Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

  Sincerely,

  R.F.

  1

  Rufus Sixsmith leans over the balcony and estimates his body’s velocity when it hits the sidewalk and lays his dilemmas to rest. A telephone rings in the unlit room. Sixsmith dares not answer. Disco music booms from the next apartment, where a party is in full swing, and Sixsmith feels older than his sixty-six years. Smog obscures the stars, but north and south along the coastal strip, Buenas Yerbas’s billion lights simmer. West, the Pacific eternity. East, our denuded, heroic, pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, berserking American continent.

  A young woman emerges from the next-door party and leans over the neighboring balcony. Her hair is shorn, her violet dress is elegant, but she looks incurably sad and alone. Propose a suicide pact, why don’t you? Sixsmith isn’t serious, and he isn’t going to jump either, not if an ember of humor still glows. Besides, a quiet accident is precisely what Grimaldi, Napier, and those sharp-suited hoodlums are praying for. Sixsmith shuffles inside and pours himself another generous vermouth from his absent host’s minibar, dips his hands in the icebox, then wipes his face. Go out somewhere and phone Megan, she’s your only friend left. He knows he won’t. You can’t drag her into this lethal mess. The disco thump pulses in his temples, but it’s a borrowed apartment and he judges it unwise to complain. Buenas Yerbas isn’t Cambridge. Anyway, you’re in hiding. The breeze slams the balcony door, and in fear Sixsmith spills half his vermouth. No, you old fool, it wasn’t a gunshot.

  He mops up the spillage with a kitchen towel, turns on the TV with the sound down low, and trawls the channels for M*A*S*H. It’s on somewhere. Just have to keep looking.

  2

  Luisa Rey hears a clunk from the neighboring balcony. “Hello?” Nobody. Her stomach warns her to set down her tonic water. It was the bathroom you needed, not fresh air, but she can’t face weaving back through the party and, anyway, there’s no time—down the side of the building she heaves: once, twice, a vision of greasy chicken, and a third time. That, she wipes her eyes, is the third foulest thing you’ve ever done. She slooshes her mouth out, spits residue into a flowerpot behind a screen. Luisa dabs her lips with a tissue and finds a mint in her handbag. Go home and just dream up your crappy three hundred words for once. People only look at the pictures, anyhow.

  A man too old for his leather trousers, bare torso, and zebra waistcoat steps onto the balcony. “Luisaaa!” A crafted golden beard and a moonstone-and-jade ankh around his neck. “Hiya! Come out for a little stargazing, huh? Dig. Bix brought eight ounces of snow with him, man. One wild cat. Hey, did I say in the interview? I’m trying on the name Ganja at the moment. Maharaj Aja says Richard is outa sync with my Iovedic Self.”

  “Who?”

  “My guru, Luisaaa, my guru! He’s on his last reincarnation before—” Richard’s fingers go pufff! Nirvanawards. “Come to an audience. His waiting list normally takes, like, forever, but jade-ankh disciples get personal audiences on the same afternoon. Like, why go through college and shit when Maharaj Aja can, like, teach you everything about … It.” He frames the moon in his fingers. “Words are so … uptight… Space … it’s so … y’ know, like, total. Smoke some weed? Acapulco Gold. Got it off of Bix.” He edges nearer. “Say, Lu, let’s get high after the party. Alone together, my place, dig? You could get a very exclusive interview. I may even write you a song and put it on my next LP.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  The minor-league rock musician narrows his eyes. “Unlucky time of the month, huh? How’s next week? I thought all you media chicks are on the Pill, like, forever.”

  “Does Bix sell you your pickup lines, too?”

  He sniggers. “Hey, has that cat been telling you things?”

  “Richard, just so there’s no uncertainty, I’d rather jump off this balcony than sleep with you, any time of any month. I really would.”

  “Whoah!” His hand jerks back as if stung. “Pick-ky! Who d’you think you are, like, Joni fucking Mitchell? You’re only a fucking gossip columnist in a magazine that like no one ever reads!”

  3

  The elevator doors close just as Luisa Rey reaches them, but the unseen occupant jams them with his cane. “Thank you,” says Luisa to the old man. “Glad the age of chivalry isn’t totally dead.”

