The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  But that can’t be. The boy-man’s most devoted caregiver, who has seen him in far worse shape. He catches her eye. Her look is renegade, running out over her left shoulder. She’s wearing a green-and-red plaid flannel men’s bathrobe out of which her legs and arms protrude like fresh mistakes. She puts a hand to her puffy face. “Am I awful?”

  She is beautiful, the beaten kind of beauty that guts him.

  She leads him into a tiny cupboard kitchen where, wobbly, she puts a kettle of water on the gas ring. He hovers next to her. “There isn’t much time,” he says. “I’ve something to show you. Before the sun rises.”

  Her hands snake up and push his chest, first gently, then hard. She nods. “I’ll just get dressed. Please…” Her palms extend, offering the three small rooms to him.

  There’s nothing to take possession of. The kitchen has service for one, a ragged collection of dented pans and jelly jars. The table and chairs in the front room could only have come from an auction. Oval rag rug and crocheted curtains. A heavy, old oak farmstead hutch and matching writing desk. Above the desk, taped to the wall, is a well-thumbed index card, written in pen: But I do nothing upon myself, and yet I am mine own Executioner.

  On the desk sits a paperback: Eiseley’s The Immense Journey. The evening reading of this nurse’s aide. The back cover identifies the author as a local boy, born and raised in the bend of the Platte. Scores of adhesive colored arrows stick to the pages. He flips to the last: The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.

  Next to the book sits a portable disc player and ear buds. Alongside the player, a short stack of discs. He picks up the top one: Monteverdi. She chooses this moment to come too quickly out of the bedroom, rushing to button her cobalt cotton blouse. She sees him fingering the disc. She’s caught; her eyebrows pinch, guilty. “The Vespers of 1610. But for you, 1595.”

  He holds it out to her, accusing. “You misled me.”

  “No! I bought that…since our evening. A keepsake. Believe me, I can’t make heads or tales of it.”

  He places it back on top of the stack without looking. He doesn’t want to see the other discs. His belief can’t bear more tests.

  She crosses the room and circles him. Inside her arms, he comes apart. A fist at the base of his brain stem opens into a palm. He surges on the dopamine, the spikes of endorphins, his chest jerking. The wildest research in the most reckless journal…He has wrecked himself, and it’s good beyond saying. No writer, no researcher, no lecturer, no husband, no father. He has precipitated out. Nothing left but sensation, the warm, light pressure against his ribs.

  The room is cold and every inch of her burns. He slips down into limbic back alleys, corners that survived when the massive neocortex came through like a superhighway. He feels his skin against her hands, skin too white and papery, his bare arms a blotchy mess of veins, his flanks rude humps. One heartbeat, and he’s strange to his body, all those nested ghosts invisible to this woman who has never seen him any way but this.

  Then stranger still: he does not care how she sees him. Does not want her to see him as anything but what he well and truly is: hollow and graceless, stripped of authority. Borderless, same as anyone.

  “Wait,” he says. “There’s something you need to see.” Something not his. The evening show is pure theater. But the morning is religion.

  They drive back out to Karin’s field in the first hint of dawn. He finds the way there, lefts and rights stored in his body. The night before has scattered. But the flock is still there, wading. He and this woman take their place in the blind, not ten feet from the nearest clump of birds. They strain for silence, but their movements alert those cranes left on guard. Awareness spreads through the flock. The cranes stir, singly and together, then settle when the danger passes. In the growing light, they begin the ordinary stutters of morning, flaring up here and there in tentative bursts of ballet.

  “I told you,” she whispers. “Everything dances.”

  One by one, the birds test the air, first in short hops, like scraps in the breeze. Then thousands of them lift up in flood. The beating surface of the world rises, a spiral calling upward on invisible thermals. Sounds carry them all the way skyward, clacks and wooden rattles, rolling, booming, bugling, clouds of living sound. Slowly, the mass unfurls in ribbons and disperses into thin blue.

  What joy there is in this life. Lifting past us always. What pointless joy.

