by Nels Hanson

“I don’t understand what you mean,” Kate said.

She flicked her head, shaking out her long copper hair so it shone like leaping fire, like my hair once.

“Why did he care so much about a butterfly?”

I’d told her already about Scheherazade, how each night she’d told the sultan the next part of the endless story. His first wife had been untrue and after that each new wife was put to the death with a sword, the morning after the wedding night.

“Do you know the story of Chuang Tzu?” I tried again in the hot upstairs room the tired fan couldn’t freshen, 40 days in a row of 100 degrees or better. In Acacia I’d had air conditioning that cooled the large house with 100 closed windows and 13 bedrooms, a parquet walnut dance floor and grand piano that reflected the wide French chandelier.

“I don’t remember—”

At the end of the bed, Kate looked toward the window, at the yellow August vineyard that waited for the raisin harvest, the long rows of Thompson Seedless vines that yearned to lift their roots and hurry toward the Coast Range and the sea, the Pacific.

“He lived in China about 450 B.C.,” I began. “One spring night”— I said “spring night” and the stuffy room with the shut window and torn screen was suddenly cooler—“Chuang Tzu went to sleep and had a dream.”

“You’re going to tell me about a dream?” Kate’s glance drifted toward my night table and the silver mirror and brush with the DM monogram I’d brought in May from Acacia, 30 miles south down scorching Highway 99.

My hired driver had finally found the farm, and in the barnyard my long-lost daughter Kyla peered through the steamed windows of the rented Cadillac. Then Kyla had turned and called to the beautiful girl, the perfect glowing ghost of my youth, who stood watching from the farmhouse steps: “Kate, help me get the spare room ready!”

“A very special dream,” I said patiently, in the heat my heart pulsing at my arm.

“He dreamed that he was a butterfly, flying high above the rice and barley fields, the rivers and towns. Now Chuang Tzu had marvelous wings and he watched his shadow race across the land, over carts and horses and people on the roads and in barnyards and village squares.

“Wherever his eye saw something shining in the distance, a painted junk on the Yellow River or a temple on a mountaintop above a cold volcanic lake, that’s where he flew with the cool wind rushing past him and instantly he was there.

“He was happier than he had ever been or imagined it was possible to be as he glided north and south, east and west, until all of China had passed under his wings.

“When Chuang Tzu finally woke in his bed, at first he was disappointed, before he felt pleasantly confused—now he wasn’t sure if he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly that was dreaming it was a man—”

“That’s the way the woman’s lover felt?” Kate looked closely at me as I lay back on my damp pillows. “The woman who had the butterfly?”

            “Dreaming and awake, here and there, alive and dead—Heaven and Earth—”

I rocked my lifted hand back and forth through the hot air.

“Yin and Yang,” I said. “Every man was in love with her.”

Kate’s green eyes grew wider, as green and large as mine.

They were mine, like her thick lovely hair, her shapely mouth and burnished skin, she got them from me, from my daughter Kyla I’d found again after 50 years—

—Kyla’s address still the 8420 Linda Verde Avenue engraved on the wedding invitation I’d forgotten to answer, that smelled of lavender and yellow dust and had slept half a lifetime at the back of my dresser drawer . . . .

And from Kyla’s father, who’d looked like my twin, a lost brother, the golden-haired peach farmer named Oscar from west of Dinuba, the exiled and illegitimate grandson of the King of  Sweden—

“The woman had other lovers?” Kate asked and I nodded, blinking as the falling sun touched the purple dress and the diamonds sewn among the rhinestones winked bright as stars of ice.

            “After her lover died, even when she was older,” I said, “there were always men coming to her.”

            “Why?”

            “After they had experienced the butterfly, they changed, they weren’t the same anymore. You could recognize them on the street.”           

            “Not really—” Kate stared at me in disbelief. “Is this a fairy tale?”

            “No,” I said. “I told you it was true. Her lovers’ eyes had a faraway look, as if the men had traveled to a foreign country, they’d been to another world and come back and this world had altered, become a dim reflection of something else, a torn fragment of some other story.”

            Now Kate lay sideways across the end of the bed, touching the purple dress with her fingertips, blocking the different gems when they sparkled and sent colored lights racing across the stained ivy wallpaper.

