The Butterfly Collector

I have never been good at taking in the scenery. Others always had to point things out to me. I never spotted the robin on the branch; I never saw the snake in the grass. For me, turtles that looked like rocks were just rocks or turtles. I never could appreciate a world filled with many things, but only individual things one at a time. I felt no pang of envy when someone would point out a rabbit in a snowdrift. I did not care.

I never understood why others cared. I knew there were rabbits that hid in the snow and rare birds that visited familiar branches, but I knew about them the same way I knew that the sidewalk was made out of concrete, or some houses were brick, or that I lived in the city. The excitement of being faced with them had no greater amplitude than the rest of the landscape I knew them to exist in. I could enjoy a walk in a wildlife sanctuary or standing in front of a cage in the zoo, but I felt nothing at the sight of the caged animal in the sanctuary, or at least nothing more than at the sight of the sanctuary landscape in the cage.

I hated the people who did care. Who wanted to show me the rare flowers, the once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon's, their shallowness revolted me. These people who lived their life from one unique, unmissable thing to the next failed to realize that at all times, the trees were implicit in the forest. These people failed to recognize the continuity, the homogeneity, in their lives of endless surprise and novelty. It was in this state of mind that I met the butterfly collector.

I saw him one hot early summer day while walking home from work. I thought about the sweat holding the cotton to my back, about my phone bill, about the need to avoid the glass on the sidewalk, then I rounded a corner, and there he was. He wore a white heavily stained mesh beekeeper's outfit riddled with holes—he looked like an alien or astronaut dropped from the heavens into the stink and heat. He carried a mason jar sealed with tape and twine in one hand, in the other a net with duck tape wrapping up the handle. He had a heavy supply belt filled with tools and a backpack with a camping roll on the top. A large dog of questionable lineage dragged a sled along loaded with more jars and nets of various sizes.

The sighting only lasted a second. He walked right past; then the crowd closed back around the sled. At the time, I didn't think much of the encounter—lots of weirdos in the city. I assumed he was a nut, or at best was some Indiana Jones of bug collectors bringing his finds to suitable collectors or charitable museums. I went back on my way, paid my phone bill, ordered pizza, didn't step on any glass.

A few weeks later, he began showing up. Not on other streets on cooler days or hunting in parks, but in my dreams. As my alarm clock or my bladder would wake me, he would always be fading on the back of my eyelids. He would always just have been telling me something or showing me some bug. But, he never quite managed to enlighten me, the cat was always at the door, or a car alarm went off; if he did tell me, it was in the middle of a deep sleep and gone by the time I was awake.

I was confused by the haunting—I'd never been one to remember dreams before, and I harbored no spiritual beliefs. But after a few weeks, my rationality was overcome, and I began to wonder what it meant. Why had the butterfly collector crept into my soul? What was he trying to tell me? Why was I so bothered by it? At first, I thought maybe in my youth I had a—now long forgotten— entomological itch that he had irritated; that maybe my unconscious was trying to get me to go off and find the butterflies myself.

So, I went to the natural history museum. I looked through the glass at the flattened bugs; I read their Latin names and their native habits; I pressed my nose up close enough to smell the peroxide and tried to find what I was looking for in their boneless corpses. I bought a ten-dollar geode in the gift shop, but otherwise, the trip was fruitless.

Next, I figured it was not the insects themselves but the hunters and collectors who interested me; that my unconscious wanted me to go off and join the butterfly collectors. I posted a classified ad, "Man early 20s bookish, business-casual, looking for butterfly collector. Paid." The few responses were sexual in nature. None merited reply.

For a while, I gave up. I grew not to mind him, his dog, his bugs, his unfinished answers. If anything, it simplified my life—no longer did I wake in a cold sweat from a strange dream or grow angry at people for imagined indiscretions. Previously I had many doubts, fears, anxieties; now; it was as if the butterfly collector had hunted my mind's darkest caverns and densest forests, bottling up all my rare feelings.

I don't know why he wanted them or what he was trying to tell me. Eventually, he went away, or, at least, I stopped seeing him. But things didn't go back to before. He took the butterflies with him. I slept without dreams; I lived without fears. It never bothered me, the smaller things. I could see a turtle pretending to be a rock and smile at its hubris. I brought my lawn chair to the park for the once-in-a-lifetime super-moon. I fled to higher ground from a one-hundred-year-storm. I could stand in front of the mirror and look at the freckles on my nose, at the stray hairs on my forehead.