David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

“Louis,” Lily said. My every muscle came alive. I tried to twist to see her, but she whispered “no” and held my shoulder. “Just listen,” she said.

“Where have you been?” I said, craning my neck. “Where’s Gurley?”

“Whisper,” Lily said. I started to repeat myself, and she interrupted: “You don’t know how to whisper.” She put a finger on my lips, which almost made me stop breathing as well as speaking.

“Louis, he’s gone,” she said. I tried once more to roll over and face her, and this time she let me. I was surprised to find her face right above mine. “Not Gurley,” she said. “Saburo. Saburo is gone. I went and looked for him, and he’s gone.”

“Lily,” I said.

“Please,” she said. “You’ll wake Gurley.” I rubbed my face. Lily waited until I was looking at her before she went on. “I went looking for Saburo,” she said then. “All night, as I was guiding us down the river, I could feel him growing closer and closer. And then we came here, and the sense was overwhelming. I could hardly breathe. I wasn’t sure what I would do when I found him, but I knew I would find him, his body. That’s why I went wandering off into the brush. There’s more island here than you might think-you’ll see it in daylight. But I followed him-it was almost like following a trail-and finally I came to a small clearing by some scrub alder. His campsite. That’s what I had found. He had been there. And gone. He’s gone now.” She turned away.

“And the… shrine?” I said.

She shook her head.

“Lily,” I said.

“I need your help now,” she said.

“Lily, I brought it.” She looked at me. “The map. I brought Saburo’s book.” Oh, such eyes-why couldn’t I have done this sooner, basked in that look so much earlier?

But as soon as the book appeared, I lost her. She took it from me, held it, felt it, bit her lip and then opened it, crying her way through the pages. She asked me about the translations; unsure how she would react, I said they were Gurley’s. She fingered them like delicate leaves.

Page by page she progressed, until she neared the end, when she began turning the pages two and three at a time, looking, I was sure, for Saburo’s last map, the one to their baby.

“Lily—” I said, but she’d already found them. The empty, gray-washed pages.

“What did you do with them?” she cried, loud enough that she might have spooked Gurley.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was going to ask you. We were-I thought, maybe secret writing, but Gurley would have made fun of me and I guess I don’t—”

“There’s nothing here,” Lily said, shaking her head, almost unable to speak.

“Lily, I-maybe there’s something earlier.” I offered to take the book from her and look myself.

She shook her head.

“I guess he-maybe he didn’t-I don’t know, Lily,” I said. “Maybe he didn’t get a chance to—” and I really was going to say, dispose of the baby’s body properly , but somehow managed to catch myself. “Maybe he didn’t get a chance to make the map. He went out, he-he-got captured-escaped?”

But while I was babbling, Lily had stopped crying. She was staring before her, and, it seemed, listening. Not to me.

“Lily?”

“Louis,” she said softly. “I need your help. There’s something- there’s something here. Nearby. It’s him, or-it’s someone. Near here, and moving. But too fast for the boat, too fast for feet. I need to follow him.”

I looked at her for a moment, uncertain if this was the new Lily, or if some old part of her still burned inside. “How?” I said finally.

“First,” she said, “some rope.”

THERE IS THE OLD, familiar challenge of describing the midnight sun, the moon on the snow on a subzero night, the northern lights, the empty Kilbuck Mountains or the endless gray sea to someone who has never been here-and then there is the unique and forbidding prospect of describing what happened in that tent that night, a few weeks shy of the end of the war and my first life.

I’ll start outside, since that’s where I had retreated to once Lily had started to undress. She hadn’t asked me to leave, hadn’t needed to- and I wonder, just now, if things might have been different if I had stayed. But she’d slipped off her boots and had started to shrug off her pants when I crawled out. I took a quick look at her face-our eyes didn’t meet, but I could see she was in the process of putting on what I now think of as her shaman’s mask-her face empty and slack, her eyes unfocused but not yet vacant. I imagine my face might have looked somewhat similar as I stood there, studying her tent and Gurley’s, some twenty soggy yards away beside a clump of cotton-wood.

I moved a little closer to his tent, to make sure he really was in it. It was tough to tell in the dark. There wasn’t a moon, or there was; when I looked up, all I could see was a dim and shifting murk, dimly lit. I imagine it’s what divers see when they look back up to the surface, only to find the way obscured by a passing cloud. But I didn’t have to see Gurley As I drew closer, I could hear him, lightly snoring. Every so often, his breath stopped completely, and then resumed in a kind of cough.

He’d left the tent flaps undone, obviously assuming Lily would join him at some point. In the meantime, though, he was at the mercy of the mosquitoes. The tent looked as though it might collapse before morning.

Then I heard another sound-Lily’s voice-and I crept back toward my tent.

“Louis,” she whispered, and I could tell she was just inside the flap. I waited a moment, then took a breath and answered. “I need your help,” she said quietly, and when I didn’t reply, she asked, “The rope? Some rope?”

I looked around and then whispered, “Wait.”

I found some tangled in the floor of the boat. Once I’d finally freed it, I decided it needed rinsing off and quietly dipped it into the water. Then I heard Lily calling me again. I shook the rope out and walked back to the tent. I squatted, poked open the flap with the coil of rope, and headed in.

First, there was a smell-or a scent-of smoke. Opposite the opening, a squat candle burned on one of the tin mess plates. The plate was wet and spread with leaves or mud of a sort-I’m not really sure, because I didn’t pay attention to anything else once I realized Lily’s clothing was all piled in a heap in the middle of the tent, and that she was curled up, completely bare, just beyond.

My eyes began to water and I coughed-pungent smoke was filling the tent; for a moment, I thought it was on fire. Then I felt Lily’s hand pressing down on my shoulder. “Lower,” she said. “Stay low, like this.” I lowered myself, and saw her face, intent, her arms and hands, and her chest, suddenly pale and ordinary now that I could see it in full. She lowered herself, too, until she was on her side, almost bent double, and it seemed the whole of her was disappearing into the dark.

“Please don’t be scared, Louis,” she said. I shook my head. “Now give me the rope.” She flinched when she took the rope from me and found it wet. She gave me a mock frown and then a little smile, the last of the night.

She wound the rope around her neck, and then her shoulders, then her legs and torso, folding and unfolding her body as needed. Here and there, a drop of water would trace a slow, shiny path across a smooth expanse of skin. I should not have been so saturated with desire-even at that moment, I remember thinking that something was wrong, that she’d disposed of a healthier self with her clothes and had instead assumed the body of someone fragile, terribly thin and gaunt. And maybe that’s why I didn’t turn away or leave the tent or simply freeze: she had been beautiful, but this new fragility made her-if not more beautiful, then somehow more desirable.