Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

  Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows—the actual past—from another such simulacrum—the actual future?

  One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each “shell” (the present) encased inside a nest of “shells” (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of “now” likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future.

  Proposition: I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey.

  The detonator is triggered. The C-4 ignites. The jet is engulfed by a fireball. The jet’s metals, plastics, circuitry, its passengers, their bones, clothes, notebooks, and brains all lose definition in flames exceeding 1200 degrees C. The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts. Now the bifurcation of these two pasts will begin.

  42

  “Betty and Frank needed to shore up their finances,” Lloyd Hooks tells his breakfast audience in the Swannekke Hotel. A circle of neophytes and acolytes pays keen attention to the Presidential Energy Guru. “So they decide Betty’d go on the game to get a little cash in hand. Night comes around, Frank drives Betty over to Whore Lane to ply her new trade. ’Hey, Frank,’ says Betty, from the sidewalk. ’How much should I charge?’ Frank does the math and tells her, ’A hundred bucks for the whole shebang.’ So Betty gets out, and Frank parks down a quiet alley. Pretty soon this guy drives up in his beat-up old Chrysler and propositions Betty: ’How much for all night, sugar?’ Betty says, ’Hundred dollars.’ The guy says, ‘I only got thirty dollars. What’ll thirty buy me?’ So Betty dashes around to Frank and asks him. Frank says, ‘Tell him thirty dollars buys a hand job.’ So Betty goes back to the guy—”

  Lloyd Hooks notices Bill Smoke in the background. Bill Smoke raises one, two, three fingers; the three fingers become a fist; the fist becomes a slashing gesture. Alberto Grimaldi, dead; Isaac Sachs, dead; Luisa Rey, dead. Swindler, sneak, snoop. Hooks’s eyes tell Smoke he has understood, and a figment from a Greek myth surfaces in his mind. The sacred grove of Diana was guarded by a warrior priest on whom luxury was lavished but whose tenure was earned by slaying his predecessor. When he slept, it was at the peril of his life. Grimaldi, you dozed for too long.

  “So, anyway, Betty goes back to the guy and says his thirty’ll buy a hand job, take it or leave it. The guy says, ‘Okay, sugar, jump in, I’ll take the hand job. Is there a quiet alley around here?’ Betty has him drive around the corner to Frank’s alley, and the guy unbelts his pants to reveal the most—y’ know—gargantuan schlong. ‘Wait up!’ gasps Betty. ‘I’ll be right back.’ She jumps out of the guy’s car and knocks on Frank’s window. Frank lowers the window, ‘What now?’ “ Hooks pauses for the punch line. “Betty says, ‘Frank, hey, Frank, lend this guy seventy dollars!’ ”

  The men who would be board members cackle like hyenas. Whoever said money can’t buy you happiness, Lloyd Hooks thinks, basking, obviously didn’t have enough of the stuff.

  43

  Through binoculars Hester Van Zandt watches the divers on their launch. An unhappy-looking barefoot teenager in a poncho ambles along the beach and pats Hester’s mongrel. “They found the car yet, Hester? Channel’s pretty deep at that point. That’s why the fishing’s so good there.”

  “Hard to be sure at this distance.”

  “Kinda ironic to drown in the sea you’re polluting. The guard’s kinda got the hots for me. Told me it was a drunk driver, a woman, ’bout four in the morning.”

  “Swannekke Bridge comes under the same special security remit as the island. Seaboard can say what they like. No one’ll cross-check their story.”

  The teenager yawns. “D’you s’pose she drowned in her car, the woman? Or d’you think she got out and kinda drowned later?”

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “If she was drunk enough to drive through a railing, she couldn’t have made it to the shore.”

  “Who knows?”

  “Gross way to die.” The teenager yawns and walks off. Hester trudges back to her trailer. Milton the Native American sits on its step, drinking from a milk carton. He wipes his mouth and tells her, “Wonder Woman’s awake.”

  Hester steps around Milton and asks the woman on the sofa how she is feeling.

  “Lucky to be alive,” answers Luisa Rey, “full of muffins, and drier. Thanks for the loan of your clothes.”

