The Cloud Atlas (35 page)

Then it was inside, dark, warm. A woman there, a man there. And bright again, the balloon again, the flash again, crying again. And here was the other man now, coming up to him, picking him up, taking him flying again, the two of them sliding through the water. He would understand. I can explain, the boy said, and began to, talking on and on until he was uncertain he was still awake or if the man was, whether he was part of the man's dream or the man was part of his.

IT WAS THEN that I opened my eyes and saw them, Gurley and Lily. I didn't see them from the boat, I just saw them, on the ground, after the blast, a vision. I didn't see how their bodies had splintered, what had been severed and what had been burned. I only saw how a tiny breeze put a ripple on the water rising around them, and how the thin morning sun slowly lit their two faces, eyes closed, Gurley's lips just parted and Lily's a silent seam. They both wore expressions not of anger or sadness, but just the mildest concern, as if they'd been sleeping in of a winter Sunday, and had stirred slightly awake to a sound from somewhere downstairs in that great big house on the hill-the kids-the youngest probably-was crying. Not the sharp cry of pain, just hungry or sad or lonely.

Then I heard the crying, too, and like them, I thought it came from somewhere distant. But they were right and I was wrong; I looked up and saw that the boy was crying again. My hearing was returning. He'd let go of my hand. The vision vanished, replaced by the sight of a dock and a shack and a radio mast flying two flags: above, the Stars and Stripes, and below, a plain red cross on a worn white field.

AND THEN what did you do?

I'm slumped asleep in a chair beside Ronnie's bed in the hospice. I'm not really asleep, though; only as much as you can be in a chair. And since I can't enter a state quite deep enough for dreaming, I seem to be passing the time by talking with Ronnie in my imagination. I tell him the rest of the story-it's easier asleep. My throat's sore, besides. I've been talking too long.

You have.

It may not, in fact, be my imagination. If I accept my experience with the boy as evidence of some-spiritual-ability, perhaps I really am speaking with Ronnie. How far is it, after all, from intuition to connection, from guessing at what someone's thinking to actually knowing? I'm a priest, besides. I should know what it's like to look into another's soul. Whatever the source of my ability, I'm good at it, I have to admit: my imagined Ronnie interrupts me in all the right places, says all the right things.

You're not imagining me.

Like that.

What happened to the boy?

(Or this.) But I should answer: he died. He died, just like he was always going to. And not of plague. I got him to the infirmary-

Where Lily had led you-

Where Lily had led me, and once I got there, he died.

And so you must lead me.

And this is where I wake up. Because I always try to wake up before these conversations go on too long; it's not healthy. Not at my age. You reach a certain point in life and you discover that the little moat that's always surrounded your mind, kept it safe, defined things-this is real, this is not-has dried up. One day you're daydreaming and the next day someone's joking about Alzheimer's, and the next day you wonder-just what day is
this?

“The next day.”

This I am not imagining. I don't think.

“Lou-is,” Ronnie says, and his eyes now meet mine. “You are awake?”

I nod my head.

“The next day,” says Ronnie. “What did you do then? Or was it that night?”

I can hear him, I can see him, but I need a little more time to adjust to Ronnie, still alive.

“Lou-is,” Ronnie says.

“Ronnie,” I say. “You came back.”

“One last time. I heard your voice and followed one last time. I did not know why, but now I do. Because of what you are about to tell me. What did you do then?”

“When?”

“With the boy. Lily's boy. The boy from the sky.”

The boy from the sky was as gray as the sky as the boat skidded west, out to sea, away from the infirmary where no one would help us. I had lost my mind or left it behind; I was making for Japan. The boy was Japanese. I would take him across the Pacific in my little open boat, the reserve tank almost empty, our food and medicine gone, completely gone.

I never saw Japan. A large island just off the southwestern coast of Alaska got in the way. I'd landed, a madman, only to be faced down by another: Father Leonard, a missionary, the last man on an island of women who had lost their husbands, sons, and brothers to the war effort.

Father Leonard was gaunt, bald, with a thin white beard, and no longer smiled or waved. When he saw my uniform, he said, “You're not taking any more.” He paused to make sure I understood. I didn't, and he went on: “What did you think would happen? Draft all the able-bodied men, and how are the wives supposed to find food? Tell me you brought food.”

