William Vollmann - The Atlas

On a hot and sinister night when the whores on Mission Street were yelling: What are you parking next to me for? I'm gonna smash your head in, motherfucker! and their pimps only said: You want any shiva? You want any doses? — on that night he turned down Seventeenth and it was dark and empty. Someone whistled urgently behind him in a two-toned signal. Whores and pimps called each other that way when something was up; maybe other characters did, too. It made him nervous. When he got to Capp Street there was only one whore, a demented pimpled mumbler far away down at Sixteenth, and the dark vacuum between thickened with smoky rainy zeroes and enigmas as his anxiety contemplated it. Another whistle. He began to walk toward the demented whore. At once he heard a louder whistle; and looking up he saw a man leaning out a window, regarding him, and the man put his fingers to his mouth and whistled. Instantly another whistle replied from behind him, much closer than before. He looked over his shoulder but could see nothing. A half-suppressed cough came only a few steps behind. He walked quickly to Sixteenth where it was light, and the demented whore pulled up her skirt to let him enumerate the stale jellies of her flesh, but then he heard the whistle again from the darkness of a doorway just behind him; and he was getting angry now, so he strode boldly to the doorway (standing some distance away to delay and hopefully prevent the launching of any blade into his stomach) and he said: Were you calling me?

You want any doses, man? said the darkness shyly. I got me some mighty fine powder. .

He replied: Now I see. I thought it was you, but it's nobody. Isn't it amazing, to realize that? There's nobody!

In those nights he was living on Mission Street because so many people swarmed there that he could hope someone might actually smash through his soul-eye's smooth flat window to kill him or make him free, but instead the people just flowed down his pane like gray rain. That afternoon there'd been a carnival with fat ladies moving their bottoms in the streets, black-eyed Asian schoolgirls cooling their teeth in the hissing streams of each other's breath, brown girls in black and silver skirts working their lips into kisses; and he'd never forget that coffeeskinned girl on the parade float, swinging her gold-spangled crotch in sharp bursting arcs; now that that was ended and the police had stacked the barricades back into rented vans there remained only the same threateners and bottle-smashers, and above them the same smell of doughnuts in the hallways because the hotel was right over a bakery — preferable to the adjoining hotel, which had married a Chinese fish market for so many do-us-parts that the slime of rotting seafood had leached its way through the wall and summoned the same slow fat evil flies that Lucifer kept under his tongue; no, give me doughnuts, please. Well, he had his doughnuts — the sweet soggy smell of them, anyway, a smell as weary as being alone at ten-o'-clock on a rainy Sunday night in a sleazy hotel.

A voice was saying: He said he was gonna gimme twenty bucks but I need thirty.

He unlocked the door. The old lady was kneeling on the floor, looking up at him in terror while her very dark blood crept slowly down her arm, the hypodermic needle which was stuck in it wine-colored with blood. Her grayish-blonde hair was drawn back tight against her head to make her younger. Her arm had doubled up as if to thrust the elbow forward in defense of her life. She held a bloody paper towel in her hand.

She wasn't such an old lady, actually. She was just a whore who only got her periods when she went to jail, because she couldn't shoot her speedballs in there. She disliked getting periods, but what she positively hated was being forced to sleep at night. (Everyone knows that whores are nocturnal while Johns and prison guards [with some exceptions] are diurnal, which proves at least one difference between the species.) And because he lived with her, because he tried to sleep at night, he dreaded the night, dreaded the smell of old cigarettes and old age, the sound of moaning and coughing in the bed beside him.

He sat down on the bed, and she came and sat next to him. She turned up her half-dead lips to be kissed. — Oh, that feels wonderful, she said.

There was a knock.

Who is it? she cried ferociously.

It's me, said a sad shy voice.

Grunting, the old lady popped her hernia back in and opened the door. It was the whore who'd been raped with a vacuum cleaner. (Two days afterward, her stomach had suddenly swelled up, and she fainted from the pain.)

You get it? said the old lady.

Got it right here, the girl whispered.

They heated the bottlecap with the old lady's lighter, untwisted the paper, added water from the brandy bottle (the white stuff in the cap was already fizzing), stirred it lovingly with the needle end.

Just draw it up, the old lady snarled.

I'm tryin' to.

The girl peered down at the mosquito-striped needle. — I left seventy-five, she said. Twenty-five for me, fifty for you.

Let's make it eighty.

OK, said the girl guiltily.

They were almost ready now to bare their arms to the needle, like children who didn't have a ticket to a carnival, stretching their hands out from so far behind the fence.

Well, that came out right, said the old lady with satisfaction.

I'll come back. Where's the restroom? I gotta stick myself in a personal place.

The old lady shot her a glare. — You'd better come back, or I'll hunt you down and kill you.

The girl cringed in terror. — I'm sorry, I'm sorry, she said almost inaudibly. I'll do it here.

Go to the restroom if you want. You heard what I said.

I'll do it here.

Well, stop whining and do it here, then. You need me to hit you? Which personal place is it today?

My pussy.

That's where the happy veins are, the old lady laughed, the needle already in her wrist, the smelly pantyhose knotted around her upper arm. .

At midnight, after the girl had gone out to make more money (her pussy was already abscessed, but one time when he was with her she'd spread herself with pride and told him: You can always tell if a woman's got a disease by smelling her vagina. If it's not healthy she's got a bad odor. See, I don't smell, do I?), he killed the light. He awoke an hour later to see the old lady kneeling on the carpet, trying to stick herself, walking on her knees to the sink so that she wouldn't wake him when she washed the blood from arm and sleeve.

There was a black woman sitting naked on his bed, with the old lady wearing nothing but underpants beside her. He knew the black woman well. She was the whore who put makeup on her needle tracks (which she called fleabites). She was the whore who always made the John pay first and then said: OK, baby, you just lemme go out and get my medicine and then I'll be more relaxed. — Whenever she could get away with it, she didn't come back. — The old lady was hitting her with the needle and the black woman's face was turned away and the old lady slyly knuckled her vulva but the black woman said: I been in the pen but I ain't never been no lesbian. I don't have no use for girls, 'cause they don't have three legs! Course, I don't need boys, either, when I got dope. (I dunno about that vein there, baby. Maybe you can't stick that vein.) Dope's my sex. Dope comes first, food comes second, and boys come last. Sorry, honey, but your finger just ain't on my list. An' them boys, they should be thankful they're on the list at all. 'Cause if they don't like it I can just go to the store and buy me a rubber husband. Plug it in and turn it on an' I don't need any other kind.