The Cloud Atlas (29 page)

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 the 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.

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 preference.”

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.

Gurley barely managed to break the spell when he finally called for us to stop. I could hardly see Lily now, but it seemed as though she nodded her head without looking back at him. A few seconds went by, and then all of a sudden, I could see her face floating in the gloom. Though it sounded as though she were whispering, I could hear her clearly: we weren't far from the shore of a small island; I was to slow down and gradually steer us to the right. I still don't know whether she saw the island or if she sensed it; whatever her method, we made land smoothly enough. The grass scraping beneath the boat sounded like static as Lily climbed over the side and then waded through the water to pull us ashore. Gurley seemed uncomfortable that he wasn't doing any work, but then appeared to decide something and settled back.

I had asked for three tents but now discovered that I had only been issued two. I set up one while Gurley watched. Lily had walked off soon after we'd all come ashore. Gurley had started to follow her, but she'd turned him back with a silent look-not a threatening look, just a look-and Gurley had straightened up, checked to see if I had been watching (I had), and then peppered me with instructions about setting up camp.

Lily had not returned by the time I had finished the first tent. Unsure if setting up the second tent would prompt or prevent a discussion about sleeping arrangements, I paused for a moment, and then tore into the second bag.

I hadn't made much progress when Gurley stopped me.

“So industrious, Sergeant,” he said, and surveyed what I had done. “How many tents do we have?”

“Just two, sir,” I said.

“You little devil,” he said.

“I asked for three,” I said. “They gave me two.”

Gurley made no reply. He walked away and then quickly returned. “I really do care for her, Belk,” he said. “About her. For her. I do. That's clear?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“The cuffs were a mistake,” he said.
“Their
mistake. That's obvious, isn't it?”

“Absolutely,” I said, now sure of the opposite.

“Sir,”
he added, for me.

“Absolutely, sir,” I mumbled.

“I'll chalk up that missing
sir
to fatigue instead of insolence,” he said. “You may retire.”

I looked at the second tent, which lay in a crumpled heap. I hadn't even found all the poles.

“Sergeant,” Gurley said. “You are kind to struggle with the tents, but you have done enough. Leave this to me.”

I stared at him for a moment, giving him time to change his mind. When he didn't, I crawled into the first tent, exhausted. I rooted around in the dark for the blankets I knew I'd thrown inside at some point, and listened to Gurley softly cursing his way through the raising of the second tent. In five minutes, I was fast asleep.

At least I think that's how it happened. The truth is that there is a short period where I don't remember anything at all, and so I am chalking it up to the most innocent explanation-sleep. Or a better explanation: what happened next was so extraordinary, it has crowded out most of my other memories from that evening.

I awoke (or was awake) when the tent flaps parted. Convinced that Gurley had belatedly decided to play the gentleman and leave Lily a tent to herself, I rolled to one side of the small, two-man tent, to give him room to lie down. I kept my eyes closed, hoping that he would assume I was asleep-or at least, fiercely pretending to be. I could smell the tundra muck and wet on him as he crawled in; it wasn't unpleasant, exactly-although I knew it would be after a few hours. It smelled of water and grass and mud, a lot of it, and I realized that pitching the second tent must have proven quite a battle. I imagined he'd had trouble finding another patch of dry ground adequate enough for the tent. I was about to roll back over and apologize for leaving him to do the job alone when the voice came in my ear.

“Louis,” Lily said. My every muscle came alive. I tried to twist to see her, but she whispered “no” and held my shoulder. “Just listen,” she said.

“Where have you been?” I said, craning my neck. “Where's Gurley?”

“Whisper,” Lily said. I started to repeat myself, and she interrupted: “You don't know how to whisper.” She put a finger on my lips, which almost made me stop breathing as well as speaking.

“Louis, he's gone,” she said. I tried once more to roll over and face her, and this time she let me. I was surprised to find her face right above mine. “Not Gurley,” she said. “Saburo. Saburo is gone. I went and looked for him, and he's gone.”

“Lily,” I said.

“Please,” she said. “You'll wake Gurley.” I rubbed my face. Lily waited until I was looking at her before she went on. “I went looking for Saburo,” she said then. “All night, as I was guiding us down the river, I could feel him growing closer and closer. And then we came here, and the sense was overwhelming. I could hardly breathe. I wasn't sure what I would do when I found him, but I knew I would find him, his body. That's why I went wandering off into the brush. There's more island here than you might think-you'll see it in daylight. But I followed him-it was almost like following a trail-and finally I came to a small clearing by some scrub alder. His campsite. That's what I had found. He had been there. And gone. He's gone now.” She turned away.

“And the… shrine?” I said.

She shook her head.

“Lily,” I said.

“I need your help now,” she said.

“Lily, I brought it.” She looked at me. “The map. I brought Saburo's book.” Oh, such eyes-why couldn't I have done this sooner, basked in that look so much earlier?

But as soon as the book appeared, I lost her. She took it from me, held it, felt it, bit her lip and then opened it, crying her way through the pages. She asked me about the translations; unsure how she would react, I said they were Gurley's. She fingered them like delicate leaves.

Page by page she progressed, until she neared the end, when she began turning the pages two and three at a time, looking, I was sure, for Saburo's last map, the one to their baby.

“Lily-” I said, but she'd already found them. The empty, gray-washed pages.

“What did you do with them?” she cried, loud enough that she might have spooked Gurley.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was going to ask you. We were-I thought, maybe secret writing, but Gurley would have made fun of me and I guess I don't-”

“There's nothing here,” Lily said, shaking her head, almost unable to speak.

“Lily, I-maybe there's something earlier.” I offered to take the book from her and look myself.

She shook her head.

“I guess he-maybe he didn't-I don't know, Lily,” I said. “Maybe he didn't get a chance to-” and I really was going to say,
dispose of the baby's body properly
, but somehow managed to catch myself. “Maybe he didn't get a chance to make the map. He went out, he-he-got captured-escaped?”

But while I was babbling, Lily had stopped crying. She was staring before her, and, it seemed, listening. Not to me.

“Lily?”

“Louis,” she said softly. “I need your help. There's something- there's something here. Nearby. It's him, or-it's someone. Near here, and moving. But too fast for the boat, too fast for feet. I need to follow him.”

I looked at her for a moment, uncertain if this was the new Lily, or if some old part of her still burned inside. “How?” I said finally.

“First,” she said, “some rope.”

THERE IS THE OLD, familiar challenge of describing the midnight sun, the moon on the snow on a subzero night, the northern lights, the empty Kilbuck Mountains or the endless gray sea to someone who has never been here-and then there is the unique and forbidding prospect of describing what happened in that tent that night, a few weeks shy of the end of the war and my first life.