Immediately he began to grow smaller. Janie reared back, smacking into one of the bedposts, and stared at the figure in front of her, shaking her head.
“No,” she whispered. “No, no.”
He was shrinking: so fast it was like watching water dissolve into dry sand. Man-size, child-size, large dog, small. His eyes flew open and for a fraction of a second stared horrified into her own. His hands and feet slipped like mercury from his bonds, wriggling until they met his torso and were absorbed into it. Janie’s fingers kneaded the duvet; six inches away the boy was no larger than her hand, then smaller, smaller still. She blinked, for a heart-shredding instant thought he had disappeared completely.
Then she saw something crawling between folds of velvet. The length of her middle finger, its thorax black, yellow-striped, its lower wings elongated into frilled arabesques like those of a festoon, deep yellow, charcoal black, with indigo eyespots, its upper wings a chiaroscuro of black and white stripes.
Bhutanitis lidderdalii. A native of the eastern Himalayas, rarely glimpsed: it lived among the crowns of trees in mountain valleys, its caterpillars feeding on lianas. Janie held her breath, watching as its wings beat feebly. Without warning it lifted into the air. Janie cried out, falling onto her knees as she sprawled across the bed, cupping it quickly but carefully between her hands.
“Beautiful, beautiful,” she crooned. She stepped from the bed, not daring to pause and examine it, and hurried into the kitchen. In the cupboard she found an empty jar, set it down, and gingerly angled the lid from it, holding one hand with the butterfly against her breast. She swore, feeling its wings fluttering against her fingers, then quickly brought her hand to the jar’s mouth, dropped the butterfly inside, and screwed the lid back in place. It fluttered helplessly inside; she could see where the scales had already been scraped from its wing. Still swearing she ran back into the bedroom, putting the lights on and dragging her collection box from under the bed. She grabbed a vial of ethyl alcohol, went back into the kitchen and tore a bit of paper towel from the rack. She opened the vial, poured a few drops of ethyl alcohol onto the paper, opened the jar and gently tilted it onto its side. She slipped the paper inside, very slowly tipping the jar upright once more, until the paper had settled on the bottom, the butterfly on top of it. Its wings beat frantically for a few moments, then stopped. Its proboscis uncoiled, finer than a hair. Slowly Janie drew her own hand to her brow and ran it along the length of the antennae there. She sat there staring at it until the sun leaked through the wooden shutters in the kitchen window. The butterfly did not move again.
The next day passed in a metallic gray haze, the only color the saturated blues and yellows of the lidderdalii’s wings, burned upon Janie’s eyes as though she had looked into the sun. When she finally roused herself, she felt a spasm of panic at the sight of the boy’s clothes on the bedroom floor.
“Shit.” She ran her hand across her head, was momentarily startled to recall she had no hair. “Now what?”
She stood there for a few minutes, thinking; then she gathered the clothes — striped V-neck sweater, jeans, socks, Jockey shorts, Timber-land knockoff shoes — and dumped them into a plastic Sainsbury’s bag. There was a wallet in the jeans pocket. She opened it, gazed impassively at a driver’s license — KENNETH REED, WOLVERHAMPTON — and a few five-pound notes. She pocketed the money, took the license into the bathroom, and burned it, letting the ashes drop into the toilet. Then she went outside.
It was early Sunday morning, no one about except for a young mother pushing a baby in a stroller. In the neighboring doorway the same drunk old man sprawled surrounded by empty bottles and rubbish. He stared blearily up at Janie as she approached.
“Here,” she said. She bent and dropped the five-pound notes into his scabby hand.
“God bless you, darlin’.” He coughed, his eyes focusing on neither Janie nor the notes. “God bless you.”
She turned and walked briskly back toward the canal path. There were few waste bins in Camden Town, and so each day trash accumulated in rank heaps along the path, beneath streetlights, in vacant alleys. Street cleaners and sweeping machines then daily cleared it all away again. Like elves, Janie thought. As she walked along the canal path she dropped the shoes in one pile of rubbish, tossed the sweater alongside a single high-heeled shoe in the market, stuffed the underwear and socks into a collapsing cardboard box filled with rotting lettuce, and left the jeans beside a stack of papers outside an unopened newsagent’s shop. The wallet she tied into the Sainsbury’s bag and dropped into an overflowing trash bag outside of Boots. Then she retraced her steps, stopping in front of a shop window filled with tatty polyester lingerie in large sizes and boldly artificial-looking wigs: pink Afros, platinum blond falls, black-and-white Cruella De Vil tresses.
The door was propped open; Schubert lieder played softly on 3 2. Janie stuck her head in and looked around, saw a beefy man behind the register, cashing out. He had orange lipstick smeared around his mouth and delicate silver fish hanging from his ears.
“We’re not open yet. Eleven on Sunday,” he said without looking up.
“I’m just looking.” Janie sidled over to a glass shelf where four wigs sat on Styrofoam heads. One had very glossy black hair in a chin-length flapper bob. Janie tried it on, eyeing herself in a grimy mirror. “How much is this one?”
“Fifteen. But we’re not—”
“Here. Thanks!” Janie stuck a twenty-pound note on the counter and ran from the shop. When she reached the corner she slowed, pirouetted to catch her reflection in a shop window. She stared at herself, grinning, then walked the rest of the way home, exhilarated and faintly dizzy.
Monday morning she went to the zoo to begin her volunteer work. She had mounted the Bhutanitis lidderdalii, on a piece of Styrofoam with a piece of paper on it, to keep the butterfly’s legs from becoming embedded in the Styrofoam. She’d softened it first, putting it into a jar with damp paper, removed it and placed it on the mounting platform, neatly spearing its thorax — a little to the right — with a #2 pin. She propped it carefully on the wainscoting beside the hawkmoth, and left.
She arrived and found her ID badge waiting for her at the staff entrance. It was a clear morning, warmer than it had been for a week; the long hairs on her brow vibrated as though they were wires that had been plucked. Beneath the wig her shaved head felt hot and moist, the first new hairs starting to prickle across her scalp. Her nose itched where her glasses pressed against it. Janie walked, smiling, past the gibbons howling in their habitat and the pygmy hippos floating calmly in their pool, their eyes shut, green bubbles breaking around them like little fish. In front of the insect zoo a uniformed woman was unloading sacks of meal from a golf cart.
“Morning,” Janie called cheerfully, and went inside. She found David Bierce standing in front of a temperature gauge beside a glass cage holding the hissing cockroaches.
“Something happened last night, the damn things got too cold.” He glanced over, handed her a clipboard, and began to remove the top of the gauge. “I called Operations but they’re at their fucking morning meeting. Fucking computers—”