The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  “On the face of it, this case would single-handedly refute that possibility. Clearly Mark Schluter’s Capgras isn’t primarily psychiatric. But his brain is struggling with complex interactions. We owe him more than a simple, one-way, functionalist, causal model.” He surprised himself. Not by his belief, but by his willingness to speak it aloud to a physician this young.

  The neurologist tapped the film on his light box. “All I know is what happened to his brain early on the morning of February 20.”

  “Yes,” Weber said, bowing. All that medicine ever wanted to know. “It’s amazing that he has any integrated sense of self left at all, isn’t it?”

  Dr. Hayes accepted the truce. “We’re lucky this particular circuit is so hard to disrupt. A handful of documented cases. If it were as common as, say, Parkinson’s, we’d all be strangers to each other. Listen, I’d like to help in any way possible. If we can do any further tests or imaging here at the hospital…”

  “I have a few low-tech examinations I’d like to try before that. The first thing I want to do is get some galvanic skin response.”

  The neurologist’s eyebrows shot up. “Something to try, I guess.”

  Dr. Hayes walked Weber back to the parking lot. They’d been sealed in the consulting room long enough that the return to stark, prairie June caught Weber out. The still air expanded in his lungs, smelling like some archaic summer holiday. It hinted of something he’d last tasted in Ohio at age ten. He turned to see Dr. Hayes hunching next to him, his hand extended.

  “Pleasure meeting you, Dr. Weber.”

  “Please. Gerald.”

  “Gerald. I look forward to seeing the new book. A nice break from work. And I want you to know I’m your biggest fan.”

  He did not say still, but Weber heard it. Weber stood, one foot in the street. “I was hoping we could touch base again, before I head back east?”

  Hayes brightened, ready to fawn or fight all over again. “Ah! Of course, if you have the time and interest.”

  Time and interest…For years, he’d strictly rationed both. A name chair at a Research One University, a long list of respected articles about perceptual processing and cognitive assembly, and a pair of popular neuropsychology books that sold to wide audiences in a dozen languages: he’d never had much time or interest to spare. He’d already outlived his father by three years and had greatly outproduced him. And yet, Weber chanced to be working at the precise moment when the race was making its first real headway into the basic riddle of conscious existence: How does the brain erect a mind, and how does the mind erect everything else? Do we have free will? What is the self, and where are the neurological correlates of consciousness? Questions that had been embarrassingly speculative since the beginnings of awareness were now on the verge of empirical answer. Weber’s growing, dazed suspicion that he might live to see such wild philosophical phantoms solved, that he might even contribute to solving them, had pretty much driven out any other semblance of what, in popular parlance, had come to be called a real life. Some days it seemed that every problem facing the species was awaiting the insight that neuroscience might bring. Politics, technology, sociology, art: all originated in the brain. Master the neural assemblage, and we might at long last master us.

  Weber had long ago commenced that extended retreat from the world that ambitious men begin to make around their fortieth year. All he wanted was to work. His old hobbies—guitar, paint box, tennis racket, verse notebooks—sat tucked away in corners of the too-big house, waiting for the day he might resurrect them. Only the sailboat gave him any sustained enjoyment now, and that, only as a platform for more cognitive reflection. He struggled to sit through feature films. He dreaded the periodic dinner-party invitation, although, truth be told, he generally enjoyed himself once the evening was under way, and hosts could always count on him to produce a bizarre conversational firework or two. Tales from the crypt, Sylvie called them: stories that proved to the assembled dinner guests that nothing they thought, saw, or felt was necessarily true.

  He had lost no capacity for mundane delights. A walk around the mill pond still pleased him in any season, although he now used such strolls more to jog stalled thoughts than to see the ducks or trees. He still indulged in what Sylvie called foraging—constant low-level snacking, a weakness for sweets that he’d nursed since childhood. His wife first fell in love with him when he declared to her, at twenty-one, that heavy glucose metabolism was essential for sustained mental effort. When, at twice that age, his body began to change so profoundly that he no longer recognized it, he briefly struggled to curb the familiar pleasure before accepting the alien new shape as his own.

