Operation Wandering Soul

Kraft cruises down the Golden State: would it were so. "Cruise" is a generous figure of speech at best, label from another time and biome still imbued with quaint, midcentury vigor, the incurably sanguine suggestion of motion more forward than lateral. "Cruise" is for the Autobahn, the Jet Stream, Club Med. What's the real word, local parlance? Shoosh. Shunt. Slalom.

Freeways, like rivers, age and meander. Lane lines, at this hour, are just a manufacturer's suggested retail, more of an honor system than anything worth bothering with. Relics, mementos, the tourist scratches on the pavement marking the sites of annihilated Spanish missions.

Up ahead, the Blue Angels run interference for an Esther Williams aqua ballet. A lazy, Quaalude cross-drift of traffic skims across Kraft's viewing screen, flow and counterflow canceling out in diffraction pattern to form a standing wave. Several hoods in front of him, sleek little fuel-injected Alpha particle manned by sandalwood-haired guy hugging cellular phone swaps places with convertible Stuttgart-apparatus piloted by blond bombshell lip-syncing to the same song Kraft himself has tuned in on the radio. Eight seconds later, for no reason in creation, the two swap back. The exchange is duplicated all across the event horizon, a synchronized, pointless, mass red shift.

Fortunately, most everyone is a diploma holder here. Driver's Ed: the backbone of the high school certificate. One might emerge from the system unable to add, predicate, or point to Canada on a map, but thanks to rigorous requirements would still be able to Aim High in Steering, Leave Oneself an Out, Second-guess the Other Guy.

Casting his vision into the advance shoals, getting what his Driver's Ed teacher almost two decades ago affectionately if firmly referred to as The Big Picture, Kraft catches the total, pointillist effect: cars flaking off each other in the steady current, making a shimmering moire, like sheer curtains swaying in front of a screen. He takes his hands from the steering wheel, passes his extended fingers in front of one another in unconscious imitation. Time (in this country of ever-expanding unusable free time) for an experiment: infinitesimal easing up on the throttle produces a gap between his grille and the nether parts of the Marquis in front of him. The instant this following distance exceeds a car length, the two vehicles on either side both try to slither in.

Proof. This shot-blast stream of continuous lane change is not prompted by anything so naive as the belief that the other queue is actually moving faster. The open spot simply must be filled on moral grounds. A question of commonweal. Switching into a slower-moving lane gives you something to do while tooling (tooling; that's the ticket) along at substandard speed through the work crews surfacing the next supplementary sixteen-lane expansion. Fills the otherwise-idle nanosecond. A way to absorb extraneous frontier spirit.

Kraft tacks west with the cattle trail. He read somewhere, a year ago, while still in the honeymoon, guidebook phase, that a mile of freeway eats up forty acres of land, give or take the mule. The whole idea came from the Nazis. Shoulders, median, dual carriageway, transition-free exit and entry ramps: the total driving environment. How many thousand acres thrashed in Angelinoland alone? Lord, I'm five hundred continuous north-south miles without a traffic light away from home. Throw in the east-wests, the redundant routes, the clover-leafs, the switchbacks and tributaries, and pretty soon you're talking real real estate.

And how many million tons of that double-bulge guardrail, spinning out its hypnotic thread cross-country, shadowing him however the chicanes slip 'n' slide? For a truly nauseating insight, Kraft considers the number of human lives devoted to manufacturing this hardware alone. Somewhere forges run full time just keeping up with the replacement pieces, the smashups, the decay of normal wear and tear. So what do you do for a living? Kraft's own answer, the chief career of daytime soaps and evening dramedies, patricidal America's most prestigious gig, half plumber, half God, is embarrassing enough to have to admit to seatmates on planes. But could have been worse. A wrong turn coming up through public school and he'd be answering: I manufacture those guard bumpers for the freeway. No — just the right-hand, convex ones. Although we are planning to diversify into mileage poles and overhead signs, the Japanese permitting.

Radio does its thing, successfully distracting him from sustained thought. Tune of the minute transmutes into a synthetically evil, crystal-meth-induced slam metal number about how the sheepman and the cattleman should be friends. Kraft considers pressing the auto-seek and floating to the next station up the dial, but he hasn't the will to discover what's lurking there in the high, truly antinomian frequencies.

He's under the impression, and would like to go empirical on this, that the city's top-polling radio tune at any given minute has a marked influence on traffic's turbulence. Audio Santa Anas, chill melodies blowing in from the vents under the dash along with the AC, raising the collective arm hair in every one of these climatrolled driving cubicles, making everybody just itch to, well, Aim High in Steering. Off somebody. Been happening a lot again, lately: a Man, a Plan, some ammo, blammo — Panama! Somebody's got to scrape together a grant to graph freeway shooting frequencies versus the Billboard Top Ten.

The occasional public service breaks on behalf of the president's current call to arms serve only to obscure the narcotic of choice in its many trappings currently being vended by the sponsors' interludes. Sure enough, by the time the next three-minute rhythm gets into full, band-box swing, the flow of control down the pike in front of Kraft settles into the unmistakable ripple effect of gapers' block.

Something has happened. Simple, unmitigated Event, the palpable Here and Now, or as close as we get to it these days — the view through the dash. As one, people slow for a look: not to pin blame on skid or stupidity. Not to check out the parts faHure or the make of the shotgun. They want to get a glimpse, to see the caller up close for once, bag his ID, collect his ephemeral calling card, gawk at the forgotten familiar, take down the number on his hideous, out-of-town plates.

Kraft has no need. Any survivors of this crash — or the one on the next freeway over — will show up at Carver General almost as soon as he does. He'll hear all about them in living color over breakfast from the Emergency Room boys. The particular inferno he now creeps past might even include a pede case for him to call his own. It's become all but traditional. Family outing to the museum or mall, laid out all over the median strip instead. If not this particular flaming wreck, the one just around the bumpered bend.

He merges right, having long ago noticed that nine of ten pileups originate in the outside lanes. Across the divider, oncoming traffic starts to bottle up too. The drivers smell something burning. Both directions max out to full carrying potential, a premature peak-volume hour. All hours are rush, here and throughout the network. Everybody on earth and his poor relations are desperate to relocate. Kraft can hardly wait until the Chinese can claim what so proudly we already hail: a national front-seat capacity fitting every citizen on the books with seats to spare. The curve of mobility will sidle up ever more intimately to asymptote until that moment at decade's, century's, and millennium's end when the last living road-certified creature not yet on rolling stock will creep out onto the ramp in whatever vehicle it can muster, and poof: perpetual gridlock.

He has lived through evacuations, but never one on this scale. The fabled civil-defense drill gone real, all the more panic-stricken in that everybody in this one acts piecemeal, deep in the dream of free agency. Given the apotheosis of private transport all around him, Kraft finds it hard to credit the shrill fact beloved of the guidebooks, that Angel City once possessed the most extensive urban transit system in the country. The tales of spanking red turn-of-the-century electric carriages smack now of Hans Christian Andersen. Nothing in human ingenuity's arsenal could have staved off this freeway. It is the peak of private enterprise, as inevitable and consummate as death.

"Artery" cuts a figure through his frontal lobes. Southbound artery. Feeder artery. Bypass artery. Exactly the sort of tough, rubbery, spreading net he's transfused into here, tracking the inside lane, the tunica intima. Yet it's impossible to ascertain, in a city as sclerotic as this, which are the arteries and which the veins. Do oxygenated heme groups transport the needed fix out to the Valley, while spent thrombocytes wash the reduced waste back to the Civic Center for reconditioning? Or does the cycle run the other way around? Even the Thomas Brothers aren't saying. Inbound? Out? Yer not from around these parts, are ya, stranger? We're kind of on open circulation here. Arthropod style. This blood doesn't flow. It shooshes. Slaloms.

He merges into the connecting shunt, seamlessly slipping onto the same road by another name. As on any given night, no matter which direction he courses, the congested red platelets pulse off in front of him, the poor venous outflow of spent white-blue plasma returning on his left to fill the spaces he's abandoned. Increasingly these days, he feels the need, deep in his limbic knot, to revert to that cure-all of his surgeon forebears: Open the vein. Primitive debridement. Let the infested fluid drain. Bleed this body, too long under pressure. Cut a counterflow, run a detour down that privileged, gerrymandered isthmus straight into the marina. Trust to the Golden State rule: cars will head toward any empty space. And for a few days at least, superfluous pus would spurt superlatively into the bay.

Reactionary, perhaps. But he's not the only one out on the lanes harboring taboo desires. A hand-lettered sign attached to the hospital exit has for some days fluttered in the semitropical breeze. Slowing dangerously for the third day running, Kraft at last makes out the text.

GET OUT OF YOUR CARS.

Sure. Why not? Billboards are scriptural, hereabouts. Billboards for multihundred-dollar tennies, for CDs fiscal and audio, for song collections of searing social protest, for attitudinal adjustments, for advertising firms, for out-of-work actresses, for billboards. Why not a billboard proclaiming a commuters' general strike? Some self-sponsoring eco-terrorist has evidently shimmied up the stainless steel under cover of night, swung out onto the overhang, and, suspended over half a dozen lanes of traffic (flowing, in these parts, even in dead darkness), masking-taped this manifesto in a prominent spot where it is nevertheless entirely illegible to all but the most incurably print-curious.

Kraft holds up instantly irate traffic just long enough to make out a smaller, scribbled footnote that has sprung up the night before. Some second death-defying maniac has taken up the gauntlet, shimmied the pole, and in midair, appended below GET OUT OF YOUR CARS the codicil, AND FIGHT LIKE A MAN. Exercising the old First Amendment rights, which will of course be suppressed tomorrow by municipal hook and ladder at taxpayer expense, in the name of public safety.

He squeezes out of the file, ramping down to surface roads. With deceleration and return to stoplights comes the acrid-sweet, sickly seductive scent of mildewing vinyl. The aroma has gone tainted since he started working this district, as if petrochemicals rotted like living things. Maroon-brown patinas of condensing air each seal an invisible vintage. The noxious residue, the breakdown skeins of hydrocarbon linkages as long as his nasal hairs fall beneath focal notice now. He smells it only on those days when the bouquet is a little fruiter than usual. Even the radio stations have long ago given up warning the aged or cardiac impaired to stay indoors.

He skirts that neighborhood set to the torch one week a quarter century ago. The car insinuates itself down these streets the way Scando-wegian types are advised to walk them, when suicide simply can't be avoided: hands out of the pockets, eyes straight ahead. Keep to a reasonable but not aggressive clip. Act like you know where you're going.

He does, in the short term, anyway: six-month stint at the Knife and Gun Club. Three weeks into the rotation, his unwisely Caucasoid viscera have already resigned themselves to winding up on the wrong side of the retractors, any stoplight now.

Pediatric service at the public No-Pay? Well you might ask. Luck of the draw, his adviser insisted. Already been all over the rest of town, swapped about like a utility infielder whose teams are too numerous to fit on the back of the bubblegum card. Rotation comes with the turf: Onco up in the Hills. Thoracic on the edge of LaLa Land, repairing the Cars of the Stars. Plastics at Trauma-by-the-Sea. The program demands that everybody do some public service, and Kraft's stint happens to be Pediatrics. Thank your deity of choice too. Could have been dealt the ER service out this way. That would have been, well, call it murder.

Bad enough having to listen to Emergency's own Dr, Tommy Plummer go on about it over Sunrise Sandwiches and chocolate-smeared bagels at the Carver cantina. "See, Kraft, it's like this. Distribution of wealth gets iniquitous enough…"

" 'Inequitable,' perhaps, Thomas?"

"Whatever. I'm liberal. Point is, wank the bills around long enough, pretty soon every day's a jolly holiday. Guy comes in last night. Big intercostal hack crescenting clear through his pect major. Stick misses the subclavian by about a centimeter. 'My girlfriend, she cut me.' I don't know what these people use for steak knives, but this looked like a number seven recurve. Nice downward slash. I'm sponging the guy off while they're sleeping him, and I come across this big keloid scar just a shade to the side of the fresh entry. Sure enough, it's on his chart. He was in last year. Gotta ask him if it's the same girlfriend."

The usual pecking-order preening: We do the sweat shop stuff while you sissy-mollies lollygag around in Kiddieland. Medimachismo. What other hobby can you have, when work consists of getting bloodied to a pulp around the clock, than cultivating masochistic one-upmanship? Plummer can afford to wax radiant in relating call night's worst waking nightmares. He too only temps here in no-man's-land. Were this his permanent abode, the man would be begging his own girlfriend to slash and burn him by now. And mind to clip the subclavian this time, woman.

But Plummer's poly-sci cliche: make it an inequity of futures, failed wish distribution, disparity in circumstance so great that it kills all ability to grant even the premise of hope, and Dr. Tommy might be on to something. The breach between dream and delivery has long since gone beyond fault line. Sinkholes in the whole mythology of progress gape open up and down the street, suck down entire retail strips at a shot. Complete casa communities visibly disintegrate, crumble into the coreolis of debt and rage each day Kraft makes the commute. The national trope, the Route 66 wayfarer's picaresque, here looks out over the vertical cliffs marking its premature dead drop. The steepest reliefs of belief are shocked into submission when laid against these wilder contours, the chasms between come-ons and their public reality.

He reaches the hospital block, his epitome of failed plot. Been here before, he has, but can't quite place the original. Streets a shambles of hubcap-liquor-weapons shops, nap hotels, beauty parlors offering quantity discounts, sheet metal wholesalers, blasted transaction booths, purveyors of fine, illegal pomades. The scent of decay emanates from under the sidewalks, behind the baleen shop grates, in the sotto voce wail of that eternal air raid siren, the permanently borrowed porta-blaster boom-box bilingually broadcasting, "Hey, man! Over your shoulder. Behind you, sucker. You look, you dead. Keep the feet to the beat. Cut you. Cut your ass."

Above all this spreading, single-story, dry-rot adobe block party, his tower rises. It shines in imminence, from armed entrance up to crenellated keep. State-bailed donjon of correctives and cures, un-reachable from this side of the counterscarp.

Fix the body, send it back out? Why bother? You must hear it. The threat, the hiss wrapping the corpse of neighborhood. The abject rejection of maybe someday that animates the warp's woofers and tweeters down here at street level.

He noses his car up to the sealed glacis, fishes through the Rolodex of plastic card-keys his wallet has become of late: one to make phone calls, one to cajole the pump, one to snag money out of the wall, one to consolidate his card-accrued loans, and here — one to lift the parking lot block and slip in. He inserts his magnetic travelogue strip into the slot, and sesame. The world as solvable logic puzzle still operates as designed, one more day, despite the lifeboats all around sliding off the dock, continuously magnum-christened, Crystal Night style.

He skulks up the back stairwell, nursing a fantasy of hot analgesic shower, water pounding away his torsal tie-up like so many barefoot French fillettes squeezing out the grape harvest. That's the most elaborate scenario his bilious libido can organize, given the call schedule Carver has had him on. The ubiquitous They spot him before he can even reach his locker and begin at once to black-and-bruise him. Bloody pulp. Professional job, execution style.

Richard, is there something the matter with your beeper? Emily Post for "You turned the sucker off, you bastard, didn't you?" And right here in the gangway they start shoveling him a shitload of new admissions. Seems there's this incredible backlog of seething humanity, and they're going to have to service-station eight mewling and puking little babes in a row just to get the work out, no matter if they have to kill half of the cases in the process.

So it continues both day and night. Some old song he half summons up. Kraft's too fatigued to remember, to name the tune, let alone locate the descant. He gets his shower, about fourteen hours later. But by then his shoulders have been hammered so brittle that he can do nothing by way of encouraging the little French girls except to smile feebly at them and mumble, Quel est le prix du repas?

He checks his watch, and then the light from a window, to determine whether that's A.M. or P.M. He crawls on all fours back to his call room where he rummages about for some reading material, some pictorial literature to numb him to sleep. But big-time humor: Plum-mer and the ER boys have raided all the call room's Penthouses and replaced them with Rifle & Handgun Illustrateds.

Well, deal with it; he's in no shape for fictively intimate biographies anyway. And he's had enough anatomy, God knows, to last his body a lifetime. So he settles into the May R & H, getting no further than the inside cover. A four-color ad: "Take the Law into Your Own Hands." Play on words, see. "The Law" is the name of this little semiautomatic honey. Portentous as the come-on is vis-a-vis cultural decomposition, the spread does yank onto center stage of Kraft's consciousness the question that's been banging about the greenrooms of his cerebellum over the last few weeks. Shouldn't he perhaps get hold of a small arm too, by way of acknowledging the law of averages? His lone survival trick to date has been to maintain a subterranean profile, to duck under the immediate median. He's got nothing of retail value stashed at his apartment. His moody ten-speed. Last epoch's TV, not even VCR-ready. Record player, if you can believe. Two original oils of the Abyss that he couldn't give away. No self-respecting filcher of any nationality is going to bother riffling the dust. Should some enterprising addict crowbar into the place by accident, transposing numbers in the address CB'ed him from Thrashers' Central Dispatch, he'd run from Kraft's postholocaust decor as from a pestilence house. A pistol at the apartment would be as superfluous as any other major appliance.

Fact is, he does not actually go back to his place these days except to pay the utils. He's never spent much time there, and that's tended toward nil ever since he became resident Resident here at Hole of Calcutta Public.

But away from home, here at Carver, reality's numbers are worse than he ever suspected, even in his gloomiest extrapolation. He sees the daily tabulations snaking in human conga lines longer than the most competent admitting nurse can hope to tag and transfer. They amble at him in those cloth shoe-wraps, merging into a multilane free-for-all as amorphously adrift as any expressway. Pimply adolescent gang partisans, assaulters, assaultees, half the underage world winds up in his pediatrics ward. Conscripts of collapsing infrastructure, their gear of choice: Kalashnikov, AK-47, Uzi, even M-16, a tool whose recent sales surge attests to Bob Hope's TV ads about buying homegrown and minding the balance of trade. "You better believe it makes a difference."

And Carver gets only those wounds that are potentially closeable. Kraft's eyes have opened some, living out here in the cash-and-carry neighborhoods, the ones that have been literally fueling the economic transformation miracle, the ones that pick up the tab for the whole ethos of buy now, pay elsewhere.

Why should he sit still and wait for the inevitable? Mornings, this nascent desire to buy a gun seems a silly flare-up, a surrender to his country's prize paranoia. The return of collectively repressed foreign-policy fantasies, writ small. But nights, nights like this one, flipping through the ER boys' practical jokebook while the steady sirens of Incoming wail away like a chorus of Aidas in the tomb, arming oneself seems a case of simple arithmetic. Do the long division: kill ratio into population density. He's not going to last the twenty weeks. He'll be popped walking down to the parking lot, or plugged lazily from the left-hand freeway lane.

The prospect of five more months at this place upends whatever residual progressive sympathies of his survived the Scuttle-and-Run decade. He doesn't need the law in his hands. But a little something in the glove compartment by way of rebuttal? Until such a day as the law stops eating its own?

