William Vollmann - The Atlas

Where is my body? the woman whispered. Where are my bones?

He could not reply.

Waitresses paced inside the glass house with the waterfall outside, and it was just the same as the birds in the aviary. He was at the nexus, the Husserlian insertion point, the city that was neither outside nor inside; so he thought that he might very easily find the key. Once he did, he could help bring the lost woman entirely into one realm or the other. The waterfall, the skyscrapers, the marble tables of the restaurant, were all so incongruous. On the ledge above the waterfall a statue of a boy stood with his arm upraised, and then the camera finished flashing and the statue moved once more.

In the twilight, the swarms in suits and uniforms hurried along the edges of black buildings whose tiles were as slick and shiny as new cakes of soap, each building with a different brand name glowing from it like a pulsing wound. So many crowds! But it seemed that they were all inside. The city's metonym was this tank of shrimp thrashing white legs at each other, bulging their eyes out and straining to fly in the water like beta-test helicopters. He was the soft red carp breathing with difficulty between two reddish companions, its eye bulging and rotating with almost the same intensity as the white spots on the shrimp's scratching legs. But who were these other fishes like slabs of ring fungus swishing their fins lethargically in the murky water, straining and crowding? So many! He'd never know them. . Behind the counter of the next window, uniformed men weighed out so many different barks and leaves and colored roots and dried sea creatures on white paper. People sat at stools before them, as if by a soda fountain. He heard the woman take in a long trembling breath. The men weighed out abalone shell for liver-cures and dyes, terrapin shells for lung complaints and renal bleeding, sea-horses for impotence, hawks-bill turtle shells for epilepsy, oyster shells for acid stomach, geckos to quench thirst and increase virility, centipedes to stop hemorrhages, tiger shins for arthritis, stag penises for a cold uterus, fossil bones for insomnia and amnesia, sulphur for virility, cinnamon for diarrhea, eucommia bark for hypertension, castor beans for cutaneous ulcer, red beans for headache. But there did not appear to be anything to remedy traumatic spatiotemporal amputation. The woman was whispering. — A jewelry window said: 61 % OFF. He saw gold chains and crosses on squares of white paper. The next window was crammed with twenty-three-carat gold sunglasses round and oval and square, even a pair that folded down the nose, and a pair not much bigger than a fountain pen; it would barely cover one's pupils. He passed another long narrow jewelry shop at whose red-velvet tables the clerks sat punching calculators, drinking Cokes and wearing golden spectacles as fierce as new-cut diamonds. The glow of red characters on yellow awnings bored into his eyes with the same brightness as the golden objects for sale in the windows. A crowd of dark-uniformed policemen stood straight, their black walkie-talkies and holsters and nightsticks hanging correctly down; they walked with their hands behind their backs.

Where is the book you put me in? asked the woman.

This is the atlas, he said. This is the book. — And he bent down and touched the pavement. He knew that everything was set upon a single page.

Open the book, she said weakly.

It's open already.

Where am I, then? Am I inside or outside?

I don't know, he murmured, suddenly resentful. I don't know where I am anymore, either. I lost my freedom because of you.

Eastward, where the streets became grayer and narrower, there was a stand of aquariums in the street, the goldfish and the other deep blue ones he didn't know slowly fanning their tails within glass worlds like the spirits in the bottles in the liquor store whose walls formed part of the thoroughfare, or the banana-clusters which hung over the apples in the fruit stand, beset by swaying red lights. The signs were carved and painted now, not lighted. Sometimes they halfway or entirely spanned the narrow alleyways like stilt roots and flying buttresses. Windows and gratings and balconies clutched each other across spaces of narrow darkness.

He bought a bottle of rice whiskey at the liquor store and poured it out upon the pale sidewalk. — Here is your blood, he said. Now it's in the book.

A girl in pink, with scarlet lips, was leaning against the ice cream freezer in the liquor store talking with her husband, and when her mouth shaped itself into O's the crimson seemed to rise like smoke-rings to join the red signs and suddenly the husband was lighting a cigarette, and the fire at its end seemed to have come from her mouth. She touched the husband's hand. Across the street, a man was searching through a pile of apples, and when he found one that seemed redder than the rest and held it up, the watcher looked at the girl and saw that her mouth had just made an O again. Here was the being who could save the woman he cared for by bringing her entirely in or out of the atlas. Enchanted, he came closer, until he could hear her speak waterfalls that peacock-tailed so brightly down the wall of the Stock Exchange, losing themselves in the hill of potted yellow flowers which bordered the long, long escalator. (Underneath were the hundreds of white gambling booths.) He caught a red O in the air. It was hard like a marble. Throwing it down onto the pavement so that it shattered and disappeared, he muttered: Here are your bones. Now they're in the book. — The girl's ruby syllables rolled him away, so that floundering past a marble lobby (evidently of a seafood restaurant in whose immaculate tanks swam crowds of giant silver carp), he could peer but briefly into a small store to see the round table and the two girls slowly slicing a mound of ginseng. He fell through a red bubble of her delicious spit, tumbled into the market of dried fish whose broad gray mummies lashed together resembled palm fronds, was carried through the restaurant whose two men in black tuxedos were just lighting the final torch around the golden border of a red sign that uttered something incomprehensible to him; and like the men in suits and ties on holiday riding escalators up the hills of Ocean Park he swam volitionlessly past two ladies whose store contained nothing but dried white shark fins, each behind its own pane of glass like some strange sea-trophy; that was when he realized that he was in the sea.

He bought a shark fin for one Hong Kong dollar. Then he took it around the corner where the two ladies would not see and be hurt. He slapped it gently down onto the hard epidermis of the street and whispered: Here is your flesh. Now it's in the book.

He thought he heard her moan.

A man unhooked a bundle of dried fish from the awning pole of his shining store, covered the boxes of nuts with burlap, returned to unhook the bale of dried eels, then the hanging light bulb, then stepped outside and pulled down a rusty wall of darkness over everything.

Next door a stern man was still sitting behind his desk, emperor of rolls and scrolls of marbled cloth, and he stared out the window. He gaped his gristly jaws and gulped, which proved him to be a fish.

Entering that shop, the watcher bought a length of midnight-black cloth and unravelled some threads from it. — Here is your hair, he said, letting go the strands. Now it's in the book.

The people whose ahs and ows twisted in the guts of the night now drowned the scarlet-lipped girl's speech entirely; so in hopes of finding other luminescence he ascended a steep hill of meat and lighted produce stands whose pears and potatoes shone like lanterns (their bok choy greener than darkness, their cats mewing like tweaked piano wire). Strings of lights transected the heavens to encourage the ones struggling up that coagulation of night, carrying those purchased brilliancies away darkened in plastic bags.