William Vollmann - The Atlas

He bent down and looked into the loupe again. Now he could see. She was driving toward the Green Line.

The internal combustion engine was one of the West's many presents to Somalia, and I would have to call it an a-a-mmah , which is to say a bequest for evil purpose (the example given in a treatise on inheritance law being money left by a Muslim to build a Christian church); but nonetheless her little red car looked sporty.

That was when he saw the other red car.

On the enemy side of the Green Line, just past the former police station, rose another camp on the dung-hued sands of the former technical institute, one of whose walls bore the scrawl: CAMP OFFISH . Refugees, their faces wide and brown, were standing at the base of the barbed-wire-topped wall, among weird mounds topped with green plastic; those were their houses. The women wore deriis and garbashars. They carried babies in sacks against their stomachs. They smoothed their garments down while the first grade of the SOS Children's Village counted one to a hundred in a deafening scream and the schoolteacher conducted with a twig. There was a little child not much more than a brown skull on skinny legs, his toy a plastic bag on the end of a string; he stood touching the shiny red car, the spare car in wonder. Now through the loupe the watcher's eyeball saw many little girls with dark brown faces. One in a white dress who had big black eyes ran inside a cave roofed with green plastic; a moment later she came out, holding a white woman's hand. The white woman was the spare of the double. He looked down from the sky and wanted to lick her bare shoulder and arm.

Sliding the loupe back along the page to his side of the Green Line, he saw the first double pass two cars with UN flags. Farhan was saying something but he didn't listen.

He thought about the way that Somali men who are friends walk so happily with their arms around one another's waists. He wondered if the doubles would do that. And he wondered if there would be room for him.

On Population Street it was getting dark, the evening sky like a crude oil painting, with solid white and gray cotton-blotches of cloud unrolling in its pale blueness; and so people were getting afraid of bandits and the petroleum market was closed; but Farhan's lantern flickered brightly down upon the atlas so that the two red cars approached each other bathed in afternoonness.

Farhan was still going on. He said that in olden times a Somali girl's dowry was one hundred camels, one horse and one rifle. Then it became five camels, and now it was only one camel, which could cost anywhere from one to five million, depending on the kind of camel.

Farhan gasped. Coming down Population Street were dozens of red cars, and a boy whose legs he could almost have circled between thumb and forefinger came running out and threw a stone through the windshield of one spare car, and the spare woman inside pulled over and jumped out cursing with that thin shrill anger he suddenly remembered very well, and then somebody shot her from the shadows. The other red cars continued on past. They appeared to be heading for the Green Line. Looking desperately through his loupe, he now saw the army of red cars approaching from the other side. He saw that all the doubles looked very angry, and they all carried guns. They were getting close enough to each other now that he could see where exactly along the Green Line they would meet. He could not bear to watch anymore. Moving the loupe away from the Green Line, he saw white soldiers patting black boys down for qat. He saw a spare Farhan going with his brother to pray in the mosque. He saw a lady in a yellow garbashar. The lady knocked on a green metal door. Inside was a sandy courtyard with one donkey and many smoldering fires. A skinny child came and let the lady in. When the metal door had closed behind her, and nobody in the street could see, she threw off her veil and looked upward at him with the deadly dark glide and glitter of a tiger snake. She was one of the doubles. This time he was mesmerized by the approaching bullet.

*U.S. $15.

I came to the bridge and there was no one there. It was ten-o'-clock on a sunny night that echoed with seal-hunters' rifle-claps, and I needed water. That was why I'd turned my back on my tent beside the lake of howling dogs and set out for the noise of water. The river was very close. Children swam in it every day, although they allowed that it was not as warm as Fossil Creek where I had camped on the night that the wind blew my tent almost to pieces. The town had a swimming pool, but that year it was closed for repairs and so they swam by the bridge.

As I went I kept to the socket of high ground around the water (the rest would have engulfed me above the rubber of my tundra boots). That night the mosquitoes were so thick that I could literally snatch them out of the air, and the sun left double orange-egged reflections in two ponds. I scrambled onto the raised gravel dike they called a road, passed a pond of rich green grass as delicate as vermicelli, for all the world like a Cambodian ricefield, then turned off the road at the river, which sucked itself down from a glowing violet lake of eerie shallowness before it slithered toward an orange-painted bridge that said I LOVE YOU and NAKOOLAK and other things. The water shimmered orange with an indistinct reflection, a slightly pale water-color of the sun-trail, and then went under the bridge, around low rocks, and out to its mouth of ice.

And no one was there.

The children had finished swimming for the moment — no reason; they sometimes swam at midnight. But even had they been there it would still have proved too late for me, because I could not be a child anymore, although I passed well enough for children to like me; and even if I'd become one I would not have been able to kill birds in flight with a single stone; and so it was too late. As for the fullgrown ones, I was not of their kind, either. That afternoon I'd seen two beauties swimming. One had a boyfriend and one didn't. The one who was alone had smiled at me, and that was too late, too. Another true or false love would only make my soul more sadly vicious. Then there were the young men, to whom women and everything came easy. — You wanna catch a polar bear? they'd say. No problem. All you gotta do is get your gun and shoot. — So their company was also salveless to me, my jealousy being a ptarmigan always half-seen, half-buried in my mossy hopes. In short, it must have been only because I was a selfish spoiler that I stood lonely on the gravel below that empty bridge, watching the mosquitoes attack my knees, listening to the river flow out into Hudson Bay, where it was almost too late for ice.

I felt that I had to make something of my condition. Like the glowing gold outlines of grassheads, I was bordered by a trick of light — oh, a real border too, but nothing with the power to detain me in such brilliant monotony.

The people in the four-wheelers on the road above, their parkas open to the breeze they made, sometimes smiled and waved at me. But I was alone.

That was my difficulty. My circumstances were no different from anyone else's. A boy had come to my tent and I'd asked him what he would do that night. — Go to the bridge and watch people swimming, he said. He was happy, more or less.

They came back, two boys and two girls, and called my name. I was more lonely than before. I stood at the bridge and watched them playing. They were walking from shadow to sun, and they reached the rocks and then the water. They were wading, the girls carrying their shoes, the boys not. They'd gone to the mossy island. They were in the violet water, bending their knees and calling out in Inuk-titut as they picked their way between sharp stones.