The Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

  The colonel continued, Gurley said.

  “What's the most dangerous thing in war?” the colonel asked. The room was already laughing. Gurley wasn't breathing. “A second lieutenant,” the colonel answered, “with a plan.”

  With a map, Gurley told me now, seething. The colonel even screwed up the punch line, Gurley said. And everyone had to know it. Hope must have trotted that joke out every USO tour he ever made.

  But if everyone knew it, they didn't care. In fact, they acted like the colonel's version was funnier. And you wouldn't even have said they were acting, Gurley said. They were enjoying themselves. As much as the colonel, who looked-and Gurley worked at finding the right word-a bit relieved at all the laughter. Relieved that his joke had gone over, and even more relieved that he wasn't alone in thinking Gurley's plan was poppycock.

  “Dismissed, Lieutenant,” the colonel said. Gurley rose and left the room while the laughter rose and followed him, and then shut the door behind him.

  A friend-or someone who wanted to twist the knife a little deeper-told him how the rest of the meeting went. Gurley was almost flattered to learn he remained the subject of the meeting for several more minutes. The colonel said that Gurley had fallen into a clever trap, set by OSS internal security to catch people who had taken to reading materials that they didn't have the proper classification for. A fictionalized, highly classified memo, designed to be outlandish enough to catch a wayward eye's interest, had been introduced into the office's paper stream. It was only a matter of time before the blue fox nabbed its prey, the colonel said, and he congratulated all those remaining in the room on their now-validated discretion.

  “It was a trap?” I asked Gurley.

  “A lie,” he said. “To be more precise. An elaborate and admittedly impressive spur-of-the-moment lie by the colonel himself.” The actor was returning. “For this self-proclaimed ‘friend’ of mine could not help but tell me something else. Something he found so funny and cruel, he could hardly bear not to share it. How could I not have known, he asked, that the blue fox was, in fact, quite real?” Gurley paused and looked at me. “My ‘friend’ went on: ‘Blue Fox’ was the nickname of the colonel's mistress.” Gurley closed his eyes and leaned back.

  “Sir,” I said.

  “Silence, Belk. Let us both agree that there is absolutely nothing adequate that you could say at this point, other than ‘Captain, shall I fetch you a thermos of coffee?’” He nodded toward the door.

  “I'm sorry, sir,” I said, because I had to. He was pitiful.

  “As I said, Belk: absolutely nothing adequate. Now try again: ‘Captain, shall I fetch you…’”

  “Sir, it's just that-”

  “Sergeant, ‘it's just that’… I haven't even gotten to the sorry part yet. Be gone.”

  WHEN I RETURNED with the thermos, Gurley smiled and brought out a bottle. The label, faded, said “vodka,” but the liquid inside was brown. He asked with raised eyebrows if I wanted any, and when I declined, poured himself some in a chipped mug. He topped off the mug with coffee, and then raised it.

  “A toast, then, to the Blue Fox. For it was due to her that I was assigned the crackpot casebook, the file containing letters from every asylum escapee who mails the OSS some deranged idea about how to wage war or defend our homeland.” Gurley rose and studied the map. “Dozens of these letters, Belk. And we read them all. Because buried in every hundredth, every thousandth, letter was something useful. A grandmother in Chicago uncovers a Nazi sympathizer. A lobsterman in Maine hauls up a trap full of codebooks and sabotage plans. And the lone inhabitant of a dot-sized Bering Sea island off the coast of Alaska, an Orthodox hermit with the unspellable name of Father Ioasaph, sends word of Armageddon. After a period of intense fasting and prayer, the good Father-whose isolation has driven him quite mad- witnesses the advance guard of the heavenly host descending in flames to his island. Or so he writes.”

  Gurley took a sip from the mug and put it down. Then he walked around the desk and sat on the edge, before me. I think the object was to position his left leg for better viewing. “Some people can lose a limb quickly and efficiently, close by, perhaps in a traffic accident right around the corner,” he said. “I had to travel to the end of the earth.”

