The Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

  And there was the article she'd read in a two-week-old copy of the FairbanksDaily News-Miner. Persons of Japanese ancestry were being relocated to special camps throughout the American West, “for their safety.” Two days later, Sam received a large white envelope emblazoned with a government eagle. Before he even opened it, he suggested the trip to Lily again. The next day, Lily and Saburo were off, down the Kuskokwim River in a haphazardly packed outboard.

  Lily had assumed she would serve as the guide; as a child, she'd often joined friends for the annual summer trip into the delta. But half an hour south of town, with Lily in the stern, piloting, Saburo pulled out a map-a journal, really, filled with page after page of drawings, charts and notes. After a few minutes' study, he looked up and pointed right.

  Lily shrugged; if you weren't aiming for a favorite spot, it really didn't matter which waterway you chose once you left the broad expanse of the Kuskokwim River. Depending on the thaw and the previous week's weather, there were hundreds, even thousands, of sloughs to follow. And if a slough ever proved to be a dead end, all you usually had to do was turn around or drag your boat through the mud and grass and reindeer moss for a few minutes before another waterway appeared.

  But Saburo's decisions that first day led them to one portage after another. By evening, they'd found themselves on a small, reasonably dry patch of tundra. Lily was exhausted. Saburo wanted to go on; it was still light, after all.

  Lily shook her head. Saburo pursed his lips, looked down in his book.

  “I did not need you to come,” Saburo said.

  Lily looked at him and then back toward Bethel. “I didn't need you to come,” she said. “It was your uncle's idea, anyway. He thought you'd get lost out here, and after what we've been through today seems like he was right.”

  “Not uncle,” said Saburo after a pause.

  Lily started unpacking some cooking gear and then changed her mind. She didn't want to cook-and she definitely did not want to cook for him. They'd eat some of the canned fish and dried blubber Sam had urged them to take.

  “I can come back, pick you up,” said Saburo.

  “That's sweet,” Lily said. Saburo glared, but Lily said nothing, just sat and chewed for a while. She offered a piece of blubber to Saburo. “How would you find me?” Lily asked. “That book of yours?” When he refused to answer or eat, she wiped her mouth with her forearm and reached for his journal.

  He snatched it away. He started to stalk off, but there was no place to go; the tuft of dry tundra they'd found for themselves wasn't much larger than Sam's store. Venture too close to any edge and your footprints started filling with water; a step or two later, you were knee-deep.

  Lily finished eating. She swallowed, and then asked him, very quietly, “May I see your book?”

  “Not a book. It's in Japanese. Hard to understand.”

  “I'm good at understanding things,” Lily said, wiping her hands on her pants.

  “You know Japanese?” he asked.

  Lily shook her head. “You know your way back?”

  He frowned, checked the height of the sun, and then handed her the journal. Smiling at him, Lily held it closed on her lap until he turned away, took a few steps north, and started scouting the route they'd take next.

  He was scouting the wrong way. Lily knew it instantly; she didn't even have to open the book. Just holding it there, on her lap, she knew what he was looking for, though not why, and where the object was, though not how it got there. She started to call for him, but hesitated. She didn't trust herself. Her powers, such as they were, had been waning after all, especially with things like books. And besides, what she was seeing didn't make sense: a black bit of earth, smoking, like the remains of a giant campfire. There was some wreckage-something had crashed-but it wasn't a truck or a plane-maybe books? Books didn't seem likely, but that was what she felt, could almost smell: paper, burning, grass, burning, and all of it just to the south.

  With Lily as guide, they reached the spot an hour and two portages later. Lily was surprised, even disappointed, that the fire she'd imagined seemed to have burned itself out some time ago. All that remained were some charred, bent metal strips-some kind of a crate?-and a few dozen square feet of earth that looked as if it had been seared by a giant, fiery thumbprint. Saburo took out his book and started writing.

