"The Cloud Atlas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mitchell David)CHAPTER 6ELEVEN P.M., THE STARHOPE HOTEL. It had taken me some puzzling over the dollar that Lily had pressed into my hand before I decided that what she’d scribbled on the back was an invitation. But to what? I stood outside the building, looking up at the windows of Lily’s “office” on the second floor, thinking about Gurley Lily, and Lily’s bare legs. Would another man be there tonight? Would another interrupt us? And yes, innocent that I was, I even thought about her advertised business, those careful and correct palm readings: after all that had happened so far, I was more interested than ever in learning my future. Especially if that future included sex. I apologize: there are certain words a priest can’t say, like Whom else could I tell what it was like to stand outside that hotel, looking up, sweating hormones, the tart, metallic taste of blood from the fight with Gurley only now going stale in my mouth? Whom else could I tell that of everything I felt, the sharpest feeling was fear? Damn right I was scared. Scared of Gurley? Maybe I thought that then, but that was a fleeting fear. You can’t be scared of a car that loses control on the highway. There’s no time, no reason: you just concentrate on staying alive. No, I was scared of the woman up on the second floor. And it kept me standing on the street right up to, and then after, eleven o’clock. Five after, ten after. I couldn’t bring myself to go in, although I decided I would rush ahead if I saw any other man make for the building. But in the meantime, I stood there, rubbing between thumb and forefinger the magic dollar Lily had given me, wondering as I did so what crime I might have already committed and what crimes I might soon commit. Here was the problem. Lily was a woman, a spit-in-the-eye-of-God occultist (the distance between palm reading and worshiping idols seemed shorter in my youth), a siren-she was all this, yes, but what consumed me was that Lily was Japanese. And while that didn’t automatically make her a spy, everything else did: her presence here, in Alaska, when all other Japanese had been sent to camps; this strange building; her dark office; Gurley’s mysterious arrival; the dollar she’d given me-and, of course, the fact that she was supposedly a palm reader. She made no secret that she dealt in secrets. “Boo,” came a voice from behind me, and I must have leapt in the air, straight up, several inches, with my heart going faster and higher. “Don’t turn around,” said the voice, which was doing a fair impression of a movie hoodlum until it broke down laughing. “Boo,” the voice said again between laughs, and I turned around to find Lily, grinning so broadly she couldn’t see. “Hello,” I said, using the biggest, most adult soldier voice I could manage. Lily imitated me-not very well, I thought, but she also found this funny, and laughed until I at least started to smile. But when she finally caught her breath and focused, she stopped laughing altogether. “What happened to you?” she asked. She started to extend a hand to the bruises on my face, and if she’d actually touched them, I would have counted the battle with Gurley as well worth the pain. But she stopped short, just inches from my skin. There was that kind of buzzing that comes just before a first kiss-yes, I know about these things, or knew-and I couldn’t say anything, do anything. She’d immobilized me faster than Gurley, and panicked me just the same. “I have to go,” I said, and then started to back away. “I should have warned you,” she said, and my heart stopped beating while it waited to see if the next word out of her mouth would be She’d won me over again until she came out with that “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really do-have to go. I shouldn’t have—” “Not so fast, soldier,” she said, stepping after me with surprising speed. “You owe me something?” “I-I don’t owe you anything-I left before—” “You left carrying something of mine. Something like-a dollar.” She waited for a response. “You think I’m a magician “Soldier,” I said. “You’re late. Note said eleven, didn’t it?” She followed this with a friendly, weary frown, as if we always argued like this. Then she started inside. “I’m not sure I should go in there,” my voice higher, age lower. Lily just looked at me. “I think you should,” she said. “Seems pretty clear you’re not safe on the streets,” she added, and then smiled. “Besides, how else are you going to get your wallet back?” UPSTAIRS, ALL WAS it had been before. The door was ajar, the single bulb still burned overhead. Still no furniture, still the pile of blankets in one corner of the room. My wallet hit me in the chest as I crossed the threshold. I fumbled and it fell. As I bent down to pick it up, I saw Lily seated on the floor, back against the wall, studying her hands, studiously not watching me. “I’m feeling a little bad about taking my dollar back,” Lily said, still not looking up. Then she rubbed her hands together and put them flat on the floor beside her. “Why do you carry that wallet anyway? There’s almost nothing in it. Somebody jump you