The Cloud Atlas

“Hands?” I looked down as she held my hands, and then watched as she traced a line on my palm.

“And he believed me,” she said, just like that, in a very small voice. “He didn't ask how I knew what I knew, or why I could sometimes tell where we'd find the next crash site. He just listened.” She folded my hands together and then folded hers on her lap.

I suppose I should have hated him more, this Saburo. He was the real boyfriend. Not Gurley not any of the other men who visited Lily at the Starhope. She never said as much, but just to hear her talk-to see how she talked-you could see what a fierce, tender, protective love she reserved for him-still. And if that weren't upsetting enough for me, there was also the fact that he was Japanese. Not just the enemy, but my enemy: he was tied to the lethal balloons Gurley and I had been risking our lives to chase and smother.

My next decision seems easy doesn't it? We were in Anchorage. Fort Richardson and the easily stirred Gurley were just a few miles away. Local and military police could be notified; Lily arrested, interrogated. Who knows what we'd learn. How many balloons we might stop. How many germs. How many lives we'd save.

Such simple equations. Here, you do the calculation, Ronnie: what if you could look into her eyes, as I did, and find there the two things I saw?

One, she really loved him, but she trusted me, and that's enough like love to make a boy like I was swoon all the same.

Two, she'd told me quite a few secrets, but it was clear there was something else she wasn't telling me, not yet. Betray her now, and lose the larger story?

“Some days, we didn't find anything,” Lily said. “Nothing ever came to me as strongly as did the image of that first day's crash site. But it didn't matter. Louis-it was a beautiful summer. Warm, clear days, cool nights, whole weeks without rain.” Weather like the tundra had never seen. And those hands: Lily was fascinated by them. Late one night-actually, the next morning, when night had finally fallen- they compared names for the stars and constellations. Lily eagerly pointed out several, but then fell silent, eager to see Saburo's hands, instead, flutter there in the air above them, more beautiful than the stars beyond, and so much closer.

The hands also turned the book of notes and maps into a beautiful journal, a work of art. Each day ended with Saburo re-creating the preceding hours on paper-first, a sketch lightly done in pencil, brought to life by watercolors, detail added with pen and ink. Lily asked what he wrote and drew on the days they found no evidence of balloons. He said that he wrote about her, about them, about the beautiful summer.

Here the story stopped. Lily looked at me.

“You know this book,” Lily said, and of course I did. From her descriptions and the way my heart was trying to thump its way out of my chest, run into the street, and call the police itself, I knew that this book was the strange journal or homemade atlas Gurley had had me study in his office. “I-I need it,” Lily said.

“Lily.”

“Louis, he's gone.”

“Where?”

“I want it, just to have some piece of-some piece of him, that time.” She was watching for my reaction. “That makes sense, doesn't it? That a girl would want that? You're a boy.”

“Yes.”

“It's at Fort Rich. His journal,” Lily said, looking down now. “I know it's there.”

I suppose I could have lied, but I didn't. “It is,” I said, and decided to go a step further. “I've seen it.”

Lily feigned surprise, so badly that she immediately confessed. “I- thought so.”

I told Lily that I'd prefer her pretending to be surprised than confessing that she had just been using me all this time to get some keepsake of a summer romance-with an enemy soldier, no less. Was this why she'd advertised herself as “careful and correct,” so as to better lure a bomb disposal man, someone who might be more useful to her than the average soldier?

Very quietly, very slowly, Lily said two words. It was the first time I'd heard a woman say them: fuck, you.

She stood up, opened the door. “He is not the enemy, not mine. It's not-a keepsake” she said. “And I was never using you,” she said. “You came and found me, remember? A very average soldier, looking for help.” She closed the door slightly and lowered her voice to a hiss. “I have been trying to use your captain, but he's been better at using me.”

The door opened again, wide.

CHAPTER 12