The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  She sits down in the dirt next to him, an inch away. Weird calm comes over the both of them.

  Bring back someone? she asks. Like she might want to, herself.

  He yanks forward, out of the hole. She falls back, her arms up to block him. But all he wants is to take her face between his hands.

  You have to help me. I’m begging you. I’ll do anything you want. I have to find this person.

  But why, Mark? What can he give you that I…?

  This guy knows. Knows why I’m still alive. Something I’d like to learn.

  Karin wrote Gerald Weber. He’d told her to write if Mark’s status changed. She didn’t mention seeing him on television. She said nothing about buying his new book or finding it cold and tired, filled with recycled pronouncements about the human brain and empty of the human soul. She wrote: “Mark is clearly getting worse.”

  She described the new symptoms: Mark’s obsessive theories about the note. His doubling places now, along with people. His rejecting the house, the subdivision, maybe even the whole town. His drifting into territory so weird it left her shaky. She asked Dr. Weber if the accident could have given Mark false memories. Could something have happened to his inner, generalizing map? Every small change was making Mark split each now into a unique world.

  She mentioned a case in Weber’s first book, an elderly woman called Adele who’d assured Dr. Weber that she wasn’t lying in a hospital in Stony Brook but was in fact in her cozy saltbox home in Old Field. When Dr. Weber pointed out all the expensive medical devices in the room, Adele had laughed. “Oh, those are just props, to make me feel better. I could never afford the real things.”

  Reduplicative paramnesia. She copied the words from his book into her e-mail. Could Mark actually be suffering from that? Could he be seeing details he’d never seen before? Did brain damage ever help memory? She cited Dr. Weber’s second book, page 287: the man he referred to as Nathan. Damage to the man’s frontal lobes somehow destroyed his internal censor and freed up long-suppressed recollections. Nathan, at fifty-six, suddenly realized that at nineteen he had killed another man. Could Mark be remembering old things about himself—or even about her—that he could not accept?

  She knew her theories were crazy, even as she suggested them. But no crazier than Capgras. Weber’s own books claimed that the human brain was not only wilder than thought, but wilder than thought could think. She quoted from The Country of Surprise: “Even baseline normality has about it something hallucinatory.” Nothing in Dr. Weber’s examination of Mark had anticipated these new symptoms. Either Mark needed a whole new diagnosis, or she was hallucinating.

  She got back a cheerful reply from Weber’s secretary. Dr. Weber’s new book required him to travel to seventeen cities in four countries over the next three months. He’d be largely out of e-mail contact, except for emergencies, until the fall. The secretary promised to alert Dr. Weber to Karin’s note at the earliest opportunity. And she encouraged Karin to be in touch if things with her brother became more serious.

  The response enraged Karin. “The man’s ducking me,” she told Daniel. “He’s taken what he wants, and now he’s blowing us off.”

  Daniel tried to hide his embarrassment. “I doubt he even has time to duck you. Things must be nuts for him right now. Television, radio, and newspapers every day.”

  “I knew, all the time he was out here. He thinks I’m a problem patient. A problem relative. He read my e-mail and told his staff to cover for him. Maybe it wasn’t even his secretary. Maybe it was him, just pretending…”

  “Karin? K.?” Daniel had grown older than the neuroscientist. “We don’t know…”

  “Don’t patronize me! I don’t care about what we know or don’t.”

  “Shh. It’s okay. You’re angry. You should be. With all the professionals. At this whole business. Maybe even angry with Mark.”

  “Are you analyzing me?”

  “I’m not analyzing. I just see that…”

  “Who the fuck…?” Do you think you are?

  The words, even stifled, knocked them both silent. Her hands started shaking and she sat down, numb.

  “My God, Daniel. What’s happening? Listen to me. I’m him. Worse than him.”

  He crossed to her and rubbed the life back into her upper arm. “Anger is natural,” he said. “Everything gets angry.”

  Everything except the saint she lived with.

  She made an appointment to see Dr. Hayes. Pulling into the garage at Good Samaritan for the appointment, she reverted to the night of the accident. She had to sit in the parked vehicle for ten minutes before her legs would support her weight.

