Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  Disclosure hits him, a kind of delayed confirmation, one more closeless closure. The numbers now make grief a deplorable indulgence. He gives himself five seconds of denial. He is beyond pretense, past anesthesia.

  But the pain is duller if you don’t stop all at once. “What about the other?” he asks. That Methuselah kid?

  A look comes over her, a stunned confusion of disgust and fear: You knew, then? Everything? “They’ve come for him. The researchers.” Her tone suggests accessory, smuggling, assisted betrayal, parental profiteering. “Oh Christ,” she sobs. “How long did he have left, anyway?”

  “And the others?”

  She returns his matte stare, uncomprehending. Hallucination reaches a pitch where he can’t remember if the carnage has really happened or he has fabricated it. He catches on to a dull ironstone finish to her eyes and realizes that she too is drugged. Has been for a while.

  She leans to take him, wrap him, punish, revenge, and absolve everything. But as she gathers to correct him from above, she crumples, hands balling at his clothing for a hold. She grips whatever she can cling to, the infant’s reflex fist. To release would be to slip endlessly. She mumbles something into his sternum, words that bite their way through his cartilage. Te necesito. Me sofoco. Cuando no estás, no tengo aire.

  Saturated in death, she lapses into her real language. In less time than it takes her suction fingers to gouge into Kraft’s neck, empathy undoes him. He never once asked this woman the first thing about her life. He sees it now, more real than his own. At last he makes the leap to why she searched him out. How she located him. What they are both doing here, hip-deep in baby genocide. All done to rewind the film’s opening frames, rework them. Another shot.

  Lit in this flash, he sees the assailant that reality arranged for her. Not Mama’s wholesome, milk-headed brother, smuggling her into the closet and pounding away at her for years, terrifying her into a pact of intimacy from which she would never emerge except in obsessive giving. Her smotherer is more sinister, darker, southern. Every hour of her life, each time she moaned in hurt pleasure at Kraft’s touch, it was in the fantasy that she might open her eyes and see him, her destroyer, might spit in his face or fall bleating into his arms. Love: the abuser’s name she swore at knifepoint never to reveal, paying its nightly visits, refusing to kill and deliver her, however old she grew.

  Refusing until this instant. Kraft looks at her for the first time, infected, condemned. Nothing is left him but her, and simply loving her back is worse than all imagining. She tears away from their crutch embrace. She darts a look over her shoulder at the insanity around them, fleeing it down blackness’s alley. He searches her face—Linda?—but she stares back wildly.

  “Let it die then,” she pronounces. Let us all suffocate. Be snuffed out along with these babies—the best release anyone can hope for. She whips her head back and forth, screaming soundless acceptance, flush up against the sick proximity infusing every instant until the last.

  He tries to close the gap between them, to sedate her somehow. But she pulls back from his hand as from a brand. “You touched me,” she tells him, lapsing back to a numb scold. “You’ll have to rescrub.”

  Cataclysm spreads in front of him, all but complete. He reads the report already, the way it will appear in the arch piece the Chief will assign him for next month’s book club. How we murdered our children. What form will explanation take this time? The one the times demand. Corrupt survival fable, deranged beyond recall. Based, as always, on actual event, but garbled in desperate retelling.

  Unless he tells her. For once, a firsthand account, a transcript beyond the journals, the papers, the nighttime anthologies. He will say what all eyewitnesses have, since the first fireside. He will tell her: I saw them. I know now where they are off to. I know where they came from. They have left us behind, with nothing but this thin plot to live on. To keep alive another sentence longer.

  “Linda,” he says. How does it go again? Clap your hands. “Linda. Listen.”

  A white-clothed male, mid-thirties, climbs to the top of a public hospital in a terminally ill Angel City neighborhood on Wednesday night of the world’s week. Children, abducted at dusk from their rooms in front of a thousand witnesses, excitedly ring him. Up through the lobby they’ve come, past the receptionists and nurses’ stations, avoiding the banks of public elevators shuttling like scythes, keeping instead to the stairs, taking these at a clip remarkable for so impaired a band.

