Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Angel Cities: well, he is getting warmer now, much. That must be it, the link he's supposed to recover. But what can this panicked pleasuredom, this theme park of loosely confederated, strip-mailed membership stores — self-asphyxiating, self-immolating, drugged, gelded, joyriding, willfully slipping back into the worst of Third World crippling sinkholes — what can his current address possibly have in common with the first one, the city Kraft once spoke to in its native language, before his facility with languages withered away to pocket translating dictionaries?

It comes to him with the force of first discovery. He lived once in another place by the same name, yet spelled in a far more ample alphabet. A city called the City of Angels in a country called the Land of the Free. A people called the Free People, although the outside world knew all three only in clumsy transliterations.

And this picture parade, the infinitely extensible police lineup of intermediary staging grounds for those Crystal Nights all school drills promise: Florence, Aberfan, Madrid, Detroit, Prague, Paris, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Newark, Belfast, Harare, Jerusalem. Each a namesake, yet sharing something steeper, deeper down, beneath names. All are celestial suburbs gone wrong. Single steps, separate arithmetic means between the shining seraph of his own childhood and this place, its follow-up succubus.

His confirmation comes in one quick cut, almost faster than he can frame his guess. There it is, on three dozen diffracting screens at once, each appliance assorting its yoked electron sprays into patterns that whisper of geometries past the axiom, corollaries beyond the freshest new crop of Euclids' ability to prove. He sees her on the screen, her beyond all reasonable doubt, running naked through cratered streets, clothes singed off, taking her skin with them.

She runs in blind panic from something dropped out of the sky. She limps, favoring the ankle he himself has only recently excised, a girl unable to outrun the leading edge of her own animal terror, running both from and right into the next descent of aerial rupture. Running dead on, in another minute perhaps dead, into the impartial lens (but a man behind it, some picture scavenger, standing there filming). She runs into a world-famous image, one arrested forever a dozen years before his little girl is even born.

And she's not alone. The whole canon of ward cases accompanies her, in shot after shot. The No-Face fills the screen, his features miraculously whole for a moment before they are smashed in again by a Chicago policeman's cudgel. Then the Rapparition, laying down a Frelimo battle celebration in Bantu-Portuguese. Joleene Weeks holding what at first seems to be her Chatty Cathy doll but horribly isn't, mother and child both panting, breathing through their ribs in — well, could be anywhere. Remember these places, does he? The day's Biafra, the day's Dhaka?

Even if he has blunted the exact coordinates for a couple of sedated decades, he cannot fail to recognize the next face, as fresh in his mind as if he'd seen it for the first time just days ago. It's the newcomer, the old kid, a year or two further along, yet a half-century younger. Still bald, or rather, shaved. Led out of the subterranean prison where he'd been buried alive. Turned about for the camera like a vertical rack of lamb, his body molded all over with blue flash burns, a Roquefort grown in caves on copper wire skewers.

And this one does not come from out of the bowels of some provisional capital a day's forced march from the Chaco. This one's from closer to home. As close to home as can be, as flush, as smack up against it as video and imagination permit.

With interlude again fuzzy to the point of nonexistent, Kraft is back at his flat. The freeway bit is totally missing. He has negotiated those masses of lanes with no recall, even from what he hopes is only a moment later.

But he knows he's home, because the lady across the way — used to call them neighbors back before the West Was Won — female, mid-fifties, non-racially distinct, slightly dyspneic, partial to ceramic goods with ironically upbeat printed messages on them, a radical mastectomy within the last year — is standing in his doorway asking him to sniff her chicken fillets. She is the first human he can recall seeing aboveground and outside an industrio-retail complex in he can't remember how long.

"I just bought this from the Food Parade not two hours ago, and it smells rotten to me. Does it smell rotten to you? Tell me honestly, because I don't want to bring it back and have them tell me I'm crazy."

Kraft takes a whiff. He smells nothing, neither micro nor macro, animal, vegetable, mineral, nor any of commerce's more recent hybrids. He can't even smell the chicken an sich. '"Yes," he says, surprised at how clinically he carries it off. "You may be right."

"Are you sure?" Sung to the tune of the old NBC triad. The living color peacock preens in front of him.

Then, he's still standing at the same door, but opening it for a second buzz, time lapse style. It's the woman, Linda, arms full of packages, volumes, damp and aromatic paper sacks. When he fails to make way for her, she slips past him with a playful nudge of the shoulders. "Hi, baby. I came straight from the hospital."

"Hosp—? Are you all right?"

Her eyebrows curl over her eye ridge, two caterpillars racing to reconnoiter the bridge of her nose. Her neck stem straightens in residual reflex. Half a beat, then she giggles. "Oh, I get it. Hospital, sick. Funny stuff, there. I stopped on the way and got some grub. I was seized by caprice to eat Chinese."

"Eat Chinese?"

"For God's sake, sit down. Open your mouth and close your eyes, and you will get…"

After dinner, she jumps up and says, "Stay put. I’ll do the dishes."

"All right." He's in no position to move anyway.

"That was a joke, dope." She crumples the eternal plastic plates and multiple sacks, makes of them a single wad that she sinks with a twenty-footer into the trash. He is still sitting motionless, staring at the spot the meal had occupied. She smuggles around behind him, kisses the crown of his head.

His spine convulses, half of the famous galvanized frog's legs. "What?"

"What, 'what'? Relax. Assault waves are over for the day."

He jerks his face around to look at hers. Assault? How much does she know?

"Tough one for you today? They do you with the rubber hoses again?" Her fingers go deep, directly into his shoulders. It's good, relief beyond description, revealing what he hadn't known had been festering in that knot of confused tissue. At the same time, the pain is excruciating, worse than the one it exorcises. Retaliatory surgical strike he has no choice but to submit to. And she hasn't even slit him yet. Just the prep, the antiseptic scrub.

The rubdown expands, deeper and wider, radiating outward from his sternocleidomastoids like dioxins through the food chain. She must feel him succumb, because her cadence starts to do the Ben-Hur -galley-master-with-the-timpani thing. "Bare your privates, huh?" she coos in his ear. "Make them available for female consumption."

These words don't seem to issue from the Linda he knows. But maybe it's the answer all the same. Now that push comes down to shove, his hormones flush from his system with cruise technology: accurate and massive, even from a great distance.

But release is no relief. Worse, that state of blurred conviction returns to him, locking up his receptor sites. Some attempt to attract his macerated attention hovers around his apartment's seams. That tribe, that band of eyes outside the school window, waving madly, hurry, come away. The massed, perhaps coordinated movements of minor militias, an agenda afoot already, stretching forever through time and space. A single overarching pattern doubles back repeatedly on two names, words that camp out in the deflated oxygen tent that once fed the language center of his brain. The first, a place name, already ascertained. The place of his own childhood mobilization, the same name as the place where he now euphemistically lives.