  Gurley decided to go investigate Father Ioasaph's letter, for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was that it got him far, far away from the office, where he remained the subject of open ridicule. More important, an odd detail in the island hermit's account of Armageddon intrigued Gurley and made him wonder if, just maybe, the flaming angel that Father Ioasaph had reported might have brought redemption as well. For Father Ioasaph wrote that there was a particular, and curious, reason he was sharing this glorious news with Gurley's office: “…it would appear, dear sirs, that God's angels speak Japanese…”

  “I KEPT THE LETTER to myself,” Gurley said, rising from his perch to pace. “I took leave. I didn't want to be mocked once again for pursuing folly, and, should anything come of the hermit's claims, I didn't want anyone barging in to steal credit. It took more than a week to get there. Or, rather, to get close. I found myself in a tiny Native village at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River.” Gurley went to the map to show me. “Look, Father Ioasaph's island isn't even on this map.” He studied the spot for a moment. “I don't think it was on anyone's map. But Father Ioasaph was well known in the area. The Russians had set up missions throughout this part of Alaska in the days of the Russian American Trading Company. And Father Ioasaph occasionally journeyed to the mainland to say Mass. In return, the villagers supplied his meager needs. It took some doing to find someone who would take me out to him-they were fiercely protective of their local loon-but I finally prevailed. I paid a generous fare, and promised even more should the boatman return promptly the following day to collect me.”

  Ioasaph's island was barren and wet. His hermitage was wedged into the rear of a small ravine and looked as though it had been constructed by an animal. And what with his beard and hair forming a wild corona around his face, he might well have been an animal. He welcomed Gurley gravely, and took him on a five-minute scramble across the island to where God's messenger had landed.

  Even someone not in the throes of religious devotion might have ascribed a divine nature to the scene, Gurley said. The earth was scorched; a circle of blackened grass and trees perhaps twenty feet in diameter marked the spot where the “angel” had alighted.

  There was a small chance Father Ioasaph had lit this fire himself in a desperate ploy to attract a visitor, Gurley thought, but that seemed unlikely. The devastation was too complete. Gurley pressed him: What do you mean, “angel”? A man with wings? Really now.

  Father Ioasaph sighed as though Gurley were hopelessly simple-minded. “No, sir,” he said. “The ways of God are mysterious to us, and this time, his messenger arrived by balloon.”

  “Balloon?” Gurley asked. Father Ioasaph described a giant balloon, as big as his hermitage, dirty white in color, plummeting from the sky.

  “And the angel was in the balloon? A man, you saw a man-a soldier-in the balloon?” This was the crucial question, Gurley said, and he watched as Father Ioasaph considered his answer.

  “No,” Father Ioasaph said. “Not a man like men we know.” He went on to describe what would soon become a familiar sight to Gurley: the multilayered payload, the rings of cylinders and the tangle of wires. But Gurley had never heard of such a thing then, and thus could offer little to counter Father Ioasaph's assertion that this was the being's strange skeleton; whatever corporeal elements might have existed would have been consumed in the fire.

  “But you said it spoke Japanese,” Gurley said. Father Ioasaph nodded and led Gurley around a small rise.

  Here lay the being's skeleton, or what remained of it, twisted and charred. For all the damage the payload had done, Gurley said, it was surprisingly intact. Dangerously intact, but he didn't know that. Father Ioasaph drew him close and pointed to various elements in the wre
ckage. Indeed, to judge from the markings, the being did “speak” Japanese.

  A sense of wonder, and then, an even greater sense of greed, consumed Gurley. He had found his prize, his ticket back into the OSS 's front ranks. Not even Bob Hope could dismiss this discovery.

  Father Ioasaph had a hand at his elbow. “I do not know what this means,” Father Ioasaph said. “Through prayer, I hope to come to know, and I will let you know when I do. But now, we must leave it be.”

  “Yes, Father,” Gurley said. “Leave it be. Leave it to me.” Father Ioasaph looked confused.

  Gurley said he barked at the man: Leave. And the change in Gurley's demeanor must have been so sudden, so sharp, that the priest did immediately as he was told. Gurley had frightened him. Still, Father Ioasaph pleaded with him even as he moved away. “Pray with me,” he said. “We must leave to God what is His and His alone…”

  But Gurley did not. He turned his back on Father Ioasaph, smiled, and began to lift a piece of the wreckage with his foot. “Speak to me, O Lord,” he muttered.

