The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  Came the trumpet and drum, the matador with red (the silver dagger hidden always behind the red cloth). The bull sought red, found nothing. Did he know yet? The matador thrust across the colored horns. The bull jerked and turned in a confused frenzy at this man with the red cloth. Pink blood ran down the bull's neck. The matador closed on him, pacing deliberately in pink stockings. The bell tolled. Yes, after all there was a cowbell. The bull reminded me more and more of the horse that he had gored. He stood lowering his weary head, gazing at yellow cloth spattered with his blood; and perhaps he was acute enough not to molest his own death by giving a sign of bellicosity or pain which might have suggested that anything could have been done. All gathered around him like advance mourners. Finally he fell. Three funeral horses came plodding. A chain went under his carcass, then the trio dragged him around the ring and out.

  Jaipur, India (1990)

  Listen to the bells. I prefer to imagine my death as a dancer in silver and gold, her eyes painted with long tails which extend slyness all the way to her cheeks. Her face is plump and pale, her lips very red, succulently moist. Her anklets are thick with bells. She stamps her foot on the marble floor with a noise like a gunshot.

  She can tremble so that the bells shimmer and hiss on her ankles, although her legs do not seem to move. She kisses her hand to me, slices the air with her arms. In her face, a joyfully cruel expression of utter mastery and possession. The music of her silver bracelets ravishes me. But does anyone think that the moment before the three horses drag me away will not be hideous?

  Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. (1994)

  One very hot afternoon in Los Angeles, Korean Jenny and I had come into her mother's house which soon would be someone else's house because the mortgage payments didn't make sense anymore and so the bank was about to foreclose; and because it was so hot, Jenny had had a margarita with me at one of those Mexican restaurant chains; and now she wanted to lie down. She slept. I was bored. After a long time, I laid my head down on her breast. I put my lips on her soft golden throat; and at once I could feel her pulse hurrying her on through life, rushing her and ringing her by so many emphatic little steps (like the clicks of her high heels) toward death. Not being able to hear my own pulse, I felt left behind. Every one of those powerful heartbeats of hers seemed to be pushing her farther away from me, so that I could see the time coming when I'd be alone on that beige carpet looking past the rubber plant into the mirror of emptiness at the base of the stairs. I got up and sat on the sofa. Now I only heard her breathing—a respiration fullhearted and trusting, accepting of the destiny which she'd fight screaming when it came.

  Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico (1992)

  The next bull came shooting into our sadistic world, a meteor of dread and hairy rage, galloping in the useless circles to which the ring constrained him, turning and twitching, his anger some hideous snaky thing of shells and teeth strung on a dried intestine. But he could never touch the picador. Next came the old horse again—an easier victim, so the bull rushed to gore his fellow creature's side again and again. The banderilleros arrived with their darts. The bull's front legs dug in the dirt. Sometimes, once in a great while, he got his horns into a banderillero's cape, which they'd convinced him was the soul of his tormentors, but once he'd thrust, it crumpled to nothing.

  The matador swaggered in, folding up his cape so calmly. I heard the trumpet and the drum. The bull charged, missed. (Turn the continent sideways, and it becomes a leaping bull, the Aleutians its horn, Central America its tail; it is springing down upon the Queen Elizabeth Islands.) A disdainful corner flick, and the bull went for it. He heard the bell, and was the bitterer for it. No one can say that he beseeched. That was why the crowd cheered. The matador scarcely moved. Again and again the bull was baffled. The matador swung his hip and turned the cloth away. Slowly he strode closer, the red cloth up in the air, making the bull gaze high. He pivoted at the center of the world, the bull his great doomed satellite.

  The bull's head lowered to the red cloth. The feathered lances danced in his sides as he whirled. His tongue hung out; his back and sides were crusted white.

  Finally the matador dropped the cloth contemptuously on the bull's mouth and the crowd beat pots and pans, waving their hats. He stood back and knelt before the bull. They shouted ahh! and leaped to their feet as he shoved the knife in! They waved papers and handkerchiefs until the bull fell. They awarded the matador the ears.

  Men with spades came to clean up the manure and the blood. Around the ring they threw sombreros and jackets. Exuberant, the matador hurled them back. As he went around the ring, a snowstorm of sombreros and shirts came, even a wineskin. He strode to the center of the ring, fell on his knees. Then he rode out on his admirers' shoulders.

  The bull lay on the sand. He had now transcended the icy white barrier to understanding established by silver (pitchers of silver and abalone; weirdly gray mirrors of silver: all colors appear in those mirrors, but half-obscured as by angular white sparks of preciousness); some silver has a yellow gleam, but the edge of a silver bowl seems pure white . . . They came and pulled the lances out. The three funeral horses dragged him around the ring. He made a track in the dirt.

  New York City and State, U.S.A. (1992)

  So we know about ivy and trees, but what if the ivy were mere wires; what if the trees were only square white pillars in the dimness between trains; what if the leaves were incandescent lights? Then the forest would be light-spangled darkness, lit the way my legs glowed luminous green under a certain bar. Then I'd know I was in New York. Outside of this forest other died trees whose wiry roots dangled down like ivy over the concrete wall of the parking lot. The Hudson River was a root boring past the chilly eastern towns whose wall-bricks were a pathwork of dirty colors. I'd thought I was going to go outside the city often but then I didn't because whenever I started planning that I got a bad feeling about it—usually after I remembered those dying trees. So instead I visited the dog poisoner.

