The Butterfly Kid

10

SO THERE I was at half-past ten on Tuesday morning, feeling a good bit less than myself and not at all happy about it, sitting in that same old two-bit candy store across the street from Laszlo’s pad, waiting for the Bard of MacDougal Street to appear. That same suspicious counterman was being suspicious again, and surly to boot. The coffee tasted foul. The street looked foul. The thought of having to follow Laszlo, that notorious author of cacography, was insufferably foul, and I could think without straining of forty-seven places I’d rather be, none of which I even liked.

The counterman and an absurdly ancient crone in clothes her mother must’ve given her were conducting in some nameless tongue an acrimonious debate of which I was probably the subject.

Once again I tried to contact Michael on the wrist radio. No soap. I was not pleased.

All through breakfast I’d tried, with my best talmudic logic, to prove that Laszlo had obviously scored on Monday and that it was therefore foolish to follow him today. But Mike is always unreasonable in the morning, and there I was.

There I was alone, furthermore. Sean, who was supposed to be helping me, was at the doctor’s instead, recovering from some excess of Sativa’s. Great. And I couldn’t raise Mike on the radio.

I was inconspicuously dressed, as is my wont; this time in early-eighteenth-century French costume: swallowtail red satin coat with gold brocade, white on white linen shirt with lace front and cuffs, knee-length gold satin breeches, anachronistic black patent leather high boots with silver buckles and high heels — a fairly popular outfit that summer, but, I was learning, much too hot for the day and the job before me. Thanks to my early-morning inner smog, I was also carrying my trusty briefcase, empty.

And then it was eleven, and there were four count ’em four old crones huddled with the counterman in highly foreign languages. Now and then one of them would point a crooked finger at me. I was becoming somewhat uncomfortable.

It kept getting later — eleven-ten, eleven-thirty, you know how it does. No Laszlo. No Michael on the radio. The coffee got no better. The old crones multiplied. I spilled coffee on my shirt front. It was being a middling bad day.

“Hey, you,” the counterman said after a while. “Whaddaya doon here, hey, whaddaya doon? Gedoudda here, ya flippin’ beatnik freak. Whassa mattah, ya Crazy’r sumpin’? Gedoudda here. I youghtta calla cop ya flippin’ freak.”

I decided to leave. The coffee was pretty bad, anyhow.

The counterman followed me to the door, saying impolite things. The assembled crones egged him on in Etruscan or whatever it was they spoke, if that’s what they did. One of them aimed arcane gestures at me.

Still no Laszlo. Still no Mike. I pretended to be interested in a hardware store window for a while, until the proprietor came out and offered to help me. Then I feigned interest in a window full of dusty lingerie.

I was being fascinated by an altogether empty store window when Laszlo finally appeared, somewhere on the other side of noon. By then I was so far gone that I’d’ve missed him altogether, but he passed right by me and his aroma — a complex mixture of funk and other essences distinctively his own — jarred me into moderate awareness. I let him get a half block lead, as Mike’d suggested, and then doggedly set out after him.

Aesthetic considerations aside, Laszlo wasn’t hard to follow. He was wearing a battery-powered electric green tuxedo, some four years out of style, that would’ve stood out like an electric green tuxedo in a London fog at midnight, and he walked so slowly that my only problem (aesthetic considerations aside) was to keep far enough behind him.

“The lame duck has flown the coop,” I hopefully told the radio, using the code Mike and I’d agreed upon at breakfast. “I am following. Do you read me?” No response. Perhaps, I wished, my radio just wasn’t receiving.

Laszlo ranged the East Side like a slug in a rose garden, making numerous stops at this, that, and the other disreputable dive, but no stops long enough for me to grab some lunch or get rid of the coffee I’d taken on whilst waiting for him. You can always count on Laszlo, yes indeed.

I kept my mute wrist radio fully informed of Laszlo’s movements, on the off chance that Michael could hear me, but the longer we walked the less hopeful I was. Laszlo was clearly embarked on an endless chain of trivial errands, and I was doomed for my psychedelic sins to follow him forever. The temperature, furthermore, chose to linger in the nineties, and the smog became alarming, and I’d left my smog mask home.

