Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  The second is not a where, but a what. It is the tag of that first strategic maneuver—emblem, metonym, the name people revive every time history rounds up its usual innocents. He can retrieve nothing of the original—not its century, nor locale, nor public motive. Somewhere there must be an account he can turn to, to recover the contour of an event he is not even sure ever actually happened.

  He rakes his rooms, mine-sweeps the shelves where the general encyclopedia should be. Nothing but a wasteland of medical texts, back issues of Morbidity and Mortality, offprints on new techniques, Board review workbooks, in-service exam crams.

  “What you looking for, sweetface?” Linda asks, scenting concern.

  He does not stop to answer, but goes on searching. Who can he phone? There must be an 800 number, elected state rep, one of those public service outfits that deal with radon, gas smells, dead squirrels in the walls. He will take anything, any account whatsoever, even the docudrama version, the reenactment, the Based on a True Event.

  Desperate, not even knowing what he is after anymore, he turns to the loose material the woman has dragged in with her. Her overnight bag. Has it come to that? Are the two of them an item, shacking up? Is this—good God—this near-girl, a little lolly-popper not more than two years out of her teens, spending whole nights, sleeping here? He’ll get busted, booked, institutionalized, sentenced to a life of continuous, punitive tonsillectomies.

  At odds’ ends, he roots through her pile of print. The hot new issue of her own trade journal, Practical Physiatrics Review. Who names these things? A beach party bit of light reading, Postoperative Flexion Restoration. Next, a ridiculous grab-bag of field tools for the over-dedicated. Picture book, A Country a Night for a Year, which he whips through in a frenzy, but without success. One of those magic water-release books, half brushed in by a wildly inaccurate saturation painter, perhaps forced to hold brush in mouth. A pack of stiff-cardboard-bound comics.

  “Oh, I traded Nico for those. You’ll never believe what that kid asked for them.”

  All at once, there it is, lying bare in front of him. In the middle of the pack of illustrated funny magazines is the glaring ringer, one of those Treasure Chest Illustrated History Classics, the You Take Part series. He might have known that transported tribe would sooner or later throw the thing in his way.

  “I had to swap him two pieces of . . .”

  But Linda stops at the sight of what has come over him. His hand is stroking the glossy cartoon cover, an elaborate medieval crusader column, puerile, weaponless, stretching unbroken to an infinite horizon. In a voice not even a close impersonation of his own, addressing not her but fleeting figures just outside his window, some boy inside him asks, “Who are these . . . ?”

  His tongue tags along after the word it can’t catch up with, the one that skids away just in front of the snare set for it. These kids. These children.

  A picture book narrator, perched in the sky, looks down from miles on high onto a map where ink-etched ocean boldly wraps blocks of continent in currents of purest palette. Successive frames gradually pull the eye in tighter, until gross features firm. Steel-gray ice caps, bleakly gorgeous, rim the borders. Coasts cut seaward under a swirl of cloud. Waters stretch away until they arrive beyond the bounds of knowledge, spotted here and there with details for the scrupulous squinter—occasional sea monsters, the puckered face of the blowing wind, the blanketing expanse of a midsea mass that might be anything but to the practiced audience outside this paper portal, pressing faces to the square-paned windows that ladder across these pages, becomes a flotilla of bottles so closely packed that they form a single decanted help message, readable only from ten thousand feet above.

  But this forsaken armada of bottled petitions is only a fanciful flicker, a curl of the illustrator’s nib, a slight tint-change in the hazel carpet spread over the surface of doom’s deep. Castles perch on cliffs, visible before they should be at this magnification. Monasteries pock-mark the shore, devout in tenuousness. Walled ports, minuscule but intricate with masonry, their plowed fields and fiefs heaped up like carpet remnants around a throne, are as yet exceptions, small halts in continuous wood and wildness.

  The storytelling eye hangs suspended in midair a little longer, a surveyor’s speculation wider than these fortified hills allow. Then, renouncing its bird’s-eye, it nestles down like a silversmithed, dove ciborium lowering itself to the surface of the sin-steeped world. The panels take on earth’s tangent, a pilgrim’s view. Focus falls to the roads below, ways swarming with travelers, one for every conceivable reason in religion’s calendar.

