William Vollmann - The Atlas

Ting sat sulkily in the front of the taxi as it navigated the red-reflected wetness of the night expressway past the pink and yellow light-strings of the New Excellency Club and the glare-spidered construction booms. She had believed that I would be a quick and easy customer, but here I was taking her past the airport. At the giant camera and soft drink signs the traffic closed around us and we stopped for an hour, and she began to seethe. All in all, it was not going to be a lucrative evening for Ting even though I'd spend a hundred and twenty dollars; a Japanese no doubt would have spent more.

The upraised helmeted faces of the motorcycle drivers swarmed about us when I rolled down the window at Donmuang to ask for directions. Ting was pale with rage. A dog on the sidewalk growled. People interflitted on the narrow sidewalks beneath hanging sausages and roasted birds. We were lost. Ting and the driver turned to me, pointed at street signs written in Thai, and shouted: Binai? which means: Where? I had given them the brochure for the place, which contained a detailed map in Thai; what's more, I even knew how to get there, but the driver had not turned where I told him to turn, and now we were lost. He would not go back to the turn until a motorcycle driver assured him that he had to. Then Ting stared wrathfully into my eyes and cried: Whaiiiiieeeeeeeeee? while the driver shook his head in disgust.

Forty minutes later we were on the proper road, rolling slowly, ever more slowly beyond the sickening black glint of night earth at a construction site. The place had been deliberately located on an unfrequented lane of trees. Although it was only a couple of miles from the airport road, the taxi driver made us take a quarter of an hour because he was so sure that I must be wrong, and Ting sat twisting and turning with vindictive rage, which gradually gave way to fear as she saw that there were no people, no houses, on this dismal way. We came to the turnoffat last, and then the gate. The watchman came out with his flashlight. Recognizing me, he pulled up the rusty stop and swung back that hinged barrier. I made the driver turn left, then take the second right, and we were at the guesthouse.

I told the receptionist to call the nurse.

Ting sat by the door, refusing to speak to me. She'd told the taxi driver, to wait. Short time! she'd snarled. No all night you! Only short time!

When the nurse came the three of us went to the coffee shop, and the nurse explained why I had brought her here. She told Ting that the women who stayed here had all had that job before, Ting's job. They were learning to be seamstresses and beauticians now. She told Ting that she and I wanted to help her, that if she wanted to leave the bar she could stay here for free and learn to do something else.

Ting replied that she loved her job. She said that she liked to buy nice clothes, that she wanted to go to Japan someday, that her boyfriend was proud of her. Slowly she had calmed down; after an hour she liked the nurse, but when I asked her if she was still angry at me the nurse said: Nit noy . Little bit.

At the end, the nurse told her what AIDS was. I gave her a handful of condoms. Was it good or bad that when the nurse hugged her and she hugged the nurse back beside the waiting taxi (she scarcely touched my outstretched hand) she was crying? (She understand now AID, the nurse later told me, with weary satisfaction.) She was going back to work. A case can be made that if a girl is going to get AIDS there is no reason to cry while she is getting it.