We roamed through the East Side, always tending downtown, never stopping long enough for me to satisfy any of my needs, until just past five. We were on Canal Street then, Laszlo on the south side, I on the north. He stopped in front of a grotesquely ruinous loft building, one of those hundred-year-old, seven-story horrors, blackened brick and rusty fire escape, that leaned a nervous five degrees forward over the street. I hid myself in a urine-scented doorway and watched.

All at once Laszlo was being furtive. He looked suspiciously in all directions, peering myopically into infinity. He checked a watch I’d not have guessed he owned. He looked around again, then ducked into the building.

“April Fool,” I told the radio. “April… no, I mean Mayday. This is It.” I ran recklessly across the street, buffeted by the backwash from a million turbo-trucks. “Mayday,” I repeated. “Two three nine Canal Street. Mayday.” Then I was at the door and didn’t dare say anything more.

I pulled the door open with an unfortunate shriek of unwilling old metal, at which I cursed ingeniously. I stepped into the hall and stood there silently, listening. Somebody, hopefully Laszlo, was several flights above and climbing, oblivious to the music of the door.

“I’m going in,” I whispered to the radio and started up the stairs. They were marble stairs, blackened with time and deeply rutted, and next to impossible to climb silently in the boots I was wearing, but I managed, more or less.

The stairwell and halls were unlighted, darker than Laszlo’s heart, and malodorous and dank. I imagined Laszlo and a horde of Communist thugs waiting for me on every landing. My nerves went through a whole year’s wear and tear in less than seven minutes. I couldn’t imagine this job’s being worth what it was costing, but this was no time to be arguing about that.

I skulked up four dim flights — each step threatening to squeal — until I saw light of a sort oozing out an open door. I paused on the stairs.

Then, “We got it made, Chief,” I heard Laszlo whine.

Contact. Now I had two choices open to me, according to the one-sided discussion Mike and I had had at breakfast. I could either cut out homeward, calling for help, or I could stick around and gather data. Without exactly saying so, Mike’d made it more than clear which choice he preferred.

I disagreed, but, “What the hell?” I admitted, “I’m already here.” So I tiptoed the rest of the way up to the fourth floor, found the landing and hall to be conveniently full of packing cases, picked a good-sized case to hide behind, and hid.

There were two voices: Laszlo’s overly familiar mush and an odd, somehow pedantic voice, low baritone, that spoke in a strange accent involving clicks on every consonant that allowed them, like a professor of philosophy accompanying himself on castanets.

“Most good, youthful Laszlo,” said that voice. “It performs to satisfaction then, our little chemical?”

“Dig it,” Laszlo pushed.

“This indicates accord?”

“Groovy.”

“Groovy? Yes. It is so quaint, your language, here, so poetical, with such a richness of analogy. Yes, groovy.”

“Dig it, man,” Laszlo pressed on regardless. “Them pills are where it’s at, baby. I mean, like, I could sell ’em for…”

“Now,” interrupting, “we commence to — what is it, your clever word? Yes, escalate. Now we escalate to phase two. You agree?”

“Phase two?”

“Of course.”

I couldn’t place the other voice’s accent. (I couldn’t place Laszlo’s, either, but that was mainly because he’d made it up himself.) It didn’t seem particularly Russian, but who knows? Commies weren’t necessarily Russian in those days. There was still China, for instance. “Red China,” we called it. But the accent didn’t seem particularly Chinese, either. Oh well.

“No more small tests, youthful Laszlo, no. No further pills.”

“Hey!”

“Now must we begin to operate upon a grander scale. Mass testing now is called for. Phase two. Then comes phase three and finishes. Soon now, youthful Laszlo, very soon, and you shall come into your own, as we agreed.”

