Cloud Atlas (12 page)

Sir E. had heard about “Todtenvogel”’s reception in Cracow (all London has, it would seem), so V.A. sent me off to fetch a score. Back in the Scarlet Room, our guest took our death-bird to the window seat and read it with the aid of a monocle while Ayrs and I pretended to busy ourselves. “A man at our time of life, Ayrs”— E. spoke at last—”has no right to such daring ideas. Where are you getting ’em from?”

V.A. puffed up like a smug hornyback. “I suppose I’ve won a rearguard action or two in my war against decrepitude. My boy Robert here is proving a valuable aide-de-camp.”

Aide-de-camp? I’m his bloody general and
he’s
the fat old Turk reigning on the memory of faded glories! Smiled sweetly as I could (as if the roof over my head depended on it. Moreover, Sir E. might be useful one day so it won’t do to create an obstreperous impression). During tea, Elgar contrasted my position at Zedelghem favorably with his first job as a musical director at a lunatic asylum in Worcestershire. “Excellent prep for conducting the London Philharmonic, what?” quipped V.A. We laughed and I half-forgave the ratty old selfish crank for being himself. Put another log or two in the hearth. In the smoky firelight the two old men nodded off like a pair of ancient kings passing the aeons in their tumuli. Made a musical notation of their snores. Elgar is to be played by a bass tuba, Ayrs a bassoon. I’ll do the same with Fred Delius and Trevor Mackerras and publish ’em all together in a work entitled
The Backstreet Museum of Stuffed Edwardians
.

Three days later

Just back from a
lento
walk with V.A. down the Monk’s Walk to the gatekeeper’s lodge. I pushed his chair. Landscape v. atmospheric this evening; autumn leaves gusted around in urgent spirals, as if V.A. was the sorcerer and I his apprentice. Poplars’ long shadows barred the mown meadow. Ayrs wanted to unveil his concepts for a final, symphonic major work, to be named
Eternal Recurrence
in honor of his beloved Nietzsche. Some music will be drawn from an abortive opera based on
The Island of Doctor Moreau
, whose Viennese production was canceled by the war, some music V.A. believes will “come” to him, and its backbone will be the “dream music” piece that he dictated in my room that hairy night last month, I wrote to you about that. V.A. wants four movements, a female choir, and a large ensemble heavy in Ayrsesque woodwind. Truly, a behemoth of the deeps. Wants my services for another half year. Said I’d think about it. He said he’d up my salary, both vulgar and crafty of him. Repeated, I needed time. V.A. most upset I didn’t give him a breathy “Yes!” on the spot—but I want the old bugger to admit to himself that he needs me more than I him.

Sincerely,
R.F.

ZEDELGHEM
28TH—IX—1931

Sixsmith,

J. growing v. tiresome. After our lovemaking, she spreads over my bed like a mooing moon-calf and demands to know about other women whose strings I’ve quivered. Now she’s teased names out of me, she says things like “Oh, I suppose Frederica taught you that?” (She plays with that birthmark in the hollow of my shoulder, the one you said resembles a comet—can’t
abide
the woman dabbling with my skin.) J. initiates petty rows in order to undergo tedious reconciliations and, worryingly, has started to let our moonlight dramas slip into our daylight lives. Ayrs can’t see further than
Eternal Recurrence
, but Eva is due back in ten days, and that hawkeyed creature will sniff out a decomposing secret in a jiffy.

J. thinks our arrangement lets her fasten my future more tightly to Zedelghem—she says, half playful, half darkly, she’s not going to let me “abandon” either her or her husband, not in “their” hour of need. The devil, Sixsmith, is in the pronouns. Worst of all, she’s started to use the L-word on me, and wants to hear it back. What’s
wrong
with the woman? She’s nearly twice my age! What’s she after? Assured her I’ve never loved anyone except myself and have no intention of starting now, especially with another man’s wife, and especially when that man could poison my name in European musical society by writing half a dozen letters. So, of course, the female plies her customary ploys, sobs in my pillow, accuses me of “using” her. I agree, of course I’ve “used” her; just as she’s “used” me too. That’s the arrangement. If she’s no longer happy with it, she’s not my prisoner. So off she storms to pout for a couple of days and nights until the old ewe gets hungry for a young ram, then she’s back, calling me her darling boy, thanking me for “giving Vyvyan his music back,” and the stupid cycle begins all over again. I wonder if she’s resorted to Hendrick in the past. Wouldn’t put anything past the woman. If one of Renwick’s Austrian doctors opened up her head, a whole beehive of neuroses would swarm out. Had I known she was this unstable, I’d never have let her in my bed that first night. There’s a joylessness in her lovemaking. No, a savagery.

