“Well, yeah, fine. I’m sure you print just great. Only, you see, we’ve got that base covered already. What we really need now is . . .” He frets at the row of plastic sizing holes at the back of his cap band. He cannot bring himself to spell it out. It. What we really need.
“What part do you make me play?” The words rustle like raw silk, that raw silk that refuses to burn. Her voice, doubling back ever softer, sounds like a refrain to one of those eternal rounds common to every culture. She tugs at the vowels as at a female fighting kite, one caught in a bright, parti-colored quarrel high up in the sky, far away, beyond eyesight. “Nico?”
He will not tell her what she already knows.
“I’m the lame one, aren’t I?”
“You’re the crip,” he agrees tersely. “You’re the gimp.” He flares his beak of a nose at her, flashes the so sue me look. Showdown slides off into a shrug.
She tries on the idea of never making it, of being the one eternally left behind. Their entire breakaway child republic will make it out, all escape on the virtue of her story, her sacrifice, all arrive safely except her. The knowledge plays like a cold, focused, close-up gel spot on her. She half-expected this, from the start of her concerted studies. But now, a working pact between them transforms all hideous kiddieland, and departure is real.
As the pair fall to arrangements, the details of set and stagecraft, the boy’s gravelly, senescent voice goes low, half sympathetic. His subdued countenance turns away from her over their daring plans. Perhaps he even feels, just this once in his compressed, accelerated life, the shape of guilt, the pitiless cameo he places in her hands.
SO MOTLEY’S THE only wear. And motley is the only crew capable of carrying the plan off with this ferocity. Mickey and Judy, transcribed to the earth’s marked races, the planet’s disinherited—Andy Hardy Goes to the Pen; Andy in the Big House—take over Linda’s office. They fill the corridor back behind Neonatal, spill into the Theraplay Room, turn the halls into their private pickup rehearsal barn.
Everyone’s in. The littlest are put to work learning forward rolls and cartwheels and whatever other traveling acrobatics they can negotiate. Suicidal eight-year-olds who only last week tried to seal themselves up in the industrial-strength Husky bags for rubbish removal paint backdrops, towns and mountains and sky, open air such as their fume-stunted lungs have never inhaled. The Rapparition, the Fiddler Crab, the No-Face, the Hernandez brothers—each already a character actor in his own urgent one-act—take to this collaboration as if joining the supreme, platonic street gang, the enterprise that all of Angel City’s other five hundred rumble clubs strive for. La marea de Dios. God’s attack rabble, in their theatrical debut.
From the first, preparations are out of Linda’s hands. Her coaching consists of getting out of the moving violation’s way. Any further suggestions from her would be as welcome as a lapdog at a nude beach. Her each schoolmarmy stutter of “Maybe flaming torches aren’t such a hot idea” sounds, even to her, like a fetid little check of death. Her every shouted encouragement comes off condescending, a reprimand in disguise, one more governor slapped on innocence’s wild turbine.
Yet nothing she could do would more than momentarily muck things up. They are stronger than she is now, for the simple reason that they know where they have been. They come from poverty’s every proliferating precinct in this balkanizing city, a state-sized political sprawl pulling its unassimilatable self apart piecemeal. Theirs is the nation’s flagship, the Western vanguard, the index of leading things-to-come, the fast track into the next eternity. They were born knowing it isn’t home. And all the fledging comic tragedians, calling out cues to one another in three dozen native languages, act with the natural flair of those who know where they must be going.
Just watching them cuts her with recovery. Oh God: these little girls, singing that a cappella road jingle they’ve collectively made up. It’s her all over. That dark-eyed little spitfire girl tugging at the hem of her dress in the front row of the yearly class photo. What’s happened to her? What bottomless hole did she tumble down? What noxious DRINK ME vial swelled her up so grotesquely that she cannot even fit into one of their pygmy chairs at the back of the rehearsal room?