  He didn't tell her the whole story the first night, and even after two months together, crisscrossing the tundra, she was never sure he had told her everything, even when she took up his hand and held it tight. But he had told her enough: he was Japanese, a soldier, a spy, sent behind enemy lines to see if early tests of a frightening new device were having any success. They were called fu-go weapons, bombs carried across the Pacific by large, gas-filled balloons. Hundreds had been launched, but so far, little news of their impact had made its way back to Japan. Scouts were sent behind enemy lines to see what they could learn. Saburo had been given southern Alaska, another scout had been given British Columbia, and a third who had already been living in San Francisco got the northwest coast of the United States. Each had too much territory to cover completely, but they were armed with maps and projections of where the balloons were likeliest to land, given the trade winds and the design of the balloons themselves.

  The enemy, I remember asking Lily: Weren't you afraid? Weren't you alarmed? Weren't you worried how you would get word to the authorities? You, an American citizen, I said, alone with a Japanese soldier. I didn't know what to say. I think the farther from the enemy you remained-and I'd spend the entire war on American soil-the more you believed that should you ever actually meet your foe, violence would be automatic, instant.

  “I was never scared,” Lily said.

  “Wasn't he scared of you?” I asked. “Here you were, an American-”

  “I don't usually get taken for American,” Lily said. “Not even by me.”

  “Lily.”

  “Louis,” she said. Smiling a mother's smile, she lifted both my hands in hers, glancing at my palms. “Louis,” she said again, looking up. “This man-had extraordinary hands.”

  “Hands?” I looked down as she held my hands, and then watched as she traced a line on my palm.

  “And he believed me,” she said, just like that, in a very small voice. “He didn't ask how I knew what I knew, or why I could sometimes tell where we'd find the next crash site. He just listened.” She folded my hands together and then folded hers on her lap.

  I suppose I should have hated him more, this Saburo. He was the real boyfriend. Not Gurley not any of the other men who visited Lily at the Starhope. She never said as much, but just to hear her talk-to see how she talked-you could see what a fierce, tender, protective love she reserved for him-still. And if that weren't upsetting enough for me, there was also the fact that he was Japanese. Not just the enemy, but my enemy: he was tied to the lethal balloons Gurley and I had been risking our lives to chase and smother.

  My next decision seems easy doesn't it? We were in Anchorage. Fort Richardson and the easily stirred Gurley were just a few miles away. Local and military police could be notified; Lily arrested, interrogated. Who knows what we'd learn. How many balloons we might stop. How many germs. How many lives we'd save.

  Such simple equations. Here, you do the calculation, Ronnie: what if you could look into her eyes, as I did, and find there the two things I saw?

  One, she really loved him, but she trusted me, and that's enough like love to make a boy like I was swoon all the same.

  Two, she'd told me quite a few secrets, but it was clear there was something else she wasn't telling me, not yet. Betray her now, and lose the larger story?

  “Some days, we didn't find anything,” Lily said. “Nothing ever came to me as strongly as did the image of that first day's crash site. But it didn't matter. Louis-it was a beautiful summer. Warm, clear days, cool nights, whole weeks without rain.” Weather like the tundra had never seen. And those hands: Lily was fascinated by them. Late one night-actuall
y, the next morning, when night had finally fallen- they compared names for the stars and constellations. Lily eagerly pointed out several, but then fell silent, eager to see Saburo's hands, instead, flutter there in the air above them, more beautiful than the stars beyond, and so much closer.

  The hands also turned the book of notes and maps into a beautiful journal, a work of art. Each day ended with Saburo re-creating the preceding hours on paper-first, a sketch lightly done in pencil, brought to life by watercolors, detail added with pen and ink. Lily asked what he wrote and drew on the days they found no evidence of balloons. He said that he wrote about her, about them, about the beautiful summer.

  Here the story stopped. Lily looked at me.

  “You know this book,” Lily said, and of course I did. From her descriptions and the way my heart was trying to thump its way out of my chest, run into the street, and call the police itself, I knew that this book was the strange journal or homemade atlas Gurley had had me study in his office. “I-I need it,” Lily said.

  “Lily.”

