The Butterfly
by Donnie (Tobie) Denome
The Butterfly
蝴蝶
To Kass, there is something enchanting to the curve of the Butterfly's cheekbones. They meet for the first time in the bathroom outside the school psychologist's office, where Kass is retching into the toilet after being beat up by the Thuggish Triad that roams the halls. He cradles his arm with his other. It might be broken.
The Butterfly is there when he turns around. He watches as the figure walks towards him, extending one exquisitely sculpted hand to him. Kass takes the hand, watching as its owner places the other one on his injured arm. The touch is comforting.
He holds back a scream of anguish, a scream of fury throughout the whole episode. The Butterfly, though definitely human, is beyond perception. Wherever they touch his skin illuminates with the energy of a thousand fireflies, each lightening bug flashing its tiny lantern across his eyes. The figure smells of the barest hint of rosemary despite the shit-stink of the bathroom and whenever they touch the gentle thunder of Pachelbel's Canon rips through his ears.
Kass's arm is still on fire – it will eventually be splinted and its owner ordered out of a gym class he isn't enrolled in – but he makes his way to the bathroom door along with the Butterfly. This is where they part ways.
He is desperately, helplessly, hopelessly, nakedly in love and does not try to hide it. He stumbles into the office covered in vomit, a black eye coming on, his shirtsleeve torn, clutching his arm to his chest with his bag lolling open. The school psychologist, Dr. Spanner-in-the-Works, as half the student population calls her, sits at her desk and stares at him.
She sends him home very quickly. The Thuggish Triad are never punished even though everyone knows it was them that did this to him.
***
His sister, Diane, is seven. She complains about having to go to their Aunt Melanie's house while their parents take him to the emergency room. His younger brother, Neal, is too young to be putting up much of a fuss.
At the emergency room, they examine his arm. It takes about five minutes to determine that it is broken but not too badly and deserves a splint. Then, in order to decide what painkillers to prescribe him, they must take his medical history.
The room sounds of Ride of the Valkyries. Hospital rooms always do. The walls ooze lentil soup, the smell almost overwhelming.
At that particular moment, he doesn't much care what painkillers interact badly with risperidone since his arm is killing him, he can't sit still, and the Butterfly is back. He moves towards the figure, holding his good arm out. His fingers brush the skin, the ivory-silk skin, and he loses himself in the figure's eyes.
They're green and gold, like something out of a ornate tapestry. The lips are pale, pale pink, the pink of a washed out photograph. Then the skin turns translucent and he can see the mechanics of his clockwork Butterfly, his wonderful majestic Butterfly. The gears spin to bring color to the defined face and the plain ivory sheen turns into a wavering film of colors, sparkling, dancing.
“…schizophrenia, diagnosis at age fourteen,” drones the doctor.
“Yes, that's correct…”
The Butterfly takes his hands and motions for him to follow. Down the halls in an instant, out a door that says DO NOT OPEN in large red letters, onto a balcony. They sit, their legs dangling over the edge, like workmen on a steel beam a million feet above the ground. The air is rice crisps dissolving on his tongue, fuzzy slippers all over his body.
When they find him, the Butterfly is gone. No one can understand how he got out that door, that triple locked door leading onto a balcony that shouldn't be there. How the hell did this boy get out onto this balcony? How the hell did he get through the entirety of psychiatric without anyone noticing?
***
Spanner-in-the-Works orders him into her office first thing Monday morning and interrogates him about what happened at the hospital. He misses music theory and government.
He stares at her. “How did you escape?” she finally asks.
The Butterfly is sitting next to him, stroking him splint gently. They squeeze hands, skin soft against skin. He trembles slightly under Spanner-in-the-Works's deadly stare. She's still waiting for an answer.
The office stinks of antiseptic cream, giving him a headache. “How did you get out of the hospital?”
The Butterfly is there again, brushing his hand gently. The touch is reassuring. It makes him feel invincible. My God, his savior whispers, just answer her question. You know how it happened.
Kass looks at the woman in front of him, her forehead crinkled with worry. Not worry for him, no, but worry that she'll lose her job if she can't crack this puzzle. She does not care what he feels as long as she gets answers. None of them do. “I followed the Butterfly,” he hears himself say from a million miles away. “It wasn't me, I swear.”
