The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  She navigated out to Farview, where Mark had bought a catalog house just months after their father’s death with his portion of the meager inheritance. She got lost and had to ask for directions to River Run Estates from the Walter Brennan impersonator at the Four Corners Texaco. Psychological. She’d never wanted Mark living there. But after Cappy died, Mark listened to no one.

  At last she found the modular Homestar, the pride of Mark’s adulthood. He’d bought it just before starting as a Maintenance and Repair Technician II at the meat packing plant in Lexington. The day Mark wrote the down-payment check, he ran around town celebrating as if he’d just gotten engaged.

  A fresh loop of dog shit welcomed her inside the front door. Blackie cowered in the living room corner, whimpering in guilty confusion. Karin let the poor creature out and fed her. In the postage-stamp yard, the border collie reverted to herding things—squirrels, snow motes, fence posts—anything to convince the humans that she was still worthy of love.

  The heat was down. Only her brother’s habit of never completely shutting off a tap had kept the pipes from bursting. She scooped the cone of shit into the frosty yard. The dog crept up to her, willing to make friends, but wanting first to know Mark’s whereabouts. Karin lowered herself to the stoop and pressed her face into the frozen railing.

  Shivering, she went back inside. She could ready the house for him, at least: cleaning that hadn’t been done in weeks. In what her brother called the family room, she straightened the stacks of truck-customization and cheesecake magazines. She gathered scattered discs and stacked them behind the paneled bar that Mark, with limited success, had installed himself. A poster of a girl in a black leather bikini slung over a vintage truck’s hood sagged off the bedroom wall. Disgusted, she tore it down. Only when she looked at the scraps in her hands did she see what she’d done. She found a hammer in the utility closet and tried to tack the poster back up, but it was too torn. She threw it in the bin, cursing herself.

  The bathroom was a science-fair project in full bloom. Mark had no cleaning supplies except pipe cleaners and Black Leather Soap. She searched the kitchen for vinegar or ammonia, but found nothing more solvent than Old Style. Under the sink, she turned up a rag-filled bucket with a can of scouring powder that thumped when she lifted it. She twisted the lid and it popped open. Inside was a packet of pills.

  She sat down on the kitchen floor and cried. She considered heading back to Sioux City, cutting her losses and resuming her life. She picked at the pills, her fingers flipping them. Dollhouse accessories or sports equipment: white plates, red barbells, tiny purple saucers with unreadable monograms. Who was he hiding them from, down there, besides himself? She thought she recognized the local favorite: Ecstasy. She’d taken some once, two years ago in Boulder. Had spent the evening mind-merging with friends and hugging perfect strangers. Numb, she held a pill and rubbed it against her sagging tongue. She tore it away and fed the whole stash down the disposal. She let the yipping Blackie back inside. The dog nosed around her calves, needing her. “It’s all right,” she promised the creature. “Everything’s going to be back again, soon.”

  She moved on to the bedroom, a museum of cows’ teeth, colored minerals, and hundreds of exotic bottle caps mounted on homemade stands. She inspected the closet. Alongside the mostly dark denim and corduroy, three grease-stained jumpsuits with the IBP logo hung on a hook above his caked work boots, the ones he wore every day, heading to the slaughter. The thought sliced through her: things she should have handled the day before. She phoned the plant. Iowa Beef Processors: World’s largest supplier of premium beef, pork, and allied products. She got an automated menu. Then another. Then chirpy music, then a chirpy person, then a croaky person who kept calling her ma’am. Ma’am. Somewhere along the line, she’d become her own mother. A personnel counselor walked her through the steps to start Mark’s disability. For the hour it took to transact the forms, she felt the release of being useful. The pleasure of it burned.

