The Cloud Atlas

CHAPTER 19

I TOOK A BREATH, I KNELT, I LIFTED HIM UP. AND THEN I carried the boy back to the spot where we’d beached the boat. It was a longer trip than we thought-I’d estimate a mile, but trudging through the tundra was such slow going, it could have been ten. The mosquitoes clotted around his open wounds like shifting scabs.

Lily and I eventually decided the best thing was to undo the mess of bandages Gurley had applied and apply a proper tourniquet, or as proper a one as we could manage. We also resplinted the arm and bound it to his side to immobilize it completely. But we only came to these decisions gradually, after several painful false starts. The boy’s screams grew louder and louder. Several times I found myself wondering if Gurley was right: it would be better if the boy had died, or could die, quickly.

There were moments when he seemed he would. I’ve seen it happen to enough others in the hospital to know he was going into shock. The boy’s red, windburned face somehow managed to lose all its color-or rather, soak up a new color, the blank white of the endlessly cloudy sky. At times, his color returned, but then I couldn’t be sure- perhaps it was just that the light was failing and it was no longer easy to tell what he looked like.

Lily paid no attention to the sky or me or Gurley whom we could now see, back at the crash site, sticking out of the horizon like the last post of some abandoned fence. Lily gave the boy water and fed him broken bits of cracker. When he shivered, she found a blanket, wrapped it around him tightly. And when night finally did come, she had me set up a tent and help her move the boy inside. Then she crawled in herself. I tried to stop her before she went into the tent.

“Lily,” I said, and she twisted around to shush me.

“What?”

“Lily,” I said again. I still hadn’t told her about Gurley’s diagnosis. The more I’d seen of the boy, the more I thought Gurley was wrong. I didn’t want to tell Lily about any of this, but I didn’t want her to expose herself any more than she had, either.

I said nothing.

“Louis,” she said. “Will you keep watch?”

“Lily—”

“Please, Louis. I’m worried about Gurley. I’m worried about the boy. I’m worried about him and the boy, what he’ll do. Just wait.”

She disappeared into the tent for several minutes. I heard some whispers, tears, and then nothing at all. Finally, her face reappeared.

“Where is he?” she asked, squinting toward the crash site. But it was too dark now to see, or to tell Gurley apart from the lonely stunted trees that cropped up here and there. She climbed out and stood up.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought he was staying out there to defuse or detonate the remaining bombs, but I never heard anything.” What I’d really been listening for was the sound of a single shot from Gurley’s sidearm, his skull perhaps muffling the sound if he held the barrel close. But there had been nothing. Just the wind, and when it paused, the whine of mosquitoes finding an ear.

“Did Gurley find out his name?” she said.

“His name?”

“I can’t read the writing on his coveralls.”

I stared at the tent. “Lily, I don’t know. No, if he did, he didn’t say. I-I don’t know Japanese either. Didn’t Saburo-your Saburo-teach you any?”

“This is my Saburo,” she said. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them once more, they were full of tears. “I-I think I killed him.”

“Lily, what’s happened?” I moved for the tent, but she stopped me. From inside the tent, the boy gave a little moan, and Lily winced. More than winced, really-she buckled slightly, grabbing her elbows, hunching her shoulders. “Can’t you hear him?” she said. “I killed him,” she said softly.

I grabbed her. “Lily, the boy? You killed the boy? Right now? Jesus, Lily. What are you doing? Gurley would’ve—”

Another tiny moan came from the tent.

The Yup’ik say the tundra is haunted. But haunted is a white man’s word, and it doesn’t mean what the Yup’ik mean. The spirits found in the bush-animal and human, living and dead-do not haunt, they exist, as real and present as any other aspect of life: water, breath, food.

I didn’t understand this for a long time. When I was a young priest, I would tell people that ghosts only haunted those who believed in them. Don’t put your faith in specters, I would say, put your faith in God: that faith will be returned.

Only later, too late, did I learn what is really true, a truth that, in some ways, has nothing to do with God: ghosts only haunt those who do not believe. Someone who already believes can never be surprised to see something he knows already exists. The shadow that disappears into a corner of the community center one winter night is doubtless your cousin who drowned the year before. The creaking floor that wakens you is your husband, finally returned from the hunt. The face outside the hospital window is an angalkuq, pulling rain from the skies.