He slinks off into REM-free sleep, passing through the stages of non-ness without a spike. At four A.M., they break into room and begin to pound him awake. Six-year-old kid whose gut he sewed up two days ago tore it open tonight on a recap nightmare. Some save-the-world decides that the repair has to be enacted immediately. And Kraft's on call. Go willingly, or be dragged kicking and screaming into that good nightmare? Fifteen minutes after coming more or less conscious, he's sewing. A little peritonitis cocktail greets him, so it's just as well they're back in. As he snips and whisks, the OR radio all the while pipes a little background tune, "Get It Right the First Time."

Afterward, there's no point in even trying to salvage the idea of sleep. Grand Rounds in a couple hours, after the day's opener, the Morbidity and Mortality conference. He can at least attempt to doze through M and M, that weekly proverbial chocolatey mess. But what to do now, now, now? Keep the pace — matter in motion. He'll go wake Plummer from the dead and demand his magazines back.

But Dr. Thomas is up and long since in the trenches. The ER looks like the war zone it is. A chaos of attendings — Milstein, Garber, even Flores — a couple anesthesiologists, scrub nurses running in and out, and Kraft's man himself standing frighteningly composed with his hands horribly enlarged on the TV monitors, poking about in somebody's lumbar, bouncing around flecks of metal confetti like slap shots at the puck in that little boys' table hockey. Kraft rescrubs and checks out the scene.

Plummer greets him, grinning, Cheshire. Always the last anatomical bit to disappear. "See those cops up in the observation gallery? They're waiting to charge this guy with the sexual battery of a woman. I'd like to be charged with the sexual battery of a woman. How 'bout yourself, Dr. Krafty? Say, uh, as long as you're scrubbed and not doing anything to justify your existence …"

Kraft stands dumbly, makes him spell it out. "Would you mind bailing for a bit, buddy? Here; just hold this thread. It'll only take a minute."

Less than a month of seniority at this outfit, and he's already garnered a reputation. Not just a reputation, which might have been damage-controllable. Kraft's saddled with several. Interesting how a person's public persona varies so insanely from service to service. Whole behavioral morphologies erupt from first impressions and a gentle audience nudge. He finds it too tough to disabuse people of their pet projections. Infinitely flexible, Kraft is. That is, cowardly by another name. Comes from having grown up all over the globe. No matter; for half a year, he can sustain any personality anyone might type him with.

Something about him must emanate this Mr. Potato Head plasticity. Chief of Surgery Burgess, dying a slow, half-century death in this city where reading span is sorely stretched by the instructions on microwave popcorn, instantly imagines that in Kraft he has found a kindred literate spirit, a simile son. Dr. Purgative, as Plummer rechristens him, keeps farming out these convoluted, epistemological novels by Kraft's obscure, young contemporaries. Plow through and report on, over sherry this afternoon, a postmodernist mystery thicker than the Index Medicus where the butler kills the author and kidnaps the narration. Damn thing includes its own explanatory Cliffs Notes halfway through, although the gloss is even more opaque than the story. What the hell; it's a break from booking for the next wave of board exams.

At the same time, Dr. Milstein, pediatric attending, has been led by Kraft's enthusiastic head-bobs to believe that the new floater resident is a great sailing buff. The man running-bowlines Kraft outside the cafeteria, presses him for a date when they can head out to the islands on Milstein's thirty-seven-footer. Kraft falls back on the ingenious perfect put-off: "I've got call all week." That gives him time to get out to the nearest Books-'n'-Stuff to secure a how-to manual. Between Purgative and the Millstone, it's quite the contretemps keeping Madeira straight from port straight from starboard.

Of the remaining permanent staff, Drs. Kean and Brache — Father Kino and Miss Peach — seem to want him for a whipping boy, a willful child in need of restraint. When we were residents, they used to stick us with hatpins until we suppurated. Loved every minute of it. Made us the exemplary physicians you see before you. Spare the rod and spoil the ortho. Well, no, we don't really need you to do seventy-two continuous hours of call. Oh, so you can't do three T-and-A's, a small bowel, an appendix, and a gallbladder in one day? Of course, if you want to go into family practice, we can always write some nice letters of rec for you. With these folks, Kraft grins a lot and asks for second helpings of everything they dish out.

And the pede nurses: the sweet cheats somehow conclude, based perhaps on Kraft's baby-face, beardless, brown-eyed prettiness, that he is totally depraved. Whatever the objective truth in that, he cannot match their own aptitude on this score. He skirts past their station on rounds; one of them says into the phone, "Wait a minute. He's just passing. I'll put him on." She hands him the receiver and hello, hello?

It takes a minute to realize that they've connected him to Dial-a-beat-off, and there's this growling feminine monstrosity on the other end beseeching him with weird invocations to zipper her skin. Another ward nurse locks him in the supply closet with her, makes him watch as she downs massive doses of cold medicine, then demands to be wrapped in seventy-five yards of surgical gauze. "Come on. Like I've been dead a hundred thousand years and you just happened across me in some pyramid?"

To Tommy Plummer, whom Kraft worked with at Kaiser across town, he is a conspiratorial, blasé fellow-sufferer. Your patient, Doctor. Survival requires, as they gather for Morbidity and Mortality, that the knot of his fellow residents, all fast approaching Jesus Christ's age at crucifixion and still in school, hover together by the coffee machine (vicious substance; inotropic agent and elevator of them gastric juices), compare massacre stories and crack bad-taste jokes about the jelly bismarks offered up for public sacrifice. Ritual fortification for the coming ordeal, when they must one by one stand up in front of the assembled surgery staff and announce: forty-two admissions, thirty-three discharges, five complications, one serious. One fatality. And say why they lost that case.

Kraft takes the spotlight, begins the lowdown on a chart that, by the slimmest of roulette-spun grace, stayed on this side of the pale, kept him from having to announce a fatality for his service this week. No blame to itemize; an instructive combination of anomalies, really. Nobody could have anticipated, before opening the kid, that we'd find…

Father Kino, the meeting's weekly host, cuts him off. "What ever made you think you could do elective surgery on a child with a potassium level that low?"

Well, how low is low? Isn't that context dependent? I mean, are there guidelines at this hospital for suitable…?

"No one cuts unless K-level is normal. That's N-O-R—"

Yes, but I wouldn't have thought…

"You didn't think. That's the problem. Consequently, you very nearly killed this boy. As it is, do you know what you've condemned him to for the next sixty years?"

The monotone recital of probable complications drowns out the slighted protestant in Kraft, the voice in the wilderness screaming, You slimy self-righteous son of a bitch. April 23. Robinson, fifty-one-year-old black male. Guy comes in with kidney stones and goes out on a platter. Your patient, Dr. Kean. Kraft ejects the internal heckler in him at the first impulse to shout. Letting himself feel anything, least of all legitimate rage, is self-destructively futile. They have all the emotions countered, covered. Say so little as I made a judgment call, and you're wiped all over the canvas.

Kean really gets into the whole TV-doctor shindig, baiting him, waiting for him to utter the first whimper of self-defense. When Kraft refuses to give in to anything but the bare minimum Hippocratic contrition, Father Kino issues a mock absolution that falls flat over the entire room: "Go and sin no more."

Plummer corners him afterward. "Nice show, Dr. Kraft. What ever possessed you…?" The rib incorporates a complex mix of sympathy and further abuse. What ever, indeed. Why put up with this horseshit harassment? Five years of eighty-hour weeks at half the salary of a bank loan officer, an aggravated sense of galloping inadequacy and a running ulcer, annihilated private life, dosed out on the varieties of punitive torture, all for the privilege of being publicly humiliated. Where did it take hold, that public-service conviction, the sense that he personally had to hold back the tide of human slaughter? Where did it come from, the terrified certainty that he'd end up squalid and starving to death in the gutter unless he amassed the thickest bulletproof moral bankroll known to man?

He tries to breach the subject with Burgess, by way of evading the latest, unfinished assignment for the week's literary chat. "Moses complex?" Burgess suggests, all but stroking his goatee. The Chief clearly missed his calling. What's a talking-cure guy doing wielding the big knife?

It earns Kraft hard currency with the boss to lay out the effects of an adolescence in transit on his adult sense of security. He says how continuous military-brat mobilization had him hit all the globe's hot spots by puberty. He spins out the case study of how, by ten, he'd left friends behind on each of four major landmasses. Even with Burgess as lay analyst, Kraft has to lie a little, invent an incriminated mechanism. Make up some plausible cathartic insight into his getting mixed up in a calling for which he never displayed the least vocation, a life of self-denial he could happily have sidestepped, a messianic stopgap that early experience should have told him was ludicrously irrelevant. Did he never, Burgess probes, dream of a career more adventuresome, more expansive? Well, yes. For years, little Kraft carried with him, three and a half times around the globe, despite the vicissitudes of local politics, his transposing horn. Somewhere deep in the AP archives, a grainy black-and-white glossy shows a scared foreign-service band, evacuated from Lahore at the start of the ’65 war to the region’s rock-solid American bastion, Teheran. In the poignant foreground, Ricky Kraft, doing his brave little John-John Jr. salute, clutches a French horn case as if it contained the tune the sick world was dying by inches to hear.

The following year, in British Guiana, as it overhauled itself into Guyana, Ricky made his first child's assault on Mozart. By Djakarta, overblowing had taken him into the high registers. As late as his two 2-year stints in what passed for accredited high schools, the terms "valve," "tubing," and "bore" still possessed not the slightest of health-professional overtones.

Simplicity came apart in a single night. That arctic year, back stateside, when it became clear that the energy crisis was not a temporary embargo. The year the president invoked one oxymoron, "the moral equivalent of war," against another oxymoron, "contemporary behavior." The year his father engineered his last international mission.

Bitterly frigid, a February beyond speaking. Four in the afternoon and already pitch black. A twenty-year-old stood on Huntington Ave outside the conservatory, waiting for the Arborway back to his chill flat in Jamaica Plain. His hand froze through his glove to the metal case handle, his breath vapor iced to the hairs of his upper lip, solidifying on contact with air. At that instant, he heard something — cracking mortar between the stones of the building he leaned against, the tensing of the rail at the approach of the trolley, the sounds of an old man being attacked with a baseball bat off toward Roxbury. With that noise — the sound of absolute zero — he would never be able to get warm again in this country.

At his apartment, the power had been out for hours and the pipes had burst. Geysers of water stood in midair, spectral faucet turbulences, ossified, Midased in place. Lying under every blanket he owned, their weave as slack as a stroke victim's mouth, the crystal interstices in his window glass thrown wide open to the outdoors' single-minded cold, Kraft remembered his way to a decision.

The age of music was over. He could play no longer. His horn uncoiled to its unmanageable seven feet. By semester's end, he cashed in his worthless education and headed home to his father, who had chosen North Dakota, the coldest, bleakest, emptiest state in the Union, to be a widower in. There, he slept for six months, shivering out the coma. Waking, Kraft began applying at once to pre-med programs.

Start again, from scratch. Better a few years late than eternally unprepared. University fell, then med school — four years in a pressurized bathyscaphe. Every test was a dry run for the Final Exam, whose hour no man could know but was coming eternally closer, its sole question akeady cribbed in that one afternoon's sickening presentiment. Assisting at his first coronary bypass, helping to clamp off and excise the saphenous vein from the meat-thick thigh and substitute it for the fouled canal-locks around the heart, Kraft felt only the placid terror of arrival. Not safe, not even here. But the operating theater was as central a station as any in which to wait for that obscure appointment laid out for him.

Even in residency at the most southerly hospital he could break into, the French horn accompanies him, superfluous baggage he's sworn off of but can't deep-six. It sits in its case, arm's length from his unfrequented bed, awaiting that postponed jam session of itinerant orchestra, midnight's clandestine musicians riffing into cleanly earned, twelve-bar sweat over sweet surreptitious saints marching someplace in.

And that's why he's a surgeon, Dr. Burgess. What does he win? Reasons, he would tell the Chief, explain nothing. Peculiarly American, this doctoring up of motive after the fact. The M.D. gives him something to fall back on; why not leave it at that?

Only overwork mitigates the sense of rendezvous, perpetually about to be missed. And this job's busier than any in the accepted register. He gives none of this away during Burgess's sherry-and-lit sessions. One does not tell the head of surgery that the career is just a holding pattern. Still, the Chief’s got a spot of it too. Cold consolation of supercompetence: earn a breathing space, prolong more lives than one terminates, bilge a patch of the spreading hematoma, nick the parabola, buy a minute, which must be sixty seconds more than nothing.

The hallways swarm with interns today. Each one grins at him from behind a patient work-up, inquiring politely after his potassium level. Kraft, after weeks of running this rat maze and still capable of getting lost in it, follows the colored-floor-stripe Baedeker, the No-Pay's heritage trail, deep into pathology's sanctum sanctorum.

In these halls the human calculus is ceaselessly differentiated with all the rote, overlearned ease of a child doing her lower times tables. Too many bodies even to be blase over. An «-space, imploded theater-in-the-round. Charity cases line the passages, capitalism's crash-test dummies and quantity grist. They drift, tubed down, stranded, pharmaceutically beached, cobbled up in assorted VA-surplus rolling furniture, talking to themselves, beyond all help but perfunctory patch job. Emergency gone quotidian. In residents' parlance, SHPOS. Subhuman pieces of shit.

Kraft makes rounds. The first pubescent post-op on the list isn't in his room. Probably off in the can getting high. Perhaps he should join the boy. But today's narcotics of choice are way out of his parlance. Two other must-sees from the same room are perched precariously on the windowsill, where they busily force flaming stuffed animals out through the barred windows to certain death six stories below.

The view from that window reveals an all-points, single-story hacienda sprawl as intricate and comprehensive as mold overwhelming a slice of damp bread. Kraft spots, in the switchback of streets that curl like machine parings, other hospitals, his previous rotations in the Byzantine farming-out that landed him here. The journeyman system has its pedagogic advantages. It lets him sample a mix of varying protocols and staffs. Each neighborhood (a euphemism in this unin-corporable metastasis of urban planning) has its exemplary disasters of the flesh. Each round is tailored to its geographical destiny: coronary with the haves; pede with the have-nots. Would that the have-nots had had a few fewer.

Every mini-mall, each net of streets beats its own unique socioeco-nomic pathologic path. For acquiring a rounded, hands-on account of general surgery, there's no substitute for touring the trenches. Short services are his entree into semi-autonomous regions just one burb over, those closed camps he could never have hoped to visit otherwise and survive. Join the army, see the world. Old idea of the study abroad, the foreign exchange program, the school field trip. Only this time, the museum is real.

Carver General — Angel City Charity — shows him things that remain obscene rumor everywhere else. Obsolete, vanquished, nineteenth-century ailments. Consumption. Botulism. Infections that the texts consign to nostalgia. Paint poisonings. Bizarre, abdomen-filling parasites. He has cured a boy of deafness by surgically removing a raw chick-pea jammed up his ear. Six months of public work put him in touch with disruptions of body and spirit not even hinted at in the random distribution he has left on the city map outside this window.

If it yielded no other therapeutic insights, the rotation system would still have provided him with this indispensable view from above, a key to the patterns of disease traveling through the city, the wake it traces through the addresses it devastates. Each new hospital adds to his hands-on conviction: something is afoot just off the free-way. Something undreamed of by the stay-at-homes.

But these private educational benefits are not the real reason he is here. Pedagogical payoff is ultimately the cover for an elaborate cost-sharing scheme. Conscript labor is the only sustainable way to staff a freebie hospital on this scale, an institution otherwise manned exclusively by alcoholics, incompetents, and saints. Comes down to power broking, horse trading. Folks up in the Hills will send their boys down only if they can secure in exchange two pros from Hollywood Pres plus a minor-league internal leech to be named later.

The knots of this kickback scam are mere ripples in a network of mutual blackmail that dwarfs even the city itself. The convoluted auction of goods and services depends on a trillion simultaneous back-scratches all coming off at once. Angel's palaces have been built largely on free riders, illegal taps into Central Power, unmet overdrafts, slumlording, vapor profits, safety paper documents erased with dollops of acid, and timely bankruptcies declared on imaginary underwritings. But for now, and for the next few moments, the whole poker-deck superstructure stands successfully shackled together on gum, safety pins, and signed agreements.

Kraft rustles up the children he must examine, hook by crook. Rounds squared away, it behooves him now only to complete clinic without passing into unconsciousness or its many equivalents. The best way to further this end is to avoid peeking at the afternoon OR schedule until too late for either hysterics or hypothetical Clinic is a three-hour, walk-through Decameron carved up into fifteen-minute segments during which he must play talk-show host to the afflicted, humoring illness's endless invention.

An aggressively built Latin woman hauls in her seven-year-old girl by both fists. She insists that Kraft excise the child's kidneys right there in the office. He flips rapidly through a pocket bilingual translating dictionary that he keeps by him at all times, as indispensable a tool these days as the stethoscope, although he suspects it of frequently capricious translations. A few confused imperfect verbs later, it becomes clear that the kid is a front: the real problem is a softball-sized lump — the big, sixteen-inch, kapok variety — in the mother's pelvic region. Kraft hooks her up with the proper department and, over her departing protests, buzzes in the next guest.

Who is, today, a return from two weeks ago — Turkish kid to whose parents Kraft failed to make clear (no dictionary) that the dressing had to be cleaned. Fourteen days of festering fuses the gauze into a scab-plasted mess more serious than the tumor the cut corrected. Kraft rasps at the leaking, Technicolor wound, picking at the putrid bits while trying to leave flesh, a fresco restorer unable to cut the grime without sponging off half the disintegrating plaster.

Throughout, he exchanges varying flavors of Englishes with the family — verbal bourse signals both opaque and disastrous. Clinic consists of Kraft's finding fifteen-minute ingenious synonym lists for "Excuse me?" Even when language is no barrier, the visitors often have a hard time explaining just what they've gotten themselves into. Exactly why did you leave a rubber band tightly constricted around your little toe for three weeks? Just how did this burned kitchen match come to lodge itself so deeply up your nasal passage?

For grotesqueries, Kraft may be perpetually one-upped by Plum-mer, with his Tales from the Emergency Zone. There simply is no matching live rats in plastic bags inserted up rectums, or even the relatively more mainstream erotic strangulations that get out of hand. Thomas tells with great relish accounts such as that of the woman who was shipped in covered with blood, her throat transversely knifed open. Starting big-bore IVs to stabilize her, they cut her clothes off to discover male genitalia, which doubtless explained the knife wound. No, there is no topping ER for sheer dramatic thrust.

Still, on two scores, Kiddie Karpentry exerts theatrical superiority. First, it is fabulously small, a technological feat of miniaturization. Simply straightening out the gross anatomy of a two-foot-long infant almost requires loupes. And second, Pediatrics — the next generation, wave of the future, America's hope for, etc. — provides the quintessential, unexpurgated view of just where Western Civ's whole project is really headed in its third thousand years.