Some insidious, viral, sexually transmitted, colossal failing of nerve she’s caught from her Kraft sinks in, and she can’t take it. Can’t look at them anymore, much less call out prompts. She sees in them all the babies she and Richard know better than ever to have together. Here are the souls of the infants they would pillow-smother at birth through overcaution. Every performing child becomes a prodigy too painful to clap for. The parental terror that paralyzes her and her mismatched mate drives her from the rehearsal room with teeth marks on her fingers. Creeping back in, she tells herself: Playact a virtue if you have it not.
These, her shock cases, ham it up in those pathetic paper hats as if they have only this staged moment seen: this life, this life we missed, the one we were stripped of? Here it is at last, restored to us in dress-ups. My spot. My cue. My line.
Onstage, their ravaged lineup reveals the telling symptom. A solid chunk of the revue is bald or balding. Not just peach-fuzzed Nico or the kitchen-match look-alikes waiting for their locks to grow back. Not just the radiation club or the Kemo Kids, grinning at their overnight transformation into a skinhead mob. The makeshift footlights pick up a glare on every other pate in the chorus. Does the hospital stand on a seething East Angel landfill dosing us all, accumulating fastest in the tissues of the very young? Have the building’s lab machines sprung a leak, sloshing the halls with a child-specific spray of rays?
Something wider, Linda concludes. The theme runs through her story almanac—the shocking hair of the very young. Feather-crested Hopi infants. Baby Zaal in the Shah-nameh, white-cropped as an ermine in winter. It shows up, always an advance signal, the Now about to announce itself. And here it is in droves, massed regiments of hairless rats returning in Act Two to double as themselves: a troupe of shedding, expectant deprivees fresh from ballroom dance lessons. Those who don’t bald by symptom or side effect join along in an act of reverse protective coloration, the leaf willing itself to blend in with the rare animal hovering on its surface. They all cover for the ones already singled out. Take me too.
The industry they lavish on this venture outstrips the sum of Linda’s every other cure. Pure energy. Each djinn takes to its specific task without being told. They fan the hospital, scavenge it for usable bits. They assemble costumes and backdrops from pilfered bedpans, gauze, linen, and tubing. They inspect each other’s handiwork, block out scenes together, write one another’s lines. The auteur urge runs through these illiterates like mumps through kindergarten nap hour.
And the place they construct in the forced-pastel dayroom: infirm Angel City hasn’t seen its like since the last large-scale emigration. Shipping-box battlements draped in rayon raiment project a proscenium that leaves almost no room for audience, whoever that might be. The sham city walls are stuccoed all over with wild child heraldry. The streets are a tumbled maze, the lace of evacuation’s ancient follow-routes.
This surreal Hansastadt is enhanced by Nico’s strange frame-tale staging. In his plan—an intuitive masterstroke—a poet reads to two kids in sickbed. The rhymester informs the sufferers, mutatis mutandis, about their looming cure by another name. (It’s the Rapparition, perching on a TV stand, chanting the bit of lame Browning that only he could get to sing, “It’s as if my great-grandsire, starting up at the Trump of Doom’s tone, had walked this way from his painted tombstone.”)
The story takes literal shape in front of the two chronics, joining the town and just at hand, a play in which both poet and sicklings take part, trade places. The players who join them to flesh out the tale cycle round-robin through analogy’s available profiles—all participant presences, teller, tellee, told.
Linda, watching in knots, begins to wonder if the piece is meant for public performance at all. It feels to her more like a fierce group tr
aining exercise, a dry run. Perhaps a drill: learn by heart these seven warning signs, the portents of nearing disappearance. The more they memorize their lines, the more they improvise.
All the while, the pace picks up, pitching toward frantic. The physiatrist can only sit by, riffling through her worthless cue cards. They keep her on for no other reason than that she has not yet secured them their leading man.
Consequently, the children must do their acting around an empty spot upstage. They work the negative space, falling in behind a piper present only by implication. The pied stranger grows even more convincing in absentia. The performing trees, the rocks, rats, river, and town politicos, the magic mountain backdrop, the featured children masquerading as their own missing selves, all play off the truant soloist.
