His guide—skin smoothing, head tufts growing back; the effects, even from this distance, of the opening in the earth’s side—runs ahead stuttering, in anguish. Ten paces, then back five. The blind boy points a harsh finger, not quite in the right direction, condemning the deserter to a miserable gallop. With a bitter little cry of triumph, the abandoned one calls out, “Nicolai!” He loosens a noose of string around his neck, where he had attached a packed lunch for the road. He throws the sack violently, wildly forward. The freakish one scurries to retrieve it, shooting back a look of stricken joy that the boy cannot see and the girl cannot reach. Then he too vanishes down the road and into the riven-open mountain wall, the hole gaping wide in the naked air.
The lame girl drags herself abreast of the last remaining human her age. From this moment, loneliness will be the most merciful thing life has to offer them. Her little one has fallen into the gravel, face down. She lifts him, dusts him off. “Come,” she says, taking him under her arm, as much for her sake as his. They can at least grope their way to the spot where the others disappeared, fix in memory the portal that has slammed in their faces, narrowly denying them the cure for innocence.
But the frame, the hinges, the jambs of the impossible passage have already faded, fused back into blank hillside even as the town of tune-drugged adults revives. The firsthand accounts from these shrill, unfossiled ones will not outlast the horror of their having survived. This version of events—piper, rats—is all the smudged variorum left, a bastard compromise script lying somewhere between what really happened and what can bear admission. For the blind and lame left-behinds—the trace memory of evacuation.
Joachim the Stone Dresser, the first out of the sleeping spell, stands on the North Gate parapet, watching a column, a whole eastern front of children disappear into legend. Three of his own vanish along with them, infants for whom—precociously—he has just begun to learn to feel affection. He stands watching two forgotten forms helping each other along the road. He hopes for a wild moment that they might be his. Then, seeing the devastation in their steps, he hopes guiltily that his have gone.
He thinks: This has all happened already. When have I seen this before? But he could not possibly have seen it. He is not old enough. The template end-time exercise left town long before. Colonial expansion, offshoot of stripling volunteers, or that crazed campaign naïveté, accounts unfolding nowhere but in his mother’s singsong, recorded in no other archives than the base of his brain. But in that old story Stone Dresser recognizes the day’s annihilation, as if recognition, remembrance, were never more than dry runs for the close.
The children have gone east, crossing that little letter-juggle from Liebestraum to Lebensraum, leaving Hamelin more living room than it will ever be able to fill. Joachim descends the capped ramparts, stands stiffly, insensate in the street that swallowed them. The two last children will be invested with every privilege the city has to offer. He personally will see to it. And free sweets on demand, for life.
HOW DOES THIS one go again? A green-clothed figure . . . Get the account, the one written, as they all are, as medicinal compensation for an ill, confined child, to ease the time remaining to him. Get the lines, forgotten for so long, skipped over at the time in favor of the lavish illustrations. That fabulous, inexhaustibly elaborate, foreshortened, piled-up street scene, deep with winding columns of those music-soothed animals. Get the poem, the spotty transcript lying on its shelf in the literary canon, the cult artifice, like those primitive plane-totems carved from logs and laid in waiting along faked jungle runways.
“For he led us, he said, to a joyous land, joining the town and just at hand.”
Joining the town? Yes; the next brutal high-rise institution over. Just at hand? As near as the artery in an open neck. As near as that nerve cable, slipping its way down through the tunnel of spine.
It occurs to the sleepy listener, for the last time, stalling for more escapism before bed. Comes on him with a clap, like the mountain closing over him: the chill of suddenly realizing, this really happened, on a specifiable day, in a well-documented year. The magic musician is based crudely on some bizarre original, an occurrence now lost in too many transmissions. Lost, except for the general contour, one standing up to existing fact. A sizable band of children gone off in a group, at the end of time, as they’ve been doing repeatedly at all hours, down odd years at steady intervals, through the shimmering, unstable portal, gauzy at best in both picture and caption iambs.
In the last tragic, accidental lockout, the sleepy staller, now jolted upright, catches a glimpse of the places you can’t get to in stories. All of them right here, within walking distance. Joining the town. Just at hand.
