Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

All the way up to the very banks of the Weser, even when the piper stands aside and nothing but the murderous flow of rapids remains between the avant-garde and their arrival, hesitation is briefer than thought and more easily dispatched. The lead rats expand into the watery sacrifice required of them. No bill too great to pay, and, with a gnawing smile, given the payoff. They rear up, plunge into the waters like, well, like lemmings. Happy, even, to go down, half in love with a resonant death, provided they can still hear the promissory sounds and sweet airs buzzing about their tiny ears until the moment when the current closes above them.

Realization at last ricochets through the ranks of animal caravan. No word travels quicker than fulfillment. Alarm backtracks through the flow faster than the flow can advance on it. Thus the rats at the back of the queue, not so much pushing as happily piling on, out of earshot of the fatal tune, could easily call upon innate survival instincts and save themselves. It would take no effort at all to break off, turn back from disaster, return to town and begin the difficult work of restoring the decimated pest populace.

But not one rat does. An even greater urge keeps them promenading almost gratefully, for three quarters of an hour, into a river from which not a single forepaw reemerges. Yes, a mother pauses here or there along the bank, thick with plunging bodies brown, and an occasional old retiree breaks into uncomprehending tears as he takes to the drink. But all choose this moment of crystalline clarity, receiving it willingly as opportune, a godsend really, far preferable to a return to the quotidian misery and ignorance that have marked their lot until that moment. It takes no bravery to listen to the soul-stilling music and make peace, put an end to experience. No courage, no strength at all aside from joy.

The last corpulent rat in the miles-long parade plunges into the water with a sort of snappy salute of thanks to the piper, who only then stops playing. No sooner does the primordial musical lure break off than the sole survivor recovers his sapped equanimity. Reviving at the last possible instant, he surfaces, rights himself in the current, and with his last full measure of devotion pilots his battered body downstream to Ratland, where — the reason he was spared — he prepares a manuscript account, this firsthand report on the proximity of ecstasy to horror.

Ghastly shepherding accomplished, the piper at last lifts the flute from his lips. Satisfied that he has done the deed as mercifully as possible, he stares at the site of the rat waterfall, seeing them still, in phosphene tracers as he pinches closed his lids. What's the point, he wonders, the purpose of wisdom's chill deliverance? He smiles grimly and turns back to town, already knowing the furtive, grubby little coda of accounting awaiting him there.

Per expectation, no grateful town lines up to douse him in ticker tape back inside Hamelin's circumvallation. He is met under the eastern gate by an ensemble of dazed gazes and several of those questions that resent having to be answered. "What the hell you put in that music? Packs a kick, don't it?" "Say, yer not from around these parts, are ya?" And instantly, without an interval for decent shame, the community reneges. "You see that? Those varmints plumb up and spontaneously offed themselves. Just like they knew what they had coming."

The piper shakes his head sadly, having anticipated this expedience. No sooner does the well water stop festering with floating carcasses, the wattle holes cease breeding disease, the stored grain quit transubstantiating into hard little feces, no sooner is the town snatched from the incisors of hell, once again spared what is known locally as the Youngest Day, than folks habituate to believing that destiny meant all along to lift the curse of damnation before it became a real hassle.

The scope of salvation is too great for gratitude. By the time its savior reaches the packhouse district, Hamelin has revamped the eyewitness histories. The town is now, has always been, and ever shall be no less than steadily, appropriately blessed.

The thought flits idly through him: he should go into another line of work, one that makes more allotment for the moral caliber of his trading partners. Say, highwayman or molten lead wholesaler. But he puts aside the consolations of philosophy and heads to his doomed date with the town exchequer.

"We want you to know how deeply the council appreciates what you have done for the citizens of this town as well as the environs as a whole. The necessary paperwork on your disbursement will take a while to process. In the meantime, we'd like to present you with this token of Hamelin's sincerest recognition…"

The piper takes a room, mit Frühstück , above the Meat Hall. Once a week, during the open grievance hour, he petitions the council for his back pay. Each week they beg him to be patient; one needs to understand that all the town funds are not in ready assets. For a sum as enormous as the one they must pay the piper, certain long-term indemnities have to be called in. No business on earth can pay out 90 percent of its net worth overnight. Why, that would be liquidating to the point of evaporation.

After a spell of outrageous deference, the piper comes to the officers with a vague ultimatum. The exchequer, paranoid that the man might jeopardize Hamelin's standing with the infant Hansa, assures him that they will have the amount ready, in full, by the beginning of the next fiscal quarter. But come the appointed date, there is yet another unforeseeable delay. The piper stands at the back of the town council chamber and lowers his head. "I see," he says politely. "No, really. I fully understand." He takes his leave of the Rathaus, certain he has done everything in his power to act in good faith.

The next Sunday, when most of the town's adults are still in church, the piper settles his Gastzimmer bill and packs his satchel. Then, for the last time in this locale, in this lifetime, he takes up his post in the Marktplatz — a monklike figure in motley, legs together, pipe to his lips — and begins to concertize. The very first air from under the mouthpiece, waves of compression and release, maps a country, a republic of staggering rightness. For those only recently banished from the place, the music loosens a visceral, recollected purpose. Children out knee-deep, wet in spring's games, stumbling by gradual intervals and small mother-may-I steps, suddenly luck onto the one universal chord, up close, tangent to everything.

His long, self-spinning line is sleet against a windowsill, the seduction of tree-branch rustics interrogating the pane, luring one out of doors. Implied interior harmonies are fraught with hunger, parched. Old friends whom you yet remember — everything about them except their names — stand rhyming in the dark, haunting the half-timbered alleyways. They gather under the overhangs, too late at night, refusing to come in when called for bed. The sound is birdsong, batsong, angel, extinct pterosaur. It is the shush of an envelope slit open, the pulse from breath half a pillow distant. Brass bands in the gazebo, martial melancholy airs, high sopranos up in the choir loft, a scream of pain from the next hospital bed, stubborn harmonicas on both sides of a violence-stilled front, a beast trapped under a bushel, the tick of the second hand, the abiding shouts of an emptying city heard from miles off, the overtone series of night silence.

The flute does the work of a light dawn dew, revealing that every square foot of the familiar, commerce-stunted world is, in fact, covered in florid web. The tune's contour traces no less than that rapture that recourseless minors are told to wait for in all bedtime tales. And at its first teasing ear-stroke, everyone who is yet ill-advisedly a child spills out the front door, cocks a curious head, then breaks out laughing in recognition. Oh! This old guy. What took you so long?