“Here” is a refugee camp on the Akobo River, the border between two stricken African republics. In its misery, the camp is like any of the thousands of shanty cities that proliferate throughout the world. But the residents of Akobo Camp are victims twice over. They fled the Sudanese civil war to the one place where they would be safe from slavery, mutilation, or death. Reaching the haven of Ethiopia, they walked straight into the upheaval now ravaging that land. . . .
Akobo Camp is remarkable for another reason: of all the twice-displaced who have found their way here, after trips of several hundred miles that led from one shell-torn front into the other, not one is older than sixteen. . . .
“No fair,” she says, the two breaths costing her brutally. “No fair reading to yourself.”
Her tone neither forgives nor accuses. But the sound pumps him full of something dangerously like hope. “No sass, or I’ll put a frowning face right here next to your case write-up.”
He slips the account back in the stack, so deep she will never have to read it. He swaps it for the top book, more appropriate for adolescent girls, judging by this gawky, goofy-looking, little raven-faced Nancy Drew in barrettes on the cover. Closer to the ticket. Some kind of girlhood diary, written long enough ago to become otherworldly romance. He starts to read, uncomprehending, then starts again at the line break, the way he reads in bed when he has fallen asleep and refuses to admit it, backtracking at every period, plowing every sentence over again until he realizes that he catches nothing, and still more nothing on the retry.
He scans once more in force, thinking, as the words refuse to come clean, Here we go, then. Ricky-boy, hold on tight. He focuses by sheer will an attention that, like a stage spot, narrows down from babbling sentence to faltering phrase to blurry word. He turns over this deranged but familiar orthography, strange resemblance, an idiom like a secret brother you visit only once a year, shut away in that tacit, untalked-about home.
Explanation hits him without the appropriate relief: a foreign language. But what is she doing . . . ? She might perhaps have French, a few words, from the residual colonial ghost. But she couldn’t know this one. This one was—where?—Indonesia at the nearest. Dutch East Indies.
“Okay,” he settles in, choosing desperately to ignore everything, all incoherence, all emergency broadcast, all advance notification, to go on pretending to a semblance of sense. The persistence short of dying. “Here’s your question. Who is . . .” He browses the lines near the opening. “Lieve Kitty?” Answer carefully, and in complete sentences.
Before she can scold him, Kraft realizes. Kitty has gone, made the leap, slipped back into fantasy from whence she came. That grackle-haired Anne on the cover invented her, conjured Kitty up, retrieved her from the holding room of hidden friends, sculpted her from scratch to keep Anne company up in night’s false-walled attic, during that last, lonely few-month stretch before deportation.
Kitty is this book. The secret pen pal that the little Frank girl created, because one always needs to write to someone. Because paper is more patient than people. Dear Kitty is the figment of that photo, the girl in the desk in front of you in fourth grade, whose eyes, a season before the finish line, smile weakly in advance at the worst that human ingenuity can dream up to put her through.
Joy, what is left of her, brings up a noise from the back of her throat, midway between giggle and gurgle. “There is no Kitty.” Exasperated with grown-up silliness, the adult refusal to accept the real.
Journalism and journal: Kraft should have known. These two late-day narrative styles round out the brief but comprehensive sampler, the trading-card sets of story that Joy and her accomplices have been busy collecting. Treasures on the scavenger hunt handout: find these somewhere in the city at large, and don’t come back until you have them all. Now they have them. She can return, like an ethnographer at the end of her field trip year. Dear Kitty: I grow hopeful now; finally, everything will turn out for the good. Really, good!
That’s it. The list is complete. Or almost. The collection crew now must mount a massive sweep, the scale of which Kraft only vaguely makes out. A drag search for the missing read-alouds, the concluding Lieve Kittys from Bergen Belsen and its blood descendants, the notes from the civic-minded citizens tipping off the authorities to the secret room.
It would not be bluff now, to stare her down. He places his hand on her gauzed-over stump and thinks, I know what you are up to. All of you.
But the words he speaks out loud, to the witness air, evade the insight. Lie low, something tells him, and go on living. Out loud, all he says is “Beauty, can I do anything for you?”
