JOY COMES TO: much . . . later, is the word she has swung loose from. The first thing she asks, when she recondenses out of the anesthetic, is how much time has vanished since she was last awake. The missing hours are more important to her than the missing bit of foot, still swaddled. She does not wonder “How did it go?” or “Will I walk again?” Meekly, she asks a nurse, her voice sounding from miles down a well: “How many days have I been away?” Worried, perhaps, about what trouble she might have made, or where she has been off to during the unaccountable interim.
She gets an answer that does not answer. No matter; she is back now, returned from the place that leaves only a ribbon-scrap in her recollection. Here, on this side, she must again work for a living. The girl’s industry returns as the pain suppressant ebbs. Furious with diligence, head bent over the hospital bed-desk, she writes out a thank-you note to her surgeon.
She uses wide, three-lined paper, the two outer lanes solidly marked, the median strip a faint, encouraging dash. Urgent schoolgirl style transforms the letter into one of those commissioned classroom pleas on behalf of some Polish boy who decided to defect despite his returning parents, or for the first-ever panda born in North America. The scope of the project forces her to dare cursive, although she is still several thousand practice ovals and half-Immelmanns shy of mastery.
“Dear Dr. Kraft, thank you for snipping the incursion out of my leg.” She copies the word carefully out of the material she has made the woman therapist give her. It’s not a long word, shorter even than her last name. To a nonnative speaker, it is no harder a word for the creature hiding inside her than any other. “I am sure you have done a most satisfying job and that the incursion will not come back. All my expectations are for the future and pain is so far low. I am sorry you had to do this but glad that you are my doctor and such a good one.” At the bottom, she draws a winged creature, midway between giant gate guard and guardian angel. She folds the thick newsprint in quarters and delivers it suspiciously to a pede nurse, making her swear up and down that she will deliver the note swiftly.
Pain is so far low: the note reaches Kraft interleaved among X-ray envelopes, incisional biopsy reports, the fan-fold printout of the week’s new admissions, an unsigned memo requiring all staff to get inoculated against the latest epidemic, and police notification of several recent assaults in the underground parking garage, one of them fatal. He unfolds the newsprint, reads it without comprehension. What are they asking him to do now?
He is still clutching the text when he next comes to, in his call room, that Motel 6 just off of the surgical interstate. He tapes her note to the cinder block wall above the bed, where he can glance at it from time to time from over the edge of the Rifle & Handgun Illustrated. I’m sorry you had to do this. I’m sorry you had to do this.
He falls asleep for the specified hundred years. While he is out, the shoots and tendrils of time’s parasitic vines overgrow the entire city, clamping in place all vehicles, transports, relays, and faxes, freezing for good all liquid assets and every medium of exchange.
“THE MAIN THING, as I see it, will be keeping her from laterally stressing the . . .”
The lovely Linder throws her hands up in exasperation. “The main thing, as I see it, will be keeping her X rays clear.”
She is a touch bristly this morning, and perhaps with good cause. Kraft takes a deep hit of the Condition Six air and tries to settle into another tone. “Look, I’ve seen you in action. I know you’re a pro.”
“Thank you.” She is as close to acid as her temperament allows. “I’m delighted to hear it.”
“And it’s not that I’m trying to tell you what to do.”
“Just how to do it?”
Okay, okay. Ordinarily, by the tender ground rules they’ve already established, he’d be the one trying to steer their rationed conversations toward fondue recipes or furniture refinishing or anything at all rather than let this last remaining candidate for his One Good Thing be infected by more medicine. But today, in these few free hours with each other, they flirt with major role reversal. Kraft can’t seem to keep from nagging the Stepaneevong post-op. He has brought up the girl’s case three times in as many blocks, and the ring of the refrain’s bad-conscience rondo is about to put a royal burr up their afternoon’s ass.
They are walking—yes, sic; as in “on foot”—down Melrose, he in jeans and a clean scrub shirt, she in this marvelous, clingy, soft rose silk shell the likes of which he’d years ago forgotten existed. They indulge in that favorite national pastime, after-shopping. An hour earlier, Linda bought a clock radio and now she is industriously devoting herself to belated comparisons, seeing how well or poorly she did. Kraft simply tags along by her side, desperate not to be left alone for an unstructured hour.
