Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Explanation hits him without the appropriate relief: a foreign language. But what is she doing…? She might perhaps have French, a few words, from the residual colonial ghost. But she couldn't know this one. This one was — where? — Indonesia at the nearest. Dutch

East Indies.

"Okay," he settles in, choosing desperately to ignore everything, all incoherence, all emergency broadcast, all advance notification, to go on pretending to a semblance of sense. The persistence short of dying.

"Here's your question. Who is…" He browses the lines near the opening. " Lieve Kitty? " Answer carefully, and in complete sentences.

Before she can scold him, Kraft realizes. Kitty has gone, made the leap, slipped back into fantasy from whence she came. That grackle-haired Anne on the cover invented her, conjured Kitty up, retrieved her from the holding room of hidden friends, sculpted her from scratch to keep Anne company up in night's false-walled attic, during that last, lonely few-month stretch before deportation.

Kitty is this book. The secret pen pal that the little Frank girl created, because one always needs to write to someone. Because paper is more patient than people. Dear Kitty is the figment of that photo, the girl in the desk in front of you in fourth grade, whose eyes, a season before the finish line, smile weakly in advance at the worst that human ingenuity can dream up to put her through.

Joy, what is left of her, brings up a noise from the back of her throat, midway between giggle and gurgle. "There is no Kitty." Exasperated with grown-up silliness, the adult refusal to accept the real.

Journalism and journal: Kraft should have known. These two late-day narrative styles round out the brief but comprehensive sampler, the trading-card sets of story that Joy and her accomplices have been busy collecting. Treasures on the scavenger hunt handout: find these somewhere in the city at large, and don't come back until you have them all. Now they have them. She can return, like an ethnographer at the end of her field trip year. Dear Kitty: I grow hopeful now; finally, everything will turn out for the good. Really, good!

That's it. The list is complete. Or almost. The collection crew now must mount a massive sweep, the scale of which Kraft only vaguely makes out. A drag search for the missing read-alouds, the concluding Lieve Kittys from Bergen-Belsen and its blood descendants, the notes from the civic-minded citizens tipping off the authorities to the secret room.

It would not be bluff now, to stare her down. He places his hand on her gauzed-over stump and thinks, I know what you are up to. All of you.

But the words he speaks out loud, to the witness air, evade the insight. Lie low, something tells him, and go on living. Out loud, all he says is "Beauty, can I do anything for you?"

She blossoms at the nickname, enough to incline her head. "Yes. Please." She would smile, were it not for the pads of subcutaneous rupture weighing down her cheeks.

"Dr. Kraft." So soft, maybe he makes it up. "Dr. Kraft. I don't know how to do this."

Seven in one blow, a burst of staccato words in a slight, Asian clip. She admits the obvious, the thing his cowardice empowers by running from. The leg alone — the whole lower body — will not be enough. Its childish sacrifice has appeased no one. Tell me how, her capillary-spattered eyes plead with him. Give me the next step.

Now, unlike the first time he watched her die, no portal opens. The view out the window of Intensive Care is blank except for a ratty palm, a bank of hospital Dumpsters, and a hummus vendor across the street. The moment grows unendurable in knowing how little chance it has of surviving. He dares not say Hold out, or she might.

He could tell her of his own deportation from the place, a record only recently recovered from long live burial. But her evacuation is more extensive, more complete, taking her beyond all preparation. He fumbles for the one deficient revenge ever offered.

"I don't know how either." He brushes a hank of limp hair from her mouth, where it has snagged. And goes on to give her, in as many words as the telling takes, the point of starting out on any once upon a time. The surgeon's sense of an ending.

He crawls up from the call room bed, fully dressed, his lids never having touched. A hot shower, and he realizes he is drowning, going under for the third count. Even with the spray squelched, he cannot get his breath in the foaming turbulence of air. He must call her. Her, the borderline jailbait, the one whose parts he but recently stroked, avoiding the more awful amplitude lying between them. Her name will come to him in a second. Linda, who has at last left him, as he advised her at their earliest flirtation.

He could drag upstairs, wash his hair, get a fresh change of clothes (his scrubs beginning to golemize on grunge and blood) and charm her back with a "Lady, you owe me lunch." Insouciant, with just the right smidgen of vulnerability, just a hint that he's fifteen minutes from complete, deep-end, isolation-tank psychotic breakdown if she doesn't dose him down and tuck him in.

A hello wouldn't hurt, basic kindness, and he could even come clean, tell her everything he has only now told himself. He makes to leave the cell, but is prevented by a knot of menacing Third Worlders with electric whips. What's your hurry, mister? Go on, have a lie-down. They shove him back onto the bed, where he is jolted — the downed tablets kicking in — across the alkaline flats of his pores. A thousand simultaneous spring-loaded disasters erupt inside his gut.

He sinks in time lapse into the bed. He flails at the bedstead for reading material to steady him and comes up with that May issue of Rifle & Handgun Illustrated. It's all weirdly familiar. He has lived this before, but where? Just such an era of accumulating, societywide, sedated, nostril-flaring panic. It's crucial he remember. Yet the patient's chart is riddled with these missing episodes. One continuous archipelago-hopping campaign from fin de to fin de, torching itself on the conviction, the absolute certainty of impending mayhem, always waiting for the last word.

But never like this before. There has never been the means, the raw megatonnage, the window of opportunity that a city like Angel, a country like the one on his passport, commands. Fear has never been so slickly institutionalized, marketed on such a mind-fogging scale, sold on such favorable terms, nothing down. And to fear something resourcefully enough is to bring it off, wholesale, well before the magic date.

Ten years, and they'll be hooking generators up to bicycles to listen to emergency radio. Cutting up railroad ties for fuel. Licking the lids off trash cans. Rodeo Drive will be a vast black market, like the one in the streets outside Carver. A slow, exaggerated drift toward video-clip, mass multiple-personality self-homicide: the perfect end for a world that has achieved the ultimate aim of being both great tasting and less filling.

And Kraft alone is left to tie apocalypse to vanishing children. Scarred tree rings, ancient internal hemorrhages, origin myths of the bewilderedly trepanned. Abuse is the seed money. Banishment sets the Bildungsroman rolling, and every page thereafter is the kid in the backseat saying, "Are we there yet?" "What happens next?"

Where happens is not a thing but a place, a remembered premonition cathartic enough to close the opening's rip.

This is Kraft's insight as he goes under. No one this side of childhood exile, not a single memoir or condescending picture book, has ever gotten it right. But no one has ever lost it either: that first house, where want and terror, the toy soldiers of self itself, have not yet split off and solidified on contact with air. He's seen it up close, under the loupes. From their ringleader, that Weight Watchers Khrushchev, to the martyred Lieve Kitty, each is a raw umbilical stump, a residual direct tap into placenta, the subterranean world.