The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  She looked up at him, the loneliest woman he’d ever met, desperate for connection, for some proof that she hadn’t created this whole existence out of her own mind. He listened to the night, to the sound of her seclusion. But like Mark’s note-writing secret witness, he held dead still, hoping to be passed over. He broke from her questioning gaze and walked toward the car. By the time they reached the rental, he could no longer defend himself, even to himself, that easiest of audiences. Yes, he’d made himself return to right things with the Schluters, to square things with himself again. But here, in the sounds of the inhabited night, in the light graze of wind on his arm, in the look of this recluse woman, so burrowed outside life, he recognized the vanishing that he, too, was after.

  Karin went to Karsh for advice. All of Daniel’s advice was clouded in morality. Medication, Daniel said, would cause more problems than it solved. But Daniel wasn’t Mark’s brother. Working for the cause was one thing. Sacrificing her blood relation to it was another.

  She’d seen Karsh twice. Drinks, catch-up. Nothing criminal, nothing she couldn’t handle. She’d been pleasureless for so long that a few quick jolts barely reset the system. She got in touch, through his old secret e-mail alias. He suggested breakfast. “Kind of a switch, no? Post-game show, with no game.”

  It used to madden her. All she wanted was to sit together, once, like civilized people, over a breakfast table, instead of slinking off like felons. She met him at Mary Ann’s, just down the street from his office. When she entered the diner, he jumped up and pecked her on the cheek. She flinched at the sudden move.

  But just breakfast: she sat and ordered. The man’s mind was just what she needed, as brisk and brutal as an audit. She laid out Dr. Weber’s proposed medication. “Antipsychotic,” she whispered. Robert just nodded. She tried him on Daniel’s most frightening objections. “I’m afraid of leaving my brother doped up on mood-altering substances.”

  Karsh shook his head and waved at their breakfast. “A cup of coffee is a mood-altering substance. A Spanish omelet. I seem to remember a little addiction of yours—that Swiss triangular chocolate? Don’t tell me a few tabs of that stuff never buzzed you.”

  “This isn’t a chocolate bar, Robert. This is psychoactive.”

  He shrugged and flapped his palms. “You’re behind the times, Rabbit. Half the people in the U.S. are on something psychoactive. Look around. See those people over there?” He waved somewhere between a table of four seniors in jogging suits and a family of Mennonites. “Almost even odds. Forty-five percent of America, on something behavior-modifying. Antianxieties. Antidepressants. Name your brew. Couldn’t function otherwise. The world is just too wired. I’m on a couple things myself, in fact.”

  She looked at him, reeling. His fresh ease, that newfound comfort and humility: maybe just something he was taking. The softening of his features, the added layer of baby fat. All just chemical. But then, the brain itself was a wash of one mood-altering substance or another. So said every book she’d read since Mark’s accident. It sickened her. She wanted the real Karsh, not this tolerant philosopher, squidding all over the place. “But antipsychotic…”

  He did this thing: his right hand perpetually checking his left wrist’s pulse. It used to make her nuts. Now it just scared her. Robert held his index finger in the air, turning preacher. “‘A gram is better than a damn.’”

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t remember?” he gloated. “We had to read it in high school. You do remember high school, don’t you? Maybe you need some memory enhancers.”

  “I remember taking you to the Sadie Hawkins Dance, and finding you out behind the levee, rooting around in that bitch Cricket Harkness like a truffle hound.”

  “I thought we were talking literature here.”

  “We were talking about my brother’s future.”

  He bowed his head. “I’m sorry. Tell me what worries you. Best and worst cases.”

  It felt good, just to be heard, without the perpetual, silent judgment. To smoke in front of a man—no hiding—felt even better. She told him all her fears for Mark: that he might hurt himself. That he might hurt someone else. That some new, uncanny symptom would crop up, leaving him one more step less human. That the medication might make him even less recognizable. “It’s tearing me up, Robert. I was packed and ready to go. And I couldn’t even do that. Mark is exactly right about me. I’m a stand-in. Look at my life. I’m a joke. One of those chameleon people. Nothing, at the core. Everybody’s girl Friday. He says I’m an impostor? He’s right. I’ve never done anything but go through the motions. Never wanted anything but what I thought someone else might want me to…”

  “Hey,” Robert scolded. “Easy. Maybe we need to get you some of this stuff.”

