“Truly shitty job,” says Kraft, up to his elbows in disinfectant.
“No, little Richie. That’s the small bowel resection, later this afternoon. This one’s slimy.”
“Shitty.” Kraft ignores him “Pitiful. First you flush the family out of their village. Then you take the village off the map and put them in a camp. Then you overrun the camp.”
“What’s this ‘you’? I was busy that year, I’m pretty sure.”
“Lead them to believe that an open boat . . . Sure, a boat, with this little puking kid, across half the Pacific . . . Toss her around assorted holding pens. Relocate her here, of all the godforsaken, fast-food-franchised, tar-paper-and-antennaed—”
“Doesn’t she have to get raped by Thai fishermen first? Don’t they always get raped by . . . ?”
Kraft just stares at him blankly, beyond everything, even disgust. Plummer’s shoulders flex an indifferent little eh. Perhaps boat people jokes are no longer au courant this season. He rifles his repertoire for comic crumbs about South American cattle prods or starving Ethiopians.
Kraft begins enunciating, always a bad sign. “Welcome to the United States.” Something in the pitch suggesting that Plummer is the cultural case in point.
“What, what? We didn’t murder this kid’s bone marrow for her. McDonald’s didn’t fuck up her leg. GM didn’t. Okay, Dow Chemical might have had a little hand in the matter. But tell me, champ. What the hell would of happened if the little china doll had stayed in Cambodia—”
“Laos.”
“Whatever. If she hadn’t gotten out, hadn’t escaped, hadn’t been allowed over here out of the pure magnanimity of the State Department? You tell me what’d have happened if she’d come down with this creepy leg-nibbling shit in her country? Those jungle cutters would have smeared her leg with a little betel nut and taken the whole thing off at the waist with a machete.”
Gravity crumples Kraft by the trapezius. He is several rounds of shock therapy past caring to answer. His insides are arid, desiccated already by ten years of apprenticeship en route to this continuous call. When he does get around to speaking, he talks to some captive audience nowhere to be seen.
“She’s the picture of eager docility. Talks in tunes. Lies in bed studying, because she doesn’t want to fall behind the class at school. She asks the nursing staff for books on the procedure we’ll be using. They say to her, ‘Wouldn’t you rather have something to color?’ She shakes her head, but respectfully, to keep from embarrassing them. She sits up in bed doing algebra, history, answering all the sample questions at the end of every chapter, never peeking, writing the answers into this little spiral notepad. Doesn’t even flinch at pain—”
“Tell me about it. I pulverized the girl’s foot in ER the night we admitted her. She just looked up and smiled forgiveness all over the damn place.”
“And then she goes and loses it completely, decompensates at the first little sputter of the traffic reporters hovering over the Harbor Freeway.”
“Is it true that they found her old man cowering under the bed in the middle of the night? Hiding out from Immigration? That they had to use the kid to talk him into authorizing the release? I heard that he signed it ‘Murrican.’ Only he wrote it in Lousish.”
“No.” Kraft’s eyes trace a migratory route around the operating theater, acquainting himself with the emergency exits. “The word was ‘Mawkhan.’ Regional dialect. A professional title. It means the man is a physician.”
“Oh, right. Absolutely. If that guy’s a doc, then I’m a . . .”
“We all know what you are, Thomas. We’re just waiting for the State Certification Board to figure it out.”
“Come on. No shit? The dude’s a doc? What’s his field?”
“Certified in cures involving the recall of a person’s errant soul.” Kraft exhales. If I remember the term correctly.
“Holy Om! Get that sumbitch to scrub. We need someone like that down in the ER.”
“Speaking of which.” Kraft, holding his hands clean, crooks an inviting elbow at the theater where the little girl is already put down, gassed on the table, like the evening spread out against the sky.
But Plummer takes the opportunity to bow out hastily. “The least I can do for you, Kraft old buddy, is to let you go on me owing one.”
Kraft puts off his clever comeback until he gets a chance to think one up.
