The Cloud Atlas (24 page)

Instead, he slowly drew the book across the desk toward him, staring at me all the while. “Before we part, Belk,” he said. “There was always something I had meant to show you. Something that will demonstrate to you why I might have predicted these balloons would, literally, come to ill in due time. Here is my point, Belk,” he said. “You must never underestimate the
nefariousness
of the Oriental mind.”

He sounded like Gurley the actor, but he no longer looked like him. He was no longer playing a part; he'd been consumed by it. One hears the term
wild-eyed
, and thinks of what? A raving drunk? A rabid dog or raccoon? Not nearly: this was wild-eyed. If I'd been nearer, he would have nipped at me, teeth flashing, and it wouldn't have mattered if I myself were a foaming pit bull or lion, or-take note, Ronnie-wolf: he would have bitten my nearest limb clean through.

His voice skittered high and low, the words tumbling out with manic speed.

“You admired the art in the book,” he said, flipping through it to the back, to those mysterious empty gray pages. He looked up, I nodded numbly. He smiled and produced a pocketknife. I leapt up; he clucked. “Shh, Sergeant. Down, boy, down. As though I'd sully my quarters with your foul blood.” He unfolded a blade and then added an afterthought: “Besides-who knows what disease lurks dormant in you?”

I sat, slowly. He sliced out a page, with difficulty, which shocked me almost as much as anything else: our precious book! Lily's book! It felt like he was peeling away an expanse of skin.

“As I said, you've admired the book, but your appreciation has been superficial, as it could only be.” He poured the glass before him almost full, and then folded the blank page and poked it in until it was submerged. “The paper, Belk. The paper, Sergeant, is most remarkable.”

I could be out the door in two steps, maybe one. Or the phone: it was within reach. But the knife, still open, was within his reach and much closer.

“The paper for the balloons is made of, what did we determine? Something like the mulberry bush.” He sang a little to himself while he poked at the paper. “Round and round the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel…” Then he looked up, head lolling as though he were drunk. “Quite similar, in fact, to the paper in this book, which, my
yeeeeaaaars
of education inform me is
washi
paper. Some of the balloons, in fact, appear to feature a few panels which are this very
same
paper.” I looked on, genuinely distracted with surprise. “Didn't that always strike you as odd? A mission this daring, this important, and they entrust it
to paper?”
I nodded, caught up, despite myself. “Indeed. Well, as it happens, as no one else in this grossly undereducated army seems to know, this paper has precisely the pedigree for the job. It's very strong, for one, curiously strong-so strong that-well, let me show you.” He drew the now-sodden paper out of the glass.

“Tradition holds that assassins-not radio show adventure heroes-made use of such paper. Say you wanted to kill someone,” he said, his voice sinking. “Say you wanted to kill someone and have no one find out. You wait until your quarry is sleeping. You take a billet-doux-sized sheet of
washi
paper and wet it”-he held up the dripping page-“don't worry, it won't disintegrate. Your prey lets out a great exhale-and you set upon him!” Gurley started, and I jumped, involuntarily, as he intended. “He awakes; he cannot breathe. He is startled, confused, he struggles, but you hold him
down”
Gurley said through gritted teeth. “You hold that paper right where it is. And he sucks and gasps, but all he's doing is pulling that paper tighter and tighter and tighter.” I looked away; it was too sickening, as though one of those plague-infected ulcers were spreading across his brain.

