The Cloud Atlas (28 page)

“There was,” I said, automatically.

“He was always there,” he said. “Even before… this. I knew him before she told me of him, I could see him, sense him, somewhere back behind her eyes, whenever she and I kissed. Made love.” He sat in his chair, somewhat calmer now, and found a handkerchief, which he unfolded and then twisted between his hands. “I could never have all of her. I knew she wanted me to have as much as I would, but somewhere, back in there, deep inside her, this fiend held on-it's like he holds some piece of her
soul.
Holds it so tight that he is able to pull her all the way out here.”

I'm right here, sir:
I wanted Gurley to look up, see me. I wanted to tell Gurley that
I
was this other person, but more than that, I wanted it to be true.

But when he did look up, all he saw was Saburo. “We have, what? Two days now, less maybe, before that major in Fairbanks sends his dogs out across the tundra in search of plague or spies. I've said I wanted to find the prize before him, and I do. But the reason is not so much for glory but revenge. If the major catches him, this spy becomes a prisoner of war, a resource. If I catch him-and we will, whether it takes forty hours or months-I will finish it. I will find him, remove him, and release Lily, to me.”

And what would happen when we didn't find him? Lily said he was gone. But Gurley was determined to find him-he'd have to find, and kill, someone. Lily hadn't thought through this part of her plan. But then, it hadn't really been a plan.

“Sir,” I said, making one last attempt. “I'm just not sure we will find anyone. It's more than a needle in a haystack, sir, it's-”

“It's a needle in a haystack for the major,” said Gurley. “But we have Lily.” He smiled. “We have you.” He rose.

“I'm just not sure, sir, what we'll find. What if he's dead?”

The color slowly returned to Gurley's cheeks. It was his fury rising in him, but in a way, it was a relief to witness-I'd had plenty of experience dealing with Gurley furious, and could steel myself against it. I'd been frightened, on the other hand, to find myself vulnerable to feeling sympathy when faced with Gurley despondent and brokenhearted.

That danger had passed.

He walked toward me, closer and closer, until he'd backed me up half across the room. “You wish him dead. Fair enough. So do I. But you wish him dead because you wish to be done with this mission, this war, me. You are scared, Sergeant. Both understandable and unattractive.” And closer. “This man is a
spy”
Gurley continued. “A spy for the enemy. The enemy whose one interest is slaughter. Have you heard what's happening in the South Pacific, Sergeant? Of the bodies of men and women, men like you, missing eyes and hands and whatever they had between their legs, stuffed into their
mouths?
” Gurley's mouth was now quite close to mine. “This-Saburo-
raped
a woman that I love, that I hope to spend the rest of a very, very long life caring for. If you need more reasons, God knows they're offering us plenty-from fires to plague to who knows what next-go ahead and do this for your country. But you know what? Our country's got more than ten million in uniform fighting for it.” He stared at me hard. “Lily's only got me.”

I'M NOT SURE IF it was a product of our conversation or his simmering madness or his fear of the major on our heels, but two minutes after he'd left, he returned and declared that we would leave at midnight. We may not have agreed on much about Saburo, but he didn't think Saburo was hiding in town, either. I thought Gurley would sneak off to Lily's “VIP quarters” before our departure, but he had me walk him down to the riverbank, doling out additional instructions all the while. He confirmed the time with me, and then I watched him hire a boat to take him across the Kuskokwim to town, in search of a drink or worse.

I figured I had at least an hour, maybe more.

I walked quickly back to the headquarters building, in search of Lily. When I asked the duty officer about her whereabouts, he gave me a blank look. He was putting on a front, of course; Lily had to be the only woman on the base-perhaps the only woman on the base in six months or more. Finally, he leaned back and said, “Oh, you mean the
prisoner
.”

Now it was my turn to put on a front, and mask my alarm with a knowing nod. The prisoner. The man said he'd been left instructions that she was not to be disturbed, but I countered that I was under orders from Gurley, and the man accepted my bluff. Gurley had obviously made his usual terrifying impression.

They didn't have cells on the base, so they had put Lily in a signal shed by the airfield with a guard stationed out front “for her protection.” When I entered and the guard closed the door behind me, Lily was sitting perfectly still in the middle of the room, on the only thing in the room, a chair.

