The Cloud Atlas

I shook my head, but turned to Lily: Had I been out of line, somehow?

“No,” Lily said. She laughed weakly, gave me a questioning look- surely this man and I knew each other?-and then retreated deeper into the office.

“No,” I mumbled.

“Good night,” the man said, not even looking at me. I felt like I was moving out the door without really moving my feet.

“Right,” I said, but by then I was outside, the door was closing.

Before it shut completely, Lily shouted for me to wait. The door eased open again, and I could see her rustling around in the room's pile of blankets while the man watched. As soon as I realized my vantage point afforded me a somewhat intimate view of her backside, I looked away. The other man did not. I looked again.

Lily came back with a closed fist, and pressed something into my left hand. “Your change,” she said, waiting until I met her gaze before she let go.

I shook my head, but only slightly and the man cut off any protest. “Make haste, young man.” He drew back and looked at me with disdain. “Change?” He exhaled. “As for myself, I intend to get my money's worth.” He turned to Lily. “Mademoiselle?” he said, and I left.

I DIDN'T REALIZE for several blocks that my hands were two fists in my pockets. Only then did I unclench, and only then, with a huddled display of instruments in a music store window looking over my shoulder, did I pull out my change and examine it. She'd given me a dollar. On it, she'd written a message. A very short message, actually, all she had had time to write: “ 11.”

I looked around, refolded the bill, and continued down the street. For whatever reason, I started walking faster and faster, until I reached the main road out to Fort Richardson. By then I was running, sure in some vague way that someone was pursuing me. But when I finally allowed myself to glance back into Anchorage 's blackout dark, I couldn't see anyone at all.

WHAT I FEARED then is what Ronnie fears now, and has feared for some time: the unseen forces that hound you through the night.

Old explorers who first witnessed this phenomenon struggled for words to describe it; eventually they settled on arctic hysteria. The affliction did not discriminate: both Natives and Outsiders occasionally succumbed to some force-often during this very time of year, deep winter, which is characterized less by snow than endless dark-that caused them to strip off their clothes and run outside, into the cold, into the tundra. If they're not caught in time, some wound up (wind up) running into the great beyond.

It's a story I like to share when people who have never been to Alaska ask me what it's like. This usually comes right after they've squealed something along the lines of “ Alaska! It's so big!” as though it might fall on them. But they don't really want to know what it's like. For them, asking me about Alaska is like pressing “play” to watch a horror movie; they just want to be scared: Alaska! A short discussion of arctic hysteria usually satisfies them, as it has all the things they think an Alaska story needs: cold, dark, death. It's missing a bear or a wolf, but I have other anecdotes to cover that.

Years ago, when I asked Ronnie about arctic hysteria, he had a ready punch line: Sometimes, they don't come after you. Time was, he explained, before the white man, before Ski-Doos, before Village Public Safety Officers, before medevac helicopters-sometimes, they just let people run away and disappear.

He was trying to spook me, of course, but it didn't work. As it happens, I have found myself chasing after Ronnie a dozen times, more frequently of late. I'll hear him run howling past my window late some night and leave my warm bed to run him down. Sometimes I catch him, sometimes I don't find him until much later, when he's passed out, in the shelter of some truck or house or Dumpster, often on a night that's cold enough to kill.

Whenever he comes to, in a few hours or a few days, he rarely mentions just what drove him into the night. But sometimes the memory is fresh or frightening enough that he can't help but speak of it, and out it comes, a similar story every time: an eagle, a caribou, a bear, encounters him, alone, walking down some street in town. He's recognized, and the animal gives chase. And as the chase continues, the animal changes from one form to another, always drawing closer, closer, until finally it is at his heels, and then Ronnie knows, hears, smells, feels, who it was all along. “The wolf, Lou-is,” he says then.

“The wolf,” he says now, blinking awake, and staring straight up at the hospice ceiling. “The wolf, Lou-is, he's closer now. He knows. He remembers. The boy. His mother. The baby. The wolf. My tuunraq.” Ronnie turns to face me, to make sure I am listening, though I myself can't be sure. Am I listening? Or dreaming? I feel a kind of fire in my legs, an urge to run myself. “He's heard I've been acting as an angalkuq once more. Without him. After all these years. He heard I was working right here. This place. That's how he found me. He's coming now. I hear him. He's coming now. Lou-is. Tell me-”

CHAPTER 4

“YOU ARE NOT CRAZY.”

First day, first hour of bomb disposal training, and a dozen of us enlisted were crammed into a makeshift classroom barracks at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Gottschalk was still alive. That first balloon, Alaska, Lily were all in my future.

First question: How can you tell the difference between a BD officer and a BD enlisted man? Some of the guys actually worried it out, raised their hands and gave answers about insignia or uniforms. One guy said something about the way a man stands, which caused another to mutter something lewd, and that's when the sergeant instructing us gave the correct answer: the difference between us guys and officers? We are not crazy.

Because it turned out there was a basic principle in bomb disposal, one they taught you before they taught you anything about bombs.

The officer defuses the bomb.

“Then what do we do, Sarge?” asked a guy nearby, whom I took to be even younger than I.

The sergeant smiled. “Grow old.”

* * *

THIS DIVISION OF DUTIES was British and was already in the process of changing. Soon enough, both enlisted and officers would be trained to render bombs safe. But when I went through, guys like me mostly had just one duty: dig. Think about bomb disposal today, and you're thinking of ticking, wiretangled things, hidden under a desk or a bridge. Maybe that sounds scary, but to us, something tucked under a desk would have sounded like roast turkey with trimmings. The bombs we went after had, for the most part, tumbled out of planes. Drop a bomb from that height, and if it doesn't explode when it's supposed to, all one hundred pounds-or five hundred or one thousand or more-of it disappears right into the ground.

That's when you start digging. Down a story or more, depending on the soil and the weight of the bomb. When you're not digging, you're timbering, to keep the hole from collapsing. To prevent anything from exploding too soon, everybody's using special, nonmagnetic tools and wearing cloth shoes without metal eyelets and belts without buckles-or that's what they were always doing in the training films.

Lit cigarettes are forbidden, obviously. They dangle from everyone's lips.

When you've finally gotten the ugly squat cockroach of a thing all exposed, you