“Who is it about?”
She flared her nostrils. “It’s about people. Infinitely peculiar packages of walking symptoms. The whole lot of us.”
“It’s laughing at people with cognitive deficits?” He sounded ludicrous, even to himself. He would have suggested they take a vacation, except that they just had.
“You know what it’s laughing at. What comedy always laughs at. Whistling past the graveyard. Nobody wants to believe that we’re what you people are saying we are.”
“Us people?”
“You know who I mean. You brain guys.”
“And what exactly are we saying that no one wants to hear? We brain guys?”
“Oh, the works. Objects may be closer than they appear. Equipment may give unexpected results. No warranty written or implied. Everything you know is wrong.”
That night, he got another e-mail from Nebraska. It came in alongside messages from friends and colleagues who wanted, with all the deniable aggression of good humor, to rub his nose in the New Yorker piece. He skipped to Karin Schluter’s note, again remembering not yet having responded to her notes earlier that summer. The critics were right. Mark Schluter had stopped existing once he could do nothing more for Weber.
Karin’s news electrified him. Her brother believed that someone was following him, in a variety of disguises. Mark was assembling a list of documented details proving that his entire town of Farview had been replaced between the night of his accident and the day he came out of his coma, for the express purpose of misleading him.
Weber had just come across a case in the clinical literature, from Greece of all mythic places, describing coexistence of Capgras and Fregoli in a single patient. Something truly remarkable was happening to Mark Schluter. A new, systematic workup might shed light on mental processes that weren’t even poorly understood, processes that only this devastating deficit could reveal. All the things nobody wants to hear.
But even as this thought took form, he had another. Gerald Weber, neurological opportunist. Violator of privacy and sideshow exploiter. He could not decide which would be worse: to follow up these new complications or to let this repeat appeal drop. These people had asked for help, and he had entered their story. Then he had forgotten them. They were still in distress, still looking to him. His one prescription—cognitive behavioral therapy—seemed to be making things worse. Even if Weber could do nothing more, he was obliged at least to listen and attend.
Karin Schluter’s note made no overt requests. “I don’t mean to push again, especially after hearing nothing back since July. But I heard your Public Radio interview, and given what you said about the brain’s plasticity, I somehow thought you would at least want to know what’s happening to Mark.” He looked up from his screen, out his window, onto the ancient maple that—when?—had broken out in the color of a May goldfinch. Nebraska at harvest: the last place on earth he wanted to go. What was the word again, for unreasonable fear of rolling, empty spaces?
Only more writing could save him. One concentrated report, published or not. One that might redeem whatever he’d botched with the last one. Not a case history: a life. He could secure, in advance, the goodwill of everyone involved. He could re-create Mark Schluter, no composites, no pseudonyms, no glossed-over detail, no hiding behind the clinical. Just the story of invented shelter, the scared struggle to build a theory big enough for wetware to live in.
He told Sylvie, after dinner the next night, while he was washing dishes. The whole transaction thickened with déjà vu. But he never imagined the announcement would upset her. “Back to Nebraska! Are you serious? You couldn’t get home fast enough the last time.”
“Just for a couple of weeks or so.”
“Two weeks! I don’t understand this. It’s sounds like…a complete reversal.”
“I think Tour Director wants me to do this.”
She was hefting the clean glasses out of the strainer, wiping them slowly, and putting them away in all the wrong places. “You’d tell me if anything was happening to you, wouldn’t you?”
He killed the spray of hot water. “Happening? What do you mean?” What could still happen, in his life?
“Anything…Any big rearrangements. If anything was, you know, truly messing with you? Or with Famous Gerald. You’d tell me?”
Weeks now. He put down the sponge, took the dish towel from her hands, folded it neatly in half, and hung it lengthwise on the handle of the stove. “Of course. Always. Everything. You know that.” He crossed back to her, placed three fingers on her temporal lobe. A mind scan; a scout’s kiss. “It’s only when I tell you things that I understand them myself.”
