Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [128]
Among these sunglassed, fashionable people my brother is an anomaly. After he left his boys’ school he reverted to his old, unkempt ways, and goes around in his moccasins and his sweaters with the worn-through elbows. He doesn’t get a haircut unless reminded, and who is there to remind him? He walks among the palm trees, oblivious, whistling, his head sheathed in a halo of invisible numbers. What do the Californians make of him? They think he is a kind of tramp.
On this particular day he takes his binoculars and his butterfly book and heads out into the countryside on his secondhand bicycle, to look for Californian butterflies. He comes to a promising field, descends, locks up the bike: he is prudent enough within limits. He heads into the field, which must have tall grass in it and some smallish bushes. He sees two exotic Californian butterflies and starts in pursuit of them, pausing to scan them with his binoculars; but at this distance he can’t identify them, and every time he moves forward they take off.
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