Lennon, Brian. "Papillon." NowCulture 3, 2006.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original published version.

Papillon
Brian Lennon

I am sitting at a blue tablecloth-draped table. A rhombus of light creeps up from the bottom left of the frame, reaching my shoulder. A stray stripe from a gap in the umbrella crosses my forehead, making me look tight and mean, or unhappy. Or maybe that is the set of my mouth, the smile that is not a smile, which one makes when one is supposed to, but does not want to be supposed to, smile. I am unused to seeing myself with a tan, smooth and vaguely androidal. An ashtray sits upside down near a plate, also on its face, directly next to my arm, which is half in the rhombus of light, which leads to a hand holding a fork poised over a fish. This scene, which also includes a salad dish, napkin dispenser, and two half-emptied bottles of water, is uncrowded; its objects repose, as though only casually arranged, in a tableau which I am tempted to say is lovely, and unlike any other table. Blind admiration, the traveler's signal for displacement. At the right of the frame, like an arrow pointing to the next page, a small boy with a piece of hair sticking up sits in a sleeveless white t-shirt, looking out at the waterfall that drops in a beard of foam to the river below. His head is a silhouette, the shirt dappled with light.

Where are you? Your lunch is there; you must have been holding the camera. You wore a thin cotton blouse that fell prettily over your collarbones, and a hat which, despiser of hats, I nonetheless liked. You argued with the waiter about the salad. When he left, you said, We look rich. The piece of hair on the boy's head waved in the breeze, as if to signal agreement. I was tense, as I am often, for no reason: not man enough in my own country, imprisoned in English here, what could I do. I was looking for difference, the difference that told me who I was, who you were, an instant reduction, to nation and mother tongue. The truth is I was a New Yorker first, and I lived among foreigners, and I dreamed cosmopolitan dreams. But none of that helped me. I was irrelevant. Irrelevants ate plastic meals and went to the moon. They didn't like eating fish with the head on, long drowsy siestas, being in pictures, watching a waterfall. I ought not to have been here, glowering at the camera: I was loving you, I wanted to be you.

It annoyed me that we'd had to fight for a spot to be photographed, being-in-front-of the waterfall. Didn't anyone just look at it? I was annoyed with myself for being annoyed, and disconnected impressions crowded in on me: a soldier was hiding in the bushes, an egg had flown past, there was a butterfly on the boy's head. Here I am again, with you next to me, summer lovely in shorts, hat, and tan, and I'm frowning. We were lucky the telephone rang and distracted us.

We drove back toward the city. The sun beat down on the windshield. I liked the scrubby coast road and the lumber-and-sprint rhythm of traffic, the benign, romanceable vigilance it required. But I had a headache from the sun, the ruins, the small boy, the waterfall, being in love, being a tourist. "May it pass," you said. The sea glittered and dove out of sight behind a hotel for Germans.

1

Vacancy of a boardwalk hotel that has never been full, or which vanishes into the sea, as at Değirmendere, or sinks three stories down into the earth, as at Adapazarı. It was an icy morning of idleness, my heart in Turkey, my bones propped in a window overlooking Amsterdam Avenue, windswept and dark, over the bridge of which there crept a miniscule and poignant group of three dressed in red and white coats, whom I felt, inexplicably, that I must know. On the screen before me, video frames retrieved live views of the Bosphorus and of Times Square at thirty second intervals, melting one into the other in digital winks: near-inky nothingness on one continent, on the other, winter-bundled crowds frozen in striding attitudes, heads down, coffees in hands, faces drawn white, tight and craggy against the cold.

The story of the butterflies appeared in four versions in my news aggregator. I had been watching the winter rain, electron glitter of droplets bouncing frozen on the pavement and from the shoulders of coats. A woman coaxed an old, and slow, and dying dog along the pavement, then picked it up---it was large, and heavy---and carried it across the span of my window, set, screen. Yielding to impulse, I phoned Fiera Gaja, a World Wildlife Fund entomologist of my acquaintance in Istanbul, who put me in touch with one Johano Jochjo of the WWF's Mexico City division.

