Operation Wandering Soul

All over the world?

Exactly. You guys are brilliant. But because he has never met any other creature …

… except fish …

… except fish …

… and octopuses …

Octopi, you igno-twerp.

Because he has never met any other humans, he doesn't even realize he's alone. He doesn't know the names of the oceans, and he cuts right through the boundaries of territorial waters. It's just liquid to him — deep or shallow, cold or warm.

Does he pick up more children along the way?

Well, sure. Why not? But not right at first. At first, when he draws close enough to solid land to figure out what it is, it scares the daylights out of him. The Hard Places, he calls the islands. He sees right away how incredibly dangerous they are. You can't sail on them; a boat would get completely stuck, or else it would be torn apart as soon as it touched. How you possibly gonna fish in such places? The hook would just lie there on the Hard Stuff, worthless.

He keeps to the wider currents. His eyes, over a long, long time, grow so strong from staring down into deep water searching for fish that he can see shoals even when they are a mile below pitch-blackness. You see, he has nothing else to look at except cloud and wave and the occasional piece of giant kelp. Years go by without even a niast. Slowly, he trains his eyes, learns how to see over the curve of the earth.

Get outta my life.

No, really. And his hearing sharpens too. There are no distractions in his whole world. So even the tiniest sound is worth concentrating on. He gets so that he can track the songs that whales sing to one another. He concentrates until he can hear even the pingings of corals. He can hear noises coming from all over the place. And one day, after several ages, he hears, from a thousand leagues off, and then he sees, long before it becomes visible over the horizon, a very weird thing.

Carrier fleet?

Jet skis?

Jet skis? For crying out softly. You people are hopeless, you know that? Absolutely lost.

A message in a bottle?

Now there we go. Only, not just one little message in one measly bottle. He paddles his reed boat closer, his eyes squinting to focus. He notices the water change temperature, color. These clear-gray flecks accumulate, growing denser until they form a solid swarm bobbing on the sea around him. He picks one up. He has no idea what in the world it is, but he thinks that if he knew what bottles were, this would probably be one. He tries to count all the bottles he can see, using the system he invented for sizing up schools of fish. He loses count at a thousand million glass bottles, each bobbing upright, congregating into the still spot at the center of the swirling ocean.

He's in the Sargasso Sea!

Now how did you know that?

I saw it on a map.

It's okay, sweetheart. I was just asking. Anyway, that's where he is. A sea inside the sea: the drainage point for the entire watery pinwheel. They all collect here, bottles from every port of call in this half of the hemisphere: messages launched from West Africa and Spain, the Canaries, Azores, Madeiras, Iceland, the mouth of the Senegal; notes from Paramaribo, Port of Spain, San Juan; letters pitched without hope from the Keys and the Carolinas, dropped in secret into bays by Baltimore, Brooklyn, and Boston, or lofted off the sides of ocean liners …

… crippled subs …

… downed private planes …

Each of a billion flasks has been swept up through the loop for a few cycles. Some have been circling for decades. Some spell out emergencies that have been over for centuries, and others come from as late as that morning. Centripetal force sucks them all into the Sargasso center. All this glass — smoky, green, gray, turquoise, sky-blue, magically transparent — just floats motionless. It's an elephants' graveyard of SOSs.

He opens one up and looks at the slip of paper inside. Of course, he doesn't know how to read, and he sure wouldn't know any of these foreign languages. But he's got a lot of time. Slowly, he teaches himself.

Impossible.

Who you calling impossible? I tell you, he's got a lot of time. He works on the first message until the words come out, "Tulip smiling wobbly Friday evaporation." He thinks, Nope; that can't be it, and he starts again. He keeps working until the message reads, "Come help me." He tries a second bottle, and this one says, "Come feed me." Bleeding on Barbados. Grounded in Greenland.

Each scroll of paper carries its own miniature map. X marks the spot. He figures it out: the globe is packed full of other creatures, exactly like him, only in trouble. Through these notes, he learns about human society. And he sees that he is nothing more than this one lone figure in a tiny, open boat, looking out over this expanse of bottles spreading across the sea. More requests than even a god could read in a lifetime.

He thinks that maybe the best thing to do would be to sink the whole herd of help messages. One by one, fill them up with water, unread. Send them to safety on the ocean bed, where they can wait until the day when they might be answered. But there are too many, even for that.

He decides to follow one of the maps. His eyes and ears, grown superpowerful on emptiness, point the way. He matches up the languages he has learned to read with the distant, background chirpings he always assumed came from some kind of land bird. The map and the sounds and the sight of land beyond the horizon take the Leech up close to a continent where something big is coming down. He picks it out of the air, this feeling of awful expectation such as he has felt nowhere else along the whole continuous ocean coast.

The Leech pulls up a safe distance from shore, trying to figure out what huge, silent shake-up is under way. Every petty principality in this patchwork landmass, every inhabitant from emperor to crook seems to be running around, trying to beat the clock. The people of the continent themselves haven't figured out what's up. Something's unfolding, although so slowly that it is still lost in myth.

Everywhere on the continent, children are chucking these bottles into rivers, where they wash down to the sea. The Leech can hear it all from his anchorage offshore. He can hear the noises banging around villages and cities. He hears people counting down the days, waiting for something that seems to get nearer with each delay. He sees the signs and wonders springing up like weeds. He watches packs of outlaws, soldiers, scholars, and peasants cut swaths in all directions.

Everybody is terrified of waking to the news they hope for most. Castle walls sprout all over. From the scorched western plains all the way up to the frozen fjords, dancing manias break out. In some provinces, everyone under twelve gets caught up, dancing for weeks until dropping. From off the coast, it's obvious: the entire continent is scared, something fierce. Inflation, unemployment, the Plague. Things are so bad that entire countries take to outrageous remedies. Boys become bishops. Whole towns are entrusted to their youngest residents.

On the extreme corner point of this continent, the Leech makes out another abused, deformed child who has built a lookout tower from which he can stare out across the sea, looking for a way to escape.

Henry the Navigator?

Now how in the world did you know that? Somebody's actually been paying attention in school. By staring for weeks at a time from the top of his tower in — where was it, again?

Portugal.

Right. By staring from his tower in Portugal, the Navigator has trained himself to see beyond the curve of the earth. He is convinced of reports of a River of Eden somewhere just beyond the next landfall. He is trying to see just past world's end, around the next cape, where the coast turns.

But that morning, in midsurvey, the Navigator gets a shock: an island off the coast, one he hasn't noticed until now. On second look, he sees it's no island, but an open boat. And there's a kid in it, dark, shrunken, deformed. In another minute, he and the ancient boy make eye contact. The boat child stands up, and the Navigator gets a second shock: it's the face of an old friend of his, from school days. The Navigator has known the face for so long that he can't place it.

The Leech seems to recognize too. He breaks into a big grin and begins to wave, great scoops that begin down by his knee and end up cupping air over his shoulder: Come on! What's keeping you? It's all the proof the Navigator needs. The boy is clearly from the East — hair, skin, eyes, everything — although the Navigator has never seen an Oriental except in imagination. If the Easterner has come over sea, then the Navigator has guessed right about his route. He lets out a whoop, audible all the way to Lisbon. He waves wildly back to the Leech Child: Hold on; we'll be right there.

It's the signal to break out. The children of Europe at last have a surefire escape. They can leave home. They start to pile into boats, whole families, whole countries of them. …

But that's not, that's not how …

(Night 366, Angel City.)

Oh God. Joy. I'm so sorry. I wasn't thinking. I completely forgot. Oh, child, forgive me. It's only a story.

Hå has a theory about the pathological popularity of hospital shows — the butt of resident humor and abused needle of a nation that pretends to have no professional relations with death. Those continuous discharges of polyphonic drama and alarm, where gangs of surgical staff careen through hallways shoving cadaver-sized rolling tea caddies full of code blues (or whatever entertainment calls them these days) owe their lurid clamp on imagination's binding sites to the emotional methadone maintenance they offer the home audience.

Kraft has this image of nuclear families everywhere, camped out in the den, lapping at disaster's nipple, squeezing it dry of the recommended daily nutrients. The pans and dissolves of affliction's visual cliches have become as foggily familiar as high mass once was from the back of the choir-screened nave. Small wonder. Every schoolgirl knows exactly how the Incomprehensible goes. She has seen it on her hand-held color LCD set, dramortized, chanted over the commercial airwaves with the ease and frequency of jungle gym jingles.

Lots of messages batch out over the public band at the same time here. First among them, Kraft wearily concludes, sitting in the decidedly unphotogenic call room, still replaying his latest real-life docu-dramas on mental video, is that total apocalypse differs from the usual domestic shouting matches and traffic collisions only in decibels. Shows also suggest that no disaster is so real that it can't be reduced to ritual emergency.

Serialization tames in exactly the way that table manners obscure the ugly reality of eating. Inevitably, around about minute 49, the runaways come back, the Hitler dads break down in tears, number one junkie son kicks the habit (shaking like blazes for a whole forty-five seconds), and the little girl in pigtails crawls out of her iron lung to do the verse about how wishing makes it so. The upshot is that your plotless, personal frame tale will reach its significance, its rare closure, in the run of time.

Reality — he might tell the scriptwriters for a small lifetime consultant's fee — is infinitely quieter. Nobody yells. Cases come in like sacks of mattress money reluctantly signed over to a bank teller. The showdown stays imperceptibly prosaic, deathly silent, as the cliche goes. Breath persists perversely in the barely living lumps, wood-grain isobars under the nicks of a beaten-up bar table.

Even down here in the bowels of the building, the emergency entrance, the residents' little sovereign state of siege, all the rushing around is done so mutely, so close to normal speed, that it's easy to miss. Accident's selected recipients, holding their eyeballs, still grasping their blackened, necrotic thumbs by the severed tendons, shuffle in quietly. The paramedics, the police escorts are quiet. Teen gang kingpins, their faces carved up, have already had their say.

If a spouse or next of kin accompanying a victim does, under the otherworldly pressure, begin to jackknife off the high dive of despair, they stay well south of sotto voce or they too are quietly escorted to another part of the medicinal forest for a sedative all their own. Large gelatinous pulp may extrude from an open skull, but the room remains demure, methodical. The leading players issue nothing more than a diplomat's "No comment." Never any word about the here and now, let alone about what happens next.

With a minute's dead time in the middle of wider emergency, Kraft flips through memory's dial. He amuses himself by running casual Monte Carlo simulations on his own prime-time roulette. He does this concurrently with committing to memory the newest complications from out of the NEJM, and dictating into a matchbox-sized mi-crorecorder a rambling, unpostable letter: "Dear American Savings, Thank you so much for yet another of your thoughtful monthly statements. Perhaps none of you realizes the value of these regular reassurances. …"

Multitasking holds him occupied all of ten minutes. He begins browsing the latest off-the-rack genre remix from the staff library: The One-Minute Messiah, or How to Survive the Next Sixty Seconds. He holds the paperback with his left hand, while with his right he doodles aimlessly, scribbling Chinese calligraphy that he imagines reads, "Serve the People" and "Fight Self."

He retreats to his makeshift office, and the desk he has been avoiding. Tommy Plummer ambushes him there, pasting up a newsprint, ransom-note quote for Kraft's benefit:

The young child which lieth in the cradle is both wayward and full of affections; and though his body be but small, yet he hath a reat heart, and is altogether inclined to evil… If this sparkle be suffered to increase, it will rage over and burn down the whole house.

This is in reference to the third prepuber pyro that Pediatrics has had to reupholster this month. "Those seventeenth-century docs knew their stuff," Thomas tells him. "Only way to save the structure is to torch it preemptively, with the tyke asleep upstairs. Where did modern medicine go wrong? Huh, champ?"

Kraft can't really call Plummer a friend, but of all the surgical starters, the man offers the best prospects of human diversion. Even the torture of companionship beats the alternative today. He must prep to go drag-line fishing in the ankle of that twelve-year-old Asian refugee princess, and the prospect has completely shot his usual aesthetic distance.

Thomas tags along behind him on the way to the OR. He seems to have nothing better to do than play this episode's sidekick. "Truly shitty job," says Kraft, up to his elbows in disinfectant. "No, little Richie. That's the small bowel resection, later this afternoon. This one's slimy."

"Shitty." Kraft ignores him. "Pitiful. First you flush the family out of their village. Then you take the village off the map and put them in a camp. Then you overrun the camp."

"What's this 'you'? I was busy that year, I'm pretty sure." "Lead them to believe that an open boat… Sure, a boat, with this little puking kid, across half the Pacific … Toss her around assorted holding pens. Relocate her here, of all the godforsaken, fast-food-franchised, tar-paper-and-antennaed—"

"Doesn't she have to get raped by Thai fishermen first? Don't they always get raped by…?"

Kraft just stares at him blankly, beyond everything, even disgust. Plummer's shoulders flex an indifferent little eh. Perhaps boat people jokes are no longer àè courant this season. He rifles his repertoire for comic crumbs about South American cattle prods or starving Ethiopians.

Kraft begins enunciating, always a bad sign. "Welcome to the United States." Something in the pitch suggesting that Plummer is the cultural case in point.

"What, what? We didn't murder this kid's bone marrow for her. McDonald's didn't fuck up her leg. GM didn't. Okay, Dow Chemical might have had a little hand in the matter. But tell me, champ. What the hell would of happened if the little china doll had stayed in Cambodja—" "Laos."

"Whatever. If she hadn't gotten out, hadn't escaped, hadn't been allowed over here out of the pure magnanimity of the State Department? You tell me what'd have happened if she'd come down with this creepy leg-nibbling shit in her country? Those jungle cutters would have smeared her leg with a little betel nut and taken the whole thing off at the waist with a machete."

Gravity crumples Kraft by the trapezius. He is several rounds of shock therapy past caring to answer. His insides are arid, desiccated already by ten years of apprenticeship en route to this continuous call. When he does get around to speaking, he talks to some captive audience nowhere to be seen.

"She's the picture of eager docility. Talks in tunes. Lies in bed studying, because she doesn't want to fall behind the class at school. She asks the nursing staff for books on the procedure we'll be using. They say to her, 'Wouldn't you rather have something to color?' She shakes her head, but respectfully, to keep from embarrassing them. She sits up in bed doing algebra, history, answering all the sample questions at the end of every chapter, never peeking, writing the answers into this little spiral notepad. Doesn't even flinch at pain—" "Tell me about it. I pulverized the girl's foot in ER the night we admitted her. She just looked up and smiled forgiveness all over the damn place."

"And then she goes and loses it completely, decompensates at the first little sputter of the traffic reporters hovering over the Harbor Freeway."

"Is it true that they found her old man cowering under the bed in the middle of the night? Hiding out from Immigration? That they had to use the kid to talk him into authorizing the release? I heard that he signed it 'Murrican.' Only he wrote it in Lousish."

"No." Kraft's eyes trace a migratory route around the operating theater, acquainting himself with the emergency exits. "The word was 'Mawkhan.' Regional dialect. A professional tide. It means the man is a physician."

"Oh, right. Absolutely. If that guy's a doc, then I'm a…"

"We all know what you are, Thomas. We're just waiting for the State Certification Board to figure it out."

"Come on. No shit? The dude's a doc? What's his field?"

"Certified in cures involving the recall of a person's errant soul." Kraft exhales. If I remember the term correctly.

"Holy Om! Get that sumbitch to scrub. We need someone like that down in the ER."

"Speaking of which." Kraft, holding his hands clean, crooks an inviting elbow at the theater where the little girl is already put down, gassed on the table, like the evening spread out against the sky.

But Plummer takes the opportunity to bow out hastily. "The least I can do for you, Kraft old buddy, is to let you go on me owing one."

Kraft puts off his clever comeback until he gets a chance to think one up.

The next thing he knows, he is cutting, following the surveyor's chalk line, mushing the blade too softly into the brown anklet, forgetting everything he's learned about the superiority of slicing over sawing. His eight years of examinations are suddenly as irretrievable as states and capitals or presidents. Of the five-hundred-plus skeletal muscles, he'd be lucky to be able to name ten and visually identify a half dozen. All the sophisticated scientific sheen strips off, leaving just the procedure right now under his hands. Strange pellets, bits of evil living gravel are loose, growing inside this girl. He must locate them the only way possible. He probes around by touch, making out structures both benign and insidious, things that would have been a marble-ized blur to him this time two years ago. He loosens the invader trace, chases it with his rubbered fingertips, differentiates it from the pulpy, pink, enveloping striations of the host.

The shock of first gaping into an open life rips into him again. The landscape looks exactly as it must. What else can it look like? A streaky piece of marinated porterhouse, only pulsating. Lurching a little to one side every second or so, then falling aside. He works his way down through the dermal layers, pinning them back, edging closer to where he can slit whatever sickening pupa they might find free of its attaching gristle. How is he to describe this stuff except through today's state-of-the-art material metaphor? Here's your problem, ma'am. Leak in the fuel line. Bad IC chip. Evil spirits inhabiting the system housing. But breaking the seal may void your warranty.

The body overhaul shop is not a one-man operation by any means. What they intend to pull off this morning is yet another miracle by committee. Surgery is the most unlikely, corporate, bureaucratic cure since the King James translators. An entire relay team passes the baton continuously between the autoclave and the open body. All decisions, however cosmetic, demand referenda. Kraft is just one of a half-dozen functionaries milling about in the room, and far from the most critical player. The position of center forward probably belongs to the lady with her eyes on the monitors and hands on the gas valves.

But the person wielding the working knife at any given moment becomes the guy with the ball. Just as an audience sometimes mistakes the virtuoso in the pretty party clothes for the composer, even the surgical team may conflate the one sticking his pinky up inside a valve with the design engineer.

Today, Kraft is the international cartel's front man, their carrier, the one they send out to slip past the douanes, to violate the border and dart back across with impunity on forged diplomatic papers. He fights against his innate, human ham-handedness the way those Ice Capades chimps struggle to stay up on skates. Whatever dexterity he can assemble depends on a stockpile of technical knowledge baroque in both mass and ornament. The quadratic can be solved by anyone of superior intelligence with the necessary patience and perfect retention, plus a dozen available years to sink into indentured slavery.

Kraft fidgets with a retractor. Here they are, making base camp just above this little girl's foot. They're in the absolute hinterlands, Hibernia, the outermost reaches of life, as far away from the core of the self-administered mystery as circulation permits. And yet, the terrain is already appallingly gorgeous. Sinew rivers cut their canyons down through layers articulate beyond the subtlest medical illustrator's ability to survey. The color, texture, distensibility, tensile strength of the conduits and struts and cables, the delicate interfaces of ligament and capillary connecting inimical tissues, all the middlemen of this fabulous political economy, mirrored in their complexity at every level all the way down the stacked hierarchy into invisible collagens, the excavated living preteen laid bare, lies touchable here, flush against her encasing wall, yielding yet giving away nothing to her correspondents, his groping, invasive tools.

A slit dead on the offending mass, and Kraft might stop further incursion. Hit it spot on and he could give this girl a birthday present of sixty more years' worth of scrapbook particulars. Or make a slight backhand nick, almost identical, another cut straight out of the textbook, only this time the anarchist disease somehow escapes and her foot goes cold.

He's not built for these constant judgment calls, continuously maneuvering in the millimeters between condemner and redeemer. Working his way by touch along the cut, Kraft stumbles up against a tactile hint of that tacit trade secret shared among all surgeons. A few years of this, and he will be lost forever to social contact, to all involvement in personality's twists and turnings. What interest can outcome still have, once he has held outcome's engine up close and arbitrary in his own hands?

Proximity to the bared root runs away with him. Merck's countless pathologies expand into an involuntary party game. He cannot shake a stranger's hand without making out tumorous mountain ranges under each mole. The lips of everyone he converses with twitch around the edges with impending Jacksonian seizures. The sound of stomachs ulcerating soars above the noise of this room. And even now, as he glances at the anesthesiologist, he can see the vein walls in her brain toy with the idea of collapse.

