The Cloud Atlas Read online

  Back in his drinking days-or, let's call them what they were, decades-Ronnie's anger was noisy and physical. But of late, his most serious weapon is silence. When he is upset, he closes his mouth and sometimes his eyes.

  He started again. “This is what they told me: you sign this, you make decisions for me. When I can't.”

  “Like always,” I said. Like when it was time to leave a bar. Like when it was time for him to finally see the doctor.

  “These are my wishes,” Ronnie said. “I wish to die. No ‘ex-tra-or-di-nar-y measures.’”

  “Ronnie,” I said. “You're not dying. And I'm not going to let them kill you.”

  He waited a long time before replying. He closed his eyes, and for a moment, I thought he'd gone to sleep. “I don't want you to let them save me,” he said, opening his eyes once more.

  “Ronnie,” I said.

  I've introduced Ronnie as the man who was trying to kill me, but the truth is, he has probably kept me alive all this time, this far from the rest of the world. “Okay,” I said. I handed back the form. “But if you die, you promise I'll get the twenty back?”

  Absolutely not. He needed the money to pay for a special bracelet from Alaska 's Comfort One program. The program is for the very ill; the bracelet indicates that you do not want to be resuscitated. Paramedics and other medical professionals have to honor it. I've seen the bracelets at work-it's like a magic charm. Say a crisis occurs. Say people automatically rush to deliver aid. Then they spot the bracelet, and it's almost as if they bounce off the patient.

  Ronnie had ordered his bracelet C.O.D., the way many people shop in the bush. They go through catalogs, place orders, and hope the money will be there when the goods come. It is heartbreaking to see the pile of unclaimed boxes at the airport after Christmas. UPS sends a man out to haul it all back each January; I call him the anti-Santa. But Ronnie had planned ahead: he'd had the band shipped care of the church. Asking for the twenty was just a courtesy; the bill was already waiting for me.

  I tried to tell Ronnie that he probably wouldn't need such a bracelet in the hospice, but if he was worried, we could talk to his doctor and make a note on his chart. I even knew the shorthand; I'd seen it on dozens of charts before: DNR, Do Not Resuscitate. Ronnie smiled, the smile he always used when he was reminded how much wiser shamans were than priests.

  “It's not for me,” he said. Then he took a deep breath, the effort of which seemed to drain his face of the smile. “It's for the wolf.”

  RONNIE'S PASSING WAS no minor thing, not in his mind. As he saw it, he was the last shaman, the last in the area to possess his gifts, or his knowledge. Generations of missionaries had driven what magic they could from the land, but the spirit had persisted. Now modern life-airplanes, college educations, government jobs-was removing what remained.

  I told Ronnie that he didn't need to worry; Yup'ik traditions were preserved in books, on tapes (thanks in part to the boundless altruism of oil companies). And the tundra teemed with academics whenever the weather was warm. Some summers, it seemed a Yup'ik family was likely to see more anthropologists than salmon.

  Ronnie never listened to me, and he didn't now. What he had to say couldn't be discussed in a classroom or read about in a book, he explained, between gasping breaths so theatrical I almost took them for real. But he persisted: he needed to pass along his stories, from one man to another, so they could pass on to still another, and another, so that the knowledge and spirit of the Yup'ik would not vanish from the earth.

  And it was more than that. He had something to tell me, he said. A particular story. A secret. Something I should know, “after all this time.”

  He closed his eyes.

  I patted Ronnie's hand gently and moved to go. I couldn't stay. Having witnessed the deaths of both friends and enemies, I know that it can be harder to lose a foe: you lose a boundary, a cause. And since Ronnie was both friend and foe, I imagined losing him would be harder still. It's a kind of love, I suppose.

