Richard Powers: Operation Wandering Soul

Kraft cruises down the Golden State: would it were so. "Cruise" is a generous figure of speech at best, label from another time and biome still imbued with quaint, midcentury vigor, the incurably sanguine suggestion of motion more forward than lateral. "Cruise" is for the Autobahn, the Jet Stream, Club Med. What's the real word, local parlance? Shoosh. Shunt. Slalom.

Freeways, like rivers, age and meander. Lane lines, at this hour, are just a manufacturer's suggested retail, more of an honor system than anything worth bothering with. Relics, mementos, the tourist scratches on the pavement marking the sites of annihilated Spanish missions.

Up ahead, the Blue Angels run interference for an Esther Williams aqua ballet. A lazy, Quaalude cross-drift of traffic skims across Kraft's viewing screen, flow and counterflow canceling out in diffraction pattern to form a standing wave. Several hoods in front of him, sleek little fuel-injected Alpha particle manned by sandalwood-haired guy hugging cellular phone swaps places with convertible Stuttgart-apparatus piloted by blond bombshell lip-syncing to the same song Kraft himself has tuned in on the radio. Eight seconds later, for no reason in creation, the two swap back. The exchange is duplicated all across the event horizon, a synchronized, pointless, mass red shift.

Fortunately, most everyone is a diploma holder here. Driver's Ed: the backbone of the high school certificate. One might emerge from the system unable to add, predicate, or point to Canada on a map, but thanks to rigorous requirements would still be able to Aim High in Steering, Leave Oneself an Out, Second-guess the Other Guy.

Casting his vision into the advance shoals, getting what his Driver's Ed teacher almost two decades ago affectionately if firmly referred to as The Big Picture, Kraft catches the total, pointillist effect: cars flaking off each other in the steady current, making a shimmering moire, like sheer curtains swaying in front of a screen. He takes his hands from the steering wheel, passes his extended fingers in front of one another in unconscious imitation. Time (in this country of ever-expanding unusable free time) for an experiment: infinitesimal easing up on the throttle produces a gap between his grille and the nether parts of the Marquis in front of him. The instant this following distance exceeds a car length, the two vehicles on either side both try to slither in.

Proof. This shot-blast stream of continuous lane change is not prompted by anything so naive as the belief that the other queue is actually moving faster. The open spot simply must be filled on moral grounds. A question of commonweal. Switching into a slower-moving lane gives you something to do while tooling (tooling; that's the ticket) along at substandard speed through the work crews surfacing the next supplementary sixteen-lane expansion. Fills the otherwise-idle nanosecond. A way to absorb extraneous frontier spirit.

Kraft tacks west with the cattle trail. He read somewhere, a year ago, while still in the honeymoon, guidebook phase, that a mile of freeway eats up forty acres of land, give or take the mule. The whole idea came from the Nazis. Shoulders, median, dual carriageway, transition-free exit and entry ramps: the total driving environment. How many thousand acres thrashed in Angelinoland alone? Lord, I'm five hundred continuous north-south miles without a traffic light away from home. Throw in the east-wests, the redundant routes, the clover-leafs, the switchbacks and tributaries, and pretty soon you're talking real real estate.

And how many million tons of that double-bulge guardrail, spinning out its hypnotic thread cross-country, shadowing him however the chicanes slip 'n' slide? For a truly nauseating insight, Kraft considers the number of human lives devoted to manufacturing this hardware alone. Somewhere forges run full time just keeping up with the replacement pieces, the smashups, the decay of normal wear and tear. So what do you do for a living? Kraft's own answer, the chief career of daytime soaps and evening dramedies, patricidal America's most prestigious gig, half plumber, half God, is embarrassing enough to have to admit to seatmates on planes. But could have been worse. A wrong turn coming up through public school and he'd be answering: I manufacture those guard bumpers for the freeway. No — just the right-hand, convex ones. Although we are planning to diversify into mileage poles and overhead signs, the Japanese permitting.

Radio does its thing, successfully distracting him from sustained thought. Tune of the minute transmutes into a synthetically evil, crystal-meth-induced slam metal number about how the sheepman and the cattleman should be friends. Kraft considers pressing the auto-seek and floating to the next station up the dial, but he hasn't the will to discover what's lurking there in the high, truly antinomian frequencies.

He's under the impression, and would like to go empirical on this, that the city's top-polling radio tune at any given minute has a marked influence on traffic's turbulence. Audio Santa Anas, chill melodies blowing in from the vents under the dash along with the AC, raising the collective arm hair in every one of these climatrolled driving cubicles, making everybody just itch to, well, Aim High in Steering. Off somebody. Been happening a lot again, lately: a Man, a Plan, some ammo, blammo — Panama! Somebody's got to scrape together a grant to graph freeway shooting frequencies versus the Billboard Top Ten.

The occasional public service breaks on behalf of the president's current call to arms serve only to obscure the narcotic of choice in its many trappings currently being vended by the sponsors' interludes. Sure enough, by the time the next three-minute rhythm gets into full, band-box swing, the flow of control down the pike in front of Kraft settles into the unmistakable ripple effect of gapers' block.

Something has happened. Simple, unmitigated Event, the palpable Here and Now, or as close as we get to it these days — the view through the dash. As one, people slow for a look: not to pin blame on skid or stupidity. Not to check out the parts faHure or the make of the shotgun. They want to get a glimpse, to see the caller up close for once, bag his ID, collect his ephemeral calling card, gawk at the forgotten familiar, take down the number on his hideous, out-of-town plates.

Kraft has no need. Any survivors of this crash — or the one on the next freeway over — will show up at Carver General almost as soon as he does. He'll hear all about them in living color over breakfast from the Emergency Room boys. The particular inferno he now creeps past might even include a pede case for him to call his own. It's become all but traditional. Family outing to the museum or mall, laid out all over the median strip instead. If not this particular flaming wreck, the one just around the bumpered bend.

He merges right, having long ago noticed that nine of ten pileups originate in the outside lanes. Across the divider, oncoming traffic starts to bottle up too. The drivers smell something burning. Both directions max out to full carrying potential, a premature peak-volume hour. All hours are rush, here and throughout the network. Everybody on earth and his poor relations are desperate to relocate. Kraft can hardly wait until the Chinese can claim what so proudly we already hail: a national front-seat capacity fitting every citizen on the books with seats to spare. The curve of mobility will sidle up ever more intimately to asymptote until that moment at decade's, century's, and millennium's end when the last living road-certified creature not yet on rolling stock will creep out onto the ramp in whatever vehicle it can muster, and poof: perpetual gridlock.