Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Henry the Navigator?

Now how in the world did you know that? Somebody's actually been paying attention in school. By staring for weeks at a time from the top of his tower in — where was it, again?

Portugal.

Right. By staring from his tower in Portugal, the Navigator has trained himself to see beyond the curve of the earth. He is convinced of reports of a River of Eden somewhere just beyond the next landfall. He is trying to see just past world's end, around the next cape, where the coast turns.

But that morning, in midsurvey, the Navigator gets a shock: an island off the coast, one he hasn't noticed until now. On second look, he sees it's no island, but an open boat. And there's a kid in it, dark, shrunken, deformed. In another minute, he and the ancient boy make eye contact. The boat child stands up, and the Navigator gets a second shock: it's the face of an old friend of his, from school days. The Navigator has known the face for so long that he can't place it.

The Leech seems to recognize too. He breaks into a big grin and begins to wave, great scoops that begin down by his knee and end up cupping air over his shoulder: Come on! What's keeping you? It's all the proof the Navigator needs. The boy is clearly from the East — hair, skin, eyes, everything — although the Navigator has never seen an Oriental except in imagination. If the Easterner has come over sea, then the Navigator has guessed right about his route. He lets out a whoop, audible all the way to Lisbon. He waves wildly back to the Leech Child: Hold on; we'll be right there.

It's the signal to break out. The children of Europe at last have a surefire escape. They can leave home. They start to pile into boats, whole families, whole countries of them. …

But that's not, that's not how …

(Night 366, Angel City.)

Oh God. Joy. I'm so sorry. I wasn't thinking. I completely forgot. Oh, child, forgive me. It's only a story.

Hå has a theory about the pathological popularity of hospital shows — the butt of resident humor and abused needle of a nation that pretends to have no professional relations with death. Those continuous discharges of polyphonic drama and alarm, where gangs of surgical staff careen through hallways shoving cadaver-sized rolling tea caddies full of code blues (or whatever entertainment calls them these days) owe their lurid clamp on imagination's binding sites to the emotional methadone maintenance they offer the home audience.

Kraft has this image of nuclear families everywhere, camped out in the den, lapping at disaster's nipple, squeezing it dry of the recommended daily nutrients. The pans and dissolves of affliction's visual cliches have become as foggily familiar as high mass once was from the back of the choir-screened nave. Small wonder. Every schoolgirl knows exactly how the Incomprehensible goes. She has seen it on her hand-held color LCD set, dramortized, chanted over the commercial airwaves with the ease and frequency of jungle gym jingles.

Lots of messages batch out over the public band at the same time here. First among them, Kraft wearily concludes, sitting in the decidedly unphotogenic call room, still replaying his latest real-life docu-dramas on mental video, is that total apocalypse differs from the usual domestic shouting matches and traffic collisions only in decibels. Shows also suggest that no disaster is so real that it can't be reduced to ritual emergency.

Serialization tames in exactly the way that table manners obscure the ugly reality of eating. Inevitably, around about minute 49, the runaways come back, the Hitler dads break down in tears, number one junkie son kicks the habit (shaking like blazes for a whole forty-five seconds), and the little girl in pigtails crawls out of her iron lung to do the verse about how wishing makes it so. The upshot is that your plotless, personal frame tale will reach its significance, its rare closure, in the run of time.

Reality — he might tell the scriptwriters for a small lifetime consultant's fee — is infinitely quieter. Nobody yells. Cases come in like sacks of mattress money reluctantly signed over to a bank teller. The showdown stays imperceptibly prosaic, deathly silent, as the cliche goes. Breath persists perversely in the barely living lumps, wood-grain isobars under the nicks of a beaten-up bar table.

Even down here in the bowels of the building, the emergency entrance, the residents' little sovereign state of siege, all the rushing around is done so mutely, so close to normal speed, that it's easy to miss. Accident's selected recipients, holding their eyeballs, still grasping their blackened, necrotic thumbs by the severed tendons, shuffle in quietly. The paramedics, the police escorts are quiet. Teen gang kingpins, their faces carved up, have already had their say.

If a spouse or next of kin accompanying a victim does, under the otherworldly pressure, begin to jackknife off the high dive of despair, they stay well south of sotto voce or they too are quietly escorted to another part of the medicinal forest for a sedative all their own. Large gelatinous pulp may extrude from an open skull, but the room remains demure, methodical. The leading players issue nothing more than a diplomat's "No comment." Never any word about the here and now, let alone about what happens next.

With a minute's dead time in the middle of wider emergency, Kraft flips through memory's dial. He amuses himself by running casual Monte Carlo simulations on his own prime-time roulette. He does this concurrently with committing to memory the newest complications from out of the NEJM, and dictating into a matchbox-sized mi-crorecorder a rambling, unpostable letter: "Dear American Savings, Thank you so much for yet another of your thoughtful monthly statements. Perhaps none of you realizes the value of these regular reassurances. …"

Multitasking holds him occupied all of ten minutes. He begins browsing the latest off-the-rack genre remix from the staff library: The One-Minute Messiah, or How to Survive the Next Sixty Seconds. He holds the paperback with his left hand, while with his right he doodles aimlessly, scribbling Chinese calligraphy that he imagines reads, "Serve the People" and "Fight Self."

He retreats to his makeshift office, and the desk he has been avoiding. Tommy Plummer ambushes him there, pasting up a newsprint, ransom-note quote for Kraft's benefit:

The young child which lieth in the cradle is both wayward and full of affections; and though his body be but small, yet he hath a reat heart, and is altogether inclined to evil… If this sparkle be suffered to increase, it will rage over and burn down the whole house.

This is in reference to the third prepuber pyro that Pediatrics has had to reupholster this month. "Those seventeenth-century docs knew their stuff," Thomas tells him. "Only way to save the structure is to torch it preemptively, with the tyke asleep upstairs. Where did modern medicine go wrong? Huh, champ?"

Kraft can't really call Plummer a friend, but of all the surgical starters, the man offers the best prospects of human diversion. Even the torture of companionship beats the alternative today. He must prep to go drag-line fishing in the ankle of that twelve-year-old Asian refugee princess, and the prospect has completely shot his usual aesthetic distance.

Thomas tags along behind him on the way to the OR. He seems to have nothing better to do than play this episode's sidekick. "Truly shitty job," says Kraft, up to his elbows in disinfectant. "No, little Richie. That's the small bowel resection, later this afternoon. This one's slimy."

"Shitty." Kraft ignores him. "Pitiful. First you flush the family out of their village. Then you take the village off the map and put them in a camp. Then you overrun the camp."