The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  He was so late clearing passport control in Sydney that he had to head straight to his first interviews, even before checking into his hotel. The first interview turned into a banal personality profile. The second was one of those disasters where the uninformed interviewer wanted Weber to comment on everything except his work. Could classical music actually make your baby smarter? How close were we to cognition-enhancing drugs? Weber was so jet-lagged he practically hallucinated. He heard his sentences growing longer and less grammatical. By the time the Australian journalist asked whether America could really hope to win the war on terrorism, he was saying injudicious things.

  He was too tired to sleep that night. The next day was the conference. He walked about the cavernous convention center, bumping into chairs and office tables. Everyone recognized him, but most attendees looked away when he caught their eyes. For his part, he fought the urge to assign a five-digit Diagnostic and Statistical Manual code to everyone who came up to shake his hand. The crowd flowed through the conference rooms, whispering and laughing, displaying, preening, praising and faulting, flocking, forming factions, picking fights, plotting overthrows. He watched a middle-aged man and woman shriek upon seeing each other, embrace, and chatter in tandem. He waited to see them comb bugs out of each other’s scalps and eat them. The evolutionary psychologists had that much right, at least. Older creatures still inhabited us, and would never vacate.

  A morning of panels confirmed his impression that the field was paying undue respect to a handful of skilled showmen, some no older than his daughter. This, too, was science: fashions came and went; theories rose and vanished for all sorts of reasons, not all of them scientific. He had no more appetite for following the latest craze than he had for sitting through an entire baseball game. For one, few of the new theories could be tested. But the field was fundable and in a hurry, and they asked only that he give an entertaining keynote. A cartoonish tale-teller could do that much.

  By mid-afternoon, he was seeing double. He sat through a baggy discussion of the phenomenology of synesthesia. He listened to a sensorimotor account of the origin of reading. He heard a fierce debate between cognitivists and new behaviorists on orbitofrontal damage and emotional processes. The one lecture of use to him examined the neurochemistry of the trait that truly separated humans from other creatures: boredom.

  There followed an excruciating mass dinner during which his table mates—three American researchers he knew by reputation—baited him about the shaky reviews. Was it a statistical fluke, or some more significant shift in popular taste? Even the word popular sounded pointed. Pushed, he replied, “I suppose I have enjoyed the kind of attention that inevitably produces a backlash.” He heard how self-serving the words were, even as they left his mouth, words these three researchers would now broadcast. The whole conference would hear them, by the time he gave his speech.

  One of the conference organizers, a “holistic psychotherapist” from Washington, gave him an introduction so luminous it sounded mocking. Only when Weber stood behind the podium, at a moment that Sydney insisted was 8:00 p.m., did he realize the whole invitation might have been a setup. He looked out across a grassland peppered with the smiling, expectant faces of a species that hunted in packs.

  He hated to read talks. Usually, he spoke from an outline, delivering freewheeling, campfire performances. But when he wandered from the script that night, vertigo hit him. He stood high on a towering cliff, water pounding over it. What was acrophobia anyway, if not the half-acknowledged desire to jump? He stayed close to the printed word, but with the stage lights on him and his eyes playing tricks, he kept losing his place. As he read aloud, he realized he’d pitched the talk too low. These were scientists, researchers. He was feeding them armchair descriptions, waiting-room stuff. He scrambled to add technical detail that got away from him even as he added it.

  The speech wasn’t a total disaster. He’d sat through worse. But it was no keynote, not worth the honorarium they paid. He took questions, mostly slow, fat lobs over the plate. The group felt sorry for him, seeing that the kill had already been made. Someone asked if he thought that the narrative impulse might actually have preceded language. The question had nothing to do with the talk he’d just delivered. It seemed to refer, if anything, to the Harper’s accusation that he’d missed his true calling, that Gerald Weber was, deep down, a fabulist.