“What did she look like?” she asked.

            “At first I only heard about her from other women. Aaron hadn’t gone to her, I’m sure of that. We were still very much in love. Once I asked about her and he laughed.”

“Laughed?” Kate looked up from a blue diamond.

“I told him I’d heard she was part Japanese, part black, from Africa, the daughter of a king—a great exotic beauty the color of finest caramel. But he’d met her, he knew who she was. Aaron’s friend was her lover.”

“He did?”

“She was Spanish, from a family of sea captains. It was true she was very beautiful, with ivory skin and black hair.”

            “But not as beautiful as you—” Kate waited. “You were the prettiest woman in San Francisco. That’s what you said Aaron said, after he found you at the Acacia Harvest Fair and took you to the city to get married—”

            At the top of Ferris wheel, the stranger who had stepped unannounced into my carriage threw back the wooden bar and attacked as the lit circle stopped, then came down as quickly I sobbed and hurried to rearrange my stained dress and petticoat.

            The man named Aaron led me quickly past my shocked sisters and high school friends down a quiet avenue of the fair—to a striped tent and the chauffeur in blue livery and the long silver car that drove north through the night until I saw the gray Pacific and the whitecaps like the wings of a million drowning birds—

            “Different,” I admitted quickly. “Her name was Belle Solar, ‘Pretty Sun.’ Aaron introduced us, the day he gave me that dress.”

“This dress?” Kate touched the bodice of faded velvet.

“Yes,” I said. “From that day she and I became fast friends.”

“What was she like?”

“We talked of travel,” I continued,  “of journeys to distant lands. Of Borneo, Taipei, the Dutch East Indies. She loved the sea and ships, she’d grown up on a ship. We enjoyed each other’s company and soon we were meeting every day.”

“In San Francisco?”

“Belle lived in a tower apartment across from Gold Gate Park. One day the maid led me to her room and when I went in she was dressing.”

“You saw it?”

Kate watched me with green eyes as her head lay beside the purple dress.

“That came later. She was standing behind a painted Chinese screen, of two emerald dragons green as your eyes, riding on a blue cloud. She asked me to sit in a chair by the bed.

“‘Have you heard of my secret?’ she asked.

“‘I have,’ I said, I couldn’t lie to Belle Solar.

“‘I want you to know the truth,’ she said. ‘I value your friendship. I don’t want any shadow to come between us.’

“She stepped from behind the screen in a beautiful silk gown patterned with flying cranes, asking me to come sit beside her on the daybed. She touched my hand, looking me in the eye with her large dark eyes, then told me her story—”

“Tell me,” Kate asked, sitting up on the bed.

“I will, in Belle Solar’s own words—

            “‘Ten years ago, after a too brief engagement, I married a sea captain, a Spaniard and mariner like my father. Together we sailed the Pacific and Indian oceans in his ship, The Manifold. I touched land only in his presence, he was jealous of my beauty. The few men I saw were members of his crew, Malays and Africans who spoke no Spanish or English.

“‘For six years I lived only with Eduardo, completely separate from others. I had my books and paint box and my diary, the journal that I kept, but the wide ocean was my world. I suppose in my enforced loneliness I was almost happy, I loved nature with all my heart. With my telescope I studied the sea birds and blue dolphins, the greenery of islands and at night the moon and southern stars.

            “‘One evening in late March, in the bay off Jakarta, an old man, a European from one country or another, came aboard for dinner.

“‘All his long life, from the time of his youth, he had lived in the East. He spoke of his travels in far, unexplored countries, his collecting of exotic zoological specimens, and his painting. For years he’d trekked through jungles and across high-mountain passes, following rivers to their source, alone or living among primitive peoples who had never seen a white man.      

“‘When the dinner plates were cleared he carefully placed a ragged leather folio on the table.

            “‘One by one he brought out pictures of white and Bengal tigers, pygmy elephants and deer, crimson lizards and coiled mosaic snakes, orange monkeys and wildly patterned parrots and macaws. Each animal was truly wonderful, the breathing spirit of the beast or bird present in the avid eyes and vibrant colors and the volumes so fluidly rendered that the creatures seemed captured for an instant, reduced and trapped in mid heartbeat on the paper’s flat surface rather than drawn by a brush.

