Just as these two impossibly inimical hues slap startlingly together, the four Mills Brothers break out of nowhere. You’re nobody. Till somebody. Loves you. It’s a call to fall in, line up for new partners. A song, a performance in debt to every indigenous ditty ever tried out in these parts.
In quick planar section, Kraft takes in the whole converted hall at once. The guy with the huge loop of keys; the frightened Pacific woman, Kon Tiki on the return leg; the drunk driver carrying his unbearable penance; the mud-masqueing, ion-corrected, thirtyish professionals in their air-cushion shoes; the Parkinson’s patient holding one shaking claw in the other; the vet trying to hide the fact; the off-duty cops and their split-shift robber opposition; the movers and movees and shakers and shook; longshoremen and short shrifters; palefaces and redskins; the old folks at home; the fast crowd that stomped at the woodpile a half century before, here tonight only pretending to be beginners all over again: too much for him. How can he live? This place, this heartbreaking, magnificent, annihilating, imperialist, insecure, conscience-stricken, anarcho-puritanical, smart-bombing, sheet-tinned, Monroe Doctrined place . . . The searing, seductive, all-palliating, caramel curative of the been-through-the-Mills Brothers (sure, who else? you always hurt the ones you love) do their patented, slowed-down, lip-simulated, bastard-son-of-Dixieland instrumental interlude, returning only to insist that you’re nobody. Till somebody. Cares.
Come on, join in, kick up your heels. “OK, ladies and gents. Are you ready for more of what you came here for?” Kraft, terrified at the prospect of going back through the unforgiving partnering line, swings around looking for Linda. His escort protection has wandered off to visit Joy and Ben, demonstrating, up close and contagious, all the subtle foot movements that those on the sidelines are missing. Kraft comes over to snare her for the next round. As Linda laughs good-bye to the two wallflowers, Ben calls out something to her. What? Anything, nothing. Nobody till somebody. You look great out there. I like this tune. Enjoy yourself! I’m glad I’m around to watch. Can you get my cost of admission back?
Kraft loses the message in the general hilarity of regrouping. Whatever Ben says, it stops the woman, bruises her, knocks the breath from her plexus. Espera turns, fighting with her lip, twists from Kraft’s grip, and runs back to pick the boy up. She lifts him up bodily, the upper half remaining of him anyway, the brutal living stump, pruned back to nothing, to the nib, the stubborn nub, the germ. Flushed with pleasure, Ben breaks into a shamed-puppy grin. The band box strikes up a sleek, sexy “Satin Doll,” and Linda, in perfect time with the teacher’s “Ad-vance, and together, and glide, and back,” travels across the parquet for both of them.
The Cheese stands alone. Or not alone; worse. Kraft stands five feet away from the one soul whose presence most upset him on arrival, the one girl he would avoid with all the power of a pubescent crush. He can feel Joy appraising him from her seat in the empty chairs pushed against the wall. Her silence is articulate, more oppressive than ever. He hears himself, how he might yet have to tell her, to administer her hero worship a lethal injection. How he has perhaps wrecked her, killed her, or worse. Your ankle—I . . . The incursion could spread. All the way up your leg, beyond. She stares passively at him, already knowing everything.
He half-steps over to her, and he must tell her now. You tell me your dream, and I’ll . . . Tell her the odds against her. Tell her what she will never live to hear any adult male tell her. Tell her in that almost common language she can half-understand and he, despite an adulthood of effort, cannot more than half-forget. He takes her by the hand, hers held out for his before he even extends. She looks at him, adoring, waiting politely. Dr. Kraft? Looking away, he asks, in his child’s Thai dialect, “Care for a spin?”
BUT SHE BELONGS to someone else. The dancing expedition does little to placate Nicolino or stave off the next maniacal enterprise. He begs broken parts from the tech equipment jockeys, and he and the inner circle set to work on a Wellsian apparatus whose function they refuse to disclose. He institutes a strict regimen of daily exercise, combat-readiness stuff. He casts about frantically to answer the summons nagging at him.
The thing, the revelation, is so close that he goes gradually bananas with the jitters. It looks, from the outside, like a burst of senile activity. From the inside, he is cranked up worse than a teen, a year before the flood of gonadotrophin that might account for it.