  He made it through the reception without further humiliation. The ordeal left him ravenous, just hours after dinner, but the reception offered nothing but Shiraz and greasy herring squares on crackers. The entire room developed Klüver-Bucy: popping things in their mouths like babies, carrying on a little too manically, mewling nonsense syllables to each other, propositioning anything that moved.

  He didn’t get back to the hotel until after midnight. He wasn’t sure if he could call Sylvie. He couldn’t even calculate the time difference. He lay awake, thinking of the answers he should have given, seeing the cracks in his ceiling as frozen synapses. Sometime after 3:00 a.m., it occurred to him that he himself might be an extremely detailed case history, a description of personality so minutely realized that it only thought it was autonomous…

  At night, the brain grows strange to itself. He knew the precise biochemistry behind “sundowner syndrome”—the intense exaggeration of medical symptoms, during hours of darkness. But knowing the biochemistry didn’t reverse it. Eventually, he must have fallen asleep, because he woke up from a dream in which people were plunging like missiles into a large body of water and emerging in molten proto-forms. Dreaming: that compromise solution for accommodating the vestigial brain stem. He woke to the phone, a wakeup call he’d forgotten asking for. It was still dark. He had thirty minutes to shower, eat, and cross town to the television studios for a live appearance on a morning news show. Five minutes on breakfast television, something he’d done half a dozen times before. He arrived at the studios with his mind still back at the hotel. They took him into Makeup and powdered him. He removed his glasses. Not vanity, really. Glasses under television lights became mirrors. He met with the show editor, who briefed him from photocopied notes and Internet printouts. The Harper’s review peeked out of the stack. The editor seemed to be discussing a book written by someone else.

  Weber sat in the cramped green room, watching a tiny monitor as the guest before him struggled to look natural. Then his turn came. They led him onto a tech-encircled set filled with glowing living room furniture. Around the couch, a small artillery unit of cameras dollied in and out. Without his glasses, the world was a Monet. They sat him next to the commentator, who looked down into what seemed to be a coffee table but was in fact a prompter. Next to this man, a woman: symbolic wife. The woman introduced him, garbling several facts. The first question came from nowhere.

  “Gerald Weber. You’ve written about so many people suffering from so many extraordinary conditions. People who think that hot is cold and black is white. People who think they can see when they can’t. People for whom time has stopped. People who think their body parts belong to someone else. Can you tell us the strangest case you’ve ever witnessed?”

  A freak show, unrolling live in front of millions of breakfasters. Just like the reviews accused. He wanted to ask her to start again. The seconds clicked off, each as large, white, and frozen as Greenland. He opened his mouth to answer and discovered that his tongue was super-glued to the back of his front teeth. He could not salivate or moisten the freeze-dried hollow of his throat. Every Australian on earth would think he was sucking on a lug nut.

  Words came out, but in chunks, as if he’d just suffered a stroke. He mumbled something about his books countering the idea of “suffering.” Every mental state was simply a new and different way of being, different from ours only in degree.

  “A person who has amnesia or experiences hallucinations isn’t suffering?” the man asked in a journalistic voice, ready for instruction. Yet his tone bore just a tinge of sarcasm about to flower.

  “Well,
let’s take hallucinations,” Weber said. The take came out closer to taste. He described Charles Bonnet syndrome, patients with damage to the visual pathway that left them at least partially blind. Bonnet patients often experienced vivid hallucinations. “I know a woman who often finds herself surrounded by animated cartoons. But Bonnet’s is common. Millions of people experience it. Yes, suffering is involved. Yet everyday, baseline consciousness involves suffering. We need to start seeing all these ways of being as continuous rather than discontinuous. Quantitatively rather than qualitatively different from us. They are us. Aspects of the same apparatus.”

  The woman commentator tilted her head at him and smiled, a megadose of gorgeous skepticism. “You’re saying we’re all a little out there?” Her companion laughed antiseptically. Television.

  He said he was saying delusional thinking was similar to ordinary thinking. Brains of any flavor produced reasonable explanations for unusual perceptions.

  “That’s what lets you enter into mental states so different from your own?”

