The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  The last time he'd seen her she'd been at the peak of her beauty; now she was a woman, not a girl.

  They went to a restaurant and she spoon-fed him and he was embarrassed. He tried to spoon-feed her too, but she said she wasn't hungry. She said that she was very sick. She had been sick for months. She touched her forehead and made signs for fever. He supposed that she had AIDS.

  The taxi driver took them to a place that said BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS and led them in, beaming. She sat in a dirty room that smelled sweet like old mouthwash. A weary lady with a headlamp that took up half her face inspected her and said that she had rhinid allergy aigue. Vanna leaned toward her so attentively from the rusty steel chair with her feet canted beneath in a ladylike way. The lady with the headlamp had a kind frown; she was oldish and patient. She put on her glasses, which were very thick and dark on top like eyebrows, sniffed, and leaned down to write something very slowly which he could not see from behind the wooden stand with its four dropper bottles like relishes. Everything happened so slowly, as if in time with the shuffling footsteps outside.

  He'd given Vanna fifty dollars, and she pulled the money out from between her breasts and gave it all to the lady with the headlamp as a tip. Then they went out to the pharmacy to fill her prescription. She swallowed a little of the first medicine, made a face, and never touched it again.

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1994)

  She said she want to cut out her eye, sir, because last time you leave, she take some medicine to kill herself, and it make that blind place in her eye.

  He looked at her. Her face was merciless.

  She say she have heavy headache for six months now. She want to kill herself if illness is incurable. Maybe she is joking. She say she don't want to be cured. She just want you to buy her a motorbike before she dies, because she is maybe joking again.

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1994)

  That night she took him by motorcycle to the Ambassador Hotel, where he'd never been before (nor had he wanted to go); maybe it was where she worked now; and the lobby was massive, empty, gleaming and dark like the crypt of some inhuman giant not yet dead; and in the corner lay a subcrypt on either side of whose stairs a security guard stood, one man and one woman, and the woman patted his wife's body down coldly and degradingly and the man gazed upon him in silence; then he and Vanna went downstairs to that basement disco of almost total darkness where the music was loud and a woman was singing a song of terrifying shrillness. They sat down and Vanna ordered some food. The vast walls sucked up all light to such an extent that he could not even see what he was eating. After awhile the disco ball came on. Vanna gestured impatiently. She wanted him to go up and dance with her. He went. They were the only couple on the dance floor. Gazing around him into the bloodvessels of darkness corpuscled by people, he occasionally made out the flash of spectacles or a watch or a gold necklace, but mainly he knew the presence of others by their cruel and scornful laughter. The lights were dazzling and the song went on and on. He felt extremely naked and ashamed. At last the song ended, and at once a double line of dancing girls came to join them. The girls faced one another, trudging toward each other and away in a weary factory step to conserve themselves for the long night ahead, while Vanna danced on, never looking at him, and the girls giggled sneering over their shoulders and already he was getting tired. The song was a love-song with English words. It had already gone on for ten minutes (he looked over every time that Vanna checked her watch) and he was bursting out with sweat because he kept trying to ape the steps his wife made so that he wouldn't disgrace her any further; and finally the song was over and they went to sit down. A man in a necktie and a sickeningly pale shirt approached their table and said: I want to dance with her. — He looked at the man, looked back at his wife who sat apprais-ingly, and he said nothing. — The man shook him by the shoulder. — I want to take her my house and bed her now, you Mister understand? — He looked again at Vanna, then said to the man as calmly as he could: She's with me. If she wants to go with you, that's up to her. Vanna, do you want to go with him?

