Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Might have been with the other man. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have called.” To placate him, she told him everything.

He listened, but was no help. “Who called the accident in? Rupp and Cain? Not the other car? I thought it was this guardian…?”

“Maybe they both called in.”

“But I thought the police said…”

“I don’t know, Daniel.”

“But if the other car didn’t stop, why the note? Taking credit, for leaving the scene…?”

“I have to sleep,” she explained. It was too late to call Mark and Bonnie. She didn’t know what she would say, anyway. What her brother could handle.

She woke the next morning to the raging phone. The room was ablaze with light and Daniel had already left for the Refuge. She dragged herself up, out of animal dreams. “I’m coming. Hold on a minute, please. You checking up on me or something?”

But when she lifted the receiver, the voice at the other end was thin and spectral. “Karin? It’s Bonnie. He’s having some kind of seizure, and I can’t get him out.”

It had to be the hospital, again.A year’s long loop back to where he was, this time last March. Some migrating thing that can’t know any better. Mark Schluter back in Good Samaritan, not the same ward, but close enough. Restrained in bed, post-toxic, 450 mg of olanzapine flushed from his body.

A dead man has tried to kill himself: the only way to fit things back together. Dystonic by the time the paramedics reached him. Intubation and gastric lavage, rushed to the hospital for intravenous fluids and cardiovascular monitoring, watched over by a staff who will ensure that he won’t try leaving again.

He comes out of his second coma, a mere figment of the first. Conscious again, he refuses all attempts to communicate except to say, “I want to talk to Shrinky. I’ll only talk to Shrinky.”

Dr. Hayes calls Weber with the news. Weber receives the report like a verdict, the fruit of his long, self-serving ambition. He calls Mark at once, but Mark refuses to talk. “No phones,” Mark tells the shift nurse. Every phone line is tapped. Every cable and satellite. “He’s got to come here, in person.”

Weber makes several more efforts at contact, all without result. Mark is out of danger, at least for now. Weber has already entered into the case beyond the bounds of professional correctness. His last trip almost finished him. Any more involvement, and he’ll be done.

But something in the neuroscientist now sees: responsibility has no limits. The case histories you appropriate are yours. If he does nothing, if he refuses the boy’s one request, if he abandons now what he has bungled so badly, then he surely is what his darkest voices already declare him. Tried to kill himself, because of me. No choice but return. Some long loop, back again. Tour Director makes him.

No way to tell his wife. Tell Sylvie. After what he has already told her, any given reason will seem the worst of self-deceptions. She, who would not stretch out a hand now if Gerald Weber, celebrity author, tainted saint of neural insight, were burnt in effigy for bogus empathy: no possible way to explain to her.

He braces for her response, but nothing prepares him for how badly his announcement shakes the woman. She takes it like some numb Cassandra who already guesses everything he hasn’t yet admitted. “What can you do for him? Anything the doctors out there can’t?”

She asked him that question, a year ago. He should have listened to her then. He should listen now. He shakes his head, his mouth a mail slot. “Nothing I can think of.”

“Haven’t you done enough, already?”

“That’s the problem. The olanzapine was my idea.”

She sits down hard in the breakfast nook. But still she masters herself, horribly true to form. “It wasn’t your idea that he take two weeks’ dosage at once.”

“No. You’re right. That one wasn’t mine.”

“Don’t do this to me, Gerald. What are you proving? You’re a good man. As good as your words. Why won’t you believe that? Why can’t you just…?”

She stands and circles. She waits for him to raise the issue. She extends him that grim respect, wholly unearned. She will assume the woman is nothing, irrelevant, until he tells her otherwise. Will believe in him, even without trust. He must say something. But he can’t grace the fact, even by dismissing it.

All things come down to belief. Belief in a gossamer too ephemeral to fool anyone. That will be the holy grail of brain studies: to see how tens of billions of chemical logic gates all sparking and damping each other can somehow create faith in their own phantom loops. “He’s in agony. He wants to talk to me. He needs something from me.”

“And you? What do you need?” Her eyes probe him, bitterly. She looks palsied and pale, suffering from her own overdose.

He answers, almost. “It costs me nothing. Some frequent flyer miles, a couple of days, and a few hundred out of the research account.” She shakes her head at him, the closest she can come to derision. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I need to do this. I’m not an exploiter. Not an opportunist.”

She has stood by, supportive, kept a hard-won poise these last few months, throughout his steady dissolving act. Every drop in his self-confidence has hammered her. “No,” she says, fighting for composure. She crosses to him; her hands scrabble at his shirt. “I don’t like this, Man. This is wrong. This is messed up.”

“Don’t worry,” he says. As soon as the words leave his mouth, he feels the ridiculousness. The self is a burning house; get out while you can. He sees his wife, really sees her, for the first time since he stopped believing in his work. Sees the pea-green amphibian puckers under her eyes, the withering of her upper lip — when did she grow old? He sees in her flinching gaze how he frightens her. She can’t make him out. She’s lost him. “Don’t worry.”

She shrinks from his words in disgust. “What the hell do you need? You need Famous Gerald? Famous Gerald can go hang himself. Do you need people to say that you…?” She bites into her lower lip and looks away. When she speaks again, it’s like a newscaster. “Will you be doing any sightseeing while you’re there?” Her face is bloodless, but her voice is casual. “Any old friends?”

“I don’t know. It’s a small town.” And then — the debt of thirty years — he corrects himself. “I’m not sure. It’s likely.”

She pushes away and crosses to the refrigerator. Her businesslike movement destroys him. She opens the freezer and removes two pieces of tilapia, to thaw for dinner. She takes the fish to the sink and runs cold water over them. “Gerald?” Idly curious, trying for acceptance, and missing by a cold mile. “Can you just tell me why?”

He deserves her fury, even desires it. But not this calm acceptance. Gerald: just tell me why. So you will think well of me again. “I’m not sure,” he tells her. Repeating that in his mind, until he makes it true.

Mark left no note before swallowing his antipsychotics. How could he, already dead? But even that lack of message accuses Karin. All this year he has called for her help, and all along she has failed him. Failed him in every way: failed to confirm his past, failed to permit his present, failed to recover his future.

The old Schluter craziness settles on her, the inheritance she’s never been able to shed. Her first identity: guilty and deficient, whatever else she manages. She visits Mark in the hospital. She even brings Daniel, Mark’s oldest nonimaginary friend. But Mark refuses to talk to either of them. “Can you two just respectfully leave me to rot here in peace?” It’s Shrinky or no one.