David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

“Listen,” she said. She came over and tried to tug me free of the pile. I used one arm to keep her away and kept searching with the other. Then I felt a sharp pain in the back of my knee, and suddenly I was sitting on the ground, staring up at her. “Louis,” she said. I started to get up, but she put a hand out and pointed to the knee. “Would you like it to hurt more?”

“Lily,” I started, then stopped. “No,” I said. I scooted away but didn’t stand. “I think I have, we have, a right to be scared. He’s not- Gurley’s never been on an even keel, and hearing about you and me in a tent could set him off-will set him off, for sure.”

“I don’t care about what he thinks happened between us last night-or the last five months, for that matter.”

“Then what are you worried about?” I said.

“What indeed,” said Gurley, who appeared beside us with all the speed and pallor of a ghost.

I scrambled to my feet. “Sir,” I said.

Gurley kept his eyes on Lily. “The lady is speaking, Mr. Belk. About something that worries her.” He turned to me. “And unlike you, I want to hear what it is.” I couldn’t tell what the cold fire in his eyes meant: violence, certainly, but to Lily or me and when?

Lily stared at him. “I’m worried you don’t believe what I saw on my journey. Or even that I went.”

Gurley looked at her, then me, then her, and then turned and walked over to the pile of gear. He began packing items. “Oh, the journey part, I believe that,” he said, and leered at me. “But what you saw, no-in fact, it makes me wonder if I’ve been in Alaska too long. At war too long. Chasing balloons too long. What have I done, Belk? Hauled an Eskimo woman out into the bush to play fortune-teller and find me balloons. Spies.” He cinched tight a pack and stood. “Really, now. I should be shot.”

And with that, he removed his prized Colt from his holster and began to examine it.

I stopped breathing. Lily spoke.

“We’re very close to the spot,” she said.

“Tingle, tingle,” Gurley said, not looking up from the gun. “Can you feel it, Belk?”

“What, sir?”

“Didn’t you tell him, fair Sacagawea? When you got back from your trip? Without a stitch of clothing? Or did you have other things to talk about?”

I turned to Lily.

“I didn’t get a chance to,” she said.

“My goodness,” said Gurley, raising his eyes. “By all means tell him. See what he thinks. I trust Sergeant Belk’s judgment implicitly.” He returned the gun to his hip and then hefted a bag toward the boat. Lily looked after him and bit her lip.

“There’s a very special balloon nearby,” she said quietly.

I looked quickly in Gurley’s direction, but he was busy stowing the bag. “Is it Saburo?” I whispered. “He’s actually come for you? Is that what you saw?”

She looked at me, eyes instantly full of tears. “No,” she hissed. “I told you before, he left as soon as we got out here. I could feel it; I knew it. No-this is different. Not a plane. This is a balloon.” She took a step closer to me, and looked over my shoulder to Gurley and the boat. “But there’s something…” She twisted her neck to look back into the interior of the island.

“Not Saburo?” I asked.

She looked around, as if searching out someone who would better understand her. “Something,” she finally said to me. “You have to believe me. He has to believe me. We have to go-to follow—”

I could hear Gurley walking up behind us.

“What’s this?” he asked, never more brittle. “Whisper, whisper.”

“I’m not sure it’s safe out here, Captain,” I said, trying hard not to exchange a look with Lily.

“A hunch, Sergeant?” he said, and raised his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me that you’ve caught the soothsaying bug, too?” He smirked. “Quite a night in the ol’ tent. Sorry I missed it. Finish loading, Sergeant.”

I did, and as I did, I watched Lily lead Gurley into another whispered conversation. I couldn’t hear them, but I could see them. I could see Lily pointing, gesturing. I could see Gurley standing tall, and then, after a few minutes, just slightly-easing. And I thought I could see why. The tiniest part of him really did believe her-not just about her sense of where to go next, but about her need to convince him, to connect with him. That is to say, he had started to believe that she really did care for him. And the strangest thing about that to me was that I sensed he was right.

I thought about it as I finished loading the boat. I replayed the trip we’d taken in my head, and I stopped the film whenever I saw them exchange a glance, or better yet, when their eyes didn’t meet; when just one of them was stealing a look at the other.

I don’t know what had happened, or what was happening, but clearly there was something working on all of us-more of Lily’s magic, I suppose-and when we got back into the boat, Gurley returned Lily to the bow and me to the stern, and pointed ahead. “Onward, Belk,” he said to the air, and then turned back to me. “Follow that woman in the bow wherever she tells us to go.” Then he took out his handkerchief and let it rest on his knee while reaching down with his other hand to unsnap, once more, his holster.

THE CLOUDS RETURNED, THIS TIME TO STAY. A SLOW, STEADY rain seemed to follow us down the Kuskokwim, and no arrangement of tarps and ponchos could keep us all from getting soaked through.

Occasionally, the rain would lift, but then the mosquitoes would descend. They took a particular interest in Gurley which I enjoyed except for those times when he had his gun out. He’d been obsessively removing it, cleaning and polishing it with the handkerchief, then replacing it and starting again thirty minutes later. But whenever the mosquitoes wreathed his head, Lily and I would be treated to the terrifying display of him wildly swatting at them, gun in hand.

Gurley had put his faith in Lily to lead us through the delta, but ever since then, she had grown more hesitant and unsure. She would point us one way, then another. She let her hand drift along in the water outside the boat. She studied the skies. And with each passing hour, she grew more anxious.

When Gurley suggested we stop for lunch, she just shook her head. Gurley looked at me and rolled his eyes-a standard gesture of his, but darker, somehow, out here alone in the bush. He and I tore into some C rations that had been stowed, and we continued on.

About one o’clock, the engine sputtered, coughed out a few mouthfuls of smoke, and died. While Gurley and Lily looked on with great concern, I uncoupled the gas line from the primary tank and inserted it into the reserve. Then I started the engine again. Miraculous. My passengers turned away, satisfied. I thought to joke that we’d need Lily to use her powers of divination to find us a gas depot eventually, but it wasn’t a joke-we would.

I was the first to see it. I had been following the contortions of an ever-widening waterway, wondering if we’d made it back into the main channel of the Kuskokwim. Even though it was wet, Gurley was slumped in the floor of the boat, sleeping or pretending to. Lily was looking at him, and I was trying to catch her eye when something downriver caught mine.

Of course, I thought I was hallucinating. There had been the strange appearance of that fire balloon my last night in Anchorage, but to actually see a balloon, in flight-that hadn’t happened since Shuyak, and that whole episode had seemed like a kind of dream anyway. But now, here one was, drifting along, not fifty feet above the ground, bright as the moon.

It was beautiful. I mean that. I knew these balloons had killed people and that one might someday kill me. But they were spectacular all the same. They were the most gorgeous thing the war produced, and again, I know that’s a horrible thing to say, given their intent. But they couldn’t help it, even if their makers could. Nothing else soared the way those balloons did. They even elevated the quality of that pokey training film that Gurley had made me watch. Before getting down to the dirty business of charts and diagrams and the stolid reenactment of disassembling a balloon, the film lingered over a long, sweeping shot of a balloon in morning flight along the Pacific Coast. The balloon seemed to be moving incredibly, effortlessly fast. Part of the thrill came from thinking how lucky the filmmakers must have been to actually capture one in flight, but even if they’d just reinflated one and sent it aloft for filming, it was still extraordinary. It felt like the beginning of an epic. There are films I see today that have such aspirations, but, honestly, none matches the power that film’s balloon had sailing through that sunny, black-and-white landscape.