“He said, ‘Va-va-voom.’ Or words to that effect. Then something or other about lamenting his vanished youth.”
Kraft has to snort, but painfully, a solid, undislodgable mass in his trachea. “What in hell is he doing here?”
“Trying to get medical attention, I think. Sor-ry.” She suppresses a guilty laugh. “His folks don’t want to turn their little boy into a rolling research freak. ‘Just fix Nico up and send him home. Our only child!’ Soon as I heard that, I thought, aha! So that’s why little Nico is spoiled. But know what? It turns out he’s not an only child. He’s got about a half-dozen sisters. They don’t count, apparently. Is that some kind of Islamic thing, or something?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Kind of a specialist, are you?”
“Did you tell these people that a little research might help the next kid who decides to go geriatric overnight?”
Linda sighs, exasperated on both sides. “What do you want to do? He is their kid, after all. Oh, Nico himself would love doing the pony show, I’m sure. He’d jump at the chance to sass the country’s leading medical investigators. But Mama’s the bottom line, wouldn’t you say? ‘Give me a new generation of mothers, and I will give you a new world.’”
“Run that by me again?”
“Nothing you’d know. It’s from a book. And not a manual. Don’t worry, it won’t be on the Boards.”
Hang up now, and the tiff will propagate. He can feel it already, building toward chain reaction. He doesn’t even feel like intervening, smoothing things over. Even throwing the offense back at her takes too much energy. Sullenness is too obvious, though. Would only give her more occasion to egg him on. He needs to find some neutral, not-too-icy politeness, and get out.
But he can think of nothing more to ask. He doesn’t even have to inquire about the reason for the admission. Median age of death: thirteen. Few true cases make it to the adulthood that mocks them. Cardiovascular crack-up, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, vessels pissing out of the parched scalp, systemic deterioration of the organs. The kid’s body clock is simply shutting down early, like an office on New Year’s Eve, pitching it in after only half a morning’s work. Nicolino is dying of a parody of old age. No other name for it, unless, like the newspapers, you go with “natural causes.”
Linda is insouciant, oblivious to his tangles. When Kraft doesn’t fill the silence, she does. “You any good with Dodger statistics, by the way?”
“You’re asking the wrong guy.” Wrong in every way. Linda; leave me. Don’t waste another day of your twenties on this lost cause. Come back when you’ve worked your way through the rest of the state, the men who like to do things at night, the ones who’ll match your bursts and stoke you up and make you flash on and keep you as alive, as supple as you still are. Come back when you’re ready to go stiff, to end things. I won’t have moved.
“Oh, sorry. That’s right. You led a deprived childhood, didn’t you? I forgot. Mowgli, the jungle boy. No Sweetarts, no juice-filled wax vampire fangs. No national pastime. That explains everything.”
He feels his muscles initiating the shove-off, biceps starting to reverse-curl the thousand-pound receiver back onto its cradle when he hears her ask, “Sleep any better last night?” Her words shine with confused, hurt highlights, a banished me-neither tone—can’t you guess? Hearing it, he can no longer help himself. He needs her otherness. He hangs on her every distraction the moment work stops. Addicted already, and following the viscous, familiar path of habituation, he will soon need her even during daylight hours. A fix, a whiff, just to start moving in the mornings.
He loves her absurdly, immaturely. His blood hops up with the high schooler’s full panoply of anticipation and dread. He would tell her now, but for Kean working in the next cubicle to his. And yet: he will not say so, even in their next night-long privacy. How else except by silence can he hope to keep her all along his length, always, and when the hour comes, still a permanent stranger?
She does not ask, as her voice hints, Are you on call tonight? Instead, her words assume the courage neither of them has. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, you know.”
But there is. Is everything. All the world must be run from. Little girls stump for miles on severed stems across a wasted city to come ambush him in the dark. Old golden-agers a lifetime beyond his roam the pediatrics ward, dying on him in the prime of childhood. How can he tell her, and not drive her hastening away?
HE KNOWS NO more about progeria than he can afford to learn. And he can afford to learn no more than he needs to string along and pass the next certification. What’s it to ya, buddy? Absolutely nothing.
