The Cloud Atlas

CHAPTER 14

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.”

When I looked up, Lily’s eyes were full of tears. “Any drunken soldier who walked into that building and actually wanted his palm read, I could tell him anything. But you-once I knew you actually did work related to what Saburo was doing-that you might have access to that journal—” She stopped. “Like I said that night I first told you about Saburo-I wanted to be useful to you.”

“Useful?” I was discovering what it was like to be Gurley; I could feel rage uncoiling inside me, seeking out a fist or arm. “And Gurley?” I said, to stall.

“Yes-or no. I mean, I knew he was involved, but eventually I realized he wouldn’t help. Couldn’t. And then it was too late. Things with Gurley-I don’t know.”

“You tricked us?”

“Louis,” she said. “I wanted you to need me. I needed you to.”

“Gurley too?” I asked, but she didn’t say anything. I felt her hand inching closer to mine again, but I didn’t move. I tried very hard to stare at the page before me and nothing else. “You were helpful,” I finally said. “Or, I guess Saburo was. But how did he know about Shuyak? Portage around the Katmai volcanoes? Kayak across the Shelikof Strait?”

Relieved, I think, to submerge into detail, Lily began speaking rapidly. “Shuyak was an old crash site, one he’d heard about before he’d come to Bethel. I sent you there thinking you’d find an old balloon, not another one, a new one.”

I quickly scanned the other pages with new eyes and saw rivers, peninsulas, mountains, even towns emerge. One page looked particularly interesting. Green to the left and then a series of arrows to the right. Had Saburo known about plans for germ bombs? Had he told her? I wanted to ask her, but I couldn’t. I was so angry and sad and defeated, I didn’t want to know. More than that, I didn’t want to see her lie, not to me.

She saw me studying the page. “I don’t know what that means,” she volunteered. “We were going to go through the whole book, him explaining, me figuring out, translating names, but we didn’t get any farther than Shuyak.” I didn’t want her to say another word.

“So you lied about being a palm reader,” I said, the anger in my voice surprising me more than her. “You lied about-or didn’t let on why you thought I’d be so useful. Did you also lie about your supposed ‘powers’? You hold something, and you know its story? How the hell did you know about me? About who I was? My childhood?” She snatched the papers away and crumpled them, tighter and tighter. “Did-did Gurley tell you? Was that a trick, too?”

“No, Louis,” Lily said.

“So what am I thinking now?” I said. “Read my thoughts. Prove it.” But there was nothing to read. I can’t tell you what I was thinking. I was angry, but it was a boy’s anger, fiery and violent and insensible, and even if you’d cracked my skull open to look inside, you would have seen nothing, only red.

I don’t know what Lily saw. She said she saw nothing anymore.

“That’s part of the reason I came all the way out here.” She held the ball of paper to her nose and mouth and breathed in. “In the city, in Anchorage, the longer I’ve been here, the harder it’s been, the more everything-everything I know-is fading.” She took the papers away from her face and put them in her lap, absently smoothing them out. “I see Saburo now, but I don’t know if that’s the paper or just memory. And even those memories-I’m losing those, too.” She dropped the papers, found a crevice in the rock and wedged her fingers there, closed her eyes. After a minute, she’d stopped crying and was breathing deeply.

“There is a story, Louis,” she began. “About a boy, a baby boy, and his mother, that’s been told for many years…”

I stopped her. I couldn’t hear it. I wonder now what would have been different if I’d let her tell the story, the whole story, then, if I’d just been patient enough to hear her out. But I wasn’t. I didn’t say a word, I just raised a hand, and she stopped. She didn’t argue, but just looked at me, disappointed and resigned.

“You really believed,” she finally said.

I nodded and sighed and slipped the papers back toward me. I studied them for a few minutes until she spoke again. Then she said, “Look.”

I turned, slowly, and saw nothing. But as I turned back, something above us distracted me, and I looked up to see something like clouds, or thinner than that, mist, twisting and undulating, changing colors as it did.

It would have done no good to tell me that I was seeing the aurora borealis for the first time and nothing more. This deep in the woods, this deep in the war, this far along with Lily: nothing was real anymore, at least nothing that I could not see, right at that moment.

And the lights above me, these I could see. I slowly leaned back until I was lying there, staring, looking up and watching the display, wondering if this was magic, or if the book had been, or the balloons, or if Lily was a magician, or Saburo, or Gurley

“Lily,” I finally whispered, worried the lights above were too fragile for me to speak any louder. Lily made no reply. I called her name, and when there was still no reply, I craned my neck to see if she was still there. She wasn’t. Then I surprised myself. Instead of leaping to my feet and running off the rock to find her, I lay there, staring up. I suppose the word is hypnotized, but that doesn’t give me enough credit. I was entranced, but I wasn’t in a trance. It was like it always was with Lily: a debilitating fascination. So I lay there, and after a while, I heard her voice. She wasn’t far away.

“I had seen the northern lights growing up in Bethel, but in Fairbanks, it seemed like we could see them almost all the time.” I kept staring at the sky, now pulsing. “Are you scared?” she asked.

I shook my head. I wasn’t scared, just surprised. Minutes ago, I had wanted to scream. I had wanted to hit someone. Lily. And now here I was, lying on the ground, looking at the sky. If it wasn’t Lily’s magic, then it was Alaska ’s, made present by the northern lights.

“Some people get scared. Of course, in Fairbanks, nobody was. The lights were as familiar as rain. But one March, far earlier in the evening than was usual, a tremendous red cloud of light appeared, just to the north. The lights had only just gone out in the dormitory, and as soon as they had, the cloud became instantly visible to all of us inside. We rushed to the window and watched it fold and wave, first one way then the next. And then suddenly—” Lily slapped her hands together, and the light show above me disappeared. I blinked, squinted, and then blinked again.

