The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  They sat for a long time, reading to a background of televised litigation. She fixed him a tuna melt for dinner. He walked her to the door when she left. “Damn it! Look at that. Night again. I don’t know how I had time to work all day, when I was working. That reminds me: Infernal Beef. I should call the plant, shouldn’t I? Gotta get back to the workaday, know what I’m saying? Can’t live on free money forever.”

  He started cognitive behavioral therapy with Dr. Tower. Karin drove him to Kearney, in what Mark called “the little Jap car.” He’d given up the idea that she might try to crash and kill him. Or perhaps he’d just reconciled himself to fate.

  The treatment called for six weekly assessments followed by twelve “adjustment sessions,” with as many follow-ups as necessary, through the next year. Karin drove him to Good Samaritan for the appointments, then walked around town for the hour. The hospital staff asked her not to talk with Mark about the therapy until they had her join the later sessions. She swore she wouldn’t. After the second session, the question slipped out before she heard herself asking. “So how is it, talking to Dr. Tower?”

  He turned clinical. “Okay, I guess. Doesn’t hurt to look at her. Little slow on the uptake, though. Man, you have to tell the woman everything a hundred times. She thinks you might be real. Maddening.”

  Barbara came by, three times a week. She would drop in unannounced, always an event. Out of her hospital clothes, in gray shorts and burgundy tee, she was summer personified. Karin admired her bare arms and legs, wondering again about the woman’s age. Barbara turned Mark into a water-drinking duck toy, constantly bobbing, game for anything she asked. And all the things she asked for felt like games. She took him to the grocery store and made him shop for himself. That course had never occurred to Karin, who stocked Mark’s kitchen each week, keeping him both fed and dependent. Barbara, though, was merciless. She’d make no decisions for him, however much he appealed to her. “Hey, Barbie. Which of these do I really like better? You remember, from all those years in our little health hotel? Am I a sausage guy or a bacon guy?”

  “I’ll tell you how you can find out. Just watch yourself, and see which one you pick.” She turned him loose, condemned to freedom in all the terror of American abundance, mounting interventions only in the matter of sprayable cheese and chocolate marshmallow cereal.

  Barbara played video games with him, even the racing program. Mark loved it: a fish on wheels he could beat every time, even with one thumb tied behind his back. She got him on cribbage. Mark loved the epic contests, which often left him begging for mercy. “Is this how you get your kicks? A grown woman, beating up on beginners?”

  Karin overheard. “Beginner? You don’t remember playing this forever, with your mother, as a child?”

  He scoffed at the idiocy. “Playing forever? My mother as a child?”

  “You know what I’m saying. Using sheets of worthless Green Stamps as stakes.”

  Mark lifted his head from the cards, to sneer. “My mother did not play cribbage. Playing cards were the increments of the Devil.”

  “That was later, Mark. When we were little, she was still a card addict. Don’t you remember? Hey. Don’t ignore me.”

  “Playing cards. With my mother. My mother as a child.”

  Three months—no; thirty years—of frustration thickened the air around her. “Oh, for God’s sake! Don’t be such a gnat-skull.” She listened to the echo, horrified at herself. Her eyes sought Barbara’s, pleading temporary insanity. Barbara checked Mark. But Mark just tipped his head back and snorted.

  “Gnat-skull. Where’d you learn that? My sister used to call me that, too.”

  Nothing rattled him, so long as Barbara was there. In small steps, she got him reading again. She tricked him into picking up a book he’d refused to crack when required back in high school. My Antonia. “Very sexy story,” she assured him. “About a young Nebraska country boy who has the hots for an older woman.”

  He got fifty pages in, although it took him two weeks. He confronted Barbara with the evidence, betrayed. “It’s not about what you said at all. It’s about immigrants and farming and drought and shit.”

  “That, too,” she admitted.

  He stuck with the story, to protect his investment, throwing good hours after bad. The book’s ending confused him. “You mean he goes back, after they’re both married and she has all those fucking kids, just to hang out? Just to, like, be her friend, or something? Just because of what happened when they were little?”

  Barbara nodded, her eyes filmy. Mark put out his hand to comfort her.

  “Best obsolete book I ever read. Not that I got it all, exactly.”

