The Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

  Gurley barely managed to break the spell when he finally called for us to stop. I could hardly see Lily now, but it seemed as though she nodded her head without looking back at him. A few seconds went by, and then all of a sudden, I could see her face floating in the gloom. Though it sounded as though she were whispering, I could hear her clearly: we weren't far from the shore of a small island; I was to slow down and gradually steer us to the right. I still don't know whether she saw the island or if she sensed it; whatever her method, we made land smoothly enough. The grass scraping beneath the boat sounded like static as Lily climbed over the side and then waded through the water to pull us ashore. Gurley seemed uncomfortable that he wasn't doing any work, but then appeared to decide something and settled back.

  I had asked for three tents but now discovered that I had only been issued two. I set up one while Gurley watched. Lily had walked off soon after we'd all come ashore. Gurley had started to follow her, but she'd turned him back with a silent look-not a threatening look, just a look-and Gurley had straightened up, checked to see if I had been watching (I had), and then peppered me with instructions about setting up camp.

  Lily had not returned by the time I had finished the first tent. Unsure if setting up the second tent would prompt or prevent a discussion about sleeping arrangements, I paused for a moment, and then tore into the second bag.

  I hadn't made much progress when Gurley stopped me.

  “So industrious, Sergeant,” he said, and surveyed what I had done. “How many tents do we have?”

  “Just two, sir,” I said.

  “You little devil,” he said.

  “I asked for three,” I said. “They gave me two.”

  Gurley made no reply. He walked away and then quickly returned. “I really do care for her, Belk,” he said. “About her. For her. I do. That's clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “The cuffs were a mistake,” he said. “Their mistake. That's obvious, isn't it?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, now sure of the opposite.

  “Sir,” he added, for me.

  “Absolutely, sir,” I mumbled.

  “I'll chalk up that missing sir to fatigue instead of insolence,” he said. “You may retire.”

  I looked at the second tent, which lay in a crumpled heap. I hadn't even found all the poles.

  “Sergeant,” Gurley said. “You are kind to struggle with the tents, but you have done enough. Leave this to me.”

  I stared at him for a moment, giving him time to change his mind. When he didn't, I crawled into the first tent, exhausted. I rooted around in the dark for the blankets I knew I'd thrown inside at some point, and listened to Gurley softly cursing his way through the raising of the second tent. In five minutes, I was fast asleep.

  At least I think that's how it happened. The truth is that there is a short period where I don't remember anything at all, and so I am chalking it up to the most innocent explanation-sleep. Or a better explanation: what happened next was so extraordinary, it has crowded out most of my other memories from that evening.

  I awoke (or was awake) when the tent flaps parted. Convinced that Gurley had belatedly decided to play the gentleman and leave Lily a tent to herself, I rolled to one side of the small, two-man tent, to give him room to lie down. I kept my eyes closed, hoping that he would assume I was asleep-or at least, fiercely pretending to be. I could smell the tundra muck and wet on him as he crawled in; it wasn't unpleasant, exactly-although I knew it would be after a few hours. It smelled of water and grass and mud, a lot of it, and I realized that pitching the second tent must have proven quite a battle. I imagined he'd had trouble finding another patch of dry ground adequate enough for the tent. I was about to roll back over and apologize for leaving him to do the job alone when the voice came in my ear.

  “Louis,” Lily said. My every muscle came alive. I tried to twist to see her, but she whispered “no” and held my shoulder. “Just listen,” she said.

  “Where have you been?” I said, craning my neck. “Where's Gurley?”

  “Whisper,” Lily said. I started to repeat myself, and she interrupted: “You don't know how to whisper.” She put a finger on my lips, which almost made me stop breathing as well as speaking.

  “Louis, he's gone,” she said. I tried once more to roll over and face her, and this time she let me. I was surprised to find her face right above mine. “Not Gurley,” she said. “Saburo. Saburo is gone. I went and looked for him, and he's gone.”

  “Lily,” I said.