Nobody, it appears, has even a game show’s clue about the thing’s etiology. Without a shred of supporting evidence, a little one-room school of thought lays suspicion on a hereditary cause. Sure, why not? Throw it on top of the “congenital” heap, the fuck-ups in the master switches twisting the body this way and that like hideously abused Raggedy Anns and Andys. The intermediary gaps between “Ann” and “and,” and “and” and “Andy” fill with any number of permutations on battered puppethood: microcephaly (pinheadedness in less polite circles), protrusion of the meninges and neural elements out the rear of the little baby back ribs, the whole salad bar of androgynies and cretinisms, endocrine leaks and overflows, organs on fire or attacking themselves, hips and limbs and skeletal connectors pointed every which way but useful. Or simply missing. Stolen. Never delivered.
Genetic disorder is Kraft’s absolute first nightmare category. It is corruption at the source, at the point of manufacture. Obscenity nuzzles up close to molecular innocence, suckling its infantile teat the way flies lap at a running sore. If purpose can be scattered already, even here, then what’s the point? The morning’s first shadow casts itself over his ward. And worst of all, all these specific charts—the No-Face, the Nephrosis, the Septal Defect—they have all been born just hours before the breakthroughs that might have saved them.
They are, perhaps, the last generation to be struck down before the arrival of the ultimate gene-weaponry. Cures are coming, just around the corner, all but here. Fantasy treatments, fictive fairy diagnostics, complete in-the-womb screenings, packets of substitute chromosome segments to replace the defective instructions. His successor physicians will have every intervention imaginable, thought-designed curative texts placed into action simply by specifying the right combination of magic words. Kraft and the rest of the last graduating class of witch doctors have only their blundering surgical corrections, bulling about with knives, helping sometimes but always at crippling expense, buying the necessary patch job at ruinous rates the day before a massive, half-price giveaway.
No firm evidence proves that Hutchinson-Gilford is, in fact, a twist in the master narrative. And yet, lumping it with congenital disorders beats the pathological alternatives. Bald, diminutive, withered twelve-year-old kid, his skin yellowed like ancient newspaper, his whole circulatory system corroding to worthlessness. We’re clearly not dealing with infectious disease here, not even one of the truly exotic. And if it were a contagion? Kids passing progeria around, picking up communicative old age as easily as croup. Whole playgrounds turned to pensioners in a matter of weeks. Lawrence Welk hastily recast to include Saturday morning cartoons. Now there would be a real plague, one worthy of Kraft’s day and age.
An environmental cause is at least conceivable. Some erratic, unidentified toxin accumulating in secret tissue. But it has no geographical outbreaks, no stricken communities like the ones becoming mundanely familiar even to those, like Kraft, who studiously avoid the nightly scoop operas. Nutrition, perhaps. God and the social workers only know what specialty dishes they’re feeding youngsters in the town’s eastern marches this season. But if age were ingestible, Southern California—the whole holistic concept—would be awash in juvenile octogenarians.
Perhaps cause lies somewhere on the far, sinister end of the spectrum. Chance micro-hit. Physical injury. Damage incurred
through the placenta or sustained at birth. Regulatory mechanism wiped out in one systemic shock. A blow to the head, deliberate or—always that ludicrous euphemism—accidental. Accidents do happen, but the stats don’t jibe. Ten American children are killed each day by handguns alone. Yet only fifty of these little old men have appeared in the entire historical record. If it is injury, then strange, reticent, internal, even molecular—not one of the more expedient violences of this increasingly adept twilight culture.
Etiology cannot help Kraft, as is so often the case. How this freak, this Nico happened to put on six decades in as many years is of less interest than what to do about it. Thank the bureaucrats that be that Kraft doesn’t have to deal with the case. How can anyone hope to treat the kid? He’s brittle, beaked, dry. Dermis like phyllo. Only, it’s not old age. No senility, no wasting of the CNS. Half his organs are untouched. The kid’s got spring in his legs yet, even if he looks more third-base coach than runner.
