William Vollmann - The Atlas

This tower closed now, said the guide. The lovely boys and girls jump off, suicide. For love and love and love. Closed now for security reason. But this part, this open ivory day.

The thief fell down when they let go of him. The soldiers stamped on his stomach. Then they raised him again.

Now, sir, lady, come-come. Look! This marble one piece. No two piece. No join. Only cutting!

The thief looked at the guide with big eyes. The soldiers punched him. Then he was not looking at the guide anymore. Sir and lady went away, trying not to hear his groans as the soldiers began to beat him. Sir and lady wore the dead girls' mouths.

Yes, please! Hello! Sir and madam!

(Sir and lady were staring again. They could not help it. The soldiers were kicking out his teeth.)

Water rippled in long grooves of onyx, malachite, coral, but sir and lady did not see it. They did not know that they had once been dead girls. They knew that he knew them in his unspoken beseeching, but that merely echoed as clouds echoed between the lapis-flowered marble screens. Far beyond the screens lay dim white-gray corridors of peace. Darkness, incense and shadows crawled slowly on marble, searching for secret sweet-smelling vaults. These were the tombs of old scores, bad crimes rotting but not yet shriven down to bones.

The soldiers hustled the thief into darkness.

Outside it was a foggy morning. Skinny men rode bicycles, with dishtowels wrapped around their heads. Roadside people squatted by smudges to keep warm. On the dusty road that stank of exhaust, platoons of dirty white cattle were marched and goaded toward Agra. They had sharp backbones and floppy bellies. Sir and lady crossed that living river and stood beside a pole which had once been the tree of their death. In this sacred place they felt compassion for their murderer. If they had been able to remember, they would have forgiven him fully. As it was, their pity made his next incarnation easier.

Postcards, please? Small marble! Elephant two rupees!

Cowtails and buttocks were crowded together long narrow and wobbly like folded drapes. They swished and twitched as if they were alive and knew where they were going, but they didn't; they only followed where they were pulled, like the thief being led into the recesses of that gorgeous tomb.

When the rattle of his bones being put back together became the rattling whir of the cable cars going up Nob Hill, then he shot forth out of darkness among the square red lights of the other soul-cars swarming from the parking tunnels, zebra-striped gate up and down; for awhile he followed a big dirty bus that had once been a selfish man, and he rolled up Powell Street, which was sutured lengthwise with steel. Crowds were standing off the curb. There was no room for them yet. He saw a man pushing a shopping cart full of old clothes. Globes of crystallized light attacked him from the edge of Union Square. Higher up the hill he rolled by hotels and brass-worked windows, flags and awnings; he saw the pedestrian souls slogging up slowly, the Chinese signs, the yellow plastic pagoda-roofs, the bulging windows of Victorian houses. A girl with a sixpack under her arm ran smiling and flushed up the hill. At the top of the hill he could see far, saw a Sunday sailing panorama off the Marin headlands, with tanned girls drinking wine coolers, and college boys pretending to be pirates with their fierce black five-dollar squirt guns, and the Golden Gate Bridge almost far away enough to shimmer as it must have done for those convicts from Alcatraz who doomed themselves trying to swim there. The red warning light still flashed on the island, now noted for its tours and wildflowers. The cellblock building became ominous again when the evening fog sprang up and the tanned girls screamed as their twenty-four-footer tacked closer and closer to the sharp black rocks, already past the limit demarcated by the old prison buoys that said KEEP OFF; and seeing the girls he wanted to kill them over again but then his cracked bones ached from being beaten and he bared his teeth and thought: If I can't eat them by stealing them, I'll get them another way! and he laughed and honked his horn and other cars honked behind him so he rolled on down the hill and came to the street of souls.

Fearing to enter the candy shop which had brought him such pain, he parked, offering himself again to that knife of fog and silence, the handle a crystal stalagmite; and he came to the coffee shop of souls.

Brass safe-deposit boxes walled him, side by side, bearing buttons and horns. Each one had a different coffee inside. The smell of coffee enflamed him. There were rows of stalls for muffins, each of which reminded him of the pale brown coconuts he had drunk. In his pocket he found a single coin with a hole in it. They gave him a muffin. He became an anthropologist.