  “Louis, he's gone.”

  “Where?”

  “I want it, just to have some piece of-some piece of him, that time.” She was watching for my reaction. “That makes sense, doesn't it? That a girl would want that? You're a boy.”

  “Yes.”

  “It's at Fort Rich. His journal,” Lily said, looking down now. “I know it's there.”

  I suppose I could have lied, but I didn't. “It is,” I said, and decided to go a step further. “I've seen it.”

  Lily feigned surprise, so badly that she immediately confessed. “I- thought so.”

  I told Lily that I'd prefer her pretending to be surprised than confessing that she had just been using me all this time to get some keepsake of a summer romance-with an enemy soldier, no less. Was this why she'd advertised herself as “careful and correct,” so as to better lure a bomb disposal man, someone who might be more useful to her than the average soldier?

  Very quietly, very slowly, Lily said two words. It was the first time I'd heard a woman say them: fuck, you.

  She stood up, opened the door. “He is not the enemy, not mine. It's not-a keepsake” she said. “And I was never using you,” she said. “You came and found me, remember? A very average soldier, looking for help.” She closed the door slightly and lowered her voice to a hiss. “I have been trying to use your captain, but he's been better at using me.”

  The door opened again, wide.

  CHAPTER 12

  WHEN GURLEY SAUNTERED INTO THE QUONSET HUT THE morning of June 13, 1945, he was two hours late and missing an eye. Well, missing a normal one. There was an eye peering out of his left socket, but it looked like something he'd stolen off some particularly nasty page in the atlas. He had a shiner, to start with, but the blackened periphery was nothing, a frame, really for the eyeball, which was crazed with red veins and weeping almost constantly. I'd never seen an eye like that, which surprised me until I remembered this was Gurley; any other man who'd gotten his eye in a way like this would have done the decent thing-for himself and others-and slipped on a patch.

  “Good morning, Sergeant,” Gurley said, bright and loud. He was dying for me to ask, so I did. He held up both hands in weak protest, and tried to do his usual fluttering of eyelids, but the pain of doing so caught him up short. That he wanted me to join him in his office was clear; either the story was long enough that it required seats for both of us, or he was about to collapse. Either way, he needed a chair.

  I'd learned over my months with Gurley that he picked fights with whomever he could, just to prove he wasn't who everybody thought he was-some effete Ivy League snot who'd been sent to the war's most distant margins because he was hardly worthy of any critical post-though this was all true.

  And he was waging war with Alaska, of course. You were either man enough to survive here, or you weren't. You alone knew, in the end. And Gurley must have found himself wanting, because he entered one scrap after another to prove he could take it, whatever it was.

  It didn't help that his official foe, the Japanese, their balloons, weren't coming out to fight. March had been busy, true: we'd logged 114 balloons, more than all the previous months combined, and we'd learned of the germ warfare threat. But then, of course, had come the drop-off, the one Gurley and I attributed to their needing time to ready the balloons for the coming bacteriological assault. But the months passed, and the assault wouldn't come. Forty balloons in April, no sign of germs. Hardly more than a dozen balloons in May, and all of them as conventionally armed as could be.

  Since trouble was steadily avoiding us, Gurley went looking for it himself, usually in downtown bars, before or after visiting Lily. He was still seeing her; I was not. I'd been too angry, and then too ashamed after that night she'd confronted me about the atlas. But we were going to patch things up eventually, I was certain. A bit like Gurley's quest, it was just a matter of me going downtown to prove my courage. Instead of pretending to be “just walking by” her window-which I “just” did a lot-I'd have to walk on up. Knock on the door. Say I'm sorry. Hand over the book. Flowers. Book first? Was she a girl who liked flowers? Well. Maybe Gurley did have it easier when it came to testing his mettle.

  But one look at him today reminded me he'd chosen the more physically painful path. He'd picked a fight, again, with someone he shouldn't have, again. Nevertheless, he seemed satisfied with the result. He held up a fist. The knuckles were scabbed and the back of his hand had a freshly crusted scar.

