The Cloud Atlas

part of her still burned inside. “How?” I said finally.

“First,” she said, “some rope.”

THERE IS THE OLD, familiar challenge of describing the midnight sun, the moon on the snow on a subzero night, the northern lights, the empty Kilbuck Mountains or the endless gray sea to someone who has never been here-and then there is the unique and forbidding prospect of describing what happened in that tent that night, a few weeks shy of the end of the war and my first life.

I'll start outside, since that's where I had retreated to once Lily had started to undress. She hadn't asked me to leave, hadn't needed to- and I wonder, just now, if things might have been different if I had stayed. But she'd slipped off her boots and had started to shrug off her pants when I crawled out. I took a quick look at her face-our eyes didn't meet, but I could see she was in the process of putting on what I now think of as her shaman's mask-her face empty and slack, her eyes unfocused but not yet vacant. I imagine my face might have looked somewhat similar as I stood there, studying her tent and Gurley's, some twenty soggy yards away beside a clump of cotton-wood.

I moved a little closer to his tent, to make sure he really was in it. It was tough to tell in the dark. There wasn't a moon, or there was; when I looked up, all I could see was a dim and shifting murk, dimly lit. I imagine it's what divers see when they look back up to the surface, only to find the way obscured by a passing cloud. But I didn't have to see Gurley As I drew closer, I could hear him, lightly snoring. Every so often, his breath stopped completely, and then resumed in a kind of cough.

He'd left the tent flaps undone, obviously assuming Lily would join him at some point. In the meantime, though, he was at the mercy of the mosquitoes. The tent looked as though it might collapse before morning.

Then I heard another sound-Lily's voice-and I crept back toward my tent.

“Louis,” she whispered, and I could tell she was just inside the flap. I waited a moment, then took a breath and answered. “I need your help,” she said quietly, and when I didn't reply, she asked, “The rope? Some rope?”

I looked around and then whispered, “Wait.”

I found some tangled in the floor of the boat. Once I'd finally freed it, I decided it needed rinsing off and quietly dipped it into the water. Then I heard Lily calling me again. I shook the rope out and walked back to the tent. I squatted, poked open the flap with the coil of rope, and headed in.

First, there was a smell-or a scent-of smoke. Opposite the opening, a squat candle burned on one of the tin mess plates. The plate was wet and spread with leaves or mud of a sort-I'm not really sure, because I didn't pay attention to anything else once I realized Lily's clothing was all piled in a heap in the middle of the tent, and that she was curled up, completely bare, just beyond.

My eyes began to water and I coughed-pungent smoke was filling the tent; for a moment, I thought it was on fire. Then I felt Lily's hand pressing down on my shoulder. “Lower,” she said. “Stay low, like this.” I lowered myself, and saw her face, intent, her arms and hands, and her chest, suddenly pale and ordinary now that I could see it in full. She lowered herself, too, until she was on her side, almost bent double, and it seemed the whole of her was disappearing into the dark.

“Please don't be scared, Louis,” she said. I shook my head. “Now give me the rope.” She flinched when she took the rope from me and found it wet. She gave me a mock frown and then a little smile, the last of the night.

She wound the rope around her neck, and then her shoulders, then her legs and torso, folding and unfolding her body as needed. Here and there, a drop of water would trace a slow, shiny path across a smooth expanse of skin. I should not have been so saturated with desire-even at that moment, I remember thinking that something was wrong, that she'd disposed of a healthier self with her clothes and had instead assumed the body of someone fragile, terribly thin and gaunt. And maybe that's why I didn't turn away or leave the tent or simply freeze: she had been beautiful, but this new fragility made her-if not more beautiful, then somehow more desirable.

With the rope wound around her in loose coils, she looked at me carefully. “Louis, from the pouch there-I need-yes, that pouch. Just open it.”

It was a small leather pouch, extremely soft, with a flap like an envelope. Inside were a variety of small objects-a feather, what looked like rocks or teeth, and some small wooden disks. It was a moment or two before my eyes adjusted and saw the carvings-faces-emerge. “These are the things I need,” she said, and then added a word in Yup'ik that I did not know. “These help me fly. The feather gives me flight, the walrus teeth strength, and the other amulets are for animals who'll help guide me back home.” Unlike Ronnie, I suppose, Lily still had command of a tuunraq or two and did not need a human voice to lead her back.

I studied the objects in the palm of my hand, and then looked at Lily-not at her face, because I couldn't, not then, maybe not anymore, but at her body, the slope and shape of it, the way it evaded the rope in some places and strained against it in others. “I need help,” she said. “I need to tie the objects to me. Spirits are powerful and will run away from you if you do not bind them tight.” She lay down quietly on her back, closed her eyes. I didn't move, not for a full minute, and then she looked up. “Let each object tell you where it goes,” she said, and then closed her eyes again.

It was too much to look at her like that, to be able to study her without her studying me. I was searching for an innocent patch of skin to place something, but as she lay there, nothing looked innocent, everything was charged. Charged: and I say that not as an expression but because it was true, there was a hum, electric, I could hear it, and I could feel the vibrations, and though you might peg it to something less complicated, at the time I thought it was pure magic, and still do.

The teeth I knotted near her knees, one amulet I placed at her shoulder, and then the feather floated across her chest and I let my hand follow it. I cannot tell you when that light touch became a caress, or how my hand continued its light tracing after I'd woven the feather into the rope at her stomach. And I cannot tell you that I do not remember all that happened next. It was both hands, my lips; I found places for everything, for all the amulets, all the charms, and then I lay there beside her and waited to explode.

And then she said-had it been seconds, minutes? An hour?-a most remarkable word: “Untie.”

It should have happened then, just as soon as I'd worked her free of the cord and its knots and charms. I should have slipped free of my clothes and we should have lain together and fallen in love, made love. But I couldn't and didn't, because as I untied her, I watched the body I was releasing release memories, too. I saw and felt Gurley, and the summer's romance with Saburo, the phantom child they produced. I saw her growing up in Bethel, I saw her mother and father. I saw all the things she had told me about her life, but in different colors, scored with different sounds. I suppose it sounds like I was sitting there watching a movie, but it wasn't that, because I was moving through the landscape. I'd more readily compare it to what I've come to believe death is like, based on dozens of people I've seen go through their last moments here in this very hospice: for an instant, there is all the immediacy of life-all the people, sights, sounds, smells. We hear people talk about how one's life passes before one's eyes, and we think of a parade, with a beginning and an end. But it's not like that. The dying don't see their lives pass: their lives flash, complete, and vanish. It's the lifeless corpse that lingers.

I have spent a life fighting my way back to that moment with Lily that flash. I have spent a life trying to get back to that precipice and leap off it. I've not been chasing after sex-good Lord, what a fleeting goal-but intimacy, knowledge. I had not gone on Lily's journey with her, but I was there when she came back. And when she asked me to untie her, she was allowing me to participate somehow in what she'd seen and done. That's why I saw the whole of her life like that. And had the moment lasted any longer, I think I would have seen the whole of mine. I really do.

Getting that moment back: That's not enough to spend a lifetime pursuing? It has been for me. I knew I could never become an angalkuq myself, so I marched down the closest spiritual path allowed me. Priesthood. I suppose I could have contented myself with regular churchgoing, or rigorous self-examination, or drugs. But none of that would have gotten Lily to where she went. She had been subsumed by the spiritual world; I wanted to be swallowed whole, too, and join her, so I consecrated myself to a