And the boy in the tent, the tan’gaurluq who dropped from a hole in the blue—

“Louis,” Lily started, stopped, and then started again. “I don’t know why this happened. Or how. I was so anxious to get back out here, where I thought my powers would be strong again. That’s why I went on my journey the other night. To see what had changed since the last time I had been able to see that other world-that world of spirits and life and everything real. And I wanted to see Saburo, see where he had put our little boy. I didn’t see anything at first-but what I saw-what I finally saw frightened me.”

Lily had seen another child. At first she thought it was her own, but came to understand that it wasn’t. It was a boy a Japanese boy who had come from beyond. And since no spirit comes into the world without another life departing it, Lily explained, she knew then that Saburo had died, and this boy had come to tell her that. The spirits- Saburo-had sent him to her, just as they had sent me. But whereas they had sent me to remind Lily that Saburo lived, they had sent this boy to let her know that Saburo was dead.

Worse, she believed she had killed him, by falling in love or into the spell that Gurley cast-whatever it was, she had lost hold of Saburo. “I let go of his memory, Louis, and when I did, I let go of him, he sank away, he died. No one should take another lover while the first still lives, while you are still in love with him. I knew this.”

I know: madness. Arctic hysteria. Or half a dozen newfangled names they now have for conditions like Lily’s (or Gurley’s, for that matter). But we had none of those names then. We had a first-aid kit with some bandages and another kit to blow up bombs. We had a boat. A balloon. A boy.

Lily’s maternal instincts already lay raw and exposed; it was easy for her-perhaps essential for her-to believe this boy from the sky had been sent by the sky. Any hope for the happy repose-and forgiveness-of the Saburo she lost now lay with this child, whatever his name was.

She was absolutely certain, and wanted me to be, too.

“He cannot die,” she said. “If he dies, I will die with him, and I will join Saburo, but not in a good place. In this place, we will wander, all of us, searching for good souls to take us.”

“Lily,” I interrupted.

“Louis, listen to me: if the boy lives, he may go on to a life of honor, he may do the work that the spirit world requires of the living. Feeding us, sheltering us, bringing us peace until that day when he has finally done enough and we may all rest.” She turned to the tent, and then to me. “Louis,” she said. “I’m not-I can’t do what I once could. I’m not strong enough, not against a man with a gun. But you know Gurley You’d know how to stop him. Just don’t let him take the boy. I’m afraid of what he’ll do. He’s just a boy. Louis? Promise me. Please. Louis. Protect him.” She clasped her hands together. “Us,” she said finally. “Protect us.”

AND WHAT DID I say then? With Lily’s eyes shining, or maybe glistening, with what faint light still held, and looking to me for help?

I said nothing. I stepped past her, around the tent, and into the brush, toward Gurley. I was afraid I would start crying-over the childish confusion and disappointment over everything, but finally, over that us-“protect us.” She might have been talking about the boy, or Saburo, or even in some strange way, Gurley-people whom she had loved. But not me. I had been a friend, just a friend, and worse still, I was now failing at that as well.

Stumbling in and out of holes, crashing into the brush here and there, I was making enough noise to hide any sniffling, and later, enough noise to allow Gurley to walk up and take me by surprise.

“Sergeant?” he said, his voice not quite a whisper. He spoke as though we’d been planning to meet, just like this.

I squinted hard to make sure my eyes hid any trace of tears and answered him: “Sir?”

“That’s a good lad,” he said softly. “You had a choice to make back there, me or her, your country or your crotch, and I’m glad to see you chose your country.”

It started as a punch, my right fist right to his face, but I was too angry, had been imagining this for too long, and found myself following my fist with my head, plowing into him like we were brawling in a schoolyard.

But there’d never been this much blood in the schoolyard, nor the orphanage. I’d never found myself atop a foe so quickly or easily swinging away, had never discovered how nauseating it is to beat someone who won’t beat back.

And he wouldn’t. Not after blood had run into the seams between every tooth, not when his left eye had swollen into its own kind of bubo, purple and wet, not even when I-I know I didn’t do this, that I couldn’t have done it, but I remember it all the same-when I bit his forehead, right at the hairline, and tasted blood.

He laughed, not a sensible laugh, but an off-key cackle that I could feel-because that’s where I was sitting-in his diaphragm. That’s why I bit him, if I bit him. If he laughed at my fists and feet, what did I have left? My head. Those teeth. I’d learned this from Gurley this wildness.

