She wore a blouse of Italian silk, something new, pale bashful lilac, the color of first buds. Around her still-smooth neck hung a thin hank of freshwater pearls, and two tiny seashells clung to her ears. Who was this woman?
“Man. Don’t just stand there! Philanthropists of all stripes have paid to see you in a monkey suit.”
He undressed her that night, for the first time in years. Then he gazed on her, looking.
“Mmm,” she said, ready to frolic too, if a little abashed at them both. She laughed at his touch. “Hmm? Where did this come from all the sudden? They put something in the water out there in Nebraska?”
They played with each other, with nothing left to learn. After, she lay on her back next to him, still breathing hard, holding his hand as if they were courting. She recovered words first. “As the Behaviorist said, ‘That was clearly great for you. Was it good for me?’”
He had to snort, rolling onto his problem back and looking out over the rising hillock of his stomach. “I suppose it has been some time. Sorry about that, Woman. I’m not the man I was, back when.”
She rolled onto her side and rubbed his shoulder, the one he’d blown out ten years ago, in his mid-forties, and never managed entirely to repair. “I like this part of life,” she said. “Slower, fuller. I like that we don’t have sex just all the time.” Vintage Sylvie. She meant: much at all. “It makes each experience…It’s newer, somehow, when there’s enough time in between to rediscover…”
“Inventive. Absolutely inspired. ‘Rediscover.’ Most people see the glass nine-tenths empty. My wife sees it one-tenth full.”
“That’s why you married me.”
“Ah! But when I married you…”
She groaned. “The glass was one-tenth over the lip.”
He spun over onto his sore shoulder and regarded her, alarmed. “Really? Did we have sex too often back then?”
Her laughs bobbled out of her, buggies over speed bumps. She pressed her face into the pillow, delighted and red. “I think that might be the first time in human history anyone ever asked that question anxiously.”
He saw it in her face, the thought crossing into her before he could speak it out loud. “The relentlessness of marriage.” He chuckled. Their old euphemism, picked up from a classic family saga they’d read out loud to each other, back in grad school. Later, after Jess, they amused each other by calling it sexuality. Mock clinical. Foreplay: Are you at all disposed toward sexuality? And afterward: Some top-drawer sexuality, that. Neuropsychology—the home version.
That night, her gaze found him through the folds of sheets, deeply amused by her pet possession, secure in her knowledge of him, constantly refreshed. “Somebody loves me,” she sang, a sturdy tonette of an alto, half muffled by the pillow. “I wonder who?”
She fell asleep in minutes. He lay in the dark, listening to her snore, and after a while, the snore turned, for the first time ever in his ears, away from an inanimate rasp, like the creak of the bed, into the shush of an animal, something trapped but preserved in the body, vestigial, released through sleep by the pull of the moon.
With 100,000 copies in print and generally fair prepublication reviews, The Country of Surprise rolled out to a reading public hungry for the alien within. The book felt like the culmination of a long second career, one Weber never expected to have. He’d said nothing to anyone except Cavanaugh and Sylvie, but this book would be his last excursion of its kind. His next book, if he was given time to write it, would be for a very different audience.
He hated promotion, having to perform himself in public. He’d gotten away with it so far, thanks to skilled colleagues and motivated grad students covering in the lab. But he could not afford more time away from research, now that brain research had been thrown wide open. Imaging and pharmaceuticals were opening the locked-room mystery of the mind. The decade since the publication of Weber’s first book had produced more knowledge about the final frontier than the previous five thousand. Goals unimaginable when Weber began The Country of Surprise were now tossed around at the most reputable professional conferences. Esteemed researchers dared to talk about completing a mechanical model of memory, finding the structures behind qualia, even producing a full functional description of consciousness. No popular anthology Weber might compile could match such prizes.
The art of the meditative case history belonged to after-hours. Somehow it had muscled in and become his day job. Too soon for that. Ramon y Cabal, the Cronos in Weber’s pantheon, said that scientific problems were never exhausted; only scientists were. Weber wasn’t exhausted yet. The best was yet to be.
