(I had had to walk back to the car to get four quarters from the little holder thing that folds down between the front bucket seats as I only had a single dollar bill plus two tens – and I didn’t want to shove a ten in the machine – who knows what would happen then)
with my dollar bill and four quarters
trying to figure which buttons to push
and where the coins slot was
the train pulled up.
It was Sunday and who knows when the next train will come
So I boarded quickly, without my ticket
I’m a scofflaw
They warn you never to ride the trains without a ticket
one hundred fifty dollar fine.
I clutched my dollar and my four quarters in my hand
“Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They’re beautiful―God, how beautiful they are! They’re like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. They’re as graceful as any bird. They’re as mysterious as any animal on earth. No one knows for sure how long they live or what impulses―except for hunger―they respond to. There are more than two hundred and fifty species of shark, and everyone is different from every other one.”
Dwayne never imagined how difficult it would be to get to Boca Diablo and see the butterflies again. After all these years the orange swarm he had seen as a child had grown in his mind. Now, after Flynn had brought him information, probably only a myth, that indicated that the insects were used by the ancient indigenous royalty for supernatural powers, the idea of the butterflies had grown in his mind until they had pushed out almost everything else. With Flynn’s support, he assumed that gaining approval from the university would be a cakewalk, and funding would surely follow.
But there was violent political unrest in the Boca Diablo area and the State Department was restricting travel. A shadowy figure, El Tiburón had raised a ragtag peasant army which, somehow, had driven the government forces out of the area. The central command didn’t seem too keen on spilling the necessary blood on getting it back.
“It has always been a backwater,” the embassy official had told him, “It will always be a backwater – bloody and dangerous. And useless. I recommend you abandon concern for that godforsaken place. Forget about it completely. I know I have. At least until you came in and started bothering me about it.”
One night, he received a phone call from someone asking to meet him down at his university office. The person on the other end refused to give his name, but said, “You need to meet me there, you won’t regret it.”
“Are you sure I won’t?” he asked.
“Well, I am absolutely sure you’ll regret not showing up,” was the answer. And it sounded convincing.
After carding into the dark research building and walking down the eerie empty echoing hallways Dwayne was startled to see his office door open, and the lights on. When he entered he saw a tall man wearing an expensive suit, smoking a cigar, sitting at his own desk.
“Have a seat,” the man said in a slight accent. He gestured at a chair in front of the desk.
“Ummm,” Dwayne stammered, “That’s my desk, and my chair, and there is no smoking allowed in the building.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, so true,” the man said in a calm voice. But he made no attempt to move or to extinguish his cigar. He simply made a generous puff and repeated his hand gesture toward the chair. Dwayne sat down.
“How did you get in here?” Dwayne said.
“I’m Mr. Albert, I work for the CIA,” was the answer. Dwayne supposed that answered his question, even if indirectly.
“Why are you here, what does anything have to do with me?” Dwayne said.
“Anything of what?”
“That’s what I need to know.”
“Well, Dwayne, can I call you Dwayne? Here’s the thing. We understand you have been trying to get permission and funding to reach Boca Negro. Is that true?”
“Of course, I want… I need to get back and study a sighting of rare… of unique butterflies I saw when I was there as a….”
Albert interrupted him. “Now Dwayne, we have no interest in the reason you want to reach Boca Diablo. Why is not important to us. What we want to know is if you are able to help us.”
“But how can I help you, I can’t even get there.”
“Those are difficulties that we can make go away… like that,” and Arnold made a simple wave through the air.
Dwayne’s eyes grew large. He hoped that Arnold wouldn’t sense his eagerness, though he was pretty sure that was not possible. As cool as possible he replied, “I suppose with help with a visa and research funding I could make a trip. But what is it that you need… what could I possibly help you with?”
Albert sat silent, staring at Dwayne as if he were sizing up an opponent – or a lion staring at a limping deer.
“You know the area has been overrun by forces of a man that calls himself El Tiburón – that means The Shark, you know.”
Dwayne nodded.
“If you get into the area, you will certainly be brought before El Tiburón and we need information about him. You would be expected to get this information and return it to us, either by returning alive, or other means.”
Dwayne didn’t like the term, “by other means,” but he had been so obsessed with getting back to the butterflies, he was willing to march through hell on the way, which wasn’t far off from what he was being presented.
“How do you know he will want to see me?”
“Oh he will. We guarantee that, at least.”
Albert paused again. Then he opened a folder that had been sitting in front of him and extracted an eight by ten glossy photo.
“We have managed, at great cost, to obtain a photograph of El Tiburón.”
He turned it toward Dwayne. “I think you might know this man.”
Dwayne gasped. The man was older, streaks of grey ran through the thick hair that poked out from beneath the military cap he wore, and the face was furrowed by years of tough living… but there was no doubt about who the man was.
“Chaix,” Dwayne mumbled.
“Yes! Chaix!” Albert replied, with too much enthusiasm… bordering on glee.
Flynn was Dwayne’s advisor for his Doctoral Dissertation. Dwayne was worried about that, but he didn’t have any choice – Flynn was the only other Lepidopterist in the entire Entomology Department. Dwayne wanted to write his dissertation on the orange butterflies he had seen years before at Boca Diablo – his preoccupation and passion for those memories was total and nothing else was of importance to him.
But Flynn had continued to doubt the existence of the insects.
He said, many times, “Butterflies, as you well know, for all their panoply of hues, solid or variegated, dull or dazzling, are not colored at random. There has to be a reason for their appearance, something that millennia of natural selection had settled upon. Butterflies in that region, in that climate can be bland or camouflaged, or they can be a brilliant blue, yellow, or green – but not orange. It simply isn’t seen and there is no reason for it.”
