The Cloud Atlas

But the sergeant stopped when he saw the lieutenant emerge, blinking, from the building. Redes told us to stay where we were and went out to meet him. After a minute's discussion, the lieutenant started off in the direction of the camp administration building, and Redes returned to us. He dispatched three men back to the building to figure out some way we could hoist the bomb out safely. Two others were sent to retrieve our specially outfitted truck, whose winch would provide most of the required muscle. That left me with no other job than to stand there, beside the sergeant.

“Careful- and correct,” he said, pleased. “That's what we learned today, right?”

“Right, Sarge,” I said.

He watched our guys file into the building. “Wasn't pleased about coming here,” he said, “if you can believe that. Who doesn't like California? Me. I don't like California. Because it's too close to goddamn Japan. And if there's a bomb you don't want to mess with, it's a Jap bomb.” We started walking over to the building. “Because they build a shitty bomb. Japanese military command, if you want to call it that, they don't exactly have the most respect for a man's life. Take your suicide planes, for example. Kids who don't know how to fly, screaming down into our ships.” He cleared his throat. “So your Jap bombmaker, he's not thinking safety when he makes his bomb. He's ready to lose a man here and there. At the factory. On the runway. In the plane. You come across one of those bombs on the ground, you don't know what kind of shit you're getting into.”

We were at the door to the building now, and he paused. He took a long look around the camp. “Now, then,” he said quietly, “I've never handled a Japanese bomb. Course, that's probably why I'm still here.” He looked around the camp one more time, and then ducked inside.

CHAPTER 5

RONNIE IS NOT IN A COMA, OR “NOT A CLASSIC COMA,” AS A doctor just put it to me, as though there were comas one might treasure and frame.

After Ro

But everyone at the hospital was busy with a snowmachine accident. Two kids were hurt, a third had died. No one could come to see the old, alcoholic angalkuq in his room at the hospice, not for hours.

Part of the problem was that Ro

I ignored him. The doctor didn't know Ro

I made the mistake of telling him, sophisticated as I was, that I still needed a little help with fancy medical terms like “these things.”

Then he got right to the point. Ro

What about the two pluses?

“He's not dying,” I said, because Ro

“He can,” the doctor said. “He will.”

“Not on my watch,” I said, trampling over what may have been an empathetic “sorry” dribbling from the doctor's mouth. I couldn't hear him very well.

“Then keep watching,” the doctor said, and started for the door. “As for me, I'm on the eight o'clock flight.”

“Godspeed,” I said. When the doctor had gone, I turned to Ro

EVERYONE IN ALASKA had a secret in World War II; most, like me, still do. There were plenty of men who had made their way to Alaska long before war had broken out. I imagine some came for a love of the wilderness, but more came for the vastness of it. Long before its official motto became “The Last Frontier,” Alaska was just that, an outpost on the edge of the Arctic, the edge of the earth. Nowadays, people flock to remote places to “find themselves,” but in the 1930s and 1940s, men, and some women, went to Alaska to do just the opposite: disappear.

Maybe you'd robbed a bank. Maybe you'd killed a man-maybe by accident or on purpose, maybe you couldn't say. Maybe you'd caught a man sleeping with your wife. Maybe a man had caught you with his. Maybe you were the wife. Maybe you were nothing more than a middle-grade con man, ru

Which, of course, is precisely what I was doing. But I was a kid then, eighteen and only getting dumber, and I didn't realize any of this at first. The longer I spent in Alaska, though, the more I realized-the more I read into eyes cast down, into conversations trailing off. No one had a past. And so while some initially feared the attention and excitement war would bring to Alaska, most grew to enjoy it. There was new anonymity amidst a growing crowd of strangers-and new chances to establish yourself, to craft a new history. War reset the clock for all of us.

In the Alaskan military community, the secrets ran even thicker. So many men were involved in so-called top secret missions that those who weren't, pretended. Ask a guy at a bar what he did, and he'd more than likely just roll his eyes and shrug. The modest would say something dismissive like “You know how it is;” the vain would look around and then whisper urgently, “It's top secret.”

A few hours after my encounter with Lily the palm reader, someone was telling me just that-“It's top secret”-over a beer. We were in an unofficial Army Air Corps club just off base, which officers and enlisted shared, after a fashion-the officers had one side of the room, the enlisted the other. It wasn't a friendly place; everybody stared at their drinks, until they no longer could stare at much of anything.

I'd retreated to the club not long before. Shortly after arriving back on base from downtown, I'd bumped into a sergeant who recognized me from the daily visits I made to Building 100. My officer was back, he said. My official duties were about to begin; if I was smart, I'd grab a last drink while I could. Who knows where I'd find myself tomorrow. But when I'd asked the sergeant where I could find my CO., he shook his head and said, he'll find you.

“ Top secret,” the man to my right said again.