“You can’t quit. You can’t let them give in to this.”
“What I can and can’t let happen does not seem to be the issue.”
She can make it the issue. Can get him back into the battle. One word from her and the Refuge will rescind whatever deal they have chosen to cut. But that one word kills any love he’s ever felt for her. He will see her in full light, at her most hideous. Stay silent, and she might even keep him, broken like this, needing her. He’d have nothing else but her care.
She thinks, for an instant, that she does this for the birds. For the river. Then she tells herself it’s to save this upright man. But she will save no one, no living thing. She will barely slow the humans, who can’t be stopped. She chooses from pure selfishness, as selfish as every human choice. He will hate her now, forever. But finally, he will know what she can give.
“It’s worse than you think,” she says. “The Outpost people, they’re planning a Phase Two. I know how the consortium will make money on the crane cabins, out of season. It’s…going to be called the Living Prairies Museum.”
She describes it to him in all its banality. “A zoo?” he asks. He can’t figure it. “They want to build a zoo?”
“Indoor-outdoor. And it gets worse. I’ve found out why they need the extra river allocation shares. There’s also a Phase Three. A water park. Slides. Hydraulic fountains and sculptures, all with nature themes. A giant wave pool.”
“A water park?” He rubs his scalp, forehead to crown. He tugs at his ear, his mouth twisted. He giggles. “A water park, in the Great American Desert.”
“You have to let the Refuge know. They have to stop this.”
He doesn’t answer, only sits on one heel, the Virasan position, and stares at all the elaborate dishes she’s prepared. Now it will come out. Now she will pay, for all this saving. “How do you know about all this?”
“I saw the blueprints.”
His chin rises and falls and rises again. A kind of pungent nodding. “And you were going to tell me…when?”
“I just told you,” she says, palms up, pointing at the food, her proof. She’s ready to give him all the brutal details. But he doesn’t need them. He sees everything. He knows now what she’s been doing, all these weeks, better than she has known. She sits looking on herself, through his eyes. Almost a relief, his fatigue. He must have known for a long time. She braces for his recrimination, disgust—anything to feel clean again. His words blow her bracing away.
“You’ve been spying on us. You and your friend? Trading secrets. Some kind of double…”
“He’s not…Okay. I’m a whore. Say what you want. You’re right about me. A lying, devious bitch. But you have to believe one thing: Robert Karsh isn’t what I want in my life, Daniel. Robert Karsh can go…”
He looks at her as if she’s dropped on all fours and started barking. What she and other men have done is meaningless. Only the river matters. He looks at her, appalled. He can’t make out, let alone count, all the ways that she has betrayed the river. “I don’t give a fuck about Robert Karsh. You can do whatever you want with him.”
She reaches out with her palms, backing him up. “Wait. Who are you talking about?” If not Karsh. “Who did you mean, ‘your friend?’”
“You know who I mean.” He has lost all patience. “Their private investigator. Their hired researcher. Your friend Barbara.”
Her head snaps back. He has some lesion, some sickness worse than Mark’s. Cold little hands stroke at her. “Daniel?” She will run from the house and call for help.
“Pumping me at the hearing, to see how much I might have guessed.”
“What investigator? She’s Mark’s old aide. She works at the rehab…”
“For what? Three dollars an hour? A woman who talks like that? A woman who acts like that? You make me sick,” he says, human at last.
A fork of panics. What is Barbara to him? She imagines some longstanding, secret explanation, something that locks her out. But the other fear is greater. Her face a snarl, she backs toward the apartment door.
He sees her confusion, and wavers. “Don’t tell me you don’t know…How much do you think you can hide?”
“I’m not hiding…”
“She called me, Karin. Her voice sounded familiar, the first time we ran into her. I talked to her on the phone, fourteen months ago. She called me, right around the time the developers started planning this thing. She pretended to be working on some news story. She asked me all about the Refuge, the Platte, the restoration work. And like an idiot I told her everything. When people want to talk about those birds, I trust them. More fool, me.” He stares past her, stilled, like some small thing dying in a blizzard.
