His parents made up for his isolation by sending him through a slew of international schools. Sometimes private tutors would catch him up to the levels of learning in the local time zone. Schools too various to keep track of arrived new every year or two. These drilled him in all the lessons of peer terror, violent schoolground rivalry, and systematic spiritual search and seizure. Yet the one great payoff of continuous upheaval was that every two years it wiped the slate clean. Thus he acquired all the lessons, with none of the long-term liabilities, of human contact.
In every new temporary home, he was allowed all the books he could amass. But by the end of the stay, at the next inevitable move, the boy had to pare back his library to fit into one packing crate. Toys, of course, accompanied him along the way: when very young, a small, weight-driven walking cow that he let traipse over a cliff in the Andes. When slightly older, a View-Master with a handful of reels that brought the death of Pope John XXIII into vivid 3-D. In some countries the family compound was overrun by house and yard pets: one-eyed dogs, a sadistic gibbon that swooped down to attack from the roof of the servants’ quarters, a myna bird that he taught to shout “Burglars!” in three languages.
His own myna mastery of the regional dialect would appear within weeks of arrival. By steeping and imitation, he’d start to jabber with the new round of street vendors in an innocent and indiscriminate mix of Farsi, Korean, Urdu, and bastard lingua franca Carib, jumbling and enjambing words, forgetting where each came from and where in the world each might successfully be used.
Terms appeared of themselves, even in conversation with his parents. (Even as an adult, he sometimes dreamed in words that were lost to conscious recall.) French was frequently helpful, but with so many obvious mother-tongue cognates, it was too trivial to be considered foreign. He could count to a hundred in three different Chineses, could pray without comprehension in Arabic, and could swear sufficiently to get himself hanged from multiple major branches of speech’s tree.
Once, they did accidentally stumble upon an entrance to the Alongside. Puberty had not yet hit him in earnest, and so he was still clear enough to recognize at once the most beautiful city he’d ever seen. Geography had been absurdly generous with the setting. The city arose from an arena of hard stone as white as bleached sheets, the perfect material for raising pure linen towers next to a turquoise sea. A naturally protected port made it a prime spot for jumping off from, a base for thirty centuries of enriching trade.
A bracing, crystal climate left the city in year-round early summer. The air contained antidotes for most debilitating infections. Food spilled off trees and animal flanks into markets that sprouted everywhere in a pristine street maze. Ricky could sit for entire afternoons in the piled-up terraces among idle ancients. The men would drag lazily on their water pipes and keep the boy in fizzy drinks and figs so long as he would sit and listen to stories of rocs and roving thief bands and sunken Phoenician ships long overripe for salvage.
Here was a city given enough time and sun and wealth to have come perilously close to transcendence. It was halfway to becoming the thing that all cities are seeded to be. With easy benevolence, it had grown into a gathering place of scattered people. Syllables of Arabic, French, Turkish, English, Italian, and Kurdish bargained with one another through the commercial districts. Life disturbed the silence of crusader churches, milled about the mosaicked mosques, and picked through the Roman ruins lying just across the rim of hills outside of town.
Sitting in the smoking cafés, listening to the reports that the old men gathered exclusively for him—accounts of wandering rocks, intelligent ships that could sniff out ocean currents, wine tuns that seeped full again overnight—the boy realized: this country was the zero milestone from which all migratory sweeps set out. A life posting here would be beyond luxury. He could snorkel forever for sea urchins in the coastal grottoes, surviving on goat cheese and lamb and olives from the azure-dry mountains.
But after only nine months, the boy was yanked away. Ricky’s father came home one day and issued the familiar packing orders. “No future in this town for the likes of us. Situation hopeless. We’ve been moved out.” Further business was contraindicated. The home office threw in the towel.
As always, his father’s insider prediction turned out to be worse than prophetic. Within weeks, the first trickles of smoke, still invisible to all but trained eyes, began rising from the airport, hovering over the harbor, and seeping through the back streets. In another five years, with the usual outside assistance, Beirut would be torn irreversibly apart. Over the next two decades, the shining white foundation by the sea would be mortared down to a quivering stump.
