The Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Author:David Mitchell [Mitchell, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary

CHAPTER 11

OH, RAPTURE.

An aging priest, I fear this most, this rapture. Evangelical Christians claimed rapture-sorry, Rapture-from Revelations, promising that the good would be sucked skyward When The Time Came. The truth is, the good disappear even earlier than that-lovely, ordinary Catholics are sucked out of my church and into the arms of these new, fresh-faced teetotaling missionaries. The young are thunderstruck, the old relieved; what a glorious, dramatic, prospect this Rapture is.

But they've not seen previous Raptures. I remember when brave and good Alaskans began disappearing before. The Japanese immigrants were the first to go; overnight, it seemed, they began disappearing from storefronts and sidewalks in Anchorage, shipped well south to California. Native Alaskans vanished, too. As Gurley had said, Aleuts had been relocated by the military, but in a most disorienting fashion: they were taken from their weatherworn, mostly treeless islands and deposited in the hush and dark of a thick southeastern Alaska forest.

And they were the lucky ones: other Aleuts, farther out on the Chain, were dragged from their homes by Japanese soldiers and taken back to Japan, where they spent the remainder of the war. Close to half died there.

That was rapture; that was when governments presumed to play God and did so with requisite carelessness. Anything in Alaska could be done if required by the war (or whim, the two terms so close, it seems now). Homes, buildings, towns, and airports were taken up and dropped elsewhere.

That was when the end of the world was nigh, not now as penny-ante preachers would have us believe. I believed then, I most definitely did. Thunderous hellfire. The dead blanketing the earth. Plague and pestilence: upon our return to Anchorage, Gurley and I waited anxiously for test results-his own, mine, and of the two fleas Gurley had “captured.”

Those were the days of Armageddon, when one horror slipped into the next, from the threat of your skin erupting with pox to that of a spy approaching from behind and slipping a wire around your throat.

It was this last threat Gurley and I returned to. As nervous as we were about finding ourselves on the front lines of the germ war, a small part of us-a very small part-had also been pleased that we would be back in the spotlight.

But our hopes were dashed, as the Army unfailingly would do. Gurley was greeted with new bulletins announcing that the germ warfare threat was now believed to be traveling our way by both balloon and human means: saboteurs might even now be in our midst, ready to release animals and insects ridden with disease, or perhaps, in the manner of kamikaze pilots, they had been infected themselves, their only goal to ensure they did not die alone.

Alaska was thought to be a likely point of entry, its vastness a perfect cloak for the solitary spy. It sounds mad now, doesn't it? But there we were, with those bulletins, with word of captured Japanese documents and messages describing one-and two-man submarines, paratroopers dropped from impossible altitudes, frogmen leaping from the surf.

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