Dwayne would reply that it was something that he had seen and it was there, reason or not. He was more than pleasantly surprised when he received the official letter that Flynn had approved his dissertation subject, had sent a request for travel funding to the University Board, and requested a meeting, “to discuss this matter further.”
“I’m so happy that you approved my subject,” Dwayne said to Flynn as they sat down across from each other. “But tell me, you have never thought they existed, what has changed your mind?”
“I still don’t think they exist,” Flynn said, “But I think that there is maybe a slight chance, and it’s a mystery that I don’t think we can ignore.”
“What? Why?”
“Read this.” Flynn passed a thick, elaborately bound leather volume across the table. Dwayne took a look at the title, “Myths and Beliefs of the Tutaconta Indians.”
“What does this have to do with my butterflies?”
“Just read it, as soon as you can, and get back to me,” Flynn said, stood up, and simply walked away.
Dwayne started in that evening, reading from front cover to back. He didn’t stop until he was finished at dawn the next day.
The Tutaconta Indians were a large and successful Pre-Columbian civilization that shared a lot of similarities with the more well-known Toltec and Maya. The history was that they built large elaborate cities that had completely and mysteriously disappeared into the jungles where they had been raised.
Dwayne’s interest became intense when he read of the legendary capital of Protamayo, which was supposedly located on the slopes of the dormant volcano which later became the Boca Diablo.
At the height of the Tutaconta civilization Boca Diablo was a tall conical mountain until a series of violent eruptions and subsequent collapses reduced the mountain to the complex of lava flows and craters that exist today. The Tutaconta capital, Protamayo, was destroyed in this cataclysm with an almost unimaginable loss of life. In a few years after this the entire Tutaconta civilization collapsed, leaving no trace except whispery collections of legend and rumors that had spread through other nearby, luckier tribes.
The book Dwayne had been handed, attributed to the author Lazarus Leon, was written in a lurid style, treating these legends as if they were absolute fact, with almost no archeological evidence to back it up. Still, its style was convincing and Dwayne was caught up in the fervent storytelling.
After chapters detailing the rise and fall of the Tutaconta Empire and the destruction of the Protamayo capital came book sections describing daily life in the civilization, with chapters on the peasant population and the royal class.
While the description of the laboring masses was as grim as could be expected from a primitive society, the upper strata lived a life of incredible privilege and luxury. The book hinted that this ever-widening gap between rich and poor, along with the increasing decadence and depravity of the so-called nobles was responsible for the destruction of the society – that the volcanic eruption was simply a terrible outside event that set the extinction in motion.
To emphasize these points followed a series of chapters on the religious practices of this upper class. They were a collection of warrior priests and practices of mass human sacrifices were the hallmark of their legacy. Page after page of stomach-turning descriptions of death and debauchery in such detail that Dwayne wondered about the source of this text – and how much was from a fevered imagination of the author.
But these royal warrior priests were possessed of immense power and lived what seemed to be preternaturally long lives. They were described as being “Several hands taller than ordinary men,” was would live a number of lifetimes without seeming to grow older.
Dwayne began to read faster and faster as the text began to give tantalizing hints about sacred magical potions that were used to acquire great strength, divine knowledge, and extraordinary long life. Finally, near the end of the book he found the passage that explained why Flynn was so suddenly extremely interested.
“The Royal Priests of Protamayo had developed a number of techniques, most involving sacrifice to the gods, to improve their physical and mental powers, and to extend their lives. More important than anything else, however, was the Brebare Magico, or magic potion that they called Quan Kaq Itzac. The exact formula for this elixir is, of course, unknown – but it was said to be prepared from the crushed bodies of sacred insects, along with a special blend of spices and human blood. These insects were also called Quan Kaq and have been described to be giant, bright orange, butterflies. These were specially bred and cared for by the most learned of priests and destined for no other purpose than the preparation of the sacred drugs that gave great powers and long life.”
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
The crater of Masaya Volcano taken from the rim of the active crater. It is a lot larger than this photo suggests. The molten lava is hidden in the inner crater – if you look closely you can see a bit of red.
After Dwayne returned to the mission group from working at the volcano with Chaix he felt he had come back from an alien planet – a different world… and he felt that he never fully returned. Everything had a surreal aura around it. Colors were sharper, smells were stronger, yet his fellow travelers seemed unsubstantial and blurred – their speech almost unintelligible and completely uninteresting. He began to worry, would the rest of his life be like this?
He felt that he was living a half-life, that something had been revealed to him that he not only didn’t understand – he couldn’t even comprehend what it was.
At night, beside his hammock in their last few days on the mission trip, he tried to explain how he felt to Suzanna.
“But I don’t understand,” she said, “You climbed a volcano, you saw some butterflies. What’s the big deal?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to explain, I don’t know. Something’s changed and I can’t figure out what it is, or what I should do about it.”
“I think that maybe you breathed a few too many fumes from that volcano,” Suzanna said.
Of course, these feelings faded over time, especially after they returned home. Still, it was always there, the small knot of surrealistic doubt that remained like a stone in the pit of Dwayne’s stomach.
He graduated and went off to school like everyone had always expected him to. He floundered around, changing majors every semester or two, until he ended up in biology. It felt like an accident, someplace random, until he sneaked away from a particularly boring lecture and, following some little-used dim passageway, ended up in a storage area in the bowels of the Natural History Museum, where his class had been held.
He wandered into a large, open room, lined with what looked like miles of identical shallow metal cases with hinged glass lids.. These were filled with specimens of butterflies. Thousands of them, dead, dried, pinned and labeled. Rank upon ran of bright fluorescent tubes burned down overhead. The walls of the room were mirrored, which gave the illusion that the room was endless.
