David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

“You trust there’s no booby trap, Sergeant?” Gurley said, looking at me very carefully now.

If Sergeant Redes had been quizzing me, I would have said hell no, never trust a bomb about anything, especially a Japanese one, but instead I said, “This looks as safe as safe gets.” Then I looked at Lily, eager to win her favor. “And, well-the boy. Sir. It’s worth a try.” But Lily was staring at Gurley waiting to hear what he would say.

“The boy,” Gurley said. “Well.” He looked around the tundra, as though searching for other balloons, other boys. Then he looked at me. “I wonder if you’d be so quick to dismiss a booby trap if it were you who were doing the disarming.” He gave a tight smile, and when I started to protest that I would be happy to help-I wanted to impress Lily, too, and moreover, I didn’t want Gurley to kill us all-he waved me away. “Officers’ work, Sergeant,” he said. “You know that,” he added, pinning me with a look that I’m sure he hoped would keep me from mumbling something about all the previous times I’d done the work of an officer. He stood, hands on hips, and surveyed the balloon. “Get the kit,” he said, “prepare the site.” Lily looked at him with such renewed fascination I almost felt ill; in the next moment, I almost grabbed for his damn gun.

PREPPING THE SITE consisted of checking it once more for any obvious booby traps-which, Sergeant Redes forgive me, I now dearly hoped to find and keep secret. I dug a small pit not far from the balloon to place the bombs in for safe detonation. It quickly filled with water, but there seemed to be no other option, so I let it be. I said what I could to calm the boy, tried to explain that Gurley would soon come to free him, and then laid out some of the tools from the kit. I made sure not to unpack the explosives, blasting wire, or hell box, afraid of what Gurley might do with them.

I then returned to Gurley and Lily and explained what I had seen. He nodded with a practiced weariness: yes, yes, Sergeant, you have told me all you know, which is, of course, so very little. Then he nodded to Lily, told me to take her back a safe distance, and proceeded toward the balloon.

I don’t think Lily could tell how nervous he was. She didn’t know his walk the way I did; she’d probably never seen him scared like I had. But I could see, in the hunch of his shoulders, his broken gait, that he’d wished he’d dispensed with the bravado and let me do the work. Replaying the conversations from earlier, I realized now that he’d simply wanted to fire at the balloon, its bombs, and the boy from a distance and be done with it. We’d lose a tremendously valuable prize, but, so what , his thinking must have run, we have other balloons.

We saw him speak to the boy and the boy speak back.

“Gurley knows Japanese,” I told Lily, as though she didn’t know this and needed to. “He’s a Princeton man,” I added, as a kind of dig, but I had little idea what I was saying and neither did Lily. We looked back toward the two of them.

We were too far away to tell, of course, but I was sure he’d frightened the boy, and I hoped Lily could see or sense this. But she just watched in rapt silence. I found the binoculars and handed them to her, hoping that her seeing Gurley close up would expose a bit of his ersatz heroism.

It didn’t. Gurley went for the boy first, taking the wire clippers to the cord that held his arm fast to the balloon. The boy shrieked as the arm fell free, all wrong, as loose and slack as a piece of rope. Even without the glasses, I could see it bend in too many places. Lily lowered the binoculars and looked at me in pain. The gun had left a jagged cut that climbed her cheek, a crease of dirt and blood.

Gurley pulled the boy free of the balloon and laid him down. He seemed to be examining the boy, then working on the arm. The boy writhed, Gurley calmed him, the boy writhed again, and finally Gurley stopped what he was doing. He scooped the boy up in his arms, an act which made the boy shrink in size even more. It was hard to believe we’d ever taken him for a man. As Gurley walked toward us, we could see him try to take on a face he felt appropriate to the act-a sympathetic warrior, the soldier with a heart. But Gurley was so consumed with perfecting his walk that he wasn’t paying enough attention to how he carried the boy, who was screaming in pain, shattering whatever pacific image Gurley was trying to project. By the time they reached us, Gurley’s lips were drawn tight and he was sweating. I could tell he was angry furious, and I wasn’t sure at whom: me? Lily? Probably the boy for spoiling the show. I was angry because Gurley had managed to leave the defusing task to me.

Gurley set him down gently enough. Lily’s hands flew about the boy, not quite touching him, as if she didn’t know where to start. Finally, she went to his face and ran two fingers along his cheek. The boy interrupted his crying to study her.

Gurley called me aside, and I tried to anticipate what he was going to say. “Shall we detonate the remaining explosives, sir?”

“What?” Gurley said, watching Lily watch the boy.

“The balloon?” I said. “Clear it?” I looked around. “Not that anyone would ever come across those bombs out here, but-still. Should I save the balloon?”

“Yes,” said Gurley, still not looking at me.

“But blow the explosives?”

“Yes,” Gurley said.

“Or disarm them?”

“Yes,” he said again, kneeling now behind Lily, almost as if he were hiding from the boy.

“Sir?” I asked again.

Gurley twisted around. “Goddammit, Belk.”

“But-sir?”

“Leave the balloon be, and get the damn medical kit out of the boat.” He turned back to the boy. “Jesus. The fiends.” He put a hand on Lily’s back. “Lily,” he said. “Fiends.”

We didn’t have much of a medical kit. Some bandages, antiseptic, a syringe, and a precious vial of morphine. When I returned, I saw that Gurley had broken off a thin alder branch to use as a kind of splint for the arm. He was standing now, hands on hips, surveying the scene.

“Lily,” he said. “Dearest.”

Gurley looked at me briefly, and then back to Lily.

“Lily,” he repeated, but she wouldn’t turn around, so he turned to me. Nodding to the boy, he drew a finger across his throat, trying- unsuccessfully-to appear remorseful as he did. Then he spoke up again. “I think-I think we’re too late, Lily. I’d like to help, but- maybe if we’d caught him… sooner. Maybe if-maybe if they’d never launched him in that damn balloon.” He looked at me, and then off at the crash site.

“Go,” Lily said quietly, so quietly the word didn’t seem to come from her; it was as if it had welled up from the earth or seeped out of the boy. She turned, then stood and stared at Gurley and me. “If you want to leave, leave. Both of you. Leave the kit, and leave us.”

Gurley clapped a hand on my back. “Of course we won’t leave you,” he said. “But Lily, he’s done-I mean, he’s not going to make it.”

Lily looked at me.

“Just a broken arm, Captain?” I said. “We can probably figure out a way to-get him back to-get him somewhere.” I could tell by Lily’s face that I was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out why. “That splint there,” I said, mostly to have something to say.

“You can splint his arm all you like, Sergeant,” Gurley said. “But you can’t splint what’s not there.” He walked over and stood above the boy, who had begun to cry again. Or rather, his face looked like he was screaming, but nothing was coming out, not really. Every now and then, a note or two of his high horrible moan would break through, but otherwise, it was just hiss and breath. I went over to the boy and knelt. Like Lily, I found my hands floating above him, unable to find a place or reason to touch him. I was no judge of kids then-I was a kid-and so I couldn’t tell you his age, only that I knew he was younger than he looked. His face was chapped and creased, burned by the sun and wind. If you studied just the wrinkles around his eyes, you might have taken him for a dwarf grandparent. But if you looked at his eyes, if you looked at what soft, smooth stretches of skin remained, here and there, along his scalp, under his chin-you could tell he was a child. Eight or nine or seven: however old you have to be to find yourself in a balloon floating across the Pacific, or lying on wet ground, hurt, so far from home, and no one like your parents anywhere near.