Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

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 Dinka-land. 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 muted 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.

If it were possible, I would tell them how, under a different binding, they live another, open book. Someone else's narrowly rescued life story. Yours.

"Does it have a happy ending?" Linda asked. "I want a happy ending. Make someone donate their organs, at least."

Someone donates their organs, all of them. You.

Remembering some old pain, forestalled until now beyond all the odds, you map up this tale. "That's enough for tonight. Go to bed."

These words sound out loud, as if spoken to a child, sitting on the top landing in the dark.

You make no response, not even objection. Growing bolder, as oldest children do (this one even older than the man he pleads with), the boy pushes his luck. "Tell that spooky one again." You know. You, Mom, those sick kids. Wandering at random.

He wants a scare that will dispel his worst fear.

The memory comes back, intact as original violence. It cuts into you, insurgent, deep as the first urge, the desire to strangle in the crib this thing that will destroy you if so little as one of its perfect cuticles is cut back.

You hate the boy for how he has forced you to love, to love him like, yes, like a child. The first, the most sickening: a love so awful that you must watch the creature go down, calling you, stunned that you do not step in with the effortless rescue. You know now how you will watch him fall, fall forever, a fall that will not stop with skinned knee or broken arm, a cast the school friends can sign in pastel. The end of all falls is impact without end. You cuff him, ruffle the baseball cap, run your hands through the luxurious hair. "Tomorrow. Remind me." With appropriate groans, he stomps up — always up — to his room at rooftop.