William Vollmann - The Atlas

The mountains of sadness were left behind. He said to someone, he didn't know who: Please don't ever let me see them again.

Then he went down into the green-gray evening desert.

P haraoh asked Moses news of the former generations, said the teacher, and Moses said: Their names are with my Lord, in a Book. My Lord never errs or forgets.

That book was the atlas. The atlas contained the rain upon her breasts in Mexico. It had cloud maps, kept track of all the water in the world. The atlas contained the browneyed dog in the van, brown-eyed, brownhaired, red, blacklipped, standing with its forelegs on her knees, trying to lick her; and she was laughing and he was laughing and the man who'd picked them up was shaking his head with a smile as they came into the high desert flats just past June Lake with the purple-brown mountains smeared with snow and purple ridges behind where he had kissed her and kissed her, sleet pelting on his camouflage raincoat which he did not wear anymore because it reminded him of her. — The teacher took a stick, dipped it in a pot of thick black ink, and wrote that verse on the long narrow piece of wood which was knobbed at the top like a weird tombstone or a cross-section of a bowling pin. The teacher had the whole Qur'an in his head. For each lesson the little boys would write one day, wash it off the next. Outside the school's walls, brown kids with their long dirty shirt-tails hanging out played games of throwing rocks and running in the shade of roofless buildings past which soldiers' trucks rolled. (Very ancient buildings, a man said. Two hundred years.) Birds flew over the missing roofs. A kid cleaned a dusty piece of canvas with his hands, and a long gray iron-breasted truck with soldiers in it came speeding around the road. Where the road turned away from the sea there was a wall with two bites taken out of it, and then the road dwindled into trees and soldiers slowly trudging across a street-horizon in the direction of the Green Line, the dangerous place. A brown man in white walked steadily down the white sand road, whirling a stick. On a ledge in a white wall, people sat, and water ran slowly from a silver bowl which a boy poured over his hands.

He did not want her back because he could not have her and also the rest of his life which contained matters which had caused her anguish, but of course he wanted her back; he wanted to wake up beside her; he was so lonely for her. In the atlas it said DRAINAGE BASINS and UNPRODUCTIVE AREAS and LOST LOVES and FOREVER LOST LOVES. The principal meteorological factors which impose severe natural limitations on human activity are temperature and aridity. — The boy poured water from the silver bowl.

The boy poured water from the bowl. Beside him lay a long narrow piece of wood which was knobbed at the top like a tombstone. A verse was written upon it in black ink. He looked up at the boy with the wooden slate, and wanted to ask which verse it was, but the boy did not understand. He wanted to ask where the gazetteer was, so that he could locate the rains which had fallen upon her in Mexico, but the boy did not understand. The boy spoke to him, and he did not understand.

No, no, it wasn't that she'd died; no, she hadn't gone down into the rotten arches of darkness that crumbled like cheese. And it wasn't that he couldn't be hers again, contingent upon certain modifications which he could (but would not) readily make in his character. He knew where she was; if he was determined enough he could find her. But he refused to rewrite the inscription on his secret obelisk. She'd told him that in that case he'd chosen to give her up. And it was true. — But, as Husserl says, how fares it with animal realities? He still wanted her. That being so, his deductions then proceeded thus: (i) When your wife dies and you die, you'll meet in Heaven, (ii) When your wife dies, and you marry again, and then you die, you'll meet both your wives in Heaven. The wife and the other wife will both be with you, loving you and each other forever, (iii) Since Heaven and forever are both beyond time, whoever is meant to be in Heaven must already be in Heaven now. (iv) Therefore, everyone you love, living or dead, is already in Heaven waiting for you.

So he descended beneath the Sunday noon of empty streets stretched tight like drumheads (a woman sounded them with her gold-flowered black high heels); so he went into the catacombs. She hadn't died. She wasn't in Mexico. That night he ascended the Spanish Stairs' white smoothness etched black in the texture of a full moon. He bought a pocket atlas in Italian; opening it, he addressed her and said: Since you are also in Heaven there must be two of you. Therefore one of you can be with me. That's reasonable, isn't it? I'm not asking for you. I'm only asking for a spare you.

He confided this into the atlas, which he then closed and tied with black ribbons. Then he left it in a church. He hoped that maybe it would call to her like a signal beacon.

At the Petroleum Market, where they'd steal the eyeglasses right off your face if they could, a lady robed in blue flowers sat on a dais at one of many covered stands whose tables were separated by thick wire mesh. Tins and jugs and bottles of molasses-colored oil stood on the tables beneath the roofs of corrugated metal. Some of the tables were fronted with rusty steel. White dust and buses blew past. A child, grinning with effort, rolled a rusty oil drum in the sand. A lady in yellow and black glided through the dust. These stands ran a long way down Population Street. They sold gasoline and diesel, direct from Mombasa and the United Arab Emirates; they sold Comet and Caltex and Pelo 400 and Ocklube. Oil cost fifty thousand shillings for ten liters.* The air reeked of oil. The lady in the blue garbashar was laughing, swatting flies on a post.

A big red truck with many brown feet and knees high on top drove down Population Street past a rusted Soviet tank. It was bound for Bardera. The passengers had paid thirty thousand shillings each. Suddenly the truck ran out of gas. It stopped, and the driver ran to the lady in blue and bought a bucketful of gasoline from her.

Another man stopped for fruit. There were both mangoes and oil on Population Street. Next door to the lady in blue, bananas had been strung like washing along a wire in a mango stand roofed by corrugated metal.

There was a man who came walking down the street holding onto his eyeglasses, and he peered into every stand of rusty metal with mangoes and limes and glasses on top, but then he'd walk on, shaking his head. Finally he came to the place that said SPER PARTS.

On the whitewashed facade of the spare parts store was painted a camel, a glass of milk, a yellow fan belt, a blue carburetor, a red and yellow battery, and a blue and black tire, all bursting with speed like cartoon rockets. The spare parts came by ship from Japan to the dusty white beach where the sea swirled green and stinking against a sharp lava-like rock (it smelled as cheap postage stamps do when they're licked) and people with brown skinny legs sat barefoot on blue steps outside a blue door with one panel blown out; the spare parts sailed between the American battleships on the blue horizon; they passed the rusted red and yellow Soviet ship; and they arrived at last, at the seaport where a handcuffed boy rushed by in the back of a jeep and crowds waited and hoped for the job of carrying sacks of rice. The spare parts kept company with a white wall veiled in white dust; then they passed through the curtain of camelbone beads in the cement doorway (a cassette playing loud and scratchy), the doorway over which was written SPER PARTS.

The man went in. — She left me in Mexico, he said. I need spare parts.