Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  Kraft’s hands go autonomous; their overlearned skill runs on ahead of him. From time to time he stops to say certain procedures by name: RUQ abdominal wound requires immediate hemostasis by application of . . . But even these speak-aloud bits are a kind of Latin liturgy, mumbled by heart with no feel for the meaning of the words. He drags, a deep-sea diver, through the reef-encrusted deep.

  After a while—no saying how long, now that time has formally ended—activity in the room accumulates. It condenses into concerted efforts like planets congealing out of stellar dust. The luxury of study, the idea of a worked-out operative plan, takes on a laughable Club Med quality—decadent contrivance of primary care givers still living the dream of sustainability shattered here.

  They operate, seat of the pants, improvisation night, open stage. He nods out along someone’s splattered linea alba and comes to, still working efficiently, hovering out-of-body over a half-sized left anterior aspect, retracting the gaping hole by hand as Dr. Brache crams the loose party favors back into the split piñata. Habituation is a marvelous thing. The annihilating assault Technicolor lasts only until it becomes familiar. Then standard emergency procedure sets up its own counter-rhythm. A little movement, a little breeze in the face of the unlivable. Endurability is simply a rate function.

  The uses of childhood exceed human count. What he wades through is this year’s quota compressed into an hour. They apply the same tourniquets, thread the same running locked sutures, ligate the same living tissue with their 2-0 chromic. So where is the threshold point, the place where what remains is no longer life but contorted burlesque? Well, in a word, here. Even the attempt to make sense of it is obscene. It’s over, over. There’s nothing for it except the stylized as-if, the subjunctive, the reflex motions of would and were. Call, as always.

  While Kraft holds his finger in the blood-spewing hole, a little melody of contrived naïveté loops infinitely through his head. It’s a phrase out of some expectant cartoon picaresque, but lovely, dark, escapist beyond telling. The words go: “Don’t leave just yet. Don’t fall.” The tune is lullaby incarnate. He fishes for a piece of lead that has molded itself against what were once vertebrae, humming to himself. He times the drop of the lead into waiting stainless pan to spank on the cadence.

  Although time has ended, something keeps changing out there in the space beyond the theater. The kids must have gotten shot sometime before three in the afternoon, when school let out. Last he stepped out for air, it was dark. But whatever change persists outside the hospital is just a leftover, inertial going-through-the-motions, a hysterectomy case on hormones, a midlifer returned to the singles circuit for reasons that escape him. Night falls, as always. The cut-faceted flares come on all over Emerald City. A lovely petrochemical astigmatic glow enchants the sprawl, holds out the flirting promise that society’s postindustrial theme park is nearing its eternally imminent completion.

  All done with back projection, of course, double exposure, soft focus, the industry’s proficient visual con. The addiction to hope is no surprise, in a creature whose soul is a complex kludge, imagination’s overlay superimposed upon superfluous animal circuitry. Mind is a sucker for its aboriginal entrapment. Then what happened? What happened is this, narrative’s two-minute drill. These lacerated trick-or-treaters left at Kraft’s door.

  News covers it all night, while the story is hot, between “Dates of the Stars” and tangled tales of accidental incest. Tonight, anyway, this one is the lead. Collective schoolyard death—this ring of real-life Riverdales and Sweet Valley Highs, assembled like a crop of eager Presidential Achievement Medal winners to deliver the valedictorian address. Its plot feeds the country a night’s full course of the Gothic frolic it has come to require.

  The ER staff and their temporary conscripts—sworn in under the crisis clause—stay glued to half-hourly accounts of the shooting that has landed in their laps. They follow the story on huge TV monitors mounted in strategic spots about the lounges. They leave the apparatuses open, bloodletting them for the glossless glaze they offer on the event. They watch the Minicams come into this same ER, pan the room, point at the monitors, which disappear down a White Rabbit hole of video regress.

  They see in slight variation, half a dozen times, each abdomen gaping underneath them. “Updates,” the wire vendors call the repeating hook. Yet the only new data, aside from the killer’s high school yearbook photo, a glimpse at his underground cache, and some revised stats from the assault rifle technical manual, are the updates that everyone in this room already knows: the count increment, a charity-drive target gone mad.

