Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  His vocabulary grew rapidly. His ear, at thirteen, was still liquid. There were sounds in the massive alphabet that his parents could not distinguish, let alone produce: an intermediate between b and p; a vicious initial ng that came from a place in the back of the throat missing in white adults. Impaired, his parents employed Ricky to negotiate with tradesmen or placate Som’s anxieties over the invasion of the evening’s pallo by winged hordes.

  A barrier more intractable than pronunciation prevented his parents from ever becoming Free speakers. In Free, a word’s meaning hinged on a proper deployment of the five tones. His mother, an amateur musician, could hear something wonderful happening in every spoken syllable. But neither she nor Kraft Sr. could hear, let alone enunciate, the difference between “color” and “four.”

  The boy, on the other hand, knew the tone of a word before he’d even learned it. He knew the tone was the word. Thus he could make, from what sounded to his parents like five equivalent syllables, the brilliant if rhetorical question, “New silk doesn’t burn, does it?”

  He studied Free at the International Institute of the City of Angels. The school housed the city’s foreign children, a monastery complex without the finials. The school mascot—racist joke on all farangs, whatever their melanin—was Hanuman, the white monkey general from the national poetic epic.

  Ricky soon studied Free with the oldest, even learning the elaborate script. He learned to name two dozen banana varieties from dealings with the canal boats. Som taught him how to sing in a seven-pitch musical scale, twisting each note with the word’s inflection. But his real language lab took place in the streets, where he quickly learned everything from “corner kick” to “bugger your mother.”

  Time thrived not in the verb but in context. Yesterday it rains. This afternoon, it rains. Cool centuries from now, when you at long last graduate from bodily history, it rains. The subtle colorations of tenseless time seeped deeper into him. He slowly understood it, or, in the Free for “understand,” it heart-entered him.

  It heart-entered him until he felt nowhere but where he was, a white ghost in an inland port on the Gulf of Free, in a street overrun by pedicabs and tone-haggling merchants, laced with jasmine and temple bells, bells rung by pilgrims’ staves in the same intervals as the seven-pitch songs Som taught him. He sang the songs at thirteen, hearing in advance what the pitches would sound like at second hand, when the one place on earth he ever belonged to was reduced to this exotic travelogue, dim cartoon.

  His parents were resigned to let him assimilate. He could wander the city at random. For two and a half cents, he took one of the hundred color-coded buses, hanging out the open back door even when crowding did not compel it. He clung to the Sunday Market, where he watched limbs thick with elephantiasis shrink at the application of fluid distilled from rare barks. There too he could buy fish and birds for the merit of releasing them. Fruit could be had that he had seen nowhere else on the planet, tastes that had no equivalent in any other language but this, the one he now tasted in.

  The Sunday Market attested to fields and rivers a little more forthcoming than most of the places he had lived. But even this relatively affluent emporium had its extensive subdivisions where the deformed laid out mats, where mothers solicited for their hydrocephalic infants—heads huge, smooth, and shiny as museum vases. Here, the boy invested his bargaining proceeds. At thirteen, he still felt the ludicrous hope of making a dent, although somewhere he already knew that all the coins in the world would never release even an insignificant fraction of the agony locked in this one illusory turn of the Wheel.

  The southeast of town was a slum so vast and desperate that no philosophy could reduce it to illusion. Ricky traveled there one day, one of the few city corners he hadn’t yet seen. The bus conductor punched his ticket using a six-inch, coiled little fingernail, and asked where the boy thought he has going. Ricky responded, “I live in this city.” I live yesterday, now, in another hundred centuries.

  But he was not ready to see just where he lived. In Squatter Town, houses for displaced spirits were irrelevant. The living there displaced nothing; they had never taken possession of the lease. Fathers defecated and mothers listlessly washed dishes in the same fetid film where their children still found the energy to swim. The diet here could not even sustain the hope of religious escape. Days were no perpetual Wheel to be ridden until history released the day’s residents. There was no passage of days here. Days were an inconceivable luxury for the privileged and already sprung.

