Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“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, jerking 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 itselfas 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.