David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

AND WHAT DID I say then? With Lily’s eyes shining, or maybe glistening, with what faint light still held, and looking to me for help?

I said nothing. I stepped past her, around the tent, and into the brush, toward Gurley. I was afraid I would start crying-over the childish confusion and disappointment over everything, but finally, over that us -“protect us.” She might have been talking about the boy, or Saburo, or even in some strange way, Gurley-people whom she had loved. But not me. I had been a friend, just a friend, and worse still, I was now failing at that as well.

Stumbling in and out of holes, crashing into the brush here and there, I was making enough noise to hide any sniffling, and later, enough noise to allow Gurley to walk up and take me by surprise.

“Sergeant?” he said, his voice not quite a whisper. He spoke as though we’d been planning to meet, just like this.

I squinted hard to make sure my eyes hid any trace of tears and answered him: “Sir?”

“That’s a good lad,” he said softly. “You had a choice to make back there, me or her, your country or your crotch, and I’m glad to see you chose your country.”

It started as a punch, my right fist right to his face, but I was too angry, had been imagining this for too long, and found myself following my fist with my head, plowing into him like we were brawling in a schoolyard.

But there’d never been this much blood in the schoolyard, nor the orphanage. I’d never found myself atop a foe so quickly or easily swinging away, had never discovered how nauseating it is to beat someone who won’t beat back.

And he wouldn’t. Not after blood had run into the seams between every tooth, not when his left eye had swollen into its own kind of bubo, purple and wet, not even when I-I know I didn’t do this, that I couldn’t have done it, but I remember it all the same-when I bit his forehead, right at the hairline, and tasted blood.

He laughed, not a sensible laugh, but an off-key cackle that I could feel-because that’s where I was sitting-in his diaphragm. That’s why I bit him, if I bit him. If he laughed at my fists and feet, what did I have left? My head. Those teeth. I’d learned this from Gurley this wildness.

The bite caused his laugh to switch to a screech, but it was all part of the same wail, and when I stood, disgusted as much with myself as with him, the laugh returned. Then he felt around in the back of his mouth for something, and winced. Two crimson fingers returned with what must have been a tooth.

“Tallyho!” Gurley chortled, or gurgled. He held up the tooth to me and I looked away. I expected him to get up, but he lay back and blinked several times and looked at the sky.

I was about to walk away when he spoke. “She’s still with the boy?” he asked, and I almost had to ask him who.

I finally nodded, once, and he nodded in return, and struggled to sit, and then stand. The place where he had fallen had begun to fill with water, and he bent over the puddle to study his face. When he stood again, I looked him over, embarrassed. He looked both worse and better than I thought he would, like he’d been attacked by a dog, or had snapped his head against a steering wheel.

I turned away again.

“There, there, Sergeant,” he said. “I’m sorry. Very sorry. We should have gotten that over with long, long ago. Shouldn’t we have? Shouldn’t we?”

I left him there. I walked away-away from Gurley away from the balloon, away from the tents and the boats. I walked toward nothing. But I didn’t get far before I ran out of land. I waded in, stumbled, soaked myself, and retreated. I walked back toward Gurley, who was still talking-to me, to himself-and tried a different direction. Again I sank. I just wanted to leave, and leave all of them behind. I wanted to keep walking until I could no longer hear Gurley’s voice, until I could no longer see anything. But wherever I stepped, the water rose around my feet. I wanted a balloon of my own.

I returned and stood by Gurley. He kept talking, and talking, whether or not I was looking at him. Usually I wasn’t. I was embarrassed with what I’d done to him. I might as well have attacked the little Japanese boy; Gurley looked almost as pathetic and wild-eyed.

Gurley made it worse by insisting that he forgave me. He said this in a dozen different ways, cited anecdotes, quoted the Bible, said he understood, offered consolation, commiseration. Unfortunately, I was young enough and Christian enough to want and need, and worst of all, believe, that forgiveness. Which meant that when he finally worked his monologue back around to Lily and the boy, the two of them in the tent, it was already too late for me. The most potent tranquilizing drug would not have worked on me so quickly or so well. He was planning, and I was listening. “A little awkward, a little awkward,” he concluded, “but-we’ll make it work. We’ll find a way. We’ve had bigger challenges in this war, haven’t we, Sergeant?” I looked away. “And bigger yet to come. Now, let us find our way back to the boat, and I shall tell you what we-what you, in particular, have to do.”

Gurley used what light the night provided to pick a way back to the boat that didn’t lead us directly past the tent. There wasn’t much of a moon, but somehow the tundra still managed a silver glow. I was too full of all that Lily had told me to stop him or even speak up. The only things I had to say in fact, were about Lily and I couldn’t find a way to tell Gurley what I knew. Did he know that Lily really loved him? Actually the word probably wasn’t love but it was something like that. Needed him. Had found herself bound to him. Gurley meanwhile, spoke of bombs and fuses and delays, and whether we had the equipment required to detonate something remotely. Then he stopped talking, and after a moment, I realized he was waiting for a reply.

“I think we do-I think we have all that, sir,” I said, having trouble readjusting from the world we were in to the one we had left, where there were rules, a war, and bombs, and people like me who dealt with them. “You want to blow up the balloon after all?” I asked, mostly to get additional time to refocus. It took a moment: after Lily’s frantic whispers, I’d forgotten that it had been a balloon that had brought the boy here, not spirits, not magic, not Lily.

Gurley stopped walking and looked at me warily. “Yes,” he said. “I want to blow up-the balloon.” He looked over my shoulder in the direction of the tent. “No need to save it. We certainly have enough balloon carcasses by now,” he said. “But you see the problem, Sergeant- yes?”

Peter betrayed Jesus three times before the cock crowed at dawn. To my knowledge, the devil has asked me to be faithful just once-right there, before dawn-and I obeyed: I listened.

Gurley wanted to blow up the balloon, yes, but he also wanted to blow up the boy. A living, breathing Japanese who’d arrived by balloon was a glorious prize, but an outdated one. The war was ending. Worse yet, men like the major in Fairbanks would add the boy to the two dead “fishermen” and decide the sum equaled the start of a massive, and manned, balloon campaign. That could only mean extra months (years?) in Alaska. No: we had to dispose of the balloon and the boy destroy any trace that they had ever existed, and we had to do it immediately. The major and the men from Ladd Field were likely just hours away from deciding to strike out across the tundra in search of germs.

The boy was dying, Gurley said, building his case. What was wanted was mercy, not agony, not for anyone. Now, he couldn’t put a gun to the boy’s head, Gurley explained. He wasn’t a barbarian. And he couldn’t ask me to do it: I wasn’t enough of a soldier. (He didn’t even pause to smirk.) No, things had to proceed according to the natural order of things, which was this: whoever had put the boy in that balloon (“A stowaway?” I asked, merely to have some way to counter him, but Gurley rolled his eyes) had intended for him to die in the ensuing explosion. When the balloon crashed, it should have exploded. He should have died. Our presence had upset this plan; we could give fate its due by placing the boy back at the crash site, and then detonating the balloon. This was not about the army, or war, or anything else. It was about predestination. The divine order of things. We had the equipment, which was simple enough. C3, blasting wire, a little hell box. Put the boy in position, affix the explosives, run the wire, retreat to safety, depress the plunger, and—