The Butterfly Kid

6

ANDREW BLAKE was less than happy with his halo. He realized the moment it hit him (his word) that it wasn’t going to give him anything but trouble, or so he claimed. Personally, I think his attitude was decidedly un-Catholic, even though events did shortly bear it, and him, out.

When, freshly enhaloed, Andy fled The Garden of Eden, the little Black-Haired Chick we’d all three been so busily impressing followed him. But for once he didn’t particularly want to have a little Black-Haired Chick, no matter how thoroughly impressed, following him.

“What I wanted was to be alone. I kept hoping I could maybe wash the damned thing off.”

Her name was Karen. Almost every chick’s name was Karen that summer, just as almost every boy was a David. Names run in tides below Fourteenth Street.

This particular Karen was a Greenbaum by trade, and during the winter she studied Creative Writing at Bard College, an unofficial Village training ground. She was nineteen, and she thought Andy’s halo quite becoming.

Andrew broke free of The Garden of Eden and turned left toward Sixth Avenue. Karen was nine feet behind him. When he reached the avenue, three-quarters of a block later, she was still nine feet behind him.

“Go away.” He felt neither gallant nor gracious.

“My name’s Karen.” She meant well. “I read your Book.”

“No. God, no. Go away.”

Andy was making a distinct impression on everyone who saw him, and, the weather being good and the afternoon being Saturday, just about everyone saw him. Even in the violent sunlight his halo was clearly visible, flickering about him like an obstinate Saint Elmo’s fire.

“I said,” teeth clenched, “go away! — Taxi!”

Every cab he hailed came just close enough for the driver to make out Andy’s halo, then squealed away, leaving only burnt rubber to show it’d been there.

“What could I do?” he told me. “I had this Halo. No cabby’s gonna stop for me an’ I’m not about to try the subway. So what can a man with a halo do in New York City?” Beat. “I walked.”

Karen walked nine feet behind him. Why nine feet? No telling. Maybe she got it from the Ananga Ranga. Who knows?

Andy was aiming for the Brooklyn Bridge, the old one. Somewhere along Houston Street, a reporter collecting local off-color spotted him and tried to stage an interview. Andy blurted something incoherent about me, mentioned Michael’s name, and started running.

“So there I am, running down Houston Street. The temperature is ninety-five, it’s broad daylight, I’m wearing a heavy wool suit, and I’m running. Also I have this Halo.”

Karen trotted along three yards behind. Sometimes she said, “Please wait,” but mostly she just trotted silently. Her long black hair grew limp with sweat, came undone, dangled lankly on either side of her pale face like a frame. Her dress, cotton but black, also grew first damp and then wet, and hung from her thin shoulders like a clinging sack.

They must’ve looked like a saint being chased by a witch. When they crossed the Bowery, untold dozens of vagrants took the pledge, according to Andrew. They turned south off Houston and plunged through the pious depths of the Lowest East Side’s most conservative ghetto, and their coming was proclaimed by slamming doors and windows, and their going was marked by heart attacks.

The reporter had long since given them up and phoned his ambiguous scoop in to the city desk, but Andrew continued to run, and Karen stayed nine feet behind him all the way.

“I don’t know. Maybe I was afraid she’d catch me, or maybe I just wanted to get home in a hurry. Who knows? All I know is, I never once considered walking or stopping. You know how it is. I had this Halo: why should anything else make sense?”

Somehow, despite the spreading confusion and the complex problems of mental and physical health they left in their wake, they didn’t attract official attention until they gained the Brooklyn end of the bridge. Then two cops in a prowl car noticed them.

One: “At first I think he’s a purse snatcher, this guy. Then I see he ain’t holdin’ on to no pocketbook or nothing, and this lady can catch him anytime she wants to. That looks suspicious.”

Two: “Yeah, an’ then I sees somethin’ real funny an’ I says, ‘Manny,’ I says, ‘Hey, Manny, get a load o’ that guy,’ I says. ‘He’s glowin’!’”

The brisk-witted fuzz instantly deduced that Andrew was an important government scientist glowing on account of some top secret experiment or something, and that Karen was a dangerous Commie spy, and that either she was chasing him or he was running away with her, one. Either way, the law felt called upon to lend a hand.

Andy’s kid brother Jeff bailed them out instantly. “But why both of us, for Christ’s sake? I’ll never understand how my brother’s mind works, never.” Andrew was hard to please.

To forestall further hassle — the thought of a blue halo running loose in Brooklyn made twenty-year-men blench — the kindly fuzz drove Andy and Karen, in separate cars about three yards apart, to Andy’s Brooklyn Heights pad. En route they warned Andrew not to leave the house until he Did Something about that goddamn Glowin’.

