The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  That's right.

  How much do you love me?

  I love you so much.

  You want to fuck me now? It's that important to you? Go ahead. See, here goes the blouse again. There. Now you can touch me. But my tits aren't hard anymore. Don't just stare at me. Look, I'm even taking off my underpants; I'm lying here spreading my goddamned legs; what else do you want? Oh, I know. You want me to tell you I love you. I'll say I love you when you're starting to come. Is there anything else you want?

  No.

  Well, then, are you going to do it or not?

  Yes, thank you, I'll do it.

  Good. Here's your rubber. Let me juice myself up.

  Let me hear you practice saying I love you.

  I love you I love you I love you, all right? Now hurry up.

  I don't feel anything.

  That's because you're not used to wearing a rubber. You're not really fucking me anymore; you're fucking a piece of latex that happens to be inside me.

  That isn't what I mean.

  All right. Both the guys who did me said they had AIDS. So I have AIDS. Take the rubber off and fuck me and get AIDS if that's what you want. See if I care. Here. Off it goes. Like peeling a banana. Now I'll put you back inside. How's that?

  It's good.

  Can you feel my death crawling inside you?

  Oh, it feels so good—

  You're thrusting deeper and deeper into my death. My death is in you now. Are you getting ready to come? You look like you are. I love you. This time I really mean it. I love you. I love you because you're going to die for me.

  INCARNATIONS

  OF THE MURDERER

  San Ignacio, Belize (1990)

  San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1991)

  Agra, Division of Uttar Pradesh, India (1990)

  San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1991)

  Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1991)

  San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1992)

  Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico (1992)

  Interstate 80, California, U.S.A. (1992)

  Battambang City, Province Battambang, Cambodia (1991)

  * * *

  San Ignacio, Belize (1990)

  Two girls sailed under the fat green branches of trees that curved like eyebrows. At the top of the grassy bank, a plantain spread its leaves across the clouds. They passed little brown girls swimming and smiling. They passed a man who dove for shrimp which he put in a plastic bag. Breasting the painted houses that were grocery stores rich with onions, Coca-Cola and condensed milk, they rode the wide brown river between tree-ridges and palm houses.

  As they paddled, the plump wet thighs of the girls quivered; water danced on their thighs. A few wet curly hairs peeked shyly from the crotches of their bathing suits. They had golden hourglass waists.

  A man was a dragonfly. He hugged his shadow on the river until he saw them.

  The water splashed under a great green tree-bridge that grew parallel to the water. Its branches were red and black like the skin of a diamondback rattler. In the branches crouched the man. The plan that the man had was as as rubbery and pink as a monkey's palm. But the canoe was not there yet. The two girls were still alive.

  Yellow butterflies skimmed low across the shallow water. They saw the girls, too. They saw each other. They saw themselves in the water and forgot everything.

  The tree that owned the water was closer now. A white horse sneezed in a grove of golden coconuts.

  All morning the man had been thinking of the two girls whom he was about to kill. Knocking yellow coconuts down from the trees with a big stick, he'd sliced away at them with his machete until a little hole like a vagina appeared. He put his mouth to that pale bristly opening and drank. (Slowly, the white meat inside oxidized brown.) But now he was silent, suspended from his purpose as if by the heavy supple tail of a spider monkey.

  Now the two girls passed little clapboard houses with laundry out to dry. They passed the last house they would ever see. In the river a lazy boa was wriggling along. That was the last snake they'd ever see.

  They went down the ripple-stained river, the ripple-striped river. They saw the broad green rocks beneath the water, the soft yellow-green tree-mounds. They came to the tree of their death, and the man jumped down lightly and stabbed them in their breasts.

  The canoe lay long and low across the neck of an island. Reflected water burned whitely on its keel.

  The man opened red fruits. He bit them. They were soft with two-colored grainy custard inside.

  The spice of the blood was like the sweet stinging of the glossy-leaved pepper-tree, whose orange fruits burn your lips when you eat, burn again when you piss. This made him happy. He went to sleep and awoke. A toucan chirped like a frog. The taste was stronger in his mouth. He laughed.

  He wandered among the caring arches of the palm tree that shaded him like wisdom, and his shirt was hot and slick on his back. He came to the grove where the white horse had sneezed and knocked down a coconut. He drank the juice, but the taste of blood was even stronger now. He looked sideways in the hot high fields of trees.

  Knuckles itching pleasantly with insect bites, searching through the wild-looking fields for ground foods with the sun hot on his sunburned neck and wrists, he swiped down a sugarcane stalk with his machete and then skinned and peeled it in long strokes, from green down to white. He was good at using knives. He snapped off a piece and chewed it, tasting in advance its sweat so fresh and sweet. But the other taste loomed still more undeniable.

  Between his teeth he thrust slices of young pineapple, bird-eaten custard apples, bay leaves, green papayas, sour plums from a leaf-bare tree. He bit them all ferociously into a mush. Then he sucked, choked, swallowed. Building a fire, he made coffee, which he drank down to the grounds. He cut an inch of medicine-vine and chewed that bitterness too. The taste of blood increased.

