Your fake sister’s boyfriend following you around in disguise: Freud might do more than the MRI. Surely the phenomenon had to be something more than a dissociation between ventral and dorsal recognition pathways. But what did psychological mean anymore, except a process that did not yet have a known neurobiological substrate? Weber made no theories about Mark’s new belief. His job now was just to help this new mental state adjust to itself. He would never again leave himself open to charges of failed compassion. He would let Mark write the book.
What did it feel like to be Mark Schluter? To live in this town, work in a slaughterhouse, then have the world fracture from one moment to the next. The raw chaos, the absolute bewilderment of the Capgras state twisted Weber’s gut. To see the person closest to you in this world, and feel nothing. But that was the astonishment: nothing inside Mark felt changed. Improvising consciousness saw to that. Mark still felt familiar; only the world had gone strange. He needed his delusions, in order to close that gap. The self’s whole end was self-continuation.
Mark, at least, was still himself—more than Gerald Weber could claim. Method-acting, Weber tried to inhabit the man who sat in front of him, weaving theories. Weber might more easily have channeled Karin, her frightened research, her desperate, self-effacing e-mails. How could he inhabit Mark Schluter, the oblivious Capgras sufferer, when he couldn’t even inhabit Mark Schluter, the healthy truck customizer and slaughterhouse technician? He could no longer even imagine what it felt like to be Gerald Weber, that confident researcher from last spring…
“Everyone born around here is in on the cover-up. You and Barbie Doll are the last two people I can trust.”
What did Mark suppose was being covered up? Worse: What made him think he could trust Weber? As a rule, Weber never humored patients’ delusions. Yet he humored everyone else, every day of the week. The Pakistani cabbie on the way to LaGuardia, with his theories about Al Qaeda links to the White House. The security agent at the airport, making him remove his belt and shoes. The woman in the plane seat next to him who grabbed his arm at takeoff, sure the cabin would explode at fifteen hundred feet. Humoring Mark was status quo.
“So I was apparently talking to the guys on these communicators. Them in Rupp’s truck, me in mine. We were on to something, chasing. And one of us had to be stopped. Funny thing? This woman playing Karin? She kept hinting those two were there, and I didn’t listen.”
Something had happened to Mark, the night of his accident. And his friends had lied to him. Weber himself couldn’t account for the guardian’s note or interpret the swerving sets of tire tracks. His own explanation for why the world now felt different to Mark wasn’t even partially satisfying. Mark had been thinking about his internal state longer and deeper than anyone. Weber could afford to humor his theories. Maybe humoring was empathy by another name.
Slumping on his couch with his shoulder on the armrest and a throw pillow between his knees, Mark launched his best hypothesis. He leaned toward a secret biological project. “Experimental breakthrough. Like the kind of thing my father was always trying to hit on. But big, on the scale only the government could swing. And it’s got to do with birds. Otherwise, why would Birdman Danny be after me?”
For that, too, Weber had no explanation.
“The whole thing must be pretty hush-hush. Otherwise, we’d have heard about it, right? So here’s what I’m thinking. All this stuff started the minute I came out of the hospital. They did something to me when I was under the knife. Okay, so K2 says I wasn’t ‘under the knife,’ in so many words. But I had a bolt coming out the head, right? A little spigot? They could inject crap, draw it out. I could be dreaming this whole situation, right now. They could have implanted this whole meeting with you, right into my cere-beanie.”
“Then they injected me, too. Because I am convinced that I’m here, too.”
Mark squinted at Weber. “Really? Are you saying…? Wait a minute. Get the hell out of here! It doesn’t mean that at all.”
He scribbled on his notepad. He leaned back on the sofa and put his feet up on the coffee table, staring across the room. He jerked up, raising his arm and pointing his shaking finger. He stood unsteadily and walked over to his computer. He tapped his monitor repeatedly with his index-finger nail. “It never occurred to me. Simply never dawned…You think it’s possible that the last several months of Mark Schluter’s life have been programmed in a government machine?”
Weber could not say that it wasn’t possible.
“That would go a long way toward explaining why I feel like I’ve been living in a video game. One where I can’t beat the level and advance to the next.”
