“I’d love to discuss something else for a while.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking…Strange days at the Crane Refuge. But I feel funny talking about anything so…while we’re facing…”
“Talk,” she said. And to her vague sense of betrayal, he did.
The Refuge, he told her, was heading for a shootout. For years, combined environmental groups had kept the river’s management honest by threatening to invoke the Endangered Species Act if demands on the Central Platte dropped the flow below levels needed to sustain wildlife. They’d surrendered that threat after the establishment of environmental accounts—guaranteed levels of flow set aside for wildlife by the three states that lived off the river.
But now the precarious scheme of water-rights trading was teetering. The system of winter recharge basins no longer accommodated all the groups that wanted to drink from the stream. In the most recent round of negotiations, the Refuge had alienated everybody but the cranes. “They’re coming after us from all sides. I was down by the river yesterday, just west of the old wagon bridge, cutting across the rise. I’ve been walking those fields since I was six. All of a sudden, this farmer comes down a row toward me. Jeans, big mud boots, work shirt, and a shotgun draped over his forearm like a tennis racket. He just rolls up to me, all smiles, and says, ‘You’re with the people trying to save those damn birds, aren’t you? You have any idea how much damage those birds do?’ I walk faster, to avoid trouble, and he starts shouting: ‘It took Americans hundreds of years to turn this swampland into beautiful farms. And you people want to turn it back into swamps again. Better get yourself some protection. Watch your back. It’s in your own best interests.’ Can you believe it? He actually threatened me!”
“I believe it,” she said. “I’ve been warning you for years.”
He giggled, the clicks of a squirrel. “Watch my back?”
“Not everyone here believes in putting birds ahead of people.”
“Those birds are the best thing this place has going. You’d think people would realize that. But no: all the local agreements that took us a decade to hammer out are breaking down. Kingsley Dam, relicensed for forty years. Insane! You should come work for us, K. We need a fighter. We need everyone we can get.”
“Yes,” she said, and almost meant it now.
“I’m telling you, greed has run amok. The Development Council, whoring itself for this new consortium of builders. They promised there wouldn’t be any new building. That’s what we’d fought for, and won. A freeze on large-scale development for ten years. They’re selling us out, like we’re the new Pawnee.”
“Consortium?” She stacked her tofu into pyramids on her plate. She knew who he meant, without his saying. And he knew her question, before she asked.
“A wolf pack of local wheelers and dealers. You wouldn’t happen to know…? You haven’t heard anything about this, have you?” He scanned her, his face uncertain.
“Nothing.” Karsh. “Should I have?”
He shrugged and shook his head, apologetic. “We know which developers are involved, but we don’t know what they’re after. They have their eye on some parcels of land for a new project. Some open tract, near the river. We blocked them two years ago. Snatched four dozen acres out from underneath them. They’re gearing up for war again, now that they know we’re broke. They’re convening the Development Council after the November elections.”
“What are they after?” She brushed at the tablecloth.
“They’re holding their cards pretty tight. They’ll need to address the water use first before they tip their hand on the properties they want.”
“What do you know about them?” Almost offhand, but the question caught him in the face. “I mean, how many are there? How deep are their pockets?”
“It seems to be three different outfits. Two from Kearney and one from Grand Island. Whatever they’re up to, it’s on a big scale.”
“Big enough to be a problem?”
“They’re looking at riverfront. And whatever they build will increase usage. Every cup that comes out of that river reduces flow and encourages vegetative encroachment. The birds—”
“Yes,” she preempted. She couldn’t bear the whole story again, just then. “So how will the Refuge counter?”
“We have to prepare a strategy, more or less in the dark.” He gauged her, and for an awful moment, she felt him calculate her trustworthiness. As close to an accusation as he could make, without accusing. “We’re forming a loose consortium of our own: the Environmental Defense Fund, the Refuge, and the Sanctuary. If we can build up a shared war chest, we can grab strategic bits of land and try to block any large acquisitions by the other side. We’d never beat them in any open auction, of course. But if we secure a couple of keystones, a little strip in the most probable areas, before the bidding wars begin. It has to be Farview. Somewhere around Farview. The best undeveloped land outside of Kearney.”
The name of Mark’s town jerked her back from her reverie.
“As usual, it’s the birds who suffer,” Daniel declared. “In myths, gods are always screwing birds. Why stop now?”
The waitress came by, too soon. “How’s everything here?”
“Everything’s just fine,” Karin intoned.
“How are your vegetables?” the waitress quizzed Daniel.
“Terrific,” he answered. “Fresh.”
“Are you sure I can’t get you anything else? Something a little more…?”
Daniel smiled. “Thanks. I’m good.”
His eyes followed the waitress as she left. When the server came to refill their waters, Daniel said sorry for thank you.
A great dam of humiliation broke, and waves of old current washed over Karin. Her spine became a willow. Her fists sat in her lap like stones. “Which do you like better?” she asked.
“Which who?”
“You know. The server or the waitress?”
He smiled at her and shook his head, the model of evasive innocence.
She stared off in the middle distance, her face a copper to match her hair. “Would you rather be somewhere else?”
He tried to keep smiling, even now. “What do you mean?”
