The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  He carries on alone. He works the Public Library and Moraine Assisted Living. But interestingly, few people are willing to give him handwriting samples, and every third person who does pretends they’re someone they aren’t. The disguise artist keeps trailing him. Someone he hasn’t seen in many years. There’s a sad droop about the eyes that gives it away every time. Like we’re all hosed and this lone, wise face is the only one to fully understand the fact. Danny boy. Riegel, the birdman of Kearney.

  It occurs to Mark: his accident happened right at the very start of bird season. Sure, that could be just coincidence. But now that Mr. Migration has taken to following him around, it lends more than a little weight to a larger theory. What’s more: Riegel and his fake sister are rubbing genitals. It’s all too much. Mark doesn’t know exactly what to make of it, but he’s got to make something soon, or it’s going to make him.

  He confronts the artificial Karin. Nothing to lose. He’s in the crosshairs already. He waits until she shows up at the would-be Homestar with her latest bag of unrequested groceries. Then he asks her point-blank, before she can confuse him: Just tell me, honestly. What is your friend the nature man up to? Don’t lie to me; we’ve known each other a while now, right? Been through some rough times.

  She gets all shy, holds her elbows and studies her shoes like they just jumped onto her feet. I don’t know, exactly, she claims. Strange, isn’t it? How he keeps coming back into my life at different crises? First when Cappy died, then Mom, and now—

  Kind of strange how he keeps coming back into my life. Every time I try to talk to anyone about my little message from heaven?

  She stares at him, like at a firing squad. Guilty, as charged. But then she goes into a major stall routine. Following you around? What are you talking about? She starts to cry, one step away from an admission of guilt. But then she turns worse than worthless. She gets on her cell phone and calls Bonnie, trying to synchronize their stories. Ten minutes later, it’s two against one, with both of the women carrying on about the most irrelevant shit, handing him the phone and telling him it’s Daniel on the other end, just say a few words to Daniel…

  He’s got to get out of this place, someplace he can think. He’s got a little spot down by the river where he can just sit in the flats and let those hundreds of muddy, liquid miles wash over him. He starts south, on foot. He hasn’t been on the Platte since last fall. He’s been afraid to discover that somebody’s jacking with the river as well. He leaves the house without his hat, and the sun scalds him. Birds track him from tree to tree. A pack of grackles, animal spies. They make an entirely uncalled-for racket, like they’ve got a problem with him. Their so-called songs echo in his head, going gaw, gaw, go, goat-head, goat-head, goathead…

  And then the words are already there: the words he was saying, just before his truck took to the air. Goat-head may be the Ram, like he was saying the truck’s name. But no. Goat-head: something more, if his life means anything. He gets to the edge of River Run Estates, slips through the fringe of sycamores. He reaches the long cut, a mile and a half of headland thick with black flies and pollen, nothing to protect him from the elements. The river recedes as he walks toward it. The grackles get on his case. Goat-head, goat-head.

  Go ahead.

  The force of it sits him down smack in a patch of prickleweed. He was saying, Go ahead. Or someone was saying it to him, in the cab of the truck. He’d picked up some angel hitchhiker, someone who survived the flipped truck, walked away from the wreck back to town, to call in the disaster. And afterward, followed him to the hospital, to leave the note, instructions for Mark Schluter’s future. An angel hitchhiker, telling him, Go ahead. Go where? Toward the wreck; through the wreck. Here.

  He stands up, shaky with insight. In the singed green of this field, black spots rise and his vision tunnels. His body wants to go down, but he fights upright. He turns back toward Farview, jogging. His brain spurts like a hot coal stabbed with a poker. He reaches the fake Homestar, doubled over by a stitch in his side. How did he get so out of shape? He bursts in the front door, eager to tell anyone, even people he probably shouldn’t tell. A manic Blackie Two almost knocks him down, already knowing, with animal telepathy, about this breakthrough. The woman is still there, sitting at his desk, at his computer, like she owns the place. She swings around, guilty, caught by his return. Even redder than usual, pushing the hair back, like: Oh, nothing. Trying to hack his credit card cookies or such. She logs off quickly and turns toward him. Mark? Mark, are you okay?

