Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Once, he’d studied an otherwise healthy man who thought that stories turned real. People spoke the world into being. Even a single sentence launched events as solid as experience. Journey, complication, crisis, and redemption: just say the words and they took shape.

For decades, that case haunted everything Weber wrote about. That one delusion— stories came true —seemed like the germ of healing. We told ourselves backward into diagnosis and forward into treatment. Story was the storm at the cortex’s core. And there was no better way to get at that fictional truth than through the haunted neurological parables of Broca or Luria — stories of how even shattered brains might narrate disaster back into livable sense.

Then the story changed. Somewhere, real clinical tools rendered case histories merely colorful. Medicine grew up. Instruments, images, tests, metrics, surgery, pharmaceuticals: no room left for Weber’s anecdotes. And all his literary cures turned to circus acts and Gothic freak shows.

Once, he knew a man who thought that telling other people’s stories might make them real again. Then others’ stories remade him. Illusion, loss, humiliation, disgrace: just say the words and they happened. The man himself had arisen from doctored accounts; Weber had invented him out of whole cloth. The complete history and physical: fabricated. Now the text unravels. Even the case’s name— GeraldW. — sounds like the feeblest of pseudonyms.

He finds himself standing beside Mark’s bed, looking for redemption. The boy pleads with him. “Doc. What kept you? I thought you were dead. Deader than I was.” His speech is slow and fumbling. “You heard what happened?” Weber doesn’t answer. “Tried to off myself. And as far as anybody can tell, maybe not for the first time.”

The words pull Weber down onto the bedside chair. “How are you feeling now?”

Mark opens his elbows, displaying the IV tube running into his left arm. “Well, I’m going to start feeling better real soon, whether I want to or not. Yep, they’re going to bring me back to myself. Mark Three. You know there’s talk of electroshock?”

“I…” Weber starts. “I think you must have gotten that wrong. Misunderstood.”

“Yep, EST. ‘Very mild,’ they tell me. I’ll walk out of this place happy as a clam. Good as new. And I won’t remember the first thing of what I know now. What I’ve figured out.” He flails and grabs Weber by the wrist. “Which is why I have to talk to you. Now. While I still can.”

Weber takes the heel of Mark’s hand in his, and Mark suffers it. The boy is that desperate. When Mark speaks, his voice is pleading.

“You saw me, not long after the accident. You ran tests on me and such. We talked all about your theory, the whole lesion idea, the right posterior thing getting split off from the almond thing. The Miggy?”

Weber sits back, shocked at Mark’s recall. He himself had forgotten their conversation. “Amygdala.”

“You know?” Mark pulls his hand from Weber’s and fakes a feeble grin. “I was sure, back then, when you told me that, that you’d lost your fucking mind.” He squeezes his eyes and shakes his head. Time’s running out. He’s losing his insight to a chemical cocktail seeping into his arms. He can’t quite name the thing he needs to say. The struggle runs the length of his body. He wrestles to grasp the thing that stands just three feet out of reach. “My brain, all those split parts, trying to convince each other. Dozens of lost Scouts waving crappy flashlights in the woods at night. Where’s me ?”

Weber could tell stories. The sufferers of automatism, their bodies moving without consciousness. The metamorphopsias, plagued by oranges the size of beach balls and pencils the size of matchsticks. The amnesiacs. The owners of vivid, detailed memories that never happened. Me is a rushed draft, pasted up by committee, trying to trick some junior editor into publishing it. “I don’t know,” Weber says.

“ Now you tell me…” Mark’s face crumples again, twisted by thought. No question he might come up with could be worth so much distress. But this is what Weber has flown thirteen hundred miles to hear. Mark’s voice drops, concealed. “Do you think it’s possible…? Could somebody be completely messed up and not have the slightest notion…? And still feel just like they’ve always…?”

It isn’t possible, Weber wants to say. It’s certain. Obligatory. “You’ll feel better,” he says. “More whole than you do now.” Reckless promise. He’d be on the drug himself if that were true.

“I’m not talking about me,” Mark hisses. “I’m talking about everybody else. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands: cases where, unlike mine, the operation actually worked. Everybody walking around without the foggiest idea.”

Weber’s hairs stiffen. Piloerection, old evolutionary holdover— goose flesh . “What operation?”

Mark is wild now. “I need you, Shrinky. There’s no one else can tell me. All the little brain parts, chattering to each other? Those packs of Cub Scouts?”

Weber nods.

“Can you cut one out? One? Without killing the troop?”

“Yes.”

The relief is immediate. Mark slips down on his pillow. “Can you put one in? You know. Kidnap a Scout, stick another in his place? Same basic crappy flashlight, waving around in the dark?”

More goose flesh. “Tell me what you mean.”

Mark drapes his palms over his eyes. “‘Tell me what you mean.’ The man wants to know what I mean.” He twists his head bitterly. The voice drops again. “I mean transplants. Cross-species mix and match.”

Xenotransplantation. An article on the subject in JAMA , last month. The growing body of experiments — bits of cortex from one animal transplanted into another, taking on the properties of the host area. Mark must have heard about these, in the bastardized, garbled way that science reaches everyone.

“They put ape parts into people, right? Why not birds? Their little almond thing for our little almond thing.”

Weber needs only say no, as gently and fully as possible. But something in him wants to say: no need to swap. Already there, inherited. Ancient structures, still in ours.

He owes it to Mark, at least to ask. “Why would they want to do this?”

Mark’s all over the question. “It’s part of a bigger deal. A whole development thing, on the drawing boards for a long time. Bird City. Capitalize on the animals. The next big business, you see? Figure out how to move bits back and forth. Cranes to humans. Vice versa. Like you say: a Cub Scout more or less and you’re still the same troop. Still feel like yourself. It would have worked on me, too, but something went wrong.”

Something communicates through Mark. Something primeval that Weber must hear before the dripping chemicals seal this boy-man back up into the human. There’s only this minute. Only now. “But…what is the operation trying to accomplish?”

“They’re trying to save the species.”

“Which species?”

The question surprises Mark. “Which species?” Shock gives way to that booming, hollowed-out laugh. “That’s a good one. Which species?” He falls silent, deciding.

In Bonnie Travis’s turn-of-the-century hip-flask of a bungalow, the two women barely have room to slide past each other. Karin apologizes at every chance, washes dishes that aren’t even dirty. Bonnie chides her. “Come on! It’s like camping. Our little soddie.”

In truth, the girl has been a blessing, mindlessly cheerful and distracting. Bonnie keeps them entertained with reading tarot cards or roasting s’mores over the gas stove. “Comfort food,” she calls it. At night, Karin fights the urge to curl up in bed with her.