Cloud Atlas (13 page)

“A string of adjectives and conjunctions?”

“Or an expletive?”

6

“Megan, my treasured niece.” Rufus Sixsmith shows Luisa a photograph of a bronzed young woman and a fitter, healthier self taken at a sunny marina. The photographer said something funny just before the shutter clicked. Their legs dangle over the stern of a small yacht named
Starfish
. “That’s my old tub, a relic from more dynamic days.”

Luisa makes polite noises about not being old.

“Truly. If I went on a serious voyage now I’d need to hire a small crew. I still spend a lot of weekends on her, pottering about the marina and doing a little thinking, a little work. Megan likes the sea, too. She’s a born physicist with a better head for mathematics than I ever had, rather to her mother’s chagrin. My brother didn’t marry Megan’s mother for her brain, I’m sorry to say. She buys into
feng shui
or
I Ching
or whatever instant-enlightenment mumbo jumbo is top of the charts. But Megan possesses a superb mind. She spent a year of her Ph.D. at my old college at Cambridge. A woman, at Caius! Now she’s finishing her radioastronomy research at the big dishes on Hawaii. While her mother and her stepfather crisp themselves to toast on the beach in the name of Leisure, Megan and I knock around equations in the bar.”

“Any children of your own, Rufus?”

“I’ve been married to science all my life.” Sixsmith changes the subject. “A hypothetical question, Miss Rey. What price would you pay, as a journalist I mean, to protect a source?”

Luisa doesn’t consider the question. “If I believed in the issue? Any.”

“Prison, for example, for contempt of court?”

“If it came to it, yes.”

“Would you be prepared to … compromise your own safety?”

“Well …” Luisa does consider this. “I … guess I’d have to.”

“Have to? How so?”

“My father braved booby-trapped marshes and the wrath of generals for the sake of
his
journalistic integrity. What kind of a mockery of his life would it be if his daughter bailed when things got a little tough?”

Tell her
. Sixsmith opens his mouth to tell her everything—the whitewashing at Seaboard, the blackmailing, the corruption—but without warning the elevator lurches, rumbles, and resumes its descent. Its occupants squint in the restored light, and Sixsmith finds his resolve has crumbled away. The needle swings round to G.

The air in the lobby feels as fresh as mountain water.

“I’ll telephone you, Miss Rey.” says Sixsmith, as Luisa hands him his stick, “soon.”
Will I break this promise or keep it?
“Do you know?” he says. “I feel I’ve known you for
years
, not ninety minutes.”

7

The flat world is curved in the boy’s eye. Javier Gomez leafs through a stamp album under an Anglepoise lamp. A team of huskies barks on an Alaskan stamp, a Hawaiian
nene
honks and waddles on a fifty-cents special edition, a paddle steamer churns up an inky Congo. A key turns in the lock, and Luisa Rey stumbles in, kicking off her shoes in the kitchenette. She is exasperated to find him here. “Javier!”

“Oh, hi.”

“Don’t ‘Oh, hi’ me. You promised not to jump across the balconies
ever
again! Suppose someone reports a burglar to the cops? Suppose you slipped and fell?”

“Then just give me a key.”

Luisa strangles an invisible neck. “I can’t rest easy knowing an eleven-year-old can waltz into my living space whenever …”
your mom’s out all night
, Luisa replaces with “… there’s a slow night on TV.”

“So why leave the bathroom window open?”

“Because if there’s one thing worse than you jumping the gap once, it’d be you jumping the gap again when you couldn’t get in.”

“I’ll be eleven in January.”

“No key.”

“Friends give each other keys.”

“Not when one is twenty-six and the other is still in the fifth grade.”

“So why are you back so late? Meet anyone
interesting?”

Luisa glares. “Trapped by the brownout in an elevator. None of your business, anyhow, mister.” She switches on the main light and flinches when she sees the mean red welt on Javier’s face. “What the—what happened?”

The boy glances at the apartment wall, then returns to his stamps.

“Wolfman?”

Javier shakes his head, folds a tiny paper strip, and licks both sides. “That Clark guy came back. Mom’s working the graveyard shift at the hotel all this week, and he’s waiting for her. He asked me stuff about Wolfman, and I told him it wasn’t any of his business.” Javier attaches the hinge to the stamp. “It doesn’t hurt. I already dabbed stuff on it.” Luisa’s hand is already on the telephone. “Don’t phone Mom! She’ll rush back, there’ll be a massive fight, and the hotel’ll fire her like last time and the time before.” Luisa considers this, replaces the receiver, and starts for the door. “Don’t go around there! He’s sick in the head! He’ll get angry and wreck our stuff, then we’ll probably get evicted or something!
Please.”