  She took him on long walks under the summer sun. They wandered, parched yet sticky, July threatening to rasp on without end, with nothing they could do but endure and keep walking. They spent hours touring the ignited wheat fields, like local farm agents responsible for monitoring the region’s harvest. They took the dog, Blackie Two. “This cur is almost as good as mine,” Mark declared. “Just a little less obedient.” Now and then he let Karin tag along, if she kept quiet.

  Barbara could listen to Mark go on about modding vehicles long after Karin numbed. “I can never leave a car stock,” Mark declared. He launched an extended anatomy of the vehicle he was building in his head: Rams, Bigfoots, and Broncos all spliced together into a monster hybrid. Ignored and invisible, tagging along fifty yards back, Karin studied the older woman’s technique. Barbara absorbed and deflected him, drawing him out. She listened, rapt, to Mark’s recited parts lists, then lifted her finger, as if in passing. “Did you hear that? What was that sound?” Without his realizing, she’d have Mark listening to the cicada choruses that he hadn’t heard since fifteen. Barbara Gillespie had the lightest touch known to man, a self-possession that Karin could dissect and even imitate for short stretches, but could never hope to embody. It saddened her to see, in Barbara, what she finally wanted to be when she grew up. But she had no more chance of becoming Barbara than a lightning bug had, through diligence, of becoming a lighthouse. The other woman now belonged here more than she did.

  Mark would do anything for his Barbie Doll. Karin came on them late one afternoon at his kitchen table, heads bowed over an art book, looking for all the world like Joan Schluter and her final pastor poring over Scripture. The book was called A Guide to Unseeing: 100 Artists Who Gave Us New Eyes. Some volume from Barbara’s secret, surprise shelf. Karin drew behind them where they sat, afraid Mark might flare up and banish her. But he didn’t even notice her. He was hypnotized by Cezanne’s House and Trees. Barbara’s fingers draped across the image, twining with the tree trunks. Mark had his face up to the page, following the scrape of the palette knife. He struggled with the picture, something forcing up from inside him. Karin saw at once what he wrestled with: their old farmhouse, the lean-to against the precarious years of their childhood, the house whose mortgage their father tried to pay by dusting crops in an ancient Grumman AgCat. She couldn’t stop herself. “You know where that is, don’t you?”

  Mark turned on her, like a bear surprised while foraging. “It’s nowhere.” He pointed wildly at his own skull. “It’s fucking fantasy, is where it is.” She shrank back. He might have stood and struck her, except for the graze of Barbara’s fingers on his arm. The touch threw a circuit breaker, and he turned back to the print, rage dissolving. He grabbed the pages and thumbed them, flip-book style, five hundred years of painted masterpieces in five seconds. “Who’s been making all this stuff? I mean, look at this! How long has this been going on? Where have I been all my life?”

  Minutes passed before Karin stopped shaking. Once, eight years ago, he’d split her lip with a backhand when she’d called him an unreliable asshole. Now he might truly hurt her, without even knowing. He’d be stuck like this for good, even farther gone than their father was, unable to hold down jobs, watching nature shows and browsing art books, reacting to the smallest impediment with cloudbursts of fury. Then turning aw
ay, puzzled, as if not quite believing what he’d just done.

  It wrecked her: he’d be dependent on her forever. And still she would fail him, as she had failed to protect her parents from their own worst instincts. Her ministrations were making Mark even worse. She needed him to be a way he would never be again, a way that she was no longer sure that he had ever been. She hadn’t the strength to cope with his crushing new innocence. She lowered herself into a folding chair. The arc of her own life no longer led anywhere. The years ahead collapsed, burying her under their dead weight. Then the graze of fingertips on her forearm took her out of herself.

  She looked up into Barbara, a face whose gaze seemed equal to any behavior. Barbara retrieved her hand from Karin’s arm and continued to walk Mark through the calming book. She seemed to know all the painters’ names, without even looking at the captions. Did she extend this care to all her discharged patients? Why the Schluters? Karin didn’t dare ask. The visits couldn’t last much longer. But there Barbara was at Mark’s kitchen table, keeping him company in his unseeing.

  The two women left together that evening. Karin walked Barbara to her car. “Listen. I don’t know how to say this. I am in your debt. I’ll never be able to thank you for this. Never.”

