Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  He took the shard back to the abbot and handed it to him. The abbot stared at it through his thick black frames, his face clouding over.

  “What is this?” the abbot softly demanded.

  Ricky could say nothing. He could add no description to the thing that the thing didn’t already contain.

  The abbot squinted, running his nail over the startling internal detail. “Do you know what this is?” the abbot asked again.

  Ricky did not dare tilt his neck.

  “This is the voice box of the last child to leave the Wheel.” He put his fingernail inside a striation. “The place where the final farewell shout will appear.” He chuckled softly to himself, thanked the boy for the gift, and set it on the shelf the priceless statue had once occupied.

  The day arrived when the boy would leave the monastery. And on that day he made his last rounds, taking leave of the monks—the abbot, the senior who had shaved his head, the new crop of novices. As he was given back his lay clothes, Ricky found himself, to his horror, wondering what he’d gotten out of the experience.

  That he still asked meant he had gotten nothing. He would forever remain the offspring of his upbringing. Beating through his pallid skin was the sick bias of his home island: we must be headed somewhere. Somewhere unprecedented. He would never escape the need to unravel, extend, be off. The question itself, the desire to arrive, prohibited passage. He had gained nothing but the ability to chant in Pali, to survive mind-numbing tedium, and to hold his hand steady enough to carve.

  He was stunned to learn that he had been in the monastery just under a month. The new school year was still weeks away. Four steps into the world, his whole head was thrown open. He stood on the front edge of outside, frozen like a cave creature blinded by the outside. Eyes, ears, throat, nose, and pores all dilated, backpedaling to accommodate the exchange threatening on all sides to swamp them.

  Four weeks of deprivation had damped down his senses to exist on thinnest impulse. Now the city erupted around him in a Water Festival, a New Year’s of obscene scale. From all sides, people shouted at him to hurry up, buy something from them, save their child, get out of their way. Each word was a firework exploding next to his ear. He was jostled by brushes, bumps, casual collisions, the mercenary seductive assaults of endless unfed cats arching against his ankles.

  And smell: a wall of overpowering durian, jasmine, charcoal, animal feces, now vined over with pungent parasites. Quinine barks, mosquito repellent, sandalwood from a second-story window, frying banana oil, the inks of cheap romance magazines, starch from schoolgirls’ uniforms, fear in its many street varieties, beetles exhuming the soil, smoke from minidragon industries, lotus leaves rotting in a canal, rice paper, powdered-over fever blisters of infants, cot sores on the old—heat, fever, ecstasy, survival, melting ice. The scent of ice melting.

  Food everywhere, indecent in its variety. Fried shrimp crackers, saté, boiled fish, teas, peanuts sugared or sopped; sesames, rice-flour gels, meats whose awful origin Ricky only now calculated. He stopped a vendor and bought a slivered mango. Crouching by the curb, he held dollops of it to his tongue. Sweet venoms shot straight to his cerebral cortex and blasted across that synapse map like purest Golden Triangle opiate. He had never—he knew now; would never forget (although the sensation was already vanishing, unarrestable)—he had never tasted.

  Across the spider’s web of paved canals, unable to keep to a bearing, a bantam who’d taken too many kicks to the head, he mazed his way through a city that, in his month away, had changed beyond recognition. How could he have missed this all? Just over the river, in a back alley not far from the palace, he was jerked around so violently that he started to run. Something alive, complex, a pulsing, globular disorder tumbled over itself, like Rama’s monkey army rampaging in the overgrown forest. He knew the thing from ancient history. Sound filled him, and would not all fit. The attack inflated his veins like a surgical balloon.

  It came from no one source. The air itself generated a coordinated agreement of particles, a sonic sphere. At last recognizing it, Ricky yelled the word “Music!” into a crowd that went about sweeping stoops or hanging out carcasses. Someone somewhere had the radio on; that was all. But extended aural abstinence made it seem as if all the molecules of earth had converted themselves into one steel-gong philharmonic. He had learned the song a life or more ago:

  Tell, me, little one: Have you ever seen an elephant?