Yet he’d interrupted work to travel thousands of miles to the Central Plains to do the Capgras interview. Granted, his current lab project concerned left-hemisphere orchestration of belief systems and the alteration of memories to fit them. But anything he learned from talking to the Nebraska Capgras sufferer was anecdotal at best. A few days back at Stony Brook and he began to see the trip as the last of a long series of surveys that would now give way to more systematic, solid research.
Yet something in him did not like where knowledge was heading. The rapid convergence of neuroscience around certain functionalist assumptions was beginning to alienate Weber. His field was succumbing to one of those ancient urges that it was supposed to shed light on: the herd mentality. As neuroscience basked in its growing instrumental power, Weber’s thoughts drifted perversely away from cognitive maps and neuron-level deterministic mechanisms toward emergent, higher-level psychological processes that could, on his bad days, sound almost like élan vital. But in the eternal split between mind and brain, psychology and neurology, needs and neurotransmitters, symbols and synaptic change, the only delusion lay in thinking that the two domains would remain separate for much longer.
Back at Dayton Chaminade High, Weber had begun intellectual life as a confirmed Freudian—brain as hydraulic pipe for mind’s spectacular waterworks—anything to confound his priest teachers. By graduate school, he’d taken to persecuting Freudians, although he’d tried to avoid the worst Behaviorist excesses. When the cognitive counterrevolution broke, some small operant-conditioned part of him held back, wanting to insist, Still not the whole story. As a clinician, he’d had to embrace the pharmacology onslaught. Yet he’d felt a real sadness—the sadness of consummation—hearing a subject who’d struggled for years with anxiety, suicidal guilt, and religious zeal tell him, after the successful tuning of his doxepin dosages, “Doctor, I’m just not sure what I was so upset about, all that time.”
He knew the drill: throughout history, the brain had been compared to the highest prevailing level of technology: steam engine, telephone switchboard, computer. Now, as Weber approached his own professional zenith, the brain became the Internet, a distributed network, more than two hundred modules in loose, mutually modifying chatter with other modules. Some of Weber’s tangled subsystems bought the model; others wanted more. Now that the modular theory had gained ascendancy over most brain thinking, Weber drifted back to his origins. In what would surely be the final stage of his intellectual development, he now hoped to find, in the latest solid neuroscience, processes that looked like old depth psychology: repression, sublimation, denial, transference. Find them at some level above the module.
In short, it now began to occur to Weber that he may have traveled out to Nebraska and studied Mark Schluter in order to prove, to himself at least, that even if Capgras were entirely understandable in modular terms, as a matter of lesions and severed connections between regions in a distributed network, it still manifested in psychodynamic processes—individual response, personal history, repression, sublimation, and wish fulfillment that couldn’t be reduced entirely to low-level phenomena. Theory might be on the verge of describing the brain, but theory alone could not yet exhaust this brain, hard-pressed by fact and frantic with survival: Mark Schluter and his impostor sister. The book waiting for Weber to write, after this book tour.
They took Mark home: no
other place to take him. When the celebrity brain scientist left, offering his one slight recommendation, Dr. Hayes could no longer keep Mark under observation at Dedham Glen. Karin fought the decision tooth and nail. Mark, for his part, was more than ready to go.
Before he could move back into the Homestar, Karin had to move out. She’d lived in the modular home for months, keeping the dog alive, performing routine maintenance. She’d thrown out Mark’s contraband and waged war against the invading plant and animal life. Now she had to erase all evidence that she’d ever occupied the campsite.
“Where will you go?” Daniel asked. They lay side by side, face up on his futon on his bare, oak floor. Six in the morning, Wednesday, deep in June. In recent weeks, she’d spent more nights in his monk’s cell. She’d taken over his kitchen and sneaked cigarettes in his bathroom, running the water and blowing the smoke out the open window into the complicit air. But she never kept even a spare pair of socks in the empty drawer he prepared for her.