  She called her own employers, up in Sioux. They were a big outfit, the third-largest computer vendor in the country. Years ago, in the early days of the PC clone boom, they’d broken out of the pack of identical mail-order vendors on the simple gimmick of running herds of Holsteins in their ads. Mark had laughed at her when she’d dragged back to Nebraska from Colorado and got a job with them. You’re going to work complaints for the Cow Computer Company? She couldn’t explain. After years of what she’d thought of as career advancement—graduating from phone receptionist in Chicago to ad-copy saleswoman for trendy trade magazines in Los Angeles, progressing to right-hand woman and finally company face for two dotcom entrepreneurs in Boulder who were going to make millions with an online world where people could develop rich alter egos, but who ended up suing each other—she’d slammed back down to earth. Past thirty, she had no more time or pride to risk on ambition. Nothing wrong with honest gruntwork for a secure company that lacked all pretension. If her fate lay in consumer relations, she would relate to consumers as expertly as humanly possible. In fact, she’d discovered a hidden aptitude for complaint-handling. Two e-mails and fifteen minutes on the phone, and she could convince a customer ready to firebomb the outfit that she and her multi-thousand-employee firm wanted nothing more than the man’s lifelong friendship and respect.

  She couldn’t explain to her brother or anyone: status and satisfaction meant nothing. Competence was all. At long last, her life had stopped misleading her. She had a job she performed well, a new one-bedroom condo near the river in South Sioux, even a nice little shared nervousness with a friendly mammal in tech support that threatened to turn into a relationship any month now. Then this. One phone call, and reality found her out again.

  No matter. Nothing in Sioux needed her. The one that really needed her lay in the hospital, on a dark island, with no other family to look out for him.

  She reached her office manager, smoothing her hair as he came on the line. He looked up her vacation days and said she could stay out until a week from the coming Monday. As self-effacingly as she could, she explained that she wasn’t sure that would be enough. It probably had to be enough, her manager said. She thanked him, apologized again, hung up, and returned to more furious cleaning.

  With only dish soap and paper towels, she brought Mark’s place back to livable. She studied herself in the bathroom mirror as she cleaned the spatter-spots: a thirty-one-year-old professional soother, three and a half pounds overweight with red hair eighteen inches too long for her age, desperate for something to fix. She could rise to this. Mark would be back soon, gleefully respattering the mirror. She would return to Cow Computer country, where people respected the work she did and only strangers asked her for help. She smoothed her dry cheeks back toward her ears and slowed her breathing. She finished the sink and tub, then went out to the car and checked her backpack: two pullovers, a pair of twill slacks, and three changes of underwear. She drove out to the Kearney outlet strip and bought a sweater, two pairs of jeans, and some moisturizer. Even that much tempted fate.

  I am No One, but Tonight on North Line Road…She asked around the trauma unit about the note. By all accounts, it had simply appeared on the bedside stand shortly after Mark’s admission. A Hispanic clerical nurse with an elaborate crucifix necklace studded with turquoise boulders insisted that no one but Karin and hospital personnel had been allowed to see him for the first thirty-six hours. She produced the paperwork to prove it. The nurse tried to confiscate the slip of paper, but Karin refused to surrender it. She needed it for Mark, when he came to.

  They moved him from trauma to a room where she could sit with him. He lay stretched on the bed, a felled mannequin. Two days later, he opened his eyes for half a minute, only to squeeze them shut. But they opened again, at dusk that evening. Over the next day, she counted six more eye openings. Each time, he looked out on some living horror film.

  His face began moving like a rubber costume mask. His unplugged gaze sought her out. She sat at bedside, s
lipping on scree at the lip of a deep quarry. “What is it, Mark? Tell me. I’m here.”

  She begged the nurses for something to do, anything, however small, that might help. They gave her special nylon socks and basketball high-tops to put on Mark and remove again, every few hours. She did this every forty minutes, massaging his feet as well. It kept his blood circulating and prevented clots. She sat at bedside, squeezing and kneading. Once, she caught herself sub-vocalizing her old 4-H pledge:

  my Head to clearer thinking,

  my Heart to greater loyalty,

  my Hands to larger service,

  and my Health to better living…

  as if she were back in high school and Mark were her project for the county fair.

