The Cloud Atlas Page 3

  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.

  I hadn't gotten too far into my monologue when Ronnie's nurse, a new one, came by. I had grown accustomed to the silence of Ronnie's room, how the light that bled through the shades made things more silent, and then this nurse came in, unable to stop talking.

  Within five minutes, I had heard her life story, up to and including that very moment. She worked for a company called Travel Nurse; the company sent nurses around the country, even the world, helping facilities fill gaps.

  Fortunately, nothing about her monologue required a reply, or even much of a reaction, so I sat mute, my thoughts gone to fuzz while she talked. As she left, though, she suddenly turned.

  “You can hold his hand, you know,” she said. “Sometimes, when patients-sorry, loved ones-are too tired to talk, or even listen, you can, well, communicate with them just by holding their hand.” I watched as she lightly picked up Ronnie's hand. He did not awaken for the demonstration. “It's easy,” she said. “Well, maybe not for men.” She smiled. I smiled. And then she laid Ronnie's hand back down, paused a moment, and left.

  “Ronnie,” I said, sure he was awake now.

  But if he was, he made no sign of it. I settled back in my chair, but then a sound at the door made me start. It was just the nurse, checking to see if we were holding hands. We exchanged a smile again, both of us trying to out-pity or -patronize the other, and then I adjusted my chair so that I could better see the hallway. It wasn't the nurse's return I feared; I'd become jumpy at the thought that those coming for me would arrive two days early, and find me at the scene of the crime.

  THE FIRST TIME Ronnie and I raised someone from the dead, it probably wasn't worth the effort.

  Fats Haugen was about to achieve what his behavior suggested he'd always sought-death by drink. There were those of us who wished him well in his quest. A Virginia native whose first name was made even worse by the fact that he'd chosen it for himself, he'd come to Bethel in the 1950s, taken a Yup'ik bride, Mary, and acted wretchedly- especially to her-ever since.

  But Mary was a saint. And beautiful. And it was because of her that I often attempted to reach out to her husband, to get him counseling, treatment, time, space-whatever he needed to return to humanness. Mary said he was Catholic; I urged him to come to confession. I'm always amazed what sort of healing confession can get started. But he spat it all back at me, sometimes literally. Mary came to confession instead, weekly, I think as a way to compensate for him, but she had to struggle to come up with any sins worth confessing. Instead of penance, I would sometimes send her forth to go kick a dog-and tell her not to come back to confession until she had.

  But she never could or would, and so I loved her dearly and knew I would do anything for her. That's why, when she knocked at the rectory door late one night, eyes full of tears, and asked if I would come and “pray over” her husband in the hospice, I did not hesitate. And when she asked, mumbling, eyes averted, if Ronnie might come along, too, I still did not refuse. I loved her this much. I could have said “Ronnie who?” or “What are you talking about?” or “The rumors you've heard about Ronnie and I calling on pagan spirits to heal people aren't true,” but I did not.

  Which is how we came to find ourselves holding hands, Ronnie and I, and Fats and Mary, the door closed, lights dimmed, and Ronnie breathing an ancient chant in an ancient language, almost below hearing.

  No, it isn't easy for men to hold hands. Fats squirmed, though he hardly seemed to have the strength to. I felt anxious, too, watching Mary divide her desperate looks between me and the door, where I'm sure she thought the devil would appear.

  I prayed for Fats, but I must also admit that I prayed for Mary, for Ronnie, and most of all for me, because I knew what I was doing would get me in trouble eventually. Praying with someone in the hospice is one thing; laying on hands is another-though it has a long and honest Christian traditi
on behind it. But joining hands, participating in a rite that, Ronnie assured me, was all about Native spirits and had nothing to do with “your god”-well, this wasn't exactly what generations of missionaries before me had preached, prayed, and died for.

  And then it happened. Fats stopped squirming; his eyes shut and his mouth opened, releasing a low moan.

  “Tell me how he died,” Ronnie has asked. Well, I would have thought it went like this. I have visited the dying for many years, I have administered last rites many times. I know what last moments look like. Fats was in the midst of his. But something happened.

  Mary cried out: “Frank!” A perfectly lovely name.