I didn't answer. I presented him with the lifeless body of the boy. And Father Leonard took a deep breath, didn't ask who or why or where, just took the boy in his arms, and began working his way back up through the rocks behind the narrow beach I'd found. For a moment, I considered pushing off once more, using the thimbleful of gas I had left to set myself adrift. Then I'd wait until the time or sea or clouds were right and I'd go over the side, feel the water, feel the cold clamp my lungs, and then, feel nothing at all.

But then I looked up and saw Father Leonard struggle with the weight of the boy as his climb grew steeper, and my reaction was automatic. I scrambled up the rocks after him, offered help, was refused, insisted on at least steadying him, and then the two of us-three of us-made our way to his tiny house.

He asked some of the local women to wash and prepare the boy's body. And then there was a cemetery forested with weathered white whalebone, a short ceremony, horizontal rain, and the boy disappearing from view.

Everyone left; I stayed. I took down the tiny wooden cross Father Leonard had fashioned for the boy; I wasn't so sure the boy was ours to give to God. I waited the rest of the afternoon and into the night, afraid and hopeful that Lily would come for him.

Or perhaps for me.

I waited there for her, on Father Leonard's island, the Bering Sea island where I'd taken the boy. Father Leonard so despised the government that he was only too glad to shelter and hide an AWOL soldier. I waited for weeks; the war ended. Then weeks turned into months, into a year, and still I waited, for I knew what Jesus knew: “Watch therefore,” He said, “for you know neither the day nor the hour.” He was speaking of the maidens awaiting the bridegroom, who sat waiting, as I do still, late into the night. The foolish ones used up their lamp oil. The wise ones waited. And hadn't Lily told me as much? Awaiting Saburo's return, she had acted foolishly; she had taken up with Gurley I knew I would not be so unwise. When Lily came, I would be alone, and ready.

So when, in time, Father Leonard mentioned the seminary, I stopped what I was doing and listened. He had read into my quiet, steady patience a vocation, or perhaps he had spoken with God, who reminded Father Leonard that I had been at the doorstep of the seminary not two years before and chose war instead.

But to return to the seminary now seemed fitting and just. If the ensuing deprivations proved painful, so be it: I could not live a life long enough to do adequate penance for my war's worth of sins. And truth be told, the life's promised restraint held real appeal for me, especially celibacy. I would not make Lily's mistake and fall in foolish love.

The priesthood offered something else, as well. A way to be with Lily, or tap into her world, while I waited. It would have been better to be a shaman, but I was not one and could not become one. It had been a struggle enough for Lily, and she had Yup'ik blood in her, had grown up in the bush. Becoming a priest was as close as an orphan Catholic could get. Please understand, though: I have never debased my vows. I do not pretend to pray to God while secretly seeking contact with the spirits of whales or walruses. I render unto God what is God's, but in my prayers to Him, I have always asked that He make me aware to
all
things unseen, not simply His mysteries.

But by now, if I am convinced of anything, it is God's omniscience- how else would He have seen to arrange my life as He has?-and I fear He knows the ulterior motive of my spiritual life. Knows it, and cannot abide it, and so my half-century waiting search for Lily has been a lonely one. He has never helped.

But I didn't know that then. I only knew Father Leonard, and he always helped. Indeed, in all my time with him, he never denied me anything, never except in the very beginning, the day we buried the boy. I had become obsessed with a need to build a fire, a fire large enough to consume the boy, cremate him, and send his ashes swirling in the air. Father Leonard said no, gently, and then firmly, and even tried to reason with me: there wasn't enough fuel for such a fire, to start with-

“The balloons,” I said. “I can do it. I just need one of the incendiaries from the balloons.” I was so addled I didn't realize that there was a possibility-or rather, as was always the case, a probability-that no fire balloons had happened to land nearby.

Father Leonard looked at me. “Balloons,” he said. “What, in God's holy name, are you talking about?”

Tell me how he died, Lou-is.

Ronnie: I glance at him; did I just hear him speak or imagine it? His eyes are closed. I take a deep breath. And then he says it again: “Tell me how he died.”

