The site of this Sign begins drawing pilgrims from many lands. It is hastily marked with a chapel built by order of the pope, a new Holy Sepulcher inscribed ECCLESIA NOVORUM INNOCENTIUM. Twelve prebends tend it with perpetual prayer. The shrine, drawn in time lapse, vanishes over the centuries, to be rediscovered half a millennium later by Grand Tourists struck with uncomprehending wonder.
Eighteen years after the mass departure, a man gnarled by torture-accelerated age returns to the Christian North, claiming to have been a child crusader. The flotilla has already passed into myth, and this wandering priest’s story—picked up in Albericus, de Champré, Bacon, the era’s Classics Illustrateds—is a curiosity at best. Well into the waning century, travelers returning from the Middle East tell of light-skinned Muslim slaves in Algeria and Alexandria who speak a strange pidgin of Arabic and Romance. This is the fabled end of that child cargo: traded on the international spot market, sold to the Saracens by creedless merchants, martyred to this round of teleology, but passing on to their own children the remembered vow “Our feet shall stand within thy walls, O Jerusalem.”
An estimated hundred thousand innocents are lost, sold, killed, betrayed, evacuated from this world by faith. Nor do the picture portals leave off there. They open onto a few more spots of scattered continuance: the Erfurt exodus. A mass child migration to St. Michel. The Kinderzeche. Dancing manias, disappearances, and sovereign successions over subsequent centuries are each given detailed treatment in a much-subdivided pane, as complex and effulgent as the best leaded glass, its Gothic model. But of the shepherd child, of Stephen himself, no more caption. He is shown, ghostly, staring leeward from a floating castle deck, looking out onto the last days that again circle overhead.
The final colored frame—the last, the very last—is a radical departure for the artist’s pen. It leaps from archaic Treasure Chest style into UPI Wire Photo: boy soldiers in another epochal year once more marching through the Lion’s Gate into God’s Foundation, while other boy soldiers flee the sacred city through secular back streets. The mother of all battles. Above them, overhead, fly Armageddon’s radar-evading Stealth engines of destruction, assembled by the same Angel City industries whose cost overruns buy their pauperized crusader state this little margin of imaginary time.
“Could it be,” the text box asks a reader who has long since fallen asleep or started on something more vivid—say a Sergeant Shrapnel or his high-tech, laser-guided reincarnation—“could it be that the seed of the Thousand-Year Kingdom, that troubled dream toward which the world still falters, was sown in a place possessed long ago and lost, forgotten except to fable?” In comic boyhood, history’s cartoon.
Well, yes it could, the once-boy concedes, his hands surgically returning the tract to the therapist’s stack of night reading. It could. All predictions are perverted remembrance. They’ll have to come back, after long wandering. No place else to go. They’re here already, all around him. Every day, the law’s brutal blue shock troops drag them into his hospital, those they haven’t emptied their clips into. Disease coaxes them to him. He steps over them in their gutter-ambush just outside the tony retail Alhambras, the mushroom towers, the high-security parking garages, there being no more open places where innocence might encamp. Ad mare stultorum, Tendebat iter puerorum. The sea will part for them. It will have to. No other place large enough to hold them all.
Yes; how could he have failed to see it? The place is breaking up. Isn’t that what has been flashing across all channels, pissing out of late-night talk radio rumblings, putting in cameo appearances on Showdown Tonight, left as live correspondents’ reports on his answering machine while he was out? The narrow space he came from has already ended, been burned off, refined away. It capitulated in the same moment, in the time it has taken the boy to think this thought, to consume this illuminated manuscript, to page, to leaf through, to see, to believe, to receive the old list of infinitives, to lip-read the traditional closing, this one: Next Year in Angel City.
The boy grows manic, racing out of control. He wants everything, all at once. He demands a continuous barrage of mil-spec mayhem. When that’s not forthcoming, he manufactures it. C’mon: new game. Scale-model Grand Prix down the emergency stairwell. Multiplayer stock market speculation with real quotes and Monopoly money. Murder in the dark, the hushed hysterics too soft for the night nurses to hear. Helicopter spotting on the roof, gawking at today’s incoming wounded. He must live through those sixty years he has acquired without experiencing, all in the space of the next three weeks. He plunges the ward into a hopped-up nonstop campaign of chaos, and only the knowledge that it will all stop suddenly and soon prevents the pros from cuffing him.