  They rise as a mass, up, always up, scaling the sealed escape shafts. They make their way airward, bubbles on a hull. In shifts, slung over his shoulder, the man carries, fireman style, a girl dying on the edge of puberty, an amputee, an earnest sailor-suited youth with suitcase, a wound victim whose lungs would not last one flight unaided.

  They reach the roof long after last visiting hours. On this stand-in sod of tar and pebbles, under a forest of vent excrescences, cooling ducts, pipes, and wiring that make meshes beyond all power to trace, they group and take a sounding. If one saw . . .

  No one sees. But if—that neverword, the home to all meaning: if you could see, it would all seem perfectly to scale, a school fire drill, except for the giant Christopher in their midst.

  The air is unexpectedly harsh, the children not properly dressed, the city exhausted, packed to pointlessness with traffic, more meandering than any of them imagined. The tales spell out their route, like charms on a bracelet that must be read in order. But what if they’ve gotten the stories wrong, misread them?

  Over the edge of this roof, all the way out to the olive-obscure horizon, no sign of the place they must head toward tonight. The chance of their arriving intact shrinks to nothing in these sterile extensions of poured stone. They waver now, while the helicopters home in, following the flood beams like shepherds tracking their nova.

  But hesitation, however real, lasts no longer than their condensing breath. At a single syllable from the man they are off, stepping across the hedge, passing disembodiedly over the building’s barrier through that pale, acidified, solidifying Angelino smog wall, taking the Imperial Highway in a few leaps. They set a new direction, one that has been hiding in orientation’s rose until this moment, mimicking the other compass lines, now revealing itself as perpendicular to everything.

  Drop the medicines and accoutrements, the intern commands. Reduce our carrying weight. Keep a change of clothes, a toothbrush if necessary. One luxury—that bedtime book, common property, with the lavish illustrations. Lightness is all in such ventures. Already we’re too near the limits, the threshold of the opaque. We will never arrive at the place until we’ve stripped back to the core.

  Empty-handed then, awake, they track the freeway for a while along a hidden frontage. They look for that familiar parlor door left open, the gaping frame inviting them softly into body-warmed dam-ask, conversation’s paneled room.

  Landmarks fall away below: City Hall. The Observatory. The immigrant’s triple hand-built towers. The Archangel Gabriel. And beyond—those banked windmills milking the desert crevasses, pan-handling energy from the air. The evidence of migration’s rest mass recedes beneath their feet: basalt heads leaning back into the island. Pacific missionaries adrift in an open boat. A stone fence the length of a continent. Golden mountains tapering to single points. A road spreading from Persia to Spain. Fifty-ton rocks rounded up into standing circles. Glass fragments clustered in cool frequencies, opening their transept apertures onto heaven.

  They sleep in the open. Talk around their temporary camps is always the same: the nature of the scavenger hunt itself, where they are headed, how close the trailing police and hospital authorities might be to catching up with them.

  Tell us one, the children plea-bargain, before they’ll go to bed. And the lone adult must improvise this evening, from memory, a story of origins, having misplaced the picture book somewhere in transit.

  A duchess, riding in style along a dusty road, stopped to dispense charity to a woman who was nursing in
the dirt, mourning last year’s laughter. The beggar’s twin infants, helpless, hungry, crusted with stale infection, incited the duchess’s indignation. “Woman, where is your husband? How is it that you are left alone with two mouths to feed?” The beggar had no answer, so her wealthy sister generously supplied one. “This is what comes from lying with two men.”

  The beggar filled with an outrage as pure as poverty. She cursed the duchess: If twins were the price of bigamy, then let the lady bear as many children as days in the year. This the duchess promptly did on Good Friday, Id al-Qurban, the Holi, Chinese New Year, Liberation Day in the year X. Three hundred and sixty-five at once, and all the boys were named John and all the girls Elizabeth, in the language of whatever land each one wandered into from out of the open womb.

