The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  Really pretty muskeg, a mother was saying to her children.

  Mommy, can we live here?

  Well, do you see all the standing water? That means there's lots and lots of mosquitoes and blackflies.

  But he thought to himself: They feel it, too. They want to live here, too.

  In a field of gray ponds and grass-haired water, he saw three little black ducks.

  Past a lake which they crossed by trestle bridge there were an Anglican church, a red building, a log house and upended aluminum canoes. Indians stood in the high buttercupped grass, watching the train. The boys and girls pretended to hit each other, laughing. The older ones just stood there. They loaded some boxes and coolers onto the train, and a few of the teenagers got on. That was in Allan Water, Ontario. Then the train went west.

  Half an hour later they reached Savant Lake. There were more Indians, in flannel shirts, old sneakers, windbreakers, tall rubber boots, baseball hats in that town of long ago whitewashed houses among the flowery grass, tall white crosses, some trailers, a propane truck, then more birch trees.

  He had begun to believe that this might be one of those perfect days which are sometimes given to you so gently and lovingly that they are half over before you comprehend their perfection. Amidst blackened backbones of dead firs sprung crazily with lichens he remembered the steep streets of Taxco, Mexico, narrower than your outstretched hands, whose stones had been worn dangerously smooth; sometimes there was grass, sometimes a smell of urine, always cool darkness from behind the window-grilles of the overhanging houses; he'd walked there with a woman he'd loved, held back from her heart by arch-windowed, bar-windowed white houses—a world of white houses with cryptic windows to make them into dominoes under the awnings where the juice-bottles stood; and now he didn't know where that woman was anymore.

  And the Bible said: Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes; for a harlot may be hired for a loaf of bread, but an adulteress stalks a man's very life. Can a man carry fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned? Or can one walk upon hot coals and his feet not be scorched? So is he who goes in to his neighbor's wife; none who touches her will go unpunished. They transected a lovely gray water-plain with brown highlights. The sun shone on spiderstrands as fine and blonde and precious as the hairs he found on his pillow after kissing the first girl he ever loved. And the Qur'-An said: It was said to her: Enter the pavilion. But when she saw it, she supposed it was a spreading water, and she bared her legs. He said: It is a pavilion smoothed of crystal. She said: My Lord, indeed I have wronged myself, and I surrender with Solomon to God, the Lord of all Being. A pale blue lake was sublated.

  An old Polish lady got on at Sioux Lookout. She'd lived there for forty years. She had three children, eleven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. She said she picked lupines as high as her shoulder —red, blue, yellow, purple, so beautiful! She ate beaver meat all the time: not just the tail, but the whole beaver, boiled an hour, then roasted. She loved to eat black bear meat, too, but beaver was the best, served on a plate of wild rice. She said she'd had a good life and was still having one. — When you get old, you know what you have to look forward to, she said. So why not go on enjoying yourself as long as you can?

  She thought he was crazy to be going into the wilderness alone.

  Now it was blue and white in Heaven instead of gray, so the land was the color of blueberry bushes in summer and the lakes were the color of blueberries.

  Can I try beaver meat in Winnipeg? he said.

  I don't know. I have no one there, so I never go there. Find an Indian.

  She saw some teenagers drinking from a water bottle. — They brought their own water, she said. That is very good.

  Fringy frothy green growth, moist, cloudy and sprucified, guarded an island like a swimming stegosaurus. They passed a still lake's black-streaked white cliff; and a memory of happiness flashed in him like some crescent-shaped brown pond, rock-shelved and hid in birchy wilderness. Everything was good; goodness was water trickling down sunburned rock.

  At Reddit he spied an island whose small steep-roofed house was half hidden by trees; at the lake's edge was a dock and a canoe. He wanted to go wherever the canoe went but already it was gone and they passed a station that said BLUE HERON and MOCCASINS and souvenirs; they passed Ottermere with its birch-clumped mowed lawns; then Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament, hence the last town in Ontario; beside a low-wooded lake he read the sublinear gloss: two moose and a black bear . . .

