David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

I stared at the blast site waiting for my hearing to return. It never has completely, but in a minute or two, some sounds returned. The rush of wind, a mosquito that sounded miles distant but appeared on my palm after I’d absently slapped at my ear, and after that slap, a high wail, also distant. I’d forgotten about the boy: even though I’d made sure that his spot in the balloon wreckage would be well clear of the explosion, the blast must have frightened him, and now he was crying.

But he was closer, too.

A few yards up the path, in fact, in a patch of salmonberries that were growing beneath a stunted cottonwood, where he was keening, choking, screaming, not having moved an inch from the spot where Gurley had safely placed him.

THE SMOKE AND NOISE OF THE BLAST HAD ALREADY DISSIPATED. The sky, incredibly, was just as it had been before. The birds that must have shrieked into flight were long gone or had already returned.

And now, this boy, wailing.

This partial deafness has been a curse all my life, but I was grateful for it then. Because if I had heard Lily screaming in pain, or Gurley moaning, I know I would have gone to them. And because they would have been too wounded for me to help in any way, I would have had to simply crouch by them, endure their screams-and eyes! Eyes! How they would have looked at me!-until they finally fell silent. Who first? Gurley? Lily? Or would they fall suddenly silent together?

And if I had heard the boy screaming, full volume, I don’t think I would have stooped and tended to him. I would have been too angry. Two people dead; an officer, his lover, the man I served and the woman I loved, and this boy screaming as though his were the only real pain? I wouldn’t have gone near him.

But I did go to him. I didn’t go to Gurley and Lily. Because I heard Lily tell me to go to the boy. It wasn’t her voice, just Lily, herself, there, inside me. Perhaps hear isn’t the right word, then-but I knew that she wanted me to take the boy to the boat, to a doctor. You could argue that I knew she wanted that before she died, before I “heard” her within me. Fair enough. But as I pushed off from shore, the boy, barely alive, in the bow, she was there, too. And after the motor had hiccuped to life and we began picking our way down through the delta to the ocean, she was still there, marking sandbars and pointing out which turns to take when. She told us where to stop the first night, and again the second.

You still don’t believe me.

Then what of this:

The morning of the third day, the boy was weak, close to death. Once we were in the boat, I gave him water, broke up some of our rations into tiny bites, some of which he spat out, some of which he ate. After the food, but especially the water, he seemed to recover some of his strength, but spent almost all that strength on moaning with new fervor. I waited until we reached a wide, almost currentless stretch of water, and then throttled back, letting the boat drift while I rummaged in the medical kit for the vial of morphine. I had wanted to wait for as long as possible before administering any, to stretch out its use for as long as possible. But now I found the needle, pierced the seal, drew a small amount, and carefully moved toward him.

I thought his eyes would be fixed on the needle, but they weren’t; he stared straight at me. And the closer I got, the less he moaned, the more open his face became. When I was close enough, I put a hand out to touch his good arm, and stopped. The rapid breaths that had come after the crying were slowing, and through that touch alone, I could feel the whole of him relaxing, degree by degree. This wasn’t me. This couldn’t have been only me.

He laid his head back and stared at the sky a moment, then at me, and then closed his eyes. I started; I thought this was the moment. I reflexively raised the needle until I realized he wouldn’t need the morphine now, not if he had reached the moment of death. I eased back and watched.

But one minute passed and then another with the boat still drifting, its progress no longer measurable. He didn’t die. He kept breathing, ragged breath after ragged breath, and I couldn’t break away. Who was he? How had he gotten here? I should have been able to tell with that touch. Even if we couldn’t speak, I could learn, as Lily could, through touch alone, through the power of a hand, what secrets lay within.

So I closed my eyes, too, and concentrated, but all I could think of was Lily, and then Gurley and the sun coming up, and some tundra spirit seeking me out, and then Father Pabich-nothing about the boy.

What happened next seemed to be the boy’s decision more than mine. Or perhaps it was Lily’s. As I was sitting there, staring at my own hands, the boy, eyes closed, reached out. I put a hand in the way of his, and he caught up two or three of my fingers in a tight grasp. It reminds me, now, of what infants will sometimes do, at the hospital or after a baptism. And the parents smile and laugh: such strength, such affection!

But I didn’t smile then. His hand was a boy’s hand, but it was dry and cracked. I found myself checking the tips of his fingers for gangrene-some telltale sign of Gurley’s black death settling in. But they were just a boy’s fingers, the dirt ringed beneath his nails the only black to be found. The feel of his hand, though, that surprised me: rough, callused. I wanted to turn his hand over, examine it more closely as Lily might have, or must have. But he held on tight, and I didn’t move, and a story seeped through-a small boy, who’d been pressed into service in a wartime factory because all the able-bodied men were at war. The balloons he was helping build were more wonderful than anything he’d ever made for himself, and he wanted so much to fly in one.

They were experimenting with a new, larger model. They flew it on a short tether, overnight, to test a new mixture of gases. He’d watched from outside the fence. It was so close, so tempting. He crawled under the fence, and then, before he realized what he was doing, he was climbing up the rope. Climbing up, hand over hand, just like they’d been doing in school, all of them training to be strong young warriors, ready to fight when the last stand began. And then he was inside. It was impossible that this was happening, of course, impossible to any adult in particular, impossible to anyone who was not a boy who wanted to fly. He took out a knife, a little one. This they hadn’t taught in school; this was what his father gave to him before his father left on a train that took him to a ship that took him to what his mother said was a tiny island, surrounded by a wide ocean, far away, so far that the boy was still waiting for an answer to the letters he’d written his dad, telling him how careful he’d been with the knife, how skilled he’d become with it.

He cut the first tether, the rope he’d climbed up on, and the knife worked beautifully, the rope helping him, each strand shattering as he drew the blade across it. When the rope snapped free, the balloon lurched, and he almost fell out, almost dropped the knife. But he was okay now, he was okay, a little scared, maybe, but okay, and his hand-saving the knife caused him to get a little cut. Was it bad? He held it up; he couldn’t see it well, it was dark. It felt moist, sticky, but it didn’t hurt, not yet. He licked it, and then it started to hurt, so he made a fist and sat back for a moment. It wasn’t much of a cut, but it was in the same place he’d gotten scratched by that cat. That cat! She’d cornered the mouse he’d been keeping-these men had been keeping the mice in these little cages, outside, but he’d gone and gotten one, just for himself, he’d take care of it, and then that cat. He’d like to have his little mouse with him now, he’d like to see this: look, he was cutting the second tether. There were three. Snap. The balloon lurched again, but this time he was ready, braced, the balloon now rocking, angry or excited, he couldn’t tell. If he were a balloon, he’d want to fly, he wouldn’t want to stay tied to the ground. Now for the last cord. His hand was bleeding again, not badly. He wiped it on his coveralls, the little worker coveralls they gave him when he started at the factory. “So grown up!” his mother had said, crying for some reason, when she saw him for the first time in the coveralls. She should have been happy: he was helping now. Helping Father. Helping Mother, who was working in the same factory. If only he had had brothers, sisters, they all could have worked, all could have helped. All of them lined up in their uniforms.