The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  He walked the narrow tongue of beach, divided by palm trees from the bare ocean and the horizon-ridge of someday.

  He paced among the slow vulture-shadows where the Moslems had once built a deep-moated fort. Trees grew on the walls. Grim black rocks. Shadows between the walls. Narrow windows. Turrets and sky. Night clouds like white stars. Gray trees. The smell of distance. The smell of dirt. A grasshopper. The feeling of an island. Dark gray water, light gray sky.

  FORTUNE-TELLERS

  The Sphere of Stars (1993)

  Yangon, Myanmar (1993)

  San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1993)

  * * *

  The Sphere of Stars (1993)

  Occult philosophy once pleased the yearnings I had in adolescence to produce terrifying effects, thereby flowering into someone superior to others. Shouldn't we grant everyone a pardonable time of life? The white supremacists who firebombed our city councilman's house yesterday, the black gangsters who shot two Jews for their sports jackets the day before—heaven's sake, they didn't mean it! — And that is just how I was. I wanted to fly not because I had anywhere to go, sought to raise the dead not for instruction or care for their clammy friendship. Hence the failure of my suffumi-gations. What if the liver of a chameleon, being burned upon a rooftop, did not incite thunderous storms? That was a lesson from the TETRAGRAMMATON: I'd trusted to corrupt procedures to fulfill shallow ends.

  But now I know. More than fresh rain I'd prefer to imbibe the dew of beautiful correspondences which is the true elixir of sorcery. Grease to a mechanic, metaphor to a Muse—such is similitude to a magician. Yes! I will speak to you of the three Spheres, and the cords of sympathy between them—ropes of power, if you will, far more necessary to the continuance of creation than those anonymously identical electrons which represent the mediocrity of mass democracy, oh, my friends! — While browsing in an ancient Coptic tractate, I found these lines: Discern what size the water is, that it is immeasurable and incomprehensible, both its beginning and its end. It supports the earth, it blows in the air, where the gods and angels are. But in him who is exalted above all these there is the fear and the light, and in him are my writings revealed. This place of fear and light is the core of talismanic magic: an empyrean cosmos of crystal, a Sphere in which reside the ideals of all created things, swarming like quartz and diamond bees around the radiant nectar of their First Cause. — Enclosing this realm one finds the Middle Globe of constellations. A seal has been inscribed upon each star's flames to name it forever according to its character, be it Tetra, Zebul, Sabbac, Kadie, Berisay, or any of a billion trillion others—for it is a law that no two stars may have the same name. They have spirits of various colors and luminosities; and they are the agents of the forms in the inner sphere where we began. Their rays broadcast influences down to the outermost Sphere of Material Elements within which we find ourselves incorporated; where all is guided by them in every place from the Zone of Snows, where the sky may sometimes be afternoon-blue and the sun lies orange on the frozen sea, to the tree-choked hollows between hot sugarcane hills: —every leaf is veined in its own language with a name, and that name is the name of its star.

  Now you know the secret. Each crystal of sea-ice already sends up an essence to its own pale planet. The blood of a bat, they say, mixed with saffron and other ingredients, then brought to a boil upon a grave, will call out of moldy darkness a quorum of demons. But why trouble yourself? The bat already has a bat-star, and the corpse in the grave its star, too; everything is controlled by those maddening rays! The known antipathy between lignum aloes and frankincense, the astrological rules of ascendants, trines and sextiles—all these phenomena can be derived from the characters of the stars which pull them hither and thither.

  Sometimes (I admit) I gaze into the night sky longing to blot away those hateful masters of our destiny. Were I to awake inside my coffin, my consolation would be to find no lethal dimples of light to interrupt the lid—foolish solace, I grant, because the stellar rays can pass with easy malignance through earth and stone any quantity of infinities thick, to link whatever they choose with their significators in that eerie Sphere of Stars. Even in the day of Jupiter one cannot hide the evil; the rite of the burial of scorpions cannot forestall it; the conjuration of vegetable souls cannot delay it. Always those horrible stars! When I see a cliff so tightly bulging with ferns as to resemble an immense palmhead; when I find a land swollen with leafy treetops, fringed with plantations and bananas, tunneled with jungle-walled lava-paved creeks, I grow dizzy in contemplation of the immensity of that hideous Sphere above, for whose tyranny every pebble in the water has been wrought; every fruit ripens in accordance with the commands of its celestial orb; each darkness between leaves corresponds to the space between two stars, the dark and waxy ether of the firmament, the mass of anguish that calls for evil to come.

  In the desert I once met cracked and banded cliffs in grand profusion, and I knew that behind heat and tree-stillness they too were starcrossed to the depths of their pink dirt. I sweated and squinted in the sun (which I liked to think was the Star that ordered me), and ascended a hill of salmon-colored sand, slipping back, digging in my heels. Boulders like the shells of turtles stirred uneasily against my knees. I touched the yellow flowers and grey shrubs, greeted the hundred-foot spruce tree and climbed the white, black and red wall that shook me with its starry silence. With that I'd gained the rim, thereby mastering the tidy distant trees; for a moment I forgot that each and all of these entities were likewise ruled from above; then I saw the meteorite sunken in the sand, the awesome matter of a star, and I pressed my face against the scorching sulphurousness of it to reaffirm my bondage. Let no one deny the sacred correspondence. Better to acknowledge the wisely baleful Star that rules you.

