Before drifting too deep into the red zone of human empathy, Kraft indulges in an exercise of extended focus. He calls to mind how, in each of these hospitals across the city where he has served time, and in all the numberless institutions where he has not yet set foot—hospitals and research foundations and university labs all the way up the coast from Baja to Livermore and on into the wilds of BC, shooting out across the Aleutians into central Asia, down through the polyglot Indonesian archipelagoes, into the Indian subcontinent, reversing Alexander back to Our Sea and up into Europe, over the Atlantic to North America again, through the government-injected foundation mazes of the East Coast, propagating à la kudzu gulfward, stampeding the Dakotas like an all-terrain, all-weather, year-round ragweed—in all these facilities, one single human woman metabolizes. A strain of her culture inhabits major health institutions all over the planet. This lady, a world and wider, is named Henrietta Lacks, but goes by her pseudonym, Helen Lane.
She’s even better known by her nickname, HeLa, that oncological favorite cell strain of researchers the world over. The abbreviation is some cultured microbiologist’s idea of literary allusion. Hela, Norse goddess of the dead. This HeLa is the goddess of a spectral eternal life, metempsychosis of the petri dish. Since they scraped her tumored cervix four decades ago, hearty Henrietta lives on in hospices and wayhouses everywhere, even in the bowels of Carver’s own Knife and Gun. She splits, respires, ingests, and transforms nutrients—cancerous but immortal. Helen’s cells dream the dream of one world, patient in the dense foliage, waiting their cue to rise like rapturous doves.
She is the modern world’s oversoul; Kraft will go so far. Her spread is a bitmap index for these million points of hospital light running over the earth’s every wrinkle, trying to assemble themselves, spell out some vast declarative that would be visible from outer space—maybe Schiller’s “Ode,” an arrow delineating a continent-sized landing strip, the unit axioms of human geometry, or just another galactic backwater neon come-on insisting WE DO IT ALL FOR YOU.
Up here, seated dangerously on the unrailed ledge—not even a handhold should a gust of wind break his tentative balance—Kraft hears Helen’s breathing on the semiarid air. She will make her run soon, become not only the oldest living human, but the planet’s largest. Her cells, spreading through all longitudes, begin to reconnect, to learn how to talk to one another again. He sees, all the way down the Golden State, the local metabolite lines already laying themselves down.
The convertibles are out tonight, sea turtles massing on that one lunar interval to hit the beaches for an orgy of egg burying. A desert caravan of them, tops down, flog the blocks below, creeping randomly, probing, one rider per machine, each with a radio set to 10, tuned to the identical station. They comprise so many stereo simulcasts that, even from all these stories up, Kraft hears the disembodied messages take to the air and aggregate into a leviathan Announcer. He leans out over the ledge, daringly far out, tempting a shift in his center of gravity to change his life for good. Bubbling up from the cars comes this night’s incarnation of the reassuring, ubiquitous heartland accent, giggling shrilly that there are only ten shopping years left until the Blowout Clearance.
The aerial overview affords him a glimpse into the neighborhood’s after-hours transactions. In the middle of the next block, a quartet of heavies improvises a counterless concession stand. Spontaneously, the line begins to form, snaking in a direction covertly understood by all takers. And it’s not just members of select underclasses who join in this evening’s bake sale. Practitioners of all the proverbial races, colors, and creeds, the complete spectra of socioeconomic plumage drop by. Each participant knows the nature of the real estate. They’ve come to buy, finding their product without the benefit of megabuck broadcast ads or four-color magazine spreads. After a bit, Kraft begins to make out the formations in play—the deep safeties, the cornerbacks prowling out in the flats for the first sign of those who don’t belong. A sharp two-pitch trill and the whole carny operation instantly shuts down tight.
And Dopplering gruesomely, audible long before seen, a pack of wailing ambulances homes in from the worst of directions. The sirens shriek through these streets like kids furiously racing to kick the can while trying to yell ole-ole-all-come-in-free-o. With this flank attack, the roof too outlives its expediency for Kraft. Its promise of protection turns out to be as anachronistic as massive ramparts, post-saltpeter. He can go no place, no commute long enough, no hideout where they cannot beep him or obliquely conjure his assistance, his call night or no.
