William Vollmann - Butterfly Stories

He stood on a steep slope of scree and broken glass in worn-out shoes, fog scudding and rippling down the low waves of sage and Scotch broom (poison oak a warning among them with its bright red leaves). Suddenly the fog turned blue. It must be thinning, he thought. The bluish-greyish-white purity of fog caressed the hill's rounded swelling; the grass-tips wove gently; the flower-stalks whipped back and forth as if on strings; the bushes shuddered. .

He was back at the Hotel 38. The ragged chain of light that hung down the door-edge kept flickering whenever someone passed by. Sometimes it flickered quickly, sometimes slowly. Sometimes the light changed to darkness, and then he knew that someone was standing outside listening.

He washed his clothes, and the next morning they were still wet. He had to travel. He packed them in a plastic bag and they got hot and steamy. That evening he hung them out to dry. In the morning they were still wet. He packed them into the plastic bag. In the evening they were mildewed. He thought: Is that how people smell when they're dead?

At the restaurant where the pigtailed girl in the green T-shirt that said HONEYstood cleaning her knife, the proprietor chopped meat and then the girl took her knife outside to talk with a girl who wore a gold chain around her neck, and a man wheeled a cart slowly down the alley and blue smoke drifted from three passing motorcycles and a wide white car rolled gently by. Peering down his nose into thick spectacles, the proprietor, bulging his chest out, put a hand on his hip and gazed placidly at the world. The girl came in, wiping her nose with the back of her hand, and cleared away a table. A couple sat at another table. The woman slid her foot easily out of the sandals, bent like a bird, and sucked up Coke through her straw. The man reached into the dish and put more on his plate. The proprietor crossed his hands against his back and jiggled his buttocks to the radio song. Vanna's husband ate pork. The girl was pretty, but he remembered his wife in the reddish-brown luminescence of everything, the old teak woodwork in the hotel room glossy reddish-brown like the back of some beetle, the cabinet a redder shade of brown, some different wood maybe or just the light, then her standing there with slightly raised shoulders against the cabinet not quite smiling at him in the crimson dress and blouse with the long gold stripes down it; her arms and hands and gentle slender fingers were more chocolaty like the puddles on the Battambang road, so thick-brown they were almost orange, but her face, though partaking of brown, was much paler with a moony lemony delicacy especially where the sunlight was touching her on cheekbones and chin and sweet soft throat and between her eyes where he used to nose-kiss her to make her laugh; and her dark hair and eyes were much more intense than the brownish-black cabinet-darkness just behind her, her hair and eyes a positive negativity of perfect black! She stood with her fingers half-open and her face turned almost completely toward him, not quite, and this was his wife now and forever, her belly not entirely flat as with the younger girls, her cheekbones a little too sharp for easy beauty. A single earring caught light like a maddening crystal; she seemed to wear somebody's soul from her ear. No other soul, though; the other ear was hidden by her unguent-sweetened hair. . And he thought: Soon she'll take her shower and I'll take my shower and we'll lie side by side in the blessed darkness and I'll put my arm around her and put my head on her heart as she cradles my head and I'll listen to her heart getting slower and slower and slower. .

As the hot night faded, Joy and Oy and Noi and Pukki now probably faking their last orgasm, he sat in second class, waiting for the train to take him to the border. On the far side of the tracks, where sarongs hung over cubicles made of corrugated siding, a young woman with long black hair prayed her hands down her face. Beside her, an old lady got to her feet and hobbled barefoot, bent half over under a burden of water. A third woman, whose age seemed in between that of the other two, began to prepare rice. When it was steaming, the young woman began to chop or massage something unknown behind the metal wall, and all at once the black night sky turned morning grey, the train honked sourly, and they began to slide into the new day whose trains and buildings, still cool, mysterious, almost pure, would not fail soon to set about their own solitary routines. His window passed wet grey walls to which laundry clung like spiderwebs. Fire cans seethed orange beside a brown canal; siding-roofed houses crowded under a gracious tree, sweating a smell of smoke. An illuminated train shot by the other window, occluding the morning-clouded sky. In the dark leaf-roofed alleys, boys bicycled out, balancing ice sacks on their handlebars.

The almost empty train pulsed open-windowed past fishy-smelling palm fields, fat lady vendeuses singsonging up and down the aisle with Coke, dried fish, satay, rice… He bought an orange peacock's fan of chicken that was wired between two halves of a bamboo stick. It was very fresh and gingery and good.

The silver-blue backs of metaled houses formed a plain interrupted by shadow-crevices, a canal, an occasional tall palm. . then these ended suddenly in grass as high as the window. A silver-fogged river flashed on him like relapsing fever. Silver fog lived on the grassheads like an aura. He saw a woman with four gold rings on her finger; she pressed her hand to her nose, looking in the window at him, and then the train was past. Bushy islands undercut by silver water-ribbons gave way to housecubes open and shuttered, grey walls. The train breasted the walled river of grass. .

Again they passed another train, through whose windows he saw other heads and then windows, cutout palm foliage. Trains seemed to him like destinies. He wondered what kind of person he'd be becoming if he were on that other train.

The conductor approached in his olive-green uniform, a pad of mysterious forms under his arm like birth control calendars. He punched four and gave them to Vanna's husband. He put a pen in his mouth when he punched them. The golden star and double arrowhead on his shoulder, the golden medallion on his lapel, the grand golden lozenge-emblem just above the slick black visor of his cap, these tokens gave indisputable proof of his majesty. He leaned against the seat, almost erect, writing, saying something with a gentle smile, the long tendons vibrating in his arms. His pockmarked face was lowered, his pants creased to fresh knife-edges. After he was gone, all the passengers had to explain to one another the various forms he'd assigned them. Suddenly, Vanna's husband remembered a maxim he'd heard: In Cambodia you can give every official a gift; in fact, you'd better give every official a gift; in Thailand you'd better not give them a gift unless you know them.

At midday the train stopped for an hour. He went out and sat under the platform canopy, staring at a giant yellow Buddha whose topknot was just a little higher than the highest tree. Two skinny old monks, their once orange robes brown, leaned forward on a bench, patiently. There was a stand with glass-fronted triple shelves on narrow legs, puffed full of white balls with something red hiding inside. - He thought: I wonder if that's how my balls are now, with AIDS inside them. .