Operation Wandering Soul

No possible connective thread explains, let alone excuses, this shock-wave assault of images. The obvious answer — Chronology, Your Early Years in Review — appalls Kraft with its arbitrariness. Okay, so the pics in this sampler of disintegration all took place in the space of — what? A small-spanned handful of months? A shared time frame still reveals nothing by way of explanation, nor says what possessed the show's rambling editor to string these random spots together. Empty syllogism, domainless variables: this then this then this…

His nostrils flare at the remembered stink of a certain institutional-green, paint-plastic coating, a pocked, porous, cinder-block lunar landscape. He feels the impression of it, close up, smashed against his face during some drill — fire, tornado, raid, political collapse. He and a few hundred others, crouched down for hours, giggling and dry-heaving by turns, compacted into the stingy angle between wall and floor. The smell sticks in his throat as if newly coated, memory's phlegm brought up by this cough of cavalcade. If these film bursts share anything at all, it's the thread running through all the other free-associating open channels. The one distributed middle, the only available theme: tenderfoot decamping, refugees on the run, issuing from cities set ablaze by those no closer to legal age than they.

Angel Cities: well, he is getting warmer now, much. That must be it, the link he's supposed to recover. But what can this panicked pleasuredom, this theme park of loosely confederated, strip-mailed membership stores — self-asphyxiating, self-immolating, drugged, gelded, joyriding, willfully slipping back into the worst of Third World crippling sinkholes — what can his current address possibly have in common with the first one, the city Kraft once spoke to in its native language, before his facility with languages withered away to pocket translating dictionaries?

It comes to him with the force of first discovery. He lived once in another place by the same name, yet spelled in a far more ample alphabet. A city called the City of Angels in a country called the Land of the Free. A people called the Free People, although the outside world knew all three only in clumsy transliterations.

And this picture parade, the infinitely extensible police lineup of intermediary staging grounds for those Crystal Nights all school drills promise: Florence, Aberfan, Madrid, Detroit, Prague, Paris, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Newark, Belfast, Harare, Jerusalem. Each a namesake, yet sharing something steeper, deeper down, beneath names. All are celestial suburbs gone wrong. Single steps, separate arithmetic means between the shining seraph of his own childhood and this place, its follow-up succubus.

His confirmation comes in one quick cut, almost faster than he can frame his guess. There it is, on three dozen diffracting screens at once, each appliance assorting its yoked electron sprays into patterns that whisper of geometries past the axiom, corollaries beyond the freshest new crop of Euclids' ability to prove. He sees her on the screen, her beyond all reasonable doubt, running naked through cratered streets, clothes singed off, taking her skin with them.

She runs in blind panic from something dropped out of the sky. She limps, favoring the ankle he himself has only recently excised, a girl unable to outrun the leading edge of her own animal terror, running both from and right into the next descent of aerial rupture. Running dead on, in another minute perhaps dead, into the impartial lens (but a man behind it, some picture scavenger, standing there filming). She runs into a world-famous image, one arrested forever a dozen years before his little girl is even born.

And she's not alone. The whole canon of ward cases accompanies her, in shot after shot. The No-Face fills the screen, his features miraculously whole for a moment before they are smashed in again by a Chicago policeman's cudgel. Then the Rapparition, laying down a Frelimo battle celebration in Bantu-Portuguese. Joleene Weeks holding what at first seems to be her Chatty Cathy doll but horribly isn't, mother and child both panting, breathing through their ribs in — well, could be anywhere. Remember these places, does he? The day's Biafra, the day's Dhaka?

Even if he has blunted the exact coordinates for a couple of sedated decades, he cannot fail to recognize the next face, as fresh in his mind as if he'd seen it for the first time just days ago. It's the newcomer, the old kid, a year or two further along, yet a half-century younger. Still bald, or rather, shaved. Led out of the subterranean prison where he'd been buried alive. Turned about for the camera like a vertical rack of lamb, his body molded all over with blue flash burns, a Roquefort grown in caves on copper wire skewers.

And this one does not come from out of the bowels of some provisional capital a day's forced march from the Chaco. This one's from closer to home. As close to home as can be, as flush, as smack up against it as video and imagination permit.

With interlude again fuzzy to the point of nonexistent, Kraft is back at his flat. The freeway bit is totally missing. He has negotiated those masses of lanes with no recall, even from what he hopes is only a moment later.

But he knows he's home, because the lady across the way — used to call them neighbors back before the West Was Won — female, mid-fifties, non-racially distinct, slightly dyspneic, partial to ceramic goods with ironically upbeat printed messages on them, a radical mastectomy within the last year — is standing in his doorway asking him to sniff her chicken fillets. She is the first human he can recall seeing aboveground and outside an industrio-retail complex in he can't remember how long.

"I just bought this from the Food Parade not two hours ago, and it smells rotten to me. Does it smell rotten to you? Tell me honestly, because I don't want to bring it back and have them tell me I'm crazy."

Kraft takes a whiff. He smells nothing, neither micro nor macro, animal, vegetable, mineral, nor any of commerce's more recent hybrids. He can't even smell the chicken an sich. '"Yes," he says, surprised at how clinically he carries it off. "You may be right."

"Are you sure?" Sung to the tune of the old NBC triad. The living color peacock preens in front of him.

Then, he's still standing at the same door, but opening it for a second buzz, time lapse style. It's the woman, Linda, arms full of packages, volumes, damp and aromatic paper sacks. When he fails to make way for her, she slips past him with a playful nudge of the shoulders. "Hi, baby. I came straight from the hospital."

"Hosp—? Are you all right?"

Her eyebrows curl over her eye ridge, two caterpillars racing to reconnoiter the bridge of her nose. Her neck stem straightens in residual reflex. Half a beat, then she giggles. "Oh, I get it. Hospital, sick. Funny stuff, there. I stopped on the way and got some grub. I was seized by caprice to eat Chinese."

"Eat Chinese?"

"For God's sake, sit down. Open your mouth and close your eyes, and you will get…"

After dinner, she jumps up and says, "Stay put. I’ll do the dishes."

"All right." He's in no position to move anyway.

"That was a joke, dope." She crumples the eternal plastic plates and multiple sacks, makes of them a single wad that she sinks with a twenty-footer into the trash. He is still sitting motionless, staring at the spot the meal had occupied. She smuggles around behind him, kisses the crown of his head.

His spine convulses, half of the famous galvanized frog's legs. "What?"

"What, 'what'? Relax. Assault waves are over for the day."

He jerks his face around to look at hers. Assault? How much does she know?

"Tough one for you today? They do you with the rubber hoses again?" Her fingers go deep, directly into his shoulders. It's good, relief beyond description, revealing what he hadn't known had been festering in that knot of confused tissue. At the same time, the pain is excruciating, worse than the one it exorcises. Retaliatory surgical strike he has no choice but to submit to. And she hasn't even slit him yet. Just the prep, the antiseptic scrub.

The rubdown expands, deeper and wider, radiating outward from his sternocleidomastoids like dioxins through the food chain. She must feel him succumb, because her cadence starts to do the Ben-Hur-galley-master-with-the-timpani thing. "Bare your privates, huh?" she coos in his ear. "Make them available for female consumption."

These words don't seem to issue from the Linda he knows. But maybe it's the answer all the same. Now that push comes down to shove, his hormones flush from his system with cruise technology: accurate and massive, even from a great distance.

But release is no relief. Worse, that state of blurred conviction returns to him, locking up his receptor sites. Some attempt to attract his macerated attention hovers around his apartment's seams. That tribe, that band of eyes outside the school window, waving madly, hurry, come away. The massed, perhaps coordinated movements of minor militias, an agenda afoot already, stretching forever through time and space. A single overarching pattern doubles back repeatedly on two names, words that camp out in the deflated oxygen tent that once fed the language center of his brain. The first, a place name, already ascertained. The place of his own childhood mobilization, the same name as the place where he now euphemistically lives.

The second is not a where, but a what. It is the tag of that first strategic maneuver — emblem, metonym, the name people revive every time history rounds up its usual innocents. He can retrieve nothing of the original — not its century, nor locale, nor public motive. Somewhere there must be an account he can turn to, to recover the contour of an event he is not even sure ever actually happened.

He rakes his rooms, mine-sweeps the shelves where the general encyclopedia should be. Nothing but a wasteland of medical texts, back issues of Morbidity and Mortality, offprints on new techniques, Board review workbooks, in-service exam crams.

"What you looking for, sweetface?" Linda asks, scenting concern.

He does not stop to answer, but goes on searching. Who can he phone? There must be an 800 number, elected state rep, one of those public service outfits that deal with radon, gas smells, dead squirrels in the walls. He will take anything, any account whatsoever, even the docudrama version, the reenactment, the Based on a True Event.

Desperate, not even knowing what he is after anymore, he turns to the loose material the woman has dragged in with her. Her overnight bag. Has it come to that? Are the two of them an item, shacking up? Is this — good God — this near-girl, a little lolly-popper not more than two years out of her teens, spending whole nights, sleeping here? He'll get busted, booked, institutionalized, sentenced to a life of continuous, punitive tonsillectomies.

At odds' ends, he roots through her pile of print. The hot new issue of her own trade journal, Practical Physiatrics Review. Who names these things? A beach party bit of light reading, Postoperative Flexion Restoration. Next, a ridiculous grab-bag of field tools for the over-dedicated. Picture book, A Country a Night for a Year, which he whips through in a frenzy, but without success. One of those magic water-release books, half brushed in by a wildly inaccurate saturation painter, perhaps forced to hold brush in mouth. A pack of stiff-cardboard-bound comics.

"Oh, I traded Nico for those. You'll never believe what that kid asked for them."

All at once, there it is, lying bare in front of him. In the middle of the pack of illustrated funny magazines is the glaring ringer, one of those Treasure Chest Illustrated History Classics, the You Take Part series. He might have known that transported tribe would sooner or later throw the thing in his way.

"I had to swap him two pieces of…"

But Linda stops at the sight of what has come over him. His hand is stroking the glossy cartoon cover, an elaborate medieval crusader column, puerile, weaponless, stretching unbroken to an infinite horizon. In a voice not even a close impersonation of his own, addressing not her but fleeting figures just outside his window, some boy inside him asks, "Who are these…?"

His tongue tags along after the word it can't catch up with, the one that skids away just in front of the snare set for it. These kids. These children.

A picture book narrator, perched in the sky, looks down from miles on high onto a map where ink-etched ocean boldly wraps blocks of continent in currents of purest palette. Successive frames gradually pull the eye in tighter, until gross features firm. Steel-gray ice caps, bleakly gorgeous, rim the borders. Coasts cut seaward under a swirl of cloud. Waters stretch away until they arrive beyond the bounds of knowledge, spotted here and there with details for the scrupulous squinter — occasional sea monsters, the puckered face of the blowing wind, the blanketing expanse of a midsea mass that might be anything but to the practiced audience outside this paper portal, pressing faces to the square-paned windows that ladder across these pages, becomes a flotilla of bottles so closely packed that they form a single decanted help message, readable only from ten thousand feet above.

But this forsaken armada of bottled petitions is only a fanciful flicker, a curl of the illustrator's nib, a slight tint-change in the hazel carpet spread over the surface of doom's deep. Castles perch on cliffs, visible before they should be at this magnification. Monasteries pock-mark the shore, devout in tenuousness. Walled ports, minuscule but intricate with masonry, their plowed fields and fiefs heaped up like carpet remnants around a throne, are as yet exceptions, small halts in continuous wood and wildness.

The storytelling eye hangs suspended in midair a little longer, a surveyor's speculation wider than these fortified hills allow. Then, renouncing its bird's-eye, it nestles down like a silversmithed, dove ciborium lowering itself to the surface of the sin-steeped world. The panels take on earth's tangent, a pilgrim's view. Focus falls to the roads below, ways swarming with travelers, one for every conceivable reason in religion's calendar.

Here, at ground level, belief marches through the year in brief. Each discrete frame is a new saint's day, another motive for mass migration. Across a quilt of color-strewn squares, searchers shake down Santiago de Compostela, assault Amritsar, Lumbini, or Ayodhya. They venture off to venerate Saint Peter's bones in Rome. They scale Mount Abu, wend to Canterbury. They figure the four sacred mountains, the five thrones, the seven sacred rivers. They close in on Buddh Gaya, Lourdes, Assisi, Sarnath, Turin, Goa, Tours, Nankana, Guadalupe, Kusinagara, Fátima, Marburg, the hills of Parasnath and Girnar. The world pictured is a surging hajj, one that every believer must make at least once, if only by proxy.

Conditional, reverential, purgational, memorial, devotional, salvational: the motives for moving sweep an arc as wide as the swing of these walkers' staves. Cartoon figures, burgundy and forest-green, journey to the source of all grace, the spring of all politics, the birthplace of history. The tour is slow but urgent, desperate enough to have demanded this illustrated guide in the first place. It is as if, the drawings insist, only a thousand miles on foot will ever set things right again.

The paneled page tags alongside this parade to those expanses that are a little more sacred, a little closer, if only because they mark the resting place of some grotesque bloodletting. Ink and watercolor snake into lines of supplicants ready to sacrifice all purchase on earth to reach their holy sites. And there, at page bottom, farther than they can hope to see, the luster of goal: a temple, crypt, battle site, the empire's earliest universities, wandering schools where they might matriculate.

Tinted print starts to hover just above the frames. Just the spidery shape of the letters speaks of a moving desire, an impulse bedded down below the soul's water table. "Pilgrimage," the captions begin, "is the path of a single life made visible, replayed in the space of a few days." Beneath these words, a band of travelers passes close by a familiar, inviting house en route to the far landscape. The very next picture is the window casement itself, drawn from the inside, the sight of the receding band insisting that the stay-at-home eye chase it down, join it. Go somewhere. What does it matter if you're not back for dinner? The suffering and cold, molestation, looting along the way are mere softened pen-strokes dipped in crimson and gold. The story stakes you only this one round trip, this one staged set of oases leading ever higher up into the mountains, this one chance to recap the embryo's first adventure overseas.

"A single hope, if never more than secret, stabs at the heart of everything that is awake." Flowery voice-over for a child's treasure chest album, but the accompanying astonishments of artwork vindicate the text. Who reads these preliminary bits anyway? The proof is all visual. Wait, walk long enough, and you will arrive. The hinted-at place is just around the next hillside. It will appear in your lifetime, in another half page or two.

Fresco-inspired friezes, severe yet sensuous, tell of the need to replay the whole itinerary in miniature. Swelling rectangles add up to a radiant, full-page display, the fabulous rivals: Mecca itself, and, en face across the stapled spread, Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulcher. Each story panel moves the seeker closer to that ultimate end, the scale model City of God on Earth. From a great distance, it appears only as a gathering, anxious Crosshatch on the horizon. Still miles away over the plain, the towers become visible, then the walls. Then, at long last, the mammoth gate appears and opens, sparkling with celebratory stone revelation, ancient promises — detailed and intricate — carved everywhere into its cyclopean surface.

The dress becomes clear now, the style, time, and place. It is that interregnum of great faith, when most of the world knows this habitation to be almost spent. The globe is degraded; it corrodes only to be restored soon to its old original. Its oversoul migrates through a slow loop, one that narrows its noose to arrive at final things. Crisis cultures, cargo cults, nativistic movements, messianics: everyone on this road-strewn surface survives the present by naming it a station, an inscrutable detour on the way to the next age, the next image, the next frame.

The passes to the shrines of the blessed martyrs, the languishing trade routes are charged now with danger and salvation. An emerald mix of fear and need lights the spired horizons. Pen and color do not dare guess yet at topography's terminus, the shape of the hastening finish, except to fan the palmer's hope that arrival must surely be near, the end of the day of wandering in sight.

The Tour Guide — the Anointed, the Mahdi or Twelfth Imam, the Mahayana redeemer, the Nanabush — is shown preparing his many returns. In every town that the processions pass, the old order is smelted off. The novum is set to make its break. Strange, reified contours, miraculous and unexpected, get ready to rise up out of the earth's destruction. "Come the Fourth Kingdom…" the supertitles predict. "Come the Third Age…" Come the revolution, the return, the liberation, the overthrow, the transforming renewal… The mass pilgrimage rolls across these ocher hills, stopping for alms at all the pox spots of civilization. Suddenly, the stills reveal all: this disguised, private campaign, this jihad by another name, draws toward the emblem of all foretold spots, the city at the end of the world.

Illuminated saga retraces the eye's first excursion. To scan these lavish psalter sheets is almost to see through the panels from the other side, to surprise the reading youth under the sheets at night again. Arrows leading from square to square mark a flagstone picture path down which the strip's original owner raced by flashlight to reach story's end. The way is a seven-hundred-year shortcut back to an ancient destiny.

Back to boyhood, back to that moment when the medieval West sits inside a defensive moat rapidly filling up with rubble. The Christian world has restively expected its impending end for twelve hundred years. It waits at this very moment, more certain of now than ever. God's tune rushes to cadence.

"True," a series of recapitulating panels concedes, "prior clockwatchers have been wrong." Many expect the old heaven and earth to burn away just as the Anointed, Antichrist Sylvester II, pronounces midnight mass on December 31, 999. Comets blazed brilliantly in advance. At the sound of transubstantiation's bell, people across the continent drop to the ground, expectant. In reprieve's let-down, hurried calculations produce another thirty years of grace. And when that extension also expires, seers settle on a new due date.

Numbers prove pliable. Sooner discard the calendar than the drift toward cartoon apocalypse it was built to predict. "Not the year 1000!" a Gnostic calculator proclaims in his cold stone cell, the astonished correction coming out his mouth in a speech bubble as old as Romanesque ecclesiastical comics. "The thousand-year reign of majesty here on earth!" Then two frames, scalloped to show they come from his monk's mind's eye: crypts opening, the martyrs resurrected to serve as kings in the new world's political machine, perfected at last.

Broadly announced now, bruited about all lands in caption and image: the Last Emperor, the ultimate successor of the Prankish kings, will soon assemble a host and make the long passage across the Middle Sea to recover by force the earthly sign of heavenly metropolis. There men will prepare the way for the Second Coming. Pilgrims return molested from the Holy Land, cries of protest filling the air above their heads. When a bubble-call for help comes from Pope Urban II, standing on a balcony in the South of France and beseeching a crowd to turn its random havoc into a single, sanctified, militant pilgrimage, his "Deus volt" is magnified a millionfold. All ranks and social stations catch fire. Europe launches itself into the new age it has long been predicting.

But the fall of the Holy City fails to bring on the last battle. Muslim and Jew are duly slaughtered to make way for Jerusalem's new inhabitants. Sovereign states are drawn up on the Levant map, diamonds designating the cities the pilgrim generals dole out among themselves: Antioch to one, Tripoli shores to another, Acre and Beirut to a third. No sooner is the new world order established than Zangi, Nureddin, and Saladin mount holy encircling maneuvers of their own.

The West, flexing itself in foreign contact, launches another wave of its eschatologically charged faithful into the World's Debate. France and Germany, the princes of Bohemia, Swabia, Poland, and Byzantium join forces under the cross. Armies of incompatible nationals pour into the Near East. But rival millennial expectations among allies prove fatal. The Second Crusade ends with a senseless attack on Damascus, executed in a disastrous fade to indigo and black.

The City of Heaven on Earth, ruled for a while by a thirteen-year-old leper, teeters on the brink, shattered by sectarian bickering. The crusader armies mass yet again for Armageddon, and are once more destroyed. Jerusalem falls again and is lost before God has a chance to install His transcelestial bureaucracy. The end of history is postponed for another few pages.

A third call for a God-willed showdown sounds across a catholic confederation too sophisticated now to hear it the way it first did, a century before. England's Lion-Heart signs on, along with Sicily, Flanders, and the Danes. They grab Cyprus as jumping-off point. Frederick Barbarossa, a furious seventy, leads the Germans cross-continent to a brilliant victory, only to drown — in intricately inked irony — crossing a stream.