Even stretched, the tent of human skin seems insufficient to span the faces of the assembled surgical team or bind together their insides. He can see beneath, to the hideous, fatty slabs just dying to squirt out all over. Beneath the pretty sausage casing, webs of nerve niagara in spraying veils. He has peeked beneath the packaging and become hardened, like a kid disabused of Adventureland by accidentally glimpsing the motor underneath the talking puppet Plasticine.

Kraft knows already how he will end. He will wind up worse than the vegetarian butcher, the agnostic priest, the book-hating professor of literature, the notary forger. His destiny lies several notches lower than the lowest of these. It feels as if there's no derailing, as if he's already halfway there: the hypochondriac doctor. The misanthrope volunteer.

The Evangelist, it occurs to Kraft as he tucks back a reticent bundle of tibialis anterior, did not know his ass from the proverbial pothole. Nothing that the nervous system is capable of believing can withstand a hand shoved deep inside the wound. Only those on the conscious side of the general anesthetic during an operation will ever know the true reading of that parable. Nothing will devastate a man as much as a fist pushed wrist-deep into the open side, all the way up to the hilt. Kraft would jimmy the punch line just a little, to restore it to truth: blessed are those who believe, even though they have seen. And more blessed are those who haven't seen, and are thus still free to believe anything they please.

These thoughts last for about one systolic flip. Then the sound of his team's gossip drives them out. The background broadcast in the room lifts him into a trance of nonthought. He follows procedure in a coma of concentration, like a batter waiting out his pitch. When he reaches the region in upheaval, his clipping turns conservative. He feels himself taking too little tissue. Every too-shallow scrape misses a bit, risks having to reopen a few weeks from now, higher up the limb. Yet his blade goes diffident, almost flirting with anklet indifference.

The trick is to disengage. He must read this beating shank of foal back into pure, anatomical model. The green cloth hide-a-screen built up around the wound works a marvelous trick. But he must do the rest, must imagine, as he plucks out the most obvious infiltrating pellets, that he takes a grappling crane and clears out the Golden State Freeway, dumping every sleek little import into the bay. When the lay of the land makes it increasingly difficult to pluck out the offending logs, he shifts fantasies. He strokes the pink fiber with the flat of a blade, and it feels for all he is worth like satin against the back of a hand.

A bit of brain bails out of the image-forming cerebral cockpit, and he finds himself lying full-length alongside his private physical therapist, her dark cross-border eyes lit up like the point coils of a space heater. Oh, Christ, Linda: give him one more chance, if you are still alive, if you still remember him, if he can survive this procedure. This, the most tenuous fantasy of all: if their rapidly collapsing social order makes it through until his next night off, he might see her again.

The fantasy plays itself out. Linda will ask him desperately how it went, and he'll respond, casually: Joy Stepaneevong? Oh, yeah. The boat girl. Well, we pulled the thing out without having to clip anything that belongs to her. What did I tell you? It always pays not to get too alarmist in these matters. Whole procedure was pretty straightforward, actually. She's spanking; disease-free. We cleaned her completely with a few flicks of the whisk broom.

To win the woman Linda from the awful accident that waits for her like a lover at the next dark street corner, he must file just such an all clear. To keep her from the worst case is his only desire. He would hand her the perfect prognosis, pristine as a rash valentine and twice as reckless. This particular case, above all others, is the one she wants.

Yet for his cutting hand, following the standard operational excision, to know the stakes means courting disaster. The case must mean no more to him than any other in the cattle call of lives he has already decided. Should he feel its specific weight, even in theory, he and the girl are both dead.

Autonomous lieutenants propel his fingers, destroying as little of the innocent-bystander tissue as they can possibly get away with. He knows he's pushing it. He can hear his misses register in the Millstone's tortured, adenoidal breathing. The man hovers over his shoulder, displacing whole air masses with each exhalation. Vast frontal systems blow down from the man's Arctic Circle directly into Kraft's inner ear.

Only, wait: it can't be Dr. Milstein whom Kraft is — as the euphemism goes — assisting here. Milstein's down in San Diego for a conference. Kraft's had a minor TIA, or he's suffering some overwork/ deprivation combo phenomenon that someone in neurology could probably get a paper out of. Brain volleying up a little spatial-temporal racketball is all. By process of elimination, if it's not the Millstone under the cap and gown wheezing behind Kraft, then it must be Father Kino. "Shorty" Kean. Little Napoleon.

Kraft snaps aware to that fact just as the said attending launches himself into an administrative shit fit. "Cut something. Cut something, goddammit. Not there. Why the hell did they ever let you through med school? What did you do, buy your way through your internship? What are you afraid of, son?"

What indeed? If Kraft is afraid of anything, it is of exactly what happens next. Dr. Kean starts flailing about in a fog of frustrated authority. "Here. Give me that." And darting out, he grabs Kraft's handy of all the shit-for-brains maneuvers. Kraft manages to fight him off with a combination of reason, diplomacy, and testy resistance.

Kean will complain to Burgess this afternoon, and the Chief will have Kraft in for a talk tomorrow, ever so delicately reprimanding the insubordination before asking for impressions of the multivolume copy of The Man Without Qualities that Burgess lent him last week. What would the profession be without a dose of the obligatory Good Dad, Bad Dad syndrome? Even satanically real medical mills must stick to the script of TV General.

They close the girl, Father Kino still blasting the assburning after-jets. Kraft feels that he has given the girl a reasonable chance while leaving her the better part of her foot. He has not once, throughout the procedure, gone up north to have a look at her face. That'd be the last thing in the world he needs just now. The already unbearably familiar iodine tint of her skin around the wound is disabling enough. All he has seen is the taper of one calf, a shape remaining as distinct across the populations of the globe as faces, build, or hair. But this particular polynomial taper he could trace freehand. He knew it by second nature once, in a previous incarnation, before this profession took up subcutaneous residence in him.

He stitches, punching his needle laterally through the complex ecosystem. He loops up the layered Dagwood sandwich in a way proven to leave behind the least surface scar. As he sews, an over-learned jingle skips trochaically through his head, a singsong rhyme he memorized once while learning the alphabet. Not that anemic, twenty-six-letter, tell-me-what-you-think-of-these. His tune taught an alphabet that flowed forth in more than four dozen symbols, a scatter pattern of phonemes too subtle for nonnatives to hear, let alone grip properly in their glottis. A poem, a song actually, in a language where all poems turn into songs because all words are pitched.

His was not the girl's language, but the next dialect over. He spoke, once, a first cousin to the one Joy's father used to sign away his rights and expectations. Learned it when exactly this girl's age, the age when industrious children of this once-blessed mainland must typically commit their mental resources to acquiring that "We the People" paragraph and a half. The syllable rhythm lies intact in him, but long since irrelevant — a letter of intent forgotten in a strongbox until long after expiration date. Ratty, riddled with holes, fragments of the alphabet chant reassemble themselves. Gratification swells him, collapsing immediately in distress at how many letters are now beyond recovery, with no words to slip into the blank melody slots.

The bits he can recall lie like surf-polished shipwreck, detritus from the semiconscious coast of a place he inhabited once and left while the leaving was good. He hums the chewed residuals of the tune, one that might as well buzz about in his brain, staving off the latest rhythm-arrested, mega-euro-yen-dollar, ten-second singing sales spot for cola-cum-life insurance coverage. He hums: g as in chicken. Ê as in egg. The tune takes him through treacherous ng, bph—sounds his tongue still recalls but cannot talk the muscles into anymore. Y as in mythological giant gate guards. H as in owl, who hoos across the borders of all time's alphabets.

Joy comes to: much… later, is the word she has swung loose from. The first thing she asks, when she recondenses out of the anesthetic, is how much time has vanished since she was last awake. The missing hours are more important to her than the missing bit of foot, still swaddled. She does not wonder "How did it go?" or "Will I walk again?" Meekly, she asks a nurse, her voice sounding from miles down a well: "How many days have I been away?" Worried, perhaps, about what trouble she might have made, or where she has been off to during the unaccountable interim.

She gets an answer that does not answer. No matter; she is back now, returned from the place that leaves only a ribbon-scrap in her recollection. Here, on this side, she must again work for a living. The girl's industry returns as the pain suppressant ebbs. Furious with diligence, head bent over the hospital bed-desk, she writes out a thank-you note to her surgeon.

She uses wide, three-lined paper, the two outer lanes solidly marked, the median strip a faint, encouraging dash. Urgent schoolgirl style transforms the letter into one of those commissioned classroom pleas on behalf of some Polish boy who decided to defect despite his returning parents, or for the first-ever panda born in North America. The scope of the project forces her to dare cursive, although she is still several thousand practice ovals and half-Immelmanns shy of mastery.

"Dear Dr. Kraft, thank you for snipping the incursion out of my leg." She copies the word carefully out of the material she has made the woman therapist give her. It's not a long word, shorter even than her last name. To a nonnative speaker, it is no harder a word for the creature hiding inside her than any other. "I am sure you have done a most satisfying job and that the incursion will not come back. All my expectations are for the future and pain is so far low. I am sorry you had to do this but glad that you are my doctor and such a good one." At the bottom, she draws a winged creature, midway between giant gate guard and guardian angel. She folds the thick newsprint in quarters and delivers it suspiciously to a pede nurse, making her swear up and down that she will deliver the note swiftly.

Pain is so far low: the note reaches Kraft interleaved among X-ray envelopes, incisional biopsy reports, the fan-fold printout of the week's new admissions, an unsigned memo requiring all staff to get inoculated against the latest epidemic, and police notification of several recent assaults in the underground parking garage, one of them fatal. He unfolds the newsprint, reads it without comprehension. What are they asking him to do now?

He is still clutching the text when he next comes to, in his call room, that Motel 6 just off of the surgical interstate. He tapes her note to the cinder block wall above the bed, where he can glance at it from time to time from over the edge of the Rifle & Handgun Illustrated. I'm sorry you had to do this. I'm sorry you had to do this.

He falls asleep for the specified hundred years. While he is out, the shoots and tendrils of time's parasitic vines overgrow the entire city, clamping in place all vehicles, transports, relays, and faxes, freezing for good all liquid assets and every medium of exchange.

"The main thing, as I see it, will be keeping her from laterally stressing the…"

The lovely Linder throws her hands up in exasperation. "The main thing, as I see it, will be keeping her X rays clear."

She is a touch bristly this morning, and perhaps with good cause. Kraft takes a deep hit of the Condition Six air and tries to settle into another tone. "Look, I've seen you in action. I know you're a pro."

"Thank you." She is as close to acid as her temperament allows. "I'm delighted to hear it."

"And it's not that I'm trying to tell you what to do."

"Just how to do it?"

Okay, okay. Ordinarily, by the tender ground rules they've already established, he'd be the one trying to steer their rationed conversations toward fondue recipes or furniture refinishing or anything at all rather than let this last remaining candidate for his One Good Thing be infected by more medicine. But today, in these few free hours with each other, they flirt with major role reversal. Kraft can't seem to keep from nagging the Stepaneevong post-op. He has brought up the girl's case three times in as many blocks, and the ring of the refrain's bad-conscience rondo is about to put a royal burr up their afternoon's ass.

They are walking — yes, sic; as in "on foot" — down Melrose, he in jeans and a clean scrub shirt, she in this marvelous, clingy, soft rose silk shell the likes of which he'd years ago forgotten existed. They indulge in that favorite national pastime, after-shopping. An hour earlier, Linda bought a clock radio and now she is industriously devoting herself to belated comparisons, seeing how well or poorly she did. Kraft simply tags along by her side, desperate not to be left alone for an unstructured hour.

He tries not to hang on her, while using her as moving shield. Only under her wing — half bare, and beautiful as a fashion model's — does he dare witness the final twenty-four hours of this EVERYTHING-MUST-GO clearance close-out. CRAZY CAL SEZ: WE'RE SELLING THE FARM. GET YOURS NOW, BEFORE WE COME òî OUR SENSES. Ten thousand groping, bewildered years of recorded culture go out in a windup FIRE SALE blaze before them. All they can do is walk, basking in the full glow of the apotheosis of retail.

"Let's duck in here," Linda says.

She indicates a tasteful little theme boutique called Cop a Buzz. It gathers together, for purposes of trade, diverse objects with no conceivable use all partaking of the slenderest of common denominators: the ornamental Insect Motif. Big this year. "Can never have too many locusts," Kraft says enthusiastically. Espera knees him gently in the kidney. "Incidentally, did I mention to you that there's a danger of her hyperextending her …?"

"Hey," Linda says, taking him by the shirtslack around his collar-less collar, clamping him to her, pulling him down a little, toward her bared teeth. "Whatever happened to that cavalier, jaded, you-mow-'em-we'll-sew-'em hack I've come to know and love?"

"Love, you say? Don't get much call for that around here, lady." You still got the sales slip? You must have the wrong shop. Wrong theme. Wrong strip mall.

"Listen, Richard. Joy is an angel — too good a patient, too good a child to be true. She detests the very idea of crutches, and I wouldn't be able to keep her on them even if I wanted to. And why would I want to? What's to protect her from? Nothing she might sprain would be any worse than bedsores. Her outlook is worth a dozen of ours put together. Who's gonna know better than she what the foot can do, and when? If there's any danger with her at all, it's …"

"Yes?" he throws out, supercasually. What, me stiffening?

"If she has any problem at all, it's with her spirits."

"Spirits? What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Easy, fella. I'm on your side, remember?" She refreshes that memory with a finger-brush across his floating rib. "This is one powerful little girl we're talking about. She has sent for her school-books. She sweats at plane geometry for hours at a stretch. When she stops, it's only to start in again on the High Middle Ages. Then she asks me to grade her homework."

Kraft stands absentmindedly stroking a Rive Gauche oven mitt with that cockroach look and feel. "So what's the problem?"

"Do you remember the difference between Louis the Fat and Charles the Bald?"

"I could probably tell them apart in a police line, if that'd help."

"We'll ignore the clown in the back of the class. Ricky, it's too strange. She smiles politely while I read make-believes to the other kids. Then I ask her what she would like to hear next, and it's The Wealth of Nations. She never laughs, never gets excited or spooked or impatient. It's as if she simply has no idea on earth what's happening to her."

Tell her, then, he wants to say. Tell her the chances of their having to go back and take more leg. Tell her what drugs or rays will do to her doll's face, her hair, her schoolgirl exercises in concentration. Tell her the odds against her sticking around long enough to graduate from junior high. Tell her how quietly it comes on, no threatening shout, no siren of stylized alarm. How can people live? How can we live?

"But as long as we're on the subject," Linda segues, sweetly tentative. She tries, now that he is suddenly volunteering all over the place, to enlist him, as simple comradely buffer, in cases every bit as heartrending as Joy's. Joleene Weeks, who refuses to talk except by pulling the string and releasing random messages from her Chatty Cathy doll. Markie C, who likes to plunge silverware deep into his prosthetic limb in cafeterias, for the sheer pleasure of the public whiplash. Kraft listens politely, as demure as the little Laotian girl listening to tonight's fairy tale.

They roll on down Melrose's Babylonian bazaar, these miles of continuous stalls at a street fair of surpassing strangeness. Shock troop merchandising here reaches its peak. Science determines definitively how to part a buck from the bottomlessly blasé. Riches from the Orient, booty from the Crusades, fatiguingly inventive combinatoric treadmills of commodity-churning high funkiness are rendered salable by their utter implausibility. The pyramid of nudge-and-wink, what-the-hell impulse buys at the cash register aspire to a high weirdness, even a conceptual art of death denial just now in the run-up to its greatest, most decadent fin de yet. Electric rare-earth jackets. Magnetic monkey's genitalia for the dash. Farmer's hats reading "Kafka." Digital executive barbells. Self-help bathroom scales. Programmable mascara. Solar-powered rain announcers. Clothing bearing every conceivable legible message except "Please stop and talk to me."

Stay sick, Kraft says, almost out loud. Stay in bed. Never get up and walk. Never go outside again.

Fashion, it strikes him, is even more insidious than the planned obsolescence people imagine. It involves engineering into each good or service a time-delayed precipitate of alienating ugliness so that the desperate purchaser will wake up one day from his incredible bender and say, "What ever possessed me?" Then head out with the electronic money transfers to go score a little hair of the dog. Every glass of refreshing, consumable product must be laced with hidden salt water, inflaming the need that it promised to placate. The point of fad is to provide tomorrow's refuse and the day after's marked-up nostalgia. And we will not stop climbing, laboring, assembling, trading, making, marking down, and closing out until there's a credit card form attached to each harnessable dissatisfaction, a coin box inserted between every somatic anguish and its real salve.

Perpetual carnival out here: a Rio of retail. Improbable as it seems, in all these theme boutiques — the flightless-bird shops, the split-crotch panty shops, the 'thirties, 'forties, and 'fifties shops (Kraft sees the day coming when his abysmal young adulthood will be bottled as campy vintage, the collision curves of trend and retro slamming head-on into each other), the information shops, the shops turning Stalinist lapels and hemlines into spangly kitsch, the Day-Glo designer industrial-waste outlets vending pet elements from beyond the actinide series — in all this synthetic needs-mongering, Kraft and Linda stumble upon a bookstore.

"Hey! Look at this. It's just like the scene in that movie." Every movie about the distant, disastrous future ever made. "You know, where they come across the half-sunk Statue of Liberty buried in the sand?" And Jesus, it's been Earth underneath there all along.

They go in and browse, evading the public promenade of fears for a moment, hiding out from the end of time. Even this old sanctuary is overrun, already prostrate, everywhere infiltrated by the tides of malevolence: How to Think and Act like Genghis Khan, Learning to Love Your Dysfunction, How I Went from Fanny Farmer to Firmer Fanny, and McMassacre! The Inside Story. No matter; this is all that is left, all the refuge the two of them will ever be allowed. They are trapped out here on the threshold, the absolute cutting edge of the dream's realization.

Kraft and Linda split at reference, each turning to trace out favorite, obsessive routes through the racks. She starts in travel, proceeds to fiction, and ends up in food. He drifts to music, scans the picture books, then sinks down into biography. Each takes a small treasure through the cash register, showing the other only when outside the shop, embarrassed at the names of their personal reading needs.

"Wait a minute," he says, remembering something a few yards down the sidewalk. "Wait for me right here." Squeezes her shoulders, semaphore pleading. Here; don't move, or we will never find one another again.

He runs back into the shop. She loses sight of him through the glass front as he scrambles about trying to negotiate a category that has become alien to him. He comes out again bearing a wrapped package, which he accidentally tears open in presenting to her. The Secret Garden. Alice in Wonderland. Oz. Peter Pan. "Give her these," Kraft coughs neutrally.

"Oh," Linda says, fingering the volumes to keep from looking at him. "Oh. The classics. Do you think…?"

"What? Something easier? Something a little more current?"

"No, no. Only … Hold still a minute, can't you? Don't be cross. Pull in your lip. I haven't hit you yet." She puts her hand to his neck and smooths him. "I was just going to ask if you thought it might be better if you gave them to her yourself. She thinks you're God, you know."

Kraft makes ready to bolt at the monosyllable. In point of fact, he has bolted already, silently gone, back on call. "You do it for me, will you?" Just this one thing. For my sake. For God's sake. Slip her a children's book, for once, while she's not looking.

Has read them all once, time was, several lives ago. Thumbed his way about in, climbed down through the portable portals, every one an infallible Blue Guide to a parallel place, unsuspected, joining the town and just at hand. Maybe's municipalities are always: the illustrated pastel covers deliver this shocking evidence to his cortex's tangled bit-bundle as he handles the books again. Immediate, closer even than the known, so close he must have constantly stumbled over the entryways without seeing. Children are forever falling through, almost by accident. Right there. Over the high hedge. A dead drop out the nursery window. Behind the heavy wall hanging. Just inside the next pastel binding.

