72

Drops of rain from the first storm of autumn hit the sides of the asbestos hut. Marc lies in bed and gazes up at the ceiling. He thinks about Henry Darger, author of the strangest book in the history of literature and loner par excellence, Marc’s obsession with whom came about after he heard Sufjan Stevens’s ‘The Vivian Girls are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and his Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies’. Sandra had first come across Sufjan Stevens in London when she happened to see him playing live, touring his latest album. The singer wore a shirt with a Texaco logo on it and jeans and a pair of butterfly wings mottled purple and other strange colours; the wings would move in time with his guitar-playing. Hanging down over the stage, angels with miniature harps moved to and fro as Stevens enveloped the place in folk melodies from the Midwest. When Sandra went to buy the CD the next day, she knew from the title of the song that it was a musical recreation of Darger’s universe. Drops of rain, the first storm of autumn, hit the asbestos sides. Marc is doing nothing, he lies in bed, he stares upwards. ‘The Vivian Girls are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and his Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies’ is playing on repeat, 2-minute recreations of the fluttering of giant pastel-and-purple butterfly wings, and of half-naked girls frolicking drowsily. Both in the song and in the hut, night falls.