  He still enjoyed his wife’s bedrock companionship. He and Sylvie still touched incessantly. Monkey grooming, they called it. Constant hand rubs while they read together, shoulder massages as they washed the dishes. “You know what you are?” she accused, pinching him. “Nothing but a dirty old neck-rub-philiac.” He answered only with happy groans.

  At growing intervals that neither of them cared to calculate, they still played with each other. However fitful, the persistence of desire surprised them both. The previous year, on their thirtieth anniversary, he estimated the number of climaxes that he and little Sylvie Bolan had shared since their first foray in the top bunk in her dorm room in Columbus. One every third day, on average, for a third of a century. Four thousand detonations, joining them at the hip. Nights of animal ecstasy always amused them, coming back to themselves, to the embarrassment of speech. Curled up against his flank, giggling a little, Sylvie might say, “Thank you for the beautiful human sexuality, Man,” before padding off to the bathroom to clean herself. A person could only howl in abandonment so many times. Time didn’t age you; memory did.

  Yes, the slowing body, the gradually depleting pleasure neurotransmitters had cooled them. But something else as well: what you loved well, you grew to resemble. He and the wife of his years now resembled each other so much that there could be no strangeness of desire between them. None except that impenetrable strangeness he’d given himself over to. The country of perpetual surprise. The naked brain. The basic riddle, on the verge of being solved.

  He stood in throbbing music, waiting for Karin Schluter. Above his head, someone growled in techno-pain, begging for euthanasia. A lunch dive, a long line of kids in retro, acid-washed jeans, Weber stark among them, having forgone the coat and tie in favor of khakis and a knit vest. Karin suppressed her giggles as she walked up. “Aren’t you warm in that?”

  “My thermostat runs a little low.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” she teased. “Is that from all the science?”

  She’d chosen a place on the local college campus called Pioneer Pizza. Her nerves from yesterday had settled. She played less with her hair. She smiled at the surrounding flock of students as the hostess seated them.

  “I went to school here. Back when it was still Kearney State College.”

  “When was that?”

  She blushed. “Ten years. Twelve.”

  “No way.” The words sounded ludicrous on his lips. They’d have sent Sylvie into convulsions. Karin just beamed.

  “Those were wild days. A little too close to home for me, but still. My friends and I were the only people between Berkeley and the Mississippi to protest the Gulf War. This gang of Young Republicans man-handled my then-boyfriend, just for wearing a “No Blood For Oil” button. Tied him up with a yellow ribbon!” Her glee hid as fast as it had surfaced. She cast a guilty look around the restaurant.

  “How about your brother?”

  “You mean school? They pretty much had to give Mark an honorary high school diploma. Don’t get me wrong. He’s no idiot.” She worked her mouth, hearing her present tense. “He was always shrewd. He could read a teacher and figure out the barest minimum needed to pass her tests. Not that it took a genius to outsmart the Kearney High faculty. But Mark just wanted to fix up trucks and dink around with video games. He could twitch over a new game cartr
idge for twenty-four hours without even getting up to pee. I told him he should get a job as a play-tester.”

  “How did he make a living, after graduation?”

  “Well, ‘a living’…He flipped burgers until Dad threw him out of the house. Then he worked at the Napa parts store and lived like an Indian for a long time. His buddy Tom Rupp got him a job at the IBP plant in Lexington.”

  “IBP?”

  She wrinkled her nose, surprised at his ignorance. “Infernal Beef Packers.”

  “Infernal…?”

  Her face flushed. She pressed three fingers to her lips and blew on them. “I mean, Iowa. Although, you know: Iowa, Infernal. You have to squint to tell the difference.”

  “He worked for a slaughterhouse?”

  “He’s not a cow killer, or anything. That’s Rupp. Markie repairs their equipment.” She looked down again. “I guess I mean ‘repaired.’” She lifted her head and studied him. Her eyes were the color of oxidized pennies. “He’s not going back there anytime soon, is he?”

  Weber shook his head. “I’ve learned not to make predictions, over the years. What we need, as in most things, is patience and cautious optimism.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m trying.”

