William Vollmann: Butterfly Stories

He was awakened by a pounding at the door. He heard the door handle turning futilely. Last night for the first time he'd locked himself in.

He put his underwear on and went to the door. It was the boy who believed in praxis. He'd known of his plan, and came by early to learn what had happened to him. - Congratulations! he said. You're alive!

Yeah, said the boy who wanted to be a journalist.

He stood there for awhile in his underwear, and then he began to feel that he needed to justify being alive, so that the boy who believed in praxis wouldn't feel that he'd come for nothing.

I decided to flip a coin, he said. Heads would be life, and tails would be the other. I went and flipped the coin, and it came up tails. But I figured I'd released it sooner than I meant to, so I flipped it again, and it came up tails. I decided to try one more time. I flipped it, and it came up tails. So I decided the coin was wrong.

A couple of weeks later he started slitting his wrists. He never cut deep enough to do any harm, however. A Band-Aid lengthwise seemed to do the trick.

He'd found a nice stuffy attic with an archives room that had an inner bolt on the door. Sometimes he'd go up there and stand on a chair and take a good length of parachute cord, throw it over a beam and tie it, put the noose around his neck and then slowly draw his knees up to his chest so that he was suspended. The novelty of it tended to take his mind off things, although his throat really hurt afterward.

Once he began to combine cutting his wrists and half-asphyxiating himself he believed that he'd found the ideal. Afterwards he'd dream of mummy sex with the gentle girl, by which he meant her body being suspended ropelessly above him, then slowly drifting down; when her knee touched his leg he jerked and then went limp there; her hands reached his hands, which died; her breasts rolled softly upon his heart, which fibrillated and stopped; finally she lay on top of him, quite docile and still and soft… He knew that the others didn't like mummy sex, but that was because they didn't understand it; they thought that it must be cold; they thought that she must paint her mouth with something to make it look black and smell horrible and soften like something rotten… He wanted to open her up until the pelvis snapped like breaking a wishbone. Would that be mummy sex?

After the gentle girl got married (which happened in the same week that mail service to the People's Democratic Republic of Kampuchea was suspended), he transferred his unclean attentions to a girl who wanted to be a linguist. The girl who wanted to be a linguist wrote him:

You had virtually always, by your remarks to me, given me the sense that you were not being straightforward with me, that you impregnated your words with a significance I did not grasp and was not sure I wanted to, and that you analyzed me, perhaps attempted, very subtly, to manipulate me. When I got your letter my first reaction was that I did not know what was going on but you no doubt did; no doubt you would carefully watch my reaction; perhaps you were in a way testing me. I realized later that you were not a low creature, that is to say you were not the sort of being that ought to be humiliated. But while I do wish to help you, or to be capable of helping you, or to help you if I knew how, I am deeply skeptical of my ability to do so. If I were like the gentle girl I might be someone who could help. But I am not like the gentle girl. I do not think you would want me to behave in whatever contrived manner. To whatever extent you are dissatisfied with me you want me to be different. But I am not what you want. I wish you would realize that, and stop loving me as you say you do. I do not understand why you do, for I do not and did not feel that I had solicited your love or given you any reason to love me.

He went to bed and cried. Then he fell in love with a lesbian.

They were now sitting in their own private compartment, chugging away from Sion into the pink snowy dusk. The lesbian sat reading a tour book beside him. Turning away as if to cough, he palmed the antipsychotic pill and swallowed it dry. Now he was safe for the night. The lesbian nodded at something that the tour book said. The bracelet seemed to be cutting into her plump arm. He wondered how she could stand it. The more he looked at the bracelet, the more gruesome it seemed. He kept expecting her fingers to start turning blue and falling off. But the lesbian did not seem to be uncomfortable. They passed a station full of red lights and funny glass windows.

They had seen Dubrovnik and they had seen Split. The lesbian closed her guidebook.

Check our backpacks and I'll save a seat, the lesbian said.

Save two, he said, for he was beginning to know her.

He made certain that the packs were loaded into the luggage compartment and got onto the bus.

I couldn't save two, she said. I think there's one in the back.

Well, I can sit next to you. That seat's empty, isn't it?

I want two seats to stretch out in, the lesbian explained.

Fine, he said.

Oh, by the way, said the lesbian with the sweetest of smiles, you'll have to pay for my ticket.

He went to the back and took a pill.

They arrived in Titograd at five in the morning. It was so cold that the water had frozen in hanging arches from the fountain. The boy who wanted to be a journalist used his German to ask the way to the railroad. They came to what they thought was the waiting room, but when he opened the door it turned out to be the signalmen's office. The signalmen stared at the lesbian and licked their lips. The boy who wanted to be a journalist pulled out a bottle of slivovitz and they shared it around; after that they were friends. They showed him dirty cartoons (they wouldn't let her see) and stuffed them insistently with dried pork, bread drippings, and a tin of mackerel and vegetables. The two Americans amused them. When the lesbian shook hands with them like a man, they laughed so hard a glass jumped off

the table. Curling up in the most comfortable chair, the lesbian slept, and then the signalmen asked the boy if she were his sister (they knew that English word). He said no. One man pointed at them, moved two fingers into intersecting courses, and continued the motion with the fingers attached to each other. - Ja, ja? he said. - The boy who wanted to be a journalist nodded and thumped his heart vigorously. The signalman put an imaginary ring on his finger and looked at the boy. The boy made clockwise movements with his forefinger on the face of his watch to indicate "in due time," nodded, and thumped his heart again, so that the lesbian would be protected. That satisfied them all.

They never did much work, just made long phone calls all night, bellowing and laughing alternately, and kissed some new arrival on both cheeks. They seemed very happy. In the morning, when their uniforms came back from the cleaners, they tried each other's on, put two on at a time, pulled the sleeves up, and threw their official caps all around.

The boy thought: I'd give anything to have what they have, and they'd probably give anything to have what I have.

In Saloniki they checked into a hotel for the night, and the clerk said: One bed or two?

The boy who wanted to be a journalist began to hope. Maybe she wasn't really a lesbian. Maybe she loved him enough that being a lesbian didn't matter. He waited.