Operation Wandering Soul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explanation hits him without the appropriate relief: a foreign language. But what is she doing…? She might perhaps have French, a few words, from the residual colonial ghost. But she couldn't know this one. This one was — where? — Indonesia at the nearest. Dutch

East Indies.

"Okay," he settles in, choosing desperately to ignore everything, all incoherence, all emergency broadcast, all advance notification, to go on pretending to a semblance of sense. The persistence short of dying.

"Here's your question. Who is…" He browses the lines near the opening. "Lieve Kitty?" Answer carefully, and in complete sentences.

Before she can scold him, Kraft realizes. Kitty has gone, made the leap, slipped back into fantasy from whence she came. That grackle-haired Anne on the cover invented her, conjured Kitty up, retrieved her from the holding room of hidden friends, sculpted her from scratch to keep Anne company up in night's false-walled attic, during that last, lonely few-month stretch before deportation.

Kitty is this book. The secret pen pal that the little Frank girl created, because one always needs to write to someone. Because paper is more patient than people. Dear Kitty is the figment of that photo, the girl in the desk in front of you in fourth grade, whose eyes, a season before the finish line, smile weakly in advance at the worst that human ingenuity can dream up to put her through.

Joy, what is left of her, brings up a noise from the back of her throat, midway between giggle and gurgle. "There is no Kitty." Exasperated with grown-up silliness, the adult refusal to accept the real.

Journalism and journal: Kraft should have known. These two late-day narrative styles round out the brief but comprehensive sampler, the trading-card sets of story that Joy and her accomplices have been busy collecting. Treasures on the scavenger hunt handout: find these somewhere in the city at large, and don't come back until you have them all. Now they have them. She can return, like an ethnographer at the end of her field trip year. Dear Kitty: I grow hopeful now; finally, everything will turn out for the good. Really, good!

That's it. The list is complete. Or almost. The collection crew now must mount a massive sweep, the scale of which Kraft only vaguely makes out. A drag search for the missing read-alouds, the concluding Lieve Kittys from Bergen-Belsen and its blood descendants, the notes from the civic-minded citizens tipping off the authorities to the secret room.

It would not be bluff now, to stare her down. He places his hand on her gauzed-over stump and thinks, I know what you are up to. All of you.

But the words he speaks out loud, to the witness air, evade the insight. Lie low, something tells him, and go on living. Out loud, all he says is "Beauty, can I do anything for you?"

She blossoms at the nickname, enough to incline her head. "Yes. Please." She would smile, were it not for the pads of subcutaneous rupture weighing down her cheeks.

"Dr. Kraft." So soft, maybe he makes it up. "Dr. Kraft. I don't know how to do this."

Seven in one blow, a burst of staccato words in a slight, Asian clip. She admits the obvious, the thing his cowardice empowers by running from. The leg alone — the whole lower body — will not be enough. Its childish sacrifice has appeased no one. Tell me how, her capillary-spattered eyes plead with him. Give me the next step.

Now, unlike the first time he watched her die, no portal opens. The view out the window of Intensive Care is blank except for a ratty palm, a bank of hospital Dumpsters, and a hummus vendor across the street. The moment grows unendurable in knowing how little chance it has of surviving. He dares not say Hold out, or she might.

He could tell her of his own deportation from the place, a record only recently recovered from long live burial. But her evacuation is more extensive, more complete, taking her beyond all preparation. He fumbles for the one deficient revenge ever offered.

"I don't know how either." He brushes a hank of limp hair from her mouth, where it has snagged. And goes on to give her, in as many words as the telling takes, the point of starting out on any once upon a time. The surgeon's sense of an ending.

He crawls up from the call room bed, fully dressed, his lids never having touched. A hot shower, and he realizes he is drowning, going under for the third count. Even with the spray squelched, he cannot get his breath in the foaming turbulence of air. He must call her. Her, the borderline jailbait, the one whose parts he but recently stroked, avoiding the more awful amplitude lying between them. Her name will come to him in a second. Linda, who has at last left him, as he advised her at their earliest flirtation.

He could drag upstairs, wash his hair, get a fresh change of clothes (his scrubs beginning to golemize on grunge and blood) and charm her back with a "Lady, you owe me lunch." Insouciant, with just the right smidgen of vulnerability, just a hint that he's fifteen minutes from complete, deep-end, isolation-tank psychotic breakdown if she doesn't dose him down and tuck him in.

A hello wouldn't hurt, basic kindness, and he could even come clean, tell her everything he has only now told himself. He makes to leave the cell, but is prevented by a knot of menacing Third Worlders with electric whips. What's your hurry, mister? Go on, have a lie-down. They shove him back onto the bed, where he is jolted — the downed tablets kicking in — across the alkaline flats of his pores. A thousand simultaneous spring-loaded disasters erupt inside his gut.

He sinks in time lapse into the bed. He flails at the bedstead for reading material to steady him and comes up with that May issue of Rifle & Handgun Illustrated. It's all weirdly familiar. He has lived this before, but where? Just such an era of accumulating, societywide, sedated, nostril-flaring panic. It's crucial he remember. Yet the patient's chart is riddled with these missing episodes. One continuous archipelago-hopping campaign from fin de to fin de, torching itself on the conviction, the absolute certainty of impending mayhem, always waiting for the last word.

But never like this before. There has never been the means, the raw megatonnage, the window of opportunity that a city like Angel, a country like the one on his passport, commands. Fear has never been so slickly institutionalized, marketed on such a mind-fogging scale, sold on such favorable terms, nothing down. And to fear something resourcefully enough is to bring it off, wholesale, well before the magic date.

Ten years, and they'll be hooking generators up to bicycles to listen to emergency radio. Cutting up railroad ties for fuel. Licking the lids off trash cans. Rodeo Drive will be a vast black market, like the one in the streets outside Carver. A slow, exaggerated drift toward video-clip, mass multiple-personality self-homicide: the perfect end for a world that has achieved the ultimate aim of being both great tasting and less filling.

