The Cloud Atlas

CHAPTER 16

WHEN I GOT BACK TO TODD FIELD, THERE WAS A MESSAGE waiting from Gurley. They’d arrive late that afternoon. Continue my preparations. Tag along on a reconnaissance flight, get a better idea of the terrain.

I’d assumed Lily had all the knowledge of the “terrain” that we would need, but with all the other supplies for our expedition secured, I had nothing else to do, and so hopped on a flight the next morning.

To my surprise, the crew hardly protested at my joining them-the flights were so boring, they said, they’d love someone like me along. When I asked what that meant, I was greeted with some mumbles and laughs, and I realized they knew about Shuyak and the infamous sergeant who jumped out of planes.

I disappointed them. I got up to look out the window once we were in flight, but I didn’t jump. And the landscape disappointed me. Or rather, shocked me. It was the first time in my life that I have ever seen that much nothing. No balloons. No bombs. No soldiers. No smoke, no villages, no people, not even animals, at least animals visible from the air. And you couldn’t see fleas from this high up.

We flew for hours over the same terrain-grasses, a clump of scrub alder here and there, mountains in the distance, and everywhere, water puddling and flooding, curling and spilling from one spot to another via waterways fat or thin. If the angle was wrong, or right, the water’s surface would catch fire with the reflection of the sun, and if you didn’t look away in time, that burst of sun would stay with you, even after you’d blinked. It glowed behind your eyelids, and then reappeared in some other portion of the sky-sometimes looking briefly like a balloon, if that’s what you were looking for, or a second sun, which, if you thought about it (and we didn’t), was no less impossible to believe.

WHAT RONNIE HAS always found difficult to believe is that Alaska ’s mosquitoes bother him more than me. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the departure of his tuunraq, but Ronnie has always been impotent when it comes to Alaska ’s unofficial state bird. Mosquitoes have driven him crazy every summer, especially during what became our annual expedition into the delta. As soon as we were clear of the city limits, the mosquitoes would descend on Ronnie, masses of them, until any remaining patch of exposed skin bore at least one or two drops of blood. Honestly, they never found as much interest in me, a fact I attributed to the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church’s path to salvation, and one that Ronnie attributed to my love of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips.

We’d go for a month or more. Originally, the trips were designed to get me out and around to some of the smaller villages and seasonal camps that would emerge each summer over the delta. But in recent years, Ronnie and I had done a kind of joint revival wherever we stop; I said Mass in the morning, he told stories and attended to shamanic requests at night.

Our pairing was both fun and funny, and surprisingly collegial. Even before he’d gotten wind of what we were up to at the hospice, my bishop frowned on such professional camaraderie. He’d liked things better, it seemed, when Ronnie had been more serious about trying to do me in. Try to pin my boss down on the issue, and the good bishop would always laugh and say “Now, I’m not about to tell you we need to go back to the days when missionaries outlawed dancing and we shipped the kids off to boarding school, but—”

“Then don’t,” I’d say, and things between the bishop and me would be set for another six months or so.

I see now, of course, how it was all adding up.

One thing I never told anyone was how I liked the traveling part of the trips best. Once we’d arrived somewhere, I was Father Louis, and in demand for a steady stream of confessions, baptisms, Masses, a calming word solicited here, a scolding one requested there. But traveling from one spot to another-in a beat-up old skiff that Ronnie had helped me find and repair-I was no one again, just a man out enjoying the widest skies on earth.

Ronnie stayed up most nights. More often than not, I did, too. Because whatever skills Ronnie lacked as a shaman, he more than had as an amateur astronomer, or meteorologist, or skywatcher. It wasn’t that he knew scientific names, or that he had a talent for predicting the weather (although he was fairly good). He simply had a way of using the sky as a canvas at night, using it as a means of telling a story. He’d analyze the way the winds were pushing a cloud, point out how the sun this far north was always fighting to keep from sinking below the horizon. In time I learned that you could get at least half the story from watching his hands alone, the way they moved a cloud or poked a hole in the blue and let a star shine down.