  He relearned the folk song in Free class the next semester, almost before his ears had readjusted to the outside. Hair growing back, he sat among chums grown prematurely sophisticated on the two-year circuit, the child elite of four dozen countries—offspring of UN relief agencies, intercontinental traders, lifer servicemen, or covert advisers; children who, like Kraft, claimed they didn’t know what their parents did—all linked by the shame of their privileged sahib-ships, each child damp with the friction, misery, and exquisite alarm of awakening urges, each feverishly pursuing fluid formations of allegiance and taste, each of them struggling to get through this toddler’s tune, banal in the extreme, singing in half-earnest for the last time before falling into jaded, self-conscious silence.

  His face grew hot and his giveaway, traitor albino eyes began to flush themselves from their rims. Ricky sang along in quavering full voice, even while classmates around him openly laughed. His arms and emaciated upper chest shook as if naked in the arctic, but he laughed too, to realize it: he had gained nothing at all. Nothing that he hadn’t always, from the start of time, already had.

  He sang forte, to drown out that searing, tiny treble vocal cord of accompaniment, that appeal beyond bearing. But he could not outsing memory. At song’s end, before they went on to plane geometry, he raised his hand and, in his most pristine Free, in that soft, insistent forensic of children (that planetwide Stone Age tribe still lumped together in one clan), he said what he had learned while gone.

  He told how there were children their age, alongside town, just at hand, wasting away hideously, calling out to this international class—this us—to come away. Come save them.

  Her rubbery resistance, sensuous in the stretch of its catenaries, spectacularly miniatured even by Oriental standards, is so uncannily perfect that it forgoes a navel, bears no hint of that dimple where the mold took its molten feed. What in creation is this thing? Smooth, slick, rippled, striated, zoomable to full complexity at every magnification. His textbook snip sneaks through the slippery veneer, revealing whole structures folded within structure. Up here, at organ level, it seems a stash-stuffed haversack, an elastic, single-sheet hyperbolic solid lashing with surface tension a vitreous humor that would otherwise spew jelly all over the cavity.

  Press any part, push this subassembly with the blade, that doorstop wedge so narrowed that it becomes lethal. Interrogate the clayey marbling with that oldest simple machine on mankind’s curriculum vitae. Separate and split, part the red corpuscular sea until the thing unsheathes, cleaves back into a Rothko cross section that did not exist discretely until this clean trough vectored it.

  But do not—God—think who this is. Not a body, not life, not that little girl who—not. Just these forty centimeters, here to here. Heuristic. Virtual reality. The live-in flight simulator. Dr . . . er, Kraft. Twelve-year-old Asian female presents with insidious, edematous living shit creeping up toward . . . Your choice of clubs, and a mock-up fairway. YOU make the call.

  Boyhood trains for this, with its pancultural small-animal torture. Species-wide, in every country he ever barnstormed. All its mini-Mengele enterprises, the How-What-Why kits, “101 Electrochemical Things You Can Do with Grasshoppers.” Ornamental firefly-abdomen rings. Lanyards of sparrow ligament. Enraged rhinoceros beetles, whipped into welterweight frenzies. Low-voltage lizard pithing, combing back fish scales. Fruit bats twined to a stake—the poor boy’s remote-controlled helicopter.

  All these clandestine recreations mean to retrieve by violence the thing that violence denies them. And the hardest harrow
ed, the most disconsolate, wander into professional sadism.

  And this rubbery, slittable resistance, midway between failed tapioca and a chewed-up gum eraser: here is the prime pornography, the stuff of all prurient fascination. Tender obscenity spreads itself just a micron of latex away from his fingers. He must wade into lewdness up to the hip. Send out the search-and-destroys. Isolate the evil empire of spreading microblasts, envelop and excise. Create strategically safe hamlets, your free-fire zones, and work outward from there.

  But wasn’t that what the child inside him had in mind? Ease back the unbearable, extend into the light. We must head upcountry. We. Our whole rainbow coalition. The infant international community. The brilliant Mickey Li, trading pictograph lessons for jump shot tips. Gopal, whose government already had plans for him after education. Tati, batik by adoption and grace. Claudio, with his legendary chocolate sandwiches. Ali, whose feel for market vicissitudes promoted a series of wildly successful commercial ventures on the lunch hour steps. All off, on foot if necessary, to answer the call of a sister village, the town of misery beyond explanation’s event horizon. Can we get there by candlelight?

