Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Come measure me with your little pencil marks against the kitchen wall. With one hushed high-pitched snag, the weave unthreads. Disaster laps at the corner of his block, and he must shoot up, now, not even stop to dress, but run out and avert the unthinkable.

Fear freezes his tensors, holds him prostrate, drugged. Impossible; his least move will wrap the raving around his head. He can only keep deathly still and wait, pinned in terror to the soaked linen. Ghostly gas seeps through the casements — chloroform held to his nostrils on a greasy rag. He is immobilized by what he would see if he ran shouting to the window: pale straw child in burning dress, albino on fire. Naked black baby bleeding from a furrow drawn clean across its face. Asian, dazed, fresh from out of the teleporter, wailing clueless through neighborhood after neighborhood until her feet swell into pulpy spades, her skin unsheathing.

A second paralyzing cry follows in the first's wake. This one is softer, a bleat of hunger or numbed grief. A child stands screaming at the end of history's downward, disintegrating spiral. It mewls in petrifying ravishment, This is not right. Where are…? This is not… An animal, a feral creature, wanders loose in the apartment, bred in a basement under the city's subskin, raised on mold and leaded water, freed for no reason except horror.

The noise wavers between cries of distress and sighs from an acid bath. The one child becomes two, alternating their howls at fading intervals. The two start to stagger their shattering screeches. How many are they? A whole community, calling out from impalement a street or two off.

A scream that spectral — here, spooned into his ear — strips off the rules, shreds them like cheap paint. Safety breaks into pasteboard pieces. Shock chooses its hour, when anyone who might resist is docile with sleep and confusion. A girl at night is beaten senseless in a street where every other plate window bears the crime-stopping palm, that secret Mason's sign of Neighborhood Watch. A girl's screams return his nervous system to randomness, his heart to clammy panic. A shout at this hour… a single small girl, this late…

Exhausted ambulances fail to appear. Sirens don't even bother going through the motions. East Angel City lies within earshot, hustled awake, listening, eyes pressed together, night-lights smothered, firearms at ready on the bed stand. Civilization, the soul's slum clearance project, rolls over and plays dead. Practice suicide.

He tests the air. His nostrils would core-sample the room if he could find it. He has been asleep for an epoch and a half. Just on the verge of falling. Still under. Eternally coming to. To what? He must be on call, Motel Residente. The Millstone and Father Kino, at work, have skipped a crucial step, general anesthetic. The scream issues from the operating theater, which they have somehow miked so that the howls…

But it can't be the hospital. The room lacks that chemical aroma of rotting flesh daubed down with Listerine. This must be the house he has just bought with that beautiful… No, another. A house he never should have left. How long? Where in the world? The shriek pierces him again. It penetrates his drums like poison. He hears, coldly mechanical, a hundred times more lucidly than waking.

An aural virus slips between the crystal interstices of window glass without needing to break in. Laboratory toxin, sprung from its test-tube home, disperses a fatal help-me through his apartment air, waiting to sink a million microsyringes into his lungs in the dark. It slinks up, unkillably small and needy. It makes of his brain a downy bed.

It implodes him. Girlish terror injects itself, becomes his. Fear worse than he has ever known, beyond the power of memory to compare. Anthrax fear, frenzied, thrashing but still. His corpse-to-be locks up with dread, except for a heart slamming on a buffet of vasodilators. Grotesque scenarios tear through him, teasers before our feature attraction. Millisecond Rorschachs, the deep stuff", the mound burials: the girl's face, eaten away by bamboo rats. Her methodical ravaging by Green Berets. Fat shit-kickers slithering over her with mucused razor blades.

His brain screams, Save her now. But the least twitch of his muscles would incinerate him. His spine fuses down its length. Commands to contract refuse to travel to his outer reaches. The constant emergency of his days has been drill for this moment, when he alone must decide all outcome. But now he seizes up against an unknown outside the threshold of control. The scream might be anything. Fictions proliferate. He cannot move.

He cannot look. He knows already who it is, come here for help past giving. She has hobbled across town, over the unfordable expressway lanes on foot, one already dead. She hobbles this way to tell him that the nightmare case already races beyond his worst possible expectation. His core self, the real Kraft — the one before all deliberation— kicks in. And at the sound of moaning just outside his door, he lies still in the dark and dissimulates, denying that this is his address. The hit-and-run urge takes hold in him, with everything now on the line. And the rest of his life, spent explaining away…

With each second, the charade of stillness gets harder to shake. Every click condemns him further into shaming it through to the end. She will die out there, hanging onto his window. With luck, she will be blown off by daybreak onto someone else's lawn, to decompose before the police can trace her back to him. He snuggles up to final deniability in the snickering blackness.

Something inside him, some uncondensed background radiation, bursts. White light cuts across the phosphors under his lids. He pushes up, shoves for all he is worth against the ice floe lovingly drowning him. And sudden as a saturated circuit breaker, he snaps.

Gravity, switched on, smashes down on his pelvis, doubling him over. He bends erect at the waist, firing perpendicular like a spring-loaded doll. Untongued, an inarticulate blur tries to tear itself from his lips, but his face muscles stonewall it with one last veto. Voice box, throat, gauze-lined mouth refuse to mobilize. He has had, is right now having a stroke, a neural storm. The stuff-arrested word, a shed piece of floating birch bark, pilots its way through, issues out in a nnnn-yy-aaeoo. No.

His own scream swallows up the girl's, eradicates it, but not before the rasped treble turns to a more domestic alarm, closer to his ear. He is awake, yelling out intervention, calling for emergency procedures, the extraordinary stopgaps he knows by rote. Thoughts come to him one after the next, tin soldiers pouring through the breach in a battered syllogism. My bed: break from it. Feet to floor. My room. My apartment. Door that way, one o'clock, north-northeast. Get to it before it seals shut.

Something reaches out to snag him before he can bolt. A hand, another human being in his bed. "Ricky?"

Arrival comes as suddenly as had violence's burst. The street torture stops the moment that Linda — artlessly naked, here, next to him, his on ephemeral credit — changes her breathing. The screams are no more than slight obstructions in her nasal passage, amplified by his ear up flush to her breath. Terror comes of closeness, the way single cells reveal an Armageddon under the microscope.

"Ricky? What's the matter? What's happened?"

He collapses into her, breaking a harder fall. Nothing. Nothing's happened. Exactly the sort of featureless, unnoticeable night he prayed for in secret as they fell asleep a lifetime earlier.

"It's all right. I'm… okay. I just thought…" Thought that the girl had come for him, like a little slaughtered bride. "I just remembered something. Really. Go back to sleep."

"Sleep?" she says, incredulous, smiling, scolding. "Ricky, you're shaking."