  “Please,” she said. “You'll wake Gurley.” I rubbed my face. Lily waited until I was looking at her before she went on. “I went looking for Saburo,” she said then. “All night, as I was guiding us down the river, I could feel him growing closer and closer. And then we came here, and the sense was overwhelming. I could hardly breathe. I wasn't sure what I would do when I found him, but I knew I would find him, his body. That's why I went wandering off into the brush. There's more island here than you might think-you'll see it in daylight. But I followed him-it was almost like following a trail-and finally I came to a small clearing by some scrub alder. His campsite. That's what I had found. He had been there. And gone. He's gone now.” She turned away.

  “And the… shrine?” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “Lily,” I said.

  “I need your help now,” she said.

  “Lily, I brought it.” She looked at me. “The map. I brought Saburo's book.” Oh, such eyes-why couldn't I have done this sooner, basked in that look so much earlier?

  But as soon as the book appeared, I lost her. She took it from me, held it, felt it, bit her lip and then opened it, crying her way through the pages. She asked me about the translations; unsure how she would react, I said they were Gurley's. She fingered them like delicate leaves.

  Page by page she progressed, until she neared the end, when she began turning the pages two and three at a time, looking, I was sure, for Saburo's last map, the one to their baby.

  “Lily-” I said, but she'd already found them. The empty, gray-washed pages.

  “What did you do with them?” she cried, loud enough that she might have spooked Gurley.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I was going to ask you. We were-I thought, maybe secret writing, but Gurley would have made fun of me and I guess I don't-”

  “There's nothing here,” Lily said, shaking her head, almost unable to speak.

  “Lily, I-maybe there's something earlier.” I offered to take the book from her and look myself.

  She shook her head.

  “I guess he-maybe he didn't-I don't know, Lily,” I said. “Maybe he didn't get a chance to-” and I really was going to say, dispose of the baby's body properly, but somehow managed to catch myself. “Maybe he didn't get a chance to make the map. He went out, he-he-got captured-escaped?”

  But while I was babbling, Lily had stopped crying. She was staring before her, and, it seemed, listening. Not to me.

  “Lily?”

  “Louis,” she said softly. “I need your help. There's something- there's something here. Nearby. It's him, or-it's someone. Near here, and moving. But too fast for the boat, too fast for feet. I need to follow him.”

  I looked at her for a moment, uncertain if this was the new Lily, or if some old part of her still burned inside. “How?” I said finally.

  “First,” she said, “some rope.”

  THERE IS THE OLD, familiar challenge of describing the midnight sun, the moon on the snow on a subzero night, the northern lights, the empty Kilbuck Mountains or the endless gray sea to someone who has never been here-and then there is the unique and forbidding prospect of describing what happened in that tent that night, a few weeks shy of the end of the war and my first life.

  I'll start outside, since that's where I had retreated to once Lily had started to undress. She hadn't asked me to leave, hadn't needed to- and I wonder, just now, if things might have been different if I had stayed. But she'd sli
pped off her boots and had started to shrug off her pants when I crawled out. I took a quick look at her face-our eyes didn't meet, but I could see she was in the process of putting on what I now think of as her shaman's mask-her face empty and slack, her eyes unfocused but not yet vacant. I imagine my face might have looked somewhat similar as I stood there, studying her tent and Gurley's, some twenty soggy yards away beside a clump of cotton-wood.

  I moved a little closer to his tent, to make sure he really was in it. It was tough to tell in the dark. There wasn't a moon, or there was; when I looked up, all I could see was a dim and shifting murk, dimly lit. I imagine it's what divers see when they look back up to the surface, only to find the way obscured by a passing cloud. But I didn't have to see Gurley As I drew closer, I could hear him, lightly snoring. Every so often, his breath stopped completely, and then resumed in a kind of cough.

  He'd left the tent flaps undone, obviously assuming Lily would join him at some point. In the meantime, though, he was at the mercy of the mosquitoes. The tent looked as though it might collapse before morning.

