Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“There,” she declares, nodding at the walking pair. “That’s what Mark’s talking about.” Her nose flares, red and raw. Her head shakes in disbelief. “They used to just unzip, and be us. Or we’d peel off our skin and go with them. Oldest story in the book.” She takes his profile, but when he turns back toward her, she swings away. “The sad thing is, though, they can’t love. They mate for life. Follow their partners every year for thousands of miles. Raise their young together. Fake a broken wing to lure a predator away from their chicks. Even sacrifice themselves to save their young. But no. Ask any scientist. Birds can’t love. Birds don’t even have a self! Nothing like us. No relation.”

He can only begin to see all the things she holds against him. He would apologize, if he could speak.

The larger of the walking pair turns and fixes him. Something looks out from the prehistoric bird, a secret about him, but not his. A look of pure wildness, all the hard intelligence of simply being that Weber has forgotten.

But the woman is talking. She is saying things, faraway things, with great urgency. She tells him about the water wars. How the preservers have won for a moment. How they will lose, forever afterward. She has seen all the numbers, and no power exists large enough to stop them. Her face sets into an ugly mask. She shakes her arm at the staring bird, who takes fright and skims away. “How can we not want this? Just this, exactly as it is. If people only knew…”

But if people knew, this field would be buried in crane peepers.

“How long do you suppose we have?” she asks. “God, what is wrong with us? You’re the expert. What is it in our brains that won’t…?”

The sky is dark now, and he can’t see what she points at. Each of them sits sealed off in their own private pit blind, looking out on an unthinkably long night.

She speaks out loud, as if already there were only memory. “I remember the first time my father took us out here. We were little. Me, Mark, and my father, sitting in this field. This one. Early morning, before the sun was up. You have to see these creatures in the morning. The evening show is pure theater. But the morning is religion. The three of us at dawn, still happy. And my father, still the wisest man alive. I can hear him. He told us how they navigated. He was a small-plane pilot, and he loved how they followed landmarks to find this exact spot, year after year. How they recognized individual fields. ‘Damn straight, cranes remember. Hang on to things like a bat hangs to a barn rafter.’ And the first time I saw those birds circle up into the air and disappear, I kept looking at the sky, thinking, Hey, me too. Take me with. Awful feeling. Empty. Like: Where’d I go bad? ”

Her fingers brush her eyebrows. He knows her now, the thing in her that had once so repelled him. Her weakness. Her need to do right by the world.

“Some kind of lesson for us. His idea of fatherhood. Going on and on about blood, family, how even the birds take care of their own. Scared the crap out of both of us. He squeezed us both until it hurt, made us swear. ‘If anything ever happens — and it will — you two never, never give up on each other.’”

These last words are so swallowed, Weber must supply them. Then she looks away, strong again, more composed than he can even fake, gazing across the wetlands, past the progress that will destroy them.

“He was wild, my father. Totally lost touch with the rest of the race. He always told me I would come to nothing. Pretty much ensured it.” She turns and grabs Weber’s arm in the dark. She needs him to contradict. Needs him to say it’s not too late to change her life. Not too late for real work at last, the only work that matters. “If you had raised me…If you had raised Mark and me? Someone who knew what you know?” She might have come to this calling sooner, while there was still time.

Weber stays silent, too scared to confirm or deny. But she’s already taken what she needs from him. She shakes her head at him and says, “Unsponsored, impossible, near-omnipotent, and infinitely fragile…”

He struggles to place the words, written by someone who once was him. Her face, flush with the idea, begs him to remember. If all forged, then all free. Free to play ourselves, free to impersonate, to improvise, free to image anything. Free to weave our minds through what we love. What lots we all might learn about this river. What places water might still get out and see.

He spends the night awake in his rented cubicle, his brain on fire. His cell phone rings twice, but he doesn’t take it. He stares at the hell-red LED of the bedside alarm, watching the minutes hang. He will go to Dedham Glen, ask to see her file. No: they would deny him access. He isn’t authorized. He could ask her supervisor: When did she come to this facility? What job did she do before this one? But the supervisor would just stonewall him, or worse.

He’s out in front of her bungalow at 4:00 a.m. He sits in the rental in total darkness, all the time in the world to decide not to torch his life. But then, it’s burned already — Chickadee, Conscience Bay, Sylvie, the lab, his writing, Famous Gerald — all consumed, months ago. He cannot even fake the role now. Not even his wife would believe the act. He wills himself downward, falling. There is a need to be no one, one that will forever hide its precise location from neuroscience’s probes. He steps from the car and wanders to her stoop, into the chaos he has made.

Barbara comes puffed and bleary to the door, the first hint of awareness on her. She tilts her head and smiles, almost expecting him. And the last, solid part of him dissolves in air. “You okay?” she asks, inviting and uncertain. “I didn’t know you were back.”

His head rocks, as easy as breathing.

Wordless, she lets him in. Only when she flicks on the dim overhead light in a bare foyer — an abandoned vacation cottage on the shores of a northern lake, circa 1950—does she ask, “Have you seen Mark?”

“Yes. Have you?”

She drops her head. “I’ve been afraid to.”

But that can’t be. The boy-man’s most devoted caregiver, who has seen him in far worse shape. He catches her eye. Her look is renegade, running out over her left shoulder. She’s wearing a green-and-red plaid flannel men’s bathrobe out of which her legs and arms protrude like fresh mistakes. She puts a hand to her puffy face. “Am I awful?”

She is beautiful, the beaten kind of beauty that guts him.

She leads him into a tiny cupboard kitchen where, wobbly, she puts a kettle of water on the gas ring. He hovers next to her. “There isn’t much time,” he says. “I’ve something to show you. Before the sun rises.”

Her hands snake up and push his chest, first gently, then hard. She nods. “I’ll just get dressed. Please…” Her palms extend, offering the three small rooms to him.

There’s nothing to take possession of. The kitchen has service for one, a ragged collection of dented pans and jelly jars. The table and chairs in the front room could only have come from an auction. Oval rag rug and crocheted curtains. A heavy, old oak farmstead hutch and matching writing desk. Above the desk, taped to the wall, is a well-thumbed index card, written in pen: But I do nothing upon myself, and yet I am mine own Executioner.

On the desk sits a paperback: Eiseley’s The Immense Journey . The evening reading of this nurse’s aide. The back cover identifies the author as a local boy, born and raised in the bend of the Platte. Scores of adhesive colored arrows stick to the pages. He flips to the last: The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.