The Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

  “But those were things you saw, and felt. What about late at night? When you're all alone? You hear a noise, you close the book you were reading, and look up, your finger marking the page you were on. What do you think?”

  I tried to think of something funny to say, and then something serious, and finally came up with nothing at all.

  “You think, for a split second, of ghosts, spirits. You do. It's possible. And the feeling passes, sure, and the next morning the sun comes up, you've lost your place in the book, and everything real is real once again, but still, for that moment, it was possible.”

  “For that moment,” I said. It really was time to go.

  “It's that moment,” Lily said. “Right now.”

  “Right,” I said, frightened to discover I was frightened.

  “Look where you are,” Lily said, walking around me, whispering. (She and Gurley shared a sense of drama, or else one had infected the other.) “There's no one here. You're in Alaska. In December. Even the sun is too scared to come around for more than a few hours each day.”

  The street really had taken on a different cast. There were no other pedestrians, no other sounds.

  “Ghosts,” I said absently, almost without meaning to.

  “Not ghosts,” Lily said, “but possibilities. In Alaska, it's all possible. Maybe elsewhere you need things like ghosts to explain what's on the horizon of what's real. But here, you're already past that line. And on this side, the whole world is creaking.” Something, somewhere, made a tiny clink, on cue. “We're all ghosts.” She came around to face me. “We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Your mother's brown eyes. Your father's height.”

  Lily shook her head. “Stop thinking like a kass'aq. At home, my home, someone dies, and a child takes up the name. Feed and clothe the child, and the deceased-they are fed and clothed in the land of the dead.”

  “Land of the dead? Lily-”

  “It's true,” said Lily. She'd stopped acting: her voice was now urgent, emphatic, and didn't quite match her eyes, which looked almost full of tears. “The dead who return, they come wearing things given to their namesake. One elder arrived wearing a dozen parkas. Years of gifts, layered one atop the other.”

  “You've seen this?” I asked.

  “I know this to be true,” she said angrily. I started to say something, but she continued: “I have heard the stories. Any elder will tell you.”

  “Tell me a story,” I said, stalling so that I could quickly scan our surroundings. Something was wrong. A lot was wrong. I'd thought this walk might lead to a kiss-even if it was just a goodbye kiss-and instead we'd found our way to wherever we were. I wondered whether there was a chance the conversation would teeter back toward intimacy while she spoke.

  But when I turned back to face her, she was crying. “Louis,” she said. “Please, if I tell you this-”

  “Of course,” I said, distracted. “Lily-”

  And then I found myself beset by ghosts. One I heard behind me- a quiet footfall, like someone barefoot or wearing moccasins, followed by a slow exhale. I turned, saw nothing and didn't really expect to- my imagination had plenty to work with by then.

  But I hadn't been imagining Lily. I couldn't have been. We'd talked, walked, had dinner together. So I turned back around, sheepish smile in place and ready to admit that, okay, perhaps she was right about spirits, because I swore I had just heard something behind me and-

  She wasn't there.

  Not there, not down the block, not anywhere. I spent a minute looking, but only a minute, before starting back toward base, anxious now to hitch a ride home through the dark. But the only vehicle I saw was a jeep going the wrong direction-into town-and I ducked into the shadows in case they were MPs enforcing curfew.

  There was just a single man in the jeep, and though I caught only a dim glimpse as he sped past me into town, I could tell it wasn't an MP, but Gurley.

  CHAPTER 10

  RONNIE RETURNED EARLY AS WELL. AND WHEN HE AWOKE, he was angry and scared and breathless. This was a couple hours ago-not long, actually, after he'd finished explaining how an angalkuq traveled the tundra. He'd closed his eyes, his breathing deepened and slowed, and I assumed he was reentering his trance-or his coma-or simply falling asleep, exhausted from the actual or imagined journeys he was making in and out of consciousness.

  And I felt guilty. Here was a poor man trying to get some rest and here I had been rattling away at his bedside, taking grateful advantage of a confessor deaf and dumb with sleep. I stopped talking. My decades-only stories, secrets, and sins could wait.