They were, by all accounts, places much like the place he inhabited, the one you were supposed to play, wait, work, grow up, or lose yourself in. They doubled reasonably for the land at large except with one rule tweaked, one natural law finally understood for all it implied. There, everything would be exactly the same, everything except perhaps that aging would turn out to be a myth, disease vastly overrated, time a steady state, and thoughts real.

Adults, de facto, could neither locate nor recognize the layout. This followed tautologically. Once naturalized and issued a green card, once lured into believing in the possibility of a long stay, once you'd accepted the terms of lease, just the idea of going abroad on speculation became too ruinously expensive. To have an address here embargoed trade with dislocation's private provinces. But to a child brought up on customs checks and absentee ballots, to a reduced fare in terminal transit, to a boy raised on tales of a blessed country unreachable except by eternal detours through every makeshift sultanate that ever swabbed the upper decks of the General Assembly, these secret gardens and lost domains, these accounts of wonder- and neverlands were simple extensions, travel brochures from sovereign states just past the next Passport Control.

Hidden valleys were commonplaces to a boy who had been twice around the world before breaking his first bone. (The bone was a clavicle, cracked in a fall from a jackfruit tree that he had scaled in a doomed attempt to spy out the Nicobar Islands from the Indian mainland. He came to consciousness two days later in a field hospital bed, clutching a regiment of his beloved toy Gurkhas.) His parents moved every couple dozen months, whether they needed to or not. They took large leaps in small integer multiples of time. The boy always moved with them, deferring to their wishes as in most incidental matters.

In such a life, the roll of real places was as mysterious as the secret, stowaway locales his books laid out. Until the age of eight, Ricky nursed the impression that his father worked for some multinational oil company. He held on to that orienting fiction long after the evidence failed to add up. For another few years, just before adolescence set in in earnest, he was content to tell people that the man was with the Foreign Service. After that it was Air America, or "I don't know." Then the topic simply stopped coming up.

Whatever the name of his father's true employers, they demanded frequent and radical relocation. Each time that the family struck the set, dismantled the current household, and loaded it into shipping crates, reading excitement came and riffled the boy again, awakened by the standard hopeful anxiety of being left behind in the shuffle. He would find it for good this time — the wayward path, the wandering door that had somehow blended in invisibly with the surrounding grass and stone.

Veteran repacking campaigns left him a quiet child, capable of sitting still for endless, uprooted stretches. If he could live through the tedium of reaching the next stopover, he might recognize the new place on arrival, instantly find his way, the way that both imagination and his biannually decimated library swore existed. The next stopover never lay along the usual picnic routes given in the Michelins. The year in Seoul and the six months in Buenos Aires were mainstream compared to a few of the more remote refueling overnighters that made the family checklist.

He was an only child, the lone ward in his parents' caretaker government. Little Ricky had already come across, in bed, by flashlight, years ahead of the event, accounts of what would become of the folks: taken by cholera up in the Punjab. Pricked by a hail of cassava-tipped arrows. Swept from ship's deck by unseasonable eagerness on the part of the Pacific south equatorial. They would either return a lifetime later with tales of a strange inheritance or they would not: the books were reticent and divided on this matter.

His parents made up for his isolation by sending him through a slew of international schools. Sometimes private tutors would catch him up to the levels of learning in the local time zone. Schools too various to keep track of arrived new every year or two. These drilled him in all the lessons of peer terror, violent schoolground rivalry, and systematic spiritual search and seizure. Yet the one great payoff of continuous upheaval was that every two years it wiped the slate clean. Thus he acquired all the lessons, with none of the long-term liabilities, of human contact.

In every new temporary home, he was allowed all the books he could amass. But by the end of the stay, at the next inevitable move, the boy had to pare back his library to fit into one packing crate. Toys, of course, accompanied him along the way: when very young, a small, weight-driven walking cow that he let traipse over a cliff in the Andes. When slightly older, a View-Master with a handful of reels that brought the death of Pope John XXIII into vivid 3-D. In some countries the family compound was overrun by house and yard pets: one-eyed dogs, a sadistic gibbon that swooped down to attack from the roof of the servants' quarters, a myna bird that he taught to shout "Burglars!" in three languages.

His own myna mastery of the regional dialect would appear within weeks of arrival. By steeping and imitation, he'd start to jabber with the new round of street vendors in an innocent and indiscriminate mix of Farsi, Korean, Urdu, and bastard lingua franca Carib, jumbling and enjambing words, forgetting where each came from and where in the world each might successfully be used.

Terms appeared of themselves, even in conversation with his parents. (Even as an adult, he sometimes dreamed in words that were lost to conscious recall.) French was frequently helpful, but with so many obvious mother-tongue cognates, it was too trivial to be considered foreign. He could count to a hundred in three different Chineses, could pray without comprehension in Arabic, and could swear sufficiently to get himself hanged from multiple major branches of speech's tree.

Once, they did accidentally stumble upon an entrance to the Alongside. Puberty had not yet hit him in earnest, and so he was still clear enough to recognize at once the most beautiful city he'd ever seen. Geography had been absurdly generous with the setting. The city arose from an arena of hard stone as white as bleached sheets, the perfect material for raising pure linen towers next to a turquoise sea. A naturally protected port made it a prime spot for jumping off from, a base for thirty centuries of enriching trade.

A bracing, crystal climate left the city in year-round early summer. The air contained antidotes for most debilitating infections. Food spilled off trees and animal flanks into markets that sprouted everywhere in a pristine street maze. Ricky could sit for entire afternoons in the piled-up terraces among idle ancients. The men would drag lazily on their water pipes and keep the boy in fizzy drinks and figs so long as he would sit and listen to stories of rocs and roving thief bands and sunken Phoenician ships long overripe for salvage.

Here was a city given enough time and sun and wealth to have come perilously close to transcendence. It was halfway to becoming the thing that all cities are seeded to be. With easy benevolence, it had grown into a gathering place of scattered people. Syllables of Arabic, French, Turkish, English, Italian, and Kurdish bargained with one another through the commercial districts. Life disturbed the silence of crusader churches, milled about the mosaicked mosques, and picked through the Roman ruins lying just across the rim of hills outside of town.

Sitting in the smoking cafés, listening to the reports that the old men gathered exclusively for him — accounts of wandering rocks, intelligent ships that could sniff out ocean currents, wine tuns that seeped full again overnight — the boy realized: this country was the sero milestone from which all migratory sweeps set out. A life posting here would be beyond luxury. He could snorkel forever for sea urchins ø the coastal grottoes, surviving on goat cheese and lamb and olives from the azure-dry mountains.

But after only nine months, the boy was yanked away. Ricky's father came home one day and issued the familiar packing orders. "No future in this town for the likes of us. Situation hopeless. We've been moved out." Further business was contraindicated. The home office threw in the towel.

As always, his father's insider prediction turned out to be worse than prophetic. Within weeks, the first trickles of smoke, still invisible to all but trained eyes, began rising from the airport, hovering over the harbor, and seeping through the back streets. In another five years, with the usual outside assistance, Beirut would be torn irreversibly apart. Over the next two decades, the shining white foundation by the sea would be mortared down to a quivering stump.

It had been the one inevitable place, a city that moved steadily for three millennia toward the goal of a livable kingdom here in this life. This capital that had teetered on the edge of final deliverance disintegrated before reaching it. Over the years, the boy watched from a distance as it descended into a spiral of factional violence from which it would never recover. He committed the lesson to long-term memory, and confirmed it repeatedly. Paris, New York, Tokyo — all would fall as quickly and completely, all the blessed islands of the world, sucked down.

His family's evacuation from a still ravishingly beautiful Beirut was banal, expected. Departure arrived as quietly as the standard strange tenant always arrives in Chapter Two. The boy took banishment in stride. By this point in his life, he could be packed to leave anywhere, forever, in a matter of a weekend.

After Beirut, the family floated about the Near East for a handful of stays, short even by his father's standards. They headed temporarily for rock-solid Cyprus. There, under a canvas tent, on a portable television with sound drowned out by a gas-powered generator the size of a small munitions plant, the three of them watched a grainy, unidentifiable machine bump up against an even grainier, more unidentifiable landscape. Through the cloud of soundtrack static, Ricky thought he could make out a man saying, "Uh, Houston?" He heard the urgency of disbelief in that endless pause, a wait pregnant with every incredulous question that technological restlessness would never be able to address. Words full of the stunned, wondering irrelevance of speech: How can one ever announce this? "Eh … Tranquillity Base … "

He thought it a toss-up as to which of those two words was more implausibly surreal. Both were imaginary constructs, pointers to a lost colony off to airless nowhere. One small step, one low-G caper that extended the infinite series and converged on a tranquillity, on an extraterrestrial base that the boy had never once in all his years doubted would be reestablished in his lifetime. His father told him to remember this moment for some future, comprehensive, behind-the-wheel exam. He smiled at the advice. Remember? He had never forgotten. He'd only been waiting for the landing to catch up to him.

Master this. Make a note. This one's important. His school was a hands-on social studies project gathered from the hot spots of the globe. Portable generators in a strikable Cypriot tent; blackboard and chalk propped up against a schoolhouse-sized baobab; a freak-show museum of formaldehyde jars in Sunday markets across Asia; a whole natural history every time he purged sub-Saharan water parasites from his system. Each chance reassignment became curriculum. Formal education was where he could scavenge it throughout his formative years.

And Ricky was an honor student in this erratic school. He rarely needed to look at a problem twice and never stooped to homework. The traditional round robins of algebra and economics, the model electric circuits, and the posters of the stages of alluvial fans were child's play compared to the shifting rainbow coalitions of recess or the occasional mandatory religion classes where he hadn't an Eskimo's chance in hell.

In sports he was too fair ever to rise higher than mediocre. He liked pickup multinational World Cups, but tried to engineer all the matches to end up ties. He learned the tensile strength of the local teak or cedar with near-native fluency, jackfruit disaster notwithstanding. A ball's parabolas could be extrapolated from kapok to rattan. But compete? Why? It didn't lead anywhere.

His schoolmates came, like Ricky, from families adrift on the world circuit. Sons and daughters of servicemen, missionaries, field agents for well-intentioned but forsaken UN agencies. For sustained companionship, small schools in insignificant villages were the best. People posted to off-track places tended to stick around longer. Big cities had notoriously high turnovers.

His friends disappeared faster than water down a wadi. When they were not being reposted, Ricky's buddies simply died on him. He lost two Sao Paulo streetballer mates to kidnappers, and his best friend in all Indonesia was found convulsed in bed, clutching a plastic sack of inhalant. Like those unmapped mansions on deserted roads, come across by chance during late-night storms, his friends vanished before he could return in daylight to look for them. Faces of all nations rushed past as furiously as a perverse dodge ball whose torture was never even to graze, never hit him at all.

He rapidly developed what his father called personal capital. Self-reliance: the reputed byword of his national character. He knew nothing about the mythic States. What stunted access he did have to homeland ways only mystified him further. The sight of Mrs. Carmi-chael or little blond Dennis-san speaking Japanese or Hindi on decrepit black-and-whites with abysmal reception kept him laughing only until he'd learned enough of the local idiom to be baffled by the lines.

To fill all the hours of a day, he drew complex maps or invented games he could play alone. He taught himself to play reed organs and talking drums. There were always gardeners or cooks who now and then had time for him. From these adult friends he learned endlessly useful things like how to treat lemon bark or how to coax a coconut tree into giving up its milk, palm cabbage, and sugar.

But none of these activities filled the expanse of time assigned him. A child abroad, at large in the unlimited confines and corridors that Air America served, he could almost palpate the concealed country he stood flush up against. The land he looked for was the only one large enough to accommodate native speculation. He read about it at night, in the maps and travel accounts of the local children's literature, not yet outgrown.

In the last summer of his childhood, Ricky's mother and father, out of parental obligation, took him to tour his unknown home. They felt that the boy should possess more than just a picture-book, View-Master acquaintance with the Lincoln Memorial and Yosemite. Ricky liked the States, where people were tried only for alleged crimes and no one need ever get out of the car, even to eat. The vaudeville system of weights and measures did give him trouble, however. And surprisingly, despite supermarkets the size of entire autonomous guerrilla regions he had lived in, Ricky's countrymen had not yet discovered anise coffee poured over crushed ice, or the pleasures of dried squid tucked in the back of the cheek all afternoon. Some mornings he would wake up too early, anxiously wondering, until consciousness took him, what had happened to the street vendors' calls.

The visit was of obvious symbolic importance to his parents, and the son tried his best to make it a success. Not long after their Atlantic arrival they attended a national folk festival called Opening Day. His parents took him to his first baseball game, between what his father kept calling "the new New York team" and their bitter rivals from Chicago. They sat in the upper decks next to a Chicago family who, although it was the first day of the season, unrolled a bedsheet that read, WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR. Ricky asked his father to explain the banner but the man only sushed him, embarrassed.

The get-acquainted session with his national sport was a disaster. Ricky listened intently to his father's intricate explanation of such violences as the suicide bunt and the hit-and-run. He shouted out a few well-meaning Spanish encouragements to all the Latin American players. But he wound up, during the tense tenth inning, under the bleachers playing fighting tops with six equally bewildered foreign-exchange students from the Balkans.

Rebuffed but forgiving, the folks took him to Niagara. There, Ricky agreed enthusiastically that the falls were truly impressive in volume, although of course not anywhere near as tall as Angel or Cuquenan. He enjoyed putting on the raincoat to ride the Maid of the Mist. The spray and spectacle and liquid statistics were all staggering, but the thing that most entranced Ricky was a scrap of yellowed newsprint pasted on the wall of the gift shop:

MIRACLE AT FALLS

Boy, Age 7, Survives Pitch over Horseshoe

He carefully added the age of the miracle survivor to the age of the clipping. The numbers summed to precisely the figure he expected. A boy his age had fallen over the impossible water cliff in a two-person dinghy. The hundred-sixty-foot dead drop had been child's play; the consummate, stone-eating churn at the bottom had killed the boy's sister instantly. But Ricky's contemporary, after a three-minute gap lost in molten madness, had bobbed free, beaten into pulpy unconsciousness, each one of his body's twigs shattered, but fished out inconceivably alive.

No one except a child could possibly have survived the Horseshoe's pitch. Ricky reread the account, confirming in his mind the only available explanation of the miracle: those three unaccounted-for minutes, away. A boy his age, saved by falling not into the rock-drill undertow but somewhere right alongside it.

He asked to buy the clipping, but it was not for sale. So he stood in the gift shop, committing the account to memory. His parents had to come tug at his sleeve, pull, him away. He would not leave without a last look at the landmark chutes, one more for the road. But even alerted to the spot, he could not see where the boy had temporarily pushed through.

The family campaigned their way westward like Indian fighters, cutting a path through all the patriotic must-sees. They had had the Old North, Liberty, Independence Hall. Now it was on to Gettysburg, and out to the GM assembly lines. At the one-third point, in one of those C-cities in Ohio, after standing at polite attention through a guided tour of some presidential home, he talked his mother into taking him to the natural history museum, where he hoped to find some mummified birds. These had been a favorite of his ever since Egyptian days, when he had caught the school bus each morning next to the mouth of a cave network where teenagers had recently discovered seven hundred thousand embalmed ibises.

The museum's collection was woefully deficient in the sacred bird-corpse department. But the Egypt room did house the transfix-ingly tiny, bound body of a three-thousand-year-old juvenile. The three of them stood looking at the diminutive god-king, his father eager to get on with things American, his mother yanking him this way and that so as not to stand in the way of other families who might want a look. Finally, in his summarizing voice, Ricky's father gave a contrite shake of the head at this creature, five hundred years older than Socrates. "Not even a teenager!"

His mother sorrowfully replied, "Isn't that a shame?"

With this exchange, Ricky realized his parents were of no help to him. And in that moment, he became an adult. He was here alone, in the middle of the strange place name stamped on his passport. From all sides, Mayday snatches from lost boys bombarded and bathed him in garbled shortwave. He stared at the hieroglyphs on the inside coffin lid until they seemed to move. The oldest picture book in existence: he should have been able to read it the way he breathed. But he could not make out the first illustrated sentence.

Late in the summer, just before heading back overseas, the family took their now high-mileage rental down a demurely paved two-lane track running through the considerable empty bit between Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon. Ricky had greatly appreciated the enormous stone noses, large enough for a man to live in. He asked his parents ingenuously if the nation had any plans to add the current president to the mountain after he died. They laughed evasively.

They steered toward the southwest, following a connect-the-dots of Park Service gazebos laid out for public display. Glass cases the width of the entire desert displayed their attic residue: dinosaur teeth, arrowheads, pony express hand cancellations. Stereopticon slides of the mayor's wife playing at squaw, the redskin papoose slung from her head. The dress the little native girl was found in, made from a flour sack taken in the fatal ambush of settlers' wagons.

Several hundred blank miles from the nearest registered monument, the car began emitting soft, enigmatic chirps. They had driven the vehicle clear across the country and apparently it had had enough sightseeing for this combusting lifetime. Ricky's father nursed them another dozen miles into a station with no identifying trade sign. Its only marking was one of those movie marquees where battered black letters lined up like a brigade of unruly railroad-building coolies:

HAVE YOU HEARD THE ALL-SAVING WORD?

Snacks, Gas, Reading Matter

The ancient proprietor's wife took it on herself to entertain the boy while the other three adults puzzled over the intractable antiphonies of the four-stroke engine. The woman claimed to be one-quarter Indian, and he asked which quarter.

"Last folks to come through here," the woman told him, "had one curious story to tell. This was late last Thursday night. Young couple, newlyweds, out on a backroads honeymoon. Now just you think how astonished they must of been to see a lone girl, no older than you yourself, hitchhiking down this roadside hundred miles out in the middle of nowhere. In a beautiful Sunday dress. It so astonished them, they said, that against their better judgment, they picked the child up. Plain as a coyote's call, something had frightened this girl into running. They say she sounded like she come from far away too." The woman whispered sympathetically to him; her voice was full of a conspiratorial forgiveness. "Foreign as you yourself."

The boy did not correct her. Nor did he interrupt the quarter-Indian woman to say that he already knew the end of the story. How the girl hitchhiker insisted on getting in the backseat. How she sat in party dress, answering all questions politely with no more than a yes or no. How, when the couple turned to let her out at the requested crossroads, the backseat was empty. How there was no trace of the girl, nothing to indicate where she had come from or where she had gone. "Far as anyone could say, she dropped down on this stretch of road from out the Airy Above. Went back to it too, I bargain."

Ricky knew better. To his experience, very few girls his age dropped out of the sky, and fewer still turned around and vanished back into it. And when they did, they rarely needed to hitchhike in between. She must have come from somewhere. Everyone did; that was the one core geography agreed upon by every school he'd ever attended. More clearly still, the girl had been headed someplace very specific. Most certain of all, she had found it, arrived while her ride wasn't looking.

The right map, the appropriate triangulation might narrow down the vanishing point the girl was after. Cartography would reveal a surface pitted with sinkholes that drew drifters across this gift plain, lured them in and pulled the covers over. He had seen, from the air above half a dozen continents, how the map might work. The surface of the earth, a continuous, dense, originally igneous curve, was wearing down and building up at different rates. Water, wind, and sun slowly threaded it with veins, favored or despoiled spots with various soils, left behind regional features that shuttled between blessing and curse over the run of time.

