The Cloud Atlas (19 page)

Not forgotten, at least by me, is the exchange Gurley and I had after we'd deposited Leavit in Cheyenne and taken off for home.

“Dodged one there, sir,” I said, flush with the success of duping Leavit, disarming the balloon single-handedly, and, most important, discovering a germ-free balloon. I assumed we'd formed a new kind of camaraderie on the way down, and thought I'd take advantage of it by needling him. “Course, sir, when you slapped the side of the truck there,” I said, “I thought that might just have been enough to get that little demo block to go-”

Gurley slowly raised his fist. I'd been mistaken about our friendship. I noticed it was the same fist he'd kept clenched all this time. But he hadn't swung at Leavit, and he didn't swing at me. Instead, he turned his hand over and slowly opened it. I stared down. Ribbing me for my supposed love of palm reading?

But you didn't need to be Lily to read the story there. A smear of dried blood and two black specks, crushed carcasses of the tiny flying insects he killed. I shook my head, I held my breath. If he spoke, I didn't hear him. I just watched him, hollow-eyed, as he fished the jewelry store clipping out of his bag and numbly scraped the fleas' remains onto the paper.

OH, RAPTURE.

An aging priest, I fear this most, this rapture. Evangelical Christians claimed rapture-sorry, Rapture-from Revelations, promising that the good would be sucked skyward When The Time Came. The truth is, the good disappear even earlier than that-lovely, ordinary Catholics are sucked out of my church and into the arms of these new, fresh-faced teetotaling missionaries. The young are thunderstruck, the old relieved; what a glorious, dramatic, prospect this Rapture is.

But they've not seen previous Raptures. I remember when brave and good Alaskans began disappearing before. The Japanese immigrants were the first to go; overnight, it seemed, they began disappearing from storefronts and sidewalks in Anchorage, shipped well south to California. Native Alaskans vanished, too. As Gurley had said, Aleuts had been relocated by the military, but in a most disorienting fashion: they were taken from their weatherworn, mostly treeless islands and deposited in the hush and dark of a thick southeastern Alaska forest.

And they were the lucky ones: other Aleuts, farther out on the Chain, were dragged from their homes by Japanese soldiers and taken back to Japan, where they spent the remainder of the war. Close to half died there.

That was rapture; that was when governments presumed to play God and did so with requisite carelessness. Anything in Alaska could be done if required by the war (or whim, the two terms so close, it seems now). Homes, buildings, towns, and airports were taken up and dropped elsewhere.

That
was when the end of the world was nigh, not now as penny-ante preachers would have us believe. I believed then, I most definitely did. Thunderous hellfire. The dead blanketing the earth. Plague and pestilence: upon our return to Anchorage, Gurley and I waited anxiously for test results-his own, mine, and of the two fleas Gurley had “captured.”

Those
were the days of Armageddon, when one horror slipped into the next, from the threat of your skin erupting with pox to that of a spy approaching from behind and slipping a wire around your throat.

It was this last threat Gurley and I returned to. As nervous as we were about finding ourselves on the front lines of the germ war, a small part of us-a very small part-had also been pleased that we would be back in the spotlight.

But our hopes were dashed, as the Army unfailingly would do. Gurley was greeted with new bulletins announcing that the germ warfare threat was now believed to be traveling our way by both balloon and
human
means: saboteurs might even now be in our midst, ready to release animals and insects ridden with disease, or perhaps, in the manner of kamikaze pilots, they had been infected themselves, their only goal to ensure they did not die alone.

Alaska was thought to be a likely point of entry, its vastness a perfect cloak for the solitary spy. It sounds mad now, doesn't it? But there we were, with those bulletins, with word of captured Japanese documents and messages describing one-and two-man submarines, paratroopers dropped from impossible altitudes, frogmen leaping from the surf.

And, of course, those balloons: that soldiers (however small) would someday arrive in them seemed inevitable. We had done experiments: the balloons would have to be larger; the soldier aboard would need additional gear, but they had the technology, rudimentary as it was. They had the balloons. They had men willing to pledge their lives. It was absolutely possible, as possible as shipping fleas.

Alaska was not unfamiliar territory to the Japanese. Even before the landings on Attu and Kiska, even before the war, there had been reports from Alaska 's southwestern coast of repeated visits by Japanese “fishermen” who seemed more interested in touring and photographing than fishing. Were Japanese spies here now? No one would say.

But I discovered a second, trusted source who could.

