The Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

  I was ready for her to scream, but what came out was more of a groan-“No.” Then she said, “Louis, don't do this.”

  “What was the baby's name?” I said.

  She looked at me for a long, silent moment, waiting for me to unsay the words, or maybe for history itself to unravel back past the point that there had ever been a war, a Saburo, a long summer under open skies full of light. Then she cried. I closed my eyes, and kept them closed when she finally began to speak.

  “He didn't have a name,” she said. Then nothing. When her voice returned, she went on. “I knew it was going to be a girl. I was going to name her Samantha-Sam, for Jap Sam, who'd been so good to me all that time until he was taken away. Introduced me to Saburo.” She stopped. I could feel her looking at me, waiting for me to open my eyes, but I didn't. I was too frightened of what I'd done or started. “But it wasn't a girl. I should have known then! What woman with the kind of sight I supposedly had wouldn't know what lay inside her, a boy or a girl? Wouldn't know he was dying?” She stopped again, and it was a minute or two before she started once more. “That little boy, inside me, dying, drowning like I'd thrown him into the sea. And then-” Lily stopped, caught her breath and tried again. “And then, he was in my arms, dead. Bella and the other aunties wanted a doctor or a priest.” I could feel her staring at me. “Keep your eyes closed, then,” she said. “That's what I want. What I wanted. No doctor, no priest, nobody. Nobody to come say, Lily the half-breed girl, whose parents ran away!' ‘Lily, who went away last summer with that Jap and came back pregnant!’ ‘Lily who thought she could have a baby on her own, and it came out dead! Look at her! Ha!’” She sniffed and coughed.

  “How much did Bella tell you? Did she tell you the story she told me? Bella, so smart. All the aunties, so smart. That's what they thought. Them and all the elders before them and before them, all of them. And now, they said, don't cry. Don't cry.”

  And now: the angalkuq. I waited for Lily to tell me about the shaman, but she did something more curious. She told me the story Bella told her, the story she'd wanted to tell me in the forest, the story that Ronnie so startled me with when he retold it yesterday.

  There was a boy, a baby boy, and his mother.

  But in Lily's version, in Bella's version, it is the baby who dies and the mother who weeps. Don't cry, Bella told Lily, and Lily told me, crying. Don't cry, or the baby will wake. Don't cry, or the baby will wake and lose his way to the land of the dead. And then you will have him with you always. Always a baby, always needing you to carry him, soothe him, always making you cry. Mind the story of the mother whose baby died and could not stop crying. The village begged her. Shamans begged her. Her husband begged her. But she would not stop, and the baby awoke, and he never left. Eventually, they all moved away. The other families, the whole village, even her husband. She was left all alone with the baby. You see her tears every summer when the snow thaws and the delta floods.

  Lily looked at Bella, still crying, unable to speak. Then what did it mean that her summer with Saburo had been so dry? Bella surprised her: Ever go hunting for mouse food? Lily held her breath, felt the prickling along her arms. Reach down sometimes, and what do you find? Mouse food? The little gnawed roots, shaped like teardrops? Little teardrops. Whose tears do you think those are?

  Bella reached over then, Lily said, and tried to take the baby from her. No, Lily said, and then repeated the word, with a hiss. Bella recoiled, shocked and hurt.

  Remember the story, Bella said. Remember what happens. The mother's left all alone. Everyone leaves her.

  “It's just a story,” Lily shrieked.

  “Then where's your husband?” Bella said, and left the room.

  THERE WAS NO SHAMAN, no angalkuq from Lower Kalskag in Lily's story. There was only Saburo, her lover from Japan, who came, and disappeared, later that night. Lily said she had called to him, had sent animal spirits sprinting out across the tundra in search of him, and then there he was. Proof of magic, or love. And those hands: she had loved him for those beautiful hands, and now she knew why. The way they moved the hair from her face, the way they pulled away the bloody sheets, the blankets, slowly, gently, and laid bare the boy. She had not let anyone else hold the baby, and now it seemed obvious why: no one else had hands fit for the task, to hold something that tiny, that fragile, that hopeless. She told him the story Bella had told her, and she loved him all the more for his reaction: he cried. They cried together, and while they were crying, whispered and planned.

