The Butterfly Plague

Adolphus understood.

  3:30 p.m.

  He drove away, dangerously and quickly, down the highway winding toward Santa Monica.

  The Franklin behaved with noisy surprise at the speed.

  The past fell back from his departing shoulders like the sea from a swimmer.

  He curved out, racing, into the oncoming lane, but there was no traffic there. It was all right for him now. He felt so elated that even the enormous threat of speed did not seem to frighten him. He had not known he could drive like this. Or that anyone could.

  As a matter of course, the old nightmare came up at his mind from the grayness of the highway, but it did not disturb him any more. He watched instead with gradual fascination, all the while abandoning his ancient fear of danger, stooping across the wheel, gazing at the road with a kind of analytical candor that, in itself, caught at his interest as he drove.

  “Yes,” he recognized, “the nails, the glass, the windshield breaking. Me crushed by the steering wheel, face gone, ears, nose, and eyes torn free. My hands thrown up to stop the impossibilities. What rubbish. Why, it’s never going to happen.”

  And so he drove faster. Faster still. And on.

  The free danger of his driving caught at him with joyous anticipation. It was a kinship, newly found. Anticipation without fear. The fist that had formed down in the heat and liquid of his stomach was gone. The saliva leapt to his mouth, flavored with forbidden acids. He wanted to close his eyes. One by one, they came. The signalings of new pulses, floods of perspiration, cold showers of sweat against the inner parts of thigh and biceps. Excitement. Speed which is faster and faster without limit—shedding its bright fears like leaves across the highway. Unbearable speed. But borne. Wet and wetting. This was a race of time against his heart. Against reality. The slashing glitter of a piece of glass. The lust of nails on the road. Pictures of death. And speed. And finally, the recklessness of knowing who you are, and giving room to danger. And the possibility of something real.

  All this Adolphus felt and saw in seconds—images—until, terrified at last, knowing who he was and what real danger was, he slowed and stopped the car. A strange heat, unknown to those who do not race, touched his nostrils. He wanted to breathe.

  But what had he done? What was the matter with him? Why should he suffocate from courage?

  He closed his eyes against the staring accusation of the road where he had nearly died.

  “On Friday, noon, July the 20th, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru…”

  He heard his blood admonishing him, astounded. He sighed. The light of the great sun knocked warnings against the pale opaqueness of his leaf-shaped eyelids. But he lay there, unresponding, head thrown back, afraid to move.

  So much, he thought, for the end of the world.

  “Hullo.”

  Adolphus sat bolt upright in the car.

  “What?”

  “I said hullo,” said a voice coming from outside the window on the passenger side of the car.

  “Where are you?” said Adolphus.

  “Here. Right here.”

  Adolphus snapped his head to the right, staring, and he saw a face so young that it looked unborn. The sort of face the gods must have, he thought. Pan-eyed and -eared, with a child’s brow and the lips of some deft relative of Eros, with the whole face formed of curiosity and wonder, slandered by a monstrous nose, inept of nature, which was more a gesture of strident nobility than it was of flesh and blood and cartilage—a nose—it was really a tirade on design—across the bridge of which the rest of the face was stretched out tight and flat. A high collar, a cravat, a pair of slender shoulders in a suit, all white, giving the indication of someone sadistically immaculate, immune, through cruelty, to dust and sand. Like Dolly himself.

  “I want to go to the city,” this person said.

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t drive, you see.”

  (The image of a figure, ramrod straight in a limousine, intensely oblivious of the papery battering of wings, toyed with the idea of entering Dolly’s conscious mind.)

  “Well, I’ll drive you there,” said Adolphus, “if you’re not in a hurry, that is. I want to sit here for a moment longer.”

  “That’s all right,” said the person, speaking with the extreme formality of someone rehearsing an unknown language. “I can wait as long as you like. Are you ill?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “What’s wrong? You’re an incredible color, if I may say so.”

