The Cloud Atlas

CHAPTER 11

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’mcold” 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.

“Well, you’re wrong about all of that. Your country is going to lose. Your God is a fake, and so is your—”

“And so are you,” I said.

She took a deep breath. “Good,” she said. “That’s a start.”

LILY CAME FROM Bethel, Alaska. Describe Bethel today-tiny homes, riverfront warehouses, a lot of sodden earth in the process of freezing or thawing, a horizon whose limits seem more lunar than earthly-and you would more or less capture Lily’s Bethel of decades ago. It’s more crowded now, more stores, more houses, more whites, more government people and programs, but it’s still the same place, a permanent splotch on the tundra.

But nothing about it was permanent for Lily-half Russian, half Yup’ik, missing both parents, Bethel didn’t have much to hold her. It did, however, have plenty of missionaries-Moravian, Catholic, Methodist, Orthodox, and more-and Lily convinced one of them to get her a place at a special girls’ boarding school in Fairbanks. It was supposed to be just for the smartest girls-which Lily, without a wink, told me she was-but Lily was a compelling candidate in another way. An orphan, she was a more attractive prospect than many other Yup’ik children, who had to be pried away from wary parents before being sent off to distant schools where they would learn the ways of a white world.

What no one could tell her in Fairbanks, however, was why going there had made her so keenly aware of yet another world-a world just like this one, but a world in which she was privy to the secrets of people, places, and things. She had sensed this world back in Bethel, but it was only a sense, and seemed as much imagination as anything. But in Fairbanks, she knew differently-she knew, for example, the life stories of girls she had just met, before they had said a word. She knew when the weather was bad back in Bethel, whether the seal hunt was going well, even the date of breakup-the day the Kuskokwim River finally thawed.

Before she knew better, she talked about such things with the other girls, and they in turn talked to their families about her whenever they returned home on breaks. Lily always stayed in Fairbanks. But then, one break, one of her classmates said that her father wanted to meet Lily, and so Lily made the long trip back to Bethel.

Her classmate’s father was known as Peter to the white community, a capable, if grumpy, boatbuilder. But the entire Yup’ik community knew him as one of the last shamans.

“Among every generation of Yup’ik,” Lily told me, “there are those who are granted special sight, and special powers.” If you were sick, if you were worried about the presence or absence of fish or game, you went to the shaman. When to move to fish camp, when to return to town-all these things the shaman knew. But, she added, “the missionaries hated shamans. They told the people that the shamans were just magicians-people who got in the way of God.”

Peter had gotten in the way of God for a long time and had suffered for it, suffered physically he told people, as though God were throwing an elbow every time they passed. Old and hurting and lonely, Peter was looking for someone to take his place.

But Lily? Could it be possible that the magic should have survived in this girl? Lily’s long-gone father was a kass’aq; she was being educated far from home; she was female. But after a day of observing her and another day speaking with her, Peter decided that Lily was, in fact, gifted.

Or rather, able to receive the gift: it really wasn’t for him to choose; they’d have to go out, deep into the tundra, to see for sure.

He wouldn’t tell her where they were going, he wouldn’t let anyone else come with them. They traveled downriver for several miles, until they came to a bend where the river had worn much of the bank away, exposing a small bluff that looked as though it were built of layered chocolate. He found a place to beach the boat, and had her climb up the bank with him. Then they went walking. Do not be afraid, he said, but this is a place for—

“Ircenrrat.” Lily knew this. Little people. Sprites. They could be friendly or not, Lily told me, depending on how you behaved. There beside Peter, Lily was worried. Walking along that eroded stretch of riverbank was not good behavior. Growing up, she’d always been told to avoid this place.

“Let’s look for mouse food,” Peter said. Lily just wanted to leave, but Peter insisted. Tundra lemmings foraging for the winter would often build up little subterranean caches of roots and stems that Yup’ik men and women would later seek out. (Dried fish or cracker crumbs might be left by way of thanks.) It took a practiced eye to spot and follow the little pathways the lemmings wove through the tundra, and a practiced hand to find the soft or spongy areas that signaled a likely spot. Lily was surprised to see that she was having more success than Peter.

She was looking over at him at one point, wondering what he was up to, as she sunk her hands into the tundra moss and cottongrass. Then she felt something odd-warm and slick. When she looked down, she saw that she’d uncovered a roiling cache of insects-worms, beetles, ants, all slithering through her fingers. She yelped and tried to leap up, but somehow, Peter had made it to her side. He held her down.

“ Melquripsaq: the worms, the insects! You have found them,” he said, smiling and breathless. “The ircenrrat have let you find their magic.”

“Let go of me!” said Lily, about to scream. Several of the insects- bigger and stranger than ones she’d ever seen-had begun to trail over her wrists, up her forearms.