a block before?” “I just got here, I guess,” I said, my mind spooning out words almost at random, since the whole of me was preoccupied with the situation: “Just got here’?” Lily said. “C’mon, sit down. Either your brain isn’t hooked up to your mouth, or you don’t have a brain, or you’re just not telling the truth. Let’s find out.” She patted the floor next to her. I didn’t move. “ ‘Palm reader,’ right?” she asked. “This is what you came about?” I finally spoke up. “Listen, I’ve got some questions, okay? I mean, up front?” “That’s what this all about, sailor,” Lily said. “Soldier,” I said. “Well, we’ll see about that,” Lily said, patting the floor beside her again. “Sit, young man.” She was smiling once more. “What?” I said. But it was useless. I was already starting to sit. Doing so was a bit painful, but not as much as I’d expected. Either my bruises were fading rapidly, or my mind was too occupied with Lily to register pain. Lily wiped her palms on her knees. “Let’s start with names. What’s yours?” I paused. “Harry,” I said. “Harry… Crosby.” I couldn’t give her my real name. She looked at me, waited, and then said, “And how “You know why,” I said. “It’s that you’re-you’re-you know.” “Taller?” she asked. “Than you? Worried I could toss you out the window? Worried I will?” “No,” I said, imagining being heaved out the window, and then lingering on the scene as I thought about how she’d have to grab hold of me, hug me, probably, wrestle me over there, her arms wrapped around me, our faces inches apart. “You’re not taller,” I said, surfacing. “You’re- Her eyes went wide with honest, and then exaggerated, alarm. “Oh dear,” she said. “You can read my every secret, can’t you? Maybe the wrong person’s running this palm-reading business.” She held out a hand to me. “Here, let’s see what else you know. Read But I defy you-or would have defied anyone-to read that hand. As soon as I saw her palm, I almost jumped as if she’d surprised me with another “boo.” Her hand was a welter of lines, as though it had been shattered and then reassembled, piece by piece. I looked at my own hands in vain for some reference point. I looked at her other hand, compared them-but they weren’t alike, at least in no way that I could tell. Stranger still, and what I remember even more clearly, is how soft her hands were. “Here’s a little advice,” Lily said. “If you decide to go into this profession after the war-and I don’t think you should, because you’re not doing so hot, so far-but if you do, it helps if you talk to the customer.” “Sorry,” I said. “And when you talk, don’t use that word,” Lily said. “It scares them. Also: I exhaled quickly and squinted, as if focusing would help me read her palms better. “Well, there goes my whole speech.” She smiled, took her hands away. “That’s not a surprise,” she said. “But you making a funny-that’s a surprise. A nice one.” But I wasn’t listening to her. I was just watching those hands disappear out of mine; the loss of that touch was almost painful. “Please” was all I could say, and something about my pathetic appearance- combined with the fact that I was harmless, just a boy to her, made her put her hands back in mine. “Okay,” she said. “But be quick. Remember, I’m here to read I smiled again. “Let’s take a look,” I said, and studied her palm. I decided all you really had to do was tell a story. And all I wanted was an excuse to hold her hands, so I just took any line I saw and started in: She was born in… Tokyo. An only child. Her parents were-but she stopped me, and pointed out that Tokyo was far away. How did she end up in Alaska, and speaking English? I rubbed her palm with a thumb, pretended to think on this for a moment while I savored the touch, and then settled on a ship, a great, ridiculous ship that was full of language instructors, chalkboards. “God, that sounds boring,” she said. I think now she was referring to the imaginary classroom as it bobbed across the Pacific, but I thought then that she was criticizing my imagination. Some palm reader I’d make. So I revised things; I found another line and started again. Born in Japan, on top of a mountain, a mother made of snow and a father made of fire. I didn’t know where all this was coming from, but she’d fallen quiet and was listening. She spoke every language, I said, the words came to her in raindrops. Raindrops; a cloud; she’d traveled across the ocean in a giant cloud, floating this way and that, until a storm had gathered, and she’d dropped to earth in a flaming downpour— Her hands flew away from me with a start, and just for an instant, I saw her wear another face, one she hadn’t shown me before. But it passed, and then she was holding my hands. Holding them, but looking at my eyes. “You’re a very, very bad palm reader,” she said. “And a creepy storyteller. I, on the other hand-I’m very good at both. You want to hear your story?” I THINK MINE is the sort of life that almost anyone could read from a hand, or better yet, my eyes. They say those eyes never leave you, eyes that blinked awake each morning wondering if this was the day your parents would come-not some foster parents they’d found for you, but your real parents, a