Jesus, the kid’s a kid. Whatever else it may or may not be, freakish aging is a childhood condition. And there, precisely, is the whole hopeless situation in a handbag. The would-be Department of Pediatrics, Dr. Joseph “It’s Under Control” Milstein presiding, is about as mythically monolithic as that twenty-five-language empire on the other side of the globe, at this very minute breaking into a caldron of contentious turfs. Their service is no more than a Jack-and-the-bean-curve, a wide-load Gaussian with Infancy on one end and Adolescence on the other, with a class of cases fat in the mode-peaked middle for which English has no good word.
Pediatrics is not a discipline. It’s a default, a catchall. Kraft cannot connect even its two main provinces. The bins themselves are hopelessly coarse: from birth to vertical, and from vertical to near voting age. What, pray tell, is the common denominator between pyelonephritis and Munchausen syndrome by proxy? In one, the kidneys drive the parents crazy; in the other, the parents drive the kidneys insane. The specialty is designed by one of those guys who go into bookstores and order a yard and a half of red hardbacks no taller than eight inches. As Dr. Brache once told him (and irony lies outside the bounds of Miss Peach’s rhetorical modes), if you can crack a fourteen-month-old’s chest, than you can wean a fourteen-year-old off crack.
The international community, from Kraft’s third-hand vantage, is currently engaged in some intensive R & D, smoking up several delicious monster scenarios for the coming collective blowout. Things are definitely on the march. Nightly news lays out its attendant horrors in a series of thought-eradicating, three-minute music videos. Ice caps melt. Fuel reserves push toward asymptote, with nothing anyone can do about it. Debt amasses faster than global capital. IRS computers threaten to trigger the long-teetering global financial shutdown by issuing checks and debits essentially at random. The president’s astrologer joins the Secretary of Defense in clicking off the Patmos checklist of critical warning signals. An Angel City, an incredible place to live for Those About to Die, has about a decade and a half’s jump on all other up-and-comers.
But Pediatrics supplies Kraft with an alternative wrap-up scenario. The department nurses, whom he tries to avoid for reasons not sufficiently buried in his checkered past, report this tremendous spike in preemies, SIDS cases, placental substance dependence, inherited autoimmune deficiencies—slopes ramping up for an assault on the airy altitudes above the graph-paper tree line. His imagination is entranced by the chance of an annual power skid in the male-to-female ratio, not just statewide, but throughout the euphemistically labeled developed countries. A Pink Shift drifts demographics measurably away from snips and snails, sugar-and-spiceward. An almost imperceptible but steady 0.1 percent reduction in males per live birth per year, when coupled with the recent slight increase in male infant mortality rates, and the shift reveals nothing less than the steady girlification of the world, with its inevitable—although belated—precipitous drop in procreation.
Wouldn’t that be the ultimate kicker? After all the high-visibility threats, the dire predictions proliferating like food stamps, the concerted forward two-and-a-halfer over the brink of willful critical mass, to wind up perishing slowly from irreversible sex-ratio drift, brought on by some invisible drinking-water effect on gamete motility? Sure, it smacks of wishful thinking on Kraft’s part, when faced with the grab bag of aggressively masculine apocalypses, to hope that the species might sink into a more benign disappearance, a surfeit of female.
But until the collective end of choice arrives, or until he finishes this service and graduates to the next one—the VA, a weekend cake promenade in comparison—whichever comes first, he is compelled to make his minor mitigations for those sufferers who share nothing in common except their unripe green. Monsters, freaks of gene or accident or pathology, race up and down these halls in relays, in fifty-yard dashes leading to no medal, no record, nowhere. Files of them, parades of shell-shocked, half-staffed pilgrims. What’s it to you?
“OKAY. NOW ROLL over. Move your arm like this.”
“God. Lay off. You’re killing me.”
“Don’t be such a baby.”
“Stop. Wait. No, really, Linda. I need both my arms. It’s a professional thing.”
“Oh, come on. Why is it that men start shrieking at the least little hint of therapeutic pain?”
“Who you calling a man? Jesus. I think you dislocated it.”