  He was not an evil man at all; he possessed rules. The dog had to have annoyed him more than once. People needed to have treated him badly at the same time. There could be no risk to him. Those conditions being met, he'd lay down the strychnined meat.

  The dog would bolt that food, crunching bones between yellow teeth. The poison was in the best parts, the fatty parts. First the dog would stretch out, happily gnawing the last thick bone. Then suddenly it would cock its head. It raised its ears, listening alertly to the bells which only it could hear. Something was happening or had just begun to happen which the dog did not understand yet because the growling whimpering convulsions had not begun. The dog knew only that what was happening was extremely important. It chewed no bone; clanged the bronze bells of death.

  Zagreb, Croatia (1992)

  Split, Dalmatia, Croatia (1994)

  Thus far I've written as if the bells never lied, as if the appearance of that sound, whether silvery or iron (as Poe would put it), was invariably more than rhetorical—as if, in short, supernatural law were quite simple. But one summer's night we walked past the scraping and squeaking of the long narrow streetcar (it's very old, Adnan said, it's not Amsterdam!) and duly arrived at the marble and glass ice cream bar which gleamed with glasses on glass shelves, which gleamed mirrors. A redhead and a brunette in slatey uniforms lived behind the counter, the brunette sloshing a foamy ice-coffee in her hand, then stirring, the redhead slowly drying glasses until they gleamed with late night brilliance from behind their marble bastion with its trays of filled ashtrays and dirty coffee cups. I was in one of those moments of suspension, hence susceptibility to the supersensible, because Francis and Adnan were chatting in Serbo-Croatian, which I didn't understand; so first I looked at the redhead, who ignored me; then I gazed upon the brunette, who scowled and glared; and then I sat drinking my mineral water (thirstily, because it was a very sultry September) and I listened to the bells. They'd rung me through that afternoon's long blocky buildings, each with its blue s
treet-plaque on a corner; and I remembered the hot gush of window-air in the taxi, my back beginning to sweat in the bulletproof vest within the gray hideaway windbreaker (which two yean later would be claimed by Francis's murderers in Mostar; I left that; I remembered almost everything else). I wasn't thinking about Mostar. The taxi driver kept shaking his head when he heard I was going to Sarajevo. Francis had decided not to go because it was too dangerous. We'd turned past the Red Cross van, down pastel-yellow-facaded streets. Still that heavy soggy summer feeling. Everyone was sitting under the cigarette-branded awnings.

  The driver had been in a battle. They'd had to pull back.

  Is Dubrovnik safe? I said.

  Not yet.

  Can I buy a gun?

  Nobody will do that for you. Everybody's afraid.

  Anyway, said the driver abruptly, the worst thing I've ever seen wasn't a battle; it was a traffic accident.

  It was then, and again that night in the ice cream bar, that I heard John Donne's bell tolling for me, warning and prophesying with ominous gloom; Francis had heard it, too, and taken more heed than I. He awaited my return from Sarajevo. One might say that whoever disregards the bells believes in absolute freedom; and yet I tell you most truthfully that later that night I could not sleep because I was so certain that the morrow would introduce me to my death; and yet I was powerless to avoid going. I saw the end as surely as when I awaited the arrival of Francis's family in Split two years later; no one could decide when the funeral would be, and the family could not come for three or four days yet, so I stood watching a procession dedicated to Dule, the patron saint of Split; waiting for the end to flash wittily through this celebration of Christian peace; hymns shrilled through the loudspeakers and white-robed men with red crosses on their hems strode forward with their arms folded. Now here came the nuns and little children; there marched the dignitaries of the church; I saw the palanquin of the icon—so many people were singing! Here were the police, there more nuns, now an old lady with a flower; and then at last came the real force, the boys in camouflage behind their general . . . They knew; they called the tune on that sunny windy evening of bells. And when I'd lain on the floor of

  Adnan's room that other night earlier, Francis snoring softly on the couch, I thought and believed that in only a few hours I would see and I would know; I would meet my end! And I was terrified. I lay with a dry throat, wishing that I didn't have to go. And of course I didn't have to. Nobody was forcing me to go. And yet I couldn't not go. Whatever sent me to Sarajevo and whatever preserved me were not my own forces. And the next day only a yellowjacket stung me; the sniper's bullet missed my ankle by a good six inches. So I lived on, in a kind of unbelieving unreality, and Francis lived on in safety; it was only next time that we went to Mostar. And that day neither of us heard any echoing ringing; and I lived and Francis died.

