Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Driven out by dragonflies, the agents provocateurs he saw again last night in blue phosphor simulacrum, that cozy, flickering glow the color of a patio bug-zapper. The hum of one too, but more curdlingly eerie, without soundtrack. Only the sober, clinical voice-over, "In the rainy season of sixty-buzz combined Special Forces of buzz …" Hit upon the surreal little fairy plan… But fact . As in, actually happened. And there, on factual film, while the factual narrator mediated the escapade, was Operation Wandering Soul. One of the roster of colorfully named undertakings: Operation Flaming Dart. Mayflower. Royal phoenix. Rolling Thunder. Niagara. Junction City. Sea Swallow. Linebacker Two.

Because he could not hope for sleep, he chose numb distraction, nonfiction Wandering Soul, the sinister lace-wing roundup. The voice-over explained it in teacherly tones, described the sick side-junket, more literary than military. Dragonflies at night swarm above unsuspecting villages, high enough to be indistinct from the season's background locust whirr, the night's dark radiation. On cue, spectral voices cut in, lighting up the night like aural phosphor flares. "Our babies," native collaborators call out, translating the names to regional variants. "Our offspring! Have you forgotten us?"

Disembodied chill semaphores, piped through megaphones at three A.M., a crude and bizarre attempt at demoralization howled down from haunted heaven into the animist jungle. A monsoon of invisible, amplified voices from out of an unreal parallel. The point was simply to ply digestion's pits, to curdle skin, to play terror off of shame by leveling the claim these villagers would be most inclined to believe in. We are your ancestors, expelled from your frag-shattered pantry altars, exiled by your bad karma and evil politics. Give up, capitulate, come over. Do this, our last bidding.

The whole project might have been pure theater, cinematic American weirdness in the jungle. But the account was too outrageously surreal for Kraft to be anything else than the recognizable exploits of the Foreign Service's fighting wing. Film didn't register the ground panic, or say whether the hot stick shoved down the anthill bore results. It's all inference, aerial recon, a grainy, underexposed, handheld frame from on high, inside the chopper, the innuendo of mayhem.

But the effects of the operation, its results, were never at issue. All the instigators wanted was all they ever want: a gold star, extra credit for inventive derangement. Look what we made. Our program, our play, our restless, destined superiority. Take that. Hit me back. Tell me what happens next. Love me.

The camera panned too much to make out the protagonists. And the voices calling out directives to one another were drowned out by the amplifiers doing the grandparent souls, and the omniscient narrator turning the whole crazed event back into fable. Kraft stared up close, his nose to the monitor like a kid pressed to mall glass. Couldn't see a thing. But he knew who was flying the beasts before the show even aired. The same ones who dreamed up the scheme to saturation-bomb the countryside with transistor radios, so the rice farmers could listen to agitprop. (They took the batteries out to build bombs.) The endlessly inventive crew, the fecund fathers of the same meandering band just then heading upcountry, two dominoes over. Air America by all its multinational names.

Then, briefly caught on his private mental celluloid, leaning out of the open cage to peer down into impenetrable blackness: it's Kraft Sr. Leans too far, too curiously, and the charm, at gravity's first callow come-on, slips the man's neck. The silver bauble Dad has had forever, the one that's protected him from pitching into utter, pragmatic corruption, is lost. Takes a decade or more to float down the air current parfait. Winds bat it about gently for years, like seals with a beachball. It traverses the sealed border on its long paradrop down and lies in a river valley, awaiting the next child.

This glimpse of darkness's raiding party cut neatly to a pledge break where the pain-o-meter declared how few degrees shy we were of need's complete pacification. The association condemns him to dredge up that contemporaneous Operation Mayflower — junior high musical, lyrics to tunes pinched from a smash hit based on a cheery little Dickens book about the criminally destitute. The production was set at that posh Chao Phraya River hotel where Maugham liked to luxuriate. A Thanksgiving show, a holiday that half the student body had never heard of. Act One, Pilgrims land by klong boat, meet Native Americans, and come to culturally relative understanding with same. Act Two, contemporaries repeat same maneuver, landing upriver in modern-day City of Angels (now cleverly playing itself), assuring the Native Free there to greet them that

We'd give an-y-thing

To keep peace flour-ish-ing,

'Cause it means ev-ry-thing (ev-ry-thing?)

Ev-ry-thing to us!

God: What had they been thinking? Same thought that's still dressed up in every night's news serial. Assist history, by any protection racket necessary, to its unbridled outcome. Push it along its path, civilization's two-stroke engine, condensing out of cold, cosmic dust the raw swaps and consolidations of power that are its only end. The stuff of every school musical.

It blazes into his head as he curls over Operation Operation, the Millstone ready to restrain him should Kraft give him cause. Atonement. Everything in his innocent suggestion — let us fortunate ones go upcountry and build a school — every word in this selfless reversal of "please, sir, I want some more," already smacked of a child's compensation. At-one-ment for adulthood's sins. Somewhere in this history-ravaged place, they might make up for the outrage to dead ancestors.

What can he hack at next? Here, something slashable. A fix, a small blow, a nickel in the drum for the old meliorist dream. He circles and slipknots the hideous foreign bits, cuts them off and kills them. He drops the insidious nodules, pellet by pellet, into the waiting pan. It's one of those saint's offering plates full of detached teeth, deflated eyes, severed digits. The emblems, the means of continuous martyrdom. Tainted nipples on a dish. 'Want to know a secret?" the girl's foster mother asked him one night, early on, when all their secrets had already been taken hostage. "For some reason, my breasts…"

"Wait, wait. You aren't going to make me do anything kinky?" He could still talk like that. How long ago? Only a week? Dissimulating monster. Where had he gotten the strength for such bravura pretense?

"Shh. I'm trying to tell you something." Something you will always be able to hold over me. "For some reason, my breasts…"

"These here?"

"Quit. Mm. For some reason, my breasts… aren't sensitive? Usually, I can't feel anything at all from here to here. But when I'm with you…?"

It deemed the announcement of a small victory, a further invitation to dine out. They had been young once, insouciant with each other. For all of fifteen minutes, one Saturday night, before they shed the respective pseudonyms.

"What do you mean, usually?"

This woman was not even Linda by looks anymore. Ready to bolt or bail, or some combination. "I meant, previously."

"You just need an older man is all." Still up to the joke, still thinking it was one, failing to see how irony fizzles into fact. Because yes, he made them pucker and yearn, stand and be counted. He alone, but only because the others had never discovered the secret to insanely upbeat females. They have this craving they don't like to admit. Hate in themselves, in fact. The sinister flip side to blissful Do-Bee-dom. They like to be vised, pinched on a neck nerve and held at attention, unsheathed, paralyzed with incisors, bitten.