William Vollmann - The Atlas

Looking into his eyes, I saw such raw wet pain in them, throbbing and obscene, that for a moment I could not breathe. In him there was more need and less hope than in any beggar I had ever met. I started to tip him a tenner, but he shook his head and said hoarsely: Listen to me, pal. Please listen. You've got to be more careful. I know things! You'll need it for the alimony payments.

They gave him parrotfish in brown rivers and he gave them white lotus flowers, purple lotus flowers; he transmuted fish into flowers. Girls and old ladies stood at the side of the road, holding out garlands for sale. They sold his flowers to him in the temples; he paid in good luck and deeds. Then he planted the flowers in the slit windows behind funnels in the stone. They grew into white towers with arches and statues. He planted the money plant in its pedestal in the courtyard. They gave him flowers, garlands and coconuts for offerings. But they were his flowers anyway. On the hillside his worshippers raised a stone phallus to him. He penetrated the faithful who lived slowly moving across their glistening fields, walking barefoot behind their water buffalo. Then the fields were fertile. At a distance suited to humility, rows of pickers and transplanters bent as if in prayer, but they were only taking from him again. Still he gave them cashew apples: red, yellow, green; gave them palm tree suns with green rays, gave them tiny black birds skittering over the swamp, houses tucked under palm trees. The hills of Goa were wrought with trees — mango, cashew, jackfruit, pineapple, and mango. Cashew liquor goes very good with Limca, they said, pleased. But they complained a little, because every year they had to change the roofs of their palm-leaf houses. — They wanted eternal leaves. If he'd given them those, then they would have wanted to be eternal, too. They wanted everything he had. They gnawed at his knowledge, paving nothing. But he couldn't help feeling pity for them. That was why he'd taught them how to fix things. To repair a bridge, they heated metal on wood fires which they'd started with dry coconut fronds. It was easy; he made it easy. His heart was bright green like a rice field.

Mango and bamboo went brown. Across the brown square fields, a woman came striding slowly in a red sari. She said to him that everyone was going to raise blue concrete crosses in front of their houses, because a porous arch had been exhaling the steam of Saint Francis Xavier's breath. Saint Francis Xavier was dead now, so he could not be contradicted. Everyone had decided to paint Jesus on the spare-tire covers of motorcycles.

He said no word. He stared at the woman in the red sari until she felt as tiny as a cashew fruit. She fled among the silvergreen palm-tree mango-tree hills.

He entered the town, and saw the Portuguese governors, plump, sweaty, with long black sickle moustaches, sitting wearily in their black and gold armor, which made their hips as big as women's. He shrank them down, but they were so far lost they didn't even notice it.

Saint Francis Xavier, dead under a roof of palm thatch; opened his eyes and saw him. There was already a halo around his head. Dappled, holding crucifix and rosary, Saint Francis Xavier said to him: They'll expose my body four times a year, on a bier of teak, resting on an angel's head!

He replied to Saint Francis Xavier: I'll be there. And I'll cover you back again, as a clean cat covers its shit.

He stared at Saint Francis Xavier, but Saint Francis didn't shrink. He was dead.

He went back to the black waterbuffalo wallowing in swamps. He saw his white churches, green trees. His arch still crowned a palm mountain.

His remaining worshippers gnawed him, like a cow nuzzling the side of a thatch house.

Houses went up, too, in the new town, roofed with red rusted tin. Churches went up. Saint Francis's church they built of porous lat-erite, its black brick arch rough like lava. Tall narrow windows capped old arches of the old black stone. Its roof-long timbers were parallel like those of a ship, then gold. The sun of Jesuit initials, I.H.S., un-derlooked two cherubs above; then beneath the sun, standing on a big gold pyramid (the child Jesus between his legs), stood Saint Ignatius with his hand raised, a silver crown upon his head, his belly plate widening like that of a beetle. He was bearded, radiant, distant.

And Saint Catherine's church, that was a white church, with a white dog, a big white arch, plaster behind hot cruciform. Inside, it was cool, white and gold. It was floored with gravestones. There were white summery muscles and tendons and arches on the ceiling. There were shell strips on her windows. She was shuttered with translucent shells.

He said: There are too many gods here now.

They gave him parrotfish in brown rivers and he gave them nothing. Girls and old ladies stood at the side of the road. They tried to sell his flowers to him in the temples, but he wouldn't buy them. They were his flowers anyway. On the hillside the angry worshippers knocked down the stone phallus. So he denied them cashew apples, palm tree suns, tiny black birds skittering over the swamp, houses tucked under palm trees. They stopped giving him anything. They stopped asking him for anything.

He walked the narrow tongue of beach, divided by palm trees from the bare ocean and the horizon-ridge of someday.

He paced among the slow vulture-shadows where the Moslems had once built a deep-moated fort. Trees grew on the walls. Grim black rocks. Shadows between the walls. Narrow windows. Turrets and sky. Night clouds like white stars. Gray trees. The smell of distance. The smell of dirt. A grasshopper. The feeling of an island. Dark gray water, light gray sky.

Occult philosophy once pleased the yearnings I had in adolescence to produce terrifying effects, thereby flowering into someone superior to others. Shouldn't we grant everyone a pardonable time of life? The white supremacists who firebombed our city councilman's house yesterday, the black gangsters who shot two Jews for their sports jackets the day before — heaven's sake, they didn't mean it! — And that is just how I was. I wanted to fly not because I had anywhere to go, sought to raise the dead not for instruction or care for their clammy friendship. Hence the failure of my suffumi-gations. What if the liver of a chameleon, being burned upon a rooftop, did not incite thunderous storms? That was a lesson from the TETRAGRAMMATON: I'd trusted to corrupt procedures to fulfill shallow ends.

But now I know. More than fresh rain I'd prefer to imbibe the dew of beautiful correspondences which is the true elixir of sorcery. Grease to a mechanic, metaphor to a Muse — such is similitude to a magician. Yes! I will speak to you of the three Spheres, and the cords of sympathy between them — ropes of power, if you will, far more necessary to the continuance of creation than those anonymously identical electrons which represent the mediocrity of mass democracy, oh, my friends! — While browsing in an ancient Coptic tractate, I found these lines: Discern what size the water is, that it is immeasurable and incomprehensible, both its beginning and its end. It supports the earth, it blows in the air, where the gods and angels are. But in him who is exalted above all these there is the fear and the light, and in him are my writings revealed. This place of fear and light is the core of talismanic magic: an empyrean cosmos of crystal, a Sphere in which reside the ideals of all created things, swarming like quartz and diamond bees around the radiant nectar of their First Cause. — Enclosing this realm one finds the Middle Globe of constellations. A seal has been inscribed upon each star's flames to name it forever according to its character, be it Tetra, Zebul, Sabbac, Kadie, Berisay, or any of a billion trillion others — for it is a law that no two stars may have the same name. They have spirits of various colors and luminosities; and they are the agents of the forms in the inner sphere where we began. Their rays broadcast influences down to the outermost Sphere of Material Elements within which we find ourselves incorporated; where all is guided by them in every place from the Zone of Snows, where the sky may sometimes be afternoon-blue and the sun lies orange on the frozen sea, to the tree-choked hollows between hot sugarcane hills: —every leaf is veined in its own language with a name, and that name is the name of its star.