Spiritual fervor degrades into a cynical race for fiefs. Holy war gives way to political shrewdness, the deftly drawn fourth campaign. The international hammerblow aimed at recovering Jerusalem, deflected by backroom Venetian power broking, ends not in sieges of infidel strongholds but in a brutal sack of Christian Constantinople. The soldiers of the cross succeed in tearing the two churches apart forever. They shatter and slice up Byzantium — beautifully penned in strategic and tactical views — the jewel that for so long formed the first line of defense against encroaching East, dealing it a wound from which it never recovers.

All this unfurls in four and a quarter pages, a dozen hand-colored rectangles per side. Then focus narrows another notch. The centuries-meandering road cants into a valley where the story's boy hides this time. (Watching these accounts of upheaval pour in, the flashlight reader marvels at how it is always them, the brigade of the displaced, each time out with the same names, the same age, the same slim chance of ever arriving by candlelight, let alone getting back again.)

"In the spring of the year 1212," a text box authoritatively interrupts, "a young boy no older than you tends sheep in a pasture near the tiny town of Cloyes-sur-le-Loir in central France." Two hundred years from now a little girl saint will lead an army through this hamlet on its mission of salvation. "A boy on the threshold of his teens, Stephen, who has never needed a last name until now. Soon the world will know him as Stephen of Cloyes." His flock is agitated and expectant, despite the sweet weather.

He lives in fabulous times, although he cannot know it. Deployments are everywhere in the air. Just outside his cleanly inked borders, towns busily receive city charters, universities spring up, cities band into trade leagues. A fever of new building spreads like flowering weeds across the champaign. The last westwork of Our Lady of Paris and the first stones of Rheims are laid in place even as Stephen keeps the two-year-old ewe with the weak left fore from sliding down a pebbled pitch.

He cannot write or read, has never even needed to sign anything. Simple arithmetic, certainly: lambs, ewes, rams, weight gains and losses, hours spent grazing. His grasp on medicine, meteorology, even natural history has all the finesse of a field practitioner. He can recognize 113 varieties of plants, diagnose fifteen different illnesses, and predict the weather for the next four hours. He once visited Vendome, and last St. Mark's Day he attended a Litana Major in Chartres, a chance service that will charge the conscience of the race. He takes the flock out after sunrise, ranging them from field to field until hail or darkness forces them in. He converses with his animals, calling each by name.

For a frame, he prays, singing psalms to himself. But now that the flock is safe, the dog content, the weather solid, the spring too sweet to admit danger, he sleeps on the sly, fifteen minutes this afternoon, his attention unneeded. The dog wakes him from his secret nap, barking in confusion at a dark figure climbing their remote rise up the path toward them.

The figure is not his father, nor any acquaintance carrying alarm from the village. Stephen can think of no reason short of catastrophe why anyone would hike all the way out to these fields. Thieves would wait for dusk; others are bound to their labor.

As the apparition approaches, Stephen makes out a pilgrim's cloak and cap. The man must have strayed miles from the cathedral route. And alone! Stephen calls out to the wanderer, thinking to set him straight. But the man preempts him, cuts off his speech bubble with another, and greets the startled shepherd boy by name.

"Who are you?" Stephen asks as the man draws closer. "I don't think I know you."

"Don't you?" the stranger smiles. A shiver runs up the boy's spine. "I woke you?"

Stephen manages a terrified, close-up shake of the head. The Pilgrim scolds him gravely with a look. "I would like you to deliver a letter."

"I can't read," Stephen blurts.

"A messenger shouldn't know how. But I will tell you what this note says. 1 have seen the Lord's City, arrayed as for her bridegroom. Why fail her now when the feast is so close?' "

Stephen taps his staff against the dog's flank, to keep her from snarling. "It's in code?" The traveler grubs about in his sack. He withdraws a moldy crust, which he shares with the boy. The man's poverty boosts Stephen's confidence. Thanking the man for the food, he asks, "Where should I deliver the letter?" He adds hopefully, "The village is just that way."

The Pilgrim places a parchment, heavy under its seal, in the child's hands. "You will bring this to the king of France."

At the touch of the man's hand, Stephen falls to his knees and begins crying. Sucking air, he manages to gasp, "Why me?"

The Pilgrim, already halfway down the rise, calls out the answer that Stephen most dreads. "I choose one who follows my profession." The innocent sheep kneel as one beast across the field, praying for absolution.

At night, after bringing his flock in, as his family gathers noisily around its late meal, Stephen announces into his soup, "I must go to the city."

His father bats him across the head with an elbow, automatic, businesslike. The younger ones snicker, and receive similar treatment.

Comic interlude turns into clamor when Stephen clarifies. He doesn't mean Vendôme or even Orléans, an already-impossible fifty miles away. "I must go to Paris." Father looks wearily at mother to discipline the outrage. She brains the boy and washes his mouth out with scalding lard. Dinner breaks up early.

He could tell them of the message and the man who set it in his hands. One word, and his family would fall at his feet and beg forgiveness. Instead, for reasons left undrawn, he chooses to slip out early, before daybreak, stealing the best pair of trekking shoes and some stale rinds destined for the feed bin. He ties the letter firmly to his forearm. He runs from the farm in the dark, choosing a random direction, running anywhere, so long as it is away and unseen.

When it grows light, Stephen stumbles upon a village and orients himself. He points himself northeast and keeps walking. It will take weeks to reach the goal he's been given. He wanders alone at a time when the average adult traveler would not last an afternoon against human ingenuity. "The Pilgrim would not have sent me off without providing for my safety." He puts up for the night in a hayrick, his belly nagging like a scythe wound.

An angel wakes him at daylight. Graphic match: a beautiful girl, perhaps a year younger than he, shakes his shoulder, calling, "Wake up! What do you think you're doing here?"

He begs some milk and a bit of bread, which his angel supplies with scorn. Then he tells her, whispering, that the Savior has sent him to the king of France, bearing a message about the end of the world. She hisses at him until he pulls up his sleeve and shows her the letter fastened there. She touches him gingerly on the muscle, and a delicious pain shoots through him, a change he can't understand. She studies him, amazed, and begs to be allowed to come along.

"Go on, then. Collect provisions, as much as you can carry. Then meet me down by the stile." She returns with a sister, also inflamed by the cause, carrying food, clothing, even a blanket. By midmorning, they are five, having met and bragged of the goal to two of the girls' village friends along the road. They sleep in an open field, together, happy as they have never been, singing religious tunes until they pass unconscious.

They travel in greater safety now, occasionally stealing an egg or two for the Lord's breakfast. To the rare adult who stops and challenges the little band upon the route, the girl lies sweetly, "We are cleaning the weeds off roadside crosses." Stephen cannot help noticing: her face grows beautiful, flushes rose with excitement when she invents the truth. They are joined by a boy named Luc, richer than all of them combined, and another named Henri, who has a dog that knows the useful trick of digging up carrots. They share all things among them, as needed. At night, they trade off standing watch.

Before the week is out, they number twenty. Stephen finds it steadily harder to keep track of this swelling flock. They can no longer move without attracting attention. But something astonishing happens as they reach this critical mass. A family of farmers offers them shelter inside a basse-cour and sends them off the next morning laden with goods. The same implausible transaction repeats itself the following evening. People ask for nothing but to be remembered along the pilgrimage route.

They lie in such a courtyard one night, four dozen children from eight to sixteen, decked out happily amid the animal stalls. They have already reached the woods that ring the royal domains. They will enter the capital in just days. Stephen lies quietly in the stall next to his angel girl. One of the older boys, a monastery runaway, finds him there.

"What does the letter say, Stephen?"

Stephen smiles inwardly and recites the passage the Pilgrim told him. The whole band knows the message by heart, and the runaway novitiate asks for it much the way that the youngest asks for the same story about the cock, the hare, and the cow each night before she can fall asleep.

"Is it in French?"

"How should I know?" Stephen shrugs. "Is that important?"

"The words allude to those of Saint John, describing his vision on the island of Patmos."

"A-allude?" Stephen stutters suspiciously.

"Do you know what the note means? It means our parents have failed us."

Stephen rubs the back of his head, still smarting from the punishment his mother never suspected would be his send-off.

"And not just our own parents." The older boy employs all the rhetorical skill the monks imparted to him. "The entire older generation. They have lost sight of God's desires." In quick pastel flashback, he tells Stephen of the four great campaigns to retrieve the Holy City, narrating the sad degradation of the blessed quest over a century and a quarter — from the first inspired flame to the sack of the Church's Eastern capital.

A change works its way over Stephen as he considers the message he has been entrusted with. Suddenly, its import is clear. The king they must serve as messenger is not the corrupted, human one. They, this band of a few dozen children, are meant to satisfy the Creator's will all by themselves. They will succeed where their parents failed. They must convert the unbeliever, recover the Holy Sepulcher, besiege the city of Jerusalem by love, doing what force of arms could not.

Yes — this was the Pilgrim's intention from the start. I choose one who follows my profession. By morning, Stephen finds a new strength and gentleness. He addresses his collected charges after breakfast with a mix of love and fervor. "We are not on our way to Paris after all." Not? Where then?

To the sea, by the most expedient route. Over the water to the towers of Civitas Dei. Let anyone who cannot aspire to reach there in perfect love turn back now, to France, to the world of things.

Not a child does. The band reconnoiters momentarily at St.-Denis, where a flaming sermon by the boy contrasts the conditions of the two sepulchers, this one flourishing, while the Lord's decays in pagan hands. The ranks of infant infantry swell with all those young enough to hear. Parents cannot reduce the stream of volunteers. The French king, as Stephen feared, bans the crusade, and professors at the earthly university declare it satanic. This is all the confirmation he needs: they must brave this alone.

Aching with resolution, Stephen turns away all petitioners over sixteen. The cause must be pure this time, untainted by anything past the first stages of innocence. The angel, his first recruit, infected by his seriousness, shaves her radiant hair and takes up walking in the rear, with the baggage train. Stephen continues to think of her at night, despite fasting, flagellation, and prayer.

They walk along in immense double file, a thread so long the middle can't see the end. A mélange of dialects fills the air, translated by magic. Here and there, children adopt a uniform — gray shift, palmer's staff, scraps of cloth sewn into a cross on the breast. Nights are steeped in fireside telling: fables, tales, legends, gests, sparked inventions to link each life to the great contour. But none of these asides can match the allegory they make now. By days, marching, they sing, several thousand voices in monodic unison, "O Lord, restore us to the True Cross."

The year is strange beyond interpreting. Overland reports tell of epochal animal convocations — fish, fowl, frogs, insects — massing for deciding diets. Dogs from all France and beyond assemble to fight their civil war. The beasts, in their spotlessness, know.

Deeper into Burgundy, on the road, in the brightness of midsummer, a voice near Stephen calls out a surprised "Hello!" Stephen spins around to greet it, but the caller is nowhere.

He has walked too far; he's begun hearing things. But he must walk many times farther still, before reaching home. "Hello?" Stephen murmurs, more to himself than to the phantom.

"That's the way!" The voice comes back, no more than twelve inches from Stephen's ears. "That's it. It's working!"

A close-up catches the alarm on Stephen's features. But his skin, in its silver youth, still proclaims the blessedness of those who believe without yet having seen. "Who are you? Where are you?"

A burst of giggle betrays that the hidden speaker is even younger than Stephen, ten years old at the most. "My name is Nicolas. I come from Cologne." (An insert shows the spire-line of the city, with a blowup of its greatest treasure — the fabulous golden Magi reliquary, containing Barbarossa's three crusade-booty skeletons, one a milk-toothed boy.) "At the moment we're camped outside Koblenz." As Nicolas speaks, his visage shimmers, solidifying in the air above the French band's vanguard.

"Cologne?" Stephen throws his tunic-draped arms up in provincial panic. "But I speak no German!"

"Don't let that worry you," Nicolas giggles. "I don't know a lick of French, neither."

The colored drawings clarify, in wonderful split-framing: a ghostly Nicolas hovering above the Rhône Valley, a disembodied Stephen, inverse fata morgana, over the Rhine. The children who walk nearest Stephen in the snaking column can neither see nor hear anything; their road to Provence is brilliantly Mediterranean, vacant. In half an hour, word ripples through the French ranks that their leader has begun to traffic in miracles.

The boys feel one another out, unsure whether to wrestle for top spot or swear blood brotherhood. At last Nicolas pouts, "We heard of what you are doing over there, and we want to meet you in the Middle East."

"We? How many are you?"

The German has been waiting for this question. "At present, eleven thousand three hundred and forty-seven. But the lieutenant in cadre six is still counting. We form a six-and-a-half-mile file when flat out." A little proudly, the kid challenges, "How many are you?"

Stephen shrugs Gallically over the private, invisible airways. Nicolas mutters the Low German equivalent of 'Vive la différence. " Stephen can hear, in the murmuring background, several thousand treble voices raising the chorale "Schönster Herr Jesu, Herrscher aller Erden."

The boys stay in constant contact, tying in at least once each evening. Nicolas enjoys charging into Stephen's ear throughout the day, issuing communiqués about his swelling numbers. Stephen, his own force growing absurdly, gently cautions the boy from time to time. "Remember, if we win the day at Acre and beyond, it will be through love and love only."

This sweet upbraiding always results in grumbles. "All right. But love can use a bit of muscle, can't it?"

Stephen comes to love the younger boy, however impetuous. They have wonderful theological arguments over whether the kingdom they are preparing will arise, at last, on this earth or on the far side of the heavenly bridge. Stephen encourages Nicolas to try his hand at healing the sick in his company, rather than leaving them along the route. Nicolas in turn endlessly suggests ways that Stephen might coordinate the movements of a migrating band now beyond all counting.

Nicolas becomes Stephen's confidant, the repository of hopes and the bulwark against night's doubt. "How am I to ferry an army of tens of thousands of children safely across the Mediterranean?" Stephen whispers to the ten-year-old, late, from a campsite a week away from

that shore.

"Ha! That'll be easy. The waters will part in front of our faith, like the sea in front of Moses." This answer passes confidently up and down Stephen's column. "I, on the other hand," counters Nicolas, "have real problems. How am I supposed to port twenty thousand children over the Alps?"

Nicolas's logistical difficulties are soon taken out of his hands. He brings his immaculate enterprise as far as Mont Cenis monastery pass. There, Revelation's field trip begins to break up. His angelically impatient first and second cadres head by shortest route to the sea, via the Ampezzo Valley. Cadres three through five choose less devastating terrain, following the Adige River via Trento and Verona. Nicolas convinces the others that they must cross Lombardy and head toward Genoa to rendezvous with Saint Stephen and the French.

By the time Stephen reaches Marseilles, all Europe knows what is happening. The continental passage of guiltless children in pursuit of the millennium inflames imaginations from England to Hungary. People throng the roads to meet the crusade, walking for days just to see the battalions pass. Faith renews the dying world with a storming force of naïveté, a little child leading them.

As they approach the sea, the columns openly chant faith's refrain. The waters will party make a land bridge for us to pass. God has taken us this far. All the earth's oceans will dry; the world will be one, without divisions.

They parade in confidence up to the shore. But the sea, it stuns them to discover, stays sadistically the sea. Callous water stretching to the limits of vision makes the youngest in the vanguard break down in bitter tears. "It cannot be!" Foretaste of failure fills thirty thousand mouths, failure on a scale humankind can neither know nor survive. But a miracle awaits Stephen's crusaders in the harbor. A whole fleet assembles there, as if divinely arranged. Merchants stand ready to take the holy army to its history-ending destination. Causa Dei, absque pretio. (No! the flashlight reader shouts. Look out! These men are evil;you can tell by their finery, the folds of their faces. But the view from above— prophetic periscope of two mirrors tilting a perpendicular to everything — fails to inform pilgrim level.)

Stephen oversees the delicate boarding. A steady, incredulous joy spreads through him to see the force distributed among the dromonds, buzas, gulafres, cats — the agent vessels of an expanding world. One day he catches sight of the girl, in all her head-shaved beauty, high up in one galleon's perilous castle poop deck. He calls to her, forgetting himself, their cub chastity. "We will meet in front of the Dome of the Rock," she calls back, beaming at her saint.

Keeping Nicolas abreast of the boarding, Stephen knows that his thousands cannot wait for the arrival of the Germans on the coast. Nicolas, beside himself trying to keep track of his forces now scattering themselves through Lombard towns, waves his joint commander on ahead. "Carry on. We're right behind you. Just leave us a dusky brute or two to baptize."

Stephen boards the last ship out of safe haven. Overjoyed, he looks back on the disappearing continent. All around him, the child-manned fleet sings "Veni Creator Spiritus." He tries to contact Nicolas to let him listen in. But for the first time, no apparition appears on the empty air.

The German child at that moment stumbles lost through the Po Valley. His splinter group has been whittled by attrition to a few thousands. Rumor — in vague watercolor washes — drifts in from the other factions: stories of children robbed by peasants, their various virgin orifices despoiled by Tuscan aristocrats. Weary ten-year-olds give in to acquired vices, then take to them willingly in quick addiction. The pursuit of the True Cross becomes a struggle to ward off utter chaos.

Nicolas's western cadres struggle on. A few thousand assemble in Genoa. Some stay to found famous patrician families, in a brief flash-forward. Others press on to the Holy See. Every set of walls and towers, every pathetic handyman's castle even on this, the wrong side of the divided world, touches off the excited cry "Is that Jerusalem? Is that Jerusalem?"

In Rome, much later, the pope welcomes them, shaming Christian Europe by pronouncing, "See how these innocents busy themselves with preparations for recovery while we drowse?" Taking pity on pink limbs that have seen more than a life's worth of sacrifice, he absolves them of their vows. He promises that each has already achieved a foothold in paradise. He tells them to return as adults if they still desire to be pilgrims. But he forbids the expedition to proceed.

The way back is colder, more harrowing, less likely, darker than can be painted. Each one of them travels alone. The innocents that do reach North come back corrupted beyond recovery. And the land they return to is not home. Nothing more is heard from the boy Nicolas, who preached the end of history. He is stranded somewhere between Genoa and St. Gotthard, Gog and Magog.

Europe waits anxiously for word of Stephen's venture. The crusade has been so long under way it seems to have existed from the very launch of time. The home front half expects that any month must bring the account of conquest. They grill all travelers for word of the promised conflagration, this time bloodless and pure, the one that will transform threadbare creation.

But word fails to come. Waiting shades seamlessly into neglect. Some months after everyone has given up on hearing, an account works its way back to the mainland. Two child ships were caught in a freak storm and cracked open on the rocks off of San Pietro, southwest of Sardinia. The thousand children's bodies, washed up on the surf, collected in a modest crypt, miraculously fail to decompose.

The site of this Sign begins drawing pilgrims from many lands. It is hastily marked with a chapel built by order of the pope, a new Holy Sepulcher inscribed ECCLESIA NOVORUM INNOCENTIUM. Twelve prebends tend it with perpetual prayer. The shrine, drawn in time lapse, vanishes over the centuries, to be rediscovered half a millennium later by Grand Tourists struck with uncomprehending wonder.

Eighteen years after the mass departure, a man gnarled by torture-accelerated age returns to the Christian North, claiming to have been a child crusader. The flotilla has already passed into myth, and this wandering priest's story — picked up in Albericus, de Champré, Bacon, the era's Classics Illustrateds — is a curiosity at best. Well into the waning century, travelers returning from the Middle East tell of light-skinned Muslim slaves in Algeria and Alexandria who speak a strange pidgin of Arabic and Romance. This is the fabled end of that child cargo: traded on the international spot market, sold to the Saracens by creedless merchants, martyred to this round of teleology, but passing on to their own children the remembered vow "Our feet shall stand within thy walls, O Jerusalem."

An estimated hundred thousand innocents are lost, sold, killed, betrayed, evacuated from this world by faith. Nor do the picture portals leave off there. They open onto a few more spots of scattered continuance: the Erfurt exodus. A mass child migration to St.-Michel. The Kinderzeche. Dancing manias, disappearances, and sovereign successions over subsequent centuries are each given detailed treatment in a much-subdivided pane, as complex and effulgent as the best leaded glass, its Gothic model. But of the shepherd child, of Stephen himself, no more caption. He is shown, ghostly, staring leeward from a floating castle deck, looking out onto the last days that again circle overhead.

