William Vollmann - The Atlas

The next morning was skygray and evergreen. Tall narrow firs were packed together as tightly as poles in a palisade. (He remembered Mexico's railing-teeth on grinning balconies.) Behind and between the tops of them, other trees flashed, helmeted guards of each other's greenness. Then suddenly from the pale bushes rose tall and grizzled stalks like arrow-shafts. There had been a fire here, perhaps three or four years ago. Now the birches returned to flash their skinny white throats, their striped white necks, keeping the firs and spruces small; now the spruces choked everything else out.

Really pretty muskeg, a mother was saying to her children.

Mommy, can we live here?

Well, do you see all the standing water? That means there's lots and lots of mosquitoes and blackflies.

But he thought to himself: They feel it, too. They want to live here, too.

In a field of gray ponds and grass-haired water, he saw three little black ducks.

Past a lake which they crossed by trestle bridge there were an Anglican church, a red building, a log house and upended aluminum canoes. Indians stood in the high buttercupped grass, watching the train. The boys and girls pretended to hit each other, laughing. The older ones just stood there. They loaded some boxes and coolers onto the train, and a few of the teenagers got on. That was in Allan Water, Ontario. Then the train went west.

Half an hour later they reached Savant Lake. There were more Indians, in flannel shirts, old sneakers, windbreakers, tall rubber boots, baseball hats in that town of long ago whitewashed houses among the flowery grass, tall white crosses, some trailers, a propane truck, then more birch trees.

He had begun to believe that this might be one of those perfect days which are sometimes given to you so gently and lovingly that they are half over before you comprehend their perfection. Amidst blackened backbones of dead firs sprung crazily with lichens he remembered the steep streets of Taxco, Mexico, narrower than your outstretched hands, whose stones had been worn dangerously smooth; sometimes there was grass, sometimes a smell of urine, always cool darkness from behind the window-grilles of the overhanging houses; he'd walked there with a woman he'd loved, held back from her heart by arch-windowed, bar-windowed white houses — a world of white houses with cryptic windows to make them into dominoes under the awnings where the juice-bottles stood; and now he didn't know where that woman was anymore.

And the Bible said: Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes; for a harlot may be hired for a loaf of bread, but an adulteress stalks a man's very life. Can a man carry fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned? Or can one walk upon hot coals and his feet not be scorched? So is he who goes in to his neighbor's wife; none who touches her will go unpunished. They transected a lovely gray water-plain with brown highlights. The sun shone on spiderstrands as fine and blonde and precious as the hairs he found on his pillow after kissing the first girl he ever loved. And the Qur'-An said: It was said to her: Enter the pavilion. But when she saw it, she supposed it was a spreading water, and she bared her legs. He said: It is a pavilion smoothed of crystal. She said: My Lord, indeed I have wronged myself, and I surrender with Solomon to God, the Lord of all Being. A pale blue lake was sublated.

An old Polish lady got on at Sioux Lookout. She'd lived there for forty years. She had three children, eleven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. She said she picked lupines as high as her shoulder — red, blue, yellow, purple, so beautiful! She ate beaver meat all the time: not just the tail, but the whole beaver, boiled an hour, then roasted. She loved to eat black bear meat, too, but beaver was the best, served on a plate of wild rice. She said she'd had a good life and was still having one. — When you get old, you know what you have to look forward to, she said. So why not go on enjoying yourself as long as you can?

She thought he was crazy to be going into the wilderness alone.

Now it was blue and white in Heaven instead of gray, so the land was the color of blueberry bushes in summer and the lakes were the color of blueberries.

Can I try beaver meat in Winnipeg? he said.

I don't know. I have no one there, so I never go there. Find an Indian.

She saw some teenagers drinking from a water bottle. — They brought their own water, she said. That is very good.

Fringy frothy green growth, moist, cloudy and sprucified, guarded an island like a swimming stegosaurus. They passed a still lake's black-streaked white cliff; and a memory of happiness flashed in him like some crescent-shaped brown pond, rock-shelved and hid in birchy wilderness. Everything was good; goodness was water trickling down sunburned rock.

At Reddit he spied an island whose small steep-roofed house was half hidden by trees; at the lake's edge was a dock and a canoe. He wanted to go wherever the canoe went but already it was gone and they passed a station that said BLUE HERON and MOCCASINS and souvenirs; they passed Ottermere with its birch-clumped mowed lawns; then Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament, hence the last town in Ontario; beside a low-wooded lake he read the sublinear gloss: two moose and a black bear. .