Linda foresaw the whole reaction the day Nico checked in. Patently transparent—an old man’s textbook love me, look past my rhinoceros hideousness. All the same, she finds herself locking horns with the little beast more and more frequently. Some days she just doesn’t care what motivates his constant, vindictive disruption. She’d like to whack him one first and do the social worker stuff later. As for his wider subversion of hospital life—“You call this food? Lemme in that kitchen. Hey, how’s about a movie theater in this dump? Casino. Dancing girls”—more power to him. But when he busts in on her Duchenne’s support group, hysterically trying to shame them out of their progressive muscle wastage by threatening to use the four of them as a baseball diamond, she and Nicolino have their first shouting showdown.
Problem is, three of her four disintegrating dystrophy boys side with their tormentor. Leave him be. Nico’s okay. He’s our Main Mind, our man with a plan to take command. (We, after all, may live to see the extreme old age of thirty.) It’s a sympathy vote for a kid picked off in a way even grimmer than their own. But there’s something more than mere sympathy in this deference to Nico’s new ward order. The others have been just waiting for a knee-high Boss Tweed to come along and tell them what to do next. Not just any newcomer; this one.
Anyone who has exploited prepubescence for any campaign, however well meaning, anybody who has ever trotted out pasteurized, freckled, fairybook simperers to pitch their wholesome radiance, has forgotten the lay of this land. Traveled too far in the interim. Remember the children. What of the children? Doesn’t anyone care about the children? Rubbish, all of it. For Linda’s money, these sales reps confuse innocence with a lack of opportunity. Been too long since they’ve gotten down on their shins to consider the turf. It’s desperate down here at half-pint level. They’re clutching and mean, and they take no prisoners.
Childhood is not that parade of vibrant kids teaching the world to sing. That’s a new one: as far as Espera has read, the product of the last fifty years. She knows the histories from school. Time was when domestic theory wrote the whole batch off as changeling babies, perversely truculent sub- and semihumans. The prescribed treatment was to beat the devils out of their tiny, ripe habitations. No wonder childhood is just waiting for her to turn around and leave the room so it can retaliate for the running lancet sores inflicted on it by ages of adulthood.
Purity is an adult bills of goods. The sweet-meaning child is just an icon, a tool in this power struggle, the power struggle, the first, original, quintessential holy war between supreme exploiter and victim. Real children—the pet mutilators, the medicine cabinet moles, the ones that refuse to pee until their bladders burst—have all lost their innocence long before they learned to speak. They had it drilled out of them at the first vindictive parental backhand.
Small wonder. Her kids are an ad hoc delegation of oppressed, low-income, minority, viciously sick, festering, powerless, disenfranchised, and condescended-to culprits. They know in their intuitively subterfuging hearts that they are the test rats, scapegoats, and pack animals of the entitled—their mature dominators, the holders of vested interests, those of the despotic head start.
Hence their incredible attraction to an adult kid. Only that can explain how Nico charges in and takes over in a matter of days. His packaging sa
ys it all. The guy’s old, and consequently brings out the natural submission to one’s elders. Yet at the same time, he’s this double agent, a traitor to his class. Here’s this adult chucking it all in and coming back. And there’s no champion like one that’s just crossed over from enemy lines.
The last thing Linda wants to do is tangle with him, to pull rank. But what are you supposed to do when the monster calls his quadriplegic buddy a beanbag? When he threatens to attach a friend’s catheter to the wheelchair motor if the malingerer doesn’t at least try to stand? When, trying out his own remedy on Ben’s suicidal depression, he gives the double amputee a highly prized board and orders him to skate or die?
Linda’s charges refuse to protect themselves from this self-appointed terrorist therapist. Nor do they want her protection. They rush, instead, to that universal tendency of the oppressed, the victim’s eternal willingness to exchange one cruelty for the other on symbolic grounds. He may be a tyrant, but he’s our tyrant. Better him than one of you.