It sounds funny, I know, to be so fascinated with another man, let alone his hands, but it has something to do with being a priest. No, not in that sense, thank you, but more of a professional interest. A good priest is sensitive to his hands the way a pianist might be to his. They are essential to his work-praying, celebrating the sacrifice of the Mass, offering communion, the sign of peace. It’s well known, at least among missionaries, certainly among Jesuits, how Isaac Jogues, Jesuit missionary to Canada in the 1600s, had to later receive special dispensation from the Vatican to say Mass. His hands had been mutilated during his tenure in North America, fingers frozen or eaten, and without the pope’s express permission, he would have been considered unfit to serve at the altar. (Jogues’s later plea to return to Canada was reluctantly granted, but his arrival coincided with sickness and blight. The Mohawks took this as evidence of sorcery and cut off his head.)

I think the real reason I admired Ronnie, or those hands of his, was that he clearly had never used his hands the way I had mine. He was a drunk, a failure, a grifter, but the earth was no worse for his being on it. If Saint Isaac Jogues had ever descended from the sky during one of those trips in the bush, he would have reached for Ronnie’s hand first, and Ronnie would have taken it, whatever condition Saint Isaac’s hand was in, and shook it firmly. Ronnie had a grudge against missionaries but admired men who, like him, had survived.

More to the point, if Jogues ever dropped down, Ronnie would have been the first to see him. Ronnie was always looking up, especially in summer, especially out in the delta. He had a theory that if you sat in one spot long enough, stared at the sky carefully and remembered all you’d seen, you would be the wisest man in the world. All the knowledge of the world was contained in the skies, he said. He was going to write it all down one day, he swore, a book ofamirlut, an atlas of clouds, and it would sell better than any bible. I asked him how he’d ever manage to chart on paper something that was always changing. He shook his head at my stupidity. “Not a map of where things are now,” he said. “No: where they will be.”

I WONDER IF RONNIE’S right, though. That staring at the sky will give you a better sense of what’s to come. After the morning reconnaissance flight, for example, I was back out at Todd Field, searching the skies for some sign of the C-47 Gurley said he’d be on. And when I finally caught sight of one, I followed it all the way down to the ground, half thinking that, if I concentrated hard enough, I’d be able to see if Lily was inside.

But Gurley could have had Saint Isaac or Saint Nicholas aboard; staring revealed nothing. It wasn’t until I saw them emerge that I knew.

They’d taxied to a stop some distance from the terminal, and a pair of jeeps raced out to meet them. I couldn’t make out faces, but the first man at the opened door was certainly Gurley, whose preening I could have spotted from the moon.

And the second person: no hat, no uniform. Just long black hair, black trousers, and a knee-length, Native-style shirtdress I’ve since learned is called a kuspuk. Though I could see well enough that I saw her turn to face my direction briefly before continuing down the stairs, I could not see her features. I couldn’t be sure, but I was. Military men are trained, after all, to recognize the silhouettes of aircraft and ships, friendly and foreign. And Lily had trained me to believe in what I knew, what I knew because I was certain of it, not because I had evidence.

So it was Lily. Gurley hadn’t sent me to Bethel just to get rid of me; the three of us really were going to journey into the bush. But then something happened that shook my faith a bit. Gurley and Lily exchanged words, it seemed, and then Gurley stepped back. The MPs took Lily by both arms, placed her in the jeep, and sped off toward some buildings at the other end of the field.

Gurley watched them go, then turned and began to walk toward me.

GURLEY HAD A NEW name for Lily: Sacagawea. We were discussing their arrival in an office he’d commandeered. I interrupted to ask him where she was. He said she’d been taken to Todd Field’s “VIP quarters,” and then pressed on with his monologue.

“I introduced her this way, as ‘our very own Miss Sacagawea,’ thinking that a rather clever shorthand introduction-to wit, our Native companion and guide-when, to my slowly building horror and delight, I realized that the good men of this forgotten outpost were assuming that that was her actual name. Sacagawea. Tell me, Sergeant, of the many subjects no longer taught in school-is American history among them?”

Gurley seemed hurt when I did not reply.

His eyes were sunken and dark and he looked even more skeletal than usual. His hands were covered with fine scratches, as though his Franklin bouts had devolved to his fighting stray cats. But then I remembered the wall map, the pushpins, and the trails he’d trace across his skin.

