The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  But then another woman was finished for the day; she smiled and departed, under over somewhere nowhere.

  He exulted, and said to himself: Yes, we'll all disappear at last. We have that to hope for. — He'd become a Buddhist like them.

  And so he was permitted one more memory which had to do with waiting, a good one this time, because in the belly of a golden tower, Buddha's plump white red-lipped face hid itself, floating above gold robes and white hands and folded knees on shelves of fishy silver, waiting, not watching, willing to let itself be seen but not displaying itself; and in a niche beside it a woman offered fresh leaves and stood praying while another girl sat with her feet tucked behind her and leftward. After many long moments of gazing downward and ahead she pivoted on one of those two crossed feet, pushed with her toes to lean forward, bowed, and bowed again. Then she vanished.

  Now he too would disappear. He was going to travel to the world's edge (which lies in Canada), and he was happy.

  They came to a wide, still, blue-gray lake, a river with tree-islands perfectly oval like lily-pads. His joy was strong and wide like the ferns around the trunks of birches. Those ferns resembled immense pale green lichens. Every place seemed a luscious place to spend a summer or a life, remote and serene like those sticks almost sunken in weedy water. There was no flaw in this landscape, because it was full of nature and loneliness.

  'Tis purty in here, he heard a boy say. All the trees an' stuff.

  His joy deepened like black bogs and black pools in the grass.

  Clouds of pale leaves and dark needles swirled by. Sumacs, buttercups, ferns, dandelions gone to seed, grand beech trees, two chrysanthemums in a pot on the topmost strand of a barbed wire fence, forget-me-nots, daisies, reddish boulders gaping out of the softness in the little towns where washing hung between spruce trees like sails too bright and perfect for the whitish plain of water—it was all home even though he'd never seen it before.

  The people that are in the sleepers are really nice, but the people that work there are snooty, a little girl said.

  The train curved like a silver river.

  They were playing cards in the observation car, making fans of their red-backed cards, passing and bidding and drinking Molson in cans as they rode high over so many rock-lipped black pools in the moss, all those ancient folks doing crossword puzzles and showing off pocket knives and laughing and saying: We all gonna get old sometime, but not yet! and everyone happy. — What's trumps? Hearts is trumps.

  He remembered Mount Aetna's broad white fang floating in blueness:

  Dead trees among the live ones, long blonde grass on the knolls between pools, every now and then a bird winging off the marsh; these things scraped away the last of his unhappiness, which fell into a birch gorge at sunset, into the brown water-mirror of nowhere nothing far below. Thinking he saw some creature in the water, he remembered his friend Joe, who'd said: And the dream was, I was swimming in the Connecticut River with my first love. This girl was a virgin. We were both virgins when we got it on. And her name was Janny and she had long red hair in a ponytail. We were swimming underwater. I remember the sunlight and the trees. We were swimming underwater, and things were green and then the water was so clear. Swimming underwater, and all the sudden I hear a voice—a voice! I say, how can I hear a voice? I'm underwater, I'm underwater! And the voice kept saying: Joe, Joe, Joe! And I realized that I was gonna drown! I didn't wanna hear that voice; someone's shakin' me: Joe, Joe, Joe! It's chow time! And just then they show up with the cornmeal and the beans, and I'm back with bars in front of me! And I say, Oh, no! I'm gonna go back to that place! 'Cause beans and cornmeal, it's the same meal every day. You know, it wasn't anything to wake up to. On my birthday, somebody else gave me their beans. Back in jail again. Nothin' to do but race the cockroaches. Oh, you catch 'em, you shake 'em hard, and you put 'em on the edge of the bed. You race 'em for cigarettes. The stupid cockroaches wouldn't have a sense of direction. You'd have a finish line, but they wouldn't know where the finish line was! They'd just take off anywhere. But you'd just take their legs off, an' influence their direction! I mean, that was if you wanted to win the cigarettes! You'd have a limited quantity of cigarettes; you had top cigarettes, and you'd roll 'em real good; that's one thing I learned in jail, it's to roll 'em, roll a damned neat cigarette. We had plenty of time to do it, so we'd roll 'em real good, tight, tuck 'em all in. It wasn't like nowadays, when they give everybody like ten cigarettes a day. We had ten cigarettes a week, so you'd save that cigarette, an' you'd use it for barter, and you'd use it for favors. Trade it for some cornbread. So the cockroaches ... I had one cockroach; it didn't last too long after I pulled its legs off. Most of em got away, though. At nighttime you'd catch 'em. They'd run across your chest. It was real hot at night. You'd sleep like this, with your arms folded. And they'd come out of the bed. They'd run across your chest at night. You'd catch 'em, wrap 'em up, save 'em till morning. The toilet paper was a stiff type toilet paper, a manuscript type toilet paper. I mean it wasn't very good for wiping your ass, but you could write on it. It was the brown paper people used to wipe their hands on. So we wrapped 'em in clothes, stuck 'em in the pockets of your clothes. I had this one G.I. jacket with buttons on it, it was really worn out. I was the Omega Man. I had a button with the omega sign for resistance; I was resisting the draft . . . Yeah, I was drafted. I gave 'em a lot of shit. I was 4-F. I'd joined the Marines when I was seventeen, wanted to go and kill some Commies. Even lied about my age. But I got in trouble sitting on the bench when the big black sergeant called my name and I couldn't hear. He'd been sayin' it for a few minutes. I said oh shit. I was the only one left. Get over there! So the lieutenant talks to me, he says: I'm sorry, son, you're just too deaf. He says: You can't pass the hearing test; you flunked all the hearing tests. Well, I was real sad and everything. I went out and said to myself: Well, what are you going to do, kid? I told all my friends: Well, I'm not going. They all shouted: You lucky bastard! — Well, after that I went to college, and in college I got it straight. I had history professors, radical history professors. I realized the whole thing was a scam and I got pretty pissed off. Then we were real wild. We went wild and made a lot of shit, made a lot of noise because we wanted to hit 'em where it hurt, in the pocketbook. So I got a couple of banks, would trash the street just to make a scene, you know, because my buddies and civilians were dying in Vietnam; everything was all injustice, like in Nazi Germany. You had to do something! Can't just go to school and get your degree, you know what I mean? — I didn't burn down any buildings, just threw a trash can through a bank window. Trash can was on fire, too! The police came and charged us. We backed up, threw some bricks and botdes and stuff. The police charged again. Then they caught a guy I was with and they beat the shit out of him and backed off and I went to pick him up and all the sudden I felt the darned presence and I look up, and they all got their pig masks on and they said something to me: budufdudufuu! so I says: Fuck you, pig! so they smashed my glasses, split my head open, and I started running down the street and one cop came up behind and hit me on the back with his baton: whop! I got away, and some Harvard students pulled me into the dorm and they stitched me up. One guy starts to stitch me up, and he says: No, no, let me do it, I'm a third-year man! They were arguin' over who was gonna stitch me up. I went to school the next day. Both my eyes were black and I had a split-open head and the newspapers were saying: 15,000 RIOT IN HARVARD SQUARE, so all the teachers knew what I was at. I was one of the movement heavies. Twice in two weeks I got a chokehold from the authorities. So I did that for awhile, and then I started hitchhiking. Had to eat, so I'd sell my blood—oh, many times. You get into town, you sleep in the park, you'd be the first one to get up in the morning, six-o'-clock, go to Peak Load or Manpower. If they didn't call you out that day you had to do something to get money. It wasn't like those spoiled brats they got nowadays or the homeless people. You had to find money. The only way to do it was through work or sell your blood or jerk of
f sell your sperm. Oh, you find out. I saw it in Oakland. In fact, I did it in Greece twice in one week. I did it in Utah, I did it in Atlanta; it's just something to do for five or ten bucks. There's nothing to it. Two times in one month, that's too much. You almost pass out from selling your blood twice in a row. Selling your blood isn't much. It's just you get five, ten bucks, you know. But that's a lot of money if you're on the road. Five dollars is really a liberator. Well, now it would be more like twenty dollars. But let me tell you about five dollars. You got five dollars, you can take fifty cents of that, walk around town, find a day-old bakery. You get a loaf of bread for twenty-five cents. And then you're all set. Tie that to your belt, stick the rest of the money in your shoe, keep your change in your pocket, put the three dollars in your shoe, put it between your big toe and your little toe; you're all set, you can sleep anywhere; no one bothers you, as long as you take your shoes off at night, put 'em under your head, use 'em as a pillow, wrap your shirt around 'em. It's a typical thing to do. That's if you're sleeping in a boxcar with other bums around. I wasn't that desperate then, either. Look, if you're hitchhiking around, come into a town, get there early enough, it's a freak town like Denver or Salt Lake City or something, you sleep in the park in a dugout or some baseball park or something, at the first light you get up, and the night before you've looked in the phone book to find out where the Peak Loads and the Manpowers are. Labor pool. So you're first on line in the morning, even though the regulars they're gonna get the jobs. 'Cause you gotta get the job, gotta get that ten bucks, twelve bucks, whatever. Hell, day-old bread only costs a nickel. You just wrap it up, tie it to your belt and hitchhike, hop a freight train or something, and you have a day-old bread on your belt and you're all set for days. Bread and water, that's fine. Cigarettes would be good, too. And then go to sleep, dream good dreams. Everywhere I went, though, I remembered swimming underwater with my first love, and waking up in that lousy jail to find it was just a dream.