  Between Malachi and Winnitoba, which is the first town in Manitoba, he recollected for accidental reasons Diesel Bend, Utah, where he'd gone north through the green fields walled in by trees, the little farms and white houses all embraced by those chalky cliffs in which fossil fishes are sometimes found; these, too, were tree-greened . . . and farther ahead lay the blue blue mountains that made you know you were going north. Families were sitting on the porch in the evening or hoeing their gardens, and beautiful white horses swished their tails, and everything smelled like clover. Diesel Bend was not so different from Winnitoba. But, like a platter of Mexican marzipans made to resemble miniature fruits (papayas studded with chocolate seeds, strawberries, pale green pears), while in color and sweetness they might approximate each other, there was no sameness anywhere (his clawing at identities but a failure even when he looked out into sunlight, his self but a grimacing face in chill sea-foam). No two things are not disparable, although life's proprieties pretend otherwise. His first love's letters lay sweedy in their envelopes, whose righthand edges had each been snipped just so because he'd loved her so much that he didn't want to mar anything with her writing on it; each envelope was from her to him, with a thirteen-cent stamp on it—but how disparable! The one that had been addressed in crayon contained a page which said: Of course Tina thought I was fantastic or unique. He had no idea who Tina had been. He was fairly sure that he'd never met her. His first love had passionately snatched up so many people, bringing them to her heart; and then when they hurt her or she tired of them she'd throw them away again. He'd be surprised if she still knew Tina. He'd be astonished if she still thought about whether or not she was unique. That was what adolescents did. He had done it. But it wasn't because I was; it was because of the life I led, living in a suite with six young men, drinking bourbon straight in my footy-pajamas in front of the fireplace, knowing the owner of the local Irish pub, seeing a cardiologist, an internist, having physical problems unique to my age, making love, roaming Philly, spending afternoons at the zoo like a child, balloon in hand. When the dope came in I sometimes had to weigh it and check it. But I am the same as I ahvays was, mostly. I am not so unique now because the novelty isn't there. She had tried so hard to be bad, to be glamorous, to have adventures. And she'd had them. Then what? In Thailand all the rigid figures relax into motion again at the end of the national song. (The train passed narrow-needled cones of green.) A mutual friend, now dead, had once told him that she was not and never had been unique. But everybody is disparable, and everybody dies. In answer to your picture: there are no squares, right? Only in three dimensions and I didn't know that counted. Are we getting to know one another quite well? I don't know you too well. But I suppose I'm willing to lean as you let me and to let me know you as you wish. The sweet earnestness of this young girl aroused his tenderness. Now he could be good to her. He could give her money and let her be and do whatever she pleased. That was goodness, wasn't it? I think this is an awful state—being in love. I wonder why people do it. I was happier not loving. That's a lie, you know. You are all I have in my life now that can make me happy. Of course you are also capable of making me miserable. After all, I am still feeling like a part of me is missing. He read that in amazement. Did I really have the power to make another person happy or unhappy? Was I ever that much alive? Jesus, I want to die of leukemia, too. Perhaps we are too much alike in thought. And now she had cancer and he didn't. The weirdness of her having wis
hed that so many years ago chilled him. He had wished it, too, solely because she did: a true puppy lover, he'd yearned to be counted among the hues of her iridescence. Neither of them could have known what leukemia was. He supposed that she knew now. I'll do what you asked about the drinking. I suppose if it were for myself I would continue to drink and smoke. I want to die young, you know, and in disgrace. But then sodden mossy trees bloomed in his brain with white mushroom cups around which regiments of ants hurried on their voracious errands. It was cool and humid in the bamboo tunnels between dripping ivied boulders as high as two tall men. Water leaped down like liquid dirt, spewing and dipping in clumps as of an old dog's hair, seething into brown pools whose mist was drunk by pale yellow butterflies beneath those living fishing rods that grew down, steadying themselves with spade-shaped leaves, reaching wooden feelers into the water. That was the place of reddish-brown waterfalls near Chiang Mai; that was the place of cool sweat and slippery jungle paths. He'd ridden a train from there back down into the lowlands, the ricefields whose muddy rivers relaxed from time to time by forming cloudy puddles in which the travelling sun was reflected. An occasional tree rose out of the rice, with water around its roots. The bitter smell of diesel-smoke was exhaled by the train. The cloud-map rushed across square lakes of green-stubbled water. His wife put her arm around him as they passed an old ruined wat with dogs loping its edges (white birds on the ricefields), then another small wat rising gold-curlicued and red-roofed in the fields and his wife, his dear and darling wife, was whispering: I love you same same crocodile . . . He was beside her in Bangkok walking to the seafood restaurant, every street calf-deep in brown water, so the two of them splashed barefoot—so pleasant to feel the warm dirty water against one's feet—and at last they arrived at the restaurant with its decorative tree dried leaves and all, studded with lights, ice and crabs in the windows. You could order Steammed Crab in Shredded Jelly, Fried Frog with Garlic, Peppered Paisa Serpent-Head Fish, or Steammed Crab with Anything. Ladies whose arms glowed with gold bracelets nibbled happily at breaded crab. The windows steamed themselves up against the hot rainy night. The waiters in their immaculate black vests and bow ties always smiled. It was a very happy restaurant, and he was happy; he said I LOVE YOU to his wife. (She cried later, of course, because he had to go away.)

  We're going to stop here and pick up some guy we threw off the other day, said the conductor. I hear he's got more money now, or at least some blueberries.

