The Butterfly Plague (35 page)

So she swam.

One.

2:45 p.m.

Adolphus had read all through the remainder of the morning. He had read through lunch (without eating) and now, at midafternoon, he was finished.

He sat exhausted and elated in the watching chair, with
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
still clasped in his lap.

He stared at his mother’s bed.

Naomi was gone forever. So was Myra. And what was the pattern? There was none. None that was discernible. Like the butterflies—they came and went, lived and died. Migrated. Counter-migrated. Stood still and fled.

He dangled the book and tried to see through the curtains to the sea.

He saw light; perhaps he saw motion, but nothing was clear—there were no definitions, no demarcations—only a sense of presence, of weight and movement—light and dark—all mingling and marking like a star where Myra was, and Naomi. Or what had taken them, whether by urging or demand he could not tell. Tides. The pull of death.

He wanted to sit on the book and brood over it like a hen, so that in this room, sitting on this nest, he might hatch an unshakable answer.

But he laid the book aside.

It was a book about people on a bridge—vulnerable people, vulnerable bridge, obeying together a vulnerable god. They had fallen in another time, to death.

He looked at his booted feet. There they were. Vulnerable. He looked at his careful knees, encased in the pink impeccable ducks. Vulnerable. He stared into his crotch. There was life itself, denied. And vulnerable. He glanced across his stomach. Vulnerable. His thin, indented chest, his hands. All vulnerable. He touched his bearded, neat sharp chin—a point for impact and entry. Vulnerable. He gazed into mirrors, and there he was, all twenty of him, thirty of him. Forty. Vulnerable. Ad infinitum. Vulnerable. Frail.

Could he not select one? Could he not choose one from the images and make it safe? Could he not escape, as his image had, into a mirrored existence somewhere safe? Could he not live forever? Safe?

No.

The bridge, all bridges, everywhere, must fall. And the bridge was love. Or did it mean that? No, it did not mean that. It meant the bridge that wasn’t there was love. The invisible, unseen bridge.

All those people. Falling.

All those people. Falling down.

Falling down forever. Into love.

3:00 p.m.

When he emerged from the bedroom into the living room, Miss Bonkers was asleep over her knitting. (Why do people knit in California? Dolly wondered.) Ruth was nowhere to be seen.

He would not disturb them. Ruth was probably asleep herself, in her room or on the beach or somewhere.

Dolly watched Miss Bonkers.

Miss Bonkers’s profession was death. Without it, she could not live. The list of her clients was long, and it culminated, altered, in the demise of Naomi.

It seemed that there would be no more deaths for Miss Bonkers until her own. Now she would minister to life. She didn’t know this, of course. But she might have sensed it. She had changed. There was no doubt about that. The glint was gone from her eye—the purse from her lips—the twitch from her fingers. Her laughter had gentled down and her voice had softened around the edges of consonants, broadened through the centers of vowels. What had done all this? Not just her books and her knitting and the presence of the sea and her dreams of airplanes.

It was Naomi’s doing, Dolly thought. For such is the power of how we die. And live.

Adolphus tiptoed onto the balcony and looked along the sand.

The gypsies were out. But only the very youngest, and their father. The rest must be in school, still, and perhaps B.J. had gone off in the little Ford to pick them up.

Noah was not wearing his shirt. He was a very handsome man with a well-defined, rather than a muscular, body.

Adolphus watched him. He wore dark trousers, and his feet were bare. All at once he hoisted a little girl onto his shoulders, and Adolphus could see that she brandished a butterfly net. The other children, who were all boys, carried tin pails with sailboats, rubber balls, and choo-choo trains painted on them. They all began to run.

Noah’s run was like a horse’s canter. He joggled Charity up and down, holding onto her fat little legs. Now, all of them were laughing, Charity crying out in her high-pitched, strident sing-song, “Take me to a butterfly, take me to a butterfly!” And Noah, running, would spot one and veer in its direction, trying to point it out to her with little ducks and jabs of his head.