On the komatik, whose slats had been partly covered by a caribou skin (now frozen into iron wrinkles), he lay comfortably on his side, gripping two slat-ends with his fishy-smelling sealskin mitts which were already getting ice-granules behind the liner (an old bedsheet) because every time he wiped his nose with the skintight capilene gloves the snot was soaked up by the old bedsheet which then began to freeze; and as the komatik rattled along at the end of its leash, making firm tracks in the snow-covered ice, the wind froze the snot around his nose and mouth into white rings, but not immediately because it was not cold enough yet to make breath-frost into instant whiskers; however, it was certainly cold enough to make his cheek ache from contact with the crust of snot-ice on the ski mask; meanwhile the smoothness of the sea began to be interrupted by hard white shards where competing currents had gashed the ice open and then the wound had scarred; sometimes the ice-plates had forced each other's edges into uprising splinters that melded and massed and hardened into strange shapes; the Inuk wended the Ski-Doo between these when he could, going slowly so that the komatik did not lurch too badly; his back was erect, almost stem, the rifle at a ready diagonal, and he steered south toward a thick horizon-band that seemed to be fog or blowing snow; in fact it was the steam of open water. Over this hung the midday sun, reddish-pale, a rotten apple of the old year.

Then the groaning ice fissured into a shape like a girl's mouth, and the komatik broke through. He fell under the ice. The other girl was waiting beneath with her mouth open to drink his blood and he was already freezing and paling, but then the girl breathed upon him lovingly and he was warmed. The first girl, the one who was ice, opened her mouth; the second one lifted him on through to the sky.

Inside the cheerful egg-yolk yellow of the Muni car, with its two-toned rising and falling whine, the man was eased confident through its narrow grooves, past hanging laundry, swashbuckling in traverse across the street-scored sides of house-choked hills, creeping patiently down the shady lanes designated for the Muni's exclusive use, then bursting back out onto the sunsetty hillside, crooning to a stop in the park where Latino children got off. Suddenly the car reeked of leather jackets like the smell of cunnilingus; fashionable people had boarded. Keeping power wires company beneath the deep blue sky, the Muni bore the man toward the vortex which would determine his next state. He knew this but did not want to bear it. An Asian mother tenderly helped her little child negotiate the aisle, the child grasping her finger in a needing hand, and he wondered whether he had been or would be her. A little black boy in an orange jacket ran down the sidewalk, and then the Muni turned onto Market Street so that the boy was gone forever, and the man felt lost. An Asian girl boarded and stood beside him for a moment, gripping her two quarters fiercely; they did not have holes in them. Did that mean that she had but one life, or that she had already lived? The girl saw a vacant seat and went away. Now the Muni car hummed at the corner by the Chinese restaurant. It drummed secret hooves, twisted along the metalled furrows that it needed, stopped, and buzzed while a pony-tailed man got on. Swooping like nuns to a steeple, the Muni turned the last aboveground corner where so many metal rails from other Muni routes joined this nexus, shining like ice. It rang its bell like a submarine about to dive, entered the long narrow cage, and sank into its cement foundations so that the evening seemed to get later and later, the afternoon shadows on the walls becoming twilight gray, then midnight black as the Muni shot into the tunnel. Believing himself now to be safely southeast of the street of souls, he permitted his anxiety to go just as beer foam slowly narrows, collapsing in the middle as the bottom eats itself away. Then at Civic Center two girls got on with barely healed wounds in their breasts. They approached him in silence, each with her left hand behind her back. They looked into his eyes. He tried to look away. They bent over him and began breathing slowly and calmly into his face. Closing his eyes in despair, he struck out and his fist encountered a girl's fist which stopped him while three other girl-hands prized his fingers open and placed a token with a hole in it onto his palm; instantly a reflex of greed and longing for life overtook him, so he closed his fingers over the token just as the Asian girl had done with her two quarters, and he felt himself becoming something but when he opened his eyes he was still on a subway.