(These night-sirened final roundups are just the latest parental attempts to ward off prophecy. To kill the still-bewildered child in themselves that their own parents failed to finish off. The word goes out from the Imperial Capital, or is initiated by some two-bit, provincial governor: damage-control the old order. Issue the slaughter papers, mandate the stopgap massacre, book boxcar passage free of charge for every imminent threat to the status quo. Invested power faces no greater danger than these revolutionaries incarnate—every breathing body under voting age.)
I don’t know, sweetheart. I wish I did.
Come on. Read. Keep reading. Give us one of those really wild ones.
(Night 12, Palestine. Herod’s storm troopers, fathers from this part of the empire, conduct their house-to-house sweep in the dark. Students of political terror, they know that the random knock on the door works best at two A.M. These hatchetmen blindly follow orders, not much motivated by national security. Theirs is a saturation search-and-destroy. To get at the one potentially destabilizing element, the incumbent commander in chief is willing to expend all innocent hostage bystanders. The troops, agents of the State, work in willed ignorance, butchering in the dark—trapping toddlers in back alleys, encircling a knot on the plaza, mopping up pockets of resistance in the poultry market, methodically dispatching children as in some dream of urban renewal.
(Grotesque tableau, but the troops are now too deep into the tale to withdraw. Crack phalanxes rip open the province’s newly toilet-trained. Erotic charge ripples once more through the professional soldier class at holding prepubescent flesh on the unsheathed sword.
(How is it that the account seems so familiar, as vivid as recent newspaper coverage or some further dead reckoning slated soon to be remembered forever? June student genocides, shooting up always on the other side of the world like so many lab strains of miracle rice, are here, by November, spread outside, flowering underneath the pediatric wing window.
(The redemptive germ kernel—how one fugitive family slips out the back steps, how one infant escapes the bloodbath to found the new order, the slaughtered little ones promoted to eternal blessedness—the end of this late-night read-aloud is decided by the time it arrives. The road to the future is paved with fourteen-inch corpses. That is their magic, incantatory function. All the teen poverty brides, the single mothers escaping another screaming mouth, the cunning merchants unwilling to invest in daughters: all serve as mere manipulated ignorant pawns of delivering prophecy. However they are killed this time around, the infant pilgrims form the race’s blood sacrifice, progress’s solid rocket fuel.
(What hope, when story outstrips the outside horrors her read-alouds are supposed to ward off? Raw nightmare will rule the ward tonight. Every splatter of Herod’s maces into these sapling chests provokes its imitative blow here among the eager listeners. A group of four gladiators, incensed, hack wildly at each other’s surgical dressings.)
Kwishhh. Whack. You a dead pers. Yeah! No, sorry, don’t. One more, one more. We’ll quit, we promise.
It’s late. Come on, kids; bed. You’ll get me in trouble.
No! Another. Okay, if you don’t want to read no more, just at least tell us what happens to that boy. The deformed dude, in the boat.
Well, I’m not sure. What do you think? He . . . just drifts. His boat holds water, he fishes, alone on the surface of an endless mirror. He slips along on the ocean current. Every so often, although time doesn’t mean anything to him, because nothing changes, he sees another boat far off on the horizon. But he never signals or calls out; he just stares, not really knowing what it is. At night he falls asleep and dreams of a whole universe full of intelligent creatures, just like him, only . . .
. . . on land?
In hospitals?
All over the world?
Exactly. You guys are brilliant. But because he has never met any other creature . . .
. . . except fish . . .
. . . except fish . . .
. . . and octopuses . . .
Octopi, you igno-twerp.
Because he has never met any other humans, he doesn’t even realize he’s alone. He doesn’t know the names of the oceans, and he cuts right through the boundaries of territorial waters. It’s just liquid to him—deep or shallow, cold or warm.
Does he pick up more children along the way?
