Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

They sit in the middle of a drifting nowhere. His phone vibrates in his pocket. If the thing rings here, it could ring in outer space. He knows who it is before he answers. The ID confirms him: Jess. His daughter, who only calls in extremity and on holidays. He has to answer. Before he can even ask what’s wrong, Jess howls at him. “I just talked to Mom. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

He can’t attach himself. He feels every mile between here and any coast. He says, “I don’t know,” perhaps several times. It only makes his daughter crazier. Grow up , she screams. Perhaps she is having an insulin attack. The signal starts to die. “Jess? Jess. I can’t hear you. Listen to me. I’ll call you back. I will call you…”

When he hangs up, Barbara is still there. She cradles his cheek, tentatively, and he lets her. The first of his punishments. Her hand says: Whatever you need. Closer or farther. Yours to keep inventing or to send away.

He is a case he has forgotten until this moment: the woman with the shattered insula, lost in asomatognosia. Now and then, for brief periods, all sense of her body disappeared. Skeleton and muscles, limbs and torso would fade to nothing. And still, without a body, she kept to the lie, believing that kapo in the temporo-parieto-occipital junction, that lackey of the system always ready to take charge.

They drive some more, the only thing for it. Another dozen miles down the road, she says, “There’s a place up ahead I’ve always wanted to see.”

“How far?”

Her lips pucker as she calculates. “A hundred miles?”

There’s nothing left of him to object. He points through the windshield, some invisible target.

She grows careless behind the wheel, even giddy. They have no future, and even less past. For two hours, they say nothing about themselves. Nor do they talk much about Mark. The closest they come is when she asks him to tell her ten essential things that neuroscience knows for certain. He should be able to list dozens. But something has happened to his list. Those that are essential no longer feel certain. And those that are certain can’t possibly be essential.

He sees their destination from a distance, rising up out of a field of winter wheat. Salisbury Plain. Megalithic monument. A wrong turn somewhere, but here they are. She laughs as he makes it out. “This is it. Carhenge.”

The huge gray stones turn into automobiles. Three dozen spray-painted junkers stood on end or draped as lintels across one another. A perfect replica. They are out of the car, walking around the standing circle. He manages a pained imitation of mirth. Here it is: the ideal memorial for the blinding skyrocket of humans, natural selection’s brief experiment with awareness. And everywhere, thousands of sparrows nest in the rusted axles.

They dine in nearby Alliance, at a place called the Longhorn Smokehouse. A television suspended above their corner booth breaks the news. Operation Iraqi Freedom has begun. War has been so long in coming that Weber feels only mild déjà vu. They watch the cycling, impenetrable footage, the president, looping over and over: May God bless our country and all who defend her. He watches her stony face as she watches the screen. She watches as only a reporter can. He has known for some time. Only now he sees her, unmistakable. Her voice catches a little when she talks. “Mark is right, you know. The whole place, a substitute. I mean: Is this country anyplace you recognize?”

They sit too long, watching too many frenzied reports packed to exploding with no content. When they get back into the car, the light is already fading.

“Should we find some place to stay?” She doesn’t look at him. She means shelter, but shelter is long gone.

He wants nothing but the blank slate. Erased from what he has done, from what he is doing. Nothing waits for him anywhere. Find some place to stay : yes, night by night, foraging, the two of them, even with the worst confirmed, even knowing about her what he now knows. No more reporting from a distance. No more case histories: only make himself as culpable as she. Yet the words out of his mouth kill even this possibility. “We need to go back.”

She can’t mask the half-second of fear. Her shoulders flinch in the snare. “Oh, Heart!” she says. Whose name is that? Someone else’s endearment. Some earlier escape that she mistakes him for. She does not want him; she only wants to avoid detection. She starts to object. “My house is so small…”

And the earth so large. “We need to,” he repeats. Yes, life is a fiction. But whatever it might mean, the fiction is steerable.

She knows what is happening. Still, she pretends. She starts up the car and points it southeast. After a few miles, her voice pure invitation, she asks, “What are you thinking?”

He shakes his head. He can’t do this in words. His silence unnerves her. She grips the wheel, her face braced for the worst.

He grazes her upper arm with his knuckles. “I was thinking, I feel I’ve known you my whole life.”

Her face turns to his and breaks. She doesn’t believe him, but she will take it. Some part of her knows, already, where he’s bringing them. Some part already suffers the sentence, before he levels it.

He chooses that moment to ask, “What story were you covering? When you first came here.”

They ride an awful mile in silence. Something in him hopes she’ll say nothing. Something in him doesn’t want the facts. He feels what he first knew in her, the dread just beneath her fake composure. Out of the corner of his eye, she is someone else. Like that woman he examined once, call her Hermia, whose only symptom was seeing children in her left visual field, even hearing their laughter, only to see them disappear when she turned to look at them…

“What do you mean?” she asks at last. Her voice is bright enamel on ashes.

He has no right to force her. He is not justice; he is duplicity itself. “Who were you working for?” No real need to know. But a proven neurological phenomenon: activity in the verbal center has a suppressing effect on pain.

She grips the wheel and steers the ruler-straight road. “Dedham Glen,” she says. “I worked for them every day for a year. I cleared twelve hundred dollars a month.”

At last the anomalies on Mark’s chart make sense to him. He knows what happened. “Karin’s friend,” he says. “The conservationist. You interviewed him over the phone, a year ago.”

Her eyes are a mess and her red nostrils quiver like a rabbit’s. Something still tenacious in her frees that last little part of him that did not yet love her. “Water,” she says. Matter of fact. Journalistic. “The story was about water.” They roll another quarter mile in the dropping dark. She speaks into a machine. “Most stories will be, soon.” She rallies, shakes her hair, turns the full force of her emptiness on him. She shoots for a fashion-magazine insouciance. It would repel him, but for that thing he recognizes in her, and shares. That desperate hope of evading discovery. “I’ll tell you everything. How much do you want to know?”

He wants to know nothing. Even now, he would disappear with her, someplace words can’t reach.

“A journalist,” she tells the windshield. Another three-street town flashes by. “Producer for Cablenation News. You know: find a colorful topic, work it up, conduct the groundwork, screen the interviews, cull the research. I always tried to…be as big as the story. I always tried to dig, to immerse in the material. That’s what killed me, I think. I’d been an editor for seven years, producer for three and a half. I could have moved up to a major desk, coasted until they turned me out to pasture.”

He stares at the age marks in her neck that he has never noticed. The tendons flare under her clenched jaw. Her face will crack open and a grown thing emerge.