  She succumbed to bleary laughter. She told Robert about the olanzapine lawsuit Daniel had discovered, pretending she’d found it herself. Karsh made notes in his agenda.

  “We keep a stable of lawyers. I’ll have somebody see what they can find out.”

  Just talking to Karsh reassured her, more than it should have. Of course, he was every bit as biased as Daniel. None of them knew what was best for Mark. But just hearing his counterarguments was liberating. A wrong decision would no longer come down on her head alone.

  Karsh took his pulse. “You know, if you do go this route, there’s still a problem.”

  “Namely?”

  “Getting Mark to comply.”

  “Get Mark to take pills? A problem?” She snorted in pain.

  “Getting him to stay on it. Or to tail off properly. He wouldn’t be the most reliable of patients. If he gets it into his head to stop suddenly…”

  She nodded, one more thing for her to stress about. Each had reached their coffee limit. It was time to leave. Neither moved.

  “I should head to work,” she said.

  “So you’re really a volunteer Sandhill Helper now?”

  She returned his smile, slash for slash. “Believe it or not, they’re actually paying me.” She still couldn’t quite believe it herself. Over a few weeks, racing to make herself worthy of being hired, she’d read every report the Refuge had issued. And right out of the gate, the Refuge had entrusted her with genuine responsibilities. In some incriminating way, her new duties lifted her from the trough of helplessness she’d lived in since Mark’s accident. Some place that actually needed her energies; some useful definition to her days. Like Daniel, she now worked at least fifty hours a week. Mark couldn’t blame her: impostors owed him no loyalty. She now knew more about the effort to protect the river than any trainee should know. Information Karsh would kill to learn.

  “Really?” he said, eyebrows up. “Paying, as in cash, American? That’s great. So what exactly are you doing for them?”

  She did everything: stacked boxes. Proofed copy. Made cold calls to local politicians and prospective donors, employing that rich, mezzo, reassuring, consumer-relations voice that was her greatest asset. “Robert. You know? I’m not supposed to say.”

  “I see.” Those aqua eyes glinted with hurt innocence. The old Robert. The one who could dismantle her without an owner’s manual. The Karsh she could no more evade than she could escape herself. “Closely held secrets of the wetlands protectors. I understand completely. What’s our personal history, compared to preserving the four-billion-year march of evolution?”

  Two years ago that month, she’d lain with this man in the pouring rain, naked in the sloppy riverbanks, licking his armpits like a kitten. “Jesus, Karsh. What can I say? It’s the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. Bigger than myself? How about bigger than anyone. I’m working through some papers…Did you know that we’ve changed that river more in one hundred years than in all the ten thousand years prior…?”

  “Sorry…papers? What kind of papers?”

  “Photocopies from the County Office, if you must know.” Already too much. But surely he’d guessed. She watched him faking calm. She’d often seen that look, but had never
before been able to cause it. The sight was nothing short of mood-altering.

  “You’re right, you probably shouldn’t tell me anything.” Pouring on the charm, charm more weirdly boyish now that he was graying. “But you’ll tell me if I guess, right?”

  “Depends.”

  “On?”

  “On what you tell me in return.”

  Hands spread on the table. “Go ahead. Ask me anything.”

  “Anything?” She snickered. “How’s family life?”

  He sat back against the booth and surrendered, too quickly. “The kids are…really great. I’m just so glad I got into this whole father thing. Something different every week. Skateboarding, amateur theatrics, industrial-scale software piracy. No, really: they’re fantastic. Wendy and I are another story.”

  “Another story than…?”

  “Listen. I don’t want to lay this on your doorstep, Rabbit. This has absolutely nothing to do with your coming back home. It’d been in the works for months before I saw you.”

