Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  “Oh, hockey is it? So you go for the rough stuff, do you?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help myself. When I see those enormous guys body-check one another into the boards . . . Mmn!”

  “Do psychological bruises count?”

  “Afraid not. They’ve got to be real, flesh and blood owies.” When he suggests that they watch some surgical study videos together, she slaps his upper arm. “I may be perverse, but I’m not sick.”

  Exactly: whole, hearty, vigorous. Which is why she shines out in this place, a minister of health touring a plague house. She agrees to a movie date. But it has to be a commercial release somewhere, about teenagers bopping forward to the future, or loved ones coming back as ghosts.

  “By the way,” she adds as wistful caveat. “You may want to keep in mind, I do happen to be ten years younger than you.”

  “Which one of us are you warning?”

  THEY MEET OUT at one of those hundred-and-forty-four-screens-under-one-roof places. The requisite separate cars, of course: it’s a Pacific Rim first date, and they want to do things right. Kraft loads his beeper for the evening with the weakest batteries money can buy. He picks Espera out from across the packed lobby, like there’s a moving flood spot glued on her. They’re both a bit buzzed. Linda buys enough Milk Duds to keep the Vienna Choir Boys dosed until all their voices change.

  When they seat themselves, she launches into what for her passes as the most self-evident coming attractions topic in the world. “Davie Diaz is in extraordinary pain. I know you said that a certain amount was inevitable for the first couple weeks, but I don’t even know where to start with him. The Wilson girl, on the other hand: you seamed her up so beautifully that she barely even needs me.”

  She speaks quickly, as if needing to squeeze more syllables out of her finite column of air than pneumatics allows. “What’s your take on Joy?”

  “I’m in favor of it.”

  “You juvenile. Are you sure you’re a decade older than me? Twelve-year-old Asian female, presenting with severe incursive . . .” Her words are like Care’s ushers, roving up and down the aisles, swinging their flashlights. “Joy, with the impossibly long last name. Cambodian or something.”

  “Pali,” he murmurs. A memory from across immense distances sounds out the edges of his mouth. But the look is too foreshortened to be made out here in the darkened hall. “I mean, the name is Pali. Joy Stepaneevong.”

  She looks at him as if he has just revealed himself to be the Gretzky of grief interdiction. “You are a doctor, aren’t you? Oh, Kraft. What in God’s creation are we going to do with her?”

  “I’ve not actually met her, tell you the truth. I’ve looked over the . . .”

  “Cojones! You’re slicing into a little girl’s foot on Friday, and you haven’t been down to see her?”

  The trip to Maui is off. The double funeral too reverts to separate tabs. Exuberance dies on the vine, replaced by a hard little spoor case of disappointment. “I suspect I’ll get around to it,” he enunciates.

  “Sorry. That was out of line.” She clams up, curls, braces herself for the worst. Her flip side is instant, and the withdrawal has something brutal and expectant to it. She tosses a raven’s lock with one hurt hand. Faster even than their first flirtation, the whole promising lanyard unravels. Her chest heaves discreetly, tender lip trying not to quiver, to be found out.

  “No,” he rushes out. “My fault. It’s that time of the surgical cycle.” He gets her to snicker, despite herself. Oh, Linder; do I need you already, a perfect stranger? “It’s just that . . .”

  Say it, then. It’s just that, if you knew all their names, if you staked your heart on the prognoses of even those most likely to survive, you’d keel over with the bends, die of decompression sickness inside a week. What can she possibly know of the technique, of the essential, deadening distance from accident that one must preserve? Her kind of care would kill the death-defying skill instantly, if ever once admitted out loud.

  “Linda. Maybe it’s indicated by all the studies, but I just can’t do the hand-holding thing.”

  At these, his words, a second change smooths her surface. As drastically as she dropped into vulnerability, she is back. She cups her all-protecting hand, crooks her pointer at him. “Com’ere, little man. Let’s see.” His cardiac muscle bangs up against the chassis like an adolescent’s. She takes his hand, stretches out each of his fingers in turn. She folds his palm into hers for the first time, holds it as if embracing the prodigal son. “I’d say you do all right.” The house lights dim on cue and the feature begins.