But he started speaking again, and when I looked at him once more, I saw that instead of his usual hideous smile, his face was slack and his eyes full of what had to be tears. “Why couldn't they have just done that, Belk? Why couldn't they have just-why couldn't Father Ioa-saph's angel been a real angel? Why couldn't he have leapt from his smoking basket beneath the balloon and set upon me?” He was talking solely to the paper now. “I asked them how long the pain would last, and one doctor said, ‘What do you mean?’ and the other doctor said, ‘Forever.’ I ask Lily to move with me south-the medical discharge is there, whenever I want it, a free ticket home, a check every month- and she says one thing and then another but never yes. She talks about how this is her home, but she never talks about the real reason. A goddamn leg that won't-”

What happened next is ridiculous, except that it really happened, in just this way. Gurley took the sheet he'd so carefully prepared, and slapped it to his face. And sure enough, it settled there, a second skin, each gasp further sealing it with an additional suture. He turned red, fell to the floor, and spasmed. The paper held absolutely fast. Maybe a minute passed, maybe two, and then I remembered that I wasn't Gurley, that I didn't have the stomach to stand by while someone killed himself, and that, however hard he'd tried to convince me otherwise, my first loyalty was to Lily, and she had said:
take care of him.

I fell to the floor, reached to peel the paper away from his face, but lost my balance as he thrashed.

That's when he made his move.

And then the paper was on me. It smelled of whisky and spit and Gurley and something else-rice, I suppose, strange as that sounds. He couldn't get it to adhere, not as well as it had on him, but he didn't need it to; he was on top of me, pressing me down, his hands making up for anything the paper failed to do.

“And you hold him down, Sergeant. He sucks in, he gasps for air, but he is only making it worse.”

If I'd have taken a breath first, if I'd been prepared, I would have had no difficulties. I would have had the air to slither out from under him. But I hadn't taken that breath, and now, instead of fighting, I was panicking. I watched him, watched for him to watch me.
Look at me
, I willed him.
Look at me.
Wouldn't this make it harder to kill me? Even for Gurley?

I don't know. It would have made it harder for me. But for whatever the reason, he did look, and maybe he saw me, or maybe he saw Lily, or maybe he saw himself. He tore the paper away, rolled off, and stared at me while I panted there.

I slid away from him, but only a short distance; I was surprised by how tired I was. I looked back at him; he was tired, too. Sitting on the floor, back against the wall, he even looked a bit like the old Gurley, comically instead of criminally mad.

We sat like that for a while. I think it was only a minute, but if someone measured it as an hour, I wouldn't argue.

“I'm sorry,” he finally said. He waved an arm so that his apology included the whole office, the whole war, perhaps. “I'm-listen,” he said. “Help me up.”

I laughed. Well, I didn't laugh. I puffed. I rolled my head to look at him, and then rolled it back to stare straight up. His left foot was cockeyed; the leg had detached.

“Louis,” he said: my first name. I don't know why; I wish he hadn't. “I still think-I mean, we can see, but-given everything. Maybe you should go anyway to-maybe it's best.” He stopped.

“Sergeant,” he said, the old voice. Not angry, but the officer once more.

“I'll go,” I said.

“You might be able to help from there,” he said. “Truly. That fishing boat-it wasn't so far south of there. It's just that, with Lily and all-”

“I'll go,” I said, and slowly got to my feet. “First thing,” I said. “First flight I can get going anywhere. Anywhere north.”

“Good boy,” said Gurley. “Good man. I'm sorry, Sergeant-”

“Good night, sir,” I said, going to the door.

Gurley put on what he must have thought was a brave face: he wasn't going to ask, again, for help getting up. Which was good, because I wasn't going to.

“Louis,” he said, which was again so strange that I turned back to look at him, even though I was through the door.

But he was still slumped against the wall, and the half-closed door obscured his face. I could only see his legs, and hands, and the sheet of paper, drying on the floor.

And I could hear him softly calling after me: “Sleep well!”

I HAD THOUGHT ABOUT SPENDING THE REST OF THE NIGHT on base, maybe even seeking out Father Pabich to help set me straight or simply to say goodbye, but I found myself skirting the pickup baseball and football games behind the barracks, making for the main gate and downtown.