  Not, apparently, another story than the one he’d told her for years. But it couldn’t hurt her now. Like one of those pieces of junk mail stamped Urgent: Dated Material. Please Respond. “I’m sure, Robert. My comings and goings would never affect you.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean. But I’m going to show great psychological acuity by letting you attack me.” Retaliating, she salted the half strip of bacon left on his plate. He popped it in his mouth, contrition. “This is exactly what I’m saying.” He waved his arms, beaming. “Do you know the last time I felt this free? Wendy and I drag through that disinfected Colonial, appraising each other like insurance-fraud investigators after a fire. We are so over each other. We’re at the point where we have to split up for the sake of the kids.” He gazed out the plate-glass window, onto Central.

  “Anything you like out there? Good morning talent?”

  He just nodded. “I like everything I see a little bit more. When you are around.”

  Most dangerous pitch of all. Someone who made others happier to be who they were: that was all she’d ever dreamed of being. And this man alone knew her fatal weak spot. She listened and indulged him, nodding at his details—the escape apartment he’d lined up, the lawyer who promised reasonable protection. She let him go on about his emerging future. At least he had the decency not to ask whether she was interested in filling it. And all that this brief escape cost her was a peck on the cheek and the surrender of her breakfast tab.

  He grabbed her by both elbows as he said goodbye. “I think your brother might be right. You have changed.” Before she could cry out, he added, “You’re better,” and disappeared down Kearney’s recently renovated main drag.

  That evening, Dr. Weber called. “How are you holding up?” he asked. He sounded genuinely solicitous. But she would not be analyzed. She did not need his help: only her brother. She scrambled to find her list of new questions about the proposed treatment and began to ask them. He gently cut her off. “I’m going back to New York tomorrow morning.”

  The words silenced her. She started two confused objections before she understood. He was signing off again, even faster than last time. She would not see him anymore, whichever option she chose.

  “I’ll be in touch with Dr. Hayes at Good Samaritan. He’ll have my full write-up. I’ll give him all the material I’ve found, bring him up to speed on where you are.”

  “That’s…I don’t…I still have questions…” Searching through a pile of paperwork for the Refuge, she tipped the stack and knocked it to the floor. She cursed brutally, then covered the receiver.

  “Please,” Weber said. “Ask anything. Now, or any time after I get back home.”

  “But I thought we were going…I thought we’d have another chance to talk about choices. This is a big decision, and I don’t have…”

  “We can talk. And you have Dr. Hayes. The hospital staff.”

  She felt her control slip and didn’t care. “So this is doctor-patient compassion,” she said out loud. Things needed letting out, for her own and everyone’s good. The man’s professional composure enraged her. Why bother coming back at all if this was what he planned? Going home to his family, his wife. Suppose he walked in his front door and his wife wouldn’t recognize him? Threatened to call the police if he didn’t leave. Antipsychotic. “You don’t know what this is doing to me.”

  “I can imagine,” Weber said.

  “No you can’t. You haven’t the slightest idea.” She was sick of people imagining they could imagine. She was ready to tell him exactly what he was. But for Mark’s sake, she calmed herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was inexcusable. I’m not quite together these days.” She reassured him that she understood his choice, and that she’d be fine on her own. Then she thanked him for all his help and said goodbye to him for good.

  She all but threw it in his face: You haven’t the slightest idea. Like she deliberately meant to confirm the worst of public accusations. Cold, functionalist opportunist. Not interested in people at all. All that interests you is theories.

  The woman’s nerve boggled his mind. He’d handed her a treatment where there was none, an option that had cost him some time and effort to find. Tens of thousands of dollars of care, delivered to her doorstep for free. Two pro bono cross-country trips by a researcher with an international reputation, when she might have been knocking on doors, begging for appointments, dragging her brother around the continent, clinic after unproven clinic, in search of anyone who even knew what he was looking at.

  Weber had stayed surprisingly composed, at least in memory. He didn’t, in any case, say what he was feeling. Too much training for that. To the best of his recollection, he’d never lost his temper in a professional capacity. He’d wanted to explain: My leaving is not what you think. But then he would have to tell her what his leaving was.

  She was right in one silent accusation: he was no psychologist. Human behavior, so opaque when he’d started his studies, now struck him as worse than religious mystery. He understood no one. He couldn’t begin to grasp her. She’d gone from gratitude to entitlement, on no grounds at all. Vulnerability wheeling to attack, even as she begged for mercy. He’d studied the absurdities of behavior his whole life, and he hadn’t come close to predicting the words she threw at him.

