Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

The hospital: she tries to remember how long Kraft's Carver rotation is to last. Can she avoid him in the halls between now and the day he's slated to go? She might sit tight and wait until his impending departure makes him the one responsible for leaving. She thinks what he has next. Intensive Care.

They are still colleagues a while longer, day laborers in the high-tech cathedral enterprise. She could avoid him for weeks in the huge monastic cloisters, the intricate, self-regulating, self-sustaining community of specialists from abusive phone receptionists to sicko plastic reconstructors whose idea of a conversation piece is a silicon implant on the coffee table.

In fact, the industry is so sprawling that it has managed to disguise its chief purpose even from her. They are deep in the process of setting up an underground railway, one that conducts the lost causes from here to the next nightmare halfway house as quickly as possible. That's what they do for a living, she and this man, her topical lover, this unstable, latex-faced anchorman whom she has just discovered sitting in the dark surrounded by a bright school assembly of faces on a hundred spoiling milks. The boy hornist's job is to cut up sick children — their legal and sanctified abductor.

What dying childhood needs — so obvious, she thinks, to anyone who's been paying attention — is not another swank kid-killer like Carver, perfunctory holding tank for prepping the virtually dead. It needs a larger-than-life tree-fort resort where a lifetime's transactions can take place faster than in the outside. She knows the shape: an arcaded, terraced, gardened, courtyarded children's pavilion, with ceramic and brocade, half timber and gingerbread cupolas, a live-in architectural anthology of hospices in the oldest sense. Everyone welcome; check your maturity at the foyer. A multiweek, all-expenses-played vacation crawling around the plasterboard moats and battlements with the shrinks and muscle-unkinkers, everybody horsing around side by side for a change. Solve society's spreading fester at the source, and wouldn't half of all the day's intractables shrivel away? Break the downward, dry-sucking cycle of indigence in one generation…

But the costs, woman . Less than any other air castle, mall, megamulti-theater, hardened silo, Stealth production facility, or toxic manufacturer's outlet park. She could campaign, show with incontestable charts that we can pay now or pay a lot more later. But to figure the figures would take foresight, an increasingly fabulous commodity. Conventional wisdom, that old oxymoron, cannot afford to destroy those monsters eating our wealth alive. We'll carry on down the perpetual sinkhole until the poor give up their debilitating poverty. It's that simple, a simplicity consistent with life in the kingdom of once-obscene wealth, where servicing the previous years' accumulated debt will soon be enough to run up another year of deficit. The land of the nationwide centrist cell, ready to backlash at anything that hints at its real condition. A landmass-wide, inhospitable hospital clutching a status quo that has already broken up…

She sees again to the milk disposal. The flight reflex and its strangled form, the need to rush to him with selfless assistance, collide inside her like two thrill-romp first cousins in stolen cars, each marine-screaming in her head, trying to outterrorize the other right up to the moment of impact. She cannot bear to look at him another second. "Not to worry," his puffy lips issue, hissing. "We've put a little Tiger Balm on the stump, and we're keeping a sharp eye." Said almost sweetly, reassuringly, a sick reference to that mother of a new admission who for two months had used the Orient's popular smear-on cure-all to fix a vertebrae-dissolving nightstalker crawling up her baby's back.

"Tiger Balm Gardens, Hong Kong. World's gaudiest theme-park cure retreat and the transpacific's answer to Anaheim. Chinese kinder-land. Been there, in my previous incarnation as Youth in Asia. I ever

tell you that?"

You 've never told me anything but " Shut your face, " she would singsong back. She hates him now, like a spurned daughter, or closer. She wants to close his eyes for good with a quick fingernail gouge. But he jerks suddenly and forestalls her, swinging the horn's fluted crocus-cup up to his mouth and playing.

He is rusty and uncertain, stabbingly out of shape. He has not played this evening, or anytime this decade. But another awful warble subverts the sound. He is trying to bend tones through the tube that are too inflected to fit down a Western bore. Overblowing, half-valving, he jury-rigs pitches that have long been expelled from the orchestral overtone series. Another scale, a further sound.

He pulls the instrument away without looking at her. "Thai song," he explains to her, apologetically. The two words, so gentle and awful and defenseless, slip into her chest and quietly bruise the place beyond healing. She will never get away now, never be able save herself or him. Ricky, Ricky, she wants to soy, put your head down, here, on my softness. But her throat is coagulate, hopeless.

"Dear moon," he goes on, "give me rice. Give me curry. Give me a copper ring to tie around the little one's wrist. Give me an elephant for the little one to ride. Give me a lizard that will cry, 'Tokay!' "

She takes him outside, thinking back to when such a thing was therapeutic. Each trunk in the ratty stand of palms outside his apartment is emblazoned with a psychedelic cuneiform that, when read across like an acid-house Burma-Shave, announces: "Dope will cope with hope."

Linda walks him like one of her tensor-flexor train wrecks. She tries to tell him something distracting, something palpable he might hook back into. She tells him about the story theater project. Nicolino—

"Which one…? Oh, right; Methuselah." Pretending he doesn't know the creature who has been menacing the expanse between them.

Nico has come up with a beautiful idea. She giggles just to think of it, almost recapturing her pretense of equanimity, the serenity that comes with being sweet-and-twenty and indiscriminately able to love. "They want to form a Hamelin traveling company. Isn't that great? Hel- loo . I'm asking you a question?"

He smiles rapidly and nods.

"One of them has found this weenie cartoon map of the city, and they're picking out venues. They want to bring it all over town, all their neighborhoods, put it on at…"

"Perform? In front of people?"

"Isn't that how plays usually go?"

"Where the hell do they think…?"

An electrogram jitter spasms across Linda's temple. Gently, she reins him in. Astonishing, how easy it is to affect a convincing calm.

She falters a minute, studies him, then against all training fails to take appropriate action. "They have their pick of spots," she carries on. "Schools jump at this kind of thing, if it's free. Arts and crafts fairs, public parks, old people's homes — you could do one show an afternoon from now until you grew up. Well, maybe not until you grew up…"

He forces the expected grunt, but a beat too late.

"You're really old school, aren't you? Keep them in bed until they've got runny ulcers up the wazoo. Can't you see? Something like this will do more for them than our entire body-shop operation put together. Get out and see the place, playact. And it's not half bad for the audience either."

She drops all hope of pulling off her assignment — to tell Kraft about his role, recruit him for the main motley. "Oh, buddy," she veers again, too cheerily, "you have to come see the costumes they've made out of nothing. Rats! They really are. And the cuddliest vermin you can possibly…"

Rats: skateboarding, hoop-stuffing, switchblading, glue-sniffing, slam-dancing, card-collecting, video-vitiated, guiltless, impoverished, sinned-against, discriminated-against jungle-gym victims. They killed the cats and bit the babies in their cradles. Rats. A word all over the well-meaning popular press lately: the current euphemism for the dozen million disinherited minors on the street in the lush subtrop-ics, down where "disappear" has long gone transitive. Where the police sooner murder a waif than work up the papers. Where the advance cities have already slipped, as theirs does now, into uncontrollable turf war, the vortex of street free market that squares off big business against urchins. Where whole abandoned countries consume steady supplies of diced-up lives on their determined hurtle downward.