The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  Few weeks went by when he didn’t receive letters from anxious readers struggling with some attenuated form of failing to recognize old acquaintances. Some were consoled by Weber’s bombshell: a simple neurological quirk that revealed how everyone suffered from a form of prosopagnosia. Even normal recognition fails when the observed face is upside down.

  Mark Schluter was not face-blind. Just the reverse: he saw differences that were not there. He most resembled those people Weber had met for whom every change in expression could split into a new and separate person. That nightmare flashed across Weber’s closed lids just before he fell asleep, looking up into the million leaves of a tree towering above him, each leaf a life he had met once, a moment in a life, even a particular emotional aspect of that isolated moment, every look a separate object to identify, unique and multiplying into the billions, beyond anyone’s ability to simplify into names…

  The third morning, he went alone to Dedham Glen. He needed more psychometry, to test for broader delusional tendencies. He found the place easily. Despite the tangled river valley, the town was a sheet of graph paper. Two days in this perfect grid and—barring any spatial-orienting lesions—one could find anything.

  Three gigantic children were camped on the floor around Mark’s television. Mark, in his knit cap, sat between a badger in a prison outfit and a keg-chested man in hunting cap and sweats. Weber recognized them from Karin’s photographs.

  On screen, a road through a rolling brown landscape reeled out from the horizon. The taillights of low-slung cars clawed across the veering asphalt. The three seated males jerked in unison with the taillights, jolting the way diabetic Jessica sometimes did, in the middle stages of insulin shock. The footage looked like home movies, handheld vérité motor sports overdubbed with a throbbing techno soundtrack. Then Weber saw the wires. Each of the trio was tethered by an umbilical to a game box. The race—part film, part cartoon—half derived from this trio’s brains.

  The wires recalled Weber to graduate student days, the sunset of behaviorism: old laboratory experiments with pigeons and monkeys, creatures taught to want nothing except to press buttons and slide levers all day long, merging with the machine until they dropped from exhaustion. The three men had become the sinuous music, the serpentine road, the engine roar. But they showed no sign of dropping anytime soon. Changes on the screen produced changes in physiology, which fed back into the screen world.

  The ribboning road bore hard to the right, floating, then falling. The cars lifted free, nosing into the air. Then the crunch of steel when chassis slammed back to earth and the three bodies absorbed the impact. The engines whined, choking on the pavement. The noise crashed like surf as the drivers ground for higher gears. Specks far down the chute of scenery swelled into other speeding vehicles, which the foreground cars scrambled to pass. No saying where the race unfolded. Somewhere empty. Some square state with more cows than people, midway between prairie and desert. A few tract homes, filling stations, strip malls—the tile set for heartland America. For a few seconds, it rained. Then the rain turned to sleet, sleet to snow. Daytime faded to dark. In another moment night lifted, as the race ground a few dozen more miles down the imaginary road.

  Whatever damage Mark Schluter suffered, his thumbs and their wiring were still intact. Recent studies by a colleague of Weber’s suggested that enormous areas of the motor cortex of game-cartridge children were devoted to thumbs, and that many in the emerging species Homo ludens now favored their thumbs over their index fingers. The game controller had at last consummated one of the three great leaps of primate evolution.

  The trio on the floor elbowed one another, their bodies extensions of the cars they piloted. They hit an open stretch where the road stopped whipping and became straightaway through sandy hills toward a looming finish line. The racers accelerated, jostling for position. They banked into a last hard right. One of the cars slid wide through the curve and fishtailed. The driver overcompensated, swinging back onto the road, into his companions’ vehicles. All three cars locked up and soared into a spectacular corkscrew. They came down, plowing into a file of slower cars cruising into the finish. One car ricocheted out of the pack and struck the filled grandstand. The screen turned a bright smear. People fled in all directions, termites from a torched hive. The car exploded into an oily flare. An arcing cry cracked open and fell back to earth as laughter. Out of the flames emerged a crash-suited figure, charred from helmet to boots, dancing crazily.