It was a Monday. Lily charged less on Mondays to read palms than any other day of the week. I'd asked her once if it was to drum up business, but she shook her head: she said she was tired on Mondays, and didn't feel she did as good a job. Whatever the reason, Mondays were a slow night, and the building was deserted when I entered. I climbed up to her office and found it dark, the door ajar. I waited a moment while my eyes adjusted to the light, just so that I could be sure she wasn't hiding in the shadows. Then I went back downstairs and outside, where low and heavy clouds were bringing the evening to an early close.

I had just started to walk back up the street when I heard Lily's voice behind me, delighted. “Louis!” But when I turned around, her face fell. “What happened?” she asked. “What did he say?” She shoved her hands in her pockets and stared at her fists through the fabric. For the briefest moment, she looked like a little girl. I felt like a little boy, the two of us on our way back to Mary Star of the Sea. Then she looked up. “I'm sorry if I made things awkward. It's just that-but he's not a man who likes being babied, even if he needs it.”

“Then why try?”

“Let's go inside,” she said.

“I can't stay,” I said. “Something happened. If he came now-”

“You mean Gurley,” she said. “He has a jealous side, doesn't he? Which is strange. But you don't need to worry.”

“Lily,” I said. “I'm leaving. Tomorrow morning. First thing.” My voice grew quieter with every word.

“Where this time?” she asked, forcing cheer. “You two have such adventures. I'd have signed up for the army if I knew-”

“Leaving”
I said. “I don't know what you said to him, but I'm
leaving.
He's sending me to Russia or damn close-Little Diomede. A rock in the ocean. He's getting rid of me. He almost tried to get rid of me tonight. He thinks I was trying to steal you away from him,” I said. And then, mostly because she was still trying to smile this all away, I added, “Guess I was.”

Lily stopped breathing then. Her mouth was open, but it stayed open, no air coming in or out. And she made one wrong face after another-concern, dismay, horror-until I turned away and did what kids do when they get upset, which is turn red and wait to cry.

“Louis,” she said. But she didn't put her hand to my face. She didn't take my palm in hers. She let me stand there, my only comfort being that the tone of her voice sounded exactly like I wanted it to, heartbroken. I wanted to hear her say my name again, just that way, so I didn't turn around. I waited. “Louis,” she said, and then came a hand to my elbow, and I turned.

The clouds had descended almost to the ground. The street was empty. Just Lily, crying, and me, watching, and some man, two blocks down, walking toward us in the mist, the whole of him indistinct save his slightly irregular gait. Step… step. Step… step.

“Louis,” Lily said once more.

“Gurley,” I whispered. “Down the street. Coming this way. He'll see us.” And he did, or whoever it was did, because he picked up speed: step, step; step, step.

Lily spun.

Then Lily's name came tumbling down the street, half shout, half moan, and she began to run. Gurley did, too, or at least lurched into the odd gallop he used those few times he did run. I stood my ground, long enough for him to see me clearly, and long enough for me to see that he hadn't expected me. Then I ran, too.

GURLEY KEPT US IN SIGHT far longer than I thought he would. I began to tire, but Lily kept streaming through the city, passing all sorts of places I thought might be good to hide or disappear into-an empty building, or a busy bar.

Eventually, Anchorage began to run out of streets and buildings. Lily kept running, until the street became a dirt road, and then a trail, and then we were in the woods. I stopped, exhausted, but also anxious to see if Gurley was still following us. I heard nothing, only the sound of Lily's footsteps ahead of me, growing fainter. I turned back to the trail and continued into the forest.

TEN, TWENTY YEARS AGO, I went back to that trail. The area is parkland today, popular with joggers in summer and cross-country skiers in winter and wildlife any time of year. It all looks as it did fifty-odd years ago when Lily and I walked into it, except it wasn't called a park then. It was just the place where Anchorage gave up and the rest of Alaska began, and it would have seemed silly to put a sign up and call it a park. Keep walking into that forest, deeper and deeper, and four hundred miles later, you'd cross the Arctic Circle. Another three hundred miles or so beyond that, Point Barrow, the ice cap, the North Pole, the place where all the longitude lines on the map begin, a place where, certain times of year, the sky seems low enough and the stars thick enough that you'd only need to be a bit taller to reach one down for yourself.

