Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Chuck, head now wrapped up tighter than the Mummy's, sports a batter's helmet several sizes too big for him, thereby succeeding in obscuring the bulk of his face. Joleene has been temporarily persuaded to swap the Chatty Cathy for a stuffed outfielder totem. "So that's what a Dodger is," Kraft murmurs to Linda; "I was wondering." The girl pulls incessantly at the mute thing's neck threads, threatening to yank

its head off.

The Fiddler Crab cracks jokes about a left hand like his not needing a mitt. Ali, a recent admittance with a plate-sized creature in his gut, who's learned to tell everybody he comes from Persia so he won't get beaten up, nasals, "Play ball, play ball!" like some muezzin up in a box-seat minaret. The Hernandez brothers keep looking around nervously, afraid they're going to bump into one of their prehospital business associates. A mute, cotton-wadded Rapparition — shouldn't even be out of bed yet — scribbles his alexandrines down on the insides of a popcorn box and passes them for public enunciation to Kyle, whose larynx is about the last part of him still functioning.

Nicolino acquires a program through judicious swapping of a rare Captain America back issue. He alternates between kicking verbal lime on the leather uppers of the collective umpiring staff and making arcane marks on the scorecard, improving on the already Byzantine official scoring system. He attempts to fix forever in recorded memory the whole game down to the trajectory of every foul ball and the bleacher location of each lucky scab who snagged one.

He keeps up a running statistician's patter. When the good guys' three-for-three hitters come up, he yells out, "All right, he's hot, he's hot." For the oh-for-three guys, this becomes, "All right, he's due, he's due." The folks in the nearby seats, after their initial, shocked whiplash, go out of their way to not give the senescent heckler a second look.

Joy sits between Kraft and Linda, an aluminum half-brace leaned up on each of her idols' knees. She studies the game furiously for its meaning, waiting, as late as the seventh-inning stretch, for things to begin. She asks in a constant but decorous undertone for help toward a hermeneutics, and when Kraft doesn't know the answer to her question he makes something up. He makes up a lot.

"Dr. Kraft, how many teams are there?"

"Two." He steals a look at Linda. "Two, right?"

"Well, what about those black men?"

"Black— Oh, in the black suits, you mean. Well, they switch back and forth, depending on who's winning. Evens things up."

"And those? The white suits?"

"Those? They're beer sellers. Not official protagonists, as far as I know."

He is nervous next to the girl, jumpy, edgier than the terrain's bad associations can account for. He can feel Linda giving him the professional second-guess, and she's right. How's he supposed to explicate this, to tell her? You see, I've this growing proof, well, not proof, this conviction, okay, suspicion, hunch… These kids, this service, this pede tour of duty: they are — what are they? Consolidating . Converging on him. And everything depends upon his finding out why. What they are after. Where they are headed.

In between Joy's questions—"Why do they put that man in the middle up on that little hill? How many points does the little boy get for picking up the discarded sticks?" — he slips in a few cross-examinations of his own. He asks her if she remembers anything at all about her old home, the village, the river basin she was driven from.

"A little. My mother's twig broom. Our dog, with only one eye. The market. The smell of certain fruit. Dr. Kraft, how come they all have those big lumps on the side of their mouths?"

"Right. Those are plugs of chewing tobacco. You win if you can spit yours over one of those '330' signs while nobody's looking. The smell of fruit," he prompts her. "Durian? Mangosteen? Luk ngoh ? "

She pulls her eyes from the all-fascinating field and stares at him. He receives it full in the face, this awful, searching look that would conceal itself even while flagging down the impossible rescue. It shoots out at him, both oblique and dead on, a summons and a bolt. How much do you know? And in the next instant, she relaxes. Not enough to worry about. Nothing of the atrocity's specifics, no real hold on the nightmare locale. Harmless superficial, she decides, because her look goes congenial, her ready-to-run bite loosens into a smile. "You ate a durian once?"

"Many." And to prove it, he does an imitation, reasonably good, given the intervening years, of a street vendor's call. The peanut peddlers flash him a dirty look: What's yer racket, jerk-off? A couple of militantly fecund families at the end of the row overcome their good breeding long enough to stare at the motley child band and their howling leader. No, Kraft decides, listening to his residual, perfectly pitched cries drift down to the nearer bullpen. It is too far, too incommensurate, too implausibly split. The gap between here and there will kill him just to gaze out over.

Linda practically falls out of her wooden folding slats. "Where in the world did that come from?"

How is he supposed to tell her? From a place called Angel City, Land of the Free.

Joy examines him again, fear creeping back into her instruments. "Say that again, please, Dr. Kraft." He repeats his strophe of fruit names, softly now, so as not to violate the national pastime. Then, in a tonal dialect he can almost understand, she says, "That is almost what we call them."

They must step no nearer. They already wander too near the shared, partitioned province. Neither wants to come any closer to where their paths cross, the tangents to earlier extraditions. Suddenly, it's all baseball between them, furious Twenty Questions about runs, hits, errors, pick-offs, sign stealings — the whole semiotic flood. They scatter from any suggestion of common childhood geography, the one from guilt, the other shame. They backpedal from overlap like a fielder badly misjudging a deep fly to center.

"Can they both win?" she frets out loud.

"Uh, Linda?"

"Well, in a word, no."

"No?" Kraft echoes. "There's your answer, then. Peculiarly American, wouldn't you say? Better to fight on forever than to tie, apparently."

Joy smiles at the diction, his goofing for her benefit. This man will never be capable of wrong, no matter what he might choose to do. He is the one adult on earth who does not talk down to her. She takes his hand, a gesture universally understood among old fellow durian catcl "How long does one game last?"

"Easy one. Until it's over. Kind of a nineteenth-century, determinist thing."

"Where's the Mighty Casey?"

Bits of Cracker Jack explode from both choking adults. The girl is devastated by her gaffe. She clearly has no idea what she's said. The recitation, out of one of her pauperized school district's obsolete, nineteenth-century, determinist texts that she has blindly committed to memory, could mean anything to her, passed through the filters of continuous dislocation. Mighty Casey as position name, like shortstop or first base? Mighty Casey as deciding machinery, deus ex apparatus rolled to the plate at the all-important juncture? Honorary tide, rank, life achievement? In any event, to her, as essential to each staging of the genre as a sailor to the epic or a floozy to the lawsuit.

"Dr. Kraft, I don't understand this stupid game." This soul that did not flinch when the ER physician shattered her ankle, that awoke from the agony of excision to write the surgeon a thank-you note, now begins soundlessly to cry. A hundred ministrations and apologies from Kraft and Linda cannot convince her that she's done no wrong.

"I don't understand it either," he says, taking her hand back after she wiggles it free. "It's apparently some kind of ritual drama," he explains to her. "National salve. Expectation. History, allegory, fable, dream." He could be bluffing his way through the Chiefs latest unread book assignment, those opaque, impenetrable predictions of the upheavals and reverses in store as we go guttering into the dark.