The police had mentioned a third set of tracks. She took Daniel and crossed to the north side of the road. Side by side, they tracked back eastward, like foraging juncos. Daniel’s tracking eye again discovered the invisible signs, a patch of crushed, sandy ground, two faint hints of wheel scrape that had not yet vanished in the spring thaw. Karin pinned Daniel’s arm. “We should have brought a camera. By summer, every one of these tracks will be gone.”
“The police must have photographs on file.”
“I don’t trust their pictures.” She sounded like her brother. He tried gentle reassurance, which she shook off. She scanned the tracks. “These people must have come up behind Mark. The whole thing happened in front of them. They had to roll off the road here. They must have sat awhile, level with him, then pulled back onto the road and headed on to Kearney. Left him lying in the ditch. Didn’t even step out of their car.”
“Maybe they saw how bad it was. Better to get to a phone fast.”
She scowled. “From the Mobil station on Second, halfway through town?” She scanned the road, from the modest rise toward the east to the shallow declivity in the direction of Kearney. “What are the odds? It’s five o’clock on a beautiful spring weekday, and look at the traffic this road gets. A car every four minutes? What are the odds, after midnight, at the end of February…?” She studied Daniel. But Daniel wasn’t calculating. Asked for numbers, Daniel returned only consolation. “I’ll tell you the odds,” she said. “Somebody swerving by accident in front of you on a deserted country road? Zero. But there’s something that would make those odds a lot higher.”
He stared at her, as if another Schluter had just gone delusional.
“Party games,” she told him. “The police were right.”
The wind picked up, the early evening turning. Daniel hunched, swinging his head through a half-circle. He had gone to school with all three boys; he knew their proclivities. It wasn’t hard to see: a punishing February night, machines with too much horsepower, young men in their twenties in a country sick with thrills, sports, war, and their many combinations. “What kind of party games?” He looked down at the oily pavement as if he were meditating. In profile, his face framed by shoulder-length sandy hair, he looked even more like an elfin archer escaped from a marathon dice-dungeon crawl. How had he grown up in rural Nebraska without her brother’s friends beating the life out of him?
She grasped his skinny upper arm and drew him back down the road toward their car. “Daniel.” She shook her head. “You wouldn’t know how to play if they strapped you in a NASCAR racer and put a cinder block on the accelerator.”
Mark still limped and contusions still lined his face, but otherwise he seemed almost healed. Two months after the accident, strangers who talked to him might have found him a little slow and inclined toward strange theories, but nothing outside the local norm. Karin alone knew how unready he was to fend for himself, let alone tend to complex packing plant equipment. His days were laced with flashes of paranoia, outbursts of pleasure and rage, and increasingly elaborate explanations.
She worked tirelessly for his protection, even as he tortured her. “My sister would have got me out of this place by now.” My sister always got me out of all my jams. I’m in the biggest jam of my life. You’ve failed to get me out. Therefore, you can’t be my sister. The syllogism made a kind of demented sense.
She’d heard the complaint countless times before. But reaching some limit, she melted down. “Stop it, Mark. I’ve had enough. You’re doing this to me for no reason. I know you’re suffering, but this whole denial thing is not helping any. I’m your damn sister, and I’ll prove it to you in a court of law if I have to. So just stop jerking me around and get over it. Now.”
The instant the words were out of her mouth, she knew she’d set her cause back by weeks. And the look he flashed her then was like some wild thing, cornered. He looked almost ready to hurt her. She’d read the articles: the rate of violent behavior in Capgras patients was well above average. A young Capgras sufferer from the British Midlands, to prove that his father was a robot, had cut the man open to expose the wires. There were worse things than being called an impostor.
“Never mind,” she said. “Forget I said that.”
His face went from wild to bewildered. “Exactly,” he said, a little tentative. “Now you’re talking my language.”
