Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

"Hey," Linda says, taking him by the shirtslack around his collar-less collar, clamping him to her, pulling him down a little, toward her bared teeth. "Whatever happened to that cavalier, jaded, you-mow-'em-we'll-sew-'em hack I've come to know and love?"

"Love, you say? Don't get much call for that around here, lady." You still got the sales slip? You must have the wrong shop. Wrong theme. Wrong strip mall.

"Listen, Richard. Joy is an angel — too good a patient, too good a child to be true. She detests the very idea of crutches, and I wouldn't be able to keep her on them even if I wanted to. And why would I want to? What's to protect her from? Nothing she might sprain would be any worse than bedsores. Her outlook is worth a dozen of ours put together. Who's gonna know better than she what the foot can do, and when? If there's any danger with her at all, it's …"

"Yes?" he throws out, supercasually. What, me stiffening?

"If she has any problem at all, it's with her spirits."

"Spirits? What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Easy, fella. I'm on your side, remember?" She refreshes that memory with a finger-brush across his floating rib. "This is one powerful little girl we're talking about. She has sent for her school-books. She sweats at plane geometry for hours at a stretch. When she stops, it's only to start in again on the High Middle Ages. Then she asks me to grade her homework."

Kraft stands absentmindedly stroking a Rive Gauche oven mitt with that cockroach look and feel. "So what's the problem?"

"Do you remember the difference between Louis the Fat and Charles the Bald?"

"I could probably tell them apart in a police line, if that'd help."

"We'll ignore the clown in the back of the class. Ricky, it's too strange. She smiles politely while I read make-believes to the other kids. Then I ask her what she would like to hear next, and it's The Wealth of Nations. She never laughs, never gets excited or spooked or impatient. It's as if she simply has no idea on earth what's happening to her."

Tell her, then, he wants to say. Tell her the chances of their having to go back and take more leg. Tell her what drugs or rays will do to her doll's face, her hair, her schoolgirl exercises in concentration. Tell her the odds against her sticking around long enough to graduate from junior high. Tell her how quietly it comes on, no threatening shout, no siren of stylized alarm. How can people live? How can we live?

"But as long as we're on the subject," Linda segues, sweetly tentative. She tries, now that he is suddenly volunteering all over the place, to enlist him, as simple comradely buffer, in cases every bit as heartrending as Joy's. Joleene Weeks, who refuses to talk except by pulling the string and releasing random messages from her Chatty Cathy doll. Markie C, who likes to plunge silverware deep into his prosthetic limb in cafeterias, for the sheer pleasure of the public whiplash. Kraft listens politely, as demure as the little Laotian girl listening to tonight's fairy tale.

They roll on down Melrose's Babylonian bazaar, these miles of continuous stalls at a street fair of surpassing strangeness. Shock troop merchandising here reaches its peak. Science determines definitively how to part a buck from the bottomlessly blasé. Riches from the Orient, booty from the Crusades, fatiguingly inventive combinatoric treadmills of commodity-churning high funkiness are rendered salable by their utter implausibility. The pyramid of nudge-and-wink, what-the-hell impulse buys at the cash register aspire to a high weirdness, even a conceptual art of death denial just now in the run-up to its greatest, most decadent fin de yet. Electric rare-earth jackets. Magnetic monkey's genitalia for the dash. Farmer's hats reading "Kafka." Digital executive barbells. Self-help bathroom scales. Programmable mascara. Solar-powered rain announcers. Clothing bearing every conceivable legible message except "Please stop and talk to me."

Stay sick, Kraft says, almost out loud. Stay in bed. Never get up and walk. Never go outside again.

Fashion, it strikes him, is even more insidious than the planned obsolescence people imagine. It involves engineering into each good or service a time-delayed precipitate of alienating ugliness so that the desperate purchaser will wake up one day from his incredible bender and say, "What ever possessed me?" Then head out with the electronic money transfers to go score a little hair of the dog. Every glass of refreshing, consumable product must be laced with hidden salt water, inflaming the need that it promised to placate. The point of fad is to provide tomorrow's refuse and the day after's marked-up nostalgia. And we will not stop climbing, laboring, assembling, trading, making, marking down, and closing out until there's a credit card form attached to each harnessable dissatisfaction, a coin box inserted between every somatic anguish and its real salve.

Perpetual carnival out here: a Rio of retail. Improbable as it seems, in all these theme boutiques — the flightless-bird shops, the split-crotch panty shops, the 'thirties, 'forties, and 'fifties shops (Kraft sees the day coming when his abysmal young adulthood will be bottled as campy vintage, the collision curves of trend and retro slamming head-on into each other), the information shops, the shops turning Stalinist lapels and hemlines into spangly kitsch, the Day-Glo designer industrial-waste outlets vending pet elements from beyond the actinide series — in all this synthetic needs-mongering, Kraft and Linda stumble upon a bookstore.

"Hey! Look at this. It's just like the scene in that movie." Every movie about the distant, disastrous future ever made. "You know, where they come across the half-sunk Statue of Liberty buried in the sand?" And Jesus, it's been Earth underneath there all along.

They go in and browse, evading the public promenade of fears for a moment, hiding out from the end of time. Even this old sanctuary is overrun, already prostrate, everywhere infiltrated by the tides of malevolence: How to Think and Act like Genghis Khan, Learning to Love Your Dysfunction, How I Went from Fanny Farmer to Firmer Fanny, and McMassacre! The Inside Story. No matter; this is all that is left, all the refuge the two of them will ever be allowed. They are trapped out here on the threshold, the absolute cutting edge of the dream's realization.

Kraft and Linda split at reference, each turning to trace out favorite, obsessive routes through the racks. She starts in travel, proceeds to fiction, and ends up in food. He drifts to music, scans the picture books, then sinks down into biography. Each takes a small treasure through the cash register, showing the other only when outside the shop, embarrassed at the names of their personal reading needs.

"Wait a minute," he says, remembering something a few yards down the sidewalk. "Wait for me right here." Squeezes her shoulders, semaphore pleading. Here; don't move, or we will never find one another again.

He runs back into the shop. She loses sight of him through the glass front as he scrambles about trying to negotiate a category that has become alien to him. He comes out again bearing a wrapped package, which he accidentally tears open in presenting to her. The Secret Garden. Alice in Wonderland. Oz. Peter Pan. "Give her these," Kraft coughs neutrally.

"Oh," Linda says, fingering the volumes to keep from looking at him. "Oh. The classics. Do you think…?"

"What? Something easier? Something a little more current?"

"No, no. Only … Hold still a minute, can't you? Don't be cross. Pull in your lip. I haven't hit you yet." She puts her hand to his neck and smooths him. "I was just going to ask if you thought it might be better if you gave them to her yourself. She thinks you're God, you know."