  “Ronnie,” I said, but that was all I got out before I was stormed by a crowd of emotions, memories, old mental movie clips. Ronnie wasn't awake enough to see me rock back into my chair. This has been happening to me more and more, lately: a kind of memory-induced vertigo. It's disturbing, clearly an illness of some sort, something inside breaking down. The woman who cleans my quarters, a woman I myself baptized but who still believes in all sorts of spirits and magic, told me the problem had to do with a restless soul. She suggested collecting some ayuq from the tundra and making iced tea from it. Ayuq is called Labrador tea, Eskimo tea, tundra tea, or ayuq, depending on who's doing the calling, and the list of illnesses it cures is diverse as well. A tattered copy of Reader's Digest, meanwhile, told me the problem was corroded neural pathways and suggested I drink brewed garlic. I thought about distilling the best of both methods by taking up whisky again, with ice, but Ronnie lying here in this bed is evidence enough that alcohol won't work.

  Ronnie's eyes opened, failed to focus, and then closed again. He spoke anyway: “In the beginning,” he told his chest, “there was Raven.”

  I settled back. I have heard multiple stories of creation in Alaska, but in the beginning, there is always Raven. The version Ronnie tells is my favorite. In the beginning, Raven scratches at the earth with his claws and makes hills, mountains. The countless gouges his talons leave in the soil fill with water and become lakes, rivers, and sloughs.

  Upon this land, Raven created a man of stone. Formidable and strong-a man designed to survive in the harsh climate of southwestern Alaska. But then spring came, and the snows melted, the soil turned to mud, and the stone man sank deeper into the tundra with every step.

  So Raven tried again. This time he molded a man of clay, or dirt. More fragile, more vulnerable-true; but more adaptable and better suited to travel the land he had sprung from.

  It's a sign of how long I have lived here that I know Ronnie and his stories so well. And while I was always more interested in hearing a new story, I was still intrigued to hear Ronnie tell one I already knew and see what use he might put it to. Did he feel like the man of stone now, sinking into his illness? Or the man of clay, so easily broken?

  Or perhaps he and I were the two first men-but which of us was stone, which clay?

  I asked him. He scowled.

  “This is what I have said,” Ronnie said. His breathing became his punctuation. “In the beginning there was Raven. And then, a family. A mother. A boy. Her lovers. His fathers.”

  “More than one?” I interrupted, still not understanding. “Sounds like quite a story.”

  Ronnie closed his eyes, and when he opened them once more, he spoke. “This is not a story. This is true.”

  A nurse arrived, bearing a syringe on a tray. Ronnie scanned back and forth: me, nurse, syringe. He settled on the syringe.

  “You heard what I said?” he told the syringe as it approached. “You told the doctor? No painkillers. No sleep medicines.” He pointed at me. “I have things I need to discuss. With my priest.” The nurse nodded gently, and reassured him that his request had already been written down on his chart. Then she explained that she was just there to draw blood. Ronnie watched carefully as she cinched the constricting band around his arm, searched for a vein, and then drew what she needed.

  “What she wants to take,” Ronnie said, “is already gone.” Which might have been true, considering that years of drinking had likely left his veins more full of Gilbey's gin than blood. When she was finished, he sank back into the pillow.

  “Raven,” he said.

  “Ronnie,” I said. “What are you bothering the nurses for? They're going to take good care of you. If there's one thing they do better in the hospice than the hospital, it's take care of pain. So if you're uncomfortable, let them-”

  “What I need to say, I need a clear head to say,” he said.

  Now, a few years before, there's only one thing Ronnie would have said next: So let us drink.

  Instead, he sa
id something I'd never heard him say before: “Father.” I tensed. Then another surprise: “I want to confess.”

  This was so startling I assumed we were joking again. “Oh, Ronnie,” I said. “Let's just talk. Old friends.”

  “Enemies,” he said, and smiled. “I want to go to confession.”

  “You're not even Catholic, Ronnie,” I said, sure the floor was groaning and splitting beneath me like some last chunk of springtime ice in the river. Was Ronnie ready to believe? Had he finally found his proof?

  “I don't have to be Catholic to tell secrets,” Ronnie said. He drew a deep breath, and then another, and another, and in another moment, he seemed deep asleep.

