Kraft is silent, thinking: She could not have gotten them back into these dated fairy suits—innocence’s routed camp—if it didn’t fit their own hidden purpose. Somehow, they’re using her.
And yet she goes on touting the idea, blithely, unsuspecting. “Then they return, in the second act, dressed as . . .”
He tries to call it back, that pestilent poem, born of an older, even more pernicious myth, the one that refuses to let go. The verse version, composed, so he learned in school, in one hemisphere or another, for the invalid son of a friend. And suddenly Kraft has to know: What did that child have? Did it live?
“They want to,” he starts, and can’t at first recall the expression. “They want to take the show on the road?”
“Yes.” She is crying now, unable to sacrifice anything more to him. Alkali seeps out of her, all the sulfureous backpressure of wanting to do right and missing, always missing, no matter what she tries. “Yes, goddammit. I just told you. Can’t you . . . ? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He doesn’t even hear the inconceivable profanity pass out of her. “Without Joy?”
He races along some linked anxiety, the need to determine the full extent of what these band members are calculating before they hurt themselves, before they can pull off their elaborate plan. “No, it’s impossible. You can’t let them go out there. Haven’t you read the papers? The casualty figures, the stats. Christ, you’ve seen the way they bring them in through the downstairs drive-up. Continuous Doppler relay race. Shriners’ shoot-out circus. You’re going to lead them out on this little field trip? So that you can send them back to me as massive crush avulsions?”
Timed to confirm him, a squad car sidles up alongside them. Officer rolls his window down just a crack, to ask whether there’s some trouble. Has their vehicle broken down or something?
Kraft turns on them furiously. “Why don’t you go beat up a couple welfare gorillas?” Only Linda’s quick shoulder restraint keeps them from arrest or worse.
The relative peace of this neighborhood, the privileged quiet of their immediate surroundings, is all a distortion, a local fluke, a maraschino paid for on ingeniously overextended credit or stolen outright. And it’s all coming down, being called in. She takes his elbow and turns him the long way home.
Waiting for them on the back stoop is that tribe of foundling milks they have just put out. He cannot even lift his head to whisper, “Don’t you see it, where they want to go?” He threads his way over them, the lost boys, the ones who left when we were small.
“All my old kindergarten familiars,” he says, turning in the threshold, too far past coherence for her to follow. He stands in the doorway, surrounded by this campfire ring. Stereo faces stare eagerly, smiling him down, waiting to hear tonight’s installment, his firsthand account. Ancient friends, wised up, computer-aged, looking for all the world like the final heist’s advance interference. Returned for a while, God knows why, to the here and now. Placed in his care, only to be snatched away again.
Listen my children, and you shall hear. Hear the remains of the unshed core that Once was once built upon. Here is the most, the closest you will ever know, the traces that stay with you when you can no longer even place the source. This is the text, the spooky grandparental ramblings in back rooms off kitchens stinking of toilet-flush conservation, those huddled alley debriefings, the day’s last recap before lights-out.
Listen up, and forever go on listening to the eternal campfire replays. Commit to memory those night imperatives that will come to seem, lifetimes later, inconceivably strange sequels to prospects that never came to pass. Re-create, in spoken hologram, mental wire-frame model, the anachronistic singsong quatrains, and learn again how every account is itself the time hole mosaic it so minutely describes.
Words will return at livid intervals to haunt even you, the most hardened, back-of-the-class switchbladers. They will pop up unsponsored, unshakable, like old manslaughter charges. Harbor the last recounting, and repeat it to yourself, looking back, in the reflected light of telling, on that circle of scared, scrubbed faces, struck with the full horror of related events, sitting here listening, just listening, before the leap.
This is the stuff of final exams. Audible, even behind the reach for the conventional opening: Once upon a time, Once before this world. Once, long ago, they say. Never here. At Cottonwood. Over yonder. In a kingdom by the sea. You, of all people, must remember. Because Once has no other visible means of support. It will die for all time when you lose its least particular.