  Like the worst traps, this one felt innocent. They steered toward the accusations about his work they’d found on the Internet. Do you really care about your patients, or are you just using them for scientific ends? Good controversy; better television. He felt the ambush develop. But he couldn’t see, his mouth was dry, and he hadn’t slept in days. He started to speak, sentences that sounded peculiar even before he formed them. He meant to say, simply, that everyone experienced passing moments of delusion, like when you look at the sunset and wonder, for an instant, where the sun goes. Such moments gave everyone the ability to understand others’ mental deficits. The words came out sounding as if he were confessing to intermittent insanity. Both hosts smiled and thanked him for coming on the show that morning. They segued seamlessly into a teaser about a Brisbane man who had a piece of coral the size of a cricket-ball crash through his bedroom roof. Then a commercial break, and assistants hustled him off the set, his debacle taped forever and soon replayable on the Web, at any time, by anyone, from anywhere on earth.

  He called Bob Cavanaugh from the hotel. “I thought you’d want to know, before you heard from other quarters. Not good. There may be some fallout.”

  After the maddening satellite uplink delay, Cavanaugh sounded only bemused. “It’s Australia, Gerald. Who’s going to know?”

  How much had Mark changed? The question dogged Karin, in that hot summer, a third of a year on. She measured him constantly, comparing him against an image of him before the accident that changed with each day she spent with the new Mark. Her sense of him was just a running average, weighted in favor of the latest person who stood in front of her. She no longer trusted her memory.

  He was certainly slower. Before the accident, even deciding how to handle their mother’s estate had taken him only twenty minutes. Now choosing whether to draw the blinds was like resolving the Middle East. A day became just long enough to sit down and figure out what he absolutely needed to do tomorrow, followed by a little necessary down time.

  He was more forgetful. He could pour a bowl of cereal right next to the one he had left half-eaten. She told him several times a week that he was on disability, but he refused to believe it. His word blurs seemed almost playful to her. “Got to get back to work,” he declared. “Bring home the bankin’.” Seeing the president on the news, he groaned, “Not him again—Mr. Taxes of Evil.” He complained about his clock radio readout. “I can’t tell if it’s 10:00 a.m. or 10:00 FM.” Maybe this was still what all the books called aphasia. Or maybe Mark was goofing on purpose. She couldn’t remember if he’d ever been funny, before.

  He was often childlike now; she could no longer deny it. Yet she’d spent years before the accident badgering him to grow up. The whole country was juvenile. The age was childlike. And when she watched him alongside Rupp and Cain, Mark did not always suffer by comparison.

  The slightest trigger set him raging. But anger, too, was an old familiar. Back in first grade, when Mark’s teacher affectionately called him “an oddball” in front of the class, for bringing his lunch in a paper sack and not a metal lunch box, he’d cursed her in furious tears. Years later, when his father mocked him in a Christmas-dinner argument, the boy of fourteen sprang up from the table, ran up the stairs shrieking Happy damn Holidays, and put his fist through the maple-paneled bedroom door, winding up in the emergency room with three broken bones in his hand. And then there was the time a hysterical Joan Schluter tried to take shears to her son’s locks after Mark and Cappy fought over his bangs. The seventeen-year-old had exploded, kicking in the oven and threatening to sue both parents for abuse.

  In fact, even the Capgras had some precedent. For three years before puberty, Mark had refined Mr. Thurman, his imaginary friend. Mr. Thurman confided to Mark, in top secret, that Mark had been adopted. Mr. Thurman knew Mark’s real family, and promised to introduce Mark when he was older. Sometimes Mr. Thurman made allowance for Karin, saying they were both foundlings, but related. Other times, they were drawn from different orphan lots. At those times, Mark consoled her, insisting they’d be better friends when they didn’t have to carry on in that sham family anymore. Karin had hated Mr. Thurman with a passion, often threatening to gas him while Mark slept.