This time I am sure I hear him, and this time, for the first time, I realize something else.

“You first,” I say.

SOMETIMES I DREAM I KILLED HIM. THAT I CLUBBED THE doctor who wouldn't ease his pain with morphine and went for the cabinet myself. Sometimes I find the morphine, enough to administer a compassionate, lethal dose. Sometimes the cabinet is empty. Sometimes the boy screams, and the doctor screams. Sometimes the doctor shoots him, sometimes I shoot the doctor.

And sometimes, the boy's wailing stops and his eyes close. And I move to his pillow, and I place the barrel of my revolver just two inches from his head. And then I wait. I wait for him to stop breathing, so as to render my bullet unnecessary. I wait for courage. I wait for mercy to replace rage. I wait for Lily to come into the room and open my hands and find the future there.

I wait for Ronnie to speak.

“There was a boy,” Ronnie said. This was just a few hours ago. “A boy and his mother.”

Would not stop crying
, I could have said, but did not have to; Ronnie knew what I was thinking.

“I did not tell you this,” Ronnie said. “There was a mother and her baby, a baby that had come too soon. And no one could help her, and the doctor wouldn't help her, and they sent for me.”

I-

I couldn't move, or speak: Ronnie had been
there
, in that room, with-

“Lily,” Ronnie said. “Yes. This was Lily,” he said, and waited. I still said nothing, and he went on.

“When I was young and strong, my
tuunraq
, my wolf, he was a good spirit helper. He could go inside a sick person, tear out the sickness. He would return to me, his jaws red with blood, and I would know he had done good. I saw this. I know this. But that night, with Lily, that was when he ran away. Lily had asked me to help her, and the
tuunraq
, he ran away. When we journey, we
angalkut
tie them to us, these spirits, because this is what they do, they run, and they will run away if they can. And this wolf broke free. I could not stop him. I have searched for him ever since. I wanted to find him before he found me.”

He did not so much speak as take the words and place them, one by one, behind my eyes, beneath my scalp. I can feel them there now.

Ronnie started again. “When they came for me, asked me to help Lily, I did not want to go. These were women's matters. But I came and I looked and I saw what the others had seen. The baby had come, the baby had died. I saw this. But I also saw something else, something else no one saw, something Lily had hoped I would see. I could see the child's spirit floating just above him, in the dark. You know what this looks like?”

Yes. I do. And I could see Lily's baby, just as well as I could see the boy from the balloon. I could see blood and hair and tiny hands and-

Ronnie was shaking his head. He held up a hand, palm up. “Like this,” he said.

“Like what?” I asked, staring at Ronnie's face, not his hand.

“A breath,” Ronnie said. “The boy was dead, maybe they thought he was born dead, but he had taken a breath, a single breath-did you know this?-and when I got there, it was still hanging in the air above him.”

“Ronnie-”

“No,” Ronnie said. “My wolf saw it, too, asked me if he should fetch it, take this spirit, this breath by the scruff of its neck, and plunge it back down inside the boy. The wolf looked at me. He asked me this. Lily was saying things, too. I did not hear. I just looked at the boy. The wolf looked at me. Then he lunged.”

Ronnie had been staring before him as he said this. Now he turned.

“But I was too quick for him. I was younger then. Faster. With two feet. I sprang for his spirit, that breath. I jumped and I got it.” Ronnie made a sudden fist and then opened his hand once more.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I jumped before the wolf. Because I understood. I thought I understood what the wolf did not. This boy was not to live here. Within him ran Yup'ik blood, but also the blood of another place. And I knew that this blood would be the end of us. Just as I knew when I first saw you and the priest before you and the priest before him. Such new blood would be the end of us. The end of how the Yup'ik lived.
Yup'ik
: this means the real people. This child was not real. I saw this. I knew this. When I saw the boy, when I saw his father.”

Worse than hearing this was believing it, and I tried to stop: “You were there, Ronnie? You were really there? This isn't alcohol or diabetes or-”

“You have the proof,” Ronnie said.

We stared at each other.

And I almost wish it had ended that way. That each of us, in turn, would feel our eyelids droop and close, our jaws go slack, and then, slowly at first, but with ever-increasing speed, our life seep out of us and into the floor.

