Martin
Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
Letters left between pages 6 and 7
30 January 2016
Dear Rachel
Thank you for saving me last night. Did you know that you snore? It’s not an unpleasant sound. It’s a soft nuzzling at air. When should we dance?
Henry
Dear Henry
I’m happy to save you any time. Did you know you steal the quilt? It was a warm night, so I let it pass. When do you want to dance?
Rachel
Dear Rachel
You snuggle, but it’s comforting, so I didn’t mind. George and Martin seem to be getting along quite well today. If we wait a week they’ll be getting along even better and they might come with us. Let’s dance next Saturday?
Henry
Dear Henry
I’m fairly certain it was you snuggling. And yes. Let’s dance on Saturday. I’d love that.
Rachel
Henry
her ears are exactly the right size
We decide to dance on Saturday at Bliss, a place with a DJ who, according to Lola, plays a pretty decent mix. A lot of people from school are starting to go there, and it sounds perfect, so I put a big circle around Saturday 6 February on the bookshop calendar.
The club lets in underage people. If you show ID on the way in, you get a yellow bracelet. No bracelet, no alcohol. It means George and Martin can come. I didn’t have to convince Rachel. I asked her and she said yes.
Bliss is at the north end of the city, near Parliament Station, so we’ve left the cars at home. It’s crowded. Rachel and George sit together. Martin sits in a seat behind them. Lola and I stand in the middle of the carriage.
‘You look good tonight,’ Lola says, touching the edge of my shirt. ‘You think Amy will be there?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t just dress up for Amy.’
Lola looks like she doesn’t believe me, but honestly I didn’t even think of Amy when I got ready tonight. Rachel and I got ready together at the bookshop, so I was too busy talking to her. ‘Amy hasn’t called me once to see if I’m okay since her dickhead boyfriend taped me to a pole. I might not take her back this time,’ I say, looking over at Rachel, who’s laughing with George.
‘She’s got a good smile, hasn’t she?’
‘Amy?’
‘Rachel,’ I say.
She looks over my shoulder and back at me. ‘Are the two of you . . .?’
‘I’m admiring her smile, that’s all. Rachel and I are purely platonic.’ She does look gorgeous, though. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t notice how gorgeous she is. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing for a best friend to notice about another best friend. She’s gorgeous, she’s brave, and she writes a good letter.
Lola waves in front of my face and repeats what she’s obviously said once before already. ‘I’m asking Hiroko to stay.’
This is terrible idea. ‘It’s a terrible, terrible idea,’ I tell her, but she says it’s a great idea and then starts listing her reasons – the more they record their songs, the more Lola knows The Hollows could really be something, they’ve got the offer of another paid gig. ‘That’s three paid gigs,’ she says. ‘She doesn’t need to study when we’re playing professionally already.’
‘She wants to study music. You can’t ask her not to go.’
‘I could just float the idea,’ Lola says as the train stops and the doors open. She walks out ahead of me, moving fast to find Hiroko, and to get away from what I’m calling after her. ‘It’s good advice!’
‘What’s good advice?’ Rachel asks as we walk towards the club. I fill her in on Lola’s plan to ask Hiroko to stay, and her expression lets me know she agrees with me. ‘Bad idea,’ she says. ‘Very bad idea.’
‘Try telling Lola that,’ I say, as we reach Bliss and get into line.
I try not to look at her because it’s weird to check out your best friend, but I can’t stop noticing things that I can’t believe I’ve missed all these years. Her ears are exactly the right size. Her head is exactly the right shape. She smells fantastic.
‘What?’ she asks.
‘Your head,’ I tell her, ‘is a very pleasing shape.’
‘Likewise,’ she says, and smiles.
The music’s loud. We walk to the dance floor and start moving. Martin and George sit at a table and watch, and Lola’s off to the side talking to Hiroko, so it’s just Rachel and me.
I love dancing. It’s true I’m no good at it, but it’s also true I don’t give a shit. Rachel and I gravitate towards each other when Iggy Pop’s ‘Sister Midnight’ comes on. The DJ is classic Lola – all the songs we danced to in her bedroom and in the garage.
Fast song after fast song plays, and Rachel and I move around each other, yelling every now and then, but the words not reaching each other over the noise. Every time I get in close to her I want to stay longer. I find myself wondering what this Joel is like, and if she’s still thinking about him.
A slow Radiohead song comes on eventually, and Rachel and I look at each other awkwardly for second or two, and then I think fuck it. We’re friends. I can dance close to her if I want.
It’s easier to talk because my mouth is close to her ear. I tell her I’ve missed her, and she asks me what specifically I’ve missed. ‘I got all my scientific facts from you, for one thing. ‘I’m a total brain because of the information you gave me. Ask me a question. I’ll prove it.’
‘Name the nine planets,’ she says.
She watches me thinking. ‘You look like you’re in pain.’
‘That’s my look of absolute genius. You don’t have a similar look?’
‘I hope not,’ she says.
‘Well, that probably means you’re not an absolute genius. Okay. Nine planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.’
‘That’s eight.’
