The Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

  I didn't move to pick his hand back up. Because maybe he was traveling. I didn't want to hold him back. I didn't want to be dragged any further out of my world, away from my God. Maybe that's it. Or maybe it's just that I didn't want to feel the wolf's teeth sinking into my hand.

  What's the difference, anyway, between what Ronnie is doing- slipping in and out of consciousness, traveling from one world to another-and my falling asleep? My dreaming of flight, and then recounting my banal dream after I awake? I don't know. I don't dream of flying. I did it once, really did it, just me and my arms and legs and the air, and I've never wanted to do it again.

  IT WAS LATE WHEN I got back on base after my dinner with Lily. Something-or everything-about my “goodbye” dinner with Lily made me desperate to talk with someone, even Father Pabich, though he would probably have treated the whole matter as something worthy of confession.

  I couldn't find anyone to talk to, but I couldn't see myself going to sleep, either. I went over to Gurley's Quonset hut. The sentry said nothing; he didn't even look surprised. He let me in through what Gurley persisted in calling the “back door” and then locked everything behind me. I banged my away across the floor in the dark to the small office in the rear. I had been granted access to the building in Gurley's absence, but not the office. He had, however, given me a small desk outside. I sat down and felt around for the desk lamp.

  Suddenly, the hut's massive overhead lights clunked on.

  “Belk!” Gurley shouted as the door shut behind him. “Working in the dark? Or sleeping?” By the time he reached me, I had some paper out and was pretending to take notes. “If there's one thing I hate more than incompetence, Belk, it's incompe tents trying to suck up.” He clapped a hand on my back. “You've been studying?” He wasn't entirely angry. “You'll be forgiven for this shameless display-working all night, it would seem-if you actually came up with something.”

  Came up with something: maybe I'm guessing at the rest of the dialogue, but I know he said this. And “came up with something,” meant just that: invented. This was Alaska, after all, where chaplains swore like stevedores and Eskimo women could tease your entire past from your hand. It was all imaginary, all true. I thought about dinner with Lily. I thought about what Gurley wanted to hear. And then I said what I knew.

  “I know where the next balloon will land.”

  Gurley's presence changed the acoustics of a conversation; his being there could make your voice sound terribly small, or terribly ominous. Or in my case, both.

  He didn't reply. I breathed deeply enough to get the memory of what Lily had whispered echoing in my ear once again. “Shu-yak,” I said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Shuyak,” I repeated, working out the pronunciation and realizing as I did what Lily had said.

  Gurley had been yawning and inattentive, but now he focused: “Along the Aleutians, isn't it?” I nodded, though I had no idea. I wasn't even sure it was a real place: perhaps Shuyak was the imaginary province of Yup'ik seers. Maybe it was simply Yup'ik for goodbye. I felt ill. “Easy enough to see why you guessed there,” Gurley said. But he was appreciative, not scolding. “I've guessed at that, too. Let's look.” He unlocked his office and went over to the wall map. I entered and sat. “Truth is, Aleutians don't matter to many people other than the Aleutians. Who, as it happens, are no longer there, poor dears.” He pointed to southeast Alaska. “That's why the Navy has thoughtfully relocated them here.” He frowned, pointed to a spot on the mainland. “No, here. Somewhere. There's plenty of Aleuts to go around. Apparently, the Japs took some, too, in fact. Probably carted them off to some zoo in Tokyo.” He studied his lip with his tongue as he drew his finger along to the end of the Aleutian chain. “Anyway there's nobody left out there, save some poor Jap soldiers, perhaps, hiding in caves out on Kiska.” He sat down and began studying his palms. I wondered if Lily had ever read his life through his hands, and if she had, what she made of the jagged scars that Gurley's pushpin doodles left behind. “It's American soil, but frozen, barren soil, so who cares?” Gurley continued. “I hope all their balloons land there. In any case, I can't find it. Any other ideas?”

  “No,” I said, studying the map. Why had I given myself over to Lily like that? Here I was, spouting some nonsense she'd purred.

  “No?” Gurley said, turning away. “Such was my supposition.”

  I sat up. “Listen-Shuyak-that's where the next balloon will land,” I said, my insistence stemming more from an automatic desire to counter Gurley than anything else.

