Daniel stared into his beer, drunk as a junior high schooler. Some other dizziness kicked in: What would he do, in Mark’s place? He’d sat in Gerald Weber’s hotel room with Karin, taking his predictable high moral stand. He might have changed tunes, had his own brother, just out of half a year of cocaine detox in Austin, suddenly refused to recognize him. Daniel Riegel: absurd with certainty. He might take this olanzapine, if the world turned strange on him, if he woke up, one day, sick of the river, blind to the birds, out of love with everything that had once been life. “It’s possible,” he mumbled. “You might want…”
A knock on the door saved him. Playful, familiar rhythm: Shave and a haircut, two bits. Daniel jumped, vaguely criminal.
“Now what?” Mark groaned, then shouted, “Come on in. It’s always open. Rob me blind. Who gives a damn?”
A shivering figure pushed inside: the woman that Karin had introduced to Daniel at the public hearing. Daniel sprang up, knocking the table and spilling his beer down his pants. A facial tic proclaimed his innocence. Mark, too, was on his feet, rushing the woman. He grappled her in a bear hug, which she, to Daniel’s amazement, returned.
“Barbie Doll! Where have you been? I was starting to panic about you.”
“Mr. Schluter! I was just here four days ago.”
“Oh, yeah. I guess. But that’s a long time ago. And only a short visit.”
“Stop whining. I could move in, and you’d still complain I was never around.”
Mark shot a look at Daniel, licking the canary feathers off his lips. “Well, we could give it a try. Purely for health-research purposes.”
She blew past him into the kitchen, struggling to remove her coat while holding out her hand to Daniel. “Hello, again.”
“Ho, ho-hold on a minute. You’re telling me the two of you know each other?”
She drew her chin back and frowned. “That’s the usual sense of ‘Hello, again.’”
“What in God’s name is going on? Everybody knows everybody. When worlds collide!”
“Now just cool your little heart. There’s an explanation for everything in this life, don’t you know.” She described the public hearing, how impressed she’d been with Daniel’s performance. The explanation quieted Mark. Daniel alone was unconvinced.
“I should go,” he said, flustered. “I didn’t realize you were expecting company.”
“Barbie? Barbie’s not company.”
“Don’t run,” Barbara said. “It’s just a social call.”
But something in Daniel was already running. On his way out the door, he told Mark, “Ask her. She’s a health professional.”
“Ask her what?” Mark said.
“Yeah,” Barbara echoed. “Ask me what?”
“Olanzapine.”
Mark grimaced. “She seems to think the decision is all mine.” As Daniel slipped through the door, Mark called after him, “Hey! Don’t be a stranger!”
Not until he got back to his apartment and checked his answering machine did Daniel Riegel, lifelong tracker, remember where he’d first heard Barbara Gillespie.
In the middle of February, the birds came back. Sylvie and Gerald Weber saw a late-night news feature on the cranes, lying in bed together in their snow-covered Setauket house on Chickadee Way. As the camera panned over the sandy banks of the Platte, husband and wife looked on in embarrassment. “That’s your place?” Sylvie asked. She couldn’t very well say nothing.
Weber grunted. His brain was wrestling with some blocked memory, some problem in identification that had been bothering him for eight months. But his thoughts pushed the near-solution farther away, the more he chased it. His wife misunderstood his preoccupation. She raised her knuckles to his upper arm and stroked. It’s all right. We two are past simplicity. Everyone’s messy. We can be, too.
The woman in front of the camera, a clumsily urbane New Yorker who seemed unnerved by so much emptiness, related the story as if it were news. “It’s been called one of the most spectacular shows of nature anywhere, and it stars half a million sandhill cranes. They start to arrive on Valentine’s Day, and most will be gone by St. Patrick’s…”
“Smart birds,” Sylvie said. “And great holiday observers.” Her husband nodded, peering at the screen. “Everybody’s Irish, huh?” Her husband said nothing. She clenched her jaw and rubbed his shoulder a little harder.