She blossoms at the nickname, enough to incline her head. “Yes. Please.” She would smile, were it not for the pads of subcutaneous rupture weighing down her cheeks.
“Dr. Kraft.” So soft, maybe he makes it up. “Dr. Kraft. I don’t know how to do this.”
Seven in one blow, a burst of staccato words in a slight, Asian clip. She admits the obvious, the thing his cowardice empowers by running from. The leg alone—the whole lower body—will not be enough. Its childish sacrifice has appeased no one. Tell me how, her capillary-spattered eyes plead with him. Give me the next step.
Now, unlike the first time he watched her die, no portal opens. The view out the window of Intensive Care is blank except for a ratty palm, a bank of hospital Dumpsters, and a hummus vendor across the street. The moment grows unendurable in knowing how little chance it has of surviving. He dares not say Hold out, or she might.
He could tell her of his own deportation from the place, a record only recently recovered from long live burial. But her evacuation is more extensive, more complete, taking her beyond all preparation. He fumbles for the one deficient revenge ever offered.
“I don’t know how either.” He brushes a hank of limp hair from her mouth, where it has snagged. And goes on to give her, in as many words as the telling takes, the point of starting out on any once upon a time. The surgeon’s sense of an ending.
HE CRAWLS UP from the call room bed, fully dressed, his lids never having touched. A hot shower, and he realizes he is drowning, going under for the third count. Even with the spray squelched, he cannot get his breath in the foaming turbulence of air. He must call her. Her, the borderline jailbait, the one whose parts he but recently stroked, avoiding the more awful amplitude lying between them. Her name will come to him in a second. Linda, who has at last left him, as he advised her at their earliest flirtation.
He could drag upstairs, wash his hair, get a fresh change of clothes (his scrubs beginning to golemize on grunge and blood) and charm her back with a “Lady, you owe me lunch.” Insouciant, with just the right smidgen of vulnerability, just a hint that he’s fifteen minutes from complete, deep-end, isolation-tank psychotic breakdown if she doesn’t dose him down and tuck him in.
A hello wouldn’t hurt, basic kindness, and he could even come clean, tell her everything he has only now told himself. He makes to leave the cell, but is prevented by a knot of menacing Third Worlders with electric whips. What’s your hurry, mister? Go on, have a lie-down. They shove him back onto the bed, where he is jolted—the downed tablets kicking in—across the alkaline flats of his pores. A thousand simultaneous spring-loaded disasters erupt inside his gut.
He sinks in time lapse into the bed. He flails at the bedstead for reading material to steady him and comes up with that May issue of Rifle & Handgun Illustrated. It’s all weirdly familiar. He has lived this before, but where? Just such an era of accumulating, societywide, sedated, nostril-flaring panic. It’s crucial he remember. Yet the patient’s chart is riddled with these missing episodes. One continuous archipelago-hopping campaign from fin de to fin de, torching itself on the conviction, the absolute certainty of impending mayhem, always waiting for the last word.
But never like this before. There has never been the means, the raw megatonnage, the window of opportunity that a city like Angel, a country like the one on his passport, commands. Fear has
never been so slickly institutionalized, marketed on such a mind-fogging scale, sold on such favorable terms, nothing down. And to fear something resourcefully enough is to bring it off, wholesale, well before the magic date.
Ten years, and they’ll be hooking generators up to bicycles to listen to emergency radio. Cutting up railroad ties for fuel. Licking the lids off trash cans. Rodeo Drive will be a vast black market, like the one in the streets outside Carver. A slow, exaggerated drift toward videoclip, mass multiple-personality self-homicide: the perfect end for a world that has achieved the ultimate aim of being both great tasting and less filling.
And Kraft alone is left to tie apocalypse to vanishing children. Scarred tree rings, ancient internal hemorrhages, origin myths of the bewilderedly trepanned. Abuse is the seed money. Banishment sets the Bildungsroman rolling, and every page thereafter is the kid in the backseat saying, “Are we there yet?” “What happens next?”
Where happens is not a thing but a place, a remembered premonition cathartic enough to close the opening’s rip.
