William Vollmann - The Atlas

That evening the wind was full of vowels, and it said: ai ee eh uh oh eh ee oh. He listened and listened again. Then he understood that the wind was saying: why we never know where we go. Everywhere nowhere up down around.

He set out for the Barren Lands, always following the coast of Hudson Bay. One of his more reliable and harmless pleasures was to return to his tent after a stroll sufficient to make the cold seem warm, look around one last time at the midnight sun, breathe another breath of that good subarctic air, undo his boots, crawl into the tent, pull the boots off, zip the doorway shut against mosquitoes and rain, and then drink to his heart's content of pure and chilly river water, the bottle having been filled that day by him or one of his Inuk friends from the place where some children swam and others sat with their parkas on. Then he walked to the place where there were no more Inuk friends, nobody nowhere forever, and his walking was completed.

He listened to voices. He loved them. They were always different, although they said the same things; in much the same way that the cries of dogs sometimes resemble those of children, sometimes those of wolves or pulled nails, sometimes those of soccer fans, and sometimes those of dogs.

Then the day came when he realized that he could truly understand some of the words the dogs shouted; and without effort he heard the meaning in the haunting cries of gulls. It was only because he spent so much time alone, eating little; it was nothing special.

He was cold. He shivered and twitched like grass. The skeletons which had been sleeping in the inch-high lichen hills grabbed with rib-claws, vertebral hooks, and tailbone rakes, wanting to pull themselves out of the cold wet place. His lichen-blots were all he owned now, but they were bright enough to keep him counting them in the wind, absorbed like a vampire in wasting all before his dawnless dawn. The grass-columns flashed like skirts.

I know I said I wouldn't write, his first love had written. I lied. The cancer is back. I'm scared to death. I cannot believe this is happening. I am not vain. I do not care about losing my breast but I do want to live. Do you believe in God?

Once she'd sent him a photograph of herself at the zoo; and when he found it years later in an envelope with a thirteen-cent butterfly stamp she scarcely seemed familiar. But he had always been bad with faces. A giraffe stretched its neck in the background. Her beauty was what they used to call "classical." It was a face that could easily have been haughty or cold but in the photo she had a sweet little smile and she looked so young, so young. She could have been his little sister; in a few more years she could be his daughter. He was ashamed that he had ever caused her inconvenience or pain. He could never be hers now. He had thought that the picture, at least, would always belong to him; but as he'd wandered through the atlas, the photograph and he had diverged. On the envelope she'd written: Inside are pictures! Lions and tigers, monkeys cats and giraffes! and Hey, did you hear Nixon resigned? and If I wrote you in French could you understand it?

Sure, he said. Try me.

He listened to the plants.

Willow Lady grew slowly out of his thoughts, hour by hour in that summer of perpetual chilly light. The wind was her breath and the wind's voice was her voice. The wind rarely spoke anymore. She had a face like a sly brown mask. She had Inuk eyes. She smiled richly, showing her teeth. Her lean skull was cradled in hair whose stubby woody strands meandered across the moss, holding her safely down; willow leaves sprouted from them in dark green clusters and sometimes there were fuzzy buds. She told him to walk to the waterfall. The wind said: go. But he didn't know where the waterfall was. He wanted to find it because he wanted to listen to it and breathe the aerated coolness when he hung his head over the clifFside, watching the white foam softer than moss become brown and then indigo as it rushed away, into the world. He asked Willow Lady how to get there but she wouldn't tell him. There were yellow flecks in the sky, the hue of that stone called tiger's eye.

Skeletons buzzed in the moss.

The tundra became an exploding puzzle. Leaves, flowers, stalks, buds, roots, mosquitoes and bones flew apart, leaving white snow between them.

Long green fibrils crawled across his soul's eye. He saw flowers and leaves glowing happily upon pages of snow.

Low clouds swarmed over the water which glowed with colored threads. The mossy promontories reached toward the Arctic islands.

Now grey clouds came over him, and the water writhed with windy lines like springs, and the droplets sprang apart, leaving whiteness between — an atlas page. He could walk along the beaches and pick up pieces of fossil coal polished over and over by the sea. The sky showed blue-green through the cloud-chinks, while pale blue icebergs bestrode the water in equivalent rarity.

Willow Lady was his wife. He didn't really know her.

He laid his face down in the moss and kissed her cold mouth that drooled fresh water. The wind said: oh.