He looked down at the specimens in the cases and their little tags perched on thin steel pins next to the specimens. There was the mysterious latin name in bold lettering – Colias eurytheme, Phyciodes campestris montana, Polygonia satyrus, Vanessa virginiensis… on and one. Under the Latin Name was the common, or English name: Crown Fritillary, Nevada Silverspot, Milbert’s Tortoiseshell, Queen Alexandra’s Sulphur, Boisduval’s Marble.
Beneath the name there was a date, a country of origin (and there were lots of these) and finally a person’s name – next to the word collector. These too were widely varied, but as he moved down the row he noticed that one name kept reappearing with regularity, one person seemed to be primarily responsible for the collection – Haiden Flynn.
He wasn’t sure why, but he felt a kinship with this Flynn.
Dwayne thought he was alone in that vast and strange place, until he was gazing at the mirrored end of the room, trying to figure out exactly where the boundaries were, when he caught a glimpse of motion down at the other end. Turning, he followed his eyes to where the movement must have been and noticed a man in a white lab coat, bending over a case. In total silence, the man’s arms worked at something and then Dwayne saw the case’s lid rise. He immediately moved to where the man was.
It was an old, old man. He was completely bald on the top of his head, the smooth skin reflecting the light from the fluorescents overhead in curved lines. On the side of his head were thick knots of pure white hair, extending out in on each side.
“Excuse me,” Dwayne said, “I didn’t realize anyone was here.”
The old man hesitated for a second, then raised his head and looked at Dwayne. He was wearing some sort of complex compound glasses and had swung a magnifier over each eye, which made his deep blue irises loom large and buglike in the glass. The old man was holding a gigantic iridescent blue butterfly specimen. He moved it slightly in the bright light, and the wings shed a shower of colors. Dwayne noticed the label on the man’s lab coat, it said Prof. Flynn.
Flynn flicked the magnifier lenses off to the side and his eyes shrank down to small beads of blue. He barely seemed to notice Dwayne until he realized that Dwayne was staring at the iridescence of the specimen’s wings.
“Aha!” Flynn cried in a surprising loud and melodic voice, “Morpho didius, commonly named Giant Blue Morpho.”
“You,” Dwayne stammered, “This is your collection?”
“But of course it is,” Flynn said, “Who else would it belong to? Now this magnificent Morpho here… I collected it on a small village farm in the high Andes of Peru. I love all my… little friends here.” Flynn waved across the room in a sweeping gesture, “of course, but I do have my favorites. And this would be one… one of many.”
Dwayne realized at that time that he had no choice but to become a Lepidopterist.
Flynn was such an odd bird that rarely would an undergraduate stoop to work for him, let alone a graduate assistant, that it was easy for Dwayne to transfer, take as many classes under Flynn as he could, and work for research credit in the dark catacombs of Flynn’s collections.
His parents were concerned, especially as he laid out his plans for continuing his studies in graduate school.
“Now, these butterflies are all nice and good,” his mother told him as they sat around the kitchen table, drinking coffee over spring break. “But we’re concerned for your future.”
“We’re not rich, you know,” his father continued. “We want you to be happy, but you’re going to have to earn a living sometime.”
“I can always teach,” Dwayne said.
The only reply from his parents were to compress their lips into a tighter line.
Back at school, he sat down with Suzanna – who had followed Dwayne to the university.
“Don’t worry about it Dwayne,” she said. “I’m about to graduate with an Engineering Degree, I’ll make enough for both of us.”
Dwayne wanted to ask some questions – he didn’t quite understand what she was talking about. Still, if this was a way he could pull it off…
They were married three months after graduation and settled into a nice but spartan apartment a mile off campus. Suzanna, true to her word, found a research position with a petrochemical firm that paid enough for them to live and for Dwayne to continue his work under Professor Flynn.
Dwayne began to settle down, but there was one big problem that continued to bother him, enough to keep him awake at night.
It took almost two years, but finally Dwayne sat down with Flynn and told him the story of the trip to the Boca Diablo volcano and the orange butterflies. Talking about it for the first time in half a decade felt like a giant weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
As the story went on, he became more and more excited, animated, and the memories came flooding back, the details sharp and clear.
Finally he finished, let out a deep breath, and sat back to see what Flynn would say.
“Well, son, that’s quite a tale.”
“And?”
“I’m sorry, but it’s completely impossible.”
“What? Why?”
“You see, son, I know every genus and species of butterfly in the world. Nobody else knows half what I know and while there may be something out there I’ve never seen, there is always more to learn, there couldn’t be something like that.”
“What do you mean ‘Something like that;?”
“Something like a bright orange butterfly living in a volcanic crater. Species of that color are very rare and there are none that size, none close to that size. And, especially, none in that country, or even that part of the world.”
“But… but I saw them, I really did.”
“Maybe what you saw is more related to how long ago it was and the smoke from that crater.”
“That’s what Suzanna said?”
“Who?”
“Suzanna, my wife.”
Dwayne realized that over the years he had worked with Flynn, the old professor had never met his wife, and he had mentioned her so little that Flynn didn’t even remember who she was. And he didn’t seem to care.
“So you are completely sure that there are no bright orange butterflies in that part of the world.”
“Absolutely.”
And Dwayne immediately knew where he had to go and what he had to do.
They finished placing the instruments sometime around the middle of the afternoon – with everyone circling back around the crater to where they had parked the trucks. One of the workmen pulled two steel buckets filled with ice and beer out from beneath a tarp in the pickup bed and the two of them, along with Chaix, sat down on the bumpers and began to drink.
“Come on, have a cold one,” Chaix said to Dwayne, offering a glass bottle beaded with condensation. “You’ve earned it, we all have worked hard.”