  He gives a grave nod.

  Luisa thinks, He looks like he’s been given a week to live. She presses G. The ancient elevator begins its descent. A leisurely needle counts off the stories. Its motor whines, its cables grind, but between the tenth and ninth stories a gatta-gatta-gatta detonates then dies with a phzzz-zzz-zz-z. Luisa and Sixsmith thump to the floor. The light stutters on and off before settling on a buzzing sepia.

  “You okay? Can you get up?”

  The sprawled old man recovers himself a little. “No bones broken, I think, but I’ll stay seated, thank you.” His old-school English accent reminds Luisa of the tiger in The Jungle Book. “The power might restart suddenly.”

  “Christ,” mutters Luisa. “A power outage. Perfect end to a perfect day.” She presses the emergency button. Nothing. She presses the intercom button and hollers: “Hey! Anyone there?” Static hiss. “We have a situation here! Can anyone hear us?”

  Luisa and the old man regard each other, sideways, listening.

  No reply. Just vague submarine noises.

  Luisa inspects the ceiling. “Got to be an access hatch …” There isn’t. She peels up the carpet—a steel floor. “Only in movies, I guess.”

  “Are you still glad,” asks the old man, “the age of chivalry isn’t dead?”

  Luisa manages a smile, just. “We might be here some time. Last month’s brownout lasted seven hours.” Well, at least I’m not confined with a psychopath, a claustrophobe, or Richard Ganga.

  4

  Rufus Sixsmith sits propped in a corner sixty minutes later, dabbing his forehead with his handkerchief. “I subscribed to Illustrated Planet in 1967 to read your father’s dispatches from Vietnam. Lester Rey was one of only four or five journalists who grasped the war from the Asian perspective. I’m fascinated to hear how a policeman became one of the best correspondents of his generation.”

  “You asked for it.” The story is polished with each retelling. “Dad joined the BYPD just weeks before Pearl Harbor, which is why he spent the war here and not in the Pacific like his brother Howie, who got blown to pieces by a Japanese land mine playing beach volleyball in the Solomons. Pretty soon, it became apparent Dad was a Tenth Precinct case, and that’s where he wound up. There’s such a precinct in every city in the country—a sort of pen where they transfer all the straight cops who won’t go on the take and who won’t turn a blind eye. So anyway, on V-J night, Buenas Yerbas was one citywide party, and you can imagine, the police were stretched thin. Dad got a call reporting looting down on Silvaplana Wharf, a sort of no-man’s-land between Tenth Precinct, the BY Port Authority, and Spinoza Precinct. Dad and his partner, a man named Nat Wakefield, drove down to take a look. They park between a pair of cargo containers, kill the engine, proceed on foot, and see maybe two dozen men loading crates from a warehouse into an armored truck. The light was dim, but the men sure weren’t dockworkers and they weren’t in military uniform. Wakefield tells Dad to go and radio for backup. Just as Dad gets to the radio, a call comes through saying the original order to investigate looting has been countermanded. Dad reports what he’d seen, but the order is repeated, so Dad runs back to the warehouse just in time to see his partner accept a light from one of the men and get shot six times in the back. Dad somehow keeps his nerve, sprints back to his squad car, and manages to radio out a Code 8— a Mayday—before his car shivers with bullets. He’s surrounded on all sides except the dockside, so over the edge he dives, into a cocktail of diesel, trash, sewage, and sea. He swims underneath the quay—in those days Silvaplana Wharf was a steel structure like a giant boardwalk, not the concrete peninsula it is today—and hauls himself up a service ladder, soaked, one shoe missing, with his non-functioning rev
olver. All he can do is observe the men, who are just finishing up when a couple of Spinoza Precinct squad cars arrive on the scene. Before Dad can circle around the yard to warn the officers, a hopelessly uneven gunfight breaks out—the gunmen pepper the two squad cars with submachine guns. The truck starts up, the gunmen jump aboard, they pull out of the yard and lob a couple of hand grenades from the back. Whether they were intended to maim or just to discourage heroics, who knows? but one caught Dad and made a human pincushion of him. He woke up two days later in the hospital minus his left eye. The papers described the incident as an opportunistic raid by a gang of thieves who got lucky. The Tenth Precinct men reckoned a syndicate who’d been siphoning off arms throughout the war decided to shift their stock, now that the war was over and accounting would get tightened up. There was pressure for a wider investigation into the Silvaplana Shootings—three dead cops meant something in 1945—but the mayor’s office blocked it. Draw your own conclusions. Dad did, and they jaded his faith in law enforcement. By the time he was out of the hospital eight months later, he’d completed a correspondence course in journalism.”

