The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  * * *

  Grand Central Station,

  New York City, U.S.A. (1991)

  Scissoring legs and shadows scudding like clouds across the marble proved destiny in action, for the people who rushed through this concourse came from the rim of everywhere to be ejaculated everywhere, redistributing themselves without reference to each other. A few, like the small girl who sat on the stairs holding her bald baby doll, or the lady who stopped, shifted the strap of her handbag, and gazed at the departure times for the New Haven Line, delayed judgment (and an executive paused in his descent of the steps, snorted at the girl's doll, and said: I thought that baby was real!). But no one stayed here, except the souls without homes. Above the information kiosk, the hands of the illuminated clock circled all the directions, tranquilly, while the stone-muffled murmurs of the multitude rose up and condensed into meaningless animal sounds. There was a circle, and its spokes were their trajectories. But the circle turned! They did not understand the strangeness of that. Creased black trousers, naked brown legs, merciless knees, skirts and jeans, overalls swollen tight with floating testicles, paisley handbags passing as smoothly as magic carpets, these made noise, had substance, but the place became more and more empty as I sat there, because none of it was for anything but itself. The belt of brass flowers that crossed the ceiling's belly meant something, made the place more like a church; the sunken tunnels where the trains stretched themselves out, gleaming their lights, were the catacombs. One of those passageways went to the Montréaler, my favorite train. Canada's railroads continued north from Montréal, which was why when I peered into that tunnel (I'd ridden the Montréaler so many times, and wouldn't anymore), it was almost as if I could see all the way to Hudson Bay; one Canadian National sleeper did still go to Churchill—

  A policeman came and told me to move on. So I went past the double green globes; I left the people who were going somewhere (a girl in high heels galloped by me, biting her lip with concentration, and one of her breasts struck my cheek); so I too went my way, obeying the same law that dispersed the others . . .

  THE BACK OF MY HEAD

  Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)

  * * *

  Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)

  There came a sharp low snapping of the air, somewhat louder than before, and then another at a distance, which briefly and metallically rippled. But these variants were incidental to the main sound, the weighty unpleasant sound of earth falling on earth, as if for some burial. Granted, they were all different in their unhappy way, like a chain of sobs. Now somebody was dropping things, slowly, with a nasty kind of weariness. Something thudded down. White smoke rose diagonally and lethargically in the hot air. So it was not fuel or tires burning. Analyzing was the first step to not listening (at least to the more distant impacts). After three or four days I no longer felt a naked tenderness at the back of my head where I imagined a sniper taking aim. I could feel the nose of the bullet pointed at me just as you can feel eyes staring at your back. No matter which way I turned, the sniper who was going to kill me kept the back of my head in his sights. The spot of tenderness was small, round, localized. Why it was that particular place (the center of the occiput) I could only theorize. Perhaps it was because it was 180 degrees from my eyes, the farthest possible point from anyplace that I could ever see, the place where I used to shoot cows to be butchered. This absurd and useless sensitivity persisted until my visit to the morgue at Koševo Hospital. On that day as always I was in the back of the car, gripping the doorhandle as the militiaman shouted to the driver to move his fucking ass because we were in a very dangerous open place and so we screeched around the corner and then the driver floored it; I saw the speedometer pass 120 kph and then we made another sharp turn. The back of my head itched. Not too far away, a sound came like a resinous twig bursting cozily in the fireplace. Then something ripped horribly. I remembered the UN observer at the airport coming to his feet at a similar sound, saying: That's bad. I don't know what that is. Sounds like a chain gun, but they're not supposed to have those. Maybe a rocket. — Last week's casualty list at the Holiday Inn, prepared by the Institute for Public Health, had figured up 218 killed and 1,406 wounded in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which worked out to 90 deaths and 540 injuries in Sarajevo, which became momentarily intelligible when, as I said, I smelled the day's harvest at the morgue and saw the dried blood on the floor. With no electricity and no water a morgue is not very nice. I saw the unidentified man whose legs had been blown off by a grenade. By law they had to keep him for twenty-four hours while he lay swelling and reeking on the table, a mass of shit and blood demarcating the end of his stomach. Next to him lay the twenty-five-year-old man with the bloody face (one wound was all that he had, a neat drilling from an antiaircraft gun); he was covered with flies and his hand was clenched and his naked body was reddish brown but blotched with a terrible white whose contrast with the extraordinary yellowness of the child's corpse (an antitank grenade had solved him) seemed almost planned, aesthetic, unlike the child's doll-face grinning, the eyes dark slits. From the child as from the others came the vinegar-vomit smell. It was unbearable to see how his head moved when the pathologist tried to unwrap the sheet, turning him round and round as his little skull shook; and in the end the pathologist could not do it because he'd been fossilized in his own dried blood, the sheet now hardened brown and crackly againsj his belly where the intestines had mushed out. Still the pathologist endeavored to remove the sheet in a professional manner, and the doll's head jerked rhythmically back and forth; so that I recollected a small Croatian girl I'd seen in a park in Zagreb; she had reddish-gold hair and was swinging. She moved almost like this doll. Sometimes she just seemed passive, with her legs locked out in front of her; at other times her knees hinged urgently until she made rapid arcs, but the creak of the swing was always the same. A man with a military crewcut sat smoking; his hair was the color of his smoke. After awhile he threw the cigarette down into the sand. It lay beside a boy's plastic spade and continued to smoke. Four boys came by and snatched it up. They passed it around from hand to hand and tried to make each other inhale. The one who'd actually found it kept his prize, watching the smoke rise from between his fingers as they all went off shouting together. The girl went on swinging. — This next one was killed several days before, said the pathologist. Perhaps you don't want to look. — The head, tiny and black, was a ball of swarming insects which for some reason had not yet attacked the yellow bloatings below. Beside him lay a woman, smiling, stained with blood.

