Operation Wandering Soul

"Well, for the love of Jiminy Cricket's dick. Look at these." He slogs into the burlap sacks in the corner, each filled with several thousand get-well cards. His pet project for the helpless crip, back when he was still your basic greenhorn progeriac casting about for a new game. Back when getting well was still a competitive sport. He kicks one of the sacks, grabs his toe, and hops about to mugged laughs. "We've got that record sewed up, anyway."

But Joy roots quietly about in the three-ringed binders that have never left her side since she beached her open craft here in this hemisphere. She searches through her communiques from message-mad America. She extracts a clipping about a Brit boy with brain tumors, evacuated to this continent of medical mavericks and sometime miracle workers, where you can always find someone who will operate on anything. This boy, capturing the imagination not only of the local media but of World News, has already scavenged enough well-wishes to beat her haul by several orders of magnitude. Thirty-three million cards, and he continues to solicit internationally for more. Worse, to add insult to injury, the winner is getting better.

"Oh Jesus. Joyless." Nicolino turns the piece over, desperately reading the bisected horoscopes on the flip side. His claws shake under the weight of the disastrous scrap. Disease's impeccable timing destroys the protection racket he tacitly promised her. He balls up the newsprint, crushing along with it the long list of coordinated lies that childhood has tried to hand them from the start.

Even the most cross-language remedial among them sees through the fairy narrative now. That old crone who tricks the charmed early readers into believing she is their mother spits them out four paragraphs before the ever after, stranding them in wildest nowhere. Or a place worse than nowhere, sicker, wider with not, with never: this Emerald City blazing away all its nonrenewable futures at this instant, there, outside Pediatrics' window.

Finding the father proves easier the second time. Despite the hospital's promises of good faith, Wisat's signature on his daughter's release alerted the governmental wide-network trawlers. Immigration picked him up and has been holding the guy in a state of blind bewilderment since Joy's first trip under the knife. He is so desperate to see the girl and learn of her fate that he even agrees to return to the scene of his betrayal.

The only hitch to securing this new round of permissions lies in words. They leave it to Kraft, the scutboy, to break it to the victims. "Extent of femoral incursion indicates immediate aggressive invasive proc…" The girl, again serving as translator, just stares charitably at her doctor. She wonders how the two men who have come to mean the most to her in her two lives can inhabit the same room, albeit unable to speak to one another.

Kraft notices the hush, the hang time where her translation should follow. He looks up from his scribbled chart and catches her staring. He stares back, at the eyes he has been avoiding for reasons more numerous than the mistakes he has made along the length of her treatment. Twelve-year-old eyes, black as the lacquer on a ceremonial barge, black as the silk pajamas that a generation of high schoolers just a grade or two older than he were told to empty their clips into.

He calculates back to the year when he first saw these eyes, had them burned into his own retinas. He was, at most, two years older than she is at this pre-op hour. And the girl: the girl, in '69… Why bother pretending to do the math? The girl was what she always will be. The girl, already, even then, was twelve.

He freezes in her gaze, the defense that night animals fall back on when astonished by light. Locked in her continuous pupil and iris, he tilts his head in a dissociative shrug of pain, as if he refuses to make out who she is. Dictaphone-steady, he repeats her prognosis. "The patient is dead animal mass unless we radically hack her back."

She blinks at him, neither wince nor recoil. The glance is that of a village girl — too young by a year yet for the silk coils that will couple her hair to another's — getting her first glimpse of her arranged life-mate. Her look inquires curiously, a dressup, a play-money look. She turns to her father and performs a near-faithful transcript of the sentence. "The patient" remains "the patient," "dead" stays "dead." But "radically hack her back," to protect her doctor, she renders as "operate."

Only: the sounds she makes, the shadow puppet epic her syllables throw against the scrim of her father's face. Kraft shrugs off the standing wave of sleep. He shakes himself like a dog shivering from the surf. The dialect's five tones reach him from a listening post inside his cochlea. He watches the old man absorb his daughter's condemnation. The judgment is just one more isolated blow in the familiar serial assault, this week's flood, famine, or mass genocide writ small. What has become second nature cannot shock. The pitch-language report of his baby's fate is already an old friend, an ancient poem trotted out again around the expiring fire.

The girl's recommencing hell is just a footnote of an appendix in this wallpaper roll register of continuous death. The girl will go the way of her mother? She'll join her brothers and sisters, the small army of offspring that was to protect the professional healer in his final infirmity? So she too will vanish, like country, land, crops, animals, favorite sticks of furniture. The family bo tree consists entirely of dead descendants and ancestors, the still- and the unborn and those dragged horribly back to birth. Life exists for no other reason than to dull the persistence of the living, to deaden them by degrees each time another of its branches is lopped back, slashed and burned.

The father holds out the backs of his hands for obscure study. He shrugs absolvingly: These things happen. It's a professional gesture, the move of the accredited Mawkhan. He knows, already, what the Cycle has in mind for his daughter's errant vital stuff, and he asks only to facilitate it.

He asks only one thing, a thing his polyglot international girl would be powerless to translate, even into her own tongue. Yet Kraft somehow intuits this simplest request, recovers it. The other medical man would like to do a brief procedure of his own, and then he will put the leg — the femoral incursion, his life's life's blood, his little girl — into the hands of the current dominant culture. One technique, then leave things to the state of the healing art.

Parent and child exchange a few hurried necessities in their private language. Kraft — coming to, coming back, his brain, numbed by several sleepless years of Human Service, condensing around the lost range of the five pitches — finds he can follow them. Not the content; individual words blow past him in a blur. But the shape, the inflected sense, insinuates itself, snuggles up willy-nilly under his arm, embraces him, shouting, "Ricky!" The words lie just next to a language he once spoke, one he can force up now only in ungrammatical museum shards.

But fluency, like all childhood diseases, carries a germ of the first contagion. He concentrates on the swift word flow until one phonetic swirl breaks over him: farang. The foreigner. The albino. You, my friend; they're talking about you. And this word, shared over so many regions from Morocco to beyond Mandalay, the common term for otherness, springs him loose. The thing that defies his spastic grasp wanders back into him, intact.

And now he needs to — how do you say? — say something about it. He blurts out, interrupting the blood pair in their emergency preparation. With no particular program more pressing than this first urgency, he starts to sing:

Chahng, chahng, chahng chahng, chahng,

Nang kuay hen chahng rue prow?

(Tell me, little one: Have you ever seen an elephant?)

Wisat jerks up, his placidity scattered. Although his daughter told him she has exchanged a few nonwhite words with this farang, she has said nothing about his possession by spirits. The old man cannot figure out from what world this outburst comes.

"It's Thai, Pa," his daughter prompts in the same language, calling him by one of the few terms shared in root as widely as "foreigner."

Of course it is. What else could it be, here on the far, shadowed side of the world, in this city of a thousand languages, half of them invented here?

"The elephant is a great creature, and not very light at all," Father Wisat sings, changing tongues as easily as he used to for clients on the far side of his river valley border.

This version is slightly different from the one the once-Ricky remembers. But the tune is the same, and the line scans.

"His nose is really long," Kraft rhymes the man. "It's frequently called a trunk."

Both men giggle at the overlap of their outside knowledge. They finish the song together, while the girl for whom they ostensibly sing looks on, smiling painfully, knowing that the grown-ups can't trouble themselves so long as they are thus occupied.

By song's end, Kraft can talk, really talk again, after half a life deprived of words. He can say anything either part of him needs. And the Laotians' Thai is equal to his own. Can this instant recovery of speech mean that the Farsi is still in there, the Urdu, the Arabic prayers? He and his new near-neighbor speak of nothing — of geography and kinships and favorite fruits you cannot get on this side, even in the most exotic Angel City bazaar. Of places you cannot find your way back to, even with the best of maps.

"Dee," Wisat pronounces, sounding to Kraft's ears like a near-native. "Dee maak. Excellent! We have nothing to worry about then."

"How so?" Kraft asks, finding the words without pause. "What is good?"

"It's good that you come from somewhere else. Like us, only, maybe you stayed dry during the voyage? Maybe you made it over in one hop?" His epithelial folds glint at Kraft; the relatively favored are always fair game. Kraft wonders how old the man is. Granted, he has this twelve-year-old kid. But he is a hundred and forty-four at the youngest.

He should correct the man. He should announce: I'm not from somewhere else. I come from here. Only I left at an early age. Then came back, then left, then… He would explain, only the chronology eludes him, and he cannot say exactly where he is from.

Wisat, oblivious, elaborates. "The trouble with Americans is they think everything begins and ends here, this time. No return, no earth. Imagine: no ancestors! How can one live? It must be terrible. Even their smallest action dies right after the deed is done!"

"A nation of oversteerers," Kraft mumbles in English. The phrase would not translate, even if he had the words. It is intelligible only to those with no beginnings or ends but their own. No time around but this one.

Wisat declares that no one who thinks deeds are their own consequences should be allowed to saw into the spirit house of another's marrow. They should be outlawed from healing, not so much for the sake of the patient's karma as for the surgeon's.

Kraft drifts from the argument. Just the perfume in these clipped syllables returns him to a moment when each sound and scent queue-ing for experience, when all the sensory boutique whispered of pre-knowledge, when the new seemed full of nearby, culminating explanation. First etudes, Handel or Haydn, the Hagia Sophia, jasmine, burned peanuts, gong wong yai, black-market currency exchanges, handworked bullwhips, iguanodon skeletons, a swing south: these, the multiplicity, the range, surrendered to culpable adulthood. Faintly familiar already, nodes on the scheme of things already inside you. Now they are back, insisting you've been here before, calling out both question and command: Remember? Remember. Little one, have you ever seen an elephant?

Commotion calls Kraft back, a noise in the street. A ghetto-blasted popping sound issues over the crunching glass, the assorted squeal-ings, the general yell of background noise. Even before its envelope parts from the white sound waterfall, every dog within a two-mile perimeter of Carver begins baying. Exactly why the grunts used to slip in and poison these beasts in advance.

Crazed cacophony, but quotidian enough that Kraft would not even cringe except for what happens to the girl. Violently, she repeats her stage swan dive. As the trigger sound becomes audible to humans, a quick-quick-quick scimitar subdividing the aqueous air, she throws herself at her father, shouting a single word, the surname of dread.

Her movement is more astonishing given that, below the waist, she is little more than two moist streamers of crepe paper. She reverts in fear to her native tongue. Wisat must translate now, baring his remaining teeth in parental embarrassment.

"Dragonflies."

Kraft hears it home in, a small rotor-blade flotilla, Plummer on the helplessly receiving end. Then it hits him: How old is this bean sprout? He checks the chart, verifies that she was not even born until years after the last Huey was swept from the continent's edge. Even granting that her war was the lingering one, dragging on in unpublished secret, beyond the limits of American attention span: Dragonflies? If the gunships were even around past the child's birth, who was flying and maintaining them? And to what ends, in that pathetic, valueless valley, except to drive out this old medicine man, annul his wife, excise all his offspring but the one remaining infant, and scar this one permanently with a monstrous metal mother's quick-quick call, a Lorenzian imprint gone mad?

That question sets off a dozen others in Kraft's head, questions that should have occurred to him long before. How did these two reach here anyway, rural refuges of permanent war? How could they have gotten out, met the exit fees? Whom could they have paid? They had no possible means of escape. Therefore, Kraft concludes, they cannot possibly be here.

The girl cowers from a conditioning she could not have picked up firsthand. Acquired chopper terror, learned from old footage, her father's accounts, or daily proximity to heavenly herbicide recipients. There are enough of them, in this city filled with escapees from all the burning jungles this city has torched. She lives alongside Hmong who cannot lift a fork without family consultation. She goes to school with the grandchildren of Nisei internees. She eats with Asians who have never seen real peppers. She studies with Asians who cannot find China in an encyclopedia. She plays with the children of potassium flashes, several hundred thousand let in over a few-year span. Half-children of fathers who thought they'd never be found. Mothers who never stopped searching. Asians who blew free of their necropolis home, smuggled out for the market's going fee or shipped to Oahu and Guam in empty American caskets, surviving by impersonating death. Asians who came here long before the first European, before the invention of the word "Asia." Asians who will never have the slightest grasp on what passes for sanity here on this side of the rim. She might have contracted the sky-burn terror from any one of them. Kraft looks away from her panicked embrace, so as not to humiliate the child even more. He picks up the top book on her study stack, placed conspicuously for his benefit over the Let's Learn About Stars and Planets! and the Electricity and You. A slender pastel paperback called Through the Looking Glass: it takes him until the invocation to remember that he bought it for her, in a luckless attempt to get the girl to read beneath her level, below herself.

Child of the pure, unclouded brow

And dreaming eyes of wonder!

Though time be fleet, and I and thou

Are half a life asunder,

Thy lowing smile will surely hail

The love-gift of a fairy tale.

It takes him until sestet's end to remember the place he bought it, the city, the day, the woman he was with, the woman's name, why he has avoided her. Too close for memory. Memory lies half a life asunder now, in Krung Thep, that other City of Angels where he was the resident immigrant.

A gnarled hand grips his, covers it as it flips pages. Wisat, pointing to the slight volume, chuckles. Addressing fatfarang in the old imperial language of occupation, he says, "Vous etes un bon homme."

Kraft looks up. The girl is back, hiding her sheepish face. In the five tones, the most musical language ever invented to say human things, Kraft sings to her, "We're going to have to take your whole leg off. And it may not be enough."

Father and daughter look surprised that he makes the pronouncement public. They give him the look of the medically indigent, the look of those who know wider beginnings and ends.

Wisat asks Joy something in an undertone Kraft cannot catch. The girl fishes about in her school supplies bag, emblazoned this year with Japanese crime-fighting robots that change into F-15s. The satchel is full of flat-ended number twos, edible paste, and carefully preserved if worthlessly smushy steel protractors. She extracts a flash of silver that she passes to her dad.

He in turn hands it to Kraft with the verbal gift-giving formula of a land belonging to neither of them. Kraft takes the present, mumbling the thank-you phrase once second nature, yet never his. At first, he mistakes the gift for a small Buddha. It is, in fact, a metal, Western-winged trinket.

"What is this?" he asks, his skin going voltaic.

But Kraft already knows what the thing is. It is the necklace angel hanging around the surplice in the sole portrait he possesses of his choirboy father.

"It's a good-luck… a good-luck…"

"Charm?" To wear while he cuts away her parts, so that things might go well with them on their way from her hip socket to the incinerator.

She flashes her eager thanks for the term and copies it industriously into her notebook.

"Where did it come from?"

Once again, dismay at this doctor's New World need to make questions overt. Joy shrugs. It came from the place all good-luck charms come from. She points vaguely at the roof, where the emergency medical dragonflies have just landed.

"It fell out of the sky."

Out of the sky: of course. The place from which all charms fall. The first word, the formula invocation, the once-upon, anomalous and abandoned, comes back to him. Now he can give her the missing bit of her fallen angel, the key. More than your lifetime before you were born, he owes her, his half of the child hostage swap, a boy your age fell out of the same blue.

That was how he always arrived. And left the same way, a year or two later, when his father went on to another part of what was then still called the developing world. They followed Foreign Service's Coriolis, their country's crusaderism with a human face. One day the boy fell from the sky and landed in the City of Angels, capital of the Land of the Free.

His first snatch of Free speech — from an armed, khaki passport-controller in the improvised airport — was more melodious than any song he'd ever heard. He would have asked the officer to chant the phrase again, had he known how. No need; the whole city was pitched in a singing school of spoken tones.

He had lived in cities that had been sacked a dozen times before the City of Angels had built its first wall. Yet this seemed the most ancient place he had ever seen, the least concerned with the passage of time. It was built in a bend of a senile river meandering down to the South China Sea in switchbacks as lazy as the sutures in a baby's skull. The city perched on this floodplain like a water strider, a floating reed mat that had rooted into an island. What roads there were had been canals until a few years before.

Planless, Krung Thep sprawled away from the river, its watery network spreading like ant trails through sugar. The house his father took them to fronted on a vegetated street and backed onto a canal served by water taxis and buses. Like every other building in the city, the house bobbed on shallow piles.

The walled compound of his new home contained the same servants' quarters, outdoor laundry, rain jar full of mosquito larvae, and copse of rotting aromatic fruit trees he had grown up knowing. But it had one distinctly local touch. Where the shard-tipped wall adjoined the canal, under a tree of wax-pink, edible Liberty Bells sat a tiny house. Doll-sized, its piers supported a triple-tiered, sharply gabled roof in orange and green ceramic. Flame finials shot out from each apex, gracing the encrusted eaves.

Ricky asked the cook, his confidant, about this tiny domicile. In a patois that became his bootstrap into Free, Som told him it housed all the essences that had been displaced when the big house was built. The boy liked to leave jasmine and burning joss sticks by the diminutive front door, an act between veneration and apology.

The floating city consisted of countless life-size, real-world spirit houses. Banks, arcades, bars, Turkish baths, whorehouses, markets, polo clubs, slums, schools, embassies, and dark mazes of hovel stalls all proliferated unzoned. Yet there was only one decisive industry in the Free capital: propitiation.

The city existed to build monasteries. The bulk of Free will had been channeled into them. There was one just up the street from the compound, and one a hundred meters down the canal. One stood across from Ricky's international school. An enormous temple complex, a walled city within the city, occupied the bow-bend of the river, the kernel of the old town. Most of the three hundred monasteries, from sprawling communities to single sheds, were classical in style: bell-shaped stupas flanked colonnaded halls with terraced roofs flamed in finials and topped with tapering spires.

The city was on a centuries-long project to convert itself into an immense way house for the spirit world's indigent. Even those desperately poor without drinking water — two million Angel inhabitants lived and died by milliliters — contributed to building. A week's income went to replace a roof tile, signed on the underside before being supped into position. Free heaven, the boy learned, was not a place but release from place, an escape of the turns of the Wheel. A celestial New York, a mendicant Tokyo, an incorporeal Paris, the City of Angels constructed itself in an architecture beyond desire.

The neighborhoods forgoing enlightenment ran in two-story, poured concrete shanties. Shops at ground level were topped by a combination office, warehouse, and family living cube. In these shops the boy learned to bargain. Even a hundred grams of candy had a concealed price that had to be discovered jointly by vendor and customer. Ricky could fake shock at suggested retail, feign indifference over an item he burned for more than all the pocket change in existence. He perfected the art of walking away, then turning at the right, world-weary moment to suggest, in the most resigned tonal speech, a compromise. Shopkeepers baited him with inflated prices, just to see this miserable excuse for an albino roll out his repertoire.

