Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  The local boys, however, are headed for the crypt. Collapsing productivity, crippling trade imbalance, noncompetitiveness, voracious and untenable consumption. “And here, the figures for unemployment, infant mortality, and emigration.” Each set of numbers elicits a groan of recognition from the captive and unmasked council.

  “I don’t need to spell out to you, gentlemen, that the general state of affairs is trending toward the iffy.” The stranger possesses graphs for everything. He has pie charts for falling food yields, balloon inserts for inflation, bar graphs for increased alcohol intake and prison confinements, line graphs for bread handouts to the poor. In fact, between negative balance of payments, debt servicing, capital depreciation, investment failure, population increase, water poisoning, field exhaustion and erosion, diminishing revenue returns, graft, tax evasion, currency softening, brain drain, corporate flight, disease, defense burden, and mushrooming social service costs, the town is clearly racing toward a condition of Infinite Sink.

  The lecture points out to the local brokers what they have long known in denying: each year, the town borrows increasingly more against principal to pay for the previous year’s emergency borrowing. Consumption is biting into production and getting hungrier as the take gets leaner. Quite simply, the town is burning itself out, chasing its own decline. All the graphs converge on that one bankrupt point, a few years down the pike, when there will be no squanderable resources left, nothing at all.

  “What we need here, gentlemen, is to implement a program of strict Structural Adjustment.” The stranger flips to a sheet showing simply those two words, initial letters embroidered in luxurious vegetation, monastery-dense with devils and demiangels. This time, Joachim the Stone Dresser doesn’t even bother asking for a definition.

  “But we’ve tried everything,” the Bürgermeister moans. “Believe me. Capital injections. Tax incentives. ‘Buy Native’ campaign. Urban development zones. Belt tightening.” His face looks as though the last-mentioned measure is about to herniate him.

  “What we need,” the head of the exchequer interrupts excitedly, “is to hang in with the infant Hanseatic League.”

  “Will you shut up with the Hanseatic League already?” the Bürgermeister shouts. “The Hanseatic League hasn’t don’t shit for us lately.”

  The head of the exchequer whimpers, feelings deeply hurt. “The Hansa is going to be big someday.”

  “Thing’s not going to amount to diddly.”

  “Polish Corridor!” shouts the head of the Archers’ Guild.

  “What we need is to substantially reduce the pressures from over-population,” contributes the abbot’s man.

  “But population growth never comes down until well after the standard of living has started to rise.” And the stranger has another graph to prove it.

  This observation releases a flurry of competing theories and prescriptions in the room, all strident, each sickeningly familiar, and every one feckless and futile. Throughout the fray, the motley lecturer waits patiently, leaning on his improvised podium. At last, the room falls into an exhausted lull. The Bürgermeister asks the man, this unwashed illegal immigrant whom not one of them knows from Adam, “Tell us, then. We beg you. What’s our problem?”

  The stranger smiles, savoring the served-up moment. He flips another piece of parchment on the easel, and pronounces the flamboyantly displayed word. “Rats.”

  The council is too stunned at first to respond. Then they produce the obligatory, derisive laughter. “Rats?”

  “Rats. Any of the diverse, murine species of rodent . . .”

  The Bürgermeister snickers nervously. “How can rats be the problem? Paderborn has rats.”

  “And Goslar!” an indignant Joachim snaps, secretly pleased with following the syllogism.

  “Yes,” the stranger concedes. “But neither of them has rats quite like Hamelin.”

  Quickly, before he loses shock’s initiative, he produces a slew of explanatory graphics. Vermin population’s impact on food reserve depletion. On depreciation of real estate—sewers, cellars, road bed, new housing starts. Increase in disease; costs to health, education, and welfare. Loss to tourist income and investment from abroad. “None of the effects, taken separately, is disastrous. But taken together, they create a threshold effect, preventing the town from reaching economic takeoff.”

