Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

He has not slept now for, oh, call it an even Week for One. He's finally managed to donate his body to medical science, one of those West Coast investigations into how many days of deprivation it takes before you start conversing with hatchet-wielding gremlins on the foot of your bed.

Funny thing is, this stay-awake dance-marathon-cum-fire-walk-ritual is no longer forced on him by the apprentice system, the National Board-certified schedule winnowing the men from the boys, the true sadomasts from the mere zombie wannabes. Sleeplessness has become a matter of personal choice. He gets off on how the tracers solidify, stalactite style, into palpable tableaux. Strangest of all is the image that memory, like an obliging mother gull, has spit up all over torn, predigested for his nourishment. He screens again, in his skull, that jerky home movie about how he was young once, but got lost deep in the jungles of experience.

Driving is a particular trip. A bit like sailing, if you think about it, the eight lanes of traffic scudding off in front of him, glinting like sun on foamy surf that stands as stiff as the peaks of beaten egg. He finds he can control the half ton of metal by passively feeling out what the Wheel wants to do — exactly how the other million and a half freeway-loaders have been navigating all along. He snickers over the stick, to think it took this crushing fatigue for him to catch the drift of his fellow Angel flotsam.

And while driving to Carver (he forgets from where exactly), he gets his first signal from deep space. He's moored in the vehicle backwash, bobbing against the fender of the Cressida in front of him like a yacht bumper thumping the dock, when he sees from the oversold freeway shoulder's Yellow Pages three giant crosses and a sign reading NOAH'S ARK BEING REBUILT HERE.

The second signal arrives late that evening, or perhaps the day after. Kraft comes momentarily to, staring at a monitor where toddlers in a roll-your-own shelter in a hill country in the process of conscientiously shelling itself out of existence are sitting at mock-up desks. For his private viewing pleasure, they stage a song, in world English, attentive to the video cameras, disburser of all curse and benefit: "Stap de woor," two, three, "fur de shilderin…" Kraft's been away, lost track of just what war the catchy chorus alludes to. Some damn fool thing in the Balkans, or wherever they've set the venue this season. The kids obviously love it, because they get to bang on the desks on the offbeats.

The videotape laps it up. Entertainment, this nation's number two net export. Modular script number 38-A. Cue the mellow tenor (how does he make his voice do that?) to intone the lead-in, "Every war is a child's war." Same mellifluous, brain-lesioning ad copy tone they use for the fabricated dramas, that theater standing in for sense of historical purpose: "This Sunday, as the world watches, two ancient rivals meet head on to decide once and for all…"

Crisis has grown so adroit that it auditions its hostages exclusively from these choice offerings. They sing for the cameras, caught in the violence of progress that overhauls everything and changes less than nil. The plea is all mediated, packaged as escapist newsreel, because if it ever really crept out of the rubble of the bazookaed day-care center calling Mama, no one who heard it could live. All the lethargic hyper-activity that waiting consists of at this moment would go still, lucid.

One badly pounded-over sopranino continues to trill to him, even as its life's blood trickles over the cinders of the alley where it has been jumped. He hears it at night, his eyelids toothpicked open, counting the Champagne poppers going off outside his window, hoping the roll into upper exponents might make him drowsy. It's the slim but marginally possible suggestion that this sexy romp in the run-up to mass offing, where even ladies' magazines ask "What to Say If Mr. Right Asks You to a Snuff Film," might yet be no more than a massive market correction on the way toward lasting fulfillment and VCRs for all.

The voice says, Ricky, clap your hands. What are the odds that the chorale prelude is so vast that each note of the cantus firmus, a whole lifetime resonating in the dark, swamps our mayfly ears with a sound like blood-soaked nails on a chalkboard? But clap your hands , the hope begs him; don't let the sadistic little sprite die. She didn't mean anybody any harm. And it's either clap or give in to the prime-time abyss lovingly opening up underneath him.

He tries it on for feel: Things are about to turn. The phrase is his national myth, the dream of that flag-waving, fallen-laurel country on whom God once shed His grace like a rattier sheds his skin. His entire autobiography awaits that plot twist. Solar breakthrough. Cold fusion. Gene therapy. Cryo-seedbanks undoing willed mass extinction in the nick of time. An uptick at the UN. Newly industrializing nirvanas. Three hundred fifty million free-market consumers in the former East. The sixteen-megabit chip. Retrieval TV, the death of broadcast.

Hope's whole checklist is wiped out by one night of the ER's demographic evidence. Every bit of well-being this life has achieved depends on perpetually eating alive the recourseless and exposed. The truth consists of amorously embroidered erectile lanyard nooses, the party tricks with splintered shot glasses that Plummer and company cannot stanch. These are the times' frilly, split-crotch fin de siècle unmentionables, inscribed with undying valentine "Maim Me's." Each victim is trained to carry on her own earliest abuse in the names of the fathers. The crippling acquired gene will not stop spreading until everyone has been mishandled, everyone's psychic icebox stuffed with frozen child.

That fact, surging through his carotid, leaves him two choices. He can take his sleeping roll into the outer darkness and lie awake there, tallying the screams. Or he can change the channel. He squeezes the remote control as if popping a painful, watery cyst. Next over, a fast-breaking advertorial proclaims how secret carrot extract smeared hourly over your face in ruinously expensive gobfuls will keep your skin young, presumably with you still in it, until the end of time. In the supreme, feeble-headed culture, being born later is a moral virtue.

This puff is interrupted by a genuine ad, for a real product, the station itself: "Our uncompromising four-part series on media sensationalizing." Sunday, just after the video version of the novelization of that runaway mega-reprint, Profiting from Total Collapse.

A storm of endorphins, and his mother comes to sit down beside him. He scribbles a note on a canary legal pad to remind himself, should he ever stabilize, to look up her date and cause of death. Meanwhile, Mom, who never had much to say while alive, is deep in one of her favorite reminiscences.

"You just wouldn't hold still," she says. 'That happens with colicky babies, especially when they have other things wrong with them. Well, we — the nurses and I — tried everything. We propped you up; we wedged you in place with stuffed animals. You just would not stay put." Kraft smiles wanly at the specter's account, knowing the punch line hundreds of times over. "This was in Seoul, in 'fifty-seven…"

" 'Fifty-six," he says.

"Don't correct your mother. Where were you raised, in a barn? This was in Korea; not state-of-the-art by any stretch. God knows where they got their radiation from. Our old castoffs, probably. Anyway, there was no other way you were going to take the doses unless I held you myself, in my own arms, the two of us, standing together in front of that awful machine…"

This, the first sacrificial bond he will never shake off. Her moist, swallowed "Oh, Ricky" identifies the larger hurt. She never loved him more than at that infant moment, because he could not harm her yet by loving back.