The final colored frame — the last, the very last — is a radical departure for the artist's pen. It leaps from archaic Treasure Chest style into UPI Wire Photo: boy soldiers in another epochal year once more marching through the Lion's Gate into God's Foundation, while other boy soldiers flee the sacred city through secular back streets. The mother of all battles. Above them, overhead, fly Armageddon's radar-evading Stealth engines of destruction, assembled by the same Angel City industries whose cost overruns buy their pauperized crusader state this little margin of imaginary time.

"Could it be," the text box asks a reader who has long since fallen asleep or started on something more vivid — say a Sergeant Shrapnel or his high-tech, laser-guided reincarnation—"could it be that the seed of the Thousand-Year Kingdom, that troubled dream toward which the world still falters, was sown in a place possessed long ago and lost, forgotten except to fable?" In comic boyhood, history's cartoon.

Well, yes it could, the once-boy concedes, his hands surgically returning the tract to the therapist's stack of night reading. It could. All predictions are perverted remembrance. They'll have to come back, after long wandering. No place else to go. They're here already, all around him. Every day, the law's brutal blue shock troops drag them into his hospital, those they haven't emptied their clips into. Disease coaxes them to him. He steps over them in their gutter-ambush just outside the tony retail Alhambras, the mushroom towers, the high-security parking garages, there being no more open places where innocence might encamp. Ad mare stultorum, Tendebat iter puerorum. The sea will part for them. It will have to. No other place large enough to hold them all.

Yes; how could he have failed to see it? The place is breaking up. Isn't that what has been flashing across all channels, pissing out of late-night talk radio rumblings, putting in cameo appearances on Showdown Tonight, left as live correspondents' reports on his answering machine while he was out? The narrow space he came from has already ended, been burned off, refined away. It capitulated in the same moment, in the time it has taken the boy to think this thought, to consume this illuminated manuscript, to page, to leaf through, to see, to believe, to receive the old list of infinitives, to lip-read the traditional closing, this one: Next Year in Angel City.

The boy grows manic, racing out of control. He wants everything, all at once. He demands a continuous barrage of mil-spec mayhem. When that's not forthcoming, he manufactures it. C'mon: new game. Scale-model Grand Prix down the emergency stairwell. Multiplayer stock market speculation with real quotes and Monopoly money. Murder in the dark, the hushed hysterics too soft for the night nurses to hear. Helicopter spotting on the roof, gawking at today's incoming wounded. He must live through those sixty years he has acquired without experiencing, all in the space of the next three weeks. He plunges the ward into a hopped-up nonstop campaign of chaos, and only the knowledge that it will all stop suddenly and soon prevents the pros from cuffing him.

Linda foresaw the whole reaction the day Nico checked in. Patently transparent-an old man's textbook love me, look past my rhinoceros hideomness. All the same, she finds herself locking horns with the little beast more and more frequently. Some days she just doesn't care what motivates his constant, vindictive disruption. She'd like to whack him one first and do the social worker stuff later. As for his wider subversion of hospital life—"You call this food? Lemme in that kitchen. Hey, how's about a movie theater in this dump? Casino. Dancing girls" — more power to him. But when he busts in on her Duchenne's support group, hysterically trying to shame them out of their progressive muscle wastage by threatening to use the four of them as a baseball diamond, she and Nicolino have their first shouting showdown.

Problem is, three of her four disintegrating dystrophy boys side with their tormentor. Leave him be. Nico's okay. He's our Main Mind, our man with a plan to take command. (We, after all, may live to see the extreme old age of thirty.) It's a sympathy vote for a kid picked off in a way even grimmer than their own. But there's something more than mere sympathy in this deference to Nico's new ward order. The others have been just waiting for a knee-high Boss Tweed to come along and tell them what to do next. Not just any newcomer; this one.

Anyone who has exploited prepubescence for any campaign, however well meaning, anybody who has ever trotted out pasteurized, freckled, fairybook simperers to pitch their wholesome radiance, has forgotten the lay of this land. Traveled too far in the interim. Remember the children. What of the children? Doesn't anyone care about the children? Rubbish, all of it. For Linda's money, these sales reps confuse innocence with a lack of opportunity. Been too long since they've gotten down on their shins to consider the turf. It's desperate down here at half-pint level. They're clutching and mean, and they take no prisoners.

Childhood is not that parade of vibrant kids teaching the world to sing. That's a new one: as far as Espera has read, the product of the last fifty years. She knows the histories from school. Time was when domestic theory wrote the whole batch off as changeling babies, perversely truculent sub- and semihumans. The prescribed treatment was to beat the devils out of their tiny, ripe habitations. No wonder childhood is just waiting for her to turn around and leave the room so it can retaliate for the running lancet sores inflicted on it by ages of adulthood.

Purity is an adult bills of goods. The sweet-meaning child is just an icon, a tool in this power struggle, the power struggle, the first, original, quintessential holy war between supreme exploiter and victim. Real children — the pet mutilators, the medicine cabinet moles, the ones that refuse to pee until their bladders burst — have all lost their innocence long before they learned to speak. They had it drilled out of them at the first vindictive parental backhand.

Small wonder. Her kids are an ad hoc delegation of oppressed, low-income, minority, viciously sick, festering, powerless, disenfranchised, and condescended-to culprits. They know in their intuitively subterfuging hearts that they are the test rats, scapegoats, and pack animals of the entitled — their mature dominators, the holders of vested interests, those of the despotic head start.

Hence their incredible attraction to an adult kid. Only that can explain how Nico charges in and takes over in a matter of days. His packaging says it all. The guy's old, and consequently brings out the natural submission to one's elders. Yet at the same time, he's this double agent, a traitor to his class. Here's this adult chucking it all in and coming back. And there's no champion like one that's just crossed over from enemy lines.

The last thing Linda wants to do is tangle with him, to pull rank. But what are you supposed to do when the monster calls his quadriplegic buddy a beanbag? When he threatens to attach a friend's catheter to the wheelchair motor if the malingerer doesn't at least try to stand? When, trying out his own remedy on Ben's suicidal depression, he gives the double amputee a highly prized board and orders him to skate or die?

Linda's charges refuse to protect themselves from this self-appointed terrorist therapist. Nor do they want her protection. They rush, instead, to that universal tendency of the oppressed, the victim's eternal willingness to exchange one cruelty for the other on symbolic grounds. He may be a tyrant, but he's our tyrant. Better him than one of you.

And the real adults, who have all read his chart, are just as disposed to let him run amok. The mere thought of telling him not to run in the corridors paralyzes them with shame. Nico, still possessed of boyhood's thought tap, knows he can get away with just about anything. He's unopposable, a berserk Mickey Rooney-Freddie Bartholomew mutant cross gone rampant, just before the boxer priest comes to straighten him out.

Only, there's not going to be any reforming priest popping up this time. Nico's parents have been preparing their only man-child for his impending kiss-off by assuring him that whatever he says is holy law. The one potential surrogate dad that Linda tries to trick into assisting with Nico moans at her softly from his side of the suddenly Siberian bed. "I said, leave me off this one. It's. Not. A. Surgical. Case."

She wants to hit him. Slap his impassive face for treating her like, well, like a willful child. She would in a second, if she thought it might help. In the man's current condition, it wouldn't even arouse him. At least he's talking again, and all she can do is let him.

"Not my rotation. I shouldn't even know of this kid's existence." He lashes the words with a ferocity that shifts her concern from the man-boy to the boy-man. One thing is clear, whatever other creeping etiologies come to bear here. Ricky too is spooked out of his composure by this freak visitor.

etiologies come to bear here. Ricky too is spooked out of his composure by this freak visitor.

Her resident-in-absentia lies on his back in the dark, in her bed. Even his spending the night here is a major concession. His arms stay folded over unremoved surgical scrubs. He lies stiff, a magician's hypnotized assistant or Gothic knight posing for the sculptured upper deck of his terminal stone bunk. Gross miscalculation on her part, to have brought up the Nico thing. They are back to the friction of their first tête-à-tête, without the erotic charge. She feels the slow spit of nebulous theories churning in him, where she had meant to forestall them. I know, she can feel his forcibly relaxed muscles thinking. I know who this creature is.

She dare not even ask him what he thinks he knows. He would dissolve in an ironic laugh at his own expense, pull back into a deeper pillbox, even as he turned to play with her. Play more perfunctory, with their every successive foray. Fondling as sop. She cannot even say anymore—already? just three weeks this time? — what she most requires from him. What she knows better than to want or say. To tell him how, with each new separation, she grows ever more frantic to have him up inside her, alive and covered and safe, would rush the day when he goes impotent at the mere sight of her eager need.

She refrains from the impulse to touch his chest, already feeling the obligatory, patterned echo from him. A quick panic fills her here in her own bed, invaded by this invité. She must have chosen him for this, singled him out before she knew him. But she did know already. Knew his reputation for Dial-a-Nurse. Knew the brutal occupation, the sardonic "Your patient, Doctor." Knew he was the very man who could replay her private nightmare scenario, the repeat foreclosure she seems intent on engineering.

She can ask him for nothing. Any request at all would be fatal for them both. The last thing she wants is confrontation. Just knowing that she dare not ask makes her a slave, sick with the irresistible question. She tries his shoulder, tentatively, feels it tense in feigned relaxation. She slithers in toward his ear. And what form will compulsion take tonight, what surrogate truce? Talk to the boy. Straighten him out, break him of cruelty's bafflement. Take him under your wing. Take care of this helplessness. Give it the protection only you can give.

Or she might speak to him for real. Might unleash at last the whispered accusations against her betrayer in age. This man, so much her senior, a decade: Was that the secret appeal? Old enough to be her grubby little uncle. He lies there across the minefield of acrylic blend, already a casualty in this single-elimination, sudden-death tournament. He lies cross-armed, denying, refusing the explanation she needs from him. She needs him to say, just once, what lies behind the pudgy, glowing, poster faces' pretended innocence. Don't you see why the boy runs manic? The dependent's bewilderment, the dazed, mislaid trust.

She closes the gap and cozies up against him, knowing how much this contact will deplete whatever stockpile of touch he might have left for her. But she needs the thing so much that she will take even sex again in its stead, since he can give nothing else. Friction — attenuating, static, distracting, ridding the minute of old injuries. It is the lesser of two requests. A way to avoid wondering when the private batterings— the cloaked secrecies, violations, and covert hurt-mes — will start again this time.

More wrongs to redress than there are hours in the day. The only answer, of course, is unflagging industry, the same ceaseless dedication and energy that enabled him, from essentially zero capitalization, to assemble the complete Riders at the End of Time, volume 3, numbers 1 through 161. Not that he makes the mistake of trying to pull off this whole scam single-handedly. He allows himself the luxury of delegating authority on labor-intensive matters. He's assigned his corps of engineers the task of building a little lookout nest on the roof next to the chopper pad, from which they hope soon to be launching bottle rockets, currently under development by Chuckie and the brain trust according to proprietary specs of his own design: various supply-closet combustibles set alight in one-liter IV bags.

Okay, everything they've mounted so far is just piddling stuff compared to the major campaign. But he refuses, on grounds of project security, to discuss future operations. Also, he's kind of winging it. Not really sure what he's after himself. The girl Joy seems somehow instrumental to the master plan. He doubles back to her on repeated, suck-up visits, cementing their wary truce with miscalculated small gifts: dried dough he swears will come back to life if soaked, half of a sundered walkie-talkie set, worthless books washed up in the tidal pools of trade, tides only she would read. Decisive Sieges of the Sixteenth Century, or Our Friends on the Pacific Rim.

"So are you getting any better?"

"I don't know," she answers gravely, unwilling to lie. He kicks at her crutches, toppling her in treachery. She emits a bleat, a "Hai!" of surprised pain.

"Sorry. Just conducting a little experiment." She stares at him in incomprehension, a retriever whose hindquarters are crushed under its careless owner's recliner. "Look, I said I'm sorry. Here." He doffs the cap. "Go ahead. Pull my hair. What's left of it, anyway."

She covers her smirk with the back of an autumn-leaf hand. She forgets the pointless cruelty faster than anything can explain. Pain passes from her face without residuals, replaced by another, iodine hurt each time she steals a look at him. Something inside her cells would match his instant age, decade for decade. Something in her is crying, "Little girl, little girl, let go of me."

Sorties with the Stepaneevong female leave Nico's senior lieutenants more than a little nervous. What's the point? How's she gonna help us any? Come on; let's go steal some tubing and make a Comm Device. Or or or: let's say that the third floor is M-31 and the fifth floor is Heliotria. The Cyclogeneron's about 90 percent finished, but we need just one more trigawatt-hour of juice…

But the guy they vie for is worlds away. Sometimes he's morose with preoccupation, and will snap, "Grow up, will you? The hell is this, Peeweeland?"

His crushing rebukes demoralize the upper echelons of Command and Control. The only encouraging spin to Nico's enigmatic insistence on parlay with this foreign element is that the more the two of them talk, the less they seem to need to.

He brings her a plastic soccer ball, half of a cruel carrot-and-stick cure. Astonishingly, she can keep it in the air with just her knees, elbows, head, and shoulders, even while propped up over her leg struts.

"Jeez. Where'd you learn how to do that?" But she cannot talk while the ball is aloft.

And he cannot wait for her to miss, which could be never. "Look," he blusters. "Joyless. They're probably not telling you everything, right?" She executes an especially skillful lob with the inside arch of her good foot. "I mean, you could be Xed off the charts as dead meat already, without even knowing it." If she gives a reply, he's the only one who hears it.

"Okay. So suppose you gotta go down," he postulates, watching her, wagging his head in admiration. She counts softly, out loud, her successive aerial taps, somewhere in the high eighties. "With all due respect, Joyless, I'd like to suggest to you that the only thing worth doing, if that's the case, is to try going down in the record books."

She giggles, and it breaks her concentration. The ball rolls down the hall, and she limps along after it. "I'm not that good," she says, the giggles still softly issuing from her like shy, unsigned, dime preemie valentines. A twinge of conscience nags at her. The books are waiting; she's been remiss. She shouldn't stand here playing all day. "I'm only so-so. Where I come from, they can keep a ball in the air all.. "

"Not that record. I'm talking something truly grabbing. Totally new project. Wait a minute. Got it. This is a great one. Classic! What we got to do is write TV-25 Action Corps and tell them there's this little Asian girl lavishing in the charity hospital and she probably's not going to make it, and the only thing that keeps her holding on fighting for sweet life is her driving dream to go down in Guinness as the recipient of the most get-well cards of all time. What do you say?"

"Languishing."

"Whatever. Come on. They love this kind of pathetic kiddie crap. Capture the regional imagination. Feel-gooder campaign. Courage in the face of keeling over. Vote with your stamps. The whole bullshit waterworks. What d'ya think?"

She smiles like she hasn't yet smiled in this lifetime, and starts the ball up in the air again. Eight, nine, ten, eleven. "Clap your hands," she says suddenly.

"Say what?"

"Clap your hands. Don't let Tink die."

He plays dumb until she explains. That book I lent you? He makes out that he hasn't read it yet. Not enough time. Hospital's been going to serious hell in a handbag, and has been for years before his arrival. Consequently, it takes every hour in his agenda just to stabilize the situation. Reading's a luxury, strictly for those with time to burn.

"Know what's wrong with this place?" Nicolino declares to a rumpled Linda. The lady is losing it; she looks like she's slept in that cute little physio getup of hers. "I said, 'Know what's wrong…?' You're supposed to say, 'No, Nico. What?' "

"Do I have to? Okay, okay. Tell me what's wrong with this place."

"Everybody's so twigging sick. We gotta git outta here before we all go rabid. I've seen it happen. Trailblazer, number twenty-three. Whole pioneer colony just ups and goes completely stir crazy with cabin fever. Hey. A ball game. There's yer ticket. How 'bout it, Doll-face? You can swing a Dodger home bill for us?"

" 'Doll-face'? Let me see those comics of yours."

"Ha! You and the Navy SEALs, maybe. Come on. Get that so-called surgeon guy of yours to take us. You two are doing it, aren't you?"

"Doing what?"

"Oh, excuse me. I thought you were old enough to know about these things."

"You little braguillas!"

To which, he replies in a language she doesn't even want to identify.

"Not that getting you long-termers out of here is such a bad idea. But baseball? Kind of sedate, isn't it? No Amorphicoms? No Grid? No Galactic Heat Death?"

"You only need that shit when nothing's breaking."

"Nico. I'm not going to tell you again."

"Promise? Sor-ry. I meant to say 'that shirt.' "

"How are you going to keep a whole patrol of your contemporaries in one place in the bleachers for nine complete innings?"

"We'll only take the crips. You know; the ones who can't move."

"What a little fiend we are. All right, let's call the so-called surgeon. But I can't believe I'm doing this for you."

Kraft is ready with the subterranean-bunker, I'm-busy-for-the-rest-of-my-life-and-beyond, blanket refusals. "Wrong guy for the wrong job. First off, when am I ever going to have the time to…?"

"You're off next Friday and Saturday," she tells him gently. "I checked the call schedule."

"You did what?" Checked on him, on his reliability. She has been out early, cutting off his lines of retreat. He is suddenly far away, indifferent, invulnerable, slack. Even the deadening silence between them feels luxurious, something one might thrive on.

"It doesn't have to be torture, you know. You might even enjoy it."

"Right. Herding a disease-ridden Halloween parade through an aggressive, beer-swilling, sweltering mass of demi-humanity? Set this group loose on Dodger Stadium? Let them out of the lockup? They'll have committed felonies in a dozen different states by half time."

"Half time?" She snickers, despite the chorus of early warning signals. "Maybe you're right. I do have the wrong guy." The joke settles between them in sad, wide ripples radiating outward in all directions.

He holds her at receiver's distance, fending off the One Good Thing, his near brush with salvation. Wasteful, deliberate, self-inflicted. "I, uh, went to a game once," he tries to blurt out. He would explain how the best course in life consists of avoiding the repeat of certain debilitating early scenarios. But he has lost the cadence of humor. He cannot even bring himself to think of that grandstand debacle, in the company of a father who taught him every survival skill but steals and bunts, everything about the complex international order except for where he belonged in it.

Softly, through the apparatus, Linda offers him redemption. "I'll go with you, if you let me." He wants to tell her she must get away from him, quickly and cleanly. That he has not yet driven her away already incriminates him. He sees it all at once. They will sink into one of those mutual balances of terror, where neither can escape the collateral damage caused by the other's tenderness.

His no, she assumes from his repeated objections, is a yes in other words. Over his increasingly ritualized objections, she books him for the Saturday twin bill against the intensely colorful but eternally hapless Cubbies.

"Pushover opponents. Couple of home victories should at least keep the beer-bottle frag bombs to a minimum."

"Oh, great," he capitulates. “Do I at least get to ogle the cheerleaders.”

"Hopeless. Hopeless." The sliver of good-bye in her voice as she hangs up suggests that she already anticipates all the ways he will abandon her.

Kraft tries to get Plummer to sub for him. Carver's emergency Lesionnaire is holing up in the residents' bathroom, perched in front of the urinals. As he tucks himself back into his khaki scrubs, he sings, "Nothing could be finer than to be in some vaginer in the morning."

"Very nice, Thomas. You compose that one all by yourself?"

"You kidding? Do I look like a genius?"

"At the moment, no."

"Such gems are not 'composed.' They erupt from a thousand simultaneous springs at the right moment. Overnight, they become part of the English-speaking heritage."

"Speaking of which. Know anything about baseball?" He lays out the request. "I'll cover ER for you."

"Do I get the girl thrown in too?"

"The girl? Oh God." Wouldn't that be a massacre. "Come on, Thomas. I thought you were onto Nurse Spiegel these days."

"Ancient history. Chalk her off. Confirmed kill. Notch on the old barrel. I thought I explained this to you already, buddy: I plan to follow you around, nibbling on your undigested scraps. You're my mentor, man. I mean, if you want to talk natural genius…"

The world, as is widely known, is divided into two sorts of people. Exactly what those two sorts are is a matter of continuous speculation. No matter; wherever the division, Plummer falls into neither camp. He is beyond good and evil, freedom and dignity, sorrow and pity — in short, the perfect surgeon-in-training.