He was not ready to face the world. She fought to delay Mark’s discharge, and to keep both the HMO and the IBP insurance people at bay. She worked on Dr. Hayes, almost flirting with him, to keep him signing off on the necessary paperwork.
But even with excellent medical coverage, Mark could not stay in rehabilitation much longer. Karin, unemployed now, was tapping her savings. She began to dip into her mother’s life-insurance legacy. Do some good with this. “I’m not sure this is the kind of thing she intended the money for,” she told Daniel. “Not exactly an emergency. Not exactly world-changing.”
“Of course this is good,” Daniel assured her. “And please don’t worry about money.” Almost too polite to say the word. Lilies of the field, etc. The ease of Daniel’s assurance almost angered her. But she started letting Daniel pay all the daily expenses—groceries and gas—and each time he did, she felt stranger. Mark, she insisted, would be more or less back to himself any week now. But time and institutional patience were running out. And her own sense of competence was fading.
Daniel did what he could to stave off her money panic. One afternoon, apropos of nothing, he said, “You could come work for the Refuge.”
“Doing what?” she asked, half hoping this might be an answer.
He looked away, embarrassed. “Office help? We need a congenial, competent set of hands. Maybe do some fund raising.”
She tried to grin, grateful. Of course: fund raising. The core of every job description in the nation, from schoolchildren on up to the president.
“We need people who can make others feel good about themselves. Experience in customer relations would be perfect!”
“Yes,” she said, thoughtfully. Meaning he was too good and she relied on him for too much already. Added to her mother’s money, a little part-time income could stabilize her. But she could not shake the belief that Mark would soon recover fully and she could go reclaim her own job—the she that she had made, out of nothing.
No war chest she might build could stave off the bills she’d face, if the insurance people signed off. When claims anxieties and physician consultations defeated her, Karin sought out Barbara Gillespie. She hit up the aide for pep talks so often that she worried that Barbara would start fleeing her on sight. But the woman had bottomless patience. She listened to Karin’s fears and groaned in sympathy at tales of the medical bureaucracy. “Off the record? It’s a business, as market-driven as a used-car dealership.”
“Only not as up-front. At least you can trust a used-car salesman.”
“I’m with you on that,” Barbara said. “Just don’t tell my boss, or I’ll be selling some fine pre-owned vehicles myself.”
“Never, Barbara. They need you.”
The woman waved off the compliment. “Everyone’s replaceable.” The smallest turn of her wrist had something classic to it—the urban proficiency that Karin had aspired to for fifteen years. “I’m only doing my job.”
“But it’s not just a job for you. I watch you. He tests you.”
“Nonsense. You’re the one being tested here.”
These graceful rebuffs only fed Karin’s admiration. She probed Barbara for anything from her professional experience that gave hope of further improvement. Barbara wouldn’t talk about other patients. She focused on Mark, as if he were the sum of her experience. The extreme tact frustrated Karin. She needed a female confidante, someone to commiserate with. Someone who would remind her that she was who she was. Someone who could reassure her that persistence wasn’t stupid.
But Barbara’s professional care turned all topics back to Mark. “I wish I knew more abou
t things he really cares about. Beef packing. Truck customization. Not my strongest subjects, I’m afraid. But the things he’ll talk about—it’s a surprise a day. Yesterday, he wanted my considered opinion on the war.”
Karin felt a twinge of jealousy. “Which war?”
Barbara grimaced. “The latest one, in fact. He’s fascinated with Afghanistan. How many recent trauma sufferers pay any attention to the outside world?”
“Mark? Afghanistan?”
“He’s a remarkably alert young man.”
The phrase, its curt insistence, accused Karin. “I wish you could have seen him…before.”
Barbara gave her patent head-tilt, both ready and reserved. “Why do you say that?”
“Mark was a real number. He could be incredibly sensitive. He had his wild moments—mostly getting back at our father and mother. And he ran with the wrong crowd. But he was really a sweet guy. Instinctively kind.”
