William Vollmann - The Atlas

Descending a mountain of trees whose fat leaves swarmed as thickly as beetles, I felt myself again lost and alone; I staggered feverish among broad-topped trees and narrow grasping claws. I wondered to what extent I too was but an animal. Once on a night plane voyage from Mauritius I'd been stricken with loneliness and let my fingers touch the thigh of the pregnant woman beside me. Her flesh was soft and burning hot through her silken dress of white flowers upon blackness. Her face was young, dark, full. She opened her eyes and silently shook her head. I withdrew my hand, ashamed, tortured by my own nature.

It was, of course, only my self-consciousness which had created the torture. Had I been a true animal, I would simply have ravished her, doing what I had been made to do, like the young brother beside me, who twitched his nose, sniffed and bared his teeth. His dirty fingernails were like long claws. — To him and his elder brother, of course, I must certainly have been a pale white dull-eyed beast, stumbling and sweating, unspeaking, the draft-horse of my destiny among these grand trees with many trunks that grabbled downwards into root-galleries. We were animals together, wading across the streams. In our adjacent prisons of aloneness we bore the touch of wet pale leaf-hands with points, gracious fingers the color of Ceylon tea, fingernails growing downward, piled hand on hand as if for some game; we were patient and unresisting like animals when our raw feet bled.

Now we'd passed both places where my horse had thrown me. We were coming down through fog and pale green trees, wading streams, approaching the smell of woodsmoke amidst high and cool plantains. I was sick — oh, very sick; and my legs threatened not to carry me. Icy droplets of sweat sizzled on the griddle of my forehead, and my feet ached. If you have ever been footsore, I mean really footsore, as if all the cushioning had been squeezed out of your shoes, and when you sit to rest, your feet burn where they touch the ground, as if the world had become a hell of flaming spikes; if you lift them, they swell to aching with weary blood, then you will know how I felt by the ninth hour, clambering up an embankment of spear-shaped plants. The elder brother was not in sight; we'd failed to glimpse him for three hours. He'd taken all the food and water. I looked at the younger brother's muddy blistered feet and asked him: Are you OK?

Never mind, he said.

He possessed the nobility of the animals. He suffered without remark. I myself suffered quietly because I could barely speak.

We came to a plant with a twenty-foot stalk from which gargantuan leaves hung down. The younger brother drew his lips down against his teeth. Sniffing and twitching his nose, he licked the plant's green skin. Then he straightened and continued on his way, never glancing at me. It seemed very natural to me then. He did it because he was an animal and he had the knowledge. I was but a golem with a fever that melted my flesh away and exhausted me to the roots of my eyeballs. Once I dropped my stick. It was a wonder to me how after I'd so painfully dragged it close, the younger brother, seeing my weakness, instantaneously whisked it upright and stood it next to my body for me to take. Yes, he was a superior animal.

When we arrived at the safehouse in Thailand at last, the elder brother was waiting. In my fever the banana trees around me seemed to get bigger and bigger. I was desperately thirsty, and thought that the two brothers must want something to drink, too. There was a refrigerator case full of beer and filtered water and other things. I gestured to them to choose what they wanted. They each picked a bottle of liquid speed and drank it straight down.

I got a taxi-bus to Mae Hong Song and they rode with me. I had told them that they were welcome to stay in the hotel room with D. and me if they wished it. But twenty minutes into the ride they tapped on the window and the bus stopped. We were at a crossroads. One road led south to Mae Hong Song, and the other road led back across the border to Burma. They jumped out, and the last I saw of them they were running at full speed toward the horizon.

Up the snow-choked gorges went tracks of musk-oxen as of foot-dragging skiers. I felt trapped and gloomy. The wind had not come yet. At eleven in the morning the world was blue and white and perfect with hard-snowed clarity — the reification of some extreme ideal. The whole island, vast and by temperate standards almost lifeless, was in effect its own planet, low, blue, white, and brown, the horizon often no more than knee-high, so that heaven was all around. A realm of the Platonic Forms might be thus. I seemed to see nothing but solidified space without a predicate. It was a blank page of all possibilities, not excluding loveliness and terror. Absolute potentiality was a very wearisome thing to any imperfect being (such as myself) which crawled across the gravel flats. By now my companion and I had come a considerable distance from the coast. The Arctic Ocean having vanished from sight, we were left with only a cold and ugly river to follow. Muddy canyons grooved the land with dreariness. But a new force, no less inhuman, was entering the realm. I could feel it and did not know whether to fear it. My companion said nothing.

By eleven-thirty mist had covered the sky, except for a blue-gray line at the horizon. Lenticular clouds rushed at right angles to the ridges.

There was a white plateau (although it was not really a plateau; it was a river-edged valley, but because there was snow on it I could not see any difference between floor and wall anymore), and above the plateau was a thin blue smudge of sky, and above the sky was a white plateau of cloud with its own humps and mounds and appendages; there was nothing else.

A breeze began to deaden my fingers inside the mitts.

How are your gloves holding up? I asked my friend.

Not bad, really. — He was stretching out socks over the gas stove. — There's a couple of dry spots here, he said.

The wind increased.

My friend got into his sleeping bag, unzipped the vestibule door and lit a cigarette. — Kind of a much different day from when we got up, he said. Looks like it must be melting out there. Or it may just be the way the light changed.

An hour later, when the wind began in earnest, the shriekings of it precluded sleep. The tent-poles bent, quivered and lashed, and the tent bulged concave and convex, while snow blew up from the ground and worked itself into shifting patterns of continents between tent and fly, constantly changing and scattering like the harvest of a kaleidoscope. Ice from condensation rattled down on our sleeping bags. Somewhere in the storm could be heard the loud and regular cries of a seagull.

Suddenly I knew that there was something for me in the wind but I did not have the courage to take it. Thus the wind was but the increase of my despair. My heart stumbled into the deep wide ditches of tundra polygons treacherously covered by snow.

In the end I did sleep, and I dreamed. When I awoke, my companion was still sleeping uneasily. Everything was quiet. I unzipped the tent flap. Outside, the country was magically white and clean. The land had been scoured down to brownness in great long tracks across the valley; elsewhere the snow was neatly raked into drifts, mound after mound of them, and the river stones were black and white. A fierce white light hung above the ridges.

I'd dreamed that I walked up a round ridge-mound into a cloud, and the wind got stronger and stronger and threw sleet in my face so that I grinned and ducked my head and climbed so happily; then the wind threw sharp ice-crystals into my face and pushed me; and I staggered but outspread my arms like flapping wings, joking with the wind. Gaining the summit, a wide upturned bowl of snowdrifts and tan pebbles, I turned myself around so that I was looking back the way I had come, with the wind at my back; the wind became mine. I felt the steady eager thrumming of it between my shoulderblades, pressing at my back and legs with unerring force.