His vocabulary grew rapidly. His ear, at thirteen, was still liquid. There were sounds in the massive alphabet that his parents could not distinguish, let alone produce: an intermediate between b and p; a vicious initial ng that came from a place in the back of the throat missing in white adults. Impaired, his parents employed Ricky to negotiate with tradesmen or placate Som's anxieties over the invasion of the evening's pallo by winged hordes.

A barrier more intractable than pronunciation prevented his parents from ever becoming Free speakers. In Free, a word's meaning hinged on a proper deployment of the five tones. His mother, an amateur musician, could hear something wonderful happening in every spoken syllable. But neither she nor Kraft Sr. could hear, let alone enunciate, the difference between "color" and "four."

The boy, on the other hand, knew the tone of a word before he'd even learned it. He knew the tone was the word. Thus he could make, from what sounded to his parents like five equivalent syllables, the brilliant if rhetorical question, "New silk doesn't burn, does it?"

He studied Free at the International Institute of the City of Angels. The school housed the city's foreign children, a monastery complex without the finials. The school mascot — racist joke on all farangs, whatever their melanin — was Hanuman, the white monkey general from the national poetic epic.

Ricky soon studied Free with the oldest, even learning the elaborate script. He learned to name two dozen banana varieties from dealings with the canal boats. Som taught him how to sing in a seven-pitch musical scale, twisting each note with the word's inflection. But his real language lab took place in the streets, where he quickly learned everything from "corner kick" to "bugger your mother."

Time thrived not in the verb but in context. Yesterday it rains. This afternoon, it rains. Cool centuries from now, when you at long last graduate from bodily history, it rains. The subtle colorations of tense-less time seeped deeper into him. He slowly understood it, or, in the Free for "understand," it heart-entered him.

It heart-entered him until he felt nowhere but where he was, a white ghost in an inland port on the Gulf of Free, in a street overrun by pedicabs and tone-haggling merchants, laced with jasmine and temple bells, bells rung by pilgrims' staves in the same intervals as the seven-pitch songs Som taught him. He sang the songs at thirteen, hearing in advance what the pitches would sound like at second hand, when the one place on earth he ever belonged to was reduced to this exotic travelogue, dim cartoon.

His parents were resigned to let him assimilate. He could wander the city at random. For two and a half cents, he took one of the hundred color-coded buses, hanging out the open back door even when crowding did not compel it. He clung to the Sunday Market, where he watched limbs thick with elephantiasis shrink at the application of fluid distilled from rare barks. There too he could buy fish and birds for the merit of releasing them. Fruit could be had that he had seen nowhere else on the planet, tastes that had no equivalent in any other language but this, the one he now tasted in.

The Sunday Market attested to fields and rivers a little more forthcoming than most of the places he had lived. But even this relatively affluent emporium had its extensive subdivisions where the deformed laid out mats, where mothers solicited for their hydrocephalic infants — heads huge, smooth, and shiny as museum vases. Here, the boy invested his bargaining proceeds. At thirteen, he still felt the ludicrous hope of making a dent, although somewhere he already knew that all the coins in the world would never release even an insignificant fraction of the agony locked in this one illusory turn of the Wheel.

The southeast of town was a slum so vast and desperate that no philosophy could reduce it to illusion. Ricky traveled there one day, one of the few city corners he hadn't yet seen. The bus conductor punched his ticket using a six-inch, coiled little fingernail, and asked where the boy thought he has going. Ricky responded, "I live in this city." I live yesterday, now, in another hundred centuries.

But he was not ready to see just where he lived. In Squatter Town, houses for displaced spirits were irrelevant. The living there displaced nothing; they had never taken possession of the lease. Fathers defecated and mothers listlessly washed dishes in the same fetid film where their children still found the energy to swim. The diet here could not even sustain the hope of religious escape. Days were no perpetual Wheel to be ridden until history released the day's residents. There was no passage of days here. Days were an inconceivable luxury for the privileged and already sprung.

The squatter boys in the streets did not even bother to mob Ricky as he handed out dimes. They took the coins and looked away, weary. One older tough, a spark in the swallowing dark, at least summoned up enough irony to push palms together in front of his bowed nose, a parody of the gesture of thanks and departure.

Squatter Town graduated the boy forever from temperament. The size of the floating ghetto, the rotting slackness of life scavenging its own dead, defeated any scheme human history might invent to justify itself. Ricky discovered, at the moment his body was everywhere tufting, losing its pink larvahood, that the Sunday Market sufferers were not confined to a few, licensed begging stalls. They proliferated in whole, autonomous free-trade cities of their own, outstripping in per capita growth anything the upward world could hope to offset.

He could make no sense of the slum's exploding compass. The image followed him around fastidiously wherever he went. He asked his Free friend, the Institute gate guard, how a slum that size could consume a city so gifted. The man darkened and pronounced his explanation.

"Do you know Hitler?" the guard asked.

Ricky confessed to having heard of him.

"I want to do for our Chinese what Hitler did for your Jews."

The boy could not even cough out "Why?"

"Chinese take all the business. They marry Free women. They hoard currency in rice sacks and make us pay double to get it back."

Ricky took the question to church — a Lutheran outfit that met in the attic of a Catholic school. Ricky asked his confirmation teacher, an Air Force captain, who quietly informed him. The war was sucking the entire subcontinent dry. And all unnecessarily, because stay-at-home lawmakers had never come out for a look. Only one step could halt the hideous drain: permission to saturate the Yangtze, every hundred kilometers. The captain tapped the palm of a spotted hand, tracing a precision pattern up his lifeline. He claimed his Free colleagues at the leased bases all agreed. Ricky sensed how soon he would have to put away childish things.

The boy tried to lose himself in diversions. He attended ceremonial combats — kites, fish, cocks, kick-boxers. He bought numbing doses of sugarcane and iced coffee from vendors, smudgy newsprint scandal magazines, spirit-restoring roots from the canal boat flotillas. The International Institute was good for killing thirty hours a week, his classes serenely unaware of the watershed crisis he had just unearthed. After school he took refuge in Indian films where heroes leaped ten meters into the air and landed while simultaneously twirling a machete and completing a tight end rhyme. But by the end of the film, as he stood at attention in front of a projection of the king while a pipat band insinuated itself into a facsimile of the royal anthem, small Kraft's desire to efface himself demanded, more than ever, its obvious out.

The boy told his parents he would enter the monastery at the onset of that rainy season.

"Time-honored response," his father chuckled, as if he had the early teen mind pegged. "Too bad you're not legal age. We could use you in the Foreign Legion."

Ricky had no idea what the man was talking about. Between the boy and his father lay every kilometer they had ever logged. His parents had brought him up without cruelty, with all the amenities. But their attempts at understanding him were, like his belated exposure to his national sport, doomed to enthusiastic blundering. How could they think he wanted to forget something? Completely wrong. There was something he needed badly to remember.

Most Free males spent some time as monks. His parents, who had delighted in his language study, taken him throughout the country, and set him loose in the capital, could not object. Fourteen was ripe for a novice; some boys entered the monastery as early as eight. Some stayed for three weeks; others found themselves still in the temple year after year, finally dying in the abbey of their original petition.

The postulant went for religious instruction. They started with the story of the Enlightened. A rich prince undergoes a spiritual crisis, realizing that he can expect nothing at the end except sickness, suffering, and death. The prince renounces the world and goes into seclusion. He undertakes a search for absolute truth, discarding a variety of paths, even starving until bones pierce his skin and hair falls out at the roots.

One day under a bo tree he wrestles with the Tempter, who tells him to choose life. He defeats desire, thereby gaining knowledge of his prior existences and seeing the flux of creation's constant rebirth. He wakes to the nature of suffering, feeling, and eternal migration: the universe as lotus pond.

The child learned of the three planes, the shape of time's cycle, and the names of many fixed points in the spinning sphere. He learned the stages leading to awareness and memorized those scraps of scripture he would need to recite at his ordination. He was accepted by a small temple on the other side of the river. A senior monk took a straight razor to every hair on his head, including eyebrows. Glimpsing the result, Ricky was shocked at the deformed terrain, its lumps and crevasses. Derogatory street slang was right: he was an albino, a freak. His bared skull was whiter than the bleached onion skin through which he had once traced the countries of the world.

Wrapped in cloth as white as his virgin scalp, he was carried three times around the temple under a parasol. Inside, seated cross-legged in front of the abbot and a dozen monks, he was examined and had all the answers ready. At the end of the questioning, the abbot — an old man in perpetual danger of disappearing into his orange robe — peered through his glasses and asked, out of nowhere, "Where are you headed?"

Panic rushed on Ricky like a monsoon. But just the way day's rain, for a minute as opaque as sheet tin, can vanish more rapidly than it blows in, his confusion cleared onto equatorial blue. He gave the first reply that came into his head: a colloquial phrase something like "I've already been." The abbot's slight smile implied that, if Ricky hadn't entirely passed the exam, he would be taken on as a promising exception.

Alone in the community, he was shown his cell — an open teak cube draped in mosquito netting, with a low prayer dais and a water barrel shared with three others. The youngest novices flocked around him until a senior monk chased the boys away. Ricky was taught how to put on and fold his robes. Then he was left to himself.

Right speech, right gesture, right countenance. No possessions. No food after noon. No singing, no music, no pictures, no broadcast. No leaving the compound except for barefoot dawn alms, receiving the day's food from merit seekers, out on the streets. He knew these rules but did not yet know what, aside from the common meal and the several chants, he was expected to do all day.

Nothing, everything. He could go for instruction with the senior monks. He could think or write. He could talk softly with the other boys during certain hours. He could meditate. The abbot gave him an English book on the subject from the monastery library. None of the other monks could read it, and the abbot was eager for a report on the contents.

This book—An Awareness of Air—started out as clear as the moon in a still water barrel, yet grew infinitely infolded with each rereading. Every line undid and rewove the previous opaline paradox. The plot was all about how to sit quietly and grow so mindful of breathing that you were once again oblivious. It said how to hold the hands, the neck, the body. But when the text described how to hold the thoughts, things grew slippery.

Meditation ascended by stages, like the tiers on his processional parasol. Align the spine, close eyes, focus on the thread passing through the lungs. Ricky reached detachment with a little effort, then went back to reading. Next came intense concentration. He breathed for a long time but was never sure whether he achieved the state or just thought he had. He returned to the book to learn that this was just a stage on the way to a more intense indifference. As the white light approached, he was supposed neither to shut it out nor give in, but to go through, to yet more things falling away. After days lost in the various positions, he drew close to the white light, but the excitement of approach dispersed the condition.

On the book's last page, he read how everything he had just read was worthless. Study and words were the worst enemy of the thing that all the study and words meant to nurture. He brought the book back to the abbot and reported how the work counseled its own destruction. Grinning and shaking his head, the abbot placed the volume back in its space on the shelves.

The boy breathed on in silence, now without trying for anything except respiration. His days were so free from distraction that he could not recall the urgency that had forced him here. An hour became fuzzy; the interval between two temple bell peals gaped grotesquely. In the silence of his cell, one day's tidal sine of light traced the rise and subsidence of whole existences. Once, in an afternoon lasting longer than belonging, he thought he was about to receive knowledge of his previous lives.

After a while, time ceased. Kraft Sr. came to check on the boy. Returning to conversation enough to anticipate how excruciating time would again be for several days after his father left, Ricky begged the man to stay overnight. But his father had work to attend to, the exploits of world political will.

Ricky enjoyed going into the abbot's study to stare at an image of the Enlightened, a dark ceramic of the man reclining full length, light with deliverance, resting his head on the crook of one arm. This statue was nothing like the thousands of Free treatments of the pose. Its was alien, other. The abbot told him the statue came from far away.

"How far?" the novice asked.

"Farther than you could walk in your life. And it is as old as it is distant."

"Older than I could walk to?" Ricky giggled, against the precepts. But the abbot quietly joined him.

"It is one of the earliest likenesses of the Enlightened in human form. Before that, artists only traced his emblems — his footprint, the tree."

"Why is it so strange?"

The abbot's lips tightened. "The first images were under the spell of the West. Half Hindu, half Roman."

"Is that true?" Ricky touched the reclining figure, finding in it another dislocated, crosstown soul.

"I don't lie to you! What do you like most about him?"

Ricky answered instantly. "The face."

"Heu." A sound that meant anything. "What about the face?"

"It's all opposites. He is smiling deeply, but…" The face of a thousand-year-old boy.

The abbot completed the unreachable thought. "But there is nothing in the world to smile about."

Ricky stared at the face's hurt bliss. "Is it valuable?" He hated the question as soon as it left him. The Blue Book value — its rarity — was more than the monastery buildings put together. He had meant to ask: Do others need this image as much as I do? But the idea had gotten lost on its way to the air.

The abbot did not reprimand him. "We use it."

The boy reached out to — what? — pet the statue, console it. But in a freak impulse, his hand shuddered. He tried to clip the flinch, but will was one step behind muscle. Even before the figure slipped from its shelf to pieces on the floor, the boy saw the irreversible and wished himself dead, floating lifeless above the earth's atmosphere.

The abbot, twenty years renouncing the illusion of things, cried out at the senseless shards, his shaved head blanching as pale as the white novice's. He said nothing, and the harshness ofthat silence cut the boy worse than the disaster.

Just months before Ricky had arrived, in a cell near his, an old monk had hanged himself. But the boy could find no place in the desert of ceiling to attach the end of a robe. He sat on the bare floor, refusing meals, forgoing prayers, unable even to close his eyes and listen to his breathing. All he allowed himself was to replay the event: Had the figure slipped before his hand twitched? No; he would not rewrite chronology. Had he wished to destroy the thing? Why?

Nothing made sense, least of all the impression that his spasm had responded to some summons from the childlike wrinkles of that face. In the instant just before he sent the figure crashing to the ground, he had heard someone — not the abbot, and certainly not the Enlightened — someone stretched out on the human cordwood pile, violently shouting from out of the hand-lit oven, "Come away!" And those words had burned a serial number into his arm, jerking it in fatal reflex.

The memory of the statue shattering dragged him around his room like a chained fighting cock. He confined himself in the cell until that afternoon when it became a choice of leave or asphyxiate. When he finally threw his door open, the force of sun blinded him like the bare bulb of an interrogation. He took an awkward step over the stoop into the forgotten place and almost tripped over a mass on his doorstep. He dropped to his knees and toyed with the thing as a caveman with first flint. It was the largest shard from the shattered statue.

Ricky took the fragment inside. Not the whole pile of permanent shame. Just this long, pristine surface, undulant as a sensuous seashell. He looked at the simple curve — once the swell of a reclining man's side as he awaited the last migration. After long looking, he made a decision. With a small knife blade and sewing needle lent him to mend his orange robe, he began working the stone surface. He searched below it for artifacts, brushing the pin tip back and forth like an archaeologist's whisk.

Ricky carved for three days. He discovered that his hands, alone of all his willful body, would do what he told them. He could think an arc almost too small to see, then duplicate it on the stone skin. When he put in place the last delineation between tiny vertebrae, the magic intaglio replica blood vessels, he knew he was finished, that he had done what he needed with the shattered waste.

He took the shard back to the abbot and handed it to him. The abbot stared at it through his thick black frames, his face clouding over.

"What is this?" the abbot softly demanded.

Ricky could say nothing. He could add no description to the thing that the thing didn't already contain.

The abbot squinted, running his nail over the startling internal detail. "Do you know what this is?" the abbot asked again.

Ricky did not dare tilt his neck.

"This is the voice box of the last child to leave the Wheel." He put his fingernail inside a striation. "The place where the final farewell shout will appear." He chuckled softly to himself, thanked the boy for the gift, and set it on the shelf the priceless statue had once occupied.

The day arrived when the boy would leave the monastery. And on that day he made his last rounds, taking leave of the monks — the abbot, the senior who had shaved his head, the new crop of novices. As he was given back his lay clothes, Ricky found himself, to his horror, wondering what he'd gotten out of the experience.

That he still asked meant he had gotten nothing. He would forever remain the offspring of his upbringing. Beating through his pallid skin was the sick bias of his home island: we must be headed somewhere. Somewhere unprecedented. He would never escape the need to unravel, extend, be off. The question itself, the desire to arrive, prohibited passage. He had gained nothing but the ability to chant in Pali, to survive mind-numbing tedium, and to hold his hand steady enough to carve.

He was stunned to learn that he had been in the monastery just under a month. The new school year was still weeks away. Four steps into the world, his whole head was thrown open. He stood on the front edge of outside, frozen like a cave creature blinded by the outside. Eyes, ears, throat, nose, and pores all dilated, backpedaling to accommodate the exchange threatening on all sides to swamp them.

Four weeks of deprivation had damped down his senses to exist on thinnest impulse. Now the city erupted around him in a Water Festival, a New Year's of obscene scale. From all sides, people shouted at him to hurry up, buy something from them, save their child, get out of their way. Each word was a firework exploding next to his ear. He was jostled by brushes, bumps, casual collisions, the mercenary seductive assaults of endless unfed cats arching against his ankles.

And smell: a wall of overpowering durian, jasmine, charcoal, animal feces, now vined over with pungent parasites. Quinine barks, mosquito repellent, sandalwood from a second-story window, frying banana oil, the inks of cheap romance magazines, starch from schoolgirls' uniforms, fear in its many street varieties, beetles exhuming the soil, smoke from minidragon industries, lotus leaves rotting in a canal, rice paper, powdered-over fever blisters of infants, cot sores on the old — heat, fever, ecstasy, survival, melting ice. The scent of ice melting.

Food everywhere, indecent in its variety. Fried shrimp crackers, saté, boiled fish, teas, peanuts sugared or sopped; sesames, rice-flour gels, meats whose awful origin Ricky only now calculated. He stopped a vendor and bought a slivered mango. Crouching by the curb, he held dollops of it to his tongue. Sweet venoms shot straight to his cerebral cortex and blasted across that synapse map like purest Golden Triangle opiate. He had never — he knew now; would never forget (although the sensation was already vanishing, unarrestable) — he had never tasted.

