William Vollmann - The Atlas

They had left the extremely wide, yellow and subterranean Aero-puerto terminal where he was born. When he was a youth they reached Oceana in the middle of the street of time, mesh fences on either side, the people elegantly serious, quiet. A vendor came along dumping candied eggs on everyone's lap. Though eating one of these would doubtless have carried him to new possibilities, he was not tempted. He feared to taste blood. The vendor returned and collected the eggs. No one had opened a single one, although two girls read the label. He was still holding his egg as the vendor neared him. Suddenly he felt a bird-heart beating inside its thinness and his fingers began to curl to clench the life out of it, but he bit his lip to save himself and swallowed his own blood, shutting his eyes and waiting until he felt the vendor remove the egg from his palm. Then he allowed himself to gaze upon his life again. The two girls stood, one wearing black shoes, one wearing white, their knees bent, holding the stanchions, swaying, almost dancing, blackhaired (one braided, one waterfalled), looking subtly down at his feet, in an obviously coordinated awareness, and he peered into their lovely broad faces and they smiled and touched him and then got off at Misterios. He was old by then. He swayed and fell down dead.

Gray-lit struts took his weight as he shot across the bridge; flat gray-green ribs were stripped of their nightflesh by the dingy lights, the lights of Oakland rippling in between like scales, inhuman lights all the way to the gray horizon. What a relief when the world finally ran out of electricity, and we'd have to turn them off! On his left was a city of stacks and towers clustered with lights like sparks that could never be peacefully extinguished, could never cool themselves in the earth. A gush of smoke blew horizontally from the topmost stack. He scuttled up greenish-gray ramps of deadness into the dead night, accompanied by characterless strings of light, dull apartment tower lights, dark bushes; he bulleted down a lane of dirty blackness clouded by trees on either side, remnant trees suffered to live only because they interrupted that ugly terrible light. Then he came into the outer darkness of unhealthy tree-mists where the sky was as empty as his heart. He slid like a shuffleboard counter through the cut between blackish-brownish-gray banks of darkness, the sky greenish-gray above. He crossed the grim vacuous bridge that was the last place before the night country; he pierced the turgid black river (so night-soaked that he could perceive it only at its edges where light coagulated upon black wrinkles) and came into the ruined desert.

The toll bar came down. The attendant was waiting. Cars were beginning to honk behind him as he sat there at the tollbooth of souls, looking through his pockets. Finally he found a single coin with a hole in it. He reached, dropped it into the attendant's palm. The toll bar went up. He became a piece of jute cloth.

A woman in a mask who had a blue blanket over her head put the soft limp jute of him onto the conveyor belt. Then he got Jmr Swashed and rolled. The rollers gleamed and worked him back and forth, softening him. He could not scream. To her he was not even a shadow. (A poster of the president changed rose-light on its shrine.) What worked the rollers? The factory had its own generator, its own grand shouting alternators, built to last, 237 kilowatts. . The jute of his soul got matted and soft. He did not see the hammer-and-sickle flag anymore. His soul got squeezed by a rickety rattling. Now he was squished almost as thin as a hair. People dragged him away slowly, pulling long bunches of him with both hands. He was in a vast cement-floored enclosure whose roof was stained brown. They stretched him out. Slowly he went up a long steep conveyor. He emerged in a pale white roll of hope, twirling down, narrowing into a strip. The barefooted workers gathered him into piles on the concrete floor, then stuffed him into barrels, which were then mounted on huge reels. Murderers like him had destroyed this place once already. There had been twelve hundred workers. Now that it had been rebuilt, eight hundred and sixty worked there, eight hours a day, six days a week, not knowing that jute was souls. They cleaned and pressed him into accordioned ribbons of fiber that built up in the turning barrels. A masked girl stood ready to pack him down with her hands and roll a new barrel into place. He recognized her. She pressed him to her unscarred breast. Then someone took the barrels to go into a second pressing machine. A metal arm whipped back and forth, but only for a minute; the barefoot girls had to fiddle with it again. His substance was cleaned and dried. A masked woman lifted up levers, twisted him by hand into the clamps, pulled down levers, and he spilled out again. He recognized her also. She smiled at him. Now everyone could see him being woven into string, dense, rough and thick; this string in turn was woven into sacking. They were going to fill his empty heart with rice. This is not such a bad destiny for anyone, since rice is life. The barefoot girls teased out the rolls of soul-cloth, gathering them from the big roll in different sizes (63 X 29 inches and 20 X 98 inches); boys dragged them across the floor at intervals, stretching, looking around, slowly smoothing them amidst the sounds of the mechanical presses. So they stacked him among the other sacks. Girls sat on sacks on the floor, sewing more sacks; they were fixing the mistakes of the sack-sewing machine. Then they pressed the sacks into bales. But he'd turned out perfectly; he did not need any girls to stitch up holes in his heart. He was ready now in the bale of sacks. If someone guarded him well he might last two years. Then he'd turn to dirt. A man's hands seized his bale and carried him toward the place where he would be used. Then the man's work-shift was over. The man went to serve his hours on the factory militia, readying himself for duty in the room of black guns on jute sacks. The man knew that in the jungle other murderers were still nearby.

I see that you like Oriental women, said the taxi driver.

Greek women are very nice too, I said. (I tried to be polite and I could tell by his accent.)

Let's be honest, the taxi driver said. All women are beautiful. Especially a young virgin from anywhere, full of hormones.

My wife stared out the window, disgusted and offended. But the driver did not see. He saw only me, because I was one of his kind, a man who liked Oriental women.

I was married to a Chinese girl, he said. I met her in Beijing. She was absolutely, uniquely beautiful. One in a million. A dress model. I had to marry her twice, once in Beijing and again the afternoon we arrived in Sydney. Here in Australia they don't recognize those other marriages. If you don't marry them again it's considered sexual slavery.

So what happened?

Oh, it was about children. She wanted them and I didn't. She accepted it initially, but after the sixth or seventh abortion she began to kick. She tried to come back to me six months after the divorce, but I didn't want to be reconciled.

Why's that?

Oh, by then I had a hot young black girl. Every night I stood her on her head and filled her full of my jizz.

We'll get out here, my wife said.

I wondered if he was going to stare, turn to me, and cry: Oh, it talks! — But he only said: Right we are. Enjoy your stay in Sydney, ma'am.

My wife stood waiting on the sidewalk with her arms folded. As I was paying him he whispered with a wink: You've put some miles on her. Better trade her in for a new one soon's you can. You want me to tell you where to go in Sydney?