  Do you think these people died in great pain? I asked the pathologist. You look at them every day; maybe you know what they know...

  He took me into another room. — This young boy lived three days, he said. See how his stomach is open? They say he screamed day and night. But I think he's an exception. My brother was wounded last month by a grenade. I asked him what he felt. He told me that he felt nothing. He was injured very seriously in his arm. He said it was not until later that the pain started. So I believe that most of these people felt nothing.

  His words comforted me. When I left the morgue, returning to the not-yet-dead outside the hospital's dusty window-shards like gray scraps of cloth where a man sat flirting with the nurses, his hand-bandage sporting a blaze of autumn, and a smiling girl took the sun with her friends, offering to God her deep scars just under knee and eye; I got back into the car (the militiaman had refused to go in with me because last time when the pathologist raised the sheet on an unidentified body it turned out to be his friend's), I found that the tenderness at the back of my head had gone away. I wasn't afraid of being shot there anymore. I feared only getting my stomach blown open. In general, of course, I remained just as afraid. A week later, when I was standing outside one of the apartment buildings near the front, waiting for my friend Sami to buy vodka, I felt a sharp impact on the crown of my head. Reaching up to explore the wound, I felt wetness. I took a deep breath. I brought my hand down in front of my eyes, prepa
ring myself to see blood. But the liquid was transparent. Eventually I realized that the projectile was merely a peach pit dropped from a fifteenth-floor window.

  IT'S TOO DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN

  Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)

  * * *

  Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)

  She sat next to me at the table, utterly trapped in silence while the laughs burst around her like shells. Finally I asked her why she was so unhappy.

  It's too difficult to explain, she said.

  Try.

  You have only a few words. I have only a few words.

  So it's not the war, then, I said. I think you were always unhappy.

  She leaned toward me. — Yes, she said.

  Me too, I said.

  She smiled. She laid her pale hand down on my hand. I felt a violent tenderness for her.

  Come, she said. I must cook for these people. You can be with me.

  As we went out together, the others all shouted with glee at the conquest they were sure I had made. The host, wounded twice since he'd volunteered a month before, was very drunk. His was one of those apartments still intact (or perhaps refurbished by means of that special liquidity which property acquires in wartime), with carpets, glass cabinets and windows (astounding to see them unbroken), fur rugs, and all the Ballantines and vodka you could drink. He had pulled out his pistol in the middle of the party and announced that he would test my bulletproof vest, which I was wearing. His eyes gleamed with desperate laughter and the barrel wavered. — May I finish my drink first? I asked. — I like your style, James Bond! he shouted. He strode to the window and fired three times, roaring. Maybe he killed one of the neighbors and maybe the bullets went nowhere. And I remember how she shivered with sorrow and despair, trembling as the shots went off. — You know, I have a pathological fear, she said to me. I want to go with you, but I cannot. I have a fear of going anywhere. This street is in the center of town. It is one of the worst for snipers. And every morning I must go to work, and I must go to the doctor for my mother. I must always run. And I cannot sleep at night. The sounds of the artillery terrify me. — At that moment I would have died for her if doing that would have helped her, but nothing could help her. So we went to the door together, and the others laughed.

  Outside the candle-lit apartment it was night-dark, of course. We felt our way down the two flights of stairs to the landing where the stove was, and she bent over it. — No good, she said. She put my hand on it, and I found that it was cold. Nothing would be cooked today.

  So we came back to the party, and the others stared at us. They thought that we must have quarrelled.

  She said to me: What I don't understand is why we have to live. Life is nothing but sadness.

  But you said you liked music. Don't you have moments of happiness?

  Happiness? Oh, yes, in brief flashes. And sadness for yean and years.

  What would make you happy?

  Not to work. To live entirely alone. But I cannot, because I have no money. And I don't understand why there must be money to live.

  How much money would you need to be happy?

  I don't know. It's impossible anyway.

  A hundred thousand deutsche marks a month?

  No, no, that's too much.

  How much?

  Maybe two hundred.*

  A month?

  Yes.

