Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

A slit dead on the offending mass, and Kraft might stop further incursion. Hit it spot on and he could give this girl a birthday present of sixty more years' worth of scrapbook particulars. Or make a slight backhand nick, almost identical, another cut straight out of the textbook, only this time the anarchist disease somehow escapes and her foot goes cold.

He's not built for these constant judgment calls, continuously maneuvering in the millimeters between condemner and redeemer. Working his way by touch along the cut, Kraft stumbles up against a tactile hint of that tacit trade secret shared among all surgeons. A few years of this, and he will be lost forever to social contact, to all involvement in personality's twists and turnings. What interest can outcome still have, once he has held outcome's engine up close and arbitrary in his own hands?

Proximity to the bared root runs away with him. Merck's countless pathologies expand into an involuntary party game. He cannot shake a stranger's hand without making out tumorous mountain ranges under each mole. The lips of everyone he converses with twitch around the edges with impending Jacksonian seizures. The sound of stomachs ulcerating soars above the noise of this room. And even now, as he glances at the anesthesiologist, he can see the vein walls in her brain toy with the idea of collapse.

Even stretched, the tent of human skin seems insufficient to span the faces of the assembled surgical team or bind together their insides. He can see beneath, to the hideous, fatty slabs just dying to squirt out all over. Beneath the pretty sausage casing, webs of nerve niagara in spraying veils. He has peeked beneath the packaging and become hardened, like a kid disabused of Adventureland by accidentally glimpsing the motor underneath the talking puppet Plasticine.

Kraft knows already how he will end. He will wind up worse than the vegetarian butcher, the agnostic priest, the book-hating professor of literature, the notary forger. His destiny lies several notches lower than the lowest of these. It feels as if there's no derailing, as if he's already halfway there: the hypochondriac doctor. The misanthrope volunteer.

The Evangelist, it occurs to Kraft as he tucks back a reticent bundle of tibialis anterior, did not know his ass from the proverbial pothole. Nothing that the nervous system is capable of believing can withstand a hand shoved deep inside the wound. Only those on the conscious side of the general anesthetic during an operation will ever know the true reading of that parable. Nothing will devastate a man as much as a fist pushed wrist-deep into the open side, all the way up to the hilt. Kraft would jimmy the punch line just a little, to restore it to truth: blessed are those who believe, even though they have seen. And more blessed are those who haven't seen, and are thus still free to believe anything they please.

These thoughts last for about one systolic flip. Then the sound of his team's gossip drives them out. The background broadcast in the room lifts him into a trance of nonthought. He follows procedure in a coma of concentration, like a batter waiting out his pitch. When he reaches the region in upheaval, his clipping turns conservative. He feels himself taking too little tissue. Every too-shallow scrape misses a bit, risks having to reopen a few weeks from now, higher up the limb. Yet his blade goes diffident, almost flirting with anklet indifference.

The trick is to disengage. He must read this beating shank of foal back into pure, anatomical model. The green cloth hide-a-screen built up around the wound works a marvelous trick. But he must do the rest, must imagine, as he plucks out the most obvious infiltrating pellets, that he takes a grappling crane and clears out the Golden State Freeway, dumping every sleek little import into the bay. When the lay of the land makes it increasingly difficult to pluck out the offending logs, he shifts fantasies. He strokes the pink fiber with the flat of a blade, and it feels for all he is worth like satin against the back of a hand.

A bit of brain bails out of the image-forming cerebral cockpit, and he finds himself lying full-length alongside his private physical therapist, her dark cross-border eyes lit up like the point coils of a space heater. Oh, Christ, Linda: give him one more chance, if you are still alive, if you still remember him, if he can survive this procedure. This, the most tenuous fantasy of all: if their rapidly collapsing social order makes it through until his next night off, he might see her again.

The fantasy plays itself out. Linda will ask him desperately how it went, and he'll respond, casually: Joy Stepaneevong? Oh, yeah. The boat girl. Well, we pulled the thing out without having to clip anything that belongs to her. What did I tell you? It always pays not to get too alarmist in these matters. Whole procedure was pretty straightforward, actually. She's spanking; disease-free. We cleaned her completely with a few flicks of the whisk broom.

To win the woman Linda from the awful accident that waits for her like a lover at the next dark street corner, he must file just such an all clear. To keep her from the worst case is his only desire. He would hand her the perfect prognosis, pristine as a rash valentine and twice as reckless. This particular case, above all others, is the one she wants.

Yet for his cutting hand, following the standard operational excision, to know the stakes means courting disaster. The case must mean no more to him than any other in the cattle call of lives he has already decided. Should he feel its specific weight, even in theory, he and the girl are both dead.

Autonomous lieutenants propel his fingers, destroying as little of the innocent-bystander tissue as they can possibly get away with. He knows he's pushing it. He can hear his misses register in the Millstone's tortured, adenoidal breathing. The man hovers over his shoulder, displacing whole air masses with each exhalation. Vast frontal systems blow down from the man's Arctic Circle directly into Kraft's inner ear.

Only, wait: it can't be Dr. Milstein whom Kraft is — as the euphemism goes — assisting here. Milstein's down in San Diego for a conference. Kraft's had a minor TIA, or he's suffering some overwork/ deprivation combo phenomenon that someone in neurology could probably get a paper out of. Brain volleying up a little spatial-temporal racketball is all. By process of elimination, if it's not the Millstone under the cap and gown wheezing behind Kraft, then it must be Father Kino. "Shorty" Kean. Little Napoleon.

Kraft snaps aware to that fact just as the said attending launches himself into an administrative shit fit. "Cut something. Cut something, goddammit. Not there. Why the hell did they ever let you through med school? What did you do, buy your way through your internship? What are you afraid of, son?"

What indeed? If Kraft is afraid of anything, it is of exactly what happens next. Dr. Kean starts flailing about in a fog of frustrated authority. "Here. Give me that." And darting out, he grabs Kraft's handy of all the shit-for-brains maneuvers. Kraft manages to fight him off with a combination of reason, diplomacy, and testy resistance.

Kean will complain to Burgess this afternoon, and the Chief will have Kraft in for a talk tomorrow, ever so delicately reprimanding the insubordination before asking for impressions of the multivolume copy of The Man Without Qualities that Burgess lent him last week. What would the profession be without a dose of the obligatory Good Dad, Bad Dad syndrome? Even satanically real medical mills must stick to the script of TV General.

They close the girl, Father Kino still blasting the assburning after-jets. Kraft feels that he has given the girl a reasonable chance while leaving her the better part of her foot. He has not once, throughout the procedure, gone up north to have a look at her face. That'd be the last thing in the world he needs just now. The already unbearably familiar iodine tint of her skin around the wound is disabling enough. All he has seen is the taper of one calf, a shape remaining as distinct across the populations of the globe as faces, build, or hair. But this particular polynomial taper he could trace freehand. He knew it by second nature once, in a previous incarnation, before this profession took up subcutaneous residence in him.