Across the spider's web of paved canals, unable to keep to a bearing, a bantam who'd taken too many kicks to the head, he mazed his way through a city that, in his month away, had changed beyond recognition. How could he have missed this all? Just over the river, in a back alley not far from the palace, he was jerked around so violently that he started to run. Something alive, complex, a pulsing, globular disorder tumbled over itself, like Rama's monkey army rampaging in the overgrown forest. He knew the thing from ancient history. Sound filled him, and would not all fit. The attack inflated his veins like a surgical balloon.

It came from no one source. The air itself generated a coordinated agreement of particles, a sonic sphere. At last recognizing it, Ricky yelled the word "Music!" into a crowd that went about sweeping stoops or hanging out carcasses. Someone somewhere had the radio on; that was all. But extended aural abstinence made it seem as if all the molecules of earth had converted themselves into one steel-gong philharmonic. He had learned the song a life or more ago:

Tell, me, little one: Have you ever seen an elephant?

He relearned the folk song in Free class the next semester, almost before his ears had readjusted to the outside. Hair growing back, he sat among chums grown prematurely sophisticated on the two-year circuit, the child elite of four dozen countries-offspring of UN relief agencies, intercontinental traders, lifer servicemen, or covert advisers; children who, like Kraft, claimed they didn't know what their parents did — all linked by the shame of their privileged sahib-ships, each child damp with the friction, misery, and exquisite alarm of awakening urges, each feverishly pursuing fluid formations of allegiance and taste, each of them struggling to get through this toddler's tune, banal in the extreme, singing in half-earnest for the last time before falling into jaded, self-conscious silence.

His face grew hot and his giveaway, traitor albino eyes began to flush themselves from their rims. Ricky sang along in quavering full voice, even while classmates around him openly laughed. His arms and emaciated upper chest shook as if naked in the arctic, but he laughed too, to realize it: he had gained nothing at all. Nothing that he hadn't always, from the start of time, already had.

He sang forte, to drown out that searing, tiny treble vocal cord of accompaniment, that appeal beyond bearing. But he could not outsing memory. At song's end, before they went on to plane geometry, he raised his hand and, in his most pristine Free, in that soft, insistent forensic of children (that planetwide Stone Age tribe still lumped together in one clan), he said what he had learned while gone.

He told how there were children their age, alongside town, just at hand, wasting away hideously, calling out to this international class— this us—to come away. Come save them.

Her rubbery resistance, sensuous in the stretch of its catenaries, spectacularly miniatured even by Oriental standards, is so uncannily perfect that it forgoes a navel, bears no hint of that dimple where the mold took its molten feed. What in creation is this thing? Smooth, slick, rippled, striated, zoomable to full complexity at every magnification. His textbook snip sneaks through the slippery veneer, revealing whole structures folded within structure. Up here, at organ level, it seems a stash-stuffed haversack, an elastic, single-sheet hyperbolic solid lashing with surface tension a vitreous humor that would otherwise spew jelly all over the cavity.

Press any part, push this subassembly with the blade, that doorstop wedge so narrowed that it becomes lethal. Interrogate the clayey marbling with that oldest simple machine on mankind's curriculum vitae. Separate and split, part the red corpuscular sea until the thing unsheathes, cleaves back into a Rothko cross section that did not exist discretely until this clean trough vectored it.

But do not — God — think who this is. Not a body, not life, not that little girl who — not. Just these forty centimeters, here to here. Heuristic. Virtual reality. The live-in flight simulator. Dr… er, Kraft. Twelve-year-old Asian female presents with insidious, edematous living shit creeping up toward… Your choice of clubs, and a mock-up fairway. YOU make the call.

Boyhood trains for this, with its pancultural small-animal torture. Species-wide, in every country he ever barnstormed. All its mini-Mengele enterprises, the How-What-Why kits, "101 Electrochemical Things You Can Do with Grasshoppers." Ornamental firefly-abdomen rings. Lanyards of sparrow ligament. Enraged rhinoceros beetles, whipped into welterweight frenzies. Low-voltage lizard pithing, combing back fish scales. Fruit bats twined to a stake — the poor boy's remote-controlled helicopter.

All these clandestine recreations mean to retrieve by violence the thing that violence denies them. And the hardest harrowed, the most disconsolate, wander into professional sadism.

And this rubbery, slittable resistance, midway between failed tapioca and a chewed-up gum eraser: here is the prime pornography, the stuff of all prurient fascination. Tender obscenity spreads itself just a micron of latex away from his fingers. He must wade into lewdness up to the hip. Send out the search-and-destroys. Isolate the evil empire of spreading microblasts, envelop and excise. Create strategically safe hamlets, your free-fire zones, and work outward from there.

But wasn't that what the child inside him had in mind? Ease back the unbearable, extend into the light. We must head upcountry. We. Our whole rainbow coalition. The infant international community. The brilliant Mickey Li, trading pictograph lessons for jump shot tips. Gopal, whose government already had plans for him after education. Tati, batik by adoption and grace. Claudio, with his legendary chocolate sandwiches. Ali, whose feel for market vicissitudes promoted a series of wildly successful commercial ventures on the lunch hour steps. All off, on foot if necessary, to answer the call of a sister village, the town of misery beyond explanation's event horizon. Can we get there by candlelight?

Get where?

To the core of the blossoming tumor.

He hears the Millstone wind-tunneling in his ear, doing his geriatric Driver's Ed teacher a month before retirement thing. Working in close, fistfighting the nodes, Kraft torches them by fractional degrees, whisking them away with tiny tempered-steel sliver pickers while the hypertensed attending spits through his surgical mask, "Wa-wa-watch it! That's the goddamn artery you're slinging around there."

The knee-length formal gown shimmies a bit as the Millstone's foot pumps away at the imaginary safety brake. The man is intermittently unstable at best. A word-salading zealot. Precisely as Kraft lifts the edge of adhesion and begins to shear the disease from where it cleaves to the end of acceptable tissue, the man starts to hyperventilate. "What are you trying to do, serve this girl up as Hamburger Helper?"

Kraft is, in fact, having some trouble self-actualizing here. The Millstone just stares at him, along with the rest of the veiled team. Anesthesiologist keeps pumping the magic punching bag, calling out stock ticker numbers that slip steadily toward debit. Millstone shouts, "Come on. Calm down. Clean things up or we're going to get some vicious scarring."

Scarring? A pretty scar the length of this girl's body would be the luckiest outcome she could hope for. Kraft rejoins the dark assault SWAT forces macheteing their way inland, upriver, deeper inside her.

He sweeps low, near the knots of growth he must defoliate. Blades whirring, like the fairy dragonflies that fly these phantom criticals in. Like the ones he rode in. The hive of bugs that flew their mercy platoon on its last leg into the triple canopy, the schoolchildren strapped in between stacks of charity goods. He saw another swarm of the things the other night on the tube, zoned out again on nonfic-tion footage, horrific public education stuff, the only shows he has patience for in his unusably few free hours. Trance, daydream, daze, stupor, coma while waiting for the wrap-up, the big — what's the undoer of bang?

These TV choppers: the same make, same breed, same machines that, between unlisted missions, airlifted their prefab schoolhouse upcountry to the jungle village he himself had picked out on the map and insisted upon. The one that had called out to him.

Millstone does not flutter now, does not even breathe. He is waiting for Kraft to finish the delicate stuff before cuffing and booking him. Wouldn't be so quiet in here if it weren't an ambush. Somebody's even turned off the radio, the vid, the eternal ubiquitous soundtrack. It's silent, anacoustic, surf-in-the-ear-vessels time. Somewhere outside the operating theater — where? adjacent? just above this room? have they gotten loose, taken over the institution? — he can hear the familiar sounds of his ward, children of daily abuse, voices in the undergrowth, singing the latest in a continuous descent of jingles that propagate out of wedlock, ignorant of their parentage:

Ching, Chang, Chinaman chopped at a rat,

Snarfed it back like a ginger snap.

And then sucked it down, and then slurped it up. Every restless permutation along the way back to suckling innocence. Chop, Chow, Chang, Chinaman, and then it comes to Kraft, in a ginger snap: the disguised anxiety hidden in this verse enchantment. How are we going to beat back the rat-eating Asian armada from our already wretchedly refused shores?

The world, as seen nightly, in increasing doses of nonfiction TV used to drug himself unconscious, is awash in open boats. Moroccans landing on the casinoed beaches of southern France. Cubans punting to Miami. Albanian fishing craft listing to Italy. The Kurds, targeted by all takers, beached, landlocked in dry mountain seas. Asia flooded, dammed behind chain-link pens in Hong Kong, Formosa, Nippon.

The favored ones are put through the holding camps' full interrogation. Are you a real political refugee, or just starving? (As if indigence weren't oppression by its maiden name.) This sieve sorts life into Right, Left, the same old two deciding queues, quintessential camp winnowings. Mass mockeries of the Last Ordeal, only none is ever the last. You: through. You, you, and you: one giant step back.

Escape this deluge by turning a handful of rat gourmets back to their so-called dominions? Pitiful, pointless, like the little blond lowlands kid with his digit in the dike. The Leg-ups' worst, concerted nightmare scenario: the wages of empire, brown foster foundlings returning with a vengeance. They trawl in solid convoys, every serviceable craft commandeered, skulling away from the mass quarries of bone and lime. Rivulets of humanity trickle into unbailable flood, a tidal surge coursing across privilege's topographic contours. They wash away the sparse island respites, leveling them in one swell of instant erosion.

The whole South is cut loose, fleeing by any means the positive feedback loop of privation, a step in front of the aerial canister and tracer. The very air is ignited behind their spree, the shock wave lifting them along, flinging them flying-monkey style toward that figment of deliverance. Driven out, and by whom? By the eminent domaineers, the same squatters to whose blessed destinations they bail out.

The whole South is cut loose, fleeing by any means the positive feedback loop of privation, a step in front of the aerial canister and tracer. The very air is ignited behind their spree, the shock wave lifting them along, flinging them flying-monkey style toward that figment of deliverance. Driven out, and by whom? By the eminent domaineers, the same squatters to whose blessed destinations they bail out.

Driven out by dragonflies, the agents provocateurs he saw again last night in blue phosphor simulacrum, that cozy, flickering glow the color of a patio bug-zapper. The hum of one too, but more curdlingly eerie, without soundtrack. Only the sober, clinical voice-over, "In the rainy season of sixty-buzz combined Special Forces of buzz…" Hit upon the surreal little fairy plan… But fact. As in, actually happened. And there, on factual film, while the factual narrator mediated the escapade, was Operation Wandering Soul. One of the roster of colorfully named undertakings: Operation Flaming Dart. Mayflower. Royal phoenix. Rolling Thunder. Niagara. Junction City. Sea Swallow. Linebacker Two.

Because he could not hope for sleep, he chose numb distraction, nonfiction Wandering Soul, the sinister lace-wing roundup. The voice-over explained it in teacherly tones, described the sick side-junket, more literary than military. Dragonflies at night swarm above unsuspecting villages, high enough to be indistinct from the season's background locust whirr, the night's dark radiation. On cue, spectral voices cut in, lighting up the night like aural phosphor flares. "Our babies," native collaborators call out, translating the names to regional variants. "Our offspring! Have you forgotten us?"

Disembodied chill semaphores, piped through megaphones at three A.M., a crude and bizarre attempt at demoralization howled down from haunted heaven into the animist jungle. A monsoon of invisible, amplified voices from out of an unreal parallel. The point was simply to ply digestion's pits, to curdle skin, to play terror off of shame by leveling the claim these villagers would be most inclined to believe in. We are your ancestors, expelled from your frag-shattered pantry altars, exiled by your bad karma and evil politics. Give up, capitulate, come over. Do this, our last bidding.

The whole project might have been pure theater, cinematic American weirdness in the jungle. But the account was too outrageously surreal for Kraft to be anything else than the recognizable exploits of the Foreign Service's fighting wing. Film didn't register the ground panic, or say whether the hot stick shoved down the anthill bore results. It's all inference, aerial recon, a grainy, underexposed, handheld frame from on high, inside the chopper, the innuendo of mayhem.

But the effects of the operation, its results, were never at issue. All the instigators wanted was all they ever want: a gold star, extra credit for inventive derangement. Look what we made. Our program, our play, our restless, destined superiority. Take that. Hit me back. Tell me what happens next. Love me.

The camera panned too much to make out the protagonists. And the voices calling out directives to one another were drowned out by the amplifiers doing the grandparent souls, and the omniscient narrator turning the whole crazed event back into fable. Kraft stared up close, his nose to the monitor like a kid pressed to mall glass. Couldn't see a thing. But he knew who was flying the beasts before the show even aired. The same ones who dreamed up the scheme to saturation-bomb the countryside with transistor radios, so the rice farmers could listen to agitprop. (They took the batteries out to build bombs.) The endlessly inventive crew, the fecund fathers of the same meandering band just then heading upcountry, two dominoes over. Air America by all its multinational names.

Then, briefly caught on his private mental celluloid, leaning out of the open cage to peer down into impenetrable blackness: it's Kraft Sr. Leans too far, too curiously, and the charm, at gravity's first callow come-on, slips the man's neck. The silver bauble Dad has had forever, the one that's protected him from pitching into utter, pragmatic corruption, is lost. Takes a decade or more to float down the air current parfait. Winds bat it about gently for years, like seals with a beachball. It traverses the sealed border on its long paradrop down and lies in a river valley, awaiting the next child.

This glimpse of darkness's raiding party cut neatly to a pledge break where the pain-o-meter declared how few degrees shy we were of need's complete pacification. The association condemns him to dredge up that contemporaneous Operation Mayflower — junior high musical, lyrics to tunes pinched from a smash hit based on a cheery little Dickens book about the criminally destitute. The production was set at that posh Chao Phraya River hotel where Maugham liked to luxuriate. A Thanksgiving show, a holiday that half the student body had never heard of. Act One, Pilgrims land by klong boat, meet Native Americans, and come to culturally relative understanding with same. Act Two, contemporaries repeat same maneuver, landing upriver in modern-day City of Angels (now cleverly playing itself), assuring the Native Free there to greet them that

We'd give an-y-thing

To keep peace flour-ish-ing,

'Cause it means ev-ry-thing (ev-ry-thing?)

Ev-ry-thing to us!

God: What had they been thinking? Same thought that's still dressed up in every night's news serial. Assist history, by any protection racket necessary, to its unbridled outcome. Push it along its path, civilization's two-stroke engine, condensing out of cold, cosmic dust the raw swaps and consolidations of power that are its only end. The stuff of every school musical.

It blazes into his head as he curls over Operation Operation, the Millstone ready to restrain him should Kraft give him cause. Atonement. Everything in his innocent suggestion — let us fortunate ones go upcountry and build a school — every word in this selfless reversal of "please, sir, I want some more," already smacked of a child's compensation. At-one-ment for adulthood's sins. Somewhere in this history-ravaged place, they might make up for the outrage to dead ancestors.

What can he hack at next? Here, something slashable. A fix, a small blow, a nickel in the drum for the old meliorist dream. He circles and slipknots the hideous foreign bits, cuts them off and kills them. He drops the insidious nodules, pellet by pellet, into the waiting pan. It's one of those saint's offering plates full of detached teeth, deflated eyes, severed digits. The emblems, the means of continuous martyrdom. Tainted nipples on a dish. 'Want to know a secret?" the girl's foster mother asked him one night, early on, when all their secrets had already been taken hostage. "For some reason, my breasts…"

"Wait, wait. You aren't going to make me do anything kinky?" He could still talk like that. How long ago? Only a week? Dissimulating monster. Where had he gotten the strength for such bravura pretense?

"Shh. I'm trying to tell you something." Something you will always be able to hold over me. "For some reason, my breasts…"

"These here?"

"Quit. Mm. For some reason, my breasts… aren't sensitive? Usually, I can't feel anything at all from here to here. But when I'm with you…?"

It deemed the announcement of a small victory, a further invitation to dine out. They had been young once, insouciant with each other. For all of fifteen minutes, one Saturday night, before they shed the respective pseudonyms.

"What do you mean, usually?"

This woman was not even Linda by looks anymore. Ready to bolt or bail, or some combination. "I meant, previously."

"You just need an older man is all." Still up to the joke, still thinking it was one, failing to see how irony fizzles into fact. Because yes, he made them pucker and yearn, stand and be counted. He alone, but only because the others had never discovered the secret to insanely upbeat females. They have this craving they don't like to admit. Hate in themselves, in fact. The sinister flip side to blissful Do-Bee-dom. They like to be vised, pinched on a neck nerve and held at attention, unsheathed, paralyzed with incisors, bitten.

Vulgar intimacy — the sick equivalent of his fingerwork now, pawing every nude, chalk-scored sector of this comatose pubescent. Little girl and an older man who knows her more privately than any lover she might live long enough to meet. A thigh is a thigh, its soft, femoral vee made more suggestive by the wax-pear color of her incised epidermis, the blood sluicing away from the suction, the smell of the cautery. Were it not for this gang of hired hit men around him, he would talk to her, soothe her though this shattering foreplay for which she only fakes anesthesia.

Talk to her. Softly, in that language, the one he rushes back inside himself to rescue from the burning structure. Softly now, when one might say anything, anything at all. Broach the account he just now reconstructs, tell her while she sleeps, when the weirdest fears slip out like wild things gliding across night's closet threshold, stupidly left ajar. As he works the appallingly sharp scissors, his hands detach from him. They carry on working, as discrete and sovereign as the Invisible Man's white gloves. He looks on, fear blotting out his receptor sites, the primal, convulsive stuff, like those waking dreams when he imagines reaching for the phone in pitch blackness and touching a human hand. Terror not of the imagined threat, but of imagining.

The parade he himself devised passes in review under his autonomous fingers. After two inert decades, the details of that end run on suffering come back to him. Two dozen kids from ten different countries — the oldest, sixteen; the youngest, nine. Not one had prior building experience. Traveling under the Institute flag — the White Monkey General — they represented no government and followed no program but care. Of course they had to have an operational name for the thing. Every human action needed its cover. They took their tag from the dominant culture hiding behind its rainbow front, the one this fantastic fifth column meant to atone for: Operation Santa Claus.