“Dear Sergeant,” he said. “You’re rather glum. This is a lonely outpost, and I imagine quiet duty, but look here: you have been given a reprieve, and your friends have come to join you. Where flees your smile? Think of what lies ahead: to catch a spy.”

For a moment, my mind had seized on fleas. I’d been out of Gurley’s company for so long, I’d lost some of my ear for his strange language. As a result, it took an extra beat for the words to come out of my already-open mouth. “Sir, I’m not sure that—”

“Splendid, dear Belk. You are still among the living. You are sentient and curious and apparently sober. And so you have your questions. But more important, do you have my spy? Or will we, in fact, have to set out after him?” The words sped from his mouth, faster and faster. He smiled, as if he noticed this, too, and thought it delightful. “Forgive my eager possessiveness: but yes, before we speak of the devil we know-fair Sacagawea, dear Lily-let us speak of the devil we don’t. Mmm?”

Mmm. I told Gurley about my wandering around town. I told him about the Emporium of Everything, and about Jap Sam. Maybe Lily wasn’t worried if Gurley didn’t find anything-anyone-but I was. So I tried to describe the now-interned Sam in such a way that Gurley might take him for our missing quarry. That would mean we could just pack up and leave Bethel -ruining Gurley’s fun and Lily’s quest, but giving us all, I thought, a better chance of finishing out the war alive. You didn’t need Lily’s kind of magic to sense the evil that was looming. Or maybe you did, and that magic had attached itself to me: here in Bethel, far from the numbing, civilizing influences of Anchorage, the spiritual world hummed that much closer to everyone.

Gurley wasn’t the least bit interested in Jap Sam. He wanted Saburo. Lily’s Saburo. The enemy’s Saburo. His Saburo.

“No sign of him, sir,” I said. “I didn’t go house to house, of course. But you’d think-in a town this small-he’d attract attention, too much attention to hide.” I made another attempt to derail the search. “If you want to know what I think, sir—”

“Always a dangerous preface, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir. But I think he died. I think he’s dead. Captured, and we don’t know about it, maybe, but I bet he”-I tried to call on a little magic for inspiration-“drowned. There’s a lot of water around here,” I added, not hearing how foolish that sounded until I saw Gurley’s face.

“There is that” Gurley said. “I assume you’re joking?” he added, suddenly brusque. He patted his pockets for cigarettes that weren’t there, and stood. “Perhaps you forgot we saw him. Lily and I, both. In the mist. In Anchorage. Perhaps you—” He started to pace. “I’m afraid I-I’m afraid I didn’t tell you everything about the other night, about what Lily told me.” He was scanning the room as he spoke, not looking at me. If he had, he would have seen me turning red with alarm: What now? “She swore me to secrecy,” he said, talking more to himself now. “And what could I say? I shouldn’t tell you, but I will, because it’s relevant to what we have to do. To our mission. To our quest. But I tell you this in the strictest of confidence because-because-no woman, no girl, no girl even with a past as-as-weathered as Lily’s deserved to have happen to her what happened-Louis!” He spun on me, with such force I almost burst out, I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have gone to see her! He knew! He had to; he was just toying with me, but before I could speak he said something even more bizarre: “He raped her, Belk. The filthy, yellow-when we find him, Belk, no quarter. Lily. Lily.”

My heart was still pounding at the news he’d just delivered, and it was a moment or two before I was able to remind myself that he’d made this up-that the shadowy figure in the mist with Lily had only been me, that Saburo’s presence had been Lily’s invention, just as this rape was now Gurley’s. But was it? Had she told him something else? Had Saburo been there, in the forest, farther on, in the dark, Lily running toward him, his having just arrived by balloon? No: Lily had lied to Gurley She’d told the truth to me. She always did. But-maybe- just not-Lily, what about the baby? Why hadn’t you ever told me—

“So it was wrong to grow attached,” Gurley said, his eyes full of tears, but not full enough to cry. I wondered now if it mattered whether Gurley had invented the rape; he clearly believed there had been one, just as Lily believed there had been a Saburo. He wiped his nose with the heel of his hand, and then held his face for a moment. “A ring. There was a ring, Belk.”

“There was,” I said, automatically.