  So if I gave you two hundred deutsche marks you could be happy for one month?

  She smiled for the second time. She thought I was joking, but she liked the joke. — Yes. You are a good man . . .

  When it was time to go I got out the money and gave it to her. I had to kneel down in front of the single candle in the middle of the room to read the denominations, so everyone was watching me and I could hear their laughter hiss down eerily into nothingness. The shadow of my hand and of the bills trembled monstrous on the sniper curtain. It smeared their faces with darkness.

  She wouldn't take it. — You understand nothing, she kept saying. Please, please.

  So I understand nothing, I said. Take it. I can live without it.

  No, no. Please.

  Finally I gave up. But as I went out, preparing to descend with the other guests those cold and utterly dark flights of stairs, remembering the rotten bannister at the bottom and then the terrible danger when we had to open the front door and run out into the open street; as the militiaman shouted in rage and pain because he'd gotten drunk and done something to break open the wound in his arm where the bullet still lay grinding against the bone and which was now bleeding through his sleeve; as the host called to me, laughing: She wants to kiss you, James!; as the driver slipped a round into the chamber of his gun; as the women tucked up their dresses so that they could run, she came to me and squeezed my hand.

  * In 1992, 200 DM would have been about U.S. $120.

  ARE YOU ALRIGHT?

  Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)

  * * *

  Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)

  Whenever I could find a phone that was working, I tried to call the woman who had said that things were too difficult to explain, but I never got through. Finally I reached her on the night before I was going to leave Sarajevo.

  Are you all right? she said. That was how everyone seemed to greet each other.

  A little shrapnel in my hand, but I wasn't hurt. And you?

  A grenade came into our neighbor's house, she said quietly. It was dreadful.

  But you, you're all right?

  Yes.

  We didn't say anything to each other for a moment, and then I said: I'm probably leaving tomorrow. The BBC said I could ride along in their armored car. I guess it depends on whether the road to Kisjeliak is safe.

  I don't think there was a silence after I had said that, but my guilt about being free to leave has built a silence over time that drowned whatever she actually said. Every day I'd have liked to call her and ask: Are you still alive? Are you all right? But of course no one could call Sarajevo.

  LOOK AT ME

  Puako Bay, Hawaii, Hawaii, U.S.A. (1992)

  * * *

  Puako Bay, Hawaii, Hawaii, U.S.A. (1992)

  Bleeding brackish droplets which his skin had borrowed from the artificial lagoon, he parted from his wife, she bound for sun, he for shade. They had not seen the giant turtles. He was almost dry now. His towel was stretched out beside the farthest boat. Before lying down he made certain that his watch had not been stolen. He had never had anything stolen at the beach but he continually expected something bad to happen. Coddling his little unhatched egg of anxiety, he could not see or think of anything else until he had done this. His wife had once bought him a very expensive watch which had been stolen in a hotel. The watch he had now was not expensive, so his vigilance must be some irrelevant suffix of guilt. Anyhow it had not been stolen. He lay comfortably alone. Then he noticed that a Japanese girl had pitched her chair next to him. She too was a subject of the shade kingdom, it seemed. Her husband lay on his belly in the sunny sand, twenty feet away. The girl wore a black bathing suit. She had long slender pale arms, thighs as slender as bones.

  He looked into the distance, where his wife basked almost at the water's edge, reading the self-help book that promised to save their marriage.

  The Japanese girl sat watching her husband with the utmost attention. Whenever he turned or stretched, she padded down to his claim of sand and knelt beside him, gazing into his face. Then she'd return to her chair in the grass by the rental boats and sit again, watching him patiendy.

  The long black locks of her hair twisted down her back and shoulders like beautiful roots. Later he would remember the sharp pelvic bone straining to break through her thigh-flesh, but for the moment he saw only her hair.

  Her face was blurred as if in a dream. The way she sat, he could see only her profile, and the dark hair spun itself about her cheek like steam.

  He waited for her to turn her head. He said to himself: If she turns her
head, that means that she and I were born for each other. But if my wife turns her head, that means that my wife and I belong together.

  He waited. Any moment now the girl would turn, and he'd see her face.

  But without ever looking at him, she got up and went to her husband once more. Then she returned, slipped on her sundress and went away. Her husband lay still.

  He looked at his wife, who at precisely that instant turned her head and smiled at him. He ached with dismay.

  Puako Bay, Hawaii, Hawaii, U.S.A. (1992)

  Fish-scales of light spread rapidly across the river. Trees shivered in their pots. The Japanese girl, shivering, tossed up her eyes in impatience, arms crossed as she stamped her feet. It was night at the lion-headed bench. Lanterns illuminated statues. Palm-fronds creaked like bedsprings. Glancing up at them, he forgot the girl at once, transfixed by the nodding of those sad and crazy shagheads, those spider-legs of darkness scutding limp and sick, impaled on their own swaying trunks, caressing themselves evilly while curtains licked each other from lighted balconies.