She tells him that the Butterfly does not exist, admonishes him for not taking the pills he is sure he took that morning and the night before and the morning and night before that. Her voice grows until she is shouting so loud they can hear her in the science classes halfway across campus. Kass shrinks back against the bookshelf, praying for it to end but it doesn't.
He is out the door, sprinting down the hallway past the guidance offices, past the attendance secretary who is chewing out a truant for the third time that month, out of the administration building, across the quad. There is a doorway that opens onto a hallway and another doorway that he opens to reveal Dr. Lanson, head of the mathematics department, sitting at his desk and correcting papers. “The whiteboard is right there,” he says. “There's a packet with the new problems at your desk.” Kass hasn't taken one of Lanson's classes since the freshman year but the old man still keeps a desk for him. He was the only one for whom things didn't change when Kass was diagnosed. “I have a class next period but you're welcome to work through break. There's butcher paper if you want to stay longer and have a pass.”
Yes, the Butterfly says, yes. You can miss Japanese. You can miss Contemporary Literature. You could miss your classes at Lumina Civitatis this afternoon. All that matters is your mathematics proofs.
While he doesn't want to miss Japanese – あなたは私の蝶蝶です。–he could stand to miss Lit. No one makes Bromden jokes in here. He picks up a packet and starts copying it onto the whiteboard while the Butterfly climbs up on the wooden stool next to the overhead projector. The math takes all of his focus and leaves none for his other problems.
Math is Appalachian Spring. The marker is sweet and sour candies and the room is perfume-and-cigarette-smoke, the smell of an old room.
Der Schmetterling
Together they sprint across the country, their shoes a beat-up old car he uses a semester of automotive technology's teachings to fix up outside of Chino. He drives with such a passion two people ask if he's just gotten out.
“Yes,” he always answers, “into life.”
He could have applied and been accepted to any college he wanted but he didn't. He withered away through his senior year and afterward started his journey into the great unknown. Now, some years later, he is on the road, a vagabond through the ups and downs of life.
The Butterfly corners him in a skanky motel one night. It is the kind infamous for hookers and drugs and ax murders but it is all he can afford. He stares at the wavering form and something wells up inside him. It sickens him, his desire for this illusion. He resists it, resists this mirage of so many colors and desires, and instead goes out to find someone at a bar.
He has never been good with people. His skills have only lessened as his condition has worsened. When he stumbles back into the room with someone trailing him, the Butterfly is there, calling out to him. “You – hic! – aren't helping,” he whispers.
“Helping?” his partner responds, holding Kass close enough that he can see the track-marks and scabs. It is no matter. “Helping what?”
“Never mind,” he says, leaning in for another kiss. “Those how you numb the pain of it all?”
“Yeah.” The kisses are soft and the voice is rough, hardened by years of bellowing drunkenly and cigarettes incessantly chain-smoked in dark corners. “How do you?”
He doesn't but he is compelled to lie, to say anything besides the god-awful truth that he deals neither with reality nor his fantasy land. While trying to think of something to say, he tastes the sugar-peppermint of the cigarette smoke, hears the punky beat of the room as it tosses and turns. “I like mathematics,” he finally says.
And toss and turn they do, hardly caring what the people in the neighboring rooms think.
***
Much, much later when he is once against alone he hears the strains of Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio? coming, appropriately enough, from a radio across the way. He turns over, extending a hand towards the sound and –
蝶蝶
“I wish someone would turn that music down,” the Butterfly's voice floats to him in a haloperidol haze. He can't move and his left arm aches down to the bones. There is something thick and itchy on it. He raises his right arm and sees only vague shapes.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip-drip.
Drrrrip!
Drip-Dr. Sanchez, please call staff reception-drip.
The pipes, the leaky pipes, are the heart of this hospital. He can't remember what he did to end up here. He can't remember anything besides the screaming pain of his arm impacting something hard. The Butterfly is there, stroking his forehead. It is comforting, more comforting than anything will be for a while.
People hurry in and out of the room, asking questions.
Do you know your name?
Do you know where you are?
Can you tell me why you're here?
Is there someone I can contact?
You broke your hand trying to get out of a dead-end alleyway. Do you remember that?
