The Cloud Atlas

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.