Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

He cannot answer her and escape with his life. Cannot say that it chills him already when she smiles, when she turns her head in a certain arc, when she kisses him like a deranged adolescent, when she laughs like an arrested preteen at the self-same movie kisses, when she attacks professional problems with the earnestness of one who still believes in healing's ability to at least break even. He dares not say how she promises to salve his inevitable next bloodying, to brush away like cobwebs the scrub-suited gang of thugs that wait for him, trimming their nails nonchalantly with number seven recurve blades at the end °f the alley. Just to look at the promise in her features chills his gut as solid as the old tennis ball dunked in liquid nitrogen.

He looks up at her from the floor where she holds him pinned. So clean, naïve, those fantastic arching eyebrows, her expanse of cheek built up from subcutaneous muscled fats as flexible and unassigned as empty last-century maps of the poles. She is one of the lights, the breeze-borne weightless people capable of taking pleasure directly from the air. He at last manages to get out: "I love your face."

She tenses, her fists clenching against compromised parts of his body that she could do genuine damage to if forced. "My face? What's the matter with my face?"

The theater-hopping, roller-skate-voiced kid from the first date vanishes. All trace of that supercompetent child-rehabilitator steeped in her rounds, the pro he first asked out, is gone. A piccolo trill of authentic fear struts front and center in her voice, above the hundred-piece marching band. Nothing the matter, he wants to say. I love your face. There is something in it I can't quite place.

But he can say nothing out loud. She twists her neck nervously around, like an icy Hitchcock blonde looking about for the blunt instrument. Only, her hair is coal-blue, her skin tinted iodine for purposes of international intrigue. Then she pounces, using on him the same trick she used to seduce the boy with a crater where his nose should have been. She begins tickling him, the same frontal attack of hands that will forever make her the No-Face's first and only love.

Kraft, like the boy Chuck, is wildly, sickeningly ticklish. He buckles, tries to throw her off, but she uses some kind of Eastern center-of-balance thing to keep him under. He is twice as big as her, and in the throes of torture. The woman knows exactly what she is after. He screams for mercy, but she just skritches him on the floating rib, his truly sensitive spot, grinning, "Go ahead. Yell your baby-brown eyes out. Who's going to answer? Screams from a single man's apartment, in this neighborhood? Not even the police'd be stupid enough to mess with that."

She levers down his wrist with her knee, grazes his flank with long strands of hair until he starts to hyperventilate. Slowly, agonizingly, she voices over, "I don't know why I'm letting myself get involved here. I hate doctors. I swore to myself to make it a rule never … You're all deranged. You're probably a real sicko, aren't you?"

Her face to his exposed nipple, just dribbling little spurts of air across his horrendously sensitized flesh. She has him flailing, laughing in agony, his eyes like Zeeland after the dikes were bombed. "Oh, you poor sick little baby. You little crippled baby child. Does it hurt? Come on. Give in. Occupational rehab. You need it bad. Trust me. I can help you."

The quick flurry of feints and ambushes slowly flutters home to the prime roost. Her infant flank attacks gradually mature, mutate into effleurage, tapotement. Yes, here, her fingers say. We know. Act it out. Do your worst. No one can hurt anyone else. A little physical therapy is all. Just what the psychiatrist ordered.

You must believe, first, in the leaping cure. In this more than anything, even though the children's ward is its living denial.

Espera believed already while still a schooler, long before experience dulled the bloom of rehabilitation theory. Two years into her first job at a place where gleaming machine panaceas are less than laughable fictions, her faith in the method is accredited. The treatment of choice here consists of a little light exercise and a few read-alouds. Pragmatics allows no other therapy. All she can do is rally the routed field trip by returning it to memory's locales, the place it might even now call home.

She cannot hope for state-of-the-art here at this public spa, given the art of the heavily indebted State. Procedures that clinics just over the freeway consider barest livable minimum are denied her. Funds for physical medicine — vague promissory notes dangled in front of her team from quarter to fiscal quarter — fail to meet even need. In place of Hubbard tanks, they get hot showers. Their muscle-zapping machines look and sound like bug lights. Even her exercycles and wobbly massage tables were picked up on the cheap from a supplier indicted in an elaborate scam involving large-scale plundering of Salvation Army drop boxes.

Lacking the requisite physiatric high tech, she must resort to restorative tricks. Each of her jerry-built cures is tailored as far as possible to the specific destruction set before her. In this, the indigence of her clients actually assists. Where the cash transaction is the exception, ordinary accounting is, if not waived, sufficiently relaxed to permit experiment.

Carver is one of those places used to launch careers or generate articles that land real, paying jobs. She does her flood control under ranking Pediatrics administrators, M.D.'s who see no children anymore, not even their own. Linda alone of them would put down permanently in health's Hooverville. In her heart, she already exercises her option to buy. More counselor than physician, she masters the tissue repair and recoordination, the schedules of heat and exercise behind all makeshift disaster relief. But these she supplements with pure play, coaxing out recovery on tempts and teases. She sails through this shoestring outfit conducting sing-alongs, assigning mock punishments, doling out treasures, improvising her own recuperative scripts. Open stage — every night, amateur night.

How many ways can a child go wrong? Leave aside the chromosomal, skeletal, and congenital disorders. Forget the untreatables, the ones even she could never repair. Count only those acute enough to force institutional treatment. Forget the nightmares of the preemie nurses, the inexplicable arrests, the sudden circulatory collapses late on winter nights. Pinpoint the préadolescent, her specialty, if she is allowed the luxury of having such a thing.

Begin with the classic infectious checklist — the potentially fatal poxes that her college texts elitely insisted were eradicated in industrialized countries. Add in the respiratory infections, the bouquet of asthmas, cystic fibrosis, miliary TB. Endo, myo, pericarditis. All known blood disorders, book length in themselves. Lymphoblastic leukemia, that spring lodger come to spread its putrefying possessions into each limb of the playhouse tree. GI failures, renal annihilation, precocious or arrested endocrine systems, convulsive disorders. Palsy and a legion of other lesions and tumors, meningitis, diabetes — a list of lethal birthday party invitees that would cripple the coolest clinician to think twice about.

Espera has studied enough Latin nomenclature to tear the short-answer soul out of any semester's final exam. Daily practice leaves her in sufficient command of Stedman's to return surgeonspeak in spades. And yet she swears still by an artesian aqua vitae free of all pharmaceutical sediment. She has watched the watery placebo work with her own eyes, even in the death dormers of this sick building. She has softened the root tumor — that secret thing all childhood illnesses share in common, whatever their differential diagnoses — with leaping treatment. Has seen hope open like any iris to the light.