  The leading lights of Hamelin confer among themselves. In the absence of any more-likely explanation, they are inclined to except the causal mechanism. Besides, the stranger has all the figures at his disposal, and who at this late a date would dare to be so medieval as to dispute statistics?

  Discussion wheels from cause to countermeasures. The commander of the Archers’ Guild says to leave it to his troops. With a systematic program of superior firepower, smart targeting, and will, they can have the little brown problem licked by fall of ’89.

  “But do we have until fall of ’89?” the Bürgermeister asks. The stranger only shrugs.

  The head of the exchequer comes down for a massive importation of cats, picked up in bulk quantities on the spot market. Others object, pointing out: (A) The unlikelihood of being able to secure sufficient felines to turn the trick. (B) The unavailability of foreign exchange credits sufficient to foot such a venture. (C) The subsequent expense of securing a similar consignment of corrective and compensatory canines.

  Local ingenuity is soon exhausted. The council has no other recourse but to turn again to the stranger and ask for his recommendation. “Genus Rattus,” the stranger carefully explains, “is a perverse animal. It’s no good reasoning with him. He will go on proliferating until the bottom drops out of the entire self-supporting system. He will extend his success until it buries all competition and pulls down his hosts on top of him. He possesses too much native smarts for most traps. Poison is too good for him. Nor is he sufficiently God-fearing to respond to religious urging. In fact, there is only one thing the rat will listen to.”

  He waits until begged. Then he discloses the word with the perfect timing of a free-marketeer. “Music.”

  One half of the council explodes with cries of fraud and nonsense. The other remains skeptically purse-lipped. The abbot’s man alone corroborates: he once saw his aunt Agatha sing a trio of baby-gnawers into contrite squeaklessness for the length of three antiphonal treatments of the Kyrie.

  The stranger withdraws from his satchel the strangest-looking flûte à bec ever to appear along the Weser. It is tiny, more of a narrow ocarina than a pipe, its cylinder a slight, silversmithed figure with finger holes running the length of its gown. “I’m afraid this is all I have by way of résumé. But I guarantee that I will rid you of all problems with it, or you will owe me nothing.”

  “And how much will we owe you if you succeed?” the shrewd Bürgermeister asks. The piper grins at him strangely and names a figure just slightly below the total hard-currency reserves of the entire Northern Marches. Said fee provokes all manner of sneaky sidelong council looks. They couldn’t possibly pay anything near that amount; it is fiscally unrealizable, as the quarterly reports put it.

  And yet, they will pay that much now, or they will pay a good deal more over the long haul. The council bows its collective head with the helplessness of a public official caught over a pork barrel. The Bürgermeister coughs casually. “Fine. No problem. Your terms. Plus a healthy bonus for finishing the job quickly.”

  Only the blundering Stone Dresser, thickheaded with integrity, holds out. “But we were saving our money. We need it to finish the basilica.”

  The Bürgermeister takes a deep breath and adopts his best patronizing campaign voice, saved for idiots, children, and the obstinately underprivileged. “We’ve been working on that church for the last two centuries, son. It’ll keep for another couple lifetimes.” In the casual tones of all weak-hand negotiators, the mayor reiterates that the piper will not get paid a single pfennig until the town has been demonstrated rat-free by an objective, third-party fact-finding commission. The piper
agrees, again eerily amused.

  On the day of the promised purge, the piper requests that all the bells in town tear off an absurdly long peal. Colliding carillons of all colors and creeds bang away blithely on teeth-freezing, diabolical sevenths. A first, tentative, pioneering rat-beak peeks cautiously from out of its cellar bunker. Others follow the lead, appearing from between wattle holes and out of drainpipes, curious to learn how long that leading-tone agony can persist before resolving to tonic. When the bells break off abruptly without resolution, the exposed rodents reel as if hit over the head with an unlicensed glockenspiel mallet.

