The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  Long green fibrils crawled across his soul's eye. He saw flowers and leaves glowing happily upon pages of snow.

  Low clouds swarmed over the water which glowed with colored threads. The mossy promontories reached toward the Arctic islands.

  Now grey clouds came over him, and the water writhed with windy lines like springs, and the droplets sprang apart, leaving whiteness between—an atlas page. He could walk along the beaches and pick up pieces of fossil coal polished over and over by the sea. The sky showed blue-green through the cloud-chinks, while pale blue icebergs bestrode the water in equivalent rarity.

  Willow Lady was his wife. He didn't really know her.

  He laid his face down in the moss and kissed her cold mouth that drooled fresh water. The wind said: oh.

  He told her about his wife in Madagascar whom he'd betrayed, about the mysterious woman who "just didn't feel it" when he made love to her, about the sad girl in that hotel room in Philadelphia whom he'd made sadder, about the woman in the House of Joy who made his heart shoot joyously out of the top of his skull, about his wife in Cambodia who needed money for facial surgery and when he sent the money she never got it and so she sent him pathetic color photographs of the operation and after that, although he went to Cambodia to give her more money, he never found her again, about Kawabata's geisha in the snow country, about his friend Joe, who didn't respect him anymore, about the woman in Sarajevo who said that it was too difficult to explain, about his Inuk girl who didn't love him now, who was just a nasty drunk, about the many he'd failed, and the few he'd done well by—he was not even potent enough to fail everyone!—about his first love, one of whose letters said: I don't need anyone very much. It's a cold feeling, a feeling where I know I should be crying and I can't. During those four days there were many times when I should have cried; I wanted to cry; I hung my head as if I were crying but all that happened was a kind of mockery inside myself showing me that I could out-deceive someone; I could hold my own. I knew during the entire time that I would be all right. In the face of outright physical violence, there's always an escape. — Sure there is, honey. Just ask any Pole or Gypsy or Jew or Armenian or Cambodian in any mass grave. — He tried to explain that in spite of his weakness he'd remained sincere, that when he thought about the ones he loved, even if he felt guilty or sorrowful at times there lay always beyond those emotions a shining wall of goodness: he loved them more year by year, and their goodness was as an organ-chord of glory in some great cathedral. — Would that be the end? Not yet! One more, one more . . . One more, then, not his first love and not his last, a married woman from Toronto, also no doubt categorized in his FBI file: Jewish, with a husband and a little daughter she loved, smart, a journalist, proud of her breasts, fortyish, with small hands. She liked to go for long walks with him, holding his hand. She had a soft low sensual sexual voice that aroused him even over the telephone. As soon as she said his name he'd be wanting to spread her legs and ride her. He couldn't get enough of her. He was crazy about her. He needed her loving ways. He sensed that she liked handcuffs, although they hadn't tried that together yet. After a long breezy day of walking by the lake it was always so good to go back to her hotel and put his hand up her dress and bring her face down upon his face. Sometimes it would be chilly in the hotel room and he would enjoy feeling cold when he took his clothes off and seeing the goose pimples on her buttocks as they got under the crisp sheets. She brought him life, life! She said that sometimes he struggled in his sleep, but he never remembered that. In those months between "seeing her," as we quaintly say, he sometimes had serial dreams of being a Polish soldier in September 1939, with the Nazis coming on one side and the Soviets on the other, closing in, shooting and killing, divebombing and tankrolling while Hitler in Berlin watched movies of Warsaw burning; he was trapped now in a marsh with a few comrades, all of them wounded, and the sky was red and yellow and stank of gunpowder. The forest was burning and quaking. Nobody could hear anymore. A row of trees smashed down; his comrades were decapitated; he was the last one. Could Hitler see him? Behind, anodized black tanks were crawling out of the ooze like crocodiles. Before him, where the trees had been blasted away, he saw a river clogged with corpses, and then a golden plain of wheat that went all the way to the horizon; the sky was black with Stukas wing to wing, coming toward him, coming down. He dreamed of sitting in an opera box with Hitler and a woman whom he had thought was his, but in the middle of the opera Hitler stood up and began dancing with the woman and nobody else dared to look. He looked though, and Hitler's eyes filled him with pain and confusion. He woke up remembering that dream night after night, struggling to keep his eyelids up so that the dream could not slam down upon him again. But when he slept in the Jewish woman's arms, he felt safe. He felt that she loved him and trusted him. He wanted to be with her always. He wanted to meet her little daughter, which of course he'd never do. Waking up happy and rested, he held her hand, kissed her lips, and she was already rolling on top of him. She was life. He could fall asleep and know that when he woke up she'd be there. It was permissible to sleep. Even Soviets did it. Her body was still quite firm. She said that she was sorry he couldn't have seen her breasts when she was younger, but he said he was happy with them just as they were. Sometimes they went shopping for toys for her daughter: hologram buttons, ribbons and things; when the fog came in they might stop and he'd buy her a beer; by night they walked hand in hand through Chinatown like obedient tourists, holding hands. He felt that he was good to her and she to him. If she were any other creature she would have been a speckled trout. He would have been a frog. They asked little of each other. She said that she sometimes woke up thinking of him. She said that she sometimes dreamed of him. He never dreamed about her; she simply kept the bad dreams away. He never saw her being murdered. Of course maybe that was because her being married shadowed the relationship with such an obvious ending. That would be something to fear. If they stopped in time, her husband wouldn't find out. Maybe he would never find out. He didn't want to wreck her marriage, to make her little daughter cry. Why didn't he break it off, then? Because they were happy together. The way they were, it couldn't be wrong. Sometimes she was a little ashamed. But he intrigued her, and she was his medicine, his dove like the dove that the boy had drawn for him in Jerusalem. Did she think of herself as Jewish? She said she didn't, but then she'd tell him how one time in a grocery store a mean old lady was picking on a man with Parkinson's disease for being too slow in the checkout line, and when she came to the man's defense the lady turned on her and shouted that she was a filthy Jew. Somehow the old lady could see in her face what she was, she said to him, trembling, and he embraced her and wished that he could send his Polish dreams to the old lady. She told him about her daughter's birthday party. And then she, his dear one, wriggled her hot little body in his arms. She was not the end.

