The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  He’d enlisted for her. Karin told him to quit, to invoke the forty-eight-hour escape clause. But hearing herself destroying her brother’s one bid for self-esteem, she backed down. And maybe he was right. Maybe she, too, needed to pay for privilege. Two weeks later, he was lying upside down in a frozen roadside ditch, his tour of patriotic duty over.

  Karin dealt with the Guard’s recruiting officers while Mark was still in Good Samaritan. She tried to exempt Mark from the agreement altogether. But the best she could manage was a temporary medical waiver, subject to review. One more dangling uncertainty to live under. After a while, the whole idea of security felt like a sucker punch. The Guard would claim Mark, if they deemed him fit to serve. Meanwhile, Rupp drilled for all of them. Duane lent his moral support by sporting a T-shirt that read, The Marines Are Looking for a Few Good Women, complete with appropriate field-guide illustration.

  But Duane did help Rupp and Bonnie guard the Homestar. Karin watched, from as close as Mark would allow. Mark basked in the company, never wondering why his homecoming festivities went on for weeks. So long as the guests hung around and the refrigerator kept replenishing itself, he seemed ready to live for the moment.

  Karin hovered on the sidelines, appealing to Rupp’s peculiar sense of duty. “Will you watch him when he smokes? He hasn’t smoked for months. I’m terrified he’s going to forget what he’s doing and burn the house down.”

  “Hey. Lighten up. Except for a few bizarre theories, the man is basically back to normal.”

  She couldn’t argue. She no longer knew what normal meant. “Can you at least go easy on the beer?”

  “This? This piss can’t hurt anybody. It’s low-carb.”

  When she drove by the Homestar at night, the lights were always on. That meant raunchy martial-arts film festivals followed by all-night video-game binges. She abided them now. Even the insane NASCAR game couldn’t be any worse than cognitive therapy, for bringing him back to life. The screen was the only place he could be happy now, racing without thinking, free from the suspicion that things didn’t add up. But the game made him crazy, too. Before his spinout, his thumbs had been faster than his eyes. Now, he remembered all that he once could do, but not how to do it. That enraged him. Then she was glad for Rupp and Cain. No one else could protect her from his outbursts. Now that his body had healed, he might maim her before he even knew it. She was a government agent, a robot. He might take her head off in a minute, to find the wires. One bout of confused fury and she’d be no one.

  Cain and Rupp contained his rage. They learned how to handle him: let him blow up, then stick the game controller back in his hands. The routine became part of the general festivities.

  On Independence Day, everyone gathered to watch the fireworks. The boys got an early start, filling an oil drum with iced beer and grilling a quarter of a calf from the plant over an open pit. When Karin showed up, they were listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing patriotic lyrics grafted onto Sousa marches. The sound waves battered her as she pulled into the subdivision. Duane was working to tame an ice-cream maker, reasoning with the unruly gear. Mark laughed at him, more naturally than he’d laughed since the accident. “Your machine has diarrhea.”

  “I’ll beat this bastard. And I’ll fix the tape deck afterward. Show me a machine I can’t whup. I think it’s a polarity problem. You familiar with those?”

  The whole show amused Mark so much he didn’t even challenge Karin’s arrival. “Look who’s here! It’s okay—you’re a citizen, too. Nice little touch, anyway. The Fourth of July is my sister’s all-time favorite. Let’s dedicate this one to her, wherever she is. Her, and all the missing Americans.”

  She hadn’t had a good thing to say about the holiday since she was ten. But maybe he meant that ten-year-old Karin. Those two small children, their eyes gold sparklers, sick with fear and thrill when their father detonated an artillery barrage of illegal Class B fireworks in the north forty.

  “She’s gotta be abroad,” Mark said, a cloud passing over him. “Abroad or in prison. I’d have heard from her if she was in the States. Today of all days. I’m telling you: maybe there’s things to her life that I just didn’t know about.”

  Bonnie showed up straight from work at the River Road Archway, still in her pioneer’s bonnet and ankle-length cotton dress. She was about to duck into Mark’s bathroom and change into her civvies when Mark stopped her. “Hey! Why don’t you stay this way? I like you this way.” He waved at her calico-printed bodice. “Nobody does that stuff anymore. I miss all that shit.”

