William Vollmann - The Atlas

As for Vanna's husband, he sat looking across the street-river at the striped awnings of the New Market, knowing that the disco was almost in sight; and his heart suddenly rose.

But he kept believing that this was a spurious double of the city, that the true Phnom Penh, where the disco was in which Vanna had always worked and always would, must be farther east. This was another way of saying that he knew he wouldn't find her.

A cigarette stand girl told him that her business had cost two hundred and fifty dollars to establish. That was how much she made in a month. He had brought five hundred for Vanna; now he was happy; now that sounded like enough.

It began to rain harder. In his camouflage raincoat, he saluted and greeted all as he had done two years before on that armored personnel carrier in Battambang; they smiled as before, but as far as his heart was concerned he might as well have been inside one of those blocks of ice. He was not exactly sad or lonely. He was simply a marionette pulled by strings of resignation.

As he splashed in his sandals through the calf-deep streets into which squatting children pissed, he saw that there were new lights, sometimes even neon, trembling jellies of light that lay on the black night he sank his legs into, that night between steely grayish walls and shut windows, that liquid night of dark crowds walking slowly, some bearing lighted cigarettes like torches, that night of glowing trucks splashing; and he came to a man. He and the man had never seen each other before. He said to the man: Je cherche ma femme.

The man looked at Vanna's photograph. Then he said: Je demanderai si ma femme la connaît.

Non, he said a moment later, with the young wife peeping out through the open door. Pourquoi vous cherchez cette femme?

Parce qu'elle est ma femme.

Je comprends. Mais pourquoi vous la cherchez?

Merci , said Vanna's husband, suddenly exhausted.

He went another block and came to where the disco was, and it was not there.

Maybe I made a mistake, he thought. He went up and down the next two streets on either side, soaked to the knees.

No, he said to himself, it's not there.

Three blocks from where it had been he found an absurd new whorehouse shaped like a wicker beehive. The motorcycle drivers at the entrance stood silently aside. He opened the door and went in.

The ceiling was an immense wheel whose infinitely packed bamboo spokes recalled for him the density theorem of numbers. The circular bar had a circular island with bottles on it and ashtrays crammed with cigarette butts. That was where he sat. UNTAC soldier-boys were playing pool beneath the tigerskin-hung walls. The jukebox sang "You Ain't Nothin' But A Hound Dog." There were tall girls in bathing suits moving about. They did not look Cambodian at all. He said hello in Khmer to the barmaid and she did not understand.

Where are you from? he said.

I am Filipina. Me, her, all from Philippines. Manila.

How long have you been here?

Two weeks. All girls very news. This bar very new.

He pulled out the photograph, which now had a water-spot on the corner. — I'm looking for my wife, he said. Have you seen this person?

She called the other girls, and the soldiers looked at him with the neutrality that comes just before anger, because he had stolen their girls, and the women all inspected the photo and said: No. Never seen that one.

He bought a beer to make the barmaid more helpful. She made him pay in dollars; Cambodian money was no good there. He asked her where he should go next and she told him the Martini. — Many Kampuchean girls there, she said.

If I paid you, would you take me there? he said.

We are not allowed to go out, the girl said carefully. Not ever.

Oh, that's a great job you have, then, he said wearily. He wanted to crush the world under his heel.

Have a good night, Ernie, a soldier said, and he saw another soldier walking beside a girl, going into the back. No, the girl was right. Only the soldiers went in and out. There were no Cambodians in this place at all. He was the only one who wasn't either a soldier or a whore; he was both.

Three dollars for the beer. He left a twenty on the bar and went out. He heard a seashell's silence behind him.

Girl good? Girl number one? laughed the motorcycle drivers in the rain.

He took out Vanna's picture. — This is my wife, he said. Which of you will take me to my wife?

A raindrop fell on Vanna's mouth.

The motorcycle stalled in deep water. He and the driver knee-waded between bamboo fences which leaned in darkness, pushing the motorcycle down a prison-like corridor of bamboo in which giant rats swam. The driver cleared the engine. — Quickly, quickly! he cried. — They yawed back into the night. Occasionally motorcycles of other dreams passed like lonely motorboats. This street was a dark lake whose window-shores very rarely shone.

They came to the Lido now, and at first when he saw the sign he thought: Yes, must be the place because it was about here that that hot low dark disco used to be. But as soon as the motorcycle driver began to slow down he saw a doorway with crimson-carpeted stairs and he knew that it was not the place. He took out the photograph, now somewhat more spotted with rain, and held it out to the woman who stood there, but she brushed it aside impatiently. The next woman took it for a moment and shook her head. — No use, said the driver, who was actually a very good person, but Vanna's husband waited until some more girls came out; they shook their heads and sent him away. It was a mark of their business sense that they did not try to entice him into spending money on a drink or on them, locum tenens ; seeing the photograph, they seemed to calculate that he would not be worth their effort to persuade, and they were right. So they sent him on his way. At the Pussy Doll, the Savoy and the Tilden it was the same.

Hee, hee, hee! laughed the cyclo men in raincoats when they heard that he wanted to marry Vanna. One bouncer analyzed his face and pronounced him Japanese. Their opinions of her showed a like sense of the exogamous. They concurred that she was Vietnamese, hence hated, enemy. When he told them that she was Cambodian, they said: Ah, very good! but he could tell they didn't believe him.

Old! Ugly! Vietnamese! the whores laughed over that sad and skinny image of his wife in the straightbacked chair in the hotel that didn't have straightbacked chain anymore. Whaiiiieeeeeee?

Because I love her, he said.

Does you loves her? For all night? Hee, hee, hee!

Seeing the photograph they usually yelled for him to go away. They looked him up and down, peering over each other's shoulders, and laughed, not always derisively. In only one bar did the girls crowd around him, looking into his face with something like hope that if he could fall in love and marry a whore, then maybe somebody might marry them someday, too.

From among the sneering girls came a girl whose name was also Vanna. Snatching up the true Vanna's photograph, she stared at it and then shrieked in disgust.

At the Regent he entered through the gate and then crossed a grand courtyard to the steps which led to this temple of flesh where women stood, and as he ascended in his rolled-up sodden trousers they jeered. The motorcycle driver nudged him; he passed Vanna around. .

Yes, the motorcycle driver said. They have ever seen her. Ever? They have or they haven't? They have all seen her before. When? When?

I don't know. They have never seen her.