“Exactly what I’m saying. But thanks for admitting it. Simplifies life a little.”
He took over the tour, pointing out every beer coaster that had been moved since the night of his accident. He tsked as they walked, shaking his head and repeating, “No, no, no. This house is no Homestar.”
Bonnie brought in his duffel bags. She started following him around. “We’ll fix things, Marker. Get everything just the way you want.”
Karin sat on the bed, head in hands, listening to Mark repudiate his beloved mail-order home. But the strength of his memory for the smallest particulars gave her forbidden hope. She herself could no longer recognize her own condo, on those quick trips to South Sioux City to ready it for sale.
“Wait,” he said. “I know how to tell once and for all whether this house is real or not. You two stay here. Don’t look! Don’t let me catch either of you spying.”
He headed toward the kitchen. Bonnie quizzed Karin with a look. Karin slumped, knowing what Mark was after. She heard him drop to his knees and root around in the cabinet underneath the sink. Some old, inherited shame stopped her from calling out, old family secrets that sealed them off from each other.
He came back triumphant. “I told you this place is a fake. Something of mine is missing. Something they wouldn’t duplicate.” He looked at Bonnie, significantly. Bonnie, leaning against a bar stool, glanced at Karin. Karin needed only say: Mark, I flushed your stash down the toilet. But she couldn’t. Couldn’t say she knew he was doing shit, maybe even on the night of the accident. It would make no difference, anyway. He’d just come up with another theory, untroubled by anything so slight as the facts.
Mark came and sat next to her on the sofa. He seemed about to put his arm around her. “I know you have to pretend ignorance. That’s your job. I accept that. But just tell me whether I’m in danger. We’ve gotten to know each other well enough over the last couple of months for you to give me that much. You’d tell me if they were going to hurt me again, wouldn’t you?”
Karin waved her hands, a chimp struggling with sign language. Bonnie answered for her. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you, Mark. Not while we’re around.”
“I mean, Christ! They wouldn’t go through all this expense if they just meant to finish the job that they bungled back on 2/20/02. Am I right? C’mon. Let’s have a look outside.”
He left the house and walked up Carson Street. The women followed. All twelve houses on his block were variations on the Homestar. The recently air-dropped subdivision contained the first new structures to be added to the backwater town of Farview since the farm crisis. Drapes fluttered up and down the street, but no one came outdoors to make small talk with a brain-damaged slaughterhouse machinist.
Mark strolled up the street, staggered. “This must have cost a fortune. I must be under massive observation. I only wish I knew why I’ve become so important.”
Bonnie took his arm. Karin expected her to say something religious, about how God kept even the sparrows under massive observation. But she surprised Karin with her intelligence by saying nothing.
Mark spun a full circle. “I’d like to know where exactly we are.”
Karin held her temples. “You saw how we came from town.”
“Well, I was kind of keeping an eye on the rear window.” He smiled, a little sheepish.
“South on County, and a straight shot west, eight miles down Greyser. Same as always. You saw everybody’s farms.”
He grabbed at her, stiffening. “Time out. Are you telling me that the whole town…?”
Karin tittered. She felt herself losing it. The stress of daily life in her brother’s newfound land was pulling her under. Kearney, Nebraska: a colossal fake, a life-sized, hollow replica. She’d thought as much herself, all the while growing up. And again, each time she returned during their mother’s final illness. Prairie World. Her giggles came harder. She wheeled and looked at Bonnie, a paralyzed, shiteating grin plastered on her face. The girl looked back, spooked, and not by Mark. “Help me,” Karin managed, before breaking into more little laughs.
Something in the other woman rose to the challenge. Bonnie guided Mark back to the Homestar, leaning into him and tracing large ovals in his back as if practicing her cursive. “That’s not what she’s saying, Marker. She’s saying this is it. Right here. Where you really live. And I’m telling you I will personally see to it that we get your nest exactly the way you want it.”