  Rice Lake, next stop! shouted the conductor, and there was a lake with grasslike tufts and clutches of wild rice, some sky-spaced pines . . .

  He saw nothing but a one-row station and grass—maybe a town, maybe not.

  I want to make love with you before I grow old and ugly, one of his first love's letters said. I want someone to enjoy what I have, now, while it is sweet and strong. I want to be hard, with many facets and moods. I don't want to be stable. I want to be stable and secure. I want to be loved. I want to spin, pushing myself around and around, living a fast, crazy, creative destructive existence. I want to give myself away and throw myself out a twentieth-storey window. And I want to live with you, away from everything. I want to lie in a bed, garden, laugh and weep. I want to have a baby.

  How many twentieth-story windows can you throw yourself out of? he wanted to ask her. That has sometimes been my life. But unfortunately when I aim for concrete the ground always turns out to be Jell-O and goose-down and rubber. That's why you got the cancer and I didn't. Nobody can kill me. Not even I can kill me. You had already been married for years the time the bullet jammed.

  Suddenly he wondered what would have happened if he had left college that last year and hitchhiked those two thousand five hundred star-edged miles in order to make her truly know and believe that he wanted to be with her forever. At the time he used to sleep with her letters under his pillow. He was still a virgin.

  Probably she was already seeing someone else.

  And now, which everybodies, somebodies and nobodies didn't he see?

  But he had to know. The telephone slept like a tiny white shark. He seized it by the flanks, lifted it from the plastic it dreamed in, and dialled.

  Mrs. Teitelbaum is sleeping, said the nurse. Is it important? Should I disturb her?

  No, it's not important, he said. I'm an old friend. I just wanted to know how she was doing.

  I want to know that, too, said the nurse warmly. Let me go upstairs and check to see if she's taken her medication.

  He waited and then he heard the receiver being lifted on the other end and he knew that it was his love and even five years before his heart would have soared but now his hair had begun to turn gray and his heart never soared except when he smoked crack, and anyhow it was only the nurse who said: She says she'll call you, maybe next week.

  Where do you come in? she'd written. Have I lied to you again? Have I made promises I can't keep? Have I hurt you yet again? Shit. I warned you, I told you, I deny responsibility, but in the end, if it hurts, it'll be my fault. I DON'T KNOW. HOW CAN I KNOW? WHAT IS HAPPENING? Oh, I don't know if I love you. I don't know if I don't. Sex is a weapon. It will be used. It doesn't hurt me as much as it hurts the men. We're friends, we're lovers? No, we're not lovers. I am not and never have been lovers with anyone. I will write you before I leave. God, I'm not sure about all this.

  Now he did feel something. With all his soul he wanted to say to the girl who no longer existed that it was all right. (Outside the train window rushed the gunmetal dapplings of dark ponds. He saw a squirrel's raised tail in the leaves.) He wouldn't embrace her because she wouldn't like it. He wouldn't demonstrate through any gesture of puerile romanticism how she who once had been the center not only of his selfish desires but also of much of the goodness and generosity which slept within him now remained and would always be his—no matter that he'd long ago lost of her all but the memory; as someone in his past she'd yearly become (in a secret all too well kept from himself) more and more a part of him, her trace so permeating him that he was hardly conscious of it. The proof was the physical weight of the grief he felt (as if he were carrying a backpack of leaden sadness) once he understood that she might die within months. You see, he loved her so much. — He'd confine himself to stating that nothing was or had been her fault, and even that communication could be reburied under his breastbone if its presentation would interrupt her (on the rare occasions when he did telephone her and got beyond the nurse, she'd say: Who's this?); he'd explain that he had no desire to ask anything of her because he had other wives now and would never be lonely. He only wanted her to be happy if she could. If she had any notion of how he could help her, he would do whatever she asked. He'd lay everything out for her with the utmost service and ceremony, just like the waiter at the Hotel Thanada in Rangoon who put on his glasses whenever you ordered, then carefully polished each utensil that he brought you, making one trip for the fork, one for the knife, one for the spoon, cleaning each of these in a once-white rag before setting it noiselessly in front of you on the greasy tablecloth. That was service from the heart. If she didn't want that, he would think kindly of her and return to his various rushing trains. But that scared girl was not there anymore. He could not find her, no matter where in the world he went. She was gone. She was not dead yet, only gone. She did not need his love and care anymore. She never had, because what he'd possessed she never wanted. Now she needed chemotherapy, and then pills to stop vomiting, and a wig to hide her baldness, and more pills for weeping and for pain.

