The Cloud Atlas

have done just that if she had wanted to, but this wasn't a cloud, just a large flat outcropping of rock overlooking a waterfall. I let Lily stand alone for a moment. Then she looked back toward me and I stepped forward.

“You walk slow,” Lily said, looking down at my feet. We'd been walking for two hours or more and I could feel precisely each of the warm, stinging spots on my feet where blisters were forming.

“I wasn't sure I was supposed to follow you,” I said.

“You're too polite, Louis,” she said. “You must make a lousy soldier.”

“I do,” I said.

She sat down, cross-legged, and I sat stiffly beside her. I looked down the trail. “He was with us for a while, but I haven't heard him in a long time.”

“He's not coming,” Lily said, looking in the direction of the waterfall. “He's heading back to Fort Rich. Probably already there.”

I tried to get her to look at me. “Is this you speaking as a shaman?” I asked. I'd earned at least that, I thought. Some teasing.

“No, as his lover,” she said, turning to me to confirm she'd landed a blow. “I know him. So do you.”

“Did you know he'd send me away?” I asked, after swallowing. “This something you cooked up together?”

She shook her head and looked at the dirt beneath us.

“That's it, Louis. That's just how it happened. He asked me, ‘Do you have any really good friends? Guys who don't use you for sex? Guys you can trust? Guys you can always talk to, count on to stick up for you, like a brother? Because I'd like to give that guy a free plane ticket to the end of the earth. What do you say there, Miss Lily?’” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “It's all going just like we damn planned.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You're always sorry Louis. Let's try this: Did you at least bring a going-away present? Did you bring the map book? The journal?”

“Lily,” I said.

Lily gave me a long look, time to give a different answer. And when I didn't, she let out a long breath, not a sigh. “You're sorry. I know.”

We sat. There were no sounds of bears, or Gurley just the water rushing by below us. Alaska 's summer sun doesn't so much set as sink, exhausted, but we still had an hour or two of light left. Some summer nights-that night-I swear I can feel the light stretch, as though one part of it had been pinned to sunrise and the rest pulled all day to that faraway sunset. Then the light breaks, and you definitely feel that, a band of rubber snapping against your skin, and everything finally goes dim.

Lily's touch felt just the same, and maybe that's what I feel those summer evenings when I'm up too late, that endless sun abetting an old man's insomnia. Maybe it's not the snap of the light I feel, but the memory of Lily, that night, as she extended a hand to me, slid it across the surface of the rock until it reached mine. I didn't move then, and neither did she. She let our two hands stay there, as if mere proximity had brought them together. And then she took my hand in hers, and I would have given her anything. Ten maps. Every codebook we had. A balloon.

But I had nothing.

“Did you ask Gurley for it?” I finally said. “I mean, obviously-that seems so easy.”

She frowned, and for a moment, I thought she was going to let go of my hand, but she didn't. She just shook her head. “You know Gurley. Or maybe you don't. I could have asked for a dozen roses-a lot damn harder to get in Anchorage than that journal-and I would have had them, that day, and every day after until I begged him to stop. But not the journal. Asking would have spooked him. I just hoped we'd find ourselves in a… situation… at some point where the journal would be nearby, and I could somehow sneak it away, without his ever knowing.”

“So you never told him about your summer, about Saburo?”

But Lily didn't look at me. She just said, “No.”

If I believed in that sort of thing, and I suppose I do now, I would have said Saburo was there with us, then. I didn't hear him say anything, and I didn't hear Lily say anything to him, but I felt him. For a moment, he was as real as Lily was beside me, and then he was gone.

I couldn't say if Lily saw him, but she relaxed. Her frown left. She let go of my hand, rubbed her face, and stretched.

“Plan on finding a lot of balloons on Diomede?” she asked. “When do you go?”

“I'm not going to be able to find another damn balloon, not on Diomede, not anywhere. Not without a new palm reader, anyway.”

“Shuyak,” she said after a pause. “That was a neat trick, wasn't it?”

“Impressed me,” I said.

“Hard to do that” she replied. She leaned to one side, slipping a hand into some hidden pocket. She pulled out a little sheaf of several tightly folded pages. “At least I brought a going-away gift,” she said. She smoothed the pages out on the ground and then handed them to me. “Everything I know about palm reading, and finding balloons.”

I looked at the pages. Though they were creased and dirty, I could tell immediately what they were-or rather, where they had come from. Faint watercolor sketches, diagrams in pencil, notes in black ink, in Japanese. And on the reverse of one page, a half-dozen tiny portraits. Some were more finished than others, but it took no imagination to see Lily in all of them.

“Before he left, I told Saburo I wanted him to leave behind a sketch of himself. He said he would, but when he finally got ready to go, he gave me these pages.”

“This is you,” I said, looking up at her to compare.

“He said every face he tried to draw came out as me. I told him he should have tried harder, but he said if I looked at these sketches long enough, I'd see all of him I needed to see.”

“That's romantic,” I said, not even teasing.

“Doesn't look like him or me,” she said. She reached toward me and turned one of the pages over, revealing a more familiar terrain of sketches and maps and charts. “I saw him here, though.” She traced her finger slowly down the slope of what looked like a cloud. “And here. And here.” She sat back. “I look at these pages and I see all of him. I remember him hunched over, making these charts, explaining as he went.”

I sifted through the papers a little more, and then came back to the page with her portraits. “So how's this going to help me become a better palm reader? Just stare at you long enough-?”

Lily took the pages. She shuffled back and forth through them until she found what she was looking for, and then held it out to me. A column of Japanese characters ran down the left-hand side of the page. In the middle was a gray-green blob, with a crosshairs in the lower right. Tiny numbers were written in each of the crosshairs' four quadrants, and at the bottom of the page, a single word in English characters, which I read aloud: “Shuyak.”

When I looked up, Lily's eyes were full of tears. “Any drunken soldier who walked into that building and actually wanted his palm read, I could tell him anything. But you-once I knew you actually did work related to what Saburo was doing-that you might have access to that journal-” She stopped. “Like I said that night I first told you about Saburo-I wanted to be useful to you.”

“Useful?” I was discovering what it was like to be Gurley; I could feel rage uncoiling inside me, seeking out a fist or arm. “And Gurley?” I said, to stall.

“Yes-or no. I mean, I knew he was involved, but eventually I realized he wouldn't help. Couldn't. And then it was too late. Things with Gurley-I don't know.”

“You tricked us?”

“Louis,” she said. “I wanted you to need me. I needed you to.”