The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  Weber just raised his eyebrows.

  “Here. Have a seat. Take a load off. You’re supposed to be an old guy, remember?” He cawed like a raven.

  Weber took his chair from yesterday, across from Mark, making the same groans to the same laughter. “Would you mind if I use a tape recorder while we talk?”

  “That’s a tape recorder? You’re shitting me! Lemme see that thing. Looks more like a cigarette lighter. You sure you aren’t some Special-Ops…?” Mark tucked the machine up to his cheek. “‘Hello? Hello? If you can hear me, I’m being held hostage here against my will.’ Hey! Don’t look like that. Just busting your balls, is all.” He handed back the tiny machine. “So, how come you need a tape recorder? You got problems or something?” He spun his fingers around each ear.

  “Something like that,” Weber admitted.

  He’d used a tape recorder the day before. There’d been no way to ask permission, out of the gate. Yet he needed to be able to reproduce that first contact verbatim. He’d banked on getting retroactive permission. And now he had it, or close enough.

  “Wow. Cool. Live on tape. You want me to sing?”

  “You’re on. Hit it.”

  Mark launched into a dead monotone, tone-deaf tune. Gonna open you up, gonna peel you out…He broke off. “So come on. Give me one of your so-called puzzles. Beats lying around and dying.”

  “I’ve got some new ones. Picture mysteries.” He pulled the Benton Facial Recognition Test out of his briefcase.

  “Mysteries? My whole damn life is a mystery.”

  Mark recognized images of the same face from different angles, in different poses, under different lighting. But he couldn’t always tell when a glance was aimed at him. He did reasonably well identifying celebrities, although he called Lyndon Johnson “some high-ranking corporate goon” and Malcolm X “that guy Dr. Chandler on the hospital show.” He enjoyed the whole process. “This guy? He’s supposed to be a comedian, if yelling like there’s Ben-Gay on your scrotum is funny. So okay. This chick calls herself a singer, but that’s just because they took her dancing pole away.” He also did well separating actual faces from facelike shapes in drawings and photographs. Overall, his recognition scores were high normal. But he struggled with the emotions of conventional facial expressions. His responses tended to skew toward fear and anger. Given the circumstances, however, Mark’s numbers showed nothing that Weber could call pathological.

  “Can we try one more thing?” Weber asked, as if it were the most natural request in the world.

  “Whatever. Knock yourself out.”

  He dove into his briefcase and pulled out a small galvanic skin response amplifier and meter. “How would you feel about me wiring you up?” He showed Mark the finger-clip electrodes. “It basically measures your skin conductivity. If you get excited, or feel tense…”

  “You mean like a lie detector?”

  “Yes, a little like that.”

  Mark cackled. “No shit! Now we’re talking. Bring it on! I always wanted to try to bust one of those things.” He held out his hands. “Wire me up, Mr. Spock.”

  Weber did, explaining every step. “Most people show a rise in skin conductivity when they see a picture of someone close to them. Friends, family…”

  “Everybody sweats when they see Mom?”

  “Exactly! I wish I’d put it that way in my last book.”

  Of course the methodology was all wrong. There should have been a separate device operator and reader. His calibration trials were primitive at best. No randomizing, no double blind. No controls. Nothing in Karin’s pictures gave him any baseline. But he was not sending this data to a refereed journal. He was just getting a rough sense of this shattered man, of Mark’s attempts to tell himself back into a continuous story.

  Mark raised his unwired hand. “I promise to tell the truth…etcetera, etcetera. So help me, Gosh.”

  They looked at pictures together. Weber flipped through Karin’s photos, watched the bobbing needle, and scribbled down numbers.

  “Hey! The Homestar! That’s my house. It’s a beautiful thing. They built that sucker to my personal specifications.”

  The needle danced again. “There’s Duane-o. Look at that pudgy bastard. Knows a lot, even if he’s not the race’s brightest bulb. And that’s the Rupture. Check the cue technique. You’d want this guy on your side, in any—you know—situation. If you’re looking for your overall good times, these are the two to call.”