It was quite dark when they arrived, and Andy’s gross candlepower was amazing. He attracted more attention than he could reasonably handle — even the local moths were a problem — so he had to endure the ultimate public indignity of being escorted to his own front door by an armed guard with all the neighbors watching.

“I’ll never be able to show my face in the neighborhood again. I may have to take up a disguise. I may have to shave my beard!”

Karen trailed forgotten behind the guards and slipped between them into Andy’s pad. Then she placidly refused to leave.

From then until he called me, Andy did original research on hell. Not only did he have a halo — an utterly undignified and embarrassing ornament, fatal to every aspect of his meticulously structured self-esteem — not only that, but he was additionally encumbered by an overtly adulatory, erotically interesting witness to his total humiliation, imposed on him with the implied blessings of the New York City Police Department solely to lacerate and sting his countless wounds. Andrew Blake was up tight.

I got all this unsponsored melodrama during Andy’s second, more polished phone call — he was suppressing video for the duration — which broke in on our contemplation of the Reality Pill’s probable significance like a flatulent apocalypse. But while Andy was extolling his own gentility in waiting so long before calling ’cause he didn’t want to wake me up or anything and for Christ’s sake, Chester, Do Something, I realized what must have happened and how to extract a few more data therefrom.

“Andy,” I interrupted, “let me talk to Karen.”

“Karen? Oh — oh. That Karen. Sure.”

There were footsteps and phone-bumping noises, during which I grimaced expressively at Michael and Sean. Then came an incomprehensible dialogue, more bumping noises, and a high, slightly nasal voice that asked, “Hello?”

She was a multiple-greetings girl, and it took us awhile to establish that we could really hear each other. Then I said, “Karen? Listen, do you take drugs?”

“Do I…?” She was coy. “Now listen, that’s an awfully — personal question, isn’t it?”

“Oh good Lord!” I wanted to go back to bed. “Look, do you know who I am?”

“Uh-uh, no. Andrew just said to…”

“Great. Good old Andy. I’m Chester. Remember Chester? You saw me with Andy yesterday when…”

“Oh! I Know You! I Read Your Book!”

Groovy. I was in. I might even be a halo candidate myself. So I carefully explained that I was only asking these personal questions for Andy’s sake — didn’t she want to help Andrew? — and didn’t give a damn personally whether she took dope or chawed terbaccy, but did she ever use drugs?

Pause. “Well…” Longer pause. Then, quite softly, shyly, “sometimes,” in a maidenly whisper.

“Sure,” very heartily. “Everybody does it Sometimes. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Sometimes I make myself sick. “But tell me, have you ever had, I think they call it, a Reality pill?”

Pause. A whole bunch of silence. Maybe she hung up? “Hello? Still there? Karen?”

“Uh-huh.” Still there.

Silence stretched between us fine as copper wires, hissing. At last Karen took a deep breath, held it, and whispered, “Yes.”

She sounded oddly different, as though she were sorry she’d said anything. This in turn made me feel as though I should’ve worn black leather, which would’ve been just a little more silly than everything else that’s happened so far.”

“Yes,” she whispered again.

I cupped the mouthpiece in my hand and stage-whispered, “Sean, how long were you high? Figure it out.”

Then back to the phone: “Karen dear, this is very important. When did you take that Reality Pill?”

“Which one?”

Oi. “The last one, dear.”

This was a tough one. She was teenyboppishly uninvolved with clocks and suchlike trivia, and we had to determine when she’d dropped that stupid pill the hard way. It was at a party, she recalled, and it was in the nighttime somewhere, and this poet called Lazarus gave it to her.

“Lazarus?” A clue. “Do you mean Laszlo Scott?”

Could be, but she wasn’t sure, except he had a blond beard you could hardly see and — Oh, wait a minute! He gave her two pills, and she took the other one just before she found Andrew.

Sean said, “Must’ve been something like thirty hours.”

Karen screamed then, and Andy either shouted or cried out in strong emotion. Damn vidiphones anyhow, and damn Andrew Blake for squelching his damned video. “What’s happening? Karen? Hey!”

“It’s Andrew! Oh! Oh dear! He’s fading!”

While she paused to gulp air, I thought of Andy’s red beard slowly turning morning-glory pink, bleaching away at last, looking first like smoke and then like dust until there was nothing left at…

Loud noises. New voice. “Chester?” View screen lighting up in pastel glory.

“Andy, what happened?”

