William Vollmann - The Atlas

They said that the girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid liked to talk about suicide. They said that her parents were always drunk. They said that her parents didn't want her. (Sure, I know her Mom and Dad, said a white guy in town who always fed me on beef stew and pie because he pitied my tenty existence. He was a good and great and generous man who hated the notion that someone might see that he was good. He gave aw3y money and time left and right and flew into a rage when people thanked him. He sat in his coveralls of wrinkled water-metal, resting on his laurels, a veteran of forest fires, mining accidents, bar fights and bad acid trips, bored and weary in the overheated hotel, worried about his blood pressure, watching adventure videos, keeping count of the number of N.E.'s. — What are N.E.'s? I said. — Nipple erections, son, he explained. You must be a tenderfoot not to know that. Have some more pie. Yeah, I know her Mum and Dad. I know them, all right. Can't take care of their own children. They both work in my crew, when they work. I don't want to lay anybody off, 'cause they need the work. I hope I don't have to lay them off. But I hate these two lazy bastards. They should have their tubes tied. I hate this place. Soon as my contract's up, I'm out of here. I hate those fucking Inuktituks. They think this hellhole's the best place in the world and no one can tell 'em any different. Well, everyone shits on the Newfies, but one thing you gotta say for 'em: they don't got an Indian problem. Took care of that first thing.*) So that was the story of the girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid. Her life was like some cold wide shallow pond rushing straight at her with fan-shaped waves, the wind picking up now, not yet strong enough to throw more than foam in her face.

That was all I learned, and I didn't see every twist her courtship took, because it wasn't my business and after all I had my own swimming to attend to. (One sign of spiritual development, Buddhists and Christians agree, is drinking more water and enjoying it more, so swimming must be good for you, too.) I swam until my hands went numb and red. They were fiery when I got out and started walking home, the sun low over heaps of rock. I had no towel, so the shaggy boy loaned me his. He was one of the many souls who seemed to be looking only into your eyes but who'd suddenly point off toward Hudson Bay and cry: Look, Bill, a weasel, weasel! There, there! — They could all see things which I couldn't. Sometimes they seemed uncanny to me. They lived on their island amidst the ruins of a race of giants. The boy from Arviat rode me on his four-wheeler out to Kirchoffer Falls, where the water was sea-green and seemingly gelid: transparent, swirly, filled with bubbles like bath gel. The mosquitoes did not find us right away. He showed me where to walk up and down the poppied stairs of cliff. I scanned the inukshuks* on the opposite bank, which was also a long cliff comprised of slabs of reddish rock, here and there a paler gravelfall; and then he showed me the Tuniit house, a rock-rimmed pit in the moss.

The Tuniit were strong, said the boy from Arviat. So strong they could lift a big rock or a polar bear with one hand.

What happened to them?

The Inuit killed them, I think, he said. A Tuniit man had sex with an Inuk woman, and an Inuk man got so mad he killed many, and the rest ran away.

When I asked the shaggy boy, he said: Some sailors came, and then they got sick. All their wives died, so they couldn't make new people.

So they're all dead?

All dead, except maybe one or two. They don't know they're Tuniit, 'cause they got adopted.

What would you do if you found out you were one of them?

I don't know. Nobody would touch me then because I'd be too strong.

The next day I saw that the girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid was holding hands with the boy she loved. I was happy for her. I went to her and said that she was the strongest diver I had ever seen. I said that she was so strong that she must have a drop or two of Tuniit blood, and she laughed proudly.

Do you think Lydia's pretty? the girl beside her said.

Sure. I mean probably.

Really? You really want to fuck Lydia?

Probably.

Do you like every girl in this town? said another girl in amazement.

Probably, I said.

Why?

I don't know.

Who do you like best?

You, of course.

If you come live here you'll get a girlfriend, said a girl comfortingly.

Probably, I said.

Now it was midnight. Three boys were silhouetted on the bridge railing against the yellow light. Lydia's cigarette illuminated the breast of her multicolored parka like a Christmas tree light. — Guess this'll freeze me or kill me, aye? said her new boyfriend, diving in. Soon everyone was peeling down, some entirely, and playing in the cool greenish water, boys and girls together and secret. Some came out to sit again on the gravel bank.

Lydia's boyfriend lit a match and said: I like it here, 'cause it's tundra, aye? We got the fattest caribou.

* The Indians of Newfoundland were hunted down and exterminated in the last century.

* The inukshuks around Coral Harbour were particularly well constructed. Their job had once been to scare caribou. They had no job now. Each one crouched with its stone arms extended and its stone knees bent, as if crossing a stream. Every time I looked at it, I thought that it had moved.

The crack pipe was a tube of glass half as thick as a finger, jaggedly broken at both ends because the prostitute had dropped it. She kept talking about the man down the hall, whose pipe still wore a bowl. She said that that special pipe was for sale, but the John figured that he'd already spent enough.

The John was of the all-night species, family Blattidae. Having reached that age when a man's virility begins to wilt flabbily, he admitted that his lust for women grew yearly more slobbery and desperate. Every year now he fell a little farther from what he had been. In his youth he had not considered himself to be anything special. Now he recollected with awe how his penis had once leaped eagerly up at the merest thought or touch, how his orgasms had gushed as fluently as Lincoln's speeches; those were the nights when ten minutes between two trash cans or beneath a parked car had sufficed. His joy now required patience and closeness. That was why he'd paid the twenty-nine dollars to share with this woman whose brown body was as skinny as a grasshopper's this stinking room whose carpet was scattered with crumbs of taco shells and rotting cheese; among his possessions he now counted the sheet which someone had used to wipe diarrhea, the science fiction book called The Metal Smile , a gold mine of empty matchboxes, and all the wads of used toilet paper that anyone would ever need to start a new life. He'd bought the room for the night, and after that he was going to go back to work and the prostitute would live there. Maybe that was why she worked so hard at cleaning up, hanging the diarrhea-sheet over the window for a curtain, picking up the hunks of spoiled food and throwing them out the window, sweeping with the broom without bristles, sprinkling the carpet with water from the sink (which had doubled as a urinal) so that the filth would stick better to the broom. Maybe that was why she cleaned, or maybe it was because she had once had a home where she'd raised her children as well as she could until jail became her home, and although they took her children and turned them into somebody else's (or more likely nobody's) it was too late for her to shuck the habit of making her surroundings decent; or maybe she worked so hard just because she was fond of the John (who was generous), because she wanted him to be happy and comfortable with her.