  “Say anything you like,” said Adolphus. He was hurt at the statement. He had hoped to look his best at such a moment as this, obviously one of the few moments-of-meeting that his dreams would ever in his whole life give up to reality. The boy was too beautiful for words. “What do you mean by incredible? Have I gone blue by any chance?”

  The other person laughed as only other people can laugh—never as we laugh, ourselves. It was a laugh so free of premeditation that it seemed hard to believe it had ever been thought of before. It signified nothing. No privacy of meaning, no contemplated private insult. No meaning but itself. To laugh.

  “I’m quite serious,” said Adolphus.

  (This was not going well at all. For some reason, physical beauty aside, he found himself disliking his encountered dream.)

  “Once, I did turn blue and I was very ill and had to be put in an oxygen tent and treated by many, many doctors. I nearly died and was in hospital for three solid months.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What color am I, then?”

  “Just white. Sort of yellow, maybe. But it’s going now. Now, you look much better.”

  “I see. Well. Do you want to get into the car?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  He did.

  They did not start. They sat, instead, quite still. Side by side. Alone.

  “Haven’t I seen you before?” said Adolphus. (The figure in the limousine decided against appearing, and gave place to the face of Jasmyn Jo. Boy-girl. Girl-boy.)

  “I don’t believe so. I very rarely do this. Go into town or anything. Just sometimes. To the movies.”

  “Ah. A fellow dreamer, I suppose.” Adolphus smiled.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “It’s nothing. Just a private thing. People who live alone. I live alone, you know.”

  “Completely alone?”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  “But you travel. You go about on the road. I’ve seen you.”

  Adolphus looked at his guest in surprise. “Seen me?”

  “Yes. I live on the beach, you see. I’ve seen you there and I’ve seen you on the road. Being driven by different women.”

  “But I thought you said.

  “Oh, I did. And it’s true. I hardly ever go out. But I watch from the roof of my house, sometimes, and there’s a sort of cliff behind it…”

  “Oh!” said Adolphus, with the lights coming on. “Oh-ho! Then it’s you. You live in that house with the fence at the end of the beach!”

  For some reason this made Octavius blush. He felt like someone who has told his real name to the police without intending to.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s me.”

  “Then you really do live alone, like me. I’ve heard about you.”

  “I’m not famous.”

  “Well, put it this way. You’re famous with my mother and my sister.”

  “Oh, why?”

  “Because they live at the other end of the beach. At least, my sister does. My mother died.”

  “The orange parasol and the swimmer?”

  “Precisely.”

  They both smiled. It was like meeting lifelong friends in the remotest Congolese village.

  “But, tell me why you don’t live there yourself,” said Octavius.

  “Well,” said Adolphus, “that’s a very long story. The story of my life, you might say.” He laughed. “Single, I came into this world, to borrow a phrase, etc.,” he said, “but to answer your question, I don’t live there because I
would not be happy there.” Nevertheless, he continued to smile. His sense of intrigue and his sense of dislike fluctuated as alternating tides. He looked again, more closely and less guardedly at the face beside him—boy and man, girl and woman.

  “But you must have met me somewhere,” Dolly said in the inverted way he had of saying things (“you” must have met “me”), “you really are so familiar.”

  He frowned. A thought came. No.

  He looked again. Perhaps. Why not?

  The pictures. Was it that? His secret pictures of “goings-on.”

  But how to say so?

  “You aren’t by any chance any kind of model, or anything? Are you?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean?”

  Adolphus’s heart leaped up. The perfect answer. An invitation delicately flavored with a coy smile.

  “A photographic model, perhaps?”

  “No…” (but still, uncertainly).

  “Uhmmmm…pictures. You know. I have some. Of gentlemen…doing things.”

  An utterly blank expression was the only reply.

  And then, “I think I may have relatives in pictures, but, you see, I don’t know. I am not acquainted with my parents.”