She rolled on her side, so he might spoon her. Talking was easier that way. Her voice was disembodied. “I don’t know. I can’t afford two leases. I can’t even afford one. I…I’ve put my place in South Sioux up for sale. I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want…What am I doing here? How much longer can I…? Back to zero, after everything that I’ve managed…But I can’t leave him. You know what he’s like now. You know what would happen, if I left him alone.”
“He wouldn’t be alone.”
She spun around and stared at him in the growing light. Whose side are you on? “If I leave him to his friends, he’ll be dead by the end of the year. They’ll shoot him in some hunting accident. They’ll have him out racing again.”
“There are others of us around, to help look after him. I’m here.”
She leaned in and pressed him. “Oh, Daniel. I don’t get you. Why are you so good? What’s in it for you?”
He put his hand on her flank and stroked, as he might stroke a newborn deer. “I’m a not-for-profit.”
She ran a finger along his neck. He was like the birds. Once the route was taught him, he stayed on it, returning, so long as there was still a place, always turning home. “The two of you combined are breaking my heart.”
They looked at each other, neither of them volunteering. He nodded just a little: totally ambiguous. “Small steps,” he said.
She bowed her head, her copper waterfall. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Simple. You can be here. You can stay here, with me.”
He could not have said it better. Neither concession nor command. Just a statement, the best possibility for them both. “Small steps,” she said. Just for a little while. Just until Mark…“You won’t resent me if…?”
A reflex pain passed across his face. What had she ever let him resent? He shook his head, decency outweighing memory. “If you won’t hold it against me.”
“It won’t be long,” she promised him. “There’s not much more I can do. Either he gets better soon or…” She stopped, seeing Daniel’s face. She’d meant to reassure that she would not invade his territory. Only as she spoke the words did she hear them as a slap.
She leaned into him again, limbs tangling, fragile, the first time in years that they lingered with each other in broad daylight. She felt it in the pallet of his chest, tasted it in his mouth’s pinched bliss. In the interests of getting wrong right, he might forgive her everything. Everything but safety and hiding.
She evacuated the Homestar, erasing her tracks. Daniel, the expert tracker who could hold still and disappear into thin air, helped. She restored Mark’s chaos to the state she remembered. She scattered the CDs. She bought another girlie poster to replace the one she’d destroyed: a blond in a slightly torn gingham dress holding a large monkey wrench in greasy hands, poised over a blood-red pickup. She had no idea what to do about Blackie. She considered bringing the dog to Daniel’s too, at least until they saw how Mark would be, once home. In his present state, Mark might attack the thing, lock it out of the house, feed it bulk laxatives. Daniel would have been fine with another creature sharing his sanctuary. But Karin couldn’t do it to the dog.
Dr. Hayes signed off on the discharge, and Dedham Glen released Mark Schluter to the care of the only kin who recognized him, even if he failed to return the favor. Barbara asked if she could help.
“Bless you,” Karin said. “I think I have Moving Day handled. It’s next week I’m worried about. And the week after that. Barbara, what am I supposed to do? The insurance won’t cover extended nursing, and I’m going to have to start working.”
“I’ll still be here. He’ll have his regular appointments with the cognitive therapist. And I can come check in on him, if that would help.”
“How? You’ve given us too much already. I can’t even think about repaying…”
The aide radiated eerie calm. Her hand on Karin’s shoulder carried absolute certainty. “Things work out. Everybody gets repaid, one way or another. Let’s see how things go.”
Karin asked Bonnie Travis to help her get Mark home. Mark made the rounds at the facility, saying goodbye to his fellow inmates. “See?” he told them. “It’s not a death sentence. They let you go, eventually. If they don’t, call me and I’ll come bust you out.”
But when Karin pulled up in her car, he refused to get in. He stood on the curb, surrounded by his bags. He was capless now, his hair a thin pelt. His face clouded, remembering. “You want to roll this little Jap thing off the road somewhere, with me inside. That’s the plan? You want to finish what was supposed to happen the first time?”
