Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

They take the last twist of serpentine street. The cluttered, cob-bled-up plaster buildings tumble away from one another and the townscape falls off into the open expanse of plain. The two who can see suck in their breath, slapped violently by the sight in front of them.

The one without eyes shouts, "What is it? Tell me!"

The girl hobbles slowly into the healing scene. She fights to say, "I can't. I can't describe. It's wonderful. Children everywhere. It is really happening."

"Where are the parents?"

"They're all… stopped."

"Stopped? What do you mean stopped ?" The blind boy screams for description, his terrified rage giving way to a sobbed giggle of disbelief, of joy at the thing he thought would never happen, yet believed in since before birth, before blindness. The girl's incoherence overloads his blacked-out imagination. "No! Wait. Don't say anything more!"

At that cue, on the downbeat of that "more," the figure at scene center turns. Unlike the rats at his earlier matinee, the mass of playing children issues no protest. Rather, the dancing, rope skipping, and hobbyhorse cantering simply step up a notch. Children tack toward the moving music like comets lassoed by the sun. The entire canvass migrates gradually outward from the market, down a discreet street, forming a carpet deeper, denser than the one the rats made.

"Come on!" the blind boy screams. "They're starting, they're starting!"

The sickling trio stumble along after the trailing edge of celebration. But bliss recedes from them swifter than an ebb sneaking out of the Baltic. The speed of the getaway — a crowd racing at the pace of a messenger charged with averting catastrophe — gives them a foretaste of the trip's distance, the miles they are headed.

A town of frozen adults falls away behind. They pass a parent or two along the road, enameled in midstride. A duchy of children, in a world where half of all human beings are under fifteen, is about to escape murderous adulthood, slip past intact without attracting notice. Cast away from it in mid-Sunday, down the main thoroughfare, in brilliant June.

By the time the impaired three pass through the North Gate, the flute, farthest beacon, is seven leagues beyond them. The mobile boy tries to yank his companions along more briskly, berating them, shoving, cajoling. He curses under his breath, "Oh Christ. Christ. Move it." He sprints ahead a few hundred paces, to map how quickly the vanguard pulls away from them. The mass dancing mania seems to suck stamina from its own punishing cadence. The tempo, the traveling speed of this reel, is too great to sustain. Those without the right steps haven't a prayer.

Another instant, and even the blind boy panics. He can hear how soft the nearest rhyme-skipping child has become. "Hey! Wait up. Not so fast." Each syllable, screamed by a hysteric caller in the world's last round of kick-the-can. They can barely hear the flute at all, so the flutist surely can't hear them. Disaster, here, at arm's distance from the end: Can this be the way the story was meant to go? Just thinking the word brings it on them, and they are lost.

The intact child throws up his arms, crucified, a gesture invisible to the blind and too clear to the crippled. Furious, the girl digs into the dirt road, and, for a few moments, actually manages to match pace with the child rear guard, keep it within striking distance. But before she can summon the strength to make the impossible next burst, she looks up and stops in place.

"What? What is it?" the blind one cries.

The old child has stopped too, just looking. Neither will answer the shouts of the littlest. What could they say? Who could call up the journalistic will to report that the sky has thrown wide a portal of blue, the north wall of the Koppelberg has split open like the slats of a secret bookcase, and that all the long-suffering children of Hamelin are pouring in?

"You two run," the girl snaps grimly. She doesn't even allow a wasteful minute of protest. "Go!" The two boys struggle forward a few steps, at a ghost-of-a-chance gait. But a few steps confirm the worst. They will never catch it together, not with one of them needing leading. The last child will vanish, the impossible opening will have sealed before they reach it. The compensation promised since before time, one greater than anything life in this place has ever offered, will be lost to them as they watch from a stone's throw away.

The little-boy-lost stops dead in his tracks and refuses to move. "Get out of here, you son of a bitch," he chants, a forsaken smile playing at the corners of his lips. He and the girl will turn back to a town death, companionless, never to know, the only ones left of an entire generation of once-playmates wiped out by epidemic euphoria. "Get! I never want to see you again."

His guide — skin smoothing, head tufts growing back; the effects, even from this distance, of the opening in the earth's side — runs ahead stuttering, in anguish. Ten paces, then back five. The blind boy points a harsh finger, not quite in the right direction, condemning the deserter to a miserable gallop. With a bitter little cry of triumph, the abandoned one calls out, "Nicolai!" He loosens a noose of string around his neck, where he had attached a packed lunch for the road. He throws the sack violently, wildly forward. The freakish one scurries to retrieve it, shooting back a look of stricken joy that the boy cannot see and the girl cannot reach. Then he too vanishes down the road and into the riven-open mountain wall, the hole gaping wide in the naked air.

The lame girl drags herself abreast of the last remaining human her age. From this moment, loneliness will be the most merciful thing life has to offer them. Her little one has fallen into the gravel, face down. She lifts him, dusts him off. "Come," she says, taking him under her arm, as much for her sake as his. They can at least grope their way to the spot where the others disappeared, fix in memory the portal that has slammed in their faces, narrowly denying them the cure for innocence.

But the frame, the hinges, the jambs of the impossible passage have akeady faded, fused back into blank hillside even as the town of tune-drugged adults revives. The firsthand accounts from these shrill, unfossiled ones will not outlast the horror of their having survived. This version of events — piper, rats — is all the smudged variorum left, a bastard compromise script lying somewhere between what really happened and what can bear admission. For the blind and lame left-behinds — the trace memory of evacuation.

Joachim the Stone Dresser, the first out of the sleeping spell, stands on the North Gate parapet, watching a column, a whole eastern front of children disappear into legend. Three of his own vanish along with them, infants for whom — precociously — he has just begun to learn to feel affection. He stands watching two forgotten forms helping each other along the road. He hopes for a wild moment that they might be his. Then, seeing the devastation in their steps, he hopes guiltily that his have gone.

He thinks: This has all happened already. When have I seen this before ? But he could not possibly have seen it. He is not old enough. The template end-time exercise left town long before. Colonial expansion, offshoot of stripling volunteers, or that crazed campaign naivete, accounts unfolding nowhere but in his mother's singsong, recorded in no other archives than the base of his brain. But in that old story Stone Dresser recognizes the day's annihilation, as if recognition, remembrance, were never more than dry runs for the close.

The children have gone east, crossing that little letter-juggle from Liebestraum to Lebensraum, leaving Hamelin more living room than it will ever be able to fill. Joachim descends the capped ramparts, stands stiffly, insensate in the street that swallowed them. The two last children will be invested with every privilege the city has to offer. He personally will see to it. And free sweets on demand, for life.