  Larger service: she’d looked for it her whole life, armed with nothing more than a bachelor’s in sociology from UNK. Teacher’s aide on the Winnebago reservation, volunteer at homeless feeding stations in downtown L.A., pro bono clerical worker for a law firm in Chicago. For the sake of a prospective boyfriend in Boulder, she’d even briefly served as street demonstrator in antiglobalization marches, chanting out the protests with a zeal that could not mask her profound sense of silliness. She would have stayed home forever, given herself to keeping her family intact, had it not been for her family. Now the last other member of it lay next to her, inert, unable to object to her services.

  The doctor put a metal tap in her brother’s brain, draining it. Monstrous, but it worked. The pressure in his skull dropped. The cysts and sacs shrank. His brain now had all the room it needed. She told him as much. “All you need to do now is heal.”

  Hours went by in a heartbeat. But the days stretched out without end. She sat by the bed, cooling his body with special chilling blankets, taking off his shoes and putting them on again. All the while, she spoke to him. He never showed any hint of hearing, but she kept talking. The eardrums still had to move, the nerves behind them ripple. “Brought you some roses from the IGA. Aren’t they pretty? They smell good, too. The nurse is changing the empties on the drip again, Markie. Don’t worry; I’m still here. You’ve got to get up and see the cranes this year, before they go. They’re out of this world. I’ve never seen so many of them. Coming into town in packs. Bunch of them landed on the roof of the McDonald’s. They’re up to something. Jeez, Mark. Your feet are ripe. They smell like a bad Roquefort.”

  Smell my feet. Her ritual punishment for any transgression, starting the year he passed her in strength. She smelled his stagnant body again, for the first time since they were children. Roquefort and curdled puke. Like the feral kitten they found hiding under the porch when she was nine. Sweet-sour, like the forest of mold on the slice of moist bread Mark left in a covered dish on top of the furnace vent in fifth grade, for a science fair, and forgot about. “We’ll draw you a good bubble bath when you get home.”

  She told him about the stream of visitors to his comatose neighbor’s bed: women in smock dresses; men in white shirts and black trousers, like 1960s Mormons on their missions. He took in all her stories, stonelike, his smallest face muscles stilled.

  In week two, an older man came into the shared room wearing a puffy coat that made him look like a shiny blue Michelin man. He stood at the bed of Mark’s unconscious roommate, shouting. “Gilbert. Boy? You hear me? Wake up, now. We don’t have time for such foolishness. That’s enough, hear. We got to get on back home.” A nurse came to check on the commotion and led the protesting man away. After that, Karin stopped speaking to Mark. He didn’t seem to notice.

  Dr. Hayes said that the fifteenth day was the point of no return. Nine-tenths of closed-head trauma victims who came back came back by then. “The eyes are good news,” he told her. “His reptilian brain is showing nice activity.”

  “He has a reptile brain?”

  Dr. Hayes smiled, like a doctor in an old public health film. “We all do. A record of the long way here.”

  Clearly he wasn’t from around these parts. Most locals hadn’t come the long way. Both Schluter parents believed evolution was Communist propaganda. Mark himself had his doubts. If all the millions of species are constantly evolving, how come we’re the only ones who got smart?

  The doctor elaborated. “The brain is a mind-boggling redesign. But it can’t escape its past. It can only add to what’s already there.”

  She pictured those mangled Kearney mansions, glorious old wooden Victorians enlarged with brick in the 1930s and again in the 1970s with pressboard and aluminum. “What’s his reptile brain…doing? What kind of nice activity?”

  Dr. Hayes reeled off names: medulla, pons, midbrain, cerebellum. She copied the words into a tiny spiral notebook where she recorded everything, to look up later. The neurologist made the brain sound more rickety than the old toy trucks Mark used to assemble from discarded cabinet parts and sawn-off detergent bottles.

  “What about his higher…? What’s above reptile—some kind of bird?”

  “The next higher structure is the mammalian.”

  Her lips moved as he talked, assisting. She couldn’t help it. “And my brother’s?”

  Dr. Hayes grew guarded. “That’s harder to say. We don’t see any explicit damage. There is activity. Regulation. The hippocampus and amygdala seem intact, but we did see some spiking in the amygdala, where some of the negative emotions, like fear, start.”

