Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

"True," he concedes. Body-long tremolos, at intervals, replace the now-silenced cry. "Hypothermia?" comes his lame proposal. And yet, partly true; he is freezing, shivering to death in this heat sink of human compromise that he's chosen expressly for its hothouse climate. "If you'd just quit stealing all the covers…"

"Covers?" Her bewildered syllables race in all directions, furious, afraid of him, like children scattering in front of the blindman in a game of bluff. She holds him to her over his protests. She cradles his head to her bareness in half comfort, half nelson. "You sure you're ten years older than I am?" And worse than her most hopeless case.

Dark in her limbs, her skin an inexhaustible chamois perfection, a taut heat treatment everywhere against him: Linda. She has come to keep him from recall. They've sent her at just this critical cusp to release him from his deserts. Grateful for that much, he considers telling her. She, if anyone, could leave the scream explained and housebroken. Listen. Your breath sounded to me like the last child left on earth, after all the rest had been taken.

But even should he confide in her, they would be alone. Both of them, unbuffered, clothed only in this faux -residential calm, hurtable now in more ways than can be cataloged. He would only freeze her, leave her as chill as he is if he told, if he held her any longer. Already her naked nipples go gooseflesh, pucker like an alum-punished mouth. Or does something else arouse them, something aside from the desert cold? Some desire awakened by his pure fear, the chances of unlimited suffering at this hour when personality is discarded as a worthless blind?

He tests the gooseflesh, puts his tongue to it. He searches across her body for hidden hiding places among her moraines that must have heard something, must have registered. And Linda, half blood, flexing like a jaguar, spooked by him now, of all he might do to her, moans. Then more, she calls out in strange languages — yes, there —uncaring who hears them through the thin walls. Love abandoned to the cries of adjacent devastation.

Those nights when the need to pass out completely marauds through his so-called consciousness like a clubfoot waltzing on parquet, nights when not even the last blast could wake him, he must still prop himself up at this twenty-four-hour convenience casino, tape his eyes open with pharmaceuticals, and deal out continuous all-or-nothing hands of one-card stud. And on those other nights, the ones that rotation magisterially allots him to go blaspheme himself with sleep, he cannot. It's no less than a form of sublimated impotence (the real thing so far blissfully spared him), imaginary. Yet from out of deepest, ripple-free Stage Four nothingness, advance warnings of alarm and visitation make the thought of even a couple hours of lowered vigilance unthinkable, even obscene.

Fortunately, work supplies a variety of substitutes for narcosis. This morning, they rebuilt Tony the Tuffian's ear. Tony's parents initially tried to deny ever having seen him in their lives when the police dragged him bleeding to them, the half of his head opened up in a street misunderstanding, as pink and wet as an Independence Day picnic melon. Only when the officer swore that the investigation had nothing to do with the folks' own improvised retail operation did the mother start wailing. The woman promptly sponged and bound the boy up with root extract, about as helpful as cornstarch to a contractor.

Couple of absolute tenderfoot cops brought Tony and his severed left outside awning to the ER. "Iced," according to Plummer, "but get this: with the ear inside the bag of melting cubes. Thing was total mealworm meat. I wouldn't even have fed the pup to my horned toad."

This was a couple months ago. During the time it took for the side of Tony's head to heal enough for Kraft to consider working it back into shape, the cops, unbeknownst to anyone outside their autonomous little fiefdom, were paying visits to the Tuff, telling him that they had forbidden surgery until Tony told all. They got their names, and Tony got scheduled for his first-stage ear reconstruction, convinced that he had the magnanimity of the American law enforcement system to thank for it.

Going into surgery this morning, the Tuffian expressed some regret that he would lose the instant status that his blunted left stump had earned him with the rest of the kids' ward. He seemed almost thrilled to hear that he would wake from the procedure with another scar, this one across his lower thorax, where Kraft would remove the bit of cartilaginous framework needed to form the new external spoiler. The transplant will hold until Tony loses the hardware again in some prison brawl.

That one is Kraft's only cut-and-paste scheduled today. Work has been his one topical balm against the thing that has steadily coagulated since he went ankle fishing inside the boat girl. And fortunately, the job drones on, long after the sexy procedures are over. The hypercom-petitive med schools ought to make it broad-band knowledge: the career of professional shamanism these days consists of equal parts corrective injury, scut follow-ups, and brute bookkeeping. Having bloodied up the Clean Room enough for one day, Kraft still has the blessed canonical troika of distractions — logging, filing, and retrieving — to keep him from replaying his latest library of debilitating mental cassettes.

Documentation is everything. Data and protective paperwork. By this point, Kraft has learned not to say so much as "Lookin' good!" to a patient without making a shorthand note of the date, time, and physical circumstances. As a result, he's saddled with a hell of a lot more scrap- than scalpelwork. So much more that even Beirut General must give him a desk to bury in forms.

He sits in his requisitioned cubicle, plucking messages back out of a Dictaphone and pinning the phrases, like formaldehyded lepidop-tera, to official reports. He keeps the corridor door open; otherwise, it gets deceptively restful in here. Now and then he comes up for air, to guard his flank by throwing a quick look hallward. Somewhere around the millionth such routine inspection, he just about jumps through his own cranium. A diminutive super-oldster in Dodger cap and baggy cardigan has crept silently into the doorframe and just stands there, staring at him.

The guy has been there a while, by all evidence. One of those balding, skin-flappy, underinflated men you see shuffling around in Griffith Park carrying a paper bag and stick, talking to pitiful cocker spaniels in tongues found only in hidden mountain villages that appear but once a year. The old fart just gazes at him from myopic mine shafts on either side of his hook nose. Kraft, deep in his usual Latinate fog, can't even summon up an officially inquisitive “Yes?”

Before Kraft can determine What Is Wrong with This Picture (This here is Pediatrics, sir. You want Gerontology, Floor Four), Gramps spits out, "What's it to ya, buddy?" and disappears. The midget Walter Brennan pads rheumatically down the corridor, looking for all the world like a gargoyle punching out at quitting time, packing up shop and lumbering stonily down the nearest flying buttress to catch the bus home.

The old geezer's voice shocks even more than his beaked features. The codger-style diction is just about in line with his general level of senescence. But where Kraft had expected a kind of Lionel Barrymore gravel, there's only this disturbingly treble whistle. May in December.

Weird, unplaceable, disconcerting. But hey. Like the man asked: What difference does it make to you? Leave it. Not your specialty; not this rotation, in any case.

Kraft sits another minute, pursed over the Dictaphone. Checks the doorway again. Has sleep deprivation progressed so far as to deliver visuals? All at once the click of differential diagnosis hits him. He blanches and stands up slowly. Hutchinson-Gilford disease. True pro-geria. Visible after a year or two of normal infancy. Onset of full-fledged symptoms around six. Sixty years old by the age of ten. Kraft falters over to his bookshelf, flips through the references catatonically, already knowing what he's going to come up with. Only four dozen known occurrences in the entire world literature. Kraft lurches back out into the corridor, but Gramps, one of creation's rarest ancient children, is gone.