There are thirty-six panels in my office drop ceiling, and four fluorescent light fixtures. The carpet, it’s commercial grade, featuring a benign pattern of interwoven blue and black circles. These are circles like a coffee mug might make if the bottom was never dry and it was set down, randomly, over and over again forever. On the wall, right across from me, is a painting of an orange butterfly, a Tawny Emperor, I think. The walls, they’re a cool white, and scarred from the negligence of countless employees before me. This office building, this isn’t our home; the sane, they don’t treat it as such. From down the hall, past two other identical offices, just past the lunchroom, gathered around an almost empty water cooler, I can hear loud talk of the weekend.
A man, one of the executives if I’m not mistaken, he doesn’t think he can go to even one more opera. That last one was just too long. Five intermissions. Five! Who can take it? It could be worse, I think. Giacomo Puccini’s opera, Madama Butterfly, enjoys the distinction of having one of the worst opening nights in history thanks, in part, to having too few intermissions. Puccini had misjudged the audience’s willingness to sit through a lengthy second act, and an already hostile crowd rebelled, the theatre plunging into chaos. They laughed and jeered. They openly mocked both Puccini and the cast. They made animal noises. The pandemonium got so loud the singers couldn’t even hear the orchestra.
I’m staring at the butterfly painting across from me, imagining the scene more than one hundred years ago in Milan’s Teatro alla Scalla, when a woman’s voice breaks my reverie. From down the hall, this other person, she tells the executive how she went to this most amazing restaurant where the food was so delicious, and the portions weren’t too big, and the decor was so hip, and, don’t you know, the chef de cuisine trained for six years in Cinque Terre? The area is known for its pesto, focaccia, and anchovies, she says, and one town, Corniglia, it’s particularly popular for its gelato made from locally harvested honey. This woman, someday she’s going to go there. This woman, she tells the executive how she’d like to someday take the train from Cinque Terre to Milan.
Transfixed by the image of the Tawny Emperor for so long, it almost appears to quiver. I close my eyes, shutting them tight, and relax. In the blackness behind my shut eyelids, a negative image of the majestic butterfly appears, its wings spread, its antennae erect. Its orange wings have become blue, and the black dots on its wings, they’ve turned to white. The spectral butterfly flaps its wings, taking off, looping and twirling through the negative image of my office, out the door, and down the hall. My eyes, they stay closed. Work will wait. There’s no need to rush things.
It’s not widely known, but Vladimir Nabokov was an entomologist, a lepidopterist specifically, specializing in the genitalia of butterflies. To this day, locked away in a dark Harvard University storeroom, is Nabokov’s genitalia cabinet containing his vast collection of butterfly penises. Each penis, each aedeagus, was carefully separated from its host, labelled, and placed in a tiny glass vial for storage. Squinting through a microscope seven days a week for hours on end, Nabokov stared at butterfly penises for so long that his eyesight was permanently impaired. All of us, to put off working, we waste time with other activities. I, for instance, eavesdrop on my coworkers. Vladimir Nabokov, when he wasn’t staring at butterfly penises, he wrote the first draft of Lolita on the backs of his entomology index cards.
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