Cloud Atlas (54 page)

I told her it was an uncannily accurate impression.

A pause. “I didn’t say anything.”

Ernie turned round and yelled in surprise. When I looked in the mirror and saw Mr. Meeks twitching in the rearmost compartment of the vehicle, I nearly drove us off the road. “How—” I began. “When—who—”

“Mr. Meeks!” cooed Veronica. “What a nice surprise.”

“A surprise?” I said. “He’s broken the laws of ruddy physics!”

“We can’t very well do a U-ie back to Hull,” Ernie stated, “and it’s too cold to drop him off. He’d be an ice block by morning.”

“We’ve run away from Aurora House, Mr. Meeks,” Veronica explained.

“I know,” the sozzled old duffer bleated, “I know.”

“All for one and one for all, is it?”

Mr. Meeks leaked a giggle, sucked toffees, and hummed “The British Grenadiers” as the Range Rover wolfed down the northward miles.

A sign—
PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY IN SCOTCH CROSS
—shone in the headlights. Ernie had ended our route plan here with a big red X, and now I saw why. An all-night petrol station servicing an A-road—next door to a pub called the Hanged Edward. Midnight was long gone, but the lights were still on. “Park in the pub. I’ll go and get us a can of petrol so nobody’ll spot us. Then my vote’s for a swift pint to celebrate a job well done. Silly Johns left his jacket in the car, and in the jacket—tra-la.” Ernie flashed a wallet the size of my briefcase. “I’m sure he can stand us a round.”

“I know!”
enthused Mr. Meeks. “I know!”

“A Drambuie and soda,” Veronica decided, “would hit the spot.”

Ernie was back in five minutes carrying the can. “No bother.” He siphoned the petrol into the tank, then the four of us walked across the car park to the Hanged Edward. “A crisp night,” remarked Ernie, offering his arm to Veronica. It was ruddy freezing, and I couldn’t stop shivering. “A beautiful moon, Ernest,” added Veronica, looping hers through his. “What a splendid night for an elopement!” She giggled like a sixteen-year-old. I screwed the lid down on my old demon, Jealousy. Mr. Meeks was wobbly, so I supported him as far as the door, where a blackboard advertised “The Massive Match!” In the warm cave inside, a crowd watched TV soccer in a distant fluorescent time zone. In the eighty-first minute England was a goal down to Scotland. Nobody even noticed us. England playing Scotland, abroad, in the deep midwinter—is it World Cup qualifier time again already? Talk about Rip van Ruddy Winkle.

I’m no fan of television pubs, but at least there was no thumpy-thumpy-thump acidic music, and that evening freedom was the sweetest commodity. A sheepdog made room for us on a fireside pew. Ernie ordered the drinks because he said my accent was too southern and they might spit in my glass. I had a double Kilmagoon and the most expensive cigar the bar could muster, Veronica ordered her Drambuie and soda, Mr. Meeks a ginger beer, and Ernie a pint of Angry Bastard bitter. The barman didn’t take his eyes off the TV—he got our drinks by sense of touch alone. Just as we took our seats in an alcove, a cyclone of despair swept through the bar. England had been awarded a penalty. Tribalism electrified the audience.

“I’d like to check my route. Ernie, the map if you will.”

“You had it last.”

“Oh. Must be in …” My room. Extreme close-up, Director Lars, of Cavendish realizing his fateful mistake. I had left the map on my bed. For Nurse Noakes. With our route marked out in felt pen. “… the car … oh, God. I think we had better drink up and move on.”

“But we’ve only just started this round.”

I swallowed hard. “About the, er, map …” I checked my watch and calculated distances and speeds.

Ernie was catching on. “What about the map?”

My answer was drowned in a howl of tribal grief. England had equalized. And at that
exact
moment, I fib not, Withers looked in. His Gestapo eyes settled on us. Not a happy man. Johns Hotchkiss appeared beside him, saw us, and he looked very happy indeed. He reached for his mobile phone to summon his angels of vengeance. A third lout with oil-stained overalls completed the posse, but it appeared Nurse Noakes had so far prevailed on Johns Hotchkiss to leave the police out of it. The oily lout’s identity I was never to discover, but I knew right then: the game was up.