“Mark, get in the car. If I wanted to hurt you, would I risk my own life doing it?”
“You hear that, everybody? You heard what the woman said?”
“Mark, please. You’ll be fine. Just get in the car.”
“Let me drive. I’ll get in if you let me drive. See? She won’t give me the keys. I always drive my sister everywhere. She never drives when we’re together.”
“Ride with me,” Bonnie said.
He considered the suggestion. “That might work,” he said. “But this woman has to wait here for ten minutes after we leave. I don’t want her trying anything funny.”
The air was ripe with manure and pesticide. The fields—matted soybeans, shin-high corn, pastures flecked with cows resigned to their fate—unrolled in all directions. When Karin reached the Homestar, Mark was on the front stoop, his head in Bonnie’s lap, crying. Bonnie stroked the fuzz on his skull, doing her best to console him. Seeing Karin approach, Mark sat up and howled. “Just tell me what’s going on. First my truck, then my sister. Now they’ve got my house.”
His elbows flung upward, while his whole body cowered. His neck craned in three directions, as if the next attack might come from anywhere. She looked behind her, and through his eyes, saw the winking, familiar neighborhood go strange. She turned back to where he sat clawing his concrete front steps. He was staring at her, searching for someone, the one she had been once but wasn’t any longer. The only one who might help him. His need for her tore her up, worse than her own helplessness.
The women consoled him for a long time. They pointed out the streets, the houses, the lone sugar maple he’d planted in the desert of lawn, the gouge in the left-hand garage edge that he’d made eight months before. Karin prayed for one of the neighbors to come out and say hello. But all living things hid themselves in the face of this epidemic.
Karin considered bundling him back into Bonnie’s car and returning him to Dedham Glen. But his moaning gradually gave way to dazed chuckles. “They did an incredible job. They got almost everything right. Jesus! How much did this cost? It’s like some billion-dollar film of my life. The Harry Truman Story.”
At last he went inside. He stood next to Bonnie in the front room, head swiveling in amazement, his tongue clucking. “My father used to tell me they did the moon landing on a sound stage in Southern California. I always thought he was nuts.”
K
arin snorted. “He was nuts, Mark. You remember how he thought the navy could quantum-rearrange the molecules in a battleship to make it invisible?”
Mark studied her. “How do you know they can’t?” He checked with Bonnie, who shrugged. He looked back at the life-sized image of his home, shaking his head in disbelief. Karin sat on the fake sofa, large parts of her dying. This fog would never blow over. Soon her brother would be right: their whole life, a copy of itself. While Bonnie unloaded Mark’s things from the car, Karin tried to rally. She took Mark on a tour of the house. She showed him the crack in the corner of the medicine-chest mirror. She raked through his clothes closet, all his summer cutoffs and legible T-shirts waiting for him. She opened the drawer full of loose photos, including dozens of the two of them together. She pointed out the magazine rack, with its three new back issues of Truckin’ Magazine.
In all this sprawl, his eyes landed on her replacement poster. His face darkened. “That’s not the picture I had up here.”
Karin groaned. “Okay. Let me explain.”
“That’s not mine. I’d never touch a thing that looked like that. That’s the crappiest body molding I’ve ever seen.”
Karin blinked before realizing he meant the truck. “Mark, that’s my fault. I tore yours. Accidentally. That’s a replacement I put up.”
He stopped and squinted at her. “Exactly the kind of shit my sister used to do.”
For a moment, she could breathe. Her arms went out to him, tentative but desperate. “Oh, Mark! Mark…? I’m sorry if anything I ever said or did…”
“But my sister would have known better than to replace a classic 1957 Chevy Cameo Carrier with some 1990 Mazda piece of crap.”
She broke down. Her silent, curdled tears perplexed him enough that he touched one hand to her forearm. The gesture thrilled her more than anything since his return to speech. She composed herself, laughed off her sniffles, and dismissed the moment with a wave. “Listen, Mark. I have to confess something. I never knew as much about the whole truck thing as I probably led you to believe.”
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