Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Finding the father proves easier the second time. Despite the hospital's promises of good faith, Wisat's signature on his daughter's release alerted the governmental wide-network trawlers. Immigration picked him up and has been holding the guy in a state of blind bewilderment since Joy's first trip under the knife. He is so desperate to see the girl and learn of her fate that he even agrees to return to the scene of his betrayal.

The only hitch to securing this new round of permissions lies in words. They leave it to Kraft, the scutboy, to break it to the victims. "Extent of femoral incursion indicates immediate aggressive invasive proc…" The girl, again serving as translator, just stares charitably at her doctor. She wonders how the two men who have come to mean the most to her in her two lives can inhabit the same room, albeit unable to speak to one another.

Kraft notices the hush, the hang time where her translation should follow. He looks up from his scribbled chart and catches her staring. He stares back, at the eyes he has been avoiding for reasons more numerous than the mistakes he has made along the length of her treatment. Twelve-year-old eyes, black as the lacquer on a ceremonial barge, black as the silk pajamas that a generation of high schoolers just a grade or two older than he were told to empty their clips into.

He calculates back to the year when he first saw these eyes, had them burned into his own retinas. He was, at most, two years older than she is at this pre-op hour. And the girl: the girl, in '69… Why bother pretending to do the math? The girl was what she always will be. The girl, already, even then, was twelve.

He freezes in her gaze, the defense that night animals fall back on when astonished by light. Locked in her continuous pupil and iris, he tilts his head in a dissociative shrug of pain, as if he refuses to make out who she is. Dictaphone-steady, he repeats her prognosis. "The patient is dead animal mass unless we radically hack her back."

She blinks at him, neither wince nor recoil. The glance is that of a village girl — too young by a year yet for the silk coils that will couple her hair to another's — getting her first glimpse of her arranged life-mate. Her look inquires curiously, a dressup, a play-money look. She turns to her father and performs a near-faithful transcript of the sentence. "The patient" remains "the patient," "dead" stays "dead." But "radically hack her back," to protect her doctor, she renders as "operate."

Only: the sounds she makes, the shadow puppet epic her syllables throw against the scrim of her father's face. Kraft shrugs off the standing wave of sleep. He shakes himself like a dog shivering from the surf. The dialect's five tones reach him from a listening post inside his cochlea. He watches the old man absorb his daughter's condemnation. The judgment is just one more isolated blow in the familiar serial assault, this week's flood, famine, or mass genocide writ small. What has become second nature cannot shock. The pitch-language report of his baby's fate is already an old friend, an ancient poem trotted out again around the expiring fire.

The girl's recommencing hell is just a footnote of an appendix in this wallpaper roll register of continuous death. The girl will go the way of her mother? She'll join her brothers and sisters, the small army of offspring that was to protect the professional healer in his final infirmity? So she too will vanish, like country, land, crops, animals, favorite sticks of furniture. The family bo tree consists entirely of dead descendants and ancestors, the still- and the unborn and those dragged horribly back to birth. Life exists for no other reason than to dull the persistence of the living, to deaden them by degrees each time another of its branches is lopped back, slashed and burned.

The father holds out the backs of his hands for obscure study. He shrugs absolvingly: These things happen. It's a professional gesture, the move of the accredited Mawkhan. He knows, already, what the Cycle has in mind for his daughter's errant vital stuff, and he asks only to facilitate it.

He asks only one thing, a thing his polyglot international girl would be powerless to translate, even into her own tongue. Yet Kraft somehow intuits this simplest request, recovers it. The other medical man would like to do a brief procedure of his own, and then he will put the leg — the femoral incursion, his life's life's blood, his little girl — into the hands of the current dominant culture. One technique, then leave things to the state of the healing art.

Parent and child exchange a few hurried necessities in their private language. Kraft — coming to, coming back, his brain, numbed by several sleepless years of Human Service, condensing around the lost range of the five pitches — finds he can follow them. Not the content; individual words blow past him in a blur. But the shape, the inflected sense, insinuates itself, snuggles up willy-nilly under his arm, embraces him, shouting, "Ricky!" The words lie just next to a language he once spoke, one he can force up now only in ungrammatical museum shards.

But fluency, like all childhood diseases, carries a germ of the first contagion. He concentrates on the swift word flow until one phonetic swirl breaks over him: farang. The foreigner. The albino. You, my friend; they're talking about you. And this word, shared over so many regions from Morocco to beyond Mandalay, the common term for otherness, springs him loose. The thing that defies his spastic grasp wanders back into him, intact.

And now he needs to — how do you say? — say something about it. He blurts out, interrupting the blood pair in their emergency preparation. With no particular program more pressing than this first urgency, he starts to sing:

Chahng, chahng, chahng chahng, chahng,

Nang kuay hen chahng rue prow?

(Tell me, little one: Have you ever seen an elephant?)

Wisat jerks up, his placidity scattered. Although his daughter told him she has exchanged a few nonwhite words with this farang, she has said nothing about his possession by spirits. The old man cannot figure out from what world this outburst comes.

"It's Thai, Pa," his daughter prompts in the same language, calling him by one of the few terms shared in root as widely as "foreigner."

Of course it is. What else could it be, here on the far, shadowed side of the world, in this city of a thousand languages, half of them invented here?

"The elephant is a great creature, and not very light at all," Father Wisat sings, changing tongues as easily as he used to for clients on the far side of his river valley border.

This version is slightly different from the one the once-Ricky remembers. But the tune is the same, and the line scans.

"His nose is really long," Kraft rhymes the man. "It's frequently called a trunk."

Both men giggle at the overlap of their outside knowledge. They finish the song together, while the girl for whom they ostensibly sing looks on, smiling painfully, knowing that the grown-ups can't trouble themselves so long as they are thus occupied.

By song's end, Kraft can talk, really talk again, after half a life deprived of words. He can say anything either part of him needs. And the Laotians' Thai is equal to his own. Can this instant recovery of speech mean that the Farsi is still in there, the Urdu, the Arabic prayers? He and his new near-neighbor speak of nothing — of geography and kinships and favorite fruits you cannot get on this side, even in the most exotic Angel City bazaar. Of places you cannot find your way back to, even with the best of maps.

" Dee, " Wisat pronounces, sounding to Kraft's ears like a near-native. " Dee maak. Excellent! We have nothing to worry about then."