William Vollmann - Butterfly Stories

Somehow, the knowledge that he sought was the same as being one with Vanna. He knew that, although he didn't know how he knew it. And while fucking the whores in Bangkok had taken him farther away from her, fucking from now on would bring him closer. What had changed? — Only this, that he sought her faithfully. Now every thrust of his penis would be like an Olympic swimmer's stroke, drawing him closer to the end of the humming blueness. - Was that really true? — He knew that it was not. But here he was so far away from Vanna that she faded from the inner walls of his eyelids faster than ever! How did it go in Dante? In the forest journey of our life I lost my way. Something like that. Whenever that came to him he remembered the jungle beyond the tame battlefield at Battam-bang, and although he had not particularly noticed the jungle at the time because the interpreter and the commune leader and the Chief of Protocol kept him so busy looking at shell-holes, it became ever more lushly menacing in his memories. Plant-phalli towered, so well leaf-scaled that nothing of their underlying structure or origin could be seen; they were studded with pale blue flowers. This was the jungle of his life where he had lost his way, and it was also Vanna's jungle, so he should have loved it, but it terrified him. Sometimes it seemed to him that in divorcing his other wife he'd thrown away his compass, and the Inuk woman whom he'd almost married was his last unlikely chance not to be lost -

At the Bay store when he went to give some acquaintances a present after not having seen them for years, they greeted him most cordially but only stopped for a dozen eyeblinks from their work of cross-checking the register tapes so that he soon felt dismissed even though they invited him down for dinner any time, "any time" being less the perfect generosity that it appeared than a courteous tautology whose complete form was: "you are invited any time we invite you" — of course that wasn't fair, because in the north people really don't mind if you drop in; nonetheless he knew that he was not going to drop in, knew it already as he zipped up his parka, burrowed his wrists into the big mitts, and worked his face mask back up from around his neck; then he turned to say goodbye and saw them so young and fine together, he a white man born and raised in Indian country, hardy in his ways, at ease with boats and guns and heavy loads, sunny and steady, she a full-blood Inuk of such striking loveliness that men meeting her for the first time couldn't look away because her traditional topknot of blueblack hair seemed to concentrate all the snow-shadows which spilled down to cool her elegant forehead; her long-lashed eyes were usually half-closed, but when she looked directly at anyone there came a stunning flash of liquid black purity; her nose was Egyptian like a sphinx's; as for her lips, to see them was to long to kiss them. . and most beautiful of all about both of them was that they wanted no one but each other, he cherishing and protecting her with his strength while she loved and gladdened him; so they went on doing the accounts together, a self-sufficient couple, and barely acknowledged his goodbye; they had work to do. -He thought: Is this how my new wife and I will be together, so happily hiding under the sheets? — And that seemed good to him. He decided not to talk to others about Vanna anymore, to pare away all the world except her. .

Of course, he wouldn't be able to talk with her, either.

Inside the Narwhal, a man was laying down strips of a silver substance in the hallway, painting them with solvent which some teenager would probably want to sniff, and a man sat reading and smoking a cigar by the pool table and the hanging plants grew, but the wind kept blowing and the ceiling kept thumping and creaking. Outside, snow blew in thin puffs and streamers across the snow-packed road and parking lot that were the same blue as snow-shadows because it was only a bit past sunrise, the orange still a long narrow triangular intrusion in the sky (nested in it, a flag on one of the airport buildings, straining like a horse's thirsty head, the flagpole bending fantastically but always straightening), and now the sky had lightened to a calm cold blue but the moon hung on, half gone, thickly yellow-white around the edge, the rest so distinctly mottled that it almost seemed possible to make out individual mountains and craters, and because the moon was pretty and far away the husband couldn't believe that it would be a more difficult place than Resolute. Meanwhile the snow-dust continued its empty rushing, not just in stripes as before but also in discrete fog-clumps which rose as high as the power wires, skating across the blue snow with the frictionless insatiability of spotlight beams. The crisscrossed tracks and treads on the snow reminded him of the dance floor in the community hall at Pond Inlet, a scratched slab of dull gleam in the warm darkness whose loud scratchy music made his ears ache; little kids in boots and parkas ran across the floor while the high school students whose dance it supposedly was sat shyly on wall benches, girls with girls, boys with boys, waiting for midnight or some even more impressive hour when things would happen; he danced with a girl once and then she wouldn't dance with him again. Maybe at one o'clock something would happen. It was for that something that people were drinking home brew, potent but thin, at a house in Clyde River, telling the same old polar bear stories, making plans to get rich, talking about ladies and dogs and distances, eating black hunks of barbecued caribou, dipping into smoked char and roasted char with onions, getting louder and more insistent about their own greatness until one of the quietly smiling Inuk women, having drunk a glass, began screaming obscenities and smashing things and then everyone had to leave. The husband imagined marrying her and getting her drunk, knowing that she wouldn't remember what she did; she'd stab him and hit him; when she came out of it she'd be amazed and tenderly concerned, unable to believe she'd done it; so he'd offer her another drink and watch the complicity in her eyes as she swallowed eagerly, knowing she was going to be transformed… At the dance one woman was already leaving, a beautiful young mother in a white parka, the baby in the armauti, and she walked white and silent through the white silent streets, brightening and fading in accordance with the laws of streetlamps, and a little girl opened the orange square of light, leaned out and cried: heüo, hello! and a skidoo went by and the mother passed the last streetlight, turned snow-blue and vanished. Once she was gone, the husband began to ache with longing. He believed that if only he could have convinced her to love him, then he might have advanced a step away from his old errors. Now, although he might love other women, and although he had utter faith that soon he'd be with Vanna, he would never learn whatever it was that the woman in the white parka might have taught him.

He wondered about the girl he'd almost married. She'd worn a parka of blue duffel. . Was she well and happy? If he'd married her, would he be closer to where he wanted to be as Vanna's husband? If he married her now, could he marry her and Vanna at the same time? Suppose they all lived together, the husband with all his wives (even the one he'd put off could come back then), all loving one another like the inmates of a monastery, walled off from sadness because none would ever have to go away…? This ideal city of wives might well be the answer, or at least part of the answer. Certainly it wouldn't be a shortcut to his ultimate union, but it might be a flowering from it. It was so simple! If he could keep them all with him, then he could make them all happy!