  “Come,” said Ronnie quietly.

  I checked the monitors. Ronnie was always in charge of whatever magic occurred. I took responsibility for the constellation of blinking red lights surrounding the patient. Fats's blood pressure was incredibly low, but climbing.

  Ronnie repeated his instruction. Fats moaned again, a little louder. Then Ronnie looked at me and rolled his eyes, ever so slightly. “It's not going to work,” he whispered. “He's not here.”

  “Who's not here?” asked Mary. Fats moaned once more, soft again.

  “No one-” I started.

  “My tuunraq,” said Ronnie, quite nonchalant now, as though he were referring to his attorney and not his favored spirit helper, his animal familiar-a wolf, in fact, whose capricious absence Ronnie had been lamenting for some time. It was the tuunraq's job to enter the patient and clear out whatever was bad-a bit like spiritual angioplasty

  “Father!” Mary hissed, letting go of our hands. I nodded Ronnie out of the room, and turned to Fats.

  He'd stopped moaning, which wasn't too much of a surprise. While Ronnie wasn't always able to bring on a cure, his touch-the lights- the chanting-could all have a disproportionate effect on the susceptible mind.

  When Fats opened his eyes, I paused. And then I made the sign of the cross and Mary followed suit, and then, much to our joint surprise, Fats did as well. “Pray with me, Fats-Frank,” I said, not because he would, but because I knew it was Mary's heart rate we then needed to ease. I began a Hail Mary. And then Fats, God bless him, was finally moved to speak.

  “Father,” he said, “I want to confess…”

  And that, to me, was magic.

  I SAT THERE AFTER she left, Ronnie's Travel Nurse, and stared at my own hands. And when the memories of what they had touched, held, let slip, grew unwieldy, I turned to Ronnie.

  I stared at Ronnie's hands for a minute, small and muscular, the knuckles cracked white. Then I picked up the one closest to me, and held it, lightly, like the nurse had. And when he didn't reply with a whisper or hoo or squeeze or tap, I smiled again; he was sleeping soundly. Time for me to leave.

  After a bit, I squeezed his hand to let him know I was going.

  Nothing. I stood, drawing the hand up with me. I squeezed harder. And listened.

  Nothing. Something was wrong.

  With my free hand, I went for his shoulder; I kept clutching his dead hand with mine. He'd become his own, life-sized voodoo doll. I called out his name, louder and louder, and then I called for the nurse, and then I called for God, and then I called for goddamned Steven Gottschalk.

  BEFORE THIS MORNING, I could not have told you what Ronnie's hand felt like-I could have imagined it, perhaps, but that would have been a feat of imagination, imagination driven by what visual details my mind retains. But Steven Gottschalk's hand, I remember every fiber of it, every whorl, and every second it took me to realize that what I'd found there on the ground was not a pink-black glove but a human hand.

  It was our last week of bomb disposal school at Aberdeen Proving Ground, just inland from the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, and I was holding Steven Gottschalk's hand. The rest of him had just been rushed back to the base hospital, though he would die before he arrived. Those of us who remained had been told to fan out over the frag-fragmentation-zone. We were looking for parts of the bomb he'd been working on. I didn't even know what I'd found until I bent down, and even then, it was a moment or two before the recognition took hold and I began to retch.

  I was unprepared, in every respect. We didn't train with live ordnance; but in this case, a truck accident had left a bomb in a precarious spot on base, and Gottschalk, an instructor, saw this as a valuable teaching opportunity. He positioned us someplace nearby but safe, and then went to work. Later, they told us that that was how he had wanted to go, but I didn't believe it. No one wants to go like that, and Gottschalk had told us in the classroom how he had once dreamed of becoming a pilot. When that hadn't worked out, he decided to give bomb disposal a chance.

  My career path was more direct. I'd earned my way into explosives training. In part because I was book-smart and good with diagrams, but more because I scored the absolute lowest-of any recruit, ever, I was told-in marksmanship. As one sergeant put it, me with a gun in my hand was a bomb waiting to go off-so why not volunteer to go to school where I could learn to prevent similar explosions?

