William Vollmann - The Atlas

After the young boy with a single dagger through his cheeks, came the man with the great temple of flowers on his shoulders, his spikes heavy with lemons and limes. The man's feet staggered steadily on shoes of spikes. He was a man pinned full of limes and bells; he lurched along, his temple canted with agony and weariness. One couple laid their sick daughter down in the middle of the street, the mother running ahead to hose it clean. The child was wide-eyed and silent. He, the one with silver spiked shoes hooked into the backs of his calves, he stepped dreamily over her, frothy-mouthed. Again and again they snatched her up and stretched her down before him to be healed. Who was the sacrifice? Once she looked into Eddy's face; but then her eyes swam back to her savior with his bloodless wounds.

Afterwards the Tamils gave juice and water to all, and the brownish-green sea rolled in like sleep.

He went home and his wife ran out, threw her arms around his neck, and laughed: Eddy! — He kissed her. And all afternoon the world greeted him again.

In the evening he sat on the cool sidewalk where his little children ate bowls of rice and milk, uttering his name in transports of pleasure while he smiled lovingly, and two kittens watched the milk, and then a boy came running in with an octopus he'd caught in a coffee can, the dead creature milky-pale in the darkness. The son and daughter babbled to their father, chewing rice, peeking into the coffee can, and the octopus's silence grew louder and louder.

After he stopped by the dry goods store for a Phoenix beer or two, Eddy sat smoking and drinking with his friends on the beach. There were so many stars. Eddy pointed. He knew exactly where the moon would be at ten, where at eleven, and so on through the night. And yet the stars did not address him, the sea did not speak to him. The woman in the yellow skirt was lantern-fishing with her husband. Knee-deep in the salty night, they called to Eddy, but the sea made mysteries of their speech.

In Pat Pong there was a long crowded alley filled with lips on signs and girls, filled with hands on trembling beers, and in that alley there was a bar where the ladies laughed but always went back to doing their receipts, and among those ladies a deaf and dumb girl was making up her face very slowly, bending over a mirror not much larger than a fingernail, with her pigtail almost down to her waist. I did not see her at first. I saw a delicious-buttocked prostitute on a barstool giggling I wuv you to an Australian who had a paunch. I saw two white-teethed barmaids gazing outside, their fingers on the counter. I saw the eyeshine of their intelligence. Where you saleep? the girl was saying to the Australian.

Beside her, an older woman swiveled on the barstool to show me some thigh, I think because I had closed the doors and rung the bell which meant that I'd just bought every girl in the bar a drink.

This was not one of those bars where music's mountainous loudness reared and crashed inside my bones, where lights shot colors round and round, where the theme was gaiters and buttocks and weird lingerie, all the better to flash lust red along those legs and breasts illuminated like roast chickens on a rotisserie. — Nor was it one of those bars that were so dark that you could not see the women's faces, maybe because they were so sad, and the women touched their lips and touched the zipper of your pants and said: OK I smoke you OK? — This bar had neither dancers nor fellators. It was a small, quiet place whose girls wore T-shirts or long formal dresses. Just above the whiskey bottles, small bat-winged fishes swam in bottles of water in which seedlings grew forests of fantastic roots and above which they uttered huge lion-toothed leaves. The fishes flickered, the air conditioner imparted steadiness, and the girls sat as peacefully immobile as basking lizards. It was my favorite bar. If I wanted to, I could sit there and read a newspaper all afternoon and no one would ask me for anything. The Australian was asking to be asked. I was not. That was why the older woman and I carried on a duet of mere politeness. She showed me thigh, as I mentioned, so to compliment her I raised my glass and cried: I pay for you one thousand baht!*

No no I forty-four you thirty-four I like you same son same student! Me ten husband already! I Mama you!

OK, I pay for you ten thousand baht.

No no no.

OK, I said, my duty ended, and as I turned away I saw the deaf and dumb girl in the corner, bowed over her thumbnail of a mirror.

She could speak only in a series of cries which resembled those of a woman reaching orgasm.

Drowning accident, a barmaid said. She get water in her ears. After that, she never speak or hear again. Crazy in the head.

Walking over to her corner, I saw her lipsticking herself with graceful untiring insect motions. The other girls were sipping their Scotches, sodas and fizzy waters, but she had nothing. I wanted to be her friend.

She can have a drink, too, I said. I promised you I'd pay for everyone.

OK, sir, never mind, said the barmaid.

I put my arm around her and bought her a Coke.

She she she want speak with you, but she cannot, said the barmaid.

Stroking her waist-length hair, I drew a heart on a sheet of paper, and she uttered a cry of joy. She wrote: I like you. — I kissed her hands, and she pretended to push me away.

I gave her my pen, and she drew a flower, and then a long-beaked bird. I drew a flower, too. For an hour we constructed a garden on that greasy piece of paper, and she made that strangely happy noise of hers. Our flowers twined and gathered like the roots that the bat-winged fishes swam between, and we crafted each petal with the care of a reputable goldsmith because we owed all the responsibilities of citizenship to this world of ours which we were crowding with greenness and lemony-smelling bushes (on each, a single yellow flower). In the center of that world we made a country where her shy spirit could dwell in the tea-dark shadows of tree-tendons. Have you ever seen the cloud-forests around Chiang Rai? Our country was steeper than those (that sheet of paper being a sheer white wall) and lusher, its hills bursting with wet leaves and trees bulging and bowing under the weight of their own fecundity. Together we drew our bananas and breadfruits, our red and blue blossoms scented with the sweetish smell of her lipstick. We raised throat-high grasses and the spider-webbed darknesses between flowers, penning in each stamen with a steady loving stroke. I made for her a flowering banana's petals folded back (stubby peels they were, with white bananas inside). Smiling faindy, she thickened the hills with green lace that was delicious like her beloved frothy spit. Finally I presented her with a Virginia meadow beauty, four petaled, pink like her lipstick, whose antlers of a buttery gold reached down to cool the backs of her hands. She moaned in delight.

But the next time I went to that bar, the lady who'd had ten husbands said: Your darling no come today. Hurt her leg motorcycle accident. Hospital. Never go back here. So. You buy me, ten thousand baht?

Never mind, I said. But I'll buy you a drink.

After I'd paid I got up and went to the corner where the deaf and dumb girl had sat. There was a lipsticked napkin, almost certainly not hers, which I turned over, half hoping to find a flower ballpointed on the other side; of course there wasn't anything. It was only a variation of the game I'd played with the woman who had ten husbands, the sad game of searching for something known not to be there.

A few days later, a friend of mine visited that bar. He told me that she was back. He assured me that he'd seen, touched and danced with her. And that wasn't all. He'd found another bar in the same alley, a better and friendlier bar where the drinks were cheaper and he'd met two beautiful deaf and dumb girls, one of whom was a midget. He highly recommended the midget. He said that lately he'd begun to notice deaf and dumb girls everywhere. They were discreet and they were cheap. I myself never saw them.