Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

This, spoken while clutching Karin’s wrist, forcing her gaze.

If you ever see the signs. Going on and on? About nothing? Even if it seems like no big deal. Promise me, Kar. Bag over my head. I do not care to stick around for that particular last act.

But, Ma, that’s against the Word of God.

Not in my Bible. Show me where.

Ending your own life?

That’s just the thing, Kar. I wouldn’t be!

I see. You want me to go to hell for you. Thou shalt not kill.

This isn’t killing. This is Christian charity. We did it for animals all the time, back on the farm. Promise me, Kar. Promise me.

Ma, watch out. You’re repeating yourself. Don’t put me into a difficult situation here.

You see what I’m saying. No fun.

Fun was not something Joan Schluter had ever had to worry about. Yet in extremity, she’d said tender things: ghastly, loving apologies for her failure as a parent. Near the end, she asked: Karin, will you pray with me? and Karin, who’d sworn never to talk to God again, even if He started the conversation, bowed her head and mouthed along.

There will be some insurance money, Joan told her. Not a lot, but some. For both of you. Can you do something good with it?

What do you mean, Ma? What good do you want me to do?

But her mother no longer knew what good was. Only that it needed doing.

From the thick of The Woodshed Mystery , Karin said, “You know what, Mark? After an upbringing like ours? We’re lucky there’s anything left of us at all.”

“Left us,” her brother agreed. “Anything.”

She surged to her feet, clapping a cry back into her mouth. She stared at him. He just sank in the sheets, hiding until the danger passed. “Jesus, Mark. You talked. You can say things.”

“Jesus Jesus. Mark. Jesus,” he said. And then fell silent.

“Echolalia,” Dr. Hayes called it. “Perseveration. He’s imitating what he hears.”

Karin would not be dimmed. “If he can say a word, it must mean something , right?”

“Ah! You’re pushing up against questions neurology can’t answer yet.”

Mark’s speech traced the same tight loops his walking did. One afternoon it was “chick, chick, chick, chick,” for most of an hour. It sounded like a symphony to her. Rousing him for a walk, Karin said, “Come on, Mark, let’s tie your shoes.” This launched a barrage of “tie shoes, tissues, die your noose.” He kept it up until she, too, felt brain-damaged. But exhilarated: in the hypnotic repetition, she thought she heard “too tight shoes.” A few loops later, he produced, “Shoofly, don’t tie me.”

The words had to mean something. Even if they weren’t quite thoughts, he flung them with the force of meaning. She was walking him down a crowded hospital corridor when Mark popped out with “Got a lot on our plates right now.”

She threw her arms around him and squeezed him in joy. He knew. He could say . All the reward she needed.

He pulled free and turned away. “You’re turning that dirt into clay.”

She followed his gaze. There in the hall’s hum, she finally heard it. With an animal precision hers had lost, his ears picked up stray pieces of the surrounding conversations and wove them together. Parrots exhibited more native intelligence. She pulled his chest up against her face and began to cry.

“We’ll get through this,” he said, his arms dead at his sides. She pushed him back and examined his face. His eyes said less than nothing.

But she fed and walked and read to him tirelessly, never doubting that he would come back. She had more energy for rehabilitation than she’d had for any job she’d ever worked.

Brother and sister were alone together the next morning when a voice like a cartoon mouse broke over them. “Hey! How’s today treating the two of you?”

Karin jumped up with a shout and threw her arms around the intruder. “Bonnie Travis. Where have you been? What took you so long?”

“My bad!” the mouse girl said. “I wasn’t sure whether…”

Her eyes pinched and she worked her lower lip. She touched Karin’s shoulders in a burst of fear. Brain damage . Worse than contagious. It turned the innocent cagey and unnerved the surest believer.

Mark sat on the end of the bed in jeans and a green work shirt, his palms curled on his knees and his head erect. He might have been pretending to be the Lincoln Memorial. Bonnie Travis hugged him. He made no sign of feeling the embrace. She sprang up from the botched gesture. “Oh, Marker! I wasn’t sure how you were going to look. But you look real good to me.”

His head was shaved, with two great riverbeds scarring the patchy watershed. His face, still scabbed over, looked like a ten-inch peach pit. “Real good,” Mark said. “Wasn’t sure, but could good should be good.”

Bonnie laughed and her Camay face flushed cherry Kool-Aid. “Wow! Would you listen to you! I heard from Duane you couldn’t talk, but I am reading you loud and clear.”

“You talked to those two?” Karin asked. “What are they telling people?”

“Looking good,” Mark said. “Pretty pretty pretty.” The reptile brain, creeping out to sun itself.

Bonnie Travis giggled. “Well, I did clean up a little before I came.”

Words came flowing out of the mouse girl, meaningless, trivial, stupid, lifesaving words. The Travis high-speed pelting, which for years had maddened Karin, now felt like a steady April downpour, raising the water table, recharging the soil. Babbling, Bonnie Travis picked at her plum wool skirt and lumpy hand-knit sweater, its patches of olive yarn converging on the color of the Platte in August. On her neck chain, a Kokopelli danced and played the flute.

The year before, after their mother’s funeral, Karin had asked Mark, Are you two an item? She your woman now? Wanting some protection for him, however little.

Mark had just grunted. Even if she was, she wouldn’t realize.

Bonnie told a motionless Mark all about her new job, the latest change from her steady waitressing. “I’m telling you, I’ve just landed every woman’s dream occupation. You’ll never guess what it is in a million years. I didn’t even know it existed. Docent for the new Great Platte River Road Archway Monument. Did you two know that our new arch is the only monument in the whole world that straddles an interstate? I can’t understand why it’s still not doing very well.”

Mark listened, mouth open. Karin closed her eyes and basked in beautiful human inanity.

“I get to dress up as a pioneer woman. I’ve a floor-length cotton dress? And a truly sweet bonnet with a little beak. The whole nine yards. And I have to answer any visitor’s questions as if I were the real deal. You know, like it’s still one hundred and fifty years ago. You’d be amazed at what people ask.”

Karin had forgotten just how intoxicatingly pointless existence could be. Mark hung on the edge of the bed, a sandstone pharaoh, staring at Bonnie’s intricate, moving mouth. Afraid to stop talking, she chattered on about the tepees lining the I-80 exit ramp, the simulated buffalo stampede, the life-size Pony Express station, and the epic story of the building of the Lincoln Highway. “And you get all that for only $8.25. Can you believe some people think that’s expensive?”

“It’s a steal,” Karin said.

“You’d be amazed, all the places people come from. Czech Republic. Bombay. Naples, Florida. Most of the folks stop to see the birds. They’re getting incredibly famous, those birds. Ten times as many crane peepers as we used to get just six years ago, according to my boss. Those birds are putting our town on the map.”