William Vollmann - Butterfly Stories

The green light came on. - OK, the producer said. Stand by for Seal Hunt III.

The next morning he had a fever and a sore throat and remembered how the white girl had coughed once or twice; it was 5:00 when he woke up lonely and got up to drink some water but could barely swallow. He lay there until 7:30. Furry bedclothes gnawed at him throughout that long night of sickness. When it started getting light he put on an eyeshade but it seemed to press against his eyes and he could not stop seeing ferocious white dots against the blackness, so he removed the eyeshade, and slowly the albino ants decayed into static. The flicker of his eyelashes, irritatingly magnified, merged with his headache like wet and rusty ferns woven into an unending basketwork of decay. At eight he thought about calling the white girl, but decided to have breakfast first. Maybe the hot tea would help him.

In the Brasserie (why they had to call it that he didn't know) he untwisted his urine-sample-sized jar of breakfast marmalade (NO ADDED COLOUR) and munched his toast, listening to the waitress's shoes squeaking on the parquet floor. The marmalade was good. At long last one other guest came in, a man in a red tie and corduroy suit. Without seeming to see the husband, the man saw him and sat on the other side of the room.

It was 8:20. He got Reception to give him an outside line; then, dreading the thought that he might reach her mother, he called the white girl. The phone rang four times. Hello? said the white girl's mother very anxiously. - Is Samantha there? he said. - No, said the mother, not angrily, not even wearily, only sadly, with such calm and final sadness as to constitute implacability. The mother understood that he and the daughter had done or were doing something that was being kept from her. The mother was never going to pass on his messages or let him see her.

Georgette Heyer in uniform green jackets, multiple copies of Cortâzar (grey), Céline (black) and some unknown faraway writer whose jackets were metallic white like the wrappers of those Belgian chocolates with the horse picture; these almost subsumed him, but he kept believing there must be some other category he longed for but couldn't think of, some special kind of book that was entirely unfamiliar but very very good… — Yeah, here's fiction, a lady said. The sound of the escalator was maddening. A wave of fever drenched him. He swayed and did not open Mayersberg.

Speak Malay! the green book shouted. A saleslady led him to an English-Eskimo Eskimo-English dictionary; he looked on his own for something Khmer but couldn't find anything closer than Speak Indonesian! He stared dull-eyed, open-mouthed, at Spoken Thai, a Gilbertese-English dictionary, Da Kine Talk . .

Climbing up insecticide-smelling stairs, looking through a window into another window set among sooty bricks, he saw other windows with books behind them. Books walled themselves off from him like the Alaskan cemetery fenced with whalebones. Whether they were books or something else didn't even matter anymore. He remembered the Polish market in Omaha with its glass coffin filled with sausage, dried smoked sausage on top, pickled sausage all around bulkheaded by bags of beef jerky; one of those sausages and only one was the right choice, but he hadn't made it. Maybe the English-Eskimo Eskimo-English dictionary was the right choice. He was starting not to think so, but it would definitely have been the wrong choice not to buy it. That's how it would have been with the white girl, too; if he hadn't made love with her he never would have known that she wasn't going to pull off her white mask to be his wife. He was sweating like a mountain-climber. He thought: I suppose this will be how it is when I get AIDS. -Then he thought: Maybe I do have AIDS.

The marquee said Cameron Red's Hypnotic Showand he thought: Well, I don't believe hypnotism is the answer, but who knows? Maybe it'll make all my problems go away.

In the poster, the hypnotist smiled innocuously in black and white like someone on an old record album. But his white fingers reached and clutched; there was a terrifyingly hysterical and concentrated brilliancy in his irises.

The hypnotist was smoking a cigarette under a water-stained ceiling in a room wallpapered with a pattern of scarlet orchids shaped like praying mantises. It was evidently his dressing room, since the far door opened directly onto the wings of a stage where chorus girls were rehearsing, stretching their legs upward like soaring tree-ferns even though nobody watched or cared. There was a welding kit under the hypnotist's bed, then the hall to the bathroom door which was stuffed with paper where somebody had kicked or smashed a hole in it (the shower pull was broken off and you had to flush the toilet three times and even then it might not work). The husband said to himself: How do I know that about the toilet? How do I know there's a welding kit under the bed? Why does this place seem so familiar? — and then the hypnotist's eyes bulged out toward him a little more and he got dizzy, the tides of fever carrying him nowhere, only working him back and forth; but for a moment, only for a moment, he was able to remember that this room and hallway and bathroom had existed in the Arctic, which meant that it couldn't exist here, which meant… — but now the hypnotist's eyeballs clanged over his own. Just as a sleeping pill's effects begin within the quarter-hour, with numbness behind the eyes, followed by a heaviness in the fingers, these zones of deadness expanding rapidly, so now the hypnotist's thrusts of light oozed down his sore throat until he couldn't feel it anymore; then light curved around and round inside his skull like a turd too big for the toilet bowl, pressing down on his brain, blinking out blood vessels like city lights at curfew, and he forgot everything.

To remember her you MUST forget, said the hypnotist.

He said: I'm searching for something, and I still don't know what it is.

You must FORGET, said the hypnotist.

He said: I married someone, and I don't know who she is.

You must FORGET, said the hypnotist.

He said: I betrayed someone, and I don't know where I am.

The hypnotist said: What about the how and why? You forgot those. Those are the five questions that a good journalist is supposed to ask. Who, what, where, how and why.

You told me to forget.

That's no excuse. What's her name?

Vanna.

What's her name?

Vanna.

What's her name?

I–I forget -

You must FORGET, said the hypnotist. What's her name?

Who? What's my name? I don't remember my name.

You must FORGET, FORGET, FORGET, FORGET. .

He said: I feel that my breast is a closed iron door that I'm standing breast to breast with, and I have to smash it open with my breast or with my head because my heart or my love's heart lies inside.

Something touched him. He didn't know what it was. It was fishy and silverwhite and crewcut-soft like sealskin kamiks.

The hypnotist had brought him out of himself, as when a brook carves rock between scaly trees, slipping ever deeper into its own crack until it can rill out into desire, which is sun and space, white light, then GONE into the bowl of green trees below, sided by rock wall looming and leaning and bending, articulated at its reddish lizard-ledges, cradling that suicidal miracle of a desert waterfall; and it seemed he was going down wide white stairs that led into a lake; and now the lukewarm waters were lapping at his ankles; now they were at his knees and he felt slimy weeds rub against him coolly; now he'd gone waist-deep and his testicles contracted with the cold; the water was getting colder and darker by the time his chest went under and the stairs weren't white anymore; they were black; the hypnotist's pale hand took his and pulled him down three more steps so that the water was at his throat and there was an animal smell; the wife he'd divorced was drowned and rotting there; the hypnotist dragged him down deeper and his face went in, only his hair still floating in that bygone world of breath; he would have floated helplessly but for the iron-dark stairs that clung like leeches to the soles of his feet and sucked the buoyancy out of him as the hypnotist pulled him down; it was all very murky and ripply and bubbly but something was going round him now in nasty circles like a chained mongoose at a snake charmer's and the hypnotist's erection was in his mouth; it was a pink mesa over which hung blue-bellied storm clouds with flickering narrow strings of lightning, and from the hot plateau far away he could see other clouds with stems of rain connecting them to the ground. Then he was speeding through the warm drafty bathroom-tiled vaults of the Tube, seeing lots of slender black-leotarded legs, and the hypnotist was whispering in his ear: When you awake you'll forget all this. You'll FORGET. - He was choking and the hypnotist was suffocating him and chuckling and saying: That's right; now drink your milk. .