William Vollmann - The Atlas

Across the aisle, a man in a T-shirt slept on his wife's shoulder, his breasts and belly jiggling like his massive brown arms, and the water giggled and slapped in the jug at his feet.

There came another stop, where people fanned themselves at flowerclothed tables and tried to sell the passengers Tropicana, corn and bread. And she was still with him, so he didn't need anything; he had bought a bottle of mescal which he shared with the other men and so they all told him that she was the most beautiful woman on the train. At the time he took it as a matter of course; later, after they'd passed the end, he tried to remember what the other women had looked like but he couldn't. In the train of his memory there were men and there was mescal and the men taught him how to sing sentimental songs like "I am the king but there is no queen" and that must have been true because there were never any women but her. The train had not gone away yet. He gazed down those wide dirt streets defined by low white houses with curvy orange-tiled roofs, fenced and treed, and he was so lonely. The fact that she was with him made no difference even though she loved him, even though they still had time; they'd not yet come to the end of the end. He held her hand tight.

Once the air conditioner was fixed, the train went into the blue mountain-walled highlands welling with cumuli whose white fringes caught the light almost like jewelwork.

The rain came down hard enough to hurt, and then the air was fresh and good with clouds still over the mountains and the smell of licorice.

In the place between cars he pulled her shirt up and held it out the window to soak it in cool fresh rain while she laughed. He loved her so much. Her inverted nipples were raspberries.

The train was rolling faster now to crosscut the breeze, past rusty rails and toilet paper, heading southeast toward the cool mountains; swaying up the canted greenish-brown plain that dim gray train crept, almost empty, through the high mountain tunnels. Ahead, the next car's row of ceiling lights could be seen slowly swaying, and a silhouetted passenger dwindled beneath them. They emerged from the tunnel. It had been raining again, and the sky was still gray, with pale orange streaks of evening. The greenshagged wilds were muted in that light, like distant mountains. Granite and then foliage ghosted by, close enough to touch. The train accomplished a perilous trestle and then a man with a medal was smiling, leaning out the window where the open air came in between cars. They descended the steep green ridge-churned villi'd slopes, rode down to the town past blue mountains, and it was dark. Through the blinds he saw the swing of a flashlight far away along the axis of a fence, flaring warmly between trees in the mountain village where they'd stopped. She said to him that it was still only the middle of the end. In the west the sky remained pale like a piece of manila paper. The train began to move again, passing a wall that was boulder-scaled like an immense crocodile, and a few houses flashed dully like skulls behind the trees and then they were out of the village. There was nothing left but dark mountains.

In Guadalajara they changed to a sleeping car. He thought that he would never forget the station's plain of tiles whose particular brown matched that of a smoked cheese; all the families sitting in the long darkstained pews subdivided into prisons by metal handrails; because he said to himself: the next time I am here she won't be with me. — Then they got on the sleeping car.

The warm orange light of the lefthand lamp, the only one on, was reflected on the khaki-painted walls with the globular texture of sweat, its original rectangular shape degraded almost into an oval as he lay sweating against this silent one who lay reading the guidebook with her knees up, her shadow-head growing hideously when she raised her real head to see the map better, and the train increased velocity so that lights like stars flowed by in stripes between the blinds which they'd closed when they were making love. Her bush sweated between her thighs, a wide brown-black wave at the edge of her flat white belly whose navel held a single drop of sweat, and the rectangular lamp outlined the ridge of her nose in gold, and a sickle-shaped goldness adorned her cheek just below her gilded eyelashes. They lay side by side in the narrow and threadbare bed in this narrow room as sturdy as a submarine, built in the U.S.A., with the original English-language instruction plaques still on the fixtures: CEILING, EMERGENCY. In this he took a curious pride. These trains had long since been abandoned by his countrymen in favor of newer and inferior things. For how many years now had the trains continued across Mexico? No doubt they broke down sometimes, but they got well and struggled on through the fleeing decades.

Someone was knocking. He got up and dressed to show the ticket to the conductor. When he was finished she'd turned her head in the other position so that her feet were beside him. She'd turned the righthand light on so that now the khaki paint was much whiter and brighter and there were two reflections in it, one on each side of her magnificent shoulders. She lay on her belly, reading. The hairs between her buttocks made pleasant shadows. They continued eastward, past darkness.

In the morning, the bed back up inside the wall, the two wide red armchairs basked, warming their faded felt in the murky light that also pleased prickly pears, plantations and white horses along the high river. Then they went into a tunnel; and the armchairs and the world were gone. Far away, a cloud-brain brooded atop a broad blue pyramid. That was the end of the end.

He said: I'll never forget.

But she only smiled bitterly and said: If you remember everything, what color was the thirteenth house we saw after Mexicali?

White, he said defiantly. It was white like your underpants. . Then their lives together were over, and they got off the train.

Sunset on the snowy rock-wrinkles haired with pines and spruces trapped him; sunset was as dreary as the evergreens crowded to shade last year's dirty snow. Last year he'd gone this road with her in the morning. They'd left the motel room in Tahoe on a snowy icy dawn whose light spread before them like the rest of their lives; and a man whose wife had left him gave them a ride to the junction. The man could hardly keep his eyes open. He had been driving all night. He was going to drive over the mountains to San Francisco. The lovers were worried about him. They warned him that he might have an accident if he didn't sleep before he went his winding icy road, but they were happy and he was sad so that he could not hear them. When he let them out, they were very glad to be free of him. His sadness had choked them like old snow. (Now the sadness of the one who remembered made him squeeze his fingernails into his palms. Did she ever remember now?) They stood in new snow, kissing. She said that the cold made her legs prickle, so he kissed her legs and then she laughed and said that she was warm. Half an hour later, two ladies who were going on a ski race picked them up and let them ride in the back of the carpeted van among bright clean skis. They let them out at breakfast time where the road made a T, east into California, west into Nevada. The lovers were going to Nevada. They waited for three hours, getting discouraged, and then a boxer came and took them down into the place where the desert day opened up before them like an endless noon.

It was the same time of year as then, but the rivers had not been so swollen that year. He would never see them with her again. This year they were pale and rushing, brown and white-flecked, drowning bushes.

The sun struck peaks with clanging strokes as it sank, dyeing them a lurid orange which made his heart pound with fear and despair.