  He spat, but his spittle was clear. There was no blood in it. He pricked his tongue with the point of the knife, but his own male blood could not drown the other, the female taste.

  He drank rum and fell down. All around him, trees steamed by humid horizons. When he awoke, the taste was stronger than ever. He began to scream.

  There was a cave he knew of whose floor was a sandy beach. The man ran there without knowing why. Jet black water became black and green there as it descended into bubbling pools close enough to the entrance to reflect the jungle, from the branches of which the black-and-orange-tailed birds hung like seedpods. The widest tree-boughs were festooned with vine-sprouts like the feathered shafts of arrows. Behind them, where it was cool and stale, the cave's chalky stalactites hung in ridge-clusters like folds of drying laundry on a line. The man ran in. He splashed through the first pool. It was alive with green and silver ripples intersecting with one another like a woman's curls. A single bubble traveled, white on black, then silver on silver. He ran crazy through the next pool. Farther in the darkness was a chalky beach, cratered with rat-prints and raccoon-prints. This was the place where the cave-roof was crowned by a trio of stalactites. Here, where everything but the river was quiet, a pale whitish bird fluttered from rock to rock, squeaking like a mouse. The bird flew back and forth very quickly. It hovered over rock-cracks' wrinkled lips. It landed on a crest of lighter-colored rock like a wave that had never broken. It darted its beak between two studs of shell-fossil and swallowed a blind ant. Then it departed into deeper caves within the cave, floored with silence and white sand. Water shimmered white on black rocks—

  The man opened his mouth to scream again and the white bird came from nowhere. The white bird was the soul of one of the girls. The bird stabbed the man's tongue with its beak and drank blood. Then it flew away, not squeaking anymore.

  The man swallowed experimentally. The taste was only half as strong.

  Farther back still was a pit. He had learned from the white bird that a tiny black bird flew there. The man clambered down. It felt like being insid
e a seashell. Deep down, the flicker of his lighter showed him pink and glistening rock-guts. Smoke streamed from the little lighter like a beam from a movie projector. He held the lighter below his mouth, so that the black bird could see him. The bird came swooping and cheeping. It was not much bigger than a bee. It flew back between his tonsils. He could feel the bird's pulse inside him. He longed to swallow it, to recapitulate his triumphs. But then the taste would strengthen again. The black bird pierced him and drank a drop of his blood. It took him again. Then it flew away in silence.

  The taste was gone now. The man shrieked with glee. The cave was empty.

  Outside, it was so brightly green that the hunger of his eyes (which he hadn't even known that he had) was caught: as long as he looked out upon it, he thought himself satisfied, but the instant he began to look away, back into the darkness, then his craving for greenness screamed out at him.

  He ran outside trying to see and taste everything. He ran down the streambank to a kingdom of pools in bowls of baking hot rock. He drank water from rolling whirlpools; he dove down Whitewater to brown water, beneath which his open eyes found chalky sand-valleys, green-slicked boulder-cliffs; he grabbled at these things with his fingers and then licked his fingertips. In the best whirlpool rushed the two girls, lying down against each other, kissing each other avidly, eating each other's soft flesh.

  San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1991)

  Down the fog-sodden wooden steps he came that night to the street walled with houses, every doorway a yellow lantern-slide suspended between floating windows, connected to earth by the tenuous courtesy of stairs. Earth was but sidewalk and street, a more coagulated gray than the silver-gleam of reflected souls in car windshields, heavier too than the gray-green linoleum sky segmented by power wires. He went fog-breathing while the two walls of houses faced each other like cliffs, ignoring one another graciously; they were long islands channelled, coved and barred, made separate by the crisscrossing riven of gray streets. Somewhere was the isle of the dead girls' canoe, which he needed now to get away from himself. All night he walked the hill streets until he came to morning, a foggy morning in the last valley of pale houses before the sea. He stood before an apartment house whose chessboard-floored arch declined to eat him as he'd eaten others; the doors were shut like the sky. The curving ceiling of the arch was stamped with white flowers in squares. Black iron latticed windows as elaborately as Qur'anic calligraphy; white railings guarded balconies. Spiked lamps smoldered at him from behind orange glass. Timidly he hid behind the sidewalk's trees whose leaf-rows whispered richly down like ferns . . .

  Once he admitted that this house was not for him, he turned away from all hill streets side-stacked with rainbow cars and went down further toward the sea. So he came to the street of souls.