  Here, at ground level, belief marches through the year in brief. Each discrete frame is a new saint’s day, another motive for mass migration. Across a quilt of color-strewn squares, searchers shake down Santiago de Compostela, assault Amritsar, Lumbini, or Ayodhya. They venture off to venerate Saint Peter’s bones in Rome. They scale Mount Abu, wend to Canterbury. They figure the four sacred mountains, the five thrones, the seven sacred rivers. They close in on Buddh Gaya, Lourdes, Assisi, Sarnath, Turin, Goa, Tours, Nankana, Guadalupe, Kusinagara, Fátima, Marburg, the hills of Parasnath and Girnar. The world pictured is a surging hajj, one that every believer must make at least once, if only by proxy.

  Contritional, reverential, purgational, memorial, devotional, salvational: the motives for moving sweep an arc as wide as the swing of these walkers’ staves. Cartoon figures, burgundy and forest-green, journey to the source of all grace, the spring of all politics, the birthplace of history. The tour is slow but urgent, desperate enough to have demanded this illustrated guide in the first place. It is as if, the drawings insist, only a thousand miles on foot will ever set things right again.

  The paneled page tags alongside this parade to those expanses that are a little more sacred, a little closer, if only because they mark the resting place of some grotesque bloodletting. Ink and watercolor snake into lines of supplicants ready to sacrifice all purchase on earth to reach their holy sites. And there, at page bottom, farther than they can hope to see, the luster of goal: a temple, crypt, battle site, the empire’s earliest universities, wandering schools where they might matriculate.

  Tinted print starts to hover just above the frames. Just the spidery shape of the letters speaks of a moving desire, an impulse bedded down below the soul’s water table. “Pilgrimage,” the captions begin, “is the path of a single life made visible, replayed in the space of a few days.” Beneath these words, a band of travelers passes close by a familiar, inviting house en route to the far landscape. The very next picture is the window casement itself, drawn from the inside, the sight of the receding band insisting that the stay-at-home eye chase it down, join it. Go somewhere. What does it matter if you’re not back for dinner? The suffering and cold, molestation, looting along the way are mere softened pen-strokes dipped in crimson and gold. The story stakes you only this one round trip, this one staged set of oases leading ever higher up into the mountains, this one chance to recap the embryo’s first adventure overseas.

  “A single hope, if never more than secret, stabs at the heart of everything that is awake.” Flowery voice-over for a child’s treasure chest album, but the accompanying astonishments of artwork vindicate the text. Who reads these preliminary bits anyway? The proof is all visual. Wait, walk long enough, and you will arrive. The hinted-at place is just around the next hillside. It will appear in your lifetime, in another half page or two.

  Fresco-inspired friezes, severe yet sensuous, tell of the need to replay the whole itinerary in miniature. Swelling rectangles add up to a radiant, full-page display, the fabulous rivals: Mecca itself, and, en face across the stapled spread, Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulcher. Each story panel moves the seeker closer to that ultimate end, the scale model City of God on Earth. From a great distance, it appears only as a gathering, anxious crosshatch on the horizon. Still miles away over the plain, the towers become visible, then the walls. Then, at long last, the mammoth gate appears and opens, sparklin
g with celebratory stone revelation, ancient promises—detailed and intricate—carved everywhere into its cyclopean surface.

  The dress becomes clear now, the style, time, and place. It is that interregnum of great faith, when most of the world knows this habitation to be almost spent. The globe is degraded; it corrodes only to be restored soon to its old original. Its oversoul migrates through a slow loop, one that narrows its noose to arrive at final things. Crisis cultures, cargo cults, nativistic movements, messianics: everyone on this road-strewn surface survives the present by naming it a station, an inscrutable detour on the way to the next age, the next image, the next frame.

  The passes to the shrines of the blessed martyrs, the languishing trade routes are charged now with danger and salvation. An emerald mix of fear and need lights the spired horizons. Pen and color do not dare guess yet at topography’s terminus, the shape of the hastening finish, except to fan the palmer’s hope that arrival must surely be near, the end of the day of wandering in sight.

