Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

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 alone of adults has accidentally gotten wind, they come now to abduct him.

It takes him some moments to realize. "God, Espéra. 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.

Disclosure hits him, a kind of delayed confirmation, one more closeless closure. The numbers now make grief a deplorable indulgence. He gives himself five seconds of denial. He is beyond pretense, past anesthesia.

But the pain is duller if you don't stop all at once. "What about the other?" he asks. That Methuselah kid?

A look comes over her, a stunned confusion of disgust and fear: You knew, then? Everything? "They've come for him. The researchers." Her tone suggests accessory, smuggling, assisted betrayal, parental profiteering. "Oh Christ," she sobs. "How long did he have left, anyway?"

"And the others?"

She returns his matte stare, uncomprehending. Hallucination reaches a pitch where he can't remember if the carnage has really happened or he has fabricated it. He catches on to a dull ironstone finish to her eyes and realizes that she too is drugged. Has been for

a while.

She leans to take him, wrap him, punish, revenge, and absolve everything. But as she gathers to correct him from above, she crumples, hands balling at his clothing for a hold. She grips whatever she can cling to, the infant's reflex fist. To release would be to slip endlessly. She mumbles something into his sternum, words that bite their way through his cartilage. Te necesito. Me sofoco. Cuando no estás, no

tengo aire.

Saturated in death, she lapses into her real language. In less time than it takes her suction fingers to gouge into Kraft's neck, empathy undoes him. He never once asked this woman the first thing about her life. He sees it now, more real than his own. At last he makes the leap to why she searched him out. How she located him. What they are both doing here, hip-deep in baby genocide. All done to rewind the film's opening frames, rework them. Another shot.

Lit in this flash, he sees the assailant that reality arranged for her. Not Mama's wholesome, milk-headed brother, smuggling her into the closet and pounding away at her for years, terrifying her into a pact of intimacy from which she would never emerge except in obsessive giving. Her smotherer is more sinister, darker, southern. Every hour of her life, each time she moaned in hurt pleasure at Kraft's touch, it was in the fantasy that she might open her eyes and see him, her destroyer, might spit in his face or fall bleating into his arms. Love: the abuser's name she swore at knifepoint never to reveal, paying its nightly visits, refusing to kill and deliver her, however old she grew.

Refusing until this instant. Kraft looks at her for the first time, infected, condemned. Nothing is left him but her, and simply loving her back is worse than all imagining. She tears away from their crutch embrace. She darts a look over her shoulder at the insanity around them, fleeing it down blackness's alley. He searches her face— Linda? — but she stares back wildly.

"Let it die then," she pronounces. Let us all suffocate. Be snuffed out along with these babies — the best release anyone can hope for. She whips her head back and forth, screaming soundless acceptance, flush up against the sick proximity infusing every instant until the last.

He tries to close the gap between them, to sedate her somehow. But she pulls back from his hand as from a brand. "You touched me," she tells him, lapsing back to a numb scold. "You'll have to rescrub."

Cataclysm spreads in front of him, all but complete. He reads the report already, the way it will appear in the arch piece the Chief will assign him for next month's book club. How we murdered our children. What form will explanation take this time? The one the times demand. Corrupt survival fable, deranged beyond recall. Based, as always, on actual event, but garbled in desperate retelling.

Unless he tells her. For once, a firsthand account, a transcript beyond the journals, the papers, the nighttime anthologies. He will say what all eyewitnesses have, since the first fireside. He will tell her: I saw them. I know now where they are off to. I know where they came from. They have left us behind, with nothing but this thin plot to live on. To keep alive another sentence longer.