There was an old man sitting beside the press section. The old man said: This guy's a butcher. They should never have brought that Mexican in. That Mexican didn't have nothing. All that Mexican had was heart.
THE ATLAS
Montréal, Quebec, Canada (1993)
Cornwall, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Port Hope, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Pickering, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Guildwood, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Napoli, Campania, Italia (1993)
Orillia, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Washago, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)
Cairo, Egypt (1993)
New South Wales, Australia (1994)
Mae Hong Song, Mae Hong Song Province, Thailand (1994)
Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. (1993) Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. (1993) Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)
Mogadishu, Somalia (1993)
Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)
Yangon, Myanmar (1993)
Orillia, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Washago, Ontario, Canada (1993)
State of Vatican City (1993)
Mount Aetna, Sicily, Italia (1993)
Lutton, Oklahoma, U.S.A. (1968)
Herculaneum, Near Napoli, Campania, Italia (1993)
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (1994)
Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1991)
Tamatave, Madagascar (1994)
Sudbury, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Mexico (1993)
Allan Water, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Savant Lake, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico (1993)
Sioux Lookout, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Reddit, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Ottermere, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Malachi, Ontario, Canada (1993)
Diesel Bend, Utah, U.S.A. (1992)
Thailand (1991)
Chiang Mai, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand (1993)
Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)
Winnitoba, Manitoba, Canada (1993)
Rice Lake, Manitoba, Canada (1993)
Yangon, Myanmar (1993)
Battle Rock, Oregon, U.S.A. (1994)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. (1994)
Budapest, Hungary (1994)
Zagreb, Croatia (1992)
Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)
Key West, Florida, U.S.A. (1994)
Samuel H. Boardman State Park, Oregon, U.S.A. (1994)
Key West, Florida, U.S.A. (1994)
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (1994)
Mendocino, California, U.S.A. (1994)
Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)
Karenni State, Burma (1994)
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (1994)
Karenni State, Burma (1994)
The Great Western Desert, Northern Territory, Australia (1994)
Key West, Florida, U.S.A. (1994)
Elma, Manitoba, Canada (1993)
Paris, Departement Paris, Region Parisienne, France (1995)
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (1993)
Roma, Italia (1993)Cairo, Egypt (1993)
Berlin, Germany (1992)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. (1994)
New York, New York. U.S.A. (1994)
The Nile River, Egypt (1993)
Ho Mong, Shan State, Burma [Myanmar] (1994)
Marakooper Cave, Tasmania, Australia (1994)
Jerusalem, Israel/Jordan (1993)
Antananarivo, Madagascar (1993)
Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1994)
Antananarivo, Madagascar (1993)
Vatican City and State (1993)
Afghanistan (1982)
The Pas, Manitoba. Canada (1994)
Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1994)
Pond Inlet, Baffin Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1990)
Tokyo to Osaka, Japan (1995)
Avignon, Departement Vaucluse, Provence, France (1995)
San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1995)
Churchill. Manitoba, Canada (1994)
Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1993)
Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1993)
Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1994)
Home (1994)
Delhi, India (1991)
Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1993)
New York. New York, U.S.A. (1991)
Home (1995)
Coral Harbour, Southampton Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1993)
Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1993)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada (1990)
Poland (Dreamed)
Eureka, Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1988)
Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1994)
Nevada, U.S.A. (1993)
The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1988)
He had used up every place now. Everywhere he went, he'd say I lto himself: There's nothing for me here anymore. No more nowhere nobody.
He had finished.
Once life had been as mysterious as a Sierra lake at dawn. That was when he believed that things would happen to him. Now he understood that nothing would ever happen.
It was time to go back to Canada.
Travelling, especially early in the morning, is equivalent to dying, swimming through a night of sleep-choked houses, carrying one's baggage the last few steps to the place where it must be surrendered, entering the irrevocable security zone, then waiting in monotonous chambers to be taken away. This was how he now voyaged through his days. Of course he knew that living, too, is a likeness of dying. Living means leaving, going on trying not to hear the screams.
Almost silently the train departed its tinsel of darkness, metal, concrete and glistening glass. It left another train behind. Then it struck the sky, which had been bright, cloudless and noisy with seagulls since five hours past midnight. The atlas opened as he entered that morning of birds. For a moment he vaguely remembered those summers that adolescents have, when they think they are about to irrevocably change. Montréal continued under its plague of sleep. Apartments, hotels and warehouses were but monuments.
