The Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

  “Not a customer,” Lily said. She told me now that she had been stalling, frantically trying to come up with a plausible scenario. He'd been watching her grow upset, and suddenly decided he knew what had happened.

  “No, Lily-you-you were attacked,” Gurley said, grabbing her arm. “My God. My God: he hurt you. And me, limping along after you, your helpless defender. Did he-did he-my God, Lily, did he- rape-?”

  Lily said she started crying: she could see no way out. He'd taken over her story-now rape was involved; should she admit to that, peg it on some random thug? One of those brawling sailors, unexpectedly returned? Lost and distraught, she blurted out-because it was true- “He was a friend.”

  She gasped, destroyed now because she'd thought she'd revealed once and for all that it was me.

  But I was apparently gone from Gurley's mind, and he pressed in on this new quarry: “‘Was’?” he asked. “Who was he? A friend? Why would you cry if it was a friend? What kind of friend is that?”

  And that was all Lily needed. Because when he asked the question, the obvious answer, the real answer, came to mind, immediately. What friend had she cried over, again and again?

  Saburo.

  She started telling Gurley before she'd even planned it all out, but the longer she talked, and the more fascinated she saw him become, the more she realized how it could all work, how well it could work. Saburo was the man who'd accosted her in the street, not Louis. Saburo was the reason she'd run from Gurley, not to him: she told Gurley that she couldn't admit, not then, that she knew-that, long before she'd met Gurley, she'd befriended-a Japanese soldier, a spy.

  And there it was: Saburo was the reason Gurley needed to take her to Bethel. Saburo had run off after her, into the dark, had begged her to leave with him, that night, told her he was going back to Japan, that he would take her with him, if only she would come, right then. “Someone sympathetic to the cause” had a floatplane waiting, would fly them west, as far west as he could. Then there would be a ship, or a submarine…

  I was awestruck. First, by the facility of Lily's storytelling, and second, by the slow realization that this story might have been, must have been, at one time, true. There had never been a midnight race through Anchorage with Saburo, but there had been promises of an airplane, of a ship, of a home across the ocean.

  “More than a friend” is how Gurley answered all this, both mollified and roused, and Lily nodded, as though he had broken her, and because he had.

  “More than a friend,” Lily repeated to Gurley. “That's what he thought,” she said, and then fell to Gurley's chest. She didn't have to say it: the spy asked and I did not go. “I don't know what he thinks now,” she told Gurley then.

  “I do,” I told Lily now.

  IT DID NOT LOOK LIKE its nickname-“Paris of the Tundra”-not from the air, not from the river, which I had to cross to get from the airfield to the town, not from my walk up its main street, nor the walk I took back down that same street, having quickly run out of road. But Bethel must have looked like Paris to the communities that dotted the tundra around it. If a clock hand began its circumnavigation of Alaska at Anchorage -about five o'clock-it would find little to interrupt its sweep west and then north to Nome, at nine o'clock. Little, except Bethel.

  Bethel sits at around seven or eight on that clock face, smack on the banks of the Kuskokwim River. The Kuskokwim shares the duty of draining western Alaska with the Yukon. The two rivers conspire each summer to turn the tundra into a vast delta so soggy and remote that, even as tourism booms elsewhere in Alaska today, it sometimes seems there are fewer humans in this corner of the continent now than there were during the war.

  When I first arrived in Bethel, however, it wasn't bustling, even then. There weren't many people around, almost no cars, just a few jeeps. I later learned that vehicles were something of an extravagance-you couldn't drive to Bethel from anywhere; you could only drive around in Bethel, or, when the weather was right, around the wide unbroken tundra that surrounded the town. In the winter, you could drive down the frozen river when they plowed it. In Anchorage or Fairbanks, if you ever get a hankering and the road's open, you can drive right out of Alaska, into Canada, and hell, on to Miami. But in Bethel, you always have to turn around eventually and come back.

