David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

I couldn’t look, but she stared at me until I did. She was wearing some old fatigues, unlaced workboots. She looked like a recruit about to wash out of basic or a civilian who’d lost her home to a fire and had had to go begging for clothes. The name strip on the shirt was gone, the color worn out of the pants.

Once I’d finished this inventory, I looked back to her face. As soon as I’d met her gaze, she hooked her thumbs into two belt loops and pushed down, first right, then left. Once free of her hips, the pants fell to her knees and she bent, pushing them down farther till they gathered at her ankles. I saw the legs I remembered from the first night, except the knees looked older, the deep brown bruises and scrapes more plentiful across her shins and across what parts of her thighs that weren’t covered by the oversized shirt.

I followed the trail of buttons back up to her face, but before I got there I saw her hands descending, undoing each button, one at a time, like a doctor snipping stitches from a scar. When she was done, a narrow, dark ribbon of skin had been revealed. I turned away, and when that wasn’t enough, closed my eyes, pulled in my legs.

“Look,” she said. And because, for one syllable, the voice sounded like the old Lily, my friend Lily, the one who helped me find balloons, the one who shared sandwiches with me, talked with me, preserved me, I did.

But it was a trick; the old voice came from this new, horrible face, now set grimly above a body not naked but stripped, everything visible except the feet and ankles, which were hidden in the pile of sloughed-off uniform.

“You read maps,” she said, and ran her hands painfully down her front, palms flat to her skin, fingers rigidly splayed. Then she brought her arms out before her and examined them. She found a bruise on her right forearm. “I got this in Anchorage,” she said, looking up. She lifted her left arm and found a patch of mottled brown-white skin; it looked like a burn. “ Bethel,” she said. She tilted her head back, felt her neck: “Dillingham,” she said, her fingertips fondling a thin, small scar where her shoulder began. She pushed her hands down across her breasts, which were slight enough to disappear beneath her palms. She revealed her chest again, studied it, and seemed about to say something, but gave a thin smile instead and continued. Now her left hand drifted to the base of her stomach while her right searched out something just above where her pelvis jutted out. There. An appendix scar. “ Memorial Hospital, Fairbanks,” she said. She brought her hands together, and lower, covering her sex as if now shy.

I looked away, and then up at her, but she shook her head and nodded down. I looked away again; she stepped closer, and took my hand, my right, in hers, and slowly ran it flat across her stomach. I could feel each little hair. Back and forth, up and down, until she said, so quietly that she did little more than move her lips, “Feel that scar?” I shook my head; I didn’t breathe. She took my hand by the wrist, lowered it, and slowly began to run it up the inside of her thigh. I tried pulling my wrist away, forcefully at first and then desperately, but she held on. “Some of my scars, you can only touch,” she said. “Even I can’t see them. They’re too far away.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “Lily, I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry, Louis?” she said. “You didn’t make the scars.” I said nothing. “Or maybe that’s why you’re sorry-you think? Jealous there’s no scar on me you can claim?”

Lily waited another moment, then moved to the other side of the room and dressed slowly. When she was done, she came back to my side of the room. She turned off the light, and then, back against the wall, slowly slid to the floor until she was sitting beside me in the perfect dark. We sat that way for a while until she got up and opened the blackout shade. The light in the room rose to a gray glow.

I missed the dark. I couldn’t look at her. I looked at my hands, at the door, at the grain of the hardwood floor. When I finally turned to face Lily, I was surprised to find her looking relieved, even pleased. She gave me a nudge and sat back. I inched away.

“Louis,” she said, and shifted closer. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, no-Lily, I’m sorry, I-should I leave?”

“No,” she said, and nodded toward the middle of the room. “It’s your turn.” Then she laughed, so loudly and so briefly it sounded like a cough, and asked for my coat. When I hesitated, she laughed again, softer this time, and said, “Don’t worry-that’s all I’ll ask you to take off.” I looked at her. “I’m cold” she said.

I took the coat off; she put it on and shivered once.

“Louis,” she said, settling back, her eyes closed. “If I tell you this story, the whole story, will you promise not to believe a word of it?”

“I promise,” I said.

“Think about that first,” she said. “You promised too quickly.”

“I won’t believe it,” I said.

“You will,” she said. “That’s what you do. You believe-believe in - everything. Don’t you? You believe in your country, you believe your country is going to win this war, you believe in your God.” She sat up now, looked me in the eye. “You believed that I was Japanese, that I was a palm reader.”

I nodded.

“Well, you’re wrong about all of that. Your country is going to lose. Your God is a fake, and so is your—”

“And so are you,” I said.

She took a deep breath. “Good,” she said. “That’s a start.”

LILY CAME FROM Bethel, Alaska. Describe Bethel today-tiny homes, riverfront warehouses, a lot of sodden earth in the process of freezing or thawing, a horizon whose limits seem more lunar than earthly-and you would more or less capture Lily’s Bethel of decades ago. It’s more crowded now, more stores, more houses, more whites, more government people and programs, but it’s still the same place, a permanent splotch on the tundra.

But nothing about it was permanent for Lily-half Russian, half Yup’ik, missing both parents, Bethel didn’t have much to hold her. It did, however, have plenty of missionaries-Moravian, Catholic, Methodist, Orthodox, and more-and Lily convinced one of them to get her a place at a special girls’ boarding school in Fairbanks. It was supposed to be just for the smartest girls-which Lily, without a wink, told me she was-but Lily was a compelling candidate in another way. An orphan, she was a more attractive prospect than many other Yup’ik children, who had to be pried away from wary parents before being sent off to distant schools where they would learn the ways of a white world.

What no one could tell her in Fairbanks, however, was why going there had made her so keenly aware of yet another world-a world just like this one, but a world in which she was privy to the secrets of people, places, and things. She had sensed this world back in Bethel, but it was only a sense, and seemed as much imagination as anything. But in Fairbanks, she knew differently-she knew, for example, the life stories of girls she had just met, before they had said a word. She knew when the weather was bad back in Bethel, whether the seal hunt was going well, even the date of breakup-the day the Kuskokwim River finally thawed.

Before she knew better, she talked about such things with the other girls, and they in turn talked to their families about her whenever they returned home on breaks. Lily always stayed in Fairbanks. But then, one break, one of her classmates said that her father wanted to meet Lily, and so Lily made the long trip back to Bethel.

Her classmate’s father was known as Peter to the white community, a capable, if grumpy, boatbuilder. But the entire Yup’ik community knew him as one of the last shamans.