Have agreed to V.A.’s proposal that I stay on here until next summer, at least. No cosmic resonance entered my decision—just artistic advantage, financial practicalities, and because J. might have some sort of collapse if I went. The consequences of
that
would not come out in the wash.

Later, same day

Gardener made a bonfire of fallen leaves—just came in from it. The heat on one’s face and hands, the sad smoke, the crackling and wheezing fire. Reminds me of the groundsman’s hut at Gresham. Anyway, got a gorgeous passage from the fire—percussion for crackling, alto bassoon for the wood, and a restless flute for the flames. Finished transcribing it this very minute. Air in the château clammy like laundry that won’t dry. Door-banging drafts down the passageways. Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don’t remember summer even saying good-bye.

Sincerely,
R.F.

1

Rufus Sixsmith leans over the balcony and estimates his body’s velocity when it hits the sidewalk and lays his dilemmas to rest. A telephone rings in the unlit room. Sixsmith dares not answer. Disco music booms from the next apartment, where a party is in full swing, and Sixsmith feels older than his sixty-six years. Smog obscures the stars, but north and south along the coastal strip, Buenas Yerbas’s billion lights simmer. West, the Pacific eternity. East, our denuded, heroic, pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, berserking American continent.

A young woman emerges from the next-door party and leans over the neighboring balcony. Her hair is shorn, her violet dress is elegant, but she looks incurably sad and alone.
Propose a suicide pact, why don’t you?
Sixsmith isn’t serious, and he isn’t going to jump either, not if an ember of humor still glows.
Besides, a quiet accident is precisely what Grimaldi, Napier, and those sharp-suited hoodlums are praying for
. Sixsmith shuffles inside and pours himself another generous vermouth from his absent host’s minibar, dips his hands in the icebox, then wipes his face.
Go out somewhere and phone Megan, she’s your only friend left
. He knows he won’t.
You can’t drag her into this lethal mess
. The disco thump pulses in his temples, but it’s a borrowed apartment and he judges it unwise to complain.
Buenas Yerbas isn’t Cambridge. Anyway, you’re in hiding
. The breeze slams the balcony door, and in fear Sixsmith spills half his vermouth.
No, you old fool, it wasn’t a gunshot
.

He mops up the spillage with a kitchen towel, turns on the TV with the sound down low, and trawls the channels for
M*A*S*H. It’s on somewhere. Just have to keep looking
.

2

Luisa Rey hears a clunk from the neighboring balcony. “Hello?”
Nobody
. Her stomach warns her to set down her tonic water.
It was the bathroom you needed, not fresh air
, but she can’t face weaving back through the party
and, anyway, there’s no time
—down the side of the building she heaves: once, twice, a vision of greasy chicken, and a third time.
That
, she wipes her eyes,
is the third foulest thing you’ve ever done
. She slooshes her mouth out, spits residue into a flowerpot behind a screen. Luisa dabs her lips with a tissue and finds a mint in her handbag.
Go home and just dream up your crappy three hundred words for once. People only look at the pictures, anyhow
.

A man too old for his leather trousers, bare torso, and zebra waistcoat steps onto the balcony.
“Luisaaa!”
A crafted golden beard and a moonstone-and-jade ankh around his neck. “Hiya! Come out for a little stargazing, huh? Dig. Bix brought eight
ounces
of snow with him, man. One
wild
cat. Hey, did I say in the interview? I’m trying on the name Ganja at the moment. Maharaj Aja says Richard is outa sync with my Iovedic Self.”

“Who?”

“My guru,
Luisaaa
, my guru! He’s on his last reincarnation before—” Richard’s fingers go
pufff
! Nirvanawards. “Come to an audience. His waiting list normally takes,
like, forever
, but jade-ankh disciples get personal audiences on the same afternoon. Like,
why
go through college and shit when Maharaj Aja can, like, teach you everything about … 
It.”
He frames the moon in his fingers.
“Words
are so … 
uptight…
Space … it’s so … y’ know, like,
total
. Smoke some weed? Acapulco Gold. Got it off of Bix.” He edges nearer. “Say, Lu, let’s get high after the party. Alone together, my place, dig? You could get a
very
exclusive interview. I may even write you a song and put it on my next LP.”

