Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  Exhausted ambulances fail to appear. Sirens don’t even bother going through the motions. East Angel City lies within earshot, hustled awake, listening, eyes pressed together, night-lights smothered, firearms at ready on the bed stand. Civilization, the soul’s slum clearance project, rolls over and plays dead. Practice suicide.

  He tests the air. His nostrils would core-sample the room if he could find it. He has been asleep for an epoch and a half. Just on the verge of falling. Still under. Eternally coming to. To what? He must be on call, Motel Residente. The Millstone and Father Kino, at work, have skipped a crucial step, general anesthetic. The scream issues from the operating theater, which they have somehow miked so that the howls . . .

  But it can’t be the hospital. The room lacks that chemical aroma of rotting flesh daubed down with Listerine. This must be the house he has just bought with that beautiful . . . No, another. A house he never should have left. How long? Where in the world? The shriek pierces him again. It penetrates his drums like poison. He hears, coldly mechanical, a hundred times more lucidly than waking.

  An aural virus slips between the crystal interstices of window glass without needing to break in. Laboratory toxin, sprung from its test-tube home, disperses a fatal help-me through his apartment air, waiting to sink a million microsyringes into his lungs in the dark. It slinks up, unkillably small and needy. It makes of his brain a downy bed.

  It implodes him. Girlish terror injects itself, becomes his. Fear worse than he has ever known, beyond the power of memory to compare. Anthrax fear, frenzied, thrashing but still. His corpse-to-be locks up with dread, except for a heart slamming on a buffet of vasodilators. Grotesque scenarios tear through him, teasers before our feature attraction. Millisecond Rorschachs, the deep stuff, the mound burials: the girl’s face, eaten away by bamboo rats. Her methodical ravaging by Green Berets. Fat shit-kickers slithering over her with mucused razor blades.

  His brain screams, Save her now. But the least twitch of his muscles would incinerate him. His spine fuses down its length. Commands to contract refuse to travel to his outer reaches. The constant emergency of his days has been drill for this moment, when he alone must decide all outcome. But now he seizes up against an unknown outside the threshold of control. The scream might be anything. Fictions proliferate. He cannot move.

  He cannot look. He knows already who it is, come here for help past giving. She has hobbled across town, over the unfordable expressway lanes on foot, one already dead. She hobbles this way to tell him that the nightmare case already races beyond his worst possible expectation. His core self, the real Kraft—the one before all deliberation—kicks in. And at the sound of moaning just outside his door, he lies still in the dark and dissimulates, denying that this is his address. The hit-and-run urge takes hold in him, with everything now on the line. And the rest of his life, spent explaining away . . .

  With each second, the charade of stillness gets harder to shake. Every click condemns him further into shaming it through to the end. She will die out there, hanging onto his window. With luck, she will be blown off by daybreak onto someone else’s lawn, to decompose before the police can trace her back to him. He snuggles up to final deniability in the snickering blackness.

  Something inside him, some uncondensed background radiation, bursts. White light cuts across the phosphors under his lids. He pushes up, shoves for all he is worth against the ice floe lovingly drowning him. And sudden as a saturated circuit breaker, he snaps.

  Gravity, switched on, smashes down on his pelvis, doubling him over. He bends erect at the waist, firing perpendicular like a spring-loaded doll. Untongued, an inarticulate blur tries to tear itself from his lips, but his face muscles stonewall it with one last veto. Voice box, throat, gauze-lined mouth refuse to mobilize. He has had, is right now having a stroke, a neural storm. The stuff-arrested word, a shed piece of floating birch bark, pilots its way through, issues out in a nnnn-yy-aaeoo No.

  His own scream swallows up the girl’s, eradicates it, but not before the rasped treble turns to a more domestic alarm, closer to his ear. He is awake, yelling out intervention, calling for emergency procedures, the extraordinary stopgaps he knows by rote. Thoughts come to him one after the next, tin soldiers pouring through the breach in a battered syllogism. My bed: break from it. Feet to floor. My room. My apartment. Door that way, one o’clock, north-northeast. Get to it before it seals shut.