  She greeted Dr. Hayes professionally. The appointment meter was ticking. She listed Mark’s new symptoms, which the neurologist copied into Mark’s chart.

  “Why don’t you bring him in? I’d better have another look at him.”

  “He won’t come,” Karin said. “He won’t listen to me, now that he’s back living by himself.”

  “Have you considered taking steps to assume legal guardianship?”

  “How…what does that involve? Would I have to declare him mentally unfit?”

  Hayes gave her a contact. Karin jotted it down, the ugly hope washing over her. Use the law against your brother. Protect him against himself.

  “How sure is your brother that his home is a fake?” Hayes asked, fascinated.

  “Out of ten? I’d say he’s a seven.”

  “How does he explain the switch?”

  “He thinks he’s been under observation since the accident.”

  “Well, he’s right, isn’t he? It’s too bad our author isn’t here to see this. This one could have come straight out of his cases.”

  “But it didn’t,” she said, brittle.

  “No. I’m sorry. It didn’t.” He set down his pen and fingered a thick, green-bound medical text on the shelf behind him. But he didn’t remove it. “Studies show a high incidence of overlap for the various misidentification syndromes. In fact, they may not be entirely distinct disorders. A quarter or more of Capgras patients go on to develop other delusional symptoms. When you consider the different causes of Capgras…”

  “You’re saying he could get worse? He might start thinking anything? Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?”

  He shot her a maddeningly composed look. “It hadn’t happened before.”

  Dr. Hayes wanted more observation. Mark was scheduled for his first outpatient CBT session in a week. The therapist, Dr. Jill Tower, had already gone over the file. Dr. Hayes would do his own follow-up assessment. Meanwhile, neither the diagnosis nor the indicated treatment would change.

  They’d reached minute seventeen; she was already overdrawn. “I also wanted to get your opinion,” she started. “I understand that Dr. Weber is an acknowledged expert. But I’ve been reading about this kind of therapy. It just sounds to me like, I don’t know. Like glorified conditioning. They try to weaken the delusion just by training and…modification. Do you think that such therapy is appropriate in Mark’s situation? The scan shows damage. What good is mental habit-changing going to do against a physical injury?”

  She hit a sore spot: clear by the way the neurologist started hedging. “We need to explore a variety of approaches. Cognitive behavioral therapy will certainly not hurt your brother as he learns to adjust to his new self. Confusion, anger, anxiety…”

  She grimaced. “Does it have any chance of helping his Capgras?”

  He swung back around to his shelf of books, but again removed none. “A small body of literature shows some melioration of misidentification delusions in psychiatric disorders. Whether CBT can do anything for Capgras caused by closed-head trauma, we’ll have to wait and see.”

  “We’re the guinea pigs?”

  “Medicine often involves some degree of experimentation.”

  “Every time I show Mark how crazy he’s being, he comes up with another more elaborate theory to explain himself. How can a therapist reason
him out of this?”

  “Cognitive behavioral therapy is not about reasoning. It’s about emotional adjustment. Training patients to explore their belief systems. Helping them work on their sense of self. Giving them exercises to change…”

  “Help Mark explore why he thinks I’m not who I am?” Whoever that was.

  “We need to determine the strength of his delusion. It may be no more resistant to modification than any belief. Some people change political parties. People fall in and out of love. Religious persecutors get converted. We don’t know what goes on in a misidentification syndrome. We can’t cause it and we can’t make it go away. But we might be able to make it easier to live with.”

  “Easier for…?” She modified. “So ‘easier’ is the best we can hope for?”

  “That might be a lot.”

  “Does Dr. Weber prescribe cognitive therapy for all his untreatable cases?”

  His eyes flickered, a little glint that almost forgot its code of ethics. A glint that admitted: Well, you know, physicians often prescribe antibiotics for colds. “We wouldn’t recommend this referral if it had no chance of helping.”

  The professional, closing ranks. But she might flush him out. “Would you have made this referral if Dr. Weber hadn’t visited?”