By Presidents’ Day, saluting everyone goodbye, Mark began the medication. Dr. Hayes doubled the dosage of the Australian case: a still-conservative 10 mg every night.
“So we should see some improvement in two weeks?” Karin suggested, as if any doctor’s agreement would be legally binding.
Dr. Hayes told her, in Latin, that they’d see what they would see. “Remember what we talked about. There may be some chance of social withdrawal.”
You can’t withdraw, she told the doctor, in American, if you’re not there to start with.
Four days later, at two in the morning, the phone tore Daniel and Karin out of a deep sleep. Naked, Daniel stumbled to the phone. He mumbled incoherently into the receiver. Or the incoherence was Karin’s, listening from the bed. Daniel stumbled back to her, bewildered. “It’s your brother. He wants to talk to you.”
Karin squeezed her eyes and shook herself. “He called here? He talked to you?”
Daniel scrambled back under the covers. He turned the heat off at night, and now his naked body was going hypothermic. “I…we saw each other. We talked to each other, a little while ago.”
Karin grappled with the lucid nightmare. “When?”
“It doesn’t matter. A few days back.” He flicked his fingers: the ticking clock, the waiting phone, the story too long. “He wants to talk to you.”
“Doesn’t matter?” She tore the gray army-surplus blanket off the bed. “It’s true, isn’t it? You loved him. I mean, love. He was the only reason you…I was never anything more than…” She wrapped the wool blanket around her shoulders and turned her back on him, fumbling for the phone in the dark. “Mark? Are you all right?”
“I know what happened to me during the operation.”
“Tell me.” Still drugged with sleep.
“I died. I passed away on the operating table, and none of the doctors noticed.”
Her voice came out of her, thin, pleading. “Mark?”
“It clarifies a bunch of stuff that made no sense. Why everything has seemed so…far. I resisted the idea because, well, obviously, someone would realize, right? If you weren’t alive? Then it hit me: How would they know? I mean, if nobody saw it happen…I mean, it just now occurred to me, and I’m the one who’s in the middle of it!”
She talked with him for a long time, first reasoning, then irrational, just trying to comfort him. He was panicked; he didn’t know how to “get properly dead.” He spoke of messing up the transition—“I scattered the deck”—and now there seemed no way to get things back into the right sequence.
“I’m coming over right now, Mark. We can figure this out, together.”
He laughed, as only the dead can laugh. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep overnight. Haven’t started rotting yet.”
“Are you sure?” she kept asking. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
“You can’t get worse than dead.”
She was afraid to hang up. “How do you feel?”
“Okay, actually. Better than I felt when I thought I was still alive.”
Back in the bedroom, Daniel held one of the neuroscience books that Karin had perpetually renewed from the library. “I’ve found it,” he said. “Cotard’s syndrome.”
She threw the gray wool blanket back on the bed and crawled under it. She’d read all about it, had spent a year exploring every horror the brain allowed. Another misidentification delusion, perhaps an extreme form of Capgras. Unrecognized death: the only possible explanation for feeling so cut off from everyone. “How can he get it now? After a year? Just when he’s started the treatment.”
Daniel killed the light a
nd crawled in next to her. He put his hand on her side. She flinched. “Maybe it’s the medication,” he suggested. “Maybe he’s having some kind of reaction.”
She spun around to face him in the blackness. “Oh my God. Is that possible? We need to get him back under observation. First thing tomorrow.”
Daniel agreed.
She froze in thought. “Shit. Jesus. How could I forget?”
“What? What is it?” He tried to rub her shoulders, but she pulled away.
“His wreck. One year ago today. It completely slipped my mind.”
She lay down and pretended stillness for something like an hour. At last she got up. “I’m going to take something,” she whispered.
“Not this late,” he said.
She went into the bathroom and closed the door. She didn’t come out for so long that he finally followed her. He knocked on the bathroom door, but there was no answer. He opened it. She sat on the closed toilet lid, glaring at him, even before he entered. “You saw him? You talked with him? And you never told me. It’s him for you, isn’t it? I’m nothing but his sister, am I?”
