The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  Kearney appears, an orange dome of light on the horizon. He waits for her to finish. Only when she glances over her right shoulder, a wild, fugitive, pleading look, does he realize she’s done. “So you quit,” he says. “And became a nurse’s aide?”

  Her shoulders jerk. But recovery comes fast enough. “They took me as a volunteer, at first. I had some experience…years ago. In high school. I got the nurse’s aide license within three months. It’s not…you know, brain science.”

  Even now, she will not tell him. Not by herself. So he tells her. “You knew they would be sending him there?”

  Her eyes steel. She grows brutally calm. “Is this some kind of theory? What do you think I am?”

  I is just a diversion. His science has known that for some time. He has suspected her, long before Daniel’s positive ID. Maybe since the day he saw her. He sensed her deception at once, as she sensed his: the lie that joined them, that drew him to her. But here is the part he still can’t understand. “I think I must have seen you once before. Some years ago. When your network interviewed…”

  “Yes,” she says, controlled, making the right onto Highway 10, just outside town. She speaks like a producer again. A journalist who might report any story. “So why did you keep coming back? To test your memory? You thought you’d use me. A little thrill, a little mystery. Public hostility was breaking you down. Take a quick escape trip; rewrite your life. Out-of-body experience. Expose a crime. Entrapment. Then pass judgment on me.”

  He shakes his head, for both of them. Something bigger than judgment brought him back. The winds of homecoming. Now, worse than ever, even as she turns cold and horrible, he knows her. Her face flares and she slams the wheel with her palms, her eyes everywhere, flushed into the open. With a flick of his head, he will force her to turn, not toward her bungalow, not toward an anonymous motel room. Back to where the story started. When he finally speaks, his voice isn’t his. “I don’t know what you ever could have felt…what I might have been to you. But I know how you feel for that boy.”

  At the second-to-last traffic light before Good Samaritan, she sees where he is forcing her. She reaches out her right hand and grabs him. One last preemptive seduction: we could still escape, the two of us. Disappear somewhere on that long river.

  He thinks of what she has already lost: her career, her community, such friends as she had, a year of her life, and as many more as the boy might want to take. It’s not enough. “Tell him,” he says. “You know you need to.”

  She turns her head, strewing explanations. “I tried,” she claims. “I would have. But he didn’t recognize…”

  “Which time?”

  All pretense between them dies. Stripped bare, they know each other. She spits venom. “Why are you doing this? Am I another case? What do you want from me? You smug, self-righteous, self-protecting little…”

  He nods in recognition. But he has grown light, empty, a committee of millions. “You can do this.” He looks down into the fact, the one thing left that he knows for certain. “You can do this. I’ll go with you.”

  A cold February night on a dark Nebraska road. She is alone in the car, driving at random. Hours ago, she filmed the evening spectacle. But the cameras failed to capture the full force of the otherwordly gathering. Tonight’s birds have shaken her so badly she can’t return to her hotel. The crew has long ago disbursed, and she is alone, at loose ends, as brittle and flimsy as she felt in New York last fall. Maybe she has gone off the medication too quickly. Or maybe it’s the cranes, those threads floating in, massing and trumpeting, misled by millions of years of memory. The end will be instant. They’ll never know what hit them.

  She herself would never have known, except in following this story. The silent, invisible new war on wetlands: she has hunted down the details, background for this report. Her species is running amok, and now more than ever, it’s every life for itself. Her nerves are jagged, the rental is suffocating, and this straight slash of road unnerves her. She has tried for hours to calm herself, sitting in a restaurant, then a movie theater, walking through the dead downtown, driving these deserted country roads, and still she’s in no state to sleep. If she can make it just a few more hours, just until dawn, and the birds again…

  Even the ancient polyphony coming out of the car speakers shreds her. She shuts it off, her fingers frenzied. But silence on this black and freezing February night is worse. She can take only thirty seconds of it before she flips the radio back on. She trembles up and down the dial, trying to land on something solid. She finds a station and fixes on it, no matter the content. It’s talk, and only talk might help her now.

  Some woman’s satin voice crawls up intimate into her ear. For a moment, it sounds like Christian revival—no believer left behind. But these words are worse than religion. Facts. The woman’s voice recites a litany, somewhere between a shopping list and a poem. It took the human race two and a half million years to reach a billion people. It took 123 years to add a second billion. We hit three billion, thirty-three years later. Then in fourteen years, then thirteen, then twelve…

  Shaking, she pulls over onto the shoulder. Alone in this nowhere with these numbers. A storm breaks somewhere in her head. Signals surge, triggering one another. Nothing in evolution prepares her for this. Sheets of electricity cascade through her, fact-induced seizures, and when the headlights appear in her rearview mirror, the most rational thing in the world is to open the door and step out into them.

  Now she enters the hospital again. The year before, they stopped her outside the sealed ward. You’re his sister? One unthinking nod of the head was enough to get her through. This time no one challenges her. Anyone at all is free to go see him. Even the person who first put him there.