By clinic's third hour, the traffic of juvenile misery drifting through his office begins to mirror the freeway's aimless lane change. It's as if Kraft's still on his commute here, a ball of fluid sucked along by capillaries' secret adhesions. Clinical existence carries no forward motion at all, only small perturbations, place-swaps, disturbances out on the edge of the crumbling empire. He lives in an afternoon when the old meliorist fantasy gives way to bare maintenance, if that. By clinic's end, Kraft has entered a long, intercalary dark age that lasts until he finds himself swabbing both arms with brown, lathery disinfectant in preparation for surgery.

The factory load is light today, the team relaxed. Somebody's hooked up the optics monitor to receive cable, and everybody stands around watching an infomagazine about how certain notorious prime-time bouffant bitches are really lovely, caring people who like to lend their megafame at low rates to assist the Third World. The current duffer intern — perfect man to send out to fetch the figurative falafel — switches between this and a big-budget docudrama about the colossal fireball death of America's space voyagers. Nothing is real until it's been fictionalized.

Opening a three-year-old's chest puts a damper on the party. Something Geppetto-like to manipulating this puppet — paste, papier-mache, hanging strapped by its face to the anesthesia mask like a fish on a barb. Its purple-coral organelles pump in unconscious coordination, racing all together now for some impossible finish line they can never reach, as if the whole, heaving mechanism needs to get someplace particular by daylight.

Poking inside the cavity, Kraft's fingers move about the place with pride of ownership: All my beautiful anatomical overlays — who dared fuck this perfection up? Even when he recalls that he did not design these inextricable meshes, Kraft's hands go on insisting that only those who have looked on the internal works, who patiently isolate the pulsing parts, who even go so far as to reroute or replace them, only this select club of God's on-site warranty service can begin to see through the cast of fantasy figures inhabiting the upper reaches of human consciousness where everyone else lives out his life.

It's all true, what the general public dares not suspect: no one can live with full anatomical knowledge. The heat and pressure of apocalyptic repair jobs transacted in wholesale volume every day of existence inevitably autoclave the heart. After a few hours of call, he does begin to see these needy, shivering bodies strapped to the monitors as so many deli cuts. These days, the freeze sets in as early as the instant he arrives in the theater.

The act of cutting never closes. It lingers on afterward, at the movies, alone over a burger. He replays the tapes of the last session, even in the thick of the next. He sees scars everywhere — perfect physiques betrayed by tiny lateral fissures. Shame-braceleted wrists, throats inscribed with suture-pearl necklaces. In bed some weeks before with an auburn beauty manifold enough to have become The One, he placed his petting hand on what had been soft breast once but now harbored implant. His finger felt the welt of the well-closed insertion slit, and he went instantly as impotent as the best lyric poets. No explanations possible; all he could do was ask her to take her perfect silhouette hence.

Three-year-old- ribs retract in front of him, supple and suggestive in their carriage, the cleavages of subcutaneous wrapping revealing, like tea leaves, the fact that the surgeon must eventually grow inured, restore the veil, return in time to those pretenses that allow casual engagement, human exchange. Every attending, however seasoned and congealed, struggles to forget what was thrust on him during the shock of internship: pus is the spirit's maiden name. Mucus, before anything.

It shocked Kraft, half a dozen years ago, during his first foray into an operating room on the conscious side of the knife, to discover how prosaic cutting's accoutrements were. You mean we just open them up, right here, in the billowing air? A scalpel was the same thing he kept in his kitchen rack, no value added. The cauterizer, just a soldering iron with no purpose except, well, to burn flesh. The wisps of smoke that the searing stick gives off smell — what else could they smell like? — like a wonderful steak on the backyard grill of a summer's night. That first time, he had actually salivated before making the induction.

He cycles through his selection of instruments, calling for them by gauges of thickness and weight and curvature, the choice of each a mix of skilled estimate and judgment call. The same basic tools employed since the Babylonians, when the punishment for malpractice was to remove the surgeon's hands. The devices available to Kraft on the sampler tray have gone unchanged for a hundred years: knives, scissors, needles, thread, forceps, retractors, the all-important hemostat. Nor has their use, despite the explosion of tech, graduated beyond the original Vedic paradox: inducing an injury to address an injury. And managing the damage of the injury induced.

What has changed, and changed only recently, is the scalpel's leverage. Incursion is nothing now; they invade and stamp about the forbidden grounds, almost at will. The only limits hemming the surgeon in are that abiding trio: shock, self-infection, pain. And of these three, the greatest is pain.

The profession's dream — free manipulation of the interior — was blocked until recently by the need to convince the body that inflicted destruction is better than the alternative. General anesthesia marked hope's first great breakthrough. More. Kraft would promote the discovery to Cornerstone of that imagined city civilization has been building from the start. The ability to baffle life's built-in jettison mechanism divides all history into Before and After: the era of all-annihilating agony and the age of deliverance by constitutional coup. On his best days, Kraft even gets a little glimpse of tenable existence off in the distance.

To crack the cap of negating pain, to rip a hacksaw downward through an expanse of flesh, to mash bone and burrow into marrow without tripping off a single shutdown signal — the chance dismantles the world and resurrects it, redecorates its interior. Life has sat imprisoned by the guard dogs posted to watch the house. Hard to overestimate just how much this advance rewrites the whole human shooting match, reassembles it elsewhere. Philosophy's frilly solfeggios now have half a fighting shot at dictating the terms of a new truce. Agony need no longer always have the last word. One might do more than abide.

Kraft tries to imagine this procedure, the one underneath his hands, coming off without anesthesia. Something pupates inside this baby. They must smash their way in, violating the miniature traceries of rib cage. A few feeble attempts to explain things to the infant, a pint of whiskey forced through a funnel to deaden the surface tingling. Then the blade, so sharp that even gristle melts at its wedge. Two adults to pin the flailing creature to the table, and a prayer that the child passes out relatively quickly. A shrieking worse than any that ever wafted over the death camps, because it screams, You were my protectors; I trusted you. Square off the incision and fold back the flaps. Take a fine-toothed jeweler's rasp to the sternum, pull the whole structure carefully apart like a Cornish game hen. By now, the infant brain so floods with torture's telegraph that it begins convulsing. He has read the stats: without dope, seven times out of ten, shock collapses the organism and pulls life in around it.

Then there is the time-honored alternative. Spread the pain out over a couple years, leaving disease free to multiply through the child where it frequently peaks in equally unbearable anguish, this time for weeks. Kill the kid quickly on the outside chance, or condemn it to certain, creeping death, coaching it through on promises of a future, pain-stripped place. There the prospect has stood, since nerve came conscious, until yesterday. That humankind, living through that scene even once, has carried on planning and projecting is almost as much a miracle as the discovery of the chemicals that might make the whole self-deluded, transparent, paper-hat tea party endurable.

Just beyond the folds of his left ear the Millstone, Kraft's attending, breathes epically, like wind sculpting a canyon. The steady oscillation calls Kraft back to the living infant on the table underneath them. Adenoidal in the best of times, the Millstone truly starts to snore when the going gets tiny. Yet better than Father Kino and his Short Man’s Syndrome. (“A short man, perhaps,” Plummer frequently jokes. “But at day's end the fellow casts a semilong shadow.”)

Together, the team extracts the mass they were after, clamps it off, and hacks it out at its insidious roots. In admiring tones as the gourd is lifted out and laid in a waiting pan, the Millstone marvels, “Hang that up on the top of your Christmas tree.”

Kraft briefly considers trying to get someone to close for him, but elects against putting his limited seniority to the test. After all, as his mother used to tell him when he went fishing with a low trump, one must never send a boy to do a man's job. He's carried the ball this far. Might as well finish, although it must be obvious to everyone on the team that he's about to go narcoleptic.

He sews like the zigzag accessory on a Singer. His sheep shanks run as erratically as a tricky halfback, say Sayers or Sweetness. This girl will grow up with Wellington's Victory stenciled across her belly — a thin red line dominating her front. However sultry and beautiful, however high her features, there will be this mark, and her every lover to a boy-man will wonder: What happened to you?

Some minutes pass, maybe even half an hour, before he realizes they are done. Quick, now: what day is it? What month, for that matter? He knows only that the time has not yet come when he is working for himself.

Outside in the parking lot, it is sunset or sunrise. Low light, in any case. Kino's favorite — day's end. The hour of Short Men the world over.

Could go home a while, but what's the point? At this hour, the freeway's still an open sewer. It will stay a running sore from now until the moment when the red trains are returned of necessity from their mothball bower.

Besides, he'd just have to swing around and come back in another few hours. Here, the meals are already made. A motel room at the Knife and Gun, already reserved in Kraft's name. And when was the last time he could do anything else but slink back to the ward and try to become a better hacker than he has been today, one for whom technique, intuition, and hands-on knowledge might, in some sustainable future, begin to grow almost equal to the body gone wrong, the infinite, anonymous petitions laid at his door?

A girl too small for her twelve years, still pitching from months on the sheet of corrugated tin that took her six hundred miles across the South China Sea, stands in front of history class in the eastern ravages of Angel City and guesses where the lost Roanoke colony has disappeared to. A year and a half of English administered by evangelical Philippines relief camp aides and a battery of weeks stateside qualifies her for the Oral Report, that time-honored ritual of passage. She chooses, for some reason, American history.

She tries to say just what that single word, carved into the bark of a tree, might reveal about the lost Virginian band's destination. She pronounces the word aloud, cuts it into the blackboard with a stump of chalk that disintegrates into pastel sand in her fingers: CROATOAN. She spells the fragment left on a second trunk: CRO. This word, the lone sign of hasty evacuation remaining to greet the colony's governor on his return from a supply run to the mother country, holds for her no impenetrable mystery. It is as English, as Lao, as Lao-Tai, as Thai, as Tagalog, as Latin Spanish as any of the trading currencies drifting through the temporary settlements where she has put up for the night. To every relocation camp its own transitory lingua franca, built up by the accidents of mass migration. And all the mysterious messages ever penned into silent bark come to the same thing: We're off, then. Don't wait up.

Why else would a person resort to words? Words, she has learned in all manner of reeducation programs along her route, have no origin and no end. They are themselves the touring urgency they try to describe. Barrio, where she now lives, comes from Spanish, from Arabic, from the idea of the idea of open country. No word could be more English now, more American, although all the open country here has been closed for lifetimes. That's okay, because barrio is now as plowed under, as built up as that lost open land. It means something else, in the run of time. It means those Arabs creeping northward into Spain like fluid in a barometer. It means the Spanish, unable to stop the Moor advance except by swallowing their science and math and militant restlessness. It means the English maritime offspring, unwisely jumping their own island for something larger, in turn unable to contain the children of New Spain except by eating them whole— their food, their music, their words.

This is the outline she was born knowing — how words are the scratch marks of intersecting trails. She still holds in her head a complex map of river linguistics: sound geographies, isoglossaries of all the valley people her own once did business with. Moors and conquistadores and Carolina pilgrims, picked up quickly at the latest trading station, she simply superimposes on the list. She imitates the local playground cries, swapping in the Spanish chants as effortlessly as the English. The two are the same, the nearest of cousins, given the family she comes from. She shares herself between them, speaking an exploratory patois eclectic enough to baffle all listeners equally.

Arriving at this school, abandoned on the principal's doorstep, she wanted only to please — a small enough price for guaranteed safety. Pleasing seemed to involve solving the riddles laid before her. In numbers and planes and problem solving, she tested years beyond her peers, beyond many of the certified teachers. But she could not paraphrase "Make hay while the sun shines," nor complete the analogy "Shoe is to sock as overcoat is to…" More indicting, she said absolutely nothing unless forced, and then acquitted herself with the barest minimum of whispered, eerie syllables.

Ceramic, tiny, terrified, she moved about on legs as pencil-tentative as a tawny mouse deer. All four of her limbs would have fit comfortably inside a third-grade lunch box. Her every gesture seemed calculated to evade the incursions of those bigger than she. The school nurse refused to believe the age the little one gave, and there was of course no birth certificate. A problem with number translation? No; the girl marked out her years in sticks on a sheet, silently polite, as if adults required infinite patience. Simple fib? But what on earth could she gain by pretending to be older than she was?

No matter. She looked eight, ocean cruise survivor or otherwise. True, she spoke (when she spoke) impressively for a recent acquirer, but no more precociously than other transpacific Asian eight-year-olds played the violin. However well she knew the Roman alphabet by sight, she could barely force her fist to push it into print. Easy cursive, flash card grace, dodge ball without shame were all out of the question. Enlightened pedagogy demanded that she start three grades beneath her age. And obediently, there she began.

Six weeks of field test routs pedagogy. The third-grade teacher allots her a desk, takes an hour to explain the subjects, gives her maps, a math notebook, a compass, and a protractor, and assigns a pristine text from the previous, humiliated decade called Our Emerging World, saying, “We'll be working in this.” Code, the girl quickly intuits, for “As soon as I teach your fifty other materially arrested classmates how to fake reading.”

Misunderstanding, or perhaps just desperate, Joy has the books finished by week's end. Incredulous teacher rejects the evidence. She tests the girl on end chapters, middle chapters, mixing the order, as if the new child were one of those square-root-solving horses from variety TV. Unstumpable if no less diminutive, Joy earns instant promotion to grade four. There, her new teacher discovers that the girl can indeed speak full, correct, even beautiful sentences, only her predicates are always lost to the background radiation of manic classroom.

By term's end, she is kicked upward again. She is made to visit the school counselor, to receive psychological patch-up for what the botched, bounce-around job must certainly be doing to her. Counselor asks her probing but shrewdly disguised questions, such as, Would you rather be a seal in a big seal colony basking on the shore or an eagle soaring all alone high above the cliffs? Seal, without hesitation. Oh? Why? Eagles eat rats and seals eat fish and she has eaten both and greatly prefers fish.

Joy takes pity on this man, helps him get to the point without more embarrassment. "Fifth grade is much better than third or fourth," she volunteers. Yes, yes; how? "In fifth grade, you get to face the street and you can watch people walking by all day long." I see. And what else? The desks move?" she asks, hoping against hope that this is the right answer.

Do you have any special worries that you'd like to tell me about? A rungs from the bottom of your secret storage, stories from before? Her eyes spark a moment, break for barrio, for open country, a place where the smells and sounds that reared her are left a little tropical acreage, where not everyone she loves has necessarily been flayed alive. Before she can control them, her hands fly up like a surprised monkey army breaking for rain forest safety. "Some of my friends here can't pronounce my last name."

The counselor files his report. This girl can be bounced from now until the last institutional foul-up of recorded time and not realize that utter flux is in any way unusual. And yet, the counselor scribbles everywhere on the form except in the blank space reserved for the OCR reader, there are lands around the world where permanent residence, for this child, would be far worse than her list of temporary visas.

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.

What can the teacher do but give the child an A, tell her the report was excellent, bump her — baffling her further — up to her rightful grade? Promotion solves nothing. They cannot help her here, can alleviate none of that afflicted breathing. The girl is bound fast in the metal burr rasps of jeans, swaddled by clothes that turn her every playground hour into live burial. Her rage for instant adult competence betrays itself. Barbed and intractable, waiting at the bus stop every morning is the scent of saffron, the flake of gold leaf still in her fingers. The temple bells, the lost pitched vendor calls sound, with each additional day-lifetime she serves out in this school-cum-mall, increasingly like a croatoan-note pulling her on toward the next promissory coordinate, deep in the still-unfounded, untouched continent.

There is a temple in this city. A classical Sukhothai pavilion stands a dozen blocks from the apartment they have put her in. A chedi, squeezed between a video rental palace and WE BUY/SELL/TRADE ANYTHING. These stepped gables edged in finial flames would once have seemed as foreign to her as the peek-a-boutiques of Melrose are to the Iowa conventioneer. The styles are of another country, a hundred kilometers from her valley, as distant and unreachable as the epic's monkey kingdom. But here, the temple is her one touchstone in a landscape as arbitrary as the language she must use to make her way through it.

Nothing can be assumed here. Total strangers greet you like a long-lost relative, fuss over you, buy you sailor suits, then disappear forever without trace. The price marked on a thing is exactly what you have to pay for it. People leave gaps between them in line, then get furious when you fill them. The water coming out of the wall is drinkable, but ponds and streams will kill you. The dead are not burned, but buried in spacious, decorated plots, while the living set up house on a square meter of sidewalk. Guns are legal but imported parrots are not.

She is saved only by seeing how no one else belongs here either. They catch her eye in the supermarket and look away, confessing. She reads with delight how only Mexico City contains more Mexicans than Angel. She spends Saturdays in the exotic street markets, where a dozen governments in exile make their unofficial homes. Something rustles her ear before she can make out the neighborhood contour: a whisper of how this entire community, even the vested interests, is provisional.

All the property is owned by transpacific gnomes. All the sports heroes hail from the Caribbean. The counter help at the Mr. Icee know no more English than "superfudgebuster." The after-school black-and-white cable classics, their credits packed with foreign drifters' unpronounceable names, always reach the same conclusion: pass yourself off as a local, whatever your origin. The displaced life leads to any ending you like.

Not that she can yet frame the tale in so many borrowed words. Her confusion is primordial. The city she has been set down in is riddled through with time holes, portals opening onto preserved bits of every world that ever saw light. They take her to them on school field trips and church-sponsored socials. That prehistoric, saber-toothed tar pit downtown; the Spanish colonial missions; those Hollywood wax museums; the Wild West storefronts; the sprawling Arab bazaars; the town-sized, live-in, glass terraria arcades enclosing futuristic retail worlds; that magic castle from a medieval past that she would not know from the original thing. These are her reals, her eternally present givens.

She makes nothing of it beyond raw specifics: how to get to school. The inscrutable uses of a library card. The ways of indigestible dried potatoes and bleached sponge bread. A playground where she watches gigglers dig through sand to the center of the earth and come out in China, where people walk on their hands.

The block where she lives, the fourth most dangerous in the city, is for her a garden of almost guilty safety. She sleeps through sirens these days. Even those after-midnight altercations, smashings and bludgeonings in the building foyer outside her room, no longer fully wake her.

The search to avoid attention extends to her choice of three-ring binders, book covers, barrettes, and jumpers. What she cannot afford she constructs facsimiles of — substitute cloth voodoo, clay expiatory figures. She forsakes popularity, a place in the opaque pecking order she cannot even appraise. Joy apes the Angelino offspring only to safeguard her residency permit, that fluke stay of extradition, almost certainly a mistake that will any moment be detected and rescinded.

The tapeworm knowledges she wolfs down only leave her more emaciated. Her virtuoso fiascoes of oral-report earnestness give the game away. Concealed, they fluoresce under pressure. She covers for a parent back at the rented room, a father who repeats, nightly, in sheer terror, the immigrant litany, succeed, adapt, evade. The girl's show of cheer is so transparent that when she finally appears one day at recess in front of the teacher's desk saying, "I hurt," teacher herself bursts into tears. Oh God, child, I know; it kills just to look at you.

