She tries to say just what that single word, carved into the bark of a tree, might reveal about the lost Virginian band’s destination. She pronounces the word aloud, cuts it into the blackboard with a stump of chalk that disintegrates into pastel sand in her fingers: CROATOAN. She spells the fragment left on a second trunk: CRO. This word, the lone sign of hasty evacuation remaining to greet the colony’s governor on his return from a supply run to the mother country, holds for her no impenetrable mystery. It is as English, as Lao, as Lao-Tai, as Thai, as Tagalog, as Latin Spanish as any of the trading currencies drifting through the temporary settlements where she has put up for the night. To every relocation camp its own transitory lingua franca, built up by the accidents of mass migration. And all the mysterious messages ever penned into silent bark come to the same thing: We’re off, then. Don’t wait up.
Why else would a person resort to words? Words, she has learned in all manner of reeducation programs along her route, have no origin and no end. They are themselves the touring urgency they try to describe. Barrio, where she now lives, comes from Spanish, from Arabic, from the idea of the idea of open country. No word could be more English now, more American, although all the open country here has been closed for lifetimes. That’s okay, because barrio is now as plowed under, as built up as that lost open land. It means something else, in the run of time. It means those Arabs creeping northward into Spain like fluid in a barometer. It means the Spanish, unable to stop the Moor advance except by swallowing their science and math and militant restlessness. It means the English maritime offspring, unwisely jumping their own island for something larger, in turn unable to contain the children of New Spain except by eating them whole—their food, their music, their words.
This is the outline she was born knowing—how words are the scratch marks of intersecting trails. She still holds in her head a complex map of river linguistics: sound geographies, isoglossaries of all the valley people her own once did business with. Moors and conquistadores and Carolina pilgrims, picked up quickly at the latest trading station, she simply superimposes on the list. She imitates the local playground cries, swapping in the Spanish chants as effortlessly as the English. The two are the same, the nearest of cousins, given the family she comes from. She shares herself between them, speaking an exploratory patois eclectic enough to baffle all listeners equally.
Arriving at this school, abandoned on the principal’s doorstep, she wanted only to please—a small enough price for guaranteed safety. Pleasing seemed to involve solving the riddles laid before her. In numbers and planes and problem solving, she tested years beyond her peers, beyond many of the certified teachers. But she could not paraphrase “Make hay while the sun shines,” nor complete the analogy “Shoe is to sock as overcoat is to . . .” More indicting, she said absolutely nothing unless forced, and then acquitted herself with the barest minimum of whispered, eerie syllables.
Ceramic, tiny, terrified, she moved about on legs as pencil-tentative as a tawny mouse deer. All four of her limbs would have fit comfortably inside a third-grade lunch box. Her every gesture seemed calculated to evade the incursions of those bigger than she. The school nurse refused to believe the age the little one gave, and there was of course no birth certificate. A problem with number translation? No; the girl marked out her years in sticks on a sheet, silently polite, as if adults required infinite patience. Simple fib? But what on earth could she gain by pretending to be older than she was?
No matter. She looked eight, ocean cruise survivor or otherwise. True, she spoke (when she spoke) impressively for a recent acquirer, but no more precociously than other transpacific Asian eight-year-olds played the violin. However well she knew the Roman alphabet by sight, she could barely force her fist to push it into print. Easy cursive, flash card grace, dodge ball without shame were all out of the question. Enlightened pedagogy demanded that she start three grades beneath her age. And obediently, there she began.
Six weeks of field test routs pedagogy. The third-grade teacher allots her a desk, takes an hour to explain the subjects, gives her maps, a math notebook, a compass, and a protractor, and assigns a pristine text from the previous, humiliated decade called Our Emerging World, saying, “We’ll be working in this.” Code, the girl quickly intuits, for “As soon as I teach your fifty other materially arrested classmates how to fake reading.”
