Operation Wandering Soul

From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of BEWILDERMENT

Richard Powers

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838950125
• Print ISBN:
  9781848871434

BY THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED BEWILDERMENT AND THE OVERSTORY In the paediatrics ward of a public hospital, a group of sick children is gathering. The surrogate parents of this band - a tired, overworked surgical resident and a therapist - are charged with prolonging their lives using storytelling and make-believe alone. Operation Wandering Soul is a novel about imagination and memory. At once a social indictment and an intensely emotional account of intimate need, it asks how we might keep alive, a little longer, the vanishing narratives of childhood. 'Richard Powers is the most intellectually stimulating novelist at work in the English language today' Daily Telegraph

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 moiré, 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 naïve 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 nano-second. 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, crystalmeth-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 failure 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.

He has lived through evacuations, but never one on this scale. The fabled civil-defense drill gone real, all the more panic-stricken in that everybody in this one acts piecemeal, deep in the dream of free agency. Given the apotheosis of private transport all around him, Kraft finds it hard to credit the shrill fact beloved of the guidebooks, that Angel City once possessed the most extensive urban transit system in the country. The tales of spanking red turn-of-the-century electric carriages smack now of Hans Christian Andersen. Nothing in human ingenuity’s arsenal could have staved off this freeway. It is the peak of private enterprise, as inevitable and consummate as death.

“Artery” cuts a figure through his frontal lobes. Southbound artery. Feeder artery. Bypass artery. Exactly the sort of tough, rubbery, spreading net he’s transfused into here, tracking the inside lane, the tunica intima. Yet it’s impossible to ascertain, in a city as sclerotic as this, which are the arteries and which the veins. Do oxygenated heme groups transport the needed fix out to the Valley, while spent thrombocytes wash the reduced waste back to the Civic Center for reconditioning? Or does the cycle run the other way around? Even the Thomas Brothers aren’t saying. Inbound? Out? Yer not from around these parts, are ya, stranger? We’re kind of on open circulation here. Arthropod style. This blood doesn’t flow. It shooshes. Slaloms.

He merges into the connecting shunt, seamlessly slipping onto the same road by another name. As on any given night, no matter which direction he courses, the congested red platelets pulse off in front of him, the poor venous outflow of spent white-blue plasma returning on his left to fill the spaces he’s abandoned. Increasingly these days, he feels the need, deep in his limbic knot, to revert to that cure-all of his surgeon forebears: Open the vein. Primitive debridement. Let the infested fluid drain. Bleed this body, too long under pressure. Cut a counterflow, run a detour down that privileged, gerrymandered isthmus straight into the marina. Trust to the Golden State rule: cars will head toward any empty space. And for a few days at least, superfluous pus would spurt superlatively into the bay.

Reactionary, perhaps. But he’s not the only one out on the lanes harboring taboo desires. A hand-lettered sign attached to the hospital exit has for some days fluttered in the semitropical breeze. Slowing dangerously for the third day running, Kraft at last makes out the text. GET OUT OF YOUR CARS.

Sure. Why not? Billboards are scriptural, hereabouts. Billboards for multihundred-dollar tennies, for CDs fiscal and audio, for song collections of searing social protest, for attitudinal adjustments, for advertising firms, for out-of-work actresses, for billboards. Why not a billboard proclaiming a commuters’ general strike? Some self-sponsoring eco-terrorist has evidently shimmied up the stainless steel under cover of night, swung out onto the overhang, and, suspended over half a dozen lanes of traffic (flowing, in these parts, even in dead darkness), masking-taped this manifesto in a prominent spot where it is nevertheless entirely illegible to all but the most incurably print-curious.

Kraft holds up instantly irate traffic just long enough to make out a smaller, scribbled footnote that has sprung up the night before. Some second death-defying maniac has taken up the gauntlet, shimmied the pole, and in midair, appended below GET OUT OF YOUR CARS the codicil, AND FIGHT LIKE A MAN. Exercising the old First Amendment rights, which will of course be suppressed tomorrow by municipal hook and ladder at taxpayer expense, in the name of public safety.

He squeezes out of the file, ramping down to surface roads. With deceleration and return to stoplights comes the acrid-sweet, sickly seductive scent of mildewing vinyl. The aroma has gone tainted since he started working this district, as if petrochemicals rotted like living things. Maroon-brown patinas of condensing air each seal an invisible vintage. The noxious residue, the breakdown skeins of hydrocarbon linkages as long as his nasal hairs fall beneath focal notice now. He smells it only on those days when the bouquet is a little fruiter than usual. Even the radio stations have long ago given up warning the aged or cardiac impaired to stay indoors.

He skirts that neighborhood set to the torch one week a quarter century ago. The car insinuates itself down these streets the way Scando-wegian types are advised to walk them, when suicide simply can’t be avoided: hands out of the pockets, eyes straight ahead. Keep to a reasonable but not aggressive clip. Act like you know where you’re going.

He does, in the short term, anyway: six-month stint at the Knife and Gun Club. Three weeks into the rotation, his unwisely Caucasoid viscera have already resigned themselves to winding up on the wrong side of the retractors, any stoplight now.

Pediatric service at the public No-Pay? Well you might ask. Luck of the draw, his adviser insisted. Already been all over the rest of town, swapped about like a utility infielder whose teams are too numerous to fit on the back of the bubblegum card. Rotation comes with the turf: Onco up in the Hills. Thoracic on the edge of LaLa Land, repairing the Cars of the Stars. Plastics at Trauma-by-the-Sea. The program demands that everybody do some public service, and Kraft’s stint happens to be Pediatrics. Thank your deity of choice too. Could have been dealt the ER service out this way. That would have been, well, call it murder.

Bad enough having to listen to Emergency’s own Dr. Tommy Plummer go on about it over Sunrise Sandwiches and chocolate-smeared bagels at the Carver cantina. “See, Kraft, it’s like this. Distribution of wealth gets iniquitous enough …”

“‘Inequitable,’ perhaps, Thomas?”

“Whatever. I’m liberal. Point is, wank the bills around long enough, pretty soon every day’s a jolly holiday. Guy comes in last night. Big intercostal hack crescenting clear through his pect major. Stick misses the subclavian by about a centimeter. ‘My girlfriend, she cut me.’ I don’t know what these people use for steak knives, but this looked like a number seven recurve. Nice downward slash. I’m sponging the guy off while they’re sleeping him, and I come across this big keloid scar just a shade to the side of the fresh entry. Sure enough, it’s on his chart. He was in last year. Gotta ask him if it’s the same girlfriend.”

The usual pecking-order preening: We do the sweat shop stuff while you sissy-mollies lollygag around in Kiddieland. Medimachismo. What other hobby can you have, when work consists of getting bloodied to a pulp around the clock, than cultivating masochistic one-upmanship? Plummer can afford to wax radiant in relating call night’s worst waking nightmares. He too only temps here in no-man’s-lan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Operation Wandering Soul