Which Kraft is not, as witnessed by the fact that as he enters the park, climbs into the funneled sunlight surrounded by a home crowd of 55,878 who lose themselves in an excitement as synesthetic as it is random, he feels inexplicably good. He and Linda shepherd a dozen kids, or rather, the kids suffer the pretense of authority as they break for the open air. The youngest of the group is a heavily urban-matured eight years old. The oldest — well, the oldest has been dead for decades.

Chuck, head now wrapped up tighter than the Mummy's, sports a batter's helmet several sizes too big for him, thereby succeeding in obscuring the bulk of his face. Joleene has been temporarily persuaded to swap the Chatty Cathy for a stuffed outfielder totem. "So that's what a Dodger is," Kraft murmurs to Linda; "I was wondering." The girl pulls incessantly at the mute thing's neck threads, threatening to yank

its head off.

The Fiddler Crab cracks jokes about a left hand like his not needing a mitt. Ali, a recent admittance with a plate-sized creature in his gut, who's learned to tell everybody he comes from Persia so he won't get beaten up, nasals, "Play ball, play ball!" like some muezzin up in a box-seat minaret. The Hernandez brothers keep looking around nervously, afraid they're going to bump into one of their prehospital business associates. A mute, cotton-wadded Rapparition — shouldn't even be out of bed yet — scribbles his alexandrines down on the insides of a popcorn box and passes them for public enunciation to Kyle, whose larynx is about the last part of him still functioning.

Nicolino acquires a program through judicious swapping of a rare Captain America back issue. He alternates between kicking verbal lime on the leather uppers of the collective umpiring staff and making arcane marks on the scorecard, improving on the already Byzantine official scoring system. He attempts to fix forever in recorded memory the whole game down to the trajectory of every foul ball and the bleacher location of each lucky scab who snagged one.

He keeps up a running statistician's patter. When the good guys' three-for-three hitters come up, he yells out, "All right, he's hot, he's hot." For the oh-for-three guys, this becomes, "All right, he's due, he's due." The folks in the nearby seats, after their initial, shocked whiplash, go out of their way to not give the senescent heckler a second look.

Joy sits between Kraft and Linda, an aluminum half-brace leaned up on each of her idols' knees. She studies the game furiously for its meaning, waiting, as late as the seventh-inning stretch, for things to begin. She asks in a constant but decorous undertone for help toward a hermeneutics, and when Kraft doesn't know the answer to her question he makes something up. He makes up a lot.

"Dr. Kraft, how many teams are there?"

"Two." He steals a look at Linda. "Two, right?"

"Well, what about those black men?"

"Black— Oh, in the black suits, you mean. Well, they switch back and forth, depending on who's winning. Evens things up."

"And those? The white suits?"

"Those? They're beer sellers. Not official protagonists, as far as I know."

He is nervous next to the girl, jumpy, edgier than the terrain's bad associations can account for. He can feel Linda giving him the professional second-guess, and she's right. How's he supposed to explicate this, to tell her? You see, I've this growing proof, well, not proof, this conviction, okay, suspicion, hunch… These kids, this service, this pede tour of duty: they are — what are they? Consolidating. Converging on him. And everything depends upon his finding out why. What they are after. Where they are headed.

In between Joy's questions—"Why do they put that man in the middle up on that little hill? How many points does the little boy get for picking up the discarded sticks?" — he slips in a few cross-examinations of his own. He asks her if she remembers anything at all about her old home, the village, the river basin she was driven from.

"A little. My mother's twig broom. Our dog, with only one eye. The market. The smell of certain fruit. Dr. Kraft, how come they all have those big lumps on the side of their mouths?"

"Right. Those are plugs of chewing tobacco. You win if you can spit yours over one of those '330' signs while nobody's looking. The smell of fruit," he prompts her. "Durian? Mangosteen? Luk ngoh? "

She pulls her eyes from the all-fascinating field and stares at him. He receives it full in the face, this awful, searching look that would conceal itself even while flagging down the impossible rescue. It shoots out at him, both oblique and dead on, a summons and a bolt. How much do you know? And in the next instant, she relaxes. Not enough to worry about. Nothing of the atrocity's specifics, no real hold on the nightmare locale. Harmless superficial, she decides, because her look goes congenial, her ready-to-run bite loosens into a smile. "You ate a durian once?"

"Many." And to prove it, he does an imitation, reasonably good, given the intervening years, of a street vendor's call. The peanut peddlers flash him a dirty look: What's yer racket, jerk-off? A couple of militantly fecund families at the end of the row overcome their good breeding long enough to stare at the motley child band and their howling leader. No, Kraft decides, listening to his residual, perfectly pitched cries drift down to the nearer bullpen. It is too far, too incommensurate, too implausibly split. The gap between here and there will kill him just to gaze out over.

Linda practically falls out of her wooden folding slats. "Where in the world did that come from?"

How is he supposed to tell her? From a place called Angel City, Land of the Free.

Joy examines him again, fear creeping back into her instruments. "Say that again, please, Dr. Kraft." He repeats his strophe of fruit names, softly now, so as not to violate the national pastime. Then, in a tonal dialect he can almost understand, she says, "That is almost what we call them."

They must step no nearer. They already wander too near the shared, partitioned province. Neither wants to come any closer to where their paths cross, the tangents to earlier extraditions. Suddenly, it's all baseball between them, furious Twenty Questions about runs, hits, errors, pick-offs, sign stealings — the whole semiotic flood. They scatter from any suggestion of common childhood geography, the one from guilt, the other shame. They backpedal from overlap like a fielder badly misjudging a deep fly to center.

"Can they both win?" she frets out loud.

"Uh, Linda?"

"Well, in a word, no."

"No?" Kraft echoes. "There's your answer, then. Peculiarly American, wouldn't you say? Better to fight on forever than to tie, apparently."

Joy smiles at the diction, his goofing for her benefit. This man will never be capable of wrong, no matter what he might choose to do. He is the one adult on earth who does not talk down to her. She takes his hand, a gesture universally understood among old fellow durian catcl "How long does one game last?"

"Easy one. Until it's over. Kind of a nineteenth-century, determinist thing."

"Where's the Mighty Casey?"

Bits of Cracker Jack explode from both choking adults. The girl is devastated by her gaffe. She clearly has no idea what she's said. The recitation, out of one of her pauperized school district's obsolete, nineteenth-century, determinist texts that she has blindly committed to memory, could mean anything to her, passed through the filters of continuous dislocation. Mighty Casey as position name, like shortstop or first base? Mighty Casey as deciding machinery, deus ex apparatus rolled to the plate at the all-important juncture? Honorary tide, rank, life achievement? In any event, to her, as essential to each staging of the genre as a sailor to the epic or a floozy to the lawsuit.

"Dr. Kraft, I don't understand this stupid game." This soul that did not flinch when the ER physician shattered her ankle, that awoke from the agony of excision to write the surgeon a thank-you note, now begins soundlessly to cry. A hundred ministrations and apologies from Kraft and Linda cannot convince her that she's done no wrong.

"I don't understand it either," he says, taking her hand back after she wiggles it free. "It's apparently some kind of ritual drama," he explains to her. "National salve. Expectation. History, allegory, fable, dream." He could be bluffing his way through the Chiefs latest unread book assignment, those opaque, impenetrable predictions of the upheavals and reverses in store as we go guttering into the dark.

"It's a twigging ball game," Nico yells through a megaphone he has made of his rolled-up scorecard. "What the hell are you guys blathering about?" Now how did he hear them, above this crowd, from the other end of this screaming murderers' row?

The boy is taking his own emotional plunge, as a result of the Dodgers' deliberate, malicious betrayal. "Pitiful," he says, shaking his balding braincase, hiding it in his hands. "These guys couldn't reach base on an error even if they'd publicly promised homers to a dozen dying kids." The Hernandez brothers emit wicked, appreciative snorts in stereo. In fact, the local boys give it their best but go down twice in splendid paralysis to the normally hapless Second City conscripts, who this day look like world beaters,

Everybody is pretty bummed, but fandom's remorse cannot completely doom this day of reprieve and freedom. Kyle, who has brought along his Walkman, keeps repeating for the others, in astonished tones, "The kids from Carver are here today," exactly the way the beery announcer said it, between rollcall mentions of Rotary chapters and nursing home brigade minuses. The Hernandez brothers light out for the territory on the way back to the bus, but Kraft is still fit enough to chase down and snag their lazy, city-vitiated pop-foul arc across the parking lot.

He sees the girl board the bus and tries to help her up the awkward steps. He is mortified when she shrugs him off. She swings along determinedly, keeping up an impressive clip down the constricted aisle. She sheds the struts in the back of the bus and lowers herself into the seat behind the two old-timers with the L.A. caps pulled down over their wasted beaks.

" 'There is no joy in Mudville,' "Joy recites in ingenue singsong for no one, the words she once performed in front of a now-forgotten class, on a twin bill with the Gettysburg Address.

"Shut yer face," Nico manages.

"Please," Chuck adds.

Kraft pulls Linda down into the seat next to him, before she can slip away to join the children. He holds her hand, ribboning the fingers of the nearest girl, the only available one. He whispers to her what he's just seen — the small-arms exchange of first flirtation. Linda steals a look over one shoulder to see this stabbing thing for herself. But all she can make out is the boys in the back, already scheming the details of the next expedition.

When the next one is launched, it's the last thing in the world any adult could have anticipated. Weeks of dilated child life pass; years click off Nico's accelerated body clock. That is to say a day, maybe a day and a half, real time. Nico shows up at his next scheduled Doll-face session and demands, "You gotta teach us to dance."

"Dance! You mean—?"

"What do you think I mean?" He is surly with compromise. "Dancing. Dancing. You've heard the word, haven't you? 'Blue Danube.' Shake yer bootie. Get up and get down. What do you want from me?"

"Is this a dare? Somebody's put you up to this."

"Nobody puts me up to nothing."

"Okay, all right. Calm down. Just tell me how in the world you came up with…"

"I don't know," he says, as preoccupied as she's ever seen him. He takes off the ball cap and runs a hand over his parchment-papered crown. The gesture is perfect, something he must have seen bald men do in some ancient cartoon. "I just have this… feeling we gotta learn some steps. That we'll need it if…"

"If what? Who's we?"

He tenses his gray temples and grits those teeth that have not yet fallen out. "The girls'll be thrilled to their ditsy little anklets. And the guys will do it and like it."

Why not? A group movement lesson is just one two-step away from her own therapies. She gets away with half her rehabilitating sashays only because the hardened, proto-criminal street toughs, in their sick and wounded conditions, can't believe she comes from this planet. But even she would never dare suggest something like this without Nico's bankrolling.

Beyond all credibility, he gets his minions to turn out for a class in the Virginia reel. Clumsy, hulking, umber gang members barrel down the chute of the longways set like bombs pouring out of a carpeting bay. She gives them folk weaves and figure eights, kicks and turns that aren't "too femmy," keeping bodily contact to a fleeting minimum. She rolls out all sorts of pieces — Hopi, Mexican, Ashanti. Best are the enchainements and positional formations that even the crutches and wheelchairs can roll through.

They rapidly outpace Linda's passing competence. The best of them began beyond her. The Rapparition, recovering, concocts this elaborate triple-level, supersyncopated, free-falling gymnastic routine like nothing Espera has ever seen a body do. Its nearest living relatives are those dim, almost-forgotten jump-rope choreographies, the bastard inheritances of her confused, crosstown shuffle-up. Double Dutch, Double Irishes, Red-hot Peppers, here mutated, further displaced until nothing but the skipping fear, the shaky shake breakdown is still recognizable.

Last night, night before,

Twenty-four robbers at my door…

I was born in a frying pan;

Can you guess how old I am…?

Little Miss P, dressed in blue,

Died last night at quarter of two.

'Fore she died, told me this:

You better run or you gonna get hit…

Call the doctor, call the nurse.

Call the lady with the alligator purse…

Grandpa, Grandma, you ain't sick. All you gotta do is the Seaside Six.

Everything she can give them is not enough. Not anywhere near what they need. Nico comes to her after a workout, vaguely distressed. "Hey, you're okay and all. But we gotta call in the pros."

She phones around, she herself now suckered into believing lessons to be necessary for their collective next step. The last of her calls is to the one she's been avoiding by mutual consent these however many generations. "Want to take a girl out dancing?" Dancing? Girl? Capillary action works its sap into Kraft, unwelcome but irresistible. Bits of his skin crinkle like new clothes at the sound of her invitation. Take a girl dancing: template words that elicit images all over the cortex map. They promise the long-abandoned hope of heart-stopping prom night. Rustles of sweet silk delay, even here, the abrasive apotheosis of the land of instant gratification, where the pinnacle of sexiness is to lightly goose the twin cams at every stoplight, blasé behind double-polarizing wraparounds, blister-packed into phosphorescent sweats inscribed all over with slogans and retail insignia. (Why, Kraft has wondered since coming to this state, must one pay double for the kind of legible ads that they used to hire sandwich-board men to peddle?)

But: take a girl dancing. A girl, she says, offering up to him the regressive, politically objectionable term as decadent concession, crepe wrapped, shameless for an evening. Who would have thought a night of dance-floor romance was still possible, here, of all the world's sprawls? Who would have suspected there were dance floors left anywhere in these hundred and thirty incorporated hacienda nightmares, slipped in somewhere along the split fault-lip, wedged between the million-dollar, ranch-house historical destinies of capitalist revengineers and the noir-punk, cut-you-for-fucking-me-over disinherited who drift through downtown in a state of perpetual pre-aftermath?

But take a girl dancing. Yes. Oh yes; anywhere you lead. Yes, even the — where? — Pasadena Women's Club. Well, so be it, if that's the last bastion of fox-trot in this fifteen-million-souled nation flying point for westward expansion's cliff-dive into the Pacific.

Come Beginners' Night, Kraft hops behind the wheel and lets the vehicle do its thing. He's come to use the car more or less like a laser-guided toilet seat these days. Just slide in, snap down, plug into the man-machine interface, think the coordinates, and watch them come up like magic on the old plasma display pasted over the former windshield. Worktime playtime mealtime snacktime anytime. Sometimes he just likes to corkscrew up and down the parking garage ramp for relaxation. Last week he drove around the corporate limits for a good hour or two, trying to find a place to drop off his empties for recycling.

He pulls into the Women's Club parking lot with five minutes to spare before the departure of the first batch of box-steppers. He's got his best shoes on. They're oiled up and ready for anything short of jitterbugging.

She's waiting for him, swaying softly to herself on the steps. O beautiful for spacious! She's wearing the lightest conceivable summer cotton dress, embroidered all over in magenta and cyan mythical foliage, a weightless drape that hugs her perfect hips, clinging up and down her like a train of little-boy puppy-lovers on market day in some fairy fiesta town from the southerly extremes of magic realist fiction. This woman is half from another, completely foreign country. What does he know about her, about any alien land, let alone his own?

He rests his hands on her cottoned waist, too ephermerally thin. She curls like desert vegetation, the feathered tip of a talipot palm in bloom. What must he do — light a candle, leave a handwritten gracias recibido to the little unwed mother of God, cast a bit of homemade ceramic to hang by the altar in the shape of the revitalized part? She kisses him, takes him by the elbow and leads him inside, where he pays his two-fifty and she shows her receipt. They enter the meeting-turned-dance-hall, and before he can register, turn, and run, they ambush him. Dr. Kraft. Dr. Kraft. We knew you would come.

It's most of the baseball consortium, plus a new cadre of recruits. Some of the tenderfeet, to put it bluntly, will do no dancing tonight. A few are beyond motor maneuvering, beyond torso control at all. Ben, for one, a case Kraft helped on, is beyond a lower torso altogether. But each is grim and determined, demanding lessons to prepare them for some unspecified ballroom showdown.

"We had a spot of trouble at the door, let me tell you," Linda tells him. "Soon as they saw us coming up the walk, they were going to call the police for one of those discreet little arrests, like they slap on folks who heckle the president while he's addressing the Junior Chamber of Commerce?"

She's racing, trying to forestall his mouth from spilling its cries of treachery. "If they could have arrested a dozen kids without attracting attention, they would have. Tried to shag us off, but this is Beginners' Night. There's no other time we could come, and I paid full price for everybody, and isn't it illegal to discriminate by age? Huh? Somewhere?" Linda tugs at his sleeve while lovingly grinding his toe beneath hers. Isn't it, you cradle robber? She cops a feel, smiling like she hasn't had so much fun since college, t.p.-ing the rival sorority house.

The dancing teacher, redder than Moira Shearer's pumps, and her Korean step-modeling partner are both still in the throes of major-league embarrassment at the army of child cripples who have come for the Arthur Murray treatment. Teacher opens with one of those effusively flustered protests of liberal tolerance.

"As I'm sure you've noticed, we have a number of little visitors tonight…" Place is at least packed, which reduces the vulnerability. "And everyone, as always, is very welcome. So will all those who want to dance and who need partners form two lines and pair off." Then to the portable tape player, where the first of tonight's soundtracks lies in wait.

And the first song? A great big American lunar crooner, Bingle or Johnny Fontane, sliding around on "Stalag by Starlight." She plays it to accompany the somber, stricken threading together of the two partner-seeking lines. Kraft, still stunned by the subterfuge, falls into line behind the last male. He watches the mating gears mesh — man in eye patch falling to woman with Parkinson's, man with heavy loop of keys hanging from his belt going to tiny, terrified Filipina who came to dance class seeking the one social activity in this newfound land that she thought would require no English.

He notices how the kids have rigged the line, counting off furiously in tandem, then weaseling into position so as to draw each other as opposites, the lesser of available humiliations. Yeah, it's starting to come back to him. All that lunch-line, recess, sports-field, field-trip, bus-stop practice in positional long division. Numbering backward by fours. Converting hours to the final bell into minutes and seconds and heartbeats. Turning margin inches into inch-and-a-quarters. Figuring necessary goals or runs per period, minimum final exam scores for a passing GPA. Around-the-world flash card drills — the countless calculations of departure. How many miles to Babylon?

All but the most incapacitated join in, grab a partner, spread themselves dubiously across the makeshift dance floor. Joy, who could limp through the calls better than a few of those who grimly but gamely take part, sits out the first set. She takes a seat next to the carved-up Ben, where they whisper and giggle to each other behind cupped hands, pointing out mismatches and clunky practice turns. Across the improvised ballroom, like munchkin cadres infiltrating the Emerald City Residenz, the urban disinherited prepare to stage a naturalist production of Rosenkavalier.

Something more than fear of Nico's wrath compels them, although a few well-timed glares from the boss do their bit to keep the ranks in file. The dance-capable among them pair off with a minimum of foot dragging, with only the Rapparition being dealt to an adult, a blue-rinsed lady in snugly tummy-tucking sequins, completely dazed by the consort that fate's conga line has assigned her tonight.

Kraft reaches the head of the snaking cue, only then discovering that another once-child has remembered the lingering, line-rigging trick of early education. "Hi there, hunk," Linda baits him, taking him by the stethoscope skitcher and hauling him to a corner up near the stage, where they can get a good view of the terpsichorean demo just now getting under way.

God knows how these folks justify billing festivities as Beginners' Night. The pedagogical Ginger, outfitted with a wireless throat mike, begins by chirping, "You all remember last week when we learned…" Well, Kraft doesn't remember last week. He has trouble remembering this afternoon. And trying to isolate the beautiful, liquid steps that she and her Asian Astaire float upon is like trying to parse flowing Arabic script. "Come on, Ahab," Linda implores him. "Shake a leg."

It's either that or become a spectacle, gawked at, even shown up by the same shabby underage irregulars he himself sewed together. You all remember the fox-trot, don't you? The bit from last week? The pogo stick, the frug? Teacher sets the tape machine turning again, heads sensing, speakers singing out a simulation of "Night and Day," a tune that dispels the nonballroom world, consigns its latest flash points to somnambulist thrashings. The song, the woman swaying gently up against him, the kids stumbling through instructed motions on all sides, the pathetic Women's Club two-hundred-watt spot standing in for a harvest moon seduce him, like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom. Okay, let's have at it then. Hum a few bars and I'll fake it.