Planet-sized convection currents in the mande churned up the crust and dealt it out again. Some places got granite, others obsidian. Lime laid down. Rock buckled into brittle ridges. The length and twist of a flood basin, a mountain range blocking or bestowing rainfall: these explained the secret, specific horrors of every place he'd ever lived. Weather spilled over the divide. On one side, forests formed; deserts dusted the other. The world surface was pimpled with unequal well-springs of wealth — tiny trees standing for timber, mocha ovals announcing coffee, triangles depicting tin.

Geography was the sole explanation anyone had yet given him for wars, trade, starvation, color, language, custom, mortality rates, the westward gravitation of power, tropical poverty that could not be dislodged. Geography was why that Hausa tribe found his hair so bizarre that they were compelled to stroke it as a good-luck charm. Geography sounded the thunk of darts thrown against the walls of the Singapore Anglo-American Club by civilizedly stewed civil servants upon whom the sun had recently set. The reason for Things as They Are lay quietly in tables of average temperature, salinity, acreage, snow, wind speed, altitude, fertility.

If, under the mesa edges, out here on the dry scrub range, a life had shaken loose, if one young hitchhiking girl had procured an exit visa, beautifully forged, it was to escape the local prejudice, the unfair play of forces flung from the earth's spinning axis. Travel companions he would never meet, friends with road tales far outstripping his streamed from spots all over the wrinkled planet surface like carbonation bubbles sprouting from invisible crevasses on the walls of drinking glasses. Places deep inside these continents must steadily absorb the stream. That was the only explanation how, fanning out from their font at the Nile, flowing atypically north to a delta a world wide, pitching over Niagara in a dinghy, the migrants could disappear back into desert, at night, on a nowhere Dakota road.

"This girl," Ricky asked the part-Indian woman politely, "this hitchhiker. Where did she ask to be dropped off?"

"She never did say. Just like, Wherever you're headed is fine with me.' Course, there aren't too many places out this way to be dropped…"

"Was she carrying anything? A knapsack, maybe? Books?"

The woman just looked at him strangely, patted him on the head, and went to check on the repair.

On the plane westward over the last stretch of coast, Ricky thanked his parents for the vacation. Yes, he agreed cooperatively, he was an American, as he was sure would become plain as soon as he had the chance to spend some time there. Yes, he hoped he would, someday, for college, perhaps. Where would he most like to settle down? Oh, St. Louis would be fine. Or Portland. Newport News. Sure, Asheville. Abilene. Anywhere. The Airy Above.

He settled in for the flight, a whole day-and-night affair, to a place whose native name was Angel City, the capital of a country called, locally, the Land of the Free. He had brought along a book for the ride. Where are you? the hurt voice, the wounded tone of this year's story opened. For whole pages, for the entire lifetime of the book's little boy, it searched down a chronic ache, a place agonizingly near in every way except for the passage there. Kraft looked up from his reading above the dead center of the Pacific, realizing, suddenly, that he had outgrown fiction.

A Sapling Learner's Classic

PETER PAN

By J. M. Barrie

Printing History

First published in 1911 under the tide Peter and Wendy and in 1921 under the tide Peter Pan and Wendy. First American edition …

ISBN number …

All rights reserved. Text copyright 1911, 1921, 19…

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any …

Do you know that this book is part of the J. M. Barrie "Peter Pan Bequest"? This means that J. M. Barrie's royalty on this book goes to help the doctors and nurses to cure the children who are lying ill in the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.

bequest: noun. A gift of money or property arranged by a person's last will. Also, the act of making such a gift.

royalty: noun. 1. The position of king or queen… A member of a royal family. 2. A portion of the money earned by the sale of a book, the licensing of an invention, the performance of…

Barrie, Sir James Matthew (May 9, 1860-June 19, 1937). Scottish author of Peter Pan. Barrie was one of ten children born to a country weaver. When he was six, an older brother died in a skating accident. The family never recovered from the shock. To Barrie's mother, the dead boy would remain a child who never …

CHAPTER ONE. PETER BREAKS THROUGH

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day …

… Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, "Oh, why can't you remain like this forever!" This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth …

henceforth: adverb. From this time forward. From now on.

CHAPTER THREE. COME AWAY, COME AWAY!

"But where do you live mostly now?"

"With the lost boys."

"Who are they?"

"They are the children who fall out of their perambulators… If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray…"

perambulate: verb. To walk about…

perambulator: noun. 1. A baby carriage. 2. A rolling wheel used to measure distances.

per ardua adastra: Latin phrase. Through difficulties, to the stars.

… and she was just slightly disappointed when he admitted that he came to the nursery window not to see her but to listen to stories.

"You see, I don't know any stories. None of the lost boys knows any stories."

lost-wax process, lost tribes, Lost Sunday, Lost Steps, Lost Manuscript, Lost Legions, Lost Generation, Lost Domain, Lost Colony, lost …

Peter the Hermit (P1050-1115). French preacher of the First Crusade. He fought in the siege of Antioch and rode victoriously into Jerusalem alongside …

Peter Pan. The boy who wouldn't grow up, hero of J. M. Barrie's …

CHAPTER FOUR. THE FLIGHT

… they drew near the Neverland… not perhaps so much owing to the guidance of Peter or Tink as because the island was out looking for them…

Strange to say, they all recognised it at once, and until fear fell upon them they hailed it, not as something long dreamt of and seen at last, but as a familiar friend…

névé, never, never ending, nevermore…

never-never: 1. noun. The Australian desert outback, especially the Northern Territory. 2. adjective. Imaginary or fanciful. A never-never land is a paradise that exists only in the mind. See also: Utopia, Eden, Canaan, Cockaigne, El Dorado, Shangri-La, Arcadia… lotus land, wonderland, dreamland, fairyland… promised land, kingdom come, millennium.

millennium: noun. The thousand-year reign of a triumphant…

Millenarianism, a form of eschatology (eschatology: noun. The study of last things…), addresses the purpose and final prospects of the human community. It asks: What will be the final destiny of this world and its inhabitants? Will mankind ever succeed in reaching the earthly paradise that it perpetually approaches and expects? What are the final prospects and purposes of the human estate?

(estate: noun. 1. A piece of land or property…)

In its specifically Christian version, the millenarian formulation takes two forms: pre- and postmillenarianism. In the first, a shattering return of Christ will end history and usher in a last, thousand-year period of transcendent righteousness before… In the second, worldwide unification of faith will climax in Christ's return and a final harrowing…

Belief in the imminent completion of the world infused the early Church, and predictions of the fast-approaching end of time erupted repeatedly throughout the Middle Ages. Yet millenarian expectation has increased steadily in modern times, concurrent with the bewildering expansion of human affairs. The settlement of the United States is shot through with millenarian models: the City on the Hill, Manifest Destiny, the Social Gospel movement, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," Fundamentalism in its many forms, the War to End All War, the New Frontier, the Great Society…

Colonialism, imperialism, and the various industrial-age crusades to establish a world order typically sport messianic hallmarks. Marx's historical apotheosis of communism, although secular, bore an obvious millenarian cast. Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich was a revival of Joachim of Fiore's medieval apocalyptic vision. The radical political fervor characterizing the present international community — from the Red Guards to the Islamic Revolution — is perhaps best understood not in economic but in eschatological terms…

Throughout history, millenarianism has centered on common themes. First is the belief that we have entered end time, the last days, and that portents visible around us warn that the completion of history is a matter not of lifetimes but of years. Although despair and excitement flourish around the ends of centuries, the date of the end has been variously set at 948, 975, 1033, 1236, 1260, 1284, 1367, 1420, 1588, 1666, 1792…

Formulas deriving the onset of the new age tend to produce dates on the immediate horizon. Millenarian feeling is often accompanied by an upsurge in occultism: belief in reincarnation, purification rituals, visits from otherworldly creatures, out-of-body experiences, alternate dimensions…

The most common hallmark of millenarian thought is the conviction that civilization is just now entering its moment of truth, an unprecedented instant of danger and opportunity, of universal calamity and convergence…

Militant expectation flares up in periods of social upheaval. The transforming stress of the nineteenth century produced an extraordinary number of prophetic cults from divergent cultures. The Mahdi of Sudan dealt the British empire several spectacular defeats and established an Islamic millenarian kingdom before being crushed by Kitchener in 1898. Isaiah Shembe, the Zulu messiah, preached the coming of a New Jerusalem exclusively for believing blacks. The Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians awaited the floods and whirlwinds that would level the earth and remove the threat of annihilation. Tens of thousands of American Millerites awaited the Second Coming on the night of October 22,1844. In Europe, a gathering sense of end time infused the anarchist uprisings, theosophy, salvationism, the…

The most devastating millenarian movement of the century was the Taiping Rebellion. A failed Chinese civil service candidate named Hung learned in a vision that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Proclaiming his Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, Hung gathered more than a million devoted followers. With this militia of believers, he surged down the Yangtze Valley and captured the city of Nanking. The move precipitated a decade of civil war during which the millenarians nearly toppled the Manchu dynasty and wrested control of China. By conflict's end, half the country was wasted and as many as twenty million lives had been lost: the second bloodiest war in human history, just behind World War II, itself an eschatological Last Battle.

Our own moment of dislocation has produced a wave of imminent expectation, from New Age movements to island cargo cults whose jungle runways and ritual wooden planes guide the Delivering Spirit safely to earth…

The idea of a progressing history may itself derive from the hope for a new heaven and earth. Prediction of the end, like historical "progress," is eternal. And yet, millenarian eschatology is not static; rather, it may steadily escalate. Just because expectation has been wrong up until now, the faithful maintain, does not mean it will be wrong forever…

Millenarianism is born in the longing for confederation and the fear of collapse, in the desire to know where the world is going, in the need for closure. We seek consolation of our own otherwise-random histories by linking them to a common destiny. But our end, eschatology insists, lies in the seed of our beginning. Predictions of Parousia frequently feature children as central protagonists. History is a propagating myth of missing innocents, carried by catastrophe to their forgotten bequest…

(bequest, checked off in minute, ghostly pencil.)

Surely no plot could be so sadistic as to end, arbitrarily, its sole chance at continuance. The epidemic of child abduction, abuse, and exploitation taking place throughout the world seems to many to be that long-awaited harrowing that presages the return of final innocence. "A holocaust of children," shouts Captain Hook, one of the quintessential millenarian reapers. "There is something grand in the idea!"

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: When Wendy Grew Up

… as if from the moment she arrived on the mainland she wanted to ask questions…

He was a little boy, and she was grown up… Something inside her was crying "Woman, woman, let go of me…"

… and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

heartless: adj'…

A girl is screaming. Through sheets of graphite, conducting air, annihilating paradise darkness, a scream trickles. Something young, as green as freshly cut grass, panic-whispers over night's dead receiver. Sound seeps into the eardrum, too curdling to face, too remote to locate or answer.

Its grace note mimics a playground giggle. But by second syllable it twists, like that beautiful young line drawing, into the hag hiding out inside it. Rattling clamps itself hideously to his building walls. It inches along the brick, reaches and taps at his bedroom window like a man clutching the outside of the rushing room as it speeds through midnight's mountain tunnel. The scream taps at awful intervals as if already dead, a hand automatically nail-scratching the glass, its twitch reflex still beating feebly against the pane to be let in.

Panic, as always, pitches itself up into soprano, a voiceless terror stuck in treble. A reedy panpipe issues from a girl lying in the deserted street, her legs snapped back over her neck, her belly stenciled by a tire tread. Or moans at gunpoint, stifling a shriek that she knows will make her panting assaulter kill her. A girl calls out from under a column of countless cubic feet of water, the words past making out, wild in the upper registers.

Chooses night, naturally, the old narcotic, always eager to assist in these matters. The wail taunts, under cover of darkness: Come try your inalienable rights, your annual increments to the GNP against me.

Come measure me with your little pencil marks against the kitchen wall. With one hushed high-pitched snag, the weave unthreads. Disaster laps at the corner of his block, and he must shoot up, now, not even stop to dress, but run out and avert the unthinkable.

Fear freezes his tensors, holds him prostrate, drugged. Impossible; his least move will wrap the raving around his head. He can only keep deathly still and wait, pinned in terror to the soaked linen. Ghostly gas seeps through the casements — chloroform held to his nostrils on a greasy rag. He is immobilized by what he would see if he ran shouting to the window: pale straw child in burning dress, albino on fire. Naked black baby bleeding from a furrow drawn clean across its face. Asian, dazed, fresh from out of the teleporter, wailing clueless through neighborhood after neighborhood until her feet swell into pulpy spades, her skin unsheathing.

A second paralyzing cry follows in the first's wake. This one is softer, a bleat of hunger or numbed grief. A child stands screaming at the end of history's downward, disintegrating spiral. It mewls in petrifying ravishment, This is not right. Where are…? This is not… An animal, a feral creature, wanders loose in the apartment, bred in a basement under the city's subskin, raised on mold and leaded water, freed for no reason except horror.

The noise wavers between cries of distress and sighs from an acid bath. The one child becomes two, alternating their howls at fading intervals. The two start to stagger their shattering screeches. How many are they? A whole community, calling out from impalement a street or two off.

A scream that spectral — here, spooned into his ear — strips off the rules, shreds them like cheap paint. Safety breaks into pasteboard pieces. Shock chooses its hour, when anyone who might resist is docile with sleep and confusion. A girl at night is beaten senseless in a street where every other plate window bears the crime-stopping palm, that secret Mason's sign of Neighborhood Watch. A girl's screams return his nervous system to randomness, his heart to clammy panic. A shout at this hour… a single small girl, this late…

Exhausted ambulances fail to appear. Sirens don't even bother going through the motions. East Angel City lies within earshot, hustled awake, listening, eyes pressed together, night-lights smothered, firearms at ready on the bed stand. Civilization, the soul's slum clearance project, rolls over and plays dead. Practice suicide.

He tests the air. His nostrils would core-sample the room if he could find it. He has been asleep for an epoch and a half. Just on the verge of falling. Still under. Eternally coming to. To what? He must be on call, Motel Residente. The Millstone and Father Kino, at work, have skipped a crucial step, general anesthetic. The scream issues from the operating theater, which they have somehow miked so that the howls…

But it can't be the hospital. The room lacks that chemical aroma of rotting flesh daubed down with Listerine. This must be the house he has just bought with that beautiful… No, another. A house he never should have left. How long? Where in the world? The shriek pierces him again. It penetrates his drums like poison. He hears, coldly mechanical, a hundred times more lucidly than waking.

An aural virus slips between the crystal interstices of window glass without needing to break in. Laboratory toxin, sprung from its test-tube home, disperses a fatal help-me through his apartment air, waiting to sink a million microsyringes into his lungs in the dark. It slinks up, unkillably small and needy. It makes of his brain a downy bed.

It implodes him. Girlish terror injects itself, becomes his. Fear worse than he has ever known, beyond the power of memory to compare. Anthrax fear, frenzied, thrashing but still. His corpse-to-be locks up with dread, except for a heart slamming on a buffet of vasodilators. Grotesque scenarios tear through him, teasers before our feature attraction. Millisecond Rorschachs, the deep stuff", the mound burials: the girl's face, eaten away by bamboo rats. Her methodical ravaging by Green Berets. Fat shit-kickers slithering over her with mucused razor blades.

His brain screams, Save her now. But the least twitch of his muscles would incinerate him. His spine fuses down its length. Commands to contract refuse to travel to his outer reaches. The constant emergency of his days has been drill for this moment, when he alone must decide all outcome. But now he seizes up against an unknown outside the threshold of control. The scream might be anything. Fictions proliferate. He cannot move.

He cannot look. He knows already who it is, come here for help past giving. She has hobbled across town, over the unfordable expressway lanes on foot, one already dead. She hobbles this way to tell him that the nightmare case already races beyond his worst possible expectation. His core self, the real Kraft — the one before all deliberation— kicks in. And at the sound of moaning just outside his door, he lies still in the dark and dissimulates, denying that this is his address. The hit-and-run urge takes hold in him, with everything now on the line. And the rest of his life, spent explaining away…

With each second, the charade of stillness gets harder to shake. Every click condemns him further into shaming it through to the end. She will die out there, hanging onto his window. With luck, she will be blown off by daybreak onto someone else's lawn, to decompose before the police can trace her back to him. He snuggles up to final deniability in the snickering blackness.

Something inside him, some uncondensed background radiation, bursts. White light cuts across the phosphors under his lids. He pushes up, shoves for all he is worth against the ice floe lovingly drowning him. And sudden as a saturated circuit breaker, he snaps.

Gravity, switched on, smashes down on his pelvis, doubling him over. He bends erect at the waist, firing perpendicular like a spring-loaded doll. Untongued, an inarticulate blur tries to tear itself from his lips, but his face muscles stonewall it with one last veto. Voice box, throat, gauze-lined mouth refuse to mobilize. He has had, is right now having a stroke, a neural storm. The stuff-arrested word, a shed piece of floating birch bark, pilots its way through, issues out in a nnnn-yy-aaeoo. No.

His own scream swallows up the girl's, eradicates it, but not before the rasped treble turns to a more domestic alarm, closer to his ear. He is awake, yelling out intervention, calling for emergency procedures, the extraordinary stopgaps he knows by rote. Thoughts come to him one after the next, tin soldiers pouring through the breach in a battered syllogism. My bed: break from it. Feet to floor. My room. My apartment. Door that way, one o'clock, north-northeast. Get to it before it seals shut.

Something reaches out to snag him before he can bolt. A hand, another human being in his bed. "Ricky?"

Arrival comes as suddenly as had violence's burst. The street torture stops the moment that Linda — artlessly naked, here, next to him, his on ephemeral credit — changes her breathing. The screams are no more than slight obstructions in her nasal passage, amplified by his ear up flush to her breath. Terror comes of closeness, the way single cells reveal an Armageddon under the microscope.

"Ricky? What's the matter? What's happened?"

He collapses into her, breaking a harder fall. Nothing. Nothing's happened. Exactly the sort of featureless, unnoticeable night he prayed for in secret as they fell asleep a lifetime earlier.

"It's all right. I'm… okay. I just thought…" Thought that the girl had come for him, like a little slaughtered bride. "I just remembered something. Really. Go back to sleep."

"Sleep?" she says, incredulous, smiling, scolding. "Ricky, you're shaking."

"True," he concedes. Body-long tremolos, at intervals, replace the now-silenced cry. "Hypothermia?" comes his lame proposal. And yet, partly true; he is freezing, shivering to death in this heat sink of human compromise that he's chosen expressly for its hothouse climate. "If you'd just quit stealing all the covers…"

"Covers?" Her bewildered syllables race in all directions, furious, afraid of him, like children scattering in front of the blindman in a game of bluff. She holds him to her over his protests. She cradles his head to her bareness in half comfort, half nelson. "You sure you're ten years older than I am?" And worse than her most hopeless case.

Dark in her limbs, her skin an inexhaustible chamois perfection, a taut heat treatment everywhere against him: Linda. She has come to keep him from recall. They've sent her at just this critical cusp to release him from his deserts. Grateful for that much, he considers telling her. She, if anyone, could leave the scream explained and housebroken. Listen. Your breath sounded to me like the last child left on earth, after all the rest had been taken.

But even should he confide in her, they would be alone. Both of them, unbuffered, clothed only in this faux-residential calm, hurtable now in more ways than can be cataloged. He would only freeze her, leave her as chill as he is if he told, if he held her any longer. Already her naked nipples go gooseflesh, pucker like an alum-punished mouth. Or does something else arouse them, something aside from the desert cold? Some desire awakened by his pure fear, the chances of unlimited suffering at this hour when personality is discarded as a worthless blind?

He tests the gooseflesh, puts his tongue to it. He searches across her body for hidden hiding places among her moraines that must have heard something, must have registered. And Linda, half blood, flexing like a jaguar, spooked by him now, of all he might do to her, moans. Then more, she calls out in strange languages — yes, there—uncaring who hears them through the thin walls. Love abandoned to the cries of adjacent devastation.

