Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

It is that spooky name, the old familiar, the last tale Linda would have thought children of this city would sit through, let alone dress up and perform this late in time's day. But the effect on Nicolino, and by association his entranced clan of republican guard, is enough to goose her flesh. "Lemme see that. Gimme that book."

He flips to the story in question and assaults it with the viciousness of the functionally illiterate. Here it is. The point of all the endless, agitated prep. The explanation, the need for dancing lessons. "Okay," he decides with producer's finality, "this is the story we're doing. You direct. We double-cast all us gimps to play both sets of teaming masses." Now: where're we going to find four dozen rat suits, a high dive, and a pipe?

How does this one go again? The ubiquitous, uninvited out-of-towner shows up on the city outskirts one morning to make a comprehensive survey. Comparing the checklists of the real against the ideal upward spiral, he concludes to himself with masterful, mumbled understatement, "Serious infrastructure problems here.

"Bad shape," he elaborates, a pleasant euphemism. One quick spin around the city-wall circuit confirms the obvious. From any perimeter tower, anyone paying attention can make out the state of affairs. Were the problem just cosmetic, it would already be unsolvable: the house plaster going shabby, the shoddy half-timbering rotting no sooner than it is rigged together. The open sewers back up into putrid pools, exceeding all stopgap attempts to sluice off the stinking sludge. The slum quarter spreads like desert into the heart of town, but the vitiated commercial sector cannot afford to pull the sinkhole down and do the required rebuilding.

The glittering Rathaus is a mammoth travesty, its obscene overhead bleeding the tax base dry. The guild buildings are down on their heels, held up by subsidy, levitation, and the magic of deficit spending. The centuries-old overhaul of the basilica has halted in mid-flying buttress. Quintessential urban nightmare, arrived at by what the grade schools will one of these once-upon-a-times take to calling civics: pauperize the past and mortgage the future to pay for an unsustainable, Pollyanna present. "An easy mark/' the self-employed surveyor says, shaking his head with a grin.

The man descends from the ramparts and heads toward the diseased downtown retail plaza. It is market day, and he settles down between a fishtail vendor, a blood sausage emporium, and a rottingly ripe cheese stall. The out-of-towner has not eaten for days, and he takes whatever sustenance he can through inhalation.

He sits down unceremoniously, cross-legged on the bare ground. He pulls open a soft leather satchel from which he draws writing materials. Spreading a piece of parchment awkwardly in front of him, he begins to print, "Fore-year 1284, Anno D. Have arrived. Find it a flea-bitten burrow with big-league pretensions, well into the predicted collapse." A woman who has slowed to gawk at this bizarre act of mall performance art edges off suspiciously as he looks up. Another, holding a hank of carrots by the hair, mistakes him for a beggar or a pope's emissary collecting for some worthy ground offensive and drops a few pennies on his parchment. The stranger politely returns them.

He settles back to his writing, and to the fine art of underplaying. A knot of children stands at a distance, giggling. "Intractable physical plant problems," the man pens, with some freedom in orthography. "Situation hopeless, but not urgent. Nothing that can't be wished away for another overdraft day or two."

Two appointed luminaries reconnoiter at the end of the writer's row of stalls. They pretend to be part of a crowd engrossed in a cleaning fluid demonstration, but give themselves away by sneaking glances in the intruder's direction. A third undersecretary slinks over to reinforce them. "It's the suit," the stranger grimaces to himself, brushing an imaginary piece of lint from his multicolored threads. "Motley gets them every time."

The suit, however flashy, is mere window dressing for the real five-alarm. Simple literacy, just kicking back and taking down travel notes, and in public at that, is a prosecutable violation of the status quo. Still, the visitor goes on annotating methodically, deliberately failing to notice the pro forma town meeting taking place on his behalf.

After another few minutes, the display of blatant public scribbling becomes too much for the assembled officials. They sidle up to where the threat sits, stopping first along the cheeses to sniff nonchalantly at some Limburger. They halt abruptly in front of the scribbler, faking an afterthought. "Good morning," the senior among them manages, in a reasonable facsimile of surprise.

"Good morning to you ," the stranger replies, the soul of enigma.

"Yes, well. Quite," the official sputters like a schoolboy. "We see that you are…" He gestures helplessly at the point and parchment.

"Writing?" supplies the stranger.

"Yes. Exactly. Are you from the Abbey?"

The stranger examines his own clothes, as if trying to solve the conundrum himself. "Have the brothers here shed the traditional brown?"

"No, of course not." The interrogator passes the reprimand along to his underlings with a shriveling look. "Perhaps you are selling something, then?"

The stranger smiles indulgently. Getting warmer. He leans forward. "I'm here to help you."

"Sshht!" one of the worthies silences him, casting around violently to see if anyone's heard. Everyone has, but the ad hoc steering committee nevertheless stifles the stranger with furtive vigor. They hustle him off the Marktplatz into the Rathaus cellar by a back entrance. They shuffle him into a side chamber and forcibly sit him down, interrogation style. The chief politico, searching the faces of the others to see if they disclose too much just by asking, pales and demands, "Who told you we needed help?"

Instantly, the interrogatee falls into his natural cadence. "Friends, your problems are apparent from as far away as the spires of Hildesheim."

This bit of cheek produces an outburst from the officials. Libel, lies, slander, discovery: Who told? The buzz goes internecine; they carp at each other in low local dialect. After several bursts of mutual recrimination, one of the number is dispatched to fetch the Bürgermeister . During the wait, the stranger removes from his leather satchel a telescoping tripod easel, which he proceeds to assemble.

When the Bürgermeister and the rest of the hurriedly summoned town council arrive, they prove shrewd enough politicians to let the visitor handle the interview on his own terms. For this, the man in motley has come eminently prepared. He places several brightly illuminated, stiffened sheets of parchment on the easel and begins. "Gentlemen, let us not deceive ourselves any longer. Your beloved town is nursing some serious infrastructure problems here."

Joachim the Stone Dresser — the power brokers' put-up sop to the laboring classes, increasingly unmanageable of late — interrupts. "What's an infrastructure?" The other councillors shout at him that it means roads.

"Yes, roads," the stranger elaborates. "And bridges. And walls and buildings and plumbing. Retail strip, industrial base, residential. It's all shot. Slum. Gone to hell in a hay wain." Joachim asks for an explanation of the figure of speech but is shouted down.

The stranger begins flipping his parchment diagrams, egg tempera graphs as gaudily colored as the man's outrageous outfit. "Here we see the per capita weighted performance of your town plotted against Goslar, Paderborn, and Lemgo, over the last forty quarters." The curves are snappily plotted against a cutaway view of a half-finished Romanesque cathedral. Goslar, Paderborn, and Lemgo all hang comfortably ensconced somewhere around the triforium.