  “Tell me what you do.” Her lips traced his words, and she looked at him blankly. “Your work.”

  “Oh!” She pressed her bangs with her right hand. “I’m a consumer relations agent for…” She stopped, surprised at herself. “Actually, I’m between job opportunities.”

  “Your employers let you go? Because of this?”

  Beneath the table, her knee pumped like a sewing machine. “I didn’t have any choice. I had to be down here. My brother comes first. It’s just the two of us, you know.” Weber nodded. She bubbled over with explanations. “I have a little war chest. My mother left us some life insurance money. It’s the right thing. I can start again, once he’s…” Her tone was optimistic, fishing.

  The waitress came to take their orders. With a guilty glance around the room, Karin ordered the Supreme. Weber chose at random. When the waitress left, Karin eyed him. “I can’t believe it. You do it, too.”

  “I’m sorry? What do I do?”

  She shook her head. “I just thought that someone with your accomplishments…”

  Weber grinned, puzzled. “I really have no idea…”

  She flicked the air with her left hand. “Never mind. It’s nothing important. Something I notice in men, sometimes.”

  Weber waited for Karin to explain. When she didn’t, he asked, “Did you bring the pictures?”

  She nodded. She reached into her shoulder bag, a brightly patterned knit sack made by some indigenous people, and withdrew an envelope. “I picked ones that would mean the most to him.”

  Weber took the photos and thumbed through them.

  “That’s our father,” Karin said. “What can I say? Blind in one eye from an argument with the livestock. Ready to recite ‘The Face on the Barroom Floor’ anytime after the night’s third shot, at least when we were young; he didn’t go in much for poetry, in his later days. He started out as a farmer, but spent most of his life trying to break into the commercial class with a parade of get-rich-quick schemes. On a Christmas-card basis with every bailiff in bankruptcy court. He lost a lot of money selling privacy boxes. You hooked them up to your TV so the cable company couldn’t track what you watched. He came up with this idea for peddling identity-theft insurance. He only sold things that he couldn’t buy enough of himself. That was his downfall. The man thought the nine-digit zip code was a Democratic Party plot to control the movements of ordinary citizens. Even the local militia guys thought he was a little out there.”

  “And he died…?”

  “Four years ago. He couldn’t sleep. He just couldn’t sleep, and then he died.”

  “I’m sorry,” Weber said, pointlessly. “How would you describe their relationship?”

  She screwed up her mouth. “Nonstop slow-mo death match? Give or take a couple of happy camping trips. They liked to fish together, back when. Or working together on engines. Stuff where they didn’t have to talk. That next one’s our mom, Joan. She didn’t look quite that good by the end. Which was a year or so ago, I think I said.”

  “You say she was a religious woman?”

  “A big, big speaker in tongues. Even her ordinary English was pretty colorful. She often had the house exorcised. She was convinced that it hid the souls of children in torment. I was like, ‘Hello! Earth to Mom! I’ll name those tormented child souls for a dime!’” Karin took the picture of the pretty, chestnut-haired farm wife from Weber and studied it, sucking in her cheeks. “But she kept us alive through all the years of Dad’s self-employment schemes. Clerk-Typist III, here at the college.”

  “How did Mark get along with her?”

  “He worshiped the woman. Worshiped them both, really. He just sometimes did it while shouting and waving a blunt weapon around.”

  “He was violent?”

  She exhaled. “I don’t know. What’s ‘violent’ anymore? He was a teenage guy. Then, a guy in his twenties.”

  “Did he share your mother’s…? Was he religious?”

  She laughed until she had to hold her hands in the air. “Not unless you count Devil worship. No. That’s unfair. The black-magic phase was me. Here, look. Karin Schluter, high school senior. Your advanced Goth vampire look. Pretty scary, huh? Two years before that, I was a cheerleader. I know what you’re thinking. If my brother hadn’t had an accident to explain this Capgras, you’d be looking for a schizophrenia gene. That’s the Schluter family. Let’s see what else I’ve got.”

