The Cloud Atlas

As she left, I thought back to Father Pabich's initial question: How did you know? “That's how,” I said, watching the tail of her coat disappear through the door.

“What?” Father Pabich had been staring after her, too. When he turned back to face me, though, I was feigning sleep.

“HOW DID YOU KNOW?”

I was walking with Lily downtown the night after I'd been discharged from the hospital. It was late, the streets were almost empty and I was due back on base.

Lily answered my question with one of her own. “You really saw one? You saw a balloon.”

“Proof is back at the base.”

“I was right,” Lily said, more to herself, and we walked on in silence for a block.

I'd never had a girlfriend-it wasn't something the nuns facilitated at the orphanage, and the Army hadn't given me an awful lot of options-and so I wasn't in much of a position to judge whether I had one then. But walking along like that, down a quiet street late at night, not even touching, but always just about to: it had to be something like this, I thought. I knew nothing of the world then, maybe I know less now, but I knew that much. I knew I was in love, or its teenage equivalent, and I knew Lily loved-well, I didn't know if she loved me, but I knew she noticed me. She'd come to the hospital to see me, she'd braved Father Pabich, and she was walking alongside me now. We weren't holding hands, but we were walking close enough to, and it felt like we could if we wanted to, and if I could ever feel that way again, just connect with another human, even my desiccated shaman friend Ronnie lying here-God forgive me, but I'd sell my soul for half price.

Lily finally broke the silence. “You believe in ghosts, right?”

I did, but in a storybook, Halloween kind of way that has nothing, really, to do with the true world of ghosts. But back then, I'd never seen a ghost. Nowadays-well, some winters you'd be hard-pressed at the end of the month to do an honest accounting of whom or what you'd seen. And I'm not talking about the Blessed Mother (who, you'll note, more frequently reveals herself to the faithful in warmer climes- like Mexico or France).

So I told Lily no. And when she looked at me, disappointed, I tried, “Well, the Holy Ghost.”

“What are you going to tell Gurley when he asks you how you knew about Shuyak?” Lily asked.

“He already did ask, and I didn't tell him anything.”

“He'll ask again.”

“Maybe. What makes you so sure?”

“Because he will. That's the way he is.”

“And you know him so well,” I said, the words out so quickly, I didn't realize what I said until I saw her coming at me. Her face stopped just short of mine, and two minutes before, I would have closed my eyes and waited for the kiss. Now I blinked and swallowed and held my breath.

“I do know him,” she said, and the way she said it, I would have preferred that she had slapped me or kneed me or put a gun to my chest. She stepped back. “Better than you do, better than either of you know me.”

We'd stopped walking now. We were a couple blocks shy of the main road out to Fort Richardson.

“I told you I was Yup'ik-”

“Lily, I'm sorry if I-”

“And Russian-”

I tried a smile: “ ‘Boom.’ I remember.”

Lily tried to smile, too. “Well, this doesn't come from the Russian part, that's for sure.”

“What doesn't?” I asked, but Lily ignored me. She was staring down the block ahead of us, talking.

“In fact, I'm sure the Russian blood just lessens my ability to- understand things. Because every generation of Yup'ik Eskimos has- people who-see. It's just that it's hard, and getting harder to see things here. In Anchorage. That's why I'm going home.”

“I understand,” I said.

“You don't,” Lily said. “That's why I asked you about ghosts.”

“Shuyak was real. The balloon was real. The ocean was very real.”

“But those were things you saw, and felt. What about late at night? When you're all alone? You hear a noise, you close the book you were reading, and look up, your finger marking the page you were on. What do you think?”

I tried to think of something funny to say, and then something serious, and finally came up with nothing at all.

“You think, for a split second, of ghosts, spirits. You do. It's possible. And the feeling passes, sure, and the next morning the sun comes up, you've lost your place in the book, and everything real is real once again, but still, for that moment, it was possible.”

“For that moment,” I said. It really was time to go.

“It's that moment,” Lily said. “Right now.”

“Right,” I said, frightened to discover I was frightened.

“Look where you are,” Lily said, walking around me, whispering. (She and Gurley shared a sense of drama, or else one had infected the other.) “There's no one here. You're in Alaska. In December. Even the sun is too scared to come around for more than a few hours each day.”

The street really had taken on a different cast. There were no other pedestrians, no other sounds.

“Ghosts,” I said absently, almost without meaning to.