The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  “Oh, Markie. What were you? Fourteen, fifteen?”

  “You should have heard him. ‘Something we could have, together. Just touch each other, there. Just you and me…’ One sick puppy.”

  She lifted her hands and knelt to the dried mud. “You’ve got to be kidding. This is the big fight that neither of you would talk about, all these years?” He squatted next to her and combed the dirt with his fingers, avoiding her eye. “All growing boys do that kind of thing with each other, at least once.”

  “Huh. Not this growing boy.”

  “You threw away a friendship on that?” But she’d exiled best girlfriends for less.

  Mark toyed with a root mass, his mouth twisted. “He went his bent way; I went mine.”

  She touched his shoulder. He didn’t pull away. “Why didn’t you tell me? I mean, why never mention it to your sister?”

  “Why? You’re both college-educated women. If you want to experiment with diddling a bisexual, what’s it to me?” He squinted in resentment across the swollen, rolling field. “What do you think he’d say, if he saw the two of us out here, like this?”

  She lay back against a furrow ridge, wanting to laugh. Horrible. Worst of all, this was their most honest, intimate conversation since they’d lived in this house.

  “It wasn’t just, you know. Petting my pecker. The guy really loved me or something.”

  His eyes caught the scudding clouds, and a sick feeling started in her. The scrape of explanations. The guy really…But it couldn’t be true. Not in the way Mark meant it.

  “I also think he may have had sex with animals.”

  “Jesus, Mark! Will you quit? Who told you that? Your friends? Biggest barnyard abusers there are.”

  He hung his hands around his neck, miserable with thought. “You know, you were right about Rupp and Cain. You were right and I was wrong. I didn’t listen to you. I should listen to you more.”

  “I know,” she told the dirt. “Same here.” She listened now, Daniel changing as she heard. She pushed off the harvested earth with her scuffed palms and stood. “Come on. Let’s head back, before we get arrested for trespassing.”

  “What do the two of you do together, anyway? For pleasure.” He twisted his head to the side and screened it with his hands. She blinked at him, feeling ill. “Don’t give me any messy details. I mean, you go to the opera? Hang out at the public library until they throw you out?”

  What did they do together? Pleasure was not something they’d perfected. “We walk, sometimes. We work together. For the Refuge.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Well, at the moment, trying to save the cranes from their admirers.” She sketched out the details of her working day, surprising herself while she talked. She had been with the Refuge for a little more than a month, and she had all the fervor of a convert. She couldn’t imagine herself now without the work. Sitting for hours at a table strewn with buttes of government pamphlets, trying to put them into language that would make an indifferent person come awake and see all the things that drank from the river. The work had populated some emptiness in her, taken up the slack Capgras had left. She’d been on hold for so long. She wanted to tell Mark her data. Humans consuming twenty percent more energy than the world can produce. Extinction at a thousand times the normal background rate. Instead, she settled for telling him about the fight for water rights, the land war unfolding outside Farview.

  “Wait a minute. You’re saying this Nature Outpost is bad for the birds?”

  “That’s what the numbers say. That’s what Daniel thinks.”

  The name plunged Mark back into a funk. “So-called Daniel. He’s the missing link, you know. Everything keeps pointing back to him.”

  Missing link. Coupler with animals. Champion of all creatures that could not compete with consciousness. They were almost back to the house. Mark had his hands in his back pockets, kicking a field stone down the furrow. He stopped short and bore around on her. “Where’s this nature village supposed to go?”

  She got her bearings and pointed southeast. “They want to put it in over there somewhere. Down on the river.”

  He snapped his head back, and his body jerked to attention. “Fuck. Look where you’re pointing! What in God’s name is going on?” A cry of pain came out of him. “You don’t see it? Right where I had my accident.” He fell back against the inclined cellar door. “Figure this out for me.” For a second he seemed on the verge of a seizure. “Save the birds? Save the river? What about saving me? Where the hell is Shrinky? There’s so much shit I have to ask him. The man bailed out of here so fast, you’d think I had tried to queer him.”