  “You’re saying my brother is afraid?” She waved off the doctor’s reassurances, thrilled. Mark was feeling. Fear or anything: it didn’t matter. “What about his…human brain? The part above the mammal?”

  “He’s piecing himself back together. Activity in his prefrontal cortex is struggling to synchronize into consciousness.”

  She asked Dr. Hayes for every pamphlet the hospital had on head injury. She underlined all the hopeful suggestions in green fine-line marker. The brain is our last frontier. The more we learn about it, the more we see how much more there is to know. The next time she met Dr. Hayes, she was ready.

  “Doctor, have you considered any of the new head-injury treatments?” She scrambled in her shoulder bag for her little spiral notebook. “Neuroprotective agents? Cerestat? PEG-SOD?”

  “Wow. I’m impressed. You’ve done your homework.”

  She tried to look as competent as she wanted him to be.

  Dr. Hayes steepled his fingers and touched them to his lips. “Things happen fast in this field. PEG-SOD has been discontinued, after poor results in a second Phase III trial. And I don’t think you want cerestat.”

  “Doctor.” Her client-relations voice. “My brother is struggling to open his eyes. You say he may be terrified. We’ll take anything you can give him.”

  “All research on cerestat—Aptiganel—has been halted. A fifth of all patients taking it have died.”

  “But you have other drugs, don’t you?” She looked down at her notebook, tremoring. At any moment, her hands would turn to doves and fly away.

  “Most are still in the early testing. You’d have to be in a clinical trial.”

  “Aren’t we, already? I mean…” She waved toward her brother’s room. In the back of her mind, she heard the radio jingle: Good Samaritan Hospital…the largest medical facility between Lincoln and Denver.

  “You’d have to change hospitals. Go where they’re running the studies.”

  She looked at the man. With proper grooming, he could be the advice doctor on breakfast television. If he saw her at all, it was only as a complication. He probably found her pathetic, in every measurable way. Something in her reptilian brain hated him.

  Rises up in flooded fields. There is a wave, a rocking in the reeds. Pain again, then nothing.

  When sense returns, he is drowning. Father teaching him to swim. Current in his limbs. Four years old, and his father floating him. Flying, then flailing, then falling. His father grabbing his leg, pulling him under. Holding him beneath the surface, stiff hand pressing down his head until all bubbles stop. River will bite, boy. Be ready.

  But there is no bite, no
ready. There is only drown.

  There comes a pyramid of light, burning diamonds, twisting fields of stars. His body threads triangles of neon, a tunnel rising. The water over him, his lungs on fire, and then he explodes upward, toward air.

  Where his mouth was, just smooth skin. Solid swallows up that hole. House remodeled; windows papered over. Door no more a door. Muscles pull lips but no space to open. Wires only, where words were. Face bent wrong and folded up into its own eyes. Slipped in a metal bed, the hell he must be in. His smallest move a pain worse than dying. Maybe death is done already. Done all ways, in one tip of his life and lifting. Who’d want to live after such a fall?

  A room of machines, the space he can’t reach. Something splits out from him. People move in and smooth away too fast. Faces push up to his mouthless face, pushing words into him. He chews them and puffs sound back. Someone says be patient, but to not him. Be patient, be a patient is what he must be.

  This may be days. No saying. Time flaps about, wings broken. Voices pass, some circle back, but one’s as close to always there as there is. A face almost his face, so close it wants something of him, if only at least words. That face a she and like water weeping. Nothing she is will say what happened.

  One need tries to tear out of him. Need to say, more than the need to be. If a mouth, then all would be out. Then this she would know what happened, know his death wasn’t what it seems.

  Pressure fills, like fluid crushed. His head: endless pressure, buried already. Sap streams out of his inner ear. Blood out his gorged eyes. Killing pressure, even after all that seeps out of him. A million more schooling thoughts than his brain can hold.

  A face hovers near, forming words on fire. Says Mark, stay, and he would die to make her stop keeping him alive. He pushes back against the thing collapsing him. Muscles pull but skin won’t move. Something slack. He works forever to winch the tendons in his neck. At last his head tilts. Later, lifetimes, lifts the edge of his upper lip.