This is Kraft’s insight as he goes under. No one this side of childhood exile, not a single memoir or condescending picture book, has ever gotten it right. But no one has ever lost it either: that first house, where want and terror, the toy soldiers of self itself, have not yet split off and solidified on contact with air. He’s seen it up close, under the loupes. From their ringleader, that Weight Watchers Khrushchev, to the martyred Lieve Kitty, each is a raw umbilical stump, a residual direct tap into placenta, the subterranean world.
Enough sleep narcotic now syrups through Kraft’s forebrain to bring him almost back as well. The lost tumbler contour: September, racing home in the rain, the runny-soaked page of oppressive sums due tomorrow, the stink of ubiquitous earthworm in the nose’s lining. Get it back, returned to the viscera—the car antennas maliciously snapped off for no reason, the lessons on saturation bombing picked up in Sunday School at no spiritual cost, the crack-of-dawn smell of oatmeal equivalent from the squatters’ quarter, the trinket bought for the beautiful half-Japanese girl next door (the one who will leave you longing inadequately after halves, forever), thrown into a canal when nerve collapsed—get that back, and you have it. The bead, the cross-locus for the there where they now abduct themselves. The locale of sickening, defenseless, permanent fragility, the one that growing up consists of more or less unsuccessfully denying.
And then it hovers over him, forgiveness in the form of a class reunion. They have come back, those two foreigners, just to give him another look, to lift the hole in the fabric for a follow-up, now that he is grown, responsible, ostensibly aware. Second shot, in a stronger body. Now he might do something about things as they are, now, when the worst has been done, when he’s lost all and nothing can hurt him further. And thinking, I will remember this when I wake up; I need only the trigger, the call-back, he falls into the first recuperative peace he has known since the incurable Hansel and Gretel checked into his ward.
PLUMMER WAKES HIM. The maniac breaks into Kraft’s call room, scrubbed, giggling crazily. “You’re not gonna, you won’t fawking believe this. Buddy boy, buddy boy, have we got a celebrity body lineup for you.”
Kraft comes out of his coma far enough to sample the disturbance. An extended adolescent stands above him, eyes watering in a colloid of shock and excitement. Thomas—unthinkably—is crying. And he won’t tell, but in his manic elation over something finally happening, an event, definitive, coming home to roost at last, he merely hustles Kraft out of bed and shoehorns him down the hall for the denouement.
It starts in the ER and splays, like a family Labor Day, down the adjacent halls and foyers. If it is not precisely the scenario Kraft has been anticipating, it is its next of kin. He feels almost relieved that it has arrived, taken shape, capped imagination.
But imagination could never have managed this without assistance. Plummer does his sugar-rush, play-by-play patter. “Tried to beep you, Dr. Krafty, but yer number was not in service. Suite phone bungied up too, suspiciously enough. But what the hey, hey? Now that we got you, the gang’s all here. Father Kino, Dr. Purgative, Miss Peach . . .”
Plummer starts to sound just like the throbbing bass of a dash radio in a distant Mazda playing acid house on volume 12 while idling at a stoplight. What a civilizing cleverness, how they always put the ER on ground level, right by the parking-lot receiving dock. Ideal for bulk shipments.
The halls fill with disembodied spectral wails, paramedical commands in Pilipino, the shouts of admission nurses whose bureaucracy has broken down under the weight of the penultimate. A kaleidoscopic aural chaos. Kraft looks out over the event just as the infotainment folks bust in through the sliding doors with the Minicams.
The thing that has come over to play, exceeding Kraft’s still-narcotized ability to take it in, is just your consummate, posturban, median mass murder. Atrocity, like art, attends to the flavor of the age. It sinks vast sums into R & D, to produce an imagery tailor-made for the sensibility that has habituated to every horror imaginable except itself. “Hey,” Plummer twitters away by Kraft’s side, “it’s not much, but we call it home.
“Guess,” Thomas keeps nattering. “Just guess. You’ll never, not in a million, not in a coon’s, not in a dead man’s . . .”
