William Vollmann - The Atlas

We saw a pile of dusty pumpkins, pale like apples of dust; we saw a sleeping platform with mosquitoes everywhere. There was dusty sun in the windows. That was his house; that was the dark house.

I wondered: Can a ghost wear a straw hat? Can a ghost smoke a pipe of sugarcane?

In that dark house there was a long wide place, all ash. Baskets and stone lived on the mats. On the wall, a white paper with V-shaped perforations forming a cross.

It's god of Hmong, said D. This ghost. You put table under it and then chicken.

Ask him if the ghost will warn him when it's time for him to die.

He says yes. He say put special something in bamboo in meat legbone to understand his destiny. Then ghost come.

How many ghosts are here now?

Million million.

And what do they say?

The driver came closer, smiled in the thick jacket, looked sadly and searchingly into D.'s eye as she leaned toward him while a fat pullet waddled between them. I stared at a sandy-colored cat licking itself and stretching in the sand. He uttered something with great effort. D. translated: He say, ghosts speak everybody die, die like plant, like grass, like leaf. So soon we die. Ghost say we warn you because we want you afraid. If always afraid for ghost, ghost very happy. Because ghost very jealous already die. Ghost speak like bell, ring ring ring! Because then you can be afraid. If afraid, you same same ghost. Very funny, eh?

A man's brown knees flexed steadily above the sea, and then they vanished. He pulled his shirt high above his underpants. His waist vanished. He continued on past three rowboats and began to emerge again. A name waited to be born from his mouth. The ocean was astonishingly hot, shallow and bright in that place behind reefs, and the other fishermen who were rooted in it gleamed and sparkled with this liquid light which now peeled so evenly from his legs as he approached a sandy islet where there was no imperfection. His waist came back to air, then his knees, and finally the very bottoms of his feet shone as he lifted them, walking across the islet to a man in a pink-orange shirt who stood casting in time with the cadence of my sleepy eyelashes as I sat in a shady tree, my tree-leaves green and cool and bobbing like breasts. The man began to laugh with happiness when he reached the one in the pink-orange shirt. He shouted: Eddy!

Eddy, his sack filled with small fish, presently waded back into the hot green morning of yawning puppies where a dingy called Venus lay upturned beside a wall on which a schoolgirl had written MON AMOUR. Another fisherman rode by on his bike, his plastic bag full of minnows; he smiled and called out: Eddy!

Inside the Chinese dry goods store the men shook hands salutl, their faces proudly raised. They cried: Eddy! They sat back down on upended crates, smoking cigarettes, looking out the bright doorway at dark girls in yellow sundresses who rushed past under parasols. The boy with the naked silver mermaid on his jacket smiled dreamily, and Eddy laughed and cuffed him.

A girl in a blue skirt entered silently like cool water. She swung toward the counter to greet the fat old Chinese lady, and her skirt whirled, spilling frilliness down her thighs so that the boy with the silver mermaid could see the mesh of the door right through it. Eddy had been sitting in front of the display case. He stood up at once. The girl in blue smiled at him. The glass pane moved soundlessly in his hand. The girl nodded, and his arm sank into the world of treasures. I remembered how in the hot wet night that smelled like leaves, a man and a woman in a yellow skirt had gone wading in the shallow sea, fishing with lantern and net, and the changing light formed the reverse of shadows on their bodies as they walked almost splashlessly in the knee-deep water, casting their hunter's light between boats. Eddy and the girl in the blue skirt were like that now; for the girl stalked parasols, pointing to every one in turn, and Eddy reached inside the glass and handed them to her, nodding respectfully at every word she murmured while the old Chinese lady behind the counter looked on sleepily, fanning herself with a fan of many colored ideograms. His friends sat drinking the beers that he had bought them, and they gazed out the doorway at the girls walking by in a jingle of morning silver. They did not look at the girl in blue anymore because she would have felt them looking, which would not have been polite. She held the red parasol, then the blue one, then the green one with gold flowers on it. Eddy fished for whatever she wanted. When she decided that the green one was prettiest, he told her how much it was, helped her count out her rupees, took them in hand, and brought them over to the counter for the old lady. The girl in blue thanked him. She stepped back into the day, where it was proper for Eddy's friends to admire her again. They saw her open her new parasol and go in shadeful delight.

Eddy visited the dry goods store every morning and every night. He knew where everything was. He helped the old lady for nothing because he felt so free in that place.

OK, Eddy! laughed his friends. It was already eleven. They sucked the last lukewarm swallows from the bottles whose labels each depicted a phoenix so skinny and jointed that it should have been a spider. The Chinese lady was snoring when they went out. Along the main street people leaned up against hot gratings or sat on bicycles or stood mahogany-footed in sandals (some women in silver anklets), because it was the day of the Tamil procession. Eddy and the boys were on the corner. They sat on railings, tapping cigarettes against scarred hands. Children came out and called: Eddy!

A child cried out, a cry without language. Eddy froze. They could see the Tamils coming, still far away, a crowd of them creeping from beneath the horizon-tree. A policeman headed them; then came the advance men wheeling an altar draped with many cloths, a cave of colors in which something burned in a coconut. A car blooming with yellow pennants shouted religious music, followed by many men in white robes who came clacking purple sticks together. After them came the ones whom everyone waited to see. They too were singing and clapping, bearing altars which expressed the holiest pictures, altars roofed with arches of flowers and bananas; they were the men whose mouths were pierced and hung with chains, whose tongues were penetrated by silver hooks, whose cheeks were perforated just like those of the fishes that Eddy caught; they were the men with spikes sunk into their waists and backs and chests, the men hung with limes, carrying the heavy wooden altars past the old one in sandals who'd scraped the paint of Venus down smooth (a pod shot down into the painted boat with a boom, and he opened his eyes; already the day was half gone). Behind and around were the ladies of each family, dressed in their best saris, anklets and bracelets sharing the jingling swing of their men's silver chains against bellies and lips, the men wearing purple loincloths, carrying the heavy altars like Christs carrying crosses. They gazed straight ahead as they came. They were a part of the world to whom Eddy meant nothing. They recognized their own gods, felt them in their flesh. Across the street stood the girl in the blue skirt, shaded by her new parasol; to her also Eddy was invisible at this moment. She watched the mutilated men with a look of almost pleading concentration. She needed to understand what made them do this thing to themselves, and she could not. Most of the other spectators no longer asked. They had watched this twice each year for as long as they'd lived. It was something to be seen without being understood, just as a husband sees his wife give birth again and yet again so that her pain is too expected to be comprehensible anymore. Now came the priest with the book, attended by singing ladies in parasols, and then the man with so many hooks in his back that he glittered like a scaly trout, then the man with spiked combs in his thighs and a spiked sun of silver in his chest, his altar enriched by peacock tails, leaves and flowers. So they walked the quiet streets of shade-trees and whitewashed walls. The last altar took fourteen days to make. As it came, people clapped and cried: Ohhh!