And there, in the least corrupt of remaining transcripts, is a coda exactly the opposite of the one that frozen adulthood remembers. How in some Transylvania there’s a tribe
Of alien people who ascribe
The outlandish ways and dress
On which their neighbors lay such stress
To their fathers and mothers having risen
Out of some subterraneous prison
Into which they were trepanned
Long time ago in a mighty band . . .
A prison from which only a reverse trepanation can spring them. A surgical strike: the bore of story through the braincase, into the firing core. The local cast of cripples picking it out for their amateur theatrics recognize in dim silhouette their own dispensation, the disaster that repeatedly leaves them here. And—good God—the trepanner, the first drowsy surgeon adult they chose to do the dirty cutting, to sink the cranial post holes for the soul’s release, sees it in a sick flash: that’s it. That’s where this group comes from. Their strangeness, their dress, their slew of alien languages. They’ve sprung up subsurface into this Angel Transylvania, drawn irresistibly to this vaguely familiar kiss-off rhyme. Only this time, they cannot keep from uncovering where it has taken them.
THE STREETS IN town are a bloodbath of crisis. Slaves and whipping beasts in life, the children, in disappearance, drive their collected parents to mass remorse. Shrieks and torn clothes form the Marktplatz’s new airs. The time for self-indulgence is forever past, but no one who should realize that does.
The town council mounts an emergency session in the Ratskeller. “I swear to you,” a panicked Bürgermeister calls into the screaming chamber, “we can make more of them.”
Joachim’s entrance accuses worse than the condemned Christ whispering, Not ten minutes more with me? His sorrow slams the room into silence. The illiterate puppet councillor, the merchants’ sop to the artisan class, walks stonily up to the town rolls, lowers his palm onto the leaves, and commands, “Write it down.” On this specific day, through our own common failure of imagination, our inability to project . . .
Stone Dresser dictates the precise message that will carry down through fixed myth to alert future sicklings, invoke them to rise up, retrace their dazed return. “On June 26, 1284, through stupidity and a mass tin ear, we killed our children.”
As for casting: no need to trek across town to those studio lots, the instant vistas of belief shot on dislocation. No call to solicit in the film set cafeterias where centurions lunch with storm troopers, senators with psychopaths, fake doctors with would-be children. They are self-sufficient, cast-ready, right here within their own institution.
Nico knows, from the moment he decrees which of Linda’s therapy performances they’re going to mount. The withered sideshow boy, age disengaged, has it all blocked out already. There’s not a chart on the ward who couldn’t become a shortsighted, self-serving adult politico, by modeling the role on a favorite probation officer. To play the paralyzed townies, they need only ape the service nurses and orderlies. After all, they have only to stand there, stony accessories after the fact. For the well-meaning, bighearted, but ultimately fumbling indentured public servant—what the hell; how about everybody’s favorite Minnesota Mexicali, in her first cross-dressing role? Nico will even
let Ms. MinneMex take producer’s credit, providing she remembers who’s calling the aesthetic shots.
Rats they possess, in their usual superabundance on this, the wrong side of what were once upon a time the tracks. You can hear them scuttling around behind the plaster, see them sunbathing up on the roof or surfing the stagnant parking-garage pools. Casts of rat thousands are no problem, and if there’s any labor dispute, some gnawing Actors Equity thing, they always have the cockroach under-studies—the ones the size of a child’s fist—to fall back on. And for a lead, Nico has his eye on this guy, a latent messianic, as ready-made a piper as fate could pitch in your path.
No; casting presents only one insurmountable snag. They have no children.
Dwarfs, maybe. Midgets, mites, pygmies, Lilliputians—chopped up, scaled down, wasted, disenfranchised. Shriveled, hypernecrotic baby elders nodding off on the toilet with a milk-shake-straw hypodermic spiked into whatever limb is still soft enough to break and enter. Eleven-year-old mothers of their own little half nieces and half sisters. Self-mutilating infants. Housing project survivors. Teen mob operatives and operatees, test cases and trial recipients for unbearable hardware. Million-dollar-a-week underground business middlemen. Those who will go directly from their treatment here to prison terms for murder or worse. They have a steady supply of underage, balloon-letter, sponge-bread breeders and bed wetters. But not one child.
