The Atlas полностью

Did I? Do I? So many years ago now she'd married somebody else. Now she had cancer. On the envelopes to her letters there were thirteen-cent butterfly stamps. In the upper lefthand corner was the address of where she'd been when she was a girl. If he ever went searching for her, he wouldn't go to the house where she lived with her husband and three children. He'd go back to that town of streets now empty of people he knew, long and empty and wide like the boulevards of Tamatave. He did not really remember the town of her girlhood at all. Memory is declivous, sinking of its own weight into the mucky ponds. That new virus he'd read about that converts a person into black slime in three days, perhaps it was but the counterpart of what forgetting does more slowly to the soul. For he could remember the excitement he'd felt when her letters alighted in his mailbox one by one, but the flagrant fragrant emotion that had rushed into his lungs when he'd opened each envelope so long ago could only be faked now, not recapitulated. The letters were now near as old as he and she had been when she'd written them. Once he started to reread them, but some were typed and some were written in her intense and crabby longhand; he'd read only the typed parts because he was tired and his eyes hurt. This is getting too long, she'd written, and he thought: I guess that's true of my life. I meant to be civil but not chatty. I am selfish and nasty now, hardly nice. I like my life the way it is now because it's mostly private and very much my own. Then she'd crossed two or three lines out and continued: I'm being rude. I just want to go away and think again. He thought that he remembered (he wasn't certain) spending an hour or more trying to make out the rude part, and now if he really wanted to do it, all he'd have to do would be to call the CIA. It wasn't that he didn't care; his mind and soul had gone so many times abroad, each time ensaring him in new experiences from which, struggling to get free or to dig himself deeper, he'd dusted and buried his past. That muffledness made him wonder whether the fact that he still loved her (or at least her memory) might be grotesque. Everything made him tired. Thinking of her afforded him pleasure even now; but those stale letters were like draghooks to pull him down. Closing his eyes, he watched her signature form itself like sky-writing on the insides of his eyelids. The words she scripted could never change. Time had split her farther and farther from what she had been. At least they were her letters. His letters would have been worse. The reflections of grass-tufts in dark water all around made it seem that the land was just as green underneath and that it floated on darkness. He'd go under to find the women who'd loved him. He'd live and leap on the islands of red rock in the forest. A bird winged like his heartbeats.

A mother read to her child: In the forest, the Iroquois were waiting for something.

The sky was a ceiling of blue crystal held up with white pillars of birch carpeted so richly with evening ferns. It was that time when the light goes out of lakes.

Near Sudbury it got sandy with hard white dunes and it was grassier and rockier but there were many fish-ripples in the streams. The reflections of birchtop and sprucetop serrations were almost black, and blue cloud-reflections swam in the brown sky. Birch groves fingered evening's green wall with their skeleton hands. That long train the sheen of evening grass followed the sky.

Now the trees began to rise up taller into the night, and the fish-rippled ponds were tarnished blackish-brown. He saw a sudden gash of blue and white light on a lake whose tree-reflections were wide enough apart to let in a little last sky-color, and then he put his head down in his seat and slept.

The next morning was skygray and evergreen. Tall narrow firs were packed together as tightly as poles in a palisade. (He remembered Mexico's railing-teeth on grinning balconies.) Behind and between the tops of them, other trees flashed, helmeted guards of each other's greenness. Then suddenly from the pale bushes rose tall and grizzled stalks like arrow-shafts. There had been a fire here, perhaps three or four years ago. Now the birches returned to flash their skinny white throats, their striped white necks, keeping the firs and spruces small; now the spruces choked everything else out.

Really pretty muskeg, a mother was saying to her children.

Mommy, can we live here?

Well, do you see all the standing water? That means there's lots and lots of mosquitoes and blackflies.

But he thought to himself: They feel it, too. They want to live here, too.