  His smile darkened. “I have no trouble backing his recommendation.”

  “But behavioral therapy for a lesion? That’s like talking somebody out of going blind.”

  “A newly blind person could use help adjusting to blindness.”

  “So this is just help adjusting? There’s nothing, then? Nothing medical? Even when he’s clearly getting worse?”

  Dr. Hayes folded his index fingers to his lips. “Nothing else advisable. Remember, this isn’t for us. It’s for your brother.”

  She stood and shook the neurologist’s hand, thinking, Whose brother? She confirmed Mark’s schedule with Dr. Tower’s scheduling nurse on her way out.

  She reached a truce with Rupp and Cain. Whatever their sins against her brother, she couldn’t afford to go to war. She had no one else to draw on. Someone had to help watch Mark, especially at night, when things got rough. She’d lost the right to come and go. One bad evening, she volunteered to stay in his spare bedroom. He’d studied her so wildly it scared her back to Daniel’s. The next day, Karin called Tommy Rupp, the brains, for want of a better term, of the Muskrateers. She could deal with Rupp over the phone. Anything, so long as she didn’t have to look at him.

  He was surprisingly decent, improvising a rotation that would keep constant tabs on Mark. The prospect of caretaking pleased him. “Just like the old days,” he told her. “He won’t think twice about us staying over.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. Please don’t make him do any drugs. Not when he’s like this.”

  Tommy chuckled. “Make? What do you take us for? We’re not monsters.”

  “According to current neurological theory, everybody’s a monster.”

  Humiliating memory lay between them, untouched. Years ago, Karin and Rupp had done each other, just for grins, late one September night on the front porch of her family’s house, while Mark, Joan, and Cappy Schluter were upstairs sleeping. Her senior year of college, with Rupp just out of high school. Almost like corrupting a minor. And she did corrupt him that night, drawing muffled squeals of disbelief from the boy that threatened to wake the whole house and get them both killed. She never knew why she’d initiated the one-shot entertainment. Curiosity. Simple thrill: the worst possible transgression. Maybe it gave her some leverage, dragging her brother’s friend behind the porch swing on a dry, brisk, pitch-black September night and doing the animal deed. Tom Rupp exercised an unnatural influence over Mark. Even at eighteen: too cool to show the slightest desire. Just along for the ride. Well, she gave him one. Not until afterward did Karin realize how much leverage she’d given the boy.

  But he never told Mark. She would have known; Mark would have disowned her, nine years sooner. Rupp never mentioned the occasion again. He’d gladly have taken second helpings anytime, but he was way above asking. She could feel his question in the way he skulked around her, the same nagging question banging around the back of her own head every time she crossed Tom Rupp’s path: That girl still in there?

  She’d had a thing for danger back then. And in the danger department, Tom Rupp was the Kearney High Bearcats’ Great White Hope. At the age of thirteen, he hitchhiked the 130 miles to Lincoln and smuggled himself into Farm Aid III, bringing back to his dumb-founded friends John Mellencamp’s fingerprints on a bottle of Myers’s Rum. At fifteen, he stole the four flags that flew outside the Twenty-second Street Municipal Building—city, state, nation, and POWMIA—and used them to decorate his room. Everyone in town knew who’d taken them except the police. He’d been a wrestler, placing fifth in state in the 152-pound class his sophomore year before dropping out of organized sports, proclaiming them “a training camp for prospective gays.” Mark, who’d struggled for years to make a name as a hustling but flatfooted guard with a mediocre outside jumper, gratefully dropped out with him.

  Rupp trained Mark, quoting ominously from the classics he fed himself in strict, autodidact regimen. “Be on your guard against the good and the just! They would fain crucify those who devise their own virtue. They hate the lonesome ones.” Mark couldn’t always follow the man, but the diction always pumped him.

  They picked up Duane Cain as their all-purpose sidekick in senior year. Cain had already succeeded in earning an eighteen-month suspended sentence for believing himself to be the first person ever to come up with an insurance fraud scheme. The three of them grew inseparable. They spent weeks rebuilding any internal-combustion engine that stood still long enough for them to strip it. They were at perpetual war with every other clique in school. Duane led them on nighttime raids involving that old Native American gesture of contempt, leaving a warm, coiled calling card on prominent display in the enemy’s front yard.

