William Vollmann - The Atlas

On the train, a child was crying with dull hopelessness. He sat down in a seat still warm from a vanished body. The train began to move almost immediately. Wet gray streets, wet white-gray sky, wet green-gray trees, mudfields and green fields unraveled, the train clicking like a monstrous loom. There was nowhere to go except home, and home was nowhere anymore. He was starving. To the even jack-hammering of the rails he sat remembering the dinner she'd made him last night: lamb chops and home fries and buttered beans.

The train slowed, as if to enjoy the shade of the overpass, then rolled between a trestle's interminable X's as it crossed the greenish-brown river.

He disembarked with the others and went into the first coffee shop he could find.

Both waitresses limped. One was a fat lady whose gray hair was cropped so severely that she might have been a recent electroshock patient. The other was an old Chinese who shouted almost consonantlessly.

The Chinese lady brought him a menu.

Pork chops and eggs, please, he said.

Why you wan' po'k cho' OK! screeched the waitress.

The walls glistened yellow-green with grease.

A giraffe-necked man in the next booth kept biting his ladyfriend's ear with a silly laugh. An old man lurched in, clutching the rails of his walker. In came a woman, limping.

The clockface was so gilded with decades of grease that it might have been deep sea brass.

A whore and a pimp were sitting side by side at the counter. The pimp said: They stole something else from me. I threw away all my underwear that didn't have holes in it so they'd leave me alone, but they stole the raggedy ones just the same.

The whore yawned and drank her coffee.

What'll you have? said the fat waitress.

Number three, said the pimp.

I dunno what the number three is, said the fat waitress. You order what it is, not what number it is. I don't care how many girls you got working for you.

Gimme some soup then, said the pimp meekly.

A man in a booth smoked, sucking his elliptical face into a round tobacco moon while his glasses gleamed greedily.

The fat waitress hobbled bowlegged, leaning on each booth as she went, struggling with a scalding platter of meat that was too heavy for her.

He remembered the taste of her armpits and the pulsing of the veins in her fingers when he kissed her hands. He thought of the train going farther and farther from her.

The Chinese waitress brought his pork chops and eggs.

Thank you, he said.

She stared at him in surprise.

What do you have coming, hon? the fat waitress was saying to the whore. I didn't hear you.

Two over easy, the whore said bitterly.

He was never going to see her again.

You whaiee po'k cho' ho' sausssssss? shrieked the old Chinese lady.

Hot sauce? OK.

Thank you, he said when she brought it, and she smiled a timid old smile. That was when he began to love her.

Where's my soup? said the pimp.

Just a minute more, said the fat waitress.

I don't have time for you, bitch, the pimp said. — He got up and walked out. The whore looked down at the counter and ground out her cigarette against the saucer.

Your friend's no good, said the fat waitress in outrage. I told him the soup would be ready in a minute and he called me a bitch. The hell with him.

The whore said nothing.

You whaiee whea' toasss please? shrieked the waitress.

Sure, I'll take some wheat toast. Thank you.

This time her smile was full and open.

As he ate he looked around him at the horrible place. The man who had been smoking moved in the next booth, which the giraffe-necked man had left. His face was flushed red. He stuck his cigarette into the nosepiece of his glasses and glared dreamily. — Thank you, he said sarcastically. I oughta run you through, you asshole. Talking to that Chink like that. Thank you, he says.

The bill came to $4.60. He was going to leave six, which would keep a dollar in his pocket after the bus. When the old lady came, she said: Whaieee now e'thing OK?

Nodding silently, he took out seven dollars.

Too much! she shrieked.

Wearily he pushed it into her hand.

T'ank you, t'ank you!

Thank you, he said. As he got up, he watched her fingers tighten ecstatically around the money.

p. xi

Compiler's Note: James Branch Cabell quotation — Let Me Lie, Being in the Main an Ethnological Account of the Remarkable Commonwealth of Virginia and the Making of Its History (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1947), p. 17.

91

"Houses," Roberts Camp section — C. H. Hinton, M.A., The Fifth Dimension (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1906), p. 38.

145

"Spare Parts," first Somalia section, "The principal meteorological factors" — W. Thompson, The Climate of Africa (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 3.

214

"The Atlas," Bible excerpt — New Oxford version, Proverbs 7:25–29.

214

"The Atlas," Qur'-An excerpt — A.J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (New York: Collier Books, 1955), XXVII:41–47.

222

"The Atlas," Sarajevo brochure extract — Sarajevo Tourist Association booklet, "Sarajevo, Yugoslavia: English" (Novi Sad: Munir Ras-idovic, 1985).

230 "The Adas," Lautreamont excerpt — Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems , trans. Paul Knight (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 281.

248—49

"The Atlas," first translation of Snow Country sentence — Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country , trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, Perigree Books, 1981; repr. of 1957 Knopf ed.), p. 3.

249

"The Atlas," second translation of Snow Country sentence — Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories , trans. Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), p. 228 ("Gleanings from 'Snow Country' ").

249-50

Note: "Translations" of the Kawabata sentence on these pages are mine.

320

"The Hill of Gold," Masada section, "The mind of the righteous": — New Oxford version, Proverbs 15:28.

324

"The Hill of Gold," Masada section, Judith's words — Apocrypha, New Oxford Version, Judith 8:16.

333

"Disappointed by the Wind" — Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary , ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 6 (letter to Martin Buber).

379

"Fortune-Tellers," Sphere of Stars section, Coptic text — James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English , 3rd rev. ed. (Harper San Francisco, 1990), "The Concept of Our Great Power" (VI, 4), p. 313.

408

"The Street of Stares," third section, "I look on the blacks as a set of monkeys…" — M. F. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria 1835— 86 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979), p. 45, quoted in Eve Mumewa D. Fesl, Conned! (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993), p. 64.

431

"Say It with Flowers" — When I returned to that bar a year later, the woman with ten husbands was still there. It was night. She clutched me fiercely like a bird of prey and drew me in, shrilly and threateningly cawing entreaties. The place was full of men and terrifying laughter. The next year, no one I knew worked there.

Author's Note

"Opening the Book," the New York section of "Cowbells," "Lunch," "Charity," the New York section of "Five Lonely Nights," and "What's Your Name?" first appeared (in more or less that order) in the 1994 special New York issue of Grand Street .

"The Back of My Head" first appeared in an abbreviated form in The Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1992. This story, along with all of this book's other 1992 pieces set in ex-Yugoslavia (except for "Where You Are Today"), was part of four BBC Radio 4 broadcasts which I made in Berlin in 1992 called "The Yugoslav Notes." (The Yugoslavia pieces in The Atlas are accompaniments to the sections "Where Are All the Pretty Girls?" and "It's Not a War" in my essay "Rising Up and Rising Down"). I am happy now to restore "The Back of My Head" to its original form.