William Vollmann - The Atlas

The Sinew Co. was being closed, but inside the shopping malls, people were still peering and pointing, the women especially wistfully touching the glass of Rainbow Leatherware Co. and Rolie Collection. A restaurant was serving tea. He bought a cup of it and cupped his hands over the steam. Then he brought his cupped hands down to the floor and said: Here is your breath. Now it's in the book. Now you're complete in my book at last.

The whole city sighed, or perhaps the sigh came from somewhere deeper than that. Then the voice said: Thank you. I love you.

The ferry buildings were like space stations, with their lights and roundness and dockings; but they did not whirl, only rose and fell, and a reflection of the sea rose and fell in their television-like windows. Beyond the Star terminal rose a golden bowtie of neon, tall and absurd, crowned by a white trapezoid and a blue spire. Forgetting the scarlet-lipped girl and the woman whom he'd saved, he let himself be caught by the blue neon-light on black water.

Goodbye, a woman's voice said from under the water.

The thin old man with the white star on his chest stood holding the gangplank railing in a gloved hand, watching something too proud for others: the blackhaired girls with arms folded over their breasts, the skinny boys jutting out their chins, the ladies in glasses happy not to have missed the ferry, the married couples (wives on their husbands' arms). Then the whistle blew, the ferryman braced his foot against the bulkhead and strained at the rope, winching the gangplank up against the door. He stood watching Kowloon come closer (another ferry passing the black water, a vast illuminated casket). He remembered the Japanese restaurant where the indigo-pigtailed waitresses stood in corners with their hands behind their backs, white bows tied behind their short black skirts; and they wished him happy New Year and grew into the New Year like those tropical trees tas-seled as if by strings of lime-colored beads. But he himself was coming outside his life again as steadily as the Kowloon ferry bearing through the cold and fishy night. — The ferryman stood still, squinting at a newspaper, his pinkish-orange face worn down almost to a skull by rain and fog and wind. He stood without support, swaying easily with the lurching deck. The horn sounded three times; the water began to burn evilly with the red and blue neon reflections of Tsim Sha Tsui, and he locked his newspaper away to again pull on his plastic gloves. He stood by the gangplank, patiently watching the greenish-gray window-lights and orange-gray wall-lights come closer. Then he gripped the rope, unhooked the chain, and let the pulley go. The crowd went out calmly, lighted faces going steadily into darkness.

So after that they let him outside. He was back inside his mind, they said. His behavior was normal. Just as in the ancient Egyptian cartouches south of Aswan each world is pale blue inside, yellow all around, so within himself he kept his secret color now. He'd closed the book and shelved it. Henceforth he'd return silence to all pleas.

He wanted to buy a ticket to take him farther outside. The sun formed white triangles and trapezoids on the floor of the railroad station whose early morning air was hot and stale, and people sat around picking their eyebrows because none of the ticket windows had opened yet. Two officials went into the MODULA DE ASIGNACIONES and he felt hopeful until they came back out and locked the door.

He waited all day and half the night. Finally, at the stroke of midnight, the window flew soundlessly open, and the woman stood behind it, smiling. Without speaking, she gave him a ticket of glowing gold.

He got on the train, and it took him into a tunnel that coiled round and round underneath the earth. And he came to the core, which was a giant geode glittering with crystals underfoot and overhead. And in the very center of the world was an atlas on a chain. He opened it, and the woman's bones fell out (they were very skinny and fragile, like fishbones), followed by her hair and gobbets of greasy flesh and flakes of her blood and all the other things which he had given her. The man broke off a crystal from the ceiling and buried it in her remains like a seed. Soon there grew a brilliant flower that filled the entire hollow heart of the world. Just before it enveloped the space which he had occupied, it invited him in. .

No, no, I did not go all the way to Blacktown (and in Launces-ton a disgusted cab driver said: Have you heard the latest? In your country the schoolchildren have to sing Baa, baa, green sheep in order to avoid offending the niggers. Next thing you know some do-gooder will say the name "Blacktown's" not good enough for them!); I did not go all the way to Blacktown, because Redfern was closer, and because a waiter had proudly related: I took a girl to Redfern and she went white as a sheet! She didn't know we had neighborhoods like that in Australia. — Being already as white as a sheet myself, in part due to birth, in part to illness, I figured that no red fern or black town or green sheep could make me seem any whiter. The NEXT TRAIN sign said BLACKTOWN but I did not go there; I rode between the grim-grimed pillars and arches with steel on top, was carried out past bulldozers gnawing gravel and then in again. NO THOROUGHFARE. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. That was what you saw if you tried to exit the wrong way at Redfern Station. The wide-gravelled channels of railway beds beset me with brick walls. The train went on to Black-town, and a man with a pole came and slammed Blacktown away to bring up another destination.

Under the sign, another man stood drinking V.B. He held the can very tightly in his hand. He did not quite reek as some drunks do but he was beery enough. He looked into my face. They called him black and that was what he sometimes called himself, but actually his skin was more reddish, almost Venetian red like that of the brown-haired aboriginal girl on the train who'd looked at me with such big searching brown eyes, working her plump, kissable lips as if to say something that she'd never said; this man opened his mouth and said: Buy me another, mate? How 'bout it? — Then he fell down. That was Redfern Station.

Outside there was a street, and across the street was a wall with a giant snake painted on it in aboriginal style, with the words 40,000 YEARS IS A LONG TIME. . 40,000 YEARS STILL ON MY MIND. Turning the corner of this street, at the Redfern Aboriginal Cooperative, I found myself looking down a narrow street where right away a fat woman with a beer in her hand said: Excuse me. Could you spare a smoke? and the wall went on down that street, muraled with silhouettes who had white-dotted skeletons; and I saw grimy rainbows and dot-painted flowers and then the street narrowed further, sloping down into shady house-walls where people sat on their porches listening to radios, drinking, smoking and staring out. This was the Street of Stares. I had the feeling of coming into a place where I did not belong. White shoes and socks glowed on dark and shaded bodies, all lining the way and watching me. Second storeys gaped doorlessly like the bomb-burned flats I'd seen in Sarajevo; sky shone through one such hole; the others were dank and dirty and grafhti'd, coolly unfriendly like the eyes of the watchers, or so it seemed to me as I went on, remembering times when I'd come into certain black neighborhoods in my own country and found myself immediately hated, but then a man nodded back at me and said: G'day, mate! and I was comfortable again, which might have been stupid, because Snake, who that day became my wise uncle, told me: I'm not allowed to go out at night. My woman don't let me. Lotsa fights. I tell you now, don't walk around here. — That was Snake, and his woman was Sadie, and then there were Ruthie and Rob, all of whom lived together farther down that narrow street which smelled in places like airplane glue, not as far as the very end where thick gratings and brick mirrors greeted the next highway, across which lay the stinking pub where I bought the case of Victoria Bitters so that Rob would like me and take me in to Ruthie, Sadie and Snake behind that wall built less of grimy brick than of stares.