Guess what? Even that much evades Kraft. The identity of the monster who did this? The Herod behind today’s installment could be any hopped-up, factory-outlet counter helper with fifty bucks for a gun, that party favor easier to purchase than alcohol in some states. He wouldn’t even need the fifty bucks, because there’s always financing.
Once again, the bullet sprayer is just another sleepless burn-baby one degree worse than the rest of us, turned by ubiquitous, state-sponsored terrorism, the housing-project prison on all sides of him, into trying to out-horror horror. Butcher, baker, ex-war criminal sponsored by the NSA, short-order loner, Veteran of Foreign Police Action, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, crazed chemmed-out cardboard apartment dweller. How high would you like to point the finger? Who do you want for your guilty party?
“What’s your hunch on this one, Krafty? Jets versus Sharks? Tong war? Fast-food shoot-up? Get a life, bro; that was last year. Football stadium spree? Please, leave that to the effete Europeans. Airport terrorist strike by Oregon Ecotopian separatists? Indiscriminate mall-walker mow-down?”
They pick their way through a litter of stretchers. Seeping bodies line the corridors because there is no room at emergency’s inn. They drift listlessly in the direction of the operating theater, with some vague notion of assisting in the red tide bailout with their plastic beach pails.
In Kraft’s doped silence, Plummer loses it. “Mother fucking Mary!” he screams. In the general frenzy, no one even turns a head. “Look around you, shit-for-brains. Look!”
The order is so violent that Kraft does, pushing back the sheets from one upward-staring face, then another. He cannot see the common denominator in this sea of victims, so salient is it, so long expected, so presupposed.
“You’re fucking kidding me. Are you blind, or what? Helen pissing Kell—” Kraft looks for something deeper, subtler, more insidious. When Plummer shouts the patent axiom, it’s only the givenness of the observation that shocks him. “A grade school, Peewee.”
At last, Kraft panics. “What school?”
“Oh Christ. Martin Luther King Junior High. Bobbie Franks Elementary. The Little Girl Down the Well Montessori School. Who fucking cares?”
Kraft would kick him in the face, Free style, but has no time. He skids around, thinking to race the half-dozen flights up to Pediatrics to find where the piper was playing today. But he remembers the tour’s cancellation. Then the sickening backwash, the shame at mouthing the parental refrain: Thank God it wasn’t my child.
Plummer looks about, grinning. “Hang on, kids. It’s Chinese assault rifle time. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand . . . ready or not, here I come.”
At this outburst, crazed as cel
adon glaze, Kraft takes the man’s wrist and tries for a steady tone. “Thomas.”
“What? ‘Get a grip,’ right? ‘We’re doctors, goddammit.’ Ever notice how much these scrubs resemble the traditional restraining jacket?”
Plummer begins to trill “Whistle While You Work,” complete with late-’thirties warbling. The sweet dwarf-tremolo serves only to conduct the shape of revelation deeper into the fibrillating heart.
Kraft bathes in iodine wash, up to his biceps. He listens to the sea of voices around him. The operating room is ablaze in the high-frequency flicker of fluorescences, a cozy home version of the seductive Christmas tree star, Shinto devotional candle, menorah stem, the burning White Light at the tip of civilization’s long bushmaster black fiber-optic cable.
Kraft’s eyes must dilate, stop down to the sight of the banquet spread for them. His own organs have never been particularly good at depth perception, especially under such light. But the slaughtered softball teams, the choir groups and secret note-passers still being wheeled in, their IVs bobbing above them like golf cart pennants—these are unmistakable. He need not even sponge off their features to confirm the ID. Schoolmates. His all-star backfield from twenty years ago. Old neighborhood friends.
Work begins without prelim. It proceeds, with only the smallest verbal dispatches, into time beyond telling. They make the first-pass sort, splitting the stretchers into two camps, red blankets and blue, those that might yet be addressable and those for whom injection and deliberate oversight is now the kindest remaining treatment. Decision is quick and concise, applied to each new batch. The sieve is axiomatic. Care for the still savable is relegated to stopgap. Gross clinical movements, close enough, timeshare between points of impact, with vague hopes of getting back to stabilize.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 42