Part Four
So You Might Live
What was full was not my creel, but my memory. Like the white-throats, I had forgotten it would ever again be aught but morning on the Fork.
—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
They find their way back down from the arctic. The family of three now fly with scores of others. In mid-morning, with the sun cooking the air into wide, rising columns, the birds lift up a mile or more above the earth. They float in growing flocks, dropping to the next thermal to the south, where they rise again. They reach fifty miles an hour, make five hundred miles a day, with little beating of wings. In the evenings, they glide to the surface and roost in shallow, open waters remembered from previous years. They sail in over harvested fields, feathered dinosaurs bugling, a last great reminder of life before the self.
The fledged crane colt follows his parents back to a home he must learn to come from. He must see the loop once, to memorize its markers. This route is a tradition, a ritual that changes only slightly, passed down through generations. Even small ripples—left down that valley, on past that outcrop—are preserved. Something in their eyes must match symbols. But how it’s done, no person knows and no bird can say.
They wing back down across the western states. Each day graces them with a tailwind. In the first week of October, the family roosts on the eastern prairies of Colorado. After daybreak, as they graze the fields, waiting for the ground to heat and the air to rise, the space around the fledged crane colt explodes. His father is hit. He sees his parent sprayed across the nearby earth. Birds scream into the shattered air, their brain stems pumping panic. This chaos, too, lays down a permanent trace, remembered forever: open season.
When the world sets again from the rush of blood, the young bird locates his mother. He hears her calling, half a mile off, circling traumatized. They wait two more days, searching, sounding some ghost of the unison call. Nothing can tell them; no way they can know. There is only circling and calling, waiting, a kind of religion, for the dead one to show. When he doesn’t, there is only yesterday, last year, the sixty million years before that, the route itself, the blind, self-organizing return.
The sandhills do not gather in Nebraska now. The Platte hosts no great fall staging. The cranes stop only briefly, in small groups. The mother brings her fledgling through, priming him. She leads him within ten yards of the spot where, late last February, she and her mate huddled themselves, yards from where the truck flipped over. She wades in the flat of the autumn river, ready to meet her mate again back here in the river’s loops, in opened, animal time, the standing now, the map whose edges wrap back on themselves.
But her mate is not in this place, either. She grows jittery again, remembering that ancient incident, the trauma of last spring. Something bad once happened here, as loud and deadly as the new, fatal wrong. A kind of forecast, that grainy irritant in the widow crane’s mind is all that remains of what happened that night. All eyewitness accounts have disappeared into the present of animals. No one can say what a bird might have seen, what a bird might remember.
Her edginess rubs off on this year’s colt. Contagious distress lifts him into a leap. He kicks out at the surrounding emptiness. His primaries spread like splayed fingers. His neck curls back and calls, curdling the air. He tosses leaves up over his arcing back, cow
ling his wings. And for the first of a thousand times in his life, he dances. In the falling dark, other species might mistake it for ecstasy.
He quits the so-called cognitive therapy. He should have quit long ago. Anything that Kopy Karin pushes so hard can’t possibly be in his best interests. It’s just a trick to distract him, get him to think about everything except what’s happening all around him. A kind of brainwashing to trick him into taking all these fakes at face value. He only hopes it hasn’t yet messed him up for good.
Dr. Tower freaks. She practically pleads with him: But we haven’t even gotten out of assessment. Well, he’s ready to give her a full assessment, if she’s interested. But she just rags on. Is he sure he’s ready to leave? Doesn’t he want to feel better about things, before…? All pretty pitiful and self-serving. He tells her to get professional help.
But he needs to talk to someone, someone who can help put all the facts together. Bonnie’s out. Okay: she’s still his Bonnie-baby. Call it love, whatever. But Kopy Karin has gotten to her, turned her, as the federales say. Convinced her there’s something wrong with him. Even when he lays out all the accumulated evidence—his missing sister, the fake Homestar, nobody admitting to the note, the new Karin hooking up with the old Daniel, the disguised Daniel following them around, training animals to watch them—she says she’s not sure.
