Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

He stands a second time to sneak out, but still she won't let him. The cold sweats shiver her limbs. Her whole torso quakes quietly, as if the traction bed hid a Magic Fingers. The tremors are on her, the wind-up ones. Now he must run, or give in too to hypothermia. To knowing.

Nico, Nico, Nico, she says, just to be saying, to keep the alternative at bay. Here, she indicates. No, the other stack, just underneath. She leads him to the thinnest volume, the belated song for the nursery, the one still wrapping her in original sight. The marker suggests there are a few pages left yet in this one.

Its tenacious cradle-grip on the girl is as strong as the first clasp, the instinct to grapple at giant index fingers, to clutch at rattles, to latch on to any probe that the immense creatures from above extend to hook us with. He picks it up, groaning.

Nico, she pleads. Nico? Read to me?

Week's last clinic wrings the woman out. She comes from it like a doily from a lye bath. Her final half-hour session of the afternoon expanded into a life term: a couple who, despite the prenatal tests, chose to keep and care for what the chart calls a severe mental handicap. As if any couple from these parts were not sufficiently handicapped already. The child seems set to stretch the terrible twos into a decade, and Linda's simple assignment is to keep him from biting his tongue off every time he moves.

Only the couple's infinitely uncomprehending hurt keeps her going. It never crosses their mind that the daily, unbearable confusion of routine might be less had the child been different. Love, it seems, is past choice, past examining. It is a severe handicap all its own.

She comes from the punching bag session dripping wet, gritty, foul to herself. She will not go home, a place that has lately taken on the appearance of a giant but empty shoe, filled with silent, sacrificed shouts. She might just be able to make it to a shower downstairs, in the staff stalls, to find some provisional hideout here, an unoccupied call cubicle where handicapped humanity will let her curl up and fall asleep for a hundred years.

Ah, now — for that she must slink unseen past the same monk's cell where she once tried to seduce him: Come on, come on. Old Dr. Kraft in there, bashing the bishop. Who was that girl? Where is she gone? Dead, deported. He has embalmed me, shot me full of the pharaohs' eleven secret herbs and spices. Done me over, rehabbed me in his own image. Rightly so; the Clara Barton thing never did any lasting good. More of them every afternoon, more brutally clipped and bewildered. Better off like him, carapaced at least, killingly efficient, steering by the self-conscious voice-over in my own head.

The scalding shower dilates only her superficial vessels. She could go out somewhere, cleaned, slicked up, and get a man. It might help, tonight, unsnag her from the immediate brambles. But the man would be him, all over again, and his microbial Registered Delivery would remain every bit as fatal. Besides, she'd botch the cosmetic doll job, slap the silks and scents on too desperately. Overt and vigorous never works, not even on the most unsuspecting of meat club marks. It lacks the necessary self-delusion. She will never be able to dumb her nerves back down again for romance. Right now, she hasn't even the energy for a token soap job.

She dries methodically, every hidden part; the building is a hotbed of sepsis and fungi. She just about jumps through her baby-powdered skin to turn and find another presence in the room. Only after seeing the other body does she hear, in backward time, the door open and Nurse Spiegel enter. The pretty little number, Kraft's squeeze before, before her. Linda will ask her how she can still live, having crawled up close to the airless mine shaft inside the man.

But Spiegel gets her question in first, a question whose sunny Golden State affect wouldn't know nausea if it spit up on her. "Hey, Lin. You making it, babe? Wanted to ask you something. You guys working on another dress-up thing?"

Espera has to think: You guys. Dress-ups. "No," she says, wanting something more friendly than the monosyllable, but helpless to expand on it. The forms of kindness are gone, buried under slag. "No," she whispers again. The cutting is over; her shot at renewal is lost. "Why?"

"You sure?" Friendly, insinuating suspicion, annoying elbow-nudge. "Those aren't your half-pint getups the nurses have been seeing?"

Linda is the last to hear. Spiegel, who has only the most theoretically vindictive reasons to mislead her, tells her an outrageous, corroborated fable. An epidemic of vague reports, figures appearing around corners, impossible posses at the ends of long corridors. All airy gossip: Spiegel has no other register. "It's not just the nurses, sweetmeats. Dr. Kean, who you know is as Drug-Free America as they come, was telling us he saw a band of tiny coal miners, the Seven Dwarfs, smeared in black dust and wearing these canvas overalls? And a bunch of, you know, millworker girls…"

Linda checks by reflex her calendar watch. Old vaudeville routine. Teacher: How long ago was the Industrial Revolution? Smarty: What time is it now? Well, it is not Halloween. Not even fall. She thinks: her group has learned how to contact their sister cells, union locals from all over the timeline.

Tipped off, Espera watches the ward, keeping a continuous eye on who is supposed to be where, when. But it's like slapping a guard on the dancing princesses. She can't trap them. A dozen will vanish at a pop, no place traceable in the building labyrinth. They come back an hour later with transparent fabrications: We were in the cafeteria. I checked the cafeteria. Oh, right after that we were hanging out in that storeroom on Eight.

"You needn't lie to me," she tells them in her gentlest read-aloud voice, trying to restring some thread of trust that has sickeningly snapped. But betrayal is deep, deeper than pity. They deny everything. Not even her most painfully smitten little suitors will tell.

Not that she needs telling. She set it up; now the idea she germinated in them has rooted like so many small science projects, those lines of lima beans in moistened paper towel. The children are leaving in secret. Her terminals and unworkables have begun making their own forays into a city sealed off from them. They are budding off into age villages, all the under-sixteens once more seasonally leaving to establish new settlements all their own. Other loose bands come to claim them, orient them to the general gathering so long in accumulation. They are joining up, taking their place in the circuit, the Grid whose completion awaits them.

On no evidence at all, the whole plot occurs to her, the clear-out in miniature. She hears its secret promise all over, as if she weren't hard now, hideously pituitary. They mean to flee in one brief wingbeat the sick entanglement that slits innocence, the offer that forever flooded all that was left of the real neverland, hers, leaving no take-backs.

It has come back, the gaping escape clause, as she knew it would one day, if she but positioned herself lifelong in the company of children, if she just waited patiently long enough to be overlooked. And though they refuse to bring her along — her! — Espera can still win her vicarious redemption by being the one who could stop them this time, but defers.

As it is, she isn't given much chance for deference. The plague hits the hospital's full grown before even those expecting it are ready. On the Wednesday after she learns they are leaving in secret, Linda confronts the presumed ringleader.

"You can trust me, Nico," she tells him, knowing full well that to speak the words out loud is to lie.

He answers with a curt "Sober up, Doll-face."

At two the next afternoon, as if she has panicked the plan's instigators by almost guessing, all childhood hell breaks loose.