  Get where?

  To the core of the blossoming tumor.

  He hears the Millstone wind-tunneling in his ear, doing his geriatric Driver’s Ed teacher a month before retirement thing. Working in close, fistfighting the nodes, Kraft torches them by fractional degrees, whisking them away with tiny tempered-steel sliver pickers while the hypertensed attending spits through his surgical mask, “Wa-wa-watch it! That’s the goddamn artery you’re slinging around there.”

  The knee-length formal gown shimmies a bit as the Millstone’s foot pumps away at the imaginary safety brake. The man is intermittently unstable at best. A word-salading zealot. Precisely as Kraft lifts the edge of adhesion and begins to shear the disease from where it cleaves to the end of acceptable tissue, the man starts to hyperventilate. “What are you trying to do, serve this girl up as Hamburger Helper?”

  Kraft is, in fact, having some trouble self-actualizing here. The Millstone just stares at him, along with the rest of the veiled team. Anesthesiologist keeps pumping the magic punching bag, calling out stock ticker numbers that slip steadily toward debit. Millstone shouts, “Come on. Calm down. Clean things up or we’re going to get some vicious scarring.”

  Scarring? A pretty scar the length of this girl’s body would be the luckiest outcome she could hope for. Kraft rejoins the dark assault SWAT forces macheteing their way inland, upriver, deeper inside her.

  He sweeps low, near the knots of growth he must defoliate. Blades whirring, like the fairy dragonflies that fly these phantom criticals in. Like the ones he rode in. The hive of bugs that flew their mercy platoon on its last leg into the triple canopy, the schoolchildren strapped in between stacks of charity goods. He saw another swarm of the things the other night on the tube, zoned out again on nonfiction footage, horrific public education stuff, the only shows he has patience for in his unusably few free hours. Trance, daydream, daze, stupor, coma while waiting for the wrap-up, the big—what’s the undoer of bang?

  These TV choppers: the same make, same breed, same machines that, between unlisted missions, airlifted their prefab schoolhouse upcountry to the jungle village he himself had picked out on the map and insisted upon. The one that had called out to him.

  Millstone does not flutter now, does not even breathe. He is waiting for Kraft to finish the delicate stuff before cuffing and booking him. Wouldn’t be so quiet in here if it weren’t an ambush. Somebody’s even turned off the radio, the vid, the eternal ubiquitous soundtrack. It’s silent, anacoustic, surf-in-the-ear-vessels time. Somewhere outside the operating theater—where? adjacent? just above this room? have they gotten loose, taken over the institution?—he can hear the familiar sounds of his ward, children of daily abuse, voices in the undergrowth, singing the latest in a continuous descent of jingles that propagate out of wedlock, ignorant of their parentage:

  Ching, Chang, Chinaman chopped at a rat,

  Snarfed it back like a ginger snap.

  And then sucked it down, and then slurped it up. Every restless permutation along the way back to suckling innocence. Chop, Chow, Chang, Chinaman, and then it comes to Kraft, in a ginger snap: the disguised anxiety hidden in this verse enchantment. How are we going to beat back the rat-eating Asian armada from our already wretchedly refused shores?

  The world, as seen nightly, in increasing doses of nonfiction TV used to drug himself unconscious, is awash in open boats. Moroccans landing on the casinoed beaches of southern France. Cubans punting to Miami. Albanian fishing craft listing to Italy. The Kurds, targeted by all takers, beached, landlocked in dry mountain seas. Asia flooded, dammed behind chain-link pens in Hong Kong, Formosa, Nippon.

  The favored ones are put through the holding camps’ full interrogation. Are you a real political refugee, or just starving? (As if indigence weren’t oppression by its maiden name.) This sieve sorts life into Right, Left, the same old two deciding queues, quintessential camp winnowings. Mass mockeries of the Last Ordeal, only none is ever the last. You: through. You, you, and you: one giant step back.