  Ban Rak Tai, Mae Hong Song Province, Thailand (1994)

  What to say, then, but that those bells mark the intervals of our lives, and nothing more; that those strange sensations of disquiet that we get, "as if something were walking on our graves," are simply what we feel upon being reminded of the obvious fact that life is the one disease for which there is a cure? Aren't those Swiss cows better off not listening? — Well, I learned another clanging lesson when the black-pajama'd driver took D. and me between the green windmills of banana fronds, with cliffs of naked rock and dry jungle above. A pyramid of blue-green rock burst up out of the forest-grown earth-cliffs.

  He believe in ghost religion, D. reported. Very funny! They have celebration for ghost. They put something in the floors of their houses. If you have five person, they put five chicken and five meat in the door. If you have five man, you can have the chicken. If you have two woman, you can have the sex change. No, I see. Meat for man, chicken for women.

  It was not so very clear. But then D., bless her, was not wildly fluent in English. The boy drove us down a road of trees, into a sun-exploding valley with misty jungle ridges ahead.

  After all women playing together, we share chicken, D. translated. All women have some something they put in bamboo in chicken legbone to see their destiny. Then all the women can look inside to tell you. But just now the young people they don't know.

  The boy smiled very quickly.

  He afraid for ghosts, said D. If they have some fever or diarrhea, they think from ghost.

  What color is a ghost? I said.

  From his idea, he think ghost is a yellow color.

  What about my dead sister? Can she hurt me?

  He says impossible. If you do good thing, then she can never hurt you.

  But I dream of her skeleton, I explained. (Francis had not been killed yet. His skeleton had not yet joined hers.)

  Oh. Yes. That was her ghost . . .

  Now rusty leaves hung above that road of yellow ocher; when other trucks came the dust was as thick as fog. We turned into a valley between dry brown rice terraces and saw the village. This was where people began to have Chinese faces. Just past a small wooden house, a woman was walking down the steep road, bearing an immense conical basket of twigs on her back. A reddish girl with mud or soot on her temple suckled a child who tranquilly wriggled his dirty toes.

  In the rainy season he can't drive, said D. Then ghosts fly all around.

  The driver lived in a very long big house behind a barrier of earth. He took us inside, while his young wife sat outside with her knees together and her heels braced far apart, wiping her nose and embroidering red diamonds and borders on white cloth on her black vest with yellow lightning borders which had consanguinity with the red and blue and pink stars on the black sleeves; and so many tiny triangles of color within color; and piglets went all around, chasing chickens; her long black hair fell down to her back.

  We saw a pile of dusty pumpkins, pale like apples of dust; we saw a sleeping platform with mosquitoes everywhere. There was dusty sun in the windows. That was his house; that was the dark house.

  I wondered: Can a ghost wear a straw hat? Can a ghost smoke a pipe of sugarcane?

  In that dark house there was a long wide place, all ash. Baskets and stone lived on the mats. On the wall, a white paper with V-shaped perforations forming a cross.

  It's god of Hmong, said D. This ghost. You put table under it and then chicken.

  Ask him if the ghost will warn him when it's time for him to die.

  He says yes. He say put special something in bamboo in meat legbone to understand his destiny. Then ghost come.

  How many ghosts are here now?

  Million million.

  And what do they say?

  The driver came closer, smiled in the thick jacket, looked sadly and searchingly into D.'s eye as she leaned toward him while a fat pullet waddled between them. I stared at a sandy-colored cat licking itself and stretching in the sand. He uttered something with great effort. D. translated: He say, ghosts speak everybody die, die like plant, like grass, like leaf. So soon we die. Ghost say we warn you because we want you afraid. If always afraid for ghost, ghost very happy. Because ghost very jealous already die. Ghost speak like bell, ring ring ring! Because then you can be afraid. If afraid, you same same ghost. Very funny, eh?

  EDDY

  Mahebourg, Mauritius (1993)

  * * *

  Mahebourg, Mauritius (1993)

  A man's brown knees flexed steadily above the sea, and then they vanished. He pulled his shirt high above his underpants. His waist vanished. He continued on past three rowboats and began to emerge again. A name waited to be born from his mouth. The ocean was astonishingly hot, shallow and bright in that place behind reefs, and the other fishermen who were rooted in it gleamed and sparkled with this liquid light which now peeled so evenly from his legs as he approached a sandy islet where there was no imperfection. His waist came back to air, then his knees, and finally the very bottoms of his feet shone as he lifted them, walking across the islet to a man in a pink-orange shirt who stood casting in time with the cadence of my sleep
y eyelashes as I sat in a shady tree, my tree-leaves green and cool and bobbing like breasts. The man began to laugh with happiness when he reached the one in the pink-orange shirt. He shouted: Eddy!

  Eddy, his sack filled with small fish, presently waded back into the hot green morning of yawning puppies where a dingy called Venus lay upturned beside a wall on which a schoolgirl had written MON AMOUR. Another fisherman rode by on his bike, his plastic bag full of minnows; he smiled and called out: Eddy!

  Inside the Chinese dry goods store the men shook hands salutl, their faces proudly raised. They cried: Eddy! They sat back down on upended crates, smoking cigarettes, looking out the bright doorway at dark girls in yellow sundresses who rushed past under parasols. The boy with the naked silver mermaid on his jacket smiled dreamily, and Eddy laughed and cuffed him.