  “My word, dear Sergeant. When I told you to search out incoming balloons, I was just-well, not joking, no, not joking at all, this is deadly serious-but I don't expect you, or anyone, to really know where each individual balloon is going to land. It's touching, of course, that you stayed up all night in an effort to obey my somewhat facetious order-facetious, Belk? Another word for your list-and if that atlas tells you something about the balloons' design or construction that we don't already know, or if you pick up something that leads you to believe you know what general areas they're targeting, or what they might be planning, okay.”

  “Shuyak,” I said. Was that what Lily had said? Every time I tried to replay the memory, the sound of what she said changed. But my mouth was still working, words kept coming out. “Oh-seven-hundred Alaskan War Time tomorrow morning.” Now Gurley looked at me sharply. “North-northwest corner of the island.”

  “The corner?” he asked slowly. “You're making this up.” I was.

  “Corner-quadrant-whatever. The northwest part of the island,” I said. It was exhilarating, lying I felt more specifics arriving-wind speed, temperature, type of blast-but what reason remained in me held my imagination in check.

  He looked up at the map again. “Closer in, maybe.” He ran his hand back along the Aleutian Chain, up onto the Alaska Peninsula and over to Kodiak. “Eureka,” he said. “Shuyak? Just north of Kodiak, right?” I nodded. He tapped the map. “That's not so far from here.” He thought about this, and then asked, “Oh-seven-hundred?” I nodded. He stared at me for a long moment. “The problem is, Belk,” he said, and stopped. He started again. “The problem is, Belk, you have to be right. You know what they told me in San Francisco? They want to press ahead with their foolish plan. Blow this all wide open. Remove the censorship directive. Let every last American know about these bombs, set the masses all to looking for them. Which is a stupid idea, but that doesn't matter, Belk. We'd be out of a job, or we'd wind up with a job similar in stature and function to the clowns who sweep up elephant dung at the rear of a circus parade.” He cupped his chin and regarded Shuyak. When he turned around, he was in the midst of trading masks- Wronged Captain for Effete Ivy Leaguer, or perhaps the Brusque CO.-or else he had forgone one altogether. His voice was softer, too. Normal, pitched well below the range at which he usually delivered his lines. “But if you're right, Belk-think what this means.”

  “We'll save lives,” I said, caught up in Gurley's growing excitement.

  “We'll save our jobs,” he said, “and our secrets, at least for a little while longer. I asked for a month; they gave me two weeks to prove there was a compelling reason not to lift the press ban. This could be a reason. If I can tell them we've cooked up a way to predict arrivals, landings, well-that really changes matters. I'd be offering them a chance to stay one step ahead, of the enemy, and the public.”

  He stopped and thought about this. All the while he'd been talking, I'd been trying to work up the courage to interrupt him and better rein in his expectations. But I couldn't then and I couldn't now, and so when he said, “You'll go, then,” I simply nodded and stood. Before I left, he had one more thing to add: “You'll go alone, of course. If it turns out you're wrong, it's best you fail alone.” He picked up the phone. “I'm sure you understand.”

  GURLEY HAD LIMITED (and diminishing) authority over a special Army Air Corps crew that was stationed at Elmendorf Field. They had all been nominally trained in the spotti
ng and destruction, though not recovery, of balloon bombs. More important, they had all been sworn to secrecy, to such a degree that none of the men would even talk to me when I got out to the field at first light, around 4 A.M. I wasn't sure what Gurley had told them, other than our destination and my name.

  We were to take a floatplane out to Shuyak, a modified PBY Catalina that looked about as ungainly and makeshift as the balloons. It had the hull of a boat but the snout of a plane; its wings extended heavily from the top of the fuselage, like the arms of a lumbering giant. Pilots called it a two-fisted airplane; once in the air, you wrestled it more than steered it.

  A young airman outfitted me with gear, including a chest-pack parachute.

  “What's this for?” I asked.

  “First flight over enemy territory?” he answered, not looking at me.

  “We're just heading to Shuyak,” I said. “That's well behind the front lines.”

  He corrected my pronunciation and said again, “Like I was saying, this your first flight?”