  Then I heard another sound-Lily's voice-and I crept back toward my tent.

  “Louis,” she whispered, and I could tell she was just inside the flap. I waited a moment, then took a breath and answered. “I need your help,” she said quietly, and when I didn't reply, she asked, “The rope? Some rope?”

  I looked around and then whispered, “Wait.”

  I found some tangled in the floor of the boat. Once I'd finally freed it, I decided it needed rinsing off and quietly dipped it into the water. Then I heard Lily calling me again. I shook the rope out and walked back to the tent. I squatted, poked open the flap with the coil of rope, and headed in.

  First, there was a smell-or a scent-of smoke. Opposite the opening, a squat candle burned on one of the tin mess plates. The plate was wet and spread with leaves or mud of a sort-I'm not really sure, because I didn't pay attention to anything else once I realized Lily's clothing was all piled in a heap in the middle of the tent, and that she was curled up, completely bare, just beyond.

  My eyes began to water and I coughed-pungent smoke was filling the tent; for a moment, I thought it was on fire. Then I felt Lily's hand pressing down on my shoulder. “Lower,” she said. “Stay low, like this.” I lowered myself, and saw her face, intent, her arms and hands, and her chest, suddenly pale and ordinary now that I could see it in full. She lowered herself, too, until she was on her side, almost bent double, and it seemed the whole of her was disappearing into the dark.

  “Please don't be scared, Louis,” she said. I shook my head. “Now give me the rope.” She flinched when she took the rope from me and found it wet. She gave me a mock frown and then a little smile, the last of the night.

  She wound the rope around her neck, and then her shoulders, then her legs and torso, folding and unfolding her body as needed. Here and there, a drop of water would trace a slow, shiny path across a smooth expanse of skin. I should not have been so saturated with desire-even at that moment, I remember thinking that something was wrong, that she'd disposed of a healthier self with her clothes and had instead assumed the body of someone fragile, terribly thin and gaunt. And maybe that's why I didn't turn away or leave the tent or simply freeze: she had been beautiful, but this new fragility made her-if not more beautiful, then somehow more desirable.

  With the rope wound around her in loose coils, she looked at me carefully. “Louis, from the pouch there-I need-yes, that pouch. Just open it.”

  It was a small leather pouch, extremely soft, with a flap like an envelope. Inside were a variety of small objects-a feather, what looked like rocks or teeth, and some small wooden disks. It was a moment or two before my eyes adjusted and saw the carvings-faces-emerge. “These are the things I need,” she said, and then added a word in Yup'ik that I did not know. “These help me fly. The feather gives me flight, the walrus teeth strength, and the other amulets are for animals who'll help guide me back home.” Unlike Ronnie, I suppose, Lily still had command of a tuunraq or two and did not need a human voice to lead her back.

  I studied the objects in the palm of my hand, and then looked at Lily-not at her face, because I couldn't, not then, maybe not anymore, but at her body, the slope and shape of it, the way it evaded the rope in some places and strained against it in others. “I need help,” she said. “I need to tie the objects to me. Spirits are powerful and will run away from you if you do not bind them tight.” She lay down quietly on her back, closed her eyes. I didn't move, not for a full minute, and then she looked up. “Let each object tell you where it goes,” she said, and then closed her eyes again.

  It was too much to look at her like that, to be able to study her without her studying me. I was searching for an innocent patch of skin to place something, but as she lay there, nothing looked innocent, everything was charged. Charged: and I say that not as an expression but because it was true, there was a hum, electric, I could hear it, and I could feel the vibrations, and though you might peg it to something less complicated, at the time I thought it was pure magic, and still do.

  The teeth I knotted near her knees, one amulet I placed at her shoulder, and then the feather floated across her chest and I let my hand follow it. I cannot tell you when that light touch became a caress, or how my hand continued its light tracing after I'd woven the feather into the rope at her stomach. And I cannot tell you that I do not remember all that happened next. It was both hands, my lips; I found places for everything, for all the amulets, all the charms, and then I lay there beside her and waited to explode.