And the real adults, who have all read his chart, are just as disposed to let him run amok. The mere thought of telling him not to run in the corridors paralyzes them with shame. Nico, still possessed of boyhood’s thought tap, knows he can get away with just about anything. He’s unopposable, a berserk Mickey Rooney–Freddie Bartholomew mutant cross gone rampant, just before the boxer priest comes to straighten him out.
ONLY, THERE’S NOT going to be any reforming priest popping up this time. Nico’s parents have been preparing their only man-child for his impending kiss-off by assuring him that whatever he says is holy law. The one potential surrogate dad that Linda tries to trick into assisting with Nico moans at her softly from his side of the suddenly Siberian bed. “I said, leave me off this one. It’s. Not. A. Surgical. Case.”
She wants to hit him. Slap his impassive face for treating her like, well, like a willful child. She would in a second, if she thought it might help. In the man’s current condition, it wouldn’t even arouse him. At least he’s talking again, and all she can do is let him.
“Not my rotation. I shouldn’t even know of this kid’s existence.” He lashes the words with a ferocity that shifts her concern from the man-boy to the boy-man. One thing is clear, whatever other creeping etiologies come to bear here. Ricky too is spooked out of his composure by this freak visitor.
Her resident-in-absentia lies on his back in the dark, in her bed. Even his spending the night here is a major concession. His arms stay folded over unremoved surgical scrubs. He lies stiff, a magician’s hypnotized assistant or Gothic knight posing for the sculptured upper deck of his terminal stone bunk. Gross miscalculation on her part, to have brought up the Nico thing. They are back to the friction of their first tête-à-tête, without the erotic charge. She feels the slow spit of nebulous theories churning in him, where she had meant to forestall them. I know, she can feel his forcibly relaxed muscles thinking. I know who this creature is.
She dare not even ask him what he thinks he knows. He would dissolve in an ironic laugh at his own expense, pull back into a deeper pillbox, even as he turned to play with her. Play more perfunctory, with their every successive foray. Fondling as sop. She cannot even say anymore—already? just three weeks this time?—what she most requires from him. What she knows better than to want or say. To tell him how, with each new separation, she grows ever more frantic to have him up inside her, alive and covered and safe, would rush the day when he goes impotent at the mere sight of her eager need.
She refrains from the impulse to touch his chest, already feeling the obligatory, patterned echo from him. A quick panic fills her here in her own bed, invaded by this invité. She must have chosen him for this, singled him out before she knew him. But she did know already. Knew his reputation for Dial-a-Nurse. Knew the brutal occupation, the sardonic “Your patient, Doctor.” Knew he was the very man who could replay her private nightmare scenario, the repeat foreclosure she seems intent on engineering.
She can ask him for nothing. Any request at all would be fatal for them both. The last thing she wants is confrontation. Just knowing that she dare not ask makes her a slave, sick with the irresistible question. She tries his shoulder, tentatively, feels it tense in feigned relaxation. She slithers in toward his ear. And what form will compulsion take tonight, what surrogate truce? Talk to the boy. Straighten him out, break him of cruelty’s bafflement. Take him under your wing. Take care of this helplessness. Give it the protection only you can give.
Or she might speak to him for real. Might unleash at last the whispered accusations against her betrayer in age. This man, so much her senior, a decade: Was that the secret appeal? Old enough to be her grubby little uncle. He lies there across the minefield of acrylic blend, already a casualty in this single-elimination, sudden-death tournament. He lies cross-armed, denying, refusing the explanation she needs from him. She needs him to say, just once, what lies behind the pudgy, glowing, poster faces’ pretended innocence. Don’t you see why the boy runs manic? The dependent’s bewilderment, the dazed, mislaid trust.
She closes the gap and cozies up against him, knowing how much this contact will deplete whatever stockpile of touch he might have left for her. But she needs the thing so much that she will take even sex again in its stead, since he can give nothing else. Friction—attenuating, static, distracting, ridding the minute of old injuries. It is the lesser of two requests. A way to avoid wondering when the private batterings—the cloaked secrecies, violations, and covert hurt-mes—will start again this time.