“No more pills?” Laszlo sounded gratifyingly pained. “Hey, baby, wait up. We gotta try it out some more, you dig?” He was nearly articulate in his despair. “I mean, like, dig it: we ain’t tried it out, you know, on teachers an’ like that, you dig? I mean…”

“Maintain a lowered temperature, youthful Laszlo. The pills are grown unnecessary now. Obsolete? Yes, obsolete. Now we must all think of larger things, and soon…”

Laszlo groveled fluently, never quite saying what he had in mind. I knew what he was after, of course. No more pills meant no more Laszlo Scott monopoly. But the strange accent kept explaining dispassionately that the pills were no longer necessary. I imagined Laszlo could’ve had as many pills as he wanted for the asking, but I couldn’t imagine him doing anything so honest and overt as asking for them. Neither, it seemed, could he.

For once, though, I was on Laszlo’s side. Now that I’d had some experience with the pills myself, the thought of phase two — whatever it might be — was frightening.

The discussion grew heated, at least on Laszlo’s side. The air grew thick with phrases like you dig?, like man, and dig it. I decided, hardly noticing how brave of me it was, to sneak up to that door under cover of Laszlo’s broken rhetoric and try for a peek inside. First, though, I whispered my plans into the radio. “Keep in touch,” Mike’d told me.

“But you must comprehend, youthful Laszlo, that the pills are inefficient on such a scale,” the voice was saying as I silently removed my boots — an engineering feat of which I was briefly proud. “Tomorrow night this city, then this world,” the voice continued. This sounded ominous, and Laszlo sounded unimpressed.

More stealthily than the cats of Queen Berúthiel I made my way to the door and peered in ever so cautiously. I was lucky: they had their backs to me, and I got a good, long look.

My mind very carefully boggled.

“Well,” I told myself, sneaking back to my packing case, “so much for Mike and his Communist plot.”

The other voice belonged to a six-foot-tall, deep blue lobster. This was getting more interesting than I really liked.

Half an hour later, nothing worth mentioning had changed. Laszlo and his lobster-friend were still inside, I was still behind my packing case in the dark hall, all that coffee I’d absorbed while waiting for Laszlo was still where it had been for altogether too long now, my lunch (I kept thinking of lobster thermidor) was still in the indeterminate future, Mike was wherever the hell Mike was, alas, and things showed little sign of getting better.

I’d spent the half hour whispering to my left wrist and trying to get my boots back on, with little luck in either project. My feet seemed to have swollen.

Some days it’s hard to maintain one’s native dignity. If I could’ve gotten my boots on I’d’ve split, having lost my taste for heroism, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk home in my stocking feet. “Anything,” says an old Anderson proverb, “is better than embarrassment.”

What I’d been saying to the radio all this time, disregarding random words on which the UNCC would frown loudly if I was being (hopefully) monitored, was mostly along the lines of, “Help! Get me out of here! Call out the Marines! Like, help!” plus everything the lobster was telling Laszlo.

Laszlo being Laszlo, this was plenty. The lobster, with amazing patience for a lobster, explained everything at least five times before I stopped counting, everything in this case being an elaborate extraterrestrial plot to conquer the Earth.

Honestly. It offended my sense of propriety something fierce, this hackneyed invasion-from-outer-space routine, but the lobster sounded quite sincere, and who was I to doubt the word of a six-foot-tall blue lobster?

Who indeed?

So all this while I crouched behind the packing case, elaborately not sneezing, ignoring even more pressing other needs, becoming acutely uncomfortable and frustrated, listening to an absurd blue crawdad telling Loathsome Laszlo how the Reality Pill was going to conquer Terra without endangering precious lobsters or involving them in anything so crude as physical violence.

Lobster: “We, of course, cannot inflict pain or,” rattling shudder, “death upon another rational being, dissimilarly to you so vicious aborigines that do such things for — what is your word? — kicks. Impossible. Not since we left our oceans, now some ten to the seventh years ago, have we been able to commit such things except as final acts of defense, and few of us could long survive such acts. You must comprehend that we are a mature culture, we Kkkkk,” a sound like a flam paradiddle, doubtless what the lobsters called themselves.

