All-points bulletins in advance, yet another Midas-like touch to the Golden State. The Binge-Purge State, the SIDS State. Even as she debates turning and fleeing, an empty billboard somewhere within a few miles of his flat is attracting nightly crowds of people who gather below it, seeing the ghostly apparition of a recently abducted nine-year-old Latina. It’s been the “spot” for two weeks running now, scene of violent outbursts at the company’s refusal to light the blank placard for each night’s pilgrimage. The Portent State. The Unsustainable State. Give nothing else, but give good video.
Linda bends away from the quart-carton gallery, the yearbook of Annihilation Middle School, certain she will discover the little miracle girl’s features among the lost graduating class if she but looks. “Planning a lactose binge, buddy?” she says, falling frail and flat, blindly fumbling for his arm. Their contact thuds neutrally. “Shakes? Malts? Frappes? Smoothies?” Repeat the weak gag until you get an anemic laugh, scold, scream—any response at all.
When he looks up, it stuns. His eyes swim with conspiracy, sparkling with theories so clear he need not even spell them out aloud. Look: the young everywhere are getting ready, rehearsing—children of the murderous projects, two-pound needle-preemies lighter than their mothers’ controlled substance ingestion during term, gang killers, stick figures from the Southern nations, even these privileged princes, snatched out from under their kiddie kreative movement instructors’ eyes—they are preparing, leaving at night on some vast, planetwide, still-obscure dress run-through. . . .
Her eyes water at him, pleading, and he groans, deflated by her failure to grasp his flash of explication. He shies away from her, slips her grip and returns to reviewing the troops, a dejected ancient emperor of milk containers, lining up his glazed, ceramic cadres for a last muster preparatory to their mass live burial. Kidnapped, abducted, seized, carried away, shanghaied. Marco Poloed, the man who left shortly after the departure of the Children’s Battalion and was still there when the second emigrant wave, the Ratcatcher Expedition, took off for ports unknown. Does she believe that her case load of historical ignorants chose theirs, of all five billion possible scripts for amateur physiotheatrics, simply because they liked the plot? She forces off his accusation before it congeals in her. One more incriminating motivic link and she will be down alongside him on emotional hands and knees, scraping her nails in attempt to excavate sense from the resistant cartons.
They multiply in front of her, these paired public service posters. On the left, Child at disappearance; on the right, Child computer-reared into the present. Each distinct case claims her, calling for undiscovered therapies, yet-to-be invented regimens of exercise that might break the loop. Each smiles, even mugs for the camera, Get it right this time, ’cause I’m outta here. Their impish grins of send-off sweetness hint dimly at the foreordained. But around the eyes, the way the cheeks crinkle in imitation mirth yet reel with bewildered trust, there, perched above the dollhouse frock collar or tiny blazer and clip-on tie, skin’s swaddling linen already fights back a muscle tic, the twitch of some other, older, extradited once-child’s pathetically misjudged attempt to outsmile horror.
Twelve dozen kiosks calling HAVE YOU SEEN THESE FACES? sprout up across Ricky’s kitchen counter top, an orchard of shock. She will never have a chance at any of these cases. They are farther from reach than her most mangled cutting-room vets. She shuts her mind to the sea of stereo views, blots them out for her own safety. The only case she can still hope to influence here is him. The emperor.
She wants to rush the receptacles, hustle them all into available refrigerators before prolonged exposure to room temperature can lace them with toxins. Ricky’s undergraduate, bite-sized appliance might save, say, six.
“What in the Blessed Nurser’s name are we going to do with all this milk?” She holds him, and he submits to petting. “Haven’t you heard that dairy is out?” Expelled from the Four Foods pantheon, she would go on, if she could find the will. They might give them away, dispense them door to door like promos for a hot new product. But in a land where even the tamperproof shrink-wrap is sewn with random malignancy, no one would accept such a compromised gift.
She cradles him, a man old enough to be her abuser uncle. After their first formal evening together—that moviethon, just weeks ago—she’d called her mother. “Look, I know I’ve been wrong about this in the past, but there’s this guy. I just don’t need anything anymore. All the anxiety’s gone. It feels, I don’t know, like arriving. Coming home.”
