Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

"What's this 'you'? I was busy that year, I'm pretty sure." "Lead them to believe that an open boat… Sure, a boat, with this little puking kid, across half the Pacific … Toss her around assorted holding pens. Relocate her here, of all the godforsaken, fast-food-franchised, tar-paper-and-antennaed—"

"Doesn't she have to get raped by Thai fishermen first? Don't they always get raped by…?"

Kraft just stares at him blankly, beyond everything, even disgust. Plummer's shoulders flex an indifferent little eh. Perhaps boat people jokes are no longer àè courant this season. He rifles his repertoire for comic crumbs about South American cattle prods or starving Ethiopians.

Kraft begins enunciating, always a bad sign. "Welcome to the United States." Something in the pitch suggesting that Plummer is the cultural case in point.

"What, what? We didn't murder this kid's bone marrow for her. McDonald's didn't fuck up her leg. GM didn't. Okay, Dow Chemical might have had a little hand in the matter. But tell me, champ. What the hell would of happened if the little china doll had stayed in Cambodja—" "Laos."

"Whatever. If she hadn't gotten out, hadn't escaped, hadn't been allowed over here out of the pure magnanimity of the State Department? You tell me what'd have happened if she'd come down with this creepy leg-nibbling shit in her country? Those jungle cutters would have smeared her leg with a little betel nut and taken the whole thing off at the waist with a machete."

Gravity crumples Kraft by the trapezius. He is several rounds of shock therapy past caring to answer. His insides are arid, desiccated already by ten years of apprenticeship en route to this continuous call. When he does get around to speaking, he talks to some captive audience nowhere to be seen.

"She's the picture of eager docility. Talks in tunes. Lies in bed studying, because she doesn't want to fall behind the class at school. She asks the nursing staff for books on the procedure we'll be using. They say to her, 'Wouldn't you rather have something to color?' She shakes her head, but respectfully, to keep from embarrassing them. She sits up in bed doing algebra, history, answering all the sample questions at the end of every chapter, never peeking, writing the answers into this little spiral notepad. Doesn't even flinch at pain—" "Tell me about it. I pulverized the girl's foot in ER the night we admitted her. She just looked up and smiled forgiveness all over the damn place."

"And then she goes and loses it completely, decompensates at the first little sputter of the traffic reporters hovering over the Harbor Freeway."

"Is it true that they found her old man cowering under the bed in the middle of the night? Hiding out from Immigration? That they had to use the kid to talk him into authorizing the release? I heard that he signed it 'Murrican.' Only he wrote it in Lousish."

"No." Kraft's eyes trace a migratory route around the operating theater, acquainting himself with the emergency exits. "The word was 'Mawkhan.' Regional dialect. A professional tide. It means the man is a physician."

"Oh, right. Absolutely. If that guy's a doc, then I'm a…"

"We all know what you are, Thomas. We're just waiting for the State Certification Board to figure it out."

"Come on. No shit? The dude's a doc? What's his field?"

"Certified in cures involving the recall of a person's errant soul." Kraft exhales. If I remember the term correctly.

"Holy Om! Get that sumbitch to scrub. We need someone like that down in the ER."

"Speaking of which." Kraft, holding his hands clean, crooks an inviting elbow at the theater where the little girl is already put down, gassed on the table, like the evening spread out against the sky.

But Plummer takes the opportunity to bow out hastily. "The least I can do for you, Kraft old buddy, is to let you go on me owing one."

Kraft puts off his clever comeback until he gets a chance to think one up.

The next thing he knows, he is cutting, following the surveyor's chalk line, mushing the blade too softly into the brown anklet, forgetting everything he's learned about the superiority of slicing over sawing. His eight years of examinations are suddenly as irretrievable as states and capitals or presidents. Of the five-hundred-plus skeletal muscles, he'd be lucky to be able to name ten and visually identify a half dozen. All the sophisticated scientific sheen strips off, leaving just the procedure right now under his hands. Strange pellets, bits of evil living gravel are loose, growing inside this girl. He must locate them the only way possible. He probes around by touch, making out structures both benign and insidious, things that would have been a marble-ized blur to him this time two years ago. He loosens the invader trace, chases it with his rubbered fingertips, differentiates it from the pulpy, pink, enveloping striations of the host.

The shock of first gaping into an open life rips into him again. The landscape looks exactly as it must. What else can it look like? A streaky piece of marinated porterhouse, only pulsating. Lurching a little to one side every second or so, then falling aside. He works his way down through the dermal layers, pinning them back, edging closer to where he can slit whatever sickening pupa they might find free of its attaching gristle. How is he to describe this stuff except through today's state-of-the-art material metaphor? Here's your problem, ma'am. Leak in the fuel line. Bad IC chip. Evil spirits inhabiting the system housing. But breaking the seal may void your warranty.

The body overhaul shop is not a one-man operation by any means. What they intend to pull off this morning is yet another miracle by committee. Surgery is the most unlikely, corporate, bureaucratic cure since the King James translators. An entire relay team passes the baton continuously between the autoclave and the open body. All decisions, however cosmetic, demand referenda. Kraft is just one of a half-dozen functionaries milling about in the room, and far from the most critical player. The position of center forward probably belongs to the lady with her eyes on the monitors and hands on the gas valves.

But the person wielding the working knife at any given moment becomes the guy with the ball. Just as an audience sometimes mistakes the virtuoso in the pretty party clothes for the composer, even the surgical team may conflate the one sticking his pinky up inside a valve with the design engineer.

Today, Kraft is the international cartel's front man, their carrier, the one they send out to slip past the douanes, to violate the border and dart back across with impunity on forged diplomatic papers. He fights against his innate, human ham-handedness the way those Ice Capades chimps struggle to stay up on skates. Whatever dexterity he can assemble depends on a stockpile of technical knowledge baroque in both mass and ornament. The quadratic can be solved by anyone of superior intelligence with the necessary patience and perfect retention, plus a dozen available years to sink into indentured slavery.

Kraft fidgets with a retractor. Here they are, making base camp just above this little girl's foot. They're in the absolute hinterlands, Hibernia, the outermost reaches of life, as far away from the core of the self-administered mystery as circulation permits. And yet, the terrain is already appallingly gorgeous. Sinew rivers cut their canyons down through layers articulate beyond the subtlest medical illustrator's ability to survey. The color, texture, distensibility, tensile strength of the conduits and struts and cables, the delicate interfaces of ligament and capillary connecting inimical tissues, all the middlemen of this fabulous political economy, mirrored in their complexity at every level all the way down the stacked hierarchy into invisible collagens, the excavated living preteen laid bare, lies touchable here, flush against her encasing wall, yielding yet giving away nothing to her correspondents, his groping, invasive tools.