mom and dad, like everyone had, even Jesus. So although I find it patronizing, I long ago decided it was also true: an orphan never loses that look, those eyes. I wasn’t too surprised, then, when Lily got that part right: orphan. And I admire her for not taking the easy route and pretending she knew who my parents were, and describing these imaginary beings to me in exquisite, unknowable detail. But maybe it would have been better for her to embroider some fiction. Because the more she talked, the more she knew, and the more scared I became. She knew about the orphanage, knew it was nothing like Dickens, knew that the Mary Star of the Sea Home for Infants and Children was south of Los Angeles, knew it was just a block from the beach, knew-and no one would ever have made this up-that the nuns treated us like the grandchildren they’d never have. She knew no family ever came for me (though if she knew why she didn’t say), and she knew that all those years saturated with sun and God’s love had left me with the pure, naïve desire to be His priest. And that’s where I stopped her. Because I didn’t want to know if she knew the rest, how I’d taken the train-paying the fare with money the teary-eyed nuns had given me-to San Diego. How I’d never made it to the high school seminary they were finally sending me to, because I stopped at the armed forces recruiting station first. I didn’t want to know if Lily knew I had been scared. Scared of what, I can’t really say, not even now. (Maybe she could have.) All I knew was that I was a kid on a train, suddenly aware of where he was going, guessing at what he was leaving. There were soldiers on the train. And girls on the train. The world was on that train, and the world was going to war. I was going off to high school, a high school seminary, and I could see it, smell it: wax and wood and incense. The train smelled like perfume and aftershave and the ocean, which was just outside the window. By the time we got to San Diego, I was sweating and queasy because I’d realized what I would do. It wasn’t that I And now, alone in a dark room in the sway of a woman who practiced magic, I finally knew He would not. “THAT’S ENOUGH,” I said. I pulled my hand away, although she hadn’t really been studying it-she’d been holding it, but not reading it. For a while, she’d closed her eyes. “A priest?” she said again, not mocking, not Gurley just curious. “There are worse things,” I said. She scrambled to her feet. “That’s not what I meant.” “I’m-sorry,” I said. “I guess it’s not what I meant either.” Lurking in the back of my mind had been the faint expectation that she’d make this easy; she’d just rip my clothes off, then hers, and there we’d be. I gave her another second to. And two more. Then I said I had to go. “You’ll come back?” she said, and while I knew I shouldn’t, I knew I would. I wanted to know how she’d done what she’d done. And I just wanted to see her again. But reflexes preceded thought, and I found myself mumbling about the base not being far away, and sure, I’d probably get a day or two of leave every now and then. I was halfway out the door when she caught hold of my jacket. “No,” she said, low and serious, “I mean, you’ll come back, tonight.” Again, I felt something flit in and out of my pocket. “And bring something to eat,” she said, even as the door was closing. As it clicked, I felt in my pocket. My wallet was still there. And along with it, a five-dollar bill, another message: “ 1.” A few paces down the street, I heard, but refused to turn and see, someone climb the steps to the Starhope, open the door, and enter. LILY SLEPT LIKE she’d been shot. Stomach-down on the floor, limbs and blankets scattered about, mouth agape, breaths coming in as noisily as they went out. I’d gotten sandwiches, stale ones, really just slices of bread and some cheese, but I’d not had a lot of choice when I went out. Finding a diner that was still open took some time, but not enough; I spent an hour or so wandering what there was then of Anchorage, waiting for 1 A.M. to arrive, and worrying that when it did, she would have meant one in the afternoon. There were soldiers and sailors everywhere, never in groups of less than three, which meant that walking alone, I attracted some attention-at least from those who were still sober enough to focus and speak. But eventually I navigated away from the bars and found a tiny neighborhood that looked like it had been built within the last few hours. I walked each of the streets on its grid, and was going to start on a second lap, when a man who’d spotted me earlier shouted from a porch: “Get a move on, pal. This is all families. None of those type of houses here.” That’s when I started to notice the signs tacked to some of the doors: “PRIVATE HOME.” Somebody later explained: women were rare enough in Anchorage in those days that when you saw one enter a house followed by a man, you might reasonably assume the premises were open for business. I wondered where Lily lived. At the Starhope? When I got back to her office and found her asleep, I thought about leaving the food and going home-back to base-myself, but I couldn’t leave. So I just