Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Kraft loses the message in the general hilarity of regrouping. Whatever Ben says, it stops the woman, bruises her, knocks the breath from her plexus. Espera turns, fighting with her lip, twists from Kraft's grip, and runs back to pick the boy up. She lifts him up bodily, the upper half remaining of him anyway, the brutal living stump, pruned back to nothing, to the nib, the stubborn nub, the germ. Flushed with pleasure, Ben breaks into a shamed-puppy grin. The band box strikes up a sleek, sexy "Satin Doll," and Linda, in perfect time with the teacher's "Ad-vance, and together, and glide, and back," travels across the parquet for both of them.

The Cheese stands alone. Or not alone; worse. Kraft stands five feet away from the one soul whose presence most upset him on arrival, the one girl he would avoid with all the power of a pubescent crush. He can feel Joy appraising him from her seat in the empty chairs pushed against the wall. Her silence is articulate, more oppressive than ever. He hears himself, how he might yet have to tell her, to administer her hero worship a lethal injection. How he has perhaps wrecked her, killed her, or worse. Your ankle — I… The incursion could spread. All the way up your leg, beyond. She stares passively at him, already knowing everything.

He half-steps over to her, and he must tell her now. You tell me your dream, and I'll… Tell her the odds against her. Tell her what she will never live to hear any adult male tell her. Tell her in that almost common language she can half-understand and he, despite an adulthood of effort, cannot more than half-forget. He takes her by the hand, hers held out for his before he even extends. She looks at him, adoring, waiting politely. Dr. Kraft? Looking away, he asks, in his child's Thai dialect, "Care for a spin?"

But she belongs to someone else. The dancing expedition does little to placate Nicolino or stave off the next maniacal enterprise. He begs broken parts from the tech equipment jockeys, and he and the inner circle set to work on a Wellsian apparatus whose function they refuse to disclose. He institutes a strict regimen of daily exercise, combat-readiness stuff. He casts about frantically to answer the summons nagging at him.

The thing, the revelation, is so close that he goes gradually bananas with the jitters. It looks, from the outside, like a burst of senile activity. From the inside, he is cranked up worse than a teen, a year before the flood of gonadotrophin that might account for it.

"Son of a Bisquick. This place is so, mind-alteringly, boring. We gotta get something going. Quick. While it's still possible."

He sits splayed under a pull-up bedside table, scribbling furious letters abroad, guarding the texts with a sheltering arm. He struggles with the pen-driven alphabet the way a first-year French horn player might fight through the valved scale. Certain of his letters get sealed TOP SECRET. Others he actually mails, Linda picking up the postage. One of those pathetic local television news-drink-spread shows picks up on the story Nicolino feeds it. "There's a little girl lying in Carver Hospital tonight who hasn't been on our shores for very long. But even where she comes from, they know what get-well cards are. Her name is Joy, and nothing would bring this Joy more of the same than to go down in the record books as the greatest

recipient of…"

They send out a camera team fronted by a snitty little media witch who tries not to touch anything in the children's ward except during those few seconds when the take goes "live." Then, in front of the opened lens, she rests her hands affectionately on Joy's passive head. Pulling away as soon as the cameras stop, the newscaster checks her palms for shed hanks. "My God," she whispers audibly to her crew, as if discovering rat feces in the coils of her electric range. "It's hair-loss city in here."

No sooner does the story run than the cards begin to pour in. Surreal get-well wishes from a sick world. Wishes in eleven languages, including her own, plus all manner of grammarless dialects. Some with no words at all, just pictures, little Crayola comic strips purporting to relate her own story back to her, tracing a narrow escape from murderous nondemocratic forces all the way to ultimate techno-cure and consignment to happy, waiting ranch family. Boutique-bought three-dollar cards with no signature. Mass-mailed photocopies. Delicate, church-circle, handmaid handmades. Sympathy and condolence scrawled on the backs of cold-tablet packets. Long, rambling teeny-tiny-print letters about the loss of daughters to the same, never-mentioned disease. About daughters who are not their real daughters, about real ones swapped or disguised or hidden. Real daughters who think they are adopted. Adopteds, abandoneds, who never in a million years suspected. Mothers who are sure Joy is theirs.

Nico sits on the foot of her bed as the crates of communiques pour in. He demands first dibs, as if the cards are really his and he has just been forced to use Stepaneevong because she's convenient. He devours the cartoons and drawings, passing them on with a low chuckle of having pulled a fast one. The hard letters, from the crackpot adults, he makes her read to him. Then the two of them set up a routing system whereby the bushels of mail are passed around for public consumption before they are turned back in for official record-book tallying. At least it's something to do.

But it's morbid, and it only serves to feed the ward's dancing mania. Each get-well is an acupuncturing coffin pin, rotated and tweaked in the suppurating wound until the subjects feel nothing except bewilderment at being held here against their will.

Aware of the risk, Linda shows up at bedside one afternoon while an on-duty card-reading shift plows bleakly through the day's mail, no longer even grinning. "What do you say to a little amateur theatrics?" she says, to no one in particular.

No one responds, until Joy stares openly at the tyrant who has taken control of operations.

"You mean, like a play?" Nico asks. "Make me heave, why don't you? Like, little froufrou costumes and makeup and that? Of all the infantile…"

She is ready for him. "Bunny hopping at the Pasadena Women's Club?"

"That's different. That was… preparation." Even in midsentence, you can see him realize that this stray message brought by unwitting courier is preparation too. Exactly the thing he's been after. "What do you got?"

Linda removes from its hiding place in her pouch the old anthology, A Country a Day for a Year, the promised term of time now an impossible luxury. Nico emits a groan, beyond repugnance.

" The Goose-Child.' "

"Wrench my neck."

" 'The Wolf-Child.' The Lizard-Child.' "

"Three strikes. Blow off this animal kingdom thing."

" 'Jam on Jerry's Rock.' "

"Pardon me?"

"That's the name. 'Jam on…' "

Nico voices a loud fart, followed by universal oos of disgust. But Linda knows she has them now.

" 'Aladdin.' 'Sinbad.' 'The Magic Caldron.' 'Trickster Plays the False Bridegroom.' 'Hanuman's Burning Tail.' 'The Borrowed Feathers.' 'The Magnetic Islands.' "

"Oh, sure, right. I'm not dressing up as anything smaller than a minor landmass."

" 'The Three Golden Sons.' 'The Seven-League Boots.' 'The Frog That Made Milk.' "

"I scddy bag the animals already."

" 'Beezaholi and the Cyclogeneron'?" a frightened voice from among the backbenchers suggests.

"Sure," Linda says. "Why not? Couple of diodes, some tinfoil…"

"No friggin' way. Jose. Full stop. Keep reading."

Linda sighs, a languorous Lillie Langtry, and returns to the table of contents. " 'The Wati Kutjara.' 'The Fake Beauty Doctor.' 'The Stone Eskimo Child.' 'The Mayor of…' "

Joy twists acrobatically under Linda's arm, her weight on her knuckles, as supple as a crippled beggar. Her fingers slide down the list of potential scripts at twice the speed that the false mother can pronounce them out loud. She sieves through the tides, moving her lips silently, looking for one in particular. When she finds it, as she never doubted she would, she calls it out in foregone-conclusion monotone, for the first and last time in her life interrupting another human being.