They keep him on the sedatives for sixty hours. Sixty hours is just enough to give a grace period of the last twelve. Seventy-two hours before they either have to release him or come before a judge to explain the circumstances. Even without RSI and haloperidol in his system, he still can't remember anything. “Shock Shop,” the Butterfly whispers.
“Be quiet,” but their conversations attract the attention of the staff, who either don't care or take them way too seriously. “They can't do nothin' unless I consent.”
“Double negatives,” the Butterfly teases, “don't use them.”
He vomits all over himself before having to go before the judge. The public defender appointed to him is a kid in his first year out of school and scared to death of a man who doesn't have the presence of mind to hurt him. They say exactly two words to each other: “Good luck,” Kass whispers to him as the Butterfly disappears from the courtroom in clothes much more appropriate to the situation than Kass's vomit-covered tee-shirt and ripped blue jeans.
The judge, while halfway sympathetic to his plight, deems him not competent and sends him back to the room for another bout of torture as they play with his mind while he sleeps and the Butterfly plays coy with him in his waking hours.
***
It is late at night and most of the lights are off in the hospital, leaving only shadows that torment paranoids like himself. He strokes the flickering face in front of him, the anchor in his tumultuous sea. It is illuminated by the candle the ivory hands hold. The tiny flame sparks and spits at him, a hissing dragon suddenly.
The Butterfly doesn't flinch as his hands caress the soft cheekbones. “Mm,” he mutters, knowing there is absolutely nothing they can do here without alerting everyone. “Mm.”
“You like that?”
“So much so,” and the Butterfly is rubbing his cheek back, smiling wildly at him.
פרפר
He wakes up in the morning with Diane clutching his broken hand. “I knew it,” she sobs, “you'd end up like this one day. Why did you have to go and punch that wall?” as if that's what got him in here. “Why'd you have to punch the goddamned wall, Kass?”
“Sis,” he stares up at her, wanting so hard to tell her to get out, never talk to him again, tell their family never to contact him, the unloved defective son, again, “I don't remember the wall.”
“Christ, Kass. You gotta remember the wall. You were screaming at it, that's what they said. Screaming and pounding like you were gonna die behind it.”
“I don't, Di. Stop it, stop telling me,” he slurred. “You should go – they don't want you to see me.”
“I'm not. I've got a apartment here – I left New York when I heard you were getting worse – Kass, I am going to make sure you get better.”
He wants to tell her that she should stop wasting her life, that she should move on, ignore him, but he can't bring himself to. “Thanks, sis.”
“I'm trying to get them to allow me your guardianship – ” oh, crap “ – but it's a process.”
She leans down to kiss him on the forehead. For the first time in ages he smells something real – not the olfactory hallucinations or the sensory confusion of synesthesia that plague him, but the very real smell of her rosemary perfume. It is the same kind of perfume their mother wore. Some second cousin or other makes it and sends it to all the women in the family. When he turned fourteen, she asked if he wanted a bottle to give as a gift when the time was right. He said yes but never gave it away.
Rosemary … rosemary … rosemary. This is the scent he falls asleep with.
La Mariposa
The Butterfly looks out the open window, flicking cigarette ash out down to the sidewalk twenty feet below. “San Francisco. Home of the best and the crazy. Here's to you,” and they toast with the cans of all-natural fruit juice sugar-free soda that Diane buys by the carton and abandons with him. “Mm. Goes down well, doesn't it?”
It tastes like rotten pomegranates and is bright, electric blue. He pours it into the planter box outside the other window. “Do you like rosemary?” he asks the Butterfly.
“No.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He looks at the figure next to him, the figure that smells of rosemary despite hating it, the figure who is the summation of all he ever wanted. “What are we going to do?”
“What do you want to do?” the Butterfly responds, holding his hand, his still tender hand, gently.
“I – don't know.”
“I can't help you if you don't know,” and the figure has vanished.
Kass sits in the room alone, waiting something to happen. He's dressed, with nowhere to go, nothing to go there in, no one to talk to, nothing to dull his delusions, and the dread and hatred of his life pressing down on him. There is nothing in the room except the windows, which do not open more than a crack; his chair; and a package of sodas.
