Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Where's the Rapparition when we need him? The pint-sized poet could defuse this whole self-powered keg with a few well-placed hypermetrics. You know, a little sync along the lines of:

Some say this madness is the workin' out of scripture,

With Belial and Nemesis taking up the picture;

You tell me the unlivable is better than okay

'Cause we're heading for a showdown like the Good Book say.

Yeah, set the kid up as equal-time evangelist on the alternative station and we might just get enough market share to survive. But Kraft himself has only recently put the boy to bed with a mouth full of bloody fudge ripple.

On another block of sets, glitz-punkers probe the anarcho-disintegrating underside, pretending (like the solitary man trekking across the Gobi followed by a hidden documentary crew of two dozen, or the first-ever flimsy plane touching down on a deserted island, as shot from below by the disembodied camera) that they aren't part of a million-dollar, cake makeup, multiple-take, posturing, slick production number. Another, adjacent slice of the color carousel busily spins out its insistence that the universe can be saved only by constructing a doughnut the size of a galaxy.

An oval nimbus above this row of screens spews out one of those Unsolved Celebrity Mystery Tonight! samplers. Today's real reenactment includes the lavish particulars of Eva Braun's unquenchable and probably unrequited crush on Robert Taylor as well as Sukarno's lifelong ambition to sleep with Marilyn Monroe. Both utterly true, the anchors swear, so help me Broadcast.

A movie vérité police-blotter public service announcement about the recent epidemic of vanishing little ones — two million annually, a full two thirds of these abductions masterminded by estranged parents — dissolves from a gloss of the Missing Children Act into an advertisement for Home Litigation Workshops. This offer, void where prohibited, is flanked on both sides by banks of full-length shots, each in slightly different tonal registers, of a devastating Brit girl, fourteen at the most, telling her Yank soldier that she isn't going to do it, war or no war, unless they do it standing up, the best contraceptive method available. He leans her gently against the wall and provides her with stirrups by sticking two Coke bottles (empty) in his khaki back pockets while the cameras cozy in for this bit of shared intimacy in the endless, interchangeable, beautifully textured darkness at the edge of time.

This brief cross-sectional spin through the dial's mandala suffices to remind Kraft of what incontestable research continuously discovers and covers back up: the species is clinically psychotic. Pathetic, deranged, intrinsically, irreversibly mercury-poisoned by nature, by birth. And what more could one expect of a cobbled-up bastard platypus, a creature whose spirit is epoxied to its somatic foundation? Mental thalidomide cases, every last mother's son, as far back as accounts take things. On one cadre of tubes, slithery androgynes belt out a hardcore rendition of the station's signature slogan: "We nail your eyes to the screen." Just kitty-corner to these, the minority bank of "educational" monitors takes things back to a past whose name is somehow familiar to Kraft, although the face evades him.

At first he mistakes this signal for more current event. But a minute's wading in this current and the waters open up just upstream of the present. A cavalcade of years from — how long ago? What time is it now? Kraft stands staring in review at events he witnessed once, some or them firsthand, when he was still young enough to weave them into the semblance of sense. The replay unfolds in front of him, hurting afresh, the second bite of remorse.

Watches a river rising, somewhere in the Sunny South. It has swollen before, overflowed even, but never like this. The Flourishing One, survivor of countless previous auguries, the jerkwater moneylenders' town that rose to respark the West, is going under. Florence's shaky alliance with its pulmonary artery has been severed. Nervous black-and-white hand-held cameras make their way down the mud-plundered streets-turned-sewers of what was once the most angelic of angel cities.

Crude floodlights play over the Old Bridge or huddle under a loggia. Here and there, spots of sculpture bob above four meters of water. Piazza becomes lago, and eight centuries of art's aid and comfort are lost. Distraught signori from the National Salvation Board tell how they have given up on the mosaics and frescoes and are concentrating on porting as many priceless paintings and papers as possible out of reach of the rising ooze. All those not busy saving themselves are conscripted: inmates, the army, whole schools…

On that sound cue, cut to another, simultaneous mudslide. North now, October of the same year. From the center of history to its exploited edge. Pitiful little Welsh mining town, population too small for formal census. The view of disaster from inside the doomed schoolroom. How they looked out, looked and saw a mountain rise up and roll down its own slurry of slag, settle in and simply annihilate this building like a felt hat left on a chair. Inside, the town's entire next generation, one hundred and sixteen studious would-be graduates, most of them slated for the mines, hard at work doing sums and grammar and history — the Blitz, the famous Evacuation — look up for a minute before they are mass-buried, swallowed in one spasm by the sliding earth. Look up and see a tribe of faces their age, peering in the schoolroom window, coaxing them desperately outside, elsewhere, beyond safety.

Now is already too late. Mudslide slips elementally into sandstorm, a desiccating desert war. Boy soldiers in that same epochal year once more march into the town of God's Foundation, while other boy soldiers flee the sacred city through secular back streets. Everywhere, scripture is fulfilled faster than it can be written. At the same time (now what, Kraft wonders, can that absurd little phrase possibly still mean?) as this holy showdown, student armies face off on three other continents. The call for victory of belief over doubt wipes away with one sweep the last cobweb cling. Half a dozen simultaneous dream liberations are declared by those young enough to have nothing to lose but the childhood already denied them.

A six-year-old black girl fire-hosed from the streets of Birmingham is replaced by a crowd of her contemporaries, singing into the city center. Teen rioters vent their birthright terrors even here, just down the block from Kraft's alma mater. He watches them stand off the State again for a while, until the inevitable body bags decide matters. The newsreels veer to the shadowed half of the ball. There, in mass placard marches, Maoist high school dropouts cow a quarter of the planet. French, Spanish, Chilean, Indonesian, and Rhodesian school-agers blunder through the revolutionary calendar, staunching their way toward year one. A fly-fanged, glazed-eyed, successionist, baby Ibo exoskeleton flexes its stick-limbs, twists to reach a mother's teat no larger or moister than a shriveled mole.

No possible connective thread explains, let alone excuses, this shock-wave assault of images. The obvious answer — Chronology, Your Early Years in Review — appalls Kraft with its arbitrariness. Okay, so the pics in this sampler of disintegration all took place in the space of — what? A small-spanned handful of months? A shared time frame still reveals nothing by way of explanation, nor says what possessed the show's rambling editor to string these random spots together. Empty syllogism, domainless variables: this then this then this…

His nostrils flare at the remembered stink of a certain institutional-green, paint-plastic coating, a pocked, porous, cinder-block lunar landscape. He feels the impression of it, close up, smashed against his face during some drill — fire, tornado, raid, political collapse. He and a few hundred others, crouched down for hours, giggling and dry-heaving by turns, compacted into the stingy angle between wall and floor. The smell sticks in his throat as if newly coated, memory's phlegm brought up by this cough of cavalcade. If these film bursts share anything at all, it's the thread running through all the other free-associating open channels. The one distributed middle, the only available theme: tenderfoot decamping, refugees on the run, issuing from cities set ablaze by those no closer to legal age than they.