How beautiful they were, Dolly dreamed: Noah with his coltish gaiety, the little boys with their ragged flags of uncut hair, the wild Boadicea-child with her net, and the barking, joyous yellow dog who circled and fell and circled and rolled and circled and jumped among them.

They moved in Dolly’s direction. The running became leaping. The leaping became a dance—the dance became a celebration.

Charity caught a butterfly. It was given into an upraised pail. The little boys pounced on the corpses that littered the beach. It did not seem cruel; it did not seem callous. It seemed—
useful
, somehow, what they were doing.

Noah began to fly. Charity held onto his hair with one hand and flapped the net with the other. Noah whirled and whirred and flew with his arms. They were all laughing, all playing, all—unbearably—alive.

And Dolly watched.

The celebration fell in a circle.

Adolphus heard one of the boys (it was Josh) say, “Papa, all the dead butterflies: I think it’s sad.” And Noah said, “Nothing is sad that’s as it ought to be.”

Then Adolphus thought, Yes, the butterflies are dying—but they’ve lived.

Now the children began to sing, and Adolphus had to sit down in a chair to listen, because a bleakness was rising in him—the bleakness of loss. That he had not taken what existed to be taken—which was life—and had never drifted, as these real people did, on the current of his existence, freely floating, waving at the sky, certain of the shore, dabbling with complacent fingers at the bright stones, the little pebbles, the colored, sparkling sands of the shallows.

All his life had been a picture of life. Something through a lens, far away at the end of a camera, beyond telescopes, caught in binoculars, laid out under glass. He’d thrived on pictures. On scripted situations, on the careful, brilliant assemblage of pretended beauty. On prearranged trees, modified mountains, altered architecture, Max-Factored faces, flattened or padded bosoms, dyed hair and wigs, well-modulated vowels, coached consonants, and perfume from Paris.

Down there on the sand there was something that he had never known. It was something he could never have arranged, or set, or directed. He could not have coaxed it from a thousand writers or described it to a million cameramen. It could not be done because it was.

That was why Myra had died. She hadn’t believed. She hadn’t believed in what she was—in the fat lady—in Old Fat. She had only believed in what she thought she was—in what she thought she ought to be—in what was expected of her—and, finally, demanded.

You die when you can’t be real, Dolly thought. When you can’t see who you are and when you cannot see what is.

You die when you forget the Milky Way. What is there. What
is
—
there
.

The butterflies.

The gypsies on the beach.

Naomi’s seals. Naomi herself.

Just as he had fallen in love with Jasmyn Jo, who wasn’t there. Who didn’t exist. Who wasn’t a boy. Who was a girl. Who masqueraded.

Stop the masquerade. Take off the dominoes and cross the bridge.

It all fell together, and Dolly closed his eyes and felt faint with the pleasure of it, sick with anticipation. He was going to meet reality.

The sea sounded its afternoon hush and the circle of gypsies, the Trelfords—Noah, his dog and his children—sang. They all seemed to sing together—children, man, dog, and sea—even the birds were singing.

Myra won’t die, Adolphus thought. I’ll make her live. It will only be in my mind, but it will be real because she’ll be walking around alive in me—in everything I do so long as I try, so long as I believe in what she really was.

A cloud of butterflies drifted overhead, close enough to touch. They didn’t make a sound.

At Fringes Field the dead had died. That was real. He’d been there. He’d seen it. But it wasn’t the butterflies’ fault. It was the fault of people. People who didn’t believe. Who hadn’t believed what they saw with their own eyes. If only they had stood and stared, had laughed at them, joyously, as Noah and his children did.

Adolphus stood up. He could feel his knees gently touching one another.

He looked over the rail.

Noah was staring at the sky. The boys were digging pits in the sand.

Charity had laid aside her net and had stretched out one arm, and a platoon of monarchs sat there now, examined and spoken to by the little girl.

“Don’t fly away,” she said. “Don’t fly away from me. Rest for a while. Stay here. And rest. Please.”

Adolphus smiled.

The dog slept.

The butterflies waited.

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.