“Thanks… but I don’t think so. Go ahead and sit, I’m just going to walk around, explore a bit.”
That’s what Dwayne wanted to do. While he had been working down along the crater wall he kept glancing upward to a high green wall that surrounded about a third of the caldera. This expanse rose above the gray ash and white smoke, gleaming bright in the afternoon tropical sun. It seemed like a pull to him, he wanted to take a look.
“Sure, I guess,” said Chaix. “Explore to your heart’s content. I’ll send these two back in a while, but I want to stay ‘till sundown. Then we can check the seismographs while they are running on batteries… plus, I want you to see the crater in the dark. It’s quite a show.”
With a not Dwayne started to walk up the steep green slope to the top of the ridge. It was easier than it looked, the layers of volcanic ash and hardened lava were under a thin layer of grass and he was able to get good traction. He would climb for a bit, then pause to catch his breath and look back over the territory he had covered. The two trucks and three beer-drinking me were shrinking fast, until they looked like toys along the curving drop of the crater.
Even the caldera itself seemed to shrink in size, now that he was high and far away enough to see it as a full circle. The evil gray pit spitting its thick column of yellowish smoke was less menacing as it withdrew into the distance – it became a geometric construction with its own strange beauty rather than a gaping void with its own steep path to hell.
Before long, Dwayne had reached the top of the slope. He realized it was a very thin curving ridge, with a faint path, probably worn by some animal, along its bending edge. Looking beyond, Dwayne could see the extensive reach of the black lava fields that, from this height, looked like a giant ink-blot upon the earth. These reached out in irregular shapes in all directions. To the South he realized they flowed down into a crescent-shaped lake, with a city perched on the cliffs on the opposite side. That lake, the low spot, protected the inhabitants in that direction from the deadly lava.
In all other directions he could make out the range of hills that marked the outer edge of the greater caldera – the entire complex of volcanoes and vents that inhabited this weak spot in the earth itself – allowing the molten rock to leak out like a vast unhealed wound.
As he walked along the ridge, he came around the curve and noticed that there was another crater, much smaller that the active one, that sprouted off the outer wall of the mountain. This crater was obviously much older than the main one and had been extinct for a long time. Its walls were eroded and green, covered in vegetation like the slope that he had climbed.
The bottom of the crater came into view. It wasn’t all that deep – it looked like a lot of material had fallen from the walls into the bottom, filling it partially up.
Not only had this process raised the bottom of the crater, but it had obviously formed material that was beneficial to plant life. A thick circular area of tropical forest had grown up in the center of the crater, with the sides of the crater dropping down to meet the walls of greenery. Its emerald color was so bright and lively that, after having spent the day staring at the gray volcanic rock of the crater, it hurt Dwayne’s eyes.
The circular grove was depressed in the center to the point that Dwayne thought that it might be open there, or at least covered with low bushes instead of trees. Something about the thicket attracted him – it seemed such an unlikely occupant in such a place he felt an irresistible urge to climb down and explore the greenery himself.
The walls were eroded to the point they weren’t any steeper than the ridge he had climbed, so after a bit of walking and examining the slope from several different angles he picked a route and began to climb down.
Within twenty minutes he was at the edge of the trees. They were much taller than they looked from up above and very thick. The impenetrable tops meant that no light could reach through to the ground. Very little could grow there and Dwayne was surprised to find that everything was open and once he pushed through a barrier of some tough bushes he was able to walk and explore the area without any trouble.
With the sun blotted out it was still, but shockingly cool. It felt like being on a completely different planet that the hot black and gray world of the rest of the volcano. He instinctively pushed his way toward the center of the crater, wondering about the shallow area he had seen from above.
It didn’t’ take very long until he found what it was. The very center of the crater was filled with water, a stagnant pond rimmed with thick mud. Bleached-white trunks of fallen trees lined that area. Dwayne figured that the water and mud would not give the trees enough purchase for their roots and once they reached a certain height would tumble in a violent storm. Beyond the barrier of the fallen trunks was the silvery expanse of still water interrupted only by clumps of scrubby bushes that rose out from the liquid. There was a flash of unexpected color from these bushes, then another, then more. Something numerous, small, and brilliant was moving around on those bushes. It was too far for Dwayne to make out at first, but he had to find out.
He worked his way slowly and carefully through the obstacles of the fallen trees. He found that the mud was firmer around the upturned root balls and he could scramble on a log that was laying the right way and advance his journey. Finally, covered in muck and breathing hard, he reached the edge of the water. The sunlight came through uninterrupted onto the watery bushes and he was able to make out clearly what was flittering there.
It was a cloud of bright orange butterflies. They were large, and the most brilliant insects he had ever seen. At first, he thought they restricted themselves to the water and the shrubs, but as he watched he would see one fly off into the trees. As soon as the wings reached the shade, the brilliant orange color faded and they seemed, like magic, to blend in and disappear.
Entranced, Dwayne stared at the spectacle of the brilliant insects, until, glancing up and out from the watery clearing, he saw that a shadow was quickly descending along the wall of the crater towards the interior forest. He knew he didn’t want to get caught down there in the dark, and, with terrible strength of willpower, tore himself away from the sight and retraced his steps.
It was harder to get out of the trees than in was to get into them, and it took longer. By the time he reached the eroded slope of the crater, the sun was to the horizon and he was climbing out of a broad, dark, void.
When he reached the ridge above the sun was gone and the sky was darkening rapidly. There was not much twilight in the tropics. He wished he had brought a flashlight, but as he moved around the curve was glad to see that Chaix, far below, had turned the Land Rover to face the ridge and turned on the lights. There was no sign of the pickup, but between those headlights and an evil red glow that came from the main active crater, Dwayne was able to pick his way down the slope, yelling out to Chaix on the way.
