Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Only when he gets the ingredients home do things really start to get fun. It's been years since he's cooked anything except with the cauterizer, but this seems child's play. Why haven't I cooked more often? I mean, they tell you all the necessary ingredients right up front. Then they step you through exactly what you need to do to put it together. Just like assembling that old one-to-whatever scale model of the Graf Spee with Dad.

He thinks: If I can remove and reattach a living, three-inch kidney, I can certainly shuffle a nine-inch dead souffle. Christ; anybody can cook. All the essential vitamins and iron, plus the perfect seduction thrown in for grins.

She buzzes. Kraft casts a last panicked look around the efficiency. He's had the foresight to stick everything in the utility closet, and the place is looking sharp. Standing tall. But Ms. Espera is not even halfway through the door before her face makes this incredulous O, like she's just witnessed a murder. "You live here?"

Why? What's wrong with it?

"Oh, nothing; I'm…just a little surprised, that's all. Say. How much are they paying you, anyway? Do you have a lot of debts from med school or something?"

Not the first impression of choice. But he still has his culinary trump card with which to win this woman's undying affection or six months' worth of lust, whichever lasts longer. The souffle comes out looking like the Thing from Three Mile Island. He can't understand it. He goes through a Morbidity and Mortality session with her, talks out the recipe, insists that he did exactly what they said to do. Linda explains to him the difference between beat and fold, a semantic differential he had attributed to the pursuit of rhetorical variety.

"But it's delicious," she objects. "Hasn't affected the taste at all." And she laughs with her mouth full, blockading the bits of exploding food with a gesture hazardously endearing. She insists on washing the dishes right after they finish, before the microorganisms can claim their eminent domain. And she invokes all the magic little rituals the female will make of the slightest procedure.

"Now," she says, drying her hands gingerly on his lone dish towel, "are we going to do some aerobics for a little bit, or what?"

The assorted alarms pounding through him flush a rush of neuro-chemical pheasants into the air from out of their cover in the undergrowth. "I believe we are."

She nips variously at his face. They lower each other slowly to their knees, hands blindly reaching out at violent angles for support. Then they are sitting sweetly in one another's laps, gently necking, mouths in each other's mouths.

This has no precedent for him. Adrift, cut loose, a little more blessedly free, at the mercy of the equatorial currents. They begin to explore in earnest, hungry but shy, like pre-meds set loose with Gray's. What is her waist's wave, the taste of her undulating armpits? How does the scoop of her scapula surprise, the taper of her calf turn imperceptibly into ankle? He all of a sudden knows nothing of anatomy but the gross outline, the generic stamp. Form is uniquely overhauled again in her particulars.

She is so alien, so deliciously not him. That's it, that's why his body craves her foreignness. His appetite for sexual pleasure kicks in, follows its intimate program to rediscover — again and again — the heft of this new instance. Vintages, mint conditions, proof bouquets. Her parts are as unique as core samples of fading sunlight. They loosen another notch, from sitting to slouching, ever nearer the carpet. There seems to be always one more buckle to her. Her hand, lighter, longer, lets its tensors clamp against him in a way he has never before mechanically known. She curls girlishly atop him on the floor, and through her body's otherly weight, he recovers his own.

Flavors, he decides. Life at any time of year always comes down to flavors and focal distances, magnifications, the concentration of waves into visible, scalding frequencies. The textures of the silky cotton he strips away from her are infinite. The smells extruded from her body's many passages form a complete concordance. What will her next anomalous patch of skin be like? The wayfarer's question, the only one worth wondering about, extends indefinitely.

She begins nosing him all over, eyes closed, head tilted intoxicatedly forward. Sniffing him like a truffle hound. Her eyes bat, her succulent lashes lap his neck. Her hand grips his trachea; thoughts of Plummer's ER tales of eroto-strangulation flash through Kraft's soaked medulla. What might he and she try out upon one another? How easily might dress-ups, all manner of exotic clothing, get out of hand. There is nothing they might not discover in themselves. She brings her mouth up to his ear. What taboo words? Could be anything, and in imagining the forbiddens she is about to try out, he fills almost to the point of spilling all over her.

"Do you like me?" she whispers, wrenching violently on him in the dark. She holds his head in some decimal fraction of a nelson. In another minute, she will rug-burn his scalp. "Do you?" Answer me. Is it the extension of Linda into stranger spaces, or some cruel multiple, a sinister substitute teacher, her identical twin?

"Do I like you?" Stupid parroting.

"That's right." She tongues the question as through a police bullhorn. A growl issues from underneath her sternum while she pins his face in a three-point takedown. Yes or no. Let's hear it.

How can he begin to say? The shot seems to dolly slowly above this postprandial wrestling match until he stares down on the whole teeming planet from on high. Her question becomes the one thing anyone asks anywhere at this minute, in all time zones. It interrogates every home, hacienda, hut, Haus, health spa, and hovel in the world's directory, and a fair chunk of the underground addresses. Superpower summits sashay around the issue. Corporate heads put it to pitiful proxy votes. Silver anniversary vets lip the litany over hurled crock potsherds. Internationally acclaimed actresses, the fluffy chenille of mass wet dreams, plead it with unseen audiences in darkened halls. Nurse Spiegel petitions Plummer with an unguarded glance as he makes his bluff pass at her back at Carver. Even Plummer's pass is a crude paraphrase. Terrified children of the ward, half hardened criminals from birth, demand something in writing from parents who never show. Rebuffed, they seek it from surrogate candy-stripers just now tucking them in for the night.

And this woman under his hands asks him, outright, in so many words. She threatens, as if his answer will tip some electoral balance. A yes might persuade a fraction of forsaken global plebiscite that paths besides abdication are still available to them this evening. She wants to hear that they are booked for the comprehensive journey, if only in steerage. Does Eligible Bachelor Number One, in efficiency number 1275, in this honeycomb of tasteless prestressed concrete on the sovereign, sunnyside corner of Mission and Delivery drives, D-5 on page 77 of the fabulous cartographic compendium of this entertainment capital of the world's largest self-undermining semifree-trade zone, on the cutting, jagged edge of all that is left of what liberal democracy must yet become in this emblematic, exemplary, guiding high beam of a high-ground nation, all but amok now that it has outlived its onetime prime motive and moral force, its colonizing adage,

Use it up

Wear it out

Make it do

Or do without,

does he, this lone fifth-year surgical resident (having exiled himself to his field only on the belief that cutting and pasting was the one profession that might keep him from backsliding into the existential aloneness his horn in F no longer protected him from), does he like this undulating orchid that he has plucked and pinned corsage-style to his designer gold shirt for the nonce, for the old beloved one-night time being? Do you recognize? Know me? See me? Approve?