  Whereupon, Gurley said, He did.

  The blast was not deafening, not blinding. But it was sudden. One moment his lower left leg and foot were there, the next moment they were not. One moment Gurley was there, on Father Ioasaph's island, the next moment he was not.

  He was, instead, lying down, in a hospital, eyes closed, listening to two men talk about him.

  Incredible he survived.

  That priest saved his life.

  Not his leg.

  Nothing to save, I'd imagine. Unless you wanted a souvenir.

  How many days did it take to get him here?

  Three.

  A miracle, indeed. He should thank that priest.

  Convert.

  Then Gurley felt a surge of pain in his left foot. Pain, and then an equal surge of relief. He hadn't lost the foot, the leg. They were talking about someone else. He opened his eyes. The two men, doctors, it seemed, were standing beside him.

  “He's awake,” one said.

  The other turned to Gurley. “You made it,” he said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.” Gurley said nothing, just looked at him. “How do you feel?”

  Gurley told me it took him a moment to decide he was awake and not dreaming. Then he answered the doctor's question, as truthfully as he could. He told the man he felt okay. Weak, but okay.

  Then, without looking anywhere except into the doctor's eyes, he said, accurately, “My left foot's a little sore, though. Really sore, kind of a sharp, shooting sore.” The two doctors looked at each other, then they looked at his left foot, or where it should have been. Then Gurley looked as well.

  “That'll happen,” said the doctor who'd first spoken to him. “Usually it's an itch, and your brain is telling you it's there. But, in your case, it's not. Nor much of anything below the knee. Now, your brain's also going to tell you the other leg hurts, and it'll be right about that. Kind of unbelievable it's still there. Or that you're here. But you are. And you'll walk, eventually. Couple weeks, they'll be by to fit a prosthetic. Two, three weeks. They've been busy, of course.”

  Gurley finished his story, looked at me. “ ‘Busy,’” he repeated. “It took three months.” He looked down at his leg and shook it gently. “Then again, it took more than a quarter century to grow the one I'd had.”

  GURLEY RETREATED behind the desk. “Let's finish.” He dropped into his chair, pulled forward, and then folded his hands over the small book that he'd pulled out when I'd first arrived.

  “Exhibit C,” Gurley said. He opened the book, riffled through its pages, closed it, and then slid it across the desk to me with both hands. I didn't pick it up. He took it back.

  The leather cover had been dyed a dark green and was well worn. There were brown smudges in several places.

  “Blood,” he said. I just looked at him. “Old blood,” he added, and smiled. He flipped it over. On the back was more blood, and you could almost see, or imagine, where a bloody hand had raked across it. If Gurley hadn't said anything, though, I would have taken it for mud or grease. But that was one of his talents: to make everything sinister.

  “That's what I'm told, anyway, and I choose to believe it. It makes for more of a fair trade. A bloodied book for a bloodied leg.” He considered this and then continued. “I was convalescing when this book was-acquired, let us say, by my former colleagues. As you'll see once you open it, it is a kind of atlas. A book of maps and drawings. And like Father Ioasaph's avenging angel, the book also ‘speaks’ Japanese. Certainly not Chinese, as the imbeciles who first showed it to me insisted.” He opened it, found a page. “Japanese.” Another page. “Japanese.” He looked at me. “Seven semesters of Japanese at Princeton, I know Japanese. I am, as they say, something of an Orientalist.”

  He handed it to me, and I took it gingerly, trying not to touch the bloodstains. The pages were beautiful-it wasn't a book, really, as much as it was some man's private journal. The Japanese calligraphy was done in a tight, neat hand in the corners or margins of each page; in the center was usually a map or illustration, done with black ink and colored with watercolor paints or a light gray wash. The fire balloons appeared on a number of pages; sometimes in flight, sometimes lying in a wreck on the ground. The pages themselves were unusual; the paper felt brittle and had a slight sheen.

  Gurley thought the book's final pages were its most curious. First, several seemed to be missing, which he found troubling. And the pages that remained-well, they looked blank. But when you looked closer you could see evidence of some color-a faint gray wash, nothing more. After a minute or two, I decided that summed up the book: pretty, but useless. I made the mistake of saying so.