“Serious? Would that include you moving in? Oh yeah, a woman’s touch. The finer things in life. But I forget: you probably still want to hold out for the paperwork. Fully legal, and all that noise? No playing house?”
Bonnie blushed and steered him homeward. All back down the street, Mark pointed out little anomalies: a missing tree, the wrong car in a driveway. Every desperate feat of memory fed him a little. A neighbor’s tool shed fifteen feet too far west left him exultant. His visual recall floored Karin. Damage had somehow unblocked him, removing the mental categories that interfered with truly seeing. Assumption no longer smoothed out observation. Every glance now produced its own new landscape.
Back at the house, Blackie had broken free from her backyard tether and was pacing the front steps, panting wildly. She held back, yipping, remembering her abuse at her master’s hands at their last meeting. But longer memories got the better of her. As the humans approached, she bounded across the lawn, joyous and suffering, leaping forward but feinting sideways, ready to flee at the first confusion. Mark stood still, which emboldened the beast until she was all over him, throwing her paws against his torso, almost knocking him over. The lower the brain, the slower the fade. Love, in an earthworm, might never extinguish at all.
Mark took his pet’s paws and danced her, a waltz with little conviction. “Look at this pathetic thing! It doesn’t even know who it isn’t. Somebody trained it to be my dog, and now it doesn’t even know what else to be. I guess I’m going to have to take care of you, aren’t I, girl? Who else will, if I don’t?”
By the time the four of them got back inside, Mark was issuing a stream of authoritative commands to the ecstatic dog.
“So what the hell am I supposed to call you? Huh? What am I gonna call you? How about Blackie Two?”
The brute thing barked in ecstasy.
They’re after Mark Schluter’s ass: this much is obvious. A man would have to be a vegetable to miss that much. Setting him up in some kind of experiment, some of it so hokey that even a child still stuck on Santa would snicker. But some of it so complex he can’t even start figuring it.
Okay: something happened in the hospital, that night they operated. Some mistake they had to cover up. Or, no: the weirdness must have started hours before that. With the accident. Which clearly couldn’t have been an accident. Great driver flips a fantastic-handling vehicle on a razor-straight road in the middle of nowhere? Sure; you might believe that, if you’re brain dead.
But that’s when it started, the switchings and impostors, all the medical crap to get Mark Schluter to think that he isn’t who he thinks. He needs a witness, but nobody was there. Rupp, Cain: they swear they were nowhere. And the doctors surgically removed his memory of that night while he was on the operating table. The secret is out there, in the empty fields. But the fields are growing over, this summer’s crop covering up the evidence. He needs a witness, but nobody saw what happened that night except the birds. Catch himself one of those cranes, one that was there, alongside the river. Find him a sandhill, and swear it in. Scan its brain.
Because it all started with the accident. Now everyone’s all Mark, Mark, he’s different, he’s losing his grip. As if that’s the issue. As if he’s the one who’s changed. The real deal is hidden behind doubles. He has only one clue. One solid thing beyond doubt: the note. The words from the person who found him, the one spectator to that night’s events, before the weirdness set in. The note they tried to keep from him.
His only clue, so he’s got to be careful. Can’t act too eager. Take the
days as they come. Rupp and Cain promise to take him truck shopping. Work is sending him checks for doing nothing. But that won’t last forever; he’s got to get back, eventually. For now, though, he sits tight and works his plan. He asks Bonnie Travis to take him to church. The girl belongs to one of those renegade Protestant splinter cells called The Waiters in the Upper Room, a so-called religion that, in one of the screwed-uppedest things he’s ever heard, actually has not-for-profit status. They meet early Sunday for marathon two-hour services in a converted real-estate office above the Second Life hobby shop. Bonnie has begged him for years to come to a service, to compensate for the assorted commandments they smashed together on Saturday nights.