Well, sure. Why not? But not right at first. At first, when he draws close enough to solid land to figure out what it is, it scares the daylights out of him. The Hard Places, he calls the islands. He sees right away how incredibly dangerous they are. You can’t sail on them; a boat would get completely stuck, or else it would be torn apart as soon as it touched. How you possibly gonna fish in such places? The hook would just lie there on the Hard Stuff, worthless.
He keeps to the wider currents. His eyes, over a long, long time, grow so strong from staring down into deep water searching for fish that he can see shoals even when they are a mile below pitch-blackness. You see, he has nothing else to look at except cloud and wave and the occasional piece of giant kelp. Years go by without even a mast. Slowly, he trains his eyes, learns how to see over the curve of the earth.
Get outta my life.
No, really. And his hearing sharpens too. There are no distractions in his whole world. So even the tiniest sound is worth concentrating on. He gets so that he can track the songs that whales sing to one another. He concentrates until he can hear even the pingings of corals. He can hear noises coming from all over the place. And one day, after several ages, he hears, from a thousand leagues off, and then he sees, long before it becomes visible over the horizon, a very weird thing.
Carrier fleet?
Jet skis?
Jet skis? For crying out softly. You people are hopeless, you know that? Absolutely lost.
A message in a bottle?
Now there we go. Only, not just one little message in one measly bottle. He paddles his reed boat closer, his eyes squinting to focus. He notices the water change temperature, color. These clear-gray flecks accumulate, growing denser until they form a solid swarm bobbing on the sea around him. He picks one up. He has no idea what in the world it is, but he thinks that if he knew what bottles were, this would probably be one. He tries to count all the bottles he can see, using the system he invented for sizing up schools of fish. He loses count at a thousand million glass bottles, each bobbing upright, congregating into the still spot at the center of the swirling ocean.
He’s in the Sargasso Sea!
Now how did you know that?
I saw it on a map.
It’s okay, sweetheart. I was just asking. Anyway, that’s where he is. A sea inside the sea: the drainage point for the entire watery pinwheel. They all collect here, bottles from every port of call in this half of the hemisphere; messages launched from West Africa and Spain, the Canaries, Azores, Madeiras, Iceland, the mouth of the Senegal; notes from Paramaribo, Port of Spain, San Juan; letters pitched without hope from the Keys and the Carolinas, dropped in secret into bays by Baltimore, Brooklyn, and Boston, or lofted off the sides of ocean liners . . .
. . . crippled subs . . .
. . . downed private planes . . .
Each of a billion flasks has been swept up through the loop for a few cycles. Some have been circling for decades. Some spell out emergencies that have been over for centuries, and others come from as late as that morning. Centripetal force sucks them all into the Sargasso center. All this glass—smoky, green, gray, turquoise, sky-blue, magically transparent—just floats motionless. It’s an elephants’ graveyard of SOSs.
He opens one up and looks at the slip of paper inside. Of course, he doesn’t know how to read, and he sure wouldn’t know any of these foreign languages. But he’s got a lot of time. Slowly, he teaches himself.
Impossible.
Who you calling impossible? I tell you, he’s got a lot of time. He works on the first message until the words come out, “Tulip smiling wobbly Friday evaporation.” He thinks,
Nope; that can’t be it, and he starts again. He keeps working until the message reads, “Come help me.” He tries a second bottle, and this one says, “Come feed me.” Bleeding on Barbados. Grounded in Greenland.
Each scroll of paper carries its own miniature map. X marks the spot. He figures it out: the globe is packed full of other creatures, exactly like him, only in trouble. Through these notes, he learns about human society. And he sees that he is nothing more than this one lone figure in a tiny, open boat, looking out over this expanse of bottles spreading across the sea. More requests than even a god could read in a lifetime.
He thinks that maybe the best thing to do would be to sink the whole herd of help messages. One by one, fill them up with water, unread. Send them to safety on the ocean bed, where they can wait until the day when they might be answered. But there are too many, even for that.
