Richard Powers: Operation Wandering Soul

The act of cutting never closes. It lingers on afterward, at the movies, alone over a burger. He replays the tapes of the last session, even in the thick of the next. He sees scars everywhere — perfect physiques betrayed by tiny lateral fissures. Shame-braceleted wrists, throats inscribed with suture-pearl necklaces. In bed some weeks before with an auburn beauty manifold enough to have become The One, he placed his petting hand on what had been soft breast once but now harbored implant. His finger felt the welt of the well-closed insertion slit, and he went instantly as impotent as the best lyric poets. No explanations possible; all he could do was ask her to take her perfect silhouette hence.

Three-year-old- ribs retract in front of him, supple and suggestive in their carriage, the cleavages of subcutaneous wrapping revealing, like tea leaves, the fact that the surgeon must eventually grow inured, restore the veil, return in time to those pretenses that allow casual engagement, human exchange. Every attending, however seasoned and congealed, struggles to forget what was thrust on him during the shock of internship: pus is the spirit's maiden name. Mucus, before anything.

It shocked Kraft, half a dozen years ago, during his first foray into an operating room on the conscious side of the knife, to discover how prosaic cutting's accoutrements were. You mean we just open them up, right here, in the billowing air? A scalpel was the same thing he kept in his kitchen rack, no value added. The cauterizer, just a soldering iron with no purpose except, well, to burn flesh. The wisps of smoke that the searing stick gives off smell — what else could they smell like? — like a wonderful steak on the backyard grill of a summer's night. That first time, he had actually salivated before making the induction.

He cycles through his selection of instruments, calling for them by gauges of thickness and weight and curvature, the choice of each a mix of skilled estimate and judgment call. The same basic tools employed since the Babylonians, when the punishment for malpractice was to remove the surgeon's hands. The devices available to Kraft on the sampler tray have gone unchanged for a hundred years: knives, scissors, needles, thread, forceps, retractors, the all-important hemostat. Nor has their use, despite the explosion of tech, graduated beyond the original Vedic paradox: inducing an injury to address an injury. And managing the damage of the injury induced.

What has changed, and changed only recently, is the scalpel's leverage. Incursion is nothing now; they invade and stamp about the forbidden grounds, almost at will. The only limits hemming the surgeon in are that abiding trio: shock, self-infection, pain. And of these three, the greatest is pain.

The profession's dream — free manipulation of the interior — was blocked until recently by the need to convince the body that inflicted destruction is better than the alternative. General anesthesia marked hope's first great breakthrough. More. Kraft would promote the discovery to Cornerstone of that imagined city civilization has been building from the start. The ability to baffle life's built-in jettison mechanism divides all history into Before and After: the era of all-annihilating agony and the age of deliverance by constitutional coup. On his best days, Kraft even gets a little glimpse of tenable existence off in the distance.

To crack the cap of negating pain, to rip a hacksaw downward through an expanse of flesh, to mash bone and burrow into marrow without tripping off a single shutdown signal — the chance dismantles the world and resurrects it, redecorates its interior. Life has sat imprisoned by the guard dogs posted to watch the house. Hard to overestimate just how much this advance rewrites the whole human shooting match, reassembles it elsewhere. Philosophy's frilly solfeggios now have half a fighting shot at dictating the terms of a new truce. Agony need no longer always have the last word. One might do more than abide.

Kraft tries to imagine this procedure, the one underneath his hands, coming off without anesthesia. Something pupates inside this baby. They must smash their way in, violating the miniature traceries of rib cage. A few feeble attempts to explain things to the infant, a pint of whiskey forced through a funnel to deaden the surface tingling. Then the blade, so sharp that even gristle melts at its wedge. Two adults to pin the flailing creature to the table, and a prayer that the child passes out relatively quickly. A shrieking worse than any that ever wafted over the death camps, because it screams, You were my protectors; I trusted you. Square off the incision and fold back the flaps. Take a fine-toothed jeweler's rasp to the sternum, pull the whole structure carefully apart like a Cornish game hen. By now, the infant brain so floods with torture's telegraph that it begins convulsing. He has read the stats: without dope, seven times out of ten, shock collapses the organism and pulls life in around it.

Then there is the time-honored alternative. Spread the pain out over a couple years, leaving disease free to multiply through the child where it frequently peaks in equally unbearable anguish, this time for weeks. Kill the kid quickly on the outside chance, or condemn it to certain, creeping death, coaching it through on promises of a future, pain-stripped place. There the prospect has stood, since nerve came conscious, until yesterday. That humankind, living through that scene even once, has carried on planning and projecting is almost as much a miracle as the discovery of the chemicals that might make the whole self-deluded, transparent, paper-hat tea party endurable.

Just beyond the folds of his left ear the Millstone, Kraft's attending, breathes epically, like wind sculpting a canyon. The steady oscillation calls Kraft back to the living infant on the table underneath them. Adenoidal in the best of times, the Millstone truly starts to snore when the going gets tiny. Yet better than Father Kino and his Short Man’s Syndrome. (“A short man, perhaps,” Plummer frequently jokes. “But at day's end the fellow casts a semilong shadow.”)

Together, the team extracts the mass they were after, clamps it off, and hacks it out at its insidious roots. In admiring tones as the gourd is lifted out and laid in a waiting pan, the Millstone marvels, “Hang that up on the top of your Christmas tree.”

Kraft briefly considers trying to get someone to close for him, but elects against putting his limited seniority to the test. After all, as his mother used to tell him when he went fishing with a low trump, one must never send a boy to do a man's job. He's carried the ball this far. Might as well finish, although it must be obvious to everyone on the team that he's about to go narcoleptic.

He sews like the zigzag accessory on a Singer. His sheep shanks run as erratically as a tricky halfback, say Sayers or Sweetness. This girl will grow up with Wellington's Victory stenciled across her belly — a thin red line dominating her front. However sultry and beautiful, however high her features, there will be this mark, and her every lover to a boy-man will wonder: What happened to you?

Some minutes pass, maybe even half an hour, before he realizes they are done. Quick, now: what day is it? What month, for that matter? He knows only that the time has not yet come when he is working for himself.

Outside in the parking lot, it is sunset or sunrise. Low light, in any case. Kino's favorite — day's end. The hour of Short Men the world over.

Could go home a while, but what's the point? At this hour, the freeway's still an open sewer. It will stay a running sore from now until the moment when the red trains are returned of necessity from their mothball bower.