  The candy shop of souls lured him in first. His nose stung with the fog. He opened the door and went in, staring at the long glass case that was like an aquarium. Here he found the chocolate ingots, the pure mint-striped cylinders, the tarts studded with fruits and berries like a dozen orchards, the vanilla bread-loaves long and slender like suntanned eels, the banana-topped lime hexagons, the chocolate-windowed eclairs domed with cream like Russian Orthodox churches, the round strawberry tortes gilded with lemon-chocolate to make pedestals for the vanilla-chocolate butterflies that rested on each with breathless wings, the sponge-cakes each like an emperor's crown, the complex wicker-basket raspberry pies of woven crust, heaped with boulders of butter and confectioner's sugar, the tins of violet lozenges, the bones and girders made of licorice, the low white disks of sugar-pies topped with fan-swirls of almonds like playing cards, the peach cakes, pear cakes, the row of delectable phosphorescent green slugs, the flowerpot of coffee frosting from which a chocolate rose bloomed, the strawberries that peaked up from unknown tarts and tortes bride-bashful behind ruffled paper—

  He sat at a little square marble table, and without a word the lady brought him a green slug, served on a white plate with white lace. He reached in his pocket and found a single coin of iron with a hole in the center. He gave her that. He sat looking past the glass case at the rows of fruit confections in matched white-lidded jars—not for him. With the silver fork he stabbed the slug and raised it into his mouth, where it overcame him between his teeth with a sweet ichor of orgasmic limes, and so he became a thief—

  Agra, India (1990)

  Two green-clad soldiers were striking a man in the face beneath one of the side-arches of the Taj Mahal. The man was not screaming. He was a thief. The soldiers had caught him, and were beating him. All around him, the Mughal tombs bulged with hard nipples on their marble breasts. — The Emperor, he had so many wives, he spend a month's salary on cosmetics! cried the guide. Blood flowered from the thief's nose.

  This tower closed now, said the guide. The lovely boys and girls jump off, suicide. For love and love and love. Closed now for security reason. But this part, this open ivory day.

  The thief fell down when they let go of him. The soldiers stamped on his stomach. Then they raised him again.

  Now, sir, lady, come-come. Look! This marble one piece. No two piece. No join. Only cutting!

  The thief looked at the guide with big eyes. The soldiers punched him. Then he was not looking at the guide anymore. Sir and lady went away, trying not to hear his groans as the soldiers began to beat him. Sir and lady wore the dead girls' mouths.

  Yes, please! Hello! Sir and madam!

  (Sir and lady were staring again. They could not help it. The soldiers were kicking out his teeth.)

  Water rippled in long grooves of onyx, malachite, coral, but sir and lady did not see it. They did not know that they had once been dead girls. They knew that he knew them in his unspoken beseeching, but that merely echoed as clouds echoed between the lapis-flowered marble screens. Far beyond the screens lay dim white-gray corridors of peace. Darkness, incense and shadows crawled slowly on marble, searching for secret sweet-smelling vaults. These were the tombs of old scores, bad crimes rotting but not yet shriven down to bones.

  The soldiers hustled the thief into darkness.

  Outside it was a foggy morning. Skinny men rode bicycles, with dishtowels wrapped around their heads. Roadside people squatted by smudges to keep warm. On the dusty road that stank of exhaust, platoons of dirty white cattle were marched and goaded toward Agra. They had sharp backbones and floppy bellies. Sir and lady crossed that living river and stood beside a pole which had once been the tree of their death. In this sacred place they felt compassion for their murderer. If they had been able to remember, they would have forgiven him fully. As it was, their pity made his next incarnation easier.

  Postcards, please? Small marble! Elephant two rupees!

  Cowtails and buttocks were crowded together long narrow and wobbly like folded drapes. They swished and twitched as if they were alive and knew where they were going, but they didn't; they only followed where they were pulled, like the thief being led into the recesses of that gorgeous tomb.

  San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1991)

  When the rattle of his bones being put back together became the rattling whir of the cable cars going up Nob Hill, then he shot forth out of darkness among the square red lights of the other soul-cars swarming from the parking tunnels, zebra-striped gate up and down; for awhile he followed a big dirty bus that had once been a selfish man, and he rolled up Powell Street, which was sutured lengthwise with steel. Crowds were standing off the curb. There was no room for them yet. He saw a man pushing a shopping cart full of old clothes. Globes of crystallized light attacked him from the edge of Union Square. Higher up the hill he rolled by hotels and brass-worked windows, flags and awnings; he saw the pedestrian souls slogging up slowly, the Chinese signs, the yellow plastic pagoda-roofs, the bulging windows of Victorian houses. A girl with a sixpack under her arm ran smiling and flushed up the hill. At the top of the hill he could see far, saw a Sunday sailing panorama off the Marin headlands, with tanned girls drinking wine coole
rs, and college boys pretending to be pirates with their fierce black five-dollar squirt guns, and the Golden Gate Bridge almost far away enough to shimmer as it must have done for those convicts from Alcatraz who doomed themselves trying to swim there. The red warning light still flashed on the island, now noted for its tours and wildflowers. The cellblock building became ominous again when the evening fog sprang up and the tanned girls screamed as their twenty-four-footer tacked closer and closer to the sharp black rocks, already past the limit demarcated by the old prison buoys that said KEEP OFF; and seeing the girls he wanted to kill them over again but then his cracked bones ached from being beaten and he bared his teeth and thought: If I can't eat them by stealing them, I'll get them another way! and he laughed and honked his horn and other cars honked behind him so he rolled on down the hill and came to the street of souls.

  Fearing to enter the candy shop which had brought him such pain, he parked, offering himself again to that knife of fog and silence, the handle a crystal stalagmite; and he came to the coffee shop of souls.