The Cloud Atlas

RONNIE WANTED several things. First, twenty dollars. Then, my signature on a form. And most important, my promise that I would help him die. I gave him the twenty. I signed the form without looking, but then took it back when he made that last request about helping him die. I may not be the Church's best priest-actually, there's no confusion on that point-but I wasn't about to help a man, my friend, commit suicide.

“Not suicide,” Ronnie said. I was simultaneously trying to read the form and figure out what was going on. “This paper says you can tell the doctors what to do. And that paper is called a will,” he said. “I'm leaving everything to you. If you help me.”

“I take ‘everything’ to mean the twenty I just gave you.”

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.