William Vollmann - The Atlas

My companion soon fell asleep and snored loudly. I sat watching the evil houses and the evil trees.

The next morning we continued into the high country, where everything had a grayish tinge — grayish-green bushes, grayish-red rocks — and everything was hot and prickly: thorns, prickly pears, nettles, and thistles. Sitting up among the pyrites, you could listen to the creek talking to itself, the faint hiss of the grass-pennants in the wind, the hums of flies and the discussions of birds where the shale spires and saddles were fractured into vertical planes seamed with quartz granite. Some of the rocks were embedded with minerals that glittered like stars. Others had been traced with concentric rings, as if they were trees. They were all hot to the touch an hour after sunup. Outside of houses, we're easily influenced, it seems. I have often seen patches of lichen on Arctic stones, forming a schematic of planetary orbits around the sun. Here, even the lichen — bright orange, bright yellow — hid from the sun in rocky fissures. I wanted to hide, too, but not from the sun. Of course it would be useless. Those houses would see me as soon as I'd clambered down to the creek to drink. Their windows saw a long way.

My companion said: I hope my house is all right. I didn't lock the back door.

All at once I, who had no home, understood why the cabins at Roberts Camp had not assaulted his brain. His own house was evil and had already eaten him. .

The Angel of Forgetting wanted to be the kindest angel. She went down to the roofless open places, the lacunae walled with diamond-angled brick. She came into the old house and began to unbuild it. The little boy said: I lived here in the old centuries. I lived in this house.

Around the edges of that squarish pit of ruins, graying apartments whose balconies fluttered with trapped white laundry rose from beards of ivy, and the sounds of auto horns floated down. A living child cried, and his anguish sifted down.

Did you hear that? said the Angel of Forgetting. — Ah, that pretty little bird!

Letting down her hair with a windrushing sound, the Angel of Forgetting overflew continents of surviving plaster. She strode the pillared yard of palms, click-heeled corridors roofed only with marbled sky. The little boy walked behind her, whimpering. Grass and weeds grew atop the jagged wall-ends.

In the room of gravel and moss, the Angel of Forgetting knocked down walls to let wind and birds in. She was being kind.

The little boy said: Don't you know me?

The Angel of Forgetting smelled a memory somewhere, like a pattern of a few dozen tiles. Sniffing, she raised her arms, swam the sea of graffiti-waved grayness, marched down narrow streets sunken like dry cobblestoned canals. Some rooms were hollowed out to store water or oil or grain, each opening being an upturned bowl with a ring around its hole, so that the darkness inside widened like a woman's breast. The little boy didn't follow. He stayed in his house.

Ah, ah, she said. Here it is. Here's the heart that needs to bleed!

She'd found the House of the Deer, in whose ultramarine violet sky of tiles golden-brown greyhounds leaped up at fleeing deer. Wreaths of leaves writhed like banners across heaven, and twin peacocks lived above.

She swept her hair across the tiles, and they faded. Slamming her heel down, she made thunder and the walls fell down.

Then she returned to the little boy's house.

The little boy sat looking at her in the pale-tiled rib-roofed chamber of echoes, sitting on his dolphin-tiled floor.

The little boy said: Don't you know me?

The Angel of Forgetting said: I'm not your mother.

The little boy said: I'm the Angel of Death. I lived in this house.

She shrieked, flew up, and ran along the many low ridges of various curvatures which hunched gray and yellow against time. Her wings fell off. She ran under the wall's narrowing archy darkness, that smell of sand in her face; she was sand in the little boy's hourglass.

The little boy, whose cheeks were burned purple by the Angel of Forgetting's death, kept twisting around to look at the woman who was getting off the train. He said: Don't you know me?

She replied: I lived in your house.

He said: I'm the Angel of Death. I lived in all the houses.

She said: You can't kill me, because I know you. Besides, I don't believe in angels.

The little boy started crying, but she said: You always do that. That's why I left. I got tired of your crying. Why don't you go kill someone?

Why don't you know me? he sobbed.

I do know you, she said. I died in all the houses. You never killed anybody but me. I'm your mother, and you were born dead.

The little boy stopped crying. He grasped the woman's sleeve. He said: Who built the houses, Mommy?

Your father did. He wants you to come upstairs. He has a new house for you now.

Then she shoved the little boy down, knelt upon his chest and strangled him. He squirmed and choked for a long time before he died.

Did you hear that? said the Angel of Forgetting from upstairs. — Ah, that pretty little bird!

Down in the golden grass near San Diego where houses and new houses terrified me, families lived the California life, saying to one another: If you can't feel it, never mind it. — A black lizard crawled and stopped. He heard what they said, and wanted everything to be true. Like ants on rocks, bees among thorns, flies and then rocks, grass-shadowed rocks, the houses went on forever.

If only I could blow up the aqueduct, I said. Maybe that would stop them.

The lizard crawled and stopped. He heard me before I heard myself.

In the desert I hear the clink of climbing gear or the clink of rock before I hear the sloosh of water in my canteen. I never hear my own voice.

The lizard heard and didn't hear. He heard desert birds talking to each other in long bright monosyllables.

Tomorrow I must die a little for your joy, the lizard said. He didn't hear his own voice.

Every time's a little drier than I remembered, I said. I didn't hear my own voice.

We both heard the slow double-beat of eagle wings.

The eagle saw cacti dead one day, green and blossoming the next. The eagle followed clouds like the branch-widening shadows of trees on narrowing rocks.

The gray dirt is covered with golden flowers, said the eagle. He didn't hear his own voice.

My, voice was a bitter salad of Joshua tree flowers. The lizard's voice was a man's legs warmed by the sun through dark trousers. The eagle's voice was a long day.

Others were building new cities in the east, where life is blue space, where so many beaches and low dry mountains are overhovered by vultures. I heard the cities growing loudly. They grew like the voices on their radios, and cars made noise between them. Forests of houses mingled with palms in the canyons, orange-roofed condos and hotels, everything owned, but green ran through it like revenge. Ivory-nippled mission phalli became erect on palm-starred hillsides, the palms bushy, grainy like phosphor from shooting stars. Houses built themselves with hammering rackets. Garage doors hummed shut. Lawn mowers ate my scream. The lizard crawled under a house and said: You can study something for years and have no conclusions, but that's not to say you've gotten nowhere. — He didn't hear his own voice.

The eagle said: This desert might look green if I fly high enough. — He didn't hear his own voice.

I saw a girl naked outside a house and said: You're too glowing to find meaning in, but I can find meaning around you. — I heard my own voice.

She said: I can't hear you until you kill the lizard under my house.