  Now only his fingers moved. Willow Lady rustled leaves in his face.

  He brought his lips to the ice, which at first was merely a glittering white surface of giant grains and crystals under the blue sky, but as the purple cumuli drew across heaven like the underside of a metal drawer the ice turned bluer and cooler-looking with a yellow line of evil running across its surface, parallel to the horizon—he had a longing to devour the horizons of this world; and here he remembered the white line where a wintry noon ended in Nevada, immense and fluffy, shooting cloud-stuff up into the sky like some defense against falling stars, so vast and triumphant and far away across the plains of tan, rust and beige.- His lips did not stick to the ice yet.

  Presently the snow began to fall. It fell in big moist flakes that clumped together even as they fell. It did not make a stinging slapping sound like the sleet or the cold dry snow; it pattered very gently down, and kept coming. In four hours there were as many inches. The tussocks on the hills became white fairy mushrooms. On the flats, golden plant-stalks still rose above the snow, not yet choked. Snow kept falling. The ice upon the river hid itself treacherously, and the
whitened ridges dimmed gendy into the sky. The world was almost featureless. In places it was relieved very occasionally by the black lines and specks of boulder-edges; only where those were swallowed up in white distances could the horizon be approximated. Everything was very warm and still.

  This was the soul of it, this rushing and swooping in winged or wheeled tombs, always straining toward some beauty as remote as the sun.

  The train entered the tunnel. The atlas closed. Inside, each page became progressively more white and warm.

  Willow Lady rolled on top of him and took him in her arms. She rocked him to sleep. No more nowhere nobody. She grew a blanket of leaves over him, and he was even warmer. He lay at the center from which the world rotated round and round and round.

  * "Be loving; you will be happy."