  He began to dream, going someplace that he could not remember which made him feel serene. In the gloom of his dreams, brown mosquitoes hung like dust-motes. He sank inside Battle Rock, outside him seedheads of grasses shuddering and hissing in the violent wind of a cloudless afternoon, the sea slightly greener than turquoise, blackberries ripe and past ripe. What a tangled quilt of reeds, ferns, thistles and poison oak there was on this high rock of tall grasses blinking in the wind like eyelashes; and he was underneath it.
The globe turned outside of him; outside of him life sped like the winds that pressed any lighthouse cape in Oregon where golden grass-stalks locked the sun in a million-barred prison that continually writhed and gnashed its lips, with the wild sea all around. He might have slept. Then blackberry spiders crawled over him, brilliant silver spider swarms that soothed him with mosquito shade and warmed him with maple leaf sunshine. Time was infusing itself into him; he was healing or perhaps just changing. The train traversed the sky. Green boulders, brown water, everywhere no one forever. At twilight a dark stream sped down its own cusp and became white, the crowded drops playing arpeggios on rock and then separating, falling separately together to the brown pool below that was ringed with fernclaws. Old man's beard hung from dusty shrub-walls. The undersides of maple leaves were translucent green windows to the twilight. He left them behind, ascending a steep gray path toward the dreariness of night rock. — Close your eyes, said the girl in the treehouse, lowering the shirt and pants from the string as if she were bringing a hanged corpse back to earth. — Still close 'em! — The other girl closed her eyes obediently, dancing around on the lawn. — He fell crashing down from his dreams. But when he awoke the train was still bringing him safely away from everything; and the man across from him who was getting old offered him a sausage and then fell asleep quickly and unknowingly; in rest the man looked so happy and refreshed; that was what he'd needed; his head lay on the back of his chair as trees trotted by, the ground with them rolling back up like the receptacle cylinder of a scroll. And he who watched felt that the dreams had left a strange and special residue inside his skull, one of those mineral salts that makes a candle burn in spooky colors. It was like a Sunday in Budapest when pigeons, families and middle-aged women paused before the windows of closed shops. What was in the darkness behind those displays of sparseness? That is what we ask our minds when we're afraid. The greenish river curved creamily round the pilings of the greenpainted bridge, every rivet of which was green. Across the river the tree-crowned cliffs had been cut away and cragged with towers and domes of its own substance. That was Gellert Rampart, and crossing the bridge he'd found it choked with garbage, the aged domes now tarnished, cracked and reeking of the piss of drunks. But it rained birds sideways along those streets of flats textured like waffles, and he liked that. The plum trees were flowering white and pink in Budapest, and a fat raven hunched his shoulders on a branch, picking at wet wood. On the side of a dumpster it said HEJ HITLER. Hitler, it would seem, was still a place-name in many atlases. A stout old man paced slowly down the path, both hands behind his back and locked around a chisel. It was one of those Sunday afternoons in the middle of spring when the wet grass (already transcendently covered by dandelions) became all the more enriched by the sky's gray, while the clouds, so deliciously bruised by the pressure of their own rain, became greener like wet moss on a slate tombstone—all this going on around a coast of steep red roofs which had long since frozen their gestures into spires. Then the thunder began, a little before the rain which now commenced to break out of that sky of polychromatic grays. The birds continued to sing. It came down so hard that he could see it dancing like dust or smoke off the roofs of cars, and whenever it struck the sidewalk it seemed to form stalagmites of water stretching explosively back upward. The streets were so wet now that they crackled like bacon under the taxicabs, and the blush of headlights across a streaming auto's rear window was every bit as subtle as the cloud-shades had been. So that was Sunday, and the next morning he bought his ancient landlady some chocolates in the Lebensmittel store just around the corner from Red Love Massage; and at the train station he changed forints for dollars and deutsche marks with the Algerians who stood near the pillars in the waiting room. His Algerian preferred to speak French. The Algerian agreed that deutsche marks were probably best. He said that he had been in Beograd before the war but not now; he had no advice on what to trade there. Men in fat coats passed, smoking cigarettes; old women in shawls carried bags; old men took only their hats; a tall bald man whose face resembled a sardonic Roman emperor's passed unanswerably, and the Algerians huddled around their pillar and whispered. His future stretched on like the long groove of double railroad ties that went past that bane of the Algerians, the official moneychanging office; and the tracks continued past the travel agencies, the news stands, whose foremost publication showed a woman licking a curvy penis; went on past the stand of canted fruits and escaped at last from under the arches of glass and black lines like cables or wires, some of which formed a face with a gaping mouth; and then they went on under the white sky all the way to Beograd, where he knew that he would be the enemy. Perhaps that was why he went there; he'd always been attracted to lamias as well as chimeras. It is perhaps too easy to say that