  Adolphus scrutinized the features one last time. The ultimate realization must have taken all of thirty seconds, the way one might count out the seconds before an explosive noise, and as each second passed, it left its scar of recognition and amazement on the listener’s face.

  “Letitia…” Adolphus barely breathed the name.

  Octavius said it too. “Letitia?”

  Dolly knew enough to turn the subject aside.

  “But, it’s incredible. No. Not Letitia.”

  “Why?”

  “She doesn’t have a child.”

  This still seemed to make sense, even with the child quite palpable and real beside him.

  Octavius waited, wanting coyly to say, “Yes she has,” but holding his secret tight.

  Adolphus almost reached out and touched him, as he might a copy of a famous statue, just to see if its texture was as true as its lines made it seem. “But it’s amazing,” he could not help saying. And so his impulse that he knew this person had been right. “What’s your name?”

  “Octavius.”

  Adolphus blinked.

  Octavius said, “You know my mother?”

  “Oh, no,” said Dolly. “Please believe me. That was a mistake.” A mistake. “Just someone you vaguely resemble. In films.”

  Soooo…thought Octavius. Then it’s absolutely certain. The Virgin is my mother.

  “Are you a movie star?” he asked, out loud.

  Adolphus did a kind of gentle double take. How enchanting it was to meet someone who did not know who he was…

  “No,” he paused.

  Pause.

  Octavius stared, waiting.

  “Please go on,” he said. “Tell me who you are.”

  “I am Adolphus Damarosch.”

  Dolly was filled with amazement. His name sounded like a bell to him.

  The child (for he had seemed up to then no more than a child) smiled. But it was not Dolly’s name that made him smile. It was his own elation. Certainly it is marvelous. Both of them thought so.

  A flight of gulls took off from some nearby rocks, flinging as they flew away a lot of noise back over their shoulders at the pair in the parked car.

  There were butterflies, too. Just a few. In the warmth.

  Adolphus decided that it was time for a cigarette. Something to make his poise at least appear less self-centered than it was. He was a new man. “Do you smoke?” he said.

  “No,” said Octavius. “But I will if you want me to.”

  “Oh, heavens!” Dolly laughed. “There’s no necessity to do anything that isn’t natural to you, my dear!”

  “It’s natural,” said Octavius. “But not to me.” (Mother had smoked, from time to time.)

  Dolly lit his own, going through the whole process of the ritual with great elegance. Then he settled back and said, “You say you’ve never met your mother.”

  “That’s right, yes.”

  “May I be so inquisitive—please don’t think me rude—but, why?”

  A flick of ash. A noncommital gaze across the sea. Idly looking at the haphazard flight of a butterfly. What an unholy conversation. How do you play a scene like this? Well, play it by ear. Just say the lines. In the end it will all make sense.

  Octavius stammered for a moment, mentally, and it affected the appearance of his face. Adolphus, withdrawing his eyes from the silently snapping wings outside, observed the change.

  “Take your time,” he said.

  “No. It isn’t that. It’s just that the answer is so point-blank.”

  “Well, then. What is it?”

  “Well. I don’t want to meet her. Yet.”

  Don’t reach. Stop making faces. Ask questions.

  “But why? I mean, can’t you find out exactly who she is, walk up to her and say, ‘Hello, aren’t you my mother?’”

  Octavius shook his head.

  “You really have no idea at all who she is?”

  Another shake, less forcible, but still a “no.”

  “It seems so crazy,” said Adolphus.

  “Well, I do have an idea,” said Octavius, who was not clever about absolute lies. “I’m just not sure.”

  He had waited so long for the answer that now, knowing it, he did not want to share it with anyone. He wanted to hoard it for a while.

  “So you still haven’t met?”

  “No. And I’m not sure we ever will.”

  “Why?”

  “I rather hate her, at this stage.”

  Ah. Yes.

  Silence. Broken by the distant—very distant—mutter of an approaching car.