“‘As I marveled at the brilliant paintings that seemed alive and more than paintings I recalled my poor attempts with watercolors—my sad albatross perched on the mast’s crosstree and the three, winged flying fish above the wave—and felt a stinging shame.

“‘I looked closely at my white-haired visitor, at his worn clothes and frail shoulders and hands, at his sun-wrinkled face and fallen mouth. He resembled beggars I had seen through my telescope, aged men who wandered about the ports begging alms. I remembered my father’s constant admonition about the deceptiveness of appearances, a warning I ignored when I met handsome Eduardo and plighted my troth.

“‘I realized our guest was a genius, an unknown and unrewarded master of masters. He sat at our table on our ship in the harbor and ours were the first Western eyes to see his life’s splendid work.

            “‘Finally, he set out the last picture.

“‘The other paintings had been truly striking in their perfect artistry of detail and realistic animation, but now I felt breathless and more amazed, suddenly I’d been transported to an undreamed of realm of experience and understanding.

“‘I also felt afraid.’”

“Why?” Kate asked.

“‘The picture was of a different order. I leaned forward, like this, as if an invisible hand gripped the back of my neck and pushed me toward the table—before I pulled back, anxious that the painted image would lift its wings and leap from the paper.’

“‘What was it, Belle?’ I asked.

“‘It was a butterfly, an exceedingly rare, almost undiscovered species the man had seen high in the Himalayas, beyond Nepal near the border of China and Tibet. He spoke the insect’s Latin scientific name, then the word the local people knew it by, that meant ‘Wonder of Heaven.’

            “‘My husband stared at it, bending close over the painting.

“‘“It’s magnificent,” he whispered at last, “don’t you think, Belle?”

“‘I agreed that it was exquisite, like some living jewel.

“‘The intricate butterfly had begun to make me apprehensive, I wanted to look at it for hours and days, for the rest of my life, and I wanted to turn and run away, to forget that I ever knew it existed. There was something frightful about it, as if we’d come upon a sleeping god and opened his hand and found the butterfly.

“‘“Yes,” said Eduardo, radiantly he smiled in agreement. “A living jewel.”

“‘And then suddenly I felt terribly fatigued, watching the butterfly’s gaze and its myriad vivid markings had drawn something from deep inside me, some private vital energy that now belonged to the emerald-eyed insect.

“‘I said goodnight, thanking the elderly man for sharing his collection. As he rose and bowed, taking my hand and lowering his lips to my skin, I shivered, but not with disgust at his ruined age and homeliness. He no longer seemed noble and pathetic, now I felt that he was somehow sinister, that his art was not his own but a stolen gift he’d gained by stealth or magic—or in trade, by conjuring dark forces and bartering his soul—

“‘For a moment, I imagined he was young, no more than 20.

“‘With an effort I stood and excused myself, then stumbled to my cabin and without undressing fell down on my berth and plunged into asleep.

“‘Immediately I dreamed that the butterfly had escaped and flew above the ship and its white sails, then swooped toward the blue waves and through my open porthole. The butterfly circled above my uncovered body, watching me as I watched it and realized I couldn’t move my arms or legs, I couldn’t tense my smallest finger or speak or cry out as the butterfly held out its great colored wings with curving stripes and swirling spots and started to descend.

“‘Then I dreamed that Eduardo and the painter had entered my door and that I didn’t rise from my bed to object but only closed my eyes and slept more deeply—’

“Now Belle Solar looked at me closely, as if her large eyes touched every pore of my face and looked through me, before she continued—”

The way you’re looking at me now, I thought as Kate listened. 

“‘Later, when I woke and regained my senses, I realized that what had happened was planned from the first, that when I left the table and returned to my cabin they had followed me and slipped off my clothes as I slept.’”

“How?” Kate asked. 

            “‘How—?’ I asked Belle Solar, just as you’re asking me now, and she answered:

            “‘At dinner my husband had drugged my wine, the artist had given him a pill that contained opium, a potion made of several powders that slowed the heart and breathing and caused a false but apparent death, a deep dreamless faint that lasted a week or more.