Those nights when the need to pass out completely marauds through his so-called consciousness like a clubfoot waltzing on parquet, nights when not even the last blast could wake him, he must still prop himself up at this twenty-four-hour convenience casino, tape his eyes open with pharmaceuticals, and deal out continuous all-or-nothing hands of one-card stud. And on those other nights, the ones that rotation magisterially allots him to go blaspheme himself with sleep, he cannot. It's no less than a form of sublimated impotence (the real thing so far blissfully spared him), imaginary. Yet from out of deepest, ripple-free Stage Four nothingness, advance warnings of alarm and visitation make the thought of even a couple hours of lowered vigilance unthinkable, even obscene.

Fortunately, work supplies a variety of substitutes for narcosis. This morning, they rebuilt Tony the Tuffian's ear. Tony's parents initially tried to deny ever having seen him in their lives when the police dragged him bleeding to them, the half of his head opened up in a street misunderstanding, as pink and wet as an Independence Day picnic melon. Only when the officer swore that the investigation had nothing to do with the folks' own improvised retail operation did the mother start wailing. The woman promptly sponged and bound the boy up with root extract, about as helpful as cornstarch to a contractor.

Couple of absolute tenderfoot cops brought Tony and his severed left outside awning to the ER. "Iced," according to Plummer, "but get this: with the ear inside the bag of melting cubes. Thing was total mealworm meat. I wouldn't even have fed the pup to my horned toad."

This was a couple months ago. During the time it took for the side of Tony's head to heal enough for Kraft to consider working it back into shape, the cops, unbeknownst to anyone outside their autonomous little fiefdom, were paying visits to the Tuff, telling him that they had forbidden surgery until Tony told all. They got their names, and Tony got scheduled for his first-stage ear reconstruction, convinced that he had the magnanimity of the American law enforcement system to thank for it.

Going into surgery this morning, the Tuffian expressed some regret that he would lose the instant status that his blunted left stump had earned him with the rest of the kids' ward. He seemed almost thrilled to hear that he would wake from the procedure with another scar, this one across his lower thorax, where Kraft would remove the bit of cartilaginous framework needed to form the new external spoiler. The transplant will hold until Tony loses the hardware again in some prison brawl.

That one is Kraft's only cut-and-paste scheduled today. Work has been his one topical balm against the thing that has steadily coagulated since he went ankle fishing inside the boat girl. And fortunately, the job drones on, long after the sexy procedures are over. The hypercom-petitive med schools ought to make it broad-band knowledge: the career of professional shamanism these days consists of equal parts corrective injury, scut follow-ups, and brute bookkeeping. Having bloodied up the Clean Room enough for one day, Kraft still has the blessed canonical troika of distractions — logging, filing, and retrieving — to keep him from replaying his latest library of debilitating mental cassettes.

Documentation is everything. Data and protective paperwork. By this point, Kraft has learned not to say so much as "Lookin' good!" to a patient without making a shorthand note of the date, time, and physical circumstances. As a result, he's saddled with a hell of a lot more scrap- than scalpelwork. So much more that even Beirut General must give him a desk to bury in forms.

He sits in his requisitioned cubicle, plucking messages back out of a Dictaphone and pinning the phrases, like formaldehyded lepidop-tera, to official reports. He keeps the corridor door open; otherwise, it gets deceptively restful in here. Now and then he comes up for air, to guard his flank by throwing a quick look hallward. Somewhere around the millionth such routine inspection, he just about jumps through his own cranium. A diminutive super-oldster in Dodger cap and baggy cardigan has crept silently into the doorframe and just stands there, staring at him.

The guy has been there a while, by all evidence. One of those balding, skin-flappy, underinflated men you see shuffling around in Griffith Park carrying a paper bag and stick, talking to pitiful cocker spaniels in tongues found only in hidden mountain villages that appear but once a year. The old fart just gazes at him from myopic mine shafts on either side of his hook nose. Kraft, deep in his usual Latinate fog, can't even summon up an officially inquisitive “Yes?”

Before Kraft can determine What Is Wrong with This Picture (This here is Pediatrics, sir. You want Gerontology, Floor Four), Gramps spits out, "What's it to ya, buddy?" and disappears. The midget Walter Brennan pads rheumatically down the corridor, looking for all the world like a gargoyle punching out at quitting time, packing up shop and lumbering stonily down the nearest flying buttress to catch the bus home.

The old geezer's voice shocks even more than his beaked features. The codger-style diction is just about in line with his general level of senescence. But where Kraft had expected a kind of Lionel Barrymore gravel, there's only this disturbingly treble whistle. May in December.

Weird, unplaceable, disconcerting. But hey. Like the man asked: What difference does it make to you? Leave it. Not your specialty; not this rotation, in any case.

Kraft sits another minute, pursed over the Dictaphone. Checks the doorway again. Has sleep deprivation progressed so far as to deliver visuals? All at once the click of differential diagnosis hits him. He blanches and stands up slowly. Hutchinson-Gilford disease. True pro-geria. Visible after a year or two of normal infancy. Onset of full-fledged symptoms around six. Sixty years old by the age of ten. Kraft falters over to his bookshelf, flips through the references catatonically, already knowing what he's going to come up with. Only four dozen known occurrences in the entire world literature. Kraft lurches back out into the corridor, but Gramps, one of creation's rarest ancient children, is gone.

A Hutchinson-Gilford, here, at a freebie institution that can barely handle tonsillectomies without sending the kid out on a tray? A hospital where half the senior staffers are alcoholics and half the residents have doctored their transcripts? How on earth can Carver even think about handling such a case? The minute the kid walked in the door, they should have airlifted him straight to Boston. There's something not quite Hippocratic going on here. Either the admitting physician doesn't know what he's looking at — impossible; that pinched nose, the vanished hairline, the jaundiced, ravaged, medieval parchment skin — or the shriveled boy has been sucked up into some medical Barnum's bailiwick.

It doesn't seem conceivable: a child rushing toward advanced old age at this wildly accelerated rate without having attracted the attention of research's power players somewhere along the line. Even the family physician, however blunderingly inept, certainly must have noticed when the kid picked up a decade between six-month checkups. Then Kraft returns to the reality check and remembers where he is. The bulk of this outfit's clientele couldn't pay for a periodic physical, even if they knew what such a thing was. But surely the school nurse, the boy's teachers, the neighborhood social worker…?

Drop it. Lose the whole matter. Run closed-lidded in the other direction singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" while cupping your hands over your ears. This admission obviously has no bearing whatsoever on surgery. As such, it lies outside the only shorthand calculus Kraft has for years been able to afford: Impact on immediate work load? Need deal with this by self?

But the wrong, awful rarity of the thing haunts him. A boy a third his age, except twice as old. That uncannily sick face. A great-grandfather's face, superannuated and wasted, yet with half a century still to go before retirement age. A half century it will never make. An extraterrestrial face, para-human, a mask violating the fixed sequence of innocence to experience to decay, mixing up the stages of growth in monster parody. The tragic by-product of a mad invention, a bio-ray, some visionary machine invented to blaze open a transforming shortcut but botched horribly, locked up deep beneath the earth's crust, forgotten by everyone except a few children who, not noticing the CONDEMNED sign rotting over the entrance, wandered down into the shaft while playing and accidentally absorbed the full, cell-accelerating blast.

He tries work again. But no matter how often Kraft rewinds and replays the burst of urgent nonsense on his Dictaphone, he cannot transcribe it. He puts the machine down, exchanges it for the phone, and dials an extension fast becoming as familiar to him as the lab technician's. "Espera, please."

Another shuffle, and a voice like home whispers out of the receiver, "Squeakheart?" Giggling at his decorum. "Zat you? I thought I told you never to call me at the office."

"Linder, listen." To what? To a transcript of ultimate unlikelihood. To wild suppositions. To the track of a background song going hideously lost. To the blood coursing as audibly as surf through his ears. To the dead silence on his end of the line, the pyre of questions piling up on his police blotter. "I just… This kid, this old kid…" The disease's proper name refuses to come out of the technical tome and unfold itself.

"Ah. You've met Nicolino."

The word convinces him of the utter hopelessness of dealing with this woman. The gap between them — almost a full generation, by the standards of developing nations and the clientele down at OB-GYN — is trivial compared to this. Their incommensurate pasts would be resolvable. Even the unspannable chasm of sex, the two of them dosed with mutually unintelligible hormonal cocktails, would be a little leap. But this, this equanimity of hers in the face of the unassimilable makes her another genus. Alien. He can't even begin to talk to her.

He has called to enlist her aid in comprehending this fifty-to-however-many-historical-billions shot strolling around loose, unprotected, Dodger-capped in the corridors just outside his door. But Linda — he might have known that she would already be on a first-name basis with astonishment — makes of this boy an order of magnitude rarer still. Just one. One, out of all the cumulative billions that do not stop today but go on growing toward some terminal forever. He might have known it'd be "Nicolino."

"Linda. Do you have any idea what this kid is?"

"Yeah. He's a cheeky little brat. He came in for his first appointment with Physiatry and propositioned me."

Kraft's resentment of this woman vanishes in a flash, replaced by murderous rivalry directed at a preteen, dirty old lecher. "What did he say?"

"He said, 'Va-va-voom.' Or words to that effect. Then something or other about lamenting his vanished youth."

Kraft has to snort, but painfully, a solid, undislodgable mass in his trachea. "What in hell is he doing here?"

"Trying to get medical attention, I think. Sor-ry." She suppresses a guilty laugh. "His folks don't want to turn their little boy into a rolling research freak. 'Just fix Nico up and send him home. Our only child!' Soon as I heard that, I thought, aha! So that's why little Nico is spoiled. But know what? It turns out he's not an only child. He's got about a half-dozen sisters. They don't count, apparently. Is that some kind of Islamic thing, or something?"

"I wouldn't know."

"Kind of a specialist, are you?"

"Did you tell these people that a little research might help the next kid who decides to go geriatric overnight?"

Linda sighs, exasperated on both sides. "What do you want to do? He is their kid, after all. Oh, Nico himself would love doing the pony show, I'm sure. He'd jump at the chance to sass the country's leading medical investigators. But Mama's the bottom line, wouldn't you say? 'Give me a new generation of mothers, and I will give you a new world.' "

"Run that by me again?"

"Nothing you'd know. It's from a book. And not a manual. Don't worry, it won't be on the Boards."

Hang up now, and the tiff will propagate. He can feel it already, building toward chain reaction. He doesn't even feel like intervening, smoothing things over. Even throwing the offense back at her takes too much energy. Sullenness is too obvious, though. Would only give her more occasion to egg him on. He needs to find some neutral, not-too-icy politeness, and get out.

But he can think of nothing more to ask. He doesn't even have to inquire about the reason for the admission. Median age of death: thirteen. Few true cases make it to the adulthood that mocks them. Cardiovascular crack-up, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, vessels pissing out of the parched scalp, systemic deterioration of the organs. The kid's body clock is simply shutting down early, like an office on New Year's Eve, pitching it in after only half a morning's work. Nicolino is dying of a parody of old age. No other name for it, unless, like the newspapers, you go with "natural causes."

Linda is insouciant, oblivious to his tangles. When Kraft doesn't fill the silence, she does. "You any good with Dodger statistics, by the way?"

"You're asking the wrong guy." Wrong in every way. Linda; leave me. Don't waste another day of your twenties on this lost cause. Come back when you've worked your way through the rest of the state, the men who like to do things at night, the ones who'll match your bursts and stoke you up and make you flash on and keep you as alive, as supple as you still are. Come back when you're ready to go stiff, to end things. I won't have moved.

"Oh, sorry. That's right. You led a deprived childhood, didn't you? I forgot. Mowgli, the jungle boy. No Sweetarts, no juice-filled wax vampire fangs. No national pastime. That explains everything."

He feels his muscles initiating the shove-off, biceps starting to reverse-curl the thousand-pound receiver back onto its cradle when he hears her ask, "Sleep any better last night?" Her words shine with confused, hurt highlights, a banished me-neither tone — can't you guess? Hearing it, he can no longer help himself. He needs her otherness. He hangs on her every distraction the moment work stops. Addicted already, and following the viscous, familiar path of habituation, he will soon need her even during daylight hours. A fix, a whiff, just to start moving in the mornings.

He loves her absurdly, immaturely. His blood hops up with the high schooler's full panoply of anticipation and dread. He would tell her now, but for Kean working in the next cubicle to his. And yet: he will not say so, even in their next night-long privacy. How else except by silence can he hope to keep her all along his length, always, and when the hour comes, still a permanent stranger?

She does not ask, as her voice hints, Are you on call tonight? Instead, her words assume the courage neither of them has. "There's nothing to be afraid of, you know."

But there is. Is everything. All the world must be run from. Little girls stump for miles on severed stems across a wasted city to come ambush him in the dark. Old golden-agers a lifetime beyond his roam the pediatrics ward, dying on him in the prime of childhood. How can he tell her, and not drive her hastening away?

He knows no more about progeria than he can afford to learn. And he can afford to learn no more than he needs to string along and pass the next certification. What's it to ya, buddy? Absolutely nothing.

Nobody, it appears, has even a game show's clue about the thing's etiology. Without a shred of supporting evidence, a little one-room school of thought lays suspicion on a hereditary cause. Sure, why not? Throw it on top of the "congenital" heap, the fuck-ups in the master switches twisting the body this way and that like hideously abused Raggedy Anns and Andys. The intermediary gaps between "Ann" and "and," and "and" and "Andy" fill with any number of permutations on battered puppethood: microcephaly (pinheadedness in less polite circles), protrusion of the meninges and neural elements out the rear of the little baby back ribs, the whole salad bar of androgynies and cretinisms, endocrine leaks and overflows, organs on fire or attacking themselves, hips and limbs and skeletal connectors pointed every which way but useful. Or simply missing. Stolen. Never delivered.

Genetic disorder is Kraft's absolute first nightmare category. It is corruption at the source, at the point of manufacture. Obscenity nuzzles up close to molecular innocence, suckling its infantile teat the way flies lap at a running sore. If purpose can be scattered akeady, even here, then what's the point? The morning's first shadow casts itself over his ward. And worst of all, all these specific charts — the No-Face, the Nephrosis, the Septal Defect — they have all been born just hours before the breakthroughs that might have saved them.

They are, perhaps, the last generation to be struck down before the arrival of the ultimate gene-weaponry. Cures are coming, just around the corner, all but here. Fantasy treatments, fictive fairy diagnostics, complete in-the-womb screenings, packets of substitute chromosome segments to replace the defective instructions. His successor physicians will have every intervention imaginable, thought-designed curative texts placed into action simply by specifying the right combination of magic words. Kraft and the rest of the last graduating class of witch doctors have only their blundering surgical corrections, bulling about with knives, helping sometimes but always at crippling expense, buying the necessary patch job at ruinous rates the day before a massive, half-price giveaway.

No firm evidence proves that Hutchinson-Gilford is, in fact, a twist in the master narrative. And yet, lumping it with congenital disorders beats the pathological alternatives. Bald, diminutive, withered twelve-year-old kid, his skin yellowed like ancient newspaper, his whole circulatory system corroding to worthlessness. We're clearly not dealing with infectious disease here, not even one of the truly exotic. And if it were a contagion? Kids passing progeria around, picking up communicative old age as easily as croup. Whole playgrounds turned to pensioners in a matter of weeks. Lawrence Welk hastily recast to include Saturday morning cartoons. Now there would be a real plague, one worthy of Kraft's day and age.

An environmental cause is at least conceivable. Some erratic, unidentified toxin accumulating in secret tissue. But it has no geographical outbreaks, no stricken communities like the ones becoming mundanely familiar even to those, like Kraft, who studiously avoid the nightly scoop operas. Nutrition, perhaps. God and the social workers only know what specialty dishes they're feeding youngsters in the town's eastern marches this season. But if age were ingestible, Southern California — the whole holistic concept—would be awash in juvenile octogenarians.

Perhaps cause lies somewhere on the far, sinister end of the spectrum. Chance micro-hit. Physical injury. Damage incurred through the placenta or sustained at birth. Regulatory mechanism wiped out in one systemic shock. A blow to the head, deliberate or — always that ludicrous euphemism — accidental. Accidents do happen, but the stats don't jibe. Ten American children are killed each day by handguns alone. Yet only fifty of these little old men have appeared in the entire historical record. If it is injury, then strange, reticent, internal, even molecular — not one of the more expedient violences of this increasingly adept twilight culture.

Etiology cannot help Kraft, as is so often the case. How this freak, this Nico happened to put on six decades in as many years is of less interest than what to do about it. Thank the bureaucrats that be that Kraft doesn't have to deal with the case. How can anyone hope to treat the kid? He's brittle, beaked, dry. Dermis like phyllo. Only, it's not old age. No senility, no wasting of the CNS. Half his organs are untouched. The kid's got spring in his legs yet, even if he looks more third-base coach than runner.

Jesus, the kid's a kid. Whatever else it may or may not be, freakish aging is a childhood condition. And there, precisely, is the whole hopeless situation in a handbag. The would-be Department of Pediatrics, Dr. Joseph "It's Under Control" Milstein presiding, is about as mythically monolithic as that twenty-five-language empire on the other side of the globe, at this very minute breaking into a caldron of contentious turfs. Their service is no more than a Jack-and-the-bean-curve, a wide-load Gaussian with Infancy on one end and Adolescence on the other, with a class of cases fat in the mode-peaked middle for which English has no good word.

Pediatrics is not a discipline. It's a default, a catchall. Kraft cannot connect even its two main provinces. The bins themselves are hopelessly coarse: from birth to vertical, and from vertical to near voting age. What, pray tell, is the common denominator between pyelonephritis and Munchausen syndrome by proxy? In one, the kidneys drive the parents crazy; in the other, the parents drive the kidneys insane. The specialty is designed by one of those guys who go into bookstores and order a yard and a half of red hardbacks no taller than eight inches. As Dr. Brache once told him (and irony lies outside the bounds of Miss Peach's rhetorical modes), if you can crack a fourteen-month-old's chest, than you can wean a fourteen-year-old off crack.

The international community, from Kraft's third-hand vantage, is currently engaged in some intensive R & D, smoking up several delicious monster scenarios for the coming collective blowout. Things are definitely on the march. Nightly news lays out its attendant horrors in a series of thought-eradicating, three-minute music videos. Ice caps melt. Fuel reserves push toward asymptote, with nothing anyone can do about it. Debt amasses faster than global capital. IRS computers threaten to trigger the long-teetering global financial shutdown by issuing checks and debits essentially at random. The president's astrologer joins the Secretary of Defense in clicking off the Patmos checklist of critical warning signals. And Angel City, an incredible place to live for Those About to Die, has about a decade and a half s jump on all other up-and-comers.

But Pediatrics supplies Kraft with an alternative wrap-up scenario. The department nurses, whom he tries to avoid for reasons not sufficiently buried in his checkered past, report this tremendous spike in preemies, SIDS cases, placental substance dependence, inherited autoimmune deficiencies — slopes ramping up for an assault on the airy altitudes above the graph-paper tree line. His imagination is entranced by the chance of an annual power skid in the male-to-female ratio, not just statewide, but throughout the euphemistically labeled developed countries. A Pink Shift drifts demographics measurably away from snips and snails, sugar-and-spiceward. An almost imperceptible but steady 0.1 percent reduction in males per live birth per year, when coupled with the recent slight increase in male infant mortality rates, and the shift reveals nothing less than the steady girlification of the world, with its inevitable — although belated — precipitous drop in procreation.

