The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  “So what were you talking about?” Weber asked Barbara. Exposed, off balance, drowning in the shallow end of the pool.

  Her smile hinted at private communications. “I was just suggesting to young Mark here…”

  “A.k.a. me…”

  “…that it’s time for a new approach. If he wants to know what Karin wants…”

  “She’s means the Pseudo-Sib—”

  “If he wants to ‘get to the bottom of her,’ then the best plan is just to talk to her. Sit down and ask her everything. Who she thinks she is. Who she thinks he is. What she remembers about her past. Listen for any…”

  “Kind of a sting operation, see? Draw her out. Really push the alibis and the briefings. Trip her up somewhere. Get something to pop out.”

  “Mr. Schluter.”

  Mark saluted. “Present and accounted for.”

  “That’s hardly the spirit that we…”

  “Hang on. All too exciting. I gotta pee. Seems like I have to pee all the time these days. Doc? How old do you need to be before you can reasonably be working on a prostate thing?” He didn’t wait for an answer.

  Weber looked at Barbara, admiring. Her plan possessed a simple beauty, out of reach of neurological theory. No one—not the brain-as-computer people, not the Cartesians or neo-Cartesians, not the disguised revived behaviorists, not the pharmacologists or the functionalists or the Lesionnaires—none but some civilian would have suggested it. And it seemed no more destructive or helpless than anything science could come up with. It might accomplish nothing at all, and still be useful.

  She avoided his eyes and murmured a question. He answered, “Mostly New York.”

  She looked up, smiling in alarm. “I’m sorry! Did I say ‘Where?’ I meant ‘How?’”

  “Oh,” he said. “Then the answer is, ‘Mostly shaky.’”

  The words seemed to come from someone else. But they surprised him less than their instant comfort. Out from hiding, after months: he might say anything to her, this unlikely caretaker, this unreadable woman.

  Barbara took his confession in stride. “Of course you’ve been. If you weren’t shaky, there’d be something wrong with you. Open season on you, right now.” Laying down her hand for him to see. A nurse’s aide, up on the latest New Yorker satire. But the most natural shared feeling imaginable. She looked up, the pupils of her hazel eyes as large as the spots on a masquerading moth. They knew him. “It’s all still about pecking order with humans, isn’t it? Even when the ranking is imaginary.”

  “Not a contest I have much interest in.”

  She reared back, that same look of amused skepticism she’d just given Mark. “Of course you have interest. This book is you. The hunters are circling. Nothing imaginary there. What are you going to do, roll over and die?”

  The gentlest reprimand, a chide based on total loyalty. Utter confidence in him, but on what authority? An hour and a half of shared time, and reading his books. Yet she saw what Sylvie didn’t. The woman unsettled him; why? What was she doing reading book reviews? What was she doing here, at a former patient’s? Could these two be involved? The idea was mad. A private visit, months after Mark’s discharge: even less a part of her job description than of his. Yet here he was, too. She studied him, suspicious of his own hidden motives, and what answer could he give the return question? He stood and said nothing, ready to roll over and die.

  Mark came out of the bathroom, still zipping. His head swung, as animated as Weber had ever seen him. “Okay, here’s the plan. Here’s what I’m going to do.”

  His words sounded tinny and far away. Weber couldn’t make them out, over the nearer din. Barbara Gillespie’s face, that open oval, still regarded him, the simplest interrogation. His insides, airborne, answered for him.

  The two of them ended up at a restaurant back in Kearney, one of those chains drawn up in Minneapolis or Atlanta and faxed around the nation. Historic, vanished America, reincarnated as comforting franchises. This one was supposed to be a silver mine from the 1880s, about four hundred miles out of place. But then, Weber had been to an identical one in Queens.

  The ease of their conversation confused him. They spoke in the compressed, comic shorthand of people who’d known each other from childhood. Idioglossia, as shared as any. They picked at a deep-fat-fried onion, chatting without having to explain themselves. Of course they had Mark’s brain to talk about, a topic of inexhaustible interest to them both. “So how do you feel, personally, about his going on this medication?” Barbara’s voice gave away nothing, no hint of her own inclination.

