This glimpse of darkness’s raiding party cut neatly to a pledge break where the pain-o-meter declared how few degrees shy we were of need’s complete pacification. The association condemns him to dredge up that contemporaneous Operation Mayflower—junior high musical, lyrics to tunes pinched from a smash hit based on a cheery little Dickens book about the criminally destitute. The production was set at that posh Chao Phraya River hotel where Maugham liked to luxuriate. A Thanksgiving show, a holiday that half the student body had never heard of. Act One, Pilgrims land by klong boat, meet Native Americans, and come to culturally relative understanding with same. Act Two, contemporaries repeat same maneuver, landing upriver in modern-day City of Angels (now cleverly playing itself), assuring the Native Free there to greet them that
We’d give an-y-thing
To keep peace flour-ish-ing,
’Cause it means ev-ry-thing (ev-ry-thing?)
Ev-ry-thing to us!
God: What had they been thinking? Same thought that’s still dressed up in every night’s news serial. Assist history, by any protection racket necessary, to its unbridled outcome. Push it along its path, civilization’s two-stroke engine, condensing out of cold, cosmic dust the raw swaps and consolidations of power that are its only end. The stuff of every school musical.
It blazes into his head as he curls over Operation Operation, the Millstone ready to restrain him should Kraft give him cause. Atonement. Everything in his innocent suggestion—let us fortunate ones go upcountry and build a school—every word in this selfless reversal of “Please, sir, I want some more,” already smacked of a child’s compensation. At-one-ment for adulthood’s sins. Somewhere in this history-ravaged place, they might make up for the outrage to dead ancestors.
What can he hack at next? Here, something slashable. A fix, a small blow, a nickel in the drum for the old meliorist dream. He circles and slipknots the hideous foreign bits, cuts them off and kills them. He drops the insidious nodules, pellet by pellet, into the waiting pan. It’s one of those saint’s offering plates full of detached teeth, deflated eyes, severed digits. The emblems, the means of continuous martyrdom. Tainted nipples on a dish. “Want to know a secret?” the girl’s foster mother asked him one night, early on, when all their secrets had already been taken hostage. “For some reason, my breasts . . .”
“Wait, wait. You aren’t going to make me do anything kinky?” He could still talk like that. How long ago? Only a week? Dissimulating monster. Where had he gotten the strength for such bravura pretense?
“Shh. I’m trying to tell you something.” Something you will always be able to hold over me. “For some reason, my breasts . . .”
“These here?”
“Quit. Mm. For some reason, my breasts . . . aren’t sensitive? Usually, I can’t feel anything at all from here to here. But when I’m with you . . . ?”
It seemed the announcement of a small victory, a further invitation to dine out. They had been young once, insouciant with each other. For all of fifteen minutes, one Saturday night, before they shed the respective pseudonyms.
“What do you mean, usually?”
This woman was not even Linda by looks anymore. Ready to bolt or bail, or some combination. “I meant, previously.”
“You just need an older man is all.” Still up to the joke, still thinking it was one, failing to see how irony fizzles into fact. Because yes, he made them pucker and yearn, stand and be counted. He alone, but only because the others had never discovered the secret to insanely upbeat females. They have this craving they don’t like to admit. Hate in themselves, in fact. The sinister flip side to blissful Do-Bee-dom. They like to be vised, pinched on a neck nerve and held at attention, unsheathed, paralyzed with incisors, bitten.
Vulgar intimacy—the sick equivalent of his fingerwork now, pawing every nude, chalk-scored sector of this comatose pubescent. Little girl and an older man who knows her more privately than any lover she might live long enough to meet. A thigh is a thigh, its soft, femoral vee made more suggestive by the wax-pear color of her incised epidermis, the blood sluicing away from the suction, the smell of the cautery. Were it not for this gang of hired hit men around him, he would talk to her, soothe her though this shattering foreplay for which she only fakes anesthesia.