And Kraft alone is left to tie apocalypse to vanishing children. Scarred tree rings, ancient internal hemorrhages, origin myths of the bewilderedly trepanned. Abuse is the seed money. Banishment sets the Bildungsroman rolling, and every page thereafter is the kid in the backseat saying, "Are we there yet?" "What happens next?"

Where happens is not a thing but a place, a remembered premonition cathartic enough to close the opening's rip.

This is Kraft's insight as he goes under. No one this side of childhood exile, not a single memoir or condescending picture book, has ever gotten it right. But no one has ever lost it either: that first house, where want and terror, the toy soldiers of self itself, have not yet split off and solidified on contact with air. He's seen it up close, under the loupes. From their ringleader, that Weight Watchers Khrushchev, to the martyred Lieve Kitty, each is a raw umbilical stump, a residual direct tap into placenta, the subterranean world.

Enough sleep narcotic now syrups through Kraft's forebrain to bring him almost back as well. The lost tumbler contour: September, racing home in the rain, the runny-soaked page of oppressive sums due tomorrow, the stink of ubiquitous earthworm in the nose's lining. Get it back, returned to the viscera — the car antennas maliciously snapped off for no reason, the lessons on saturation bombing picked up in Sunday School at no spiritual cost, the crack-of-dawn smell of oatmeal equivalent from the squatters' quarter, the trinket bought for the beautiful half-Japanese girl next door (the one who will leave you longing inadequately after halves, forever), thrown into a canal when nerve collapsed — get that back, and you have it. The bead, the cross-locus for the there where they now abduct themselves. The locale of sickening, defenseless, permanent fragility, the one that growing up consists of more or less unsuccessfully denying.

And then it hovers over him, forgiveness in the form of a class reunion. They have come back, those two foreigners, just to give him another look, to lift the hole in the fabric for a follow-up, now that he is grown, responsible, ostensibly aware. Second shot, in a stronger body. Now he might do something about things as they are, now, when the worst has been done, when he's lost all and nothing can hurt him further. And thinking, I wil remember this when I wake up; I need only the trigger, the call-back, he falls into the first recuperative peace he has known since the incurable Hansel and Gretel checked into his ward.

Plummer wakes him. The maniac breaks into Kraft's call room, scrubbed, giggling crazily. "You're not gonna, you won't fawking believe this. Buddy boy, buddy boy, have we got a celebrity body lineup for you."

Kraft comes out of his coma far enough to sample the disturbance. An extended adolescent stands above him, eyes watering in a colloid of shock and excitement. Thomas — unthinkably — is crying. And he won't tell, but in his manic elation over something finally happening, an event, definitive, coming home to roost at last, he merely hustles Kraft out of bed and shoehorns him down the hall for the denouement.

It starts in the ER and splays, like a family Labor Day, down the adjacent halls and foyers. If it is not precisely the scenario Kraft has been anticipating, it is its next of kin. He feels almost relieved that it has arrived, taken shape, capped imagination.

But imagination could never have managed this without assistance. Plummer does his sugar-rush, play-by-play patter. "Tried to beep you, Dr. Krafty, but yer number was not in service. Suite phone bungled up too, suspiciously enough. But what the hey, hey? Now that we got you, the gang's all here. Father Kino, Dr. Purgative, Miss Peach…"

Plummer starts to sound just like the throbbing bass of a dash radio in a distant Mazda playing acid house on volume 12 while idling at a stoplight. What a civilizing cleverness, how they always put the ER on ground level, right by the parking-lot receiving dock. Ideal for bulk shipments.

The halls fill with disembodied spectral wails, paramedical commands in Pilipino, the shouts of admission nurses whose bureaucracy has broken down under the weight of the penultimate. A kaleidoscopic aural chaos. Kraft looks out over the event just as the infotainment folks bust in through the sliding doors with the Minicams.

The thing that has come over to play, exceeding Kraft's still-narcotized ability to take it in, is just your consummate, posturban, median mass murder. Atrocity, like art, attends to the flavor of the age. It sinks vast sums into R & D, to produce an imagery tailor-made for the sensibility that has habituated to every horror imaginable except itself. "Hey," Plummer twitters away by Kraft's side, "it's not much, but we call it home.

"Guess," Thomas keeps nattering. "Just guess. You'll never, not in a million, not in a coon's, not in a dead man's…"

Guess what"? Even that much evades Kraft. The identity of the monster who did this? The Herod behind today's installment could be any hopped-up, factory-outlet counter helper with fifty bucks for a gun, that party favor easier to purchase than alcohol in some states. He wouldn't even need the fifty bucks, because there's always financing.

Once again, the bullet sprayer is just another sleepless burn-baby one degree worse than the rest of us, turned by ubiquitous, state-sponsored terrorism, the housing-project prison on all sides of him, into trying to out-horror horror. Butcher, baker, ex-war criminal sponsored by the NSA, short-order loner, Veteran of Foreign Police Action, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, crazed chemmed-out cardboard apartment dweller. How high would you like to point the finger? Who do you want for your guilty party?

"What's your hunch on this one, Krafty? Jets versus Sharks? Tong war? Fast-food shoot-up? Get a life, bro; that was last year. Football stadium spree? Please, leave that to the effete Europeans. Airport terrorist strike by Oregon Ecotopian separatists? Indiscriminate mall-walker mow-down?"

They pick their way through a litter of stretchers. Seeping bodies line the corridors because there is no room at emergency's inn. They drift listlessly in the direction of the operating theater, with some vague notion of assisting in the red tide bailout with their plastic beach pails.

In Kraft's doped silence, Plummer looses it. "Mother fucking Mary!" he screams. In the general frenzy, no one even turns a head. "Look around you, shit-for-brains. Look!"

The order is so violent that Kraft does, pushing back the sheets from one upward-staring face, then another. He cannot see the common denominator in this sea of victims, so salient is it, so long expected, so presupposed.

"You're fucking kidding me. Are you blind, or what? Helen pissing Kell—" Kraft looks for something deeper, subtler, more insidious. When Plummer shouts the patent axiom, it's only the givenness of the observation that shocks him. "A grade school, Peewee."

