The Cloud Atlas (26 page)

Gurley put one hand to his lips, another lightly to my chest, and shut his eyes. “Sergeant Belk,” he said, and then opened his eyes. “We are no longer chasing fleas. Your captain's snare may have finally caught a
spy
.”

GURLEY CONTINUED speaking, with very few interruptions, for the next two hours. At least, I remember it that way. I remember him meeting me at the terminal late that morning, and I remember him dismissing me from the Quonset hut that afternoon, and I remember him talking the entire time.

I don't remember much of what he said, however. Because I learned one important piece of information early on, and after that, found it hard to focus on much of anything else he said.

Lily had told him about Saburo.

Not much, not everything, but enough. Enough to convince Gurley to venture out into the tundra in search of Saburo, and enough to insist Lily accompany him as a guide. I would come along, too, of course- one could never imagine what sort of menial or distasteful tasks might arise. In fact, Gurley wanted me to precede him and Lily to Bethel. He needed a bit of extra time to finagle Lily's passage, but I could make the most of the delay by securing supplies in Bethel and “doing a bit of sleuthing” around town to see if I could come up with any information about Saburo on my own. Gurley and Lily would follow in a day or two. Depending on the weather-and Lily-we would disappear into the bush shortly thereafter.

Replaying these memories, it seems unmistakable now to me how completely mad he was. And I don't mean madness like the kind that doctors like to cure nowadays with dollops of prettily colored pills. I mean old-fashioned, Edgar Allan Poe-type madness, incurable but for a gun placed at the temple. The words fast and steady, the volume rising and falling, the eyes darting this way and that.

Yes, that's precisely how it looks now-insanity-but to have seen it through my eyes then, you would never have thought him so sane. Missing were the theatrics, the powder-keg rage-that way he had of flushing red and trembling like he was his own private earthquake, every extremity poised to fly off in pursuit of the leg that was already gone. In its place was this calm, constant, reasoned stream of language, punctuated every so often with words that almost set me to trembling:
Lily, Saburo, Lily.

She had told Gurley about Saburo. She had told him his name. She had told him that he was Japanese, a soldier, a spy. She had told him almost everything that she had told me, except-and I listened carefully-that they were lovers.

The longer he went without mentioning this most important (only to me?) fact, the more rattled I became. How could she not have told him? Saburo: her first love, that golden summer, those perfect hands? As Gurley rambled on, however, I had time to think about it, and came to realize that she had every reason to lie to him. Her one desire was to make it out into the bush in search of-well, I'd never let her spell it out that night, but I knew she was searching for Saburo's body. But she couldn't get to Bethel without a military escort-that's why she had wanted me to come. I'd failed her, so she'd gone to Gurley. Riskier, but also better-he would have access to better resources. He could operate with more autonomy. He was an officer, after all, unlike me. He was her lover.

But I got to Lily first that afternoon. I'm sure Gurley expected me to go directly to the airfield without even stopping at my barracks, but instead, I went directly downtown, where I found Lily, peering out her window, as if she was expecting me, or someone. She smiled and gave me a little wave. I ran up to the second floor, a new question popping up on each stair-
Did we really see the northern lights? Did I really see a balloon? Did we really run into the forest, the two of us, together, last night?
-but when I reached her, what came out first was Gurley's decision to go to Bethel.

She looked both delighted and scared. “We're going to go?” she asked. “You're sure? Me, too? He said all of us?”

“He didn't tell you? It seemed like things were pretty well decided.”

“Last night-” Lily began, “or I guess it was this morning, after I made it back into town, I came back down here, I found him wandering the street.”

“Was he angry?” I asked. “He must have asked why you ran. Did he see me? I was sure he saw me.”

“What did he tell you?” Lily asked carefully.

“About last night?” I said. “Nothing. Just that you'd had this conversation.” I waited for her to augment this, but she didn't, so I went on. “About a ‘spy.’” I paused again. “Lily, what were you thinking? Look what's happened-he's carting us all off to the bush, and God knows what he'll do there, where he won't have to worry about anyone other than us witnessing him completely cracking up. He's dangerous, Lily. He's ready to kill. Starting with me.”

Lily went to the window and checked the street. “That's why I told him,” she said, and then turned to me. “To spare you.”

LILY'S ACCOUNT OF the early morning hours differed from Gurley's. Gurley hadn't mentioned to me that he'd seen Lily or anyone else on the misty streets; and he'd heavily edited his conversation with Lily. He left out, for example, what Lily said was the first thing he'd asked her-
Was that you and Louis I saw in the street?
-and he'd left out her reply.

“Yes, it was me,” she told him. “But not Louis. You've scared him half to death. I'll be lucky if I ever see him again.”

“I'll be luckier if you don't,” Gurley had said. I wondered how he'd looked when he'd said that. With me, it would have been behind a sneer, or preceding a fist. But it had to be different with her.

“He's just a boy,” she told him, and didn't even smile at me as she repeated the line now.

“Well,” Gurley said. Lily said he kept looking around, like I might still be lurking in the shadows. “Who was it, then? It
was
someone. It was someone. I know I saw someone with you. A man. Not a ‘customer’? I thought we had an agreement. I thought I'd taken care of that for you. You should have enough now, enough to get by without-God, Lily, we've talked about this. You know what I've said, what I'm planning for you, for us-”

“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.