David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

Lily turned to me. I hadn’t had enough time to decide what to say or how. But Lily didn’t wait for me to speak. “Louis,” she said, and we both looked down at our very ill charge. “Can you pick him up?”

I TOOK A BREATH, I KNELT, I LIFTED HIM UP. AND THEN I carried the boy back to the spot where we’d beached the boat. It was a longer trip than we thought-I’d estimate a mile, but trudging through the tundra was such slow going, it could have been ten. The mosquitoes clotted around his open wounds like shifting scabs.

Lily and I eventually decided the best thing was to undo the mess of bandages Gurley had applied and apply a proper tourniquet, or as proper a one as we could manage. We also resplinted the arm and bound it to his side to immobilize it completely. But we only came to these decisions gradually, after several painful false starts. The boy’s screams grew louder and louder. Several times I found myself wondering if Gurley was right: it would be better if the boy had died, or could die, quickly.

There were moments when he seemed he would. I’ve seen it happen to enough others in the hospital to know he was going into shock. The boy’s red, windburned face somehow managed to lose all its color-or rather, soak up a new color, the blank white of the endlessly cloudy sky. At times, his color returned, but then I couldn’t be sure- perhaps it was just that the light was failing and it was no longer easy to tell what he looked like.

Lily paid no attention to the sky or me or Gurley whom we could now see, back at the crash site, sticking out of the horizon like the last post of some abandoned fence. Lily gave the boy water and fed him broken bits of cracker. When he shivered, she found a blanket, wrapped it around him tightly. And when night finally did come, she had me set up a tent and help her move the boy inside. Then she crawled in herself. I tried to stop her before she went into the tent.

“Lily,” I said, and she twisted around to shush me.

“What?”

“Lily,” I said again. I still hadn’t told her about Gurley’s diagnosis. The more I’d seen of the boy, the more I thought Gurley was wrong. I didn’t want to tell Lily about any of this, but I didn’t want her to expose herself any more than she had, either.

I said nothing.

“Louis,” she said. “Will you keep watch?”

“Lily—”

“Please, Louis. I’m worried about Gurley. I’m worried about the boy. I’m worried about him and the boy, what he’ll do. Just wait.”

She disappeared into the tent for several minutes. I heard some whispers, tears, and then nothing at all. Finally, her face reappeared.

“Where is he?” she asked, squinting toward the crash site. But it was too dark now to see, or to tell Gurley apart from the lonely stunted trees that cropped up here and there. She climbed out and stood up.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought he was staying out there to defuse or detonate the remaining bombs, but I never heard anything.” What I’d really been listening for was the sound of a single shot from Gurley’s sidearm, his skull perhaps muffling the sound if he held the barrel close. But there had been nothing. Just the wind, and when it paused, the whine of mosquitoes finding an ear.

“Did Gurley find out his name?” she said.

“His name?”

“I can’t read the writing on his coveralls.”

I stared at the tent. “Lily, I don’t know. No, if he did, he didn’t say. I-I don’t know Japanese either. Didn’t Saburo-your Saburo-teach you any?”

“This is my Saburo,” she said. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them once more, they were full of tears. “I-I think I killed him.”

“Lily, what’s happened?” I moved for the tent, but she stopped me. From inside the tent, the boy gave a little moan, and Lily winced. More than winced, really-she buckled slightly, grabbing her elbows, hunching her shoulders. “Can’t you hear him?” she said. “I killed him,” she said softly.

I grabbed her. “Lily, the boy? You killed the boy? Right now? Jesus, Lily. What are you doing? Gurley would’ve—”

Another tiny moan came from the tent.

The Yup’ik say the tundra is haunted. But haunted is a white man’s word, and it doesn’t mean what the Yup’ik mean. The spirits found in the bush-animal and human, living and dead-do not haunt, they exist, as real and present as any other aspect of life: water, breath, food.

I didn’t understand this for a long time. When I was a young priest, I would tell people that ghosts only haunted those who believed in them. Don’t put your faith in specters, I would say, put your faith in God: that faith will be returned.

Only later, too late, did I learn what is really true, a truth that, in some ways, has nothing to do with God: ghosts only haunt those who do not believe. Someone who already believes can never be surprised to see something he knows already exists. The shadow that disappears into a corner of the community center one winter night is doubtless your cousin who drowned the year before. The creaking floor that wakens you is your husband, finally returned from the hunt. The face outside the hospital window is an angalkuq , pulling rain from the skies.

And the boy in the tent, the tan’gaurluq who dropped from a hole in the blue—

“Louis,” Lily started, stopped, and then started again. “I don’t know why this happened. Or how. I was so anxious to get back out here, where I thought my powers would be strong again. That’s why I went on my journey the other night. To see what had changed since the last time I had been able to see that other world-that world of spirits and life and everything real. And I wanted to see Saburo, see where he had put our little boy. I didn’t see anything at first-but what I saw-what I finally saw frightened me.”

Lily had seen another child. At first she thought it was her own, but came to understand that it wasn’t. It was a boy a Japanese boy who had come from beyond. And since no spirit comes into the world without another life departing it, Lily explained, she knew then that Saburo had died, and this boy had come to tell her that. The spirits- Saburo-had sent him to her, just as they had sent me. But whereas they had sent me to remind Lily that Saburo lived, they had sent this boy to let her know that Saburo was dead.

Worse, she believed she had killed him, by falling in love or into the spell that Gurley cast-whatever it was, she had lost hold of Saburo. “I let go of his memory, Louis, and when I did, I let go of him, he sank away, he died. No one should take another lover while the first still lives, while you are still in love with him. I knew this.”

I know: madness. Arctic hysteria. Or half a dozen newfangled names they now have for conditions like Lily’s (or Gurley’s, for that matter). But we had none of those names then. We had a first-aid kit with some bandages and another kit to blow up bombs. We had a boat. A balloon. A boy.

Lily’s maternal instincts already lay raw and exposed; it was easy for her-perhaps essential for her-to believe this boy from the sky had been sent by the sky. Any hope for the happy repose-and forgiveness-of the Saburo she lost now lay with this child, whatever his name was.

She was absolutely certain, and wanted me to be, too.

“He cannot die,” she said. “If he dies, I will die with him, and I will join Saburo, but not in a good place. In this place, we will wander, all of us, searching for good souls to take us.”

“Lily,” I interrupted.

“Louis, listen to me: if the boy lives, he may go on to a life of honor, he may do the work that the spirit world requires of the living. Feeding us, sheltering us, bringing us peace until that day when he has finally done enough and we may all rest.” She turned to the tent, and then to me. “Louis,” she said. “I’m not-I can’t do what I once could. I’m not strong enough, not against a man with a gun. But you know Gurley You’d know how to stop him. Just don’t let him take the boy. I’m afraid of what he’ll do. He’s just a boy. Louis? Promise me. Please. Louis. Protect him.” She clasped her hands together. “Us,” she said finally. “Protect us.”