  His desperate chestnut eyes widened at her, and she had to say something. “It wasn’t your fault, Mark. The man has problems of his own.”

  He leaned forward on the incline, ready to lunge. “What do you mean ‘of his own’?”

  She stepped backward. Checked the distance to the car. He was capable of anything. Something basic was in him, clawing to get out.

  But he leaned back again and held up his palms. “Okay, bag it. Just listen. I asked you out here for a reason. Sorry about tricking you, but this is wartime. There’s something I need to settle, once and for all. I’m not sure who you answer to, or whose side you’re really on. But I do know you helped me out while I was down. I’m still not sure why, but I’ll never forget it.” He craned his neck and looked up at the eggshell sky. “Well, let’s put it this way. So long as I remember anything, I’ll remember that. I don’t know how you know what you know, but it’s clear you’ve got my sister’s entire database, give or take. They downloaded her, imprinted you, or something. You know more crap about me than I know about myself. You’re the only one who can answer me this. I have no choice but to trust you. So don’t screw me on this, all right?” He stood and walked ten feet from the house, angle enough to point up at his old bedroom window. “You remember that guy?”

  She managed to get her skull to bob.

  “Something in your memory banks. Who he was, how he grew up, what became of him? What he became?”

  She willed her head to nod again, but it would not. Mark didn’t notice. He was staring up at his childhood window, waiting for the evidence to come crawling down on a long pillowcase-and-sheet rope.

  He turned and took her by the shoulders like she was God’s own messenger. “You have a strong memory of Mark Schluter, this time last year? Say, ten or twelve days before the accident? I need to know whether you think, given your sense of that guy they primed you with…whether you think he could have done it…on purpose.”

  Her brain made a muffled buzz. “What do you mean, Markie?”

  “Don’t call me that. You know what I’m asking. Was I trying to off myself?”

  Her gut folded. She shook her head so hard her hair whipped her face.

  He studied her for betrayal. “You’re sure? You’re absolutely sure? I didn’t say anything beforehand? Wasn’t depressed? Because here’s what I’m thinking. Something was in the road in front of me. I’m remembering something in the road. White. Maybe that oncoming car, cutting me off. Then again, maybe it was, you know, my finder, that note-writer, changing the course of my life. Because maybe I was out there, you know: trying to roll it. Finish up the story. And somebody stopped me.”

  Objections appeared before she could think them. He’d shown no sign of depression. He had his job, his friends, and his new home. If he’d wanted to do something like that, she would have known…But she’d suspected the possibility herself. As early as the hospital, and as late as that morning.

  “You’re sure?” Mark said. “Nothing in the sisterly memories they fed you to suggest anything suicidal? All right. I have to believe you wouldn’t lie to me about this. Let’s go. Take me home.” They walked back to the car. He got in the passenger side. She started the engine. “Just a minute,” he said. He got out again, ran up to the rotting porch, and tore off the NO TRESPASSING sign. He ran back to the car and piled in, jer
king his head toward the road.

  She drove him home, a distance that expanded as they rode. She wavered again over the olanzapine decision. Mark liked her now, at least a little. Better, he liked what she’d been. She knew what a cure might return him to. Maybe Mark was better off like this. Maybe well-being meant more than official sanity. He—the old Mark—might have said as much himself. But succumbing to reason, she told him that they needed to go see Dr. Hayes again. “They’ve found something, Mark. Something they can give you that might help clear things up. Make you feel a little more…together.”

  “Together would be very helpful, right around now.” But he wasn’t really listening. He was peering off to his right, toward the river, the future Nature Outpost, his past accident. “Save the birds, you say?” He nodded stoically at the utter insanity of the race. “Save the birds and kill the people.”

  He flipped on the car radio. It was tuned to the frenzied conservative talk station that she listened to, for the pleasure of confirming her own worst fears. The president had ordered half a million servicemen vaccinated against smallpox. Now the home audience was calling in with advice about protecting yourself from the coming outbreak.