LOVERS. I SAY Lily and I were lovers because we had secrets, but other men who knew her wore the title more accurately than I. Gurley for one. She did not speak as freely of him as he did of her. But I knew, through his innuendos and her silences, that he still visited. In the hopes of avoiding him, and perhaps disrupting their plans, I always tried to get Lily out of her “office” whenever I went to see her. She liked leaving less and less, though, what with the recent rapture of those other Asiatic faces from the sidewalks.

Gurley and I entered a quiet period when we returned from Kirby a kind of self-imposed quarantine as winter devolved into a wet and muddy spring.

Then the results arrived, and relief and disappointment with them: Gurley had killed two all-American fruit flies. They were clear; no sign of plague. But still we kept to Anchorage. I felt fine-I knew I was fine, with a certainty that seems altogether foreign to me now. But Gurley was convinced they'd made a mistake with the tests-he worked his way through a variety of symptoms, and produced a fairly convincing rash on his torso. He sulked in the office and waited for calls from the hospital.

The balloons weren't venturing out much either, it seemed. We'd had no new reports of sightings or groundings. This was evidence, Gurley said (and I agreed), that the Japanese were pausing while they changed over to the new, germ-carrying balloons. The new wave would arrive soon.

Until then, we would wait. And while we did, I wandered. Downtown, as often as I could, where I cultivated a growing hatred of Gurley.

Now, consider the sailors Lily and I had battled in her office. I hadn't seen or heard them since we'd left the two bleeding on the second floor of the Starhope. But Gurley I saw every day. And the more I got to know him, and the more I got to know Lily, the more I despised my captain. In a way, I was glad of his connection to Lily; it made his iniquity total and freed me from worrying that I was overlooking some part of him that was worthy of respect or charity.

As the object of my fascination, as the only friend I had in Alaska, Lily was beyond reproach, but as time wore on, her relationship with Gurley wore on me. I became increasingly indignant. Sometimes my thoughts restricted their wandering to the moral high ground-I had defended her against those evil sailors; surely I should defend her against Gurley as well.

Other times, I wandered lower.

I teased her, or rather, I was past the point of teasing; I taunted. I wanted to know her as these other men had, but she showed little interest, and I, less courage. In the meantime, I derived what bitter enjoyment I could from making her feel bad about her “relationships,” even though I could see she loathed her employment as much as I did. She no longer talked of leaving town, though I knew she still wanted to. I almost wanted her to, as well. I knew I would ache at the loss, but I'd still draw some pleasure knowing she was out of Gurley's arms.

“Your boyfriend's been in a bad mood recently,” I said one afternoon. Gurley had been even more insufferable than usual, his hypochondria, theatricality, and temper combining demonically. I slid down to the floor in her darkened office, having arrived with sandwiches in the wake of the night's last customer. The sandwiches, always stale bread and cheese, always wrapped awkwardly in wax paper, had become a tradition.

She cursed at me, but without much spark, and gestured toward the door. “Definitely
not my
boyfriend,” she said. She took a giant bite of the sandwich I'd given her and sank back, relieved. “This is my boyfriend,” she said, patting the sandwich and closing her eyes.

“No, your
real
boyfriend,” I said. After a minute, she opened her eyes and studied me. It was because of the way she looked, on this occasion and previous ones, that I assumed Gurley was, in fact, that “real” man: “Good old Captain Gurley,” I said. I smiled, though any humor, even dark humor, had faded by now.

“You're jealous of
Gurley?”
she asked.

I thought of the ring, the jeweler, the clipped ad that had disappeared with the suspect fleas. Instead, I said, “Of him and every other guy who comes in here, not even with sandwiches, and gets more- out of you-than I ever-”

“Gets what?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said, and then added, too quickly: “I'm guessing some men up here feel like they spend enough time with their own palms. Maybe there's other stuff of theirs they want to get read. Maybe-”

But I didn't finish. Lily stood-

No, I need to describe this carefully. Lily, standing there, me on the floor, the two of us lit only by the lights from the street, until she went and pulled the blackout shade. Then it was completely dark, only breathing and steps.

Click. The light went on. And while I blinked, she stepped around in front of me and stopped, just out of reach. It's inappropriate for me to say what her face looked like then, because it was a private thing, a horrible thing, a mix of fear and hate; it was her true face, the one she wore beneath whatever smile she presented to the men who visited her.