  Yangon, Myanmar (1993)

  It was thus for eminently fine reasons that while in Rangoon I felt impelled to make submission to the astrologers. My goal was to help somebody escape from Burma, just as if I were to release more sparrows from a cage for five kyats* apiece, feeling each tiny brown life beat so weakly in my palm, and then opening my fingers to see the bird go upward. The idea was to gain merit (for we all believe that Papal indulgences can be sold). I once bought a whole cageful of the little things and sent them into the air one by one, feeling so happy and good that I plain forgot they were only bird-puppets being retracted upwards on their star-pulled strings. What can their Heaven be but one of those dark stale restaurants on the second floor of some unpainted building? So I surmise, since all birds come down again, and when they do the bird-sellers catch them in order to sell their freedom again. After all, why should there be intermittence for sparrows? So they flutter busily down from the Sphere of Stars, and what do they see? — It was at Sule Pagoda that I usually bought my prisoners; and they did not fly far. That is why I know that they first saw how Sule's narrow gold spires grew from widening layers of silver roofs whose festoonings were as masses and strings of lichens; these guarded gold figures grew progressively larger as the sparrows neared the ground, then ended in steep wide red roof-plateaus comprised of long slats. Below this was the raised polygon on which all the towers and Buddhas were set (at the Buddhas' knees, offerings of leaves, flowers and bananas). The people walked barefoot on the wet white marble tiles. So many Buddhas! And I wondered this: If the Buddhas outnumbered the stars, could evil destinies be neutralized by calmness? I prayed at the first shrine roofed with silver leafery (darkness in between like ashes), and my prayer ascended those tapering gold towers which were strung between stars. I prayed at the second and the third, where I was kept company by a nine-year-old shavepate, a novice monk in scarlet robes. Passing a skinny old lady shaking a pair of joss sticks, I came to the place of glass hexagonal heads like giant lampshades inset with fringed and brassy bells. In a niche of compound mirrors were two Buddhas. I chose the left hand, the lesser, and prayed that I might do good for someone. Could the stars be appeased or tricked? Past me the sparrows flew down the tunne
lled stain of lukewarm slippery marble where beautiful girls sat among strings of their blossoms and mounds of fresh leafy flowers like the treasures of vegetable stands, looking out at the warm rain and spitting flowers on long peeled sticks. They had sold me a bouquet for Buddha. They sat bare-brownfooted, wearing flower dresses, assembling votive umbrellas of all colors, and white thanakah-paste was smeared on their throats and faces. Below them the temple was encircled by puddled pavement around which trucks and buses slowly crept; there were stair-tunnels on every facet of the pagoda; and in that zone the sparrow-sellers waited with their cages. There, too, ranged around the base of the pagoda, were the fortune-tellers' booths.

  Some made elaborate calculations on a notebook page before they pronounced, while others used a silver pencil on a slate, and still others saw everything through the immense metal-rimmed magnifying glasses that gave them power.

  There was a fortune-teller with a tight brown face like a skull, shaved, with a long black goatee, a black-and-silver moustache, and thick black glasses. His skinny brown-veined fingers grappled my palm. The skull peered with deep concentration through an immense magnifying glass.

  Eisenhower's palm was on the wall, seven times life-size. Other giant hands were continents of horses, elephants, towers, knives and flowers. The cell smelled like incense from the temple above.

  You try to help others, to be of service to others, he said.

  The skull's eyes were also magnified by his glasses. He wanted to know on what day of the week I had been born, and when I could not say he found it in a hundred-year calendar.

  You have a strong lifeline, he whispered. You will not die a bad death. But you must be careful of your stomach.

  In his pale gray jacket, which matched his dust-colored beard, his elbow on an immense black book with red pages, he sold me knowledge as sweet and plentiful as the smoke from one of those Burmese cheroots whose green cross-section contains a hundred chambers of fragrance.

  You are not married?

  I had to think about this.

  No, I said finally.

  Long brown fingertips probed the palm of the hand, seeking to align me with the wisdom that he kept in his narrow glass cabinet filled with books in gold wrappers.

  You must meet a woman older than you who was born on a Wednesday or a Friday.

  When he asked me if I had any questions I said: How can I help the people in Burma?

  From a child you have been interested in Buddhism, he said. You must not try to help by any other means, but through study and religious concentration. You will have great difficulties, but you will overcome them after the seventeenth of September.

  You will die peacefully, he added. You know, some die of hunger, and some are hanged, but never you! You will meet death in a better way.

  And I said again, with my palms under the pressure of the skull's fingers: How can I help Burma?

  Better to give the help to the religious, the true religious, whispered the skull.

  What he was saying was that I must not go against the stars, that I had no right to decide anything without asking permission of those who oversaw him.

  * In 1993, a kyat (pronounced chat) was worth slightly less than a cent on the black market.

