Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Where necessity goes unpaid, she must donate her time, extending physical medicine until she becomes half teacher, half trainer, half director, half coach, half psychologist. When she reads out loud to too many, too long into the night, when the story safeguarding her listeners against actual awfulness is too Northern and icy in its enchantments, when the sense of its foretold ending grows too immediate and real, she begins to draw up, by story's end, a report card for the entire delinquent human project, a teacherly evaluation of this global little handgun victim, curled up invalid in front of her for the evening:

Math and Science: A.Student possesses enormous aptitude. Advancing rapidly on all fronts now…

Language Arts: —. Although gifted here, student remains undisciplined. Lapses into fits of inarticulateness when excited. Penmanship a joke.

Social Studies: C.Disappointing. Despite every opportunity of late, fails to rise above provincialism. Shows little sensitivity to foreign affairs…

Economics: Ñ—. Extremely uneven. Impressive progress in some areas, at the expense of others. Has not yet figured out the basic principles…

Civics and Poly Sci: D.Don't even ask. Pleads no contest on final exams.

Music and Art: Â+. Student constantly surprises. Varied and restless. Creativity really coming to the fore. A big overhaul may lie in wait.

History:Incomplete.

Health and Personal Hygiene: F.Five million children dead each year of diarrhea, for God's sake.

With such mixed grades, can the creature ever dream of graduating? Could any tutoring, any therapy at all work at this hour? Radical surgery, her new perhaps-beau might whisper to her. No program short of total slash-and-burn has any chance in hell of helping.

Fortunately, she's never been one to worry about the odds. One reaches an age when being realistic just isn't practical anymore. The work she does all life long may save no one. Even for the limb-clipped, organ-stripped preschooler with the IV walker, she may do nothing but cake-makeup a scar that the crippled child will never walk away from whole. She may at best only delay the night of full payment, the helpless screaming fit of fear laid down in personality's pede ward, in the so-called formative years. But whatever she gives them will be more than they arrived with.

And if she shares her professional conviction — say with this new man, at thirty-three already too worn down by fact ever to follow her, this jaded practitioner of a career she should know better than to mix with, a man who clearly prefers that she not learn the first thing about him — if she shows him the clinical trials for this secret healing charm, would he get it? Might she make even her new surgeon see that to pretend, to live as if life might yet lead all the way to unexpected deliverance, is the best way to keep from dying in midfable? Could she get him to sit in with her circle of stricken, listening children and take part in the promise of fiction, the pleasure, our one moral obligation?

He is no older, no more decimated than the worst of her children. And she has only this, this cobbled, worn ministration, to show any of those stubborn enough to remember how they have been dropped down in the middle of a plot that is only waiting for them to follow the lead. You are going somewhere. You are going somewhere. Sound it out, exercise the phonetics, the rhyme, the muscular spasm, the shape of the storied curve — beginning, development, complication, end. It is the point of being, the thing bones were built for, broken by, the land all leaps aim at, the link, the hovering conclusion, her whole-body therapy, the reading cure. A tale at night. A country a day for a year.

(Night 57, Japan.)

This is how the world begins. At first, the All was no more than a blurry egg, full of seeds and shaken together. After a time beyond telling, the heavier parts began to sink down and the lighter floated upon them, forming the plain of high heaven. On this plain, three gods were born of no one, lived out an eternity, and then vanished back into nothing.

How you gonna be born of no one? Everybody got.

Shh. Come on. It's a makeup; that's how it opens. Next there came about, on their own, a few pairs of gods who lived in the drifting middle of nowhere. The youngest couple among them were called Izanami and Izanagi, or She-the-Inviter and He-the-Inviter. She and He were ordered by their elders to collect a solid world from out of the shapeless, muddy waters that flowed beneath the high plain of heaven. They stood on the bridge of the sky and dipped a jeweled spear into the sandy broth below them, stirring it slowly. They pulled their spear out of the waters. A drop of brine sticking to the shaft fell off to form Onogoro, the first island.

She-the-Inviter and He-the-Inviter climbed down onto the island and began exploring it. They circled slowly around one another at the pillar at the center of the solid world. Slowly, they discovered each other, and learned that they wanted one another.

Uh-oh. They in trouble now. When my daddy found my big brother and me …

No, sweetheart; it wasn't like that. Remember, these two gods had no parents. Slowly, by experiment and chance, She-the-Inviter and He-the-Inviter learned how to make a baby. But their first child was born with something wrong with it. Because She did not yet know the rules of courtship she accidentally broke them. So the first infant who laid eyes on the world was born deformed.

Heh. Like me, you mean?

Yes, Chuck, my man. A little like you. She and He named their boy Hiruko, the Leech Child. They didn't know what they were supposed to do with him, so they built him a boat of reeds and set the boy adrift on the open sea. So you see, the very first child ever was abandoned. As soon as the Leech Child drifted out of sight, his parents began making other babies, more deities to cover every walk of creation.

Among their new children were the eight main islands of the world. She-the-Inviter was burned to death while giving birth to her last child, Fire. Gods spilled out of her dying body. Other gods arose from the tears of her husband's eyes. In a rage, He-the-Inviter swung his great blade and cut off the head of Fire, his son. From out of the bleeding neck of Fire there sprang Thunder, with several more gods.

The soul of She-the-Inviter went down into Yomi, the land of darkness, where He-the-Inviter madly followed. He wanted to find her and bring her back to life. But his wife had already eaten food cooked in the land of darkness, so she could not come back. The dead She warned her husband not to look upon her. But he disobeyed her command. He looked at her face, and saw something horrible. His wife was rotting. Maggots covered her. Shh! Yes, like the ones in old garbage. He-the-Inviter ran back up into the world in terror. She was hurt and angry, and She sent a pack of Furies to chase after her husband.

When He reached the surface once again, He sealed up the entrance to the land of darkness with an enormous rock. His wife became furious. She threatened to kill a thousand of their children every day that He kept her trapped. But He just sneered at her. He said that He would father fifteen hundred new children for every thousand that She killed. She and He knew they had come to an end.

To purify himself, He bathed in the waters. As He washed, more gods sprang from him. From the water sprinkling from his left eye was born the Sun, and from his right the Moon. Out of his nose there came Susanoo, the God of the Wind and Storm.

His nose? Gross. But what about the boy in the boat? The Leech?