“Wait. Daniel. That’s crazy. You’re saying she’s, what? An industrial spy? That she works at Dedham Glen as some kind of cover?”
“Spy? You would know, wouldn’t you? I’m saying I spoke to her. I answered her questions. I remember her voice.”
Birding by ear. “Well, you’re remembering wrong. Trust me on this one.”
“Yes? Trust you? On this one?” His head comes about, luffing. “And what else should I trust you on? You’ve been ratting me, laughing at me with your old sweet fuck for months…”
She swings away from him and presses her ears. His right cheek twitches. He squints and shakes his head.
“You’re going to sit there and deny this, after everything? Her name never came up, in all the secret conversations you were having with him? When you were meeting with him, telling them about us? About the Refuge?”
She moans and starts to break. He stands and crosses to the far side of the room, as far from her as possible, holding his elbow and pinching his mouth, waiting for her to be done. She breathes in, mouthful by mouthful, grappling for calm, pretending she is him. “I think I should go.”
“You’re probably right,” he says, and leaves the house.
She wanders about the apartment for a long time. Eventually she drifts to the bedroom and stuffs her clothes into a bag. He will come back and stop her, listen to her explanation. But he is as gone now as her brother. She goes to the kitchen, packs the meal in old bean sprout containers and sticks them in the refrigerator. She sits on the toilet lid in a daze, trying to read one of his meditation books, a crash course in transcendence. She sits at the front door, on the bags she has stuffed with her things. He’s outside somewhere, tracking, watching the building, waiting for her to go.
At twenty minutes to midnight she at last calls her brother’s friend. “Bonnie? I’m sorry to wake you. Can I crash at your place? Just a night or two. I’m nowhere. Nothing.”
Gerald Weber pulls alongside a cash machine in his third Nebraska rental. His hands shake, withdrawing far more money than he intends. From the airport, he heads on instinct back to that hotel where he is now a regular. Welcome Crane Peepers. Only now, the lobby is crawling with heavy, aging people in knit clothes carrying field guides and light binoculars. He himself has way overpacked, three times what he would ordinarily bring on a professional trip. He even carries the cell phone and digital recorder, a professional habit that should have died months ago, along with his professional pretenses. In his Dopp kit, alongside the Band-Aids and fold-up sewing sampler, he has packed ten different ingestibles, from ginkgo to DMAE.
Once, he’d studied an otherwise healthy man who thought that stories turned real. People spoke the world into being. Even a single sentence launched events as solid as experience. Journey, complication, crisis, and redemption: just say the words and they took shape.
For decades, that case haunted everything Weber wrote about. That one delusion—stories came true—seemed like the germ of healing. We told ourselves backward into diagnosis and forward into treatment. Story was the storm at the cortex’s core. And there was no better way to get at that fictional truth than through the haunted neurological parables of Broca or Luria—stories of how even shattered brains might narrate disaster back into livable sense.
&
nbsp; Then the story changed. Somewhere, real clinical tools rendered case histories merely colorful. Medicine grew up. Instruments, images, tests, metrics, surgery, pharmaceuticals: no room left for Weber’s anecdotes. And all his literary cures turned to circus acts and Gothic freak shows.
Once, he knew a man who thought that telling other people’s stories might make them real again. Then others’ stories remade him. Illusion, loss, humiliation, disgrace: just say the words and they happened. The man himself had arisen from doctored accounts; Weber had invented him out of whole cloth. The complete history and physical: fabricated. Now the text unravels. Even the case’s name—GeraldW.—sounds like the feeblest of pseudonyms.
He finds himself standing beside Mark’s bed, looking for redemption. The boy pleads with him. “Doc. What kept you? I thought you were dead. Deader than I was.” His speech is slow and fumbling. “You heard what happened?” Weber doesn’t answer. “Tried to off myself. And as far as anybody can tell, maybe not for the first time.”
The words pull Weber down onto the bedside chair. “How are you feeling now?”
