Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

He saw her in green dungarees and white cotton shirt, climbing a wooden stepladder. The ladder was up against a white Cape Cod house, near the ocean. She was reaching up to the eaves. What did he know about her? Nothing at all. Nothing but what his prefrontal cortex might spin out of thin air and flotsam from the hippocampus. He saw her as a little girl with a black veil pulled down over her face, lighting a fifty-cent candle and placing it on an altar in an incense-choked church. What did he know about anyone? He saw her and Mark Schluter, in gray jumpsuits and yellow hardhats, inspecting a bouquet of gauges on a gleaming stainless-steel cylinder as tall as a house. He saw her hanging out of the passenger window of a trolling blue coupe driven by Karin Schluter, holding out a stuffed teddy bear to the winds. He saw himself, standing shoulder to shoulder with Barbara in a crowded courtroom somewhere like Kabul, trying to get legal custody of the Schluter brother and sister, but unable to make their request understood in any useful language.

It struck him that he’d invented Nebraska. The whole story: some foray into a mixed, experimental genre, a morality play masquerading as journalism. He had no reliable memory of anything that had happened there. He could accurately reconstruct exactly none of Barbara Gillespie’s traits, let alone her features. Yet he could not stop summoning up recovered memories of her, all of them so detailed that he might have sworn they were documented data.

What did he know about his own wife’s life? Who she was when she wasn’t his wife. He drove home, through the snow-covered commons. The two colonial churches never failed to settle him. He made the long bend onto Strong’s Neck, the brown-green harbor at low tide. He turned up Bob’s Lane, that passage impossible for visitors to find unless they’d already been on it. The winter rains still swamped the front yard. A family of green-winged teal had, all fall, made a home alongside the temporary lake. But now that lake was frozen over, and the ducks had flown.

Sylvie had beaten him home. She tried to return from Wayfinders early these days, ever since he’d dropped his bombshell. He hadn’t asked her to. But neither did he have the courage to tell her it wasn’t necessary. She was feeding something into the oven, eggplant casserole. Twenty years ago, he’d told her that he would gladly eat it every night, and now she remembered that buried zeal. Her anxious smile when she looked up went right through him. “Good day?”

“Golden.” Something they used to say.

“How did the lecture go?”

“If you’re asking me , I believe there’s a distinct possibility that I was brilliant.” He took her in his arms too quickly, while she struggled to remove her oven mitt. “Have I told you that I’m absolutely mad about you?”

She giggled doubtfully and looked behind him. Who did she imagine might be coming? Who could he possibly be bringing home? “You have indeed. Yesterday, I believe.”

The TV show airs.But it’s strange. They’ve done something digital to Mark — run him through some kind of high-tech video filter. People who don’t know him would never suspect. But his friends, what few friends Mark Schluter has left, will think he’s some kind of stunt man stand-in.

The show gets the story mostly right, at least. They talk about the crash, the vehicle that cut in front of him, the one that ran off the road behind. And there’s a great moment when the handwritten note comes up and fills the screen, and they even have subtitles, in case you can’t read or something. I am no one. I am no one. Man, that could be anybody, these days. But there’s a cash award, like five hundred bucks. With the economy down the toilet again and the whole state on the dole, somebody’s bound to come forward and collect.

He’d like to sit around and wait for the phone to ring with anonymous tips, but there’s too much to do. The Kopy Karin comes by, all cranked because she heard about the show but missed it. When did you do this? Why didn’t you tell me? It’s a good performance; he pretty much believes she had no idea.

He’s got a plan to test her, something he’s been thinking about forever. He asks if she’d like to take a drive, out to Brome Road, the old abandoned farm his father once tried to run. The place he lived in from eight until almost fourteen. The place his sister always talked about like it was some kind of paradise lost. Her replacement seems to have been drilled on the routine. She’s bouncing like a girl as soon as the invitation is out of his mouth. You’d think he was asking her to the prom or something.

They drive out together, in her little Jap car. It’s weirdly warm, for two weeks before Christmas. He’s in his light-blue jacket, October gear. Greenhouse ecological catastrophe, probably. Well, enjoy the short-term bennies. She’s all stoked, like she hasn’t seen the place forever. Funny thing is, she probably hasn’t. They head up the long farmhouse driveway, and it’s like somebody dropped a neutron bomb on the front porch. All the windows, black and curtainless. The yard, a sea of tall grass and weeds, like some kind of prairie restoration project. There’s a black and orange NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to the porch, which is a joke. Nobody’s lived in the place for years. Truth be told, the Schluter family kind of ran the place into the ground, and no subsequent resident has been able to bring it back. Abandoned since ’99, but he’s never come prowling until now.

The barn is leaning hard to the right, like it’ll ditch if it gets hit by a little microwave radiation. But before they can pull up to it, Karin Two slams on the brakes. She’s all: Where’s the tree? The sycamore is gone. The one that you and Dad planted for my twelfth birthday. Well, it shakes him up, at first. She knows what they planted, when. But then, there’s the stump sitting right there. And anybody in town could’ve told her. Those fool Schluter men, planting a big water-sucking tree, when they don’t even have water table enough to keep their beans from getting singed.

He says: I heard they were taking it down, a while ago.

She turns on him, her eyes all hurt. Why didn’t you tell me?

Tell you? I didn’t even know you then.

She pulls over on the gravel and gets out. He follows her. She walks up to the stump and just stands there, in her baggy jeans, her hands in the pockets of her little brown leather jacket just like the one Karin One used to wear. She’s not a bad human being. She’s just gotten mixed up in bad business.

When did it go? she asks. Before or after Mom?

The question knocks him back a little. And not just her asking it. He’s not sure.

She looks at him, going: I know. It’s like she’s still around, isn’t it? Like she’s going to come out that side door with a plateful of pigs-in-blankets and threaten us with a belt whipping if we don’t say grace and eat.

Well, the words really creep him. But this is exactly why he’s brought her out here. To probe the limits. What else do you remember about her? he asks. And she starts unloading all kinds of stuff. Stuff only his sister knows. Things from when they were young, when Joan Schluter still looked like the original Betty Crocker. She goes: You remember how proud she was, about that award her family won when she was little?

He can’t help answering: Fitter Family Contest, Nebraska State Fair, 1951.

Run by some kind of national eugenics society, she says. Judging them on their teeth and hair, like they did the cows and pigs. And they got a gold medal!

Bronze, he corrects her.

Whatever. The point is, she spent the rest of her life pissed off at Cappy for polluting the gene pool and producing us.