The songs queue up in what quickly becomes a full-color historical atlas of the dance academy at large. The complete curriculum, fiendishly arranged to lead them from fox-trot to tango to don't-mean-a-thing-if-you-ain't-got-that-swing. A step for everything, and everything its step. They dance to "Blue Skies," to "Stormy Weather," to "Misty," to "Paper Moon," to "April Showers," to "I Can See Clearly Now (the Rain Has Gone)." Oh, how they dance to "The Anniversary Waltz." They samba their way through show numbers of those good, God-fearing, nativer-than-thous, Friml and Romberg. They do these mongrel North American polkas to tunes half Protestant hymnody, half "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

They do a slogging "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp," a passel of barn dances, a reconditioned "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," a "When the Saints" packed with imminent expectation, and a resigned boxcar deportation of "Hobo's Blues." As a hat-tip to the Mother Country, they get a buttered-up rumba version of that pseudo-franglaised Fab Four hit (one of Kraft's least favorite of his childhood's Top Forty). This being the Unided Snakes, the tape bears a fair share of ballistics motif, from "Fired Our Guns (but Those Whoosits Kept A-Comin')" to "Pistol Packin' Mama." Kraft watches his recent small-caliber facial-trauma cases prancing to "Put it down before you hurt someone."

They do wild shimmy-Charlestons not approved by any tango-tea ever sponsored by the Official Board of Ballroom Dancing. Their steps whisper of suppressed or denied covert influences — Iberian, Cuban, black, black, black. Alongside the handgun hop, they do the walkaway, the stamp-and-go shanty, the old Chisolm trailblaze. We're homeward bound, I hear them say. Good-bye, fare you well, good-bye, fare you well. We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.

When they can't quite control the proper heel-toe, they make up a sequence of their own. It hobbles Kraft to see, peripherally, just what naturals they are. Teacher goes around the room privately tutoring each clinch. That's it; you've got it. And out… two… three-and-now-sweep-through, two… three-and-come-back-home, two… Some of the band are more than competent. Even good. And only the periodic "Get off my bloody foot, you Homo sapiens; your epidermis is showing" betrays the fact that tonight's class is packed to breaking with third-age, quarter-sized fifth columnists.

When they can't quite control the proper heel-toe, they make up a sequence of their own. It hobbles Kraft to see, peripherally, just what naturals they are. Teacher goes around the room privately tutoring each clinch. That's it; you've got it. And out… two… three-and-now-sweep-through, two… three-and-come-back-home, two… Some of the band are more than competent. Even good. And only the periodic "Get off my bloody foot, you Homo sapiens; your epidermis is showing" betrays the fact that tonight's class is packed to breaking with third-age, quarter-sized fifth columnists.

The regulars — who are these people? If they come, as their packaging advertises, from the right side of the tracks, they are still living testimony that even the better berm is everywhere shard-strewn. The twosome just tangent to Linda's twirl exchange bios. She is a thrice-singled mother whose last husband has recently kidnapped her youngest girl and disappeared into the invisible consumer ratlands between Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys. Her dancing companion for this first set has recently been convicted of drunken driving manslaughter and sentenced to pay the parents of the victim a dollar a month for each of the eighteen years of the victim's life.

Everyone: Arabs in black glasses, would-be aerobiots with legs like stovepipes, homeowners destined for a hotel death, mestizos of every conceivable blood-cocktail concoction, timid souls who've done time in the self s prison for removing manufacturers' stickers from mattresses. A powerfully built man, Karok or Modoc or Yurok, turns the prescribed box step into a sad stenographer's account of the ghost dance, shuffling, dragging left foot, humming hu-hu-hu in hope of a return to aboriginal safety away from this place where promise and threat both push to breakpoint.

Across the crowded hall, Kraft thinks he sees Dr. Burgess thumping away obediently at the lesson assignment. Now how the hell? Here? This? Repeated stolen cowering looks, and Kraft still can't decide whether it's really the Chief or somebody else borrowing the man's body, taking the hackysack of digesting flesh out for an evening spin while Burgess himself stays home reading Dead White Male Classics.

The density of the dance floor, the sampler of tunes listing out of the cheap speakers — a checklist history of the country's sins as rich as a Puritan's embroidered alphabet — the golf shirts, the Mary Richards toreador pants, the endangered species shoes all shuffle-ball-changing for whatever the moves might still be worth wring Kraft's ribs, pound him, pump on him like scouts on a CPR dummy. Pathetic, pitiful, insistent, begging for scraps of social club love, each mass that he narrowly maneuvers past, the colostomy bags, the mastectomy implants, the bungled tummy tucks all but rubbing up against him, ravish his chest and lay him open.

Linda laughs, forced to step on his gunboats to keep them from keelhauling her. "Whoa there. Get along, little doggies. Left. Left. Right hand over your heart. Yes, even when you're facing south."

All he can do is hold this woman tighter to him, follow her as if she were his advance probe through this explosive field. This woman, who thought it productive to haul half the ambulatory pede ward here, and a third of the inerts. This girl, a tube of selflessness running through her as unfillable as those empty Torricellian columns pleading for the United Way. Teacher comes by to try to straighten out his ambling shambles. Yeah, smack in the middle of "Stompin' at the Savoy," the entire junior element stops in its tracks to enjoy a good yuck at his expense.

At break, as their carrion flock swoops down and devours the entire folding-table spread of Tang and spritz cookies before the forty-plussers can even get close, Kraft asks Linder, "Time to call it a night?"

"What, are you crazy? We haven't learned the lindy hop yet."

A four-foot person of color at Kraft's elbow mutters,

"So these the moves that the White Ruling Nation

Take to when they do their White Station gyration.

Lindy hop don't put me no closer to elation."

The Rapparition's companion from the first set, grown fond of the poet, his street metric — although she can't understand a word of it — apparently taking her back to her glory days as Marie Louise's governess, embarks on matching him recitation for recitation. "Blake's 'Little Boy Lost,' " she says, in a spectral whippoorwill. " 'The mire was deep and the child did weep and away the vapor flew.' 'Little Girl Lost,' from Songs of Experience. 'Children of the future age, reading this indignant page, know that in a former time…' " Limbs as frail and thin as an ultra-fine pen point on onionskin reach down to take the Rapparition's hand, and he low-fives her.

Just as these two impossibly inimical hues slap startlingly together, the four Mills Brothers break out of nowhere. You're nobody. Till somebody. Loves you. It's a call to fall in, line up for new partners. A song, a performance in debt to every indigenous ditty ever tried out in these parts.

In quick planar section, Kraft takes in the whole converted hall at once. The guy with the huge loop of keys; the frightened Pacific woman, Kon Tiki on the return leg; the drunk driver carrying his unbearable penance; the mud-masqueing, ion-corrected, thirtyish professionals in their air-cushion shoes; the Parkinson's patient holding one shaking claw in the other; the vet trying to hide the fact; the off-duty cops and their split-shift robber opposition; the movers and movees and shakers and shook; longshoremen and short shrifters; palefaces and redskins; the old folks at home; the fast crowd that stomped at the woodpile a half century before, here tonight only pretending to be beginners all over again: too much for him. How can he live? This place, this heartbreaking, magnificent, annihilating, imperialist, insecure, conscience-stricken, anarcho-puritanical, smart-bombing, sheet-tinned, Monroe Doctrined place… The searing, seductive, all-palliating, caramel curative of the been-through-the-Mills Brothers (sure, who else? you always hurt the ones you love) do their patented, slowed-down, lip-simulated, bastard-son-of-Dixieland instrumental interlude, returning only to insist that you're nobody. Till somebody. Cares.

Come on, join in, kick up your heels. "OK, ladies and gents. Are you ready for more of what you came here for?" Kraft, terrified at the prospect of going back through the unforgiving partnering line, swings around looking for Linda. His escort protection has wandered off to visit Joy and Ben, demonstrating, up close and contagious, all the subtle foot movements that those on the sidelines are missing. Kraft comes over to snare her for the next round. As Linda laughs good-bye to the two wallflowers, Ben calls out something to her. What? Anything, nothing. Nobody till somebody. You look great out there. I like this tune. Enjoy yourself! I'm glad I'm around to watch. Can you get my cost of admission back?

Kraft loses the message in the general hilarity of regrouping. Whatever Ben says, it stops the woman, bruises her, knocks the breath from her plexus. Espera turns, fighting with her lip, twists from Kraft's grip, and runs back to pick the boy up. She lifts him up bodily, the upper half remaining of him anyway, the brutal living stump, pruned back to nothing, to the nib, the stubborn nub, the germ. Flushed with pleasure, Ben breaks into a shamed-puppy grin. The band box strikes up a sleek, sexy "Satin Doll," and Linda, in perfect time with the teacher's "Ad-vance, and together, and glide, and back," travels across the parquet for both of them.

The Cheese stands alone. Or not alone; worse. Kraft stands five feet away from the one soul whose presence most upset him on arrival, the one girl he would avoid with all the power of a pubescent crush. He can feel Joy appraising him from her seat in the empty chairs pushed against the wall. Her silence is articulate, more oppressive than ever. He hears himself, how he might yet have to tell her, to administer her hero worship a lethal injection. How he has perhaps wrecked her, killed her, or worse. Your ankle — I… The incursion could spread. All the way up your leg, beyond. She stares passively at him, already knowing everything.

He half-steps over to her, and he must tell her now. You tell me your dream, and I'll… Tell her the odds against her. Tell her what she will never live to hear any adult male tell her. Tell her in that almost common language she can half-understand and he, despite an adulthood of effort, cannot more than half-forget. He takes her by the hand, hers held out for his before he even extends. She looks at him, adoring, waiting politely. Dr. Kraft? Looking away, he asks, in his child's Thai dialect, "Care for a spin?"

But she belongs to someone else. The dancing expedition does little to placate Nicolino or stave off the next maniacal enterprise. He begs broken parts from the tech equipment jockeys, and he and the inner circle set to work on a Wellsian apparatus whose function they refuse to disclose. He institutes a strict regimen of daily exercise, combat-readiness stuff. He casts about frantically to answer the summons nagging at him.

The thing, the revelation, is so close that he goes gradually bananas with the jitters. It looks, from the outside, like a burst of senile activity. From the inside, he is cranked up worse than a teen, a year before the flood of gonadotrophin that might account for it.

"Son of a Bisquick. This place is so, mind-alteringly, boring. We gotta get something going. Quick. While it's still possible."

He sits splayed under a pull-up bedside table, scribbling furious letters abroad, guarding the texts with a sheltering arm. He struggles with the pen-driven alphabet the way a first-year French horn player might fight through the valved scale. Certain of his letters get sealed TOP SECRET. Others he actually mails, Linda picking up the postage. One of those pathetic local television news-drink-spread shows picks up on the story Nicolino feeds it. "There's a little girl lying in Carver Hospital tonight who hasn't been on our shores for very long. But even where she comes from, they know what get-well cards are. Her name is Joy, and nothing would bring this Joy more of the same than to go down in the record books as the greatest

recipient of…"

They send out a camera team fronted by a snitty little media witch who tries not to touch anything in the children's ward except during those few seconds when the take goes "live." Then, in front of the opened lens, she rests her hands affectionately on Joy's passive head. Pulling away as soon as the cameras stop, the newscaster checks her palms for shed hanks. "My God," she whispers audibly to her crew, as if discovering rat feces in the coils of her electric range. "It's hair-loss city in here."

No sooner does the story run than the cards begin to pour in. Surreal get-well wishes from a sick world. Wishes in eleven languages, including her own, plus all manner of grammarless dialects. Some with no words at all, just pictures, little Crayola comic strips purporting to relate her own story back to her, tracing a narrow escape from murderous nondemocratic forces all the way to ultimate techno-cure and consignment to happy, waiting ranch family. Boutique-bought three-dollar cards with no signature. Mass-mailed photocopies. Delicate, church-circle, handmaid handmades. Sympathy and condolence scrawled on the backs of cold-tablet packets. Long, rambling teeny-tiny-print letters about the loss of daughters to the same, never-mentioned disease. About daughters who are not their real daughters, about real ones swapped or disguised or hidden. Real daughters who think they are adopted. Adopteds, abandoneds, who never in a million years suspected. Mothers who are sure Joy is theirs.

Nico sits on the foot of her bed as the crates of communiques pour in. He demands first dibs, as if the cards are really his and he has just been forced to use Stepaneevong because she's convenient. He devours the cartoons and drawings, passing them on with a low chuckle of having pulled a fast one. The hard letters, from the crackpot adults, he makes her read to him. Then the two of them set up a routing system whereby the bushels of mail are passed around for public consumption before they are turned back in for official record-book tallying. At least it's something to do.

But it's morbid, and it only serves to feed the ward's dancing mania. Each get-well is an acupuncturing coffin pin, rotated and tweaked in the suppurating wound until the subjects feel nothing except bewilderment at being held here against their will.

Aware of the risk, Linda shows up at bedside one afternoon while an on-duty card-reading shift plows bleakly through the day's mail, no longer even grinning. "What do you say to a little amateur theatrics?" she says, to no one in particular.

No one responds, until Joy stares openly at the tyrant who has taken control of operations.

"You mean, like a play?" Nico asks. "Make me heave, why don't you? Like, little froufrou costumes and makeup and that? Of all the infantile…"

She is ready for him. "Bunny hopping at the Pasadena Women's Club?"

"That's different. That was… preparation." Even in midsentence, you can see him realize that this stray message brought by unwitting courier is preparation too. Exactly the thing he's been after. "What do you got?"

Linda removes from its hiding place in her pouch the old anthology, A Country a Day for a Year, the promised term of time now an impossible luxury. Nico emits a groan, beyond repugnance.

" The Goose-Child.' "

"Wrench my neck."

" 'The Wolf-Child.' The Lizard-Child.' "

"Three strikes. Blow off this animal kingdom thing."

" 'Jam on Jerry's Rock.' "

"Pardon me?"

"That's the name. 'Jam on…' "

Nico voices a loud fart, followed by universal oos of disgust. But Linda knows she has them now.

" 'Aladdin.' 'Sinbad.' 'The Magic Caldron.' 'Trickster Plays the False Bridegroom.' 'Hanuman's Burning Tail.' 'The Borrowed Feathers.' 'The Magnetic Islands.' "

"Oh, sure, right. I'm not dressing up as anything smaller than a minor landmass."

" 'The Three Golden Sons.' 'The Seven-League Boots.' 'The Frog That Made Milk.' "

"I scddy bag the animals already."

" 'Beezaholi and the Cyclogeneron'?" a frightened voice from among the backbenchers suggests.

"Sure," Linda says. "Why not? Couple of diodes, some tinfoil…"

"No friggin' way. Jose. Full stop. Keep reading."

Linda sighs, a languorous Lillie Langtry, and returns to the table of contents. " 'The Wati Kutjara.' 'The Fake Beauty Doctor.' 'The Stone Eskimo Child.' 'The Mayor of…' "

Joy twists acrobatically under Linda's arm, her weight on her knuckles, as supple as a crippled beggar. Her fingers slide down the list of potential scripts at twice the speed that the false mother can pronounce them out loud. She sieves through the tides, moving her lips silently, looking for one in particular. When she finds it, as she never doubted she would, she calls it out in foregone-conclusion monotone, for the first and last time in her life interrupting another human being.

It is that spooky name, the old familiar, the last tale Linda would have thought children of this city would sit through, let alone dress up and perform this late in time's day. But the effect on Nicolino, and by association his entranced clan of republican guard, is enough to goose her flesh. "Lemme see that. Gimme that book."

He flips to the story in question and assaults it with the viciousness of the functionally illiterate. Here it is. The point of all the endless, agitated prep. The explanation, the need for dancing lessons. "Okay," he decides with producer's finality, "this is the story we're doing. You direct. We double-cast all us gimps to play both sets of teaming masses." Now: where're we going to find four dozen rat suits, a high dive, and a pipe?

How does this one go again? The ubiquitous, uninvited out-of-towner shows up on the city outskirts one morning to make a comprehensive survey. Comparing the checklists of the real against the ideal upward spiral, he concludes to himself with masterful, mumbled understatement, "Serious infrastructure problems here.

"Bad shape," he elaborates, a pleasant euphemism. One quick spin around the city-wall circuit confirms the obvious. From any perimeter tower, anyone paying attention can make out the state of affairs. Were the problem just cosmetic, it would already be unsolvable: the house plaster going shabby, the shoddy half-timbering rotting no sooner than it is rigged together. The open sewers back up into putrid pools, exceeding all stopgap attempts to sluice off the stinking sludge. The slum quarter spreads like desert into the heart of town, but the vitiated commercial sector cannot afford to pull the sinkhole down and do the required rebuilding.

The glittering Rathaus is a mammoth travesty, its obscene overhead bleeding the tax base dry. The guild buildings are down on their heels, held up by subsidy, levitation, and the magic of deficit spending. The centuries-old overhaul of the basilica has halted in mid-flying buttress. Quintessential urban nightmare, arrived at by what the grade schools will one of these once-upon-a-times take to calling civics: pauperize the past and mortgage the future to pay for an unsustainable, Pollyanna present. "An easy mark/' the self-employed surveyor says, shaking his head with a grin.

The man descends from the ramparts and heads toward the diseased downtown retail plaza. It is market day, and he settles down between a fishtail vendor, a blood sausage emporium, and a rottingly ripe cheese stall. The out-of-towner has not eaten for days, and he takes whatever sustenance he can through inhalation.

He sits down unceremoniously, cross-legged on the bare ground. He pulls open a soft leather satchel from which he draws writing materials. Spreading a piece of parchment awkwardly in front of him, he begins to print, "Fore-year 1284, Anno D. Have arrived. Find it a flea-bitten burrow with big-league pretensions, well into the predicted collapse." A woman who has slowed to gawk at this bizarre act of mall performance art edges off suspiciously as he looks up. Another, holding a hank of carrots by the hair, mistakes him for a beggar or a pope's emissary collecting for some worthy ground offensive and drops a few pennies on his parchment. The stranger politely returns them.

He settles back to his writing, and to the fine art of underplaying. A knot of children stands at a distance, giggling. "Intractable physical plant problems," the man pens, with some freedom in orthography. "Situation hopeless, but not urgent. Nothing that can't be wished away for another overdraft day or two."

Two appointed luminaries reconnoiter at the end of the writer's row of stalls. They pretend to be part of a crowd engrossed in a cleaning fluid demonstration, but give themselves away by sneaking glances in the intruder's direction. A third undersecretary slinks over to reinforce them. "It's the suit," the stranger grimaces to himself, brushing an imaginary piece of lint from his multicolored threads. "Motley gets them every time."

The suit, however flashy, is mere window dressing for the real five-alarm. Simple literacy, just kicking back and taking down travel notes, and in public at that, is a prosecutable violation of the status quo. Still, the visitor goes on annotating methodically, deliberately failing to notice the pro forma town meeting taking place on his behalf.

After another few minutes, the display of blatant public scribbling becomes too much for the assembled officials. They sidle up to where the threat sits, stopping first along the cheeses to sniff nonchalantly at some Limburger. They halt abruptly in front of the scribbler, faking an afterthought. "Good morning," the senior among them manages, in a reasonable facsimile of surprise.

"Good morning to you," the stranger replies, the soul of enigma.

"Yes, well. Quite," the official sputters like a schoolboy. "We see that you are…" He gestures helplessly at the point and parchment.

"Writing?" supplies the stranger.

"Yes. Exactly. Are you from the Abbey?"

The stranger examines his own clothes, as if trying to solve the conundrum himself. "Have the brothers here shed the traditional brown?"

"No, of course not." The interrogator passes the reprimand along to his underlings with a shriveling look. "Perhaps you are selling something, then?"

The stranger smiles indulgently. Getting warmer. He leans forward. "I'm here to help you."