“I’m glad you found your way back,” Chaix said, “I saw you disappear over the ridge and was worried that you wouldn’t come back.”
“I climbed down into the crater beyond, the little one.”
“Oh, I know what you’re talking about. They call that Crater Arbol – the crater of the trees. I’ve never been into it. What did you find?”
“Nothing. Only trees and mud.”
“I see that,” Chaix said, gesturing at Dwayne’s filthy clothes. “I’ll catch hell for that.”
Dwayne did not mention the butterflies, though he had no idea why he felt that it was important to keep them a secret.
Chaix picked up a powerful torch that he had placed on the bumper of the Land Rover and switched it on. He waved the beam in the dark sky and Dwayne could see the beam cutting through the clouds of smoke swirling in the dark above like a searchlight below a bombing raid.
“Come on, Chaix said, let me show you what an eruption looks like in the dark. We’re not sure why, but they seem to be more violent when the air cools a bit. It’s spectacular.”
He began to walk toward the crater with the torch making an elliptical pool of light on the ground in front of them.
“Be careful, we don’t want to walk over the edge.”
Suddenly, the light disappeared over the edge and Chaix put a hand out to stop Dwayne, who was now transfixed by the sight of looking down into the crater. Chaix made sure Dwayne was on firm ground then switched off the light.
Without the sun covering it up the crater was filled with an evil red light that came up out of the vent in the center. It seemed to swirl around with the smoke and paint the walls with a hellish, unnatural tint. Dwayne couldn’t see the source of the light, it was too far down the throat of the vent, but the world seemed swallowed out by its glow.
“The seven minutes is about up,” Chaix said.
As if on cue, the vent began to howl like a jet engine on takeoff and suddenly waves of bright glowing rocks came shooting up out of the vent. It was like watching a fireworks displace from up above, except instead of booms and explosions, there were screaming whooshing noises and crackling retorts as the rocks cooled and split.
The two of them stood there until the display waned and the vent returned to its quiet state. Still, the red glow poured out. Chaix turned on his torch and pointed it into the void, which swallowed the tiny light like it was not there. Finally, he tapped Dwayne on the shoulder and they turned and walked in the ellipse of torchlight until they reached the Land Rover.
It was slow and tricky but the truck had extra running lights and they were able to cross the rough lava road and reach the highway by midnight.
“Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn’t stop it. I was going to sleep.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Smoke, steam, and sulfur dioxide coming out of the volcano, Masaya, Nicaragua.
Boca Diablo (part 1)
Dwayne was the only young “vacationary” that could sleep in a hammock. He tied it up between two rough wooden support poles on the vast front porch of the mission where he enjoyed the slightly-cooler night breezes while the rest slept in standard bunkbeds inside. The others thought he was nuts.
“You’re only a few feet from the dirt street,” Suzanna said, “Plus all the bugs and crap flying around.”
“I’d rather deal with that than all those snoring kids inside… and that’s after they quit horsing around and go to sleep.”
Suzanna was from his church back home and he knew his mother had asked her to look out for him. He didn’t appreciate that at all – but supposed that it wasn’t her fault.
Though he was comfortable in the hammock, he couldn’t sleep tonight. He rocked gently side to side, thinking about all the work he had done, the weekend carwashes, the letter writing, essentially all the begging, to earn enough money for this trip to Santa Pagua. Up until that evening, it had been a waste – more of a teenager week at camp than the serious expedition into a foreign land that he had hoped for. Most of the male kids spent their days out in front of the mission scrabbling at the rocky entrance road with no real effect. The girls repackaged vitamins from giant bulk containers into little ziplock bags – counting pills to distribute somewhere unknown.
“Be sure and throw away the moisture packet,” the leader would shout out, again and again, “We don’t want anyone eating those.”
“What a waste of time and money all that was,” Dwayne mumbled to himself. The disappointment and bitterness had melted away though, replaced that afternoon by the excitement that was keeping him awake.
He had come in from digging at a particularly stubborn rock with a pointed iron bar, dripping with sweat, and was getting a Coke from the refrigerator when he noticed a man speaking to the Reverend Martin. The man was obviously a local, dressed in the straw hat, loose collared shirt, and light cotton pants adapted to the tropical climate – but his English was impeccable. He had been making a impassioned point, waving his hands in the way typical to Santa Pagua, to the Reverend – who simply stood there, passive, and looking around. Finally the Reverend replied.
“Of course, Mr. Chaix, we understand your needs and appreciate your objective, but you must know that we are here doing God’s work, and his work is never finished.”
Dwayne was instantly interested and boldly walked up to the pair.
“What does he need Reverend Martin?”
“Oh, Dwayne,” the Reverend began, condescension dripping in his voice, “This is Roberto Chaix, a local geologist. He is looking for some free labor in helping place some seismographic equipment around an active volcano.”
Dwayne felt his eyes grow wide. An active volcano! This is the sort of thing he had been hoping for.
“What volcano?” he asked Chaix directly, ignoring the Reverend.
“Well, you look strong enough to be of help to me,” Chaix replied. “It’s called Boca Diablo. It’s a low cluster of collapsed structures about fifteen clicks south of here. You can see the smoke rising on a clear day.”
Dwayne had noticed that column of rising smoke. He had read about Boca Diablo in his research before the trip. It was one of the most active volcanic vents on the planet, alternately spewing lava and collapsing back into itself since recorded history. The early Spanish explorers had called it Boca Diablo, thinking it had to be a portal into hell itself.
“Oh, please, Reverend Martin, please let me go.”
