Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  Listen, my children, and there, as every story formula ever committed to memory puts it, there you have a tale. And here you come to the end of it.

  They travel light, pare back the carrying weight. Essentials only. When the requisitioned gimp vans come to take them on the road, they bring along just the costumes on their backs and a few props—a tonette, a papier-mâché mountainside that splits down the middle to reveal a fleeting crevasse.

  Angel City is not the place they left upon entering the magic maintenance hideout. They see for the first time the town that has passed itself off as home. They play tourists to their own back barrios, the ones the package junkets only buzz through with the tinted windows rolled up shut. They perform in Jorge and Roberto’s alma mater, where the classes are led through the auditorium in controlled shifts, frisked by armed guards. One seventh-grader in the audience is rushed to Carver in midperformance, when the smuggler’s balloon he swallowed earlier that morning breaks inside him.

  They play a gazebo in a once-park on the east side, where indigents of all ages crawl from their Masonite maisonettes to stare at the inscrutable proceedings as if at another unreadable eviction notice. A religious club where they do an afternoon show is raided two days later for sheltering a hive of illegals. Necrosis has taken hold everywhere. It’s all coming due, extended credit’s final statement. Privation now costs more than wealth, the old pyramiding scheme, can hope to generate.

  They cross over to the happy Valley, where bad conscience has booked them at the Galleria for a matinee. There they play to a weekend mob of glazed children who call their parents by first names. Children with weekly Top Forty head-dos, two-hundred-dollar helium-injected shoes, color-coordinated spun-silk lip-shaped purses stuffed with supplementary credit cards slung around their want-not waists.

  The Hamelin rats had no idea. This unspannable gulf accounts for the spreading partisan rumble, the GAS THE BASTARDS T-shirts, the collapse of the street economy into a single, exhausted, gag-gift boutique of hate and rage, as if future GNP depended on our continuing to buy fart cushions and SHUT THE FUCK UP coffee mugs for one another. It explains the six hundred autonomous Angel armies, now the city’s chief employment for minors. It glosses the junior-chamber-of-commerce consortium of tax-free, million-dollar-a-week retailers, cataclysm’s middlemen, scalpers at this ticket-holders-only mass send-off.

  Travel works an awful mental broadening on them. They are toted downtown, where they have never been, past the Ray-Ban investment house towers and airline office blocks. Each one is a laundering of the architectural balance sheet, a pauper’s hospital in disguise. Even here, the down curve has begun, steeper and more abrupt than the city planners suspect.

  In the van, they amuse themselves with road games. A chunk of Nerf cinderblock and the newest rap lyric hold them beguiled for whole freeway jams. Nico bullies the group into leading Joleene to believe she’s telepathic: “My God, you’ve guessed our secret object again. Quit . . . How in the . . . ? You’re playing with our Innermost, girl.”

  “I don’t know how I know. I just know. I think, and it comes to me. It just springs, like, into my head.”

  They switch between suppressed snickers and reverential awe at the girl’s newly discovered power. But they never tell. The girl will die thinking she’s psychic.

  Nico is everywhere in the van aisles—cheerleader, voice coach, tour guide—working the sickos, most of whom should not have been allowed to step foot out of the plague house, even for these brief, homeopathic afternoons. He plays with the young ones. “Okay, punks. Huddle up. Let’s go over the playbook.” He prepares them for the longer outing rapidly coming up. He waves a comic in front of them like a shiner lure, but the tykes just sit there on the knife-slashed vinyl, facing him, their very instinct to curl up on the right side of the page rendered cagey, extinguished by unspeakable early conditioning. It hurts to see how much it will take before these stunted crips will be ready.

  “Criminy. You younger generation are frigging illiterates. Hey you: yeah, the one with the wet spot on your pants. Complete this rhyme. ‘Simple Simon met a . . .’”

  A sidelong look of suspicion gives way to a lagged but crescendoing “Pimon!” of near-rapturous relief.

  “Yeah, so ya got lucky. ‘Going to the fair. Says Simple Simon to the . . .’”

  “Pimon!”

  “‘Let me taste your . . .’”

  Agonized pause. Total exam panic. “Hair?”