  But Ronnie could not. I had been silent for a minute, perhaps not even that, when his eyes blinked wide. His hands, which had been lying quietly at his side, sprang open as well. Perhaps he'd met his fearful wolf, I thought, and the nightmare had awakened him.

  “Lou-is,” he said, and though his voice was barely louder than the whisper it had been, it was enough change in volume to make it seem like he was shouting. I jumped. “You stopped,” he said. I started to ask what he meant, but he cut me off. “Talking. You stopped talking. You must not stop talking. I have told you this. I have told you the story of the boy and his mother. You must not stop talking.”

  “Ronnie,” I said. “I was just trying to let you sleep.”

  He glared. “Not sleep. I have told you this. I have told you of my journeys. I have told you the story of the boy and his mother.”

  Now I interrupted him. “You didn't,” I said, forcing a patient smile as guilt turned to anger-at Ronnie, and myself. Ronnie was a friend, but not a believer. How could I justify sitting here, by his side, around the clock, when others-the faithful-needed me, as they surely did? Ronnie had not asked me to pray with him. He'd not asked me for much of anything, in fact, other than twenty dollars and a promise to help him die. What should have followed, then, was not an endless vigil of two old men exchanging stories, but rather a priest administering what sacraments he could-baptism, if the man was interested, confession, communion, and the anointing of the sick. At which point, the talking should stop, and the priest should leave, and the dying man should do his best to die.

  I prepared to ask Ronnie if, as the hour of his death grew near, he wanted to be baptized with the waters of everlasting life, in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I prepared to be rejected. I prepared to stand, say a short, defiant prayer, give a curt nod, and leave.

  But none of this happened, because I hadn't prepared for what Ronnie was about to tell me.

  “You must not stop talking,” Ronnie said again. “You may speak softly, but your voice must be clear to me. Your voice, your human, kass'aq, priest-voice, it worries the wolf. This tuunraq, he circles me, he circles you, but he is afraid to move closer while you are here. This is good. I am not ready for him yet. You must keep speaking.” He took a deep breath and let his head rest back on the pillow. “Not just because of the tuunraq, but also because that is how I find my way home. Hearing you. I have to travel far this time, to where the dead live. I was not sure I had to go.” He looked at me and shrugged, as though we were discussing an unexpected need to visit Anchorage, or the grocery store. He settled back again. “But this is what I think. This is why I told you the story of the mother and the boy.”

  “Ronnie,” I interrupted once more, no longer hiding my anger.

  His face was completely open, as though he were indulging me and not the other way around. “Then I tell it again. This was not long ago. This was when the kass'at brought the great sickness to our land.” I wanted to stand, then, and leave, rather than be excoriated-as I'd been a dozen times before-for being of that tribe, that world, that introduced smallpox and tuberculosis and worse to the Yup'ik Eskimo. Disease: the Outsiders' invisible, potent weapon. Within years, we had killed thousands. One out of every three died from TB. More babies died than lived. It didn't matter that we later stormed the tundra with nurses, doctors, and drugs. It was too late. “And this
was a mother with a new child. A boy. He was very small, this boy. A baby. He rushed out of his mother too early, and into the sickness. The other wives all scooped him up and held him close and waited for him to die. But he surprised them. He lived. It was the mother who died. The baby had come too soon. She was too tired.” Ronnie took a long breath, tired himself. “They took the mother to be buried. The baby too. No one wanted this boy who had killed his mother. Into the grave he went, placed beside his silent mother, wailing all the while.” He paused, took another long breath, and I realized he was about to reproduce the baby's cry. But the sound that came out-it was unbearable, a terribly thin and eerie wail. If I had never known Ronnie until that minute, if I had simply walked into the room and encountered him there, that sound spewing out of him, I would have said without reservation that this was a man who spoke with spirits. This sound came from far, far beneath him. He caught his breath and continued. “He would not stop crying. He sobbed. This is what babies do. But he cried on and on, and his voice carried, through the dirt, through the grass, through the walls of their homes, through their skulls. He cried so long and so loud that his mother awoke. He had distracted her on her journey to the land of the dead. She heard him, as any mother would, and she knew the villagers had abandoned him. She arose and walked to the village. The people begged her to leave. The shamans begged her. But the mother was confused. She had risen for the baby, but he had fallen silent. What was she to do? She was angry. Why had she died? Why had they buried her boy? She broke things. Stole things. She told the animals to stay away. The hunters could not hunt. She would not leave. Where was her husband? Why had he allowed this? She looked for him, but he hid,” Ronnie finished abruptly. “This is what they say.”