"Sshht!" one of the worthies silences him, casting around violently to see if anyone's heard. Everyone has, but the ad hoc steering committee nevertheless stifles the stranger with furtive vigor. They hustle him off the Marktplatz into the Rathaus cellar by a back entrance. They shuffle him into a side chamber and forcibly sit him down, interrogation style. The chief politico, searching the faces of the others to see if they disclose too much just by asking, pales and demands, "Who told you we needed help?"

Instantly, the interrogatee falls into his natural cadence. "Friends, your problems are apparent from as far away as the spires of Hildesheim."

This bit of cheek produces an outburst from the officials. Libel, lies, slander, discovery: Who told? The buzz goes internecine; they carp at each other in low local dialect. After several bursts of mutual recrimination, one of the number is dispatched to fetch the Bürgermeister. During the wait, the stranger removes from his leather satchel a telescoping tripod easel, which he proceeds to assemble.

When the Bürgermeister and the rest of the hurriedly summoned town council arrive, they prove shrewd enough politicians to let the visitor handle the interview on his own terms. For this, the man in motley has come eminently prepared. He places several brightly illuminated, stiffened sheets of parchment on the easel and begins. "Gentlemen, let us not deceive ourselves any longer. Your beloved town is nursing some serious infrastructure problems here."

Joachim the Stone Dresser — the power brokers' put-up sop to the laboring classes, increasingly unmanageable of late — interrupts. "What's an infrastructure?" The other councillors shout at him that it means roads.

"Yes, roads," the stranger elaborates. "And bridges. And walls and buildings and plumbing. Retail strip, industrial base, residential. It's all shot. Slum. Gone to hell in a hay wain." Joachim asks for an explanation of the figure of speech but is shouted down.

The stranger begins flipping his parchment diagrams, egg tempera graphs as gaudily colored as the man's outrageous outfit. "Here we see the per capita weighted performance of your town plotted against Goslar, Paderborn, and Lemgo, over the last forty quarters." The curves are snappily plotted against a cutaway view of a half-finished Romanesque cathedral. Goslar, Paderborn, and Lemgo all hang comfortably ensconced somewhere around the triforium.

The local boys, however, are headed for the crypt. Collapsing productivity, crippling trade imbalance, noncompetitiveness, voracious and untenable consumption. "And here, the figures for unemployment, infant mortality, and emigration." Each set of numbers elicits a groan of recognition from the captive and unmasked council.

"I don't need to spell out to you, gentlemen, that the general state of affairs is trending toward the iffy." The stranger possesses graphs for everything. He has pie charts for falling food yields, balloon inserts for inflation, bar graphs for increased alcohol intake and prison confinements, line graphs for bread handouts to the poor. In fact, between negative balance of payments, debt servicing, capital depreciation, investment failure, population increase, water poisoning, field exhaustion and erosion, diminishing revenue returns, graft, tax evasion, currency softening, brain drain, corporate flight, disease, defense burden, and mushrooming social service costs, the town is clearly racing toward a condition of Infinite Sink.

The lecture points out to the local brokers what they have long known in denying: each year, the town borrows increasingly more against principal to pay for the previous year's emergency borrowing. Consumption is biting into production and getting hungrier as the take gets leaner. Quite simply, the town is burning itself out, chasing its own decline. All the graphs converge on that one bankrupt point, a few years down the pike, when there will be no squanderable resources left, nothing at all.

"What we need here, gentlemen, is to implement a program of strict Structural Adjustment." The stranger flips to a sheet showing simply those two words, initial letters embroidered in luxurious vegetation, monastery-dense with devils and demiangels. This time, Joachim the Stone Dresser doesn't even bother asking for a definition.

"But we've tried everything," the Bürgermeister moans. "Believe me. Capital injections. Tax incentives. 'Buy Native' campaign. Urban development zones. Belt tightening." His face looks as though the last-mentioned measure is about to herniate him.

"What we need," the head of the exchequer interrupts excitedly, "is to hang in with the infant Hanseatic League."

"Will you shut up with the Hanseatic League already?" the Bürgermeister shouts. "The Hanseatic League hasn't don't shit for us lately."

The head of the exchequer whimpers, feelings deeply hurt. "The Hansa is going to be big someday."

"Thing's not going to amount to diddly."

"Polish Corridor!" shouts the head of the Archers' Guild.

"What we need is to substantially reduce the pressures from overpopulation," contributes the abbot's man.

"But population growth never comes down until well after the standard of living has started to rise." And the stranger has another graph to prove it.

This observation releases a flurry of competing theories and prescriptions in the room, all strident, each sickeningly familiar, and every one feckless and futile. Throughout the fray, the motley lecturer waits patiently, leaning on his improvised podium. At last, the room falls into an exhausted lull. The Bürgermeister asks the man, this unwashed illegal immigrant whom not one of them knows from Adam, "Tell us, then. We beg you. What's our problem?"

The stranger smiles, savoring the served-up moment. He flips another piece of parchment on the easel, and pronounces the flamboyantly displayed word. "Rats."

The council is too stunned at first to respond. Then they produce the obligatory, derisive laughter. "Rats?"

"Rats. Any of the diverse, murine species of rodent…"

The Bürgermeister snickers nervously. "How can rats be the problem? Paderborn has rats."

"And Goslar!" an indignant Joachim snaps, secretly pleased with following the syllogism.

"Yes," the stranger concedes. "But neither of them has rats quite like Hamelin."

Quickly, before he loses shock's initiative, he produces a slew of explanatory graphics. Vermin population's impact on food reserve depletion. On depreciation of real estate — sewers, cellars, road bed, new housing starts. Increase in disease; costs to health, education, and welfare. Loss to tourist income and investment from abroad. "None of the effects, taken separately, is disastrous. But taken together, they create a threshold effect, preventing the town from reaching economic takeoff."

The leading lights of Hamelin confer among themselves. In the absence of any more-likely explanation, they are inclined to except the causal mechanism. Besides, the stranger has all the figures at his disposal, and who at this late a date would dare to be so medieval as to dispute statistics?

Discussion wheels from cause to countermeasures. The commander of the Archers' Guild says to leave it to his troops. With a systematic program of superior firepower, smart targeting, and will, they can have the little brown problem licked by fall of '89.

"But do we have until fall of '89?" the Bürgermeister asks. The stranger only shrugs.

The head of the exchequer comes down for a massive importation of cats, picked up in bulk quantities on the spot market. Others object, pointing out: (A) The unlikelihood of being able to secure sufficient felines to turn the trick. (B) The unavailability of foreign exchange credits sufficient to foot such a venture. (C) The subsequent expense of securing a similar consignment of corrective and compensatory canines.

Local ingenuity is soon exhausted. The council has no other recourse but to turn again to the stranger and ask for his recommendation. "Genus Rattus" the stranger carefully explains, "is a perverse animal. It's no good reasoning with him. He will go on proliferating until the bottom drops out of the entire self-supporting system. He will extend his success until it buries all competition and pulls down his hosts on top of him. He possesses too much native smarts for most traps. Poison is too good for him. Nor is he sufficiently God-fearing to respond to religious urging. In fact, there is only one thing the rat will listen to."

He waits until begged. Then he discloses the word with the perfect timing of a free-marketeer. "Music."

One half of the council explodes with cries of fraud and nonsense. The other remains skeptically purse-lipped. The abbot's man alone corroborates: he once saw his aunt Agatha sing a trio of baby-gnawers into contrite squeaklessness for the length of three antiphonal treatments of the Kyrie.

The stranger withdraws from his satchel the strangest-looking flûte à bec ever to appear along the Weser. It is tiny, more of a narrow ocarina than a pipe, its cylinder a slight, silversmithed figure with finger holes running the length of its gown. "I'm afraid this is all I have by way of résumé. But I guarantee that I will rid you of all problems with it, or you will owe me nothing."

"And how much will we owe you if you succeed?" the shrewd Bürgermeister asks. The piper grins at him strangely and names a figure just slightly below the total hard-currency reserves of the entire Northern Marches. Said fee provokes all manner of sneaky sidelong council looks. They couldn't possibly pay anything near that amount; it is fiscally unrealizable, as the quarterly reports put it.

And yet, they will pay that much now, or they will pay a good deal more over the long haul. The council bows its collective head with the helplessness of a public official caught over a pork barrel. The Bürgermeister coughs casually. "Fine. No problem. Your terms. Plus a healthy bonus for finishing the job quickly."

Only the blundering Stone Dresser, thickheaded with integrity, holds out. "But we were saving our money. We need it to finish the basilica."

The Bürgermeister takes a deep breath and adopts his best patronizing campaign voice, saved for idiots, children, and the obstinately underprivileged. "We've been working on that church for the last two centuries, son. It'll keep for another couple lifetimes." In the casual tones of all weak-hand negotiators, the mayor reiterates that the piper will not get paid a single pfennig until the town has been demonstrated rat-free by an objective, third-party fact-finding commission. The piper agrees, again eerily amused.

On the day of the promised purge, the piper requests that all the bells in town tear off an absurdly long peal. Colliding carillons of all colors and creeds bang away blithely on teeth-freezing, diabolical sevenths. A first, tentative, pioneering rat-beak peeks cautiously from out of its cellar bunker. Others follow the lead, appearing from between wattle holes and out of drainpipes, curious to learn how long that leading-tone agony can persist before resolving to tonic. When the bells break off abruptly without resolution, the exposed rodents reel as if hit over the head with an unlicensed glockenspiel mallet.

The piper then takes up a strategic stand in the middle of the Marktplatz and produces his seraphic, silversmithed tube. He announces the first piece on his program — an onomatopoeic panpipe idyll by some Frenchman that not a single one of the beasts has ever heard of. But from the first plaintive, impossible modal tones, they are done for. The mimetic ditty, swelling like rapids in a rising river, foamy and expectant with near-narrative, soul-ravishing ripples, builds to a perpetually postponed, eternally almost announcement of new arrival, that long-awaited descent of formal ecstasy.

It visits again, for every creature that has ears to hear. How big the place is, how strangely familiar beyond saying. The interval field fills with drumlins and rifts, chord-catches that flare free of polities' darkening penumbra. The piece hints of cross-border calls for help, the membrane embrace, a fate that these notes, like dutiful parents, refuse to do more than allude to in front of the offspring, the underaged. Music — the choking scold of closeness, the basilica at funds' end— again sounds its insistence that soul is headed somewhere, forever caught in midpassage, in leap's parabola as it pitches from the burning structure, abandoned to the airy apotheosis it was fixed upon from the first, no matter what temporary and transient panic snags it on its way back to ground level.

One fat brown rat, suckered by the rabbit punch of that sweet outpouring of tones, creeps halfway from safety, the better to hear explanation's up-close whisper. Her next of kin — squeaking in holy terror, Get back, you fool; don't be insane—stop in midsqueal and cock their own conical little heads, puzzled by a poignant, dimly recognized, still-discernible invitation that nestles in the notes. Belong and be lost. The tune reads like one of those misplaced love letters at last delivered to the forgetting door just up the avenue, generations after its intended has died.

The piper follows up the French pentatonics by embarking on a solo sonata by a Thuringian provincial, hailing from somewhat closer to home, but still a virtual unknown to the local music-loving rodents. At the first arpeggiated tracings of A minor, the rats begin milling, rumoring among themselves. What is this? Here, at last, something one might learn from: the comprehensive architectural drawing, the crib sheet, the answer to the ancient question of whence evil, the touch that sense hungers for, quieting angst, reconciling crisis, finger-painting with balm the crests of industrial madness.

After a few measures, the rat hordes discover that they want nothing else but to be forsaken, to throw themselves away, to make love to their destiny, however awful the chapter and verse held in ambush for them. They ask only that the blow be swift and unmitigated, that completion come now, that it consume them in the beating forge, ravish them with answers.

The townsfolk, instructed in advance to stay behind doors, witness this epic theater of the absurd unfold outside their front windows. Rats begin slithering out into the open, assembling in groups of desperately adoring listeners across the town square. They push down into the expensive front-row seats that even the scalpers scrap for — anything to close the gap, press flush against the piper as he stands winding his inspiration. An adult human or two sneak out of their cottages with a grain scoop or meal mallet, sick with excitement to seize the weird occasion and bash in as many congregated rat skulls as possible before the encores. But a sidelong look from the piper is enough to send these forays scurrying back indoors.

Rats: Mammalia's abandoned and abused underclass, products of broken rodent homes, ladle lickers, cat killers, baby biters, pillagers and gnawers at civilization's tuck-pointing, mobile incisored havoc, random terrorists, surprise packages of plague. A parish of pestilence, a veritable national bank run of blind mouths! Who in Saxony would have thought rathood had undone so many? Each one an arrested psychohistory of criminal disfigurement, they pour out of hidden tunnels, shimmy down off roofs, come clean from hideouts of honor in church chancels to hear this: the sound of healing deliverance, delayed for so long, forever, the diminuendo clink of the tumblers aligning in the lock of divine plan.

They pack into the central square as if for an all-star, superband, gala charity extravaganza performance of the heavenly host's hall-of-famers: Live Revelation Relief; Apocalypse Aid. When all available standing room disappears, the vermin swarm the mezzanines and upper decks, buckling the balconies facing the market, clinging to the rotting timbers and gutters of the Rathaus. Overhangs and ledges fill with rats dangling precariously from shop signs and gables. Rats crawl over one another's shoulders, assembling in rat ziggurats, laying down a continuous, plush living shag four or five pelts high in places.

Sound rushes from their collective, forgotten past, music that spells out everything that will still befall their race, all races. A few of the more impressionable ones burst into tears at all that the modulations dredge up in them. Others shiver in rat-somatic euphoria, preening their reptilian tails, pointing their bristly snouts toward heaven in thanksgiving simply for having been alive for this moment. The astonished townsfolk cannot tell just what shared vision this carpet of cubic rat is granted. The solo flute transports them en masse into a promised place, a vantage point granting that privileged glimpse of blissful, universal design. Rat rhapsodic rapture: the vast, scattering sugar-and-grain mill of creation.

Seeing revealed tonal teleology play across a million pointy little snouts, several townspeople want to cry out to spare the creatures.

Others are filled with desire to rush out and join the doomed beasts, kneel down beside the enthralled throng. But no one does. The town's contract with expediency has been struck; it is too late to revoke, in any case. The piper turns his back on the assembled audience, producing a rumbling, aggregate rat-roar of protest. But he does not take the flute from his lips. The music persists, a constant circuit of peace passing all understanding locked into this endless circle of fifths.

The piper edges himself infinitesimally down the Osterstrasse, step by step toward the Weser. The crowd — no, the nation, the global confederation of rats — refusing to surrender what is here so excruciatingly close to deliverance once and for all, presses along after him in cold delight. Fortunately the streets have been cleared, roadblocked and flag-routed for this parade catharsis. The waves of wee timorous cowering beasts flow down the street-sluice toward the city walls, lower mammals molded into a molten flood, rats tumbling over rats, surging surflike in curlers and cleansing eddies. But the living flood admits to no shoving, no panic, no collapse of societal mores. Not a stampede at all; more of a dense, euphoric dance, cobbles pounded in time to the soaring tune, each figurant in the formation as certain of its precise measure as it is of this glorious, fading daylight.

They glut the length of the eastern avenue, packed tighter than dead leaves in autumn or mud in spring. The road becomes a single, continuous file of suppliants on their way to some unimaginable rat holy site. When it dawns on the front ranks of entranced dancers just what potter's field they are posting off to, only the slightest momentary objection ripples through the column. Distress passes; courage revives. Flute lilt reveals just how untenable their rattish existence had been until the covenant hidden in this little turn of phrase came to release them. Sarabande assures each quivering whisker that they are now linked to a destiny far preferable to any softer, safer end.

All the way up to the very banks of the Weser, even when the piper stands aside and nothing but the murderous flow of rapids remains between the avant-garde and their arrival, hesitation is briefer than thought and more easily dispatched. The lead rats expand into the watery sacrifice required of them. No bill too great to pay, and, with a gnawing smile, given the payoff. They rear up, plunge into the waters like, well, like lemmings. Happy, even, to go down, half in love with a resonant death, provided they can still hear the promissory sounds and sweet airs buzzing about their tiny ears until the moment when the current closes above them.

Realization at last ricochets through the ranks of animal caravan. No word travels quicker than fulfillment. Alarm backtracks through the flow faster than the flow can advance on it. Thus the rats at the back of the queue, not so much pushing as happily piling on, out of earshot of the fatal tune, could easily call upon innate survival instincts and save themselves. It would take no effort at all to break off, turn back from disaster, return to town and begin the difficult work of restoring the decimated pest populace.

But not one rat does. An even greater urge keeps them promenading almost gratefully, for three quarters of an hour, into a river from which not a single forepaw reemerges. Yes, a mother pauses here or there along the bank, thick with plunging bodies brown, and an occasional old retiree breaks into uncomprehending tears as he takes to the drink. But all choose this moment of crystalline clarity, receiving it willingly as opportune, a godsend really, far preferable to a return to the quotidian misery and ignorance that have marked their lot until that moment. It takes no bravery to listen to the soul-stilling music and make peace, put an end to experience. No courage, no strength at all aside from joy.

The last corpulent rat in the miles-long parade plunges into the water with a sort of snappy salute of thanks to the piper, who only then stops playing. No sooner does the primordial musical lure break off than the sole survivor recovers his sapped equanimity. Reviving at the last possible instant, he surfaces, rights himself in the current, and with his last full measure of devotion pilots his battered body downstream to Ratland, where — the reason he was spared — he prepares a manuscript account, this firsthand report on the proximity of ecstasy to horror.

Ghastly shepherding accomplished, the piper at last lifts the flute from his lips. Satisfied that he has done the deed as mercifully as possible, he stares at the site of the rat waterfall, seeing them still, in phosphene tracers as he pinches closed his lids. What's the point, he wonders, the purpose of wisdom's chill deliverance? He smiles grimly and turns back to town, already knowing the furtive, grubby little coda of accounting awaiting him there.

Per expectation, no grateful town lines up to douse him in ticker tape back inside Hamelin's circumvallation. He is met under the eastern gate by an ensemble of dazed gazes and several of those questions that resent having to be answered. "What the hell you put in that music? Packs a kick, don't it?" "Say, yer not from around these parts, are ya?" And instantly, without an interval for decent shame, the community reneges. "You see that? Those varmints plumb up and spontaneously offed themselves. Just like they knew what they had coming."

The piper shakes his head sadly, having anticipated this expedience. No sooner does the well water stop festering with floating carcasses, the wattle holes cease breeding disease, the stored grain quit transubstantiating into hard little feces, no sooner is the town snatched from the incisors of hell, once again spared what is known locally as the Youngest Day, than folks habituate to believing that destiny meant all along to lift the curse of damnation before it became a real hassle.

The scope of salvation is too great for gratitude. By the time its savior reaches the packhouse district, Hamelin has revamped the eyewitness histories. The town is now, has always been, and ever shall be no less than steadily, appropriately blessed.

The thought flits idly through him: he should go into another line of work, one that makes more allotment for the moral caliber of his trading partners. Say, highwayman or molten lead wholesaler. But he puts aside the consolations of philosophy and heads to his doomed date with the town exchequer.

"We want you to know how deeply the council appreciates what you have done for the citizens of this town as well as the environs as a whole. The necessary paperwork on your disbursement will take a while to process. In the meantime, we'd like to present you with this token of Hamelin's sincerest recognition…"

The piper takes a room, mit Frühstück, above the Meat Hall. Once a week, during the open grievance hour, he petitions the council for his back pay. Each week they beg him to be patient; one needs to understand that all the town funds are not in ready assets. For a sum as enormous as the one they must pay the piper, certain long-term indemnities have to be called in. No business on earth can pay out 90 percent of its net worth overnight. Why, that would be liquidating to the point of evaporation.

After a spell of outrageous deference, the piper comes to the officers with a vague ultimatum. The exchequer, paranoid that the man might jeopardize Hamelin's standing with the infant Hansa, assures him that they will have the amount ready, in full, by the beginning of the next fiscal quarter. But come the appointed date, there is yet another unforeseeable delay. The piper stands at the back of the town council chamber and lowers his head. "I see," he says politely. "No, really. I fully understand." He takes his leave of the Rathaus, certain he has done everything in his power to act in good faith.

