David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

A glass touched my lips & Goose’s hand cradled my head. I tried to thank him. The potion tasted of bilgewater & almond. Goose raised my head & stroked my Adam’s apple until I swallowed the liquid. Time passed, I know not how long. The creaking of my bones & the ship’s timbers were one.

Somebody knocked. Light softened my coffin’s darkness & I heard Goose’s voice from the corridor. “Yes, much, much better, Mr. Green! Yes, the worst is over. I was very worried, I confess, but Mr. Ewing’s color is returning & his pulse strong. Only one hour? Excellent news. No, no, he’s asleep now. Tell the captain we’ll be going ashore tonight—if he could send word to arrange lodgings, I know Mr. Ewing’s father-in-law will remember the kindness.”

Goose’s face floated into my vision again. “Adam?”

Another fist knocked at the door. Goose uttered an oath & swam away. I could no longer move my head but heard Autua demanding, “I see Missa Ewing!” Goose bade him begone, but the tenacious Indian was not to be faced down so easily. “No! Missa Green say he better! Missa Ewing save my life! He my duty!” Goose then told Autua this:—that I saw in Autua a carrier of disease & a rogue planning to exploit my present infirmity to rob me even of the buttons from my waistcoat. I had begged Goose, so he claimed, to “keep that d——d nigger away from me!” adding that I regretted ever saving his worthless neck. With that, Goose slammed & bolted my coffin door.

Why had Goose lied so? Why was he so determined no one else should see me? The answer raised the latch on a door of deception & an horrific truth kicked that same door in. To wit, the doctor was a poisoner & I his prey. Since the commencement of my “Treatment,” the doctor had been killing me by degrees with his “cure.”

My Worm? A fiction, implanted by the doctor’s power of suggestion! Goose, a doctor? No, an itinerant, murdering confidence trickster!

I fought to rise, but the evil liquid my succubus had lately fed me had enfeebled my limbs so wholly I could not so much as twitch my extremities. I tried to shout for aid, but my lungs did not inflate. I heard Autua’s footsteps retreat up the companionway & prayed for God to guide him back, but his intentions were otherwise. Goose clambered up the hawser to my bunk. He saw my eyes. Seeing my fear, the demon removed his mask.

“What’s that you’re saying, Ewing? How shall I comprehend if you drool & dribble so?” I emitted a frail whine. “Let me guess what you’re trying to tell me—’Oh, Henry, we were friends, Henry, how could you do this to me?’ [He mimicked my hoarse, dying whisper.] Am I on the nose?” Goose cut the key from my neck & spoke as he worked at uncovering my trunk. “Surgeons are a singular brotherhood, Adam. To us, people aren’t sacred beings crafted in the Almighty’s image, no, people are joints of meat; diseased, leathery meat, yes, but meat ready for the skewer & the spit.” He mimicked my usual voice, very well. “ ‘But why me , Henry, are we not friends?’ Well, Adam, even friends are made of meat. ‘Tis absurdly simple. I need money & in your trunk, I am told, is an entire estate, so I have killed you for it. Where is the mystery? ‘But, Henry, this is wicked!’ But, Adam, the world is wicked. Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats, Christians on infidels, first mates on cabin boys, Death on the Living. ‘The weak are meat, the strong do eat.’ ”

Goose checked my eyes for sentience & kissed my lips. “Your turn to be eaten, dear Adam. You were no more gullible than any other of my patrons.” My trunk lid swung open. Goose counted through my pocketbook, sneered, found the emerald from von Weiss & examined it through an eyepiece. He was unimpressed. The fiend untied the bundles of documents relating to the Busby estate & tore open the sealed envelopes in search of banknotes. I heard him count my modest supply. He tapped my trunk for secret compartments, but he found none, for there are none. Lastly, he snipped the buttons from my waistcoat.

Goose addressed me through my delirium, as one might address an unsatisfactory tool. “Frankly, I am disappointed. I have known Irish navvies with more pounds to their name. Your cache scarcely covers my arsenick & opiate. If Mrs. Horrox had not donated her hoard of black pearls to my worthy cause, poor Goose’s goose would be basted & cooked! Well, it is time for us to part. You will be dead within the hour & for me, ’tis hey, ho! for the open road.”

My next cogent remembrance is of drowning in salt water so bright it hurt. Had Boerhaave found my body & thrown me overboard to ensure my silence & avoid tiresome procedures with the American consul? My mind was still active & as such might yet exercise some say in my destiny. Consent to drown, or attempt to swim? Drowning was by far the least troublesome option, so I cast about for a dying thought & settled on Tilda, waving off the Belle-Hoxie from Silvaplana Wharf so many months before with Jackson shouting, “Papa! Bring me back a kangaroo’s paw!”

The thought of never more seeing them was so distressing, I elected to swim & found myself not in the sea but curled on deck, vomiting profusely & trembling violently with fever, aches, cramps, pinches. Autua was holding me (he had forced a bucketful of brine down me to “flush out” the poison). I retched & retched. Boerhaave shoved his way through the crowd of onlooking stevedores & seamen, snarling, “I told you once, nigger, that Yankee’s no concern of yours! & if a direct order won’t convince you—” Though the sun half-blinded me, I saw the first mate land one brutal kick in Autua’s ribs & launch another. Autua gripped the atrabilious Hollander’s shin in one firm hand whilst he gently lowered my head to the deck and rose up to his full height, taking his assailant’s leg with him, robbing Boerhaave of his balance. The Dutchman fell on his head with a leonine roar. Autua now seized the other foot & slung our first mate over the bulwarks like a sack of cabbages.

Whether the crewmen were too fearful, astonished, or delighted to offer any resistance, I shall never know, but Autua carried me down a gangplank on the dockside unmolested. My reason informed me that Boerhaave could not be in heaven nor Autua in hell so we must be in Honolulu. From the harbor we passed down a thoroughfare bustling with innumerable tongues, hues, creeds & odors. My eyes met a Chinaman’s as he rested beneath a carved dragon. A pair of women whose paint & tournure advertised their ancient calling peered at me & crossed themselves. I tried to tell them I was not yet dead, but they were gone. Autua’s heart beat against my side, encouraging my own. Thrice he asked of strangers, “Where doctor, friend?” Thrice he was ignored (one answered, “No medicine for stinking Blacks!”) before an old fish seller grunted directions to a sick house. I was parted from my senses for a time, before hearing the word Infirmary . Merely entering its fetid air, laden with ordure & decomposition, caused me to retch anew, notwithstanding my stomach was empty as a discarded glove. The buzzing of bluebottles hovered & a madman howled about Jesus adrift on the Sargasso Sea. Autua muttered to himself in his own tongue. “Patience more, Mr. Ewing—this place smell death—I take you to Sisters.”

How Autua’s Sisters might have strayed so far from Chatham Isle was a puzzle I could not begin to solve, but I entrusted myself to his care. He quitted that charnel house & soon the taverns, dwellings, and warehouses thinned before giving way to sugar plantations. I knew I should ask, or warn, Autua about Goose, but speech was yet beyond my powers. Nauseous slumber tightened then loosened its grip on me. A distinct hill rose up & its name stirred in memory’s sediment:—Diamond Head. The road hither was rocks, dust & holes, walled on both sides with unyielding vegetation. Autua’s stride broke only once, to cup cool stream water to my lips, until we arrived at a Catholick mission, beyond the final fields. A nun tried to “shoo” us away with a broom, but Autua enjoined her, in Spanish as broken as his English, to grant his White charge sanctuary. Finally, one sister who evidently knew Autua arrived & persuaded the others that the savage was on a mission not of malice but of mercy.