He tries not to hang on her, while using her as moving shield. Only under her wing—half bare, and beautiful as a fashion model’s—does he dare witness the final twenty-four hours of this EVERYTHING-MUST-GO clearance close-out. CRAZY CAL SEZ: WE’RE SELLING THE FARM. GET YOURS NOW, BEFORE WE COME TO OUR SENSES. Ten thousand groping, bewildered years of recorded culture go out in a windup FIRE SALE blaze before them. All they can do is walk, basking in the full glow of the apotheosis of retail.
“Let’s duck in here,” Linda says.
She indicates a tasteful little theme boutique called Cop a Buzz. It gathers together, for purposes of trade, diverse objects with no conceivable use all partaking of the slenderest of common denominators: the ornamental Insect Motif. Big this year. “Can never have too many locusts,” Kraft says enthusiastically. Espera knees him gently in the kidney. “Incidentally, did I mention to you that there’s a danger of her hyperextending her . . . ?”
“Hey,” Linda says, taking him by the shirtslack around his collarless collar, clamping him to her, pulling him down a little, toward her bared teeth. “Whatever happened to that cavalier, jaded, you-mow-’em-we’ll-sew-’em hack I’ve come to know and love?”
“Love, you say? Don’t get much call for that around here, lady.” You still got the sales slip? You must have the wrong shop. Wrong theme. Wrong strip mall.”
“Listen, Richard. Joy is an angel—too good a patient, too good a child to be true. She detests the very idea of crutches, and I wouldn’t be able to keep her on them even if I wanted to. And why would I want to? What’s to protect her from? Nothing she might sprain would be any worse than bedsores. Her outlook is worth a dozen of ours put together. Who’s gonna know better than she what the foot can do, and when? If there’s any danger with her at all, it’s . . .”
“Yes?” he throws out, supercasually. What, me stiffening?
“If she has any problem at all, it’s with her spirits.”
“Spirits? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Easy, fella. I’m on your side, remember?” She refreshes that memory with a finger-brush across his floating rib. “This is one powerful little girl we’re talking about. She has sent for her schoolbooks. She sweats at plane geometry for hours at a stretch. When she stops, it’s only to start in again on the High Middle Ages. Then she asks me to grade her homework.”
Kraft stands absentmindedly stroking a Rive Gauche oven mitt with that cockroach look and feel. “So what’s the problem?”
“Do you remember the difference between Louis the Fat and Charles the Bald?”
“I could probably tell them apart in a police line, if that’d help.”
“We’ll ignore the clown in the back of the class. Ricky, it’s too strange. She smiles politely while I read make-believes to the other kids. Then I ask her what she would like to hear next, and it’s The Wealth of Nations. She never laughs, never gets excited or spooked or impatient. It’s as if she simply has no idea on earth what’s happening to her.”
Tell her, then, he wants to say. Tell her the chances of their having to go back and take more leg. Tell her what drugs or rays will do to her doll’s face, her hair, her schoolgirl exercises in concentration. Tell h
er the odds against her sticking around long enough to graduate from junior high. Tell her how quietly it comes on, no threatening shout, no siren of stylized alarm. How can people live? How can we live?
“But as long as we’re on the subject,” Linda segues, sweetly tentative. She tries, now that he is suddenly volunteering all over the place, to enlist him, as simple comradely buffer, in cases every bit as heart-rending as Joy’s. Joleene Weeks, who refuses to talk except by pulling the string and releasing random messages from her Chatty Cathy doll. Markie C, who likes to plunge silverware deep into his prosthetic limb in cafeterias, for the sheer pleasure of the public whiplash. Kraft listens politely, as demure as the little Laotian girl listening to tonight’s fairy tale.