  The picture of his sister—Karin as Goth vampire—produced little conductance. He closed his eyes and pushed the picture away. Weber fished. “Anyone you know?”

  Mark looked down at the four-by-six glossy picture. “It’s…you know. The daughter from the Addams Family.”

  The needle flickered at the picture of his great-grandfather. “The patriarch. This guy? He was sitting in that sod house when he was a kid, and a cow came crashing through the roof. Good times, back then.”

  The IBF packing plant produced an anxious twitch. “That’s where I work. Christ, it’s been weeks. I hope to God they’re holding my spot. You think?”

  Conscientiousness outliving its usefulness: Weber had seen it hundreds of times. Twenty years before, his eight-year-old daughter, Jessica, almost killed by a burst appendix, came back to awareness frantic that her oral report on the honey-dance of bees would be late.

  “I can’t lose that job, man. It’s the best thing to happen to me since my father died. They need me to keep those hoppers going. I’ve got to get in touch with the boss, ASAP.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” Weber told him.

  The needle spiked again with the picture of Mark’s attendant. “Barbie Doll! So, all right, I know this Gillespie woman is like practically your age. But she’s still great. Sometimes I think she’s the only real person to survive the Android Invasion.”

  He responded to the picture of Bonnie Travis as well. In fact, watching the meter as Mark studied her picture, Weber made out something Karin Schluter hadn’t mentioned.

  Mark nodded at the photo of Cattle Call. The needle failed to suggest that Mark associated the local band with the anxiety of his last intact night. “These guys are okay. They’re not ready to play Omaha, or anything. But they’ve got a groove and a little bit of the High Lonesome, two things that aren’t easy to combine, I’m telling you. I’ll take you to hear them, if you’d like.”

  “Might be interesting,” Weber said.

  For Mark’s parents, another flat line. Mark stuck his unwired hand up underneath his knit cap, stretching it from the inside. “I know what you want me to say. This one looks like Harrison Ford, pretending to be my father. This one—somebody’s idea of my mother on a good day. But not even in the minor-league ballpark, really. Hang on a minute.” He gathered the stack of pictures and crumpled them. “Where’d you get these?”

  Stupidly, Weber wasn’t ready for the question. He ran through the possible lies. He rested his face on his fist, looked Mark in the eye, and said nothing.

  Mark grew frantic with theories. “You get these from her? Don’t you see what’s going on? I thought you were supposed to be some famous East Coast freak of intellect. She steals these good pictures from my friends. Then she hires actors who look a little like my family. Snaps a few shots. Boom! Suddenly, I’ve got a whole new history. And because nobody else knows any better, I’m stuck with it.” He slapped the picture of his parents with the back of his hand. He threw the stack of pictures on the table between them and tore the electrode leads off his fingers.

  Weber picked up the photo of Mark Schluter’s father. “Can you say what exactly doesn’t seem…?”

  Mark plucked the photo from his hands. He tore it down the middle, neatly bisecting his father’s head. He offered the pieces to Weber. “A gift for Miss Deep Space…” A gasp came from the hall. Mark scrambled to his feet. “Hey! You want to spy on me, come spy…” He swung toward the door, ready for a chase. Karin tumbled into the room.

  She
brushed past him and snatched the torn photo pieces. “What do you think you’re doing, tearing your own father?” She threatened him with the scraps. “How many of these do you think we have?”

  It stopped him in place. Her sheer rage baffled him. Docile, he stood by as she fit the scraps together and inspected the damage.

  “It can be taped,” she declared at last. She glared at her brother, shaking her head. “Why are you doing this?” She sat down on the bed, shaking. Mark sat down again, too, chastened by something too big to dope out. Weber just watched. His job description: watch and report. For twenty years, he’d built a reputation on exposing the inadequacy of all neural theory in the face of the great humbler, observation.

  “What are you feeling right now?” he asked.

  “Anger!” Karin shouted, before realizing the question wasn’t for her.