  Escape this deluge by turning a handful of rat gourmets back to their so-called dominions? Pitiful, pointless, like the little blond lowlands kid with his digit in the dike. The Leg-ups’ worst, concerted nightmare scenario: the wages of empire, brown foster foundlings returning with a vengeance. They trawl in solid convoys, every serviceable craft commandeered, skulling away from the mass quarries of bone and lime. Rivulets of humanity trickle into unbailable flood, a tidal surge coursing across privilege’s topographic contours. They wash away the sparse island respites, leveling them in one swell of instant erosion.

  The whole South is cut loose, fleeing by any means the positive feedback loop of privation, a step in front of the aerial canister and tracer. The very air is ignited behind their spree, the shock wave lifting them along, flinging them flying-monkey style toward that figment of deliverance. Driven out, and by whom? By the eminent domaineers, the same squatters to whose blessed destinations they bail out.

  Driven out by dragonflies, the agents provocateurs he saw again last night in blue phosphor simulacrum, that cozy, flickering glow the color of a patio bug-zapper. The hum of one too, but more curdlingly eerie, without soundtrack. Only the sober, clinical voice-over, “In the rainy season of sixty-buzz, combined Special Forces of buzz . . .” Hit upon the surreal little fairy plan . . . But fact. As in, actually happened. And there, on factual film, while the factual narrator mediated the escapade, was Operation Wandering Soul. One of the roster of colorfully named undertakings: Operation Flaming Dart. Mayflower. Royal Phoenix. Rolling Thunder. Niagara. Junction City. Sea Swallow. Linebacker Two.

  Because he could not hope for sleep, he chose numb distraction, nonfiction Wandering Soul, the sinister lace-wing roundup. The voice-over explained it in teacherly tones, described the sick side-junket, more literary than military. Dragonflies at night swarm above unsuspecting villages, high enough to be indistinct from the season’s background locust whirr, the night’s dark radiation. On cue, spectral voices cut in, lighting up the night like aural phosphor flares. “Our babies,” native collaborators call out, translating the names to regional variants. “Our offspring! Have you forgotten us?”

  Disembodied chill semaphores, piped through megaphones at three A.M., a crude and bizarre attempt at demoralization howled down from haunted heaven into the animist jungle. A monsoon of invisible, amplified voices from out of an unreal parallel. The point was simply to ply digestion’s pits, to curdle skin, to play terror off of shame by leveling the claim these villagers would be most inclined to believe in. We are your ancestors, expelled from your frag-shattered pantry altars, exiled by your bad karma and evil politics. Give up, capitulate, come over. Do this, our last bidding.

  The whole project might have been pure theater, cinematic American weirdness in the jungle. But the account was too outrageously surrea
l for Kraft to be anything else than the recognizable exploits of the Foreign Service’s fighting wing. Film didn’t register the ground panic, or say whether the hot stick shoved down the anthill bore results. It’s all inference, aerial recon, a grainy, underexposed, handheld frame from on high, inside the chopper, the innuendo of mayhem.

  But the effects of the operation, its results, were never at issue. All the instigators wanted was all they ever want: a gold star, extra credit for inventive derangement. Look what we made. Our program, our play, our restless, destined superiority. Take that. Hit me back. Tell me what happens next. Love me.

  The camera panned too much to make out the protagonists. And the voices calling out directives to one another were drowned out by the amplifiers doing the grandparent souls, and the omniscient narrator turning the whole crazed event back into fable. Kraft stared up close, his nose to the monitor like a kid pressed to mall glass. Couldn’t see a thing. But he knew who was flying the beasts before the show even aired. The same ones who dreamed up the scheme to saturation-bomb the countryside with transistor radios, so the rice farmers could listen to agitprop. (They took the batteries out to build bombs.) The endlessly inventive crew, the fecund fathers of the same meandering band just then heading upcountry, two dominoes over. Air America by all its multinational names.

  Then, briefly caught on his private mental celluloid, leaning out of the open cage to peer down into impenetrable blackness: it’s Kraft Sr. Leans too far, too curiously, and the charm, at gravity’s first callow come-on, slips the man’s neck. The silver bauble Dad has had forever, the one that’s protected him from pitching into utter, pragmatic corruption, is lost. Takes a decade or more to float down the air current parfait. Winds bat it about gently for years, like seals with a beachball. It traverses the sealed border on its long paradrop down and lies in a river valley, awaiting the next child.