The next thing he knows, he is cutting, following the surveyor’s chalk line, mushing the blade too softly into the brown anklet, forgetting everything he’s learned about the superiority of slicing over sawing. His eight years of examinations are suddenly as irretrievable as states and capitals or presidents. Of the five-hundred-plus skeletal muscles, he’d be lucky to be able to name ten and visually identify a half dozen. All the sophisticated scientific sheen strips off, leaving just the procedure right now under his hands. Strange pellets, bits of evil living gravel are loose, growing inside this girl. He must locate them the only way possible. He probes around by touch, making out structures both benign and insidious, things that would have been a marbleized blur to him this time two years ago. He loosens the invader trace, chases it with his rubbered fingertips, differentiates it from the pulpy, pink, enveloping striations of the host.
The shock of first gaping into an open life rips into him again. The landscape looks exactly as it must. What else can it look like? A streaky piece of marinated porterhouse, only pulsating. Lurching a little to one side every second or so, then falling aside. He works his way down through the dermal layers, pinning them back, edging closer to where he can slit whatever sickening pupa they might find free of its attaching gristle. How is he to describe this stuff except through today’s state-of-the-art material metaphor? Here’s your problem, ma’am. Leak in the fuel line. Bad IC chip. Evil spirits inhabiting the system housing. But breaking the seal may void your warranty.
The body overhaul shop is not a one-man operation by any means. What they intend to pull off this morning is yet another miracle by committee. Surgery is the most unlikely, corporate, bureaucratic cure since the King James translators. An entire relay team passes the baton continuously between the autoclave and the open body. All decisions, however cosmetic, demand referenda. Kraft is just one of a half-dozen functionaries milling about in the room, and far from the most critical player. The position of center forward probably belongs to the lady with her eyes on the monitors and hands on the gas valves.
But the person wielding the working knife at any given moment becomes the guy with the ball. Just as an audience sometimes mistakes the virtuoso in the pretty party clothes for the composer, even the surgical team may conflate the one sticking his pinky up inside a valve with the design engineer.
Today, Kraft is the international cartel’s front man, their carrier, the one they send out to slip past the douanes, to violate the border and dart back across with impunity on forged diplomatic papers. He fights against his innate, human ham-handedness the way those Ice Capades chimps struggle to stay up on skates. Whatever dexterity he can assemble depends on a stockpile of technical knowledge baroque in both mass and ornament. The quadratic can be solved by anyone of superior intelligence with the necessary patience and perfect retention, plus a dozen available years to sink into indentured slavery.
Kraft fidgets with a retractor. Here they are, making base camp just above this little girl’s foot. They’re in the absolute hinterlands, Hibernia, the outermost reaches of life, as far away from the core of the self-administered mystery as circulation permits. And yet, the terrain is already appallingly gorgeous. Sinew rivers cut their canyons down through layers articulate beyond the subtlest medical illustrator’s ability to survey. The color, texture, distensibility, tensile strength of the conduits and struts and cables, the delicate interfaces of ligament and capillary connecting inimical tissues, all the middlemen of this fabulous political economy, mirrored in their complexity at every level all the way down the stacked hierarchy into invisible collagens
, the excavated living preteen laid bare, lies touchable here, flush against her encasing wall, yielding yet giving away nothing to her correspondents, his groping, invasive tools.
A slit dead on the offending mass, and Kraft might stop further incursion. Hit it spot on and he could give this girl a birthday present of sixty more years’ worth of scrapbook particulars. Or make a slight backhand nick, almost identical, another cut straight out of the textbook, only this time the anarchist disease somehow escapes and her foot goes cold.
He’s not built for these constant judgment calls, continuously maneuvering in the millimeters between condemner and redeemer. Working his way by touch along the cut, Kraft stumbles up against a tactile hint of that tacit trade secret shared among all surgeons. A few years of this, and he will be lost forever to social contact, to all involvement in personality’s twists and turnings. What interest can outcome still have, once he has held outcome’s engine up close and arbitrary in his own hands?