  The squatter boys in the streets did not even bother to mob Ricky as he handed out dimes. They took the coins and looked away, weary. One older tough, a spark in the swallowing dark, at least summoned up enough irony to push palms together in front of his bowed nose, a parody of the gesture of thanks and departure.

  Squatter Town graduated the boy forever from temperament. The size of the floating ghetto, the rotting slackness of life scavenging its own dead, defeated any scheme human history might invent to justify itself. Ricky discovered, at the moment his body was everywhere tufting, losing its pink larvahood, that the Sunday Market sufferers were not confined to a few, licensed begging stalls. They proliferated in whole, autonomous free-trade cities of their own, outstripping in per capita growth anything the upward world could hope to offset.

  He could make no sense of the slum’s exploding compass. The image followed him around fastidiously wherever he went. He asked his Free friend, the Institute gate guard, how a slum that size could consume a city so gifted. The man darkened and pronounced his explanation.

  “Do you know Hitler?” the guard asked.

  Ricky confessed to having heard of him.

  “I want to do for our Chinese what Hitler did for your Jews.”

  The boy could not even cough out “Why?”

  “Chinese take all the business. They marry Free women. They hoard currency in rice sacks and make us pay double to get it back.”

  Ricky took the question to church—a Lutheran outfit that met in the attic of a Catholic school. Ricky asked his confirmation teacher, an Air Force captain, who quietly informed him. The war was sucking the entire subcontinent dry. And all unnecessarily, because stay-at-home lawmakers had never come out for a look. Only one step could halt the hideous drain: permission to saturate the Yangtze, every hundred kilometers. The captain tapped the palm of a spotted hand, tracing a precision pattern up his lifeline. He claimed his Free colleagues at the leased bases all agreed. Ricky sensed how soon he would have to put away childish things.

  The boy tried to lose himself in diversions. He attended ceremonial combats—kites, fish, cocks, kick-boxers. He bought numbing doses of sugarcane and iced coffee from vendors, smudgy newsprint scandal magazines, spirit-restoring roots from the canal boat flotillas. The International Institute was good for killing thirty hours a week, his classes serenely unaware of the watershed crisis he had just unearthed. After school he took refuge in Indian films where heroes leaped ten meters into the air and landed while simultaneously twirling a machete and completing a tight end rhyme. But by the end of the film, as he stood at attention in front of a projection of the king while a pipat band insinuated itself into a facsimile of the royal anthem, small Kraft’s desire to efface himself demanded, more than ever, its obvious out.

  The boy told his parents he would enter the monastery at the onset of that rainy season.

  “Time-honored response,” his father chuckled, as if he had the early teen mind pegged. “Too bad you’re not legal age. We could use you in the Foreign Legion.”

  Ricky had no idea what the man was talking about. Between the boy and his father lay every kilometer they had ever logged. His parents had brought him up without cruelty, with all the amenities. But their attempts at understanding him were, like his belated exposure to his national sport, doomed to enthusiastic blundering. How could they think he wanted to forget something? Completely wrong. There was something he needed badly to remember.

  Most Free mal
es spent some time as monks. His parents, who had delighted in his language study, taken him throughout the country, and set him loose in the capital, could not object. Fourteen was ripe for a novice; some boys entered the monastery as early as eight. Some stayed for three weeks; others found themselves still in the temple year after year, finally dying in the abbey of their original petition.

  The postulant went for religious instruction. They started with the story of the Enlightened. A rich prince undergoes a spiritual crisis, realizing that he can expect nothing at the end except sickness, suffering, and death. The prince renounces the world and goes into seclusion. He undertakes a search for absolute truth, discarding a variety of paths, even starving until bones pierce his skin and hair falls out at the roots.

  One day under a bo tree he wrestles with the Tempter, who tells him to choose life. He defeats desire, thereby gaining knowledge of his prior existences and seeing the flux of creation’s constant rebirth. He wakes to the nature of suffering, feeling, and eternal migration: the universe as lotus pond.

