1. The Invisible Butterfly
Some lonely whisper half-caught in the morning light: earth does not support, yet all life is sustained… but it was only an echo. The music had vanished and left the air empty, as empty as Daisuke’s butterfly net, as empty as it had been all summer, from the blooming of the wild columbine to the cry of the final cicada. A cold wind blew through the mesh. The sky was full of crushed purple clouds, and beech trees were spreading mast on the ground. That meant autumn was here, and Daisuke’s hunt for the butterfly had failed.
A scarlet leaf fell into the channel that fed Lake Michigan, the stretch of concrete, dune, and forest he had searched all summer for the glimpse of a translucent wing. It was hard to believe that only a few days ago his life seemed to depend on finding an Invisible Butterfly and holding it up to his dad’s folded arms so the proboscis might at last pierce the strange armor all adults pulled on in the dark before the children woke. But now? He almost didn’t care. One butterfly wouldn’t change the world, not even his small world, which now seemed so small and pathetic it could fit on the maple leaf now spinning on the water. He thought he might jump into the bowl of the curling leaf, pull one corner down and wrap himself up, become hidden and cocooned, and dad would finally unfold his arms in worry and fear, finally open a corner of his mind to his son’s attention…
Daisuke looked up at a cedar towering over the peaks of the maples in the copse nearby. Had that always been there? No wonder he hadn’t found a butterfly if he could miss a tree like that.
A cedar struck by lightning—half dead, half alive.
It was perfect, Daisuke thought. A tree ripped from the ukiyo-e of Hiroshige, transformed by the spirit of lightning, injured or improved by an outside power. The air smelled like incense. Between the cedar’s exposed roots, Daisuke found a hole large enough to crawl into, and he would have if it weren’t for what he imagined might live there: badgers, serpents, spiny hedgehogs, wild men of the forest. He decided to poke his net into the hole instead, one last chance to fill it up.
He caught something.
The net’s aluminum shaft bent and bowed at such a sharp angle Daisuke thought it would snap, but the cedar snapped first. Daisuke fell on his back as the tree crashed against nearby maples. The upturned roots exploded in a shower of soil.
He thought he was safe until a shadow crossed his face.
A giant leaf loomed over him.
Dappled sunlight limned the leaf’s edges in gold, a cryptic silhouette. Had there been a tree to which this leaf belonged, it would have been the World Tree, its trunk stretching through the core of Earth, roots unseen, boughs touching the stars, holding up the cosmos. Daisuke was shaking. He was the child abandoned at the tower’s door, and he knew one day the door would open whether his hand was on the knob or not.
But then the leaf spoke and changed everything: “My rest disturbed, my home destroyed. These are the sins and victories of your ancestors. You honor them well. But you cannot possibly reverse the damage you’ve done unless you’re a witch, a shaman, or a priest of the woods.”
Even animals speak, but Daisuke had the feeling the leaf had offered its language to him, a sign of peace, or at least assurance that he wouldn’t be destroyed immediately. And now he saw the leaf for what it really was. The cryptic silhouette resolved into six limbs, a tail, a head, and onyx globes of eyes above a wrinkle of mouth. He noted the hard, sharp claws at the end of each limb, like two giant fishhooks fused at the base.
Daisuke was afraid, but he had one last chance at saving the summer. “You’re not an Invisible Butterfly, are you?”
“Do I look invisible? I am King Walking Leaf, the Lost Man. The Discarded One. The women need me no longer, and I will die without a son. They have discovered parthenogenesis, a gift from the Fool.”
Daisuke needed to look away from the King for a moment. His presence was too intense, an arrow of light, the needling focal point of a faraway power capable of pinning him defenseless to the naked day.
“You are too late. What few butterflies remain have mated and died by now, their quests complete. The eggs blow now on the wind. May they reach shores uninhabited by meddlers and machines.”
Daisuke was a meddler—he stood accused—but not a very perceptive one, apparently. He really had wasted an entire summer, and he would never get it back, and he was old enough to know the weight of those lost moments and how they accrue like snow in dreams of spring. “I give up.”
“You must not do that,” the King said. “Autumn is here. Winter’s on its tail. I will brown and blow away if I do not find a new home. If you do not find one for me.”
“You should probably just stay away from me,” Daisuke said, “or something else bad will happen. I’m cursed.”
