The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  Karbon Karin expresses her own opinions on the way home, opinions suspiciously close to his own sister’s. Family is our country kind of noise. Mark forgets about the whole thing until a week later, when he gets a letter from NEARNG, with the little Patriot head logo in the circle of stars on it. Basically: don’t call us, we’ll call you.

  Then he whiffs a third time. Pseudo Sib lets slip that the checks he’s been getting from Infernal may dry up after the accident’s anniversary. You can tell she’s sorry as soon as she says it, like he’s not supposed to hear, which of course gets his attention. There’s absolutely no reason why she should be so freaked. So, needless to say, her whole little secretive song and dance freaks him something serious.

  He calls the plant. After about a million minutes on hold listening to Surprising Beef Processing Facts while being bounced from one clueless personnel officer to another, they put him through to somebody who seems to know all about his situation. Not a good sign, and it makes him think that Rupp or Cain has gotten to them first and given them the other side of the story, the side that everyone is keeping from Mark. The personnel officer tells him that he’ll need a whole new round of tests—clean bill of health from Good Samaritan—before they’ll consider rehiring him. What the hell do they mean, re-hire? He already works there. The desk man says something rude, and Mark counters with something about: Do you want me to tell the feds about the thirty Hispanic illegals you have working the cutting floors? An idle threat, really, since Mark and the feds aren’t on great terms at the moment. The guy hangs up on him, so there’s nothing to do but take the hospital tests. He’s sure he can do pretty well on these, having had his fair share of practice. But the hospital is pissed at him, apparently, for quitting Thera-Play, and they give him some truly bizarre questions, which he bombs out on again.

  So that’s three strikes, and by the rules of the game, he’s out of there. Only, Mark is still in the thick of shit. He’s looking at real unemployment. The whole thing is a life-and-death video game, on a countdown timer to detonation. He’s got until the anniversary of his accident to figure out what they did to him on the operating table. His one hope is to find his finder, the note-writer, his guardian angel, the only one who knows everything.

  A plan comes to Mark, something he should have thought of a while ago. Would have, too, if it hadn’t been for all the craziness around these parts. Simple enough, and the beauty of the plan lies in how it forces the hand of the authorities. He’ll go public. He’ll put the note on Crime Solvers. Everybody in four counties will see the plastic-laminated thing pressed up against their TV screens. I am No One, but Tonight on North Line Road…If any real, unbrainwashed people who know what happened that night are left alive, they’ll have to come forward. And if the Powers That Be try to snag and silence them, all of central Nebraska will know.

  A year ago, he’d never have considered stooping so low. The show is just too pathetic: the worst kind of local television brain-scrambler. A female reporter and a male policeman run all over the Big Bend region, pretending to be interested in everybody’s so-called unsolved mysteries, while all they really want to do, obviously, is run off into the wheat fields somewhere off camera and drill each other silly. And the tangled, baffling cases they go after? Three-quarters of them are clueless women bleating about how they haven’t seen their husbands for weeks. Lady, have you tried your teenage Mexican housekeeper’s apartment? Once in a blue moon they show some interesting stuff, like the two applicator tanks full of anhydrous ammonia stolen off a siding in Holdrege that turned up in this big old subterranean meth facility in Hartwell. Or the Prairie Bigfoot, this sasquatch thing spotted at night rooting through people’s trash barrels in North Platte, and subsequently reported all over the place from Ogallala to Litchfield, which turned out to be this telco wire guy’s illegal escaped pet sun bear: one very confused creature, whacked out by a few hundred hysterical, hallucinating humans.

  But Crime Solvers is his last hope. He does a phone interview with their “story hunter,” also known as unpaid student intern. They’re interested, and they send the famous Tracey Barr over in person, along with a camera guy, to film him. The Homestar, on the idiot box. Or at least the fake Homestar. Tracey Barr herself, in his living room. He wants to call the guys, get them over to gawk, maybe even get them on camera. Then he remembers he can’t really call the guys anymore.

  The statuesque Miss Barr is a bit older and not quite as sexual in person. Not as sexual, shall we say, as a certain Bonita Baby, in her homestead garb. Nevertheless, Tracey—she asks him to call her Tracey, believe it or don’t—is impressive, in a kind of black tube skirt and backward ruby blouse kind of way. Fortunately, Mark remembers to dress up, too: his fancy green long-sleeve Izod. Present from Bonnie Before.

  Tracey wants the whole story. Of course, Mark Schluter doesn’t have the whole story. That’s the point of dragging in the Grime Patrol in the first place. And he’s learned that when he does tell everything he knows, people go weird on him. He doesn’t want to trip any more mines than he has to. The less the station knows about the big picture, the better. He gives her the basic package: accident, tire tracks, hospital, sealed ICU, and the note on the bedside table, waiting for him when he comes back to himself weeks later. She eats it up. They film all over the yard and house: Mark alone, gazing off into fields. Mark with photo of truck. Mark with Blackie Two, because who’s going to know the difference? Mark holding note, showing note to Tracey. Tracey reading note out loud. And most important: full-screen closeup of note, so everyone at home can see the handwriting and read every word.

