Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

She surrenders him again to the health professionals, to the chemical correctives now dripping into his limp arms. She slips down her own Glasgow Scale. She can focus on nothing. Her concentration strays for hours at a stretch. At last she sees why her brother stopped recognizing her. Nothing to recognize. She has twisted herself past recognition. One small deceit laid on another, until even she can’t say where she stands or who she’s working for. Things she’s waffled on, denied, and lied about, things she’s hidden even from herself. All things to all people. Doing a conservationist and a developer at the same time. Making herself over, personality du jour. Imagination, even memory, all too ready to accommodate her, whoever her is. Anything for a scratch behind the ears. Scratch from anyone.

She is nothing. No one. Worse than no one. Blank at the core.

She must change her life. From the mess of her fouled nest, salvage something. Anything. The slightest, drab, creeping thing: it makes no difference, so long as it’s uncompromised and wild. She may be too late to get her brother back. But she might still rescue her brother’s sister.

She buries herself in legwork for the Refuge, researching her pamphlets. Something to wake sleepwalkers and make the world strange again. The least dose of life science, a few figures in a table, and she begins to see: people, desperate for solidity, must kill anything that exceeds them. Anything bigger or more linked, or, in its bleak enduring, a little more free. No one can bear how large the outside is, even as we decimate it. She has only to look, and the facts pour out. She reads, and still can’t believe: twelve million or more species, less than a tenth of them counted. And half will snuff out in her lifetime.

Crushed by data, her senses come weirdly alive. The air smells like lavender, and even the drab, late-winter browns feel more vivid than they have since sixteen. She’s hungry all the time, and the futility of her work doubles her energy. Her connections race. She’s like that case in Dr. Weber’s last book, the woman with fronto-temporal dementia who suddenly started producing the most sumptuous paintings. A kind of compensation: when one brain part is overwhelmed, another takes over.

The web she glimpses is so intricate, so wide, that humans should long ago have shriveled up and died of shame. The only thing proper to want is what Mark wanted: to not be, to crawl down the deepest well and fossilize into a rock that only water can dissolve. Only water, as solvent against all toxic run-off, only water to dilute the poison of personality. All she can do is work, try to return the river to those we’ve stolen it from. Everything human and personal horrifies her now, everything except this doomed pamphleteering.

Water wants something from her. Something only consciousness can deliver. She is nothing, as toxic as anything with an ego. A sham; a pretense. Nothing worth recognizing. But still, this river needs her, its liquid mind, its way of surviving…

The world fills with luxuries she can’t afford. Sleep is one of them. When she does succumb, she and Daniel still share a bed. But touching has stopped, except by accident. He meditates more now, sometimes an hour at a shot, just to escape all the damage she has done him. She has battered him with betrayals; he absorbs the battering, as he absorbs all the race’s insults. He seems to her now a man who might absorb anything, someone who, alone of everyone she knows, has put away vanity and looked past himself. And this is what she has so resented in him. Of all the men she has ever been with, he now seems the only one fluid enough to be a decent father, to teach a child about everything outside us that must be recognized. But he would sooner die than bring another estranged human into this world. Another like her.

He should have thrown her out months ago. No reason why he hasn’t. Maybe only residual love for her brother. Or just the care he extends to any creature. She must seem hideous to him, clutching, a brittle little shell of need. He can’t want her, and never really did. Yet he remains stubbornly if silently decent to her in all things. Her brother has almost died, and this man alone knows what that means. This man alone might help her cope. She lies in bed, her spine eight inches from his, aching just to reach back with one blind palm and touch the warm of him. Prove that he’s still there.

The third day after Mark’s attempt, the Development Council indicates its willingness in principle to grant the Central Platte Scenic Natural Outpost the right to purchase water shares. She has dreaded the decision for weeks, but never really believed it would come. The combined Platte preservation groups respond in numb disarray. They’ve lost their footrace with the developers’ consortium, and in a series of hasty meetings, the alliance begins to crumble.

If the decision demoralizes her, it crushes Daniel. He says nothing about the judgment but curt, stoic maxims. He finds the council beneath condemning. Something withers in him, some basic willingness to go on fighting a species that won’t be rehabilitated and can’t be beaten. He won’t talk to her about it, and she has lost her right to press him.

She needs to square things by him. To fix one thing, for one real person, in all the debacle of recent days. Redeem his ill-placed trust and return something to the one man who loves her brother as much as she does.

She has one thing she can give him, one thing only. The thing water wants. She almost talks herself into believing that she has worked toward this, all these months, just to be able to give it to him now. She knows what the gift will cost her; he will learn who she is, and wash his hands of her. The other man, too. She will lose them both, everything that she has perjured herself to get. But she can give Daniel something worth far more than herself.

She spends the day preparing him a vegan feast: broccoli almond seitan, skordalia, and coriander chutney. Even tahini rice pudding, for the man who considers dessert a sin. She flies around the kitchen, mixing and assembling, feeling almost steady. Blessed distraction, and the most effort she has expended on him since moving in. She’s done nothing for him, while he has tended to her every crisis. She has let their life be overgrown by the weed of her personality. Is it so impossible to be someone else, to make him a grateful meal for once? Even if it is their last.

Daniel blows in on a cloud of distraction. He struggles to make sense of the feast. “What is all this? Some occasion?”

It stings, but she needs it to. “There’s always occasion.”

“True. Well.” His smile is crucified. He sits and spreads his hands, stunned at all the food. He hasn’t even taken off his coat. “My separation party, then.”

She stops licking rice pudding off her finger. “What do you mean?”

He’s placid, head bowed. “Quit the job.”

She holds the counter, her head shaking. She drops onto the stool across from him. “What do you mean? What are you saying?” He can’t stop his work. Impossible: like a hummingbird on a hunger strike.

He’s expansive, almost amused. “Split with the Refuge. An ideological parting of the ways. They seem to have decided that this whole crane theme park isn’t so bad after all. Something they can work with. Compromise is the better part of valor, you know. They’re circulating a memo saying that, properly run, the Outpost might even be beneficial for the birds!”

A thing she herself believed in, well past the public hearing. “Oh, Daniel. No. You can’t let this happen.”

He tilts an eyebrow at her. “Don’t worry. I’ve covered for you. Already talked it out with them. You can go on working there. They won’t hold it against you that you’re my…that you and I…”