Weber suggested they go outside and stroll down toward the river. A little nervously, Mark agreed. The brisk air worked on Mark. The longer they talked, the more adamant Mark became. It struck Weber that maybe he’d been helping the man create this illness. Iatrogenic. Collaboration between doctor and patient.
“So I’m on the walkie-talkie to my buds. We’re communicating, we’re chasing this thing down. All of a sudden, I see something on the road. I flip the truck. So the question is: What did I see? What was out there in the middle of the road that night? There just aren’t too many choices.”
Weber conceded the point.
“Someone who wasn’t supposed to be out there. I’m not saying terrorists, necessarily. Could be working for either side.”
They walked back along a dusty gravel road through two walls of russet corn days away from harvesting. Autumn, the season that always crippled Weber with anticipation. The cool, dry, alerting breeze got to Weber as it hadn’t for years. His pulse quickened, tricked by the perfect day into thinking something was about to happen. At his side, Mark walked, grim and resigned. His stride no longer showed any injury.
“Sometimes I think it was, you know: Mark Schluter. The other one. The guy who used to work for a living. The sure one, who could pass all your little trick tests without even thinking. That’s who was out there, in the middle of nowhere. I ran that guy over. Killed him.”
He’d begun to double himself. This boy-man might throw no end of light on consciousness. They came back through the fields to River Run, the Homestar. They sat side by side on the concrete front steps, Mark’s legs spread too wide. The dog, Blackie Two, came up on its chain and stuck its muzzle into Mark’s hands. Mark petted and ignored it at random. The dog whimpered, unable to decode human whim. Nor could Weber. He’d sworn off anything that could be accused of exploitation. Yet surely empathy with Mark didn’t preclude a wider care. Perhaps science wasn’t over yet. He said nothing for as long as he could. Then he asked, “Would you like to come to New York for a while?” A full workup at the Medical Center, state-of-the-art equipment, the luxury of time, lots of talented researchers, interpretations less vested than his own.
Mark leaned away from him, astonished. “New York? What, and have some airplane slam me?” Weber told him there would be no danger. Mark just scoffed, well past conning. “You guys are big on anthrax out there, too, right?”
Nothing mattered but trust. “I hear you,” Weber said. “Probably safer to stick around here.”
Mark shook his head. “I’m telling you, Doc. It’s a weird world. They can hit you, wherever you are.” He studied the horizon for the clue that had to appear there, eventually. “But I do appreciate the offer. I might’ve been dead by now without you, Shrinky. You and Barbara are the only ones who have truly cared what happens to me.”
Weber flinched at the words, the most delusional Mark had spoken all afternoon.
Mark’s arms began to shake, as if his body had gone terribly cold. “Doc, I’ve got a really bad feeling about my sister. It’s been like, what? Half a year. Not even a word. Nobody willing to say what happened to her. You have to understand: she’s been checking up on me weekly since I was old enough to wet the bed. God knows why, but she’s always cared for me. She and this guardian both, disappearing without a trace. Even if they have her locked up, she�
��d have found some way to get a message to me by now. I’m beginning to think I’ve hosed my sister. Gotten her in trouble, maybe even killed, just for being related to me. You don’t suppose…it couldn’t have been her who…? She must be…let’s face it. I think she’s probably…”
“Tell me about her,” Weber said, to keep him from worse speculation.
Mark sucked the air and a sharp syllable of laugh shot from him. “Don’t ever tell her I said this, but there’s nothing at all to her. Simplest person in the world. She just needs petting. Give her, like, three-fifths of a gold star and she’ll go through fire for you. See, we had this mom? Nothing short of Jesus’ starting five was good enough for her. She and my sister had what you might call issues. You miserable thrill-seeking liberal ingrate, yada yada. Nine months of morning sickness followed by the most excruciating pain of my life, just so you can go and seduce your Physical Education teacher, yada yada yada. So Karin? She decides she’s going to be perfect. Find out what everyone expects of her, and serve it up to a T. Even a total stranger’s disappointment just kills her. Simpler than a household pet, though. Just needs two things: Love me, and tell me I’m doing right. Don’t call me a shiftless shit-kicker. Hey; maybe that’s three things. How about you, Doc? You got any of the sibling thing going? Hey: don’t take so long answering. It ain’t a trick question or anything.”
