Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

His parents were resigned to let him assimilate. He could wander the city at random. For two and a half cents, he took one of the hundred color-coded buses, hanging out the open back door even when crowding did not compel it. He clung to the Sunday Market, where he watched limbs thick with elephantiasis shrink at the application of fluid distilled from rare barks. There too he could buy fish and birds for the merit of releasing them. Fruit could be had that he had seen nowhere else on the planet, tastes that had no equivalent in any other language but this, the one he now tasted in.

The Sunday Market attested to fields and rivers a little more forthcoming than most of the places he had lived. But even this relatively affluent emporium had its extensive subdivisions where the deformed laid out mats, where mothers solicited for their hydrocephalic infants — heads huge, smooth, and shiny as museum vases. Here, the boy invested his bargaining proceeds. At thirteen, he still felt the ludicrous hope of making a dent, although somewhere he already knew that all the coins in the world would never release even an insignificant fraction of the agony locked in this one illusory turn of the Wheel.

The southeast of town was a slum so vast and desperate that no philosophy could reduce it to illusion. Ricky traveled there one day, one of the few city corners he hadn't yet seen. The bus conductor punched his ticket using a six-inch, coiled little fingernail, and asked where the boy thought he has going. Ricky responded, "I live in this city." I live yesterday, now, in another hundred centuries.

But he was not ready to see just where he lived. In Squatter Town, houses for displaced spirits were irrelevant. The living there displaced nothing; they had never taken possession of the lease. Fathers defecated and mothers listlessly washed dishes in the same fetid film where their children still found the energy to swim. The diet here could not even sustain the hope of religious escape. Days were no perpetual Wheel to be ridden until history released the day's residents. There was no passage of days here. Days were an inconceivable luxury for the privileged and already sprung.

The squatter boys in the streets did not even bother to mob Ricky as he handed out dimes. They took the coins and looked away, weary. One older tough, a spark in the swallowing dark, at least summoned up enough irony to push palms together in front of his bowed nose, a parody of the gesture of thanks and departure.

Squatter Town graduated the boy forever from temperament. The size of the floating ghetto, the rotting slackness of life scavenging its own dead, defeated any scheme human history might invent to justify itself. Ricky discovered, at the moment his body was everywhere tufting, losing its pink larvahood, that the Sunday Market sufferers were not confined to a few, licensed begging stalls. They proliferated in whole, autonomous free-trade cities of their own, outstripping in per capita growth anything the upward world could hope to offset.

He could make no sense of the slum's exploding compass. The image followed him around fastidiously wherever he went. He asked his Free friend, the Institute gate guard, how a slum that size could consume a city so gifted. The man darkened and pronounced his explanation.

"Do you know Hitler?" the guard asked.

Ricky confessed to having heard of him.

"I want to do for our Chinese what Hitler did for your Jews."

The boy could not even cough out "Why?"

"Chinese take all the business. They marry Free women. They hoard currency in rice sacks and make us pay double to get it back."

Ricky took the question to church — a Lutheran outfit that met in the attic of a Catholic school. Ricky asked his confirmation teacher, an Air Force captain, who quietly informed him. The war was sucking the entire subcontinent dry. And all unnecessarily, because stay-at-home lawmakers had never come out for a look. Only one step could halt the hideous drain: permission to saturate the Yangtze, every hundred kilometers. The captain tapped the palm of a spotted hand, tracing a precision pattern up his lifeline. He claimed his Free colleagues at the leased bases all agreed. Ricky sensed how soon he would have to put away childish things.

The boy tried to lose himself in diversions. He attended ceremonial combats — kites, fish, cocks, kick-boxers. He bought numbing doses of sugarcane and iced coffee from vendors, smudgy newsprint scandal magazines, spirit-restoring roots from the canal boat flotillas. The International Institute was good for killing thirty hours a week, his classes serenely unaware of the watershed crisis he had just unearthed. After school he took refuge in Indian films where heroes leaped ten meters into the air and landed while simultaneously twirling a machete and completing a tight end rhyme. But by the end of the film, as he stood at attention in front of a projection of the king while a pipat band insinuated itself into a facsimile of the royal anthem, small Kraft's desire to efface himself demanded, more than ever, its obvious out.

The boy told his parents he would enter the monastery at the onset of that rainy season.

"Time-honored response," his father chuckled, as if he had the early teen mind pegged. "Too bad you're not legal age. We could use you in the Foreign Legion."

Ricky had no idea what the man was talking about. Between the boy and his father lay every kilometer they had ever logged. His parents had brought him up without cruelty, with all the amenities. But their attempts at understanding him were, like his belated exposure to his national sport, doomed to enthusiastic blundering. How could they think he wanted to forget something? Completely wrong. There was something he needed badly to remember.

Most Free males spent some time as monks. His parents, who had delighted in his language study, taken him throughout the country, and set him loose in the capital, could not object. Fourteen was ripe for a novice; some boys entered the monastery as early as eight. Some stayed for three weeks; others found themselves still in the temple year after year, finally dying in the abbey of their original petition.

The postulant went for religious instruction. They started with the story of the Enlightened. A rich prince undergoes a spiritual crisis, realizing that he can expect nothing at the end except sickness, suffering, and death. The prince renounces the world and goes into seclusion. He undertakes a search for absolute truth, discarding a variety of paths, even starving until bones pierce his skin and hair falls out at the roots.

One day under a bo tree he wrestles with the Tempter, who tells him to choose life. He defeats desire, thereby gaining knowledge of his prior existences and seeing the flux of creation's constant rebirth. He wakes to the nature of suffering, feeling, and eternal migration: the universe as lotus pond.

The child learned of the three planes, the shape of time's cycle, and the names of many fixed points in the spinning sphere. He learned the stages leading to awareness and memorized those scraps of scripture he would need to recite at his ordination. He was accepted by a small temple on the other side of the river. A senior monk took a straight razor to every hair on his head, including eyebrows. Glimpsing the result, Ricky was shocked at the deformed terrain, its lumps and crevasses. Derogatory street slang was right: he was an albino, a freak. His bared skull was whiter than the bleached onion skin through which he had once traced the countries of the world.

Wrapped in cloth as white as his virgin scalp, he was carried three times around the temple under a parasol. Inside, seated cross-legged in front of the abbot and a dozen monks, he was examined and had all the answers ready. At the end of the questioning, the abbot — an old man in perpetual danger of disappearing into his orange robe — peered through his glasses and asked, out of nowhere, "Where are you headed?"