The Cloud Atlas

Ronnie has insisted that his powers have dimmed to such a degree that he's of little use to anyone, but even I can see that certain patients, certain families, get a measure of peace from our visits. They don't look to Ronnie for a cure any more than they do the hospice. Rather, they just want some sort of assurance that the one who is ill will pass through death and into the next life more easily.

Unfortunately, other families want Lazarus-level care, and this leads to disappointments. I know-I thought we all knew-that sometimes people get better, and sometimes they don't, especially in a hospice, but I guess some people expect more of Ronnie. And so when patients he's visited with die-though they were going to die anyway (we all die)-it counts against Ronnie.

And lately, me. I'd thought my role was innocent enough, just nudging Ronnie into spending his last years more productively, more spiritually, but no. Ronnie visits, a patient dies-a parishioner, no less, albeit one who always dozed through Mass-and word spreads around town. Maybe two others outlive their diagnoses for a month or two, but another dies suddenly, maybe another, and maybe to those who haven't stood beside Ronnie and seen the-for lack of a better word- peace he brings, it all adds up wrong.

And so word travels, this wide-open land doing nothing to check its course, and the bishop hears one of his priests is aiding the practice of witchcraft, and an inquiry is made, and another, and these are ignored, and then you are where I am. At the bedside of a shaman, magic having failed both of you, at the mercy of gossips and gods and bishops and ravens.

So I sat with Ronnie for a while, waiting to see if he was faking sleep-or death. But his breathing settled into a quiet rhythm, and when a gentle snoring commenced, I rose to leave.

On the way out, I checked his chart for the DNR. I didn't see it. But something else was written there, two words that sent me back to my seat beside him and kept me there for the rest of the morning.

I WANTED TO CONFESS, too. I go to confession regularly, of course, once a year, at least, whether I need to or not. I usually avail myself of another missionary who's passing through (I prefer the foreign ones, whose faith is always stronger than their English), or I go during one of my visits to Anchorage or Fairbanks. But there, partly out of respect for my brother priests, I confess only what is expected: the petty excesses, errors, failures of daily life. I'm not about to saddle them with all that happened to me, especially during the war. It is enough that I should bear that: I don't want them to suffer with it as well. Wartime transgressions, I figure, will wait for my deathbed, for last rites, when I can cough them out in an unintelligible rattle, be forgiven, and then go on to my reward.

And this is exactly what Ronnie, my brother shaman, was doing. And that's how I realized what I was missing: release, reward. Oh, I'm old enough, have seen enough, that there have been times of late when I've wanted to die-long, dark nights of the soul are nothing new in a land where winter nights can last twenty hours or more. But who could wait, like Ronnie, until the precipice before death to talk? I wanted to tell my secrets, now, ones I have held fast for a lifetime. And who would listen? Ronnie.

No, I've not wanted to burden a brother priest with my secrets, but I'd happily burden Ronnie: he's dying, after all; he won't have to suffer me long. As I waited for him to reawaken, I began to draft my speech in my head. But the longer he slept, the longer my confession became. I worried I would never get it all out if I waited for Ronnie to reawaken. So I didn't wait. Instead, in low tones, mumbling to myself, to Ronnie, I started my story.

In the beginning, Ronnie had said, there was Raven, trickster and creator of the Yup'ik world.

My story also began with something that flew

IT WAS A MOST INGENIOUS device. Leave aside the compliment implicit in ingenious-yes, yes, this was 1944-45, they were still the enemy-and for now, simply admire the handiwork, as I did, each time we found one intact.

A four-tier wedding cake, mostly aluminum, two feet tall. The top tier is a plastic box, a little bigger than one you'd use to hold recipes. Inside the box, a liquid solution of 10 percent calcium chloride, which insulates the small, 1.5 volt wet-cell battery, equal in heft to a good-size bar of soap. Two wires emerge from the box: follow them down. One disappears into a larger wooden box, the cake's second tier. This is where they housed the aneroid barometers: three smaller ones, each calibrated to complete an electrical circuit at a specific altitude, and one larger, more sophisticated, barometer that served as the primary control unit for the flight.

Okay, working our way down now, top to bottom, just like you would (and I did) in the field. Nothing explosive yet.

Next: the wooden barometer box is sitting on a large, round Bakelite platter. Innocent enough. But look beneath (or don't; it was unnerving, even for me, hurriedly trained in bomb disposal). Dozens of wires, all crisscrossing this way and that, many of them connecting to contacts on the bottom of the Bakelite platter, and still others descending to the cake's two lower tiers, the two round aluminum rings spoked like wagon wheels. I suppose I should be more exact. We're not following wires; these are fuses. Twenty-four inches long. Burning time of two minutes, sixteen seconds. Wired in pairs so that if one fuse failed, the other would finish the job. Smart. While airborne, the barometers set the fuses off during the final descent. On the ground, clumsiness or ignorance did the job equally well.

Bang: it wasn't the fuses you had to worry about, though, not ultimately. But they were connected to little-well, squibs is what we called them, because to call them what they essentially were, firecrackers, made it all sound like fun.

When the firecrackers popped, one of the thirty-two sandbags would drop, and as each one dropped, you got a better view (if you were watching this contraption in flight, but few were that lucky) of what all this fuss was about. Around the circumference of the ring dangled four or more 5-kilogram thermite incendiary bombs, which would explode on impact. And in the middle? In the middle dangled a nasty black 15-kilogram antipersonnel bomb, finned like a torpedo and filled with picric acid or TNT. When these exploded, you'd encounter debris scattered as far as a quarter mile away. And for variety sometimes you'd discover some strange canister hanging there you didn't recognize at all.

Oh, and the flash bomb-250 grams of magnesium powder that you'd find if you followed the longest fuse-followed it from where it began, beneath that bottom tier, followed it to where it climbed, up, up, sixty-four feet, where it burrowed like a canker into the side of those magical balloons.

That's what they were, balloons.

Who wouldn't be curious coming upon one in a field, beside a road, among trees? Even deflated, flat on the forest floor like it was melting away, wouldn't you marvel at it? Thirty-two feet in diameter, one hundred feet in circumference, and the whole of it, most incredibly, paper, made from mulberry trees or rice, washi paper. Each balloon required forty to sixty paper panels, and each panel was painstakingly made by hand, in thousands of homes across Japan. Each household produced their share, then handed it up the line to authorities who handed it up to factories (in one case, a converted opera house), where women and children-girls, all who were left then, and who were found to be more skilled than the boys anyway-joined the panels with glue made from a potato-like vegetable. (The vegetable: konnyaku, “devil's tongue,” quite edible, quite Japanese; to reply in kind, we'd have had to caulk our bombs with apple pie. In any case, with food growing scarce in war-winnowed Japan, workers began eating what glue they didn't use, and then, whatever glue they could find.)

A balloon of paper and potato glue, a wedding cake of firecrackers and aluminum. Designed to silently ride the winds across the Pacific, barometers triggering ballast drops when necessary, and then, finally, descend into the impregnable United States mainland, setting forest fires, killing soldiers, civilians.

Ingenious. Yes, I'll use the word. Considering that any one balloon, landing in the right spot, or even a wrong spot, could do an incredible amount of damage.

But the Japanese didn't just send one balloon. Over the course of a few months,