  “Good grief,” says Sixsmith.

  “The rest you may know. Covered Korea for Illustrated Planet, then became West Coast Herald’s Latin America man. He was in Vietnam for the battle of Ap Bac and stayed based in Saigon until his first collapse back in March. It’s a miracle my parents’ marriage lasted the years it did—y’ know, the longest I spent with him was April to July, this year, in the hospice.” Luisa is quiet. “I miss him, Rufus, chronically. I keep forgetting he’s dead. I keep thinking he’s away on assignment, somewhere, and he’ll be flying in any day soon.”

  “He must have been proud of you, following in his footsteps.”

  “Oh, Luisa Rey is no Lester Rey. I wasted years being rebellious and liberated, posing as a poet and working in a bookstore on Engels Street. My posturing convinced no one, my poetry was ‘so vacuous it isn’t even bad’—so said Lawrence Ferlinghetti—and the bookstore went bust. So I’m still only a columnist.” Luisa rubs her tired eyes, thinking of Richard Ganga’s parting shot. “No award-winning copy from war zones. I had high hopes when I moved to Spyglass, but simpering gossip on celebrity parties is the closest I’ve gotten so far to Dad’s vocation.”

  “Ah, but is it well-written simpering gossip?”

  “Oh, it’s excellently written simpering gossip.”

  “Then don’t bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.”

  5

  “Hitchcock loves the limelight,” says Luisa, her bladder now growing uncomfortable, “but hates interviews. He didn’t answer my questions because he didn’t really hear them. His best works, he said, are roller coasters that scare the riders out of their wits but let them off at the end giggling and eager for another ride. I put it to the great man, the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that’s … the stuff of Buchenwald, dystopia, depression. We’ll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless universe—but only our toes. Hitchcock’s response was”—Luisa does an above-average impersonation—” ‘I’m a director in Hollywood, young lady, not an Oracle at Delphi.’ I asked why Buenas Yerbas had never featured in his films. Hitchcock answered, ‘This town marries the worst of San Francisco with the worst of Los Angeles. Buenas Yerbas is a city of nowhere.’ He spoke in bons mots like that, not to you, but into the ear of posterity, for dinner-party guests of the future to say, ‘That’s one of Hitchcock’s, you know.’ ”

  Sixsmith wrings sweat from his handkerchief. “I saw Charade with my niece at an art-house cinema last year. Was that Hitchcock? She strong-arms me into seeing these things, to prevent me from growing ‘square.’ I rather enjoyed it, but my niece said Audrey Hepburn was a ‘bubblehead.’ Delicious word.”

  “Charade’s the one where the plot swings on the stamps?”

  “A contrived puzzle, yes, but all thrillers would wither without contrivance. Hitchcock’s Buenas Yerbas remark puts me in mind of John F. Kennedy’s observation about New York. Do you know it? ‘Most cities are nouns, but New York is a verb.’ What might Buenas Yerbas be, I wonder?”

  “A string of adjectives and conjunctions?”

  “Or an expletive?”

  6

  “Megan, my treasured niece.” Rufus Sixsmith shows Luisa a photograph of a bronzed young woman and a fitter, healthier self taken at a sunny marina. The photographer said something funny just before the shutter clicked. Their legs dangle over the stern of a small yacht named Starfish. “That’s my old tub, a relic from more dynamic days.”

  Luisa makes polite noises about not being old.

