Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

It caught her in her stride's downbeat. So drilled was she in stories of such a noise that she froze before the fatal follow-through. She stood, pinned to the spot, unable to so much as shift her body's weight.

Like a wet appliance that clamps a hand onto killing amperage, dread clamped the children electrically to the riverbed. Everything infancy suspects is true: there is no floor, no ceiling, no warmth, no reassuring voices from the next room, no bed but what hides under it. There is just one lullaby, waiting to detain you.

Every one of them was mature enough to panic. Those in the water swung in midcurrent for the Free shore. Those still on land braced or hit the earth. Ricky, ever the boy who shouts "Look out behind you!" at the Punch and Judy, ran toward her. He began to call out whatever commands came into his head. Hold still; we'll come and slip a rock onto the pin. Breathe imperceptibly, slow your heart, while someone runs back to the village. Keep calm. Keep your weight centered. Rub your leg if it stiffens. Tell us what you need and we'll bring it.

The words were gibberish. They unraveled in the air before reaching her. She heard nothing; so the boy had to tell himself in later years. She wavered a moment between sense and need. She knelt and clawed at the ground hiding the mine, mewling like a trapped animal. The others yelled at her to stop. She did not even look around. She began to whimper, looking off in the direction she had been taking them, at an invisible hole, some epochal, closing chance. She fidgeted, twitching her thighs as if confined at a desk in that new school prison. Children wailed at her, in every language they knew, not to bounce, not to jitter. Her agitation accumulated, and the demand to be off, now, while there was yet time, increased until simply holding still would have killed her as certainly as moving.

A faction was already tearing back through the undergrowth. Another group, coaxing, circled warily toward her, threading through death's bulb nursery, knowing their impotence even if they reached her. The best they could do was hold her to the mine, bring her food, carry away her waste for decades until she died of old age.

In the time it took to bounce a ball and sweep up a single jack, Kraft rejected all other choices. He broke for the river and in a few strides had topped his best fifty meters. He ran full out, silently. It seemed to him a searing slow motion. His eye worked faster than his legs could pump, and three paces from the river he saw that she was going to move. He stopped to yell, but could not force the air through his throat until she was already away.

She lit out for a spot in the clearing, flinging her whole body off the trigger as if safety depended on a further deadline. The sight on the near horizon compelled her to fly or be annihilated anyway. She knew, and never turned her back. The light that she touched off by leaving lit up the jungle canopy.

Even years later, there was never any sound. The first noise he could ever remember was the spatter of clods drizzling back onto the ground they had just failed to escape. But that came long after. First he had to witness, reflected like a shadow puppet epic against the scrim of indifferent air, the vision the girl was after. The explosion transfigured the girl in a sky-wall of visuals as fractured as a fly's convex eye. That endless interval of flash condensed in vivid, live coverage the campaign under way all over the globe.

The mine, planted in the sober calculation that it might well take such a girl, took along the soul of everyone in the blast perimeter. It opened up a hole in the night air into which they stood transfixed and looked. Poking through some warp in the firmament, on the biggest of big screens, lay the surprise destination of every child Gypsy ever rounded up and quicklimed.

Before Kraft could force himself to look away, he saw. The old story had been mangled in word of mouth. What had always been reported as an interdicted vision of bliss, a glimpse at child heaven sadistically denied those left behind, was really this: a first look at the staging ground where the worst afflicted gathered. And the locked-out grief of those left behind was the anguish of those whose enlistment is refused.

The sound and light show, the event rim of the burst, collapsed just as quickly back into the blast's confusion. The girl and Lok both fell to the far side of the explosion, allowing Kraft for an instant to believe the fiction that they had been blown clear, with just the stray limb lost, the disfigurement shared by a quarter of the population in these parts. In the space that it took the air's shock to settle, he had healed them already, frenziedly restored them to prosthetic life. Then compensation dissolved, and he hurled himself into the river, gulping water as he thrashed toward the crater.

When the adults arrived — Headmaster, chaperons, villagers, alerted by incoherent messengers — they set to their rehearsed worst-case procedures. By dawn, every child that had left Nam Chai the previous night was accounted for, except for the boy Lok and the foreign girl, whose existence the adults only half credited. The blasted ground bore no trace of bone or pulp. The mine had cleaned all implicating evidence. Hurried reparations were made in the Institute's name to the lost boy's parents, deeded over at the same time as the soccer balls, T-shirts, and streamed elementary readers.

The school building was deemed complete enough to be finished with local resources, appropriate technologies — whatever the current euphemism for abandonment. The Institute scholars were hustled onto the bus caravan back to the City of Angels, this time without layovers. For a year or two, those who had taken part were fed occasional accounts of the progress of the sister school they had helped found. Children were learning things, the reports agreed. Exactly what they learned went unsaid.

The boy: of course. You want to know what became of the boy with the beautiful idea. By the slightest of accidents, he slipped in between conscriptions, lived out his twenties in an anomalous interlude of what the North called peace. Sent back to a home he could not assimilate to, he was schooled there in the impossible art of putting bodies back together. After long banishment, he slowly came to think of the upcountry expedition, Operation Santa Claus, the Land of the Free, as bits of myth to be dealt with only on call-troubled nights.

As for the City of Angels, where he had lived out belonging's last years: he read about it in the papers now and then, when he read a paper. Bangkok had newly industrialized, paid passage into the dominant camp, gone Little Tokyo. By all accounts, it had grown into a skylined, sprawling, runaway, AIDS-infested needle nest. It had become a child-peddling shambles. Some hundred thousand juvenile whores of both sexes made a living in the place, the murder capital of the exotic East, the Golden Triangle's peddler, catamite to the slickest tourist classes, gutted by CarniCruze junkets and semiconductor sweat shops, glistening in fat postcolonialism, clear-cutting its irreplaceable upcountry forest to support its habit.

From his stateside confinement — the man with a country, the nightmare opposite of that morality tale they terrorize you with in these parts in the sixth grade, when you are most vulnerable — the boy read of Free students dying in bulk, their blood flushing the streets, sacrificed in trying to reclaim the old round of corruption and coup, dying, and for what? For politics, the Wheel's worst illusion.

The place became a figment of childhood, a site on an itinerary that from the first had been no more than an extension of authority's vocation, his parents' dream. They too revealed themselves to him in time. His mother acquired the status of a filed form, and he passed her by in age. And Kraft Sr., Wandering Soul's conductor if not engineer, entered the old age due him: a nursing home apartment full of Post-it notes to himself: "Stove top?" "Cigarette butts?" "Turn off lights?" Here and there across the walls, greeting the boy on his filial visits, mental jogs mapped a track of terror in the wake of the ephemeral words slipping away from the man: "mollify," "onus," "evensong."