Misunderstanding, or perhaps just desperate, Joy has the books finished by week’s end. Incredulous teacher rejects the evidence. She tests the girl on end chapters, middle chapters, mixing the order, as if the new child were one of those square-root-solving horses from variety TV. Unstumpable if no less diminutive, Joy earns instant promotion to grade four. There, her new teacher discovers that the girl can indeed speak full, correct, even beautiful sentences, only her predicates are always lost to the background radiation of manic classroom.
By term’s end, she is kicked upward again. She is made to visit the school counselor, to receive psychological patch-up for what the botched, bounce-around job must certainly be doing to her. Counselor asks her probing but shrewdly disguised questions, such as, Would you rather be a seal in a big seal colony basking on the shore or an eagle soaring all alone high above the cliffs? Seal, without hesitation. Oh? Why? Eagles eat rats and seals eat fish and she has eaten both and greatly prefers fish.
Joy takes pity on this man, helps him get to the point without more embarrassment. “Fifth grade is much better than third or fourth,” she volunteers. Yes, yes; how? “In fifth grade, you get to face the street and you can watch people walking by all day long.” I see. And what else? “The desks move?” she asks, hoping against hope that this is the right answer.
Do you have any special worries that you’d like to tell me about? Things from the bottom of your secret storage, stories from before? Her eyes spark a moment, break for barrio, for open country, a place where the smells and sounds that reared her are left a little tropical acreage, where not everyone she loves has necessarily been flayed alive. Before she can control them, her hands fly up like a surprised monkey army breaking for rain forest safety. “Some of my friends here can’t pronounce my last name.”
The counselor files his report. This girl can be bounced from now until the last institutional foul-up of recorded time and not realize that utter flux is in any way unusual. And yet, the counselor scribbles everywhere on the form except in the blank space reserved for the OCR reader, there are lands around the world where permanent residence, for this child, would be far worse than her list of temporary visas.
In the fifth grade, the bulk of the way back to where she should have been all along, Joy extends her squatter’s rights in the New World. She dutifully holds her end of the jump rope, twirling it as she once wound wooden bobbins, in this life singing:
I spy! (Who do you spy?)
Little girl. (What color eye?)
Green eye. Yellow hair.
(What’s her name?) Mary Jane.
(Tell the truth.) Baby Ruth.
(TELL THE TRUTH . . . !)
Her chant is a perfect mime except for phonemes slightly pitched, inflected to pentatonic. In the cafeteria, she inquires politely into which foods are acceptable to fling across the room and which are not.
Her academic progress is even more rapid. She has assignments done even before they are given. Some of the subjects she has seen already, at her last roofless holding camp on Luzon. Math and science are just common sense, written in symbols no harder or more arbitrary than the various alien alphabets. She falls in love with map reading: every location, a cross hair on the universal grid. What they call social studies is the easiest of all. She rapidly gleans the generating pattern of history. This country—no country at all and all countries rolled into one—is, like its language, the police blotter of invasions both inflicted and suffered, flash points involving all races of the world, violent scale-tips, constant oversteerings, veerings away from the world’s deciding moment.
Her Brief and True Report of
the New Found Land quietly maintains that CROATOAN was probably the misspelled name of a nearby Indian clan. No trace of a massacre; no remains. The colonists simply wandered off into the interior, not to escape this foreign force, Joy claims, but to join it. She has found a book in the school library (a lost colonial outpost of progress all its own) that tells how other Europeans, a century later, came across remote Indians with oddly colored hair and speech that bore the inexplicable ghosts of white words, the reverse of those etymological spirits still living in the settlers’ canoes, hickories, pecans, squashes, raccoons, corn.
She exceeds her assigned ten minutes, gesturing with her hands, softly overloaded with discovery, repeating the recurrent theme of this continent. She recites in pitched, open vowels the logs of westward expansion, tales of white Indians in Kentucky, of European languages greeting the very first foreigners to track the upper Missouri. She urges her schoolmates, waving them on in a way she hopes is friendly and encouraging, speculating about the great-great-grandchildren of Madog, a man whose band of Welshmen sailed off the face of the map in 1170 and could have arrived no place but here. This she explicates without the least conception of Wales, or 1170, or Europe, or the Missouri.
