Butterflies

The refrigerator, grumbling and barking. The retrograde acts of some tardy planet. July filled with clouds. Another slow day.

Squabbling crows drew him back to the rainy window. On the roof below, taunting, raising and folding black wings. One had something. The others would pester and shout. Their dance of angry noise.

In the tree-dimmed garden, a young man in swim trunks slept in a deckchair. Perhaps in sun, when he fell asleep. Now in rain. Minutes at the window, he thought the young man would wake, maybe shake like a wet dog, amble inside. But he slept. As rain struck his face, as rivers slalomed across his hard chest. The refrigerator creaking and snapping. The crows’ flurried jabs. Rain falling.

He saw the first, as clouds emptied and thinned. Quick heels, handbag raised to protect the black mortar that splayed her hair in strings. The gown loose wings at her shoulders. A face of makeup. Facing the rain. Then others, some with elderly people – parents, well-wishers – in groups of caps and gowns. Pupated from tall blocks of rooms, a species, their black and bright flashes distinguished from the woolly crowd.

He went out. It was none of his business. Planetary pressure, the weight of noise, of error. Outside was someone else’s concern. Damp air and the clatter of crows. They hopped the rooftops, insisting, sure of their claims. Their squabbles took him along the dull street, riled with each of their kind.

Among college buildings a song was swelling. A popular tune, streamlined for amateur choir, to gather gowns and mortarboards to their moment. To mark the passage earned by such work. He watched them congregate in weakened light. Shy to go in, they stood among indifferent weather, hugged classmates, took pictures, tipped those comical hats. They understood this as a beginning. None wanted to dwell on the failure of their happiest days, so this couldn’t be a conclusion but something fresh. Among tricky lies of adulthood, a moment, for some, to stake a claim, carve a niche, those tropes. For others, one further step in a leisurely education, the road to honour with disillusion and authority without spine.

As he moved between them, he called to mind his occasion in those clothes. Rented clothes. No one owned such things. A day like this. A few faces he knew. Keen appreciation the squads of other people’s friends should keep applauding, should not slack from applauding, when he took the stage for his reward: a blank card rolled in ribbon. When they claimed their paper torpedoes his classmates stood around, congratulating each other on years done. Some had lunch with friends, some had to get to jobs, already working. Early afternoon, the crowd thinned and gone. He returned his cap and gown to the room where rented clothes were inventoried. There was no one left.

These young people led better efforts. The sharing generation, anyone who couldn’t attend was in their pocket. They had great poise, these graduates. A lifetime standing for pictures readied their bones. Even these costume antics couldn’t knock them off balance. Even parents, ornamented, inordinate, capturing every angle, reminiscing their hopeful cap and gown days, couldn’t drag this velocity. Crows tumbled around the college lawns, inspecting each shiny discard, giving full-throated annoyance at all creatures. Yet even crows weren’t louder than triumphs to come.

He circled the celebration, assuming the crowd assumed he was with somebody, a speck of a party he hadn’t yet found. He wouldn’t speak with anyone. Wouldn’t detain them. Wouldn’t make dumb comparisons of this striped sash to another. A public spectacle of a closed world, these things held meaning as surely and as long as leaves held rain.

Clouds thickened. Raindrops fell. People hunched their shoulders, straightened some item of dress. Called it poor weather for this time of year. Which naturally led them to holiday plans, August escapes, invitations and modest evasion. Strands of connection spread between them. The young people: colleagues and rivals. The parents with their settled lives, their villaed lawns, the silted responsibilities of their professions. The lecturers, totting scores, grading talent, dismally fated to summer schools and outreach. Another paper published and one in review. New explorations in ethics, combustion, the lives of the celibates. Strands of connection never trammelled him, however much he stood in their way.

A tide caught the crowd. Some official, some starving accessory, their hoarse announcement transmitted chemically through the ranks. The crowd began moving, called to their ceremonial moment. This appointed ritual of passing grades. Some bowed their caps and clutched their gowns, relieved to make themselves small among friendly shoulders. Others stepped with imperial assurance, filmed by parents as they entered the hall, filmed each day of their life. Like rain through a grate, as crows fought for litter.