shut the door behind me and slid down the wall until I was sitting opposite her. I opened one of the sandwiches and ate it, anticipating a good long period of studying her, memorizing her every feature. I wanted a picture, the way other guys had a picture-or half a dozen pictures-of sweethearts, of movie stars. But I wasn’t going to get one, so I’d have to make one. But the picture kept going out of focus. She was snoring. Snoring: I’m glad I remember that detail. Sometimes, I forget it-though I don’t see how that’s possible. She snored like she was gargling, or choking, or drowning, or was a dog engaged in any one of those activities. I’m glad I remember her snoring, because it’s real enough to reassure me that this memory actually occurred. Otherwise, the moment seems made up of too much magic: outside, that weak, watery blue Alaskan version of midnight twilight, Lily lying there, me sitting there, she sleeping, me watching. I didn’t think, then, that we could ever be closer. I’m not sure anyone can. I’m not sure there is a place closer to someone than being at their side, awake, while they’re asleep. I found it increasingly difficult to breathe myself-as if what sounded like snoring were actually her wolfing down what air remained in the room. I was watching her, but not as a voyeur-I was watching But after a few minutes of listening to her snore and wheeze, my restraint failed. Something deeper stirred within me, starting as a shiver and then finishing as flat-out, coughing laughter. The snoring stopped. Lily sat up and looked around, wide-eyed, not smiling, not frowning. I fell silent. She saw the remaining sandwich and slid it toward her, peeking inside the wax paper. “Sorry—” I said. Lily said nothing, just took a bite and chewed, staring ahead. “Not the worst way to wake up,” she said. She took another bite and chewed for a while. “You’re really-curious,” she said. “You know that? Curious. Comic, soldier, priest. I’m not sure who you are.” “You did a pretty good job earlier figuring me out,” I said. She yawned. “What about what happens next?” “I’m not so good at ‘next,’” Lily said. “Maybe if I was,” she continued, but stopped to take another bite, “I wouldn’t be here, eating this sandwich, hanging out with some sailor thinks I’m Jap.” She stuffed the remaining sandwich in her mouth with the heel of her palm and smiled, cheeks bulging, as I stared at her. “Do I look Japanese now?” she said, cheeks still huge, bits of sandwich spittling out. She took a big swallow, and then pulled on her ears, stuck out her tongue. “How about now? Martian?” “You’re not-?” She swallowed the last of the sandwich and looked around. “You only bought one? I gave you five bucks.” “Two, but I ate one. You’re not Japanese?” “How much did it cost? That wasn’t enough change. What, you think I’m Jap, you can steal from me?” “I’m sorry, I—” “Well, I’m not sorry. In fact, I am—” and then she said a word I didn’t understand. Or was it a word? It sounded like something she’d done with her throat, her mouth. She said it again: “Yup’ik.” “What’s that?” “It’s whaddyacallit, Eskimo. Or it’s whatever you get when you take a Russian sailor who’s far from home, and add a Native woman who’s not,” she said. She held up a hand for each and then slapped them together. “Boom: you get one of me. Tallest Eskimo gal for a thousand miles.” “Not Japanese?” I said, relieved, confused. Eskimos lived in igloos. That is, I knew better, but the truth is, I knew as much then about Eskimos as I did about the Japanese-or palm readers. “Eskimo,” she said. “Russian-Eskimo,” she added, yawning. “Which means, that whole bit you did about fire and snow-not so far off, after all.” She looked up. “And I didn’t pick up language from raindrops, although I might as well have, because my father hauled my mother off when I was four or five.” “To where?” “To Siberia,” Lily said. “To Russia, Japan, the moon. Who knows? They left, and they left me.” “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I’m sorry,” she parroted in a high-pitched voice. “You like saying that,” she added. “I thought they tried to get rid of ‘sorry’ in the army.” I was about to say it again before I stopped myself. “So you know my secret, or secrets. Now let’s get one out of you.” She pointed to my insignia. “What do you do?” She waited. “Well, it’s secret,” I said. “Well, tell me,” Lily said. “Actually, it’s, well, obvious,” I said, looking at the patch, with its fat beet of a bomb. “Bombs,” she said. “Bomb disposal? Right. But what do “Well,” I said. “That-that I can’t tell you. Japanese or no. Of course. I can’t.” “Yup’ik,” she said, and then studied me for a beat or two. “Well, that’s a shame.” “Why? Why would you even ask?” “Well, I thought you might be somebody I needed to get to know “Who?” “Somebody “I got the sandwiches,” I said, a little desperate. She leaned down, extended a hand. “Thanks,” she said, pulling me up. “But you run along home.” “I thought we were—” and then I think I said something tiny, like “friends.” Whatever it was, she laughed, and put her hand on the doorknob. “That’s really sweet,” she said. “But I got guys who pay to be friends with me. For now, near