self-destructiveness is an attribute of certain members of the propertied class. Poor people destroy themselves in their own way. By Lenin's standards he lived a meaningless life which required infantile romanticism to stimulate a spuriously healthy blush in the tissues of pale lassitude. By his own standards he was simply looking for something. He wanted to see the world, that was all. He wanted to know and love the entire atlas. As far as Beograd went, fear was a secretary typing up a long list of scary reasons. He had once been a secretary himself and knew that lists are always revised. Two years previous, in Muhammed's bar in Zagreb the list of reasons not to proceed to Sarajevo had been voluminous, so it became irresistibly prudent to figure out what to do upon arrival at that city's sandbagged airport, now surrounded by snipers. As the brochure from the 1984 Winter Games had put it so magically, The noble Olympic spirit experienced full satisfaction in Sarajevo, and for that reason it will certainly in the future attract travellers from all over the world who are desirous not only of new natural but also of new spiritual horizons. — Fine. Here I come. — So he was buying thick sweet dark To-maslav beers for sundry members of the secret order of Bosnian Dragons (whom the Serbs in Beograd would later assure him existed only in enemy legends) and in return the Dragons were explaining to him exactly how easy it would be. — From the airport go by car to the UNPROFOR encampment, a big man said, gesturing like a falcon stabbing its beak into the meat of another dead bird. At UNPROFOR you can telephone our commander. They have a nice yellow building, about a hundred and fifty meters away. But you must be very careful because anything could happen to you. — And then what? he said. — Tell them to hang in there. Victory is ours. — I want to run through this one more time, he said. Can I walk to this yellow building from UNPROFOR? — Yes! the man said. — No! said another Muslim. You must request five soldiers to escort you. — You must go by car, insisted a third fighter. And never go alone. — Best to go alone, opined a fourth. That way you'll be less conspicuous to the enemy. — I get it, he said wearily. And will UNPROFOR ask me any questions? — Oh, those Serb-loving bastards! the Bosnian Dragons all shouted. Tell 'em to fuck their mothers! — That was when he had realized that he could not expect and would never have any good advice when he went to wars because wars were by definition processes which strove to make advice obsolete. That was why children, old ladies, mapmakers, commandos and wise men all got holes in their heads. Perfect. There was webbing over the windows of the Hercules, and evil yellow lights glared out of the steel ceiling. He remembered all the hours and days spent on airplanes when they wouldn't let anybody look out the window even when overflying beautiful Greenland because that might pale their movie which crawled so nauseatingly and inanely upon its soulless screen. At least there would be no movie today. A man in green fatigues leaped in and mounted to the cockpit. Another soldier came, slammed the entry hatch behind him, shone his flashlight through that steely room, and also went forward. Just before that one disappeared, he turned back to the traveller and shouted over the engine (for the engine was howling like a spoiled child): After you talk about places you'd rather be, there's not a hell of a lot to say! — It was not going to be a nice day. — A moment later the comedian stuck his face back through the opening. He was s
moking a cigarette. He shouted: No rules in war! In Beirut some dumb broad told me smoking's bad for your health. I says to her, I says, that's the least of my worries! — A tight-lashed stack of cargo boxes quivered as the plane began to move. His own bulletproof vest embraced him comfortingly, heavy and firm like a wall against his back and his first love in his lap. The groin protector came down almost to his knees. He tightened the four straps still further so that the weight and rigidity they empowered could more firmly encourage his hollow, fuming stomach (the rest of him was cold, numb and ever so slightly drizzled with sweat), and he felt calm and satisfied that he had prepared himself as well as he could, having not yet learned that a certain grasshopper-green Warsaw Pact vest obtainable only through illegal trade covered the armpits and that special cylinder of flesh beneath the chin, the black market vest's shelter for which consisting of a doughnutlike collar that might be useful as a neckrest for snoozing on long bus rides: You forgot about your carotid artery! sneered one of the many well-wishers one meets in this life. One nick from a bit of shrapnel and you'll bleed to death! But not me, buddy, I went Warsaw; I'm protected! — Trembling, roaring and buzzing, the Hercules departed. The atlas slammed open. And then it was very hot and loud and nothing happened for a long time, and through the window-webbing he saw pale brown hills, bare and riven earth, a vast lake of blue, slightly tinted white. So this was the vortex. The plane was circling again. They were going down. The cargo hatch was already opening as the plane hit the runway, and hot white light poured in. Somebody was shouting. As he ran across the tarmac he saw two plumes of black smoke far away, and he heard a thud. A crash. A thud. A thud. A thud. Among the red-roofed houses across the runway one car moved in the next hour. One house appeared to be raggedly half-finished, as if the workmen didn't know the meaning of a straight line. Black smoke was coming out of it. A thud. He entered the airport sprinting, and they told him to sit on the floor behind a wall of sandbags. A departing journalist in a flak jacket of slender stopping power was pacing, unable to stop