Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Her eyes water at him, pleading, and he groans, deflated by her failure to grasp his flash of explication. He shies away from her, slips her grip and returns to reviewing the troops, a dejected ancient emperor of milk containers, lining up his glazed, ceramic cadres for a last muster preparatory to their mass live burial. Kidnapped, abducted, seized, carried away, shanghaied. Marco Poloed, the man who left shortly after the departure of the Children's Battalion and was still there when the second emigrant wave, the Ratcatcher Expedition, took off for ports unknown. Does she believe that her case load of historical ignorants chose theirs, of all five billion possible scripts for amateur physiotheatrics, simply because they liked the plot ? She forces off his accusation before it congeals in her. One more incriminating motivic link and she will be down alongside him on emotional hands and knees, scraping her nails in attempt to excavate sense from the resistant cartons.

They multiply in front of her, these paired public service posters. On the left, Child at disappearance; on the right, Child computer-reared into the present. Each distinct case claims her, calling for undiscovered therapies, yet-to-be invented regimens of exercise that might break the loop. Each smiles, even mugs for the camera, Get it right this time, 'cause I'm outta here. Their impish grins of send-off sweetness hint dimly at the foreordained. But around the eyes, the way the cheeks crinkle in imitation mirth yet reel with bewildered trust, there, perched above the dollhouse frock collar or tiny blazer and clip-on tie, skin's swaddling linen already fights back a muscle tic, the twitch of some other, older, extradited once-child's pathetically misjudged attempt to outsmile horror.

Twelve dozen kiosks calling HAVE YOU SEEN THESE FACES? sprout up across Ricky's kitchen counter top, an orchard of shock. She will never have a chance at any of these cases. They are farther from reach than her most mangled cutting-room vets. She shuts her mind to the sea of stereo views, blots them out for her own safety. The only case she can still hope to influence here is him. The emperor.

She wants to rush the receptacles, hustle them all into available refrigerators before prolonged exposure to room temperature can lace them with toxins. Ricky's undergraduate, bite-sized appliance might save, say, six.

'What in the Blessed Nurser's name are we going to do with all this milk?" She holds him, and he submits to petting. "Haven't you heard that dairy is out?" Expelled from the Four Foods pantheon, she would go on, if she could find the will. They might give them away, dispense them door to door like promos for a hot new product. But in a land where even the tamperproof shrink-wrap is sewn with random malignancy, no one would accept such a compromised gift.

She cradles him, a man old enough to be her abuser uncle. After their first formal evening together — that moviethon, just weeks ago— she'd called her mother. "Look, I know I've been wrong about this in the past, but there's this guy. I just don't need anything anymore. All the anxiety's gone. It feels, I don't know, like arriving. Coming home."

She actually used the taboo word out loud, to one of the two people who shared her lifelong embrace of mutual blackmail, the tacit refusal to hand over the place's negatives. Her mother, who kept holy water in the fridge, who threw elaborate coloratura fits about far less, simply shrugged audibly over the wires and asked, "How do you know you love him? I haven't even met him yet."

Nobody ever meets anybody. Always a matter of equanimity and stealth, a match-up of missing parts under cover of deniable darkness. Once he joked about it: a furtive shuffle as she came in the room, and he would look up, saying, "Oh, nothing!" Now, when she kisses him for no reason except that they are both lost, both all-points material, he looks up the same way, only the terror, the furtiveness, is real.

She does not know the first thing about him. And she will leave him now, agree finally to be the abandoning one, the way he wanted from the start, knowing less than on the day they crossed paths on rounds. She begins taking the milk outdoors, four quarts at a time, to leave for whatever mange might run wild in this alley. Her eyes catch the open instrument case, the tarnished French horn sitting on the Formica table, it too slated to be taken out and interrogated, perhaps beaten. Has he actually been playing the ancient thing, diverting his auditorium of abductees with scales or remembered grade-school showpiece repertoire?

"Ricky? You had the horn out?" Of course, asking is no good. As always, the accumulated inconsequences, the trivia that make all the difference in this peopled world, go unanswered.

She picks up the twisted coil of brass and hands it to him. "Play me something." Up to your room and practice an hour before you even think of going outside.

She reverse computer-ages him, back to age eight. Or not him: another close-to-the-chest orphan DP, borrowing Ricky's face in order to blend in with these new surroundings, to mimic himself into inconspicuousness. A reborn half-Kraft, but done over in Linda's brown, tagged by her goofy earlobes and big teeth that will one day be, but only too late, after their attendant early trauma has hardened, beautiful. She sees the boy's features for an instant, and her lungs collapse in on themselves, as if the resentful child himself slugs her in the solar plexus. She must run from the apartment before just looking at the man kills her.

It will never happen now, the ending they were supposed to have. This one will run, instead, like some women's magazine fiction, the last column clipped out along a coupon silhouette from the flip side of the page. She tries to come about, console herself with fierce pragmatics. They would have made the worst kind of parents in any event. With their combined professional commitments, real children would have been impossible, except perhaps through some offspring time-sharing arrangement, two weeks out of the year, like a gulfside condominium. And the latest photos from the continuous news flash would thermal-fax themselves, register in their newborn's Play-Doh face, turning the least hint of growth unbearable.

Kraft, the adult version, grown up in every particular except the essential, looks at the musical instrument this woman places in his hands. He turns it over, inspecting the valves the way a dinner guest might sneak a discreet peek at the china mark. He sticks a cupped hand in the bell and makes that trademark pucker sound of brass players warming up their mouthpieces. She hopes dizzily for a moment that he'll play, bring the remaining carton mug shots to life again, singing in a long file behind him. Instead, he removes the horn from his lips before any real sound can slip out.

When he speaks, it is absolutely clinical. Competent, surgical, perfectly modulated, as if he has never been out on anybody's ledge, as if his soul has not just been caught strung out all over its dark night. "The girl will be legless, if grace allows her that much. At the hip. Mutilation. For my money, worse than the most senseless accident."

Worse, because antiseptic, deliberate. The girl's adopted society has marked her for life, the way some clans disfigure a sickly child, chop it up to prevent reinfestation of the next born.

Linda looks out his window, east toward the desert, where people once buried their young under the kitchen floor, to keep an eternal eye on them. The marks he has made on this girl, the skilled, high-tech dismemberments, were all for this: to keep her soul from coming back, raiding the world again in the form of their child, a child she has just glimpsed, but who will never, now, return.

She will break for the door as soon as he looks the other way. But Kraft just sits there, fiddling with the bits of detachable tubing, in the creepy calm of someone reconciled to being slated from the start for a rented death. He has already made giant strides toward arriving, in half the usual time, at that neighbor ward, the mirror service to their own, where an opposite incontinent band hangs around the TV room, staining the floor in a pony-show ring.