William Vollmann - The Atlas

In Coral Harbour a boy had asked him why Reepah would meet him in Montréal but not in a northern town.

Maybe the south is more interesting for her because she doesn't live there, he said. Maybe she's ashamed to be seen by other Inuit when she's with a Qaallunaat.*

Don't worry, the Inuk said kindly. Lots of our girls have ugly boyfriends and we don't mind it. One girl even goes with a man with a wooden leg.

Later still, walking upon the tundra, he remembered Reepah stepping so easily and confidently from rock to tussock, never wetting her toe in any hidden puddle, never needing to look.

* White man.

In the reddish-black light of a bar that stank of cigarette smoke, four men sat around a table watching their hands. They had big pale arms. Drunkenness gleamed on their waxy foreheads, and their pale shirts lay open to the chest. They were sweating and grayhaired. The U-shaped shadows across their faces and paunches cheated the checked shadows around their dark eyes that burned like cigarette-ends. Their features were bland and flushed. Their glasses were as empty as falsehoods we tell every night.

The drunken artist slowly signed his worthless painting. He had the same last name as the best chess player in the world. Slowly he rolled his cigarette between thumb and forefinger and shook it like a baton.

The drunken zombie said: The time I was dead, dead, dead, it was real medicine. I used medicine that my body couldn't accept. That was the day I died. My heart had the pulse zero. It was only sleep, a very deep sleep like heroin. You see, brothers, I'd spent more than three years in India. That was the time yellow fever was popular. At least eighty percent of the junkies caught yellow fever. But I was playing with fever. It was something like playing poker or one-eyed jack. That's how it was when I was dead.

The drunken gypsy said: There is no most beautiful. Let's say tomorrow I am free, I am — I don't have to work. . No! I want brandy! And one beer for all of us, just to water it. .

The drunken soldier, the old one in the plaid shirt, was the only one who still had money. He got brandy and one beer for all. He shook his fingers at the others, a glass of brandy in his other hand, brandy on his breath.

The drunken zombie said: They took my passport in 1978 for making samples of medicine for myself. .

Silence! Silence! cried the drunken gypsy. The soldier wishes to sing.

Bowing, the drunken soldier placed his fingers on the drunken gypsy's arm. Then he began to sing, demonstrating that he almost had teeth. His singing was a series of spitting sounds.

The drunken artist, the beefy one, squeezed his own biceps and wept as the bikini-girl twitched in the flesh of him. He'd tattooed her into marrying him so long ago that she was faded to the color of old chewing gum. He wept, and whispered: Children, everyone wants my money.

Take it easy, said the drunken gypsy, who was happy.

The drunken soldier's cigarette dropped out of his mouth. — I was in Tito's army in '64, he said. I saved all your asses. Without me, you wouldn't be where you are today.

A t two o'clock on a rainy afternoon, a dozen people waited in front of the bakery. Behind the fence, a man in camouflage stood guard. The people were pale and they shivered. The man in camouflage spoke to someone at the inner door and then approached me, never letting go his gun. I was permitted inside. I could feel the stares of the waiting people in my back.

The name of the director was Mešak Kempl. He was very tired. He said: This bakery has been hit five or six times, and we never stopped for one day. We're still working. But there's been no electricity for the past two weeks, and no diesel, and erratic water. Today for the first time the whole city is without water.

How many bakeries are there?

Before the war, there were two. One is now held by the Chetniks. Two or three hundred private bakeries provided half of our bread, but they're mostly not working now. So it's only this bakery that provides bread for the city. Two weeks ago we made one hundred thousand loaves a day. Even that wasn't enough. Now we make fewer than fifty thousand. Our trucks have been shelled at, shot at — every truck has holes in it! We've had two drivers killed and five severely injured in these five months of war. And after tonight, we will be making no more bread. Well, maybe by some miracle we'll get more diesel…

I could think of nothing to say. There was a fresh loaf of bread on Kempl's desk, and he smiled and offered me a piece.

The only thing we have left is the will to work, he said. The people would prefer it if the plane was full of guns and ammunition, not flour.

He smiled. — We've come to the end, he said.

What will people eat?

There's left some pasta and rice. The pasta factory itself hasn't been working for fifteen days.

He took me into the room that smelled like dough, where two men in white uniforms were straining their arms deep in the mixing bowl because there was not enough diesel to use the electric mixer. — We have only two more bowls' worth left, said Kempl. Then the dough will be finished.

The room was almost dark, but it was warm. Three lights in the entire bank were working. A pretty girl in white was taking loaves of dough off the conveyor belt. Then the fermentation box drew them into darkness, the hygrometer at seventy, rolls and rolls in wheels slowly turning.

There was an immense space of empty floor where it was dark. This place was like the heart of a dying man, still pumping life, but only in negligible quantities and only for a little longer. The fresh brown loaves, smelling so yeasty and good, slowly rolled off the last conveyor. There were no loaves before them, and none after. Those hot brown loaves spiralled down to the basement like golden squirrels, to be caught by a girl in white who loaded them into cartons.

The director shook my hand politely. He offered me a loaf of bread to take with me. As I went back into the chilly rainy afternoon and passed the line, which had now grown to fifty people, the tears burst out of my eyes.

He had left her burning in her tears at the Greyhound station, I land now he was about to take the city bus home. It was twi-w light. Knowing that she was standing in line at this moment, facing him, yearning for him, made him weary and afraid. A black cawing creature crooked itself through the slatey air between palms. A bus came, well lit inside. People dreamed or stared as it rolled them away. Perhaps she was boarding her bus now, passing through the long smelly darkness of the loading garage. The blue-uniformed baggage man would be kicking the last suitcase deeper into the sidecave; then he'd slam down the cover. Could she hear that, sitting inside? She'd be looking out her window at the numbered metal doors. The driver would close and lock the one she had just come through, so that she couldn't see the Coke machine anymore, but through the window she'd still be able to find legs opening and closing with comic earnestness, reflecting themselves on the bile-green floor. Now she'd be staring at the streaks of brown grease above those metal doors. He could feel her thinking of him. He'd never get away from her. She thought of him until the driver came in and started the engine. The driver took his coat off, slammed the door, slid glasses over his nose, honked, and began to pull out into the street. A man in a baseball cap was whistling and pacing, a garbage bag over his shoulder. Cold shadows and tired lights began to encase the buildings in their night incarnation. Another bus went by, almost empty, a rolling box of lateness. She would be on the freeway now because the traffic was light. It was too late for her to be accompanied by the noises of little boys in baseball caps eating chips. The other heads growing from the seats like halitosis melons would be weary heads, not even mumbling as she passed the Hofbrau and the Hotel Marshall on that bus which sometimes smelled of leather, sometimes of tunafish, always of that disinfectant whose nauseating fumes always commanded him to consider the toilets of mental wards. He could see himself sitting behind her, glimpsing the top of her head over the seat, her shoulder between the seats; maybe she'd reach for the reading light and he'd see her arm bloom sweetly up. He allowed himself to remember kissing her. Remembering was just the same as reading the commentary on a favorite poem, not to learn any secret, but only because he'd read the poem to satiation without yet exhausting his love, and scanning the commentary was a way to kiss the poem again without reading it. Nobody was in sight. Blank or vicious little headlights scuttered around the bases of the chilly skyscrapers. It got darker. The trees were now almost the color of the sky. Cool darkness pressed on his head. On a squat skyscraper, a glowing red bead tipped a horn of darkness.