Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“I was in trouble. Flameout, they called it. It should never have started. I was superwoman. I mean, Jesus: I’d been at Waco, with those rows and rows of lawn chairs, all the good American citizens turning out to watch the human barbecue. I produced a series on the crèche babies at Oklahoma City. I did Heaven’s Gate — three successive days of collaborative suicide. Nothing bothered me. I could tell it all. Walked around lower Manhattan, sticking a video camera in people’s faces after the towers. A week after that, I started to lose it. We’re out of control, aren’t we? And we’re pulling everything down on top of us.”

She still needs him to contradict. What she has always needed from him. And even here, he fails her.

“My boss made me see a pill peddler, who put me on the same stuff the rest of the nation is already taking. It smoothed me out a little. But I lost my edge. Got dull and sloppy. I couldn’t get the job done anymore. They took me off news and put me on human interest. Harmless pieces. Pathetic. The pauper custodian who dies and leaves a million dollars to the local community college. Twins reunited after forty years, and still behaving identically. That’s what the trip to Nebraska was supposed to be. A little rest and recuperation. A can’t-miss, please-everyone story, one that even I could handle.”

“The cranes,” Weber says. The only story out here. Endless return.

On a flat, featureless stretch three miles out of town, she turns to look at him. Her face searches his, bargaining. “They wanted Disney. I tried to make it bigger. So I dug a little. It didn’t take much to find the water. I dug a little more. I learned that we were going to waste that river, no matter what I wrote. I could tell a story that broke people down and made them ache to change their lives, and it would make no difference. That water is already gone.”

Kearney appears, an orange dome of light on the horizon. He waits for her to finish. Only when she glances over her right shoulder, a wild, fugitive, pleading look, does he realize she’s done. “So you quit,” he says. “And became a nurse’s aide?”

Her shoulders jerk. But recovery comes fast enough. “They took me as a volunteer, at first. I had some experience…years ago. In high school. I got the nurse’s aide license within three months. It’s not…you know, brain science.”

Even now, she will not tell him. Not by herself. So he tells her. “You knew they would be sending him there?”

Her eyes steel. She grows brutally calm. “Is this some kind of theory? What do you think I am?”

I is just a diversion. His science has known that for some time. He has suspected her, long before Daniel’s positive ID. Maybe since the day he saw her. He sensed her deception at once, as she sensed his: the lie that joined them, that drew him to her. But here is the part he still can’t understand. “I think I must have seen you once before. Some years ago. When your network interviewed…”

“Yes,” she says, controlled, making the right onto Highway 10, just outside town. She speaks like a producer again. A journalist who might report any story. “So why did you keep coming back? To test your memory? You thought you’d use me. A little thrill, a little mystery. Public hostility was breaking you down. Take a quick escape trip; rewrite your life. Out-of-body experience. Expose a crime. Entrapment. Then pass judgment on me.”

He shakes his head, for both of them. Something bigger than judgment brought him back. The winds of homecoming. Now, worse than ever, even as she turns cold and horrible, he knows her. Her face flares and she slams the wheel with her palms, her eyes everywhere, flushed into the open. With a flick of his head, he will force her to turn, not toward her bungalow, not toward an anonymous motel room. Back to where the story started. When he finally speaks, his voice isn’t his. “I don’t know what you ever could have felt…what I might have been to you. But I know how you feel for that boy.”

At the second-to-last traffic light before Good Samaritan, she sees where he is forcing her. She reaches out her right hand and grabs him. One last preemptive seduction: we could still escape, the two of us. Disappear somewhere on that long river.

He thinks of what she has already lost: her career, her community, such friends as she had, a year of her life, and as many more as the boy might want to take. It’s not enough. “Tell him,” he says. “You know you need to.”

She turns her head, strewing explanations. “I tried,” she claims. “I would have. But he didn’t recognize…”

“Which time?”

All pretense between them dies. Stripped bare, they know each other. She spits venom. “Why are you doing this? Am I another case ? What do you want from me? You smug, self-righteous, self-protecting little…”

He nods in recognition. But he has grown light, empty, a committee of millions. “You can do this.” He looks down into the fact, the one thing left that he knows for certain. “You can do this. I’ll go with you.”

A cold February night on a dark Nebraska road. She is alone in the car, driving at random. Hours ago, she filmed the evening spectacle. But the cameras failed to capture the full force of the otherwordly gathering. Tonight’s birds have shaken her so badly she can’t return to her hotel. The crew has long ago disbursed, and she is alone, at loose ends, as brittle and flimsy as she felt in New York last fall. Maybe she has gone off the medication too quickly. Or maybe it’s the cranes, those threads floating in, massing and trumpeting, misled by millions of years of memory. The end will be instant. They’ll never know what hit them.

She herself would never have known, except in following this story. The silent, invisible new war on wetlands: she has hunted down the details, background for this report. Her species is running amok, and now more than ever, it’s every life for itself. Her nerves are jagged, the rental is suffocating, and this straight slash of road unnerves her. She has tried for hours to calm herself, sitting in a restaurant, then a movie theater, walking through the dead downtown, driving these deserted country roads, and still she’s in no state to sleep. If she can make it just a few more hours, just until dawn, and the birds again…

Even the ancient polyphony coming out of the car speakers shreds her. She shuts it off, her fingers frenzied. But silence on this black and freezing February night is worse. She can take only thirty seconds of it before she flips the radio back on. She trembles up and down the dial, trying to land on something solid. She finds a station and fixes on it, no matter the content. It’s talk, and only talk might help her now.

Some woman’s satin voice crawls up intimate into her ear. For a moment, it sounds like Christian revival — no believer left behind. But these words are worse than religion. Facts. The woman’s voice recites a litany, somewhere between a shopping list and a poem. It took the human race two and a half million years to reach a billion people. It took 123 years to add a second billion. We hit three billion, thirty-three years later. Then in fourteen years, then thirteen, then twelve …

Shaking, she pulls over onto the shoulder. Alone in this nowhere with these numbers. A storm breaks somewhere in her head. Signals surge, triggering one another. Nothing in evolution prepares her for this. Sheets of electricity cascade through her, fact-induced seizures, and when the headlights appear in her rearview mirror, the most rational thing in the world is to open the door and step out into them.

Now she enters the hospital again. The year before, they stopped her outside the sealed ward. You’re his sister? One unthinking nod of the head was enough to get her through. This time no one challenges her. Anyone at all is free to go see him. Even the person who first put him there.