  Tracey drags him out to North Line, to film him at the scene of the crime. They’re joined by this week’s Cop on the Case, Sergeant Ron Fagan, who, it turns out, knows Karin from high school, perhaps even in the Old Testament sense. He keeps asking Mark about his sister. Like “the police” don’t know about the switch. How’s that sister of yours? She’s real nice. She still in town? She dating anyone? Quite creepy: this big guy in a uniform, probing to see how much Mark suspects. Mark ducks the questions without, he hopes, getting in any deeper than he’s already in.

  But Officer Fagan is masterful with Tracey, going on about the accident-scene evidence: the tracks that cut Mark off and the ones that ran off the road behind him. You mean like a squeeze? Tracey asks. And with a straight face, the cop says he doesn’t want to leap to conclusions. Leap, after almost a year. Says they have no match on the treads, no leads on the vehicles…

  Unfortunately, he also mentions the speed Mark was going when he flipped. It’s a figure that isn’t going to endear him to any potentially watching guardians. Mark had no idea he’d been going so fast. It dawns on him that the car behind him must have been pursuing. He was evading, and he blasted right into the ambush.

  They set up the accident-scene camera at the wrong spot. Right road, wrong stretch. Mark objects, but they blow him off. They claim the backdrop looks better here; more picturesque or something. The cop waves his hands like a conductor, pointing out what happened where, but it’s all wrong. All fake. Mark tells them, maybe a little too loud. Tracey commands him to shut up. He yells back: How the hell is the person who found him going to recognize the place and come forward, if the show doesn’t even show the right spot?

  Well, they all look at him like he’s just escaped from Floor Five. But they relocate to the real spot, rather than push it. They film him walking along his little stretch, which is nuts when you think about it, since he wasn’t exactly in walking shape that night. But hey: Hollywood. It’s mild and dry—light jacket weather, with a teasing wind and all the fields taken in. But he’s absolutely freezing, cold at his core, so cold he might as well be lying there, pinned in a ditch, in February, his face pressed through the broken windshield in a slurry of ice.

  Another prairie winter, the thing Karin Schluter had fled her whole adult life. She’d been raised on stories of the killer of ’36, with its month of unbroken subzeros, or ’49, with its fort
y-foot drifts of snow, or the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard of 1888, with its one-day drop of eighty degrees dotting the landscape with frozen statues. This one was nothing. And still, she feared for her survival.

  The cardboard browns and gunmetal grays took over. The last of the squashes and pumpkins dried off their vines, and everything sane went south or underground. Longer nights settled in, hooding the town early. Most nights, the wind kept her up; few places on the globe had air so loud. She suffered her traditional November break, that sense that she’d crashed through the world’s guard rail and now lay under the unbroken gauze of Nebraska sky, unable to do anything but wait for spring and someone to discover her.

  She’d have diagnosed herself with seasonal affective disorder, but she refused to believe in recently invented diseases. Riegel tried to get her to sit under his plant grow lights. “It’s all about sun. Your number of hours of sunlight per day.”

  “You want to trick my body with fluorescent lights? That doesn’t seem very natural to me.” She felt herself sniping at him more as the days shortened, but couldn’t stop herself. He suffered in noble silence, which only made things worse. She rushed to apologize with small kindnesses, telling him again how grateful she was for the work, the most meaningful work she’d ever put her hand to. The next day, she’d snipe again.

  She called Barbara for advice. “I don’t know what to do. I can change him with this drug, into God knows what. I can leave him who he is now. It’s too much power.”

  She recited Daniel’s problems with pharmaceuticals. The nurse’s aide listened carefully. “I understand your friend’s fears, and I’m speaking to you as someone who has, in her life, given up cigarettes, caffeine, and processed sugar. I know you’re scared of anything that might make things worse. I can’t tell you what to do. But you need to look into this olanzapine as carefully as…”

  “I’ve done that,” Karin snapped. “And the man who dumped this in my lap is gone. Barbara! Please?”

  “I can’t advise. I’m not qualified. If I could make this choice for you, I would.”

  Karin, who’d dreamed once of becoming this woman’s friend, even her confidante, hung up the phone hating her.

  She increased her hours at the Refuge. If she’d had this work from the beginning—a river to give herself to—she might have become a different creature. They had her preparing pamphlets. Copy for fund raising and lobbying. Small-arms fire in the increasingly desperate war over water. The pros did the real work, of course. But even her gopher efforts contributed. Daniel, almost afraid to look at her growing wildness, walked her through the research materials, laying out the goals. “We need something to wake sleepwalkers,” he instructed her. “To make the world strange and real again.”

  She was seeing Robert, too, every several days, when he could get away. They’d done nothing, at least nothing Wendy could use in court. They squeezed each other’s heads. There were certain lines on the skull Daniel had taught her about, and she showed Robert. Meridians. Powerful stuff, if you could find them. They spent hours outside, at Cottonmill Lake, under the skeletal trees, looking for them: pressure above the eye ridges, a track leading up and back to the crown of the head that, pressed hard, could absolutely pickle your senses. When she tapped into Robert’s lines, he’d lean back, shout “Wasabi!” and take his pulse.

