Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  Ricky knew better. To his experience, very few girls his age dropped out of the sky, and fewer still turned around and vanished back into it. And when they did, they rarely needed to hitchhike in between. She must have come from somewhere. Everyone did; that was the one core geography agreed upon by every school he’d ever attended. More clearly still, the girl had been headed someplace very specific. Most certain of all, she had found it, arrived while her ride wasn’t looking.

  The right map, the appropriate triangulation might narrow down the vanishing point the girl was after. Cartography would reveal a surface pitted with sinkholes that drew drifters across this gift plain, lured them in and pulled the covers over. He had seen, from the air above half a dozen continents, how the map might work. The surface of the earth, a continuous, dense, originally igneous curve, was wearing down and building up at different rates. Water, wind, and sun slowly threaded it with veins, favored or despoiled spots with various soils, left behind regional features that shuttled between blessing and curse over the run of time.

  Planet-sized convection currents in the mantle churned up the crust and dealt it out again. Some places got granite, others obsidian. Lime laid down. Rock buckled into brittle ridges. The length and twist of a flood basin, a mountain range blocking or bestowing rainfall: these explained the secret, specific horrors of every place he’d ever lived. Weather spilled over the divide. On one side, forests formed; deserts dusted the other. The world surface was pimpled with unequal well-springs of wealth—tiny trees standing for timber, mocha ovals announcing coffee, triangles depicting tin.

  Geography was the sole explanation anyone had yet given him for wars, trade, starvation, color, language, custom, mortality rates, the westward gravitation of power, tropical poverty that could not be dislodged. Geography was why that Hausa tribe found his hair so bizarre that they were compelled to stroke it as a good-luck charm. Geography sounded the thunk of darts thrown against the walls of the Singapore Anglo-American Club by civilizedly stewed civil servants upon whom the sun had recently set. The reason for Things as They Are lay quietly in tables of average temperature, salinity, acreage, snow, wind speed, altitude, fertility.

  If, under the mesa edges, out here on the dry scrub range, a life had shaken loose, if one young hitchhiking girl had procured an exit visa, beautifully forged, it was to escape the local prejudice, the unfair play of forces flung from the earth’s spinning axis. Travel companions he would never meet, friends with road tales far outstripping his streamed from spots all over the wrinkled planet surface like carbonation bubbles sprouting from invisible crevasses on the walls of drinking glasses. Places deep inside these continents must steadily absorb the stream. That was the only explanation how, fanning out from their font at the Nile, flowing atypically north to a delta a world wide, pitching over Niagara in a dinghy, the migrants could disappear back into desert, at night, on a nowhere Dakota road.

  “This girl,” Ricky asked the part-Indian woman politely, “this hitchhiker. Where did she ask to be dropped off?”

  “She never did say. Just like, ‘Wherever you’re headed is fine with me.’ Course, there aren’t too many places out this way to be dropped. . . .”

  “Was she carrying anything? A knapsack, maybe? Books?”

  The woman just looked at him strangely, patted him on the head, and went to check on the repair.

  On the plane westward over the last stretch of coast, Ricky thanked his parents for the vacation. Yes, he agreed cooperatively, he was an American, as he was sure would become plain as soon as he had the chance to spend some time there. Yes, he hoped he would, someday, for college, perhaps. Where would he most like to settle down? Oh, St. Louis would be fine. Or Portland. Newport News. Sure, Asheville. Abilene. Anywhere. The Airy Above.

  He settled in for the flight, a whole day-and-night affair, to a place whose native name was Angel City, the capital of a country called, locally, the Land of the Free. He had brought along a book for the ride. Where are you? the hurt voice, the wounded tone of this year’s story opened. For whole pages, for the entire lifetime of the book’s little boy, it searched down a chronic ache, a place agonizingly near in every way except for the passage there. Kraft looked up from his reading above the dead center of the Pacific, realizing, suddenly, that he had outgrown fiction.

  A Sapling Learner’s Classic

  PETER PAN

  By J. M. Barrie

  Printing History

  First published in 1911 under the title Peter and Wendy and in 1921 under the title Peter Pan and Wendy. First American edition . . .

  ISBN number . . .

  All rights reserved. Text copyright 1911, 1921, 19 . . .

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any . . .

  Do you know that this book is part of the J. M. Barrie “Peter Pan Bequest”? This means that J. M. Barrie’s royalty on this book goes to help the doctors and nurses to cure the children who are lying ill in the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.

  bequest: noun. A gift of money or property arranged by a person’s last will. Also, the act of making such a gift.

  royalty: noun. 1. The position of king or queen . . . A member of a royal family. 2. A portion of the money earned by the sale of a book, the licensing of an invention, the performance of . . .

  Barrie, Sir James Matthew (May 9, 1860–June 19, 1937). Scottish author of Peter Pan. Barrie was one of ten children born to a country weaver. When he was six, an older brother died in a skating accident. The family never recovered from the shock. To Barrie’s mother, the dead boy would remain a child who never . . .

  CHAPTER ONE. PETER BREAKS THROUGH

  All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day . . .

  . . . Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this forever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth . . .

  henceforth: adverb. From this time forward. From now on.

