William Vollmann - The Atlas

It began to rain, so he returned to the room and slept for an hour. At six-o'-clock he went down without hope or enthusiasm. He flip-flopped his rubber-sandalled way through the hot ankle-deep street-ponds, looking for a place to eat. He wasn't hungry and hadn't been for days. He saw a sign that said CAFE and went inside but it was only a bar with a brand-new bank of slot machines. Crossing the street, he encountered a restaurant whose long tables were covered by stained white cloths. New money proudly illuminated glass cabinets of beer and soda. Outside the double glass doors, motorcycles rolled in magical silence across the silvery black wetness, and neon string wriggled. For a moment those activities seemed almost meaningful and he remembered some place of lights and hot exciting rain where he had been alive; at the same moment he experienced a passionate flush of hope and belief and then that died.

Two young waitresses stood behind him, watching. At last he pulled out Vanna's photograph. There she was in the hotel that didn't exist anymore, sitting in that teakwood chair in her starchy gauzy disco dress of rainbow colors. He loved her sadly but without shame.

Madame? said one.

He nodded.

Madame you? said the other incredulously.

Sure. Why not?

They looked at the picture, then at him, then burst out giggling.

The restaurant was replete with music and empty chairs. The songs were sung by a Cambodian woman with a shrill yet very beautiful voice whose turned vowels reminded him of a harpsichord's metallic loneliness. The chairs were all pulled back a little as if skinny ghosts were sitting in them. He felt a longing for death which passed as quickly as the earlier gush of joy. Outside, a white UNTAC pickup went by, possibly to a nightclub. A very dark truck passed in the opposite direction, heaped with hideous earth like the cargo of another mass grave.

The lady behind the bar wore a night-blue dress and a long golden necklace. She was older than Vanna, but no one laughed at her. She opened a plastic bag of cashews and poured it out onto two saucers for the waiter to take away. When he had gone, she slipped a single nut happily between her teeth.

The singer sang: Ah, la, la, la.

It would be seven soon. He felt very nervous.

The Lido was completely empty and dark. He went upstairs. Dounia was not there. The second floor was half as huge as a city block. Its windows looked out on the street. Mirrors, neon-strings, glowing beer signs, mirror-pillars, loud music and the whirling disco ball — these things just made him more alone, because no one was there. He swam the expanse of dark tables, avoiding the light which whirled meaninglessly on the dark and empty dance floor. It was almost terrifying. So empty and huge! After awhile he saw a man sitting alone in a corner. The man looked at him, got up, and left.

Nobody, nobody. Nothing but heat and darkness with a dead voice singing. He rose and redescended those red-carpeted stairs to wade again in the streetpools that little boys pissed in, and he stood in the rain waiting for Dounia among the motorcycle drivers and their neutral headlights. She did not come. It was half-past seven, and he was desperately afraid that his wife might come to the table of rendezvous at the floating restaurant, find him not there, and go with another man. He would not wait anymore.

A cyclo driver took him down that quietly puddled street, past the silhouette of a woman walking and the pale form of two strolling men. They made a left down a wide boulevard of fences, walls and monolithic buildings with black windows. He thought that maybe the Ministry of Foreign Affairs used to be here. Trees overhung a ragged black river in each gutter; over a driveway one incandescent bulb blinked crazily. Mosquitoes bit his feet. They passed a glowing sign that said NO PROBLEM; ahead, a faded banner in Khmer overryjng the street. Trees squiggled down like multivulvaed mushroom caps. The night was cool.

The cyclo driver had lost his way. He pedaled him into new darkness lit in lightning-flashes by the occasional barfront. They paralleled a long wall with high dim ornaments, and he remembered that this was the Palace. At each corner a sentry stood in the dark with a rifle over his shoulder. They passed a park of many frogs and then joined a lighted road with two-storey villas glowing and billboards and almost shut gratings and people leaning from balconies as he remembered. Now in the night many changes had come undone, so he began to hope again that he'd find his wife and that she'd be as she'd been. The light and music did not bother him anymore. Behind a hill of garbage a beggar-woman was squatting. Darkness hissed and sparkled from between her thighs. Reddish cans of motor oil gleamed almost comfortingly in a window. Then they made the last turn, and he saw the long low spiral of lights at the river's edge. Dounia waited there.

She sat beside him among the other jades and sylphids, saying: friend; not smiling in her spiral-frosted dress and gleaming gold necklace and watch. The narrow eyebrows he remembered from Cambodia, these dense inverted U's. High heels clicked on the squeaking boards. White teeth cracked nuts. Earrings and hair darknesses and tight bras lived around him; wide belts shone with silver. Girls wearing butterfly barrettes sat at the white-clothed tables, waiting.

Then a woman came whom he was sure he'd never seen before. Young, beautiful, full-figured, she hopped on his lap with a cry of joy. Later he'd think that now he knew how the prince in a fairytale felt when his enchanted wife became someone else. He simply could not believe that it was she. She was talking to him with hisses and ahs and ais, laughing with sparkling eyes to find him come back to her, and he could not believe in her. She was getting humiliated now; she thought he didn't love her. She went and sat quietly on the other seat, not looking at him anymore. He gazed out at the bonnets and polka-dotted butterfly-shaped ribbons and the girls in quilcy dresses walking with their hands on their hips.

Vanna? he said to her.

She nodded.

The other woman took the photograph out of his hands, pointed to it, to her, nodded.

OK, he said, defeated. You can be her.

He got two motorcycles and took Dounia and this new, false Vanna to the hotel. He hired one of the clerks to come upstairs and interpret for him. He asked her some questions that only Vanna could know the answers to, and she knew all the answers. The clerk said: She want to tell you, sir, before, when you with her, she very sick, very skinny! Now in health again!

He believed.

He thanked the clerk and Dounia and paid them both off. Then he sat alone with his wife and he put his arm around her, but she sat unmoving and he wondered how much his unbelief had hurt her.

Vanna's nipples were long and thin as he remembered; they were the beautiful rusty bloody color that he remembered (Cambodian rubies tend to the brownish). Her urine was a robust color because she was menstruating. He could smell it on her breath and in her sweat. Her skin was neither warm nor cold. She lay so still, barely breathing, the sheet rising and falling over her breasts, her dark hair on the pillow. She had the same slender fingers he remembered.

She kept tweaking his nose, gently pinching him as he made love to her.

He gazed into that oval deeply beautiful face with the arched eyebrows and red red lips, and he knew it at last. He believed, he believed!

She was very anxious and resdess all night. Later he found out from the hotel maid that she'd been expecting him to take her away with him on the airplane in the morning. He would have if he could; but she'd never written to him; she'd told the maid she'd lost his address… So he had no ticket. Maybe she didn't love him. How could he have known he'd find her?