But Joy, as always, is something more literal. She points to a spot above her right ankle. Did you twist it? The girl shakes her head gravely. She is sent to the nurse, takes a spot in a line of metal chairs behind the usual strep throats and malingerers. Nurse detects evident swelling. A little discoloration, maybe. In her notes, nurse accuses the child, for obscure cross-cultural reasons, of trying to cover up a team-sport injury. As has become customary, she also misspells the child's last name.

When the sprain fails to heal over the following week, nurse grows furious. She grills the perverse patient: What aren't you telling me? She palpates the reticent swelling again, brusquely but by no means roughly. During this routine handling, Joy slips unconscious from accumulated torment. Passes out in preference to crying.

The sense of emergency begins to settle in. Nurse finds no phone number in the girl's file where her parents might be reached. A father exists, apparently, but where in the hellish human miasma he might be found is anyone's guess. A runner sent to the girl's reported address finds the building uninhabited, uninhabitable, judging from the husk. The girl is "medically indigent," as the catch phrase has it. Another underage Medi/cal gal.

The public institutions transfer her from one to the other, bucket brigade style. At the charity hospital, a roughriding ER paramedic applies the stopgap, probing just enough to cover his own ass before routing the girl to the pediatric attending, who is, as always, tied up.

One of the service's surgical residents performs the biopsy. Sinking the shaft, he can see nothing beyond the abnormalities of his own uncen-sored imagination — a Rorschach of tissue turning gradually into soft sandwich spread powdered with Parmesan. The path report comes back stamped "Insufficient Tissue Sample." Don't be stingy, dahlinks. Give us enough to play with, sufficient decent slides to make the necessary stains.

During this whole time, the child's father has yet to turn up. Although voiced only a notch above inaudible, the girl clearly has enough verbal ingenuity to answer the complete history and physical. But when the work-up doubles back on the identity of parent or legal guardian, the girl only shrugs. She is protecting him, by express prior command. The admissions people have seen this before. Dad's another illegal, or maybe a legitimate resident so bewildered by Immigration's cross-interrogating triplicate that he goes fugitive, without the first notion of his legal standing and too frightened to find out on the fly.

But the hospital can do nothing without mature consent. The impasse is resolved only after the pediatric nurse on night duty literally stumbles over the man. Two A.M., and she has gone into the ward to refresh in relative leisure a baby-drip neglected earlier this harried evening. On her way past Joy's bed, she trips headlong over an adult sleeping on an improvised pallet by the cot's baseboard.

The man is wearing a cheap cotton short-sleeve and black pants so loose he has tied them up in front like a sarong. He scrambles awake. A flushed animal, he wavers, torn between surrendering and abandoning his daughter in escape. The moment's hesitation gives the nurse time to summon a massive night-shift orderly who missed his calling as a strip club bouncer. They corner the man, who seems unable to understand their attempts at calming patter.

Soon, the entire ward wakes. Kid Circus spontaneously erupts. Doped, in traction, terminally ill, the imps remain capable of thrilling to a fracas. Sick juveniles aid and abet, to the best of their vitiated abilities, the breakdown of law and order. Staff must resort to riot suppression, the kiddie water cannons.

Questions commence with the return to normal. How did father and daughter find one another with no messages passed between them? They didn't: the only possible answer. How could a full-grown man slip past the whole medical establishment, unobserved? He couldn’t, obviously. Yet there is his makeshift pallet, right by her bedside.

Joy, terrified, serves as interpreter for her even more frightened father. The admin nurse in charge says, "Tell him to calm down. We're not the police. No one will hear anything about him. We just need his cooperation, nothing more." She considers adding: Tell him you might die unless he gives us his signature.

Negotiations are awkward and drawn out. The man proclaims his innocence. He several times launches into the story of his escape from home, carefully illustrating the persecutions that macerated his family. He lays out their mine-strewn path to the sea. He recites a complex, speculative narrative about what happened to various of his fellow sailors once the craft touched land, their fates, grander or more hideous, enfranchising his.

The hospital objects at every turn: We don't care. We don't need to know. We just want to save your daughter. Both sides have trouble hearing the demure, soft-voiced, simultaneous translator losing strength between them.

Slowly the required papers get hashed through. A staffer reads the legalese and prepares a delicate paraphrase for the twelve-year-old. She in turn constructs a valley dialect version for her father: You agree not to ask them for lots of money if they should make a mistake and something bad happen to me. The old man then launches into an account about a man on the boat who wasn't even a political refugee being given to a rich family up north where all he has to do is skim their pool every morning and douse it with chemicals twice a week. The girl must then translate this story to the objecting staff, silently succumbing to a shame more private and roseate than any bone disease.

The whole transaction is bathed in the surreal sepia of two in the morning. When the signing at last takes place, even that must be mediated. The man inscribes his name in the specified place, but in a Devanagari-derived script that does no one any good whatsoever. The night shift has no idea if the signature is sufficient. They know only that they need something from the fugitive before he bolts and vanishes again.

They ask him for a Roman transliteration. Joy must again supply it, reading, sounding, thinking, converting, moistening the ballpoint pensively on her tongue, writing in her bulging, balloon, block printing (she has not yet mastered cursive) WISAT STEPANEEVONG MAWKHAN. Emergency words that will remain behind, carved in this bark, when all this room's transients have moved on, traceless, into the interior.

Bó what would have been elevenses in another life, the evacuation had run mad. Children thickened alleys into lanes, lanes into streets, streets into high circuses. Evacuee bands swerved across the city, schooling like shoals over lost galleons' hulks. Squadrons swarmed the roundabouts, mobbed junctions, and lined the embankments, throttling thoroughfares in cinematic crocodile lines, past all authorities' ability to administer.

The city was now an orderly anarchy, urgently well mannered, tamed by emergency. Theatre, Chriswick had thought, stumbling out to take his part in the overcast September light. The gross, otherworldly theatre of history's gymkhana.

It was as if some world mother had climbed into the lantern of St. Paul's and blown an enormous whistle three times — the signal for home before dark. Only, the motion triggered in delinquent children wasn't homewards now, but out, flung wide, scattering all school-agers onto the sleepy hinterland.

Nothing in the city's two written millennia could match this. The occasional plague, even great fires seemed slack in comparison. Chris-wick and his band of assignees, paralyzed on the school steps, watched j the tide of London under-twelvers recede before their eyes. Chriswick -1 could not even manage a head count of his own. All Southwark would be emptied by nightfall.

Fifteen years in planning, and the ARP scheme's Friday-morning live run had already pitched the nation into the chaos it meant to prevent. Air Raid Preparedness: within hours, it seemed a cruel joke. Who prepared them for the preparations? No sirens or screaming. No final showdown alarms aside from the gauntlet of Southwark mums sobbing along the escape routes. All the advance warning they had received was headmaster calling assembly and announcing, "Get a move on, lads. You girls too. We're off, then. Do Prince Edward's proud." A picnic on the parade ground of apocalypse.

Chriswick's form sent up a great cheer at headmaster's announcement. Another lark, like the three rehearsal shams they'd had at the end of summer. Anything to escape lessons. The poor wretches hadn't a clue in creation to what lay in wait for them. Not to say that the masters had any more notion; Chriswick himself, in The Palmer's just a dozen months before, had drained an ale at the news of that spineless wonder waving his little scrap of paper around out on the tarmac. The whole local had sent up a pitiful, liquid huzzah of deliverance from evil.

This morning, deliverance disappeared as quickly as the state ration of Cadbury's. Somehow, the typists had managed to produce a label for each child. More miraculously, staff succeeded in getting the right labels pinned to more or less the right human parcels. Then the haversacks, the carrier bags, the personal bundles, and of course the cardboard boxes promising protection against mass chemical death. Chriswick and the other escorting officers donned their humiliating white armbands and away they went, behind a bedsheet banner as if to the bloody Baden-Powell family reunion.

They struck off, although Chriswick hadn't any more idea where they were headed than those idiots on the ARP subcommittee. It had taken the combined intellects of the War Office, Ministry of Health, CID, and — added in a moment of patronizing weakness — the chief inspector of schools to toss off the plan for evacuating four million tinies from the nation's principal cities in seventy-two hours. Unfortunately, no one in the chain of command had thought to inform Prince Edward's, Chriswick's battalion, just how they were to join ranks with that four million.

Chriswick marshalled his contingent on the south playing fields, awaiting word. None coming, he skirted back out among the departing groups and cornered a colleague. "Hunter, where exactly are we headed?"

The swine only shrugged and replied in his best George Sanders, "Why, into the valley of Death, old man."

Returning to his group, Chriswick surprised a dozen boys in the act of putting on their masks, making explosions, and dying noisily. The masks were silly nuisances. How any child could stand the rubbery taste was beyond Chriswick. He'd heard that some up-and-comer at the Air Ministry had put into production bright blue-and-red masks with big Mickey ears — respirators for the two-to-fives in the final struggle against the international fascist subversion of world order.

Chriswick had not asked for this. Teaching had once promised reasonable working hours and a brilliant summer vacation for life. But Chriswick had barely commenced caning his first class for butchering their recitations when the government called him up for the Territorial. And on the very day that he went in to serve notice, school sprung this on him: first shepherd several dozen of London's destitute to imaginary safe havens in green fields far away.

He collected his young and fell in behind the moving masses. The children crocodiled, two by two, as if born to the formation. But despite their exemplary Sunday School marching, his group made no headway through the swells of schoolchild files. Another white armband motioned Chriswick toward a red double-decker at kerbside. He fed the children into the bus, recoiling from the conductor's "You've got their fares, duck?" before placing it as a joke.

In rapid consultation, he and the driver settled on London Bridge Station. The ten-minute ride took three times that. The station was so overrun by evacuees that the bus could get no closer than several blocks away. Chriswick had the presence of mind to leave the children on board and run in himself, to determine the extent of the station's insanity. He milled about in the mob for minutes before locating the makeshift routing table. A foreheadless gentleman skimmed his lists, clicking his dental plate. "That'll be Waterloo for you, sir."

No use even groaning. The whole country had been cut adrift on improvisation. It could have been worse, in any case. Could have been Victoria or ever-weeping Paddington. When he got back to the bus, half the tinned bully beef and potted pears had been downed, and several boys had been sick all over the tartan seats. The furious driver refused to take them any further than back to the school. "Can't be messing about with you all day, guv. I've got a city to save." Good old London Transport; failed to recognize the city even when it heaved all over its upholstery.

Back at Prince Edward's, Chriswick's company rejoined a dozen other rerouted groups trying to get their bearings. To make it difficult for the enemy to hit them from the air, the movements of the evacuation were being kept top secret, even from the organizers. London had become a gargantuan thimblerig, a living shell game. The logistics of shuttling each battalion to its safe destination degenerated into a nightmare Königsberg bridge problem, a problem Chriswick devoutly hoped the RAF would shortly simplify.

The children were growing restive and the morning had not yet reached its worst. No more public transportation seemed forthcoming so there was nothing for it but to walk. A good hike would at least take something out of the more rambunctious ones. Chriswick opted for Union Street and the Cut. But the way was a disaster. Crossing Blackfriars alone required minor divine intervention.

After an hour on foot, many of the children prayed for a direct hit to put them out of their misery. Almost to the station, they ran across Jansen's group. The sports master was turning the whole incident into a paramilitary exercise. He had his band calling out in drill time, "Are we disenchanted? Not our Prince Edward's! Are we dispirited? Never Prince Edward's School!" On the shout of one, the whole file made a right face. On two, the block-long, two-deep ranks dashed across the street. On three, a left turn restored them to columns. The old tune was right: Britons never never never shall be slaves.

Chriswick had been a fool for thinking things would never come to this. The Bank of England, the BBC — they'd run off to the countryside months back. The other week, he'd heard that the National Gallery was scouting about Wales for idle mine shafts in which to stash The Fighting Temeraire. Chriswick's letter box alone should have been sufficient to convince anyone. Wednesday last he'd received a pamphlet with the racy title Masking Your Windows. And here they were, his own form, scrambling to evade the fate that until that morning had seemed confined to fairylands like China and Spain. A quarter of visible England took to the streets and turned evidence that we happy few would never outlive this day, nor come safe home.

At Waterloo, ten thousand children seethed about in the waiting chambers and spilled onto the platforms. Mad shouting, panicked tears, bowel and urinary crises laced the main hall. Children were everywhere, laden with prized possessions. They carried school-stenciled portable potties, engaged in last-ditch knucklebones or marbles, and worked out spot wartime exchange rates between Blue and Green Fairy Books. Chriswick watched as two little girls, no more than six, went about hand-in-hand with chilling composure asking anyone who would listen for help locating the foundlings' group from Samaritan House.

His charges, barely civilised on the best of days, began making elaborate barrow-dances. It seemed best to get them to the trains and let the War Office come try to dislodge them if they were in the wrong place. Ask questions later: the great lesson of historically awakened adulthood needed only this epochal evacuation to at last become self-evident.

The way to the platforms was a study in crowd madness. Another foreheadless fellow with clipboard snagged his group before they could board. "Bit tardy, aren't we? You were supposed to be here hours ago."

"Yes, well, the town's not quite itself today."

"Listen, you. I'm responsible for seeing fifteen thousand children onto thirty trains, each with twenty carriages unloading at over a hundred villages. Don't come snivelling to me."

"Oh, shove off."

"Right. Just so long's we understand one another. You'll be on Platform Twelve, Carriage F." One supposed this exchange would be remembered fondly years from now, a nation pulling together in dark times.

Passing through the throng to change platforms, Chriswick heard an announcement over the Tannoy. All men with strange accents asking for directions were to be beaten senseless. A notice board on Platform Twelve verified that the waiting train was theirs. But neither platform nor notice disclosed anything about destination.

The sight of a virgin car fresh for despoiling should have revived his group's flagging spirit of adventure. But the children suddenly began to cry. It finally dawned on them that the clothes redeemed from the pawnshop, the ruinous knickerbocker glory of the night before, were certain indications of the end.

The train pulled out. In every third garden abutting the line, people were sinking corrugated-steel air raid shelters. Chriswick made a halfhearted effort to patrol the carriage. In front, the girls shouted endless choruses of "Ten Green Bottles" at the top of their working-class lungs. In back, the lads took turns peeing out the windows and squealing, "Watch out! You'll get your willie cut off!" He did not bother reprimanding.

Clearing the city must have lasted several lifetimes for the children, even for those who had never been on a train in their lives. Outside Dartford, an evacuation volunteer finally came through with instructions. "You'll be getting off at Canterbury."

"Good God, man. You're joking."

"That's what it says here."

"Canterbury's another city. And it's halfway to Berlin. They'll all be incinerated before…"

"Hush, sir. Pas devant les enfants"

It was all too ludicrous. Evacuating children to Canterbury was like well, carrying coals to Newcastle. The place would be torched for the cultural value alone. It could only be some embittered, Trinity double first's idea of ironic retribution for his clerk's job at the ARP: send a band from Southwark to the holy martyr's shrine.

The children were spent by the time they reached their destination. But the hard part had not yet begun. Canterbury Station was decked out in banners, but any welcoming committee had long since gone home. Chriswick huddled the little ones outside the station. The afternoon began to turn crisp. A terse billeting officer arrived, with forehead this time, but without chin. "We were told you'd be in at

one."

"Yes, well, we weren't."

"Evidently." They packed the children on buses and brought them to the market square outside the cathedral gate. There, patriotically obligated villagers gathered round, sizing the wares, every so often issuing a sceptical "I'll take that one," or "Have you got two girls around eleven? We want a pair."

People came looking for cheap labor, replacements for dead offspring, a government subsidy. The Shirley Temple look-alikes went first, to the local child molesters. Some brothers and sisters refused to be split up; other sibs were dispersed to opposite sides of town without so much as a swap of address. The billeting officer made hurried notes of who had whom, but Chriswick knew the scribbling was worse than worthless. These children would never be found again.

Today's trip had already dispersed them past recall, even before the town had turned out to bid for them as for so many second-string elevens. And the solid Canterbury middle class, clucking at Hemming's head lice and the fungus behind Davis's ears: by tonight, these redoubtable folk would learn words long since banished from England's green and pleasant land.

In a modest few hours, an entire nation had abandoned itself to a scavenger hunt with consequences at least equal to those of the world war's latest test match. Was the country counting on being home for Christmas again this time? These children, doled out so freely in the Butter market, would grow up away, in the homes of strangers. A whole generation scattered at random, scientifically indifferent, city to country, south to north, Catholic billeted on Ñ of E, Formby fans descending on the lords of the manor, the desperately poor laid out on the thick linen of the privileged. The island had conducted an irreversible sociological experiment at a clap, almost without thought.

By tea, all the potential providers had disappeared, leaving Chris-wick and the billeting officer with the South Bank's least marketable. One of the Shillingford twins was wailing that nobody wanted them, while the other shouted excitedly how that meant they got to go back home. The rest of the rejected sat about fiddling with gas mask boxes, all in.

"All right then," the officer declared. "We'll just place the rest of these door to door." This they did, as if delivering milk. They paced the circuit of city walls, knocking on houses with known spare rooms. When the residents resisted, the officer bullied them. The Shillingford girls were split up, one going to a black-and-blue woman whose husband roared from a hidden back room, the other to a widower who had his paws up the girl's knickers before the door closed. The billeting officer mumbled something about correcting the situation tomorrow. Levy went to a mother of five who first ran an interrogating hand through the boy's hair, feeling for horns.

At length, they chiseled the group down to a grim cadre of remainders. The billeting officer sneaked a look at his watch. "Would you excuse me a moment? The wife's expecting me for dinner. I'll be back directly."

And Chriswick was left in the dark, in a strange city, alone with half a dozen dirty, cold, starving, fatigued, senseless children not his own. He ducked into a stall and bought them chips with salt and vinegar, out of his own pocket.

Down the lane, an ancient parish church held out the possibility of a place to sit. At the door, a tiny fist restrained Chriswick by the trouser turnup. "Sir, what sort of church is it?"

"What? Oh, for God's sake, Evans. Don't be an idiot. It's just to rest a minute."

Evans kept from breaking down only by viciously inscissoring his lip. "Really, sir. I can't go in if it's a… you know."

"It's a Saxon church, boy."

"Oh. Very well then."

The children collapsed in the pews, two or three finding the strength to genuflect. Chriswick busied himself with the tourist plaque — yet another Oldest Parish Church in England — to keep from ulcerating with murderous intent at the billeting officer, headmaster, the ARP board, and Hitler. A sudden, pure-pitched resonance rang out through the church, and Chriswick spun about in surprise.

In silence, while his back was turned, the chancel had filled with choristers. Boys, no older than his own vitiated group, stood decked in white surplices over crimson cassocks. They must have hid in some vestry and filed in while Chriswick wasn't looking. They now formed two reverent banks facing each other in the stalls, and, with no adult to be seen, they launched into a late evensong.