  Saburo would take the boy away, bury him in a special place in the bush, build him a tiny shrine as he would have done were they in Japan. Lily begged to come with him, but he insisted she rest. He would come back for her, bring some token from the shrine, and then-he would spirit her back to Japan. He didn't say how.

  Days passed. A week, then two. “I was worried, but not scared,” Lily went on. “I thought I had powers, and I thought they were strong, despite everything that happened: something had made him appear, after all. But nothing was making him come back. I went outside one night and listened for him, finally. After a while, I was sure I heard him, very faintly, very far away. In Anchorage. So I went.”

  But Anchorage was too “noisy,” Lily said. Once she got there, she couldn't find Saburo anywhere. In time, she needed money, just to survive, and, once she'd saved up enough, to get back home. Another Yup'ik woman told her about fortune-telling. She didn't tell her, though, what the men really came to find out-whether you would have sex with them. If you did, they paid you more. And as scared as she was of losing Saburo, as scared as she might have been for what he thought of what she was doing, she kept doing it, because something told her that she was getting closer.

  She was: Gurley arrived one night, and she knew immediately that she'd found a link to Saburo. Lily didn't know what the link was, not at first, but she knew she had to cultivate a relationship with Gurley. When she did, and various details slowly surfaced about his work, such as the balloons (Gurley! Master of secrets!), she knew she'd done right. Eventually, he'd lead her to Saburo.

  But after her initial excitement about Gurley's connection to Saburo, the notion that he would lead her to him began to fade. Not because it seemed impractical or implausible, but because-well, it will sound preposterous coming out of my mouth, so I'll just quote what Lily said:

  “There is an old tradition, from generations ago, that the night after a hunt, the women of the less successful hunters would seek out the men who had been successful, and have sex with them. It was thought they might then pass on some of that power to their own less fortunate husbands. It had nothing to do with love or even sex. It was about doing all you could to make sure your husband, your lover, would bring honor to your family. Gurley was successful.”

  I think Lily asked me then, “Does that make sense?” I don't remember answering. But I do remember what she said next.

  “We stayed on and on in Anchorage, Gurley and I. We didn't leave. And any idea I had about finding Saburo faded, and faded, until I could no longer see his face anymore. And then his face started to be replaced with another. I studied it each night in my dreams, and each night it came closer and closer, until one night I saw who it was. I woke up and saw him there beside me: Gurley.”

  By now, I had opened my eyes, but I wish I hadn't. Then I could have imagined some look of disgust on her face when she said the name Gurley, but instead I had to watch her as tears came to her eyes, and listen as she went on: “You see why I have to tell it to you this way? Why I can't simply say that I fell in love with him? Because I had loved another man. And we'd had a baby a boy and we'd lost him, and then I lost Saburo, and then there was this other man, so strong and proud, and he was going to help me.”

  It wasn't love, she said. That's not wishful revising, at least not on my part: that's what she said. She said it wasn't anything she could really even put into words. But whatever the connection was, she needed it, she needed him. All the while, she told herself that th
e need sprang from her need to find Saburo, but eventually she began to wonder if that was true.

  Gurley had begun to talk about life after the war, together. About some property he'd bought while posted in California, north of San Francisco. It was near the ocean, part of an old ranch. There was a hill you could stand on and see-well, everything. That's where the house would go. Big and broad with a long porch that would ramble around the whole of the first floor. From there, you'd be able to see the land unfurling all the way down to the water, where the ocean would carry the eye on to the horizon and the clouds above. Such clouds, Gurley had told her, such a sun: the pleasures of the sky there were so vast. How like Gurley, I thought, to think that some small panorama he'd purchased might sell a girl who'd grown up beneath the world's biggest sky. Still, I could hear him: “Such a sky as would befit a century's worth of painters! Imagine, heaven's cloak…” And what is there to say, really, against that, or against him? Decades on, I'm not sure I can tell you precisely what the sky looked like above Mary Star of the Sea, or what the walk from the orphanage to the ocean looked like. But I can remember that imaginary house of Gurley's. I can see them both there; I can see every blade of grass, every window, every flower, every cloud above.