“I’ll pass.”

The minor-league rock musician narrows his eyes. “Unlucky time of the month, huh? How’s next week? I thought all you media chicks are on the Pill, like, forever.”

“Does Bix sell you your pickup lines, too?”

He sniggers. “Hey, has that cat been telling you things?”

“Richard, just so there’s no uncertainty, I’d rather jump off this balcony than sleep with you, any time of any month. I really would.”

“Whoah!” His hand jerks back as if stung. “Pick-
ky
! Who d’you think you are, like, Joni fucking Mitchell? You’re only a fucking
gossip columnist
in a magazine that like
no one ever reads!”

3

The elevator doors close just as Luisa Rey reaches them, but the unseen occupant jams them with his cane. “Thank you,” says Luisa to the old man. “Glad the age of chivalry isn’t totally dead.”

He gives a grave nod.

Luisa thinks,
He looks like he’s been given a week to live
. She presses G. The ancient elevator begins its descent. A leisurely needle counts off the stories. Its motor whines, its cables grind, but between the tenth and ninth stories a
gatta-gatta-gatta
detonates then dies with a
phzzz-zzz-zz-z
. Luisa and Sixsmith thump to the floor. The light stutters on and off before settling on a buzzing sepia.

“You okay? Can you get up?”

The sprawled old man recovers himself a little. “No bones broken, I think, but I’ll stay seated, thank you.” His old-school English accent reminds Luisa of the tiger in
The Jungle Book
. “The power might restart suddenly.”

“Christ,” mutters Luisa. “A power outage. Perfect end to a perfect day.” She presses the emergency button. Nothing. She presses the intercom button and hollers: “Hey! Anyone there?” Static hiss. “We have a situation here! Can anyone hear us?”

Luisa and the old man regard each other, sideways, listening.

No reply. Just vague submarine noises.

Luisa inspects the ceiling. “Got to be an access hatch …” There isn’t. She peels up the carpet—a steel floor. “Only in movies, I guess.”

“Are you still glad,” asks the old man, “the age of chivalry isn’t dead?”

Luisa manages a smile, just. “We might be here some time. Last month’s brownout lasted seven hours.”
Well, at least I’m not confined with a psychopath, a claustrophobe, or Richard Ganga
.

4

Rufus Sixsmith sits propped in a corner sixty minutes later, dabbing his forehead with his handkerchief. “I subscribed to
Illustrated Planet
in 1967 to read your father’s dispatches from Vietnam. Lester Rey was one of only four or five journalists who grasped the war from the Asian perspective. I’m fascinated to hear how a policeman became one of the best correspondents of his generation.”

“You asked for it.” The story is polished with each retelling. “Dad joined the BYPD just weeks before Pearl Harbor, which is why he spent the war here and not in the Pacific like his brother Howie, who got blown to pieces by a Japanese land mine playing beach volleyball in the Solomons. Pretty soon, it became apparent Dad was a Tenth Precinct case, and that’s where he wound up. There’s such a precinct in every city in the country—a sort of pen where they transfer all the straight cops who won’t go on the take and who won’t turn a blind eye. So anyway, on V-J night, Buenas Yerbas was one citywide party, and you can imagine, the police were stretched thin. Dad got a call reporting looting down on Silvaplana Wharf, a sort of no-man’s-land between Tenth Precinct, the BY Port Authority, and Spinoza Precinct. Dad and his partner, a man named Nat Wakefield, drove down to take a look. They park between a pair of cargo containers, kill the engine, proceed on foot, and see maybe two dozen men loading crates from a warehouse into an armored truck. The light was dim, but the men sure weren’t dockworkers and they weren’t in military uniform. Wakefield tells Dad to go and radio for backup. Just as Dad gets to the radio, a call comes through saying the original order to investigate looting has been countermanded. Dad reports what he’d seen, but the order is repeated, so Dad runs back to the warehouse just in time to see his partner accept a light from one of the men and get shot six times in the back. Dad somehow keeps his nerve, sprints back to his squad car, and manages to radio out a Code 8— a Mayday—before his car shivers with bullets. He’s surrounded on all sides except the dockside, so over the edge he dives, into a cocktail of diesel, trash, sewage, and sea. He swims underneath the quay—in those days Silvaplana Wharf was a steel structure like a giant boardwalk, not the concrete peninsula it is today—and hauls himself up a service ladder, soaked, one shoe missing, with his non-functioning revolver. All he can do is observe the men, who are just finishing up when a couple of Spinoza Precinct squad cars arrive on the scene. Before Dad can circle around the yard to warn the officers, a hopelessly uneven gunfight breaks out—the gunmen pepper the two squad cars with
submachine guns
. The truck starts up, the gunmen jump aboard, they pull out of the yard and lob a couple of hand grenades from the back. Whether they were intended to maim or just to discourage heroics, who knows? but one caught Dad and made a human pincushion of him. He woke up two days later in the hospital minus his left eye. The papers described the incident as an opportunistic raid by a gang of thieves who got lucky. The Tenth Precinct men reckoned a syndicate who’d been siphoning off arms throughout the war decided to shift their stock, now that the war was over and accounting would get tightened up. There was pressure for a wider investigation into the Silvaplana Shootings—three dead cops meant something in 1945—but the mayor’s office blocked it. Draw your own conclusions. Dad did, and they jaded his faith in law enforcement. By the time he was out of the hospital eight months later, he’d completed a correspondence course in journalism.”