He doesn't know when Diane will be coming over next. He has a few friends in this city now, having been here for a few months, but none of them will visit.
He nods off and, when the church bell strikes half-past-ten, he wakes to the soft touch of the Butterfly's fingers. “Hey.”
“How are you? Drunk? You look it.”
Well, he wants to say, it's not my fault I've been alone. “I'm just fine,” he snarls. “Just fine, you.”
“What are we going to do?”
There's another room, the bedroom, and they stumble into it and talk and talk and talk and stumble out of it laughing and giggling like two teenagers alive on a sleepless summer night. He says something abut doesn't know what it is, hoping the Butterfly will, maybe, maybe….
“I love you,” the Butterfly whispers.
“I love you, too.”
And then the figure laughs – they don't mean it, no, not at all – and as he is caught in that wicked, harsh stare, Kass can only hope that he might be all right someday.
But now? Now he's just a mess.
Le Papillon
They take a walk in Golden Gate Park, holding hands. They pass graffiti'd walls, the Academy of Sciences, the de Young, the tea gardens. At some point, they circle back around to a vivid black-and-white of two teenagers in the middle of a passionate kiss. “That's something,” Kass whispers.
“He's invisible,” the Butterfly says. “She's like you. Special.”
“Mm. Special isn't always a bad thing.” He sits down against the wall, remembering that one terrible day in the school bathroom, the kindness of Dr. Lanson, the years of imitations passing as he tried to come close to the Butterfly….
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah. I guess… no. I'm not. I would be.”
“If not for what?”
“I'm a mess,” and they embrace right there in the park that smells of eucalyptus and the sweet flowers in the conservatory. Kass feels the Butterfly's warmth and sighs, “Oh, I am such a mess,” into the man's shirt.
The author would like to thank Martha Lampert (German), Stefanie Fan (Japanese), Clementine Chou (French), Brij Desai (Spanish) Mayan Hazan (Hebrew), and Eugene Cheng (Chinese) for help with the translation of “the butterfly” and acknowledge that this story could not have been written without listening to “Papillon” by The Airborne Toxic Event more times than is probably healthy.
by Donnie (Tobie) Denome
The Butterfly
蝴蝶
To Kass, there is something enchanting to the curve of the Butterfly's cheekbones. They meet for the first time in the bathroom outside the school psychologist's office, where Kass is retching into the toilet after being beat up by the Thuggish Triad that roams the halls. He cradles his arm with his other. It might be broken.
The Butterfly is there when he turns around. He watches as the figure walks towards him, extending one exquisitely sculpted hand to him. Kass takes the hand, watching as its owner places the other one on his injured arm. The touch is comforting.
He holds back a scream of anguish, a scream of fury throughout the whole episode. The Butterfly, though definitely human, is beyond perception. Wherever they touch his skin illuminates with the energy of a thousand fireflies, each lightening bug flashing its tiny lantern across his eyes. The figure smells of the barest hint of rosemary despite the shit-stink of the bathroom and whenever they touch the gentle thunder of Pachelbel's Canon rips through his ears.
Kass's arm is still on fire – it will eventually be splinted and its owner ordered out of a gym class he isn't enrolled in – but he makes his way to the bathroom door along with the Butterfly. This is where they part ways.
He is desperately, helplessly, hopelessly, nakedly in love and does not try to hide it. He stumbles into the office covered in vomit, a black eye coming on, his shirtsleeve torn, clutching his arm to his chest with his bag lolling open. The school psychologist, Dr. Spanner-in-the-Works, as half the student population calls her, sits at her desk and stares at him.
She sends him home very quickly. The Thuggish Triad are never punished even though everyone knows it was them that did this to him.
***
His sister, Diane, is seven. She complains about having to go to their Aunt Melanie's house while their parents take him to the emergency room. His younger brother, Neal, is too young to be putting up much of a fuss.
At the emergency room, they examine his arm. It takes about five minutes to determine that it is broken but not too badly and deserves a splint. Then, in order to decide what painkillers to prescribe him, they must take his medical history.
The room sounds of Ride of the Valkyries. Hospital rooms always do. The walls ooze lentil soup, the smell almost overwhelming.