One role in particular drives herself savagely in prep for the lead’s delayed arrival. Clinical Linda must bench the girl a half dozen times, precautions for which Joy rewards her with almost resentful sulks, were this girl capable of resentment. The little lame cameo rehearses furiously, forgetting that it doesn’t have to be perfect until there’s an audience. Or maybe not forgetting, maybe just deciding that Now is always its own public. After all, no one knows opening night’s hour. She calls out her lines, flails to her masking-taped mark with inexhaustible amateur zeal.
Nico, doing his militant DeMillenarian tyrant bit, barks at everyone but her. Two against one. Actually, it’s the whole lot of them against the lone authority. Everyone in the cast conspires to keep Linda from butting in with Your Own Good.
Joy’s own good is only this: to draw near, in dress run-through at least, the place she is denied in the master script. A glimpse now will make the last lockout more bearable. When it comes time for her to hobble across the stage, a Method-acted cripple more lifelike than life, she pushes her ulcerated bone beyond capacity. She crumples and sheers. Linda watches the girl go down in slow motion. It is the old moment of maternal horror: in the end, the best parent must let them all fall.
And fall they all will, beginning with the boat girl, who snaps and spills to the floor. Omnivorous eternal booker, assimilation-intent A student, she is nevertheless stunned by this pop quiz. She balls up on the Theraplay Room rug, screaming so violently that not even Linda dares take a step toward her. Silent at every step of the deportation, stoic all during her cells’ savage transpacific drift, she screams now, on arrival. At her bloodcurdling magic shriek, every onstage freak in waif’s clothing reverts to the real thing. Referred pain convulses through the faces of the entire cast. Not this. Not Joy, the quiet one. The one beyond pain, spasming in torture on the floor.
Her limb twists backward, withers like the ashes of a self-immolating monk. But her anguish is out of proportion to the pain, even this nerve razored open and limed. Her writhing is more than bone-based. Unbearable implication flashes through her even before she hits the ground. Stunted syllables work up from her throat. “No. Not yet!”
Not again, she means, immune to her own anguish but grieving for that doomed, near-miss girl she is playing. From hysterics she fades to soft mewling, then level-voiced, rapid reasoning with anyone who tries to touch her. Everything is okay. Just one second, please. Let’s finish this rehearsal and then they can have a look at the leg.
After several minutes of frenzied standoff, Linda sends for the parameds. These conclude that a little judicious pharmacology is the persuasion of choice. Persuaded despite herself, the girl falls asleep and is lost.
Espera tries to alert Kraft, but he seems to have finally achieved his beloved nowhere. He is not in the call room or at home or at any known transmitter extension.
Turns out he is down in the ER, having responded to an assist request, Plummer’s tired old time-honored line: “Say hey, Dr. Kraft. There’s a consult down here with your name tooled all over it.” Power-tooled, to be precise. A seven-year-old who has discovered the difference between a hand and a bandsaw. As Kraft finally emerges from the cutting room, uncountable incarnations later, a vaguely familiar woman is waiting to waylay him.
“It’s Joy,” Linda tells him.
Kraft nods at her intelligently, as if he can almost place this woman’s face, or the words issuing from it.
A BAND OF children wander into the suite where their colleague is being readied for the inevitable. They come not so much for her as to dampen their own terror, assure themselves that the creature they saw curled up in anguish on the stage floor was a trick of the lighting.
All the show’s principals are present and accounted for. They are led, as always, by time’s toy, the principals’ principal. Nico plays with the traction bed’s counterweights. He assures her, “We’re holding up the production until you can make it back.”
She gives him a forlorn look: It’s dull in our town since my playmates left. She has calmed since her flailing fall, but something in her busily turns over a distant phrase that the others haven’t gotten wind of yet. She pulls herself away sufficiently to answer, “You can’t wait. Not possible, Nico.” You knew when you assigned me the part.