  Unbelievable question. Who in the whole godforsaken world is okay? It may be death, to tell her what he’s discovered. She might be anyone. He still has no idea whose side she’s on. But they’ve grown close over these months, in adversity. She feels something for him, he’s sure of that. Sympathy or pity, seeing what he’s up against. Maybe enough to make her break ranks and join him. Or maybe not. Telling her may be the stupidest thing he’s ever done, since whatever he did to lose his real sister. But finally, he wants to tell her. He needs to tell her. Logic’s got nothing to do with it. It’s about survival.

  Listen, he says, excited. Your fiancé? Boyfriend, whatever. See if you can find out what he was doing the night of my accident. Ask him if the words go ahead mean anything to him.

  For a moment, Weber couldn’t find his left arm or shoulder. No sense of whether his hand was underneath him or above him, palm up or down, flung out or drawn in. He panicked, and the alarm congealed him, bringing him almost alert enough to identify the mechanism: awareness before the full return of the somatosensory cortex from sleep. But only when he forced his paralyzed side to move could he locate all his parts again.

  An anonymous hotel, in another country. Another hemisphere. Singapore. Bangkok. A slightly more spacious version of those Tokyo morgue hotels, with businessmen filed away in drawers, rented by the night. Even when he remembered where he was, he couldn’t credit it. Why he was there lay beyond answer. He read the clock: an arbitrary number that might have meant either day or night. He flipped on the diffident bedside light and headed to the bathroom. A hot shower would help to disperse his lingering displacement. But his body came back only tentatively. None of the bizarre neurological insights acquired over the course of his professional life unsettled him more than this simplest one: baseline experience was simply wrong. Our sense of physical embodiment did not come from the body itself. Several layers of brain stood in between, cobbling up from raw signals the reassuring illusion of solidity.

  Scalding water streamed over his neck and down his chest. He felt his shoulders relax, but he did not place too much faith in the feeling. The cortex’s body maps were fluid at best, and easily dismantled. He could alarm any undergraduate by having her slide her arms into two boxes with a window in the end of the right one. The student’s hand appeared in the window. Only: the hand in the window wasn’t her right one, but a cleverly superimposed reflection of her left. Asked to flex her right hand, the student saw, through the window, a hand that wouldn’t move. Instead of reaching the only logical conclusion—a trick of mirrors—the student would almost always feel a surge of terror, believing her hand to be somehow paralyzed.

  Worse still: a subject who watched a rubber hand being stroked in synchrony with his own hidden hand would continue to feel the strokes, even when the stroking of his real hand stopped. The dummy hand didn’t even have to be lifelike, or even a hand. It could be a cardboard box or the corner of a table, and still the brain would absorb it as part of its body. A subject with a dowel strapped to the tip of one finger would gradually incorporate the dowel into his body image, extending his sense of finger inches too far.

  The smallest warping could distort the map. Each fall, Weber asked his lecture full of undergrads to roll their tongue tips upside down, then run a pencil from the right to the left across their tongue’s bottom, now uppermost in their mouths. Every subject felt the pencil as if from underneath, running from left to right. He made other students don prismatic glasses
until they normalized the image of an inverted world. When they removed the glasses and looked out again with their unaided eyes, the real, unfiltered landscape now presented itself, upside down.

  Soapy rivulets ran over the apron of his belly and down his knobby legs. They reminded him of Jeffrey L., a man whose spine was crushed in a motorcycle accident. The wreck had sprawled Jeffrey upside down on an embankment, with his legs in the air, at the moment that his spinal cord was severed. He lost all use of his body below his neck, and should have lost all feeling as well. But Jeffrey still felt his inverted body, his feet hovering forever above his head. Another of Weber’s patients, Rita V., had been sitting with her wrists crossed when thrown from a horse. Ever afterward she lived in agony, wanting only to straighten her arms, which, in fact, lay perpetually extended at her sides. Still other quadriplegics reported no bodily sensation at all, simply the sense of existing as a floating head.