  Reporters start relaying as news the bits all the other news media say. Panels of experts pick at the thing listlessly, like hostages to the Clean Plate Club toying with their asparagus. The stats sprout their privately suspected proofs: one in five American schoolchildren has possessed a gun. On any given day, one hundred thousand come to school armed.

  Internationally, vicarious glee sets the dominant tone. Iran, Syria, South Africa—the usual pariahs—have a field day. World Service dubs the solo corral gunfight “this peculiarly American crime.” Yet if it is at all peculiar, Kraft thinks, it is only to show how the States is still, for a last short gasp at least, the world’s innovator, the flagging standard bearer in trade’s westward migration, as first formulated by one of those Adams boys.

  News drags the standard surreal figures back and forth into the viewing plane. Its sick traffic is matched only by the continuous crowd tiding in and out of the frantically composed operating theater. It’s pure opera, a lavish Medea in modern dress mounted by artists in exile’s holding camps. One alderman makes the point that most of our annual firearm homicides are caused by unregistered weapons. Thus, what we really need to discourage the illegal trade is easier registration. The city could even liquidate some of its crippling debt by selling portions of its massive seized arsenal. . . .

  Surgical nurses palm Kraft the requested blades as in that old game, pass the shoe from me to you to you. Their heads bob like toy water-sipping ducks, peering up to gape at the monitors while they clamp and cauterize, listening, as if the clue to the next incision, the mystery they hold braced under their latex, is out there. In the floodlit close-ups of hysterical mothers. In the filler human interest about the kid whose life was spared by a truant afternoon in the video arcade. In the pastel artwork pinned to the corkboard of the decimated classroom.

  Bodies and delayed broadcast: the team members watch both images at once, needing only the colored glasses to go 3-D. They watch in the stunned peace that settles in after event passes all understanding.

  On the dozenth repeat of the simpering anchor’s “Topping the stories this hour,” somebody snaps. It’s Kean, raving, “Do we have to . . . can’t we get a shade less grotesque soundtrack?” His tone is puerile, an I-didn’t-ask-to-be-here-you-know. Even here, disaster is, de facto, every man for himself.

  “Whatcha want, Father Kino?” a mask-muffled voice heckles him. “Mozart symphony?” In a world where such things still mattered, Thomas would live to regret the outburst. Kean would ensure that he never got certified. The thought is an idle curiosity. It has gone hypothetical, scattered among the dozens of schoolchildren strewn all over Carver’s cutting room floors.

  One of the scuts obliges by shutting off the media. The decibel level drops so precipitously that Kraft cannot at first place the crash of surf that swooshes in to replace the news. Then physiology returns: the bruits in the capillaries shaking his tympanic membrane. By concentrating, he can mold the sound into the aural hallucination of his choice. He tries his hand at contemporary avant-garde, a piece of pitch equivalents pulled from the points on a random medical chart.

  The aleatoric stuff is a piece of cake. Emboldened, he allows it to adhere into the Kindertotenlieder: a little light has gone out in my tent. From there he works massively backward, fashioning the pulse into the censered thrill of Renaissance polyphony, that paltry little Glory to God issuing out of
a host of fist-sized boys’ choir lungs, the organs he holds now cupped in his hands. Et in terra, the high, hanging resonators soar off, the lines below launching them vaultward with complex but concerted churning, heartsick with courage and perseverance, releasing a plainsong whiff of the place all leading tones lead.

  Music issues from inside his skull marrow, an automatic writing like the one his hands obey. The sense is punctured when the notes begin to take their madrigal dictation from another source. He hears the choir above him before he even looks up. There, in the observation mezzanine, a line of children stare down from on high, pressing their palms to the gallery glass.

  They gape slowly, like baffled, landed bass, silent except for the soaring twelve-part Stabat Mater sluicing through Kraft’s ears. Their motet starts to partake of this grisly Christmas, Saint Nick, their patron, revealed as the all-seeing prep for the Last Judgment. He barely recognizes them, so spruced up, surpliced, tricked out like this, high altos at the very lowest, launching effortlessly into the piece they have been rehearsing all these many weeks. They sound their stunned bit of praise, steeped in the requiem service that assembles them, wringing whole-toned in paradisum from catastrophe’s loft.