  He hears his own voice coming out of him, broken counterpoint to this honking morning chorus. “Not to be separated, not by the thinnest curtain shut out from the measure of the stars.”

  “What is that?” she asks.

  He struggles to call it back. “Innerness—what is it if not amplified sky, shot through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming?”

  A book of Rilke he bought for Sylvie, lifetimes ago, right out of school, when they still made time for pointless elegies.

  “The scientist is a poet,” this woman says.

  But he is neither. He’s no profession he can recognize. Nothing he ever thought he might become. And this woman: What is this nurse’s aide? A woman so alone she wants even him.

  She puts her hand down inside the collar of his coat. He touches her back. They trace the skin, the trap between them. His hands shake against her breasts, and she would let him, would lead him forward into everything, right here in this bird-filled field. Her rib cage presses against his palm. They blunder into something startling to them both. Their mouths are on each other and thinking goes. Everything goes except this first need.

  Something huge and white streaks across the field. He jerks up, and she with him. He spots it first, but she identifies. “My God. A whooper.” Ghosts in that flash of light, some private terror. She squeezes his arm, a tourniquet. “We can’t be seeing this. One hundred and sixty of them left. Jesus, that’s one!”

  The ghost glides shining across the fields. Neither can breathe. He grasps at a last hope. “That was it. What was in the road. He said he saw a column of white…” He studies her face, science wanting so badly to be confirmed.

  She follows the bird, afraid to look at Weber. She has the chance now, to clear everything. Instead, she says, “You think?”

  They watch the phantom bird until it vanishes through a line of trees. They crouch and watch, long after the field empties.

  Both are frozen and caked in mud. She pulls him back to her, mindless again. They flood each other, waves of oxytocin and a savage bonding. Release—vanishing in mid-prairie, lifted free of everything—hovers just out of his reach.

  A broken laugh comes from too nearby, something not belonging to the Platte’s dawn chorus. A cricket chirr, months too early. It chirps again, from inside his shed jacket at his feet. He glances at her, bewildered. Her look tells him: your phone. He fumbles to find the pocket that hides the device. He looks at the number on the caller ID, the first time ever. He shuts the ringer off and folds back into her. Everything will be panic, from now on. Strange as birth. He would write it up—first case ever of contagious Capgras—if he could still write. He seems to be nearing, and she is taking him. Thoughts flow through him like a brook over pebbles, none of them his. There comes the emptiness of arrival. Then there is just holding, and bracing for endless vertigo.

  Wordless, they head back to her car.

  “Which way?” she asks.

  No choice, really. “West.”

  No other compass for the two of them. She drives at random. They cross some dry stream. “Oregon Trail,” she says. Scars in the land confirm her, despite the century and a half of erosion.

  They drive for miles in silence. He waits for her to say what at any moment he could make her say. But he is perjured now, too, and deserves nothing. When they get light-headed, they stop for something to eat in a town called Broken Bow. “Another ghost town,” she says. “Most of the towns out here peaked a hundred years ago. The place is emptying out. Heading back to frontier.”

 
; “How do you know these things?” He knows already, how she knows.

  She dodges. “Around here? Only the dying stick around.”

  They buy water and fruit and bread and carry it into the sandhills. They picnic on a dune that drifts downwind even as they sit on it. Some part of them is always touching. The land is abandoned, a worldwide contagion. In the middle distance, the pitch-bending minor chords of an endless freight.

  She touches his ear in surprise. “I just remembered last night’s dream. How beautiful! I dreamt we were making music. You and me, Mark and Karin, I think. I was playing the cello. I’ve never touched a cello. But the music coming out…unbelievable! How can the brain do that? I mean, pretending to play an instrument: fine. But who was composing that music? In real time? I can’t even read music. The most gorgeous harmonies I’ve ever heard. And I must have written it.”

  He has no answer, and he gives her as much. All he can do is touch her ear back. His dream last night was one he hasn’t had for months: a man, plunging headlong, frozen in the air in front of a smoking column of white.