  He made a gesture of her going with the man, and she nodded, started to get up, put her hand on the man's arm, and he looked away from them, choking with shame and bitterness and sadness; and then his wife had evidently taken pity upon him because the man was going away (and later he wondered: Had she begun to go with him because she'd wanted to or because she'd believed he was commanding her to?); but his wife was now dragging him nervously back to the dance floor; and suddenly he understood the rule, which was as brutal as life: As long as he could keep dancing with her (and paying to dance), she'd still be his. As soon as he became too tired to go on, she'd be compelled to dance with someone else. — This next dance, by the way, was a very strange and crowded one of men and women in nested circles moving very slowly around the floor, groping their arms and fingers like swimmers in a nightmare of cobwebbed jelly; and he was able to regain his strength. — The following dance was a fast one. He had to keep wiping his forehead as he danced. No other man was dancing all the dances; only Vanna and her troupe, those girls who continued to move so dreamily; Vanna, it seemed, was enjoying herself, because unlike the other women she danced with superb energy, practically leaping while they shuffled (but on the other hand she never looked anywhere but at her watch). An hour later he was gasping for breath, but he said to himself: If those girls can do this then so can I; and he watched carefully through his fog of sweat to learn how they shuffled and glided in such wise as to expend as little energy as possible; he began to copy them; but his wife continued as fresh as ever.

  He hung on. At the end of the third hour it was over. He paid and paid and then they went back to the hotel. Even through an interpreter she refused to speak to him, and he never found out what he had done wrong.

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1994)

  In the morning she had to go to work. She and her friend were selling wine. She said that she would be back at two in the afternoon (so the ladies at the desk interpreted). Of course she was sometimes late. She hadn't come back after two days.

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1994)

  He was very hungry and thirsty because he had waited to eat i with her. He walked and walked all day, half crazed. Every now and then some policeman with a Kalashnikov would stop him and practice English upon him and then he'd have to buy the policeman a beer. Or a man would say: Excuse me, sir, what is your nationality? and then: Where are you from? and then: Where are you going? and then: When you arrive our country? (they all seemed to have studied from the same phrasebook) and then: How long you stay? He always answered patiently; he had no right not to. He passed the site of the floating restaurant (nothing there now), and he turned up a dirt road where girls were unloading huge sacks of rice. The Tonlé Sap was aswarni that afternoon with drifting boats like up-curved dark leaves or maybe seedpods because the seeds were souls, three or four of them, well spaced, in each craft; some of them were standing and lethargically poling; and there were also people bathing and washing in that greenish-gray water where the concrete sloped steeply down from the pavilion in whose shade some beer- and toilet-paper-vendeuses squatted or sat upon their sandals listening to xylophone music there just opposite the weird red and yellow roof-scarps of Sihanouk's palace which rose so impossibly steep and tapered like a lock of his wife's hair after she'd shampooed it and he'd pulled it up from her head in a fairytale horn.

  He went to the market which so long ago he had passed through but never been a part of; she'd brought him to that district when he'd bought her the first gold bracelet; and the swarming crowds no longer affected him. Maybe nothing did. He said to himself: These people are here to enrich or glorify themselves, or maybe to pass the time. Any of those choices wearied him so much now. He felt very tired. He realized that he was getting sick.

  After a long time he neared the hotel, which he was beginning to loathe. He passed by that restaurant where he'd eaten just before beginning his search for her the previous year. The chicken
s and vegetables still hung upside down inside the glass case, but the streets were dry and the skeleton-man had grown fat. Then suddenly he saw the place where he'd gotten his hair dressed that last time.

  A different girl got him. His girl saw him halfway through and cried: Hello, hello! — The entire time that the new girl was doing him, even when she struck the back of his neck with skillful wooden-sounding clackings of her knuckles and wrist, he remembered that first time now years ago when Vanna had shaved him; and at her brother's flat she'd giggled at him and said something in Khmer; when he asked the brother what she'd said, the man hung his head and replied: She say, who shaved for you? Not so good! — Not surprisingly, her brother was an ambiguous soul. At first he hadn't known that he was her brother; he'd assumed that he was the doctor because he'd made an appointment with an English-speaking specialist about her fevers and headaches and they'd set out on a motorcycle to go there, but, perhaps because she'd never had any headaches or perhaps for some other reason, she'd led him around an almost bright sky-blue cyclo with yellow struts whose skinny-legged old driver had been in an accident and held half a lemon around his bleeding finger, and into a hot doorway and up these four flights of dark and urine-smelling stairs to what he'd supposed was the doctor's house; and sat for awhile with the old lady who he did not yet know was her mother.

