The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  A girl in a blue skirt entered silently like cool water. She swung toward the counter to greet the fat old Chinese lady, and her skirt whirled, spilling frilliness down her thighs so that the boy with the silver mermaid could see the mesh of the door right through it. Eddy had been sitting in front of the display case. He stood up at once. The girl in blue smiled at him. The glass pane moved soundlessly in his hand. The girl nodded, and his arm sank into the world of treasures. I remembered how in the hot wet night that smelled like leaves, a man and a woman in a yellow skirt had gone wading in the shallow sea, fishing with lantern and net, and the changing light formed the reverse of shadows on their bodies as they walked almost splashlessly in the knee-deep water, casting their hunter's light between boats. Eddy and the girl in the blue skirt were like that now; for the girl stalked parasols, pointing to every one in turn, and Eddy reached inside the glass and handed them to her, nodding respectfully at every word she murmured while the old Chinese lady behind the counter looked on sleepily, fanning herself with a fan of many colored ideograms. His friends sat drinking the beers that he had bought them, and they gazed out the doorway at the girls walking by in a jingle of morning silver. They did not look at the girl in blue anymore because she would have felt them looking, which would not have been polite. She held the red parasol, then the blue one, then the green one with gold flowers on it. Eddy fished for whatever she wanted. When she decided that the green one was prettiest, he told her how much it was, helped her count out her rupees, took them in hand, and brought them over to the counter for the old lady. The girl in blue thanked him. She stepped back into the day, where it was proper for Eddy's friends to admire her again. They saw her open her new parasol and go in shadeful delight.

  Eddy visited the dry goods store every morning and every night. He knew where everything was. He helped the old lady for nothing because he felt so free in that place.

  OK, Eddy! laughed his friends. It was already eleven. They sucked the last lukewarm swallows from the bottles whose labels each depicted a phoenix so skinny and jointed that it should have been a spider. The Chinese lady was snoring when they went out. Along the main street people leaned up against hot gratings or sat on bicycles or stood mahogany-footed in sandals (some women in silver anklets), because it was the day of the Tamil procession. Eddy and the boys were on the corner. They sat on railings, tapping cigarettes against scarred hands. Children came out and called: Eddy!

  A child cried out, a cry without language. Eddy froze. They could see the Tamils coming, still far away, a crowd of them creeping from beneath the horizon-tree. A policeman headed them; then came the advance men wheeling an altar draped with many cloths, a cave of colors in which something burned in a coconut. A car blooming with yellow pennants shouted religious music, followed by many men in white robes who came clacking purple sticks together. After them came the ones whom everyone waited to see. They too were singing and clapping, bearing altars which expressed the holiest pictures, altars roofed with arches of flowers and bananas; they were the men whose mouths were pierced and hung with chains, whose tongues were penetrated by silver hooks, whose cheeks were perforated just like those of the fishes that Eddy caught; they were the men with spikes sunk into their waists and backs and chests, the men hung with limes, carrying the heavy wooden altars past the old one in sandals who'd scraped the paint of Venus down smooth (a pod shot down into the painted boat with a boom, and he opened his eyes; already the day was half gone). Behind and around were the ladies of each family, dressed in their best saris, anklets and bracelets sharing the jingling swing of their men's silver chains against bellies and lips, the men wearing purple loincloths, carrying the heavy altars like Christs carrying crosses. They gazed straight ahead as they came. They were a part of the world to whom Eddy meant nothing. They recognized their own gods, felt them in their flesh. Across the street stood the girl in the blue skirt, shaded by her new parasol; to her also Eddy was invisible at this moment. She watched the mutilated men with a look of almost pleading concentration. She needed to understand what made them do this thing to themselves, and she could not. Most of the other spectators no longer asked. They had watched this twice each year for as long as they'd lived. It was something to be seen without being understood, just as a husband sees his wife give birth again and yet again so that her pain is too expected to be comprehensible anymore. Now came the priest with the book, attended by singing ladies in parasols, and then the man with so many hooks in his back that he glittered like a scaly trout, then the man with spiked combs in his thighs and a spiked sun of silver in his chest, his altar enriched by peacock tails, leaves and flowers. So they walked the quiet streets of shade-trees and whitewashed walls. The last altar took fourteen days to make. As it came, people clapped and cried: Ohhh!

