Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  The last corpulent rat in the miles-long parade plunges into the water with a sort of snappy salute of thanks to the piper, who only then stops playing. No sooner does the primordial musical lure break off than the sole survivor recovers his sapped equanimity. Reviving at the last possible instant, he surfaces, rights himself in the current, and with his last full measure of devotion pilots his battered body downstream to Ratland, where—the reason he was spared—he prepares a manuscript account, this firsthand report on the proximity of ecstasy to horror.

  Ghastly shepherding accomplished, the piper at last lifts the flute from his lips. Satisfied that he has done the deed as mercifully as possible, he stares at the site of the rat waterfall, seeing them still, in phosphene tracers as he pinches closed his lids. What’s the point, he wonders, the purpose of wisdom’s chill deliverance? He smiles grimly and turns back to town, already knowing the furtive, grubby little coda of accounting awaiting him there.

  Per expectation, no grateful town lines up to douse him in ticker tape back inside Hamelin’s circumvallation. He is met under the eastern gate by an ensemble of dazed gazes and several of those questions that resent having to be answered. “What the hell you put in that music? Packs a kick, don’t it?” “Say, yer not from around these parts, are ya?” And instantly, without an interval for decent shame, the community reneges. “You see that? Those varmints plumb up and spontaneously offed themselves. Just like they knew what they had coming.”

  The piper shakes his head sadly, having anticipated this expedience. No sooner does the well water stop festering with floating carcasses, the wattle holes cease breeding disease, the stored grain quit transubstantiating into hard little feces, no sooner is the town snatched from the incisors of hell, once again spared what is known locally as the Youngest Day, than folks habituate to believing that destiny meant all along to lift the curse of damnation before it became a real hassle.

  The scope of salvation is too great for gratitude. By the time its savior reaches the packhouse district, Hamelin has revamped the eyewitness histories. The town is now, has always been, and ever shall be no less than steadily, appropriately blessed.

  The thought flits idly through him: he should go into another line of work, one that makes more allotment for the moral caliber of his trading partners. Say, highwayman or molten lead wholesaler. But he puts aside the consolations of philosophy and heads to his doomed date with the town exchequer.

  “We want you to know how deeply the council appreciates what you have done for the citizens of this town as well as the environs as a whole. The necessary paperwork on your disbursement will take a while to process. In the meantime, we’d like to present you with this token of Hamelin’s sincerest recognition. . . .”

  The piper takes a room, mit Frübstück, above the Meat Hall. Once a week, during the open grievance hour, he petitions the council for his back pay. Each week they beg him to be patient; one needs to understand that all the town funds are not in ready asserts. For a sum as enormous as the one they must pay the piper, certain long-term indemnities have to be called in. No business on earth can pay out 90 percent of its net worth overnight. Why, that would be liquidating to the point of evaporation.

  After a spell of outrageous deference, the piper comes to the officers with a vague ultimatum. The exchequer, paranoid that the man might jeopardize Hamelin’s standing with the infant Hansa, assures him that they will have the amount ready, in full, by the beginning of the next fiscal quarter. But come the appointed date, there is yet another unforeseeable delay. The piper stands at the back of the town council chamber and lowers his head. “I see,” he says politely. “No, really. I fully understand.” He takes his leave of the Rathaus, certain he has done everything in his power to act in good faith.

  The next Sunday, when most of the town’s adults are still in church, the piper settles his Gastzimmer bill and packs his satchel. Then, for the last time in this locale, in this lifetime, he takes up his post in the Marktplatz—a monklike figure in motley, legs together, pipe to his lips—and begins to concertize. The very first air from under the mouthpiece, waves of compression and release, maps a country, a republic of staggering rightness. For those only recently banished from the place, the music loosens a visceral, recollected purpose. Children out knee-deep, wet in spring’s games, stumbling by gradual intervals and small mother-may-I steps, suddenly luck onto the one universal chord, up close, tangent to everything.