  She stood, a giggling museum diorama. “What do you mean, ‘miss’?”

  “You know: olden days. Americana. Sort of sexy. It relaxes me.”

  Despite the salacious abuse she took from Rupp and Cain, she stayed in costume, fussing in the kitchen to prepare the impromptu feast alongside Karin in her cutoffs and bare midriff. Denim, duck-hunting camouflage, legible tees, and a fake calico bonnet: America at two and a quarter centuries.

  “Where’s your friend?” Bonnie asked Karin.

  “What friend?” Mark called from the patio.

  Karin considered snapping that frilly, calico neck. “He’s at home. He’s…” She waved her hand vaguely at the stereo system, the massed choral Sousa marches. “He hates military displays. He can’t take the explosions.”

  “Invite him anyway,” Bonnie suggested. “He can leave when the fun starts.”

  “What friend?” Mark, outside the kitchen window, pressed his nose to the screen. “Who are you talking about?”

  “You banging somebody?” Rupp asked, with polite interest.

  Duane savored his rare informational advantage. “Old news, Gus. She’s shacking up with Riegel. What country have you dudes been living in?”

  “Danny Riegel? Bird Boy? Again?” Rupp toasted Karin with a beer can wrapped in a foam Koozie. “That’s priceless. Why didn’t I see that coming? I mean, coming back? The annual migration.”

  Duane snickered. “That dude is going to save the planet someday.”

  “More than you’ll ever do,” Bonnie chided.

  Karin scoped Mark through the kitchen screen. He sat back down on his patio chair, holding a piece of ice to his forehead. He wrestled with the name, fitting the long past into the five seconds of fleeting present where he now lived. Someone pretending to be his sister, shacking up with a boy who, in another life, had once been his inseparable companion. Who’d once shacked up with his actual sister. Impossible to assemble. How many lives was one person supposed to dope out in this life?

  Over the cookout, the boys decided where America would strike next. Duane and Mark proposed various countries, and Tommy rated how hard each one would be to take out. Bonnie—a tinted daguerreotype with half a pound of steak on a paper plate balancing on her knee—listened, as if to a speech she had to memorize for her job at the Archway. “Don’t you just feel sorry for them sometimes? Foreigners?”

  “Well,” Rupp said, doubtfully. “It’s not like they’re just being naïve.”

  “Reverend Billy says this thing with Iraq is actually predicted in the Bible,” Bonnie contributed. “Something that has to happen, before the end.”

  Karin suggested that every dropped bomb might be creating more terrorists.

  “Jesus.” Mark shook his head. “You’re a bigger traitor than my sister. I’m beginning to think you’re not affiliated with the government at all!”

  The Mormon Tabernacle Choir collapsed in exhaustion and was replaced by deeply affirmative Christian country rock. Groups of neighbors, camped over their own scattered cookouts, called out holiday greetings. The sun set and the bugs came out and the first tentative sprigs of fireworks tested the dark. The first Independence Day celebrations since the attacks, and the indolently exploding colored missiles felt both helpless and defiant. Tommy Rupp shot off a dozen “Exploding Terror Heads” he’d picked up at a roadside tent near Plattsmouth: colorful figures of Hussein and bin Laden that whistled skyward and burst
into streamers.

  Karin watched her brother in the shooting light. His eyes swung toward heaven, flinched at each explosion, then cackled at the flinching. His face, now green, now blue, now red, mouthed the same astonishment as all of Farview at this barrage of light they could no longer afford but couldn’t do without. She saw him look around, trying to catch the attention of his friends, searching for confirmation none of them could give. Under the fall of a massive chrysanthemum, he turned and caught her staring at him. And brief as that flash, his eyes finding hers, the slightest sign of kinship issued from him: You’re lost here, too, aren’t you?

  Weber’s life began veering in late July. When plaintive chirps issued from a pile of his clothes, he thought it an animal. First Sylvie’s struggles to evict the raccoon family from the attic, now a plague of locusts in the living quarters. Only the chirps’ regularity made him recall the cell phone. He dug up the burrowing thing and stuck it to his face. “Weber.”

