Operation Wandering Soul by Richard Powers

Author:Richard Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Published: 2021-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

The boy grows manic, racing out of control. He wants everything, all at once. He demands a continuous barrage of mil-spec mayhem. When that’s not forthcoming, he manufactures it. C’mon: new game. Scale-model Grand Prix down the emergency stairwell. Multiplayer stock market speculation with real quotes and Monopoly money. Murder in the dark, the hushed hysterics too soft for the night nurses to hear. Helicopter spotting on the roof, gawking at today’s incoming wounded. He must live through those sixty years he has acquired without experiencing, all in the space of the next three weeks. He plunges the ward into a hopped-up nonstop campaign of chaos, and only the knowledge that it will all stop suddenly and soon prevents the pros from cuffing him.

Linda foresaw the whole reaction the day Nico checked in. Patently transparent—an old man’s textbook love me, look past my rhinoceros hideousness. All the same, she finds herself locking horns with the little beast more and more frequently. Some days she just doesn’t care what motivates his constant, vindictive disruption. She’d like to whack him one first and do the social worker stuff later. As for his wider subversion of hospital life—“You call this food? Lemme in that kitchen. Hey, how’s about a movie theater in this dump? Casino. Dancing girls”—more power to him. But when he busts in on her Duchenne’s support group, hysterically trying to shame them out of their progressive muscle wastage by threatening to use the four of them as a baseball diamond, she and Nicolino have their first shouting showdown.

Problem is, three of her four disintegrating dystrophy boys side with their tormentor. Leave him be. Nico’s okay. He’s our Main Mind, our man with a plan to take command. (We, after all, may live to see the extreme old age of thirty.) It’s a sympathy vote for a kid picked off in a way even grimmer than their own. But there’s something more than mere sympathy in this deference to Nico’s new ward order. The others have been just waiting for a knee-high Boss Tweed to come along and tell them what to do next. Not just any newcomer; this one.

Anyone who has exploited prepubescence for any campaign, however well meaning, anybody who has ever trotted out pasteurized, freckled, fairybook simperers to pitch their wholesome radiance, has forgotten the lay of this land. Traveled too far in the interim. Remember the children. What of the children? Doesn’t anyone care about the children? Rubbish, all of it. For Linda’s money, these sales reps confuse innocence with a lack of opportunity. Been too long since they’ve gotten down on their shins to consider the turf. It’s desperate down here at half-pint level. They’re clutching and mean, and they take no prisoners.

Childhood is not that parade of vibrant kids teaching the world to sing. That’s a new one: as far as Espera has read, the product of the last fifty years. She knows the histories from school. Time was when domestic theory wrote the whole batch off as changeling babies, perversely truculent sub- and semihumans.

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