  The Tour Guide—the Anointed, the Mahdi or Twelfth Imam, the Mahayana redeemer, the Nanabush—is shown preparing his many returns. In every town that the processions pass, the old order is smelted off. The novum is set to make its break. Strange, reified contours, miraculous and unexpected, get ready to rise up out of the earth’s destruction. “Come the Fourth Kingdom . . .” the supertitles predict. “Come the Third Age . . .” Come the revolution, the return, the liberation, the overthrow, the transforming renewal . . . The mass pilgrimage rolls across these ocher hills, stopping for alms at all the pox spots of civilization. Suddenly, the stills reveal all: this disguised, private campaign, this jihad by another name, draws toward the emblem of all foretold spots, the city at the end of the world.

  Illuminated saga retraces the eye’s first excursion. To scan these lavish psalter sheets is almost to see through the panels from the other side, to surprise the reading youth under the sheets at night again. Arrows leading from square to square mark a flagstone picture path down which the strip’s original owner raced by flashlight to reach story’s end. The way is a seven-hundred-year shortcut back to an ancient destiny.

  Back to boyhood, back to that moment when the medieval West sits inside a defensive moat rapidly filling up with rubble. The Christian world has restively expected its impending end for twelve hundred years. It waits at this very moment, more certain of now than ever. God’s tune rushes to cadence.

  “True,” a series of recapitulating panels concedes, “prior clock-watchers have been wrong.” Many expect the old heaven and earth to burn away just as the Anointed, Antichrist Sylvester II, pronounces midnight mass on December 31, 999. Comets blazed brilliantly in advance. At the sound of transubstantiation’s bell, people across the continent drop to the ground, expectant. In reprieve’s let-down, hurried calculations produce another thirty years of grace. And when that extension also expires, seers settle on a new due date.

  Numbers prove pliable. Sooner discard the calendar than the drift toward cartoon apocalypse it was built to predict. “Not the year 1000!” a Gnostic calculator proclaims in his cold stone cell, the astonished correction coming out his mouth in a speech bubble as old as Romanesque ecclesiastical comics. “The thousand-year reign of majesty here on earth!” Then two frames, scalloped to show they come from his monk’s mind’s eye: crypts opening, the martyrs resurrected to serve as kings in the new world’s political machine, perfected at last.

  Broadly announced now, bruited about all lands in caption and image: the Last Emperor, the ultimate successor of the Frankish kings, will soon assemble a host and make the long passage across the Middle Sea to recover by force the earthly sign of heavenly metropolis. There men will prepare the way for the Second Coming. Pilgrims return molested from the Holy Land, cries of protest filling the air above their heads. When a bubble-call for help comes from Pope Urban II, standing on a balcony in the South of France and beseeching a crowd to turn its random havoc into a single, sanctified, militant pilgrimage, his “Deus volt” is magnified a millionfold. All ranks and social stations catch fire. Europe launches itself into the new age it has long been predicting.

  But the fall of the Holy City fails to bring on the last battle. Muslim and Jew are duly slaughtered to make way for Jerusalem’s new inhabitants. Sovereign states are drawn up on the Levant map, diamonds designating the cities the pilgrim generals dole out among themselves: Antioch to one, Tripoli shores to another, Acre and Beirut to a third. No sooner is the new world order established than Zangi, Nureddin, and Saladin mount holy encircling maneuvers of their own.

  The West, flexing itself in foreign contact, launches another wave of its eschatologically charged faithful into the World’s Debate. France and Germany, the princes of Bohemia, Swabia, Poland, and Byzantium join forces under the cross. Armies of incompatible nationals pour into the Near East. But rival millennial expectations among allies prove fatal. The Second Crusade ends with a senseless attack on Damascus, executed in a disastrous fade to indigo and black.

  The City of Heaven on Earth, ruled for a while by a thirteen-year-old leper, teeters on the brink, shattered by sectarian bickering. The crusader armies mass yet again for Armageddon, and are once more destroyed. Jerusalem falls again and is lost before God has a chance to install His transcelestial bureaucracy. The end of history is postponed for another few pages.