But it didn't.

“When the wolf left, I knew I had done wrong,” Ronnie said. “I took the breath, I went to the boy-but it had been too long now, and without the wolf, I could not plunge his breath deep enough inside him. Lily only knew-Lily only knew that I tried. She saw my tears and saw my failure, but did not see all of it. Lou-is: when her lover came, this Saburo, when she asked me to help him out of town, help him deliver the baby's body into the tundra? Yes. I would never say no again.

“One of the aunties had talked-there were soldiers, police, everywhere. We almost got caught, several times. We took two kayaks; I led him an hour downriver, and from there, he insisted he go on alone. You would know the place? Where the bank is worn away? Where the
ircenrrat
gather? He said to wait there for him, that he would come back, return the map-the path Lily might take to see their son.” Ronnie shook his head. “Why there?”

“I know it,” I said quietly. “I know the place.”

“It was not a place I could go, not then, not after my
tuunraq
had left me, run before me and set all the other spirits against me. I could feel them coming, worming through the
ayuq
, the soil, down the bank, to the water. I ran for my kayak, I started upstream.”

“You left Saburo?”

“He found me,” Ronnie said. “I took the map from him, but-but by the time he caught up with me, I'd almost made it back to Bethel. A boat-with a light-it saw us. I went to shore, into the cottonwood. Saburo went downriver. I heard yelling, shots, then nothing.”

I waited before speaking.

“What did Lily say when she saw the map?” I asked.

“I couldn't face her, not then,” Ronnie said. “Not after what I knew had happened to Saburo. I found some gin. Then more gin. I got drunk. Police came. And when I woke up in my cell, the book was gone. I at least gave Lily and Saburo this: I would not let them beat the truth out of me. I played the drunk fool, said I had no idea where the map came from, what it meant.” Ronnie scrunched his face at the memory. “I was the drunk fool,” he said, and looked at me, shrugged. “Proof.”

I shook my head. Ronnie smiled, exhausted, and looked outside.

“The wolf, he's closer,” Ronnie said. “Not close enough.” The window looked the way our televisions up here used to before satellite: snow swirling against a dark screen, pressing to get in. “But you'll help him, Lou-is, won't you? Give him what he's coming for.” Ronnie paused, tried to smile once more. “Tell him he's late.”

“Ronnie,” I said, on my feet, desperate to stop him. Or the wolf. “It's no good, Ronnie-wait. I don't believe-”

Ronnie looked at his wrist. “I need the bracelet,” he said.

I slowly shook my head.

“I need it for the wolf,” he said.

“Not yet,” I said.

“I need it to tie him to me. I'm not going to let him escape again this time.”

“Ronnie,” I said.

“Lou-is,” Ronnie said. “What have I asked?”

I sat silent, then reached in my pocket, took out the pyx, opened it, and removed the bracelet. I unraveled it as carefully as if it were a chain of diamonds and then affixed it to his wrist. “Let's pray,” I said, not looking up.

Ronnie looked pleased, and shook his head. “I can't pray if I don't believe, Lou-is.”

I couldn't answer, only taunt: “Well, I'm getting ready to go after your wolf, and I don't exactly believe in him, so-”

“It's okay,” Ronnie interrupted. “He believes in you.” He smiled, but to himself, and then lay back on the pillow. “Now,” he said, the word coming quite clearly, “this is what you must give him-” But here his voice faltered again. He went down, deep in his chest to find his breath, to cough it out once more, but this time it did not come.

I shouted. I shook him. I ran to the hall. I called for help. I was crying, tears actually running down my face, my old man's face. I dropped the side rail. I bent over him. And then-

I breathed. Once, twice. My mouth to his. Then my hands on his chest. One, two, three, four, five. But it was no good: the bed was too soft. Sometimes there was a board beneath you could pull out for CPR. I couldn't find it. I thought about dragging him onto the floor, but there wasn't enough time. Jesus, Mary, and you, too, Joseph. Breathe. Again to his chest. One, two, three, four-I could hear footsteps, voices behind me.

