William Vollmann - Butterfly Stories

The funny thing was that he couldn't feel anything wrong inside him yet. He thought he looked great. The doctor said that right now he was only HIV positive. It would be two to six years before he developed ARC, which was to say an AIDS-related condition, which was to say being sick, and then once he got sick enough they would be able to note down in his medical records that he had AIDS. It was easy to believe that the virus wasn't doing anything yet, but of course it had already begun wearing him down moment by moment, like a river undercutting its banks. When he was in Phnom Penh the Tonlé Sap had been rising, so people were laying down mounds of fresh dirt with shovels, walking on them, smoothing them out. A little boy was swimming beside his porch. It happened every monsoon season, they said. The air smelled like fish. There were crowds. A woman was wading from one house to the next. Serious crowds with spades tamped down the levee.

The photographer called him and said: Well, I just heard from your friend Sien. That disco's finished. They closed it down.

What happened to the girls?

The girls? Probably in some fucking concentration camp. I'd say you better kiss off any chance you had of finding Vanna again. Sien's out of it. He doesn't want to get involved anymore. You better go to Thailand and shop around. There are thousands like her. It's too bad, though. That disco was GREAT! And I feel sorry for those poor girls. .

What do you think Vanna would have done if I'd been able to get her home? What would she have done when I first took her through my front door?

Remember when you asked me that before? I told you she would shit in her pants, man! She would have loved you so much for your money! She would have never ever left you. .

Well, thanks for saying that.

Oh, that's all right, the photographer said.

He woke up and had a sore throat.

He picked up the newspaper and read Cambodia and did not read anymore. He went to bed in the night-sodden house and dreamed that Vanna was screaming with terror, stretching out her arms to him, waiting for him to come and get her while she was still alive… *

* Witness's testimony: "In the society built up by the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique there was no prostitution (a good mark to their credit). There a man was not allowed to have two wives. If a married man or married woman had a lover, the couple would incur death."

Berkeley was like Seattle, the same white fog, hills of trees, angry-looking boys and girls storming into the record store, people in rainbow-colored backpacks clicking cassette cases restlessly, skateboarders, students ambling and loitering, girls wandering in a dream of ice cream, boys and girls coming out of the record store exchanging complicitous looks, as if they'd just jerked each other off, because they'd BOUGHT things, hairy-legged wiry boys in shorts, daypacks, luna-green bike helmets, a ponytailed man in earth shoes wiggling his butt against the railing, a professor grinning like Fu Manchu as he strolled, arms behind his back, discoursing to his prettiest pupil, black boys in backwards hats walking and eating pizza, then of course the long-haired fathers who carried their babies on their backs.

Well, I don't know, the editor was saying. I'm not really familiar with your politics. I guess we could maybe work something out. I'd have to put it up to the group. The fact that you're a white male kind of makes me uneasy.

Tell the group that my grandmother was a Seneca Indian, the husband lied cunningly.

Oh, now that's cool. Actually I can kind of see the resemblance.

In the end they commissioned him to do an article on the AIDS ward. The group had even chosen the title: "The Bordello of Pain. " — Because the outrage that we feel for these victims is the same outrage that we feel for women whose bodies are exploited by unmediated prostitution! a girl explained.

The husband didn't care. It was five hundred bucks. Like any prostitute, he had to get along somehow.

Armed with his myriad press cards, he entered the Bordello of Pain. Skeletons that had not yet died surrounded him like a traffic jam in an afternoon thunderstorm, glistening cars creeping all the way to the horizon; a long crooked verticality of lightning, then thunder close enough to make the car jump. . Five hundred bucks. He asked them each what drugs they were taking, how they'd contracted the disease, what message they wanted to give the world. Five hundred bucks. Some were calm and one was happy and all the rest were angry fearful people who wanted to blame someone because they were dying. The one who was happy chuckled and beckoned him and whispered: I see the same death in your eyes. - Skinny arms and legs thinned second by second in front of him. A lady coughed. She couldn't eat anymore. How skinny she was! A skeleton scuttled screaming underneath a bed; a lady said: That's where she always goes to cry. - A lady smiled at him and whispered: Thank you so much for coming here. You're so patient and quiet with me that I almost feel that you're one of us. . - A lady said to him: I guess what I want to tell the world is that when you know you're dying your choices seem to fall away. There's only one thing left to do. Whatever's the most important thing, that's what you do. That's all you have time for. .

Vanna's husband whirled upon her. - And for you, he said to her in a very low voice, what's the most important thing?

She smiled and took his hand. - Love, she said.

Death isn't sad; it's Being itself. Death is the founder of consciousness, and therefore of political awareness.

Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer,

Pure War (1983)

In foggy grassless moon-dips of gloom under spreading trees, he made up his mind to defy the embargoes on wife and life that had been set upon him; clambering down to grey smooth-packed dirt gashed deep by the fingernails of floods, he ducked under the last tree and came out onto the hill-swollen coast that was wild with grass and poison oak and weed pods and the last blue flowers of the season. Fog horns blew ragged and strange against the chilly breeze. Digging in his heels, he descended a wall of eroded dirt headlong to the beach, riding down the raking wounds his haste scored in the earth, rushing down like the powdered soil that crumbled out of his tracks. The sand was wet. Between waves he climbed up a boulder that became an island every minute or two; he stood watching the sea-lurch, chalk-grey and cold, come to cover the other bird-dunged rocks. Masses of foam near shore highlighted the dark stone teeth. Farther out, there was nothing to see but grey grey sea, grey sky; he breathed the smell of rotten kelp. . All doubt was scoured away as he swore to himself that he'd find her. He dreamed of the jungle almost every night now. He was going to her. That was what he promised himself. And as soon as he became his own witness — impossible to unoath anything now — he felt relief and exaltation, standing on that bemusseled black boulder, ocean foaming around him like beer, slapping up and spraying him… A white and grey gull perched beside him, seemingly one-legged. Rocks jutted up tirelessly in the surf.