“Self-pity is a whirlpool none escape.” King Walking Leaf got down on all sixes and circled Daisuke, sniffing him like a dog. “It is fine to be a little low, down under the earth, but not to wallow. Most humans are too busy anyway, twitching like the last leaf on a tree, insecure about the life running through their veins, running so swiftly out. Regardless.” He shook his left wing and tucked it back beneath its emerald elytron. “I like you.”
“You do?” Daisuke didn’t know if he wanted to be liked by the King, if that would turn out to be a good thing or a bad one, but somehow, even though he didn’t understand every word, the King’s speech made more sense than anyone else’s ever had. He felt an unlocking, a clicking-into-place, tumblers shifting, but he was afraid to open the door.
“I like you, yes, but the old law presides. You have destroyed my home and must now offer me room and board by the conditions of your being here on this Earth.”
“Oh,” Daisuke said, not knowing quite what he meant. He might have been asked to pocket a mountain and bring it home. “Okay, but my dad might be mad. He should be here soon, but I don’t think you’ll fit in the car.”
The King quivered, shrank to the size of a normal leaf, and attached himself to Daisuke’s pantleg with his claws. No one would suspect a thing. They waited in silence for Daisuke’s dad, but he never came.
“I hate him,” Daisuke said, and in that moment it was true.
2. Hereditary Alienation
“It’s not the first time.” Daisuke couldn’t call him. He wasn’t allowed to have a cellphone until he turned fourteen. And if he left, his dad wouldn’t know where to find him. He’d be lost. He would just have to stop caring about his dad then. Withdraw all his love. Yes, that’s what he would do. Retract it like the soft part of a snail back into its shell. The thought made him feel unbearably heavy.
“We will look for him by light of morning,” the King said.
“If we have to.”
Daisuke spent the night underneath the King, his body stretched and secured like a tent over a circle of moss. He smelled like a fresh cucumber the moment it’s sliced open. Daisuke tried to get comfortable, but he couldn’t stop imagining the King folding up his body while he slept, trapping him inside. Or maybe the King would just crush him and absorb his lifeforce, debt paid in full. It’s not too late to run, Daisuke thought, but then the King anchored his sixth claw against the earth and the door closed. He had chosen. But it was warm inside the King’s tent and together with the darkness the warmth began walking Daisuke down the steps into dreaming. Was the King making that whispered paper music, or was it merely the leaves in the trees?
He dreamed that King Walking Leaf was the discovery of a lifetime, a world record, and he became a famous entomologist celebrated worldwide for his perseverance and curiosity. He was the guest of honor at a conference in Tokyo; he was the ringmaster of a circus, and the King was his lion; he was an old man watching TV, and the King was his son.
He woke. Dawn had turned the tent into a yellow-green bubble of light. Daisuke touched his fingertips to the King’s taut skin. It was cold, dry, faintly vibrating. The discovery of a lifetime. But Daisuke knew the great factory of the world outside would turn bug catching into “urban pest management” or “medical etymology”, as if the gold of Daisuke’s passion was only fool’s gold, useless outside the realm of his dreams. He didn’t want to take bugs apart like clocks and figure out how they worked, he wanted to live among them like an anthropologist. He didn’t want to exterminate them, he wanted to help them flourish—but that’s not what adults did with their lives.
“Let’s go home,” the King said, pulling his hooks out of the earth and releasing the sky. He began to flatten himself against the ground. “Prince Husain did not buy a magic carpet. He befriended a King.”
“How come I can understand you?”
“Because I’m speaking English. I can speak Japanese, if you prefer. My own language is much older than the oldest of your tongues, the voice of red-hearted Pan himself.”
“Can I hear it?”
“You can, but you may not.”
“Please?”
“It’s forbidden.”
“Why?”
“Because it is contagious. Because you cannot walk through the same door twice. Because it is a fruit you are much too young to eat. Now, sit!”
Daisuke stepped carefully on the King’s back and sat down, shaking. He was afraid, and his mind refused even as his body obeyed. Was this courage, or some magic compulsion of the King’s? He closed his eyes and when he reopened them, he was weightless; he was a mosquito, a moth, a dragonfly, and the world seemed both smaller and larger than it did a minute before.