What in disintegrating creation do they expect of him? When will it be enough? Never, comes the siren’s singsong answer, the little disco ditty of this minute’s shattering accident. There will forever be as many demands on his technique as there are ways of children going wrong, ending up in this halfway hospice of disaster.
THE WAYS ARE many—more than he can keep apart. On Grand Rounds, he maintains the current catalog only by metonymic shorthand. He visits the Rib Metastasis, the Crushed Kidney, the Mitral Valve, the Saturday Night Special. Everyone is pathetically trusting, shouting excitedly at his bedside arrivals, calling his name out confidentially, intimately—Doc Kraft—as if urging on a stickball teammate. Pitifully friendly, fast to transfer, ready to love him more than they love their own fathers. Unfair comparison: half of them don’t know who their fathers are.
The Fiddler Crab knows. Fiddler’s dad decided that the prescription that Mom brought home from the freebie clinic to treat Fiddler’s cinder-infected hand was gibberish. The boy’s mitt decided otherwise. Now the Crab is back, claw immense and gangrenous, stinking so badly that Kraft can barely get close enough to schedule him for immediate draining.
He cannot linger, but must keep rolling down the roster. Next up, he checks the chart on the No-Face, a prepube whose misfortune it is to have been born with nothing from the bottom of the eye sockets down to the anterior palate. The plastics team has been working him for years, and after half a dozen reconstructions (although “re-” is an overstatement in the No-Face’s case) the boy is no longer completely a monster. He still resembles an Etch-A-Sketch something fierce, but he can at least go out in public. Kraft has asked to be allowed to look in on the next buildup. As dues payment, he is given what remains of the pre-op. He visits the kid on the eve of the procedure. The No-Face is fearless, cheerful, but still cowering behind the veteran campaigner’s blase affect.
Leaving the boy’s bed, Kraft is replaced, changing-of-the-colors style, by the pediatric psychiatrist from the rehabilitation team. The No-Face breaks into what will one day, after another half-dozen operations, begin to resemble a huge grin. “Dr. Kraft,” he calls out, grotesquely polite, the accents of an overrehearsed child star skipping over the years cheated from him, “I’d like you to meet my friend Linda.”
Kraft turns to go through the amenities and stalls at his first glance at the woman. Her face is imperative with memory. Her look is full of reminders, pieces of string tied around his finger that long ago rotted off. Brown dominates her register, with jet hair and black eyes that spring continuous surprise from wells of unlikeliness. Her build is assertive enough to make her hospital sack coat look like a poolside party dress. Hands sufficiently pudgy to keep them from preciousness, and calves to kill for.
Linda attacks the No-Face with tickles, laughing aggressively. “And this is my old buddy, Chuck.”
Chuck, through screams of pleasure, calls out to Dr. Kraft to intervene, stop this madwoman. But Kraft just stands there, helpless with sudden propriety. And probably Chuck doesn’t really want any help here. The boy is so completely in love with his physical therapist that Kraft’s only option is to get in line behind him and take a number. Linda, oblivious, stops tickling long enough to wonder out loud to herself, “There certainly are a lot of amazing creatures on God’s earth.”
“‘Creature’ is the right word for it,” Chuck laughs, pulling a grimace that exaggerates the plastic mounts lying beneath
his grafted skin.
Linda drops her whole beautiful, lip-round mouth in mock shock. “Why, I oughta . . .” And she sets to tickling him again. Like sharks smelling a feeding frenzy, the other children in the room pile over to join the altercation. “Yo!” she shouts. “Hold it, gang. Things are getting out of hand here. Okay, all of you: ‘I will not assault health professionals.’ One thousand million times.”
This elicits great squeals of pleasure—the most fun any of them have had all week. For some, the most fun they’ve had since their mothers set themselves on fire while freebasing. They set to work on the assignment at once. Like the immigrants to this continent that they are, they attack the problem via division of labor. They’ll do their punishment in huge, vertical, mass-produced columns, one word each. I I I I. Will will will will. Not not not not. The kid who gets “assault” breaks it into “a salt,” and the kid who gets “professionals” isn’t even in the ballpark.
