Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

"It's a twigging ball game," Nico yells through a megaphone he has made of his rolled-up scorecard. "What the hell are you guys blathering about?" Now how did he hear them, above this crowd, from the other end of this screaming murderers' row?

The boy is taking his own emotional plunge, as a result of the Dodgers' deliberate, malicious betrayal. "Pitiful," he says, shaking his balding braincase, hiding it in his hands. "These guys couldn't reach base on an error even if they'd publicly promised homers to a dozen dying kids." The Hernandez brothers emit wicked, appreciative snorts in stereo. In fact, the local boys give it their best but go down twice in splendid paralysis to the normally hapless Second City conscripts, who this day look like world beaters,

Everybody is pretty bummed, but fandom's remorse cannot completely doom this day of reprieve and freedom. Kyle, who has brought along his Walkman, keeps repeating for the others, in astonished tones, "The kids from Carver are here today," exactly the way the beery announcer said it, between rollcall mentions of Rotary chapters and nursing home brigade minuses. The Hernandez brothers light out for the territory on the way back to the bus, but Kraft is still fit enough to chase down and snag their lazy, city-vitiated pop-foul arc across the parking lot.

He sees the girl board the bus and tries to help her up the awkward steps. He is mortified when she shrugs him off. She swings along determinedly, keeping up an impressive clip down the constricted aisle. She sheds the struts in the back of the bus and lowers herself into the seat behind the two old-timers with the L.A. caps pulled down over their wasted beaks.

" 'There is no joy in Mudville,' "Joy recites in ingenue singsong for no one, the words she once performed in front of a now-forgotten class, on a twin bill with the Gettysburg Address.

"Shut yer face," Nico manages.

"Please," Chuck adds.

Kraft pulls Linda down into the seat next to him, before she can slip away to join the children. He holds her hand, ribboning the fingers of the nearest girl, the only available one. He whispers to her what he's just seen — the small-arms exchange of first flirtation. Linda steals a look over one shoulder to see this stabbing thing for herself. But all she can make out is the boys in the back, already scheming the details of the next expedition.

When the next one is launched, it's the last thing in the world any adult could have anticipated. Weeks of dilated child life pass; years click off Nico's accelerated body clock. That is to say a day, maybe a day and a half, real time. Nico shows up at his next scheduled Doll-face session and demands, "You gotta teach us to dance."

"Dance! You mean—?"

"What do you think I mean?" He is surly with compromise. "Dancing. Dancing. You've heard the word, haven't you? 'Blue Danube.' Shake yer bootie. Get up and get down. What do you want from me?"

"Is this a dare? Somebody's put you up to this."

"Nobody puts me up to nothing."

"Okay, all right. Calm down. Just tell me how in the world you came up with…"

"I don't know," he says, as preoccupied as she's ever seen him. He takes off the ball cap and runs a hand over his parchment-papered crown. The gesture is perfect, something he must have seen bald men do in some ancient cartoon. "I just have this… feeling we gotta learn some steps. That we'll need it if…"

"If what? Who's we?"

He tenses his gray temples and grits those teeth that have not yet fallen out. "The girls'll be thrilled to their ditsy little anklets. And the guys will do it and like it."

Why not? A group movement lesson is just one two-step away from her own therapies. She gets away with half her rehabilitating sashays only because the hardened, proto-criminal street toughs, in their sick and wounded conditions, can't believe she comes from this planet. But even she would never dare suggest something like this without Nico's bankrolling.

Beyond all credibility, he gets his minions to turn out for a class in the Virginia reel. Clumsy, hulking, umber gang members barrel down the chute of the longways set like bombs pouring out of a carpeting bay. She gives them folk weaves and figure eights, kicks and turns that aren't "too femmy," keeping bodily contact to a fleeting minimum. She rolls out all sorts of pieces — Hopi, Mexican, Ashanti. Best are the enchainements and positional formations that even the crutches and wheelchairs can roll through.

They rapidly outpace Linda's passing competence. The best of them began beyond her. The Rapparition, recovering, concocts this elaborate triple-level, supersyncopated, free-falling gymnastic routine like nothing Espera has ever seen a body do. Its nearest living relatives are those dim, almost-forgotten jump-rope choreographies, the bastard inheritances of her confused, crosstown shuffle-up. Double Dutch, Double Irishes, Red-hot Peppers, here mutated, further displaced until nothing but the skipping fear, the shaky shake breakdown is still recognizable.

Last night, night before,

Twenty-four robbers at my door…

I was born in a frying pan;

Can you guess how old I am…?

Little Miss P, dressed in blue,

Died last night at quarter of two.

'Fore she died, told me this:

You better run or you gonna get hit…

Call the doctor, call the nurse.

Call the lady with the alligator purse…

Grandpa, Grandma, you ain't sick. All you gotta do is the Seaside Six.

Everything she can give them is not enough. Not anywhere near what they need. Nico comes to her after a workout, vaguely distressed. "Hey, you're okay and all. But we gotta call in the pros."

She phones around, she herself now suckered into believing lessons to be necessary for their collective next step. The last of her calls is to the one she's been avoiding by mutual consent these however many generations. "Want to take a girl out dancing?" Dancing? Girl? Capillary action works its sap into Kraft, unwelcome but irresistible. Bits of his skin crinkle like new clothes at the sound of her invitation. Take a girl dancing: template words that elicit images all over the cortex map. They promise the long-abandoned hope of heart-stopping prom night. Rustles of sweet silk delay, even here, the abrasive apotheosis of the land of instant gratification, where the pinnacle of sexiness is to lightly goose the twin cams at every stoplight, blasé behind double-polarizing wraparounds, blister-packed into phosphorescent sweats inscribed all over with slogans and retail insignia. (Why, Kraft has wondered since coming to this state, must one pay double for the kind of legible ads that they used to hire sandwich-board men to peddle?)

But: take a girl dancing. A girl, she says, offering up to him the regressive, politically objectionable term as decadent concession, crepe wrapped, shameless for an evening. Who would have thought a night of dance-floor romance was still possible, here, of all the world's sprawls? Who would have suspected there were dance floors left anywhere in these hundred and thirty incorporated hacienda nightmares, slipped in somewhere along the split fault-lip, wedged between the million-dollar, ranch-house historical destinies of capitalist revengineers and the noir-punk, cut-you-for-fucking-me-over disinherited who drift through downtown in a state of perpetual pre-aftermath?

But take a girl dancing. Yes. Oh yes; anywhere you lead. Yes, even the — where? — Pasadena Women's Club. Well, so be it, if that's the last bastion of fox-trot in this fifteen-million-souled nation flying point for westward expansion's cliff-dive into the Pacific.

Come Beginners' Night, Kraft hops behind the wheel and lets the vehicle do its thing. He's come to use the car more or less like a laser-guided toilet seat these days. Just slide in, snap down, plug into the man-machine interface, think the coordinates, and watch them come up like magic on the old plasma display pasted over the former windshield. Worktime playtime mealtime snacktime anytime. Sometimes he just likes to corkscrew up and down the parking garage ramp for relaxation. Last week he drove around the corporate limits for a good hour or two, trying to find a place to drop off his empties for recycling.