‘Thanks to information you gave me in Year 7, I know that was a trick question. There are only eight planets. Pluto is a dwarf planet.’
‘Impressive,’ she says. ‘You should kiss me.’
‘I should name the eight planets more often. Did I hear you right?’ I ask. ‘You want me to kiss you?’
She nods, and I pull back so I’m looking at her face, at her mouth, at her ears and freckles and neck and I realise that this is not an idea that I find terrible. I find it far from terrible. ‘It wouldn’t make things complicated?’ I ask, and instead of answering she points over my shoulder.
I follow the line of her finger and see Amy, and I realise that Rachel’s not asking me to kiss her how I think she’s asking me to kiss her and I’m disappointed at the same time that I’m relieved.
‘You really want her back?’ Rachel asks, but she doesn’t wait for my answer. Instead, she loops her hands around my neck. ‘Relax. We’re just making her jealous,’ she says.
And then she kisses me. For a very long time.
Rachel
sometimes you need the poets
I’ve been waiting for as long as I can remember to kiss Henry and I’m sick of waiting and I know as soon as I see Amy walk into the club that this could be my one and only chance.
She’s wearing a killer dress – her hair is perfect. Greg is nowhere to be seen. My guess is she’s here to make sure Henry’s not going anywhere. My other guess is that he told her where to find him tonight.
She didn’t turn up here by coincidence and that means they’ll be together again soon. Our letters will stop, or slow. The nights in the bookstore will end along with nights when we dance together.
‘You really want her back?’ I ask Henry, and the answer is in his body. The second he spots her, he turns in her direction. I step in close, and he looks surprised and worried so I tell him to relax. ‘We’re just making her jealous.’
I keep my eyes closed, but the lights seem to have gotten under my lids, and there’s a flickering show happening in the darkness. Thoughts turn in the k
aleidoscope, in no particular order – why would Amy keep leaving someone who kissed like this? Cal should have lived to kiss a girl. What is Henry thinking? When should we stop?
I pull away first. I try to read Henry’s expression – confused, worried, thrilled – all three maybe. ‘Is she still watching?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ he says, and I can feel his breath as he answers.
‘You’ll have her back within the week,’ I tell him, and try not to sound unhappy.
I tell Henry it’ll be better for the plan if we leave now, and together. I don’t want to stay here with him looking at her, not after that kiss. I can’t see Lola anywhere or George or Martin, so we text to let them know that we’re leaving, and then I pull Henry towards the exit.
We decide to walk home. We’re less than an hour away, and if we get tired we’ll get a taxi. There are loads of people on the street. This is the time that I love the city. The heat is soft. I hate it in the day when the sun bounces off concrete.
We walk through the streets without talking, the kiss making things awkward between us. I decide to put him out of his misery. ‘It didn’t mean anything, Henry. I was helping you out. It’s not worth being embarrassed about small things.’
I try to explain what it’s like to see your brother on the beach, looking empty like Cal did. ‘Nothing seems important after that. Or, the small things don’t seem important,’ I say, trying to convince myself at the same time.
‘I disagree,’ he says.
‘You don’t know what I know.’
‘I disagree that love and sex are the small things. I don’t need to have seen a dead body to know I’m right about that.’
We take the short cut through the park. The sprinklers are on, and we rest near one and hold our legs over the soft specks.
Henry points to the park light and the moths that are flying around it. ‘What is it about the light?’ he asks, and I tell him that moths are phototactic.
‘Phototaxis is when something automatically moves to or away from light. Moths are positively phototactic – they’re attracted to light.’
‘But why?’ he asks.
‘No one knows for certain. Some people think that migrating moths use the night sky to navigate. They follow the lights in the sky.’
‘But they’re flying around a streetlight.’
‘They’ve been using the moon as a guide, flying towards it, but never expecting to reach it, and when they hit the lamp or the fire, they get confused. They think it could be the moon.’
‘It’s nothing like the moon,’ he says.
‘But they don’t know that.’
We sit here for a long time. Henry takes off his shoes and socks to feel the water on his feet. We look at the moths. Henry points out the water’s shadow on the grass, the blackbird singing at night, the lights in the buildings. He’s picking up parts of the world and showing them to me, saying, See? It’s beautiful.
We get back to the bookstore around two. George and Martin and Lola took a taxi, so they’re home ahead of us. George and Martin are talking in the reading garden. Lola is zonked out on the fiction couch. According to George, Hiroko didn’t take it well when Lola ordered her to stay in the country. ‘Lola drank a lot, very quickly,’ she says.
I put a glass of water next to the couch, and leave her sleeping.
I text Rose and tell her I’m sleeping here and she texts back a winking smile. I think about the kiss and how Henry hasn’t spoken about Amy once since we left the club, and I’m hopeful. I think about the amount of times he’s spoken about her in the past, and I’m not.
Henry’s already lying on the floor when I put down my phone. I lie close beside him. ‘Remember how your dad used to tell us the place was haunted?’ I ask, as we listen to the sounds in the store.
‘Second-hand books are haunted according to him. Ghosts in the pages.’