“A brother,” Weber said. “Four years younger. He’s a cook out in Nevada.” If he was still out there. If he was still alive. Weber had last heard from Larry two years before, with too much detail about the Liberty Riders’ annual “Lead, Follow or Get the Hell out of the Way Fest.” Fanatical conservative national motorcycle organization: Lawrence Weber’s whole life. Sylvie nagged Weber every few months to call, make some effort to stay in touch. “A good man,” Weber claimed. “He reminds me a little of you.”
“No shit?” The notion tickled Mark. “Your folks?”
“Gone,” Weber said. More than half true. His father, dead of a stroke when three years younger than Weber was now. His mother with advanced Alzheimer’s, in a Catholic assisted-care facility in Dayton where he visited once a season. He and Sylvie still conversed with her twice a month over the phone, dialogues out of Ionesco.
“Sorry to hear that,” Mark said, and by way of consolation invited Weber in for dinner. The simple kindness stabbed at Weber. How many tiny mental courtesies persisted in their own obscure loops, oblivious to the disasters that hammered them? Dinner was beers out of the bottle and frozen lasagna reheated in a deep aluminum tin. “Something the surrogate sister brought over. Eat at your own risk.”
“Are you okay?” Sylvie asked that night. “You sound different, somehow. Your voice is very…I don’t know. Unfolded. Like a philosopher or something.”
“Philosopher. Now there’s a career future.”
“Makes me nervous, Man.”
In fact, he felt different, even to himself: pooled somewhere outside the realm of public judgment. “Strange, isn’t it? Two round trips, four thousand miles each, just to see a man who really only wants me to be a detective.”
“And they say doctors no longer make house calls.”
“But what a case! Medicine needs to know about this.”
“Medicine should know lots of things. I’m glad you’re doing this. I know you, Man. This one’s been preying on you.”
“Wife? Remind me to call my brother when I get home.”
After the call, he went out and walked into town, block after gingerbread block, under the amber globe of streetlights, as if on his way to some obscure assignation. Autumn thickened the air. The year was drawing into itself, dense with preparation. Massive maples flared up on their way to going dormant. A restless insect swarm blared its band-saw death chorus. He stood at the corner of four white-wood A-frames, one flickering with nineteenth-century glow, two lit blue by television, and the fourth dark. He’d never felt more eager to find out. Find out what, he couldn’t say. What was he doing back? Something that autumn promised to answer.
He was still walking at random when the street went dark. He took four full seconds to think: power failure. The thrill of thunderstorms and ambulances came over him. He looked up; the sky was deep in stars. He’d forgotten how many there could be. Washes of them, spilling in streams. He’d forgotten how rich darkness looked. He could see, but poorly, without color, plunged into achromatopsia. Both of the achromats he’d interviewed had raged against the very words, red, yellow, blue. They lived for the night world, where they were superior to the color-sighted and merely ordinary. Weber fumbled in the dark for blocks, his sense of direction failing. When the lights surged back on, he felt the banality of sight.
The next day, Mark took him fishing. “Nothing fancy, man. Crude stuff. Maybe previous Mark might have taught you how to tie kick-ass midges and sculpins. But we’re talking commercial lures today. Scented rubber worms dragging around their lazy, fake-invertebrate barbed asses through the water until some loser crappie takes a hit. Anybody can handle it. Little kids. Neuroshrinkists. What have you.”
The fishing spot was secret, as all fishing spots are. Weber had to swear a vow of silence before Mark would take him. Shelter Lake, on private land, turned out to be little more than a dew pond with delusions of grandeur.
“Here we are. The hidey-hole. Catch and release,” Mark said. “Man with the most fish by 2:00 p.m. is the superior human being. Ready, set, go. Dude, you look like you’ve never baited a hook.”
“Only in self defense,” Weber said.
His father had taken him, every summer until he turned twelve—bluegill in a small stocked lake just over the Indiana line. His father told him the fish felt nothing, and he’d believed it, on no evidence at all. Nonsense; of course they felt pain. How could he not have seen it? He took Jess once, some nostalgic recreation, surf casting on Long Island’s South Fork, when she was still small. The expedition ended in disaster when she hooked a bass through the eye. He could still picture her, running up and down the beach, shrieking. That was the last time.
