David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

I should clarify: recognizing his theatricality wouldn’t have immunized me against it. I think I’d have to be as unconscious as Ronnie here to have resisted Gurley’s performance. But I wasn’t unconscious, I was alive, and I shivered- the enemy is here! Japs all around! -and you know what? It was wonderful. It was wonderful the same way it’s wonderful to flinch at some frightening point in a book or a movie; there’s a certain dizzy pleasure that comes with knowing you’ve succumbed, you’ve been duped.

And, back then, it was a lot more than that: it was wonderful to know the war was real. You had to be young to think this; the country had to be younger, too. But that’s the way it was with kids like me: it was wonderful to know that this enemy we’d read so much about was really out there, that I would finally get to fight, and that Gurley would somehow wave a magic wand, take me through a back door, and usher me right into the middle of all of it.

All of it: Japanese soldiers, hiding in trees, leaping out of mailboxes late at night. Bombs in the sky. Balloons in the clouds. A giant red rising sun on a white field, strung between the twin towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. But gradually, as Gurley rambled on, talking more to himself now than to me, my excitement began to give way to a kind of panic.

What he was talking about was preposterous. Evidence of Japanese activity in a dozen states or more? And nobody other than fifty men (fifty-one now?) knew about it? I looked around the office; I looked at Gurley as he stared at the map with red-rimmed eyes. I wondered if fifty men now knew what I thought I knew: here, in this lonely Alaskan outpost, Captain Thomas Gurley U.S. Army Air Corps, had gone mad.

And he’d dreamed himself up a new front line in the process. Even as a work of insanity, it was impressive: his line stretched clear across North America-through Canada and into Michigan. He rattled on, and I marveled at the performance, and at the magnitude of the fiction. I began to wonder which would come first: my transfer away from Anchorage, or Gurley’s? Who would assume his post, and its attendant, if imaginary, duties?

What a world this was, wartime Alaska. Half-naked palm readers, rampaging drunken sailors, lunatic captains raving in darkened Quonset huts, and me. If I had been older, I would have been too scared to speak.

But I was young, stupid, and, once the panic subsided, bemused, so what I finally said was “Incredible.”

Gurley frowned, furious. I was not as good an actor as he. “Not enough for you,” he said.

“No, no, it’s-incredible. You’ve-you’ve come up with quite a, a map.” I tried furrowing my brow, but it was no use-I don’t even think I knew what the word furrowing meant back then.

Gurley would have known, though, and he knew I was mocking him. He scrambled across the desk, right over the top, growling and sputtering.

For a minute, I feared (even hoped) that I had provoked the inevitable and total breakdown. I calculated whether I could get to the door before him and raise the alarm with the MPs. I decided to jump clear. He jumped after me and then fell horribly short. I took a moment to take in the scene: he was sprawled at my feet, while the better part of his left leg was separated from him, dangling off the desk.

He extended a hand, and I hesitated, unsure what horror had just happened and what horror would now follow.

“You didn’t hear a word I said, did you, you sanctimonious shit?” he hissed. He closed his eyes for a second; I could see the mask fall, instantly. But then his eyes opened, the mask was back, and it had all happened too quickly for me to see what had been revealed. He extended a hand to me, and I automatically hauled him up. He teetered back to the desk and leaned on it. On the floor behind him lay two red pins that had fallen from the map.

Gurley recovered his artificial leg and regarded it for a second. “Maybe I should just beat you with this instead of going through it all again.” I stared at the leg, then at Gurley. What part of him would fly apart next? “Here’s the short version: the Japs are bombing North America. Believe the map, or believe this, you insolent fuck.” He hiked up the pant leg that was missing a leg below the knee and revealed a stump that looked more rock than human-angry purple and brown, mottled with scabs. He spent a moment trying to get the leg back on, and then gave up, letting it clatter to the floor. He hobbled around to the back of the desk and fell into his chair.

I slowly bent down and picked up the leg. It was heavier than I imagined, and it took two hands to place it on the desk with any care.

“Exhibit A,” he said, nodding to the map. “The past.” He dragged his leg back across the desk. “Exhibit B, the interminable present.” Then he took out a small key, unlocked a desk drawer, and drew out a small, leather-bound book, about the size of a priest’s breviary. “Exhibit C,” he said, brightening again. “The future.” He looked at the book for a full minute. He didn’t open it. Then he looked at me.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” he said, and with that, began to recount the history-his history-of the balloon program to date. The first, mysterious explosions and fires. The eventual discovery of an intact balloon. The determination of the balloon’s origin. The recovery of ever-growing numbers of balloon shrouds and payloads, evidence of which sat just outside the office.

“And the most recent chapter, August 1944, wherein a certain bomb disposal sergeant looks on, dumbstruck, while a balloon sets fire to a golden hillside. Said fire roasts alive several men.” He sat back. “Sergeant? Am I missing anything?”

“Sir?” I asked, but even as the word was coming out of my mouth, my mind was finally making the connection. It seems odd to me now that it took that long, but of course, the balloons-as patent an impossibility as there ever was-were still new to me then.

I almost leapt from my chair: “The weather balloon! Fort Cronkhite! Sir, I—”

“Failed in your first encounter?” Gurley suggested, somehow managing a face that was half sneer, half sympathy. That wasn’t what I was going to say-I had no idea what I was going to say-but his words had all the effect of his having reached over and pulled the pin from a grenade I hadn’t known I was carrying.

What a cruel thing to put on a child-sure, I was a young man, a soldier in uniform, but I had the wild conscience and boundless shame of a Catholic kid, one raised by nuns, no less-and how sinister of Gurley to attempt to make the death of those soldiers on the hill my legacy, my burden.

Hours, days later, when I thought about it, I realized his gambit was only that; I knew nothing about the balloons that day in California. And if I had? I was too far away to do anything. But it didn’t matter. Gurley knew what he was doing. He’d planted a seed, an irritant, deep inside me that I could smother with excuses but would still know was always there. The fact was, I had known-felt-that something was wrong, that it wasn’t a weather balloon. The fact was, I’d gone running toward it. The fact was, I hadn’t made it there in time.

If Gurley’s aim had been to provoke in me an instant and towering resolve to avenge their deaths (while expiating my own apparent guilt), I suppose the ends would have justified his means: my commitment to the war then was naïve and relatively shallow.

But his next words made me think he had another aim altogether. He wasn’t looking to stir up some fight in me; he simply wanted to commiserate.

“That’s okay, Sergeant,” he said. “My first time out, I failed, too.”

GURLEY EXPLAINED that he’d begun his wartime service with the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The OSS was the war’s headquarters for Ivy Leaguers, spies, scientists, and anyone with an unusual idea for waging war. Poison cigars, exploding pens, buttonhole cameras, and worse. At the bidding of a favorite professor, Gurley had left Princeton a semester early to work in OSS research and development. He should have been a natural. Articulate, cosmopolitan, heir to a fortune (from fountain pens, of all things), he’d also spent his Princeton years studying “the men and minds of the Orient”-in particular, all things Japanese. He was even somewhat fluent. He pointed to an impressively worn Japanese-English dictionary on a shelf behind him.