David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

But I got to Lily first that afternoon. I’m sure Gurley expected me to go directly to the airfield without even stopping at my barracks, but instead, I went directly downtown, where I found Lily, peering out her window, as if she was expecting me, or someone. She smiled and gave me a little wave. I ran up to the second floor, a new question popping up on each stair- Did we really see the northern lights? Did I really see a balloon? Did we really run into the forest, the two of us, together, last night? -but when I reached her, what came out first was Gurley’s decision to go to Bethel.

She looked both delighted and scared. “We’re going to go?” she asked. “You’re sure? Me, too? He said all of us?”

“He didn’t tell you? It seemed like things were pretty well decided.”

“Last night—” Lily began, “or I guess it was this morning, after I made it back into town, I came back down here, I found him wandering the street.”

“Was he angry?” I asked. “He must have asked why you ran. Did he see me? I was sure he saw me.”

“What did he tell you?” Lily asked carefully.

“About last night?” I said. “Nothing. Just that you’d had this conversation.” I waited for her to augment this, but she didn’t, so I went on. “About a ‘spy.’” I paused again. “Lily, what were you thinking? Look what’s happened-he’s carting us all off to the bush, and God knows what he’ll do there, where he won’t have to worry about anyone other than us witnessing him completely cracking up. He’s dangerous, Lily. He’s ready to kill. Starting with me.”

Lily went to the window and checked the street. “That’s why I told him,” she said, and then turned to me. “To spare you.”

LILY’S ACCOUNT OF the early morning hours differed from Gurley’s. Gurley hadn’t mentioned to me that he’d seen Lily or anyone else on the misty streets; and he’d heavily edited his conversation with Lily. He left out, for example, what Lily said was the first thing he’d asked her- Was that you and Louis I saw in the street? -and he’d left out her reply.

“Yes, it was me,” she told him. “But not Louis. You’ve scared him half to death. I’ll be lucky if I ever see him again.”

“I’ll be luckier if you don’t,” Gurley had said. I wondered how he’d looked when he’d said that. With me, it would have been behind a sneer, or preceding a fist. But it had to be different with her.

“He’s just a boy,” she told him, and didn’t even smile at me as she repeated the line now.

“Well,” Gurley said. Lily said he kept looking around, like I might still be lurking in the shadows. “Who was it, then? It was someone. It was someone. I know I saw someone with you. A man. Not a ‘customer’? I thought we had an agreement. I thought I’d taken care of that for you. You should have enough now, enough to get by without-God, Lily, we’ve talked about this. You know what I’ve said, what I’m planning for you, for us—”

“Not a customer,” Lily said. She told me now that she had been stalling, frantically trying to come up with a plausible scenario. He’d been watching her grow upset, and suddenly decided he knew what had happened.

“No, Lily-you-you were attacked,” Gurley said, grabbing her arm. “My God. My God: he hurt you. And me, limping along after you, your helpless defender. Did he-did he-my God, Lily, did he- rape-?”

Lily said she started crying: she could see no way out. He’d taken over her story-now rape was involved; should she admit to that, peg it on some random thug? One of those brawling sailors, unexpectedly returned? Lost and distraught, she blurted out-because it was true- “He was a friend.”

She gasped, destroyed now because she’d thought she’d revealed once and for all that it was me.

But I was apparently gone from Gurley’s mind, and he pressed in on this new quarry: “‘Was’?” he asked. “Who was he? A friend? Why would you cry if it was a friend? What kind of friend is that?”

And that was all Lily needed. Because when he asked the question, the obvious answer, the real answer, came to mind, immediately. What friend had she cried over, again and again?

Saburo.

She started telling Gurley before she’d even planned it all out, but the longer she talked, and the more fascinated she saw him become, the more she realized how it could all work, how well it could work. Saburo was the man who’d accosted her in the street, not Louis. Saburo was the reason she’d run from Gurley, not to him: she told Gurley that she couldn’t admit, not then, that she knew-that, long before she’d met Gurley, she’d befriended-a Japanese soldier, a spy.

And there it was: Saburo was the reason Gurley needed to take her to Bethel. Saburo had run off after her, into the dark, had begged her to leave with him, that night, told her he was going back to Japan, that he would take her with him, if only she would come, right then. “Someone sympathetic to the cause” had a floatplane waiting, would fly them west, as far west as he could. Then there would be a ship, or a submarine…

I was awestruck. First, by the facility of Lily’s storytelling, and second, by the slow realization that this story might have been, must have been, at one time, true. There had never been a midnight race through Anchorage with Saburo, but there had been promises of an airplane, of a ship, of a home across the ocean.

“More than a friend” is how Gurley answered all this, both mollified and roused, and Lily nodded, as though he had broken her, and because he had.

“More than a friend,” Lily repeated to Gurley. “That’s what he thought,” she said, and then fell to Gurley’s chest. She didn’t have to say it: the spy asked and I did not go. “I don’t know what he thinks now,” she told Gurley then.

“I do,” I told Lily now.

IT DID NOT LOOK LIKE its nickname-“Paris of the Tundra”-not from the air, not from the river, which I had to cross to get from the airfield to the town, not from my walk up its main street, nor the walk I took back down that same street, having quickly run out of road. But Bethel must have looked like Paris to the communities that dotted the tundra around it. If a clock hand began its circumnavigation of Alaska at Anchorage -about five o’clock-it would find little to interrupt its sweep west and then north to Nome, at nine o’clock. Little, except Bethel.

Bethel sits at around seven or eight on that clock face, smack on the banks of the Kuskokwim River. The Kuskokwim shares the duty of draining western Alaska with the Yukon. The two rivers conspire each summer to turn the tundra into a vast delta so soggy and remote that, even as tourism booms elsewhere in Alaska today, it sometimes seems there are fewer humans in this corner of the continent now than there were during the war.

When I first arrived in Bethel, however, it wasn’t bustling, even then. There weren’t many people around, almost no cars, just a few jeeps. I later learned that vehicles were something of an extravagance-you couldn’t drive to Bethel from anywhere; you could only drive around in Bethel, or, when the weather was right, around the wide unbroken tundra that surrounded the town. In the winter, you could drive down the frozen river when they plowed it. In Anchorage or Fairbanks, if you ever get a hankering and the road’s open, you can drive right out of Alaska, into Canada, and hell, on to Miami. But in Bethel, you always have to turn around eventually and come back.

The flight from Anchorage had lasted long enough for me to work out a plan, or as I think of it now, a kind of essential theology. Gurley represented evil, a powerful, but not unbeatable, foe. Lily was Eve, of course. Lovely, and susceptible. Did that make me Adam, or did Saburo have more claim to that title? Maybe I was Adam after he’d eaten the apple. Maybe I was the snake.