Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

She wants to hit him. Slap his impassive face for treating her like, well, like a willful child. She would in a second, if she thought it might help. In the man's current condition, it wouldn't even arouse him. At least he's talking again, and all she can do is let him.

"Not my rotation. I shouldn't even know of this kid's existence." He lashes the words with a ferocity that shifts her concern from the man-boy to the boy-man. One thing is clear, whatever other creeping etiologies come to bear here. Ricky too is spooked out of his composure by this freak visitor.

etiologies come to bear here. Ricky too is spooked out of his composure by this freak visitor.

Her resident-in-absentia lies on his back in the dark, in her bed. Even his spending the night here is a major concession. His arms stay folded over unremoved surgical scrubs. He lies stiff, a magician's hypnotized assistant or Gothic knight posing for the sculptured upper deck of his terminal stone bunk. Gross miscalculation on her part, to have brought up the Nico thing. They are back to the friction of their first tête-à-tête, without the erotic charge. She feels the slow spit of nebulous theories churning in him, where she had meant to forestall them. I know, she can feel his forcibly relaxed muscles thinking. I know who this creature is.

She dare not even ask him what he thinks he knows. He would dissolve in an ironic laugh at his own expense, pull back into a deeper pillbox, even as he turned to play with her. Play more perfunctory, with their every successive foray. Fondling as sop. She cannot even say anymore— already? just three weeks this time? — what she most requires from him. What she knows better than to want or say. To tell him how, with each new separation, she grows ever more frantic to have him up inside her, alive and covered and safe, would rush the day when he goes impotent at the mere sight of her eager need.

She refrains from the impulse to touch his chest, already feeling the obligatory, patterned echo from him. A quick panic fills her here in her own bed, invaded by this invité. She must have chosen him for this, singled him out before she knew him. But she did know already. Knew his reputation for Dial-a-Nurse. Knew the brutal occupation, the sardonic "Your patient, Doctor." Knew he was the very man who could replay her private nightmare scenario, the repeat foreclosure she seems intent on engineering.

She can ask him for nothing. Any request at all would be fatal for them both. The last thing she wants is confrontation. Just knowing that she dare not ask makes her a slave, sick with the irresistible question. She tries his shoulder, tentatively, feels it tense in feigned relaxation. She slithers in toward his ear. And what form will compulsion take tonight, what surrogate truce? Talk to the boy. Straighten him out, break him of cruelty's bafflement. Take him under your wing. Take care of this helplessness. Give it the protection only you can give.

Or she might speak to him for real. Might unleash at last the whispered accusations against her betrayer in age. This man, so much her senior, a decade: Was that the secret appeal? Old enough to be her grubby little uncle. He lies there across the minefield of acrylic blend, already a casualty in this single-elimination, sudden-death tournament. He lies cross-armed, denying, refusing the explanation she needs from him. She needs him to say, just once, what lies behind the pudgy, glowing, poster faces' pretended innocence. Don't you see why the boy runs manic? The dependent's bewilderment, the dazed, mislaid trust.

She closes the gap and cozies up against him, knowing how much this contact will deplete whatever stockpile of touch he might have left for her. But she needs the thing so much that she will take even sex again in its stead, since he can give nothing else. Friction — attenuating, static, distracting, ridding the minute of old injuries. It is the lesser of two requests. A way to avoid wondering when the private batterings— the cloaked secrecies, violations, and covert hurt-mes — will start again this time.

More wrongs to redress than there are hours in the day. The only answer, of course, is unflagging industry, the same ceaseless dedication and energy that enabled him, from essentially zero capitalization, to assemble the complete Riders at the End of Time, volume 3, numbers 1 through 161. Not that he makes the mistake of trying to pull off this whole scam single-handedly. He allows himself the luxury of delegating authority on labor-intensive matters. He's assigned his corps of engineers the task of building a little lookout nest on the roof next to the chopper pad, from which they hope soon to be launching bottle rockets, currently under development by Chuckie and the brain trust according to proprietary specs of his own design: various supply-closet combustibles set alight in one-liter IV bags.

Okay, everything they've mounted so far is just piddling stuff compared to the major campaign. But he refuses, on grounds of project security, to discuss future operations. Also, he's kind of winging it. Not really sure what he's after himself. The girl Joy seems somehow instrumental to the master plan. He doubles back to her on repeated, suck-up visits, cementing their wary truce with miscalculated small gifts: dried dough he swears will come back to life if soaked, half of a sundered walkie-talkie set, worthless books washed up in the tidal pools of trade, tides only she would read. Decisive Sieges of the Sixteenth Century, or Our Friends on the Pacific Rim.

"So are you getting any better?"

"I don't know," she answers gravely, unwilling to lie. He kicks at her crutches, toppling her in treachery. She emits a bleat, a "Hai!" of surprised pain.

"Sorry. Just conducting a little experiment." She stares at him in incomprehension, a retriever whose hindquarters are crushed under its careless owner's recliner. "Look, I said I'm sorry. Here." He doffs the cap. "Go ahead. Pull my hair. What's left of it, anyway."

She covers her smirk with the back of an autumn-leaf hand. She forgets the pointless cruelty faster than anything can explain. Pain passes from her face without residuals, replaced by another, iodine hurt each time she steals a look at him. Something inside her cells would match his instant age, decade for decade. Something in her is crying, "Little girl, little girl, let go of me."

Sorties with the Stepaneevong female leave Nico's senior lieutenants more than a little nervous. What's the point? How's she gonna help us any? Come on; let's go steal some tubing and make a Comm Device. Or or or: let's say that the third floor is M-31 and the fifth floor is Heliotria. The Cyclogeneron's about 90 percent finished, but we need just one more trigawatt-hour of juice…

But the guy they vie for is worlds away. Sometimes he's morose with preoccupation, and will snap, "Grow up, will you? The hell is this, Peeweeland?"

His crushing rebukes demoralize the upper echelons of Command and Control. The only encouraging spin to Nico's enigmatic insistence on parlay with this foreign element is that the more the two of them talk, the less they seem to need to.

He brings her a plastic soccer ball, half of a cruel carrot-and-stick cure. Astonishingly, she can keep it in the air with just her knees, elbows, head, and shoulders, even while propped up over her leg struts.

"Jeez. Where'd you learn how to do that?" But she cannot talk while the ball is aloft.

And he cannot wait for her to miss, which could be never. "Look," he blusters. "Joyless. They're probably not telling you everything, right?" She executes an especially skillful lob with the inside arch of her good foot. "I mean, you could be Xed off the charts as dead meat already, without even knowing it." If she gives a reply, he's the only one who hears it.