“That way!” Daisuke pointed at a house. “There!” It was Saturday—they would find his father watching Norwegian crime dramas, snug in his easy chair, everything ordinary and expected, but the red and blue kaleidoscope of police lights made them pause, and the King hovered far above the house. An ambulance, a fire truck, a circle of neighbors on the opposite side of the street, their faces too distant to read. The King was saying something, but Daisuke’s head was heavy and silent as he watched the scene below, the front door of his home wide open, figures coming and going, bodies hammered by the lights.
“We cannot stay.”
The King dropped Daisuke off in an oil field in the middle of the State Forest nearby. The rusty arm of an oil well pump was still, and the birds had finished their songs and torn themselves from the tapestry of dawn.
“Wait here. I’ll be right back,” the King said, then he returned to Daisuke’s house, shrank to the size of a gingko leaf, and saw what Daisuke never would: the silhouette of his father’s head surrounded by a red bloom on the queen bed in the room at the top of the stairs that smelled like smoke. The statue of a god smiled from the carpet where it had fallen. The man must have suffered the rhythm of unbelonging and alienation, suffered it alone and for too long. “What afflicts the son might also afflict the father, as I inherited the royal mutation from my forebears,” the King thought. No one saw or heard or knew him.
When he returned to the oil well, he said: “Your father is dead.”
Daisuke was glad he was already sitting down.
“Try not to think good, try not to think not-good,” the King said. “Non-judgement is the kingdom of sages. I once grieved the loss of my friend King Walking Stick for two of your years and many of mine. We made a very beautiful tree together. Take your time.”
Later, Daisuke would decide that there wasn’t enough time in a single life to understand what had happened. He would need a few more beyond his own to comprehend. He would need this life just to understand himself, and yet the world asked you to understand everyone else as well, how they came and went and how their places were filled by others. He laid down in the grass and cried, confused, estranged from his emotions even as he began to feel himself expand into knowing. He had never wondered if he loved his father, though he said it sometimes. But the words weren’t always evidence of the act. The image he kept in his mind more closely resembled a man of stone or glass than of flesh like his own, full of hard edges that tricked the light. And what memories did Daisuke have, really? Watching him play Nintendo, searching for a bush he had to burn; being scolded for looking at his round belly for no reason he could imagine at the time; being scolded again for rolling his eyes when he was told to wear gloves one winter day. Surely his father’s colleagues and neighbors knew him as a real human, actually knew him better than Daisuke did, which at that moment seemed intolerably unfair.
The King put a green paw on Daisuke’s shoulder. “You must place all this in a box and learn to keep it shut until you will it to be opened. Do you understand? But now, we should go. When you are ready. Or before.”
“What? Where?”
The King wrinkled himself into a shape that resembled Japan, his triangular head shaped as the island of Hokkaido. “It’s not the same country you hold in your mind, but your family is there. I’m not afraid to go.”
“But I am. What if—what if they come looking for me here? What if we don’t make it to Japan? It’s across the ocean, which goes on forever. And there are sharks and glaciers. And—” And what if, Daisuke wondered, the King himself was malevolent after all? Who was this creature born from the depths of Arthropoda like a dragon in a cave who now asked him to go very far away? Why did it feel as if he had to do it all alone, everything alone?
“What if this, what if that. Says the boy who waited all summer for a butterfly he never caught. Thoughts are the friction between events. Come!”
Somehow, before he could sort through the events that seemed to be carrying him inexorably along like a log in a river’s current, Daisuke had chosen to act again. His mind watched his body step on the King’s back and sit down.
When they reached the stony western shore, the King folded himself into a boat and they began their voyage across the sea.
3. The Sound of One Leaf Clapping
At sea, Daisuke caught fish hypnotized by the King’s discordant songs and ate them raw. The King ate kelp and sea vegetables. He nibbled on a hundred-meter skein of violet algae. Daisuke drank rain and the blue honey that bled from the King’s injuries: minor scrapes from rocks and flotsam, and once a limb torn open by a shark. He healed quickly. At night, the King closed his limbs like the petals of a sleeping flower, and in that green pod they dreamed of Japan.
Everything moved swiftly and peacefully for two weeks. And then they saw a flock of moths swarming, frantic, beneath a full moon.
“It’s more than moonlight that disturbs them,” the King said. He looked at Daisuke. “Cover your ears. I’ll find out if there’s sense left in them for speech.”