Wouldn't that be the ultimate kicker? After all the high-visibility threats, the dire predictions proliferating like food stamps, the concerted forward two-and-a-halfer over the brink of willful critical mass, to wind up perishing slowly from irreversible sex-ratio drift, brought on by some invisible drinking-water effect on gamete motility? Sure, it smacks of wishful thinking on Kraft's part, when faced with the grab bag of aggressively masculine apocalypses, to hope that the species might sink into a more benign disappearance, a surfeit of female.

But until the collective end of choice arrives, or until he finishes this service and graduates to the next one — the VA, a weekend cake promenade in comparison — whichever comes first, he is compelled to make his minor mitigations for those sufferers who share nothing in common except their unripe green. Monsters, freaks of gene or accident or pathology, race up and down these halls in relays, in fifty-yard dashes leading to no medal, no record, nowhere. Files of them, parades of shell-shocked, half-staffed pilgrims. What's it to you?

"Okay. Now roll over. Move your arm like this."

"God. Lay off. You're killing me."

"Don't be such a baby."

"Stop. Wait. No, really, Linda. I need both my arms. It's a professional thing."

"Oh, come on. Why is it that men start shrieking at the least little hint of therapeutic pain?"

"Who you calling a man? Jesus. I think you dislocated it."

"Then it probably needed to be dislocated. It's for your own good. I've never seen anyone with more restricted mobility."

"Yeah? Well that comes from years of conscientious discipline."

"Discipline? You ungulate, you. I ought to teach you the meaning of the word."

"I'm sure you could."

"Do you want me to fix you or not?"

"I ain't broke."

"That's what all the boys who come see me say. Your little mascot these days, Tony the Tuff? Diminutive little machismo thug. He sits in my office whining that it hurts when he grimaces."

" 'Don't grimace?' "

"No. Don't get your ear cut off next time. Now, if you want to talk about real bravery…"

"I'm supposed to sing 'Sank heven vor leetel gerlz' now, right? Speaking of which, did you give them to her?"

"Give what to who?"

"Joy. The books."

"Of course I gave them to her. You think maybe I fenced them for their street value?"

"What did she say?"

"When I brought them to her, she just… I'm sorry. You know, those eyes. It's like: 'I have to protect you from what you don't know about the world.' She thanked me profusely, and begged me to thank you, and looked up to me, deadly serious, and said, 'Do you want to read them out loud to me?' Like that's the only official way of doing these things. Like they were part of some…"

"And what did you say?"

"Will you shut up, please, and let me tell this story? I asked her, Would you like me to read them to you?' To which she very tentatively suggested, 'I think I would rather look at them carefully during my free time.' "

"Free time? Free time from what?"

"From her self-designated study periods. We have to graduate, didn't you know?"

"Oh God."

"Here. This way. A little radial…"

"And did she read them?"

"She took what is for her a leisurely stroll through them, compared to the day and a half she usually takes to polish off the histories and almanacs. Then she tried to return them with the usual politeness. When I told her they were hers, she said she had a few questions. Why does that boy, when they wheel him into the garden, say I shall live forever? That other boy, the one who never grew up: How is that possible?' Not your typical twelve-year-old concerns."

"Utter failure, in other words."

"Oh, I don't know. Who can say what Joy's imagination is capable of? That she's kept pace with reality is astounding."

"Not her. I mean me. Utter failure in selecting tides."

"I wouldn't say that either. Okay, now the planar axis."

"Ouch. Oh Christ. What are you doing to me?"

"I'm not sure. But you love it, don't you? Admit it. Admit it or I'll twist your little wing right off.".

"Anything. Anything."

"Undress me."

"What? Here? In the middle of…?"

"Come on, come on. Am I going to have to do this myself?"

"Espera! Oh holy. Shh. Stop. People will hear."

"So what? They'll just think, Hmm. Old Dr. Kraft in there, bashing the bishop."

"Old?"

"Enough to know what he's doing."

"Oops! I'm afraid that's my beeper."

"Look at him grin. I hadn't realized you could make it go off just by wishing."

He does not say good-bye, or set the time and place for finishing what they have started. He does not tell her that far more than the foot is in danger, that getting away with just the calf would be deliverance. His old saving grace: say as little as contractually necessary.

And when he sees the child next, for a set of scans, she welcomes him with a smile that would be shy if it weren't visibly shaken. He thinks: The pain. It's starting. It will wring her until she cries out to be killed.

But it is not the pain. Not yet. Something else drives her brown-petal face ashen. "Dr. Kraft," she tells him excitedly, swallowing the consonants in a ghostly holdover of lost Asian highlights. Ghostly for them both. "I have seen him. He's here, right here on my floor. The boy. The boy who never grew up!"

(A softbound text works its way to the top of the To Do stack. Its ocher cover mirrors a map maker's fantasy: the Land of Faith, the Land of Infidels, the Promised Land, all bound by the Unknown Ocean, crossed bravely by two intrepid small craft and a spouting sea monster. An ink noose tightens around the book's title, The World Awakens, Part III. The loop fills with snorer's zzz's. The spine is split and a sewn signature of pages slips loose.)

… occupational rescue work in a dark time — the stopgaps that a people summon at the moment of collapse — would make a profitable study. The psychology of decline, the realization that progress has reversed and that history is entering upon a long, perhaps terminal decay, must be one of the most revealing of civilization's convictions. But such speculation lies beyond the scope of this endeavor…

… a narrow span of nine years in the Europe of the early sixteenth century. Few periods have been more ambivalently explosive than the years 1527 to 1535. The dissemination of printed matter through movable type, rapid expansion of trade, advances in medicine led by Paracelsus's epochal surgical manual, a density of artistic genius such as the world never again produced, and the daily exodus of ships embarking westward on a salubrious footrace of nations were cause for the highest optimism.

Yet the underside of the era's developments more than kept pace. The scale of political intrigue and social dislocation stripped conviction from even the age's most gifted. Signs and portents — the comet of 1531, the Gnostic calculations pointing to the fifteenth centennial of the Savior's death, Columbus's prophetic fulfillment in gathering together the globe's scattered races (a collision from which the world has yet to recover) — become the basis for a more substantive chiliasm. The renewed Turkish incursions, Müntzer's Peasants' Uprising, the endless roles of famine and crop failure, returns of Plague, horrific distribution of wealth, the sundering of the sole institution that had held Europe alive for the thousand years since the collapse of the Western Empire, and Luther's new timetable for the perpetually impending Visit all attest to a climate of frightened expectation.

For one highly cultivated, multinational confederation the size of Western Europe, these years truly were the end of history. Pizarro and his two hundred soldiers sprung their ambush in Cajamarca town square, captured the Incan emperor, and slaughtered his four-thou-sand-man bodyguard. The Cuzco hegemony fell, and an empire as remarkable as any the world has seen vanished into legend.

From the home ports, a fabulous, golden land seemed to rise up from the sea in the nick of time expressly to solve intractable overpopulation, inflation, stagnation, unemployment, and restless violence. Yet the overnight infusion of new goods — tobacco, tubers, maize, gold, human lives — only increased the disruption of populations. By 1527, all Europe was crisscrossing the seas in carracks and caravels. Assembling a fleet became a nation's rite of passage, a frenzied, peripatetic hunt for commodities and resources. But by a process that has become historical law, a sudden, often inflationary increase in the material stakes brought about a proportional expansion in the risk of disastrous…

(A passage obscured here by vigorous Crayola spirals, scarlet, canary-yellow, Adriatic blue-green.)

… had angered Charles with the Cognac maneuverings. The emperor's response was to incite a force of mercenaries under Frunds-berg. We are fortunate to possess, almost intact, the diary of Michael Klotz, a Lutheran lance commander in the condottiere's band, a remarkable document providing, like Cellini's on the other side, a firsthand account of the Sack. Klotz writes of the devastation the Landsknechte cut on the way through Lombardy, where they merged with the duke of Bourbon's army for a combined drive down the Via Emilia upon the Eternal City.

Privately, Klotz favored the last-minute attempts to patch up a truce between pope and emperor. But the terms offered by Clement and accepted by Charles's agent were too niggling for the twenty thousand German and Spanish troops, stoked by promises of pillage and booty. Klotz could no more sway his own brigade than Frunds-berg or Bourbon could restrain the force as a whole. The army now advanced on the capital of Christendom with an independent will.

By April, Rome at last realized that it was the object of the march. On Easter, a crazed recluse ran through the streets, calling on the bastard children of Sodom to repent or be destroyed. Desperate defense preparations commenced, but these came too late. The pope's guard were outnumbered at least five to one. Skillful use of the walls and existing artillery managed to thin the attacking squares. Soon, however, the pope was forced back upon the Castel Sant'Angelo. Cellini tells us how he single-handedly…

(Two more pages of florid Crayola, now a jeweled, sunken garden through which float disembodied figurines, boats, fireworks, and several uppercase Hs and Os, alongside a chorus line of amorphous shepherd's crooks.)

The task of safeguarding the endless inventories of artistic splendor in the papal treasuries fell to the younger Antonio da Sangallo. Antonio, nephew of the great Sangallo architect brothers, then headed the building project whose funding schemes — excessive taxations, selling of papal indulgences, and the like — had precipitated the calamitous unraveling of the Western world…

Many of the treasury objects were melted down rather than allowed to fall into the hands of the Northern invaders. Cellini himself (who derided Antonio as a tasteless woodworker) personally destroyed unique masterworks of his own art, as well as works by his greatest contemporaries and predecessors.

But Sangallo had another plan, equally outlandish, one that meant to preserve the achievements of civilization from the storm. The shape of the secret measures emerges only from gaps in the record. The master builder worked around the clock in the confines of the Vatican, packing sandbags to fill Sixtus's private chapel, hoping to protect the Botticelli, Perugino, and Ghirlandajo frescoes from falling mortar and to absorb the bombardment's shocks to Michelangelo's already world-famous tabernacle to Creation. Antonio worked steadily and without much hope to preserve the triumphs of the imagination from reality's latest onslaught, stacking sand in the full knowledge that this was neither the first, nor the last, nor even the most senseless of polities' annihilating sieges.

Antonio's daring plan was carried out on the night of May 6, as the invaders poured through the breached walls in a turmoil of fog and artillery fire. He assembled, in the now-barricaded papal apartments, as many of the quarter's juvenile homeless as he could find. Street urchins were the ideal cover, the last bodies that a pillaging mercenary would think to shake down. On his own initiative, Sangallo doled out priceless medallions, cameos, portraits, reliquaries, vessels, precious glass, and jewelry to this band of cutthroat children, instructing them to carry the fortunes away and threatening them with God's eternal damnation if they should fail to return so little as a single piece of sacred art after the danger subsided.

And so it came about that a considerable part of the richest collection of artifacts in Europe passed into the impoverished streets inside the torn shirt seams of children, not one of them privileged enough ever to have attended school…

Klotz relates, with fascinated horror, the events of those eight days. His professional soldiers degenerated into a blood-drinking mob, killing at random for sheer pleasure, ransacking churches and libraries and palazzi, destroying the university, starting fires with irreplaceable manuscripts, looting anything that looked pawnable, carrying off all movable painted surfaces and destroying much of the immovable out of spite, torturing eminences, parading about in cardinals' vestments, desecrating altars, proclaiming Luther the pope, forcing nuns and young women and girls into the Piazza del Popolo at sword point for a promiscuous carnival of violation.

(The word "promiscuous" clumsily circled by crude exclamation points.) In one senseless indulgence, marauders entered the orphanage of Santo Spirito Hospital and slaughtered all the helpless who had assumed sanctuary there. The pope was held prisoner in the Castello; law and decency had come to an end. It is little wonder that the Sage of Rotterdam saw in the Sack "not the destruction of a single city, but of the entire world."

Klotz's share of the spoils, if we credit his account, was modest. He spent the first two days attempting to restore decorum. As papal resistance dissolved, he roamed the streets trying to reduce the brutality of his men. He writes at length about rescuing a tiny boy and girl from the hands of a loot-incensed cavalier. The soldier had discovered brooches in the children's possession — an encrusted filigree pin, a Romanesque silver winged grotesque, and a Florentine terra-cotta. Klotz killed the molesting soldier with some evident satisfaction.

There follows a long, sometimes pathetic passage in which Klotz describes taking the children under his private protection during the fierce, waning days of the Sack. His harrowing inner battle between the altruistic impulse to protect these wartime refugees, followed by what seem to have been repeated, ungovernable bouts of baser…

(Two pages cleanly excised by razor blade or moral equivalent)

… upon Klotz's return to Germany and his rise through the ranks of the imperial armies. Eight years after the Sack of Rome he was involved in another siege. This time, he was deployed against the Catholic capital's very opposite: the Anabaptist stronghold of Münster, the protestant New Jerusalem.

The Anabaptist movement, a loose uprising of millennial sects, gained momentum in Germany and the Low Countries during the troubled late 1520s and early 1530s. Hans Hut, a bookbinder turned prophet, died mysteriously in an Augsburg prison in 1527, having prophesied Christ's return for the following year. The wandering visionary Melchior Hofmann gathered a wide following, preaching a period of woes that would culminate in revelation in 1533. And in that year, mass expectation of the End began to turn the prosperous Hanse town of Münster into a grotesque parody of the City of God on Earth.

In early February 1534, the merchant Knipperdollinck and the Dutchman Jan Beuckelson (John of Leiden) ran screaming through the city's streets calling on people to repent. They managed to provoke an armed uprising of converted Anabaptists, who took over the town hall. The council, weakened by infighting and filled with Lutherans eager to protect their own freedom of worship, did nothing to oppose the revolt. Assisted by the arrival of his spiritual master, the gaunt, bearded ascetic Jan Matthys of Haarlem, Beuckelson rapidly took over. Armed mobs ejected all misbelievers from the town, appropriating their property and condemning to a February snowstorm a stream of dispossessed, including expectant mothers and infants.

The Dutch proclaimers of the Second Coming were left to establish an absolute theocracy, a divinely inspired island of the Chosen amid history's final deluge. Matthys began implementing the Utopian communalism that would for a few months turn the city insane. Private money was abolished, and property was commonly distributed. All books except the Bible were set ablaze on a pyre in the cathedral square. Public execution of dissenting voices took place to the accompaniment of hymns.

To restore order, the bishop of Münster threw up earthworks around the town. But his forces were too weak to lay a fully effective siege. On Easter, Matthys, now absolute dictator of the city, claiming divine assurance of success, rode out with a handful of men to scatter the besieging army. Matthys and his suicidal squad were sliced apart without mercy.

Back inside the walls, the cloak of leadership fell to Beuckelson. Obeying mystic revelations, he implemented a strict rotation of labor and appointed a governing body of twelve elders. He instituted polygamy and compelled all women under a certain age to marry. By year's end, polygamy had devolved into a kind of mandatory, rampant promiscuity. Beuckelson so inflamed his little garrison of two thousand men that they repeatedly withstood the attacks of episcopal forces several times their size.

In September, a goldsmith named Dusentschur stood in the Prin-zipalmarkt and announced that God had chosen Beuckelson as king of kings, ruler of all the nations of earth, and Messiah of the Last Days. Such was Beuckelson promptly ordained, to increasing murmurs among the fanfare. Streets, gates, days of the week, even children were all given new names. An ornamental coinage was struck, and Beuckelson surrounded himself with the trappings of an ornate fantasy court. While requisitioning goods from the poor to pay for this splendor, the new king assured them that the day was at hand when stones would be turned to bread and mud into gold. The Third Age was here, when the Children of God would inherit an earth richer than their wildest dreams.

Sympathetic Anabaptist uprisings erupted across the North. At last realizing the scale of events at Münster, the states of the empire joined together in sending money and soldiers to topple Beuckelson's messianic kingdom. By the time Klotz arrived to seal off the blockade in January of 1535, life inside the city had descended into a last, macabre nightmare. Fantastic feats of stagecraft were devised for the starving populace — athletic tournaments, masques, obscene masses performed in the cathedral. Trumpeters went about delivering concerted blasts at all hours, the signal for townsfolk to assemble in the square, under penalty of death, and listen to the king's latest inspirations.

Much of what Klotz describes, however fantastic, is corroborated by sources inside the walls. In May, Beuckelson began resorting to mass executions of his starving, hysterical subjects. Many believers were ready to be transported up to heaven along with him. At first, those who came to their senses were allowed to leave the city, but the imperial forces refused to let them through the siege lines. Klotz describes how these creatures crawled about like animals in the moat between the city walls and the besieging earthworks, grazing on grass, begging to be put to death. These were the lucky ones; subsequent defectors were quartered and nailed up about town.

Klotz's task was to shell the northern ramparts along the Buddenturm with cannonades of leaflets, imploring the citizens of the town to turn on their king and thus avoid a massacre. He reports that by the siege's gruesome end, the desperate garrison had been whittled down to starved children. When the besiegers finally pierced the city and overcame the last, fanatical defense, they had to pick their way through carnage beyond imagining. Stacks of corpses lined the streets, most so mutilated by execution, scavenging, or disease that the aged could not be told from the young.

The surviving Anabaptist leaders, Beuckelson and Knipperdol-linck, were singed to death with red-hot irons. Klotz reports that the king made no sound during his torture, nor did he recant. Their bodies were hung in lead cages from the spire of the Lambertikirche.

At precisely this time Michelangelo, old and misanthropic, embittered by history, returned to the Sistine Chapel, now free of San-gallo's sandbagging, to add to his ceiling's Creation a transforming footnote: the horrifying Last Judgment, that most pitiless work in Western art…

(Crayola flowers, houses, their chimneys curly with Prussian-blue smoke, some simple words, a girl's stick face, a fighter airplane spewing pudgy, rainbow caterpillars of bullets …)

Well, yes: of course. Through the arabesques of innocence's syllogisms, the conclusion grows obvious to him. Her insight shines as brightly as the pool of early reader flashlight under the covers at night. Kraft backtracks through the steps of her logic. And she has it weirdly right. Still adept, Joy infers what he has missed. The codger in the Dodger cap is not a little boy propelled into a sensationally aged body. Exactly the reverse. The new kid on the block is the Laotian myth-equivalent of Methuselah, a spirit older than entire generations who perversely refuses to detach himself from boyhood.

The explanation she comes up with is simpler, closer to the bone. A child shriveling from the husk inward still stays green in the core. She asks the boy's name. Kraft tells her, as if he, like Linda, has known the tag all along. He sees her roll the clinical syllables around on her tongue. She tries the name out loud: "Nicolino." Beyond doubt, one of the lost boys. Fell out of the perambulator in Kensington Gardens. Corroded by time in outward stuff, while remaining essentially untouched. All children, except one, grow up. I've seen him; he's just flown in the window of the ward.

"That book you gave me…" He knows what she struggles to protest: every word of it, the literal, documentary truth.

Kraft considers giving her Hutchinson-Gilford disease to add to the pile of homework assignments she keeps by the side of her bed. Prrogeria's Pan, the ward's most fantastic invalid ever, might outdo all the study texts she has so meticulously assembled. The boy who never grew up: brutal practicality leaves her no fiercer a fairy tale. Joy will need myth much more outrageous — absurdly, magically more — to live through the mystery ahead of her.

She will need to believe far worse, and wilder. Kraft can't even compose faith's prerequisite list, so deeply has measurement encroached on his own credence. She will need to hope that escalating pain has some surprise, hidden by design until the redeeming twist. She will have to keep believing that the physician she adores is not poisoning her for pleasure with sloe nausea fizzes and chemo chasers. Let her believe. Let her escape the exam constraints this once, buy in, subscribe to any prognostic faith that helps her account for the nursery damned. Believe any transparency at all rather than come to the one unskirtable truth Kraft himself would still deny if he could: that all children will grow up, except this believing one.