  CHAPTER THREE. COME AWAY, COME AWAY!

  “But where do you live mostly now?”

  “With the lost boys.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They are the children who fall out of their perambulators. . . . If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray . . .”

  perambulate: verb. To walk about. . . .

  perambulator: noun. 1. A baby carriage. 2. A rolling wheel used to measure distances.

  per ardua ad astra: Latin phrase. Through difficulties, to the stars.

  . . . and she was just slightly disappointed when he admitted that he came to the nursery window not to see her but to listen to stories.

  “You see, I don’t know any stories. None of the lost boys knows any stories.”

  lost-wax process, lost tribes, Lost Sunday, Lost Steps, Lost Manuscript, Lost Legions, Lost Generation, Lost Domain, Lost Colony, lost . . .

  Peter the Hermit (?1050–1115). French preacher of the First Crusade. He fought in the siege of Antioch and rode victoriously into Jerusalem alongside . . .

  Peter Pan. The boy who wouldn’t grow up, hero of J. M. Barrie’s . . .

  Peter the Wild Boy (?1716–1785). In 1724, a savage child was found scampering about the trees like a squirrel in the forests near Hamelin, in what is now Germany. The boy was taken to England under the protection of George I, where . . .

  CHAPTER FOUR. THE FLIGHT

  . . . they drew near the Neverland . . . not perhaps so much owing to the guidance of Peter or Tink as because the island was out looking for them. . . .

  Strange to say, they all recognised it at once, and until fear fell upon them they hailed it, not as something long dreamt of and seen at last, but as a familiar friend. . . .

  névé, never, never ending, nevermore . . .

  never-never: 1. noun. The Australian desert outback, especially the Northern Territory. 2. adjective. Imaginary or fancif
ul. A never-never land is a paradise that exists only in the mind. See also: Utopia, Eden, Canaan, Cockaigne, El Dorado, Shangri-La, Arcadia . . . lotus land, wonderland, dreamland, fairyland . . . promised land, kingdom come, millennium.

  millennium: noun. The thousand-year reign of a triumphant . . .

  Millenarianism, a form of eschatology (eschatology: noun. The study of last things . . .), addresses the purpose and final prospects of the human community. It asks: What will be the final destiny of this world and its inhabitants? Will mankind ever succeed in reaching the earthly paradise that it perpetually approaches and expects? What are the final prospects and purposes of the human estate?

  (estate: noun. 1. A piece of land or property . . .)

  In its specifically Christian version, the millenarian formulation takes two forms: pre-and postmillenarianism. In the first, a shattering return of Christ will end history and usher in a last, thousand-year period of transcendent righteousness before . . . In the second, worldwide unification of faith will climax in Christ’s return and a final harrowing. . . .

  Belief in the imminent completion of the world infused the early Church, and predictions of the fast-approaching end of time erupted repeatedly throughout the Middle Ages. Yet millenarian expectation has increased steadily in modern times, concurrent with the bewildering expansion of human affairs. The settlement of the United States is shot through with millenarian models: the City on the Hill, Manifest Destiny, the Social Gospel movement, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Fundamentalism in its many forms, the War to End All Wars, the New Frontier, the Great Society . . .

  Colonialism, imperialism, and the various industrial-age crusades to establish a world order typically sport messianic hallmarks. Marx’s historical apotheosis of communism, although secular, bore an obvious millenarian cast. Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich was a revival of Joachim of Fiore’s medieval apocalyptic vision. The radical political fervor characterizing the present international community—from the Red Guards to the Islamic Revolution—is perhaps best understood not in economic but in eschatological terms. . . .

  Throughout history, millenarianism has centered on common themes. First is the belief that we have entered end time, the last days, and that portents visible around us warn that the completion of history is a matter not of lifetimes but of years. Although despair and excitement flourish around the ends of centuries, the date of the end has been variously set at 948, 975, 1033, 1236, 1260, 1284, 1367, 1420, 1588, 1666, 1792 . . .

  Formulas deriving the onset of the new age tend to produce dates on the immediate horizon. Millenarian feeling is often accompanied by an upsurge in occultism: belief in reincarnation, purification rituals, visits from otherworldly creatures, out-of-body experiences, alternate dimensions . . .

  The most common hallmark of millenarian thought is the conviction that civilization is just now entering its moment of truth, an unprecedented instant of danger and opportunity, of universal calamity and convergence. . . .

  Militant expectation flares up in periods of social upheaval. The transforming stress of the nineteenth century produced an extraordinary number of prophetic cults from divergent cultures. The Mahdi of Sudan dealt the British empire several spectacular defeats and established an Islamic millenarian kingdom before being crushed by Kitchener in 1898. Isaiah Shembe, the Zulu messiah, preached the coming of a New Jerusalem exclusively for believing blacks. The Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians awaited the floods and whirlwinds that would level the earth and remove the threat of annihilation. Tens of thousands of American Millerites awaited the Second Coming on the night of October 22, 1844. In Europe, a gathering sense of end time infused the anarchist uprisings, theosophy, salvationism, the . . .