            “‘One morning I woke alone and instantly I understood that many days had passed from the night I lay down after seeing the butterfly. I looked out the porthole and the open sea stretched to the horizon. The sun’s latitude shone several degrees south of Jakarta, we’d sailed hundreds of leagues.

            “‘As I sat up, throwing back the sheet, I saw something else had changed—

“‘I kept trying to wake, praying that I dreamed, in the dream wetting my hand and rubbing and rubbing to erase the colored ink that had sunk beneath the skin. I shouted and beat my fists against the bed’s wood frame, I studied my face in a mirror, to make certain who I was, then threw it down and tore my hair and bit my fingers but when I looked again the nightmare wouldn’t stop.

“‘I remembered that a cabinet held a Turkish dagger. If I opened the drawer and found the knife, I would know beyond doubt that what I saw on waking was real and would never disappear, I wasn’t dreaming and there was only one escape.

“‘I pulled the brass knob and stared at the knife, at its gleaming crescent blade and ivory handle and silver guard.

“‘I grasped the ivory and held the curved steel just above my heart, looking aslant at my body, at what had been my body before my husband had brought the old man.

“‘I lifted the knife, ready to bring it down with all my strength, then let its tip fall slowly until the point touched and drew a single drop of blood less red than three scarlet spots drawn across my breast, on the white skin that had turned to magenta and Prussian blue.

 “‘It was then that I decided to wait, to pretend to continue my long sleep, until Eduardo came to my cabin to enjoy his handiwork.

“‘I’d stab and kill him—he was never my husband, he was a monster, a hateful fiend!—before I took my own life.

            “‘I lay back and as I waited for his step in the passageway I slowly examined the butterfly, every farthest part and reach of it, the manner in which it was all woven and interlaced and deepened into itself, altering as one color opened inward and shaded to another and another, without end, like the blue eye of a peacock’s feather, like the darker, richer lines within a tiger’s broader stripe.

            “‘The butterfly was exactly the same, identical to the painting in the folio, only now it was alive, not etched on dead paper but part of my own breathing skin, but not just my skin, it was Belle Solar.

“‘I had become the butterfly.’”

            “Did she kill Eduardo?” Kate asked, almost catching me off guard in the hot room.

            “Belle Solar wasn’t a murderer, but she had a keen hatred for cruelty and a sense of rightful justice like a compass needle, Simple Truth was her True North. She was good and very intelligent, much brighter than the dreadful man she had married, and instantly she understood the perfect punishment.”

“What was that?”

“Each night she allowed him to come into her cabin, to sit in a chair as she lay on the bed. She never let him touch her again, she said she’d kill herself first. He pleaded with her but each time he began to stir she lifted the knife, holding it above the heart of the butterfly, then lowering the blade until it nearly touched her and he sat back again.”

“Then what happened?”

“Six months later he caught a fever off Bombay.

            “‘I suppose,’ Belle said, she still clasped my hand, ‘the butterfly killed him.’

            “With herself as captain, Belle and her crew sailed the Indian Ocean around Africa, crossed the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, Brazil and Argentina, to Chile and around Cape Horn. Her black hair blew loose in the sea wind, her dark eyes read the stars when she took the wheel at midnight and saw the Southern Cross. Then up the coast of South America past Peru to Mexico and California, she brought The Manifold to San Francisco.”

            “And you saw it?” Kate said.

            “As she finished her story she stood before me again, then let the blue silk gown with flying white cranes fall from her shoulders, past her lovely breasts and waist.”

I opened my arms, bending my hands.

“The wings flew out, then scalloped in, out, like an hourglass, toward her knees. The antennae were black and finely drawn, close together at first. Then they slowly curved, shading to purple, blue, then black again to make tight spiral curls about each breast, where the upper wingtips reached.

            “And the colors—strange greens and lavenders, burnished golds, swirling pinks and yellow saffron, coral, indigo, now maroon, here a band of crimson, there a carmine, sudden cobalt, now cool azure, violet, ultramarine, on and on—all distinct yet blended, fathomless suggestions of color, wavering back and forth.