“Wait,” Peter said. “Let it come to you.”

“No!” Lily shrieked. She could feel them swarming now, prickling up past her elbows.

“Wait!” Peter shouted. “You’ll see! You must do this!”

“No!” Lily yelled, and broke free. She swung her arms wildly, clapped her hands together, scraped at her scalp.

Peter fell to his knees and searched the grass. “Too soon,” he cried.

Lily looked down. Her arms were clear. She looked around. No trace of insects. She walked back to the cache. Empty.

Peter stood and walked back to the boat. “I cannot say what will happen to you now,” Peter said once she’d joined him. Lily later left for Fairbanks without his having said another word to her. His daughter did not return to school.

Lily told no one about her trip out on the tundra with Peter. But back at school, if the other girls ever started talking about shamans, about the stories the elders used to tell, Lily would listen carefully. That’s how she learned that her experience was not unique; many shamans before her had sought and received their powers the same way. One or two of the other girls said they had uncovered buginfested caches as well, but none had ever plunged their hands in, frightened either by the bugs themselves or because they knew magic was at work.

And something was at work in Lily. A strange thing had happened after she’d left the tundra with Peter. Her previous abilities had dimmed. Where once she could look at a girl, even from a distance, and know her village, what her father was like, whether she’d been kissed, or smell the air midwinter and know if the summer would be wet or dry, now she needed to touch something to know anything about it at all. Even then, the knowledge she gained was shot through with static, sometimes to the point of incoherence.

She tested herself and found she did better with people than with objects. She might sit at a desk or hold a book and get a sense of who had done so before her, but these stirrings were faint. But if she shook a hand, received a hug, that contact might grant her visibility into the other person’s past or, more rarely, future. Sometimes she’d feel a strange sensation in her hands and forearms- qunguaguuk,-as though the insects she’d uncovered were skittering along her skin once more.

She returned to Bethel at the end of the school year, but it was a bitter homecoming. Peter had died, his family moved away. Before he’d died, though, he must have told others about the trip he and Lily had taken, because everyone knew what had happened. No one approved.

Those who had rejected traditional beliefs and become enthusiastic converts to Christianity rejected Lily for seeking to indulge in “the black arts,” as one missionary termed it. But Lily received even sharper censure from those elders who still had an admiration for, if not faith in, older Yup’ik traditions. A gift had been presented to Lily, and she had refused it. On the tundra, rejecting a gift freely given-whether the gift was shamanic powers or the season’s first seal-was unconscionable.

But then, what do you expect, people said. She’s a girl. A girl whose mother disappeared with a Russian sailor. This girl, half Yup’ik, a shaman? Peter had made a mistake. The ircenrrat had made a mistake. Lily tried to explain, she hadn’t sought the job, she didn’t want the job, but that only made matters worse.

In time, Lily realized that it wasn’t just her who was making the Yup’ik community mad. It was the world, its missionaries, its kass’at, all flooding the tundra with new ways, food, language, ideas. Even if one no longer needed the services of a shaman to heal a sick child or predict weather, you still wanted one around, as a link to that other, older world they’d all once known. And with Peter dead, and Lily ducking the job, there really wasn’t anyone around. Now, there was a young man from Lower Kalskag, a good distance upriver, who came to town occasionally. There were those who said he was a shaman, said they’d even seen him fly. But others said he only flew when he drank, and the only way you’d see him fly is if you drank, too-a lot.

Townspeople pressured Lily to leave. Go to your parents, they said. Go to Russia, they said. Go live with the other kass’at. Leave us alone. Lily weathered a winter of this and then decided to do as she was told. She’d go to Anchorage. And from there, maybe Russia. Maybe anywhere.

She waited through the spring, and just as the summer began and she was getting ready to leave, she found a reason to stay.

He was Japanese.

HER REASON HAD BEEN living, temporarily, in the back stockroom of Sam’s Universal Supply. The Supply was Bethel ’s second, and lesser, general store, and Lily worked there as a cashier.

Saburo spoke English fairly well, a little better than Sam, in fact, who had been born an unknown number of years ago to Japanese immigrant parents in Southern California. How Sam had made his way to Bethel, and whether he had done so on purpose, was never clear. But he’d done well once he’d arrived. He was kind, honest, fair to a fault, and extremely generous. Until the war with Japan began, his being Japanese attracted little attention- Bethel had a small but persistent collection of people who were neither white nor Yup’ik, and as a result, little discussed.

Saburo’s arrival was only mysterious if you thought about it: one week he wasn’t there, the next week he was. And people didn’t think about it, not even Lily, at first. People were always passing through Sam’s employ, particularly those, like Lily, who didn’t quite fit in anywhere else.