Luisa looks away. She takes a deep breath. “Cocoa?”

“Yes, please.” The boy is determined not to cry, but his jaw aches with the effort. He wipes his eyes on his wrists. “Luisa?”

“Yes, Javi, you’re sleeping on my sofa tonight, it’s okay.”

8

Dom Grelsch’s office is a study in ordered chaos. The view across Third Avenue shows a wall of offices much like his own. An Incredible Hulk punching bag hangs from a metal gallows in the corner. The editor-in-chief of
Spyglass
magazine declares the Monday
A.M
. features meeting open by stabbing a stubby digit at Roland Jakes, a grizzled, prunelike man in an aloha shirt, flared Wranglers, and dying sandals. “Jakes.”

“I, uh, wanna follow up my
Terror in Sewerland
series, to tie in with
Jaws
fever. Dirk Melon, he can be a freelance hack, is found under 50th East Street on a routine maintenance inspection. Or rather his, uh, remains are. Dental records and tattered press pass ID him. Flesh torn from corpse in manner consistent with
Serrasalmus scapularis
—I thank you—queen bitch of all piranhas, imported by fish freaks, then flushed down toilets when the meat bill gets too big. I’ll phone Captain Vermin at City Hall and have him deny a spate of attacks on sewage workers. Taking notes, Luisa? Believe nothing till it’s officially denied. So c’mon, Grelsch. Time you gave me that raise?”

“Just be grateful your last paycheck didn’t
boing
. On my desk by eleven tomorrow, with a pic of one of those snappers. A question, Luisa?”

“Yes. Is there a new editorial policy no one’s told me about that excludes articles containing truth?”

“Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it is. Nancy, what’ve you got for me?”

Nancy O’Hagan has conservative clothes, a pickled complexion, and giraffe-size eyelashes that often come unstuck. “My trusty mole got a picture of the bar on the president’s airplane. ‘Wing-dings and gin slings on
Air Force One.’
The dumb money says the last drop’s been squeezed out of the old soak, but Auntie Nance thinks not.”

Grelsch considers. Telephones ring and typewriters clack in the background. “Okay, if nothing fresher comes up. Oh, and interview that ventriloquist puppet guy who lost his arms for
It Never Rains …
Nussbaum. You’re up.”

Jerry Nussbaum wipes dewdrops of choco-Popsicle from his beard, leans back, and triggers a landslide of papers. “The cops are chasing their own asses on the St. Christopher case, so how about a ‘Are
You
St. Christopher’s Next Slaying?’ piece? Profiles of all the snuffs to date and reconstructions of the victims’ last minutes. Where they were going, who they were meeting, what thoughts were going through their heads …”

“When St. Chris’s bullet went through their heads.” Roland Jakes laughs.

“Yeah, Jakes, let’s hope he’s attracted to flashy Hawaiian colors. Then later I’m seeing the colored streetcar driver the cops had on the rack last week. He’s suing the police department for wrongful arrest under the Civil Rights Act.”

“Could be a cover story. Luisa?”

“I met an atomic engineer.” Luisa ignores the indifference chilling the room. “An inspector at Seaboard Incorporated.” Nancy O’Hagan is doing her fingernails, driving Luisa to present her suspicions as facts. “He believes the new HYDRA nuclear reactor at Swannekke Island isn’t as safe as the official line. Isn’t safe at all, in fact. Its launch ceremony is this afternoon, so I want to drive out and see if I can turn anything up.”

“Hot shit, a technical launch ceremony,” exclaims Nussbaum. “What’s that rumbling sound, everyone? A Pulitzer Prize, rolling this way?”

“Oh, kiss my ass, Nussbaum.”

Jerry Nussbaum sighs. “In my wettest dreams …”

Luisa is torn between retaliation—
Yeah, and letting the worm know how much he riles you
—and ignoring him—
Yeah, and letting the worm get away with saying what the heck he wants
.

Dom Grelsch breaks her impasse. “Marketeers prove”—he twirls a pencil—”every scientific term you use represents two thousand readers putting down the magazine and turning on a rerun of
I Love Lucy.”