Tag? Tops? Piggyback? That would strain the suspension of disbelief to breaking point, even among the Playhouse playhouse set. They haven’t even so much as a single credible summer-stock juvenile. Intensive care just turfed a little girl, left her lying on Linda’s doorstep after a few weeks of “Hail Marys” during which they hung her up strapped to the sustaining meter-taps. She is the size and shape of a dachshund thorax, with two smashed ribs, fissured head, and torso smeared all over with a shiny, blue-green oil slick, like a fungus colonizing the skin of a faltering Bartlett pear.
“Wreck of the Hesperus,” Plummer called her—anesthetized pros’ parlance. “Peanut sittin’ on a railroad track. The tyke had pelvic inflammatory disease so bad we had to do a double eggbeater on her.” One year old. The man responsible—Mama’s current beau, looking for diversion during her latest delivery—wound up getting fifteen years. The kid, as always, got life. Linda is to treat the baby for lingering limb impairment and pass her on to the social worker, who is left, in turn, to thrash things out forever with the assistance of the anatomically correct Raggedy Anns and Andys.
These are their choice for young ones.
But Nico knows they will need even this maimed creature. They must dress her in peasant rags and deed her to some surrogate big sister, herself rustically keloided from neck to nether parts. Offer the baby up to be chucked into the air in time to the delivering ditty. That, on second look at the synopsis, is exactly the point, the secret of this story’s draw. The day on which their bruised, abused, futureless ancient counterparts skipped town seven hundred years before is the same day that will freeze facts in their pragmatic tracks, finally freeing these chart-condemned to do the tag thing. Go piggyback. Believe in amateur theatrics. Act out the child’s play.
Nico takes over the idea as if it had been his from the start. He launches a massive promotional blitz to sell the story to the others. Persuading the boys consists of the usual bribes and blood threats: debts canceled for cooperation, crucial comic sequels withheld for failure to comply. Most of the street savants, with some grounds, consider the entire project yet another load of Eurocentric, racist, imperialist, hegemonistic, queer-ball, degrading eco-exploitation. Why the fuck should they dress up as a bunch of doomed little Kraut goombas? And nary a martial arts sequence in the whole script.
Nicolino, inspired, co-opts these holdouts. “You: we need you for the Rat King, Mr. Rat Heavy Heself. Big, ugly beefalo muffa, and chillin’ like nobody’s B. And you, you can be that Julius Caesar rat, the one who lives to write home about it. You, we’re going to let be the principal baby-brutalizer. Strip you to your waist, give you a hockey mask. Think how awesome your tattoo will look under the footlights.”
They’re sold the instant they start bargaining for plum parts. This frees up Nico to concentrate on the females. In practice, he needs the blessing of only one of them: the boat princess, that Stepaneevong. The one who chose the fable in the first place. Through no effort of her own—she’s either out in the halls learning how to limp without a crutch, or tucked in bed, booking for an imaginary final exam—she’s become the revered senior statesgirl. Fagging unfair, but go figure. It’s as if all the other mindless rope skippers, the guaranteed survivors of this ward, have wind of what’s up, and defer to her in shame.
He pays a bedside visit, this time with no sidekicks, no seconds in tow. He stands at her elbow, Dodger cap in hand, maybe thinking that the last lone tufts of eiderdown on his evacuated skull might win him some sympathy points. “Yo, Joyless! What is it now? Trig? Bio? Nuclear physics? Spelling?”
“History,” she replies, concealing the edges of her widening mouth behind two fingers. She has learned to hide her excitement like winter seed under snow.
“Again? Stuff never ends, does it? I ever show you this great Treasure Chest Illustrated Classic, the one where this whole army of kids—I mean, like we’d be the oldest ones in the entire outfit—storm off to whip the Musclemen? Really happened. That’s the unbelievable part.”
“What happened?” she asks, all hushed urgency.
“I ransomed it to the adults.”
