His outward progress was breathtaking. Even his friends were shocked by the great leaps of evolution, from one visit to the next. He talked more than he had before the accident. He swung from bouts of rage into a sweetness he’d lost at the age of eight. She told him the doctors wanted to move him out of the hospital. Mark glowed. He thought he was going home. “Can you tell my sister I’ve got the green light? Tell her Mark Schluter is out of here. Whatever’s been holding her up, she’ll know where to find me.”
She bit her lip and refused even to nod. She’d read in one of Daniel’s neurology books never to humor delusions.
“She’ll be worried about me. Man, you have to promise me. Wherever she’s gone, she needs to know what’s happening. She was like always looking after me? That’s her big thing. Personal claim to fame. Saved my life once. My father came this close to snapping my neck like a pencil. I’ll tell you about it someday. Personal stuff. But trust me: I’d be dead without my sister.”
It tore her up, to look on and say nothing. And yet, she felt a sick fascination at the chance to learn what Mark really said about her when talking to someone else. She could survive this, for however long it took him to come back to reason. And his reason was solidifying daily.
“Maybe they’re keeping her away from me. Why won’t they let me talk to her? Am I somebody’s science project? They want to see if I’ll mistake you for her?” He saw her distress, but mistook it for indignation. “Hey, okay. You’ve helped me, too, in your own way. You’re here every day. Walking, reading, whatever. I don’t know what you want. But I’m the grateful recipe.”
“Recipient,” she said. He stared at her, baffled. “You said ‘recipe.’ You mean ‘recipient.’”
He scowled. “I was using the singular. You look a lot like her, you know? Maybe not quite as pretty. But damn close.”
A wave of vertigo rolled over her. Steadying herself, she reached into her shoulder pouch and pulled out the note. “Look at this, Mark! I’m not the only one who has been looking out for you.” Unplanned therapy. She knew he needed to recover more, before plunging back into the accident. But she thought it might shake him loose, bring him back to himself. Prove her authority, somehow.
He fisted the paper and stared at it. He squinted from different distances, then handed it back to her. “Tell me what it says.”
“Mark! You can read. You just read two pages for the therapist this morning.”
“Holy jump up and sit down. Anybody ever tell you you sound exactly like my mother?”
The woman she’d spent her life trying not to become. “Here. Have another look.”
“Hey! It’s not my problem, all right? I mean, look at that creeping thing. That’s not writing. Some kind of spiderweb. Tree bark or something. You tell me what it says.”
The writing was spectral. It snaked like their Swedish grandmother’s illegible longhand. Karin put the writer at eighty years old, an ancient immigrant afraid of making any contact that would require surrendering information to a database. She read the words off the scrap, although she’d long ago memorized them. I am No One but Tonight on North Line Road GOD led me to you so You could Live and bring back someone else.
Mark pressed the scar that flowed up his forehead. He took the note back from her. “What’s that supposed to mean? God led somebody? Well, if God’s so big on me, how come He took my perfect truck and flipped it in the first place? Whoosh. Like shooting craps with me.”
She took his arm. “You remember that?”
He shook off her hand. “So you’ve been telling me. Like twenty times a day. How could you forget?” He fingered the note. “No, man. That’s too many steps. Just to get my attention? Not even God takes that many steps.”
What their mother had said the year before, about her wasting death: You’d think the Lord would be a little more efficient.
“Whoever wrote this note found you, Mark. They came to see you in Intensive Care. They left you this. They wanted you to know.”
A noise tore out of him, the squeal of a dog whose hind legs were just run over by his master’s station wagon. “Know what? What am I supposed to do with this? Go help somebody else come back from the dead? How do I do that? I don’t even know where the dead are.”
Cold clawed up Karin’s spine. Dark things, games the police had hinted at. “What do you mean, Mark? What are you saying?”
He waved his arms around his head, warding off evil like a swarm of bees. “How am I supposed to know what I mean?”
“What…dead people don’t you…?”
