Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Mark started laughing. At least it sounded like laughter, slowed to a crawl. Even Bonnie flinched. She stuttered and laughed, herself. She could think of nothing more to say. Her lips curdled, her cheeks flushed, and her eyes filled with tears.

It came time for Karin to change Mark’s shoes and socks, the old circulation ritual from bed-bound weeks that she kept up because she had nothing else to do. Mark sat docile as she removed his Converse All-Stars. Bonnie pulled herself together and helped with the other foot. Holding Mark’s bare feet, she asked, “Want me to do your toes?”

He seemed to mull over the idea.

“You want to paint his…? He’d have a fit.”

“Just for fun. It’s something we’ve played with, in the past. He loves it. Calls them his hind claws. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s really not that kinky. Marker?”

He didn’t move his head or blink. “He loves it,” he said, his voice thick and sad. Bonnie clapped her hands and looked at Karin. Karin shrugged. The girl dove into her fringed bag, digging out a supply of nail polish stashed away for just this possibility. Bonnie made Mark lie back and surrender his feet to the process. “Iced Cherry? How about Bruise? No. Frostbite? Frostbite it is.”

Karin sat and watched the ritual. She’d come back six years too late to help Mark. Whatever she did for him now, however far she rehabilitated him, he would return to this. “I’ll be right back,” she promised, and left the room. Coatless, she cut a surveyor’s line to the Shell station she’d been daydreaming about for a week. She pasted a sum on the counter and asked for a pack of Marlboros. The cashier laughed at her: two dollars short. Six years since she’d thought of buying a cigarette, and the price had doubled while she was stupidly staying clean. She made up the difference and dragged the prize outside. She put one to her lips, already buzzing from the taste of the filter. With a shaking hand, she lit it and drew in. A cloud of indescribable relief expanded in her lungs and inked into her limbs. Eyes closed, she smoked half the cigarette, then carefully stubbed it out and slipped the unsmoked half back into the pack. When she returned to the hospital, she sat on a cold bench in the horseshoe drive, just outside the sliding glass doors, and smoked the other half. She would brake her descent as much as possible, a long, slow ride back to exactly where she’d been before her six brutally won years. But she’d savor every baby step back down into enslavement.

In Mark’s room, the pedicure was wrapping up. Mark sat on the bed, studying his toes the way a sloth might study a film of a tree branch. Bonnie fluttered about him, twittering. “Perfect timing,” she told Karin. “Could you take our picture?” Bonnie rooted through her magic bag and produced a disposable camera. She lined up alongside Mark’s hind claws, the lime of her eyes wildly complimenting the purple she’d applied to him.

As Karin swung the plastic viewfinder up to her eye, her brother smiled. Who knew what he knew? Karin couldn’t even vouch for Bonnie.

Blissful Bonnie retrieved her camera. “I’ll make copies for you both.” She rubbed Mark’s shoulder. “We’re going to have a lot of fun when you’re one hundred percent together again.”

He grinned and studied her. Then one hand shot out for her sweater-covered breasts while the other grabbed his crotch. Syllables dripped from his mouth: Fork, fuck a fox, sock suck cunt me …

She squealed, jumped back, and swatted away his hand. She clutched her chest and caught her breath, shaking. The shaking turned to high-strung giggles. “Well, maybe not that much fun.” But she kissed his healing skull as she left. “Love you, Marker!” He tried to stand up and follow her. Karin held him back, petting and calming him until he shrugged her off and swung away onto the bed, arching upward, his eyes full of pain. Karin followed Bonnie out into the hallway. Around the door frame, out of sight, Bonnie stood crying.

“Oh, Karin! I am so sorry. I tried my hardest to be up. I had no idea. They told me to be ready for anything. But not this.”

“It’s okay,” Karin lied. “This is just how he is right now.”

Bonnie insisted on a long embrace, which Karin returned, for her brother’s sake.

Pulling away at last, Karin asked, “Do you know what happened that…? Did the boys tell you anything…?”

Bonnie waited, eager to answer anything. But Karin just turned away and let her go. Back in the room, she found Mark on the bed, leaning back on his arms, head tilted up, inspecting the ceiling, as if he’d paused while exercising and forgot to resume living.

“Mark? I’m back. Just the two of us again. Are you all right?”

“One hundred percent,” he said. “Back together.” He shook his head sagely and turned toward her. “Maybe not that much fun.”

First he’s nowhere, then he’s not.The change steals over, one life stepping through another. Just as he crosses back, he sees the nowhere he’s been. Not even a place until feeling flows in. And then, he loses all the nothing he was.

Here is a bed he lives in. But a bed bigger than the town. He lies along its giant length, a whale in the street. Beached creature blocks long. Off-beam ocean thing come back to life-crushing weight, dying of gravity.

Nothing large enough to carry him here or lift him away. Flattened belly running the whole road length. Flukes snagged on fences, stabbed by sharp tree peaks. Lying alongside white wooden boxes with pitched roofs, smoke curling from crayon chimneys, a child’s scribbled home .

This whale is pain, and searing cold. Bursts of fact his skin tells him. Planted in this flat prairie, dumped by a wave that went out too fast. Great jaws bigger than a garage flap on the ground, sounding. Every cry from the cavern throat shakes walls and breaks windows. Far away, blocks down — the stranded beast’s tail flaps. Hemmed in by houses, pinned by this instant low tide.

Miles of air above press down so hard the whale can’t breathe. Can’t lift his own lungs. Dying in dried ocean, smothered underneath the thing it now must inhale. Largest living thing, almost God, stretched out flat, muscles beaten. Only his heart, as big as the courthouse, keeps pounding.

He wants death, if he wants anything. But death rolls away with the retreating water. His breathing is an earthquake. The whale gasps and rolls, crushing lives underneath it, as it is crushed by air. Storms rage in its head. Spears and cables drape down his sides. His skin peels off in sheets of blubber.

Weeks, months, and the groans of the rotting mountain of animal subside. The scattered town drifts back. Tiny, land-born lives poke at the monster with pins and needles, hack at him, reclaiming their crushed homes. Birds pick at his decaying flesh. Squirrels tear off chunks, bury them for the coming winter. Coyotes polish his bones to shining ivory. Cars drive under his huge, vaulting ribs. Stoplights hang from the knobs of his spine.

Soon, his bones sprout branches and leaves. Residents crawl through him, seeing no more than street, stone, trees.

His parts come back to him, so slowly he can’t know. He lies in the shrinking bed, taking stock. Ribs: yes. Belly: check. Arms: two. Legs: too. Fingers: many. Toes: maybe. He does this always, with changing results. Makes a list of himself, like old rebuilt machines. Remove. Clean. Replace. List again.

The place that threw him away now wants him back too bad. People push sounds on him, endless free samples. Words, by the way people say them. How how how now now now? Something he might hear in the fields at night, if he stopped to listen. Mark mark mark, they make him. Cackles, copying with every new user. No use. Silence can’t cover him. They read him off of papers, speak him out. They merge him, move him on, make him up from scratch. Words without tongue. He, tongue without words.