The Brooklyn Rail

In this original story, Samuel Rutter envisions an afternoon with fictional lepidopterist Matt Damon. The dreams themselves are having dreams in a way that reminds me of Sebald or the Saragossa Manuscript. Even when seated, the narrator engenders a dizziness in the reader. Once standing, dizziness gives way to benign vertigo—a pleasant spin around a butterfly house. Rutter has the rare ability to maintain a sense of bonhomie and comfort while the narrator's thoughts flit and spiral.

I was holding hands with Matt Damon in the Schmetterlinghaus in Vienna, some forty species of tropical butterfly flitting about in the Art Deco greenhouse while outside it snowed. We strolled together in silence on a narrow path amongst the banana leaves and the papaya trees, the tinkling of an artificial waterfall echoing pleasantly off the glass and wrought-iron. A little girl in a blue pinafore tore the ink-black wings off a Papilio Memnon while her mother pretended not to notice.

After two full circuits, we stopped in at the café. Matt Damon sat down opposite me, ordered a Viennese coffee and a sparkling mineral water, and then I began to feel nervous. After the waiter had left, Matt Damon gave me a crooked grin.

My daughter says I have to stop using the word retarded, he said, knowing full well that he ought to have stopped already. The way he said it was the way it would sound if I had said it myself, his Boston R kissing my Melbourne R in some dark corner of the English language.

Is that it? I asked. I can’t have this conversation again.

Well I don’t know, said Matt Damon. I just want to, you know, shoot the shit. I feel like we don’t hang out like we used to.

But when we do, we have fun, don’t we, I said, and gave his bicep a little squeeze through his pea coat.

The waiter returned with the drinks on a silver tray, and the revolting dollop of cream on top of Matt Damon’s coffee was already beginning to melt. The sight of it turned my stomach.

Fuck me, he said, after a moment. A fuckin’ Protambulix Strigilis just landed on your shoulder.

No way, I said. A Streaked Sphinx?

Those bastards were everywhere when I was down in Panama, said Matt Damon. When they’re grubs, they hide out at the bottom of trees.

What were you doing in Panama? I asked Matt Damon.

I was doing research for this movie about the Chief Engineer of the Panama Canal, he said. In the end they were going to give the role to Phil Hoffman, but then he died.

I knew for a fact that this was not true.

Actually, that’s not true, Matt Damon said. I just do my banking down there.

Then Matt Damon told me a story I’ve reflected upon many times since, especially when I’m surrounded by lush vegetation in mild to humid conditions.

People don’t really think of the Scottish as colonial overlords, he began, but they gave it their best shot. As much as a third of Scotland’s wealth was tied up in an ambitious scheme to establish a colony on the Darien Peninsula in Panama, an unforgiving strip of land from which the highland nation would attempt to muscle into the sea trade by controlling access from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. Everyone from lords to lairds to shepherds and ironmongers tipped in their cash, and in 1698, five ships set off to found New Caledonia with about 1200 people on board. They had to stay below deck for the duration of the voyage, to avoid detection by their supposed friends the English, and soon the women and children were scorbutic and drunk on beer once the freshwater spoiled. It got no better when they made landfall: the Guna tribes had little interest in trading for combs and heavy tartan, and they already knew about yams and maize. The Spanish made great sport of attacking the little Scottish fort, and although the Scots hired a Jamaican privateer to run them off, this proved ineffective. Isolation and tropical disease ravaged the fledgling colony and when two more ships arrived to resupply, they found the fort in ruins, the stone huts overrun by the riot of the jungle, and a printing press rusting unused on the foreshore. The Scots sent yet more ships, but it was no use. Two of the colony’s leaders, the Brothers Drummond, took all the able-bodied men to raid the ports of Africa, but there they encountered the pirate John Bowen, who scuttled their ships off the coast of Madagascar. The brothers were never heard from again.

Over a thousand Scots died on the Darien Gap and received Christian burials, but their graves have never been found. The isthmus is now a treacherous overland route for those seeking a new life in America, and many more have died from heat and disease and exhaustion, their lives swallowed by the steaming mud, nothing left to bear witness of their passage except for piles of discarded, counterfeit clothes made in China then shipped to Paraguay, the last death rattle of the Mercantilist dream.

Matt Damon tilted his head back and drank the last of his disgusting coffee and curdled cream. The heat in the Schmetterlinghaus became too much for me: my scarf pricked at my neck, I could feel my ears filling with blood, and then I passed out. When I came to, I was on my back, and I could see a perfectly blank sky, snowflakes melting the moment they touched the warm glass dome overhead.

Matt Damon loomed above me and smiled, but then a thick bead of sweat rolled down his nose and landed on my face. A diadem of butterflies, great monarchs and Ulysses and Heliconiuses, hovered above his head. Then he lay down on the ground beside me, on pebbles white as the cliffs of Dover, and one last time he took my hand in his. We lay there together while somebody called my wife, who at that moment was wincing at Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow at the Kunsthistoriches Museum, and asked her to come and help us.