Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

He has lived through evacuations, but never one on this scale. The fabled civil-defense drill gone real, all the more panic-stricken in that everybody in this one acts piecemeal, deep in the dream of free agency. Given the apotheosis of private transport all around him, Kraft finds it hard to credit the shrill fact beloved of the guidebooks, that Angel City once possessed the most extensive urban transit system in the country. The tales of spanking red turn-of-the-century electric carriages smack now of Hans Christian Andersen. Nothing in human ingenuity's arsenal could have staved off this freeway. It is the peak of private enterprise, as inevitable and consummate as death.

"Artery" cuts a figure through his frontal lobes. Southbound artery. Feeder artery. Bypass artery. Exactly the sort of tough, rubbery, spreading net he's transfused into here, tracking the inside lane, the tunica intima. Yet it's impossible to ascertain, in a city as sclerotic as this, which are the arteries and which the veins. Do oxygenated heme groups transport the needed fix out to the Valley, while spent thrombocytes wash the reduced waste back to the Civic Center for reconditioning? Or does the cycle run the other way around? Even the Thomas Brothers aren't saying. Inbound? Out? Yer not from around these parts, are ya, stranger? We're kind of on open circulation here. Arthropod style. This blood doesn't flow. It shooshes. Slaloms.

He merges into the connecting shunt, seamlessly slipping onto the same road by another name. As on any given night, no matter which direction he courses, the congested red platelets pulse off in front of him, the poor venous outflow of spent white-blue plasma returning on his left to fill the spaces he's abandoned. Increasingly these days, he feels the need, deep in his limbic knot, to revert to that cure-all of his surgeon forebears: Open the vein. Primitive debridement. Let the infested fluid drain. Bleed this body, too long under pressure. Cut a counterflow, run a detour down that privileged, gerrymandered isthmus straight into the marina. Trust to the Golden State rule: cars will head toward any empty space. And for a few days at least, superfluous pus would spurt superlatively into the bay.

Reactionary, perhaps. But he's not the only one out on the lanes harboring taboo desires. A hand-lettered sign attached to the hospital exit has for some days fluttered in the semitropical breeze. Slowing dangerously for the third day running, Kraft at last makes out the text.

GET OUT OF YOUR CARS.

Sure. Why not? Billboards are scriptural, hereabouts. Billboards for multihundred-dollar tennies, for CDs fiscal and audio, for song collections of searing social protest, for attitudinal adjustments, for advertising firms, for out-of-work actresses, for billboards. Why not a billboard proclaiming a commuters' general strike? Some self-sponsoring eco-terrorist has evidently shimmied up the stainless steel under cover of night, swung out onto the overhang, and, suspended over half a dozen lanes of traffic (flowing, in these parts, even in dead darkness), masking-taped this manifesto in a prominent spot where it is nevertheless entirely illegible to all but the most incurably print-curious.

Kraft holds up instantly irate traffic just long enough to make out a smaller, scribbled footnote that has sprung up the night before. Some second death-defying maniac has taken up the gauntlet, shimmied the pole, and in midair, appended below GET OUT OF YOUR CARS the codicil, AND FIGHT LIKE A MAN. Exercising the old First Amendment rights, which will of course be suppressed tomorrow by municipal hook and ladder at taxpayer expense, in the name of public safety.

He squeezes out of the file, ramping down to surface roads. With deceleration and return to stoplights comes the acrid-sweet, sickly seductive scent of mildewing vinyl. The aroma has gone tainted since he started working this district, as if petrochemicals rotted like living things. Maroon-brown patinas of condensing air each seal an invisible vintage. The noxious residue, the breakdown skeins of hydrocarbon linkages as long as his nasal hairs fall beneath focal notice now. He smells it only on those days when the bouquet is a little fruiter than usual. Even the radio stations have long ago given up warning the aged or cardiac impaired to stay indoors.

He skirts that neighborhood set to the torch one week a quarter century ago. The car insinuates itself down these streets the way Scando-wegian types are advised to walk them, when suicide simply can't be avoided: hands out of the pockets, eyes straight ahead. Keep to a reasonable but not aggressive clip. Act like you know where you're going.

He does, in the short term, anyway: six-month stint at the Knife and Gun Club. Three weeks into the rotation, his unwisely Caucasoid viscera have already resigned themselves to winding up on the wrong side of the retractors, any stoplight now.

Pediatric service at the public No-Pay? Well you might ask. Luck of the draw, his adviser insisted. Already been all over the rest of town, swapped about like a utility infielder whose teams are too numerous to fit on the back of the bubblegum card. Rotation comes with the turf: Onco up in the Hills. Thoracic on the edge of LaLa Land, repairing the Cars of the Stars. Plastics at Trauma-by-the-Sea. The program demands that everybody do some public service, and Kraft's stint happens to be Pediatrics. Thank your deity of choice too. Could have been dealt the ER service out this way. That would have been, well, call it murder.

Bad enough having to listen to Emergency's own Dr, Tommy Plummer go on about it over Sunrise Sandwiches and chocolate-smeared bagels at the Carver cantina. "See, Kraft, it's like this. Distribution of wealth gets iniquitous enough…"

" 'Inequitable,' perhaps, Thomas?"

"Whatever. I'm liberal. Point is, wank the bills around long enough, pretty soon every day's a jolly holiday. Guy comes in last night. Big intercostal hack crescenting clear through his pect major. Stick misses the subclavian by about a centimeter. 'My girlfriend, she cut me.' I don't know what these people use for steak knives, but this looked like a number seven recurve. Nice downward slash. I'm sponging the guy off while they're sleeping him, and I come across this big keloid scar just a shade to the side of the fresh entry. Sure enough, it's on his chart. He was in last year. Gotta ask him if it's the same girlfriend."

The usual pecking-order preening: We do the sweat shop stuff while you sissy-mollies lollygag around in Kiddieland. Medimachismo. What other hobby can you have, when work consists of getting bloodied to a pulp around the clock, than cultivating masochistic one-upmanship? Plummer can afford to wax radiant in relating call night's worst waking nightmares. He too only temps here in no-man's-land. Were this his permanent abode, the man would be begging his own girlfriend to slash and burn him by now. And mind to clip the subclavian this time, woman.

But Plummer's poly-sci cliche: make it an inequity of futures, failed wish distribution, disparity in circumstance so great that it kills all ability to grant even the premise of hope, and Dr. Tommy might be on to something. The breach between dream and delivery has long since gone beyond fault line. Sinkholes in the whole mythology of progress gape open up and down the street, suck down entire retail strips at a shot. Complete casa communities visibly disintegrate, crumble into the coreolis of debt and rage each day Kraft makes the commute. The national trope, the Route 66 wayfarer's picaresque, here looks out over the vertical cliffs marking its premature dead drop. The steepest reliefs of belief are shocked into submission when laid against these wilder contours, the chasms between come-ons and their public reality.