Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

It doesn't say. He must have floated for a long, long time. Reeds can be very watertight in these stories. But the ocean can be pretty big too. The Leech Child probably drifted in the current for years, farther and farther away, into places where land was completely unheard of.

Maybe the boat was held together by little metal clasps. That's it; I once read something like this. He pulled one of these metal strands loose and fashioned a bit of tinsel from it, which he dangled in the water just to amuse himself, because it looked pretty. And that's how, by accident, he learned that fish will bite at a hook. And he figured out that by eating fish, he could live pretty much as long as he needed.

Yeah? Well, all right It's possible. Read us another one.

(Night 139, central Italy. Twin infant sons of a vestal virgin and the God of War are sentenced by the king to be drowned in the Tiber. Miraculously, the cask they are put in floats. They are found and suckled by a wolf more loving than human parents. The foundlings grow up to invent the West.)

Go on. We want more.

(Night 21, the Near East. Another terrified tyrant orders all the male offspring of a certain tribe to be drowned to death. The mother makes a little reed ark for the boy, and lays him in the rushes on the riverbank. The tyrant's daughter finds the infant, and hires the boy's own mother to nurse him. The boy grows up to bring God's law to …)

Why drowning? Why water all the time? Why little boats?

Yes, that's odd, isn't it? Happens all over the place. Look at this: Night 308, the Mississippi. Night 145, Norway. Night 98, Kashmir. Night 114, Zimbabwe.

(Across the planet, attempted drownings, tiny bound bodies thrown deliberately back into the sea. All through the time line, vanishing into the current, carried along by the undertow. Every other story in any anthology — children sealed up, locked in casks, keelhauled, strapped on rafts, sucked down by the departing tide. A few miraculously saved, for future purposes.)

And some mom and dad always want to kill them.

Yes, true! Notice how the stories always blame some evil step-something, or foster fathers, or kings? Guilty conscience, I'll bet you anything. These cats have something to hide, I'm here to tell you. If they're not putting the kids out to drown in chests, then they're leaving them on church steps or by a roadside out of town. Or here, look: dropped off deep in the woods, bricked up into cornerstones, rolled over on in the parents' shared bed…

(…swaddled too tightly, delivered with a club to the skull or butterfly slit in the trachea, wrung with a bit of old cloth, or, for maximum efficiency-Night 3, Greece — eaten.)

Awesome. Any that stuff really happen?

(Night Before Last, Pacific Islands: two thirds of offspring. West Africa: any twins. Sarawak: boys strung up from trees. China: daughters given instant turnaround chance to return as sons. Germany, Italy, France: 1.8 "live birth" males to one female. SE England: "Three drowned in pond, two in well, five buried, two suffocated by pillow, two left in ditch, one thrown on dung heap, one slammed against bedpost, two twisted necks…" Chicago; Houston; Portland, OR: discreet suburban fatalities, malign neglect, everyday police roundups dribbling out of radio speakers in the dark, on all-night talk stations turned down low, between choruses of that old folk tune, / am no stranger to your town.}

Why?

(Tales 101 and 343: postpartum birth control. Done because we are too many. Tales 45, 83,162: quick cures for deprivation, illegitimacy, incest. That historical run in the 200s: merciful assists of nature, stifling the half-lunged, leaving the acephalic to starve. All but the hardiest arctic infants turned onto open pack ice. Mass infanticide — the simple extension of the battering and abuse cases right here in this listening ring. Folder 219: "She wouldn't love me, the little four-year-old slut. So I burned her feet with a cigarette." One step further, now. A last-ditch, or oven, or well, or pillowcase effort to extirpate the thing that will always remain a heartbeat outside control. Children are evil creatures. A devil lives in them. You can recognize changelings by the way they cry. A child needs both bread and blows. We must terrify them into being good. It was going to outlive me, so I killed it.

(These night-sirened final roundups are just the latest parental attempts to ward off prophecy. To kill the still-bewildered child in themselves that their own parents failed to finish off. The word goes out from the Imperial Capital, or is initiated by some two-bit, provincial governor: damage-control the old order. Issue the slaughter papers, mandate the stopgap massacre, book boxcar passage free of charge for every imminent threat to the status quo. Invested power faces no greater danger than these revolutionaries incarnate — every breathing body under voting age.)

I don't know, sweetheart. I wish I did.

Come on. Read. Keep reading. Give us one of those really mid ones.

(Night 12, Palestine. Herod's storm troopers, fathers from this part of the empire, conduct their house-to-house sweep in the dark. Students of political terror, they know that the random knock on the door works best at two A.M. These hatchetmen blindly follow orders, not much motivated by national security. Theirs is a saturation search-and-destroy. To get at the one potentially destabilizing element, the incumbent commander in chief is willing to expend all innocent hostage bystanders. The troops, agents of the State, work in willed ignorance, butchering in the dark — trapping toddlers in back alleys, encircling a knot on the plaza, mopping up pockets of resistance in the poultry market, methodically dispatching children as in some dream of urban renewal.

(Grotesque tableau, but the troops are now too deep into the tale to withdraw. Crack phalanxes rip open the province's newly toilet-trained. Erotic charge ripples once more through the professional soldier class at holding prepubescent flesh on the unsheathed sword.

(How is it that the account seems so familiar, as vivid as recent newspaper coverage or some further dead reckoning slated soon to be remembered forever? June student genocides, shooting up always on the other side of the world like so many lab strains of miracle rice, are here, by November, spread outside, flowering underneath the pédiatrie wing window.

(The redemptive germ kernel — how one fugitive family slips out the back steps, how one infant escapes the bloodbath to found the new order, the slaughtered little ones promoted to eternal blessedness — the end of this late-night read-aloud is decided by the time it arrives. The road to the future is paved with fourteen-inch corpses. That is their magic, incantatory function. All the teen poverty brides, the single mothers escaping another screaming mouth, the cunning merchants unwilling to invest in daughters: all serve as mere manipulated ignorant pawns of delivering prophecy. However they are killed this time around, the infant pilgrims form the race's blood sacrifice, progress's solid rocket fuel.

(What hope, when story outstrips the outside horrors her read-alouds are supposed to ward off? Raw nightmare will rule the ward tonight. Every splatter of Herod's maces into these sapling chests provokes its imitative blow here among the eager listeners. A group of four gladiators, incensed, hack wildly at each other's surgical dressings.)

Kwishhh. Whack. You a dead pers. Yeah! No, sorry, don't. One more, one more. We'll quit, we promise.

It's late. Come on, kids; bed. You'll get me in trouble.

No! Another. Okay, if y ou don't want to read no more, just at least tell us what happens to that boy. The deformed dude, in the boat.