  The Capgras was changing her, too. She fought against her habituation. For a little while longer, she still saw it: his laughter, eerily mechanical. His bouts of sadness, just statements of fact. Even his anger, mere colorful ritual. He’d burst out with some seven-year-old’s declaration of love for Barbara, apropos of nothing. He’d go fishing with his buddies, mimic all the patter, sit in the boat casting and cursing his luck like the robot host of some television fishing show, going through the motions with fearful, flattened intensity, desperate to prove that he was still intact, inside the wrappings. For a little while longer, she knew the accident had blown them both away, and all the selfless attention from her in the world would never get them back. There was no back to get them to. For each new day, her own integrating memory increasingly proved that my brother was always like that.

  Visiting the Homestar one early July afternoon, Karin found Mark watching a travel documentary featuring a gentle, anemic priest stumbling around Tuscany. Mark sat entranced, as if he’d just chanced upon the most extraordinary reality TV. He greeted Karin, excited. “Hey, guy. Look at this place! Unbelievable. People living there for millions of years. And stones even older than that.”

  Karin watched with him. He abided her now, a habit as upsetting as earlier hostilities. The travelogue ended, and Mark surfed the other channels. He buzzed his old favorites—motor and contact sports, music videos, manic comedies. But he flinched at the noise and speed. He could no longer open up the pipe that connected him to the outside world without overflowing. After five minutes of a rerun of his favorite syndicated farce, he asked, “Could that accident have made me psychic?”

  She faked calm. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like I can tell every joke before they even crack it.”

  He settled on a nature show about the three species of primitive egg-laying mammals, something he would not have been caught dead watching before the accident. “Jesus. What are those things? Somebody really screwed up on the design specs. Birds with hair!”

  This was the Mark she remembered from childhood. Curious and tender, with no sudden moves. He’d grown baffled enough to want her there, sitting next to him on the narrow sofa. She had him just as she wanted. She could make tea for him, might even extend her arm across the sofa and touch his shoulder, and he’d bear it. The thought traumatized her. She stood and paced the room. Unthinkable: Tuscany, echidnas, and her brother. She stared at him where he sat on the couch, knitting his brows at the backward mammals, a charade of excitement. “Just look at that thing! Abandoned by evolution. Left behind. That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.” He looked up and saw her pacing. “Hey. Would you sit down a minute? You’re making me nervous.”

  She sat ba
ck on the couch next to him. He leaned toward her, turning on his idea of charm. He rested a hand on her thigh and launched into his daily litany. “How about driving me over to Thompson Motors? I can get a used F-150 for nothing. Trick it out. You gotta help me, though, because they stole my checkbook. Left me my address thingie, but the names and numbers are messed up.”

  “I don’t know, Mark. That’s probably not such a great idea yet.”

  “No?” He scowled and raised his helpless hands. “Whatever.” He picked up a week-old copy of the Kearney Hub left on the coffee table as a place mat and flipped through the used-truck listings that he’d already penned up. She reached forward and pressed the power on the remote. He whirled on her. “Would you mind? I’m watching that. You don’t really care about the egg mammals, do you? You don’t care much about any species except yourself.”

  “Mark, the egg mammals are over.”

  “The hell they are. Living fossils. Greatest survival story in vertebrate history. Over? No way. Look! What is…that’s…some kind of a sea unicorn or something.”

  “That’s a new show, Mark.”

  “What the fuck do you know? It’s all the same show.” By way of proof, he flipped the clicker back around the channels. “Hey. Look at this one. Based on a true story. Doesn’t anyone make movies based on fake stories, anymore?” He clicked some more, landing on Court TV. “All right? Satisfied? Jeez. Not from around here, are you?”

  While Mark read his newspaper, she watched two neighbors sue each other over a garden plot they’d purchased together. After a while, she asked, “Would you like to go for a walk?”

  He jerked up, alarmed. “Walk where?”

  “I don’t know. Down to Scudder’s meadow? We could shoot for the river. Get out of the subdivision, anyway.”

  He looked at her with pity, that she’d think this possible. “I don’t think so. Maybe tomorrow.”