She admired his nerve, however transparent the denial. She smiled back, full wattage. “You can do better out there, can’t you?”
The words crushed him. He looked down at his plate, the strewn slices. “Karin. Please, let’s not…I thought we weren’t going to do this anymore.”
“I thought so, too.” Until he’d doubted.
“K. I don’t know what…what you think you saw…”
“Think? Think I saw?”
“I swear to you, the thought never crossed my mind.”
“What thought?”
He bowed his head again, like one of those fairy creatures who gathered more life force from simply cowering and taking the hits. “Any thought.”
She might still do anything: laugh it off, grow up. Get over herself. Or plunge them back into their worst nightmare. A dizzy thrill coursed through her. “She’s a cute little cucumber herself. ‘Fresh.’ And the water-pourer, too. Both delicious. Your lucky night. Two-for-one sale.”
“I wasn’t shopping.” He tried to hold her eye, but the sick spark of it got to him, too. All their history.
She matched his calm. “Just window gazing?”
He raised his palms in the air. “I wasn’t looking. What did I do? Did I do something wrong? Say something to hurt you? If so, I am sincerely—”
“It’s okay, Danny. I can accept the fact that males are genetically programmed for variety. Every man has to inspect the wares, out in the marketplace. That doesn’t bother me. I just wish—don’t! please, just don’t!—wish you would come to terms with it.”
He pushed his plate forward and folded his hands in front of his face, a guidance counselor or a priest. He rested his forehead on the steeple of his fingers. “Listen. I’m sorry. Whatever I did to upset you just now, I’m sorry for it.”
“Just now? You can’t say it, can you? You can’t say that you were simply enjoying her. Both of them. I don’t even want you to be sorry about it. It would just be nice if you could admit for once that you were simply imagining…”
His head snapped back. Old words came out of him, as old as the ones she struck him with. “I would say that, if that’s what I was doing. I didn’t even see her. I can’t even tell you what she looks like.”
Pointlessness flooded her, the futility of all exchange. Nobody really cared how the world looked to anyone else. She felt a deep need to break everything that pretended to connection. To live in this hollowness, where loyalty always led. Love was not the antidote to Capgras. Love was a form of it, making and denying others, at random. “Forgotten already? Have another look!”
His words came through his teeth. “I am not that kind of man. I told you as much eight years ago. I told you that five years ago. You didn’t believe me then. But I was waiting for you when you came back. I’m with you. I’ve always been, and I always will be. With you, and no one else. Not looking. Found already.”
He reached out across the table to take her hand. She flinched, flipping her fork and scattering tofu. “With me? With your eyes still everywhere? Which ‘me’ do you mean?” She looked around, embarrassed by herself. The whole restaurant was avoiding looking at them. She turned back to him and chirped, “It’s okay, Daniel. I’m not judging you. You are who you are. If you would just agree to tell me…”
He withdrew his hand. “We should never have come out to eat. We should have remembered what always…” She arched her eyebrows at the admission. He inhaled, trying to regain his scattered possession. “Someday you’ll know what I’m looking at. Always. Trust me, K….”
He sounded so scared it stung her. At that moment she felt the deep appeal of Robert Karsh, a man without a tenth of Daniel’s idealism. Karsh, of all the men she’d ever been with, at least had the decency to say which women he was looking at. No illusions. At least Karsh never once deceived himself about being all hers. Karsh, always on the lookout. Karsh, the relentless developer.
They sat and stirred their plates, hot with shame. More words would only clarify. People at nearby tables wolfed their food, paid, and left. She ached to change the subject, to pretend she’d said nothing. Doubt formed a little scab over the wound, which she picked at. She wanted only to tear down everything, clear the landscape, escape somewhere empty and true. But no true place existed; only brief mirage, followed by long, humiliating self-justification. She would return with this man to his monk’s cell tonight. He was her lover, her mate. This year’s current, eternal promise. She had no other bed, no other place to go back to, and still be near her brother, the brother she probably shouldn’t be near. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I’m losing it.”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Everything mattered. The waitress came back around, still smiling, but wary. Everyone knew them, now. “Can I get this out of your way, or are you still working…?”
Daniel held up his half-empty plate, eyes averted from the Medusa. The contortion only confirmed her, made things sadder. When the girl left, he turned the full force of his will on Karin, desperate to show a decency even she would have to affirm.
“We need to tell Weber about Mark. We’re in new territory here.”
Karin nodded, but could not look at him. Everything old, new again.
Back at last in his corner of the globe, his aerie on the shores of Conscience Bay, Weber touched ground. Sylvie was stalwart, of course, truly indifferent to what anyone aside from their daughter thought of them. Public judgment meant no more to her than spam. As far as Sylvie was concerned, consensus was the delusion. “We can’t think clearly alone, let alone in groups of two or three. And you want me to trust the marketplace? Let’s see what they say about you in twenty years.”
The fate of Famous Gerald concerned her less than the epidemic of corporate scandals: Enron, WorldCom—the mega-billion-dollar fraud of the month. She read him the latest outrages over breakfast.
