(written with the help of fans)

I am working on a little girl.  Her mother is hovering like a honeybee that cannot get back into the hive.

“Is mom all right?” I ask the girl with a smile. 

Her eyes crinkle up at the sides, the only sign that she is smiling. Her mouth is stuffed with cotton and opened wide so I can maneuver my way in there.  I am tightening her spacer, a medieval device.  Her teeth are coming in quicker than her skull is growing, causing  crowding of the teeth.  Her mom wants it fixed right now.  No waiting to see if the teeth will shift as the skull and jaws grow. The spacer is a metal box with four spider-leg-like prongs coming out if it, the prongs are hooked into the child’s mouth and the box rests in the upper palette.  The box needs to be tightened with a key to push the metal legs out every week, so the teeth straighten.  This can take about a year.

My back is killing me, thank God I’m done.

“OK Sally,” I begin

“Kali.” her mother corrects me tersely.

“Kali, remember, no sticky foods, no gum taffy-”

“We don’t eat junk food, we only eat raw food.” her mother interrupts me again.

I look down at Kali with pity, first the spacer and now no reward of candy or gum when it comes off. I  motion for her to get out of the chair and shoo both mother and daughter out of the door, BS can deal with them now.  I clean the counter of all the implements I had to use, and place them in the sterilizer.  I switch it to on and stare at the blue light.

“B.S.!” I call, I want to know how many more patients I have today, I’m tired and want to go home.

“B.S.!” I say louder, she should have been done with the mother daughter pair by now.

“I told you to call me by my name, Butterfly Sunset, or just Butterfly.” she has appeared through the door, angry.  Her full lips are curled into a snarl.  This is an argument we have had before.

“A doctor calling out Butterfly to his assistant sounds silly.”  I say.

“Sillier than calling me B.S.?  Are you kidding?  Butt-er-fly, or I quit!” she spins on her clogs.

I haven’t had a chance to ask her how many patients are left.  I wander into the waiting room.  It’s empty.  Only a few toys are scattered on the linoleum and the light is fading through the windows.

“And besides, “ Butterfly has appeared silently behind me again, “You’re not a doctor.” she hisses.

I watch as she busies herself collecting the discarded toys and throwing them with a clang into the plastic bin we keep for this purpose.  She has every right to be angry.  She is trying to reinvent herself, like I am.  And it’s hard.  It’s hard to have lived a whole life one way and then have it ripped away from you.  Nothing but wonderful, beautiful memories that sneak up and attack you constantly.  These fantastic memories become so painful you wish for death, or unbearable pain, or a coma or drugs.

Butterfly has picked up a little toy tractor.  It’s plastic and green and has a little plastic farmer sitting on the seat.  She throws it so hard into the bin, the farmers head cracks off and flies across the room hitting me in my eye.

I wince and cover it with what’s left of my right hand.

Butterfly laughs, covering her mouth.  “Sorry,” she gets out between giggles, “Did it get scratched?”

I rub the glass lightly with my finger but feel nothing, “I don’t know, can you see?”

“Yes, in three dimensions!” Butterfly doubles over  at this point.

I stand there nodding like an idiot.  My right eye is glass you see, the real eye having been blown out of my face by a Molotov cocktail, along with all but two of the fingers of my right hand.

“Are you done?” I ask gently.

She nods, and wipes the tears from her two good eyes, which are deep and gray and usually angry.  She leans in close to me, so close I can smell the Moroccan oil in her hair. Her hand is on my shoulder to steady herself.   She studies my eye and shakes her head. “Looks fine, a shame really.” she keeps her hand on my shoulder.

“Why?” I ask

She shrugs, that Uzbek shrug that can be translated into so many ways. “Maybe you should change color, you know like David Bowie.  Make one green, one blue.”

I stare at her, “But my eyes are brown, I would always have one brown eye.”

“Whatever.” she slips her hand slowly off my shoulder and saunters into the back room.  I imagine she is going to have some strong coffee, or as she says, ‘Very strong coffee’. I have the most uncomfortable feeling that if I asked her to gouge out my other eye, the good one, in order to replace it with a more interesting color, she would do so.  In a heartbeat.