  RONNIE IS NOT CATHOLIC. Nor is he Russian Orthodox. Nor Moravian Protestant. Nor Baptist, nor a member of any of the other churches that crowd vulnerable Bethel. As a result, it was somewhat difficult for me to obtain for him a position as assistant chaplain at the hospice some time ago, but it was certainly easier than getting him a position titled, say, “staff shaman.”

  It's not that people would have frowned on the term shaman. (Or maybe they might have; it's a white man's word, and imprecise the way white men's words are. Angalkuq is the Yup'ik term.) Shamans, or angalkut, served many functions in times past, but a chief duty was healing, and even the hospital in town incorporates such traditional medicine into its care today.

  But people did frown on Ronnie. He was, way back when, an angalkuq of some note. Mostly because he was a final, and absolutely unrepentant, holdout against the missionaries. As such, he merited a certain amount of respect, even from those God-fearing Natives who no longer sought his services-so much of the old ways had been lost, but in Ronnie they had a time capsule, a treasury, an unassailable fortress.

  Until a tide of alcohol flooded it.

  Ronnie's abilities had waned during the war, it was said, maybe before. Some said it happened gradually, some said abruptly. Some said Ronnie had done something, and others said something had been done to him. But every version of the story I heard turned out the same way: the war had brought soldiers; the soldiers, alcohol; and alcohol, for Ronnie at least, brought fleeting glimpses of the ethereal provinces he once visited regularly.

  By the time I met him, he lacked both powers and respect. To my shame, I did nothing to help him. I thought an enfeebled foe made my job that much easier. Though Ronnie's various attempts to run me out of Alaska, or out of this world altogether, were occasionally frightening, withstanding them seemed to burnish my reputation in the community.

  But eventually, I'd had my fill of respect. And I'd come to like Ronnie-in part, because no one else did. So I went to him. I worked with him, as much as he'd let me.

  He should have been long dead by then, and I think he knew this. I say that because I can't think of any other reason why he would have let me help him as much as I tried to. Except for one. I'd suggested a dozen times he enter a treatment program, but he didn't agree until I- or a mischievous God putting words in my mouth-announced that if he stopped drinking, I would as well. I wasn't an alcoholic, but-well, drinking wasn't improving me, either.

  In any case, I could see in Ronnie's smile gratitude for someone joining him on the difficult road ahead-and also delight that he had found yet a new way to discomfort me.

  We've had a truce, a delicate one, with alcohol ever since. But a strange thing happened when Ronnie sobered up: he had nothing to do. He'd had nothing to do when he was an alcoholic, but being drunk was itself a kind of occupation: you had duties and obligations, like being disorderly, you had an office-in Ronnie's case, a jail cell-where you could reliably be found.

  So for the past three or four years, before this most recent set of ailments put him in bed instead of beside one, Ronnie has worked with me at the hospice. I suppose I could have tried to get him a place at the hospital in town, but they were already staffed with Native healers (with far finer reputations than Ronnie's), and besides, I wanted someplace quiet. Out of the way.

  Ronnie has insisted that his powers have dimmed to such a degree that he's of little use to anyone, but even I can see that certain patients, certain families, get a measure of peace from our visits. They don't look to Ronnie for a cure any more than they do the hospice. Rather, they just want some sort of assurance that the one who is ill will pass through death and into the next life more easily.

  Unfortunately, other families want Lazarus-level care, and this leads to disappointments. I know-I thought we all knew-that sometimes people get better, and sometimes they don't, especially in a hospice, but I guess some people expect more of Ronnie. And so when patients he's visited with die-though they were going to die anyway (we all die)-it counts against Ronnie.

  And lately, me. I'd thought my role was innocent enough, just nudging Ronnie into spending his last years more productively, more spiritually, but no. Ronnie visits, a patient dies-a parishioner, no less, albeit one who always dozed through Mass-and word spreads around town. Maybe two others outlive their diagnoses for a month or two, but another dies suddenly, maybe another, and maybe to those who haven't stood beside Ronnie and seen the-for lack of a better word- peace he brings, it all adds up wrong.