Thank you, Lord, for this: for the help of doctors and nurses, for those who can truly bring the dead back to life. I explained between breaths, between compressions, what I was doing, how I was saving him, how I needed help. I was on the verge of saying why-of saying that I needed to save him from the wolf, or for the wolf, or that I needed to keep him alive long enough to tell me, an old priest, a believer, one baptized in the waters of everlasting life, just what it was that I had to give this wolf.

They pulled me away from Ronnie. I fought, but they pulled me away-and I decided: they know best. They know better than I: they are the professionals; they are younger. Let them breathe, let them save him.

They did not.

“Father! Stop!” I think this is what I heard as they struggled with me. “Father-what are you doing? You have to-” I think I may have hit someone at this point, but, let's be clear, I did not bite, did not bite at one of them. “You have to respect his wishes.” A nurse held up his wrist and the Comfort One bracelet, but I couldn't see it. I know it was there, but I couldn't see it. I could only hear it clink and wink and laugh at me, and then I couldn't hear it at all, because I was running, down the hall, out the doors, into the snow, off to the wolf.

YOU HAVE THE PROOF, Ronnie said, and I do.

Proof is in my pocket, the inside breast pocket of my parka, as I race my snowmachine down the frozen river. Proof is a small book of strange paper bound in green leather. Proof is what I bring the wolf.

Proof: this is what I searched for, years later, in Anchorage.

But there was none.

Everything had changed. Every street I walked down was paved, the sidewalks were clear. New buildings had gone up. Old buildings cleared away. The Starhope still stood, or its shell did. It had new windows. In the lobby, plants, and a guard in coat and tie. And on the second floor: nothing, nothing I needed to see.

And out at the base, where the strangely frightened teenaged soldier at the main gate waved me through when he saw my collar, I could see that Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Airfield had changed as well. They were separate bases now, but more important, the mud was gone, and so too the tents, the crowds. I picked my way down new streets, around new buildings, circumscribed, incredibly, by tidy green lawns. And finally, I turned down a street that I'm fairly certain is the one that used to terminate at the front door of our Quonset hut.

And it was gone, too, of course. Which I expected, though I was disappointed. I wondered what it was like when they tore it down, what happened when neither Gurley nor I returned from our secret mission, whether the major ever searched the tundra for some proof of plague, or whether he launched a search for some proof of us.

Maybe no one noticed, or didn't notice for a while. The war was ending then. We disappeared in July, the war ended in August. And the balloon that carried that boy was either the last or among the last, or so I've deduced from the odd article or two that I've read in the decades since. They gave up, Japan. Credit Gurley, I guess, or the editors who voluntarily obeyed the press ban: until it was lifted, not a word about the balloons was printed or broadcast, and the Japanese were left to conclude that their massive undertaking had failed.

No trace of plague weapons was ever found in Alaska or farther south, though I've read there were plans for plague-laden kamikaze planes to attack San Diego in the fall of '45. Northern China, Unit 731's home, offers a glimpse of what might have been: in the years following the war, tens of thousands died in successive waves of plague, likely spread by animals escaping from, or released by, those who'd spent the war experimenting on them.

The plague failed to reach us, but the balloons did not. They rose from the ground into the clouds and flew across the ocean. They landed in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. In Alaska, in Washington, in Oregon, in California, in a dozen other states, and who knows what's still concealed today beneath the forest floor? After the war, researchers reinflated a captured Japanese paper balloon and launched it from Southern California, just to see how hardy it was, just to see how far it would travel, having already made the trek from Japan.

It landed in Africa.

But that one balloon doesn't interest me so much as the dozens Gurley and I left behind in Anchorage. How strange it must have been in those first days without us, those last days of the war, MPs guarding a building uninhabited but for balloons.

In time, of course, the Army would have sent someone up to take inventory and look for clues of what had happened among the items that we'd left. What would they have found?

Balloons, still hanging from the rafters, crates upon crates of balloon parts, and those pieces too big to be crated, stacked along the floor, the whole place looking less like a home for decommissioned war matériel than the breeding ground of some terrible new weapon.

In his office, after they'd snapped the padlock? They'd find the wall map, of course, the pins running red across it, the clocks above. Gurley's dog-eared Japanese-English dictionary. The blackguard's tooth.