  “I like you very much,” said Adolphus. “I have never met anyone quite so honest before. Imagine, not wanting to know your mother…”

  He smiled. This, too then, was part of his revelation. An honest sense of hate.

  (“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love.”)

  And hate.

  Octavius lay open another blank page. He said, “In a way, I’m afraid of losing my hate. You see, I’ve lived with this so long.”

  Yes, Dolly thought, and tossed his cigarette away.

  “You’ll start a fire!” said Octavius.

  “Oh, goodness,” said Adolphus. “Surely not. We’re right beside the water.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Octavius. “The grass is dry. Everything is. The least spark on the wind could burn us all out.”

  “Oh, very well…” said Adolphus, whose hand had been on the starter. “I was just going to drive you into town.”

  “Good,” said Octavius. “But it can wait another minute or so.”

  They both got out of the car.

  “Where did you throw it?”

  “I don’t know. I just flicked it over my shoulder.”

  The distant motorcar, no longer distant, appeared around the corner, but was not at once observed. It whirred like a biplane and Octavius did at least give a slight glance at the sky. But fire is all important and in drought, such as the drought now, it could mean death.

  “On the road? On the verge?”

  “I tell you I don’t know.”

  Whirrrrrr…whirrrrrrrr.

  And, stooping blindly to retrieve the blazing canyons from the grass, they searched. Above them, the sun blazed on butterflies that seemed to be on fire.

  “Must have gone…” (whirrrrr) “…out on the…” (whirring…whirring…) “…road.” And thinking. Someone new. So honest. Revelations. Funny. Fires and trips to town and the mysteries of mothers. Never met. Oh, goodness, the way the world is set ablaze is strange. With…(whirring)…strangers…bringing revelations, innocence, and (whirrrr) death. The (whirring…whirrrrrrrr) innocence of death. That bridge…

  Adolphus cried, “I have it. Here!” And instantly up
on the spot was struck and hurtled upward by a small red roadster driven by a traveling salesman who had come all the way that day from San Francisco on an errand of the utmost urgency.

  The salesman, whose name it is important not to mention (it is such an ordinary name and would not look appropriate at this moment), sat in his roadster, whimpering. He said first of all something about being in a hurry, and then he sobbed, and then he just shook and made noises, like a dog whose chain has become wound around a tree in the panic of a thunderstorm, and who is forced to sit out the thunder and lightning and to contemplate their violence from a seated position.

  For a brief moment, too, it seemed that Octavius was not going to move. Never going to advance on the prostrate form which lay, glazed with agony and stillness, on the road.

  Having seen so many films in his life, Octavius was only aware of the semblance of death. He did not know that, in real life, blood was a signal for absolute panic and concern.

  “We should do something,” he finally whispered, “I suppose.”

  The salesman from San Francisco whimpered as bravely as he could, still sitting in his place. He managed to convert part of his shaking fit into a nod of approval.

  Octavius had been searching for the cigarette on the far, sea-side of the car. He rose and ran the tips of his ten fingers, one by one, over the cottony sheen of his thighs. “Will you—or will I?” he seemed to say, giving a few jab-by, unrhythmic parts of his black-and-brown stare to the salesman. Like a choice of gifts. But he received no reply. The salesman merely sat and abhorred his deed.

  Guiding himself through the tender aid of his fingers, Octavius found his way around the hood of the Franklin. He brushed against the full dusty length of its silvered bumpers, and thus the properly soiled appearance of an accident began.

  He got as far as the very edge of the road, and stopped.

  It seemed a physical impossibility to trespass further. Out there in the middle of the river of cement lay a man in pink trousers, drowning in blood.

  Octavius could not recall the man’s name. Idiotically, he was only aware of what his mind was doing, up against the brick wall of this terrible event; it was relieving itself in a stream of yellow nerve ends, and there seemed to be a panic-stricken signaling from various other parts of him which called out for information. And thus he felt that the first imperative thing to do was to remember the man’s name.