Chriswick rushed to the pews to discipline his group, sit them up straight, or drag them out of the church while he still could. But such was unnecessary. First, there wasn't a soul in the place for his Clink deportees to disturb. Further, Chriswick's children, amazed at a handful of boys their own age conducting an unassisted musical service, sat rapt on their benches, entranced by the sound.

The versicle line fell to a boy who couldn't have been more than fourteen. He sang the plainsong in head tones of a purity that would disappear with the arrival of adult conscience. While the last, long note of his chant still hung about in the vault, its answer arrived in a rush of chorus, slipping off into conductus, flowering full with Renaissance polyphony.

Chriswick knew something about church music, had even partaken once, when younger. But he was unable to place this setting. The moment he thought Dunstable, the piece slid off a further century and a half, to Tallis or Byrd. After another measure, it sounded like one of those imperial, last-century anachronisms, returning to ancient and better days while the world around this island went down in flames.

It started out Latin, but it soon became very Anglican. The text turned into a dog's breakfast — bits and pieces from the Book of Common Prayer. It had been too long to be sure, but Chriswick seemed to make out familiar lines, like forgotten but still familiar faces from old school photographs. Give peace in our time, Î Lord. (You'd think they might have suppressed that bit of questionable taste this evening.) Defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. All that are in danger, necessity, and tribulation. All that travel by land or by water. All sick persons, and young children. All prisoners and captives. The fatherless children, and widows. Keep us from the craft and subtilty of the devil and man.

Doubly odd: the setting did not correspond to any service Chriswick had ever heard. No speech — no invocations or readings or prayers. Only this pure singing, from voices of shockingly high calibre. How could a small parish barn, however historic, put together such a choir? Child voices, usually selected for sightsinging ability to perform two hundred settings a year while the trebly tint lasted, seemed here to have been chosen for nothing short of transcendent throats. Every lad in the dozen possessed uncanny musical maturity; they'd been singing for twenty minutes, a cappella, without straying from pitch.

The singing — at the end of evacuation, after hours in flight from the penultimate urban raid, deciding lifetimes by lot — was too much for Chriswick. Those pitches of absolute tone stripped of vibrato cut into his muscle like angel scalpels. A religion that worshipped always like this would have counted Chriswick still among the believers. Freely expanding parts — shared out among twelve boys, the lower voices pitched up into the innocence of airy rapture — interrogated the scar where his abdomen had been.

Assertion and response sounded fifths so clean it made no difference whether the purity was put on or not. This one thing alone of his race might be worth saving from the coming bombs. These soaring, high, head voices said what it was to be alive, to be anything at all. To be displaced, begging temporary address, a choirboy in this alien, bass body, under attack from on high. To be a child from the East End, father a sot, mother numbed by tons of others' washing, a boy duped by a good matric into going on and becoming a teacher, winding up by perverse twist of fate back in the Clink, now subaltern to a war that will send all England to final sleep. To be a functionary, assigned the pointless task of stripping children from their one anaemic chance at temporary home, children by adoption and grace just now discovering too late that all they ever wanted to do while alive on this earth was to sing out blamelessly, however laughably, Make us an acceptable people in thy sight.

Alarmed by silence, Chriswick looked up to find the choristers filing toward the vestry. He called out, "Hallo. You boys." The choir turned in unison, as if noticing for the first time that the nave was inhabited. Chriswick's speaking in church wiped away some cobweb restraint from the boys. At the common signal, choirboys and frayed evacuees met in the transept crossing, converged on each other, touching, talking rapidly, collapsing back to their proper ages.

Chriswick found himself unable to take the few steps to where the children gathered. He sat in the pew and gazed on this meeting between mutually uncomprehending races. The choirboys paid court to Chriswick's two youngest girls, giving them chocolate that appeared by magic from cassock pockets. He overheard one of his toughs compliment a singer. "You don't 'alf sound like a host of bleedin' serabim."

Each group sniffed the other, excitedly. The spent children had found a second wind. The day, the evensong had so drained Chriswick that he could barely open his mouth. From the back of the nave, he called out to the youth who had sung solo, "Are you boys at the cathedral school?"

The boy jerked. "What cathedral?"

Chriswick's surprise was even greater. The boy was American. Imperceptible when singing, the speech was unmistakable. Something in the boy's reticence suggested secret transatlantic alliances, affairs of state ahead of their time.

"Where is your conductor? Are you rehearsing for something?"

"We're touring," the boy replied, in churchly whisper. The South-wark children, awed by his accent, crowded around. The Yank began spinning them a fantastic travelogue, an adventure Chriswick could not make out from the narthex. The chanter handed over for examination a metal pendant hanging on the end of a chain. Some High Church bauble, an excellent Norman copy it seemed from Chriswick's distance. A trumpet-toting angel, but with an astonishing, disfigured face. The street urchins fingered it in hushed admiration.

A fatigue suddenly swept over Chriswick, a heaviness past describing. Sleep penetrated into the rote core that had kept him moving for the past twelve hours. He felt as if St. Martin's were filling with a gas that made him want to curl up and fall blessedly, permanently unconscious. He pinched his jowls with his nails and shook himself. With effort, he stood and left by the west portal, needing air.

He stood in the churchyard, wanting a cigarette badly and a pint even worse. It was pitch dark; English evensong was over. Where was the billeting officer? Where would they sleep this night? Perhaps it would be best to bring the remainder back to London on a night train. They had spoiled enough lives already, condemning those children to the whims of strangers. He did not believe for a minute that any spot on this entire island would be safe from the coming nightmare.

The pilgrims' town was settled in for its night of sacrifice. All across the country tonight, in towns sheltered and forgotten, in Somerset and Devon and Dorset, in minuscule specks in East Anglia named Diss and Watton and Scole, in unpronounceable Welsh stone settlements, on the coastal ports, in Seaford and Hastings and Skegness, steeped in the Midlands, streaming over farms off the moors and dales and downs, ranging out to Lands End, Penzance, the project was coming home. Schoolchildren fleeing Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and London scattered like factory workers at history's closing whistle. From the southeast, over the coast, Chriswick could hear a low, mechanical hum, still far away but rushing toward the cliffs with each tick of earth's politics: the blanketing engines, the flotillas of their common, aerial destruction.

He turned back into the church to gather the remaining children and find at least temporary shelter for them. But the building was empty, as bare as the old woman's cupboard. Chriswick, in a daze, checked the niches and sacristy. There were no chapels where a group that size could hide. He was tired, tired past telling. He could not even remember, from any past so distant as an hour ago, how many he had come inside with. No one could have left by the west porch without his knowing. And yet, choir and makeshift congregation — both gone.

After the doomed city, the impassable Southwark streets, escape's debacle, the chaos of Waterloo, the market humiliation, the door-to-door desperate soliciting, the last sung service of innocence, the children had shaken loose of the real. The young had abandoned him to whatever fairy survival adults might still believe in at so late an hour.

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

What is the historical background behind these events?

Who is "that spineless wonder waving his little scrap of paper around out on the tarmac"?

What is the source of the allusion "into the valley of Death"? How does this irony contribute to the description of the evacuation?

Where, do you imagine, do the children disappear to at the story's end?

Define: elevenses, matric, Cadbury's, Norman, Saxon, Baden-Powell.

The nationwide evacuation of children described here really happened. Research this strange event and speculate on the impact it made on the life of a nation.

Interview a contemporary who has had to live through a similar experience. Gather his or her life history, and tell it.

They beat him within an inch of his life. While it's too much to say that he loves every minute of it, Kraft does come back for more. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Where'd that come from? Takes a beating, comes back bleating. Takes a mauling, keeps on crawling.

And not just on account of the student loans, which he could pay off easily from behind a desk at some university health center, pushing antacids and peddling the bland diet sheet to overwrought undergrads. Something inside him must prefer this, the assembly line of cases spilling out of packed cutting rooms, this dance marathon of service, sacrifice, and salvation. Op 'til you drop. Only intolerable fatigue keeps at bay the worse punishment awaiting him in slack hours. Whenever he's dealt more than three free hours in a row, he winds up on the phone, long distance to lost friends, philosophizing, predicting things, asking acquaintances spooky and proscribed questions.

Idle too long, he dallies with the idea of social reinstatement. A little free time, and he begins to believe he might be able to settle in somewhere. Memories of the place still lodge like lost baggage in the base of his brain. Sky-blue, home free, nights of lazy music while elaborate shaggy dog jokes drift in and out of attention. The kegger tap, the stoked fire, voices in the kitchen exchanging book and movie tides like spent mistresses. Close shoulder-brushes with strangers and intimates. Men to postmortem the latest big-league box scores and international fuck-ups. Women for declaring long unspoken love, just for the hell of it.

When the free hours grow too expansive, he takes Schwartz, the Board cram book, up to the hospital roof. This aerial view, distance perfecting the taillight-as-platelet metaphor, never ceases to calm him with scale. Sheer surface area, baroque Brussels-lace intricacy of civilization's switchboard interconnects, insists that he need never worry about leaving anything undone. It's all being checked off the To Do list somewhere, looked after deep inside this city circuitry. Somebody's taking care of it in a remote strip mall, office complex, or underground research facility out on the periphery. Or if not here, then within another city matrix elsewhere in the megapole, along the freeway, further down the continuous data stream.

During heavy call assaults, his beeper ponging every few seconds, the phone machine LCD stacking up a Sisyphean queue of unplugga-ble leaks, Kraft tends to stray into the contempt bred of familiarity. (And what could be more familiar than pawing minors' privates from the inside, hands not just on their dollhouse genitals but underneath them?) The temptation during unstructured R & R is even more dangerous. Sentimentality sets in, fueled by nostalgia of the worst kind. Nostalgia for events that haven't happened yet.

On the roof, along various rays streaking off from Carver's ground zero, Kraft picks out his recent ports of call: Hollywood Pres, Hills Brothers General, St. Tomography's. The so-called skyline of this city is so low — all the potentially tall buildings demurring at sissy altitudes, each lisping, After you; No, after you, what, with all this free land and the Big Quake ratcheting up to unleash any century's end now — that the place names on his resume spread around him as clearly as the castles on a cartoon postcard of the Rhine.

He can take them in at a glance, opaque oxides and noxides permitting. Photochemical smog, tucked in lovingly by heat inversions, welcomed Cabrillo himself, three centuries before the first car. Ozone in the wrong place, that's all. What we need's a multibillion-dollar bailout, a five-mile-radius undershot waterwheel to hoist the O3 back up where it belongs.

Before drifting too deep into the red zone of human empathy, Kraft indulges in an exercise of extended focus. He calls to mind how, in each of these hospitals across the city where he has served time, and in all the numberless institutions where he has not yet set foot — hospitals and research foundations and university labs all the way up the coast from Baja to Livermore and on into the wilds of BC, shooting out across the Aleutians into central Asia, down through the polyglot Indonesian archipelagoes, into the Indian subcontinent, reversing Alexander back to Our Sea and up into Europe, over the Atlantic to North America again, through the government-injected foundation mazes of the East Coast, propagating à la kudzu gulfward, stampeding the Dakotas like an all-terrain, all-weather, year-round ragweed — in all these facilities, one single human woman metabolizes. A strain of her culture inhabits major health institutions all over the planet. This lady, a world and wider, is named Henrietta Lacks, but goes by her pseudonym, Helen Lane.

She's even better known by her nickname, HeLa, that oncological favorite cell strain of researchers the world over. The abbreviation is some cultured microbiologist's idea of literary allusion. Hela, Norse goddess of the dead. This HeLa is the goddess of a spectral eternal life, metempsychosis of the petri dish. Since they scraped her tumored cervix four decades ago, hearty Henrietta lives on in hospices and wayhouses everywhere, even in the bowels of Carver's own Knife and Gun. She splits, respires, ingests, and transforms nutrients — cancerous but immortal. Helen's cells dream the dream of one world, patient in the dense foliage, waiting their cue to rise like rapturous doves.

She is the modern world's oversoul; Kraft will go so far. Her spread is a bitmap index for these million points of hospital light running over the earth's every wrinkle, trying to assemble themselves, spell out some vast declarative that would be visible from outer space — maybe Schiller's "Ode," an arrow delineating a continent-sized landing strip, the unit axioms of human geometry, or just another galactic backwater neon come-on insisting WE DO IT ALL FOR YOU.

Up here, seated dangerously on the unrailed ledge — not even a handhold should a gust of wind break his tentative balance — Kraft hears Helen's breathing on the semiarid air. She will make her run soon, become not only the oldest living human, but the planet's largest. Her cells, spreading through all longitudes, begin to reconnect, to learn how to talk to one another again. He sees, all the way down the Golden State, the local metabolite lines already laying themselves down.

The convertibles are out tonight, sea turtles massing on that one lunar interval to hit the beaches for an orgy of egg burying. A desert caravan of them, tops down, flog the blocks below, creeping randomly, probing, one rider per machine, each with a radio set to 10, tuned to the identical station. They comprise so many stereo simulcasts that, even from all these stories up, Kraft hears the disembodied messages take to the air and aggregate into a leviathan Announcer. He leans out over the ledge, daringly far out, tempting a shift in his center of gravity to change his life for good. Bubbling up from the cars comes this night's incarnation of the reassuring, ubiquitous heartland accent, giggling shrilly that there are only ten shopping years left until the Blowout Clearance.

The aerial overview affords him a glimpse into the neighborhood's after-hours transactions. In the middle of the next block, a quartet of heavies improvises a counterless concession stand. Spontaneously, the line begins to form, snaking in a direction covertly understood by all takers. And it's not just members of select underclasses who join in this evening's bake sale. Practitioners of all the proverbial races, colors, and creeds, the complete spectra of socioeconomic plumage drop by. Each participant knows the nature of the real estate. They've come to buy, finding their product without the benefit of megabuck broadcast ads or four-color magazine spreads. After a bit, Kraft begins to make out the formations in play — the deep safeties, the cornerbacks prowling out in the flats for the first sign of those who don't belong. A sharp two-pitch trill and the whole carny operation instantly shuts down tight.

And Dopplering gruesomely, audible long before seen, a pack of wailing ambulances homes in from the worst of directions. The sirens shriek through these streets like kids furiously racing to kick the can while trying to yell ole-ole-all-come-in-free-o. With this flank attack, the roof too outlives its expediency for Kraft. Its promise of protection turns out to be as anachronistic as massive ramparts, post-saltpeter. He can go no place, no commute long enough, no hideout where they cannot beep him or obliquely conjure his assistance, his call night or no.

What in disintegrating creation do they expect of him? When will it be enough? Never, comes the siren's singsong answer, the little disco ditty of this minute's shattering accident. There will forever be as many demands on his technique as there are ways of children going wrong, ending up in this halfway hospice of disaster.

The ways are many — more than he can keep apart. On Grand Rounds, he maintains the current catalog only by metonymic shorthand. He visits the Rib Metastasis, the Crushed Kidney, the Mitral Valve, the Saturday Night Special. Everyone is pathetically trusting, shouting excitedly at his bedside arrivals, calling his name out confidentially, intimately—Doc Kraft—as if urging on a stickball teammate. Pitifully friendly, fast to transfer, ready to love him more than they love their own fathers. Unfair comparison: half of them don't know who their fathers are.

The Fiddler Crab knows. Fiddler's dad decided that the prescription that Mom brought home from the freebie clinic to treat Fiddler's cinder-infected hand was gibberish. The boy's mitt decided otherwise. Now the Crab is back, claw immense and gangrenous, stinking so badly that Kraft can barely get close enough to schedule him for immediate draining.

He cannot linger, but must keep rolling down the roster. Next up, he checks the chart on the No-Face, a prepube whose misfortune it is to have been born with nothing from the bottom of the eye sockets down to the anterior palate. The plastics team has been working him for years, and after half a dozen reconstructions (although "re-" is an overstatement in the No-Face's case) the boy is no longer completely a monster. He still resembles an Etch-A-Sketch something fierce, but he can at least go out in public. Kraft has asked to be allowed to look in on the next buildup. As dues payment, he is given what remains of the pre-op. He visits the kid on the eve of the procedure. The No-Face is fearless, cheerful, but still cowering behind the veteran campaigner's blase affect.

Leaving the boy's bed, Kraft is replaced, changing-of-the-colors style, by the pediatric psychiatrist from the rehabilitation team. The No-Face breaks into what will one day, after another half-dozen operations, begin to resemble a huge grin. "Dr. Kraft," he calls out, grotesquely polite, the accents of an overrehearsed child star skipping over the years cheated from him, "I'd like you to meet my friend Linda."

Kraft turns to go through the amenities and stalls at his first glance at the woman. Her face is imperative with memory. Her look is full of reminders, pieces of string tied around his finger that long ago rotted off. Brown dominates her register, with jet hair and black eyes that spring continuous surprise from wells of unlikeliness. Her build is assertive enough to make her hospital sack coat look like a poolside party dress. Hands sufficiently pudgy to keep them from preciousness, and calves to kill for.

Linda attacks the No-Face with tickles, laughing aggressively. "And this is my old buddy, Chuck."

Chuck, through screams of pleasure, calls out to Dr. Kraft to intervene, stop this madwoman. But Kraft just stands there, helpless with sudden propriety. And probably Chuck doesn't really want any help here. The boy is so completely in love with his physical therapist that Kraft's only option is to get in line behind him and take a number. Linda, oblivious, stops tickling long enough to wonder out loud to herself, 'There certainly are a lot of amazing creatures on God's earth."

" 'Creature' is the right word for it," Chuck laughs, pulling a grimace that exaggerates the plastic mounts lying beneath his grafted skin.

Linda drops her whole beautiful, lip-round mouth in mock shock. "Why, I oughta…" And she sets to tickling him again. Like sharks smelling a feeding frenzy, the other children in the room pile over to join the altercation. "Yo!" she shouts. "Hold it, gang. Things are getting out of hand here. Okay, all of you: 'I will not assault health professionals.' One thousand million times."

This elicits great squeals of pleasure — the most fun any of them have had all week. For some, the most fun they've had since their mothers set themselves on fire while freebasing. They set to work on the assignment at once. Like the immigrants to this continent that they are, they attack the problem via division of labor. They'll do their punishment in huge, vertical, mass-produced columns, one word each. I I I I. Will will will will. Not not not not. The kid who gets "assault" breaks it into "a salt," and the kid who gets "professionals" isn't even in the ballpark.

"C'mon," Linda says, pulling Kraft by his health professional's sleeve. "Let's beat it while we can." The woman is ample, ample in ways that Kraft hasn't even thought possible in years.

Half from memory of rosters, half from sneaking a peak at her tag, he tries, "Estefan?"

She brays. "Close. Espera. And assimilate that s a little bit, huh? My mama's from Dairyland, U.S.A." She clips down the hall, already on her way to the next child on her list. "Mestiza, I just met a pretty mestiza. …"

"Oh Jesus," Kraft mutters, catching the cadence at last, if only a little. "I thought that word went out with the prewar genetics texts."

"Well, we're kind of an army surplus outfit, here. In case you haven't noticed."

"Richard Kraft," he says, sticking out a paw that she is now too far down the corridor to grab.

