Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

The boat girl alone treats him with a mixture of suspicion and astonishment. "What's with What's-her-namee-vong?" Nicolino asks Chuck, the No-Face, whose fantastic handicap, despite his angelic good nature, promotes him to Nico's second-in-command and senior partner in crime.

Chuck shrugs. "Think she had to have some stuff taken out of her ankle."

"Not that matter, Cluckie. I mean, how come she's got her head up her bunghole and her nose in dictionaries all the time? We're working some great angles here. And where the crud is she? Studying."

"Maybe we move around too fast for her. She's still a little wobbly…»

"Wobbly? Hah. Ben here is your basic beach ball. Double amputee, and he's in on just about every operation we run."

"I don't know, Nico. Maybe we…"

"Maybe we better go have a talk with this chick, that's what. Let's see. Think she'd go for one of these?" He riffles through his stash of illustrated fiction and produces a Sergeant Shrapnel, all about hand-to-hand fighting on a Pacific island infested with subterranean networks of enemy burrows crawling with giant bamboo rats. A hesitant pause from Chuck makes Nico throw up his age-wasted arms in exasperation. "Come on! Gimme a flipping bee. This is one of the best 'zines I got."

He pulls out the Blue Book as proof, but Chuck stands firm. "Uh-uh, Nico. I don't think so. She likes to read those…"

"I know what she likes to read. That's exactly the problem here, isn't it? Wait. I got it. Here's the ticket." He rummages around in the piles of noncomic trading booty, at last locating a plastic bag no bigger than his fist. "Come on, Cluck. Let's go have a word with this femme."

Preliminaries are awkward. Or, rather, there are no preliminaries. Joy watches them approach from the horizontal, frightened and expectant, as if she has long known that this visit was inevitable.

"Here," Nico says, when they reach her bedside. He thrusts the buy-off peace offering into the boat girl's hands. The boss remains unflustered despite the suppressed giggling on all sides. But it does unnerve him a little when this Joy creature refuses to ask what the present is, resorting instead to label reading.

The bag is full of tiny, brown bulbs that shuffle about as if alive. She watches hushed as the lumps of animate popcorn bang randomly with increasing vigor as she takes them into her hand. The label reads:

Mexican Jumping Beans

Born into the only home they will ever know, gradually expending their finite supply of food, these tiny larvae hurl themselves continuously against the walls of their constricting prisons….

"Immense, huh?" Nico prompts.

"Intense," Chuck is quick to ratify.

But Joy looks up after a moment's incomprehension. "Sad."

"Sad?" Nico fails to keep the note of moral outrage out of his dignified tone.

"Very sad."

Chuck jumps in, the hapless moderator, eager to show the merits of both sides. "Yeah, but, I mean, they can't be unhappy in there. Huh? Because they've never seen anything but the inside. They don't even know about, they can't even picture…"

"Then why are they trying so hard to get out?" Joy's interruption, awful in its certainty, is soft to the point of disappearing. But she looks forgivingly at Chuck; he, at least, is doing the best he can.

"Holy jump up and sit down. Listen to this, will ya? Get outta my star system. Get outta order. I've never heard such drivel. These things are utterly cool. You got to be completely whacked not to see that. And they're illegal too! Any idea what it takes to slip one of these babies past the Agriculture agents they got posted all up and down the borders?"

"Half the children in this hospital have slipped…"

"Wait a minute," Chuck intervenes. "They must be able to get out. If they can't get out, then how do they…?"

"How what, you weed weevil?"

"How does the species, you know…?"

"Procreate?" Joy suggests, at almost speaking volume.

" 'Procreate,' Cluckie? That the word you're looking for?" Nico shoves his buddy, almost spitting with smirk.

The question returns Joy to the magic beans with new intensity. Perhaps there is more to this prison than the identifying label lets on. "Thank you. I'll take care of them," she says, looking into the eyes of the man who never shed boyhood. A nervous treaty, but the one he came to establish.

"Great. You do that. Now tell me one thing. How come you just lie here studying all the time?"

"My leg hurts."

"No, the studying part. I mean, Louise. You're on vacation here."

"We still have to graduate."

"Oh wow. You are spoo-ky. Graduate? Why?" Nico tries to wipe the sweatband of his ball cap without removing it. "Okay, never mind that one. Suppose, just for grins, that I humor you. So what do we have to know for the exam? Go ahead. I'm asking. Graduate me. Learn me something."

She gives him a strange, probing look. Her eyes tell him: You can drop the disguise. No need to pretend with me. I've read your biography. Twice through. And this is where I'm supposed to teach you the end of the story you were eavesdropping on, outside the window, late one interrupted night.

The look, the accusation — I know who you are — rattles him. "Hey, Cluckie. C'mon. Let's blow this peanut stand. We got work to do."

Chuck hesitates a moment, his bandaged face trying to twist into an explanation wide enough to appease everyone. He turns to trot after the boss, when Joy calls them back.

"Wait a minute. 'Lino?" She swallows the first syllables in ignorance or first, awkward attempt at familiarity. The summoned boy returns to bedside, nice and casual like. "I wanted to ask you." She reaches, without letting him from her steady scrutiny, for a thin volume that she has kept at her side since receiving it days back. She fixes on the ancient, taut face, hoping to surprise it into dropping its disguise. "Do you know this story?"

If she flushes out the revealing muscle-flinch she expects, it does not show. Nico takes the hundred and fifty pages, thumbs through it back to front, reads the dedication and the tide page. "I'll swap you two superheroes, a sci-fi, and a kissy thing of your choice."

He looks up. His eyes challenge those of this overlathed dowel, this vanishing girl. "And I'll throw in a mint-condition chocolate cream egg. Just because I'm a nice guy."

For obvious reasons, the premature pensioner becomes Linda's darling. Any kid who not only puts up willingly with her amateur therapy reading but actually ad-libs asides is a patient after her own heart. On her rounds, she quickly learns how to get the maximum rile-up by calling out to him, "How's it hanging, old man?"

He glows under the sobriquet, puts on a palsy act, laces his already disconcerting voice with parody tremolo, and warbles back, "Can't complain. Well, I could complain. In fact…" Or: "Hanging? Wait. Lemme check."

Well, she asked for it. This afternoon, Linda finds Nico and a fraction of his gang camped around a TV. "What's up? What's on?" Perfect chance to get them to tell her one for a change.

"Stupid so-called show about some cartoon future that the friggin' cat dragged in." Nico's betrayal of the spell that has held half a dozen of his cohorts enthralled causes several wounded faces to jerk in hurt incomprehension. His better self, protesting pitifully from its perch on the traditional right clavicle, causes Nico to repent his rudeness by the time-honored method of redoubling it. "Yeah. You heard me right. Dumbshit program here, gentlemen."

"Nico," Linda growls. Quite the little performance he's mustering for her sake. A shame that kind of strutting is restricted to the young, or the old, or whatever her potty-mouthed courtier actually is.