  Her interest in Mark nagged at him, indicting his own. Why should she be so intimate with the boy, when she shared even less with Mark than Weber did? He shook his head and combed his hand through the idea of his hair. “Hesitant, at best. I’m ordinarily conservative, when it comes to something so powerful. Every roll of the neurochemical dice is a bit of a crapshoot. Like trying to fix a ship in a bottle by shaking it. I’m not even a fan of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, before exhausting other possibilities.”

  “Really? You must not suffer from depression.”

  He was no longer sure. “Half the people who respond to them will respond to placebos. I’ve seen studies suggesting that fifteen minutes of exercise and twenty minutes of reading a day can do as much for depression as most popular medications.”

  She blinked and tilted her head. “I read for three or four hours a day, and it doesn’t keep me particularly safe.”

  A woman who read more than he did, who suffered her own dark bouts: he would have guessed neither fact. Now both seemed self-evident. “Yeah?” He twisted his mouth. “Try cutting back to twenty minutes.”

  She grinned and flicked her forehead. “Yes, Doctor.”

  “But this may be the right thing for him. The only path with any chance of helping.” Two different things, he knew. But he didn’t point out the difference.

  She asked many questions, avid for the topic of Mark. Seamlessly, they drifted to Capgras, then reduplicative paramnesia, then inter-metamorphosis. She couldn’t get enough of anosagnosia: patients unable to see their symptoms, even when shown. “I can’t wrap my head around it. Do you think this man Ramachandran can be right? That there’s a little ‘devil’s advocate’ brain subsystem that goes on the blink?”

  She’d read far more than just Weber’s books. And she was far too eager to talk about what she’d read. He listed hard, looking at her, ear almost on his shoulder, a gesture vaguely canine. He wanted to ask, So who are you, when you’re not yourself? He asked, “So how long have you been in nursing?”

  She dipped her head. “I’m not really a nurse. You know that. I’m a nurse’s aide. A care attendant.” Furtive, she stole a fried ring from the onion bloom.

  “And you never felt like getting licensed? You never thought of training as a therapist?” He began to form a theory: something had left her as panicked by the arena of public judgment as he was fast becoming. Another thing that linked them.

  “Well, I haven’t been in the health business for very long.”

  “What did you do before?”

  Her eyes sparked. “Why do I feel like I’m the next case history?”

  “I’m sorry. That was a bit pushy.”

  “Oh, don’t apologize. I’m flattered, really. It’s been so long since anyone gave me the full interrogation.”

  “I promise to quit prying.”

  “No need. To tell the truth, it feels good to talk about…real things. I don’t get much chance…” Her eyes wandered off. He caught a glimpse of her, starved for any scrap of intellectual connection, here in a place where she had chosen exile, a place that distrusted intellect and resented words. Perhaps the only reason she responded to him.

  “You’re…by yourself? No friends? You’re not married?”

  She laughed. “The proper question these days is: ‘How many times?’”

  “I’m sorry! Crass of me.”

  “You say ‘sorry’ a lot. One might a
lmost think you meant it. Anyway: twice. The first time was a twenty-something temporary insanity. No-fault. The second one left when I took too long deciding on the kid thing.”

  “Hang on. He divorced you for not having children?”

  “He needed an heir.”

  “What was he, the king of England?”

  “A lot of men are.”

  He studied her face, needing neuroscience to immunize him against beauty. He saw her as she would look in her late seventies, plagued by Alzheimer’s and sitting vacant at an empty window. “And you didn’t want children?”

  “About these neural subsystems,” she said. “Just how many of them are there? I’m getting a ramshackle, electoral-college feel.”

  She was using him. And not even him, but just an available, crowded brain, something to bounce herself off of. “Ah! Politics. I should probably go home now.”

  He didn’t go home. They sat talking until the waitress cut off their coffee refills. Even in the parking lot, leaning against his car in the leaf-crackling air, they kept talking. They returned to Mark, to retrograde amnesia, to whether the memory of that night was still inside, theoretically retrievable, if not by him.