  A bastard a day? What became of them?

  In the space of their first evening they were gone. Half walked into central Asia. Two fashioned a dugout and island-hopped across Oceania. Three or four dozen learned that cancer-baffling skin trick and stayed in Africa. Almost as many turned ghostly white, plowing the inhospitable North. Fifty fanned out across the Americas. One child joined a scientific expedition to both poles.

  And their lives? Did they reach where they were going?

  Twenty-three were shelled out of their villages. Eleven stood up in front of tanks with bricks. Another twelve drove the tanks. Ten percent were sent to camps, and relocation, for half these, was consummated. One little girl became a child star, touring the world under an assumed name. A hundred and one had to interrupt their lessons to set up in business prematurely. Several made the hajj, sauntered to Compostela, ascended to the Forbidden City. Six performed as prodigies. Five joined the circus. Four served as illegal couriers. Two more were State Department plants. Seventeen succumbed directly to curiosity, and the remaining majority died in doorways, puffed with poisons and ingested antidotes.

  Not one stopped here for any length of time. Kilometer logging started at once, although the motive for mass exit may have been nothing but the search for a meal or a pair of good long-distance shoes.

  The story makes due for the moment, scares even the oldest obediently to sleep. But in the morning, some of the smaller children are sorry they ever came. The littlest fade first, the heavily hurt, the limbless, the ones with the fractional hearts. Children who would have died tomorrow in bed have been made to travel distances that would cripple the fittest adult. Enchantment frays at the end, and the whispers begin.

  The hospital beds look better at this distance, their diseases less inevitable. Giving themselves up would be as easy now as standing still and waiting to be found. After the additional distance of this day, even the longer-legged among them begin to fade. Are we there yet? How much farther?

  An old question, older than anyone alive. Desk-disciplined, sepia ten-year-olds in Meerut, the week before the Sepoy Mutiny, thumbing their dog-eared, half-century-old copies of Songs for the Nursery, were expected to acquire it by heart, recite in perfect imperial accents:

  How many miles to Babylon?

  Threescore miles and ten.

  Can I get there by candle-light?

  Yes, and back again.

  The Children of God, threescore and ten years under Babylonian captivity, made discreet inquiries into their own evacuation. What are we after? That convention hall where all the planet’s hidden children congregate. Some other place that might clarify what has happened here. Almost there? asked the Saxon schoolchildren on the Rattenfänger expedition, and once again on those night transport trains six and a half centuries later. How much longer?

  If your heels are nimble and light, you may get there by candlelight.

  But where? Get where?

  This short list of escaped pediatrics is not the only band out and about, skirting the shoulders, the back alleys along the interstate lanes, tonight. The place is awash in child villages, from Nebraska to Dinkaland. Solitary adolescents walk across the outback, threading the way to the scattered Places of Dreaming. A school full of Welsh miners’ children vanishes under a mountain. Ge youths seclude themselves upriver for decades. Whole divisions of preteens wander the Vakhan toting guided missiles. A class of Bolivian villagers follows an odd child to the Land of the Grandfather. Pubescent refugee males form autonomous boy-nations that drift through the sub-Sahara. Several thousand children for whom adulthood would have been an unnecessary elaboration put themselves at the service of causes, hungry for martyrdom, a massacre the equal of their innocence.

  They are leaving now in all epochs, all regions, packing off by candlelight. Stories continue to pour in. Myth shades off into reportage, fact into invention. If, tomorrow around the fire, to seed the needed child-courage, the one leading this group God-knows-where were to make a diagram on a strip stranger than a Möbius, dotting every place a child has ever disappeared, would a revealing curve take shape? A tendency, a table of tides, extrapolating to reveal that one spot, the Babylon that whole schools strike off to at all hours, losing everything to reach?