Dr. Hayes examined Mark, baffled, but fascinated. He listened as Mark announced, “I’m not saying it’s a cover-up. I’m just saying that nobody noticed. You can see how it might happen. But I’m telling you, Doc, I never felt like this when alive.”
He scheduled Mark for another scan, for the first week in March. Mark, weirdly compliant, left to see the lab techs. “It can’t be the medication,” Hayes told Karin. “There’s nothing like this in the literature.”
“Literature,” she repeated, everything fictional. She could feel the neurologist, already writing up this new wrinkle for publication.
The Cotard’s diagnosis changed nothing substantial. Now that Mark had started the olanzapine, Dr. Hayes insisted that he continue without missing any doses. Could Karin vouch that he’d kept with the medication schedule, exactly as given? She could not, but did. Did she feel able to continue supervising her brother, or would she like to put Mark back into Dedham Glen? Continue supervising, Karin said. She had no choice. The insurance coverage would not pay for re-admission.
She couldn’t afford to increase her hours out at Farview. Already, there weren’t enough hours in the week for the Refuge. What had begun as an invented job, the charity of a man who wanted to keep her nearby, had turned real. It was no longer even a question of meaningful work, of self-fulfillment. As absolutely delusional as it would have sounded to say aloud to anyone, she now knew: water wanted something from her.
Desperate, she called Barbara and asked for help in covering. “It’s only for a few days, until the medication kicks in and he pulls out of this.” The goals of care had changed. She no longer needed Mark to recognize her. She only needed him to believe he was alive.
“Of course,” Barbara said. “Anything. For however long he might need it.”
The woman’s willingness stung her. “It’s a crazy time at the Refuge,” Karin explained. “Things are heating up with…”
“Of course,” Barbara said. “Someone should probably be there at night. Nights are probably bad for him, right now.” Her voice hinted willingness, even that far. But that much Karin refused to ask of her. If the night shift couldn’t be Karin, it wouldn’t be Barbara, either.
Karin called Bonnie, the only real choice. She got the infectious answering machine—I wish I was here to talk to you for real—in that cheerful treble that sounded like the horn of a Ford Focus on mood elevators. Karin tried twice more, but couldn’t bring herself to leave a message. Would you mind spending nights at my brother’s for a little while? He thinks he’s a dead man. Even by Kearney standards, something you’d want to ask in person. At last, Karin went out to the Arch, on Bonnie’s shift. Karin hadn’t yet bothered to take a look. Sixty-five million dollars to turn her great-grandparents into the Cartoon Channel and to trick people on their way to California in their Navigators into thinking there was something here worth stopping for.
She paid her $8.25, pushed past the life-size pioneer figures, and rode up the escalator through the covered wagon, surrounded by giant murals. She spotted Bonnie near the sod house exhibit, in her calico dress and poke bonnet, talking to a group of schoolchildren in a bizarre, old-fashiony voice—an MTV version of Ma Kettle. Seeing Karin, Bonnie broke into a big wave and, in the same fake-archaic voice, called out, “Hiya!” She picked clinging first-graders off her skirt and joined Karin in the Pawnee exhibit, calico alongside Tencel.
“He’s convinced he died and no one noticed,” Karin told her.
Thought soured Bonnie’s nose. “You know? I felt that way myself, once.”
“Bon? Do you think you could stay with him for a bit? At the Homestar? Just for the next few nights?”
The girl’s eyes went wide as a lemur’s. “With Marker? ’Course!” She answered as if the question were itself deranged. And last of anyone again, Karin saw how things were.
Arrangements firmed; the women each took a shift, with Mark indifferent to the measures all around him. “Whatever,” Mark told Karin, when she described the arrangements. “Knock yourself out. Can’t hurt me. I’m already gone.”
