The Cloud Atlas

lights surrounding the patient. Fats's blood pressure was incredibly low, but climbing.

Ronnie repeated his instruction. Fats moaned again, a little louder. Then Ronnie looked at me and rolled his eyes, ever so slightly. “It's not going to work,” he whispered. “He's not here.”

“Who's not here?” asked Mary. Fats moaned once more, soft again.

“No one-” I started.

“My tuunraq,” said Ronnie, quite nonchalant now, as though he were referring to his attorney and not his favored spirit helper, his animal familiar-a wolf, in fact, whose capricious absence Ronnie had been lamenting for some time. It was the tuunraq's job to enter the patient and clear out whatever was bad-a bit like spiritual angioplasty

“Father!” Mary hissed, letting go of our hands. I nodded Ronnie out of the room, and turned to Fats.

He'd stopped moaning, which wasn't too much of a surprise. While Ronnie wasn't always able to bring on a cure, his touch-the lights- the chanting-could all have a disproportionate effect on the susceptible mind.

When Fats opened his eyes, I paused. And then I made the sign of the cross and Mary followed suit, and then, much to our joint surprise, Fats did as well. “Pray with me, Fats-Frank,” I said, not because he would, but because I knew it was Mary's heart rate we then needed to ease. I began a Hail Mary. And then Fats, God bless him, was finally moved to speak.

“Father,” he said, “I want to confess…”

And that, to me, was magic.

I SAT THERE AFTER she left, Ronnie's Travel Nurse, and stared at my own hands. And when the memories of what they had touched, held, let slip, grew unwieldy, I turned to Ronnie.

I stared at Ronnie's hands for a minute, small and muscular, the knuckles cracked white. Then I picked up the one closest to me, and held it, lightly, like the nurse had. And when he didn't reply with a whisper or hoo or squeeze or tap, I smiled again; he was sleeping soundly. Time for me to leave.

After a bit, I squeezed his hand to let him know I was going.

Nothing. I stood, drawing the hand up with me. I squeezed harder. And listened.

Nothing. Something was wrong.

With my free hand, I went for his shoulder; I kept clutching his dead hand with mine. He'd become his own, life-sized voodoo doll. I called out his name, louder and louder, and then I called for the nurse, and then I called for God, and then I called for goddamned Steven Gottschalk.

BEFORE THIS MORNING, I could not have told you what Ronnie's hand felt like-I could have imagined it, perhaps, but that would have been a feat of imagination, imagination driven by what visual details my mind retains. But Steven Gottschalk's hand, I remember every fiber of it, every whorl, and every second it took me to realize that what I'd found there on the ground was not a pink-black glove but a human hand.

It was our last week of bomb disposal school at Aberdeen Proving Ground, just inland from the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, and I was holding Steven Gottschalk's hand. The rest of him had just been rushed back to the base hospital, though he would die before he arrived. Those of us who remained had been told to fan out over the frag-fragmentation-zone. We were looking for parts of the bomb he'd been working on. I didn't even know what I'd found until I bent down, and even then, it was a moment or two before the recognition took hold and I began to retch.

I was unprepared, in every respect. We didn't train with live ordnance; but in this case, a truck accident had left a bomb in a precarious spot on base, and Gottschalk, an instructor, saw this as a valuable teaching opportunity. He positioned us someplace nearby but safe, and then went to work. Later, they told us that that was how he had wanted to go, but I didn't believe it. No one wants to go like that, and Gottschalk had told us in the classroom how he had once dreamed of becoming a pilot. When that hadn't worked out, he decided to give bomb disposal a chance.

My career path was more direct. I'd earned my way into explosives training. In part because I was book-smart and good with diagrams, but more because I scored the absolute lowest-of any recruit, ever, I was told-in marksmanship. As one sergeant put it, me with a gun in my hand was a bomb waiting to go off-so why not volunteer to go to school where I could learn to prevent similar explosions?

I did learn. Quickly. And I became consumed with strange, twin desires. One, to prove myself so expert that those who once laughed at me would feel ashamed that they ever had. And two, to edge as close to death as I could as often as I could, with the faint, teenaged hope that I might just die-and those who had once laughed at me would feel even worse.

My drive was mistaken for talent and my recklessness for courage, and the result was that I was promoted rapidly (not such a feat, sadly in bomb disposal, where sudden openings were frequent). I made sergeant in just a matter of months. But by then, my war-with those who had laughed-was over. My zeal went away with Steven Gottschalk's hand, just as surely as if he had reached inside me and pulled it out himself. But it was too late; my course was set. I finished training and received orders for the South Pacific.

As I was processing through the Fourth Air Force headquarters in San Francisco, however, an officer decided that I should “make the most” of my “layover” by undergoing some additional training across the Golden Gate, where the army had established a network of coastal artillery batteries and a small garrison, Fort Cronkhite.

Fort Cronkhite was an unusual place. Designed to help repel an invasion, it often looked as though it were being invaded. Soldiers in training regularly stormed the small cove where the fort was located, taking the wide stony beach and then working their way up the ravine behind, picking their way around the fort's tidy collection of red-roofed, white-clapboard buildings. Beyond the buildings, the slope climbed sharply into the Marin Headlands, grassy hills that formed that part of the continent's final defense against the Pacific Ocean. From a distance, it looked as though the Headlands ran parallel to the shoreline in a long, smooth ridge, but up close, what looked like innocent folds in the earth's fabric turned out to be countless ravines, great and small.

Viewed from the ridgetop gun emplacements, the fort resembled a California- style summer camp-broad, meadowed hillsides gone gold for lack of rain, the ocean beyond making a slow, vain, glittering entrance late each morning as the fog burned off.

Instead of training, I was given the duty of inspecting the gun batteries' concrete bunkers. They were fitted with clumsy booby traps, designed to explode if the positions were ever overrun. After the first day I'd determined they were more likely to kill our boys-I was surprised, in fact, that they hadn't already. The colonel leading me around was so proud of the setup, however, that I knew I couldn't be candid. So, while he waited outside each bunker gloating, I went in and did my “inspections,” which I performed by quickly and permanently disarming each device.

I was staring at my handiwork in the last bunker, trying not to think of Steven Gottschalk, when I heard shouts. I ducked back out and, blinking rapidly, tried to figure out why a piece of the afternoon sky had torn loose and was floating toward us.

“Stand by to fire!” screamed the colonel, but it was a moment before anyone moved. It looked like a balloon, and it swung toward us like a hypnotist's watch, an ordinary thing working some extraordinary magic. Once I separated it from the sun, I realized that it was a balloon, an unusual one, thirty or so feet in diameter, and slender. It was more than slender, actually: it looked starved and weak, a dirty gray. The bottom half of the balloon was partially deflated; a quick glance would mistake it for a parachute. But down beneath, where you'd expect some person to dangle, hung instead a kind of crate that hardly seemed worth the balloon's trouble.

“Weather balloon, sir?” asked another sergeant, squinting. “I dunno, I heard some guys down in Monterey got in some awful kind of trouble for shooting down a-”

“Stand by to fire!” the colonel shrieked, his voice getting higher instead of louder. The sergeant backed up a step, and then skipped into a slow trot toward his bunker.