  After the young boy with a single dagger through his cheeks, came the man with the great temple of flowers on his shoulders, his spikes heavy with lemons and limes. The man's feet staggered steadily on shoes of spikes. He was a man pinned full of limes and bells; he lurched along, his temple canted with agony and weariness. One couple laid their sick daughter down in the middle of the street, the mother running ahead to hose it clean. The child was wide-eyed and silent. He, the one with silver spiked shoes hooked into the backs of his calves, he stepped dreamily over her, frothy-mouthed. Again and again they snatched her up and stretched her down before him to be healed. Who was the sacrifice? Once she looked into Eddy's face; but then her eyes swam back to her savior with his bloodless wounds.

  Afterwards the Tamils gave juice and water to all, and the brownish-green sea rolled in like sleep.

  He went home and his wife ran out, threw her arms around his neck, and laughed: Eddy! — He kissed her. And all afternoon the world greeted him again.

  In the evening he sat on the cool sidewalk where his little children ate bowls of rice and milk, uttering his name in transports of pleasure while he smiled lovingly, and two kittens watched the milk, and then a boy came running in with an octopus he'd caught in a coffee can, the dead creature milky-pale in the darkness. The son and daughter babbled to their father, chewing rice, peeking into the coffee can, and the octopus's silence grew louder and louder.

  After he stopped by the dry goods store for a Phoenix beer or two, Eddy sat smoking and drinking with his friends on the beach. There were so many stars. Eddy pointed. He knew exactly where the moon would be at ten, where at eleven, and so on through the night. And yet the stars did not address him, the sea did not speak to him. The woman in the yellow skirt was lantern-fishing with her husband. Knee-deep in the salty night, they called to Eddy, but the sea made mysteries of their speech.

  SAY IT WITH FLOWERS

  Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi, Thailand (1993)

  * * *

  Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi, Thailand (1993)

  In Pat Pong there was a long crowded alley filled with lips on signs and girls, filled with hands on trembling beers, and in that alley there was a bar where the ladies laughed but always went back to doing their receipts, and among those ladies a deaf and dumb girl was making up her face very slowly, bending over a mirror not much larger than a fingernail, with her pigtail almost down to her waist. I did not see her at first. I saw a delicious-buttocked prostitute on a barstool giggling I wuv you to an Australian who had a paunch. I saw two white-teethed barmaids gazing outside, their fingers on the counter. I saw the eyeshine of their intelligence. Where you saleep? the girl was saying to the Australian.

  Beside her, an older woman swiveled on the barstool to show me some thigh, I think because I had closed the doors and rung the bell which meant that I'd just bought every girl in the bar a drink.

  This was not one of those bars where music's mountainous loudness reared and crashed inside my bones, where lights shot colors round and round, where the theme was gaiters and buttocks and weird lingerie, all the better to flash lust red along those legs and breasts illuminated like roast chickens on a rotisserie. — Nor was it one of th
ose bars that were so dark that you could not see the women's faces, maybe because they were so sad, and the women touched their lips and touched the zipper of your pants and said: OK I smoke you OK? — This bar had neither dancers nor fellators. It was a small, quiet place whose girls wore T-shirts or long formal dresses. Just above the whiskey bottles, small bat-winged fishes swam in bottles of water in which seedlings grew forests of fantastic roots and above which they uttered huge lion-toothed leaves. The fishes flickered, the air conditioner imparted steadiness, and the girls sat as peacefully immobile as basking lizards. It was my favorite bar. If I wanted to, I could sit there and read a newspaper all afternoon and no one would ask me for anything. The Australian was asking to be asked. I was not. That was why the older woman and I carried on a duet of mere politeness. She showed me thigh, as I mentioned, so to compliment her I raised my glass and cried: I pay for you one thousand baht!*

  No no I forty-four you thirty-four I like you same son same student! Me ten husband already! I Mama you!