Pity the poor biologist who had to prove (I never found why) that caribou in the Canadian Barrenlands lose a pint of blood a week to the mosquitoes. Of course caribou have more blood to spare than we; perhaps it is not as bad as it sounds, to pay a pint a week for the privilege of living. I remember summer days in Alaska when I could hardly see the backs of my hands because they were so thick with mosquitoes. And a bush pilot told me how he once overflew a man on a hilltop who seemed to be signalling him with long black streamers; these too were mosquitoes in their thousands, using the man for a windbreak while they attacked him, rising and falling in eerie concordance with his frantic arms, veiling his face with whining hungry blackness. It is usually difficult to apprehend the concept of an ocean by analogy with a single drop of water, but in the case of these unpleasant creatures, one will fall upon you with sufficient vampirish alacrity to represent the whole swarm, unlike a dewdrop which lies so docile in the palm as to seem altogether alien to reef-tides and shipwrecks. The dewdrop is at rest anywhere. The mosquito seems fulfilled only when installed upon your skin, its six knees drawn tightly up above its wings, the forelegs stretched partly out like a basking dog's, antennae alertly cocked, head down, proboscis stabbed into you to drink a little more of your life. Even in this state of fulfillment the creature appears tense. It is ready to withdraw from the wound at any time (although as it swells up with blood it becomes less able to do so quickly); it gains, in short, a furtive and half-disengaged orgasm, which is all that natural law permits when a pygmy rapes a giant. The spectrum of feeling between lust and fear and satiation in mosquitoes must be very narrow. When they crouch restlessly on leaves or ceilings they do not seem so different from when they are feeding. This family Culicidae is a family of machines. Delicately tooled with bands and scales, equipped with near-infallible sensors to locate their victims, they've been adjusted by their maker to the behavior best suited to carry out their mission in a given place. In the tropics they are silently multitudinous. Knowing that if one doesn't get you another one will, they launch themselves directly, though by all means taking advantage of leaf-shade and darkness. Temperate latitudes do not hold so very many of them. As a result, they are cunning and wary there. On a black sticky night, a single mosquito in a room may succeed in biting you half a dozen times. When you finally turn on the light to search for it, you cannot find it. Farther north, and again they have less need for these subtleties. Kill one or ten, it makes no matter. A hundred more will come. Proof that the manufacturer is not concerned about the potential loss of a few automata is given by the noise they so often emit, which not only alerts the victim, but also annoys, as anyone who's endured the quavering whining of a mosquito lodged inside the ear would agree. This provocation, combined with the itching, would require a Brahmin's self-control not to avenge. Anyhow, kill them, shoo them away, or let them bite, it makes very little difference. They will win out. I remember how grateful I was when the days were cold enough to keep them sluggish; and even when they swarmed everything was so beautiful with flowers and red sphagnum moss that they didn't matter until I began to get tired; parting the river-brambles and river-trees I forded braids of rivers without minding the mosquitoes on my face; and then I climbed the tussock-hills to where the tundra was very thin, like the greening on a pool table, and had a nice view of rivers and snowdrifts, always the sound of a river to remind me that mosquito-songs were not all there was, and sometimes a bird sang, too. If I was lucky there might be a breeze to scatter the mosquitoes; and I could eat my lunch very quickly. But I'd often stop early on those days, not having been able to rest enough. (Doubtless if I'd been born there they would have affected me less.) Pitching my tent was unpleasant, because the time it took was more than sufficient for my guests to thicken about me and I could not fight them all off since that required constant use of both hands and I must use at least one to work. If I slapped a tickle on my cheek, I'd kill a dozen bloated mosquitoes, my palm wetted with my blood. I did have repellent, but it didn't stay on long, because the thick clothes which the mosquitoes compelled me to wear made me sweat. So by evening, when I was exhausted, I'd squeeze a few more drops of that bitterly toxic elixir onto my skin before shaking the tentpoles out of their stuffsack, but I'd always miss a few places: maybe my ankles that time (secure, I'd thought, behind the armor of my pants-cuff), or the inviting slice of flesh at the back of my neck, just behind my collar. I'd scarcely have one pole assembled before being seized by that maddening itching, which I was already tensed to expect, and as I forgot everything but slapping the pole would fall apart again, and I'd have to laugh, since swearing wouldn't have helped. At least I did have thick clothes on and could get the tent up in due time, then crawl inside and zip the door shut behind me, kill the twenty or thirty mosquitoes who'd ventured in (they were not good at hiding), rub some cold canteen-water over my burning lumps, scratch my swollen face and hands, and relax upon the top of my sleeping bag, listening to mosquitoes pelt against the fly of the tent like rain. The next day, more mosquitoes. Four miles up Inukpasugruk Creek was a waterfall climb. Surges of water made me uneasy. I didn't know whether it was runoff from rain over the ridge, or whether a glacier-finger waited for me. The mosquitoes weren't too bad. They only bit my eyelids, earlobes, cheeks, knees, buttocks, wrists, hands and ankles a few times. The worst thing, as I said, was that singing whine. It was not enough that they bit; they must also make that noise, louder as they got closer, always teasing, uneven so that I could never get used to it; and one note became a chord as more of them came singing around until I could think of nothing but where they would land next. I'd sweep the air and my arms would meet mosquitoes; I'd make a sudden fist anywhere and mosquitoes would be caught inside. — Of course it was a failure on my part to be so disturbed by them. There's a scene in Tolstoy (in "The Cossacks," I think) when mosquito-bites suddenly become glowing love-bites and the sportsman strides happily through the forest of his own self-reliance. — And what about the Inuit, who'd lived with mosquitoes for perhaps twenty centuries without repellent? An old lady from Pond Inlet once told me that she could remember living in a sod house. The mosquitoes had been very bad, but her family fanned themselves with feathers. They'd done that every summer for all their lives until the whalers came to stay.