David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

“Ronnie,” I said, on my feet, desperate to stop him. Or the wolf. “It’s no good, Ronnie-wait. I don’t believe—”

Ronnie looked at his wrist. “I need the bracelet,” he said.

I slowly shook my head.

“I need it for the wolf,” he said.

“Not yet,” I said.

“I need it to tie him to me. I’m not going to let him escape again this time.”

“Ronnie,” I said.

“Lou-is,” Ronnie said. “What have I asked?”

I sat silent, then reached in my pocket, took out the pyx, opened it, and removed the bracelet. I unraveled it as carefully as if it were a chain of diamonds and then affixed it to his wrist. “Let’s pray,” I said, not looking up.

Ronnie looked pleased, and shook his head. “I can’t pray if I don’t believe, Lou-is.”

I couldn’t answer, only taunt: “Well, I’m getting ready to go after your wolf, and I don’t exactly believe in him, so—”

“It’s okay,” Ronnie interrupted. “He believes in you.” He smiled, but to himself, and then lay back on the pillow. “Now,” he said, the word coming quite clearly, “this is what you must give him—” But here his voice faltered again. He went down, deep in his chest to find his breath, to cough it out once more, but this time it did not come.

I shouted. I shook him. I ran to the hall. I called for help. I was crying, tears actually running down my face, my old man’s face. I dropped the side rail. I bent over him. And then—

I breathed. Once, twice. My mouth to his. Then my hands on his chest. One, two, three, four, five. But it was no good: the bed was too soft. Sometimes there was a board beneath you could pull out for CPR. I couldn’t find it. I thought about dragging him onto the floor, but there wasn’t enough time. Jesus, Mary, and you, too, Joseph. Breathe. Again to his chest. One, two, three, four-I could hear footsteps, voices behind me.

Thank you, Lord, for this: for the help of doctors and nurses, for those who can truly bring the dead back to life. I explained between breaths, between compressions, what I was doing, how I was saving him, how I needed help. I was on the verge of saying why-of saying that I needed to save him from the wolf, or for the wolf, or that I needed to keep him alive long enough to tell me, an old priest, a believer, one baptized in the waters of everlasting life, just what it was that I had to give this wolf.

They pulled me away from Ronnie. I fought, but they pulled me away-and I decided: they know best. They know better than I: they are the professionals; they are younger. Let them breathe, let them save him.

They did not.

“Father! Stop!” I think this is what I heard as they struggled with me. “Father-what are you doing? You have to—” I think I may have hit someone at this point, but, let’s be clear, I did not bite, did not bite at one of them. “You have to respect his wishes.” A nurse held up his wrist and the Comfort One bracelet, but I couldn’t see it. I know it was there, but I couldn’t see it. I could only hear it clink and wink and laugh at me, and then I couldn’t hear it at all, because I was running, down the hall, out the doors, into the snow, off to the wolf.

YOU HAVE THE PROOF, Ronnie said, and I do.

Proof is in my pocket, the inside breast pocket of my parka, as I race my snowmachine down the frozen river. Proof is a small book of strange paper bound in green leather. Proof is what I bring the wolf.

Proof: this is what I searched for, years later, in Anchorage.

But there was none.

Everything had changed. Every street I walked down was paved, the sidewalks were clear. New buildings had gone up. Old buildings cleared away. The Starhope still stood, or its shell did. It had new windows. In the lobby, plants, and a guard in coat and tie. And on the second floor: nothing, nothing I needed to see.

And out at the base, where the strangely frightened teenaged soldier at the main gate waved me through when he saw my collar, I could see that Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Airfield had changed as well. They were separate bases now, but more important, the mud was gone, and so too the tents, the crowds. I picked my way down new streets, around new buildings, circumscribed, incredibly, by tidy green lawns. And finally, I turned down a street that I’m fairly certain is the one that used to terminate at the front door of our Quonset hut.

And it was gone, too, of course. Which I expected, though I was disappointed. I wondered what it was like when they tore it down, what happened when neither Gurley nor I returned from our secret mission, whether the major ever searched the tundra for some proof of plague, or whether he launched a search for some proof of us.

Maybe no one noticed, or didn’t notice for a while. The war was ending then. We disappeared in July, the war ended in August. And the balloon that carried that boy was either the last or among the last, or so I’ve deduced from the odd article or two that I’ve read in the decades since. They gave up, Japan. Credit Gurley, I guess, or the editors who voluntarily obeyed the press ban: until it was lifted, not a word about the balloons was printed or broadcast, and the Japanese were left to conclude that their massive undertaking had failed.

No trace of plague weapons was ever found in Alaska or farther south, though I’ve read there were plans for plague-laden kamikaze planes to attack San Diego in the fall of ’45. Northern China, Unit 731’s home, offers a glimpse of what might have been: in the years following the war, tens of thousands died in successive waves of plague, likely spread by animals escaping from, or released by, those who’d spent the war experimenting on them.

The plague failed to reach us, but the balloons did not. They rose from the ground into the clouds and flew across the ocean. They landed in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. In Alaska, in Washington, in Oregon, in California, in a dozen other states, and who knows what’s still concealed today beneath the forest floor? After the war, researchers reinflated a captured Japanese paper balloon and launched it from Southern California, just to see how hardy it was, just to see how far it would travel, having already made the trek from Japan.

It landed in Africa.

But that one balloon doesn’t interest me so much as the dozens Gurley and I left behind in Anchorage. How strange it must have been in those first days without us, those last days of the war, MPs guarding a building uninhabited but for balloons.

In time, of course, the Army would have sent someone up to take inventory and look for clues of what had happened among the items that we’d left. What would they have found?

Balloons, still hanging from the rafters, crates upon crates of balloon parts, and those pieces too big to be crated, stacked along the floor, the whole place looking less like a home for decommissioned war matériel than the breeding ground of some terrible new weapon.

In his office, after they’d snapped the padlock? They’d find the wall map, of course, the pins running red across it, the clocks above. Gurley’s dog-eared Japanese-English dictionary. The blackguard’s tooth.

There I was, years later, half afraid some MP would finally take this long-absent soldier prisoner, and there was nothing there.

There’s nothing there: Lily was as amazed as I at those final pages in the book, page after page of gray wash that I had read as blank, as failure, as proof of Saburo’s inability to show Lily where he had gone, what he had done, what had happened to their little boy.

It’s only now I understand that he could no more have mapped their son’s death than he could the clouds, blood coursing through a body or spilling into the sea. The pattern is unknowable, out of reach, divine. It’s only now I see, in my mind and in the overcast sky ahead of me, those washed gray pages for what they were. There may be no sharper map of grief than this, no more precise way to show a war’s worth, a life’s worth, a love’s worth of ache and loss and absence.