  I did learn. Quickly. And I became consumed with strange, twin desires. One, to prove myself so expert that those who once laughed at me would feel ashamed that they ever had. And two, to edge as close to death as I could as often as I could, with the faint, teenaged hope that I might just die-and those who had once laughed at me would feel even worse.

  My drive was mistaken for talent and my recklessness for courage, and the result was that I was promoted rapidly (not such a feat, sadly in bomb disposal, where sudden openings were frequent). I made sergeant in just a matter of months. But by then, my war-with those who had laughed-was over. My zeal went away with Steven Gottschalk's hand, just as surely as if he had reached inside me and pulled it out himself. But it was too late; my course was set. I finished training and received orders for the South Pacific.

  As I was processing through the Fourth Air Force headquarters in San Francisco, however, an officer decided that I should “make the most” of my “layover” by undergoing some additional training across the Golden Gate, where the army had established a network of coastal artillery batteries and a small garrison, Fort Cronkhite.

  Fort Cronkhite was an unusual place. Designed to help repel an invasion, it often looked as though it were being invaded. Soldiers in training regularly stormed the small cove where the fort was located, taking the wide stony beach and then working their way up the ravine behind, picking their way around the fort's tidy collection of red-roofed, white-clapboard buildings. Beyond the buildings, the slope climbed sharply into the Marin Headlands, grassy hills that formed that part of the continent's final defense against the Pacific Ocean. From a distance, it looked as though the Headlands ran parallel to the shoreline in a long, smooth ridge, but up close, what looked like innocent folds in the earth's fabric turned out to be countless ravines, great and small.

  Viewed from the ridgetop gun emplacements, the fort resembled a California-style summer camp-broad, meadowed hillsides gone gold for lack of rain, the ocean beyond making a slow, vain, glittering entrance late each morning as the fog burned off.

  Instead of training, I was given the duty of inspecting the gun batteries' concrete bunkers. They were fitted with clumsy booby traps, designed to explode if the positions were ever overrun. After the first day I'd determined they were more likely to kill our boys-I was surprised, in fact, that they hadn't already. The colonel leading me around was so proud of the setup, however, that I knew I couldn't be candid. So, while he waited outside each bunker gloating, I went in and did my “inspections,” which I performed by quickly and permanently disarming each device.

  I was staring at my handiwork in the last bunker, trying not to think of Steven Gottschalk, when I heard shouts. I ducked back out and, blinking rapidly, tried to figure out why a piece of the afternoon sky had torn loose and was floating toward us.

  “Stand by to fire!” screamed the colonel, but it was a moment before anyone moved. It looked like a balloon, and it swung tow
ard us like a hypnotist's watch, an ordinary thing working some extraordinary magic. Once I separated it from the sun, I realized that it was a balloon, an unusual one, thirty or so feet in diameter, and slender. It was more than slender, actually: it looked starved and weak, a dirty gray. The bottom half of the balloon was partially deflated; a quick glance would mistake it for a parachute. But down beneath, where you'd expect some person to dangle, hung instead a kind of crate that hardly seemed worth the balloon's trouble.

  “Weather balloon, sir?” asked another sergeant, squinting. “I dunno, I heard some guys down in Monterey got in some awful kind of trouble for shooting down a-”

  “Stand by to fire!” the colonel shrieked, his voice getting higher instead of louder. The sergeant backed up a step, and then skipped into a slow trot toward his bunker.

  But the colonel wouldn't issue the order to fire; he just stood there, same as me, and stared the balloon all the way down to the ground. I think we didn't move because it was so quiet: except for the moon, there's nothing in life that big that ever moved so quietly. Even a sailboat makes a sound-the sails, the rigging, the water roiling past. But these balloons, six or seven stories tall, sailed silently. The only sound they made was when they landed, as this one soon did. Its payload scraped into a fold in the hill a few hundred yards off, and for a moment, the balloon floated there, stuck.

  “Stand down,” said the colonel. I looked down the hill and saw that some curious soldiers were already climbing toward it. The colonel summoned a pair of binoculars and studied the balloon for a while, until a gust of wind came. The balloon popped free, dragged itself and its cargo a few yards up the hill, and then gave up once more. The colonel handed me the glasses, which I thought generous until I realized he simply didn't want to hold them anymore.