“Good grief,” says Sixsmith.

“The rest you may know. Covered Korea for
Illustrated Planet
, then became
West Coast Herald’s
Latin America man. He was in Vietnam for the battle of Ap Bac and stayed based in Saigon until his first collapse back in March. It’s a miracle my parents’ marriage lasted the years it did—y’ know, the longest I spent with him was April to July, this year, in the hospice.” Luisa is quiet. “I miss him, Rufus, chronically. I keep forgetting he’s dead. I keep thinking he’s away on assignment, somewhere, and he’ll be flying in any day soon.”

“He must have been proud of you, following in his footsteps.”

“Oh, Luisa Rey is no Lester Rey. I wasted years being rebellious and liberated, posing as a poet and working in a bookstore on Engels Street. My posturing convinced no one, my poetry was ‘so vacuous it isn’t even bad’—so said Lawrence Ferlinghetti—and the bookstore went bust. So I’m still only a columnist.” Luisa rubs her tired eyes, thinking of Richard Ganga’s parting shot. “No award-winning copy from war zones. I had high hopes when I moved to
Spyglass
, but simpering gossip on celebrity parties is the closest I’ve gotten so far to Dad’s vocation.”

“Ah, but is it well-written simpering gossip?”

“Oh, it’s
excellently
written simpering gossip.”

“Then don’t bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no
conception
of what a misspent life constitutes.”

5

“Hitchcock loves the limelight,” says Luisa, her bladder now growing uncomfortable, “but hates interviews. He didn’t answer my questions because he didn’t really hear them. His best works, he said, are roller coasters that scare the riders out of their wits but let them off at the end giggling and eager for another ride. I put it to the great man, the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world
is
a Bates Motel, well, that’s … the stuff of Buchenwald, dystopia, depression. We’ll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless universe—but only our toes. Hitchcock’s response was”—Luisa does an above-average impersonation—” ‘I’m a director in Hollywood, young lady, not an Oracle at Delphi.’ I asked why Buenas Yerbas had never featured in his films. Hitchcock answered, ‘This town marries the worst of San Francisco with the worst of Los Angeles. Buenas Yerbas is a city of nowhere.’ He spoke in bons mots like that, not to you, but into the ear of posterity, for dinner-party guests of the future to say, ‘That’s one of Hitchcock’s, you know.’ ”

Sixsmith wrings sweat from his handkerchief. “I saw
Charade
with my niece at an art-house cinema last year. Was that Hitchcock? She strong-arms me into seeing these things, to prevent me from growing ‘square.’ I rather enjoyed it, but my niece said Audrey Hepburn was a ‘bubblehead.’ Delicious word.”

“Charade’s
the one where the plot swings on the stamps?”

“A contrived puzzle, yes, but all thrillers would wither without contrivance. Hitchcock’s Buenas Yerbas remark puts me in mind of John F. Kennedy’s observation about New York. Do you know it? ‘Most cities are nouns, but New York is a verb.’ What might Buenas Yerbas be, I wonder?”