She took Saburo at his word when he said he was a relative of Sam’s; she didn’t realize differently until they were a few days into a fishing trip together. Sam had suggested that Lily “show Saburo Alaska;” she had thought he was making fun. But then, it was summer; almost all of the Yupiit and many of the whites had already left town, journeying south and west to fish camps across the vast, marshy delta that surfaced each year beneath the lingering sun.

And there was the article she’d read in a two-week-old copy of the FairbanksDaily News-Miner. Persons of Japanese ancestry were being relocated to special camps throughout the American West, “for their safety.” Two days later, Sam received a large white envelope emblazoned with a government eagle. Before he even opened it, he suggested the trip to Lily again. The next day, Lily and Saburo were off, down the Kuskokwim River in a haphazardly packed outboard.

Lily had assumed she would serve as the guide; as a child, she’d often joined friends for the annual summer trip into the delta. But half an hour south of town, with Lily in the stern, piloting, Saburo pulled out a map-a journal, really, filled with page after page of drawings, charts and notes. After a few minutes’ study, he looked up and pointed right.

Lily shrugged; if you weren’t aiming for a favorite spot, it really didn’t matter which waterway you chose once you left the broad expanse of the Kuskokwim River. Depending on the thaw and the previous week’s weather, there were hundreds, even thousands, of sloughs to follow. And if a slough ever proved to be a dead end, all you usually had to do was turn around or drag your boat through the mud and grass and reindeer moss for a few minutes before another waterway appeared.

But Saburo’s decisions that first day led them to one portage after another. By evening, they’d found themselves on a small, reasonably dry patch of tundra. Lily was exhausted. Saburo wanted to go on; it was still light, after all.

Lily shook her head. Saburo pursed his lips, looked down in his book.

“I did not need you to come,” Saburo said.

Lily looked at him and then back toward Bethel. “I didn’t need you to come,” she said. “It was your uncle’s idea, anyway. He thought you’d get lost out here, and after what we’ve been through today seems like he was right.”

“Not uncle,” said Saburo after a pause.

Lily started unpacking some cooking gear and then changed her mind. She didn’t want to cook-and she definitely did not want to cook for him. They’d eat some of the canned fish and dried blubber Sam had urged them to take.

“I can come back, pick you up,” said Saburo.

“That’s sweet,” Lily said. Saburo glared, but Lily said nothing, just sat and chewed for a while. She offered a piece of blubber to Saburo. “How would you find me?” Lily asked. “That book of yours?” When he refused to answer or eat, she wiped her mouth with her forearm and reached for his journal.

He snatched it away. He started to stalk off, but there was no place to go; the tuft of dry tundra they’d found for themselves wasn’t much larger than Sam’s store. Venture too close to any edge and your footprints started filling with water; a step or two later, you were knee-deep.

Lily finished eating. She swallowed, and then asked him, very quietly, “May I see your book?”

“Not a book. It’s in Japanese. Hard to understand.”

“I’m good at understanding things,” Lily said, wiping her hands on her pants.

“You know Japanese?” he asked.

Lily shook her head. “You know your way back?”

He frowned, checked the height of the sun, and then handed her the journal. Smiling at him, Lily held it closed on her lap until he turned away, took a few steps north, and started scouting the route they’d take next.

He was scouting the wrong way. Lily knew it instantly; she didn’t even have to open the book. Just holding it there, on her lap, she knew what he was looking for, though not why, and where the object was, though not how it got there. She started to call for him, but hesitated. She didn’t trust herself. Her powers, such as they were, had been waning after all, especially with things like books. And besides, what she was seeing didn’t make sense: a black bit of earth, smoking, like the remains of a giant campfire. There was some wreckage-something had crashed-but it wasn’t a truck or a plane-maybe books? Books didn’t seem likely, but that was what she felt, could almost smell: paper, burning, grass, burning, and all of it just to the south.

With Lily as guide, they reached the spot an hour and two portages later. Lily was surprised, even disappointed, that the fire she’d imagined seemed to have burned itself out some time ago. All that remained were some charred, bent metal strips-some kind of a crate?-and a few dozen square feet of earth that looked as if it had been seared by a giant, fiery thumbprint. Saburo took out his book and started writing.

He didn’t tell her the whole story the first night, and even after two months together, crisscrossing the tundra, she was never sure he had told her everything, even when she took up his hand and held it tight. But he had told her enough: he was Japanese, a soldier, a spy, sent behind enemy lines to see if early tests of a frightening new device were having any success. They were called fu-go weapons, bombs carried across the Pacific by large, gas-filled balloons. Hundreds had been launched, but so far, little news of their impact had made its way back to Japan. Scouts were sent behind enemy lines to see what they could learn. Saburo had been given southern Alaska, another scout had been given British Columbia, and a third who had already been living in San Francisco got the northwest coast of the United States. Each had too much territory to cover completely, but they were armed with maps and projections of where the balloons were likeliest to land, given the trade winds and the design of the balloons themselves.