I introduced myself as a UNESCO translator and apologized for intruding with unofficial research. Did Johano Jochjo have a few moments to expand the remarks quoted in an AP wire that morning?

On the other end of the line, a long silence, as though the propriety of any response at all were being considered, and while I paced up the hallway with the cordless to the kitchen to brew tea, I pictured my interlocutor sitting gravely before a set of panels covered with luminescent charts and graphs, fingertips pressed together, silently tabulating this massive expenditure.

Before the Michoacan freeze, Johano Jochjo said finally (but then pausing again, and audibly drawing breath: a dramatic man, I thought---or was he smoking?), our best estimate of the winter monarch population had been 100 million. Now, it is 500 million, since half of that is our best current estimate of the number of dead.

I paused for a moment to parse this, trapped between languages. 250 million? I finally asked in my imperfect Spanish, watching as, down on the pavement, pedestrians swerved around a panhandler extending a paper cup, the entire figure revolving like a dial or gyroscope.

It is a number, Johano Jochjo replied impatiently, assuming a familiar tone. It means little. Imaginable, yet at the same time impossible, unreal. All my life I have known this. It does not prevent me from wanting to understand. Besides, the problems are at once larger, and smaller, than these. It is a paradox of globalization.

That is certainly true, I began. Down on the street, the scene moved in reverse, the panhandler's arm sweeping counterclockwise. Did you know, I wanted to ask Johano Jochjo, that the Hudson River flows in both directions? But Jochjo did not let me continue.

Butterfly tourism, Jochjo said, is in decline. Thousands used to come to El Rosario, but this year, almost no one. The September 11 attacks are one reason.

You will write about this latest freeze, Johano Jochjo said. People will say there is nothing worth seeing here.

Let me tell you, said Johano Jochjo, pausing again. I had seen such things before in my work. But this time, for reasons I cannot well explain, I was at something of a loss. For the first time, I felt that I, too, was prepared to die. It was a feeling of great peace, but at the same time, and in a way that I cannot make sense of, a deep and unwelcome disturbance. As my hands sank into piles of these beautiful, delicate creatures, with which I have worked my entire life, I was overcome by a depth of sadness I had never before known. It was one of those eddies of ageless insight into the world, said Johano Jochjo, when you are equal to everything in it, until some tide arrives to wash you away again or you are fixed there by trauma. You think: I am as old and young as I will ever be; perhaps a certain slant of light suggests, for one unreal moment, a continuous world, sub spaecie aeternitatis.

Your colleague Fiera Hanım, who was with me at the time, shared this sensation. It was most curious, and I have not since managed to erase its impression. Glimpses of such a thing are not forgotten, and I suppose it will follow me to the end of my days.

In the background, the ring of a teaspoon set to saucer, as though for punctuation. Suddenly anxious, I thanked my interlocutor for his time and made haste to bring the exchange to a close. As I thanked him again, Johano Jochjo abruptly closed the line.

2

I looked out over the white city. Empire meant my own body was a mere node of exchange, matricized, flanged and torn along on super-string millions of future tunnels, in indifferently ongoing transmission. A repeater, I lived only for communication. Peering out at my New York, towers of chips of light, I felt: love and ascesis. My instructions, such as I imagined them, were lodged in the buffer, only a pulse away, low-tech red blip in the internal display.