He decides to follow one of the maps. His eyes and ears, grown superpowerful on emptiness, point the way. He matches up the languages he has learned to read with the distant, background chirpings he always assumed came from some kind of land bird. The map and the sounds and the sight of land beyond the horizon take the Leech up close to a continent where something big is coming down. He picks it out of the air, this feeling of awful expectation such as he has felt nowhere else along the whole continuous ocean coast.
The Leech pulls up a safe distance from shore, trying to figure out what huge, silent shake-up is under way. Every petty principality in this patchwork landmass, every inhabitant from emperor to crook seems to be running around, trying to beat the clock. The people of the continent themselves haven’t figured out what’s up. Something’s unfolding, although so slowly that it is still lost in myth.
Everywhere on the continent, children are chucking these bottles into rivers, where they wash down to the sea. The Leech can hear it all from his anchorage offshore. He can hear the noises banging around villages and cities. He hears people counting down the days, waiting for something that seems to get nearer with each delay. He sees the signs and wonders springing up like weeds. He watches packs of outlaws, soldiers, scholars, and peasants cut swaths in all directions.
Everybody is terrified of waking to the news they hope for most. Castle walls sprout all over. From the scorched western plains all the way up to the frozen fjords, dancing manias break out. In some provinces, everyone under twelve gets caught up, dancing for weeks until dropping. From off the coast, it’s obvious: the entire continent is scared, something fierce. Inflation, unemployment, the Plague. Things are so bad that entire countries take to outrageous remedies. Boys become bishops. Whole towns are entrusted to their youngest residents.
On the extreme corner point of this continent, the Leech makes out another abused, deformed child who has built a lookout tower from which he can stare out across the sea, looking for a way to escape.
Henry the Navigator?
Now how in the world did you know that? Somebody’s actually been paying attention in school. By staring for weeks at a time from the top of his tower in—where was it, again?
Portugal.
Right. By staring from his tower in Portugal, the Navigator has trained himself to see beyond the curve of the earth. He is convinced of reports of a River of Eden somewhere just beyond the next landfall. He is trying to see just past world’s end, around the next cape, where the coast turns.
But that morning, in midsurvey, the Navigator gets a shock: an island off the coast, one he hasn’t noticed until now. On second look, he sees it’s no island, but an open boat. And there’s a kid in it, dark, shrunken, deformed. In another minute, he and the ancient boy make eye contact. The boat child stands up, and the Navigator gets a second shock: it’s the face of an old friend of his, from school days. The Navigator has known the face for so long that he can’t place it.
The Leech seems to recognize too. He breaks into a big grin and begins to wave, great scoops that begin down by his knee and end up cupping air over his shoulder: Come on! What’s keeping you? It’s all the proof the Navigator needs. The boy is clearly from the East—hair, skin, eyes, everything—although the Navigator has never seen an Oriental except in imagination. If the Easterner has come over sea, then the Navigator has guessed right about his route. He lets out a whoop, audible all the way to Lisbon. He waves wildly back to the Leech Child: Hold on; we’ll be right there.
It’s the signal to break out. The children of Europe at last have a surefire escape. They can leave home. They start to pile into boats, whole families, whole countries of them. . . .
But that’s not, that’s not how . . .
(Night 366, Angel City.)
Oh God. Joy. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I completely forgot. Oh, child, forgive me. It’s only a story.
He has a theory about the pathological popularity of hospital shows—the butt of resident humor and abused needle of a nation that pretends to have no professional relations with death. Those continuous discharges of polyphonic drama and alarm, where gangs of surgical staff careen through hallways shoving cadaver-sized rolling tea caddies full of code blues (or whatever entertainment calls them these days) owe their lurid clamp on imagination’s binding sites to the emotional methadone maintenance they offer the home audience.
Kraft has this image of nuclear families everywhere, camped out in the den, lapping at disaster’s nipple, squeezing it dry of the recommended daily nutrients. The pans and dissolves of affliction’s visual clichés have become as foggily familiar as high mass once was from the back of the choir-screened nave. Small wonder. Every schoolgirl knows exactly how the Incomprehensible goes. She has seen it on her hand-held color LCD set, dramortized, chanted over the commercial airwaves with the ease and frequency of jungle gym jingles.
