The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  The little girl answered. Better her than her older brother. The girl’s drawled “Hello” had two too many syllables. Seven years old. What kind of parents let their seven-year-old girl answer the phone after dark?

  Karin fished up the girl’s name. “Ashley?”

  The tiny voice returned a broad, trusting, Cartoon Network “Yeesss!” Austin and Ashley: names that could scar a child for life. Karin hung up, and instinctively dialed another number, one she’d considered calling for weeks.

  When he picked up, she said, simply, “Daniel.” After an ambushed pause, Daniel Riegel said, “It’s you.” Such relief surged through Karin that she couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t called him earlier. He might have helped, as early as the night of the accident. Someone who knew Mark. The real Mark, the kind one. Someone she could talk to about both past and future.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  She started to giggle. Horrified, she got hold of herself. “Here. I mean, Farview.”

  In his naturalist’s voice, the hush he used in the field to point out things that were easily scared away, Daniel said, “For your brother.”

  It felt like telepathy. Then she remembered: small town. She sunk into his soft questions. The release of answering was beyond description. She reversed herself with every sentence: Mark was getting better by leaps and bounds; he was worse than helpless. He could think and identify things and even talk; he was still trapped in the wreck, walking like a trained bear and chattering like a perverted parrot. Daniel asked how she was coping. She was doing fine, considering. The days were long, but she could handle them. With help, her voice begged, despite herself.

  She considered asking Daniel to meet her somewhere, but couldn’t risk scaring him. So she just talked, her voice curling like surf. She tried to sound for him like the capable woman she had almost become. She had no right even to contact the man. But her brother had nearly died. Disaster trumped the past and gave her temporary asylum.

  Until the age of thirteen, her brother and Daniel had been joined at the hip, twin nature boys turning up ornate box turtles, stumbling on bobwhite nests, camped outside burrows that they dreamed of inhabiting. Then, in high school, something happened. Sometime during sophomore year, from one class period to the next, they fell out. Long, protracted war, with a static front. Danny stayed with the animals and Mark abandoned them for people. “Growing up,” Mark explained, as if love of nature were an adolescent fixation. He never had anything to do with Daniel again. Years later, when Karin started dabbling with Daniel herself, neither boy ever mentioned the other to her.

  She and Daniel spun out, almost as soon as they’d started. She ran off to Chicago, then on to Los Angeles, before crawling home, humbled. Daniel, untiring idealist, welcomed her back without questions. Only when he overheard her mimicking him in whispers on the phone to Karsh did Daniel kick her out. She fled to her brother for support. But when Mark, loyal to her, started bad-mouthing Daniel, hinting at dark secrets in the past, Karin turned on him so harshly they didn’t speak for weeks.

  Now Daniel’s voice reassured her: she was better than her past. He’d always said as much, and now life had dealt her a challenge that would prove him right. Daniel’s tone threatened to convince her. Human stupidity meant nothing, least of all what humans thought it meant. You could brush it away like a wisp of insect silk grazing your face. Unintended cruelties didn’t matter. All that mattered now was her brother. Daniel asked about Mark’s care, good questions she should have asked the therapists long before. She listened to him as if to a forgotten favorite song, one that distilled a whole chapter of life into three minutes. “I’d be happy to come to the hospital,” he said.

  “Well, he’s not making much of anyone, just yet.” Something in her didn’t want him seeing Mark as he was now. What she wanted from Daniel was stories, stories of Mark, before. Things she wasn’t sure she was remembering right, after too many days at bedside.

  She did remember to ask Daniel about his own life. The distraction helped, even if she couldn’t focus on the details. “How are things at the Sanctuary?”

  He had quit the Sanctuary in despair at their compromises. He now worked for the Buffalo County Crane Refuge, a smaller, more limber and confrontational group. Work at the Sanctuary had been steady and well-intentioned, but far too accommodating. The Refuge was harder-line. “If you want to save something that’s been around for millions of years, you can’t be moderate.”