It seemed that I had been walking up and down Upper Broadway forever, waiting amid the throngs, in vigilant impatience, to cross from the mall to the shady side and back again, sun soaking my collar, warming the wires. Down there. Drift, dérive, the half-hearted search for what will happen anyway, in all its here now, gone tomorrow, constantly craving, widening gyre---eventually. Each year I had found new anomie and new solace in this drift: the knowing you are alive, the knowing you're dead, the half-lived ghostness of seeing the end, which lets you be earnest in secret and secret in earnest, taking the small things for wonders. Would I find the mirage? Most of the time it was only a matter of appearing there, near the dormant entrance to the Tünel, and I would see your hair in the yellow light that drifted up from the Strait as you shifted your weight onto the other foot or attentively turned your head, waiting. The city strove around us like a living creature. It was almost natural for me to arrive there, deaf from solitude, going over to where you stood, where you would smile, knowing as I did that we met not by chance, not in some haphazardness, but on a mission.

3

In a follow-up conversation, Johano Jochjo had referred me to the Lorenz Attractor applet written by Michael Cross of the California Institute of Technology. The applet ran in a window on my terminal between the Bosphorus and Times Square cameras, above the messaging cluster, my writing space, and the image panel. The attractor's double-lobe map, resembling nothing so much as a pair of wings, was not beautiful, but its relentlessness, the slow hardening of opacity out of retracing, engendered a sinking feeling all the same: something of the sublime.

Then the wind shifts and brings the stench to you, it is a shock, said Johano Jochjo. Beneath your feet is a carpet of silver and black dust, which with each step sponges down wetly and raises a glittering cloud. The footpath, when you look closely, is lined with drifts of the insects, and a putrid slime clings to your shoes. As far as you can see, into the forest, the ground is piled. An odor so strong it is a medium or local world, you think your thoughts in it. It smells like a hospital, like some place purged of all nature, rather than nature in its totality, flowering and devastation. To an extent, said Johano Jochjo, even I could not take this truly seriously as death, could not see it as monstrous: my beloved creatures barely live to begin with, their beauty is their very evanescence. Yet for the disturbance produced through substitution, in the work of the imagination on that scene---then, that natural muck is a horror, one's entire being recoils.

Distinctly now, the scratch and hiss of a cigarette lighter, an unhurried exhalation. Outside, Amsterdam Avenue was coming to life at rush hour, that dense, gray medium of purpose, bath of homeward motion, through which vehicle lamps floated like small fish and pedestrians strode trailing their scarves: the crowded loneliness I had loved, whose love was unbearable. Overhead, an airliner roared toward LaGuardia, a whale in the sky, and before the window, in a mise-en-abyme, my screen with its screens, one displaying a view of the highway traffic---sunbursts on chrome---on the hillside overlooked by Johano Jochjo's office in Mexico City. Atop the bookshelf that stood near my desk, a feed scanner disgorged photographs; they piled up curling and warm in front of the boxes of letters, postcards, greeting cards, theater and concert tickets, receipts, diplomas, clippings, and notes. Everything was being digitized, written to local and remote backups, after which I would put my physical memories in physical storage and flee, a New Nomad, my life as data in a chip in my eye, to you.

Then, my interlocutor continued after a pause---just as you begin to understand that you are not alive, that you are in hell, here is life again. A vast spiral wave of monarchs, fluttering up through a band of sunlight, which fixes them for a moment like particles in the cone of a film projector. Wings nag at the threshold of sound, a scrub or hum that seems to buoy you and which you fear might drive you mad. But the butterflies glance from your ears, your forehead, your arms in the gentlest attack. You cannot help thinking: they are happy. And this happiness flows over you. A butterfly in winter, Henri Charrière wrote, is like life after death. Do you know his Papillon?

That day I made another cup of tea and went to bed with a migraine. In a dream I was walking with Johano Jochjo through the Valley of the Butterflies, wearing a surgical mask, in a snowstorm of dying tiger moths, which spilled over our shoulders, each animal clinging for a moment with a shimmer of will that drove a needle of fear through me. And when I turned and lowered the mask, my mouth was filled with dead moths, and when I involuntarily bit down, what oozed from the mass into my throat tasted---I heard myself tell you in Turkish, turning again and raising my mask again---like honey.

--end--