Talk to her. Softly, in that language, the one he rushes back inside himself to rescue from the burning structure. Softly now, when one might say anything, anything at all. Broach the account he just now reconstructs, tell her while she sleeps, when the weirdest fears slip out like wild things gliding across night’s closet threshold, stupidly left ajar. As he works the appallingly sharp scissors, his hands detach from him. They carry on working, as discrete and sovereign as the Invisible Man’s white gloves. He looks on, fear blotting out his receptor sites, the primal, convulsive stuff, like those waking dreams when he imagines reaching for the phone in pitch blackness and touching a human hand. Terror not of the imagined threat, but of imagining.
The parade he himself devised passes in review under his autonomous fingers. After two inert decades, the details of that end run on suffering come back to him. Two dozen kids from ten different countries—the oldest, sixteen; the youngest, nine. Not one had prior building experience. Traveling under the Institute flag—the White Monkey General—they represented no government and followed no program but care. Of course they had to have an operational name for the thing. Every human action needed its cover. They took their tag from the dominant culture hiding behind its rainbow front, the one this fantastic fifth column meant to atone for: Operation Santa Claus.
Those fourteen days rise up out of the girl’s cracked-open hip as he chases infection up her obliterated leg. The specifics of that old disaster hatch like malarial larvae in this aseptic room. He must tell someone, or be pulled apart in memory’s undertow. Tell who? Linda is out, impossible. She would guess in a minute, hear in the first syllable the reason why he ever even remotely loved her once. She would see in a flash just how she first appeared to him—her hint of strangeness, the half-brown, half-breed tone that he clung to while running from.
He can tell her nothing. Not after the reciprocal awfulness she has already signed over to him. Not after her airy courage—anesthesia, he now sees—in entrusting him with her worst, even while searching out his to treat it.
He replays these mangled mental tapes while his knuckles bang up against the clamps and retractors keeping Joy’s invaded layers out of his hands’ way. He anchors his thumb against her pulped tibia to steady himself. Recovering the lost event is beyond him. Anything that happened less than four weeks ago, the start of this rotation, eternity’s internship, is hopeless. Pre-pre-med is a rococo blur. Details, names and dates, the blinding clarities, the sidebar precision bombs from off the front page of his life’s morning paper of record: gone.
Some muscle gasp refusing the irreversible gash he was just about to make in this pelvis retrieves him. He looks up to a room of cackling masks. With mouth and nose blanked, laughter and horror collapse into identical slits. He’s covered; he can fall in as if he never left. Can triangulate by the key-word method.
“Did you read about the five-year-old girl found guilty of inciting her molestation? Judge said she was behaving in a flirtatious manner.”
The era’s hot topic. Team banter, doing its best to hold off the horror of the interior. Who’s speaking? Impossible to tell one from the other. Identical covey of cloaked desperadoes, green skullcaps, white bandanas pulled up over their faces, waylaying the living stage. Just throw yer limbs down and nobody will get hurt. He looks from one to the other, squints. Can’t tell who is talking; wouldn’t know who it was even if he could trace the source. He doesn’t know any of these people.
“Brazen little tramp. Got what she was asking for.”
Fiend. No one could make that joke without meaning it. But why fault the man for repeating what the judge actually said? Even if they overthrow the travesty on appeal, disbar the judge, sue the robes off the suck
er, the thing still transpired. This country, this self-defiling race, its reeling, abused, psychotic, accusatory voiceprint conscience seeking relief by compounding outrage, is his home. A place thrashing about for release everywhere but at the source of absolution.
Memory, once it has been jettisoned as useless, turns whatever is left of social probity into whoopie-cushion comedy. Kraft, slack at the center of a shameless knot of grown-ups dressed like a bunch of budget summer-stock transvestite Klansmen guffawing at the apocalyptic tidbits and lascivious human-interest fillers that wrap up the thousand-year news broadcast, pros who have grown so enslaved with brain-inflaming spirochete that the words “moral decency” provoke a nervous ironic titter, thinks: Yes. Got what we asked for. Solicited our own bloody wholesale rape like the cheap little tush-swinging toddlers we are.