  The flight from Anchorage had lasted long enough for me to work out a plan, or as I think of it now, a kind of essential theology. Gurley represented evil, a powerful, but not unbeatable, foe. Lily was Eve, of course. Lovely, and susceptible. Did that make me Adam, or did Saburo have more claim to that title? Maybe I was Adam after he'd eaten the apple. Maybe I was the snake.

  DEALING WITH THE LOCAL military authorities was easier than I had expected. The same frenzied culture of secrecy permeated Bethel as it did Anchorage; the soldiers I met at Bethel 's Todd Field were so interested in keeping their mission a secret that they were scarcely interested in mine.

  But Lily had kept another secret from just about everyone, as I was soon to discover.

  I was standing on the long, low porch in front of the optimistically named Bethel Emporium of Everything, sleuthing. After a short walk around town, I'd been unable to find Lily's old store, Sam's Universal Supply, and was starting to wonder if she'd told me the truth-about that, or about anything.

  Four men were on the porch. One heavyset white fellow, standing, and three men I took to be Yup'ik, all sitting, all watching the white man like they were waiting for him to leave.

  “Jap Sam, sure,” the white man said. “Good fella,” he said. “Never went there much, but heard he was a good fella.” He looked to the others on the porch, and so did I. “Mind you, the man had products of inferior quality.”

  “Good prices,” one of the Yup'ik men said to the empty street. “Good man,” another said.

  “‘Good prices,’” the white man repeated. “Not if you're buying junk. Mind you, that's what I thought at first, when I saw them come up in the jeep and take him off: I thought, there you go, he's getting arrested for selling inferior products. But no, wasn't that at all.” He looked again at the Yup'ik men, all of whom stared at me.

  “Where'd you take him?” one of the Yup'ik men said.

  “I don't know,” I tried, taking a moment to figure out what he was asking. “Some soldiers took him?” My questioner turned away.

  “Now, boys,” the white man said. “Not every soldier knows every other soldier. See here, he's not from that kind of a unit.” Instead of pointing to my bomb disposal insignia, he pointed to my sergeant's stripes. “No, the government took Jap Sam down to California, I hear, for his capital-S safety. Mind you, he was Japanese, and I'm sure we're all safer, too, knowing all them Japanese are safe in that camp.”

  “No one's never heard from Sam,” one of the Yup'ik men said. “Never since.”

  “Mind you, boys,” the white man said. “There's a war on.” He looked out into the street. “Good day, Captain,” the man said to me, and left.

  I stood there a minute, trying to decide what to do next, growing tense under the collective stare of the men. “What you want Jap Sam for, anyway?” said the one who'd spoken up earlier.

  “Met a friend of his down in Anchorage,” I said.

  “Jap friend?” the man said.

  “No,” I said. “She's Yup'ik.” Glances were exchanged; I must have gotten the pronunciation close. “Well, Yup'ik and Russian.”

  “Lily!” one of the other guys said with a shout and smile. Suddenly they were all talking. “How's our Lily?” “How's that girl?” “She still tall and pretty as anything?” Then one guy gushed, “Wasn't there a kid? How's he doin'?” and the other two frowned and fell silent.

  No one said anything for a moment, and if you'd asked me, in that very instant, if I'd ever be able to speak again, I'm not sure if I'd have said yes. I'd been asked to believe a lot of things over the course of the war-that bombs could float through the air for thousands of miles, that teenagers could be given guns after a few weeks of training
and be called soldiers, that the frozen-solid emptiness of Alaska was of strategic importance-but now I was being asked to believe that Lily had once been pregnant, had had a child.

  The Yup'ik man who'd first questioned me looked up. “You're going to want to see Auntie Bella,” he said. “She's going to want to know about Lily, what she's doing and all.” He gave me directions, and when he finished speaking, it was clear I was to leave, immediately, without asking another thing.

  BELLA: THAT NAME PROMISED someone huge, and round, and, I assumed, Yup'ik. But Bella was as thin and worn and white as the wooden posts that held up the porch outside her small boardinghouse.

  Before I could say anything, she told me she had no vacancies, but when I told her I had news of Lily, she reluctantly let me in. Bella asked a lot of questions, mostly about Lily's health. Whenever I tried to ask a question, she interrupted with another one, asking questions about me when she'd run out of ones about Lily.