  San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1993)

  And yet some of you still disbelieve in astrology. For me those star-rays of influence are as reliable as the steely light-strings that the trolleys slide on beneath the Sunset District's gray skies. My wife and I used to live there, and so did another couple, a white man of ill luck and his wife, a Japanese whose face was a long slender triangle. Years after we moved away a sad thing happened; and that night I slept in the apartment of their sister-in-law, who was my friend. The sister-in-law had a Japanese doll that the Japanese girl had given her (she was always giving presents like drops of blood from her loving heart). This doll was as long as my arm, and more slender. Flat in shape, almost like an immense tongue depressor, it had been constructed from paper wrapped around a cardboard core; somehow it lived as a woman in a red kimono of white flowers, bearing a blue gift in her arms. She had Japanese pigtails and inky black Japanese eye-dots. A calligraphed cartouche ran down her. I thought that I knew the sister-in-law, but I had never seen this doll before.

  The sister-in-law was moving away after seven years. After she left there'd be nobody I knew in this neighborhood anymore. Her new home was a room in a flat with other women. She could not take all her possessions with her. So she was having a garage sale, and the Japanese doll already had a price tag on it that said three dollars. — She's given me so many nice things, the sister-in-law said to me. I have another wooden doll from her. This one has been on my mantlepiece for years. I feel sort of bad about getting rid of it, but, you know, it's something that could make some little girl very happy. I would have loved it when I was that age. I hope a little girl buys it.

  That night I could not sleep, partly because the living room was very stuffy, partly because for a week I'd had a fever that made me anxious, but mainly because I could not put out of my mind the Japanese girl sobbing in the kitchen as she'd told the tale of her days, pressing her cheek against my chest while her pure transparent tears splashed down onto my hands. 1 believe her husband was in the bathroom. So, as I said, I could not sleep (and the next morning the sister-in-law told me that she had not slept, either—although for different reasons, according to the stars). At three in the morning, overrun suddenly by such grief and loneliness that I was compelled to bite my lip, I sat up. I considered going in to the sister-in-law, just to hold somebody, anybody, but that would have been awfully selfish. So I took the doll in my arms. I felt better at once. Finally I slept.

  In the morning the sister-in-law passed by on her way to the bathroom. — You know, you can have that doll if you want, she said. I'd be happy to give it to you.

  Remembering how the Japanese girl's voice had been hoarse from so much crying, I thanked the sister-in-law but said I thought that keeping this doll would make me unhappy. After all, the doll had not been meant for me. If it had come from a person I never met, it could not do me any harm (for in astrology and voodoo we believe that auras have less power the less one knows about them). And I remembered that once the Japanese girl had said to me: No, if we must separate, I doan' want to see him again. Because I must forget him quickly, to find my new happiest. — And I knew that if the Japanese girl left her life, then she would leave her sister-in-law, too, and me, and everyone, forever. If I had a doll of hers, then that doll might pull her back a litde, keeping me a ghost in her heart that could not die. That would not be kind. So I sat up in bed and put the doll gently on the floor, knowing that I would never hug it again.

  Years before, there'd been an October's day when we'd met at Anza Lake, which exuded a fog as livid gray as mercury, and the dog's wet fur stood up in clumps like tufts of reddish grass as she panted and snorted after thrown sticks, swimming narrow-nosed in the lake, waddling out and shaking herself, happy and alert in the clammy breeze. My wife stood plump-kneed, commanding, happily absorbed on shore, crying: Get the stick! Get the stick! Swim, swim, swim—good girl!

  The Japanese girl and her husband came up the path. She called our names smilingly and hurried ahead to meet us. As I've said, she possessed one of those sweetly extravagant natures which long to make others happy, pouring themselves into work, gratefully returning every kindness a hundredfold. He'd found her when he was teaching English in Japan. Although I was happily married myself (I forget now if my wife was born on a Wednesday or a Sunday), I envied him his discovery. I too, as the Burmese astrologer well knew, have had many of my most joyous hours in being of service—or trying to; for many times one does harm meaning to do good. She at least I had helped, or so I believed. The first time I met her, she could speak only a little English. Her husband's Japanese was better that year than at any other period of his life, because they had just come from Tokyo, so he probably should have interpreted for her. But he was tired
and had been doing that for months, and, as it happened, a friend of a friend had just given me a quarter-pound of marijuana—a princely gift, which (prince that I was) I mainly passed on to others. So the husband was in the kitchen, madly smoking the delicious herb, and I was left to entertain the wife, who was afraid of drugs. Now, it may seem that this situation demonstrates the sexual motive behind much of my supposed altruism—for why wasn't I content to have made him happy? But it was not like that. I had nothing against him smoking up all my marijuana. It was meant to be given away. But there was something so defenseless and good about her—a homesickness, a brave cheeriness to prevent others from being embarrassed by her own terrified incapacity. I had the sense that others had not perhaps been kind to her—oh, nothing cruel, but there were so many new Americans who could not speak English; maybe the longstanding Americans grew a little tired. I would not be one of them. I chatted with her, enunciating slowly, using simple words and pleasant ideas; and I could see that she was grateful; every moment I felt warmer toward her; and her husband smoked on.