Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

How does this one go again? A green-clothed figure… Get the account, the one written, as they all are, as medicinal compensation for an ill, confined child, to ease the time remaining to him. Get the lines, forgotten for so long, skipped over at the time in favor of the lavish illustrations. That fabulous, inexhaustibly elaborate, foreshortened, piled-up street scene, deep with winding columns of those music-soothed animals. Get the poem, the spotty transcript lying on its shelf in the literary canon, the cult artifice, like those primitive plane-totems carved from logs and laid in waiting along faked jungle runways.

"For he led us, he said, to a joyous land, joining the town and just at hand."

Joining the town? Yes; the next brutal high-rise institution over. Just at hand? As near as the artery in an open neck. As near as that nerve cable, slipping its way down through the tunnel of spine.

It occurs to the sleepy listener, for the last time, stalling for more escapism before bed. Comes on him with a clap, like the mountain closing over him: the chill of suddenly realizing, this really happened, on a specifiable day, in a well-documented year. The magic musician is based crudely on some bizarre original, an occurrence now lost in too many transmissions. Lost, except for the general contour, one standing up to existing fact. A sizable band of children gone off in a group, at the end of time, as they've been doing repeatedly at all hours, down odd years at steady intervals, through the shimmering, unstable portal, gauzy at best in both picture and caption iambs.

In the last tragic, accidental lockout, the sleepy staller, now jolted upright, catches a glimpse of the places you can't get to in stories. All of them right here, within walking distance. Joining the town. Just at hand.

And there, in the least corrupt of remaining transcripts, is a coda exactly the opposite of the one that frozen adulthood remembers. How in some Transylvania there's a tribe

Of alien people who ascribe

The outlandish ways and dress

On which their neighbors lay such stress

To their fathers and mothers having risen

Out of some subterraneous prison

Into which they were trepanned

Long time ago in a mighty band…

A prison from which only a reverse trepanation can spring them. A surgical strike: the bore of story through the braincase, into the firing core. The local cast of cripples picking it out for their amateur theatrics recognize in dim silhouette their own dispensation, the disaster that repeatedly leaves them here. And — good God — the trepanner, the first drowsy surgeon adult they chose to do the dirty cutting, to sink the cranial post holes for the soul's release, sees it in a sick flash: that's it. That's where this group comes from. Their strangeness, their dress, their slew of alien languages. They've sprung up subsurface into this Angel Transylvania, drawn irresistibly to this vaguely familiar kiss-off rhyme. Only this time, they cannot keep from uncovering where it has taken them.

The streets in town are a bloodbath of crisis. Slaves and whipping beasts in life, the children, in disappearance, drive their collected parents to mass remorse. Shrieks and torn clothes form the Markt-platz's new airs. The time for self-indulgence is forever past, but no one who should realize that does.

The town council mounts an emergency session in the Ratskeller. "I swear to you," a panicked Bürgermeister calls into the screaming chamber, "we can make more of them."

Joachim's entrance accuses worse than the condemned Christ whispering, Not ten minutes more with me? His sorrow slams the room into silence. The illiterate puppet councillor, the merchants' sop to the artisan class, walks stonily up to the town rolls, lowers his palm onto the leaves, and commands, "Write it down." On this specific day, through our own common failure of imagination, our inability to project…

Stone Dresser dictates the precise message that will carry down through fixed myth to alert future sicklings, invoke them to rise up, retrace their dazed return. "On June 26, 1284, through stupidity and a mass tin ear, we killed our children."

As for casting: no need to trek across town to those studio lots, the instant vistas of belief shot on dislocation. No call to solicit in the film set cafeterias where centurions lunch with storm troopers, senators with psychopaths, fake doctors with would-be children. They are self-sufficient, cast-ready, right here within their own institution.

Nico knows, from the moment he decrees which of Linda's therapy performances they're going to mount. The withered sideshow boy, age disengaged, has it all blocked out already. There's not a chart on the ward who couldn't become a shortsighted, self-serving adult politico, by modeling the role on a favorite probation officer. To play the paralyzed townies, they need only ape the service nurses and orderlies. After all, they have only to stand there, stony accessories after the fact. For the well-meaning, bighearted, but ultimately fumbling indentured public servant — what the hell; how about everybody's favorite Minnesota Mexicali, in her first cross-dressing role? Nico will even let Ms. MinneMex take producer's credit, providing she remembers who's calling the aesthetic shots.

Rats they possess, in their usual superabundance on this, the wrong side of what were once upon a time the tracks. You can hear them scuttling around behind the plaster, see them sunbathing up on the roof or surfing the stagnant parking-garage pools. Casts of rat thousands are no problem, and if there's any labor dispute, some gnawing Actors Equity thing, they always have the cockroach understudies — the ones the size of a child's fist — to fall back on. And for a lead, Nico has his eye on this guy, a latent messianic, as ready-made a piper as fate could pitch in your path.

No; casting presents only one insurmountable snag. They have no children.

Dwarfs, maybe. Midgets, mites, pygmies, Lilliputians — chopped up, scaled down, wasted, disenfranchised. Shriveled, hypernecrotic baby elders nodding off on the toilet with a milk-shake-straw hypodermic spiked into whatever limb is still soft enough to break and enter. Eleven-year-old mothers of their own little half nieces and half sisters. Self-mutilating infants. Housing project survivors. Teen mob operatives and operatees, test cases and trial recipients for unbearable hardware. Million-dollar-a-week underground business middlemen. Those who will go directly from their treatment here to prison terms for murder or worse. They have a steady supply of underage, balloon-letter, sponge-bread breeders and bed wetters. But not one child.

Tag? Tops? Piggyback? That would strain the suspension of disbelief to breaking point, even among the Playhouse playhouse set. They haven't even so much as a single credible summer-stock juvenile. Intensive care just turfed a little girl, left her lying on Linda's doorstep after a few weeks of "Hail Marys" during which they hung her up strapped to the sustaining meter-taps. She is the size and shape of a dachshund thorax, with two smashed ribs, fissured head, and torso smeared all over with a shiny, blue-green oil slick, like a fungus colonizing the skin of a faltering Bartlett pear.

"Wreck of the Hesperus," Plummer called her — anesthetized pros' parlance. "Peanut sittin' on a railroad track. The tyke had pelvic inflammatory disease so bad we had to do a double eggbeater on her." One year old. The man responsible — Mama's current beau, looking for diversion during her latest delivery — wound up getting fifteen years. The kid, as always, got life. Linda is to treat the baby for lingering limb impairment and pass her on to the social worker, who is left, in turn, to thrash things out forever with the assistance of the anatomically correct Raggedy Anns and Andys.