  Something reaches out to snag him before he can bolt. A hand, another human being in his bed. “Ricky?”

  Arrival comes as suddenly as had violence’s burst. The street torture stops the moment that Linda—artlessly naked, here, next to him, his on ephemeral credit—changes her breathing. The screams are no more than slight obstructions in her nasal passage, amplified by his ear up flush to her breath. Terror comes of closeness, the way single cells reveal an Armageddon under the microscope.

  “Ricky? What’s the matter? What’s happened?”

  He collapses into her, breaking a harder fall. Nothing. Nothing’s happened. Exactly the sort of featureless, unnoticeable night he prayed for in secret as they fell asleep a lifetime earlier.

  “It’s all right. I’m . . . okay. I just thought . . .” Thought that the girl had come for him, like a little slaughtered bride. “I just remembered something. Really. Go back to sleep.”

  “Sleep?” she says, incredulous, smiling, scolding. “Ricky, you’re shaking.”

  “True,” he concedes. Body-long tremolos, at intervals, replace the now-silenced cry. “Hypothermia?” comes his lame proposal. And yet, partly true; he is freezing, shivering to death in this heat sink of human compromise that he’s chosen expressly for its hothouse climate. “If you’d just quit stealing all the covers . . .”

  “Covers?” her bewildered syllables race in all directions, furious, afraid of him, like children scattering in front of the blindman in a game of bluff. She holds him to her over his protests. She cradles his head to her bareness in half comfort, half nelson. “You sure you’re ten years older than I am?” And worse than her most hopeless case.

  Dark in her limbs, her skin an inexhaustible chamois perfection, a taut heat treatment everywhere against him: Linda. She has come to keep him from recall. They’ve sent her at just this critical cusp to release him from his deserts. Grateful for that much, he considers telling her. She, if anyone, could leave the scream explained and housebroken. Listen. Your breath sounded to me like the last child left on earth, after all the rest had been taken.

  But even should he confide in her, they would be alone. Both of them, unbuffered, clothed only in this faux-residential calm, hurtable now in more ways than can be cataloged. He would only freeze her, leave her as chill as he is if he told, if he held her any longer. Already her naked nipples go gooseflesh, pucker like an alum-punished mouth. Or does something else arouse them, something aside from the desert cold? Some desire awakened by his pure fear, the chances of unlimited suffering at this hour when personality is discarded as a worthless blind?

  He tests the gooseflesh, puts his tongue to it. He searches across her body for hidden hiding places among her moraines that must have heard something, must have registered. And Linda, half blood, flexing like a jaguar, spooked by him now, of all he might do to her, moans. Then more, she calls out in strange languages—yes, there—uncaring who hears them through the thin walls. Love abandoned to the cries of adjacent devastation.

  THOSE NIGHTS WHEN the need to pass out completely marauds through his so-called consciousness like a clubfoot waltzing on parquet, nights when not even the last blast could wake him, he must still prop himself up at this twenty-four-hour convenience casino, tape his eyes open with pharmaceuticals, and deal out continuous all-or-nothing hands of one-card stud. And on those other nights, the ones that rotation magisterially allots him to go blaspheme himself with sleep, he cannot. It’s no less than a form of sublimated impotence (the real thing so far blissfully spared him), imaginary. Yet from out of deepest, ripple-free Stage Fou
r nothingness, advance warnings of alarm and visitation make the thought of even a couple hours of lowered vigilance unthinkable, even obscene.

  Fortunately, work supplies a variety of substitutes for narcosis. This morning, they rebuilt Tony the Tuffian’s ear. Tony’s parents initially tried to deny ever having seen him in their lives when the police dragged him bleeding to them, the half of his head opened up in a street misunderstanding, as pink and wet as an Independence Day picnic melon. Only when the officer swore that the investigation had nothing to do with the folks’ own improvised retail operation did the mother start wailing. The woman promptly sponged and bound the boy up with root extract, about as helpful as cornstarch to a contractor.

  Couple of absolute tenderfoot cops brought Tony and his severed left outside awning to the ER. “Iced,” according to Plummer, “but get this: with the ear inside the bag of melting cubes. Thing was total mealworm meat. I wouldn’t even have fed the pup to my horned toad.”

