She dries methodically, every hidden part; the building is a hotbed of sepsis and fungi. She just about jumps through her baby-powdered skin to turn and find another presence in the room. Only after seeing the other body does she hear, in backward time, the door open and Nurse Spiegel enter. The pretty little number, Kraft’s squeeze before, before her. Linda will ask her how she can still live, having crawled up close to the airless mine shaft inside the man.
But Spiegel gets her question in first, a question whose sunny Golden State affect wouldn’t know nausea if it spit up on her. “Hey, Lin. You making it, babe? Wanted to ask you something. You guys working on another dress-up thing?”
Espera has to think: You guys. Dress-ups. “No,” she says, wanting something more friendly than the monosyllable, but helpless to expand on it. The forms of kindness are gone, buried under slag. “No,” she whispers again. The outting is over; her shot at renewal is lost. “Why?”
“You sure?” Friendly, insinuating suspicion, annoying elbow-nudge. “Those aren’t your half-pint getups the nurses have been seeing?”
Linda is the last to hear. Spiegel, who has only the most theoretically vindictive reasons to mislead her, tells her an outrageous, corroborated fable. An epidemic of vague reports, figures appearing around corners, impossible posses at the ends of long corridors. All airy gossip: Spiegel has no other register. “It’s not just the nurses, sweetmeats. Dr. Kean, who you know is as Drug-Free America as they come, was telling us he saw a band of tiny coal miners, the Seven Dwarfs, smeared in black dust and wearing these canvas overalls? And a bunch of, you know, millworker girls . . .”
Linda checks by reflex her calendar watch. Old vaudeville routine. Teacher: How long ago was the Industrial Revolution? Smarty: What time is it now? Well, it is not Halloween. Not even fall. She thinks: her group has learned how to contact their sister cells, union locals from all over the timeline.
Tipped off, Espera watches the ward, keeping a continuous eye on who is supposed to be where, when. But it’s like slapping a guard on the dancing princesses. She can’t trap them. A dozen will vanish at a pop, no place traceable in the building labyrinth. They come back an hour later with transparent fabrications: We were in the cafeteria. I checked the cafeteria. Oh, right after that we were hanging out in that storeroom on Eight.
“You needn’t lie to me,” she tells them in her gentlest read-aloud voice, trying to restring some thread of trust that has sickeningly snapped. But betrayal is deep, deeper than pity. They deny everything. Not even her most painfully smitten little suitors will tell.
Not that she needs telling. She set it up; now the idea she germinated in them has rooted like so many small science projects, those lines of lima beans in moistened paper towel. The children are leaving in secret. Her terminals and unworkables have begun making their own forays into a city sealed off from them. They are budding off into age villages, all the under-sixteens once more seasonally leaving to establish new settlements all their own. Other loose bands come to claim them, orient them to the general gathering so long in accumulation. They are joining up, taking their place in the circuit, the Grid whose completion awaits them.
On no evidence at all, the whole plot occurs to her, the clear-out in miniature. She hears its secret promise all over, as if she weren’t hard now, hideously pituitary. They mean to flee in one brief wingbeat the sick entanglement that slits innocence, the offer that forever flooded all that was left of the real neverland, hers, leaving no take-backs.
It has come back, the gaping escape clause, as she knew it would one day, if she but positioned herself lifelong in the company of children, if she just waited patiently long enough to be overlooked. And though they refuse to bring her along—her!—Espera can still win her vicarious redemption by being the one who could stop them this time, but defers.
As it is, she isn’t given much chance for deference. The plague hits the hospital’s full grown before even those expecting it are ready. On the Wednesday after she learns they are leaving in secret, Linda confronts the presumed ringleader.
“You can trust me, Nico,” she tells him, knowing full well that to speak the words out loud is to lie.
He answers with a curt “Sober up, Doll-face.”
At two the next afternoon, as if she has panicked the plan’s instigators by almost guessing, all childhood hell breaks loose.