“He was always there,” he said. “Even before… this. I knew him before she told me of him, I could see him, sense him, somewhere back behind her eyes, whenever she and I kissed. Made love.” He sat in his chair, somewhat calmer now, and found a handkerchief, which he unfolded and then twisted between his hands. “I could never have all of her. I knew she wanted me to have as much as I would, but somewhere, back in there, deep inside her, this fiend held on-it’s like he holds some piece of her soul. Holds it so tight that he is able to pull her all the way out here.”

I’m right here, sir: I wanted Gurley to look up, see me. I wanted to tell Gurley that I was this other person, but more than that, I wanted it to be true.

But when he did look up, all he saw was Saburo. “We have, what? Two days now, less maybe, before that major in Fairbanks sends his dogs out across the tundra in search of plague or spies. I’ve said I wanted to find the prize before him, and I do. But the reason is not so much for glory but revenge. If the major catches him, this spy becomes a prisoner of war, a resource. If I catch him-and we will, whether it takes forty hours or months-I will finish it. I will find him, remove him, and release Lily, to me.”

And what would happen when we didn’t find him? Lily said he was gone. But Gurley was determined to find him-he’d have to find, and kill, someone. Lily hadn’t thought through this part of her plan. But then, it hadn’t really been a plan.

“Sir,” I said, making one last attempt. “I’m just not sure we will find anyone. It’s more than a needle in a haystack, sir, it’s—”

“It’s a needle in a haystack for the major,” said Gurley. “But we have Lily.” He smiled. “We have you.” He rose.

“I’m just not sure, sir, what we’ll find. What if he’s dead?”

The color slowly returned to Gurley’s cheeks. It was his fury rising in him, but in a way, it was a relief to witness-I’d had plenty of experience dealing with Gurley furious, and could steel myself against it. I’d been frightened, on the other hand, to find myself vulnerable to feeling sympathy when faced with Gurley despondent and brokenhearted.

That danger had passed.

He walked toward me, closer and closer, until he’d backed me up half across the room. “You wish him dead. Fair enough. So do I. But you wish him dead because you wish to be done with this mission, this war, me. You are scared, Sergeant. Both understandable and unattractive.” And closer. “This man is a spy” Gurley continued. “A spy for the enemy. The enemy whose one interest is slaughter. Have you heard what’s happening in the South Pacific, Sergeant? Of the bodies of men and women, men like you, missing eyes and hands and whatever they had between their legs, stuffed into their mouths?” Gurley’s mouth was now quite close to mine. “This-Saburo- raped a woman that I love, that I hope to spend the rest of a very, very long life caring for. If you need more reasons, God knows they’re offering us plenty-from fires to plague to who knows what next-go ahead and do this for your country. But you know what? Our country’s got more than ten million in uniform fighting for it.” He stared at me hard. “Lily’s only got me.”

I’M NOT SURE IF it was a product of our conversation or his simmering madness or his fear of the major on our heels, but two minutes after he’d left, he returned and declared that we would leave at midnight. We may not have agreed on much about Saburo, but he didn’t think Saburo was hiding in town, either. I thought Gurley would sneak off to Lily’s “VIP quarters” before our departure, but he had me walk him down to the riverbank, doling out additional instructions all the while. He confirmed the time with me, and then I watched him hire a boat to take him across the Kuskokwim to town, in search of a drink or worse.

I figured I had at least an hour, maybe more.

I walked quickly back to the headquarters building, in search of Lily. When I asked the duty officer about her whereabouts, he gave me a blank look. He was putting on a front, of course; Lily had to be the only woman on the base-perhaps the only woman on the base in six months or more. Finally, he leaned back and said, “Oh, you mean the prisoner.”

Now it was my turn to put on a front, and mask my alarm with a knowing nod. The prisoner. The man said he’d been left instructions that she was not to be disturbed, but I countered that I was under orders from Gurley, and the man accepted my bluff. Gurley had obviously made his usual terrifying impression.

They didn’t have cells on the base, so they had put Lily in a signal shed by the airfield with a guard stationed out front “for her protection.” When I entered and the guard closed the door behind me, Lily was sitting perfectly still in the middle of the room, on the only thing in the room, a chair.

Neither of us said anything; we just looked at each other. I’m not sure what my face looked like, but Lily kept hers completely blank. I could have been Gurley I could have been Tojo, I could have been a six-foot raven. She stared.