At that particular moment, he doesn't much care what painkillers interact badly with risperidone since his arm is killing him, he can't sit still, and the Butterfly is back. He moves towards the figure, holding his good arm out. His fingers brush the skin, the ivory-silk skin, and he loses himself in the figure's eyes.
They're green and gold, like something out of a ornate tapestry. The lips are pale, pale pink, the pink of a washed out photograph. Then the skin turns translucent and he can see the mechanics of his clockwork Butterfly, his wonderful majestic Butterfly. The gears spin to bring color to the defined face and the plain ivory sheen turns into a wavering film of colors, sparkling, dancing.
“…schizophrenia, diagnosis at age fourteen,” drones the doctor.
“Yes, that's correct…”
The Butterfly takes his hands and motions for him to follow. Down the halls in an instant, out a door that says DO NOT OPEN in large red letters, onto a balcony. They sit, their legs dangling over the edge, like workmen on a steel beam a million feet above the ground. The air is rice crisps dissolving on his tongue, fuzzy slippers all over his body.
When they find him, the Butterfly is gone. No one can understand how he got out that door, that triple locked door leading onto a balcony that shouldn't be there. How the hell did this boy get out onto this balcony? How the hell did he get through the entirety of psychiatric without anyone noticing?
***
Spanner-in-the-Works orders him into her office first thing Monday morning and interrogates him about what happened at the hospital. He misses music theory and government.
He stares at her. “How did you escape?” she finally asks.
The Butterfly is sitting next to him, stroking him splint gently. They squeeze hands, skin soft against skin. He trembles slightly under Spanner-in-the-Works's deadly stare. She's still waiting for an answer.
The office stinks of antiseptic cream, giving him a headache. “How did you get out of the hospital?”
The Butterfly is there again, brushing his hand gently. The touch is reassuring. It makes him feel invincible. My God, his savior whispers, just answer her question. You know how it happened.
Kass looks at the woman in front of him, her forehead crinkled with worry. Not worry for him, no, but worry that she'll lose her job if she can't crack this puzzle. She does not care what he feels as long as she gets answers. None of them do. “I followed the Butterfly,” he hears himself say from a million miles away. “It wasn't me, I swear.”
She tells him that the Butterfly does not exist, admonishes him for not taking the pills he is sure he took that morning and the night before and the morning and night before that. Her voice grows until she is shouting so loud they can hear her in the science classes halfway across campus. Kass shrinks back against the bookshelf, praying for it to end but it doesn't.
He is out the door, sprinting down the hallway past the guidance offices, past the attendance secretary who is chewing out a truant for the third time that month, out of the administration building, across the quad. There is a doorway that opens onto a hallway and another doorway that he opens to reveal Dr. Lanson, head of the mathematics department, sitting at his desk and correcting papers. “The whiteboard is right there,” he says. “There's a packet with the new problems at your desk.” Kass hasn't taken one of Lanson's classes since the freshman year but the old man still keeps a desk for him. He was the only one for whom things didn't change when Kass was diagnosed. “I have a class next period but you're welcome to work through break. There's butcher paper if you want to stay longer and have a pass.”
Yes, the Butterfly says, yes. You can miss Japanese. You can miss Contemporary Literature. You could miss your classes at Lumina Civitatis this afternoon. All that matters is your mathematics proofs.
While he doesn't want to miss Japanese – あなたは私の蝶蝶です。–he could stand to miss Lit. No one makes Bromden jokes in here. He picks up a packet and starts copying it onto the whiteboard while the Butterfly climbs up on the wooden stool next to the overhead projector. The math takes all of his focus and leaves none for his other problems.
Math is Appalachian Spring. The marker is sweet and sour candies and the room is perfume-and-cigarette-smoke, the smell of an old room.
Der Schmetterling
Together they sprint across the country, their shoes a beat-up old car he uses a semester of automotive technology's teachings to fix up outside of Chino. He drives with such a passion two people ask if he's just gotten out.
“Yes,” he always answers, “into life.”
He could have applied and been accepted to any college he wanted but he didn't. He withered away through his senior year and afterward started his journey into the great unknown. Now, some years later, he is on the road, a vagabond through the ups and downs of life.