            “‘Watch, Dolly,’ Belle told me, ‘watch closely so you’ll know what I saw when I woke that morning in my bed on The Manifold.’

             “The figure seemed alive, independent yet instantly responsive to Belle’s most delicate gesture and breath. Her merest whisper of movement sent a shiver across the length and span of the butterfly, new colors flickering, shining and rearranging, vanishing, the wings trembling, ready to lift from her skin—

            “‘You’ll think me mad,’ she said, ‘at first I thought myself mad, but it changes—’

            “‘I believe you, Belle,’ I said, ‘I can see.’

            “‘No, Dolly,’ she said. ‘With the moon—’”

            “Really?” Kate watched me, waiting for my answer.

            “Truly,” I said.

            As I tried to describe the Butterfly to Kate—I’d been just her age when I’d first seen it—I saw it again for the first time too, when I woke from the drugged wine in my bedroom in Aaron’s house in San Francisco and Dr. Bolger smiled and whispered, “Many men will leave the Earth on the wings of the Butterfly—”

            —Old and stooped Dr. Bolger had appeared “straight from the court of the Caliph of Samara,” Aaron had said grandly as he’d introduced us and we’d gone into dinner.

            In a vacant chair the doctor set down his leather satchel—that hid the many needles and the dozen colored bottles like thimbles and the Map of the Butterfly that later he’d unfold across half my wide bed as the narcotics took hold and I slept deeply for a week—

            In the room’s pressing heat I felt overwhelmed and despaired of finding the exact words to match the miraculous.

I reminded Kate that the Eskimos had 33 names for snow and lived in igloos with window panes of frozen fresh water, that the Hopi had no past or future verb tense, only present, yet their language was supple and complex enough to describe Einstein’s Theory of Relativity—once a month they bathed in steam from hot rocks, then ran from the sweat lodge and dived into icy mountain waters before they chewed buttons of peyote cactus to see God.

“Like a hidden rainbow, the entire color spectrum is contained in white light.”

            I’d read once that Moslem women weaving flawless Persian rugs mistied one knot so as not to challenge the perfection of Allah. 

If Dr. Bolger had dropped a stitch, I had never seen the mark—

But then I had never really seen the Butterfly—no one who had seen it had ever truly seen it, never taken the Butterfly’s dynamic and infinite measure, not Aaron or Dr. Bolger or 1,000 other men.

And not even Oscar, my one-month true love, my blonde prince in exile, Kyla’s father, Kate’s grandfather, the farmer from along the Kings River south of Kingsburg—

Oscar was after Aaron my abductor was safely dead and buried and I’d returned to Acacia from San Francisco, to start a new life and entertain and instruct all who heard and came running—

“Have you ever closed your eyes and looked at the sun?” I asked Kate.

Forever and effortlessly the wings and body kept evolving, opening out into a hundred fresh generations and involutions that superceded the last flashing patterns fading always across my green eyes that had turned to mirrors trying to capture fire. 

“It was evergreen, like a redwood,” I said. “Sequoia semperviren, like the giants at Kings Canyon.”

            “And the men were changed afterward?” Kate asked quietly, waiting.

            What could I say?

            All I could do was quote Shakespeare:

            “‘Full fathom five./ These are the pearls that were his eyes./ He hath suffered a sea change.’”

            “And that was the day Aaron gave you this dress?”

            “The same day,” I answered. “Not long before he died, of a heart attack.”

            Now it glowed richly in the setting sun through the closed window. The cooler night was coming and the jewels lit up like the first stars.

            “Would you like to try it on?”

            “You mean it?”

            Our eyes met, like green eyes in a mirror.

            “You won’t tell Kyla?”

            “It’s all right—”

            I nodded and Kate jumped to her feet, bending her head and pulling the blue t-shirt past the torrent of shining blonde and red and copper hair, past her perfect breasts and shoulders and striking face.

            “And when you die,” Dr. Bolger had explained as I woke drugged on the bed. “The butterfly will fly away. What a beautiful death—”

            But I didn’t tell Kate as she slipped on my purple velvet scattered with the rain of Aaron’s secret diamonds I’d taken as he lay with open eyes that looked out at the sea but saw only the fading shadow of the Butterfly.