William Vollmann - The Atlas

I want to say hi and thank you for inviting us to see you today, she cried, it is very glad to see you! Jenny, we couldn't see you the last time so we are very happy to see you today.

Her husband had now approached, and he went toward my wife tentatively, unsure whether he ought to kiss her or merely take her hand. I forget what he did. He never stayed much in my mind. For this I am entirely to blame, I admit. He had many good points. He worked hard (it was not his fault that he could never hold a job); he loved his wife very much, and told me once that he could never be unfaithful to her. As he said this he gazed at me a little challengingly.

I remember that afternoon of long chives and forgotten blackberries. The air was as still as a breath. I remember how the four of us went walking alongside the brown guts of that creek that twisted and wound into a brownish-silver mirror. It was better than silver jewelry. Perhaps it could be reproduced by melding ten parts silver with three parts copper, not just any copper… I remember seeing the Japanese girl reflected in it, and my heart soared.

Her husband and I talked, too. He'd brought a bottle of mescal which we passed back and forth. I admired his physical strength. I respected the manual labor that he did (her job with a Japanese company brought in more money, but how could that be his fault?). We crossed the tree-bridge, he and I, climbed hills as thickly grasshaired as bear fur, and after a long time we found ourselves in a place of myriad orange thistleflowers on tall iron-colored stalks, flowers like the "choke" of an artichoke, cupped by artichoke-like leaves. My instant thought was to pick two, one for my wife and one for his. Then I saw how he regarded me, and we turned away together, descending to our wives, following a path among gray groping stalks of dead grasses as skinny as an insect's leg.

A year or two later, my wife and I had to leave San Francisco. I remember how the Japanese girl sobbed in my arms, refusing to let her husband pull her away, while I stood holding her, rocking her, kissing and being kissed by that beautiful face, trying to calm her while my wife looked on.

Five years fell like shooting stars. They had a child now, I'd heard; they'd moved twice; he'd just lost his latest job. I happened to be in San Francisco on business, so I called and they invited me to dinner. Her English was almost perfect by then. That was the night that the thing happened that shocked me so much that the aftershocks kept ringing hours later when I sat on the yellow-lit bus that brought me through the night whose fog chilled my knees. I was next to a security guard whose epaulets bore crimson stars. He gazed down at the toes of his jackboots, drained by the rays from Gemini which had propelled him so mercilessly through life. I could not stop thinking about what had happened. We passed cages of light in the silent foggy darkness, slowly withdrawing from the Outer Sunset, the houses closer together now and taller, more and more filled with light. The woman across the egg-yolk-colored partition grimaced, her face a wrinkled brittle mask, her hair greasy and shiny. After her eyes closed, the most prominent part of her face was her nostrils, those twin black star-points of negativity, like the eyes of that Japanese paper doll.

What had happened was this:

The two of them had been quarrelling again — or rather (to be more accurate) she had continued to upbraid him in shrill and humiliating terms. To change the subject (it seemed that I was changing the subject every few minutes that evening), I asked her which of the twelve Chinese years each of them had been born in — for even Japanese and Koreans take cognizance of this calendar.

He was born in the Year of the Rat, she replied, looking at me (never at him!).

What kind of character is a person born then supposed to have? I asked.

Always running around, she said scornfully. Running this way and that way. I doan' mean it in a good sense.

And you? I said quickly, changing the subject one last time.

Me? I was born in the Year of the Rabbit, she said. Very good. Very cute.

What does that say about your character?

For the first and only time that night, she smiled. In a voice that glittered like a new steel blade, she said: Ladies born in Year of the Rabbit, we lose our husbands early. They die very young. Soon I will be a happy widow.

It was impossible to mistake what I was hearing. This was a confession of intended murder.

Of course it was not her fault. What she was had been decided by the conjunction of stars in the Year of the Rabbit. What he was was likewise determined.

I have seen a few dead bodies in my work as a journalist. I have looked into a number of murderers' eyes. When I took my leave of the happy couple a few moments later, I said to myself: I truly believe in the stars.

You want some blood? said the guy in the camouflage coat.

Yeah.

The back of my arm is good.

The doctor hit it. — Yeah. That's a good vein, the doctor said.

I hope so. It's at a hard angle, though. You can get it straighter there, Doc. It's up to you. You know how you want to do it.

The needle went slowly in. The guy in the camouflage coat bit his lip. Not looking, he said: You get it?

Yeah.

Good.

The blood came out from between the wings of the butterfly in a pretty thread, reproducing those times when traffic becomes a liquid with many red eyes that oozes through tunnels in obedience to horizontal pinball gravity. Just as taxi-lights bleed across the ceilings of tunnels, so the pink vibrations took wing inside his eyelids. The corpuscles were smoking, tottering trucks and weepy-eyed cars rushing like red ants between the ribs of some dead bridge.

Still going, huh?

Yeah, said the doctor. It's a gusher.

That's good, 'cause I never mess with the back one.

He looked down at the floor. Yeah, he went on. I have a positive antibody. I hope I don't have AIDS. I've been feeling terrible lately.

As he sat there leaning forward he jigged his knee and he jigged his fist on his knee. He looked very serious.

The guy in the camouflage coat got a Butterfly Bar vest and a bar number like the girls and went around like some tragic diffusion of evening traffic, saying to them: OK you pay me one baht I sleep you hotel no problem I smoke you my Mama-Papa very poor — and they laughed.

But the slender sad girl whose hair was rubberbanded back in a ponytail said: I no like my job.

Why you work Soi Cowboy then? he said, throwing his jacket off and rolling up his sleeve.

Little money. I send money Mama-Papa.

You have Thai boyfriend?

Before I have. But he send me away. I small small money. He marry big money.

The slender girl never resisted. Her tiny fieldworn hands would always settle on his back, gently caressing. (Before, I work water buffalo, she said.) She had a pale ocher face. She never complained about his not using a rubber.

You want some blood? he said afterward.

No, sir. Why you say give me blood?

I want to do it to you. I did it to you one way, but maybe you still don't have my antibody. I want you to drink my blood. I want to maybe stick you with this needle and squirt my blood into you, OK?

The slender girl wrung her hands. — OK, sir. Up to you.

The guy in the camouflage coat remembered the woman who'd given him the disease. He remembered going to the doctor with her.

Hi, the doctor had said. Are you gonna do this?

Yeah. I guess, said the scared woman, smiling. Then she said quickly: no, I really have to get to work. — She ran away.