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.