The Cloud Atlas Read Online Free PDF

someone in the hospice is one thing; laying on hands is another-though it has a long and honest Christian tradition behind it. But joining hands, participating in a rite that, Ronnie assured me, was all about Native spirits and had nothing to do with
“your
god”-well, this wasn't exactly what generations of missionaries before me had preached, prayed, and died for.
    And then it happened. Fats stopped squirming; his eyes shut and his mouth opened, releasing a low moan.
    “Tell me how he died,” Ronnie has asked. Well, I would have thought it went like this. I have visited the dying for many years, I have administered last rites many times. I know what last moments look like. Fats was in the midst of his. But something happened.
    Mary cried out: “Frank!” A perfectly lovely name.
    “Come,” said Ronnie quietly.
    I checked the monitors. Ronnie was always in charge of whatever magic occurred. I took responsibility for the constellation of blinking red lights surrounding the patient. Fats's blood pressure was incredibly low, but climbing.
    Ronnie repeated his instruction. Fats moaned again, a little louder. Then Ronnie looked at me and rolled his eyes, ever so slightly. “It's not going to work,” he whispered. “He's not here.”
    “Who's not here?” asked Mary. Fats moaned once more, soft again.
    “No one-” I started.
    “My
tuunraq
,” said Ronnie, quite nonchalant now, as though he were referring to his attorney and not his favored spirit helper, his animal familiar-a wolf, in fact, whose capricious absence Ronnie had been lamenting for some time. It was the
tuunraq's
job to enter the patient and clear out whatever was bad-a bit like spiritual angioplasty
    “Father!” Mary hissed, letting go of our hands. I nodded Ronnie out of the room, and turned to Fats.
    He'd stopped moaning, which wasn't too much of a surprise. While Ronnie wasn't always able to bring on a cure, his touch-the lights- the chanting-could all have a disproportionate effect on the susceptible mind.
    When Fats opened his eyes, I paused. And then I made the sign of the cross and Mary followed suit, and then, much to our joint surprise, Fats did as well. “Pray with me, Fats-Frank,” I said, not because he would, but because I knew it was Mary's heart rate we then needed to ease. I began a Hail Mary. And then Fats, God bless him, was finally moved to speak.
    “Father,” he said, “I want to confess…”
    And that, to me, was magic.
     
    I SAT THERE AFTER she left, Ronnie's Travel Nurse, and stared at my own hands. And when the memories of what they had touched, held, let slip, grew unwieldy, I turned to Ronnie.
    I stared at Ronnie's hands for a minute, small and muscular, the knuckles cracked white. Then I picked up the one closest to me, and held it, lightly, like the nurse had. And when he didn't reply with a whisper or
hoo
or squeeze or tap, I smiled again; he was sleeping soundly. Time for me to leave.
    After a bit, I squeezed his hand to let him know I was going.
    Nothing. I stood, drawing the hand up with me. I squeezed harder. And listened.
    Nothing. Something was wrong.
    With my free hand, I went for his shoulder; I kept clutching his dead hand with mine. He'd become his own, life-sized voodoo doll. I called out his name, louder and louder, and then I called for the nurse, and then I called for God, and then I called for goddamned Steven Gottschalk.
     
    BEFORE THIS MORNING, I could not have told you what Ronnie's hand felt like-I could have imagined it, perhaps, but that would have been a feat of imagination, imagination driven by what visual details my mind retains. But Steven Gottschalk's hand, I remember every fiber of it, every whorl, and every second it took me to realize that what I'd found there on the ground was not a pink-black glove but a human hand.
    It was our last week of bomb disposal school at Aberdeen Proving Ground, just inland from the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, and I was holding Steven Gottschalk's hand. The