Cloud Atlas, Page 52

  Goose checked my eyes for sentience & kissed my lips. “Your turn to be eaten, dear Adam. You were no more gullible than any other of my patrons.” My trunk lid swung open. Goose counted through my pocketbook, sneered, found the emerald from von Weiss & examined it through an eyepiece. He was unimpressed. The fiend untied the bundles of documents relating to the Busby estate & tore open the sealed envelopes in search of banknotes. I heard him count my modest supply. He tapped my trunk for secret compartments, but he found none, for there are none. Lastly, he snipped the buttons from my waistcoat.

  Goose addressed me through my delirium, as one might address an unsatisfactory tool. “Frankly, I am disappointed. I have known Irish navvies with more pounds to their name. Your cache scarcely covers my arsenick & opiate. If Mrs. Horrox had not donated her hoard of black pearls to my worthy cause, poor Goose’s goose would be basted & cooked! Well, it is time for us to part. You will be dead within the hour & for me, ’tis hey, ho! for the open road.”

  My next cogent remembrance is of drowning in salt water so bright it hurt. Had Boerhaave found my body & thrown me overboard to ensure my silence & avoid tiresome procedures with the American consul? My mind was still active & as such might yet exercise some say in my destiny. Consent to drown, or attempt to swim? Drowning was by far the least troublesome option, so I cast about for a dying thought & settled on Tilda, waving off the Belle-Hoxie from Silvaplana Wharf so many months before with Jackson shouting, “Papa! Bring me back a kangaroo’s paw!”

  The thought of never more seeing them was so distressing, I elected to swim & found myself not in the sea but curled on deck, vomiting profusely & trembling violently with fever, aches, cramps, pinches. Autua was holding me (he had forced a bucketful of brine down me to “flush out” the poison). I retched & retched. Boerhaave shoved his way through the crowd of onlooking stevedores & seamen, snarling, “I told you once, nigger, that Yankee’s no concern of yours! & if a direct order won’t convince you—” Though the sun half-blinded me, I saw the first mate land one brutal kick in Autua’s ribs & launch another. Autua gripped the atrabilious Hollander’s shin in one firm hand whilst he gently lowered my head to the deck and rose up to his full height, taking his assailant’s leg with him, robbing Boerhaave of his balance. The Dutchman fell on his head with a leonine roar. Autua now seized the other foot & slung our first mate over the bulwarks like a sack of cabbages.

  Whether the crewmen were too fearful, astonished, or delighted to offer any resistance, I shall never know, but Autua carried me down a gangplank on the dockside unmolested. My reason informed me that Boerhaave could not be in heaven nor Autua in hell so we must be in Honolulu. From the harbor we passed down a thoroughfare bustling with innumerable tongues, hues, creeds & odors. My eyes met a Chinaman’s as he rested beneath a carved dragon. A pair of women whose paint & tournure advertised their ancient calling peered at me & crossed themselves. I tried to tell them I was not yet dead, but they were gone. Autua’s heart beat against my side, encouraging my own. Thrice he asked of strangers, “Where doctor, friend?” Thrice he was ignored (one answered, “No medicine for stinking Blacks!”) before an old fish seller grunted directions to a sick house. I was parted from my senses for a time, before hearing the word Infirmary. Merely entering its fetid air, laden with ordure & decomposition, caused me to retch anew, notwithstanding my stomach was empty as a discarded glove. The buzzing of bluebottles hovered & a madman howled about Jesus adrift on the Sargasso Sea. Autua muttered to himself in his own tongue. “Patience more, Mr. Ewing—this place smell death—I take you to Sisters.”