  OK, I pay for you ten thousand baht.

  No no no.

  OK, I said, my duty ended, and as I turned away I saw the deaf and dumb girl in the corner, bowed over her thumbnail of a mirror.

  She could speak only in a series of cries which resembled those of a woman reaching orgasm.

  Drowning accident, a barmaid said. She get water in her ears. After that, she never speak or hear again. Crazy in the head.

  Walking over to her corner, I saw her lipsticking herself with graceful untiring insect motions. The other girls were sipping their Scotches, sodas and fizzy waters, but she had nothing. I wanted to be her friend.

  She can have a drink, too, I said. I promised you I'd pay for everyone.

  OK, sir, never mind, said the barmaid.

  I put my arm around her and bought her a Coke.

  She she she want speak with you, but she cannot, said the barmaid.

  Stroking her waist-length hair, I drew a heart on a sheet of paper, and she uttered a cry of joy. She wrote: I like you. — I kissed her hands, and she pretended to push me away.

  I gave her my pen, and she drew a flower, and then a long-beaked bird. I drew a flower, too. For an hour we constructed a garden on that greasy piece of paper, and she made that strangely happy noise of hers. Our flowers twined and gathered like the roots that the bat-winged fishes swam between, and we crafted each petal with the care of a reputable goldsmith because we owed all the responsibilities of citizenship to this world of ours which we were crowding with greenness and lemony-smelling bushes (on each, a single yellow flower). In the center of that world we made a country where her shy spirit could dwell in the tea-dark shadows of tree-tendons. Have you ever seen the cloud-forests around Chiang Rai? Our country was steeper than those (that sheet of paper being a sheer white wall) and lusher, its hills bursting with wet leaves and trees bulging and bowing under the weight of their own fecundity. Together we drew our bananas and breadfruits, our red and blue blossoms scented with the sweetish smell of her lipstick. We raised throat-high grasses and the spider-webbed darknesses between flowers, penning in each stamen with a steady loving stroke. I made for her a flowering banana's petals folded back (stubby peels they were, with white bananas inside). Smiling faindy, she thickened the hills with green lace that was delicious like her beloved frothy spit. Finally I presented her with a Virginia meadow beauty, four petaled, pink like her lipstick, whose antlers of a buttery gold reached down to cool the backs of her hands. She moaned in delight.

  But the next time I went to that bar, the lady who'd had ten husbands said: Your darling no come today. Hurt her leg motorcycle accident. Hospital. Never go back here. So. You buy me, ten thousand baht?

  Never mind, I said. But I'll buy you a drink.

  After I'd paid I got up and went to the corner where the deaf and dumb girl had sat. There was a lipsticked napkin, almost certainly not hers, which I turned over, half hoping to find a flower ballpointed on the other side; of course there wasn't anything. It was only a variation of the game I'd played with the woman who had ten husbands, the sad game of searching for something known not to be there.

  A few days later, a friend of mine visited that bar. He told me that she was back. He assured me that he'd seen, touched and danced with her. And that wasn't all. He'd found another bar in the same alley, a better and friendlier bar where the drinks were cheaper and he'd met two beautiful deaf and dumb girls, one of whom was a midget. He highly recommended the midget. He said that lately he'd begun to notice deaf and dumb girls everywhere. They were discreet and they were cheap. I myself never saw them.

  It would be an exaggeration to claim that every day I thought upon the one I had cared for, but sometimes I wished that I could be with her just an instant, just to make her utter for me that cry which I had so greatly longed to believe expressed perfect happiness.

