Butterfly Stories

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When they got back to Bangkok, the journalist said to the photographer: Well, that was it. No more whores for me. - And he'd start talking about how he was going to marry Vanna, until the photographer said: Aw, you're driving me crazy! — The photographer went and got laid. He really wanted the journalist to do it, too. He looked out for him. When the journalist's balls had been at their worst, the photographer always got him meals in bed. But the journalist wanted to be good now; he said no. - Can I at least bring you back something? — Red-boiled by the sun until he resembled a vulture, staring blearily, grimly ahead, the harsh light of Bangkok illuminating the insides of his ears, the photographer had had a hard time getting through the daylight hours. But now all his grace was back. As ever, the journalist envied him and wanted to be like him. - Oh, that's all right, he said. You go spread one for me. - He stayed in and washed his underwear in the sink. The room was bright, cool and quiet, with hardly any cockroaches — this being the world-famous Hotel 38, you see, which they'd never heard of before; the two lower floors were all whores; and their room number was special also, for the Pakistanis down the hall had said: Room 302? Very unlucky. Whenever someone in Pakistan gets murdered in a hotel room, it's always 302! - Looking around and smiling, the journalist had said to the photographer: I think I'm going to LIKE this place! and the photographer laughed so hard he had to hold onto the wall. - I wonder, said the journalist to the air conditioner, do they call it the Hotel 38 because it has thirty-eight stars? I'll give it that many in m} book… — but the air conditioner didn't answer. When he'd scrubbed his underwear from brown to grey, he squeezed them out and left them hanging and dripping on the bathroom doorknob. (The photographer sometimes rearranged his laundry for him neatly. The photographer, pitying his incompetence in almost every sphere of life, did what he could to help him. - Don't ever leave your wife, the photographer always said to him. Without her you'd really have problems!) The journalist stood in the empty room. His mouth was very dry. Too tired to pump the filter anymore, he decided to go down to the alley to buy bottled water. The miniature pagoda was illuminated in the courtyard; the neon sign darted on its pole like a string of lizards, a spill of water on the concrete below twisting rhythmic orange in sympathy. . His guts churned a little, and so did his balls. Time for dysentery. The second-floor girls were coming down the corridor arm in arm, linked by pink lights, laughing harshly. One had already snagged some geek in a white shirt. . The girls poked the journalist in the belly and he poked them back. He stood on the landing between the second and third floors looking across interstellar darkness into the window of a garment factory where girls in pale uniforms sat sewing; it seemed to him very strange and bleak; the prostitutes probably had a better life, in spite of the shame. . Just after he'd turned the light out and gotten into bed, the light came on, and he opened his eyes to see the photographer with someone else in the hot glowing doorway. A moment later, Joy, the photographer's old Bangkok girl, was on the journalist's bed, holding his hand and hugging him so naturally like he was her brother while the photographer laughed. - Only one boyfriend me! she said, pointing to the photographer. I love him! — You are so sweet, said the journalist in wonder, meaning every word of it, wondering how many times he'd meant it. .

Joy went into the bathroom. Then she and the photographer went to bed. The journalist told them both goodnight. Soon he heard Joy's soft rhythmic moans, faked or unfaked, while in the hall a cat in heat went aaoow, aaoow. .

At six-thirty in the morning, when the maid was sweeping the courtyard and hooking up various-colored lengths of hose to water the plants, he stood on the fire escape watching an old lady across the street turn slowly on her heels while a dog ran in circles around her, and two schoolgirls in uniform marched down the alley; a boy balanced a huge book on his head; the maid swept water across the concrete, toward the wicker baskets loaded with papers and trash; the photographer slept on with his whore in the cold dark room.

He'd given away most of the bread that Vanna had given him, because he couldn't eat it all before it went stale. Last night he'd shared the last loaf with the photographer as they'd stood together in this very place. The photographer had taken one bite and then thrown the rest down onto the roof-ledge. The journalist had felt a weird heartache when he saw that. He ate his half without saying anything. This morning the bread was still there, brownish-black with dirt, rocking under the surges of voracious ants.

What is she to you? a cyclo driver had shouted from among the crowd that encircled him as he walked her across the street on that last morning, his fingertips gentle and careful against her back.

She's my friend, he said.

And what was she to him? She said she loved him, and he did believe that if he asked her to marry him she would do it, come with him, bring her child (her other husband had kicked her in the face and abandoned her), and he thought that she must love him as she understood love, and he loved her as he understood love; was that enough? When he drew sketches of the Hotel 38 maids they kissed him on the lips and asked him to take them out dancing; later that day one said to him very tentatively: I love you?