  This was a couple months ago. During the time it took for the side of Tony’s head to heal enough for Kraft to consider working it back into shape, the cops, unbeknownst to anyone outside their autonomous little fiefdom, were paying visits to the Tuff, telling him that they had forbidden surgery until Tony told all. They got their names, and Tony got scheduled for his first-stage ear reconstruction, convinced that he had the magnanimity of the American law enforcement system to thank for it.

  Going into surgery this morning, the Tuffian expressed some regret that he would lose the instant status that his blunted left stump had earned him with the rest of the kids’ ward. He seemed almost thrilled to hear that he would wake from the procedure with another scar, this one across his lower thorax, where Kraft would remove the bit of cartilaginous framework needed to form the new external spoiler. The transplant will hold until Tony loses the hardware again in some prison brawl.

  That one is Kraft’s only cut-and-paste scheduled today. Work has been his one topical balm against the thing that has steadily coagulated since he went ankle fishing inside the boat girl. And fortunately, the job drones on, long after the sexy procedures are over. The hypercompetitive med schools ought to make it broad-band knowledge: the career of professional shamanism these days consists of equal parts corrective injury, scut follow-ups, and brute bookkeeping. Having bloodied up the Clean Room enough for one day, Kraft still has the blessed canonical troika of distractions—logging, filing, and retrieving—to keep him from replaying his latest library of debilitating mental cassettes.

  Documentation is everything. Data and protective paperwork. By this point, Kraft has learned not to say so much as “Lookin’ good!” to a patient without making a shorthand note of the date, time, and physical circumstances. As a result, he’s saddled with a hell of a lot more scrap- than scalpelwork. So much more that even Beirut General must give him a desk to bury in forms.

  He sits in his requisitioned cubicle, plucking messages back out of a Dictaphone and pinning the phrases, like formaldehyded lepidoptera, to official reports. He keeps the corridor door open; otherwise, it gets deceptively restful in here. Now and then he comes up for air, to guard his flank by throwing a quick look hallward. Somewhere around the millionth such routine inspection, he just about jumps through his own cranium. A diminutive super-oldster in Dodger cap and baggy cardigan has crept silently into the doorframe and just stands there, staring at him.

  The guy has been there a while, by all evidence. One of those balding, skin-flappy, underinflated men you see shuffling around in Griffith Park carrying a paper bag and stick, talking to pitiful cocker spaniels in tongues found only in hidden mountain villages that appear but once a year. The old fart just gazes at him from myopic mine shafts on either side of his hook nose. Kraft, deep in his usual Latinate fog, can’t even summon up an officially inquisitive “Yes?”

  Before Kraft can determine What Is Wrong with This Picture (This here is Pediatrics, sir. You want Gerontology, Floor Four), Gramps spits out, “What’s it to ya, buddy?” and disappears. The midget Walter Brennan pads rheumatically down the corridor, looking for all the world like a gargoyle punching out at quitting time, packing up shop and lumbering stonily down the nearest flying buttress to catch the bus home.

  The old geezer’s voice shocks even more than his beaked features. The codger-style diction is just about in line with his general level of senescence. But where Kraft had expected a kind of Lionel Barrymore gravel, there’s only this disturbingly treble whistle. May in December. Weird, unplaceable, disconcerting. But hey. Like the man asked: What difference does it make to you? Leave it. Not your specialty; not this rotation, in any case.

  Kraft sits another minute, pursed over the Dictaphone. Checks the doorway again. Has sleep deprivation progressed so far as to deliver visuals? All at once the click of differential diagnosis hits him. He blanches and stands up slowly. Hutchinson-Gilford disease. True progeria. Visible after a year or two of normal infancy. Onset of full-fledged symptoms around six. Sixty years old by the age of ten. Kraft falters over to his bookshelf, flips through the references catatonically, already knowing what he’s going to come up with. Only four dozen known occurrences in the entire world literature. Kraft lurches back out into the corridor, but Gramps, one of creation’s rarest ancient children, is gone.