Those fourteen days rise up out of the girl's cracked-open hip as he chases infection up her obliterated leg. The specifics of that old disaster hatch like malarial larvae in this aseptic room. He must tell someone, or be pulled apart in memory's undertow. Tell who? Linda is out, impossible. She would guess in a minute, hear in the first syllable the reason why he ever even remotely loved her once. She would see in a flash just how she first appeared to him — her hint of strangeness, the half-brown, half-breed tone that he clung to while running from.

He can tell her nothing. Not after the reciprocal awfulness she has already signed over to him. Not after her airy courage — anesthesia, he now sees — in entrusting him with her worst, even while searching out his to treat it.

He replays these mangled mental tapes while his knuckles bang up against the clamps and retractors keeping Joy's invaded layers out of his hands' way. He anchors his thumb against her pulped tibia to steady himself. Recovering the lost event is beyond him. Anything that happened less than four weeks ago, the start of this rotation, eternity's internship, is hopeless. Pre-pre-med is a rococo blur. Details, names and dates, the blinding clarities, the sidebar precision bombs from off the front page of his life's morning paper of record: gone.

Some muscle gasp refusing the irreversible gash he was just about to make in this pelvis retrieves him. He looks up to a room of cackling masks. With mouth and nose blanked, laughter and horror collapse into identical slits. He's covered; he can fall in as if he never left. Can triangulate by the key-word method.

"Did you read about the five-year-old girl found guilty of inciting her molestation? Judge said she was behaving in a flirtatious manner."

The era's hot topic. Team banter, doing its best to hold off the horror of the interior. Who's speaking? Impossible to tell one from the other. Identical covey of cloaked desperadoes, green skullcaps, white bandanas pulled up over their faces, waylaying the living stage. Just throw yer limbs down and nobody will get hurt. He looks from one to the other, squints. Can't tell who is talking; wouldn't know who it was even if he could trace the source. He doesn't know any of these people.

"Brazen little tramp. Got what she was asking for."

Fiend. No one could make that joke without meaning it. But why fault the man for repeating what the judge actually said? Even if they overthrow the travesty on appeal, disbar the judge, sue the robes off the sucker, the thing still transpired. This country, this self-defiling race, its reeling, abused, psychotic, accusatory voiceprint conscience seeking relief by compounding outrage, is his home. A place thrashing about for release everywhere but at the source of absolution.

Memory, once it has been jettisoned as useless, turns whatever is left of social probity into whoopie-cushion comedy. Kraft, slack at the center of a shameless knot of grown-ups dressed like a bunch of budget summer-stock transvestite Klansmen guffawing at the apocalyptic tidbits and lascivious human-interest fillers that wrap up the thousand-year news broadcast, pros who have grown so enslaved with brain-inflaming spirochete that the words "moral decency" provoke a nervous ironic titter, thinks: Yes. Got what we asked for. Solicited our own bloody wholesale rape like the cheap little tush-swinging toddlers we are.

Sick insight opens to him like a shining flower. Another night's late interval, a lifetime after their film-hopping honeymoon. She had boxed him into the pillow and was turning him to face her, an insistence he easily deflected with some squirming familiarity, maybe nibbling a rib. She suddenly demanded, "Little boy! Where are you? Were you ever sexually abused as a child?"

He had his half snort already perfected. "Not to the best of my recollection." Recollection, of course, never any better than what experience can afford. "Why do you ask?"

He pieces together the answer only now, after the idiot's annihilating delayed reaction. She was. His hunch is immediately gang-raped by grotesque irrelevances. How old? How long? How badly? Who? Stranger? Family friend? Family? Suspicion's principal suspect — oh, awful — is always the victim.

"You show all the classic symptoms," she teased, tickling his ribs. The playful ebullience, the intimate, knowing tone.

Little Linda, molested? In a second, it swells to explain everything, as complete as it is unconfirmed. He wants to run from the cutting room, race up the four floors to her office, trailing the frail girl's soft tissue. Stand in the door and berate her. How dare you grin like that. How can you trust? How can you live?

Chill chases up his nape, the sudden snap of floorboard in the sealed pitch-dark. Her scar is this stupid optimism, never being able to feel, to admit how bleak we really are… Her whole compulsively giving, holistic healer routine — the ultimate evasion, supreme crippling. Total anesthetic seal-off, cureless because never forgotten.

Sex, her expert damp abandonment, their freestyle, exquisite wrestling matches on his apartment floor: Are ò going to do some aerobics for a little bit, or what? That she could even ask without retching, let alone implore so amply, so avid… Pleasure, wantonness like he has seen her take in the exchange is inconceivable, worse than obscene. Feverishly faking full recovery; flinging herself into the one thing her whole soul must cringe from, just to consider.

The operating banter has moved on to the junior high schooler who killed her baby because the courts wouldn't let her put it up for fostering. Silently, he closes what is left of the ruined girl. She is now indistinguishable from the Asian twelve-year-old from the other side of the river, the one his pilgrim party met on its tropical Christmas operation a half world ago. The little girl, driven from her village by voices, ancestors calling out of the sky. The one on film — too familiar for horror anymore; exactly why they keep reprinting it until it is threatless and limp — her clothes burned off in a pillar of flame, running down the road to the nearest help, the nearest adult, who is busy photographing this kiddie nude.

He sews shut the provocative one, who, after all her eager search for approval, would be best off mercy-pithed now. Nothing remains of her but macerated tissue. The salvaged pulp is probably still infiltrated, the search-and-destroys as worthless as they ever were. And he, Kraft, committed this atrocity, punished her worse than any crack-hopped, tremor-fingered, street-ganged, random serial murderer could. More unforgivable, what he's done, because more conscientious, more selfless, professional, deliberate, necessary: autoclaved mutilation of love.

Linda lets herself in quietly, her loaner latchkey slithering through the Yale's tumbler tunnel. The elated raiding of a few days back now feels more like answering a summons. She never knows what to expect anymore, in the intervals when he is ostensibly off call. She stands in the forced door, listening for some clue in the dark. Just the sound of suppressed respiration from the far side of the threshold is enough to trigger ancient panic attacks, a rude head rush. The sotto voce threats emanating from his silent front hall fill her with desire to deny every attachment before it can be denied her. Her hands struggle to pull the knob forever shut while she forces them to push it open. There is no cure but hair of the dog.

His apartment is a pit, an abyss. Why did she get involved with this emotional leper in the first place, when all the signs cautioned her off, when he himself told her, with his last remnant of worldly charm, that he would one day go surgical on her? She must be the real sicko here, in this thing up to her hospital insignia. Trying to love the man, for no more reason than to prove everyone wrong. One little supportive smile, one recreational theraplay scenario and she hoped to strip the permanent, told-you-so, hardened finish from the boy's bleak, condemning H and P. Why try to plead the ludicrous case for recovery in this irrevocable place? Charity can be only a kind of belated revenge.

She recognized him instantly, the jokey verbal competence, trying to charm her while a host of betraying postures peeped out from behind his poise like live ordnance poking out of the living room wall. She thought to outmatch his evasion, hold out her arms to him— always her best feature. Unleash the entire arsenal of care. I can make you whole. Rub jour pulse back to beating. Pathetic porta-box first aid, like sprinkling camphor on emphysema.

She needed little Ricky's infirmity for her own private ends. To overcome exactly this dread that swells thermostatically, filling her holding cavity, immobilizing with the worst that memory and imagination can conjure. His labored breathing breaks in waves around her in the black room, a sound she thought she could love but would run from now if she could.

One of these days I mil come home and he … She rehearses the worst cases as she tentatively flicks on the light with her grocery-bent elbow. And before thought can shape itself around the image, she finds him just as the much-practiced terror predicts. Precisely the way she knew she would one day come home to find him. He is sitting in his makeshift, bachelor meal nook. He might be only waiting for his mate to come by, waiting to tell her, with a protracted shaggy-dog smile, of the day's surgical shoestring catches. But he is not.

He slumps at the counter, head down. In front of him, in fastidiously arranged ranks and columns, stretching out along the synthetic Formica plain in a kind of orchard-perfection, are more quart containers of milk than she can count. Enough to baby-shower a whole nursery of infant teethers, sufficient to slop down a day care's generous week's worth of cookies. And each of the perspiring cardboard towers bears a smudgy gray-scale portrait emblazoned with the caption: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?

She sucks in sharply. Now comes that awful scraping, focus dulled by refusal. He just slumps there, languidly scouring the faces and disappearance data for the revealing pattern, unaware, even, of her presence. Should she call someone? Who? Certainly not those crazies down at the ER. Her clinical composure, she discovers, works only in the kingdom of pedes. She is less than helpless to help someone who was ten already when she was still wet with expelled placenta.

She steps toward him gingerly, careful not to startle. "Ricky? Low-fat, I hope?"

She steadily subdivides the distance between them, thinking that if she can just get a hand on his shoulder… She closes enough space to make out that the wax-coated photo-transfers he so intently stares down are close twins, stereoscopic. Then and now: age five, at time of abduction. Today, age nine. But if the child is missing, how…?

The captions explain. The last known photo of the missing one on earth — some school portrait or candid birthday shot — has been computer-aged. The smiling, composite cartilage of the snatched-away has been fed through a fast transform that knows all about the way tissue bloats and widens and falls slack year by year, everything that even a face flush with the priceless unpredictability of love must inevitably become over the scatter run of time.

She's seen these three times a week for the last decade, and still flinches. She, Linda, who no longer even blinks at flailing spastics or livid purple human whetstones. The dairy industry's notorious public service spot. Why here, and not on Wonder bread wrappers or cheerful two-tone jars of Peter Pan? Something to do with the antagonistic effects of calcium on kidnapping. A way of shaming, over a bowl of Cocoa Charms, that most common of abductors, the estranged parent, into returning the paschal stolen goods. No, the reason for milk, like the cartons' malignant subjects, this brigade of the universally missing, lies buried deep in the North American bedrock, the Vishnu Schist.

The piper has been busy of late, logging overtime, capitalizing on the general spread of night, dragging his net across the subdivisions and condolands, the isolated farmhouses and condemned public projects, the sprawling, illegal squatter towns that compose the world's temporary housing. Has been everywhere, threading down the centuries of serpentine trail heads, spreading the hits across all continents so randomly that no international bureau could hope to trace so much as a backwater fraction of his route or modus.

She fights the urge to finger one of the wax dossiers, knowing that, as with litter on the street, the one who touched it last is responsible. She has already participated in this state's drive to register the children at greatest risk. She has watched the authorities create whole photo and fact portfolios of prospective kidnappees, take advance prints, with almost loving anticipation of the theft they mean to prevent.

All-points bulletins in advance, yet another Midas-like touch to the Golden State. The Binge-Purge State, the SIDS State. Even as she debates turning and fleeing, an empty billboard somewhere within a few miles of his flat is attracting nightly crowds of people who gather below it, seeing the ghostly apparition of a recently abducted nine-year-old Latina. It's been the "spot" for two weeks running now, scene of violent outbursts at the company's refusal to light the blank placard for each night's pilgrimage. The Portent State. The Unsustainable State. Give nothing else, but give good video.

Linda bends away from the quart-carton gallery, the yearbook of Annihilation Middle School, certain she will discover the little miracle girl's features among the lost graduating class if she but looks. "Planning a lactose binge, buddy?" she says, falling frail and flat, blindly fumbling for his arm. Their contact thuds neutrally. "Shakes? Malts? Frappes? Smoothies?" Repeat the weak gag until you get an anemic laugh, scold, scream — any response at all.

When he looks up, it stuns. His eyes swim with conspiracy, sparkling with theories so clear he need not even spell them out aloud. Look: the young everywhere are getting ready, rehearsing — children of the murderous projects, two-pound needle-preemies lighter than their mothers' controlled substance ingestion during term, gang killers, stick figures from the Southern nations, even these privileged princes, snatched out from under their kiddie kreative movement instructors' eyes — they are preparing, leaving at night on some vast, planetwide, still-obscure dress run-through…

Her eyes water at him, pleading, and he groans, deflated by her failure to grasp his flash of explication. He shies away from her, slips her grip and returns to reviewing the troops, a dejected ancient emperor of milk containers, lining up his glazed, ceramic cadres for a last muster preparatory to their mass live burial. Kidnapped, abducted, seized, carried away, shanghaied. Marco Poloed, the man who left shortly after the departure of the Children's Battalion and was still there when the second emigrant wave, the Ratcatcher Expedition, took off for ports unknown. Does she believe that her case load of historical ignorants chose theirs, of all five billion possible scripts for amateur physiotheatrics, simply because they liked the plot? She forces off his accusation before it congeals in her. One more incriminating motivic link and she will be down alongside him on emotional hands and knees, scraping her nails in attempt to excavate sense from the resistant cartons.

They multiply in front of her, these paired public service posters. On the left, Child at disappearance; on the right, Child computer-reared into the present. Each distinct case claims her, calling for undiscovered therapies, yet-to-be invented regimens of exercise that might break the loop. Each smiles, even mugs for the camera, Get it right this time, 'cause I'm outta here. Their impish grins of send-off sweetness hint dimly at the foreordained. But around the eyes, the way the cheeks crinkle in imitation mirth yet reel with bewildered trust, there, perched above the dollhouse frock collar or tiny blazer and clip-on tie, skin's swaddling linen already fights back a muscle tic, the twitch of some other, older, extradited once-child's pathetically misjudged attempt to outsmile horror.

Twelve dozen kiosks calling HAVE YOU SEEN THESE FACES? sprout up across Ricky's kitchen counter top, an orchard of shock. She will never have a chance at any of these cases. They are farther from reach than her most mangled cutting-room vets. She shuts her mind to the sea of stereo views, blots them out for her own safety. The only case she can still hope to influence here is him. The emperor.

She wants to rush the receptacles, hustle them all into available refrigerators before prolonged exposure to room temperature can lace them with toxins. Ricky's undergraduate, bite-sized appliance might save, say, six.

'What in the Blessed Nurser's name are we going to do with all this milk?" She holds him, and he submits to petting. "Haven't you heard that dairy is out?" Expelled from the Four Foods pantheon, she would go on, if she could find the will. They might give them away, dispense them door to door like promos for a hot new product. But in a land where even the tamperproof shrink-wrap is sewn with random malignancy, no one would accept such a compromised gift.

She cradles him, a man old enough to be her abuser uncle. After their first formal evening together — that moviethon, just weeks ago— she'd called her mother. "Look, I know I've been wrong about this in the past, but there's this guy. I just don't need anything anymore. All the anxiety's gone. It feels, I don't know, like arriving. Coming home."

She actually used the taboo word out loud, to one of the two people who shared her lifelong embrace of mutual blackmail, the tacit refusal to hand over the place's negatives. Her mother, who kept holy water in the fridge, who threw elaborate coloratura fits about far less, simply shrugged audibly over the wires and asked, "How do you know you love him? I haven't even met him yet."

Nobody ever meets anybody. Always a matter of equanimity and stealth, a match-up of missing parts under cover of deniable darkness. Once he joked about it: a furtive shuffle as she came in the room, and he would look up, saying, "Oh, nothing!" Now, when she kisses him for no reason except that they are both lost, both all-points material, he looks up the same way, only the terror, the furtiveness, is real.

She does not know the first thing about him. And she will leave him now, agree finally to be the abandoning one, the way he wanted from the start, knowing less than on the day they crossed paths on rounds. She begins taking the milk outdoors, four quarts at a time, to leave for whatever mange might run wild in this alley. Her eyes catch the open instrument case, the tarnished French horn sitting on the Formica table, it too slated to be taken out and interrogated, perhaps beaten. Has he actually been playing the ancient thing, diverting his auditorium of abductees with scales or remembered grade-school showpiece repertoire?

"Ricky? You had the horn out?" Of course, asking is no good. As always, the accumulated inconsequences, the trivia that make all the difference in this peopled world, go unanswered.

She picks up the twisted coil of brass and hands it to him. "Play me something." Up to your room and practice an hour before you even think of going outside.

She reverse computer-ages him, back to age eight. Or not him: another close-to-the-chest orphan DP, borrowing Ricky's face in order to blend in with these new surroundings, to mimic himself into inconspicuousness. A reborn half-Kraft, but done over in Linda's brown, tagged by her goofy earlobes and big teeth that will one day be, but only too late, after their attendant early trauma has hardened, beautiful. She sees the boy's features for an instant, and her lungs collapse in on themselves, as if the resentful child himself slugs her in the solar plexus. She must run from the apartment before just looking at the man kills her.

It will never happen now, the ending they were supposed to have. This one will run, instead, like some women's magazine fiction, the last column clipped out along a coupon silhouette from the flip side of the page. She tries to come about, console herself with fierce pragmatics. They would have made the worst kind of parents in any event. With their combined professional commitments, real children would have been impossible, except perhaps through some offspring time-sharing arrangement, two weeks out of the year, like a gulfside condominium. And the latest photos from the continuous news flash would thermal-fax themselves, register in their newborn's Play-Doh face, turning the least hint of growth unbearable.

Kraft, the adult version, grown up in every particular except the essential, looks at the musical instrument this woman places in his hands. He turns it over, inspecting the valves the way a dinner guest might sneak a discreet peek at the china mark. He sticks a cupped hand in the bell and makes that trademark pucker sound of brass players warming up their mouthpieces. She hopes dizzily for a moment that he'll play, bring the remaining carton mug shots to life again, singing in a long file behind him. Instead, he removes the horn from his lips before any real sound can slip out.

When he speaks, it is absolutely clinical. Competent, surgical, perfectly modulated, as if he has never been out on anybody's ledge, as if his soul has not just been caught strung out all over its dark night. "The girl will be legless, if grace allows her that much. At the hip. Mutilation. For my money, worse than the most senseless accident."

Worse, because antiseptic, deliberate. The girl's adopted society has marked her for life, the way some clans disfigure a sickly child, chop it up to prevent reinfestation of the next born.

Linda looks out his window, east toward the desert, where people once buried their young under the kitchen floor, to keep an eternal eye on them. The marks he has made on this girl, the skilled, high-tech dismemberments, were all for this: to keep her soul from coming back, raiding the world again in the form of their child, a child she has just glimpsed, but who will never, now, return.

She will break for the door as soon as he looks the other way. But Kraft just sits there, fiddling with the bits of detachable tubing, in the creepy calm of someone reconciled to being slated from the start for a rented death. He has already made giant strides toward arriving, in half the usual time, at that neighbor ward, the mirror service to their own, where an opposite incontinent band hangs around the TV room, staining the floor in a pony-show ring.

