Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

During the film, she is wonderful. She organically annihilates the armrest between them. At certain key points in the plot, she nudges him and scribbles circled numbers down on a note pad produced from her purse. Afterward, she extemporizes at length the thoughts that each number stands for. Number one is that according to her, people don't really talk like that. Number two is that they should have had the Russian and the American switch briefcases by accident. Number three is she wants to know how high the feature's leading love interest ranks on his personal lust-o-meter.

"Know what?" she asks, vamping for him. "If you stay on this side of the lobby, they don't recheck your ticket." She casts him a challenging nostril flare, suggesting they partake of a hundred and forty-four films for the price of one. Well, what the hell. He missed this kind of thing the first time around. So they take to screen hopping, rolling from one anthology of images to the next in best tragical-comical-historical-pastoral style, giggling at all these eternal middles of stories, each one ludicrously stripped of any sense of beginning or end.

They watch, in converging splices: the story of a woman who gets gang-raped in a bar, a reexamination of Chicago mobsters and one of quiet Nazis living in Cleveland, a stock market scandal torn from yesterday's headlines, the realife events of a horribly disfigured kid, a heady biopic of the discoverers of DNA, one of an early film mogul, of an early automobile antimogul, the pioneer astronauts or folks very much like them, Billy the Kid or a pack of teens very much like him, teens triumphing in historic sporting-event re-creations, teens inadvertently starting the Third World War, aliens inadvertently starting the Third World War, and adults advertently starting the Third World War. Every one a virtual fact, actually dramatized. Based on a true story.

Stories like you read about, and all included in the price of entry. They do the Scheherazade thing all over again, only this time it's not just the beautiful child-bride who's gonna lose her head if the spell of narrative slips. Should the film break or the power brown out with the last unpaid bill for fossil fuel, should the projection booths simultaneously proclaim themselves autonomous republics acting in the name of fundamentalist revenge squads everywhere, should the two of them be caught and sent home on movie probation, the death sentence will at once fall not just on this one double-dutch evening but on the whole heterogeneous experiment in migratory, free-market, fiction-consuming, two-car-date democracy. This multimovie complex will take its place alongside ziggurats, galleons, the colonial pith helmet — all the museum bric-a-brac emblems of lost eras in the world's blind expansion.

Linda laughs, drags him by the arm into another show-stall. At the peak of her giddiness, he feels out her mouth with his.

She stops laughing long enough to kiss him back. The sneaked interval reveals just how many years there are, in fact, between them. It synopsizes the drama of two health professionals who have only just met, out on a mobile Saturday night, testing the myth-edge of accessible, Valley happiness. Yet he cannot help but wonder, despite lips whose novel turns compel his full attention, despite the plot complications hinted at in the feel of her hips, despite her hand wandering across his back, tracing out a story thread that could lead anywhere at all — he cannot help but ask himself how, exactly how things are going to end this time.

Gotta go shopping, he announces. Sort of thing a body needs to resort to every now and again.

"Shopping?" Plummer echoes incredulously. "As in food shopping, you mean? You realize, don't you, that grocery stores have become the exclusive last resorts of hopeless reactionaries and the desperately poor?" Common knowledge, man. Who in this self-respecting world eats at home anymore?

They sit in the Sauna, a gritty cross between locker room and on-call lounge, so baptized because of the uninsulated heat pipes that hang out of the ceiling, peeling the wallpaper and misting the furnishings with a light coat of mildew. Ordinarily, well-offs like Kraft and Plummer would have to pay big bucks to do this kind of slumming. But here in the charity rotation, it's just one of life's simple fringe bennies and franking privileges. Add to this the rooms Plummer has christened the Squash Courts and the Jacuzzi — obscure maintenance function facilities now employed by residents in competitive rituals of moral toughening — and one has a complete home away from home.

Plummer, hands down the toughest among them, has food stores in this neck of the world's woods pegged. The places are hopeless archaisms. Ordinarily, Kraft has no trouble avoiding them. But when, the thousand and one movies having all ended happily, he asked the lovely Linda for a repeat engagement, he could come up with no restaurant suggestion that she found both edible and politically correct. "Why don't you cook something for us, Ricky? That'd be different."

Different indeed. He hasn't brought a foodstuff under his roof for months, aside from the odd soda cracker packet and single-dose PCB tub of marmalade pocketed from Carver's subsidized eatery. And yet, the prospect of rolling around in the deeper spots of his shag with a woman of mixed ancestry who is still in her early twenties is enough to make him want to suffer the whole avuncular hunter-gatherer charade, and like it.

"You going alone?" Plummer resorts to muted, deputy-sheriff intonation. "Good God, buddy. Be careful out there."

Kraft, to keep from having to give the forced grin, asks what his blademate is doing for sustenance this evening.

"Is that an invitation?"

Absolutely not. Read my lips, as the commander in chief likes to say, in an era when actions no longer speak louder than even the softest subvocalizings.

"Well," Plummer wheedles, "I've kinda had my eye on that cast-off of yours. You know. That Nurse Spiegel? What we used to call sloppy seconds when we was kids?" The uses of loneliness rear their ugly hydra heads. Is Kraft himself the last person on this coast who didn't realize he and Nurse S were an item? "I figure she's had enough time to get over you, but not enough to resist the temptation of a sudden and insensate rebound relationship. Maybe ask her out to this little candlelight place on Far Point Pier…"

Far Point was wiped out by storms last spring.

“Was it? I never heard. I've been busy. Well then, that Dishpansation place on Ventura?”

Torched by the cattle-rights activists.

"Holy jump-up-and-sit-down. What the hell's happening to this place? Drugs, Mr. Rico. Tell me: just how responsive might everybody's favorite RN be to the Tastee-Freez phenomenon?"

The grocery store, when Kraft at last faces it, is its usual, fluorescent humiliation. Food Warehouse, that stately rollerdrome, smacks of historical emblem. It seems the penultimate whistle stop on the Big Parade from pickle barrel general store to palatial Hot-to-Go emporium. Standing in embarrassment in the produce department as they weigh his goods, Kraft fights the urge to shout, "That's okay, I trust you." At the meat counter, he sees this woman in dark glasses who he thinks may have been the oldest daughter in an ancient family sitcom, a formative, masturbatory fantasy of his. She warns him off with a "One word and I'll radio the SWAT team" look.

Half the food packages bear, on their printed labels, black, fake "Actual Price" numbers, inked out by the same press run in red, the universal color code for Discount. The afterthought text reads: "Your Price: Only…" How stupid do they think we are? Or rather, how stupid are we obliged to be? Kraft forgets to weigh his bulk lentils, and the cashier makes a tremendous pedagogical show of sending the sack back with a runner, personally apologizing to the line behind him for the man's hopelessness.