Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  Adulthood would reach them almost superfluously: the popular South Americans had their bank vice presidencies all but signed; the Chinese and Indians their elite if shabby governmental back offices. The junior Eurocrat brats saw in this trip invaluable résumé experience, while the offspring of international Asian cartels would remember these tropical forests years later as game board squares to be played to. The sons and daughters of lifer soldiers and PX personnel, the long lineage of crate-lifters, passing this once for socially acceptable on a disguised outing up from the underclass, already felt the knee-jerk exclusion from their school chums that even in these presophisticates went unnamed.

  Kraft, who had already begun to dream at night of saving everyone he knew from Ganges-scale floods, saw in the flicker of the bug-drawing fire that he was destined for futile sandbag duty at the end. Surrounded by a circle of lit faces that suddenly seemed too impossibly young to be his contemporaries, he froze and could not deliver his piece when his turn came around. His national allegory—the wandering guy with the sack of apple seeds—had degraded along the way to the executive mercenary, Kraft Sr., leaning out of his machine in the pitch-black, calling down amplified confusion on lands too wayward to reform by any other means. The country of the universally displaced had somehow graduated to evil overlord, backing every backwater tyrant who owned a cattle prod. It had torn itself apart on cynical profit, gone debauched in a single step, and nobody could say how or why.

  What national folk tale could he relate, he who had been home for all of six weeks in his life? He thought he might tell them of the child’s “Come away!” that had inspired this field project. Instead, he made due by playing the kluay obbligato while Francisca Ng, daughter of a high-ranking international aid officer, sang:

  Where are you off to, little girl, so late?

  Are frogs calling, do owls keep you awake?

  How far must you go yet, at this hour?

  Can’t it wait?

  Where in the world the tune came from was anyone’s guess. The girl, a grade older than Kraft, could sing the verse in any language, with no damage to the musical line. Her voice was spectral, beyond forgetting. All who heard her wanted to jump up and continue that night, to push to the boundless banyan’s edge, into the threatened countryside.

  On day two, stopping to stretch and bat about a takraw, one of mankind’s few cooperative sports, they were met by a khakied American who came from nowhere out of the bush. The man asked for food and told an incredulous student council that he was walking home. He deserted them as quickly as he had appeared. The exchange made Headmaster remind them that they were nearing the shooting zone; the war that they had all seen broadcast was near, border violating, and real. Hill tribes in this region were routinely rounded up by the government and sent against the insurgents, local peasants who had suffered opposite recruitment.

  Nam Chai, when they arrived, was not so much a village as a letter of intent. The government had made a colossal mistake in agreeing to let them see the place, let alone attempt philanthropy here. Not only was there no school, there was no market, no shop, no post office, no sewers, no garage, no clinic. The dwellings were no larger than Angel City spirit houses.

  The bus discharged the legation, and all the living souls in that few square kilometers formed two queues of the mutually incredulous. In one glance, education as escape revealed itself to be wishful thinking. Something was wrong with this village, more wrong than any school could cure. Some antique curse—a troll extracting weekly blood tribute, some slow leach, a heavy-metal impurity lacing the all-purpose stream, a terrain inviting perpetual foreign invasion—hung over the place, turning assistance almost cruel.

  The self-appointed international ambassadors of goodwill unloaded their trucks. They stacked the modular walls, the globes, chalkboards, and diminutive desks next to the foundation spot in the morass. Their heaps might have been more useful as firewood. The inventory seemed as pointless as a stockpile of thousand-watt ice shavers rotting in some outletless outback. Over these confused caches flew the school flag with its Hanuman silhouette.

  Every other village child suffered some exotic jungle affliction. Faces swelled shut under parasite assault. Leeches laddered up legs. Wild defects bent fingers back like the brass nails of a classical dancer, or sprouted wing stumps between shoulder blades. These were the bastard UNICEF wraiths, those dirt-cripples that privilege was supposed to save with a couple pennies’ worth of trick-or-treats.