The hospital: she tries to remember how long Kraft's Carver rotation is to last. Can she avoid him in the halls between now and the day he's slated to go? She might sit tight and wait until his impending departure makes him the one responsible for leaving. She thinks what he has next. Intensive Care.

They are still colleagues a while longer, day laborers in the high-tech cathedral enterprise. She could avoid him for weeks in the huge monastic cloisters, the intricate, self-regulating, self-sustaining community of specialists from abusive phone receptionists to sicko plastic reconstructors whose idea of a conversation piece is a silicon implant on the coffee table.

In fact, the industry is so sprawling that it has managed to disguise its chief purpose even from her. They are deep in the process of setting up an underground railway, one that conducts the lost causes from here to the next nightmare halfway house as quickly as possible. That's what they do for a living, she and this man, her topical lover, this unstable, latex-faced anchorman whom she has just discovered sitting in the dark surrounded by a bright school assembly of faces on a hundred spoiling milks. The boy hornist's job is to cut up sick children — their legal and sanctified abductor.

What dying childhood needs — so obvious, she thinks, to anyone who's been paying attention — is not another swank kid-killer like Carver, perfunctory holding tank for prepping the virtually dead. It needs a larger-than-life tree-fort resort where a lifetime's transactions can take place faster than in the outside. She knows the shape: an arcaded, terraced, gardened, courtyarded children's pavilion, with ceramic and brocade, half timber and gingerbread cupolas, a live-in architectural anthology of hospices in the oldest sense. Everyone welcome; check your maturity at the foyer. A multiweek, all-expenses-played vacation crawling around the plasterboard moats and battlements with the shrinks and muscle-unkinkers, everybody horsing around side by side for a change. Solve society's spreading fester at the source, and wouldn't half of all the day's intractables shrivel away? Break the downward, dry-sucking cycle of indigence in one generation…

But the costs, woman. Less than any other air castle, mall, megamulti-theater, hardened silo, Stealth production facility, or toxic manufacturer's outlet park. She could campaign, show with incontestable charts that we can pay now or pay a lot more later. But to figure the figures would take foresight, an increasingly fabulous commodity. Conventional wisdom, that old oxymoron, cannot afford to destroy those monsters eating our wealth alive. We'll carry on down the perpetual sinkhole until the poor give up their debilitating poverty. It's that simple, a simplicity consistent with life in the kingdom of once-obscene wealth, where servicing the previous years' accumulated debt will soon be enough to run up another year of deficit. The land of the nationwide centrist cell, ready to backlash at anything that hints at its real condition. A landmass-wide, inhospitable hospital clutching a status quo that has already broken up…

She sees again to the milk disposal. The flight reflex and its strangled form, the need to rush to him with selfless assistance, collide inside her like two thrill-romp first cousins in stolen cars, each marine-screaming in her head, trying to outterrorize the other right up to the moment of impact. She cannot bear to look at him another second. "Not to worry," his puffy lips issue, hissing. "We've put a little Tiger Balm on the stump, and we're keeping a sharp eye." Said almost sweetly, reassuringly, a sick reference to that mother of a new admission who for two months had used the Orient's popular smear-on cure-all to fix a vertebrae-dissolving nightstalker crawling up her baby's back.

"Tiger Balm Gardens, Hong Kong. World's gaudiest theme-park cure retreat and the transpacific's answer to Anaheim. Chinese kinder-land. Been there, in my previous incarnation as Youth in Asia. I ever

tell you that?"

You 've never told me anything but "Shut your face," she would singsong back. She hates him now, like a spurned daughter, or closer. She wants to close his eyes for good with a quick fingernail gouge. But he jerks suddenly and forestalls her, swinging the horn's fluted crocus-cup up to his mouth and playing.

He is rusty and uncertain, stabbingly out of shape. He has not played this evening, or anytime this decade. But another awful warble subverts the sound. He is trying to bend tones through the tube that are too inflected to fit down a Western bore. Overblowing, half-valving, he jury-rigs pitches that have long been expelled from the orchestral overtone series. Another scale, a further sound.

He pulls the instrument away without looking at her. "Thai song," he explains to her, apologetically. The two words, so gentle and awful and defenseless, slip into her chest and quietly bruise the place beyond healing. She will never get away now, never be able save herself or him. Ricky, Ricky, she wants to soy, put your head down, here, on my softness. But her throat is coagulate, hopeless.

"Dear moon," he goes on, "give me rice. Give me curry. Give me a copper ring to tie around the little one's wrist. Give me an elephant for the little one to ride. Give me a lizard that will cry, 'Tokay!' "

She takes him outside, thinking back to when such a thing was therapeutic. Each trunk in the ratty stand of palms outside his apartment is emblazoned with a psychedelic cuneiform that, when read across like an acid-house Burma-Shave, announces: "Dope will cope with hope."

Linda walks him like one of her tensor-flexor train wrecks. She tries to tell him something distracting, something palpable he might hook back into. She tells him about the story theater project. Nicolino—

"Which one…? Oh, right; Methuselah." Pretending he doesn't know the creature who has been menacing the expanse between them.

Nico has come up with a beautiful idea. She giggles just to think of it, almost recapturing her pretense of equanimity, the serenity that comes with being sweet-and-twenty and indiscriminately able to love. "They want to form a Hamelin traveling company. Isn't that great? Hel-loo. I'm asking you a question?"

He smiles rapidly and nods.

"One of them has found this weenie cartoon map of the city, and they're picking out venues. They want to bring it all over town, all their neighborhoods, put it on at…"

"Perform? In front of people?"

"Isn't that how plays usually go?"

"Where the hell do they think…?"

An electrogram jitter spasms across Linda's temple. Gently, she reins him in. Astonishing, how easy it is to affect a convincing calm.

She falters a minute, studies him, then against all training fails to take appropriate action. "They have their pick of spots," she carries on. "Schools jump at this kind of thing, if it's free. Arts and crafts fairs, public parks, old people's homes — you could do one show an afternoon from now until you grew up. Well, maybe not until you grew up…"

He forces the expected grunt, but a beat too late.

"You're really old school, aren't you? Keep them in bed until they've got runny ulcers up the wazoo. Can't you see? Something like this will do more for them than our entire body-shop operation put together. Get out and see the place, playact. And it's not half bad for the audience either."

She drops all hope of pulling off her assignment — to tell Kraft about his role, recruit him for the main motley. "Oh, buddy," she veers again, too cheerily, "you have to come see the costumes they've made out of nothing. Rats! They really are. And the cuddliest vermin you can possibly…"

Rats: skateboarding, hoop-stuffing, switchblading, glue-sniffing, slam-dancing, card-collecting, video-vitiated, guiltless, impoverished, sinned-against, discriminated-against jungle-gym victims. They killed the cats and bit the babies in their cradles. Rats. A word all over the well-meaning popular press lately: the current euphemism for the dozen million disinherited minors on the street in the lush subtrop-ics, down where "disappear" has long gone transitive. Where the police sooner murder a waif than work up the papers. Where the advance cities have already slipped, as theirs does now, into uncontrollable turf war, the vortex of street free market that squares off big business against urchins. Where whole abandoned countries consume steady supplies of diced-up lives on their determined hurtle downward.

Even here, in the North, on ground still a meter above flood, intact for another half decade, they have all gone precociously, so-phisticatedly rat, superaged by witnessing ten hundred slow-mo deaths before puberty. Told that all the purchasable world is theirs, then unceremoniously strip-searched for grabbing it, they know their real birthright early, the transparency of the fables handed them.

Kraft is silent, thinking: She could not have gotten them back into these dated fairy suits — innocence's routed camp — if it didn't fit their own hidden purpose. Somehow, they're using her.

And yet she goes on touting the idea, blithely, unsuspecting. "Then they return, in the second act, dressed as…"

He tries to call it back, that pestilent poem, born of an older, even more pernicious myth, the one that refuses to let go. The verse version, composed, so he learned in school, in one hemisphere or another, for the invalid son of a friend. And suddenly Kraft has to know: What did that child have? Did it live?

"They want to," he starts, and can't at first recall the expression. "They want to take the show on the road?"

"Yes." She is crying now, unable to sacrifice anything more to him. Alkali seeps out of her, all the sulfureous backpressure of wanting to do right and missing, always missing, no matter what she tries. "Yes, goddammit. I just told you. Can't you…? What the fuck is wrong with you? "

He doesn't even hear the inconceivable profanity pass out of her. "Without Joy?"

He races along some linked anxiety, the need to determine the full extent of what these band members are calculating before they hurt themselves, before they can pull off their elaborate plan. "No, it's impossible. You can't let them go out there. Haven't you read the papers? The casualty figures, the stats. Christ, you've seen the way they bring them in through the downstairs drive-up. Continuous Doppler relay race. Shriners' shoot-out circus. You're going to lead them out on this little field trip? So that you can send them back to me as massive crush avulsions?"

Timed to confirm him, a squad car sidles up alongside them. Officer rolls his window down just a crack, to ask whether there's some trouble. Has their vehicle broken down or something?

Kraft turns on them furiously. "Why don't you go beat up a couple welfare gorillas?" Only Linda's quick shoulder restraint keeps them from arrest or worse.

The relative peace of this neighborhood, the privileged quiet of their immediate surroundings, is all a distortion, a local fluke, a maraschino paid for on ingeniously overextended credit or stolen outright. And it's all coming down, being called in. She takes his elbow and turns him the long way home.

Waiting for them on the back stoop is that tribe of foundling milks they have just put out. He cannot even lift his head to whisper, "Don't you see it, where they want to go?" He threads his way over them, the lost boys, the ones who left when we were small.

"All my old kindergarten familiars," he says, turning in the threshold, too far past coherence for her to follow. He stands in the door-way, surrounded by this campfire ring. Stereo faces stare eagerly, smiling him down, waiting to hear tonight's installment, his firsthand account. Ancient friends, wised up, computer-aged, looking for all the world like the final heist's advance interference. Returned for a while, God knows why, to the here and now. Placed in his care, only to be snatched away again.

Listen my children, and you shall hear. Hear the remains of the unshed core that Once was once built upon. Here is the most, the closest you will ever know, the traces that stay with you when you can no longer even place the source. This is the text, the spooky grandparental ramblings in back rooms off kitchens stinking of toilet-flush conservation, those huddled alley debriefings, the day's last recap before lights-out.

Listen up, and forever go on listening to the eternal campfire replays. Commit to memory those night imperatives that will come to seem, lifetimes later, inconceivably strange sequels to prospects that never came to pass. Re-create, in spoken hologram, mental wire-frame model, the anachronistic singsong quatrains, and learn again how every account is itself the time hole mosaic it so minutely describes.

Words will return at livid intervals to haunt even you, the most hardened, back-of-the-class switchbladers. They will pop up unsponsored, unshakable, like old manslaughter charges. Harbor the last recounting, and repeat it to yourself, looking back, in the reflected light of telling, on that circle of scared, scrubbed faces, struck with the full horror of related events, sitting here listening, just listening, before the leap.

This is the stuff of final exams. Audible, even behind the reach for the conventional opening: Once upon a time, Once before this world, once, long ago, they say. Never here. At Cottonwood. Over yonder.

In a kingdom by the sea. You, of all people, must remember. Because Once has no other visible means of support. It will die for all time when you lose its least particular.

Storytime is over, and yet, the rustiest recitation will come claim you one day, when you least expect it. You are as ancient as the oldest then. All the word's shadow-puppet spectacles — the magic cabins, monkey armies, unrippable spinnakers, interlocking dreams, winter fruit trees, inscribed rings, insidious machines — can come to their appointed end only if you sit still, stop sniping for a minute, and listen.

Once, far away, there lived a boy who wanted to make things right. He would come to his mother after dinner, a dish towel in his hand, and she would shake her heard sadly and wonder how the world would end up killing him. When the obligatory three wishes came and ambushed him, he politely refused all but one. Just let me try to cure things. A simple enough request, and he himself volunteered to lead the way to the broken locale, the spot that needed fixing.

He had lived everywhere, belonged nowhere, and had already seen hopelessness huge enough to glut the most jaded famine tourist. Misery was the rule in the two thirds of the earth the boy had visited. Eight of the best pickup starting eleven he ever played with died of deficiencies. His friends lived in cardboard and subsisted by selling jasmine ringlets to jammed motorists. He worked with a school service club, aiding at a state asylum where concrete cubicles swarmed with children — deformed, diseased, degeneratively crippled, industrially poisoned, lumped together and left to rock on their haunches all day on the bare floor. There, he had watched helplessly as a boy his age picked at ooze in the back of his head, trying to get to his brain and scoop his curse away by its roots the way a child from a luckier continent might crumble a honeycomb.

After a summer of monastic retreat, he saw the obvious: suffering was not a condition. It was a thing. Need, like wealth, its claim-jumping cousin (which the boy, one sad homecoming, had also seen), could be made and unmade. Poverty was an unfortunate detour, a world jerking too suddenly toward its one shot at well-being. Suffering had nothing to do with power and exploitation, good versus evil. It had to do with logistics, better delivering.

Generations of adults before him had overlooked the simple corrective. He would have missed it too, had an ancient boy not whispered it to him. Hold a bit of the miracle cash crop out for seed. Then send these shoots where nothing had yet rooted.

And there was such a spot, no farther away than his pointing finger. One day, when the moment was right, in the middle of class (you remember classes, those wards you worked in before this ward?), the boy raised his hand and asked, "What would it cost…" This was how he started the matter. He knew enough to speak the dialect of the person he was speaking to. "What would it cost" — although he suspected that no one had yet put the full price tag on our being here or not—"to build a school?"

This was his simple, inexorable idea. One school in the right place: all it would take. The most negligible null will unfold into all, if it has at its heart the self-propagating spark. Nail broth. Engines that could and estranged third sons that ascend all manner of glass mountains on sheer will. The goose that lays the golden eggs that hatch. He was no naïf, and knew that food would disappear in a week. Clothing too would stretch at best only into the next decade. But a school…

The boy's teacher made the fatal mistake of humoring the off-the-wall question. Build? Where? The boy was ready with his answer: upcountry. One of the hidden villages from which Squatter Town's most destitute continuously poured. He pointed out on the classroom map the spot he had selected, a tribal area near the border.

"Right here," he said, "Nam Chai." The easiest place to drain grief's ocean is up in the hills, where the flow is still a trickle.

The teacher juggled a few rough estimates, an improvised economics session. The boy's classmates took to the idea. Teacher then made a group project of writing up the proposal for the Institute's Headmaster, hoping thereby to vitiate the scheme with democracy's death sentence.

The boy's plan would have ended there, except for the ironies of design. In crumpling up the proposal, Headmaster gave himself a vicious paper cut. And when he put the bloody fingertip in his mouth to stanch it, the bubble tasted cold, like gold leaf patted on statue stone.

The taste brought to the man's mind the story of that plaster likeness of the Enlightened in one Angel monastery, pretty, but worthless. One day during handling, the plaster cracked. Deep in the fissure, something glistened. The plaster was stripped off, revealing a figure of pure gold. Only then did amnesia lift: the statue had been covered during one of the eternal incursions, to keep it from capture. As final safeguard, the city willed itself to forget, the last safety.

This had happened years ago, before the boy was born. But this letter, or rather the taste of the slit it made in Headmaster's finger, made the moral clear. The city itself was cracking. Its disguise of timeless compliance was forever compromised, stripped off in a pragmatic deal done at missile-point. The region was already lost, sacrificed en passant to historical destinies. Its fish runs and fecund fields had been redone in Air Force blue. The world was ending and about to begin again, and who could say what awful gold would appear beneath its plaster disguise?

The letter was opportune. The thin coalition, led by the country that once refused a Free king's offer of combat elephants for use in its own suicidal civil war, was in urgent need of PR. It was losing to its own self-incriminating conscience. If beaten prematurely, the farangs would never complete their reduction of the last sane stretch of the globe to total hell, a prerequisite for return to worldwide infancy. One good report on foreign philanthropy in the region, and the purge could go on a little longer. And yes, thought Headmaster, reading the petition. Why not the pupils of the International Institute?

In truth, the boy could not have cared less about the world. International interests were no more than the street gang refrain he knew in a half-dozen languages: Stay on your side of the line, or you die.

The world could rot with all the other unreachable mangoes on national interest's tree. It could incinerate itself, the goal of all governments, so long as it left this one innocent spot a chance to break into the still center of heaven's hub. The city's angel orders — the heavy smells of orchid and pedicab exhaust, sulfurous curries and feces-sweet durian, Som's saffron-flooded recipes, the timbre of temple bells, Sunday Market barter, the five tones — were too much to bear losing.

Yet the city had already started out on its own death march. Its venerable saving grace, a calculated accommodation, had been beaten at last. The lump was there, in a thousand and one Turkish baths, in the raw purchasing power of soldiers on R & R from the steady-state war, in cash that would trade this accommodating place into prosperity.

Against the Enlightened's advice, the floating city had chosen for growth, life, illusion. At dinner, the boy's father, baffled by the fact that attached itself more lovingly to him with his each covert business trip, said, "In ten years, the place will have launched itself into wealth or it will have burned up like cheap charcoal." Lotus pad pond, or cesspool. A mood came over the man, one that had never taken hold in any other of the far more miserable countries he had helped subvert.

The boy watched his father shake his head and exhale, "Serious infrastructure problems." At fourteen, the boy knew vaguely what infrastructure was — as much as he would ever know. It meant roads. Roads, telephones, depots, sewers: all as ethereal in the City of Angels as this trip around the rim of the Wheel.

This was the infrastructure he proposed to improve, beginning with an upcountry schoolhouse, that bootstrap, the capital required for lift-off. A bemused teacher relayed the message from Headmaster to cheering class that a school would cost almost nothing at all, providing you built it yourself.

In a rush of industry, they chartered buses, laid in supplies, requisitioned materials, and secured the state's approval. School books, chalk, pointers, and globes (some still proclaiming obsolete borders) miraculously began piling up from out of a fabulous caldron. The logistics were taken out of the initiators' hands. Yet, overwhelmed by success, the boy and his class hardly felt the coup, experience's autocratic take-over.