At last, Kraft panics. "What school?"

"Oh Christ. Martin Luther King Junior High. Bobbie Franks Elementary. The Little Girl Down the Well Montessori School. Who fucking cares?"

Kraft would kick him in the face, Free style, but has no time. He skids around, thinking to race the half-dozen flights up to Pediatrics to find where the piper was playing today. But he remembers the tour's cancellation. Then the sickening backwash, the shame at mouthing the parental refrain: Thank God it wasn't my child.

Plummer looks about, grinning. "Hang on, kids. It's Chinese assault rifle time. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand… ready or not, here I come."

At this outburst, crazed as celadon glaze, Kraft takes the man's wrist and tries for a steady tone. "Thomas."

"What? 'Get a grip,' right? We're doctors, goddammit.' Ever notice how much these scrubs resemble the traditional restraining jacket?"

Plummer begins to trill "Whistle While You Work," complete with late-'thirties warbling. The sweet dwarf-tremolo serves only to conduct the shape of revelation deeper into the fibrillating heart.

Kraft bathes in iodine wash, up to his biceps. He listens to the sea of voices around him. The operating room is ablaze in the high-frequency flicker of fluorescences, a cozy home version of the seductive Christmas tree star, Shinto devotional candle, menorah stem, the burning White Light at the tip of civilization's long bushmaster black fiber-optic cable.

Kraft's eyes must dilate, stop down to the sight of the banquet spread for them. His own organs have never been particularly good at depth perception, especially under such light. But the slaughtered Softball teams, the choir groups and secret note-passers still being wheeled in, their IVs bobbing above them like golf cart pennants— these are unmistakable. He need not even sponge off their features to confirm the ID. Schoolmates. His all-star backfield from twenty years ago. Old neighborhood friends.

Work begins without prelim. It proceeds, with only the smallest verbal dispatches, into time beyond telling. They make the first-pass sort, splitting the stretchers into two camps, red blankets and blue, those that might yet be addressable and those for whom injection and deliberate oversight is now the kindest remaining treatment. Decision is quick and concise, applied to each new batch. The sieve is axiomatic. Care for the still savable is relegated to stopgap. Gross clinical movements, close enough, timeshare between points of impact, with vague hopes of getting back to stabilize.

Kraft's hands go autonomous; their overlearned skill runs on ahead of him. From time to time he stops to say certain procedures by name: RUQ abdominal wound requires immediate hemostasis by application of… But even these speak-aloud bits are a kind of Latin liturgy, mumbled by heart with no feel for the meaning of the words. He drags, a deep-sea diver, through the reef-encrusted deep.

After a while — no saying how long, now that time has formally ended — activity in the room accumulates. It condenses into concerted efforts like planets congealing out of stellar dust. The luxury of study, the idea of a worked-out operative plan, takes on a laughable Club Med quality — decadent contrivance of primary care givers still living the dream of sustainability shattered here.

They operate, seat of the pants, improvisation night, open stage. He nods out along someone's splattered linea alba and comes to, still working efficiently, hovering out-of-body over a half-sized left anterior aspect, retracting the gaping hole by hand as Dr. Brache crams the loose party favors back into the split piñata. Habituation is a marvelous thing. The annihilating assault Technicolor lasts only until it becomes familiar. Then standard emergency procedure sets up its own counter-rhythm. A little movement, a little breeze in the face of the unlivable. Endurability is simply a rate function.

The uses of childhood exceed human count. What he wades through is this year's quota compressed into an hour. They apply the same tourniquets, thread the same running locked sutures, ligate the same living tissue with their 2–0 chromic. So where is the threshold point, the place where what remains is no longer life but contorted burlesque? Well, in a word, here. Even the attempt to make sense of it is obscene. It's over, over. There's nothing for it except the stylized as-if, the subjunctive, the reflex motions of would and were. Call, as always.

While Kraft holds his finger in the blood-spewing hole, a little melody of contrived naïveté loops infinitely through his head. It's a phrase out of some expectant cartoon picaresque, but lovely, dark, escapist beyond telling. The words go: "Don't leave just yet. Don't fall." The tune is lullaby incarnate. He fishes for a piece of lead that has molded itself against what were once vertebrae, humming to himself. He times the drop of the lead into waiting stainless pan to spank on the cadence.

Although time has ended, something keeps changing out there in the space beyond the theater. The kids must have gotten shot sometime before three in the afternoon, when school let out. Last he stepped out for air, it was dark. But whatever change persists outside the hospital is just a leftover, inertial going-through-the-motions, a hysterectomy case on hormones, a midlifer returned to the singles circuit for reasons that escape him. Night falls, as always. The cut-faceted flares come on all over Emerald City. A lovely petrochemical astigmatic glow enchants the sprawl, holds out the flirting promise that society's postindustrial theme park is nearing its eternally imminent completion.

All done with back projection, of course, double exposure, soft focus, the industry's proficient visual con. The addiction to hope is no surprise, in a creature whose soul is a complex kludge, imagination's overlay superimposed upon superfluous animal circuitry. Mind is a sucker for its aboriginal entrapment. Then what happened? What happened is this, narrative's two-minute drill. These lacerated trick-or-treaters left at Kraft's door.

News covers it all night, while the story is hot, between "Dates of the Stars" and tangled tales of accidental incest. Tonight, anyway, this one is the lead. Collective schoolyard death — this ring of real-life Riverdales and Sweet Valley Highs, assembled like a crop of eager Presidential Achievement Medal winners to deliver the valedictorian address. Its plot feeds the country a night's full course of the Gothic frolic it has come to require.

The ER staff and their temporary conscripts — sworn in under the crisis clause — stay glued to half-hourly accounts of the shooting that has landed in their laps. They follow the story on huge TV monitors mounted in strategic spots about the lounges. They leave the apparatuses open, bloodletting them for the glossless glaze they offer on the event. They watch the Minicams come into this same ER, pan the room, point at the monitors, which disappear down a White Rabbit hole of video regress.