She actually used the taboo word out loud, to one of the two people who shared her lifelong embrace of mutual blackmail, the tacit refusal to hand over the place’s negatives. Her mother, who kept holy water in the fridge, who threw elaborate coloratura fits about far less, simply shrugged audibly over the wires and asked, “How do you know you love him? I haven’t even met him yet.”
Nobody ever meets anybody. Always a matter of equanimity and stealth, a match-up of missing parts under cover of deniable darkness. Once he joked about it: a furtive shuffle as she came in the room, and he would look up, saying, “Oh, nothing!” Now, when she kisses him for no reason except that they are both lost, both all-points material, he looks up the same way, only the terror, the furtiveness, is real.
She does not know the first thing about him. And she will leave him now, agree finally to be the abandoning one, the way he wanted from the start, knowing less than on the day they crossed paths on rounds. She begins taking the milk outdoors, four quarts at a time, to leave for whatever mange might run wild in this alley. Her eyes catch the open instrument case, the tarnished French horn sitting on the Formica table, it too slated to be taken out and interrogated, perhaps beaten. Has he actually been playing the ancient thing, diverting his auditorium of abductees with scales or remembered grade-school showpiece repertoire?
“Ricky? You had the horn out?” Of course, asking is no good. As always, the accumulated inconsequences, the trivia that make all the difference in this peopled world, go unanswered.
She picks up the twisted coil of brass and hands it to him. “Play me something.” Up to your room and practice an hour before you even think of going outside.
She reverse computer-ages him, back to age eight. Or not him: another close-to-the-chest orphan DP, borrowing Ricky’s face in order to blend in with these new surroundings, to mimic himself into inconspicuousness. A reborn half-Kraft, but done over in Linda’s brown, tagged by her goofy earlobes and big teeth that will one day be, but only too late, after their attendant early trauma has hardened, beautiful. She sees the boy’s features for an instant, and her lungs collapse in on themselves, as if the resentful child himself slugs her in the solar plexus. She must run from the apartment before just looking at the man kills her.
It will never happen now, the ending they were supposed to have. This one will run, instead, like some women’s magazine fiction, the last column clipped out along a coupon silhouette from the flip side of the page. She tries to come about, console herself with fierce pragmatics. They would have made the worst kind of parents in any event. With their combined professional commitments, real children would have been impossible, except perhaps through some offspring time-sharing arrangement, two weeks out of the year, like a gulfside condominium. And the latest photos from the continuous news flash would thermal-fax themselves, register in their newborn’s Play-Doh face, turning the least hint of growth unbearable.
Kraft, the adult version, grown up in every particular except the essential, looks at the musical instrument this woman places in his hands. He turns it over, inspecting the valves the way a dinner guest might sneak a discreet peek at the china mark. He sticks a cupped hand in the bell and makes that trademark pucker sound of brass players warming up their mouthpieces. She hopes dizzily for a moment that he’ll play, bring the remaining carton mug shots to life again, singing in a long file behind him. Instead, he removes the horn from his lips before any real sound can slip out.
When he
speaks, it is absolutely clinical. Competent, surgical, perfectly modulated, as if he has never been out on anybody’s ledge, as if his soul has not just been caught strung out all over its dark night. “The girl will be legless, if grace allows her that much. At the hip. Mutilation. For my money, worse than the most senseless accident.”
Worse, because antiseptic, deliberate. The girl’s adopted society has marked her for life, the way some clans disfigure a sickly child, chop it up to prevent reinfestation of the next born.
Linda looks out his window, east toward the desert, where people once buried their young under the kitchen floor, to keep an eternal eye on them. The marks he has made on this girl, the skilled, high-tech dismemberments, were all for this: to keep her soul from coming back, raiding the world again in the form of their child, a child she has just glimpsed, but who will never, now, return.