I looked at her hands; they were cuffed. What had Gurley done?

I knelt beside her and tried to take one hand of hers in mine, but she moved away. “I’m okay,” she said.

“Lily, I’m so sorry,” I said. “Who did this? I’m going to get you out of here. No, I promise. I think-I think Gurley’s finally lost it. I mean, completely. I think he’s gone, or going. I don’t think it will be long now, not at all. Jesus-he wants to leave at midnight. And he’s got you locked in a closet. In handcuffs.”

She shook her head, and rolled her eyes-the first I had seen so far of the old Lily. “He has me here for my safety,” she said and smiled. “He told them I was a prisoner of war, someone with information. He told them that so they wouldn’t bother me. So no one would wonder why a captain flew an Eskimo girl out to the bush.” She smiled, and I couldn’t decide what to do. Was Gurley this crazy? Was she?

I felt bad for her, but now I also felt angry. Part of it was the old anger, jealousy-Gurley held her completely in sway. The new anger was that this growing debacle was all her doing. She’d told Gurley some story about Saburo in order to get herself back to Bethel, and now here she was, cuffed, and here I was, suddenly party to the whole rotten plan. “Why are you doing this?” I asked, but I got up as I said it, and ended up delivering the words more to the room than her.

But she still heard me. “Louis,” she said. “I’m so close now. I’m almost there.”

I turned to look at her and realized that Gurley was with us-or rather, within me. Standing there, eyes cast down at her, chin pointing up, disdain on my face. I was becoming him or had become him. And I couldn’t shake it off. Maybe Gurley was a wizard, too. He’d obviously possessed Lily somehow, even though she was a shaman in her own right. Who was I to think I could resist? And when I spoke, it was his words, his tone.

“A rapist?” I said, and everything about her changed. Her face, her hands, her body, flushed and strained against the cuffs. “You told him Saburo was a rapist? To get yourself out here?”

“What?”

“He told me Saburo raped you. Lily, what does he really know about Saburo?” She clasped her hands together until the knuckles went white. “You told him he was Japanese, a spy, but did you tell him everything about that summer, Lily? Did you tell him everything that he’d find out if he’d gone walking around town today, like me?”

I was ready for her to scream, but what came out was more of a groan-“No.” Then she said, “Louis, don’t do this.”

“What was the baby’s name?” I said.

She looked at me for a long, silent moment, waiting for me to unsay the words, or maybe for history itself to unravel back past the point that there had ever been a war, a Saburo, a long summer under open skies full of light. Then she cried. I closed my eyes, and kept them closed when she finally began to speak.

“He didn’t have a name,” she said. Then nothing. When her voice returned, she went on. “I knew it was going to be a girl. I was going to name her Samantha-Sam, for Jap Sam, who’d been so good to me all that time until he was taken away. Introduced me to Saburo.” She stopped. I could feel her looking at me, waiting for me to open my eyes, but I didn’t. I was too frightened of what I’d done or started. “But it wasn’t a girl. I should have known then! What woman with the kind of sight I supposedly had wouldn’t know what lay inside her, a boy or a girl? Wouldn’t know he was dying?” She stopped again, and it was a minute or two before she started once more. “That little boy, inside me, dying, drowning like I’d thrown him into the sea. And then—” Lily stopped, caught her breath and tried again. “And then, he was in my arms, dead. Bella and the other aunties wanted a doctor or a priest.” I could feel her staring at me. “Keep your eyes closed, then,” she said. “That’s what I want. What I wanted. No doctor, no priest, nobody. Nobody to come say, Lily the half-breed girl, whose parents ran away!’ ‘Lily, who went away last summer with that Jap and came back pregnant!’ ‘Lily who thought she could have a baby on her own, and it came out dead! Look at her! Ha!’” She sniffed and coughed.

“How much did Bella tell you? Did she tell you the story she told me? Bella, so smart. All the aunties, so smart. That’s what they thought. Them and all the elders before them and before them, all of them. And now, they said, don’t cry. Don’t cry.”

And now: the angalkuq. I waited for Lily to tell me about the shaman, but she did something more curious. She told me the story Bella told her, the story she’d wanted to tell me in the forest, the story that Ronnie so startled me with when he retold it yesterday.