The Butterfly corners him in a skanky motel one night. It is the kind infamous for hookers and drugs and ax murders but it is all he can afford. He stares at the wavering form and something wells up inside him. It sickens him, his desire for this illusion. He resists it, resists this mirage of so many colors and desires, and instead goes out to find someone at a bar.
He has never been good with people. His skills have only lessened as his condition has worsened. When he stumbles back into the room with someone trailing him, the Butterfly is there, calling out to him. “You – hic! – aren't helping,” he whispers.
“Helping?” his partner responds, holding Kass close enough that he can see the track-marks and scabs. It is no matter. “Helping what?”
“Never mind,” he says, leaning in for another kiss. “Those how you numb the pain of it all?”
“Yeah.” The kisses are soft and the voice is rough, hardened by years of bellowing drunkenly and cigarettes incessantly chain-smoked in dark corners. “How do you?”
He doesn't but he is compelled to lie, to say anything besides the god-awful truth that he deals neither with reality nor his fantasy land. While trying to think of something to say, he tastes the sugar-peppermint of the cigarette smoke, hears the punky beat of the room as it tosses and turns. “I like mathematics,” he finally says.
And toss and turn they do, hardly caring what the people in the neighboring rooms think.
***
Much, much later when he is once against alone he hears the strains of Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio? coming, appropriately enough, from a radio across the way. He turns over, extending a hand towards the sound and –
蝶蝶
“I wish someone would turn that music down,” the Butterfly's voice floats to him in a haloperidol haze. He can't move and his left arm aches down to the bones. There is something thick and itchy on it. He raises his right arm and sees only vague shapes.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip-drip.
Drrrrip!
Drip-Dr. Sanchez, please call staff reception-drip.
The pipes, the leaky pipes, are the heart of this hospital. He can't remember what he did to end up here. He can't remember anything besides the screaming pain of his arm impacting something hard. The Butterfly is there, stroking his forehead. It is comforting, more comforting than anything will be for a while.
People hurry in and out of the room, asking questions.
Do you know your name?
Do you know where you are?
Can you tell me why you're here?
Is there someone I can contact?
You broke your hand trying to get out of a dead-end alleyway. Do you remember that?
They keep him on the sedatives for sixty hours. Sixty hours is just enough to give a grace period of the last twelve. Seventy-two hours before they either have to release him or come before a judge to explain the circumstances. Even without RSI and haloperidol in his system, he still can't remember anything. “Shock Shop,” the Butterfly whispers.
“Be quiet,” but their conversations attract the attention of the staff, who either don't care or take them way too seriously. “They can't do nothin' unless I consent.”
“Double negatives,” the Butterfly teases, “don't use them.”
He vomits all over himself before having to go before the judge. The public defender appointed to him is a kid in his first year out of school and scared to death of a man who doesn't have the presence of mind to hurt him. They say exactly two words to each other: “Good luck,” Kass whispers to him as the Butterfly disappears from the courtroom in clothes much more appropriate to the situation than Kass's vomit-covered tee-shirt and ripped blue jeans.
The judge, while halfway sympathetic to his plight, deems him not competent and sends him back to the room for another bout of torture as they play with his mind while he sleeps and the Butterfly plays coy with him in his waking hours.
***
It is late at night and most of the lights are off in the hospital, leaving only shadows that torment paranoids like himself. He strokes the flickering face in front of him, the anchor in his tumultuous sea. It is illuminated by the candle the ivory hands hold. The tiny flame sparks and spits at him, a hissing dragon suddenly.
The Butterfly doesn't flinch as his hands caress the soft cheekbones. “Mm,” he mutters, knowing there is absolutely nothing they can do here without alerting everyone. “Mm.”
“You like that?”
“So much so,” and the Butterfly is rubbing his cheek back, smiling wildly at him.
פרפר
He wakes up in the morning with Diane clutching his broken hand. “I knew it,” she sobs, “you'd end up like this one day. Why did you have to go and punch that wall?” as if that's what got him in here. “Why'd you have to punch the goddamned wall, Kass?”
“Sis,” he stares up at her, wanting so hard to tell her to get out, never talk to him again, tell their family never to contact him, the unloved defective son, again, “I don't remember the wall.”