He sat beside a French-named family of Indians: the plumply phlegmatic young mother, disinclined toward rippling her own peace, her four- or five-year-old daughter, who was the most "native"-looking of them with her cedar complexion and long black hair, then the old grandmother complete in spectacles and purple. The grandmother was reading a book about how to live in Paradise forever, her crumpleskinned arm flat across the type, her glasses crouched on the tip of her nose, her lower lip puffed out. He decided that he wanted to live in Paradise, too. He tried to have faith that the train was taking him there. Maybe it was. No more nowhere nobody.
They crossed the river of small green islands.
In an hour they were already in Cornwall, riding the green ocean whose spray was leaves and needles foaming gently against the sky. Another train passed so rapidly that it became a sky of reddish flickers in the lefthand windows.
When the train broke down and another train had to push, the Canadian ladies merely said: Ooh, this is exciting, eh? — Only one person complained, a man who was going to be late in London.
They crossed a shining river, greeted the shiny roofs of metal sheds, and then said to each other: You meet the most interesting people on trains.
I was raised on the prairie, a woman said; which was enough to make him long for the prairie miles ahead. Canada was already making him well. It was an infallible country. What heart-wound or soul-wound could remain unhealed by Canada balsam? How could death ever gnaw away Canada's birches in full-leaf? Why, those leaves had the power to compose an entire yellow-green sky! The grandmother's
book was true. He had come back to Paradise.
Passing along the deep brown railroad ties they reached the forest's end. Wet fields of pale green with trees between the rows, a silver silo, long streams of blond hay on the emerald fields—these things now refreshed and greeted him.
Then, like the forest, the world ended in a darker coagulation of blue sky that went on forever: Lake Ontario. Trestles, canals, whitewashed box-houses; they'd reached Port Hope. They continued without stopping. The center was not at the center but at his left hand, which addressed nothing. On the left, nothing but water (lightest closer to shore, with occasional white diagonals across its middle surface, almost all the way to its thick dark horizon-line of blue).
Not a lot to see, though, once you get west, eh? a man said.
No, not a lot, a lady said. We were there once. We got on the flat prairie.
Now and again trees rose tall and summer-leaved around the tracks, and another reddish train-body hurtled by, but then the water would be there again, nearer or farther away.
Pickering's the most special place, the lady said. Wait till you see Pickering.
More semicylindrical hay bales, then a hot, wooded suburb, a vast golf course, a river half-shored with concrete, two men fishing at a sandy spit choked with seagulls—these manifestations he'd finished with. Maybe that was why they didn't stop at Pickering. As for Guild-wood, that town came into being as a hot wasteland of pipes, bulldozers, weeds and apartment towers, but Canada itself could not hurt his Canada. He remained unburied even yet, and they changed at Toronto. In the waiting room he remembered all the waiting rooms of his life. He remembered a crazy old man in Napoli with bandages around his ankles who'd come stamping rhythmically across the floor, raising an army of echoes. The young men put their hands in their pockets and leaned forward grinning. They shouted: March, march! Now suddenly it seemed that all his deeds and hopes and memories were no more than the old man's echoes. But he said: Never mind. I'm in Canada.
Nobody knows what this government's gonna do, a man said. I'm taking a ten percent pay cut in September.
Well, it has booms and busts, though, Alberta does. That's the thing. Those oil stocks keep gaining.
Trees as woolly as German participles, pale green, and all the two-storey white houses; yellow flowers, maybe dandelion or mustard (he couldn't tell because the train was going so fast now), like wet stars in the grass; a brown creek; a ferny forest not yet overthrown; a scudding lake with sailboats on it and roller-skaters around it; smooth green pebbles under the water; these were the letters constituting CANADA. Now the land was greener; Orillia was hot and green and shrubby. His joy bloomed bright green like swamp algae, and there were white and purple blooms in the grass. The train honked by the boy on the rusty watchtower in Washago, his bike on the weed-fringed road beneath. The boy called something soundlessly. The lady in the facing seat looked out the window and opened her mouth to reply. He saw her teeth and behind them the inward glistenings of her throat. Her tongue pulsed. Then suddenly he was assaulted by all the useless scraps of language he'd learned: A ring seal was a nutsiq. A harp seal was a qairulik. A bearded seal was an ugjuk. No more nowhere everywhere.
