrushes; and thinking of Vanna (whose face he could no longer see quite as readily as if she'd been tattooed on the insides of his eyelids) his heart butterflied as it did when he waited to go on studio, the second hand of left clock and right clock clicking like synchronized eyelashes, the green nipple on the wooden breast not yet glowing so that the husband could ignore life's tests yet a little longer, afloat and irrelevant like his styrofoam cup on the blue felt. - Do not consider what you may do (thus Claudius Claudianus), but what it will become you to have done, and let the sense of honor subdue your mind. - But the grammar of his particular shoulds and oughts was beyond him. Not finding answers, he asked himself the same questions; no need to know whether he lived on the left clock or the right; being in either case a second hand, he clicked round fruitlessly. Life's dreary stretch and trickle was making him forget Vanna month by month; sometimes it seemed that he remembered far more vividly the Chinese porcelain-faced girl with her head down in the darkness offering her round maggot-pale cheek so dreamily to her glass, as if she were listening, while another pallid lady who wore an ice-blue butterfly bow elongated her silver braceleted arm out toward the Chinese porcelain-faced girl in the darkness; a lady with an ice-pink artificial flower in her hair got to the husband first, grinning cautiously downward with her lip lifted from her upper teeth. - Vanna, Vanna! he shouted.

He dreamed that he was cutting his wife up with a saw, and she never cried out, not when he cut her ankles off, not when he severed her knees; but when he began to saw her heart out she wept very very quietly.

Why should we send you to Cambodia? yawned the editor. You've already been, right? And you didn't get what you went for?

Well, it's just that it's such an exciting time there, the husband blabbered, they're just now getting reliable electricity again, and soon the import-export businesses will be going; history's being made and I want to be there when it happens. .

You know what? said the editor. I really don't think I'm interested.

There was a famous writer named Ned who had been invited to read at what is called an "event" because nothing happens there; they permitted the husband to be the warmup act. The whole time he made his appeal, he thought he saw Prince Sihanouk smiling at him from the back row. Everyone else was yawning. He stopped in the middle of a sentence and two or three people clapped politely; Ned leaped up on the stage and began to crow and snort and fart while everyone shouted for laughter, and when he was through the audience was on its feet shouting madly: NED! NED! NED! NED! and Ned came back and gave them another raspberry.

No, I just don't see how we can send you to Cambodia, said the editor, a magnificent lady who was very vague. - If we made money off you it would be one thing, but you know that hardly a soul reads you. And then there are the budget cuts. That office is a minefield right now. It just wouldn't be safe to bring you up. If I did, you might lose everything. .

Well, but what should I do? asked the husband with such pathos that she couldn't duck him with brightness.

There's always Ned, she replied. You might learn a little about writing from Ned. Ned's very generous with lesser writers.

The next time he was on stage with Ned, the husband watched his act very carefully. The husband was up next. His attention hovered like a butterfly over a pool. Doing what Ned did would be pulling down his pants in public. It would be giving head. It would be doing what Vanna did.

His turn came. Tentatively, into the horn of the audience's deepening embarrassed silence, the husband began to crow.

Hello, Sien?

Yes.

This is the journalist. Any news?

No news. Not yet.

That's not too good. You think anything is wrong?

I think maybe I wait one two more week, then I send another letter. Early next month. I have backup copy.