“I don’t even know who is dead. I don’t know where my sister is. I don’t even know where I am. This whole so-called hospital could be a movie studio where they take people to fool them into thinking that everything’s regular.”
She mumbled apologies. The note meant nothing. She reached to take it back. But he grabbed it away from her.
“I need to find who wrote this. This person knows what happened to me.” He scrambled in his back pockets, his favorite baggy, low-riding, black jeans that Karin had brought him from home. “Shit! I don’t even have a wallet to put this in. No social certificate card. No fucking photo ID! No wonder I’m nowhere.”
“I’ll bring your wallet tomorrow.”
He stared up at her, his face flared. “How are you going to get into my home to get it?” When she said nothing, his shoulders collapsed. “Well, I suppose if they can operate on your brain without you even knowing, they’ve probably got the keys to your damn house.”
They ask Mark Schluter who he thinks he’s supposed to be. Sounds like an easy one, but their questions all have little tricks. Always more to them than you might think. God knows why, but they try to trip him up. All he can do is answer and stay cool.
They ask him where he lives. He points to all the medical crap, everybody running around in whites. Shouldn’t they be telling him? They change the question: Does he know his home address? Mark Schluter, 6737 Sherman, Kearney, Nebraska. Reporting for duty. They go: Is he sure? How sure do they want him to be? They ask if his house is in Kearney or Farview. Just another desperate attempt to confuse him. Sure, he lives in Farview now. But they never said he needed to answer in the present tense.
They ask him what he does. Trick question. Hang with his friends. Go hear bands, at the Bullet or elsewhere. Check for ground effects on eBay. Do vids. Watch TV. Run the dog. He’s got a thief character online whose stats he builds up when nothing else is happening. He does not say the obvious: that they’re treating him like an online character himself.
Is that all? All he does? Well, they don’t have to know all. Not their business, what goes on behind closed doors. But no; they’re like: What does he do to make a living? Where does he work? Well, why didn’t they ask as much in the first place?
He tells them about Utility Maintenance and Repair II. Which machines are a bitch and which are cake to maintain. Only in his third year, and already earning sixteen big ones an hour. They don’t ask him how he feels about the animals, which is just as well. He hates it when people ask. Everybody eats the damn animals; somebody has to kill them. And that’s not even him: all he does is watch over the gear. He gets to wondering why they want to know so much about the plant. He hasn’t been in for a few days, and perhaps there’s funny stuff afoot. Certain people might want his job. It’s decent money and good work, especially in a recession. Tons of guys would kill for worse.
They ask him who’s the vice president under the first bush. Insane. What next? Senators in the trees? They tell him to count backward from a hundred by threes. Is this a particularly useful skill, might one inquire? They give him tons of quizzes—circling things, crossing them out, and whatnot. Even here, they jerk him around, make the print way too small, or give him ten seconds to do half an hour of work. He tells them he likes his life and doesn’t really want to audition for anything else; if they want to fire him from the test program, feel free. They just laugh and give him more tests.
Something weird about
all this grilling. Doctors saying they’re his friends. Tests proving he can’t do certain things, when obviously he can. They should be testing the woman who’s impersonating his sister.
His buds come by, but even they are strange. Duane-o seems regular enough. You can’t duplicate him. Get him started on any topic—terrorism, whatever: Are you familiar with the concept of jihad? Here’s the thing the State Department doesn’t understand about the Islamicists. They can’t help belonging to a foreign country.
Islamicists? I thought they were called Muslims. Am I wrong in calling them Muslims?
Well, “wrong.” Wrong is a relative term. Nobody’s going to call you “wrong,” per se…
A stream of unbelievably meaningless crap, like only the Cain Man can deliver. Rupp looks and sounds okay, too, but there’s something off with his timing. Tommy Rupp is never off. The man who got Mark hired at the plant, who taught him how to shoot, who turned Mark on to undreamed-of alternate experiences: One-shot Rupp, of everyone, should be able to explain what’s going on.
