William Vollmann - The Atlas

Now only his fingers moved. Willow Lady rustled leaves in his face.

He brought his lips to the ice, which at first was merely a glittering white surface of giant grains and crystals under the blue sky, but as the purple cumuli drew across heaven like the underside of a metal drawer the ice turned bluer and cooler-looking with a yellow line of evil running across its surface, parallel to the horizon — he had a longing to devour the horizons of this world; and here he remembered the white line where a wintry noon ended in Nevada, immense and fluffy, shooting cloud-stuff up into the sky like some defense against falling stars, so vast and triumphant and far away across the plains of tan, rust and beige.- His lips did not stick to the ice yet.

Presently the snow began to fall. It fell in big moist flakes that clumped together even as they fell. It did not make a stinging slapping sound like the sleet or the cold dry snow; it pattered very gently down, and kept coming. In four hours there were as many inches. The tussocks on the hills became white fairy mushrooms. On the flats, golden plant-stalks still rose above the snow, not yet choked. Snow kept falling. The ice upon the river hid itself treacherously, and the whitened ridges dimmed gendy into the sky. The world was almost featureless. In places it was relieved very occasionally by the black lines and specks of boulder-edges; only where those were swallowed up in white distances could the horizon be approximated. Everything was very warm and still.

This was the soul of it, this rushing and swooping in winged or wheeled tombs, always straining toward some beauty as remote as the sun.

The train entered the tunnel. The atlas closed. Inside, each page became progressively more white and warm.

Willow Lady rolled on top of him and took him in her arms. She rocked him to sleep. No more nowhere nobody. She grew a blanket of leaves over him, and he was even warmer. He lay at the center from which the world rotated round and round and round.

* "Be loving; you will be happy."

Past the restaurant lazed a corridor of water-marked concrete, whose righthand wall curved, being the edge of the stadium where I was going to see how proud garlanded warriors beat each other down. A Siamese cat pursued a rat. Another cat sat on the concrete wide-eyed with ears raised, forepaws demurely together. A man was filling a chest with a bucket of ice. A woman emerged laughing from the storeroom from which workmen were wheeling water jugs on trolleys past the stand where soft drink bottles stood as colorful as Christmas trees, and bottlenecks grew from baskets of shaved ice, shining with incredible purity. Soon there'd come a storm of punches and kicks, gloves slapping on the side of the head, because the steel gates were open, and the million-cratered concrete, walled by yellowing whitewashed slats, crouched ready now to let Red and Blue into the ring whose whirly fans now vivisected the overcast sky and made the concrete rings of corrugated metal of which the ceiling was comprised seem to tremble. But it was only four-thirty, and the rotation of the fans was just for practice. They died; the beer and soft drink signs faded; and the sticky air fell back upon my shoulders like a moldy blanket.

Because the concept of two men punching and kicking each other for hire is not unattended by conceptual and ethical difficulties, I'd paid for the privilege of entering the realm called Ringside, founded eons ago by King Money and dedicated to the proposition that others should not be able to get what they haven't shelled out for. Ringside, in short, cost 600 baht,* but within its circular dominions, practically against the ring, lay a special section for family, trainer and friends, who would soon be leaning their heads back open-mouthed, prancing, shouting ooooh! pushing each other's shoulders; they'd be gloating, applauding, slamming their hips against the stands, bouncing on their feet. I don't know how much, if anything, they paid.

Ringside was surrounded by a thick-meshed fence through which the middle-payers (320 baht) could see, more or less, and behind and above that zone was another mesh fence which demarcated the outer limbo of the 120-baht masses. The early enthusiasts were already there. They gripped the fence like prisoners. The middle zone was still almost empty. Two skinny boys danced there, embraced, kicked high gently at each other's faces while a third boy clung to the mesh netting. They were the ones who a few years later would be working out in the park of sweating flowers. Maybe they already were. Their heads shot up and lurched. They smiled as they struck each other. One boy overpowered another, forcing his head down just as the authorities turned on lights, fans and music, and the boxers entered to be taped up. Cats still wandered about the ring. At ringside the smiling young usherette in red came like an airplane stewardess to take orders for soft drinks and to peddle videos: Thai Boxing: The Hardest Sport on Earth. Perhaps the sport of rape or torture is more difficult, at least for the loser, but kickboxing is certainly hard enough. I could see that on the boxers' faces as they finished getting ready and the men in green came in — men in green vests, that is, with a giant golden jewel on the back of each, and white Thai writing. I never figured out why they were there. The music gradually became louder and more martial. All rose for the anthem. When it was over, all bowed. Then they stood craning and glaring at the ring.

The two boxers entered the ring wearing garlands and yellow-bordered blue robes. They began to sweat almost at once. They bowed to Buddha. Then they threw off the robes, showing their trunks — Red and Blue. While someone tinged cymbals and someone else blew an instrument as cavernously loud as a Tibetan horn, they knelt and stretched, each in his corner, drinking water held out by his trainer who afterwards hung the garland on the corner pole. The boxers then quickly knelt and touched their heads to the floor.

I thought I might have seen Blue a week before in the park of sweating flowers where men lay knees up on phony-granite benches, breathing steadily, some with wrists infolded across their hearts so that steel watchbands caught the cloudy light, others with their fingers hanging over the edges of the benches; in this park of sweating flowers, a man with what looked like an astral map tattooed across his back (thrashing lines, quartered circles, and captions of Chaldean incomprehensibility) was working out, bending and lifting. He was not Blue. In fact, that night at Lumpini Stadium I did not see a single tattooed boxer. Another man who was not Blue, sporting differently quartered circles on his chest, lay on the press bench by the ginkgo tree, lifting weights. His pectorals were as big as his thighs. He had great muscular tattooed breasts. A third, who now took his turn, carried a great world-circle on his back blessed by many notations. The weights rode up and down. He yelled: Ho! ho! ho! ho! A fourth, now lying on the bench, lifted a hundred and fifty pounds, crying: Euh! uh! uh! A fifth stood over him, frowning, his neck gold-chained, and they changed places. The frowner's quartered circle glistened as he began. Across the sand, other brown men stood silently swinging fists over each other's heads. Weights rolled silently up and down on pulleys. And then a slender man in a T-shirt walked by. He stopped and watched and smiled slightly. Then he went away. I think he was Blue.

Slender dancing knees, the sharp slap of a foot against a rib — how different this was from the boxing I had seen in the U.S.A., where they only punch — and yet also so similar, because here too are the ones who clap whenever their hero gets in a blow, and here too there has to be a loser, and I hate seeing anyone lose.