  “Holy shit,” the badger felon said. “That’s what I call a big finish there, Gus.”

  “Un-fucking-be-lieve-able,” the keg-chest confirmed. “Greatest fireball ever.”

  But the third driver, the one Weber came to see, just droned. “Wait. Give me that puppy back. One more time.”

  The engines dead, the badger glanced up and saw Weber in the doorway. He nudged Mark. “Company, Gus.”

  Mark spun around, his eyes both lit and scared. Seeing Weber, he snorted. “That’s not company. That’s the Incredible Shrinking Man. Hey. This guy’s famous. Tons more famous than most people realize.”

  “Pull up a spot,” the hunting cap offered. “We were just winding up, anyway.”

  Weber reached into his pocket and turned on his voice recorder. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take another lap. I’ll just sit and collect my thoughts.”

  “Hey! I’m forgetting myself. Where the hell are my manners?” Mark scrambled to his feet, shoving off of his cursing friends. “Shrinkster, meet Duane-o Cain. And this one here…” He pointed to the badger. “Hey, Gus. Who the hell you supposed to be, again?” The badger shot him the finger. Mark laughed, an emptying gas cylinder. “Whatever you say. This one’s Tommy Rupp. One of the world’s great drivers.”

  Duane Cain snorted. “Driver? Putter, maybe.”

  Weber watched the trio maneuver to a new starting line. He was thirty-four years old when he first saw one of these boxes. He’d gone to pick up seven-year-old Jessica from her girlfriend’s house. He found the girls parked in front of the tube and scolded them. “What kind of children are you, watching television on such a gorgeous day?”

  The question reduced the girls to derisive howls. It wasn’t television, they sneered. It was, in fact, lobotomized table tennis stood on end. He watched in fascination. Not the game: them. The game was chunky, flat, and repetitive. But the two girls: they were off somewhere in deep symbolic space.

  “How is this better than real Ping-Pong?” he asked tiny Jess. He genuinely wanted to know her answer. The same question haunted his work. What was it about the species that would save the symbol and discard the thing it stood for?

  His seven-year-old sighed. “Dad,” she told him, with that first hint of contempt for adulthood and all its trouble with the obvious. “It’s just cleaner.”

  His daughter never really looked back. Eight years later, she built her own computer from parts. By eighteen, she was using it to analyze the traces of light from a backyard telescope. Now almost thirty, living in Southern California, that most abstract of states, she was winning grants from the NSF for finding new planets, at least one of which would surely turn out to be cleaner than Earth.

  The trio of boys conferred without words. They ran laps of intricate ballet beyond the reach of any choreographer. Weber studied Mark for signs of deficit. No saying how coordinated he had once been. But even now, Mark could run rings around Weber in any vehicle, real or phantom. He drove like a maniac. The occasional stunning fireball drew no more than a viscous laugh.

  Weber was noting down Mark’s eye movements when a shout tore through the room. It seemed just another of the game’s shattering sound effects. He turned to see Karin in the doorway, her face aflame. Her hands were up, clutching the back of her skull. Her elbows flared. “Animals. What do you think you’re doing?”

  The males scrambled to their feet. Tom Rupp recovered first. “We thought we’d come keep our friend company. He needed a little diversion.”

  Her left hand grabbe
d her neck while her right cut the air. “Are you insane?”

  Duane Cain twisted under the injustice. “You want to get back on the Prozac for a minute? We’re just here to supply companionship.”

  Karin waved her nails at the video game, the road still snaking mindlessly across the screen. “Companionship? That’s what you call putting him through this again?” She shot Weber a look of betrayal.

  “The man’s not objecting,” Rupp said. “Are you, buddy?”

  Mark stood grasping his controller, one cheek screwed up. “We were just doing what we always do.” He held up the game pad. “What’s with the freaking?”

  “Exactly.” Cain looked at Weber, then back at Karin. “See what we’re saying? It’s not like this is real, or anything. We’re not putting anybody through anything.”

  “Don’t you two have jobs? Or have you become completely unemployable?”