The unlikely project, theirs still in feeling if not in fact, was bar-raged with more student applicants than they needed. Headmaster culled them down to a final cut, as if picking the cast for the spring musical. The final mix had something calculated to it. Alongside the boy founder, Kraft, came a Security Council of upperclassmen: Elaine Chang (a compromise on the two Chinas question), Dimi Popovich, Gopal Patnaik, Eleni Katzourakis, Bandele K, and Jien Daishi. Fleshing out this core were a host of Tatis, Claudios, Yuans, Jacqueses, and Jills ranging from fourth-grader to near adult. The chaperons included Headmaster; Sampao, the Free art teacher; and old Springer, who had taught social studies at the Institute for so long he no longer had a nationality.

This careful cross-cultural balance was upended in one blow when it came to naming the project. Because it was December, because the build-it-yourself school would be a gift from the blue, and thinking, perhaps, to lend the whole enterprise an ironic disguise by giving it a paramilitary ring, Headmaster christened the expedition Operation Santa Claus. The name horrified the boy, and he nearly dropped out at the last minute. Only his friend Gopal's assurance that Santa was one of the officially recognized incarnations of Vishnu the Defender kept him in.

The expedition opened with a giddy field-trip feel. The caravan consisted of a busload of volunteers followed by ramshackle grain trucks filled with tools and donated supplies. Festivities on the bus ride up included manic, perpetual choruses of "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer" and its anthropological equivalents from four continents.

Kraft joined the precocious Institute boys at the back of the bus. The moment's obsession was paper airplanes. For the previous two weeks, boys had stood on the roof during recess, struggling with the engineering problem of how best to fold a piece of paper to defy gravity. The ingenuity of the hundreds of experimental designs continued unabated in the cramped quarters of the child-mad vehicle, although test flights grew a little erratic. An Afro-Middle Eastern consortium worked on a tube-and-airfoil design to maximize distance and flight time. The Anglo-European alliance, feeling their competitive edge slipping, pursued showy climb rates and speed. Kraft worked for a group of independents who wanted to produce the most unlikely, unwieldy design that would still fly.

Near the first refueling stop, they visited the shrine of one of the Enlightened's most famous manifestations. The student travelers filed above a depression in the ground two meters deep. This hole, it took a moment to gather, was a footprint the length of two men. The toeprints radiated in perfect concentric circles. The foot itself was oval, pristine — as sinuously magnificent as a Siamese fighting fish. Most miraculous of all, the foot had left its impression not in soil but in something more resistant, metallic. Flecks of hammered-thin gold, no more than a handful of atoms thick, clung about the relic, like the ephemeral backing papers of toy tattoos.

That night, they pitched camp in a clearing in what seemed the gentlest of forests. Sampao, the art teacher, who had chosen the campsite, went around grinning until the children realized something was up. Kraft was the first to crack it; their forest was a single, all-over-arching tree. They were ensconced beneath a lone banyan, its every branch sending down air roots that turned into trunk and started the cycle all over again, its center spreading outward indefinitely, an enchanted wood large enough to swallow this entire student society, a thicket maze so extensive and dense that even the classic cartographic bread crumbs (lost, in this version, not to birds but to giant red fire ants) would be no help.

The stories around the campfire were inspired by the defenseless, unearthly adventure, by being out so late with no curfew, no home to return to in the morning. Gabi Lauter told of the Kinderzeche, an annual festival from her birthplace honoring the children who saved the town from destruction during a war that had lasted longer than a generation. Farouk Ali — one of those demonic, genius-grant-funded child wizards behind the world's seemingly spontaneous playground chants, the war cries of the paste- and eraser-eating set, the fear-enforced slanders that made even captains of industry, walking past playgrounds, lose their equanimity and assume the taunts were aimed at them — produced an Arabic rhyme that, freely translated, went something like "Cinderella, dressed in yella, went downtown to meet her fella…"

Farouk good-naturedly supposed out loud that Guus Vandersteen-hoven had been chosen to come because a mission like this needed at least one boy who would be willing to stick his finger in a dyke. Guus swore nobody in his country had ever heard that story, or the one about the kid with the ice skates, either.

Claudio, a hopeless intellectual whose most vigorous sport was the crossruff, changed the topic to a fantastic tale of art treasures transported to England via Khartoum, where they had been brought from the collapsing East by that Messiah fighter, Chinese Gordon, of the Ever-Victorious Army. Dimi said that he'd read the same story somewhere, and Farouk asked him if he'd ever finished coloring the book in.

Quintessential cookout fare, in short, followed by ghost tales and toasted bananas over the night's last embers. Some played cards or pit-and-pebble while the light held. The youngest swapped things— plastic figures or little cast-iron cars — while the oldest grilled one another on the lyrics of the latest stateside songs to reach this place, by then pathetically dated.

Adulthood would reach them almost superfluously: the popular South Americans had their bank vice presidencies all but signed; the Chinese and Indians their elite if shabby governmental back offices. The junior Eurocrat brats saw in this trip invaluable résumé experience, while the offspring of international Asian cartels would remember these tropical forests years later as game board squares to be played to. The sons and daughters of lifer soldiers and PX personnel, the long lineage of crate-lifters, passing this once for socially acceptable on a disguised outing up from the underclass, already felt the knee-jerk exclusion from their school chums that even in these presophisticates went unnamed.

Kraft, who had already begun to dream at night of saving everyone he knew from Ganges-scale floods, saw in the flicker of the bug-drawing fire that he was destined for futile sandbag duty at the end. Surrounded by a circle of lit faces that suddenly seemed too impossibly young to be his contemporaries, he froze and could not deliver his piece when his turn came around. His national allegory — the wandering guy with the sack of apple seeds — had degraded along the way to the executive mercenary, Kraft Sr., leaning out of his machine in the pitch-black, calling down amplified confusion on lands too wayward to reform by any other means. The country of the universally displaced had somehow graduated to evil overlord, backing every backwater tyrant who owned a cattle prod. It had torn itself apart on cynical profit, gone debauched in a single step, and nobody could say how or why.

What national folk tale could he relate, he who had been home for all of six weeks in his life? He thought he might tell them of the child's "Come away!" that had inspired this field project. Instead, he made due by playing the kluay obbligato while Francisca Ng, daughter of a high-ranking international aid officer, sang:

Where are you off to, little girl, so late? Are frogs calling, do owls keep you awake? How far must you go yet, at this hour? Can't it wait?

Where in the world the tune came from was anyone's guess. The girl, a grade older than Kraft, could sing the verse in any language, with no damage to the musical line. Her voice was spectral, beyond forgetting. All who heard her wanted to jump up and continue that night, to push to the boundless banyan's edge, into the threatened countryside.

On day two, stopping to stretch and bat about a takraw, one of mankind's few cooperative sports, they were met by a khakied American who came from nowhere out of the bush. The man asked for food and told an incredulous student council that he was walking home. He deserted them as quickly as he had appeared. The exchange made Headmaster remind them that they were nearing the shooting zone; the war that they had all seen broadcast was near, border violating, and real. Hill tribes in this region were routinely rounded up by the government and sent against the insurgents, local peasants who had suffered opposite recruitment.

Nam Chai, when they arrived, was not so much a village as a letter of intent. The government had made a colossal mistake in agreeing to let them see the place, let alone attempt philanthropy here. Not only was there no school, there was no market, no shop, no post office, no sewers, no garage, no clinic. The dwellings were no larger than Angel City spirit houses.

The bus discharged the legation, and all the living souls in that few square kilometers formed two queues of the mutually incredulous. In one glance, education as escape revealed itself to be wishful thinking. Something was wrong with this village, more wrong than any school could cure. Some antique curse — a troll extracting weekly blood tribute, some slow leach, a heavy-metal impurity lacing the all-purpose stream, a terrain inviting perpetual foreign invasion — hung over the place, turning assistance almost cruel.

The self-appointed international ambassadors of goodwill unloaded their trucks. They stacked the modular walls, the globes, chalkboards, and diminutive desks next to the foundation spot in the morass. Their heaps might have been more useful as firewood. The inventory seemed as pointless as a stockpile of thousand-watt ice shavers rotting in some outletless outback. Over these confused caches flew the school flag with its Hanuman silhouette.

Every other village child suffered some exotic jungle affliction. Faces swelled shut under parasite assault. Leeches laddered up legs. Wild defects bent fingers back like the brass nails of a classical dancer, or sprouted wing stumps between shoulder blades. These were the bastard UNICEF wraiths, those dirt-cripples that privilege was supposed to save with a couple pennies' worth of trick-or-treats.

What ruined Ricky, though, was the abject happiness of this monstrous pantheon. Even the sickest tore around in uncontrollable excitement. They spun through the village shouting in hill dialects how everything was at last coming true. The monkey army had arrived, fresh from the City of Angels.

On the whole, the assortment of internationals responded better than Kraft to the shock of these village children. Slight Janie Hawkins, whose teaspoon tits had recently begun debuting in the boy's nightly revue as he fell off to sleep, instinctively cradled in her white-fuzzed arms a limbless newborn the size and pallor of a bleached rugby ball. She sung the first song that came into her head, a lullaby from her long-forgotten Kentucky:

Every time the baby cries,

Stick my finger in the baby's eyes.

What'll we do with the ba-a-by?

What shall we do with the baby-o?

There is a patois known by everyone below the age of consent. A system of shouts and postures is enough; words would just confuse things. Within an afternoon, troops from opposite ends of the planetary playing field had formed a work force. They set to the improvisational plans as to a life-size mud castle. Boys who had never heard of a latrine pitched in to dig a bank of them on no instruction at all. Carters, haulers, trenchers, plumbers, joiners, carpenters, metalworkers, masons, sanders, water fetchers, day carers for the as yet too small to day-labor: everyone fell to a task without being assigned. The engineering feat fashioned itself out of nothing, memory.

Children who only grinned foolishly, as at a comic myth, at tales of seasons, the back-and-forth battle of summer and winter, children who wouldn't know the grim stomach-pit thrill of oranging September if it came up and rattled their lunch boxes, collaborated in their own undoing by erecting the edifice that would forever, for generations to come, stamp the school calendar upon them. Kraft began to wonder whether they had chosen the wrong place, whether he had somehow misinterpreted that distress call transmitted to him across the citizens band.

Work proceeded rapidly. The Institute candy stripers had not booked themselves much time — two weeks of winter break, a whirlwind gift-spattering run, even by Santa Claus standards. The floor plan called for a circular sala whose walls could be thrown open to the weather, extending the tent of learning like a processional umbrella or a catch-all sarong.

Once the ground had been readied and the pilings sunk, the skin went up with a speed that surprised everyone. Each set of pint-sized hands hammered in gearwork happiness, humming inside the dovetailing whole. Walls went up in half an afternoon, so smoothly was the effort shared. The heavenly pavement could be laid by this time next month; Cleveland, Djakarta, Addis Ababa could explode with great textured marble cylinders of learning, structures that would make New York and Tokyo seem botched hick towns if all adults worked as they once toyed.

One afternoon, midway through building, when the rapid rise of teak lintels sent waves of anticipation through the crew, the landscape began to throb softly as if the piece they had just inserted had set off an oscillation in the fabric of air. The children of the strategically meaningless hamlet placed the sound before the city sophisticates. They scattered into the undergrowth with barks of pleasure-threaded panic.

Farangs, as usual, failed to recognize their own handiwork until it swarmed them. Kraft's first thought was that Dad had tracked him down, sent out a pin-and-interdict against this Operation Claus, which, acting on its own initiative, was not in the best of coalition interests. The megaphones would start up, or they'd go gunship first and ask questions later. One well-placed shaped charge underneath the teacher's desk, or a ten-thousand-fléchette canister. Or, most ingenious of all, a camera rocket trailing a metal wire beaming back pictures, steered by some JD four years older than Ricky, parked up in his hovering air platform in front of a monitor as if watching American bandstand. Any of history's current munitions and delivery systems would do.

The airships landed and Nam Chai came out from cover. The machines spit up a small team of pale, bellied men with film equipment. Endless hanks of cable and portable generators appeared from nowhere, glutting the makeshift landing area around the school. An albino dressed in the camouflage fatigues worn only by teenage heavy-metal fans and greener members of the press corps hit the turf asking who was in charge.

Headmaster's quiet news leaks as the group departed the city had, like a banyan branch, taken root. Word of the unlikely roving charity had reached the international media, message-in-bottle style. Temporarily sated with soldiers setting one another on fire, briefly glazed-eyed with the tedious predictability of horror, and always on the lookout for the latest curio, TV dispatched a mobile cell to get the take on this group of kids cheekily trying to work its own welfare.

Not your cheap feel-good, the producer rushed to assure. Not your toss-off geopolitical PR puff piece. "Just, like, you know: 'Out-of-the-mouths-of-babes?"

Headmaster nodded in acquiescence, serving the turn of the Wheel.

Even the Northerners stood in awe at the unloading of equipment. The hardware was a cargo cult's fetish come true. Sampao executed a series of sketches on rice paper. The village kids, thinking it Stage Two of the incomprehensible project, served as native bearers.

"Can you give me a good cross section of colort" the producer requested. Headmaster selected a sample core of babes, out of whose mouths the world would learn just what it was up to. He chose one student from each of the lost continents, and Kraft, the trip's most colorful North American.

Ricky suggested that they include a hill tribe kid. He picked one, a boy named Lok whose hobby was gumming up the nostrils of domesticated animals with red clay. The film crew jumped at the novelty. They patted the boy on the head, violating a dozen cultural prohibitions, and asked his name. Lok replied, "Yet ma," which Kraft refrained from translating.

The man they propped in front of the camera was a former pro athlete who seemed surprised that none of these children asked for his autograph. Kraft lied and said he thought he'd heard of him, and this settled the man enough to get him started.

"Deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia, just a few hours from the Mekong," he started, and Gopal ruined the take by snickering."… is exactly the place," the ex-sports star continued, after the splice, "you might expect to find a guerrilla army. But this army will surprise you." His voice sashayed in pitch, as if he were about to rattle off the toll-free number you could call to place an order. "This is an army of peace," he said, emphasizing the last word's outrageousness. "The guerrillas come from over a dozen different countries." Gopal nudged Kraft and asked if Americans could count that high. "And every one of them," enunciated the genial ex-jock, working up to his punch line, "is a child."

He gave the first question to Elaine Chang, who looked Oriental and had been pointed out to him as the Institute brain. "Can you tell us what you and your schoolmates are doing here?"

"A television interview?" Elaine replied tentatively. On the second take, she got the answer right: "We're building a school."

"And can you tell us why?" Come on, you can do it, his voice pleaded. Kraft held his breath, but Elaine, eminently sensible, answered to perfection. "Because they didn't have one."

"Yes," the reporter granted, grinning at the home audience, like that show host whose book, Kids Are the Wackiest Wonders, was upstaged by his daughter's subsequent plunge from an upper-story window. "But do you think your choice to build a school here has anything to do with what is happening nearby?"

He waited expectantly, perhaps for a polite show of hands. "Can any of you tell us what is happening in this region?"

Gopal cleared his throat and took the plunge. "I'm afraid if you haven't figured it out by now…"

The reporter adroitly intercepted the boy. "Gopal, you're from…?"

"India. It's a large country just through the center of the earth from…"

So the interview went, turning the simplest act of care into the usual broadcast circus. The reporter didn't want children building a schoolhouse upcountry. Not: I'm fifteen, and I rub myself off nightly and I've twice smoked ganja and my job is digging post holes. Not: I'm eight and I like melting dolls and I can't bring friends home when my mother's there. He wanted allegory, Little Eva or Nell, a two-minute twist-wrap in the manner that this rightless class has always been painted: perversely small, alien creatures, a delightful variety act in their Tinytown getup, dancing, prancing, romancing, just like homunculus adults. He kept rephrasing every question until it became an elaborate description to which the student had simply to answer yeah.

"This little boy's name is Luke… "

"Lok," Kraft corrected, knowing that the reporter would stop and explain to him with increasing testiness that for American TV, only one person was allowed to talk at one time, and that person was him until he said so.

"This little boy actually grew up in this very village, a forgotten town lost in the crossfire, but one where his new friends from many countries are now building him a building that might change his life. Luke, can you tell us how the war has touched you?"

Kraft interpreted, and the cameras ate up the image of the two crew cuts jabbering at each other, the brown one shyly smirking as he spoke. Ricky turned back to the MC. "He wants to know whether you have any chewing gum."

Shielded by the omnipotent edit, the reporter hacked on. "How does it feel when you hear shooting in the distance? Are you worried that it's coming closer?"

Kraft dutifully relayed the question and Lok's answer: "He says he once saw a body spread across the river path. Lots of teeny creatures were making their home in it."

The reporter got excited; they could use that bit. Maybe they could take him to the spot for an image. "Luke, can you tell the boys and girls back in America what you most want to learn at your new school?" A slight altercation followed, the boys barking at each other in their playing-field pidgin. The reporter gently reminded Kraft that he mustn't hold anything back.

"He wants to know if American girls have a furry patch between their legs."

"How about you?" the reporter turned on him when the fracas settled. "Are you frightened to be here?"

A whiff of future came across the clearing, and Kraft knew that the refuge was already lost. The miracle beans he had hoped to stash away in the soil would not take root until this patch of ground too had been flooded under a sea of asylum seekers. And he felt free to say anything he wanted, safe in the knowledge that any truth he might utter would never slip past the editors of this new continuous primer in illiteracy and evasion, the world's last will and testament.

Listen my children and you shall hear the sense of the words this boy spoke as adulthood has hung on to them. TV wanted the war in anecdote — this season's diversion for the stimulus stunned. Very well then. The boy began to speak softly, plumping the rhythms like a jump-rope rhyme. He spoke of all the hot spots he had put up in for a while and had been forced to evacuate. He told of a Caribbean island that sowed its fields with its own carcasses rather than share the land. He described half a billion subcontinentals massing in sacrificial machete waves over the shape of God's head. He painted a perfect white-tower-topped palace by the sea, then set it to the torch.

"Aren't you afraid? Isn't everyone?" he giggled. He tried to say how every place he had ever lived was an armed camp, swarming with shirtless, underaged adolescents toting lightweight grenade launchers. He said how he had read that there had been two wars a year, each costing an average quarter-million lives, since the start of history.

The war over the river, he said, mattered to the cameras only because home boys were dying. We were using wire-guided weapons and aerial defoliants. They were using children with spring-loaded shredded-tin-can bombs strapped to their chests. In a few years, the reporter's war that this school outing opposed would probably be turned into anonymous, stylish, prime-time violence, colorful punji combat for rating stakes. The kerchiefed, bare-chested, M-l6—decked commando filmed in front of a stand of bamboo will turn the war into a small-bore lullaby.