  “Hobbling God on a bloody crutch! Okay, okay. I’m sorry. Hair. Whatever you say. Just don’t blither on me.”

  And why not? These infants, connoisseurs of every conceivable tang, have at least hung on to that primal impulse to pop everything into the mouth: paste, plastic, wrapping paper, cakes of hardened snot, a salad bar of gravels and soils, earthworm pies, pasty pastry scabs, lead paint peels. A hank of hair is among the more innocent of the thousand and thirty-one flavors left their lingering ability to savor. They will miss these taste buds dearly, this time next month.

  “Well, I’d let you taste mine, guys, but . . .” He springs the arch grin that vampires always flash their victims. “Got no hair!” He flips his cap. His translucent, purple-pink, shriveled parchment map of bared veins sets off the desired shrieks of terrified delight.

  Emboldened, one of the pitiful tinies asks Lieutenant Chuck if she can satisfy the shameless longing that’s been nagging at her for weeks. She wants to put her fingers into the resounding hole that still plumbs deep into the lower left of his reconstructed face. Chuck clears away the clutter of removable prosthetic and stoically caters to the request not once but several times, while each little rat extra trills in fascinated disgust as she finger-probes the pit.

  “Don’t wiggle or you’ll touch brain,” Nico warns, causing a new round of diving for cover among the nightmares-in-training. Chuck holds still; anything for the cause. Each must be prepared to submit to whatever it takes to secure the trust for the impending Big One.

  An altercation at one of their school stints temporarily grounds the road show while Linda clears up some legalities. Some fiendishly healthy, overaged fourth-grader insists at snub-nose-point on following the Hamelin children through the papier-mâché mountain to whatever offstage hidden prospect it opens on. The scare is no more than a routine, late-day urban heart murmur, but it is enough to keep them hospital-bound for a little longer. While the players wait for the incident to be settled, Nico continues to recruit for the standing cast.

  His canvassing brings him even among the pre-young: he hovers over the incubator, the greenhouse glass palace of a six-hundred-gram, red sugar beet born four months too soon. He plagues the nurses with questions that they find cute for a while, until the obsessive grilling progresses toward the macabre. He asks about the catheters, pump primers jammed into the surfactant-stripped lungs to keep them from collapsing like a graft-riddled public housing project. He wants the tech specs on that hypo needle stuck through the umbilical into the heart, the standing kegger tap for injections and test draws. He wonders out loud what would happen if it were accidentally disconnected. He demands to know if these still-unshaped souls, the only humans coming up for air before they are even zero years old, might be close enough to eviction that their speechless brains still carry some trace of the original place.

  “Hook them up to the CAT scanners,” he urges, beginning almost winsomely, then waxing vulture-beaked when they laugh him off. He dares the authorities, gives them all the early warning they will need by muttering audibly, loud enough for even the packets of preexistence to hear. “Yeah,” he says, his lips almost pressed to the Plexiglas, “you guys too.”

  BRING ME SOMETHING, Joy begs each time the troupe sets out for a new venue. She lies in Intensive Care, allowed no visitors, unconscious, swaddled from top to shortened tip, strapped to the electromechanical life assistants, without which not, nothing.

  Staff has no idea that Gramps Jr. is sneaking visits to her. The IC nurses, if they came across hi
m there, signing to the comatose girl in an unearthly semaphore, would not even know how he managed to break and enter.

  What? Bring you what? He lifts one balding eyebrow as if to ask: What souvenir of the death throes out of doors do you want for a keepsake?

  He needn’t ask. The answer is obvious, lying uselessly all around her tube-thicketed bed. Books, of course: before she went under the knife, before she would agree to suffer the anesthetic, Joy made her doctors promise to stack her magic hoard alongside her in the IC, so that the pick-a-mix of printed spells would be there the moment she came to.

  Still booking, cramming for the pop final that has already been slipped her. Nico picks up one volume after the other, flips through the stack, shaking his head. How can you read these things, Joyless? They got no pictures.

