Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“I’ll…look into that.”

“Give it back to the migratories. The birds can’t mess it up any worse than we have.”

Daniel smiled, despite himself. “You’re right, there. To really finish things off, you need human-sized brains.”

The word woke Mark up again. “Danny. Danny Boy. Speaking of brains and cranes? How come all their heads are red? You don’t find that weird? It’s like they’ve all been operated on. You should have seen me, man, with my bloody skull in a sling. Oh, wait: you did see me. I’m the one who didn’t see me.” He held that same battered head in his hands, split all over again. Riegel said nothing; he moved less than his little finger. The life-long expert tracker, reverting to form. Join yourself to where you are, and the creature will come to you, of its own accord.

Mark gathered himself for a leap of faith. “That woman you’re doing? She wants me to take these pills. Dope me up, I guess. Well, not exactly dope. If only it were that interesting. No, this stuff’s called Olestra. Ovaltine. Something like that. It’s supposed to give me ‘clarity.’ Make me feel more like myself. I don’t know who I’ve been feeling like, lately, but, man, it would be good to be off this ride.” He looked up at Daniel, a flicker of false hope begging to be confirmed. “Thing is, this could be Stage Three of whatever they’re trying to do to me. First, run me off the road. Second, take something out of my head while I’m on the operating table. Third, feed me some chemical ‘cure’ that changes me forever. Danny, you’re from the early days. The earliest. Okay, so we fucked up the friendship. Killed the past and wrecked fifteen years. But you never lied to me. I could always trust you — well, except for your impulses, which you couldn’t really help. I need advice on this. It’s tearing me apart. What would you do, man? Take this shit? See what happens? What would you do, if you were you?”

Daniel stared into his beer, drunk as a junior high schooler. Some other dizziness kicked in: What would he do, in Mark’s place? He’d sat in Gerald Weber’s hotel room with Karin, taking his predictable high moral stand. He might have changed tunes, had his own brother, just out of half a year of cocaine detox in Austin, suddenly refused to recognize him . Daniel Riegel: absurd with certainty. He might take this olanzapine, if the world turned strange on him, if he woke up, one day, sick of the river, blind to the birds, out of love with everything that had once been life. “It’s possible,” he mumbled. “You might want…”

A knock on the door saved him. Playful, familiar rhythm: Shave and a haircut, two bits. Daniel jumped, vaguely criminal.

“Now what?” Mark groaned, then shouted, “Come on in. It’s always open. Rob me blind. Who gives a damn?”

A shivering figure pushed inside: the woman that Karin had introduced to Daniel at the public hearing. Daniel sprang up, knocking the table and spilling his beer down his pants. A facial tic proclaimed his innocence. Mark, too, was on his feet, rushing the woman. He grappled her in a bear hug, which she, to Daniel’s amazement, returned.

“Barbie Doll! Where have you been? I was starting to panic about you.”

“Mr. Schluter! I was just here four days ago.”

“Oh, yeah. I guess. But that’s a long time ago. And only a short visit.”

“Stop whining. I could move in, and you’d still complain I was never around.”

Mark shot a look at Daniel, licking the canary feathers off his lips. “Well, we could give it a try. Purely for health-research purposes.”

She blew past him into the kitchen, struggling to remove her coat while holding out her hand to Daniel. “Hello, again.”

“Ho, ho-hold on a minute. You’re telling me the two of you know each other?”

She drew her chin back and frowned. “That’s the usual sense of ‘Hello, again.’”

“What in God’s name is going on? Everybody knows everybody. When worlds collide!”

“Now just cool your little heart. There’s an explanation for everything in this life, don’t you know.” She described the public hearing, how impressed she’d been with Daniel’s performance. The explanation quieted Mark. Daniel alone was unconvinced.

“I should go,” he said, flustered. “I didn’t realize you were expecting company.”

“Barbie? Barbie’s not company.”

“Don’t run,” Barbara said. “It’s just a social call.”

But something in Daniel was already running. On his way out the door, he told Mark, “Ask her . She’s a health professional.”

“Ask her what?” Mark said.

“Yeah,” Barbara echoed. “Ask me what?”

“Olanzapine.”

Mark grimaced. “She seems to think the decision is all mine.” As Daniel slipped through the door, Mark called after him, “Hey! Don’t be a stranger!”

Not until he got back to his apartment and checked his answering machine did Daniel Riegel, lifelong tracker, remember where he’d first heard Barbara Gillespie.

In the middle of February, the birds came back.Sylvie and Gerald Weber saw a late-night news feature on the cranes, lying in bed together in their snow-covered Setauket house on Chickadee Way. As the camera panned over the sandy banks of the Platte, husband and wife looked on in embarrassment. “That’s your place?” Sylvie asked. She couldn’t very well say nothing.

Weber grunted. His brain was wrestling with some blocked memory, some problem in identification that had been bothering him for eight months. But his thoughts pushed the near-solution farther away, the more he chased it. His wife misunderstood his preoccupation. She raised her knuckles to his upper arm and stroked. It’s all right. We two are past simplicity. Everyone’s messy. We can be, too.

The woman in front of the camera, a clumsily urbane New Yorker who seemed unnerved by so much emptiness, related the story as if it were news. “It’s been called one of the most spectacular shows of nature anywhere, and it stars half a million sandhill cranes. They start to arrive on Valentine’s Day, and most will be gone by St. Patrick’s…”

“Smart birds,” Sylvie said. “And great holiday observers.” Her husband nodded, peering at the screen. “Everybody’s Irish, huh?” Her husband said nothing. She clenched her jaw and rubbed his shoulder a little harder.

By Presidents’ Day, saluting everyone goodbye, Mark began the medication. Dr. Hayes doubled the dosage of the Australian case: a still-conservative 10 mg every night.

“So we should see some improvement in two weeks?” Karin suggested, as if any doctor’s agreement would be legally binding.

Dr. Hayes told her, in Latin, that they’d see what they would see. “Remember what we talked about. There may be some chance of social withdrawal.”

You can’t withdraw, she told the doctor, in American, if you’re not there to start with.

Four days later, at two in the morning, the phone tore Daniel and Karin out of a deep sleep. Naked, Daniel stumbled to the phone. He mumbled incoherently into the receiver. Or the incoherence was Karin’s, listening from the bed. Daniel stumbled back to her, bewildered. “It’s your brother. He wants to talk to you.”

Karin squeezed her eyes and shook herself. “He called here ? He talked to you?”

Daniel scrambled back under the covers. He turned the heat off at night, and now his naked body was going hypothermic. “I…we saw each other. We talked to each other, a little while ago.”

Karin grappled with the lucid nightmare. “When?”

“It doesn’t matter. A few days back.” He flicked his fingers: the ticking clock, the waiting phone, the story too long. “He wants to talk to you.”