David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

“I just got here, I guess,” I said, my mind spooning out words almost at random, since the whole of me was preoccupied with the situation: I am in a room, all by myself, with a woman, with a Japanese woman, and we are at war with Japan, and I am an American soldier, and I’ve never slept with a woman, from Japan or anywhere else, and-

“Just got here’?” Lily said. “C’mon, sit down. Either your brain isn’t hooked up to your mouth, or you don’t have a brain, or you’re just not telling the truth. Let’s find out.” She patted the floor next to her. I didn’t move. “ ‘Palm reader,’ right?” she asked. “This is what you came about?”

I finally spoke up. “Listen, I’ve got some questions, okay? I mean, up front?”

“That’s what this all about, sailor,” Lily said.

“Soldier,” I said.

“Well, we’ll see about that,” Lily said, patting the floor beside her again. “Sit, young man.” She was smiling once more.

“What?” I said. But it was useless. I was already starting to sit. Doing so was a bit painful, but not as much as I’d expected. Either my bruises were fading rapidly, or my mind was too occupied with Lily to register pain.

Lily wiped her palms on her knees. “Let’s start with names. What’s yours?”

I paused. “Harry,” I said. “Harry… Crosby.” I couldn’t give her my real name.

She looked at me, waited, and then said, “And how is Bing?” She smiled. “With a brother that famous, I can see why you go under a secret name like ‘Belk.’” She pointed to the name strip on my pocket. I closed my eyes. “Just what are you so nervous about, Soldier Belk?” she asked softly.

“You know why,” I said. “It’s that you’re-you’re-you know.”

“Taller?” she asked. “Than you? Worried I could toss you out the window? Worried I will?”

“No,” I said, imagining being heaved out the window, and then lingering on the scene as I thought about how she’d have to grab hold of me, hug me, probably, wrestle me over there, her arms wrapped around me, our faces inches apart. “You’re not taller,” I said, surfacing. “You’re- Japanese .” I whispered the word like it was a secret she’d asked me to keep.

Her eyes went wide with honest, and then exaggerated, alarm. “Oh dear,” she said. “You can read my every secret, can’t you? Maybe the wrong person’s running this palm-reading business.” She held out a hand to me. “Here, let’s see what else you know. Read my palm. Tell me my future.” I still knew I had to leave, but I was hardly going to leave now , now that I had a chance to hold a woman’s-this woman’s- hand. I took it gingerly, cradled it with the same care I’d use on some new piece of ordnance that I was encountering for the first time.

But I defy you-or would have defied anyone-to read that hand. As soon as I saw her palm, I almost jumped as if she’d surprised me with another “boo.” Her hand was a welter of lines, as though it had been shattered and then reassembled, piece by piece. I looked at my own hands in vain for some reference point. I looked at her other hand, compared them-but they weren’t alike, at least in no way that I could tell.

Stranger still, and what I remember even more clearly, is how soft her hands were.

“Here’s a little advice,” Lily said. “If you decide to go into this profession after the war-and I don’t think you should, because you’re not doing so hot, so far-but if you do, it helps if you talk to the customer.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“And when you talk, don’t use that word,” Lily said. “It scares them. Also: sick, death, troubling, mother, and price”

I exhaled quickly and squinted, as if focusing would help me read her palms better. “Well, there goes my whole speech.”

She smiled, took her hands away. “That’s not a surprise,” she said. “But you making a funny-that’s a surprise. A nice one.”

But I wasn’t listening to her. I was just watching those hands disappear out of mine; the loss of that touch was almost painful. “Please” was all I could say, and something about my pathetic appearance- combined with the fact that I was harmless, just a boy to her, made her put her hands back in mine.

“Okay,” she said. “But be quick. Remember, I’m here to read your palm. Which reminds me: How are you going to pay?”

I smiled again. “Let’s take a look,” I said, and studied her palm.

I decided all you really had to do was tell a story. And all I wanted was an excuse to hold her hands, so I just took any line I saw and started in: She was born in… Tokyo. An only child. Her parents were-but she stopped me, and pointed out that Tokyo was far away. How did she end up in Alaska, and speaking English? I rubbed her palm with a thumb, pretended to think on this for a moment while I savored the touch, and then settled on a ship, a great, ridiculous ship that was full of language instructors, chalkboards.

“God, that sounds boring,” she said. I think now she was referring to the imaginary classroom as it bobbed across the Pacific, but I thought then that she was criticizing my imagination. Some palm reader I’d make. So I revised things; I found another line and started again. Born in Japan, on top of a mountain, a mother made of snow and a father made of fire. I didn’t know where all this was coming from, but she’d fallen quiet and was listening. She spoke every language, I said, the words came to her in raindrops. Raindrops; a cloud; she’d traveled across the ocean in a giant cloud, floating this way and that, until a storm had gathered, and she’d dropped to earth in a flaming downpour—

Her hands flew away from me with a start, and just for an instant, I saw her wear another face, one she hadn’t shown me before. But it passed, and then she was holding my hands. Holding them, but looking at my eyes.

“You’re a very, very bad palm reader,” she said. “And a creepy storyteller. I, on the other hand-I’m very good at both. You want to hear your story?”

I THINK MINE is the sort of life that almost anyone could read from a hand, or better yet, my eyes. They say those eyes never leave you, eyes that blinked awake each morning wondering if this was the day your parents would come-not some foster parents they’d found for you, but your real parents, a mom and dad, like everyone had, even Jesus. So although I find it patronizing, I long ago decided it was also true: an orphan never loses that look, those eyes.

I wasn’t too surprised, then, when Lily got that part right: orphan. And I admire her for not taking the easy route and pretending she knew who my parents were, and describing these imaginary beings to me in exquisite, unknowable detail.

But maybe it would have been better for her to embroider some fiction. Because the more she talked, the more she knew, and the more scared I became. She knew about the orphanage, knew it was nothing like Dickens, knew that the Mary Star of the Sea Home for Infants and Children was south of Los Angeles, knew it was just a block from the beach, knew-and no one would ever have made this up-that the nuns treated us like the grandchildren they’d never have. She knew no family ever came for me (though if she knew why she didn’t say), and she knew that all those years saturated with sun and God’s love had left me with the pure, naïve desire to be His priest.

And that’s where I stopped her. Because I didn’t want to know if she knew the rest, how I’d taken the train-paying the fare with money the teary-eyed nuns had given me-to San Diego. How I’d never made it to the high school seminary they were finally sending me to, because I stopped at the armed forces recruiting station first.