“But he’s a sweet guy now. The sweetest! When he’s not confused.”
“This isn’t him. Mark wasn’t cruel or stupid. Mark wasn’t so angry all the time.”
“He’s just scared. You must be, too. I’d be a mess, if I were you.”
Karin wanted to melt into the woman, hand over everything, let Barbara take care of her, the way she had tried to take care of Mark. “You would’ve liked him. He cared for everybody.”
“I do like him,” Barbara said. “As he is.” And her words filled Karin with shame.
By May, Karin was beside herself. “They’re not doing anything for him,” she told Daniel.
“You say they work with him all day long.”
“Busy work. Mindless stuff. Daniel? Do you think I should move him?”
He spread his fingers. Where? “You said that Barbara woman was wonderful with him.”
“Barbara, sure. If Barbara were his primary physician, we’d be cured. Okay, so the therapists get him to tie his shoes. That doesn’t help much, does it?”
“It helps a little.”
“You sound just like Dr. Hayes. How did that man ever get certified? He won’t do anything. ‘Wait and watch.’ We need to do something real. Surgery. Drugs.”
“Drugs? You mean mask the symptoms?”
“You think I’m just a symptom? His fake sister?”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Daniel said. And for a minute, he turned foreign.
She held out her palms, apologizing and defending all at once. “Look. Please don’t…please just stay with me on this. I just feel so helpless. I’ve done nothing at all for him.” And to his look of utter incredulity, she said, “His real sister would have.”
Trying to make himself useful, Daniel brought her two more paperbacks. The books were written by a Gerald Weber, an apparently well-known cognitive neurologist from New York. Daniel had come across the name in the news, regarding a much-anticipated new book about to appear. He apologized for not finding him sooner. Karin studied the author’s photo, a gentle, gray-haired man in his fifties who looked like a playwright. The contemplative eyes gazed just alongside the lens. They seemed to find her out, already half-suspecting her story.
She devoured the books in three straight nights. For chapter after bewildering chapter, she could not stop reading. Dr. Weber’s books compiled a travelogue of every state that consciousness could enter, and from his first words, she felt the shock of discovering a new continent where none had been. His accounts revealed the brain’s mind-boggling plasticity and neurology’s endless ignorance. He wrote in a modest voice and ordinary style that placed more faith in individuals’ stories than in prevailing medical wisdom. “Now more than ever,” he declared, in Wider Than the Sky, “especially in the age of digital diagnosis, our combined well-being depends less on telling than on listening.” No one had yet listened to her. This man suggested that she might be worth hearing.
Dr. Weber wrote:
Mental space is larger than anyone can think. A single brain’s 100 billion cells make thousands of connections each. The strength and nature of these connections changes every time use triggers them. Any given brain can put itself into more unique states than there are elementary particles in the universe…If you were to ask a random group of neuroscientists how much we know about how the brain forms the self, the best would have to answer, “Almost nothing.”
In a succession of personal case histories, Weber showed the endless surprise folded inside the most complex structure in the universe. The books filled Karin with an awe she’d forgotten she could still feel. She read of split brains fighting over their oblivious owners; of a man who could speak sentences but not repeat them; of a woman who could smell purple and hear orange. Many of the stories made her thankful that Mark had avoided all the fates worse than Capgras. But even when Dr. Weber wrote about people stripped of words, stuck in time, or frozen in premammalian states, he seemed to treat them all like his nearest kin.
For the first time since Mark sat up and spoke, she felt guarded optimism. She was not alone; half of humanity was partly brain-damaged. She read every word of both books, her synapses changing as she devoured the pages. The writer sounded like some masterful, future intelligence. She couldn’t be sure of the path that Mark’s accident laid out for her. But somehow, she knew it crossed this man’s.
By his own accounts, Dr. Weber had never visited any land quite like the one her brother now inhabited. Karin sat down to write him, consciously mimicking his style. It felt like the longest of long shots, to somehow win the attention of this larger-than-life researcher. But she might make the very wildness of Mark’s Capgras irresistible to such a man.
