That book was the atlas. The atlas contained the rain upon her breasts in Mexico. It had cloud maps, kept track of all the water in the world. The atlas contained the browneyed dog in the van, brown-eyed, brownhaired, red, blacklipped, standing with its forelegs on her knees, trying to lick her; and she was laughing and he was laughing and the man who'd picked them up was shaking his head with a smile as they came into the high desert flats just past June Lake with the purple-brown mountains smeared with snow and purple ridges behind where he had kissed her and kissed her, sleet pelting on his camouflage raincoat which he did not wear anymore because it reminded him of her. — The teacher took a stick, dipped it in a pot of thick black ink, and wrote that verse on the long narrow piece of wood which was knobbed at the top like a weird tombstone or a cross-section of a bowling pin. The teacher had the whole Qur'an in his head. For each lesson the little boys would write one day, wash it off the next. Outside the school's walls, brown kids with their long dirty shirt-tails hanging out played games of throwing rocks and running in the shade of roofless buildings past which soldiers' trucks rolled. (Very ancient buildings, a man said. Two hundred years.) Birds flew over the missing roofs. A kid cleaned a dusty piece of canvas with his hands, and a long gray iron-breasted truck with soldiers in it came speeding around the road. Where the road turned away from the sea there was a wall with two bites taken out of it, and then the road dwindled into trees and soldiers slowly trudging across a street-horizon in the direction of the Green Line, the dangerous place. A brown man in white walked steadily down the white sand road, whirling a stick. On a ledge in a white wall, people sat, and water ran slowly from a silver bowl which a boy poured over his hands.
He did not want her back because he could not have her and also the rest of his life which contained matters which had caused her anguish, but of course he wanted her back; he wanted to wake up beside her; he was so lonely for her. In the atlas it said DRAINAGE BASINS and UNPRODUCTIVE AREAS and LOST LOVES and FOREVER LOST LOVES.
The boy poured water from the bowl. Beside him lay a long narrow piece of wood which was knobbed at the top like a tombstone. A verse was written upon it in black ink. He looked up at the boy with the wooden slate, and wanted to ask which verse it was, but the boy did not understand. He wanted to ask where the gazetteer was, so that he could locate the rains which had fallen upon her in Mexico, but the boy did not understand. The boy spoke to him, and he did not understand.
No, no, it wasn't that she'd died; no, she hadn't gone down into the rotten arches of darkness that crumbled like cheese. And it wasn't that he couldn't be hers again, contingent upon certain modifications which he could (but would not) readily make in his character. He knew where she was; if he was determined enough he could find her. But he refused to rewrite the inscription on his secret obelisk. She'd told him that in that case he'd chosen to give her up. And it was true. — But, as Husserl says, how fares it with
So he descended beneath the Sunday noon of empty streets stretched tight like drumheads (a woman sounded them with her gold-flowered black high heels); so he went into the catacombs. She hadn't died. She wasn't in Mexico. That night he ascended the Spanish Stairs' white smoothness etched black in the texture of a full moon. He bought a pocket atlas in Italian; opening it, he addressed her and said: Since you are also in Heaven there must be two of you. Therefore one of you can be with me. That's reasonable, isn't it? I'm not asking for you. I'm only asking for a spare you.
He confided this into the atlas, which he then closed and tied with black ribbons. Then he left it in a church. He hoped that maybe it would call to her like a signal beacon.
