The Cloud Atlas

WE SPENT AN HOUR flying Leavit around Wyoming. Gurley had told him that the Army was investigating the region for a whole new network of “intracontinental defense bases.” He pointed out one imaginary site after another. He was in full performance mode, charming and arch, though I knew he was tense-he kept that one fist clenched the entire time, at his side, or behind his back. But Leavit didn't notice, he was too delighted with his scoop. The story he later wrote caused a bit of consternation among Gurley's higher-ups and Wyoming 's congressional delegation, but the matter was soon forgotten.

Not forgotten, at least by me, is the exchange Gurley and I had after we'd deposited Leavit in Cheyenne and taken off for home.

“Dodged one there, sir,” I said, flush with the success of duping Leavit, disarming the balloon single-handedly, and, most important, discovering a germ-free balloon. I assumed we'd formed a new kind of camaraderie on the way down, and thought I'd take advantage of it by needling him. “Course, sir, when you slapped the side of the truck there,” I said, “I thought that might just have been enough to get that little demo block to go-”

Gurley slowly raised his fist. I'd been mistaken about our friendship. I noticed it was the same fist he'd kept clenched all this time. But he hadn't swung at Leavit, and he didn't swing at me. Instead, he turned his hand over and slowly opened it. I stared down. Ribbing me for my supposed love of palm reading?

But you didn't need to be Lily to read the story there. A smear of dried blood and two black specks, crushed carcasses of the tiny flying insects he killed. I shook my head, I held my breath. If he spoke, I didn't hear him. I just watched him, hollow-eyed, as he fished the jewelry store clipping out of his bag and numbly scraped the fleas' remains onto the paper.

CHAPTER 11

OH, RAPTURE.

An aging priest, I fear this most, this rapture. Evangelical Christians claimed rapture-sorry, Rapture-from Revelations, promising that the good would be sucked skyward When The Time Came. The truth is, the good disappear even earlier than that-lovely, ordinary Catholics are sucked out of my church and into the arms of these new, fresh-faced teetotaling missionaries. The young are thunderstruck, the old relieved; what a glorious, dramatic, prospect this Rapture is.

But they've not seen previous Raptures. I remember when brave and good Alaskans began disappearing before. The Japanese immigrants were the first to go; overnight, it seemed, they began disappearing from storefronts and sidewalks in Anchorage, shipped well south to California. Native Alaskans vanished, too. As Gurley had said, Aleuts had been relocated by the military, but in a most disorienting fashion: they were taken from their weatherworn, mostly treeless islands and deposited in the hush and dark of a thick southeastern Alaska forest.

And they were the lucky ones: other Aleuts, farther out on the Chain, were dragged from their homes by Japanese soldiers and taken back to Japan, where they spent the remainder of the war. Close to half died there.

That was rapture; that was when governments presumed to play God and did so with requisite carelessness. Anything in Alaska could be done if required by the war (or whim, the two terms so close, it seems now). Homes, buildings, towns, and airports were taken up and dropped elsewhere.

That was when the end of the world was nigh, not now as penny-ante preachers would have us believe. I believed then, I most definitely did. Thunderous hellfire. The dead blanketing the earth. Plague and pestilence: upon our return to Anchorage, Gurley and I waited anxiously for test results-his own, mine, and of the two fleas Gurley had “captured.”

Those were the days of Armageddon, when one horror slipped into the next, from the threat of your skin erupting with pox to that of a spy approaching from behind and slipping a wire around your throat.

It was this last threat Gurley and I returned to. As nervous as we were about finding ourselves on the front lines of the germ war, a small part of us-a very small part-had also been pleased that we would be back in the spotlight.

But our hopes were dashed, as the Army unfailingly would do. Gurley was greeted with new bulletins announcing that the germ warfare threat was now believed to be traveling our way by both balloon and human means: saboteurs might even now be in our midst, ready to release animals and insects ridden with disease, or perhaps, in the manner of kamikaze pilots, they had been infected themselves, their only goal to ensure they did not die alone.

Alaska was thought to be a likely point of entry, its vastness a perfect cloak for the solitary spy. It sounds mad now, doesn't it? But there we were, with those bulletins, with word of captured Japanese documents and messages describing one-and two-man submarines, paratroopers dropped from impossible altitudes, frogmen leaping from the surf.