  How Autua’s Sisters might have strayed so far from Chatham Isle was a puzzle I could not begin to solve, but I entrusted myself to his care. He quitted that charnel house & soon the taverns, dwellings, and warehouses thinned before giving way to sugar plantations. I knew I should ask, or warn, Autua about Goose, but speech was yet beyond my powers. Nauseous slumber tightened then loosened its grip on me. A distinct hill rose up & its name stirred in memory’s sediment:—Diamond Head. The road hither was rocks, dust & holes, walled on both sides with unyielding vegetation. Autua’s stride broke only once, to cup cool stream water to my lips, until we arrived at a Catholick mission, beyond the final fields. A nun tried to “shoo” us away with a broom, but Autua enjoined her, in Spanish as broken as his English, to grant his White charge sanctuary. Finally, one sister who evidently knew Autua arrived & persuaded the others that the savage was on a mission not of malice but of mercy.

  By the third day I could sit up, feed myself, thank my guardian angels & Autua, the last free Moriori in this world, for my deliverance. Autua insists that had I not prevented him from being tossed overboard as a stowaway he could not have saved me & so, in a sense, it is not Autua who has preserved my life but myself. Be that as it may, no nursemaid ever ministered as tenderly as rope-roughened Autua has to my sundry needs these last ten days. Sister Véronique (of the broom) jests that my friend should be ordained & appointed hospital director.

  Mentioning neither Henry Goose (or the poisoner who assumed that name) nor the saltwater bath which Autua gave Boerhaave, Cpt. Molyneux forwarded my effects via Bedford’s agent, doubtless with one eye on the mischief my father-in-law may inflict on his future as a trader operating from San Francisco. Molyneux’s other eye is on disassociating his reputation from that now-notorious murderer known as the Arsenick Goose. The devil has not yet been apprehended by the Port Constabulary nor, I suspect, shall that day ever come. In Honolulu’s lawless hive, where vessels of all flags & nations arrive & depart daily, a man may change his name & history between entrée & dessert.

  I am exhausted & must rest. Today is my thirty-fourth birthday.

  I remain thankful to God for all his mercies.

  Monday, 13th January—

  Sitting under the candlenut tree in the courtyard is pleasant in the afternoon. Laced shadows, frangipani & coral hibiscus ward away the memory of recent evil. The sisters go about their duties, Sister Martinique tends her vegetables, the cats enact their feline comedies & tragedies. I am making acquaintances amongst the local avifauna. The palila has a head & tail of burnished gold, the ākohekohe is a handsome crested honeycreeper.

  Over the wall is a poorhouse for foundlings, also administered by the sisters. I hear the children chanting their classes (just as my schoolmates and I used to before Mr. & Mrs. Channing’s philanthropy elevated my prospects). After their studies are done, the children conduct their play in a beguiling babel. Sometimes, the more daring of their number brave the nuns’ displeasure by scaling the wall & conduct a grand tour above the hospice garden by means of the candlenut’s obliging branches. If the “coast is clear,” the pioneers beckon their more timid playmates onto this human aviary & white faces, brown faces, kanáka faces, Chinese faces, mulatto faces appear in the arboreal overworld. Some are Rafael’s age & when I remember him a bile of remorse rises in my throat, but the orphans grin down at me, imitate monkeys, poke out their tongues, or try to drop kukui nuts into the mouths of snoring convalescents & do not let me stay mournful for very long. They beg me for a cent or two. I toss up a coin for dextrous fingers to pluck, unerringly, from the air.

  My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity. My thoughts flow thus. Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.

  What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.

  What precipitates acts? Belief.

  Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history’s Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, sha
ll not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?

  Why? Because of this:—one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

  Is this the doom written within our nature?

  If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.

  A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.

  I hear my father-in-law’s response: “Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don’t tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the rednecks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell ’em their imperial slaves’ rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium’s! Oh, you’ll grow hoarse, poor & gray in caucuses! You’ll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!”

  Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

  * Here my father’s handwriting slips into spasmodic illegibility.—J.E.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Mitchell’s first novel, Ghostwritten, was awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best book by a writer under thirty-five, and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, Number9Dream, followed in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2003, David Mitchell was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta. He also returned to Britain from Japan, where he spent eight years, and now lives in Ireland.