  They sit in the middle of a drifting nowhere. His phone vibrates in his pocket. If the thing rings here, it could ring in outer space. He knows who it is before he answers. The ID confirms him: Jess. His daughter, who only calls in extremity and on holidays. He has to answer. Before he can even ask what’s wrong, Jess howls at him. “I just talked to Mom. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  He can’t attach himself. He feels every mile between here and any coast. He says, “I don’t know,” perhaps several times. It only makes his daughter crazier. Grow up, she screams. Perhaps she is having an insulin attack. The signal starts to die. “Jess? Jess. I can’t hear you. Listen to me. I’ll call you back. I will call you…”

  When he hangs up, Barbara is still there. She cradles his cheek, tentatively, and he lets her. The first of his punishments. Her hand says: Whatever you need. Closer or farther. Yours to keep inventing or to send away.

  He is a case he has forgotten until this moment: the woman with the shattered insula, lost in asomatognosia. Now and then, for brief periods, all sense of her body disappeared. Skeleton and muscles, limbs and torso would fade to nothing. And still, without a body, she kept to the lie, believing that kapo in the temporo-parieto-occipital junction, that lackey of the system always ready to take charge.

  They drive some more, the only thing for it. Another dozen miles down the road, she says, “There’s a place up ahead I’ve always wanted to see.”

  “How far?”

  Her lips pucker as she calculates. “A hundred miles?”

  There’s nothing left of him to object. He points through the windshield, some invisible target.

  She grows careless behind the wheel, even giddy. They have no future, and even less past. For two hours, they say nothing about themselves. Nor do they talk much about Mark. The closest they come is when she asks him to tell her ten essential things that neuroscience knows for certain. He should be able to list dozens. But something has happened to his list. Those that are essential no longer feel certain. And those that are certain can’t possibly be essential.

  He sees their destination from a distance, rising up out of a field of winter wheat. Salisbury Plain. Megalithic monument. A wrong turn somewhere, but here they are. She laughs as he makes it out. “This is it. Carhenge.”

  The huge gray stones turn into automobiles. Three dozen spray-painted junkers stood on end or draped as lintels across one another. A perfect replica. They are out of the car, walking around the standing circle. He manages a pained imitation of mirth. Here it is: the ideal memorial for the blinding skyrocket of humans, natural selection’s brief experiment with awareness. And everywhere, thousands of sparrows nest in the rusted axles.

  They dine in nearby Alliance, at a place called the Longhorn Smokehouse. A television suspended above their corner booth breaks the news. Operation Iraqi Freedom has begun. War has been so long in coming that Weber feels only mild déjà vu. They watch the cycling, impenetrable footage, the president, looping over and over: May God bless our country and all who defend her. He watches her stony face as she watches the screen. She watches as only a reporter can. He has known for some time. Only now he sees her, unmistakable. Her voice catches a little when she talks. “Mark is right, you know. The whole place, a substitute. I mean: Is this country anyplace you recognize?”

  They sit too long, watching too many frenzied reports packed to exploding with no content. When they get back into the car, the light is already fading.

  “Should we find some place to stay?” She doesn’t look at him. She means shelter, but shelter is long gone.

  He wants nothing but the blank slate. Erased from what he has done, from what he is doing. Nothing waits for him anywhere. Find some place to stay: yes, night by night, foraging, the two of them, even with the worst confirmed, even knowing about her what he now knows. No more reporting from a distance. No more case histories: only make himself as culpable as she. Yet the words out of his mouth kill even this possibility. “We need to go back.”

  She can’t mask the half-second of fear. Her shoulders flinch in the snare. “Oh, Heart!” she says. Whose name is that? Someone else’s endearment. Some earlier escape that she mistakes him for. She does not want him; she only wants to avoid detection. She starts to object. “My house is so small…”

  And the earth so large. “We need to,” he repeats. Yes, life is a fiction. But whatever it might mean, the fiction is steerable.

  She knows what is happening. Still, she pretends. She starts up the car and points it southeast. After a few miles, her voice pure invitation, she asks, “What are you thinking?”

  He shakes his head. He can’t do this in words. His silence unnerves her. She grips the wheel, her face braced for the worst.

