Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Doesn’t matter ?” She tore the gray army-surplus blanket off the bed. “It’s true, isn’t it? You loved him. I mean, love . He was the only reason you…I was never anything more than…” She wrapped the wool blanket around her shoulders and turned her back on him, fumbling for the phone in the dark. “Mark? Are you all right?”

“I know what happened to me during the operation.”

“Tell me.” Still drugged with sleep.

“I died. I passed away on the operating table, and none of the doctors noticed.”

Her voice came out of her, thin, pleading. “Mark?”

“It clarifies a bunch of stuff that made no sense. Why everything has seemed so… far . I resisted the idea because, well, obviously, someone would realize, right? If you weren’t alive? Then it hit me: How would they know? I mean, if nobody saw it happen…I mean, it just now occurred to me , and I’m the one who’s in the middle of it!”

She talked with him for a long time, first reasoning, then irrational, just trying to comfort him. He was panicked; he didn’t know how to “get properly dead.” He spoke of messing up the transition—“I scattered the deck”—and now there seemed no way to get things back into the right sequence.

“I’m coming over right now, Mark. We can figure this out, together.”

He laughed, as only the dead can laugh. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep overnight. Haven’t started rotting yet.”

“Are you sure?” she kept asking. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

“You can’t get worse than dead.”

She was afraid to hang up. “How do you feel?”

“Okay, actually. Better than I felt when I thought I was still alive.”

Back in the bedroom, Daniel held one of the neuroscience books that Karin had perpetually renewed from the library. “I’ve found it,” he said. “Cotard’s syndrome.”

She threw the gray wool blanket back on the bed and crawled under it. She’d read all about it, had spent a year exploring every horror the brain allowed. Another misidentification delusion, perhaps an extreme form of Capgras. Unrecognized death: the only possible explanation for feeling so cut off from everyone. “How can he get it now ? After a year? Just when he’s started the treatment.”

Daniel killed the light and crawled in next to her. He put his hand on her side. She flinched. “Maybe it’s the medication,” he suggested. “Maybe he’s having some kind of reaction.”

She spun around to face him in the blackness. “Oh my God. Is that possible? We need to get him back under observation. First thing tomorrow.”

Daniel agreed.

She froze in thought. “Shit. Jesus. How could I forget?”

“What? What is it?” He tried to rub her shoulders, but she pulled away.

“His wreck. One year ago today. It completely slipped my mind.”

She lay down and pretended stillness for something like an hour. At last she got up. “I’m going to take something,” she whispered.

“Not this late,” he said.

She went into the bathroom and closed the door. She didn’t come out for so long that he finally followed her. He knocked on the bathroom door, but there was no answer. He opened it. She sat on the closed toilet lid, glaring at him, even before he entered. “You saw him? You talked with him? And you never told me. It’s him for you, isn’t it? I’m nothing but his sister, am I?”

Dr. Hayes examined Mark, baffled, but fascinated. He listened as Mark announced, “I’m not saying it’s a cover-up. I’m just saying that nobody noticed. You can see how it might happen. But I’m telling you, Doc, I never felt like this when alive.”

He scheduled Mark for another scan, for the first week in March. Mark, weirdly compliant, left to see the lab techs. “It can’t be the medication,” Hayes told Karin. “There’s nothing like this in the literature.”

“Literature,” she repeated, everything fictional. She could feel the neurologist, already writing up this new wrinkle for publication.

The Cotard’s diagnosis changed nothing substantial. Now that Mark had started the olanzapine, Dr. Hayes insisted that he continue without missing any doses. Could Karin vouch that he’d kept with the medication schedule, exactly as given? She could not, but did. Did she feel able to continue supervising her brother, or would she like to put Mark back into Dedham Glen? Continue supervising, Karin said. She had no choice. The insurance coverage would not pay for re-admission.

She couldn’t afford to increase her hours out at Farview. Already, there weren’t enough hours in the week for the Refuge. What had begun as an invented job, the charity of a man who wanted to keep her nearby, had turned real. It was no longer even a question of meaningful work, of self-fulfillment. As absolutely delusional as it would have sounded to say aloud to anyone, she now knew: water wanted something from her.

Desperate, she called Barbara and asked for help in covering. “It’s only for a few days, until the medication kicks in and he pulls out of this.” The goals of care had changed. She no longer needed Mark to recognize her. She only needed him to believe he was alive.

“Of course,” Barbara said. “Anything. For however long he might need it.”

The woman’s willingness stung her. “It’s a crazy time at the Refuge,” Karin explained. “Things are heating up with…”

“Of course,” Barbara said. “Someone should probably be there at night. Nights are probably bad for him, right now.” Her voice hinted willingness, even that far. But that much Karin refused to ask of her. If the night shift couldn’t be Karin, it wouldn’t be Barbara, either.

Karin called Bonnie, the only real choice. She got the infectious answering machine— I wish I was here to talk to you for real —in that cheerful treble that sounded like the horn of a Ford Focus on mood elevators. Karin tried twice more, but couldn’t bring herself to leave a message. Would you mind spending nights at my brother’s for a little while? He thinks he’s a dead man . Even by Kearney standards, something you’d want to ask in person. At last, Karin went out to the Arch, on Bonnie’s shift. Karin hadn’t yet bothered to take a look. Sixty-five million dollars to turn her great-grandparents into the Cartoon Channel and to trick people on their way to California in their Navigators into thinking there was something here worth stopping for.

She paid her $8.25, pushed past the life-size pioneer figures, and rode up the escalator through the covered wagon, surrounded by giant murals. She spotted Bonnie near the sod house exhibit, in her calico dress and poke bonnet, talking to a group of schoolchildren in a bizarre, old-fashiony voice — an MTV version of Ma Kettle. Seeing Karin, Bonnie broke into a big wave and, in the same fake-archaic voice, called out, “Hiya!” She picked clinging first-graders off her skirt and joined Karin in the Pawnee exhibit, calico alongside Tencel.

“He’s convinced he died and no one noticed,” Karin told her.

Thought soured Bonnie’s nose. “You know? I felt that way myself, once.”

“Bon? Do you think you could stay with him for a bit? At the Homestar? Just for the next few nights?”

The girl’s eyes went wide as a lemur’s. “With Marker? ’Course!” She answered as if the question were itself deranged. And last of anyone again, Karin saw how things were.

Arrangements firmed; the women each took a shift, with Mark indifferent to the measures all around him. “Whatever,” Mark told Karin, when she described the arrangements. “Knock yourself out. Can’t hurt me. I’m already gone.”