  During the film, she is wonderful. She organically annihilates the armrest between them. At certain key points in the plot, she nudges him and scribbles circled numbers down on a note pad produced from her purse. Afterward, she extemporizes at length the thoughts that each number stands for. Number one is that according to her, people don’t really talk like that. Number two is that they should have had the Russian and the American switch briefcases by accident. Number three is she wants to know how high the feature’s leading love interest ranks on his personal lust-o-meter.

  “Know what?” she asks, vamping for him. “If you stay on this side of the lobby, they don’t recheck your ticket.” She casts him a challenging nostril flare, suggesting they partake of a hundred and forty-four films for the price of one. Well, what the hell. He missed this kind of thing the first time around. So they take to screen hopping, rolling from one anthology of images to the next in best tragical-comical-historical-pastoral style, giggling at all these eternal middles of stories, each one ludicrously stripped of any sense of beginning or end.

  They watch, in converging splices: the story of a woman who gets gang-raped in a bar, a reexamination of Chicago mobsters and one of quiet Nazis living in Cleveland, a stock market scandal torn from yesterday’s headlines, the real-life events of a horribly disfigured kid, a heady biopic of the discoverers of DNA, one of an early film mogul, of an early automobile antimogul, the pioneer astronauts or folks very much like them, Billy the Kid or a pack of teens very much like him, teens triumphing in historic sporting-event re-creations, teens inadvertently starting the Third World War, aliens inadvertently starting the Third World War, and adults advertently starting the Third World War. Every one a virtual fact, actually dramatized. Based on a true story.

  Stories like you read about, and all included in the price of entry. They do the Scheherazade thing all over again, only this time it’s not just the beautiful child-bride who’s gonna lose her head if the spell of narrative slips. Should the film break or the power brown out with the last unpaid bill for fossil fuel, should the projection booths simultaneously proclaim themselves autonomous republics acting in the name of fundamentalist revenge squads everywhere, should the two of them be caught and sent home on movie probation, the death sentence will at once fall not just on this one double-dutch evening but on the whole heterogeneous experiment in migratory, free-market, fiction-consuming, two-car-date democracy. This multimovie complex will take its place alongside ziggurats, galleons, the colonial pith helmet—all the museum bric-a-brac emblems of lost eras in the world’s blind expansion.

  Linda laughs, drags him by the arm into another show-stall. At the peak of her giddiness, he feels out her mouth with his.

  She stops laughing long enough to kiss him back. The sneaked interval reveals just how many years there are, in fact, between them. It synopsizes the drama of two health professionals who have only just met, out on a mobile Saturday night, testing the myth-edge of accessible, Valley happiness. Yet he cannot help but wonder, despite lips whose novel turns compel his full attention, despite the plot complications hinted at in the feel of her hips, despite her hand wandering across his back, tracing out a story thread that could lead anywhere at all—he cannot help but ask himself how, exactly how things are going to end this time.

  GOTTA GO SHOPPING, he announces. Sort of thing a body needs to resort to every now and again.

 
; “Shopping?” Plummer echoes incredulously. “As in food shopping, you mean? You realize, don’t you, that grocery stores have become the exclusive last resorts of hopeless reactionaries and the desperately poor?” Common knowledge, man. Who in this self-respecting world eats at home anymore?

  They sit in the Sauna, a gritty cross between locker room and on-call lounge, so baptized because of the uninsulated heat pipes that hang out of the ceiling, peeling the wallpaper and misting the furnishings with a light coat of mildew. Ordinarily, well-offs like Kraft and Plummer would have to pay big bucks to do this kind of slumming. But here in the charity rotation, it’s just one of life’s simple fringe bennies and franking privileges. Add to this the rooms Plummer has christened the Squash Courts and the Jacuzzi—obscure maintenance function facilities now employed by residents in competitive rituals of moral toughening—and one has a complete home away from home.

  Plummer, hands down the toughest among them, has food stores in this neck of the world’s woods pegged. The places are hopeless archaisms. Ordinarily, Kraft has no trouble avoiding them. But when, the thousand and one movies having all ended happily, he asked the lovely Linda for a repeat engagement, he could come up with no restaurant suggestion that she found both edible and politically correct. “Why don’t you cook something for us, Ricky? That’d be different.”