The next night the photographer brought some pussy back for each of them, a sort of midnight snack; he'd asked again before he went and this time the journalist had said: Go ahead; twist my arm. - The photographer's pussy was Joy again. The journalist's was a greedy thief smooth-shaven between her legs and he kissed her but her breath tasted horrible and he ate her out but as soon as he'd stuck his tongue in her he knew that it was a mistake. He got up and rinsed his mouth out. Then he put a rubber on. The next day his tongue was coated with white fungus and his throat was so swollen that he could hardly breathe. Over and over a fierce fever grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and lifted him out of his dreams, then let him fall back to sleep exhausted. Afterward, the crusts of something on the sheets pricking him like needles, he remembered Vanna's face. Well, doubtless Vanna wasn't celibate, either. Was it then that he began to get the unbounded confidence and ease that permitted him to cut any pretty girl who caught his fancy right out of the Pat Pong herd and take her straight back to the hotel, so that later, when he awoke in the middle of the night, jet-lagged, and saw a woman sleeping beside him, at once, not knowing who she was, he pulled her underpants briskly down to her ankles and rubbed her fuzz and spread her until she stirred and muttered: What…? and he suddenly remembered that this was his wife? The next day he walked back and forth very quickly and his wife said: Why are you pacing? — I guess I need the exercise. - His wife said: There was a look on your face just now as if you'd done something naughty. - There was? he said in amazement. He inspected his reflection in the window of darkness, but learned nothing; his reflection decomposed in just the same way that the white dogs scuttling in front of the TV in the beauty parlor and the whirling checkered sign became part of the same blur after a giant Singha beer on an empty stomach. He wanted to say to his wife: Who am I? — only to see her expression when he said it, of course. - I'm thinking of leaving my wife and marrying an illiterate prostitute from Cambodia whose language I can't speak a word of, he said to one of his friends. - That's very interesting, his friend said. Maybe you should sleep on it. I wouldn't do anything drastic. - How much do you think I'd need to support her and her baby? he said. - We can run through the numbers together, his friend said. A thousand a month for a two-bedroom place. You'd need that; you'd need a room to work, a room for the kid. That's twelve thousand. Then there's food and health insurance. Transportation. She'd be learning English the first year; there'd be a bill for that. Maybe day care. Figure twenty-five grand. That's after taxes. So you'd need thirty-five, forty grand. - So much? whispered the journalist in dismay. . Turning left, he found himself by the Snake Farm. He went into the ice cream parlor and ordered. - Okay, sir, said the waitress, whom he'd seen before. Won mickshake waniwwa. - I love you, he said, and she giggled and said: I you my heart. . Now he became in truth a crazed and greedy butterfly, no longer pretending to know who he was or what he was looking for, dreading the weary moment when he must stick it in, dreading the moment when the lady must leave, but avid to have and have had, his tips becoming smaller as the money went, the girls giving him colds, coughs, sore throats, weird new aches in his balls. . What he was doing was systematically dismantling his own reality, blurring faces and names (sometimes he couldn't remember the name of the woman he was on top of; of course she couldn't remember his, either), forming mutually exclusive attachments that left him a liar and a cheat attached to no one, passing his own reckoning by. When he wanted to eat out a whore, he'd say: I want to kin kao you, which means, I want to eat rice you, and then he'd point to her pussy -

Butterfly! Joy crooned drunkenly. Go work, go dance, go dingalow, go fuck a lot! I say hello how are you where you come from, what city? I say buy me drink. I go work six o'clock thirty. I no show; you give me money too much OK I show.

When the gunfire drumming of rain disturbed the metal roof, Joy jumped up to bring her laundry in, sat back lotus-legged on the green plastic, folding her bluejeans neatly shipshape while Pukki came back bare-shouldered in her Pat Pong dress, having just showered (remember Pukki? The journalist didn't. But she remembered him. She'd tried to get him to buy her that night in Joy's bar when he told her he loved Oy. He'd never seen Oy since coming back to Thailand. He'd been faithful to Oy; so if he saw her again that wouldn't be faithful to Vanna. .) Joy's lingerie became square white bales. In her bra and white-striped black skirt, Joy sat folding and smoothing; then she made the bed and lay beside the photographer and stretched -

The journalist sat staring at her long smooth brown legs. He didn't love her the way he loved Vanna; but he LIKED her, of course.

Faces peered in the door-crack.

Joy yawned into the photographer's ear. - I want to take shower and uh -

Pukki came back from another shower, wet, wrapped in a towel, and borrowed a tampon. - Pussy accident, said Joy. You know?

She straddled the photographer and lovingly drummed his shoulders. - No butterfly, you? she whispered anxiously.

They'd checked out of the 38 to sleep at Joy's just for a day; that might be cheaper. On the way out, one of the maids called the journalist into the room once more and said: You come back? — I don't know, he said. - She kissed him full on the lips while the other maid watched. Then she said: Ten bhat. - He reached into his pocket and gave her a hundred to divide with the other maid. Her eyes glowed like Christmas bulbs. As he went out, he heard them both laughing at him hoarsely, no doubt believing that he must have made a mistake with the banknote. .

The transvestites skull-grinning with black cobwebs made up over their sparkling eyes didn't tempt him, not even the ones with black bridles and nostril-slits and double eyebrow-slits cut into their sweating glistening faces leering sheer and sweet out of darkness, but by now he'd begun to understand De Sade's prison scribblings when the sex object no longer mattered; an old man was as good as a young girl; there was always a hole somewhere; but unlike De Sade he didn't want to hurt anyone, really didn't; didn't even want to fuck anyone anymore particularly; it was just that he was so lost like a drifting spaceman among the pocked and speckled and gilded and lip-pinked grinning heads that floated in flashing darkness, cratered with deer-eyes, holding Japanese-style umbrellas like darkness-gilled mushrooms; he was so lonely among them that he wanted to love any and all of them even though loving any of them would only make him more lonely because loving them wasn't really loving them -