  So many are adrift, out of doors late tonight, too far from home, migrating, campaigning, colonizing, on pilgrimage, displaced, dispersed, tortured loose, running for their lives—so many interrogate the miles there and back that any myth that need might invent to map their progress will somewhere, in time, be born out. Even this one. This one.

  Their movements are as plentiful as the places in the world they cannot get to. The paths they take are more fractured, less predictable than the weather on this late-summer night that sets them loose. “Tomorrow,” the lone adult promises them, “we’ll be home.”

  It is a loving enough lie, omitting only to add that home too is a way of leaving. It is about leaving, a departure as certain as any urge, longer even than the sense of having come from there. The pleasant clapboard, the kitchen table, so perfect for late-night reunions, waits patiently for its occupants to come back. But there will be no stopping. Their return will be brief: two nights, a long weekend at most, over the holidays.

  Whatever the house this band might at last locate, the smell locked in its furniture, piping through the radiators, ungluing from under the wallpaper will be the smell of people who have long since disappeared. In through the open front window will come the scent of meadows, burning woods, rain forest, tundra, jungle, sea floor, nitrogens resting a minute in skeins of soil on their way back through the cycle. The first hint of open evening will be too much; they’ll be off again, kitchen tables carrying notes of summer flights. At most a way station along the route, home will be less than the lightest touch, long outlasted by the desire to reach it.

  But just the mention of the word leaves the runaways, some who would not have lasted out the week in care of the anesthetizing State, ready to resume the first program of childhood: the command to quiz the world. For a day longer, they are certain of forever, and the night is theirs. They can see in the dark; their eyes are yet that mint.

  The tour leader removes his coat, hospital issue, insignia indicting, and places it under his head here in the grass. Perfect roadside pillow. On all sides of him these new lives curl up, still proof in the recall of a longing longer than belonging. They have not been around sufficient years yet to believe in any myth so transparent as permanence. They want tonight’s installment before dropping off. Those three hundred and sixty-five siblings: How did they end? Did they ever meet again?

  Oh, perhaps. Over the years. They get together every so often, what is left of them, to celebrate their birthday. They compare notes, the layouts of the place, all the secret excuses to push on, to navigate. They talk about open land, doors left unlatched, places where they might build cities or ways they might tear down their earlier, terrible mistakes.

  They study economics, they write long books, always lavishly illustrated. They fill walls with murals of overgrown, forgotten, impossible lands of Cockaigne. They formulate a history longer even than the hope of its imminence. They send a deep-space packet-boat probe straying in the mute
d vacuum for millennia, seeking, searching for a place it might finally touch down, carrying as interplanetary barter a parcel of stories, pictures, messages in threescore and ten globe-bound languages all unintelligible to any being the Voyager might one day come across, each reading, “Greetings from the children of Planet Earth.”

  This is one that my older brother the surgeon gave me, his little brother the storyteller. No more than the slightest Just So, about how the once-monk came to own a framed letter of appreciation thanking him for saving two child lives out of a hideous many.

  He was trauma surgical resident in Watts when the recurring nightmare happened on his shift. The papers have all the details, if you want to read them.

  I sent him my draft, to see if he might somehow be able to save it too from its inevitable end. My best intentions had failed to disperse the bleakness of the real.

  He said, “Call the woman up. Linda.” The one I’d once danced clumsily with at the Pasadena Women’s Club. “She’s still in L.A. She has a story for you.”

  She did. From her hospital office, Linda told me of life eavesdropping again, exceeding the worst make-believe, horror for horror, joy for joy. She described a little girl whose life had just replayed the one I had invented. For better or worse, this one was saved.

  The story meant nothing, except that it had happened.

  I asked her about the boy.

  “Which boy? Oh, him. He’ll be back.” They always come back. Next year, next class.

  “How do you live?” I asked.

  I could hear her shrug. “I live just fine. But a child dies of poverty every two and a half seconds.” One at her every fourth word.

  She, like my big brother, is unmarried and childless, though neither is old yet, except in soul. Maybe they are too bound by all these lost histories and physicals to make more hostages.