  The child learned of the three planes, the shape of time’s cycle, and the names of many fixed points in the spinning sphere. He learned the stages leading to awareness and memorized those scraps of scripture he would need to recite at his ordination. He was accepted by a small temple on the other side of the river. A senior monk took a straight razor to every hair on his head, including eyebrows. Glimpsing the result, Ricky was shocked at the deformed terrain, its lumps and crevasses. Derogatory street slang was right: he was an albino, a freak. His bared skull was whiter than the bleached onion skin through which he had once traced the countries of the world.

  Wrapped in cloth as white as his virgin scalp, he was carried three times around the temple under a parasol. Inside, seated cross-legged in front of the abbot and a dozen monks, he was examined and had all the answers ready. At the end of the questioning, the abbot—an old man in perpetual danger of disappearing into his orange robe—peered through his glasses and asked, out of nowhere, “Where are you headed?”

  Panic rushed on Ricky like a monsoon. But just the way day’s rain, for a minute as opaque as sheet tin, can vanish more rapidly than it blows in, his confusion cleared onto equatorial blue. He gave the first reply that came into his head: a colloquial phrase something like “I’ve already been.” The abbot’s slight smile implied that, if Ricky hadn’t entirely passed the exam, he would be taken on as a promising exception.

  Alone in the community, he was shown his cell—an open teak cube draped in mosquito netting, with a low prayer dais and a water barrel shared with three others. The youngest novices flocked around him until a senior monk chased the boys away. Ricky was taught how to put on and fold his robes. Then he was left to himself.

  Right speech, right gesture, right countenance. No possessions. No food after noon. No singing, no music, no pictures, no broadcast. No leaving the compound except for barefoot dawn alms, receiving the day’s food from merit seekers, out on the streets. He knew these rules but did not yet know what, aside from the common meal and the several chants, he was expected to do all day.

  Nothing, everything. He could go for instruction with the senior monks. He could think or write. He could talk softly with the other boys during certain hours. He could meditate. The abbot gave him an English book on the subject from the monastery library. None of the other monks could read it, and the abbot was eager for a report on the contents.

  This book—An Awareness of Air—started out as clear as the moon in a still water barrel, yet grew infinitely infolded with each rereading. Every line undid and rewove the previous opaline paradox. The plot was all about how to sit quietly and grow so mindful of breathing that you were once again oblivious. It said how to hold the hands, the neck, the body. But when the text described how to hold the thoughts, things grew slippery.

  Meditation ascended by stages, like the tiers on his processional parasol. Align the spine, close eyes, focus on the thread passing through the lungs. Ricky reached detachment with a little effort, then went back to reading. Next came intense concentration. He breathed for a long time but was never sure whether he achieved the state or just thought he had. He returned to the book to learn that this was just a stage on the way to a more intense indifference. As the white light approached, he was supposed neither to shut it out nor give in, but to go through, to yet more things falling away. After days lost in the various positions, he drew close to the white light, but the excitement of approach dispersed the condition.

  On the book’s last page, he read how everything he had just read was worthless. Study and words were the worst enemy of the thing that all the study and words meant to nurture. He brought the book back to the abbot and reported how the work counseled its own destruction. Grinning and shaking his head, the abbot placed the volume back in its space on the shelves.

  The boy breathed on in silence, now without trying for anything except respiration. His days were so free from distraction that he could not recall the urgency that had forced him here. An hour became fuzzy; the interval between two temple bell peals gaped grotesquely. In the silence of his cell, one day’s tidal sine of light traced the rise and subsidence of whole existences. Once, in an afternoon lasting longer than belonging, he thought he was about to receive knowledge of his previous lives.

  After a while, time ceased. Kraft Sr. came to check on the boy. Returning to conversation enough to anticipate how excruciating time would again be for several days after his father left, Ricky begged the man to stay overnight. But his father had work to attend to, the exploits of world political will.