Storytime is over, and yet, the rustiest recitation will come claim you one day, when you least expect it. You are as ancient as the oldest then. All the word’s shadow-puppet spectacles—the magic cabins, monkey armies, unrippable spinnakers, interlocking dreams, winter fruit trees, inscribed rings, insidious machines—can come to their appointed end only if you sit still, stop sniping for a minute, and listen.
Once, far away, there lived a boy who wanted to make things right. He would come to his mother after dinner, a dish towel in his hand, and she would shake her heard sadly and wonder how the world would end up killing him. When the obligatory three wishes came and ambushed him, he politely refused all but one. Just let me try to cure things. A simple enough request, and he himself volunteered to lead the way to the broken locale, the spot that needed fixing.
He had lived everywhere, belonged nowhere, and had already seen hopelessness huge enough to glut the most jaded famine tourist. Misery was the rule in the two-thirds of the earth the boy had visited. Eight of the best pickup starting eleven he ever played with died of deficiencies. His friends lived in cardboard and subsisted by selling jasmine ringlets to jammed motorists. He worked with a school service club, aiding at a state asylum where concrete cubicles swarmed with children—deformed, diseased, degeneratively crippled, industrially poisoned, lumped together and left to rock on their haunches all day on the bare floor. There, he had watched helplessly as a boy his age picked at ooze in the back of his head, trying to get to his brain and scoop his curse away by its roots the way a child from a luckier continent might crumble a honeycomb.
After a summer of monastic retreat, he saw the obvious: suffering was not a condition. It was a thing. Need, like wealth, its claim-jumping cousin (which the boy, one sad homecoming, had also seen), could be made and unmade. Poverty was an unfortunate detour, a world jerking too suddenly toward its one shot at well-being. Suffering had nothing to do with power and exploitation, good versus evil. It had to do with logistics, better delivering.
Generations of adults before him had overlooked the simple corrective. He would have missed it too, had an ancient boy not whispered it to him. Hold a bit of the miracle cash crop out for seed. Then send these shoots where nothing had yet rooted.
And there was such a spot, no farther away than his pointing finger. One day, when the moment was right, in the middle of class (you remember classes, those wards you worked in before this ward?), the boy raised his hand and asked, “What would it cost . . .” This was how he started the matter. He knew enough to speak the dialect of the person he was speaking to. “What would it cost”—although he suspected that no one had yet put the full price tag on our being here or not—“to build a school?”
This was his simple, inexorable idea. One school in the right place: all it would take. The most negligible null will unfold into all, if it has at its heart the self-propagating spark. Nail broth. Engines that could and estranged third sons that ascend all manner of glass mountains on sheer will. The goose that lays the golden eggs that hatch. He was no naïf, and knew that food would disappear in a week. Clothing too would stretch at best only into the next decade. But a school . . .
The boy’s teacher made the fatal mistake of humoring the off-the-wall question. Build? Where? The boy was ready with his answer: upcountry. One of the hidden villages from which Squatter Town’s most destitute continuously poured. He pointed out on the classroom map the spot he had selected, a tribal
area near the border.
“Right here,” he said, “Nam Chai.” The easiest place to drain grief’s ocean is up in the hills, where the flow is still a trickle.
The teacher juggled a few rough estimates, an improvised economics session. The boy’s classmates took to the idea. Teacher then made a group project of writing up the proposal for the Institute’s Headmaster, hoping thereby to vitiate the scheme with democracy’s death sentence.
The boy’s plan would have ended there, except for the ironies of design. In crumpling up the proposal, Headmaster gave himself a vicious paper cut. And when he put the bloody fingertip in his mouth to stanch it, the bubble tasted cold, like gold leaf patted on statue stone.
The taste brought to the man’s mind the story of that plaster likeness of the Enlightened in one Angel monastery, pretty, but worthless. One day during handling, the plaster cracked. Deep in the fissure, something glistened. The plaster was stripped off, revealing a figure of pure gold. Only then did amnesia lift: the statue had been covered during one of the eternal incursions, to keep it from capture. As final safeguard, the city willed itself to forget, the last safety.