He mumbled this prediction, accusing no one. Was he afraid? Anyone who wasn't was not paying attention. That was the point of this school: to teach the children of the village what was being done all around them to the children of Planet Earth. Just the Who, What, When, and Where, because the lone Why was too awful to bear. Ricky declared that the only solution to the crisis across the river, to the trauma racing through every country on unlimited tourist visas, was mandatory intermarriage at gunpoint for a hundred generations, until everybody looked exactly the same. As his sentences grew longer, he savored his first taste of cynicism along the sides of his tongue, right next to "Sour" and "Salt" in the Science and You diagrams. And with that taste, he crossed a subterranean border into old age.

He finished his diatribe to dead silence. The cameras had long since shut off. The reporter was already gesturing for kids to go over by the school and move some teak trunks around. Kraft's impromptu parable was sucked up by a spinning dust devil into the vacant sky above Nam Chai. The wind carried off his words as it would a scuttled fighting kite. He watched the reporter film his prepared tag, khaki flapping in front of Kraft's classmates, each swinging languidly at a fake nail, guilty of betrayal but unable to help themselves.

"We've all heard the line 'A little child'll lead them'? The question is whether those of us old enough to remember have the courage to follow. This is…"

Kraft camped out that night in the roofless sala, all the shelter he wanted. He sat toying with a giant chalk protractor, convenient tool for projecting Euclidean circles into the arcless bush. The whole project felt suddenly cruel — laying this foundation, then retreating to the City of Angels without supplying the one thing needed to touch off the genesis: a teacher. He rummaged through the boxes of supplies looking for a fuse, but only came up with a stack of fraction-wedged pie pans, a thick-mounted jigsaw of the world ("Mideast," "Southeast Asia," each a single cartoon balloon, for easy assembly), and a softball-sized heart with cutaway flaps that he clapped together like the slack jaw of a ventriloquist's dummy.

A shuffle announced the arrival, in the dark, of a few other ad hoc Security Councillors. Jien, Bandele — he couldn't make them out. "They're looking for you, buster," someone who sounded like Eleni Katzourakis said. "The adults. Headmaster. Herr Springer."

Figures spread around the unfinished room, squeezing into the matrix of desks that had been shoved to the side to avoid construction damage. "Hey, Kraft." That was Farouk. "That little speech of yours…" He gave a half-whistle of admiration and disbelief.

''Yeah," a Janie shape and an Elaine voice said together. Then, again stereo: "Jinx!" As if it were easy, here in the unfinished dark, to pretend still to immaturity.

Gopal chuckled. "Not bad for a liberal lackey."

Whatever other votes of confidence the delegation had come to give him were drowned by the arrival of Lok, leading a pack of rabble who had managed to slip out of restraints under cover of darkness. The townies burst in, rollicking but stealthy, a sampler of deficiencies whose only revenge was a know-no-better amusement.

Lok tore over to Kraft, spitting in hill dialect delight, "Hey, do that again!" That bit of extended sass, mouthing off to the pod of helicopters that had come bringing nothing at all, not cigarettes, not opiates, not candy.

Nam Chai's future proceeded to parade about the room, rooting through the forbidden containers and demanding an explanation for every arcane item. They found and unspread a cartoon, room-encircling alphabet banner: kh as in bottle; k as in water buffalo. From the bottom of one eclectic crate came a book from the empire's sunset years, destined for Malaya or Burma but ending up here, in the one country that had never been anyone's colonial possession.

Kraft, folk hero of the hour, was made to read. He had to repeat Messrs. Rat and Toad a thousand times for the little ones, who hadn't a clue, even in hasty translation, what the words meant, but who knew a funny voice when they heard one. Calls of "Encore," even from the ironically amused anglophones, were punctuated by fanatical cries for "Bed-jah!" from Lok, for whom badgers and moles were monster fantasies as outrageous as monkey generals or demon kings. What was the appeal of a story that meandered, messing about in boats, going nowhere? Kraft went on doing the voices, the creatures' falsettos and growls, all the explanation ever granted.

Only waiting until the contingent had gathered, a face appeared at one of the unfinished openings. One look at her hushed the hilarity, confiscated it like an intercepted note. The stalk of body stood wrapped in a dress cut from an old rice sack, the stenciled brand still visible, swallowed up in a dart. The burlap makeshift lent the wearer the aura of escaped animal kingdom. The Northerners thought at first that she was a local, but she left the village children even more surprised.

Two Institutes undid the wall's hinges, but the creature wouldn't enter. Like a velvety automatic weapon, she repeated two singsong syllables. It was not Free, nor any language Kraft had ever heard. "What's she saying?" he asked Lok.

Lok answered in dialect, an aggressive but entranced "Who the hell knows?"

Just as suddenly, Kraft heard, although the syllables remained impenetrable. The rice sack girl was chanting, in some form of Ur-pali, the same words that had issued from the abbot's crabbed statue the instant before he'd smashed it to the floor: "Come away!" Come away.

Her furious gestures confirmed him. Asian, yet pale, luminous, she glowed like an impatient filament. She circled and yipped, dashing a few paces into the bush before doubling back to see what was keeping them. Every so often, she released explanatory bursts, pleas that might have meant anything: a parent prostrate on the path with snakebite, a house on fire, or a feast just one village over, replete with pipat band and unlimited roasted bananas. Her choreography proved the size of the prize, as a bee's dance spells out to the hive a massive find.

The children stared at the dancer, then at one another. Even the upper forms deferred to Kraft, as if his taboo-breaking incantation of that afternoon had summoned up this sprite. Kraft took a breath, although there was never any choice, not even briefly. "So. Who's up for it?" he asked in English. Then, once more, in the five tones: "Bai mat?"

It surprised no one that she led them toward the neighboring disaster. Even the Northerners began to realize that the trek wound them slowly down to the river, the imaginary buffer between the one country that until then had gone officially unscathed and the other, already smeared by the nightmare adjacent to it. But the specific destination Kraft could only imagine. It took the shape, in his sleep-heavy head, of an improvised emergency paradise, a forced regrouping along an itinerary of true amazement, a swelling river settlement full of the napalmed and claymored, driven from their lives.

A camp of children, he thought. She has come for the newest batch of recruits, new lives to boost the ones already assembled there. These thoughts contended with the rattan and fern, the shadowy plants scraping his face on the dark path. The girl knew the terrain, keeping to the best track, a packed mound both dry and open, yet not too exposed to bare moonlight. They walked long enough to lose track of time, and only the gibbon whoops from distant canopies convinced Kraft that they moved at all.

Although he was older than their guide, he felt like the little girl's infant. How many kilometers now? Are we there yet? It occurred to him that they might not make it there and back again before Nam Chai awoke to miss them.

A sound like twigs snapping underfoot grew gradually as they walked until he had to recognize it: sporadic small-arms fire. Then, pitching over a sharp rise, they saw it. She had led them right up to the river at its narrowest, the same river that meandered to the senile dowager city a thousand kilometers downstream, at its gum-diseased mouth. Here it was narrow enough to skip a lucky coin over. Before they had time to take in the sight, the girl, twenty meters in the vanguard, slipped her rice sack off and paddled into the current, her shift held over her head.

On the other side, she dressed hastily. Annoyed at the others' failure to follow, she made that odd hand gesture, palm downward and out, fingers curling repeatedly. To the Euro-offspring, the wave meant good-bye, auf, au rev…, we will never see each other again. But in the region, the fingerpumping was fiercely unambiguous: ma nee, get a move on, what's keeping you? A cold, deadly Red Rover.

Lok was first in after her. He slipped into the water as if it were a buffalo patty pool. Kraft watched terrified as Janie Hawkins stripped and lowered herself in after. Then the other student shadows began to shed their shock, and the party became a filament of frog kick and dog paddle, as silent as tension permitted, a cortege of clothes held above bobbing heads under the angled and eerie moon.

Compulsion brushed away the risk. Swimmers peeled off one by one, the group crumbling like a heel of hard bread. Kraft stood with the group riveted on the Free side by their failure of nerve or inability to swim. They had been brought here for life's one classic examination: turn back to camp now, to a life of empty safety, or press on, on nothing, following an apparition that might just as easily be malicious as revealing.

Kraft, answerable for every life in the water-snaking conga line, gauged the instant. The girl, whose Oxfam face made her the perfect insurgent, had come to lead a unit of foreign imperialists into ambush. She had suffered some Special Forces Pentecost from the air and had wandered stunned for days until she found the only people she could trust, minors, whom she now led back to a scene of unimaginable hideousness. She was It in a trillion-hectare, multinational kick-the-can, the globewide game that every child knows is taking place without him, and finding them assembled late at night, she decided to cut them in. She was the recruiting arm of a child cartel intent on stopping the war where the adults had failed, and she took them now, untrained and flawless, to the front. She was a shape changer, a demon from the Ramakien, come to teach them what the tales really meant.

He knew what he needed to do. Break off, bring the contingent back. Instead, by the dark riverside, he began to undo his shirt. As he touched his collar, a sound wafted across the stilled air, the lightest of clicks. He knew, on the envelope's attack, what the snap was. The girl had just stepped on that kind of mine, pointlessly polite, that warned the victim by the cock of the firing pin.

In her excitement to keep the file moving, the girl had dropped her guard just long enough to miss the telltale artificial mound. Kraft had no moment to shout stop, nor did he know the word in her language. He didn't need to. She knew what she had triggered as soon as the click rippled up through her foot.

It caught her in her stride's downbeat. So drilled was she in stories of such a noise that she froze before the fatal follow-through. She stood, pinned to the spot, unable to so much as shift her body's weight.

Like a wet appliance that clamps a hand onto killing amperage, dread clamped the children electrically to the riverbed. Everything infancy suspects is true: there is no floor, no ceiling, no warmth, no reassuring voices from the next room, no bed but what hides under it. There is just one lullaby, waiting to detain you.

Every one of them was mature enough to panic. Those in the water swung in midcurrent for the Free shore. Those still on land braced or hit the earth. Ricky, ever the boy who shouts "Look out behind you!" at the Punch and Judy, ran toward her. He began to call out whatever commands came into his head. Hold still; we'll come and slip a rock onto the pin. Breathe imperceptibly, slow your heart, while someone runs back to the village. Keep calm. Keep your weight centered. Rub your leg if it stiffens. Tell us what you need and we'll bring it.

The words were gibberish. They unraveled in the air before reaching her. She heard nothing; so the boy had to tell himself in later years. She wavered a moment between sense and need. She knelt and clawed at the ground hiding the mine, mewling like a trapped animal. The others yelled at her to stop. She did not even look around. She began to whimper, looking off in the direction she had been taking them, at an invisible hole, some epochal, closing chance. She fidgeted, twitching her thighs as if confined at a desk in that new school prison. Children wailed at her, in every language they knew, not to bounce, not to jitter. Her agitation accumulated, and the demand to be off, now, while there was yet time, increased until simply holding still would have killed her as certainly as moving.

A faction was already tearing back through the undergrowth. Another group, coaxing, circled warily toward her, threading through death's bulb nursery, knowing their impotence even if they reached her. The best they could do was hold her to the mine, bring her food, carry away her waste for decades until she died of old age.

In the time it took to bounce a ball and sweep up a single jack, Kraft rejected all other choices. He broke for the river and in a few strides had topped his best fifty meters. He ran full out, silently. It seemed to him a searing slow motion. His eye worked faster than his legs could pump, and three paces from the river he saw that she was going to move. He stopped to yell, but could not force the air through his throat until she was already away.

She lit out for a spot in the clearing, flinging her whole body off the trigger as if safety depended on a further deadline. The sight on the near horizon compelled her to fly or be annihilated anyway. She knew, and never turned her back. The light that she touched off by leaving lit up the jungle canopy.

Even years later, there was never any sound. The first noise he could ever remember was the spatter of clods drizzling back onto the ground they had just failed to escape. But that came long after. First he had to witness, reflected like a shadow puppet epic against the scrim of indifferent air, the vision the girl was after. The explosion transfigured the girl in a sky-wall of visuals as fractured as a fly's convex eye. That endless interval of flash condensed in vivid, live coverage the campaign under way all over the globe.

The mine, planted in the sober calculation that it might well take such a girl, took along the soul of everyone in the blast perimeter. It opened up a hole in the night air into which they stood transfixed and looked. Poking through some warp in the firmament, on the biggest of big screens, lay the surprise destination of every child Gypsy ever rounded up and quicklimed.

Before Kraft could force himself to look away, he saw. The old story had been mangled in word of mouth. What had always been reported as an interdicted vision of bliss, a glimpse at child heaven sadistically denied those left behind, was really this: a first look at the staging ground where the worst afflicted gathered. And the locked-out grief of those left behind was the anguish of those whose enlistment is refused.

The sound and light show, the event rim of the burst, collapsed just as quickly back into the blast's confusion. The girl and Lok both fell to the far side of the explosion, allowing Kraft for an instant to believe the fiction that they had been blown clear, with just the stray limb lost, the disfigurement shared by a quarter of the population in these parts. In the space that it took the air's shock to settle, he had healed them already, frenziedly restored them to prosthetic life. Then compensation dissolved, and he hurled himself into the river, gulping water as he thrashed toward the crater.

When the adults arrived — Headmaster, chaperons, villagers, alerted by incoherent messengers — they set to their rehearsed worst-case procedures. By dawn, every child that had left Nam Chai the previous night was accounted for, except for the boy Lok and the foreign girl, whose existence the adults only half credited. The blasted ground bore no trace of bone or pulp. The mine had cleaned all implicating evidence. Hurried reparations were made in the Institute's name to the lost boy's parents, deeded over at the same time as the soccer balls, T-shirts, and streamed elementary readers.

The school building was deemed complete enough to be finished with local resources, appropriate technologies — whatever the current euphemism for abandonment. The Institute scholars were hustled onto the bus caravan back to the City of Angels, this time without layovers. For a year or two, those who had taken part were fed occasional accounts of the progress of the sister school they had helped found. Children were learning things, the reports agreed. Exactly what they learned went unsaid.

The boy: of course. You want to know what became of the boy with the beautiful idea. By the slightest of accidents, he slipped in between conscriptions, lived out his twenties in an anomalous interlude of what the North called peace. Sent back to a home he could not assimilate to, he was schooled there in the impossible art of putting bodies back together. After long banishment, he slowly came to think of the upcountry expedition, Operation Santa Claus, the Land of the Free, as bits of myth to be dealt with only on call-troubled nights.

As for the City of Angels, where he had lived out belonging's last years: he read about it in the papers now and then, when he read a paper. Bangkok had newly industrialized, paid passage into the dominant camp, gone Little Tokyo. By all accounts, it had grown into a skylined, sprawling, runaway, AIDS-infested needle nest. It had become a child-peddling shambles. Some hundred thousand juvenile whores of both sexes made a living in the place, the murder capital of the exotic East, the Golden Triangle's peddler, catamite to the slickest tourist classes, gutted by CarniCruze junkets and semiconductor sweat shops, glistening in fat postcolonialism, clear-cutting its irreplaceable upcountry forest to support its habit.

From his stateside confinement — the man with a country, the nightmare opposite of that morality tale they terrorize you with in these parts in the sixth grade, when you are most vulnerable — the boy read of Free students dying in bulk, their blood flushing the streets, sacrificed in trying to reclaim the old round of corruption and coup, dying, and for what? For politics, the Wheel's worst illusion.

The place became a figment of childhood, a site on an itinerary that from the first had been no more than an extension of authority's vocation, his parents' dream. They too revealed themselves to him in time. His mother acquired the status of a filed form, and he passed her by in age. And Kraft Sr., Wandering Soul's conductor if not engineer, entered the old age due him: a nursing home apartment full of Post-it notes to himself: "Stove top?" "Cigarette butts?" "Turn off lights?" Here and there across the walls, greeting the boy on his filial visits, mental jogs mapped a track of terror in the wake of the ephemeral words slipping away from the man: "mollify," "onus," "evensong."

Occasionally, a letter from Dad would arrive, overposted with a police lineup of stamps, addressed in a loopy handwriting that resembled the boy's earliest attempts at onion-skin tracing: "Dear Richie, The enclosed article beautifully explains the wonders of laser light. FYI. Thought you might like to know." Dragged back to the first condition, just prior to permanent exile.

So the boy grew older, simpler, sleepier, until one day the pupils of that forgotten jungle school came back for him. They returned, one for one, back from all those years held in some detainees' transit Westerbork (the murals of which, you must sooner or later learn, depicted a brightly colored, larger-than-life piper going about his eternal job description). He grew until waylaid by you, my old friends, tomorrow's casualties, today's belated show-and-tells.

Listen, my children, and there, as every story formula ever committed to memory puts it, there you have a tale. And here you come to the end of it.

They travel light, pare back the carrying weight. Essentials only. When the requisitioned gimp vans come to take them on the road, they bring along just the costumes on their backs and a few props — a tonette, a papier-mache mountainside that splits down the middle to reveal a fleeting crevasse.

Angel City is not the place they left upon entering the magic maintenance hideout. They see for the first time the town that has passed itself off as home. They play tourists to their own back barrios, the ones the package junkets only buzz through with the tinted windows rolled up shut. They perform in Jorge and Roberto's alma mater, where the classes are led through the auditorium in controlled shifts, frisked by armed guards. One seventh-grader in the audience is rushed to Carver in midperformance, when the smuggler's balloon he swallowed earlier that morning breaks inside him.

They play a gazebo in a once-park on the east side, where indigents of all ages crawl from their Masonite maisonettes to stare at the inscrutable proceedings as if at another unreadable eviction notice. A religious club where they do an afternoon show is raided two days later for sheltering a hive of illegals. Necrosis has taken hold everywhere. It's all coming due, extended credit's final statement. Privation now costs more than wealth, the old pyramiding scheme, can hope to generate.

They cross over to the happy Valley, where bad conscience has booked them at the Galleria for a matinee. There they play to a weekend mob of glazed children who call their parents by first names. Children with weekly Top Forty head-dos, two-hundred-dollar helium-injected shoes, color-coordinated spun-silk lip-shaped purses stuffed with supplementary credit cards slung around their want-not waists.

