Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

"Okay. So suppose you gotta go down," he postulates, watching her, wagging his head in admiration. She counts softly, out loud, her successive aerial taps, somewhere in the high eighties. "With all due respect, Joyless, I'd like to suggest to you that the only thing worth doing, if that's the case, is to try going down in the record books."

She giggles, and it breaks her concentration. The ball rolls down the hall, and she limps along after it. "I'm not that good," she says, the giggles still softly issuing from her like shy, unsigned, dime preemie valentines. A twinge of conscience nags at her. The books are waiting; she's been remiss. She shouldn't stand here playing all day. "I'm only so-so. Where I come from, they can keep a ball in the air all.. "

"Not that record. I'm talking something truly grabbing. Totally new project. Wait a minute. Got it. This is a great one. Classic! What we got to do is write TV-25 Action Corps and tell them there's this little Asian girl lavishing in the charity hospital and she probably's not going to make it, and the only thing that keeps her holding on fighting for sweet life is her driving dream to go down in Guinness as the recipient of the most get-well cards of all time. What do you say?"

"Languishing."

"Whatever. Come on. They love this kind of pathetic kiddie crap. Capture the regional imagination. Feel-gooder campaign. Courage in the face of keeling over. Vote with your stamps. The whole bullshit waterworks. What d'ya think?"

She smiles like she hasn't yet smiled in this lifetime, and starts the ball up in the air again. Eight, nine, ten, eleven. "Clap your hands," she says suddenly.

"Say what?"

"Clap your hands. Don't let Tink die."

He plays dumb until she explains. That book I lent you? He makes out that he hasn't read it yet. Not enough time. Hospital's been going to serious hell in a handbag, and has been for years before his arrival. Consequently, it takes every hour in his agenda just to stabilize the situation. Reading's a luxury, strictly for those with time to burn.

"Know what's wrong with this place?" Nicolino declares to a rumpled Linda. The lady is losing it; she looks like she's slept in that cute little physio getup of hers. "I said, 'Know what's wrong…?' You're supposed to say, 'No, Nico. What?' "

"Do I have to? Okay, okay. Tell me what's wrong with this place."

"Everybody's so twigging sick . We gotta git outta here before we all go rabid. I've seen it happen. Trailblazer , number twenty-three. Whole pioneer colony just ups and goes completely stir crazy with cabin fever. Hey. A ball game. There's yer ticket. How 'bout it, Doll-face? You can swing a Dodger home bill for us?"

" 'Doll-face'? Let me see those comics of yours."

"Ha! You and the Navy SEALs, maybe. Come on. Get that so-called surgeon guy of yours to take us. You two are doing it, aren't you?"

"Doing what ?"

"Oh, excuse me. I thought you were old enough to know about these things."

"You little braguillas !"

To which, he replies in a language she doesn't even want to identify.

"Not that getting you long-termers out of here is such a bad idea. But baseball? Kind of sedate, isn't it? No Amorphicoms? No Grid? No Galactic Heat Death?"

"You only need that shit when nothing's breaking."

"Nico. I'm not going to tell you again."

"Promise? Sor-ry. I meant to say 'that shirt.' "

"How are you going to keep a whole patrol of your contemporaries in one place in the bleachers for nine complete innings?"

"We'll only take the crips. You know; the ones who can't move."

"What a little fiend we are. All right, let's call the so-called surgeon. But I can't believe I'm doing this for you."

Kraft is ready with the subterranean-bunker, I'm-busy-for-the-rest-of-my-life-and-beyond, blanket refusals. "Wrong guy for the wrong job. First off, when am I ever going to have the time to…?"

"You're off next Friday and Saturday," she tells him gently. "I checked the call schedule."

"You did what?" Checked on him, on his reliability. She has been out early, cutting off his lines of retreat. He is suddenly far away, indifferent, invulnerable, slack. Even the deadening silence between them feels luxurious, something one might thrive on.

"It doesn't have to be torture, you know. You might even enjoy it."

"Right. Herding a disease-ridden Halloween parade through an aggressive, beer-swilling, sweltering mass of demi-humanity? Set this group loose on Dodger Stadium? Let them out of the lockup? They'll have committed felonies in a dozen different states by half time."

"Half time?" She snickers, despite the chorus of early warning signals. "Maybe you're right. I do have the wrong guy." The joke settles between them in sad, wide ripples radiating outward in all directions.

He holds her at receiver's distance, fending off the One Good Thing, his near brush with salvation. Wasteful, deliberate, self-inflicted. "I, uh, went to a game once," he tries to blurt out. He would explain how the best course in life consists of avoiding the repeat of certain debilitating early scenarios. But he has lost the cadence of humor. He cannot even bring himself to think of that grandstand debacle, in the company of a father who taught him every survival skill but steals and bunts, everything about the complex international order except for where he belonged in it.

Softly, through the apparatus, Linda offers him redemption. "I'll go with you, if you let me." He wants to tell her she must get away from him, quickly and cleanly. That he has not yet driven her away already incriminates him. He sees it all at once. They will sink into one of those mutual balances of terror, where neither can escape the collateral damage caused by the other's tenderness.

His no, she assumes from his repeated objections, is a yes in other words. Over his increasingly ritualized objections, she books him for the Saturday twin bill against the intensely colorful but eternally hapless Cubbies.

"Pushover opponents. Couple of home victories should at least keep the beer-bottle frag bombs to a minimum."

"Oh, great," he capitulates. “Do I at least get to ogle the cheerleaders.”

"Hopeless. Hopeless." The sliver of good-bye in her voice as she hangs up suggests that she already anticipates all the ways he will abandon her.

Kraft tries to get Plummer to sub for him. Carver's emergency Lesionnaire is holing up in the residents' bathroom, perched in front of the urinals. As he tucks himself back into his khaki scrubs, he sings, "Nothing could be finer than to be in some vaginer in the morning."

"Very nice, Thomas. You compose that one all by yourself?"

"You kidding? Do I look like a genius?"

"At the moment, no."

"Such gems are not 'composed.' They erupt from a thousand simultaneous springs at the right moment. Overnight, they become part of the English-speaking heritage."

"Speaking of which. Know anything about baseball?" He lays out the request. "I'll cover ER for you."

"Do I get the girl thrown in too?"

"The girl? Oh God." Wouldn't that be a massacre. "Come on, Thomas. I thought you were onto Nurse Spiegel these days."

"Ancient history. Chalk her off. Confirmed kill. Notch on the old barrel. I thought I explained this to you already, buddy: I plan to follow you around, nibbling on your undigested scraps. You're my mentor, man. I mean, if you want to talk natural genius…"

The world, as is widely known, is divided into two sorts of people. Exactly what those two sorts are is a matter of continuous speculation. No matter; wherever the division, Plummer falls into neither camp. He is beyond good and evil, freedom and dignity, sorrow and pity — in short, the perfect surgeon-in-training.

Which Kraft is not, as witnessed by the fact that as he enters the park, climbs into the funneled sunlight surrounded by a home crowd of 55,878 who lose themselves in an excitement as synesthetic as it is random, he feels inexplicably good. He and Linda shepherd a dozen kids, or rather, the kids suffer the pretense of authority as they break for the open air. The youngest of the group is a heavily urban-matured eight years old. The oldest — well, the oldest has been dead for decades.