  He is sitting up in bed, struggling with an old, familiar book. She can tell by his posture that the fog is lifting. His face lights up at the sight of her, that mix of ideal and instinctual gratitude. But it fades as fast, with a look at her face.

  What’s happened? he asks. Who died?

  She stands at the foot of his bed. Her stance alone might trigger his memory. That trace is still in there, in the weights of his synapses. But still, she must tell him. Her tracks were first. The car that was behind him was in front of him. She was in the road. He rolled his truck to keep from killing her.

  How? he asks. Why? The pieces won’t fit together.

  She is alive because of him. He is brain-damaged because of her.

  You are my guardian? You wrote the note?

  No, she tells him. Not me.

  She stands in front of him again in memory, only hours after the first time, out in the empty road. He is still intact, still responsive. Strung with tubes, but not comatose yet. That will come later, with the excitotoxicity. The shock of this visit will bring it on. Now, as she stands by his bed in the trauma unit, he recognizes. He looks on her, terrified. She has come back, the white pillar he swerved to avoid. She’s some supernatural creature, rising up from death. But her face is molten, and choked sounds stream out of her. He recoils before he realizes: she’s begging for forgiveness.

  He tries to tell her. Nothing comes out his throat but a dry hiss. She leans down to his mouth, and still nothing. His right hand scratches in the air, gesturing for paper and pen. She fishes these out of her purse and hands them to him. Already half-paralyzed by pressure rising in his skull, his bruised lobes swelling against the fixed bone, in a damaged hand that isn’t his, he draws the words:

  I am No One

  but Tonight on North Line Road

  GOD led me to you

  so You could Live

  and bring back someone else.

  He fumbles the note into her fingers. As she reads it, a blinding spike hits his right hemisphere. He falls back onto the bed, his cry cut short. Then he is still.

  She has destroyed him twice. In reptile panic, she drops the note on the bedside table and vanishes.

  His anguish comes on, too stunned to stop itself. Even a
s she pleads with him, his eyes deny her. In his stare, the saint disintegrates and she turns back into herself.

  You let me hunt for a year, and never said shit. How could you? You were my…You would have done anything…

  She stands in front of him, erased. She has lost even the right to defend herself. He tears the note out of his bedside drawer and waves it in the air, slapping the stricken handwriting.

  If that’s what happened…what the fuck am I doing with this? Get it away from me.

  He throws the scrap of laminated paper at her. It falls to the floor. She bends down and clutches it to her.

  This is yours. Your curse, not mine.

  Her mouth works, asking, How? Who? But no sound emerges.

  His rage bursts. You’re the one who’s supposed to go do this. Go bring back someone.

  Someone stands mute in the doorway, brought back by a note that will forever circulate. So you might live. And now that curse is his.

  Part Five

  And Bring Back Someone Else

  As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going about beyond the reach of rivers?

  —Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey, “The Flow of the River”

  What does a bird remember? Nothing that anything else might say. Its body is a map of where it has been, in this life and before. Arriving at these shallows once, the crane colt knows how to return. This time next year it will come back through, pairing off for life. The year after next: here again, feeding the map to its own new colt. Then one more bird will recall just what birds remember.

  The yearling crane’s past flows into the now of all living things. Something in its brain learns this river, a word sixty million years older than speech, older even than this flat water. This word will carry when the river is gone. When the surface of the earth is parched and spoiled, when life is pressed down to near-nothing, this word will start its slow return. Extinction is short; migration is long. Nature and its maps will use the worst that man can throw at it. The outcome of owls will orchestrate the night, millions of years after people work their own end. Nothing will miss us. Hawks’ offspring will circle above the overgrown fields. Skimmers and plovers and sandpipers will nest in the thousand girdered islands of Manhattan. Cranes or something like them will trace rivers again. When all else goes, birds will find water.

  When Karin Schluter enters her brother’s room, the man who has been denying her is gone. In his place, a Mark she has never seen sits in a chair in striped pajamas, reading a paperback with a picture of a prairie on the cover. He looks up as if she’s late for a longstanding appointment.

  “It’s you,” he tells her. “You’re here.” His tongue cups the roof of his mouth, the first half of a K. But a shudder passes through him, and he turns away.

  The muscles of her face revolt. A wave breaks over her. He is back again; he all but knows her. The thing she has needed all these months, worse than anything. The reunion she has dreamed about for more than a year. But this is nothing like she has imagined. The return is too seamless, too gradual in coming.

  He looks up at her, changed in a way she can’t identify. He grimaces. “What took you so long?” She crumples on him, pulls his neck up into her face. Rapids course between them. “Don’t wet me,” he says. “I’ve bathed already today.” He pulls her head off him and holds it between his hands. “Jesus. Look at you. Some things never change.”

  She has to stare back for a second before the difference hits her. “God, Mark. You’re wearing glasses.”

  He takes them off to inspect them. “Yeah. They’re not mine. Just borrowed them from the guy next door.” He replaces them and lays the book down on the windowsill on top of another. A Sand County Almanac. “Been boning up.”