whistling. The man lit one cigarette after another with shaking fingers. A crash. A terrifying boom. The UNPROFOR security man behind the desk, which was actually a slab of laminated plywood and fiber-board resting on a radiator and a stack of sandbags, glanced out the window, mildly interested. The nearest minaret had just been brought up to date with a new hole. The security man thought for awhile. Then he got out his camera and took a snapshot, like a dutiful tourist who'd paid admission to a castle or museum of small merit. — Five observers got hit by a mortar round the other day and had to be evacuated, a soldier was saying, and another soldier was explaining on the telephone: Well, we watch to see what they're firing and when they're firing, and write down the serial numbers, so when they say we have only five weapons we can say, look, there are nine hundred and seventy-three fucking weapons and here are the fucking serial numbers. — A French freelancer came in limping. He'd been at the cemetery, filming the latest funeral, and was awarded two shell fragments in his leg. — The traveller, the new boy, sat against his sandbags taking all this in, and finally, recalling the directions of the Bosnian Dragons, said to the security man: So, how do I get to the UNPROFOR encampment? — The security man laughed in his face. — That's your problem, buddy. You can talk to MOVCON if you want, but the answer's gonna be no. — There were good UN guys, too, who shook his hand whenever they went off shift and said: See you later. Keep your head down. — He never did reach the commander in the yellow building to give him the message that victory was ours; a week later, in fact, he was informed that the Serbs had captured him and most of his men; the Bosnian Dragons who gave him this pleasant news, before dismissing him with a well-bred rendering of the Bosnian Dragon anthem on a battery-powered cassette machine, remarked that in any event the detachment in the yellow building had existed with no legal basis prior to its liquidation. — After a day of sitting on his sandbags, hoping doggishly for someone to give him a ride, sipping at his bottle of Zagreb tap water, forbidden, like other personnel not connected to the UN, to use the lavatory, some American journalists took disgusted pity upon his lowliness. At a run he helped carry their video camera cases to the car, which received a solitary bullet during the zoom to town; the hole was a few inches from his ankle. There were three journalists in the car. One was very friendly and kind, one was neutral, and the third, a redhead who never forgot her own admirableness, asked what he was doing here. He said that he was writing a feature. — Oh, my God, the redhead said. He's in features. — They said little to him after that. But they had rescued him; if it hadn't been for them, MOVCON would have made him go back to Zagreb on the last flight. They dropped him at the TV station, which was thick-walled; later somebody else gave him a lift to the Holiday Inn, the journalist hotel; and that night he listened to machine-gunners playing their instruments like musicians in that dark night, one flashlight illuminating the room while the battery powered radio spoke of bananas, and the man whose room it was moved the flashlight a little further from the window to decrease the likelihood that the musicians would shoot into it; came a shell, and then an AK-47 burst in a nasty hard rhythm accompanied by its lethal sparkles, and the radio kept talking about bananas. No more nowhere never. So he went inside the pale green foliage of Canada (too early yet to find those yellow leaves drilled with insect holes of beautiful regularity), not into the clouds or lake; each leaf was a thought with a voice, and because they all whispered at once, none could be heard save by dreamers who heard them all, and having heard so much, the dreamers could not remember the words. They passed Elma with its cut logs and white cross, and right there the fields commenced so that his dreams had to be hotter and sleepier now, wandering under the short-cropped sod. Then the trees rushed back. Tonight I am thin and tall: blue jeans and T-shirt, sexy but vulnerable. I feel disoriented tonight. Sis and I talked for about forty-five minutes. I was shaky and a little too intense for her. You are much more suitable as a midnight confessee (confessor?). It did us both good, Sis and I, to talk. Sitting in her room, I felt I was talked into a patch of black velvet. She wasn't visible, and my eyes made funny lights out of the darkness. Maybe I am seeing the aurora that is her "essence." The only thing clearly visible was the top half of her clock and the folds of her bed ruffle. Intimate conversations with a bed ruffle. I want to reach you but you're not there. The waste of my love goes on tonight. Are first loves always unhappy? This question, which echoed precious, rhetorical, absurd even as he posed it (how desperately serious she'd been! Was her young love better or purer then, that the absence of its object could waste it?) was one he did not know how to answer. Her love had not been unhappy in the end; her husband and three small children had led her to a perfection of a sort (or at least it seemed so to her now, because she might be taken away from them swiftly). — Nor had his own career of the affections been ill-starred. He remembered, for example, one woman gentle and sunny, remembered those long warm beautiful sunny days in her house of joy, the fans turning at different speeds, her hips like music, other white houses seen through the blinds. That had been in Key West. At a quarter till midnight he was sitting in her house with a flamenco album playing; and in a denim shirt she sat with her small dark clipboard upon her jackknifed knees as she smoked a long cigarette, her face a little older than when he'd last seen it three or four years ago but also even dearer, her slender body as taut and lovely as ever. The light from her praying mantis of a lamp outlined the right side of her long oval face and her right leg and knee. She was writing very seriously. She lowered her knees, took a sheet of paper off the clipboard, then brought her knees up again, and he looked at her and remembered how they'd made love all afternoon, six or seven hours! and she'd had her knees around his neck, and she'd had her knees across his chest, and she'd had her knees bent around his waist; and he'd been kissing her cigarette-flavored mouth so many times and then he'd taken her pretty little nipples between his lips. She sat across from him with her knees drawn up like a sweet little frog and the midnig