Daisuke was still too afraid of the King—and his language—to disobey. Could the language of old Arthropoda poison him, tear him apart? Infest him with maggots and the spawn of blowflies? Was it a virus? He covered his ears and heard nothing of the King’s contagious language.
“Everything may not be okay,” the King reported. “An evil storm approaches. We won’t outrun it.”
The storm front bruised the clouds above, and the King closed his limbs, sealing Daisuke within, a message inside the King’s green bottle. Daisuke whispered a prayer for the first time in years: Earth does not support, yet all life is sustained. The waves began to beat upon the King, and he cried out in pain.
“I didn’t think bugs could feel pain!”
“A common misconception! A balm on your conscience for not sweeping the path before you walk!”
The storm tossed them all night. The King tried to fly above it, but the wind thwarted him. Daisuke’s stomach churned, and he was sick. The King turned into a harpoon and tried swimming, but the force of the current forced water into Daisuke’s mouth, and he was sick again. He thought they were both dying. He thought of his father, he thought of the undiscovered plane of the future, dim and begging to be explored like the sky. He thought of Japan, a land that existed for him only in language. The sea came in through his nose and ears, and by morning the world was so calm and serene he thought he had ascended to the pure land.
But the King was ragged and windblown. The ivory rib of a whale had pierced his abdomen. With the last of his strength, he grew to the size of a battleship—Daisuke dangling from the prow of the King’s head—to loosen the rib, then he shrank against his will and fell limp and shapeless against the water, now the size of an aspen leaf.
“I can swim,” Daisuke said, but he only had strength to put the King in his pocket. They floated, dreaming, until they washed up on an island shrouded in mist.
The King crawled out of Daisuke’s pocket and grew to normal size again, but his wound was weeping blood and blue honey. “Daisuke, you must eat what passes for my heart.”
A shock went through his spine. “Why? You can heal yourself. Use your magic!”
“There is no magic in this world now. We all light this fire, we all walk through it. Quickly now, take my heart, before I brown and crumble and follow the wind.”
Daisuke refused.
“You must! I will not leave you stranded here!” The King’s claw flashed in the muted light of the evening and cut a hole in his breast. He reached in and extracted a kernel of tissue. The turquoise heart dangled from the King’s own hand, dripping blue drops of life. “Take it.”
“No! Put it back!”
The King urged him on, his words confused, his sentences full of holes. Daisuke was beginning to think he was too young for this, too young for any amount of life at all. He took the King’s heart in his hands. He couldn’t understand why he was being made to do this. He gagged on the first bite. It tasted like fish guts, anise, and vinegar. He took another bite, forcing himself to swallow, and the flesh of the heart filled him with memories of events he had never experienced, of life lived through someone else’s body. He watched the sky through the eyes of a leaf, and the King forgot all human language and reverted to a much, much older speech.
Daisuke’s ears were open. He couldn’t help but listen. Each word tasted like poetry. They resonated with the mouthfuls of heart passing through Daisuke’s body, and something stirred deep down below before names. It couldn’t be said it belonged to him alone. He finished the heart and wept as the King paled and died.
Daisuke wrapped himself in a blanket of the King’s remains and slept fitfully that night, his head full of racing, colliding words. He dreamed nothing, and in the morning he was alone: the King’s lifeless husk had blown away during the night.
Daisuke thought he could hear him flapping in the wind, but it was only the wind.
And yet…
What was that sound in his head, that flavor on his tongue? A decomposing log, the layered bitterness of fresh chitin. Formic acid from a line of ants. A spider’s egg. Bark parting, wood shearing away like the cooked flesh of a chicken. He could hear words squirming beneath the log. He lifted, and listened, and spoke.
The old speech flew from his lips!
Words finally lived up to their old promise of knitting everything together in a line that ran from Heaven to Earth, everything given its due and nothing emphasized over anything else. Daisuke ran across the beach naming the sand, the sky, the turtle, the palm, the wave. Here was a language that didn’t by its nature divide into groups, but one that somehow drew everything into one event. He turned the new words inward and renamed his father. He renamed himself and his sadnesses. He couldn’t say he was happy, but he couldn’t say he was unhappy. Not this, not that.
The sun rose and cleared the isle of mist. Daisuke’s skin was turning green.