The enemy, I remember asking Lily: Weren’t you afraid? Weren’t you alarmed? Weren’t you worried how you would get word to the authorities? You, an American citizen, I said, alone with a Japanese soldier. I didn’t know what to say. I think the farther from the enemy you remained-and I’d spend the entire war on American soil-the more you believed that should you ever actually meet your foe, violence would be automatic, instant.

“I was never scared,” Lily said.

“Wasn’t he scared of you?” I asked. “Here you were, an American—”

“I don’t usually get taken for American,” Lily said. “Not even by me.”

“Lily.”

“Louis,” she said. Smiling a mother’s smile, she lifted both my hands in hers, glancing at my palms. “Louis,” she said again, looking up. “This man-had extraordinary hands.”

“Hands?” I looked down as she held my hands, and then watched as she traced a line on my palm.

“And he believed me,” she said, just like that, in a very small voice. “He didn’t ask how I knew what I knew, or why I could sometimes tell where we’d find the next crash site. He just listened.” She folded my hands together and then folded hers on her lap.

I suppose I should have hated him more, this Saburo. He was the real boyfriend. Not Gurley not any of the other men who visited Lily at the Starhope. She never said as much, but just to hear her talk-to see how she talked-you could see what a fierce, tender, protective love she reserved for him-still. And if that weren’t upsetting enough for me, there was also the fact that he was Japanese. Not just the enemy, but my enemy: he was tied to the lethal balloons Gurley and I had been risking our lives to chase and smother.

My next decision seems easy doesn’t it? We were in Anchorage. Fort Richardson and the easily stirred Gurley were just a few miles away. Local and military police could be notified; Lily arrested, interrogated. Who knows what we’d learn. How many balloons we might stop. How many germs. How many lives we’d save.

Such simple equations. Here, you do the calculation, Ronnie: what if you could look into her eyes, as I did, and find there the two things I saw?

One, she really loved him, but she trusted me, and that’s enough like love to make a boy like I was swoon all the same.

Two, she’d told me quite a few secrets, but it was clear there was something else she wasn’t telling me, not yet. Betray her now, and lose the larger story?

“Some days, we didn’t find anything,” Lily said. “Nothing ever came to me as strongly as did the image of that first day’s crash site. But it didn’t matter. Louis-it was a beautiful summer. Warm, clear days, cool nights, whole weeks without rain.” Weather like the tundra had never seen. And those hands: Lily was fascinated by them. Late one night-actually, the next morning, when night had finally fallen- they compared names for the stars and constellations. Lily eagerly pointed out several, but then fell silent, eager to see Saburo’s hands, instead, flutter there in the air above them, more beautiful than the stars beyond, and so much closer.

The hands also turned the book of notes and maps into a beautiful journal, a work of art. Each day ended with Saburo re-creating the preceding hours on paper-first, a sketch lightly done in pencil, brought to life by watercolors, detail added with pen and ink. Lily asked what he wrote and drew on the days they found no evidence of balloons. He said that he wrote about her, about them, about the beautiful summer.

Here the story stopped. Lily looked at me.

“You know this book,” Lily said, and of course I did. From her descriptions and the way my heart was trying to thump its way out of my chest, run into the street, and call the police itself, I knew that this book was the strange journal or homemade atlas Gurley had had me study in his office. “I-I need it,” Lily said.

“Lily.”

“Louis, he’s gone.”

“Where?”

“I want it, just to have some piece of-some piece of him, that time.” She was watching for my reaction. “That makes sense, doesn’t it? That a girl would want that? You’re a boy.”

“Yes.”

“It’s at Fort Rich. His journal,” Lily said, looking down now. “I know it’s there.”

I suppose I could have lied, but I didn’t. “It is,” I said, and decided to go a step further. “I’ve seen it.”

Lily feigned surprise, so badly that she immediately confessed. “I- thought so.”

I told Lily that I’d prefer her pretending to be surprised than confessing that she had just been using me all this time to get some keepsake of a summer romance-with an enemy soldier, no less. Was this why she’d advertised herself as “careful and correct,” so as to better lure a bomb disposal man, someone who might be more useful to her than the average soldier?

Very quietly, very slowly, Lily said two words. It was the first time I’d heard a woman say them: fuck, you.

She stood up, opened the door. “He is not the enemy, not mine. It’s not-a keepsake” she said. “And I was never using you,” she said. “You came and found me, remember? A very average soldier, looking for help.” She closed the door slightly and lowered her voice to a hiss. “I have been trying to use your captain, but he’s been better at using me.”

The door opened again, wide.