Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

“Not that record. I’m talking something truly grabbing. Totally new project. Wait a minute. Got it. This is a great one. Classic! What we got to do is write TV-25 Action Corps and tell them there’s this little Asian girl lavishing in the charity hospital and she probably’s not going to make it, and the only thing that keeps her holding on fighting for sweet life is her driving dream to go down in Guinness as the recipient of the most get-well cards of all time. What do you say?”

  “Languishing.”

  “Whatever. Come on. They love this kind of pathetic kiddie crap. Capture the regional imagination. Feel-gooder campaign. Courage in the face of keeling over. Vote with your stamps. The whole bullshit waterworks. What d’ya think?”

  She smiles like she hasn’t yet smiled in this lifetime, and starts the ball up in the air again. Eight, nine, ten, eleven. “Clap your hands,” she says suddenly.

  “Say what?”

  “Clap your hands. Don’t let Tink die.”

  He plays dumb until she explains. That book I lent you? He makes out that he hasn’t read it yet. Not enough time. Hospital’s been going to serious hell in a handbag, and has been for years before his arrival. Consequently, it takes every hour in his agenda just to stabilize the situation. Reading’s a luxury, strictly for those with time to burn.

  “KNOW WHAT’S WRONG with this place?” Nicolino declares to a rumpled Linda. The lady is losing it; she looks like she’s slept in that cute little physio getup of hers. “I said, ‘Know what’s wrong . . . ?’ You’re supposed to say, ‘No, Nico. What?’”

  “Do I have to? Okay, okay. Tell me what’s wrong with this place.”

  “Everybody’s so twigging sick. We gotta git outta here before we all go rabid. I’ve seen it happen. Trailblazer, number twenty-three. Whole pioneer colony just ups and goes completely stir crazy with cabin fever. Hey. A ball game. There’s yer ticket. How ’bout it, Doll-face? You can swing a Dodger home bill for us?”

  “‘Doll-face’? Let me see those comics of yours.”

  “Ha! You and the Navy SEALs, maybe. Come on. Get that so-called surgeon guy of yours to take us. You two are doing it, aren’t you?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Oh, excuse me. I thought you were old enough to know about these things.”

  “You little braguillas!”

  To which, he replies in a language she doesn’t even want to identify.

  “Not that getting you long-termers out of here is such a bad idea. But baseball? Kind of sedate, isn’t it? No Amorphicoms? No Grid? No Galactic Heat Death?”

  “You only need that shit when nothing’s breaking.”

  “Nico. I’m not going to tell you again.”

  “Promise? Sor-ry. I meant to say ‘that shirt.’”

  “How are you going to keep a whole patrol of your contemporaries in one place in the bleachers for nine complete innings?”

  “We’ll only take the crips. You know; the ones who can’t move.”

  “What a little fiend we are. All right, let’s call the so-called surgeon. But I can’t believe I’m doing this for you.”

  Kraft is ready with the subterranean-bunker, I’m-busy-for-the-rest-of-my-life-and-beyond, blanket refusals. “Wrong guy for the wrong job. First off, when am I ever going to have the time to . . . ?”

  “You’re off next Friday and Saturday,” she tells him gently. “I checked the call schedule.”

  “You did what?” Checked on him, on his reliability. She has been out early, cutting off his lines of retreat. He is suddenly far away, indifferent, invulnerable, slack. Even the deadening silence between them feels luxurious, something one might thrive on.

  “It doesn’t have to be torture, you know. You might even enjoy it.”

  “Right. Herding a disease-ridden Halloween parade through an aggressive, beer-swilling, sweltering mass of demi-humanity? Set this group loose on Dodger Stadium? Let them out of the lockup? They’ll have committed felonies in a dozen different states by half time.”

  “Half time?” She snickers, despite the chorus of early warning signals. “Maybe you’re right. I do have the wrong guy.” The joke settles between them in sad, wide ripples radiating outward in all directions.

  He holds her at receiver’s distance, fending off the One Good Thing, his near brush with salvation. Wasteful, deliberate, self-inflicted. “I, uh, went to a game once,” he tries to blurt out. He would explain how the best course in life consists of avoiding the repeat of certain debilitating early scenarios. But he has lost the cadence of humor. He cannot even bring himself to think of that grandstand debacle, in the company of a father who taught him every survival skill but steals and bunts, everything about the complex international order except for where he belonged in it.