"Oh, I know all about who you are. Now you're going to ask me out to lunch?"

"Is that the book on me?"

"Yeah," shouts a prematurely gawky kid just slipping past the two of them. "That the book on you." Linda collars the child and tells him when he must show up at her office, downstairs.

"Now. You were saying?" She looks back at Kraft, her chin too curved to jut, her eyes wild with that gorgeous surprise.

"I was just about to confirm the ugliest rumors about me."

"Right. Tomorrow at noon. The cafeteria, where you always meet Nurse Spiegel."

Oh, that Nurse Spiegel. Well, yeah. Small world, just friends, etc. But Ms. Espera doesn't wait for any clever protests. She simply states, "I'll warn you in advance, I've got proven soul-saving tendencies."

"Messianic and mixed blood?" he tries feebly. "Sounds dangerous." But she is gone, ducking into the next doorway. In a minute, the room issues shouts of more free-for-all scrimmage.

Despite the public poop on him, Kraft has, to his mind, been involved in only three relationships that reached life-threatening proportions. One long followed by two shorts, the Morse letter D, if it means anything. It occurs to him, a fact dredged up from adolescent ham radio days, that a long and two shorts followed by another, terminal long would be an X. As in X marks the spot. As in just sign on the line marked X. Cross hair. Algebraic variable of choice. Universal placeholder.

Walking away, he cannot suppress a stupid lilt. He passes the nurses' station, where it seems somebody's had her ears to the listening post. Whatever the source of the info, Nurse Spiegel is wringing the phone like a chicken neck and saying into the receiver, "No, Dr. Kraft can't be reached right now. He's in Skulk Mode. Can I take a message?"

He looks up Linda and she is there, in his pocket two-way translation dictionary: wait, waiting, patience, composure, delay. In a holding pattern, like the rest of sentient hope.

But he doesn't need to wait long to see her again, to learn why she agreed, his rep rap notwithstanding, to meet him for lunch. The answer comes swiftly, and it's merciless in its disappointment. The woman wants to talk cases. She brings her list to lunch, although she clearly doesn't need to refer to it. She knows all these kids, and not just by complaint. Names, dates, the whole curriculum vitae on each one of them, all lodged up in that voluptuous raven's head.

Her mother may have been a cheese squeezer, but daughter Linda definitely hails from somewhere far south of white man's sovereignty She is a great and constant toucher, handling everything. She fingers the catsup bottle, feels the weave of his tie. "Can you help me at all with Suzi Banks?" she asks, clamping him familiarly by the upper arm. "The girl hasn't spoken a word since you fitted the bag." She dunks her chips liberally in salsa, downs them, brushing crumbs from his sleeve and smirking guiltily at her own healthy appetite. "And Chuck. God. Too brave, the boy. He doesn't have the first idea about what he'll be looking at once childhood is over." She taps the back of Kraft's hand in worried appeal.

"And oh." She grabs his shoulder without a trace of self-consciousness. Propriety wouldn't occur to her. Her nature lies completely beyond more median practices in these parts. She is clearly, constitutionally incapable of worrying about who she is or how she might be taken. She knows these things, the way her fingers already know the cut of his clavicle.

He grabs her back in return, on the opposing side. Pinches her a little on what he hopes is a radiating line. "Yes? Oh? What is it now?"

"And oh," she repeats, smiling too strongly to be mistaken for coy, "I need to ask one of you how radical you expect Davie Diaz's spinal thing to be."

That "one of you" gives away his role for her here. "Spinal thing?" he asks, dripping with dryness. What he really wants to say is Davie? What's with this first-name basis, Espera? Davie? Kraft would be lucky to place the boy by sight. "You've looked at the chart, haven't you?"

"Of course I've looked at the chart. But you guys are so cagey on paper. Never put down anything they might hold you to. I want to hear the real story, out loud." She footsies with him under the table, her toes on his arches. Her face pleads with him playfully, goofily. And his urge to get up and leave evaporates.

So he's expected to do the consultant physician thing, nothing more. The irony of the situation is not to be missed: across the table from him hovers a face promising all the loveliness of final escape, sensuous lips savoring the salsa, seducing him to deliver. But all she wants delivered is more shop talk. She is the living apotheosis of the paging device. Messianic tendencies indeed. Even sex, the last refuge of free men, is turned to a mere marketing campaign, corrupted by altruism.

But the woman (and here's the frightening bit) is even sexier for all her sainthood. Kraft watches her talk — conjugating with her hands, her flashing pseudo-senorita eyes, her three and a half octaves of voice arpeggiating amazingly from bari Bacall to trebly Billie Burke. And he thinks: Here, perhaps, is a woman even worth playing social worker with. They might make up their own rules as they go along. He twice tries to steer the topic away from child rescue and retrieval toward a bit of rehabilitory salve between consenting adults. For the moment, she will not bite, which is the hell of it, given the woman's dentition. She sticks to business, displaying an impressive knowledge of anatomy, if some of the desired nomenclature is missing. Ah, but he could teach her the technical terms.

Well then, let him see how she looks when self-righteous, blazing, her principles affronted. A bit of Mexican spitfire shouting how you doctor bastards are all the same: you all think treatment ends with sterile bandages, "binder," he scolds her. A too-affectionate name derangement for the first half an hour. But she smiles at the liberty, a glorious, asymmetrical, arousing flare forming in her brow ridges.

"Linder, all this holistic medicine stuff. It's all a tad too type A for me."

"You—! Not to be believed. Ãò type A? You little boys arrange it so that you can stay up all night—"

"Night? Singular?"

"Go ahead. Prove my point, why don't you? Stay up all week, then, with a dozen spinning plates up in the air at once. Big tray full of shiny, sharp tools at your beck and call. You make this colossal mess and then leave us to clean it up over the next several years. Talk about MI candidates. You're so wound up from constant jolts of fourth-and-inches stuff that you probably can't even hold up your end of a decent dinner conversation."

"Try me."

"Only if I get to pay."

"See? Type A. I knew it. Crying shame too."

"Come on. Consider it a little payola. You let the drug company pimps take you out to floor shows and things, don't you?"

"I have never let a drug company pimp take me to a floor show in my life."

"No? But you accept the little bribes? The pens and key chains…"

"Nope. Nada."

"The note pads with prescription logos up top?"

"Uh, well …"

"Well, okay then. This comes to the same thing. I take you to dinner. You do little favors for me."

"I would love to do little favors for you." He finally manages to slip in something of the old cadence.

A glaze spreads across her face, impish: "Yeah? Really?" Coquette, perhaps, but bathed in unmistakable pleasure. Surprise? Impossible. Looking the way she does? How could she have come this far, with those shoulders, that rib taper, these cheekbones, and not know what she does to half the men in every room she enters, and a handful of the women too?

"Yeah," he says. He'll let her pay for dinner. They'll alternate every other lunch. She can pick up the theater and symphony tabs, and he'll square the Maui vacations. The mortgage they'll do proportionately by incomes. They can split the cost of the double funeral down the middle.

They both behave themselves admirably, right up until she must go keep her afternoon appointments. She amuses him with stories about having to prove her citizenship the last time she did a day trip over the border. "They started asking me all these questions I haven't thought about since sixth grade. I panicked and confused Francis Scott Key with Julia Ward Howe. Finally got in by naming three of the U.S. Olympic hockey starters."

"Oh, hockey is it? So you go for the rough stuff, do you?"

"I'm sorry. I can't help myself. When I see those enormous guys body-check one another into the boards…Mmn!"

"Do psychological bruises count?"

"Afraid not. They've got to be real, flesh and blood owies." When he suggests that they watch some surgical study videos together, she slaps his upper arm. "I may be perverse, but I'm not sick."

Exactly: whole, hearty, vigorous. Which is why she shines out in this place, a minister of health touring a plague house. She agrees to a movie date. But it has to be a commercial release somewhere, about teenagers bopping forward to the future, or loved ones coming back as ghosts.

"By the way," she adds as wistful caveat. "You may want to keep in mind, I do happen to be ten years younger than you."

"Which one of us are you warning?"

They meet out at one of those hundred-and-forty-four-screens-under-one-roof places. The requisite separate cars, of course: it's a Pacific Rim first date, and they want to do things right. Kraft loads his beeper for the evening with the weakest batteries money can buy. He picks Espera out from across the packed lobby, like there's a moving flood spot glued on her. They're both a bit buzzed. Linda buys enough Milk Duds to keep the Vienna Choir Boys dosed until all their voices change.

When they seat themselves, she launches into what for her passes as the most self-evident coming attractions topic in the world. "Davie Diaz is in extraordinary pain. I know you said that a certain amount was inevitable for the first couple weeks, but I don't even know where to start with him. The Wilson girl, on the other hand: you seamed her up so beautifully that she barely even needs me."

She speaks quickly, as if needing to squeeze more syllables out of her finite column of air than pneumatics allows. "What's your take on

Joy?"

"I'm in favor of it."

"You juvenile. Are you sure you're a decade older than me? Twelve-year-old Asian female, presenting with severe incursive…" Her words are like Care's ushers, roving up and down the aisles, swinging their flashlights. "Joy, with the impossibly long last name. Cambodian or something."

"Pali," he murmurs. A memory from across immense distances sounds out the edges of his mouth. But the look is too foreshortened to be made out here in the darkened hall. "I mean, the name is Pali. Joy Stepaneevong."

She looks at him as if he has just revealed himself to be the Gretzky of grief interdiction. "You are a doctor, aren't you? Oh, Kraft. What in God's creation are we going to do with her?"

"I've not actually met her, tell you the truth. I've looked over

the…"

"Cojones! You're slicing into a little girl's foot on Friday, and you haven't been down to see her?"

The trip to Maui is off. The double funeral too reverts to separate tabs. Exuberance dies on the vine, replaced by a hard little spoor case of disappointment. "I suspect I'll get around to it," he enunciates.

"Sorry. That was out of line." She clams up, curls, braces herself for the worst. Her flip side is instant, and the withdrawal has something brutal and expectant to it. She tosses a raven's lock with one hurt hand. Faster even than their first flirtation, the whole promising lanyard unravels. Her chest heaves discreetly, tender lip trying not to quiver, to be found out.

"No," he rushes out. "My fault. It's that time of the surgical cycle." He gets her to snicker, despite herself. Oh, Linder; do I need you already, a perfect stranger? "It's just that…"

Say it, then. It's just that, if you knew all their names, if you staked your heart on the prognoses of even those most likely to survive, you'd keel over with the bends, die of decompression sickness inside a week. What can she possibly know of the technique, of the essential, deadening distance from accident that one must preserve? Her kind of care would kill the death-defying skill instantly, if ever once admitted out loud.

"Linda. Maybe it's indicated by all the studies, but I just can't do the hand-holding thing."

At these, his words, a second change smooths her surface. As drastically as she dropped into vulnerability, she is back. She cups her all-protecting hand, crooks her pointer at him. "Com'ere, little man. Let's see." His cardiac muscle bangs up against the chassis like an adolescent's. She takes his hand, stretches out each of his fingers in turn. She folds his palm into hers for the first time, holds it as if embracing the prodigal son. "I'd say you do all right." The house lights dim on cue and the feature begins.

During the film, she is wonderful. She organically annihilates the armrest between them. At certain key points in the plot, she nudges him and scribbles circled numbers down on a note pad produced from her purse. Afterward, she extemporizes at length the thoughts that each number stands for. Number one is that according to her, people don't really talk like that. Number two is that they should have had the Russian and the American switch briefcases by accident. Number three is she wants to know how high the feature's leading love interest ranks on his personal lust-o-meter.

"Know what?" she asks, vamping for him. "If you stay on this side of the lobby, they don't recheck your ticket." She casts him a challenging nostril flare, suggesting they partake of a hundred and forty-four films for the price of one. Well, what the hell. He missed this kind of thing the first time around. So they take to screen hopping, rolling from one anthology of images to the next in best tragical-comical-historical-pastoral style, giggling at all these eternal middles of stories, each one ludicrously stripped of any sense of beginning or end.

They watch, in converging splices: the story of a woman who gets gang-raped in a bar, a reexamination of Chicago mobsters and one of quiet Nazis living in Cleveland, a stock market scandal torn from yesterday's headlines, the realife events of a horribly disfigured kid, a heady biopic of the discoverers of DNA, one of an early film mogul, of an early automobile antimogul, the pioneer astronauts or folks very much like them, Billy the Kid or a pack of teens very much like him, teens triumphing in historic sporting-event re-creations, teens inadvertently starting the Third World War, aliens inadvertently starting the Third World War, and adults advertently starting the Third World War. Every one a virtual fact, actually dramatized. Based on a true story.

Stories like you read about, and all included in the price of entry. They do the Scheherazade thing all over again, only this time it's not just the beautiful child-bride who's gonna lose her head if the spell of narrative slips. Should the film break or the power brown out with the last unpaid bill for fossil fuel, should the projection booths simultaneously proclaim themselves autonomous republics acting in the name of fundamentalist revenge squads everywhere, should the two of them be caught and sent home on movie probation, the death sentence will at once fall not just on this one double-dutch evening but on the whole heterogeneous experiment in migratory, free-market, fiction-consuming, two-car-date democracy. This multimovie complex will take its place alongside ziggurats, galleons, the colonial pith helmet — all the museum bric-a-brac emblems of lost eras in the world's blind expansion.

Linda laughs, drags him by the arm into another show-stall. At the peak of her giddiness, he feels out her mouth with his.

She stops laughing long enough to kiss him back. The sneaked interval reveals just how many years there are, in fact, between them. It synopsizes the drama of two health professionals who have only just met, out on a mobile Saturday night, testing the myth-edge of accessible, Valley happiness. Yet he cannot help but wonder, despite lips whose novel turns compel his full attention, despite the plot complications hinted at in the feel of her hips, despite her hand wandering across his back, tracing out a story thread that could lead anywhere at all — he cannot help but ask himself how, exactly how things are going to end this time.

Gotta go shopping, he announces. Sort of thing a body needs to resort to every now and again.

"Shopping?" Plummer echoes incredulously. "As in food shopping, you mean? You realize, don't you, that grocery stores have become the exclusive last resorts of hopeless reactionaries and the desperately poor?" Common knowledge, man. Who in this self-respecting world eats at home anymore?

They sit in the Sauna, a gritty cross between locker room and on-call lounge, so baptized because of the uninsulated heat pipes that hang out of the ceiling, peeling the wallpaper and misting the furnishings with a light coat of mildew. Ordinarily, well-offs like Kraft and Plummer would have to pay big bucks to do this kind of slumming. But here in the charity rotation, it's just one of life's simple fringe bennies and franking privileges. Add to this the rooms Plummer has christened the Squash Courts and the Jacuzzi — obscure maintenance function facilities now employed by residents in competitive rituals of moral toughening — and one has a complete home away from home.

Plummer, hands down the toughest among them, has food stores in this neck of the world's woods pegged. The places are hopeless archaisms. Ordinarily, Kraft has no trouble avoiding them. But when, the thousand and one movies having all ended happily, he asked the lovely Linda for a repeat engagement, he could come up with no restaurant suggestion that she found both edible and politically correct. "Why don't you cook something for us, Ricky? That'd be different."

Different indeed. He hasn't brought a foodstuff under his roof for months, aside from the odd soda cracker packet and single-dose PCB tub of marmalade pocketed from Carver's subsidized eatery. And yet, the prospect of rolling around in the deeper spots of his shag with a woman of mixed ancestry who is still in her early twenties is enough to make him want to suffer the whole avuncular hunter-gatherer charade, and like it.

"You going alone?" Plummer resorts to muted, deputy-sheriff intonation. "Good God, buddy. Be careful out there."

Kraft, to keep from having to give the forced grin, asks what his blademate is doing for sustenance this evening.

"Is that an invitation?"

Absolutely not. Read my lips, as the commander in chief likes to say, in an era when actions no longer speak louder than even the softest subvocalizings.

"Well," Plummer wheedles, "I've kinda had my eye on that cast-off of yours. You know. That Nurse Spiegel? What we used to call sloppy seconds when we was kids?" The uses of loneliness rear their ugly hydra heads. Is Kraft himself the last person on this coast who didn't realize he and Nurse S were an item? "I figure she's had enough time to get over you, but not enough to resist the temptation of a sudden and insensate rebound relationship. Maybe ask her out to this little candlelight place on Far Point Pier…"

Far Point was wiped out by storms last spring.

“Was it? I never heard. I've been busy. Well then, that Dishpansation place on Ventura?”

Torched by the cattle-rights activists.

"Holy jump-up-and-sit-down. What the hell's happening to this place? Drugs, Mr. Rico. Tell me: just how responsive might everybody's favorite RN be to the Tastee-Freez phenomenon?"

The grocery store, when Kraft at last faces it, is its usual, fluorescent humiliation. Food Warehouse, that stately rollerdrome, smacks of historical emblem. It seems the penultimate whistle stop on the Big Parade from pickle barrel general store to palatial Hot-to-Go emporium. Standing in embarrassment in the produce department as they weigh his goods, Kraft fights the urge to shout, "That's okay, I trust you." At the meat counter, he sees this woman in dark glasses who he thinks may have been the oldest daughter in an ancient family sitcom, a formative, masturbatory fantasy of his. She warns him off with a "One word and I'll radio the SWAT team" look.

Half the food packages bear, on their printed labels, black, fake "Actual Price" numbers, inked out by the same press run in red, the universal color code for Discount. The afterthought text reads: "Your Price: Only…" How stupid do they think we are? Or rather, how stupid are we obliged to be? Kraft forgets to weigh his bulk lentils, and the cashier makes a tremendous pedagogical show of sending the sack back with a runner, personally apologizing to the line behind him for the man's hopelessness.

Only when he gets the ingredients home do things really start to get fun. It's been years since he's cooked anything except with the cauterizer, but this seems child's play. Why haven't I cooked more often? I mean, they tell you all the necessary ingredients right up front. Then they step you through exactly what you need to do to put it together. Just like assembling that old one-to-whatever scale model of the Graf Spee with Dad.

He thinks: If I can remove and reattach a living, three-inch kidney, I can certainly shuffle a nine-inch dead souffle. Christ; anybody can cook. All the essential vitamins and iron, plus the perfect seduction thrown in for grins.

She buzzes. Kraft casts a last panicked look around the efficiency. He's had the foresight to stick everything in the utility closet, and the place is looking sharp. Standing tall. But Ms. Espera is not even halfway through the door before her face makes this incredulous O, like she's just witnessed a murder. "You live here?"

Why? What's wrong with it?

"Oh, nothing; I'm…just a little surprised, that's all. Say. How much are they paying you, anyway? Do you have a lot of debts from med school or something?"

Not the first impression of choice. But he still has his culinary trump card with which to win this woman's undying affection or six months' worth of lust, whichever lasts longer. The souffle comes out looking like the Thing from Three Mile Island. He can't understand it. He goes through a Morbidity and Mortality session with her, talks out the recipe, insists that he did exactly what they said to do. Linda explains to him the difference between beat and fold, a semantic differential he had attributed to the pursuit of rhetorical variety.