It took some time to get Reverend Martin to relent and agree to loan him to Chaix for a few days. After the Reverend had acquiesced Chaix simply said, “Be ready at six thirty tomorrow morning, out in front of the mission.”
Dwayne wasn’t sure if he had slept at all when the sun began to splash purple and gray phosphorescent figures along the horizon. He slipped out of his hammock, untied the knots, and rolled it up into a tight packet, hiding it behind a planter. Since he knew he was up before anyone else, he slipped off his clothes and dipped himself in the barrel of water that caught the runoff from the mission roof. The other kids would take conventional showers but he had come to enjoy the natural softness of the aqua pura.
He quickly dressed and moved out into the street away from the mission to wait. He didn’t want the Reverend to come out and change his mind about letting him go.
Chaix showed up exactly on time, driving a heavily dented British Land Rover. Following behind was an ancient junky looking pickup truck piled with gear. Dwayne sat in the ‘Rover beside Chaix and the two trucks set off for Boca Diablo.
It was a day of hard work. The first order of business was to get the vehicles across the lava field that stretched between the volcano and the highway. Some semblance of a road had been dozed through the jumble of rugged jet-black slag, but it was not passable. The razor-sharp glassy rock broke and shifted and they had to constantly wrestle the vehicles through tight or loose spots. Dwayne understood why Chaix had come to the mission for help, the two workers from the pickup were strong, but lazy, and would take no initiative themselves, simply standing around until someone told them exactly where to stand and what to do.
The obsidian lava caught all of the heat of the rapidly rising sun and soon the heat became unbearable. The workers in the pickup were sneaking beers from a cooler hidden under their dash and quickly became even more useless. Finally, a little before noon, they reached the volcano itself.
Dwayne had always imagined a volcano as a symmetrical cone of a mountain, something like Mount Fuji in Japan, rising up above all the land around. Boca Diablo, however, wasn’t like that at all.
Chaix explained that most volcanoes went through cycles of eruption and collapse and at Boca Diablo – the collapse won out.
“It’s a down volcano,” he explained. “The actual vent is a long way below the level of the surface.”
There was an oval ridge that surrounded the complex that was a lot smoother than the lava field and the vehicles climbed the last mile easily. Then they parked and walked up to the edge.
The sight was so unexpectedly stunning that Dwight felt dizzy for a second. He was staring into a vast, deep void, a huge cylinder cut out of the very crust of the earth – possibly a half-kilometer wide and just as deep. The bottom was smooth – a jet black sea of recently solidified molten rock. In the center, a smaller crater dropped down even farther, and a constant column of white smoke rose from the vent high into the sky above them. This pillar of smoke would move around in the wind. When it approached the side they stood on it would stagger them with a horrific rotten-egg, sulfurous odor.
“Sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, mixed with sulfuric acid and steam” Chaix said. “We have to be very careful, that stuff can be deadly. We must stay out of the smoke at all costs.”
As he explained the dangers, a low rumbling sound came up from the vent. They felt it in their feet as much as heard it in their ears. Chaix glanced down at his watch.
“Oh, here it comes. Every seven minutes, like clockwork.”
As they looked down into the vast crater, a sound like a jet engine began to whine out of the vent. Then, without warning, a swarm of bright orange specks began to shoot out of the smoke, arcing across the space in the crater, then splattering against the rock floor.
“Lava, shooting out from a pool down in the vent,” Chaix said. “For years it’s been doing that, surprisingly steady. Sometimes it shoots more, sometimes less – but every seven minutes.”
Then they all started in to work. After some instruction from Chaix, Dwayne was able to understand how the seismographs worked – how to set them in place, how to arrange the solar panel that provided power, how to turn on the radio transmitter. Dwayne took one of the workers and Chaix the other. That way they could each carry two instruments, and then walk off around the crater, placing them. The idea was to put sixteen seismographs spaced more or less evenly around the crater. They would run for a few months; then be picked up.
“Look, there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Collected Poems Of Alvaro De Campos: 1928 1935: V. 2
Kids love the reflecting pool. The water is less than a quarter inch deep.
Cake Walk
The ladies of the town were holding their cake walk. A rough circular path of squares and numbers had been put down onto the concrete in yellow masking tape. A motley group of old women and small children slowly walked this course while a record player pumped out a thin buzzing stream of polka music. After an appropriate delay a hand lifted the tone arm and the cake walkers settled onto their squares with an obvious air of excitement and anticipation.
After a short dramatic pause, Mrs. Slaughter, the oldest and biggest battle-ax in the women’s veteran auxiliary, reached into a metal can and drew out a slip of paper. There was a microphone hooked to the record player and after blowing on the microphone screen, causing the record player to pop and squeal, Mrs. Slaughter called out “Number Sixteen, the winner is number Sixteen.”
A huge gray-haired woman in a shapeless, colorless print dress shook with excitement and shouted, “I win! I win!” She was escorted by the other walkers over to a long table covered with various cakes of all shapes, colors, and sizes. Her eyes gleamed as she looked up and down, finally making her choice, and everyone clapped as she hoisted her choice high. The look on her face… this might well be the highlight of her life.
“All right everyone, get on your squares,” Mrs. Slaughter’s voice crawled from the speaker, “Get on your squares, find a good one, only a dollar.”
Sam palmed the single bill in his pocket. He had found a dollar forgotten in his sock drawer that morning. He was filled with a strange excitement and smiled as he dropped his money into the box and took his place in the masking-tape squares. The music started and Sam started to walk, following a scrawny little kid around and around. Sam looked around and grinned as he walked until, suddenly the music stopped. The kid in front of him halted on the seven square, which was Sam’s lucky number. Without really thinking about it he took an extra step and forced the kid to hop one more, ending up on Eight.