  Ricky enjoyed going into the abbot’s study to stare at an image of the Enlightened, a dark ceramic of the man reclining full length, light with deliverance, resting his head on the crook of one arm. This statue was nothing like the thousands of Free treatments of the pose. Its was alien, other. The abbot told him the statue came from far away.

  “How far?” the novice asked.

  “Farther than you could walk in your life. And it is as old as it is distant.”

  “Older than I could walk to?” Ricky giggled, against the precepts. But the abbot quietly joined him.

  “It is one of the earliest likenesses of the Enlightened in human form. Before that, artists only traced his emblems—his footprint, the tree.”

  “Why is it so strange?”

  The abbot’s lips tightened. “The first images were under the spell of the West. Half Hindu, half Roman.”

  “Is that true?” Ricky touched the reclining figure, finding in it another dislocated, crosstown soul.

  “I don’t lie to you! What do you like most about him?”

  Ricky answered instantly. “The face.”

  “Heu.” A sound that meant anything. “What about the face?”

  “It’s all opposites. He is smiling deeply, but . . .” The face of a thousand-year-old boy.

  The abbot completed the unreachable thought. “But there is nothing in the world to smile about.”

  Ricky stared at the face’s hurt bliss. “Is it valuable?” He hated the question as soon as it left him. The Blue Book value—its rarity—was more than the monastery buildings put together. He had meant to ask: Do others need this image as much as I do? But the idea had gotten lost on its way to the air.

  The abbot did not reprimand him. “We use it.”

  The boy reached out to—what?—pet the statue, console it. But in a freak impulse, his hand shuddered. He tried to clip the flinch, but will was one step behind muscle. Even before the figure slipped from its shelf to pieces on the floor, the boy saw the irreversible and wished himself dead, floating lifeless above the earth’s atmosphere.

  The abbot, twenty years renouncing the illusion of things, cried out at the senseless shards, his shaved head blanching as pale as the white novice’s. He said nothing, and the harshness of that silence cut the boy worse than the disaster.

  Just months before Ricky had arrived, in a cell near his, an old monk had ha
nged himself. But the boy could find no place in the desert of ceiling to attach the end of a robe. He sat on the bare floor, refusing meals, forgoing prayers, unable even to close his eyes and listen to his breathing. All he allowed himself was to replay the event: Had the figure slipped before his hand twitched? No; he would not rewrite chronology. Had he wished to destroy the thing? Why?

  Nothing made sense, least of all the impression that his spasm had responded to some summons from the childlike wrinkles of that face. In the instant just before he sent the figure crashing to the ground, he had heard someone—not the abbot, and certainly not the Enlightened—someone stretched out on the human cordwood pile, violently shouting from out of the hand-lit oven, “Come away!” And those words had burned a serial number into his arm, jerking it in fatal reflex.

  The memory of the statue shattering dragged him around his room like a chained fighting cock. He confined himself in the cell until that afternoon when it became a choice of leave or asphyxiate. When he finally threw his door open, the force of sun blinded him like the bare bulb of an interrogation. He took an awkward step over the stoop into the forgotten place and almost tripped over a mass on his doorstep. He dropped to his knees and toyed with the thing as a caveman with first flint. It was the largest shard from the shattered statue.

  Ricky took the fragment inside. Not the whole pile of permanent shame. Just this long, pristine surface, undulant as a sensuous seashell. He looked at the simple curve—once the swell of a reclining man’s side as he awaited the last migration. After long looking, he made a decision. With a small knife blade and sewing needle lent him to mend his orange robe, he began working the stone surface. He searched below it for artifacts, brushing the pin tip back and forth like an archaeologist’s whisk.

  Ricky carved for three days. He discovered that his hands, alone of all his willful body, would do what he told them. He could think an arc almost too small to see, then duplicate it on the stone skin. When he put in place the last delineation between tiny vertebrae, the magic intaglio replica blood vessels, he knew he was finished, that he had done what he needed with the shattered waste.