The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  If you don't like me, it's OK, he said. I'll give you some money for the hotel and then go away. Yes or no?

  I don't know, she wrote on a piece of paper.

  Reepah, I love you.

  Same here, she wrote.

  Reepah, I want you happy. I want everything for you.

  I like Montréal. I am sad I don't have money.

  Don't be sad. I don't have much money but I'll give you a little bit.

  I want some beer, please.

  In our room at the hotel, he said, not wanting to have to get her at the police station.

  Way not read now? I am sick. I am tired.

  They went walking late after midnight down to Chinatown and then back up the hill to Sherbrooke Street and she cried: Wow! Look at those lights! Just like good orange Inukjuak berries!

  That was about the only time she sounded happy over anything but beer. He had wanted to give her something good and she had wanted to come there, but nothing that came from him could reach her, not even Montréal's streets, which were a guitar of light.

  Inukjuak, Québec, Canada (1990)

  Thirty or forty feet high, and therefore up in the clouds, a small lake had been set in rock by God. The rapids from this made a foamy white fall as soft and pure as caribou hair. Crowberries, grasses and lichens grew on and between the rock shapes around the pool, so that the grayness of the place was softened by green, red and yellow. A cool wind blew away some of the clouds like smoke, leaving zones of blue as sweet as anything in Italy. It seemed here above the bog of caribou skulls (the place so lovely with grass-antlers nodding even on foam-sprayed rock) that the foreverness of the Barren Lands was something lovely like the eternal echo of a bell—something secret, too, like whatever sensibility she had—her consciousness or integrity, both of which were either eroding or else withdrawing from his like those shrinking clouds.

  In the lake itself, just where the falls commenced, rose a low rock-island, faceless like an irregular crystal (in other words, shaped just like any other rock-mass hereabouts), and it was close enough to the bank that a strong man might be able to leap onto it. He was not a strong man but he wasn't weak, either. On that day when he had walked away from Reepah's house because they loved each other in a sad and terrible way that made her steal his blue pills until she passed out snoring while the baby cried and shat on the floor, he proposed a contest with himself to see if he could reach that rock with a running lunge—the loser being by definition he who missed, and was therefore whirled down the rapids. He landed on the rock, had no sensation of winning, paced awhile, turned, jumped back, and missed, of course. For an instant, just before the cold water got him, he saw Reepah's face shining as if in darkness, watching him with hurt black eyes, her lips slightly parted as if she were about to scream in pain and terror. Then the falls had him, and every stone he grabbed slipped out of his hands, and he was thumped and choked and chilled and bruised all the way down. It was a warm and windy day, so when he got out he didn't shiver much. He walked back to Reepah's house, squish-squish-squish . . .

  Montréal, Québec, Canada (1993)

  Reepah?

  Reepah, why did you come to Montréal with me?

  I don't know.

  Reepah, today you don't talk to me. So I get afraid you don't like me.

  I want drunk.

  You don't like me. You only like drunk.

  She was clapping all by herself on the balcony, smiling and nodding and in the street below her people were beginning to jump up and down in the happiness that the music gave them and the musicians were stamping their feet and dry ice smoked in all colors from the stage and the musicians whirled their arms and everyone went: Aaaaaah!

  Aah, whispered Reepah on the balcony, not looking at him.

  The next morning she slept until checkout time, and when he woke her up so that he wouldn't have to pay for another day she cried: Aaah! Doan' wake up me! I'm hot. I doan' like you.

  Eureka Sound, Ellesmere Island, Northwest

  Territories, Canada (1988)

  Before he ever met Reepah he'd been farther north at summer's end where the ripples in the leads flowed like chevrons, like herringbones. At the edge of a gray ice-islet, slush crumbled steadily into the water with a hissing noise.

  In the evening there was a pencil-thick line of clear sky across the fjord, and he could see the white streak of ice in the middle and the white and brown land to the south, amputated miraculously flat and even by the fog-knife, and a steady steam noise came from the weather station, the buildings and petrol towers standing silhouetted in the fog like a great city. A streetlight glowed in front of the dome of the H building, and other lights glowed behind it—as his joy would do in Inukjuak when she held him sleeping in the tent with the baby between them; when she actually loved and trusted him. A truck rolled across the red and blue pontoon bridge. It was the Inuk handyman again taking him and many friendly soldiers to the dump to feed slops to the wolves, but there was only one fox and one seagull and the soldiers stood with their cameras dangling in disappointment. They were scheduled to fly to Alert on the thirteenth and back to Ottawa on the fifteenth. They worried about the pastries, wishing that they could lose twenty pounds. (Shivering in his tent, he wished that he could gain twenty pounds. It was very gray in there and he could see his breath and his iron-frozen boots hurt to touch.)