as I figure, I’ve been paying to be friends with you.” She gave me another tight smile. “That’s not good business.” All of a sudden, the doorknob jerked out of her hand. The door flapped open on two sailors, both drunk, both blond, both taller than Lily and I. Their faces were doughy, and their heavy, puffed features almost looked unfinished, infantile. It didn’t occur to me then that the reason their noses appeared that way was because they’d been broken so many times. One was more drunk than the other; his name strip read “ Jackson,” and the way he held on to his partner, “Sanger,” with a modified headlock, made his arm seem impossibly long. Jackson tried to say something, but it fizzled into a drooling smile. Sanger lurched them both into the room. “We’re here,” he said to Lily, “for a reading.” He held up both hands, palms out, and doing so made Jackson slide off him and onto the floor. Jackson looked up at Lily. “She’s a “I’m closed,” Lily said, her voice, eyes, shoulders all new to me, a different person, from a different place. “You mean, busy?” Sanger said, reaching forward to grab a wrist of Lily’s, which she flicked away just in time. He and Jackson looked at me. “ ’Cause he don’t look like he’s keeping you busy.” “He’s not busy,” Jackson said, and wormed across the floor toward me with surprising speed. I jumped away. “He’s leaving,” Lily said. “You’re leaving. I’m leaving. I’m closed.” “We’ve come a long fucking way, lady,” Sanger said, moving on her. “All the way from the fucking mooooooon,” said Jackson, and before I knew it, he had a hold of my ankle. “He don’t look closed, Davey do he?” “Get out of here,” I said, but it was useless; my voice had flown into its highest registers. “He’s a “Poor little girl,” said Sanger. “Leave,” said Lily. “Now.” “I could leave,” Sanger said. “But then you’d be on your own with Jackson, here. And he don’t do well on his own. Spent the whole trip here from Seattle locked in the brig for hitting an officer.” “Locked in a fucking closet,” Jackson said, on his knees now, his hands on my hips, head at my stomach. “Fucking closet with two other guys.” I don’t know if Jackson was fainting or attacking, but he wound up pulling me to the floor. After that, I remember his breath, his nails, his weight; I remember the way my hands wouldn’t go all the way around his wrists. Sanger, suddenly sounding sober and reasonable, broke in like a radio announcer with a product to shill. “What’s the matter now, boys? We’re all on the same team here. Let’s not—” I don’t remember Lily leaping on Jackson, or how or when his ear started to bleed. But I remember him coming off me and then the two of them on Lily, who was writhing on the floor with such fury, it seemed she was doing more damage to herself than they ever could. It was too hard to separate out a hand, an arm, but more and more bare skin, mostly hers, became visible. I tore off my belt, and with someone else’s strength, fell onto Jackson ’s back, looping the belt around his neck. Lily shrieked, I yanked, Jackson bucked and would have thrown me had his buddy not fallen on top of me, his drunken logic insisting that would help. And it might have; he might have smothered me before I finished choking Jackson, but then a louder shriek entered the room, and when I twisted around, I found it was him screaming, not Lily. There was blood everywhere now, it seemed-on the floor, smeared on a wall, on Lily’s palms, and most of all, on Sanger. He rolled off me; I sprang away from Jackson, leaving him coughing, using a finger to eke some breathing room out of my belt. “Fucking Jap fuck,” Sanger spat, each word weaker than the one before. “I’m going to go over to that fucking Japland and fuck and kill every one of your cousins. Your mother, your brother, your fucking father.” Jackson had the belt off his neck now, and fell back, exhausted. “Cripes, lady,” Jackson said, and I suddenly realized he wasn’t much older than me. It didn’t seem possible that he’d really wanted to hurt me, or Lily. But a quick look at Lily made it clear that she’d wanted to hurt them. Quite improbably, I began to worry that the two would leave-and leave me alone with Lily. “Can’t read your palm now,” Lily said. “Too messy.” She stepped out of the tiny office quickly. I paused for a moment. Jackson was staring toward me but not focusing. Sanger looked ready to start again. I sprang for the door and dashed down the stairs. Lily was waiting for me outside. She started walking, and I followed, neither of us saying a word until we were some blocks away. “Like I said,” she muttered then. “Sailors.” I tried to figure out a reply, anxiously shifting the duty of holding up my beltless pants from one hand to the other. She sniffed, half a laugh, looked me up and down. Then she stepped close to me and carefully hooked a finger through a belt loop. She was holding them up now, so I let go. “Soldier,” she said quietly and then shook her head and added something Ronnie only recently had taught me how to spell: “What?” I said, matching her whisper. “Friend,” she said, even softer, and then removed her hand. |
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