"The Cloud Atlas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mitchell David)

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 tradition 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 toward 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.

“What the hell can a balloon tell you about weather, Sergeant?” he asked, still staring after it.

“I don’t know, sir,” I mumbled, adjusting the focus. Finally, I found the curious soldiers. I scanned up the hill ahead of them, along the path the balloon had torn through the grass and brush, until I reached the balloon itself.

Something had pierced the envelope, and the balloon now lay on its side, seemingly gasping, as if it had beached itself.

“Look like rain?” the colonel asked, and answered himself by laughing once. “Sunny and seventy through the weekend?” he added, checking his watch. “Weather. Five bucks says this is a Navy toy.”

I held my breath as I followed the balloon’s shroud down to its pay-load. I’d never seen a hot-air balloon other than in photographs, and if anything, this balloon looked more incredible on the ground than in the air. The soldiers were almost upon it now, and I frowned, realizing that they would soon obstruct my view.

That’s when I saw the fuse.

And then another, and another. And then a whole tangle of them came into view as I studied the payload more closely, and realized that each was a carefully wired charge—

“It’s-a-bomb-sir,” I said. I couldn’t be sure-the soldiers were in the way now, milling about, but-it had to be. I’d never seen a weather balloon, but I’d seen plenty of bombs in the classroom, and they—

“Sergeant?” the colonel asked, as if I’d reported sighting a seagull.

“A bomb, a bomb, a bomb,” I said, the words tumbling out so rapidly, it felt as though they were causing me to fall forward-and then I was-falling, running down the hillside toward the balloon.

I hadn’t saved Gottschalk, hadn’t even had a chance to.

As I ran, I stumbled, the binoculars caught me in the jaw; I tore them off and threw them away, yelling all the while. Behind me, the colonel must have been yelling, too, but I don’t remember that. I only remember thinking, for a split second, that I had indeed fooled time, and that I was the only one moving. The soldiers, the bomb-laden balloon, the colonel-everyone was still, awaiting my intercession.

The first blast-just the noise, not the force-sent me to the ground. When I got up, I saw flames, and heard screams so fierce it was like I could see the sound. I began running even faster until I heard the second blast, tripped again, and lying there, finally realized I was too late.

One of the balloon’s incendiaries must have detonated. It was later determined that the first blast had only wounded one or two of the soldiers, but the fire ended up claiming them all. The fire would have caught up with me as well, except that within a minute or so more of scrambling toward the crash, I was stopped by a steep, sharp ravine that had been invisible when I first started out. I picked my way down into it, but then discovered I couldn’t climb the other side. Eventually I had to follow the ravine all the way down to the beachhead, watching the smoke billow just above me, out of reach.

ANOTHER RAVINE, on the far side of the crash site, and a fire road- a hopeful name for a swath of bare earth-did more to contain the blaze than anything else. By the time they had figured out a way to pump water up the hillside, the fire was mostly out. That night, the bodies of the soldiers were recovered, and around midnight, a pair of military policemen pulled me from my bunk and drove me as far up the hillside as their jeep would take us.

They delivered me into the care of the colonel. Earlier in the day during the cleanup, I’d offered my services but had been rebuffed. I wasn’t sure if the colonel had summoned me now for apologies or blame.

“Turns out we lost two of our three bomb disposal guys in the fire,” he said. “Third’s on leave. So we’ve got you.” He jerked his head up the hill, where gas-powered floodlights illuminated a still-smoking black field. Now I would say that it looked like lava, but back then, I’d never seen hot lava, not even pictures. Back then, it looked like what it was-scorched earth, a little piece of hell. “What happened?” he asked.

“Sir,” I said, looking up the hill, “I’m guessing it was some kind of incendiary—”

“That’s pretty fucking brilliant, Sergeant. What was your clue? The six-acre brush fire?”

Another jeep, and then another, arrived.

“Wait here,” the colonel said, and I did, because it looked for all the world like aliens were stepping out of the jeeps. Six men in silver flash-suits and gas masks finished zipping up, checking gear. I’d seen fire-retardant clothing during my bomb disposal training-but nothing like these outfits, this late at night, lit by lights high on a hill.

“Who’s in charge here?” said the only one of them not suited in silver.

“I am,” said the colonel.

“You were,” said the man, a captain, closing the distance. “We’ll take it from here.”

“I lost five men,” the colonel said. “Is this your goddamn weather balloon?”

The captain nodded his men up the hill, and they began a surprisingly rapid ascent. Then he turned back to us. “It’s mine now.”

“Whose was it? Where did it come from? Why wasn’t I alerted?” the colonel asked.

“That,” the captain said, “is confidential.” That clearly wasn’t good enough for the colonel, but before the colonel could blurt out another question, the captain looked at me and asked, “Who’s this?”