Butterfly Sunset.  I met her during the Kyrgyzstan uprising in Uzbekistan in the city of Osh.  I had stumbled over her as her two year old son bled to death in her lap behind a bombed out building.  I am a photographer for Life magazine.  Sorry, scratch that, I was a photographer for Life Magazine.  I always found it funny that they call it Life magazine when most of the photos I took over my twenty year career were of death.  My editor asked if I wanted to go to Osh.  I said yes – purely based on the fact that it sounded like a name out of Dr. Suess.  OK, so I was a young, stupid photographer.  I wound up in Uzbekistan right as the Kyrgyz were getting fed up with the Uzbeks. Then …bang.  The first rock was thrown.  The first rape.  The first car was overturned.  Then nothing could stop it.  One hated the other only for difference in name, though they lived on the same street, went to the same grocer, had their children in the same school. Resentment- I learned that day, could run deep and generational.  I had no idea.  I snapped photos as the Kyrgyz ran the Uzbeks out of town.  I constantly requested the Uzbek military to get me the fuck out of there, to get me to the American consulate, to see that I did not fucking belong there, that it was all a mistake – I was not strong or brave or righteous and I had to go.  But they couldn’t help me, they were on the losing side.  So I found myself behind a building with Butterfly Sunset and her dying two year old.  Shots would be fired and out of instinct I would shove my head around the side of the building and fire back with my camera.  It was insane I guess, but I had no idea what to do.  Butterfly sobbed as she squeezed the last breath from her son, Rais I think she called, Rais, Rais, I seem to remember her crying.  Then the fighting stopped.  Butterfly hunched over the boys dead body, the only sign of how long we had been there was the state of his rigor.  Like an idiot I stood up, stretched, and mistaking silence for peace sauntered around the corner of the building, where my face was met by a Molotov cocktail.  After that I remember little. We wound up in an encampment outside of Osh, given medical treatment by tight jawed Uzbeks and asked if we wished to be deported.  “Yes!” I had shouted.  “Men Amerikadanman!  American!”

I turned to Farkhunda, Butterfly’s name before she came with me.  It had meant ‘lucky’, which she wasn’t, so it seemed wise to change it.

She was slumped over, they had wrestled the little boy from her and now she was nothing.  She had no husband, no education, no money.  Now her one reason to live, her son, had been thrown on a pyre with other victims to be burned.

“C’mon!” I motioned to her madly, “C’mon, let’s get out of here!”  I don’t know why I had asked her to come with me.  It seemed natural after you hang out with some one and witness the death of their child and then they watch you get half your face blown off.  She didn’t move.  I grabbed her arm and jerked her up.  “C’mon!  We’re going!” she pulled her arm away from me and the Uzbek officials looked confused.  Butterfly’s scarf had fallen away a while ago, revealing blonde hair and blue eyes.  Later I would realize she had dyed it for her husband, but in the throes of a civil war, without the traditional Muslim garb, with her light hair, her silence and  in the company of an American journalist (and I use that term lightly) they assumed she was with me.

“Nima?” one of the officials asked me gesturing to her.

And I don’t know why, but in that moment with the sun going down, with a feeling of urgency for someone else that I had never felt before, I said the first name that came to mind.

“Butterfly Sunset!”  tumbled out of my mouth.

Butterfly Sunset was the name of a horse, a toy My Little Pony horse. My sister had collected them.  Maybe not as much collected them as they were bestowed upon her.  Like Rais she was two when she died. My mother had just left my father and she had bought a brand new white stucco house in Monterey California.  I was unpacking my sister’s toys to keep her busy while mom got the house in order.

“Look, it’s Butterfly Sunset!”  I said to my baby sister, holding up an orange pony with yellow hair and a butterfly stamped on it’s ass.

“Butter, butter!” she cooed.  It was her favorite one, she grabbed it.

Then as quick as you can say ‘Oq yo’l!’ she was down the hall, out the door and in the middle of Pacific Street being hit by a car.

But I digress.

I brought the real Butterfly Sunset home to California.  How I got her past every American and Uzbekistan official I can only chalk up to the throes of war.  We settled in my old house on Pacific Street and stared at the walls for a few months.  She learned English, I learned no more Uzbek then I had when I was there.

Finally, after the electric was shut off, she asked if we should not be making some money.  I agreed and we fled to Portland, Maine.  I don’t know why, I think I just liked the name.  Maine.  Sounded sturdy, rainy, matter of fact.  A place where I could get my head together.  Well, what was left of it.

I was fitted with a glass eye, I turned down a prosthetic for my hand. I could no longer hold a camera though, so my job at Life was…dead.

We settled into a pathetic apartment on Fore Street above a bakery and I proceeded to get fat.  Butterfly soon had enough.

“You! You get a job, you idiot!”  she shouted at me one day.  This shouting wasn’t via her rights through a sexual relationship, there was none, nor was it due to the fact that I had stolen her from her home. Her home was blown up.  It was out of necessity.  I agreed, and we sat at ‘our’ kitchen table and tried to work out a plan.  “What can you do?” she asked me.

“Nothing.” I offered and lamely produced my mangled hand and winked at her pathetically with my glass eye.

“Och,” she was disgusted. “You are so lazy it’s unbelievable.”

That was the summer from hell.  Instead of hanging out on the fire escape getting fat off the smells from the bakery, she made me learn the dentistry trade.  Apparently it was what her late husband had done before he witnessed her being raped in front of their two year old and flung himself off the fifth floor of their building in Osh.

I am quite a natural at it.  Mainly because with only having the two pinching fingers of my right hand I was really able to get right down deep into people’s mouths.

Now here we are getting on each other’s nerves, cramming bad memories so far back we almost choke.  I know the problem is me, that Butterfly will leave me soon.  I am the constant reminder with my glass eye and scars, with my lobster like hand and shell shocked expression.  I refuse to take my combat boots off, I need the memory, she does not. I need to remind myself every day that life can change in a heartbeat.  I am un-erasable, I am not a re-do, I can’t be made over. And as a result I will lose her.  Again.

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