  * About U.S. $40. Although in 1993 some bars in Pat Pong charged 1,500 baht or more for a girl, a small establishment such as this one would have asked between 300 and 500.

  THE RIFLES

  Montréal, Québec, Canada (1993)

  Inukjuak, Québec, Canada (1990)

  Montréal, Québec, Canada (1993)

  Eureka Sound, Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1988)

  Montréal, Québec, Canada (1993)

  Montréal, Québec, Canada (1993)

  * * *

  Montréal, Québec, Canada (1993)

  They caught baby birds and held them. One bird they passed too many times among them and it ended up with a broken wing. They threw it repeatedly into the air to see if it could fly, but it only tumbled crazily down into the moss, flapping its good wing in desperate silence. Finally they dropped it into the campfire. They did that where life was green and muddy and stony in late July; they did it on their low brown mass of island with its pale-eyed lakes and skinny long wispy streaks of snow across gullies and mounds; they did it in their streaky whiteness between capes, but he'd done it down south with Reepah, picking her up one time too many so that she loved him and couldn't fly away, then dropping her and when her wing got better seizing her again. He'd never drop her, though, never. Besides, she'd started it.

  He felt terribly nervous and gloomy as he waited for Reepah at the airport. She was now above the blue and green squares and rectangles of fields half hidden by bright northern clouds (small irregular puddles of forest among them); now if she looked down she'd see the lovely indigo of the Saint Lawrence River mirroring clouds between the pincers of its islets where the river darkened between the flat gray bellies of thunderheads; it partook of the wide grace of rivers suddenly tinged by hot dark clouds.

  Thank you for Montréal, she said.

  It was a July day, a sunny day of rain in Montréal. The maple trees sparkled. Red trucks were so red and the fresh girls as bright as wet stones, striding umbrellaless in the rain.

  She wanted him to buy her cigarettes. She said: Secrets is my best friend.

  She didn't really want to talk to him or be with him. When they met a drunken Inuk lady on Rue Sainte-Catherine, Reepah talked with her for hours. Him she ignored.

  She wanted him to buy her beers until she got drunk. He didn't want to. She looked at him with a hard and nasty viciousness he'd never seen before and shouted: You want to fuck me tonight? If you want to fuck me, I want drunk. I want drunk!

  Fine, he said. You don't have to fuck me at all. I'll get you drunk and you can do whatever you want.

  After her second or third beer she got louder and happier and she said: I like you. 'Cause I'm drunk.

  Every few blocks some spectacle would come out of the summer darkness, like the fantastically roofed houses shooting steep and narrow above the dark street. Purple-plumed clowns mimed by candlelight. They passed the fountain where Reepah had wanted to swim in the afternoon, and she didn't remember it. Everybody was sitting around it; its water fell with a glow; and people sat on the grass listening to musicians and smelling the sweet summer nigh
t. Reepah dipped her hand in and wanted to go get drunk. Fullbreasted girls in sundresses floated on the grass's emerald darkness. On the lighted cobblestones a pancake-made-up twelve-year-old was singing humorous French ballads in an exaggerated mincing voice while her father played the guitar; then suddenly the songs grew serious and he could tell that she had a magnificent voice. Reepah smiled faintly for the first moment. Then she sat scratching and staring at her empty beer.

  The musicians (who were really astoundingly good) got everybody clapping, so she clapped; in those marble mirrored morgues of blue-lit soundproofed sex bars at first she smiled with naughty delight to see naked boys and girls but soon enough she sat picking her teeth morosely between beers (each of which lasted seconds), and her lower lip gaped slightly wider at the flash of genitals or the applause of the other drinkers but then her black eyes would gaze into some particularly monotonous version of zero. And then a beautiful dancer might move in beautiful ways and she would stare steadily, leaning forward, maybe trying to be beautiful in the way the dancer was (the dancers usually thought that Reepah was a boy), trying to learn what made this other soul the center of attention in a way she could never be. When she was happy, when he bought her another beer, she cried: Aw-riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh'!