Laszlo: “But dig it, man, you’re pushin’ it too fast, you dig? We gotta — you know — test them pills like Uptown, unnerstan’? I mean, like…”

Anderson, uncomfortably: “Michael? Oh, Michael. Do you, what’d you call it, read me? Oh hell. Michael?”

Lobster: “But, youthful Laszlo, we need room, new shorelines and new seas. We Kkkk are a growing race and long-lived. We must grow or die, and to grow we must conquer. Do you comprehend?”

Laszlo: “Look, man, give it another week, you dig? I mean, like, in a week I can prob’ly…”

Lobster: “However this is not the paradox it might seem to your unsophisticated intellect. Your science, biochemistry, is to us an art form. Likewise your psychology. We need but study any race some while in order to produce such clever drugs as will induce said race to be its own conquistadores. Yes? Nor is our skill in forming psychological devices any less.”

Laszlo: “At least gimme another day or two, huh? Whaddaya say?”

Lobster: “Whereupon we show ourselves when the native violence subsides, reestablish order, and become as gods or heroes to our newly subject peoples. All so simple. Many hundred times has this been done, nor have we ever failed. We cannot fail.”

Laszlo: “You don’t unnerStan’!”

Lobster: “We are kindly masters. Have no fear.”

Anyhow, after thirty minutes of this double monologue, something finally happened. I was standing, boots in my right hand, briefcase in my left, peering over the top of my friendly packing case at the shadows Laszlo and the conquering lobster cast on the hall floor, trying simultaneously to figure out what to do and how to get away, when something hard and cold, but not metallic, suddenly grabbed me under both armpits, hoisted me a good four feet off the floor, and carried me off toward the lighted room.

I screamed, spectacularly gave up on the coffee problem, dropped my boots and briefcase, and kicked vigorously, all to no avail at all. What had grabbed me was another blue lobster, somewhat taller than Laszlo’s buddy, who took great care not to hurt me or let me go, and paid absolutely no attention to my attempts to hurt him.

Moving more smoothly than I’d thought a lobster could, my chitinous captor hauled me to the lighted doorway and stopped there. “Ckckckckck,” he said, or words to that effect.

Laszlo’s eyes bulged. His friend’s eyestalks fully extended themselves and examined me from wildly unlikely combinations of angles. My captor continued to rattle like a baritone snare drum. I continued to kick, my heels hitting my captor’s cephalothorax with a dull booming sound, until he grabbed my ankles with two lesser pincers and held me motionless.

My hands remained free, however. I raised the wrist radio to my mouth, turned the volume up to full, and yelled, “I’m caught! I’ve been captured! Send help!” I intended to say much more, but a prehensile segmented feeler curled down from behind me, removed the radio, and crushed it like a grape before my eyes. Okay, I’m easily convinced. I went limp and waited to see what would happen.

Both lobsters were rat-a-tatting on at a great rate now, and Laszlo’s expression was slowly changing to something I knew in advance I wasn’t going to like. I was right.

“Well, if it ain’t Mister Wiseass Anderson hisself,” Laszlo drooled. “Fawncy meeting you here.” Then he laughed, an uninspiring sound.

“Aha, youthful Laszlo,” said the first lobster, while the second continued to clatter. “This person is known to you?”

“Dig it,” Laszlo admitted. “This here’s ol’ Wiseass Anderson.”

“Oh. What is it, this wiseass?”

“He’s jus’ another MacDougal Street bum, man. That’s all he is.”

“Indeed. And did you bring him here, Laszlo Scott?”

“Me? Hell no. He brung hisself, man. Like, he’s jus’ tryin’ to Spy on me, that’s all. He’s always, you know, tryin’ to Spy on me an’ like that.”

“A spy?”

“Dig it.”

“Indeed.” The lobster advanced toward me menacingly, its huge blue claws snapping fiercely bare inches from my face. “Well now, we know exactly what to do with spies. Indeed we do. Exactly. Oh my, yes.”

I missed Michael very much. Indeed I did. Oh my, yes.