  More disconcerting still were the phantom limbs. Nothing worse than excruciating pain in a limb that no longer existed, pain dismissed by the rest of the world as purely imaginary—all in your head—as if there were another kind. A person could suffer persistent tenderness in any removed part—lips, nose, ears, and especially breasts. One man continued to experience erections in his amputated penis. Another told Weber that he now enjoyed vastly intensified orgasms that reverberated through his missing foot.

  Then there were the border wars, the brain maps of the amputated part invaded by nearby maps. Somewhere—God only knew in which book—Weber described discovering a largely intact and responsive hand blossoming across the face of an amputee, Lionel D. Touched high up on the cheekbone, Lionel felt it in his missing thumb. Grazed on the chin, he felt it in his pinkie. Splashing his face with water, he felt liquid trickle down his vanished hand.

  Weber shut off the shower and closed his eyes. For a few more seconds, warm tributaries continued to stream down his back. Even the intact body was itself a phantom, rigged up by neurons as a ready scaffold. The body was the only home we had, and even it was more a postcard than a place. We did not live in muscles and joints and sinews; we lived in the thought and image and memory of them. No direct sensation, only rumors and unreliable reports. Weber’s tinnitus—just an auditory map, rearranged to produce phantom sounds in an undamaged ear. He would end up like one of his stroke patients, an extra left arm, three necks, a candelabrum full of fingers, each discreetly sensed, hiding under a hospital blanket.

  And yet the ghost was real. People with lost feet, asked to tap their toes, lit up that part of their motor cortex responsible for walking. Even the motor cortex of intact people flashed, when they simply imagined walking. Seeing himself running from something, Weber felt his pulse shoot up, even as he stood immobile in the tub. Sensing and moving, imagining and doing: phantoms bleeding, one into the other. He could not, for a moment, decide which was worse: to be sealed in a solid room, thinking yourself outside; or to be freed to pass through the porous walls, into the protean blue…

  Without reaching for a towel, he flipped off the bathroom light and moved back toward the dimly lit bed. He sat dripping on an upholstered chair. He had humiliated himself abroad. Back home, hundreds of subjects awaited him, real people he’d used as mere thought experiments. Every one of them throbbed in him and could not be cut out. The world had no place left, real or imagined, where he might put down.

  She found a description online, at Mark’s house, in something called The People’s Free Encyclopedia. The site looked reputable, with footnotes and citations, but assembled in public, by community vote, leaving her as uncertain as ever.

  FREGOLI SYNDROME: one of a rare group of delusional misidentification syndromes in which the sufferer is convinced that several different people are in fact all a single person of changing appearance. The syndrome takes its name from Leopoldo Fregoli (1867–1936), an Italian stage magician and mimic whose lightning ability to change his face and voice into any character astonished audiences…

  Like Capgras Syndrome, Fregoli involves some disruption of the ability to categorize faces. Some researchers suggest that all misidentification delusions may exist along a spectrum of familiar anomalies shared by ordinary, nonpathological consciousness…

  She told Daniel, over Chinese dinner. She’d pushed him into a night out, needing to escape his monk’s cell and talk in public. She’d dressed up, even used scent. But she’d forgotten about the logistical problems, which started as soon as Daniel got the menu. Daniel dining out: like a Calvinist minister at a rave. He wagged his head, whistling. “Eight dollars for a plate of beef and broccoli? Can you imagine, K.?”

  The entrée was the restaurant’s loss leader. She battened down and waited.

  “Eight dollars is a lot of money to the Crane Refuge.”

  With matching grants and good management, they could buy and retire a square inch of marginal farmland. The waitress came to tell them the specials. The list of slaughtered fish, flesh, and fowl crucified Daniel.

  “This ‘Chinese eggplant,’” he asked the blameless woman. “Would you know, offhand, how that’s prepared?”

  “Vegetarian,” the waitress assured him, like the menu said.

  “But is the eggplant fried in butter? Do they use milk fat in the preparation?”

  “I could find out?” the waitress bleated.

