William Vollmann - The Atlas

The dark bull ran through the ring with his horns lowered, leaving tracks in the brown sand. His life was ringing out. He jerked his head. It was only the first tercio. The banderilleros flared their lavender and yellow capes at him like dresses, so he charged, but they pivoted in place, baffling him repeatedly. He stopped, wanting to give up, and they annoyed him again, so he gored the weary old horse, which fell on its side without a groan. I wonder now whether the horse had followed the bull's movements with much attention; if so, there would have been no wisdom but that of fatalism. How severely the horse was hurt I don't know. I saw no good death. The banderilleros raised it back up again, and the picador in yellow remounted. Then came trumpet and drum. Most cattle die violently, so perhaps it would have been too much to expect a bell to call this bull to his fate; did he hear the inner bell yet or had the trumpet been no warning? Why should we be warned? The bull hornswiped the cloth away from a picador. He leaped, lowered his head, swished his tail. Everyone whistled with happiness.

One banderillero backed away; the other rushed in and threw the first two darts. The first dart came out; the second hung in flesh. The bull jumped. The man threw two more darts. The bull turned, watched, began to switch his tail. What was he to do? His life stood hardly in his power. The man skipped closer to the bull. The bull lowered his head. The man stabbed the darts in.

Came the trumpet and drum, the matador with red (the silver dagger hidden always behind the red cloth). The bull sought red, found nothing. Did he know yet? The matador thrust across the colored horns. The bull jerked and turned in a confused frenzy at this man with the red cloth. Pink blood ran down the bull's neck. The matador closed on him, pacing deliberately in pink stockings. The bell tolled. Yes, after all there was a cowbell. The bull reminded me more and more of the horse that he had gored. He stood lowering his weary head, gazing at yellow cloth spattered with his blood; and perhaps he was acute enough not to molest his own death by giving a sign of bellicosity or pain which might have suggested that anything could have been done. All gathered around him like advance mourners. Finally he fell. Three funeral horses came plodding. A chain went under his carcass, then the trio dragged him around the ring and out.

Listen to the bells. I prefer to imagine my death as a dancer in silver and gold, her eyes painted with long tails which extend slyness all the way to her cheeks. Her face is plump and pale, her lips very red, succulently moist. Her anklets are thick with bells. She stamps her foot on the marble floor with a noise like a gunshot.

She can tremble so that the bells shimmer and hiss on her ankles, although her legs do not seem to move. She kisses her hand to me, slices the air with her arms. In her face, a joyfully cruel expression of utter mastery and possession. The music of her silver bracelets ravishes me. But does anyone think that the moment before the three horses drag me away will not be hideous?

One very hot afternoon in Los Angeles, Korean Jenny and I had come into her mother's house which soon would be someone else's house because the mortgage payments didn't make sense anymore and so the bank was about to foreclose; and because it was so hot, Jenny had had a margarita with me at one of those Mexican restaurant chains; and now she wanted to lie down. She slept. I was bored. After a long time, I laid my head down on her breast. I put my lips on her soft golden throat; and at once I could feel her pulse hurrying her on through life, rushing her and ringing her by so many emphatic little steps (like the clicks of her high heels) toward death. Not being able to hear my own pulse, I felt left behind. Every one of those powerful heartbeats of hers seemed to be pushing her farther away from me, so that I could see the time coming when I'd be alone on that beige carpet looking past the rubber plant into the mirror of emptiness at the base of the stairs. I got up and sat on the sofa. Now I only heard her breathing — a respiration fullhearted and trusting, accepting of the destiny which she'd fight screaming when it came.

The next bull came shooting into our sadistic world, a meteor of dread and hairy rage, galloping in the useless circles to which the ring constrained him, turning and twitching, his anger some hideous snaky thing of shells and teeth strung on a dried intestine. But he could never touch the picador. Next came the old horse again — an easier victim, so the bull rushed to gore his fellow creature's side again and again. The banderilleros arrived with their darts. The bull's front legs dug in the dirt. Sometimes, once in a great while, he got his horns into a banderillero's cape, which they'd convinced him was the soul of his tormentors, but once he'd thrust, it crumpled to nothing.

The matador swaggered in, folding up his cape so calmly. I heard the trumpet and the drum. The bull charged, missed. (Turn the continent sideways, and it becomes a leaping bull, the Aleutians its horn, Central America its tail; it is springing down upon the Queen Elizabeth Islands.) A disdainful corner flick, and the bull went for it. He heard the bell, and was the bitterer for it. No one can say that he beseeched. That was why the crowd cheered. The matador scarcely moved. Again and again the bull was baffled. The matador swung his hip and turned the cloth away. Slowly he strode closer, the red cloth up in the air, making the bull gaze high. He pivoted at the center of the world, the bull his great doomed satellite.

The bull's head lowered to the red cloth. The feathered lances danced in his sides as he whirled. His tongue hung out; his back and sides were crusted white.

Finally the matador dropped the cloth contemptuously on the bull's mouth and the crowd beat pots and pans, waving their hats. He stood back and knelt before the bull. They shouted ahh! and leaped to their feet as he shoved the knife in! They waved papers and handkerchiefs until the bull fell. They awarded the matador the ears.

Men with spades came to clean up the manure and the blood. Around the ring they threw sombreros and jackets. Exuberant, the matador hurled them back. As he went around the ring, a snowstorm of sombreros and shirts came, even a wineskin. He strode to the center of the ring, fell on his knees. Then he rode out on his admirers' shoulders.

The bull lay on the sand. He had now transcended the icy white barrier to understanding established by silver (pitchers of silver and abalone; weirdly gray mirrors of silver: all colors appear in those mirrors, but half-obscured as by angular white sparks of preciousness); some silver has a yellow gleam, but the edge of a silver bowl seems pure white. . They came and pulled the lances out. The three funeral horses dragged him around the ring. He made a track in the dirt.

So we know about ivy and trees, but what if the ivy were mere wires; what if the trees were only square white pillars in the dimness between trains; what if the leaves were incandescent lights? Then the forest would be light-spangled darkness, lit the way my legs glowed luminous green under a certain bar. Then I'd know I was in New York. Outside of this forest other died trees whose wiry roots dangled down like ivy over the concrete wall of the parking lot. The Hudson River was a root boring past the chilly eastern towns whose wall-bricks were a pathwork of dirty colors. I'd thought I was going to go outside the city often but then I didn't because whenever I started planning that I got a bad feeling about it — usually after I remembered those dying trees. So instead I visited the dog poisoner.