  Then his tone changed, from storyteller to teacher. “This is why you must never cry at a funeral,” he said. “You must be quiet when death is near, or the dead will not complete their journey. And this is why you must speak to me. Because I do not want to lose my way in the land of the dead. Keep talking. Your voice will call me back.”

  He smiled before adding one more thing. “It is nice that it is an annoying voice. Easier to follow.” But I missed the joke: the story had stunned me.

  Gone were baptism and communion and the anointing of the sick. Gone was the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Gone even the hospital. There was only that room, that shaman and this priest and legions upon legions of dead pressing ever nearer.

  I knew this because I knew Ronnie's story. I had heard it before, once before, years before.

  It has haunted me ever since, both because of the circumstances of the telling and of what happened to the storyteller. Ronnie's version was slightly different, and I wanted to ask him why. But I was so scared or disoriented by what he said that I focused on what I-me, a man of God-now truly believed was the immediate danger: “But if I speak,” I whispered, “if my voice follows you on your journey-what if others hear it? What if others have their journey disrupted? Will they return, too?”

  But Ronnie was done talking. He hardly glanced at me before shutting his eyes and mouthing just the one word: speak.

  * * *

  I LEFT MY BARRACKS for the Quonset hut at 7:30 A.M., half an hour, at least, after the time Gurley usually expected me. But since I'd seen him driving into town so late, I didn't expect him to arrive for an hour or more. Surely-I tried to block the thought, but it arrived, pounding, all the same-he and Lily would have busied themselves throughout the predawn hours.

  There was a jeep idling outside the Quonset hut when I walked up. I didn't pay much attention; I was busy rehearsing an answer to the question Gurley would ask first: just how had I known about Shuyak Island?

  Suddenly, he was right in front of me.

  “Kirby-fucking-Wyoming,” he said, clanging out of the compound gate. “Was that your next guess?” He bumped past me and into the jeep. As it drove away, he turned around and shouted, “Walking to Kirby?” I stared after him. “Run, you sot!” Gurley bellowed. I looked at the sentry, who refused to look at me. At the sound of a gunshot, I turned back around to find Gurley firing into the air. I ran. Gurley had the driver slow down enough to keep me close, but not close enough. After a half a mile or so, the jeep stopped and I climbed aboard.

  “Why didn't you just get in the jeep back at the hut?” Gurley said, shaking his head, and then dug into a briefcase between his legs. “We have problems, Sergeant,” he said.

  “But we've got two weeks,” I said.

  Gurley looked up with a blank face. “Until what?”

  “Two weeks, you said. We have two weeks to prove ourselves.”

  “Oh hell,” Gurley said. “It'd be nice to return to that fairyland, when all our problems were so simple.” He burrowed back into the briefcase, then bumped his head against the dash when the driver stopped at an intersection. “Fuck!” he shouted, and then pulled out his gun, which he put to the driver's head. “This is an emergency, not traffic school. You stop at any more traffic signs, and-”

  The jeep launched forward with such force, Gurley almost landed in the backseat with me. When he'd resettled, I had to ask: “What's the problem, Captain?”

  “The problem, Sergeant, is a downed balloon.”

  “In Wyoming?” I said.

  “Correct,” he said, and burrowed into his briefcase.

  “So?” I tried to sound like an old hand. “Who found it?”

  Gurley appeared to find his paper and sat up. “That,” Gurley said, “is part of the problem.” He pointed to the page before me. “Kirby Wyoming. Balloon found intact. By the Associated Press.”

  I read the transcription as we pulled up to the terminal.