  I told Lily it sounded beautiful, and she shook her head quickly.

  “That's why I was so glad you came, Louis. I was falling for him, I had fallen for him-so much of me still has.”

  My heart swelled, is that the word? I was precisely the knight I had taken myself for.

  “When you came, you were so different. So young.” We smiled. “And so, so frightened. So unlike anyone else who'd ever come to that dingy little office. I felt it immediately. And you frightened me. You'd been sent, I knew that right away. Not like Gurley You'd been sent to remind me.”

  “To what?”

  “To-to-rescue me. To shame me. To remind me to-stop crying. To go home, to find my son, his father. Saburo.”

  Things were going horribly wrong. I'd been sent to rescue her, but for myself. I tried to protest: “Lily, I-no one sent me.”

  “No one you knew, but you knew, somehow, didn't you?” she said.

  Lily, I loved you: but I didn't say it. The words were there, but all I could do was cough. “You knew” she went on, “that I didn't need a lover, that I needed a friend.”

  If I coughed again, if I even opened my mouth to speak, I knew I might lose whatever was in my stomach.

  “You understand,” said Lily, relieved.

  I pointed to the door.

  “Gurley doesn't, but you do. I don't even understand. I don't even understand what I feel about Gurley-that's why I came here, out here, where I was born, where I can understand things better.” I knocked on the door for the guard to let me out. “The sooner we go, Louis, the better!” she called after me. The guard smirked. I wanted to slap him, but could barely manage to nod as I stumbled down the corridor.

  I kept walking until I reached the riverbank. I found our boat, a long, broad skiff, equipped with five days' worth of food, gallons of gas and water, tents, and for appearance's sake, a crate of bomb disposal equipment-tools, plastic explosives, blasting wire, and a little ten-cap hell box. There was one other small item, too, one that I'd secreted from Gurley's office and now kept hidden in a knapsack. I wouldn't fail Lily this time: I'd brought Saburo's map.

  I looked it all over and then I sat, the good friend. I stared across the river and listened for some sign of Gurley-the whine of a boat, the crack of a gunshot.

  CHAPTER 17

  I'VE SEEN RONNIE FIRE A GUN ONLY ONCE, BUT IT WAS TO great effect.

  A couple had lost their child. A tiny child. A baby girl, who, like Lily's child, was stillborn. But the baby was terribly early, terribly small, and the whole thing so horrifying that when the couple was asked immediately afterward if they'd like the hospital to “take care of things,” they numbly agreed without knowing what they were agreeing to.

  The hospital cremated the body.

  They found this out a few days later, when the husband returned to claim the body. He was told it had been cremated; shocked, he asked for the remains; alarmed, the hospital told him there weren't any. Our bodies are mostly water, the man was told, and tiny babies like yours-they sometimes simply evaporate. There's nothing left.

  The man returned to his wife, and then, beyond grief, even past rage, the two found me. I did what I could-I arranged a memorial service for their child, I offered to secure an empty burial plot where they could at least place a marker. But they wanted more.

  So I summoned Ronnie. He talked with me, and then with the couple, and then he told them to meet him outside the hospital in two days' time, at 5 P.M.

  Though it was July, the sky had gone dark early black with threatening clouds. The first drops landed on my windshield as I parked. I found Ronnie and the couple in the small play yard outside the hospital, and watched as he threw a handful of ashes north, then south, then east and west. The couple looked on, stupefied.

  This sounds like a myth. It is not; I was there. (Though saying so makes it sound all the more mythic, I know.)

  Ronnie dusted his hands of the ashes and reached into a small pouch. I expected him to remove some amulet or tiny mask; instead, he removed an old, rusted.38. (It may have been mine; the parishioners had given one to me “for my safety,” but I'd hidden or lost it and it had been missing for years.)