“C’mon,” Linda says, pulling Kraft by his health professional’s sleeve. “Let’s beat it while we can.” The woman is ample, ample in ways that Kraft hasn’t even thought possible in years.
Half from memory of rosters, half from sneaking a peak at her tag, he tries, “Estefan?”
She brays. “Close. Espera. And assimilate that s a little bit, huh? My mama’s from Dairyland, U.S.A.” She clips down the hall, already on her way to the next child on her list. “Mestiza, I just met a pretty mestiza. . . .”
“Oh Jesus,” Kraft mutters, catching the cadence at last, if only a little. “I thought that word went out with the prewar genetics texts.”
“Well, we’re kind of an army surplus outfit, here. In case you haven’t noticed.”
“Richard Kraft,” he says, sticking out a paw that she is now too far down the corridor to grab.
“Oh, I know all about who you are. Now you’re going to ask me out to lunch?”
“Is that the book on me?”
“Yeah,” shouts a prematurely gawky kid just slipping past the two of them. “That the book on you.” Linda collars the child and tells him when he must show up at her office, downstairs.
“Now. You were saying?” She looks back at Kraft, her chin too curved to jut, her eyes wild with that gorgeous surprise.
“I was just about to confirm the ugliest rumors about me.”
“Right. Tomorrow at noon. The cafeteria, where you always meet Nurse Spiegel.”
Oh, that Nurse Spiegel. Well, yeah. Small world, just friends, etc. But Ms. Espera doesn’t wait for any clever protests. She simply states, “I’ll warn you in advance, I’ve got proven soul-saving tendencies.”
“Messianic and mixed blood?” he tries feebly. “Sounds dangerous.” But she is gone, ducking into the next doorway. In a minute, the room issues shouts of more free-for-all scrimmage.
Despite the public poop on him, Kraft has, to his mind, been involved in only three relationships that reached life-threatening proportions. One long followed by two shorts, the Morse letter D, if it means anything. It occurs to him, a fact dredged up from adolescent ham radio days, that a long and two shorts followed by another, terminal long would be an X. As in X marks the spot. As in just sign on the line marked X. Cross hair. Algebraic variable of choice. Universal placeholder.
Walking away, he cannot suppress a stupid lilt. He passes the nurses’ station, where it seems somebody’s had her ears to the listening post. Whatever the source of the info, Nurse Spiegel is wringing the phone like a chicken neck and saying into the receiver, “No, Dr. Kraft can’t be reached right now. He’s in Skulk Mode. Can I take a message?”
He looks up Linda and she is there, in his pocket two-way translation dictionary: wait, waiting, patience, composure, delay. In a holding pattern, like the rest of sentient hope.
But he doesn’t need to wait long to see her again, to learn why she agreed, his rep rap notwithstanding, to meet him for lunch. The answer comes swiftly, and it’s merciless in its disappointment. The woman wants to talk cases. She brings her list to lunch, although she clearly doesn’t need to refer to it. She knows all these kids, and not just by complaint. Names, dates, the whole curriculum vitae on each one of them, all lodged up in that voluptuous raven’s head.
Her mother may have been a cheese squeezer, but daughter Linda definitely hails from somewhere far south of white man’s sovereignty. She is a great and constant toucher, handling everything. She fingers the catsup bottle, feels the weave of his tie. “Can you help me at all with Suzi Banks?” she asks, clamping him familiarly by the upper arm. “The girl hasn’t spoken a word since you fitted the bag.” She dunks her chips liberally in salsa, downs them, brushing crumbs from his sleeve and smirking guiltily at her own healthy appetite. “And Chuck. God. Too brave, the boy. He doesn’t have the first idea about what he’ll be looking at once childhood is over.” She taps the back of Kraft’s hand in worried appeal.
“And oh.” She grabs his shoulder without a trace of self-consciousness. Propriety wouldn’t occur to her. Her nature lies completely beyond more median practices in these parts. She is clearly, constitutionally incapable of worrying about who she is or how she might be taken. She knows these things, the way her fingers already know the cut of his clavicle.
He grabs her back in return, on the opposing side. Pinches her a little on what he hopes is a radiating line. “Yes? Oh? What is it now?”