  “On the contrary, Belk,” Gurley said. “It is extremely useful, in fact, albeit to a small number of people.” He counted them off with his hand, starting with his thumb. “First it is useful to the spy, or spies, who created it. Should we find them and-secure-their assistance, then the book becomes useful indeed. Second, it is, and has been, useful to me. I was able to convince my former colleagues that the book, and by extension, the balloon campaign, was worthy of my personal and total focus. I admit the colonel was uncertain, initially, but I explained that I would be happy to brief his wife on all that I had discovered about the Blue Fox. He turned a shade of red that was indeed close to blue.” Gurley smiled. “He was only too happy to send me back to Alaska.”

  Gurley looked at his row of clocks and stood. “It's time to go.” I started to stand as well, and Gurley pointed me back down. “This book, lastly, will prove useful, I hope, to you. I have read it, studied it, translated it, but have yet to find a balloon with it, or predict, precisely, where one will land.” I looked up. “Yes, we're quite good at finding them after they've landed. But by then it's too late: a fire has started, or worse, rumors have started among the local populace.” Gurley paused until I looked at him. “So please, Sergeant, find us our next balloon, before some lumberjack does. Find me my spy. Find the next bomb in that book, on paper, before I find it in the field, with my one remaining foot.”

  He limped quite slowly around the desk to the door. I twisted around to see him go. “I'll not be back today, Sergeant. Business in town.” He smiled, broadly. “But I look forward to hearing the fruits of your labors. Tomorrow, 0700, at the airfield. Do not be late. Nor empty-handed.”

  “I don't know what I can do by then, sir. That's not nearly enough time to-”

  Gurley cut me off. “Sergeant,” he said, teeth bared in his favorite apparent smile. “You've seen this weapon in flight. You've seen it land. You've seen what happens when you don't move fast enough.” He spun and kicked the door with a violence that no other man who wanted to spare his foot injury could have matched. Which, when I saw his face, I realized was precisely his point.

  “Boom,” he said, just the one word, quiet and slow, and then he left.

  CHAPTER 8

  I HAD NO IDEA WHERE GURLEY AND I WERE FLYING, SO I packed everything I
could think of into a large duffel and hauled it down to the airfield the next morning. I got there an hour early, just to be safe. After a flight left for Juneau and points south at 0630, I had the terminal to myself, with the exception of a surly master sergeant who appeared to be in charge of everyone's comings and goings. I went outside to wait.

  At 7:10, the sergeant poked his head outside the door and asked if I'd seen a Captain Gurley I said no, and he ducked back inside before I could say anything more.

  At 7:30, the sergeant poked his head outside again, saw me, frowned, and then disappeared once more.

  At 7:55, Gurley bounced up in the back of a jeep driven by two sailors. None of the three looked like they had bathed, changed, or slept since the day before. Gurley climbed out of the back carefully, but quickly, exchanged a laugh with the driver, and then turned to face me. The jeep lurched away.

  “Who's late, Belk? You or me?” He looked at his watch, and then caught sight of my bag. “What's this?” he asked, kicking it. “You packed me a lunch?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I-well, I wasn't sure where we were going, so I packed everything I-” Gurley looked completely confused, so I tried something shorter: “That's my gear, sir.”

  “Lovely, Belk, but why-oh dear,” he said. “You assumed-but of course you did, what with your feeble brain and eager youth. You thought you were going with me. That's charming.”

  Gurley walked us away from the building-he was concerned about eavesdropping; I was concerned about a fight-and then turned me around, put his hands on my shoulders, and said, “Before we begin, Sergeant, let us be absolutely clear on one point. What you learned yesterday is extremely secret. You are to tell no one. If you do-” Now, it would have been clear enough for Gurley to draw a finger across his own throat. But, as always, he'd devised better. Whether it was improvised or practiced, I can't say, but this is what he did: he put a thumb to my neck, just to the left of my carotid artery. And then he slowly drew his thumbnail across-carotid, esophagus, jugular- before lifting it, before I quite knew how to react, before I'd started breathing once more. He smiled. “There, now,” he said. “It might just be better to pretend-and this may not be too difficult to do-that you learned nothing, not a single thing.”