Cloud Atlas

the Hotchkiss vehicle. Here our fellowship parted. Ernie, Veronica, and Mr. Meeks waved me off at the station. Ernie promised to take the flak if the law were ever to catch up, as he’s too old to stand trial, which is ruddy civilized of him. He and Veronica were headed to a Hebridean location where Ernie’s handyman-preacher-cousin does up falling-down crofts for Russian mafiosi and German enthusiasts of the Gaelic tongue. I offer my secular prayers for their well-being. Mr. Meeks was to be deposited in a public library with a “Please Look After This Bear” tag, but I suspect Ernie and Veronica will take him with them. After my arrival at Widow Manx’s, I slept under my goosedown quilt as sound as King Arthur on the Blessed Isle. Why didn’t I get on the first train south to London, there and then? I’m still not sure. Maybe I recall Denholme’s remark about life beyond the M25. I shall never know what part he played in my incarceration, but he was right—London darkens the map like England’s bowel polyp. There is a whole country up here.

I looked up Mrs. Latham’s home number at the library. Our telephone reunion was a moving moment. Of course, Mrs. Latham smothered her emotion by lambasting me, before filling me in on my missing weeks. The Hoggins Hydra had ripped the office apart when I failed to show for my three o’clock castration, but years of financial brinkmanship had stood my redoubtable pit prop in good stead. She had captured the vandalism on a cunning video camera supplied by her nephew. The Hogginses were thus restrained: steer clear of Timothy Cavendish, Mrs. Latham warned, or this footage will appear on the Internet and your various probations shall hatch into prison sentences. Thus they were prevailed upon to accept an equitable proposal cutting them into future royalties. (I suspect they had a sneaking admiration for my lady bulldog’s cool nerves.) The building management used my disappearance—and the trashing of my suite—as an excuse to turf us out. Even as I write, my former premises are being turned into a Hard Rock Cafe for homesick Americans. Cavendish Publishing is currently run from a house owned by my secretary’s eldest nephew, who resides in Tangier. Now for the best news: a Hollywood studio has optioned Knuckle Sandwich—The Movie for a figure as senselessly big as the number on a bar code. A lot of the money will go to the Hogginses, but for the first time since I was twenty-two, I am flush.

Mrs. Latham sorted out my bank cards, etc., and I am designing the future on beer mats, like Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, and I must say the future is not too shabby. I shall find a hungry ghostwriter to turn these notes you’ve been reading into a film script of my own. Well, sod it all, if Dermot “Duster” Hoggins can write a bestseller and have a film made, why the ruddy hell not Timothy “Lazarus” Cavendish? Put Nurse Noakes in the book, the dock, and on the block. The woman was sincere—bigots mostly are—but no less dangerous for that, and she shall be named and shamed. The minor matter of Johns Hotchkiss’s vehicle loan needs to be handled with delicacy, but fouler fish have been fried. Mrs. Latham got on the e-mail to Hilary V. Hush to express our interest in Half-Lives, and the postman delivered part two not an hour ago. A photo was enclosed, and it turns out the V is for Vincent! And what a lard-bucket! I’m no Chippendale myself, but Hilary has the girth to fill not two but three airline economy seats. I’ll find out if Luisa Rey is still alive in a corner of the Whistling Thistle, my de facto office and a wrecked galleon of a back-alley tavern where Mary, Queen of Scots, summoned the devil to assist her cause. The landlord, whose double measures would be quadruples in management-consulted Londinium, swears he sees Her ill-starred Majesty, regularly. In vino veritas.

That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all. Outside, fat snowflakes are falling on slate roofs and granite walls. Like Solzhenitsyn laboring in Vermont, I shall beaver away in exile, far from the city that knitted my bones.

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

Half-Lives The First Luisa Rey Mystery

40

The black sea roars in. Its coldness shocks Luisa’s senses back to life. Her VW’s rear struck the water at forty-five degrees, so the seat saved her spine, but the car now swings upside down. She is trussed by her seat belt inches from the windshield. Get out, or die here. Luisa panics, breathes a lungful of water, and struggles into a pocket of air, coughing. Unhook this belt. She squirms and jackknifes up to the belt lock. Release button. It doesn’t click. The car half-somersaults deeper, and with a wrenching noise, a giant squid-shaped air bubble flies away. Luisa stabs the button, frantic, and the strap drifts free. More air. She finds an air pocket trapped beneath a windshield of dark water. The sea’s mass jams the door shut. Roll down the window. It inches halfway and jams, right where it always jams. Luisa shimmies around, squeezes her head, shoulders, and torso through the gap.

Sixsmith’s Report!

She pulls herself back into the sinking vehicle. Can’t see a damn thing. A plastic trash bag. Wedged under the seat. She doubles up in the confined space .?.?. It’s here. She hauls, like a woman hauling a sack of rocks. She feeds herself feetfirst back out the window, but the report is too fat. The sinking car drags Luisa down. Her lungs ache now. The sodden papers have quadrupled their weight. The trash bag is through the window, but as she kicks and struggles Luisa feels a lightening. Hundreds of pages spin free from the vanilla binder, wheeling wherever the sea will take them, wheeling around her, playing cards in Alice. She kicks off her shoes. Her lungs shriek, curse, beg. Every pulse is a thump in Luisa’s ears. Which way is up? The water is too murky to guess. Up is away from the car. Her lungs will collapse in another moment. Where’s the car? Luisa realizes she has paid for the Sixsmith Report with her life.

41

Isaac Sachs looks down on a brilliant Pennsylvania morning. Labyrinthine suburbs of ivory mansionettes and silk lawns inset with turquoise swimming pools. The executive-jet window is cool against his face. Six feet directly beneath his seat is a suitcase in the baggage hold containing enough C-4 to turn an airplane into a meteor. So, thinks Sachs, you obeyed your conscience. Luisa Rey has the Sixsmith Report. He recollects as many details of her face as he can. Do you feel doubt? Relief? Fear? Righteousness?

A premonition I’ll never see her again.

Alberto Grimaldi, the man he has double-crossed, is laughing at an aide’s remark. The hostess passes with a tray of clinking drinks. Sachs retreats into his notebook, where he writes the following sentences.

•?Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction—in short, belief—grows ever “truer.” The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent.

•?The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy