William Vollmann - The Atlas

For a long time she didn't recognize him. Then she said: OK no problem! I sleep under you one more time, you me two ladies? OK I speakee you good! I likee you very good. .

He said: Why didn't you come back?

She gazed at him without answering. Then suddenly she'd wriggled past him, was running down the street so that the other two whores gaped; almost gone in the darkness, she screeched over her shoulder: I no likee you! I no likee you!

* In 1992, 30,000 Malagasy francs was about U.S. $16.

Every evening was a parade of crowd sounds, honking horns, calls, chantings and whistlings, and yet he never saw any parade. Maybe he needed to look again, persevering like the toilets in Nairobi, which often work best on the second flush; or maybe he was the parade, and everybody else a spectator: the whores on posts with their feet stretched out before them (big smiling whores in blue-jeans and sandals, smiling because they had all the time in the world), the men sitting on switchboxes, the birds rushing like the crowded buses, like the cigarette smoke whirling up from beneath men's top-hats and baseball caps. He obtruded himself upon the Kenyans' attention in just the same way that the diesel-smoke crept along the pavement in swirling melting ridges like blowing snow, flickering across people's shoes and steel shutters and gratings and across the uniformed guards outside the shops. He paraded on. Taxi drivers grinned wide and white, elbows out the window. He went past the yellow honeycomb of Nyakio House whose windows were melted in, and he came to the striped posts around the perimeter of the concrete island by Moonlit Limited where the whores always began to sit in the late afternoon. There was a dark girl at a post, chewing gum, her cheeks bulging out and shining white in the streetlights. He hurried past her and saw another one in a doorway and her eyes made his eyes explode into flames. He went on. The twilight smelled like cigarettes, curry and armpits. Through that continuous grimy roar men rode in open vans, packed like soldiers. Dark men in pale suits and hats sat on a low wall that curled around a dirt parking lot for taxis. — My friend, can you give something to eat? Something small? — They were unlike the beggars in Madagascar, who upon receiving money immediately asked for more. The children, however, were the same — sly, insistent and treacherous. When a grimy waif — boy or girl? — pushed up against him like a calf as he walked, grabbling in his pockets, he felt helpless. — No, he said. — The child snuffled. It worked its snotty fingers deep into his pockets, digging and scratching while it clung, its head against his crotch; he wearily said no and no. Everyone was watching him. They pointed at him in the way that people point in Nairobi, reaching up at the sky. He did not want to hurt the child, and he did not want to be hurt for hurting the child, and he did not want the child to take his money. Finally a man shouted and pushed the creature away.

Outside the National Archives, a crowd began to shout because the police were beating a thief. They shouted: Justice, justice! They were shouting and running. He walked on. A man came with a razor and tried to cut his wristband and he kicked the man hard in the stomach so that the man sat down in the street with a very surprised look on his face, and he went on; that time he ran on. He saw the rainbow Cobra bus with the big snake painted on the side, and on the other side of it the whores were waiting. One of them reminded him of a woman he thought he had seen in the heat of the afternoon: a woman in a loose black dress of ankle length, with a black shawl over her midnight hair, only her eyes white as she moved across the parched dirty sidewalk like living shade; now she was wearing a pink miniskirt and no bra.

At the entrance to the movie theater, a cat emerged and ran under a car. In a doorhole of a moving twilight-colored bus, a dark man's smile screamed white as he banged on the side of the bus. People often walked with their heads flung back. Two security guards came slowly out of the theater, one thoughtfully tapping his truncheon against his palm. The birds were flying faster and faster, and the lights of the bus blinked balefully. A man sat smoking. He appeared to be sucking his thumb. A woman in a blue blouse and a yellow skirt sat with her legs up, cheek on wrist, and when she saw him she opened her legs wider, put her middle finger between them, and gave him a smile. But he would not do that anymore.

A man was roasting khaki-colored corn at the corner. Another man leaned on upraised knee at a post, smoking. Foliage wept from the yellow eyes of streetlights.

A woman in pink curved her flirty neck from behind a mound of garbage. A fat girl in pink, the same one he'd seen the day before, came up and took him by the hand. She said softly: I like 'ee. Less go.

I'm married, he replied as gendy as he could.

Please, we do busy here, she whispered, pointing between his legs. I like 'ee! I like!

Again he refused her, and this time saw her smile's hurt. As she walked slowly backwards to the car against which she had leaned with two slenderer sisters (their hair twirled into delicious snaky ropes), she never took her eyes from him.

He began to walk away, past the staring man who pushed up froggy glasses, and the striding brown-ankled people who watched the potholes and muck-mounds on the sidewalk, and he smiled and waved to her and she waved back, and he knew that she could not possibly be hurt but he knew that she was hurt, and as he turned his face away from her for good the loneliness struck him in the chest so hard he almost groaned.

Faces at lunch, oh, yes, smirking, lordly, bored or weary — here and there a flash of passion, of dreams or loving seriousness; these signs I saw, notwithstanding the sweep of a fork like a Stuka dive-bomber, stabbing down into the cringing salads, carrying them up to the death of unseen teeth between dancing wrinkled cheeks; a breadstick rose in hand, approached the purple lips in a man's dull gray face; an oval darkness opened and shut and the breadstick was half gone! A lady in a red blazer, her face alert, patient and professionally kind like a psychoanalyst's, stuck her fork lovingly into a tomato, smiling across the table at another woman's face; everything she did was gentle, and it was but habit for her to hurt the tomato as little as possible; nonetheless she did not see it. Nodding and shaking her head, she ate and ate, gazing sweetly into the other woman's face. Finally I saw one woman in sunglasses who studied her arugula as she bit it…It disappeared by jagged inches, while across the table, in her husband's lap, the baby watched in dark-eyed astonishment. Her husband crammed an immense collage of sandwich components into his hairy cheeks. He snatched up pommes-frites and they vanished in toto. When the dessert cart came, the starched white shoulders of businessmen continued to flex and shine; the faces gazed at one another over emptiness, maybe happier now that they had eaten, unthinking of what they had wrought.

I hadn't seen her for years, and every time I happened to be in town and got a chance to go to Haight Street, I wondered if she was still alive.

One day I saw her and called out her street name. She didn't come flying to me as she used to do; she was older and a little more tired. But she came; she came. She remembered me right off. — Sure, you're the one I used to con all the time and you'd never get mad!

I remembered a little boy who used to panhandle with her, and whomever's hand I'd put the quarter into, the other's hand would fight to snatch it. — How's your son? I said.