The bite caused his laugh to switch to a screech, but it was all part of the same wail, and when I stood, disgusted as much with myself as with him, the laugh returned. Then he felt around in the back of his mouth for something, and winced. Two crimson fingers returned with what must have been a tooth.

“Tallyho!” Gurley chortled, or gurgled. He held up the tooth to me and I looked away. I expected him to get up, but he lay back and blinked several times and looked at the sky.

I was about to walk away when he spoke. “She’s still with the boy?” he asked, and I almost had to ask him who.

I finally nodded, once, and he nodded in return, and struggled to sit, and then stand. The place where he had fallen had begun to fill with water, and he bent over the puddle to study his face. When he stood again, I looked him over, embarrassed. He looked both worse and better than I thought he would, like he’d been attacked by a dog, or had snapped his head against a steering wheel.

I turned away again.

“There, there, Sergeant,” he said. “I’m sorry. Very sorry. We should have gotten that over with long, long ago. Shouldn’t we have? Shouldn’t we?”

I left him there. I walked away-away from Gurley away from the balloon, away from the tents and the boats. I walked toward nothing. But I didn’t get far before I ran out of land. I waded in, stumbled, soaked myself, and retreated. I walked back toward Gurley, who was still talking-to me, to himself-and tried a different direction. Again I sank. I just wanted to leave, and leave all of them behind. I wanted to keep walking until I could no longer hear Gurley’s voice, until I could no longer see anything. But wherever I stepped, the water rose around my feet. I wanted a balloon of my own.

I returned and stood by Gurley. He kept talking, and talking, whether or not I was looking at him. Usually I wasn’t. I was embarrassed with what I’d done to him. I might as well have attacked the little Japanese boy; Gurley looked almost as pathetic and wild-eyed.

Gurley made it worse by insisting that he forgave me. He said this in a dozen different ways, cited anecdotes, quoted the Bible, said he understood, offered consolation, commiseration. Unfortunately, I was young enough and Christian enough to want and need, and worst of all, believe, that forgiveness. Which meant that when he finally worked his monologue back around to Lily and the boy, the two of them in the tent, it was already too late for me. The most potent tranquilizing drug would not have worked on me so quickly or so well. He was planning, and I was listening. “A little awkward, a little awkward,” he concluded, “but-we’ll make it work. We’ll find a way. We’ve had bigger challenges in this war, haven’t we, Sergeant?” I looked away. “And bigger yet to come. Now, let us find our way back to the boat, and I shall tell you what we-what you, in particular, have to do.”

Gurley used what light the night provided to pick a way back to the boat that didn’t lead us directly past the tent. There wasn’t much of a moon, but somehow the tundra still managed a silver glow. I was too full of all that Lily had told me to stop him or even speak up. The only things I had to say in fact, were about Lily and I couldn’t find a way to tell Gurley what I knew. Did he know that Lily really loved him? Actually the word probably wasn’t love but it was something like that. Needed him. Had found herself bound to him. Gurley meanwhile, spoke of bombs and fuses and delays, and whether we had the equipment required to detonate something remotely. Then he stopped talking, and after a moment, I realized he was waiting for a reply.

“I think we do-I think we have all that, sir,” I said, having trouble readjusting from the world we were in to the one we had left, where there were rules, a war, and bombs, and people like me who dealt with them. “You want to blow up the balloon after all?” I asked, mostly to get additional time to refocus. It took a moment: after Lily’s frantic whispers, I’d forgotten that it had been a balloon that had brought the boy here, not spirits, not magic, not Lily.

Gurley stopped walking and looked at me warily. “Yes,” he said. “I want to blow up-the balloon.” He looked over my shoulder in the direction of the tent. “No need to save it. We certainly have enough balloon carcasses by now,” he said. “But you see the problem, Sergeant- yes?”

Peter betrayed Jesus three times before the cock crowed at dawn. To my knowledge, the devil has asked me to be faithful just once-right there, before dawn-and I obeyed: I listened.

Gurley wanted to blow up the balloon, yes, but he also wanted to blow up the boy. A living, breathing Japanese who’d arrived by balloon was a glorious prize, but an outdated one. The war was ending. Worse yet, men like the major in Fairbanks would add the boy to the two dead “fishermen” and decide the sum equaled the start of a massive, and manned, balloon campaign. That could only mean extra months (years?) in Alaska. No: we had to dispose of the balloon and the boy destroy any trace that they had ever existed, and we had to do it immediately. The major and the men from Ladd Field were likely just hours away from deciding to strike out across the tundra in search of germs.

