The Cloud Atlas

And for an interloper, I was, and am, i

And I've blessed things. Babies, houses, holes in the ice. Dogs, and later, snowmachines. Outboard motors and cases of Crisco. Nets, knives, and sewing needles, yes; but guns, never. And once, a dead woman's stuffed parakeet, although that was more exorcism than blessing. Her widower had remarried; the man's new wife said the parakeet helped friends cheat her at cards. Saint Francis, I prayed, it's not enough that this woman has to make a life in the subarctic tundra? With a husband who keeps his first wifes parakeet? Peace, Saint Francis. Go easy, O Lord.

And this hospice, Quyana House. It's a curious, mostly empty place, located well outside of town. It blossomed on the grounds of an abandoned radar installation, and is supported almost entirely by a Seattle family whose son drowned here one summer while serving as a missionary-in-training.

THE HOSPICE IS OFTEN empty because it's hard to get to, and people don't quite trust this Outside generosity. (Quyana means “thank you” in Yup'ik, which is all well and good, since this part of Alaska is Yup'ik Eskimo, but people find it a strange name nonetheless: just who is being thanked, and for what?) Plus, the old and terminally ill usually die at home-or at the hospital in town. The hospital is known as the Yellow Submarine, but the way it snakes along the tundra, long and flat, its every corner rounded, it looks more like bars of soap smushed together, or maybe some Outside architect's idea for a hospital on the moon. It stands on stilts; just about everything in town does. Otherwise, buildings would melt the permafrost and slowly sink into the tundra. But the hospital's awkward seventies Star Wars design makes its stilts look like landing gear; the entire building seems poised for takeoff, and there are those in town who sometimes wish it would.

The hospice, on the other hand, is a soaring structure, seemingly composed of equal parts glass and light. We all await the storm that will level it, but month after month it survives, and maybe I shouldn't be surprised: I've blessed the place half a dozen times. First, when they cleared the land for construction; second, when someone had fallen from some scaffolding and broken both legs; third and fourth came when a new wing went up and when it collapsed; fifth was the grand opening; and sixth was the dedication of the wing where Ro

I had put the doll replica of me in my breast pocket, taking care that the little arms and head were peeking out. At first, I did it as a joke, but then I had this sudden, inexplicable need to cough, and I thought: play it safe. I gave the little guy more room and Ro

Maybe.

For Ro

Diabetes, on the other hand, is proof of my work. Not me personally, not even my God, but certainly my people, he says. And it's true, junk food is replacing alcohol as the white man's new smallpox, and though it takes longer to kill the native population, the unhealthy shift in diet from what the land provided to what air cargo provides-Spam, Pop-Tarts, and worse-still takes too many lives too early.

Diabetes sent Ro

In the past, we'd talk and joke a bit whenever I visited him here. (Or rather, I talk, and Ro

The balance has shifted of late, though. He's dying. Or rather, he thinks he is and wants me to think the same. I'll admit: he is asleep more than he is awake, and when he is awake, it's very strange. He'll stop, mid-conversation, and search around the room: something is missing, or something is here. “I can hear him,” he'll whisper. And sometimes, when there is something to hear-a distant moan or cough-he'll say, “Tell me how he died,” which I never understand: Does he need a primer? What does he think he'd learn from the other patients? Then he'll look at me, and I can see in his eyes what he wants to say, what he's never said to me, not directly: I need your help. Help, real help, is back in town, back at the hospital. But whenever I ask about moving him there, he shakes his head.

“Everyone is gone, Lou-is.”

Ro

“Gone where?” I asked, and he nodded his head toward the window. “To the festival?” I said. He shook his head and stared outside, silent. One of the smaller villages upriver was hosting a gathering; as always, they'd scheduled it for the last days of winter, at just about the point when you simply couldn't take it anymore. Alaska 's winter calendar is full of these events. They say that, in Anchorage, if you have a tuxedo, you'll have something to do every night from November through March; out here, the same is true if you swap the tuxedo for a snowmachine.

I don't have a tuxedo-clerical garb is just as black and much cheaper-but I do have a snowmachine, which I got from the high school shop class. They'd gotten it from the manufacturer, who'd donated it with only one condition (courtesy of their lawyers): students couldn't ride it, just take it apart and put it back together again. Which they did for ten years, before giving it to me, with, their teacher promised, the “vast majority” of its essential parts intact. But I take it out less and less of late. Not because of my body-though my bones do increasingly feel as though they were made of kindling-but my mind. The older I get, the more recent my youth seems, and the more I recall that first youthful trip I made into the bush. I was a soldier then, not a priest, and it was summer, not winter.