He told her about his wife in Madagascar whom he'd betrayed, about the mysterious woman who "just didn't feel it" when he made love to her, about the sad girl in that hotel room in Philadelphia whom he'd made sadder, about the woman in the House of Joy who made his heart shoot joyously out of the top of his skull, about his wife in Cambodia who needed money for facial surgery and when he sent the money she never got it and so she sent him pathetic color photographs of the operation and after that, although he went to Cambodia to give her more money, he never found her again, about Kawabata's geisha in the snow country, about his friend Joe, who didn't respect him anymore, about the woman in Sarajevo who said that it was too difficult to explain, about his Inuk girl who didn't love him now, who was just a nasty drunk, about the many he'd failed, and the few he'd done well by — he was not even potent enough to fail everyone! — about his first love, one of whose letters said: I don't need anyone very much. It's a cold feeling, a feeling where I know I should be crying and I can't. During those four days there were many times when I should have cried; I wanted to cry; I hung my head as if I were crying but all that happened was a kind of mockery inside myself showing me that I could out-deceive someone; I could hold my own. I knew during the entire time that I would be all right. In the face of outright physical violence, there's always an escape. — Sure there is, honey. Just ask any Pole or Gypsy or Jew or Armenian or Cambodian in any mass grave. — He tried to explain that in spite of his weakness he'd remained sincere, that when he thought about the ones he loved, even if he felt guilty or sorrowful at times there lay always beyond those emotions a shining wall of goodness: he loved them more year by year, and their goodness was as an organ-chord of glory in some great cathedral. — Would that be the end? Not yet! One more, one more. . One more, then, not his first love and not his last, a married woman from Toronto, also no doubt categorized in his FBI file: Jewish, with a husband and a little daughter she loved, smart, a journalist, proud of her breasts, fortyish, with small hands. She liked to go for long walks with him, holding his hand. She had a soft low sensual sexual voice that aroused him even over the telephone. As soon as she said his name he'd be wanting to spread her legs and ride her. He couldn't get enough of her. He was crazy about her. He needed her loving ways. He sensed that she liked handcuffs, although they hadn't tried that together yet. After a long breezy day of walking by the lake it was always so good to go back to her hotel and put his hand up her dress and bring her face down upon his face. Sometimes it would be chilly in the hotel room and he would enjoy feeling cold when he took his clothes off and seeing the goose pimples on her buttocks as they got under the crisp sheets. She brought him life, life! She said that sometimes he struggled in his sleep, but he never remembered that. In those months between "seeing her," as we quaintly say, he sometimes had serial dreams of being a Polish soldier in September 1939, with the Nazis coming on one side and the Soviets on the other, closing in, shooting and killing, divebombing and tankrolling while Hitler in Berlin watched movies of Warsaw burning; he was trapped now in a marsh with a few comrades, all of them wounded, and the sky was red and yellow and stank of gunpowder. The forest was burning and quaking. Nobody could hear anymore. A row of trees smashed down; his comrades were decapitated; he was the last one. Could Hitler see him? Behind, anodized black tanks were crawling out of the ooze like crocodiles. Before him, where the trees had been blasted away, he saw a river clogged with corpses, and then a golden plain of wheat that went all the way to the horizon; the sky was black with Stukas wing to wing, coming toward him, coming down. He dreamed of sitting in an opera box with Hitler and a woman whom he had thought was his, but in the middle of the opera Hitler stood up and began dancing with the woman and nobody else dared to look. He looked though, and Hitler's eyes filled him with pain and confusion. He woke up remembering that dream night after night, struggling to keep his eyelids up so that the dream could not slam down upon him again. But when he slept in the Jewish woman's arms, he felt safe. He felt that she loved him and trusted him. He wanted to be with her always. He wanted to meet her little daughter, which of course he'd never do. Waking up happy and rested, he held her hand, kissed her lips, and she was already rolling on top of him. She was life. He could fall asleep and know that when he woke up she'd be there. It was permissible to sleep. Even Soviets did it. Her body was still quite firm. She said that she was sorry he couldn't have seen her breasts when she was younger, but he said he was happy with them just as they were. Sometimes they went shopping for toys for her daughter: hologram buttons, ribbons and things; when the fog came in they might stop and he'd buy her a beer; by night they walked hand in hand through Chinatown like obedient tourists, holding hands. He felt that he was good to her and she to him. If she were any other creature she would have been a speckled trout. He would have been a frog. They asked little of each other. She said that she sometimes woke up thinking of him. She said that she sometimes dreamed of him. He never dreamed about her; she simply kept the bad dreams away. He never saw her being murdered. Of course maybe that was because her being married shadowed the relationship with such an obvious ending. That would be something to fear. If they stopped in time, her husband wouldn't find out. Maybe he would never find out. He didn't want to wreck her marriage, to make her little daughter cry. Why didn't he break it off, then? Because they were happy together. The way they were, it couldn't be wrong. Sometimes she was a little ashamed. But he intrigued her, and she was his medicine, his dove like the dove that the boy had drawn for him in Jerusalem. Did she think of herself as Jewish? She said she didn't, but then she'd tell him how one time in a grocery store a mean old lady was picking on a man with Parkinson's disease for being too slow in the checkout line, and when she came to the man's defense the lady turned on her and shouted that she was a filthy Jew. Somehow the old lady could see in her face what she was, she said to him, trembling, and he embraced her and wished that he could send his Polish dreams to the old lady. She told him about her daughter's birthday party. And then she, his dear one, wriggled her hot little body in his arms. She was not the end.