Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Vulgar intimacy — the sick equivalent of his fingerwork now, pawing every nude, chalk-scored sector of this comatose pubescent. Little girl and an older man who knows her more privately than any lover she might live long enough to meet. A thigh is a thigh, its soft, femoral vee made more suggestive by the wax-pear color of her incised epidermis, the blood sluicing away from the suction, the smell of the cautery. Were it not for this gang of hired hit men around him, he would talk to her, soothe her though this shattering foreplay for which she only fakes anesthesia.

Talk to her. Softly, in that language, the one he rushes back inside himself to rescue from the burning structure. Softly now, when one might say anything, anything at all. Broach the account he just now reconstructs, tell her while she sleeps, when the weirdest fears slip out like wild things gliding across night's closet threshold, stupidly left ajar. As he works the appallingly sharp scissors, his hands detach from him. They carry on working, as discrete and sovereign as the Invisible Man's white gloves. He looks on, fear blotting out his receptor sites, the primal, convulsive stuff, like those waking dreams when he imagines reaching for the phone in pitch blackness and touching a human hand. Terror not of the imagined threat, but of imagining.

The parade he himself devised passes in review under his autonomous fingers. After two inert decades, the details of that end run on suffering come back to him. Two dozen kids from ten different countries — the oldest, sixteen; the youngest, nine. Not one had prior building experience. Traveling under the Institute flag — the White Monkey General — they represented no government and followed no program but care. Of course they had to have an operational name for the thing. Every human action needed its cover. They took their tag from the dominant culture hiding behind its rainbow front, the one this fantastic fifth column meant to atone for: Operation Santa Claus.

Those fourteen days rise up out of the girl's cracked-open hip as he chases infection up her obliterated leg. The specifics of that old disaster hatch like malarial larvae in this aseptic room. He must tell someone, or be pulled apart in memory's undertow. Tell who? Linda is out, impossible. She would guess in a minute, hear in the first syllable the reason why he ever even remotely loved her once. She would see in a flash just how she first appeared to him — her hint of strangeness, the half-brown, half-breed tone that he clung to while running from.

He can tell her nothing. Not after the reciprocal awfulness she has already signed over to him. Not after her airy courage — anesthesia, he now sees — in entrusting him with her worst, even while searching out his to treat it.

He replays these mangled mental tapes while his knuckles bang up against the clamps and retractors keeping Joy's invaded layers out of his hands' way. He anchors his thumb against her pulped tibia to steady himself. Recovering the lost event is beyond him. Anything that happened less than four weeks ago, the start of this rotation, eternity's internship, is hopeless. Pre-pre-med is a rococo blur. Details, names and dates, the blinding clarities, the sidebar precision bombs from off the front page of his life's morning paper of record: gone.

Some muscle gasp refusing the irreversible gash he was just about to make in this pelvis retrieves him. He looks up to a room of cackling masks. With mouth and nose blanked, laughter and horror collapse into identical slits. He's covered; he can fall in as if he never left. Can triangulate by the key-word method.

"Did you read about the five-year-old girl found guilty of inciting her molestation? Judge said she was behaving in a flirtatious manner."

The era's hot topic. Team banter, doing its best to hold off the horror of the interior. Who's speaking? Impossible to tell one from the other. Identical covey of cloaked desperadoes, green skullcaps, white bandanas pulled up over their faces, waylaying the living stage. Just throw yer limbs down and nobody will get hurt. He looks from one to the other, squints. Can't tell who is talking; wouldn't know who it was even if he could trace the source. He doesn't know any of these people.

"Brazen little tramp. Got what she was asking for."

Fiend. No one could make that joke without meaning it. But why fault the man for repeating what the judge actually said ? Even if they overthrow the travesty on appeal, disbar the judge, sue the robes off the sucker, the thing still transpired. This country, this self-defiling race, its reeling, abused, psychotic, accusatory voiceprint conscience seeking relief by compounding outrage, is his home. A place thrashing about for release everywhere but at the source of absolution.

Memory, once it has been jettisoned as useless, turns whatever is left of social probity into whoopie-cushion comedy. Kraft, slack at the center of a shameless knot of grown-ups dressed like a bunch of budget summer-stock transvestite Klansmen guffawing at the apocalyptic tidbits and lascivious human-interest fillers that wrap up the thousand-year news broadcast, pros who have grown so enslaved with brain-inflaming spirochete that the words "moral decency" provoke a nervous ironic titter, thinks: Yes. Got what we asked for. Solicited our own bloody wholesale rape like the cheap little tush-swinging toddlers we are.

Sick insight opens to him like a shining flower. Another night's late interval, a lifetime after their film-hopping honeymoon. She had boxed him into the pillow and was turning him to face her, an insistence he easily deflected with some squirming familiarity, maybe nibbling a rib. She suddenly demanded, "Little boy! Where are you? Were you ever sexually abused as a child?"

He had his half snort already perfected. "Not to the best of my recollection." Recollection, of course, never any better than what experience can afford. "Why do you ask?"

He pieces together the answer only now, after the idiot's annihilating delayed reaction. She was. His hunch is immediately gang-raped by grotesque irrelevances. How old? How long? How badly? Who? Stranger? Family friend? Family? Suspicion's principal suspect — oh, awful — is always the victim.

"You show all the classic symptoms," she teased, tickling his ribs. The playful ebullience, the intimate, knowing tone.

Little Linda, molested? In a second, it swells to explain everything, as complete as it is unconfirmed. He wants to run from the cutting room, race up the four floors to her office, trailing the frail girl's soft tissue. Stand in the door and berate her. How dare you grin like that. How can you trust? How can you live ?

Chill chases up his nape, the sudden snap of floorboard in the sealed pitch-dark. Her scar is this stupid optimism, never being able to feel, to admit how bleak we really are… Her whole compulsively giving, holistic healer routine — the ultimate evasion, supreme crippling. Total anesthetic seal-off, cureless because never forgotten.

Sex, her expert damp abandonment, their freestyle, exquisite wrestling matches on his apartment floor: Are ò going to do some aerobics for a little bit, or what? That she could even ask without retching, let alone implore so amply, so avid… Pleasure, wantonness like he has seen her take in the exchange is inconceivable, worse than obscene. Feverishly faking full recovery; flinging herself into the one thing her whole soul must cringe from, just to consider.

The operating banter has moved on to the junior high schooler who killed her baby because the courts wouldn't let her put it up for fostering. Silently, he closes what is left of the ruined girl. She is now indistinguishable from the Asian twelve-year-old from the other side of the river, the one his pilgrim party met on its tropical Christmas operation a half world ago. The little girl, driven from her village by voices, ancestors calling out of the sky. The one on film — too familiar for horror anymore; exactly why they keep reprinting it until it is threatless and limp — her clothes burned off in a pillar of flame, running down the road to the nearest help, the nearest adult, who is busy photographing this kiddie nude.