They roll on down Melrose’s Babylonian bazaar, these miles of continuous stalls at a street fair of surpassing strangeness. Shock troop merchandising here reaches its peak. Science determines definitively how to part a buck from the bottomlessly blasé. Riches from the Orient, booty from the Crusades, fatiguingly inventive combinatoric treadmills of commodity-churning high funkiness are rendered salable by their utter implausibility. The pyramid of nudge-and-wink, what-the-hell impulse buys at the cash register aspire to a high weirdness, even a conceptual art of death denial just now in the run-up to its greatest, most decadent fin de yet. Electric rare-earth jackets. Magnetic monkey’s genitalia for the dash. Farmer’s hats reading “Kafka.” Digital executive barbells. Self-help bathroom scales. Programmable mascara. Solar-powered rain announcers. Clothing bearing every conceivable legible message except “Please stop and talk to me.”
Stay sick, Kraft says, almost out loud. Stay in bed. Never get up and walk. Never go outside again.
Fashion, it strikes him, is even more insidious than the planned obsolescence people imagine. It involves engineering into each good or service a time-delayed precipitate of alienating ugliness so that the desperate purchaser will wake up one day from his incredible bender and say, “What ever possessed me?” Then head out with the electronic money transfers to go score a little hair of the dog. Every glass of refreshing, consumable product must be laced with hidden salt water, inflaming the need that it promised to placate. The point of fad is to provide tomorrow’s refuse and the day after’s marked-up nostalgia. And we will not stop climbing, laboring, assembling, trading, making, marking down, and closing out until there’s a credit card form attached to each harnessable dissatisfaction, a coin box inserted between every somatic anguish and its real salve.
Perpetual carnival out here: a Rio of retail. Improbable as it seems, in all these theme boutiques—the flightless-bird shops, the split-crotch panty shops, the ’thirties, ’forties, and ’fifties shops (Kraft sees the day coming when his abysmal young adulthood will be bottled as campy vintage, the collision curves of trend and retro slamming head-on into each other), the information shops, the shops turning Stalinist lapels and hemlines into spangly kitsch, the Day-Glo designer industrial-waste outlets vending pet elements from beyond the actinide series—in all this synthetic needs-mongering, Kraft and Linda stumble upon a bookstore.
“Hey! Look at this. It’s just like the scene in that movie.” Every movie about the distant, disastrous future ever made. “You know, where they come across the half-sunk Statue of Liberty buried in the sand?” And Jesus, it’s been Earth underneath there all along.
They go in and browse, evading the public promenade of fears for a moment, hiding out from the end of time. Even this old sanctuary is overrun, already prostrate, everywhere infiltrated by the titles of malevolence: How to Think and Act like Genghis Khan, Learning to Love Your Dysfunction, How I Went from Fanny Farmer to Firmer Fanny, and McMassacre! The Inside Story. No matter; this is all that is left, all the refuge the two of them will ever be allowed. They are trapped out here on the threshold, the absolute cutting edge of the dream’s realization.
Kraft and Linda split at reference, each turning to trace out favorite, obsessive routes through the racks. She starts in travel, proceeds to fiction, and ends up in food. He drifts to music, scans the picture books, then sinks down into biography. Each takes a small treasure through the cash register, showing the other only when outside the shop, embarrassed at the names of their personal reading needs.
“Wait a minute,” he says, remembering something a few yards down the sidewalk. “Wait for me right here.” Squeezes her shoulders, semaphore pleading. Here; don’t move, or we will never find one another again.
He runs back into the shop. She loses sight of him through the glass front as he scrambles about trying to negotiate a category that has become alien to him. He comes out again bearing a wrapped package, which he accidentally tears open in presenting to her. The Secret Garden. Alice in Wonderland. Oz. Peter Pan. “Give her these,” Kraft coughs neutrally.
“Oh,” Linda says, fingering the volumes to keep from looking at him. “Oh. The classics. Do you think . . . ?”
“What? Something easier? Something a little more current?”
“No, no. Only . . . Hold still a minute, can’t you? Don’t be cross. Pull in your lip. I haven’t hit you yet.” She puts her hand to his neck and smooths him. “I was just going to ask if you thought it might be better if you gave them to her yourself. She thinks you’re God, you know.”