There were no stars visible; the clouds were lifting, but it was too early for stars. And the farther we walked into the forest, the more of the sky that was obscured, the damper the air and earth became. I remember how nothing was as strange or exotic to me as the smell of that forest, then; it wasn't anything like the sage or chaparral smell of Southern California wilderness, which made you think of dust and sun and sometimes smoke. This forest smelled wet, green, and cool, and the scent stuck to you like you'd dipped your face in a stream.

I caught sight of Lily within a few hundred yards; she'd started walking. She didn't stop, though, when she saw me. She wanted me to keep up, but not catch up, not yet.

We kept climbing through the forest, ever more thick, well past the point I would have ever ventured alone. Even in the short time I'd been in Alaska, I'd heard stories of guys wandering off for a weekend of camping and drinking and encountering all sorts of animals and trouble. Favorite stories involved run-ins with bears. I don't think every guy who had a bear story had actually seen one, or if they had, that they were as large as described. The way you knew they were telling the truth? They didn't talk about teeth or eyes or the sound of a roar-they talked about smell. And the more they talked about that horrible smell, the closer you knew they'd come. That detail had to be true; you didn't make up a story about stink to impress people. So while I heard bears all around me-cracking branches, and in the distance every now and then, something like a bark-I only smelled the wet and decaying forest, and knew we were safe.

Eventually, the mist grew thick enough that Lily seemed to be only a glow whenever I looked up the trail toward her. If I chanced to look away and then back, she faded away even more dramatically.

We had been tracking along the banks of a stream, knee-high ferns deepening from green to black as the light faded. We'd been walking toward a sound, it seemed, one that started out like wind, high in the trees-but the closer we got, it emerged as rushing water, perhaps rapids. I lost Lily for a moment then. She was just twenty yards ahead of me, maybe more, and she'd disappeared. I kept moving forward in the direction I'd last seen her and then there she was, standing on what looked briefly like a cloud. Maybe she could have done just that if she had wanted to, but this wasn't a cloud, just a large flat outcropping of rock overlooking a waterfall. I let Lily stand alone for a moment. Then she looked back toward me and I stepped forward.

“You walk slow,” Lily said, looking down at my feet. We'd been walking for two hours or more and I could feel precisely each of the warm, stinging spots on my feet where blisters were forming.

“I wasn't sure I was supposed to follow you,” I said.

“You're too polite, Louis,” she said. “You must make a lousy soldier.”

“I do,” I said.

She sat down, cross-legged, and I sat stiffly beside her. I looked down the trail. “He was with us for a while, but I haven't heard him in a long time.”

“He's not coming,” Lily said, looking in the direction of the waterfall. “He's heading back to Fort Rich. Probably already there.”

I tried to get her to look at me. “Is this you speaking as a shaman?” I asked. I'd earned at least that, I thought. Some teasing.

“No, as his lover,” she said, turning to me to confirm she'd landed a blow. “I know him. So do you.”

“Did you know he'd send me away?” I asked, after swallowing. “This something you cooked up together?”

She shook her head and looked at the dirt beneath us.

“That's it, Louis. That's just how it happened. He asked me, ‘Do you have any really good friends? Guys who don't use you for sex? Guys you can trust? Guys you can always talk to, count on to stick up for you, like a brother? Because I'd like to give that guy a free plane ticket to the end of the earth. What do you say there, Miss Lily?’” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “It's all going just like we damn planned.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You're always sorry Louis. Let's try this: Did you at least bring a going-away present? Did you bring the map book? The journal?”

“Lily,” I said.

Lily gave me a long look, time to give a different answer. And when I didn't, she let out a long breath, not a sigh. “You're sorry. I know.”

