William Vollmann - Butterfly Stories

Where are you coming from? the US customs woman said.

London.

OK. Wait a minute. No other baggage?

Nope.

On his card she scribbled "CET."

This code will get you right through, she said. Otherwise they'll be suspicious about the absence of luggage.

Thanks, he said.

Don't mention it.

At the exit, the lady who took cards read "C.E.T.," stopped dead, and sent him to the special agent's desk.

Where you coming from?

London.

How long were you there?

A week.

Purpose of trip?

Business.

What kind of business?

Journalism.

I see you were in Bangkok, said the customs man, flipping through his passport very lazily. Earlier this year?

Yep.

You like it there? I bet you really liked it there.

It was all right.

I lived there ten years, the customs man said.

What part of Bangkok?

You wouldn't know if I told you. I bet the only places you know are Pat Pong and the shopping mall.

What shopping mall? said the husband defiantly.

The customs man had unzipped his backpack and was turning it inside out. The husband almost admired him, because he was impervious to the husband's dirty underwear, squeezing every wrinkle so gracefully, looking for contraband. .

And the husband thought: Have I only lately become a sleaze to them, or did they always think I was a sleaze?

He stood in a dream until the agent let him go.

Hello, Sien. I hear you wanted me to call.

Yes, sir. I have some news for you. You know sir we contact Cambodia go disco show picture your taxi girl they say no one like that is working there now. They say no one like that ever worked there.

She's not there anymore?

No, sir. When she working there? Long time ago?

September.

September is not long time. I don't know why, sir. I think maybe your letter was too heavy. We enclose the four photos of you and the four photos of her. When it got Phnom Penh my contact say only one picture of her and one picture of you in there. Letter was too heavy.

You think she's dead?

I don't know, sir. I think maybe no news is insufficient news. We must try another way.

By now, through the weird and inverse pointillism of so many other influences, Vanna's image had disintegrated and dispersed in the blackness of his mind like the dust of a losing protostar.

That night in a dream he saw a woman he hadn't seen for many years, a white woman with a beautiful face whom he'd always loved and who had never loved him. In his vision she wasn't saying anything to him, only gazing lovingly into him, which was enough and more. In real life this woman was dying or had already died.

It is by the activity of our passions, that our reason improves. . The passions, in turn, owe their origin to our needs, and their increase to our progress in science.

J.J. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1755)

The phlebotomist rolled on white rubber gloves before she stuck him. When she asked questions for the case record, she looked right through him. When she was finished the doctor came in. The doctor was tall and muscular like a gym teacher. He didn't bother to shut the door.

Drop your trousers, said the doctor.

He looked at the door.

Drop your trousers, I said.

He dropped his trousers.

The doctor rolled on white gloves with an angry and disgusted face.

Doctor, do you see anything?

Take a deep breath, said the doctor.

The doctor slammed the culture probe up his urethra. He grunted with the sudden stunning pain. The doctor almost smiled.

Doctor, what do you think my chances are of having the virus?

How would I know? I don't know how you've been spending your life. What's more, I don't want to know.

Do you think I have a fifty-fifty chance?

You've been doing a lot of stupid things, said the doctor, writing something onto the chart.

He rose and flipped a box contemptuously down. - Have some condoms, he said. Maybe your wife can still be saved.

He knew and sensed that everything was going according to timetable. There was no need to interfere. They knew everything themselves. It would only make people nervous. They were good lads.

Yaroslav Golovanov, Sergei Korolev: The Apprenticeship of a Space Pioneer (1975)

As small black vermin-birds fluttered through the air of the Greyhound platforms, which then whirred behind picket by picket through the scratched windows, he thought: Well, in a few hours my life will be different.

Rolling down the concrete tube fringed by stalled buses, they proceeded across the Bay Bridge, whose replicated girders sickened him through the windows. Pale shining bluish-whitish-grey water gazed at him. He was so tired.

He got to the clinic and they kept him waiting for an hour and said: You see that the numbers match.

Well, it says right here: HIV ANTIBODIES PRESENT.

You have the virus.

So I finally won the lottery, he said. That's good. That's very good.

I wouldn't be smiling like that if I were you.

No, he said, I'm sure you wouldn't. But I'd be smiling if you were me. I'd really like to see how you coped with that.

Here are some brochures on AIDS resources which you might like to look over. .

Oh, I have all the resources I need if I want to get AIDS.

You certainly are upbeat about it.

Then why aren't you? the husband laughed. He went out smiling.

You can notch the fish's fin, harden the removed bit of tissue with epoxy, and then slice it with a diamond saw, slice it thin for the microscope. Now turn the brass knob on the stem, your eye gazing passionlessly into that other world that used to be a fish; when it comes into focus you'll see the fish's age straightaway; it's just like counting tree-rings; it's no different than half-listening to the interpreter explaining the difference between Soviet pistols (he never did learn the difference between the K-54 and the K-59) while gazing out the car window at the houses on stilts over the squishy river, houses connected by gangplanks; you can see the people inside looking out; there is no privacy. That's how it must be for those mercilessly illuminated fish-cells. When he was six or seven his parents told him that he was a big boy, but he got sick and then he was little; they wouldn't use the oral thermometer. They made him pull down his pants on the bed and then the anal thermometer went in, cool and greasy. The whole world saw. He lay still. When they pulled it out and told him that he could move, he continued to lie there with his face in the pillow. He'd gone out of himself; the worst thing now would be if anyone saw him coming back into himself; then that would prove that this thing had happened. But you do it; you look, see, stare, observe, count, measure and categorize. You have to do it! You suck into your eyes the naked children squatting in the mud, coffee-colored puddles in the muddy road, grass-roofed wooden booths in the mud. You match the numbers, my dear technicians. HIV ANTIBODIES PRESENT.Then you continue on down the wide almost empty mud road so beset with puddles that the driver must snake along on brown ridges between them while whitish-pale beggar children hold out their hands screaming. But you do it; you undress it. The fish has been caught; that is the end for the fish there between tall lush pale green trees.