  And so word travels, this wide-open land doing nothing to check its course, and the bishop hears one of his priests is aiding the practice of witchcraft, and an inquiry is made, and another, and these are ignored, and then you are where I am. At the bedside of a shaman, magic having failed both of you, at the mercy of gossips and gods and bishops and ravens.

  So I sat with Ronnie for a while, waiting to see if he was faking sleep-or death. But his breathing settled into a quiet rhythm, and when a gentle snoring commenced, I rose to leave.

  On the way out, I checked his chart for the DNR. I didn't see it. But something else was written there, two words that sent me back to my seat beside him and kept me there for the rest of the morning.

  I WANTED TO CONFESS, too. I go to confession regularly, of course, once a year, at least, whether I need to or not. I usually avail myself of another missionary who's passing through (I prefer the foreign ones, whose faith is always stronger than their English), or I go during one of my visits to Anchorage or Fairbanks. But there, partly out of respect for my brother priests, I confess only what is expected: the petty excesses, errors, failures of daily life. I'm not about to saddle them with all that happened to me, especially during the war. It is enough that I should bear that: I don't want them to suffer with it as well. Wartime transgressions, I figure, will wait for my deathbed, for last rites, when I can cough them out in an unintelligible rattle, be forgiven, and then go on to my reward.

  And this is exactly what Ronnie, my brother shaman, was doing. And that's how I realized what I was missing: release, reward. Oh, I'm old enough, have seen enough, that there have been times of late when I've wanted to die-long, dark nights of the soul are nothing new in a land where winter nights can last twenty hours or more. But who could wait, like Ronnie, until the precipice before death to talk? I wanted to tell my secrets, now, ones I have held fast for a lifetime. And who would listen? Ronnie.

  No, I've not wanted to burden a brother priest with my secrets, but I'd happily burden Ronnie: he's dying, after all; he won't have to suffer me long. As I waited for him to reawaken, I began to draft my speech in my head. But the longer he slept, the longer my confession became. I worried I would never get it all out if I waited for Ronnie to reawaken. So I didn't wait. Instead, in low tones, mumbling to myself, to Ronnie, I started my story.

  In the beginning, Ronnie had said, there was Raven, trickster and creator of the Yup'ik world.

  My story also began with something that flew

  IT WAS A MOST INGENIOUS device. Leave aside the compliment implicit in ingenious-yes, yes, this was 1944-45, they were still the enemy-and for now, simply admire the handiwork, as I did, each time we found one intact.

  A four-tier wedding cake, mostly aluminum, two feet tall. The top tier is a plastic box, a little bigger than one you'd use t
o hold recipes. Inside the box, a liquid solution of 10 percent calcium chloride, which insulates the small, 1.5 volt wet-cell battery, equal in heft to a good-size bar of soap. Two wires emerge from the box: follow them down. One disappears into a larger wooden box, the cake's second tier. This is where they housed the aneroid barometers: three smaller ones, each calibrated to complete an electrical circuit at a specific altitude, and one larger, more sophisticated, barometer that served as the primary control unit for the flight.

  Okay, working our way down now, top to bottom, just like you would (and I did) in the field. Nothing explosive yet.

  Next: the wooden barometer box is sitting on a large, round Bakelite platter. Innocent enough. But look beneath (or don't; it was unnerving, even for me, hurriedly trained in bomb disposal). Dozens of wires, all crisscrossing this way and that, many of them connecting to contacts on the bottom of the Bakelite platter, and still others descending to the cake's two lower tiers, the two round aluminum rings spoked like wagon wheels. I suppose I should be more exact. We're not following wires; these are fuses. Twenty-four inches long. Burning time of two minutes, sixteen seconds. Wired in pairs so that if one fuse failed, the other would finish the job. Smart. While airborne, the barometers set the fuses off during the final descent. On the ground, clumsiness or ignorance did the job equally well.

  Bang: it wasn't the fuses you had to worry about, though, not ultimately. But they were connected to little-well, squibs is what we called them, because to call them what they essentially were, firecrackers, made it all sound like fun.

  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.