Kraft makes ready to bolt at the monosyllable. In point of fact, he has bolted already, silently gone, back on call. “You do it for me, will you?” Just this one thing. For my sake. For God’s sake. Slip her a children’s book, for once, while she’s not looking.
Has read them all once, time was, several lives ago. Thumbed his way about in, climbed down through the portable portals, every one an infallible Blue Guide to a parallel place, unsuspected, joining the town and just at hand. Maybe’s municipalities are always: the illustrated pastel covers deliver this shocking evidence to his cortex’s tangled bit-bundle as he handles the books again. Immediate, closer even than the known, so close he must have constantly stumbled over the entryways without seeing. Children are forever falling through, almost by accident. Right there. Over the high hedge. A dead drop out the nursery window. Behind the heavy wall hanging. Just inside the next pastel binding.
They were, by all accounts, places much like the place he inhabited, the one you were supposed to play, wait, work, grow up, or lose yourself in. They doubled reasonably for the land at large except with one rule tweaked, one natural law finally understood for all it implied. There, everything would be exactly the same, everything except perhaps that aging would turn out to be a myth, disease vastly overrated, time a steady state, and thoughts real.
Adults, de facto, could neither locate nor recognize the layout. This followed tautologically. Once naturalized and issued a green card, once lured into believing in the possibility of a long stay, once you’d accepted the terms of lease, just the idea of going abroad on speculation became too ruinously expensive. To have an address here embargoed trade with dislocation’s private provinces. But to a child brought up on customs checks and absentee ballots, to a reduced fare in terminal transit, to a boy raised on tales of a blessed country unreachable except by eternal detours through every makeshift sultanate that ever swabbed the upper decks of the General Assembly, these secret gardens and lost domains, these accounts of wonder- and neverlands were simple extensions, travel brochures from sovereign states just past the next Passport Control.
Hidden valleys were commonplaces to a boy who had been twice around the world before breaking his first bone. (The bone was a clavicle, cracked in a fall from a jackfruit tree that he had scaled in a doomed attempt to spy out the Nicobar Islands from the Indian mainland. He came to consciousness two days later in a field hospital bed, clutching a regiment of his beloved toy Gurkhas.) His parents moved every couple dozen months, whether they needed to or not. They took large leaps in small integer multiples of time. The boy always moved with them, deferring to their wishes as in most incidental matters.
In such a life, the roll of real places was as mysterio
us as the secret, stowaway locales his books laid out. Until the age of eight, Ricky nursed the impression that his father worked for some multinational oil company. He held on to that orienting fiction long after the evidence failed to add up. For another few years, just before adolescence set in in earnest, he was content to tell people that the man was with the Foreign Service. After that it was Air America, or “I don’t know.” Then the topic simply stopped coming up.
Whatever the name of his father’s true employers, they demanded frequent and radical relocation. Each time that the family struck the set, dismantled the current household, and loaded it into shipping crates, reading excitement came and riffled the boy again, awakened by the standard hopeful anxiety of being left behind in the shuffle. He would find it for good this time—the wayward path, the wandering door that had somehow blended in invisibly with the surrounding grass and stone.
Veteran repacking campaigns left him a quiet child, capable of sitting still for endless, uprooted stretches. If he could live through the tedium of reaching the next stopover, he might recognize the new place on arrival, instantly find his way, the way that both imagination and his biannually decimated library swore existed. The next stopover never lay along the usual picnic routes given in the Michelins. The year in Seoul and the six months in Buenos Aires were mainstream compared to a few of the more remote refueling overnighters that made the family checklist.
He was an only child, the lone ward in his parents’ caretaker government. Little Ricky had already come across, in bed, by flashlight, years ahead of the event, accounts of what would become of the folks: taken by cholera up in the Punjab. Pricked by a hail of cassava-tipped arrows. Swept from ship’s deck by unseasonable eagerness on the part of the Pacific south equatorial. They would either return a lifetime later with tales of a strange inheritance or they would not: the books were reticent and divided on this matter.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 13