This had happened years ago, before the boy was born. But this letter, or rather the taste of the slit it made in Headmaster’s finger, made the moral clear. The city itself was cracking. Its disguise of timeless compliance was forever compromised, stripped off in a pragmatic deal done at missile-point. The region was already lost, sacrificed en passant to historical destinies. Its fish runs and fecund fields had been redone in Air Force blue. The world was ending and about to begin again, and who could say what awful gold would appear beneath its plaster disguise?
The letter was opportune. The thin coalition, led by the country that once refused a Free king’s offer of combat elephants for use in its own suicidal civil war, was in urgent need of PR. It was losing to its own self-incriminating conscience. If beaten prematurely, the farangs would never complete their reduction of the last sane stretch of the globe to total hell, a prerequisite for return to worldwide infancy. One good report on foreign philanthropy in the region, and the purge could go on a little longer. And yes, thought Headmaster, reading the petition. Why not the pupils of the International Institute?
In truth, the boy could not have cared less about the world. International interests were no more than the street gang refrain he knew in a half-dozen languages: Stay on your side of the line, or you die.
The world could rot with all the other unreachable mangoes on national interest’s tree. It could incinerate itself, the goal of all governments, so long as it left this one innocent spot a chance to break into the still center of heaven’s hub. The city’s angel orders—the heavy smells of orchid and pedicab exhaust, sulfurous curries and feces-sweet durian, Som’s saffron-flooded recipes, the timbre of temple bells, Sunday Market barter, the five tones—were too much to bear losing.
Yet the city had already started out on its own death march. Its venerable saving grace, a calculated accommodation, had been beaten at last. The lump was there, in a thousand and one Turkish baths, in the raw purchasing power of soldiers on R & R from the steady-state war, in cash that would trade this accommodating place into prosperity.
Against the Enlightened’s advice, the floating city had chosen for growth, life, illusion. At dinner, the boy’s father, baffled by the fact that attached itself more lovingly to him with his each covert business trip, said, “In ten years, the place will have launched itself into wealth or it will have burned up like cheap charcoal.” Lotus pad pond, or cesspool. A mood came over the man, one that had never taken hold in any other of the far more miserable countries he had helped subvert.
The boy watched his father shake his head and exhale, “Serious infrastructure problems.” At fourteen, the boy knew vaguely what infrastructure was—as much as he would ever know. It meant roads. Roads, telephones, depots, sewers: all as ethereal in the City of Angels as this trip around the rim of the Wheel.
This was the infrastructure he proposed to improve, beginning with an upcountry schoolhouse, that bootstrap, the capital required for lift-off. A bemused teacher relayed the message from Headmaster to cheering class that a school would cost almost nothing at all, providing you built it yourself.
In a rush of industry, they chartered buses, laid in supplies, requisitioned materials, and secured the state’s approval. School books, chalk, pointers, and globes (some still proclaiming obsolete borders) miraculously began piling up from out of a fabulous caldron. The logistics were taken out of the initiators’ hands. Yet, overwhelmed by success, the boy and his class hardly felt the coup, experience’s autocratic take-over.
The unlikely project, theirs still in feeling if not in fact, was barraged with more student applicants than they needed. Headmaster culled them down to a final cut, as if picking the cast for the spring musical. The final mix had something calculated to it. Alongside the boy founder, Kraft, came a Security Council of upperclassmen: Elaine Chang (a compromise on the two Chinas question), Dimi Popovich, Gopal Patnaik, Eleni Katzourakis, Bandele K, and Jien Daishi. Fleshing out this core were a host of Tatis, Claudios, Yuans, Jacqueses, and Jills ranging from fourth-grader to near adult. The chaperons included Headmaster; Sampao, the Free art teacher, and old Springer, who had taught social studies at the Institute for so long he no longer had a nationality.