They see in slight variation, half a dozen times, each abdomen gaping underneath them. "Updates," the wire vendors call the repeating hook. Yet the only new data, aside from the killer's high school yearbook photo, a glimpse at his underground cache, and some revised stats from the assault rifle technical manual, are the updates that everyone in this room already knows: the count increment, a charity-drive target gone mad.

Reporters start relaying as news the bits all the other news media say. Panels of experts pick at the thing listlessly, like hostages to the Clean Plate Club toying with their asparagus. The stats sprout their privately suspected proofs: one in five American schoolchildren has possessed a gun. On any given day, one hundred thousand come to school armed.

Internationally, vicarious glee sets the dominant tone. Iran, Syria, South Africa — the usual pariahs — have a field day. World Service dubs the solo corral gunfight "this peculiarly American crime." Yet if it is at all peculiar, Kraft thinks, it is only to show how the States is still, for a last short gasp at least, the world's innovator, the flagging standard bearer in trade's westward migration, as first formulated by one of those Adams boys.

News drags the standard surreal figures back and forth into the viewing plane. Its sick traffic is matched only by the continuous crowd tiding in and out of the frantically composed operating theater. It's pure opera, a lavish Medea in modern dress mounted by artists in exile's holding camps. One alderman makes the point that most of our annual firearm homicides are caused by unregistered weapons. Thus, what we really need to discourage the illegal trade is easier registration. The city could even liquidate some of its crippling debt by selling portions of its massive seized arsenal…

Surgical nurses palm Kraft the requested blades as in that old game, pass the shoe from me to you to you. Their heads bob like toy water-sipping ducks, peering up to gape at the monitors while they clamp and cauterize, listening, as if the clue to the next incision, the mystery they hold braced under their latex, is out there. In the floodlit close-ups of hysterical mothers. In the filler human interest about the kid whose life was spared by a truant afternoon in the video arcade. In the pastel artwork pinned to the corkboard of the decimated classroom.

Bodies and delayed broadcast: the team members watch both images at once, needing only the colored glasses to go 3-D. They watch in the stunned peace that settles in after event passes all understanding.

On the dozenth repeat of the simpering anchor's "Topping the stories this hour," somebody snaps. It's Kean, raving, "Do we have to… can't we get a shade less grotesque soundtrack?" His tone is puerile, an I-didn't-ask-to-be-here-you-know. Even here, disaster is, de facto, every man for himself.

"Whatcha want, Father Kino?" a mask-muffled voice heckles him. "Mozart symphony?" In a world where such things still mattered, Thomas would live to regret the outburst. Kean would ensure that he never got certified. The thought is an idle curiosity. It has gone hypothetical, scattered among the dozens of schoolchildren strewn all over Carver's cutting room floors.

One of the scuts obliges by shutting off the media. The decibel level drops so precipitously that Kraft cannot at first place the crash of surf that swooshes in to replace the news. Then physiology returns: the bruits in the capillaries shaking his tympanic membrane. By concentrating, he can mold the sound into the aural hallucination of his choice. He tries his hand at contemporary avant-garde, a piece of pitch equivalents pulled from the points on a random medical chart.

The aleatoric stuff is a piece of cake. Emboldened, he allows it to adhere into the Kindertotenlieder: a little light has gone out in my tent. From there he works massively backward, fashioning the pulse into the censered thrill of Renaissance polyphony, that paltry little Glory to God issuing out of a host of fist-sized boys' choir lungs, the organs he holds now cupped in his hands. Et in terra) the high, hanging resonators soar off, the lines below launching them vaultward with complex but concerted churning, heartsick with courage and perseverance, releasing a plainsong whiff of the place all leading tones lead.

Music issues from inside his skull marrow, an automatic writing like the one his hands obey. The sense is punctured when the notes begin to take their madrigal dictation from another source. He hears the choir above him before he even looks up. There, in the observation mezzanine, a line of children stare down from on high, pressing their palms to the gallery glass.

They gape slowly, like baffled, landed bass, silent except for the soaring twelve-part Stabat Mater sluicing through Kraft's ears. Their motet starts to partake of this grisly Christmas, Saint Nick, their patron, revealed as the all-seeing prep for the Last Judgment. He barely recognizes them, so spruced up, surpliced, tricked out like this, high altos at the very lowest, launching effortlessly into the piece they have been rehearsing all these many weeks. They sound their stunned bit of praise, steeped in the requiem service that assembles them, wringing whole-toned in paradisum from catastrophe's loft.

He has been waiting for them. Chuck the No-Face; Joleene, falset-toing through her Chatty Cathy; the High Latin Hernandez brothers, radiant as altar boys; the Rapparition, springing the hymnal's Index of Meters with his freer syncopations. Today's front line, brought together in his ward for a purpose, have only been awaiting the arrival of these cadres, through the old portals of disappearance, to begin the mop-up evensong, the consolidating tutti heave.

They converge through all history's holes. The child miners are there, the factory fire victims, the bands incarcerated to reduce indigence. The ones converted, over generations of shame, to fable and fairy tale. They ring the observation platform, staring at Kraft's handiwork. On an unseen cue, they break from their antiphony and await orders from the commander of the hour, his face more beaked and wizened, head balder, nervous energy more premeditated when seen from a story below.

Little Father Time in his Dodger cap counts casualties, scouring the bloodbath for the expected sign. His eyes, from this distance, dart around the shredded scraps like sparrows after lunch crumbs. The inventory of his gaze courses over the head wounds and exploded chests. His own face absorbs the features of those that are food-processed beyond recognition, no longer identifiable as human.

That look settles on the pieces of disintegrating sponge Kraft pretends to sew together. Kraft follows the glance down, sees the girl under his instruments for the first time. He traces with his gloved hand the still-gushing projectile gash. He places his finger in the ruptured esophagus, the severed tendons relaxing what's left of her mouth into a Quattrocento smile radiating peace. She will be spared, at least, reaching comprehension. The age of consent.

He looks up at the loft, helplessly. What? What do you want me to do? The answer is impossible; the girl steps from behind Nico, comes from the shadow where she has hidden. He almost tears from the operating team, breaks for the mezzanine stairs to grab her, carry her back to Intensive Care. But the measured, appraising stare she levels at him fixes him in place. Something is different about her, a change he cannot quite name. Then it comes to him. She is upright. Whole. Her legs restored.