  “Biological warfare,” he chanted. He turned, his face plastered with absolute incomprehension. “I wish I’d been born sixty years earlier.”

  The words blindsided her. “What do you mean, Mark? Why?”

  “Because if I’d been born sixty years earlier, I’d be dead by now.”

  She turned into River Run and crawled up in front of his house. “I’ll make an appointment with Dr. Hayes, okay, Mark? Mark? Are you with me?”

  He shook off his fog, hesitating, his right foot dangling out of the car door. “Whatever. Just do me one small favor. If my real sister ever does show up again?” He drummed his forehead with his first two fingers. “You think you could still save a little feeling for me?”

  “The self presents itself as whole, willful, embodied, continuous, and aware.” Or so Weber wrote once, in The Three-Pound Infinity. But even back then, before he knew anything, he knew how each of those prerequisites could fail.

  Whole: Sperry and Gazzaniga’s work with commissurotomy patients split that fiction down the middle. Epileptics who’d had their corpus callosum cut as a last-ditch method to treat their disease ended up inhabiting two separate brain hemispheres with no connection. Two severed minds in the same skull, intuitive right and patterning left, each hemisphere using its own percepts, ideas, and associations. Weber had watched the personalities of a subject’s two half brains tested independently. The left claimed to believe in God; the right reported itself an atheist.

  Willful: Libet laid that one to rest in 1983, even for the baseline brain. He asked subjects to watch a microsecond clock and note when they decided to lift a finger. Meanwhile, electrodes watched for a readiness potential, indicating muscle-initiating activity. The signal began a full third of a second before any decision to move the finger. The we that does the willing is not the we that we think we are. Our will was one of those classic comedy bit parts: the errand boy who thinks he’s the CEO.

  Embodied: consider autoscopy and out-of-body experience. Neuroscientists in Geneva concluded that the events resulted from paroxysmal cerebral dysfunctions of the temporoparietal junction. A little electrical current to the proper spot in the right parietal cortex, and anyone could be made to float up to the ceiling and gaze back down on their abandoned body.

  Continuous: that thread was ready to snap at the lightest pull. De-realization and depersonalization. Anxiety attacks and religious conversions. Misidentification—the whole continuum of Capgras-like phenomena, phenomena that Weber had witnessed his whole life without quite noticing. Eternal love retracted. Entire life philosophies abandoned in disgust. The concert pianist he’d interviewed who woke one morning after prolonged illness, no discernible pathology, still able to play, but unable to feel the music, or care about it…

  Aware: here was his wife, asleep on the pillow next to him.

  This thought formed in him as he lay awake at dawn, listening to a mockingbird roll through its round of pilfered calls: of selves as the self describes itself, no one had one. Lying, denying, repressing, confabulating: these weren’t pathologies. They were the signature of awareness, trying to stay intact. What was truth, compared to survival? Floating or broken or split or a third of a second behind, something still insisted: Me. Always the water changed, but the river stood still.

  The self was a painting, traced on that liquid surface. Some thought sent an action potential down an axon. A little glutamate jumped the gap, found a receptor on the target dendrite, and triggered an action potential in the second cell. But then came the real fire: the action potential in the receiver cell kicked out a magnesium block from another kind of receptor, calcium flowed in, and all chemical hell broke loose. Genes activated, producing new proteins, which flowed back to the synapse and remodeled it. And that made a new memory, the canyon down which thought flowed. Spirit from matter. Every burst of light, every sound, every coincidence, every random path through space changed the brain, altering synapses, even adding them, while others weakened or fell away from lack of activity. The brain was a set of changes for mirroring change. Use or lose. Use and lose. You chose, and the choice unmade you.

  As with synapse, so went science. When long-term potentiation was discovered in the 1970s, perhaps a dozen articles appeared in half a decade. In the half-decade after that, almost one hundred. Fire together, wire together. In the early nineties, a thousand papers or more. Now more than twice that, and redoubling every five years. More articles than any researcher could hope to integrate. Science was loose, with the exposed synapse. The synapse was already science. Smallest imaginable machine for comparing and conjoining. Classical and operant conditioning, written in chemicals, able to learn the entire world, and float a you on top of it.

