David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Sixsmith’s Report!

She pulls herself back into the sinking vehicle. Can’t see a damn thing. A plastic trash bag. Wedged under the seat . She doubles up in the confined space … It’s here . She hauls, like a woman hauling a sack of rocks. She feeds herself feetfirst back out the window, but the report is too fat. The sinking car drags Luisa down. Her lungs ache now. The sodden papers have quadrupled their weight. The trash bag is through the window, but as she kicks and struggles Luisa feels a lightening. Hundreds of pages spin free from the vanilla binder, wheeling wherever the sea will take them, wheeling around her, playing cards in Alice. She kicks off her shoes. Her lungs shriek, curse, beg. Every pulse is a thump in Luisa’s ears. Which way is up? The water is too murky to guess. Up is away from the car . Her lungs will collapse in another moment. Where’s the car? Luisa realizes she has paid for the Sixsmith Report with her life.

41

Isaac Sachs looks down on a brilliant Pennsylvania morning. Labyrinthine suburbs of ivory mansionettes and silk lawns inset with turquoise swimming pools. The executive-jet window is cool against his face. Six feet directly beneath his seat is a suitcase in the baggage hold containing enough C-4 to turn an airplane into a meteor. So , thinks Sachs, you obeyed your conscience. Luisa Rey has the Sixsmith Report . He recollects as many details of her face as he can. Do you feel doubt? Relief? Fear? Righteousness?

A premonition I’ll never see her again .

Alberto Grimaldi, the man he has double-crossed, is laughing at an aide’s remark. The hostess passes with a tray of clinking drinks. Sachs retreats into his notebook, where he writes the following sentences.

Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction—in short, belief—grows ever “truer.” The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent .

The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune)

Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up—a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone .

Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows—the actual past—from another such simulacrum—the actual future?

One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each “shell” (the present) encased inside a nest of “shells” (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of “now” likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future .

Proposition: I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey .

The detonator is triggered. The C-4 ignites. The jet is engulfed by a fireball. The jet’s metals, plastics, circuitry, its passengers, their bones, clothes, notebooks, and brains all lose definition in flames exceeding 1200 degrees C. The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts. Now the bifurcation of these two pasts will begin.

42

“Betty and Frank needed to shore up their finances,” Lloyd Hooks tells his breakfast audience in the Swannekke Hotel. A circle of neophytes and acolytes pays keen attention to the Presidential Energy Guru. “So they decide Betty’d go on the game to get a little cash in hand. Night comes around, Frank drives Betty over to Whore Lane to ply her new trade. ’Hey, Frank,’ says Betty, from the sidewalk. ’How much should I charge?’ Frank does the math and tells her, ’A hundred bucks for the whole shebang.’ So Betty gets out, and Frank parks down a quiet alley. Pretty soon this guy drives up in his beat-up old Chrysler and propositions Betty: ’How much for all night, sugar?’ Betty says, ’Hundred dollars.’ The guy says, ‘I only got thirty dollars. What’ll thirty buy me?’ So Betty dashes around to Frank and asks him. Frank says, ‘Tell him thirty dollars buys a hand job.’ So Betty goes back to the guy—”

Lloyd Hooks notices Bill Smoke in the background. Bill Smoke raises one, two, three fingers; the three fingers become a fist; the fist becomes a slashing gesture. Alberto Grimaldi, dead; Isaac Sachs, dead; Luisa Rey, dead. Swindler, sneak, snoop . Hooks’s eyes tell Smoke he has understood, and a figment from a Greek myth surfaces in his mind. The sacred grove of Diana was guarded by a warrior priest on whom luxury was lavished but whose tenure was earned by slaying his predecessor. When he slept, it was at the peril of his life. Grimaldi, you dozed for too long .

“So, anyway, Betty goes back to the guy and says his thirty’ll buy a hand job, take it or leave it. The guy says, ‘Okay, sugar, jump in, I’ll take the hand job. Is there a quiet alley around here?’ Betty has him drive around the corner to Frank’s alley, and the guy unbelts his pants to reveal the most—y’ know—gargantuan schlong. ‘Wait up !’ gasps Betty. ‘I’ll be right back.’ She jumps out of the guy’s car and knocks on Frank’s window. Frank lowers the window, ‘What now?’ “ Hooks pauses for the punch line. “Betty says, ‘Frank, hey, Frank, lend this guy seventy dollars!’ ”

The men who would be board members cackle like hyenas. Whoever said money can’t buy you happiness , Lloyd Hooks thinks, basking, obviously didn’t have enough of the stuff .

43

Through binoculars Hester Van Zandt watches the divers on their launch. An unhappy-looking barefoot teenager in a poncho ambles along the beach and pats Hester’s mongrel. “They found the car yet, Hester? Channel’s pretty deep at that point. That’s why the fishing’s so good there.”

“Hard to be sure at this distance.”

“Kinda ironic to drown in the sea you’re polluting. The guard’s kinda got the hots for me. Told me it was a drunk driver, a woman, ’bout four in the morning.”

“Swannekke Bridge comes under the same special security remit as the island. Seaboard can say what they like. No one’ll cross-check their story.”

The teenager yawns. “D’you s’pose she drowned in her car, the woman? Or d’you think she got out and kinda drowned later?”