ht breeze stirred outside and the fan made her fern twitch like his straining face between her thighs, and she sat thinking, with all the oils and graphite sketches on the walls around her. There was a young girl painted six times into the same beach scene: once groping and grabbling in the sand, twice wading in the swirly turquoise sea, once sitting demurely in a wick-erwork beach chair, once gangling her skinny legs as she gazed down at her own wet shadow upon the changing sands; and once squatting with her knees out, showing teeth and tongue in a hilariously rude face. Across the room were the drawings that began her "Venus" series: the constructivist figures which were so elfin and strangely lifelike, black and white and black and white with powerful skeletons showing themselves inside the naked girls. (He'd seen how when she painted the German girl naked she used glowing yellow watercolors with a few blues and oranges to form the translucent bones inside. She gave her long slender arms and legs which were bent but still reaching out for the balance of those beautiful geometries which almost always skulk away from us. The German girl dreamed. When she painted the German girl she flexed her legs and danced around the canvas; she said that she had to paint with her entire body.) She wrote on, not quite smiling. And the next afternoon mangoes were falling outside and a lizard scurried past one of her half-awake cats as she came to him on the sofa wiggling the soft tanned toes that he'd kissed; she was resting now, breathing, her lovely face inside her folded arms, all of her still except for her waist gently contracting in a slow rhythm; then she turned onto her back and her homemade dress rode up above her knees so that he could see again the reddish goldish pubic hair he'd played with all morning; he'd made love to her mainly with his hands, her body so deliciously sentient that a long soft stroking of her back and buttocks could bring her to orgasm as she lay on top of him, riding his thigh (it's all done with hipbones, a lesbian once explained); or a gentle clockwise twirling of his fingers in her vulva could also make her happy. The more hours they spent making love, the wilder he became about her. Whenever he'd given her great pleasure she'd fall down limply on top of him, her breasts and back so rich with sweat that he could draw his hands through it and then lick the droplets off his fingers. During intercourse he felt not only the pleasure and power of giving her joy, and the joy of giving to one who took so happily and well, but also an almost mystical feeling that her body was speaking to his fingers and mouth, saying exactly what was needed and wanted for its happiness, and that because through some miracle his fingers and mouth understood and answered and gave, her body spoke to his with more and more freedom and joy, giving him back all the sweetness he was giving and wanted to give, so that when he slid his hands up and down her back, for instance, his fingers experienced like special molasses seasoned with hibiscus flowers a sensation, as thickly material as that liquid which dripped from her clitoris, and her musky moans perfumed him with joy. He learned her silent signs and ways. When he'd first reach between her buttocks and work his hand farther to the mound of hair, the double lips inside already parted to receive his caress, he'd know by the heaviness of her eyelids and the workings of her throat that he'd found the right way to touch her, and a quarter-hour later, when her pelvis began its first slow inchwormings of joyous measurements, this confirmation that he had understood filled him with thankfulness. — Nonetheless, with her he was impotent. On the very first night with his first condom he'd been able to do the deed, but after that, even though his penis might be rigid with feeling or even need as he played with her during all those hours, it collapsed as soon as he put the rubber on. This was not frustrating for him physically. With her he did not need to ejaculate. He drank his delight through his hands. But he was afraid that no matter how many orgasms he gave her, even when he worked two fingers in deep, thrusting and corkscrewing in ways he could never have done with his penis, no matter how many times she collapsed sweatily against him pounding-hearted, whispering that she was happy, still she might want the other. He was not impotent with anyone else. The reason was simple. She was afraid that without a condom he might give her a fatal disease. Knowing this, every time he put his erection into her he immediately imagined the condom breaking, and then her fear and misery and his guilt, and so his penis would shrink. He explained it to her; she was touched, and kissed him; she understood; but still he worried that she was disappointed in him even though he knew that she wasn't. So that was why he made love to her with his hands. At night, exhausted, he'd fall asleep with his head against her breasts and dream of hands, seeing again Oregon's low