Lots of messages batch out over the public band at the same time here. First among them, Kraft wearily concludes, sitting in the decidedly unphotogenic call room, still replaying his latest real-life docu-dramas on mental video, is that total apocalypse differs from the usual domestic shouting matches and traffic collisions only in decibels. Shows also suggest that no disaster is so real that it can’t be reduced to ritual emergency.
Serialization tames in exactly the way that table manners obscure the ugly reality of eating. Inevitably, around about minute 49, the runaways come back, the Hitler dads break down in tears, number one junkie son kicks the habit (shaking like blazes for a whole forty-five seconds), and the little girl in pigtails crawls out of her iron lung to do the verse about how wishing makes it so. The upshot is that your plotless, personal frame tale will reach its significance, its rare closure, in the run of time.
Reality—he might tell the scriptwriters for a small lifetime consultant’s fee—is infinitely quieter. Nobody yells. Cases come in like sacks of mattress money reluctantly signed over to a bank teller. The showdown stays imperceptibly prosaic, deathly silent, as the cliché goes. Breath persists perversely in the barely living lumps, wood-grain isobars under the nicks of a beaten-up bar table.
Even down here in the bowels of the building, the emergency entrance, the residents’ little sovereign state of siege, all the rushing around is done so mutely, so close to normal speed, that it’s easy to miss. Accident’s selected recipients, holding their eyeballs, still grasping their blackened, necrotic thumbs by the severed tendons, shuffle in quietly. The paramedics, the police escorts are quiet. Teen gang kingpins, their faces carved up, have already had their say.
If a spouse or next of kin accompanying a victim does, under the otherworldly pressure, begin to jackknife off the high dive of despair, they stay well south of sotto voce or they too are quietly escorted to another part of the medicinal forest for a sedative all their own. Large gelatinous pulp may extrude from an open skull, but the room remains demure, methodical. The leading players issue nothing more than a diplomat’s “No comment.” Never any word about the here and now, let alone about what happens next.
With a minute’s dead time in the middle of wider emergency, Kraft fl
ips through memory’s dial. He amuses himself by running casual Monte Carlo simulations on his own prime-time roulette. He does this concurrently with committing to memory the newest complications from out of the NEJM, and dictating into a matchbox-sized microrecorder a rambling, unpostable letter: “Dear American Savings, Thank you so much for yet another of your thoughtful monthly statements. Perhaps none of you realizes the value of these regular reassurances. . . .”
Multitasking holds him occupied all of ten minutes. He begins browsing the latest off-the-rack genre remix from the staff library: The One-Minute Messiah, or How to Survive the Next Sixty Seconds. He holds the paperback with his left hand, while with his right he doodles aimlessly, scribbling Chinese calligraphy that he imagines reads, “Serve the People” and “Fight Self.”
He retreats to his makeshift office, and the desk he has been avoiding. Tommy Plummer ambushes him there, pasting up a newsprint, ransom-note quote for Kraft’s benefit:
The young child which lieth in the cradle is both wayward and full of affections; and though his body be but small, yet he hath a great heart, and is altogether inclined to evil. . . . If this sparkle be suffered to increase, it will rage over and burn down the whole house.
This is in reference to the third prepuber pyro that Pediatrics has had to reupholster this month. “Those seventeenth-century docs knew their stuff,” Thomas tells him. “Only way to save the structure is to torch it preemptively, with the tyke asleep upstairs. Where did modern medicine go wrong? Huh, champ?”
Kraft can’t really call Plummer a friend, but of all the surgical starters, the man offers the best prospects of human diversion. Even the torture of companionship beats the alternative today. He must prep to go drag-line fishing in the ankle of that twelve-year-old Asian refugee princess, and the prospect has completely shot his usual aesthetic distance.
Thomas tags along behind him on the way to the OR. He seems to have nothing better to do than play this episode’s sidekick.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 11
