Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

But the woman (and here's the frightening bit) is even sexier for all her sainthood. Kraft watches her talk — conjugating with her hands, her flashing pseudo-senorita eyes, her three and a half octaves of voice arpeggiating amazingly from bari Bacall to trebly Billie Burke. And he thinks: Here, perhaps, is a woman even worth playing social worker with. They might make up their own rules as they go along. He twice tries to steer the topic away from child rescue and retrieval toward a bit of rehabilitory salve between consenting adults. For the moment, she will not bite, which is the hell of it, given the woman's dentition. She sticks to business, displaying an impressive knowledge of anatomy, if some of the desired nomenclature is missing. Ah, but he could teach her the technical terms.

Well then, let him see how she looks when self-righteous, blazing, her principles affronted. A bit of Mexican spitfire shouting how you doctor bastards are all the same: you all think treatment ends with sterile bandages, "binder," he scolds her. A too-affectionate name derangement for the first half an hour. But she smiles at the liberty, a glorious, asymmetrical, arousing flare forming in her brow ridges.

"Linder, all this holistic medicine stuff. It's all a tad too type A for me."

"You—! Not to be believed. Ãò type A? You little boys arrange it so that you can stay up all night—"

"Night? Singular?"

"Go ahead. Prove my point, why don't you? Stay up all week, then, with a dozen spinning plates up in the air at once. Big tray full of shiny, sharp tools at your beck and call. You make this colossal mess and then leave us to clean it up over the next several years. Talk about MI candidates. You're so wound up from constant jolts of fourth-and-inches stuff that you probably can't even hold up your end of a decent dinner conversation."

"Try me."

"Only if I get to pay."

"See? Type A. I knew it. Crying shame too."

"Come on. Consider it a little payola. You let the drug company pimps take you out to floor shows and things, don't you?"

"I have never let a drug company pimp take me to a floor show in my life."

"No? But you accept the little bribes? The pens and key chains…"

"Nope. Nada."

"The note pads with prescription logos up top?"

"Uh, well …"

"Well, okay then. This comes to the same thing. I take you to dinner. You do little favors for me."

"I would love to do little favors for you." He finally manages to slip in something of the old cadence.

A glaze spreads across her face, impish: "Yeah? Really?" Coquette, perhaps, but bathed in unmistakable pleasure. Surprise? Impossible. Looking the way she does? How could she have come this far, with those shoulders, that rib taper, these cheekbones, and not know what she does to half the men in every room she enters, and a handful of the women too?

"Yeah," he says. He'll let her pay for dinner. They'll alternate every other lunch. She can pick up the theater and symphony tabs, and he'll square the Maui vacations. The mortgage they'll do proportionately by incomes. They can split the cost of the double funeral down the middle.

They both behave themselves admirably, right up until she must go keep her afternoon appointments. She amuses him with stories about having to prove her citizenship the last time she did a day trip over the border. "They started asking me all these questions I haven't thought about since sixth grade. I panicked and confused Francis Scott Key with Julia Ward Howe. Finally got in by naming three of the U.S. Olympic hockey starters."

"Oh, hockey is it? So you go for the rough stuff, do you?"

"I'm sorry. I can't help myself. When I see those enormous guys body-check one another into the boards…Mmn!"

"Do psychological bruises count?"

"Afraid not. They've got to be real, flesh and blood owies." When he suggests that they watch some surgical study videos together, she slaps his upper arm. "I may be perverse, but I'm not sick."

Exactly: whole, hearty, vigorous. Which is why she shines out in this place, a minister of health touring a plague house. She agrees to a movie date. But it has to be a commercial release somewhere, about teenagers bopping forward to the future, or loved ones coming back as ghosts.

"By the way," she adds as wistful caveat. "You may want to keep in mind, I do happen to be ten years younger than you."

"Which one of us are you warning?"

They meet out at one of those hundred-and-forty-four-screens-under-one-roof places. The requisite separate cars, of course: it's a Pacific Rim first date, and they want to do things right. Kraft loads his beeper for the evening with the weakest batteries money can buy. He picks Espera out from across the packed lobby, like there's a moving flood spot glued on her. They're both a bit buzzed. Linda buys enough Milk Duds to keep the Vienna Choir Boys dosed until all their voices change.

When they seat themselves, she launches into what for her passes as the most self-evident coming attractions topic in the world. "Davie Diaz is in extraordinary pain. I know you said that a certain amount was inevitable for the first couple weeks, but I don't even know where to start with him. The Wilson girl, on the other hand: you seamed her up so beautifully that she barely even needs me."

She speaks quickly, as if needing to squeeze more syllables out of her finite column of air than pneumatics allows. "What's your take on

Joy?"

"I'm in favor of it."

"You juvenile. Are you sure you're a decade older than me? Twelve-year-old Asian female, presenting with severe incursive…" Her words are like Care's ushers, roving up and down the aisles, swinging their flashlights. "Joy, with the impossibly long last name. Cambodian or something."

"Pali," he murmurs. A memory from across immense distances sounds out the edges of his mouth. But the look is too foreshortened to be made out here in the darkened hall. "I mean, the name is Pali. Joy Stepaneevong."

She looks at him as if he has just revealed himself to be the Gretzky of grief interdiction. "You are a doctor, aren't you? Oh, Kraft. What in God's creation are we going to do with her?"

"I've not actually met her, tell you the truth. I've looked over

the…"

"Cojones! You're slicing into a little girl's foot on Friday, and you haven't been down to see her?"

The trip to Maui is off. The double funeral too reverts to separate tabs. Exuberance dies on the vine, replaced by a hard little spoor case of disappointment. "I suspect I'll get around to it," he enunciates.

"Sorry. That was out of line." She clams up, curls, braces herself for the worst. Her flip side is instant, and the withdrawal has something brutal and expectant to it. She tosses a raven's lock with one hurt hand. Faster even than their first flirtation, the whole promising lanyard unravels. Her chest heaves discreetly, tender lip trying not to quiver, to be found out.

"No," he rushes out. "My fault. It's that time of the surgical cycle." He gets her to snicker, despite herself. Oh, Linder; do I need you already, a perfect stranger? "It's just that…"

Say it, then. It's just that, if you knew all their names, if you staked your heart on the prognoses of even those most likely to survive, you'd keel over with the bends, die of decompression sickness inside a week. What can she possibly know of the technique, of the essential, deadening distance from accident that one must preserve? Her kind of care would kill the death-defying skill instantly, if ever once admitted out loud.

"Linda. Maybe it's indicated by all the studies, but I just can't do the hand-holding thing."

At these, his words, a second change smooths her surface. As drastically as she dropped into vulnerability, she is back. She cups her all-protecting hand, crooks her pointer at him. "Com'ere, little man. Let's see." His cardiac muscle bangs up against the chassis like an adolescent's. She takes his hand, stretches out each of his fingers in turn. She folds his palm into hers for the first time, holds it as if embracing the prodigal son. "I'd say you do all right." The house lights dim on cue and the feature begins.