Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

The man is wearing a cheap cotton short-sleeve and black pants so loose he has tied them up in front like a sarong. He scrambles awake. A flushed animal, he wavers, torn between surrendering and abandoning his daughter in escape. The moment's hesitation gives the nurse time to summon a massive night-shift orderly who missed his calling as a strip club bouncer. They corner the man, who seems unable to understand their attempts at calming patter.

Soon, the entire ward wakes. Kid Circus spontaneously erupts. Doped, in traction, terminally ill, the imps remain capable of thrilling to a fracas. Sick juveniles aid and abet, to the best of their vitiated abilities, the breakdown of law and order. Staff must resort to riot suppression, the kiddie water cannons.

Questions commence with the return to normal. How did father and daughter find one another with no messages passed between them? They didn't: the only possible answer. How could a full-grown man slip past the whole medical establishment, unobserved? He couldn’t, obviously. Yet there is his makeshift pallet, right by her bedside.

Joy, terrified, serves as interpreter for her even more frightened father. The admin nurse in charge says, "Tell him to calm down. We're not the police. No one will hear anything about him. We just need his cooperation, nothing more." She considers adding: Tell him you might die unless he gives us his signature.

Negotiations are awkward and drawn out. The man proclaims his innocence. He several times launches into the story of his escape from home, carefully illustrating the persecutions that macerated his family. He lays out their mine-strewn path to the sea. He recites a complex, speculative narrative about what happened to various of his fellow sailors once the craft touched land, their fates, grander or more hideous, enfranchising his.

The hospital objects at every turn: We don't care. We don't need to know. We just want to save your daughter. Both sides have trouble hearing the demure, soft-voiced, simultaneous translator losing strength between them.

Slowly the required papers get hashed through. A staffer reads the legalese and prepares a delicate paraphrase for the twelve-year-old. She in turn constructs a valley dialect version for her father: You agree not to ask them for lots of money if they should make a mistake and something bad happen to me. The old man then launches into an account about a man on the boat who wasn't even a political refugee being given to a rich family up north where all he has to do is skim their pool every morning and douse it with chemicals twice a week. The girl must then translate this story to the objecting staff, silently succumbing to a shame more private and roseate than any bone disease.

The whole transaction is bathed in the surreal sepia of two in the morning. When the signing at last takes place, even that must be mediated. The man inscribes his name in the specified place, but in a Devanagari-derived script that does no one any good whatsoever. The night shift has no idea if the signature is sufficient. They know only that they need something from the fugitive before he bolts and vanishes again.

They ask him for a Roman transliteration. Joy must again supply it, reading, sounding, thinking, converting, moistening the ballpoint pensively on her tongue, writing in her bulging, balloon, block printing (she has not yet mastered cursive) WISAT STEPANEEVONG MAWKHAN. Emergency words that will remain behind, carved in this bark, when all this room's transients have moved on, traceless, into the interior.

Bó what would have been elevenses in another life, the evacuation had run mad. Children thickened alleys into lanes, lanes into streets, streets into high circuses. Evacuee bands swerved across the city, schooling like shoals over lost galleons' hulks. Squadrons swarmed the roundabouts, mobbed junctions, and lined the embankments, throttling thoroughfares in cinematic crocodile lines, past all authorities' ability to administer.

The city was now an orderly anarchy, urgently well mannered, tamed by emergency. Theatre, Chriswick had thought, stumbling out to take his part in the overcast September light. The gross, otherworldly theatre of history's gymkhana.

It was as if some world mother had climbed into the lantern of St. Paul's and blown an enormous whistle three times — the signal for home before dark. Only, the motion triggered in delinquent children wasn't homewards now, but out, flung wide, scattering all school-agers onto the sleepy hinterland.

Nothing in the city's two written millennia could match this. The occasional plague, even great fires seemed slack in comparison. Chris-wick and his band of assignees, paralyzed on the school steps, watched j the tide of London under-twelvers recede before their eyes. Chriswick -1 could not even manage a head count of his own. All Southwark would be emptied by nightfall.

Fifteen years in planning, and the ARP scheme's Friday-morning live run had already pitched the nation into the chaos it meant to prevent. Air Raid Preparedness: within hours, it seemed a cruel joke. Who prepared them for the preparations? No sirens or screaming. No final showdown alarms aside from the gauntlet of Southwark mums sobbing along the escape routes. All the advance warning they had received was headmaster calling assembly and announcing, "Get a move on, lads. You girls too. We're off, then. Do Prince Edward's proud." A picnic on the parade ground of apocalypse.

Chriswick's form sent up a great cheer at headmaster's announcement. Another lark, like the three rehearsal shams they'd had at the end of summer. Anything to escape lessons. The poor wretches hadn't a clue in creation to what lay in wait for them. Not to say that the masters had any more notion; Chriswick himself, in The Palmer's just a dozen months before, had drained an ale at the news of that spineless wonder waving his little scrap of paper around out on the tarmac. The whole local had sent up a pitiful, liquid huzzah of deliverance from evil.

This morning, deliverance disappeared as quickly as the state ration of Cadbury's. Somehow, the typists had managed to produce a label for each child. More miraculously, staff succeeded in getting the right labels pinned to more or less the right human parcels. Then the haversacks, the carrier bags, the personal bundles, and of course the cardboard boxes promising protection against mass chemical death. Chriswick and the other escorting officers donned their humiliating white armbands and away they went, behind a bedsheet banner as if to the bloody Baden-Powell family reunion.

They struck off, although Chriswick hadn't any more idea where they were headed than those idiots on the ARP subcommittee. It had taken the combined intellects of the War Office, Ministry of Health, CID, and — added in a moment of patronizing weakness — the chief inspector of schools to toss off the plan for evacuating four million tinies from the nation's principal cities in seventy-two hours. Unfortunately, no one in the chain of command had thought to inform Prince Edward's, Chriswick's battalion, just how they were to join ranks with that four million.

Chriswick marshalled his contingent on the south playing fields, awaiting word. None coming, he skirted back out among the departing groups and cornered a colleague. "Hunter, where exactly are we headed?"

The swine only shrugged and replied in his best George Sanders, "Why, into the valley of Death, old man."

Returning to his group, Chriswick surprised a dozen boys in the act of putting on their masks, making explosions, and dying noisily. The masks were silly nuisances. How any child could stand the rubbery taste was beyond Chriswick. He'd heard that some up-and-comer at the Air Ministry had put into production bright blue-and-red masks with big Mickey ears — respirators for the two-to-fives in the final struggle against the international fascist subversion of world order.