  Rupp stepped toward her, and she backed toward the door. “I took home thirty-one hundred dollars this month. How about you?” Karin crossed her arms under her breasts and looked down. Weber felt some old, unfinished business between them.

  “Working?” Duane said. “It’s Sunday, for Christ’s sake.”

  A giggle leaked out of Mark. “Even God didn’t bust his balls all the time, Sarge.”

  “Go away,” she said. “Go kill some cows.”

  Rupp smiled a little lemonade smile and flicked the back of his fingernails up his cheek. “Give it up, Ms. Gandhi. You take a hit out on a cow every time you bite into a burger. You know what I think? Our man here is right. Arab terrorists kidnaped Karin Schluter and replaced her with a foreign agent.”

  Duane Cain glanced nervously at Weber. But Mark just laughed like a thudding cowbell. Karin sliced through the men toward her brother. Reaching him, she lifted the controller from his hands and placed it on the console. She popped the disc from the machine and the screen went blue. She crossed to Weber and handed him the platter of offending code. She touched his elbow. “Ask these two what they know about Mark’s accident.”

  A cry issued from her brother. “Uh, hello? Are you on crack?”

  “They used to play games like this, only out on real country roads.”

  Mark leaned close to Weber. He whispered, “This is what I mean about her.”

  Tom Rupp sneered. “This is defamation. Do you have the slightest evidence…?”

  “Evidence! Don’t talk to me like I’m some dimwit policeman. Who do you think I am? I’m his sister. You hear me? His own flesh and blood. You want evidence? I’ve been out there. Three sets of tracks?”

  Mark dropped into the chair next to Weber. “Out where? What tracks?” He curled up, clutching his elbows.

  Duane Cain formed a T with his hands. “Deep breathing time. Would it kill anyone if we all just chilled for a second?”

  “Maybe you’ve managed to fool the police. But I hold you personally responsible. If things never get better…”

  “Hey!” Mark said. “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

  Tom Rupp shook his head. “There’s something seriously wrong with you, Karin. You might want to consult with the professional while he’s here.”

  “And then to make him play racing games, drag him through all that again, like nothing ever happened? Have you lost your minds?”

  Mark sprang from his chair. “Who the hell do you think you are? You’ve got no power here!” He made for her, arms thrust outward. She turned, instinctively, into the arms of Rupp, who opened to protect her. Mark stopped short, hung his hands on his neck, and whimpered. Not what I meant. Not what you think.

  Weber watched the free-for-all, already telling Sylvie. She would show him no sympathy. You’re the one who wanted to get out of the lab. Who wanted to see this thing up close, before you died.

  Karin pushed herself from Rupp’s arms. “I’m sorry, but you two have to leave.”

  “Already gone.” Rupp gave her a dress salute, snappy National Guard issue, which Mark, by reflex, mimicked.

  Duane Cain wobbled his extended thumb and pinky at Mark. “Keep it real, bro. We’ll be back.”

  When they were gone and calm returned, Weber turned to Karin. “Mark and I should probably work alone for a bit.” Mark pointed two fingers at her and chuckled. Karin’s face fell. She hadn’t thought Weber capable of such betrayal. She spun and fled the room. Weber followed her into the hall, calling her until she stopped. “I’m sorry. I needed to watch Mark with his friends.”

  She exhaled and rubbed her cheeks. “With his friends? That part of him hasn’t changed.”

  Something occurred to Weber, from reviewing the literature the night before. “How does your brother seem when you talk to him on the phone?”

  “I…haven’t called him. I’m just here, every day. I hate phones.”

  “Ah! We can bond over that.”

  “I haven’t called him since the accident. No point. He’d just hang up on me. At least that’s one thing he can’t do face-to-face.”

  “Would you like to try an experiment?”

  She was ready to try anything.

  Mark Schluter sat toying with a video-game controller, turning it over in his palms as if it were some sealed bivalve he couldn’t open. Something had gone out of the game. He looked up at Weber, imploring. “You making some secret plans with her?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You think she’s right?”