  Softly, through the apparatus, Linda offers him redemption. “I’ll go with you, if you let me.” He wants to tell her she must get away from him, quickly and cleanly. That he has not yet driven her away already incriminates him. He sees it all at once. They will sink into one of those mutual balances of terror, where neither can escape the collateral damage caused by the other’s tenderness.

  His no, she assumes from his repeated objections, is a yes in other words. Over his increasingly ritualized objections, she books him for the Saturday twin bill against the intensely colorful but eternally hapless Cubbies.

  “Pushover opponents. Couple of home victories should at least keep the beer-bottle frag bombs to a minimum.”

  “Oh, great,” he capitulates. “Do I at least get to ogle the cheerleaders?”

  “Hopeless. Hopeless.” The sliver of good-bye in her voice as she hangs up suggests that she already anticipates all the ways he will abandon her.

  Kraft tries to get Plummer to sub for him. Carver’s emergency Lesionnaire is holing up in the residents’ bathroom, perched in front of the urinals. As he tucks himself back into his khaki scrubs, he sings, “Nothing could be finer than to be in some vaginer in the morning.”

  “Very nice, Thomas. You compose that one all by yourself?”

  “You kidding? Do I look like a genius?”

  “At the moment, no.”

  “Such gems are not ‘composed.’ They erupt from a thousand simultaneous springs at the right moment. Overnight, they become part of the English-speaking heritage.”

  “Speaking of which. Know anything about baseball?” He lays out the request. “I’ll cover ER for you.”

  “Do I get the girl thrown in too?”

  “The girl? Oh God.” Wouldn’t that be a massacre. “Come on, Thomas. I thought you were onto Nurse Spiegel these days.”

  “Ancient history. Chalk her off. Confirmed kill. Notch on the old barrel. I thought I explained this to you already, buddy: I plan to follow you around, nibbling on your undigested scraps. You’re my mentor, man. I mean, if you want to talk natural genius . . .”

  The world, as is widely known, is divided into two sorts of people. Exactly what those two sorts are is a matter of continuous speculation. No matter; wherever the division, Plummer falls into neither camp. He is beyond good and evil, freedom and dignity, sorrow and pity—in short, the perfect surgeon-in-training.

  Which Kraft is not, as witnessed by the fact that as he enters the park, climbs into the funneled sunlight surrounded by a home crowd of 55,878 who lose themselves in an excitement as synesthetic as it is random, he feels inexplicably good. He and Linda shepherd a dozen kids, or rather, the kids suffer the pretense of authority as they break for the open air. The youngest of the group is a heavily urban-matured eight years old. The oldest—well, the oldest has been dead for decades.

  Chuck, head now wrapped up tighter than the Mummy’s, sports a batter’s helmet several sizes too big for him, thereby succeeding in obscuring the bulk of his face. Joleene has been temporarily persuaded to swap the Chatty Cathy for a stuffed outfielder totem. “So that’s what a Dodger is,” Kraft murmurs to Linda; “I was wondering.” The girl pulls incessantly at the mute thing’s neck threads, threatening to yank its head off.

>   The Fiddler Crab cracks jokes about a left hand like his not needing a mitt. Ali, a recent admittance with a plate-sized creature in his gut, who’s learned to tell everybody he comes from Persia so he won’t get beaten up, nasals, “Play ball, play ball!” like some muezzin up in a box-seat minaret. The Hernandez brothers keep looking around nervously, afraid they’re going to bump into one of their prehospital business associates. A mute, cotton-wadded Rapparition—shouldn’t even be out of bed yet—scribbles his alexandrines down on the insides of a popcorn box and passes them for public enunciation to Kyle, whose larynx is about the last part of him still functioning.

  Nicolino acquires a program through judicious swapping of a rare Captain America back issue. He alternates between kicking verbal lime on the leather uppers of the collective umpiring staff and making arcane marks on the scorecard, improving on the already Byzantine official scoring system. He attempts to fix forever in recorded memory the whole game down to the trajectory of every foul ball and the bleacher location of each lucky scab who snagged one.

