The Cloud Atlas

“Ronnie,” I said, but that was all I got out before I was stormed by a crowd of emotions, memories, old mental movie clips. Ronnie wasn't awake enough to see me rock back into my chair. This has been happening to me more and more, lately: a kind of memory-induced vertigo. It's disturbing, clearly an illness of some sort, something inside breaking down. The woman who cleans my quarters, a woman I myself baptized but who still believes in all sorts of spirits and magic, told me the problem had to do with a restless soul. She suggested collecting some ayuq from the tundra and making iced tea from it. Ayuq is called Labrador tea, Eskimo tea, tundra tea, or ayuq, depending on who's doing the calling, and the list of illnesses it cures is diverse as well. A tattered copy of Reader's Digest, meanwhile, told me the problem was corroded neural pathways and suggested I drink brewed garlic. I thought about distilling the best of both methods by taking up whisky again, with ice, but Ronnie lying here in this bed is evidence enough that alcohol won't work.

Ronnie's eyes opened, failed to focus, and then closed again. He spoke anyway: “In the beginning,” he told his chest, “there was Raven.”

I settled back. I have heard multiple stories of creation in Alaska, but in the beginning, there is always Raven. The version Ronnie tells is my favorite. In the beginning, Raven scratches at the earth with his claws and makes hills, mountains. The countless gouges his talons leave in the soil fill with water and become lakes, rivers, and sloughs.

Upon this land, Raven created a man of stone. Formidable and strong-a man designed to survive in the harsh climate of southwestern Alaska. But then spring came, and the snows melted, the soil turned to mud, and the stone man sank deeper into the tundra with every step.

So Raven tried again. This time he molded a man of clay, or dirt. More fragile, more vulnerable-true; but more adaptable and better suited to travel the land he had sprung from.

It's a sign of how long I have lived here that I know Ronnie and his stories so well. And while I was always more interested in hearing a new story, I was still intrigued to hear Ronnie tell one I already knew and see what use he might put it to. Did he feel like the man of stone now, sinking into his illness? Or the man of clay, so easily broken?

Or perhaps he and I were the two first men-but which of us was stone, which clay?

I asked him. He scowled.

“This is what I have said,” Ronnie said. His breathing became his punctuation. “In the beginning there was Raven. And then, a family. A mother. A boy. Her lovers. His fathers.”

“More than one?” I interrupted, still not understanding. “Sounds like quite a story.”

Ronnie closed his eyes, and when he opened them once more, he spoke. “This is not a story. This is true.”

A nurse arrived, bearing a syringe on a tray. Ronnie scanned back and forth: me, nurse, syringe. He settled on the syringe.

“You heard what I said?” he told the syringe as it approached. “You told the doctor? No painkillers. No sleep medicines.” He pointed at me. “I have things I need to discuss. With my priest.” The nurse nodded gently, and reassured him that his request had already been written down on his chart. Then she explained that she was just there to draw blood. Ronnie watched carefully as she cinched the constricting band around his arm, searched for a vein, and then drew what she needed.

“What she wants to take,” Ronnie said, “is already gone.” Which might have been true, considering that years of drinking had likely left his veins more full of Gilbey's gin than blood. When she was finished, he sank back into the pillow.

“Raven,” he said.

“Ronnie,” I said. “What are you bothering the nurses for? They're going to take good care of you. If there's one thing they do better in the hospice than the hospital, it's take care of pain. So if you're uncomfortable, let them-”

“What I need to say, I need a clear head to say,” he said.

Now, a few years before, there's only one thing Ronnie would have said next: So let us drink.

Instead, he said something I'd never heard him say before: “Father.” I tensed. Then another surprise: “I want to confess.”

This was so startling I assumed we were joking again. “Oh, Ronnie,” I said. “Let's just talk. Old friends.”

“Enemies,” he said, and smiled. “I want to go to confession.”

“You're not even Catholic, Ronnie,” I said, sure the floor was groaning and splitting beneath me like some last chunk of springtime ice in the river. Was Ronnie ready to believe? Had he finally found his proof?

“I don't have to be Catholic to tell secrets,” Ronnie said. He drew a deep breath, and then another, and another, and in another moment, he seemed deep asleep.