He himself swore off religion the minute he turned sixteen and his father pronounced him fit for the damnation of his own choosing. Nobody’s going to be comfortable with the whole Left Behind thing after growing up with a mother on a first-name basis with the Big Smiter Himself. It bugs the crap out of Bonnie when Mark busts Jesus’ chops, so over the years they’ve gotten pretty good at ignoring the topic. It could be raining frogs and blood, and they’d be, like: You bring your umbrella? That’s why, when Mark asks her to take him to the Upper Room, the woman acts like all the seven seals have just started barking.
Of course, Mark! Just say the word.
Like, what word do I need to say? Methuselah? Vouchsafe?
She laughs, at least. Sure; we can go anytime. This Sunday! And all the while, her face is going, Is this a joke? I’ve been praying for this for years.
She comes to get him in her car on Sunday morning. She’s looking quite deluxe, in a short, sky-blue dress with white collar, like a chrome woman singer in an MTV video fantasy about a 1950 corn-husker girl’s first communion. Really: he could pop himself off just looking at her, although that might not be entirely appropriate, given the circumstances. By the look she shoots him, he’s made some miscalculation. Can’t be his clothes: his fancy khakis—his wedding pants, Rupp calls them—a pretty clean denim shirt, and his best bolo tie. It’s something else that he can’t figure. Bonnie drives them to the Upper Room, all quiet. And she stays that way during the whole two-hour show, twitching her head side to side, just looking at him, like he’s got a spider crawling out of his nose. Afterward, back in the car, tugging at the hem of her dress like she suddenly doesn’t want it to be all that short, she’s pissed.
You didn’t hardly listen to one single word that Reverend Billy had to say.
I did. The whole bit about the repopulation of Palestine and the fulfillment of prophecy and whatnot.
And you wouldn’t break bread with us.
Well, you can’t be sure where that stuff has been.
Why did you bother coming? You spent the whole time just eyeing the congregation and waving that little note around like some kind of summons.
How can he tell her? If there’s really some Guardian Angel hiding out, refusing to identify himself, claiming God led me to you, he’s probably hanging somewhere like the Upper Room.
Bonnie comes back later that afternoon with his wannabe sister, while he’s going through churches in the Kearney yellow pages. It hurts his head to look at the list, and maybe he’s bitching a bit.
Jesus H. Crimmeny! Look at them all. They’re breeding like bugs. What’s a town this size need with so many churches? We’ve got more of these denomination things than we have people.
Bonnie slips behind him and rubs his back. This could become comforting. But counterfeit Karin sits down next to him and gets up in his face.
What is it, Mark? What do you want? We can help you.
He makes himself a stone. He tells them: I can do a couple every Sunday.
I can go with you, says Bonnie, pressing his shoulders.
But…how? These aren’t your churches.
She jerks back and laughs, like he’s being funny. They aren’t yours, either, Mark!
He runs his hand down the yellow-page list. You know what I’m saying. These things are all—whatever. Baptist. Methodist, and such. You’re an Upstairs Roommate.
So? They’re not going to stop me at the door.
They might. Homo sapiens can be very territorial.
If they stop me, why wouldn’t they stop you?
Because I’m nothing. Nobody stops a nothing from slipping in anywhere. They can still get to a nobody; convert him.
Pseudo-Sister reaches out to touch him, but stops. Mark. Honey. You want to know who wrote that note?
Like she’s graduating to mind reading.
Maybe we can take an ad out in the newspaper or something.
No ads! He probably yells a bit. Freaks even himself out, a little. But it’s just that whoever wrote the note might also know what happened to his sister. And if the people who got to his sister get to the note-writer first…
This upsets the sister stand-in. For some reason, it’s more than an act. Pulling her hair, like Karin always does. Bugs the hell out of him.
What can I do, Mark? Okay, so whoever left you the note believes in God. In guardian angels. Everyone in Nebraska believes in guardian angels! I’d believe in them myself, if…
She stops, like she almost gives the game away. If what? he says. If what?
She won’t answer, so he gets a scrap of paper and starts copying down addresses: Alpha and Omega Church of Jesus Christ. Antioch Bible…
Mark, I’m telling you. This is crazy. It’s a total crapshoot.