  What ruined Ricky, though, was the abject happiness of this monstrous pantheon. Even the sickest tore around in uncontrollable excitement. They spun through the village shouting in hill dialects how everything was at last coming true. The monkey army had arrived, fresh from the City of Angels.

  On the whole, the assortment of internationals responded better than Kraft to the shock of these village children. Slight Janie Hawkins, whose teaspoon tits had recently begun debuting in the boy’s nightly revue as he fell off to sleep, instinctively cradled in her white-fuzzed arms a limbless newborn the size and pallor of a bleached rugby ball. She sung the first song that came into her head, a lullaby from her long-forgotten Kentucky:

  Every time the baby cries,

  Stick my finger in the baby’s eyes.

  What’ll we do with the ba-a-by?

  What shall we do with the baby-o?

  There is a patois known by everyone below the age of consent. A system of shouts and postures is enough; words would just confuse things. Within an afternoon, troops from opposite ends of the planetary playing field had formed a work force. They set to the improvisational plans as to a life-size mud castle. Boys who had never heard of a latrine pitched in to dig a bank of them on no instruction at all. Carters, haulers, trenchers, plumbers, joiners, carpenters, metalworkers, masons, sanders, water fetchers, day carers for the as yet too small to day-labor: everyone fell to a task without being assigned. The engineering feat fashioned itself out of nothing, memory.

  Children who only grinned foolishly, as at a comic myth, at tales of seasons, the back-and-forth battle of summer and winter, children who wouldn’t know the grim stomach-pit thrill of oranging September if it came up and rattled their lunch boxes, collaborated in their own undoing by erecting the edifice that would forever, for generations to come, stamp the school calendar upon them. Kraft began to wonder whether they had chosen the wrong place, whether he had somehow misinterpreted that distress call transmitted to him across the citizens band.

  Work proceeded rapidly. The Institute candy stripers had not booked themselves much time—two weeks of winter break, a whirlwind gift-spattering run, even by Santa Claus standards. The floor plan called for a circular sala whose walls could be thrown open to the weather, extending the tent of learning like a processional umbrella or a catch-all sarong.

  Once the ground had been readied and the pilings sunk, the skin went up with a speed that surprised everyone. Each set of pint-sized hands hammered in gearwork happiness, humming inside the dovetailing whole. Walls went up in half an afternoon, so smoothly was the effort shared. The heavenly pavement could be laid by this time next month; Cleveland, Djakarta, Addis Ababa could explode with great textured marble cylinders of learning, structures that would make New York and Tokyo seem botched hick towns if all adults worked as they once toyed.

  One afternoon, midway through building, when the rapid rise of teak lintels sent waves of anticipation through the crew, the landscape began to throb softly as if the piece they had just inserted had set off an oscillation in the fabric of air. The children of the strategically meaningless hamlet placed the sound before the city sophisticates. They scattered into the undergrowth with barks of pleasure-threaded panic.

  Farangs, as usual, failed to recognize their own handiwork until it swarmed them. Kraft’s first thought was that Dad had tracked him down, sent out a pin-and-interdict against this Operation Claus, which, acting on its own initiative, was not in the best of coalition interests. The megaphones would start up
, or they’d go gunship first and ask questions later. One well-placed shaped charge underneath the teacher’s desk, or a ten-thousand-fléchette canister. Or, most ingenious of all, a camera rocket trailing a metal wire beaming back pictures, steered by some JD four years older than Ricky, parked up in his hovering air platform in front of a monitor as if watching American Bandstand. Any of history’s current munitions and delivery systems would do.

  The airships landed and Nam Chai came out from cover. The machines spit up a small team of pale, bellied men with film equipment. Endless hanks of cable and portable generators appeared from nowhere, glutting the makeshift landing area around the school. An albino dressed in the camouflage fatigues worn only by teenage heavy-metal fans and greener members of the press corps hit the turf asking who was in charge.

