Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

"That's right. Nobody knows how it came about. It's always been that way."

"Oh." The monosyllable comes up out of her throat, a bit of phlegm wrapped around an acid lemon drop that went down the wrong pipe. She will choke on it, on the image of this bewildered Thursday afternoon class, huddled around the fable-fire for whatever feeble electron-beam spark it might still emit, whatever slight stay, its half-hour postponement of heat death. Not one of them knows. Look: look now, what the primitive metal casting does. It stands still while Heliotria's ravenous fads slither past in reflex after-spasms, faster than she can track. It draws toward itself hands still raw from thumb sucking, gathering them up with the crisis touch, catapulting them, adding their increment of ergs to swell the eternally just-insufficient Grid.

The Ikonankh swims in front of her to fill the screen. She watches as the summoning trinket burrows through the tube's phosphor trail and lands in this room. It materializes, pulsing, beating its metal wings, come to recruit a last-ditch rescue for the universe's doomed omnipo-tents, to enlist these ignorant psychics, robust in their innocence, to put them to work assembling, arresting, assisting in the most desperate invention necessity ever mothered.

Meanwhile, in another galaxy just around the bend, Kraft is performing sloppy seconds on an emergency repair cobbled together by Plummer on an eleven-year-old male who was riding semifigurative shotgun in a car that a couple club brothers had taken out on community loan. Ably assisted by a cordial that subsequently registered all kinds of exotic blood concentrations, the driver power-skidded the vehicle into the rear end of a tomato-motif, twenty-four-hour pizza delivery van. The kid cohort happened to be picking his teeth with a wooden skewer at the moment of impact.

His cruising buddies would give no name for him aside from "the Rapparition," a tide they claimed he'd legally earned in brilliant public battle. The boy was past interrogation, so that was the handle that went down on the ER paperwork. Plummer's initial repair consisted of removing the larger bits of toothpick from their resting place in the boy's soft palate. The Rapparition's first slurred words upon swimming up from under the anesthetic were "The movement lives on; you can't slash it down. You can't even long to make it gone."

The scrape of the sutures makes him wretch, but the Rapparition gets the words out. By the time Kraft inherits the kid for all the rest of the patchwork, he's become Carver's blessed peacemaker. When Tony the Tuffian and that Rib Fix from the Crack Pack go tearing each other's sutures out in a territorial blood dispute, the Rapparition interposes himself between them, declaiming,

This is a plea

For u-ni-ty

Between the He and the We

And the Me and the She.

We're on a mission

Here, so don't start dissin'.

Ya got to listen to the Rapparition:

Use your God-given powers of analysis!

We got to break through this crip-pl-ing paralysis.

Kraft could not have put the matter more succinctly. Today's follow-up procedure is aimed at repairing a bit of the damage Plummer's stopgap palate patch-up has done to the Rapparition's dactyls. Nothing life shattering. In fact, almost opera buffa fare compared to much of what society has been shoving under Kraft's blade as of late. But it is, nevertheless, a long, grueling, painstaking, delicate transaction of considerable consequence to one who has chosen speech over any of the deadlier assault weapons in aggression's arsenal. A constructive bit of craftwork, placing it in the decided minority of piece labor assigned Kraft in this place.

Still under the influence of the Rapparition's cadence, half desperate to convince himself of the feasibility of a Lindaesque lightness in the face of wounds beyond fusing, or maybe just punchdrunk with overwork, Kraft notices an upbeat, potato-chip rhythm using his cerebrum as electronic drum pad while he closes. The pernicious little beat goes: Let's have a jammer (uh) , I said let's jam (rest, rest, rest) in the slammer. And mixed in there, like undercoatings of old wallpaper forever unsteamable unless one is willing to gouge out half the drywall along with it, the phrase's Renaissance counterpoint: Lulla lullaby, my sweet little baby. What meanest thou to cry?

He senses something expected of him, a rendezvous all arranged and penned into his agenda by unknown secretary. He feels it, the weight of specific disaster, of predetermined public breakdown settling in for the evening, locating the point of perfect parasitic attachment, homing in with all the inevitability of an earnest grade-school mathematician employing approximate roots to close in on an irrational decimal. Armies of omens assemble themselves, fall into the only formation he affords them these days — the short roster, the cursory catalog standing in for a more comprehensive account of approaching capitulation. Generic alphabets, glossaries of collective pathology you do not want enumerated at greater length.

What is this place? The lightest attention limns it: the evidence is everywhere, widening with the decline of light. Poverty in positive feedback. Cascade of chain-failing banks. Earnings not even enough to cover debt service. Volume discounts rewarding the spree mentality. Illiteracy passed down as the only family heirloom, actually cultivated by every trick in the marketing book, because merchandisers, like politicians, prosper from a maimed electorate. Ten-year-olds who can tell caliber and make of a handgun by sound alone, especially in the dark. Toxins trickling down into the aquifer, from which they can never be filtered. All the while, the index of leading indicators — wealth measured by the ability to wage disaster — doctors itself until its message is bearable, even downright rosy to the ears of the self-proclaimed best-informed people on earth. Of the two alternatives in the ancient grudge match, Thanatos clearly has more future in it.

Pale, cheap, and prosaic, this doomsday laundry list. Kraft feels it grow glib under his suturing fingers. He takes facile pleasure in confirming his worst fears, talking himself up onto the hospital rooftop in his bloodied surgical robes to wait for the arrival of this year's all-obliterating comet. Anemic, stripped even of outrage. The bleakest symptom on his list is less than quotidian. They are easy, breezy, light conversational cocktail gambits sung to the swish of a vein-skewering swizzle stick. Thus all the more horrific. When collapse becomes aperitif, it must be here at last. When the end is announced in silence, in blase acquiescence, then it must truly be the end.

Polyphony pounds through Kraft's head as he shoves the point of the needle in and under, punching repeatedly through the drawn drumskin that lines the soft insides of the Rapparition's mouth. Let's have a jammer— uh! In the slammer. Lulla, lu la la, and lo, alas! Behold what slaughter he doth make, shedding the blood of infants all, sweet Savior for thy sake.

He can feel himself running aground on bone shoals that haven't been named, that didn't exist until he blundered against them with his field sewing kit. The voice-leading of his obsessive ditties grows too dense for him to keep the competing lines straight. His repeated, rustling whistles — a dozen notes at a pop, each ritornelloed perhaps a quarter of a thousand times over the course of this operation, alternating fragments forced through the tiny crack decades ago chipped in his central incisor that for some reason he's never had capped — are getting on the nerves of his fellow team members something fierce.

He knows how much these cheerful, trilled flute-de-loops must be driving the whole surgical crew up the blessed institutional walls. But he can't help himself. That's the sound. Uh. That's the sound. The sound of his horn, his oldest continuous possession aside from birth certificate, neglected, long unplayable, but still sitting at the bottom of the closet in that apartment standing in for a more permanent abode. The sound of something out of his own fading repertoire, a bit of musical past he impels himself to conjure up from the scrap heap. A tinny, treble, obbligato rescue me, pitted against the short list of inevitables. The idiot whistling is some reincarnation of saving playground charm. Or perhaps it just traces a random resonance, a tone-row association triggered by the accidental conjunction of prepuber repairs thrown at him as of late, of lulla, lullaby.