Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Here was a city given enough time and sun and wealth to have come perilously close to transcendence. It was halfway to becoming the thing that all cities are seeded to be. With easy benevolence, it had grown into a gathering place of scattered people. Syllables of Arabic, French, Turkish, English, Italian, and Kurdish bargained with one another through the commercial districts. Life disturbed the silence of crusader churches, milled about the mosaicked mosques, and picked through the Roman ruins lying just across the rim of hills outside of town.

Sitting in the smoking cafés, listening to the reports that the old men gathered exclusively for him — accounts of wandering rocks, intelligent ships that could sniff out ocean currents, wine tuns that seeped full again overnight — the boy realized: this country was the sero milestone from which all migratory sweeps set out. A life posting here would be beyond luxury. He could snorkel forever for sea urchins ø the coastal grottoes, surviving on goat cheese and lamb and olives from the azure-dry mountains.

But after only nine months, the boy was yanked away. Ricky's father came home one day and issued the familiar packing orders. "No future in this town for the likes of us. Situation hopeless. We've been moved out." Further business was contraindicated. The home office threw in the towel.

As always, his father's insider prediction turned out to be worse than prophetic. Within weeks, the first trickles of smoke, still invisible to all but trained eyes, began rising from the airport, hovering over the harbor, and seeping through the back streets. In another five years, with the usual outside assistance, Beirut would be torn irreversibly apart. Over the next two decades, the shining white foundation by the sea would be mortared down to a quivering stump.

It had been the one inevitable place, a city that moved steadily for three millennia toward the goal of a livable kingdom here in this life. This capital that had teetered on the edge of final deliverance disintegrated before reaching it. Over the years, the boy watched from a distance as it descended into a spiral of factional violence from which it would never recover. He committed the lesson to long-term memory, and confirmed it repeatedly. Paris, New York, Tokyo — all would fall as quickly and completely, all the blessed islands of the world, sucked down.

His family's evacuation from a still ravishingly beautiful Beirut was banal, expected. Departure arrived as quietly as the standard strange tenant always arrives in Chapter Two. The boy took banishment in stride. By this point in his life, he could be packed to leave anywhere, forever, in a matter of a weekend.

After Beirut, the family floated about the Near East for a handful of stays, short even by his father's standards. They headed temporarily for rock-solid Cyprus. There, under a canvas tent, on a portable television with sound drowned out by a gas-powered generator the size of a small munitions plant, the three of them watched a grainy, unidentifiable machine bump up against an even grainier, more unidentifiable landscape. Through the cloud of soundtrack static, Ricky thought he could make out a man saying, "Uh, Houston?" He heard the urgency of disbelief in that endless pause, a wait pregnant with every incredulous question that technological restlessness would never be able to address. Words full of the stunned, wondering irrelevance of speech: How can one ever announce this? "Eh … Tranquillity Base … "

He thought it a toss-up as to which of those two words was more implausibly surreal. Both were imaginary constructs, pointers to a lost colony off to airless nowhere. One small step, one low-G caper that extended the infinite series and converged on a tranquillity, on an extraterrestrial base that the boy had never once in all his years doubted would be reestablished in his lifetime. His father told him to remember this moment for some future, comprehensive, behind-the-wheel exam. He smiled at the advice. Remember? He had never forgotten. He'd only been waiting for the landing to catch up to him.

Master this. Make a note. This one's important. His school was a hands-on social studies project gathered from the hot spots of the globe. Portable generators in a strikable Cypriot tent; blackboard and chalk propped up against a schoolhouse-sized baobab; a freak-show museum of formaldehyde jars in Sunday markets across Asia; a whole natural history every time he purged sub-Saharan water parasites from his system. Each chance reassignment became curriculum. Formal education was where he could scavenge it throughout his formative years.

And Ricky was an honor student in this erratic school. He rarely needed to look at a problem twice and never stooped to homework. The traditional round robins of algebra and economics, the model electric circuits, and the posters of the stages of alluvial fans were child's play compared to the shifting rainbow coalitions of recess or the occasional mandatory religion classes where he hadn't an Eskimo's chance in hell.

In sports he was too fair ever to rise higher than mediocre. He liked pickup multinational World Cups, but tried to engineer all the matches to end up ties. He learned the tensile strength of the local teak or cedar with near-native fluency, jackfruit disaster notwithstanding. A ball's parabolas could be extrapolated from kapok to rattan. But compete? Why? It didn't lead anywhere.

His schoolmates came, like Ricky, from families adrift on the world circuit. Sons and daughters of servicemen, missionaries, field agents for well-intentioned but forsaken UN agencies. For sustained companionship, small schools in insignificant villages were the best. People posted to off-track places tended to stick around longer. Big cities had notoriously high turnovers.

His friends disappeared faster than water down a wadi. When they were not being reposted, Ricky's buddies simply died on him. He lost two Sao Paulo streetballer mates to kidnappers, and his best friend in all Indonesia was found convulsed in bed, clutching a plastic sack of inhalant. Like those unmapped mansions on deserted roads, come across by chance during late-night storms, his friends vanished before he could return in daylight to look for them. Faces of all nations rushed past as furiously as a perverse dodge ball whose torture was never even to graze, never hit him at all.

He rapidly developed what his father called personal capital. Self-reliance: the reputed byword of his national character. He knew nothing about the mythic States. What stunted access he did have to homeland ways only mystified him further. The sight of Mrs. Carmi-chael or little blond Dennis-san speaking Japanese or Hindi on decrepit black-and-whites with abysmal reception kept him laughing only until he'd learned enough of the local idiom to be baffled by the lines.

To fill all the hours of a day, he drew complex maps or invented games he could play alone. He taught himself to play reed organs and talking drums. There were always gardeners or cooks who now and then had time for him. From these adult friends he learned endlessly useful things like how to treat lemon bark or how to coax a coconut tree into giving up its milk, palm cabbage, and sugar.

But none of these activities filled the expanse of time assigned him. A child abroad, at large in the unlimited confines and corridors that Air America served, he could almost palpate the concealed country he stood flush up against. The land he looked for was the only one large enough to accommodate native speculation. He read about it at night, in the maps and travel accounts of the local children's literature, not yet outgrown.

In the last summer of his childhood, Ricky's mother and father, out of parental obligation, took him to tour his unknown home. They felt that the boy should possess more than just a picture-book, View-Master acquaintance with the Lincoln Memorial and Yosemite. Ricky liked the States, where people were tried only for alleged crimes and no one need ever get out of the car, even to eat. The vaudeville system of weights and measures did give him trouble, however. And surprisingly, despite supermarkets the size of entire autonomous guerrilla regions he had lived in, Ricky's countrymen had not yet discovered anise coffee poured over crushed ice, or the pleasures of dried squid tucked in the back of the cheek all afternoon. Some mornings he would wake up too early, anxiously wondering, until consciousness took him, what had happened to the street vendors' calls.