Becoming the Full Butterfly Rosamund Chorley

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.’Special units of the National Guard had been drafted in to control the crowds.Half of Utah and Arizona was cordoned off by razor wire.Counter-insurgency posts had been established; Washington was wary of dream-makers.Tanks, trucks, armed personnel carriers, patrolled everywhere.Special elevated ways had been erected.Armed police bikers roared along them, licensed to fire down on the crowds if trouble was brewing.Heligunships circled overhead, cracking the eardrums of Monument Valley with spiteful noise.They supervised a sprawling site bearing the hallmarks of an interior landscape of manic depression.Someone said, ‘Seems like they are shooting the war movie to end all war movies.’Private automobiles had been banned.They were corralled in huge parks as far north as Blanding, Utah; at Shiprock, New Mexico, in the east; and at Tuba City, Arizona, to the south.The Hopis and Navajos were making a killing.A slew of cafes, bars and restaurants had sprung up from nowhere.Along authorised routes, lurid entertainments of various kinds sprang forth like paintboxes bursting.Many carried giant effigies of Leigh Tireno, looking at her best, above booths with such come-ons as ‘Change Your Sex By Hypnosis - PAINLESS!’ No one mentioned Casper Trestle.How the good folk jostled on their way to the spectacle! It was mighty hot there, in the crowded desolation; sweat rose like a mist, an illness above the heaving shoulders.Bacteria were having a great time.Countless city people, unaccustomed to walking more than a block, found the quarter mile from a Park and Ride bus drop more than they could take, and collapsed into the many field ambulance units.Rest was charged at $25 an hour.Some walked on singing or sobbing, according to taste.Pickpockets moved among the crowd, elbowing hot gospellers of many kinds.The preachers preached their tunes of damnation.It was not difficult for the unprivileged, as blisters formed on their heels, to believe that the end of the world was nigh - or at least heaving into sight from the seas of misery, a kind of ‘Jaws’ from the nether regions - or that the whole universe might sizzle down into a little white dot, like when you turned off the TV at two in the sullen Bronx morning.Could be, ending was best.Maybe with this possibility in mind, a fair percentage of the adults stomped along like cattle, pressing fast food to their mouths or slurping sweet liquids.A fat woman, hemmed in by heated bodies, was hit simultaneously by congestion and digestion; her cries as she cartwheeled among the marching legs were drowned by sporadic ghetto music from a multitude of receivers.Every orifice was stuffed.It was the law.At least no one was smoking.’ Varieties of bobbing caps amid the throng indicated children, big and little hobbledehoys fighting to get through first, yelling, screaming, gobbling popcorn as they went.Underfoot, all kinds of coloured cartons and wrappers of non-biodegradable material were trampled in the dust, along with the tumbling bodies, the gobs of pink gum, the discarded items of clothing, the ejected tampons, the lost soles.It was a real media event, as much a crowd-puller as the World Series.Casper had set the whole vast scheme in motion.Now he was responsible only for himself and Leigh.Human nature was beyond his control.He stood in the middle of a mile-wide arena where John Wayne had once ridden hell-for-leather.Mr V.K.Bannerji was with him, terrified by the sheer blast of public attention.‘Vill it vork?’ he asked Casper.‘Otherwise ve shall have wiolence.’But at six in the evening, when the shadows of the giant mesas grew like long, blunt, black teeth over the land, a bell rang and silence fell.A slight breeze arose, mitigating the heat, cooling many a feverish armpit.The pale blue plastic in which one of the mesas had been wrapped, crackled slightly.Otherwise all was at last still - still as it had been in the millennia before the human race existed.A king-size bed stood raised in the middle of the arena.Leigh waited by the side of the bed.She removed her clothes without coquetry, turning about once in a full circle, so that all could see she was now a woman.She climbed into the bed.Casper removed his clothes, also turned about to demonstrate that he was a man, and climbed in beside Leigh.He touched her.They put their arms about each other and fell asleep.Gently, music arose from the assembled Boston Pops Orchestra.Tchaikovsky’s waltz from ‘The Sleeping Beauty’.The organisers felt this composition was particularly appropriate on this occasion.In the million-strong audience women wept, kids threw up as quietly as possible.Before their television screens all round the world, people were weeping and throwing up into plastic bowls.It was an ancient dream they dreamed, welling from the brain’s ancient core.The beings that paraded across a primal tapestry of fields wore stiff antique garb.In these personages was vested an untroubled power over human behaviour.An untroubled archetypal power [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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