A little looking around, a quick, pragmatic show of hands. “No, you’re right.” The offer was only for show. Caught in the idle kindness like a fly’s wing under a cover slip, he glances around the room. His eyes dart about for a change of topic. Something wants to insist that there is still a route out, a path, perpendicular to every other, that they might still take. And, suddenly grinning as broadly as on the day of his admission, he sees one.
“Well, for the love of Jiminy Cricket’s dick. Look at these.” He slogs into the burlap sacks in the corner, each filled with several thousand get-well cards. His pet project for the helpless crip, back when he was still your basic greenhorn progeriac casting about for a new game. Back when getting well was still a competitive sport. He kicks one of the sacks, grabs his toe, and hops about to mugged laughs. “We’ve got that record sewed up, anyway.”
But Joy roots quietly about in the three-ringed binders that have never left her side since she beached her open craft here in this hemisphere. She searches through her communiqués from message-mad America. She extracts a clipping about a Brit boy with brain tumors, evacuated to this continent of medical mavericks and sometime miracle workers, where you can always find someone who will operate on anything. This boy, capturing the imagination not only of the local media but of World News, has already scavenged enough well-wishes to beat her haul by several orders of magnitude. Thirty-three million cards, and he continues to solicit internationally for more. Worse, to add insult to injury, the winner is getting better.
“Oh Jesus. Joyless.” Nicolino turns the piece over, desperately reading the bisected horoscopes on the flip side. His claws shake under the weight of the disastrous scrap. Disease’s impeccable timing destroys the protection racket he tacitly promised her. He balls up the newsprint, crushing along with it the long list of coordinated lies that childhood has tried to hand them from the start.
Even the most cross-language remedial among them sees through the fairy narrative now. That old crone who tricks the charmed early readers into believing she is their mother spits them out four paragraphs before the ever after, stranding them in wildest nowhere. Or a place worse than nowhere, sicker, wider with not, with never: this Emerald City blazing away all its nonrenewable futures at this instant, there, outside Pediatrics’ window.
FINDING THE FATHER proves easier the second time. Despite the hospital’s promises of good faith, Wisat’s signature on his daughter’s release alerted the governmental wide-network trawlers. Immigration picked him up and has been holding the guy in a state of blind bewilderment since Joy’s first trip under the knife. He is so desperate to see the girl and learn of her fate that he even agrees to return to the scene of his betrayal.
The only hitch to securing this new round of permissions lies in words. They leave it to Kraft, the scutboy, to break it to the victims. “Extent of femoral incursion indicates immediate aggressive invasive proc . . .” The girl, again serv
ing as translator, just stares charitably at her doctor. She wonders how the two men who have come to mean the most to her in her two lives can inhabit the same room, albeit unable to speak to one another.
Kraft notices the hush, the hang time where her translation should follow. He looks up from his scribbled chart and catches her staring. He stares back, at the eyes he has been avoiding for reasons more numerous than the mistakes he has made along the length of her treatment. Twelve-year-old eyes, black as the lacquer on a ceremonial barge, black as the silk pajamas that a generation of high schoolers just a grade or two older than he were told to empty their clips into.
He calculates back to the year when he first saw these eyes, had them burned into his own retinas. He was, at most, two years older than she is at this pre-op hour. And the girl: the girl, in ’69 . . . Why bother pretending to do the math? The girl was what she always will be. The girl, already, even then, was twelve.
He freezes in her gaze, the defense that night animals fall back on when astonished by light. Locked in her continuous pupil and iris, he tilts his head in a dissociative shrug of pain, as if he refuses to make out who she is. Dictaphone-steady, he repeats her prognosis. “The patient is dead animal mass unless we radically hack her back.”
She blinks at him, neither wince nor recoil. The glance is that of a village girl—too young by a year yet for the silk coils that will couple her hair to another’s—getting her first glimpse of her arranged lifemate. Her look inquires curiously, a dressup, a play-money look. She turns to her father and performs a near-faithful transcript of the sentence. “The patient” remains “the patient,” “dead” stays “dead.” But “radically hack her back,” to protect her doctor, she renders as “operate.”
Operation Wandering Soul Page 31