“And oh,” she repeats, smiling too strongly to be mistaken for coy, “I need to ask one of you how radical you expect Davie Diaz’s spinal thing to be.”
That “one of you” gives away his role for her here. “Spinal thing?” he asks, dripping with dryness. What he really wants to say is Davie? What’s with this first-name basis, Espera? Davie? Kraft would be lucky to place the boy by sight. “You’ve looked at the chart, haven’t you?”
“Of course I’ve looked at the chart. But you guys are so cagey on paper. Never put down anything they might hold you to. I want to hear the real story, out loud.” She footsies with him under the table, her toes on his arches. Her face pleads with him playfully, goofily. And his urge to get up and leave evaporates.
So he’s expected to do the consultant physician thing, nothing more. The irony of the situation is not to be missed: across the table from him hovers a face promising all the loveliness of final escape, sensuous lips savoring the salsa, seducing him to deliver. But all she wants delivered is more shop talk. She is the living apotheosis of the paging device. Messianic tendencies indeed. Even sex, the last refuge of free men, is turned to a mere marketing campaign, corrupted by altruism.
But the woman (and here’s the frightening bit) is even sexier for all her sainthood. Kraft watches her talk—conjugating with her hands, her flashing pseudo-senorita eyes, her three and a half octaves of voice arpeggiating amazingly from bari Bacall to trebly Billie Burke. And he thinks: Here, perhaps, is a woman even worth playing social worker with. They might make up their own rules as they go along. He twice tries to steer the topic away from child rescue and retrieval toward a bit of rehabilitory salve between consenting adults. For the moment, she will not bite, which is the hell of it, given the woman’s dentition. She sticks to business, displaying an impressive knowledge of anatomy, if some of the desired nomenclature is missing. Ah, but he could teach her the technical terms.
Well then, let him see how she looks when self-righteous, blazing, her principles affronted. A bit of Mexican spitfire shouting how you doctor bastards are all the same: you all think treatment ends with sterile bandages. “Linder,” he scolds her. A too-affectionate name derangement for the first half an hour. But she smiles at the liberty, a glorious, asymmetrical, arousing flare forming in her brow ridges. “Linder, all this holistic medicine stuff. It’s all a tad too type A for me.”
“You—! Not to be believed. I’m type A? You little boys arrange it so that you can stay up all night—”
“Night? Singular?”
“Go ahead. Prove my point, why don’t you? Stay up all week, then, with a doze
n spinning plates up in the air at once. Big tray full of shiny, sharp tools at your beck and call. You make this colossal mess and then leave us to clean it up over the next several years. Talk about MI candidates. You’re so wound up from constant jolts of fourth-and-inches stuff that you probably can’t even hold up your end of a decent dinner conversation.”
“Try me.”
“Only if I get to pay.”
“See? Type A. I knew it. Crying shame too.”
“Come on. Consider it a little payola. You let the drug company pimps take you out to floor shows and things, don’t you?”
“I have never let a drug company pimp take me to a floor show in my life.”
“No? But you accept the little bribes? The pens and key chains . . .”
“Nope. Nada.”
“The note pads with prescription logos up top?”
“Uh, well . . .”
“Well, okay then. This comes to the same thing. I take you to dinner. You do little favors for me.”
“I would love to do little favors for you.” He finally manages to slip in something of the old cadence.
A glaze spreads across her face, impish: “Yeah? Really?” Coquette, perhaps, but bathed in unmistakable pleasure. Surprise? Impossible. Looking the way she does? How could she have come this far, with those shoulders, that rib taper, these cheekbones, and not know what she does to half the men in every room she enters, and a handful of the women too?
“Yeah,” he says. He’ll let her pay for dinner. They’ll alternate every other lunch. She can pick up the theater and symphony tabs, and he’ll square the Maui vacations. The mortgage they’ll do proportionately by incomes. They can split the cost of the double funeral down the middle.
They both behave themselves admirably, right up until she must go keep her afternoon appointments. She amuses him with stories about having to prove her citizenship the last time she did a day trip over the border. “They started asking me all these questions I haven’t thought about since sixth grade. I panicked and confused Francis Scott Key with Julia Ward Howe. Finally got in by naming three of the U.S. Olympic hockey starters.”
Operation Wandering Soul Page 7