  Barbara wrinkled her nose. “Pff. Hardly. Thanks for letting me drop in.”

  “Serious. He’d be lost without you. I’d be…worse.”

  Too much: the woman cringed, ready to flee. “It’s nothing. It’s completely for me.”

  “If there’s ever anything—anything at all—please, please…”

  Barbara held her eye: There might be, one day. To Karin’s surprise, she rushed out, “Who knows when we’ll need someone looking out for us?”

  Not even the Muskrateers rattled Barbara. When their visits overlapped, Rupp and Cain enlisted Barbara in rounds of five-card stud or two-hand touch. Whatever game the boys were playing, Barbara joined. Mark came out of his maze for as long as she was nearby. Cain couldn’t resist drawing her into running debates—the war on terror, the necessary curtailment of civil liberties, the invulnerable yet somehow infinitely threatened American way of life. He was one of those stubby, apoplectic debaters who jabbed out statistics, richly detailed and constantly mutating. Barbara pummeled him. Unsportsmanlike, even letting Duane into the same ring with her. Once, he cited some newly upholstered article from the Bill of Rights, and she countered with the entire document, memorized. He fled the room at peak decibel, shouting, “Maybe in your Constitution!”

  Rupp hit on the woman conscientiously, duty-bound, resorting to increasingly desperate supplications: help with his pet ferret. A model rocketry excursion. Licking envelopes for a mass fund-raiser. Her job was the cheerful slam. Muzzle it. Try a solo lift-off. Get stuffed. Everyone waited for the next escalation. Everyone except Mark, who begged them, eyes wet, to quit.

  Karin gave what he let her give. She loved to run the taxi service to the hour-long cognitive therapy sessions that Mark increasingly resisted. Taking him home after the third appointment, so casually she wasn’t really breaking the hospital’s orders, she sounded him out again. “How are things going with you and Dr. Tower?”

  “Pretty good,” Mark said, eyes, as always, glued to the road. “I think all this therapy is starting to make her feel a little better.”

  Before the fourth session, Mark demanded to visit Intensive Care. He picked a floor nurse at random, told her the story and showed the note. The startled woman promised to pass along anything she heard.

  “See that?” he asked, as Karin steered him toward Dr. Tower’s floor. “She was stonewalling. Claiming they didn’t let anyone in to see me that first night except my next of kin. But you told me they let you in. It doesn’t add up, does it?”

  She shook her head, surrendering to the laws of his world. “No, Mark. It really doesn’t.”

  She spent the hour of his session sitting in the hospital cafeteria, calculating the degree of her self-delusion. Therapy was doing nothing for him. She was clinging to medical science the same way her mother clung to Revelation. Weber’s scientific assurances had seemed so rational. But then, Mark seemed rational to himself. And increasingly clearer-eyed than she.

  When he came out of the session, Karin suggested dinner. “How about Grand Island, the Farmer’s Daughter Café?”

  “Holy crap!” Pleasure and fear struggled over his face. “That’s my favorite place to eat in this whole forsaken life. How did you know that? You talk to the guys?”

  She felt ashamed for everything human. “I know you. I know what you like.”

  He shrugged. “Hey! Maybe you have weird powers you don’t know about. We should run some tests.”

  Mark and his friends loved to drive forty-five miles for the same bloody beef they could get anywhere in half a dozen places in Kearney. Karin had never understood the Farmer’s Daughter’s appeal, but she was glad now for the ride. Mark, hostage, sat next to her, thoughtful, for most of an hour. Riding shotgun—the death seat, he called it—he scanned the fields of wheat, beans, and corn, scouring the landscape for the slightest thing that didn’t fit. He read the road signs out loud: “Adopt-a-highway. Adopt a highway! Who would’ve thought so many of our nation’s roads were orphaned?”

  She waited until the sleepy stretch between Shelton and Wood River to question him. Medicine had betrayed her; she could betray medicine. “So what’s the worst thing about Dr. Tower?”