  A noise outside distracted her and I jumped in. “One of the men I met, he said something about a kid-Lily has a child? Here?”

  Bella gave me a hard look. “If she didn't tell you, don't imagine she wanted you to know,” Bella said, and we sat in silence for a bit.

  Finally, Bella spoke up. “Wasn't no kid” she said. We sat a while longer. “I'm thinking about telling you a story,” she said. “But if I do, it's only because I want you to feel bad for having asked.”

  “I already do,” I said. She snorted, and then got up and left the room. When she returned, she had a single, steaming mug of something, which she put on the table. After a moment, she picked it up and took a sip.

  “I'm down to the one decent mug these days,” she said. “So I don't mind if I do.” Another sip. “Now, from all that you said, you sound like you're a friend.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “Boyfriend?” she asked, and I was so taken aback, I said nothing.

  “Didn't think so,” she said, and shifted in her chair. “Well, you'll still feel bad,” she said. “But you'll probably also want to help her. And that's reason enough, I suppose.” She put the mug back down. “Feel free,” she said, nodding to it. But once she started talking, I couldn't move, and lost myself to the story.

  LILY HAD RETURNED from her summer trip alone. People took some notice, but not much; few had seen her leave on her trip weeks back with Saburo, and in the meantime, the person who probably knew the most about Saburo, Sam, had been taken off to California, interned at Tule Lake.

  And as the months passed, few people even noticed Lily had returned from her summer pregnant. Winter clothing concealed her secret from most everyone, except Bella, of course, who'd given Lily a room in the back.

  Bella said you'd never seen a woman so happy who had so little reason to be. Here Lily was, alone, and with child. Sam, the man who'd taken care of her for so long in Bethel, had been hauled away and imprisoned. Saburo, the man she'd loved, had vanished-Lily wouldn't say where or how, but Bella assumed Saburo was attempting to return to Japan.

  “Lily says he's dead,” I blurted out.

  “Dead,” Bella said. “Not sure how she would know, but-then, I'm not sure how she knows half of what she does. Or how she could be so fool stupid, too.” Bella counted off the degrees of foolishness on her fingers: no money, no family, no husband.

  “But she had you,” I said, and Bella nodded, puckered her lips.

  “What we needed, in the end, was a doctor,” Bella said. Bethel shared its doctor with several towns up and down the Kuskokwim. One evening, Lily told Bella that dinner hadn't gone down well; a few hours later, Bella said, it was clear it wasn't dinner but the baby who was making problems.

  “Now here we were, seven months in, I'd say, though she never knew when exactly she got in the family way, of course. Or wouldn't tell.” Bella exhaled. “And no doctor-he's two villages up, and bad weather's keeping him there. But this baby-this baby is coming. I got some of the other aunties in town over here double-quick, but all of us just knew wasn't going to be nothing we could do once that child come out.”

  Bella sent word over to the airfield, to see if their doctor was around. He was, the report came back, but he couldn't work on civilians. “Couldn't work on Eskimos is what they meant,” said Bella. “Couldn't then, couldn't now. Couldn't or wouldn't? Well, you tell me, soldier boy, why we got problems with the soldiers in this town, drunk or sober?”

  Lily read the panic in the eyes all around her, and grew panicked herself. She knew as well as they did that the baby was coming. She sent them all away and then called them all back in; she screamed for Saburo, she screamed for her mother. And then, twelve hours after dinner, two months too early, she delivered. A baby boy. Perfect in every way, but one: he was dead.

  “Not a mark on that child,” Bella said. “Just the biggest head of black, black hair you've ever seen.” It looked like Bella was crying, but I couldn't be sure; the light was dim and nothing else had changed in her face or voice. “Tiny. Tiny, tiny thing. And here's where we disagree, the other women and me. I think-I know-that little boy took a breath, a single breath”-she gave a little gasp-“and that was all. Lily said so, too.” She reached for her mug and saw there was nothing in it. “No matter. Nothing any of us could do but sit there and cry with her a spell.”