  Mark’s voice, when it came, was even more mechanical than his eerie baseline. “What do you care?” He tilted his head toward heaven. “You don’t understand this. You come from New York, where everybody’s God, or something. Out here, people…My sister? She’s weird, but she’s my only ally on earth. Me and her, basically, against everybody. This woman?” He pointed and snorted. “You saw her try to attack me.” He sat down at the testing table and started to cry. “Where is she? I just miss her. I’d just like to see her again for five seconds. I’m afraid something may have happened to her.”

  Karin Schluter echoed the moan. She raised her palms and took two steps toward the door, then stopped and sat down. The tape recorder was running. A part of Weber was already writing up this uncanny moment. Mark sat fiddling with the GSR meter. His eyes cast terrified looks around the room. He held the electrical leads in one hand. Then, as if convulsed by current, his fist clenched and he sat up. “Listen. I just had an idea. Can we try something? Can you just…?”

  Mark offered Weber the leads. Weber thought to refuse, as affectionately as possible. But in two decades of field research, no one had ever refused his testing. He smiled and attached the contacts to his fingertips. “Fire when ready.”

  Mark Schluter slid his pelvis forward. His limbs flailed like the blades of a tin windmill. From his jeans pocket he extracted a crumpled note. At the sight of it, his sister groaned again. Mark fixed his eyes on the meter. He unfolded the paper and handed it to Weber. In a frantic, leaky hand, almost unreadable, someone had scribbled:

  I am No One

  but Tonight on North Line Road

  GOD led me to you

  so You could Live

  and bring back someone else.

  “Look!” Mark cried out. “It moved. The needle jerked. It went right up to here. What does that mean? Tell me what that means.”

  “You have to calibrate it,” Weber said.

  “Have you seen this note before?” Mark kept his eye fixed on the meter. “Do you know who wrote this?”

  Weber shook his head. “No.” Pure alien curiosity.

  “It moved again! Man. Please don’t jerk me. We’re talking about my life, here.”

  “I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you. But I don’t know anything about it.” Even to himself, he sounded fake.

  Disgusted, Mark waved for him to remove the finger clips. He pointed toward the bed. “Hook her up.”

  Karin was on her feet, both hands slicing the air. “Mark, I’ve told you all I know about the thing a hundred times.”

  He wouldn’t quit until she sat and attached the leads to her fingers. Then, the barrage of questions. Who wrote this? Who found it? What does it mean? What am I supposed to do with it? She answered every accusation with increasing impatience.

  “Nothing’s happening,” Mark cried. “Does that mean she’s telling the truth?”

  It meant her skin was not changing conductance. “It doesn’t mean anything,” Weber said. “You have to calibrate it.”

  Before Weber left that afternoon, he put it to Mark. “There’s a condition called Capgras. Very rarely, when the brain is hurt, people lose their ability to recognize—”

  A primal howl cut him off. “Fuck. Don’t start with that, man. That’s what the Haz-doctor keeps saying. But he’s in on the whole thing. That woman is sucking his cock or something.” Mark, bare, stared at Weber, eyes begging. “I thought I could trust you, Shrinky.”

  Weber fingered his beard. “You can,” he said, and fell silent.

  “Besides,” the thin voice pleaded. “Isn’t it more scientific, just to go with the more likely explanation?”

  Sylvie’s words that night from the MotoRest were honey out of stone. “Ah! I know that voice. Wait—don’t tell me. It’s the man who used to hang around here.”

  He couldn’t remember everything he wanted to tell her. It didn’t matter. She was primed with her own stories.

  “Your very clever daughter Jessica has just won an NSF grant for young researchers. Apparently, planet-hunting is still fundable, this year.” She quoted a handsome figure. “California will have to tenure her, just for the loot she’s bringing in.”

  Jess, his Jess. My daughter, my ducats.

  Sylvie launched into the day’s long adventure, her attempts to trap a family of raccoons that was holding regular book-club gatherings in the Weber attic. She planned to catch them alive and drive them around in circles for a long time in broad daylight, to bewilder them, before dropping them off behind a strip mall in Centereach.

  At last she asked, “So what did you learn from your misidentifier today?”