  “Big Daddy. Calling to wish you your day in the sun.”

  “Hey, Jess. It’s you!”

  His daughter, in her astronomical aerie in Southern California, wishing him a happy fifty-sixth. Whatever the awkwardness between them, Jessica always observed the forms. She flew back east for three or four days every Christmas. She sent them trinkets on Mother’s and Father’s Days—films and music, vain attempts to educate her parents in popular culture. She even remembered their anniversary, a thing no self-respecting child ever did. And she called them without fail on their birthdays, however halting the calls.

  “You sound surprised. You know there’s caller ID on the screen of your phone.”

  “Get thee behind me. Besides, how do you know which phone I’m on?”

  “Daddy? Brain fart.”

  “Oh. Right. Forget that. How come you’re calling on this cell thing, anyway?” Wrong foot, as usual, out of the gate.

  “I thought you might enjoy birthday greetings from your daughter.”

  “I guess I’m not used to this ring-tone yet.”

  “You’re not using it? You’re sorry I got it for you?”

  “I’m using it. I use it to call your mother, when I’m on the road.”

  “If you don’t like it, Father, you can bring it back.”

  “Who said I don’t like it?”

  “Get Mom to return it for you. She knows how to move about freely in the retail world.”

  “I like it. It’s handy.”

  “Fine. Listen, I’m telling you this now so you won’t spin out when it happens. I’m thinking about getting you a DVD player for Christmas.”

  “What’s wrong with tapes?”

  His daughter snickered. “So, what birthday is this, anyway?”

  “Sorry. We’ve stopped counting.” The mere sound of each other’s voices returned him to his thirties and her to thirteen.

  Jess had never been big with words. She preferred figures. But she liked the phone, an unimpeachably clean technology. As a teen, she went through the obligatory phone stage—long, near-silent sessions with her friend Gayle while she played Tetris and Gayle watched cable, a medium the Webers managed to duck. The girls would breathe at each other for hours at a shot, punctuated only by Jess’s occasional reports of high scores or interrogations of Gayle’s plot synopses: “He’s kissing her? Where? Why?” Sylvie would sweep through every half-hour, insisting, “You girls start talking or give it up.”

  Her phone behavior was much the same now, only Tetris had given way to Hubble scans. Weber could hear her computing on the other end; the furtive clacking of keys. Applying for grants or querying enormous online astronomical databases. She said nothing for some seconds. At last, he asked, “How’s the planet hunting?”

  “Fine,” she clicked. “I’ve got Keck time in August. We’re looking to supplement the radial-velocity method with…You aren’t really interested, are you?”

  “Of course I am. You found anything small, warm, and water-bearing yet?”

  “No. But I promise your choice of half a dozen before I come up for tenure.”

  “You’re filling in all the required promotion forms?”

  She sighed. “Yes, Parental Unit.” One of the rising stars among young cosmologists, and he was fretting about her paperwork.

  “How’s the new insulin pump working?”

  “Oh my God. Best two months’ salary I’ve ever spent. Absolutely life-changing. I feel like a new person.”

  “Really? That’s fantastic. So it’s keeping you from crashing?”

  “Not entirely. Zuul still inhabits me from time to time. Capricious little fiend. Came and took me over in the middle of the night last week. First time in a long time. Scared the crap out of both of us.”

  Say her name, Weber willed Jess. But she didn’t. “So how is…Cleo?”

  “Father!” She sounded almost amused. He blessed the screens of distracting data on her end. “Don’t you think it’s strange that you would ask about my dog before you asked about my mate?”

  “Well,” he said. “How is…your mate?”

  Deep silence from California. “You’ve forgotten her name, haven’t you?”

  “Not ‘forgotten.’ I’ve just mislaid it, for the moment. Ask me anything about her. Brookline, Massachusetts. Holy Cross, Stanford, dissertation on the French colonial adventure in sub-Saharan…”

  “It’s called ‘blocking,’ Father. It happens when you’re anxious or uncomfortable. You’ve never really gotten used to it, have you?”