  A Hutchinson-Gilford, here, at a freebie institution that can barely handle tonsillectomies without sending the kid out on a tray? A hospital where half the senior staffers are alcoholics and half the residents have doctored their transcripts? How on earth can Carver even think about handling such a case? The minute the kid walked in the door, they should have airlifted him straight to Boston. There’s something not quite Hippocratic going on here. Either the admitting physician doesn’t know what he’s looking at—impossible; that pinched nose, the vanished hairline, the jaundiced, ravaged, medieval parchment skin—or the shriveled boy has been sucked up into some medical Barnum’s bailiwick.

  It doesn’t seem conceivable: a child rushing toward advanced old age at this wildly accelerated rate without having attracted the attention of research’s power players somewhere along the line. Even the family physician, however blunderingly inept, certainly must have noticed when the kid picked up a decade between six-month checkups. Then Kraft returns to the reality check and remembers where he is. The bulk of this outfit’s clientele couldn’t pay for a periodic physical, even if they knew what such a thing was. But surely the school nurse, the boy’s teachers, the neighborhood social worker . . . ?

  Drop it. Lose the whole matter. Run closed-lidded in the other direction singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” while cupping your hands over your ears. This admission obviously has no bearing whatsoever on surgery. As such, it lies outside the only shorthand calculus Kraft has for years been able to afford: Impact on immediate work load? Need deal with this by self?

  But the wrong, awful rarity of the thing haunts him. A boy a third his age, except twice as old. That uncannily sick face. A great-grandfather’s face, superannuated and wasted, yet with half a century still to go before retirement age. A half century it will never make. An extraterrestrial face, para-human, a mask violating the fixed sequence of innocence to experience to decay, mixing up the stages of growth in monster parody. The tragic by-product of a mad invention, a bio-ray, some visionary machine invented to blaze open a transforming shortcut but botched horribly, locked up deep beneath the earth’s crust, forgotten by everyone except a few children who, not noticing the CONDEMNED sign rotting over the entrance, wandered down into the shaft while playing and accidentally absorbed the full, cell-accelerating blast.

  He tries work again. But no matter how often Kraft rewinds and replays the burst of urgent nonsense on his Dictaphone, he cannot transcribe it. He puts the machine down, exchanges it for the phone, and dials an extension fast becoming as familiar to him as the lab technician’s. “Espera, please.”

  Another shuffle, and a voice like home whispers out of the receiver, “Squeakheart?” Giggling at hi
s decorum. “Zat you? I thought I told you never to call me at the office.”

  “Linder, listen.” To what? To a transcript of ultimate unlikelihood. To wild suppositions. To the track of a background song going hideously lost. To the blood coursing as audibly as surf through his ears. To the dead silence on his end of the line, the pyre of questions piling up on his police blotter. “I just . . . This kid, this old kid . . .” The disease’s proper name refuses to come out of the technical tome and unfold itself.

  “Ah. You’ve met Nicolino.”

  The word convinces him of the utter hopelessness of dealing with this woman. The gap between them—almost a full generation, by the standards of developing nations and the clientele down at OB-GYN—is trivial compared to this. Their incommensurate pasts would be resolvable. Even the unspannable chasm of sex, the two of them dosed with mutually unintelligible hormonal cocktails, would be a little leap. But this, this equanimity of hers in the face of the unassimilable makes her another genus. Alien. He can’t even begin to talk to her.

  He has called to enlist her aid in comprehending this fifty-to-however-many-historical-billions shot strolling around loose, unprotected, Dodger-capped in the corridors just outside his door. But Linda—he might have known that she would already be on a firstname basis with astonishment—makes of this boy an order of magnitude rarer still. Just one. One, out of all the cumulative billions that do not stop today but go on growing toward some terminal forever. He might have known it’d be “Nicolino.”

  “Linda. Do you have any idea what this kid is?”

  “Yeah. He’s a cheeky little brat. He came in for his first appointment with Physiatry and propositioned me.”

  Kraft’s resentment of this woman vanishes in a flash, replaced by murderous rivalry directed at a preteen, dirty old lecher. “What did he say?”