Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Recapping in miniature the general blackout between Kraft's pre-teens and his thirties, the operating room vanishes. The set gives way to one of those membership discount stores, his city's most distinguished contribution to world betterment. The place is crawling with self-proclaimed discounts, but only for those who put up enough grubstake to secure the photo club card. The fee is trivial — just high enough to screen out the underclass. The only illegals allowed within spitting circumference of the showrooms are hired under the table to swab the decks perpetually with blisterproof paint.

Closing the Rapparition, changing out of the scrubs, heading down to the subterranean lot, blasting his automotive escape out of Fortress Carver, negotiating the freeway, finding his way to this warehouse, and flashing yet another private badge to win entry: all these steps fade to a blur at best. He has a generic memory of the overall process, the recall of one who has read the crib notes but not the book. He flails at his belt to check for his beeper, but does not feel it there. All the same, he feels queasily certain that he must still be on call.

Memory loss: a thing that virtually every text Kraft has ever been made to memorize would unhesitatingly classify as No Goodish. More alarming, he can't seem to get worked up about his brief disappearance. He's willing to flow with the symptoms, string them along with the hope of staying supple for a potential shot at the broader diagnosis. And yet, how far is he going to get without a complete work-up, beginning with a decent history and physical? He's become exactly the sort of patient he most dreads, the stuff of Plummer's rolling burlesques. Childhood diseases? M-maybe. Any trace of this in your family? You mean, like, mother, father…?

He hasn't a clue in creation why he is here. Here in this store, that is, let alone any wider, more imponderable locale. At this point, he can't even recall why he paid for membership in the first place, except to prove that twenty bucks would still buy him into some anesthetizing club somewhere.

Well, let it be retail then, the sheer, diversionary power of the stuff. And harbor the hope that here amid the available merchandise, one might find the best place to hold vigil against the quiet pogrom already under way. One or another clearance trough in this charnel house of bargains must cradle the ticket item that he'd been after when the lights went out. Track it down, kick its unholy can, freeze the statue maker, bluff the blindman, all-come-in-free-o!

Problem is, the commodity he is after could be anything, anything this heartbreaking, magnificent mess of a country marks down in today's race to clear inventory. Perhaps he's in pressing need of some processor or another — word, data, food, sound, trash, or love. Could be this here artificial-intelligence beer-can Thermos ring. Or this: a mock-membrane-pad simulation of a security alarm system to fasten to his front door, instant advertisement to smart-shopping, card-holding break-and-enterers that his home is in fact prostrate and defenseless. A key chain that comes when you whistle? A tape recorder that starts recording eight seconds before it is turned on? An own-yer-own, home version of some private-reserve cinema classic, say, Seven Brides for Seven Samurai?

He figures it can't be this last, as he'd have to buy a player first. He has so far failed to do so, knowing that whatever device he might settle on would be obsoleted (as the English-obsoleting term of the moment has it) ten minutes before he could tweak the thing's pots. Nevertheless, home electronics alone keeps his speculative faculties happily suspended for over an hour. He stands gazing, in fascinated stupor, at a gargantuan image thrown up on a flat-screen, wraparound, wall-sized, live-in, digital stereo television larger than his apartment, larger, in fact, than his entire bet-hedging, twitch-appeasing leisure existence. The eerie, green-shifted specter waltzing around up there seems weirdly familiar, despite the chromosmear. It moves when he moves, ducks, shadowboxes in perfect synchrony, and hey! Howdy, Dr. Kraft. I'm on TV.

His first thought is: How'd they know I was coming? And how'd they get me on video in the first place? Utter idiocy lasts long enough for Kraft to feel the sensation of dancing to yesterday's ballet, as if he's the mario-martinet doing the tag-along, aping his screen alter ego's choreography class. Once he figures out it's live, he almost twists his neck off trying to look directly at himself. Why can't he get his eyes — either this or that pair — around and past the side of his head? The problem's not with any obstruction in his face, any blockage in the old universal joint. It's just that the screen is here and the camera is over there, and that's why, he decides, every picture tells a story. And every story lies at right angles to itself.

He picks up the Handycam, fiddles with it. He points it around the store, at the other cameras, at a nearby mirror, holding the mimic at arm's length and gauging the effects on screen. He points it at the screen itself. Big mistake. He loses another god-knows-how-many minutes of his life, image-mapping the edges of recursion's all-devouring hellmouth.

A bank of demonic monitors runs along the back aisle and out of sight. Several hundred of them superimpose their simultaneous soundtracks into a cacophony that makes Ives sound like monkish homo-phony. The massed picture screens make up a mammoth grasshopper's compound eye. They trawl at random for a half-dozen picture signals and flaunt these in assembled, inscrutable patterns. One block of picture beam, interrupted by another, resumes as an irregular trapezoid just down the plane. For Kraft, the channels congeal into a single, wide-gauge program whose theme any stringer pediatrician would recognize at once: children adrift, out of doors too late at night, too far from home, migrating, campaigning, colonizing, displaced, dispersed, tortured loose, running for their lives.

He has stumbled onto one of those half-hour slots reserved for dispensing pitched bewilderment. They're doing news again, as they do around the clock these days. Image chorus line. The sight-bite Zeitgeist One signal block has been hijacked by an emergency update on this year's flash point, one that Kraft has until now only dimly registered. He focuses in on the account, amazed at how quickly this one has slipped from precocious to precarious. The language of direct confrontation — the contempt for the public behind all action in the public interest — cranks itself up to a pitch past the usual theatrics. The endless, impotent, international diplomatic game of chicken in Dad's car begins to embrace its casualty rates. Grim foreign secretaries shaking their heads Live at Ten rule out negotiation, basking in an electrified aura of imminence that, because of the network-wide inability of home audiences everywhere to sustain concentration, will once more turn to boredom by the dismembering end.

This evening's particular head-on high noon has been busy escalating, introducing new twists and chicanes while Kraft's been away. All sides accuse the others of disinformation, a spiral of ever more sophisticated muddying of the waters. Claims of historical mandate crash up against new world orders. Preacher beseechers on a competing channel tick off the prophetic countdown to Megiddo Revisited. Nebuchadnezzar is returned to power. Engineers work at constructing life-sized living models of Babylon. TV-steered TOWs stand in for angels of incineration. Infidel legions mass for final face-off against the emissaries of evil expansionism. Does have a familiar ring to it — the old high road to simplification. Details available in this million-selling handbook; order now by calling the toll-free number on your screen.