There was a boy, a baby boy, and his mother.

But in Lily’s version, in Bella’s version, it is the baby who dies and the mother who weeps. Don’t cry, Bella told Lily, and Lily told me, crying. Don’t cry, or the baby will wake. Don’t cry, or the baby will wake and lose his way to the land of the dead. And then you will have him with you always. Always a baby, always needing you to carry him, soothe him, always making you cry. Mind the story of the mother whose baby died and could not stop crying. The village begged her. Shamans begged her. Her husband begged her. But she would not stop, and the baby awoke, and he never left. Eventually, they all moved away. The other families, the whole village, even her husband. She was left all alone with the baby. You see her tears every summer when the snow thaws and the delta floods.

Lily looked at Bella, still crying, unable to speak. Then what did it mean that her summer with Saburo had been so dry? Bella surprised her: Ever go hunting for mouse food? Lily held her breath, felt the prickling along her arms. Reach down sometimes, and what do you find? Mouse food? The little gnawed roots, shaped like teardrops? Little teardrops. Whose tears do you think those are?

Bella reached over then, Lily said, and tried to take the baby from her. No, Lily said, and then repeated the word, with a hiss. Bella recoiled, shocked and hurt.

Remember the story, Bella said. Remember what happens. The mother’s left all alone. Everyone leaves her.

“It’s just a story,” Lily shrieked.

“Then where’s your husband?” Bella said, and left the room.

THERE WAS NO SHAMAN, no angalkuq from Lower Kalskag in Lily’s story. There was only Saburo, her lover from Japan, who came, and disappeared, later that night. Lily said she had called to him, had sent animal spirits sprinting out across the tundra in search of him, and then there he was. Proof of magic, or love. And those hands: she had loved him for those beautiful hands, and now she knew why. The way they moved the hair from her face, the way they pulled away the bloody sheets, the blankets, slowly, gently, and laid bare the boy. She had not let anyone else hold the baby, and now it seemed obvious why: no one else had hands fit for the task, to hold something that tiny, that fragile, that hopeless. She told him the story Bella had told her, and she loved him all the more for his reaction: he cried. They cried together, and while they were crying, whispered and planned.

Saburo would take the boy away, bury him in a special place in the bush, build him a tiny shrine as he would have done were they in Japan. Lily begged to come with him, but he insisted she rest. He would come back for her, bring some token from the shrine, and then-he would spirit her back to Japan. He didn’t say how.

Days passed. A week, then two. “I was worried, but not scared,” Lily went on. “I thought I had powers, and I thought they were strong, despite everything that happened: something had made him appear, after all. But nothing was making him come back. I went outside one night and listened for him, finally. After a while, I was sure I heard him, very faintly, very far away. In Anchorage. So I went.”

But Anchorage was too “noisy,” Lily said. Once she got there, she couldn’t find Saburo anywhere. In time, she needed money, just to survive, and, once she’d saved up enough, to get back home. Another Yup’ik woman told her about fortune-telling. She didn’t tell her, though, what the men really came to find out-whether you would have sex with them. If you did, they paid you more. And as scared as she was of losing Saburo, as scared as she might have been for what he thought of what she was doing, she kept doing it, because something told her that she was getting closer.

She was: Gurley arrived one night, and she knew immediately that she’d found a link to Saburo. Lily didn’t know what the link was, not at first, but she knew she had to cultivate a relationship with Gurley. When she did, and various details slowly surfaced about his work, such as the balloons (Gurley! Master of secrets!), she knew she’d done right. Eventually, he’d lead her to Saburo.

But after her initial excitement about Gurley’s connection to Saburo, the notion that he would lead her to him began to fade. Not because it seemed impractical or implausible, but because-well, it will sound preposterous coming out of my mouth, so I’ll just quote what Lily said:

“There is an old tradition, from generations ago, that the night after a hunt, the women of the less successful hunters would seek out the men who had been successful, and have sex with them. It was thought they might then pass on some of that power to their own less fortunate husbands. It had nothing to do with love or even sex. It was about doing all you could to make sure your husband, your lover, would bring honor to your family. Gurley was successful.”