"But it's delicious," she objects. "Hasn't affected the taste at all." And she laughs with her mouth full, blockading the bits of exploding food with a gesture hazardously endearing. She insists on washing the dishes right after they finish, before the microorganisms can claim their eminent domain. And she invokes all the magic little rituals the female will make of the slightest procedure.

"Now," she says, drying her hands gingerly on his lone dish towel, "are we going to do some aerobics for a little bit, or what?"

The assorted alarms pounding through him flush a rush of neuro-chemical pheasants into the air from out of their cover in the undergrowth. "I believe we are."

She nips variously at his face. They lower each other slowly to their knees, hands blindly reaching out at violent angles for support. Then they are sitting sweetly in one another's laps, gently necking, mouths in each other's mouths.

This has no precedent for him. Adrift, cut loose, a little more blessedly free, at the mercy of the equatorial currents. They begin to explore in earnest, hungry but shy, like pre-meds set loose with Gray's. What is her waist's wave, the taste of her undulating armpits? How does the scoop of her scapula surprise, the taper of her calf turn imperceptibly into ankle? He all of a sudden knows nothing of anatomy but the gross outline, the generic stamp. Form is uniquely overhauled again in her particulars.

She is so alien, so deliciously not him. That's it, that's why his body craves her foreignness. His appetite for sexual pleasure kicks in, follows its intimate program to rediscover — again and again — the heft of this new instance. Vintages, mint conditions, proof bouquets. Her parts are as unique as core samples of fading sunlight. They loosen another notch, from sitting to slouching, ever nearer the carpet. There seems to be always one more buckle to her. Her hand, lighter, longer, lets its tensors clamp against him in a way he has never before mechanically known. She curls girlishly atop him on the floor, and through her body's otherly weight, he recovers his own.

Flavors, he decides. Life at any time of year always comes down to flavors and focal distances, magnifications, the concentration of waves into visible, scalding frequencies. The textures of the silky cotton he strips away from her are infinite. The smells extruded from her body's many passages form a complete concordance. What will her next anomalous patch of skin be like? The wayfarer's question, the only one worth wondering about, extends indefinitely.

She begins nosing him all over, eyes closed, head tilted intoxicatedly forward. Sniffing him like a truffle hound. Her eyes bat, her succulent lashes lap his neck. Her hand grips his trachea; thoughts of Plummer's ER tales of eroto-strangulation flash through Kraft's soaked medulla. What might he and she try out upon one another? How easily might dress-ups, all manner of exotic clothing, get out of hand. There is nothing they might not discover in themselves. She brings her mouth up to his ear. What taboo words? Could be anything, and in imagining the forbiddens she is about to try out, he fills almost to the point of spilling all over her.

"Do you like me?" she whispers, wrenching violently on him in the dark. She holds his head in some decimal fraction of a nelson. In another minute, she will rug-burn his scalp. "Do you?" Answer me. Is it the extension of Linda into stranger spaces, or some cruel multiple, a sinister substitute teacher, her identical twin?

"Do I like you?" Stupid parroting.

"That's right." She tongues the question as through a police bullhorn. A growl issues from underneath her sternum while she pins his face in a three-point takedown. Yes or no. Let's hear it.

How can he begin to say? The shot seems to dolly slowly above this postprandial wrestling match until he stares down on the whole teeming planet from on high. Her question becomes the one thing anyone asks anywhere at this minute, in all time zones. It interrogates every home, hacienda, hut, Haus, health spa, and hovel in the world's directory, and a fair chunk of the underground addresses. Superpower summits sashay around the issue. Corporate heads put it to pitiful proxy votes. Silver anniversary vets lip the litany over hurled crock potsherds. Internationally acclaimed actresses, the fluffy chenille of mass wet dreams, plead it with unseen audiences in darkened halls. Nurse Spiegel petitions Plummer with an unguarded glance as he makes his bluff pass at her back at Carver. Even Plummer's pass is a crude paraphrase. Terrified children of the ward, half hardened criminals from birth, demand something in writing from parents who never show. Rebuffed, they seek it from surrogate candy-stripers just now tucking them in for the night.

And this woman under his hands asks him, outright, in so many words. She threatens, as if his answer will tip some electoral balance. A yes might persuade a fraction of forsaken global plebiscite that paths besides abdication are still available to them this evening. She wants to hear that they are booked for the comprehensive journey, if only in steerage. Does Eligible Bachelor Number One, in efficiency number 1275, in this honeycomb of tasteless prestressed concrete on the sovereign, sunnyside corner of Mission and Delivery drives, D-5 on page 77 of the fabulous cartographic compendium of this entertainment capital of the world's largest self-undermining semifree-trade zone, on the cutting, jagged edge of all that is left of what liberal democracy must yet become in this emblematic, exemplary, guiding high beam of a high-ground nation, all but amok now that it has outlived its onetime prime motive and moral force, its colonizing adage,

Use it up

Wear it out

Make it do

Or do without,

does he, this lone fifth-year surgical resident (having exiled himself to his field only on the belief that cutting and pasting was the one profession that might keep him from backsliding into the existential aloneness his horn in F no longer protected him from), does he like this undulating orchid that he has plucked and pinned corsage-style to his designer gold shirt for the nonce, for the old beloved one-night time being? Do you recognize? Know me? See me? Approve?

He cannot answer her and escape with his life. Cannot say that it chills him already when she smiles, when she turns her head in a certain arc, when she kisses him like a deranged adolescent, when she laughs like an arrested preteen at the self-same movie kisses, when she attacks professional problems with the earnestness of one who still believes in healing's ability to at least break even. He dares not say how she promises to salve his inevitable next bloodying, to brush away like cobwebs the scrub-suited gang of thugs that wait for him, trimming their nails nonchalantly with number seven recurve blades at the end °f the alley. Just to look at the promise in her features chills his gut as solid as the old tennis ball dunked in liquid nitrogen.

He looks up at her from the floor where she holds him pinned. So clean, naïve, those fantastic arching eyebrows, her expanse of cheek built up from subcutaneous muscled fats as flexible and unassigned as empty last-century maps of the poles. She is one of the lights, the breeze-borne weightless people capable of taking pleasure directly from the air. He at last manages to get out: "I love your face."

She tenses, her fists clenching against compromised parts of his body that she could do genuine damage to if forced. "My face? What's the matter with my face?"

The theater-hopping, roller-skate-voiced kid from the first date vanishes. All trace of that supercompetent child-rehabilitator steeped in her rounds, the pro he first asked out, is gone. A piccolo trill of authentic fear struts front and center in her voice, above the hundred-piece marching band. Nothing the matter, he wants to say. I love your face. There is something in it I can't quite place.

But he can say nothing out loud. She twists her neck nervously around, like an icy Hitchcock blonde looking about for the blunt instrument. Only, her hair is coal-blue, her skin tinted iodine for purposes of international intrigue. Then she pounces, using on him the same trick she used to seduce the boy with a crater where his nose should have been. She begins tickling him, the same frontal attack of hands that will forever make her the No-Face's first and only love.

Kraft, like the boy Chuck, is wildly, sickeningly ticklish. He buckles, tries to throw her off, but she uses some kind of Eastern center-of-balance thing to keep him under. He is twice as big as her, and in the throes of torture. The woman knows exactly what she is after. He screams for mercy, but she just skritches him on the floating rib, his truly sensitive spot, grinning, "Go ahead. Yell your baby-brown eyes out. Who's going to answer? Screams from a single man's apartment, in this neighborhood? Not even the police'd be stupid enough to mess with that."

She levers down his wrist with her knee, grazes his flank with long strands of hair until he starts to hyperventilate. Slowly, agonizingly, she voices over, "I don't know why I'm letting myself get involved here. I hate doctors. I swore to myself to make it a rule never … You're all deranged. You're probably a real sicko, aren't you?"

Her face to his exposed nipple, just dribbling little spurts of air across his horrendously sensitized flesh. She has him flailing, laughing in agony, his eyes like Zeeland after the dikes were bombed. "Oh, you poor sick little baby. You little crippled baby child. Does it hurt? Come on. Give in. Occupational rehab. You need it bad. Trust me. I can help you."

The quick flurry of feints and ambushes slowly flutters home to the prime roost. Her infant flank attacks gradually mature, mutate into effleurage, tapotement. Yes, here, her fingers say. We know. Act it out. Do your worst. No one can hurt anyone else. A little physical therapy is all. Just what the psychiatrist ordered.

You must believe, first, in the leaping cure. In this more than anything, even though the children's ward is its living denial.

Espera believed already while still a schooler, long before experience dulled the bloom of rehabilitation theory. Two years into her first job at a place where gleaming machine panaceas are less than laughable fictions, her faith in the method is accredited. The treatment of choice here consists of a little light exercise and a few read-alouds. Pragmatics allows no other therapy. All she can do is rally the routed field trip by returning it to memory's locales, the place it might even now call home.

She cannot hope for state-of-the-art here at this public spa, given the art of the heavily indebted State. Procedures that clinics just over the freeway consider barest livable minimum are denied her. Funds for physical medicine — vague promissory notes dangled in front of her team from quarter to fiscal quarter — fail to meet even need. In place of Hubbard tanks, they get hot showers. Their muscle-zapping machines look and sound like bug lights. Even her exercycles and wobbly massage tables were picked up on the cheap from a supplier indicted in an elaborate scam involving large-scale plundering of Salvation Army drop boxes.

Lacking the requisite physiatric high tech, she must resort to restorative tricks. Each of her jerry-built cures is tailored as far as possible to the specific destruction set before her. In this, the indigence of her clients actually assists. Where the cash transaction is the exception, ordinary accounting is, if not waived, sufficiently relaxed to permit experiment.

Carver is one of those places used to launch careers or generate articles that land real, paying jobs. She does her flood control under ranking Pediatrics administrators, M.D.'s who see no children anymore, not even their own. Linda alone of them would put down permanently in health's Hooverville. In her heart, she already exercises her option to buy. More counselor than physician, she masters the tissue repair and recoordination, the schedules of heat and exercise behind all makeshift disaster relief. But these she supplements with pure play, coaxing out recovery on tempts and teases. She sails through this shoestring outfit conducting sing-alongs, assigning mock punishments, doling out treasures, improvising her own recuperative scripts. Open stage — every night, amateur night.

How many ways can a child go wrong? Leave aside the chromosomal, skeletal, and congenital disorders. Forget the untreatables, the ones even she could never repair. Count only those acute enough to force institutional treatment. Forget the nightmares of the preemie nurses, the inexplicable arrests, the sudden circulatory collapses late on winter nights. Pinpoint the préadolescent, her specialty, if she is allowed the luxury of having such a thing.

Begin with the classic infectious checklist — the potentially fatal poxes that her college texts elitely insisted were eradicated in industrialized countries. Add in the respiratory infections, the bouquet of asthmas, cystic fibrosis, miliary TB. Endo, myo, pericarditis. All known blood disorders, book length in themselves. Lymphoblastic leukemia, that spring lodger come to spread its putrefying possessions into each limb of the playhouse tree. GI failures, renal annihilation, precocious or arrested endocrine systems, convulsive disorders. Palsy and a legion of other lesions and tumors, meningitis, diabetes — a list of lethal birthday party invitees that would cripple the coolest clinician to think twice about.

Espera has studied enough Latin nomenclature to tear the short-answer soul out of any semester's final exam. Daily practice leaves her in sufficient command of Stedman's to return surgeonspeak in spades. And yet she swears still by an artesian aqua vitae free of all pharmaceutical sediment. She has watched the watery placebo work with her own eyes, even in the death dormers of this sick building. She has softened the root tumor — that secret thing all childhood illnesses share in common, whatever their differential diagnoses — with leaping treatment. Has seen hope open like any iris to the light.

Figure in the assaults by things that as yet have no medical name. No matter; every injury is of a piece. The precise etiology of reality's strike is almost irrelevant. All impairment flows from a shared subterranean source. Her pedes are broken by a first disease long before they are hit by the particular trauma that dispatches the ambulance. Malnutrition, psychodisorientation, pellagras, anemias, dementias, the regional varieties of abuse distinctive to city hospitals: all leave traces, a common pallor that shellacs her every child's skin.

That culprit, the Ur-wrong, underwrites even accident, the leading destroyer of under-eighteens. It lies beneath the hungry ingestions of household poisons, the handgun mistakes, the training wheels spinning their mangled aluminum sidewalls in the air after a hit-and-run. Even burns are at best secondary: she's read the study showing that half of all arsonists are children looking for love.

Among her floor and outpatients this week, she has Chuck, the child born without a face; Jorge and Roberto, twin preteen overdosers; the girl Joy, darkness creeping up her ankle; the brutally ectomized Davie Diaz and Suzi Banks; a new boy, Nicolino, wasting away freakishly; Ben, the double amputee. She has only a single treatment to bring them all back. And she will return them, as far as they are willing to run. She can do nothing for the parts irreparably lost. But she has something to leave in the dark reaches, the space in each one where the earliest, inviolable fable of self still stands intact, ready to respond to a little food, workout, heat, and play. She can plant a start in that place waiting to be proven wrong, a plot that will still heal at the first touch of fresh, outrageously naive narrative.

She possessed the germ well before the six years she spent up north, studying by the bay. It was built into her posture already as an undergrad, that era of cotton and arm down when she lived in a state of permanent expectation engineered by temperate breezes. Her personal knowledge turned heads from across the medical quad. It lent her a come-on, broad-based cheerleader appeal without any of the attendant, affected sorority girl contempt. She knew, just by living, how to thrive in the health profession, without once having to book for a single hourly in the subject. She was born knowing it, the single greatest advance in contemporary medicine, the one that at last set organized care on its unfolding path: the discovery that healing only begins with treating the wound.

This was the breakthrough forced on an industrialized world by the arrival on the doorstep of a permanent surplus of maimed child veterans who, for the first time, survived their treatments in numbers beyond ignoring. She gleaned it by second nature, even while her professors mouthed the formula from their operating theaters. The kindergartner who shoots screamingly awake from an anesthetic dream to find a huge, paste-oozing, suture-stubbled, crimson gash-work down the length of her abdomen tends to resort to her original conviction, buried under ancient keloid scar tissue: I knew it. You tried to kill me. You cut into me with knives. Fail the patient here, fail to talk that scream into remission, and all the mediating incisions, however beneficial, will remain forever open, pussing subcutaneously until final discharge, the hour of the child's second street death.

How best, then, to reassemble what the king's combined cavalry and foot labored over impotently, powerless to transact? (She wonders, mouth twisted in healthy skepticism as she reads that rhyme out loud, what, pray tell, horses were supposed to contribute to restoration.) If musculature alone were at stake — relearning how to swing a bat or kick a sprocket — a few simple professional references would address everyone. Even the subtle ruddering of a pencil — that immensely complex navigation across empty expanses of paper — can be brought back from nowhere, relearned in committee.

Warmth, water, a little oscillating current, passive tensor-flexion aid, and a sprinkling of weights can work wonders. As much as you can, as steadily as you can. You learned it all from scratch once; you can repeat the process, from crawl on up, with whatever parts fortune has left you. That much is simple routine. Rigorous, brutal, overwhelming at times, but straightforward. A little technical know-how, some trivial persistence, and that would be the extent of the job description.

Still-forming bodies can heal, sometimes faster than she can prompt them with suggestion. Baby bones refute excision. Unripe brains reshape to compensate for lost capacity, almost as if youth still remembered the starfish and lizard trick of regenerating lost parts. Near-full functionality returns almost as quickly as it was struck down. Espera's infallible algorithms even return words to the mute. She has taught pseudolaryngeal speech to a roomful of croakers barely out of tadpole stage. Suck in a gulp of air, swallow it like food. Belch it up from your esophagus, shape it with gullet and nose and tongue to produce real names. Ready now: in unison. She's had them singing, industriously belching out "Up a Lazy River." And she would have yanked them kicking and buzzing through "Flight of the Bumblebee" had they not used up their available esophageal supply on gales of laughter.

Walking, swinging, singing, eating, bending, grasping, blinking, breathing, peeing, flipping, sitting, seeing, shouting — all the procedures of earliest urgency can be taken out for a reconstructive spin. They can be approximated by brute, repetitive, accumulating rote no different than the afternoon hours upstairs with a music stand, wood-shedding on the clarinet, the clarinet, goes doodle-doodle-doodle-doodle-det. But her job is to carry off that old joke: to get them playing the instrument again, even when they'd never played before.

There is a catch. All destructions dip layers deep. Knives sever through much more than muscle, than mere mechanics. Every child who shuffles up her office ramp is a shattered hierarchy. Whole systems have been shaken loose, one from the other. The skeleton may move impeccably after a year or three. The circulation routes generously reopen, but the larger links are lost. The simplest gesture, the pressure of an overhand curl contracting the hand into a wave goodbye, no longer means what it used to. Will becomes detached, as cleanly as retinas in a playground brawl.

The leaning, eager hesitance of ducking through a jump rope only begins in the feet. The legs are just the first fuse. Once quadriceps do their buckle and flex, a spark must spread outward, catch fire. The real rope skip is desire. Motive must magellan its way across the cerebral map until the whole quorum organism grows ready to hurl itself through the rotating whips. Try to teach timing the delicate diplomacies of depth perception and projection. Instruct in wish, give daily classes in confidence retrieval. Try to instill want, the belief that shooting through the twirling ropes has some primal significance. Convince them that the brandished, braided lasso cycloiding its playground arcs, wobbling like the precessing equator above a navigator's head, is not glass infested, will not slice like the collector's scythe. Ah! To teach that, one needs an advanced degree.

What's more, the skipping per se is trivial. The tribal jingles that go with it are the tricky part.

Who are these children that the surgeons palm off on her to recondition? Here, in the sunny Southern Caliphate, they make up a smorgasbord of least-favored nations. There's not a single schoolbook innocent among them. She's had little girls who needed propping up in bed, glaze-eyed and indifferent to everything but broadcast. She has treated the spreading allergies of the underclass, those puffed black bruises that can be only one thing. She converses with furious patterers who growl in hyped-up rhythmic pidgins she cannot understand.

Her clients belie every story she would read to them: wasted torsos inscribed by gang insignia. Scurvied spines that slump appalled by their first balanced dinner. Ten-year-olds who food-process their eyes with homemade weapons. Who put their faces through the windshields of cars they were stealing. Who, by junior high, replay in miniature their parents' lifetime criminal loops — expulsion, record, parole, repeat offense. Who spit into drinking glasses and clean their teeth with salted index fingers or the corners of scummy undershirts.

Yet she knows them all by name and history, almost before making their manila acquaintance. She can recognize each halth-compatriota from her own sixth-grade studio photographer's composite photo of a suburban school grotesque in its Wisconsin, fairy tale privilege. The might-have-been lives not yet extinguished in their faces seem to her the bewildered remakes of safeguarded Julie Axelrods and John Lartzes, prophase faces frozen for little Linda Espéra at the age when she last saw them. She knows: every one of these visaless deportees would kill for the chance to regress to afternoons of benevolent chutes and ladders if they could.