  “Lucky we’re the same size. Divers are looking for your car.”

  “The Sixsmith Report, not my car. My body would be a bonus.”

  Milton locks the door. “So you crashed through a barrier, dropped into the sea, got out of a sinking car, and swam three hundred yards to shore, with no injuries worse than mild bruising.”

  “It hurts plenty when I think of my insurance claim.”

  Hester sits down. “What’s your next move?”

  “Well, first I need to go back to my apartment and get a few things. Then I’ll go stay with my mother, on Ewingsville Hill. Then … back to square one. I can’t get the police or my editor interested in what’s happening on Swannekke without the report.”

  “Will you be safe at your mother’s?”

  “As long as Seaboard thinks I’m dead, Joe Napier won’t come looking. When they learn I’m not …” She shrugs, having gained an armor of fatalism from the events of the last six hours. “Altogether safe, possibly not. An acceptable degree of risk. I don’t do this sort of thing often enough to be an expert.”

  Milton digs his thumbs into his pockets. “I’ll drive you back to Buenas Yerbas. Gimme a minute, I’ll go call a friend and get him to bring his pickup over.”

  “Good guy,” says Luisa, after he’s left.

  “I’d trust Milton with my life,” answers Hester.

  44

  Milton strides over to the flyblown general store that services the campsite, trailer park, beachgoers, traffic to Swannekke, and the isolated houses hereabouts. An Eagles song comes on a radio behind the counter. Milton feeds a dime into the phone, checks the walls for ears, and dials in a number from memory. Water vapor rises from the Swannekke cooling towers like malign genies. Pylons march north to Buenas Yerbas and south to Los Angeles. Funny, thinks Milton. Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible. The phone is answered. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, Napier? It’s me. Listen, about a woman called Luisa Rey. Well, suppose she isn’t? Suppose she’s still walking around eating Popsicles and paying utility bills? Would her whereabouts be worth anything to you? Yeah? How much? No, you name a figure. Okay, double that … No? Nice talking with you, Napier, I gotta go and”—Milton smirks—”the usual account within one working day, if you please. Right. What? No, no one else has seen her, only Crazy Van Zandt. No. She did mention it, but it’s in the bottom of the deep blue sea. Quite sure. Fish food. Course not, my exclusives are for your ears only … Uh-huh, I’m driving her back to her apartment, then she’s going to her mother’s … Okay, I’ll make it an hour. The usual account. One working day.”

  45

  Luisa opens her front door to the sounds of a Sunday ball game and the smell of popcorn. “Since when did I say you could fry oil?” she calls through to Javier. “Why are the blinds all down?”

  Javier bounces down the hallway, grinning. “Hi, Luisa! Your uncle Joe made the popcorn. We’re watching Giants versus Dodgers. Why are you dressed like an old woman?”

  Luisa feels her core sicken. “Come here. Where is he?”

  Javier sniggers. “On your sofa! What’s up?”

  “Come here! Your mom wants you.”

  “She’s working overtime at the hotel.”

  “Luisa, it wasn’t me, on the bridge, it wasn’t me!” Joe Napier appears behind him, holding out his palms as if reassuring a scared animal. “Listen—”

  Luisa’s voice judders. “Javi! Out! Behind me!”

  Napier raises his voice. “Listen to me—”
<
br />   Yes, I am talking with my own killer. “Why in hell should I listen to a word you say?”

  “Because I’m the only insider at Seaboard who doesn’t want you dead!” Napier’s calm has deserted him. “In the parking lot, I was trying to warn you! Think about it! If I was the hit man would we even be having this conversation? Don’t go, for Chrissakes! It’s not safe! Your apartment could be under surveillance still. That’s why the blinds are down.”

  Javier looks aghast. Luisa holds the boy but doesn’t know the least dangerous way to turn. “Why are you here?”

  Napier is quiet again, but tired and troubled. “I knew your father, when he was a cop. V-J Day on Silvaplana Wharf. Come in, Luisa. Sit down.”

