Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

He sews shut the provocative one, who, after all her eager search for approval, would be best off mercy-pithed now. Nothing remains of her but macerated tissue. The salvaged pulp is probably still infiltrated, the search-and-destroys as worthless as they ever were. And he, Kraft, committed this atrocity, punished her worse than any crack-hopped, tremor-fingered, street-ganged, random serial murderer could. More unforgivable, what he's done, because more conscientious, more selfless, professional, deliberate, necessary: autoclaved mutilation of love.

Linda lets herself in quietly, her loaner latchkey slithering through the Yale's tumbler tunnel. The elated raiding of a few days back now feels more like answering a summons. She never knows what to expect anymore, in the intervals when he is ostensibly off call. She stands in the forced door, listening for some clue in the dark. Just the sound of suppressed respiration from the far side of the threshold is enough to trigger ancient panic attacks, a rude head rush. The sotto voce threats emanating from his silent front hall fill her with desire to deny every attachment before it can be denied her. Her hands struggle to pull the knob forever shut while she forces them to push it open. There is no cure but hair of the dog.

His apartment is a pit, an abyss. Why did she get involved with this emotional leper in the first place, when all the signs cautioned her off, when he himself told her, with his last remnant of worldly charm, that he would one day go surgical on her? She must be the real sicko here, in this thing up to her hospital insignia. Trying to love the man, for no more reason than to prove everyone wrong. One little supportive smile, one recreational theraplay scenario and she hoped to strip the permanent, told-you-so, hardened finish from the boy's bleak, condemning H and P. Why try to plead the ludicrous case for recovery in this irrevocable place? Charity can be only a kind of belated revenge.

She recognized him instantly, the jokey verbal competence, trying to charm her while a host of betraying postures peeped out from behind his poise like live ordnance poking out of the living room wall. She thought to outmatch his evasion, hold out her arms to him— always her best feature. Unleash the entire arsenal of care. I can make you whole. Rub jour pulse back to beating. Pathetic porta-box first aid, like sprinkling camphor on emphysema.

She needed little Ricky's infirmity for her own private ends. To overcome exactly this dread that swells thermostatically, filling her holding cavity, immobilizing with the worst that memory and imagination can conjure. His labored breathing breaks in waves around her in the black room, a sound she thought she could love but would run from now if she could.

One of these days I mil come home and he … She rehearses the worst cases as she tentatively flicks on the light with her grocery-bent elbow. And before thought can shape itself around the image, she finds him just as the much-practiced terror predicts. Precisely the way she knew she would one day come home to find him. He is sitting in his makeshift, bachelor meal nook. He might be only waiting for his mate to come by, waiting to tell her, with a protracted shaggy-dog smile, of the day's surgical shoestring catches. But he is not.

He slumps at the counter, head down. In front of him, in fastidiously arranged ranks and columns, stretching out along the synthetic Formica plain in a kind of orchard-perfection, are more quart containers of milk than she can count. Enough to baby-shower a whole nursery of infant teethers, sufficient to slop down a day care's generous week's worth of cookies. And each of the perspiring cardboard towers bears a smudgy gray-scale portrait emblazoned with the caption: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?

She sucks in sharply. Now comes that awful scraping, focus dulled by refusal. He just slumps there, languidly scouring the faces and disappearance data for the revealing pattern, unaware, even, of her presence. Should she call someone? Who? Certainly not those crazies down at the ER. Her clinical composure, she discovers, works only in the kingdom of pedes. She is less than helpless to help someone who was ten already when she was still wet with expelled placenta.

She steps toward him gingerly, careful not to startle. "Ricky? Low-fat, I hope?"

She steadily subdivides the distance between them, thinking that if she can just get a hand on his shoulder… She closes enough space to make out that the wax-coated photo-transfers he so intently stares down are close twins, stereoscopic. Then and now: age five, at time of abduction. Today, age nine. But if the child is missing, how…?

The captions explain. The last known photo of the missing one on earth — some school portrait or candid birthday shot — has been computer-aged. The smiling, composite cartilage of the snatched-away has been fed through a fast transform that knows all about the way tissue bloats and widens and falls slack year by year, everything that even a face flush with the priceless unpredictability of love must inevitably become over the scatter run of time.

She's seen these three times a week for the last decade, and still flinches. She, Linda, who no longer even blinks at flailing spastics or livid purple human whetstones. The dairy industry's notorious public service spot. Why here, and not on Wonder bread wrappers or cheerful two-tone jars of Peter Pan? Something to do with the antagonistic effects of calcium on kidnapping. A way of shaming, over a bowl of Cocoa Charms, that most common of abductors, the estranged parent, into returning the paschal stolen goods. No, the reason for milk, like the cartons' malignant subjects, this brigade of the universally missing, lies buried deep in the North American bedrock, the Vishnu Schist.

The piper has been busy of late, logging overtime, capitalizing on the general spread of night, dragging his net across the subdivisions and condolands, the isolated farmhouses and condemned public projects, the sprawling, illegal squatter towns that compose the world's temporary housing. Has been everywhere, threading down the centuries of serpentine trail heads, spreading the hits across all continents so randomly that no international bureau could hope to trace so much as a backwater fraction of his route or modus.

She fights the urge to finger one of the wax dossiers, knowing that, as with litter on the street, the one who touched it last is responsible. She has already participated in this state's drive to register the children at greatest risk. She has watched the authorities create whole photo and fact portfolios of prospective kidnappees, take advance prints, with almost loving anticipation of the theft they mean to prevent.

All-points bulletins in advance, yet another Midas-like touch to the Golden State. The Binge-Purge State, the SIDS State. Even as she debates turning and fleeing, an empty billboard somewhere within a few miles of his flat is attracting nightly crowds of people who gather below it, seeing the ghostly apparition of a recently abducted nine-year-old Latina. It's been the "spot" for two weeks running now, scene of violent outbursts at the company's refusal to light the blank placard for each night's pilgrimage. The Portent State. The Unsustainable State. Give nothing else, but give good video.

Linda bends away from the quart-carton gallery, the yearbook of Annihilation Middle School, certain she will discover the little miracle girl's features among the lost graduating class if she but looks. "Planning a lactose binge, buddy?" she says, falling frail and flat, blindly fumbling for his arm. Their contact thuds neutrally. "Shakes? Malts? Frappes? Smoothies?" Repeat the weak gag until you get an anemic laugh, scold, scream — any response at all.

When he looks up, it stuns. His eyes swim with conspiracy, sparkling with theories so clear he need not even spell them out aloud. Look: the young everywhere are getting ready, rehearsing — children of the murderous projects, two-pound needle-preemies lighter than their mothers' controlled substance ingestion during term, gang killers, stick figures from the Southern nations, even these privileged princes, snatched out from under their kiddie kreative movement instructors' eyes — they are preparing, leaving at night on some vast, planetwide, still-obscure dress run-through…