  He has been waiting for them. Chuck the No-Face; Joleene, falsettoing through her Chatty Cathy; the High Latin Hernandez brothers, radiant as altar boys; the Rapparition, springing the hymnal’s Index of Meters with his freer syncopations. Today’s front line, brought together in his ward for a purpose, have only been awaiting the arrival of these cadres, through the old portals of disappearance, to begin the mop-up evensong, the consolidating tutti heave.

  They converge through all history’s holes. The child miners are there, the factory fire victims, the bands incarcerated to reduce indigence. The ones converted, over generations of shame, to fable and fairy tale. They ring the observation platform, staring at Kraft’s handiwork. On an unseen cue, they break from their antiphony and await orders from the commander of the hour, his face more beaked and wizened, head balder, nervous energy more premeditated when seen from a story below.

  Little Father Time in his Dodger cap counts casualties, scouring the bloodbath for the expected sign. His eyes, from this distance, dart around the shredded scraps like sparrows after lunch crumbs. The inventory of his gaze courses over the head wounds and exploded chests. His own face absorbs the features of those that are food-processed beyond recognition, no longer identifiable as human.

  That look settles on the pieces of disintegrating sponge Kraft pretends to sew together. Kraft follows the glance down, sees the girl under his instruments for the first time. He traces with his gloved hand the still-gushing projectile gash. He places his finger in the ruptured esophagus, the severed tendons relaxing what’s left of her mouth into a Quattrocento smile radiating peace. She will be spared, at least, reaching comprehension. The age of consent.

  He looks up at the loft, helplessly. What? What do you want me to do? The answer is impossible; the girl steps from behind Nico, comes from the shadow where she has hidden. He almost tears from the operating team, breaks for the mezzanine stairs to grab her, carry her back to Intensive Care. But the measured, appraising stare she levels at him fixes him in place. Something is different about her, a change he cannot quite name. Then it comes to him. She is upright. Whole. Her legs restored.

  All at once they are beckoning, bailing scoops of air over their shoulders. They turn, point, gesture down a path that won’t wait. Kraft’s eyes well with salt. He pleads with them to stay just a minute longer. I can’t. Not now. I can’t abandon this in the middle.

  It takes him only one stopped heartbeat to realize, humiliated: the come away is not meant for him. What would they want with a traitor, a grotesque, repulsive giant, a freak who would smash any clubhouse he tried to squeeze into, a sellout double agent in the pay of age? He snickers at his mistake, the arrogance of it, the pitiful decrepit who cannot recognize his own wrinkles in the mirror. Not him: they have come to whisk off their slaughtered school friends.

  The a cappella Knabenchor resumes. Their ravishing high notes launch a pathetic prayer at the clerestory, a help message holding at bay, for one more hemiola, the floodgate crossing. All sick persons, and young children. The fatherless children, and widows. All that travel by land or by water. Give peace in our time. Defend us from all the perils and dangers of this night. The tune flies up, flushed like a suicidal game bird. It keeps going, up past the atmosphere, eternal as tempered alloy, as awful and permanent as a satellite plowing the black vacuum, pointlessly rehearsing its greeting, millennia after the message senders have all gone.

  Kraft sinks back into the pointless exercise, just short of salvage and past salvation. He works head down, endlessly steeped in bodily punishment, an automaton in darkness. He does not look up again at the observation glass or at the faces of the mauled meat packings under his hands.

  Tempo imperceptibly shades off. It would be possible to stop and count bodies now, if one were inclined. The field lies, if not cleared, at least preliminarily shoveled. A portion of the mown-down children have been rerouted, airlifted to “more appropriate area facilities,” as Admin informs the press. Another portion, steadily rising, are lost in post-op, give up languidly on the table, or fulfill the prognostic leveled at them on arrival.

  He cannot say how his colleagues hold out. All but the most manic one or two have long since stopped talking except to call for the occasional clamp. A round robin of catnaps takes over when the rush of violence no longer suffices to kill fatigue. Chief comes and taps you on the shoulder; it’s your turn to dive into oblivion a while. As Kraft goes down, the darkness is so thick and sticky that it coos at him.

