The Cloud Atlas

summer with Saburo had been so dry? Bella surprised her: Ever go hunting for mouse food? Lily held her breath, felt the prickling along her arms. Reach down sometimes, and what do you find? Mouse food? The little gnawed roots, shaped like teardrops? Little teardrops. Whose tears do you think those are?

Bella reached over then, Lily said, and tried to take the baby from her. No, Lily said, and then repeated the word, with a hiss. Bella recoiled, shocked and hurt.

Remember the story, Bella said. Remember what happens. The mother's left all alone. Everyone leaves her.

“It's just a story,” Lily shrieked.

“Then where's your husband?” Bella said, and left the room.

THERE WAS NO SHAMAN, no angalkuq from Lower Kalskag in Lily's story. There was only Saburo, her lover from Japan, who came, and disappeared, later that night. Lily said she had called to him, had sent animal spirits sprinting out across the tundra in search of him, and then there he was. Proof of magic, or love. And those hands: she had loved him for those beautiful hands, and now she knew why. The way they moved the hair from her face, the way they pulled away the bloody sheets, the blankets, slowly, gently, and laid bare the boy. She had not let anyone else hold the baby, and now it seemed obvious why: no one else had hands fit for the task, to hold something that tiny, that fragile, that hopeless. She told him the story Bella had told her, and she loved him all the more for his reaction: he cried. They cried together, and while they were crying, whispered and planned.

Saburo would take the boy away, bury him in a special place in the bush, build him a tiny shrine as he would have done were they in Japan. Lily begged to come with him, but he insisted she rest. He would come back for her, bring some token from the shrine, and then-he would spirit her back to Japan. He didn't say how.

Days passed. A week, then two. “I was worried, but not scared,” Lily went on. “I thought I had powers, and I thought they were strong, despite everything that happened: something had made him appear, after all. But nothing was making him come back. I went outside one night and listened for him, finally. After a while, I was sure I heard him, very faintly, very far away. In Anchorage. So I went.”

But Anchorage was too “noisy,” Lily said. Once she got there, she couldn't find Saburo anywhere. In time, she needed money, just to survive, and, once she'd saved up enough, to get back home. Another Yup'ik woman told her about fortune-telling. She didn't tell her, though, what the men really came to find out-whether you would have sex with them. If you did, they paid you more. And as scared as she was of losing Saburo, as scared as she might have been for what he thought of what she was doing, she kept doing it, because something told her that she was getting closer.

She was: Gurley arrived one night, and she knew immediately that she'd found a link to Saburo. Lily didn't know what the link was, not at first, but she knew she had to cultivate a relationship with Gurley. When she did, and various details slowly surfaced about his work, such as the balloons (Gurley! Master of secrets!), she knew she'd done right. Eventually, he'd lead her to Saburo.

But after her initial excitement about Gurley's connection to Saburo, the notion that he would lead her to him began to fade. Not because it seemed impractical or implausible, but because-well, it will sound preposterous coming out of my mouth, so I'll just quote what Lily said:

“There is an old tradition, from generations ago, that the night after a hunt, the women of the less successful hunters would seek out the men who had been successful, and have sex with them. It was thought they might then pass on some of that power to their own less fortunate husbands. It had nothing to do with love or even sex. It was about doing all you could to make sure your husband, your lover, would bring honor to your family. Gurley was successful.”

I think Lily asked me then, “Does that make sense?” I don't remember answering. But I do remember what she said next.

“We stayed on and on in Anchorage, Gurley and I. We didn't leave. And any idea I had about finding Saburo faded, and faded, until I could no longer see his face anymore. And then his face started to be replaced with another. I studied it each night in my dreams, and each night it came closer and closer, until one night I saw who it was. I woke up and saw him there beside me: Gurley.”

By now, I had opened my eyes, but I wish I hadn't. Then I could have imagined some look of disgust on her face when she said the name Gurley, but instead I had to watch her as tears came to her eyes, and listen as she went on: “You see why I have to tell it to you this way? Why I can't simply say that I fell in love with him? Because I had loved another man. And we'd had a baby a boy and we'd lost him, and then I lost Saburo, and then there was this other man, so strong and proud, and he was going to help me.”

It wasn't love, she said. That's not wishful revising, at least not on my part: that's what she said. She said it wasn't anything she could really even put into words. But whatever the connection was, she needed it, she needed him. All the while, she told herself that the need sprang from her need to find Saburo, but eventually she began to wonder if that was true.

Gurley had begun to talk about life after the war, together. About some property he'd bought while posted in California, north of San Francisco. It was near the ocean, part of an old ranch. There was a hill you could stand on and see-well, everything. That's where the house would go. Big and broad with a long porch that would ramble around the whole of the first floor. From there, you'd be able to see the land unfurling all the way down to the water, where the ocean would carry the eye on to the horizon and the clouds above. Such clouds, Gurley had told her, such a sun: the pleasures of the sky there were so vast. How like Gurley, I thought, to think that some small panorama he'd purchased might sell a girl who'd grown up beneath the world's biggest sky. Still, I could hear him: “Such a sky as would befit a century's worth of painters! Imagine, heaven's cloak…” And what is there to say, really, against that, or against him? Decades on, I'm not sure I can tell you precisely what the sky looked like above Mary Star of the Sea, or what the walk from the orphanage to the ocean looked like. But I can remember that imaginary house of Gurley's. I can see them both there; I can see every blade of grass, every window, every flower, every cloud above.

I told Lily it sounded beautiful, and she shook her head quickly.

“That's why I was so glad you came, Louis. I was falling for him, I had fallen for him-so much of me still has.”

My heart swelled, is that the word? I was precisely the knight I had taken myself for.

“When you came, you were so different. So young.” We smiled. “And so, so frightened. So unlike anyone else who'd ever come to that dingy little office. I felt it immediately. And you frightened me. You'd been sent, I knew that right away. Not like Gurley You'd been sent to remind me.”

“To what?”

“To-to-rescue me. To shame me. To remind me to-stop crying. To go home, to find my son, his father. Saburo.”

Things were going horribly wrong. I'd been sent to rescue her, but for myself. I tried to protest: “Lily, I-no one sent me.”

“No one you knew, but you knew, somehow, didn't you?” she said.

Lily, I loved you: but I didn't say it. The words were there, but all I could do was cough. “You knew” she went on, “that I didn't need a lover, that I needed a friend.”

If I coughed again, if I even opened my mouth to speak, I knew I might lose whatever was in my stomach.

“You understand,” said Lily, relieved.

I pointed to the door.

“Gurley doesn't, but you do. I don't even understand. I don't even understand what I feel about Gurley-that's why I came here, out here, where I was born, where I can understand things better.” I knocked on the door for the guard to let me out. “The sooner we go, Louis, the