The colonel drew himself up. “This asshole, supposedly a bomb man, was the first to figure out that the balloon was booby-trapped.”

“Bomb disposal?” the captain said, peering through the dark. “What’s your name?”

“He was a little damn slow,” the colonel said. “A few minutes earlier, he could have saved some lives.”

I looked at the captain: “Belk, sir.”

The captain barked a little laugh. “You don’t say? Sergeant Louis A. Belk?” I nodded. “How do you like that? You’re mine, too. Wait for me in the jeep.”

I was glad to leave the colonel to him, and watched from a distance as the two officers argued. Finally, the colonel offered up a bit of a smile, and the two of them walked over.

The colonel regarded me, savored, and smirked. “You poor sap,” he said. “Whose ass did you forget to kiss?”

I looked to the captain. He looked at the colonel and then at me. “I am carrying orders to remove you from Camp Sunshine here, immediately, and deliver you to Elmendorf Field, Fort Richardson, Alaska,” he said, and then hiked up the hill toward his men.

“ Alaska,” the colonel repeated, very pleased.

I watched the captain exchange words with his men, who now had their masks off. Then he walked back toward us and climbed into the jeep.

“Bon voyage,” the colonel said to me.

“I’d keep clear of the area,” the captain said. “Just in case.” We all looked back up the hill, where the men now had their masks back on. The jeep sputtered to life and the captain steered us down the track he’d come up.

Hands on hips, feet apart, the colonel watched us drive away. I stared back at him for as long as I could, until I couldn’t be sure if I was seeing or imagining him.

WHAT NEITHER THE colonel nor I knew at the time was that one of the most closely guarded secrets of World War II had exploded right in front of us.

The Japanese were bombing mainland North America. And the attack was far more widespread, and had gone on much longer, than the infamous raid on Pearl Harbor. In many ways, it was much more audacious. Certainly the censorship campaign that surrounded the bombing campaign was audacious: American authorities ordered nothing be reported. In the months to come, I would learn a little more, but only a little. The complete history-such as it is-I have come to learn only over the course of many years.

In mid-1944-not long after I enlisted, as it happens-a Navy ship made a curious discovery just off the coast of Southern California. The lookout first reported a downed pilot; what he could see through his binoculars had all the looks of a parachute. But there had been no word of any sorties being flown in their sector that day, and certainly no word of any mishaps. Upon drawing closer, the ship found no evidence of a pilot or plane, and when the material was hauled on board, it appeared to be a large hot-air balloon of rubberized silk. Instead of a basket, it contained a peculiar sort of crate, to which were affixed various instruments. One of the communications officers said it looked like a weather balloon. Thus mollified, the ship’s captain brought the balloon and its crate home, where it was packed off to a warehouse in Long Beach. Word was sent to the weather bureau to come collect their fallen star.

The bureau had yet to reply when the authorities learned of an explosion outside Thermopolis, Wyoming (I’m fuzzy on some details, but not that one; my Alaskan missionary mind refuses to forget such a warm-sounding place). Residents had seen what appeared to be a parachute, rocketing toward earth with fatal speed. Shortly after came a tremendous explosion, and bright flames of a bizarre red hue leapt in answer to the sound. The next morning, locals set out to discover what had happened, and there, fifteen miles northwest of town, they came upon a great crater littered with shrapnel. There was talk of comets and flying saucers. The police notified the military.

Not long after, the Fourth Air Force, responsible for the air defense of the western United States, learned of a gigantic paper balloon that had crashed outside Kalispell, Montana. Its construction, though elaborately conceived, was somewhat makeshift, and authorities initially believed it had been assembled and launched from a nearby German prisoner-of-war camp or one of the Japanese internment camps.

But within the next few weeks, dozens more balloons were sighted. Some as far north as Saskatchewan and others just south of Santa Barbara. And while evidence of some of the early landings had disappeared in explosions, more balloons began to be recovered intact. (One western sheriff bravely, or comically, leapt after a balloon’s trailing line as it near ed the ground; it bounced and dragged him across the desert for several miles before he finally managed to stop and anchor it.)

The balloons found intact dispelled much of the mystery that had initially surrounded them. Since the Japanese had assumed any evidence of the balloon weapon would be destroyed in an explosion, they had done little to mask the weapon’s source: serial numbers and other designations, written in Japanese, were printed directly on the balloon. Further evidence was found in the sandbags that served as ballast: government geologists determined the sand used was particular to the east coast of Japan ’s mainland, or largest island, Honshu.

Slowly, it became clear what was happening. Japan had developed and was deploying the world’s first intercontinental warheads. And so far, America ’s defense consisted of tall trees and wide-open spaces.