Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

He reaches the hospital block, his epitome of failed plot. Been here before, he has, but can't quite place the original. Streets a shambles of hubcap-liquor-weapons shops, nap hotels, beauty parlors offering quantity discounts, sheet metal wholesalers, blasted transaction booths, purveyors of fine, illegal pomades. The scent of decay emanates from under the sidewalks, behind the baleen shop grates, in the sotto voce wail of that eternal air raid siren, the permanently borrowed porta-blaster boom-box bilingually broadcasting, "Hey, man! Over your shoulder. Behind you, sucker. You look, you dead. Keep the feet to the beat. Cut you. Cut your ass."

Above all this spreading, single-story, dry-rot adobe block party, his tower rises. It shines in imminence, from armed entrance up to crenellated keep. State-bailed donjon of correctives and cures, un-reachable from this side of the counterscarp.

Fix the body, send it back out? Why bother? You must hear it. The threat, the hiss wrapping the corpse of neighborhood. The abject rejection of maybe someday that animates the warp's woofers and tweeters down here at street level.

He noses his car up to the sealed glacis, fishes through the Rolodex of plastic card-keys his wallet has become of late: one to make phone calls, one to cajole the pump, one to snag money out of the wall, one to consolidate his card-accrued loans, and here — one to lift the parking lot block and slip in. He inserts his magnetic travelogue strip into the slot, and sesame. The world as solvable logic puzzle still operates as designed, one more day, despite the lifeboats all around sliding off the dock, continuously magnum-christened, Crystal Night style.

He skulks up the back stairwell, nursing a fantasy of hot analgesic shower, water pounding away his torsal tie-up like so many barefoot French fillettes squeezing out the grape harvest. That's the most elaborate scenario his bilious libido can organize, given the call schedule Carver has had him on. The ubiquitous They spot him before he can even reach his locker and begin at once to black-and-bruise him. Bloody pulp. Professional job, execution style.

Richard, is there something the matter with your beeper? Emily Post for "You turned the sucker off, you bastard, didn't you?" And right here in the gangway they start shoveling him a shitload of new admissions. Seems there's this incredible backlog of seething humanity, and they're going to have to service-station eight mewling and puking little babes in a row just to get the work out, no matter if they have to kill half of the cases in the process.

So it continues both day and night. Some old song he half summons up. Kraft's too fatigued to remember, to name the tune, let alone locate the descant. He gets his shower, about fourteen hours later. But by then his shoulders have been hammered so brittle that he can do nothing by way of encouraging the little French girls except to smile feebly at them and mumble, Quel est le prix du repas?

He checks his watch, and then the light from a window, to determine whether that's A.M. or P.M. He crawls on all fours back to his call room where he rummages about for some reading material, some pictorial literature to numb him to sleep. But big-time humor: Plum-mer and the ER boys have raided all the call room's Penthouses and replaced them with Rifle & Handgun Illustrated s.

Well, deal with it; he's in no shape for fictively intimate biographies anyway. And he's had enough anatomy, God knows, to last his body a lifetime. So he settles into the May R & H, getting no further than the inside cover. A four-color ad: "Take the Law into Your Own Hands." Play on words, see. "The Law" is the name of this little semiautomatic honey. Portentous as the come-on is vis-a-vis cultural decomposition, the spread does yank onto center stage of Kraft's consciousness the question that's been banging about the greenrooms of his cerebellum over the last few weeks. Shouldn't he perhaps get hold of a small arm too, by way of acknowledging the law of averages? His lone survival trick to date has been to maintain a subterranean profile, to duck under the immediate median. He's got nothing of retail value stashed at his apartment. His moody ten-speed. Last epoch's TV, not even VCR-ready. Record player, if you can believe. Two original oils of the Abyss that he couldn't give away. No self-respecting filcher of any nationality is going to bother riffling the dust. Should some enterprising addict crowbar into the place by accident, transposing numbers in the address CB'ed him from Thrashers' Central Dispatch, he'd run from Kraft's postholocaust decor as from a pestilence house. A pistol at the apartment would be as superfluous as any other major appliance.

Fact is, he does not actually go back to his place these days except to pay the utils. He's never spent much time there, and that's tended toward nil ever since he became resident Resident here at Hole of Calcutta Public.

But away from home, here at Carver, reality's numbers are worse than he ever suspected, even in his gloomiest extrapolation. He sees the daily tabulations snaking in human conga lines longer than the most competent admitting nurse can hope to tag and transfer. They amble at him in those cloth shoe-wraps, merging into a multilane free-for-all as amorphously adrift as any expressway. Pimply adolescent gang partisans, assaulters, assaultees, half the underage world winds up in his pediatrics ward. Conscripts of collapsing infrastructure, their gear of choice: Kalashnikov, AK-47, Uzi, even M-16, a tool whose recent sales surge attests to Bob Hope's TV ads about buying homegrown and minding the balance of trade. "You better believe it makes a difference."

And Carver gets only those wounds that are potentially closeable. Kraft's eyes have opened some, living out here in the cash-and-carry neighborhoods, the ones that have been literally fueling the economic transformation miracle, the ones that pick up the tab for the whole ethos of buy now, pay elsewhere.

Why should he sit still and wait for the inevitable? Mornings, this nascent desire to buy a gun seems a silly flare-up, a surrender to his country's prize paranoia. The return of collectively repressed foreign-policy fantasies, writ small. But nights, nights like this one, flipping through the ER boys' practical jokebook while the steady sirens of Incoming wail away like a chorus of Aidas in the tomb, arming oneself seems a case of simple arithmetic. Do the long division: kill ratio into population density. He's not going to last the twenty weeks. He'll be popped walking down to the parking lot, or plugged lazily from the left-hand freeway lane.

The prospect of five more months at this place upends whatever residual progressive sympathies of his survived the Scuttle-and-Run decade. He doesn't need the law in his hands. But a little something in the glove compartment by way of rebuttal? Until such a day as the law stops eating its own?

He slinks off into REM-free sleep, passing through the stages of non-ness without a spike. At four A.M., they break into room and begin to pound him awake. Six-year-old kid whose gut he sewed up two days ago tore it open tonight on a recap nightmare. Some save-the-world decides that the repair has to be enacted immediately. And Kraft's on call. Go willingly, or be dragged kicking and screaming into that good nightmare? Fifteen minutes after coming more or less conscious, he's sewing. A little peritonitis cocktail greets him, so it's just as well they're back in. As he snips and whisks, the OR radio all the while pipes a little background tune, "Get It Right the First Time."

Afterward, there's no point in even trying to salvage the idea of sleep. Grand Rounds in a couple hours, after the day's opener, the Morbidity and Mortality conference. He can at least attempt to doze through M and M, that weekly proverbial chocolatey mess. But what to do now, now, now? Keep the pace — matter in motion. He'll go wake Plummer from the dead and demand his magazines back.