  As he rode away from Joe he recollected how in Herculaneum steel bars had been installed by the Museum staff in so many of the streetfronted rooms to prevent anyone from damaging the frescoes; thus these curatorial efforts formed an empty afternoon of ruined jails, like Joe's barred rooms reminiscent of prostitutes' cages in Thailand or India. And he wondered which of his own memories were like that, in sight but out of reach like place-names on an atlas page which the eye grazes over. A squirrel descended a tree headfirst. I want to remember my first love, too, he said to himself, but his love was in out up down everywhere everybody. (At the train station in Sydney the man by the turnstile said: Out you go. Off you go. Off we go. Now, where did you want to go?) He'd been too promiscuous. In Cambodia, where everyone talked slowly and dreamily, where even the beggars walked slowly, he could look through the gratings of the restaurant windows and see the cyclists' heads go slowly by. At that time he hadn't finished. He had never wanted to reach through the grating and touch one of those shiny blue Russian-made bikes as it slid by. But the next time he went there the cyclists had begun decomposing into memories; motorbikes had injected themselves onto the scene, in accordance with the smog dialectic. He said: I guess I should start remembering these bicycles. He said: I want to remember my first love, every time everywhere forever. In the French restaurant across from the Hotel Papillon, boys in clean shirts slowly, almost silently tried to sell him things. They squinted and wrote out the prices in thousands of riels, and began to pray the count of bills whenever he bought something. The hundred-riel notes were jungle-green, with a socialist face, stern and green, hair cropped back like some Viet Cong general's. He could almost remember his first love's face. The city seemed empty that first time. Had so many been killed? Of course Bangkok had been very crowded; most other cities would seem empty after Bangkok. The boys in clean shirts went out, and he could see them through the restaurant grating and then they were gone.

  They passed an abandoned beaver dam in a winding river that reflected everything in the hue of a sepia-tinted photograph. The river was widening, the trees lowering. Admiring the turf of the winding banks so overhung with bushes and rich grasses, he said to himself: This is Joe's river. If Joe were here with me he'd dive beyond those grimacing branches of dead spruces to be with that virgin he loved; he'd find her here. What kind of jail would that be?

  Rocks furred with blueberry bushes sank their snouts into blue lakes. An osprey flapped low with open talons. Knowing that very soon now he'd vanish forever from the atlas, he felt a happy excitement. His eyes drank from ponds whose rich mud tinted them the color of wine.