“Leaping lizards, Man. Can you believe what’s happening? We’re living in the age of mass hypnotism. As long as we keep clapping our hands and believing, the captains of industry will take care of us.”
He was grateful for the distraction, her righteous anger at corporate deception. She was right not to humor his private jitters. And yet a part of him resented her indifference, resented being upstaged by corporate crooks. Resented that she temperamentally could not be shaken by the sudden, summary judgment against him.
He began to check his Amazon ratings, each time he logged online. Cavanaugh had shown him the feature, back in the good times. He wanted a reality check. Public reviewers had a vested professional interest; the private reader did not. But the private ratings were all over the map. One star: Who Does This Guy Think He Is? Five stars: Ignore the Naysayers; Gerald Weber Does It Again. The praise was worse than the poison. Responses multiplied, like the snakes writhing in his family’s basement in the one recurring nightmare of his childhood. Scores more, each time he looked. Somehow, when he wasn’t looking, private thought gave way to perpetual group ratings. The age of personal reflection was over. From now on, everything would be haggled out in public feedback brawls. Call-in radio, focus groups every time anyone moved. Leo Tolstoy: 4.1. Charles Darwin: 3.0.
And yet, every time he logged off, nauseated by the relentless assessments, he found himself immediately wanting to check again, to see if the next response might erase the last mindless dismissal. He compared his numbers to those of other writers he was lumped with. Was he alone in this backlash? Who was the moment’s darling? Which of his colleagues had also fallen? How did the public manage to bank and wheel in such perfect synchrony, as if on signal?
He’d done nothing this time that he hadn’t done at least twice before. Perhaps that was the problem: he’d failed the endless collective appetite for novelty. No one wanted to be reminded of bygone enthusiasms. He’d become an icon of a former decade. Now he’d have to pay for all his previous acclaim.
And that was the ugly irony. When he’d started out, back in his thirties, his evening writing had been for no one. Pure reflection, a letter to Sylvie. Words to little Jess, for when she grew up. Just a way to understand his field a little more humanely, with a few more connections, those soft speculations forbidden by empiricism, the stuff science was really after but didn’t dare admit. Just something to refresh his sensibilities each evening. The human brain musing on itself.
Only the enthusiasm of a few close friends to whom he’d shown excerpts convinced him there might be an audience for such essays. Public approval meant nothing, until he had it. Now the thought of losing his audience shamed him. What started as a sideline had grown defining, a definition that vanished the moment he accredited it. He was only fifty-five. Fifty-six. How would he fill the next twenty years? There was the lab, of course. But he’d been little more than an administrator there for a long time. The curse of successful science: senior researchers inevitably became chief fund-raisers. He could not spend the next two decades raising funds.
Most of neuroscience had been discovered since Weber began research. The knowledge base was doubling every decade. One might reasonably guess that everything knowable about brain function would be known by the time his current graduate students retired. Cognition was heading toward its prime collective achievement: grasping itself. What self-image would be left to us, in light of the full facts? The mind might not endure its self-discovery. Might never be ready to know. What would the race do, with full knowledge? What new creature would the human brain build, to take its place? Some new, more efficient structure, stripped of its ancient ballast…
He went for long walks around the mill pond, until he began running into pleasant neighbors. He took the boat out onto Conscience Bay. The dinghy had lain upside down in the yard for so long that an opossum was nesting under it. Befuddled
by daylight, the creature hissed at him as he uncovered it. Out along the Neck, drifting with the tide, he felt the wind twist the boat at will. He had embarrassed his wife and daughter in public. He’d become a matter of easy mockery.
He’d done nothing wrong, committed no conscious deception or serious error. He could still point to thirty years of reputable research, a tiny corner of the species’ crowning enterprise. Only his attempt to popularize that science had somehow gone wrong. To his surprise, he realized how he felt: seedy, caught in some infidelity.
September came, that bleak, first anniversary. What did private setback matter in the shadow of that shared trauma? He tried to recall the public dread of the year before, turning on the radio to find the world blown away. The force was intact, though the details were gone. His memory was surely worsening. Even simple stuff: the names of graduate students. A tune he’d known since childhood. The opening words of the Declaration of Independence. He obsessed over retrieval, proving to himself there was nothing wrong, which only made the blocking worse. He didn’t tell Sylvie. She would have just scoffed. Nor did he mention the bouts of depression. She would only have made excuses for him. Perhaps something was wrong with his HPA system, something that might account for all this emotional oversteering. He thought of self-prescribing a low dosage of deprenyl, but principle and pride prevented him.
In the last days of the month, when even Bob Cavanaugh had given up on the book and stopped calling, a short story came out in The New Yorker, where Weber had sometimes published his own meditations. The author was a woman still in her mid-twenties, apparently well-known, and well beyond whatever came after hip. A two-page humorous vignette, “From the Files of Dr. Frontalobe” took the form of a series of first-person case histories as told by their examining neuroscientist. The woman who used her husband as a tea cozy. The man who awakened from a forty-year coma with the urge to believe his elected officials. The man who turned multiple-personality in order to use the HOV lane. Sylvie laughed at the piece. “It’s affectionate. And anyway, it’s not about you, Man.”
The Echo Maker Page 31
