William Vollmann - The Atlas

At once the passengers went rushing down the long air-conditioned hallway with airplanes and jungle mountains painted into every window, and the people were carrying guitars, luminescent duffel bags, and long cardboard tubes, and began moving faster and faster, like ants being pulled into a vacuum cleaner. Evening was coming. The purple-gray clouds raced.

I wanted to reach my sister, I said. She's dead.

For this kind of thing you need to contact the Authority, said the Chinese, the Highest Ministry of the Authority. The Authority, they can try to do something. But you may not be welcome, as you may be aware.

I think she was called to the wrong gate, sir. I think she went to the gate too early.

Ah, this will pose some problems for the Authority.

A Chinese with a shaved head and skinny glasses aimed his cigarette at the man's head. A black-eyed old lady hunched her shoulders. I realized that they were fellow petitioners.

I don't mean to trouble you, I said. It shouldn't cost you much time, because I know where her skeleton is.

The man lifted the cheeks of his yellow face so that his glasses became very vulnerable.

It's never easy, he said benevolently. It's sometimes difficult. You must do something of your own choice. There is a center for this. There is an organization.

I've been to so many organizations, I told him. I've sung at all the graves. But they never answer.

So, vanity is one of those characters of eastern people, Oriental people. But you must make mistakes.

And she never answers me. Except that sometimes when the wind blows I hear something that almost sounds like words—

The man had sat down by now. He ducked his face backward until his eyeglasses became wells of disaster. He began jigging his knees and snapping his fingers. He said: They are speaking some quite old ancient language which is quite strange to the younger generation of Chinese. To be exact, it is half a language, half a dialect. If you are not well trained you cannot catch a word. So it is like half and half.

And you, sir, aren't you yourself connected with the Highest Authority?

Thank you very much, cried the man in alarm. Thank you very much.

Then do I have any chance?

I think the situation will remain more or less the same. By more or less, I mean more or less the same.

And if I behave better or become better in my heart?

That is a range of uncertain territory. It is not easy to be realistic. That is not compatible with the status of your life.

There was a little Chinese girl in a white dress and white shoes who was beckoned by a grinning Indian into the place where they awaited the flight to Bombay. I wondered if she had died, too, or if she really somehow belonged in India.

Maybe I could petition them differently—

It is not a complicated process. It is simply a longterm process.

And what if I just went and dragged her back?

In the first place, if there is a conflict, both sides will keep their small islands. That will not affect the Hong Kong area. But we reserve the right of military use.

After that he would not talk to me any further, perhaps regretting that he had divulged so much, so I went through the Hong Kong gate when the loudspeaker called me. Hong Kong was the next world. As soon as I got into the taxi, the driver said: I think you look for girl. You want girl?

Yes, yes! I cried in excitement. Has she come here?

He showed me a binder comprising color glossies of Chinese prostitutes, each woman smiling beside a shiny red car, each glossy professionally mounted onto ivory cardboard. I looked at every page, but my sister was not there.

No, I said.

I big uncle but you only big boy! You want girl? Look girl! Police a colosatopoli! What! What! Police a close a door! What! Please close a door! You wear low face, I no talk you! I hate you, 'cause Negroes make big problem in your country! You want girl? Look! Photo girl! Many, many! She standing by taxi! Good smile! Look, look, big little boy!

On the night that the photographer and I returned from Burma, we went to Soi Cowboy to pick up whores. Long swaying arms, black breastcups, lights slowly pulsing across the mirrored tiles — these things both excited and refreshed me, but only at first. Something bad might happen. I felt this like a cancer's tenderness in my throat, not yet knowing that I felt it. I thought that I was happy. Breasts rose and fell, thrusting in and out. Ladies slowly raised and lowered their legs, smoothing their briefs down out of buttock-cracks. The girls who were not dancing slipped on their terrycloth robes and served drinks. The photographer ordered a beer and I had a soda-water. The two of us were, as I have said, quite satisfied with ourselves. Last week we'd rescued a child-prostitute from a nightmarish brothel in the south (no matter that she didn't like us); and in Rangoon just now we'd made a contact who could take one or two Burmese girls back home if we could break them loose on the Thai side. We figured that since we were heroes we deserved what heroes get.

As always, I picked the first woman who approached me in the bar. I had not even seen her ascend to that platform ringed by cold black railings around which white men grinned, the altar of bikini'd bottoms, bobbing heads, pale oval faces that blossomed with long cigarettes, long legs, and wriggling black triangles between soft brown thighs, and I did not care. I was simply lonely. I wanted a human being that I could touch.

She said she was twenty-six, but looked ten years older. She was plump and brown, with steel earrings and large black eyes. — Sure, I said. I'll buy you out if you want me to. — That made her very happy. Possibly she could see that I was the type who overpaid. I was being a hero again.

When we got to the hotel room I said: If you want to stay, OK. If you want to go, no problem. You stay, you go, I pay you the same, OK?

I want you make love me, she said. Me no man, nobody, very lonely please.

Afterward I had a dream in which my mother said: You mean you really don't remember the box? and I said no, already terrified, at which my father began to tell me. He said that you had not drowned at all. You had disappeared. After several days they finally thought to look in a large wooden box that I had left in the yard — a coffin, of course, in which you lay rotting. I woke up either screaming or thinking I was screaming.

That was when I realized that everything I had done was for nothing, that no matter how many young girls I saved I could never undo or appease, that my meeting with your ghost could never be friendly because you waited to send my panic dreams whenever you could; and when I died at last, then the true punishment would begin.

The Soi Cowboy woman's eyes were open. She looked at me.

I had a bad dream, I said. My sister is dead. You understand?

She nodded and touched my head. — You hurt here?

I nodded.

All through the next morning the Thai woman shied away, coughing tired garlicky breath and watching me unsmilingly with big eyes. Every few minutes she'd ask: You no good here? gingerly touching my forehead.

No problem, I said to her. My sister is dead, you understand?

She nodded.

So I have bad dreams about her. No problem. Never mind.

But she would not trust me anymore, and so once again, sister, you'd had your revenge as easily and purely as an ander of sunlight slitting a woman's throat on a passing bus.

So I let my shadow lead me down to the stain, even though you wouldn't hold my hand (I was only your symbiont). They say that the Cross with the anchor means salvation, that the olive branch is a symbol of hope. I found those symbols scraped into white shards of marble in the dark tufa walls of Saint Callisto's. I found them in the graves shelved with cool earth. Man-worms bored these caves into the world, some rounded, all so low that my head met the shadow of my head. Looking up into a skylight now very far above, I saw moss around that hole from which I'd been born from within my marble pillar of secretness. I'd dreamed nine months in the crypt of the Popes, their names carved in Greek, all tombs rectangled with darkness; they'd been opened to remove the remains from the danger of the barbarians. But now I'd been born; I'd squirmed down the long narrow hall that was textured with stone like a palate.