  Needless to say, he goes on cutting and sewing in sleep. Creatures spring out of cracked kid chests at him; whole bodies disappear down holes that open up in the operating table. They die on him even faster here.

  Reports filter in, litter his dreamscape with the everyday surreal. With the whole surgical staff overwhelmed by this brilliant diversion, the guerrillas move in and the nightmare evacuation begins in earnest. In the chaos created by the assault, the preemies disappear into thin smog, along with their Plexiglas incubators. In their wake, the second wave—the severe handicaps and defects—disperse as one. They were just waiting; he might have pieced it together. Camped, quartered until the arrival of this go-ahead.

  He wakens violently just before the last dance step. He is cutting again, alongside Kean and a stringer he can’t recognize. Kean is rambling. “Well, kiddies, we’ve saved this one. This one, and maybe that head wound thing from yesterday. But these here are turfed.”

  The man dusts his gloved hands into the open chest. “Still: two out of a couple dozen ain’t bad, given the conditions. Should be good for a certificate from the mayor’s office.” The man turns to address Kraft. “You’ll be set for the advance residency of your choice.”

  Kraft surveys what is left of the room. Torsos in every contortion lie live in their fresh cornerstones, the latest act of ancient sacrifice. He fiddles with his gloved hand for compassion’s trinket. Nothing else signifies. He stops in front of a school kid whom Kean gives no hope. They are easy to find, those about to take off. He skims the chart to verify; yes: irreparable. Then he hangs the tin angel, septic with time, around the slender and severed neck.

  With no link, he is out in the anteroom, on breather perhaps, with nothing more recuperative to do than stand in front of the plate glass and look back in on the emergency still under way. Someone fastens a blood-pressure cuff to Kraft’s biceps, pumps it to tourniquet tightness.

  He turns to find a green alien, masked and gloved, tugging at his arm. It is one of those creatures from far away, accumulating energy for aeons, assembling a machine the size of imagination’s galaxy, a particle smasher that will break the bonds of memory and deliver life from forever by the simple expedient of splitting time. All those still young enough to learn a foreign language have been conscripted. Because Kraft alon
e of adults has accidentally gotten wind, they come now to abduct him.

  It takes him some moments to realize. “God, Espera. You’ve come. Listen. Where did you take that show? What schools?”

  She dissolves into hysteric, giggle-soaked sobs, the witch in water. It flashes into his mind, just what she is trying to cover up: the itinerary, the venues of tomorrow’s mass murder, and the day after’s.

  He starts to level the accusation, but her snorting, out of control, enrages him. “Listen. This is important. Who did they have playing . . . ?”

  She comes to with a crack. She rolls her head limply back and forth on her shoulders, in disbelief at him, at his theories in this theory-killing place. “I can’t . . . It’s not happening. It’s not. For the love of . . .”

  The punctuating profanity is lost to a language he doesn’t know. “You sick animal,” she whispers. “Look at you. Look around.” She is throatless, on the verge of slapping him, throwing the worst, most vicious thing she could say to another human scaldingly into his face: Grow up. Grow up, won’t you? She stares at him as if his hands were sharp instruments. “Oh, Ricky. Ricky.” You boy.

  “She left this,” Linda says dully. “In the tablet by her bed.” She holds out a notebook scrap. Joy’s Lieve Kitty. Kraft is terrified to take it. When he refuses the scrap, Linda, practiced, reads it to him aloud.

  Of course you are mine! Otherwise I wouldn’t kiss you, would I? Buuut . . . you are my best friend, huh? Are we going to get married and live together in a big house? I saw a beautiful white house with blue shutters. Right by a playground. And then my mom and dad can come stay, yes/no?

  love Joy

  Only a love note, then. He is destroyed, abandoned, as promised at the very start. Linda stops, her voice hanging in allegation.

  “This is not to me,” he objects. “I never kissed her. It’s the other, the old guy . . .”

  A choking laugh rips out of the woman. She removes mask and gloves. Once more it is briefly her, the radiance that almost saved him. She is shaking her head, biting back her lip, trembling hopeless, hopeless, as if he has just come home, his new coat torn, after she warned him.