He follows them to the end of the field, where there is a chain-link fence. They fly through it, he climbs over. On the other side there’s another field, a flatter one with less vegetation. There’s a dirt road crossing it, but he disregards this and follows the butterflies, red and white and black in color, with an hourglass pattern, something he’s never seen before. At the other side of this field there’s another fence, a higher one, and he scales this too. Then, when the butterflies have finally stopped, on a low tropical bush with pink flowers, and he’s down on one knee focusing his binoculars, three uniformed men in a jeep drive up.
“What’re you doing in here?” they say.
“In where?” says my brother. He’s impatient with them, they’ve disturbed the butterflies, which have flown off again.
“Didn’t you see the signs?” they say. “The ones that said, DANGER, KEEP OUT?”
“No,” says my brother. “I was chasing those butterflies.”
“Butterflies?” says one. The second one makes a twirling motion beside his ear, with his finger, denoting craziness. “Wacko,” he says. The third one says, “You expect us to believe that?”
“What you believe is your own concern,” says my brother. Or something of the sort.
“Wise guy,” they say, because this is what Americans say in comic books. I add some cigarettes, in the sides of their mouths, a few pistols and other hardware, and boots.
It turns out they are the military and this is a military testing zone. They take my brother back to their headquarters and lock him up. Also they confiscate his binoculars. They don’t believe he’s a graduate student in Astrophysics out chasing butterflies, they think he’s a spy, although they can’t figure out why he would have been so open about it. Spy novels, as I and the military know but my brother does not, are crawling with spies who pretend to be harmless butterfly fanciers.
Finally they allow him to make a phone call, and his graduate supervisor from the university has to come and bail him out. When he goes back to retrieve his bike, it’s been pinched. I get the bare bones of this from my parents over the beef stew. They don’t know whether to be amused or alarmed. From my brother, however, I hear nothing of the sort. Instead I get a letter, written in pencil on a page torn from a loose-leaf notebook. His letters always begin without greeting and end without signature, as if they’re part of one single letter, unrolling through time like an endless paper towel. He’s writing this letter, he says, from the top of a tree, where he’s watching the football game over the stadium wall—cheaper than buying a ticket—and eating a peanut butter sandwich, cheaper than eating in a restaurant: he doesn’t like monetary transactions. There are in fact several grease spots on the paper. He says he can see a bunch of pom-pom-covered capons jumping up and down. These must be the cheerleaders. He’s living in a student dormitory with a lot of mucus membranes who do nothing but drool over girls and get pissed on American beer. In his opinion this takes some doing, as the stuff is weaker than shampoo and tastes like it into the bargain. In the mornings he eats prefrozen reheated fried eggs, which are square in shape and have ice crystals in the yolks. A triumph of modern technology, he says. Apart from that he’s enjoying himself, as he is hard at work on The Nature of the Universe. The burning question is: is the universe more like a giant ever-enlarging blimp, or does it pulsate, does it expand and contract? Probably the suspense is killing me, but I will just have to wait a few years till he works out the final answer. TUNE IN FOR THE NEXT THRILLING INSTALLMENT, he writes, in block letters. I hear you’ve gone into the picture business, he continues in normal-sized writing. I used to do that sort of thing when I was younger. I hope you’re taking your cod liver oil pills and keeping out of trouble. And that is the end of the letter.
I think of my brother sitting at the top of a tree, in California. He no longer knows who he’s writing to, because I have surely changed beyond all recognition. And I no longer know who’s writing. I think of him as staying always the same, but of course this can’t be true. He must know things by now that he didn’t know before, as I do.
Also: if he’s eating a sandwich and writing a letter both at the same time, how is he holding on? He seems happy enough, up there in his perch of a sniper. But he should be more careful. What I have always assumed in him to be bravery may be merely an ignorance of consequences. He thinks he is safe, because he is what he says he is. But he’s out in the open, and surrounded by strangers.
Chapter 53
I sit in a French restaurant with Josef, drinking white wine and eating snails. They’re the first snails I have ever eaten, this is the first French restaurant I have ever been in. It’s the only French restaurant in Toronto, according to Josef. It’s called La Chaumière, which Josef says means “thatched cottage.” La Chaumière, is not however a thatched cottage, but a prosaic, dowdy building like other Toronto buildings. The snails themselves look like large dark pieces of snot; you eat them with a two-pronged fork. I think they are quite good, though rubbery.
Josef says they aren’t fresh snails but have come out of a tin. He says this sadly, with resignation, as if it means the end, though the end of what is not clear; this is how he says many things. It was the way he first said my name, for instance. That was back in May, in the last week of Life Drawing. Each of us was supposed to meet with Mr. Hrbik for an individual evaluation, to discuss our progress during the year. Marjorie and Babs were ahead of me, standing in the hall with takeout coffees.
“Hi, kid,” they said. Marjorie was telling a story about how a man exposed himself to her in Union Station, where she had gone to meet her daughter on the train from Kingston. Her daughter was my age, and going to Queen’s.
“He had on a raincoat, would you believe,” said Marjorie.
“Oh God,” said Babs.
“So I looked him in the eye—the eye—and I said, ”Can’t you do any better than that?“ I mean, talk about weenies. No wonder the poor boob runs around in train stations trying to get somebody to look at it!”
“And?”
“Listen, what goes up must come down, eh?”
They snorted, spewing droplets of coffee, coughing out smoke. As usual I found them slightly disreputable: making jokes about things that were no joking matter.
Susie came out of Mr. Hrbik’s office. “Hi, you guys,” she said, trying for cheer. Her eyeshadow was smudged, her eyes pinkish. I’d been reading modern French novels, and William Faulkner as well. I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession, with undertones of nausea. Susie was the sort of girl who would go in for this kind of love. She would be abject, she would cling and grovel. She would lie on the floor, moaning, hanging onto Mr. Hrbik’s legs, her hair falling like blond seaweed over the black leather of his shoes (he would have his shoes on, being about to stalk out of the door). From this angle, Mr. Hrbik was cut off at the knees and Susie’s face was invisible. She would be squashed by passion, obliterated.
I was not sorry for her, however. I was a little envious.
“Poor bunny rabbit,” Babs said behind her retreating back.
“Europeans,” said Marjorie. “I don’t believe for a minute he was ever divorced.”
“Listen, maybe he was never even married.”
“What about those kids of his?”