  Headmaster’s quiet news leaks as the group departed the city had, like a banyan branch, taken root. Word of the unlikely roving charity had reached the international media, message-in-bottle style. Temporarily sated with soldiers setting one another on fire, briefly glazed-eyed with the tedious predictability of horror, and always on the lookout for the latest curio, TV dispatched a mobile cell to get the take on this group of kids cheekily trying to work its own welfare.

  Not your cheap feel-good, the producer rushed to assure. Not your toss-off geopolitical PR puff piece. “Just, like, you know: ‘Out-of-the-mouths-of-babes’?”

  Headmaster nodded in acquiescence, serving the turn of the Wheel.

  Even the Northerners stood in awe at the unloading of equipment. The hardware was a cargo cult’s fetish come true. Sampao executed a series of sketches on rice paper. The village kids, thinking it Stage Two of the incomprehensible project, served as native bearers.

  “Can you give me a good cross section of color?” the producer requested. Headmaster selected a sample core of babes, out of whose mouths the world would learn just what it was up to. He chose one student from each of the lost continents, and Kraft, the trip’s most colorful North American.

  Ricky suggested that they include a hill tribe kid. He picked one, a boy named Lok whose hobby was gumming up the nostrils of domesticated animals with red clay. The film crew jumped at the novelty. They patted the boy on the head, violating a dozen cultural prohibitions, and asked his name. Lok replied, “Yet ma,” which Kraft refrained from translating.

  The man they propped in front of the camera was a former pro athlete who seemed surprised that none of these children asked for his autograph. Kraft lied and said he thought he’d heard of him, and this settled the man enough to get him started.

  “Deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia, just a few hours from the Mekong,” he started, and Gopal ruined the take by snickering. “. . . is exactly the place,” the ex-sports star continued, after the splice, “you might expect to find a guerrilla army. But this army will surprise you.” His voice sashayed in pitch, as if he were about to rattle off the toll-free number you could call to place an order. “This is an army of peace,” he said, emphasizing the last word’s outrageousness. “The guerrillas come from over a dozen different countries.” Gopal nudged Kraft and asked if Americans could count that high. “And every one of them,” enunciated the genial ex-jock, working up to his punch line, “is a child.”

  He gave the first question to Elaine Chang, who looked Oriental and had been pointed out to him as the Institute brain. “Can you tell us what you and your schoolmates are doing here?”

  “A television interview?” Elaine replied tentatively. On the second take, she got the answer right: “We’re building a school.”

  “And can you tell us why?” Come on, you can do it, his voice pleaded.

  Kraft held his breath, but Elaine, eminently sensible, answered to perfection. “Because they didn’t have one.”

  “Yes,” the reporter granted, grinning at the home audience, like that show host whose book, Kids Are the Wackiest Wonders, was upstaged by his daughter’s subsequent plunge from an upper-story window. “But do you think your choice to build a school here has anything to do with what is happening nearby?”

  He waited expectantly, perhaps for a polite show of hands. “Can any of you tell us what is happening in this region?”

  Gopal cleared his throat and took the plunge. “I’m afraid if you haven’t figured it out by now . . .”

  The reporter adroitly intercepted the boy. “Gopal, you’re from . . . ?”

  “India. It’s a large country just through the center of the earth from . . .”

  So the interview went, turning the simplest act of care into the usual broadcast circus. The reporter didn’t want children building a schoolhouse upcountry. Not: I’m fifteen, and I rub myself off nightly and I’ve twice smoked ganja and my job is digging post holes. Not: I’m eight and I like melting dolls and I can’t bring friends home when my mother’s there. He wanted allegory, Little Eva or Nell, a two-minute twist-wrap in the manner that this rightless class has always been painted: perversely small, alien creatures, a delightful variety act in their Tinytown getup, dancing, prancing, romancing, just like homunculus adults. He kept rephrasing every question until it became an elaborate description to which the student had simply to answer yeah.

  “This little boy’s name is Luke. . . .”

  “Lok,” Kraft corrected, knowing that the reporter would stop and explain to him with increasing testiness that for American TV, only one person was allowed to talk at one time, and that person was him until he said so.