  He was at the end of a long journey, waiting for the supply plane to come and take him home. He'd been far from the soldiers in a country that began with a lake which was a gray mirror the color of the sky, with nothing else but a low ridge-horizon. From this lake he'd walked up the ridge that was very snowy and white and gently treacherous because he could not see the top of it in the fog (although he kept thinking that he could), and half-frozen tussocks burst out of it, half-soft, but crushed hard and slippery so that his feet glided off and fell hard in an ankle-deep snowhole, over and over, every few steps. Reepah never fell when she was sober. A low ridge of cloud circumnavigated him. Pastel-white mountains pulsed in the yellow light. It was 26° F. Half a month later he'd come back and the gray lake was frozen. He'd wanted to drink from it before. It was supper-time, and he was thirsty so he chopped a piece out and melted it on his stove. It tasted like burned desolation. He was lonely but not yet thinking of Reepah because he didn't know her, and he wasn't thinking of the lake in Inukjuak because he hadn't been there; later he'd say to himself: those two lakes were the same. They were one lake, the lake of my wrongdoing. What did I do wrong?

  Montréal, Québec, Canada (1993)

  I love my Reepah.

  I love you, too. I want more beer, please. Thanks for beer. I want boyfriend in Montréal.

  I'm your boyfriend in Montréal.

  I want it.

  Montréal, Québec, Canada (1993)

  The night before she went back home she sat with him on the hotel balcony gazing down into nothing and when he asked her if she liked the parade that was going on below them she worked her lower lip and nodded and that was all; she'd virtually given up speaking. Only in the middle of the night when she woke up drunk would she say anything; usually she'd laugh and say: I want to kill myself. — Why? he'd say. — Because I hate myself. — Why? — I don't know. — Then they had another fight because she wanted him to buy a bottle of vodka for her to take back and he'd said OK but since it was Sunday all the Sociétés des alcools were closed and the grocery stores didn't have it. She didn't understand, and blamed him. He'd bought her a sixpack of beer as a consolation prize but that wasn't good enough anymore although she'd been drinking nothing else the whole time except for ginger ale; every night at about two or three she'd wake him up by tickling him and then demand one beer, one cigarette and one ginger ale; all she'd enjoyed doing was going to more sex clubs, getting drunk and wishing she were beautiful enough to be a stripper, too. No, the sixpack wasn't good enough. She kept saying in that new hard and angry voice: You stupid. You stupid. — For the first time in the yean he'd known her he felt r
age. He opened one of the bottles and poured it down the toilet. — Don't call me stupid anymore, he said.

  You stupid.

  He poured out the second bottle. So it went with the third, the fourth, and the fifth. She looked at the last bottle and her thirsty greed momentarily overmastered her pride, so she said: OK. I'm sorry OK.

  Then a moment later she looked him full in the face and said: You stupid. I hate you.

  He poured the bottle out.

  She took her suitcase and went into that Montréal midnight with the intention of leaving him forever, and he sat in anguish worrying about her because she didn't have any money; she'd come without money and he'd doled it out this time so she couldn't get crazy drunk and cause more trouble; what would happen to her? But she was free; she didn't want him; she had to make her own way. She came back because she'd forgotten something; then she went out again. Through the window he glimpsed her down on Saint-Denis between the giant grinning green plastic monster heads where the music went whirling crazily like a Russian orgy, singing up over the street of those shouting jigging heads from which she had previously curled timidly back; she vanished there now.

  He stood at the window and saw chess-chested kicking girls and bluehaired greenfooted drummers.

  An hour later she came back quietly, her face screwed up by weeping, wearing those same low brownish wrinkles he'd seen in the indigo sea salted with ice. — My friend went away, she explained. He said I can't go with him.

  OK, he said. Let's go to sleep.

  They turned out the light and he rolled tight against the wall to avoid annoying her. She said very softly: Please don't come to the Inukjuak anymore.

  His heart almost exploded. For a moment he could not speak. — I'll go where I want, he said finally.

  Please. Please.

  OK. I won't go to Inukjuak anymore.

  Then she laughed with relief and touched him and made love to him and said she loved him. That was the worst.

  He lay awake thinking how the previous night she'd gotten drunk and said: I want to go to Inukjuak, so I can see my boyfriend in Heaven.

  How did he die?

  From rifle. He killed himself.

  When will you kill yourself?

  When I go to Inukjuak.

  Early the next morning he took her to the airport and the last he saw of her she was walking away, wiping his goodbye kiss off her mouth with the back of her hand, a gesture he recognized from somewhere, although she'd never unkissed him before; then as he went to get his bus he realized that it had been with that same slow forceful-ness that she used to squash mosquitoes against the wall of the tent.

  In Coral Harbour a boy had asked him why Reepah would meet him in Montréal but not in a northern town.

  Maybe the south is more interesting for her because she doesn't live there, he said. Maybe she's ashamed to be seen by other Inuit when she's with a Qaallunaat.*

  Don't worry, the Inuk said kindly. Lots of our girls have ugly boyfriends and we don't mind it. One girl even goes with a man with a wooden leg.

