Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

"Hook them up to the CAT scanners," he urges, beginning almost winsomely, then waxing vulture-beaked when they laugh him off. He dares the authorities, gives them all the early warning they will need by muttering audibly, loud enough for even the packets of préexistence to hear. "Yeah," he says, his lips almost pressed to the Plexiglas, "you guys too."

Bring me something, Joy begs each time the troupe sets out for a new venue. She lies in Intensive Care, allowed no visitors, unconscious, swaddled from top to shortened tip, strapped to the electromechanical life assistants, without which not, nothing.

Staff has no idea that Gramps Jr. is sneaking visits to her. The 1C nurses, if they came across him there, signing to the comatose girl in an unearthly semaphore, would not even know how he managed to break and enter.

What? Bring you what? He lifts one balding eyebrow as if to ask: What souvenir of the death throes out of doors do y ou want for a keepsake?

He needn't ask. The answer is obvious, lying uselessly all around her tube-thicketed bed. Books, of course: before she went under the knife, before she would agree to suffer the anesthetic, Joy made her doctors promise to stack her magic hoard alongside her in the 1C, so that the pick-a-mix of printed spells would be there the moment she came to.

Still booking, cramming for the pop final that has already been slipped her. Nico picks up one volume after the other, flips through the stack, shaking his head. How can y ou read these things, joyless? They got no pictures.

The ones that do have illustrations are the bleakest. Smeary black-and-white negatives from the written-off countries populate that pathetic social studies text, groundlessly optimistic even back when it was printed, sometime around the year of their birth. Previous borrowers' Crayola do-it-yourselfers lay down illicit tracks in her heavily book-marked history. Bright tempera washes explicate the book that Linda has placed on the top of this stack — advance pastel flowers on a granite grave. The swirly romantic maroons and silvers of the legend of Saint George, who, it says right here, had to slay a dragon that had developed an unfortunate taste for human calf, child veal cutlet. Wouldn't even get him six months' probation in most states these days.

He picks up an intimidating reader, gauging by the tiny type that ordinary kids wouldn't be hassled by it for another four grades at the earliest, if they still troubled with reading at all by then. The collection's carefully cracked spine falls open to a short story about kids being sold door to door during some war. Houses on fire, Krauts doing their Space Invaders number again. He prefers the Pacific Theater. Still, it'd make a great comic: Cosmic Quester gets dimension-shifted into this place where they're shipping all their kids…

At the end, underneath those "Questions for Further Study" — he can't believe this — she has actually scribbled in a whole dollhouse-sized bible of answers, printed in teensy longhand, spidery, like she's still writing Whoositskrit. For the very last question, "Interview a contemporary…", she has patiently printed a whole case history too tiny to read.

He snaps the book shut, to trap the answers inside. Fine, Joyless. We'll bring you back whatever you want. Name the title. We'll liberate it for y ou from the very next school library we play.

He does not mention that the touring theatrics may be over for good. He gives her IV sack a shake, the practical equivalent of shoving her down on the foursquare asphalt, and makes ready to sneak back through enemy lines.

Nico, wait. Don't go yet. I'm afraid.

Deep breath, slowing for stamina. We almost got away without having to do this. Get outta here. What's to be afraid of?

It's not going to work. We are going to miss it again, aren't we?

Grow up, huh? He nudges her traction set, grinning. We're about to pull this sucker off, once and for all. Exactly the way I told you.

Nico, I've been reading.

No duh.

Shh. What's happening to us, it's — farther along then you know. Wider. There's a lot more to it than we thought. That story. They… made a mistake remembering what really happened. They got confused, in the time it took to write everything down. That place they escape to, the childrens?

Children, you DP.

It's not what we think it is. The way you perform it is… wrong. Don't you remember? Don't you? It's not about escape. Not about leaving at all. The hole in the mountain is just where they are held, caged up together before being shipped back.

Shipped back? Why?

Can't you see? They still need us for something. Here. Nobody can go until everybody…

He has never heard her so talkative, certainly not while she still had the use of her voice. She is no longer herself, but a convert frantic to make her single point. And tugging at his thoughts, she insists, Look here, Nico. And here. A.II over, everywhere.

She flails at her texts, rooting around in ones that even adults should need notes from their mothers before being allowed to check out. She selects telltale passages, forces them on him from her comatose horizontal. Look here: three thousand new refugees, every day. And doubling in less than ten years.

She rolls out the sick ciphers, like a UNESCO bean counter gone stark, staring prayerless. Here: the soft parts of homeless street swervers, collected in plastic garbage bags for the per-pound cartilage bounty. Just down this hall: crack and HIV little sibs arriving and dispatched again at a nationwide rate of one beltway suburb a month. One child in five, born below the subsistence line. And this, she lectures to him, eyes clamped shut in her liquidy, shinered sockets, all this without taking a step out of the world's richest nation.

The times table she forces on him is just another tired catalog, impenetrable text in a world grown senile on images. But she has her own visual proof to bring the journey's contour home. She leads him to a baroque, fine-line Magic Marker chart, several loose-leaf pages Scotch taped together. Scores of different-colored marks stand for the spectrum of evacuations, the scope and scale of each assorted outrage. He finds the treasure map by telepathy, tucked carefully in the flyleaf of a book called Waiting for 2000: A Grade School Guide for Millennium Straddlers.

The scatter pattern of her careful connect-the-dots historical atlas leaves no territory for doubt. Graduation Day is already upon them, and their study group has been cribbing with an obsolete, fractured-fairyland flat-earth projection of the turf.

She smiles at him, weakly but warmly, from under the massive sedative, letting him on to her last secret.

You know what they taught you, early on, when you still attended classes? How the surface of the earth was mostly water?

He says nothing. He can already complete her argument, the example left for the student as an exercise. The thing teachers everywhere neglect to add. The thing that every kid from the newer neighborhoods now knows first hand: the people of the earth are mostly afloat.

Hey: not to worry,]S. I'm tellingyou, dudette. We have our moment picked, and as soon as it arrives…

You will slip through the crack without me. And when you come back — that is the worst part. You will all be in another place, without knowing how you came there. You won't remember why you talk or dress the way you do, the way no one else does for thousands of miles around. You won't even be able to say what you were escaping.

Leave without you, Joyless? What kind of monsters do you take us for?

The monster in question makes a last, bored flip through the stack of scare-tactic facts. His smirk pretends not to know that it is under scrutiny.

Besides, he tacks on, straightening his Dodger cap in the reflection of her life support apparatus, these little picnics we're doing now are just reconnaissance. Chill out, huh? On the day when we tweak the ending you'll be along for the ride.