“Then it probably needed to be dislocated. It’s for your own good. I’ve never seen anyone with more restricted mobility.”
“Yeah? Well that comes from years of conscientious discipline.”
“Discipline? You ungulate, you. I ought to teach you the meaning of the word.”
“I’m sure you could.”
“Do you want me to fix you or not?”
“I ain’t broke.”
“That’s what all the boys who come see me say. Your little mascot these days, Tony the Tuff? Diminutive little machismo thug. He sits in my office whining that it hurts when he grimaces.”
“‘Don’t grimace?’”
“No. Don’t get your ear cut off next time. Now, if you want to talk about real bravery . . .”
“I’m supposed to sing ‘Sank heven vor leetel gerlz’ now, right? Speaking of which, did you give them to her?”
“Give what to who?”
“Joy. The books.”
“Of course I gave them to her. You think maybe I fenced them for their street value?”
“What did she say?”
“When I brought them to her, she just . . . I’m sorry. You know, those eyes. It’s like: ‘I have to protect you from what you don’t know about the world.’ She thanked me profusely, and begged me to thank you, and looked up to me, deadly serious, and said, ‘Do you want to read them out loud to me?’ Like that’s the only official way of doing these things. Like they were part of some . . .”
“And what did you say?”
“Will you shut up, please, and let me tell this story? I asked her, ‘Would you like me to read them to you?’ To which she very tentatively suggested, ‘I think I would rather look at them carefully during my free time.’”
“Free time? Free time from what?”
“From her self-designated study periods. We have to graduate, didn’t you know?”
“Oh God.”
“Here. This way. A little radial . . .”
“And did she read them?”
“She took what is for her a leisurely stroll through them, compared to the day and a half she usually takes to polish off the histories and almanacs. Then she tried to return them with the usual politeness. When I told her they were hers, she said she had a few questions. ‘Why does that boy, when they wheel him into the garden, say I shall live forever? That other boy, the one who never grew up: How is that possible?’ Not your typical twelve-year-old concerns.”
“Utter failure, in other words.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Who can say what Joy’s imagination is capable of? That she’s kept pace with reality is astounding.”
<
br /> “Not her. I mean me. Utter failure in selecting titles.”
“I wouldn’t say that either. Okay, now the planar axis.”
“Ouch. Oh Christ. What are you doing to me?”
“I’m not sure. But you love it, don’t you? Admit it. Admit it or I’ll twist your little wing right off.”
“Anything. Anything.”
“Undress me.”
“What? Here? In the middle of . . . ?”
“Come on, come on. Am I going to have to do this myself?”
“Espera! Oh holy. Shh. Stop. People will hear.”
“So what? They’ll just think, Hmm. Old Dr. Kraft in there, bashing the bishop.”
“Old?”
“Enough to know what he’s doing.”
“Oops! I’m afraid that’s my beeper.”
“Look at him grin. I hadn’t realized you could make it go off just by wishing.”
He does not say good-bye, or set the time and place for finishing what they have started. He does not tell her that far more than the foot is in danger, that getting away with just the calf would be deliverance. His old saving grace: say as little as contractually necessary.
And when he sees the child next, for a set of scans, she welcomes him with a smile that would be shy if it weren’t visibly shaken. He thinks: The pain. It’s starting. It will wring her until she cries out to be killed.
But it is not the pain. Not yet. Something else drives her brown-petal face ashen. “Dr. Kraft,” she tells him excitedly, swallowing the consonants in a ghostly holdover of lost Asian highlights. Ghostly for them both. “I have seen him. He’s here, right here on my floor. The boy. The boy who never grew up!”
(A softbound text works its way to the top of the To Do stack. Its ocher cover mirrors a map maker’s fantasy: the Land of Faith, the Land of Infidels, the Promised Land, all bound by the Unknown Ocean, crossed bravely by two intrepid small craft and a spouting sea monster. An ink noose tightens around the book’s title, The World Awakens, Part III. The loop fills with snorer’s zzz’s. The spine is split and a sewn signature of pages slips loose.)
Operation Wandering Soul Page 17