  “He talks about being at a bar,” Weber said. “Some roadside dance house.”

  She smiled, the most solitary smile he’d ever seen. “Want to see the place?”

  Only then did Weber see he’d been fishing.

  “Call your wife first,” she instructed.

  “How did you…?”

  “Please. You’ve been with me all evening. I told you I’ve been married. I know the drill.”

  So Weber stood in the parking lot, checking in with Sylvie for the night, while the unreadable woman walked in loops under a street-light fifty yards away, giving him privacy, hugging herself in her too-thin suede coat.

  They took his rental to the Silver Bullet. When he started the engine, the radio roared to life—the classical station he’d found, coming in from Lincoln. He flicked it off. “Wait!” she told him. “Go back.”

  He flipped it on again and nosed out of the parking lot, onto the deserted road. High unaccompanied voices wove through each other, borne up by a curtain of brass. Music from another planet, antiphony, a lost way of thought.

  “My God,” she said. She sounded ill. He glanced over at her. In the darkness, her face was taut and her eyes wet. She held up an objecting palm and looked away. “Sorry.” Her voice was damp. “Listen to me! ‘Sorry.’ I sound like you. Sorry. It’s nothing. Don’t mind me.”

  “Monteverdi,” he guessed. “Something you know?”

  She shook her head, hard. “I’ve never heard anything like it.” She listened as if to an old crystal set broadcasting news of a foreign invasion. After half a chorus, she reached and turned off the radio. They drove out of town along dark country roads, in silence, Barbara navigating with only hand gestures. When she spoke again, her voice was casual. “This is the road. This is Mark’s stretch.”

  He studied it, but could see nothing. Utterly featureless. They might have been anywhere between South Dakota and Oklahoma. They rode along in the autumn dark, the headlights just bright enough to push them ahead forever through total ignorance.

  The dance house was deafening, music so loud it trampolined on his eardrums. “At least it’s not topless night,” Barbara yelled. “That’s the band that was playing the night of the accident. Mark’s favorite.”

  He wanted to say that he knew all about the band, that he knew as much about Mark’s musical tastes as she did. It angered him, that her care for Mark was so spontaneous, while his was full of motives.

  They found a booth in the corner. She went to the bar and brought back two pale beers in ribbed plastic cups. She leaned across the table and shouted into his ear, “‘You may ask yourself: How did I get here?’ ”

  “How’s that?”

  She looked at him, checking if he was serious. “Nothing. Talkin’ ’bout my generation.”

  He spread his arms out in a fan. “Are these people all regulars?” She shrugged: Most of them. “Some of them were here, the night that Mark and his friends…?” The music swallowed his words.

  She leaned into him, elbows on the table. “The police have talked to everyone. Nobody knows anything. Nobody ever does.”

  They sat in the confined booth and drank, each periscoping the room. He measured her. Up close, her face was like some child’s, counting the days to its birthday. The woman’s inexplicable isolation disturbed him. Something had happened to seal her inside a pose, some bizarre collapse of confidence that left her eking out a life far beneath her ability. She had lost something of herself, or thrown it away, refusing to compete, declining to take part in that collective enterprise that every day grew more unstoppable. Could damage to the prefrontal cortex have turned her into a hermit? No damage necessary. He recognized her, her withdrawal. Something bound them together. Something more than the unthinkable weirdness of Capgras—the orphan in their shared custody—had estranged them both. She had been through a crisis much like the one that now eroded him.

  She caught his eye, probing. She reached across the narrow booth and took his wrist. “So this is what you mean by ‘Mostly shaky’?”

  Even as she held it, he could not control the palsied limb. His whole body: tremoring as if he’d just tried to lift something many times his own weight over his head.

  She leaned in and lifted his chin. “Listen to me. They’re no one. They have no power over you.”