“Son of a Bisquick. This place is so, mind-alteringly, boring. We gotta get something going. Quick. While it’s still possible.”
He sits splayed under a pull-up bedside table, scribbling furious letters abroad, guarding the texts with a sheltering arm. He struggles with the pen-driven alphabet the way a first-year French horn player might fight through the valved scale. Certain of his letters get sealed TOP SECRET. Others he actually mails, Linda picking up the postage.
One of those pathetic local television news-drink-spread shows picks up on the story Nicolino feeds it. “There’s a little girl lying in Carver Hospital tonight who hasn’t been on our shores for very long. But even where she comes from, they know what get-well cards are. Her name is Joy, and nothing would bring this Joy more of the same than to go down in the record books as the greatest recipient of . . .”
They send out a camera team fronted by a snitty little media witch who tries not to touch anything in the children’s ward except during those few seconds when the take goes “live.” Then, in front of the opened lens, she rests her hands affectionately on Joy’s passive head. Pulling away as soon as the cameras stop, the newscaster checks her palms for shed hanks “My God,” she whispers audibly to her crew, as if discovering rat feces in the coils of her electric range. “It’s hair-loss city in here.”
No sooner does the story run than the cards begin to pour in. Surreal get-well wishes from a sick world. Wishes in eleven languages, including her own, plus all manner of grammarless dialects. Some with no words at all, just pictures, little Crayola comic strips purporting to relate her own story back to her, tracing a narrow escape from murderous nondemocratic forces all the way to ultimate techno-cure and consignment to happy, waiting ranch family. Boutique-bought three-dollar cards with no signature. Mass-mailed photocopies. Delicate, church-circle, handmaid handmades. Sympathy and condolence scrawled on the backs of cold-tablet packets. Long, rambling teeny-tiny-print letters about the loss of daughters to the same, never-mentioned disease. About daughters who are not their real daughters, about real ones swapped or disguised or hidden. Real daughters who think they are adopted. Adopteds, abandoneds, who never in a million years suspected. Mothers who are sure Joy is theirs.
Nico sits on the foot of her bed as the crates of communiqués pour in. He demands first dibs, as if the cards are really his and he has just been forced to use Stepaneevong because she’s convenient. He devours the cartoons and drawings, passing them on with a low chuckle of having pulled a fast one. The hard letters, from the crackpot adults, he makes her read to him. Then the two of them set up a routing system whereby the bushels of mail are passed around for public consumption before they are turned back in for official record-book tallying. At least it’s something to do.
But it’s morbid, and it only serves to feed the ward’s dancing mania. Each get-well is an acupuncturing coffin pin, rotated and tweaked in the suppurating wound until the subjects feel nothing except bewilderment at being held here against their will.
Aware of the risk, Linda shows up at bedside one afternoon while an on-duty card-reading shift plows bleakly through the day’s mail, no longer even grinning. “What do you say to a little amateur theatrics?” she says, to no one in particular.
No one responds, until Joy stares openly at the tyrant who has taken control of operations.
“You mean, like a play?” Nico asks. “Make me heave, why don’t you? Like, little froufrou costumes and makeup and that? Of all the infantile . . .”
She is ready for him. “Bunny hopping at the Pasadena Women’s Club?”
&
nbsp; “That’s different. That was . . . preparation.” Even in midsentence, you can see him realize that this stray message brought by unwitting courier is preparation too. Exactly the thing he’s been after. “What do you got?”
Linda removes from its hiding place in her pouch the old anthology, A Country a Day for a Year, the promised term of time now an impossible luxury. Nico emits a groan, beyond repugnance.
“‘The Goose-Child.’”
“Wrench my neck.”
“‘The Wolf-Child.’ ‘The Lizard-Child.’”
“Three strikes. Blow off this animal kingdom thing.”
“‘Jam on Jerry’s Rock.’”
“Pardon me?”
“That’s the name. ‘Jam on . . .’”
Nico voices a loud fart, followed by universal oos of disgust. But Linda knows she has them now.