Mark opens his elbows, displaying the IV tube running into his left arm. “Well, I’m going to start feeling better real soon, whether I want to or not. Yep, they’re going to bring me back to myself. Mark Three. You know there’s talk of electroshock?”
“I…” Weber starts. “I think you must have gotten that wrong. Misunderstood.”
“Yep, EST. ‘Very mild,’ they tell me. I’ll walk out of this place happy as a clam. Good as new. And I won’t remember the first thing of what I know now. What I’ve figured out.” He flails and grabs Weber by the wrist. “Which is why I have to talk to you. Now. While I still can.”
Weber takes the heel of Mark’s hand in his, and Mark suffers it. The boy is that desperate. When Mark speaks, his voice is pleading.
“You saw me, not long after the accident. You ran tests on me and such. We talked all about your theory, the whole lesion idea, the right posterior thing getting split off from the almond thing. The Miggy?”
Weber sits back, shocked at Mark’s recall. He himself had forgotten their conversation. “Amygdala.”
“You know?” Mark pulls his hand from Weber’s and fakes a feeble grin. “I was sure, back then, when you told me that, that you’d lost your fucking mind.” He squeezes his eyes and shakes his head. Time’s running out. He’s losing his insight to a chemical cocktail seeping into his arms. He can’t quite name the thing he needs to say. The struggle runs the length of his body. He wrestles to grasp the thing that stands just three feet out of reach. “My brain, all those split parts, trying to convince each other. Dozens of lost Scouts waving crappy flashlights in the woods at night. Where’s me?”
Weber could tell stories. The sufferers of automatism, their bodies moving without consciousness. The metamorphopsias, plagued by oranges the size of beach balls and pencils the size of matchsticks. The amnesiacs. The owners of vivid, detailed memories that never happened. Me is a rushed draft, pasted up by committee, trying to trick some junior editor into publishing it. “I don’t know,” Weber says.
“Now you tell me…” Mark’s face crumples again, twisted by thought. No question he might come up with could be worth so much distress. But this is what Weber has flown thirteen hundred miles to hear. Mark’s voice drops, concealed. “Do you think it’s possible…? Could somebody be completely messed up and not have the slightest notion…? And still feel just like they’ve always…?”
It isn’t possible, Weber wants to say. It’s certain. Obligatory. “You’ll feel better,” he says. “More whole than you do now.” Reckless promise. He’d be on the drug himself if that were true.
“I’m not talking about me,” Mark hisses. “I’m talking about everybody else. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands: cases where, unlike mine, the operation actually worked. Everybody walking around without the foggiest idea.”
Weber’s hairs stiffen. Piloerection, old evolutionary holdover—goose flesh. “What operation?”
Mark is wild now. “I need you, Shrinky. There’s no one else can tell me. All the little brain parts, chattering to each other? Those packs of Cub Scouts?”
Weber nods.
“Can you cut one out? One? Without killing the troop?”
“Yes.”
The relief is immediate. Mark slips down on his pillow. “Can you put one in? You know. Kidnap a Scout, stick another in his place? Same basic crappy flashlight, waving around in the dark?”
More goose flesh. “Tell me what you mean.”
Mark drapes his palms over his eyes. “‘Tell me what you mean.’ The man wants to know what I mean.” He twists his head bitterly. The voice drops again. “I mean transplants. Cross-species mix and match.”
Xenotransplantation. An article on the subject in JAMA, last month. The growing body of experiments—bits of cortex from one animal transplanted into another, taking on the properties of the host area. Mark must have heard about these, in the bastardized, garbled way that science reaches everyone.
“They put ape parts into people, right? Why not birds? Their little almond thing for our little almond thing.”
Weber needs only say no, as gently and fully as possible. But something in him wants to say: no need to swap. Already there, inherited. Ancient structures, still in ours.
He owes it to Mark, at least to ask. “Why would they want to do this?”
