The Cloud Atlas

WHEN GURLEY SAUNTERED INTO THE QUONSET HUT THE morning of June 13, 1945, he was two hours late and missing an eye. Well, missing a normal one. There was an eye peering out of his left socket, but it looked like something he'd stolen off some particularly nasty page in the atlas. He had a shiner, to start with, but the blackened periphery was nothing, a frame, really for the eyeball, which was crazed with red veins and weeping almost constantly. I'd never seen an eye like that, which surprised me until I remembered this was Gurley; any other man who'd gotten his eye in a way like this would have done the decent thing-for himself and others-and slipped on a patch.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” Gurley said, bright and loud. He was dying for me to ask, so I did. He held up both hands in weak protest, and tried to do his usual fluttering of eyelids, but the pain of doing so caught him up short. That he wanted me to join him in his office was clear; either the story was long enough that it required seats for both of us, or he was about to collapse. Either way, he needed a chair.

I'd learned over my months with Gurley that he picked fights with whomever he could, just to prove he wasn't who everybody thought he was-some effete Ivy League snot who'd been sent to the war's most distant margins because he was hardly worthy of any critical post-though this was all true.

And he was waging war with Alaska, of course. You were either man enough to survive here, or you weren't. You alone knew, in the end. And Gurley must have found himself wanting, because he entered one scrap after another to prove he could take it, whatever it was.

It didn't help that his official foe, the Japanese, their balloons, weren't coming out to fight. March had been busy, true: we'd logged 114 balloons, more than all the previous months combined, and we'd learned of the germ warfare threat. But then, of course, had come the drop-off, the one Gurley and I attributed to their needing time to ready the balloons for the coming bacteriological assault. But the months passed, and the assault wouldn't come. Forty balloons in April, no sign of germs. Hardly more than a dozen balloons in May, and all of them as conventionally armed as could be.

Since trouble was steadily avoiding us, Gurley went looking for it himself, usually in downtown bars, before or after visiting Lily. He was still seeing her; I was not. I'd been too angry, and then too ashamed after that night she'd confronted me about the atlas. But we were going to patch things up eventually, I was certain. A bit like Gurley's quest, it was just a matter of me going downtown to prove my courage. Instead of pretending to be “just walking by” her window-which I “just” did a lot-I'd have to walk on up. Knock on the door. Say I'm sorry. Hand over the book. Flowers. Book first? Was she a girl who liked flowers? Well. Maybe Gurley did have it easier when it came to testing his mettle.

But one look at him today reminded me he'd chosen the more physically painful path. He'd picked a fight, again, with someone he shouldn't have, again. Nevertheless, he seemed satisfied with the result. He held up a fist. The knuckles were scabbed and the back of his hand had a freshly crusted scar.

“I mounted a vigorous defense, Sergeant. You would be proud.”

“I'm not so sure, Captain. You don't look so good.”

“I took a tooth off the blackguard, Belk,” he said, and extended the fist closer to me. Then he smiled a broad smile. “And retained all of mine.”

“But your eye,” I said, wincing without meaning to.

“A tooth, Belk,” he said, and fished around in his pocket. I had no idea what he was doing until it was sitting there before me, a little ivory chip, the tooth, right there in the middle of the blotter of his desk. “I may have it mounted,” he said. He tried to smile, and then explained that he'd gone another round in what he'd proudly called his “ Franklin bouts.” They were named for the nation's thirty-second president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Gurley loathed.

I'd heard all about the first bout two months ago, the morning of April 13. The day before, despite the nonstop clamor of church bells, despite the people openly weeping and clutching each other on the sidewalks, Gurley had managed to avoid learning that Roosevelt had died. It wasn't until he wandered into a bar, ordered a drink, and asked the bartender just what everyone's problem was that he heard.

“Thank fucking God” Gurley said, a remark that efficiently set him against anyone who admired Roosevelt as well as those who didn't like their God prefixed so. Gurley used the silence that followed to try to clarify-no, really, he thought Roosevelt a complete ass-and round one began.