William Vollmann - The Atlas

He was not an evil man at all; he possessed rules. The dog had to have annoyed him more than once. People needed to have treated him badly at the same time. There could be no risk to him. Those conditions being met, he'd lay down the strychnined meat.

The dog would bolt that food, crunching bones between yellow teeth. The poison was in the best parts, the fatty parts. First the dog would stretch out, happily gnawing the last thick bone. Then suddenly it would cock its head. It raised its ears, listening alertly to the bells which only it could hear. Something was happening or had just begun to happen which the dog did not understand yet because the growling whimpering convulsions had not begun. The dog knew only that what was happening was extremely important. It chewed no bone; clanged the bronze bells of death.

Thus far I've written as if the bells never lied, as if the appearance of that sound, whether silvery or iron (as Poe would put it), was invariably more than rhetorical — as if, in short, supernatural law were quite simple. But one summer's night we walked past the scraping and squeaking of the long narrow streetcar (it's very old, Adnan said, it's not Amsterdam!) and duly arrived at the marble and glass ice cream bar which gleamed with glasses on glass shelves, which gleamed mirrors. A redhead and a brunette in slatey uniforms lived behind the counter, the brunette sloshing a foamy ice-coffee in her hand, then stirring, the redhead slowly drying glasses until they gleamed with late night brilliance from behind their marble bastion with its trays of filled ashtrays and dirty coffee cups. I was in one of those moments of suspension, hence susceptibility to the supersensible, because Francis and Adnan were chatting in Serbo-Croatian, which I didn't understand; so first I looked at the redhead, who ignored me; then I gazed upon the brunette, who scowled and glared; and then I sat drinking my mineral water (thirstily, because it was a very sultry September) and I listened to the bells. They'd rung me through that afternoon's long blocky buildings, each with its blue street-plaque on a corner; and I remembered the hot gush of window-air in the taxi, my back beginning to sweat in the bulletproof vest within the gray hideaway windbreaker (which two yean later would be claimed by Francis's murderers in Mostar; I left that; I remembered almost everything else). I wasn't thinking about Mostar. The taxi driver kept shaking his head when he heard I was going to Sarajevo. Francis had decided not to go because it was too dangerous. We'd turned past the Red Cross van, down pastel-yellow-facaded streets. Still that heavy soggy summer feeling. Everyone was sitting under the cigarette-branded awnings.

The driver had been in a battle. They'd had to pull back.

Is Dubrovnik safe? I said.

Not yet.

Can I buy a gun?

Nobody will do that for you. Everybody's afraid.

Anyway, said the driver abruptly, the worst thing I've ever seen wasn't a battle; it was a traffic accident.

It was then, and again that night in the ice cream bar, that I heard John Donne's bell tolling for me, warning and prophesying with ominous gloom; Francis had heard it, too, and taken more heed than I. He awaited my return from Sarajevo. One might say that whoever disregards the bells believes in absolute freedom; and yet I tell you most truthfully that later that night I could not sleep because I was so certain that the morrow would introduce me to my death; and yet I was powerless to avoid going. I saw the end as surely as when I awaited the arrival of Francis's family in Split two years later; no one could decide when the funeral would be, and the family could not come for three or four days yet, so I stood watching a procession dedicated to Dule, the patron saint of Split; waiting for the end to flash wittily through this celebration of Christian peace; hymns shrilled through the loudspeakers and white-robed men with red crosses on their hems strode forward with their arms folded. Now here came the nuns and little children; there marched the dignitaries of the church; I saw the palanquin of the icon — so many people were singing! Here were the police, there more nuns, now an old lady with a flower; and then at last came the real force, the boys in camouflage behind their general. . They knew; they called the tune on that sunny windy evening of bells. And when I'd lain on the floor of

Adnan's room that other night earlier, Francis snoring softly on the couch, I thought and believed that in only a few hours I would see and I would know ; I would meet my end! And I was terrified. I lay with a dry throat, wishing that I didn't have to go. And of course I didn't have to. Nobody was forcing me to go. And yet I couldn't not go. Whatever sent me to Sarajevo and whatever preserved me were not my own forces. And the next day only a yellowjacket stung me; the sniper's bullet missed my ankle by a good six inches. So I lived on, in a kind of unbelieving unreality, and Francis lived on in safety; it was only next time that we went to Mostar. And that day neither of us heard any echoing ringing; and I lived and Francis died.

What to say, then, but that those bells mark the intervals of our lives, and nothing more; that those strange sensations of disquiet that we get, "as if something were walking on our graves," are simply what we feel upon being reminded of the obvious fact that life is the one disease for which there is a cure? Aren't those Swiss cows better off not listening? — Well, I learned another clanging lesson when the black-pajama'd driver took D. and me between the green windmills of banana fronds, with cliffs of naked rock and dry jungle above. A pyramid of blue-green rock burst up out of the forest-grown earth-cliffs.

He believe in ghost religion, D. reported. Very funny! They have celebration for ghost. They put something in the floors of their houses. If you have five person, they put five chicken and five meat in the door. If you have five man, you can have the chicken. If you have two woman, you can have the sex change. No, I see. Meat for man, chicken for women.

It was not so very clear. But then D., bless her, was not wildly fluent in English. The boy drove us down a road of trees, into a sun-exploding valley with misty jungle ridges ahead.

After all women playing together, we share chicken, D. translated. All women have some something they put in bamboo in chicken legbone to see their destiny. Then all the women can look inside to tell you. But just now the young people they don't know.

The boy smiled very quickly.

He afraid for ghosts, said D. If they have some fever or diarrhea, they think from ghost.

What color is a ghost? I said.

From his idea, he think ghost is a yellow color.

What about my dead sister? Can she hurt me?

He says impossible. If you do good thing, then she can never hurt you.

But I dream of her skeleton, I explained. (Francis had not been killed yet. His skeleton had not yet joined hers.)

Oh. Yes. That was her ghost. .

Now rusty leaves hung above that road of yellow ocher; when other trucks came the dust was as thick as fog. We turned into a valley between dry brown rice terraces and saw the village. This was where people began to have Chinese faces. Just past a small wooden house, a woman was walking down the steep road, bearing an immense conical basket of twigs on her back. A reddish girl with mud or soot on her temple suckled a child who tranquilly wriggled his dirty toes.

In the rainy season he can't drive, said D. Then ghosts fly all around.

The driver lived in a very long big house behind a barrier of earth. He took us inside, while his young wife sat outside with her knees together and her heels braced far apart, wiping her nose and embroidering red diamonds and borders on white cloth on her black vest with yellow lightning borders which had consanguinity with the red and blue and pink stars on the black sleeves; and so many tiny triangles of color within color; and piglets went all around, chasing chickens; her long black hair fell down to her back.