She will break for the door as soon as he looks the other way. But Kraft just sits there, fiddling with the bits of detachable tubing, in the creepy calm of someone reconciled to being slated from the start for a rented death. He has already made giant strides toward arriving, in half the usual time, at that neighbor ward, the mirror service to their own, where an opposite incontinent band hangs around the TV room, staining the floor in a pony-show ring.
The hospital: she tries to remember how long Kraft’s Carver rotation is to last. Can she avoid him in the halls between now and the day he’s slated to go? She might sit tight and wait until his impending departure makes him the one responsible for leaving. She thinks what he has next. Intensive Care.
They are still colleagues a while longer, day laborers in the high-tech cathedral enterprise. She could avoid him for weeks in the huge monastic cloisters, the intricate, self-regulating, self-sustaining community of specialists from abusive phone receptionists to sicko plastic reconstructors whose idea of a conversation piece is a silicon implant on the coffee table.
In fact, the industry is so sprawling that it has managed to disguise its chief purpose even from her. They are deep in the process of setting up an underground railway, one that conducts the lost causes from here to the next nightmare halfway house as quickly as possible. That’s what they do for a living, she and this man, her topical lover, this unstable, latex-faced anchorman whom she has just discovered sitting in the dark surrounded by a bright school assembly of faces on a hundred spoiling milks. The boy hornist’s job is to cut up sick children—their legal and sanctified abductor.
What dying childhood needs—so obvious, she thinks, to anyone who’s been paying attention—is not another swank kid-killer like Carver, perfunctory holding tank for prepping the virtually dead. It needs a larger-than-life tree-fort resort where a lifetime’s transactions can take place faster than in the outside. She knows the shape: an arcaded, terraced, gardened, courtyarded children’s pavilion, with ceramic and brocade, half timber and gingerbread cupolas, a live-in architectural anthology of hospices in the oldest sense. Everyone welcome; check your maturity at the foyer. A multiweek, all-expenses-played vacation crawling around the plasterboard moats and battlements with the shrinks and muscle-unkinkers, everybody horsing around side by side for a change. Solve society’s spreading fester at the source, and wouldn’t half of all the day’s intractables shrivel away? Break the downward, dry-sucking cycle of indigence in one generation . . .
BUT THE COSTS, woman. Less than any other air castle, mall, megamulti-theater, hardened silo, Stealth production facility, or toxic manufacturer’s outlet park. She could campaign, show with incontestable charts that we can pay now or pay a lot more later. But to figure the figures would take foresight, an increasingly fabulous commodity. Conventional wisdom, that old oxymoron, cannot afford to destroy those monsters eating our wealth alive. We’ll carry on down the perpetual sinkhole until the poor give up their debilitating poverty. It’s that simple, a simplicity consistent with life in the kingdom of once-obscene wealth, where servicing the previous years’ accumulated debt will soon be enough to run up another year of deficit. The land of the nationwide centrist cell, ready to backlash at anything that hints at its real condition. A landmass-wide, inhospitable hospital clutching a status quo that has already broken up . . .
She sees again to the milk disposal. The flight reflex and its strangled form, the need to rush to him with selfless assistance, collide inside her like two thrill-romp first cousins in stolen cars, each marine-screaming in her head, trying to outterrorize the other right up to the moment of impact. She cannot bear to look at him another second.
“Not to worry,” his puffy lips issue, hissing. “We’ve put a little Tiger Balm on the stump, and we’re keeping a sharp eye.” Said almost sweetly, reassuringly, a sick reference to that mother of a new admission who for two months had used the Orient’s popular smear-on cure-all to fix a vertebrae-dissolving nightstalker crawling up her baby’s back.
“Tiger Balm Gardens, Hong Kong. World’s gaudiest theme-park cure retreat and the transpacific’s answer to Anaheim. Chinese kinderland. Been there, in my previous incarnation as Youth in Asia. I ever tell you that?”
You’ve never told me anything but “Shut your face,” she would singsong back. She hates him now, like a spurned daughter, or closer. She wants to close his eyes for good with a quick fingernail gouge. But he jerks suddenly and forestalls her, swinging the horn’s fluted crocus-cup up to his mouth and playing.