  A third call for a God-willed showdown sounds across a catholic confederation too sophisticated now to hear it the way it first did, a century before. England’s Lion-Heart signs on, along with Sicily, Flanders, and the Danes. They grab Cyprus as jumping-off point. Frederick Barbarossa, a furious seventy, leads the Germans cross-continent to a brilliant victory, only to drown—in intricately inked irony—crossing a stream.

  Spiritual fervor degrades into a cynical race for fiefs. Holy war gives way to political shrewdness, the deftly drawn fourth campaign. The international hammerblow aimed at recovering Jerusalem, deflected by backroom Venetian power broking, ends not in sieges of infidel strongholds but in a brutal sack of Christian Constantinople. The soldiers of the cross succeed in tearing the two churches apart forever. They shatter and slice up Byzantium—beautifully penned in strategic and tactical views—the jewel that for so long formed the first line of defense against encroaching East, dealing it a wound from which it never recovers.

  All this unfurls in four and a quarter pages, a dozen hand-colored rectangles per side. Then focus narrows another notch. The centuries-meandering road cants into a valley where the story’s boy hides this time. (Watching these accounts of upheaval pour in, the flashlight reader marvels at how it is always them, the brigade of the displaced, each time out with the same names, the same age, the same slim chance of ever arriving by candlelight, let alone getting back again.)

  “In the spring of the year 1212,” a text box authoritatively interrupts, “a young boy no older than you tends sheep in a pasture near the tiny town of Cloyes-sur-le-Loir in central France.” Two hundred years from now a little girl saint will lead an army through this hamlet on its mission of salvation. “A boy on the threshold of his teens, Stephen, who has never needed a last name until now. Soon the world will know him as Stephen of Cloyes.” His flock is agitated and expectant, despite the sweet weather.

  He lives in fabulous times, although he cannot know it. Deployments are everywhere in the air. Just outside his cleanly inked borders, towns busily receive city charters, universities spring up, cities band into trade leagues. A fever of new building spreads like flowering weeds across the champaign. The last westwork of Our Lady of Paris and the first stones of Rheims are laid in place even as Stephen keeps the two-year-old ewe with the weak left fore from sliding down a pebbled pitch.

  He cannot write or read, has never even needed to sign anything. Simple arithmetic, certainly: lambs, ewes, rams, weight gains and losses, hours spent grazing. His grasp on medicine, meteorology, even natural history has all the finesse of a field practitioner. He can recognize 113 varieties of pla
nts, diagnose fifteen different illnesses, and predict the weather for the next four hours. He once visited Vendôme, and last St. Mark’s Day he attended a Litana Major in Chartres, a chance service that will charge the conscience of the race. He takes the flock out after sunrise, ranging them from field to field until hail or darkness forces them in. He converses with his animals, calling each by name.

  For a frame, he prays, singing psalms to himself. But now that the flock is safe, the dog content, the weather solid, the spring too sweet to admit danger, he sleeps on the sly, fifteen minutes this afternoon, his attention unneeded. The dog wakes him from his secret nap, barking in confusion at a dark figure climbing their remote rise up the path toward them.

  The figure is not his father, nor any acquaintance carrying alarm from the village. Stephen can think of no reason short of catastrophe why anyone would hike all the way out to these fields. Thieves would wait for dusk; others are bound to their labor.

  As the apparition approaches, Stephen makes out a pilgrim’s cloak and cap. The man must have strayed miles from the cathedral route. And alone! Stephen calls out to the wanderer, thinking to set him straight. But the man preempts him, cuts off his speech bubble with another, and greets the startled shepherd boy by name.

  “Who are you?” Stephen asks as the man draws closer. “I don’t think I know you.”

  “Don’t you?” the stranger smiles. A shiver runs up the boy’s spine. “I woke you?”

  Stephen manages a terrified, close-up shake of the head. The Pilgrim scolds him gravely with a look. “I would like you to deliver a letter.”

  “I can’t read,” Stephen blurts.

  “A messenger shouldn’t know how. But I will tell you what this note says. ‘I have seen the Lord’s City, arrayed as for her bridegroom. Why fail her now when the feast is so close?’”