  Then sunlight crazed the river strangely, turning it the exact hue of a sheet of yellow paper on which his first love had written: Last night I dreamed we were both in a double bed with the covers pulled up over our heads. We were wearing karate type pants. You had longish hair. It looked really dark against mine. Our legs were stretched out in front of us and there was a cat purring between mine. She was black and white and her head was resting against my knee. It was all very warm. The cat got up and walked over my stomach to my chest. She started licking my breasts and neck. It tickled and you were laughing and I pushed her away. Then I woke up. At first I felt really happy. My body was excited but I was so tired and warm, I curled up. I began to think about you and suddenly I panicked. I had this irrational fear that you were just pretending to care for me to "get even." You were going to make me care for you, let me love you, and then, for educational purposes, to justify your own pain, you were going to cut yourself off completely from me. I got out of bed and reread all your letters from this summer. At that hour they struck me as dignified, careful, cold, impersonal. Then I cried myself to sleep. This morning I put the letters away and thought: sad, silly girl. And on the back of the sheet, almost at the bottom, she'd written: I don't really want to ask you this and I won't ask it again but I'm rather insecure today. Do you love me?

  Did I? Do I? So many years ago now she'd married somebody else. Now she had cancer. On the envelopes to her letters there were thirteen-cent butterfly stamps. In the upper lefthand corner was the address of where she'd been when she was a girl. If he ever went searching for her, he wouldn't go to the house where she lived with her husband and three children. He'd go back to that town of streets now empty of people he knew, long and empty and wide like the boulevards of Tamatave. He did not really remember the town of her girlhood at all. Memory is declivous, sinking of its own weight into the mucky ponds. That new virus he'd read about that converts a person into black slime in three days, perhaps it was but the counterpart of what forgetting does more slowly to the soul. For he could remember the excitement he'd felt when her letters alighted in his mailbox one by one, but the flagrant fragrant emotion that had rushed into his lungs when he'd opened each envelope so long ago could only be faked now, not recapitulated. The letters were now near as old as he and she had been when she'd written them. Once he started to reread them, but some were typed and some were written in her intense and crabby longhand; he'd read only the typed parts because he was tired and his eyes hurt. This is getting too long, she'd written, and he thought: I guess that's true of my life. I meant to be civil but not chatty. I am selfish and nasty now, hardly nice. I like my life the way it is now because it's mostly private and very much my own. Then she'd crossed two or three lines out and continued: I'm being rude. I just want to go away and think again. He thought that he remembered (he wasn't certain) spending an hour or more trying to make out the rude part, and now if he really wanted to do it, all he'd have to do would be to call the CIA. It wasn't that he didn't care; his mind and soul had gone so many times abroad, each time ensaring him in new experiences from which, struggling to get free or to dig himself deeper, he'd dusted and buried his past. That muffledness made him wonder whether the fact that he still loved her (or at least her memory) might be grotesque. Everything made him tired. Thinking of her afforded him pleasure even now; but those stale letters were like draghooks to pull him down. Closing his eyes, he wa
tched her signature form itself like sky-writing on the insides of his eyelids. The words she scripted could never change. Time had split her farther and farther from what she had been. At least they were her letters. His letters would have been worse. The reflections of grass-tufts in dark water all around made it seem that the land was just as green underneath and that it floated on darkness. He'd go under to find the women who'd loved him. He'd live and leap on the islands of red rock in the forest. A bird winged like his heartbeats.

  A mother read to her child: In the forest, the Iroquois were waiting for something.

  The sky was a ceiling of blue crystal held up with white pillars of birch carpeted so richly with evening ferns. It was that time when the light goes out of lakes.

  Near Sudbury it got sandy with hard white dunes and it was grassier and rockier but there were many fish-ripples in the streams. The reflections of birchtop and sprucetop serrations were almost black, and blue cloud-reflections swam in the brown sky. Birch groves fingered evening's green wall with their skeleton hands. That long train the sheen of evening grass followed the sky.

  Now the trees began to rise up taller into the night, and the fish-rippled ponds were tarnished blackish-brown. He saw a sudden gash of blue and white light on a lake whose tree-reflections were wide enough apart to let in a little last sky-color, and then he put his head down in his seat and slept.

  The next morning was skygray and evergreen. Tall narrow firs were packed together as tightly as poles in a palisade. (He remembered Mexico's railing-teeth on grinning balconies.) Behind and between the tops of them, other trees flashed, helmeted guards of each other's greenness. Then suddenly from the pale bushes rose tall and grizzled stalks like arrow-shafts. There had been a fire here, perhaps three or four years ago. Now the birches returned to flash their skinny white throats, their striped white necks, keeping the firs and spruces small; now the spruces choked everything else out.