  The piper then takes up a strategic stand in the middle of the Marktplatz and produces his seraphic, silversmithed tube. He announces the first piece on his program—an onomatopoeic panpipe idyll by some Frenchman that not a single one of the beasts has ever heard of. But from the first plaintive, impossible modal tones, they are done for. The mimetic ditty, swelling like rapids in a rising river, foamy and expectant with near-narrative, soul-ravishing ripples, builds to a perpetually postponed, eternally almost announcement of new arrival, that long-awaited descent of formal ecstasy.

  It visits again, for every creature that has ears to hear. How big the place is, how strangely familiar beyond saying. The interval field fills with drumlins and rifts, chord-catches that flare free of politics’ darkening penumbra. The piece hints of cross-border calls for help, the membrane embrace, a fate that these notes, like dutiful parents, refuse to do more than allude to in front of the offspring, the underaged. Music—the choking scold of closeness, the basilica at funds’ end—again sounds its insistence that soul is headed somewhere, forever caught in midpassage, in leap’s parabola as it pitches from the burning structure, abandoned to the airy apotheosis it was fixed upon from the first, no matter what temporary and transient panic snags it on its way back to ground level.

  One fat brown rat, suckered by the rabbit punch of that sweet outpouring of tones, creeps halfway from safety, the better to hear explanation’s up-close whisper. Her next of kin—squeaking in holy terror, Get back, you fool; don’t be insane—stop in midsqueal and cock their own conical little heads, puzzled by a poignant, dimly recognized, still-discernible invitation that nestles in the notes. Belong and be lost. The tune reads like one of those misplaced love letters at last delivered to the forgetting door just up the avenue, generations after its intended has died.

  The piper follows up the French pentatonics by embarking on a solo sonata by a Thuringian provincial, hailing from somewhat closer to home, but still a virtual unknown to the local music-loving rodents. At the first arpeggiated tracings of A minor, the rats begin milling, rumoring among themselves. What is this? Here, at last, something one might learn from: the comprehensive architectural drawing, the crib sheet, the answer to the ancient question of whence evil, the touch that sense hungers for, quieting angst, reconciling crisis, finger-painting with balm the crests of industrial madness.

  After a few measures, the rat hordes discover that they want nothing else but to be forsaken, to throw themselves away, to make love to their destiny, however awful the chapter and verse held in ambush for them. They ask only that the blow be swift and unmitigated, that completion come now, that it consume them in the beating forge, ravish them with answers.

  The townsfolk, instructed in advance to stay behind doors, witness this epic theater of the absurd unfold outside their front windows. Rats begin slithering out into the open, assembling in groups of desperately adoring listeners across the town square. They push down into the expensive front-row seats that even the scalpers scrap for—anything to close the gap, press flush against the piper as he stands winding his inspiration. An adult human or two sneak out of their cottages with a grain scoop or meal mallet, sick with excitement to seize the weird occasion and bash in as many congregated rat skulls as possible before the encores. But a sidelong look from the piper is enough to send these forays scurrying back indoors.

  Rats: Mammalia’s abandoned and abused underclass, products of broken rodent homes, ladle lickers, cat killers, baby biters, pillagers and gnawers at civilization’s tuck-pointing, mobile incisored havoc, random terrorists, surprise packages of plague. A parish of pestilence, a veritable national bank run of blind mouths! Who in Saxony would have thought rathood had undone so many? Each one an arrested psychohistory of criminal disfigurement, they pour out of hidden tunnels, shimmy down off roofs, come clean from hideouts of honor in church chancels to hear this: the sound of healing deliverance, delayed for so long, forever, the diminuendo clink of the tumblers aligning in the lock of divine plan.

  They pack into the central square as if for an all-star, superband, gala charity extravaganza performance of the heavenly host’s hall-of-famers: Live Revelation Relief; Apocalypse Aid. When all available standing room disappears, the vermin swarm the mezzanines and upper decks, buckling the balconies facing the market, clinging to the rotting timbers and gutters of the Rathaus. Overhangs and ledges fill with rats dangling precariously from shop signs and gables. Rats crawl over one another’s shoulders, assembling in rat ziggurats, laying down a continuous, plush living shag four or five pelts high in places.