All at once they are beckoning, bailing scoops of air over their shoulders. They turn, point, gesture down a path that won't wait. Kraft's eyes well with salt. He pleads with them to stay just a minute longer. I can't. Not now. I can't abandon this in the middle.

It takes him only one stopped heartbeat to realize, humiliated: the come away is not meant for him. What would they want with a traitor, a grotesque, repulsive giant, a freak who would smash any clubhouse he tried to squeeze into, a sellout double agent in the pay of age? He snickers at his mistake, the arrogance of it, the pitiful decrepit who cannot recognize his own wrinkles in the mirror. Not him: they have come to whisk off their slaughtered school friends.

The a cappella Knabenchor resumes. Their ravishing high notes launch a pathetic prayer at the clerestory, a help message holding at bay, for one more hemiola, the floodgate crossing. All sick persons, and young children. The fatherless children, and widows. All that travel by land or by water. Give peace in our time. Defend us from all the perils and dangers of this night. The tune flies up, flushed like a suicidal game bird. It keeps going, up past the atmosphere, eternal as tempered alloy, as awful and permanent as a satellite plowing the black vacuum, pointlessly rehearsing its greeting, millennia after the message senders have all gone.

Kraft sinks back into the pointless exercise, just short of salvage and past salvation. He works head down, endlessly steeped in bodily punishment, an automaton in darkness. He does not look up again at the observation glass or at the faces of the mauled meat packings under his hands.

Tempo imperceptibly shades off. It would be possible to stop and count bodies now, if one were inclined. The field lies, if not cleared, at least preliminarily shoveled. A portion of the mown-down children have been rerouted, airlifted to "more appropriate area facilities," as Admin informs the press. Another portion, steadily rising, are lost in post-op, give up languidly on the table, or fulfill the prognostic leveled at them on arrival.

He cannot say how his colleagues hold out. All but the most manic one or two have long since stopped talking except to call for the occasional clamp. A round robin of catnaps takes over when the rush of violence no longer suffices to kill fatigue. Chief comes and taps you on the shoulder; it's your turn to dive into oblivion a while. As Kraft goes down, the darkness is so thick and sticky that it coos at him.

Needless to say, he goes on cutting and sewing in sleep. Creatures spring out of cracked kid chests at him; whole bodies disappear down holes that open up in the operating table. They die on him even faster here.

Reports filter in, litter his dreamscape with the everyday surreal. With the whole surgical staff overwhelmed by this brilliant diversion, the guerrillas move in and the nightmare evacuation begins in earnest. In the chaos created by the assault, the preemies disappear into thin smog, along with their Plexiglas incubators. In their wake, the second wave — the severe handicaps and defects — disperse as one. They were just waiting; he might have pieced it together. Camped, quartered until the arrival of this go-ahead.

He wakens violently just before the last dance step. He is cutting again, alongside Kean and a stringer he can't recognize. Kean is rambling. "Well, kiddies, we've saved this one. This one, and maybe that head wound thing from yesterday. But these here are turfed."

The man dusts his gloved hands into the open chest. "Still: two out of a couple dozen ain't bad, given the conditions. Should be good for a certificate from the mayor's office." The man turns to address Kraft. "You'll be set for the advance residency of your choice."

Kraft surveys what is left of the room. Torsos in every contortion lie live in their fresh cornerstones, the latest act of ancient sacrifice. He fiddles with his gloved hand for compassion's trinket. Nothing else signifies. He stops in front of a school kid whom Kean gives no hope. They are easy to find, those about to take off. He skims the chart to verify; yes: irreparable. Then he hangs the tin angel, septic with time, around the slender and severed neck.

With no link, he is out in the anteroom, on breather perhaps, with nothing more recuperative to do than stand in front of the plate glass and look back in on the emergency still under way. Someone fastens a blood-pressure cuff to Kraft's biceps, pumps it to tourniquet tightness.

He turns to find a green alien, masked and gloved, tugging at his arm. It is one of those creatures from far away, accumulating energy for aeons, assembling a machine the size of imagination's galaxy, a particle smasher that will break the bonds of memory and deliver life from forever by the simple expedient of splitting time. All those still young enough to learn a foreign language have been conscripted. Because Kraft alone of adults has accidentally gotten wind, they come now to abduct him.

It takes him some moments to realize. "God, Espéra. You've come. Listen. Where did you take that show? What schools?"

She dissolves into hysteric, giggle-soaked sobs, the witch in water. It flashes into his mind, just what she is trying to cover up: the itinerary, the venues of tomorrow's mass murder, and the day after's.

He starts to level the accusation, but her snorting, out of control, enrages him. "Listen. This is important. Who did they have playing…?"

She comes to with a crack. She rolls her head limply back and forth on her shoulders, in disbelief at him, at his theories in this theory-killing place. "I can't… It's not happening. It's not. For the love of…"

The punctuating profanity is lost to a language he doesn't know. "You sick animal," she whispers. "Look at you. Look around." She is throatless, on the verge of slapping him, throwing the worst, most vicious thing she could say to another human scaldingly into his face: Grow up. Grow up, won't you? She stares at him as if his hands were sharp instruments. "Oh, Ricky. Ricky." You boy.

"She left this," Linda says dully. "In the tablet by her bed." She holds out a notebook scrap. Joy's Lieve Kitty. Kraft is terrified to take it. When he refuses the scrap, Linda, practiced, reads it to him aloud.

Of course you are mine! Otherwise I wouldn't kiss you, would I? Buuut… you are my best friend, huh? Are we going to get married and live together in a big house? I saw a beautiful white house with blue shutters. Right by a playground. And then my mom and dad can come stay, yes/no?

love Joy

Only a love note, then. He is destroyed, abandoned, as promised at the very start. Linda stops, her voice hanging in allegation.