The disease, the accident that brings them to her is just the tip of a spiked pithing stick lifetimes longer than the few years these victims have been given. She has brought children back from the point of despair, returned them to whole except for a refusal to urinate, or an uncontrollable need to pee around the clock. Or eat until unconscious, or starve into airy nothingness. Or scream at certain colors and pitches, or buckle over from imaginary pains. Or refuse to talk, or lose all ability to stop. She has seen a child pinch off his finger in a folding bed rather than let himself be discharged back home.

What medicine can she possibly slip them, during the few weeks when the state will pick up the tab? She needs the psychic analog of antimalarial paste from thirteen buttercups. Brown sugar and beets for whooping cough. Bandages of spider webs, cobwebs, puffballs, for binding up wounds. Powwows for burns and bleeding. Nothing less than immigrant folk remedies will help. Leaping cures for those abandoned to a newfound land.

A single checklist informs her every therapy. If their legs jitter, she takes them jogging. Longer and longer circuits, through the wards, up and down the emergency stairwells, around the parking lot, in neighborhood runs swelling incrementally until they are off, no turning back, gone. If their voices catch or slur, then it's amateur forensics, debating gowns scissored from surgical scrubs, the stage curtain stenciled with the hospital logo. A season of speech, and they begin throwing off the podium yoke, exiting into the imaginary wings in search of more in situ material. If they still scream in their sleep over torched apartment blocks, then she assigns them to a design team busy drawing up an entire Utopian city from the fireplugs up. Those who have fallen out of perfect pitch she recruits to carol the geriatrics, and if their "First Noel" comes out more sinuous mariachi or reedy street Arabic than Eurodiatonic, then it's that much more medicinal for the chorus.

Reading out loud helps as much as anything. Hardly among her official requirements; not included in what they ever-so-modestly pay her for. It's strictly volunteer, candy-striper activity at best. But nothing can touch it for building collateral trust. When the parents go home (yes, she repeatedly tells the slumming doctors, even welfare mothers notice when one of their dozen is missing), after her own official rounds are over, Linda sneaks back into the sick bay, setting off shouted requests. Box scores, pop lyrics, soap opera synopses, fanzines, miscellanies, believe-it-or-nots, books of video game clues: they demand any printed word whatsoever from the outside world.

The reading therapy is as much for her as for them. It restores her to prepragmatics, when she still believed she might somehow make a living out of the communal pleasure of words. At eighteen, the mystery unfolding around her like a convoluted orchid, the erotics of social prosody suggested for a semester that English lit might be a legitimate, maybe even a responsible major. In those days the fate of the West at its pivotal, wavering moment seemed to depend on what the word "still" meant in the line "Thou still unravished bride of quietness." She hears it again now, out loud — poetry, antique verse so strange and illegally alien in this place that it holds even hardened and dying children spellbound for the scope of a few stanzas.

Read-alouds, the oldest recorded remedy, older than the earliest folk salves: these are her only way to trick her patients into downing, in concentrated oral doses, the whole regimen of blessed, bourgeois, fictive closure they have missed. Tales are the only available inoculations against the life they keep vomiting up for want of antigens. She reads them things she herself would have grimaced at at eight, knowing that without at least a taste of that outrageous fable of return in their deficiency-distended stomachs, they will never survive their own recovery. Children already lost to inherited addictions sit in a rapt half-circle, listening to their moonlighting occupational therapist reading from a book she has found in the ward library, a volume rescued from God knows what improbable secondhand shop of anomalous trinkets fetching absurd designer prices for hysterical campiness — tea trays emblazoned with saluting fifties hostesses or wall lamps made from the front ends of fatuous Chevy sedans. She plows through the spine, ticking off, one by one, the tales from that anthology, A Country a Day for a Year.

Tonight's story is from the distant North. How is it — the primary mystery for students of children's literature — that in all eras, the richest hints of hidden destination derive from the North? The differential is wider than the gap between brocade and flax. She has her private answer: the South insists on the child as embryonic adult, while the North has always known that the adult is just a displaced child. Is it freezing climate that crystallizes imagination, or is there some Southern Andersen or Grimm that her anthology has not yet discovered? She reads to them tonight about an innkeeper's wife on the North Sea, who dreams of unspendable treasure to be found outside the bourse of the big city. There, at the bourse, a broker laughs at her gullibility. "Why, I myself have dreamed of a fortune under the bed in an inn on the North Sea." The woman rushes home, tears up her floorboards, and finds her kingdom. This is the key to narrative therapy, the cure of interlocking dreams.

That surgeon she has foolishly flirted with comes into the ward on autopilot, stands and examines her. She feels herself a girl in this moment, reading. The anachronistic tableau fades as he watches, a freak five-point snowflake melting in the hand. She keeps her cadence up for half a story before he withdraws, thinking himself unseen. Outside the hospital window, even in the failing light, every listening child can see it is still East Angel City, a neighborhood a year or two away from setting itself on fire, exploding again under the pressure of daily unanswered need, routinely violated due process, random strip-search and seizure. They need only shift their eyes to see a skyline rushing to void all the clauses of the social contract it has but acquiesced to until now. Each thing she reads them tells in code how they are rudderless, at the mercy of their own unchecked unfolding, racing to event's end.

Story Hour is strictly giveaway. Tax wars in a country that considers public payment to be an infringement on private liberty guarantee that all costs remain hidden, shunted off on revolving credit until the unpayable lump sum comes due. Linda never got around to economics in school. Perhaps that's why she, almost alone, sees that society's every advance up to this minute has been paid for by liquidating principal, mortgaging the unborn. It takes no special macroeconomic smarts to see where the curves of expenditure and cost will intersect. She reads them another tale, one where life exists entirely off wishes and interest.

Where necessity goes unpaid, she must donate her time, extending physical medicine until she becomes half teacher, half trainer, half director, half coach, half psychologist. When she reads out loud to too many, too long into the night, when the story safeguarding her listeners against actual awfulness is too Northern and icy in its enchantments, when the sense of its foretold ending grows too immediate and real, she begins to draw up, by story's end, a report card for the entire delinquent human project, a teacherly evaluation of this global little handgun victim, curled up invalid in front of her for the evening:

Math and Science: A. Student possesses enormous aptitude. Advancing rapidly on all fronts now…

Language Arts: Â —. Although gifted here, student remains undisciplined. Lapses into fits of inarticulateness when excited. Penmanship a joke.

Social Studies: C. Disappointing. Despite every opportunity of late, fails to rise above provincialism. Shows little sensitivity to foreign affairs…

Economics: Ñ —. Extremely uneven. Impressive progress in some areas, at the expense of others. Has not yet figured out the basic principles…

Civics and Poly Sci: D. Don't even ask. Pleads no contest on final exams.

Music and Art: Â +. Student constantly surprises. Varied and restless. Creativity really coming to the fore. A big overhaul may lie in wait.

History: Incomplete.

Health and Personal Hygiene: F. Five million children dead each year of diarrhea, for God's sake.

With such mixed grades, can the creature ever dream of graduating? Could any tutoring, any therapy at all work at this hour? Radical surgery, her new perhaps-beau might whisper to her. No program short of total slash-and-burn has any chance in hell of helping.

Fortunately, she's never been one to worry about the odds. One reaches an age when being realistic just isn't practical anymore. The work she does all life long may save no one. Even for the limb-clipped, organ-stripped preschooler with the IV walker, she may do nothing but cake-makeup a scar that the crippled child will never walk away from whole. She may at best only delay the night of full payment, the helpless screaming fit of fear laid down in personality's pede ward, in the so-called formative years. But whatever she gives them will be more than they arrived with.

And if she shares her professional conviction — say with this new man, at thirty-three already too worn down by fact ever to follow her, this jaded practitioner of a career she should know better than to mix with, a man who clearly prefers that she not learn the first thing about him — if she shows him the clinical trials for this secret healing charm, would he get it? Might she make even her new surgeon see that to pretend, to live as if life might yet lead all the way to unexpected deliverance, is the best way to keep from dying in midfable? Could she get him to sit in with her circle of stricken, listening children and take part in the promise of fiction, the pleasure, our one moral obligation?

He is no older, no more decimated than the worst of her children. And she has only this, this cobbled, worn ministration, to show any of those stubborn enough to remember how they have been dropped down in the middle of a plot that is only waiting for them to follow the lead. You are going somewhere. You are going somewhere. Sound it out, exercise the phonetics, the rhyme, the muscular spasm, the shape of the storied curve — beginning, development, complication, end. It is the point of being, the thing bones were built for, broken by, the land all leaps aim at, the link, the hovering conclusion, her whole-body therapy, the reading cure. A tale at night. A country a day for a year.

(Night 57, Japan.)

This is how the world begins. At first, the All was no more than a blurry egg, full of seeds and shaken together. After a time beyond telling, the heavier parts began to sink down and the lighter floated upon them, forming the plain of high heaven. On this plain, three gods were born of no one, lived out an eternity, and then vanished back into nothing.

How you gonna be born of no one? Everybody got.

Shh. Come on. It's a makeup; that's how it opens. Next there came about, on their own, a few pairs of gods who lived in the drifting middle of nowhere. The youngest couple among them were called Izanami and Izanagi, or She-the-Inviter and He-the-Inviter. She and He were ordered by their elders to collect a solid world from out of the shapeless, muddy waters that flowed beneath the high plain of heaven. They stood on the bridge of the sky and dipped a jeweled spear into the sandy broth below them, stirring it slowly. They pulled their spear out of the waters. A drop of brine sticking to the shaft fell off to form Onogoro, the first island.

She-the-Inviter and He-the-Inviter climbed down onto the island and began exploring it. They circled slowly around one another at the pillar at the center of the solid world. Slowly, they discovered each other, and learned that they wanted one another.

Uh-oh. They in trouble now. When my daddy found my big brother and me …

No, sweetheart; it wasn't like that. Remember, these two gods had no parents. Slowly, by experiment and chance, She-the-Inviter and He-the-Inviter learned how to make a baby. But their first child was born with something wrong with it. Because She did not yet know the rules of courtship she accidentally broke them. So the first infant who laid eyes on the world was born deformed.

Heh. Like me, you mean?

Yes, Chuck, my man. A little like you. She and He named their boy Hiruko, the Leech Child. They didn't know what they were supposed to do with him, so they built him a boat of reeds and set the boy adrift on the open sea. So you see, the very first child ever was abandoned. As soon as the Leech Child drifted out of sight, his parents began making other babies, more deities to cover every walk of creation.

Among their new children were the eight main islands of the world. She-the-Inviter was burned to death while giving birth to her last child, Fire. Gods spilled out of her dying body. Other gods arose from the tears of her husband's eyes. In a rage, He-the-Inviter swung his great blade and cut off the head of Fire, his son. From out of the bleeding neck of Fire there sprang Thunder, with several more gods.

The soul of She-the-Inviter went down into Yomi, the land of darkness, where He-the-Inviter madly followed. He wanted to find her and bring her back to life. But his wife had already eaten food cooked in the land of darkness, so she could not come back. The dead She warned her husband not to look upon her. But he disobeyed her command. He looked at her face, and saw something horrible. His wife was rotting. Maggots covered her. Shh! Yes, like the ones in old garbage. He-the-Inviter ran back up into the world in terror. She was hurt and angry, and She sent a pack of Furies to chase after her husband.

When He reached the surface once again, He sealed up the entrance to the land of darkness with an enormous rock. His wife became furious. She threatened to kill a thousand of their children every day that He kept her trapped. But He just sneered at her. He said that He would father fifteen hundred new children for every thousand that She killed. She and He knew they had come to an end.

To purify himself, He bathed in the waters. As He washed, more gods sprang from him. From the water sprinkling from his left eye was born the Sun, and from his right the Moon. Out of his nose there came Susanoo, the God of the Wind and Storm.

His nose? Gross. But what about the boy in the boat? The Leech?

It doesn't say. He must have floated for a long, long time. Reeds can be very watertight in these stories. But the ocean can be pretty big too. The Leech Child probably drifted in the current for years, farther and farther away, into places where land was completely unheard of.

Maybe the boat was held together by little metal clasps. That's it; I once read something like this. He pulled one of these metal strands loose and fashioned a bit of tinsel from it, which he dangled in the water just to amuse himself, because it looked pretty. And that's how, by accident, he learned that fish will bite at a hook. And he figured out that by eating fish, he could live pretty much as long as he needed.

Yeah? Well, all right It's possible. Read us another one.

(Night 139, central Italy. Twin infant sons of a vestal virgin and the God of War are sentenced by the king to be drowned in the Tiber. Miraculously, the cask they are put in floats. They are found and suckled by a wolf more loving than human parents. The foundlings grow up to invent the West.)

Go on. We want more.

(Night 21, the Near East. Another terrified tyrant orders all the male offspring of a certain tribe to be drowned to death. The mother makes a little reed ark for the boy, and lays him in the rushes on the riverbank. The tyrant's daughter finds the infant, and hires the boy's own mother to nurse him. The boy grows up to bring God's law to …)

Why drowning? Why water all the time? Why little boats?

Yes, that's odd, isn't it? Happens all over the place. Look at this: Night 308, the Mississippi. Night 145, Norway. Night 98, Kashmir. Night 114, Zimbabwe.

(Across the planet, attempted drownings, tiny bound bodies thrown deliberately back into the sea. All through the time line, vanishing into the current, carried along by the undertow. Every other story in any anthology — children sealed up, locked in casks, keelhauled, strapped on rafts, sucked down by the departing tide. A few miraculously saved, for future purposes.)

And some mom and dad always want to kill them.

Yes, true! Notice how the stories always blame some evil step-something, or foster fathers, or kings? Guilty conscience, I'll bet you anything. These cats have something to hide, I'm here to tell you. If they're not putting the kids out to drown in chests, then they're leaving them on church steps or by a roadside out of town. Or here, look: dropped off deep in the woods, bricked up into cornerstones, rolled over on in the parents' shared bed…

(…swaddled too tightly, delivered with a club to the skull or butterfly slit in the trachea, wrung with a bit of old cloth, or, for maximum efficiency-Night 3, Greece — eaten.)

Awesome. Any that stuff really happen?

(Night Before Last, Pacific Islands: two thirds of offspring. West Africa: any twins. Sarawak: boys strung up from trees. China: daughters given instant turnaround chance to return as sons. Germany, Italy, France: 1.8 "live birth" males to one female. SE England: "Three drowned in pond, two in well, five buried, two suffocated by pillow, two left in ditch, one thrown on dung heap, one slammed against bedpost, two twisted necks…" Chicago; Houston; Portland, OR: discreet suburban fatalities, malign neglect, everyday police roundups dribbling out of radio speakers in the dark, on all-night talk stations turned down low, between choruses of that old folk tune, / am no stranger to your town.}

Why?

(Tales 101 and 343: postpartum birth control. Done because we are too many. Tales 45, 83,162: quick cures for deprivation, illegitimacy, incest. That historical run in the 200s: merciful assists of nature, stifling the half-lunged, leaving the acephalic to starve. All but the hardiest arctic infants turned onto open pack ice. Mass infanticide — the simple extension of the battering and abuse cases right here in this listening ring. Folder 219: "She wouldn't love me, the little four-year-old slut. So I burned her feet with a cigarette." One step further, now. A last-ditch, or oven, or well, or pillowcase effort to extirpate the thing that will always remain a heartbeat outside control. Children are evil creatures. A devil lives in them. You can recognize changelings by the way they cry. A child needs both bread and blows. We must terrify them into being good. It was going to outlive me, so I killed it.

(These night-sirened final roundups are just the latest parental attempts to ward off prophecy. To kill the still-bewildered child in themselves that their own parents failed to finish off. The word goes out from the Imperial Capital, or is initiated by some two-bit, provincial governor: damage-control the old order. Issue the slaughter papers, mandate the stopgap massacre, book boxcar passage free of charge for every imminent threat to the status quo. Invested power faces no greater danger than these revolutionaries incarnate — every breathing body under voting age.)

I don't know, sweetheart. I wish I did.

Come on. Read. Keep reading. Give us one of those really mid ones.

(Night 12, Palestine. Herod's storm troopers, fathers from this part of the empire, conduct their house-to-house sweep in the dark. Students of political terror, they know that the random knock on the door works best at two A.M. These hatchetmen blindly follow orders, not much motivated by national security. Theirs is a saturation search-and-destroy. To get at the one potentially destabilizing element, the incumbent commander in chief is willing to expend all innocent hostage bystanders. The troops, agents of the State, work in willed ignorance, butchering in the dark — trapping toddlers in back alleys, encircling a knot on the plaza, mopping up pockets of resistance in the poultry market, methodically dispatching children as in some dream of urban renewal.

(Grotesque tableau, but the troops are now too deep into the tale to withdraw. Crack phalanxes rip open the province's newly toilet-trained. Erotic charge ripples once more through the professional soldier class at holding prepubescent flesh on the unsheathed sword.

(How is it that the account seems so familiar, as vivid as recent newspaper coverage or some further dead reckoning slated soon to be remembered forever? June student genocides, shooting up always on the other side of the world like so many lab strains of miracle rice, are here, by November, spread outside, flowering underneath the pédiatrie wing window.

(The redemptive germ kernel — how one fugitive family slips out the back steps, how one infant escapes the bloodbath to found the new order, the slaughtered little ones promoted to eternal blessedness — the end of this late-night read-aloud is decided by the time it arrives. The road to the future is paved with fourteen-inch corpses. That is their magic, incantatory function. All the teen poverty brides, the single mothers escaping another screaming mouth, the cunning merchants unwilling to invest in daughters: all serve as mere manipulated ignorant pawns of delivering prophecy. However they are killed this time around, the infant pilgrims form the race's blood sacrifice, progress's solid rocket fuel.

(What hope, when story outstrips the outside horrors her read-alouds are supposed to ward off? Raw nightmare will rule the ward tonight. Every splatter of Herod's maces into these sapling chests provokes its imitative blow here among the eager listeners. A group of four gladiators, incensed, hack wildly at each other's surgical dressings.)

Kwishhh. Whack. You a dead pers. Yeah! No, sorry, don't. One more, one more. We'll quit, we promise.

It's late. Come on, kids; bed. You'll get me in trouble.

No! Another. Okay, if y ou don't want to read no more, just at least tell us what happens to that boy. The deformed dude, in the boat.

Well, I'm not sure. What do you think? He… just drifts. His boat holds water, he fishes, alone on the surface of an endless mirror. He slips along on the ocean current. Every so often, although time doesn't mean anything to him, because nothing changes, he sees another boat far off on the horizon. But he never signals or calls out; he just stares, not really knowing what it is. At night he falls asleep and dreams of a whole universe full of intelligent creatures, just like him, only …

… on land?

In hospitals?