Between Malachi and Winnitoba, which is the first town in Manitoba, he recollected for accidental reasons Diesel Bend, Utah, where he'd gone north through the green fields walled in by trees, the little farms and white houses all embraced by those chalky cliffs in which fossil fishes are sometimes found; these, too, were tree-greened. . and farther ahead lay the blue blue mountains that made you know you were going north. Families were sitting on the porch in the evening or hoeing their gardens, and beautiful white horses swished their tails, and everything smelled like clover. Diesel Bend was not so different from Winnitoba. But, like a platter of Mexican marzipans made to resemble miniature fruits (papayas studded with chocolate seeds, strawberries, pale green pears), while in color and sweetness they might approximate each other, there was no sameness anywhere (his clawing at identities but a failure even when he looked out into sunlight, his self but a grimacing face in chill sea-foam). No two things are not disparable, although life's proprieties pretend otherwise. His first love's letters lay sweedy in their envelopes, whose righthand edges had each been snipped just so because he'd loved her so much that he didn't want to mar anything with her writing on it; each envelope was from her to him, with a thirteen-cent stamp on it — but how disparable! The one that had been addressed in crayon contained a page which said: Of course Tina thought I was fantastic or unique. He had no idea who Tina had been. He was fairly sure that he'd never met her. His first love had passionately snatched up so many people, bringing them to her heart; and then when they hurt her or she tired of them she'd throw them away again. He'd be surprised if she still knew Tina. He'd be astonished if she still thought about whether or not she was unique. That was what adolescents did. He had done it. But it wasn't because I was; it was because of the life I led, living in a suite with six young men, drinking bourbon straight in my footy-pajamas in front of the fireplace, knowing the owner of the local Irish pub, seeing a cardiologist, an internist, having physical problems unique to my age, making love, roaming Philly, spending afternoons at the zoo like a child, balloon in hand. When the dope came in I sometimes had to weigh it and check it. But I am the same as I ahvays was, mostly. I am not so unique now because the novelty isn't there. She had tried so hard to be bad, to be glamorous, to have adventures. And she'd had them. Then what? In Thailand all the rigid figures relax into motion again at the end of the national song. (The train passed narrow-needled cones of green.) A mutual friend, now dead, had once told him that she was not and never had been unique. But everybody is disparable, and everybody dies. In answer to your picture: there are no squares, right? Only in three dimensions and I didn't know that counted. Are we getting to know one another quite well? I don't know you too well. But I suppose I'm willing to lean as you let me and to let me know you as you wish . The sweet earnestness of this young girl aroused his tenderness. Now he could be good to her. He could give her money and let her be and do whatever she pleased. That was goodness, wasn't it? I think this is an awful state — being in love. I wonder why people do it. I was happier not loving. That's a lie, you know. You are all I have in my life now that can make me happy. Of course you are also capable of making me miserable. After all, I am still feeling like a part of me is missing. He read that in amazement. Did I really have the power to make another person happy or unhappy? Was I ever that much alive? Jesus, I want to die of leukemia, too. Perhaps we are too much alike in thought. And now she had cancer and he didn't. The weirdness of her having wished that so many years ago chilled him. He had wished it, too, solely because she did: a true puppy lover, he'd yearned to be counted among the hues of her iridescence. Neither of them could have known what leukemia was. He supposed that she knew now. I'll do what you asked about the drinking. I suppose if it were for myself I would continue to drink and smoke. I want to die young, you know, and in disgrace. But then sodden mossy trees bloomed in his brain with white mushroom cups around which regiments of ants hurried on their voracious errands. It was cool and humid in the bamboo tunnels between dripping ivied boulders as high as two tall men. Water leaped down like liquid dirt, spewing and dipping in clumps as of an old dog's hair, seething into brown pools whose mist was drunk by pale yellow butterflies beneath those living fishing rods that grew down, steadying themselves with spade-shaped leaves, reaching wooden feelers into the water. That was the place of reddish-brown waterfalls near Chiang Mai; that was the place of cool sweat and slippery jungle paths. He'd ridden a train from there back down into the lowlands, the ricefields whose muddy rivers relaxed from time to time by forming cloudy puddles in which the travelling sun was reflected. An occasional tree rose out of the rice, with water around its roots. The bitter smell of diesel-smoke was exhaled by the train. The cloud-map rushed across square lakes of green-stubbled water. His wife put her arm around him as they passed an old ruined wat with dogs loping its edges (white birds on the ricefields), then another small wat rising gold-curlicued and red-roofed in the fields and his wife, his dear and darling wife, was whispering: I love you same same crocodile . . He was beside her in Bangkok walking to the seafood restaurant, every street calf-deep in brown water, so the two of them splashed barefoot — so pleasant to feel the warm dirty water against one's feet — and at last they arrived at the restaurant with its decorative tree dried leaves and all, studded with lights, ice and crabs in the windows. You could order Steammed Crab in Shredded Jelly, Fried Frog with Garlic, Peppered Paisa Serpent-Head Fish, or Steammed Crab with Anything . Ladies whose arms glowed with gold bracelets nibbled happily at breaded crab. The windows steamed themselves up against the hot rainy night. The waiters in their immaculate black vests and bow ties always smiled. It was a very happy restaurant, and he was happy; he said I LOVE YOU to his wife. (She cried later, of course, because he had to go away.)