The next Sunday, when most of the town's adults are still in church, the piper settles his Gastzimmer bill and packs his satchel. Then, for the last time in this locale, in this lifetime, he takes up his post in the Marktplatz — a monklike figure in motley, legs together, pipe to his lips — and begins to concertize. The very first air from under the mouthpiece, waves of compression and release, maps a country, a republic of staggering rightness. For those only recently banished from the place, the music loosens a visceral, recollected purpose. Children out knee-deep, wet in spring's games, stumbling by gradual intervals and small mother-may-I steps, suddenly luck onto the one universal chord, up close, tangent to everything.

His long, self-spinning line is sleet against a windowsill, the seduction of tree-branch rustics interrogating the pane, luring one out of doors. Implied interior harmonies are fraught with hunger, parched. Old friends whom you yet remember — everything about them except their names — stand rhyming in the dark, haunting the half-timbered alleyways. They gather under the overhangs, too late at night, refusing to come in when called for bed. The sound is birdsong, batsong, angel, extinct pterosaur. It is the shush of an envelope slit open, the pulse from breath half a pillow distant. Brass bands in the gazebo, martial melancholy airs, high sopranos up in the choir loft, a scream of pain from the next hospital bed, stubborn harmonicas on both sides of a violence-stilled front, a beast trapped under a bushel, the tick of the second hand, the abiding shouts of an emptying city heard from miles off, the overtone series of night silence.

The flute does the work of a light dawn dew, revealing that every square foot of the familiar, commerce-stunted world is, in fact, covered in florid web. The tune's contour traces no less than that rapture that recourseless minors are told to wait for in all bedtime tales. And at its first teasing ear-stroke, everyone who is yet ill-advisedly a child spills out the front door, cocks a curious head, then breaks out laughing in recognition. Oh! This old guy. What took you so long?

The cadre of adults, however, are universally frozen in place. Churchgoing, field-mowing, crockery-stowing, they hear nothing, least of all their young skipping clandestinely away to see who else in this world can possibly know the melody that has been plaguing their heads since — when? — last night, the life before, twenty-four centuries at my door. Every battered, conscripted day laborer, the devil nightly Wed out of him, every manhandled mug under the magical cutoff age, takes to this melody like a new soul to the amniotic bath.

The youngest of them follow it more clearly than they as yet follow speech. A tiny blond girl with bruises down the length of each tube-worm thigh begins to sing a descant. Another, perhaps twelve, her flesh harder, her father-inflicted running sores more secret and circumspect, starts to twirl a tempo. She sets off others, mad bodies spinning reckless Ptolemaic epicycles through a market that fills with children aligning to the sound like filings to lodestone's invisible rose.

The whole carnival consolidates in a subslice of time, in the moment between one frozen adult's footstep and the next. Children march into the square banging and blowing and beating on makeshift drums and fifes of their own devising. In those where music has been stillborn, strangled blue in the bloody birthing sheets, the cord of melody twisted around the infant neck, song now frantically rough-houses free in the open. Rhythms race the way little dead sibs do, making up for lost time on their one released night of the year.

Solo flute sparks a tremendous tagalong chorus counted out in rope skipping, beam swinging, seesawing, clacker clapping, acrobating: all the manic, oscillating metronomes of native idiom. Voices from all corners — calls and responses in the highest registers — take up the tune, improvise lyrics, lay down an obbligato above the piper's air:

How many miles must we go?

Hush, baby; play on. No one knows.

Will we make it there by candlelight?

Maybe one day; never tonight.

A boy who celebrated his seventh birthday underground, in salt passages no wider than his emaciated body, reverts to a game of fighting tops with a boy who last year had to kill his crazed father with a backhand bottle gash. Girl slaves kneel down to jackstones or rummy bones. Others gavotte about with tiny babies on their hips, real mothers playing with last year's dolls. A half-Mongol mongrel tribe ride imaginary hobbyhorses, battle on piggyback, cross stick weapons, everywhere singing. Some dress up in tablecloths and shawls. Others tug rope or tag or hide. The market erupts in celebration of every child's pastime yet devised, and several still waiting their invention. Each one is a step in a vast, improvised, composite dance.

Though fewer now, nose for nose, than at the piper's previous gig, the mammals filling the square for this reprise are more ecstatic and numinous. More certain. Their eyes, their hands, their open voices, their shared heart iambics are akeady transported. They know this song the way they knew to start breathing with the midwife's first abusive slap. Three sweet notes and the hope that has kept them alive is at last delivered. They are leaving at long last, today, now. This frozen instant. This time, there will be no delays. Wrapped in these supernatural pitches, subdividing them, pushing up against the vein of tone, inside the ambient candle globe of the sonic glow, the quickest, brightest children are already across to the other shore, the far face. Through. Over. Sky-blue.

On an alley cutting across the town's axis, the one band not yet tune-transformed makes its way agonizingly toward the square. The children of the house of desolation, confined just outside the city walls: no one has thought to alert them, and only the carrying power of summer air and the acuity of hearing when there is nothing to listen to tip them off. The plague house adults, too far from the sound to be frozen by it, do not bother to lift a hand against the exodus.

The band of sick ones clips along toward the market. The faster they rush, the farther the goal disappears in front of them. Their anxious skipping is disciplined, kept in check by the self-appointed child kapos in charge of this march. A boy of twelve, his injury not immediately visible, waves his arms in front of him like palm fronds, or those little national flags that liberators pass out to spruce up their reception.

"Faster," he whimpers. "Hur-ree! They'll leave any minute." His foot scuffs clumsily against a cobble, but he does not look down.

"Shut your face!" the oldest boy commands; actually, Hold your head, as they say in that time and region. He is older by too many years to be possible. Wrinkled, sagging with a disease that made his parents turn him out without provision. His head is unholdable, sleek, slippery, stripped of hair. He holds one hand on a blind boy's collarbone, roughly guiding him, and the other underneath the armpit of a girl whose leg has been taken off above the knee by a crescent of Romanesque iron. "We're going as fast as we can."

"I can go faster," the girl hisses. She tries to move her tree-stump crutch at cut time across the cobbles. But while she takes twice as many steps as before, they are only half as long.

"Easy," the bald boy says. "We'll make it." The panpipe and its pickup chorus carry in the air over their heads. The roll of that sung rhyme immobilizes them with desire, the need to melt the last mile with mere will. "We'll make it, or I’ll slaughter you all," he adds cheerfully. "They'll wait for us." He spits out a bit of tooth grit. "They gotta."

But the group's advance cadres already shear off. The band loses its front-runners to the melody. The lead invalids sprint marketward, laughing like imbeciles. All those unimpaired by their sickness are off, accelerating, casting a reluctant look back over a shoulder, shrugging, apologetic but vindicated.

"Hey, wait up. Stick together."

But the sound is too close now to hold out against. Its appeal, brook-clear and incomparably more refreshing, is greater than loyalty, debt, the bonds of the plague house. Betrayal is a crime in this world only. The notes they hear forgive everything.

Of the last, teetering stragglers, the girl is fiercest. She is first to return to walking's brutal pragmatics. Pushing herself forward painfully, she crinkles her nose in thought. "Will it be another town, there, do you think?"

Her features are dark, gracefully rounded, from nowhere near here. Her father was a Horseman. That explains her eyes and ear whorls, and perhaps even what God did to her leg, although His instrument was a fireplace andiron. "Will it be a city?"

The question falls on a dwindling gang of lag-behinds. Her human crutch, the boy with the tortoise-neck folds, picks it up. "Jesus. Who knows? Whatever you want. Who cares?'' He wants to shake her, kick her existing knee out from underneath her. "Can't you feel it yet?" You're getting your leg back there. Me, reprieve from freakhood. We'll all walk for our damn selves, from here on."

The cries of collective delight in the distance insist that they, all of them, will emigrate, today, to a place where they will not be tied down or caged, sent off to strangers, hung up in trees or exposed on the roadside to die, whipped naked in cellars for their parents' sins, shown corpses and executions as moral instruction, locked in closets for having nightmares, seared on their softest parts, groped out in sport, strangled for saying yes, put up as collateral for debt, traded, sold at seven, sentenced to life apprenticeship. The tune piping in the distance is deliverance from evil, the end of that torture, childhood.

"But nobody's going anywhere if we don't get a move on." The two that he hustles down the road exhale exasperated affection. The last delinquent band is down to a frayed thread, pulling itself on in urgency. The freak boy lifts the blind one and runs with him, carrying him like a root sack for several paces. The girl laughs and tries to crutch along quickly enough to catch them up.

They take the last twist of serpentine street. The cluttered, cob-bled-up plaster buildings tumble away from one another and the townscape falls off into the open expanse of plain. The two who can see suck in their breath, slapped violently by the sight in front of them.

The one without eyes shouts, "What is it? Tell me!"

The girl hobbles slowly into the healing scene. She fights to say, "I can't. I can't describe. It's wonderful. Children everywhere. It is really happening."

"Where are the parents?"

"They're all… stopped."

"Stopped? What do you mean stopped?" The blind boy screams for description, his terrified rage giving way to a sobbed giggle of disbelief, of joy at the thing he thought would never happen, yet believed in since before birth, before blindness. The girl's incoherence overloads his blacked-out imagination. "No! Wait. Don't say anything more!"

At that cue, on the downbeat of that "more," the figure at scene center turns. Unlike the rats at his earlier matinee, the mass of playing children issues no protest. Rather, the dancing, rope skipping, and hobbyhorse cantering simply step up a notch. Children tack toward the moving music like comets lassoed by the sun. The entire canvass migrates gradually outward from the market, down a discreet street, forming a carpet deeper, denser than the one the rats made.

"Come on!" the blind boy screams. "They're starting, they're starting!"

The sickling trio stumble along after the trailing edge of celebration. But bliss recedes from them swifter than an ebb sneaking out of the Baltic. The speed of the getaway — a crowd racing at the pace of a messenger charged with averting catastrophe — gives them a foretaste of the trip's distance, the miles they are headed.

A town of frozen adults falls away behind. They pass a parent or two along the road, enameled in midstride. A duchy of children, in a world where half of all human beings are under fifteen, is about to escape murderous adulthood, slip past intact without attracting notice. Cast away from it in mid-Sunday, down the main thoroughfare, in brilliant June.

By the time the impaired three pass through the North Gate, the flute, farthest beacon, is seven leagues beyond them. The mobile boy tries to yank his companions along more briskly, berating them, shoving, cajoling. He curses under his breath, "Oh Christ. Christ. Move it." He sprints ahead a few hundred paces, to map how quickly the vanguard pulls away from them. The mass dancing mania seems to suck stamina from its own punishing cadence. The tempo, the traveling speed of this reel, is too great to sustain. Those without the right steps haven't a prayer.

Another instant, and even the blind boy panics. He can hear how soft the nearest rhyme-skipping child has become. "Hey! Wait up. Not so fast." Each syllable, screamed by a hysteric caller in the world's last round of kick-the-can. They can barely hear the flute at all, so the flutist surely can't hear them. Disaster, here, at arm's distance from the end: Can this be the way the story was meant to go? Just thinking the word brings it on them, and they are lost.

The intact child throws up his arms, crucified, a gesture invisible to the blind and too clear to the crippled. Furious, the girl digs into the dirt road, and, for a few moments, actually manages to match pace with the child rear guard, keep it within striking distance. But before she can summon the strength to make the impossible next burst, she looks up and stops in place.

"What? What is it?" the blind one cries.

The old child has stopped too, just looking. Neither will answer the shouts of the littlest. What could they say? Who could call up the journalistic will to report that the sky has thrown wide a portal of blue, the north wall of the Koppelberg has split open like the slats of a secret bookcase, and that all the long-suffering children of Hamelin are pouring in?

"You two run," the girl snaps grimly. She doesn't even allow a wasteful minute of protest. "Go!" The two boys struggle forward a few steps, at a ghost-of-a-chance gait. But a few steps confirm the worst. They will never catch it together, not with one of them needing leading. The last child will vanish, the impossible opening will have sealed before they reach it. The compensation promised since before time, one greater than anything life in this place has ever offered, will be lost to them as they watch from a stone's throw away.

The little-boy-lost stops dead in his tracks and refuses to move. "Get out of here, you son of a bitch," he chants, a forsaken smile playing at the corners of his lips. He and the girl will turn back to a town death, companionless, never to know, the only ones left of an entire generation of once-playmates wiped out by epidemic euphoria. "Get! I never want to see you again."

His guide — skin smoothing, head tufts growing back; the effects, even from this distance, of the opening in the earth's side — runs ahead stuttering, in anguish. Ten paces, then back five. The blind boy points a harsh finger, not quite in the right direction, condemning the deserter to a miserable gallop. With a bitter little cry of triumph, the abandoned one calls out, "Nicolai!" He loosens a noose of string around his neck, where he had attached a packed lunch for the road. He throws the sack violently, wildly forward. The freakish one scurries to retrieve it, shooting back a look of stricken joy that the boy cannot see and the girl cannot reach. Then he too vanishes down the road and into the riven-open mountain wall, the hole gaping wide in the naked air.

The lame girl drags herself abreast of the last remaining human her age. From this moment, loneliness will be the most merciful thing life has to offer them. Her little one has fallen into the gravel, face down. She lifts him, dusts him off. "Come," she says, taking him under her arm, as much for her sake as his. They can at least grope their way to the spot where the others disappeared, fix in memory the portal that has slammed in their faces, narrowly denying them the cure for innocence.

But the frame, the hinges, the jambs of the impossible passage have akeady faded, fused back into blank hillside even as the town of tune-drugged adults revives. The firsthand accounts from these shrill, unfossiled ones will not outlast the horror of their having survived. This version of events — piper, rats — is all the smudged variorum left, a bastard compromise script lying somewhere between what really happened and what can bear admission. For the blind and lame left-behinds — the trace memory of evacuation.

Joachim the Stone Dresser, the first out of the sleeping spell, stands on the North Gate parapet, watching a column, a whole eastern front of children disappear into legend. Three of his own vanish along with them, infants for whom — precociously — he has just begun to learn to feel affection. He stands watching two forgotten forms helping each other along the road. He hopes for a wild moment that they might be his. Then, seeing the devastation in their steps, he hopes guiltily that his have gone.

He thinks: This has all happened already. When have I seen this before? But he could not possibly have seen it. He is not old enough. The template end-time exercise left town long before. Colonial expansion, offshoot of stripling volunteers, or that crazed campaign naivete, accounts unfolding nowhere but in his mother's singsong, recorded in no other archives than the base of his brain. But in that old story Stone Dresser recognizes the day's annihilation, as if recognition, remembrance, were never more than dry runs for the close.

The children have gone east, crossing that little letter-juggle from Liebestraum to Lebensraum, leaving Hamelin more living room than it will ever be able to fill. Joachim descends the capped ramparts, stands stiffly, insensate in the street that swallowed them. The two last children will be invested with every privilege the city has to offer. He personally will see to it. And free sweets on demand, for life.

How does this one go again? A green-clothed figure… Get the account, the one written, as they all are, as medicinal compensation for an ill, confined child, to ease the time remaining to him. Get the lines, forgotten for so long, skipped over at the time in favor of the lavish illustrations. That fabulous, inexhaustibly elaborate, foreshortened, piled-up street scene, deep with winding columns of those music-soothed animals. Get the poem, the spotty transcript lying on its shelf in the literary canon, the cult artifice, like those primitive plane-totems carved from logs and laid in waiting along faked jungle runways.

"For he led us, he said, to a joyous land, joining the town and just at hand."

Joining the town? Yes; the next brutal high-rise institution over. Just at hand? As near as the artery in an open neck. As near as that nerve cable, slipping its way down through the tunnel of spine.

It occurs to the sleepy listener, for the last time, stalling for more escapism before bed. Comes on him with a clap, like the mountain closing over him: the chill of suddenly realizing, this really happened, on a specifiable day, in a well-documented year. The magic musician is based crudely on some bizarre original, an occurrence now lost in too many transmissions. Lost, except for the general contour, one standing up to existing fact. A sizable band of children gone off in a group, at the end of time, as they've been doing repeatedly at all hours, down odd years at steady intervals, through the shimmering, unstable portal, gauzy at best in both picture and caption iambs.

In the last tragic, accidental lockout, the sleepy staller, now jolted upright, catches a glimpse of the places you can't get to in stories. All of them right here, within walking distance. Joining the town. Just at hand.

And there, in the least corrupt of remaining transcripts, is a coda exactly the opposite of the one that frozen adulthood remembers. How in some Transylvania there's a tribe

Of alien people who ascribe

The outlandish ways and dress

On which their neighbors lay such stress

To their fathers and mothers having risen

Out of some subterraneous prison

Into which they were trepanned

Long time ago in a mighty band…

A prison from which only a reverse trepanation can spring them. A surgical strike: the bore of story through the braincase, into the firing core. The local cast of cripples picking it out for their amateur theatrics recognize in dim silhouette their own dispensation, the disaster that repeatedly leaves them here. And — good God — the trepanner, the first drowsy surgeon adult they chose to do the dirty cutting, to sink the cranial post holes for the soul's release, sees it in a sick flash: that's it. That's where this group comes from. Their strangeness, their dress, their slew of alien languages. They've sprung up subsurface into this Angel Transylvania, drawn irresistibly to this vaguely familiar kiss-off rhyme. Only this time, they cannot keep from uncovering where it has taken them.

The streets in town are a bloodbath of crisis. Slaves and whipping beasts in life, the children, in disappearance, drive their collected parents to mass remorse. Shrieks and torn clothes form the Markt-platz's new airs. The time for self-indulgence is forever past, but no one who should realize that does.

The town council mounts an emergency session in the Ratskeller. "I swear to you," a panicked Bürgermeister calls into the screaming chamber, "we can make more of them."

Joachim's entrance accuses worse than the condemned Christ whispering, Not ten minutes more with me? His sorrow slams the room into silence. The illiterate puppet councillor, the merchants' sop to the artisan class, walks stonily up to the town rolls, lowers his palm onto the leaves, and commands, "Write it down." On this specific day, through our own common failure of imagination, our inability to project…

Stone Dresser dictates the precise message that will carry down through fixed myth to alert future sicklings, invoke them to rise up, retrace their dazed return. "On June 26, 1284, through stupidity and a mass tin ear, we killed our children."

As for casting: no need to trek across town to those studio lots, the instant vistas of belief shot on dislocation. No call to solicit in the film set cafeterias where centurions lunch with storm troopers, senators with psychopaths, fake doctors with would-be children. They are self-sufficient, cast-ready, right here within their own institution.

Nico knows, from the moment he decrees which of Linda's therapy performances they're going to mount. The withered sideshow boy, age disengaged, has it all blocked out already. There's not a chart on the ward who couldn't become a shortsighted, self-serving adult politico, by modeling the role on a favorite probation officer. To play the paralyzed townies, they need only ape the service nurses and orderlies. After all, they have only to stand there, stony accessories after the fact. For the well-meaning, bighearted, but ultimately fumbling indentured public servant — what the hell; how about everybody's favorite Minnesota Mexicali, in her first cross-dressing role? Nico will even let Ms. MinneMex take producer's credit, providing she remembers who's calling the aesthetic shots.

Rats they possess, in their usual superabundance on this, the wrong side of what were once upon a time the tracks. You can hear them scuttling around behind the plaster, see them sunbathing up on the roof or surfing the stagnant parking-garage pools. Casts of rat thousands are no problem, and if there's any labor dispute, some gnawing Actors Equity thing, they always have the cockroach understudies — the ones the size of a child's fist — to fall back on. And for a lead, Nico has his eye on this guy, a latent messianic, as ready-made a piper as fate could pitch in your path.

No; casting presents only one insurmountable snag. They have no children.

