Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

But do not — God — think who this is. Not a body, not life, not that little girl who — not. Just these forty centimeters, here to here. Heuristic. Virtual reality. The live-in flight simulator. Dr… er, Kraft. Twelve-year-old Asian female presents with insidious, edematous living shit creeping up toward… Your choice of clubs, and a mock-up fairway. YOU make the call.

Boyhood trains for this, with its pancultural small-animal torture. Species-wide, in every country he ever barnstormed. All its mini-Mengele enterprises, the How-What-Why kits, "101 Electrochemical Things You Can Do with Grasshoppers." Ornamental firefly-abdomen rings. Lanyards of sparrow ligament. Enraged rhinoceros beetles, whipped into welterweight frenzies. Low-voltage lizard pithing, combing back fish scales. Fruit bats twined to a stake — the poor boy's remote-controlled helicopter.

All these clandestine recreations mean to retrieve by violence the thing that violence denies them. And the hardest harrowed, the most disconsolate, wander into professional sadism.

And this rubbery, slittable resistance, midway between failed tapioca and a chewed-up gum eraser: here is the prime pornography, the stuff of all prurient fascination. Tender obscenity spreads itself just a micron of latex away from his fingers. He must wade into lewdness up to the hip. Send out the search-and-destroys. Isolate the evil empire of spreading microblasts, envelop and excise. Create strategically safe hamlets, your free-fire zones, and work outward from there.

But wasn't that what the child inside him had in mind? Ease back the unbearable, extend into the light. We must head upcountry. We. Our whole rainbow coalition. The infant international community. The brilliant Mickey Li, trading pictograph lessons for jump shot tips. Gopal, whose government already had plans for him after education. Tati, batik by adoption and grace. Claudio, with his legendary chocolate sandwiches. Ali, whose feel for market vicissitudes promoted a series of wildly successful commercial ventures on the lunch hour steps. All off, on foot if necessary, to answer the call of a sister village, the town of misery beyond explanation's event horizon. Can we get there by candlelight?

Get where?

To the core of the blossoming tumor.

He hears the Millstone wind-tunneling in his ear, doing his geriatric Driver's Ed teacher a month before retirement thing. Working in close, fistfighting the nodes, Kraft torches them by fractional degrees, whisking them away with tiny tempered-steel sliver pickers while the hypertensed attending spits through his surgical mask, "Wa-wa-watch it! That's the goddamn artery you're slinging around there."

The knee-length formal gown shimmies a bit as the Millstone's foot pumps away at the imaginary safety brake. The man is intermittently unstable at best. A word-salading zealot. Precisely as Kraft lifts the edge of adhesion and begins to shear the disease from where it cleaves to the end of acceptable tissue, the man starts to hyperventilate. "What are you trying to do, serve this girl up as Hamburger Helper?"

Kraft is, in fact, having some trouble self-actualizing here. The Millstone just stares at him, along with the rest of the veiled team. Anesthesiologist keeps pumping the magic punching bag, calling out stock ticker numbers that slip steadily toward debit. Millstone shouts, "Come on. Calm down. Clean things up or we're going to get some vicious scarring."

Scarring? A pretty scar the length of this girl's body would be the luckiest outcome she could hope for. Kraft rejoins the dark assault SWAT forces macheteing their way inland, upriver, deeper inside her.

He sweeps low, near the knots of growth he must defoliate. Blades whirring, like the fairy dragonflies that fly these phantom criticals in. Like the ones he rode in. The hive of bugs that flew their mercy platoon on its last leg into the triple canopy, the schoolchildren strapped in between stacks of charity goods. He saw another swarm of the things the other night on the tube, zoned out again on nonfic-tion footage, horrific public education stuff, the only shows he has patience for in his unusably few free hours. Trance, daydream, daze, stupor, coma while waiting for the wrap-up, the big — what's the undoer of bang?

These TV choppers: the same make, same breed, same machines that, between unlisted missions, airlifted their prefab schoolhouse upcountry to the jungle village he himself had picked out on the map and insisted upon. The one that had called out to him.

Millstone does not flutter now, does not even breathe. He is waiting for Kraft to finish the delicate stuff before cuffing and booking him. Wouldn't be so quiet in here if it weren't an ambush. Somebody's even turned off the radio, the vid, the eternal ubiquitous soundtrack. It's silent, anacoustic, surf-in-the-ear-vessels time. Somewhere outside the operating theater — where? adjacent? just above this room? have they gotten loose, taken over the institution? — he can hear the familiar sounds of his ward, children of daily abuse, voices in the undergrowth, singing the latest in a continuous descent of jingles that propagate out of wedlock, ignorant of their parentage:

Ching, Chang, Chinaman chopped at a rat,

Snarfed it back like a ginger snap.

And then sucked it down, and then slurped it up. Every restless permutation along the way back to suckling innocence. Chop, Chow, Chang, Chinaman, and then it comes to Kraft, in a ginger snap: the disguised anxiety hidden in this verse enchantment. How are we going to beat back the rat-eating Asian armada from our already wretchedly refused shores?

The world, as seen nightly, in increasing doses of nonfiction TV used to drug himself unconscious, is awash in open boats. Moroccans landing on the casinoed beaches of southern France. Cubans punting to Miami. Albanian fishing craft listing to Italy. The Kurds, targeted by all takers, beached, landlocked in dry mountain seas. Asia flooded, dammed behind chain-link pens in Hong Kong, Formosa, Nippon.

The favored ones are put through the holding camps' full interrogation. Are you a real political refugee, or just starving? (As if indigence weren't oppression by its maiden name.) This sieve sorts life into Right, Left, the same old two deciding queues, quintessential camp winnowings. Mass mockeries of the Last Ordeal, only none is ever the last. You: through. You, you, and you: one giant step back.

Escape this deluge by turning a handful of rat gourmets back to their so-called dominions? Pitiful, pointless, like the little blond lowlands kid with his digit in the dike. The Leg-ups' worst, concerted nightmare scenario: the wages of empire, brown foster foundlings returning with a vengeance. They trawl in solid convoys, every serviceable craft commandeered, skulling away from the mass quarries of bone and lime. Rivulets of humanity trickle into unbailable flood, a tidal surge coursing across privilege's topographic contours. They wash away the sparse island respites, leveling them in one swell of instant erosion.

The whole South is cut loose, fleeing by any means the positive feedback loop of privation, a step in front of the aerial canister and tracer. The very air is ignited behind their spree, the shock wave lifting them along, flinging them flying-monkey style toward that figment of deliverance. Driven out, and by whom? By the eminent domaineers, the same squatters to whose blessed destinations they bail out.

The whole South is cut loose, fleeing by any means the positive feedback loop of privation, a step in front of the aerial canister and tracer. The very air is ignited behind their spree, the shock wave lifting them along, flinging them flying-monkey style toward that figment of deliverance. Driven out, and by whom? By the eminent domaineers, the same squatters to whose blessed destinations they bail out.