William Vollmann - The Atlas

The man came in quietly. — Hello, sir, he said.

Very pleased to meet you, Doctor, he said.

No problem, replied the man after awhile. I am her brother.

He wasn't her brother, of course. Pol Pot had killed all her brothers and sisters, along with her parents. But he was himself an orphan and he had also been raised by this weary old woman.

At any rate, what she'd said about his shaving made him smile. Later he realized that maybe this was her way of offering to shave him once more. He no longer possessed the Happiness double-bladed razor because one day when he was travelling his suitcase had burst open and the metal box flew out, opened, and scattered parts far under the conveyor belt of his life's airport. Certainly she spoonfed him with rice with her own hands at her stepmother's house that day. It was all so confusing. So why hadn't she come?

He went into the hotel finally and the maid who now was always busy said: I'm sorry I forgot to tell you your wife came yesterday afternoon and waited for you a very long time, maybe more than one hour.

What did she say?

She was afraid maybe you were angry with her.

No, I'm not angry. What did she say?

She said maybe at night very very busy in restaurant.

You think she meant the good busy or the bad busy? he said.

I don't know. I'm very sorry, she replied, her face filled with pity.

He said nothing.

Have you been to the restaurant? she said.

No, he said. I don't want to see.

The next morning the phone had not rung, and so he went out to get fried rice and two orange juices for his breakfast. The swarm of cyclo and motorcycle drivers that always rushed to meet him shouted: Does you forget her?

Never, he said.

Among them was one who closely observed him and his, affairs; this man slept in his cyclo facing the hotel, opening his eyes whenever anyone passed in or out. On that third morning without Vanna the cyclo driver smiled evilly and said: And last night you sleep your wife?

The other thrill-chasers drew in breath and listened.

It gave him particular pleasure to look the man in the face and reply: Of course. My wife is with me every night. She always has been and always will be. She's my wife.

Later she came back to him, that day or another day; he didn't remember anymore, and why should it matter? When he came into the lobby and saw her sitting tensely with another girl awaiting him he knew that none of it had been her fault, that the misunderstandings would never stop, that he would never ever stay with her, that he loved her violently (he was very ill now with the same headaches and fevers that she had), and he took her so gently upstairs and kissed her. There was another night when he had to bring the desk clerk up to interpret again and the man said:

Please, sir, she say to you: She afraid for old age have no house. She say please buy for her a nice house. She afraid now go your country, better she stay here.

How much would that be?

Forty pieces of gold.

And how much is forty pieces of gold in dollars these days?

Seventeen dollar, sir. No. Forty-two. No. One thousand fifteen dollar. No. One eight seven hundred.

Oh. I knew that all along.

He was extremely sick now and could barely stand. The only other thing that he later remembered was that the next time his wife disappeared he'd gone to a house of Vietnamese prostitutes to get shaved, wanting to imagine that she was shaving him like that first time, so of course he did not even get a woman but instead was presented to a very stern man who wielded an immense straight razor and suddenly he knew that the man was going to cut him. The man was almost finished now. The razor had rasped over his lip and across his naked sweating throat. The man was shaving his cheek now and he gazed into the man's face and the man smiled unpleasantly and by reflex he began to smile back and at once the razor sank deeply into his cheek.

On a melancholy night in the hills, my companion's stove sputtered and extruded wiggling yellow flames from behind the weeds. The moon was the only happy thing; and it was out of reach, above a slanting black ridge. Another ridge slanted the opposite way to meet the first in a V. This second ridge had been tinted greenish-gray by the moon in demarcation of its separateness. Whereas the first ridge could not be construed as anything but a silhouetted phantasm, the second ridge was as evil as doom. My companion did not see or know this, nor did I tell him, even when the ridge began to unlock itself: what would have been the use? Along its shoulder and down its front, black tree-balls waited out the night. I am generally fond of trees on account of their gentle unconsciousness, but these I feared. They squatted there with a purpose, as if they might be demons lurking with their heads on their knees, perhaps planning to inch down the hill come moonset, and get me. Either they would not harm my companion or else his fate was immutable, because he could not see them, so there continued to be no reason to speak out. Evil black cabins, gutted and stinking, hid like turds among the tall wet grass by the creek, or proclaimed their wickedness on the rock piles. Inside them, everything had been ripped from the walls. They were dark, and they stank. They were horrible. The walls had been cut with hatchets and blown out with shotguns. The windows were smashed, the stovepipes ripped out, and the thresholds piled with plaster. Every fixture had been gutted. The floorboards were stained with deer blood where lazy hunters had drained their kills. Flies had come and gone, but there was still a stale sweetish smell.

Years since, some other boys and I had come here by horseback. I remember how the creek looped through a rockwalled meadow; my buckskin dipped his head to drink, and suddenly we all saw the cabins standing tall and lonely. The canyon appeared to end behind them, although it didn't; only life and meaning ended here. Several structures were ruinous even then, whole walls' worth of planks having been prised off for fenceposts or firewood; but I'd choose to call them melancholy, not evil — strange stages for a theater of lizards, snakes and jackrabbits. Lupines and mariposas grew at the edges of those wooden caves, thriving in the shade of overhanging roofs; and the sun projected straight-arrow rays and trapezoids across the darknesses of back walls. Had I been a young child I might have liked to gather quartz crystals from the hills and lay them out in rows upon those floors strewn with lumber and scraps of tarpaper; I might have tried to make them intercept those long spears of light. But the resultant streams of prismatic color mean little to me now. I see in black and white. — These cabins, once used by cowboys and linemen, were older than the century. A half-crazed recluse built the first shack back in the days before White Mountain City went from one tent to half a hundred tents to a ghost town. In those days you borrowed freely, and then repaid with interest. Even in my time the cabins were a little like that. I'd slept in them half a dozen times; the windows had no glass, and the bedsteads had no mattresses, being now mere high flat platforms of solid wood, more comfortable than the mosquito-ridden grass by the stream. I remember how the bare floors were shiny and golden with desert sunlight; and at night sleep always came quickly so that the cold dewy dawn surprised me like a glimpse of my horse's head through the window. I'd borrowed an old silver spoon from one cabin for a summer, and when my horse took me back there, I left it on the old lace doily and added a cheap pocket-knife because that seemed like the thing to do. The next time I rode that way, the knife and spoon were still there, and somebody had left a fork, too; missing one tine, but still a fork; someone had thought and cared. What next? As the mathematician C. H. Hinton wrote:. . we are accustomed to find in nature infinite series, and do not feel obliged to pass on to a belief in the ultimate limits to which they seem to point. I guess he was right. Now the fork and knife and spoon were gone, and the bedsteads were smashed as if by idiots at war. Now they were dead houses. Therefore they were evil houses.