The Cloud Atlas

lawns. And finally, I turned down a street that I'm fairly certain is the one that used to terminate at the front door of our Quonset hut.

And it was gone, too, of course. Which I expected, though I was disappointed. I wondered what it was like when they tore it down, what happened when neither Gurley nor I returned from our secret mission, whether the major ever searched the tundra for some proof of plague, or whether he launched a search for some proof of us.

Maybe no one noticed, or didn't notice for a while. The war was ending then. We disappeared in July, the war ended in August. And the balloon that carried that boy was either the last or among the last, or so I've deduced from the odd article or two that I've read in the decades since. They gave up, Japan. Credit Gurley, I guess, or the editors who voluntarily obeyed the press ban: until it was lifted, not a word about the balloons was printed or broadcast, and the Japanese were left to conclude that their massive undertaking had failed.

No trace of plague weapons was ever found in Alaska or farther south, though I've read there were plans for plague-laden kamikaze planes to attack San Diego in the fall of '45. Northern China, Unit 731's home, offers a glimpse of what might have been: in the years following the war, tens of thousands died in successive waves of plague, likely spread by animals escaping from, or released by, those who'd spent the war experimenting on them.

The plague failed to reach us, but the balloons did not. They rose from the ground into the clouds and flew across the ocean. They landed in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. In Alaska, in Washington, in Oregon, in California, in a dozen other states, and who knows what's still concealed today beneath the forest floor? After the war, researchers reinflated a captured Japanese paper balloon and launched it from Southern California, just to see how hardy it was, just to see how far it would travel, having already made the trek from Japan.

It landed in Africa.

But that one balloon doesn't interest me so much as the dozens Gurley and I left behind in Anchorage. How strange it must have been in those first days without us, those last days of the war, MPs guarding a building uninhabited but for balloons.

In time, of course, the Army would have sent someone up to take inventory and look for clues of what had happened among the items that we'd left. What would they have found?

Balloons, still hanging from the rafters, crates upon crates of balloon parts, and those pieces too big to be crated, stacked along the floor, the whole place looking less like a home for decommissioned war materiel than the breeding ground of some terrible new weapon.

In his office, after they'd snapped the padlock? They'd find the wall map, of course, the pins running red across it, the clocks above. Gurley's dog-eared Japanese-English dictionary. The blackguard's tooth.

There I was, years later, half afraid some MP would finally take this long-absent soldier prisoner, and there was nothing there.

There's nothing there: Lily was as amazed as I at those final pages in the book, page after page of gray wash that I had read as blank, as failure, as proof of Saburo's inability to show Lily where he had gone, what he had done, what had happened to their little boy.

It's only now I understand that he could no more have mapped their son's death than he could the clouds, blood coursing through a body or spilling into the sea. The pattern is unknowable, out of reach, divine. It's only now I see, in my mind and in the overcast sky ahead of me, those washed gray pages for what they were. There may be no sharper map of grief than this, no more precise way to show a war's worth, a life's worth, a love's worth of ache and loss and absence.

Rest, write, my superiors told me, almost sixty years in the bush, what stories you must have! And this is how I would tell them, not with pen or pencil but a brush, dipped in water, dipped in paint, sweeping back and forth across an empty page.

Look how the gray gathers here, how here it stumbles into white.

Look closer, how each square inch, each speck of color is made up of smaller specks of moisture. Of water from the brush, of Ronnie's rain falling to those grieving parents' faces, of snow, of molecules, of the hydrogen escaped years ago from those balloons.

Of breaths escaped from mouths.

And the last thing I would draw or paint or write is what I see emerging now: eyes, ears, tail, snout, a thick mane. I throttle back and stop. Red tongue, white teeth.

Ronnie's wolf.

It must be: any other wolf would have run at the sound and light- or maybe this one has sized me up and seen me for what I am. An aging priest. A soldier who couldn't shoot. The one the others left behind.

The wolf paces left, then right, fast at first, then slow. I don't know what holds him at bay: fear of a gun? I do not have one. I raise my empty hands, and he stops and stares, his muscles tense, and so do mine.

I believe in God the Father Almighty and I believe in the wolves He made, their claws, their bite. But He did not make this one, so I have nothing to fear. This is Ronnie's wolf. A tuunraq. A spirit, a familiar, a work of the mind. Isn't he? I cannot come to harm from something imaginary.

But something in me is frightened, enough to hammer my heart and make me sweat in the subzero cold. Frightened and almost teary with joy, because the longer the wolf paces and pants, the more I find this proof that he is not, in fact, a tuunraq, he is the work of no one's imagination but God's, or that there is no such thing as imagination out here, that everything is real, that he is real, teeth and all, and this is why Ronnie sent me to meet him. To die, and in doing so join Lily, and the rest.

Park rangers say: appear larger than you are, make a noise, speak; remind the animal that you are human, not standard prey.

So I stay silent, I move away from the snowmachine, I crouch down, I put one knee in the snow. I shift my weight, the snow gives, I sink a little. I put down the other knee and sink a little more. I recover my balance, extend a hand, and then the other.

And the wolf steps closer, unsure.

I look at his eyes, and then remember: his mouth! Who or what is he carrying by the scruff of its neck? Lily's baby? Saburo? The boy from the balloon? Ronnie? I can't see. I look at the eyes again.

The wolf steps closer, close enough that our breath now clouds together, and I am on both knees, trembling, remembering: This is what you must give him-

Breath, cloud. Breath, cloud.

I breathe out the breath Ronnie gave me as he died, the breath Ronnie took from Lily's baby after he died.

Bring this to her son, I tell the wolf.

Breath, cloud.

And to Ronnie, breathe his life back. And the boy who flew across the ocean: fill his lungs once more, his balloon as well.

Breathe life into Lily.

Into me.

Deep in the snow, I feel a flash of how that first Yup'ik man of stone felt. A staggering jumble of blocks sinking, too slowly, into the tundra. I am cold and wet, and old.

The wolf steps closer and then around me. I can feel him at the small of my back, now my shoulder, now he's before me once more. I breathe deep; I'm ready. But then, without a look, without a sound, he leaps away, lands in a trot, then leaps again, and lands galloping, fleeing or leading me to some new and distant place.

I rise.