"This is not to me," he objects. "I never kissed her. It's the other, the old guy…"

A choking laugh rips out of the woman. She removes mask and gloves. Once more it is briefly her, the radiance that almost saved him. She is shaking her head, biting back her lip, trembling hopeless, hopeless, as if he has just come home, his new coat torn, after she warned him.

Disclosure hits him, a kind of delayed confirmation, one more closeless closure. The numbers now make grief a deplorable indulgence. He gives himself five seconds of denial. He is beyond pretense, past anesthesia.

But the pain is duller if you don't stop all at once. "What about the other?" he asks. That Methuselah kid?

A look comes over her, a stunned confusion of disgust and fear: You knew, then? Everything? "They've come for him. The researchers." Her tone suggests accessory, smuggling, assisted betrayal, parental profiteering. "Oh Christ," she sobs. "How long did he have left, anyway?"

"And the others?"

She returns his matte stare, uncomprehending. Hallucination reaches a pitch where he can't remember if the carnage has really happened or he has fabricated it. He catches on to a dull ironstone finish to her eyes and realizes that she too is drugged. Has been for

a while.

She leans to take him, wrap him, punish, revenge, and absolve everything. But as she gathers to correct him from above, she crumples, hands balling at his clothing for a hold. She grips whatever she can cling to, the infant's reflex fist. To release would be to slip endlessly. She mumbles something into his sternum, words that bite their way through his cartilage. Te necesito. Me sofoco. Cuando no estás, no

tengo aire.

Saturated in death, she lapses into her real language. In less time than it takes her suction fingers to gouge into Kraft's neck, empathy undoes him. He never once asked this woman the first thing about her life. He sees it now, more real than his own. At last he makes the leap to why she searched him out. How she located him. What they are both doing here, hip-deep in baby genocide. All done to rewind the film's opening frames, rework them. Another shot.

Lit in this flash, he sees the assailant that reality arranged for her. Not Mama's wholesome, milk-headed brother, smuggling her into the closet and pounding away at her for years, terrifying her into a pact of intimacy from which she would never emerge except in obsessive giving. Her smotherer is more sinister, darker, southern. Every hour of her life, each time she moaned in hurt pleasure at Kraft's touch, it was in the fantasy that she might open her eyes and see him, her destroyer, might spit in his face or fall bleating into his arms. Love: the abuser's name she swore at knifepoint never to reveal, paying its nightly visits, refusing to kill and deliver her, however old she grew.

Refusing until this instant. Kraft looks at her for the first time, infected, condemned. Nothing is left him but her, and simply loving her back is worse than all imagining. She tears away from their crutch embrace. She darts a look over her shoulder at the insanity around them, fleeing it down blackness's alley. He searches her face— Linda? — but she stares back wildly.

"Let it die then," she pronounces. Let us all suffocate. Be snuffed out along with these babies — the best release anyone can hope for. She whips her head back and forth, screaming soundless acceptance, flush up against the sick proximity infusing every instant until the last.

He tries to close the gap between them, to sedate her somehow. But she pulls back from his hand as from a brand. "You touched me," she tells him, lapsing back to a numb scold. "You'll have to rescrub."

Cataclysm spreads in front of him, all but complete. He reads the report already, the way it will appear in the arch piece the Chief will assign him for next month's book club. How we murdered our children. What form will explanation take this time? The one the times demand. Corrupt survival fable, deranged beyond recall. Based, as always, on actual event, but garbled in desperate retelling.

Unless he tells her. For once, a firsthand account, a transcript beyond the journals, the papers, the nighttime anthologies. He will say what all eyewitnesses have, since the first fireside. He will tell her: I saw them. I know now where they are off to. I know where they came from. They have left us behind, with nothing but this thin plot to live on. To keep alive another sentence longer.

"Linda," he says. How does it go again? Clap your hands. "Linda. Listen."

A white-clothed male, mid-thirties, climbs to the top of a public hospital in a terminally ill Angel City neighborhood on Wednesday night of the world's week. Children, abducted at dusk from their rooms in front of a thousand witnesses, excitedly ring him. Up through the lobby they've come, past the receptionists and nurses' stations, avoiding the banks of public elevators shuttling like scythes, keeping instead to the stairs, taking these at a clip remarkable for so impaired a band.

They rise as a mass, up, always up, scaling the sealed escape shafts. They make their way airward, bubbles on a hull. In shifts, slung over his shoulder, the man carries, fireman style, a girl dying on the edge of puberty, an amputee, an earnest sailor-suited youth with suitcase, a wound victim whose lungs would not last one flight unaided.

They reach the roof long after last visiting hours. On this stand-in sod of tar and pebbles, under a forest of vent excrescences, cooling ducts, pipes, and wiring that make meshes beyond all power to trace, they group and take a sounding. If one saw…

No one sees. But if—that neverword, the home to all meaning: if you could see, it would all seem perfectly to scale, a school fire drill, except for the giant Christopher in their midst.

The air is unexpectedly harsh, the children not properly dressed, the city exhausted, packed to pointlessness with traffic, more meandering than any of them imagined. The tales spell out their route, like charms on a bracelet that must be read in order. But what if they've gotten the stories wrong, misread them?

Over the edge of this roof, all the way out to the olive-obscure horizon, no sign of the place they must head toward tonight. The chance of their arriving intact shrinks to nothing in these sterile extensions of poured stone. They waver now, while the helicopters home in, following the flood beams like shepherds tracking their nova.

But hesitation, however real, lasts no longer than their condensing breath. At a single syllable from the man they are off, stepping across the hedge, passing disembodiedly over the building's barrier through that pale, acidified, solidifying Angelino smog wall, taking the Imperial Highway in a few leaps. They set a new direction, one that has been hiding in orientation's rose until this moment, mimicking the other compass lines, now revealing itself as perpendicular to everything.

Drop the medicines and accoutrements, the intern commands. Reduce our carrying weight. Keep a change of clothes, a toothbrush if necessary. One luxury — that bedtime book, common property, with the lavish illustrations. Lightness is all in such ventures. Already we're too near the limits, the threshold of the opaque. We will never arrive at the place until we've stripped back to the core.