‘You believe in them,’ I say.
‘I don’t disbelieve in them. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
‘Hamlet?’ I ask.
‘Very good,’ he says, and I tell him it’s underlined in the Letter Library.
‘So maybe there’s something to it,’ he says.
‘Maybe,’ I say, thinking about the arrow on Sea.
‘I’ve seen Cal since he died,’ I tell him. ‘He’s a hallucination but he seems so real. I can actually smell apple gum.’
‘Is that possible?’ he asks, and I tell him it is.
‘You can hallucinate sights and smells.’
‘And you’re sure he’s not a ghost? You never thought he might be?’
‘I know he’s not, but I can’t help hoping that he is. Sometimes a television show will come on, one that he loved, and I’ll get so sad because he’ll never know how it ends. I think, if he’s a ghost, then at least he can watch Game of Thrones.’
‘Maybe there’s Game of Thrones on permanent stream wherever he is.’
‘That’s what we think because we can’t imagine what it’s like to not exist.’
He stretches out his arm so I can lie on it, and that makes the thought of not existing slightly less terrifying.
‘You’re warm,’ he says.
‘It’s a warm night,’ I say.
‘Cal believed in them,’ he says, and we’re back to ghosts.
‘Cal believed in all kinds of things,’ I say, and he laughs as if he’s remembering those Sunday-night dinners at our place.
‘He used to love messing with my head, telling me the theories of time,’ he says. ‘Like the growing block universe theory. I still don’t understand it.’
‘The growing block universe theory of time states that the past and present are happening simultaneously,’ I say, thinking about that night when Cal was explaining it to us. He was reading all kinds of books, like Objective Becoming by Bradford Skow. That book told the reader to imagine time as another dimension, a dimension like space. It told them to imagine they could see the universe from above, get outside the universe and look down. If they could do that, then they’d see all the events of their life spread out like they see things in space spread out. I imagined time as like the landscape seen from a plane.
‘Cal believed in the growing block universe. The one that says the past and present are real, but the future hasn’t happened yet,’ I say. ‘He really believed that the past was place.’
‘You don’t think it’s true?’ Henry asks.
‘I’ve never been outside the universe; I couldn’t say for certain.’
Cal was convinced. ‘Think of it like this,’ Cal had said. ‘This house we’re in doesn’t stop existing just because we leave it, and the past doesn’t either.’
‘It’s a nice thought,’ I say. ‘That the things we love still exist somewhere.’
‘He told me about a theory of time where the future existed too, as well as the past,’ Henry says.
‘It’s called the block universe theory. The past, present and future all exist at the same time. We’re just moving forward through time to the next event that’s waiting for us.’
‘If my future already exists somewhere, I don’t want to know. I want to live under the illusion that I have complete control over my life so I’m going with the growing block universe theory,’ Henry says.
‘I want that too.’
I want a lot of things tonight. I want to touch the scar I’ve just noticed on Henry’s chin. I want to kiss him again, but tell him I mean it. I think I knew when I came back to the city that this moment would come. The moment when I wouldn’t feel overwhelmed by sadness for Cal, when I’d feel overwhelmed by Henry.
‘If our lives are there, in the future, already mapped,’ Henry says, ‘then who writes them? Because if the future is set, then someone must plan that future, and with seven billion people in the world, that’s impossible. The logistics alone rule it out.’
‘You think we’re ruled by chance, then.’
‘I’m convinced
of it.’
‘I want to believe that. Because if we’re not ruled by chance, then Cal was always going to die on that day and he was born with a terrible future.’
Henry tightens his arm around me and says people could go mad looking for the answers. He says he read a story, by Borges, about people looking for the answers, looking for a book that contained them.
‘Did they find it?’
‘The answers don’t exist. You know that.’
I tell Henry about Cal’s last days, about the reasons I felt so cheated. Looking back, those days leading up to his death were beautiful and thick with meaning. The light felt different. Milk gold. He and I spent more time talking about the future than we’d ever done.
I remember one night he came into my room. He said, ‘Shhh,’ and waved for me to follow. We went to the water, and walked along the edge, and saw a silver fish, too big for the shallows. We pushed it gently out to sea. The silver against the dark velvet-blue seems unreal to me now, but it happened.
Cal told me the night that we saw them he couldn’t sleep for thinking about all the things he wanted to see – the Midnight Sun and its opposite, the Polar Night. He wanted to see the sun stay below the horizon. He wanted to see the light reflected off the sea and the snow, see everything coated in blue.
I tell Henry how we talked our way over the whole world, all the places we wanted to dive – Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, Malaysia, Japan, Antarctica.
‘After, at the funeral, I thought that it was so cruel, that in the month before he died, he thought so much about the life he wanted to have.’
I look up and see that tear-shaped sun. We’re exactly where we were before. Exactly in alignment.
‘I don’t know how to talk to you about this,’ Henry says, ‘because I’ve never been where you are. But I will be where you are, at some stage in the future, because it’s impossible for me not to be. And it seems to me as though you’re looking at it the wrong way around.’