And forty-eight hours suffice to prove that her take on the new boy is in every way superior to Kraft's own. Nicolino is not a child; he is a phenomenon, a hell-raiser of perverse proportions impossible for anyone under retirement age on what Linda still insists on calling God's earth to achieve. He moves in with both overnight bags blazing, and before the week is out, he not only owns the ward, he's backdated the deed. After ten days, he's ruling the rotting, disease-infested roost as if that's the way things have been since time out of mind.

Joy is right: this is no geriatric boy. He's an incontestable old-timer, hanging on to the sandlot by his gnarled claws. Linda's not the only one to get solicited. The better part — and Kraft has to admire the squib's taste — of the female staff assembles with bewildered frequency at the ward nurses' station comparing incredulities. Did that kid say what I think he said?

On rounds, Kraft himself hears the precocious lecher come on to Suzi Banks, the Colostomy Girl. Asks to see the lump under her dress. And virtually in the same breath, the mini-mogul hits up on Joleene Weeks, whose response to acute lymphatic havoc has been to drift into a kind of self-induced autism. "You're cute," he tells her. "When did you first do it?"

"Do what?" the girl manages, her first, faltering verbal steps independent of the Chatty Cathy in more than a week.

"Coy one, are we? I like that in a woman. 'Still waters run deep,' and like that."

Still waters? Kraft's pretty sure that catch phrase died out with democracy in America. Where the hell does this kid come from? Kraft tries asking, with a kind of verbal head-pat, in their first conversational exchange. So, uh, you're not from around these parts, are you? Nico snaps at him, "Right down the street. Read the chart, Dr. Killdeer."

Time-scrambled sass, and weirder than it is rude. Who taught this little Spanky to speak? The diction instructor is revealed after a few days when the little old guy produces, from out of nowhere, several gross of comics — a major-league library of them. Complete, contiguous series span the whole illustrated spectrum from classic demigods down to diluted, contemporary, adolescent chelonians. The collection incorporates everything from old Arthropodmen and Vigilante Patrols to Tender Traumas, Tales from Beyond Terrors, strips starring inflatable bubble-figures, Masterplots Illustrated^ (including four-color, frame formats of The Ambassadors and The Magic Mountain), the adventures of Arnie and pal Jimjam (at a ridiculously recently integrated Brookvale High), Green Stingers, Dark Cowls, cartoon anthro rats, cats, and wombats — all the perennials, and some tides so obscure they barely lasted through single numbers, not to mention a European department complete with a Gallic imperial pocket of resistance, two Fleming kids constantly getting one another into big-time trouble, and a cowlicked cosmopolitan news reporter somewhere between fifteen and a hundred fifty years old.

Nico unpacks not only this Rabelaisian bibliotheque, but also a thick, loosely bound Blue Book of his own devising that accompanies the collection. In it, he has carefully cross-listed, in the block letter capitals of a spastic on a muscle stimulant, every single issue number, its publisher, date, and point of acquisition, a synopsis of the adventure, and, of course, the volume's fair resale price. The pricing scheme has only one foot, size 2½, in the realm of supply and demand. For instance, an old Cosmic Sentinel scarce enough to command the bulk of an upper-middle-class ten-year-old's annual allowance even back when Kraft was doing his own international assets trading costs roughly the same as a buck-a-bushel dentist's office throwaway.

His market yardstick has nothing to do with peddlable rarity. It's something altogether different — use value, readability, the catalyzing spark, or some other subjective look under the hood. Whatever his pricing formula, Nicolino imposes mercantile order upon the naive economic anarchy of the pede department. Every item in his comic inventory is available for open circulation, but only after the book value has been coughed up.

He establishes a cashless barter system. "Gotta watch it or those Fed creeps'll be on our cases." Other kids' comics, from parental care packages once shared out freely, are kicked into the kitty according to a rigorous system of swapped debits and credits. He'll take any currency: broken hand-held LCD games, Mars bars (unwrapped are half value), singing rings — anything with resale potential. Nico introduces new commodity wrinkles from day to day, producing, by spontaneous generation, bulk shipments of cinnamon-soaked toothpicks, iridescent kaleidoscope disks, or silly sand. Rooms of the demoralized listless soon start to hum with the biggest trading racket since Green Stamps. He is utterly scrupulous; he will not skim or scalp. If a Fantastic Forces returns to his pool in roughly initial condition, it will earn back its original price or the equivalent in, say, multicolored water-pistol pens. Yet he's dead firm on the rates of exchange. He's not going to trade a good Saviors of the Universe for anything less than two middleweight ghost yarns plus a knock-off heartthrobber. In this manner his catalog steadily grows. But somehow, so do the smaller satellite stockpiles of his trading partners. In a form of perpetual motion, the ward's magic cottage industries begin to generate wealth.

But this free-enterprise zone is the least of Nicolino's impacts on the nation of sick children. He forms the inhabitants, both terminal and transient, into voting blocks, loose political parties that he then coerces into running referenda on the kids' choice for chief nurse and head resident. He presents the results, scribbled in pencil on a nubbly-edged sheet of shabby spiral-notebook paper, to the staff. When the mandate fails to produce the demanded changes, the new ward boss— his own constituency more or less ensured — starts talking hunger strike and sets himself up as People's Government in Exile.

He gradually picks up the tempo of the place until it lags just behind his own. He cannot keep still long enough even to do up his laces. He rallies his troops, splits them into rebus-solving R & D teams. He sets them to work prototyping escape vehicles. He enlists them in cracking jigsaws — a 1,496-piece Garden of Earthly Delights spread across the top of his bedcovers, for want of enough flat space anywhere else. He teaches them to sing innocuous verses that turn obscene when sung as rounds. He organizes gangway-long grudge matches of Smear the Queer with the Ball. He awards the highest-ranking, most loyal of his cadres with revolving tides, offices, and privileges. He designs gambling ladders, plays out pools on sporting events using tons of colored golf tees as the stakes. He endows taffy pulls, paper airplane competitions (prizes for both outrageous design and distance flight), potato-printing marathons — activities selected exclusively for their ability to leave a trail of carnage in their wake.

He doesn't sleep. Some voice must somehow rag him into trying to thrash time while time is still his to thrash. At ridiculous hours, he appears at the bedsides of all-too-willing friends, whispering "Are you awake?" until they are. Then come the first of the expeditions, slipping invisibly past the adult night watch to whatever destinations they might pick their way into without tripping alarms. They shoot for the roof heliport or raid the inner kitchens as if they were Prester John's lost kingdom or the source of the Nile. There they fall upon whatever loose prizes they can carry off undetected.

In less time than it takes him to age another decade, Nicolino wins over the whole turf. Those who had been most frightened by his beak and baldness become the most devoted. That's the source of his manic power. Convince them there's nothing to be afraid of. That you're just one of the gang. The only place where this one's ever going to be inconspicuous is front and center, in the brightest light. In days, Nico comes into his own, kingpin of these victims, the race of those singled out for damage, barred from public playgrounds.

The boat girl alone treats him with a mixture of suspicion and astonishment. "What's with What's-her-namee-vong?" Nicolino asks Chuck, the No-Face, whose fantastic handicap, despite his angelic good nature, promotes him to Nico's second-in-command and senior partner in crime.

Chuck shrugs. "Think she had to have some stuff taken out of her ankle."

"Not that matter, Cluckie. I mean, how come she's got her head up her bunghole and her nose in dictionaries all the time? We're working some great angles here. And where the crud is she? Studying."

"Maybe we move around too fast for her. She's still a little wobbly…»

"Wobbly? Hah. Ben here is your basic beach ball. Double amputee, and he's in on just about every operation we run."

"I don't know, Nico. Maybe we…"

"Maybe we better go have a talk with this chick, that's what. Let's see. Think she'd go for one of these?" He riffles through his stash of illustrated fiction and produces a Sergeant Shrapnel, all about hand-to-hand fighting on a Pacific island infested with subterranean networks of enemy burrows crawling with giant bamboo rats. A hesitant pause from Chuck makes Nico throw up his age-wasted arms in exasperation. "Come on! Gimme a flipping bee. This is one of the best 'zines I got."

He pulls out the Blue Book as proof, but Chuck stands firm. "Uh-uh, Nico. I don't think so. She likes to read those…"

"I know what she likes to read. That's exactly the problem here, isn't it? Wait. I got it. Here's the ticket." He rummages around in the piles of noncomic trading booty, at last locating a plastic bag no bigger than his fist. "Come on, Cluck. Let's go have a word with this femme."

Preliminaries are awkward. Or, rather, there are no preliminaries. Joy watches them approach from the horizontal, frightened and expectant, as if she has long known that this visit was inevitable.

"Here," Nico says, when they reach her bedside. He thrusts the buy-off peace offering into the boat girl's hands. The boss remains unflustered despite the suppressed giggling on all sides. But it does unnerve him a little when this Joy creature refuses to ask what the present is, resorting instead to label reading.

The bag is full of tiny, brown bulbs that shuffle about as if alive. She watches hushed as the lumps of animate popcorn bang randomly with increasing vigor as she takes them into her hand. The label reads:

Mexican Jumping Beans

Born into the only home they will ever know, gradually expending their finite supply of food, these tiny larvae hurl themselves continuously against the walls of their constricting prisons….

"Immense, huh?" Nico prompts.

"Intense," Chuck is quick to ratify.

But Joy looks up after a moment's incomprehension. "Sad."

"Sad?" Nico fails to keep the note of moral outrage out of his dignified tone.

"Very sad."

Chuck jumps in, the hapless moderator, eager to show the merits of both sides. "Yeah, but, I mean, they can't be unhappy in there. Huh? Because they've never seen anything but the inside. They don't even know about, they can't even picture…"

"Then why are they trying so hard to get out?" Joy's interruption, awful in its certainty, is soft to the point of disappearing. But she looks forgivingly at Chuck; he, at least, is doing the best he can.

"Holy jump up and sit down. Listen to this, will ya? Get outta my star system. Get outta order. I've never heard such drivel. These things are utterly cool. You got to be completely whacked not to see that. And they're illegal too! Any idea what it takes to slip one of these babies past the Agriculture agents they got posted all up and down the borders?"

"Half the children in this hospital have slipped…"

"Wait a minute," Chuck intervenes. "They must be able to get out. If they can't get out, then how do they…?"

"How what, you weed weevil?"

"How does the species, you know…?"

"Procreate?" Joy suggests, at almost speaking volume.

" 'Procreate,' Cluckie? That the word you're looking for?" Nico shoves his buddy, almost spitting with smirk.

The question returns Joy to the magic beans with new intensity. Perhaps there is more to this prison than the identifying label lets on. "Thank you. I'll take care of them," she says, looking into the eyes of the man who never shed boyhood. A nervous treaty, but the one he came to establish.

"Great. You do that. Now tell me one thing. How come you just lie here studying all the time?"

"My leg hurts."

"No, the studying part. I mean, Louise. You're on vacation here."

"We still have to graduate."

"Oh wow. You are spoo-ky. Graduate? Why?" Nico tries to wipe the sweatband of his ball cap without removing it. "Okay, never mind that one. Suppose, just for grins, that I humor you. So what do we have to know for the exam? Go ahead. I'm asking. Graduate me. Learn me something."

She gives him a strange, probing look. Her eyes tell him: You can drop the disguise. No need to pretend with me. I've read your biography. Twice through. And this is where I'm supposed to teach you the end of the story you were eavesdropping on, outside the window, late one interrupted night.

The look, the accusation — I know who you are — rattles him. "Hey, Cluckie. C'mon. Let's blow this peanut stand. We got work to do."

Chuck hesitates a moment, his bandaged face trying to twist into an explanation wide enough to appease everyone. He turns to trot after the boss, when Joy calls them back.

"Wait a minute. 'Lino?" She swallows the first syllables in ignorance or first, awkward attempt at familiarity. The summoned boy returns to bedside, nice and casual like. "I wanted to ask you." She reaches, without letting him from her steady scrutiny, for a thin volume that she has kept at her side since receiving it days back. She fixes on the ancient, taut face, hoping to surprise it into dropping its disguise. "Do you know this story?"

If she flushes out the revealing muscle-flinch she expects, it does not show. Nico takes the hundred and fifty pages, thumbs through it back to front, reads the dedication and the tide page. "I'll swap you two superheroes, a sci-fi, and a kissy thing of your choice."

He looks up. His eyes challenge those of this overlathed dowel, this vanishing girl. "And I'll throw in a mint-condition chocolate cream egg. Just because I'm a nice guy."

For obvious reasons, the premature pensioner becomes Linda's darling. Any kid who not only puts up willingly with her amateur therapy reading but actually ad-libs asides is a patient after her own heart. On her rounds, she quickly learns how to get the maximum rile-up by calling out to him, "How's it hanging, old man?"

He glows under the sobriquet, puts on a palsy act, laces his already disconcerting voice with parody tremolo, and warbles back, "Can't complain. Well, I could complain. In fact…" Or: "Hanging? Wait. Lemme check."

Well, she asked for it. This afternoon, Linda finds Nico and a fraction of his gang camped around a TV. "What's up? What's on?" Perfect chance to get them to tell her one for a change.

"Stupid so-called show about some cartoon future that the friggin' cat dragged in." Nico's betrayal of the spell that has held half a dozen of his cohorts enthralled causes several wounded faces to jerk in hurt incomprehension. His better self, protesting pitifully from its perch on the traditional right clavicle, causes Nico to repent his rudeness by the time-honored method of redoubling it. "Yeah. You heard me right. Dumbshit program here, gentlemen."

"Nico," Linda growls. Quite the little performance he's mustering for her sake. A shame that kind of strutting is restricted to the young, or the old, or whatever her potty-mouthed courtier actually is.

"Oh. Sorry, ma'am. I mean dumb-fu…"

"Cut! That's enough out of you. Somebody fill me in."

But the other kids are too cowed now to give a synopsis, and His Nibs is pulling this royal sulk to punish the woman. So just kick back and watch a while. Linda settles in, tries to catch the drift of this installment's saga. It's set in that obligatory, endless High Chaparral of Space. She can tell it's the outermost Outer, because the guns, bombs, and assorted vehicles of outrageous intricacy are all proton-powered.

Wider and wilder skeins, eternally higher levels of energy manipulation: that's, like the immortal hokey-pokey, what it's all about.

On the one hand, they've got the matter transporter — the be-all and end-all of the whole civilized shooting match. On the other hand, galactic destiny still comes down to a slew of hand-to-hand combats with what amount to electrified meter sticks. The story takes place in two different worlds. One world just doesn't cut it with discriminating audiences anymore. Seems on one of these two, there's this combination architect, civil engineer, and voice crying in the wilderness…

"Hold it. Who is this guy? I can never understand it when they talk through those echo machines."

Suzi Banks peers up suspiciously, steals a glance at Nicolino and then back at Ms. Espera. "Beezaholi," she murmurs, in a coy, little-girl drawl as impenetrable as the cartoon sound effects.

"Say who? Beet-aholic? Would you mind spelling that?"

A violent shush from Nico cannot quell the ranks' revival. Suddenly, paraphrase flies at Linda from all directions, almost as if recounting gives as much pleasure as watching the wrinkle of event unfold in the first place.

"Beezaholi."

"He's eviir

"He's not evil. He's the one's gonna save M-31."

"What's M-31?"

"That's where the Dromedaries live."

"Andromedans, pissbag."

"Oh, them," Linda says. "I remember them. We go way back. What's bugging them this time?"

Childhood's hair-trigger tone detectors threaten to set off a chain reaction of suspicion, jamming all the communicator channels. Linda is rescued by the beautiful Chuck, who says, "They're facing Galactic Heat Death something fierce."

"Sun blowing up on them?"

An exasperated quartet shouts, "No! Dying out slowly." Dummy. Get your stellar thermodynamics straight.

Their spark is going cold, motionless, still. A race against the last ticks of the thermal buzzer before life fades into the freezing vacuum. The fable's appeal is as familiar as the planet-encroaching ice caps visible even from here, in the smogged semitropics of Angel City. Every day, a little trickle of available use escapes irreversibly through the cracks of the system. Cars slow, appliances rust out, neighbors capitulate in a hush. If Linda herself feels it, these kids must be frantic.

These, the fresh heat litmuses, the thermostatic coils still factory mint, must long ago have registered the approach of absolute zero and are left to go about astonished that the planet makes no preparation.

Beezaholi chooses this lull to mumble to himself: "The Cyclogeneron must be assembled on a scale no one has jet imagined. It must span the entire diameter of the star system! Only then mil it be capable of accelerating particles to the velocity needed to give us final power over the very laws of…"

"What's a Cyclogeneron?" Linda asks.

More irritation at her unending trouble with the obvious. But facts are as boundless as their unassuageable underpinning. The more they give to her, the more they have.

"It's this humongous metal ring…"

"More of a torus, really. A doughnut."

"I'm sure. A galaxy-sized metal doughnut. Give me a break."

"Arm or a leg?"

"And it's lined with these awesome hyperelectric solenoids that accelerate these subatomic…"

"And truly brutal cosmic forces come shooting out the other end."

"End? How can a doughnut…?"

"Beezaholi tried to tell the 'Dromedans about it. But that Rathgor, who's got control of the Planetary Radix…"

"Not just Rathgor. All the Phagolytics. It's like they simply don't want to…"

"The whoozy-whats?"

"Rathgor," Beezaholi says, "you must listen. If we don't begin at once to redirect the energy we squander on Amorphicoms into the construction of…"

"Did he say 'Amorphicom'?"

"They're like these immense private jets…"

"I thought they could transport themselves."

"The vehicle part is just a fringe bennie. They're really these ultra-cool live-in pods that you connect yourself to for the most intense…"

"Give up our Amorphicoms, Eee^aholi? You're joking. Why, the mere mention of the idea at the People's Council would…"

"Right on, R. No way! The Amorphi is the coolest thing this side of…"

"And why should we give them up, you bellowing old fool? Just to humor your delusions?"

"Beezy's right. They need the Cyclogeneron, or it is Heat Death City. The end of M-31 as we know it."

"Our people will never surrender the pleasures they have struggled so hard for centuries to secure. People mil kill for the possession ofanAmorphi. To bodypilot is the most rewarding experience known to…"

"They are wickedly wasteful," Jorge concedes.

"And addictive as sin," adds Roberto, Jorge's twin and sometime needle sharer.

"A massive drain on the Grid."

"The Grid?" Linda whispers.

"It's no use. Even if I managed to win over the whole Planetary Radix, we still wouldn't possess more than a fraction of the energy we need to manufacture the Cyclogeneron. The entire tappable Grid wouldn't provide…"

"Could someone tell me why he needs an accelerator the size of a…?"

"Man! You get particles to that speed and collide them: you can Do It All. Make a new star. Create new forces. Name it."

"Only — one hope — left. Must — renew interplanetary contact — with Heli-otria."

"I give up."

"Heliotria. The other world."

"That's it! I knew it. Bishop Perpetuus. The Touring Monks. The Ikonankh."

"Sure, Mr. Massive Brain Case. I could have told you that a half hour ago."

"Much has changed since Andromeda last made contact with Heliotria. The good Bishop Perpetuus must have died generations ago."

"Will somebody please rescue me?"

"Shh! A long time ago they hyper-tapped this other planet, where these monks went about in robes chanting all the time and the head abbot gave them this jewel thing… "

"More like a little metal statue."

"And so long as they had this figure from the monks on Heliotria, the Andromedans could open up the space-time fabric between the planets. Only that was in the past, and now it's the distant future."

"I must return the Ikonankh to Helio…"

"Don't risk it, dude. You'll never get the thing back."

"… where it will act as a powerful beacon, drawing into our galaxy, across the space threshold, all those with special abilities. The ones the Heliotrians call…"

A minor emergency with Suzi Banks's new hardware precludes Linda's witnessing the polychrome passage of the Ikonankh through the opening it tears in space. She returns just in time to exclaim, "Oh, lo-lo-look! See what it's doing! How come the thing is only going after kids?"