  “Truly. If I went on a serious voyage now I’d need to hire a small crew. I still spend a lot of weekends on her, pottering about the marina and doing a little thinking, a little work. Megan likes the sea, too. She’s a born physicist with a better head for mathematics than I ever had, rather to her mother’s chagrin. My brother didn’t marry Megan’s mother for her brain, I’m sorry to say. She buys into feng shui or I Ching or whatever instant-enlightenment mumbo jumbo is top of the charts. But Megan possesses a superb mind. She spent a year of her Ph.D. at my old college at Cambridge. A woman, at Caius! Now she’s finishing her radioastronomy research at the big dishes on Hawaii. While her mother and her stepfather crisp themselves to toast on the beach in the name of Leisure, Megan and I knock around equations in the bar.”

  “Any children of your own, Rufus?”

  “I’ve been married to science all my life.” Sixsmith changes the subject. “A hypothetical question, Miss Rey. What price would you pay, as a journalist I mean, to protect a source?”

  Luisa doesn’t consider the question. “If I believed in the issue? Any.”

  “Prison, for example, for contempt of court?”

  “If it came to it, yes.”

  “Would you be prepared to … compromise your own safety?”

  “Well …” Luisa does consider this. “I … guess I’d have to.”

  “Have to? How so?”

  “My father braved booby-trapped marshes and the wrath of generals for the sake of his journalistic integrity. What kind of a mockery of his life would it be if his daughter bailed when things got a little tough?”

  Tell her. Sixsmith opens his mouth to tell her everything—the whitewashing at Seaboard, the blackmailing, the corruption—but without warning the elevator lurches, rumbles, and resumes its descent. Its occupants squint in the restored light, and Sixsmith finds his resolve has crumbled away. The needle swings round to G.

  The air in the lobby feels as fresh as mountain water.

  “I’ll telephone you, Miss Rey.” says Sixsmith, as Luisa hands him his stick, “soon.” Will I break this promise or keep it? “Do you know?” he says. “I feel I’ve known you for years, not ninety minutes.”

  7

  The flat world is curved in the boy’s eye. Javier Gomez leafs through a stamp album under an Anglepoise lamp. A team of huskies barks on an Alaskan stamp, a Hawaiian nene honks and waddles on a fifty-cents special edition, a paddle steamer churns up an inky Congo. A key turns in the lock, and Luisa Rey stumbles in, kicking off her shoes in the kitchenette. She is exasperated to find him here. “Javier!”

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Don’t ‘Oh, hi’ me. You promised not to jump across the balconies ever again! Suppose someone reports a burglar to the cops? Suppose you slipped and fell?”

  “Then just give me a key.”

  Luisa strangles an invisible neck. “I can’t rest easy knowing an eleven-year-old can waltz into my living space whenever …” your mom’s out all night, Luisa replaces with “… there’s a slow night on TV.”

  “So why leave the bathroom window open?”

  “Because if there’s one th
ing worse than you jumping the gap once, it’d be you jumping the gap again when you couldn’t get in.”

  “I’ll be eleven in January.”

  “No key.”

  “Friends give each other keys.”

  “Not when one is twenty-six and the other is still in the fifth grade.”

  “So why are you back so late? Meet anyone interesting?”

  Luisa glares. “Trapped by the brownout in an elevator. None of your business, anyhow, mister.” She switches on the main light and flinches when she sees the mean red welt on Javier’s face. “What the—what happened?”

  The boy glances at the apartment wall, then returns to his stamps.

  “Wolfman?”

  Javier shakes his head, folds a tiny paper strip, and licks both sides. “That Clark guy came back. Mom’s working the graveyard shift at the hotel all this week, and he’s waiting for her. He asked me stuff about Wolfman, and I told him it wasn’t any of his business.” Javier attaches the hinge to the stamp. “It doesn’t hurt. I already dabbed stuff on it.” Luisa’s hand is already on the telephone. “Don’t phone Mom! She’ll rush back, there’ll be a massive fight, and the hotel’ll fire her like last time and the time before.” Luisa considers this, replaces the receiver, and starts for the door. “Don’t go around there! He’s sick in the head! He’ll get angry and wreck our stuff, then we’ll probably get evicted or something! Please.”