  Yes, the damage he’d made a career of studying fell along a spectrum continuous with baseline psychology. But the things he labored to explain in deficits he couldn’t excuse in this healthy person. No medical court would have convicted him had he hung up on her. Instead, he hung on, feeling everything, from far off. He’d seen the same condition in a young woman patient once. Pain asymbolia: damage to the dominant parietal lobe’s supramarginal gyrus. Doctor, I know the pain is there; I feel it. It’s excruciating. But it just doesn’t bother me anymore. Pain everywhere, but just not distressing.

  Maybe he’d suffered a lesion and was in full-fledged compensation. But on the phone, he could do nothing but go through the motions: What would Gerald Weber do? He let Karin Schluter abuse him, saying nothing in his own defense. He answered her questions as honestly as possible. He hung up feeling worse than humiliated. But the humiliation did not concern him. The thing dismantling him also exhilarated, lifted him so bodily he hovered above himself. On the brink of sixty, and tomorrow threatened to reveal the mystery his whole life had struggled to unlock. A rush of anticipation flooded through him, worse than something pharmaceutical. He’d fallen in love with a total cipher, a woman he didn’t know from Eve.

  He called Christopher Hayes at Good Samaritan, who greeted him warmly. “I’m in the middle of your new book. I haven’t finished it yet, but I just can’t understand the press’s pile-on. It’s no different than anything you’ve ever written.”

  Weber had reached the same annihilating conclusion. Everything he’d written now only added to his vague disgrace. He told Hayes that he’d been in town examining Mark. The news silenced Hayes. Weber described Mark’s furt
her deterioration, mentioned the article he found in the ANZJP, and conveyed the case for olanzapine.

  Dr. Hayes concurred with everything. “Of course you remember that I thought we should explore this direction, back in June.”

  Weber did not remember. Acutely aware of how he appeared to the other man, he nudged the conversation to a close, finally euthanizing it. He drove back to Lincoln that night, waiting on standby until he could get a flight. He called Mark from the airport to say goodbye.

  Mark was stoic. “I figured you might be bailing. You tore out of here kinda fast. When you coming back through?”

  Weber said he didn’t know.

  “Never, huh? Can’t say I blame you. I’d get back to the real deal myself, if I knew how.”

  Mark’s not good for squat these days except for failing people’s tests. First, he lets Shrinky down. He’s not sure why—something to do with his less-than-optimal performance in their latest Q and A—but the man tears out of town like he’s taken a fire hose of sweat bees up the ass. No sooner does he drive Shrinky away than the Guard is after him. Some kind of agreement that young Mark signed, and apparently his country is now in desperate need of his services.

  You-Know-Who—at least she’s dependable—runs him up to the recruiting office in Kearney. Same place that Rupp and the aforementioned Mark turned up worlds ago, to talk about doing Mark’s bit for Homeland Security. He tries to work it out, on the ride up: the same Specialist Rupp who has finally admitted to communicating with him just after Mark supposedly signs some official papers, and just before somebody runs Mark off the road. As usual, it doesn’t add up, except to implicate the government. But government involvement is generally a no-brainer.

  At the Guard office, there’s a heavy conference that he’s not privy to, between the Karin-like person and the Top Guardsman. She’s trying to bust up the deal, whipping out files from the hospital, brother obviously impaired, etc. But the army sees through her, of course. And Mark Schluter is asked to answer a few questions for his country. He does his best; he honestly does. If America is under siege and has to go whip some serious foreign butt to break free again, Mark needs to go, just like everybody else. But he has to laugh out loud at some of the questions. True or false: I believe that meeting people with different backgrounds can improve me as a person. Well, that all depends. Is “people” some Arab waving a gun and trying to crash my airline? I sometimes get angered by repetitive or monotonous situations. You mean, like answering these questions? He asks the recruiting doctor whether we are, in fact, preparing to take the Saddamizer out at last, finish the job, after ten years. But Mr. Ramrod is unbelievably uptight. I couldn’t say, sir. Just answer the questions, sir. Apparently we’re dealing with some heavily classified dope.