William Vollmann - The Atlas

How much?

One hundred fifty deutsche marks.*

I don't have that much.

No? No credit card?

No. I'm sorry; I wish I could. I didn't know it was that much. I talked with a girl last night who told me a hundred. .

Nothing?

No.

It includes the price of the room.

I can't.

She stepped back.

I wish I could, he said again.

You know, the blonde from Mannheim explained, the more you pay the more you get.

I'm not surprised.

You want to try?

OK.

Ja?

Sure, I'll try it.

The blonde from Mannheim unlocked the door, and they went up wide stairs. Just past the landing, where it could no longer be seen from the street, a red carpet began. These last stairs pulsated like blood vessels. Inside the salon where the loitering crowds of ladies in lingerie were pinkened by crimson lights, the red carpet thickened into something resembling endometrial lining, and he felt as if the blonde from Mannheim had led him into the womb of a ruby grapefruit. It was very dim and spacious and he walked beside her into this soundlessly cinematic dream of a brothel, a dream he'd had many times before.

She took him into the first room on the right. It had a red carpet, and the double bed had a red bedspread. The casement was open. She closed it and began to undress, which didn't take long. He laid the money down on the table.

I must go pay the rent, she said. Please undress.

He took his clothes off and lay down on the bedspread, which was warm, damp and smelly. After awhile he lifted it up and got beneath it. There was nothing there but a bare mattress covered with crumbs of something like old scabs.

The blonde from Mannheim returned and said: For what you gave me I can do nothing except with my hand.

Can I kiss you?

Never.

He looked at her. Then he got dressed.

The money is gone, you know, said the blonde. You can't get it back.

Why isn't that news? he said, tying his shoes.

You're not angry?

No, never mind, he said.

She followed him to the top of the stairs.

Well, then, goodnight, she said.

Goodnight, he said emptily.

He came back down onto Kürfurstendammstrasse where it was a late September night and a double-decker bus passed among street-lamped trees like a ghost. Greasy squares of sidewalk throbbed with the U-bahn's moling. Two men played a duet on electronic keyboard and xylophone. A crewcut boy in a denim vest sat with a knifeblade between his teeth. A clean straighthaired woman stood inspecting haloes in a jewelry shop; the haloes were watches. A little past eleven, a guard came and drew shutters over that window. Now the haloes were transubstantiated into denizens of the kingdom of squares.

For the purposes of free enterprise there were illuminated glass cubes displaying towels or else white lingerie on black dummies with roses. A blonde leaned against the nearest one, chewing gum alertly.

— You want to go back up with me? she said. I can make you very happy.

Can I kiss you?

No.

Some whores stood intense and still. Others in big boots waved to him with cheery wolf-whistles. He went to three of them and said: I'm sorry I don't have any money left but can I just kiss one of you?

OK, darling, laughed a redhead. I'll kiss you. — She sucked at her gum for awhile, strode up to him, pulled his head toward her and spat in his face.

* In 1992, 150 DM was about U.S. $94.

I speakee you good! I speakee you no problem! I sleep under you hotel? But afterward she drew her hand across her forehead, wiping the sweat of amazed disgust.

Once she had put her clothes on, she raised again her lovingness, like a man lifting an immense load of green bananas onto his head, and whispered: No problem. I likee you! No problem! I likee you! I speakee Mama come back here six-o'-clock morning.

She got dressed in the dark, whispering again and again to him in pidgin her lies of reassurance. Then she asked for money for the taxi. He gave her thirty thousand,* which was the rate for a full night of that work, and she kissed him on the lips and went out. He had already forgotten her face, but there stayed with him the delicious feel of her hair, which she had braided with fibers from some plant so that it felt like hempen rope intermixed with velvet, and he remembered the sugary taste of her nipple and the salty taste of her vulva, the energy of her blood when she first approached him; in an instant she'd been writhing and begging on his lap in the disco while she pierced his mouth with her long wet tongue, and he remembered how as soon as he'd entered her all that had paled to patience, but most of all he remembered the rich smell of her, a smell of roast coffee, chocolate, shit, soap and fresh sweat, a smell which had repulsed him slighdy at first but which he grew to love faithfully in the course of that hour because of its strength: he trusted her fleshly richness.

But she never came back.

He'd known that she wouldn't, but waited just the same, unable to sleep in the sweltering room of rainforest planks whose knotholes let the mosquitoes in, and outside he heard music and dancing and laughing because it was New Year's Eve, so he could not sleep, and finally he went out to see if he could join them but they'd gone into closed houses; and as he stood taking this in, a chalky dog loomed out of the dirt's darkness and he went back upstairs to his room where he sat smelling the stink of his sweat and waiting for the night to be eaten like so many others and listening to the mosquitoes around his head.

Her smell stayed on him — at first a mere pale greenish stalk, but then when for loneliness he pressed his face in the pillow where her head had lain it expanded like a mango tree's cracked and crumbled bark; it became an orchard of palms whose trunks were thickly sprouting everywhere with ferns.

Weeks later he spied her by daylight, a barefoot woman striding rapidly down the road with an immense basket on her head, her arms easy at her sides. He watched, and she didn't see him. And he said to himself: Her cunt is one of those roadside huts in which any can take shade — any of these muddy barefoot men in patched pants! So why won't she shade me? Why won't she shade me?

Then it was night in another town. Night it was, while the two women he'd rented sat over their coffee, and he over fresh white lychee-fruit juice, and his women were swishing flies off their brown arms and laughing, tranquilly scratching insect bites, while motorcycles and pousse-pousses went by and the one who'd made him so lonely went into market across the street, the market which offered pineapples and melons. He could not get away from her, it seemed. He wanted only her. His women chatted. Charlotte sans culottes was always grinning, laughing hoarsely at him and the other woman, slapping her thighs. She'd be a good loser. Tonight, although he'd paid her off, she'd attached herself to him and the other woman like a leech, coming all the way to the Bras d'Or to get him to buy her coffee, but so lazy she wouldn't walk like they did; she had to pay the pousse-pousse both ways. It had been an expensive coffee for her.

He said to Charlotte: Are you lonely?

She laughed until she cried. Then she said: Always.

She laughed again quickly, so that he wouldn't believe her. Then he knew that she was telling the truth.

And you? he said to the other one.

Not with you, my love. — She for her part tried so hard to be sincere that he knew she must be lying.

So they were both lonely! Imagine that — and him, too! All lost and falling!

The whore who'd left him came out of the melon store, licking fruit pulp from around her lips. He stood and blocked her way.