It had been the one inevitable place, a city that moved steadily for three millennia toward the goal of a livable kingdom here in this life. This capital that had teetered on the edge of final deliverance disintegrated before reaching it. Over the years, the boy watched from a distance as it descended into a spiral of factional violence from which it would never recover. He committed the lesson to long-term memory, and confirmed it repeatedly. Paris, New York, Tokyo—all would fall as quickly and completely, all the blessed islands of the world, sucked down.
His family’s evacuation from a still ravishingly beautiful Beirut was banal, expected. Departure arrived as quietly as the standard strange tenant always arrives in Chapter Two. The boy took banishment in stride. By this point in his life, he could be packed to leave anywhere, forever, in a matter of a weekend.
After Beirut, the family floated about the Near East for a handful of stays, short even by his father’s standards. They headed temporarily for rock-solid Cyprus. There, under a canvas tent, on a portable television with sound drowned out by a gas-powered generator the size of a small munitions plant, the three of them watched a grainy, unidentifiable machine bump up against an even grainier, more unidentifiable landscape. Through the cloud of soundtrack static, Ricky thought he could make out a man saying, “Uh, Houston?” He heard the urgency of disbelief in that endless pause, a wait pregnant with every incredulous question that technological restlessness would never be able to address. Words full of the stunned, wondering irrelevance of speech: How can one ever announce this? “Eh . . . Tranquillity Base . . .”
He thought it a toss-up as to which of those two words was more implausibly surreal. Both were imaginary constructs, pointers to a lost colony off to airless nowhere. One small step, one low-G caper that extended the infinite series and converged on a tranquillity, on an extraterrestrial base that the boy had never once in all his years doubted would be reestablished in his lifetime. His father told him to remember this moment for some future, comprehensive, behind-the-wheel exam. He smiled at the advice. Remember? He had never forgotten. He’d only been waiting for the landing to catch up to him.
Master this. Make a note. This one’s important. His school was a hands-on social studies project gathered from the hot spots of the globe. Portable generators in a strikable Cypriot tent; blackboard and chalk propped up against a schoolhouse-sized baobab; a freak-show museum of formaldehyde jars in Sunday markets across Asia; a whole natural history every time he purged sub-Saharan water parasites from his system. Each chance reassignment became curriculum. Formal education was where he could scavenge it throughout his formative years.
And Ricky was an honor student in this erratic school. He rarely needed to look at a problem twice and never stooped to homework. The traditional round robins of algebra and economics, the model electric circuits, and the posters of the stages of alluvial fans were child’s play compared to the shifting rainbow coalitions of recess or the occasional mandatory religion classes where he hadn’t an Eskimo’s chance in hell.
In sports he was too fair ever to rise higher than mediocre. He liked pickup multinational World Cups, but tried to engineer all the matches to end up ties. He learned the tensile strength of the local teak or cedar with near-native fluency, jackfruit disaster notwithstanding. A ball’s parabolas could be extrapolated from
kapok to rattan. But compete? Why? It didn’t lead anywhere.
His schoolmates came, like Ricky, from families adrift on the world circuit. Sons and daughters of servicemen, missionaries, field agents for well-intentioned but forsaken UN agencies. For sustained companionship, small schools in insignificant villages were the best. People posted to off-track places tended to stick around longer. Big cities had notoriously high turnovers.
His friends disappeared faster than water down a wadi. When they were not being reposted, Ricky’s buddies simply died on him. He lost two São Paulo streetballer mates to kidnappers, and his best friend in all Indonesia was found convulsed in bed, clutching a plastic sack of inhalant. Like those unmapped mansions on deserted roads, come across by chance during late-night storms, his friends vanished before he could return in daylight to look for them. Faces of all nations rushed past as furiously as a perverse dodge ball whose torture was never even to graze, never hit him at all.
