Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

He is sitting up in bed, struggling with an old, familiar book. She can tell by his posture that the fog is lifting. His face lights up at the sight of her, that mix of ideal and instinctual gratitude. But it fades as fast, with a look at her face.

What’s happened? he asks. Who died?

She stands at the foot of his bed. Her stance alone might trigger his memory. That trace is still in there, in the weights of his synapses. But still, she must tell him. Her tracks were first. The car that was behind him was in front of him. She was in the road. He rolled his truck to keep from killing her.

How? he asks. Why? The pieces won’t fit together.

She is alive because of him. He is brain-damaged because of her.

You are my guardian? You wrote the note?

No, she tells him. Not me.

She stands in front of him again in memory, only hours after the first time, out in the empty road. He is still intact, still responsive. Strung with tubes, but not comatose yet. That will come later, with the excitotoxicity. The shock of this visit will bring it on. Now, as she stands by his bed in the trauma unit, he recognizes. He looks on her, terrified. She has come back, the white pillar he swerved to avoid. She’s some supernatural creature, rising up from death. But her face is molten, and choked sounds stream out of her. He recoils before he realizes: she’s begging for forgiveness.

He tries to tell her. Nothing comes out his throat but a dry hiss. She leans down to his mouth, and still nothing. His right hand scratches in the air, gesturing for paper and pen. She fishes these out of her purse and hands them to him. Already half-paralyzed by pressure rising in his skull, his bruised lobes swelling against the fixed bone, in a damaged hand that isn’t his, he draws the words:

I am No One

but Tonight on North Line Road

GOD led me to you

so You could Live

and bring back someone else.

He fumbles the note into her fingers. As she reads it, a blinding spike hits his right hemisphere. He falls back onto the bed, his cry cut short. Then he is still.

She has destroyed him twice. In reptile panic, she drops the note on the bedside table and vanishes.

His anguish comes on, too stunned to stop itself. Even as she pleads with him, his eyes deny her. In his stare, the saint disintegrates and she turns back into herself.

You let me hunt for a year, and never said shit. How could you? You were my…You would have done anything …

She stands in front of him, erased. She has lost even the right to defend herself. He tears the note out of his bedside drawer and waves it in the air, slapping the stricken handwriting.

If that’s what happened…what the fuck am I doing with this? Get it away from me.

He throws the scrap of laminated paper at her. It falls to the floor. She bends down and clutches it to her.

This is yours. Your curse, not mine.

Her mouth works, asking, How? Who? But no sound emerges.

His rage bursts. You’re the one who’s supposed to go do this. Go bring back someone.

Someone stands mute in the doorway, brought back by a note that will forever circulate. So you might live. And now that curse is his.

What does a bird remember?Nothing that anything else might say. Its body is a map of where it has been, in this life and before. Arriving at these shallows once, the crane colt knows how to return. This time next year it will come back through, pairing off for life. The year after next: here again, feeding the map to its own new colt. Then one more bird will recall just what birds remember.

The yearling crane’s past flows into the now of all living things. Something in its brain learns this river, a word sixty million years older than speech, older even than this flat water. This word will carry when the river is gone. When the surface of the earth is parched and spoiled, when life is pressed down to near-nothing, this word will start its slow return. Extinction is short; migration is long. Nature and its maps will use the worst that man can throw at it. The outcome of owls will orchestrate the night, millions of years after people work their own end. Nothing will miss us. Hawks’ offspring will circle above the overgrown fields. Skimmers and plovers and sandpipers will nest in the thousand girdered islands of Manhattan. Cranes or something like them will trace rivers again. When all else goes, birds will find water.

When Karin Schluter enters her brother’s room,the man who has been denying her is gone. In his place, a Mark she has never seen sits in a chair in striped pajamas, reading a paperback with a picture of a prairie on the cover. He looks up as if she’s late for a longstanding appointment.

“It’s you,” he tells her. “You’re here.” His tongue cups the roof of his mouth, the first half of a K. But a shudder passes through him, and he turns away.

The muscles of her face revolt. A wave breaks over her. He is back again; he all but knows her. The thing she has needed all these months, worse than anything. The reunion she has dreamed about for more than a year. But this is nothing like she has imagined. The return is too seamless, too gradual in coming.

He looks up at her, changed in a way she can’t identify. He grimaces. “What took you so long?” She crumples on him, pulls his neck up into her face. Rapids course between them. “Don’t wet me,” he says. “I’ve bathed already today.” He pulls her head off him and holds it between his hands. “Jesus. Look at you. Some things never change.”

She has to stare back for a second before the difference hits her. “God, Mark. You’re wearing glasses.”

He takes them off to inspect them. “Yeah. They’re not mine. Just borrowed them from the guy next door.” He replaces them and lays the book down on the windowsill on top of another. A Sand County Almanac . “Been boning up.”

She knows the copy. It shouldn’t be here. “Where did you get that? Who gave that to you?” More bite than she intends. Despite herself: brother and sister again, too soon.

He looks at the book, as if for the first time. “Who do you think gave it to me? Your boyfriend.” He turns to her, expanding. “Complicated guy. But he’s got a lot of intriguing theories.”

“Theories? About what?”

“He thinks we are all hosed. That we’ve all gone schiz or something. Kind of out there, wouldn’t you say?”

The medication is working, the mild shocks, but so gradually there is almost no threshold. The same spin-doctor subsystem that cut him out without his knowing now blinds him to his own return. She watches him turn back into Mark, old Mark, before her appalled eyes.

“We’ve screwed up down here, so your man Danny is looking into Alaska.”

She sits down in a chair next to him, arms across her chest to still them. “Yes. I’ve heard.”

“Getting himself a new job. Be with the cranes all summer long, on their breeding grounds.” He shakes his head at the riddle of everything living. “He’s had it with us all, hasn’t he?”

She starts to explain, then leaves it at “Yes.”

“Doesn’t want to be around, when we finally wreck the place.”

Her throat closes and her eyes bitter up. She just nods.

He rolls on his side, his fist up to his ear. Afraid to ask. “You going with him?”

She should have long ago habituated to this pain. “No,” she tells him. “I don’t think so.”