William Vollmann - The Atlas

The first time he read the Japanese girl's letter his heart rushed because he was sure that she was saying she was his. He had written to her passionately. She'd replied: If you have a little enough time, please stop by Tokyo to visit me. You probably are not interested in Tokyo, but maybe in seeing me . To him this phrasing seemed so delicate and perfect a statement of acceptance that he kissed her letter for joy. Then at the end she said: Please come back alive from Burma. Because I love you, too.

Night after night he stayed up rereading this and imagining holding her in his arms. He felt that he was approaching her ever more closely. Soon he'd be kissing the moist lips of her desire. But he wasn't there yet; although he knew what she'd written by heart, he had not penetrated every veil of her meaning. Her penciled marks were as cold and smoky as the Japanese Sea; it was only latterly that his urgency had begun to sense the low brain-colored island of Japan coming closer, to see the khaki squares as of a woven mat, interspersed with the dull leaden glitter of cities: You probably are not interested in Tokyo, but maybe in seeing me. Now he was close enough to glimpse Japan's dragonclaws and rivers, and the water like silvery fog (but maybe in seeing me), those dark green curds called trees. In seeing me. Because I love you, too. But then one night the letter was used up. Instead of tacit it seemed lukewarm. He tumbled into despondent confusion.

A week went by in which he didn't read it, and then one hot afternoon he took it from the envelope and traveled down its lines. This time it was not lukewarm but sisterly, loving, enthusiastic, not at all erotic. There was some other matter in the letter — chatty, newsy stuff — which in previous nights had appeared to him only as the lingerie which translucened the more exciting words, but now he comprehended that it was in fact the real stuff, that love was no more than fondness and the invitation merely kind and polite. He'd only thought otherwise because the letter he'd sent her first had been so desperately tender. What if she'd never even received that letter? After all, there was no reference to it. Ah, the perils of context! So he flew away from Japan, leaving her lights and blackness for more blackness.

He said to himself: How can the meaning of these words squirm and wriggle so much on my mind's hook?

But then he thought: After all, I never knew what anything else meant, so why should I know what this means? It's written that there's no such thing as truth. .

He sent her a love-charged reply and waited. Six months later he heard from her in a Christmas card that she was about to marry someone else.

West of the place where Niagara's turquoise marbles itself with foam and changes to cobalt, there are other blue veins in my atlas which idle between Lakes Erie and Ontario; north of them the eye is caught by Lake Ontario's burrowing nose which one's gaze traces from Burlington to Bronte, Oakville to Clarkson, Port Credit to Mississauga, and so up to the city of Toronto. In the autumn this way of going allows one to make the acquaintance of wide blonde and redhaired trees. There are coppery-leafed forests along the riverbanks, and lanes of leaves the milky green of English apples. Closer to Toronto they have all turned the hue of golden deliciouses or Mclntoshes; and in Toronto itself they have mainly left the trees. Looking once more at my atlas I discover the whole weight of northern Canada bearing down on Toronto. From James Bay roots of frosty rivers grow south, reaching.

In October, when I was visiting, a chilly wind blew always from the lake, piling up fog that was beige with whitish highlights like a field of October corn. I felt alone. On the subway people wore woolly jackets over their sweaters, sitting bowed against the dismalness of the growing cold. By January they would be long used to it, but that was because by then the summer would be dead and in a frozen grave, permitting the mourning to take place with detachment, irony, and eventually even joy as the extremists joined the strong fierce red-cheeked battalions of winter, gloating in fresh stinging winds; but at the moment summer was newly deceased, still paling and cooling and clotting on a bed of crunchy leaves. So each subway passenger was alone like some Arctic traveller who, homesick while the wind groaned, stretched a hand out of the sleeping bag and ate dry cereal, pushing the cold back a few steps. I knew a little about what cold was. Toronto was not cold yet. On the borders of Canada lay snowdrifts as pure and rich as cream. In summer the mud had been wet between them. It was just above freezing — much colder with the wind chill. Beside the Arctic Ocean was a ridge of pumice-like rock, and then a long low snow-ridge, flat on top like a barn roof, that was almost the same color as the sky. When I tried to read or write there my fingers quickly became numb. The wind grew more forceful; the tent-fly was caked with ice, and my wet boots froze. That was not cold yet; that was still summer. But now the sea had begun to freeze, and down in Toronto we knew that even without knowing it. On the subway we felt cold. Each passenger hunched with his hands in his pockets or deep inside his sleeves, longing to retract arms and legs within his heartwarmed torso to resist the cold, as a sphere of glowing blood. The men glared or sadly gazed; the women wrinkled themselves into frumpishness or followed the flashing stations with clear and angry eyes.

At night it was so much colder still that loneliness overcame lethargic sadness. That was why at night the girls in their thick coats seemed to offer promises of warm cuddlings. It was like Walter Benjamin in Moscow in 1926, pursuing Asja Lacis and scribbling: Moscow as it appears at the present reveals a full range of possibilities in schematic form: above all, the possibility that the Revolution might fail or succeed.

Asja would not give herself to him anymore. Her hair was as weightless as milkweed down. But one evening they pushed their coats off the bed and he lay down with her on top of him. They started kissing. He put his hands inside her warm sweater.

As I rode the subway on those foggy Toronto nights, I looked at the women and felt that I could have gone home with them to be warm, but I never asked any of them, and when I reached my stop I went out without looking back.

This happened night after night. Night after night I derived pleasure from sitting across from the women of Toronto, imagining holding them in my arms in their dark warm bedrooms. Night after night I passed through the turnstile and ascended to Yonge Street, where the clammy wind tried to steal my hat. Then late one evening I came out into the silver, frosty air, and the wind was ready for me. It snatched my hat and whirled it over the roofs of buildings. It tweaked my nose and earlobes with burning mischievous fingers. It caught me up and lifted me above the lake. I saw my hat far ahead of me, a black star whirling higher to cap one of the delicious white stars of winter. Because I had fallen in love with the wind, I was permitted to become the white star, and my black cap sailed lovingly down onto my head. I was in the bedroom of the wind. The wind wanted to play with me, love me and eat me. I married the wind, and rode the wind all night.

In the morning I woke up naked on an island of dark wet gar-tersnakes and birches whose leaves were speckled and orange. The wind came to kiss me, and sent an orange rain upon the sand. When I stopped blinking, the trees were bare and the snakes had slipped underground.