Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Kraft turns to go through the amenities and stalls at his first glance at the woman. Her face is imperative with memory. Her look is full of reminders, pieces of string tied around his finger that long ago rotted off. Brown dominates her register, with jet hair and black eyes that spring continuous surprise from wells of unlikeliness. Her build is assertive enough to make her hospital sack coat look like a poolside party dress. Hands sufficiently pudgy to keep them from preciousness, and calves to kill for.

Linda attacks the No-Face with tickles, laughing aggressively. "And this is my old buddy, Chuck."

Chuck, through screams of pleasure, calls out to Dr. Kraft to intervene, stop this madwoman. But Kraft just stands there, helpless with sudden propriety. And probably Chuck doesn't really want any help here. The boy is so completely in love with his physical therapist that Kraft's only option is to get in line behind him and take a number. Linda, oblivious, stops tickling long enough to wonder out loud to herself, 'There certainly are a lot of amazing creatures on God's earth."

" 'Creature' is the right word for it," Chuck laughs, pulling a grimace that exaggerates the plastic mounts lying beneath his grafted skin.

Linda drops her whole beautiful, lip-round mouth in mock shock. "Why, I oughta…" And she sets to tickling him again. Like sharks smelling a feeding frenzy, the other children in the room pile over to join the altercation. "Yo!" she shouts. "Hold it, gang. Things are getting out of hand here. Okay, all of you: 'I will not assault health professionals.' One thousand million times."

This elicits great squeals of pleasure — the most fun any of them have had all week. For some, the most fun they've had since their mothers set themselves on fire while freebasing. They set to work on the assignment at once. Like the immigrants to this continent that they are, they attack the problem via division of labor. They'll do their punishment in huge, vertical, mass-produced columns, one word each. I I I I. Will will will will. Not not not not. The kid who gets "assault" breaks it into "a salt," and the kid who gets "professionals" isn't even in the ballpark.

"C'mon," Linda says, pulling Kraft by his health professional's sleeve. "Let's beat it while we can." The woman is ample, ample in ways that Kraft hasn't even thought possible in years.

Half from memory of rosters, half from sneaking a peak at her tag, he tries, "Estefan?"

She brays. "Close. Espera. And assimilate that s a little bit, huh? My mama's from Dairyland, U.S.A." She clips down the hall, already on her way to the next child on her list. "Mestiza, I just met a pretty mestiza. …"

"Oh Jesus," Kraft mutters, catching the cadence at last, if only a little. "I thought that word went out with the prewar genetics texts."

"Well, we're kind of an army surplus outfit, here. In case you haven't noticed."

"Richard Kraft," he says, sticking out a paw that she is now too far down the corridor to grab.

"Oh, I know all about who you are. Now you're going to ask me out to lunch?"

"Is that the book on me?"

"Yeah," shouts a prematurely gawky kid just slipping past the two of them. "That the book on you." Linda collars the child and tells him when he must show up at her office, downstairs.

"Now. You were saying?" She looks back at Kraft, her chin too curved to jut, her eyes wild with that gorgeous surprise.

"I was just about to confirm the ugliest rumors about me."

"Right. Tomorrow at noon. The cafeteria, where you always meet Nurse Spiegel."

Oh, that Nurse Spiegel. Well, yeah. Small world, just friends, etc. But Ms. Espera doesn't wait for any clever protests. She simply states, "I'll warn you in advance, I've got proven soul-saving tendencies."

"Messianic and mixed blood?" he tries feebly. "Sounds dangerous." But she is gone, ducking into the next doorway. In a minute, the room issues shouts of more free-for-all scrimmage.

Despite the public poop on him, Kraft has, to his mind, been involved in only three relationships that reached life-threatening proportions. One long followed by two shorts, the Morse letter D, if it means anything. It occurs to him, a fact dredged up from adolescent ham radio days, that a long and two shorts followed by another, terminal long would be an X. As in X marks the spot. As in just sign on the line marked X. Cross hair. Algebraic variable of choice. Universal placeholder.

Walking away, he cannot suppress a stupid lilt. He passes the nurses' station, where it seems somebody's had her ears to the listening post. Whatever the source of the info, Nurse Spiegel is wringing the phone like a chicken neck and saying into the receiver, "No, Dr. Kraft can't be reached right now. He's in Skulk Mode. Can I take a message?"

He looks up Linda and she is there, in his pocket two-way translation dictionary: wait, waiting, patience, composure, delay. In a holding pattern, like the rest of sentient hope.

But he doesn't need to wait long to see her again, to learn why she agreed, his rep rap notwithstanding, to meet him for lunch. The answer comes swiftly, and it's merciless in its disappointment. The woman wants to talk cases. She brings her list to lunch, although she clearly doesn't need to refer to it. She knows all these kids, and not just by complaint. Names, dates, the whole curriculum vitae on each one of them, all lodged up in that voluptuous raven's head.

Her mother may have been a cheese squeezer, but daughter Linda definitely hails from somewhere far south of white man's sovereignty She is a great and constant toucher, handling everything. She fingers the catsup bottle, feels the weave of his tie. "Can you help me at all with Suzi Banks?" she asks, clamping him familiarly by the upper arm. "The girl hasn't spoken a word since you fitted the bag." She dunks her chips liberally in salsa, downs them, brushing crumbs from his sleeve and smirking guiltily at her own healthy appetite. "And Chuck. God. Too brave, the boy. He doesn't have the first idea about what he'll be looking at once childhood is over." She taps the back of Kraft's hand in worried appeal.

"And oh." She grabs his shoulder without a trace of self-consciousness. Propriety wouldn't occur to her. Her nature lies completely beyond more median practices in these parts. She is clearly, constitutionally incapable of worrying about who she is or how she might be taken. She knows these things, the way her fingers already know the cut of his clavicle.

He grabs her back in return, on the opposing side. Pinches her a little on what he hopes is a radiating line. "Yes? Oh? What is it now?"

"And oh," she repeats, smiling too strongly to be mistaken for coy, "I need to ask one of you how radical you expect Davie Diaz's spinal thing to be."

That "one of you" gives away his role for her here. "Spinal thing?" he asks, dripping with dryness. What he really wants to say is Davie? What's with this first-name basis, Espera? Davie? Kraft would be lucky to place the boy by sight. "You've looked at the chart, haven't you?"

"Of course I've looked at the chart. But you guys are so cagey on paper. Never put down anything they might hold you to. I want to hear the real story, out loud." She footsies with him under the table, her toes on his arches. Her face pleads with him playfully, goofily. And his urge to get up and leave evaporates.

So he's expected to do the consultant physician thing, nothing more. The irony of the situation is not to be missed: across the table from him hovers a face promising all the loveliness of final escape, sensuous lips savoring the salsa, seducing him to deliver. But all she wants delivered is more shop talk. She is the living apotheosis of the paging device. Messianic tendencies indeed. Even sex, the last refuge of free men, is turned to a mere marketing campaign, corrupted by altruism.