  He lay back on the rented bed, closed his eyes, and held the shoehorn of a phone against his cheek. “He’s got one thin scrap of sheet tin propped up between himself and dissolving. Just looking at him makes everything I think I know about consciousness melt into air.”

  The conversation shifted; he had some trouble following where it wanted to go. He asked about the weather on Chickadee Way, how the place looked.

  “Conscience Bay was just gorgeous, Man. Like glass. Like frozen time.”

  “I can imagine,” he said. The needle would have jumped.

  He worked late, going over his notes. A moist June chill that mocked his whole image of the Great Plains saturated his room. He could find no way to shut off the air conditioner or open a window. He lay in bed, in the amber glow of the clock, appraising himself. Midnight came and went, and his eyes wouldn’t close. He had seen the note before. Karin Schluter had Xeroxed it and stuffed the copy into the thick portfolio she’d shown him on his first day. Now, as he lay miles from sleep, he tried to decide whether he’d lied about not knowing it, or had just forgotten.

  He’d seen true face blindness, and this wasn’t it. All his books described some flavor of agnosia—blindness to objects, blindness to places, blindness to age or expression or gaze. He’d written about people who couldn’t distinguish foods, cars, or coins, although some part of their brains still knew how to interact with the baffling objects. He’d told the story of Martha T., a devoted ornithologist, who overnight lost the ability to tell a wren from a red-bellied sapsucker, yet could still describe, in detail, how the birds differed. Several times in the books he described prosopagnosia. For truly vertiginous diseases, the brain was endlessly accommodating.

  The Country of Surprise portrayed Joseph S. In his early twenties, he was shot in the head by a mugger’s small-caliber handgun, damaging a small region in his right inferotemporal region—the fusiform gyrus. He lost his ability to recognize acquaintances, friends, family, loved ones, or celebrities. He could walk past anyone and not know him, however often or recently they’d met. He even had trouble picking out his own mirror image.

  “I know they are faces,” Joseph S. told Weber. “I can see the differences in each feature. But they aren’t distinctive. They mean nothing to me. Think of the leaves of an enormous maple. Put any two next to each other and you can see how different they are. But look up into the tree and try to name the leaves.”

  Nothing to do with memory: Joseph could list in some detail accurate descriptions of fe
atures that friends of his ought to have. He just couldn’t recognize those features, when assembled into a face.

  Despite his crippling damage, Joseph S. earned a doctorate in mathematics and pursued a successful university career. He scored off the charts on standard IQ tests, especially spatial reasoning, navigation, memory, and mental rotation. He described to Weber his elaborate compensatory systems: cues of voice, clothing, body type, and minute ratios of eye width to nose length to lip thickness. “I’ve gotten fast enough to fool a lot of people.”

  Faces only: nothing else gave him trouble. In fact, he was better than most at picking out slight differences in nearly identical objects: pebbles, socks, sheep. But surviving in society depended upon performing staggering facial calculations constantly, as if they were child’s play. Joseph S. lived like a spy behind enemy lines, doing by laborious math and algorithm what everyone else did like breathing. Every moment out in public demanded vigilance. He said that the problem contributed to the breakup of his first marriage. His wife couldn’t bear his having to study her in order to pick her out of a crowd. “It very nearly cost me my current marriage, too.” He described seeing his second wife on campus one afternoon and embracing her. Only it wasn’t his wife. It was no one he knew.

  “What we think of as a single, simple process,” Weber wrote,

  is in fact a long assembly line. Vision requires careful coordination between thirty-two or more separate brain modules. Recognizing a face takes at least a dozen…We are hardwired for finding faces. Two Oreo cookies and a carrot can make an infant howl or laugh. Only: the many, delicate hardwires between modules can break at several different spots…

  With varying damage to different areas, a person might lose his ability to distinguish sex, age, the emotional expression of a face, or the direction of someone’s attention. Weber described a patient who was completely unable to decide how attractive a given face seemed. In his own lab, he gathered data suggesting that some sufferers from face blindness were actually matching faces without their conscious minds knowing.