Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“ Daniel .” She can’t take him in. They’ve lost. That’s what he’s saying. The fight is over. The river will be developed; more staging ground will vanish. He’s saying…but it’s impossible, what he’s saying. Quitting the Refuge. Leaping off into nothing. Death by disengagement.

“You can’t quit. You can’t let them give in to this.”

“What I can and can’t let happen does not seem to be the issue.”

She can make it the issue. Can get him back into the battle. One word from her and the Refuge will rescind whatever deal they have chosen to cut. But that one word kills any love he’s ever felt for her. He will see her in full light, at her most hideous. Stay silent, and she might even keep him, broken like this, needing her. He’d have nothing else but her care.

She thinks, for an instant, that she does this for the birds. For the river. Then she tells herself it’s to save this upright man. But she will save no one, no living thing. She will barely slow the humans, who can’t be stopped. She chooses from pure selfishness, as selfish as every human choice. He will hate her now, forever. But finally, he will know what she can give.

“It’s worse than you think,” she says. “The Outpost people, they’re planning a Phase Two. I know how the consortium will make money on the crane cabins, out of season. It’s…going to be called the Living Prairies Museum .”

She describes it to him in all its banality. “A zoo?” he asks. He can’t figure it. “They want to build a zoo ?”

“Indoor-outdoor. And it gets worse. I’ve found out why they need the extra river allocation shares. There’s also a Phase Three. A water park. Slides. Hydraulic fountains and sculptures, all with nature themes. A giant wave pool.”

“A water park?” He rubs his scalp, forehead to crown. He tugs at his ear, his mouth twisted. He giggles. “A water park, in the Great American Desert.”

“You have to let the Refuge know. They have to stop this.”

He doesn’t answer, only sits on one heel, the Virasan position, and stares at all the elaborate dishes she’s prepared. Now it will come out. Now she will pay, for all this saving. “How do you know about all this?”

“I saw the blueprints.”

His chin rises and falls and rises again. A kind of pungent nodding. “And you were going to tell me…when?”

“I just told you,” she says, palms up, pointing at the food, her proof. She’s ready to give him all the brutal details. But he doesn’t need them. He sees everything. He knows now what she’s been doing, all these weeks, better than she has known. She sits looking on herself, through his eyes. Almost a relief, his fatigue. He must have known for a long time. She braces for his recrimination, disgust — anything to feel clean again. His words blow her bracing away.

“You’ve been spying on us. You and your friend? Trading secrets. Some kind of double…”

“He’s not…Okay. I’m a whore. Say what you want. You’re right about me. A lying, devious bitch. But you have to believe one thing: Robert Karsh isn’t what I want in my life, Daniel. Robert Karsh can go…”

He looks at her as if she’s dropped on all fours and started barking. What she and other men have done is meaningless. Only the river matters. He looks at her, appalled. He can’t make out, let alone count, all the ways that she has betrayed the river. “I don’t give a fuck about Robert Karsh. You can do whatever you want with him.”

She reaches out with her palms, backing him up. “Wait. Who are you talking about?” If not Karsh. “Who did you mean, ‘your friend?’”

“You know who I mean.” He has lost all patience. “Their private investigator. Their hired researcher. Your friend Barbara.”

Her head snaps back. He has some lesion, some sickness worse than Mark’s. Cold little hands stroke at her. “Daniel?” She will run from the house and call for help.

“Pumping me at the hearing, to see how much I might have guessed.”

“What investigator ? She’s Mark’s old aide. She works at the rehab…”

“For what? Three dollars an hour? A woman who talks like that? A woman who acts like that? You make me sick,” he says, human at last.

A fork of panics. What is Barbara to him? She imagines some longstanding, secret explanation, something that locks her out. But the other fear is greater. Her face a snarl, she backs toward the apartment door.

He sees her confusion, and wavers. “Don’t tell me you don’t know…How much do you think you can hide?”

“I’m not hiding…”

“She called me, Karin. Her voice sounded familiar, the first time we ran into her. I talked to her on the phone, fourteen months ago. She called me, right around the time the developers started planning this thing. She pretended to be working on some news story. She asked me all about the Refuge, the Platte, the restoration work. And like an idiot I told her everything. When people want to talk about those birds, I trust them. More fool, me.” He stares past her, stilled, like some small thing dying in a blizzard.

“Wait. Daniel. That’s crazy. You’re saying she’s, what? An industrial spy? That she works at Dedham Glen as some kind of cover?”

“Spy? You would know, wouldn’t you? I’m saying I spoke to her. I answered her questions. I remember her voice.”

Birding by ear. “Well, you’re remembering wrong. Trust me on this one.”

“Yes? Trust you? On this one?” His head comes about, luffing. “And what else should I trust you on? You’ve been ratting me, laughing at me with your old sweet fuck for months…”

She swings away from him and presses her ears. His right cheek twitches. He squints and shakes his head.

“You’re going to sit there and deny this, after everything? Her name never came up, in all the secret conversations you were having with him? When you were meeting with him, telling them about us? About the Refuge?”

She moans and starts to break. He stands and crosses to the far side of the room, as far from her as possible, holding his elbow and pinching his mouth, waiting for her to be done. She breathes in, mouthful by mouthful, grappling for calm, pretending she is him. “I think I should go.”

“You’re probably right,” he says, and leaves the house.

She wanders about the apartment for a long time. Eventually she drifts to the bedroom and stuffs her clothes into a bag. He will come back and stop her, listen to her explanation. But he is as gone now as her brother. She goes to the kitchen, packs the meal in old bean sprout containers and sticks them in the refrigerator. She sits on the toilet lid in a daze, trying to read one of his meditation books, a crash course in transcendence. She sits at the front door, on the bags she has stuffed with her things. He’s outside somewhere, tracking, watching the building, waiting for her to go.

At twenty minutes to midnight she at last calls her brother’s friend. “Bonnie? I’m sorry to wake you. Can I crash at your place? Just a night or two. I’m nowhere. Nothing.”

Gerald Weber pulls alongside a cash machine in his third Nebraska rental. His hands shake, withdrawing far more money than he intends. From the airport, he heads on instinct back to that hotel where he is now a regular. Welcome Crane Peepers . Only now, the lobby is crawling with heavy, aging people in knit clothes carrying field guides and light binoculars. He himself has way overpacked, three times what he would ordinarily bring on a professional trip. He even carries the cell phone and digital recorder, a professional habit that should have died months ago, along with his professional pretenses. In his Dopp kit, alongside the Band-Aids and fold-up sewing sampler, he has packed ten different ingestibles, from ginkgo to DMAE.