  How contemptible she’d been, ever to take this man lightly. His gentle firmness was worth ten of her and Karsh put together. She couldn’t believe that he would still talk to her. The accident permitted that, too. Made everyone briefly better than they were. Put the present above the past. She’d been circling in a snowstorm, frostbitten and near collapse, and she’d stumbled on a lean-to with a fire. She wanted this conversation to go on, slowly meandering nowhere. For the first time since the hospital’s call, she felt she could do whatever disaster required. If she could just call this man from time to time.

  Daniel asked about her life before the wreck. He asked in a soft aside, as if lying motionless in a field, looking through binoculars. “I’ve been managing,” she told him. “Learning a lot about myself. It turns out I have some skill, working with upset people.” She described all the responsibilities she’d had, in the job she’d just lost. “They say they might be able to hire me back, when this is all over.”

  “Have you been seeing anyone?”

  She started to giggle again. Something was truly wrong with her. Something skidding out of control. “Only my brother. Nine or ten hours a day.” Even telling him that much terrified her. But how infinitely better it was to be terrified than dead. “Daniel? It would be really good if we could sit for a minute. If you have the time to see me. I don’t want to burden you. This is…a handful, is all. I know I’m the last person with any right to ask you…But I don’t quite know how to do this by myself.”

  Long after they hung up, she heard him saying, “Of course. I would like that. Too.”

  She could learn, she told herself, falling asleep. Learn how not to be her knee-jerk, self-protecting self. The time for constantly rebuffing imagined slights was over. The accident changed everything, gave her a chance to undo all her old hit-and-runs. The last few weeks had emptied her—just having to look at Mark laid bare. How easy now, to float above herself, gaze down on all the killing needs that controlled her, and see them for the phantoms they were. Nothing had the power to hurt her except for what power she gave it. Every barrier she’d ever chafed against was no more than a Chinese finger lock that opened instantly when she stopped pulling. She could simply watch, learn about the new Mark, listen to Daniel without having to understand him. Other people were about themselves, not about her. Everyone alive was at least as scared as she was. Remember that, and a person might come to love anyone.

  Echo caca. Cocky locky. Caca lala. Living things, always talking. How you know they’re living. Always with the look, with the listen, with the see what I mean. What can things mean, that they aren’t already? Live things make such sounds, just to say what silence says better. Dead things are what they are already, and can shut up in peace.

  Humans the worst. All over him with their words. Worse than cicadas on a warm night. Or all frog, more or legs. Listen to the spurts. Listen to those birds. But birds might be louder. His mother told him. The less the thing, the louder the ring. Take the wind: all that noise, just going nowhere from nothing for no reason, and there’s no thing on earth less than the wind.

  Someone says he’s missing the birds. How can that be? The birds are always coming. How can he miss them, when they aren’t even missing? Animals must be more like rocks. Saying only what they are. A longer now, a shorter then, living in the place he’s just come from.

  He knew what that place is, but now it’s just saying.

  They make him say a lot, humans. They take him out spinning, and it’s murder. Hell in a hall, bumper to bum
per, worse than freeways, people flying all ways too fast to miss. And still they want talk, even while moving. Like talk isn’t crazy enough. But once they work him, they let him lie. Sleeping old dogs, up to new tricks. This he loves: when they give him his body back, and no need. Loves just lying still in the world buzz, all channels at once pouring through his skin.

  He has to work some, with time come back. Up and attic, there and bath again. Have him living in a boxcar now. Old train with others orphaned like him. He’s lived in worse. Not easy to say just where he is. So he says nothing. Some things say him. What’s on his mind hops off. Thoughts come out, not thoughts he knew he had. No one always knows what he means. This can’t bother him. He doesn’t really, either.

  A girl comes by he’d like to do. Maybe already did. That would make it good, though. Could go. Do each other, always. Encore. One car, for the two of them, doing it. Those birds mate for good, after all. The birds he’s missing. Who are humans, to do better? Pair forever. Teach their kids to reach the top of the earth and find their way back, the way-back way he found.

  Those birds are smart. His father always told him. A dad who knew those birds so well he used to kill them.

  Something killing him to remember, just now, but it goes.

