Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

He stitches, punching his needle laterally through the complex ecosystem. He loops up the layered Dagwood sandwich in a way proven to leave behind the least surface scar. As he sews, an over-learned jingle skips trochaically through his head, a singsong rhyme he memorized once while learning the alphabet. Not that anemic, twenty-six-letter, tell-me-what-you-think-of-these. His tune taught an alphabet that flowed forth in more than four dozen symbols, a scatter pattern of phonemes too subtle for nonnatives to hear, let alone grip properly in their glottis. A poem, a song actually, in a language where all poems turn into songs because all words are pitched.

His was not the girl's language, but the next dialect over. He spoke, once, a first cousin to the one Joy's father used to sign away his rights and expectations. Learned it when exactly this girl's age, the age when industrious children of this once-blessed mainland must typically commit their mental resources to acquiring that "We the People" paragraph and a half. The syllable rhythm lies intact in him, but long since irrelevant — a letter of intent forgotten in a strongbox until long after expiration date. Ratty, riddled with holes, fragments of the alphabet chant reassemble themselves. Gratification swells him, collapsing immediately in distress at how many letters are now beyond recovery, with no words to slip into the blank melody slots.

The bits he can recall lie like surf-polished shipwreck, detritus from the semiconscious coast of a place he inhabited once and left while the leaving was good. He hums the chewed residuals of the tune, one that might as well buzz about in his brain, staving off the latest rhythm-arrested, mega-euro-yen-dollar, ten-second singing sales spot for cola-cum-life insurance coverage. He hums: g as in chicken. Ê as in egg. The tune takes him through treacherous ng, bph —sounds his tongue still recalls but cannot talk the muscles into anymore. Y as in mythological giant gate guards. H as in owl, who hoos across the borders of all time's alphabets.

Joy comes to: much… later, is the word she has swung loose from. The first thing she asks, when she recondenses out of the anesthetic, is how much time has vanished since she was last awake. The missing hours are more important to her than the missing bit of foot, still swaddled. She does not wonder "How did it go?" or "Will I walk again?" Meekly, she asks a nurse, her voice sounding from miles down a well: "How many days have I been away?" Worried, perhaps, about what trouble she might have made, or where she has been off to during the unaccountable interim.

She gets an answer that does not answer. No matter; she is back now, returned from the place that leaves only a ribbon-scrap in her recollection. Here, on this side, she must again work for a living. The girl's industry returns as the pain suppressant ebbs. Furious with diligence, head bent over the hospital bed-desk, she writes out a thank-you note to her surgeon.

She uses wide, three-lined paper, the two outer lanes solidly marked, the median strip a faint, encouraging dash. Urgent schoolgirl style transforms the letter into one of those commissioned classroom pleas on behalf of some Polish boy who decided to defect despite his returning parents, or for the first-ever panda born in North America. The scope of the project forces her to dare cursive, although she is still several thousand practice ovals and half-Immelmanns shy of mastery.

"Dear Dr. Kraft, thank you for snipping the incursion out of my leg." She copies the word carefully out of the material she has made the woman therapist give her. It's not a long word, shorter even than her last name. To a nonnative speaker, it is no harder a word for the creature hiding inside her than any other. "I am sure you have done a most satisfying job and that the incursion will not come back. All my expectations are for the future and pain is so far low. I am sorry you had to do this but glad that you are my doctor and such a good one." At the bottom, she draws a winged creature, midway between giant gate guard and guardian angel. She folds the thick newsprint in quarters and delivers it suspiciously to a pede nurse, making her swear up and down that she will deliver the note swiftly.

Pain is so far low: the note reaches Kraft interleaved among X-ray envelopes, incisional biopsy reports, the fan-fold printout of the week's new admissions, an unsigned memo requiring all staff to get inoculated against the latest epidemic, and police notification of several recent assaults in the underground parking garage, one of them fatal. He unfolds the newsprint, reads it without comprehension. What are they asking him to do now?

He is still clutching the text when he next comes to, in his call room, that Motel 6 just off of the surgical interstate. He tapes her note to the cinder block wall above the bed, where he can glance at it from time to time from over the edge of the Rifle & Handgun Illustrated. I'm sorry you had to do this. I'm sorry you had to do this.

He falls asleep for the specified hundred years. While he is out, the shoots and tendrils of time's parasitic vines overgrow the entire city, clamping in place all vehicles, transports, relays, and faxes, freezing for good all liquid assets and every medium of exchange.

"The main thing, as I see it, will be keeping her from laterally stressing the…"

The lovely Linder throws her hands up in exasperation. "The main thing, as I see it, will be keeping her X rays clear."

She is a touch bristly this morning, and perhaps with good cause. Kraft takes a deep hit of the Condition Six air and tries to settle into another tone. "Look, I've seen you in action. I know you're a pro."

"Thank you." She is as close to acid as her temperament allows. "I'm delighted to hear it."

"And it's not that I'm trying to tell you what to do."

"Just how to do it?"

Okay, okay. Ordinarily, by the tender ground rules they've already established, he'd be the one trying to steer their rationed conversations toward fondue recipes or furniture refinishing or anything at all rather than let this last remaining candidate for his One Good Thing be infected by more medicine. But today, in these few free hours with each other, they flirt with major role reversal. Kraft can't seem to keep from nagging the Stepaneevong post-op. He has brought up the girl's case three times in as many blocks, and the ring of the refrain's bad-conscience rondo is about to put a royal burr up their afternoon's ass.

They are walking — yes, sic; as in "on foot" — down Melrose, he in jeans and a clean scrub shirt, she in this marvelous, clingy, soft rose silk shell the likes of which he'd years ago forgotten existed. They indulge in that favorite national pastime, after-shopping. An hour earlier, Linda bought a clock radio and now she is industriously devoting herself to belated comparisons, seeing how well or poorly she did. Kraft simply tags along by her side, desperate not to be left alone for an unstructured hour.

He tries not to hang on her, while using her as moving shield. Only under her wing — half bare, and beautiful as a fashion model's — does he dare witness the final twenty-four hours of this EVERYTHING-MUST-GO clearance close-out. CRAZY CAL SEZ: WE'RE SELLING THE FARM. GET YOURS NOW, BEFORE WE COME òî OUR SENSES. Ten thousand groping, bewildered years of recorded culture go out in a windup FIRE SALE blaze before them. All they can do is walk, basking in the full glow of the apotheosis of retail.

"Let's duck in here," Linda says.

She indicates a tasteful little theme boutique called Cop a Buzz. It gathers together, for purposes of trade, diverse objects with no conceivable use all partaking of the slenderest of common denominators: the ornamental Insect Motif. Big this year. "Can never have too many locusts," Kraft says enthusiastically. Espera knees him gently in the kidney. "Incidentally, did I mention to you that there's a danger of her hyperextending her …?"