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.