Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

"Could it be," the text box asks a reader who has long since fallen asleep or started on something more vivid — say a Sergeant Shrapnel or his high-tech, laser-guided reincarnation—"could it be that the seed of the Thousand-Year Kingdom, that troubled dream toward which the world still falters, was sown in a place possessed long ago and lost, forgotten except to fable?" In comic boyhood, history's cartoon.

Well, yes it could, the once-boy concedes, his hands surgically returning the tract to the therapist's stack of night reading. It could. All predictions are perverted remembrance. They'll have to come back, after long wandering. No place else to go. They're here already, all around him. Every day, the law's brutal blue shock troops drag them into his hospital, those they haven't emptied their clips into. Disease coaxes them to him. He steps over them in their gutter-ambush just outside the tony retail Alhambras, the mushroom towers, the high-security parking garages, there being no more open places where innocence might encamp. Ad mare stultorum, Tendebat iter puerorum. The sea will part for them. It will have to. No other place large enough to hold them all.

Yes; how could he have failed to see it? The place is breaking up. Isn't that what has been flashing across all channels, pissing out of late-night talk radio rumblings, putting in cameo appearances on Showdown Tonight, left as live correspondents' reports on his answering machine while he was out? The narrow space he came from has already ended, been burned off, refined away. It capitulated in the same moment, in the time it has taken the boy to think this thought, to consume this illuminated manuscript, to page, to leaf through, to see, to believe, to receive the old list of infinitives, to lip-read the traditional closing, this one: Next Year in Angel City.

The boy grows manic, racing out of control. He wants everything, all at once. He demands a continuous barrage of mil-spec mayhem. When that's not forthcoming, he manufactures it. C'mon: new game. Scale-model Grand Prix down the emergency stairwell. Multiplayer stock market speculation with real quotes and Monopoly money. Murder in the dark, the hushed hysterics too soft for the night nurses to hear. Helicopter spotting on the roof, gawking at today's incoming wounded. He must live through those sixty years he has acquired without experiencing, all in the space of the next three weeks. He plunges the ward into a hopped-up nonstop campaign of chaos, and only the knowledge that it will all stop suddenly and soon prevents the pros from cuffing him.

Linda foresaw the whole reaction the day Nico checked in. Patently transparent-an old man's textbook love me, look past my rhinoceros hideomness. All the same, she finds herself locking horns with the little beast more and more frequently. Some days she just doesn't care what motivates his constant, vindictive disruption. She'd like to whack him one first and do the social worker stuff later. As for his wider subversion of hospital life—"You call this food? Lemme in that kitchen. Hey, how's about a movie theater in this dump? Casino. Dancing girls" — more power to him. But when he busts in on her Duchenne's support group, hysterically trying to shame them out of their progressive muscle wastage by threatening to use the four of them as a baseball diamond, she and Nicolino have their first shouting showdown.

Problem is, three of her four disintegrating dystrophy boys side with their tormentor. Leave him be. Nico's okay. He's our Main Mind, our man with a plan to take command. (We, after all, may live to see the extreme old age of thirty.) It's a sympathy vote for a kid picked off in a way even grimmer than their own. But there's something more than mere sympathy in this deference to Nico's new ward order. The others have been just waiting for a knee-high Boss Tweed to come along and tell them what to do next. Not just any newcomer; this one.

Anyone who has exploited prepubescence for any campaign, however well meaning, anybody who has ever trotted out pasteurized, freckled, fairybook simperers to pitch their wholesome radiance, has forgotten the lay of this land. Traveled too far in the interim. Remember the children. What of the children? Doesn't anyone care about the children? Rubbish, all of it. For Linda's money, these sales reps confuse innocence with a lack of opportunity. Been too long since they've gotten down on their shins to consider the turf. It's desperate down here at half-pint level. They're clutching and mean, and they take no prisoners.

Childhood is not that parade of vibrant kids teaching the world to sing. That's a new one: as far as Espera has read, the product of the last fifty years. She knows the histories from school. Time was when domestic theory wrote the whole batch off as changeling babies, perversely truculent sub- and semihumans. The prescribed treatment was to beat the devils out of their tiny, ripe habitations. No wonder childhood is just waiting for her to turn around and leave the room so it can retaliate for the running lancet sores inflicted on it by ages of adulthood.

Purity is an adult bills of goods. The sweet-meaning child is just an icon, a tool in this power struggle, the power struggle, the first, original, quintessential holy war between supreme exploiter and victim. Real children — the pet mutilators, the medicine cabinet moles, the ones that refuse to pee until their bladders burst — have all lost their innocence long before they learned to speak. They had it drilled out of them at the first vindictive parental backhand.

Small wonder. Her kids are an ad hoc delegation of oppressed, low-income, minority, viciously sick, festering, powerless, disenfranchised, and condescended-to culprits. They know in their intuitively subterfuging hearts that they are the test rats, scapegoats, and pack animals of the entitled — their mature dominators, the holders of vested interests, those of the despotic head start.

Hence their incredible attraction to an adult kid. Only that can explain how Nico charges in and takes over in a matter of days. His packaging says it all. The guy's old, and consequently brings out the natural submission to one's elders. Yet at the same time, he's this double agent, a traitor to his class. Here's this adult chucking it all in and coming back. And there's no champion like one that's just crossed over from enemy lines.

The last thing Linda wants to do is tangle with him, to pull rank. But what are you supposed to do when the monster calls his quadriplegic buddy a beanbag? When he threatens to attach a friend's catheter to the wheelchair motor if the malingerer doesn't at least try to stand? When, trying out his own remedy on Ben's suicidal depression, he gives the double amputee a highly prized board and orders him to skate or die?

Linda's charges refuse to protect themselves from this self-appointed terrorist therapist. Nor do they want her protection. They rush, instead, to that universal tendency of the oppressed, the victim's eternal willingness to exchange one cruelty for the other on symbolic grounds. He may be a tyrant, but he's our tyrant. Better him than one of you.

And the real adults, who have all read his chart, are just as disposed to let him run amok. The mere thought of telling him not to run in the corridors paralyzes them with shame. Nico, still possessed of boyhood's thought tap, knows he can get away with just about anything. He's unopposable, a berserk Mickey Rooney-Freddie Bartholomew mutant cross gone rampant, just before the boxer priest comes to straighten him out.

Only, there's not going to be any reforming priest popping up this time. Nico's parents have been preparing their only man-child for his impending kiss-off by assuring him that whatever he says is holy law. The one potential surrogate dad that Linda tries to trick into assisting with Nico moans at her softly from his side of the suddenly Siberian bed. "I said, leave me off this one. It's. Not. A. Surgical. Case."