  Different indeed. He hasn’t brought a foodstuff under his roof for months, aside from the odd soda cracker packet and single-dose PCB tub of marmalade pocketed from Carver’s subsidized eatery. And yet, the prospect of rolling around in the deeper spots of his shag with a woman of mixed ancestry who is still in her early twenties is enough to make him want to suffer the whole avuncular hunter-gatherer charade, and like it.

  “You going alone?” Plummer resorts to muted, deputy-sheriff intonation. “Good God, buddy. Be careful out there.”

  Kraft, to keep from having to give the forced grin, asks what his blademate is doing for sustenance this evening.

  “Is that an invitation?”

  Absolutely not. Read my lips, as the commander in chief likes to say, in an era when actions no longer speak louder than even the softest subvocalizings.

  “Well,” Plummer wheedles, “I’ve kinda had my eye on that cast-off of yours. You know. That Nurse Spiegel? What we used to call sloppy seconds when we was kids?” The uses of loneliness rear their ugly hydra heads. Is Kraft himself the last person on this coast who didn’t realize he and Nurse S were an item? “I figure she’s had enough time to get over you, but not enough to resist the temptation of a sudden and insensate rebound relationship. Maybe ask her out to this little candlelight place on Far Point Pier . . .”

  Far Point was wiped out by storms last spring.

  “Was it? I never heard. I’ve been busy. Well then, that Dishpansation place on Ventura?”

  Torched by the cattle-rights activists.

  “Holy jump-up-and-sit-down. What the hell’s happening to this place? Drugs, Mr. Rico. Tell me: just how responsive might everybody’s favorite RN be to the Tastee-Freez phenomenon?”

  The grocery store, when Kraft at last faces it, is its usual, fluorescent humiliation. Food Warehouse, that stately rollerdrome, smacks of historical emblem. It seems the penultimate whistle stop on the Big Parade from pickle barrel general store to palatial Hot-to-Go emporium. Standing in embarrassment in the produce department as they weigh his goods, Kraft fights the urge to shout, “That’s okay, I trust you.” At the meat counter, he sees this woman in dark glasses who he thinks may have been the oldest daughter in an ancient family sitcom, a formative, masturbatory fantasy of his. She warns him off with a “One word and I’ll radio the SWAT team” look.

  Half the food packages bear, on their printed labels, black, fake “Actual Price” numbers, inked out by the same press run in red, the universal color code for Discount. The afterthought text reads: “Your Price: Only . . .” How stupid do they think we are? Or rather, how stupid are we obliged to be? Kraft forgets to weigh his bulk lentils, and the cashier makes a tremendous pedagogical show of sending the sack back with a runner, personally apologizing to the line behind him for the man’s hopelessness.

  Only when he gets the ingredients home do things really start to get fun. It’s been years since he’s cooked anything except with the cauterizer, but this seems child’s play. Why haven’t I cooked more often? I mean, they tell you all the necessary ingredients right up front. Then they step you through exactly what you need to do to put it together. Just like assembling that old one-to-whatever scale model of the Graf Spee with Dad.

  He thinks: If I can remove and reattach a living, three-inch kidney, I can certainly shuffle a nine-inch dead soufflé. Christ; anybody can cook. All the essential vitamins and iron, plus the perfect seduction thrown in for grins.

  She buzzes. Kraft casts a last panicked look around the efficiency. He’s had the foresight to stick everything in the utility closet, and the place is looking sharp. Standing tall. But Ms. Espera is not even halfway through the door before her face makes this incredulous O, like she’s just witnessed a murder. “You live here?”

  Why? What’s wrong with it?

  “Oh, nothing; I’m . . . just a little surprised, that’s all. Say. How much are they paying you, anyway? Do you have a lot of debts from med school or something?”

  Not the first impression of choice. But he still has his culinary trump card with which to win this woman’s undying affection or six months’ worth of lust, whichever lasts longer. The soufflé comes out looking like the Thing from Three Mile Island. He can’t understand it. He goes through a Morbidity and Mortality session with her, talks out the recipe, insists that he did exactly what they said to do. Linda explains to him the difference between beat and fold, a semantic differential he had attributed to the pursuit of rhetorical variety.

