Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Occasionally, a letter from Dad would arrive, overposted with a police lineup of stamps, addressed in a loopy handwriting that resembled the boy's earliest attempts at onion-skin tracing: "Dear Richie, The enclosed article beautifully explains the wonders of laser light. FYI. Thought you might like to know." Dragged back to the first condition, just prior to permanent exile.

So the boy grew older, simpler, sleepier, until one day the pupils of that forgotten jungle school came back for him. They returned, one for one, back from all those years held in some detainees' transit Westerbork (the murals of which, you must sooner or later learn, depicted a brightly colored, larger-than-life piper going about his eternal job description). He grew until waylaid by you, my old friends, tomorrow's casualties, today's belated show-and-tells.

Listen, my children, and there, as every story formula ever committed to memory puts it, there you have a tale. And here you come to the end of it.

They travel light, pare back the carrying weight. Essentials only. When the requisitioned gimp vans come to take them on the road, they bring along just the costumes on their backs and a few props — a tonette, a papier-mache mountainside that splits down the middle to reveal a fleeting crevasse.

Angel City is not the place they left upon entering the magic maintenance hideout. They see for the first time the town that has passed itself off as home. They play tourists to their own back barrios, the ones the package junkets only buzz through with the tinted windows rolled up shut. They perform in Jorge and Roberto's alma mater, where the classes are led through the auditorium in controlled shifts, frisked by armed guards. One seventh-grader in the audience is rushed to Carver in midperformance, when the smuggler's balloon he swallowed earlier that morning breaks inside him.

They play a gazebo in a once-park on the east side, where indigents of all ages crawl from their Masonite maisonettes to stare at the inscrutable proceedings as if at another unreadable eviction notice. A religious club where they do an afternoon show is raided two days later for sheltering a hive of illegals. Necrosis has taken hold everywhere. It's all coming due, extended credit's final statement. Privation now costs more than wealth, the old pyramiding scheme, can hope to generate.

They cross over to the happy Valley, where bad conscience has booked them at the Galleria for a matinee. There they play to a weekend mob of glazed children who call their parents by first names. Children with weekly Top Forty head-dos, two-hundred-dollar helium-injected shoes, color-coordinated spun-silk lip-shaped purses stuffed with supplementary credit cards slung around their want-not waists.

The Hamelin rats had no idea. This unspannable gulf accounts for the spreading partisan rumble, the GAS THE BASTARDS T-shirts, the collapse of the street economy into a single, exhausted, gag-gift boutique of hate and rage, as if future GNP depended on our continuing to buy fart cushions and SHUT THE FUCK UP coffee mugs for one another. It explains the six hundred autonomous Angel armies, now the city's chief employment for minors. It glosses the junior-chamber-of-commerce consortium of tax-free, million-dollar-a-week retailers, cataclysm's middlemen, scalpers at this ticket-holders-only mass send-off.

Travel works an awful mental broadening on them. They are toted downtown, where they have never been, past the RayBan investment house towers and airline office blocks. Each one is a laundering of the architectural balance sheet, a pauper's hospital in disguise. Even here, the down curve has begun, steeper and more abrupt than the city planners suspect.

In the van, they amuse themselves with road games. A chunk of Nerf cinderblock and the newest rap lyric hold them beguiled for whole freeway jams. Nico bullies the group into leading Joleene to believe she's telepathic: "My God, you've guessed our secret object again. Quit… How in the…? You're playing with our Innermost, girl."

"I don't know how I know. I just know. I think, and it comes to me. It just springs, like, into my head."

They switch between suppressed snickers and reverential awe at the girl's newly discovered power. But they never tell. The girl will die thinking she's psychic,

Nico is everywhere in the van aisles — cheerleader, voice coach, tour guide — working the sickos, most of whom should not have been allowed to step foot out of the plague house, even for these brief, homeopathic afternoons. He plays with the young ones. "Okay, punks. Huddle up. Let's go over the playbook." He prepares them for the longer outing rapidly coming up. He waves a comic in front of them like a shiner lure, but the tykes just sit there on the knife-slashed vinyl, facing him, their very instinct to curl up on the right side of the page rendered cagey, extinguished by unspeakable early conditioning. It hurts to see how much it will take before these stunted crips will be ready.

"Criminy. You younger generation are frigging illiterates. Hey you: yeah, the one with the wet spot on your pants. Complete this rhyme. 'Simple Simon met a…' "

A sidelong look of suspicion gives way to a lagged but crescendoing "Pimon!" of near-rapturous relief.

"Yeah, so ya got lucky. 'Going to the fair. Says Simple Simon to the…'"

"Pimon!"

" 'Let me taste your…' "

Agonized pause. Total exam panic. "Hair?"

"Hobbling God on a bloody crutch! Okay, okay. I'm sorry. Hair. Whatever you say. Just don't blither on me."

And why not? These infants, connoisseurs of every conceivable tang, have at least hung on to that primal impulse to pop everything into the mouth: paste, plastic, wrapping paper, cakes of hardened snot, a salad bar of gravels and soils, earthworm pies, pasty pastry scabs, lead paint peels. A hank of hair is among the more innocent of the thousand and thirty-one flavors left their lingering ability to savor. They will miss these taste buds dearly, this time next month.

"Well, I'd let you taste mine, guys, but…" He springs the arch grin that vampires always flash their victims. "Got no hair!" He flips his cap. His translucent, purple-pink, shriveled parchment map of bared veins sets off the desired shrieks of terrified delight.

Emboldened, one of the pitiful tinies asks Lieutenant Chuck if she can satisfy the shameless longing that's been nagging at her for weeks. She wants to put her fingers into the resounding hole that still plumbs deep into the lower left of his reconstructed face. Chuck clears away the clutter of removable prosthetic and stoically caters to the request not once but several times, while each little rat extra trills in fascinated disgust as she finger-probes the pit.

"Don't wiggle or you'll touch brain," Nico warns, causing a new round of diving for cover among the nightmares-in-training. Chuck holds still; anything for the cause. Each must be prepared to submit to whatever it takes to secure the trust for the impending Big One.

"Don't wiggle or you'll touch brain," Nico warns, causing a new round of diving for cover among the nightmares-in-training. Chuck holds still; anything for the cause. Each must be prepared to submit to whatever it takes to secure the trust for the impending Big One. An altercation at one of their school stints temporarily grounds the road show while Linda clears up some legalities. Some fiendishly healthy, overaged fourth-grader insists at snub-nose-point on following the Hamelin children through the papier-mâche mountain to whatever offstage hidden prospect it opens on. The scare is no more than a routine, late-day urban heart murmur, but it is enough to keep them hospital-bound for a little longer. While the players wait for the incident to be settled, Nico continues to recruit for the standing cast.

His canvassing brings him even among the pre-young: he hovers over the incubator, the greenhouse glass palace of a six-hundred-gram, red sugar beet born four months too soon. He plagues the nurses with questions that they find cute for a while, until the obsessive grilling progresses toward the macabre. He asks about the catheters, pump primers jammed into the surfactant-stripped lungs to keep them from collapsing like a graft-riddled public housing project. He wants the tech specs on that hypo needle stuck through the umbilical into the heart, the standing kegger tap for injections and test draws. He wonders out loud what would happen if it were accidentally disconnected. He demands to know if these still-unshaped souls, the only humans coming up for air before they are even zero years old, might be close enough to eviction that their speechless brains still carry some trace of the original place.