Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

The right map, the appropriate triangulation might narrow down the vanishing point the girl was after. Cartography would reveal a surface pitted with sinkholes that drew drifters across this gift plain, lured them in and pulled the covers over. He had seen, from the air above half a dozen continents, how the map might work. The surface of the earth, a continuous, dense, originally igneous curve, was wearing down and building up at different rates. Water, wind, and sun slowly threaded it with veins, favored or despoiled spots with various soils, left behind regional features that shuttled between blessing and curse over the run of time.

Planet-sized convection currents in the mande churned up the crust and dealt it out again. Some places got granite, others obsidian. Lime laid down. Rock buckled into brittle ridges. The length and twist of a flood basin, a mountain range blocking or bestowing rainfall: these explained the secret, specific horrors of every place he'd ever lived. Weather spilled over the divide. On one side, forests formed; deserts dusted the other. The world surface was pimpled with unequal well-springs of wealth — tiny trees standing for timber, mocha ovals announcing coffee, triangles depicting tin.

Geography was the sole explanation anyone had yet given him for wars, trade, starvation, color, language, custom, mortality rates, the westward gravitation of power, tropical poverty that could not be dislodged. Geography was why that Hausa tribe found his hair so bizarre that they were compelled to stroke it as a good-luck charm. Geography sounded the thunk of darts thrown against the walls of the Singapore Anglo-American Club by civilizedly stewed civil servants upon whom the sun had recently set. The reason for Things as They Are lay quietly in tables of average temperature, salinity, acreage, snow, wind speed, altitude, fertility.

If, under the mesa edges, out here on the dry scrub range, a life had shaken loose, if one young hitchhiking girl had procured an exit visa, beautifully forged, it was to escape the local prejudice, the unfair play of forces flung from the earth's spinning axis. Travel companions he would never meet, friends with road tales far outstripping his streamed from spots all over the wrinkled planet surface like carbonation bubbles sprouting from invisible crevasses on the walls of drinking glasses. Places deep inside these continents must steadily absorb the stream. That was the only explanation how, fanning out from their font at the Nile, flowing atypically north to a delta a world wide, pitching over Niagara in a dinghy, the migrants could disappear back into desert, at night, on a nowhere Dakota road.

"This girl," Ricky asked the part-Indian woman politely, "this hitchhiker. Where did she ask to be dropped off?"

"She never did say. Just like, Wherever you're headed is fine with me.' Course, there aren't too many places out this way to be dropped…"

"Was she carrying anything? A knapsack, maybe? Books?"

The woman just looked at him strangely, patted him on the head, and went to check on the repair.

On the plane westward over the last stretch of coast, Ricky thanked his parents for the vacation. Yes, he agreed cooperatively, he was an American, as he was sure would become plain as soon as he had the chance to spend some time there. Yes, he hoped he would, someday, for college, perhaps. Where would he most like to settle down? Oh, St. Louis would be fine. Or Portland. Newport News. Sure, Asheville. Abilene. Anywhere. The Airy Above.

He settled in for the flight, a whole day-and-night affair, to a place whose native name was Angel City, the capital of a country called, locally, the Land of the Free. He had brought along a book for the ride. Where are you? the hurt voice, the wounded tone of this year's story opened. For whole pages, for the entire lifetime of the book's little boy, it searched down a chronic ache, a place agonizingly near in every way except for the passage there. Kraft looked up from his reading above the dead center of the Pacific, realizing, suddenly, that he had outgrown fiction.

A Sapling Learner's Classic

PETER PAN

By J. M. Barrie

Printing History

First published in 1911 under the tide Peter and Wendy and in 1921 under the tide Peter Pan and Wendy. First American edition …

ISBN number …

All rights reserved. Text copyright 1911, 1921, 19…

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any …

Do you know that this book is part of the J. M. Barrie "Peter Pan Bequest"? This means that J. M. Barrie's royalty on this book goes to help the doctors and nurses to cure the children who are lying ill in the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.

bequest: noun. A gift of money or property arranged by a person's last will. Also, the act of making such a gift.

royalty: noun. 1. The position of king or queen… A member of a royal family. 2. A portion of the money earned by the sale of a book, the licensing of an invention, the performance of…

Barrie, Sir James Matthew(May 9, 1860-June 19, 1937). Scottish author of Peter Pan. Barrie was one of ten children born to a country weaver. When he was six, an older brother died in a skating accident. The family never recovered from the shock. To Barrie's mother, the dead boy would remain a child who never …

CHAPTER ONE. PETER BREAKS THROUGH

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day …

… Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, "Oh, why can't you remain like this forever!" This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth …

henceforth: adverb. From this time forward. From now on.

CHAPTER THREE. COME AWAY, COME AWAY!

"But where do you live mostly now?"

"With the lost boys."

"Who are they?"

"They are the children who fall out of their perambulators… If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray…"

perambulate: verb. To walk about…

perambulator: noun. 1. A baby carriage. 2. A rolling wheel used to measure distances.

per ardua adastra: Latin phrase. Through difficulties, to the stars.

… and she was just slightly disappointed when he admitted that he came to the nursery window not to see her but to listen to stories.

"You see, I don't know any stories. None of the lost boys knows any stories."

lost-wax process, lost tribes, Lost Sunday, Lost Steps, Lost Manuscript, Lost Legions, Lost Generation, Lost Domain, Lost Colony, lost …

Peter the Hermit(P1050-1115). French preacher of the First Crusade. He fought in the siege of Antioch and rode victoriously into Jerusalem alongside …

Peter Pan.The boy who wouldn't grow up, hero of J. M. Barrie's …

CHAPTER FOUR. THE FLIGHT

… they drew near the Neverland… not perhaps so much owing to the guidance of Peter or Tink as because the island was out looking for them…

Strange to say, they all recognised it at once, and until fear fell upon them they hailed it, not as something long dreamt of and seen at last, but as a familiar friend…

névé, never, never ending, nevermore…

never-never:1. noun. The Australian desert outback, especially the Northern Territory. 2. adjective. Imaginary or fanciful. A never-never land is a paradise that exists only in the mind. See also: Utopia, Eden, Canaan, Cockaigne, El Dorado, Shangri-La, Arcadia… lotus land, wonderland, dreamland, fairyland… promised land, kingdom come, millennium.