Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Near the first refueling stop, they visited the shrine of one of the Enlightened's most famous manifestations. The student travelers filed above a depression in the ground two meters deep. This hole, it took a moment to gather, was a footprint the length of two men. The toeprints radiated in perfect concentric circles. The foot itself was oval, pristine — as sinuously magnificent as a Siamese fighting fish. Most miraculous of all, the foot had left its impression not in soil but in something more resistant, metallic. Flecks of hammered-thin gold, no more than a handful of atoms thick, clung about the relic, like the ephemeral backing papers of toy tattoos.

That night, they pitched camp in a clearing in what seemed the gentlest of forests. Sampao, the art teacher, who had chosen the campsite, went around grinning until the children realized something was up. Kraft was the first to crack it; their forest was a single, all-over-arching tree. They were ensconced beneath a lone banyan, its every branch sending down air roots that turned into trunk and started the cycle all over again, its center spreading outward indefinitely, an enchanted wood large enough to swallow this entire student society, a thicket maze so extensive and dense that even the classic cartographic bread crumbs (lost, in this version, not to birds but to giant red fire ants) would be no help.

The stories around the campfire were inspired by the defenseless, unearthly adventure, by being out so late with no curfew, no home to return to in the morning. Gabi Lauter told of the Kinderzeche, an annual festival from her birthplace honoring the children who saved the town from destruction during a war that had lasted longer than a generation. Farouk Ali — one of those demonic, genius-grant-funded child wizards behind the world's seemingly spontaneous playground chants, the war cries of the paste- and eraser-eating set, the fear-enforced slanders that made even captains of industry, walking past playgrounds, lose their equanimity and assume the taunts were aimed at them — produced an Arabic rhyme that, freely translated, went something like "Cinderella, dressed in yella, went downtown to meet her fella…"

Farouk good-naturedly supposed out loud that Guus Vandersteen-hoven had been chosen to come because a mission like this needed at least one boy who would be willing to stick his finger in a dyke. Guus swore nobody in his country had ever heard that story, or the one about the kid with the ice skates, either.

Claudio, a hopeless intellectual whose most vigorous sport was the crossruff, changed the topic to a fantastic tale of art treasures transported to England via Khartoum, where they had been brought from the collapsing East by that Messiah fighter, Chinese Gordon, of the Ever-Victorious Army. Dimi said that he'd read the same story somewhere, and Farouk asked him if he'd ever finished coloring the book in.

Quintessential cookout fare, in short, followed by ghost tales and toasted bananas over the night's last embers. Some played cards or pit-and-pebble while the light held. The youngest swapped things— plastic figures or little cast-iron cars — while the oldest grilled one another on the lyrics of the latest stateside songs to reach this place, by then pathetically dated.

Adulthood would reach them almost superfluously: the popular South Americans had their bank vice presidencies all but signed; the Chinese and Indians their elite if shabby governmental back offices. The junior Eurocrat brats saw in this trip invaluable résumé experience, while the offspring of international Asian cartels would remember these tropical forests years later as game board squares to be played to. The sons and daughters of lifer soldiers and PX personnel, the long lineage of crate-lifters, passing this once for socially acceptable on a disguised outing up from the underclass, already felt the knee-jerk exclusion from their school chums that even in these presophisticates went unnamed.

Kraft, who had already begun to dream at night of saving everyone he knew from Ganges-scale floods, saw in the flicker of the bug-drawing fire that he was destined for futile sandbag duty at the end. Surrounded by a circle of lit faces that suddenly seemed too impossibly young to be his contemporaries, he froze and could not deliver his piece when his turn came around. His national allegory — the wandering guy with the sack of apple seeds — had degraded along the way to the executive mercenary, Kraft Sr., leaning out of his machine in the pitch-black, calling down amplified confusion on lands too wayward to reform by any other means. The country of the universally displaced had somehow graduated to evil overlord, backing every backwater tyrant who owned a cattle prod. It had torn itself apart on cynical profit, gone debauched in a single step, and nobody could say how or why.

What national folk tale could he relate, he who had been home for all of six weeks in his life? He thought he might tell them of the child's "Come away!" that had inspired this field project. Instead, he made due by playing the kluay obbligato while Francisca Ng, daughter of a high-ranking international aid officer, sang:

Where are you off to, little girl, so late? Are frogs calling, do owls keep you awake? How far must you go yet, at this hour? Can't it wait?

Where in the world the tune came from was anyone's guess. The girl, a grade older than Kraft, could sing the verse in any language, with no damage to the musical line. Her voice was spectral, beyond forgetting. All who heard her wanted to jump up and continue that night, to push to the boundless banyan's edge, into the threatened countryside.

On day two, stopping to stretch and bat about a takraw, one of mankind's few cooperative sports, they were met by a khakied American who came from nowhere out of the bush. The man asked for food and told an incredulous student council that he was walking home. He deserted them as quickly as he had appeared. The exchange made Headmaster remind them that they were nearing the shooting zone; the war that they had all seen broadcast was near, border violating, and real. Hill tribes in this region were routinely rounded up by the government and sent against the insurgents, local peasants who had suffered opposite recruitment.

Nam Chai, when they arrived, was not so much a village as a letter of intent. The government had made a colossal mistake in agreeing to let them see the place, let alone attempt philanthropy here. Not only was there no school, there was no market, no shop, no post office, no sewers, no garage, no clinic. The dwellings were no larger than Angel City spirit houses.

The bus discharged the legation, and all the living souls in that few square kilometers formed two queues of the mutually incredulous. In one glance, education as escape revealed itself to be wishful thinking. Something was wrong with this village, more wrong than any school could cure. Some antique curse — a troll extracting weekly blood tribute, some slow leach, a heavy-metal impurity lacing the all-purpose stream, a terrain inviting perpetual foreign invasion — hung over the place, turning assistance almost cruel.

The self-appointed international ambassadors of goodwill unloaded their trucks. They stacked the modular walls, the globes, chalkboards, and diminutive desks next to the foundation spot in the morass. Their heaps might have been more useful as firewood. The inventory seemed as pointless as a stockpile of thousand-watt ice shavers rotting in some outletless outback. Over these confused caches flew the school flag with its Hanuman silhouette.

Every other village child suffered some exotic jungle affliction. Faces swelled shut under parasite assault. Leeches laddered up legs. Wild defects bent fingers back like the brass nails of a classical dancer, or sprouted wing stumps between shoulder blades. These were the bastard UNICEF wraiths, those dirt-cripples that privilege was supposed to save with a couple pennies' worth of trick-or-treats.