  “I mounted a vigorous defense, Sergeant. You would be proud.”

  “I'm not so sure, Captain. You don't look so good.”

  “I took a tooth off the blackguard, Belk,” he said, and extended the fist closer to me. Then he smiled a broad smile. “And retained all of mine.”

  “But your eye,” I said, wincing without meaning to.

  “A tooth, Belk,” he said, and fished around in his pocket. I had no idea what he was doing until it was sitting there before me, a little ivory chip, the tooth, right there in the middle of the blotter of his desk. “I may have it mounted,” he said. He tried to smile, and then explained that he'd gone another round in what he'd proudly called his “ Franklin bouts.” They were named for the nation's thirty-second president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Gurley loathed.

  I'd heard all about the first bout two months ago, the morning of April 13. The day before, despite the nonstop clamor of church bells, despite the people openly weeping and clutching each other on the sidewalks, Gurley had managed to avoid learning that Roosevelt had died. It wasn't until he wandered into a bar, ordered a drink, and asked the bartender just what everyone's problem was that he heard.

  “Thank fucking God” Gurley said, a remark that efficiently set him against anyone who admired Roosevelt as well as those who didn't like their God prefixed so. Gurley used the silence that followed to try to clarify-no, really, he thought Roosevelt a complete ass-and round one began.

  A month later, May 12, he was telling me that “just by coincidence,” he'd found himself back in the same bar. Again, the bar was hushed and somber. Again, Gurley asked-an honest question, he assured me, and such tactlessness was certainly not beyond him-what was going on. It had been a month to the day of Roosevelt 's death, he was told.

  “Good God, people!” Gurley shouted. “Even the worms have had their fill of him now!” Round two.

  And last night, round three. Delighted to discover that the monthly mourning was occurring as scheduled, Gurley had surreptitiously ordered a drink. Then he smiled a huge smile, raised a glass, and shouted, “The king is dead! Long live the king!” Which no one seemed to quite understand, though their faces all made one thing clear. This would be the third and final round.

  A woman began “screeching” at him, Gurley said, about being a “traitor” to his own commander in chief. Gurley took offense and sought to correct her. “I just wanted a word with her,” Gurley said. But he got much more: fists, a stein of beer, part of
a chair, and from the woman herself, the heel of a shoe. It was this last blow, he added quietly, that had caused the most damage to the eye. “Ironic,” he said, “but heroic all the same, don't you think?”

  I didn't answer, distracted by the discovery that the glee had gone out of Gurley's voice. He was no longer enjoying his story. I assumed that pain had now overtaken him and he was regretting this last fight, and probably the fights before. But that wasn't it at all.

  “Do you know that our current military force in Alaska is less than half what it was a year ago?” he asked. “It's a month since the Germans surrendered. Almost two months since we landed on Okinawa. We're running out of time, Sergeant.” He slowly raised a hand to his eye, but he seemed unable to stomach anything more than his fingertips grazing his eyebrow.

  “Let's get that looked at, sir,” I said, sitting forward. I was worried- and it wasn't as irrational as it sounds-that his eyeball was going to pop out in a spray of blood and land on the desk.

  “The war is not over, Belk,” he said. “I doubt this Truman knows that. I wonder if FDR knew that. Europe is won. But the war in the Pacific, Sergeant. The ocean will run red for years to come.” He took a breath and closed his eyes with a wince. “We can only hope,” he said.

  MY LAST BAR FIGHT was in Fairbanks, just a few years ago. It was my fault, for the most part. I'd flown into town to do some business with the diocese, and Ronnie had invited himself along, as he'd done before. On such occasions, I referred to Ronnie as a deacon or president of the parish Holy Name Society-certainly not as a shaman. We'd only just started our “alternative health care” visits at the hospice, and word had yet to spread.

  On this particular flight, however, Ronnie was not doing well at playing the role of a devout Christian. He kept opening and closing a small pouch that appeared to be full of various talismans and other tiny, carved figures. And he kept talking about murder.