  His long, self-spinning line is sleet against a windowsill, the seduction of tree-branch rustles interrogating the pane, luring one out of doors. Implied interior harmonies are fraught with hunger, parched. Old friends whom you yet remember—everything about them except their names—stand rhyming in the dark, haunting the half-timbered alleyways. They gather under the overhangs, too late at night, refusing to come in when called for bed. The sound is birdsong, batsong, angel, extinct pterosaur. It is the shush of an envelope slit open, the pulse from breath half a pillow distant. Brass bands in the gazebo, martial melancholy airs, high sopranos up in the choir loft, a scream of pain from the next hospital bed, stubborn harmonicas on both sides of a violence-stilled front, a beast trapped under a bushel, the tick of the second hand, the abiding shouts of an emptying city heard from miles off, the overtone series of night silence.

  The flute does the work of a light dawn dew, revealing that every square foot of the familiar, commerce-stunted world is, in fact, covered in florid web. The tune’s contour traces no less than that rapture that recourseless minors are told to wait for in all bedtime tales. And at its first teasing ear-stroke, everyone who is yet ill-advisedly a child spills out the front door, cocks a curious head, then breaks out laughing in recognition. Oh! This old guy. What took you so long?

  The cadre of adults, however, are universally frozen in place. Churchgoing, field-mowing, crockery-stowing, they hear nothing, least of all their young skipping clandestinely away to see who else in this world can possibly know the melody that has been plaguing their heads since—when?—last night, the life before, twenty-four centuries at my door. Every battered, conscripted day laborer, the devil nightly bled out of him, every manhandled mug under the magical cutoff age, takes to this melody like a new soul to the amniotic bath.

  The youngest of them follow it more clearly than they as yet follow speech. A tiny blond girl with bruises down the length of each tubeworm thigh begins to sing a descant. Another, perhaps twelve, her flesh harder, her father-inflicted running sores more secret and circumspect, starts to twirl a tempo. She sets off others, mad bodies spinning reckless Ptolemaic epicycles through a market that fills with children aligning to the sound like filings to lodestone’s invisible rose.

  The whole carnival consolidates in a subslice of time, in the moment between one frozen adult’s footstep and the next. Children march into the square banging and blowing and beating on makeshift drums and fifes of their own devising. In those where music has been stillborn, strangled blue in the bloody birthing sheets, the cord of melody twisted around the infant neck, song now frantically roughhouses free in the open. Rhythms race the way little dead sibs do, making up for lost time on their one released night of the year.

  Solo flute sparks a tremendous tagalong chorus counted out in rope skipping, beam swinging, seesawing, clacker clapping, acrobating: all the manic, oscillating metronomes of native idiom. Voices from all corners—calls and responses in the highest registers—take up the tune, improvise lyrics, lay down an obbligato above the piper’s air:

  How many miles must we go?

  Hush, baby; play on. No one knows.

  Will we make it there by candlelight?

  Maybe one day; never tonight.

  A boy who celebrated his seventh birthday underground, in salt passages no wider than his emaciated body, reverts to a game of fighting tops with a boy who last year had to kill his crazed father with a backhand bottle gash. Girl slaves kneel down to jackstones or rummy bones. Others gavotte about with tiny babies on their hips,
real mothers playing with last year’s dolls. A half-Mongol mongrel tribe ride imaginary hobbyhorses, battle on piggyback, cross stick weapons, everywhere singing. Some dress up in tablecloths and shawls. Others tug rope or tag or hide. The market erupts in celebration of every child’s pastime yet devised, and several still waiting their invention. Each one is a step in a vast, improvised, composite dance.

  Though fewer now, nose for nose, than at the piper’s previous gig, the mammals filling the square for this reprise are more ecstatic and numinous. More certain. Their eyes, their hands, their open voices, their shared heart iambics are already transported. They know this song the way they knew to start breathing with the midwife’s first abusive slap. Three sweet notes and the hope that has kept them alive is at last delivered. They are leaving at long last, today, now. This frozen instant. This time, there will be no delays. Wrapped in these supernatural pitches, subdividing them, pushing up against the vein of tone, inside the ambient candle globe of the sonic glow, the quickest, brightest children are already across to the other shore, the far face. Through. Over. Sky-blue.