  “About what?”

  “About those guys,” Mark snapped.

  “I couldn’t say. What do you think?”

  Mark flinched. He sucked in a mouthful of air and held it for fifteen seconds, fingering his tracheotomy scar. “You’re supposed to be Dr. Brainiac. You gotta explain all this crap to me.”

  Weber fell back on professional training. “It might help us both figure out what happened if we worked through a few tests.” Not exactly a lie, per se. He’d seen stranger things happen. As hopes went, it was qualified enough.

  Mark stroked his scarred face and sighed. “Fine. Whatever you got. Knock yourself out.”

  They worked for a long time. Mark hunched over the tests, gripping a pen as doggedly as he’d gripped the controller. His focus was all over the road, but he managed to complete most of the tasks. He showed little cognitive impairment. His emotional maturity tested below average, but not much lower, Weber guessed, than the other parties to the morning’s confrontation. All of America would have tested below average on that, nowadays. Mark showed some features of depression. Weber would have been stunned if he didn’t. Borderline depression was a signal indicator of appropriate response, in the summer of 2002.

  Other tests ferreted out paranoia. Until the mid 1970s, many clinicians maintained that Capgras was the by-product of a paranoiac condition. Another quarter-century had reversed cause and effect. Ellis and Young, in the late 1990s, suggested that patients who lose affective response to familiar people would reasonably become paranoid. So it always went, with ideas: go back far enough, and moving clouds caused the wind. Wilder reversals were on their way, should Weber live to witness them. The day would come when the last clean cause and effect would disappear into thickets of tangled networks.

  But indisputably, Capgras and paranoia correlated. No surprise, then, when Mark’s scores showed mild paranoid tendencies. Just what horror the flashes of persecution and clowning held at bay, Weber’s tests could not determine.

  Mark marveled at Weber’s professional patter. “Man! If I could talk like you, I’d be getting laid on a daily basis.” He launched into imitative psychobabble, almost convincing enough to earn him a comfortable wage somewhere on the West Coast.

  Weber said, “I’m going to read you a story, and I want you to repeat it.” He took out the standard text and read at the usual speed. “‘Once upon a time, there was a farmer who fell ill. He went to the town doctor, but the doctor failed to cure him. The doctor told him, “Only a happy look will make you happy again.” So the farmer walked all through town looking
for someone happy, but he could find no one. He went home. But just before he reached his farm, he saw a happy-looking deer racing across the hills, and began to feel a little better.’ Now you tell it back to me.”

  “Whatever turns you on. So there’s this guy,” Mark growled. “Who got banged up and was in a depression. He went to the hospital, but nobody would help. They told him to go look for someone happier than he was. So he went downtown, but he couldn’t find anyone. So he went home. But on his way home, he saw this animal, and he thought, ‘That thing is happier than I am.’ The end.” He shrugged, waiting for his score and dismissing it at the same time.

  That afternoon, at a break in the testing, Mark asked, “Did they build you, too?”

  The recorder was still running. Weber turned nonchalant. The creature he was hunting relaxed in a patch of sunlight, just in front of him. “What do you mean?”

  “Did they build you from parts, as well?” The simple tone of voice, the bodily ease: he might have been greeting a neighbor over the back fence. Sweetly polite, but poised over the bottomless pit.

  “You don’t think I’m human?”

  “‘I couldn’t say,’” Mark mimicked. “‘What do you think?’” His grazing eyes swung to some movement behind Weber. “Hey! Barbie Doll!”

  Weber turned, startled. Barbara Gillespie stood just next to him, in a tailored, ochre skirt suit fit for a job interview. She greeted him covertly in the fraction of a second before addressing Mark. “Mr. S.! You are due for a complete oil change.”

  Mark banked a glance at Weber, filled with criminal glee. “Don’t worry. It’s nowhere near as interesting as it sounds.”

  Barbara looked at Weber. “Should I come back later? Do you two need more time?”

  The tacit alliance unnerved Weber. “We were just wrapping up, in fact.”