He is rusty and uncertain, stabbingly out of shape. He has not played this evening, or anytime this decade. But another awful warble subverts the sound. He is trying to bend tones through the tube that are too inflected to fit down a Western bore. Overblowing, half-valving, he jury-rigs pitches that have long been expelled from the orchestral overtone series. Another scale, a further sound.
He pulls the instrument away without looking at her. “Thai song,” he explains to her, apologetically. The two words, so gentle and awful and defenseless, slip into her chest and quietly bruise the place beyond healing. She will never get away now, never be able save herself or him. Ricky, Ricky, she wants to say, put your head down, here, on my softness. But her throat is coagulate, hopeless.
“Dear moon,” he goes on, “give me rice. Give me curry. Give me a copper ring to tie around the little one’s wrist. Give me an elephant for the little one to ride. Give me a lizard that will cry, ‘Tokay!’”
She takes him outside, thinking back to when such a thing was therapeutic. Each trunk in the ratty stand of palms outside his apartment is emblazoned with a psychedelic cuneiform that, when read across like an acid-house Burma-Shave, announces: “Dope will cope with hope.”
Linda walks him like one of her tensor-flexor train wrecks. She tries to tell him something distracting, something palpable he might hook back into. She tells him about the story theater project. Nicolino—
“Which one . . . ? Oh, right; Methuselah.” Pretending he doesn’t know the creature who has been menacing the expanse between them.
Nico has come up with a beautiful idea. She giggles just to think of it, almost recapturing her pretense of equanimity, the serenity that comes with being sweet-and-twenty and indiscriminately able to love. “They want to form a Hamelin traveling company. Isn’t that great? Hel-loo. I’m asking you a question?”
He smiles rapidly and nods.
“One of them has found this weenie cartoon map of the city, and they’re picking out venues. They want to bring it all over town, all their neighborhoods, put it on at . . .”
“Perform? In front of people?”
“Isn’t that how plays usually go?”
“Where the hell do they think . . . ?”
An electrogram jitter spasms across Linda’s temple. Gently, she reins him in. Astonishing, how easy it is to affect a convincing calm.
She falters a minute, studies him, then against all training fails to take appropriate action. “They have their pick of spots,” she carries on. “Schools jump at this kind of thing, if it’s free. Arts and crafts fairs, public parks, old people’s h
omes—you could do one show an afternoon from now until you grew up. Well, maybe not until you grew up . . .”
He forces the expected grunt, but a beat too late.
“You’re really old school, aren’t you? Keep them in bed until they’ve got runny ulcers up the wazoo. Can’t you see? Something like this will do more for them than our entire body-shop operation put together. Get out and see the place, playact. And it’s not half bad for the audience either.”
She drops all hope of pulling off her assignment—to tell Kraft about his role, recruit him for the main motley. “Oh, buddy,” she veers again, too cheerily, “you have to come see the costumes they’ve made out of nothing. Rats! They really are. And the cuddliest vermin you can possibly . . .”
Rats: skateboarding, hoop-stuffing, switchblading, glue-sniffing, slam-dancing, card-collecting, video-vitiated, guiltless, impoverished, sinned-against, discriminated-against jungle-gym victims. They killed the cats and bit the babies in their cradles. Rats. A word all over the well-meaning popular press lately: the current euphemism for the dozen million disinherited minors on the street in the lush subtropics, down where “disappear” has long gone transitive. Where the police sooner murder a waif than work up the papers. Where the advance cities have already slipped, as theirs does now, into uncontrollable turf war, the vortex of street free market that squares off big business against urchins. Where whole abandoned countries consume steady supplies of diced-up lives on their determined hurtle downward.
Even here, in the North, on ground still a meter above flood, intact for another half decade, they have all gone precociously, sophisticatedly rat, superaged by witnessing ten hundred slow-mo deaths before puberty. Told that all the purchasable world is theirs, then unceremoniously strip-searched for grabbing it, they know their real birthright early, the transparency of the fables handed them.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 36