Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Weber does nothing except wait until the chemicals take Mark, and he sleeps. Then Weber totters down the hospital hall. He sits for a moment in a glass terrarium of a waiting room, filled with individuals all promised a high-tech miracle. A girl, twenty at the outside, sits in a cushioned orange chair, reading aloud from an oversized, garish picture book to a four-year-old on her lap. “Did you ever wonder how the miracle of you began?” She reads sweetly, reassuringly. “You didn’t come from monkeys. Not from some jellyfish in the sea. No! You began when God decided…”

He looks up, and it’s as if he has willed her into being, there in front of him. The sister, in green silk. “Did you see him?” he asks. His voice sounds strange to him.

Karin shakes her head. “He’s sleeping. Unconscious.”

Weber nods. Un-conscious. Wrong, that the negation should stand for something so many billions of years older than the negated.

“Will he be all right?”

There’s something in the question he can’t penetrate. Will anyone? “He’s safe. For now.” They stand near each other, saying nothing. He sees the hundred small muscles around her eyes reading his, even as his fit to hers. “He’s under the impression that he might be part bird.”

She smiles in slow pain. “I know the feeling.”

“He feels that the emergency room surgeons swapped…”

Her brusque nod cuts him off. “Old story,” she says. “Not surprising, given the look of them.”

She has gone demented — something in the water supply. “The surgeons?”

Her face creases like a child’s, a girl who has just discovered the total hoax of words. “No, the birds.”

“Ah. I’ve never seen them.”

She looks at him, like he’s just said he has never felt pleasure. She checks her watch. “Let’s go,” she says. “We’ve just time.”

They hide in an abandoned pit blind as dusk comes down. They sit on an old trysting tarp she had in her trunk, she still in Bonnie’s green silk dress, he in coat and tie. She’s taken him to a roost that only natives know — a private farm, a secret uninhabited trespass. The pit is chilly, the field around them littered with last year’s brown corn stalk stubs and waste grain. Just beyond the field, the sandy banks of the river serpentine. A few birds already gather. She folds her hands in front of her face, like a kid learning to pray. He looks at the thicket of birds a hundred yards from them, then back at her. This is it? The mythic spectacle?

She grins and shakes her head at his doubt. She brushes his shoulder: wait. Life is long out here. Longer than you think. Longer than you can think.

For a moment in the chill dusk, he lifts. The sky slips from peach to garnet to blood. A thread ripples across the light: a kettle of cranes home in from nowhere. They make a sound, prehistoric, too loud and carrying for their body size. A sound he remembers from before he hears it.

He and the woman crouch on the ground. His spine hums with cold. Another thread floats down on the still air. Then another. The fibers of bird catch and join, an unraveled cloth coming back together. Threads appear from all compass points, the sky crimson, shot through with veins of black. The wings bank and yaw, slip or skate up again, before winding back in a slow cyclone. Soon the sky fills with tributaries, a river of birds, a mirror Platte meandering through heaven. And every part of it, calling.

The birds are huge, much bigger than he imagined. Their wings pump slow and full, the long primaries arcing high above the body, then drooping well below, a shawl perpetually resettled over forgetting shoulders. Necks stretch out while legs dangle behind, and in the middle, the slight bulge of body, like a child’s toy suspended between strings. A bird lands twenty feet from the blind. It shakes out its wings, a span longer than Weber. Behind this one, hundreds more fall in. And the roosting in this private field is just a sideshow, nothing compared to the climaxes in the larger sanctuaries. The calls collect and echo, a single splintering, tone-deaf chorus stretching miles in every direction, back into the Pleistocene.

He thinks: Sylvie should see this. The most natural thought in the world. Sylvie and Jess. Not Jess, but Jessie, at eight or nine, when a city of birds would have astounded her. Did he ever come close to that child? Did that self-shaping little girl deserve some more feeling father?

In threaded clumps, the birds coast back to earth. They collapse from grace into earthbound stumbling. The diminishment would be comic if it weren’t so painful. A thousand floating cranes succumb to gravity. They spot the humans and carry on, deep in the constantly meandering present. For as long as there have been prairies and sandy banks and the idea of safety here, birds have gathered in these braids. This century, they graze on field corn. Next century: whatever scraps this place might still supply.

The icy ground numbs him. He jumps at the sound of her voice, from a distant planet. “Look! That one, there.” He lifts his head to see. It’s him, in the roadside dance house, alongside Barbara Gillespie, wrestling his body into joy. The crane dances, weirdly deliberate. It tosses twigs into the air. It cowls its fingers and kinks itself like a rapper. Then the bird and its mate rise to the alert, necks extended, eyes on something invisibly far off, their beaks parallel, signing the air. They alternate, then synchronize, looping their calls into unison.

He locates something in the pirouetting pair. Some clue to his own dissolve. And then, in trivial telepathy, something even science could explain, she reads his thoughts: “Why did you come back? Was it for Mark? Or for her?”

He can’t even play dumb.

Her grin twists into a sneer. “Everybody saw. Obvious.”

“Saw what?” They can have seen nothing. He’s only just seen, himself. But even his slow science converges on the obvious: the first person is always the last to know.

She talks to someone out in the field. “Daniel says she called him. A year ago, before Mark’s accident. Asking him all sorts of questions about the Refuge. He says she’s a spy. A researcher, working for the developers. Does that sound crazy to you? Like one of Mark’s theories?”

He would say something if he could. He’d have a thought, and even give it, but he is slipping back down, underneath words.

She examines him, the two of them reversed, she the doctor and he the subject. “Something’s happened to you.”

“Yes,” he says. He sees that something, thousands of it, combing the fields, a whisper away.

She closes her eyes and lies down on the frosty ground. He eases back beside her, on his side, his head in his crooked arm. He looks at her, at the open country of her, as the last amber flecks of light die, searching for the woman of a year ago. Now she looks back. “I don’t know what I needed from you. Writing you about Mark. I don’t know what I needed from him . From anyone.” She flicks her palm out at the damning evidence, the bird-crammed field. What is there possibly to need ?

She looks away, self-conscious. She sits up, points at a nearby pair: two large and agitated birds, walking with their wings out, jabbering. One bugles a melody, four notes of spontaneous surprise. The other picks up the motive and shadows it. The sound stabs him: creation chattering to itself, locking him out. True speech, beyond any but a crane’s ability to decode. The speaking pair fall silent, scouring the ground for evidence. They could be detectives, or scientists. Life incommunicable, even to life.

He looks at the woman, her face lined with the same thought, as clearly as if he has put it there: What does it feel like, to be a bird?