Proximity to the bared root runs away with him. Merck’s countless pathologies expand into an involuntary party game. He cannot shake a stranger’s hand without making out tumorous mountain ranges under each mole. The lips of everyone he converses with twitch around the edges with impending Jacksonian seizures. The sound of stomachs ulcerating soars above the noise of this room. And even now, as he glances at the anesthesiologist, he can see the vein walls in her brain toy with the idea of collapse.
Even stretched, the tent of human skin seems insufficient to span the faces of the assembled surgical team or bind together their insides. He can see beneath, to the hideous, fatty slabs just dying to squirt out all over. Beneath the pretty sausage casing, webs of nerve niagara in spraying veils. He has peeked beneath the packaging and become hardened, like a kid disabused of Adventureland by accidentally glimpsing the motor underneath the talking puppet Plasticine.
Kraft knows already how he will end. He will wind up worse than the vegetarian butcher, the agnostic priest, the book-hating professor of literature, the notary forger. His destiny lies several notches lower than the lowest of these. It feels as if there’s no derailing, as if he’s already halfway there: the hypochondriac doctor. The misanthrope volunteer.
The Evangelist, it occurs to Kraft as he tucks back a reticent bundle of tibialis anterior, did not know his ass from the proverbial pothole. Nothing that the nervous system is capable of believing can withstand a hand shoved deep inside the wound. Only those on the conscious side of the general anesthetic during an operation will ever know the true reading of that parable. Nothing will devastate a man as much as a fist pushed wrist-deep into the open side, all the way up to the hilt. Kraft would jimmy the punch line just a little, to restore it to truth: blessed are those who believe, even though they have seen. And more blessed are those who haven’t seen, and are thus still free to believe anything they please.
These thoughts last for about one systolic flip. Then the sound of his team’s gossip drives them out. The background broadcast in the room lifts him into a trance of nonthought. He follows procedure in a coma of concentration, like a batter waiting out his pitch. When he reaches the region in upheaval, his clipping turns conservative. He feels himself taking too little tissue. Every too-shallow scrape misses a bit, risks having to reopen a few weeks from now, higher up the limb. Yet his blade goes diffident, almost flirting with anklet indifference.
The trick is to disengage. He must read this beating shank of foal back into pure, anatomical model. The green cloth hide-a-screen built up around the wound works a marvelous trick. But he must do the rest, must imagine, as he plucks out the most obvious infiltrating pellets, that he takes a grappling crane and clears out the Golden State Freeway, dumping every sleek little import into the bay. When the lay of the land makes it increasingly difficult to pluck out the offending logs, he shifts fantasies. He strokes the pink fiber with the flat of a blade, and it feels for all he is worth like satin against the back of a hand.
A bit of brain bails out of the image-forming cerebral cockpit, and he finds himself lying full-length alongside his private physical therapist, her dark cross-border eyes lit up like the point coils of a space heater. Oh, Christ, Linda: give him one more chance, if you are still alive, if you still remember him, if he can survive this procedure. This, the most tenuous fantasy of all: if their rapidly collapsing social order makes it through until his next night off, he might see her again.
The fantasy plays itself out. Linda will ask him desperately how it went, and he’ll respond, casually: Joy Stepaneevong? Oh, yeah. The boat girl. Well, we pulled the thing out without having to clip anything that belongs to her. What did I tell you? It always pays not to get too alarmist in these matters. Whole procedure was pretty straightforward, actually. She’s spanking; disease-free. We cleaned her completely with a few flicks of the whisk broom.
To win the woman Linda from the awful accident that waits for her like a lover at the next dark street corner, he must file just such an all clear. To keep her from the worst case is his only desire. He would hand her the perfect prognosis, pristine as a rash valentine and twice as reckless. This particular case, above all others, is the one she wants. Yet for his cutting hand, following the standard operational excision, to know the stakes means courting disaster. The case must mean no more to him than any other in the cattle call of lives he has already decided. Should he feel its specific weight, even in theory, he and the girl are both dead.