  “Would it be possible just to get a plateful of sliced vegetables? Raw carrots, cucumbers? That sort of thing?”

  Karin had been crazy to suggest the outing, and he’d been crazy to agree. The beef and broccoli sounded like a dream, a cure to her growing whole-foods anemia. Weeks of living with Daniel had left her wasted. She peeked at him, the waitress hovering. His face was placid, like something being led up a ramp to the waiting stun gun. She ordered the tofu and bean threads.

  She’d forgotten what he was like in these places, places the rest of the civilized world depended on. When the waitress brought his sliced cucumbers, he just slid them around the plate with his fork, quibbling with them.

  “It doesn’t seem possible for him to suffer both conditions at once,” she said. “I mean, Capgras is about underidentifying. Fregoli sounds like the exact opposite.”

  “K.? We probably want to be careful with the self-diagnosis.”

  “Self…? What do you mean, ‘self…’?”

  “Lay person’s. You and I aren’t qualified to diagnose him. We need to go back to Good Samaritan.”

  “To Hayes? He practically insulted me, the last time. Daniel, I have to say, I’m a little surprised. Since when have you defended organized medicine? I thought they were all faith healers. ‘Native Americans have forgotten more medicine than Western technology has yet discovered.’”

  “Well, that’s basically true. But they didn’t have many car accidents, back when the First Nations discovered their medicine. If I knew a Native American with experience in closed-head trauma, I’d recommend him above anyone you’ve talked to.”

  He didn’t mention Gerald Weber by name. He didn’t have to. Daniel had taken an irrational dislike to the man without having met him.

  “I have to tell Dr. Weber,” Karin said. She meant she’d already written him.

  “Do you?” Daniel grew blissfully calm. Like he was meditating.

  “Well, he is one of the leading…” But then, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was just famous. Not quite the same thing. “I promised I’d let him know if Mark changed.” Daniel had changed; so had Mark’s friends. She herself had altered, more than any of them.

  Daniel studied his fingertips. “Is there any downside to contacting him?”

  “Aside from more humiliation and disappointment?”

  The waitress came to ask how everything was. “Wonderful,” Daniel said, smiling.

  After she left, Karin asked, “Did we go to school with her?”

  Daniel grinned out the side of his mouth. “She’s a decade younger than us.”

  “No way! You think?” They ate in silence. At last she sai
d, “Daniel, I’m making him worse.”

  He objected nobly; that was his job. But all the evidence was against him.

  “Really. I think the strain of seeing me every day, of not being able to recognize—it’s breaking him apart. I haven’t been able to do much of anything for him. And now he’s getting new symptoms. It’s me. The sight of me is messing him up. I’m making him…”

  Daniel trained his full calm on her, but his alpha state was wavering. “We don’t know what he would’ve been like, if you hadn’t been here all this time.”

  “Your life certainly would have been simpler, wouldn’t it?”

  He grinned again, as if she’d just cracked a joke. “Emptier.”

  Empty as she felt. Empty as all her gestures turned out to be. She ran her fork through her bean curds, like a scythe. “You know the strangest part? He doesn’t think I’m her; and he’s never going to think I’m her. So if I just took off—stopped torturing him, got a job, started to work my way back out of debt—it wouldn’t be like she was abandoning him at all. His sister. He’d never hold it against me. He’d celebrate!”

  She saw the flash in his eye before he could suppress it. She was spooking him. She would pull him down, too. She was doing to Daniel what Mark was doing to her. Soon she would be a stranger to him. Then to herself. Better for Daniel, too, her exit.

  He shook his head, marvelously certain. “He wouldn’t be the casualty.”

  “What? Stay for myself?” The worst imaginable reason. The words pushed her a million miles away from him, off on an airless planet. “You’re preoccupied,” she said.

  He shook his head, a little sadly.

  “Y’are,” she accused, trying to clown. “I read in one of my brain books that women are ten times more sensitive at detecting another’s internal states than men.”

  Daniel stopped badgering a split bell pepper and set down his fork. “But we’re talking about you,” he said. “About Mark…”