We sat. There were no sounds of bears, or Gurley just the water rushing by below us. Alaska 's summer sun doesn't so much set as sink, exhausted, but we still had an hour or two of light left. Some summer nights-that night-I swear I can feel the light stretch, as though one part of it had been pinned to sunrise and the rest pulled all day to that faraway sunset. Then the light breaks, and you definitely feel
that
, a band of rubber snapping against your skin, and everything finally goes dim.

Lily's touch felt just the same, and maybe that's what I feel those summer evenings when I'm up too late, that endless sun abetting an old man's insomnia. Maybe it's not the snap of the light I feel, but the memory of Lily, that night, as she extended a hand to me, slid it across the surface of the rock until it reached mine. I didn't move then, and neither did she. She let our two hands stay there, as if mere proximity had brought them together. And then she took my hand in hers, and I would have given her anything. Ten maps. Every codebook we had. A balloon.

But I had nothing.

“Did you ask Gurley for it?” I finally said. “I mean, obviously-that seems so easy.”

She frowned, and for a moment, I thought she was going to let go of my hand, but she didn't. She just shook her head. “You know Gurley. Or maybe you don't. I could have asked for a dozen roses-a lot damn harder to get in Anchorage than that journal-and I would have had them, that day, and every day after until I begged him to stop. But not the journal. Asking would have spooked him. I just hoped we'd find ourselves in a… situation… at some point where the journal would be nearby, and I could somehow sneak it away, without his ever knowing.”

“So you never told him about your summer, about Saburo?”

But Lily didn't look at me. She just said, “No.”

If I believed in that sort of thing, and I suppose I do now, I would have said Saburo was there with us, then. I didn't hear him say anything, and I didn't hear Lily say anything to him, but I felt him. For a moment, he was as real as Lily was beside me, and then he was gone.

I couldn't say if Lily saw him, but she relaxed. Her frown left. She let go of my hand, rubbed her face, and stretched.

“Plan on finding a lot of balloons on Diomede?” she asked. “When do you go?”

“I'm not going to be able to find another damn balloon, not on Diomede, not anywhere. Not without a new palm reader, anyway.”

“Shuyak,” she said after a pause. “That was a neat trick, wasn't it?”

“Impressed me,” I said.

“Hard to do
that”
she replied. She leaned to one side, slipping a hand into some hidden pocket. She pulled out a little sheaf of several tightly folded pages. “At least
I
brought a going-away gift,” she said. She smoothed the pages out on the ground and then handed them to me. “Everything I know about palm reading, and finding balloons.”

I looked at the pages. Though they were creased and dirty, I could tell immediately what they were-or rather, where they had come from. Faint watercolor sketches, diagrams in pencil, notes in black ink, in Japanese. And on the reverse of one page, a half-dozen tiny portraits. Some were more finished than others, but it took no imagination to see Lily in all of them.

“Before he left, I told Saburo I wanted him to leave behind a sketch of himself. He said he would, but when he finally got ready to go, he gave me these pages.”

“This is you,” I said, looking up at her to compare.

“He said every face he tried to draw came out as me. I told him he should have tried harder, but he said if I looked at these sketches long enough, I'd see all of him I needed to see.”

“That's romantic,” I said, not even teasing.

“Doesn't look like him or me,” she said. She reached toward me and turned one of the pages over, revealing a more familiar terrain of sketches and maps and charts. “I saw him here, though.” She traced her finger slowly down the slope of what looked like a cloud. “And here. And here.” She sat back. “I look at these pages and I see all of him. I remember him hunched over, making these charts, explaining as he went.”

I sifted through the papers a little more, and then came back to the page with her portraits. “So how's this going to help me become a better palm reader? Just stare at you long enough-?”

Lily took the pages. She shuffled back and forth through them until she found what she was looking for, and then held it out to me. A column of Japanese characters ran down the left-hand side of the page. In the middle was a gray-green blob, with a crosshairs in the lower right. Tiny numbers were written in each of the crosshairs' four quadrants, and at the bottom of the page, a single word in English characters, which I read aloud: “Shuyak.”