Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

"What part do you make me play?" The words rustle like raw silk, that raw silk that refuses to burn. Her voice, doubling back ever softer, sounds like a refrain to one of those eternal rounds common to every culture. She tugs at the vowels as at a female fighting kite, one caught in a bright, parti-colored quarrel high up in the sky, far away, beyond eyesight. "Nico?"

He will not tell her what she already knows.

"I'm the lame one, aren't I?"

"You're the crip," he agrees tersely. "You're the gimp." He flares his beak of a nose at her, flashes the so sue me look. Showdown slides off into a shrug.

She tries on the idea of never making it, of being the one eternally left behind. Their entire breakaway child republic will make it out, all escape on the virtue of her story, her sacrifice, all arrive safely except her. The knowledge plays like a cold, focused, close-up gel spot on her. She half-expected this, from the start of her concerted studies. But now, a working pact between them transforms all hideous kiddieland, and departure is real.

As the pair fall to arrangements, the details of set and stagecraft, the boy's gravelly, senescent voice goes low, half sympathetic. His subdued countenance turns away from her over their daring plans. Perhaps he even feels, just this once in his compressed, accelerated life, the shape of guilt, the pitiless cameo he places in her hands.

So motley's the only wear. And motley is the only crew capable of carrying the plan off with this ferocity. Mickey and Judy, transcribed to the earth's marked races, the planet's disinherited— Andy Hardy Goes to the Pen; Andy in the Big House —take over Linda's office. They fill the corridor back behind Neonatal, spill into the Theraplay Room, turn the halls into their private pickup rehearsal barn.

Everyone's in. The littlest are put to work learning forward rolls and cartwheels and whatever other traveling acrobatics they can negotiate. Suicidal eight-year-olds who only last week tried to seal themselves up in the industrial-strength Husky bags for rubbish removal paint backdrops, towns and mountains and sky, open air such as their fume-stunted lungs have never inhaled. The Rapparition, the Fiddler Crab, the No-Face, the Hernandez brothers — each already a character actor in his own urgent one-act — take to this collaboration as if joining the supreme, platonic street gang, the enterprise that all of Angel City's other five hundred rumble clubs strive for. La marea de Dios. God's attack rabble, in their theatrical debut.

From the first, preparations are out of Linda's hands. Her coaching consists of getting out of the moving violation's way. Any further suggestions from her would be as welcome as a lapdog at a nude beach. Her each schoolmarmy stutter of "Maybe flaming torches aren't such a hot idea" sounds, even to her, like a fetid little check of death. Her every shouted encouragement comes off condescending, a reprimand in disguise, one more governor slapped on innocence's wild turbine.

Yet nothing she could do would more than momentarily muck things up. They are stronger than she is now, for the simple reason that they know where they have been. They come from poverty's every proliferating precinct in this balkanizing city, a state-sized political sprawl pulling its unassimilatable self apart piecemeal. Theirs is the nation's flagship, the Western vanguard, the index of leading things-to-come, the fast track into the next eternity. They were born knowing it isn't home. And all the fledging comic tragedians, calling out cues to one another in three dozen native languages, act with the natural flair of those who know where they must be going.

Just watching them cuts her with recovery. Oh God: these little girls, singing that a cappella road jingle they've collectively made up. It's her all over. That dark-eyed little spitfire girl tugging at the hem of her dress in the front row of the yearly class photo. What's happened to her? What bottomless hole did she tumble down? What noxious DRINK ME vial swelled her up so grotesquely that she cannot even fit into one of their pygmy chairs at the back of the rehearsal room?

Some insidious, viral, sexually transmitted, colossal failing of nerve she's caught from her Kraft sinks in, and she can't take it. Can't look at them anymore, much less call out prompts. She sees in them all the babies she and Richard know better than ever to have together. Here are the souls of the infants they would pillow-smother at birth through overcaution. Every performing child becomes a prodigy too painful to clap for. The parental terror that paralyzes her and her mismatched mate drives her from the rehearsal room with teeth marks on her fingers. Creeping back in, she tells herself: Playact a virtue if you have it not.

These, her shock cases, ham it up in those pathetic paper hats as if they have only this staged moment seen: this life, this life we missed, the one we were stripped of? Here it is at last, restored to us in dress-ups. My spot. My cue. My line.

Onstage, their ravaged lineup reveals the telling symptom. A solid chunk of the revue is bald or balding. Not just peach-fuzzed Nico or the kitchen-match look-alikes waiting for their locks to grow back. Not just the radiation club or the Kemo Kids, grinning at their overnight transformation into a skinhead mob. The makeshift footlights pick up a glare on every other pate in the chorus. Does the hospital stand on a seething East Angel landfill dosing us all, accumulating fastest in the tissues of the very young? Have the building's lab machines sprung a leak, sloshing the halls with a child-specific spray of rays?

Something wider, Linda concludes. The theme runs through her story almanac — the shocking hair of the very young. Feather-crested Hopi infants. Baby Zaal in the Shah-nameh, white-cropped as an ermine in winter. It shows up, always an advance signal, the Now about to announce itself. And here it is in droves, massed regiments of hairless rats returning in Act Two to double as themselves: a troupe of shedding, expectant deprivees fresh from ballroom dance lessons. Those who don't bald by symptom or side effect join along in an act of reverse protective coloration, the leaf willing itself to blend in with the rare animal hovering on its surface. They all cover for the ones already singled out. Take me too.

The industry they lavish on this venture outstrips the sum of Linda's every other cure. Pure energy. Each djinn takes to its specific task without being told. They fan the hospital, scavenge it for usable bits. They assemble costumes and backdrops from pilfered bedpans, gauze, linen, and tubing. They inspect each other's handiwork, block out scenes together, write one another's lines. The auteur urge runs through these illiterates like mumps through kindergarten nap hour.

And the place they construct in the forced-pastel dayroom: infirm Angel City hasn't seen its like since the last large-scale emigration. Shipping-box battlements draped in rayon raiment project a proscenium that leaves almost no room for audience, whoever that might be. The sham city walls are stuccoed all over with wild child heraldry. The streets are a tumbled maze, the lace of evacuation's ancient follow-routes.

This surreal Hansastadt is enhanced by Nico's strange frame-tale staging. In his plan — an intuitive masterstroke — a poet reads to two kids in sickbed. The rhymester informs the sufferers, mutatis mutandis, about their looming cure by another name. (It's the Rapparition, perching on a TV stand, chanting the bit of lame Browning that only he could get to sing "It's as if my great-grandsire, starting up at the Trump of Doom's tone, had walked this way from his painted tombstone.")

The story takes literal shape in front of the two chronics, joining the town and just at hand, a play in which both poet and sicklings take part, trade places. The players who join them to flesh out the tale cycle round-robin through analogy's available profiles — all participant presences, teller, tellee, told.