Autonomous lieutenants propel his fingers, destroying as little of the innocent-bystander tissue as they can possibly get away with. He knows he’s pushing it. He can hear his misses register in the Millstone’s tortured, adenoidal breathing. The man hovers over his shoulder, displacing whole air masses with each exhalation. Vast frontal systems blow down from the man’s Arctic Circle directly into Kraft’s inner ear.
Only, wait: it can’t be Dr. Milstein whom Kraft is—as the euphemism goes—assisting here. Milstein’s down in San Diego for a conference. Kraft’s had a minor TIA, or he’s suffering some overwork/deprivation combo phenomenon that someone in neurology could probably get a paper out of. Brain volleying up a little spatial-temporal racketball is all. By process of elimination, if it’s not the Millstone under the cap and gown wheezing behind Kraft, then it must be Father Kino. “Shorty” Kean. Little Napoleon.
Kraft snaps aware to that fact just as the said attending launches himself into an administrative shit fit. “Cut something. Cut something, goddammit. Not there. Why the hell did they ever let you through med school? What did you do, buy your way through your internship? What are you afraid of, son?”
What indeed? If Kraft is afraid of anything, it is of exactly what happens next. Dr. Kean starts flailing about in a fog of frustrated authority. “Here. Give me that.” And darting out, he grabs Kraft’s hand, of all the shit for brains maneuvers. Kraft manages to fight him off with a combination of reason, diplomacy, and testy resistance.
Kean will complain to Burgess this afternoon, and the Chief will have Kraft in for a talk tomorrow, ever so delicately reprimanding the insubordination before asking for impressions of the multivolume copy of The Man Without Qualities that Burgess lent him last week. What would the profession be without a dose of the obligatory Good Dad, Bad Dad syndrome? Even satanically real medical mills must stick to the script of TV General.
They close the girl, Father Kino still blasting the assburning afterjets. Kraft feels that he has given the girl a reasonable chance while leaving her the better part of her foot. He has not once, throughout the procedure, gone up north to have a look at her face. That’d be the last thing in the world he needs just now. The already unbearably familiar iodine tint of her skin around the wound is disabling enough. All he has seen is the taper of one calf, a shape remaining as distinct across the populations of the globe as faces, build, or hair. But this particular polynomial taper he could trace freehand. He knew it by second nature once, in a previous incarnation, before this profession took up subcutaneous residence
in him.
He stitches, punching his needle laterally through the complex ecosystem. He loops up the layered Dagwood sandwich in a way proven to leave behind the least surface scar. As he sews, an overlearned jingle skips trochaically through his head, a singsong rhyme he memorized once while learning the alphabet. Not that anemic, twenty-six-letter, tell-me-what-you-think-of-these. His tune taught an alphabet that flowed forth in more than four dozen symbols, a scatter pattern of phonemes too subtle for nonnatives to hear, let alone grip properly in their glottis. A poem, a song actually, in a language where all poems turn into songs because all words are pitched.
His was not the girl’s language, but the next dialect over. He spoke, once, a first cousin to the one Joy’s father used to sign away his rights and expectations. Learned it when exactly this girl’s age, the age when industrious children of this once-blessed mainland must typically commit their mental resources to acquiring that “We the People” paragraph and a half. The syllable rhythm lies intact in him, but long since irrelevant—a letter of intent forgotten in a strongbox until long after expiration date. Ratty, riddled with holes, fragments of the alphabet chant reassemble themselves. Gratification swells him, collapsing immediately in distress at how many letters are now beyond recovery, with no words to slip into the blank melody slots.
The bits he can recall lie like surf-polished shipwreck, detritus from the semiconscious coast of a place he inhabited once and left while the leaving was good. He hums the chewed residuals of the tune, one that might as well buzz about in his brain, staving off the latest rhythm-arrested, mega-euro-yen-dollar, ten-second singing sales spot for cola–cum–life insurance coverage. He hums: g as in chicken. K as in egg. The tune takes him through treacherous ng, bph—sounds his tongue still recalls but cannot talk the muscles into anymore. Y as in mythological giant gate guards. H as in owl, who hoos across the borders of all time’s alphabets.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 12