  It took him a moment to identify them: the court of public opinion. “Clearly they do,” he said. More power over him than he had over himself. The human cortex had first evolved by way of navigating intricate social rank. Half of cognition, the chief selection pressure now in play: the herd in the head.

  And shaped for it by the power of them, her brain read his. “What do you care about that monkey-troop stuff? Grooming and jockeying. Nothing matters but your own sense of work.”

  All sense of his work was gone. Only the summary judgment remained. She tilted her head at him, searching. And at that one helpless gesture, the words flowed out of him. “That’s the problem. Everything the reviewers say is perfectly true. My work is highly suspect.”

  Almost elating, to admit as much to this woman. She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “Why are you saying that?”

  “I didn’t come out here to help the man. Not originally.” The music battered away; all around him, people were at work making other people. He could bear to look at nothing more complex than the foam on his beer. “Simple narcissism, to think I could help him in the first place. What more can I do but hand him some chemical shotgun—‘Here, take this, and let’s cross our fingers and hope for the best’?”

  She stroked his knuckles with the back of her thumb, as if she had been doing it forever.

  “What good is all the brain science in the world to him? Arrogance, really. A kind of charlatanism. What am I even doing out here?”

  She kept a steady pressure on his fingers and said nothing. Her spine curved forward. Something in her shared his sense of deception, took it into her own body. Only her eyes assured him: empathy meant vertigo. She shook his wrist in the air. It had almost stopped quivering. “Basta. Enough flagellation. Let’s dance.”

  He shrank back against the back of the booth, stunned. “I don’t dance.”

  “What are you talking about? Everything alive dances.” She laughed at his look of terror. “Just get out there and wiggle. Like you’re catching bugs.”

  He was too spent to object. She towed him out to the middle of the dance floor, a tug pulling a wounded freighter. He scrambled along in her wake, looking for instructions, but none were forthcoming. Dancing in a bar with a woman he didn’t know: he felt queasy, the way he felt when going a day without work. But this was just simple, improvised, mutual shelter. The idea of anything illicit felt almost comical—assault with a dead weapon, he always joked with Sylvie. Weber and Barbara stirred and unfolde
d. All around them, people moved. Salsa and boogie. Box step and rhythmic stumble. Odd writhings to match the house band’s even odder Appalachian fiddling and thrashing guitars. Next to them, a younger couple stared at each other and vigorously kicked shit. Farther away, a Ponca descendant did a variation of the ground-stomp-and-scan, his partner soaring to full flight. Everywhere, knees kicking forward, shoulders flapping. The woman was right: everything alive shook itself under the pull of the moon.

  She laughed at him. “You look great!”

  He looked like a fool. A clumsy, autumn-honking fledgling. But his body pulsed with the beat of things. The music stopped, stranding them. Weber stood in a pool of shame, needing to fill the emptiness. “Do you suppose that Mark and his friends were dancing that night?”

  She squinted at the possibility. “Bonnie said she wasn’t here. Not that there weren’t women involved. There certainly was drinking, as well as other substances. Mark has told me as much.”

  The music started up again: heavy bluegrass metal. A wave came over Weber, light, omniscient. Even dancing felt too full to bear. “Come on,” he said. “We should go. Nothing to learn here.”

  She felt it, too: he was sure of that. All the thrill of collapse. They might have been anyone, in any life, hiding from discovery. Her face, as unsteady as his, pretended to carelessness. She found the exit and they fell out of the cloud of smoke and noise into a star-filled sky. He felt the most improbable calm, the placidity of helplessness, and knew that she, too, had spilled into that silence with him. The air was dense and dry with harvest. His feet scuffed the gravel as he crossed toward the car. She grabbed his elbow, stopping him. “Shh. Listen!”

  He heard it again, in the night’s version. Storms of insects, and the screeches of insect hunters. Now and then owls—Who cooks for you? Who looks for you?—and the antiphonal call of what could only be coyotes. Creatures, all of whom heard humans and knew them as just part of the wider network of sounds. Living things of every gauge for whom the roadside bar was just another mound in the continuous test of the landscape, just another swarming node in the biome to exploit.