MORE WRONGS TO redress than there are hours in the day. The only answer, of course, is unflagging industry, the same ceaseless dedication and energy that enabled him, from essentially zero capitalization, to assemble the complete Riders at the End of Time, volume 3, numbers 1 through 161. Not that he makes the mistake of trying to pull off this whole scam single-handedly. He allows himself the luxury of delegating authority on labor-intensive matters. He’s assigned his corps of engineers the task of building a little lookout nest on the roof next to the chopper pad, from which they hope soon to be launching bottle rockets, currently under development by Chuckie and the brain trust according to proprietary specs of his own design: various supply-closet combustibles set alight in one-liter IV bags.
Okay, everything they’ve mounted so far is just piddling stuff compared to the major campaign. But he refuses, on grounds of project security, to discuss future operations. Also, he’s kind of winging it. Not really sure what he’s after himself. The girl Joy seems somehow instrumental to the master plan. He doubles back to her on repeated, suck-up visits, cementing their wary truce with miscalculated small gifts: dried dough he swears will come back to life if soaked, half of a sundered walkie-talkie set, worthless books washed up in the tidal pools of trade, titles only she would read. Decisive Sieges of the Sixteenth Century, or Our Friends on the Pacific Rim.
“So are you getting any better?”
“I don’t know,” she answers gravely, unwilling to lie. He kicks at her crutches, toppling her in treachery. She emits a bleat, a “Hail” of surprised pain.
“Sorry. Just conducting a little experiment.” She stares at him in incomprehension, a retriever whose hindquarters are crushed under its careless owner’s recliner. “Look, I said I’m sorry. Here.” He doffs the cap. “Go ahead. Pull my hair. What’s left of it, anyway.”
She covers her smirk with the back of an autumn-leaf hand. She forgets the pointless cruelty faster than anything can explain. Pain passes from her face without residuals, replaced by another, iodine hurt each time she steals a look at him. Something inside her cells would match his instant age, decade for decade. Something in her is crying, “Little girl, little girl, let go of me.”
Sorties with the Stepaneevong female leave Nico’s senior lieutenants more than a little nervous. What’s the point? How’s she gonna help us any? Come on; let’s go steal some tubing and make a Comm Device. Or or or: let’s say that the third floor is M-31 and the fifth floo
r is Heliotria. The Cyclogeneron’s about 90 percent finished, but we need just one more trigawatt-hour of juice. . . .
But the guy they vie for is worlds away. Sometimes he’s morose with preoccupation, and will snap, “Grow up, will you? The hell is this, Peeweeland?”
His crushing rebukes demoralize the upper echelons of Command and Control. The only encouraging spin to Nico’s enigmatic insistence on parlay with this foreign element is that the more the two of them talk, the less they seem to need to.
He brings her a plastic soccer ball, half of a cruel carrot-and-stick cure. Astonishingly, she can keep it in the air with just her knees, elbows, head, and shoulders, even while propped up over her leg struts.
“Jeez. Where’d you learn how to do that?” But she cannot talk while the ball is aloft.
And he cannot wait for her to miss, which could be never. “Look,” he blusters. “Joyless. They’re probably not telling you everything, right?” She executes an especially skillful lob with the inside arch of her good foot. “I mean, you could be Xed off the charts as dead meat already, without even knowing it.” If she gives a reply, he’s the only one who hears it.
“Okay. So suppose you gotta go down,” he postulates, watching her, wagging his head in admiration. She counts softly, out loud, her successive aerial taps, somewhere in the high eighties. “With all due respect, Joyless, I’d like to suggest to you that the only thing worth doing, if that’s the case, is to try going down in the record books.”
She giggles, and it breaks her concentration. The ball rolls down the hall, and she limps along after it. “I’m not that good,” she says, the giggles still softly issuing from her like shy, unsigned, dime preemie valentines. A twinge of conscience nags at her. The books are waiting; she’s been remiss. She shouldn’t stand here playing all day. “I’m only so-so. Where I come from, they can keep a ball in the air all . . .”
Operation Wandering Soul Page 24