  But the hardest part came later, Bella said. Lily wouldn't give the baby up. The ladies let Lily have the day with the child, but when they came for him that night, she wouldn't move. “Saburo has to see him,” Lily said, though she wouldn't answer any questions about where Saburo was or how he would know what had happened.

  “She wasn't making a whole lot of sense,” Bella said. “Said we needed to send for help-and I'm thinking, ‘A doctor? It's too late for a doctor’-and she's saying no, someone much better, much smarter than that.” Bella stopped. “Well. If this Saburo had been so smart, I don't think she would have found herself in this predicament in the first place. Course, I didn't tell her that.”

  Bella looked in her mug once more. “Imagine they're expecting you back about now,” she said, but she didn't make a move herself.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Baby died,” Bella said. “Was dead. Told you that.”

  “But who did you-”

  “Aw,” Bella said, “this part of the story ain't worth the telling. What you might call a medicine man, a shaman: that's what she wanted. Hell of a bad idea, turns out. Oh, we got this man-young man- down visiting from Lower Kalskag. He comes in-drunk as a fart- I'm ready to turn him out. But Lily, she was beyond hollering by then, just screeching, and the fact is, none of the other aunties wanted to be in there. I didn't want to be in there. I don't think this shaman much did, either. But we left, he went in, and-” Bella thought about this for a moment, and then drew herself up before going on. “The next morning, it's just Lily lying there, wrecked, like something'd exploded. And she won't talk, but she don't have to. No baby. No shaman. No father. She's in there all alone.”

  CHAPTER 16

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO TODD FIELD, THERE WAS A MESSAGE waiting from Gurley. They'd arrive late that afternoon. Continue my preparations. Tag along on a reconnaissance flight, get a better idea of the terrain.

  I'd assumed Lily had all the knowledge of the “terrain” that we would need, but with all the other supplies for our expedition secured, I had nothing else to do, and so hopped on a flight the next morning.

  To my surprise, the crew hardly protested at my joining them-the flights were so boring, they said, they'd love someone like me along. When I asked what that meant, I was greeted with some mumbles and laughs, and I realized they knew about Shuyak and the infamous sergeant who jumped out of planes.

  I disappointed them. I got up to look out the window once we were in flight, but I didn't jump. And the landscape disappointed me. Or rather, shocked me. It was the first time in my life that I have ever seen that much nothing. No balloons. No bombs. No soldiers. No smoke, no villages, no people, not even animals, at
least animals visible from the air. And you couldn't see fleas from this high up.

  We flew for hours over the same terrain-grasses, a clump of scrub alder here and there, mountains in the distance, and everywhere, water puddling and flooding, curling and spilling from one spot to another via waterways fat or thin. If the angle was wrong, or right, the water's surface would catch fire with the reflection of the sun, and if you didn't look away in time, that burst of sun would stay with you, even after you'd blinked. It glowed behind your eyelids, and then reappeared in some other portion of the sky-sometimes looking briefly like a balloon, if that's what you were looking for, or a second sun, which, if you thought about it (and we didn't), was no less impossible to believe.

  WHAT RONNIE HAS always found difficult to believe is that Alaska 's mosquitoes bother him more than me. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the departure of his tuunraq, but Ronnie has always been impotent when it comes to Alaska 's unofficial state bird. Mosquitoes have driven him crazy every summer, especially during what became our annual expedition into the delta. As soon as we were clear of the city limits, the mosquitoes would descend on Ronnie, masses of them, until any remaining patch of exposed skin bore at least one or two drops of blood. Honestly, they never found as much interest in me, a fact I attributed to the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church's path to salvation, and one that Ronnie attributed to my love of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips.

  We'd go for a month or more. Originally, the trips were designed to get me out and around to some of the smaller villages and seasonal camps that would emerge each summer over the delta. But in recent years, Ronnie and I had done a kind of joint revival wherever we stop; I said Mass in the morning, he told stories and attended to shamanic requests at night.