He has not slept now for, oh, call it an even Week for One. He’s finally managed to donate his body to medical science, one of those West Coast investigations into how many days of deprivation it takes before you start conversing with hatchet-wielding gremlins on the foot of your bed.
Funny thing is, this stay-awake dance-marathon-cum-fire-walk-ritual is no longer forced on him by the apprentice system, the National Board– certified schedule winnowing the men from the boys, the true sadomasts from the mere zombie wannabes. Sleeplessness has become a matter of personal choice. He gets off on how the tracers solidify, stalactite style, into palpable tableaux. Strangest of all is the image that memory, like an obliging mother gull, has spit up all over him, predigested for his nourishment. He screens again, in his skull, that jerky home movie about how he was young once, but got lost deep in the jungles of experience.
Driving is a particular trip. A bit like sailing, if you think about it, the eight lanes of traffic scudding off in front of him, glinting like sun on foamy surf that stands as stiff as the peaks of beaten egg. He finds he can control the half ton of metal by passively feeling out what the wheel wants to do—exactly how the other million and a half freeway-loaders have been navigating all along. He snickers over the stick, to think it took this crushing fatigue for him to catch the drift of his fellow Angel flotsam.
And while driving to Carver (he forgets from where exactly), he gets his first signal from deep space. He’s moored in the vehicle backwash, bobbing against the fender of the Cressida in front of him like a yacht bumper thumping the dock, when he sees from the oversold freeway shoulder’s Yellow Pages three giant crosses and a sign reading noah’s ark being rebuilt here.
The second signal arrives late that evening, or perhaps the day after. Kraft comes momentarily to, staring at a monitor where toddlers in a roll-your-own shelter in a hill country in the process of conscientiously shelling itself out of existence are sitting at mock-up desks. For his private viewing pleasure, they stage a song, in world English, attentive to the video cameras, disburser of all curse and benefit: “Stap de woor,” two, three, “fur de shilderin . . .” Kraft’s been away, lost track of just what war the catchy chorus alludes to. Some damn fool thing in the Balkans, or wherever they’ve set the venue this season. The kids obviously love it, because they get to bang on the desks on the offbeats.
The videotape laps it up. Entertainment, this nation’s number two net export. Modular script number 38-A. Cue the mellow tenor (how does he make his voice do that?) to intone the lead-in, “Every war is a child’s war.” Same mellifluous, brain-lesioning ad copy tone they use for the fabricated dramas, that theater standing in for sense of historical purpose: “This Sunday, as the world watches, two ancient rivals meet head on to decide once and for all . . .”
Crisis has grown so adroit that it auditions its hostages exclusively from these choice offerings. They sing for the cameras, caught in the violence of progress that overhauls everything and changes less than nil. The plea is all mediated, packaged as escapist newsreel, because if it ever really crept out of the rubble of the bazookaed day-care center calling Mama, no one who heard it could live. All the lethargic hyperactivity that waiting consists of at this moment would go still, lucid.
One badly pounded-over sopranino continues to trill to him, even as its life’s blood trickles over the cinders of the alley where it has been jumped. He hears it at night, his eyelids toothpicked open, counting the Champagne poppers going off outside his window, hoping the roll into upper exponents might make him drowsy. It’s the slim but marginally possible suggestion that this sexy romp in the ru
n-up to mass offing, where even ladies’ magazines ask “What to Say If Mr. Right Asks You to a Snuff Film,” might yet be no more than a massive market correction on the way toward lasting fulfillment and VCRs for all.
The voice says, Ricky, clap your hands. What are the odds that the chorale prelude is so vast that each note of the cantus firmus, a whole lifetime resonating in the dark, swamps our mayfly ears with a sound like blood-soaked nails on a chalkboard? But clap your hands, the hope begs him; don’t let the sadistic little sprite die. She didn’t mean anybody any harm. And it’s either clap or give in to the prime-time abyss lovingly opening up underneath him.