The Hamelin rats had no idea. This unspannable gulf accounts for the spreading partisan rumble, the GAS THE BASTARDS T-shirts, the collapse of the street economy into a single, exhausted, gag-gift boutique of hate and rage, as if future GNP depended on our continuing to buy fart cushions and SHUT THE FUCK UP coffee mugs for one another. It explains the six hundred autonomous Angel armies, now the city's chief employment for minors. It glosses the junior-chamber-of-commerce consortium of tax-free, million-dollar-a-week retailers, cataclysm's middlemen, scalpers at this ticket-holders-only mass send-off.

Travel works an awful mental broadening on them. They are toted downtown, where they have never been, past the RayBan investment house towers and airline office blocks. Each one is a laundering of the architectural balance sheet, a pauper's hospital in disguise. Even here, the down curve has begun, steeper and more abrupt than the city planners suspect.

In the van, they amuse themselves with road games. A chunk of Nerf cinderblock and the newest rap lyric hold them beguiled for whole freeway jams. Nico bullies the group into leading Joleene to believe she's telepathic: "My God, you've guessed our secret object again. Quit… How in the…? You're playing with our Innermost, girl."

"I don't know how I know. I just know. I think, and it comes to me. It just springs, like, into my head."

They switch between suppressed snickers and reverential awe at the girl's newly discovered power. But they never tell. The girl will die thinking she's psychic,

Nico is everywhere in the van aisles — cheerleader, voice coach, tour guide — working the sickos, most of whom should not have been allowed to step foot out of the plague house, even for these brief, homeopathic afternoons. He plays with the young ones. "Okay, punks. Huddle up. Let's go over the playbook." He prepares them for the longer outing rapidly coming up. He waves a comic in front of them like a shiner lure, but the tykes just sit there on the knife-slashed vinyl, facing him, their very instinct to curl up on the right side of the page rendered cagey, extinguished by unspeakable early conditioning. It hurts to see how much it will take before these stunted crips will be ready.

"Criminy. You younger generation are frigging illiterates. Hey you: yeah, the one with the wet spot on your pants. Complete this rhyme. 'Simple Simon met a…' "

A sidelong look of suspicion gives way to a lagged but crescendoing "Pimon!" of near-rapturous relief.

"Yeah, so ya got lucky. 'Going to the fair. Says Simple Simon to the…'"

"Pimon!"

" 'Let me taste your…' "

Agonized pause. Total exam panic. "Hair?"

"Hobbling God on a bloody crutch! Okay, okay. I'm sorry. Hair. Whatever you say. Just don't blither on me."

And why not? These infants, connoisseurs of every conceivable tang, have at least hung on to that primal impulse to pop everything into the mouth: paste, plastic, wrapping paper, cakes of hardened snot, a salad bar of gravels and soils, earthworm pies, pasty pastry scabs, lead paint peels. A hank of hair is among the more innocent of the thousand and thirty-one flavors left their lingering ability to savor. They will miss these taste buds dearly, this time next month.

"Well, I'd let you taste mine, guys, but…" He springs the arch grin that vampires always flash their victims. "Got no hair!" He flips his cap. His translucent, purple-pink, shriveled parchment map of bared veins sets off the desired shrieks of terrified delight.

Emboldened, one of the pitiful tinies asks Lieutenant Chuck if she can satisfy the shameless longing that's been nagging at her for weeks. She wants to put her fingers into the resounding hole that still plumbs deep into the lower left of his reconstructed face. Chuck clears away the clutter of removable prosthetic and stoically caters to the request not once but several times, while each little rat extra trills in fascinated disgust as she finger-probes the pit.

"Don't wiggle or you'll touch brain," Nico warns, causing a new round of diving for cover among the nightmares-in-training. Chuck holds still; anything for the cause. Each must be prepared to submit to whatever it takes to secure the trust for the impending Big One.

"Don't wiggle or you'll touch brain," Nico warns, causing a new round of diving for cover among the nightmares-in-training. Chuck holds still; anything for the cause. Each must be prepared to submit to whatever it takes to secure the trust for the impending Big One. An altercation at one of their school stints temporarily grounds the road show while Linda clears up some legalities. Some fiendishly healthy, overaged fourth-grader insists at snub-nose-point on following the Hamelin children through the papier-mâche mountain to whatever offstage hidden prospect it opens on. The scare is no more than a routine, late-day urban heart murmur, but it is enough to keep them hospital-bound for a little longer. While the players wait for the incident to be settled, Nico continues to recruit for the standing cast.

His canvassing brings him even among the pre-young: he hovers over the incubator, the greenhouse glass palace of a six-hundred-gram, red sugar beet born four months too soon. He plagues the nurses with questions that they find cute for a while, until the obsessive grilling progresses toward the macabre. He asks about the catheters, pump primers jammed into the surfactant-stripped lungs to keep them from collapsing like a graft-riddled public housing project. He wants the tech specs on that hypo needle stuck through the umbilical into the heart, the standing kegger tap for injections and test draws. He wonders out loud what would happen if it were accidentally disconnected. He demands to know if these still-unshaped souls, the only humans coming up for air before they are even zero years old, might be close enough to eviction that their speechless brains still carry some trace of the original place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nico, I've been reading.

No duh.

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

Children, you DP.

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

Shipped back? Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stands a second time to sneak out, but still she won't let him. The cold sweats shiver her limbs. Her whole torso quakes quietly, as if the traction bed hid a Magic Fingers. The tremors are on her, the wind-up ones. Now he must run, or give in too to hypothermia. To knowing.

Nico, Nico, Nico, she says, just to be saying, to keep the alternative at bay. Here, she indicates. No, the other stack, just underneath. She leads him to the thinnest volume, the belated song for the nursery, the one still wrapping her in original sight. The marker suggests there are a few pages left yet in this one.

Its tenacious cradle-grip on the girl is as strong as the first clasp, the instinct to grapple at giant index fingers, to clutch at rattles, to latch on to any probe that the immense creatures from above extend to hook us with. He picks it up, groaning.

Nico, she pleads. Nico? Read to me?

Week's last clinic wrings the woman out. She comes from it like a doily from a lye bath. Her final half-hour session of the afternoon expanded into a life term: a couple who, despite the prenatal tests, chose to keep and care for what the chart calls a severe mental handicap. As if any couple from these parts were not sufficiently handicapped already. The child seems set to stretch the terrible twos into a decade, and Linda's simple assignment is to keep him from biting his tongue off every time he moves.

Only the couple's infinitely uncomprehending hurt keeps her going. It never crosses their mind that the daily, unbearable confusion of routine might be less had the child been different. Love, it seems, is past choice, past examining. It is a severe handicap all its own.

She comes from the punching bag session dripping wet, gritty, foul to herself. She will not go home, a place that has lately taken on the appearance of a giant but empty shoe, filled with silent, sacrificed shouts. She might just be able to make it to a shower downstairs, in the staff stalls, to find some provisional hideout here, an unoccupied call cubicle where handicapped humanity will let her curl up and fall asleep for a hundred years.

Ah, now — for that she must slink unseen past the same monk's cell where she once tried to seduce him: Come on, come on. Old Dr. Kraft in there, bashing the bishop. Who was that girl? Where is she gone? Dead, deported. He has embalmed me, shot me full of the pharaohs' eleven secret herbs and spices. Done me over, rehabbed me in his own image. Rightly so; the Clara Barton thing never did any lasting good. More of them every afternoon, more brutally clipped and bewildered. Better off like him, carapaced at least, killingly efficient, steering by the self-conscious voice-over in my own head.

The scalding shower dilates only her superficial vessels. She could go out somewhere, cleaned, slicked up, and get a man. It might help, tonight, unsnag her from the immediate brambles. But the man would be him, all over again, and his microbial Registered Delivery would remain every bit as fatal. Besides, she'd botch the cosmetic doll job, slap the silks and scents on too desperately. Overt and vigorous never works, not even on the most unsuspecting of meat club marks. It lacks the necessary self-delusion. She will never be able to dumb her nerves back down again for romance. Right now, she hasn't even the energy for a token soap job.

She dries methodically, every hidden part; the building is a hotbed of sepsis and fungi. She just about jumps through her baby-powdered skin to turn and find another presence in the room. Only after seeing the other body does she hear, in backward time, the door open and Nurse Spiegel enter. The pretty little number, Kraft's squeeze before, before her. Linda will ask her how she can still live, having crawled up close to the airless mine shaft inside the man.

But Spiegel gets her question in first, a question whose sunny Golden State affect wouldn't know nausea if it spit up on her. "Hey, Lin. You making it, babe? Wanted to ask you something. You guys working on another dress-up thing?"

Espera has to think: You guys. Dress-ups. "No," she says, wanting something more friendly than the monosyllable, but helpless to expand on it. The forms of kindness are gone, buried under slag. "No," she whispers again. The cutting is over; her shot at renewal is lost. "Why?"

"You sure?" Friendly, insinuating suspicion, annoying elbow-nudge. "Those aren't your half-pint getups the nurses have been seeing?"

Linda is the last to hear. Spiegel, who has only the most theoretically vindictive reasons to mislead her, tells her an outrageous, corroborated fable. An epidemic of vague reports, figures appearing around corners, impossible posses at the ends of long corridors. All airy gossip: Spiegel has no other register. "It's not just the nurses, sweetmeats. Dr. Kean, who you know is as Drug-Free America as they come, was telling us he saw a band of tiny coal miners, the Seven Dwarfs, smeared in black dust and wearing these canvas overalls? And a bunch of, you know, millworker girls…"

Linda checks by reflex her calendar watch. Old vaudeville routine. Teacher: How long ago was the Industrial Revolution? Smarty: What time is it now? Well, it is not Halloween. Not even fall. She thinks: her group has learned how to contact their sister cells, union locals from all over the timeline.

Tipped off, Espera watches the ward, keeping a continuous eye on who is supposed to be where, when. But it's like slapping a guard on the dancing princesses. She can't trap them. A dozen will vanish at a pop, no place traceable in the building labyrinth. They come back an hour later with transparent fabrications: We were in the cafeteria. I checked the cafeteria. Oh, right after that we were hanging out in that storeroom on Eight.

"You needn't lie to me," she tells them in her gentlest read-aloud voice, trying to restring some thread of trust that has sickeningly snapped. But betrayal is deep, deeper than pity. They deny everything. Not even her most painfully smitten little suitors will tell.

Not that she needs telling. She set it up; now the idea she germinated in them has rooted like so many small science projects, those lines of lima beans in moistened paper towel. The children are leaving in secret. Her terminals and unworkables have begun making their own forays into a city sealed off from them. They are budding off into age villages, all the under-sixteens once more seasonally leaving to establish new settlements all their own. Other loose bands come to claim them, orient them to the general gathering so long in accumulation. They are joining up, taking their place in the circuit, the Grid whose completion awaits them.

On no evidence at all, the whole plot occurs to her, the clear-out in miniature. She hears its secret promise all over, as if she weren't hard now, hideously pituitary. They mean to flee in one brief wingbeat the sick entanglement that slits innocence, the offer that forever flooded all that was left of the real neverland, hers, leaving no take-backs.

It has come back, the gaping escape clause, as she knew it would one day, if she but positioned herself lifelong in the company of children, if she just waited patiently long enough to be overlooked. And though they refuse to bring her along — her! — Espera can still win her vicarious redemption by being the one who could stop them this time, but defers.

As it is, she isn't given much chance for deference. The plague hits the hospital's full grown before even those expecting it are ready. On the Wednesday after she learns they are leaving in secret, Linda confronts the presumed ringleader.

"You can trust me, Nico," she tells him, knowing full well that to speak the words out loud is to lie.

He answers with a curt "Sober up, Doll-face."

At two the next afternoon, as if she has panicked the plan's instigators by almost guessing, all childhood hell breaks loose.

He has not slept now for, oh, call it an even Week for One. He's finally managed to donate his body to medical science, one of those West Coast investigations into how many days of deprivation it takes before you start conversing with hatchet-wielding gremlins on the foot of your bed.

Funny thing is, this stay-awake dance-marathon-cum-fire-walk-ritual is no longer forced on him by the apprentice system, the National Board-certified schedule winnowing the men from the boys, the true sadomasts from the mere zombie wannabes. Sleeplessness has become a matter of personal choice. He gets off on how the tracers solidify, stalactite style, into palpable tableaux. Strangest of all is the image that memory, like an obliging mother gull, has spit up all over torn, predigested for his nourishment. He screens again, in his skull, that jerky home movie about how he was young once, but got lost deep in the jungles of experience.

Driving is a particular trip. A bit like sailing, if you think about it, the eight lanes of traffic scudding off in front of him, glinting like sun on foamy surf that stands as stiff as the peaks of beaten egg. He finds he can control the half ton of metal by passively feeling out what the Wheel wants to do — exactly how the other million and a half freeway-loaders have been navigating all along. He snickers over the stick, to think it took this crushing fatigue for him to catch the drift of his fellow Angel flotsam.

And while driving to Carver (he forgets from where exactly), he gets his first signal from deep space. He's moored in the vehicle backwash, bobbing against the fender of the Cressida in front of him like a yacht bumper thumping the dock, when he sees from the oversold freeway shoulder's Yellow Pages three giant crosses and a sign reading NOAH'S ARK BEING REBUILT HERE.

The second signal arrives late that evening, or perhaps the day after. Kraft comes momentarily to, staring at a monitor where toddlers in a roll-your-own shelter in a hill country in the process of conscientiously shelling itself out of existence are sitting at mock-up desks. For his private viewing pleasure, they stage a song, in world English, attentive to the video cameras, disburser of all curse and benefit: "Stap de woor," two, three, "fur de shilderin…" Kraft's been away, lost track of just what war the catchy chorus alludes to. Some damn fool thing in the Balkans, or wherever they've set the venue this season. The kids obviously love it, because they get to bang on the desks on the offbeats.

The videotape laps it up. Entertainment, this nation's number two net export. Modular script number 38-A. Cue the mellow tenor (how does he make his voice do that?) to intone the lead-in, "Every war is a child's war." Same mellifluous, brain-lesioning ad copy tone they use for the fabricated dramas, that theater standing in for sense of historical purpose: "This Sunday, as the world watches, two ancient rivals meet head on to decide once and for all…"

Crisis has grown so adroit that it auditions its hostages exclusively from these choice offerings. They sing for the cameras, caught in the violence of progress that overhauls everything and changes less than nil. The plea is all mediated, packaged as escapist newsreel, because if it ever really crept out of the rubble of the bazookaed day-care center calling Mama, no one who heard it could live. All the lethargic hyper-activity that waiting consists of at this moment would go still, lucid.

One badly pounded-over sopranino continues to trill to him, even as its life's blood trickles over the cinders of the alley where it has been jumped. He hears it at night, his eyelids toothpicked open, counting the Champagne poppers going off outside his window, hoping the roll into upper exponents might make him drowsy. It's the slim but marginally possible suggestion that this sexy romp in the run-up to mass offing, where even ladies' magazines ask "What to Say If Mr. Right Asks You to a Snuff Film," might yet be no more than a massive market correction on the way toward lasting fulfillment and VCRs for all.

The voice says, Ricky, clap your hands. What are the odds that the chorale prelude is so vast that each note of the cantus firmus, a whole lifetime resonating in the dark, swamps our mayfly ears with a sound like blood-soaked nails on a chalkboard? But clap your hands, the hope begs him; don't let the sadistic little sprite die. She didn't mean anybody any harm. And it's either clap or give in to the prime-time abyss lovingly opening up underneath him.

He tries it on for feel: Things are about to turn. The phrase is his national myth, the dream of that flag-waving, fallen-laurel country on whom God once shed His grace like a rattier sheds his skin. His entire autobiography awaits that plot twist. Solar breakthrough. Cold fusion. Gene therapy. Cryo-seedbanks undoing willed mass extinction in the nick of time. An uptick at the UN. Newly industrializing nirvanas. Three hundred fifty million free-market consumers in the former East. The sixteen-megabit chip. Retrieval TV, the death of broadcast.

Hope's whole checklist is wiped out by one night of the ER's demographic evidence. Every bit of well-being this life has achieved depends on perpetually eating alive the recourseless and exposed. The truth consists of amorously embroidered erectile lanyard nooses, the party tricks with splintered shot glasses that Plummer and company cannot stanch. These are the times' frilly, split-crotch fin de siècle unmentionables, inscribed with undying valentine "Maim Me's." Each victim is trained to carry on her own earliest abuse in the names of the fathers. The crippling acquired gene will not stop spreading until everyone has been mishandled, everyone's psychic icebox stuffed with frozen child.

That fact, surging through his carotid, leaves him two choices. He can take his sleeping roll into the outer darkness and lie awake there, tallying the screams. Or he can change the channel. He squeezes the remote control as if popping a painful, watery cyst. Next over, a fast-breaking advertorial proclaims how secret carrot extract smeared hourly over your face in ruinously expensive gobfuls will keep your skin young, presumably with you still in it, until the end of time. In the supreme, feeble-headed culture, being born later is a moral virtue.

This puff is interrupted by a genuine ad, for a real product, the station itself: "Our uncompromising four-part series on media sensationalizing." Sunday, just after the video version of the novelization of that runaway mega-reprint, Profiting from Total Collapse.

A storm of endorphins, and his mother comes to sit down beside him. He scribbles a note on a canary legal pad to remind himself, should he ever stabilize, to look up her date and cause of death. Meanwhile, Mom, who never had much to say while alive, is deep in one of her favorite reminiscences.

"You just wouldn't hold still," she says. 'That happens with colicky babies, especially when they have other things wrong with them. Well, we — the nurses and I — tried everything. We propped you up; we wedged you in place with stuffed animals. You just would not stay put." Kraft smiles wanly at the specter's account, knowing the punch line hundreds of times over. "This was in Seoul, in 'fifty-seven…"

" 'Fifty-six," he says.

"Don't correct your mother. Where were you raised, in a barn? This was in Korea; not state-of-the-art by any stretch. God knows where they got their radiation from. Our old castoffs, probably. Anyway, there was no other way you were going to take the doses unless I held you myself, in my own arms, the two of us, standing together in front of that awful machine…"

This, the first sacrificial bond he will never shake off. Her moist, swallowed "Oh, Ricky" identifies the larger hurt. She never loved him more than at that infant moment, because he could not harm her yet by loving back.

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

Blabs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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