Everyone turned to watch Mrs. Slaughter pull out a slip of paper.
“Seven,” she said, “The winner is Seven.”
The kid glared at Sam and started to choke out, “But that was my….,” but it was too late, Sam was already starting over to the table to make his choice. Before he made two steps, his mother appeared from nowhere and put her hand on his shoulder.
“I can’t believe you actually won something,” his mother said. “Now, let’s make sure you pick a good cake.”
Sam shrugged until his mother’s hand fell away – and then they were at the table, surrounded by the other cake walkers, waiting for Sam to make his choice.
The cakes on the table had been baked and donated by all the better ladies of Putterburg. Baking was a prized skill and this was the opportunity to show off. The cakes were elaborate constructions of flour and sugar, colored, piped, and sculpted into scallops and swirls of Angel Food and German Chocolate. Sam’s mother licked her lips as the two of them scanned the rows and debated the beauty of this one or that.
Sam, however, found himself irresistibly drawn to one particular cake that had been shunted off to the far left-hand side. This one wasn’t fancy at all. It was a simple dark cylinder of chocolate icing, with no additions or decoration… not even a sprinkle. It wasn’t large and wasn’t even particularly even or symmetrical. It had a definite oblong lean to one side. The other cakes were on elaborate decorated slabs, color-coordinated with the icing. The chocolate one was on a simple piece of corrugated cardboard with a layer of aluminum foil.
Sam stared at the cake and imagined some poverty stricken woman, eking out a tough living in a rough shack on the bad side of town. Despite her perilous condition she had her pride and wanted to make a donation to the cause. All she had were basic tools, an old, unreliable oven, and the cheapest, basic ingredients. Sam could hear the clucks of the better ladies as this poor patriot brought her humble contribution, watched in his mind their disparaging sneers as the simple chocolate cake was slid to the side, forgotten, until Sam came along.
Sam had no way of knowing if his little cake fantasy was true, but once it lodged in his mind it stuck. Beside, he liked chocolate.
“I choose this one,” Sam said, pointing to the plain chocolate cake.
“Oh, no, Sam,” said his mother, “You don’t want that one. It’s… It’s probably a mix.” She said the word “mix” under her breath like it was the worst obscenity in the world. “Here,” she said and grabbed for an elaborate pink and blue design, let’s take this one.”
“No, I want the chocolate cake. I like chocolate. I like this one the best. I won and I get to chose.” Sam was stubborn and held onto the foil covered cardboard. His mother looked like she was going to die. Sam could hear the clucks from the ladies auxiliary as he set his jaw and walked away. He took his cake and went straight home. He walked the whole way, leaving his bicycle leaning against a tree.
At home Sam grabbed a plate, knife, and fork, then pulled a half-empty bottle of milk from the fridge and retreated to his room. His parents didn’t like it when he locked the door, but he did anyway. He sliced a generous hunk of chocolate cake and ate it in his bed, alternating bites with swigs from the milk bottle. He took joy in the dark crumbs that fell and disappeared into the bedspread and sheets.
The cake was good, but not as good as he had imagined when he first saw the stark cylinder of pure dark chocolate.
Sam pitched the empty milk bottle into his trash, arranged the cutlery around the cake, and slid the foil-covered cardboard under his bed. Sam heard the commotion when his parents and little brother came home, but simply turned on his bedside radio and cranked the dial to drown out the thumps, squeaks, and shouts of the three of them garumphing around. He was pretty sure nobody would bother him and nobody did.
In the morning Sam woke and heard his family clanking around the kitchen, getting their breakfast ready. He was hungry but didn’t feel ready to face all of them yet. He remembered the cake under his bed – there was still at least three-quarters left – and dropped down to pull it out. Overnight the cake had been discovered by ants and the tiny black red bodies swarmed and choked the cake, a line stretched across the floor, each soldier holding aloft a single black crumb.
“The ambiguous role of the car crash needs no elaboration—apart from our own deaths, the car crash is probably the most dramatic event in our lives, and in many cases the two will coincide. Aside from the fact that we generally own or are at the controls of the crashing vehicle, the car crash differs from other disasters in that it involves the most powerfully advertised commercial product of this century, an iconic entity that combines the elements of speed, power, dream and freedom within a highly stylized format that defuses any fears we may have of the inherent dangers of these violent and unstable machines.” ― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
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Blonde in a Black Corvette
The traffic was the worst Earl had ever seen… and he had seen a lot of really bad traffic. He made the decision to bail off the freeway but he was sleepy and distracted by a stalled bus, made a mistake and found himself forced back on; merging back into the wide endless molasses-slow river of brakelights.
He spent a long, long time behind a blonde driving a black Corvette convertible. Her hair was long and she brushed it for what seemed like twenty minutes. She took some phone calls and worked on her makeup – it looked like she put new blush on and redid her mascara. Her car had giant rectangular exhausts – dual. They belched blue exhaust smoke. The license plates were temporary – dealer’s plates. It was cold and drizzly outside – her fabric top was up. Finally, Earl reached the next exit down and was able to bail. She pulled out before him, turned right and sped away. Earl drove a lot slower than she did, especially in the morning – going to work.
In less than a minute she was gone, moving past a curve through a fog of exhaust smoke.
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
Sam I Am
It was only this morning when I first saw her. It seems like a hundred years ago. The worst thing is that I don’t even know her name. I haven’t forgotten, she never told me what it was – never mentioned it.
Everything started when I came out of Todd’s Comic Book Store walking with a spring in my step. I had just bought a new Jedi Bounty Hunter action figure, on the day it was released. It cost a good hunk of my paycheck, but I had been drooling over the advance ads for this excellent hunk of plastic for months.