“Are you sure this is legal?” he asked Mark.
Mark just laughed. “I’ll take the rap for you, Shrink, if they bust us. I’ll keep your sheet clean.”
They fished from the shore, Mark cursing. “We should have stolen the damn boat from Rupp. It’s part mine, anyway. He’d probably shoot me in the back if I tried to take it now. Can you believe they lied to me? Whoever we were hunting together that night must have gotten to them. Turned them. Now I’ll never learn what went down.”
They fished deliberately, casting and reeling without conviction. Weber caught nothing. Mark enjoyed harassing him. “No wonder you’re wiping out. You cast like some girls’ sixteen-inch softball pitcher.”
Mark caught half a dozen midsized sunfish. Weber inspected the catch each time, before Mark threw it back. “Are you sure those are all different? I think you’re catching the same fish, again and again.”
“You must be shitting me! The first few were full of fight. This one’s completely limp. Nothing to do with one another.” Mark waded ankle deep in the water, shaking his head in amused disgust. “This look like any fish you know? You’ve finally lost it, Doc. Too much direct sunlight. Not good for someone in your line.” He stood like a heron, leaning forward, frozen in the reeds. He fished the way that Weber typed: in a distracted rapture. He’d needed to get Weber away from town, someplace slow enough to think and talk, without any danger of being overheard. “Why do you suppose they’re so worried about me, when I don’t know anything? This whole elaborate fantasy, just to keep me in the dark. Why not just kill me? They could have done that easily, in Intensive Care. Slipped into the room, switched off the machines. Pffft.”
“Maybe you know something that they want to find out.”
The idea stunned Mark. It stunned Weber more, to hear it come out of his mouth.
“That must be it,” Mark said. “Like the note says: kept alive, to bring back someone else. Do something with
what I know. But I don’t fucking know what I know.”
“You know a lot,” Weber insisted. “About some things you know more than anyone else alive.”
Mark spun his neck, his eyes a barn owl’s. “I do?”
“You know what it means to be you. Now. Here.”
Mark looked back at the water, so defeated he couldn’t even rouse a rage. “Fuck if I do. I’m not even sure that this is here.”
He changed them both over to bass spinners, not in the hopes of catching anything on them in so small a pond, but for the simple pleasure of pulling them through the water. Weber marveled at his own ineptitude. Not just his failure to catch anything: his complete inability to sit still and enjoy himself. Wasting half a day, holding a stick with a string on it, while his whole career, all his professional duties, unraveled around him. But this was his professional duty now, his own self-selected job description. To sit still and watch, not some syndrome, but some improvising being. Without that, the reviewers were right and the rest of his life a lie.
Mark, meanwhile, had grown as placid as a bottom feeder. He tasted the air in large gulps. “You know, Shrink? I’ve been thinking. I think you and I might be related somehow. Aw, don’t give me that neurological look. You know what I’m saying, Sherlock. I’m just saying: collision paths, and all. Listen.” Mark dropped his voice, so none of the nearby chordates could pick him up. “You believe in guardian angels?”
It distressed Weber to remember: he had been the most devout of children. A kid who liked nothing better than to put on a white cassock and swing something brass and smoky. Even his parents had found him upsettingly spiritual. He’d considered it his personal responsibility, to tip the world toward ancient and reverent. His zeal for purity, some compulsive cleaning mania of the soul, had lasted, only mildly modified, all the way through adolescence, extending even to bouts of shame at failing to refrain from what he and his priest tacitly code-named susceptibility, the pleasure that diminished all grace, simply by being solitary. Even science had not wholly killed off his belief; his Jesuit teachers had kept faith and facts ingeniously harmonized. Then, in college, religion had died, overnight, unmarked and un-mourned, simply in his meeting Sylvie, whose boundless faith in human sufficiency led him to put away childish things. After that, his whole childhood seemed to have belonged to another person. Nothing to do with him. Nothing remained of that boy but the adult’s trust in the scalpel of science.
The Echo Maker Page 35