  46

  Joe Napier calculated that the neighbor’s kid would tether Luisa long enough to make her listen. He’s not proud that his plan paid off. Napier, more a watcher than a speaker, chisels out his sentences with care. “In 1945, I’d been a cop for six years at Spinoza District Station. No commendations, no black marks. A regular cop, keeping his nose clean, dating a regular girl in a typing pool. On the fourteenth of August, the radio said the Japs had surrendered and Buenas Yerbas danced one almighty hula. Drink flowed, cars revved up, firecrackers were set off, people took a holiday even if their bosses didn’t give ’em one. Come nine o’clock or so, my partner and I were called to a hit-and-run in Little Korea. Normally we didn’t bother with that end of town, but the victim was a white kid, so there’d be relatives and questions. We were en route when a Code Eight comes through from your father, calling all available cars to Silvaplana Wharf. Now, the rule of thumb was, you didn’t go snooping around that part of the docks, not if you wanted a career. The mob had their warehouses there, under a city hall umbrella. What’s more, Lester Rey”—Napier decides not to modify his language—”was known as a Tenth Precinct pain-in-the-ass Sunday-school cop. But two officers were down, and that ain’t the same ball game. It could be your buddy bleeding to death on the tarmac. So we flat-outed and reached the wharf just behind another Spinoza car, Brozman and Harkins. Saw nothing at first. No sign of Lester Rey, no sign of a squad car. The dockside lights were off. We drove between two walls of cargo containers, around the corner into a yard where men were loading up an army truck. I was thinking we were in the wrong zone of the docks. Then the wall of bullets hit us. Brozman and Harkins took the first wave—brakes, glass filling the air, our car skidded into theirs, me and my partner rolled out of our car and holed up behind a stack of steel tubes. Brozman’s car horn sounds, doesn’t stop, and they don’t appear. More bullets ack-ack-acking around us, I’m shitting myself—I’d become a cop to avoid war zones. My partner starts firing back. I follow his lead, but our chances of hitting anything are zilch. To be honest with you, I was glad when the truck trundled by. Dumb ass that I was, I broke cover too soon—to see if I could get a license plate.” The root of Napier’s tongue is aching. “Then all this happens. A yelling man charges me from across the yard. I fire at him. I miss—the luckiest miss of my life, and yours too, Luisa, because if I’d shot your father you wouldn’t be here. Lester Rey is pointing behind me as he sprints by, and he kicks an object rolling my way, lobbed from the back of the truck. Then a blinding light fries me, a noise axes my head, and a needle of pain shoots through my butt. I lay where I fell, half conscious, until I was hoisted into an ambulance.”

  Luisa still isn’t saying anything.

  “I was lucky. A fragment of grenade shrapnel tore through both buttock cheeks. The rest of me was fine. The doctor said it was the first time he’d seen one projectile make four holes. Your dad, of course, was not so fine. Lester was a piece of Swiss cheese. They’d operated but failed to save his eye the day before I left the hospital. We just shook hands and I left, I didn’t know what to say. The most humiliating thing you can do to a man is to save his life. Lester knew it too. But there’s not a day, possibly not an hour, that’s gone by without my thinking about him. Every time I sit down.”

  Luisa says nothing for a while. “Why didn’t you tell me this on Swannekke Island?”

  Napier scratches his ear. “I was afraid you’d use the connection to squeeze me for juice …”

  “On what really happened to Rufus Sixsmith?”

  Napier doesn’t say yes, doesn’t say no. “I know how reporters work.”

  “You are picking holes in my integrity?”

  She’s speaking generally—she can’t know about Margo Roker. “If you keep on looking for Rufus Sixsmith’s report”—Napier wonders if he should say this in front of the boy—”you’ll be killed, plain and simple. Not by me! But it’ll happen. Please. Leave town now. Jettison your old life and job, and go.”

  “Alberto Grimaldi sent you to tell me that, did he?”

  “No one knows I’m here—pray God—or I’m in as much trouble as you.”

  “One question first.”