I couldn't look, but she stared at me until I did. She was wearing some old fatigues, unlaced workboots. She looked like a recruit about to wash out of basic or a civilian who'd lost her home to a fire and had had to go begging for clothes. The name strip on the shirt was gone, the color worn out of the pants.

Once I'd finished this inventory, I looked back to her face. As soon as I'd met her gaze, she hooked her thumbs into two belt loops and pushed down, first right, then left. Once free of her hips, the pants fell to her knees and she bent, pushing them down farther till they gathered at her ankles. I saw the legs I remembered from the first night, except the knees looked older, the deep brown bruises and scrapes more plentiful across her shins and across what parts of her thighs that weren't covered by the oversized shirt.

I followed the trail of buttons back up to her face, but before I got there I saw her hands descending, undoing each button, one at a time, like a doctor snipping stitches from a scar. When she was done, a narrow, dark ribbon of skin had been revealed. I turned away, and when that wasn't enough, closed my eyes, pulled in my legs.

“Look,” she said. And because, for one syllable, the voice sounded like the old Lily, my friend Lily, the one who helped me find balloons, the one who shared sandwiches with me, talked with me, preserved me, I did.

But it was a trick; the old voice came from this new, horrible face, now set grimly above a body not naked but stripped, everything visible except the feet and ankles, which were hidden in the pile of sloughed-off uniform.

“You read maps,” she said, and ran her hands painfully down her front, palms flat to her skin, fingers rigidly splayed. Then she brought her arms out before her and examined them. She found a bruise on her right forearm. “I got this in Anchorage,” she said, looking up. She lifted her left arm and found a patch of mottled brown-white skin; it looked like a burn. “ Bethel,” she said. She tilted her head back, felt her neck: “Dillingham,” she said, her fingertips fondling a thin, small scar where her shoulder began. She pushed her hands down across her breasts, which were slight enough to disappear beneath her palms. She revealed her chest again, studied it, and seemed about to say something, but gave a thin smile instead and continued. Now her left hand drifted to the base of her stomach while her right searched out something just above where her pelvis jutted out. There. An appendix scar. “ Memorial Hospital, Fairbanks,” she said. She brought her hands together, and lower, covering her sex as if now shy.

I looked away, and then up at her, but she shook her head and nodded down. I looked away again; she stepped closer, and took my hand, my right, in hers, and slowly ran it flat across her stomach. I could feel each little hair. Back and forth, up and down, until she said, so quietly that she did little more than move her lips, “Feel that scar?” I shook my head; I didn't breathe. She took my hand by the wrist, lowered it, and slowly began to run it up the inside of her thigh. I tried pulling my wrist away, forcefully at first and then desperately, but she held on. “Some of my scars, you can only touch,” she said. “Even I can't see them. They're too far away.”

“I don't want to,” I said. “Lily, I'm sorry.”

“Why are you sorry, Louis?” she said. “You didn't make the scars.” I said nothing. “Or maybe that's why you're sorry-you think? Jealous there's no scar on me you can claim?”

Lily waited another moment, then moved to the other side of the room and dressed slowly. When she was done, she came back to my side of the room. She turned off the light, and then, back against the wall, slowly slid to the floor until she was sitting beside me in the perfect dark. We sat that way for a while until she got up and opened the blackout shade. The light in the room rose to a gray glow.

I missed the dark. I couldn't look at her. I looked at my hands, at the door, at the grain of the hardwood floor. When I finally turned to face Lily, I was surprised to find her looking relieved, even pleased. She gave me a nudge and sat back. I inched away.

“Louis,” she said, and shifted closer. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“No, no-Lily, I'm sorry, I-should I leave?”

“No,” she said, and nodded toward the middle of the room. “It's your turn.” Then she laughed, so loudly and so briefly it sounded like a cough, and asked for my coat. When I hesitated, she laughed again, softer this time, and said, “Don't worry-that's all I'll ask you to take off.” I looked at her. “I'm
cold
”
she said.

I took the coat off; she put it on and shivered once.

“Louis,” she said, settling back, her eyes closed. “If I tell you this story, the whole story, will you promise not to believe a word of it?”

“I promise,” I said.

“Think about that first,” she said. “You promised too quickly.”

“I won't believe it,” I said.

“You will,” she said. “That's what you do. You believe-believe
in
- everything. Don't you? You believe in your country, you believe your country is going to win this war, you believe in your God.” She sat up now, looked me in the eye. “You believed that I was Japanese, that I was a palm reader.”

I nodded.