Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Next to the book sits a portable disc player and ear buds. Alongside the player, a short stack of discs. He picks up the top one: Monteverdi. She chooses this moment to come too quickly out of the bedroom, rushing to button her cobalt cotton blouse. She sees him fingering the disc. She’s caught; her eyebrows pinch, guilty. “The Vespers of 1610. But for you, 1595.”

He holds it out to her, accusing. “You misled me.”

“No! I bought that…since our evening. A keepsake. Believe me, I can’t make heads or tales of it.”

He places it back on top of the stack without looking. He doesn’t want to see the other discs. His belief can’t bear more tests.

She crosses the room and circles him. Inside her arms, he comes apart. A fist at the base of his brain stem opens into a palm. He surges on the dopamine, the spikes of endorphins, his chest jerking. The wildest research in the most reckless journal…He has wrecked himself, and it’s good beyond saying. No writer, no researcher, no lecturer, no husband, no father. He has precipitated out. Nothing left but sensation, the warm, light pressure against his ribs.

The room is cold and every inch of her burns. He slips down into limbic back alleys, corners that survived when the massive neocortex came through like a superhighway. He feels his skin against her hands, skin too white and papery, his bare arms a blotchy mess of veins, his flanks rude humps. One heartbeat, and he’s strange to his body, all those nested ghosts invisible to this woman who has never seen him any way but this.

Then stranger still: he does not care how she sees him. Does not want her to see him as anything but what he well and truly is: hollow and graceless, stripped of authority. Borderless, same as anyone.

“Wait,” he says. “There’s something you need to see.” Something not his. The evening show is pure theater. But the morning is religion.

They drive back out to Karin’s field in the first hint of dawn. He finds the way there, lefts and rights stored in his body. The night before has scattered. But the flock is still there, wading. He and this woman take their place in the blind, not ten feet from the nearest clump of birds. They strain for silence, but their movements alert those cranes left on guard. Awareness spreads through the flock. The cranes stir, singly and together, then settle when the danger passes. In the growing light, they begin the ordinary stutters of morning, flaring up here and there in tentative bursts of ballet.

“I told you,” she whispers. “Everything dances.”

One by one, the birds test the air, first in short hops, like scraps in the breeze. Then thousands of them lift up in flood. The beating surface of the world rises, a spiral calling upward on invisible thermals. Sounds carry them all the way skyward, clacks and wooden rattles, rolling, booming, bugling, clouds of living sound. Slowly, the mass unfurls in ribbons and disperses into thin blue.

What joy there is in this life. Lifting past us always. What pointless joy.

He hears his own voice coming out of him, broken counterpoint to this honking morning chorus. “ Not to be separated, not by the thinnest curtain shut out from the measure of the stars. ”

“What is that?” she asks.

He struggles to call it back. “ Innerness — what is it if not amplified sky, shot through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming? ”

A book of Rilke he bought for Sylvie, lifetimes ago, right out of school, when they still made time for pointless elegies.

“The scientist is a poet,” this woman says.

But he is neither. He’s no profession he can recognize. Nothing he ever thought he might become. And this woman: What is this nurse’s aide? A woman so alone she wants even him.

She puts her hand down inside the collar of his coat. He touches her back. They trace the skin, the trap between them. His hands shake against her breasts, and she would let him, would lead him forward into everything, right here in this bird-filled field. Her rib cage presses against his palm. They blunder into something startling to them both. Their mouths are on each other and thinking goes. Everything goes except this first need.

Something huge and white streaks across the field. He jerks up, and she with him. He spots it first, but she identifies. “My God. A whooper.” Ghosts in that flash of light, some private terror. She squeezes his arm, a tourniquet. “We can’t be seeing this. One hundred and sixty of them left. Jesus, that’s one!”

The ghost glides shining across the fields. Neither can breathe. He grasps at a last hope. “That was it. What was in the road. He said he saw a column of white…” He studies her face, science wanting so badly to be confirmed.

She follows the bird, afraid to look at Weber. She has the chance now, to clear everything. Instead, she says, “You think?”

They watch the phantom bird until it vanishes through a line of trees. They crouch and watch, long after the field empties.

Both are frozen and caked in mud. She pulls him back to her, mindless again. They flood each other, waves of oxytocin and a savage bonding. Release — vanishing in mid-prairie, lifted free of everything — hovers just out of his reach.

A broken laugh comes from too nearby, something not belonging to the Platte’s dawn chorus. A cricket chirr, months too early. It chirps again, from inside his shed jacket at his feet. He glances at her, bewildered. Her look tells him: your phone. He fumbles to find the pocket that hides the device. He looks at the number on the caller ID, the first time ever. He shuts the ringer off and folds back into her. Everything will be panic, from now on. Strange as birth. He would write it up — first case ever of contagious Capgras — if he could still write. He seems to be nearing, and she is taking him. Thoughts flow through him like a brook over pebbles, none of them his. There comes the emptiness of arrival. Then there is just holding, and bracing for endless vertigo.

Wordless, they head back to her car.

“Which way?” she asks.

No choice, really. “West.”

No other compass for the two of them. She drives at random. They cross some dry stream. “Oregon Trail,” she says. Scars in the land confirm her, despite the century and a half of erosion.

They drive for miles in silence. He waits for her to say what at any moment he could make her say. But he is perjured now, too, and deserves nothing. When they get light-headed, they stop for something to eat in a town called Broken Bow. “Another ghost town,” she says. “Most of the towns out here peaked a hundred years ago. The place is emptying out. Heading back to frontier.”

“How do you know these things?” He knows already, how she knows.

She dodges. “Around here? Only the dying stick around.”

They buy water and fruit and bread and carry it into the sandhills. They picnic on a dune that drifts downwind even as they sit on it. Some part of them is always touching. The land is abandoned, a worldwide contagion. In the middle distance, the pitch-bending minor chords of an endless freight.

She touches his ear in surprise. “I just remembered last night’s dream. How beautiful! I dreamt we were making music. You and me, Mark and Karin, I think. I was playing the cello. I’ve never touched a cello. But the music coming out…unbelievable! How can the brain do that? I mean, pretending to play an instrument: fine. But who was composing that music? In real time? I can’t even read music. The most gorgeous harmonies I’ve ever heard. And I must have written it.”

He has no answer, and he gives her as much. All he can do is touch her ear back. His dream last night was one he hasn’t had for months: a man, plunging headlong, frozen in the air in front of a smoking column of white.