  The ones that do have illustrations are the bleakest. Smeary black-and-white negatives from the written-off countries populate that pathetic social studies text, groundlessly optimistic even back when it was printed, sometime around the year of their birth. Previous borrowers’ Crayola do-it-yourselfers lay down illicit tracks in her heavily bookmarked history. Bright tempera washes explicate the book that Linda has placed on the top of this stack—advance pastel flowers on a granite grave. The swirly romantic maroons and silvers of the legend of Saint George, who, it says right here, had to slay a dragon that had developed an unfortunate taste for human calf, child veal cutlet. Wouldn’t even get him six months’ probation in most states these days.

  He picks up an intimidating reader, gauging by the tiny type that ordinary kids wouldn’t be hassled by it for another four grades at the earliest, if they still troubled with reading at all by then. The collection’s carefully cracked spine falls open to a short story about kids being sold door to door during some war. Houses on fire, Krauts doing their Space Invaders number again. He prefers the Pacific Theater. Still, it’d make a great comic: Cosmic Quester gets dimension-shifted into this place where they’re shipping all their kids . . .

  At the end, underneath those “Questions for Further Study”—he can’t believe this—she has actually scribbled in a whole dollhouse-sized bible of answers, printed in teensy longhand, spidery, like she’s still writing Whoositskrit. For the very last question, “Interview a contemporary . . . ,” she has patiently printed a whole case history too tiny to read.

  He snaps the book shut, to trap the answers inside. Fine, Joyless. We’ll bring you back whatever you want. Name the title. We’ll liberate it for you from the very next school library we play.

  He does not mention that the touring theatrics may be over for good. He gives her IV sack a shake, the practical equivalent of shoving her down on the foursquare asphalt, and makes ready to sneak back through enemy lines.

  Nico, wait. Don’t go yet. I’m afraid.

  Deep breath, slowing for stamina. We almost got away without having to do this. Get outta here. What’s to be afraid of?

  It’s not going to work. We are going to miss it again, aren’t we?

  Grow up, huh? He nudges her traction set, grinning. We’re about to pull this sucker off, once and for all. Exactly the way I told you.

  Nico, I’ve been reading.

  No duh.

  Shh. What’s happening to us, it’s—farther along than you know. Wider. There’s a lot more to it than we thought. That story. They . . . made a mistake remembering what really happened. They got confused, in the time it took to write everything down. That place they escape to, the childrens?

  Children, you DP.

  It’s not what we think it is. The way you perform it is . . . wrong. Don’t you remember? Don’t you? It’s not about escape. Not about leaving at all. The hole in the mountain is just where they are held, caged up together before being shipped back.

  Shipped back? Why?

  Can’t you see? They still need us for something. Here. Nobody can go until everybody . . .

  He has never heard her so talkative, certainly not while she still had the use of her voice. She is no longer herself, but a convert frantic to make her single point. And tugging at his thoughts, she insists, Look here, Nico. And here. All over, everywhere.

  She flails at her texts, rooting around in ones that even adults should need notes from their mothers before being allowed to check out. She selects telltale passages, forces them on him from her comatose horizontal. Look here: three thousand new refugees, every day. And doubling in less than ten years.

  She rolls out the sick ciphers, like a UNESCO bean counter gone stark, staring prayerless. Here: the soft parts of homeless street swervers, collected in plastic garbage bags for the per-pound cartilage bounty. Just down this hall: crack and HIV little sibs arriving and dispatched again at a nationwide rate of one beltway suburb a month. One child in five, born below the subsistence line. And this, she lectures to him, eyes clamped shut in her liquidy, shinered sockets, all this without taking a step out of the world’s richest nation.

  The times table she forces on him is just another tired catalog, impenetrable text in a world grown senile on images. But she has her own visual proof to bring the journey’s contour home. She leads him to a baroque, fine-line Magic Marker chart, several loose-leaf pages Scotch taped together. Scores of different-colored marks stand for the spectrum of evacuations, the scope and scale of each assorted outrage. He finds the treasure map by telepathy, tucked carefully in the flyleaf of a book called Waiting for 2000: A Grade School Guide for Millennium Straddlers.

  The scatter pattern of her careful connect-the-dots historical atlas leaves no territory for doubt. Graduation Day is already upon them, and their study group has been cribbing with an obsolete, fractured-fairyland flat-earth projection of the turf.

