Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

He waited expectantly, perhaps for a polite show of hands. "Can any of you tell us what is happening in this region?"

Gopal cleared his throat and took the plunge. "I'm afraid if you haven't figured it out by now…"

The reporter adroitly intercepted the boy. "Gopal, you're from…?"

"India. It's a large country just through the center of the earth from…"

So the interview went, turning the simplest act of care into the usual broadcast circus. The reporter didn't want children building a schoolhouse upcountry. Not: I'm fifteen, and I rub myself off nightly and I've twice smoked ganja and my job is digging post holes. Not: I'm eight and I like melting dolls and I can't bring friends home when my mother's there. He wanted allegory, Little Eva or Nell, a two-minute twist-wrap in the manner that this rightless class has always been painted: perversely small, alien creatures, a delightful variety act in their Tinytown getup, dancing, prancing, romancing, just like homunculus adults. He kept rephrasing every question until it became an elaborate description to which the student had simply to answer yeah.

"This little boy's name is Luke… "

"Lok," Kraft corrected, knowing that the reporter would stop and explain to him with increasing testiness that for American TV, only one person was allowed to talk at one time, and that person was him until he said so.

"This little boy actually grew up in this very village, a forgotten town lost in the crossfire, but one where his new friends from many countries are now building him a building that might change his life. Luke, can you tell us how the war has touched you?"

Kraft interpreted, and the cameras ate up the image of the two crew cuts jabbering at each other, the brown one shyly smirking as he spoke. Ricky turned back to the MC. "He wants to know whether you have any chewing gum."

Shielded by the omnipotent edit, the reporter hacked on. "How does it feel when you hear shooting in the distance? Are you worried that it's coming closer?"

Kraft dutifully relayed the question and Lok's answer: "He says he once saw a body spread across the river path. Lots of teeny creatures were making their home in it."

The reporter got excited; they could use that bit. Maybe they could take him to the spot for an image. "Luke, can you tell the boys and girls back in America what you most want to learn at your new school?" A slight altercation followed, the boys barking at each other in their playing-field pidgin. The reporter gently reminded Kraft that he mustn't hold anything back.

"He wants to know if American girls have a furry patch between their legs."

"How about you?" the reporter turned on him when the fracas settled. "Are you frightened to be here?"

A whiff of future came across the clearing, and Kraft knew that the refuge was already lost. The miracle beans he had hoped to stash away in the soil would not take root until this patch of ground too had been flooded under a sea of asylum seekers. And he felt free to say anything he wanted, safe in the knowledge that any truth he might utter would never slip past the editors of this new continuous primer in illiteracy and evasion, the world's last will and testament.

Listen my children and you shall hear the sense of the words this boy spoke as adulthood has hung on to them. TV wanted the war in anecdote — this season's diversion for the stimulus stunned. Very well then. The boy began to speak softly, plumping the rhythms like a jump-rope rhyme. He spoke of all the hot spots he had put up in for a while and had been forced to evacuate. He told of a Caribbean island that sowed its fields with its own carcasses rather than share the land. He described half a billion subcontinentals massing in sacrificial machete waves over the shape of God's head. He painted a perfect white-tower-topped palace by the sea, then set it to the torch.

"Aren't you afraid? Isn't everyone?" he giggled. He tried to say how every place he had ever lived was an armed camp, swarming with shirtless, underaged adolescents toting lightweight grenade launchers. He said how he had read that there had been two wars a year, each costing an average quarter-million lives, since the start of history.

The war over the river, he said, mattered to the cameras only because home boys were dying. We were using wire-guided weapons and aerial defoliants. They were using children with spring-loaded shredded-tin-can bombs strapped to their chests. In a few years, the reporter's war that this school outing opposed would probably be turned into anonymous, stylish, prime-time violence, colorful punji combat for rating stakes. The kerchiefed, bare-chested, M-l6—decked commando filmed in front of a stand of bamboo will turn the war into a small-bore lullaby.

He mumbled this prediction, accusing no one. Was he afraid? Anyone who wasn't was not paying attention. That was the point of this school: to teach the children of the village what was being done all around them to the children of Planet Earth. Just the Who, What, When, and Where, because the lone Why was too awful to bear. Ricky declared that the only solution to the crisis across the river, to the trauma racing through every country on unlimited tourist visas, was mandatory intermarriage at gunpoint for a hundred generations, until everybody looked exactly the same. As his sentences grew longer, he savored his first taste of cynicism along the sides of his tongue, right next to "Sour" and "Salt" in the Science and You diagrams. And with that taste, he crossed a subterranean border into old age.

He finished his diatribe to dead silence. The cameras had long since shut off. The reporter was already gesturing for kids to go over by the school and move some teak trunks around. Kraft's impromptu parable was sucked up by a spinning dust devil into the vacant sky above Nam Chai. The wind carried off his words as it would a scuttled fighting kite. He watched the reporter film his prepared tag, khaki flapping in front of Kraft's classmates, each swinging languidly at a fake nail, guilty of betrayal but unable to help themselves.

"We've all heard the line 'A little child'll lead them'? The question is whether those of us old enough to remember have the courage to follow. This is…"

Kraft camped out that night in the roofless sala, all the shelter he wanted. He sat toying with a giant chalk protractor, convenient tool for projecting Euclidean circles into the arcless bush. The whole project felt suddenly cruel — laying this foundation, then retreating to the City of Angels without supplying the one thing needed to touch off the genesis: a teacher. He rummaged through the boxes of supplies looking for a fuse, but only came up with a stack of fraction-wedged pie pans, a thick-mounted jigsaw of the world ("Mideast," "Southeast Asia," each a single cartoon balloon, for easy assembly), and a softball-sized heart with cutaway flaps that he clapped together like the slack jaw of a ventriloquist's dummy.

A shuffle announced the arrival, in the dark, of a few other ad hoc Security Councillors. Jien, Bandele — he couldn't make them out. "They're looking for you, buster," someone who sounded like Eleni Katzourakis said. "The adults. Headmaster. Herr Springer."

Figures spread around the unfinished room, squeezing into the matrix of desks that had been shoved to the side to avoid construction damage. "Hey, Kraft." That was Farouk. "That little speech of yours…" He gave a half-whistle of admiration and disbelief.

''Yeah," a Janie shape and an Elaine voice said together. Then, again stereo: "Jinx!" As if it were easy, here in the unfinished dark, to pretend still to immaturity.

Gopal chuckled. "Not bad for a liberal lackey."

Whatever other votes of confidence the delegation had come to give him were drowned by the arrival of Lok, leading a pack of rabble who had managed to slip out of restraints under cover of darkness. The townies burst in, rollicking but stealthy, a sampler of deficiencies whose only revenge was a know-no-better amusement.