This careful cross-cultural balance was upended in one blow when it came to naming the project. Because it was December, because the build-it-yourself school would be a gift from the blue, and thinking, perhaps, to lend the whole enterprise an ironic disguise by giving it a paramilitary ring, Headmaster christened the expedition Operation Santa Claus. The name horrified the boy, and he nearly dropped out at the last minute. Only his friend Gopal’s assurance that Santa was one of the officially recognized incarnations of Vishnu the Defender kept him in.
The expedition opened with a giddy field-trip feel. The caravan consisted of a busload of volunteers followed by ramshackle grain trucks filled with tools and donated supplies. Festivities on the bus ride up included manic, perpetual choruses of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer” and its anthropological equivalents from four continents.
Kraft joined the precocious Institute boys at the back of the bus. The moment’s obsession was paper airplanes. For the previous two weeks, boys had stood on the roof during recess, struggling with the engineering problem of how best to fold a piece of paper to defy gravity. The ingenuity of the hundreds of experimental designs continued unabated in the cramped quarters of the child-mad vehicle, although test flights grew a little erratic. An Afro–Middle Eastern consortium worked on a tube-and-airfoil design to maximize distance and flight time. The Anglo-European alliance, feeling their competitive edge slipping, pursued showy climb rates and speed. Kraft worked for a group of independents who wanted to produce the most unlikely, unwieldy design that would still fly.
Near the first refueling stop, they visited the shrine of one of the Enlightened’s most famous manifestations. The student travelers filed above a depression in the ground two meters deep. This hole, it took a moment to gather, was a footprint the length of two men. The toeprints radiated in perfect concentric circles. The foot itself was oval, pristine—as sinuously magnificent as a Siamese fighting fish. Most miraculous of all, the foot had left its impression not in soil but in something more resistant, metallic. Flecks of hammered-thin gold, no more than a handful of atoms thick, clung about the relic, like the ephemeral backing papers of toy tattoos.
That night, they pitched camp in a clearing in what seemed the gentlest of forests. Sampao, the art teacher, who had chosen the campsite, went around grinning until the children realized something was up. Kraft was the first to crack it; their forest was a single, all-over-arching tree. They were ensconced beneath a lone banyan, its every branch sending down air roots that turned into trunk and started the cycle all over again, its center spreading outward indefinitely, an enchanted wood large enough to swallow this entire student
society, a thicket maze so extensive and dense that even the classic cartographic bread crumbs (lost, in this version, not to birds but to giant red fire ants) would be no help.
The stories around the campfire were inspired by the defenseless, unearthly adventure, by being out so late with no curfew, no home to return to in the morning. Gabi Lauter told of the Kinderzeche, an annual festival from her birthplace honoring the children who saved the town from destruction during a war that had lasted longer than a generation. Farouk Ali—one of those demonic, genius-grant-funded child wizards behind the world’s seemingly spontaneous playground chants, the war cries of the paste- and eraser-eating set, the fear-enforced slanders that made even captains of industry, walking past playgrounds, lose their equanimity and assume the taunts were aimed at them—produced an Arabic rhyme that, freely translated, went something like “Cinderella, dressed in yella, went downtown to meet her fella. . . .”
Farouk good-naturedly supposed out loud that Guus Vandersteenhoven had been chosen to come because a mission like this needed at least one boy who would be willing to stick his finger in a dike. Guus swore nobody in his country had ever heard that story, or the one about the kid with the ice skates, either.
Claudio, a hopeless intellectual whose most vigorous sport was the crossruff, changed the topic to a fantastic tale of art treasures transported to England via Khartoum, where they had been brought from the collapsing East by that Messiah fighter, Chinese Gordon, of the Ever-Victorious Army. Dimi said that he’d read the same story somewhere, and Farouk asked him if he’d ever finished coloring the book in.
Quintessential cookout fare, in short, followed by ghost tales and toasted bananas over the night’s last embers. Some played cards or pit-and-pebble while the light held. The youngest swapped things—plastic figures or little cast-iron cars—while the oldest grilled one another on the lyrics of the latest stateside songs to reach this place, by then pathetically dated.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 37