Empty-handed then, awake, they track the freeway for a while along a hidden frontage. They look for that familiar parlor door left open, the gaping frame inviting them softly into body-warmed damask, conversation's paneled room.

Landmarks fall away below: City Hall. The Observatory. The immigrant's triple hand-built towers. The Archangel Gabriel. And beyond — those banked windmills milking the desert crevasses, panhandling energy from the air. The evidence of migration's rest mass recedes beneath their feet: basalt heads leaning back into the island. Pacific missionaries adrift in an open boat. A stone fence the length of a continent. Golden mountains tapering to single points. A road spreading from Persia to Spain. Fifty-ton rocks rounded up into standing circles. Glass fragments clustered in cool frequencies, opening their transept apertures onto heaven.

They sleep in the open. Talk around their temporary camps is always the same: the nature of the scavenger hunt itself, where they are headed, how close the trailing police and hospital authorities might be to catching up with them.

Tell us one, the children plea-bargain, before they'll go to bed. And the lone adult must improvise this evening, from memory, a story of origins, having misplaced the picture book somewhere in transit.

A duchess, riding in style along a dusty road, stopped to dispense charity to a woman who was nursing in the dirt, mourning last year's laughter. The beggar's twin infants, helpless, hungry, crusted with stale infection, incited the duchess's indignation. "Woman, where is your husband? How is it that you are left alone with two mouths to feed?" The beggar had no answer, so her wealthy sister generously supplied one. "This is what comes from lying with two men."

The beggar filled with an outrage as pure as poverty. She cursed the duchess: If twins were the price of bigamy, then let the lady bear as many children as days in the year. This the duchess promptly did on Good Friday, Id al-Qurban, the Holi, Chinese New Year, Liberation Day in the year X. Three hundred and sixty-five at once, and all the boys were named John and all the girls Elizabeth, in the language of whatever land each one wandered into from out of the open womb. A bastard a day? What became of them?

In the space of their first evening they were gone. Half walked into central Asia. Two fashioned a dugout and island-hopped across Oceania. Three or four dozen learned that cancer-baffling skin trick and stayed in Africa. Almost as many turned ghostly white, plowing the inhospitable North. Fifty fanned out across the Americas. One child joined a scientific expedition to both poles.

And their lives? Did they reach where they were going?

Twenty-three were shelled out of their villages. Eleven stood up in front of tanks with bricks. Another twelve drove the tanks. Ten percent were sent to camps, and relocation, for half these, was consummated. One little girl became a child star,

touring the world under an assumed name. A hundred and one had to interrupt their lessons to set up in business prematurely. Several made the hajj, sauntered

to Compostela, ascended to the Forbidden City. Six performed as prodigies. Five joined the circus. Four served as illegal couriers. Two more were State Department plants. Seventeen succumbed directly to curiosity, and the remaining majority died in doorways, puffed with poisons and ingested antidotes.

Not one stopped here for any length of time. Kilometer logging started at once, although the motive for mass exit may have been nothing but the search for a meal or a pair of good long-distance shoes.

The story makes due for the moment, scares even the oldest obediently to sleep. But in the morning, some of the smaller children are sorry they ever came. The littlest fade first, the heavily hurt, the limbless, the ones with the fractional hearts. Children who would have died tomorrow in bed have been made to travel distances that would cripple the fittest adult. Enchantment frays at the end, and the whispers begin.

The hospital beds look better at this distance, their diseases less inevitable. Giving themselves up would be as easy now as standing still and waiting to be found. After the additional distance of this day, even the longer-legged among them begin to fade. Are we there yet? How much farther?

An old question, older than anyone alive. Desk-disciplined, sepia ten-year-olds in Meerut, the week before the Sepoy Mutiny, thumbing their dog-eared, half-century-old copies of Songs for the Nursery, were expected to acquire it by heart, recite in perfect imperial accents:

How many miles to Babylon?

Threescore miles and ten.

Can I get there by candle-light?

Yes, and back again.

The Children of God, threescore and ten years under Babylonian captivity, made discreet inquiries into their own evacuation. What are we after? That convention hall where all the planet's hidden children congregate. Some other place that might clarify what has happened here. Almost there? asked the Saxon schoolchildren on the Rattenfanger expedition, and once again on those night transport trains six and a half centuries later. How much longer?

If your heels are nimble and light, you may get there by candlelight.

But where? Get where?

This short list of escaped pediatrics is not the only band out and about, skirting the shoulders, the back alleys along the interstate lanes, tonight. The place is awash in child villages, from Nebraska to Dinka-land. Solitary adolescents walk across the outback, threading the way to the scattered Places of Dreaming. A school full of Welsh miners' children vanishes under a mountain. Ge youths seclude themselves upriver for decades. Whole divisions of preteens wander the Vakhan toting guided missiles. A class of Bolivian villagers follows an odd child to the Land of the Grandfather. Pubescent refugee males form autonomous boy-nations that drift through the sub-Sahara. Several thousand children for whom adulthood would have been an unnecessary elaboration put themselves at the service of causes, hungry for martyrdom, a massacre the equal of their innocence.

They are leaving now in all epochs, all regions, packing off by candlelight. Stories continue to pour in. Myth shades off into reportage, fact into invention. If, tomorrow around the fire, to seed the needed child-courage, the one leading this group God-knows-where were to make a diagram on a strip stranger than a Möbius, dotting every place a child has ever disappeared, would a revealing curve take shape? A tendency, a table of tides, extrapolating to reveal that one spot, the Babylon that whole schools strike off to at all hours, losing everything to reach?

So many are adrift, out of doors late tonight, too far from home, migrating, campaigning, colonizing, on pilgrimage, displaced, dispersed, tortured loose, running for their lives — so many interrogate the miles there and back that any myth that need might invent to map their progress will somewhere, in time, be born out. Even this one. This one.

Their movements are as plentiful as the places in the world they cannot get to. The paths they take are more fractured, less predictable than the weather on this late-summer night that sets them loose. "Tomorrow," the lone adult promises them, "we'll be home."