He could ask Rupp and Cain. He might have, a long time ago, but for that little seed of doubt. Where were they, after all, on the night he rolled the Ram? He’s held back, waiting for an explanation that never quite materializes. But now it occurs to him: Who planted that doubt? Karbon Karin again, trying to do to him what she’s managed to do to Bonnie. Convince him his friends are foes, and vice versa. The whole three-car theory: all the impostor’s idea. He’s crazy to give it a second thought.
He looks for a chance to enlist the guys. He gets it, one chilly afternoon, when they come by to take him on a squirrel dump. One of Ruppie’s specialties: all summer long he picks off gray squirrels in his yard with a pellet gun, then stashes them in his freezer until he has enough to justify a disposal run out of town. Then the three of them take binoculars, a couple of sixes, some brats, and a Hefty Bag full of the thawed rodents and head out to a little strip of uncultivated prairie along the South Loup. Build a little squirrel pyramid in the open field, set up camp a hundred yards away, and wait for the turkey vultures. Rupp loves those things, could watch them all day. Cathartes aura, he calls out when they start circling overhead. Ave, Cathartes aura, like they’re something out of the Bible, and the squirrels are their burnt offering. And it is kind of biblical, in fact: the swarming cloud of them.
Mark and Duane are in jeans and sweats. Rupp is in shorts and a black tee; unfreezable. They set up camp and kick back. Talk turns to desirable women. Want to know who’s hot? Cain says. That Cokie Roberts is hot.
Seven, Rupp says. Seven and a half. Great face, but the super-abundance of ideas lowers the property value. So what’s up with that Christiane Amanpour? I mean, what’s her angle? Is she even American, or what?
Talking in code. The one says: You know what would look good around Britney’s neck? And the other answers: Her ankles? It gets on Mark’s nerves after a while. He watches the squirrel pile. Why do you kill those things, anyway? he asks Rupp.
Because they kill my best and brightest tomatoes.
That’s their job description, Duane-o says. Your basic yard rat is supposed to wreak havoc on your typical tomato. Were you aware that the tomato is a fruit?
I have long had my suspicions, Rupp says. I wouldn’t mind if the rodents actually ate the things. But they like to just pull them off the vine and play polo. No reasoning with them, short of the deep freeze.
Killing is a sin, man.
I am aware. I wrestled with my conscience and beat the bastard, two out of three falls.
The three of them sit, drink, cook up some brats on the little hibachi. The vultures arrive, and it’s two kindred species, fraternizing over a little shared picnic.
Ah, Labor Day, Duane says. You gotta love it.
Rupp agrees. Vita doesn’t get any dolcier than this. Day like this calls for some poetry. Recite some poetry for us, will you, Cain?
I’d rather yank a fart out of a cow’s ass, Cain says.
Rupp shrugs. There’s a herd over that hill. It’s your America. Knock yourself out.
Duane suggests they take some target practice, but Rupp just slaps him upside of the head. You don’t shoot at Cathartes aura. It’s nobility. The finest we have. You wouldn’t take potshots at the president, would you?
Not unless he wings me first. Speaking of which: You hear anything more about your unit? Orders to mobilize, or what have you? Rupp just laughs. But Duane-o is all: It’s gonna be any minute now. You know America is going on a tear before the year’s out, and nobody better get in her way. Afghanistan’s going to look like a training bike with streamers. The big one’s coming. Armor get-on. Direct flight from Fort Riley to Riyadh. You’re going on the hajj, bud. One weekend a month, my ass.
If it be not now, yet it will come, Rupp says. We have to do something. Can’t just sit here, burning. But it’s going to be cruise missiles against camel jockeys, all over again. All I personally have to do is keep the wheels greased. Home by Veterans Day. He shoves Duane’s shoulder: Come on, dipstick. Join up. No knowledge without suffering.
