Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

The second is not a where, but a what. It is the tag of that first strategic maneuver — emblem, metonym, the name people revive every time history rounds up its usual innocents. He can retrieve nothing of the original — not its century, nor locale, nor public motive. Somewhere there must be an account he can turn to, to recover the contour of an event he is not even sure ever actually happened.

He rakes his rooms, mine-sweeps the shelves where the general encyclopedia should be. Nothing but a wasteland of medical texts, back issues of Morbidity and Mortality, offprints on new techniques, Board review workbooks, in-service exam crams.

"What you looking for, sweetface?" Linda asks, scenting concern.

He does not stop to answer, but goes on searching. Who can he phone? There must be an 800 number, elected state rep, one of those public service outfits that deal with radon, gas smells, dead squirrels in the walls. He will take anything, any account whatsoever, even the docudrama version, the reenactment, the Based on a True Event.

Desperate, not even knowing what he is after anymore, he turns to the loose material the woman has dragged in with her. Her overnight bag. Has it come to that? Are the two of them an item, shacking up? Is this — good God — this near-girl, a little lolly-popper not more than two years out of her teens, spending whole nights, sleeping here? He'll get busted, booked, institutionalized, sentenced to a life of continuous, punitive tonsillectomies.

At odds' ends, he roots through her pile of print. The hot new issue of her own trade journal, Practical Physiatrics Review. Who names these things? A beach party bit of light reading, Postoperative Flexion Restoration. Next, a ridiculous grab-bag of field tools for the over-dedicated. Picture book, A Country a Night for a Year, which he whips through in a frenzy, but without success. One of those magic water-release books, half brushed in by a wildly inaccurate saturation painter, perhaps forced to hold brush in mouth. A pack of stiff-cardboard-bound comics.

"Oh, I traded Nico for those. You'll never believe what that kid asked for them."

All at once, there it is, lying bare in front of him. In the middle of the pack of illustrated funny magazines is the glaring ringer, one of those Treasure Chest Illustrated History Classics, the You Take Part series. He might have known that transported tribe would sooner or later throw the thing in his way.

"I had to swap him two pieces of…"

But Linda stops at the sight of what has come over him. His hand is stroking the glossy cartoon cover, an elaborate medieval crusader column, puerile, weaponless, stretching unbroken to an infinite horizon. In a voice not even a close impersonation of his own, addressing not her but fleeting figures just outside his window, some boy inside him asks, "Who are these…?"

His tongue tags along after the word it can't catch up with, the one that skids away just in front of the snare set for it. These kids. These children.

A picture book narrator, perched in the sky, looks down from miles on high onto a map where ink-etched ocean boldly wraps blocks of continent in currents of purest palette. Successive frames gradually pull the eye in tighter, until gross features firm. Steel-gray ice caps, bleakly gorgeous, rim the borders. Coasts cut seaward under a swirl of cloud. Waters stretch away until they arrive beyond the bounds of knowledge, spotted here and there with details for the scrupulous squinter — occasional sea monsters, the puckered face of the blowing wind, the blanketing expanse of a midsea mass that might be anything but to the practiced audience outside this paper portal, pressing faces to the square-paned windows that ladder across these pages, becomes a flotilla of bottles so closely packed that they form a single decanted help message, readable only from ten thousand feet above.

But this forsaken armada of bottled petitions is only a fanciful flicker, a curl of the illustrator's nib, a slight tint-change in the hazel carpet spread over the surface of doom's deep. Castles perch on cliffs, visible before they should be at this magnification. Monasteries pock-mark the shore, devout in tenuousness. Walled ports, minuscule but intricate with masonry, their plowed fields and fiefs heaped up like carpet remnants around a throne, are as yet exceptions, small halts in continuous wood and wildness.

The storytelling eye hangs suspended in midair a little longer, a surveyor's speculation wider than these fortified hills allow. Then, renouncing its bird's-eye, it nestles down like a silversmithed, dove ciborium lowering itself to the surface of the sin-steeped world. The panels take on earth's tangent, a pilgrim's view. Focus falls to the roads below, ways swarming with travelers, one for every conceivable reason in religion's calendar.

Here, at ground level, belief marches through the year in brief. Each discrete frame is a new saint's day, another motive for mass migration. Across a quilt of color-strewn squares, searchers shake down Santiago de Compostela, assault Amritsar, Lumbini, or Ayodhya. They venture off to venerate Saint Peter's bones in Rome. They scale Mount Abu, wend to Canterbury. They figure the four sacred mountains, the five thrones, the seven sacred rivers. They close in on Buddh Gaya, Lourdes, Assisi, Sarnath, Turin, Goa, Tours, Nankana, Guadalupe, Kusinagara, Fátima, Marburg, the hills of Parasnath and Girnar. The world pictured is a surging hajj, one that every believer must make at least once, if only by proxy.

Conditional, reverential, purgational, memorial, devotional, salvational: the motives for moving sweep an arc as wide as the swing of these walkers' staves. Cartoon figures, burgundy and forest-green, journey to the source of all grace, the spring of all politics, the birthplace of history. The tour is slow but urgent, desperate enough to have demanded this illustrated guide in the first place. It is as if, the drawings insist, only a thousand miles on foot will ever set things right again.

The paneled page tags alongside this parade to those expanses that are a little more sacred, a little closer, if only because they mark the resting place of some grotesque bloodletting. Ink and watercolor snake into lines of supplicants ready to sacrifice all purchase on earth to reach their holy sites. And there, at page bottom, farther than they can hope to see, the luster of goal: a temple, crypt, battle site, the empire's earliest universities, wandering schools where they might matriculate.

Tinted print starts to hover just above the frames. Just the spidery shape of the letters speaks of a moving desire, an impulse bedded down below the soul's water table. "Pilgrimage," the captions begin, "is the path of a single life made visible, replayed in the space of a few days." Beneath these words, a band of travelers passes close by a familiar, inviting house en route to the far landscape. The very next picture is the window casement itself, drawn from the inside, the sight of the receding band insisting that the stay-at-home eye chase it down, join it. Go somewhere. What does it matter if you're not back for dinner? The suffering and cold, molestation, looting along the way are mere softened pen-strokes dipped in crimson and gold. The story stakes you only this one round trip, this one staged set of oases leading ever higher up into the mountains, this one chance to recap the embryo's first adventure overseas.

"A single hope, if never more than secret, stabs at the heart of everything that is awake." Flowery voice-over for a child's treasure chest album, but the accompanying astonishments of artwork vindicate the text. Who reads these preliminary bits anyway? The proof is all visual. Wait, walk long enough, and you will arrive. The hinted-at place is just around the next hillside. It will appear in your lifetime, in another half page or two.