  She talked him through the rest of the loose scrapbook. She had family photos going back to a great-grandfather, Bartlett Schluter, standing in front of the ancestral sod house as a young boy, his hair like corn silk. She had pictures of the beef-packing plant in Lexington, a five-hundred-thousand-square-foot, windowless box with a hundred forty-foot containers lined up alongside it, waiting to be hauled away by semis. She had portraits of Mark’s best friends, two scraggly men in their mid-twenties enjoying themselves with smoke, drink, and pool cues, one in a camouflage tee and the other in a shirt reading “Got Meth?” She had a photo of a gangly, black-haired, pale-blue woman in a hand-knit olive V-neck, radiating a fragile smile. “Bonnie Travis. The group’s moll.”

  “This is in the hospital?”

  “Mid-March. Those are Mark’s toes, with the little pedicure treatment. She thought it would be cute to paint them fuchsia.” Her words thickened with the injustice of affection. “Here: you wanted pictures that would excite him.”

  A familiar face flashed in front of Weber. His own skin would have registered a change in conductivity.

  “You’ve met Barbara. As you noticed, he’s completely gaga over her.”

  The woman smiled sadly into the camera, forgiving the machine and its operator. “Yes,” Weber said. “Do you know why?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking. He responds to something in her. Her trust. Respect.” A note filled her voice: an envy that could go either way. I’d give him what this woman does, if he’d let me. Karin stroked the photo. “I can’t tell you what I owe this woman. Can you believe she works down at the bottom of the food chain? One baby step up from a volunteer. That’s for-profit health care for you. Put three greedy humans together, and they can’t tell their assets from their armpits.”

  Weber smiled noncommittally.

  “Here’s Mark’s pride and joy.” She fingered a picture of a narrow, vinyl-sided modular home, something Weber’s generation would have called a prefab. “This is the Homestar. That’s actually the name of the catalog building company. But that’s what he calls his, like it’s the only one in the world. My bad-ass, rebel brother, never prouder than the day he finally scraped together the six-thousand-dollar down payment, his toehold on the bottom rung of the middle class.” She bit her thumb tip. “What you call fleeing a precarious upbringing.”

 
; “That’s where you’re living, while you’re in town?”

  He might have served her a warrant. “Where else can I go? I’m out of a job. I don’t know how long this is going to go on.”

  “Makes perfect sense,” he declared.

  “It’s not like I’m rooting through his things.” She shut her eyes and blanched. He picked up a photo of five hirsute men with guitars and a trap set. She looked again. “That’s Cattle Call. A sorry house band at a bar called the Silver Bullet, outside town. Mark loves them. They were playing the night of his accident. That’s where Mark was, right before. Here’s his truck; I found a whole shoe box full of truck shots, in a closet at the Homestar. This could upset him.”

  “Yes. Maybe we should skip that one for now.”

  The pizzas came. His choice dismayed him: pineapple and ham. He couldn’t imagine having ordered it. Karin dug into her Supreme with gusto. “I shouldn’t be having pizza. I know I could eat better. Still, I don’t do much meat, except when I eat out. I’m surprised they can sell any cow parts at all, in this part of the country. You should hear what goes on at that plant. Ask Mark. It’ll put you off your feed for good. You know, they have to clip the horns to keep the crazed beasts from goring each other.”

  It didn’t much hinder her appetite. Weber poked at his Hawaiian as if he were doing ethnography. At last the food gave out, along with their words.

  “You ready?” she asked doubtfully, pretending she was.

  At Dedham Glen, he asked for an hour alone with Mark. Her presence might jeopardize a clean skin response test.

  “You’re the boss.” She smoothed her eyebrows and backed away, bobbing.

  Mark was alone in his room, studying a bodybuilding magazine. He looked up and beamed. “Shrink! You’re back. Give me that one with crossing out the numbers and letters again. I’m ready for it now. I wasn’t ready for it yesterday.”

  They shook hands. Mark was in a different shirt, this one listing a dozen Nebraska laws still on the books. Mothers may not perm their daughters’ hair without a state license. If a child burps in church, his parents may be arrested. He wore the knit cap from the day before, even in the close, summer room. “You by yourself today, or…?”