“‘Aladdin.’ ‘Sinbad.’ ‘The Magic Caldron.’ ‘Trickster Plays the False Bridegroom.’ ‘Hanuman’s Burning Tail.’ ‘The Borrowed Feathers.’ ‘The Magnetic Islands.’”
“Oh, sure, right. I’m not dressing up as anything smaller than a minor landmass.”
“‘The Three Golden Sons.’ ‘The Seven-League Boots.’ ‘The Frog That Made Milk.’”
“I said, bag the animals already.”
“‘Beezaholi and the Cyclogeneron’?” a frightened voice from among the backbenchers suggests.
“Sure,” Linda says. “Why not? Couple of diodes, some tinfoil . . .”
“No friggin’ way. José. Full stop. Keep reading.”
Linda sighs, a languorous Lillie Langtry, and returns to the table of contents. “‘The Wati Kutjara.’ ‘The Fake Beauty Doctor.’ ‘The Stone Eskimo Child.’ ‘The Mayor of . . .’”
Joy twists acrobatically under Linda’s arm, her weight on her knuckles, as supple as a crippled beggar. Her fingers slide down the list of potential scripts at twice the speed that the false mother can pronounce them out loud. She sieves through the titles, moving her lips silently, looking for one in particular. When she finds it, as she never doubted she would, she calls it out in foregone-conclusion monotone, for the first and last time in her life interrupting another human being.
It is that spooky name, the old familiar, the last tale Linda would have thought children of this city would sit through, let alone dress up and perform this late in time’s day. But the effect on Nicolino, and by association his entranced clan of republican guard, is enough to goose her flesh. “Lemme see that. Gimme that book.”
He flips to the story in question and assaults it with the viciousness of the functionally illiterate. Here it is. The point of all the endless, agitated prep. The explanation, the need for dancing lessons. “Okay,” he decides with producer’s finality, “this is the story we’re doing. You direct. We double-cast all us gimps to play both sets of teaming masses.” Now: where’re we going to find four dozen rat suits, a high dive, and a pipe?
How does this one go again? The ubiquitous, uninvited out-of-towner shows up on the city outskirts one morning to make a comprehensive survey. Comparing the checklists of the real against the ideal upward spiral, he concludes to himself with masterful, mumbled understatement, “Serious infrastructure problems here.
“Bad shape,” he elaborates, a pleasant euphemism. One quick spin around the city-wall circuit confirms the obvious. From any perimeter tower, anyone paying attention can make out the state of affairs. Were the problem just cosmetic, it would already be unsolvable: the house plaster going shabby, the shoddy half-timbering rotting no sooner than it is rigged together. The open sewers back up into putrid pools, exceeding all stopgap attempts to sluice off the stinking sludge. The slum quarter spreads like desert into the heart of town, but the vitiated commercial sector cannot afford to pull the sinkhole down and do the required rebuilding.
The glittering Rathaus is a mammoth travesty, its obscene overhead bleeding the tax base dry. The guild buildings are down on their heels, held up by subsidy, levitation, and the magic of deficit spending. The centuries-old overhaul of the basilica has halted in mid–flying buttress. Quintessential urban nightmare, arrived at by what the grade schools will one of these once-upon-a-times take to calling civics: pauperize the past and mortgage the future to pay for an unsustainable, Pollyanna present. “An easy mark,” the self-employed surveyor says, shaking his head with a grin.
The man descends from the ramparts and heads toward the diseased downtown retail plaza. It is market day, and he settles down between a fishtail vendor, a blood sausage emporium, and a rottingly ripe cheese stall. The out-of-towner has not eaten for days, and he takes whatever sustenance he can through inhalation.
He sits down unceremoniously, cross-legged on the bare ground. He pulls open a soft leather satchel from which he draws writing materials. Spreading a piece of parchment awkwardly in front of him, he begins to print, “Fore-year 1284, Anno D. Have arrived. Find it a flea-bitten burrow with big-league pretensions, well into the predicted collapse.” A woman who has slowed to gawk at this bizarre act of mall performance art edges off suspiciously as he looks up. Another, holding a hank of carrots by the hair, mistakes him for a beggar or a pope’s emissary collecting for some worthy ground offensive and drops a few pennies on his parchment. The stranger politely returns them.