  His head was nearly on the dash, peering up at a raptor circling above them. “She’s getting on my nerves. She wants to know all this crap that happened twenty million years ago. What’s different, what’s the same. I tell her: You want ancient history? Go buy an ancient history book.” The hawk fell away behind them. Mark straightened and leaned over toward her. “‘What did you do when you were little and your sister made you angry?’ What’s the point? I mean, it’s weird, don’t you think? Trying to find out so much about me. Change the way I look at things.”

  Her pulse quickened at his conspiratorial tone. She remembered their covert adolescent resistance, surviving their parents’ worst certainties. Now he offered a new alliance. She could join him, however crazy. They’d both have what they needed. She sucked air, dizzy to toady to him. “First of all, Mark. No one is making you do anything.”

  “Whew. That’s a relief.”

  “Dr. Tower just wants to understand what’s on your mind now.”

  “Why don’t they just stick me back inside one of those scanners? Damn, they’ve got to work the kinks out of those things. You ever been inside one of those tubes? Damn racket. Like having your skull worked on in a body shop. And you can’t move. Chin all strapped in. Mess you up good, if you’re not messed up already. Computerized mind reading.”

  She let it drop until Grand Island. Summer along the Platte: the shimmering mirage, the burnt-green wall of flattening heat that made the Plains everyone else’s model of godforsaken barrenness released Karin. The surging, Lego grid of Chicago had oppressed her. The Rockies left her edgy. L.A.’s wraparound glitz felt like hysterical blindness. This place, at least, she knew. This place alone was open and empty enough to disappear in.

  The Farmer’s Daughter occupied an old 1880s storefront with cherry wood wainscoting and bits of rusting farm implements hanging on the walls. Nebraska playing itself. The grandmotherly hostess greeted them as long-lost friends, and Karin replied with like effusion. “They’ve changed this place around,” Mark insisted, in their booth. “I don’t know. Rehabbed. It used to be newer.” And when they ordered: “The menu’s the same, but the food’s relapsed.” He ate with resolve, but little joy.

  “Dr. Tower just wants to get a sense of your thoughts,” Karin insisted. “That way, she can, you know, kind of put things back together.”

  “I see. I see. You think I’m coming apart?”

  “Well.” She knew she was. “How do you feel?”

  “That’s what that damn doctor keeps asking. I never felt better. Felt a whole lot worse, I�
��ll tell you that much.”

  “No question. You’re worlds better than you were, this time five months ago.”

  He laughed at her. “How can you have ‘this time’ five months ago?”

  She waved her hands, flustered. Every word her mind fingered melted into meaningless figures of speech. “Mark, for days after they cut you out of that truck, you couldn’t see, you couldn’t move, you couldn’t talk. You were barely human. You’ve worked a miracle since then. That’s the word the doctors use: miracle.”

  “Yep. Me and Jesus.”

  “So now, with all the ground you’ve gained, Dr. Tower can help you even more. She might find some things that could make you feel better.”

  “Not having had that accident would make me feel better. You going to finish those potatoes?”

  “Mark, this is for real. You want to feel more like yourself again, don’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?” He giggled again, approximately. “I feel exactly like myself. Who else am I supposed to feel like?”

  More than she could claim. She let the matter fall. When the modest meal check came, she reached to take it. He snatched her hand. “What are you doing? You can’t pay for this. You’re the woman.”

  “It was my idea.”

  “True.” Mark toyed with the pepper shaker, figuring. “You want to pay for my dinner? I don’t get it.” His voice searched for a teasing tone. “Is this some kind of date? Oh, no. Wait. I forgot. Incest.”

  The waitress came and took Karin’s credit card. Soon it would be maxed out and she’d have to start another. In another five months, her mother’s life insurance, the sum that Karin hadn’t wanted to dip into, the money she was supposed to use to do good things, would be wiped out, too.

  “This absolutely proves you can’t be my sister. My sister is the cheapest person I’ve ever met. Except for maybe my father.”

  She jerked back, wounded. But his blank face stopped her. He was probably right. Her whole life she’d clutched, panicked, at anything buoyant enough to float her free from the maelstrom of Cappy and Joan. And all her hoarding had depleted her. So it went, with safety: the more you guarded, the less you had. She would make up for it, now. Mark would cost her no less than everything. She would spend what life she’d had, to pay for the life he couldn’t even see he’d lost. Did it count as generosity, if you had no choice?