Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Her clients belie every story she would read to them: wasted torsos inscribed by gang insignia. Scurvied spines that slump appalled by their first balanced dinner. Ten-year-olds who food-process their eyes with homemade weapons. Who put their faces through the windshields of cars they were stealing. Who, by junior high, replay in miniature their parents' lifetime criminal loops — expulsion, record, parole, repeat offense. Who spit into drinking glasses and clean their teeth with salted index fingers or the corners of scummy undershirts.

Yet she knows them all by name and history, almost before making their manila acquaintance. She can recognize each halth- compatriota from her own sixth-grade studio photographer's composite photo of a suburban school grotesque in its Wisconsin, fairy tale privilege. The might-have-been lives not yet extinguished in their faces seem to her the bewildered remakes of safeguarded Julie Axelrods and John Lartzes, prophase faces frozen for little Linda Espéra at the age when she last saw them. She knows: every one of these visaless deportees would kill for the chance to regress to afternoons of benevolent chutes and ladders if they could.

The disease, the accident that brings them to her is just the tip of a spiked pithing stick lifetimes longer than the few years these victims have been given. She has brought children back from the point of despair, returned them to whole except for a refusal to urinate, or an uncontrollable need to pee around the clock. Or eat until unconscious, or starve into airy nothingness. Or scream at certain colors and pitches, or buckle over from imaginary pains. Or refuse to talk, or lose all ability to stop. She has seen a child pinch off his finger in a folding bed rather than let himself be discharged back home.

What medicine can she possibly slip them, during the few weeks when the state will pick up the tab? She needs the psychic analog of antimalarial paste from thirteen buttercups. Brown sugar and beets for whooping cough. Bandages of spider webs, cobwebs, puffballs, for binding up wounds. Powwows for burns and bleeding. Nothing less than immigrant folk remedies will help. Leaping cures for those abandoned to a newfound land.

A single checklist informs her every therapy. If their legs jitter, she takes them jogging. Longer and longer circuits, through the wards, up and down the emergency stairwells, around the parking lot, in neighborhood runs swelling incrementally until they are off, no turning back, gone. If their voices catch or slur, then it's amateur forensics, debating gowns scissored from surgical scrubs, the stage curtain stenciled with the hospital logo. A season of speech, and they begin throwing off the podium yoke, exiting into the imaginary wings in search of more in situ material. If they still scream in their sleep over torched apartment blocks, then she assigns them to a design team busy drawing up an entire Utopian city from the fireplugs up. Those who have fallen out of perfect pitch she recruits to carol the geriatrics, and if their "First Noel" comes out more sinuous mariachi or reedy street Arabic than Eurodiatonic, then it's that much more medicinal for the chorus.

Reading out loud helps as much as anything. Hardly among her official requirements; not included in what they ever-so-modestly pay her for. It's strictly volunteer, candy-striper activity at best. But nothing can touch it for building collateral trust. When the parents go home (yes, she repeatedly tells the slumming doctors, even welfare mothers notice when one of their dozen is missing), after her own official rounds are over, Linda sneaks back into the sick bay, setting off shouted requests. Box scores, pop lyrics, soap opera synopses, fanzines, miscellanies, believe-it-or-nots, books of video game clues: they demand any printed word whatsoever from the outside world.

The reading therapy is as much for her as for them. It restores her to prepragmatics, when she still believed she might somehow make a living out of the communal pleasure of words. At eighteen, the mystery unfolding around her like a convoluted orchid, the erotics of social prosody suggested for a semester that English lit might be a legitimate, maybe even a responsible major. In those days the fate of the West at its pivotal, wavering moment seemed to depend on what the word "still" meant in the line "Thou still unravished bride of quietness." She hears it again now, out loud — poetry, antique verse so strange and illegally alien in this place that it holds even hardened and dying children spellbound for the scope of a few stanzas.

Read-alouds, the oldest recorded remedy, older than the earliest folk salves: these are her only way to trick her patients into downing, in concentrated oral doses, the whole regimen of blessed, bourgeois, fictive closure they have missed. Tales are the only available inoculations against the life they keep vomiting up for want of antigens. She reads them things she herself would have grimaced at at eight, knowing that without at least a taste of that outrageous fable of return in their deficiency-distended stomachs, they will never survive their own recovery. Children already lost to inherited addictions sit in a rapt half-circle, listening to their moonlighting occupational therapist reading from a book she has found in the ward library, a volume rescued from God knows what improbable secondhand shop of anomalous trinkets fetching absurd designer prices for hysterical campiness — tea trays emblazoned with saluting fifties hostesses or wall lamps made from the front ends of fatuous Chevy sedans. She plows through the spine, ticking off, one by one, the tales from that anthology, A Country a Day for a Year.

Tonight's story is from the distant North. How is it — the primary mystery for students of children's literature — that in all eras, the richest hints of hidden destination derive from the North? The differential is wider than the gap between brocade and flax. She has her private answer: the South insists on the child as embryonic adult, while the North has always known that the adult is just a displaced child. Is it freezing climate that crystallizes imagination, or is there some Southern Andersen or Grimm that her anthology has not yet discovered? She reads to them tonight about an innkeeper's wife on the North Sea, who dreams of unspendable treasure to be found outside the bourse of the big city. There, at the bourse, a broker laughs at her gullibility. "Why, I myself have dreamed of a fortune under the bed in an inn on the North Sea." The woman rushes home, tears up her floorboards, and finds her kingdom. This is the key to narrative therapy, the cure of interlocking dreams.

That surgeon she has foolishly flirted with comes into the ward on autopilot, stands and examines her. She feels herself a girl in this moment, reading. The anachronistic tableau fades as he watches, a freak five-point snowflake melting in the hand. She keeps her cadence up for half a story before he withdraws, thinking himself unseen. Outside the hospital window, even in the failing light, every listening child can see it is still East Angel City, a neighborhood a year or two away from setting itself on fire, exploding again under the pressure of daily unanswered need, routinely violated due process, random strip-search and seizure. They need only shift their eyes to see a skyline rushing to void all the clauses of the social contract it has but acquiesced to until now. Each thing she reads them tells in code how they are rudderless, at the mercy of their own unchecked unfolding, racing to event's end.

Story Hour is strictly giveaway. Tax wars in a country that considers public payment to be an infringement on private liberty guarantee that all costs remain hidden, shunted off on revolving credit until the unpayable lump sum comes due. Linda never got around to economics in school. Perhaps that's why she, almost alone, sees that society's every advance up to this minute has been paid for by liquidating principal, mortgaging the unborn. It takes no special macroeconomic smarts to see where the curves of expenditure and cost will intersect. She reads them another tale, one where life exists entirely off wishes and interest.