  Sound rushes from their collective, forgotten past, music that spells out everything that will still befall their race, all races. A few of the more impressionable ones burst into tears at all that the modulations dredge up in them. Others shiver in rat-somatic euphoria, preening their reptilian tails, pointing their bristly snouts toward heaven in thanksgiving simply for having been alive for this moment. The astonished townsfolk cannot tell just what shared vision this carpet of cubic rat is granted. The solo flute transports them en masse into a promised place, a vantage point granting that privileged glimpse of blissful, universal design. Rat rhapsodic rapture: the vast, scattering sugar-and-grain mill of creation.

  Seeing revealed tonal teleology play across a million pointy little snouts, several townspeople want to cry out to spare the creatures. Others are filled with desire to rush out and join the doomed beasts, kneel down beside the enthralled throng. But no one does. The town’s contract with expediency has been struck; it is too late to revoke, in any case. The piper turns his back on the assembled audience, producing a rumbling, aggregate rat-roar of protest. But he does not take the flute from his lips. The music persists, a constant circuit of peace passing all understanding locked into this endless circle of fifths.

  The piper edges himself infinitesimally down the Osterstrasse, step by step toward the Weser. The crowd—no, the nation, the global confederation of rats—refusing to surrender what is here so excruciatingly close to deliverance once and for all, presses along after him in cold delight. Fortunately the streets have been cleared, roadblocked and flag-routed for this parade catharsis. The waves of wee timorous cowering beasts flow down the street-sluice toward the city walls, lower mammals molded into a molten flood, rats tumbling over rats, surging surflike in curlers and cleansing eddies. But the living flood admits to no shoving, no panic, no collapse of societal mores. Not a stampede at all; more of a dense, euphoric dance, cobbles pounded in time to the soaring tune, each figurant in the formation as certain of its precise measure as it is of this glorious, fading daylight.

  They glut the length of the eastern avenue, packed tighter than dead leaves in autumn or mud in spring. The road becomes a single, continuous file of suppliants on their way to some unimaginable rat holy site. When it dawns on the front ranks of entranced dancers just what potter’s field they are posting off to, only the slightest momentary objection ripples through the column. Distress passes; courage revives. Flute lilt reveals just how untenable their rattish existence had been until the covenant hidden in this little turn of phrase came to release them. Sarabande assures each quivering whisker that they are now linked to a destiny far preferable to any softer, safer end.

  All the way up to the very banks of the Weser, even when the piper stands aside and nothing but the murderous flow of rapids remains between the avant-
garde and their arrival, hesitation is briefer than thought and more easily dispatched. The lead rats expand into the watery sacrifice required of them. No bill too great to pay, and, with a gnawing smile, given the payoff. They rear up, plunge into the waters like, well, like lemmings. Happy, even, to go down, half in love with a resonant death, provided they can still hear the promissory sounds and sweet airs buzzing about their tiny ears until the moment when the current closes above them.

  Realization at last ricochets through the ranks of animal caravan. No word travels quicker than fulfillment. Alarm backtracks through the flow faster than the flow can advance on it. Thus the rats at the back of the queue, not so much pushing as happily piling on, out of earshot of the fatal tune, could easily call upon innate survival instincts and save themselves. It would take no effort at all to break off, turn back from disaster, return to town and begin the difficult work of restoring the decimated pest populace.

  But not one rat does. An even greater urge keeps them promenading almost gratefully, for three quarters of an hour, into a river from which not a single forepaw reemerges. Yes, a mother pauses here or there along the bank, thick with plunging bodies brown, and an occasional old retiree breaks into uncomprehending tears as he takes to the drink. But all choose this moment of crystalline clarity, receiving it willingly as opportune, a godsend really, far preferable to a return to the quotidian misery and ignorance that have marked their lot until that moment. It takes no bravery to listen to the soul-stilling music and make peace, put an end to experience. No courage, no strength at all aside from joy.