The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  A week or so later I bought her a dictionary and some English primers. Again she was grateful. The husband smiled a little distantly. I could see that she was ashamed that he did not thank me too; she cast him a look of shy reproach, which made me feel awkward; and I wondered if I had overstepped.

  But we continued to be great friends, all of us. She prepared a four-course Japanese dinner for my wife and me (did I mention that they were very poor?). She was very intelligent and hardworking; her English continually improved. I was always happy to see her. Whenever we met, she came running into my arms, while my wife and her husband stood looking on.

  So on this fall day as I stood inhaling the smell of eucalyptus and watching her come hurrying toward me along the edge of the white-wrinkled brownish creek, I found my arms flying open of their own accord. I watched her tiny feet flash through fallen moon-crescents ofleaves. — Hi, Jenny! she cried, waving gaily. My wife replied, unsmiling. The Japanese girl threw herself into my embrace and kissed me on the mouth. There was nothing wanton or teasing about her; she was only affectionate.

  I want to say hi and thank you for inviting us to see you today, she cried, it is very glad to see you! Jenny, we couldn't see you the last time so we are very happy to see you today.

  Her husband had now approached, and he went toward my wife tentatively, unsure whether he ought to kiss her or merely take her hand. I forget what he did. He never stayed much in my mind. For this I am entirely to blame, I admit. He had many good points. He worked hard (it was not his fault that he could never hold a job); he loved his wife very much, and told me once that he could never be unfaithful to her. As he said this he gazed at me a little challengingly.

  I remember that afternoon of long chives and forgotten blackberries. The air was as still as a breath. I remember how the four of us went walking alongside the brown guts of that creek that twisted and wound into a brownish-silver mirror. It was better than silver jewelry. Perhaps it could be reproduced by melding ten parts silver with three parts copper, not just any copper ... I remember seeing the Japanese girl reflected in it, and my heart soared.

  Her husband and I talked, too. He'd brought a bottle of mescal which we passed back and forth. I admired his physical strength. I respected the manual labor that he did (her job with a Japanese company brought in more money, but how could that be his fault?). We crossed the tree-bridge, he and I, climbed hills as thickly grasshaired as bear fur, and after a long time we found ourselves in a place of myriad orange thistleflowers on tall iron-colored stalks, flowers like the "choke" of an artichoke, cupped by artichoke-like leaves. My instant thought was to pick two, one for my wife and one for his. Then I saw how he regarded me, and we turned away together, descending to our wives, following a path among gray groping stalks of dead grasses as skinny as an insect's leg.

  A year or two later, my wife and I had to leave San Francisco. I remember how the Japanese girl sobbed in my arms, refusing to let her husband pull her away, while I stood holding her, rocking her, kissing and being kissed by that beautiful face, trying to calm her while my wife looked on.

  Five years fell like shooting stars. They had a child now, I'd heard; they'd moved twice; he'd just lost his latest job. I happened to be in San Francisco on business, so I called and they invited me to dinner. Her English was almost perfect by then. That was the night that the thing happened that shocked me so much that the aftershocks kept ringing hours later when I sat on the yellow-lit bus that brought me through the night whose fog chilled my knees. I was next to a security guard whose epaulets bore crimson stars. He gazed down at the toes of his jackboots, drained by the rays from Gemini which had propelled him so mercilessly through life. I could not stop thinking about what had happened. We passed cages of light in the silent foggy darkness, slowly withdrawing from the Outer Sunset, the houses closer together now and taller, more and more filled with light. The woman across the egg-yolk-colored partition grimaced, her face a wrinkled brittle mask, her hair greasy and shiny. After her eyes closed, the most prominent part of her face was her nostrils, those twin black star-points of negativity, like the eyes of that Japanese paper doll.

  What had happened was this:

  The two of them had been quarrelling again—or rather (to be more accurate) she had continued to upbraid him in shrill and humiliating terms. To change the subject (it seemed that I was changing the subject every few minutes that evening), I asked her which of the twelve Chinese years each of them had been born in—for even Japanese and Koreans take cognizance of this calendar.

  He was born in the Year of the Rat, she replied, looking at me (never at him!).

  What kind of character is a person born then supposed to have? I asked.

  Always running around, she said scornfully. Running this way and that way. I doan' mean it in a good sense.

  And you? I said quickly, changing the subject one last time.

  Me? I was born in the Year of the Rabbit, she said. Very good. Very cute.

  What does that say about your character?

  For the first and only time that night, she smiled. In a voice that glittered like a new steel blade, she said: Ladies born in Year of the Rabbit, we lose our husbands early. They die very young. Soon I will be a happy widow.

  It was impossible to mistake what I was hearing. This was a confession of intended murder.

  Of course it was not her fault. What she was had been decided by the conjunction of stars in the Year of the Rabbit. What he was was likewise determined.

  I have seen a few dead bodies in my work as a journalist. I have looked into a number of murderers' eyes. When I took my leave of the happy couple a few moments later, I said to myself: I truly believe in the stars.