He tries it on for feel: Things are about to turn. The phrase is his national myth, the dream of that flag-waving, fallen-laurel country on whom God once shed His grace like a rattler sheds his skin. His entire autobiography awaits that plot twist. Solar breakthrough. Cold fusion. Gene therapy. Cryo-seedbanks undoing willed mass extinction in the nick of time. An uptick at the UN. Newly industrializing nirvanas. Three hundred fifty million free-market consumers in the former East. The sixteen-megabit chip. Retrieval TV, the death of broadcast.
Hope’s whole checklist is wiped out by one night of the ER’s demographic evidence. Every bit of well-being this life has achieved depends on perpetually eating alive the recourseless and exposed. The truth consists of amorously embroidered erectile lanyard nooses, the party tricks with splintered shot glasses that Plummer and company cannot stanch. These are the times’ frilly, split-crotch fin de siècle unmentionables, inscribed with undying valentine “Maim Me’s.” Each victim is trained to carry on her own earliest abuse in the names of the fathers. The crippling acquired gene will not stop spreading until everyone has been mishandled, everyone’s psychic icebox stuffed with frozen child.
That fact, surging through his carotid, leaves him two choices. He can take his sleeping roll into the outer darkness and lie awake there, tallying the screams. Or he can change the channel. He squeezes the remote control as if popping a painful, watery cyst. Next over, a fast-breaking advertorial proclaims how secret carrot extract smeared hourly over your face in ruinously expensive gobfuls will keep your skin young, presumably with you still in it, until the end of time. In the supreme, feeble-headed culture, being born later is a moral virtue.
This puff is interrupted by a genuine ad, for a real product, the station itself: “Our uncompromising four-part series on media sensationalizing.” Sunday, just after the video version of the novelization of that runaway mega-reprint, Profiting from Total Collapse.
A storm of endorphins, and his mother comes to sit down beside him. He scribbles a note on a canary legal pad to remind himself, should he ever stabilize, to look up her date and cause of death. Meanwhile, Mom, who never had much to say while alive, is deep in one of her favorite reminiscences.
“You just wouldn’t hold still,” she says. “That happens with colicky babies, especially when they have other things wrong with them. Well, we—the nurses and I—tried everything. We propped you up; we wedged you in place with stuffed animals. You just would not stay put.” Kraft smiles wanly at the specter’s account, knowing the punch line hundreds of times over. “This was in Seoul, in ’fifty-seven . . .”
“’Fifty-six,” he says.
“Don’t correct your mother. Where were you raised, in a barn? This was in Korea; not state-of-the-art by any stretch. God knows where they got their radiation from. Our old castoffs, probably. Anyway, there was no other way you were going to take the doses unless I held you myself, in my own arms, the two of us, standing together in front of that awful machine. . . .”
This, the first sacrificial bond he will never shake off. Her moist, swallowed “Oh, Ricky” identifies the larger hurt. She never loved him more than at that infant moment, because he could not harm her yet by loving back.
By traceless association, he is again on the western leg of that disastrous homecoming tour. He is in some national park just up the road from that phantom hitchhiker. He and his mother perch over a display case on “The Winning of the West,” reading in embarrassed silence:
BLABS
These metal spikes were placed in the noses of calves, to wean . . .
Accomplished in humans, he remembers thinking, without resort to hardware. The stab grows in lockstep with the calf. No parent loves as fiercely—he’s seen it here, in the assiduous death camps of the destitute—as one who loses a child at birth. Proof is up on the call room prickboard, a poem-laced card distributed to the Obstetrics staff, commemorating a named, fully invested baby, dead after one day. And loved horribly, worse than one lost in the flush of age. A haunted, coupleted, last-century thing, translated from a vanished original: Permit your little one to come; I will conduct it home.
All these muffled hits that strangle him by inches, iatrogenic events, injuries caused by medical care. A public hospital, a chop shop to scare off ghetto death? Jesus God, it’s the present’s quintessential scheme to borrow itself out of debt. A reflex squeeze on the remote, and he shuts down the set. This sends Mother, as well, temporarily back to the spooks’ anteroom.