  The wife looked terrified and grabbed her husband. The husband maintained a kind of crumbling defiance: shoot me, his face said. Shoot us both. We no longer want to live.

  But Ronnie shot at God instead. He raised the gun over his head, shouted angrily, and fired. It's hard to describe how perfect an act this was, but the evidence was on the couple's faces, first the husband's, then the wife's: here was the angry retort they'd wanted to send to heaven, futile as an oath, but so completely satisfying.

  Ronnie wasn't finished, though. Or heaven wasn't.

  The rain began. Slowly, and then heavier and heavier. The couple started to move toward shelter, but Ronnie told them to stay. They looked puzzled, sad, depleted. Ronnie held his face to the sky, soaking it. Then, looking at the couple, he slowly wiped his face and presented them his hands, water pooling in the creases of his palms.

  It was pouring now, so I couldn't hear what he said then, but I could just about make out his lips. She's here.

  They were too stunned to move at first. Then the mother and father raised their faces to the flood and wept, as the clouds returned their daughter.

  * * *

  MIDNIGHT CAME, and there was no sign of Gurley. Above, a tumble of clouds arrived, and with them, an early twilight. I was still studying the sky when the jeep pulled up behind me. I turned to see: Gurley and an MP were in front, Lily in back. Somehow, Gurley had made it back across the river from town, silent and invisible.

  “Everything ready?” Gurley said, and then repeated himself as he looked everything over. I nodded, and started to ask a question, but by then, he was already moving back to the jeep, where the MP was unlocking Lily's cuffs. Gurley then walked Lily toward the boat, one hand of hers in two of his. Every so often, he would whisper to her, and she would smile. Beyond, I could see the MP taking great pains to appear professionally disinterested in all that was taking place.

  “Thugs,” Gurley said to me when they reached the boat. “Imagine: handcuffs.” He took one of Lily's hands to help her aboard. “I'm only sorry I didn't come to your aid sooner, dearest. You must forgive me. Thugs.” He followed Lily into the boat, and turned to me. “Handcuffs? Can you imagine? Find out his name, and when we get back, make sure that he is severely dealt with,” Gurley said. I turned to look back up at the MP, who was now getting into his jeep. “Too late,” Gurley said quickly. “Fair enough, just get in, get in. Cast off, skipper, or whatever you do.” Lily was staring across the river at the town, which was disappearing into a haze of cooling fog. “Mademoiselle,” Gurley said. “I insist you choose the seat of prefere
nce.”

  Lily gave him a quiet smile, nodded to me, and went to the bow. I started the motor in one pull, cast off, and pointed us out into the middle of the river. The man who'd issued me the boat said I was crazy to be setting out so late; we were likely to run aground before we'd gotten five hundred yards. I studied the surface of the water for any clues. Gurley looked back at the town. And then Lily turned, leaned so I could see her face behind Gurley's back, and gave me a smile. Bigger than the one she'd given Gurley-I was sure of it. “Louis,” she said, just mouthing the word. And then she half extended a hand, and mouthed two more words: “Follow me.”

  * * *

  WITHIN AN HOUR, the clouds had gone, but the sun was done with us anyway. The thin tundra twilight had finally dimmed into a kind of night, more blue than black. We would have to land soon and make camp, but Gurley showed no signs of stopping. He sat in the middle of the boat, between Lily and me, and scanned the horizon. I suppose he might have been searching for Saburo, but his look was so vacant and the light so poor, I wasn't sure what he was doing or thinking.

  Lily, on the other hand, watched the water before us intently. She had had me slow down, and whenever she thought I needed to adjust my course, she would point one way or the other, and yip. It was eerie, that sound-I would not have thought a single, clipped syllable would be enough to convey that she was speaking a different language, but it was. It completed the scene, really: wartime Alaska had always been a strange place, but we were streaming into something altogether different, a kind of dreamscape, where every reference point had been replaced with a not-quite-identical twin. The sky was a blanket, the water was ink, and there, in the bow of the boat, a woman I once knew was speaking a language I did not. Not English, not even Yup'ik. I could feel the blue dark slither up my skin.