Mark’s all over the question. “It’s part of a bigger deal. A whole development thing, on the drawing boards for a long time. Bird City. Capitalize on the animals. The next big business, you see? Figure out how to move bits back and forth. Cranes to humans. Vice versa. Like you say: a Cub Scout more or less and you’re still the same troop. Still feel like yourself. It would have worked on me, too, but something went wrong.”
Something communicates through Mark. Something primeval that Weber must hear before the dripping chemicals seal this boy-man back up into the human. There’s only this minute. Only now. “But…what is the operation trying to accomplish?”
“They’re trying to save the species.”
“Which species?”
The question surprises Mark. “Which species?” Shock gives way to that booming, hollowed-out laugh. “That’s a good one. Which species?” He falls silent, deciding.
In Bonnie Travis’s turn-of-the-century hip-flask of a bungalow, the two women barely have room to slide past each other. Karin apologizes at every chance, washes dishes that aren’t even dirty. Bonnie chides her. “Come on! It’s like camping. Our little soddie.”
In truth, the girl has been a blessing, mindlessly cheerful and distracting. Bonnie keeps them entertained with reading tarot cards or roasting s’mores over the gas stove. “Comfort food,” she calls it. At night, Karin fights the urge to curl up in bed with her.
On the second evening, she comes back inside from smoking half a pack out on Bonnie’s deck, to find the girl distraught. She won’t say why at first, just keeps repeating, “It’s nothing. No problem.” But she can’t stay on task and ends up carbonizing the potpies. Karen finds the culprit on Bonnie’s coffee table: Weber’s new book, which the girl has been dutifully plowing through at the rate of half a page a day over the last several months.
“This is what’s upset you?” Karen asks. “Something in here?”
One more denying shake of the head, then the girl breaks down. “There’s a God part of the brain? Religious visions from some kind of epilepsy storm?”
Karin is all over herself, comforting the girl. And the girl takes some comforting.
“You can turn God on and off with electric…? It’s just some built-in structure? Did you already know this? Does everybody? Everybody smart?”
Karin shushes her, strokes her shoulders. “Nobody knows. He doesn’t know.”
“Of course he knows! He wouldn’t put it in a book, if he didn’t. He’s the smartest man I’ve ever met. Religion is just a temporal lobe…? He’s saying belief is just an evolv
ed chemical thing you could gain or lose…? Like what Mark decided about you. How it’s not him anymore, how he can’t even see that he…Oh shit. Shit. I’m too stupid to get this!”
And Karin, too stupid to help. Some part of her—some temporal storm—wants to say: What we sum to is still real. The phantom wants our shaping. Even a God module would have been selected for its survival value. Water is up to something. She says none of this; she has no words. Bonnie’s doubt must have been long in coming, a slow-growing tumor. She’s shaken enough to entertain any wider belief system Karin might suggest. For a long time, they look at each other, caught in some shameful secret. Then, on nothing but grim smiles, they make a pact, joined in the trick of belief, novitiates in a new faith, until damage changes them.
Karin hasn’t stepped out of the toy house except for one more unsuccessful attempt to talk to her brother in the hospital. She hasn’t been to the Refuge since leaving Daniel’s. All her life, she has secretly suspected that everything you learn to want, everything you really make your own, gets taken from you. Now she knows why: nothing is your own. Last night she dreamt herself aloft, high above the oxbows of the Platte. Crusts of ice studded the flats, and stubble filled the fields. No large life of any sort, anywhere. All large creatures were gone. But life was everywhere—microscopic, vegetative, humming in the hive. Voices without language, voices she recognized, calling on her to see. She woke refreshed and filled with baffling confidence.
Now she preps for a venture outside, borrowing Bonnie’s best non-pioneer dress, a sage-green fitted silk that could cause whiplash on Chicago’s Gold Coast. She even gets Bonnie to theme her makeup. An older, grimmer Bonnie holds color chips up to Karin’s face, studying them through squinted eyes.
Touching the girl’s elbow, Karin asks, “You remember painting Mark’s toes when he was still in Trauma?”
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