Sick insight opens to him like a shining flower. Another night’s late interval, a lifetime after their film-hopping honeymoon. She had boxed him into the pillow and was turning him to face her, an insistence he easily deflected with some squirming familiarity, maybe nibbling a rib. She suddenly demanded, “Little boy! Where are you? Were you ever sexually abused as a child?”
He had his half snort already perfected. “Not to the best of my recollection.” Recollection, of course, never any better than what experience can afford. “Why do you ask?”
He pieces together the answer only now, after the idiot’s annihilating delayed reaction. She was. His hunch is immediately gang-raped by grotesque irrelevances. How old? How long? How badly? Who? Stranger? Family friend? Family? Suspicion’s principal suspect—oh, awful—is always the victim.
“You show all the classic symptoms,” she teased, tickling his ribs. The playful ebullience, the intimate, knowing tone.
Little Linda, molested? In a second, it swells to explain everything, as complete as it is unconfirmed. He wants to run from the cutting room, race up the four floors to her office, trailing the frail girl’s soft tissue. Stand in the door and berate her. How dare you grin like that. How can you trust? How can you live?
Chill chases up his nape, the sudden snap of floorboard in the sealed pitch-dark. Her scar is this stupid optimism, never being able to feel, to admit how bleak we really are. . . . Her whole compulsively giving, holistic healer routine—the ultimate evasion, supreme crippling. Total anesthetic seal-off, cureless because never forgotten.
Sex, her expert damp abandonment, their freestyle, exquisite wrestling matches on his apartment floor: Are we going to do some aerobics for a little bit, or what? That she could even ask without retching, let alone implore so amply, so avid . . . Pleasure, wantonness like he has seen her take in the exchange is inconceivable, worse than obscene. Feverishly faking full recovery; flinging herself into the one thing her whole soul must cringe from, just to consider.
The operating banter has moved on to the junior high schooler who killed her baby because the courts wouldn’t let her put it up for fostering. Silently, he closes what is left of the ruined girl. She is now indistinguishable from the Asian twelve-year-old from the other side of the river, the one his pilgrim party met on its tropical Christmas operation a half world ago. The little girl, driven from her village by voices, ancestors calling out of the sky. The one on film—too familiar for horror anymore; exactly why they keep reprinting it until it is threatless and limp—her clothes burned off in a pillar of flame, running down the road to the nearest help, the nearest adult, who is busy photographing this kiddie nude.
He sews shut the provocative one, who, after all her eager search for approval, would be best off mercy-pithed now. Nothing remains of her but macerated tissue. The salvaged pulp is probably still infiltrated, the search-and-destroys as worthless as they ever were. And he, Kraft, committed this atrocity, punished her worse than any crack-hopped, tremor-fingered, street-ganged, random serial murderer could. More unforgivable, what he’s done, because more conscientious, more selfless, professional, deliberate, necessary: autoclaved mutilation of love.
LINDA LETS HERSELF in quietly, her loaner latchkey slithering through the Yale’s tumbler tunnel. The elated raiding of a few days back now feels more like answering a summons. She never knows what to expect anymore, in the intervals when he is ostensibly off call. She stands in the forced door, listening for some clue in the dark. Just the sound of suppressed respiration from the far side of the threshold is enough to trigger ancient panic attacks, a rude head rush. The sotto voce threats emanating from his silent front hall fill her with desire to deny every attachment before it can be denied her. Her hands struggle to pull the knob forever shut while she forces them to push it open. There is no cure but hair of the dog.
His apartment is a pit, an abyss. Why did she get involved with this emotional leper in the first place, when all the signs cautioned her off, when he himself told her, with his last remnant of worldly charm, that he would one day go surgical on her? She must be the real sicko here, in this thing up to her hospital insignia. Trying to love the man, for no more reason than to prove everyone wrong. One little supportive smile, one recreational theraplay scenario and she hoped to strip the permanent, told-you-so, hardened finish from the boy’s bleak, condemning H and P. Why try to plead the ludicrous case for recovery in this irrevocable place? Charity can be only a kind of belated revenge.
