Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

"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 damask, 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, panhandling 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 Rattenfanger expedition, and once again on those night transport trains six and a half centuries later. How much longer?