  Small talk, but all talk. Say it, say if, say at. Say it’s an easy it. Echo. Lala.

  Finished, over and done, just then. Now he’s not. That’s why they make him talk. Prove he’s with the living things, not stones.

  Not sure why he’s here, or how. He’s taken an acid dent. Something else dented worse, but wordy people won’t say. All those things to talk about, millions of moving things, and that’s never one anyone mentions. Most times when they’re talking, nothing happens. Nothing but what’s already right here. What happened to him is a thing even living things won’t say.

  She kept reading to Mark: all she could do. Mark’s face stayed placid through the stories’ struggles. He just rode those sentences, their boxcar rhythm. But the most predictable read-aloud went right up Karin’s spine. The scene where the twelve-year-old boy is felled by a blow to the skull as he sneaks into a derelict house and is bound and gagged in the root cellar made her shut the book, unable to read on. Closed head trauma had ruined her. Even children’s fiction now went real.

  The Muskrateers came by for repeat offenses. “Didn’t we promise?” Tommy Rupp asked. “Didn’t we say we’d help bring the man back?” He and Cain produced foam footballs outfitted with tail fins, handheld electronic games, even radio-controlled cars. Mark responded, first with flattened bafflement, then with machine-like glee. He made more hand-eye headway in half an hour with his friends than he did in days with the physical therapist.

  Duane was all consultation. “What’re you doing with your rotator cuff there, Mark? Watch the rotator cuff. It’s what you call a flash-point.”

  Rupp kept them on task. “Will you hold up with the medicine man bit and let Gus here throw the ball? Am I right, Gus?”

  “Right, Gus,” Mark said, watching the commotion as if in instant replay.

  Bonnie showed up every few days. Mark reveled in her visits. She always brought joy stuff: rubber animals wrapped in metallic paper, washable tattoos, fortunes sealed in ornamental envelopes. You will soon embark on an unforeseen adventure…She was better than a book. She could go on forever with funny stories of living in a covered wagon along the interstate that never quite reached its homestead tract. She showed up once in her faux pioneer outfit. Mark looked at her in wonder, half birthday boy, half child molester. Bonnie brought him a disc player and ear buds, something Karin had failed to think of. She produced a box of discs—chick music, sighs about the blindness of guys—nothing Mark would ever have been caught dead listening to. But under the headphones, Mark closed his eyes, smiled, and tapped his thigh with his fingers.

  Bonnie liked to listen along to the stories that Karin read aloud. “He’s following every word,” she insisted.

  “You think?” Karin asked, grasping at any hope.

  “You can see it in his eyes.”

  Her optimism was an opiate. Karin already depended on her, worse than cigarettes.

  “Can I try something?” Bonnie asked, touching her shoulder. Her hands probed Karin incessantly, turning every word into a confidence. She cozied up to Mark, one palm coaxing, the other restraining. “Ready, Marker? Show us what you’re made of. Here we go. One, two, buckle my…?”

  He gazed at her, slack-jawed, smitten.

  “Come on, buddy. Focus!” She sang again: “One, two, buckle my…”

  “Shoe.” The syllable came out, a pitched moan. Karin gasped at the first proof that somewhere deep down, Mark still made meaning. Her brother, who only a few weeks before, had repaired complex slaughterhouse machinery, could now complete the first line of a nursery rhyme. She pressed her jaw, mouthing, Yes!

  Bonnie carried on, giggling like water in a brook. “Three, four. Knock at the…”

  “…door!”

  “Five, six, pick up…”

  “…shit.”

  Karin broke into mortified laughter. Bonnie reassured the crestfallen Mark. “Hey! Two out of three. You’re doing fantastic.”

  They tried him on “Hickory Dickory Dock.” Mark, his face strained with ecstatic concentration, scored perfectly on dock, clock, down, and dock. Bonnie began, “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring,” but getting far enough in to remember the words that came next, broke off in mumbled apologies.