Veronica sighed a frail sigh. “I had so hoped to see,” she half-sang, “the wild mountain thyme, all across the blooming heather, and it’s go, lassie, go …”

A drug-addled semilife of restraints and daytime programs lay ahead. Mr. Meeks stood up to go with our jailer.

He let out a biblical bellow. (Lars: zoom the camera in from the outside car park, across the busy bar, and right down between Mr. Meeks’s rotted tonsils.) The TV viewers dropped their conversations, spilt their drinks, and looked. Even Withers was stopped in his tracks. The octogenarian leapt onto the bar, like Astaire in his prime, and roared this SOS to his universal fraternity, “Are there nor
trrruuue Scortsmen
in tha
hooossse?”

A whole sentence! Ernie, Veronica, and I were stunned as mullets.

High drama. Nobody stirred.

Mr. Meeks pointed at Withers with skeletal forefinger and intoned this ancient curse: “Those there English gerrrru
n
t
s
are trampling o’er ma God-gi’en
rrraights!
Theeve used me an’ ma pals morst
dírely
an’ we’re inneed of a wee
assistance!”

Withers growled at us: “Come quiet and face your punishments.”

Our captor’s southern Englishness was out! A rocker rose like Poseidon and flexed his knuckles. A crane operator stood by him. A sharky-chinned man in a thousand-quid suit. An axwoman with the scars to prove it.

The TV was switched off.

A Highlander spoke softly: “Aye, laddie. We’ll nort let ye doone.”

Withers assessed the stage and went for
a get real!
smirk. “These men are car thieves.”

“You a copper?” The axwoman advanced.

“Show us your badge then.” The crane operator advanced.

“Aw, you’re full o’ shite, man,” spat Poseidon.

Coolheadedness might have lost us the day, but Johns Hotchkiss scored a fatal own goal. Finding his way blocked by a pool cue, he prefixed his distress with “Now you just look here, you
grebo
, you can go shag your bloody sporran if you think—” One of his teeth splashed into my Kilmagoon, fifteen feet away. (I fished the tooth out to keep as proof of this unlikely claim, otherwise no one will ever believe me.) Withers caught and snapped an incoming wrist, hurled a wee Krankie over the pool table, but the ogre was one and his enraged foes legion. Oh, the ensuing scene was Trafalgaresque. I must admit, the sight of that brute being brutalized was not wholly unpleasant, but when Withers hit the deck and disfiguring blows began to fall, I proposed a tactful exit stage left to our borrowed vehicle. We departed via the back and scuttled over the blustery car park as fast as our legs, whose combined age well exceeded three centuries, could carry us. I drove. North.

Where all this will end, I do not know.

THE END

Very well, dear Reader, you deserve an epilogue if you’ve stayed with me this far. My ghastly ordeal touched down in this spotless Edinburgh rooming house, kept by a discreet widow from the Isle of Man. After the brawl at the Hanged Edward, we four blind mice drove to Glasgow, where Ernie knows a bent copper who can take care of the Hotchkiss vehicle. Here our fellowship parted. Ernie, Veronica, and Mr. Meeks waved me off at the station. Ernie promised to take the flak if the law were ever to catch up, as he’s too old to stand trial, which is ruddy civilized of him. He and Veronica were headed to a Hebridean location where Ernie’s handyman-preacher-cousin does up falling-down crofts for Russian mafiosi and German enthusiasts of the Gaelic tongue. I offer my secular prayers for their well-being. Mr. Meeks was to be deposited in a public library with a “Please Look After This Bear” tag, but I suspect Ernie and Veronica will take him with them. After my arrival at Widow Manx’s, I slept under my goosedown quilt as sound as King Arthur on the Blessed Isle. Why didn’t I get on the first train south to London, there and then? I’m still not sure. Maybe I recall Denholme’s remark about life beyond the M25. I shall never know what part he played in my incarceration, but he was right—London darkens the map like England’s bowel polyp. There is a whole country up here.