Now the crowds of nations and memories overthrew his joy; wasn't there a place where they ran sugarcanes between two motorized cylinders to squeeze the pale green juice? The two cylinders were weariness and despair; and they extracted the freshest liquid from his thoughts, leaving him the husks while the abyss drank everything else, catching each green drop on its coal-black twitching tongue. He had a fever headache, and drops of sweat exploded on his forehead like grains from a shotgun, dense, heavy and painful. The black tongue drank those, too. — So many souls and countries weighting down his atlas—eternally everywhere everybody! — He remembered all the women he'd loved and waited for, all the friends and hopes like fruits in the compartments of an upslanted tray, brown ocher terraces, mottled walls covered with Arabic writing, remembered the happiness, blessings that had come and passed away; and he remembered ants in an anthill. He remembered a late night plane to Australia when he sat in dull amazement observing a woman's struggle down the aisle, a massive gilded vase in her arms; then a man dragged a bulging garment bag which swiped at everyone's faces—useless things people serve and pray to in their useless lives! He remembered ants crawling by the hundreds across his hands in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. He remembered ants in Mae Hong Song. He remembered Bangkok. Behind the grand oval windows of the massage parlor, ladies with numbers, ladies as numerous as ants sat on stairs of pink carpet, each woman a memory for many men whom she mostly did not remember (although the men remembered her, discussed her with one another and made claims, just as each anthropologist argues for the superiority of his own natives); and the women's hands were clasped upon crossed knees, and no doubt they were sitting there still, even as the "Hudson Bay" clacked farther up the track; the ants were waiting to become memories like the Somali women in flower-robes and stripe-robes and check-robes who sold mangoes inside the corrugated metal boxes under pale yellow-leaved toothbrush trees of Mogadishu. That was it. You waited to sell or you waited to buy, but in any event you waited, your consciousness essentially contingent as Hegel had said somewhere; so the Somali women waited and three Thai girls in tight blue ankle-length dresses ran giggling to the elevator. They were through for the day. — But a girl in street clothes entered like wintertide, passing through the hot velvet darkness where viewers and buyers fed upon each other (one girl lay on the sofa there, and another in a bathing suit trod her back quite lovingly). The new girl folded back the drape that hid a long hall of mildew which stretched to the dressing room where girls sat tweezing themselves before the mirror, and she went in and the drape closed and so she vanished. Behind the oval windows, her colleagues sat very still beside their purses, occasionally running a hand through their long hair. A tall German came in, and they froze into winning statues.
Just a massage, or a real Thai massage? said the German. Fifty dollars with sex?
Yes, said the obliging necktied boy, who'd just smashed a journalist's camera.
For the girl in, uh, red? said the German.
OK, sir.
Soon the girl in red was bending her knee in a kind of curtsey and gesturing the German into the elevator.
Next three Thais came in and drummed ballpoint pens on the glass very thoughtfully while the barman swivelled his stool and tapped a pen on another stool. The three Thais lowered their heads and tucked in their shirts.
Body massage? said the necktied one.
A girl in a bathing suit strode rapidly across the pink world. More girls inhabited its steps now, and they fixed their perfect unmoving heads in the direction of those three men who leaned and drummed and worried about prices. Whenever the girls sat down, they arranged their hair, tucked their skirts up to show a little knee, worshipped compacts, licked lips, then became mannequins. In Thailand were people acquainted with the adamantine heads and shoulders which we call tombstones? Beneath this Stone are Deposited the Remains of Cap. John Mackay. Stared a skull with fish-scale angel-wings. Mackay's headstone was canted and darkened. How much farther would it sink this year? H. P. Lovecraft had written that certain gravestones were keys which could be turned to unlock the infernal regions of space. Did all those American flags hinder that? It was Memorial Day in Boston. He sat down upon the mellow green grass fed by so many rotting carcasses of people who had once worried about prices or showed a little knee; and the graves went on like all those houses on stilts just outside Bangkok, each house a patchwork box of rags, an island in canal water green with algae; those were the tombs of poverty, perhaps worse than the tombs of death, perhaps not; and stones weighed down that old burying ground. A panhandler, a paunchy bully, came rattling the money in his paper cup, moaning: I'm doin' real bad! Do you have anybody buried here? and when he shook his head, the panhandler said: There's always room for you. I'll be waitin' for you at the gate because there's no way out! a
nd his face split with terrifying glee.
When the women came down from the elevators alone they always looked happy. They gave little slips of paper to the barman to write on and file, and then they went back down the hall of mildew. The boy in the necktie stood in front of the oval windows and added up profits aloud, smiling. (His favorite thing was to go dancing. But whenever other boys asked him how often he went, he'd hang his head as if caught in some lie.)
And he, the traveller and erstwhile weary watcher, thought: This is not the train station or airport, where travellers pass and go, but a hot round world of women going round and round. Only the men disappear.
The Atlas Page 22
