The Cloud Atlas

I awoke (or was awake) when the tent flaps parted. Convinced that Gurley had belatedly decided to play the gentleman and leave Lily a tent to herself, I rolled to one side of the small, two-man tent, to give him room to lie down. I kept my eyes closed, hoping that he would assume I was asleep-or at least, fiercely pretending to be. I could smell the tundra muck and wet on him as he crawled in; it wasn't unpleasant, exactly-although I knew it would be after a few hours. It smelled of water and grass and mud, a lot of it, and I realized that pitching the second tent must have proven quite a battle. I imagined he'd had trouble finding another patch of dry ground adequate enough for the tent. I was about to roll back over and apologize for leaving him to do the job alone when the voice came in my ear.

“Louis,” Lily said. My every muscle came alive. I tried to twist to see her, but she whispered “no” and held my shoulder. “Just listen,” she said.

“Where have you been?” I said, craning my neck. “Where's Gurley?”

“Whisper,” Lily said. I started to repeat myself, and she interrupted: “You don't know how to whisper.” She put a finger on my lips, which almost made me stop breathing as well as speaking.

“Louis, he's gone,” she said. I tried once more to roll over and face her, and this time she let me. I was surprised to find her face right above mine. “Not Gurley,” she said. “Saburo. Saburo is gone. I went and looked for him, and he's gone.”

“Lily,” I said.

“Please,” she said. “You'll wake Gurley.” I rubbed my face. Lily waited until I was looking at her before she went on. “I went looking for Saburo,” she said then. “All night, as I was guiding us down the river, I could feel him growing closer and closer. And then we came here, and the sense was overwhelming. I could hardly breathe. I wasn't sure what I would do when I found him, but I knew I would find him, his body. That's why I went wandering off into the brush. There's more island here than you might think-you'll see it in daylight. But I followed him-it was almost like following a trail-and finally I came to a small clearing by some scrub alder. His campsite. That's what I had found. He had been there. And gone. He's gone now.” She turned away.

“And the… shrine?” I said.

She shook her head.

“Lily,” I said.

“I need your help now,” she said.

“Lily, I brought it.” She looked at me. “The map. I brought Saburo's book.” Oh, such eyes-why couldn't I have done this sooner, basked in that look so much earlier?

But as soon as the book appeared, I lost her. She took it from me, held it, felt it, bit her lip and then opened it, crying her way through the pages. She asked me about the translations; unsure how she would react, I said they were Gurley's. She fingered them like delicate leaves.

Page by page she progressed, until she neared the end, when she began turning the pages two and three at a time, looking, I was sure, for Saburo's last map, the one to their baby.

“Lily-” I said, but she'd already found them. The empty, gray-washed pages.

“What did you do with them?” she cried, loud enough that she might have spooked Gurley.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was going to ask you. We were-I thought, maybe secret writing, but Gurley would have made fun of me and I guess I don't-”

“There's nothing here,” Lily said, shaking her head, almost unable to speak.

“Lily, I-maybe there's something earlier.” I offered to take the book from her and look myself.

She shook her head.

“I guess he-maybe he didn't-I don't know, Lily,” I said. “Maybe he didn't get a chance to-” and I really was going to say, dispose of the baby's body properly, but somehow managed to catch myself. “Maybe he didn't get a chance to make the map. He went out, he-he-got captured-escaped?”

But while I was babbling, Lily had stopped crying. She was staring before her, and, it seemed, listening. Not to me.

“Lily?”

“Louis,” she said softly. “I need your help. There's something- there's something here. Nearby. It's him, or-it's someone. Near here, and moving. But too fast for the boat, too fast for feet. I need to follow him.”

I looked at her for a moment, uncertain if this was the new Lily, or if some old part of her still burned inside. “How?” I said finally.

“First,” she said, “some rope.”

THERE IS THE OLD, familiar challenge of describing the midnight sun, the moon on the snow on a subzero night, the northern lights, the empty Kilbuck Mountains or the endless gray sea to someone who has never been here-and then there is the unique and forbidding prospect of describing what happened in that tent that night, a few weeks shy of the end of the war and my first life.