Free The Butterfly Plague by Timothy Findley Page B

houses and there were only hiding places; street greetings but no one spoke. Carelessness but there was always care; freedom to come and go but where you came from you hurried back to and that was the only place to go. They thought of words but the words were silence. And they thought of the One Who would come Who never came. It was the Others who came. Always the Others.
    They dreamed in long rows. Lined up dreaming.
    I saw them.
    The world was lovely if you closed your eyes.
    And there was always a band playing somewhere.
    The sun shone.
    The flags were up.
    The streets rang in chorus.
    There were geraniums on the balconies.
    People wore their hearts on their sleeves. Stars and crosses. One or the other.
    This was the world to belong to. The one they had never lived in, but thought they had.
    This was the world they wanted to remember. It belongs to someone else. It always did.

    The Nightmare is always present and timeless. It is formless. I have gathered it all the while I’ve been away.
    America is not the Nightmare. It will be.
    The Nightmare is Europe. I went there in 1936. I can tell you that all parts and portions of this Nightmare belong, fit or can be wrenched away from the period between 1936 and 1938. That is, between going and coming back; then and now. Today it is sometime in August or September. I honestly don’t remember. August or September 1938. I know that I came home the other day and it was August and a dear old friend of mine whose shoes I remember and whose eyes are close to my heart threw himself down on the cinders under the very train I rode in. I was arriving and he died. It was voluntary, or so I understand. His death is important to everyone. It holds the beginnings of a new Nightmare.
    This is how a new Nightmare begins. With an act. Sometimes an act of absolution. Sometimes an act of atonement. The act will inevitably involve your integrity. You will believe in what you are saying and doing and perhaps you will even have bothered to make a chart of consequences, all of them hypothetical by necessity, but all of them bound up in the parings of intellect. Lovely long sweet parings. You throw them away. You are left alone with the washed body, skinned and peeled and pure, and this is the act. Inside the body, however skinned and peeled, however washed, however scoured and pure, there are seeds. These are the seeds of everything and there are worms.
    It is the worms I think of.
    It is the worms.

    He threw himself under the train. His lovely feet were severed and broken. I have arrived on many trains. I have never been aware of these deaths, although now I see them very clearly. Someone throws part of himself under every train, coming or going. I’ve just never been aware of it before.
    I am never going to know why Bully killed himself. But I am certain that somewhere in someone he has started a Nightmare and perhaps I will know the consequences of that. Perhaps that Nightmare will touch me. But this is not important. What I am thinking is: just as with Bully, every Nightmare begins with integrity and action. They do not all end in death. Think of Bully’s feet and what he did with them, for himself, for us. Think of Bully’s feet. They led and were led. They were both guides and followers. Dancer and walker. Think of Bully’s feet. In shoes they tell a story. Naked? No one ever saw them naked. They were silent. Think of Bully’s feet.

    Think of the dreamers.
    Dreaming in long rows.
    I saw them first in midsummer 1936.
    I was in a taxicab and Bruno was holding my hand and we had got off the boat in Southampton and I wanted him to ask me to marry him. We were going to the hotel. As I was sitting there with my thigh against his thigh and my hand in his hand I looked out the window, waiting, thinking, He will ask me now, we will register at the hotel as man and wife and tomorrow he will marry me. We were still near the sheds. And out of one of these sheds, having come through customs, having