  The nights grew too cold to stay out of doors. But they had no place to go. They ended up steaming up her car, pulled over on the shoulders of dark country roads or in the far corners of abandoned box-store parking lots. They couldn’t use his car, because of Wendy’s acute sense of smell. The woman was, by her husband’s account, as olfactorially acute as a badger.

  “It’s worse than being a teenager,” Karin groaned. “Damn it, Robert. I’m going to explode.”

  Then they’d stop and turn back to touchless talk. They had reached the age when frustration offered more than delivery. It meant something, this holding on to technical fidelity. Cheating came later, when they returned to their respective mates.

  It surprised her to discover: if she had to choose between fooling around and talk, she’d choose talk. That’s what she needed most from him, these days. His mind was so brutally other than Daniel’s, or her own. She thought faster around Robert. He was a huge, calculating extension of that PDA he was forever poking at. He could sit behind the steering wheel of the parked Corolla, fiddling with the handheld device like a newborn exploring a Playskool Activity Center. To her anxiety over starting Mark on drugs, he said, “Figure the costs. Count up the benefits. See which is bigger.”

  “Listen to you. If only it were that easy.”

  “It is that easy. Unless you want to make it harder. Come on! What else is there? The plus column and the minus column. Then the math.”

  His clarity maddened her, but it kept her going.

  “Really,” he told her. His voice was so calming—Peter Jennings visiting a junior high social studies class. “What’s to keep you from starting him on these antipsychotics and seeing what happens?”

  “They’re hard to tail off of, once you start.”

  “Hard on you, or hard for him?”

  She slugged him, which he enjoyed. “What do I do if they work?”

  He twisted in his seat to face her. He didn’t understand. How could he? She wasn’t sure she did. He shook his head. But his eyes were more amused than exasperated. She was his brainteaser, his handheld puzzle box.

  She took his palm and stroked it with her thumb, their most dangerous transaction to date. “What would he be like, if he…came back?”

  Robert sniffed. “Like he was. Your brother.”

  “Right. But which one? Don’t look at me like that. You know what I’m saying. He could be such an aggressive prick. Always riding me.”

  Karsh shrugged, the guilt of all mankind. “I’ve been known to, you know, be a bit that way myself.”

  “It’s just that I can’t really…When I try to picture him, before? I can’t be sure I…He was really hairy, sometimes. Raging about my going off and saving myself, condemning him to the faith healer and the entrepreneur. Calling me a…Sometimes he really hated me.”

  “He didn’t hate you.”

  “How would you know?” His palms flew up, a bull’s-eye for her rage. “I’m sorry,” she rushed. “I’m just not sure I can do all that again.” They sat in silence. He checked his watch, then cranked the ignition. She did not have much time to ask it. “Robert? Do you think I ever resented him, back then? You know. Some kind of hidden…?”

  Robert drummed the wheel. “Truth? Nothing hidden about it.”

  She flared up, then hung her head. “But see? That’s part…I don’t really resent him now, like this. I…don’t really mind, anymore. His being who…”

  “Don’t mind?” Karsh downshifted. “You mean you like him better this way?”

  “No! Of course not. It’s just…I like his new idea of me, better than his old one. Well, not of me; you know: of ‘the real Karin.’ I like who he thinks I was. He defends the old me now, against everyone. Two years ago, the real Karin was a constant source of disappointment. I was forever letting him down. A tramp, a sell-out, a money-grubber, a pretentious middle-class wannabe, too good for my roots. Now the real Karin is some kind of victim of history. The sister I never quite managed to be.”

  Karsh drove in silence. He looked as if he needed to flip open his pocket PC and start a spreadsheet ledger. Karin Schluter upgrade. Costs. Benefits.

  “I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. Am I totally disgusting?”

  Eyes on the road, he smiled, taunting. “Not totally.”

  “I can’t believe that I told anyone. That I even admitted it to myself, out loud.”

  They pulled up four blocks from his house, where he always got out and walked. He opened the driver’s-side door. “You told me because you love me,” he said.

  She passed a hand over her face. “No,” she said. “Not totally.”

  He called her at
times, when his office was empty. They talked in stolen installments, whispering about nothing. Once they got past the essentials—what did he have for lunch? what was she wearing?—everything else devolved into current events. Was the Washington sniper a terrorist or just a self-made, rugged individual? Why weren’t the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq turning up anything? Should the Enron and ImClone executives be given their own reality television network? As good as outright phone sex to both of them.

  She held out for fairness, and he for freedom. Each thought they might convert the other: that had always been their fatal attraction. Both agreed that the government was out of control. Only, she wanted to put it to decent use at last, while he wanted to put it down once and for all. A chance encounter with The Fountainhead had turned a sunny, self-effacing high school swimming champion into a Libertarian, although Karsh found even that name way too restricting. “Every competent person on earth is a kind of god, babe. Together, we’re unstoppable. Human ingenuity might accomplish anything. Name a material constraint, and we’re halfway to transcending it. Get out of our way and watch the miracles roll in.”