The Atlas полностью

In Omaha there were little houses in rows, spreading trees all the way to the malls, the place dusty tan with the blue-green blotches of trees. But in the empty old town, the railroad depot still offered its chessboard floor and waiting benches as finely finished as pianos. You could take a train to New York, although that wasn't as easy as it used to be. At the Bohemian Café, where they sold ceramic bottles of Jim Beam shaped and painted like Czech girls, and the waitresses in traditional dress were themselves shaped like bottles, bearing magnificent quantities of platters on their brawny arms, food travelled to and fro according to the same laws, in a union of love and shame, leaving the restaurant inside people's bellies, rolling past the neon beer-lights of bars in the Czech section, entering the little houses in rows, becoming flesh, then dirt at last, dusty tan dirt under the blue-green blotches of trees. It changed into plants and animals. The blonde cheerleader who'd shot her arm up on TV was made out of Nebraska, but when she came home from the game she'd have atoms of Oklahoma inside her. This I have learned by following the contours of universal law. Those atoms would not receive their due, either from her or from anyone she'd ever meet, but for all of that, they wouldn't go away since doing so would have left them even more emptied of their Oklahoma selfhood than remaining a part of somebody who had once at least paid lip service to the sovereignty of Oklahoma. And so the blonde cheerleader would marry, move to Iowa and die, becoming dirt, then barley, but at that point the suppressed principle of Oklahoma would bust out in an angry taint; she'd be barley that the snow geese wouldn't eat. The end would be autumn, as they say, but the middle was midsummer lying heavy on Omaha on the day that the blonde cheerleader came home to tall light-globes, signs on poles, lines of concrete splitting the grass. Summer besieged Omaha's chilly warehouse-wide supermarkets whose white aisles (mopped and polished continually) could fit six shopping carts abreast; there was a whole lane of nothing but potato chips. Outside, the summer said: I am Omaha. Without my formative activities, humidity could not quarrel with the absolute. You sweating people know it, and that's why you hide from me. That's why you go inside your cold supermarkets to buy red-white-and-blue cheeses with tinsel stars on them for the Fourth of July. Behind the supermarket was the house where the cheerleader lived. I never met her, but I believe that she too had a picture of a snow goose on the wall. From this house the cheerleader's father drove her past all the other houses to the bus station. She was going to Iowa to visit the boy whom she'd marry. Her father thought that she was going to stay with a girl from school. The ticket window was just opening. She stood her guitar on end like a longnecked pear as she finished her root beer. Then she lifted it and made it keep her company to the trash can. She came back to her place in line and played an inaudible melody. Something nickered against the window, and she heard a bird crying like an Indian. It was only a starling. For a minute she wanted to go home; she didn't know why. If she didn't say a word her boyfriend would hardly notice. What he wanted was to see her in her underwear. Maybe this time she'd let him. He and his friends had watched her on TV for the Oklahoma game. They'd said: looky here, and they'd said: a nice batch. She thought she heard the bird crying again. She didn't want to live in Iowa even though she knew that she would. Tonight for him she'd take off her underwear. Tonight she'd take his penis in her mouth. She didn't know that he had a bet about that riding with his friends. His friends said: Just pull her head down. Worst she'll do is slap you. — When she saw him she was scared for a second; she didn't know why. She didn't like his house. He grinned. The pale light was very intense as it came in through his windows. He was cleaning his shotgun. He promised that come Christmastime he'd bag her a goose.

The cardboard house smelled of urine. The door was part of a packing crate curtained with flower-print cloth. Inside, an old sofa and a chair squatted on the rubble. The dresser was the shell of a dead television. The rear wall was the long brick-edge of the factory that all the other cardboard houses embraced. There was sunlight on the bricks.

Next to this house was a mile of others.