Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Linda, watching in knots, begins to wonder if the piece is meant for public performance at all. It feels to her more like a fierce group training exercise, a dry run. Perhaps a drill: learn by heart these seven warning signs, the portents of nearing disappearance. The more they memorize their lines, the more they improvise.

All the while, the pace picks up, pitching toward frantic. The physiatrist can only sit by, riffling through her worthless cue cards. They keep her on for no other reason than that she has not yet secured them their leading man.

Consequently, the children must do their acting around an empty spot upstage. They work the negative space, falling in behind a piper present only by implication. The pied stranger grows even more convincing in absentia. The performing trees, the rocks, rats, river, and town politicos, the magic mountain backdrop, the featured children masquerading as their own missing selves, all play off the truant soloist.

One role in particular drives herself savagely in prep for the lead's delayed arrival. Clinical Linda must bench the girl a half dozen times, precautions for which Joy rewards her with almost resentful sulks, were this girl capable of resentment. The little lame cameo rehearses furiously, forgetting that it doesn't have to be perfect until there's an audience. Or maybe not forgetting, maybe just deciding that Now is always its own public. After all, no one knows opening night's hour. She calls out her lines, flails to her masking-taped mark with inexhaustible amateur zeal.

Nico, doing his militant DeMillenarian tyrant bit, barks at everyone but her. Two against one. Actually, it's the whole lot of them against the lone authority. Everyone in the cast conspires to keep Linda from butting in with Your Own Good.

Joy's own good is only this: to draw near, in dress run-through at least, the place she is denied in the master script. A glimpse now will make the last lockout more bearable. When it comes time for her to hobble across the stage, a Method-acted cripple more lifelike than life, she pushes her ulcerated bone beyond capacity. She crumples and sheers. Linda watches the girl go down in slow motion. It is the old moment of maternal horror: in the end, the best parent must let them all fall.

And fall they all win, beginning with the boat girl, who snaps and spills to the floor. Omnivorous eternal booker, assimilation-intent A student, she is nevertheless stunned by this pop quiz. She balls up on the Theraplay Room rug, screaming so violently that not even Linda dares take a step toward her. Silent at every step of the deportation, stoic all during her cells' savage transpacific drift, she screams now, on arrival. At her bloodcurdling magic shriek, every onstage freak in waifs clothing reverts to the real thing. Referred pain convulses through the faces of the entire cast. Not this. Not Joy, the quiet one. The one beyond pain, spasming in torture on the floor.

Her limb twists backward, withers like the ashes of a self-immolating monk. But her anguish is out of proportion to the pain, even this nerve razored open and limed. Her writhing is more than bone-based. Unbearable implication flashes through her even before she hits the ground. Stunted syllables work up from her throat. "No. Not yet!"

Not again , she means, immune to her own anguish but grieving for that doomed, near-miss girl she is playing. From hysterics she fades to soft mewling, then level-voiced, rapid reasoning with anyone who tries to touch her. Everything is okay. Just one second, please. Let's finish this rehearsal and then they can have a look at the leg.

After several minutes of frenzied standoff, Linda sends for the parameds. These conclude that a little judicious pharmacology is the persuasion of choice. Persuaded despite herself, the girl falls asleep and is lost.

Espera tries to alert Kraft, but he seems to have finally achieved his beloved nowhere. He is not in the call room or at home or at any known transmitter extension.

Turns out he is down in the ER, having responded to an assist request, Plummer's tired old time-honored line: "Say hey, Dr. Kraft. There's a consult down here with your name tooled all over it." Power-tooled, to be precise. A seven-year-old who has discovered the difference between a hand and a bandsaw. As Kraft finally emerges from the cutting room, uncountable incarnations later, a vaguely familiar woman is waiting to waylay him.

"It's Joy," Linda tells him.

Kraft nods at her intelligently, as if he can almost place this woman's face, or the words issuing from it.

A band of children wander into the suite where their colleague is being readied for the inevitable. They come not so much for her as to dampen their own terror, assure themselves that the creature they saw curled up in anguish on the stage floor was a trick of the lighting.

All the show's principals are present and accounted for. They are led, as always, by time's toy, the principals' principal. Nico plays with the traction bed's counterweights. He assures her, "We're holding up the production until you can make it back."

She gives him a forlorn look: It's dull in our town since my playmates left. She has calmed since her flailing fall, but something in her busily turns over a distant phrase that the others haven't gotten wind of yet. She pulls herself away sufficiently to answer, "You can't wait. Not possible, Nico." You knew when you assigned me the part. A little looking around, a quick, pragmatic show of hands. "No, you're right." The offer was only for show. Caught in the idle kindness like a fly's wing under a cover slip, he glances around the room. His eyes dart about for a change of topic. Something wants to insist that there is still a route out, a path, perpendicular to every other, that they might still take. And, suddenly grinning as broadly as on the day of his admission, he sees one.

"Well, for the love of Jiminy Cricket's dick. Look at these." He slogs into the burlap sacks in the corner, each filled with several thousand get-well cards. His pet project for the helpless crip, back when he was still your basic greenhorn progeriac casting about for a new game. Back when getting well was still a competitive sport. He kicks one of the sacks, grabs his toe, and hops about to mugged laughs. "We've got that record sewed up, anyway."

But Joy roots quietly about in the three-ringed binders that have never left her side since she beached her open craft here in this hemisphere. She searches through her communiques from message-mad America. She extracts a clipping about a Brit boy with brain tumors, evacuated to this continent of medical mavericks and sometime miracle workers, where you can always find someone who will operate on anything. This boy, capturing the imagination not only of the local media but of World News, has already scavenged enough well-wishes to beat her haul by several orders of magnitude. Thirty-three million cards, and he continues to solicit internationally for more. Worse, to add insult to injury, the winner is getting better.

"Oh Jesus. Joyless." Nicolino turns the piece over, desperately reading the bisected horoscopes on the flip side. His claws shake under the weight of the disastrous scrap. Disease's impeccable timing destroys the protection racket he tacitly promised her. He balls up the newsprint, crushing along with it the long list of coordinated lies that childhood has tried to hand them from the start.

Even the most cross-language remedial among them sees through the fairy narrative now. That old crone who tricks the charmed early readers into believing she is their mother spits them out four paragraphs before the ever after, stranding them in wildest nowhere. Or a place worse than nowhere, sicker, wider with not, with never: this Emerald City blazing away all its nonrenewable futures at this instant, there, outside Pediatrics' window.