The Cloud Atlas

“Today? In Fairbanks,” I said, excited just to be talking to her. And a day like today: this was the kind of day I missed her most, when such strange things had happened, and I had no one to tell them to. Secrets? I just needed another chance.

“No, last night, when he got hurt? Why weren't you there? You know he's not-he can't-you know he needs looking after.”

I was too taken aback to speak.

Then Gurley called for her, quietly, a kind of moan.

Lily glared at me. “Please,” Lily said. “From now on? Louis?”

My mouth was open to say something, but the best I could do was nod.

“Okay, okay,” Lily said, distracted. She walked back to Gurley and helped him inside. I watched and waited. The light in her office came on; I could see now that the window was open. She came to it, looked out, looked down, saw me, looked like she was about to say something, and then pulled the shade.

I sat there, staring up, watching as the thinnest line of light appeared and disappeared whenever the shade fluttered gently. I kept staring, long after the window went dark and remained dark, and the only light there was came from the sky. The moon had set and I had to use the stars to help me home.

CHAPTER 13

GURLEY DIDN'T COME IN THE NEXT MORNING. I DIDN'T expect him to. I almost went looking for him in the vain hope that I would not find him where I knew he was. But I stayed put. He was Lily's, for now. And she could have him. She could use Gurley leech whatever secrets she might from him. That's what she wanted, all she wanted.

Alone in the Quonset hut, I spun open the safe, removed the atlas, and set it on my desk.

But I didn't open it, not at first. To do so would have been to stumble into another tryst. Lily and Saburo's romantic summer scrapbook. The most I could console myself with was that here, at least, lay evidence that Gurley had competition, too.

I laid my hand flat on the cover. How big was Saburo's hand? Was it callused? Soft? Smooth? Creased? What did it look like, when it was clenched as a fist or with fingers splayed, cupped or about to caress? Had it ever unlocked a cage, delicately removed a rat? Swatted a flea?

I wiped my hands on my pants, despite myself, felt foolish, and then opened the book again.

The problem was, our book-Gurley's and mine, Lily and Saburo's-was too beautiful. It might have looked like the other atlas on the outside-and the more I looked, the more certain I was that they came from the same source-but on the inside, it was completely different. What little I'd seen of the other book had revealed only writing, a scribbled diagram here and there, hasty notes, that strange code. No pictures. No watercolor sketches.

But this book-

I leafed through the drawings, the written passages alongside. Much of the book was given over to weather observations, with notes of wind direction and speed. The balloons were mentioned repeatedly and predictions were made as to where they would land in North America, Alaska in particular. Some of these locations were plotted on maps. Beyond that, however, little was clear. The book was “maddeningly poetic,” Gurley had said; the descriptions grew more lyrical and opaque as the book progressed. The maps were rich in topographic detail, but none bore place names. And they were done on a microscopic scale; no pages depicted the whole of Alaska, say, or the entire Pacific Northwest. Instead there were detailed coastlines of indeterminate islands. Stretches of riverbank. Tempting paths plotted across lush but vague landscapes.

I tried to imagine Saburo's hand at the end of a day, cradling a pencil or brush, dabbing at the page while Lily stoked a small fire for dinner. I tried to tease figures of Lily out of the watercolor sketches. That vertical brushstroke, there, the way it intersected with that thin line: that was Lily.

Saburo and I shared this, at least: only we knew that she was everywhere in this book of balloons and bombs, hidden within the stroke of a pen or a brush. There was no trace of her if you didn't know how or where to look. Once I decided I did, I found her everywhere, even in the little maps that were inked in here and there. One seemed to trace a path clear into a sun-clear across the Pacific, most likely, the route Saburo wanted to use to spirit Lily home.

I know what you're hiding, Saburo. Where you're hiding. Right- here.

But it was no use. Trace the drawings as I might, rub at the maps with my thumb until the page began to smudge, nothing emerged, nothing of Saburo, of Lily. Gurley had thought bombs were hidden here, and I suppose there were, if Lily had been telling the truth. But I hadn't seen them, not balloons, not bombs, and certainly not buboes, swollen with disease. I found myself wanting to exonerate Saburo, at least from this last, most heinous crime. Well, Lily was alive and healthy, that was evidence enough, wasn't it? He couldn't have been handling dangerous germs, not without risking her life, let alone his own-