  “This little boy actually grew up in this very village, a forgotten town lost in the crossfire, but one where his new friends from many countries are now building him a building that might change his life. Luke, can you tell us how the war has touched you?”

  Kraft interpreted, and the cameras ate up the image of the two crew cuts jabbering at each other, the brown one shyly smirking as he spoke. Ricky turned back to the MC. “He wants to know whether you have any chewing gum.”

  Shielded by the omnipotent edit, the reporter hacked on. “How does it feel when you hear shooting in the distance? Are you worried that it’s coming closer?”

  Kraft dutifully relayed the question and Lok’s answer: “He says he once saw a body spread across the river path. Lots of teeny creatures were making their home in it.”

  The reporter got excited; they could use that bit. Maybe they could take him to the spot for an image. “Luke, can you tell the boys and girls back in America what you most want to learn at your new school?”

  A slight altercation followed, the boys barking at each other in their playing-field pidgin. The reporter gently reminded Kraft that he mustn’t hold anything back.

  “He wants to know if American girls have a furry patch between their legs.”

  Cheers broke out from all quarters, and Kraft was reprimanded for ruining expensive film.

  “How about you?” the reporter turned on him when the fracas settled. “Are you frightened to be here?”

  A whiff of future came across the clearing, and Kraft knew that the refuge was already lost. The miracle beans he had hoped to stash away in the soil would not take root until this patch of ground too had been flooded under a sea of asylum seekers. And he felt free to say anything he wanted, safe in the knowledge that any truth he might utter would never slip past the editors of this new continuous primer in illiteracy and evasion, the world’s last will and testament.

  Listen my children and you shall hear the sense of the words this boy spoke as adulthood has hung on to them. TV wanted the war in anecdote—this season’s diversion for the stimulus stunned. Very well then. The boy began to speak softly, plumping the rhythms like a jump-rope rhyme. He spoke of all the hot spots he had put up in for a while and had been forced to evacuate. He told of a Caribbean island that sowed its fields with its own carcasses rather than share the land. He described half a billion subcontinentals massing in sacrificial machete waves over the shape of God’s head. He painted a perfect white-tower-topped palace by the sea, then set it to the torch.<
br />
  “Aren’t you afraid? Isn’t everyone?” he giggled. He tried to say how every place he had ever lived was an armed camp, swarming with shirtless, underaged adolescents toting lightweight grenade launchers. He said how he had read that there had been two wars a year, each costing an average quarter-million lives, since the start of history.

  The war over the river, he said, mattered to the cameras only because home boys were dying. We were using wire-guided weapons and aerial defoliants. They were using children with spring-loaded shredded-tin-can bombs strapped to their chests. In a few years, the reporter’s war that this school outing opposed would probably be turned into anonymous, stylish, prime-time violence, colorful punji combat for rating stakes. The kerchiefed, bare-chested, M-16–decked commando filmed in front of a stand of bamboo will turn the war into a small-bore lullaby.

  He mumbled this prediction, accusing no one. Was he afraid? Anyone who wasn’t was not paying attention. That was the point of this school: to teach the children of the village what was being done all around them to the children of Planet Earth. Just the Who, What, When, and Where, because the lone Why was too awful to bear. Ricky declared that the only solution to the crisis across the river, to the trauma racing through every country on unlimited tourist visas, was mandatory intermarriage at gunpoint for a hundred generations, until everybody looked exactly the same. As his sentences grew longer, he savored his first taste of cynicism along the sides of his tongue, right next to “Sour” and “Salt” in the Science and You diagrams. And with that taste, he crossed a subterranean border into old age.

  He finished his diatribe to dead silence. The cameras had long since shut off. The reporter was already gesturing for kids to go over by the school and move some teak trunks around. Kraft’s impromptu parable was sucked up by a spinning dust devil into the vacant sky above Nam Chai. The wind carried off his words as it would a scuttled fighting kite. He watched the reporter film his prepared tag, khaki flapping in front of Kraft’s classmates, each swinging languidly at a fake nail, guilty of betrayal but unable to help themselves.