The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  Later, of course, he cried.

  Past The Pas the spruces were as narrow as wolves' tails and there were ripply warm brown rivers. Cormorant Lake was a pale miniature sea. There was swamp, and then muskeg, and white birch flashing and thrumming by. They passed silver lakes in the green-walled dusk.

  Came a blue dawn of tiny skinny trees, of lake and lichen. He was approaching the edge of the continent, soft and flat and wet, speckled and boggy. Some lakes were blue with pulsing stripes of paleness in the breeze. Waterdrops struck the train window, making transparent worlds. The ground was now itself a map, the lakes minuscule blue continents in a greenish sea, all unfamiliar, and so many of them, countries he'd never known before. The world was larger than he had thought.

  An old Inuk couple sat drinking from economy-sized bottles of ginger ale and staring alertly out the window, looking for animals. The man's dark hands were the color of bloodstains, the web between thumb and forefinger snug over the other wrist. The woman, who was fat, never stopped smiling. Sometimes they spotted small flocks of Canada geese resting on the tundra and watched them in silence. Sometimes the old man divorced his veincorded reddish hands, leaned, coughed, and spat into the wastebag.

  The ground was pale with lichened tussocks. The dwarf spruces' branch-ends were like strange green-toed claws. Memories landed on him with a mosquito's six-legged crouch.

  They came into Churchill where the land was spongy brown and green, with so many indigo Swiss cheese holes, with flat olive-colored trees along the river's bank, ocher sand-islands, small infrequent patches of snow like crusty flakes of dryness in the soggy boggy ground, and ahead the sharp cracked white ice of the bay forest with patches of bog eaten out of them. The atlas closed. His train riding was finished. No more nobody never. He was in the snow country now.

  He had read Snow Country long ago one Arctic summer in Pond Inlet when people were hunting narwhals. Pond Inlet lies considerably north of Churchill, and the landscape is different. East of the dump, perhaps a thousand paces from shore, a stream wound through a rich bed of moss. If you walked up this green S-shaped valley you reached a triangular arroyo whose walls hid ice and waterfalls. Above, climbing the black-lichened steps of these white and orange cliffs, you reached a green ridge that looked down on the sea where a Ski-Doo slid bravely along one of the last solid spans of ice and the sun was long and white on Bylot Island. A shot sounded. Water trickled down beneath banks of dirty snow (which resembled the black-lichened white rocks). Listening to the splashes of the dying animal, he remembered the book's first sentence, variously translated as: The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country and After the long border tunnel, the snow country appeared. It reminded him of that Faulkner sentence Soon now they would enter the delta. Snow Country is a hundred and seventy-five pages long, and its palm-of-the-hand reduction a mere eleven, yet old Kawabata, who they say was shy and wise and lonely and who gassed himself, not long after receiving his Nobel Prize, kept this sentence even in the shorter version. It was the backbone of the world he must miniaturize. The train emerged from the long border tunnel into the snow country. The snow country was for Kawabata's protagonist the end of this world and the beginning of another, the country of pure mountains of sunset crystal which all tunnels are supposed to lead to, the zone of that uncanny whiteness hymned by Poe and Melville, the pole of transcendence. But on the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka, although it was snowing outside and there had been a tunnel, ladies sat reading glamour magazines or drinking piping hot canned tea, while businessmen dozed or fuddled over their papers. No one had been transcended. The snow country was to the north, but they were going west. Yuki said that the snow country had been grossly developed since Kawabata's time. (Yuki was the traveller's wife.) She said that it would be difficult to find sensitively decaying geishas in the hot springs now. He looked out the window and everything was ugly, dreary and clean. Now they passed Mount Fuji's broad paleness. Yuki's father had taken her there when she was five. Her father had put her on a horse when she got tired. It had been summer season, and so beautiful, she said. The top half of the mountain had refracted a special purple color into her soul. He gazed at Fuji's dull snow far above so many dull white apartments and could not see any beauty. The train was born from the lengthy border tunnel; it came into the snow country. Behind Yuki, a man in a silk suit gaped his lips blackly, the lower side of his mouth sagging from right to left. He looked dead. It was too warm in the car although outside it was very cold. The tiny old conductor, whose cap seemed larger than his head, pigeon-toed his slow and pensive way up the aisle. A girl in a sky-blue miniskirt passed, offering a tray of cartons which could have been anything from yogurt to wine. Now they flashed in and out of so many hollowed-out mountains and it was snowing but they were not and would never be in the snow country. From the long border tunnel the train came out into the snow country. There was no border, no special world. Ahead grew more swarms of houses and factories. Fuji was getting closer while she slept. The lower part of Fuji was grayish-green; it could have been the base of a cinder cone in the American west. Smokestacks offered their gruesome twisting homage. Then the train was past. Later they rushed through a snowstorm and it was lovely and white on greenish mountains and raindrops crawled sideways on the windows. In Pond Inlet the stream glowed mirror-like in the moss, and the mosquitoes swarmed. It was almost windless. The evening was the wannest time. Mosquitoes straddled his chin and knees and fingers; when he slapped one he killed three. Dead mosquitoes smeared his clothes. — In the sun's tail, floes glowed coolly. The Ski-Doo had stopped in a glowing yellow place, and presently the shot sounded. But now the stream was frozen and covered with snow, the mosquitoes were all dead, the narwhals were gone for the year, and the solid ice was back. From the long tunnel the train pulled out, across the border into the snow country. He remembered the strange, richly chilly colors which Kawabata's lovers, so distant from themselves and each other, saw through the frosted windows of the snow country. Life lay outside the windows; it throve only where the sunset's rays struck snowdrifts, everywhere nowhere everywhere. — He got off the train.