  The most devastating millenarian movement of the century was the Taiping Rebellion. A failed Chinese civil service candidate named Hung learned in a vision that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Proclaiming his Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, Hung gathered more than a million devoted followers. With this militia of believers, he surged down the Yangtze Valley and captured the city of Nanking. The move precipitated a decade of civil war during which the millenarians nearly toppled the Manchu dynasty and wrested control of China. By conflict’s end, half the country was wasted and as many as twenty million lives had been lost: the second bloodiest war in human history, just behind World War II, itself an eschatological Last Battle.

  Our own moment of dislocation has produced a wave of imminent expectation, from New Age movements to island cargo cults whose jungle runways and ritual wooden planes guide the Delivering Spirit safely to earth. . . .

  The idea of a progressing history may itself derive from the hope for a new heaven and earth. Prediction of the end, like historical “progress,” is eternal. And yet, millenarian eschatology is not static; rather, it may steadily escalate. Just because expectation has been wrong up until now, the faithful maintain, does not mean it will be wrong forever. . . .

  Millenarianism is born in the longing for confederation and the fear of collapse, in the desire to know where the world is going, in the need for closure. We seek consolation of our own otherwise-random histories by linking them to a common destiny. But our end, eschatology insists, lies in the seed of our beginning. Predictions of Parousia frequently feature children as central protagonists. History is a propagating myth of missing innocents, carried by catastrophe to their forgotten bequest. . . .

  (bequest, checked off in minute, ghostly pencil.)

  Surely no plot could be so sadistic as to end, arbitrarily, its sole chance at continuance. The epidemic of child abduction, abuse, and exploitation taking place throughout the world seems to many to be that long-awaited harrowing that presages the return of final innocence. “A holocaust of children,” shouts Captain Hook, one of the quintessential millenarian reapers. “There is something grand in the idea!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. WHEN WENDY GREW UP

  . . . as if from the moment she arrived on the mainland she wanted to ask questions . . .

  He was a little boy, and she was grown up. . . . Something inside her was crying “Woman, woman, let go of me. . . .”

  . . . and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

  heartless: adj . . .

  A girl is screaming. Through sheets of graphite, conducting air, annihilating paradise darkness, a scream trickles. Something young, as green as freshly cut grass, panic-whispers over night’s dead receiver. Sound seeps into the eardrum, too curdling to face, too remote to locate or answer.

  Its grace note mimics a playground giggle. But by second syllable it twists, like that beautiful young line drawing, into the hag hiding out inside it. Rattling clamps itself hideously to his building walls. It inches along the brick, reaches and taps at his bedroom window like a man clutching the outside of the rushing room as it speeds through midnight’s mountain tunnel. The scream taps at awful intervals as if already dead, a hand automatically nail-scratching the glass, its twitch reflex still beating feebly against the pane to be let in.

  Panic, as always, pitches itself up into soprano, a voiceless terror stuck in treble. A reedy panpipe issues from a girl lying in the deserted street, her legs snapped back over her neck, her belly stenciled by a tire tread. Or moans at gunpoint, stifling a shriek that she knows will make her panting assaulter kill her. A girl calls out from under a column of countless cubic feet of water, the words past making out, wild in the upper registers.

  Chooses night, naturally, the old narcotic, always eager to assist in these matters. The wail taunts, under cover of darkness: Come try your inalienable rights, your annual increments to the GNP against me. Come measure me with your little pencil marks against the kitchen wall. With one hushed high-pitched snag, the weave unthreads. Disaster laps at the corner of his block, and he must shoot up, now, not even stop to dress, but run out and avert the unthinkable.

  Fear freezes his tensors, holds him prostrate, drugged. Impossible; his least move will
wrap the raving around his head. He can only keep deathly still and wait, pinned in terror to the soaked linen. Ghostly gas seeps through the casements—chloroform held to his nostrils on a greasy rag. He is immobilized by what he would see if he ran shouting to the window: pale straw child in burning dress, albino on fire. Naked black baby bleeding from a furrow drawn clean across its face. Asian, dazed, fresh from out of the teleporter, wailing clueless through neighborhood after neighborhood until her feet swell into pulpy spades, her skin unsheating.

  A second paralyzing cry follows in the first’s wake. This one is softer, a bleat of hunger or numbed grief. A child stands screaming at the end of history’s downward, disintegrating spiral. It mewls in petrifying ravishment, This is not right. Where are . . . ? This is not . . . An animal, a feral creature, wanders loose in the apartment, bred in a basement under the city’s subskin, raised on mold and leaded water, freed for no reason except horror.

  The noise wavers between cries of distress and sighs from an acid bath. The one child becomes two, alternating their howls at fading intervals. The two start to stagger their shattering screeches. How many are they? A whole community, calling out from impalement a street or two off.

  A scream that spectral—here, spooned into his ear—strips off the rules, shreds them like cheap paint. Safety breaks into pasteboard pieces. Shock chooses its hour, when anyone who might resist is docile with sleep and confusion. A girl at night is beaten senseless in a street where every other plate window bears the crime-stopping palm, that secret Mason’s sign of Neighborhood Watch. A girl’s screams return his nervous system to randomness, his heart to clammy panic. A shout at this hour . . . a single small girl, this late . . .