Get shot at? I’d sooner be anally savaged by Hastings escapees.
Hey. Who says you can’t have it all?
Got a letter from the National Guard, Mark says.
What? Rupp shouts. Like he’s upset. What did it say?
Mark waves his hand around his head, swatting gnats. Just a letter; friendly and personal, in a legal sort of way. Not something you can just sit down and read through.
When was this, Rupp wants to know. Like it’s an issue.
Who knows? A while back. No biggie. They’re the damn army, man. It’s not like they’re in any hurry.
But Rupp is all upset, ball-busting him. We’ll get on that puppy instantly, soon as we take you home. Remind me.
Sure, sure. But just chill for a minute. Listen. It’s possible that the government has other plans for us, altogether.
This gets their attention. But Mark has to take it slow. The big picture is a little hard to grasp, and he doesn’t want them to overload. He starts with the stuff they’re already familiar with. The substitutions: sister, dog, house. Then the note, given to him, he now believes, by somebody who was there, in the truck with him.
That’s impossible, both fellow Muskrats say at once.
He gives them a hard look: I know what you’re going to say. There was nobody there. Nobody in the wreck when the medics came. Except me. He walked away. He called in the accident.
Rupp shakes his head, holding a cold beer to it. No, no man. If you had seen…
Duane jumps in. Dude, your truck looked like a big old Angus on the other end of the cutters. Picture in the paper. Nobody was walking away from that. It’s a miracle you…
Mark Schluter gets a little upset. He flips over the hibachi. A rolling coal burns a brown spot in the tops of his Chuck Taylors.
Okay, okay, Rupp says. Let’s assume. For point of argument. What makes you think this guy was…? Who was he? What was he doing in your truck?
Mark holds up his hands. Everybody just relax. Regroup. I know he was there because I remember him.
It’s like the moment in a thriller when the guy reaches underneath his chin and pulls off the latex face.
You remember? Who…? What are you saying?
All right: so Mark doesn’t remember the hitchhiker himself. But he remembers talking to him. As plain as this conversation. Must have picked him up a while earlier, because they were in the middle of some kind of interview guessing game. Questions the hitchhiker wasn’t directly answering, except with hints. Warmer, colder kind of thing. Guess the secret.
Rupp is upset, which doesn’t happen often. He’s all: Ha
ng on. What exactly do you remember?
But the details aren’t worrying Mark right now. He’s after the full jigsaw. Which is exactly what everybody wants to keep him from seeing. Some kind of systematic cover-up, to keep him from finding out too much about what he’s stumbled into. Look at the facts: A few minutes after he picks up this angel hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere and starts in on this whole Twenty Questions thing, he has an accident. Then, in the hospital, something happens to him on the operating table. Something that conveniently erases his memory. And when he does come back to himself, they’ve swapped out his sister, who might help him remember, and replaced her with a fake who keeps him under 24/7 surveillance. That’s a lot to call coincidence. And then they set him up in a parallel Farview. A whole live-in experiment, with Mark as the lab monkey.
What about us? Duane wants to know. How come they didn’t swap us out? He sounds offended. Left out.
Isn’t that obvious? You two don’t know anything.
This pisses Duane off. But Mark doesn’t have time to make every little point. He’s got to get them to see how big this must be, in order for the government to throw around that kind of money, replacing a whole town.
Jesus, Duane says, starting to grasp the scale. What do you think they’re up to?
That’s just the thing. That must have been what the hitchhiker was hinting at. Warmer. Colder. They’re using this place for some project. Either they need some big old empty spot with nobody in it. Or there’s something specific they need—something special about life out here.
Rupp snorts. Something special? About life out here?
Mark pushes them. Think: something so close we don’t even see it anymore. Something we do that nobody else does.
Duane almost chokes on a bratwurst. Wheat. Meatpacking. Migrating birds.
Good Christ, Mark says. The birds. How could we have missed it? Don’t you two remember? When did I have my accident?
The Echo Maker Page 32