William Vollmann - The Atlas

Her asymmetrical purple mouth imploded, slobbered and kissed him.

The late darkness of summer had begun to dim the hot gray night. On Main Street sat a drunken Indian panhandler, and when he gave him change the panhandler stared at the coins adding up on his palm without comprehending; and he walked past three staggering Indian boys in baseball caps, and came to the old Indian hooker who had to hold onto a lamppost to keep from falling down, her tongue the brown, black-banded furry ovoid of a queen bee hibernating in the dirt under the snow of men's mouths, and after her he kept passing Indians leaning in front of hotels that served beer downstairs and a piece of thistledown blew against his face from a vacant lot full of puddles and frostcracked mud and beer bottles and planks and dandelions and camomile and horsetails, and it began to rain again. The vacant lot was a slice of muskeg, and muskeg was an Ojibway word. Across the street, an Indian in a blue cap walked head down, kicking something, and then he turned and kicked it back the way he had come. An Indian in a fringed leather jacket strode energetically, swinging his arms. Three Indian boys came. One said: Why you fellas fuckin' whinin'? It's time for another fuckin' round, so let's fuckin' go.

He remembered how his companion's wife (who was on probation for assault) had said to him: We have our traditions, aye? We have our power. Like, suppose it's stormy outside in the morning and we want it to be calm weather. All we got to do is say: I want it to be a nice day, and then smoke a pipe, and pretty quick it calms down.

He saw the woman who had died in her sleep and said to her: Can you stop the rain?

Sure, she said. Anytime. As long as it's not raining beer. A Mountie came to shove her along and she said: Did you notice there's a red stripe on your leg?

Oh, fuck off, the Mountie said.

Did you notice that you're wearing a bulletproof vest?

Yeah, I noticed that all right, Maisie.

Are you wearing bulletproof trousers, too? Ah, hah, hah, hah!

Some sit in darkness and gloom, says Psalm 107, and I was of them but I didn't know it more or less than a tree knows why he shakes his green-hung arms in an evening breeze. I'd seen and heard them die, an old friend and a new friend, just outside that city whose huddled steel doors had been so many times pierced by bullets that they resembled Go gameboards overwhelmed by the round black empty stones of Master Negativity. Just outside that city whose sandbagged and boarded-up windows were ringed around their frames with jagged silver ice, outside that city of scorched chair-skeletons and fresh-nailed coffins ran a river where my friends died. I think I met their murderers afterward, although in war nothing is clear. Or maybe they were Samaritans, those quiet ones with machine-guns who helped me pull my friends from the car and later tried to use their credit cards. I did what I could for the dead, which was nothing, and then I strove to guide myself back to the light.

It was a month later that I ate the psilocybin mushrooms, in the Sierras near Donner Pass with Jenny, whom I loved, and Paul, who was my friend. It was not my intention to have a vision, which must have been why I had one. Some people go to seek out hallucinatory novelties, as if the usual blue sky pasted upon the lenses of their spectacles were an annoyance, but I have seen enough, thank you: visions tend to trick me, backstab me, or rape me. Last night, for instance, I had a hideous dream that life was but a show in a dingy theater of stale air, the actors dully or busily traversing an immense map laid out upon the stage; and because the tale went on so fruitlessly, no one bothered to watch; semicircular rows of worn seats gaped like half-open mouths; but at the righthand extremity of the front few rows some observers sat in black raven costumes, with raven masks and long beaks. Whenever one of the poor souls on stage would say something like I feel sick or I'm going to kill you or I insist that we fight to the last man then the ravens would clap their wingtips daintily. They sat interested, amused, aloof, like Thoreau brooding over Walden Pond. And when each sad life upon the wide atlas page drew to its close, the ravens would caw until the rafters trembled with the shrieking echoes, then launch themselves into the dusty air, wheel, croak, swoop, and tear that doomed soul to pieces. So when Paul gave me some of his mushrooms I believed with confidence that no transfiguration would occur. The leaden wall between myself and all the dead people in my years of life would not be breached. Alcohol clouded it into a creamy graphite haze. Lovemaking swiveled it downward, making it a solid stone to lie and dream upon. No doubt the mushrooms would make it funny. Too much contemplation of any object, however unwilling the gaze, may reveal a secret. Better to change the angle of view as often as possible. — That was why I so frequently ascended mountains without seeing inside them. (In the Norse sagas people go "inside the mountain" when they die.) Whenever I began to fear that the Gray Wall was becoming smoky, translucent, almost transparent, it obligingly changed its skin. Once, for instance, I visited Ellesmere Island, which is colored a pale icy-blue in my atlas, so the Gray Wall became a slope of pebble pavement set in mud: jet-black rocks with sunbursts of orange lichen, smooth tan pebbles, golden rocks lichened blue like cheese mold, and as the slope continued gently up, my feet sank into the clean soft snow and it was a warm 3 °C. Grasses and three-leaved plants, their leaves an autumn orange, poked up here and there like reaching fingers. Musk-oxen dung stood in little mounds, little pyramids of buckshot; and the hill steepened into a snow-covered ridge. — Another time the Gray Wall was a jungle mountain at whose base skinny-legged barefoot kids sucked from plastic bags of sugared ice. Mornings and evenings its mass of forest was tea-colored and indistinct. A dog barked at a horse under a thatch roof who neighed and rang his bell. In the afternoons, ladies in shirts gray and black with grime, with raised yokes of embroidery once black or white, sat gazing up to see if they could spy their husbands returning from the opium fields. The Gray Wall fed them. I saw a basket of bright green vegetables, saw everywhere babies sucking at the reddish-brown breast. — Today the Grey Wall was in the Sierras. A cool noonish breeze perfumed by resins and bees' nests swirled about us as our footsteps rimmed dark ponds, Jenny running ahead, too busy and excited to notice the flowers. (Later, mushroom-drunk on the way down, she'd sway and giggle in amazement: Look at that blue one! See that yellow one? Oh, God, why do I keep falling down?) Congregations of pines presented their thin and branching fingers to the air, growing them downward like roots. Because I still understood where entities started and stopped, I saw each thing as its own thing, which is the way we build walls by moving individual stones. There is nothing wrong with this. A dermatologist sees the freckles, not the face, and we do not fault him for it. But Paul and I continued up the mountain path, beginning to get the drunken feeling, eating those delicious vegetables of the inner ear, and then suddenly there came what I call the mushroom laugh , which always happens in an unexpected manner. This time it struck from the stones and boulders around me, all their freckles and granules and pixilations of texture flying out in a swarm of deep mirth whose sound was not quite a buzzing thrumming G-major chord. The main thing about the mushroom laugh was its inhumanness. I had chosen to eat the mushrooms, and that was the last choice that I could make. The mushroom laugh would now take me and do whatever it wanted with me, no matter whether I enjoyed myself or was hurt. I was nothing to the mushroom laugh.