The Cloud Atlas

No morphine: no use, the doctor said.

The boy would die within the hour, and morphine was in short supply. He was saving it for the soldiers-for American soldiers, he added, checking the wall clock, then his watch, then me. It was four o’clock, 1600 hours Alaskan War Time, on July 6, 1945, a mere thirty-four days before fighting in Japan officially ended. The boy was Japanese.

When I was a boy, I was told a writer should date his age from the day he started writing. I can’t remember why I was told this; I just remember that I liked it enough to repeat it over the years to those who might benefit from the wisdom. To anyone. To people like my drill sergeant.

He had a quick reply: a soldier should date his age from the day he started killing.

If that’s so, I was even younger than the world took me for back then. An eighteen-year-old sergeant, I’d been in the army for ten months, waging a secret war, from Alaska, for six. I’d trained in bomb disposal. I’d learned to speak some Yup’ik, I’d fallen in love with a woman who talked with touch, I’d shot a bar glass out of my captain’s hand.

And now, in that tiny room, in a mission infirmary just inland from the Bering Sea, the weather cool and wet, I was sitting at the side of a boy who was dying.

I was AWOL.

And for the first time since putting on a uniform, I was crying.

At eleven, the boy died. At midnight, I turned three days old.