Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Well, how the hell should I know? She was always changing it around.

Karin Two puts a hand on his wrist, stops his arms. She tries to look him in the eye. What was she like? Tell me what…she was like.

Who? You mean my sister? You’re really interested in my sister?

Gone so long that she can’t ever be coming back. And something must be wrong with Mark Schluter, something from the accident that not even the hospital knows about, because he stands there bawling like a goddamned child.

They stood alone togetherin the abandoned Brome house, reconstructing the past they no longer shared. There came a moment, amid the trashed rooms and shaky memories, when it struck Karin that they’d have that day, at least, that one sunlit afternoon of confusion in common, if nothing else. And when her brother started to cry and she moved to console him, he let her. A thing they’d never had, before.

They went outside, into the warm December. They walked the length of their father’s old field, not knowing who farmed it now. In the crush of stubble under their feet, she felt those summer mornings, waking before daylight, going out to walk beans while the dew was still on them, hacking weeds with a hoe so sharp she once almost sliced off her big toe, right through the leather of her work boot.

Mark tagged alongside, head down. She felt him struggling and was afraid to say a word, afraid to be anyone, least of all Karin Schluter. Oddest of all, she was okay with holding back. She’d gotten used to the doubling, to being this woman . It let her start from scratch with him, even while the other Karin improved so drastically in his memory. A chance to rewrite the record: in fact, two chances at once.

They rolled over the stubbly black rise. She felt all over again, as she had as a child, the vicious treelessness of this place. Not a scrap of cover in sight. Do anything at all, and God would spy you out. Off on a slight crest in the middle distance, cars and trucks whipped back and forth on the interstate like scythes. She turned to look at the house. This time next year, it would be gone, collapsed or bulldozed, never to have existed. The open-book roof, the slanting cellar door propped up against the brick foundation, the square-shouldered white stump of a box, jutting up from the bare horizon. Protection from nothing.

“You remember when you and Dad tried to clean out that backed-up cistern?”

He pounded his head, as if the disaster had just happened. “Don’t remind me about shit you can’t know.”

She didn’t know how hard to push. “Remember when your sister ran away?”

He folded his hands over the crown of his head, to keep it from flying off. He started walking again, studying the rill in the soil that his feet followed. “She was a godsend, all those years growing up. She kept me out of a heap of death. Oh, she had her little quirks. Don’t we all? But she just wanted to be loved.”

“Don’t we all?” Karin echoed.

“You two really are a lot alike. She used to sleep around a bit, too.” She swung toward him, violent. He gaped back, mocking. “Hey, chill. I’m just bashing you. Man, you are even easier to get a rise out of than she was.” She slapped him in the chest with the back of her hand. He just laughed that mirthless laugh. “But, hey, I have to ask you — that guy you’re currently doing?”

She dropped her eyes and studied the plow cut. Which one?

“Why are you with him, anyway? Is he entirely sexually normal?”

She couldn’t help snickering. “What’s normal, Mark?”

“Normal? Man, woman, front door. Nothing that’s going to get you arrested.”

“He’s…pretty normal.”

Mark stopped and knelt down on the ground, over a dried carcass. He prodded it with his toe. “Pocket gopher,” he declared. “Poor thing.”

She pulled him away. “What do you have against Daniel, anyway? You were such deep friends, all those years. What happened?”

“What ‘happened’?” Mark traced the quotes in the air. “I’ll tell you what ‘happened.’ He tried to queer me. Out of the blue. Sexual harassment.”

“Mark! Come on. I don’t believe you. When did this happen?”

He spun around and raised his hands. “How am I supposed to know? Like, November 20, 1988, five o’clock in the afternoon?”

“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.