Neither of us said anything; we just looked at each other. I'm not sure what my face looked like, but Lily kept hers completely blank. I could have been Gurley I could have been Tojo, I could have been a six-foot raven. She stared.

I looked at her hands; they were cuffed. What had Gurley done?

I knelt beside her and tried to take one hand of hers in mine, but she moved away. “I'm okay,” she said.

“Lily, I'm so sorry,” I said. “Who did this? I'm going to get you out of here. No, I promise. I think-I think Gurley's finally lost it. I mean, completely. I think he's gone, or going. I don't think it will be long now, not at all. Jesus-he wants to leave at midnight. And he's got you locked in a closet. In handcuffs.”

She shook her head, and rolled her eyes-the first I had seen so far of the old Lily. “He has me here for my
safety,”
she said and smiled. “He told them I was a prisoner of war, someone with information. He told them that so they wouldn't bother me. So no one would wonder why a captain flew an Eskimo girl out to the bush.” She smiled, and I couldn't decide what to do. Was Gurley this crazy? Was she?

I felt bad for her, but now I also felt angry. Part of it was the old anger, jealousy-Gurley held her completely in sway. The new anger was that this growing debacle was all her doing. She'd told Gurley some story about Saburo in order to get herself back to Bethel, and now here she was, cuffed, and here I was, suddenly party to the whole rotten plan. “Why are you doing this?” I asked, but I got up as I said it, and ended up delivering the words more to the room than her.

But she still heard me. “Louis,” she said. “I'm so close now. I'm almost there.”

I turned to look at her and realized that Gurley was with us-or rather, within me. Standing there, eyes cast down at her, chin pointing up, disdain on my face. I was becoming him or had become him. And I couldn't shake it off. Maybe Gurley was a wizard, too. He'd obviously possessed Lily somehow, even though she was a shaman in her own right. Who was I to think I could resist? And when I spoke, it was his words, his tone.

“A rapist?” I said, and everything about her changed. Her face, her hands, her body, flushed and strained against the cuffs. “You told him Saburo was a rapist? To get yourself out here?”

“What?”

“He told me Saburo
raped
you. Lily, what does he really know about Saburo?” She clasped her hands together until the knuckles went white. “You told him he was Japanese, a spy, but did you tell him everything about that summer, Lily? Did you tell him everything that he'd find out if he'd gone walking around town today, like me?”

I was ready for her to scream, but what came out was more of a groan-“No.” Then she said, “Louis, don't do this.”

“What was the baby's name?” I said.

She looked at me for a long, silent moment, waiting for me to unsay the words, or maybe for history itself to unravel back past the point that there had ever been a war, a Saburo, a long summer under open skies full of light. Then she cried. I closed my eyes, and kept them closed when she finally began to speak.

“He didn't have a name,” she said. Then nothing. When her voice returned, she went on. “I knew it was going to be a girl. I was going to name her Samantha-Sam, for Jap Sam, who'd been so good to me all that time until he was taken away. Introduced me to Saburo.” She stopped. I could feel her looking at me, waiting for me to open my eyes, but I didn't. I was too frightened of what I'd done or started. “But it wasn't a girl. I should have known then! What woman with the kind of sight I supposedly had wouldn't know what lay inside her, a boy or a girl? Wouldn't know he was dying?” She stopped again, and it was a minute or two before she started once more. “That little boy, inside me, dying, drowning like I'd thrown him into the sea. And then-” Lily stopped, caught her breath and tried again. “And then, he was in my arms, dead. Bella and the other aunties wanted a doctor or a priest.” I could feel her staring at me. “Keep your eyes closed, then,” she said. “That's what I want. What I wanted. No doctor, no priest, nobody. Nobody to come say, Lily the half-breed girl, whose parents ran away!' ‘Lily, who went away last summer with that Jap and came back pregnant!’ ‘Lily who thought she could have a baby on her own, and it came out dead! Look at her! Ha!’” She sniffed and coughed.

“How much did Bella tell you? Did she tell you the story she told me? Bella, so smart. All the aunties, so smart. That's what they thought. Them and all the elders before them and before them, all of them. And now, they said, don't cry. Don't cry.”