  She smiles at him, weakly but warmly, from under the massive sedative, letting him on to her last secret.

  You know what they taught you, early on, when you still attended classes? How the surface of the earth was mostly water?

  He says nothing. He can already complete her argument, the example left for the student as an exercise. The thing teachers everywhere neglect to add. The thing that every kid from the newer neighborhoods now knows first hand: the people of the earth are mostly afloat.

  Hey: not to worry, JS. I’m telling you, dudette. We have our moment picked, and as soon as it arrives . . .

  You will slip through the crack without me. And when you come back—that is the worst part. You will all be in another place, without knowing how you came there. You won’t remember why you talk or dress the way you do, the way no one else does for thousands of miles around. You won’t even be able to say what you were escaping.

  Leave without you, Joyless? What kind of monsters do you take us for?

  The monster in question makes a last, bored flip through the stack of scare-tactic facts. His smirk pretends not to know that it is under scrutiny.

  Besides, he tacks on, straightening his Dodger cap in the reflection of her life support apparatus, these little picnics we’re doing now are just reconnaissance. Chill out, huh? On the day when we tweak the ending, you’ll be along for the ride.

  He stands a second time to sneak out, but still she won’t let him. The cold sweats shiver her limbs. Her whole torso quakes quietly, as if the traction bed hid a Magic Fingers. The tremors are on her, the wind-up ones. Now he must run, or give in too to hypothermia. To knowing.

  Nico, Nico, Nico, she says, just to be saying, to keep the alternative at bay. Here, she indicates. No, the other stack, just underneath. She leads him to the thinnest volume, the belated song for the nursery, the one still wrapping her in original sight. The marker suggests there are a few pages left yet in this one.

  Its tenacious cradle-grip on the girl is as strong as the first clasp, the instinct to grapple at giant index fingers, to clutch at rattles, to latch on to any probe that the immense creatures from above extend to hook us with. He picks it up, groaning.

  Nico, she pleads. Nico? Read to me?

  WEEK’S LAST CLINIC wrings the woman
out. She comes from it like a doily from a lye bath. Her final half-hour session of the afternoon expanded into a life term: a couple who, despite the prenatal tests, chose to keep and care for what the chart calls a severe mental handicap. As if any couple from these parts were not sufficiently handicapped already. The child seems set to stretch the terrible twos into a decade, and Linda’s simple assignment is to keep him from biting his tongue off every time he moves.

  Only the couple’s infinitely uncomprehending hurt keeps her going. It never crosses their mind that the daily, unbearable confusion of routine might be less had the child been different. Love, it seems, is past choice, past examining. It is a severe handicap all its own.

  She comes from the punching bag session dripping wet, gritty, foul to herself. She will not go home, a place that has lately taken on the appearance of a giant but empty shoe, filled with silent, sacrificed shouts. She might just be able to make it to a shower downstairs, in the staff stalls, to find some provisional hideout here, an unoccupied call cubicle where handicapped humanity will let her curl up and fall asleep for a hundred years.

  Ah, now—for that she must slink unseen past the same monk’s cell where she once tried to seduce him: Come on, come on. Old Dr. Kraft in there, bashing the bishop. Who was that girl? Where is she gone? Dead, deported. He has embalmed me, shot me full of the pharaohs’ eleven secret herbs and spices. Done me over, rehabbed me in his own image. Rightly so; the Clara Barton thing never did any lasting good. More of them every afternoon, more brutally clipped and bewildered. Better off like him, carapaced at least, killingly efficient, steering by the self-conscious voice-over in my own head.

  The scalding shower dilates only her superficial vessels. She could go out somewhere, cleaned, slicked up, and get a man. It might help, tonight, unsnag her from the immediate brambles. But the man would be him, all over again, and his microbial Registered Delivery would remain every bit as fatal. Besides, she’d botch the cosmetic doll job, slap the silks and scents on too desperately. Overt and vigorous never works, not even on the most unsuspecting of meat club marks. It lacks the necessary self-delusion. She will never be able to dumb her nerves back down again for romance. Right now, she hasn’t even the energy for a token soap job.