He rapidly developed what his father called personal capital. Self-reliance: the reputed byword of his national character. He knew nothing about the mythic States. What stunted access he did have to homeland ways only mystified him further. The sight of Mrs. Carmichael or little blond Dennis-san speaking Japanese or Hindi on decrepit black-and-whites with abysmal reception kept him laughing only until he’d learned enough of the local idiom to be baffled by the lines.
To fill all the hours of a day, he drew complex maps or invented games he could play alone. He taught himself to play reed organs and talking drums. There were always gardeners or cooks who now and then had time for him. From these adult friends he learned endlessly useful things like how to treat lemon bark or how to coax a coconut tree into giving up its milk, palm cabbage, and sugar.
But none of these activities filled the expanse of time assigned him. A child abroad, at large in the unlimited confines and corridors that Air America served, he could almost palpate the concealed country he stood flush up against. The land he looked for was the only one large enough to accommodate native speculation. He read about it at night, in the maps and travel accounts of the local children’s literature, not yet outgrown.
In the last summer of his childhood, Ricky’s mother and father, out of parental obligation, took him to tour his unknown home. They felt that the boy should possess more than just a picture-book, View-Master acquaintance with the Lincoln Memorial and Yosemite. Ricky liked the States, where people were tried only for alleged crimes and no one need ever get out of the car, even to eat. The vaudeville system of weights and measures did give him trouble, however. And surprisingly, despite supermarkets the size of entire autonomous guerrilla regions he had lived in, Ricky’s countrymen had not yet discovered anise coffee poured over crushed ice, or the pleasures of dried squid tucked in the back of the cheek all afternoon. Some mornings he would wake up too early, anxiously wondering, until consciousness took him, what had happened to the street vendors’ calls.
The visit was of obvious symbolic importance to his parents, and the son tried his best to make it a success. Not long after their Atlantic arrival they attended a national folk festival called Opening Day. His parents took him to his first baseball game, between what his father kept calling “the new New York team” and their bitter rivals from Chicago. They sat in the upper decks next to a Chicago family who, although it was the first day of the season, unrolled a bedsheet that read, WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR. Ricky asked his father to explain the banner but the man only sushed him, embarrassed.
The get-acquainted session with his national sport was a disaster. Ricky listened intently to his father’s intricate explanation of such violences as the suicide bunt and the hit-and-run. He shouted out a few well-meaning Spanish encouragements to all the Latin American players. But he wound up, during the tense tenth inning, under the bleachers playing fighting tops with six equally bewildered foreign-exchange students from the Balkans.
Rebuffed but forgiving, the folks took him to Niagara. There, Ricky agreed enthusiastically that the falls were truly impressive in volume, although of course not anywhere near as tall as Angel or Cuquenán. He enjoyed putting on the raincoat to ride the Maid of the Mist. The spray and spectacle and liquid statistics were all staggering, but the thing that most entranced Ricky was a scrap of yellowed newsprint pasted on the wall of the gift shop:
MIRACLE AT FALLS
Boy, Age 7, Survives Pitch over Horseshoe
He carefully added the age of the miracle survivor to the age of the clipping. The numbers summed to precisely the figure he expected. A boy his age had fallen over the impossible water cliff in a two-person dinghy. The hundred-sixty-foot dead drop had been child’s play; the consummate, stone-eating churn at the bottom had killed the boy’s sister instantly. But Ricky’s contemporary, after a three-minute gap lost in molten madness, had bobbed free, beaten into pulpy unconsciousness, each one of his body’s twigs shattered, but fished out inconceivably alive.
No one except a child could possibly have survived the Horseshoe’s pitch. Ricky reread the account, confirming in his mind the only available explanation of the miracle: those three unaccounted-for minutes, away. A boy his age, saved by falling not into the rock-drill undertow but somewhere right alongside it.
He asked to buy the clipping, but it was not for sale. So he stood in the gift shop, committing the account to memory. His parents had to come tug at his sleeve, pull him away. He would not leave without a last look at the landmark chutes, one more for the road. But even alerted to the spot, he could not see where the boy had temporarily pushed through.