  “I don't understand,” I said. “I thought only the two outermost Aleutian islands were ever occupied by the Japanese. And they're long gone.”

  “Right,” the airman said. “But who's going out there to check on them these days? Thing is, the Japs have been sneaking on and off all those islands out there for a long time now.” He raked down a strap. “Thing is, a hundred miles out of Anchorage, you don't know whose side you're on.”

  “You could be anywhere,” I said.

  “You could be following some idiot's hunch to go to Shuyak,” the airman said, stepping back.

  I climbed aboard.

  THE PLANE BUFFETED along through a constantly changing sky that seemed to have leaked from the pages of Gurley's captured atlas. The sunrise chased us as we flew south and slightly west, the sky going from sooty gray to a strange, soupy green, and then improbably into pink. One of the PBY's stranger features was a pair of bubble windows, or “blisters,” that bulged out just forward of the tail. Each was manned with a spotter, neither of whom seemed much interested in spotting anything. I offered to take over for one of them and soon found myself staring slack-jawed at the celestial show while the rest of the crew snoozed or snickered.

  By the time we reached Shuyak, it was just before six. During the last forty-five minutes of the flight, I had come to my senses; that is to say, I had realized that I had endangered my life and the lives of a brave, if surly, crew because I had a-what? A hunch? Based on a woman's whisper? Or a hand's promise?

  From Anchorage, we'd flown southwest over the waters of Cook Inlet, skirting the coast of the Kenai Peninsula. Looking out the right side of the aircraft, I watched a series of volcanic peaks stretch along the coast. Snowy and distant, they looked like mountains you might visit in a dream. I wondered if Lily's island lay beneath them.

  A crew member elbowed me and then handed over his headset. As I fumbled to put it on, he shouted something above the plane's roar that I did not understand.

  The sudden arrival of voices via the headset brought on a flash of recognition. Voices in my head: now, this was madness. “We're here, Sergeant,” the pilot said. “Now, just where on Shuyak is this balloon going to land?” I had, of course, assumed that Shuyak was an island as big, and featureless, as a soccer field, and that it would reveal its secrets to us in a single flyby

  It did not. Shuyak was not an island but a wild, tiny continent. It was, in fact, flat as a soccer field-flatter than any other scrap of land in sight-but its surface was a dense paisley of Sitka spruce and pothole lakes. A half dozen balloons could land here and never be found.

  Suddenly short of breath, I pulled my head out of the blister, only to see the entire crew staring at me, expectant. I crouched in the narrow space and, so I wouldn't have to look at them, pretended to be studying some emergency ditching instructions printed on the cabin wall.

  Before I could respond to the pilot, I heard another voice on the radio: “Whaddya know, balloon, two o'clock.” Everyone darted for one of the blisters; I managed to wedge my head in alongside another man's.

  I stared at my balloon.

  The pilot brought the plane into a wide swoop, and we all watched, transfixed, as if we'd just entered the orbit of the moon. This balloon looked precisely like the one that had crashed into that California hillside, and for a moment, my mind insisted it was that balloon, resurrected and airborne once more.

  I wanted it.

  “Not too close now,” I muttered, and then realized I was speaking into the headset's microphone. “They're armed with explosives,” I said, speaking up. “There's no telling what sets them off.”

  “Trees,” said a sarcastic voice.

  “Rocks,” said another.

  “Bomb disposal sergeants,” said a third.

  “Remember, Sergeant, we've been on this patrol for a few months now. We know what kind of animal this is.”

  “Which explains why you've had such success figuring out where and when they're going to land,” I thought, and without thinking further, said.

  “Okay, folks, let's take her down,” the pilot said. I looked around to see where we might touch down, but saw nothing. One of the crew tapped me on the shoulder and nodded to a small canvas sling seat that folded down from the wall. Once we were seated, I asked him via hand gestures-he didn't have a headset-just how we would land. I understood the concept of floatplanes, but the island's coast didn't look hospitable to us bobbing alongside and hopping out.

  My seatmate shook his head, and then pretended to shoot me with his thumb and index finger. Boom. The balloon exploded between his hands.

