William Vollmann - The Atlas

I caught the lizard and said: I'm going to kill you. — He was screaming but I couldn't hear him. I killed him, and the girl and I poisoned his body together. We threw him on the road and watched. The eagle came to eat him and I said: You're going to die. — The eagle couldn't hear me, and 1 knew that and laughed. The eagle rose with the lizard in his beak. Then he screamed and the whole world heard. He fell out of the sky.

The feeling that I had to become something left me then, in that house where she and I always lived naked together. I knew that I was something, and did not feel trapped. Yes, I became something more evil and more good. Now that it is over, I can say that I was happy.

Once we went outside to look for lizards, but found none. We comforted each other, saying: Here we'll always hear flies. We'll always hear wind blowing until our ears ache.

Snow geese ascended from pond and field like leaves returning to the trees. I could hear them crying like Indians. I could see their flickering shadows by the hundreds on the ground. That was in Iowa. The difference between Iowa and Nebraska was more arcane than the shading between silver and rust on a corncrib, but crossing back into Nebraska I saw ever fewer snow geese. Omaha was not the chalice. Outside the city, among the grasses, tawny, red and brown, fields of barley watched the bluffs on the Iowa side, those steep bluffs which commemorated themselves with trees. Pale light, chilly and dusty over the plains, weakened as it crossed the river. Maybe that was why there were no snow geese anymore. Naturally I discovered birdbaths in the backyards (starlings by the dozen), houses window-eyed and door-mouthed like Chalcolithic ossuaries. One house even owned a picture of a snow goose on the wall. That house would have denied that it was jealous or that it worshipped icons. I never saw anyone stop to gaze at the picture, which does not mean that it was without influence. While its situation was not lethal, however, that same pale light declined even further en route to the living room, where there were power tool ads on the TV and blonde cheerleaders yelled prettily.

Like a chicken on a June bug, said the TV. Six-thirty to go in the third. Looks like a pass! Got that little laceration over the eye. Don't wanna put a Band-Aid on it. Facing third. This Ace speed drill looks right to me. Not a cloud in the sky here in Oklahoma.

A cheerleader shot her arm up and did a miniskirted somersault, momentarily displaying something like the underside of a mushroom. She was from Nebraska.

That pass went right through Nebraska, said the TV. Nebraska's gettin' blown away thirty-five to ten. They've beaten the stuffing out of Nebraska. And the fullback today — a hundred seventy-seven yards. Let those guys go back to Lincoln. Let's not rub it in.

In Omaha there were little houses in rows, spreading trees all the way to the malls, the place dusty tan with the blue-green blotches of trees. But in the empty old town, the railroad depot still offered its chessboard floor and waiting benches as finely finished as pianos. You could take a train to New York, although that wasn't as easy as it used to be. At the Bohemian Café, where they sold ceramic bottles of Jim Beam shaped and painted like Czech girls, and the waitresses in traditional dress were themselves shaped like bottles, bearing magnificent quantities of platters on their brawny arms, food travelled to and fro according to the same laws, in a union of love and shame, leaving the restaurant inside people's bellies, rolling past the neon beer-lights of bars in the Czech section, entering the little houses in rows, becoming flesh, then dirt at last, dusty tan dirt under the blue-green blotches of trees. It changed into plants and animals. The blonde cheerleader who'd shot her arm up on TV was made out of Nebraska, but when she came home from the game she'd have atoms of Oklahoma inside her. This I have learned by following the contours of universal law. Those atoms would not receive their due, either from her or from anyone she'd ever meet, but for all of that, they wouldn't go away since doing so would have left them even more emptied of their Oklahoma selfhood than remaining a part of somebody who had once at least paid lip service to the sovereignty of Oklahoma. And so the blonde cheerleader would marry, move to Iowa and die, becoming dirt, then barley, but at that point the suppressed principle of Oklahoma would bust out in an angry taint; she'd be barley that the snow geese wouldn't eat. The end would be autumn, as they say, but the middle was midsummer lying heavy on Omaha on the day that the blonde cheerleader came home to tall light-globes, signs on poles, lines of concrete splitting the grass. Summer besieged Omaha's chilly warehouse-wide supermarkets whose white aisles (mopped and polished continually) could fit six shopping carts abreast; there was a whole lane of nothing but potato chips. Outside, the summer said: I am Omaha. Without my formative activities, humidity could not quarrel with the absolute. You sweating people know it, and that's why you hide from me. That's why you go inside your cold supermarkets to buy red-white-and-blue cheeses with tinsel stars on them for the Fourth of July. Behind the supermarket was the house where the cheerleader lived. I never met her, but I believe that she too had a picture of a snow goose on the wall. From this house the cheerleader's father drove her past all the other houses to the bus station. She was going to Iowa to visit the boy whom she'd marry. Her father thought that she was going to stay with a girl from school. The ticket window was just opening. She stood her guitar on end like a longnecked pear as she finished her root beer. Then she lifted it and made it keep her company to the trash can. She came back to her place in line and played an inaudible melody. Something nickered against the window, and she heard a bird crying like an Indian. It was only a starling. For a minute she wanted to go home; she didn't know why. If she didn't say a word her boyfriend would hardly notice. What he wanted was to see her in her underwear. Maybe this time she'd let him. He and his friends had watched her on TV for the Oklahoma game. They'd said: looky here, and they'd said: a nice batch. She thought she heard the bird crying again. She didn't want to live in Iowa even though she knew that she would. Tonight for him she'd take off her underwear. Tonight she'd take his penis in her mouth. She didn't know that he had a bet about that riding with his friends. His friends said: Just pull her head down. Worst she'll do is slap you. — When she saw him she was scared for a second; she didn't know why. She didn't like his house. He grinned. The pale light was very intense as it came in through his windows. He was cleaning his shotgun. He promised that come Christmastime he'd bag her a goose.

The cardboard house smelled of urine. The door was part of a packing crate curtained with flower-print cloth. Inside, an old sofa and a chair squatted on the rubble. The dresser was the shell of a dead television. The rear wall was the long brick-edge of the factory that all the other cardboard houses embraced. There was sunlight on the bricks.

Next to this house was a mile of others.

Every month or two, the army came to burn these homes. The people watched. Then they came back, because they did not know where else to live. One old man asked the army what they should do, but the army did not know.

Whenever it rained hard enough that the train policemen could not see, the people leaped onto the factory trains to steal cardboard bales. Some of it they used to make houses, and the rest they sold.

(The toilets were also cardboard boxes. When they became filled, the people built others.)