She means the crusade, not the comic, but does not correct the confusion. Nico picks up and flips nervously through her stack of books, picking at her paper-snipped place markers. Rome, Münster, London, Roanoke, Vientiane: each slip marks another adjacent subterranean prison, points of arrival and departure. The scraps slip from his palsied fingers and scatter across the floor like tails on a paper donkey. “Criminetly. You read some weird stuff, I’m here to tell you.”
She stares at him, her eyes huge, relentless, and black. “What part?” she says to him, softer than the sweetest confession. “What part do you want me to play?”
The question pops his clutch, but big time. Here she is, coming out both feet, as it were, in favor of the plan. That’s it, then; cake. Wrapped up. History. No fight, no hard sell necessary. She’ll bring the femmes into the fold, wagging their tails behind them. Slight shift of the bargaining chips, and he ought to be out of suppliant mode, well clear of the proverbial woods. The tough part should be over with, all but put to bed. But in fact, they just now slink up alongside it.
Of course she already knows. Knows it the way she knew he could be depended on to kidnap her choice of tales and take over the production. Knows it the way she knew, on first thumbing through the picture book, that Hamelin was already in the itinerary, a scheduled stop for history’s through-service deportation trains.
He spins around defensively, unnerved. “I mean, what the hell, eh? Somebody’s gotta take charge. Who do we have capable of pulling something like this off? Floor full of target dummies. Sickos, freaks, and illegals. You: okay. So you’re our supreme genius. Everybody knows that. But you’re handicapped. You don’t understand this country. This place. They think they can buy us off with toxic canned peaches and Jell-O cubes. If that doesn’t work, they cram a tube down all available holes, park us in front of the vid, and threaten to send us home if we get better. I swear on my last sheet of toilet paper, they’re trying to deep-six us.”
“Deep . . . ?” Joy casts about for the translating dictionary among her hopeless references.
“Deep-six, eighty-six. ’Za matta? You no speekee? Out. Off. Posthole us. Cash in our chips. Cancel our receipts.”
“You mean kill us?” Her eyes widen impossibly. This is the truth they have been waiting to whisper to one another. This one. “Why?”
“Well, aren’t you the little angel choir? They don’t like our kind, case you haven’t noticed. Screws up their bookkeeping, jerks around the bed
count. And it’s a whole lot cheaper to kill us than to give us our own little jungle kingdom.”
“But they take care of us.”
“Will you listen to this! I don’t know whether to laugh or barf. ‘Take care of us’ is right. Okay, so they stop short of lethal injections. But they bust their royal butane to make this place about as survivable as a slow boat to . . . Oh, shitski, Joyless. Sorry. Just an expression, huh?”
A slipup ugly enough to bungle this whole transaction, to condemn it to Sudden Infant Death. But Miss South China Sea punishes him with nothing worse than a serene smirk. You boy, the look says. You harmless boy; how I’d love to rouge your sagging cheek pouches, lipstick that chapped mouth red, tie silk bows through the few remaining sprigs of your hair!
Their complicity infuriates Nico. She’d be frog bait by now, nightcrawler in another world, were she not essential to his plan. And in one quick shudder, he receives the even creepier realization: he is essential to hers. Her legs, perhaps? Her mobility. She uses him as executor, someone manic enough to enact the story she, for her own private reasons, has selected.
Point blank between them, they come to terms: We must play this thing or die. Repeat the fading incantation and pass through, rush the crawl-sized slit or be rubbed out, deep-sixed, three baby steps away from the tear they reopen in the seamless cell wall. In the lost boys’ world he would cackle at her, threaten her with something sharp, leap through the window and escape on the pulleys and spy wires sketched in by this issue’s artist. But in this world, he only chews on his bleeding cuticles, pushes back his nonexistent locks, and hisses. “So. How’s about it?”
Her turn for appalling compromise now. “What part?” she asks again, head down. Having bestowed him with executive powers, she must bend to whatever role those powers assign her. “I could make the costumes,” she bleats. “I could whisper the lines. I could look up the different versions of the story. There must be an awful lot.” Stress scatters her cantering accents wildly through the syllables. “I could print the programs. I’m a very careful printer.” Better than any of her peers born into twenty-six letters. The advantage of the late starter.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 30