I looked up Mrs. Latham’s home number at the library. Our telephone reunion was a moving moment. Of course, Mrs. Latham smothered her emotion by lambasting me, before filling me in on my missing weeks. The Hoggins Hydra had ripped the office apart when I failed to show for my three o’clock castration, but years of financial brinkmanship had stood my redoubtable pit prop in good stead. She had captured the vandalism on a cunning video camera supplied by her nephew. The Hogginses were thus restrained: steer clear of Timothy Cavendish, Mrs. Latham warned, or this footage will appear on the Internet and your various probations shall hatch into prison sentences. Thus they were prevailed upon to accept an equitable proposal cutting them into future royalties. (I suspect they had a sneaking admiration for my lady bulldog’s cool nerves.) The building management used my disappearance—and the trashing of my suite—as an excuse to turf us out. Even as I write, my former premises are being turned into a Hard Rock Cafe for homesick Americans. Cavendish Publishing is currently run from a house owned by my secretary’s eldest nephew, who resides in Tangier. Now for the best news: a Hollywood studio has optioned
Knuckle
Sandwich—The Movie
for a figure as senselessly big as the number on a bar code. A lot of the money will go to the Hogginses, but for the first time since I was twenty-two, I am flush.

Mrs. Latham sorted out my bank cards, etc., and I am designing the future on beer mats, like Churchill and Stalin at Yalta, and I must say the future is not too shabby. I shall find a hungry ghostwriter to turn these notes you’ve been reading into a film script of my own. Well, sod it all, if Dermot “Duster” Hoggins can write a bestseller and have a film made, why the ruddy hell not Timothy “Lazarus” Cavendish? Put Nurse Noakes in the book, the dock, and on the block. The woman was sincere—bigots mostly are—but no less dangerous for that, and she shall be named and shamed. The minor matter of Johns Hotchkiss’s vehicle loan needs to be handled with delicacy, but fouler fish have been fried. Mrs. Latham got on the e-mail to Hilary V. Hush to express our interest in
Half-Lives
, and the postman delivered part two not an hour ago. A photo was enclosed, and it turns out the V is for Vincent! And what a lard-bucket! I’m no Chippendale myself, but Hilary has the girth to fill not two but three airline economy seats. I’ll find out if Luisa Rey is still alive in a corner of the Whistling Thistle, my de facto office and a wrecked galleon of a back-alley tavern where Mary, Queen of Scots, summoned the devil to assist her cause. The landlord, whose double measures would be quadruples in management-consulted Londinium, swears he sees Her ill-starred Majesty, regularly.
In vino veritas
.

That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all. Outside, fat snowflakes are falling on slate roofs and granite walls. Like Solzhenitsyn laboring in Vermont, I shall beaver away in exile, far from the city that knitted my bones.

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

40

The black sea roars in. Its coldness shocks Luisa’s senses back to life. Her VW’s rear struck the water at forty-five degrees, so the seat saved her spine, but the car now swings upside down. She is trussed by her seat belt inches from the windshield.
Get out, or die here
. Luisa panics, breathes a lungful of water, and struggles into a pocket of air, coughing.
Unhook this belt
. She squirms and jackknifes up to the belt lock.
Release button
. It doesn’t click. The car half-somersaults deeper, and with a wrenching noise, a giant squid-shaped air bubble flies away. Luisa stabs the button, frantic, and the strap drifts free.
More air
. She finds an air pocket trapped beneath a windshield of dark water. The sea’s mass jams the door shut.
Roll down the window
. It inches halfway and jams,
right where it always jams
. Luisa shimmies around, squeezes her head, shoulders, and torso through the gap.

Sixsmith’s Report!

She pulls herself back into the sinking vehicle.
Can’t see a damn thing. A plastic trash bag. Wedged under the seat
. She doubles up in the confined space … 
It’s here
. She hauls, like a woman hauling a sack of rocks. She feeds herself feetfirst back out the window, but the report is too fat. The sinking car drags Luisa down. Her lungs ache now. The sodden papers have quadrupled their weight. The trash bag is through the window, but as she kicks and struggles Luisa feels a lightening. Hundreds of pages spin free from the vanilla binder, wheeling wherever the sea will take them, wheeling around her,
playing cards in
Alice. She kicks off her shoes. Her lungs shriek, curse, beg. Every pulse is a thump in Luisa’s ears.
Which way is up?
The water is too murky to guess.
Up is away from the car
. Her lungs will collapse in another moment.
Where’s the car?
Luisa realizes she has paid for the Sixsmith Report with her life.