  BLOOD

  San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1986)

  Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)

  * * *

  San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1993)

  You want some blood? said the guy in the camouflage coat.

  Yeah.

  The back of my arm is good.

  The doctor hit it. — Yeah. That's a good vein, the doctor said.

  I hope so. It's at a hard angle, though. You can get it straighter there, Doc. It's up to you. You know how you want to do it.

  The needle went slowly in. The guy in the camouflage coat bit his lip. Not looking, he said: You get it?

  Yeah.

  Good.

  The blood came out from between the wings of the butterfly in a pretty thread, reproducing those times when traffic becomes a liquid with many red eyes that oozes through tunnels in obedience to horizontal pinball gravity. Just as taxi-lights bleed across the ceilings of tunnels, so the pink vibrations took wing inside his eyelids. The corpuscles were smoking, tottering trucks and weepy-eyed cars rushing like red ants between the ribs of some dead bridge.

  Still going, huh?

  Yeah, said the doctor. It's a gusher.

  That's good, 'cause I never mess with the back one.

  He looked down at the floor. Yeah, he went on. I have a positive antibody. I hope I don't have AIDS. I've been feeling terrible lately.

  As he sat there leaning forward he jigged his knee and he jigged his fist on his knee. He looked very serious.

  Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)

  The guy in the camouflage coat got a Butterfly Bar vest and a bar number like the girls and went around like some tragic diffusion of evening traffic, saying to them: OK you pay me one baht I sleep you hotel no problem I smoke you my Mama-Papa very poor—and they laughed.

  But the slender sad girl whose hair was rubberbanded back in a ponytail said: I no like my job.

  Why you work Soi Cowboy then? he said, throwing his jacket off and rolling up his sleeve.

  Little money. I send money Mama-Papa.

  You have Thai boyfriend?

  Before I have. But he send me away. I small small money. He marry big money.

  The slender girl never resisted. Her t
iny fieldworn hands would always settle on his back, gently caressing. (Before, I work water buffalo, she said.) She had a pale ocher face. She never complained about his not using a rubber.

  You want some blood? he said afterward.

  No, sir. Why you say give me blood?

  I want to do it to you. I did it to you one way, but maybe you still don't have my antibody. I want you to drink my blood. I want to maybe stick you with this needle and squirt my blood into you, OK?

  The slender girl wrung her hands. — OK, sir. Up to you.

  The guy in the camouflage coat remembered the woman who'd given him the disease. He remembered going to the doctor with her.

  Hi, the doctor had said. Are you gonna do this?

  Yeah. I guess, said the scared woman, smiling. Then she said quickly: no, I really have to get to work. — She ran away.

  She was dead now.

  Close your eyes, bitch, he said to the slender girl. I don't want you looking into my eyes while I do this. Don't worry. I'll pay you one thousand baht.* Make a fist. Make a fist, I said. Yeah, that's a good vein. You got such pretty litde veins.

  Thank you, sir.

  OK, it's going in. Don't move. Don't move. There it goes.

  Thank you very much, sir.

  What the fuck are you thanking me for? I just murdered you.

  Excuse me sir me no no understand you speak.

  I apologize, he said. It's just that I've been feeling pretty down lately.

  * About U.S. $40 in 1993. About what an all-night girl might expect to receive.

  OUTSIDE AND INSIDE

  Berkeley, California, U.S.A. (1992)

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1991)

  Hong Kong, Territory of United Kingdom, Southeast Asia (1993)

  Mexicali, Estado de Baja California, Mexico (1992)

  * * *

  Berkeley, California, U.S.A. (1992)

  Outside the vast squares of yellow bookstore-light, the panhandlers, longhaired and greasy, held out their palms, asking for their dinners, and two started fighting, while inside people turned the pages of picture-books whose flowers smelled like meadows of fresh ink.

  I don't want her around me! a panhandler shouted. I don't need that fucking bitch! I hate that monster.

  Inside, everyone pretended that the shouting was silence. A man looked at a book and wanted to buy it, knowing how wonderful it would be to sit in his own house with a drink in his hand looking at this thirty-eight-color picture-book printed on paper as smooth as a virgin's thigh while the sun kept coming in through the leaves—

  Outside, somebody screamed.

  The man bought the book and went out. He saw a man smashing a woman's head against a window of the bookstore. The glass shattered, and as the woman's livid and half-dead face shot into the yellow light he saw it become beautiful like the planet Saturn ringed by arrowheads of whirling glass that rainbowed her in their cruel prisms and clung to wholeness in that spinning second also ringed by her hair and spattering blood.

  The man ran back inside where the woman's mouth lay peaceful. He opened his book and invited her in. Gently he raised her head and pillowed the book beneath. Spangles of blood struck the pages like a misty rain, becoming words which had never existed before. She began to bleed faster and faster. Her hair grew down between the words like grass, underscoring and embellishing them with fragrant flourishes. Her eyes and teeth became punctuation marks. Her skin became pages of bloodless purity. Her flesh kept company with the threads and glue; the plates of her skull broke neatly into cover-armor. Then there was nothing left of her above the raw red throat.