It is a loving enough lie, omitting only to add that home too is a way of leaving. It is about leaving, a departure as certain as any urge, longer even than the sense of having come from there. The pleasant clapboard, the kitchen table, so perfect for late-night reunions, waits patiently for its occupants to come back. But there will be no stopping. Their return will be brief: two nights, a long weekend at most, over the holidays.

Whatever the house this band might at last locate, the smell locked in its furniture, piping through the radiators, ungluing from under the wallpaper will be the smell of people who have long since disappeared. In through the open front window will come the scent of meadows, burning woods, rain forest, tundra, jungle, sea floor, nitrogens resting a minute in skeins of soil on their way back through the cycle. The first hint of open evening will be too much; they'll be off again, kitchen tables carrying notes of summer flights. At most a way station along the route, home will be less than the lightest touch, long outlasted by the desire to reach it.

But just the mention of the word leaves the runaways, some who would not have lasted out the week in care of the anesthetizing State, ready to resume the first program of childhood: the command to quiz the world. For a day longer, they are certain of forever, and the night is theirs. They can see in the dark; their eyes are yet that mint.

The tour leader removes his coat, hospital issue, insignia indicting, and places it under his head here in the grass. Perfect roadside pillow. On all sides of him these new lives curl up, still proof in the recall of a longing longer than belonging. They have not been around sufficient years yet to believe in any myth so transparent as permanence. They want tonight's installment before dropping off. Those three hundred and sixty-five siblings: How did they end? Did they ever meet again? Oh, perhaps. Over the years. They get together every so often, what is left of them, to celebrate their birthday. They compare notes, the layouts of the place, all the secret excuses to push on, to navigate. They talk about open land, doors left unlatched, places where they might build cities or ways they might tear down their earlier, terrible mistakes.

They study economics, they write long books, always lavishly illustrated. They fill walls with murals of overgrown, forgotten, impossible lands of Cockaigne. They formulate a history longer even than the hope of its imminence. They send a deep-space packet-boat probe straying in the muted vacuum for millennia, seeking searching for a place it might finally touch down, carrying as interplanetary barter a parcel of stories, pictures, messages in threescore and ten globe-bound languages all unintelligible to any being the Voyager might one day come across, each reading "Greetings from the children of Planet Earth."

This is one that my older brother the surgeon gave me, his little brother the storyteller. No more than the slightest Just So, about how the once-monk came to own a framed letter of appreciation thanking him for saving two child lives out of a hideous many.

He was trauma surgical resident in Watts when the recurring nightmare happened on his shift. The papers have all the details, if you want to read them.

I sent him my draft, to see if he might somehow be able to save it too from its inevitable end. My best intentions had failed to disperse the bleakness of the real.

He said, "Call the woman up. Linda." The one I'd once danced clumsily with at the Pasadena Women's Club. "She's still in L.A. She has a story for you."

She did. From her hospital office, Linda told me of life eavesdropping again, exceeding the worst make-believe, horror for horror, joy for joy. She described a little girl whose life had just replayed the one I had invented. For better or worse, this one was saved.

The story meant nothing, except that it had happened.

I asked her about the boy.

"Which boy? Oh, him. He'll be back." They always come back. Next year, next class.

"How do you live?" I asked.

I could hear her shrug. "I live just fine. But a child dies of poverty every two and a half seconds." One at her every fourth word.

She, like my big brother, is unmarried and childless, though neither is old yet, except in soul. Maybe they are too bound by all these lost histories and physicals to make more hostages.

If it were possible, I would tell them how, under a different binding, they live another, open book. Someone else's narrowly rescued life story. Yours.

"Does it have a happy ending?" Linda asked. "I want a happy ending. Make someone donate their organs, at least."

Someone donates their organs, all of them. You.

Remembering some old pain, forestalled until now beyond all the odds, you map up this tale. "That's enough for tonight. Go to bed."

These words sound out loud, as if spoken to a child, sitting on the top landing in the dark.

You make no response, not even objection. Growing bolder, as oldest children do (this one even older than the man he pleads with), the boy pushes his luck. "Tell that spooky one again." You know. You, Mom, those sick kids. Wandering at random.

He wants a scare that will dispel his worst fear.

The memory comes back, intact as original violence. It cuts into you, insurgent, deep as the first urge, the desire to strangle in the crib this thing that will destroy you if so little as one of its perfect cuticles is cut back.

You hate the boy for how he has forced you to love, to love him like, yes, like a child. The first, the most sickening: a love so awful that you must watch the creature go down, calling you, stunned that you do not step in with the effortless rescue. You know now how you will watch him fall, fall forever, a fall that will not stop with skinned knee or broken arm, a cast the school friends can sign in pastel. The end of all falls is impact without end. You cuff him, ruffle the baseball cap, run your hands through the luxurious hair. "Tomorrow. Remind me." With appropriate groans, he stomps up — always up — to his room at rooftop.

In the kitchen, you ask this woman — this other with whom you share this house, these offspring this life — whether perhaps we have been assembled here in safekeeping awaiting some return.

What do you mean? she asks, although she knows what you mean. It always comes down to this. Every night.

You tell her again of that spacecraft, launched back when you were both too young to know you were young The one with the pictures and recordings, the message in all those languages. One day the rest will trace it back to us from where they have vanished, drop by, ask us to come out and play. But all they will know how to say will be the only words we've taught them: "Greetings from the children of Planet Earth…"

She laughs at the idea, and hurt, you defend. You follow her up to bed again, in the dark.

On the way, you find the blanketed shape huddling at the top of the stairs. The woman, your wife, handles it this time. The killing responsibility of care, split down the middle between you.

"What are you doing here?" she demands, in the playacted voice of authority. "Get back up… You're supposed to be asleep. Didn't jour father just tell you…?"

But it's the little one this time, the girl, and her eyes are burning wet, incredulous, on fire. There is a look to them, such a look it scares you both.

It can be only one thing one discovery painful enough to rate that gauge. Remember? Remember it? And yes, she blurts out, confesses, each word catching tearing into her with the merciless beauty of the thing. "I finished it. That book you gave me? Your old favorite? I just finished it."