“Okay,” says Luisa. “How about ‘Seaboard Atom Bomb to Blow Buenas Yerbas to Kingdom Come!’?”

“Terrific, but you’ll need to prove it.”

“Like Jakes can prove his story?”

“Hey.” Grelsch’s pencil stops twirling. “Fictitious people eaten by fictitious fish can’t flay every last dollar off you in the courts or lean on your bank to pull the plug. A coast-to-coast operation like Seaboard Power Inc. has lawyers who can and, sweet Mother of God, you put a foot wrong, they
will.”

9

Luisa’s rust-orange VW Beetle travels a flat road toward a mile-long bridge connecting Yerbas Cape to Swannekke Island, whose power station dominates the lonely estuary. The bridge checkpoint is not quiet today. A hundred-strong demonstration lines the last stretch, chanting, “Swannekke C over our dead bodies!” A wall of police keeps them back from the line of nine or ten vehicles. Luisa reads the placards while she waits.
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING CANCER ISLAND
, warns one, another,
HELL, NO
!
WE WON’T GO
! and, enigmatically,
WHERE OH WHERE IS MARGO ROKER
?

A guard taps on the window; Luisa winds it down and sees her face in the guard’s sunglasses. “Luisa Rey,
Spyglass
magazine.”

“Press pass, ma’am.”

Luisa gets it from her purse. “Expecting trouble today?”

“Nah.” He consults a clipboard and hands back her pass. “Only our regular nature freaks from the trailer park. The college boys are vacationing where the surf’s better.”

As she crosses the bridge, the Swannekke B plant emerges from behind the older, grayer cooling towers of Swannekke A. Once again, Luisa wonders about Rufus Sixsmith.
Why wouldn’t he give me a contact number? Scientists can’t be telephobic. Why did no one in the super’s office in his apartment building even know his name? Scientists can’t have aliases
.

Twenty minutes later Luisa arrives at a colony of some two hundred luxury homes overlooking a sheltered bay. A hotel and golf course share the semiwooded slope below the power station. She leaves her Beetle in the R & D parking lot and looks at the power station’s abstract buildings half-hidden by the brow of the hill. An orderly row of palm trees rustles in the Pacific wind.

“Hi!” A Chinese-American woman strides up. “You look lost. Here for the launch?” Her stylish oxblood suit, flawless makeup, and sheer poise make Luisa feel shabby in her blueberry suede jacket. “Fay Li”—the woman offers her hand—”Seaboard PR.”

“Luisa Rey,
Spyglass
magazine.”

Fay Li’s handshake is powerful.
“Spyglass?
I didn’t
realize
—”

“—our editorial scope includes energy policy?”

Fay Li smiles. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a feisty magazine.”

Luisa invokes Dom Grelsch’s reliable deity. “Market research identifies a growing public who demand more substance. I was hired as
Spyglass’s
highbrow face.”

“Very glad you’ve come, Luisa, whatever your brow. Let me sign you in at Reception. Security insists on bag searches and the rest, but it’s no good having our guests treated like saboteurs. That’s why
I
was hired.”

10

Joe Napier watches a bank of CCTV screens covering a lecture theater, its adjacent corridors, and the Public Center grounds. He stands, fluffs up his special cushion, and sits on it.
Is it my imagination, or are my old wounds aching more of late?
His gaze flits from screen to screen to screen. One shows a technician doing a sound check; another, a TV crew discussing angles and light; Fay Li crossing the parking lot with a visitor; waitresses pouring wine into hundreds of glasses; a row of chairs beneath a banner reading
SWANNEKKE B
—
AN AMERICAN MIRACLE
.

The real miracle
, Joseph Napier ruminates,
was getting eleven out of twelve scientists to forget the existence of a nine-month inquiry
. A screen shows these very scientists drifting onstage, chatting amicably.
Like Grimaldi says, every conscience has an off switch somewhere
. Napier’s thoughts segue through memorable lines from the interviews that achieved the collective amnesia.
“Between us, Dr. Franklin, the Pentagon’s lawyers are itching to try out their shiny new Security Act. The whistle-blower is to be blacklisted in every salaried position in the land.”

A janitor adds another chair to the row onstage.

“The choice is simple, Dr. Moses. If you want Soviet technology to burn ahead of ours, leak this report to your Union of Concerned Scientists, fly to Moscow to collect your medal, but the CIA has told me to tell you, you won’t be needing a round-trip ticket.”