The boy was dying, Gurley said, building his case. What was wanted was mercy, not agony, not for anyone. Now, he couldn’t put a gun to the boy’s head, Gurley explained. He wasn’t a barbarian. And he couldn’t ask me to do it: I wasn’t enough of a soldier. (He didn’t even pause to smirk.) No, things had to proceed according to the natural order of things, which was this: whoever had put the boy in that balloon (“A stowaway?” I asked, merely to have some way to counter him, but Gurley rolled his eyes) had intended for him to die in the ensuing explosion. When the balloon crashed, it should have exploded. He should have died. Our presence had upset this plan; we could give fate its due by placing the boy back at the crash site, and then detonating the balloon. This was not about the army, or war, or anything else. It was about predestination. The divine order of things. We had the equipment, which was simple enough. C3, blasting wire, a little hell box. Put the boy in position, affix the explosives, run the wire, retreat to safety, depress the plunger, and—

“Lily?” I asked.

Gurley spun around, then turned back to me, relieved. We’d reached the boat. “I thought you meant she was here.”

“No,” I said, taking a quick look for her myself. “But she’ll hear the blast.”

Gurley nodded and exhaled and said nothing for a while.

When he started speaking again, his voice had changed. Just slightly, but the effect was startling. “It’s too much,” he said. “It’s too much to ask her, too, to die-of simple heartache,” he added. “Not over me, of course,” he said, his face tight with disdain. “But dear Saburo.” I stared. “Rapist and rival, and spy.” He waited, clearly looking for a sign in me that I understood what he meant and did not need him to go on. But whatever he saw wasn’t enough, so he continued. “As you must know, hormone-besotted as you are, Fair Belk, Miss Lily has become a… difficulty, yes. ’Tis true?”

“Sir,” I said, and stopped. “My-my God—”

“Yes,” Gurley said. “Your God. Does not smile down upon this part of the world. No, tremble not, Sergeant. As convenient as it would be if Lily, too, lay beside the boy, beside the balloon, only to disappear with the rest of the mess, it is a trifle inconvenient as well,” he admitted. “Morally.”

“She-loves you,” I said. It was all I could think of to say. “She told me.”

Gurley looked at me. First his face said: a lie. Then it said: how sweet if it were true. And then he spoke. “Well, Sergeant,” he said. “You see our dilemma.”

I COULD HAVE REFUSED to set the charge against the balloon. Refused to unspool the wire, refused to attach it to the hell box. I could have refused to knife the wall of the tent where the boy and Lily lay, refused to snatch the boy through the gash-his screams instant, inhuman-and sprint for the crash site while Gurley wrestled with Lily quieting her with the force of his words and, when that didn’t work, force alone. I could have refused to set the boy in the place Gurley had designated within the balloon’s wreckage. I could have refused to bind the boy’s arms and legs to the control frame just as Gurley insisted he would tie Lily to the boat, or to stakes in the ground, or to whatever he had to in order to keep her from following us back to the balloon.

But I did as I was told, and, with Lily’s plea still echoing, a little bit more. When Gurley and I met, however-me walking back from the balloon site and him walking toward it-I realized, too late, that I could have done better.

He looked furious, on the point of weeping. He didn’t break his stride nor even turn to look at me as he spoke: “Change of plans, Sergeant.” I think my heart stopped beating. I certainly stopped walking, and turned to watch him lurch through the swampy tundra toward the balloon.

He had killed Lily. I had failed her, utterly. And now what: Was I supposed to chase after him? Leap on him, press his face into the nearest puddle and drown him? Or race to where Lily lay, apologize to whatever life of her still remained?

I ran to Lily. There’d be time enough to deal with Gurley But Saburo, Jap Sam, the girl who died in childbirth at her boarding school-all the seeing spirits might all be drawing Lily into the clouds, even now.

I said prayers as I ran. Ones I knew by heart and others I made up. Whatever I said, though, it must have been powerful. Because when I reached the camp, I found Lily, alive and upright, packing our supplies onto the boat.