  And then she said-had it been seconds, minutes? An hour?-a most remarkable word: “Untie.”

  It should have happened then, just as soon as I'd worked her free of the cord and its knots and charms. I should have slipped free of my clothes and we should have lain together and fallen in love, made love. But I couldn't and didn't, because as I untied her, I watched the body I was releasing release memories, too. I saw and felt Gurley, and the summer's romance with Saburo, the phantom child they produced. I saw her growing up in Bethel, I saw her mother and father. I saw all the things she had told me about her life, but in different colors, scored with different sounds. I suppose it sounds like I was sitting there watching a movie, but it wasn't that, because I was moving through the landscape. I'd more readily compare it to what I've come to believe death is like, based on dozens of people I've seen go through their last moments here in this very hospice: for an instant, there is all the immediacy of life-all the people, sights, sounds, smells. We hear people talk about how one's life passes before one's eyes, and we think of a parade, with a beginning and an end. But it's not like that. The dying don't see their lives pass: their lives flash, complete, and vanish. It's the lifeless corpse that lingers.

  I have spent a life fighting my way back to that moment with Lily that flash. I have spent a life trying to get back to that precipice and leap off it. I've not been chasing after sex-good Lord, what a fleeting goal-but intimacy, knowledge. I had not gone on Lily's journey with her, but I was there when she came back. And when she asked me to untie her, she was allowing me to participate somehow in what she'd seen and done. That's why I saw the whole of her life like that. And had the moment lasted any longer, I think I would have seen the whole of mine. I really do.

  Getting that moment back: That's not enough to spend a lifetime pursuing? It has been for me. I knew I could never become an angalkuq myself, so I marched down the closest spiritual path allowed me. Priesthood. I suppose I could have contented myself with regular churchgoing, or rigorous self-examination, or drugs. But none of that would have gotten Lily to where she went. She had been subsumed by the spiritual world; I wanted to be swallowed whole, too, and join her, so I consecrated myself to a spiritual life. I'd go off in search of God and His knowledge-and if I found Lily there in the ether, somewhere along the way, so much the better.

  But I've not found her. It may be that I should have tied myself to Lily when I tied
on those other charms, and made her take me with her wherever she flew And when we returned, I would not have untied us, we would have held on, skin to skin, until Gurley found us, shot us, and let us die, our blood pooling together. Our lives would have flashed then with a brilliance only suns could match.

  But Lily didn't die that night. Neither did I. After spending a moment watching me, and, I was sure, waiting for me, she quietly got dressed. When Lily was finished, she leaned close, her eyes sad, her face exhausted. Then she said, “Thank you,” and gave me a kiss: yes, a kiss, her lips to mine.

  It was a tender moment, or would have been (I was sad, but somehow, also satisfied) but for the fact that Gurley tore open the tent flap at precisely the moment that Lily was pulling away from me. I was able to look at him blankly enough at first, but Lily reddened with shame and stared at the ground, and then I turned away, too.

  Gurley looked from one to the other of us, eyes wide and bloodshot, face taut like someone in that moment between receiving a wound and feeling pain. He finally exclaimed, “Good morning!” and then pulled his head out of the tent so fast he knocked over a pole. I struggled out first, then Lily.

  “Good morning, Sergeant,” Gurley said again, with that compressed smile he usually employed before hitting someone. But then Lily was taking him by the elbow and trying to lead him away. He followed her for a short distance; I watched Lily try to speak to him while he turned his head up and away from her. They kept walking, out of sight, and I set about striking camp, because it was all I could think to do. I was almost finished with the tents when Lily returned, alone.

  “Where's Gurley?” I said.

  “He doesn't believe me,” she said quietly. “But you were there, you can tell him.”

  “I don't think he'll believe me, either,” I said, scanning the brush for signs of him. “He looked in, he saw you kiss me, or maybe just missed it, but still, all he had to do was look at us and figure it out. Thank God he didn't see us when you were-on your journey. Without your clothes.”