Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Besides, he'd just have to swing around and come back in another few hours. Here, the meals are already made. A motel room at the Knife and Gun, already reserved in Kraft's name. And when was the last time he could do anything else but slink back to the ward and try to become a better hacker than he has been today, one for whom technique, intuition, and hands-on knowledge might, in some sustainable future, begin to grow almost equal to the body gone wrong, the infinite, anonymous petitions laid at his door?

A girl too small for her twelve years, still pitching from months on the sheet of corrugated tin that took her six hundred miles across the South China Sea, stands in front of history class in the eastern ravages of Angel City and guesses where the lost Roanoke colony has disappeared to. A year and a half of English administered by evangelical Philippines relief camp aides and a battery of weeks stateside qualifies her for the Oral Report, that time-honored ritual of passage. She chooses, for some reason, American history.

She tries to say just what that single word, carved into the bark of a tree, might reveal about the lost Virginian band's destination. She pronounces the word aloud, cuts it into the blackboard with a stump of chalk that disintegrates into pastel sand in her fingers: CROATOAN. She spells the fragment left on a second trunk: CRO. This word, the lone sign of hasty evacuation remaining to greet the colony's governor on his return from a supply run to the mother country, holds for her no impenetrable mystery. It is as English, as Lao, as Lao-Tai, as Thai, as Tagalog, as Latin Spanish as any of the trading currencies drifting through the temporary settlements where she has put up for the night. To every relocation camp its own transitory lingua franca, built up by the accidents of mass migration. And all the mysterious messages ever penned into silent bark come to the same thing: We're off, then. Don't wait up.

Why else would a person resort to words? Words, she has learned in all manner of reeducation programs along her route, have no origin and no end. They are themselves the touring urgency they try to describe. Barrio, where she now lives, comes from Spanish, from Arabic, from the idea of the idea of open country. No word could be more English now, more American, although all the open country here has been closed for lifetimes. That's okay, because barrio is now as plowed under, as built up as that lost open land. It means something else, in the run of time. It means those Arabs creeping northward into Spain like fluid in a barometer. It means the Spanish, unable to stop the Moor advance except by swallowing their science and math and militant restlessness. It means the English maritime offspring, unwisely jumping their own island for something larger, in turn unable to contain the children of New Spain except by eating them whole— their food, their music, their words.

This is the outline she was born knowing — how words are the scratch marks of intersecting trails. She still holds in her head a complex map of river linguistics: sound geographies, isoglossaries of all the valley people her own once did business with. Moors and conquistadores and Carolina pilgrims, picked up quickly at the latest trading station, she simply superimposes on the list. She imitates the local playground cries, swapping in the Spanish chants as effortlessly as the English. The two are the same, the nearest of cousins, given the family she comes from. She shares herself between them, speaking an exploratory patois eclectic enough to baffle all listeners equally.

Arriving at this school, abandoned on the principal's doorstep, she wanted only to please — a small enough price for guaranteed safety. Pleasing seemed to involve solving the riddles laid before her. In numbers and planes and problem solving, she tested years beyond her peers, beyond many of the certified teachers. But she could not paraphrase "Make hay while the sun shines," nor complete the analogy "Shoe is to sock as overcoat is to…" More indicting, she said absolutely nothing unless forced, and then acquitted herself with the barest minimum of whispered, eerie syllables.

Ceramic, tiny, terrified, she moved about on legs as pencil-tentative as a tawny mouse deer. All four of her limbs would have fit comfortably inside a third-grade lunch box. Her every gesture seemed calculated to evade the incursions of those bigger than she. The school nurse refused to believe the age the little one gave, and there was of course no birth certificate. A problem with number translation? No; the girl marked out her years in sticks on a sheet, silently polite, as if adults required infinite patience. Simple fib? But what on earth could she gain by pretending to be older than she was?

No matter. She looked eight, ocean cruise survivor or otherwise. True, she spoke (when she spoke) impressively for a recent acquirer, but no more precociously than other transpacific Asian eight-year-olds played the violin. However well she knew the Roman alphabet by sight, she could barely force her fist to push it into print. Easy cursive, flash card grace, dodge ball without shame were all out of the question. Enlightened pedagogy demanded that she start three grades beneath her age. And obediently, there she began.

Six weeks of field test routs pedagogy. The third-grade teacher allots her a desk, takes an hour to explain the subjects, gives her maps, a math notebook, a compass, and a protractor, and assigns a pristine text from the previous, humiliated decade called Our Emerging World, saying, “We'll be working in this.” Code, the girl quickly intuits, for “As soon as I teach your fifty other materially arrested classmates how to fake reading.”

Misunderstanding, or perhaps just desperate, Joy has the books finished by week's end. Incredulous teacher rejects the evidence. She tests the girl on end chapters, middle chapters, mixing the order, as if the new child were one of those square-root-solving horses from variety TV. Unstumpable if no less diminutive, Joy earns instant promotion to grade four. There, her new teacher discovers that the girl can indeed speak full, correct, even beautiful sentences, only her predicates are always lost to the background radiation of manic classroom.

By term's end, she is kicked upward again. She is made to visit the school counselor, to receive psychological patch-up for what the botched, bounce-around job must certainly be doing to her. Counselor asks her probing but shrewdly disguised questions, such as, Would you rather be a seal in a big seal colony basking on the shore or an eagle soaring all alone high above the cliffs? Seal, without hesitation. Oh? Why? Eagles eat rats and seals eat fish and she has eaten both and greatly prefers fish.

Joy takes pity on this man, helps him get to the point without more embarrassment. "Fifth grade is much better than third or fourth," she volunteers. Yes, yes; how? "In fifth grade, you get to face the street and you can watch people walking by all day long." I see. And what else? The desks move?" she asks, hoping against hope that this is the right answer.

Do you have any special worries that you'd like to tell me about? A rungs from the bottom of your secret storage, stories from before? Her eyes spark a moment, break for barrio, for open country, a place where the smells and sounds that reared her are left a little tropical acreage, where not everyone she loves has necessarily been flayed alive. Before she can control them, her hands fly up like a surprised monkey army breaking for rain forest safety. "Some of my friends here can't pronounce my last name."

The counselor files his report. This girl can be bounced from now until the last institutional foul-up of recorded time and not realize that utter flux is in any way unusual. And yet, the counselor scribbles everywhere on the form except in the blank space reserved for the OCR reader, there are lands around the world where permanent residence, for this child, would be far worse than her list of temporary visas.