The Cloud Atlas

“How much did it cost? That wasn't enough change. What, you think I'm Jap, you can steal from me?”

“I'm sorry, I-”

“Well, I'm not sorry. In fact, I am-” and then she said a word I didn't understand. Or was it a word? It sounded like something she'd done with her throat, her mouth. She said it again: “Yup'ik.”

“What's that?”

“It's whaddyacallit, Eskimo. Or it's whatever you get when you take a Russian sailor who's far from home, and add a Native woman who's not,” she said. She held up a hand for each and then slapped them together. “Boom: you get one of me. Tallest Eskimo gal for a thousand miles.”

“Not Japanese?” I said, relieved, confused. Eskimos lived in igloos. That is, I knew better, but the truth is, I knew as much then about Eskimos as I did about the Japanese-or palm readers.

“Eskimo,” she said. “Russian-Eskimo,” she added, yawning. “Which means, that whole bit you did about fire and snow-not so far off, after all.” She looked up. “And I didn't pick up language from raindrops, although I might as well have, because my father hauled my mother off when I was four or five.”

“To where?”

“To Siberia,” Lily said. “To Russia, Japan, the moon. Who knows? They left, and they left me.”

“I'm sorry,” I said again.

“I'm sorry,” she parroted in a high-pitched voice. “You like saying that,” she added. “I thought they tried to get rid of ‘sorry’ in the army.”

I was about to say it again before I stopped myself.

“So you know my secret, or secrets. Now let's get one out of you.” She pointed to my insignia. “What do you do?”

She waited.

“Well, it's secret,” I said.

“Well, tell me,” Lily said.

“Actually, it's, well, obvious,” I said, looking at the patch, with its fat beet of a bomb.

“Bombs,” she said. “Bomb disposal? Right. But what do you do? What's your assignment?” She was very serious now, which startled me as much as anything else that evening.

“Well,” I said. “That-that I can't tell you. Japanese or no. Of course. I can't.”

“Yup'ik,” she said, and then studied me for a beat or two. “Well, that's a shame.”

“Why? Why would you even ask?”

“Well, I thought you might be somebody I needed to get to know better.” She leaned closer, imperceptibly to anyone but me, who was measuring every fraction of an inch.

“Who?”

“Somebody useful, soldier,” she said, and waited. But I didn't say anything, and she didn't say anything. Instead, she smiled briefly, and stood.

“I got the sandwiches,” I said, a little desperate. She leaned down, extended a hand.

“Thanks,” she said, pulling me up. “But you run along home.”

“I thought we were-” and then I think I said something tiny, like “friends.”

Whatever it was, she laughed, and put her hand on the doorknob. “That's really sweet,” she said. “But I got guys who pay to be friends with me. For now, near as I figure, I've been paying to be friends with you.” She gave me another tight smile. “That's not good business.”

All of a sudden, the doorknob jerked out of her hand. The door flapped open on two sailors, both drunk, both blond, both taller than Lily and I. Their faces were doughy, and their heavy, puffed features almost looked unfinished, infantile. It didn't occur to me then that the reason their noses appeared that way was because they'd been broken so many times. One was more drunk than the other; his name strip read “ Jackson,” and the way he held on to his partner, “Sanger,” with a modified headlock, made his arm seem impossibly long.

Jackson tried to say something, but it fizzled into a drooling smile. Sanger lurched them both into the room.

“We're here,” he said to Lily, “for a reading.” He held up both hands, palms out, and doing so made Jackson slide off him and onto the floor.

Jackson looked up at Lily. “She's a Jap!”

“I'm closed,” Lily said, her voice, eyes, shoulders all new to me, a different person, from a different place.

“You mean, busy?” Sanger said, reaching forward to grab a wrist of Lily's, which she flicked away just in time. He and Jackson looked at me. “ 'Cause he don't look like he's keeping you busy.”

“He's not busy,” Jackson said, and wormed across the floor toward me with surprising speed. I jumped away.

“He's leaving,” Lily said. “You're leaving. I'm leaving. I'm closed.”

“We've come a long fucking way, lady,” Sanger said, moving on her.

“All the way from the fucking mooooooon,” said Jackson, and before I knew it, he had a hold of my ankle. “He don't look closed, Davey do he?”

“Get out of here,” I said, but it was useless; my voice had flown into its highest registers.

“He's a girl” Jackson said, pulling himself up on my knee and getting a good look at my face. “Look at this. He's a girl gotten all beat up by another girl”

“Poor little girl,” said Sanger.

“Leave,” said Lily. “Now.”

“I could leave,” Sanger said. “But then you'd be on your own with Jackson, here. And he don't do well on his own. Spent the whole trip here from Seattle locked in the brig for hitting an officer.”

“Locked in a fucking closet,” Jackson said, on his knees now, his hands on my hips, head at my stomach. “Fucking closet with two other guys.”

I don't know if Jackson was fainting or attacking, but he wound up pulling me to the floor. After that, I remember his breath, his nails, his weight; I remember the way my hands wouldn't go all the way around his wrists.

Sanger, suddenly sounding sober and reasonable, broke in like a radio announcer with a product to shill. “What's the matter now, boys? We're all on the same team here. Let's not-”

I don't remember Lily leaping on Jackson, or how or when his ear started to bleed. But I remember him coming off me and then the two of them on Lily, who was writhing on the floor with such fury, it seemed she was doing more damage to herself than they ever could. It was too hard to separate out a hand, an arm, but more and more bare skin, mostly hers, became visible. I tore off my belt, and with someone else's strength, fell onto Jackson 's back, looping the belt around his neck.

Lily shrieked, I yanked, Jackson bucked and would have thrown me had his buddy not fallen on top of me, his drunken logic insisting that would help. And it might have; he might have smothered me before I finished choking Jackson, but then a louder shriek entered the room, and when I twisted around, I