March of this year we were in the desert and, like Stephen Crane’s famous creature, we were bestial and squatting; maybe we were naked as well. It’s possible—we were on one drug or another, and memory is strange. I did not hold my heart in my hands but a shotgun. We had bought a box of old records from a flea market on the way down and were taking turns tossing them up in the air and making it rain black diamonds, fragments of song titles and run times. We had liquor, and music, and all five of David Mitchell’s novels—Ghostwritten, number9dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I brought along the audiobook versions as well, as we were staying the night and planned on being too insensate before long to do any actual reading.

I had received the books in Venezuela a few months earlier, from an expat Israeli I met in a hotel in Caracas. He wouldn’t tell me his real name or what he was doing there, so I could only assume he was hunting Nazis. I was in South America because Hunter S. Thompson had spent a year writing in South America, and I loved Hunter S. Thompson very much. Ushuaia is also in South America, southernmost city on the planet, all the way down in Patagonia where the sea lions perch on the rocks like sentries awaiting Armageddon, and I also love Ushuaia very much. The Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse sits on the Beagle Channel. East of that is the Lighthouse at the End of the World. You take the Tren del Fin del Mundo through Tierra del Fuego—you actually ride through a place called the Land of Fire on something called the End of the World Train; the names are very portentous and grandiose, and you feel really small and unimportant and lost, so they’re all very fitting. It is my favorite place on Earth, and I had been planning to die, and where better to die than in your very favorite place? I was drunk most always and buried deep in ketamine holes, painfully self-aware of how much of a cliché I was, so dying didn’t seem like such a bad idea at the time.

I didn’t make it to Ushuaia. I killed time in Rio for about a month, indulging my fantasies of being South America’s answer to The Sheltering Sky’s Port Moresby before miserably deciding one rainy depressing afternoon that I missed my niece very much and wanted to go home for Christmas. While I was down there I read Mitchell’s books, all of them, because that’s what you do when you’re stuck in a hostel, depressed and all your beer money gone: You stare at the ceiling, try to catch and crush mosquitos in your fist, gaze with a thousand-yard stare at anyone who tries to talk to you, ask them for drugs, and you read.

“His prose makes you cry,” the young Yakov Liebermann told me as he pushed the books across the table. “The ‘Gulls’ passage in Thousand Autumns made me cry. But he is at his best when it comes to creating aphorisms. He is a genius.”

David Mitchell is a genius, I think. I say “I think” because while anyone can write books that are deliberately difficult, I think it takes a genius to do deliberately difficult well. I don’t know. I read Cloud Atlas first and the difficulty reminded me of my first run-through of Delany’s Dhalgren, which cost me half a year, three copies of the book, and two friendships when none of us could agree on what the hell was going on. Cloud Atlas is a Matryoshka doll of an anthology, where each story nests inside the succeeding one and then out of nowhere some evil bastard locks the whole thing inside Hellraiser’s puzzle box and stabs you with the key.

It’s a difficult read, yes, but I was in Rio, three thousand miles from home, wondering if I would ever be able to make it back, alone and scared and penniless with spider bites marching up and down my arm and a rash growing on my crotch, and this most amazing thing happened: In my head I was in Mitchell’s dystopian Korea, where a genetically engineered clone named Sonmi-451 is being executed for daring to be human; in the next story, further into the future still, I found out that Sonmi-451 is regarded as a god, and I laughed for the first time in days, ‘neath the sound of strange rain. David Mitchell made that happen, and that was all right.

Other things happened as well, and I made it home, eventually.

In March, in the desert at night, a slooowww crash from pink mushroom clouds way in the middle of the air, and we were listening to the audiobooks and spitting chewed shell casings into the fire. I had my notebook with me, and for the next eight hours we switched back and forth between the books and skipped around at random as I wrote down and annotated some of the aphorisms and prose that made a grown-ass Nazi hunter cry:

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Phil Roland was born in the Philippines, found a copy of Iggy Pop’s The Idiot on a stairwell when he was 8, and now blogs at philroland.tumblr.com. He lives in Los Angeles, but he hopes to move to the Internet soon.

Image: Cloud Atlas by Angie Rogers