Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

But Pediatrics supplies Kraft with an alternative wrap-up scenario. The department nurses, whom he tries to avoid for reasons not sufficiently buried in his checkered past, report this tremendous spike in preemies, SIDS cases, placental substance dependence, inherited autoimmune deficiencies — slopes ramping up for an assault on the airy altitudes above the graph-paper tree line. His imagination is entranced by the chance of an annual power skid in the male-to-female ratio, not just statewide, but throughout the euphemistically labeled developed countries. A Pink Shift drifts demographics measurably away from snips and snails, sugar-and-spiceward. An almost imperceptible but steady 0.1 percent reduction in males per live birth per year, when coupled with the recent slight increase in male infant mortality rates, and the shift reveals nothing less than the steady girlification of the world, with its inevitable — although belated — precipitous drop in procreation.

Wouldn't that be the ultimate kicker? After all the high-visibility threats, the dire predictions proliferating like food stamps, the concerted forward two-and-a-halfer over the brink of willful critical mass, to wind up perishing slowly from irreversible sex-ratio drift, brought on by some invisible drinking-water effect on gamete motility? Sure, it smacks of wishful thinking on Kraft's part, when faced with the grab bag of aggressively masculine apocalypses, to hope that the species might sink into a more benign disappearance, a surfeit of female.

But until the collective end of choice arrives, or until he finishes this service and graduates to the next one — the VA, a weekend cake promenade in comparison — whichever comes first, he is compelled to make his minor mitigations for those sufferers who share nothing in common except their unripe green. Monsters, freaks of gene or accident or pathology, race up and down these halls in relays, in fifty-yard dashes leading to no medal, no record, nowhere. Files of them, parades of shell-shocked, half-staffed pilgrims. What's it to you?

"Okay. Now roll over. Move your arm like this."

"God. Lay off. You're killing me."

"Don't be such a baby."

"Stop. Wait. No, really, Linda. I need both my arms. It's a professional thing."

"Oh, come on. Why is it that men start shrieking at the least little hint of therapeutic pain?"

"Who you calling a man? Jesus. I think you dislocated it."

"Then it probably needed to be dislocated. It's for your own good. I've never seen anyone with more restricted mobility."

"Yeah? Well that comes from years of conscientious discipline."

"Discipline? You ungulate, you. I ought to teach you the meaning of the word."

"I'm sure you could."

"Do you want me to fix you or not?"

"I ain't broke."

"That's what all the boys who come see me say. Your little mascot these days, Tony the Tuff? Diminutive little machismo thug. He sits in my office whining that it hurts when he grimaces."

" 'Don't grimace?' "

"No. Don't get your ear cut off next time. Now, if you want to talk about real bravery…"

"I'm supposed to sing 'Sank heven vor leetel gerlz' now, right? Speaking of which, did you give them to her?"

"Give what to who?"

"Joy. The books."

"Of course I gave them to her. You think maybe I fenced them for their street value?"

"What did she say?"

"When I brought them to her, she just… I'm sorry. You know, those eyes. It's like: 'I have to protect you from what you don't know about the world.' She thanked me profusely, and begged me to thank you, and looked up to me, deadly serious, and said, 'Do you want to read them out loud to me?' Like that's the only official way of doing these things. Like they were part of some…"

"And what did you say?"

"Will you shut up, please, and let me tell this story? I asked her, Would you like me to read them to you?' To which she very tentatively suggested, 'I think I would rather look at them carefully during my free time.' "

"Free time? Free time from what?"

"From her self-designated study periods. We have to graduate, didn't you know?"

"Oh God."

"Here. This way. A little radial…"

"And did she read them?"

"She took what is for her a leisurely stroll through them, compared to the day and a half she usually takes to polish off the histories and almanacs. Then she tried to return them with the usual politeness. When I told her they were hers, she said she had a few questions. Why does that boy, when they wheel him into the garden, say I shall live forever? That other boy, the one who never grew up: How is that possible?' Not your typical twelve-year-old concerns."

"Utter failure, in other words."

"Oh, I don't know. Who can say what Joy's imagination is capable of? That she's kept pace with reality is astounding."

"Not her. I mean me. Utter failure in selecting tides."

"I wouldn't say that either. Okay, now the planar axis."

"Ouch. Oh Christ. What are you doing to me?"

"I'm not sure. But you love it, don't you? Admit it. Admit it or I'll twist your little wing right off.".

"Anything. Anything."

"Undress me."

"What? Here? In the middle of…?"

"Come on, come on. Am I going to have to do this myself?"

"Espera! Oh holy. Shh. Stop. People will hear."

"So what? They'll just think, Hmm. Old Dr. Kraft in there, bashing the bishop."

"Old?"

"Enough to know what he's doing."

"Oops! I'm afraid that's my beeper."

"Look at him grin. I hadn't realized you could make it go off just by wishing."

He does not say good-bye, or set the time and place for finishing what they have started. He does not tell her that far more than the foot is in danger, that getting away with just the calf would be deliverance. His old saving grace: say as little as contractually necessary.

And when he sees the child next, for a set of scans, she welcomes him with a smile that would be shy if it weren't visibly shaken. He thinks: The pain. It's starting. It will wring her until she cries out to be killed.

But it is not the pain. Not yet. Something else drives her brown-petal face ashen. "Dr. Kraft," she tells him excitedly, swallowing the consonants in a ghostly holdover of lost Asian highlights. Ghostly for them both. "I have seen him. He's here, right here on my floor. The boy. The boy who never grew up!"

(A softbound text works its way to the top of the To Do stack. Its ocher cover mirrors a map maker's fantasy: the Land of Faith, the Land of Infidels, the Promised Land, all bound by the Unknown Ocean, crossed bravely by two intrepid small craft and a spouting sea monster. An ink noose tightens around the book's title, The World Awakens, Part III. The loop fills with snorer's zzz's. The spine is split and a sewn signature of pages slips loose.)

… occupational rescue work in a dark time — the stopgaps that a people summon at the moment of collapse — would make a profitable study. The psychology of decline, the realization that progress has reversed and that history is entering upon a long, perhaps terminal decay, must be one of the most revealing of civilization's convictions. But such speculation lies beyond the scope of this endeavor…

… a narrow span of nine years in the Europe of the early sixteenth century. Few periods have been more ambivalently explosive than the years 1527 to 1535. The dissemination of printed matter through movable type, rapid expansion of trade, advances in medicine led by Paracelsus's epochal surgical manual, a density of artistic genius such as the world never again produced, and the daily exodus of ships embarking westward on a salubrious footrace of nations were cause for the highest optimism.

Yet the underside of the era's developments more than kept pace. The scale of political intrigue and social dislocation stripped conviction from even the age's most gifted. Signs and portents — the comet of 1531, the Gnostic calculations pointing to the fifteenth centennial of the Savior's death, Columbus's prophetic fulfillment in gathering together the globe's scattered races (a collision from which the world has yet to recover) — become the basis for a more substantive chiliasm. The renewed Turkish incursions, Müntzer's Peasants' Uprising, the endless roles of famine and crop failure, returns of Plague, horrific distribution of wealth, the sundering of the sole institution that had held Europe alive for the thousand years since the collapse of the Western Empire, and Luther's new timetable for the perpetually impending Visit all attest to a climate of frightened expectation.