David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Frustrated and weary, Rufus Sixsmith addresses the TV. “And when the hydrogen buildup blows the roof off the containment chamber? When prevailing winds shower radiation over California?” He turns the set off and squeezes the bridge of his nose. I proved it. I proved it. You couldn’t buy me, so you tried intimidation. I let you, Lord forgive me, but no longer. I’m not sitting on my conscience any longer .

The telephone rings. Sixsmith snatches it up. “Megan?”

A brusque male voice. “They’re coming.”

“Who is this?”

“They traced your last call to the Talbot Motel, 1046 Olympia Boulevard. Get to the airport now , get on the next flight for England, and conduct your exposé from over there, if you must. But go.”

“Why should I believe—”

“Use logic. If I’m lying, you’re still back in England safe and sound—with your report. If I’m not lying, you’re dead.”

“I demand to know—”

“You’ve got twenty minutes to get away, max. Go!”

Dial tone, a droning eternity.

14

Jerry Nussbaum rotates his office chair, straddles it, places his folded arms on its back, and rests his chin on them. “Picture the scene, me and six dreadlocked freaks of the negroid persuasion, a handgun tickling my tonsils. Not talking dead-of-night Harlem here, I’m talking Greenwich goddamn Village in broad goddamn daylight after a sixteen-pound steak with Norman goddamn Mailer. So there we were, this black bro’ frisks me down with his bitonal paw and relieves me of my wallet. ‘Wassis? Alligator skin?’ ” Nussbaum does a Richard Pryor accent. “ ‘No fuckin’ class , Whitey!’ Class? Those bums made me turn out my pockets for my every last cent— literally . But Nussbaum had the last laugh, you bet he did. In the cab back to Times Square, I wrote my now-classic ‘New Tribes’ editorial—no point in false modesty—and got it syndicated thirty times by the end of the week! My muggers turned me into a household name. So, Luey-Luey, what say you take me to dinner and I teach you how to extract a little gold from the Fangs of Fate?”

Luisa’s typewriter pings. “If the muggers took your every last cent— literally —what were you doing in a cab from Greenwich Village to Times Square? Sell your body for the fare?”

“You”—Nussbaum shifts his mass—”have a genius for missing the point.”

Roland Jakes drips candle wax onto a photograph. “Definition of the Week. What’s a conservative?”

The joke is old by summer 1975. “A mugged liberal.”

Jakes, stung, goes back to his picture-doctoring.

Luisa crosses the office to Dom Grelsch’s door. Her boss is speaking on the phone in a low, irate voice. Luisa waits outside but overhears. “No—no, no, Mr. Frum, it is black-and-white, tell me—hey, I ’m talking now—tell me a more black-and-white ‘condition’ than leukemia? Know what I think? I think my wife is just one piece of paperwork between you and your three o’clock golf slot, isn’t she? Then prove it to me. Do you have a wife, Mr. Frum? Do you? You do. Can you imagine your wife lying in a hospital ward with her hair falling out? … What? What did you say? ‘Getting emotional won’t help’? Is that all you can offer, Mr. Frum? Yeah, buddy, you’re damn right I’ll be seeking legal counsel!” Grelsch slams the receiver down, lays into his punching bag gasping “Frum!” with each blow, collapses into his chair, lights a cigarette, and catches sight of Luisa hesitating in his doorway. “Life. A Force Ten shitstorm. You hear any of that?”

“The gist. I can come back later.”

“No. Come in, sit down. Are you young, healthy, and strong, Luisa?”

“Yes.” Luisa sits on boxes. “Why?”

“Because what I gotta say about your article on this unsubstantiated cover-up at Seaboard will, frankly, leave you old, sick, and weak.”

15

At Buenas Yerbas International Airport, Dr. Rufus Sixsmith places a vanilla binder into locker number 909, glances around the crowded concourse, feeds the slot with coins, turns the key, and slips this into a padded khaki envelope addressed to Luisa Rey at Spyglass , Klugh Bldg. 12F, 3rd Avenue, BY. Sixsmith’s pulse rises as he nears the postal desk. What if they get me before I reach it? His pulse rockets. Businessmen, families with luggage carts, snakes of elderly tourists all seem intent on thwarting his progress. The mailbox slot looms closer. Just yards away now, just inches.

The khaki envelope is swallowed and gone. Godspeed .

Sixsmith next lines up for an airplane ticket. News of delays lulls him like a litany. He keeps a nervous eye out for signs of Seaboard’s agents coming to pick him up at this late hour. Finally, a ticket clerk waves him over.

“I have to get to London. Any destination in the United Kingdom, in fact. Any seat, any airline. I’ll pay in cash.”

“Not a prayer , sir.” The clerk’s tiredness shows through her makeup. “Earliest I can manage”—she consults a teleprinted sheet—”London Heathrow … tomorrow afternoon, three-fifteen departure, Laker Skytrains, change at JFK.”

“It’s terribly important that I leave sooner.”

“I’m sure it is, sir, but we got air-traffic-control strikes and acres of stranded passengers.”

Sixsmith tells himself that not even Seaboard could arrange aviation strikes to detain him. “Then tomorrow it shall have to be. One-way, business class, please, nonsmoking. Is there overnight accommodation anywhere in the airport?”

“Yes, sir, third level. Hotel Bon Voyage. You’ll be comfortable there. If I can just see your passport, please, so I can process your ticketing?”

16

A stained-glass sunset illuminates the velveteen Hemingway in Luisa’s apartment. Luisa is buried in Harnessing the Sun: Two Decades of Peacetime Atomic Power , chewing a pen. Javier is at her desk doing a sheet of long-division problems. Carole King’s Tapestry LP is playing at a low volume. Drifting through the windows comes the dim roar of automobiles heading home. The telephone rings, but Luisa lets it. Javier studies the answering machine as it clunks into action. “Hi, Luisa Rey can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you.”

“I loathe these contraptions,” complains the caller. “Cookie, it’s your mother. I just heard from Beatty Griffin, who told me you split up with Hal— last month? I was dumbstruck! You didn’t breathe a word at your father’s funeral, or at Alphonse’s. This bottling-up worries me so much. Dougie and I are having a fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society, and it’d mean the sun, the moon, and the stars to us if you’d abandon your poky little nest just for one weekend and come stay, Cookie? The Henderson triplets will be here, that’s Damien the cardiologist, Lance the gynecologist, and Jesse the … Doug? Doug! Jesse Henderson, what does he do? A lobotomist? Oh, funny . Anyway, daughter of mine, Beatty tells me by some freak of planetary alignment all three brothers are unattached. On the hoof, Cookie, on the hoof! So call the moment you get this. All my love now.” She ends with a suction kiss, “Mmmmchw aaa !”

“She sounds like the mother on Bewitched.” Javier lets a little time go by. “What’s ‘dumbstruck’?”

Luisa doesn’t look up. “When you’re so amazed you can’t speak.”

“She didn’t sound very dumbstruck, did she?”

Luisa is engrossed in her work.

“ ‘Cookie’?”