  “But it’s delicious,” she objects. “Hasn’t affected the taste at all.” And she laughs with her mouth full, blockading the bits of exploding food with a gesture hazardously endearing. She insists on washing the dishes right after they finish, before the microorganisms can claim their eminent domain. And she invokes all the magic little rituals the female will make of the slightest procedure.

  “Now,” she says, drying her hands gingerly on his lone dish towel, “are we going to do some aerobics for a little bit, or what?”

  The assorted alarms pounding through him flush a rush of neurochemical pheasants into the air from out of their cover in the undergrowth. “I believe we are.”

  She nips variously at his face. They lower each other slowly to their knees, hands blindly reaching out at violent angles for support. Then they are sitting sweetly in one another’s laps, gently necking, mouths in each other’s mouths.

  This has no precedent for him. Adrift, cut loose, a little more blessedly free, at the mercy of the equatorial currents. They begin to explore in earnest, hungry but shy, like pre-meds set loose with Gray’s. What is her waist’s wave, the taste of her undulating armpits? How does the scoop of her scapula surprise, the taper of her calf turn imperceptibly into ankle? He all of a sudden knows nothing of anatomy but the gross outline, the generic stamp. Form is uniquely overhauled again in her particulars.

  She is so alien, so deliciously not him. That’s it, that’s why his body craves her foreignness. His appetite for sexual pleasure kicks in, follows its intimate program to rediscover—again and again—the heft of this new instance. Vintages, mint conditions, proof bouquets. Her parts are as unique as core samples of fading sunlight. They loosen another notch, from sitting to slouching, ever nearer the carpet. There seems to be always one more buckle to her. Her hand, lighter, longer, lets its tensors clamp against him in a way he has never before mechanically known. She curls girlishly atop him on the floor, and through her body’s otherly weight, he recovers his own.

  Flavors, he decides. Life at any time of year always comes down to flavors and focal distances, magnifications, the concentration of waves into visible, scalding frequencies. T
he textures of the silky cotton he strips away from her are infinite. The smells extruded from her body’s many passages form a complete concordance. What will her next anomalous patch of skin be like? The wayfarer’s question, the only one worth wondering about, extends indefinitely.

  She begins nosing him all over, eyes closed, head tilted intoxicatedly forward. Sniffing him like a truffle hound. Her eyes bat, her succulent lashes lap his neck. Her hand grips his trachea; thoughts of Plummer’s ER tales of eroto-strangulation flash through Kraft’s soaked medulla. What might he and she try out upon one another? How easily might dress-ups, all manner of exotic clothing, get out of hand. There is nothing they might not discover in themselves. She brings her mouth up to his ear. What taboo words? Could be anything, and in imagining the forbiddens she is about to try out, he fills almost to the point of spilling all over her.

  “Do you like me?” she whispers, wrenching violently on him in the dark. She holds his head in some decimal fraction of a nelson. In another minute, she will rug-burn his scalp. “Do you?” Answer me. Is it the extension of Linda into stranger spaces, or some cruel multiple, a sinister substitute teacher, her identical twin?

  “Do I like you?” Stupid parroting.

  “That’s right.” She tongues the question as through a police bullhorn. A growl issues from underneath her sternum while she pins his face in a three-point takedown. Yes or no. Let’s hear it.

  How can he begin to say? The shot seems to dolly slowly above this postprandial wrestling match until he stares down on the whole teeming planet from on high. Her question becomes the one thing anyone asks anywhere at this minute, in all time zones. It interrogates every home, hacienda, hut, Haus, health spa, and hovel in the world’s directory, and a fair chunk of the underground addresses. Superpower summits sashay around the issue. Corporate heads put it to pitiful proxy votes. Silver anniversary vets lip the litany over hurled crock potsherds. Internationally acclaimed actresses, the fluffy chenille of mass wet dreams, plead it with unseen audiences in darkened halls. Nurse Spiegel petitions Plummer with an unguarded glance as he makes his bluff pass at her back at Carver. Even Plummer’s pass is a crude paraphrase. Terrified children of the ward, half hardened criminals from birth, demand something in writing from parents who never show. Rebuffed, they seek it from surrogate candy-stripers just now tucking them in for the night.