Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Enough sleep narcotic now syrups through Kraft's forebrain to bring him almost back as well. The lost tumbler contour: September, racing home in the rain, the runny-soaked page of oppressive sums due tomorrow, the stink of ubiquitous earthworm in the nose's lining. Get it back, returned to the viscera — the car antennas maliciously snapped off for no reason, the lessons on saturation bombing picked up in Sunday School at no spiritual cost, the crack-of-dawn smell of oatmeal equivalent from the squatters' quarter, the trinket bought for the beautiful half-Japanese girl next door (the one who will leave you longing inadequately after halves, forever), thrown into a canal when nerve collapsed — get that back, and you have it. The bead, the cross-locus for the there where they now abduct themselves. The locale of sickening, defenseless, permanent fragility, the one that growing up consists of more or less unsuccessfully denying.

And then it hovers over him, forgiveness in the form of a class reunion. They have come back, those two foreigners, just to give him another look, to lift the hole in the fabric for a follow-up, now that he is grown, responsible, ostensibly aware. Second shot, in a stronger body. Now he might do something about things as they are, now, when the worst has been done, when he's lost all and nothing can hurt him further. And thinking, I wil remember this when I wake up; I need only the trigger, the call-back, he falls into the first recuperative peace he has known since the incurable Hansel and Gretel checked into his ward.

Plummer wakes him. The maniac breaks into Kraft's call room, scrubbed, giggling crazily. "You're not gonna, you won't fawking believe this. Buddy boy, buddy boy, have we got a celebrity body lineup for you."

Kraft comes out of his coma far enough to sample the disturbance. An extended adolescent stands above him, eyes watering in a colloid of shock and excitement. Thomas — unthinkably — is crying. And he won't tell, but in his manic elation over something finally happening, an event, definitive, coming home to roost at last, he merely hustles Kraft out of bed and shoehorns him down the hall for the denouement.

It starts in the ER and splays, like a family Labor Day, down the adjacent halls and foyers. If it is not precisely the scenario Kraft has been anticipating, it is its next of kin. He feels almost relieved that it has arrived, taken shape, capped imagination.

But imagination could never have managed this without assistance. Plummer does his sugar-rush, play-by-play patter. "Tried to beep you, Dr. Krafty, but yer number was not in service. Suite phone bungled up too, suspiciously enough. But what the hey, hey? Now that we got you, the gang's all here. Father Kino, Dr. Purgative, Miss Peach…"

Plummer starts to sound just like the throbbing bass of a dash radio in a distant Mazda playing acid house on volume 12 while idling at a stoplight. What a civilizing cleverness, how they always put the ER on ground level, right by the parking-lot receiving dock. Ideal for bulk shipments.

The halls fill with disembodied spectral wails, paramedical commands in Pilipino, the shouts of admission nurses whose bureaucracy has broken down under the weight of the penultimate. A kaleidoscopic aural chaos. Kraft looks out over the event just as the infotainment folks bust in through the sliding doors with the Minicams.

The thing that has come over to play, exceeding Kraft's still-narcotized ability to take it in, is just your consummate, posturban, median mass murder. Atrocity, like art, attends to the flavor of the age. It sinks vast sums into R & D, to produce an imagery tailor-made for the sensibility that has habituated to every horror imaginable except itself. "Hey," Plummer twitters away by Kraft's side, "it's not much, but we call it home.

"Guess," Thomas keeps nattering. "Just guess. You'll never, not in a million, not in a coon's, not in a dead man's…"

Guess what"? Even that much evades Kraft. The identity of the monster who did this? The Herod behind today's installment could be any hopped-up, factory-outlet counter helper with fifty bucks for a gun, that party favor easier to purchase than alcohol in some states. He wouldn't even need the fifty bucks, because there's always financing.

Once again, the bullet sprayer is just another sleepless burn-baby one degree worse than the rest of us, turned by ubiquitous, state-sponsored terrorism, the housing-project prison on all sides of him, into trying to out-horror horror. Butcher, baker, ex-war criminal sponsored by the NSA, short-order loner, Veteran of Foreign Police Action, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, crazed chemmed-out cardboard apartment dweller. How high would you like to point the finger? Who do you want for your guilty party?

"What's your hunch on this one, Krafty? Jets versus Sharks? Tong war? Fast-food shoot-up? Get a life, bro; that was last year. Football stadium spree? Please, leave that to the effete Europeans. Airport terrorist strike by Oregon Ecotopian separatists? Indiscriminate mall-walker mow-down?"

They pick their way through a litter of stretchers. Seeping bodies line the corridors because there is no room at emergency's inn. They drift listlessly in the direction of the operating theater, with some vague notion of assisting in the red tide bailout with their plastic beach pails.

In Kraft's doped silence, Plummer looses it. "Mother fucking Mary!" he screams. In the general frenzy, no one even turns a head. "Look around you, shit-for-brains. Look! "

The order is so violent that Kraft does, pushing back the sheets from one upward-staring face, then another. He cannot see the common denominator in this sea of victims, so salient is it, so long expected, so presupposed.

"You're fucking kidding me. Are you blind, or what? Helen pissing Kell—" Kraft looks for something deeper, subtler, more insidious. When Plummer shouts the patent axiom, it's only the givenness of the observation that shocks him. "A grade school , Peewee."

At last, Kraft panics. "What school?"

"Oh Christ. Martin Luther King Junior High. Bobbie Franks Elementary. The Little Girl Down the Well Montessori School. Who fucking cares?"

Kraft would kick him in the face, Free style, but has no time. He skids around, thinking to race the half-dozen flights up to Pediatrics to find where the piper was playing today. But he remembers the tour's cancellation. Then the sickening backwash, the shame at mouthing the parental refrain: Thank God it wasn't my child.

Plummer looks about, grinning. "Hang on, kids. It's Chinese assault rifle time. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand… ready or not, here I come."

At this outburst, crazed as celadon glaze, Kraft takes the man's wrist and tries for a steady tone. "Thomas."

"What? 'Get a grip,' right? We're doctors, goddammit.' Ever notice how much these scrubs resemble the traditional restraining jacket?"

Plummer begins to trill "Whistle While You Work," complete with late-'thirties warbling. The sweet dwarf-tremolo serves only to conduct the shape of revelation deeper into the fibrillating heart.

Kraft bathes in iodine wash, up to his biceps. He listens to the sea of voices around him. The operating room is ablaze in the high-frequency flicker of fluorescences, a cozy home version of the seductive Christmas tree star, Shinto devotional candle, menorah stem, the burning White Light at the tip of civilization's long bushmaster black fiber-optic cable.

Kraft's eyes must dilate, stop down to the sight of the banquet spread for them. His own organs have never been particularly good at depth perception, especially under such light. But the slaughtered Softball teams, the choir groups and secret note-passers still being wheeled in, their IVs bobbing above them like golf cart pennants— these are unmistakable. He need not even sponge off their features to confirm the ID. Schoolmates. His all-star backfield from twenty years ago. Old neighborhood friends.