He settles back to his writing, and to the fine art of underplaying. A knot of children stands at a distance, giggling. “Intractable physical plant problems,” the man pens, with some freedom in orthography. “Situation hopeless, but not urgent. Nothing that can’t be wished away for another overdraft day or two.”
Two appointed luminaries reconnoiter at the end of the writer’s row of stalls. They pretend to be part of a crowd engrossed in a cleaning fluid demonstration, but give themselves away by sneaking glances in the intruder’s direction. A third undersecretary slinks over to reinforce them. “It’s the suit,” the stranger grimaces to himself, brushing an imaginary piece of lint from his multicolored threads. “Motley gets them every time.”
The suit, however flashy, is mere window dressing for the real five-alarm. Simple literacy, just kicking back and taking down travel notes, and in public at that, is a prosecutable violation of the status quo. Still, the visitor goes on annotating methodically, deliberately failing to notice the pro forma town meeting taking place on his behalf.
After another few minutes, the display of blatant public scribbling becomes too much for the assembled officials. They sidle up to where the threat sits, stopping first along the cheeses to sniff nonchalantly at some Limburger. They halt abruptly in front of the scribbler, faking an afterthought. “Good morning,” the senior among them manages, in a reasonable facsimile of surprise.
“Good morning to you,” the stranger replies, the soul of enigma.
“Yes, well. Quite,” the official sputters like a schoolboy. “We see that you are . . .” He gestures helplessly at the point and parchment.
“Writing?” supplies the stranger.
“Yes. Exactly. Are you from the Abbey?”
The stranger examines his own clothes, as if trying to solve the conundrum himself. “Have the brothers here shed the traditional brown?”
“No, of course not.” The interrogator passes the reprimand along to his underlings with a shriveling look. “Perhaps you are selling something, then?”
The stranger smiles indulgently. Getting warmer. He leans forward. “I’m here to help you.”
“Sshht!” one of the worthies silences him, casting around violently to see if anyone’s heard. Everyone has, but the ad hoc steering committee nevertheless stifles the stranger with furtive vigor. They hustle him off the Marktplatz into the Rathaus cellar by a back entrance. They shuffle him into a side chamber and forcibly sit him down, interrogation style. The chief politico, searching the faces of the others to see if they disclose too much just by asking, pales and demands, “Who told you we needed help?”
Instantly, the interrogatee falls into his natural cadence. “Friends, your problems ar
e apparent from as far away as the spires of Hildesheim.”
This bit of cheek produces an outburst from the officials. Libel, lies, slander, discovery: Who told? The buzz goes internecine; they carp at each other in low local dialect. After several bursts of mutual recrimination, one of the number is dispatched to fetch the Bürgermeister. During the wait, the stranger removes from his leather satchel a telescoping tripod easel, which he proceeds to assemble.
When the Bürgermeister and the rest of the hurriedly summoned town council arrive, they prove shrewd enough politicians to let the visitor handle the interview on his own terms. For this, the man in motley has come eminently prepared. He places several brightly illuminated, stiffened sheets of parchment on the easel and begins. “Gentlemen, let us not deceive ourselves any longer. Your beloved town is nursing some serious infrastructure problems here.”
Joachim the Stone Dresser—the power brokers’ put-up sop to the laboring classes, increasingly unmanageable of late—interrupts. “What’s an infrastructure?” The other councillors shout at him that it means roads.
“Yes, roads,” the stranger elaborates. “And bridges. And walls and buildings and plumbing. Retail strip, industrial base, residential. It’s all shot. Slum. Gone to hell in a hay wain.” Joachim asks for an explanation of the figure of speech but is shouted down.
The stranger begins flipping his parchment diagrams, egg tempera graphs as gaudily colored as the man’s outrageous outfit. “Here we see the per capita weighted performance of your town plotted against Goslar, Paderborn, and Lemgo, over the last forty quarters.” The curves are snappily plotted against a cutaway view of a half-finished Romanesque cathedral. Goslar, Paderborn, and Lemgo all hang comfortably ensconced somewhere around the triforium.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 27