“Hey, Sam!” she shouted. She was gorgeous, drop dead perfect, a God’s Vision chiseled in female flesh. I couldn’t stop staring at her and it took me a long minute to realize she was talking to me. Of course my name is Andrew, not Sam, but I was not going to disagree with someone that good looking. So Sam I am.
“Hey you!” was all I could muster. Who was this woman? I’m not the best with faces and names but I would remember her. If she thinks she knows me, even if she has my name wrong, maybe I’ll play along until I can figure out what’s up. “It’s been… a bit of water under the bridge, hasn’t it?” That was the most noncommittal thing I could come up with.
The woman looked a little confused but still, she replied, “Yup… I suppose it has.”
She saw the bag in my hand with its logo – Todd’s Comics. “What do you have there?”
“Oh, that’s the new Jedi Bounty Hunter action figure. It was released today.”
She looked at me as if I was a toad, a smashed flat one at that. “Why do you have that? Are you into…?”
“Oh no,” I lied, thinking fast. “This is a present for… my nephew. Yeah my nephew Brad. He’s really into this stuff and when I saw this was a new release I knew I had to get it for him. Cost… ridiculous, but I’ll do anything for my favorite nephew.” I hoped my tone of voice wouldn’t convey that my favorite nephew Brad did not exist.
Suddenly I thought of an opening. “How’s the family?”
Her eyes flared. “Jesus! I can’t believe you brought that up. When you made that pass at my sister… She was so drunk… I’m not sure if I will ever forgive you for that.”
I glanced around. There was a bar right there, The Anchor. “Well, I’m sorry, you know that. Why don’t we go into The Anchor and I’ll buy you a drink. We can talk about it… maybe I’ll be able to make it up to you.”
“Sam, dammit! You know I can’t drink.”
“Well, I hear The Anchor has the best Diet Coke in town. Let’s go for that.”
And now, here I am, walking around her thirtieth story apartment stark naked at four in the morning trying to be quiet. It’s a really nice, expensive place. I’m looking for something, anything, that will tell me who she is and what she is up to. The only clues so far is a satchel stuffed with about sixty thousand in hundred dollar bills stashed behind her couch and a pair of loaded handguns in her top dresser drawer. What I really need to know is who am I – or who does she think I am – and what does she want from me…. I probably should get dressed and sneak home. Pretty soon she’s going to wake up and figure out I’m not Sam… I can’t believe she hasn’t already. And… well, she’s going to be super pissed off.
I need to find my clothes and get the hell out of Dodge but I can’t. First, she is so goddamn beautiful. Plus, I can’t find my clothes. I had them on when I came here. But where are they now? I was sleeping pretty hard, maybe she woke up and folded them somewhere. But where?
Now I know this is not going to end well, not for me, probably not for anybody.
He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.
― Wong kar-wei, In the Mood for Love
Mojo Coffee, Magazine Street, New Orleans, Louisiana
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A Gentle Touch
The drugs didn’t work. The stents failed to keep the flow going. Time had wracked its fatal damage in its efficient and inexorable way.
Nobody really told him what was happening but he knew. Especially the way they were gathering around him, a circle of faces either somber and quiet or swallowed in a false cheer. When they told him his sister was flying in from Seattle he knew the end was very close. She had not been on a plane in fifty years.
He had so many tubes stuck in him that when he would move the slightest bit one or another would be jostled and he would be hit by a horrific beeping from the machine attached to that conduit. If he was alone, he would suffer, palming the call button again and again for what seemed like an eternity until a nurse would finally come and turn off the infernal sound. It was worse if others were in the room – they would cluck and scatter like chickens until the nurse came – their protestations bothered him more than the beeping.
The balance of his life between future and past, between memory and hope, had now shifted completely to memory and the past. There was no future left and no hope.
And finally his memory was beginning to collapse and implode, fewer and fewer recollections were left. The past would slowly go to black and white, like an old television, then begin to fade until only a handful of echoes were left.
His life had been full. His marriage had lasted over half a century. He had been blessed with children, grand children, great grandchildren. He had a few victories and many, many defeats.
He was shocked, however, at what remained after all these accomplishments and catastrophes had faded.
Many decades ago his company sent him to a multi-evening seminar to learn a new accounting software program. He had met a woman there. She was sitting in the back near where he was and he noticed her walking to the front table to get supplies.
After the classes some of the employees would grab a coffee and talk about the software and how much they didn’t want to use it. Each time the woman seemed to end up sitting next to him at the large round table.
The two of them enjoyed talking to each other and he felt strangely excited on the drive home. After the last day of the class a handful of folks decided to keep meeting in the evenings – both he and the woman were in that group.
It was the start of a decade long friendship. The meeting became the high point of his week. The two of them would almost always sit next to each other. He remembered that sometimes she would laugh at something or make a point and reach out and gently touch him – on the shoulder or leg.
Nothing more ever came of the two of them. They had never even met outside of that group. He decided that they simply enjoyed each other’s company. He couldn’t say why.
The friendship eventually faded and finally dissolved completely. He hadn’t spoken to her in twenty years. Now, in his weakened state, he could barely remember her name and wasn’t sure the hazy memory was right.
But as the last few days fell away, the times he spent with her loomed larger and larger in his mind. His family wondered about the otherworldly expression on his face and the fact he paid less and less attention to them.
“He’s losing his mind,” they all said. And shook their heads sadly.
They weren’t wrong. But he was aware enough to wonder why it was this particular set of memories that were filling his last few miserable, precious days. Pleasant, bittersweet memories. Something that, at the time, meant little in the flow of days.
As his heart struggled, weakened, and finally gave out his final thoughts were of a quiet laugh and the innocent gentle touch of a friend’s hand along his leg.
Bill Chance 