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 smelclass="underline" 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?