The Cloud Atlas

TEN, TWENTY YEARS AGO, I went back to that trail. The area is parkland today, popular with joggers in summer and cross-country skiers in winter and wildlife any time of year. It all looks as it did fifty-odd years ago when Lily and I walked into it, except it wasn't called a park then. It was just the place where Anchorage gave up and the rest of Alaska began, and it would have seemed silly to put a sign up and call it a park. Keep walking into that forest, deeper and deeper, and four hundred miles later, you'd cross the Arctic Circle. Another three hundred miles or so beyond that, Point Barrow, the ice cap, the North Pole, the place where all the longitude lines on the map begin, a place where, certain times of year, the sky seems low enough and the stars thick enough that you'd only need to be a bit taller to reach one down for yourself.

There were no stars visible; the clouds were lifting, but it was too early for stars. And the farther we walked into the forest, the more of the sky that was obscured, the damper the air and earth became. I remember how nothing was as strange or exotic to me as the smell of that forest, then; it wasn't anything like the sage or chaparral smell of Southern California wilderness, which made you think of dust and sun and sometimes smoke. This forest smelled wet, green, and cool, and the scent stuck to you like you'd dipped your face in a stream.

I caught sight of Lily within a few hundred yards; she'd started walking. She didn't stop, though, when she saw me. She wanted me to keep up, but not catch up, not yet.

We kept climbing through the forest, ever more thick, well past the point I would have ever ventured alone. Even in the short time I'd been in Alaska, I'd heard stories of guys wandering off for a weekend of camping and drinking and encountering all sorts of animals and trouble. Favorite stories involved run-ins with bears. I don't think every guy who had a bear story had actually seen one, or if they had, that they were as large as described. The way you knew they were telling the truth? They didn't talk about teeth or eyes or the sound of a roar-they talked about smell. And the more they talked about that horrible smell, the closer you knew they'd come. That detail had to be true; you didn't make up a story about stink to impress people. So while I heard bears all around me-cracking branches, and in the distance every now and then, something like a bark-I only smelled the wet and decaying forest, and knew we were safe.

Eventually, the mist grew thick enough that Lily seemed to be only a glow whenever I looked up the trail toward her. If I chanced to look away and then back, she faded away even more dramatically.

We had been tracking along the banks of a stream, knee-high ferns deepening from green to black as the light faded. We'd been walking toward a sound, it seemed, one that started out like wind, high in the trees-but the closer we got, it emerged as rushing water, perhaps rapids. I lost Lily for a moment then. She was just twenty yards ahead of me, maybe more, and she'd disappeared. I kept moving forward in the direction I'd last seen her and then there she was, standing on what looked briefly like a cloud. Maybe she could have done just that if she had wanted to, but this wasn't a cloud, just a large flat outcropping of rock overlooking a waterfall. I let Lily stand alone for a moment. Then she looked back toward me and I stepped forward.

“You walk slow,” Lily said, looking down at my feet. We'd been walking for two hours or more and I could feel precisely each of the warm, stinging spots on my feet where blisters were forming.

“I wasn't sure I was supposed to follow you,” I said.

“You're too polite, Louis,” she said. “You must make a lousy soldier.”

“I do,” I said.

She sat down, cross-legged, and I sat stiffly beside her. I looked down the trail. “He was with us for a while, but I haven't heard him in a long time.”

“He's not coming,” Lily said, looking in the direction of the waterfall. “He's heading back to Fort Rich. Probably already there.”

I tried to get her to look at me. “Is this you speaking as a shaman?” I asked. I'd earned at least that, I thought. Some teasing.

“No, as his lover,” she said, turning to me to confirm she'd landed a blow. “I know him. So do you.”

“Did you know he'd send me away?” I asked, after swallowing. “This something you cooked up together?”

She shook her head and looked at the dirt beneath us.

“That's it, Louis. That's just how it happened. He asked me, ‘Do you have any really good friends? Guys who don't use you for sex? Guys you can trust? Guys you can always talk to, count on to stick up for you, like a brother? Because I'd like to give that guy a free plane ticket to the end of the earth. What do you say there, Miss Lily?’” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “It's all going just like we damn planned.”

“I'm sorry.”