  What then? What had he found? What use had he made of his devices? (In Churchill's bright windy days, silver-brown light drained curvily in the river's tidal flats, flowers nodding their purple heads, belugas in the river like immense ivory-colored snails, birds overhead. The wheat cars were now open, a few kernels lying on the bottom. He ate them raw, crunching them in his teeth. He saw that the water in the river was the same color as the mud: not gray, not blue, but a sunny silver-blue all shimmery like the belly of a fish.) This book being a palindrome, and this tale being the central and infinitely regressive metonym thereof, one might hope by now to have established the center of our traveller's world, but the Earth itself is scarcely a sphere, only an asymmetric rotational spheroid—that is, a pear—and so the reference point, the map of magma which lies precisely halfway through our atlas, is not quite where intuition might lead us to expect. Then, too, mass displacements occur beneath our feet and no one knows their laws. But, as I've said, cannot we make our own planets wherever we go, with even our own idées fixes or lunar satellites to accompany us in orbits of measurable eccentricity? He'd once breakfasted at a café in Avignon, and the food was good so he returned the next morning, discovering himself to be at the center of a polished world of tables, those square lakes reflecting the chestnut trees' green mottlings and marblings even while shaded by snowy awnings. It was a vantage-point for gazing, as the Frenchmen did, at the sunny greater world of cars and breasty women while imbibing a café au lait so deliciously milky-bitter, the foam yellowish-brown like crème brûlée; beside it a fresh croissant half coiled itself, flanked by two thimble-sized butter dishes, a tiny ribbed cylinder of apricot preserves, and a hot chocolate like a grayish-blue cumulus cloud—everything in immaculate white china, the hot chocolate and its complementary milk in two white pitchers each of which was petite enough to close one's hand around, w
hile the fresh orange juice existed imperially distinct in its silver-clear glass. From his table and the world of tables extended the whole world in a succession of unpredictably angled streets which were sometimes trapezoidal when two old buildings faced strangely; streets walled by ancient stone houses with lion-headed knockers, streets sometimes asphalted and sometimes cobbled, sometimes blistered with stones; some streets were long tunnels of plane or chestnut trees that ran all the way to the city wall which bent around the ends of the world. That was the world for but a day or three, and then he had to leave Avignon. His satellite followed him, revolving everywhere nowhere everywhere. His satellite was the atlas. It flapped its pages like an immense square bird, beguiling and terrifying him with its pursuit. Had he been courageous enough to leap onto the page which spoke most sweetly to his heart, the recession of that moon of his would cease; he'd be troubled no more. But he did not do it; he could not. On the lower terrace of the Cliff House in San Francisco one free spirit of an old fellow ran a strange concession whose hours depended on the weather and his own moods. The business was a giant camera obscura. It cost a dollar to go inside. Within the circular railing lay a world-bowl across which long foamy breakers kept running, tilting and curving and rotating as they ran, the birds overflying them in strange swoops because the world was slowly rolling over! In this world-sea, comber-striped like Jupiter, waves raced upside-down to spill down seal-rocks; and on the beach ceiling out-of-focus people lived feet upwards like flies. Sometimes their world was dismal gray and blurred, sometimes so bright and blue. The lens went round and round. And the people kept walking and breathing, not knowing that they were in the camera obscura's world. A little girl, rightside up now, struggled happily across the sand. Headlight-eyes sparkled like mica on the road above Ocean Beach. Spinning foam-braids brought the world time, and a concave horizon sagged sleepily in upon itself. The girl was lost. The traveller was lost. Lives sped like arrows, and the world turned upside down again with the turning of the great lens. The world was so blue and so excellent, and even though it was just outside this dark room, he could never get there. If he were to climb over the railing and lie down in that pale bowl upon which the lens projected its findings, then he could not get there, either, even though the image of that world might be tattooed upon him. The world was lost, and the more precious for being so. Was that so strange? Was it the secret at the center of the world, that the rest is lost?