The Cloud Atlas

When the firecrackers popped, one of the thirty-two sandbags would drop, and as each one dropped, you got a better view (if you were watching this contraption in flight, but few were that lucky) of what all this fuss was about. Around the circumference of the ring dangled four or more 5-kilogram thermite incendiary bombs, which would explode on impact. And in the middle? In the middle dangled a nasty black 15-kilogram antipersonnel bomb, finned like a torpedo and filled with picric acid or TNT. When these exploded, you'd encounter debris scattered as far as a quarter mile away. And for variety sometimes you'd discover some strange canister hanging there you didn't recognize at all.

Oh, and the flash bomb-250 grams of magnesium powder that you'd find if you followed the longest fuse-followed it from where it began, beneath that bottom tier, followed it to where it climbed, up, up, sixty-four feet, where it burrowed like a canker into the side of those magical balloons.

That's what they were, balloons.

Who wouldn't be curious coming upon one in a field, beside a road, among trees? Even deflated, flat on the forest floor like it was melting away, wouldn't you marvel at it? Thirty-two feet in diameter, one hundred feet in circumference, and the whole of it, most incredibly, paper, made from mulberry trees or rice, washi paper. Each balloon required forty to sixty paper panels, and each panel was painstakingly made by hand, in thousands of homes across Japan. Each household produced their share, then handed it up the line to authorities who handed it up to factories (in one case, a converted opera house), where women and children-girls, all who were left then, and who were found to be more skilled than the boys anyway-joined the panels with glue made from a potato-like vegetable. (The vegetable: konnyaku, “devil's tongue,” quite edible, quite Japanese; to reply in kind, we'd have had to caulk our bombs with apple pie. In any case, with food growing scarce in war-winnowed Japan, workers began eating what glue they didn't use, and then, whatever glue they could find.)

A balloon of paper and potato glue, a wedding cake of firecrackers and aluminum. Designed to silently ride the winds across the Pacific, barometers triggering ballast drops when necessary, and then, finally, descend into the impregnable United States mainland, setting forest fires, killing soldiers, civilians.

Ingenious. Yes, I'll use the word. Considering that any one balloon, landing in the right spot, or even a wrong spot, could do an incredible amount of damage.

But the Japanese didn't just send one balloon. Over the course of a few months, beginning in the fall of 1944 and ending in the spring of 1945, they launched close to ten thousand bomb-laden balloons, an effort which, by its end, had required the concerted effort of millions of people.

I'm not sure what the word for that is.

Years after the war, I was on a retreat with a German Jesuit who had been in Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped. One night at dinner, it came up that I had been a soldier in the war. He fixed me with a stare, and then asked me a question he'd obviously been asking Americans ever since VJ Day. “Why?” he said. I knew better than to answer, but then he asked another question. “Why two?”

Why ten thousand?

But I didn't say it.

And in the end, of course, he was right. You only needed one, be it atomic bomb or balloon.

One balloon could halt the development of the atomic bomb, in fact.

And one did, temporarily, on April Fool's Day, 1945, knocking down power lines that led to the Hanford, Washington, atomic energy plant, which was producing materials for the bombs that would later be dropped on Japan.

Or-

One balloon could result in the only World War II civilian casualties due to enemy action on mainland U.S. soil.

And one did, on May 6, 1945, in an Oregon forest, where it intrigued children on a church outing. It exploded, killing all five, plus a young woman, pregnant, who'd been watching over them, while her husband, the reverend, was parking the car.

Or-

One balloon could carry a small life from one world to another.

It is this last balloon that carried me into this life, into this hospice, to this bedside, this mumbled confession.

Or it was all ten thousand.

It's simply a question of what you believe, or what proof you have, and I might have asked Ronnie what he believed, but I didn't; he was sleeping. So for a response, I was left with words scribbled in bold at the top of his chart, proof of Ronnie's wishes, words Ronnie thought would help ensure he said all he needed to say.

“NO MORPHINE.”

CHAPTER 2

IT'S STILL WEDNESDAY. I'M STILL IN THE HOSPICE. IT'S NOT clear where Ronnie is. He's lying on the bed, same as he was. But with his eyes closed, his breath a series of uneven sighs, it's clear he's somewhere else. Not gone, but going.