Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Even here, in the North, on ground still a meter above flood, intact for another half decade, they have all gone precociously, so-phisticatedly rat, superaged by witnessing ten hundred slow-mo deaths before puberty. Told that all the purchasable world is theirs, then unceremoniously strip-searched for grabbing it, they know their real birthright early, the transparency of the fables handed them.

Kraft is silent, thinking: She could not have gotten them back into these dated fairy suits — innocence's routed camp — if it didn't fit their own hidden purpose. Somehow, they're using her.

And yet she goes on touting the idea, blithely, unsuspecting. "Then they return, in the second act, dressed as…"

He tries to call it back, that pestilent poem, born of an older, even more pernicious myth, the one that refuses to let go. The verse version, composed, so he learned in school, in one hemisphere or another, for the invalid son of a friend. And suddenly Kraft has to know: What did that child have? Did it live?

"They want to," he starts, and can't at first recall the expression. "They want to take the show on the road?"

"Yes." She is crying now, unable to sacrifice anything more to him. Alkali seeps out of her, all the sulfureous backpressure of wanting to do right and missing, always missing, no matter what she tries. "Yes, goddammit. I just told you. Can't you…? What the fuck is wrong with you? "

He doesn't even hear the inconceivable profanity pass out of her. "Without Joy?"

He races along some linked anxiety, the need to determine the full extent of what these band members are calculating before they hurt themselves, before they can pull off their elaborate plan. "No, it's impossible. You can't let them go out there. Haven't you read the papers? The casualty figures, the stats. Christ, you've seen the way they bring them in through the downstairs drive-up. Continuous Doppler relay race. Shriners' shoot-out circus. You're going to lead them out on this little field trip? So that you can send them back to me as massive crush avulsions?"

Timed to confirm him, a squad car sidles up alongside them. Officer rolls his window down just a crack, to ask whether there's some trouble. Has their vehicle broken down or something?

Kraft turns on them furiously. "Why don't you go beat up a couple welfare gorillas?" Only Linda's quick shoulder restraint keeps them from arrest or worse.

The relative peace of this neighborhood, the privileged quiet of their immediate surroundings, is all a distortion, a local fluke, a maraschino paid for on ingeniously overextended credit or stolen outright. And it's all coming down, being called in. She takes his elbow and turns him the long way home.

Waiting for them on the back stoop is that tribe of foundling milks they have just put out. He cannot even lift his head to whisper, "Don't you see it, where they want to go?" He threads his way over them, the lost boys, the ones who left when we were small.

"All my old kindergarten familiars," he says, turning in the threshold, too far past coherence for her to follow. He stands in the door-way, surrounded by this campfire ring. Stereo faces stare eagerly, smiling him down, waiting to hear tonight's installment, his firsthand account. Ancient friends, wised up, computer-aged, looking for all the world like the final heist's advance interference. Returned for a while, God knows why, to the here and now. Placed in his care, only to be snatched away again.

Listen my children, and you shall hear. Hear the remains of the unshed core that Once was once built upon. Here is the most, the closest you will ever know, the traces that stay with you when you can no longer even place the source. This is the text, the spooky grandparental ramblings in back rooms off kitchens stinking of toilet-flush conservation, those huddled alley debriefings, the day's last recap before lights-out.

Listen up, and forever go on listening to the eternal campfire replays. Commit to memory those night imperatives that will come to seem, lifetimes later, inconceivably strange sequels to prospects that never came to pass. Re-create, in spoken hologram, mental wire-frame model, the anachronistic singsong quatrains, and learn again how every account is itself the time hole mosaic it so minutely describes.

Words will return at livid intervals to haunt even you, the most hardened, back-of-the-class switchbladers. They will pop up unsponsored, unshakable, like old manslaughter charges. Harbor the last recounting, and repeat it to yourself, looking back, in the reflected light of telling, on that circle of scared, scrubbed faces, struck with the full horror of related events, sitting here listening, just listening, before the leap.

This is the stuff of final exams. Audible, even behind the reach for the conventional opening: Once upon a time, Once before this world, once, long ago, they say. Never here. At Cottonwood. Over yonder.

In a kingdom by the sea. You, of all people, must remember. Because Once has no other visible means of support. It will die for all time when you lose its least particular.

Storytime is over, and yet, the rustiest recitation will come claim you one day, when you least expect it. You are as ancient as the oldest then. All the word's shadow-puppet spectacles — the magic cabins, monkey armies, unrippable spinnakers, interlocking dreams, winter fruit trees, inscribed rings, insidious machines — can come to their appointed end only if you sit still, stop sniping for a minute, and listen.

Once, far away, there lived a boy who wanted to make things right. He would come to his mother after dinner, a dish towel in his hand, and she would shake her heard sadly and wonder how the world would end up killing him. When the obligatory three wishes came and ambushed him, he politely refused all but one. Just let me try to cure things. A simple enough request, and he himself volunteered to lead the way to the broken locale, the spot that needed fixing.

He had lived everywhere, belonged nowhere, and had already seen hopelessness huge enough to glut the most jaded famine tourist. Misery was the rule in the two thirds of the earth the boy had visited. Eight of the best pickup starting eleven he ever played with died of deficiencies. His friends lived in cardboard and subsisted by selling jasmine ringlets to jammed motorists. He worked with a school service club, aiding at a state asylum where concrete cubicles swarmed with children — deformed, diseased, degeneratively crippled, industrially poisoned, lumped together and left to rock on their haunches all day on the bare floor. There, he had watched helplessly as a boy his age picked at ooze in the back of his head, trying to get to his brain and scoop his curse away by its roots the way a child from a luckier continent might crumble a honeycomb.

After a summer of monastic retreat, he saw the obvious: suffering was not a condition. It was a thing. Need, like wealth, its claim-jumping cousin (which the boy, one sad homecoming, had also seen), could be made and unmade. Poverty was an unfortunate detour, a world jerking too suddenly toward its one shot at well-being. Suffering had nothing to do with power and exploitation, good versus evil. It had to do with logistics, better delivering.

Generations of adults before him had overlooked the simple corrective. He would have missed it too, had an ancient boy not whispered it to him. Hold a bit of the miracle cash crop out for seed. Then send these shoots where nothing had yet rooted.

And there was such a spot, no farther away than his pointing finger. One day, when the moment was right, in the middle of class (you remember classes, those wards you worked in before this ward?), the boy raised his hand and asked, "What would it cost…" This was how he started the matter. He knew enough to speak the dialect of the person he was speaking to. "What would it cost" — although he suspected that no one had yet put the full price tag on our being here or not—"to build a school?"