  Karin took over. She tried him on a verse Bonnie had never heard. But for the two Schluter siblings, the four lines condensed all the icy chill of childhood. “I see the moon,” Karin prompted, sounding just like their mother, back when Joan Schluter’s rhymes weren’t yet devil exorcisms. “And the moon…”

  Mark’s eyes widened, a rush of comprehension. His lips closed around a hopeful grimace. “Sees me!”

  “God bless the moon,” Karin assured him, that old singsong. “And…?”

  But her brother held still, pressed against his chair, staring at some creature unknown to science that suddenly appeared in silhouette on the horizon at dusk.

  Karin sat beside Mark one afternoon, refreshing him on the rules for checkers, when a shadow moved across the board. She twisted to see a familiar figure in a navy pea coat hovering over her shoulder. Daniel’s hand reached for her but didn’t touch. He called to Mark, a gentle hello, as if the two of them hadn’t shunned each other for the last decade. As if Mark weren’t sitting robot-like in a hospital chair.

  Mark’s head snapped back. He scrambled up onto the chair, faster than he’d moved since the accident, pointing and wailing, “God, oh God! Help me. See see see?”

  Daniel stepped forward to calm Mark. Mark climbed up over the chair back, screaming, “Miss it, miss it.” Karin backed Daniel out of the room as a floor nurse rushed in. “I’ll call you,” she said. Their first face-to-face in three years. She squeezed his hand, criminal. Then she rushed back to calm her brother.

  Mark was still seeing things. Karin worked to comfort him. But she couldn’t figure out what he’d seen, in the long shadow falling out of nowhere. He lay in bed, still shaking. “See?” She hushed and lied to him, saying she saw.

  She went to Daniel, after the hospital calamity. He felt just as she remembered him: steady, mammalian, familiar. He looked unchanged since high school: the long, sandy hair, the wisp of goatee, the narrow, vertical face: a gentle seed-eater. His continuity comforted her, now that all else had changed. They talked for fifteen minutes, four feet from each other across his kitchen table, nervous and sick with reassurance. She rushed away before breaking anything, but not before they agreed to meet again.

  Their difference in age had vanished. Daniel had always been a child: Markie’s grade, Markie’s friend. Now he was older than she was, and Mark was an infant between them. She started calling Daniel at all hours for help with the endless overwhelming decisions: claims forms, disability, the papers for Mark’s move to rehab. She trusted D
aniel as she should have trusted him, years ago. He could always find the best available answer. More: he knew her brother, and could guess what Mark would want.

  Daniel didn’t open to her all at once. He couldn’t have, this time around. He was no longer who he’d been, if only because of what she had done to him. That he spent time with her at all left her amazed, ashamed, and grateful. She didn’t know what their new contact meant or what, if anything, might be in it for him. For her, seeing him meant the difference between bobbing and going under. After another day in the chaos of Mark’s new kingdom, she found herself inventing reasons to contact Daniel. She could voice anything with him, from the wildest hope for Mark’s latest tiny triumph to her fear that he was sliding back. Daniel would meet her every word with inward reserve, and keep her to some middle, steady path.

  They could have no real future, after the humiliations of their past. But they could make a better past than the one they’d mangled. Mark’s struggles engaged them. Their vicarious work, undoing old pettiness: measuring how far Mark had come, and how far he had to go.

  Daniel brought Karin books from libraries as far away as Lincoln, accounts of brain damage, carefully selected to lift her hope. He copied articles, the latest neurological research, which he helped her decode. He called to check in, prompting her on what to ask the therapists. It felt like life again, letting him carry her for a while. Once, her gratitude so overwhelmed her that she couldn’t resist a rushed, deniable hug.

  She began to see Daniel with new eyes. Some part of her had always dismissed him, a neo-hippie inclined to righteousness, a little too organically pure, hovering above the herd. Now she felt her long unfairness. He simply wanted people to be as selfless as they should be, humbled by the million supporting links that kept them alive, as generous with others as nature was with them. Why did he waste his time with her, after what she’d done to him? Because she asked him to. What could he possibly get from their new connection? Simply the chance to do things right, at last. Reduce, reuse, recycle, retrieve, redeem.