Not as big a crapshoot as this guardian finding me out there in the dark, clear off the road. In the middle of winter. The middle of nowhere. What are the odds of that?
Bonnie, at least, is as good as her word. She thinks she’s going to save Mark’s soul. Maybe she is. They dress up every Sunday and go churchgoing, like a courting couple out of some pioneer schoolbook. Sex afterward and he’d be in heaven. But the best he can hope for after the service is a good buffet. They go to Phil’s or the Hearth Stone, places with high old-folk turnover. It must be an old person, given the spidery scrawl. At both the churches and the restaurants, he keeps the note out in plain view. Even walks around with it, waving it under strangers’ noses. But nobody even nibbles. And they’re not faking ignorance. He’d know faking, blindfolded.
He overhears the Special Sister Agent talking to Bonnie, when they come back. She wants all the details. What’s in it for B-Baby, to be filing reports on him? Distinctly possible that she’s his leash, that she’s helping set up the whole charade. But he can’t confront her. Not just yet.
The Woman Who Would Be Karin keeps coming by, pretty much every day. She brings him groceries, and doesn’t want cash for them. All very suspicious, but the food is mostly sealed, and by and large it tastes pretty great. Sometimes she cooks for him. Go figure. But it seems like a sweet deal, at least until he learns what it’s going to cost him.
She corners him one afternoon when he’s home alone, digging a new post hole for his mailbox. He’s gotten nothing but junk since leaving Dead Man’s Glands. They put the mailbox in the wrong place. Throws the mailman off. His sister might have been writing him this whole time, and no one would know.
It’s not where it was, before, he tells her.
She pretends to be horrified. Where was it before?
Hard to say, exactly. You can’t measure against anything. What can you use as a baseline? Everything’s a few feet off.
He looks out toward the few scattered trees fringing River Run Estates. Beyond the stand of houses, a single, green cornfield ripples out to the horizon. For a minute, the ground liquefies, like he and his real sister used to make it do when they were kids, spinning like tops, then slamming to a standstill. He looks at Karin’s substitute; she, too, looks wobbly.
Mark, we need to talk. About the note.
His whole body surges up out of the post hole. You know something?
I…wish I did. Now, Mark. Mark! Stop it. Listen to me. If whoever wrote this note hasn’t gotten in touch by now, it’s because they want to be…selfless. Nameless.
They don’t want to be a hero or take credit. They don’t want you to know who they are. They just want you to live your life.
He spreads the post hole digger and drives it into the parched dirt. Then what fucking good is leaving a note? Why bother leaving one at all?
They wanted you to feel protected. Connected.
Connected? Connected to what? He slams the shovel to the ground and kicks it, his arms twisting like bull snakes. Mr. Invisible Nameless Angel? That’s supposed to make me feel safe? Connected?
Why do you need to—?
He almost jabs her. Whoever wrote this note saved my life. If I could find him, then I might find out what…
It gets to him: stupid, stupid. But he doesn’t even care if she sees him kind of cry. She joins in. Whatever. Monkey see.
I know. I know what you’re feeling, she says. And it’s almost like she does. She says: Do you really need to put a face to this note? Would it matter if you found out that they…? Mark, stop. No! Just tell me what you’re thinking. Do you just want to thank them? Do you want…I don’t know. Are you thinking you might get to know them? Make friends?
It’s like she’s just materialized out of nowhere. Suddenly trying to be the person she was just imitating.
I don’t give a good flying leap who the guy really is. He could be a ninety-year-old Lithuanian girl-groper.
So why are you trying so hard to find him?
Mark Schluter grabs his head in both hands and rattles it. Guardian devils, everywhere. His muddy work boots kick at the earth, trying to destroy the fresh hole.
Read the note. Just read the goddamn note. He squeezes two fingers into the pocket of his overalls and pulls out the folded-up scrap. It’s always with him now, next to his body. She doesn’t take the paper. She won’t touch it.
So you could live, he recites, holding the sheet up in her face. And bring back someone else.
The Echo Maker Page 23