  The man came in quietly. — Hello, sir, he said.

  Very pleased to meet you, Doctor, he said.

  No problem, replied the man after awhile. I am her brother.

  He wasn't her brother, of course. Pol Pot had killed all her brothers and sisters, along with her parents. But he was himself an orphan and he had also been raised by this weary old woman.

  At any rate, what she'd said about his shaving made him smile. Later he realized that maybe this was her way of offering to shave him once more. He no longer possessed the Happiness double-bladed razor because one day when he was travelling his suitcase had burst open and the metal box flew out, opened, and scattered parts far under the conveyor belt of his life's airport. Certainly she spoonfed him with rice with her own hands at her stepmother's house that day. It was all so confusing. So why hadn't she come?

  He went into the hotel finally and the maid who now was always busy said: I'm sorry I forgot to tell you your wife came yesterday afternoon and waited for you a very long time, maybe more than one hour.

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1994)

  What did she say?

  She was afraid maybe you were angry with her.

  No, I'm not angry. What did she say?

  She said maybe at night very very busy in restaurant.

  You think she meant the good busy or the bad busy? he said.

  I don't know. I'm very sorry, she replied, her face filled with pity.

  He said nothing.

  Have you been to the restaurant? she said.

  No, he said. I don't want to see.

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1994)

  The next morning the phone had not rung, and so he went out to get fried rice and two orange juices for his breakfast. The swarm of cyclo and motorcycle drivers that always rushed to meet him shouted: Does you forget her?

  Never, he said.

  Among them was one who closely observed him and his, affairs; this man slept in his cyclo facing the hotel, opening his eyes whenever anyone passed in or out. On that third morning without Vanna the cyclo driver smiled evilly and said: And last night you sleep your wife?

  The other thrill-chasers drew in breath and listened.

  It gave him particular pleasure to look the man in the face and reply: Of course. My wife is with me every night. She always has been and always will be. She's my wife.

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1994)

  Later she came back to him, that day or another day; he didn't remember anymore, and why should it matter? When he came into the lobby and saw her sitting tensely with another girl awaiting him he knew that none of it had been her fault, that the misunderstandings would never stop, that he would never ever stay with her, that he loved her violently (he was very ill now with the same headaches and fevers that she had), and he took her so gently upstairs and kissed her. There was another night when he had to bring the desk clerk up to interpret again and the man said:

  Please, sir, she say to you: She afraid for old age have no house. She say please buy for her a nice house. She afraid now go your country, better she stay here.

  How much would that be?

  Forty pieces of gold.

  And how much is forty pieces of gold in dollars these days?

  Seventeen dollar, sir. No. Forty-two. No. One thousand fifteen dollar. No. One eight seven hundred.

  Oh. I knew that all along.

  He was extremely sick now and could barely stand. The only other thing that he later remembered was that the next time his wife disappeared he'd gone to a house of Vietnamese prostitutes to get shaved, wanting to imagine that she was shaving him like that first time, so of course he did not even get a woman but instead was presented to a very stern man who wielded an immense straight razor and suddenly he knew that the man was going to cut him. The man was almost finished now. The razor had rasped over his lip and across his naked sweating throat. The man was shaving his cheek now and he gazed into the man's face and the man smiled unpleasantly and by reflex he began to smile back and at once the razor sank deeply into his cheek.