“Lily?” I sat up on my elbows, and when she didn’t reply, stood up.

When she first touched my hand, I flinched, but then she reached out with her other hand and touched me gently on the chest. I relaxed, and let her take my right hand back in hers.

“People who have lived here their whole lives-white, Yup’ik, Inuit-will tell you the northern lights never make a sound. They did that night. They made a crack, just like that, and they were gone.”

“What happened just now?”

“One of the teachers tried to tell us what the lights really were the next day, like it had something to do with science. But we all knew what the lights really were. Really are: the souls of women who die in childbirth. Suicides. Those who have been murdered. That’s who you see.”

Lily fell silent, and when I looked over a moment later, she was crying. “Who do you see?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Then she said, “When I first came to Anchorage, there were things I could see, I could hear, there were things I knew, but the longer I’ve been here-it’s flowing away from me. I can feel it.” She ran her hands along her arms. “Here-here.”

“Lily,” I said. “I know why you want the journal. You want to find him.” Lily kept rubbing her forearms. “You want to find Saburo.”

“Saburo,” Lily said. “He’s gone. He’s died,” she whispered. “I know it, or knew it. What I want to find is—”

“Whatever you need,” I said. “I’ll help you.”

Lily looked at me.

“I’ll talk to Gurley when he’s calmed down. I’ll get this transfer canceled or postponed, and I’ll go with you. I’ll help.”

“Tonight,” she said. “We have to leave tonight.”

“Lily.”

She stepped away. “Come with me,” Lily said. “I’d go alone-I should have already gone alone. But I don’t want to. He left something for me, out on the tundra. Something I need to find, to see. Something that’s going to be very hard for me to see. I want a friend with me. I want you, Louis.”

“I want to be there, Lily. It’s just that—”

“Jesus, Louis. If you won’t listen to the real reason, how about this one, since it’s the one you’d believe anyway. I need to use you. I can’t get out of Anchorage, can’t get to Bethel, can’t get into the bush, can’t go anywhere, without permission from the military. The whole state is restricted. You know what it’s like to be a civilian here? A half-breed civilian? Wasn’t so long ago the goddamn officers’ club was off-limits to any girl who wasn’t white.”

She just wanted to use me. I’d fallen, again, for that fiction about friendship and trust and whatever simulacrum of love that offered, and then she’d come out with it. Why she really needed me, then, there. The worst part-for her-was that I couldn’t help. A kid sergeant like myself? Like I’d be allowed to escort a civilian-a “half-breed”-into restricted areas.

Years later, with the benefit, or burden, of knowing all that would happen next, I see that she was right, of course-about everything. About what Saburo left her. About the need to leave that night. About how Anchorage was sapping her. About how she thought of me, first, as a friend, and about how she knew I’d never think that was enough.

What I want now is another chance, just one more chance to live this life over. To make the right choice back when I stepped off that train in San Diego, or all the way back, when I left my mother’s womb for someone else’s arms. To answer the right way when Lily asked a final time, Tonight?, to not hear myself say, I can’t, to not hear her say quietly, I know you can, or knew.

Instead I’m just left with the memory of her drawing close a final time, and picking up my hand, my left. She held it to her mouth, I could feel her breaths, tiny and rapid. She drew her lips along the back of my hand. I leaned forward. But she was already backing away. In two paces, she was gone into the dark, and for a horrible moment, I thought she’d leapt off the rock into the rapids, but then I heard someone, something, beating through the brush.

I followed her, the sound of her, for as long as I could hear her. An hour, longer. I had the right answer for her now.

But by the time the sky had gone light again, I had nothing left to follow. No sound, no sign. The forest floor was a trackless carpet of pine needles. I stopped, looked around. Overhead, I heard the first morning planes in and out of Elmendorf Field. I was about to turn and head back the way I had come when I saw something hanging on a tree. It was a tiny mask of weathered gray wood, no bigger than my palm. The face was simple-two eyes, a nose, a mouth set in a line. A small feather dangled from the chin. I took down the mask and turned it over. Then I lifted it to my face, peered through one of the eyeholes, and saw-another feather? I lowered the mask. Sure enough, not twenty yards away. Not far away, I found another feather, and not far from that, another. They were tiny, and easy to miss, but what they led me to was not. A clearing with a giant boulder in the center like a bull’s-eye.

The balloon had missed its target, though. It dangled from a tall tree nearby, explosive payload intact, the whole mess swaying and creaking with each gust of wind.

The first day, it was still possible. The hospital was just a few hours away, I was sure. I could see it plainly on the map: on the coast of the Bering Sea, just below the mouth of the Yukon. We would make it there in time, the boy would live. We’d used up most of the morphine, but I administered what was left in order to keep him comfortable, especially as we’d soon be in open water. He didn’t like the needle, but he was too tired to cry.

I left most of the gear behind. I hadn’t wanted to waste time packing, and thought the trip ahead would be brief. I avoided portages. I ran the throttle wide open whenever I could and tried to let all that was invisible guide me. I listened; I tried to remember how to concentrate. I prayed. But all that came to me was the roar of the motor and, occasionally, the crying and raving of the boy.

Then the clouds came, at first soft and high above us, then lower and thicker until they surrounded the boat and it was no longer clear which way to go. I looked at the map; it was useless. It showed the land and sea: we needed one for clouds.

We spent a day in those clouds, and then another. And when the mission infirmary materialized around noon that third day, I was more angry than relieved. Never finding it would have meant absolution, that I’d gone in search of something that wasn’t there.