She recognized him instantly, the jokey verbal competence, trying to charm her while a host of betraying postures peeped out from behind his poise like live ordnance poking out of the living room wall. She thought to outmatch his evasion, hold out her arms to him—always her best feature. Unleash the entire arsenal of care. I can make you whole. Rub your pulse back to beating. Pathetic porta-box first aid, like sprinkling camphor on emphysema.
She needed little Ricky’s infirmity for her own private ends. To overcome exactly this dread that swells thermostatically, filling her holding cavity, immobilizing with the worst that memory and imagination can conjure. His labored breathing breaks in waves around her in the black room, a sound she thought she could love but would run from now if she could.
One of these days I will come home and he . . . She rehearses the worst cases as she tentatively flicks on the light with her grocery-bent elbow. And before thought can shape itself around the image, she finds him just as the much-practiced terror predicts. Precisely the way she knew she would one day come home to find him. He is sitting in his makeshift, bachelor meal nook. He might be only waiting for his mate to come by, waiting to tell her, with a protracted shaggy-dog smile, of the day’s surgical shoestring catches. But he is not.
He slumps at the counter, head down. In front of him, in fastidiously arranged ranks and columns, stretching out along the synthetic Formica plain in a kind of orchard-perfection, are more quart containers of milk than she can count. Enough to baby-shower a whole nursery of infant teethers, sufficient to slop down a day care’s generous week’s worth of cookies. And each of the perspiring cardboard towers bears a smudgy gray-scale portrait emblazoned with the caption: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?
She sucks in sharply. Now comes that awful scraping, focus dulled by refusal. He just slumps there, languidly scouring the faces and disappearance data for the revealing pattern, unaware, even, of her presence. Should she call someone? Who? Certainly not those crazies down at the ER. Her clinical composure, she discovers, works only in the kingdom of pedes. She is less than helpless to help someone who was ten already when she was still wet with expelled placenta.
She steps toward him gingerly, careful not to startle. “Ricky? Low-fat, I hope?”
She steadily subdivides the distance between them, thinking that if she can just get a hand on his shoulder . . . She closes enough space to make out that the wax-coated photo-transfers he so intently stares down are close twins, stereoscopic. Then and now: age five, at time of abduction. Today, age nine. But if the child is missing, how . . . ?
The captions explain. The last known photo of the missing one on earth—some school portrait or candid birthday shot—has
been computer-aged. The smiling, composite cartilage of the snatched-away has been fed through a fast transform that knows all about the way tissue bloats and widens and falls slack year by year, everything that even a face flush with the priceless unpredictability of love must inevitably become over the scatter run of time.
She’s seen these three times a week for the last decade, and still flinches. She, Linda, who no longer even blinks at flailing spastics or livid purple human whetstones. The dairy industry’s notorious public service spot. Why here, and not on Wonder bread wrappers or cheerful two-tone jars of Peter Pan? Something to do with the antagonistic effects of calcium on kidnapping. A way of shaming, over a bowl of Cocoa Charms, that most common of abductors, the estranged parent, into returning the paschal stolen goods. No, the reason for milk, like the cartons’ malignant subjects, this brigade of the universally missing, lies buried deep in the North American bedrock, the Vishnu Schist.
The piper has been busy of late, logging overtime, capitalizing on the general spread of night, dragging his net across the subdivisions and condolands, the isolated farmhouses and condemned public projects, the sprawling, illegal squatter towns that compose the world’s temporary housing. Has been everywhere, threading down the centuries of serpentine trail heads, spreading the hits across all continents so randomly that no international bureau could hope to trace so much as a backwater fraction of his route or modus.
She fights the urge to finger one of the wax dossiers, knowing that, as with litter on the street, the one who touched it last is responsible. She has already participated in this state’s drive to register the children at greatest risk. She has watched the authorities create whole photo and fact portfolios of prospective kidnappees, take advance prints, with almost loving anticipation of the theft they mean to prevent.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 35