  He keeps up a running statistician’s patter. When the good guys’ three-for-three hitters come up, he yells out, “All right, he’s hot, he’s hot.” For the oh-for-three guys, this becomes, “All right, he’s due, he’s due.” The folks in the nearby seats, after their initial, shocked whiplash, go out of their way to not give the senescent heckler a second look.

  Joy sits between Kraft and Linda, an aluminum half-brace leaned up on each of her idols’ knees. She studies the game furiously for its meaning, waiting, as late as the seventh-inning stretch, for things to begin. She asks in a constant but decorous undertone for help toward a hermeneutics, and when Kraft doesn’t know the answer to her question he makes something up. He makes up a lot.

  “Dr. Kraft, how many teams are there?”

  “Two.” He steals a look at Linda. “Two, right?”

  “Well, what about those black men?”

  “Black—Oh, in the black suits, you mean. Well, they switch back and forth, depending on who’s winning. Evens things up.”

  “And those? The white suits?”

  “Those? They’re beer sellers. Not official protagonists, as far as I know.”

  He is nervous next to the girl, jumpy, edgier than the terrain’s bad associations can account for. He can feel Linda giving him the professional second-guess, and she’s right. How’s he supposed to explicate this, to tell her? You see, I’ve this growing proof, well, not proof, this conviction, okay, suspicion, hunch . . . These kids, this service, this pede tour of duty: they are—what are they? Consolidating. Converging on him. And everything depends upon his finding out why. What they are after. Where they are headed.

  In between Joy’s questions—“Why do they put that man in the middle up on that little hill? How many points does the little boy get for picking up the discarded sticks?”—he slips in a few cross-examinations of his own. He asks her if she remembers anything at all about her old home, the village, the river basin she was driven from.

  “A little. My mother’s twig broom. Our dog, with only one eye. The market. The smell of certain fruit. Dr. Kraft, how come they all have those big lumps on the side of their mouths?”

  “Right. Those are plugs of chewing tobacco. You win if you can spit yours over one of those ‘330’ signs while nobody’s looking. The smell of fruit,” he prompts her. “Durian? Mangosteen? Luk ngoh?”

  She pulls her eyes from the all-fascinating field and stares at him. He receives it full in the face, this awful, searching look that would conceal itself even while flagging down the impossible rescue. It shoots out at him, both oblique and dead on, a summons and a bolt. How much do you know? And in the next instant, she relaxes. Not enough to worry about. Nothing of the atrocity’s specifics, no real hold on the nightmare locale. Harmless superficials, she decides, because her look goes congenial, her ready-to-run bite loosens into a smile. “You ate a durian once?”

  “Many.” And to prove it, he does an imitation, reasonably good, given the intervening years, of a street vendor’s call. The peanut peddlers flash him a dirty look: What’s yer racket, jerk-off? A couple of militantly fecund families at the end of the row overcome their good breeding long enough to stare at the motley child band and their howling leader. No, Kraft decides, listening to his residual, perfectly pitched cries drift down to the nearer bullpen. It is too far, too incommensurate, too implausibly split. The gap between here and there will kill him just to gaze out over.

  Linda practically falls out of her wooden folding slats. “Where in the world did that come from?”

  How is he supposed to tell her? From a place called Angel City, Land of the Free.

  Joy examines him again, fear creeping back into her instruments. “Say that again, please, Dr. Kraft.” He repeats his strophe of fruit names, softly now, so as not to violate the national pastime. Then, in a tonal dialect he can almost understand, she says, “That is almost what we call them.”

  They must step no nearer. They already wander too near the shared, partitioned province. Neither wants to come any closer to where their paths cross, the tangents to earlier extraditions. Suddenly, it’s all baseball between them, furious Twenty Questions about runs, hits, errors, pick offs, sign stealings—the whole semiotic flood. They scatter from any suggestion of common childhood geography, the one from guilt, the other shame. They backpedal from overlap like a fielder badly misjudging a deep fly to center.

  “Can they both win?” she frets out loud.

  “Uh, Linda?”

  “Well, in a word, no.”