And now: the
angalkuq
.
I waited for Lily to tell me about the shaman, but she did something more curious. She told me the story Bella told her, the story she'd wanted to tell me in the forest, the story that Ronnie so startled me with when he retold it yesterday.

There was a boy, a baby boy, and his mother.

But in Lily's version, in Bella's version, it is the baby who dies and the mother who weeps. Don't cry, Bella told Lily, and Lily told me, crying. Don't cry, or the baby will wake. Don't cry, or the baby will wake and lose his way to the land of the dead. And then you will have him with you always. Always a baby, always needing you to carry him, soothe him, always making you cry. Mind the story of the mother whose baby died and could not stop crying. The village begged her. Shamans begged her. Her husband begged her. But she would not stop, and the baby awoke, and he never left. Eventually, they all moved away. The other families, the whole village, even her husband. She was left all alone with the baby. You see her tears every summer when the snow thaws and the delta floods.

Lily looked at Bella, still crying, unable to speak. Then what did it mean that her summer with Saburo had been so dry? Bella surprised her: Ever go hunting for mouse food? Lily held her breath, felt the prickling along her arms. Reach down sometimes, and what do you find? Mouse food? The little gnawed roots, shaped like teardrops? Little teardrops. Whose tears do you think those are?

Bella reached over then, Lily said, and tried to take the baby from her. No, Lily said, and then repeated the word, with a hiss. Bella recoiled, shocked and hurt.

Remember the story, Bella said. Remember what happens. The mother's left all alone. Everyone leaves her.

“It's just a story,” Lily shrieked.

“Then where's
your
husband?” Bella said, and left the room.

THERE WAS NO SHAMAN, no
angalkuq
from Lower Kalskag in Lily's story. There was only Saburo, her lover from Japan, who came, and disappeared, later that night. Lily said she had called to him, had sent animal spirits sprinting out across the tundra in search of him, and then there he was. Proof of magic, or love. And those hands: she had loved him for those beautiful hands, and now she knew why. The way they moved the hair from her face, the way they pulled away the bloody sheets, the blankets, slowly, gently, and laid bare the boy. She had not let anyone else hold the baby, and now it seemed obvious why: no one else had hands fit for the task, to hold something that tiny, that fragile, that hopeless. She told him the story Bella had told her, and she loved him all the more for his reaction: he cried. They cried together, and while they were crying, whispered and planned.

Saburo would take the boy away, bury him in a special place in the bush, build him a tiny shrine as he would have done were they in Japan. Lily begged to come with him, but he insisted she rest. He would come back for her, bring some token from the shrine, and then-he would spirit her back to Japan. He didn't say how.

Days passed. A week, then two. “I was worried, but not scared,” Lily went on. “I thought I had powers, and I thought they were strong, despite everything that happened: something had made him appear, after all. But nothing was making him come back. I went outside one night and listened for him, finally. After a while, I was sure I heard him, very faintly, very far away. In Anchorage. So I went.”

But Anchorage was too “noisy,” Lily said. Once she got there, she couldn't find Saburo anywhere. In time, she needed money, just to survive, and, once she'd saved up enough, to get back home. Another Yup'ik woman told her about fortune-telling. She didn't tell her, though, what the men really came to find out-whether you would have sex with them. If you did, they paid you more. And as scared as she was of losing Saburo, as scared as she might have been for what he thought of what she was doing, she kept doing it, because something told her that she was getting closer.

She was: Gurley arrived one night, and she knew immediately that she'd found a link to Saburo. Lily didn't know what the link was, not at first, but she knew she had to cultivate a relationship with Gurley. When she did, and various details slowly surfaced about his work, such as the balloons (Gurley! Master of secrets!), she knew she'd done right. Eventually, he'd lead her to Saburo.

But after her initial excitement about Gurley's connection to Saburo, the notion that he would lead her to him began to fade. Not because it seemed impractical or implausible, but because-well, it will sound preposterous coming out of my mouth, so I'll just quote what Lily said:

“There is an old tradition, from generations ago, that the night after a hunt, the women of the less successful hunters would seek out the men who had been successful, and have sex with them. It was thought they might then pass on some of that power to their own less fortunate husbands. It had nothing to do with love or even sex. It was about doing all you could to make sure your husband, your lover, would bring honor to your family. Gurley was successful.”