Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

On the roof, along various rays streaking off from Carver's ground zero, Kraft picks out his recent ports of call: Hollywood Pres, Hills Brothers General, St. Tomography's. The so-called skyline of this city is so low — all the potentially tall buildings demurring at sissy altitudes, each lisping, After you; No, after you, what, with all this free land and the Big Quake ratcheting up to unleash any century's end now — that the place names on his resume spread around him as clearly as the castles on a cartoon postcard of the Rhine.

He can take them in at a glance, opaque oxides and noxides permitting. Photochemical smog, tucked in lovingly by heat inversions, welcomed Cabrillo himself, three centuries before the first car. Ozone in the wrong place, that's all. What we need's a multibillion-dollar bailout, a five-mile-radius undershot waterwheel to hoist the O3 back up where it belongs.

Before drifting too deep into the red zone of human empathy, Kraft indulges in an exercise of extended focus. He calls to mind how, in each of these hospitals across the city where he has served time, and in all the numberless institutions where he has not yet set foot — hospitals and research foundations and university labs all the way up the coast from Baja to Livermore and on into the wilds of BC, shooting out across the Aleutians into central Asia, down through the polyglot Indonesian archipelagoes, into the Indian subcontinent, reversing Alexander back to Our Sea and up into Europe, over the Atlantic to North America again, through the government-injected foundation mazes of the East Coast, propagating à la kudzu gulfward, stampeding the Dakotas like an all-terrain, all-weather, year-round ragweed — in all these facilities, one single human woman metabolizes. A strain of her culture inhabits major health institutions all over the planet. This lady, a world and wider, is named Henrietta Lacks, but goes by her pseudonym, Helen Lane.

She's even better known by her nickname, HeLa, that oncological favorite cell strain of researchers the world over. The abbreviation is some cultured microbiologist's idea of literary allusion. Hela, Norse goddess of the dead. This HeLa is the goddess of a spectral eternal life, metempsychosis of the petri dish. Since they scraped her tumored cervix four decades ago, hearty Henrietta lives on in hospices and wayhouses everywhere, even in the bowels of Carver's own Knife and Gun. She splits, respires, ingests, and transforms nutrients — cancerous but immortal. Helen's cells dream the dream of one world, patient in the dense foliage, waiting their cue to rise like rapturous doves.

She is the modern world's oversoul; Kraft will go so far. Her spread is a bitmap index for these million points of hospital light running over the earth's every wrinkle, trying to assemble themselves, spell out some vast declarative that would be visible from outer space — maybe Schiller's "Ode," an arrow delineating a continent-sized landing strip, the unit axioms of human geometry, or just another galactic backwater neon come-on insisting WE DO IT ALL FOR YOU.

Up here, seated dangerously on the unrailed ledge — not even a handhold should a gust of wind break his tentative balance — Kraft hears Helen's breathing on the semiarid air. She will make her run soon, become not only the oldest living human, but the planet's largest. Her cells, spreading through all longitudes, begin to reconnect, to learn how to talk to one another again. He sees, all the way down the Golden State, the local metabolite lines already laying themselves down.

The convertibles are out tonight, sea turtles massing on that one lunar interval to hit the beaches for an orgy of egg burying. A desert caravan of them, tops down, flog the blocks below, creeping randomly, probing, one rider per machine, each with a radio set to 10, tuned to the identical station. They comprise so many stereo simulcasts that, even from all these stories up, Kraft hears the disembodied messages take to the air and aggregate into a leviathan Announcer. He leans out over the ledge, daringly far out, tempting a shift in his center of gravity to change his life for good. Bubbling up from the cars comes this night's incarnation of the reassuring, ubiquitous heartland accent, giggling shrilly that there are only ten shopping years left until the Blowout Clearance.

The aerial overview affords him a glimpse into the neighborhood's after-hours transactions. In the middle of the next block, a quartet of heavies improvises a counterless concession stand. Spontaneously, the line begins to form, snaking in a direction covertly understood by all takers. And it's not just members of select underclasses who join in this evening's bake sale. Practitioners of all the proverbial races, colors, and creeds, the complete spectra of socioeconomic plumage drop by. Each participant knows the nature of the real estate. They've come to buy, finding their product without the benefit of megabuck broadcast ads or four-color magazine spreads. After a bit, Kraft begins to make out the formations in play — the deep safeties, the cornerbacks prowling out in the flats for the first sign of those who don't belong. A sharp two-pitch trill and the whole carny operation instantly shuts down tight.

And Dopplering gruesomely, audible long before seen, a pack of wailing ambulances homes in from the worst of directions. The sirens shriek through these streets like kids furiously racing to kick the can while trying to yell ole-ole-all-come-in-free-o. With this flank attack, the roof too outlives its expediency for Kraft. Its promise of protection turns out to be as anachronistic as massive ramparts, post-saltpeter. He can go no place, no commute long enough, no hideout where they cannot beep him or obliquely conjure his assistance, his call night or no.

What in disintegrating creation do they expect of him? When will it be enough? Never, comes the siren's singsong answer, the little disco ditty of this minute's shattering accident. There will forever be as many demands on his technique as there are ways of children going wrong, ending up in this halfway hospice of disaster.

The ways are many — more than he can keep apart. On Grand Rounds, he maintains the current catalog only by metonymic shorthand. He visits the Rib Metastasis, the Crushed Kidney, the Mitral Valve, the Saturday Night Special. Everyone is pathetically trusting, shouting excitedly at his bedside arrivals, calling his name out confidentially, intimately— Doc Kraft —as if urging on a stickball teammate. Pitifully friendly, fast to transfer, ready to love him more than they love their own fathers. Unfair comparison: half of them don't know who their fathers are.

The Fiddler Crab knows. Fiddler's dad decided that the prescription that Mom brought home from the freebie clinic to treat Fiddler's cinder-infected hand was gibberish. The boy's mitt decided otherwise. Now the Crab is back, claw immense and gangrenous, stinking so badly that Kraft can barely get close enough to schedule him for immediate draining.

He cannot linger, but must keep rolling down the roster. Next up, he checks the chart on the No-Face, a prepube whose misfortune it is to have been born with nothing from the bottom of the eye sockets down to the anterior palate. The plastics team has been working him for years, and after half a dozen reconstructions (although "re-" is an overstatement in the No-Face's case) the boy is no longer completely a monster. He still resembles an Etch-A-Sketch something fierce, but he can at least go out in public. Kraft has asked to be allowed to look in on the next buildup. As dues payment, he is given what remains of the pre-op. He visits the kid on the eve of the procedure. The No-Face is fearless, cheerful, but still cowering behind the veteran campaigner's blase affect.

Leaving the boy's bed, Kraft is replaced, changing-of-the-colors style, by the pediatric psychiatrist from the rehabilitation team. The No-Face breaks into what will one day, after another half-dozen operations, begin to resemble a huge grin. "Dr. Kraft," he calls out, grotesquely polite, the accents of an overrehearsed child star skipping over the years cheated from him, "I'd like you to meet my friend Linda."