But he assembled Karin and Bonnie in the Homestar living room on the first Monday evening in March, to see the latest edition of Crime Solvers. “Got a heads-up call today,” he explained, refusing to say more. He moved methodically, forcing hot drinks and bags of corn nuts on them, making sure everyone used the facilities before the show started. Karin watched him, feeling the folly of all hope.
Then, as if on command, Tracey, the show’s hostess, announced, “There’s been a break in the story we brought to you some weeks ago about the Farview man who…”
On screen, a farmer out by Elm Creek pointed to a hole in the border of his front lawn. Five days before, his wife had discovered some bloodroot growing up inside the planter he’d fashioned for her out of an old tire he’d fished out of the river back in August, when the water was low. “Now, my wife and I are a couple old fans of your show, and as I stood there, looking at that tire, your television story came back to me, and it crossed my mind to ask myself…”
Police Sergeant Ron Fagan explained how the tires had been impounded and checked by forensics against the crime-scene evidence on file. “We believe we have a match,” he told the world, a bit crestfallen to be describing computer database searches instead of high-speed chases. But he reported that the tire had been traced to a local man who had been brought in for questioning. The man worked at the Lexington packing plant and was named Duane Cain.
Karin shouted at the tube. “I knew it. That pond scum.”
Bonnie, on the other side of Mark, shook her head. “That can’t be right. They swore to me it was someone else.”
Mark sat rigid, already a corpse. “They ran me off the road. Chicken goat-head. They left me for dead. At least I finally know I am.”
Karin threw on her coat, slamming around in her bag for her keys. “I’ll give him questioning.” She fumbled for the door. In her haste, she sprang it open on her face and smashed her lip.
Mark lifted off the sofa. “I’m coming with you.”
“No!” She wheeled, furious, scaring even herself. “No. You let me talk to him!” Blackie Two growled. Mark stepped back, hands raised. Then she was out in the dark, blundering toward her car.
She checked at the police station. Duane Cain had been released. Sergeant Fagan was not on duty, and no one would give her details. The night was as cold and the world as airless as any meteor. Her breath came frozen out of her nostrils and bathed her hands in flinty smoke. She beat her elbows against her sides to keep her lungs pumping. She got back into her Corolla and headed across town, making it to Cain’s apartment in minutes. He opened the door to her assault in a purple sweatshirt reading: What Would Beelzebub Do? He was expecting someone else, and he shrank at the sight of her. “I take it you saw that show?”
She pushed into the room and slammed him into the wal
l. He didn’t fight back, only reached up and pinned her wrists.
“They let me go. I didn’t do anything.”
“Your fucking skid marks cut right in front of him.” She struggled to land a punch while he blunted her in a clumsy embrace.
“Do you want me to tell you what happened, or don’t you?”
He refused to say anything until she stopped struggling. He sat her on a beanbag chair and tried to give her something to drink. He balanced on a bar stool at a safe distance, brandishing the phone book like a shield.
“We didn’t really lie, per se. Technically speaking…”
She threatened to kill him, or worse. He started again.
“You were right about the games. We were racing. But it wasn’t what you think. We were at the Bullet. Tommy had recently acquired a set of communicators. We went out and started goofing with them. Me and Rupp in Tommy’s truck, Mark in his. Just tag. Driving around like we always did, testing the range, chasing each other. You know: hotter, colder, losing the signal, picking it up again. We were a ways away, coming east on North Line, from town. We thought we had him. Mark was giggling into the communicator, something about taking evasive action. Then his signal went dead. Took his finger off the transmit button and never came back. We didn’t know what he was up to. Tommy kicked his truck, figuring we had to be close. It was pretty dark out there.”
He hooded his eyes with one hand, from the glare of memory.
“Then we saw him. He was upside down in the ditch, right-hand side, just south of the road. Tommy swore and slammed the brakes. We fishtailed and swerved across the center line. That’s what you saw: our tracks in his lane. Only, we got there after him.”
The Echo Maker Page 46