The Cloud Atlas

So, if the Japanese had returned-well, I couldn't speak. This is why the colonel back in California had laughed when he heard I was being taken to Alaska. The Aleutians! It was where the world ended, careers ended, lives ended. Suicides were rampant. So were courts-martial. GIs sent there weren't even told of the destination until they were safely aboard ship and through the Golden Gate, a practice Gurley himself surely approved of.

“The Aleutians?” he said. “Good God, Belk. This means you're literate-you do read, and read the papers, to boot-” He feigned awe, and then resumed. “But no. Hell no. I'm not talking about the Aleutians -the islands or the swarthy Lilliputians who populate them. I'm talking about the fucking homefront, my brother-in-arms. The watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.” He started tapping the map. “ Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana.” His eyes grew wider, his voice deeper. He was a prophet. A leader. The Wizard of Oz.

I should clarify: recognizing his theatricality wouldn't have immunized me against it. I think I'd have to be as unconscious as Ronnie here to have resisted Gurley's performance. But I wasn't unconscious, I was alive, and I shivered- the enemy is here! Japs all around!-and you know what? It was wonderful. It was wonderful the same way it's wonderful to flinch at some frightening point in a book or a movie; there's a certain dizzy pleasure that comes with knowing you've succumbed, you've been duped.

And, back then, it was a lot more than that: it was wonderful to know the war was real. You had to be young to think this; the country had to be younger, too. But that's the way it was with kids like me: it was wonderful to know that this enemy we'd read so much about was really out there, that I would finally get to fight, and that Gurley would somehow wave a magic wand, take me through a back door, and usher me right into the middle of all of it.

All of it: Japanese soldiers, hiding in trees, leaping out of mailboxes late at night. Bombs in the sky. Balloons in the clouds. A giant red rising sun on a white field, strung between the twin towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. But gradually, as Gurley rambled on, talking more to himself now than to me, my excitement began to give way to a kind of panic.

What he was talking about was preposterous. Evidence of Japanese activity in a dozen states or more? And nobody other than fifty men (fifty-one now?) knew about it? I looked around the office; I looked at Gurley as he stared at the map with red-rimmed eyes. I wondered if fifty men now knew what I thought I knew: here, in this lonely Alaskan outpost, Captain Thomas Gurley U.S. Army Air Corps, had gone mad.

And he'd dreamed himself up a new front line in the process. Even as a work of insanity, it was impressive: his line stretched clear across North America-through Canada and into Michigan. He rattled on, and I marveled at the performance, and at the magnitude of the fiction. I began to wonder which would come first: my transfer away from Anchorage, or Gurley's? Who would assume his post, and its attendant, if imaginary, duties?

What a world this was, wartime Alaska. Half-naked palm readers, rampaging drunken sailors, lunatic captains raving in darkened Quonset huts, and me. If I had been older, I would have been too scared to speak.

But I was young, stupid, and, once the panic subsided, bemused, so what I finally said was “Incredible.”

Gurley frowned, furious. I was not as good an actor as he. “Not enough for you,” he said.

“No, no, it's-incredible. You've-you've come up with quite a, a map.” I tried furrowing my brow, but it was no use-I don't even think I knew what the word furrowing meant back then.

Gurley would have known, though, and he knew I was mocking him. He scrambled across the desk, right over the top, growling and sputtering.

For a minute, I feared (even hoped) that I had provoked the inevitable and total breakdown. I calculated whether I could get to the door before him and raise the alarm with the MPs. I decided to jump clear. He jumped after me and then fell horribly short. I took a moment to take in the scene: he was sprawled at my feet, while the better part of his left leg was separated from him, dangling off the desk.

He extended a hand, and I hesitated, unsure what horror had just happened and what horror would now follow.

“You didn't hear a word I said, did you, you sanctimonious shit?” he hissed. He closed his eyes for a second; I could see the mask fall, instantly. But then his eyes opened, the mask was back, and it had all happened too quickly for me to see what had been revealed. He extended a hand to me, and I automatically hauled him up. He teetered back to the desk and leaned on it. On the floor behind him lay two red pins that had fallen from the map.