Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Mark Schluter. Shoes, shirt, service. Huge loops of him. Steps he takes. Round around and back again. Repeat as needed. Something settles out, a him big enough for him to climb back in. In noise and rush, he keeps deep down. Sometimes a field of corn, the popping stalks talking to him. He never knew that all things talk. Had to slow to hear. Other times, a mud flat, flow in an inch of water. His body a small craft. The hairs on his limbs are oars, beating the current. His body, countless microscopic creatures banded together in need.

At last notions climb out his throat. Belching, birthing words. Baby wolf spiders, scattering off the back of their mother sound. Every curved line in the world is saying. Branches tapping the glass. Tracks in the snow. “Lucky” is there, circling alongside. “Pretty,” panting, happy to see him. “Good,” a purple flower stabbing up through the lawn.

One last broken moment and he might still feel: something in the road that ruined me. But then mending brings him back, to the smear of thoughts and words.

Some days his rage was so bad that even lying still infuriated him.Then the therapists asked her to leave. Help out by vanishing. She camped out in Farview, in her brother’s modular home. She fed his dog, paid his bills, ate off of his plates, watched his television, slept in his bed. She smoked only out on the deck, in the frosty March wind, on a damp director’s chair inscribed BORN SCHLUTER, so his living room wouldn’t stink of cigarettes when he finally came home. She tried to keep to one cigarette an hour. She forced herself to slow, taste the smoke, close her eyes, and just listen. At dawn and dusk, as her ears sensitized, she could hear the sandhills’ bugle call underneath the neighbor’s militant exercise videos and the long-haul eighteen-wheelers pounding up and down the interstate. She would hit the filter in seven minutes, and be checking her watch again fifteen minutes later.

She might have called half a dozen old friends, but didn’t. When she went into town to shop, she hid from old classmates. But she couldn’t avoid them all. Acquaintances stepped out of some movie version of her past, playing themselves, only nicer than they’d ever been in real life. Their sympathy hungered for details. What was Mark like? Would he ever be back to normal? She told them he was almost there.

She had one phone number, still in her fingers. On those days when Mark defeated her, she would come home with half a gallon of her old college-favorite Gallo, get quietly smashed while watching the Classic Movies Channel, then dial a few digits, just for the surge of the forbidden. Four numbers in, and she remembered that she wasn’t dead yet. Anything might still happen. She’d quit him like cigarettes, though purging him from her system had taken longer. Karsh: slick, dexterous, unrepentant Robert Karsh, Kearney HS Class of ’89, Most Likely to Make a Difference, the eternal angle-worker whom she’d once had to order out of a car 150 miles from anywhere, the only soul other than her brother who could always see right through her. She heard his voice, part evangelist, part pornographer, already bringing her back to herself, only three more digits away from her probing fingers.

A decade of chemical craving — anger and longing, guilt and resentment, nostalgia and fatigue — flooded through her as she dialed the reflex number. But she always stopped short of follow-through. She didn’t really want him : just some proof that her brother wouldn’t drag her down with him into the buried kingdom of brain damage.

The intoxicating ritual self-abasement mixed with the Gallo and the ever-denser cigarettes to make her glow, a color all hers again. She would put on one of Mark’s bootlegged CDs — his one-hit thrasher bands, masters of the blissfully relentless. Then she’d spread back onto his bed and fall endlessly down into the mattress, skydiving through pure air. She’d touch herself as Robert had— still alive —while Mark’s dog looked on from the doorway, baffled. The simple tests of her body graduated by degrees into pleasure, so long as she could keep her hands from thinking.

A point of moral pride: she dialed the whole number only once. In late March, the days lengthening, she took her brother for one of his first spins outside the hospital. They walked around the grounds, Mark deep in a focus she couldn’t penetrate. The air around them filled with spring’s first insect drones. The winter aconite was already fading, and the crocuses and daffodils pushed through the last clumps of snow. A white-fronted goose flew overhead. Mark’s head snapped back. He couldn’t see the bird, but when he looked down, his face burned with memory. He broke into a smile wider than any she’d seen on him since their father died. His mouth hung open, readying the word goose . She urged him on with her hands and eyes.

“G-G-G-go goo god damn. Damn it to hell. God shit piss bitch. Suck a flaming cunt up your ass.”

He smiled proudly. She gasped and pulled away, and his face fell. She fought off the rush of tears, took his arm again in fake calm, and turned him back toward the building. “It’s a goose, Mark. You remember them. You’re kind of a silly goose yourself, you know that.”

“Shit piss fuck,” he chanted, studying his shuffling feet.

This was injury, not her brother. Just sounds: meaningless, buried things brought up by trauma. He didn’t mean to assault her. She told herself this all the way back to Farview. But she no longer believed anything she told herself. All the hopes that had carried her for weeks dissolved in that stream of mocking profanity. She found her way to the Homestar in the pitch dark. Inside, she went straight to the phone and dialed Robert Karsh. Her steady, years-long rise to self-sufficiency was ready to submit again.

The little girl answered. Better her than her older brother. The girl’s drawled “Hello” had two too many syllables. Seven years old. What kind of parents let their seven-year-old girl answer the phone after dark?

Karin fished up the girl’s name. “Ashley?”

The tiny voice returned a broad, trusting, Cartoon Network “Yeesss!” Austin and Ashley: names that could scar a child for life. Karin hung up, and instinctively dialed another number, one she’d considered calling for weeks.

When he picked up, she said, simply, “Daniel.” After an ambushed pause, Daniel Riegel said, “It’s you.” Such relief surged through Karin that she couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t called him earlier. He might have helped, as early as the night of the accident. Someone who knew Mark. The real Mark, the kind one. Someone she could talk to about both past and future.

“Where are you?” he asked.

She started to giggle. Horrified, she got hold of herself. “Here. I mean, Farview.”

In his naturalist’s voice, the hush he used in the field to point out things that were easily scared away, Daniel said, “For your brother.”

It felt like telepathy. Then she remembered: small town. She sunk into his soft questions. The release of answering was beyond description. She reversed herself with every sentence: Mark was getting better by leaps and bounds; he was worse than helpless. He could think and identify things and even talk; he was still trapped in the wreck, walking like a trained bear and chattering like a perverted parrot. Daniel asked how she was coping. She was doing fine, considering. The days were long, but she could handle them. With help , her voice begged, despite herself.

She considered asking Daniel to meet her somewhere, but couldn’t risk scaring him. So she just talked, her voice curling like surf. She tried to sound for him like the capable woman she had almost become. She had no right even to contact the man. But her brother had nearly died. Disaster trumped the past and gave her temporary asylum.