Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

By traceless association, he is again on the western leg of that disastrous homecoming tour. He is in some national park just up the road from that phantom hitchhiker. He and his mother perch over a display case on "The Winning of the West," reading in embarrassed silence:

Blabs

These metal spikes were placed in the noses of calves, to wean…

Accomplished in humans, he remembers thinking, without resort to hardware. The stab grows in lockstep with the calf. No parent loves as fiercely — he's seen it here, in the assiduous death camps of the destitute — as one who loses a child at birth. Proof is up on the call room prickboard, a poem-laced card distributed to the Obstetrics staff, commemorating a named, fully invested baby, dead after one day. And loved horribly, worse than one lost in the flush of age. A haunted, coupleted, last-century thing, translated from a vanished original: Permit your little one to come; I will conduct it home.

All these muffled hits that strangle him by inches, iatrogenic events, injuries caused by medical care. A public hospital, a chop shop to scare off ghetto death? Jesus God, it's the present's quintessential scheme to borrow itself out of debt. A reflex squeeze on the remote, and he shuts down the set. This sends Mother, as well, temporarily back to the spooks' anteroom.

He is half a life late for rounds. The question is no longer whether he can face the prospect. The question is will he, and the debate migrates down into his arms and legs.

When he arrives today, she is awake for the first time since going under. Father Wisat, dislodger of locked migratory spirits, is gone, his own traveling soul retrieved by Immigration, which, while sensitive to the situation, has the country to protect.

The girl's smile, once automatic, fails to break through the layers of apparatus strapped to her face. The covers flatten at her south, two feet before they should, an absence, an obscene vanishing trick. Her torso is caught in the act of sliding off to another world. He can still smell on her the aromas that bore and bone rasp released from her.

"Hey, sweet stuff," he greets her, gagging on the steel wool words. "How are we feeling today?"

The plural pronoun is poison. Her face is impassive under its morass of black and blue, the record of the various blunt implements shoved down it. Maybe her English is gone, systematically beaten out of her. Or perhaps the answer is too obvious for words. We hurt. Nothing else is.

He turns her, probing, fastidiously recording all measurements in his write-up. The hacked-apart schoolgirl, who once wrote him shy thank-you letters, looking up the spelling of every other word, holds still throughout. Except for her labored gasping, she plies him with silence. He cannot bear it. He'll go write himself the magic prescription. It would be easy. Kindergarten.

Her eyes are cold panes. They give no hint of anything but indifference to the attentions of her betrayer. She is so shocked by her internal mauling that she cannot even cry for help, let alone want to.

He must hear her speak, even the word that would make her hatred unambiguous, the accusation he would refuse to defend himself against. He must tell her, Weekly Reader style, how the operation went, what they found, what they tried, what they gave up on. A lunch-meat-on-balloon-bread synopsis (the mustard the precise color of those pots of yellow reserved for affixing the blazing sun to newsprint) of what she can expect from the life remaining to her.

You may have noticed that your body drops off a bit sooner than it did. Something in her refusal to speak says she has a better sense of where she is, more profound, more real than his chart can hope to lay out.

He could cut through, lay the mutual knowledge out on the traction bed between them like a hand of crazy eights. You know; you know. My baby, Joy, don't make me say it. But a sense of impending disaster worse than disease leaves him staring at his clipboard. The real disclosure must come from her.

He considers a full frontal bluff: I know what brought you to this hospital, the reason you are all assembling here. I know, in rough outline, at least, what you and that pal of yours are planning. But that gambit could lead only to the same grisly cul-de-sac: his untethering in front of her. Rocking, lathering, sobbing uncontrollably like the special residents five floors above.

He hunts, hypertensing, for something to sound out aloud. Talk, jabber anything, only make it fast. "All right, Ms. Stepaneevong." His accent is tone-perfect, if shaky beyond recognition. "Time for the end-of-year review."

That brief quiz you've been waiting for from the start. A crucial, last-minute check on her preparation in all disciplines. States and capitals. Planets of the solar system. Periodic table. Content does not matter one atom, so long as she'll talk. The work she has in front of her expands like a crazed zoom fisheye, and suddenly, the fact is as plain as the bruise that was her face. Talk, extemporizing, is the only skill that she will require in school's next annihilating grade.

Material for the promised pop test lies everywhere at hand. She has stacked all around her, for the moment when she would be ready to use them, the collected texts of her private library, an anthology of telling. He grabs at a loose bit on the nearest pile and sits down on the end of her bed, amply vacated now, as if amputation were expecting him.

One box of the newsprint scrap has been heavily outlined in Magic Marker script, not hers. Arrows flank-attack the article's lead, and clumsy balloon print asks, "This one?!" His eyes run over the piece. His lips moving silently in sync, as if still reading with training wheels:

James says that when the Rebel troops set fire to his village, he ran one way and his parents ran the other. He has not seen them since that moment of confusion. "They are not dead," he insists, not even pausing as he grinds grain for tonight's communal dinner. "I just don't know where they are. If I knew, I would go to them. But I don't, so I stay here."

"Here" is a refugee camp on the Akobo River, the border between two stricken African republics. In its misery, the camp is like any of the thousands of shanty cities that proliferate throughout the world. But the residents of Akobo Camp are victims twice over. They fled the Sudanese civil war to the one place where they would be safe from slavery, mutilation, or death. Reaching the haven of Ethiopia, they walked straight into the upheaval now ravaging that land…

Akobo Camp is remarkable for another reason: of all the twice-displaced who have found their way here, after trips of several hundred miles that led from one shell-torn front into the other, not one is older than sixteen…

"No fair," she says, the two breaths costing her brutally. "No fair reading to yourself."

Her tone neither forgives nor accuses. But the sound pumps him full of something dangerously like hope. "No sass, or I'll put a frowning face right here next to your case write-up."

He slips the account back in the stack, so deep she will never have to read it. He swaps it for the top book, more appropriate for adolescent girls, judging by this gawky, goofy-looking, little raven-faced Nancy Drew in barrettes on the cover. Closer to the ticket. Some kind of girlhood diary, written long enough ago to become otherworldly romance. He starts to read, uncomprehending, then starts again at the line break, the way he reads in bed when he has fallen asleep and refuses to admit it, backtracking at every period, plowing every sentence over again until he realizes that he catches nothing, and still more nothing on the retry.

He scans once more in force, thinking, as the words refuse to come clean, Here we go, then. Ricky-boy, hold on tight. He focuses by sheer will an attention that, like a stage spot, narrows down from babbling sentence to faltering phrase to blurry word. He turns over this deranged but familiar orthography, strange resemblance, an idiom like a secret brother you visit only once a year, shut away in that tacit, untalked-about home.