Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Alarmed by silence, Chriswick looked up to find the choristers filing toward the vestry. He called out, "Hallo. You boys." The choir turned in unison, as if noticing for the first time that the nave was inhabited. Chriswick's speaking in church wiped away some cobweb restraint from the boys. At the common signal, choirboys and frayed evacuees met in the transept crossing, converged on each other, touching, talking rapidly, collapsing back to their proper ages.

Chriswick found himself unable to take the few steps to where the children gathered. He sat in the pew and gazed on this meeting between mutually uncomprehending races. The choirboys paid court to Chriswick's two youngest girls, giving them chocolate that appeared by magic from cassock pockets. He overheard one of his toughs compliment a singer. "You don't 'alf sound like a host of bleedin' serabim."

Each group sniffed the other, excitedly. The spent children had found a second wind. The day, the evensong had so drained Chriswick that he could barely open his mouth. From the back of the nave, he called out to the youth who had sung solo, "Are you boys at the cathedral school?"

The boy jerked. "What cathedral?"

Chriswick's surprise was even greater. The boy was American. Imperceptible when singing, the speech was unmistakable. Something in the boy's reticence suggested secret transatlantic alliances, affairs of state ahead of their time.

"Where is your conductor? Are you rehearsing for something?"

"We're touring," the boy replied, in churchly whisper. The South-wark children, awed by his accent, crowded around. The Yank began spinning them a fantastic travelogue, an adventure Chriswick could not make out from the narthex. The chanter handed over for examination a metal pendant hanging on the end of a chain. Some High Church bauble, an excellent Norman copy it seemed from Chriswick's distance. A trumpet-toting angel, but with an astonishing, disfigured face. The street urchins fingered it in hushed admiration.

A fatigue suddenly swept over Chriswick, a heaviness past describing. Sleep penetrated into the rote core that had kept him moving for the past twelve hours. He felt as if St. Martin's were filling with a gas that made him want to curl up and fall blessedly, permanently unconscious. He pinched his jowls with his nails and shook himself. With effort, he stood and left by the west portal, needing air.

He stood in the churchyard, wanting a cigarette badly and a pint even worse. It was pitch dark; English evensong was over. Where was the billeting officer? Where would they sleep this night? Perhaps it would be best to bring the remainder back to London on a night train. They had spoiled enough lives already, condemning those children to the whims of strangers. He did not believe for a minute that any spot on this entire island would be safe from the coming nightmare.

The pilgrims' town was settled in for its night of sacrifice. All across the country tonight, in towns sheltered and forgotten, in Somerset and Devon and Dorset, in minuscule specks in East Anglia named Diss and Watton and Scole, in unpronounceable Welsh stone settlements, on the coastal ports, in Seaford and Hastings and Skegness, steeped in the Midlands, streaming over farms off the moors and dales and downs, ranging out to Lands End, Penzance, the project was coming home. Schoolchildren fleeing Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and London scattered like factory workers at history's closing whistle. From the southeast, over the coast, Chriswick could hear a low, mechanical hum, still far away but rushing toward the cliffs with each tick of earth's politics: the blanketing engines, the flotillas of their common, aerial destruction.

He turned back into the church to gather the remaining children and find at least temporary shelter for them. But the building was empty, as bare as the old woman's cupboard. Chriswick, in a daze, checked the niches and sacristy. There were no chapels where a group that size could hide. He was tired, tired past telling. He could not even remember, from any past so distant as an hour ago, how many he had come inside with. No one could have left by the west porch without his knowing. And yet, choir and makeshift congregation — both gone.

After the doomed city, the impassable Southwark streets, escape's debacle, the chaos of Waterloo, the market humiliation, the door-to-door desperate soliciting, the last sung service of innocence, the children had shaken loose of the real. The young had abandoned him to whatever fairy survival adults might still believe in at so late an hour.

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

What is the historical background behind these events?

Who is "that spineless wonder waving his little scrap of paper around out on the tarmac"?

What is the source of the allusion "into the valley of Death"? How does this irony contribute to the description of the evacuation?

Where, do you imagine, do the children disappear to at the story's end?

Define: elevenses, matric, Cadbury's, Norman, Saxon, Baden-Powell.

The nationwide evacuation of children described here really happened. Research this strange event and speculate on the impact it made on the life of a nation.

Interview a contemporary who has had to live through a similar experience. Gather his or her life history, and tell it.

They beat him within an inch of his life. While it's too much to say that he loves every minute of it, Kraft does come back for more. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Where'd that come from? Takes a beating, comes back bleating. Takes a mauling, keeps on crawling.

And not just on account of the student loans, which he could pay off easily from behind a desk at some university health center, pushing antacids and peddling the bland diet sheet to overwrought undergrads. Something inside him must prefer this, the assembly line of cases spilling out of packed cutting rooms, this dance marathon of service, sacrifice, and salvation. Op 'til you drop. Only intolerable fatigue keeps at bay the worse punishment awaiting him in slack hours. Whenever he's dealt more than three free hours in a row, he winds up on the phone, long distance to lost friends, philosophizing, predicting things, asking acquaintances spooky and proscribed questions.

Idle too long, he dallies with the idea of social reinstatement. A little free time, and he begins to believe he might be able to settle in somewhere. Memories of the place still lodge like lost baggage in the base of his brain. Sky-blue, home free, nights of lazy music while elaborate shaggy dog jokes drift in and out of attention. The kegger tap, the stoked fire, voices in the kitchen exchanging book and movie tides like spent mistresses. Close shoulder-brushes with strangers and intimates. Men to postmortem the latest big-league box scores and international fuck-ups. Women for declaring long unspoken love, just for the hell of it.

When the free hours grow too expansive, he takes Schwartz, the Board cram book, up to the hospital roof. This aerial view, distance perfecting the taillight-as-platelet metaphor, never ceases to calm him with scale. Sheer surface area, baroque Brussels-lace intricacy of civilization's switchboard interconnects, insists that he need never worry about leaving anything undone. It's all being checked off the To Do list somewhere, looked after deep inside this city circuitry. Somebody's taking care of it in a remote strip mall, office complex, or underground research facility out on the periphery. Or if not here, then within another city matrix elsewhere in the megapole, along the freeway, further down the continuous data stream.

During heavy call assaults, his beeper ponging every few seconds, the phone machine LCD stacking up a Sisyphean queue of unplugga-ble leaks, Kraft tends to stray into the contempt bred of familiarity. (And what could be more familiar than pawing minors' privates from the inside, hands not just on their dollhouse genitals but underneath them?) The temptation during unstructured R & R is even more dangerous. Sentimentality sets in, fueled by nostalgia of the worst kind. Nostalgia for events that haven't happened yet.