"Because" — the shortcut Methuselah at last condescends to address her—"that's the core commercial market for this kind of bullshit. Real adults don't waste their lives watching this Gerber drool."

"Well, you're still hanging around."

"Dodgers don't start for another two hours," Nico says, with the barest giveaway glint. "Quit. You tickle me, lady, you die a slow death."

"Wait a minute." Linda breaks off the brawl. "I just got it. They're all ancient there in M-31, aren't they? They have no…?"

"That's right. Nobody knows how it came about. It's always been that way."

"Oh." The monosyllable comes up out of her throat, a bit of phlegm wrapped around an acid lemon drop that went down the wrong pipe. She will choke on it, on the image of this bewildered Thursday afternoon class, huddled around the fable-fire for whatever feeble electron-beam spark it might still emit, whatever slight stay, its half-hour postponement of heat death. Not one of them knows. Look: look now, what the primitive metal casting does. It stands still while Heliotria's ravenous fads slither past in reflex after-spasms, faster than she can track. It draws toward itself hands still raw from thumb sucking, gathering them up with the crisis touch, catapulting them, adding their increment of ergs to swell the eternally just-insufficient Grid.

The Ikonankh swims in front of her to fill the screen. She watches as the summoning trinket burrows through the tube's phosphor trail and lands in this room. It materializes, pulsing, beating its metal wings, come to recruit a last-ditch rescue for the universe's doomed omnipo-tents, to enlist these ignorant psychics, robust in their innocence, to put them to work assembling, arresting, assisting in the most desperate invention necessity ever mothered.

Meanwhile, in another galaxy just around the bend, Kraft is performing sloppy seconds on an emergency repair cobbled together by Plummer on an eleven-year-old male who was riding semifigurative shotgun in a car that a couple club brothers had taken out on community loan. Ably assisted by a cordial that subsequently registered all kinds of exotic blood concentrations, the driver power-skidded the vehicle into the rear end of a tomato-motif, twenty-four-hour pizza delivery van. The kid cohort happened to be picking his teeth with a wooden skewer at the moment of impact.

His cruising buddies would give no name for him aside from "the Rapparition," a tide they claimed he'd legally earned in brilliant public battle. The boy was past interrogation, so that was the handle that went down on the ER paperwork. Plummer's initial repair consisted of removing the larger bits of toothpick from their resting place in the boy's soft palate. The Rapparition's first slurred words upon swimming up from under the anesthetic were "The movement lives on; you can't slash it down. You can't even long to make it gone."

The scrape of the sutures makes him wretch, but the Rapparition gets the words out. By the time Kraft inherits the kid for all the rest of the patchwork, he's become Carver's blessed peacemaker. When Tony the Tuffian and that Rib Fix from the Crack Pack go tearing each other's sutures out in a territorial blood dispute, the Rapparition interposes himself between them, declaiming,

This is a plea

For u-ni-ty

Between the He and the We

And the Me and the She.

We're on a mission

Here, so don't start dissin'.

Ya got to listen to the Rapparition:

Use your God-given powers of analysis!

We got to break through this crip-pl-ing paralysis.

Kraft could not have put the matter more succinctly. Today's follow-up procedure is aimed at repairing a bit of the damage Plummer's stopgap palate patch-up has done to the Rapparition's dactyls. Nothing life shattering. In fact, almost opera buffa fare compared to much of what society has been shoving under Kraft's blade as of late. But it is, nevertheless, a long, grueling, painstaking, delicate transaction of considerable consequence to one who has chosen speech over any of the deadlier assault weapons in aggression's arsenal. A constructive bit of craftwork, placing it in the decided minority of piece labor assigned Kraft in this place.

Still under the influence of the Rapparition's cadence, half desperate to convince himself of the feasibility of a Lindaesque lightness in the face of wounds beyond fusing, or maybe just punchdrunk with overwork, Kraft notices an upbeat, potato-chip rhythm using his cerebrum as electronic drum pad while he closes. The pernicious little beat goes: Let's have a jammer (uh), I said let's jam (rest, rest, rest) in the slammer. And mixed in there, like undercoatings of old wallpaper forever unsteamable unless one is willing to gouge out half the drywall along with it, the phrase's Renaissance counterpoint: Lulla lullaby, my sweet little baby. What meanest thou to cry?

He senses something expected of him, a rendezvous all arranged and penned into his agenda by unknown secretary. He feels it, the weight of specific disaster, of predetermined public breakdown settling in for the evening, locating the point of perfect parasitic attachment, homing in with all the inevitability of an earnest grade-school mathematician employing approximate roots to close in on an irrational decimal. Armies of omens assemble themselves, fall into the only formation he affords them these days — the short roster, the cursory catalog standing in for a more comprehensive account of approaching capitulation. Generic alphabets, glossaries of collective pathology you do not want enumerated at greater length.

What is this place? The lightest attention limns it: the evidence is everywhere, widening with the decline of light. Poverty in positive feedback. Cascade of chain-failing banks. Earnings not even enough to cover debt service. Volume discounts rewarding the spree mentality. Illiteracy passed down as the only family heirloom, actually cultivated by every trick in the marketing book, because merchandisers, like politicians, prosper from a maimed electorate. Ten-year-olds who can tell caliber and make of a handgun by sound alone, especially in the dark. Toxins trickling down into the aquifer, from which they can never be filtered. All the while, the index of leading indicators — wealth measured by the ability to wage disaster — doctors itself until its message is bearable, even downright rosy to the ears of the self-proclaimed best-informed people on earth. Of the two alternatives in the ancient grudge match, Thanatos clearly has more future in it.

Pale, cheap, and prosaic, this doomsday laundry list. Kraft feels it grow glib under his suturing fingers. He takes facile pleasure in confirming his worst fears, talking himself up onto the hospital rooftop in his bloodied surgical robes to wait for the arrival of this year's all-obliterating comet. Anemic, stripped even of outrage. The bleakest symptom on his list is less than quotidian. They are easy, breezy, light conversational cocktail gambits sung to the swish of a vein-skewering swizzle stick. Thus all the more horrific. When collapse becomes aperitif, it must be here at last. When the end is announced in silence, in blase acquiescence, then it must truly be the end.

Polyphony pounds through Kraft's head as he shoves the point of the needle in and under, punching repeatedly through the drawn drumskin that lines the soft insides of the Rapparition's mouth. Let's have a jammer—uh! In the slammer. Lulla, lu la la, and lo, alas! Behold what slaughter he doth make, shedding the blood of infants all, sweet Savior for thy sake.

He can feel himself running aground on bone shoals that haven't been named, that didn't exist until he blundered against them with his field sewing kit. The voice-leading of his obsessive ditties grows too dense for him to keep the competing lines straight. His repeated, rustling whistles — a dozen notes at a pop, each ritornelloed perhaps a quarter of a thousand times over the course of this operation, alternating fragments forced through the tiny crack decades ago chipped in his central incisor that for some reason he's never had capped — are getting on the nerves of his fellow team members something fierce.

He knows how much these cheerful, trilled flute-de-loops must be driving the whole surgical crew up the blessed institutional walls. But he can't help himself. That's the sound. Uh. That's the sound. The sound of his horn, his oldest continuous possession aside from birth certificate, neglected, long unplayable, but still sitting at the bottom of the closet in that apartment standing in for a more permanent abode. The sound of something out of his own fading repertoire, a bit of musical past he impels himself to conjure up from the scrap heap. A tinny, treble, obbligato rescue me, pitted against the short list of inevitables. The idiot whistling is some reincarnation of saving playground charm. Or perhaps it just traces a random resonance, a tone-row association triggered by the accidental conjunction of prepuber repairs thrown at him as of late, of lulla, lullaby.

Recapping in miniature the general blackout between Kraft's pre-teens and his thirties, the operating room vanishes. The set gives way to one of those membership discount stores, his city's most distinguished contribution to world betterment. The place is crawling with self-proclaimed discounts, but only for those who put up enough grubstake to secure the photo club card. The fee is trivial — just high enough to screen out the underclass. The only illegals allowed within spitting circumference of the showrooms are hired under the table to swab the decks perpetually with blisterproof paint.

Closing the Rapparition, changing out of the scrubs, heading down to the subterranean lot, blasting his automotive escape out of Fortress Carver, negotiating the freeway, finding his way to this warehouse, and flashing yet another private badge to win entry: all these steps fade to a blur at best. He has a generic memory of the overall process, the recall of one who has read the crib notes but not the book. He flails at his belt to check for his beeper, but does not feel it there. All the same, he feels queasily certain that he must still be on call.

Memory loss: a thing that virtually every text Kraft has ever been made to memorize would unhesitatingly classify as No Goodish. More alarming, he can't seem to get worked up about his brief disappearance. He's willing to flow with the symptoms, string them along with the hope of staying supple for a potential shot at the broader diagnosis. And yet, how far is he going to get without a complete work-up, beginning with a decent history and physical? He's become exactly the sort of patient he most dreads, the stuff of Plummer's rolling burlesques. Childhood diseases? M-maybe. Any trace of this in your family? You mean, like, mother, father…?

He hasn't a clue in creation why he is here. Here in this store, that is, let alone any wider, more imponderable locale. At this point, he can't even recall why he paid for membership in the first place, except to prove that twenty bucks would still buy him into some anesthetizing club somewhere.

Well, let it be retail then, the sheer, diversionary power of the stuff. And harbor the hope that here amid the available merchandise, one might find the best place to hold vigil against the quiet pogrom already under way. One or another clearance trough in this charnel house of bargains must cradle the ticket item that he'd been after when the lights went out. Track it down, kick its unholy can, freeze the statue maker, bluff the blindman, all-come-in-free-o!

Problem is, the commodity he is after could be anything, anything this heartbreaking, magnificent mess of a country marks down in today's race to clear inventory. Perhaps he's in pressing need of some processor or another — word, data, food, sound, trash, or love. Could be this here artificial-intelligence beer-can Thermos ring. Or this: a mock-membrane-pad simulation of a security alarm system to fasten to his front door, instant advertisement to smart-shopping, card-holding break-and-enterers that his home is in fact prostrate and defenseless. A key chain that comes when you whistle? A tape recorder that starts recording eight seconds before it is turned on? An own-yer-own, home version of some private-reserve cinema classic, say, Seven Brides for Seven Samurai?

He figures it can't be this last, as he'd have to buy a player first. He has so far failed to do so, knowing that whatever device he might settle on would be obsoleted (as the English-obsoleting term of the moment has it) ten minutes before he could tweak the thing's pots. Nevertheless, home electronics alone keeps his speculative faculties happily suspended for over an hour. He stands gazing, in fascinated stupor, at a gargantuan image thrown up on a flat-screen, wraparound, wall-sized, live-in, digital stereo television larger than his apartment, larger, in fact, than his entire bet-hedging, twitch-appeasing leisure existence. The eerie, green-shifted specter waltzing around up there seems weirdly familiar, despite the chromosmear. It moves when he moves, ducks, shadowboxes in perfect synchrony, and hey! Howdy, Dr. Kraft. I'm on TV.

His first thought is: How'd they know I was coming? And how'd they get me on video in the first place? Utter idiocy lasts long enough for Kraft to feel the sensation of dancing to yesterday's ballet, as if he's the mario-martinet doing the tag-along, aping his screen alter ego's choreography class. Once he figures out it's live, he almost twists his neck off trying to look directly at himself. Why can't he get his eyes — either this or that pair — around and past the side of his head? The problem's not with any obstruction in his face, any blockage in the old universal joint. It's just that the screen is here and the camera is over there, and that's why, he decides, every picture tells a story. And every story lies at right angles to itself.

He picks up the Handycam, fiddles with it. He points it around the store, at the other cameras, at a nearby mirror, holding the mimic at arm's length and gauging the effects on screen. He points it at the screen itself. Big mistake. He loses another god-knows-how-many minutes of his life, image-mapping the edges of recursion's all-devouring hellmouth.

A bank of demonic monitors runs along the back aisle and out of sight. Several hundred of them superimpose their simultaneous soundtracks into a cacophony that makes Ives sound like monkish homo-phony. The massed picture screens make up a mammoth grasshopper's compound eye. They trawl at random for a half-dozen picture signals and flaunt these in assembled, inscrutable patterns. One block of picture beam, interrupted by another, resumes as an irregular trapezoid just down the plane. For Kraft, the channels congeal into a single, wide-gauge program whose theme any stringer pediatrician would recognize at once: children adrift, out of doors too late at night, too far from home, migrating, campaigning, colonizing, displaced, dispersed, tortured loose, running for their lives.

He has stumbled onto one of those half-hour slots reserved for dispensing pitched bewilderment. They're doing news again, as they do around the clock these days. Image chorus line. The sight-bite Zeitgeist One signal block has been hijacked by an emergency update on this year's flash point, one that Kraft has until now only dimly registered. He focuses in on the account, amazed at how quickly this one has slipped from precocious to precarious. The language of direct confrontation — the contempt for the public behind all action in the public interest — cranks itself up to a pitch past the usual theatrics. The endless, impotent, international diplomatic game of chicken in Dad's car begins to embrace its casualty rates. Grim foreign secretaries shaking their heads Live at Ten rule out negotiation, basking in an electrified aura of imminence that, because of the network-wide inability of home audiences everywhere to sustain concentration, will once more turn to boredom by the dismembering end.

This evening's particular head-on high noon has been busy escalating, introducing new twists and chicanes while Kraft's been away. All sides accuse the others of disinformation, a spiral of ever more sophisticated muddying of the waters. Claims of historical mandate crash up against new world orders. Preacher beseechers on a competing channel tick off the prophetic countdown to Megiddo Revisited. Nebuchadnezzar is returned to power. Engineers work at constructing life-sized living models of Babylon. TV-steered TOWs stand in for angels of incineration. Infidel legions mass for final face-off against the emissaries of evil expansionism. Does have a familiar ring to it — the old high road to simplification. Details available in this million-selling handbook; order now by calling the toll-free number on your screen.

Where's the Rapparition when we need him? The pint-sized poet could defuse this whole self-powered keg with a few well-placed hypermetrics. You know, a little sync along the lines of:

Some say this madness is the workin' out of scripture,

With Belial and Nemesis taking up the picture;

You tell me the unlivable is better than okay

'Cause we're heading for a showdown like the Good Book say.

Yeah, set the kid up as equal-time evangelist on the alternative station and we might just get enough market share to survive. But Kraft himself has only recently put the boy to bed with a mouth full of bloody fudge ripple.

On another block of sets, glitz-punkers probe the anarcho-disintegrating underside, pretending (like the solitary man trekking across the Gobi followed by a hidden documentary crew of two dozen, or the first-ever flimsy plane touching down on a deserted island, as shot from below by the disembodied camera) that they aren't part of a million-dollar, cake makeup, multiple-take, posturing, slick production number. Another, adjacent slice of the color carousel busily spins out its insistence that the universe can be saved only by constructing a doughnut the size of a galaxy.

An oval nimbus above this row of screens spews out one of those Unsolved Celebrity Mystery Tonight! samplers. Today's real reenactment includes the lavish particulars of Eva Braun's unquenchable and probably unrequited crush on Robert Taylor as well as Sukarno's lifelong ambition to sleep with Marilyn Monroe. Both utterly true, the anchors swear, so help me Broadcast.

A movie vérité police-blotter public service announcement about the recent epidemic of vanishing little ones — two million annually, a full two thirds of these abductions masterminded by estranged parents — dissolves from a gloss of the Missing Children Act into an advertisement for Home Litigation Workshops. This offer, void where prohibited, is flanked on both sides by banks of full-length shots, each in slightly different tonal registers, of a devastating Brit girl, fourteen at the most, telling her Yank soldier that she isn't going to do it, war or no war, unless they do it standing up, the best contraceptive method available. He leans her gently against the wall and provides her with stirrups by sticking two Coke bottles (empty) in his khaki back pockets while the cameras cozy in for this bit of shared intimacy in the endless, interchangeable, beautifully textured darkness at the edge of time.

This brief cross-sectional spin through the dial's mandala suffices to remind Kraft of what incontestable research continuously discovers and covers back up: the species is clinically psychotic. Pathetic, deranged, intrinsically, irreversibly mercury-poisoned by nature, by birth. And what more could one expect of a cobbled-up bastard platypus, a creature whose spirit is epoxied to its somatic foundation? Mental thalidomide cases, every last mother's son, as far back as accounts take things. On one cadre of tubes, slithery androgynes belt out a hardcore rendition of the station's signature slogan: "We nail your eyes to the screen." Just kitty-corner to these, the minority bank of "educational" monitors takes things back to a past whose name is somehow familiar to Kraft, although the face evades him.

At first he mistakes this signal for more current event. But a minute's wading in this current and the waters open up just upstream of the present. A cavalcade of years from — how long ago? What time is it now? Kraft stands staring in review at events he witnessed once, some or them firsthand, when he was still young enough to weave them into the semblance of sense. The replay unfolds in front of him, hurting afresh, the second bite of remorse.

Watches a river rising, somewhere in the Sunny South. It has swollen before, overflowed even, but never like this. The Flourishing One, survivor of countless previous auguries, the jerkwater moneylenders' town that rose to respark the West, is going under. Florence's shaky alliance with its pulmonary artery has been severed. Nervous black-and-white hand-held cameras make their way down the mud-plundered streets-turned-sewers of what was once the most angelic of angel cities.

Crude floodlights play over the Old Bridge or huddle under a loggia. Here and there, spots of sculpture bob above four meters of water. Piazza becomes lago, and eight centuries of art's aid and comfort are lost. Distraught signori from the National Salvation Board tell how they have given up on the mosaics and frescoes and are concentrating on porting as many priceless paintings and papers as possible out of reach of the rising ooze. All those not busy saving themselves are conscripted: inmates, the army, whole schools…

On that sound cue, cut to another, simultaneous mudslide. North now, October of the same year. From the center of history to its exploited edge. Pitiful little Welsh mining town, population too small for formal census. The view of disaster from inside the doomed schoolroom. How they looked out, looked and saw a mountain rise up and roll down its own slurry of slag, settle in and simply annihilate this building like a felt hat left on a chair. Inside, the town's entire next generation, one hundred and sixteen studious would-be graduates, most of them slated for the mines, hard at work doing sums and grammar and history — the Blitz, the famous Evacuation — look up for a minute before they are mass-buried, swallowed in one spasm by the sliding earth. Look up and see a tribe of faces their age, peering in the schoolroom window, coaxing them desperately outside, elsewhere, beyond safety.

Now is already too late. Mudslide slips elementally into sandstorm, a desiccating desert war. Boy soldiers in that same epochal year once more march into the town of God's Foundation, while other boy soldiers flee the sacred city through secular back streets. Everywhere, scripture is fulfilled faster than it can be written. At the same time (now what, Kraft wonders, can that absurd little phrase possibly still mean?) as this holy showdown, student armies face off on three other continents. The call for victory of belief over doubt wipes away with one sweep the last cobweb cling. Half a dozen simultaneous dream liberations are declared by those young enough to have nothing to lose but the childhood already denied them.

A six-year-old black girl fire-hosed from the streets of Birmingham is replaced by a crowd of her contemporaries, singing into the city center. Teen rioters vent their birthright terrors even here, just down the block from Kraft's alma mater. He watches them stand off the State again for a while, until the inevitable body bags decide matters. The newsreels veer to the shadowed half of the ball. There, in mass placard marches, Maoist high school dropouts cow a quarter of the planet. French, Spanish, Chilean, Indonesian, and Rhodesian school-agers blunder through the revolutionary calendar, staunching their way toward year one. A fly-fanged, glazed-eyed, successionist, baby Ibo exoskeleton flexes its stick-limbs, twists to reach a mother's teat no larger or moister than a shriveled mole.