Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

A Hutchinson-Gilford, here, at a freebie institution that can barely handle tonsillectomies without sending the kid out on a tray? A hospital where half the senior staffers are alcoholics and half the residents have doctored their transcripts? How on earth can Carver even think about handling such a case? The minute the kid walked in the door, they should have airlifted him straight to Boston. There's something not quite Hippocratic going on here. Either the admitting physician doesn't know what he's looking at — impossible; that pinched nose, the vanished hairline, the jaundiced, ravaged, medieval parchment skin — or the shriveled boy has been sucked up into some medical Barnum's bailiwick.

It doesn't seem conceivable: a child rushing toward advanced old age at this wildly accelerated rate without having attracted the attention of research's power players somewhere along the line. Even the family physician, however blunderingly inept, certainly must have noticed when the kid picked up a decade between six-month checkups. Then Kraft returns to the reality check and remembers where he is. The bulk of this outfit's clientele couldn't pay for a periodic physical, even if they knew what such a thing was. But surely the school nurse, the boy's teachers, the neighborhood social worker…?

Drop it. Lose the whole matter. Run closed-lidded in the other direction singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" while cupping your hands over your ears. This admission obviously has no bearing whatsoever on surgery. As such, it lies outside the only shorthand calculus Kraft has for years been able to afford: Impact on immediate work load? Need deal with this by self?

But the wrong, awful rarity of the thing haunts him. A boy a third his age, except twice as old. That uncannily sick face. A great-grandfather's face, superannuated and wasted, yet with half a century still to go before retirement age. A half century it will never make. An extraterrestrial face, para-human, a mask violating the fixed sequence of innocence to experience to decay, mixing up the stages of growth in monster parody. The tragic by-product of a mad invention, a bio-ray, some visionary machine invented to blaze open a transforming shortcut but botched horribly, locked up deep beneath the earth's crust, forgotten by everyone except a few children who, not noticing the CONDEMNED sign rotting over the entrance, wandered down into the shaft while playing and accidentally absorbed the full, cell-accelerating blast.

He tries work again. But no matter how often Kraft rewinds and replays the burst of urgent nonsense on his Dictaphone, he cannot transcribe it. He puts the machine down, exchanges it for the phone, and dials an extension fast becoming as familiar to him as the lab technician's. "Espera, please."

Another shuffle, and a voice like home whispers out of the receiver, "Squeakheart?" Giggling at his decorum. "Zat you? I thought I told you never to call me at the office."

"Linder, listen." To what? To a transcript of ultimate unlikelihood. To wild suppositions. To the track of a background song going hideously lost. To the blood coursing as audibly as surf through his ears. To the dead silence on his end of the line, the pyre of questions piling up on his police blotter. "I just… This kid, this old kid…" The disease's proper name refuses to come out of the technical tome and unfold itself.

"Ah. You've met Nicolino."

The word convinces him of the utter hopelessness of dealing with this woman. The gap between them — almost a full generation, by the standards of developing nations and the clientele down at OB-GYN — is trivial compared to this. Their incommensurate pasts would be resolvable. Even the unspannable chasm of sex, the two of them dosed with mutually unintelligible hormonal cocktails, would be a little leap. But this, this equanimity of hers in the face of the unassimilable makes her another genus. Alien. He can't even begin to talk to her.

He has called to enlist her aid in comprehending this fifty-to-however-many-historical-billions shot strolling around loose, unprotected, Dodger-capped in the corridors just outside his door. But Linda — he might have known that she would already be on a first-name basis with astonishment — makes of this boy an order of magnitude rarer still. Just one. One, out of all the cumulative billions that do not stop today but go on growing toward some terminal forever. He might have known it'd be "Nicolino."

"Linda. Do you have any idea what this kid is?"

"Yeah. He's a cheeky little brat. He came in for his first appointment with Physiatry and propositioned me."

Kraft's resentment of this woman vanishes in a flash, replaced by murderous rivalry directed at a preteen, dirty old lecher. "What did he say?"

"He said, 'Va-va-voom.' Or words to that effect. Then something or other about lamenting his vanished youth."

Kraft has to snort, but painfully, a solid, undislodgable mass in his trachea. "What in hell is he doing here? "

"Trying to get medical attention, I think. Sor-ry." She suppresses a guilty laugh. "His folks don't want to turn their little boy into a rolling research freak. 'Just fix Nico up and send him home. Our only child!' Soon as I heard that, I thought, aha! So that's why little Nico is spoiled. But know what? It turns out he's not an only child. He's got about a half-dozen sisters. They don't count, apparently. Is that some kind of Islamic thing, or something?"

"I wouldn't know."

"Kind of a specialist, are you?"

"Did you tell these people that a little research might help the next kid who decides to go geriatric overnight?"

Linda sighs, exasperated on both sides. "What do you want to do? He is their kid, after all. Oh, Nico himself would love doing the pony show, I'm sure. He'd jump at the chance to sass the country's leading medical investigators. But Mama's the bottom line, wouldn't you say? 'Give me a new generation of mothers, and I will give you a new world.' "

"Run that by me again?"

"Nothing you'd know. It's from a book. And not a manual. Don't worry, it won't be on the Boards."

Hang up now, and the tiff will propagate. He can feel it already, building toward chain reaction. He doesn't even feel like intervening, smoothing things over. Even throwing the offense back at her takes too much energy. Sullenness is too obvious, though. Would only give her more occasion to egg him on. He needs to find some neutral, not-too-icy politeness, and get out.

But he can think of nothing more to ask. He doesn't even have to inquire about the reason for the admission. Median age of death: thirteen. Few true cases make it to the adulthood that mocks them. Cardiovascular crack-up, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, vessels pissing out of the parched scalp, systemic deterioration of the organs. The kid's body clock is simply shutting down early, like an office on New Year's Eve, pitching it in after only half a morning's work. Nicolino is dying of a parody of old age. No other name for it, unless, like the newspapers, you go with "natural causes."

Linda is insouciant, oblivious to his tangles. When Kraft doesn't fill the silence, she does. "You any good with Dodger statistics, by the way?"

"You're asking the wrong guy." Wrong in every way. Linda; leave me. Don't waste another day of your twenties on this lost cause. Come back when you've worked your way through the rest of the state, the men who like to do things at night, the ones who'll match your bursts and stoke you up and make you flash on and keep you as alive, as supple as you still are. Come back when you're ready to go stiff, to end things. I won't have moved.

"Oh, sorry. That's right. You led a deprived childhood, didn't you? I forgot. Mowgli, the jungle boy. No Sweetarts, no juice-filled wax vampire fangs. No national pastime. That explains everything."