The Cloud Atlas

“Sir,” I said. “Last night, the office-the paper?”

Gurley's theatrical glee momentarily waned. “Yes, Sergeant?” he said. “And who have you told about that?” I looked away. “No one, I take it?” He waited until I met his gaze. He looked around to see if anyone was close to us, and then threw an arm around my shoulders, hissing into my ear as we walked. “You may think your captain mad, but what have you done about it? Nothing at all, it would seem.”

“Maybe I will do something,” I said. “Sir.”

He hustled me farther from the building before he spoke again. “Maybe you will, Sergeant. But you haven't yet, and I daresay you won't. Because your case is thin, because as scared as you are, you're even more curious, and because…” He let the word hang there while he looked at me, as though waiting for me to finish the sentence. But I couldn't, so he did, speaking slowly and evenly: “…you know that lives, the lives of certain people, depend on the actions you take.” Did I know whom he was referring to? This is what his gaze now asked. I lowered my own eyes; this was my answer.

“Good,” he said, smiling once more. We started to walk. “I admit, we have had our difficulties. But I promise, dear Sergeant, that all that will be forgotten in the excitement of the days ahead.” He darted a quick look behind us, and then replaced his arm around my shoulders. “What did those fools say up at Ladd? Five days? We'd wait five days before searching the tundra for signs of sabotage, or saboteurs?”

I nodded. “Three now, I suppose.”

“Three days,” Gurley said. “Seventy-two hours to beat that major, that galoot Swift, and the rest of the Army to the waning war's greatest prize.”

“Sir,” I started.

“Belk,” Gurley said, but I persisted.

“Sir, the major was right. They probably never got to launch their balloon. And even if they did, they probably did nothing more than make some moose sick. Maybe some mice, or ravens. And that's assuming the infected fleas were able to fight their way through the tundra winds long enough to-”

Gurley put one hand to his lips, another lightly to my chest, and shut his eyes. “Sergeant Belk,” he said, and then opened his eyes. “We are no longer chasing fleas. Your captain's snare may have finally caught a spy.”

GURLEY CONTINUED speaking, with very few interruptions, for the next two hours. At least, I remember it that way. I remember him meeting me at the terminal late that morning, and I remember him dismissing me from the Quonset hut that afternoon, and I remember him talking the entire time.

I don't remember much of what he said, however. Because I learned one important piece of information early on, and after that, found it hard to focus on much of anything else he said.

Lily had told him about Saburo.

Not much, not everything, but enough. Enough to convince Gurley to venture out into the tundra in search of Saburo, and enough to insist Lily accompany him as a guide. I would come along, too, of course- one could never imagine what sort of menial or distasteful tasks might arise. In fact, Gurley wanted me to precede him and Lily to Bethel. He needed a bit of extra time to finagle Lily's passage, but I could make the most of the delay by securing supplies in Bethel and “doing a bit of sleuthing” around town to see if I could come up with any information about Saburo on my own. Gurley and Lily would follow in a day or two. Depending on the weather-and Lily-we would disappear into the bush shortly thereafter.

Replaying these memories, it seems unmistakable now to me how completely mad he was. And I don't mean madness like the kind that doctors like to cure nowadays with dollops of prettily colored pills. I mean old-fashioned, Edgar Allan Poe-type madness, incurable but for a gun placed at the temple. The words fast and steady, the volume rising and falling, the eyes darting this way and that.

Yes, that's precisely how it looks now-insanity-but to have seen it through my eyes then, you would never have thought him so sane. Missing were the theatrics, the powder-keg rage-that way he had of flushing red and trembling like he was his own private earthquake, every extremity poised to fly off in pursuit of the leg that was already gone. In its place was this calm, constant, reasoned stream of language, punctuated every so often with words that almost set me to trembling: Lily, Saburo, Lily.

She had told Gurley about Saburo. She had told him his name. She had told him that he was Japanese, a soldier, a spy. She had told him almost everything that she had told me, except-and I listened carefully-that they were lovers.

The longer he went without mentioning this most important (only to me?) fact, the more rattled I became. How could she not have told him? Saburo: her first love, that golden summer, those perfect hands? As Gurley rambled on, however, I had time to think about it, and came to realize that she had every reason to lie to him. Her one desire was to make it out into the bush in search of-well, I'd never let her spell it out that night, but I knew she was searching for Saburo's body. But she couldn't get to Bethel without a military escort-that's why she had wanted me to come. I'd failed her, so she'd gone to Gurley. Riskier, but also better-he would have access to better resources. He could operate with more autonomy. He was an officer, after all, unlike me. He was her lover.

But I got to Lily first that afternoon. I'm sure Gurley expected me to go directly to the airfield without even stopping at my barracks, but instead, I went directly downtown, where I found Lily, peering out her window, as if she was expecting me, or someone. She smiled and gave me a little wave. I ran up to the second floor, a new question popping up on each stair- Did we really see the northern lights? Did I really see a balloon? Did we really run into the forest, the two of us, together, last night?-but when I reached her, what came out first was Gurley's decision to go to Bethel.

She looked both delighted and scared. “We're going to go?” she asked. “You're sure? Me, too? He said all of us?”

“He didn't tell you? It seemed like things were pretty well decided.”

“Last night-” Lily began, “or I guess it was this morning, after I made it back into town, I came back down here, I found him wandering the street.”

“Was he angry?” I asked. “He must have asked why you ran. Did he see me? I was sure he saw me.”

“What did he tell you?” Lily asked carefully.

“About last night?” I said. “Nothing. Just that you'd had this conversation.” I waited for her to augment this, but she didn't, so I went on. “About a ‘spy.’” I paused again. “Lily, what were you thinking? Look what's happened-he's carting us all off to the bush, and God knows what he'll do there, where he won't have to worry about anyone other than us witnessing him completely cracking up. He's dangerous, Lily. He's ready to kill. Starting with me.”

Lily went to the window and checked the street. “That's why I told him,” she said, and then turned to me. “To spare you.”

LILY'S ACCOUNT OF the early morning hours differed from Gurley's. Gurley hadn't mentioned to me that he'd seen Lily or anyone else on the misty streets; and he'd heavily edited his conversation with Lily. He left out, for example, what Lily said was the first thing he'd asked her- Was that you and Louis I saw in the street?-and he'd left out her reply.

“Yes, it was me,” she told him. “But not Louis. You've scared him half to death. I'll be lucky if I ever see him again.”

“I'll be luckier if you don't,” Gurley had said. I wondered how he'd looked when he'd said that. With me, it would have been behind a sneer, or preceding a fist. But it had to be different with her.

“He's just a boy,” she told him, and didn't even smile at me as she repeated the line now.

“Well,” Gurley said. Lily said he kept looking around, like I might still be lurking in the shadows. “Who was it, then? It was someone. It was someone. I know I saw