  On an alley cutting across the town’s axis, the one band not yet tune-transformed makes its way agonizingly toward the square. The children of the house of desolation, confined just outside the city walls: no one has thought to alert them, and only the carrying power of summer air and the acuity of hearing when there is nothing to listen to tip them off. The plague house adults, too far from the sound to be frozen by it, do not bother to lift a hand against the exodus.

  The band of sick ones clips along toward the market. The faster they rush, the farther the goal disappears in front of them. Their anxious skipping is disciplined, kept in check by the self-appointed child kapos in charge of this march. A boy of twelve, his injury not immediately visible, waves his arms in front of him like palm fronds, or those little national flags that liberators pass out to spruce up their reception.

  “Faster,” he whimpers. “Hur-ree! They’ll leave any minute.” His foot scuffs clumsily against a cobble, but he does not look down.

  “Shut your face!” the oldest boy commands; actually, Hold your head, as they say in that time and region. He is older by too many years to be possible. Wrinkled, sagging with a disease that made his parents turn him out without provision. His head is unholdable, sleek, slippery, stripped of hair. He holds one hand on a blind boy’s collarbone, roughly guiding him, and the other underneath the armpit of a girl whose leg has been taken off above the knee by a crescent of Romanesque iron. “We’re going as fast as we can.”

  “I can go faster,” the girl hisses. She tries to move her tree-stump crutch at cut time across the cobbles. But while she takes twice as many steps as before, they are only half as long.

  “Easy,” the bald boy says. “We’ll make it.” The panpipe and its pickup chorus carry in the air over their heads. The roll of that sung rhyme immobilizes them with desire, the need to melt the last mile with mere will. “We’ll make it, or I’ll slaughter you all,” he adds cheerfully. “They’ll wait for us.” He spits out a bit of tooth grit. “They gotta.”

  But the group’s advance cadres already shear off. The band loses its front-runners to the melody. The lead invalids sprint marketward, laughing like imbeciles. All those unimpaired by their sickness are off, accelerating, casting a reluctant look back over a shoulder, shrugging, apologetic but vindicated.

  “Hey, wait up. Stick together.”

  But the sound is too close now to hold out against. Its appeal, brook-clear and incomparably more refreshing, is greater than loyalty, debt, the bonds of the plague house. Betrayal is a crime in this world only. The notes they hear forgive everything.

  Of the last, teetering stragglers, the girl is fiercest. She is first to return to walking’s brutal pragmatics. Pushing herself forward painfully, she crinkles her nose in thought. “Will it be another town, there, do you think?”

  Her features are dark, gracefully rounded, from nowhere near here. Her father was a Horseman. That explains her eyes and ear whorls, and perhaps even what God did to her leg, although His instrument was a fireplace andiron. “Will it be a city?”

  The question falls on a dwindling gang of lag-behinds. Her human crutch, the boy with the tortoise-neck folds, picks it up. “Jesus. Who knows? Whatever you want. Who cares?” He wants to shake her, kick her existing knee out from underneath her. “Can’t you feel it yet? You’re getting your leg back there. Me, reprieve from freakhood. We’ll all walk for our damn selves, from here on.”

  The cries of collective delight in the distance insist that they, all of them, will emigrate, today, to a place where they will not be tied down or caged, sent off to strangers, hung up in trees or exposed on the roadside to die, whipped naked in cellars for their parents’ sins, shown corpses and executions as moral instruction, locked in closets for having nightmares, seared on their softest parts, groped out in sport, strangled for saying yes, put up as collateral for debt, traded, sold at seven, sentenced to life apprenticeship. The tune piping in the distance is deliverance from evil, the end of that torture, childhood.

  “But nobody’s going anywhere if we don’t get a move on.” The two that he hustles down the road exhale exasperated affection. The last delinquent band is down to a frayed thread, pulling itself on in urgency. The freak boy lifts the blind one and runs with him, carrying him like a root sack for several paces. The girl laughs and tries to crutch along quickly enough to catch them up.