He is half a life late for rounds. The question is no longer whether he can face the prospect. The question is will he, and the debate migrates down into his arms and legs.
When he arrives today, she is awake for the first time since going under. Father Wisat, dislodger of locked migratory spirits, is gone, his own traveling soul retrieved by Immigration, which, while sensitive to the situation, has the country to protect.
The girl’s smile, once automatic, fails to break through the layers of apparatus strapped to her face. The covers flatten at her south, two feet before they should, an absence, an obscene vanishing trick. Her torso is caught in the act of sliding off to another world. He can still smell on her the aromas that bore and bone rasp released from her.
“Hey, sweet stuff,” he greets her, gagging on the steel wool words. “How are we feeling today?”
The plural pronoun is poison. Her face is impassive under its morass of black and blue, the record of the various blunt implements shoved down it. Maybe her English is gone, systematically beaten out of her. Or perhaps the answer is too obvious for words. We hurt. Nothing else is.
He turns her, probing, fastidiously recording all measurements in his write-up. The hacked-apart schoolgirl, who once wrote him shy thank-you letters, looking up the spelling of every other word, holds still throughout. Except for her labored gasping, she plies him with silence. He cannot bear it. He’ll go write himself the magic prescription. It would be easy. Kindergarten.
Her eyes are cold panes. They give no hint of anything but indifference to the attentions of her betrayer. She is so shocked by her internal mauling that she cannot even cry for help, let alone want to.
He must hear her speak, even the word that would make her hatred unambiguous, the accusation he would refuse to defend himself against. He must tell her, Weekly Reader style, how the operation went, what they found, what they tried, what they gave up on. A lunch-meat-on-balloon-bread synopsis (the mustard the precise color of those pots of yellow reserved for affixing the blazing sun to newsprint) of what she can expect from the life remaining to her.
You may have noticed that your body drops off a bit sooner than it did. Something in her refusal to speak says she has a better sense of where she is, more profound, more real than his chart can hope to lay out.
He could cut through, lay the mutual knowledge out on the traction bed between them like a hand of crazy eights. You know; you know. My baby, Joy, don’t make me say it. But a sense of impending disaster worse than disease leaves him staring at his clipboard. The real disclosure must come from her.
He considers a full frontal bluff: I know what brought you to this hospital, the reason you are all assembling here. I know, in rough outline, at least, what you and that pal of yours are planning. But that gambit could lead only to the same grisly cul-de-sac: his untethering in front of her. Rocking, lathering, sobbing un
controllably like the special residents five floors above.
He hunts, hypertensing, for something to sound out aloud. Talk, jabber anything, only make it fast. “All right, Ms. Stepaneevong.” His accent is tone-perfect, if shaky beyond recognition. “Time for the end-of-year review.”
That brief quiz you’ve been waiting for from the start. A crucial, last-minute check on her preparation in all disciplines. States and capitals. Planets of the solar system. Periodic table. Content does not matter one atom, so long as she’ll talk. The work she has in front of her expands like a crazed zoom fisheye, and suddenly, the fact is as plain as the bruise that was her face. Talk, extemporizing, is the only skill that she will require in school’s next annihilating grade.
Material for the promised pop test lies everywhere at hand. She has stacked all around her, for the moment when she would be ready to use them, the collected texts of her private library, an anthology of telling. He grabs at a loose bit on the nearest pile and sits down on the end of her bed, amply vacated now, as if amputation were expecting him.
One box of the newsprint scrap has been heavily outlined in Magic Marker script, not hers. Arrows flank-attack the article’s lead, and clumsy balloon print asks, “This one?!” His eyes run over the piece. His lips moving silently in sync, as if still reading with training wheels:
James says that when the Rebel troops set fire to his village, he ran one way and his parents ran the other. He has not seen them since that moment of confusion. “They are not dead,” he insists, not even pausing as he grinds grain for tonight’s communal dinner. “I just don’t know where they are. If I knew, I would go to them. But I don’t, so I stay here.”
Operation Wandering Soul Page 41