And yet, the advantage of the late starter reveals to her what the established are too privileged to see. There are no natives here. Even the resident ambers and ochers descended from lost tribes, crossed over on some destroyed land bridge, destined to be recovered from the four corners of the earth where they had wandered. She tells how a shipwreck survivor named Christbearer Colonizer washed up on the rocks of the Famous Navigators’ School with a head full of scripture and childhood fantasies. And she shows how these elaborate plans for regaining the metropolis of God on Earth led step by devastating step to their own Angel barrio.
Everything she relates she has already lived through: how that first crew survives on promises of revelation. How the Christbearer mistakes Cuba for Japan. How he makes his men swear that they are on the tip of Kublai Khan’s empire. How, in the mouth of the Orinoco, he tastes the fourth river of Paradise flowing from the top of the tear-shaped globe. How he sets the earth on permanent displacement.
Her American history is a travelogue of mass migration’s ten anxious ages: the world’s disinherited, out wandering in search of colonies, falling across this convenient and violently arising land mass that overnight doubles the size of the known world. They slip into the mainland on riverboat and Conestoga, sow apple trees from burlap sacks, lay rail, blast through rock, decimate forests with the assistance of a giant blue ox. They survive on hints of the Seven Cities, the City on the Hill, the New Jerusalem, scale architectural models of urban renewal, migration’s end. At each hesitant and course-corrected step, they leave behind hurriedly scrawled notes: Am joining up with new outfit, just past the next meridian.
She would leap across the continental divide, from CROATOAN to the Queen of the Angels Mission for recovering lost souls, go on to describe how this city she has landed in is itself founded by forty-four illiterate, migratory, mixed redskins and blacks, who stumbled by chance upon the rat-scabbed valley they imagined would deliver them. She would woo her classmates, win friends, by telling how the city they now share has within one lifetime served as Little Tokyo, Little Weimar, Little Oaxaca, Little Ho Chi Minh City. Not to mention Hollywood.
But her teacher cuts her off, amazed. Where did you learn all this? “In books,” she guiltily admits. “I’m sorry I went overtime.”
The teacher—her third in a little under a year—doesn’t respond. Doesn’t even hear. The adult is wondering how this bonsai-framed, walking Red Cross ad in the secondhand Hang Ten tee, whose intact arrival already constitutes a skeletal miracle, who for months (as teachers’ lounge rumor recounts) lived on desiccated squid, who has since slept ten abreast on sheets silvery with parasites and counted it paradise to have a sheet at all, who survived by learning to override her throat’s retch reflex, whose head had twice to be shaved on return to civilization, how this bit of nubby raw silk, recovered from a forsaken test zone the teacher cannot even begin to imagine let alone presume to teach, could summon up enough linguistic resolve to report on colonial governors and covered wagons and Columbus. How in hell’s name could this heartbreak Joy accommodate, let alone decode, the incomprehensible slickie shirts, Slurpees, Nerf balls, Slime as a registered trademark, robots that metamorphose into intergalactic defense depots—all the commodities of exchange with which her every instant on this shore assaults her?
These occult childhood currencies buy and sell the others’ oral reports. Andy Johnson gives the fast-breaking private-bio spy’s eye profile of this week’s slam-dunk, slap-action, singer/actor idol of billions. Pathetic Kelly Frank reports on an afternoon series based loosely on a video game about Armageddon and whimpers witlessly when the teacher informs him that cartoons de facto fail to qualify as nonfiction. The impact of Joy’s emergency dispatches upon her classmates is nil at best. Even the sharpest among them sits dazed, too mentally gelded to absorb the first curve of the motions she maps out. If the class stayed amazingly sedate and violence-free throughout her talk, it is the stunned silence of islanders unable even to see the first arrival of masts on their horizon.