I think Lily asked me then, “Does that make sense?” I don’t remember answering. But I do remember what she said next.

“We stayed on and on in Anchorage, Gurley and I. We didn’t leave. And any idea I had about finding Saburo faded, and faded, until I could no longer see his face anymore. And then his face started to be replaced with another. I studied it each night in my dreams, and each night it came closer and closer, until one night I saw who it was. I woke up and saw him there beside me: Gurley.”

By now, I had opened my eyes, but I wish I hadn’t. Then I could have imagined some look of disgust on her face when she said the name Gurley, but instead I had to watch her as tears came to her eyes, and listen as she went on: “You see why I have to tell it to you this way? Why I can’t simply say that I fell in love with him? Because I had loved another man. And we’d had a baby a boy and we’d lost him, and then I lost Saburo, and then there was this other man, so strong and proud, and he was going to help me.”

It wasn’t love, she said. That’s not wishful revising, at least not on my part: that’s what she said. She said it wasn’t anything she could really even put into words. But whatever the connection was, she needed it, she needed him. All the while, she told herself that the need sprang from her need to find Saburo, but eventually she began to wonder if that was true.

Gurley had begun to talk about life after the war, together. About some property he’d bought while posted in California, north of San Francisco. It was near the ocean, part of an old ranch. There was a hill you could stand on and see-well, everything. That’s where the house would go. Big and broad with a long porch that would ramble around the whole of the first floor. From there, you’d be able to see the land unfurling all the way down to the water, where the ocean would carry the eye on to the horizon and the clouds above. Such clouds, Gurley had told her, such a sun: the pleasures of the sky there were so vast. How like Gurley, I thought, to think that some small panorama he’d purchased might sell a girl who’d grown up beneath the world’s biggest sky. Still, I could hear him: “Such a sky as would befit a century’s worth of painters! Imagine, heaven’s cloak…” And what is there to say, really, against that, or against him? Decades on, I’m not sure I can tell you precisely what the sky looked like above Mary Star of the Sea, or what the walk from the orphanage to the ocean looked like. But I can remember that imaginary house of Gurley’s. I can see them both there; I can see every blade of grass, every window, every flower, every cloud above.

I told Lily it sounded beautiful, and she shook her head quickly.

“That’s why I was so glad you came, Louis. I was falling for him, I had fallen for him-so much of me still has.”

My heart swelled, is that the word? I was precisely the knight I had taken myself for.

“When you came, you were so different. So young.” We smiled. “And so, so frightened. So unlike anyone else who’d ever come to that dingy little office. I felt it immediately. And you frightened me. You’d been sent, I knew that right away. Not like Gurley You’d been sent to remind me.”

“To what?”

“To-to-rescue me. To shame me. To remind me to-stop crying. To go home, to find my son, his father. Saburo.”

Things were going horribly wrong. I’d been sent to rescue her, but for myself. I tried to protest: “Lily, I-no one sent me.”

“No one you knew, but you knew, somehow, didn’t you?” she said.

Lily, I loved you: but I didn’t say it. The words were there, but all I could do was cough. “You knew” she went on, “that I didn’t need a lover, that I needed a friend.”

If I coughed again, if I even opened my mouth to speak, I knew I might lose whatever was in my stomach.

“You understand,” said Lily, relieved.

I pointed to the door.

“Gurley doesn’t, but you do. I don’t even understand. I don’t even understand what I feel about Gurley-that’s why I came here, out here, where I was born, where I can understand things better.” I knocked on the door for the guard to let me out. “The sooner we go, Louis, the better!” she called after me. The guard smirked. I wanted to slap him, but could barely manage to nod as I stumbled down the corridor.

I kept walking until I reached the riverbank. I found our boat, a long, broad skiff, equipped with five days’ worth of food, gallons of gas and water, tents, and for appearance’s sake, a crate of bomb disposal equipment-tools, plastic explosives, blasting wire, and a little ten-cap hell box. There was one other small item, too, one that I’d secreted from Gurley’s office and now kept hidden in a knapsack. I wouldn’t fail Lily this time: I’d brought Saburo’s map.

I looked it all over and then I sat, the good friend. I stared across the river and listened for some sign of Gurley-the whine of a boat, the crack of a gunshot.