The Cloud Atlas

I thought of the ring, the jeweler, the clipped ad that had disappeared with the suspect fleas. Instead, I said, “Of him and every other guy who comes in here, not even with sandwiches, and gets more- out of you-than I ever-”

“Gets what?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said, and then added, too quickly: “I'm guessing some men up here feel like they spend enough time with their own palms. Maybe there's other stuff of theirs they want to get read. Maybe-”

But I didn't finish. Lily stood-

No, I need to describe this carefully. Lily, standing there, me on the floor, the two of us lit only by the lights from the street, until she went and pulled the blackout shade. Then it was completely dark, only breathing and steps.

Click. The light went on. And while I blinked, she stepped around in front of me and stopped, just out of reach. It's inappropriate for me to say what her face looked like then, because it was a private thing, a horrible thing, a mix of fear and hate; it was her true face, the one she wore beneath whatever smile she presented to the men who visited her.

I couldn't look, but she stared at me until I did. She was wearing some old fatigues, unlaced workboots. She looked like a recruit about to wash out of basic or a civilian who'd lost her home to a fire and had had to go begging for clothes. The name strip on the shirt was gone, the color worn out of the pants.

Once I'd finished this inventory, I looked back to her face. As soon as I'd met her gaze, she hooked her thumbs into two belt loops and pushed down, first right, then left. Once free of her hips, the pants fell to her knees and she bent, pushing them down farther till they gathered at her ankles. I saw the legs I remembered from the first night, except the knees looked older, the deep brown bruises and scrapes more plentiful across her shins and across what parts of her thighs that weren't covered by the oversized shirt.

I followed the trail of buttons back up to her face, but before I got there I saw her hands descending, undoing each button, one at a time, like a doctor snipping stitches from a scar. When she was done, a narrow, dark ribbon of skin had been revealed. I turned away, and when that wasn't enough, closed my eyes, pulled in my legs.

“Look,” she said. And because, for one syllable, the voice sounded like the old Lily, my friend Lily, the one who helped me find balloons, the one who shared sandwiches with me, talked with me, preserved me, I did.

But it was a trick; the old voice came from this new, horrible face, now set grimly above a body not naked but stripped, everything visible except the feet and ankles, which were hidden in the pile of sloughed-off uniform.

“You read maps,” she said, and ran her hands painfully down her front, palms flat to her skin, fingers rigidly splayed. Then she brought her arms out before her and examined them. She found a bruise on her right forearm. “I got this in Anchorage,” she said, looking up. She lifted her left arm and found a patch of mottled brown-white skin; it looked like a burn. “ Bethel,” she said. She tilted her head back, felt her neck: “Dillingham,” she said, her fingertips fondling a thin, small scar where her shoulder began. She pushed her hands down across her breasts, which were slight enough to disappear beneath her palms. She revealed her chest again, studied it, and seemed about to say something, but gave a thin smile instead and continued. Now her left hand drifted to the base of her stomach while her right searched out something just above where her pelvis jutted out. There. An appendix scar. “ Memorial Hospital, Fairbanks,” she said. She brought her hands together, and lower, covering her sex as if now shy.

I looked away, and then up at her, but she shook her head and nodded down. I looked away again; she stepped closer, and took my hand, my right, in hers, and slowly ran it flat across her stomach. I could feel each little hair. Back and forth, up and down, until she said, so quietly that she did little more than move her lips, “Feel that scar?” I shook my head; I didn't breathe. She took my hand by the wrist, lowered it, and slowly began to run it up the inside of her thigh. I tried pulling my wrist away, forcefully at first and then desperately, but she held on. “Some of my scars, you can only touch,” she said. “Even I can't see them. They're too far away.”

“I don't want to,” I said. “Lily, I'm sorry.”

“Why are you sorry, Louis?” she said. “You didn't make the scars.” I said nothing. “Or maybe that's why you're sorry-you think? Jealous there's no scar on me you can claim?”

Lily waited another moment, then moved to the other side of the room and dressed slowly. When she was done, she came back to my side of the room. She turned off the light, and then, back against the wall, slowly slid to the floor until she was sitting beside me in the perfect dark. We sat that way for a while until she got up and opened the blackout shade. The light in the room rose to a gray glow.