  He picked up the book, which spoke to him, saying: Now you have loved me, and I will love you forever. But where are my hands? Where are my feet, my breasts?

  I'm sorry, the man said. They're outside.

  Bring them in, the book told him. Bring them through the window.

  Holding the book tight, the man ran out to obey her, but police had already condensed out of the night. When he tried to smash the corpse's shoulders through the window, they led him into the squad car. He knew that they would take him inside.

  Where are my hands? the book wept.

  They took you away, the man whispered.

  The book began to bleed despondently.

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1991)

  Once when the thioridazine wore off he found himself with a Bible because they'd taken away the other book to be kept forever in a long manila envelope labeled EVIDENCE. But the woman he'd helped and loved had finally found him. She whispered to him from the Bible, telling him to ask them for an atlas, and when the psychiatrists agreed because that was a sign of healthy involvement with the world, he opened the atlas at random, and the wide heavy covers flipped down to anchor him in the new country which he would soon find; and he looked and read KAMPUCHEA. So he entered a dark-staired hallway without electricity in Phnom Penh, kids hopping barefoot everywhere, silhouettes in hallways, black crowds watching in the hallway, smells of sweat and body odor and death, fat girls peering out of a dark doorway, giggling. Three girls leaned out. Warily they smiled. The door opened on a sunny place where more fat girls peered out carefully. He stepped into the new part of the hall that the open door had made, the bright part, and they beckoned him in. People were watching. He stood there in the place between outside and inside, entering a nested memory of an openwalled restaurant not far away where he had sat, feeling neither inside nor outside, a Chinese movie shouting along on the TV, while boys rode past one and two to a bike; awnings swirled in the breeze. Then he came out of that memory and entered the open door. All the pretty girls sat on the floor or the rumpled bed, watching TV. The madam closed the door behind him and then he knew that he had truly been admitted to the inside. But he also knew that he could not stay. Sooner or later he'd have to rent one of the girls, or else they'd make him leave. And even if he did rent somebody, so that he could come inside her, eventually he'd finish or his money would be finished and then he'd have to go back into the black hall again, which was outside like the far side of Pluto.

  He closed the atlas. They gave him two more pills and checked beneath his tongue to make sure that he had swallowed. Soon he could feel himself going inside again.

  Hong Kong, Territory of United Kingdom, Southeast Asia (1993)

  The woman whispered, so he opened the atlas; and the harbor burned with bluish-gray fog, cool winds ruffling nothing on the blocky buildings across the water which were backdropped by camel's back hills the same color as the fog. He went among the tea-colored faces in round glasses, became present on the ferry across the gray-green sea. The happiness of going without map or guidebook, having no idea what he'd find, prevented him from recognizing the danger of the tall white buildings like punchcards on the horizon.

  Not only this outsider, whose education in boundaries had been so abundant, but also the other inhabitants of Hong Kong, that abstraction as readily graspable as a parallelogram, often heard a strange woman's voice calling to them from across the water, the voice of a woman neither inside nor outside, who therefore called from loneliness, wanting to be loved so that her hands at least could live with her brain and skull; but to most others her pathetic aspect, which did require something of them, made them prefer not to recognize her; of course it was also that they were completely inside, so that they had little use for somebody who was neither one nor the other. Better not to acknowledge any ghost. Of course he was compelled to, because he already had. It is not as easy to get rid of consequences as first principles. He heard her desperate whisperings as he got ofF the ferry and approached the bank walled with sparkling transparent cubicles in which people paced or pressed or sat downgazing at computer mysteries; in the lower levels, where the public was permitted to come, embankments of metal and marble gleamed like sunlight, while the uniformed ones swarmed safely behind. Below this was a glass floor of many rectangular panes, joined by silvery rods; beneath this the gloomy silhouettes of the lowest walkers passed at obscure
diagonals, all at the same pace.

  He descended the slow escalator that brought the red uniforms and red displays into broader angles like an airplane approaching the runway, falling from the ceiling, which was a Ptolemaic crystalline sphere.

  To cross the street you took an escalator above the statued men at the bank, crossed a marble bridge of potted plants whose leaves gleamed almost as coldly as the black shoes of the officials who marched so soundlessly, followed the V's of darker marble like caramelized sugar on a pudding dessert, turned left at the stained glass window, and then you could look down at the red and silver taxis, the blue and tan double-decker buses, the gray cars and white cars— all very clean, of course—sliding below you along the immaculate street. Then you came to a glass door which let you outside. You followed a walled path, which traversed a steep hill bulging with ferns, lilies, ginkgo trees and tall palms whose tea-colored darknesses strained toward the glowing fog and were undone by the weight of their own success; their umbrellalike spreadings and droopings from the resolute stalk were a falling back of darkness into darkness. This was the Battery path: a pavement of roots, like the muscles in athletes' shoulders. This was a city of clean paths telling him which way to go.