  “Gotten used to what?” Stupid time-buying.

  Jessica stopped clicking. She was enjoying this. “You know. Never gotten used to your daughter sleeping with someone from the humanities.”

  “Some of my best friends are humanists.”

  “Name one.”

  “Your mother is a humanist.”

  “My mother is the last of the pagan saints. How soul-strengthening you’ve been for her, all these years.”

  “You know, Jess. It’s really starting to worry me. It’s not just common names anymore. I’m surprised by entries in my agenda, in my own handwriting.”

  “Daddy, remember what you said in one of your own books. ‘If you forget where you put your car keys, don’t sweat. If you forget what car keys are, see a physician.’”

  “Did I say that?”

  Jess laughed, the same goofy, distracted, bucktoothed laugh she’d laughed at eight years old. It cut right through him. “Besides, if it gets really bad, you can get your hands on the latest and greatest drugs. You guys have all sorts of things you’re not telling us public about yet, don’t you? Memory, concentration, speed, intelligence: a pill for everything, I bet. Irks the crap out of me that you won’t cut your own flesh and blood into any of this stuff.”

  “Treat me nice,” he said. “You never know.”

  “Speaking of your book, Shawna showed me the Harper’s review.” Shawna. No wonder he could never remember. “I say to hell with him,” his daughter said. “Obviously jealous, pure and simple. I wouldn’t think twice about it.”

  A flash of disconnect. Harper’s? They’d jumped pub date. His publishers must have known about the review days ago. No one had mentioned anything to him. “I won’t,” he said.

  “And have yourself a happy little birthday? Can you do that much for me?”

  “I will.”

  “Which I suppose means writing four thousand words and discovering a couple of heretofore unknown states of altered consciousness. I mean, in other people.”

  He said goodbye, folded and pocketed the cricket, then hopped on the bike and pedaled up to Setauket Common and the Clark Library. He ran the gauntlet of news-magazine headlines: U.S. bombs obliterate Afghan wedding. Cabinet-level Security Department rushed through. Where had he been while this was happening? Handling the new Harper’s in its hardened red plastic folder, he felt vaguely criminal. Obscene, looking up a review of his work. Like Googling his own name. Scanning down the table of contents, he felt ridiculous. He’d been wri
ting for years, with more success than he’d ever dared imagine. He wrote for the insight of the phrase, to locate, in some strange chain, its surprise truth. The way a reader received his stories said as much about the reader’s story as about the story itself. In fact, his books explored that very fact: there was no story itself. No final judgment. Anything this reviewer might say was just part of the distributed network, signals cascading through the fragile ecosystem. What could a pan or praise matter to him? He cared only what his daughter thought. His daughter’s mate. Shawna. Shawna. They’d read this piece, but not yet seen the book. If Jess got around to The Country of Surprise—and he imagined she would, someday—she’d be reading, inescapably, the book this review created, in her mind. Best to know what other volumes were now floating around, spun from the one he wrote.

  The title of the review jumped off the page with a sickening thrill: “Neurologist in a Vat.” The reviewer’s name meant nothing to him. The article started out respectfully enough. But within a paragraph, it turned brittle. He began to scan, lingering on evaluative dismissals. The thesis, at the end of the second paragraph, was more damning than Jess had let on:

  Driven by medical imaging and new molecular-level experimental technologies, brain research has surged ahead phenomenally in the last few years; Gerald Weber’s increasingly slender, anecdotal approach has not. He returns here with his familiar and slightly cartoonish tales, hiding behind an entirely predictable if irrefutable plea for tolerance of diverse mental conditions, even as his stories border on privacy violations and sideshow exploitation…Seeing such a respected figure capitalize on unacknowledged research and unfelt suffering borders on the embarrassing.

  Weber read on, from out-of-context quotes to gross generalizations, from factual errors to ad hominem attacks. How could Jess have been so matter-of-fact about this? The piece made his book out to be both inaccurate science and irresponsible journalism, the pseudoempirical equivalent of reality television, profiting from fad and pain. He dealt in generalities with no particulars, facts with no understanding, cases with no individual feeling.