  Later still, walking upon the tundra, he remembered Reepah stepping so easily and confidently from rock to tussock, never wetting her toe in any hidden puddle, never needing to look.

  * White man.

  WHERE ARE YOU TODAY

  Zagreb, Croatia (1992)

  * * *

  Zagreb, Croatia (1992)

  In the reddish-black light of a bar that stank of cigarette smoke, four men sat around a table watching their hands. They had big pale arms. Drunkenness gleamed on their waxy foreheads, and their pale shirts lay open to the chest. They were sweating and grayhaired. The U-shaped shadows across their faces and paunches cheated the checked shadows around their dark eyes that burned like cigarette-ends. Their features were bland and flushed. Their glasses were as empty as falsehoods we tell every night.

  The drunken artist slowly signed his worthless painting. He had the same last name as the best chess player in the world. Slowly he rolled his cigarette between thumb and forefinger and shook it like a baton.

  The drunken zombie said: The time I was dead, dead, dead, it was real medicine. I used medicine that my body couldn't accept. That was the day I died. My heart had the pulse zero. It was only sleep, a very deep sleep like heroin. You see, brothers, I'd spent more than three years in India. That was the time yellow fever was popular. At least eighty percent of the junkies caught yellow fever. But I was playing with fever. It was something like playing poker or one-eyed jack. That's how it was when I was dead.

  The drunken gypsy said: There is no most beautiful. Let's say tomorrow I am free, I am—I don't have to work . . . No! I want brandy! And one beer for all of us, just to water it . . .

  The drunken soldier, the old one in the plaid shirt, was the only one who still had money. He got brandy and one beer for all. He shook his fingers at the others, a glass of brandy in his other hand, brandy on his breath.

  The drunken zombie said: They took my passport in 1978 for making samples of medicine for myself. . .

  Silence! Silence! cried the drunken gypsy. The soldier wishes to sing.

  Bowing, the drunken soldier placed his fingers on the drunken gypsy's arm. Then he began to sing, demonstrating that he almost had teeth. His singing was a series of spitting sounds.

  The drunken artist, the beefy one, squeezed his own biceps and wept as the bikini-girl twitched in the flesh of him. He'd tattooed her into marrying him so long ago that she was faded to the color of old chewing gum. He wept, and whispered: Children, everyone wants my money.

  Take it easy, said the drunken gypsy, who was happy.

  The drunken soldier's cigarette dropped out of his mouth. — I was in Tito's army in '64, he said. I saved all your asses. Without me, you wouldn't be where you are today.

  LAST DAY AT THE BAKERY

  Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)

  * * *

  Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)

  A t two o'clock on a rainy afternoon, a dozen people waited in front of the bakery. Behind the fence, a man in camouflage stood guard. The people were pale and they shivered. The man in camouflage spoke to someone at the inner door and then approached me, never letting go his gun. I was permitted inside. I could feel the stares of the waiting people in my back.

  The name of the director was Mešak Kempl. He was very tired. He said: This bakery has been hit five or six times, and we never stopped for one day. We're still working. But there's been no electricity for the past two weeks, and no diesel, and erratic water. Today for the first time the whole city is without water.

  How many bakeries are there?

  Before the war, there were two. One is now held by the Chetniks. Two or three hundred private bakeries provided half of our bread, but they're mostly not working now. So it's only this bakery that provides bread for the city. Two weeks ago we made one hundred thousand loaves a day. Even that wasn't enough. Now we make fewer than fifty thousand. Our trucks have been shelled at, shot at—every truck has holes in it! We've had two drivers killed and five severely injured in these five months of war. And after tonight, we will be making no more bread. Well, maybe by some miracle we'll get more diesel ...

  I could think of nothing to say. There was a fresh loaf of bread on Kempl's desk, and he smiled and offered me a piece.

  The only thing we have left is the will to work, he said. The people would prefer it if the plane was full of guns and ammunition, not flour.

  He smiled. — We've come to the end, he said.

  What will people eat?

  There's left some pasta and rice. The pasta factory itself hasn't been working for fifteen days.

  He took me into the room that smelled like dough, where two men in white uniforms were straining their arms deep in the mixing bowl because there was not enough diesel to use the electric mixer. — We have only two more bowls' worth left, said Kempl. Then the dough will be finished.

  The room was almost dark, but it was warm. Three lights i
n the entire bank were working. A pretty girl in white was taking loaves of dough off the conveyor belt. Then the fermentation box drew them into darkness, the hygrometer at seventy, rolls and rolls in wheels slowly turning.

  There was an immense space of empty floor where it was dark. This place was like the heart of a dying man, still pumping life, but only in negligible quantities and only for a little longer. The fresh brown loaves, smelling so yeasty and good, slowly rolled off the last conveyor. There were no loaves before them, and none after. Those hot brown loaves spiralled down to the basement like golden squirrels, to be caught by a girl in white who loaded them into cartons.