He senses something expected of him, a rendezvous all arranged and penned into his agenda by unknown secretary. He feels it, the weight of specific disaster, of predetermined public breakdown settling in for the evening, locating the point of perfect parasitic attachment, homing in with all the inevitability of an earnest grade-school mathematician employing approximate roots to close in on an irrational decimal. Armies of omens assemble themselves, fall into the only formation he affords them these days — the short roster, the cursory catalog standing in for a more comprehensive account of approaching capitulation. Generic alphabets, glossaries of collective pathology you do not want enumerated at greater length.
What is this place? The lightest attention limns it: the evidence is everywhere, widening with the decline of light. Poverty in positive feedback. Cascade of chain-failing banks. Earnings not even enough to cover debt service. Volume discounts rewarding the spree mentality. Illiteracy passed down as the only family heirloom, actually cultivated by every trick in the marketing book, because merchandisers, like politicians, prosper from a maimed electorate. Ten-year-olds who can tell caliber and make of a handgun by sound alone, especially in the dark. Toxins trickling down into the aquifer, from which they can never be filtered. All the while, the index of leading indicators — wealth measured by the ability to wage disaster — doctors itself until its message is bearable, even downright rosy to the ears of the self-proclaimed best-informed people on earth. Of the two alternatives in the ancient grudge match, Thanatos clearly has more future in it.
Pale, cheap, and prosaic, this doomsday laundry list. Kraft feels it grow glib under his suturing fingers. He takes facile pleasure in confirming his worst fears, talking himself up onto the hospital rooftop in his bloodied surgical robes to wait for the arrival of this year's all-obliterating comet. Anemic, stripped even of outrage. The bleakest symptom on his list is less than quotidian. They are easy, breezy, light conversational cocktail gambits sung to the swish of a vein-skewering swizzle stick. Thus all the more horrific. When collapse becomes aperitif, it must be here at last. When the end is announced in silence, in blase acquiescence, then it must truly be the end.
Polyphony pounds through Kraft's head as he shoves the point of the needle in and under, punching repeatedly through the drawn drumskin that lines the soft insides of the Rapparition's mouth. Let's have a jammer—uh! In the slammer. Lulla, lu la la, and lo, alas! Behold what slaughter he doth make, shedding the blood of infants all, sweet Savior for thy sake.
He can feel himself running aground on bone shoals that haven't been named, that didn't exist until he blundered against them with his field sewing kit. The voice-leading of his obsessive ditties grows too dense for him to keep the competing lines straight. His repeated, rustling whistles — a dozen notes at a pop, each ritornelloed perhaps a quarter of a thousand times over the course of this operation, alternating fragments forced through the tiny crack decades ago chipped in his central incisor that for some reason he's never had capped — are getting on the nerves of his fellow team members something fierce.
He knows how much these cheerful, trilled flute-de-loops must be driving the whole surgical crew up the blessed institutional walls. But he can't help himself. That's the sound. Uh. That's the sound. The sound of his horn, his oldest continuous possession aside from birth certificate, neglected, long unplayable, but still sitting at the bottom of the closet in that apartment standing in for a more permanent abode. The sound of something out of his own fading repertoire, a bit of musical past he impels himself to conjure up from the scrap heap. A tinny, treble, obbligato rescue me, pitted against the short list of inevitables. The idiot whistling is some reincarnation of saving playground charm. Or perhaps it just traces a random resonance, a tone-row association triggered by the accidental conjunction of prepuber repairs thrown at him as of late, of lulla, lullaby.
Recapping in miniature the general blackout between Kraft's pre-teens and his thirties, the operating room vanishes. The set gives way to one of those membership discount stores, his city's most distinguished contribution to world betterment. The place is crawling with self-proclaimed discounts, but only for those who put up enough grubstake to secure the photo club card. The fee is trivial — just high enough to screen out the underclass. The only illegals allowed within spitting circumference of the showrooms are hired under the table to swab the decks perpetually with blisterproof paint.
Closing the Rapparition, changing out of the scrubs, heading down to the subterranean lot, blasting his automotive escape out of Fortress Carver, negotiating the freeway, finding his way to this warehouse, and flashing yet another private badge to win entry: all these steps fade to a blur at best. He has a generic memory of the overall process, the recall of one who has read the crib notes but not the book. He flails at his belt to check for his beeper, but does not feel it there. All the same, he feels queasily certain that he must still be on call.
Memory loss: a thing that virtually every text Kraft has ever been made to memorize would unhesitatingly classify as No Goodish. More alarming, he can't seem to get worked up about his brief disappearance. He's willing to flow with the symptoms, string them along with the hope of staying supple for a potential shot at the broader diagnosis. And yet, how far is he going to get without a complete work-up, beginning with a decent history and physical? He's become exactly the sort of patient he most dreads, the stuff of Plummer's rolling burlesques. Childhood diseases? M-maybe. Any trace of this in your family? You mean, like, mother, father…?
He hasn't a clue in creation why he is here. Here in this store, that is, let alone any wider, more imponderable locale. At this point, he can't even recall why he paid for membership in the first place, except to prove that twenty bucks would still buy him into some anesthetizing club somewhere.
Well, let it be retail then, the sheer, diversionary power of the stuff. And harbor the hope that here amid the available merchandise, one might find the best place to hold vigil against the quiet pogrom already under way. One or another clearance trough in this charnel house of bargains must cradle the ticket item that he'd been after when the lights went out. Track it down, kick its unholy can, freeze the statue maker, bluff the blindman, all-come-in-free-o!
Problem is, the commodity he is after could be anything, anything this heartbreaking, magnificent mess of a country marks down in today's race to clear inventory. Perhaps he's in pressing need of some processor or another — word, data, food, sound, trash, or love. Could be this here artificial-intelligence beer-can Thermos ring. Or this: a mock-membrane-pad simulation of a security alarm system to fasten to his front door, instant advertisement to smart-shopping, card-holding break-and-enterers that his home is in fact prostrate and defenseless. A key chain that comes when you whistle? A tape recorder that starts recording eight seconds before it is turned on? An own-yer-own, home version of some private-reserve cinema classic, say, Seven Brides for Seven Samurai?
He figures it can't be this last, as he'd have to buy a player first. He has so far failed to do so, knowing that whatever device he might settle on would be obsoleted (as the English-obsoleting term of the moment has it) ten minutes before he could tweak the thing's pots. Nevertheless, home electronics alone keeps his speculative faculties happily suspended for over an hour. He stands gazing, in fascinated stupor, at a gargantuan image thrown up on a flat-screen, wraparound, wall-sized, live-in, digital stereo television larger than his apartment, larger, in fact, than his entire bet-hedging, twitch-appeasing leisure existence. The eerie, green-shifted specter waltzing around up there seems weirdly familiar, despite the chromosmear. It moves when he moves, ducks, shadowboxes in perfect synchrony, and hey! Howdy, Dr. Kraft. I'm on TV.