Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

What can the teacher do but give the child an A, tell her the report was excellent, bump her — baffling her further — up to her rightful grade? Promotion solves nothing. They cannot help her here, can alleviate none of that afflicted breathing. The girl is bound fast in the metal burr rasps of jeans, swaddled by clothes that turn her every playground hour into live burial. Her rage for instant adult competence betrays itself. Barbed and intractable, waiting at the bus stop every morning is the scent of saffron, the flake of gold leaf still in her fingers. The temple bells, the lost pitched vendor calls sound, with each additional day-lifetime she serves out in this school-cum-mall, increasingly like a croatoan-note pulling her on toward the next promissory coordinate, deep in the still-unfounded, untouched continent.

There is a temple in this city. A classical Sukhothai pavilion stands a dozen blocks from the apartment they have put her in. A chedi, squeezed between a video rental palace and WE BUY/SELL/TRADE ANYTHING. These stepped gables edged in finial flames would once have seemed as foreign to her as the peek-a-boutiques of Melrose are to the Iowa conventioneer. The styles are of another country, a hundred kilometers from her valley, as distant and unreachable as the epic's monkey kingdom. But here, the temple is her one touchstone in a landscape as arbitrary as the language she must use to make her way through it.

Nothing can be assumed here. Total strangers greet you like a long-lost relative, fuss over you, buy you sailor suits, then disappear forever without trace. The price marked on a thing is exactly what you have to pay for it. People leave gaps between them in line, then get furious when you fill them. The water coming out of the wall is drinkable, but ponds and streams will kill you. The dead are not burned, but buried in spacious, decorated plots, while the living set up house on a square meter of sidewalk. Guns are legal but imported parrots are not.

She is saved only by seeing how no one else belongs here either. They catch her eye in the supermarket and look away, confessing. She reads with delight how only Mexico City contains more Mexicans than Angel. She spends Saturdays in the exotic street markets, where a dozen governments in exile make their unofficial homes. Something rustles her ear before she can make out the neighborhood contour: a whisper of how this entire community, even the vested interests, is provisional.

All the property is owned by transpacific gnomes. All the sports heroes hail from the Caribbean. The counter help at the Mr. Icee know no more English than "superfudgebuster." The after-school black-and-white cable classics, their credits packed with foreign drifters' unpronounceable names, always reach the same conclusion: pass yourself off as a local, whatever your origin. The displaced life leads to any ending you like.

Not that she can yet frame the tale in so many borrowed words. Her confusion is primordial. The city she has been set down in is riddled through with time holes, portals opening onto preserved bits of every world that ever saw light. They take her to them on school field trips and church-sponsored socials. That prehistoric, saber-toothed tar pit downtown; the Spanish colonial missions; those Hollywood wax museums; the Wild West storefronts; the sprawling Arab bazaars; the town-sized, live-in, glass terraria arcades enclosing futuristic retail worlds; that magic castle from a medieval past that she would not know from the original thing. These are her reals, her eternally present givens.

She makes nothing of it beyond raw specifics: how to get to school. The inscrutable uses of a library card. The ways of indigestible dried potatoes and bleached sponge bread. A playground where she watches gigglers dig through sand to the center of the earth and come out in China, where people walk on their hands.

The block where she lives, the fourth most dangerous in the city, is for her a garden of almost guilty safety. She sleeps through sirens these days. Even those after-midnight altercations, smashings and bludgeonings in the building foyer outside her room, no longer fully wake her.

The search to avoid attention extends to her choice of three-ring binders, book covers, barrettes, and jumpers. What she cannot afford she constructs facsimiles of — substitute cloth voodoo, clay expiatory figures. She forsakes popularity, a place in the opaque pecking order she cannot even appraise. Joy apes the Angelino offspring only to safeguard her residency permit, that fluke stay of extradition, almost certainly a mistake that will any moment be detected and rescinded.

The tapeworm knowledges she wolfs down only leave her more emaciated. Her virtuoso fiascoes of oral-report earnestness give the game away. Concealed, they fluoresce under pressure. She covers for a parent back at the rented room, a father who repeats, nightly, in sheer terror, the immigrant litany, succeed, adapt, evade. The girl's show of cheer is so transparent that when she finally appears one day at recess in front of the teacher's desk saying, "I hurt," teacher herself bursts into tears. Oh God, child, I know; it kills just to look at you.

But Joy, as always, is something more literal. She points to a spot above her right ankle. Did you twist it? The girl shakes her head gravely. She is sent to the nurse, takes a spot in a line of metal chairs behind the usual strep throats and malingerers. Nurse detects evident swelling. A little discoloration, maybe. In her notes, nurse accuses the child, for obscure cross-cultural reasons, of trying to cover up a team-sport injury. As has become customary, she also misspells the child's last name.

When the sprain fails to heal over the following week, nurse grows furious. She grills the perverse patient: What aren't you telling me? She palpates the reticent swelling again, brusquely but by no means roughly. During this routine handling, Joy slips unconscious from accumulated torment. Passes out in preference to crying.

The sense of emergency begins to settle in. Nurse finds no phone number in the girl's file where her parents might be reached. A father exists, apparently, but where in the hellish human miasma he might be found is anyone's guess. A runner sent to the girl's reported address finds the building uninhabited, uninhabitable, judging from the husk. The girl is "medically indigent," as the catch phrase has it. Another underage Medi/cal gal.

The public institutions transfer her from one to the other, bucket brigade style. At the charity hospital, a roughriding ER paramedic applies the stopgap, probing just enough to cover his own ass before routing the girl to the pediatric attending, who is, as always, tied up.

One of the service's surgical residents performs the biopsy. Sinking the shaft, he can see nothing beyond the abnormalities of his own uncen-sored imagination — a Rorschach of tissue turning gradually into soft sandwich spread powdered with Parmesan. The path report comes back stamped "Insufficient Tissue Sample." Don't be stingy, dahlinks. Give us enough to play with, sufficient decent slides to make the necessary stains.

During this whole time, the child's father has yet to turn up. Although voiced only a notch above inaudible, the girl clearly has enough verbal ingenuity to answer the complete history and physical. But when the work-up doubles back on the identity of parent or legal guardian, the girl only shrugs. She is protecting him, by express prior command. The admissions people have seen this before. Dad's another illegal, or maybe a legitimate resident so bewildered by Immigration's cross-interrogating triplicate that he goes fugitive, without the first notion of his legal standing and too frightened to find out on the fly.

But the hospital can do nothing without mature consent. The impasse is resolved only after the pediatric nurse on night duty literally stumbles over the man. Two A.M., and she has gone into the ward to refresh in relative leisure a baby-drip neglected earlier this harried evening. On her way past Joy's bed, she trips headlong over an adult sleeping on an improvised pallet by the cot's baseboard.