Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

On the second evening, she comes back inside from smoking half a pack out on Bonnie’s deck, to find the girl distraught. She won’t say why at first, just keeps repeating, “It’s nothing. No problem.” But she can’t stay on task and ends up carbonizing the potpies. Karen finds the culprit on Bonnie’s coffee table: Weber’s new book, which the girl has been dutifully plowing through at the rate of half a page a day over the last several months.

“This is what’s upset you?” Karen asks. “Something in here?”

One more denying shake of the head, then the girl breaks down. “There’s a God part of the brain? Religious visions from some kind of epilepsy storm?”

Karin is all over herself, comforting the girl. And the girl takes some comforting.

“You can turn God on and off with electric…? It’s just some built-in structure? Did you already know this? Does everybody? Everybody smart?”

Karin shushes her, strokes her shoulders. “Nobody knows. He doesn’t know .”

“Of course he knows! He wouldn’t put it in a book, if he didn’t. He’s the smartest man I’ve ever met. Religion is just a temporal lobe…? He’s saying belief is just an evolved chemical thing you could gain or lose…? Like what Mark decided about you. How it’s not him anymore, how he can’t even see that he…Oh shit. Shit. I’m too stupid to get this!”

And Karin, too stupid to help. Some part of her — some temporal storm — wants to say: What we sum to is still real. The phantom wants our shaping. Even a God module would have been selected for its survival value. Water is up to something. She says none of this; she has no words. Bonnie’s doubt must have been long in coming, a slow-growing tumor. She’s shaken enough to entertain any wider belief system Karin might suggest. For a long time, they look at each other, caught in some shameful secret. Then, on nothing but grim smiles, they make a pact, joined in the trick of belief, novitiates in a new faith, until damage changes them.

Karin hasn’t stepped out of the toy house except for one more unsuccessful attempt to talk to her brother in the hospital. She hasn’t been to the Refuge since leaving Daniel’s. All her life, she has secretly suspected that everything you learn to want, everything you really make your own, gets taken from you. Now she knows why: nothing is your own. Last night she dreamt herself aloft, high above the oxbows of the Platte. Crusts of ice studded the flats, and stubble filled the fields. No large life of any sort, anywhere. All large creatures were gone. But life was everywhere — microscopic, vegetative, humming in the hive. Voices without language, voices she recognized, calling on her to see. She woke refreshed and filled with baffling confidence.

Now she preps for a venture outside, borrowing Bonnie’s best non-pioneer dress, a sage-green fitted silk that could cause whiplash on Chicago’s Gold Coast. She even gets Bonnie to theme her makeup. An older, grimmer Bonnie holds color chips up to Karin’s face, studying them through squinted eyes.

Touching the girl’s elbow, Karin asks, “You remember painting Mark’s toes when he was still in Trauma?”

“Frostbite,” Bonnie remembers.

“Frostbite,” Karen agrees. “Do me.”

They work together, like technicians. Bonnie steps back to admire her handiwork. “Killer,” she says, which must be good. “Armed and dangerous. You could eat men like a frog eats flies. He won’t know what hit him. Killer, I’m telling you.”

Karin sits still and cries. She takes the crestfallen makeup artist and hugs her. Bonnie hugs back, clutching, an accomplice before the fact.

Then Karin is downtown, the same spot where she first flushed out Robert Karsh. Early evening, and his office empties onto the street. He’s among the last. When he glides out the door and sees her, he stops in surprise. She turns and closes the distance to him, trying not to think, humming the word killer to herself, a protecting spell. He comes up to meet her. His chin is out, and his eyes are everywhere.

“Jesus,” he says. “Look at you.” He wants her, even now, even after what she’s done. Maybe more, because of it. He wants to take her off behind the burning bushes and do it right there, like lower vertebrates. “Well,” he says. “Your friend Daniel seems to have gotten the Development Council’s attention.” He doesn’t need to add: mine, too . He smiles, his scary, wholesale smile. The smile is so Karsh she can’t help smiling back. “You gave away the whole show. Spilled pretty much everything I told you in confidence. Okay: maybe not everything. But all the business stuff.” He’s still smiling, as if at his little Ashley, the girl Karin has never been allowed to meet. “Maybe this was all about business, huh? From the beginning?”

“Robert?” Her voice flies a little, until she rides it down. “I wish I could take credit for that. I wish I’d been that smart.”

“Well, you’ve certainly set us back. Complicated the game. Major personal embarrassment, for me. A scramble to keep my ass out of the fire. Hey: keeps things interesting. The price of learning what I mean to you.”

She shakes her head. “You always knew that. Better than I did.”

“But, hey. If this project doesn’t happen right in Farview, we’ll do it somewhere downstream. You think you’re going to stop us from building ? You think growth is just going to go away? Who are you? You aren’t even…”

“I’m not even anyone,” she says.

“I didn’t say that. I’m just saying that whatever the community needs is going to get built. Eventually. If not next year…”

Too self-evident even to counter. Even now, his eyes say, Let’s go somewhere. Get a room. Twenty minutes. Silk dress, doing its job. And she feels nothing, a nothing that fills and lifts her. She stands dead still, unable to stop shaking her head. “I erased myself for you.” Bewildered that she did; bewildered that she still might. She looks at him, scavenging for her past. “You think you knew me. You think you know me!” Years of effort, and she might pass him on the street and not feel a peep. Karsh, too: mimetic Capgras, a smile that fails to acknowledge anything, standing there grinning like he’s just bribed the grade school teacher with an infected apple.

And still, they are connected. She turns and slices a straight line back through town, this town she hates and will never be rid of. And all down the block, at her back, she hears him calling, half amused, “Babe? Come on, Rabbit. Hey! Let’s talk this out.” Easy, understanding, sure she will be back, if not now, then this time next year.

They talk for longer than Weber can say. And with every answer Mark needs, Weber grows less certain. That pack of Scouts, waving faulty flashlights in the woods at night, is scattered. All his life, he has known himself to be just this makeshift troop. Only now, something undams in him, and knowing goes real.

They talk until Mark’s theories start to sound plausible, until Mark believes that Weber has grasped the size of the facts. They talk until the chemicals in the IV drip dampen the activity of his synapses, calming him.

But something in him still struggles. One palm on his temples, the other on his nape. “You know, they can do anything that they want to me. Drugs. Electroshock. Even surgery, if that’s what it takes. I’ll happily let them inside again, if they just get it right this time. I can’t live with this halfway bullshit anymore.” He closes his eyes and growls like a cornered wolf. “Hate this feeling that I’ve made everything up. That I’m some totally invented asshole. But there’s one thing I know I did not invent.” He contorts his body, reaches to his bedside drawer, and pulls out the note. It refuses to decay; the lamination has turned it permanent. He throws it down on the sill. “I wish to God I did invent it. I wish there were no guardian. But there it is. And what in God’s name are we supposed to do about it?”