  They take the last twist of serpentine street. The cluttered, cobbled-up plaster buildings tumble away from one another and the townscape falls off into the open expanse of plain. The two who can see suck in their breath, slapped violently by the sight in front of them.

  The one without eyes shouts, “What is it? Tell me!”

  The girl hobbles slowly into the healing scene. She fights to say, “I can’t. I can’t describe. It’s wonderful. Children everywhere. It is really happening.”

  “Where are the parents?”

  “They’re all . . . stopped.”

  “Stopped? What do you mean stopped?” The blind boy screams for description, his terrified rage giving way to a sobbed giggle of disbelief, of joy at the thing he thought would never happen, yet believed in since before birth, before blindness. The girl’s incoherence overloads his blacked-out imagination. “No! Wait. Don’t say anything more!”

  At that cue, on the downbeat of that “more,” the figure at scene center turns. Unlike the rats at his earlier matinee, the mass of playing children issues no protest. Rather, the dancing, rope skipping, and hobbyhorse cantering simply step up a notch. Children tack toward the moving music like comets lassoed by the sun. The entire canvass migrates gradually outward from the market, down a discreet street, forming a carpet deeper, denser than the one the rats made.

  “Come on!” the blind boy screams. “They’re starting, they’re starting!”

  The sickling trio stumble along after the trailing edge of celebration. But bliss recedes from them swifter than an ebb sneaking out of the Baltic. The speed of the getaway—a crowd racing at the pace of a messenger charged with averting catastrophe—gives them a foretaste of the trip’s distance, the miles they are headed.

  A town of frozen adults falls away behind. They pass a parent or two along the road, enameled in midstride. A duchy of children, in a world where half of all human beings are under fifteen, is about to escape murderous adulthood, slip past intact without attracting notice. Cast away from it in mid-Sunday, down the main thoroughfare, in brilliant June.

  By the time the impaired three pass through the North Gate, the flute, farthest beacon, is seven leagues beyond them. The mobile boy tries to yank his companions along more briskly, berating them, shoving, cajoling. He curses under his breath, “Oh Christ. Christ. Move it.” He sprints ahead a few hundred paces, to map how quickly the vanguard pulls away from them. The mass dancing mania seems to suck stamina from its own punishing cadence. The tempo, the traveling speed of this reel, i
s too great to sustain. Those without the right steps haven’t a prayer.

  Another instant, and even the blind boy panics. He can hear how soft the nearest rhyme-skipping child has become. “Hey! Wait up. Not so fast.” Each syllable, screamed by a hysteric caller in the world’s last round of kick-the-can. They can barely hear the flute at all, so the flutist surely can’t hear them. Disaster, here, at arm’s distance from the end: Can this be the way the story was meant to go? Just thinking the word brings it on them, and they are lost.

  The intact child throws up his arms, crucified, a gesture invisible to the blind and too clear to the crippled. Furious, the girl digs into the dirt road, and, for a few moments, actually manages to match pace with the child rear guard, keep it within striking distance. But before she can summon the strength to make the impossible next burst, she looks up and stops in place.

  “What? What is it?” the blind one cries.

  The old child has stopped too, just looking. Neither will answer the shouts of the littlest. What could they say? Who could call up the journalistic will to report that the sky has thrown wide a portal of blue, the north wall of the Koppelberg has split open like the slats of a secret bookcase, and that all the long-suffering children of Hamelin are pouring in?

  “You two run,” the girl snaps grimly. She doesn’t even allow a wasteful minute of protest. “Go!” The two boys struggle forward a few steps, at a ghost-of-a-chance gait. But a few steps confirm the worst. They will never catch it together, not with one of them needing leading. The last child will vanish, the impossible opening will have sealed before they reach it. The compensation promised since before time, one greater than anything life in this place has ever offered, will be lost to them as they watch from a stone’s throw away.

  The little-boy-lost stops dead in his tracks and refuses to move. “Get out of here, you son of a bitch,” he chants, a forsaken smile playing at the corners of his lips. He and the girl will turn back to a town death, companionless, never to know, the only ones left of an entire generation of once-playmates wiped out by epidemic euphoria. “Get! I never want to see you again.”