“It’s gone.” Now he sounded like a French horn with adenoids. “It just Faded Away. Only a minute ago. Just faded away.” That was more like the usual bassoon.

“Congratulations. Tell Karen not to take any more pills and everything will be all right. It wasn’t your halo, baby, it was hers.”

I hung up as soon as I decently could, for the talk had lost its savor and I had some thinking to do. I felt just about to solve the butterfly problem, I knew not how.

Mike and Sean shared my silence for a few minutes, then Mike drawled, “Well?” and we did us some mind-picking.

This pill was obviously a brand-new drug, we decided, some kind of projectile hallucinogen. You have the hallucinations and everyone gets to see them. This would’ve been harder to believe than to imagine if it hadn’t been for Sean and his butterflies, which were clearly nothing but public hallucinations. Not mass hypnosis, either: these were as substantial as any other, more orthodox butterflies, and they caused extensive and quite objective damage, too. But when the drug wore off and Sean came down, the hallucinations ended and the butterflies vanished. Interesting.

“Consider,” I said, prepared to mark points off on my fingers. “We’ve never heard of this stuff before. No newspaper has mentioned it. Nor rumors. Nothing. All highly unlikely.”

We agreed. A revolutionary drug like this should’ve made headlines long ago. Quaint.

“Therefore,” I continued, “this thing was not produced by one of the big drug houses. We’d’ve heard.”

“Right.” Mike was excited. “My God, you couldn’t even test the damn thing secretly. The first pill that worked… Well, you saw what happened with the butterflies.”

My turn. “Who could’ve developed this Reality Pill and really kept it a secret?”

“Nobody.” This was Mike’s field of special competence. “There’s just no way to keep that kind of secret. Not even in China. No.”

We stared at each other with matched expressions of unbridled surmise, and then, in chorus, said, “The Pill from Outer Space!”

I dropped to the floor, laughing, and rolled about a bit, now and then gasping, “No! Mother of God! Oh wow!” but mostly, “No!” Mike was doing much the same thing, and Sean looked unusually tentative.

“It’s absurd,” I yelped. “Also corny. It’s impossible to take seriously. It’s worse than third-class pulp science fiction. It’s just unthinkable. Therefore,” one of my favorite words, “once you’ve eliminated the unthinkable…”

Michael, still semihelpless on the floor, agreed. “It’s a Communist Plot,” he chuckled. “Elementary.”

This bit of unreason was only a little easier to take, but eventually we calmed down and took it. I had a few reservations, but Mike — who was hooked on spies and such to begin with — was wholly smitten by the notion. His eyes hinted at incredible schemes.

“Well,” he said at length, “what’re we going to do about it?”

“Do?” I hadn’t considered that angle.

“Yeah, do. We’re not gonna let ’em get away with this, are we?”

“Of course not, I suppose.”

“Right. Whatever this plot is, we’ve got to thwart it.”

“We do?”

“It’s our duty, baby. They’re trying to overthrow society, Chet. And where would we be without society?”

It was an interesting question, but I didn’t like any of the answers.

“Okay,” I resigned. “What’re we gonna do?”

We discussed it for almost an hour, confusing Sean beyond repair and swearing him to absolute secrecy. He was already a little afraid to open his mouth anyway, and when Mike casually mentioned plastique, you could almost see Sean shrivel up. But his eyes were just as excited as Mike’s.

“We’ve got one solid handle,” said Michael the Theodore Bear.

“Which is?”

“Laszlo Scott,” he replied. “Sean and that chick got their pills from Laszlo. But where did he get them?”

Another interesting question. Laszlo Scott was an exceptionally slimy creature, capable, to my mind, of any enormity, but he was also imposingly stupid, and I couldn’t imagine any really competent Communist Plotter making use of him.

“Where indeed?” I counterqueried.

“Right!” Mike snapped. “That’s what you’ve got to find out.”

“I?”

“Who else? You’re the local Laszlo Scott expert. It wouldn’t do much good if I tried to follow him, would it? Sean can help you.”

“You want Me to follow Laszlo?”

“Only for a few days, until he gets more pills. That’s when the fun begins.”

“Following Laszlo?”

“C’mon, it won’t hurt you. It’ll be Fun, Chester. Really. You can take notes.”

Groovy. So I resigned myself to tailing Loathsome Laszlo, but I was already sick of the whole routine. I had a whole anthology of arguments against this project, beginning with, “If this is really a Communist Plot, we ought to notify the FBI,” and ending with, “I’m a musician, dammit, not a spy,” but it was already evening, and we had to go west.

I didn’t really want to follow Laszlo.