  HOUSES

  Roberts Camp, Wyman Creek, Deep Springs Valley, California, U.S.A. (1986, 1979)

  Herculaneum, Near Napoli, Campania, Italia (1993)

  San Diego, California, U.S.A. (1988, 1992)

  Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.A. (1990, 1991)

  La Loma, Near Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico (1992)

  * * *

  Roberts Camp, Wyman Creek, Deep Springs

  Valley, California, U.S.A. (1986, 1979)

  On a melancholy night in the hills, my companion's stove sputtered and extruded wiggling yellow flames from behind the weeds. The moon was the only happy thing; and it was out of reach, above a slanting black ridge. Another ridge slanted the opposite way to meet the first in a V. This second ridge had been tinted greenish-gray by the moon in demarcation of its separateness. Whereas the first ridge could not be construed as anything but a silhouetted phantasm, the second ridge was as evil as doom. My companion did not see or know this, nor did I tell him, even when the ridge began to unlock itself: what would have been the use? Along its shoulder and down its front, black tree-balls waited out the night. I am generally fond of trees on account of their gentle unconsciousness, but these I feared. They squatted there with a purpose, as if they might be demons lurking with their heads on their knees, perhaps planning to inch down the hill come moonset, and get me. Either they would not harm my companion or else his fate was immutable, because he could not see them, so there continued to be no reason to speak out. Evil black cabins, gutted and stinking, hid like turds among the tall wet grass by the creek, or proclaimed their wickedness on the rock piles. Inside them, everything had been ripped from the walls. They were dark, and they stank. They were horrible. The walls had been cut with hatchets and blown out with shotguns. The windows were smashed, the stovepipes ripped out, and the thresholds piled with plaster. Every fixture had been gutted. The floorboards were stained with deer blood where lazy hunters had drained their kills. Flies had come and gone, but there was still a stale sweetish smell.

  Years since, some other boys and I had come here by horseback. I remember how the creek looped through a rockwalled meadow; my buckskin dipped his head to drink, and suddenly we all saw the cabins standing tall and lonely. The canyon appeared to end behind them, although it didn't; only life and meaning ended here. Several structures were ruinous even then, whole walls' worth of planks having been prised off for fenceposts or firewood; but I'd choose to call them melancholy, not evil—strange stages for a theater of lizards, snakes and jackrabbits. Lupines and mariposas grew at the edges of those wooden caves, thriving in the shade of overhan
ging roofs; and the sun projected straight-arrow rays and trapezoids across the darknesses of back walls. Had I been a young child I might have liked to gather quartz crystals from the hills and lay them out in rows upon those floors strewn with lumber and scraps of tarpaper; I might have tried to make them intercept those long spears of light. But the resultant streams of prismatic color mean little to me now. I see in black and white. — These cabins, once used by cowboys and linemen, were older than the century. A half-crazed recluse built the first shack back in the days before White Mountain City went from one tent to half a hundred tents to a ghost town. In those days you borrowed freely, and then repaid with interest. Even in my time the cabins were a little like that. I'd slept in them half a dozen times; the windows had no glass, and the bedsteads had no mattresses, being now mere high flat platforms of solid wood, more comfortable than the mosquito-ridden grass by the stream. I remember how the bare floors were shiny and golden with desert sunlight; and at night sleep always came quickly so that the cold dewy dawn surprised me like a glimpse of my horse's head through the window. I'd borrowed an old silver spoon from one cabin for a summer, and when my horse took me back there, I left it on the old lace doily and added a cheap pocket-knife because that seemed like the thing to do. The next time I rode that way, the knife and spoon were still there, and somebody had left a fork, too; missing one tine, but still a fork; someone had thought and cared. What next? As the mathematician C. H. Hinton wrote: . . . we are accustomed to find in nature infinite series, and do not feel obliged to pass on to a belief in the ultimate limits to which they seem to point. I guess he was right. Now the fork and knife and spoon were gone, and the bedsteads were smashed as if by idiots at war. Now they were dead houses. Therefore they were evil houses.