41

Isaac Sachs looks down on a brilliant Pennsylvania morning. Labyrinthine suburbs of ivory mansionettes and silk lawns inset with turquoise swimming pools. The executive-jet window is cool against his face. Six feet directly beneath his seat is a suitcase in the baggage hold containing enough C-4 to turn an airplane into a meteor.
So
, thinks Sachs,
you obeyed your conscience. Luisa Rey has the Sixsmith Report
. He recollects as many details of her face as he can.
Do you feel doubt? Relief? Fear? Righteousness?

A premonition I’ll never see her again
.

Alberto Grimaldi, the man he has double-crossed, is laughing at an aide’s remark. The hostess passes with a tray of clinking drinks. Sachs retreats into his notebook, where he writes the following sentences.

• Exposition: the workings of the actual past
  +
  the
  virtual
  past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the
  Titanic.
  The disaster as it
  actually
  occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish
  +
  the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a
  virtual
  sinking of the
  Titanic,
  created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction—in short, belief—grows ever “truer.” The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming
  +
  ever more problematic to access
  +
  reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening
  +
  ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent
  .
  
• The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies
  +
  legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks
  +
  is
  the
  right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune)
  
• Symmetry demands an actual
  +
  virtual
  future,
  too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up—a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies
  +
  daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future
  +
  the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone
  .
  
• Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors
  +
  shadows—the actual past—from another such simulacrum—the actual future?
  
• One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each “shell” (the present) encased inside a nest of “shells” (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we
  perceive
  as the virtual past. The doll of “now” likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we
  perceive
  as the virtual future
  .
  
• Proposition: I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey
  .
  

The detonator is triggered. The C-4 ignites. The jet is engulfed by a fireball. The jet’s metals, plastics, circuitry, its passengers, their bones, clothes, notebooks, and brains all lose definition in flames exceeding 1200 degrees C. The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts. Now the bifurcation of these two pasts will begin.

42

“Betty and Frank needed to shore up their finances,” Lloyd Hooks tells his breakfast audience in the Swannekke Hotel. A circle of neophytes and acolytes pays keen attention to the Presidential Energy Guru. “So they decide Betty’d go on the game to get a little cash in hand. Night comes around, Frank drives Betty over to Whore Lane to ply her new trade. ’Hey, Frank,’ says Betty, from the sidewalk. ’How much should I charge?’ Frank does the math and tells her, ’A hundred bucks for the whole shebang.’ So Betty gets out, and Frank parks down a quiet alley. Pretty soon this guy drives up in his beat-up old Chrysler and propositions Betty: ’How much for all night, sugar?’ Betty says, ’Hundred dollars.’ The guy says, ‘I only got thirty dollars. What’ll thirty buy me?’ So Betty dashes around to Frank and asks him. Frank says, ‘Tell him thirty dollars buys a hand job.’ So Betty goes back to the guy—”

Lloyd Hooks notices Bill Smoke in the background. Bill Smoke raises one, two, three fingers; the three fingers become a fist; the fist becomes a slashing gesture.
Alberto Grimaldi, dead; Isaac Sachs, dead; Luisa Rey, dead. Swindler, sneak, snoop
. Hooks’s eyes tell Smoke he has understood, and a figment from a Greek myth surfaces in his mind.
The sacred grove of Diana was guarded by a warrior priest on whom luxury was lavished but whose tenure was earned by slaying his predecessor. When he slept, it was at the peril of his life. Grimaldi, you dozed for too long
.

“So, anyway, Betty goes back to the guy and says his thirty’ll buy a hand job, take it or leave it. The guy says, ‘Okay, sugar, jump in, I’ll take the hand job. Is there a quiet alley around here?’ Betty has him drive around the corner to Frank’s alley, and the guy unbelts his pants to reveal the most—y’ know—gargantuan schlong. ‘Wait
up
!’ gasps Betty. ‘I’ll be right back.’ She jumps out of the guy’s car and knocks on Frank’s window. Frank lowers the window, ‘What
now?’ “
Hooks pauses for the punch line. “Betty says, ‘Frank, hey, Frank, lend this guy seventy dollars!’ ”

The men who would be board members cackle like hyenas.
Whoever said money can’t buy you happiness
, Lloyd Hooks thinks, basking,
obviously didn’t have enough of the stuff
.

