David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

With the rope wound around her in loose coils, she looked at me carefully. “Louis, from the pouch there-I need-yes, that pouch. Just open it.”

It was a small leather pouch, extremely soft, with a flap like an envelope. Inside were a variety of small objects-a feather, what looked like rocks or teeth, and some small wooden disks. It was a moment or two before my eyes adjusted and saw the carvings-faces-emerge. “These are the things I need,” she said, and then added a word in Yup’ik that I did not know. “These help me fly. The feather gives me flight, the walrus teeth strength, and the other amulets are for animals who’ll help guide me back home.” Unlike Ronnie, I suppose, Lily still had command of a tuunraq or two and did not need a human voice to lead her back.

I studied the objects in the palm of my hand, and then looked at Lily-not at her face, because I couldn’t, not then, maybe not anymore, but at her body, the slope and shape of it, the way it evaded the rope in some places and strained against it in others. “I need help,” she said. “I need to tie the objects to me. Spirits are powerful and will run away from you if you do not bind them tight.” She lay down quietly on her back, closed her eyes. I didn’t move, not for a full minute, and then she looked up. “Let each object tell you where it goes,” she said, and then closed her eyes again.

It was too much to look at her like that, to be able to study her without her studying me. I was searching for an innocent patch of skin to place something, but as she lay there, nothing looked innocent, everything was charged. Charged: and I say that not as an expression but because it was true, there was a hum, electric, I could hear it, and I could feel the vibrations, and though you might peg it to something less complicated, at the time I thought it was pure magic, and still do.

The teeth I knotted near her knees, one amulet I placed at her shoulder, and then the feather floated across her chest and I let my hand follow it. I cannot tell you when that light touch became a caress, or how my hand continued its light tracing after I’d woven the feather into the rope at her stomach. And I cannot tell you that I do not remember all that happened next. It was both hands, my lips; I found places for everything, for all the amulets, all the charms, and then I lay there beside her and waited to explode.

And then she said-had it been seconds, minutes? An hour?-a most remarkable word: “Untie.”

It should have happened then, just as soon as I’d worked her free of the cord and its knots and charms. I should have slipped free of my clothes and we should have lain together and fallen in love, made love. But I couldn’t and didn’t, because as I untied her, I watched the body I was releasing release memories, too. I saw and felt Gurley, and the summer’s romance with Saburo, the phantom child they produced. I saw her growing up in Bethel, I saw her mother and father. I saw all the things she had told me about her life, but in different colors, scored with different sounds. I suppose it sounds like I was sitting there watching a movie, but it wasn’t that, because I was moving through the landscape. I’d more readily compare it to what I’ve come to believe death is like, based on dozens of people I’ve seen go through their last moments here in this very hospice: for an instant, there is all the immediacy of life-all the people, sights, sounds, smells. We hear people talk about how one’s life passes before one’s eyes, and we think of a parade, with a beginning and an end. But it’s not like that. The dying don’t see their lives pass: their lives flash, complete, and vanish. It’s the lifeless corpse that lingers.

I have spent a life fighting my way back to that moment with Lily that flash. I have spent a life trying to get back to that precipice and leap off it. I’ve not been chasing after sex-good Lord, what a fleeting goal-but intimacy, knowledge. I had not gone on Lily’s journey with her, but I was there when she came back. And when she asked me to untie her, she was allowing me to participate somehow in what she’d seen and done. That’s why I saw the whole of her life like that. And had the moment lasted any longer, I think I would have seen the whole of mine. I really do.

Getting that moment back: That’s not enough to spend a lifetime pursuing? It has been for me. I knew I could never become an angalkuq myself, so I marched down the closest spiritual path allowed me. Priesthood. I suppose I could have contented myself with regular churchgoing, or rigorous self-examination, or drugs. But none of that would have gotten Lily to where she went. She had been subsumed by the spiritual world; I wanted to be swallowed whole, too, and join her, so I consecrated myself to a spiritual life. I’d go off in search of God and His knowledge-and if I found Lily there in the ether, somewhere along the way, so much the better.

But I’ve not found her. It may be that I should have tied myself to Lily when I tied on those other charms, and made her take me with her wherever she flew And when we returned, I would not have untied us, we would have held on, skin to skin, until Gurley found us, shot us, and let us die, our blood pooling together. Our lives would have flashed then with a brilliance only suns could match.

But Lily didn’t die that night. Neither did I. After spending a moment watching me, and, I was sure, waiting for me, she quietly got dressed. When Lily was finished, she leaned close, her eyes sad, her face exhausted. Then she said, “Thank you,” and gave me a kiss: yes, a kiss, her lips to mine.

It was a tender moment, or would have been (I was sad, but somehow, also satisfied) but for the fact that Gurley tore open the tent flap at precisely the moment that Lily was pulling away from me. I was able to look at him blankly enough at first, but Lily reddened with shame and stared at the ground, and then I turned away, too.

Gurley looked from one to the other of us, eyes wide and bloodshot, face taut like someone in that moment between receiving a wound and feeling pain. He finally exclaimed, “Good morning!” and then pulled his head out of the tent so fast he knocked over a pole. I struggled out first, then Lily.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” Gurley said again, with that compressed smile he usually employed before hitting someone. But then Lily was taking him by the elbow and trying to lead him away. He followed her for a short distance; I watched Lily try to speak to him while he turned his head up and away from her. They kept walking, out of sight, and I set about striking camp, because it was all I could think to do. I was almost finished with the tents when Lily returned, alone.

“Where’s Gurley?” I said.

“He doesn’t believe me,” she said quietly. “But you were there, you can tell him.”

“I don’t think he’ll believe me, either,” I said, scanning the brush for signs of him. “He looked in, he saw you kiss me, or maybe just missed it, but still, all he had to do was look at us and figure it out. Thank God he didn’t see us when you were-on your journey. Without your clothes.”

“Oh, I told him about that,” Lily said.

“Jesus, Lily,” I said. “That’s why he hasn’t come back. He’s looking for a club. Does he have his gun?” I ran to the pile of gear and started to rummage through. Of course he had his gun; he always wore it.

“Louis!” Lily cried.

“Get in the boat!” I said, now looking in the gear for a gun of my own. I could see Lily explaining to him what had happened; I could see her trying to explain how she had called on her shamanic powers to climb into the clouds. I could see her mentioning, without being asked, that she had had to remove all her clothing. How she had had to have an assistant, well, watch her, carefully. I could see Gurley hearing all of this, understanding none of it, except for the part where his naked girlfriend lay in a darkened tent with another man.