The Cloud Atlas

He walked toward me, closer and closer, until he'd backed me up half across the room. “You wish him dead. Fair enough. So do I. But you wish him dead because you wish to be done with this mission, this war, me. You are scared, Sergeant. Both understandable and unattractive.” And closer. “This man is a spy” Gurley continued. “A spy for the enemy. The enemy whose one interest is slaughter. Have you heard what's happening in the South Pacific, Sergeant? Of the bodies of men and women, men like you, missing eyes and hands and whatever they had between their legs, stuffed into their mouths?” Gurley's mouth was now quite close to mine. “This-Saburo- raped a woman that I love, that I hope to spend the rest of a very, very long life caring for. If you need more reasons, God knows they're offering us plenty-from fires to plague to who knows what next-go ahead and do this for your country. But you know what? Our country's got more than ten million in uniform fighting for it.” He stared at me hard. “Lily's only got me.”

I'M NOT SURE IF it was a product of our conversation or his simmering madness or his fear of the major on our heels, but two minutes after he'd left, he returned and declared that we would leave at midnight. We may not have agreed on much about Saburo, but he didn't think Saburo was hiding in town, either. I thought Gurley would sneak off to Lily's “VIP quarters” before our departure, but he had me walk him down to the riverbank, doling out additional instructions all the while. He confirmed the time with me, and then I watched him hire a boat to take him across the Kuskokwim to town, in search of a drink or worse.

I figured I had at least an hour, maybe more.

I walked quickly back to the headquarters building, in search of Lily. When I asked the duty officer about her whereabouts, he gave me a blank look. He was putting on a front, of course; Lily had to be the only woman on the base-perhaps the only woman on the base in six months or more. Finally, he leaned back and said, “Oh, you mean the prisoner.”

Now it was my turn to put on a front, and mask my alarm with a knowing nod. The prisoner. The man said he'd been left instructions that she was not to be disturbed, but I countered that I was under orders from Gurley, and the man accepted my bluff. Gurley had obviously made his usual terrifying impression.

They didn't have cells on the base, so they had put Lily in a signal shed by the airfield with a guard stationed out front “for her protection.” When I entered and the guard closed the door behind me, Lily was sitting perfectly still in the middle of the room, on the only thing in the room, a chair.

Neither of us said anything; we just looked at each other. I'm not sure what my face looked like, but Lily kept hers completely blank. I could have been Gurley I could have been Tojo, I could have been a six-foot raven. She stared.

I looked at her hands; they were cuffed. What had Gurley done?

I knelt beside her and tried to take one hand of hers in mine, but she moved away. “I'm okay,” she said.

“Lily, I'm so sorry,” I said. “Who did this? I'm going to get you out of here. No, I promise. I think-I think Gurley's finally lost it. I mean, completely. I think he's gone, or going. I don't think it will be long now, not at all. Jesus-he wants to leave at midnight. And he's got you locked in a closet. In handcuffs.”

She shook her head, and rolled her eyes-the first I had seen so far of the old Lily. “He has me here for my safety,” she said and smiled. “He told them I was a prisoner of war, someone with information. He told them that so they wouldn't bother me. So no one would wonder why a captain flew an Eskimo girl out to the bush.” She smiled, and I couldn't decide what to do. Was Gurley this crazy? Was she?

I felt bad for her, but now I also felt angry. Part of it was the old anger, jealousy-Gurley held her completely in sway. The new anger was that this growing debacle was all her doing. She'd told Gurley some story about Saburo in order to get herself back to Bethel, and now here she was, cuffed, and here I was, suddenly party to the whole rotten plan. “Why are you doing this?” I asked, but I got up as I said it, and ended up delivering the words more to the room than her.

But she still heard me. “Louis,” she said. “I'm so close now. I'm almost there.”

I turned to look at her and realized that Gurley was with us-or rather, within me. Standing there, eyes cast down at her, chin pointing up, disdain on my face. I was becoming him or had become him. And I couldn't shake it off. Maybe Gurley was a wizard, too. He'd obviously possessed Lily somehow, even though she was a shaman in her own right. Who was I to think I could resist? And when I spoke, it was his words, his tone.

“A rapist?” I said, and everything about her changed. Her face, her hands, her body, flushed and strained against the cuffs. “You told him Saburo was a rapist? To get yourself out here?”

“What?”

“He told me Saburo raped you. Lily, what does he really know about Saburo?” She clasped her hands together until the knuckles went white. “You told him he was Japanese, a spy, but did you tell him everything about that summer, Lily? Did you tell him everything that he'd find out if he'd gone walking around town today, like me?”

I was ready for her to scream, but what came out was more of a groan-“No.” Then she said, “Louis, don't do this.”

“What was the baby's name?” I said.

She looked at me for a long, silent moment, waiting for me to unsay the words, or maybe for history itself to unravel back past the point that there had ever been a war, a Saburo, a long summer under open skies full of light. Then she cried. I closed my eyes, and kept them closed when she finally began to speak.

“He didn't have a name,” she said. Then nothing. When her voice returned, she went on. “I knew it was going to be a girl. I was going to name her Samantha-Sam, for Jap Sam, who'd been so good to me all that time until he was taken away. Introduced me to Saburo.” She stopped. I could feel her looking at me, waiting for me to open my eyes, but I didn't. I was too frightened of what I'd done or started. “But it wasn't a girl. I should have known then! What woman with the kind of sight I supposedly had wouldn't know what lay inside her, a boy or a girl? Wouldn't know he was dying?” She stopped again, and it was a minute or two before she started once more. “That little boy, inside me, dying, drowning like I'd thrown him into the sea. And then-” Lily stopped, caught her breath and tried again. “And then, he was in my arms, dead. Bella and the other aunties wanted a doctor or a priest.” I could feel her staring at me. “Keep your eyes closed, then,” she said. “That's what I want. What I wanted. No doctor, no priest, nobody. Nobody to come say, Lily the half-breed girl, whose parents ran away!' ‘Lily, who went away last summer with that Jap and came back pregnant!’ ‘Lily who thought she could have a baby on her own, and it came out dead! Look at her! Ha!’” She sniffed and coughed.

“How much did Bella tell you? Did she tell you the story she told me? Bella, so smart. All the aunties, so smart. That's what they thought. Them and all the elders before them and before them, all of them. And now, they said, don't cry. Don't cry.”

And now: the angalkuq. I waited for Lily to tell me about the shaman, but she did something more curious. She told me the story Bella told her, the story she'd wanted to tell me in the forest, the story that Ronnie so startled me with when he retold it yesterday.

There was a boy, a baby boy, and his mother.

But in Lily's version, in Bella's version, it is the baby who dies and the mother who weeps. Don't cry, Bella told Lily, and Lily told me, crying. Don't cry, or the baby will wake. Don't cry, or the baby will wake and lose his way to the land of the dead. And then you will have him with you always. Always a baby, always needing you to carry him, soothe him, always making you cry. Mind the story of the mother whose baby died and could not stop crying. The village begged her. Shamans begged her. Her husband begged her. But she would not stop, and the baby awoke, and he never left. Eventually, they all moved away. The other families, the whole village, even her husband. She was left all alone with the baby. You see her tears every summer when the snow thaws and the delta floods.

Lily looked at Bella, still crying, unable to speak. Then what did it mean that her