  RED AND BLUE

  Bangkok, Prah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)

  * * *

  Bangkok, Prah Nakhon-Thonburi Province,

  Thailand (1993)

  Past the restaurant lazed a corridor of water-marked concrete, whose righthand wall curved, being the edge of the stadium where I was going to see how proud garlanded warriors beat each other down. A Siamese cat pursued a rat. Another cat sat on the concrete wide-eyed with ears raised, forepaws demurely together. A man was filling a chest with a bucket of ice. A woman emerged laughing from the storeroom from which workmen were wheeling water jugs on trolleys past the stand where soft drink bottles stood as colorful as Christmas trees, and bottlenecks grew from baskets of shaved ice, shining with incredible purity. Soon there'd come a storm of punches and kicks, gloves slapping on the side of the head, because the steel gates were open, and the million-cratered concrete, walled by yellowing whitewashed slats, crouched ready now to let Red and Blue into the ring whose whirly fans now vivisected the overcast sky and made the concrete rings of corrugated metal of which the ceiling was comprised seem to tremble. But it was only four-thirty, and the rotation of the fans was just for practice. They died; the beer and soft drink signs faded; and the sticky air fell back upon my shoulders like a moldy blanket.

  Because the concept of two men punching and kicking each other for hire is not unattended by conceptual and ethical difficulties, I'd paid for the privilege of entering the realm called Ringside, founded eons ago by King Money and dedicated to the proposition that others should not be able to get what they haven't shelled out for. Ringside, in short, cost 600 baht,* but within its circular dominions, practically against the ring, lay a special section for family, trainer and friends, who would soon be leaning their heads back open-mouthed, prancing, shouting ooooh!, pushing each other's shoulders; they'd be gloating, applauding, slamming their hips against the stands, bouncing on their feet. I don't know how much, if anything, they paid.

  Ringside was surrounded by a thick-meshed fence through which the middle-payers (320 baht) could see, more or less, and behind and above that zone was another mesh fence which demarcated the outer limbo of the 120-baht masses. The early enthusiasts were already there. They gripped the fence like prisoners. The middle zone was still almost empty. Two skinny boys danced there, embraced, kicked high gently at each other's faces while a third boy clung to the mesh netting. They were the ones who a few years later would be working out in the park of sweating flowers. Maybe they already were. Their heads shot up and lurched. They smiled as they struck each other. One boy overpowered another, forcing his head down just as the authorities turned on lights, fans and music, and the boxers entered to be taped up. Cats still wandered about the ring. At ringside the smiling young usherette in red came like an airplane stewardess to take orders for soft drinks and to peddle videos: Thai Boxing: The Hardest Sport on Earth. Perhaps the sport of rape or torture is more difficult, at least for the loser, but kickboxing is certainly hard enough. I could see that on the boxers' faces as they finished getting ready and the men in green came in—men in green vests, that is, with a giant golden jewel on the back of each, and white Thai writing. I never figured out why they were there. The music gradually became louder and more martial. All rose for the anthem. When it was over, all bowed. Then they stood craning and glaring at the ring.

  The two boxers entered the ring wearing garlands and yellow-bordered blue robes. They began to sweat almost at once. They bowed to Buddha. Then they threw off the robes, showing their trunks—Red and Blue. While someone tinged cymbals and someone else blew an instrument as cavernously loud as a Tibetan horn, they knelt and stretched, each in his corner, drinking water held out by his trainer who afterwards hung the garland on the corner pole. The boxers then quickly knelt and touched their heads to the floor.

  I thought I might have seen Blue a week before in the park of sweating flowers where men lay knees up on phony-granite benches, breathing steadily, some with wrists infolded across their hearts so that steel watchbands caught the cloudy light, others with their fingers hanging over the edges of the benches; in this park of sweating flowers, a man with what looked like an astral map tattooed across his back (thrashing lines, quartered circles, and captions of Chaldean incomprehensibility) was working out, bending and lifting. He was not Blue. In fact, that night at Lumpini Stadium I did not see a single tattooed boxer. Another man who was not Blue, sporting differently quartered circles on his chest, lay on the press bench by the ginkgo tree, lifting weights. His pectorals were as big as his thighs. He had great muscular tattooed breasts. A third, who now took his turn, carried a great world-circle on his back blessed by many notations. The weights rode up and down. He yelled: Ho! ho! ho! ho! A fourth, now lying on the bench, lifted a hundred and fifty pounds, crying: Euh! uh! uh! A fifth stood over him, frowning, his neck gold-chained, and they changed places. The frowner's quartered circle glistened as he began. Across the sand, other brown men stood silently swinging fists over each other's heads. Weights rolled silently up and down on pulleys. And then a slender man in a T-shirt walked by. He stopped and watched and smiled slightly. Then he went away. I think he was Blue.