  “No?” Kraft echoes. “There’s your answer, then. Peculiarly American, wouldn’t you say? Better to fight on forever than to tie, apparently.”

  Joy smiles at the diction, his goofing for her benefit. This man will never be capable of wrong, no matter what he might choose to do. He is the one adult on earth who does not talk down to her. She takes his hand, a gesture universally understood among old fellow durian eaters. “How long does one game last?”

  “Easy one. Until it’s over. Kind of a nineteenth-century, determinist thing.”

  “Where’s the Mighty Casey?”

  Bits of Cracker Jack explode from both choking adults. The girl is devastated by her gaffe. She clearly has no idea what she’s said. The recitation, out of one of her pauperized school district’s obsolete, nineteenth-century, determinist texts that she has blindly committed to memory, could mean anything to her, passed through the filters of continuous dislocation. Mighty Casey as position name, like shortstop or first base? Mighty Casey as deciding machinery, deus ex apparatus rolled to the plate at the all-important juncture? Honorary title, rank, life achievement? In any event, to her, as essential to each staging of the genre as a sailor to the epic or a floozy to the lawsuit.

  “Dr. Kraft, I don’t understand this stupid game.” This soul that did not flinch when the ER physician shattered her ankle, that awoke from the agony of excision to write the surgeon a thank-you note, now begins soundlessly to cry. A hundred ministrations and apologies from Kraft and Linda cannot convince her that she’s done no wrong.

  “I don’t understand it either,” he says, taking her hand back after she wiggles it free. “It’s apparently some kind of ritual drama,” he explains to her. “National salve. Expectation. History, allegory, fable, dream.” He could be bluffing his way through the Chief’s latest unread book assignment, those opaque, impenetrable predictions of the upheavals and reverses in store as we go guttering into the dark.

  “It’s a twigging ball game,” Nico yells through a megaphone he has made of his rolled-up scorecard. “What the hell are you guys blathering about?” Now how did he hear them, above this crowd, from the other end of this screaming murderers’ row?

  The boy is taking his own emotional plunge, as a result of the Dodgers’ deliberate, malicious betrayal. “Pitiful,” he says, shaking his balding braincase, hiding it in his hands. “These guys couldn’t reach base on an error even if they’d pu
blicly promised homers to a dozen dying kids.” The Hernandez brothers emit wicked, appreciative snorts in stereo. In fact, the local boys give it their best but go down twice in splendid paralysis to the normally hapless Second City conscripts, who this day look like world beaters.

  Everybody is pretty bummed, but fandom’s remorse cannot completely doom this day of reprieve and freedom. Kyle, who has brought along his Walkman, keeps repeating for the others, in astonished tones, “The kids from Carver are here today,” exactly the way the beery announcer said it, between rollcall mentions of Rotary chapters and nursing home brigade minuses. The Hernandez brothers light out for the territory on the way back to the bus, but Kraft is still fit enough to chase down and snag their lazy, city-vitiated pop-foul arc across the parking lot.

  He sees the girl board the bus and tries to help her up the awkward steps. He is mortified when she shrugs him off. She swings along determinedly, keeping up an impressive clip down the constricted aisle. She sheds the struts in the back of the bus and lowers herself into the seat behind the two old-timers with the L.A. caps pulled down over their wasted beaks.

  “‘There is no joy in Mudville,’” Joy recites in ingenue singsong for no one, the words she once performed in front of a now-forgotten class, on a twin bill with the Gettysburg Address.

  “Shut yer face,” Nico manages.

  “Please,” Chuck adds.

  Kraft pulls Linda down into the seat next to him, before she can slip away to join the children. He holds her hand, ribboning the fingers of the nearest girl, the only available one. He whispers to her what he’s just seen—the small-arms exchange of first flirtation. Linda steals a look over one shoulder to see this stabbing thing for herself. But all she can make out is the boys in the back, already scheming the details of the next expedition.

  WHEN THE NEXT one is launched, it’s the last thing in the world any adult could have anticipated. Weeks of dilated child life pass; years click off Nico’s accelerated body clock. That is to say a day, maybe a day and a half, real time. Nico shows up at his next scheduled Doll-face session and demands, “You gotta teach us to dance.”