Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

Work begins without prelim. It proceeds, with only the smallest verbal dispatches, into time beyond telling. They make the first-pass sort, splitting the stretchers into two camps, red blankets and blue, those that might yet be addressable and those for whom injection and deliberate oversight is now the kindest remaining treatment. Decision is quick and concise, applied to each new batch. The sieve is axiomatic. Care for the still savable is relegated to stopgap. Gross clinical movements, close enough, timeshare between points of impact, with vague hopes of getting back to stabilize.

Kraft's hands go autonomous; their overlearned skill runs on ahead of him. From time to time he stops to say certain procedures by name: RUQ abdominal wound requires immediate hemostasis by application of… But even these speak-aloud bits are a kind of Latin liturgy, mumbled by heart with no feel for the meaning of the words. He drags, a deep-sea diver, through the reef-encrusted deep.

After a while — no saying how long, now that time has formally ended — activity in the room accumulates. It condenses into concerted efforts like planets congealing out of stellar dust. The luxury of study, the idea of a worked-out operative plan, takes on a laughable Club Med quality — decadent contrivance of primary care givers still living the dream of sustainability shattered here.

They operate, seat of the pants, improvisation night, open stage. He nods out along someone's splattered linea alba and comes to, still working efficiently, hovering out-of-body over a half-sized left anterior aspect, retracting the gaping hole by hand as Dr. Brache crams the loose party favors back into the split piñata. Habituation is a marvelous thing. The annihilating assault Technicolor lasts only until it becomes familiar. Then standard emergency procedure sets up its own counter-rhythm. A little movement, a little breeze in the face of the unlivable. Endurability is simply a rate function.

The uses of childhood exceed human count. What he wades through is this year's quota compressed into an hour. They apply the same tourniquets, thread the same running locked sutures, ligate the same living tissue with their 2–0 chromic. So where is the threshold point, the place where what remains is no longer life but contorted burlesque? Well, in a word, here. Even the attempt to make sense of it is obscene. It's over, over. There's nothing for it except the stylized as-if, the subjunctive, the reflex motions of would and were. Call, as always.

While Kraft holds his finger in the blood-spewing hole, a little melody of contrived naïveté loops infinitely through his head. It's a phrase out of some expectant cartoon picaresque, but lovely, dark, escapist beyond telling. The words go: "Don't leave just yet. Don't fall." The tune is lullaby incarnate. He fishes for a piece of lead that has molded itself against what were once vertebrae, humming to himself. He times the drop of the lead into waiting stainless pan to spank on the cadence.

Although time has ended, something keeps changing out there in the space beyond the theater. The kids must have gotten shot sometime before three in the afternoon, when school let out. Last he stepped out for air, it was dark. But whatever change persists outside the hospital is just a leftover, inertial going-through-the-motions, a hysterectomy case on hormones, a midlifer returned to the singles circuit for reasons that escape him. Night falls, as always. The cut-faceted flares come on all over Emerald City. A lovely petrochemical astigmatic glow enchants the sprawl, holds out the flirting promise that society's postindustrial theme park is nearing its eternally imminent completion.

All done with back projection, of course, double exposure, soft focus, the industry's proficient visual con. The addiction to hope is no surprise, in a creature whose soul is a complex kludge, imagination's overlay superimposed upon superfluous animal circuitry. Mind is a sucker for its aboriginal entrapment. Then what happened? What happened is this, narrative's two-minute drill. These lacerated trick-or-treaters left at Kraft's door.

News covers it all night, while the story is hot, between "Dates of the Stars" and tangled tales of accidental incest. Tonight, anyway, this one is the lead. Collective schoolyard death — this ring of real-life Riverdales and Sweet Valley Highs, assembled like a crop of eager Presidential Achievement Medal winners to deliver the valedictorian address. Its plot feeds the country a night's full course of the Gothic frolic it has come to require.

The ER staff and their temporary conscripts — sworn in under the crisis clause — stay glued to half-hourly accounts of the shooting that has landed in their laps. They follow the story on huge TV monitors mounted in strategic spots about the lounges. They leave the apparatuses open, bloodletting them for the glossless glaze they offer on the event. They watch the Minicams come into this same ER, pan the room, point at the monitors, which disappear down a White Rabbit hole of video regress.

They see in slight variation, half a dozen times, each abdomen gaping underneath them. "Updates," the wire vendors call the repeating hook. Yet the only new data, aside from the killer's high school yearbook photo, a glimpse at his underground cache, and some revised stats from the assault rifle technical manual, are the updates that everyone in this room already knows: the count increment, a charity-drive target gone mad.

Reporters start relaying as news the bits all the other news media say. Panels of experts pick at the thing listlessly, like hostages to the Clean Plate Club toying with their asparagus. The stats sprout their privately suspected proofs: one in five American schoolchildren has possessed a gun. On any given day, one hundred thousand come to school armed.

Internationally, vicarious glee sets the dominant tone. Iran, Syria, South Africa — the usual pariahs — have a field day. World Service dubs the solo corral gunfight "this peculiarly American crime." Yet if it is at all peculiar, Kraft thinks, it is only to show how the States is still, for a last short gasp at least, the world's innovator, the flagging standard bearer in trade's westward migration, as first formulated by one of those Adams boys.

News drags the standard surreal figures back and forth into the viewing plane. Its sick traffic is matched only by the continuous crowd tiding in and out of the frantically composed operating theater. It's pure opera, a lavish Medea in modern dress mounted by artists in exile's holding camps. One alderman makes the point that most of our annual firearm homicides are caused by unregistered weapons. Thus, what we really need to discourage the illegal trade is easier registration. The city could even liquidate some of its crippling debt by selling portions of its massive seized arsenal…

Surgical nurses palm Kraft the requested blades as in that old game, pass the shoe from me to you to you. Their heads bob like toy water-sipping ducks, peering up to gape at the monitors while they clamp and cauterize, listening, as if the clue to the next incision, the mystery they hold braced under their latex, is out there. In the floodlit close-ups of hysterical mothers. In the filler human interest about the kid whose life was spared by a truant afternoon in the video arcade. In the pastel artwork pinned to the corkboard of the decimated classroom.

Bodies and delayed broadcast: the team members watch both images at once, needing only the colored glasses to go 3-D. They watch in the stunned peace that settles in after event passes all understanding.

On the dozenth repeat of the simpering anchor's "Topping the stories this hour," somebody snaps. It's Kean, raving, "Do we have to… can't we get a shade less grotesque soundtrack?" His tone is puerile, an I-didn't-ask-to-be-here-you-know. Even here, disaster is, de facto, every man for himself.