  He grazes her upper arm with his knuckles. “I was thinking, I feel I’ve known you my whole life.”

  Her face turns to his and breaks. She doesn’t believe him, but she will take it. Some part of her knows, already, where he’s bringing them. Some part already suffers the sentence, before he levels it.

  He chooses that moment to ask, “What story were you covering? When you first came here.”

  They ride an awful mile in silence. Something in him hopes she’ll say nothing. Something in him doesn’t want the facts. He feels what he first knew in her, the dread just beneath her fake composure. Out of the corner of his eye, she is someone else. Like that woman he examined once, call her Hermia, whose only symptom was seeing children in her left visual field, even hearing their laughter, only to see them disappear when she turned to look at them…

  “What do you mean?” she asks at last. Her voice is bright enamel on ashes.

  He has no right to force her. He is not justice; he is duplicity itself. “Who were you working for?” No real need to know. But a proven neurological phenomenon: activity in the verbal center has a suppressing effect on pain.

  She grips the wheel and steers the ruler-straight road. “Dedham Glen,” she says. “I worked for them every day for a year. I cleared twelve hundred dollars a month.”

  At last the anomalies on Mark’s chart make sense to him. He knows what happened. “Karin’s friend,” he says. “The conservationist. You interviewed him over the phone, a year ago.”

  Her eyes are a mess and her red nostrils quiver like a rabbit’s. Something still tenacious in her frees that last little part of him that did not yet love her. “Water,” she says. Matter of fact. Journalistic. “The story was about water.” They roll another quarter mile in the dropping dark. She speaks into a machine. “Most stories will be, soon.” She rallies, shakes her hair, turns the full force of her emptiness on him. She shoots for a fashion-magazine insouciance. It would repel him, but for that thing he recognizes in her, and shares. That desperate hope of evading discovery. “I’ll tell you everything. How much do you want to know?”

  He wants to know nothing. Even now, he would disappear with
her, someplace words can’t reach.

  “A journalist,” she tells the windshield. Another three-street town flashes by. “Producer for Cablenation News. You know: find a colorful topic, work it up, conduct the groundwork, screen the interviews, cull the research. I always tried to…be as big as the story. I always tried to dig, to immerse in the material. That’s what killed me, I think. I’d been an editor for seven years, producer for three and a half. I could have moved up to a major desk, coasted until they turned me out to pasture.”

  He stares at the age marks in her neck that he has never noticed. The tendons flare under her clenched jaw. Her face will crack open and a grown thing emerge.

  “I was in trouble. Flameout, they called it. It should never have started. I was superwoman. I mean, Jesus: I’d been at Waco, with those rows and rows of lawn chairs, all the good American citizens turning out to watch the human barbecue. I produced a series on the crèche babies at Oklahoma City. I did Heaven’s Gate—three successive days of collaborative suicide. Nothing bothered me. I could tell it all. Walked around lower Manhattan, sticking a video camera in people’s faces after the towers. A week after that, I started to lose it. We’re out of control, aren’t we? And we’re pulling everything down on top of us.”

  She still needs him to contradict. What she has always needed from him. And even here, he fails her.

  “My boss made me see a pill peddler, who put me on the same stuff the rest of the nation is already taking. It smoothed me out a little. But I lost my edge. Got dull and sloppy. I couldn’t get the job done anymore. They took me off news and put me on human interest. Harmless pieces. Pathetic. The pauper custodian who dies and leaves a million dollars to the local community college. Twins reunited after forty years, and still behaving identically. That’s what the trip to Nebraska was supposed to be. A little rest and recuperation. A can’t-miss, please-everyone story, one that even I could handle.”

  “The cranes,” Weber says. The only story out here. Endless return.

  On a flat, featureless stretch three miles out of town, she turns to look at him. Her face searches his, bargaining. “They wanted Disney. I tried to make it bigger. So I dug a little. It didn’t take much to find the water. I dug a little more. I learned that we were going to waste that river, no matter what I wrote. I could tell a story that broke people down and made them ache to change their lives, and it would make no difference. That water is already gone.”