Bewilderment is always bilateral. The girl’s assimilation mounts a makeshift platform rig no wider than the air soles of her jogging shoes. Behind her flawless homework assignments and singsong pronunciation, beneath her mastery of subtle dress codes and cocky akimbo stances, she still floats on the current. She has lived in an open boat since day raids first flushed her from her valley. Evidence slips through the hairline cracks in that celadon-glaze face. The truth is obvious, in the way she hurries over the syllables joe-nee ap-al-seet like water over stones in an embarrassed brook. In the way she casts a look out over her audience, a look so afraid of giving offense that all it can do is cower between the muscle twitches of appeasement. She has no choice but to obey the creed of all immigrants: stay quiet, learn all you can, and keep to the middle of the room.
What can the teacher do but give the child an A, tell her the report was excellent, bump her—baffling her further—up to her rightful grade? Promotion solves nothing. They cannot help her here, can alleviate none of that afflicted breathing. The girl is bound fast in the metal burr rasps of jeans, swaddled by clothes that turn her every playground hour into live burial. Her rage for instant adult competence betrays itself. Barbed and intractable, waiting at the bus stop every morning is the scent of saffron, the flake of gold leaf still in her fingers. The temple bells, the lost pitched vendor calls sound, with each additional day-lifetime she serves out in this school-cum-mall, increasingly like a croatoan-note pulling her on toward the next promissory coordinate, deep in the still-unfounded, untouched continent.
There is a temple in this city. A classical Sukhothai pavilion stands a dozen blocks from the apartment they have put her in. A chedi, squeezed between a video rental palace and WE BUY/SELL/TRADE ANYTHING. These stepped gables edged in finial flames would once have seemed as foreign to her as the peek-a-boutiques of Melrose are to the Iowa conventioneer. The styles are of another country, a hundred kilometers from her valley, as distant and unreachable as the epic’s monkey kingdom. But here, the temple is her one touchstone in a landscape as arbitrary as the language she must use to make her way through it.
Nothing can be assumed here. Total strangers greet you like a long-lost relative, fuss over you, buy you sailor suits, then disappear forever without trace. The price marked on a thing is exactly what you have to pay for it. People leave gaps between them in line, then get furious when you fill them. The water coming out of the wall is drinkable, but ponds and streams will kill you. The dead are not burned, but buried in spacious, decorated plots, while the living set up house on a square meter of sidewalk. Guns are legal but imported parrots are not.
She is saved only by seeing how no one else belongs here either. They catch her eye in the supermarket and look away, confessing. She rea
ds with delight how only Mexico City contains more Mexicans than Angel. She spends Saturdays in the exotic street markets, where a dozen governments in exile make their unofficial homes. Something rustles her ear before she can make out the neighborhood contour: a whisper of how this entire community, even the vested interests, is provisional.
All the property is owned by transpacific gnomes. All the sports heroes hail from the Caribbean. The counter help at the Mr. Icee know no more English than “superfudgebuster.” The after-school black-and-white cable classics, their credits packed with foreign drifters’ unpronounceable names, always reach the same conclusion: pass yourself off as a local, whatever your origin. The displaced life leads to any ending you like.
Not that she can yet frame the tale in so many borrowed words. Her confusion is primordial. The city she has been set down in is riddled through with time holes, portals opening onto preserved bits of every world that ever saw light. They take her to them on school field trips and church-sponsored socials. That prehistoric, sabertoothed tar pit downtown; the Spanish colonial missions; those Hollywood wax museums; the Wild West storefronts; the sprawling Arab bazaars; the town-sized, live-in, glass terraria arcades enclosing futuristic retail worlds; that magic castle from a medieval past that she would not know from the original thing. These are her reals, her eternally present givens.
She makes nothing of it beyond raw specifics: how to get to school. The inscrutable uses of a library card. The ways of indigestible dried potatoes and bleached sponge bread. A playground where she watches gigglers dig through sand to the center of the earth and come out in China, where people walk on their hands.
The block where she lives, the fourth most dangerous in the city, is for her a garden of almost guilty safety. She sleeps through sirens these days. Even those after-midnight altercations, smashings and bludgeonings in the building foyer outside her room, no longer fully wake her.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 4