  The mockingbird peeled off its bursts: fives, sevens, threes. Each burst mutated like the spins of a cycling car alarm. Listen to the mockingbird. Listen to the mockingbird. He’d sung that song with this same wife once, when they still sang. A mockingbird is singing over her grave.

  This was the bird’s hymn to plasticity, every glance of rising sunlight off the rippled bay changing the shape of its brain. The brain that retrieved a memory was not the brain that had formed it. Even retrieving a memory mangled what was formerly there. Every thought, damaging and redamming. Even this mockingbird accompaniment, this one, changing Weber beyond recall.

  The tangle thickened as he traced it: groups of wired neurons that modeled and memorized the changing light were themselves modeled, in other neuron groups. Whole chunks of circuitry reserved for sandboxing other circuits, the mind’s eye cannibalizing the brain’s eye, social intelligence stealing the circuitry of spatial orientation. What-if mimicking what-is; simulations simulating simulations. When his little Jess was not yet a month old, he could get her to stick out her tongue just by sticking out his tongue at her. No counting the miracles involved. She had to locate his tongue relative to his body, then somehow map his parts onto the feel of hers, find and order a tongue she could not even see, could not even know about. And she did all this at the mere sight of him, this infant who had been taught nothing. Where was the end of his self, the start of hers?

  The self bled out, the work of mirror neurons, empathy circuits, selected for and preserved through many species for their obscure survival value. Baby Jess’s supramarginal gyrus conjured up a fiction, an imaginary model of what her body would be like if it did what his was doing. Weber had seen people with damage to the area—ideomotor apraxia. Asked to hang a picture, they could. But asked to pretend to hang a picture, they slapped helplessly at the wall, no clasped hammer, no mimed nail.

  When his girl, at four, looked through her picture books, her face would match the expressions painted there. A smile made her smile, inducing girlish happiness. A grimace gave her real pain. Weber, too, to witness: emotions moved th
e muscles, but merely moving the muscles made emotions. Those with damage to the insula could no longer do the imitative, integrated mapping of body-states necessary to read or adopt someone else’s muscles. Then the community of self collapsed into one.

  The bird mocked on from a branch up close to their bedroom window, bits of riff stolen from other species and stuffed into the growing melody. On the backs of his eyelids, using the same brain regions as real sight, Weber watched a little boy he did not recognize—it might have been Mark, or someone much like him—out in a frosty field watching birds taller than he. And seeing them arch and leap and curl their necks and beat their wings, the boy beat his.

  To be awake and know: already awful. To be awake, know, and remember: unbearable. Against the triple curse, Weber could make out only one consolation. Some part of us could model some other modeler. And out of that simple loop came all love and culture, the ridiculous overflow of gifts, each one a frantic proof that I was not it…We had no home, no whole to come back to. The self spread thin on everything it looked at, changed by every ray of the changing light. But if nothing inside was ever fully us, at least some part of us was loose, in the run of others, trading in all else. Someone else’s circuits circled through ours.

  This was the dawn thought that formed in Weber’s brain, his shifting synapses, all the insight that he ought ever to have needed. But it scattered at the arrival of new bursts, as Sylvie moaned and twisted awake, opened her eyes and smiled at him. “Did you?” she asked, fuzzily. Old code between them: Sleep well?

  And, yes, he nodded his head, smiling back at her. All his life long, he had slept well.

  Christmas came and went, and still no angel. Dozens of people called in after the broadcast, all of them with theories but none with useful information. When even Crime Solvers let him down, Mark hinted broadly to Karin that he now had a pretty good idea of what had really happened that night. Any ambitious business project for transforming the region would first require transforming the region’s inhabitants. When she tried to get him to elaborate, he told her to use her head and figure it out herself.