  “We need to save it!” I shouted. Part of me wanted a scalp to bring back to Gurley; part of me was curious what magic had wrought: an island, a balloon. This was Lily's prize as much as it was mine.

  The pilot came back on. “Thanks, Sergeant, we'll take it from here.”

  “We have standing orders, don't we, to recover all we can?”

  “I have standing orders to preserve the lives of my crew,” he replied.

  “But this is a big chance for us-it's in excellent condition.” The pilot didn't reply, and then I heard a burst of gunfire. The entire plane shook, and for a moment, I thought we had been hit.

  “Bad news, Sergeant,” the pilot said. “It's in lousy condition.” I went to the blister. The balloon had already dropped from sight; a surprisingly thin plume of smoke was all that remained.

  “Did you hit the basket or the balloon?” I asked. There was still a chance we might recover something.

  “It's not that big a target,” said the pilot. He banked so I could see the balloon, which had plummeted into lighter-green waters just off the island's coast. “I can't really say we were aiming for one or the other.” The plane pulled up. We were heading home.

  “We can't leave,” I said quickly. “It's in shallow water. What if someone finds it, what if one of the bombs attached hasn't exploded? What if it went off and killed them?”

  “I can drop you off, Sergeant.” The pilot laughed. “Answer all your questions.” I heard him radioing coded results of our mission back to base. I was feverish not to return. The balloon I'd seen-it wasn't just a balloon, it was magic, or more. Not just my magic. The magic of an entire nation-Japan had managed to send a bomb several thousand miles, from their shores to ours-and the magic of a palm reader in Anchorage, the magic of a whisper, a touch. I did want to see that balloon, and desperately. Not because I wanted evidence for Gurley but because-because it was somehow the gateway to another world, a world I had invented, or that Lily had invented for me. And if I could grasp some piece of that world-that balloon-I'd make the dream real. I would prove to myself that all the rest of this awful dream- Alaska, Gurley, war-was controllable by me as well.

  Or I would die in the attempt, which struck me as both noble and expedient. At least God wouldn't take me for a coward, which I was sure was what He thought when I ducked the seminary. (Don't smirk-He watched my ever
y move in those days.) I cinched tight the parachute I'd been issued.

  I had never leapt out of a plane before. Parachuting had been offered as part of our training, but few men took the course who were not required to. “Why jump out of a perfectly good airplane?” I heard a flight surgeon once ask. And the PBY didn't make the task easy-it was built to float, after all, and so holes in the fuselage were few. If I wanted out, it looked like I'd have to wriggle out the blister.

  But I was invincible now, full of faith and magic. I could escape the PBY, and I could master the art of jumping after exiting the plane. I ducked quickly to read the emergency instructions I'd seen before and then reached up to open the blister.

  The crewman at my right pulled at me. I elbowed him away. Another man came from the left. I kicked.

  The pilot started shouting in my headset. “Don't go batty on me, Sergeant. You're not going anywhere. For starters, I can't afford to lose that headset you're wearing.” I handed it off. I heaved myself up into the blister opening. The harness caught on something. The wind tore at me. The air was freezing. The men behind me were grabbing at my feet, my legs. I lost a boot to one of them and then the other.

  One or two bruising kicks later, the wind snatched me away. The last thing I heard was “Head!” I looked up to see the tail assembly flash past my nose. And then I was flying, as free and fast as a shaman.

  WHEN HE LATER HEARD about it, Gurley could not believe that I had jumped out of the plane. Neither could I, nor had I, technically speaking. I had kicked myself halfway out, but the wind had ripped me the rest of the way. It could as easily have been Lily's hand pulling me earthward, as surely as she had pulled me toward Shuyak when she whispered in my ear.

  And some spirit was with me that day. As chance would have it, the plane was flying slowly enough for someone who knew how to jump, to jump. And parachutes are not so complicated that a man of great faith cannot come to a decision as to which toggle to pull and deploy his parachute. Had I known a little more, however, I might have been able to actually land myself on the slip of rocky shore. Instead, I plunged into the ocean. Just fifty or so yards offshore-swimmable, were I in the summertime waters of my childhood Pacific Ocean, but here, the ocean was December cold and patrolled by what looked like, at first glance, miniature enemy submarines (they were, in fact, sea lions).