“Lily,” I cried. I went to hug her, but something about the way she looked at me stopped me short.

“Where’s Gurley?” she said. I was anxious to explain away my role in hustling the boy away from camp, to mention how I needed to do so in order for the rest of the plan to work, but Lily wasn’t interested. “Where is he?” she asked again, nervous now.

I know what I wanted to say, but I hadn’t heard the noise I’d been waiting for yet. So instead of answering her directly, I explained what I’d done. I’d protected them, her and the boy, and by extension, Saburo. Gurley had wanted me to wire the balloon to explode. He’d planned to place the boy in the balloon, retreat to a little tuft of tundra where I’d placed the hell box. Then he’d depress the plunger, the charge would go down the wire, and all his problems, save Lily, would disappear.

I’d placed the hell box on the small patch of dry land, as requested. I’d run the wires out to the balloon, as requested. The wires disappeared under the balloon, as though that were where they connected to the invisible charges. But they actually continued on past the balloon, hidden in the grass, and looped all the way back, still hidden, to the tuft of land where Gurley now stood.

Evil as I was, or am, I could not kill a man. I knew this even then. The granting and taking of life is best left to fate, to God, and I had left it so. I could lay the wire, attach it to charges (not a stick or two, but all we had) buried in the grass beneath the spot where Gurley would have to stand, but only God could see to it that Gurley did what he did. That is, if Gurley chose to kill the boy, he would kill himself. If he spared the boy, he would spare himself.

But Lily did not fall into my arms, sad and relieved. Instead, she cried: “What have you done?”

“Protected you,” I said, quiet with shock. “Both of you.”

“Didn’t you see him?” she said. I nodded. “He was going out there to get the boy.”

“He was going out there to kill him,” I said. “He was going to-he talked about-he was going to kill you. He said, ‘Change of…’- he-I thought he had.”

“Louis!” she cried, and began to run.

During the past hours, we’d worn a path from our landing spot to the balloon, and for a while, Lily stayed on it. But as we grew closer, she left the path for the most direct route, sloshing through the water and brush straight to Gurley.

I stayed on the path. It would be faster.

I saw Gurley stoop and pick up the hell box. Even before crying a warning to Lily, I wanted to yell to her, See what he’s doing? He was going to kill the boy!

The morning was just breaking, and we were close enough now to see everything-the balloon resting lightly on the soggy tundra, as though it might inflate and fly once more; Gurley, hell box in hand, surveying the scene.

“Stop! Stop!” Lily screamed.

I kept along the path, not saying a word, calculating how large the blast zone would be and when I would enter it.

Stop, stop!

She loved him.

The boy: she needed the boy.

But Gurley: she loved him.

And when Gurley looked back and saw her, I had to hope he saw this. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t see his eyes, I could only see him turn to face her as she staggered out of the last stretch of water. I wish I had been closer! To see Gurley, to see if he was angry, or bemused, if his cheeks were flushed or if he rolled his eyes. To see if when their eyes finally met, he realized that he had been in love, had been loved.

Or to see whether, in that moment before Gurley pressed the plunger, they touched, whether their hands met, or their lips, whether it was their lives, whole and complete, that flashed before their eyes, or whether it was merely the flash of the blast itself.

But I wasn’t closer. If I had been, I might have been killed instead of merely deafened. Thrown by the blast, I was flat on my back in an inch-deep puddle that had already been there or that I had created. I may have blacked out; I’m not sure. I could feel my fingers tangled in the ayuq, I could feel the tundra ooze pulling at my boots, my shoulders, my scalp. I could smell and taste the salt of the far-off ocean, and for some moments, I thought the water was high enough that it had entered my ears-all I could hear was a dull, muffled rustling somewhere inside my head. But when I finally stood, my ears didn’t clear.

I stared at the blast site waiting for my hearing to return. It never has completely, but in a minute or two, some sounds returned. The rush of wind, a mosquito that sounded miles distant but appeared on my palm after I’d absently slapped at my ear, and after that slap, a high wail, also distant. I’d forgotten about the boy: even though I’d made sure that his spot in the balloon wreckage would be well clear of the explosion, the blast must have frightened him, and now he was crying.

But he was closer, too.

A few yards up the path, in fact, in a patch of salmonberries that were growing beneath a stunted cottonwood, where he was keening, choking, screaming, not having moved an inch from the spot where Gurley had safely placed him.