He asks Rupp if he knows anything about the chick who’s pretending to be Karin. The guy gives him a look like Mark’s turned werewolf. Something has infiltrated the man’s food supply. He’s so uptight all the time, like it’s always somebody’s funeral. Real Ruppie never gave a shit. He knew how to have a time. Real Ruppie could stand in the cooler all day long, toting cow quarters around and not even feel it. Nothing ever froze that guy. This guy is frozen constantly.
The whole setup is deeply disturbing, and all Mark can do is roll with it. They’re hiding something from him, something bad. His truck, destroyed. His sister, missing. Everyone claims innocence. No one will tell him about the accident or the hours just before and after it. He can only sit tight, play dumb, and see what he can learn.
Duane-o and Rupp make him play five-card. Therapy, they say. So okay: he’s not doing anything else. But they use trick cards where the clubs and spades look the same. The deck is funny, too, with way too many sixes, sevens, and eights. They play for IBP packing stickers; Mark’s stack vanishes like the buffalo. They keep telling him he’s already drawn cards, when he hasn’t. A dumbass game for pissants. He tells them as much. They’re like: Schluter, this is your favorite game of all time. He doesn’t bother correcting them.
They spend a lot of time listening to mix CDs that Duane downloads and burns. A lot has happened to music while Mark was away. The songs jack with him. Jesus! Would you listen to this? Weirdest stuff I’ve ever heard. What is this, country metal?
This upsets Rupp. Stop squirming and use your ears, Gus. Country metal! You still on morphine, or something?
Country metal exists, Cain insists. It’s a totally recognized genre. You’re not onto that? Duane’s the real Cain, no matter what.
But the looks those two shoot each other make Mark want to hide. When they’re near, he can’t hear himself think. Too much happening at once for him to see what’s wrong. But when they’re gone, he has no leads to follow. You can’t explain what you can’t see.
Problem is, the Karin look-alike seems so real. He’s sitting by himself, respecting the laws, listening to something restful, when she comes by to harass him. She won’t quit with the sister act. She hears the music. Hawaiian vocal trios?
I don’t know. They’re like Polynesian polkas, or something.
She’s all: Where’d you get this?
No say. An orderly gave it to me, for being a nice guy.
Mark? Are you serious?
What? You think I stole it from some Alzheimer’s spaceman? What do you care? Are you tracking my activities now?
She goes: You really enjoy listening to this?
Well, come on. What’s not to love?
It’s just that…No, I’m sure you do. I bet it’s good. Her eyes, all red and puffy, like someone’s salted them.
You don’t know me. I listen to this stuff all the time. I like to listen to, you know, stupid music. When nobody’s around. Under the helmet—the, the earmuffs.
Like he’s just told her he’s into cross dressing, or something. All cranked up. I’m sure, she says. Me, too.
He doesn’t quite get it. It really tortures her. He doesn’t get anything. He needs to talk less, watch more. He could write things down, but the pages might be used as evidence.
Even Bonnie, beautiful simple Bonnie, has changed on him. She’s like a ghost, something out of an old TV show, little pioneer cap and dress down to the floor. She’s got some new life or something, living on roots, in a grass-covered trench, like a giant prairie dog, out by the Interstate Arch. She has to pretend her mother dies in a snowstorm and her father dies from drought, like something out of the freaking Bible, even though her parents are both alive and living in a gated community outside Tucson. Nobody’s quite what they say they are, and he’s just supposed to laugh and play along.
But she’s still sexy as a pay channel, even in the ankle-length dress. So he doesn’t argue with her. In fact, the whole getup is kind of hot, especially the antique cap. It cheers him to sit next to her and gawk while she designs little cards and such. Get Well thingies for total strangers in the rooms next to his. Postcards of newborns in bassinets to send to lawmakers in Washington. He sits up close, helping, painting inside the lines with one hand while keeping his other on her. If nobody else is there, she’ll let him put his fingers just about anywhere.
But the cards won’t cooperate. He stabs one, and the tip of his pen dents the tabletop. What the hell is wrong with these things? he asks. This looks like shit.