  Slender dancing knees, the sharp slap of a foot against a rib—how different this was from the boxing I had seen in the U.S.A., where they only punch—and yet also so similar, because here too are the ones who clap whenever their hero gets in a blow, and here too there has to be a loser, and I hate seeing anyone lose.

  At the round's-end bell they sat Blue down in a chair, poured water into a big saucer, laved it over him, encouraging and caressing him. Then he bowed to his garland.

  At the end of the second round he shivered as they poured water over his head. They were working at him, supporting his face, massaging his ribs. He was limper now.

  At the end of the third round he gazed at his feet on the dirty canvas while they rubbed him down. He barely moved when they poured cold water over his head. He breathed heavily through his open mouth. When they stood him up, he clung with both hands to the greasy ropes.

  At the beginning of the fourth round he got in a knee to Red's groin, and then a knee to the hip. Red did not cry out. The boxers never did. They wore the face of someone enduring pain: resolute, it scarcely distorted; it only tightened upon itself.

  Red shot a leg up to get Blue in the stomach. Blue did not flinch. Both kept their gloves above their faces. Red got an arm around Blue's neck, punched him behind, hissing tsss! and threw Blue down. Arising less than easily, Blue gripped Red in an expressionless embrace which somehow involved the side of a foot against a knee. This was life, was life's bitter sweat in the hourlong moments between intermissions when silver strings of water drip down the boxer's hair, the centurylong moments when knee meets knee and thigh meets stomach, when the heel finally scores the solar plexus. A leg shot up. Blue's wrist went under Red's knee and threw him. The crowd cried: Eh! Eh! Eh!—because that was rare; from few of these moments could anything be squeezed but continued clinging and struggling. Blue and Red were embracing at the neck, working their knees around each other's legs and buttocks. A glove in the side, but it was always an embrace. They locked kne
es around each other. More than anything else I'd ever seen, it was like some new and terrible way of making love.

  At the end of that round Blue's arms drooped down around the ropes like wilting stems. He gazed wide-eyed as they washed him, flicked him with a wet towel, lifted his legs. He bowed to the garland. The grayclad judges sat with folded arms, almost unblinking.

  In the fifth round Red got in a knee to Blue's kidney. They were head to head, dancing in their pain, holding on while mosquitoes bit silently. Blue thrust out his chin and raised his shoulder, flailing, and the young lady in red brought soft drinks to the spectators at ringside and a white cat came out from between everyone's legs. Red whirled him against the ropes and the referee separated them. Then they danced, but not so lightly. Ankles flashed high like swords. A foot struck a shoulder.

  The boxer in the red corner wins the prize, said the announcer.

  They took the garlands away. The winner shot both hands above his head, then bowed. The loser walked away.

  The stadium was full now of people whose light-colored garments hung in the darkness like moths. A cop stood ready in helmet and jackboots. A fresh Red and Blue entered the ring, threw off their robes, bowed to their garlands; and I saw that the bodies and souls had never mattered; it was only Red against Blue forever, no matter who won; and one kicked but the other caught a knee in his armpit and pulled him down. When they'd come into the ring they were wearing circlets around their heads with stiff rods in back like the handles of frying pans; there was a long tassel that made each look feminine, especially with all the flowers of their garlands; and when they stretched and swayed and flexed, they were like dancing girls. But perfect dancing lasts only for the first round. Soon enough, arms upraised, mouth gaping, Blue leaned weakly on his helpers' shoulders. A dripping towel on his head while they pulled his arms and legs and chafed them, a caress, a shake—nothing could reach him. They boxed at him, trying to show him something, but, panting, he stared straight ahead. After each round, he spat out his mouthguard. They opened his pants and pulled something out. Now they were trying to massage energy back into his muscles. Lifting him, they sucked water from his ears.