  They enrolled together at U of N Kearney, Rupp finishing in four years, Mark and Duane managing a total of four between them. Rupp took a “telecommunications opening” in Omaha, abandoning Duane and Mark to lives of moving furniture and reading gas meters. Eight months later, Rupp was back in town, without explanations, but with a long-term plan to advance all three of their professional fates. He talked his way into a start at the Lexington packing plant, where he migrated from postprocessing over to the slaughter side, which paid three dollars more per hour. As soon as he amassed some seniority, he got jobs for his two friends. Duane joined One-shot Rupp on the zapping side, but Mark hadn’t the stomach for it, let alone the nose. Mark gladly stayed behind in machine maintenance and repair, saving enough money over three years for a down payment on the Homestar.

  Alone of the trio, Tommy Rupp was ambitious. The Nebraska National Guard offered him a supplemental paycheck and even promised three-quarters of his tuition if he went back to school. All that, for only one weekend a month. It was a no-brainer. He tried to get the other Muskrateers to join up together. Free money, and gender-integrated patriotic service: the best legal deal anyone was going to hand the likes of them. But Duane and Mark chose to wait and see.

  Rupp enlisted in July 2001 as an MOS 63B: Light-Wheel Vehicle Mechanic, the same stuff he loved to do all weekend, anyway. The 167th Cavalry. They tried to poison him in basic, and he had the souvenir commemorative videotape to prove it: stumbling from the qualification gas chamber, crawling out of the sealed room full of chlorobenzalmalononitrile where he and twenty-five other recruits had been ordered to remove their gas masks. Duane Cain took one look at the tape—Rupp the Ironman, falling to his knees in the dirt, choking and puking—and decided that national service was not in his foreseeable future. The video freaked Mark, too. He’d never been especially big on inhaling poisons.

  September came, and then the attacks. Alongside the rest of the world, the trio hung on the endlessly looping, slow-motion, cinematic insanity. From the Central Plains, New York
was a black plume on the farthest horizon. Troops were securing the Golden Gate Bridge. Anthrax started turning up in the nation’s sugar bowls. Then the bombs began to fall in Afghanistan. A broadcaster in Omaha declared, It’s payback time, and all along the river came stony, unanimous assent.

  Rupp called it simple self-defense. Early and often, he explained that America couldn’t afford to sit and wait for some new fanatical operative dreaming of seventy-two virgins to smallpox the country in its sleep. The terrorists weren’t going to stop until everyone looked just like them. Duane fretted over Tommy’s future. But Rupp was philosophical. Freedom wasn’t free. Besides, the army had no targets to send the Guard after.

  By winter, America rose up striking at targets everywhere. Rupp’s duty time increased, and a few guys he served with were dragged off to Fort Riley, Kansas. On the third of February, just after the president delivered his hunt-them-down State of the Union address and Washington lost track of bin Laden, Mark came to Rupp and said he’d changed his mind. He wanted to serve, despite the chlorobenzalmalononitrile. Rupp welcomed the news like an Amway distributor entitled to a cut. They hit the recruitment center together, and Mark went shopping. MOS 63G: Fuel and Electrical Systems Repairer. He wasn’t sure he could pass the qualifying test, but figured it couldn’t be much harder than what he did for IBP. He signed a letter of intent, and he and Rupp celebrated by going out and shooting .22s at pop cans out on country fence posts for a couple of hours. He called Karin late that night, his words slurred and swirling. He told her the whole story. He sounded different, his voice prouder, more serene then she’d heard him in a while. Like he was already a soldier. A credit to the country.

  She told him not to go through with it. He laughed at her fears. “Who’s going to protect your way of life, if not me? I just wish I’d gone with it sooner. So obvious. I can do this. Remember Dad and Mom?” She said she did. “They both passed, convinced I was a slacker. You don’t think I’m a slacker, do you?”