David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

There were no stars visible; the clouds were lifting, but it was too early for stars. And the farther we walked into the forest, the more of the sky that was obscured, the damper the air and earth became. I remember how nothing was as strange or exotic to me as the smell of that forest, then; it wasn’t anything like the sage or chaparral smell of Southern California wilderness, which made you think of dust and sun and sometimes smoke. This forest smelled wet, green, and cool, and the scent stuck to you like you’d dipped your face in a stream.

I caught sight of Lily within a few hundred yards; she’d started walking. She didn’t stop, though, when she saw me. She wanted me to keep up, but not catch up, not yet.

We kept climbing through the forest, ever more thick, well past the point I would have ever ventured alone. Even in the short time I’d been in Alaska, I’d heard stories of guys wandering off for a weekend of camping and drinking and encountering all sorts of animals and trouble. Favorite stories involved run-ins with bears. I don’t think every guy who had a bear story had actually seen one, or if they had, that they were as large as described. The way you knew they were telling the truth? They didn’t talk about teeth or eyes or the sound of a roar-they talked about smell. And the more they talked about that horrible smell, the closer you knew they’d come. That detail had to be true; you didn’t make up a story about stink to impress people. So while I heard bears all around me-cracking branches, and in the distance every now and then, something like a bark-I only smelled the wet and decaying forest, and knew we were safe.

Eventually, the mist grew thick enough that Lily seemed to be only a glow whenever I looked up the trail toward her. If I chanced to look away and then back, she faded away even more dramatically.

We had been tracking along the banks of a stream, knee-high ferns deepening from green to black as the light faded. We’d been walking toward a sound, it seemed, one that started out like wind, high in the trees-but the closer we got, it emerged as rushing water, perhaps rapids. I lost Lily for a moment then. She was just twenty yards ahead of me, maybe more, and she’d disappeared. I kept moving forward in the direction I’d last seen her and then there she was, standing on what looked briefly like a cloud. Maybe she could have done just that if she had wanted to, but this wasn’t a cloud, just a large flat outcropping of rock overlooking a waterfall. I let Lily stand alone for a moment. Then she looked back toward me and I stepped forward.

“You walk slow,” Lily said, looking down at my feet. We’d been walking for two hours or more and I could feel precisely each of the warm, stinging spots on my feet where blisters were forming.

“I wasn’t sure I was supposed to follow you,” I said.

“You’re too polite, Louis,” she said. “You must make a lousy soldier.”

“I do,” I said.

She sat down, cross-legged, and I sat stiffly beside her. I looked down the trail. “He was with us for a while, but I haven’t heard him in a long time.”

“He’s not coming,” Lily said, looking in the direction of the waterfall. “He’s heading back to Fort Rich. Probably already there.”

I tried to get her to look at me. “Is this you speaking as a shaman?” I asked. I’d earned at least that, I thought. Some teasing.

“No, as his lover,” she said, turning to me to confirm she’d landed a blow. “I know him. So do you.”

“Did you know he’d send me away?” I asked, after swallowing. “This something you cooked up together?”

She shook her head and looked at the dirt beneath us.

“That’s it, Louis. That’s just how it happened. He asked me, ‘Do you have any really good friends? Guys who don’t use you for sex? Guys you can trust? Guys you can always talk to, count on to stick up for you, like a brother? Because I’d like to give that guy a free plane ticket to the end of the earth. What do you say there, Miss Lily?’” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “It’s all going just like we damn planned.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re always sorry Louis. Let’s try this: Did you at least bring a going-away present? Did you bring the map book? The journal?”

“Lily,” I said.

Lily gave me a long look, time to give a different answer. And when I didn’t, she let out a long breath, not a sigh. “You’re sorry. I know.”

We sat. There were no sounds of bears, or Gurley just the water rushing by below us. Alaska ’s summer sun doesn’t so much set as sink, exhausted, but we still had an hour or two of light left. Some summer nights-that night-I swear I can feel the light stretch, as though one part of it had been pinned to sunrise and the rest pulled all day to that faraway sunset. Then the light breaks, and you definitely feel that , a band of rubber snapping against your skin, and everything finally goes dim.

Lily’s touch felt just the same, and maybe that’s what I feel those summer evenings when I’m up too late, that endless sun abetting an old man’s insomnia. Maybe it’s not the snap of the light I feel, but the memory of Lily, that night, as she extended a hand to me, slid it across the surface of the rock until it reached mine. I didn’t move then, and neither did she. She let our two hands stay there, as if mere proximity had brought them together. And then she took my hand in hers, and I would have given her anything. Ten maps. Every codebook we had. A balloon.

But I had nothing.

“Did you ask Gurley for it?” I finally said. “I mean, obviously-that seems so easy.”

She frowned, and for a moment, I thought she was going to let go of my hand, but she didn’t. She just shook her head. “You know Gurley. Or maybe you don’t. I could have asked for a dozen roses-a lot damn harder to get in Anchorage than that journal-and I would have had them, that day, and every day after until I begged him to stop. But not the journal. Asking would have spooked him. I just hoped we’d find ourselves in a… situation… at some point where the journal would be nearby, and I could somehow sneak it away, without his ever knowing.”

“So you never told him about your summer, about Saburo?”

But Lily didn’t look at me. She just said, “No.”

If I believed in that sort of thing, and I suppose I do now, I would have said Saburo was there with us, then. I didn’t hear him say anything, and I didn’t hear Lily say anything to him, but I felt him. For a moment, he was as real as Lily was beside me, and then he was gone.

I couldn’t say if Lily saw him, but she relaxed. Her frown left. She let go of my hand, rubbed her face, and stretched.

“Plan on finding a lot of balloons on Diomede?” she asked. “When do you go?”

“I’m not going to be able to find another damn balloon, not on Diomede, not anywhere. Not without a new palm reader, anyway.”

“Shuyak,” she said after a pause. “That was a neat trick, wasn’t it?”

“Impressed me,” I said.

“Hard to do that” she replied. She leaned to one side, slipping a hand into some hidden pocket. She pulled out a little sheaf of several tightly folded pages. “At least I brought a going-away gift,” she said. She smoothed the pages out on the ground and then handed them to me. “Everything I know about palm reading, and finding balloons.”

I looked at the pages. Though they were creased and dirty, I could tell immediately what they were-or rather, where they had come from. Faint watercolor sketches, diagrams in pencil, notes in black ink, in Japanese. And on the reverse of one page, a half-dozen tiny portraits. Some were more finished than others, but it took no imagination to see Lily in all of them.