  MYSTERY BALLOON FOUND NEAR KIRBY

  KIRBY, WY (AP)____________________ A mysterious aircraft crashed just outside Kirby Tuesday. Local resident Gertrude Cleary, 68, said she saw what looked like the remains of a large helium balloon tangled in a line of trees at the far border of the town park, and reported it immediately to police. Police and civil defense officials refused to comment on the balloon, prompting much speculation and concern among the local citizenry. Cleary and others believe the balloon is from a nearby POW camp. Said Cleary: “So some Nazi is on the loose now, and nobody's talking. You got a lot of scared people here.”

  “So word is out,” I said, though it didn't seem that bad. Who read the Cheyenne paper outside of Wyoming?

  Gurley had the driver circle around the terminal and deposit us directly before the plane. “Things are actually a bit more fucked up than that, Sergeant,” he said, anxiously scanning the tarmac. “A lot more.”

  The plane's propellers were already lazily spinning, but Gurley didn't board. I hung back as well, wondering if this was another invitation-only flight. Gurley asked a crewman nearby if a particular crate of gear had been loaded. The man looked confused; Gurley started yelling. Nothing would be fast enough today. The man left in a trot for the passenger terminal. Gurley followed him at his slower pace, and the two met beside a waist-high box. I was too far away to hear what they were saying, but I could see-anyone could see-that the box was labeled with skull and crossbones. While the crewman loaded the box, Gurley returned. I asked him what was inside. He shook his head and then frowned. The sincere, sympathetic look that followed it was alarming, both for its rarity and for the speed with which it had completely replaced the raw red fury of moments before.

  “Sergeant,” he said, and stopped. “I-yes. I have to ask you a question.” He looked nervous, even scared, and he didn't look like he was acting at all. Then he gave a little smile, which made things even worse. He tried again. “And here we are,” he said. “Now then, I have to ask you a question, but it's not really a fair one. The thing is, Sergeant, our war has changed. It may change for everyone, soon, but today, it starts with us. And it starts with me asking if you will volunteer to join me on this flight to Wyoming.”

  “Of course,” I interrupted. I couldn't bear Gurley, human. It was disorienting, and oddly frightening.
If wild, towering, vengeful Gurley could be spooked, then there could be little hope for the rest of us.

  “Hear me out, Sergeant,” Gurley said curtly, almost relieved to be back in the position of scold. “I've been told to formally ask if you will volunteer for this mission because of the hazards involved-”

  “A balloon is a balloon, sir,” I said, and then stopped speaking when I saw Gurley's face.

  “Inside the crate are gas masks and suits,” Gurley said. “We have word-too damn late word, if you ask me, but no one ever does-that one, or a dozen, or all of the balloons now approaching the United States may carry a new kind of bomb. Not incendiaries. Not antipersonnel. Bacteriological. Germs.”

  And I really didn't know what he was talking about. Germ wasn't that scary a word to me then. Germs gave you colds. That's why people covered their noses when they sneezed. I would eventually learn just how naïve I was, but before Gurley explained anything else, he first had to get me aboard the plane.

  “This information is so new that-we-well, they're not sure if the gear we have is really, you know, up to the task. We just don't know. So I'm supposed to ask if, knowing the risks, which you really don't, you'll volunteer to go. And I'm supposed to let you stay behind if you want.” He took a step toward the plane. “But I can't really do that, Belk, you know why?”

  The officer defuses the bomb. I looked at him a moment. “Because you need help with-? Because I will, sir,” I said. “Even though I didn't really train for-”

  Gurley smiled. “Yes, Belk,” he said. “I need you for that. But I also need you for the simple reason that, when the question was asked of the NCOs present at the meeting I flew to yesterday-well, there were no volunteers.”

  “Sir,” I began.

  “Good man,” Gurley said, his actor's smile and flourish returning as he swung himself aboard.

  GURLEY GAVE ME MORE background on the flight. The supposedly weeklong meeting he'd been summoned to in Juneau during my Shuyak convalescence had been cut short when word of the Wyoming balloon arrived.