She jumps. She’s scared of him. But she puts her arm around him. You’re doing great, Marker. It’s amazing how good. You were pretty beaten up there, for a while.
Was I? But I’m getting back now, right? To where I was?
Already are. Just look at you!
He studies her, but can’t tell if she’s lying. He wipes his fucked-up eyes. He pulls out his own Get Well card, for comparison: I am No One…Well, join the club. You’re not alone.
Weeks passed that Karin couldn’t account for. While the therapists were examining her brother, testing his memory and grasp of ordinary detail, she was losing days. Some part of her was out of sync. Small wonder, with Mark twice a day calling her an impostor. Not days she much cared to remember.
They moved Mark to the rehab facility. It crushed him. “So this is what ‘discharge’ means. This place is worse than where I was. It’s just a minimum-security hospital. What happens if I jump bail?”
In fact, Dedham Glen was a fair step up from Good Samaritan. All pastels and river stone, the place might have been a low-end retirement community. He never mentioned recognizing the place where they’d consigned their mother in her final illness. Mark had his own room, the halls were cheerier, the food better, and the staff more capable than at the colder, more sterile hospital.
Best of all was Barbara Gillespie, the nurse’s aide for his wing. Though new to the facility and surely pushing forty, Barbara worked with the zeal of the self-employed. From the start, she and Mark seemed to have known each other forever. Barbara could always tell, better than Karin, what Mark was asking for, even when Mark himself didn’t know. Barbara made the rehab clinic feel like a family holiday timeshare. She was so assuring that both Schluter siblings tried to please her by acting healthier than they really were. Around Barbara, Karin found herself believing in total cures. Mark fell in love with her within days, and Karin soon followed. She lived for her exchanges with the attendant, inventing little problems to consult her about. In Karin’s dreams, she and Barbara Gillespie were as close as sisters, consoling each other over Mark’s damage as if they’d both known him since infancy. In waking life, Barbara was almost as consoling, preparing Karin for the hurdles still ahead.
Karin studied Barbara at every chance, trying to imitate her self-possession and easy grace. She described her to Daniel one night in his dark monk’s cell. She tried not to sound too fawning. “She’s always completely with you when she talks
to you. More present than any person I’ve ever met. Never out in front of or behind herself. Not working on the next patient, or the last one. Wherever she happens to be, that’s where she is. I’m always either undoing the last three stupid things I’ve done or fending off the next three. But Barbara, she’s just…centered. Right there. You have to see her in action. She’s the perfect nurse for Mark. Completely comfortable with him. Listens to all his theories, even when I want to press his face into a pillow. She’s more at home in her body than anyone I’ve ever seen. I’ll bet you there’s no one in the world she’d rather be.”
Daniel put a hand on her forearm, cautioning her in the dark. She lay back on his futon on the floor of a room so bare his three potted plants seemed like remainders in nature’s clearance sale. His basement apartment’s few furnishings were all retreads. His bookshelves—full of USGS publications, Conservation Service pamphlets, and field guides—were made from stacked orange crates. His work desk was an old oak door recovered from a demolition and laid out on sawhorses. Even his refrigerator was a refurbished dorm-room mini-cube, picked up at Goodwill for ten dollars. He kept his apartment a dim sixty degrees. Of course he was right: the only defensible way of life. But she already had plans to make the place livable.
“The woman has her own internal thermometer,” she said. “Her own atomic clock. The last person on earth who’s not prorating her time. She’s just so even. So tranquil. A bubble of steady attentiveness.”
“Sounds like she’d make a good birder.”
“Mark never rattles her, even when he’s completely out there. None of the residents unnerve her, and some are as spooky as you get. She has no expectations about who people are supposed to be. She just sees you, sees whoever is in front of her.”
“What does she do for him?”
“Officially? She’s the general attendant. Keeps the schedule, does light therapy, takes care of his routine needs, checks in five times a day, monitors his craziness, cleans up after him. She’s the most under-employed person I know, including me. I can’t understand why she’s not running the place.”
The Echo Maker Page 8