She wrote with little hope that Gerald Weber would respond. But already, she imagined what would happen if he did. He would see in Mark a story like the ones his books described. “The people inside these changed lives differ from us only in degree. Each of us has inhabited these baffling islands, if only briefly.” The odds against his even reading her note were great. But his books described far stranger things as if they were commonplace.
“These books are incredible,” she told her lover. “The author is amazing. How did you find him?”
She was in Daniel’s debt again. On top of everything else, he had given her this thread of possibility. And she, once again, had given him nothing. But Daniel, as ever, seemed to need nothing but the chance to give. Of all the alien, damaged brain states this writing doctor described, none was as strange as care.
Part Two
But Tonight on North Line Road
I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all.
—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Faster than they gathered, the only witnesses disappear. They crowd together on the river for a few weeks, fattening; then they’re gone. On an invisible signal, the carpet unravels into skeins. Birds by the thousands thread away, taking their memory of the Platte with them. Half a million cranes disperse across the continent. They press north, a state or more a day. The heartiest will cover thousands more miles, on top of the thousand that brought them to this river.
Cranes that crowded into dense bird cities now scatter. They fly in families, lifelong mates with their one or two offspring, any that have survived the previous year. They head for the tundra, peat bogs and muskegs, a remembered origin. They follow landmarks—water, mountains, woods—places recovered from previous years, by a crane map, inside a crane’s head. Hours before the onset of bad weather, they will stop for the day, predicting storms on no evidence. By May, they find the nesting spots they left the previous year.
Spring spreads across the Arctic to their archaic cries. A pair that roosted at the roadside on the night of the accident, near to the overturned truck, home in on a remote stretch of coastal Alaska on the Kotzebue Sound. A seasonal switch flips in their brains as they near their nest. They turn fiercely territorial. They attack even their baffled yearling, the one they have nursed all this way back, driving it off with beak jabs and beating wings.
The blue-gray pair turn brown, from the iron rusting in these bogs. They coat themselves with mud and leaves, seasonal camouflage. Their nest is a moated heap of plants and feathers, three feet wide. They call to each other, with coiled, booming trombone wind-pipes. They dance, bowing deeply, kicking the brisk salt air, bowing again, leaping, spinning, cowling their wings, their throats arched backward in some impulse between stress and joy: ritual spring at the northern edge of being.
Suppose birds store, fixed as a photograph, the outlines of what they have seen. This pair is in their fifteenth year. They will have five more. By June, two new eggs, spotted gray ovals, will follow all the pairs already laid on this spot, a spot all those earlier years had stored in memory.
The pair take turns, as they always have, caring for the clutch. The northern days lengthen until, by the time the eggs hatch, light is continuous. Two colts emerge, already walking and ravenous. The parents trade off hunting for the voracious young, feeding them constantly—seeds and insects, small rodents, the trapped spare energy of the Arctic.
In July, the younger colt starves to death, killed by his older brother’s appetite. It has happened before, in most years: a life begun with fratricide. Alone, the surviving bird shoots up. In two months, he is fledged. As the long northern days collapse, his short test flights expand. Frost forms on the family’s nest these nights; ice crusting the bogs. By autumn, the young bird is ready to replace last year’s ousted child on the long trip back to winter grounds.
But first the birds molt, reverting to native gray. Something happens to their late-summer brains, and this isolated family of three recovers a larger motion. They shed the solitary need. They feed with others, roosting together at night. They hear nearby families passing overhead, threading the great funnel of the Tanana Valley. One day they lift up and join a self-forming V. They lose themselves in the moving strand. Strands converge in kettles, kettles merge in sheets. Soon, fifty thousand birds a day mass down the startled valley, their prehistoric blasts brilliant and deafening, a sky-wide braided river of cranes, tributaries that run for days.
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