43

Through binoculars Hester Van Zandt watches the divers on their launch. An unhappy-looking barefoot teenager in a poncho ambles along the beach and pats Hester’s mongrel. “They found the car yet, Hester? Channel’s pretty deep at that point. That’s why the fishing’s so good there.”

“Hard to be sure at this distance.”

“Kinda ironic to drown in the sea you’re polluting. The guard’s kinda got the hots for me. Told me it was a drunk driver, a woman, ’bout four in the morning.”

“Swannekke Bridge comes under the same special security remit as the island. Seaboard can say what they like. No one’ll cross-check their story.”

The teenager yawns. “D’you s’pose she drowned in her car, the woman? Or d’you think she got out and kinda drowned later?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“If she was drunk enough to drive through a railing, she couldn’t have made it to the shore.”

“Who knows?”

“Gross way to die.” The teenager yawns and walks off. Hester trudges back to her trailer. Milton the Native American sits on its step, drinking from a milk carton. He wipes his mouth and tells her, “Wonder Woman’s awake.”

Hester steps around Milton and asks the woman on the sofa how she is feeling.

“Lucky to be alive,” answers Luisa Rey, “full of muffins, and drier. Thanks for the loan of your clothes.”

“Lucky we’re the same size. Divers are looking for your car.”

“The Sixsmith Report, not my car. My body would be a bonus.”

Milton locks the door. “So you crashed through a barrier, dropped into the sea, got out of a sinking car, and swam three hundred yards to shore, with no injuries worse than mild bruising.”

“It hurts plenty when I think of my insurance claim.”

Hester sits down. “What’s your next move?”

“Well, first I need to go back to my apartment and get a few things. Then I’ll go stay with my mother, on Ewingsville Hill. Then … back to square one. I can’t get the police or my editor interested in what’s happening on Swannekke without the report.”

“Will you be safe at your mother’s?”

“As long as Seaboard thinks I’m dead, Joe Napier won’t come looking. When they learn I’m not …” She shrugs, having gained an armor of fatalism from the events of the last six hours. “Altogether safe, possibly not. An acceptable degree of risk. I don’t do this sort of thing often enough to be an expert.”

Milton digs his thumbs into his pockets. “I’ll drive you back to Buenas Yerbas. Gimme a minute, I’ll go call a friend and get him to bring his pickup over.”

“Good guy,” says Luisa, after he’s left.

“I’d trust Milton with my life,” answers Hester.

44

Milton strides over to the flyblown general store that services the campsite, trailer park, beachgoers, traffic to Swannekke, and the isolated houses hereabouts. An Eagles song comes on a radio behind the counter. Milton feeds a dime into the phone, checks the walls for ears, and dials in a number from memory. Water vapor rises from the Swannekke cooling towers like malign genies. Pylons march north to Buenas Yerbas and south to Los Angeles.
Funny
, thinks Milton.
Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible
. The phone is answered. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, Napier? It’s me. Listen, about a woman called Luisa
Rey
. Well, suppose she isn’t? Suppose she’s still walking around eating Popsicles and paying utility bills? Would her whereabouts be worth anything to you? Yeah? How much? No,
you
name a figure. Okay, double that … No? Nice talking with you, Napier, I gotta go and”—Milton smirks—”the usual account within one working day, if
you please
. Right. What? No, no one else has seen her, only Crazy Van Zandt. No. She did mention it, but it’s in the bottom of the deep blue sea. Quite sure. Fish food. Course not, my exclusives are for your ears only … Uh-huh, I’m driving her back to her apartment, then she’s going to her mother’s … Okay, I’ll make it an hour. The usual account. One working day.”

45

Luisa opens her front door to the sounds of a Sunday ball game and the smell of popcorn. “Since when did I say you could fry oil?” she calls through to Javier. “Why are the blinds all down?”

Javier bounces down the hallway, grinning. “Hi, Luisa! Your uncle Joe made the popcorn. We’re watching Giants versus Dodgers. Why are you dressed like an old woman?”