barnacled rocks carpeted with kelp's many hands, dark green bulbous fingers open, hands upon hands, the squishy bulbs of fingertips reaching down into crabridden channels where dark snails slowly made their way. Those were the places where the ocean came in, searching out every hidden way. The tide was rising. Green anemones pulsed. Mussels clung to boulders. He slept late beside her, and then they made love all morning and all afternoon. Sometimes they couldn't stop long enough to eat. They made love until twilight. Shy khaki-colored palmetto lizards came out of hiding as it got dark. The two cats chased them or gazed at insects and rotten mangoes, the foliage bending under the weight of its own ranks of fingers, its greenish wrists flexed into downcurves of magnificent idleness which now magnified their authority as the darkness dripped down from the treetops like hot tar and the first cricket began to make its announcements in a voice much less kingly than any voice the leaves would have had if they could speak as they grew down out of darkness. Darkness came like music. Just as in an orchestra the drummer hunches forward, having selected from his convenient palate two sticks with the requisite heads, and begins to thrum one of his giant kettles so lightly, so the first thickening of night rippled quietly down from her thick humid trees as she smiled and kissed her hand to him; he remembered how at the Sydney Opera House the tenor and the soprano had stood before the conductor like a bride and groom before the minister. He saw the flash of trombones as the trio in the orchestra raised them like rifles, taking aim at the musical notes which had called them forth (and again for a moment Sarajevo entered his mind in much the same way as in California a muddy-gray wave can come in, sweeping sideways, having been diverted by a knife-sharp shapelessness of lava, then wheels back home, leaving a semicircular deposit of sand; amidst the raveling of Florida darkness he recalled the construction of a Sarajevo morning; how at six-thirty it would be sunny, empty, quiet; and then suddenly came the ka-chonk-chonk-chonk-chonk of an anti-aircraft gun; a car sped desperately by, and he heard individual shots echoing between buildings; then another car fled squealing, almost tipping over. He heard breaking glass. It was silent and sunny for a moment. A machine-gun burst made the windowpane rattle, and he saw that there was a new hole in the ledge outside. That was how it would be all day. The old mother, smiling and tired, brought in a piece of grenade. — On our balcony. From last night. — The Bosnian Dragons had said: If you are killed we will light seven candles. — That meant that they would kill seven Serbs. — In Karenni State, on the other hand, what he'd thought to be gunshots had been but the explosions of burning trees where refugees cleared the jungle.) The opera interrupted his thoughts. As he peered down the concentric golden rings of an immense tuba's barrel, he wondered if he saw what the doomed fly sees in approaching a pitcher plant. As Lautréamont says, to struggle against evil is to pay it too great a compliment. — Should the fly struggle then? Should anybody struggle against his ominous golden destiny? In the secret jungle village the candleshine had been like liquid in the grooves of the long bamboo table when the Karenni soldier in his tunic with the red emblem poured smilingly from a glowing cloudy bottle of Karenni rice whiskey which tasted both sulphury and sweet, while water ran in the bamboo darkness beneath. To fly into the pitcher plant must be like drinking that whiskey, like drinking light without knowing what might happen. How could one struggle effectively against the unknown? And the choir came out, some of them bald and ugly, some frumpy, some overdressed in diamonds, some shrivelled by the light of their own spectacles. The
cymbal-player did not have a gleeful face as he himself would in his position but he was compensated for by the happy gesticulations of the conductor. That was how the oncoming darkness felt. Somebody was making it, sifting down clouds of sweet and spicy trickery like the greenish flash of a Li So woman's skirt. It was a very good darkness. The woman whom he made love to with his hands was still writing, so he went out to the adas and fell into it, the outline of his identity staining place-names below him in just the same fashion that a plane descending into the Great Western Desert of Australia casts its shadow on a land like an immense dead leaf with many veins both black and white; and then, sinking deeper into the lichenous red of that continent darkened by blue haze, it loses itself in uplooining, lands lonely in that vermillion country of purple shrubs and broad low W-shaped gullies, becomes a small silver glint in dirt as red as Mars, its belly almost lapped by yellow grass. It is nothing nowhere nobody. For darkness is so vast and wide. That was the shape of his experience when he went out from the house of joy and descended into the Florida night, meeting at the end of the street a large cemetery hunched behind its diamond-meshed fence, the vaults sometimes three high in an immense U-shaped block like apartments, flowers and flags on the ledges by the nameplates, a fingernail moon overhead, the sound of running water from a dormer-windowed palmridden house across the street. Here and there he saw a low white vault, with palm silhouettes behind. So he spoke to all the dead, asking where they were from, and their silence said that they were from nowhere everywhere, and he wanted to explain that he himself travelled everywhere and perhaps he did explain it after the best conceivable fashion; namely, he said nothing; thus he spoke the language of the dead. — He went back and took his woman by the hand, and they made love until dawn.