The Cloud Atlas

I missed the dark. I couldn't look at her. I looked at my hands, at the door, at the grain of the hardwood floor. When I finally turned to face Lily, I was surprised to find her looking relieved, even pleased. She gave me a nudge and sat back. I inched away.

“Louis,” she said, and shifted closer. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“No, no-Lily, I'm sorry, I-should I leave?”

“No,” she said, and nodded toward the middle of the room. “It's your turn.” Then she laughed, so loudly and so briefly it sounded like a cough, and asked for my coat. When I hesitated, she laughed again, softer this time, and said, “Don't worry-that's all I'll ask you to take off.” I looked at her. “I'mcold” she said.

I took the coat off; she put it on and shivered once.

“Louis,” she said, settling back, her eyes closed. “If I tell you this story, the whole story, will you promise not to believe a word of it?”

“I promise,” I said.

“Think about that first,” she said. “You promised too quickly.”

“I won't believe it,” I said.

“You will,” she said. “That's what you do. You believe-believe in- everything. Don't you? You believe in your country, you believe your country is going to win this war, you believe in your God.” She sat up now, looked me in the eye. “You believed that I was Japanese, that I was a palm reader.”

I nodded.

“Well, you're wrong about all of that. Your country is going to lose. Your God is a fake, and so is your-”

“And so are you,” I said.

She took a deep breath. “Good,” she said. “That's a start.”

LILY CAME FROM Bethel, Alaska. Describe Bethel today-tiny homes, riverfront warehouses, a lot of sodden earth in the process of freezing or thawing, a horizon whose limits seem more lunar than earthly-and you would more or less capture Lily's Bethel of decades ago. It's more crowded now, more stores, more houses, more whites, more government people and programs, but it's still the same place, a permanent splotch on the tundra.

But nothing about it was permanent for Lily-half Russian, half Yup'ik, missing both parents, Bethel didn't have much to hold her. It did, however, have plenty of missionaries-Moravian, Catholic, Methodist, Orthodox, and more-and Lily convinced one of them to get her a place at a special girls' boarding school in Fairbanks. It was supposed to be just for the smartest girls-which Lily, without a wink, told me she was-but Lily was a compelling candidate in another way. An orphan, she was a more attractive prospect than many other Yup'ik children, who had to be pried away from wary parents before being sent off to distant schools where they would learn the ways of a white world.

What no one could tell her in Fairbanks, however, was why going there had made her so keenly aware of yet another world-a world just like this one, but a world in which she was privy to the secrets of people, places, and things. She had sensed this world back in Bethel, but it was only a sense, and seemed as much imagination as anything. But in Fairbanks, she knew differently-she knew, for example, the life stories of girls she had just met, before they had said a word. She knew when the weather was bad back in Bethel, whether the seal hunt was going well, even the date of breakup-the day the Kuskokwim River finally thawed.

Before she knew better, she talked about such things with the other girls, and they in turn talked to their families about her whenever they returned home on breaks. Lily always stayed in Fairbanks. But then, one break, one of her classmates said that her father wanted to meet Lily, and so Lily made the long trip back to Bethel.

Her classmate's father was known as Peter to the white community, a capable, if grumpy, boatbuilder. But the entire Yup'ik community knew him as one of the last shamans.

“Among every generation of Yup'ik,” Lily told me, “there are those who are granted special sight, and special powers.” If you were sick, if you were worried about the presence or absence of fish or game, you went to the shaman. When to move to fish camp, when to return to town-all these things the shaman knew. But, she added, “the missionaries hated shamans. They told the people that the shamans were just magicians-people who got in the way of God.”

Peter had gotten in the way of God for a long time and had suffered for it, suffered physically he told people, as though God were throwing an elbow every time they passed. Old and hurting and lonely, Peter was looking for someone to take his place.

But Lily? Could it be possible that the magic should have survived in this girl? Lily's long-gone father was a kass'aq; she was being educated far from home; she was female. But after a day of observing her and another day speaking with her, Peter decided that Lily was, in fact, gifted.

Or rather, able to receive the gift: it really wasn't for him to choose; they'd have to go out, deep into the tundra, to see for sure.