Dwarfs, maybe. Midgets, mites, pygmies, Lilliputians — chopped up, scaled down, wasted, disenfranchised. Shriveled, hypernecrotic baby elders nodding off on the toilet with a milk-shake-straw hypodermic spiked into whatever limb is still soft enough to break and enter. Eleven-year-old mothers of their own little half nieces and half sisters. Self-mutilating infants. Housing project survivors. Teen mob operatives and operatees, test cases and trial recipients for unbearable hardware. Million-dollar-a-week underground business middlemen. Those who will go directly from their treatment here to prison terms for murder or worse. They have a steady supply of underage, balloon-letter, sponge-bread breeders and bed wetters. But not one child.

Tag? Tops? Piggyback? That would strain the suspension of disbelief to breaking point, even among the Playhouse playhouse set. They haven't even so much as a single credible summer-stock juvenile. Intensive care just turfed a little girl, left her lying on Linda's doorstep after a few weeks of "Hail Marys" during which they hung her up strapped to the sustaining meter-taps. She is the size and shape of a dachshund thorax, with two smashed ribs, fissured head, and torso smeared all over with a shiny, blue-green oil slick, like a fungus colonizing the skin of a faltering Bartlett pear.

"Wreck of the Hesperus," Plummer called her — anesthetized pros' parlance. "Peanut sittin' on a railroad track. The tyke had pelvic inflammatory disease so bad we had to do a double eggbeater on her." One year old. The man responsible — Mama's current beau, looking for diversion during her latest delivery — wound up getting fifteen years. The kid, as always, got life. Linda is to treat the baby for lingering limb impairment and pass her on to the social worker, who is left, in turn, to thrash things out forever with the assistance of the anatomically correct Raggedy Anns and Andys.

These are their choice for young ones.

But Nico knows they will need even this maimed creature. They must dress her in peasant rags and deed her to some surrogate big sister, herself rustically keloided from neck to nether parts. Offer the baby up to be chucked into the air in time to the delivering ditty. That, on second look at the synopsis, is exactly the point, the secret of this story's draw. The day on which their bruised, abused, futureless ancient counterparts skipped town seven hundred years before is the same day that will freeze facts in their pragmatic tracks, finally freeing these chart-condemned to do the tag thing. Go piggyback. Believe in amateur theatrics. Act out the child's play.

cient counterparts skipped town seven hundred years before is the same day that will freeze facts in their pragmatic tracks, finally freeing these chart-condemned to do the tag thing. Go piggyback. Believe in amateur theatrics. Act out the child's play.

Nico takes over the idea as if it had been his from the start. He launches a massive promotional blitz to sell the story to the others. Persuading the boys consists of the usual bribes and blood threats: debts canceled for cooperation, crucial comic sequels withheld for failure to comply. Most of the street savants, with some grounds, consider the entire project yet another load of Eurocentric, racist, imperialist, hegemonistic, queer-ball, degrading eco-exploitation. Why the fuck should they dress up as a bunch of doomed little Kraut goombas? And nary a martial arts sequence in the whole script.

Nicolino, inspired, co-opts these holdouts. '"You: we need you for the Rat King, Mr. Rat Heavy Heself. Big, ugly beefalo muffa, and chillin' like nobody's B. And you, you can be that Julius Caesar rat, the one who lives to write home about it. You, we're going to let be the principal baby-brutalizer. Strip you to your waist, give you a hockey mask. Think how awesome your tattoo will look under the footlights."

They're sold the instant they start bargaining for plum parts. This frees up Nico to concentrate on the females. In practice, he needs the blessing of only one of them: the boat princess, that Stepaneevong. The one who chose the fable in the first place. Through no effort of her own — she's either out in the halls learning how to limp without a crutch, or tucked in bed, booking for an imaginary final exam — she's become the revered senior statesgirl. Fagging unfair, but go figure. It's as if all the other mindless rope skippers, the guaranteed survivors of this ward, have wind of what's up, and defer to her in shame.

He pays a bedside visit, this time with no sidekicks, no seconds in tow. He stands at her elbow, Dodger cap in hand, maybe thinking that the last lone tufts of eiderdown on his evacuated skull might win him some sympathy points. "Yo, Joyless! What is it now? Trig? Bio? Nuclear physics? Spelling?"

"History," she replies, concealing the edges of her widening mouth behind two fingers. She has learned to hide her excitement like winter seed under snow.

"Again? Stuff never ends, does it? I ever show you this great Treasure Chest Illustrated Classic, the one where this whole army of kids — I mean, like we'd be the oldest ones in the entire outfit — storm off to whip the Musclemen? Really happened. That's the unbelievable part."

"What happened?" she asks, all hushed urgency.

"I ransomed it to the adults."

She means the crusade, not the comic, but does not correct the confusion. Nico picks up and flips nervously through her stack of books, picking at her paper-snipped place markers. Rome, Münster, London, Roanoke, Vientiane: each slip marks another adjacent subterranean prison, points of arrival and departure. The scraps slip from his palsied fingers and scatter across the floor like tails on a paper donkey. "Criminetly. You read some weird stuff, I'm here to tell you."

She stares at him, her eyes huge, relentless, and black. "What part?" she says to him, softer than the sweetest confession. "What part do you want me to play?"

The question pops his clutch, but big time. Here she is, coming out both feet, as it were, in favor of the plan. That's it, then; cake. Wrapped up. History. No fight, no hard sell necessary. She'll bring the femmes into the fold, wagging their tails behind them. Slight shift of the bargaining chips, and he ought to be out of suppliant mode, well clear of the proverbial woods. The tough part should be over with, all but put to bed. But in fact, they just now slink up alongside it.

Of course she already knows. Knows it the way she knew he could be depended on to kidnap her choice of tales and take over the production. Knows it the way she knew, on first thumbing through the picture book, that Hamelin was already in the itinerary, a scheduled stop for history's through-service deportation trains.

He spins around defensively, unnerved. "I mean, what the hell, eh? Somebody's gotta take charge. Who do we have capable of pulling something like this off? Floor full of target dummies. Sickos, freaks, and illegals. You: okay. So you're our supreme genius. Everybody knows that. But you're handicapped. You don't understand this country. This place. They think they can buy us off with toxic canned peaches and Jell-O cubes. If that doesn't work, they cram a tube down all available holes, park us in front of the vid, and threaten to send us home if we get better. I swear on my last sheet of toilet paper, they're trying to deep-six us."

"Deep…?" Joy casts about for the translating dictionary among her hopeless references.

"Deep-six, eighty-six. 'Za matta? You no speekee? Out. Off. Post-hole us. Cash in our chips. Cancel our receipts."

"You mean kill us?" Her eyes widen impossibly. This is the truth they have been waiting to whisper to one another. This one. "Why?"

'Well, aren't you the little angel choir? They don't like our kind, case you haven't noticed. Screws up their bookkeeping, jerks around the bed count. And it's a whole lot cheaper to kill us than to give us our own little jungle kingdom." "But they take care of us."

"Will you listen to this! I don't know whether to laugh or barf. "Take care of us' is right. Okay, so they stop short of lethal injections. But they bust their royal butane to make this place about as survivable as a slow boat to… Oh, shitski, Joyless. Sorry. Just an expression, huh?"

A slipup ugly enough to bungle this whole transaction, to condemn it to Sudden Infant Death. But Miss South China Sea punishes him with nothing worse than a serene smirk. You bay, the look says. You harmless boy; how I'd love to rouge your sagging cheek pouches, lipstick that chapped mouth red, tie silk bows through the few remaining sprigs of your hair!

Their complicity infuriates Nico. She'd be frog bait by now, night-crawler in another world, were she not essential to his plan. And in one quick shudder, he receives the even creepier realization: he is essential to hers. Her legs, perhaps? Her mobility. She uses him as executor, someone manic enough to enact the story she, for her own private reasons, has selected.

Point blank between them, they come to terms: We must play this thing or die. Repeat the fading incantation and pass through, rush the crawl-sized slit or be rubbed out, deep-sixed, three baby steps away from the tear they reopen in the seamless cell wall. In the lost boys' world he would cackle at her, threaten her with something sharp, leap through the window and escape on the pulleys and spy wires sketched in by this issue's artist. But in this world, he only chews on his bleeding cuticles, pushes back his nonexistent locks, and hisses, "So. How's about it?"

Her turn for appalling compromise now. "What part?" she asks again, head down. Having bestowed him with executive powers, she must bend to whatever role those powers assign her. "I could make the costumes," she bleats. "I could whisper the lines. I could look up the different versions of the story. There must be an awful lot." Stress scatters her cantering accents wildly through the syllables. "I could print the programs. I'm a very careful printer." Better than any of her peers born into twenty-six letters. The advantage of the late starter. "Well, yeah, fine. I'm sure you print just great. Only, you see, we've got that base covered already. What we really need now is…" He frets at the row of plastic sizing holes at the back of his cap band. He cannot bring himself to spell it out. It. What we really need.

"What part do you make me play?" The words rustle like raw silk, that raw silk that refuses to burn. Her voice, doubling back ever softer, sounds like a refrain to one of those eternal rounds common to every culture. She tugs at the vowels as at a female fighting kite, one caught in a bright, parti-colored quarrel high up in the sky, far away, beyond eyesight. "Nico?"

He will not tell her what she already knows.

"I'm the lame one, aren't I?"

"You're the crip," he agrees tersely. "You're the gimp." He flares his beak of a nose at her, flashes the so sue me look. Showdown slides off into a shrug.

She tries on the idea of never making it, of being the one eternally left behind. Their entire breakaway child republic will make it out, all escape on the virtue of her story, her sacrifice, all arrive safely except her. The knowledge plays like a cold, focused, close-up gel spot on her. She half-expected this, from the start of her concerted studies. But now, a working pact between them transforms all hideous kiddieland, and departure is real.

As the pair fall to arrangements, the details of set and stagecraft, the boy's gravelly, senescent voice goes low, half sympathetic. His subdued countenance turns away from her over their daring plans. Perhaps he even feels, just this once in his compressed, accelerated life, the shape of guilt, the pitiless cameo he places in her hands.

So motley's the only wear. And motley is the only crew capable of carrying the plan off with this ferocity. Mickey and Judy, transcribed to the earth's marked races, the planet's disinherited—Andy Hardy Goes to the Pen; Andy in the Big House—take over Linda's office. They fill the corridor back behind Neonatal, spill into the Theraplay Room, turn the halls into their private pickup rehearsal barn.

Everyone's in. The littlest are put to work learning forward rolls and cartwheels and whatever other traveling acrobatics they can negotiate. Suicidal eight-year-olds who only last week tried to seal themselves up in the industrial-strength Husky bags for rubbish removal paint backdrops, towns and mountains and sky, open air such as their fume-stunted lungs have never inhaled. The Rapparition, the Fiddler Crab, the No-Face, the Hernandez brothers — each already a character actor in his own urgent one-act — take to this collaboration as if joining the supreme, platonic street gang, the enterprise that all of Angel City's other five hundred rumble clubs strive for. La marea de Dios. God's attack rabble, in their theatrical debut.

From the first, preparations are out of Linda's hands. Her coaching consists of getting out of the moving violation's way. Any further suggestions from her would be as welcome as a lapdog at a nude beach. Her each schoolmarmy stutter of "Maybe flaming torches aren't such a hot idea" sounds, even to her, like a fetid little check of death. Her every shouted encouragement comes off condescending, a reprimand in disguise, one more governor slapped on innocence's wild turbine.

Yet nothing she could do would more than momentarily muck things up. They are stronger than she is now, for the simple reason that they know where they have been. They come from poverty's every proliferating precinct in this balkanizing city, a state-sized political sprawl pulling its unassimilatable self apart piecemeal. Theirs is the nation's flagship, the Western vanguard, the index of leading things-to-come, the fast track into the next eternity. They were born knowing it isn't home. And all the fledging comic tragedians, calling out cues to one another in three dozen native languages, act with the natural flair of those who know where they must be going.

Just watching them cuts her with recovery. Oh God: these little girls, singing that a cappella road jingle they've collectively made up. It's her all over. That dark-eyed little spitfire girl tugging at the hem of her dress in the front row of the yearly class photo. What's happened to her? What bottomless hole did she tumble down? What noxious DRINK ME vial swelled her up so grotesquely that she cannot even fit into one of their pygmy chairs at the back of the rehearsal room?

Some insidious, viral, sexually transmitted, colossal failing of nerve she's caught from her Kraft sinks in, and she can't take it. Can't look at them anymore, much less call out prompts. She sees in them all the babies she and Richard know better than ever to have together. Here are the souls of the infants they would pillow-smother at birth through overcaution. Every performing child becomes a prodigy too painful to clap for. The parental terror that paralyzes her and her mismatched mate drives her from the rehearsal room with teeth marks on her fingers. Creeping back in, she tells herself: Playact a virtue if you have it not.

These, her shock cases, ham it up in those pathetic paper hats as if they have only this staged moment seen: this life, this life we missed, the one we were stripped of? Here it is at last, restored to us in dress-ups. My spot. My cue. My line.

Onstage, their ravaged lineup reveals the telling symptom. A solid chunk of the revue is bald or balding. Not just peach-fuzzed Nico or the kitchen-match look-alikes waiting for their locks to grow back. Not just the radiation club or the Kemo Kids, grinning at their overnight transformation into a skinhead mob. The makeshift footlights pick up a glare on every other pate in the chorus. Does the hospital stand on a seething East Angel landfill dosing us all, accumulating fastest in the tissues of the very young? Have the building's lab machines sprung a leak, sloshing the halls with a child-specific spray of rays?

Something wider, Linda concludes. The theme runs through her story almanac — the shocking hair of the very young. Feather-crested Hopi infants. Baby Zaal in the Shah-nameh, white-cropped as an ermine in winter. It shows up, always an advance signal, the Now about to announce itself. And here it is in droves, massed regiments of hairless rats returning in Act Two to double as themselves: a troupe of shedding, expectant deprivees fresh from ballroom dance lessons. Those who don't bald by symptom or side effect join along in an act of reverse protective coloration, the leaf willing itself to blend in with the rare animal hovering on its surface. They all cover for the ones already singled out. Take me too.

The industry they lavish on this venture outstrips the sum of Linda's every other cure. Pure energy. Each djinn takes to its specific task without being told. They fan the hospital, scavenge it for usable bits. They assemble costumes and backdrops from pilfered bedpans, gauze, linen, and tubing. They inspect each other's handiwork, block out scenes together, write one another's lines. The auteur urge runs through these illiterates like mumps through kindergarten nap hour.

And the place they construct in the forced-pastel dayroom: infirm Angel City hasn't seen its like since the last large-scale emigration. Shipping-box battlements draped in rayon raiment project a proscenium that leaves almost no room for audience, whoever that might be. The sham city walls are stuccoed all over with wild child heraldry. The streets are a tumbled maze, the lace of evacuation's ancient follow-routes.

This surreal Hansastadt is enhanced by Nico's strange frame-tale staging. In his plan — an intuitive masterstroke — a poet reads to two kids in sickbed. The rhymester informs the sufferers, mutatis mutandis, about their looming cure by another name. (It's the Rapparition, perching on a TV stand, chanting the bit of lame Browning that only he could get to sing "It's as if my great-grandsire, starting up at the Trump of Doom's tone, had walked this way from his painted tombstone.")

The story takes literal shape in front of the two chronics, joining the town and just at hand, a play in which both poet and sicklings take part, trade places. The players who join them to flesh out the tale cycle round-robin through analogy's available profiles — all participant presences, teller, tellee, told.

Linda, watching in knots, begins to wonder if the piece is meant for public performance at all. It feels to her more like a fierce group training exercise, a dry run. Perhaps a drill: learn by heart these seven warning signs, the portents of nearing disappearance. The more they memorize their lines, the more they improvise.

All the while, the pace picks up, pitching toward frantic. The physiatrist can only sit by, riffling through her worthless cue cards. They keep her on for no other reason than that she has not yet secured them their leading man.

Consequently, the children must do their acting around an empty spot upstage. They work the negative space, falling in behind a piper present only by implication. The pied stranger grows even more convincing in absentia. The performing trees, the rocks, rats, river, and town politicos, the magic mountain backdrop, the featured children masquerading as their own missing selves, all play off the truant soloist.

One role in particular drives herself savagely in prep for the lead's delayed arrival. Clinical Linda must bench the girl a half dozen times, precautions for which Joy rewards her with almost resentful sulks, were this girl capable of resentment. The little lame cameo rehearses furiously, forgetting that it doesn't have to be perfect until there's an audience. Or maybe not forgetting, maybe just deciding that Now is always its own public. After all, no one knows opening night's hour. She calls out her lines, flails to her masking-taped mark with inexhaustible amateur zeal.

Nico, doing his militant DeMillenarian tyrant bit, barks at everyone but her. Two against one. Actually, it's the whole lot of them against the lone authority. Everyone in the cast conspires to keep Linda from butting in with Your Own Good.

Joy's own good is only this: to draw near, in dress run-through at least, the place she is denied in the master script. A glimpse now will make the last lockout more bearable. When it comes time for her to hobble across the stage, a Method-acted cripple more lifelike than life, she pushes her ulcerated bone beyond capacity. She crumples and sheers. Linda watches the girl go down in slow motion. It is the old moment of maternal horror: in the end, the best parent must let them all fall.

And fall they all win, beginning with the boat girl, who snaps and spills to the floor. Omnivorous eternal booker, assimilation-intent A student, she is nevertheless stunned by this pop quiz. She balls up on the Theraplay Room rug, screaming so violently that not even Linda dares take a step toward her. Silent at every step of the deportation, stoic all during her cells' savage transpacific drift, she screams now, on arrival. At her bloodcurdling magic shriek, every onstage freak in waifs clothing reverts to the real thing. Referred pain convulses through the faces of the entire cast. Not this. Not Joy, the quiet one. The one beyond pain, spasming in torture on the floor.

Her limb twists backward, withers like the ashes of a self-immolating monk. But her anguish is out of proportion to the pain, even this nerve razored open and limed. Her writhing is more than bone-based. Unbearable implication flashes through her even before she hits the ground. Stunted syllables work up from her throat. "No. Not yet!"

Not again, she means, immune to her own anguish but grieving for that doomed, near-miss girl she is playing. From hysterics she fades to soft mewling, then level-voiced, rapid reasoning with anyone who tries to touch her. Everything is okay. Just one second, please. Let's finish this rehearsal and then they can have a look at the leg.

After several minutes of frenzied standoff, Linda sends for the parameds. These conclude that a little judicious pharmacology is the persuasion of choice. Persuaded despite herself, the girl falls asleep and is lost.

Espera tries to alert Kraft, but he seems to have finally achieved his beloved nowhere. He is not in the call room or at home or at any known transmitter extension.

Turns out he is down in the ER, having responded to an assist request, Plummer's tired old time-honored line: "Say hey, Dr. Kraft. There's a consult down here with your name tooled all over it." Power-tooled, to be precise. A seven-year-old who has discovered the difference between a hand and a bandsaw. As Kraft finally emerges from the cutting room, uncountable incarnations later, a vaguely familiar woman is waiting to waylay him.

"It's Joy," Linda tells him.

Kraft nods at her intelligently, as if he can almost place this woman's face, or the words issuing from it.

A band of children wander into the suite where their colleague is being readied for the inevitable. They come not so much for her as to dampen their own terror, assure themselves that the creature they saw curled up in anguish on the stage floor was a trick of the lighting.

All the show's principals are present and accounted for. They are led, as always, by time's toy, the principals' principal. Nico plays with the traction bed's counterweights. He assures her, "We're holding up the production until you can make it back."

She gives him a forlorn look: It's dull in our town since my playmates left. She has calmed since her flailing fall, but something in her busily turns over a distant phrase that the others haven't gotten wind of yet. She pulls herself away sufficiently to answer, "You can't wait. Not possible, Nico." You knew when you assigned me the part. A little looking around, a quick, pragmatic show of hands. "No, you're right." The offer was only for show. Caught in the idle kindness like a fly's wing under a cover slip, he glances around the room. His eyes dart about for a change of topic. Something wants to insist that there is still a route out, a path, perpendicular to every other, that they might still take. And, suddenly grinning as broadly as on the day of his admission, he sees one.