The family campaigned their way westward like Indian fighters, cutting a path through all the patriotic must-sees. They had had the Old North, Liberty, Independence Hall. Now it was on to Gettysburg, and out to the GM assembly lines. At the one-third point, in one of those C-cities in Ohio, after standing at polite attention through a guided tour of some presidential home, he talked his mother into taking him to the natural history museum, where he hoped to find some mummified birds. These had been a favorite of his ever since Egyptian days, when he had caught the school bus each morning next to the mouth of a cave network where teenagers had recently discovered seven hundred thousand embalmed ibises.
The museum’s collection was woefully deficient in the sacred bird-corpse department. But the Egypt room did house the transfixingly tiny, bound body of a three-thousand-year-old juvenile. The three of them stood looking at the diminutive god-king, his father eager to get on with things American, his mother yanking him this way and that so as not to stand in the way of other families who might want a look. Finally, in his summarizing voice, Ricky’s father gave a contrite shake of the head at this creature, five hundred years older than Socrates. “Not even a teenager!”
His mother sorrowfully replied, “Isn’t that a shame?”
With this exchange, Ricky realized his parents were of no help to him. And in that moment, he became an adult. He was here alone, in the middle of the strange place name stamped on his passport. From all sides, Mayday snatches from lost boys bombarded and bathed him in garbled shortwave. He stared at the hieroglyphs on the inside coffin lid until they seemed to move. The oldest picture book in existence: he should have been able to read it the way he breathed. But he could not make out the first illustrated sentence.
Late in the summer, just before heading back overseas, the family took their now high-mileage rental down a demurely paved two-lane track running through the considerable empty bit between Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon. Ricky had greatly appreciated the enormous stone noses, large enough for a man to live in. He asked his parents ingenuously if the nation had any plans to add the current president to the mountain after he died. They laughed evasively.
They steered toward the southwest, following a connect-the-dots of Park Service gazebos laid out for public display. Glass cases the width of the entire desert displayed their attic residue: dinosaur teeth, arrowheads, pony express hand cancellations. Stereopticon slides of the mayo
r’s wife playing at squaw, the redskin papoose slung from her head. The dress the little native girl was found in, made from a flour sack taken in the fatal ambush of settlers’ wagons.
Several hundred blank miles from the nearest registered monument, the car began emitting soft, enigmatic chirps. They had driven the vehicle clear across the country and apparently it had had enough sightseeing for this combusting lifetime. Ricky’s father nursed them another dozen miles into a station with no identifying trade sign. Its only marking was one of those movie marquees where battered black letters lined up like a brigade of unruly railroad-building coolies:
HAVE YOU HEARD THE ALL-SAVING WORD?
Snacks, Gas, Reading Matter
The ancient proprietor’s wife took it on herself to entertain the boy while the other three adults puzzled over the intractable antiphonies of the four-stroke engine. The woman claimed to be one-quarter Indian, and he asked which quarter.
“Last folks to come through here,” the woman told him, “had one curious story to tell. This was late last Thursday night. Young couple, newlyweds, out on a backroads honeymoon. Now just you think how astonished they must of been to see a lone girl, no older than you yourself, hitchhiking down this roadside hundred miles out in the middle of nowhere. In a beautiful Sunday dress. It so astonished them, they said, that against their better judgment, they picked the child up. Plain as a coyote’s call, something had frightened this girl into running. They say she sounded like she come from far away too.” The woman whispered sympathetically to him; her voice was full of a conspiratorial forgiveness. “Foreign as you yourself.”
The boy did not correct her. Nor did he interrupt the quarter-Indian woman to say that he already knew the end of the story. How the girl hitchhiker insisted on getting in the backseat. How she sat in party dress, answering all questions politely with no more than a yes or no. How, when the couple turned to let her out at the requested crossroads, the backseat was empty. How there was no trace of the girl, nothing to indicate where she had come from or where she had gone. “Far as anyone could say, she dropped down on this stretch of road from out the Airy Above. Went back to it too, I bargain.”
Operation Wandering Soul Page 14