William Vollmann - The Atlas

In a sense the people had a desperate kind of freedom. Nothing was theirs, and so they could never lose it. Their houses could not eat them. Roofed with corrugated metal, those improvised dwellings an arm's length from the hot and sunny tracks swelled full of puppies, chickens and bright laundry. The railroad was like a street walled with cardboard and planks, curving as the tracks curved.

A dirty little boy in galoshes that came up to his knees was laughing. A man approached slowly, carrying baskets of water for his family. Children peered from the rusty stalls between houses. They played on the tracks. Little girls walked brown-legged in skirts. Their clothes were very clean. A beautiful woman with a blouse that shone like metal came running down the tracks. She ran past a house whose walls were made of tires. She ran past the wall of rusty iron where someone had scratched a round and happy face with big breasts. Laundry blew in the wind. The black slits of darkness between trousers and dresses expanded and contracted with the wind. The woman ran from tie to tie with easy grace, not needing to look down anymore. She was coming home. She ran to a house of cardboard where her mother sat in the doorway, smiling to see her come.

A week later the army arrived. When they had finished, the boy in galoshes wept. I want to go home.

Our home is everywhere, the woman comforted him. Don't cry. Come help me and my mother. I'll teach you how to build a house.

Your little skull's a light-globe to help my shadow lead me as you did when I was your brother, older than you but small like you, afraid of the toilet's cool skull-gape at night. You always held my hand. Now please take me down the slippery dark path, down between the crowds of palms to the lava-walled, frond-curtained river of broad and rapid waterfalls. Until now I've scrubbed at the stain of your face on my brain's floor, your sky, your headstone — I never wanted you to come back! But whenever you did (your ghost some ignored dog to raise itself hopefully at every word), I convinced myself that you loved me most, because when I thought of you I thought of you alone. Can't you understand that I'm afraid of you? (You're only caput mortuum .) Now take me to you. (Thus my briefless brevet, blotted, illegally disquisitive, which must be sealed with a crimson spider.)

Under your moldy stone, you radicate where the lava's tapestried with mossy crotches, ferns, leaves (dark and pale) so subdivided into heart-leaflets as to baffle my eyes. Within all this fineness, almost as fine as the humid air, I find something finer still, a spiderweb on whose lattices hang a huge yellowbodied spider, vertical, legs wide and strong, waiting. Closing my screams with phosphorite consolations of words that hiss out like hollow jets of flame, I uncrumble your chamber's riddled copper to reach you lying in the black dirt's guts. I sweep back your hair, breach your skullhelm in the muggish air. From behind your hinges and bismite-yellow pivots the crimson spider scuttles out. He rushes on his sister with a bravery as bitter as camphor, determined to gnaw her as I once effaced you with my exclusionary conceit. But the golden one snaps him up. His legs fib-rillate. A single crimson droplet tumbles from strand to strand, is drunk by my warrant now validated:

They told me to take care because you were littler, but I forgot. Brawny ropes of water captured you. The fishes asked to drink your gurgling breaths. The mud asked to kiss your eyes. The sand asked to fiD your mouth. The weeds asked to sprout inside your ears. Outside the night skull, a tunnel of blue light led you to India. Inside the night skull, your blood became cold brown water.

They said: Where's your sister?

They said: Where's your sister?

When the sea draws away from lava-islands, a thousand rills of white run down, like Grandfather's hair-roots. When the water dribbled out of you as the desperate divers breathed into your mouth, each drop was whitish-blue with the lymph of your death.

That night I had not yet drunk the ginger of sunlight that made my soul walk widdershins: My little sister was dead! No one had liked me, but now everyone would be nice to me because you were dead. I had not yet drunk the perfervid ginger of sunlight because our mother and father came to my bed with the minister to say to my night skull: Julie is dead. Choking, I turned to the wall until they left. Fat white tears rolled like pure light behind bamboo. In the morning my tears became a waterfall partially and temporarily catching itself on ledges. — I heard your sister died, they said. — I nodded with tinsel rectitude. I had the passkey to peachworms. Your death was a great gift you gave me.

Your coffin, that closed vacuole, went bitch-hunting for the blackest dog of all, the black and rotting bitch called earth, whose nipples feed leeches, rats, worms and moles, her ill-assorted blind sucking whelps. — Suck the blackest opium-tinctured drop, said the minister as they lowered you down the ropes.

Immensely long skinny leaves of fear (spider lily, annum asiaticum) grew around my throat every night like thick sad trees over a lava hole where the sea comes sadly in. You rushed as a yellow skeleton into every dream. If I screamed myself awake, you waited until the long skinny leaves of sleep choked me back to you again. You came clacking and scuttling like a yellow spider until I screamed crimson tears. A package arrived from the post office of dreams and you skittered out to punish me. Something smelled bad in my closet and everyone knew that you were rotting there. I walked a hotly endless course of graves that suddenly whirled like marble trap doors beneath my feet to pitch me down to black liquescent corpses whose stench screamed through my dreams.

Our parents gave me a toy of yours to totemize you by and told me to keep it forever because you were never coming back. When they were gone, I buried it in the garbage so that it couldn't hurt me with its horrifying screams.

Outside the night skull, you looked for me to hold your hand, but I only screamed.

Sometimes we used to visit your headstone, under which your bones lunged muffled in black dirt. Our mother would cry but I tried not to cry because then you would hear me and get me.

I made your birthday gutter out like wax-light and scumbled the slime-slaked anniversary of your death. I forgot every word you ever said and the sound of your voice and how we played like salamanders, but Mother mothballed your dresses in a cedarwood chest where every year they went smaller and yellower (although I never looked) as your face grew along with mine. Now you're my white witch.

Suppose I'd never done what they never said I did, my execution-eering I mean, would I still have been brazed to ferocity year by year by the memory of your blue face? My blood-writing has quarried you, but I wish that you were still my sister, dancing above the grass.

If the waiting room of a train station is a windblown world, an airport's waiting room subdivides itself more neatly into nations. Gate One was the Hong Kong flight, and in the seats of that country sat ever so many Chinese, some with broad coarse-pored faces like old woks, others delicate and meager, the ladies in flower dresses, smoking cigarettes. At the next gate was the Paris flight, and there sat the white people speaking French. The loudspeaker called them, and they were gone forever like a convoy to Auschwitz.

There was a Chinese with gold tie-clasp, bearing loaves of brown-wrapped boxes, and I asked him how to get to the important place.

We stay here for transit only, he replied.

Boarding closing now at Gate Number Three, the loudspeaker said. Boarding closing now at Gate Number Three.