Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

In the fifth grade, the bulk of the way back to where she should have been all along, Joy extends her squatter's rights in the New World. She dutifully holds her end of the jump rope, twirling it as she once wound wooden bobbins, in this life singing:

I spy! (Who do you spy?)

Little girl. (What color eye?)

Green eye. Yellow hair.

(What's her name?) Mary Jane.

(Tell the truth.) Baby Ruth.

(TELL THE TRUTH …!)

Her chant is a perfect mime except for phonemes slightly pitched, inflected to pentatonic. In the cafeteria, she inquires politely into which foods are acceptable to fling across the room and which are not.

Her academic progress is even more rapid. She has assignments done even before they are given. Some of the subjects she has seen already, at her last roofless holding camp on Luzon. Math and science are just common sense, written in symbols no harder or more arbitrary than the various alien alphabets. She falls in love with map reading: every location, a cross hair on the universal grid. What they call social studies is the easiest of all. She rapidly gleans the generating pattern of history. This country — no country at all and all countries rolled into one — is, like its language, the police blotter of invasions both inflicted and suffered, flash points involving all races of the world, violent scale-tips, constant oversteerings, veerings away from the world's deciding moment.

Her Brief and True Report of the New Found Land quietly maintains that GROATOAN was probably the misspelled name of a nearby Indian clan. No trace of a massacre; no remains. The colonists simply wandered off into the interior, not to escape this foreign force, Joy claims, but to join it. She has found a book in the school library (a lost colonial outpost of progress all its own) that tells how other Europeans, a century later, came across remote Indians with oddly colored hair and speech that bore the inexplicable ghosts of white words, the reverse of those etymological spirits still living in the settlers' canoes, hickories, pecans, squashes, raccoons, corn.

She exceeds her assigned ten minutes, gesturing with her hands, softly overloaded with discovery, repeating the recurrent theme of this continent. She recites in pitched, open vowels the logs of westward expansion, tales of white Indians in Kentucky, of European languages greeting the very first foreigners to track the upper Missouri. She urges her schoolmates, waving them on in a way she hopes is friendly and encouraging, speculating about the great-great-grandchildren of Madog, a man whose band of Welshmen sailed off the face of the map in 1170 and could have arrived no place but here. This she explicates without the least conception of Wales, or 1170, or Europe, or the Missouri.

And yet, the advantage of the late starter reveals to her what the established are too privileged to see. There are no natives here. Even the resident ambers and ochers descended from lost tribes, crossed over on some destroyed land bridge, destined to be recovered from the four corners of the earth where they had wandered. She tells how a shipwreck survivor named Christbearer Colonizer washed up on the rocks of the Famous Navigators' School with a head full of scripture and childhood fantasies. And she shows how these elaborate plans for regaining the metropolis of God on Earth led step by devastating step to their own Angel barrio.

Everything she relates she has already lived through: how that first crew survives on promises of revelation. How the Christbearer mistakes Cuba for Japan. How he makes his men swear that they are on the tip of Kublai Khan's empire. How, in the mouth of the Orinoco, he tastes the fourth river of Paradise flowing from the top of the tear-shaped globe. How he sets the earth on permanent displacement.

Her American history is a travelogue of mass migration's ten anxious ages: the world's disinherited, out wandering in search of colonies, falling across this convenient and violently arising land mass that overnight doubles the size of the known world. They slip into the mainland on riverboat and Conestoga, sow apple trees from burlap sacks, lay rail, blast through rock, decimate forests with the assistance of a giant blue ox. They survive on hints of the Seven Cities, the City on the Hill, the New Jerusalem, scale architectural models of urban renewal, migration's end. At each hesitant and course-corrected step, they leave behind hurriedly scrawled notes: Am joining up with new outfit, just past the next meridian.

She would leap across the continental divide, from CROATOAN to the Queen of the Angels Mission for recovering lost souls, go on to describe how this city she has landed in is itself founded by forty-four illiterate, migratory, mixed redskins and blacks, who stumbled by chance upon the rat-scabbed valley they imagined would deliver them. She would woo her classmates, win friends, by telling how the city they now share has within one lifetime served as Little Tokyo, Little Weimar, Little Oaxaca, Little Ho Chi Minh City. Not to mention Hollywood.

But her teacher cuts her off, amazed. Where did you learn all this? "In books," she guiltily admits. "I'm sorry I went overtime."

The teacher — her third in a little under a year — doesn't respond. Doesn't even hear. The adult is wondering how this bonsai-framed, walking Red Cross ad in the secondhand Hang Ten tee, whose intact arrival already constitutes a skeletal miracle, who for months (as teachers' lounge rumor recounts) lived on desiccated squid, who has since slept ten abreast on sheets silvery with parasites and counted it paradise to have a sheet at all, who survived by learning to override her throat's retch reflex, whose head had twice to be shaved on return to civilization, how this bit of nubby raw silk, recovered from a forsaken test zone the teacher cannot even begin to imagine let alone presume to teach, could summon up enough linguistic resolve to report on colonial governors and covered wagons and Columbus. How in hell's name could this heartbreak Joy accommodate, let alone decode, the incomprehensible slickie shirts, Slurpees, Nerf balls, Slime as a registered trademark, robots that metamorphose into intergalactic defense depots — all the commodities of exchange with which her every instant on this shore assaults her?

These occult childhood currencies buy and sell the others' oral reports. Andy Johnson gives the fast-breaking private-bio spy's eye profile of this week's slam-dunk, slap-action, singer/actor idol of billions. Pathetic Kelly Frank reports on an afternoon series based loosely on a video game about Armageddon and whimpers witlessly when the teacher informs him that cartoons de facto fail to qualify as nonfiction. The impact of Joy's emergency dispatches upon her classmates is nil at best. Even the sharpest among them sits dazed, too mentally gelded to absorb the first curve of the motions she maps out. If the class stayed amazingly sedate and violence-free throughout her talk, it is the stunned silence of islanders unable even to see the first arrival of masts on their horizon.

Bewilderment is always bilateral. The girl's assimilation mounts a makeshift platform rig no wider than the air soles of her jogging shoes. Behind her flawless homework assignments and singsong pronunciation, beneath her mastery of subtle dress codes and cocky akimbo stances, she still floats on the current. She has lived in an open boat since day raids first flushed her from her valley. Evidence slips through the hairline cracks in that celadon-glaze face. The truth is obvious, in the way she hurries over the syllables joe-nee ap-al-seet like water over stones in an embarrassed brook. In the way she casts a look out over her audience, a look so afraid of giving offense that all it can do is cower between the muscle twitches of appeasement. She has no choice but to obey the creed of all immigrants: stay quiet, learn all you can, and keep to the middle of the room.