The Cloud Atlas

She suggested collecting some ayuq from the tundra and making iced tea from it. Ayuq is called Labrador tea, Eskimo tea, tundra tea, or ayuq, depending on who's doing the calling, and the list of illnesses it cures is diverse as well. A tattered copy of Reader's Digest, meanwhile, told me the problem was corroded neural pathways and suggested I drink brewed garlic. I thought about distilling the best of both methods by taking up whisky again, with ice, but Ronnie lying here in this bed is evidence enough that alcohol won't work.

Ronnie's eyes opened, failed to focus, and then closed again. He spoke anyway: “In the beginning,” he told his chest, “there was Raven.”

I settled back. I have heard multiple stories of creation in Alaska, but in the beginning, there is always Raven. The version Ronnie tells is my favorite. In the beginning, Raven scratches at the earth with his claws and makes hills, mountains. The countless gouges his talons leave in the soil fill with water and become lakes, rivers, and sloughs.

Upon this land, Raven created a man of stone. Formidable and strong-a man designed to survive in the harsh climate of southwestern Alaska. But then spring came, and the snows melted, the soil turned to mud, and the stone man sank deeper into the tundra with every step.

So Raven tried again. This time he molded a man of clay, or dirt. More fragile, more vulnerable-true; but more adaptable and better suited to travel the land he had sprung from.

It's a sign of how long I have lived here that I know Ronnie and his stories so well. And while I was always more interested in hearing a new story, I was still intrigued to hear Ronnie tell one I already knew and see what use he might put it to. Did he feel like the man of stone now, sinking into his illness? Or the man of clay, so easily broken?

Or perhaps he and I were the two first men-but which of us was stone, which clay?

I asked him. He scowled.

“This is what I have said,” Ronnie said. His breathing became his punctuation. “In the beginning there was Raven. And then, a family. A mother. A boy. Her lovers. His fathers.”

“More than one?” I interrupted, still not understanding. “Sounds like quite a story.”

Ronnie closed his eyes, and when he opened them once more, he spoke. “This is not a story. This is true.”

A nurse arrived, bearing a syringe on a tray. Ronnie scanned back and forth: me, nurse, syringe. He settled on the syringe.

“You heard what I said?” he told the syringe as it approached. “You told the doctor? No painkillers. No sleep medicines.” He pointed at me. “I have things I need to discuss. With my priest.” The nurse nodded gently, and reassured him that his request had already been written down on his chart. Then she explained that she was just there to draw blood. Ronnie watched carefully as she cinched the constricting band around his arm, searched for a vein, and then drew what she needed.

“What she wants to take,” Ronnie said, “is already gone.” Which might have been true, considering that years of drinking had likely left his veins more full of Gilbey's gin than blood. When she was finished, he sank back into the pillow.

“Raven,” he said.

“Ronnie,” I said. “What are you bothering the nurses for? They're going to take good care of you. If there's one thing they do better in the hospice than the hospital, it's take care of pain. So if you're uncomfortable, let them-”

“What I need to say, I need a clear head to say,” he said.

Now, a few years before, there's only one thing Ronnie would have said next: So let us drink.

Instead, he said something I'd never heard him say before: “Father.” I tensed. Then another surprise: “I want to confess.”

This was so startling I assumed we were joking again. “Oh, Ronnie,” I said. “Let's just talk. Old friends.”

“Enemies,” he said, and smiled. “I want to go to confession.”

“You're not even Catholic, Ronnie,” I said, sure the floor was groaning and splitting beneath me like some last chunk of springtime ice in the river. Was Ronnie ready to believe? Had he finally found his proof?

“I don't have to be Catholic to tell secrets,” Ronnie said. He drew a deep breath, and then another, and another, and in another moment, he seemed deep asleep.

RONNIE IS NOT CATHOLIC. Nor is he Russian Orthodox. Nor Moravian Protestant. Nor Baptist, nor a member of any of the other churches that crowd vulnerable Bethel. As a result, it was somewhat difficult for me to obtain for him a position as assistant chaplain at the hospice some time ago, but it was certainly easier than getting him a position titled, say, “staff shaman.”

It's not that people would have frowned on the term shaman. (Or maybe they might have; it's a white man's word, and imprecise the way white men's words are. Angalkuq is the Yup'ik term.) Shamans, or angalkut, served many functions in times past, but a chief duty was healing, and even the hospital in town incorporates such traditional medicine into its care today.

But people did frown on Ronnie. He was, way back when, an angalkuq of some note. Mostly because he was a final, and absolutely unrepentant, holdout against the missionaries. As such, he merited a certain amount of respect, even from those God-fearing Natives who no longer sought his services-so much of the old ways had been lost, but in Ronnie they had a time capsule, a treasury, an unassailable fortress.

Until a tide of alcohol flooded it.

Ronnie's abilities had waned during the war, it was said, maybe before. Some said it happened gradually, some said abruptly. Some said Ronnie had done something, and others said something had been done to him. But every version of the story I heard turned out the same way: the war had brought soldiers; the soldiers, alcohol; and alcohol, for Ronnie at least, brought fleeting glimpses of the ethereal provinces he once visited regularly.

By the time I met him, he lacked both powers and respect. To my shame, I did nothing to help him. I thought an enfeebled foe made my job that much easier. Though Ronnie's various attempts to run me out of Alaska, or out of this world altogether, were occasionally frightening, withstanding them seemed to burnish my reputation in the community.

But eventually, I'd had my fill of respect. And I'd come to like Ronnie-in part, because no one else did. So I went to him. I worked with him, as much as he'd let me.

He should have been long dead by then, and I think he knew this. I say that because I can't think of any other reason why he would have let me help him as much as I tried to. Except for one. I'd suggested a dozen times he enter a treatment program, but he didn't agree until I- or a mischievous God putting words in my mouth-announced that if he stopped drinking, I would as well. I wasn't an alcoholic, but-well, drinking wasn't improving me, either.

In any case, I could see in Ronnie's smile gratitude for someone joining him on the difficult road ahead-and also delight that he had found yet a new way to discomfort me.

We've had a truce, a delicate one, with alcohol ever since. But a strange thing happened when Ronnie sobered up: he had nothing to do. He'd had nothing to do when he was an alcoholic, but being drunk was itself a kind of occupation: you had duties and obligations, like being disorderly, you had an office-in Ronnie's case, a jail cell-where you could reliably be found.

So for the past three or four years, before this most recent set of ailments put him in bed instead of beside one, Ronnie has worked with me at the hospice. I suppose I could have tried to get him a place at the hospital in town, but they were already staffed with Native healers (with far finer reputations than Ronnie's), and besides, I wanted someplace quiet. Out of the way.