Cloud Atlas

she’s your only friend left. He knows he won’t. You can’t drag her into this lethal mess. The disco thump pulses in his temples, but it’s a borrowed apartment and he judges it unwise to complain. Buenas Yerbas isn’t Cambridge. Anyway, you’re in hiding. The breeze slams the balcony door, and in fear Sixsmith spills half his vermouth. No, you old fool, it wasn’t a gunshot.

He mops up the spillage with a kitchen towel, turns on the TV with the sound down low, and trawls the channels for M*A*S*H. It’s on somewhere. Just have to keep looking.

2

Luisa Rey hears a clunk from the neighboring balcony. “Hello?” Nobody. Her stomach warns her to set down her tonic water. It was the bathroom you needed, not fresh air, but she can’t face weaving back through the party and, anyway, there’s no time—down the side of the building she heaves: once, twice, a vision of greasy chicken, and a third time. That, she wipes her eyes, is the third foulest thing you’ve ever done. She slooshes her mouth out, spits residue into a flowerpot behind a screen. Luisa dabs her lips with a tissue and finds a mint in her handbag. Go home and just dream up your crappy three hundred words for once. People only look at the pictures, anyhow.

A man too old for his leather trousers, bare torso, and zebra waistcoat steps onto the balcony. “Luisaaa!” A crafted golden beard and a moonstone-and-jade ankh around his neck. “Hiya! Come out for a little stargazing, huh? Dig. Bix brought eight ounces of snow with him, man. One wild cat. Hey, did I say in the interview? I’m trying on the name Ganja at the moment. Maharaj Aja says Richard is outa sync with my Iovedic Self.”

“Who?”

“My guru, Luisaaa, my guru! He’s on his last reincarnation before—” Richard’s fingers go pufff! Nirvanawards. “Come to an audience. His waiting list normally takes, like, forever, but jade-ankh disciples get personal audiences on the same afternoon. Like, why go through college and shit when Maharaj Aja can, like, teach you everything about .?.?. It.” He frames the moon in his fingers. “Words are so .?.?. uptight?.?.?. Space .?.?. it’s so .?.?. y’ know, like, total. Smoke some weed? Acapulco Gold. Got it off of Bix.” He edges nearer. “Say, Lu, let’s get high after the party. Alone together, my place, dig? You could get a very exclusive interview. I may even write you a song and put it on my next LP.”

“I’ll pass.”

The minor-league rock musician narrows his eyes. “Unlucky time of the month, huh? How’s next week? I thought all you media chicks are on the Pill, like, forever.”

“Does Bix sell you your pickup lines, too?”

He sniggers. “Hey, has that cat been telling you things?”

“Richard, just so there’s no uncertainty, I’d rather jump off this balcony than sleep with you, any time of any month. I really would.”

“Whoah!” His hand jerks back as if stung. “Pick-ky! Who d’you think you are, like, Joni fucking Mitchell? You’re only a fucking gossip columnist in a magazine that like no one ever reads!”

3

The elevator doors close just as Luisa Rey reaches them, but the unseen occupant jams them with his cane. “Thank you,” says Luisa to the old man. “Glad the age of chivalry isn’t totally dead.”

He gives a grave nod.

Luisa thinks, He looks like he’s been given a week to live. She presses G. The ancient elevator begins its descent. A leisurely needle counts off the stories. Its motor whines, its cables grind, but between the tenth and ninth stories a gatta-gatta-gatta detonates then dies with a phzzz-zzz-zz-z. Luisa and Sixsmith thump to the floor. The light stutters on and off before settling on a buzzing sepia.

“You okay? Can you get up?”

The sprawled old man recovers himself a little. “No bones broken, I think, but I’ll stay seated, thank you.” His old-school English accent reminds Luisa of the tiger in The Jungle Book. “The power might restart suddenly.”

“Christ,” mutters Luisa. “A power outage. Perfect end to a perfect day.” She presses the emergency button. Nothing. She presses the intercom button and hollers: “Hey! Anyone there?” Static hiss. “We have a situation here! Can anyone hear us?”

Luisa and the old man regard each other, sideways, listening.

No reply. Just vague submarine noises.

Luisa inspects the ceiling. “Got to be an access hatch?.?.?.” There isn’t. She peels up the carpet—a steel floor. “Only in movies, I guess.”

“Are you still glad,” asks the old man, “the age of chivalry isn’t dead?”

Luisa manages a smile, just. “We might be here some time. Last month’s brownout lasted seven hours.” Well, at least I’m not confined with a psychopath, a claustrophobe, or Richard Ganga.

4

Rufus Sixsmith sits propped in a corner sixty minutes later, dabbing his forehead with his handkerchief. “I subscribed to Illustrated Planet in 1967 to read your father’s dispatches from Vietnam. Lester Rey was one of only four or five journalists who grasped the war from the Asian perspective. I’m fascinated to hear how a policeman became one of the best correspondents of his generation.”

“You asked for it.” The story is polished with each retelling. “Dad joined the BYPD just weeks before Pearl Harbor, which is why he spent the war here and not in the Pacific like his brother Howie, who got blown to pieces by a Japanese land mine playing beach volleyball in the Solomons. Pretty soon, it became apparent Dad was a Tenth Precinct case, and that’s where he wound up. There’s such a precinct in every city in the country—a sort of pen where they transfer all the straight cops who won’t go on the take and who won’t turn a blind eye. So anyway, on V-J night, Buenas Yerbas was one citywide party, and you can imagine, the police were stretched thin. Dad got a call reporting looting down on Silvaplana Wharf, a sort of no-man’s-land between Tenth Precinct, the BY Port Authority, and Spinoza Precinct. Dad and his partner, a man named Nat Wakefield, drove down to take a look. They park between a pair of cargo containers, kill the engine, proceed on foot, and see maybe two dozen men loading crates from a warehouse into an armored truck. The light was dim, but the men sure weren’t dockworkers and they weren’t in military uniform. Wakefield tells Dad to go and radio for backup. Just as Dad gets to the radio, a call comes through saying the original order to investigate looting has been countermanded. Dad reports what he’d seen, but the order is repeated, so Dad runs back to the warehouse just in time to see his partner accept a light from one of the men and get shot six times in the back. Dad somehow keeps his nerve, sprints back to his squad car, and manages to radio out a Code 8—a Mayday—before his car shivers with bullets. He’s surrounded on all sides except the dockside, so over the edge he dives, into a cocktail of diesel, trash, sewage, and sea. He swims underneath the quay—in those days Silvaplana Wharf was a steel structure like a giant boardwalk, not the concrete