William Vollmann - The Atlas

I guess I'll go now, said the john.

What's the matter, baby? said the prostitute. Listen, come on into the bedroom and tell me what's going on. Excuse us for a second, Danny.

Sure, the white boy said dully.

Now what's goin' on? said the prostitute, sitting beside him on the bed with her hand on his knee, looking into his eyes like a worried mother whom he must not disappoint.

He wants him and me to do you at the same time, he said, in a low voice because the bedroom door was open and he did not want to hurt the white boy's feelings. I just can't. I'm sorry.

He said that? cried the prostitute in amazement. I don't do that!

It's okay, he said. Anyway I'm going to go.

She sat motionless on the bed.

The white boy walked him to the door. He looked back and she was sitting on the bed crying. — Please come 'ere, she said.

He went back to her, hesitated, and said: I love you. Then he strode out without looking back.

She could open soda bottles with her teeth. Her plump and delicious lips, her nipples swollen from nursing babies, her succulent clitoris, these and other dainties enthralled her customers all night, until at last they must snatch greedy gobbets of sleep. She never let anyone fuck her up the ass because that would be trying to fool God.

When he asked her if she loved him, she opened her eyes wide in the bed and said: My God! How can you ask me that? I treat you like my own husband!

One night he was chewing khat with her and her sister, holding each one's hand in the theater's darkness. Her hand was hot and excitingly sweaty. The sister's was cool and getting colder, because the sister chewed khat too much. She said: When I chew khat, I can't stop. Just want to chew more!

He remembered the boy at the Twenty-Four-Hour Green Bar, fallen asleep with his head on the table, pale like riverbottom sand. — From smoking brown sugar, the sister whispered.

The sister caught the smooth red skin of a khat stalk between her teeth and pulled, ripping it away from the bad green flesh inside, like a hyena nuzzling the dirt sideways to snap rotten meat in his jaws.

The sister kept passing him fresh stalks of khat even after he'd had enough. She gave him chewing gum so that his mouth would not go numb and dry. Her hand got colder and colder. She laid her head down against his neck and watched the movie with a silent smile.

The other one, his love, burned his hand with her hand. She chewed khat in silence. He could not stop thinking about the way her thighs glistened with water after she had shaved her pussy. Her pubic hair had been lush like the black lump on a lion's neck, but not long-stranded like an American girl's, not like the bundle of leaves hung from street signs or tobacconist's signs to betoken khat, because the heat of Africa always made her crop it into a darling checkerboard. This time she had gone farther and shaved it all off with his razor. Now it itched. With her free hand she kept scratching herself and then stuffing khat into her mouth.

The two sisters had different mothers. Both mothers had been circumcised (they cut only the sweetest part, his love whispered). When the sisters had become women, they'd refused to let that happen to them. The sister's mother was a fat old lady in a blue and red kerchief who sat very slowly sifting the grit out of red beans in a wicker basket, picking out pebbles with one hand. The courtyard, bright with dripping laundry, smelled like piss.

The heat of his true love's hand drenched him with lust. Her hot wet fingers encircled his in just the same way as the black areolas ringed her nipples, not mere virginal speckles of some untested theory of circumnavigation, but solid disks from breast-feeding, sturdy like steel washers. Her hand was equally strong. Its grip came from work. Twice a week she washed her clothes and the baby's clothes, scrubbing and wringing them in her iron-hard palms. She was always bending over the baby (his bald round face slightly more orange than hers), always putting on his little shoes. She'd taught him to shit nicely on a scrap of paper bag on the bathroom floor. She cleaned him and carried him and spanked him a hundred times a day, striding tall and brown down the street with a ten-pound bag of rice under her other arm. The baby cried and she bounced him gently. (As for the man, he thought to himself: to mate with a widowed lioness, the lion first kills her cubs.) On her slender well-callused feet one toenail had been split by a stone years before. She had scarred knees. Her hair was always stiff and greasy with sweet oil.

The sister's hand was very cold now. Lovingly she popped a stalk of khat in his mouth.

There was a long pale green plain with dark green trees topped by flatfish elongations, and then far away a blade of sky-blue mountain, translucent like church-glass. The plain was stained with crawling emerald shadows by the clouds. Its grass was frosted with seedheads. Low green trees shone with white thorns. A leopard was in a tree like a mass of white stare in muscular darkness. — No, I fear to see a wildebeest, his love said. I fear the strange high shape. — His love said: I don't like Masai, because they don't fear animals. They live just like animals. They drink blood. — Near the leopard was a buffalo like a lump of burned wood, black-eyed, humped atop his skull like a coolie's hat. Almost in sight of the buffalo, a cheetah lay under a tree like a puddle of speckled milk. Then came dirt roads and shanties and the muddy place behind the wall where his love sat by the open door, cleaning rice. The low bubble of the camp stove was a loving voice. She had once been a girl with skinny chocolate knees who uncapped soda bottles with her teeth.

She was dicing a fresh steak, bending and laughing with her friend who'd just come in and was sitting on the bed. She chopped up onions and carrots and added giant spoonfuls of cooking fat.

When Kikuyu lady get married, they buy for her a cow, she said. When I get a cow, I sell it, buy a business.

There were happy Kikuyu songs on cassette outside and she sang, her mouth a circle. She was serious and stately, calm and happy, tall and brown; she said she was fat because she used to chew too much khat.

And me, I'm fat because you take such good care of me, he said.

When we get married, I must feed you in front of all, she said to him. I will give you big cake, very big cake, so that all know I take good care of you!

But her best friend said: I'd never stay with a white man without money.

The baby was upon him like a leopard leaping with meat in his mouth, his spots shimmering with his breath. The sister was in his eyes like the three dark stripes on an impala's backside. Only his love lived aloof; she was busy working; she was the only one who worked.

Water ran down the diagonal channel in the concrete, gray with oatmeal, flecks of wasted food in the bottom, while the yellow soles of her housegirl's feet flexed very slightly as she stood on the concrete riser, leaning against the long communal basin like a man standing at a bar, scrubbing pots slowly, expressionlessly and thoroughly, while his love, her skirt tucked above her knees, worked ten feet down the same channel, her bracelet shining, her wrists white with suds, her ankles flecked as if the baby had spat on them again, and she scrubbed the clothes one by one in the soaping basin and then scrubbed them again in the rinsing basin there in that courtyard with the bathroom smell; and then she wrung them out and pinned them on the wire. (The sister was asleep. Every day she slept until almost sundown. Then she put her earrings on and went out to chew khat and get drunk. She never paid rent. She was much happier than his love, whom he rarely heard laughing outside her home; he could remember only one time when the baby was on her lap and she was throwing litter out the window of a taxi.) The baby took the pushbroom and played with the water in the channel while inside one of the still-shut blue doors someone else's baby cried determinedly, and the lady beside his love bent over a plastic basin, twisting and scrubbing, and she and his love laughed gently together. The baby stood and peed into the gutter again, picking fretfully at his sneakers. Then he threw a passionfruit rind in and stepped on it. By now it was nine-o'-clock and she had been at it for two hours. She darkened the courtyard with her cool dripping clothes hanging from the wire, baffling the unpleasant sun. She cleaned out the gutter and scrubbed the floor with a brush. None of the other ladies ever did that; she'd taken it upon herself.