He couldn’t follow. The hall would be crowded. Lengthy recitals of names to try the most boosterish mater. Some senior gown would ramble old lines: the value of education, the premium on creativity, the splendid achievements of this gifted troupe of grand futures. For some, perhaps. Others would fade, deviate, find their conclusion. A few would sicken and some would die before making their mark. Some would leap to madness. Some land in a space six metres square. Those who succeeded would fade, as attention moved – as it must – to the next generation. Some would remain, under retrograde stars, alone here on a slow day.

With the crowd funnelled in, he was taken with an urgency not to be seen. A lone figure in a deserted square, rain gilding the gravel, his separation too obvious to be thrilling. The college husk lay open, changed only in paint from his time. Changed only in its absence of cigarette ends by the door and politics in the flowers. The guard occupied with some matter in back. A clear way in. Past faded rainbows soaring the walls, he took the lift one floor short and walked the last flight to the top. The stairs eternally grey and scuffed, streaked with spills from hands that long forgot a clumsy moment, on an unremembered day, long ago when they were in school.

The room unchanged in its essentials. The precarious tilted windows. Air pipes across the ceiling. Smudgy whiteboard ghosts. Dusty disuse of summer. Wedded to purpose, he had spent hours in this room, as days became months, as instruction stretched to parchment. At times he sat by the window, losing focus among shoehorned buildings, glimpsed views, each sudden flash of an opening window miles away. He wondered who sent those signals. What habit or sudden moment made them open the window. What they did since that fugitive connection. His classmates wouldn’t notice. They wanted value for their fees.

He didn’t see them since graduation. Didn’t hear from them, though he joined the chats. Their lives, he supposed, followed paths to plausible outcomes. Enough time had passed for their years together not to matter. For everything to rise and reshape their days. It was that thing they did, for a while, back then. That qualification they landed, three, four jobs ago. Important, no doubt. Not relevant. Not to skin so much more experienced.

The room’s comatose air webbed him. There was no purpose now. There’d be none till rigid September. The life of the mind, engaged through tuition, lay as dust. He didn’t want to watch the sky grow dim. The close to another lost day. He wanted this moment, the fractured clouds, the breezy light – the rest of his life this moment. Waiting for someone miles away to catch the sun on their window.

He did nothing. Thought nothing. Barely breathed. Time passed the same. Each second, a loosening tremor tumbled him down. Each second flying off from him. Dismantling him. Less of him in the world with each click of air in his throat. The sun slid between ruins of clouds, their memorials broken, their dizzy heights burned through. His hands gripped at this moment and this. He craved to hold time. To have this same afternoon. Sunk in the room’s scruffy walls the record of those lectures, the imprint of days when study was fresh, a comfortable padding of years before completion. When the week was no more than finding the reading, then precis and discursion, jotted thoughts for an essay not due for a month. Debates at the bar. On cold walks in winter twilight. The sense of things as significant, larger than oneself.

Noise from the yard, an updraft of jubilate voices, the cadence of bells across the cement to the streets and city beyond. He tore himself from the room, tore apart its stillness. A new recollection to sink, without thought, in the walls.

Clouds gathered behind the retreating sun. Crows, aloft, in raucous displeasure, their scavenging ended. Students streamed out, graduates now, clutching symbols of their success. More hugs. More pictures. More accumulated emotion punching holes in the weather. And summer ahead, its indolent rewards. Bodies released exuberance. Arms outstretched, capes rose and fell, wings beating, a delight that this moment could drive a hurricane at some far point in their lives. The start to whatever actions amassed their future. Smiling in these immortal pictures, never to be this young and feel this hope.

He turned away, done with it all. He wouldn’t speak with anyone. Wouldn’t detain them. Wouldn’t make dumb predictions that only faint successes, stinted achievements, could follow. When so much of the world was weight and retrograde motion.

Walking back to his apartment, celebration fogged his thoughts. The college yard two blocks behind but he could hear it. The hubbub of a thousand futures chiming together. The encouragement from those old enough to know better. Beating wings. But life, its generosity, brought corrections. Autumn winds would take every leaf from the trees.

His door closed and locked, he stood at the window. Between chimneystacks, crows harried each other, jealous of the slightest scrap of whatever useless thing. The young man in swim trunks was gone. The deckchair folded aside. A patch of yellowed grass that missed the rain.