  She knows the copy. It shouldn’t be here. “Where did you get that? Who gave that to you?” More bite than she intends. Despite herself: brother and sister again, too soon.

  He looks at the book, as if for the first time. “Who do you think gave it to me? Your boyfriend.” He turns to her, expanding. “Complicated guy. But he’s got a lot of intriguing theories.”

  “Theories? About what?”

  “He thinks we are all hosed. That we’ve all gone schiz or something. Kind of out there, wouldn’t you say?”

  The medication is working, the mild shocks, but so gradually there is almost no threshold. The same spin-doctor subsystem that cut him out without his knowing now blinds him to his own return. She watches him turn back into Mark, old Mark, before her appalled eyes.

  “We’ve screwed up down here, so your man Danny is looking into Alaska.”

  She sits down in a chair next to him, arms across her chest to still them. “Yes. I’ve heard.”

  “Getting himself a new job. Be with the cranes all summer long, on their breeding grounds.” He shakes his head at the riddle of everything living. “He’s had it with us all, hasn’t he?”

  She starts to explain, then leaves it at “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t want to be around, when we finally wreck the place.”

  Her throat closes and her eyes bitter up. She just nods.

  He rolls on his side, his fist up to his ear. Afraid to ask. “You going with him?”

  She should have long ago habituated to this pain. “No,” she tells him. “I don’t think so.”

  “Where you going, then? Home, I suppose?”

  Her brain is loose and feral. She can say nothing.

  “Sure,” he says. “Back to Siouxland. Sioux City Sue. So sue me already.”

  “I’m staying, Mark. The Refuge says they can still use me. They’re a little shorthanded, now.” Water is not done with her.

  He looks off, as if reading his words printed on the sealed window. “Makes sense, I guess. With Danny gone. Hey—somebody has to be him, if he won’t.”

  So this is how it ends. So gradually that neither of them can feel the gears catch. She wants him to shake free all at once, to rise from his fever dream and see where they’ve been. But he’ll crush her again, this time from the other direction. Claim he knew who she was, all along. No firmness floods back into her. If anything, the whole structure seems even flimsier, with no injury to blame.

  He stretches out his legs and crosses them, the imitation of repose. “So is Cain going to the slammer, or something? No, I forgot. Totally innocent. Know what they should do with that guy? They should send him to the next Iraq. Use him as a hostage.” He looks up, uncomprehending. “It was Barbara. Barbara out there, all along.”

  He is six again, terrified. And she is everywhere, trying to comfort him. For once, he lets her, so fully broken. He squeezes his forehead, then shakes it. He covers his eyes with his hands.

  “You know about all this?” She nods. “You know it was her?” He grasps his skull, the source of all confusion. She nods again. “But you didn’t know…before?”

  She shakes her head hard. “No one knew.”

  He tries to figure this. “And you were here…all along?”

  He collapses into himself, not wanting an answer. When he pulls himself together again enough to talk, his words stun her.

  “She says she’s finished. Says she’s nothing, now.”

  She flares up, insulted that her brother should still care. Disgusted that the woman should give up on them, having come this far. More fraudulence. More wasted godliness. “Jesus Christ,” she spits. “A woman with her skills! Just because she fucked up, does she think the world can’t use her? We’re down to gallons here. Hours and ounces. And she’s going to roll over and die?”

  Mark looks at her, bewildered. Some possibility lifts him up. His own loss means nothing. The accident gives him this. “Ask her,” he begs. Afraid to suggest even this little.

  “Not me. I’ll never ask that woman for anything again.”

  He sits up, clenched in the terror of animals. “You gotta ask her to work for you. I’m not just saying. This is my life we
’re talking about.” He slows himself and breathes. He squeezes his eyes again. He points apologetically at the IV drip. “Man! I need to get back in the driver’s seat, here. What are they doing to me? Mr. Emotion all of a sudden. With the shit they’ve got figured out now? They could probably turn anyone into anyone else.”

  It no longer seems to her like a delusion. Tomorrow will be worse.

  He looks at her, forgetting everything but the immediate need. He circles her forearm with his fingers, measuring. “You haven’t been eating.”

  “I have.”

  “Food?” he asks, skeptically. “She’s not that thin.”

  “Who?”

  “Come on! Don’t give me who. My sister.” And at her flash of panic, he laughs clear and deep. “Would you look at you! Relax. Just busting your chops.”

  Mark leans back in the chair, stretches out his black cross-trainers, weaves his hands behind his head. It’s like he’s sixty-five, retired. In three months, her brother will be gone again, or his sister will, someplace the other won’t be able to follow. But for a little while, now, they know each other, because of their time away.

  “At least somebody else is sticking around. That’s what I’m doing. Hang where you know. Where else can you go, with all hell breaking loose?”

  Her nostrils quiver and her eyes burn. She tries to say nowhere, but she can’t.

  “I mean, how many homes does one person get?” He waves his hand toward the gray window. “It’s not such a bad place to come back to.”

  “Best place on earth,” she says. “Six weeks, every year.”