“Christ, Kass. You gotta remember the wall. You were screaming at it, that's what they said. Screaming and pounding like you were gonna die behind it.”
“I don't, Di. Stop it, stop telling me,” he slurred. “You should go – they don't want you to see me.”
“I'm not. I've got a apartment here – I left New York when I heard you were getting worse – Kass, I am going to make sure you get better.”
He wants to tell her that she should stop wasting her life, that she should move on, ignore him, but he can't bring himself to. “Thanks, sis.”
“I'm trying to get them to allow me your guardianship – ” oh, crap “ – but it's a process.”
She leans down to kiss him on the forehead. For the first time in ages he smells something real – not the olfactory hallucinations or the sensory confusion of synesthesia that plague him, but the very real smell of her rosemary perfume. It is the same kind of perfume their mother wore. Some second cousin or other makes it and sends it to all the women in the family. When he turned fourteen, she asked if he wanted a bottle to give as a gift when the time was right. He said yes but never gave it away.
Rosemary … rosemary … rosemary. This is the scent he falls asleep with.
La Mariposa
The Butterfly looks out the open window, flicking cigarette ash out down to the sidewalk twenty feet below. “San Francisco. Home of the best and the crazy. Here's to you,” and they toast with the cans of all-natural fruit juice sugar-free soda that Diane buys by the carton and abandons with him. “Mm. Goes down well, doesn't it?”
It tastes like rotten pomegranates and is bright, electric blue. He pours it into the planter box outside the other window. “Do you like rosemary?” he asks the Butterfly.
“No.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He looks at the figure next to him, the figure that smells of rosemary despite hating it, the figure who is the summation of all he ever wanted. “What are we going to do?”
“What do you want to do?” the Butterfly responds, holding his hand, his still tender hand, gently.
“I – don't know.”
“I can't help you if you don't know,” and the figure has vanished.
Kass sits in the room alone, waiting something to happen. He's dressed, with nowhere to go, nothing to go there in, no one to talk to, nothing to dull his delusions, and the dread and hatred of his life pressing down on him. There is nothing in the room except the windows, which do not open more than a crack; his chair; and a package of sodas.
He doesn't know when Diane will be coming over next. He has a few friends in this city now, having been here for a few months, but none of them will visit.
He nods off and, when the church bell strikes half-past-ten, he wakes to the soft touch of the Butterfly's fingers. “Hey.”
“How are you? Drunk? You look it.”
Well, he wants to say, it's not my fault I've been alone. “I'm just fine,” he snarls. “Just fine, you.”
“What are we going to do?”
There's another room, the bedroom, and they stumble into it and talk and talk and talk and stumble out of it laughing and giggling like two teenagers alive on a sleepless summer night. He says something abut doesn't know what it is, hoping the Butterfly will, maybe, maybe….
“I love you,” the Butterfly whispers.
“I love you, too.”
And then the figure laughs – they don't mean it, no, not at all – and as he is caught in that wicked, harsh stare, Kass can only hope that he might be all right someday.
But now? Now he's just a mess.
Le Papillon
They take a walk in Golden Gate Park, holding hands. They pass graffiti'd walls, the Academy of Sciences, the de Young, the tea gardens. At some point, they circle back around to a vivid black-and-white of two teenagers in the middle of a passionate kiss. “That's something,” Kass whispers.
“He's invisible,” the Butterfly says. “She's like you. Special.”
“Mm. Special isn't always a bad thing.” He sits down against the wall, remembering that one terrible day in the school bathroom, the kindness of Dr. Lanson, the years of imitations passing as he tried to come close to the Butterfly….
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah. I guess… no. I'm not. I would be.”
“If not for what?”
“I'm a mess,” and they embrace right there in the park that smells of eucalyptus and the sweet flowers in the conservatory. Kass feels the Butterfly's warmth and sighs, “Oh, I am such a mess,” into the man's shirt.
The author would like to thank Martha Lampert (German), Stefanie Fan (Japanese), Clementine Chou (French), Brij Desai (Spanish) Mayan Hazan (Hebrew), and Eugene Cheng (Chinese) for help with the translation of “the butterfly” and acknowledge that this story could not have been written without listening to “Papillon” by The Airborne Toxic Event more times than is probably healthy.