  “You want to ask if”—he wishes the kid was elsewhere—”if Sixsmith’s ‘fate’ was my work. The answer is no. That sort of … job, it wasn’t my business. I’m not saying I’m innocent. I’m just saying I’m guilty only of looking the other way. Grimaldi’s fixer killed Sixsmith and drove you off the bridge last night. A man by the name of Bill Smoke—one name of many, I suspect. I can’t make you believe me, but I hope you will.”

  “How did you know I’d survived?”

  “Vain hope. Look, life is more precious than a damn scoop. I’m begging you, one last time, and it will be the last, to drop this story. Now I’ve got to leave, and I wish to Christ you’d do the same.” He stands. “One last thing. Can you use a gun?”

  “I have an allergy to guns.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Guns make me nauseous. Literally.”

  “Everyone should learn to use a gun.”

  “Yeah, you can see crowds of ’em laid out in morgues. Bill Smoke isn’t going to wait politely while I get a gun out of my handbag, is he? My only way out is to get evidence that’ll blow this affair so totally, killing me would be a pointless act.”

  “You’re underestimating man’s fondness for petty revenge.”

  “What do you care? You’ve paid back your debt to Dad. You’ve salved your conscience.”

  Napier gives a morose sigh. “Enjoyed the ball game, Javi.”

  “You’re a liar,” says the boy.

  “I lied, yes, but that doesn’t make me a liar. Lying’s wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “You’re damn right it doesn’t, but it’s still true.”

  Joe Napier lets himself out.

  Javier is angry with Luisa, too. “And you act like I’m gambling with my life just because I jump across a couple of balconies?”

  47

  Luisa’s and Javier’s footsteps reverberate in the stairwell. Javier peers over the handrail. Lower floors recede like the whorls of a shell. A wind of vertigo blows, making him giddy. It works the same looking upward. “If you could see into the future,” he asks, “would you?”

  Luisa slings her bag. “Depends on if you could change it or not.”

  “S’posing you could? So, say you saw you were going to be kidnapped by Communist spies on the second story, you’d take the elevator down to the ground floor.”

  “But what if the spies called the elevator, agreeing to kidnap whoever was in it? What if trying to avoid the future is what triggers it all?”

  “If you could seethe future, like you can see the end of Sixteenth Street from the top of Kilroy’s department store, that means it’s already there. If it’s already there, you can’t change it.”

  “Yes, but what’s at the end of Sixteenth Street isn’t made by what you do. It’s pretty much fixed, by planners, architects, designers, unless you go and blow a building up or something. What happens in a minute’s time is made by what you do.”

  “So what’s the answer? Can you change the future or not?”
>
  Maybe the answer is not a function of metaphysics but one, simply, of power. “It’s a great imponderable, Javi.”

  They have reached the ground floor. The Six Million Dollar Man’s bionic biceps jangle on Malcolm’s TV.

  “See you, Luisa.”

  “I’m not leaving town forever, Javi.”

  At the boy’s initiative they shake hands. The gesture surprises Luisa: it feels formal, final, and intimate.

  48

  A silver carriage clock in Judith Rey’s Ewingsville home tinkles one o’clock in the afternoon. Bill Smoke is being talked at by a financier’s wife. “This house never fails to bring out the demon of covetousness in me,” the fifty-something bejeweled woman confides, “it’s a copy of a Frank Lloyd Wright. The original’s on the outskirts of Salem, I believe.” She is standing an inch too close. You look like a witch from the outskirts of Salem gone fucking crazy in Tiffany’s, Bill Smoke thinks, remarking, “Now, is that so?”

  Hispanic maids supplied by the caterers carry trays of food among the all-white guests. Swan-shaped linen napkins bear place cards. “That white-leafed oak tree on the front lawn would have been here when the Spanish missions were built,” the wife says, “wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Without doubt. Oaks live for six hundred years. Two hundred to grow, two hundred to live, two hundred to die.”

  Smoke sees Luisa enter the lavish room, accepting a kiss on both cheeks from her stepfather. What do I want from you, Luisa Rey? A female guest of Luisa’s age hugs her. “Luisa! It’s been three or four years!” Close-up, the guest’s charm is cattish and prying. “But is it true you’re not married yet?”